ON THEIR SUMMER HOLIDAY OF 1900, the last year of Queen Victoria’s reign, the Knoxes lost their holdall, containing all their waterproofs, umbrellas, fishing rods and tweed coats. Mrs K. believed, with a serene optimism which the years never dimmed, that it would turn up, perhaps on the next train. The boys, with their inborn melancholy and natural relish for disaster, declared that it would not, and it did not.
The holiday that year was in a large house on the desolate fringe of Dartmoor. “We should have been warned,” Winnie wrote, “by the low rent demanded, but this my father held was due to its being in so remote a spot, so far from any railway station.” They arrived in two open waggonettes through the Devonshire lanes thick with honeysuckle, all of them drenched with rain, Ronnie with a pitiful cough on which he had decided to write a treatise. In the damp house itself, mice ran over the girls as they knelt at their evening prayers, and Ronnie, still coughing, had to meow like a cat (he had a talent for animal imitations) to keep them at bay. In the morning spirits revived, and Eddie and Wilfred went down to the rushing stream to fish, but there was a sensation, not to be shaken off, of something coming to an end. The family was dividing into children and those whose childhood was past.
Eddie was nineteen, Dilly seventeen, two pipe-smoking, Norfolk-jacketed young men. The sight of them, both unattached, was maddening to local hostesses in this remote district; “calls” had to be paid and returned. But Ronnie at twelve still clung to childhood, while Wilfred, fourteen, imperturbably arranged his Bits of Old Churches. These were souvenirs, stones and chippings which must genuinely have fallen off and been honestly picked up, otherwise they did not “count”, though Eddie and Dilly sometimes assisted with a good hard blow at the church wall which Wilfred never suspected. Dilly handed over to Ronnie his collection of 231 railway tickets; they no longer interested him.
In the autumn Eddie would be going to Corpus and Ronnie to Eton. In this family which breathed the air of scholarship, but had constant difficulty in making ends meet, education was the key to the future, and the Bishop believed that he could look forward with sober confidence. Although it was clear that Ethel, increasingly deaf and much slower than the others, would never leave home, Winnie was destined for University and, surely, for a brilliant clerical marriage, the three elder boys for the Civil Service, Ronnie for the Evangelical ministry. The Bishop was exceedingly busy, both with his pastorate and with the immense task of raising £100,000 for church extension. It is probable that he did not notice certain disturbing undercurrents, and that Mrs K. did not like to mention them. Neither Eddie nor Dilly felt certain any longer about the truth of Christianity. Their bookboxes contained not only classical texts but also The Golden Bough, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and George Moore’s Esther Waters. On the other hand Winnie, dreamily adolescent when she was not energetically bicycling, escaped into Malory, into William Morris and the stained-glass colouring of the Ages of Faith, and, safe in the airing cupboard, read aloud to Ronnie from the poems of Christina Rossetti.
The family were still conscious, if threatened, of a solid front against intruders. “We imagined other people might think we were peculiar, and yet we were quite sure that our family standpoint on almost any question was absolutely and unanswerably right.” No passage of time would ever destroy this feeling, but neither would it ever bring back the unity of 1900.
For the dimensions of earthly happiness, Ronnie always had to turn back to his childhood, and in particular to Eton. From the moment he arrived in College, was gowned and told “Sis bonus puer”, he gave the school his wholehearted devotion, and it offered him in return the certainty, the sense of belonging, and the discreet respect for brilliance which he so much needed. This was so in spite of the early days of bewilderment, which were not made much easier by Dilly, descending, when he remembered, like a vaguely amiable god, from his room to see how his “minor” was doing.
Sept 23 1900
Dear Mother,
I don’t quite understand the way the forms go, but Dilly says I am in the bottom division of Fifth Form as a matter of course. I hope this letter will reach you early, but I am only writing at 18 3/4 minutes past 8 p.m.… Yesterday I played in a game of Eton field game. I was put to hold a person up on one side, then someone threw the ball in among us, and by the time we were all sitting on top of one another the ball was far away.
We won apparently by three to none. I am very happy here. My love to Winnie,
your very sleepy son,
R. A. Knox
P.S. Floreat Etona.
He was possessed by a kind of pleasurable anxiety to do the right thing, and yet not to waste money at home, asking diffidently for a Liberty’s armchair for his room “to get something in accordance with the rules of taste. Mr Goodhart [the Master in College] is always calling chairs ‘horrible!’, because he makes little expeditions into one’s room just as one is getting into bed, and remarks on pictures and things. He told me the picture of Rembrandt was the sort of thing you could look at for hours. I’ve never tried.” But if Ronnie was eager to conform, he felt free to be happy at Eton. The romantic in him, the inconvenient love of mystery and beauty—inconvenient, that is, to one who thought he mistrusted enthusiasm and only valued a reasonable faith—began to spread its wings. He felt a devotion to Henry VI, the Sorrowful King, the Founder of Eton, which merged, in his thirteenth year, with his feeling for the poetry of the Rossettis and for the splendour of the west window at St Philip’s, the Burne-Jones window through whose ruby-red glass the light streamed in at evensong.
To outward appearances he was still the brilliant, dutiful and rather delicate prizewinner, petted by the Matron in College and still kept firmly in order by his brothers. As the cold of winter approached, Wilfred had “borrowed” his gloves, Dillwyn his cherished new overcoat, which he had christened Alitat, the name of a goddess in Herodotus. Alitat was returned, but Ronnie was often in the sickroom. He meditated anxiously on his resources. “I have bought all my birthday presents, expending 10/- on the whole lot,” he wrote home in June 1902. “I shall have to send Eddie his to-morrow; I have got him a knife-sharpener and strop combined, and also a little pendant for his watch chain.”
Eddie’s departure to Oxford meant that the first of the Bishop’s sons was at University, and he could not help recalling his own achievements there and Bishop Chavasse’s letter to him: “Thank God, thank God, dear old boy, that you have got a First.” Might not this very real triumph be repeated, in four years’ time? Corpus was the Bishop’s own college, and the President, Dr Thomas Fowler, was an old friend. Fowler was one of the great men of the University, a grammar-school boy from Lincolnshire who had become Professor of Logic, but valued philosophy principally as a means of training character; in his famous “private hours” he drew out his young men, and made them apply thought to conduct. To parents he made the terrifying observation, that if they failed to give their children a good education they were no better than the parents in primitive societies, who were permitted to put their children to death. He was both conscientious and sympathetic, and the terrible responsibility of choosing undergraduates for commissions for the Boer Wars was said to have shortened his life.
