Читать книгу Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes - Richard Davenport-Hines - Страница 11

‘The golden mediocrity of a successful English middle-class family’ was John Maynard Keynes’s phrase to describe the ancestry of his fellow economist Malthus. The calm, assuaging prosperity of his own family began with a teenage boy’s stagecoach ride from Salisbury to Andover in the last years of the reign of King George III. His grandfather John Keynes (1805–78), who had been apprenticed at the age of eleven to his father’s brush factory at Salisbury, admired a purple carnation (called Butt’s Lord Rodney) in the buttonhole of a passenger sitting opposite him. He determined to cultivate carnations and pinks, and pawned his watch to buy his first plants. At the age of seventeen his pinks won his first prize in a garden-show: a pair of sugar-tongs. Within years his hobby was bringing him a respectable fortune. Thousands flocked to his dahlia exhibition at Stonehenge in 1841. Four years later he opened a nursery in Salisbury, where he produced dahlias, verbenas and carnations, and hybridized new roses. Copious hot-house beauty brought social opportunities that had been unimaginable to the apprentice in the brush factory. When the Prince Consort opened the Horticultural Society’s new gardens at South Kensington in 1861, Keynes was a member of the committee that welcomed him.1

The success of John Keynes’s nursery depended on the increased purchasing-power of middle-class Victorians and the confident assertion of their tastes. His customers rejected the aristocratic model of landscape gardening practised by William Kent, Capability Brown and Humphry Repton, whereby lawns swept up to the house and flowers were confined to the borders in the kitchen-garden. Instead of austere, distant and picturesque views, they wanted banks of colourful, floriferous, fragrant plants to abound in the beds around their houses. A description of the conservatory at a flower-show in Kensington in 1861, at which John Keynes took several prizes, encapsulates a Victorian world in which comfort, safety, abundance and colour were valued. The building was bestrewn with dahlia blooms, hollyhocks, gladioli, phloxes, petunias, roses, lilies, geraniums, verbenas, ferns. Mediterranean tree frogs, disporting themselves on mosses, lichens and ferns inside a glass case, fascinated onlookers, especially children. Military bands performed a selection of marches, overtures, fantasies, waltzes and operatic airs throughout the day.2

John Keynes, ‘the principal grower of dahlias in the kingdom’, was eminent in the cathedral city where he spent his life. He helped to build a school there, and was long-serving Sunday-school superintendent of Brown Street Baptist chapel. Education was seen as empowering, enriching, meritorious and fulfilling: it was not a chore, but a privilege. His household took The Times. For years before John Keynes’s election as mayor in 1876 he served as a Liberal member of the municipal council. Such was the esteem in which his neighbours held him that most shops in Salisbury closed during his funeral in 1878. The old man left assets exceeding £40,000. Probably his profits from the nursery had been amplified by judicious investments in railways. A network of branch-lines and junction railways, some more profitable than others, were built to radiate from Salisbury during the 1850s. John Keynes probably joined in this local railway boom, and surely participated in the Salisbury Railway & Market House Company, which built a warehouse district on the edge of town and opened a profitable freight-line in 1859.3

The provincial prosperity of the old nurseryman seemed mellow to his descendants. ‘Like everything English,’ as Virginia Woolf wrote in 1937 of pre-war life, ‘the past seemed near, domestic, friendly.’ Maynard Keynes’s sense of the brightness of English and European life before the lights were extinguished by continent-wide war was fundamental to what he thought and did. ‘What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914!’ Keynes wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace – doubtless mindful of his family’s burgeoning prosperity. Although most people were overworked, with few comforts, they were given hope by the pliancy of the class system. ‘Escape was possible,’ he felt convinced, ‘for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.’4

Neville Keynes (1852–1949) was the child of the floriculturist’s second marriage to Anna Maynard Neville. She is often said to have been an Essex farmer’s daughter; but her father, although descended from millers and yeomen, was in business in London: her childhood was mainly spent in the countrified suburb of Camberwell. The fact that the Keynes family were staunch Baptists predicated Neville’s education. At the age of fifteen he was sent to a nonconformist boarding-school, where it was instilled in pupils that their hopes of salvation on Judgement Day lay in virtuous living and in passing the London University matriculation exam. Neville Keynes duly, in 1869, won a scholarship to University College, London, which, unlike the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, accepted undergraduates from outside the Church of England. During his three years at University College, this young nonconformist, with his provincial background in trade, was shown longer horizons, which were to propel his children towards titles and academic honours, and to make their surname the basis for an adjective with world recognition, ‘Keynesian’.

In 1871 Gladstone’s Liberal government enacted the University Tests Act against Tory opposition. By this legislation, the Church of England lost its privilege to exclude religious dissenters and Roman Catholics from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and from their constituent colleges. This reform followed hard on Gladstone’s order-in-council in 1870 that future permanent appointments to the civil service (excluding the Foreign Office) should be filled by open competitive examinations – for which university-trained candidates were most apt. Both the reform of civil service recruitment and the abolition of university tests dismantled England’s traditional system of jobbery and sinecures; but although hailed as bold progressive measures they were also socially defensive. They occurred shortly after the Second Reform Act of 1867, which had broadened the electoral franchise: the dual reforms of 1870–1 were intended to bolster the established order by accommodating dissenters within both administrative government and the ancient universities, thus defusing the power of outsiders’ dissident thinking and dispelling their grievances in a time of diffused democracy. Until the University Tests Act relaxed admissions policy to include religious nonconformists, most advanced, significant and enduring political, social, economic and scientific (although not theological) ideas had come from men working outside the ancient universities. After 1871, for nearly a century, until the two universities became less exclusive and less authoritative, the world of ideas was dominated by people who had trained at either Oxford or Cambridge.

These twin reforms of 1870–1 established a new governing order of trained, non-partisan expertise to regulate human affairs and national destinies. They were, incidentally, the making of Maynard Keynes. Nearly fifty years later, in scornful and unforgiving mood, he compiled one of the deadliest indictments and most rousing rallying-cries against the corrupt and botched old political order: The Economic Consequences of the Peace is one culmination of the trends began by open competitive examination and the University Tests Act. Moreover, university reform – as a tempered experiment designed to forestall social upheaval – proved a model for later Keynesian economics.

Social exclusions and cultural filters were retained in the ancient universities by the primacy of classical languages in the entrance requirements and by the narrow appeal of the curriculum. Dead languages were the antidote to the mercenary outlook that emphasized ownership, productivity, money-making, accumulation. The traditional educated classes feared that if the classics were ousted from their position as the chief instrument of education at Oxford and Cambridge, Greek would perish in the grammar schools and the ascent from elementary schools to those universities would become too easy. ‘Ancient Colleges shd be fortresses of the humanities,’ with newer universities in London, Manchester and Birmingham providing more utilitarian, modern systems, Maynard Keynes’s teacher H. E. Luxmoore wrote in 1901, explaining why he opposed the abolition of Greek as a compulsory subject for university admission examinations. ‘If a very smart Science or Math man knows no Greek I don’t see much harm … but I had rather he went to Owens College or Liverpool. Is that pig-headed?’5

The University Tests Act enabled Neville Keynes to obtain promotion from London University to Cambridge a year after the legislation was ratified. In 1872 he won, at the age of twenty, the top entrance scholarship in classics and mathematics at Pembroke, one of the smaller Cambridge colleges. Dismayed by the drab, stilted teaching of mathematics by hacks who crammed their pupils for the examinations, he was drawn to moral sciences, where lively, innovative dons, notably Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall, gave inspiring tuition in philosophy, political economy and logic. At the earliest possible moment, he transferred from mathematics to moral sciences, which he studied for two and a half years. He was elected as a Fellow of Pembroke in 1876 (the first nonconformist to be admitted into the fellowship), acquired the minor college office of domestic bursar, and for six years gave intercollegiate lectures on logic and political economy to male undergraduates and to students from the new women’s colleges, Girton and Newnham.

