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