Eddie went up to Corpus not only as a good classical scholar, but as an Edwardian elegant. He had never bought any clothes for himself before he was sixteen. Mrs K. made large orders at the drapers and outfitters as required, while in the “girls’ room” Winnie pinned and sewed, with Dilly intervening to adapt the sewing-machine to steam power. But the Bishop, who had suffered himself from reach-me-down clothes and “boots heeled, and, I think, tipped with iron—in vain did I attempt to deaden the hateful noises that attended my movements”—was sympathetic to his own boys, all of whom, except the lounging Dilly, had the instincts of a dandy. Eddie was made an allowance of a hundred pounds per annum, to be deducted from his share of the money left in trust by their mother. To the awe of the younger ones, he opened an account with a Birmingham tailor and a cigar merchant, and indulged his good taste in eau-de-Cologne and silk handkerchiefs.
The Oxford to which he went up, on the other hand, was still a slumbrous place where the old eccentrics, whom Lewis Carroll had compared to caterpillars and fantastic birds, emerged from the “sets” which they had occupied for some forty years, complaining at the disturbance of young bloods. The University was still slowly digesting the Commission of 1877, aimed at diverting wealth from the colleges, to expanding the sciences and giving increased chances to poorer students. In 1893 the mighty Jowett had died, glad to have lived to interpret the ideas of Plato to the world, and Corpus itself, which up to 1850 had never had more than twenty undergraduates, had cautiously followed the times, and had expanded into Merton Street. The college remained small, all the members could be gathered at once on the secluded green lawn under the old mulberry tree, and the record of scholarship, as always, stood high.
The idea that a son of Bishop Knox could be “frivolous and extravagant” did not cross Dr Fowler’s mind. But the President’s regulations, even by the standards which Edwardian Oxford tried to impose, were strict to excess. He had a horror of even the mildest forms of gambling, and imposed penalties on the undergraduates for playing the dreaded new game of “Bridge” and for attending the theatre in gowns “on the pretext that they thought the play was by Shakespeare”. Eddie could not conform. He stayed out late. The most difficult route for climbing in at night was across the wall from Merton, where the less agile were sometimes impaled on revolving iron spikes; he became an expert, only damaging his wrists during the last few feet when his friends dragged his light weight across the windowsill.
With these friends, and in particular with Alan Barlow, later Secretary of the Treasury and Trustee of the National Gallery, Eddie passed golden hours. He was the unobtrusive wit of the dining clubs, organized races in hansom cabs, and introduced Miss Mabel Love, a music-hall performer, into the college. But he was aware of a document headed Communication to Mr E.V. Knox, Scholar, after complaints by the Tutors on his Idleness, and of the bitter disappointment that this was likely to cause at home. The summer of 1901 was spent at Glencrippsdale, where in the course of damp picnics and fishing expeditions Eddie fell into the melancholy which lay in wait for all the brothers. In an elegant version of the Greek Anthology, not the less true because it was a commonplace, he wrote,
Leaf and bud, ah quick, how quick returning
Here is visaged immortality;
Freshly from the dark soil sunward yearning
Lifts the ageless green; and must I die?
The natural confidante for these moods would be a young woman, in this case a girl called Evelyn Stevenson, who was also staying at Glencrippsdale, a spirited creature who played billiards and tramped over the heather in an “artistically simple” outfit from Liberty’s. “Do you know, I actually read your letter right through?” she wrote to him. “Awfully good of me, wasn’t it? I hope you are taking a generally less gloomy view of life and things in general … it’s really easier than one thinks to go on living—at least it seems to me to be so.” She also advised him “not to get too clever”. But on his return to Oxford Dr Fowler informed him, in a spirit of anxious justice, that his scholarship had been suspended.
To retrieve himself he must come back in September and take an examination on the whole of Herodotus and the whole of Plato’s Republic, with a fine to be paid if he did not pass, “which I fear would fall on your father rather than on yourself”—and Dr Fowler would be unable to supply him with testimonials of any kind. As a threat this would have had no effect on Eddie, but as an appeal to his affection it could and did. He gave up his “habitually late hours” (the records by now refer to him as “Mr Knox’s case”), spent only eightpence a week on bread and beer in Hall, and he passed his Honour Mods. A further letter from the Doctor recalls the pastoral atmosphere of Edwardian Oxford:
Dear Mr Knox,
I sincerely hope that our relations may be more pleasant in future, and that the discipline you have been under, and will continue to be under, in a modified form, this term, may turn out to be for your good, not only by teaching you the useful lessons of obedience and submission to authorities, but also by procuring for you more opportunities of reading undisturbed by callers, during the solitary hours in your rooms, as well as by leading you to reflect on, and I trust to repent of, the folly of some part of your conduct in the past.
If all goes well for the rest of the term, I shall regard your present punishment and the spirit in which you have received it as purging your offences of the past, and, I trust, giving me the opportunity of speaking well of you to any one who may make enquiries as to your character.
Those who were expected to make enquiries were the examiners for the Indian Civil Service, for which Eddie was destined. But now he knew—and, indeed, he had told Miss Stevenson—that he was going to be a writer, and one good enough to justify his choice of career to his father. He never took his final degree, but spent his last two years at Oxford training himself as a debater, essayist and poet by practising, as an apprentice has to do, in the styles he admired most—Swinburne, A. E. Housman, the young W. B. Yeats, the later George Meredith. Confined to his rooms by nine-fifteen every evening, he wrote alcaics:
I am dumb to-night, I cannot sing your praises,
Only feel this cool sweet-smelling silence,
Between leaf-lattices, upward and upward …
Wilfred was left stolidly behind at Rugby, working towards his turn for a scholarship. He was not very interested in school teams, and not very successful in getting prizes. But the placid exterior was deceptive, for Wilfred, like his brothers, had to come to terms with an inner struggle between reason and emotion, and between emotion and the obligation not to show it. From his letters it appears that his solution, for the time being, was a strange fantasy life entirely of his own devising. He refused to join the school debating society, “as if one who has spoken in all the Parliaments of Europe would condescend to speak at a petty school society!” When his box arrived and the Railway Company had demanded four shillings and ninepence he had “flung the minion out of the window for his presumptuous demands.” The heat had been appalling for October and during a rugby match several players melted into pools of water, drowning one of the onlookers, “a double tragedy which has cast a gloom over the whole community.” The Bishop complained about his spelling, and was told that “as soon as my friend Joseph Chamberlain has finished with Free Trade I shall instruct him to introduce a bill for spelling reform.” No alterations were to be undertaken at St Philip’s Rectory until Wilfred had come home to direct the workmen with a few well-chosen words, and if too many visiting clergymen arrive, he advises that it will be best to poison them with white arsenic.