Initially, as a provincial youth from a Baptist family in trade, Neville Keynes floundered in Cambridge college life. His isolation was mitigated by finding a congenial set of religious dissenters who met at a Congregationalist grocer’s home a few minutes’ walk from Pembroke: best of all, among them, a robust, clear-headed girl called Florence Brown (1861–1958). As the eldest child of John Brown, Minister of Bunyan’s Meeting at Bedford, she had been reared in the manse in Dame Alice Street, Bedford. Her father was the biographer of Bunyan, wrote books on puritanism and on the Pilgrim Fathers, and received an honorary degree in divinity from Yale. Her brother Walter Langdon-Brown became Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge in 1932, and was knighted three years later. At seventeen she went to Newnham, the Cambridge woman’s college which had been founded in 1871 under the sponsorship of Henry Sidgwick. Although, from 1881, women students of Girton and Newnham were permitted to be examined and classed in tripos examinations, they were kept ineligible for titular degrees until 1923, and were not conceded membership of the university until 1947.

Neville Keynes married Florence Brown in 1882. His paternal inheritance of £17,000, which he invested on the Stock Exchange, ensured that they both had well-kept, orderly lives. After the outlay required to set up his household, and to run it harmoniously, he still had in 1887 investments with a net worth of about £17,300, which provided 60 per cent of his family’s income. As a man who disliked uncertainty in all things, he was a fretful, pessimistic investor, who saw a steady increment in the net value of his investments: over £24,000 by 1900; £38,000 by 1908.

In November 1882 the newly-marrieds moved into a newly built semi-detached brick house at 6 Harvey Road, Cambridge. The kitchen and servants’ room were in the basement; a study and dining-room lay on either side of the double-fronted, bay-windowed ground floor, with the larger drawing-room overlooking the small back garden; family bedrooms were on the first floor; with attic bedrooms for the cook, parlour-maid, and nursery-maid. The furnishings from Maple’s furniture emporium in Tottenham Court Road were well polished, but not too shiny. The walls were covered with family photographs and etchings of reassuring conventionality. For Neville Keynes his home was a sanctum beneath its curtain pelmets.

The row of houses in Harvey Road, with their uniform bricks, angles and front steps, had been erected to accommodate married dons after the lifting of the celibacy restrictions on the tenure of fellowships. They were occupied, when Keynes was a child, by such Cambridge luminaries as the composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, the university’s Professor of Music; Sir Donald Macalister, a Fellow of St John’s for fifty-seven years and President of the General Medical Council for twenty-seven years; the physicist Sir Richard Glazebrook, senior bursar of Trinity; the mathematician William Besant, a Fellow of St John’s; and Anchitel Boughey, vicar of Great St Mary’s church, a lecturer in classics and theology, and a Fellow of Trinity. Harvey Road – a tree-lined residential street that was not a short-cut to anywhere except Fenner’s cricket ground – stood about midway between Pembroke College and Cambridge railway station (the latter within pleasant walking-distance). At the foot of the road a bulky Roman Catholic church was built in the early 1890s: it was said by E. M. Forster to have been funded by someone who made a fortune supplying movable eyes for dolls, but was in fact financed by a ballet-dancer who took to Christian repentance after marrying a banker.

Cambridge in the 1880s, and for another century, resembled a country town rather than a university city. It was nearer to John Keynes’s native Salisbury than to Oxford. The atmosphere and values at 6 Harvey Road might have been those of a medical household in a provincial town if it had not been for the emphasis on educational striving, tripos results, the rating of young men as having ‘first-class minds’ or being ‘unsound’. Maynard Keynes was always proud to identify himself as a member of the educated middle class: he saw education as enlarging and redemptive.

The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge Act of 1877 meanwhile facilitated reforms of college and university statutes, which came into force about the time of Neville Keynes’s marriage in 1882. Life fellowships (unless held with a major college office) were abolished; a progressive levy on colleges redistributed income throughout the university; and the ban on the marriage of college fellows was lifted. As a practical idealist, keen to raise academic quality, Neville Keynes diverted his energies towards the administration of the reformed university, became assistant secretary of the Examinations Board at Cambridge and vacated his fellowship. Two years later, in 1884, he was included among the first Cambridge University lecturers ever appointed. He was thus a pioneer in Cambridge of a new type of university employee whose chief commitment was to teaching and administration for faculty boards rather than for colleges. As secretary of the Examination and Lectures Syndicate in 1892–1910, Neville Keynes was instrumental in starting the economics tripos in 1902–3. His link with Pembroke dwindled to dining-rights and combination-room privileges, until he was elected to an honorary fellowship at Pembroke after retiring as university lecturer in moral sciences in 1911.

Neville Keynes had a low estimate of himself. He needed calm and regular routines to fend off attacks of nerves. He preferred to stay in a level, straight rut than to take any path on which he might be surprised or jolted; was prone to migraines or hypochondria when faced with tricky personal decisions; took pride in never tampering with a fact; preferred steady, unimaginative, impartial but somehow restful desk-work to tasks that excited tension or doubts. Consequently, he did not seek the vacant chair in economics at University College, London for which Alfred Marshall recommended him. In 1887 he similarly declined requests from Marshall to become the first editor of the Economic Journal because he knew the responsibility would make him ill with worry. This timidity disappointed his wife, who sought substitute consolations in the later successes of her children. Maynard, significantly, became editor of the Economic Journal some twenty-one years after his father had shirked the task – and retained the editorship until February 1945.

Macmillan, the London publishers with Cambridge roots, published Neville Keynes’s Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic in 1884, and The Scope and Method of Political Economy in 1891. Both books were painstaking but sterile; he revised each of them, but published little else. Instead, year after year, he churned out lucid, impersonal minutes and unfeeling, characterless memoranda for university committees. Repetitious, dutiful work made him feel better. He was described in 1904 by Arthur Benson of Magdalene as ‘a nice little chippy, precise, solemn man – a good Secretary, I should think – not exciting’.6

Life for Neville Keynes was seated on well-cushioned comfort. It was protected by the broad, solid mass of unchallenged English prosperity. In one respect he was a model parent: he encouraged his children, wished them to succeed, and cherished their ambitions; he never wanted them to be smaller than him or dependent on him, never sought to overshadow them, or retard their progress. At work and at home he shrank from exaggeration or severity. Long after Queen Victoria had died at Windsor, Neville Keynes remained a mid-Victorian in his belief in preserving orderliness, exhibiting social deference, fulfilling personal obligations and public duties, and in Christian decency.

In 1882, after the celibacy restrictions on the tenure of fellowships had been lifted, there was a spurt of marriages among Fellows: it was said that all but one of the resident Fellows of Jesus married within a year. ‘In that first age of married society in Cambridge, when the narrow circle of the spouses-regnant of the Heads of Colleges and of a few wives of Professors was first extended, several of the most notable dons, particularly in the School of Moral Science, married students of Newnham,’ Maynard Keynes recalled in the 1920s of his parents and their circle. ‘The double link between husbands and between wives bound together a small cultured society of great simplicity and distinction. This circle was at its full strength in my boyhood, and, when I was first old enough to be asked out to luncheon or to dinner, it was to these houses that I went.’7

In 1942 Maynard Keynes spoke at a family luncheon at King’s to mark his father’s ninetieth birthday and his parents’ diamond wedding. He imagined his father sixty years earlier as an ‘elegant, mid-Victorian high-brow, reading Swinburne, Meredith, Ibsen, buying William Morris wall-paper, whiskered, modest, and industrious, but rather rich, rather pleasure-loving, rather extravagant within carefully set limits, most generous; very sociable; loved entertaining, wine, games, novels, theatre, travel; but the shadow of work gradually growing, as migraine headaches set a readiness to look on the more gloomy or depressing side of any prospect.’ Maynard Keynes praised his father, too, as a university administrator: ‘He helped to create a framework within which learning and science and education could live and flourish without feeling … a hampering hand.’8

Neville Keynes is easy to judge because he kept a moderately informative diary from 1864 until 1917. For his wife one must rely on public records and a memoir written in her old age. Florence Keynes bore three children (Maynard, Margaret and Geoffrey) between June 1883 and March 1887. She was an attentive, stimulating mother. When her eldest son Maynard was aged four and a half, she began teaching him the alphabet in hourly lessons each morning. ‘Mother is such a clever person,’ the child told his father, before adding, ‘Mother is so kind. You are kind, too, but not so kind as Mother.’9

Once alphabets had been taught and her children launched into school life, Florence Keynes began to fulfil the ideals of service inculcated by her Baptist upbringing and Newnham training. She did not talk about the poor as if they were characters in a book; she had not a shred of the soft, subservient femininity of Victorian women; she was neither meddlesome nor domineering. Around 1895, deploring waste, confusion, insecurity and distress, she became founding secretary of the Cambridge branch of the Charity Organization Society, and began using her bracing virtuous intelligence to advance the education and health of girls and mothers. She entered local government in 1907 with her election to Cambridge’s Board of Guardians (which oversaw the Poor Law workhouses), and served as chairman of the Board from 1922 until the modernization of social service provisions under the Local Government Act of 1929.

