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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