In contrast to this, Wilfred showed the humility of the “in-between” child in a large family when he insisted that he doesn’t need a new bicycle—the old Raleigh will do quite well “for something I have always rather wanted to do, ride back from Rugby to Birmingham,” and his only request for new clothes is when the time comes for him to sit for his University scholarship.
The problem which had begun to occupy Wilfred’s inmost thoughts was moral and social, rather than religious. It was the question of poverty, which concerned him at the simplest and perhaps the only important level: is it tolerable that anyone should be truly poor? At Edmundthorpe he had asked Aunt Fanny whether it was right that the village children should be lifting potatoes until it was too dark to see, and had received the reply, “Nonsense, Wilfred! It will teach them habits of industry!” Since then he had seen the frightening slum poverty of Aston, where the women gathered round the stalls on Friday nights to fight for scraps of bone and offal. He did not, of course, underestimate his father’s tireless work in the grimy parish, but the Evangelical Movement, with all its wonderful record of service to humanity, did not go as far as Wilfred wanted. He felt that a new century needed a new direction.
Of all the older boys at Rugby, the one who had impressed him most had been Billy Temple. Temple, even as a schoolboy, had steadfastly refused to discuss “the Christian solution” for any specific problem; there was only one solution, and that was a total change of heart in society. From this idea, for which he had an ungrudging respect, and from what he had read of Ruskin and F. D. Maurice, Wilfred, at the age of seventeen, began to arrive at his own vision of the socialism of the future. In March 1903 he wrote to Ronnie about the Woolwich by-election in which Will Crooks, brought up in the workhouse, had just won the seat for Labour in what had always been considered a safe Conservative stronghold. Ronnie was not sure whether to rejoice or not. He was struggling, for his part, with a “Sunday Question” on the subject “What do you understand by Socialism and by the doctrines of Nietzsche?” Ronnie’s suggestion was that the poor and habitually unemployed might be shipped to Canada “or other places”. “This would only be applicable to the young,” Mr Goodhart wrote in the margin.
In the August of 1903 Wilfred and Ronnie were sent abroad together on a trip down the Rhine in the perennial hope of parents that they would “improve their German”. They were to photograph the churches and to keep a Tagebuch. They began by drawing up elaborate rules and regulations for calculating the number of lemon squashes consumed and the probable weight of the very stout German ladies on the boat. The tramway systems were, they thought, unimpressive, but they dutifully did the sights. Cologne was “clean but papistical”—and Ronnie, very much the junior, was made to sew on Wilfred’s buttons. The diary soon became light-headed:
August 5: Wilfie asks for beer at Gurzenich restaurant. Thrown downstairs. [Ronnie] … Ronnie evicted from St. Somebody’s by sacristan for sitting on tomb and intoning from Baedeker during mass. [Wilf] … W. excommunicated by Archbp. of Cologne for photographing him in Compline. [Ronnie] … Pulled Archbp’s mitre about his ears and beat him with a beadle’s bargepole. [Wilf] … Got W. out of military prison on plea of insanity. [Ronnie] …
As the trip went on, however, Ronnie grew serious. Not very sensitive, in later life, to the language of painting, he was touched, during those hot summer days, by the unmistakably direct appeal of what religious pictures he saw. On 16 August he wrote: “We went to the church of Notre Dame in Bruges, where there is a glorious Van Dyke Crucifixion with a very dark background and no one else except Our Lord in the picture. It makes one feel terribly lonely.” Although Ronnie, as he wrote in A Spiritual Aeneid, “then as always dreaded the undue interference of emotion in religion,” he bought a small silver crucifix in Bruges which he put first on the wall, then on his watch chain, then round his neck. Such an object had never been seen before at St Philip’s Rectory. He found himself responsive also to the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. “I should like books for presents; obscurer English poets, esp. before and just after the Revolution,” he wrote to Mrs K. He was still very ready to become a finished product of Eton; he still valued highly the power of Etonian understatement. (The best reproof for a violent offender, A. C. Benson tells us, is “I believe, Smith, we do not see you quite at your best today.”) Ronnie’s heart was given to Eton, but it was also open to the poetry of Henry Vaughan and his emblems of light and “dazzling darkness”, the night-time when “spirits their fair kindred catch”. He read for the first time, and memorized, Vaughan’s “Peace”:
My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a wingèd sentry
All skilful in the wars …
But the book which moved him most at this time was a present from his sister Winnie, a volume of unashamedly sentimental short stories, Hugh Benson’s The Light Invisible, a book abounding in wise, tobacco-stained old priests, one of whom tries and fails to save a child in danger of being crushed by a cart: an angel appears and gently guides the child, not away from, but underneath the wheels. This story particularly struck Ronnie. We have no idea what God intends for us; we have no right to ask for safety, perhaps we do not even know what it is. A lifelong enthusiasm for unpopular causes awoke in him. He borrowed a history of the Tractarian Movement, and, as he put it, “trembled for Newman, mourned for him as lost to the Church, and rose with the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the circles I moved in, there was a cause for which clergymen had been sent to prison and noble lives spent; a cause which could be mine.” To his father, to all the Evangelical homes of his childhood, the Tractarians were traitors from which English Christianity must be rescued. Ronnie’s changing views were “known at home, and doubtless regretted”, but he was only sixteen, the favourite child, the youngest, and these notions of his would surely pass.
Meantime the Bishop’s field of activity grew even wider when he was appointed, in the autumn of 1903, to the see of Manchester. He accepted by return of post, knowing that Balfour’s ministry might fall and the offer might not be repeated by a new Prime Minister less favourable to the Evangelicals. The bishopric had been constituted only fifty years earlier, and covered a huge district of east and central Lancashire, caring for three million souls. The great Lancashire battle to keep its own religious education, of which the Bishop was to be a staunch champion, had only just begun. There were unshepherded multitudes in Blackpool, where in Wakes Week the landladies let their beds for half the night, then put in a new relay of holidaymakers while the first lot were turned out in the backyard. Manchester, with God’s help, would be a worthy opportunity for his energy and splendid powers of organization.