Although women had been entitled since 1894 to serve on urban and rural district councils, they were excluded from borough and county councils until the Liberal government enacted the Qualification of Women Act of 1907. Even then the qualification for candidates was to be a householder; and as in the eye of the law, only husbands could be householders, not married women, this meant that only spinsters and widows could stand for election. Florence Keynes brought this anomaly to the attention of a Liberal Cabinet minister, and the law was altered in the summer of 1914. In an uncontested election in October, Florence Keynes became the first woman member of Cambridge borough council – and probably the first married woman to serve on a town council. She was described in 1916 as the busiest woman in Cambridge. After the passage of the Sex Disqualification Removal Act of 1919, she was among the earliest women to become magistrates. She served as alderman of Cambridge from 1930 and as mayor in 1932.

It is notable that Maynard Keynes drew closer to his mother, consulted and respected her, as she became prominent in Cambridge civic life: his letters to her became informative, while his contacts with his father receded in importance. Public works lightened her domestic character. ‘Florence is becoming quite frivolous – playing auction bridge, and solving crossword puzzles,’ Neville Keynes noted in 1914. His devoted dependence on her increased with time. ‘If possible I love my dear wife more than I ever did. I am always thinking about her.’10

As a Cambridge councillor Florence Keynes took up modernizing initiatives in both health and the law. During the Great War she was one of the doughty wives of Cambridge dons who helped Sir Pendrill Varrier-Jones to start the Papworth tuberculosis sanatorium outside the town. The Fulbourn mental asylum was another local cause that she adopted. She campaigned for the establishment of juvenile courts and for the appointment of women police; and urged women to serve as jurors. Sometimes by private lobbying, sometimes through voluntary organizations or in her official roles, Florence Keynes helped to start an open-air school for sick children and the first English juvenile labour exchanges. The provision of free spectacles and dentistry for needy Cambridge schoolchildren, and the supply of gadgets or false limbs to help the disabled, were among her other good causes. She sat on a Whitehall committee on the recruitment and training of nurses. Many of her accomplishments were achieved through the National Council of Women, of which she became national president in 1930–2.

But all this came when her children were adults. A quarter-century of maternity had supervened. Florence Keynes became pregnant about a month into her marriage. The family doctor, who oversaw the pregnancy and delivery, was typical of the Harvey Road set. George Wherry, surgeon at Addenbrooke’s hospital, Fellow of Downing College and University Lecturer on Surgery, was a lanky long-distance runner, who (like Neville Keynes) adored Switzerland and (unlike Neville Keynes) was a bold mountaineer. The author of Alpine Notes and the Climbing Foot (1896) and Notes from a Knapsack (1900), he savoured the inarticulate camaraderie of men who climbed steep mountains roped together. He had gone to Cambridge by an arbitrary route that was characteristic of its period. At the age of twenty-one, having qualified in medicine at a London teaching hospital, he was invited to a whist party by the house surgeon. There, when someone cited Tennyson’s ‘Northern Farmer’, he capped the quotation with one from Virgil’s Aeneid. Perhaps this seemed bumptious, for the surgeon retorted that Wherry was too immature to practise medicine, and sent him with a letter of recommendation for further studies at Cambridge. A young physician who quoted Virgil, climbed Alps, analysed old bones in the Fitzwilliam Museum and wrote a monograph on Charles Lamb was the only man present at the birth of Maynard Keynes.

Neville Keynes listened at the bedroom door (Tuesday 5 June 1883) as his mother-in-law Ada Brown and Dr Wherry handled the delivery. ‘I saw her at intervals till about nine, but after that they wd not let me go into the room,’ he recorded in his diary.

At 9.30 I went to listen outside the door … Florence was giving a slight groan every now & then (they say she was very brave) and at 9.45 I heard such a hullaballoo, & Mrs Brown just came to the door, & said it was a boy … Everything went well, except for a little tear, wh Wherry sewed up. Just before eleven I was allowed in to see her, & I thought her looking bonny. They say that the boy is the image of me. It’s ugly enough.

Next day Neville added in his diary: ‘I am already getting very fond of him notwithstanding his ugliness … I could sit & look at him for hours. I love the contortions of his little face and his little hands.’ This harping on the baby’s ugliness may have persisted: as a boy, Maynard Keynes was convinced of his ugliness, and in manhood he continued to feel that his appearance was repulsive.11

The forenames ‘John Maynard’ were chosen, but ‘the little man’ was never known to his family, friends and contemporaries by any forename except Maynard. The formulation ‘John Maynard Keynes’ is used on the title-page of his books, in library catalogues and by people who never knew him. He disliked this wording, and in letters to intimate friends always signed himself ‘JMK’: ‘John’ was used only by his mother at rare moments of stress.

The baby delighted his parents, who watched him with love and pride. ‘With my own eyes I really did see him smile this morning,’ Neville Keynes noted after a month. ‘He is beginning to look about him a good deal, & he is particularly fond of colour. We think him the sweetest baby that ever was. Florence is getting so fond of him as almost to surprise herself.’ And when the infant was approaching two months old: ‘We don’t think it possible that we could love any other baby as we do our little Maynard. He looks so sweet and so pathetic when he begins to cry. I would [that] I could photograph his looks upon my memory. I fear to forget them. His intelligence is increasing, & this enables him to be more patient when his Mother is getting ready to nurse him. He at least half understands what is going on.’ A fortnight later, in mid-August 1883, the doting father noted (with a characteristic touch of unease behind his pleasure): ‘the little man has again been making a distinct advance. He laughs a good deal and looks so pretty … He sometimes tries to sit up by himself, & he likes to feel his feet; but they say that is not good for him.’12

Neville Keynes loved the watchfulness, the receptivity, the thoughts and the growing articulacy of his children. He valued the childlike, and his children’s pride of accomplishment. ‘It is our dear little boy’s third birthday,’ Neville noted on 5 June 1886. ‘He is quite a little man now; & we can send him to any part of the house by himself on errands. There is nothing he likes better than being entrusted with an errand … I wish he weighed more the little shrimp.’ On summer holiday at Hunstanton in 1887, he grabbed his four-year-old for boisterous play: ‘O Father,’ Maynard remonstrated, ‘you are so frisky!’ When his aunt Fanny Purchase, who was married to a Weybridge grocer, remarked that she had a bad memory, Maynard chirped out, ‘O, I have a very good one.’ His aunt asked if he wouldn’t give her a little bit of his memory. ‘He thought for a moment and then he said, “But I don’t know how to get it out of myself.”’ Just before Christmas of 1887 (aged four and a half) he impressed his father with his latest philosophic enquiry: ‘How do things get their names?’13

When that same autumn Neville admitted ‘that I shall be so sorry when he grows big so that I can no longer carry him about and hug him’, Maynard promised to remain small and not grow up. Neville Keynes wanted his boy to remain a sprightly, skinny little darling full of bright quips and treasured confidences: half dreaded him turning into an independent, long-legged stripling striding away to an unpredictable future in which misfortunes could pounce on him.14

During the spring of 1888 Neville Keynes began reading aloud to his elder son for ten minutes every evening at bedtime, which increased their mutual trust, intimacy and pleasure. One night, when Neville was reading Grimm’s tales, he spoke the sentence: ‘A certain father had two sons, the elder of whom was sharp & sensible.’ A little voice piped up, quite seriously, ‘Why that is like me!’ A few weeks later, Grimm was put aside, and Alice in Wonderland started. ‘He is a delightful little man to read to. His attention never wanders for an instant, & he hardly misses a single point.’ At the age of six he told his mother that he was interested in his own brain. ‘Just now, it’s wondering how it thinks. It ought to know.’ Both parents read aloud to their children: on a holiday in 1894, for example, Florence read Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda; Neville, Kipling’s Jungle Book.15

