Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines
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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