Ronnie, who had rather expected “fatal opulence”, as though the Knoxes were entering a new chapter of Barchester Towers, was a little dashed to be told by Mrs K. that “it wouldn’t make much difference; it would make much more if we all got scholarships.” Perhaps even she was disconcerted by a moving day of such formidable proportions—it was during this move that Wilfred’s Bits of Old Churches were finally dispersed—and still more by the sight of Bishopscourt, the family’s new home in Manchester.
Dear Father [Ronnie wrote],
I told you that I didn’t want us to be better off, but only not worse off, so I am quite happy. Besides, you speak as if keeping a carriage was a necessary expense without any remuneration; but if we have a carriage we save cab-fares. Again, if we keep a garden, no more (or at any rate a little less) need to buy vegetables; even extra hospitality always has its remains; with charity the gain is purely moral. So we are practically better off.
About the house sounds more serious. But I am quite ready to
… let my childish eyes
Distort it into paradise …
(this is not a quotation but a thing I have just made up à propos). Anyway there is a walled garden which has a small dogs’ graveyard in it. And whatever it’s like, I shall be ready to be happy there.
Bishopscourt, behind its forbidding gateway and under its mask of soot, was about two miles north of the Cathedral; an electric tram passed within about thirty yards, but you had to be adept—as all the boys were by this time—at jumping off at the right place. There were three acres of garden, “the soil of which,” the Bishop recalled, “was, on the whole, waterlogged, and the surface blackened with coal-dust and fog.” The rooms were ill-arranged, and the butler, who “went” with the house, was offended to find the chaplain working next door to his pantry in a kind of cupboard. “My Lord,” he said, “what is to become of my dignity?” There was, however, plenty of room to entertain visitors on a large scale, from the Ragged School children to the justices of Assize, and to put up ordination candidates; the Bishop was satisfied. Two bathrooms were put in, and the drainage improved, and although the curtains were still being hung in the front rooms as the first Examining Chaplain appeared in the drive, Mrs K. was immediately her charming, welcoming self. Alice, the grumbling cook, and Richmond, the parlour maid, retreated into the cavernous kitchen, and the Bishop entered upon a further twenty years of selfless hospitality.
“What one chiefly remembers of Manchester,” Eddie wrote, “is the great dray-horses bringing loads of cotton to be bleached; they made a tremendous noise, and struck sparks, because of the stone setts.” When they were not at large in the roaring city, the boys took possession of a darkish, dampish study on the ground floor. If they wanted to smoke, they climbed up on to the roof and sat on the top of the glass dome of the entrance hall, where a false step meant a broken neck. The Bishop was unaware of this, and also of some of the scurrilous and wide-ranging discussions in the “boys’ room”. where the brothers could disagree just as fiercely as in the days when they had punched one another in the wind. “In polite and educated circles,” Dr Fowler of Corpus had written, “physical blows are replaced by sarcasm and innuendo, but this refined mode of warfare may give an equal amount of pain.” The brothers, who loved each other, could not resist the temptation to hurt each other at times. Dilly, when roused, was particularly arrogant, always taking, in argument, the extreme position.
The Bishop had understandably determined not to send his second son to Corpus, or even to Oxford. Dillwyn, who seemed equally attracted to classics and mathematics, should try for Cambridge, and sit for a scholarship to Eton’s sister foundation, King’s.
In the December of 1902 the Bishop had received a letter from Canon Bowlby, at Eton, which began: “I cannot imagine a better Christmas present than the report on your two boys.” But the delight and astonishment in young Ronald’s progress became somewhat clouded when he turned to the perplexing Dillwyn, who in his Cambridge exam had done two brilliant papers, one in maths and the other in Greek verse, and had left all the others unfinished. “It is not known whether he has any taste for philosophy or archaeology.” Perhaps Dilly had been asked, but had not replied. The Canon’s letter now takes on the tone of a racehorse trainer as he adds: “As to the Newcastle [scholarship] one can never be sure what D. will do. Only two boys are left who might beat him in classics, Swithinbank and Daniel Macmillan. They are a dangerous pair, no doubt, as they have been improving at the same time as he has.” One feels he might go on to recommend more oats and regular exercise, as, indeed, an Edwardian schoolmaster would not hesitate to do. But Dilly would not compete where he was not interested. His friend Maynard Keynes, who had beaten him the year before in the Tomline Prize, wrote to his father that Knox showed up his work “in a most loathsomely untidy, unintelligible, illegible condition,” forgetting to write down the most necessary steps, and “even in conversation he is wholly incapable of expressing the meaning he intends to convey.” Yet he respected Dilly as a mathematician, and perhaps, as Sir Roy Harrod suggests in his biography of Keynes, “it was precisely the shower of irrelevant ideas impinging on a brain of the very highest quality that produced such successful results.” We recognize the description of genius. So, too, did Nathaniel Wedd, the King’s admissions tutor in classics; he recommended Dillwyn for a scholarship, and said that he “appeared to be capable of indefinite improvement”. This was fortunate for Dilly.
In a certain sense, he had left home already. During his last half at Eton, Dilly had become a ferocious agnostic. He had postponed a confrontation with his father for the familiar reason—not fear, but the fear of giving pain. God once dismissed, Dilly and Maynard Keynes had calmly undertaken experiments, intellectual and sexual, to resolve the question of what things are necessary to life. Pleasure, like morality and duty, was a psychological necessity which must therefore be accepted, but without too much fuss; and just as Dilly had eaten cold porridge at Aston, because the pleasure of eating consisted of the pleasure of filling your belly, so now he declared that one should drink only to get drunk, and that women (to whom he was always timidly and scrupulously polite) existed only for sex. True pleasure came from solving problems: “nothing is impossible”. Happiness was a different matter; it was suspect, as being too static.
Dilly’s Cambridge was liberating in quite a different sense from Eddie’s Oxford. In 1903 it was still a small East Anglian market town with shopkeepers anxious to supply to the great colleges, and not without its share of Victorian eccentrics; old Professor Newton, in his top hat, walked between the rails of the horsetrams and refused to give way to oncoming vehicles. But the spirit of the University was the exposure of truth at all costs, and in that atmosphere, under that remorseless light and in the cold winds of the Fen country, Dilly’s mind was condensed into a harder crystal. By compensation, he developed even wilder notions and a tenderer heart, and made there the friendships of a lifetime.
His rooms, like most of those allocated by King’s to its freshmen, were in The Drain, a row of cramped buildings without running water, and connected with Chetwynd Court by a kind of tunnel. He was obliged to buy crockery and furniture from the last occupant, but, as he wrote to Mrs K., “they look solid, and may last for years … I am doing the room mainly in green,” he added, rather surprisingly, but one could never tell what Dilly would, or would not, notice.