For the nonconformist intelligentsia, for whom personal morals, religious faith and social duty were indivisible, it was inconceivable that godless people could remain good. Neville Keynes disliked the idea of his children being reared without religious influences. In January 1884, at six months of age, the baby was therefore baptized by his grandfather at the Bunyan Meeting in Bedford. Nevertheless, when Maynard was eleven, his father was ‘appalled’ by his ‘ignorance of Bible History’. Maynard was a witty, self-confident boy who reacted against his father’s pessimistic anxiety by developing an outlook of sunny optimism. He stuttered, especially if excited or tired by pressure, but was outspoken, as his father recorded in 1888 when the boy was five: ‘Maynard generally likes to go to chapel with us in the morning, although he gets rather bored when he is there. To-day as we were returning home other members of the congregation surrounding us – he cried out in his loud clear voice “It is the prayers that I dislike the most!”’16

Maynard Keynes entered a kindergarten in 1889. Three years later he began at St Faith’s preparatory school in Trumpington Road. The headmaster at St Faith’s, Ralph Goodchild, proved to be a formative influence. Educated at the Clergy Orphan School at Canterbury and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Goodchild had been appointed headmaster of St Faith’s in 1883 at the age of twenty-three. He was trusted as a kindred spirit by Neville Keynes, who recruited him from St Faith’s in 1909 to become assistant secretary of the Cambridge University Appointments Board. From the outset, Goodchild was impressed by Maynard’s brightness and pluck. At the age of nine the boy had finished book 1 of Euclid, was studying quadratics in algebra, Ovid in Latin and Samson Agonistes in English. Algebra was his forte. ‘Maynard’, noted his father in 1894, ‘is in high glee because he is to have two hours special mathematical teaching four days in the week.’17

Keynes absorbed much from his father. He did school work beside him in the study at Harvey Road, and dealt with his father’s post when the latter was away. For a time the logician Willy Johnson, a Fellow of King’s, lunched at Harvey Road almost once a week. The two men would sit endlessly over their meal discussing logic: ‘I would be in a fidget to be allowed to get up and go,’ Keynes recalled, and yet he learnt rudimentary ideas which contributed to his later work on probability. At his father’s table he heard, said Jack Sheppard, his colleague at King’s for forty years and occasional sexual partner, ‘the courtesies of conversation and the thrust and parry of high argument’, and thus enjoyed formative training. ‘Maynard to me was’, said Sheppard, ‘always gracious and serene. Those who were privileged to visit Harvey Road with him, I think, know why.’18

While a pupil at St Faith’s, Maynard shared his father’s enthusiasm for stamp-collecting, golf, puns and word-play. Conning and appraising stamp catalogues as a boy was training for his adult skill in scrutinizing catalogues of rare books (butterfly-collecting and classification was the avocation which Neville shared with Margaret and Geoffrey). Maynard played golf with his father at Royston links, and compensated for his indifferent performance in competitive games by his cleverness at sporting statistics. Neville took him to circuses, firework displays and theatres. All the children enjoyed happy, revitalizing holidays at pretty, salubrious middle-class resorts, notably Hunstanton, Ventnor, Tintagel and the Lake District.

‘Goodchild is still most enthusiastic about Maynard,’ Neville Keynes noted in January 1897. ‘I am already too proud of the dear boy. My pride in him and my love in him feed each other.’ When Maynard went to his grandmother’s house at Bedford for ten days that April (bicycling both ways), Neville was doleful and apprehensive. ‘I have got Maynard & his school very much on my mind just now,’ he wrote when the boy had been gone for twenty-four hours. His quandary was whether to enter the boy prodigy for Eton’s scholarship examination. ‘It worries me at night & in the early morning.’ He brooded over the boy’s imminent departure from day-school and home. The fact that the boy’s voice began to break and that he grew three inches in the first half of 1897 only emphasized the looming changes, and the end of an idyll. In the week of Maynard’s fourteenth birthday in June father and son began rising early so that they could have an hour’s cramming before breakfast. He received intensive tuition in maths and classics from other coaches. His stammering increased under the pressure. ‘It is a grief to me’, wrote Neville that month, ‘to think that the dear boy will not … do his work very much longer with me in his study. I like to see his books arranged opposite me; & I like all his little ways.’19

On 5 July both parents took their son to Eton, where they installed themselves in lodgings in the High Street. This intrusive parental involvement must have set Maynard apart. It is improbable that both parents of other scholarship candidates journeyed to the town in order to form a tight protective phalanx around their sons. Their fretting may not have helped. ‘Frightfully noisy,’ Neville fussed about their lodgings. ‘Maynard went to bed a little after 8.30 and at 10.30 I found him still awake, and again at 11.15. We then went to bed ourselves but were worried at the idea that Maynard might still be staying awake.’ The boy seemed calmer than his father. His parents fed him Valentine’s Beef Extract to fortify him before the day’s examinations. Sixty-two candidates sat seventeen papers over three and a half days: their examinations lasted from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. The general paper required an essay of up to thirty lines on a choice of subjects which show the disposition of the Eton beaks: ‘The uses of an aristocracy’; ‘Your favourite poet with reasons for the choice’; ‘Westward the tide of empire holds its course’; ‘God made the country, but man made the town’; ‘Free Trade and Protection’.20

Neville Keynes itched with disquiet until on 12 July a telegram confirmed that the boy was placed tenth among the scholars. Mathematics had proved Maynard’s strongest subject. The family were acclaimed in Cambridge: congratulations tumbled through the letter-box; when Florence attended garden-parties, her reception ‘seemed like a triumphal progress’. In addition to swimming-lessons as preparation for Eton, Maynard was taught by the Harvey Road cook how to fry, boil, scramble and poach eggs: ‘Skill in this respect will be required of him by his fag master.’21

The squalls of puberty had blown up. ‘The dear boy Maynard worries both Florence & me just now by a certain fractiousness & apparent want of consideration for others,’ Neville noted in September. ‘Every point must be argued, & to get him to do anything that he at all dislikes doing is an arduous task.’ His parents hoped that school life would improve him, and ‘correct our tendency to spoil him’. Certainly he was seldom punished as a child, but subjected to the discipline of reason.22

For five years, from September 1897, Maynard was a King’s Scholar of Eton. He was demarcated from the ruck of Etonians by living in College – that is, at the centre of the school buildings rather than in one of the surrounding boarding-houses. The seventy Collegers were distinguished by wearing gowns, and hence had the epithet of ‘Tugs’ (alluding to togas) applied to them. Keynes as the star product of a Cambridge day-school was typical of Collegers in coming from a less smart preparatory school than most boarding-house boys. This disparity rooted the conviction in other pupils that Collegers were their social inferiors, and that ‘brains were no part of a gentleman’s make-up’, according to Esmé Wingfield-Stratford, who went to Eton a year before Keynes and was elected a Fellow of King’s in 1907. In Harvey Road Keynes had appreciated the studious habits, intellectual ambitions, restrained emotions and moderate behaviour of his parents: he found nothing there to resent or fight. At Eton, too, he found no causes for rebellion. His fag-master (son of the head of detectives at Scotland Yard) was considerate. There was much to stimulate, amuse and fulfil an inherently happy boy. The beauty of the buildings, their historic associations and time-worn fabric, enchanted and transmuted him: the imaginative pleasures of living in College amid such beauty made him a devoted Etonian for life. As a pupil there, he was flecked with the dust of apathy or boredom less than most. Living in College with other cerebral King’s Scholars, there was little impingement from the unreflective games-players whom Rudyard Kipling in 1902 stigmatized as ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals / Given to strong delusion, wholly believing a lie’.23

At Eton Keynes continued his family’s process of social betterment by education. What sort of a school was it?

