adition altogether. I had men in my mind to
begin the work, and I should have found others. I should have aimed at
making a hard-trained, capable, intellectually active, proud type of
man. Everything else would have been made subservient to that. I should
have kept my grip on the men through their vacation, and somehow or
other I would have contrived a young woman to match them. I think I
could have seen to it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet
and tennis with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping
Tom fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life that
it isn't really virile to reek of tobacco. I should have had military
manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so forth,
in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I should have fed
and housed my men clean and very hard--where there wasn't any audit ale,
no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high pressure douches....

I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came
down, and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those two
places....

Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of
lowness and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an underground
room where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling of ineradicable
contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow ditch-like rivers, in
those roads and roads of stuffy little villas. Those little villas
have destroyed all the good of the old monastic system and none of its
evil....

Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but their
collective effect is below the quality of any individual among them.
Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle humours, of
prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but it has no fear
of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary between disguises and
antiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught;
one hears there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in the
world--a covetous scandal--so that I am always reminded of Ibsen in
Cambridge. In Cambridge and the plays of Ibsen alone does it seem
appropriate for the heroine before the great crisis of life to "enter,
take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella upon the writing
desk."...

We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last thing
to make it out of, I am convinced, is the old Academic mind. One
might as soon try