King’s at this time had only a hundred and fifty undergraduates and thirty dons, all unmarried; it was a little world within a world, self-regarding, self-rewarding, and doubtful about how far life outside the boundaries of King’s was worth undertaking. The college finances were depressed, the food uneatable, and Hall so crowded that waiters and diners were in constant collision, but the prevailing air was one of humanism and free intellect, and many felt, as Lowes Dickinson had described it, that “the realisation of a vast world extending outside Christianity was like a door that had once or twice swung ajar, and now opened and let me out.” But across the way their magnificent chapel stood in all its beauty, a perpetual reproach to them.
The Provost, in 1903, was the mighty Henry Bradshaw, the “don’s don”. Bradshaw, a man of ferocious integrity, once faced a visiting preacher who had said that the loss of Christian faith must mean a loss of morals with the words: “Well, you lied, and you know it.” This was the last year of his provostship; in 1904, he was found dead in his chair, with an open book in front of him. Nathaniel Wedd, Dilly’s first tutor, seemed to many people an aggressive man, shocking with his red tie and open blasphemies, but, as his unpublished autobiographical notes show, he had hidden complexities. By origin he was an East Ender, raised in dockland, who had got to Cambridge the hard way; on the other hand, his hard-working cynicism was relieved by strange communications from the unseen world, to which, as time went by, he paid increasing attention.
But the greatest influence upon Dilly was the best-loved and most eccentric of the Fellows, Walter Headlam. Headlam, one of the finest of all interpreters of Greek thought and language, was a purebred scholar, descended from scholars. In 1902 he was thirty-seven years old, and seemed to have only a frail contact with reality. Travelling was difficult because he could not take the right train, and even when on horseback he rode straight into the pond at Newnham, saying doubtfully, “Do you think I ought to get off?” Letters were difficult, because Headlam chose his stamps only for the beauty of the colours. But his rooms in Gibbs Buildings were open to everyone who cared to come, and anyone who could make their way through the piles of manuscripts and bills was sure to be listened to and taught. The pupils’ work was usually lost and rapidly disappeared under the mass of papers, but Headlam sat “balancing an ink-pot on one knee,” as Shane Leslie described him, “and scribbling words into Greek texts, missing since the Renaissance, with the other. His famous emendations, in exquisite script, were allowed to float about the room until gathered for the Classical Review. A year later they became the prey of German editors.”
Headlam taught both by night and by day, for both were the same to him. His knowledge of Greek literature was enormous and consisted quite simply of knowing everything that had been written in ancient Greek, down to the obscurest Rhetoricians; he had no need for a dictionary. But Greece, to him, was not a dead civilization. He taught the Eleusinian mysteries with reference to ghost-raising and The Golden Bough, Greek obscenities were collated with Burton’s Arabian Nights, he strummed on a hired piano to illustrate the music of the tragic chorus, and, draped in his own beautiful faded crimson curtains, demonstrated how they should enter. Enthusiasm, however, combined with meticulous exactness. Headlam’s vast learning told him infallibly what an author could not have written, his artist’s eye helped him to supply missing letters. And only here, in matters of textual criticism, a battlefield of giants in those days when reputations were lost and won and German and English scholars faced each other in mighty competition, did Headlam make enemies. Confronted with an inaccurate text, his charming, sunny temperament disappeared and was replaced by a concentration of scorn. Afterwards he would be mildly surprised at the resentment of those he had called “idiotic pedants” and “illiterate amateurs”; a party had formed against him, even in King’s itself. Meanwhile his own undertakings, and in particular his edition of Aeschylus, remained unfinished; his own sense of perfection made it impossible for him to finish anything.
Dilly did not find Dr Headlam’s rooms unusual at all, or even untidy. They were exactly the kind of rooms he would have liked himself, and he responded at once to the problems of emendation, which, as Headlam wrote to Professor Postgate, “are, I suppose, empiric; what you call ‘instinct,’ I should rather call ‘observation.’ ” The borderland where the mind, prowling among misty forms and concepts, suddenly perceives analogies with what it already knows, and moves into the light—this was where Dilly was most at home. And he was able to help Headlam to find his notes. They are, after all, always more or less where you left them last night, as long as no one is allowed to tidy them away.
As far as friends were concerned, the college, as E. M. Forster put it, was divided into the excluded and the included, and Dilly, as an Etonian, was included, though this was of singularly little importance to him. The prodigiously brilliant and impatient Keynes had arrived in The Drain a year earlier, and had made his classic comment: “This place seems pretty inefficient to me.” With Lytton Strachey, who had already been up at Trinity for three years, he had taken readily to the Apostolic atmosphere of intense friendship and mutual criticism, based on a very natural desire to talk about each other’s shortcomings, and on a convenient version of some of the notions of their captive philosopher, G. E. Moore. Moore, diffident and speechless himself, was confidently interpreted by the brilliant Kingsmen. His proposition that it is useless to discuss what is meant by “I’ve got sixpence,” but useful to think what we mean by saying it, led to endless variations of “What do you mean by … ?” and “You don’t really mean … ?” His recognition of goodness and beauty (Moore did not think they could be defined) as inherent qualities of things, in some ways like blueness or squareness, and his insistence that it was actually wrong to be in a state of contemplating ugliness, meant that those who could recognize beauty must be in a superior class apart, as, indeed, the Apostles already felt they were. This particularly infuriated Dilly. “Knox, of course, was highly enraged at anyone’s writing such rubbish,” Keynes wrote to Strachey, after a reading of his paper on Beauty. Furthermore, the search for beauty tended to become narrowed to a search for fresh-faced undergraduates with whom one could fall in love.
Homosexuality appeared in many shades in early-twentieth-century Cambridge, linking more than one generation, from the outrageous Oscar Browning, wallowing naked, though by this time decrepit, in the Cam, to the “charmed life”, sometimes more a matter of imagination than of fact, of the Apostles themselves. Headlam himself had found, as he told Mrs Leslie Stephen, that “life is not simple for those who have to choose between conflicting tendencies,” and had expressed this in the finest of his English poems, on the death of John Addington Symonds:
I go mourning for my friend
That for all my mourning stirs nor murmurs in his sleep …
Dilly regarded the subject with detachment, knowing that it explained why Lytton Strachey should at first dislike him violently and describe him as “gravely inconsiderate”. Dilly never became an Apostle, although his name was more than once put forward.