Eton was no longer the unruly schoolboy rough-house which had been notorious in the early Victorian period. It was more like a counterpart of the Indian Empire, with the head master as a remote, awe-inspiring viceroy, the house masters as state governors under him, and an administrative hierarchy which sometimes exerted rationality, but generally relied on violence. The Lower Master of the school, Edward Austen-Leigh, ‘a shortish, pot-bellied, and apoplectic-visaged old boy, with a bull-terrier squeak and a sardonic manner’, strong on wholesome piety, was known to boys as The Flea – acknowledgement of ‘his skill, not to speak of delight, in drawing blood from the lower boys whom he was privileged … to birch’. Robert Vansittart, who overlapped for two years with Keynes and found Eton in the 1890s ‘lovely’, recalled that the birch, as swished by Austen-Leigh or other teachers, stung less than fag-masters’ bamboo canes: ‘we should all have been astonished to hear that corporal punishment ever harmed anybody’. As Maynard half boasted to his brother Geoffrey after a few weeks at the school, insubordinate boys were punished by older pupils whacking them with rubber tubes which were meant for siphoning water into baths.24

Percy Lubbock, the younger brother of Keynes’s classics tutor and Keynes’s near contemporary at Eton, said that their head master, the Reverend Edmond Warre, educated nobody. Neither ‘his odd jumbled storehouse of a mind’ nor ‘his musing wandering speculating humour’ caught the attention of boys. ‘He brought forth his lore, he quoted the poets, he harangued us upon the grammar of the ancients; but he absolutely lacked the gift of the kindling spark, nothing that he touched ever sprang to fire in his teaching.’ Warre was more voluble than intelligent – ‘a portly dignified John Bullish sort of man’, said Keynes’s future sexual partner George Ives. Keynes was satirical about Warre’s sermons on Sundays, with their mouldy ideas and asinine wordiness. ‘In chapel he stirred nobody,’ agreed Percy Lubbock, ‘he was merely a headmaster doing his duty; he preached as the old head of an old school may be expected to preach, with all his dignity and sonority, with round faces that rolled away to the roof unnoticed till he came to an end.’ Yet perhaps Warre’s conventionality was apt for his audience, for Eton boys were shocked when a colonial bishop, preaching one Whitsunday, mentioned ‘cigarettes’. Daily chapel attendance was obligatory. For Vansittart, the drowsy sermons might have been tolerable if he had not also been plagued by endless divinity papers.25

Although Keynes was loyal to Eton, his friend Bernard Swithinbank thought that the school’s curriculum was narrow and class-room teaching was poor. He never learnt even the meaning of the words physics, biology and geology, as he recalled in 1948.

Somebody told us that Adam Smith had drawn attention to the division of labour, and of the harm done by restraints in trade, and that was all the Political Economy we knew. We heard of the Crusades vaguely, because some English princes took the cross, and we knew the names of two or three Popes who gave trouble to England, and that was all we knew of European history from 100 A.D. to 1453 A.D. Of the history of Asia and America, outside the British Empire, we learnt nothing. Of Architecture we learnt literally nothing: of how to look at pictures, or listen to music, only a few, who had a natural bent, learnt anything at all. Our classical reading may have been intensive, certainly it was not extensive (I remember taking three halves over one play of Sophocles) and it was almost wholly unillustrated from archaeological sources. There was a feeling that it was a good thing to read ‘English Literature’ in one’s spare time.26

The view of what constituted literature was crabbed. When in 1902, Keynes had to prepare orations, he proposed to recite passages from Browning and Meredith; but as Warre forbade anything so modern, he was reduced to the stale patriotic resonances of Edmund Burke’s panegyric on Charles James Fox.

Esmé Wingfield-Stratford thought Eton, under Warre’s regime, was designed to churn out ‘numskulls’. Pupils wasted their days construing sentences from printed sheets, copying words from lexicons, and in travesties of Latin verse composition which aped the way that Virgil might have written about cricket-pitches: ‘what passed for education in the Eton of my day tended not so much to impart knowledge, as to plant an invincible distaste for every form of intellectual activity’. School work was a grind which conformist boys performed with ‘the decent minimum of application necessary to avoid scandal’. Any boy who betrayed enthusiasm was ‘branded as a prig and an outsider’. Wingfield-Stratford acknowledged that one quality distinguished Etonians of the 1890s, ‘an ingrained self-possession and savoir faire’, before concluding, ‘the class from which Eton was recruited was in the lowest trough of intellectual depression’. It was a disheartening reflection on Victorian England that Warre’s teaching methods ‘gave those who paid for Eton precisely the sort of Eton they wanted’.27

As a King’s Scholar in 1897–1902, Keynes had as his tutor (as opposed to his house master or form master) Samuel Gurney Lubbock, a newly appointed classics master known as ‘Jimbo’. Lubbock was tall and trim, with gauntly sensitive features, and versatile as an oarsman, high-jumper, rifle-shot, carpenter and amateur of watercolours. He married a distinguished pianist after Keynes had left the school, and took over a boarding-house where the Duke of Brabant, afterwards King Leopold III of the Belgians, and Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, third son of King George V, were both inmates during the First World War. He enjoyed Maynard Keynes’s mental nimbleness, felt sure in 1898 ‘that the boy can do well in almost anything’ and ranked him ‘much the best of his year in mathematics’. Yet at Eton, with Lubbock’s support, Maynard refused to let himself be confined to mathematics.28

Another influence on Keynes was Henry Luxmoore, who like Lubbock spent his life as boy and man at Eton. Luxmoore was a revered figure, who fostered the artistic and intellectual leanings of favoured pupils, painted in watercolours and planted a beautiful garden. Fastidious and discriminating, ‘an artist in life, and a scorner of materialism’, he listed his recreations in Who’s Who as ‘ethics and economics’. Keynes, who was susceptible to the mood of rooms, will have appreciated the austere restraint about the rooms where Luxmoore entertained him: they ‘excluded superfluity, cleared the way for a serious working life’, wrote Percy Lubbock; ‘no luxuriance, even of the best, was permitted in the good grave light of these rooms’. The King’s Scholar from the donnish Cambridge household was soon a favourite with Luxmoore. ‘I like Keynes much & think highly of his power – except in the direction of imagination,’ he reported in 1900. ‘He has a scholarly & rather mature mind, grasps & states a subject well, & can get the meaning of an author; he is very attentive, good, & interesting.’29

Neville Keynes enjoyed vicarious triumphs, and the fulfilment of his own forfeited academic hopes, through his prodigious son. ‘I always feel a little depressed after parting from the dear Boy,’ he wrote after a summer’s day at Eton. He swelled to meet his son – ‘a resplendent young Etonian with light blue favour, flower & umbrella tassel’ – after the Eton & Harrow cricket match at Lord’s, and to take him for dinner at a restaurant in Holborn before seeing Charles Hawtrey in the title role of Lord and Lady Algy at the Comedy Theatre. Watching the cricket, he relished sitting beside sprigs of the aristocracy. Florence, who accompanied him, was unlike most Eton mothers: a feathered, powdered, complacent, chattering flock. Back in Cambridge, a few days later, the Keyneses had dinner guests who ‘seemed so much interested in hearing about Maynard & Eton that perhaps we talked about the school too much. I am afraid it is always what I like talking about most.’30

In January 1900, after notorious English defeats in the Boer War, Warre roused his pupils with a hortatory address on the Eton Volunteer Corps, as Maynard reported to his parents: ‘For once his words have had effect and people are joining or being coerced into joining in throngs including all the Sixth Form and the greater part of the College. Am I to join? I am not keen and the drills will be a nuisance but I am perfectly willing to do so if I ought. It would be unpleasant to be almost the only non-shooter.’ His parents, who loathed jingoism, replied that they preferred him not to enlist: ‘but we pronounce no veto; he may join if his not joining would make him feel very much out of it’. In the event, less than half of the boys in Keynes’s school year enlisted in the corps: he held out, thinking boy-soldiers no more useful than patriots flourishing Union Jacks.31

‘Maynard’s work seems to improve visibly every half,’ Lubbock reported in 1901. ‘It says a great deal for him that he has got on so thoroughly well with Luxmoore: certainly he has a remarkable mind, full of taste & perception, with all its precision and accuracy.’ At English boarding-schools throughout the twentieth century it was the acme of splendour to be casual. Boys had to achieve their laurels by effortless talent: those who cultivated their nonchalance were preferred by masters as well as fellow pupils; swots who publicly strove in mental exertion were condemned as prigs. This sentiment underlay Lubbock’s further approving comment on Maynard: ‘there is never the slightest trace of the prig about him, a fact which I notice with continually increasing pleasure. No doubt he has a great deal of success before him.’ There were imagined to be physiological arguments against priggery. ‘On the whole,’ Luxmoore wrote of Eton boys in 1905, ‘they will resent any steady hard thorough study, whether cricket or farming or French or physics or Greek. Children have vast curiosity and eagerness, but after about 14 as the physique changes I believe intellectual application becomes tiresome generally except in a more or less desultory way.’ It was because Luxmoore thought English literature so precious, and drilled subjects were so disliked by adolescent boys, that he opposed English becoming a standard subject in their teaching. ‘History is less resented because it is easier … & science sometimes because there is more to do with the hands.’32

