Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines
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
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge trained young men to serve the needs of an expansive imperial nation. They broadened admissions policy to include youths such as Neville Keynes – the provincial, non-Anglican son of a self-made businessman – whom they converted to their values by imposing Greek as a compulsory entrance requirement, and by providing a non-vocational curriculum based on classics. Both the entrance requirements and the curriculum were aimed at ensuring that neither university would be soiled by mercenary values. Thrusting businessmen would not pay for their sons to fritter away three years without promise of monetary profit. Still less would young men find that their undergraduate training disposed them towards life in business offices. Until the 1880s the academic cream of the undergraduates had become clergymen. Afterwards they entered government departments or the colonial service, enlisted as military officers, practised law or perhaps medicine. ‘It is really most distressing the way the civil service swallows nearly all the best Cambridge men,’ G. M. Trevelyan told Keynes around 1906.1
The Liberal legislation of 1870–1, which reformed entrance to both the civil service and the ancient universities, created a new governing order that was one of the glories of history. Compared with its forerunners, it was socially elastic. Its uppermost echelons were beguiling in their intelligence, and a tradition of adaptive self-renewal was instilled. The high officials in the ministries did not bend to populism; they stood beyond the swerves and crashes of public opinion; and they tempered the moody enthusiasms of voters and incoming ministers. There were neither political placelings in departments nor putsches of staff by politicians. Officials aspired to monastic clarity of thought. They honoured continuity, formality and objectivity. This system, it can be objected, discouraged initiative, venerated hierarchical authority and ossified departmental character; but until the late twentieth century it represented the acme of civilized organization.
Some commentators complain that this system produced administrators who were remote from the needs of industrial society, who disdained entrepreneurship, deprecated profit-chasing and, by valuing private avocations as well as productivity, brought amateurism to public life, and thus spread timidity, low productivity and economic failure. Such reproaches can be overdone. They ignore the extent that from 1915 onwards, in wartime and in peace, government departments recruited bankers, industrialists, merchants and tradesmen as privileged advisers and consultants. It undervalues the extent to which Whitehall – while trying to balance the counter-claims of trade unions and a globally dispersed empire – was receptive to the demands of the business community. Officials, if anything, had an inferiority complex where profit-making was concerned, and were at times too compliant with the imperatives that the business community brought them.
Lord Chalmers, Keynes’s wartime chief at the Treasury, used to say that every man ought to drive two horses abreast, one his work and the other some scholarly enthusiasm which would give relief from his duties. Chalmers chose his hobby early: he took up the study of Pali, and translated sacred texts of Buddhism. As a further pastime he read and re-read Virgil, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divina Commedia and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Basil Blackett, who first recruited Keynes to the Treasury, was an expert translator of Byzantine Greek. Otto Niemeyer, a classical scholar from Balliol who won first place in the civil service examinations of 1906, remained a keen classicist throughout his Treasury career. Sir George Barstow, Niemeyer’s colleague, was a wit and versifier, and so polished an amateur of the arts as to be elected to the Society of Dilettanti. Frederick Leith-Ross for a time contributed a weekly article to Vogue as well as poems to the Pall Mall Gazette. One could feel pride in being governed by such men.
It was settled in the Keynes family that Maynard was to join this governing class. In the civil service entrance examinations of 1906, he came second out of 104 candidates, behind Niemeyer. The Foreign Office was unthinkable for Keynes, because it entailed overseas postings far from Saturdays with the Apostles, and from other precious King’s affinities: he plumped for the India Office as the government department with the next highest prestige. It had a peaceable reputation – the Permanent Secretary of the Treasury had recently described the India Office as ‘an office where everything goes right and there is little Parliamentary interference’ – as well as the shortest working-hours of any of the great ministries: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays; 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday; with an hour for lunch, two months’ annual holiday, and remission from attendance on bank holidays and Derby Day. Keynes used these long hours of leisure to work at his Treatise on Probability, which was the first systematic English exploration of the logical foundations of probability since his father’s