But, in spite of his hesitations (one of his nicknames at home was Erm), he was a speaker much in demand at college societies. Of these there were many, including one organized by Lowes Dickinson (it was here that Keynes had read his paper on Beauty) which was known as the “As It Were In Contradistinction Society”.
The adjective “noxian”, applied to Dilly in Basileon (the irregularly appearing Book of King’s), was said to mean “noxious and anti-Christian”. It must be said that the loss of faith, now apparently final and complete, was a process far more painful for him than for his contemporaries. Thus, G. E. Moore had ceased to be a Christian simply from what he heard his elder brother say at table; Leonard Woolf, so he tells us, gave up God because He was not of much use if He did not produce rain when it was asked for; while Nathaniel Wedd had been told at the age of eleven, “Most people have some form of religion, but your father and I have none,” and advised to find one for himself. But Dilly had been brought up with active Christianity around him, his stepmother’s kindness and hope, his father’s charity and energy. In exactly the same way as Ronnie, Dilly felt the need to justify his faith—since his refusal to believe was nothing less than a faith by an appeal to reason. His scepticism was not logical; it came to him in the form of blazing indignation, a vision of Christianity as a two-thousand-year-old swindle, inducing human beings to fear where there is nothing to fear, and hope when there is nothing to hope for. If the swindle could be proved, that would “save his reason”, and Dilly always hoped that it might be. Yet his attitude was always to defy God for what He had done, or reprove Him for not existing, rather than ignore Him because He didn’t. And, more treacherous still was the fact that Dilly, like all his brothers, could not forget or unlearn the words of the Authorized Version of the Bible, which had been interwoven since childhood with his daily life. He would never cease to be profoundly moved by “Son of Man, can these dry bones live?” or “Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?” or “Many waters cannot drown love,” or simply by phrases like “clear shining after rain”, or that strange description of a breeze, “a going in the tops of the mulberry trees”. And Dilly could not forgive himself, because he had been betrayed by his emotions and was unable to keep his own rules.
At Cambridge he swam and rowed on the Cam (“Poor Cam!” said Walter Headlam, “it thinks it’s a river! But rivers sing! rivers are transparent!”), bowled the slow spinners that nobody could play, and played cards at bridge that nobody could understand. Even Maynard Keynes, who allowed no one to hesitate during the game, paused in amazement at some of Dilly’s leads, but Dilly, with only fifty-two cards to think about, was able to calculate the probabilities so rapidly that he and his partner usually won. His absent-mindedness, however, seemed to increase, and he had rather more accidents than Headlam, whom a special Providence apparently guarded. He acquired a motor-bicycle—it was just five years since the Hon. C. S. Rolls had ridden the first one in Cambridge down the Corn Exchange—and this caused difficulties, since Dilly was logically rather than mechanically minded, and insisted, in the face of all experience, however painful, that certain results must follow certain causes. On other occasions his habit of suddenly standing stock still, lost in thought, led to trouble—“Colbeck of Marlborough ran into me at a good pace, and fell on the pavement, but escaped with some bruises.” On an impulse he went down to Eton to take Ronnie out to tea, but kicked a football over the wall “which landed on the floor of a carriage containing two ladies”. In the summer of 1904 he burned himself badly in a fearful explosion, the result of adjusting an acetylene lamp on a motor-car. “As an invalid he is a gentle creature,” John Sheppard wrote to Wedd, “though he tells me that when he first met me he thought me a doubtful character, and I gather he still does.” This combination of mildness and downright rudeness was very like Dilly.
Mrs K. became alarmed, and wrote to both Ronnie and Wilfred to go and see what their brother was doing. She could not leave the Bishop, who was occupied with preparations for a great holiday mission on Blackpool sands.
At Eton, Ronnie by now, though still fragile and delicate, was swimming in a golden atmosphere of popularity and success. As Captain of the School, he was known as the cleverest boy within living memory; his recent operation for appendicitis had kept the whole school in suspense; he was getting ready his first book of poems, Signa Severa, for publication, and had just been given his gold Newcastle medal, “one of the oases,” as he told Mrs K., “in the arena of my struggling existence.” His friends, too, were those who seemed set apart, not only because they had been born into the governing aristocracy, but because they naturally did all things well. But at Cambridge, anxiously trying to find Dilly’s tobacco and to be generally useful, he felt himself a small boy again. “I generally came to feel myself rather a fraud,” he wrote home, “as Dilly quite suddenly got up and went out to dinner.” Maynard Keynes, he added, had taken pity on him and showed him round the college, but, not unexpectedly, he had had to go to Evensong by himself. “King’s Chapel is topping,” he added.
Wilfred also came over to see Dilly; his comment was that he had already warned his brother that no good would come of messing about with motor-cars. “I don’t know that Dilly liked this very much, but he had to admit I was right.”
Wilfred was going up to Oxford in the coming autumn. The Bishop, although he did not know the whole extent of Dilly’s agnosticism, knew enough about it not to risk another son at Cambridge, and Wilfred, without much remark from his family, had won a scholarship to Trinity, Oxford. His letters home were in his customary unruffled style. He told Mrs K. that the President of the college, Dr Blakiston, would make an excellent butler (there was a vacancy by now at Bishopscourt), “while his removal would confer a real benefit on the University.” As cox of the Trinity boat, he had had several opportunities of shipwrecking the University crew, but had “decided to spare them”. In the meantime, since Winnie had come up as a student to Lady Margaret Hall, the river had become a place of daily dread, being crowded with strange females whom he was required to take on picnics.
The Bishop did not fear idleness or dissipation from Wilfred, but he might, if he had known more, have feared something more serious, for this third son had gradually reached a state of mind in which he “didn’t particularly believe in anything”. He had lost the precious sense of communication with God, without losing the need for it. Wilfred had, however, a great capacity for clearing his mind, and for making it wait patiently for what might come. He did not want to waste time, and he was aware that—as he wrote many years later—in times of crisis “the weakness of the flesh will probably suggest to us that the laziest method is really most suited to our individual temperament.” To avoid the dangerous empty moments when vacancy threatened, he set himself—when he was not working, or with friends, or at socialist meetings—a series of ingenious tasks. One of these was to establish, by a series of controlled experiments in the college gardens, whether tortoises really preferred yellow flowers. Wilfred always lifted the Trinity tortoise carefully, by the edge of its shell, to avoid putting it off its feed, and he made his notes the basis of an essay on the inductive method.