Maynard Keynes won ten prizes during his first year at Eton, and eighteen in the next. By the time that he left Eton, he owned over 300 books: about half of them school prizes. In 1901 he achieved his greatest schoolboy triumph by his election to the most exclusive of the Eton societies, Pop. This was a self-selected group of leading boys, who monitored the other pupils as a preparation for running the country as adults. Usually members of Pop were sporting heroes in the school, and it was testimony to Keynes’s power of leadership that he was elected without having athletic prowess. After his election, he sported white duck trousers with an ornate waistcoat and braid-edged tailcoat, and placed a daily order with a florist for a flower to sport in his buttonhole. ‘This costume’, as his mother proudly noted, ‘was the outward mark of a position which entitled the wearer to certain privileges, such as the right to stand in the front row to watch matches, and to carry a small cane with which to castigate the ankles of unauthorised intruders, also to walk with other boys of similar standing arm in arm in the street.’ Maynard was a good manager who, for example, organized the Collegers’ Christmas supper in 1901: soup, fish, turkeys, partridges, plum puddings, mince-pies, pâté de foie gras and dessert were washed down by claret, moselle, champagne and coffee. He joined school committees, and was elected president of the Eton Literary Society in 1902. ‘I am finding that’, he told his father, ‘when I am appointed to a committee I am invariably made to do all the work.’33

Harvey Road was a formative influence on Keynes, but neither the Salisbury nurseryman’s son nor the Bedford minister’s daughter gave him any expectation of governing. Eton did. It initiated him into notions of statecraft and techniques of rule. When later he became an economist, he did not give himself to analysis for its own sake, but directed his fertility of ideas towards problems of governance. He respected neutrality, and upheld practical justice, as an Olympian ruler should. Always, with his ruling assumptions, he devised economic solutions and recommended policies that promoted efficient administration.

Historically there was such a close connection between Eton and King’s College, Cambridge that Isaac Newton had been rejected as Provost of the college because he was not an Etonian. Until the late Victorian period King’s was perhaps the most intimate and cohesive of the Cambridge colleges because of the Eton schooling that united both Fellows and undergraduates. In the mid-1880s, with the increasing admission of non-Etonians, the undergraduates had split into two warring camps, Etonian and non-Etonian, bent on exasperating one another; and only the humorous tact of an outstanding Old Etonian undergraduate, John Withers, conciliated the factions. It was never doubted at Eton that Maynard would aim for King’s. Armed with a scholarship in classics and mathematics, he began his undergraduate career there in the Michaelmas term of 1902.

The classical and mathematical tripos at Cambridge, like the Literae Humaniores course at Oxford, trained undergraduates in abstract thought, taught them to evaluate evidence, and to frame proofs and disproof. Studying the languages of ancient Greece and Rome was seen as a civilizing course: it clarified the English prose of able undergraduates, which helped to make them more honest in their thinking. By contrast, as Bertrand Russell noted with dismay in 1907, educated people were oblivious to the importance of mathematics to civilization. Numbers and calculations were treated as means to promote mechanization, faster transport and victory over foreigners in business or war. These ends seemed degrading to Russell, who found in mathematics ‘a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show’. Mathematics, for Russell, redeemed existence from being a useless chore. ‘Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs.’ Although Keynes appreciated the stern perfection and implacable rationality of mathematics, he felt unfulfilled by undergraduate work in the subject. He stuck with it until his final examinations in 1905, but never gave more than six hours a day to routine cramming. In college he found livelier interests.34

Although King’s welcomed sturdy, open-air youngsters as well as studious, hunch-shouldered types, it discouraged lusty athletes who came to squander three years on the playing-fields, and condemned wasters slumped in tobacco-stained, drink-sodden lounging, with no more study of books than enabled them to scrape a pass degree. At most colleges, the dons were aloof and suspicious of the undergraduates, whom they punished for breaches of rules with fines, confinement within the college gates and expulsion. But, at King’s, the Eton background shared by Fellows and undergraduates meant that the senior men aimed to treat their juniors with trust and informality as members of the same community.

William Herrick Macaulay, who as Senior Tutor of King’s during 1902–13 was responsible for preserving order, was admired by Keynes for respecting the privacy of young minds, and for extruding mindless, iron-clad discipline from the college. ‘Rules, rules, what are rules for?’ Macaulay would ask before answering himself: ‘To be broken, to be broken.’ This exemplary man, with his intuitive sense of justice, convinced Keynes that ‘we most of us pay either too much or too little attention to rules’. The sentiment that creative minds were justified in breaking rules, when the results might be productive, was to underlie Keynes’s rethinking of economic laws after 1924. Macaulay detested imprecision, insincerity and unfinished thoughts – all of which he challenged by feigning obtuseness. Deliberate miscomprehension ‘was partly used by him as a form of criticism, not only of muddle and pretended knowledge, but of all kinds of nonsense and humbug, of conventional feeling, false sentiment and over-statement’, Keynes wrote. He admired Macaulay’s clear-cut feelings which ‘made him live in a purer world than those who see round the corner of everything and know themselves and other people too much’.35

Luxmoore, who had polished Keynes’s mind at Eton, liked to spend his Christmas holidays at King’s. ‘It is like a most splendidly appointed club in which each member has a suite of noble rooms to himself & is paid an income instead of subscribing,’ he wrote in 1902 at the end of Keynes’s first term. One night Montague Rhodes James, the first man to be successively Provost of King’s and Provost of Eton, read a blood-curdling horror story, which he had written, to the other senior members of the college who had dined together in hall. Afterwards they played a card-game called ‘animal grab’ in which victorious players had to make the noises of animals and birds: ‘Moo-Moo’, they shouted for a cow, ‘Hee-Haw’ for a donkey, ‘Hobble-gobble’ for a turkey and so forth. ‘The cleverness & gaiety of them all is wonderful & yet if it goes on like this in term time – & it does – where is the strenuous [intellectual] life, & search for truth & for knowledge that one looks for at College?’ Luxmoore wondered. ‘Chaff & extravagant fancy & mimicry & camaraderie & groups that gather & dissolve first in this room & then in that like the midges that dance their rings in the sunshine, ought to be only the fringe of life & I doubt if here it does not cover the whole, or nearly so.’ Yet for all this frivolity, King’s excelled most Cambridge colleges by standing out against the prevalent culture of insularity, obscurity, opacity and smugness. ‘There are three things that no Cambridge man can endure,’ one Fellow of King’s, Oscar Browning, told another, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. ‘One is, that a man should know anything outside his own subject. The second is, that his name should be known outside the University. The third, that he should be able to express himself lucidly, either in speech or writing.’ Rhodes James, Browning, Dickinson and other King’s men did not bundle themselves inside the college, but pursued wide questing interests and national fame.36

Maynard Keynes was bought life membership of the Cambridge Union debating society by his father at the time of his matriculation in the university. There, in November 1902, he gave his maiden speech, four minutes long, in support of a motion deploring party government. This speech, which presaged a lifelong distaste for the waste of partisanship, drew the admiration of the Union’s president, Edwin Montagu, who fostered him as a speaker at the Union, of which he was elected president in the Lent term of 1905. ‘I owed – rather surprisingly – nearly all my steps up in life to him,’ Keynes said of Montagu. He had his first experiences of electioneering in support of Montagu as (the successful) Liberal parliamentary candidate in 1905 for West Cambridgeshire (‘the home of a peculiarly sturdy type of Nonconformity’). Later Montagu sponsored him as a Whitehall man of influence. As Under-Secretary of State for India, Montagu got Keynes on to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency in 1913. As Financial Secretary of the Treasury in 1915, he clinched his appointment as a Treasury official. Montagu introduced him to the world of political dinners, official secrets and confidential plans. ‘He was so moody and temperamental and unhealthy and ugly to look at, that I daresay he wasn’t very sorry to die,’ Keynes reflected after Montagu wasted away at the age of forty-five. ‘He was an Emperor, a tout and a child; also a wit, an actor and a gambler; he ate and drank too much and always had indigestion afterwards. Although he was extraordinarily hideous, I (unlike many) never found him physically repulsive.’37

At Cambridge Keynes was recruited to a body that – far more than the debating union – was crucial to the course of his life. In his second term at King’s, Keynes was identified by two undergraduates from Trinity, Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf, as a potential member – in their private jargon, an embryo – of the Cambridge Conversazione Society, which had been founded in 1820 and was generally known as the Apostles. On 28 January 1903 he was initiated into the society as Apostle 243 in a ceremony which included the reading of a secret oath or curse. Election to the Apostles in his twentieth year forged much the strongest corporate bond of his life. For five or six years he thought, talked and confided about Apostle meetings, and plotted over Apostle elections, as much as about sex. The personal importance of individual Apostles, and of the Apostolic circle, to his thinking, choices and actions cannot be overstated. Their meetings accentuated his preoccupation with private intimacies and affinities; they promoted the priority he gave to aesthetics and philosophy; and they demoted his respect for political controversy.

The Apostles met every Saturday evening during term, behind a locked door, to eat anchovies on toast, drink tea or coffee and listen to a paper read by a member on a previously agreed subject. The members present drew lots to settle the order in which they questioned and discussed the paper. Like the speaker reading his paper, they stood in turn on the hearth-rug to deliver their remarks. Although they sometimes answered one another with vehemence, their remarks were hallmarked by precision and composure. As Keynes wrote, ‘victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility’.38 The Apostles constituted a sort of intellectual freemasonry with their arcane ceremonials, exclusive jargon and oblique allusions that served as passwords. The anchovies on toast were known as Whales, for example, even after sardines had superseded anchovies. Philistines were called ‘stumps’. The Apostles’ stealthy exclusivity and air of clandestine privilege intensified the intellectual and emotional excitement of meetings.

At the time of Keynes’s recruitment, the Apostles included two other King’s undergraduates, the classicists Jack Sheppard and Leonard Greenwood, and three from Trinity, Saxon Sydney-Turner as well as Woolf and Strachey, who had recruited him. Older King’s men, including the art critic Roger Fry and the novelist E. M. Forster, returned to the college for meetings. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson was resident in the college. The Trinity contingent was formidable: it included the philosophers Bertrand Russell, J. M. E. McTaggart, G. E. Moore and A. N. Whitehead, the mathematician G. H. Hardy, the historian G. M. Trevelyan, his poetaster brother R. C. Trevelyan, and the littérateur Desmond MacCarthy. McTaggart, Moore, Russell and Whitehead were preoccupied by moral philosophy, while Forster, MacCarthy, Strachey and others were drawn to aesthetics. Hardy had a maxim that it was never worth a first-class man’s time to express a majority opinion: by definition, there were plenty of others to do that. The Apostles met to dispute and define minority views.

The Edwardian Apostles were ambitious men who wanted their work to endure in memory. They even had a code-word, ‘footprints’, for the guiding-marks which they hoped to leave for posterity. The best test of the value of work, they believed, is that it continues to please or impress future ages. Bertrand Russell once recounted to G. H. Hardy a distressing dream in which he stood among the book-stacks of Cambridge University Library two centuries in the future. A librarian was winnowing the shelves, taking down books in turn, glancing at them, restoring them to their places or dumping them into an enormous bucket. Finally he reached three volumes which Russell recognized as the last surviving copy of his Principia Mathematica. He took down one of the volumes, turned over a few pages, seemed puzzled by what he saw, shut the volume, balanced it in his hand and hesitated: Russell presumably awoke with a shuddering cry, for the devaluation of their work, or the absence of footprints, was the Apostles’ nightmare.39

They liked in-jokes, teasing, cryptic allusions, irreverence, oblique personal meanings and passionate affection for friends. Imagination was as much valued by them as knowledge. They tended to mistrust showy brilliance, but prized integrity especially if it came in the wrappings of unworldliness. Henry Sidgwick, who had been elected to the Apostles in 1856, described their meetings as ‘the pursuit of truth with absolute devotion and unreserved by a group of intimate friends, who were perfectly frank with each other and indulged in any amount of humorous sarcasm and playful banter, and yet each respects the other when he discourses, tries to learn from him and see what he sees. Absolute candour was the only duty that the tradition of the society enforced. No consistency was demanded with opinions previously held.’40 The Apostles’ state of mind can be summarized by the detail that Ellis McTaggart, the Hegelian philosopher and metaphysician from Trinity, always wore a string around one of his waistcoat buttons in case, as he explained, he should meet a playful kitten.

From their earliest meetings in the 1820s, Apostles discussed Christianity, doubts and heresies without reserve when they stood on the hearth-rug, although, until religious tests were abolished in 1871, doctrinal conformity was obligatory in Cambridge. The secrecy of the Apostles was therefore a precaution which allowed impartial analysis and fearless speculation during the half-century when the university authorities penalized religious dissent and repressed scepticism. The Cambridge outsiders who knew of the Apostles’ existence tended to mock the society’s self-mystification: in the late twentieth century, after the unmasking of the Apostle Sir Anthony Blunt as a communist spy, English journalists, with their hatred of locked doors, denounced the society as a nursery of espionage.

Although most Apostles in Keynes’s time were vehement in their rejection of Christianity, and loathed the penitential temper, they had many residual Christian beliefs. Arthur Benson in 1905 noted that McTaggart ‘tho’ an Agnostic Philosopher is at heart a medieval prelate, a believer in privilege and tradition. “I believe in the Apostolic succession, but I don’t believe in God” is one of McT’s dicta.’ Christianity stressed the importance of every moment: time was precious, and accounting for one’s well-spent hours was the mark of a good Christian. There were few time-wasters among the Apostles: Keynes’s fatal regime of overwork was instilled in him by ambitious, nonconformist parents, sermons heard in boyhood, but also by the example of his fellow Apostles. ‘Most people can do nothing at all well,’ wrote Hardy in true Apostolic spirit. ‘Perhaps five or even ten per cent of men can do something rather well. It is a tiny minority who can do anything really well, and the number of men who can do two things well is negligible. If a man has any genuine talent, he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.’41

The Apostles could seem too isolated, rootless, impressionable and fervent. Virginia Woolf once watched Dickinson in intellectual contention: ‘poor old Goldie wrinkled his forehead & flung himself lightly & ardently into one question after another in his usual way – the way of a bachelor who lives by plying his mind & moving by that means from person to person, having no settled abode’. Christians had been taught for nearly two millennia that they were never alone, because God was always with them; but the Apostles faced the metaphysical loneliness of a godless existence. They accentuated their isolation even as they sought to mitigate it by intellectual intensity. A pupil of McTaggart’s described him: ‘he did not smile or attempt to put you at your ease by any arts whatever; his manner of speaking was dry and terse; he appeared to care nothing for your feelings or your past history or tastes or anything like that; you knew at once that none of that was to the point – it had better not be spoken about; and yet you got an impression of utter benevolence’.42

The lovelorn earnestness of the Edwardian Apostles is indicated by Keynes’s account of a conversation between McTaggart and a younger Apostle, Harry Norton, in 1908.

McT has been in love five times and is still in love with all of them, one is now a farmer in New Zealand, two live together in London, one is his wife and the fifth I don’t know about. Every week he writes to each of them and has these last twenty years, but some never reply. Very occasionally he meets them and is in a fever of excitement. At the end of the conversation he and Norton fell on one another’s necks and shook one another warmly by the hand.

A year later, in 1909, Rupert Brooke described two Apostles, Jack Sheppard and Gerald Shove, walking round a country garden in pure-minded dispute about a candidate for the Apostles with whom Sheppard was in love.