It was surely to the credit of the brothers that all four of them stood by their father when, in 1905, he organized a march to London in support of the Church schools. Even Dilly refused an invitation to go to Brittany with the artist Henry Lamb, whom he found totally sympathetic, to join, as he put it to Keynes, “10,000 Lancashiremen and that unprincipled ruffian, the Dean of Manchester,” in the great demonstration. The Bishop described his feelings on the summer’s day when, after weeks of preparation, he descended from his hansom at the appointed rallying-place and found himself alone. But the excursion trains soon came rolling in, and with the support of Lord Halifax, he led his procession, more than a mile and a half long, to a mass meeting at the Albert Hall. There were brass bands and waving banners, and Eddie in particular was delighted when the chosen hymn, under the swelteringly bright sun, was “Lead, kindly light, amid encircling gloom”. But there was no mistaking the desperate earnestness of the occasion. Lancashire in those days was prepared to go to great lengths to maintain her independence and her right, if she wanted it, to maintain her religious education. It also brought home keenly to the brothers how wide the gap was now between their interests and those of their father.
In the November of 1906 Dilly attempted a reunion of a different kind when he invited his father and brothers to the Amateur Dramatic Society’s production of the Eumenides, which was intended to revive the glories of the classical play in Cambridge. Eddie and Ronnie came, and, sitting together, saw Rupert Brooke, in his first term at King’s, come on stage as the Herald—“a vision of ideal beauty,” according to the connoisseur of poetry Eddie Marsh, but, in the view of some of the undergraduates, “accoutred in a not very decent manner.” Dilly himself was being apprehended as an object of beauty by Lytton Strachey, who was in the audience, and, after a change of heart, had begun to find his appearance “transcendent”. Only Walter Headlam, excluded by his enemies from the play committee, sat, unaware of these cross-currents, in an unworldly trance, totally absorbed in the music and in the crimson robes which his own researches had shown to be the authentic colour worn by the choroi of Aeschylus. Dilly knew, indeed, that his beloved master had become increasingly vague, insisting, although he seemed in excellent health, that his health was failing and his days were numbered. The work for the second part of his Tripos, Dilly wrote home, had “begun to bore”, and he dismissed still more acidly the prospect of the Civil Service. He was determined on a permanent Fellowship at King’s, and the chance to be of use to Headlam in his definitive edition of Herodas.
A papyrus of the Mimiambi of Herodas (or Herodes, or Herondas, for even his name was, and still is, in doubt) was one of the more striking acquisitions of the British Museum from the excavations at Oxyrhynchus in 1889. These finds had excited the whole world of learning. Even Bishop French, on his last journey, had been given news of them by the Sultan of Muscat, but although a scholar himself, he had commented: “Human sciences are passing; only God’s word abides.”
The Herodas was a little roll about five inches high, preserved in the dry sands of Egypt, worm-eaten, rubbed, missing in parts, written out, not too carefully, by a copyist in about ad 100. It gave a complete version of some of the mimes, or satiric dialogues, which since ancient times had been known only through allusions or quotations in other Greek authors. Herodas was not a very good writer—not considered as such by the great authorities, who graded Greek and Latin literature as carefully as they did their pupils’ work. He was an oversophisticated, sprightly, not very clean-minded Alexandrian, writing in a distinctive metre, “limping iambics”. “Malign fate”, Dilly thought, had preserved these mimes when so much else was lost. But their value to classical scholars, grammarians, archaeologists and historians was beyond price.
But who was to edit the mimes? Nothing can be attempted with a newly discovered papyrus, closely guarded by a great museum, without the editio princeps, that is, a clear text deciphered and transcribed by an expert palaeographer. This was being done, in 1891, by the British Museum’s specialist, Dr F. H. Kenyon, while the honour of the first critical edition, after his work was completed, had been entrusted to W. G. Rutherford. But, to the horror of the world of learning, Kenyon suddenly married and went off on his honeymoon, thus selfishly delaying the editio princeps. Rutherford had to publish without it, exposing himself to the cruel mockery of German critics. Other editions followed, but none were satisfactory, and the work of scholarship waited for the deeply respected Henry Jackson, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge. But Dr Jackson, who seems never to have consulted the papyrus himself, delayed, distracted by “innumerable worries”, and distressed by the terrible discovery that one of the mimes took place in a sex-shop.
None of these things were upsetting to Walter Headlam, who knew more than anyone else about Herodas, but refused to stand in the way of Jackson, and treated the many editions as an excuse to put off his own. Brilliant expositions, delivered in an airy aside, were taken down on scraps of paper by Dilly and John Sheppard, and added to the ever-mounting piles. Difficulties, as always, Headlam referred to the whole of the rest of Greek literature. He distrusted archaeology: “so easy to take a spade!” And Herodas must be brought to life, as Aeschylus had been. He and Dr Jackson might act out one of the mimes at Trinity, or they might demonstrate how the Athenians, on festival days, danced on a slippery goatskin until they fell flat. His imagination took wing. When he was thrown out of his horse-and-trap he exclaimed, as he sailed through the air: “Now I shall never edit Herodas!”
But this kind of light-heartedness is possible only for the essentially serious. To present an unknown author to the world, even if he illuminates only an obscure corner of corrupt Alexandria, and to do it in the spirit of true scholarship is, after all, not an unworthy task. And Headlam did care a little about fame, even if he was too unmethodical to set about winning it.
The situation had grown more complex. In 1900, to quote Dr Kenyon’s words, “a small box which must have remained in the possession of some native” was sent from Egypt to the British Museum. It was found to contain papyrus fragments, “some of them reduced to mere powder,” and those fragments proved to be some of the missing portions of the Herodas papyrus. It would now be necessary to reconstruct what was left of Mime VIII, The Dream, and Mime IX, The Breakfast, like a jigsaw puzzle. A scrap of papyrus glued into the wrong place would destroy the sense entirely. Six years had passed since the box arrived, and still no agreement had been reached between scholars.
This, then, was what Dilly wanted to do. He did not care that, in spite of winning the Chancellor’s Medal for Latin verse, he got only second-class honours in the second part of his Tripos. He did not care whether the Apostles thought him a thing of beauty. Just before he went down, he wrote and produced a little farce, The Limit. The play dealt with the tribulations of Delicia Crackle, a college bed-maker, and Dilly bicycled on to the stage as Screachey, the aesthete, complete with long black beard. Then, in 1907, he went down, content to keep body and soul together until he could return as a Fellow.