They were both talking confusedly at once, expostulating ‘Yes, but don’t you see …’, ‘I cannot allow …’, ‘I don’t think you quite understand …’ They were always arm-in-arm, Gerald’s left in Sheppard’s right, and, very painfully, looking outwards, Gerald to his right, Sheppard to his left, and occasionally each on the ground, – but always each at his own toes, never at the other’s. I think they never saw each other at all, much less met each other’s eyes … Both faces were red (especially Gerald’s) with nobility, and just perceptibly nervous.43

Collectively the Edwardian Apostles were intellectually aggressive, physically clumsy and timid, and prone to hypochondria and melancholy. With a few poetic exceptions, such as Rupert Brooke and Ferenc Békássy, they were charmless, gawky and unlovely. Keynes was convinced of his repulsiveness: he slouched. Lytton Strachey knew that he was ugly and maladroit, with a namby-pamby voice. Norton was a tall, round-faced, bespectacled invalid, disfigured by acne, who walked with comically small steps. Woolf had the face of an anxious, ill-used basset-hound and hands that shook uncontrollably. McTaggart was agoraphobic, and scuttled along streets with his backside to the wall like a crab scrabbling against the side of a bucket: he was too, said Lowes Dickinson, ‘the poet of pedantry’. Virginia Woolf wondered at the anaemic ugliness of cloistered young Cambridge intellectuals: ‘whether it was necessary that thought and scholarship should maltreat their bodies, and should thus elevate their minds to a very high tower from which the human race appeared to them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.’ Their communal cleverness provided therapeutic compensation for their individual maladjustments: together they felt less embarrassing and exposed than as lone hobbledehoys. Their integrity, their moral courage, their ideals were cherished and magnified as a group. They claimed to be incorruptible. Many of them aspired to be numinous in a secularized vocabulary.44

Gossiping in 1904 about Etonian undergraduates at King’s, Montague Rhodes James mused that ‘Keynes seems to be an Apostle, full of argument & with no interest in humanity.’ He was talking to Arthur Benson, who as an Eton beak had taught Keynes before migrating to Cambridge. Dialectical, robotic and therefore displeasing to his waggish elders Keynes seemed at twenty-one. This was midway through a three-year interval when (as described in chapter 5) he had no sexual partners: once he jettisoned celibacy in 1906, his racing mind and his angularities were somewhat slaked and softened. At an early age he was a noteworthy figure in the university. On a hot summer day in 1905, Benson met ‘odd, shy, clever, influential Keynes’ at Cambridge railway station, travelled to Royston with him and thought it worthwhile to jot his impressions of a youth of twenty-two. ‘He had Jevons’ Economy in his pocket; & was going to play golf. He talked: but his utterance is so low & rapid that the train, not I, had the benefit.’45

Some of the Edwardian intelligentsia outside Cambridge fretted about the Apostles – and especially at the conquest of their morals by the doctrines of G. E. Moore. ‘There is a pernicious set presided over by Lowes Dickinson, which makes a sort of ideal of anarchic ways in sexual questions – we have, for a long time, been aware of its bad influence on our young Fabians,’ Beatrice Webb wrote in 1911. ‘The intellectual star is the metaphysical George Moore with his Principia Ethica – a book they all talk of as “The Truth”! I never can see anything in it, except a metaphysical justification for doing what you like and what other people disapprove of!’46

Just before the start of Keynes’s second undergraduate year, in October 1903, he read Moore’s recently published Principia Ethica. It came on him, and on his fellow Apostles, as a revelation that dominated their hearts and minds. A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic published in 1936 was a similar colossus for the next generation. Good was undefinable, Moore proposed, because it is an attribute which cannot be stated in terms of anything else. It must never be defined as that which promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number, as Benthamites did. For Moore, states and emotions with intrinsic value – worth having for their own sakes, and capable of exact definition – were preferable to states or emotions that were judged best for society, and could only be described in woozy language.

‘Its effect on us, and the talk which proceeded and followed it, dominated … everything else,’ Keynes recalled of Principia Ethica in his paper entitled ‘My Early Beliefs’, which he read in 1938 to the Memoir Club, where Apostles predominated. ‘It was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth, we were the forerunners of a new dispensation, we were not afraid of anything.’ Moore’s writings, he thought, freed him from conformity and accepted bounds. They made it permissible for him to choose his personal myth: the person he thought he was, the individual he wanted others to recognize, the man who took decisions and battled with circumstances and aimed at perfection as a way of putting a barrier around him. Or to put it differently, in words taken from Iris Murdoch, man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture: it is just a case of making the right picture; and Keynes’s adult picture of himself was made by the Apostles.47

‘We repudiated entirely a personal liability on us to obey general rules,’ Keynes said of the Apostolic early readers of Principia Ethica. ‘We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully. This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world it was our most obvious and dangerous characteristic. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, in the strictest sense of the term, immoralists.’ Moore’s Apostolic followers, said Keynes, ‘were among the last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who believe in continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good’. Most Apostles believed in the rationality of human nature: ‘we were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence … for everything and everyone.’48

The objective world was discounted beneath the primacy of personal feelings by the Apostolic readers of Principia Ethica. ‘Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people’s, of course, but chiefly our own,’ as Keynes believed.

These states of mind were not associated with action or achievement or with consequences. They consisted in timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion … The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and one’s prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these love came a long way first. But in the early days under Moore’s influence the public treatment of this and its associated acts was, on the whole, austere and platonic.49

It is a measure of the daring of these ideas that Sir Roy Harrod in his official biography of Keynes published in 1951 omitted the phrase that ‘love came a long way first’ among his ‘prime objects in life’ – despite the remark being indispensable to understanding the trajectory of Keynes’s career. Not everyone will be beguiled by Principia Ethica, as the Apostles were, into enthroning personal relationships and the contemplation of beauty as the principal ends of human life. But for Keynes these remained the purpose of civilized existence.

Keynes might have been a stony, sterile, mortifying intellectual, more an oblivious calculating-machine than a man, but for the loving attention and ease of his upbringing by two bright parents. His zest was all his own, from infancy onwards, but they nurtured his originality, his creativity and his love of imaginative play. Although Keynes read deeply from boyhood, the great influences on him were personal rather than bookish. He responded to some people with staunch loyalty, and incorporated the best of their ideas into his own. His upbringing and early manhood exemplify the suppleness of the English class system from the 1870s: Eton and King’s set the ambit of his life; he learnt at school and college to discriminate between the shoddy, the stupid and the futile in ideas, amusements, objects and people and all that was well made, intelligent and purposive.

Clear thinking about other people’s mazes of notions and impulses contributed less to Keynes’s prodigious authority than the fact that all his conscious thoughts and deliberate acts were intended to serve what he believed to be true. No one, he thought, was entitled to accept a dogma unless he had thought or tested it himself. Few people had the disposition, the education, the strength of mind, the tenacity to think as he did: that is, to sift the weight of authority and tradition; to jettison much, but treasure a little. The urge to self-deception, which seemed to Keynes fundamental to untrained and thoughtless people, was what he most resisted. Public opinion he recognized as gullible, uninformed, wayward and super-abundant in misplaced confidence. Improvisations, expedients and thoughtless half-truths led to blunders, as he was to demonstrate in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

Keynes thought the Apostles stood apart from other Edwardians: ‘We prefer to analyse and discuss ends; we have not very much to say about means and duties.’ But they were akin to many of their contemporaries in feeling that traditional verities were flickering out. ‘In all the fields of knowledge and action, boundaries are being broken down with a rapidity to which there is no kind of parallel whatever in the past history of the world,’ he said in his paper on ‘Modern Civilisation’ delivered in 1905. ‘I cannot believe that family relations, or business relations, or political relations will subsist much longer with any sincerity or useful purpose, unless we remember that all duties are with respect to time and place, and that sometimes old duties must go to be replaced by new.’ Three years later, delivering his paper entitled ‘Paradise’, he reverted to this theme. ‘Our old ideas are not so much overthrown as upset. The old is not destroyed; it is replaced. We simply learn to see new things in a different light.’ His life as an economist, official, public man and benefactor of the arts held true to these beliefs. But he was an Edwardian, not a Victorian, so never caught unawares speaking in earnest. In submitting his credo in 1908, he chose to tease. His mother’s enfranchisement, the destruction of bulwarks of boneheaded reaction, sexual liberty, affordable pleasures for poorer people, disseminated culture were all causes that he supported until his death – but without the solemnity that characterized so much twentieth-century progressive thinking in Cambridge. ‘I believe’, he affirmed on the Apostles’ hearth-rug, ‘in Woman’s Suffrage and the New Mathematical Tripos, in the abolition of the House of Lords and the Sodomy Acts, in cheap weekend tickets, in Heaven and Hell and The Times Book Club.’ And so he did.50