That Easter, Eddie and Dilly took Ronnie on an expedition to Rome. Like the trip to Germany, it was paid for by the Newtons in the hope of some educational benefit to the boys. The little party, in straw hats and white flannel shirts, were respectably lodged at the Pensione Bethell in the Via del Babuino, at the rather high price of forty-two shillings a week.
Ronnie, who was nineteen, had by now been for a year at Balliol, where he had gone on a first scholarship, but somewhat reluctantly, feeling that in leaving Eton, where for six years he had been a favourite with both the boys and the masters, he had been exiled from an earthly paradise. “I feel curiously schoolsick,” he wrote to Winnie. He had gone up to Oxford, however, with a number of brilliant friends from his election and had found his feet at once; only now, in Rome with his brothers, he was reduced once more to the status of the youngest, the Little Grampus. He attended the English Church, kept the coffee hot for the moment when his elders would deign to get up, and went out to try to buy Punch, in which Eddie’s poems were now appearing regularly. Ronnie was trying to write a short story himself, in the manner of Hugh Benson, the diary of a priest who, attempting to exorcise one of his parishioners, is possessed by a nameless, hideous evil. Meanwhile Eddie and Dilly had got hold of a Baedeker which told them that the top of the Via del Babuino was “a haunt of artist’s models, chiefly natives of the Abruzzi,” and they sometimes left Ronnie to his own devices, although Dilly refused to learn any Italian beyond the sentence “These lavatories are dirty,” and ordered everything he wanted in Latin. Yet he managed to check the kinds of marble on the walls of a large number of churches, to see whether green malachite was as rare as it was said to be in the Choliambic Fragments. This, needless to say, was an errand casually suggested by Headlam.
In the autumn, Dilly went to teach classics and ancient history at St Paul’s. The school was then in Hammersmith, and he found lodgings at 37 Talgarth Road. In class, he made no attempt to keep order, but was “loved by all”. He used to say that the VIII form at St Paul’s were so clever that he had to sit up half the night to keep ahead of them, and that this seriously impeded his social life.
Eddie was also in London. After coming down from Corpus he too had done his share of schoolmastering, a year at North Manchester Preparatory School, which prepared boys for Manchester Grammar. Like Wilfred, but unlike Dilly and Ronnie, he was able to keep order and stood no nonsense. “He comes into the room and smiles at me,” he wrote on one boy’s report. “It is not enough!”
The years at Corpus were to be the only years of his life during which he did not work hard; but he wanted to write, and suffered, as generations of authors have done, at the stuffy and inky boredom of the classroom. In 1905, after a number of attempts, he had some verses accepted by Punch. In 1906 the Manchester Courier took a piece on the elections—the Liberal landslide during which, in Manchester as in London, the crowds stood in the cold streets to watch, as red and blue rockets shot up into the sky to give news of a Liberal or a Conservative victory. A few weeks later the journalist James Bone, the “London end” of the Guardian, came back to Manchester to do an article on the Old Ship Inn; he promised to help, if Eddie could get down to London. The Courier gave him a letter of introduction to Clement Shorter, the editor of the Sphere; finally, the Bishop arranged to raise his allowance to £150 a year until he found his feet. Eddie settled an outstanding bill of 16s 9d for cigars, and set off.
Many years afterwards, he used to regret that he had come to London too late; to become a real “character”, he said, one must have arrived before the Diamond Jubilee. But the fog-bound London of autumn 1906 was exciting enough, and he felt like a country boy in the capital. His family expected an account of the historical buildings and institutions; Eddie concentrated on the theatres and music halls, the transport, of course—one whistle for a motor-cab, two for a hansom—politics, the life of the streets and the newspapers.
Fleet Street, with the Empire it served, was in its great days, with hardly a warning shadow of the long decline to come. As James Bone described it, it was still the Street of Adventure, short and undistinguished in appearance, with cookshops, cheap tailors, provincial papers crowded into upstairs offices, but above all the din, “that terrific pulse of the news that, once heard by a youth on his first newspaper, is never forgotten till his own pulse runs down.” The district was crowded with typesetters and compositors, and “the meanest tea-boy felt that he was part of a great power that could make war, though it could not make peace.”
Editors seemed all-powerful, the reporters were heroic bohemians who emerged from the Cheshire Cheese and the Press Club to write copy for a drunken friend, who might make a rapid recovery, so that his editor was faced with two stories at once. There was a quartet—James Bone himself, Philip Gibbs, the essayist Robert Lynd, fragile in his Rhymesters’ black cloak, and that fine writer H. M. Tomlinson, whose father had been a foreman in the East India Docks. They were, as Lynd said, “the sort of people our mothers warned us against”. All four accepted Eddie as a promising beginner, and helped him.
Though the Street was dominated by the daily press, the 1900s were the heyday of magazines—The Strand, The Pall Mall Gazette, Tit-Bits, Pearson’s—covering a wide range of interests as well as solid fiction and “astonishing facts” (or “it is not generally knowns”). Although Eddie was later to write: “What is the difference between literature and journalism? None, except that journalism is paid, and literature is not,” this was a time of great popular writers, who were happy to contribute to the magazines. Joyce, in Trieste, was struggling with the second version of his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, T. S. Eliot, at Smith Academy, was feeling “the disillusion only possible at sixteen”, but the public had many years yet to become aware of them, and meanwhile they enjoyed, without perceiving any subtleties, the stories of Hardy, Conrad and Kipling. Furthermore, they read poetry. The “pocket anthology” fitted into a Norfolk jacket, and could be taken out on long weekend walks; it had fine thin pages and a piece of ribbon attached as a bookmarker. The Golden Treasury (1891 edition) was the right size for this, so too was A Shropshire Lad. “Poetry,” Eddie wrote, “is presumably to be felt. It is presumably, by feeling, to be understood.”
There was also a large public for the art, or craft, of light verse, in which all four brothers excelled. “Every newspaper editor, I think,” wrote H. A. Gwynne of the Standard in May 1907, “is looking out for a good versifier, and if Mr. Knox is able and clever in this way, I think there will be no doubt of his being able to get his foot on the journalistic ladder.” Eddie combined Dilly’s ear for metre, and Ronnie’s skill in rhyming, with a political sense and a certain dry response to life’s unpleasant surprises which was all his own.
“It was very stultifying, having no money,” he recalled. The Courier had paid £3 7s 6d for five poems, and Punch 10s 6d for a contribution. His first lodgings were in Trevor Square, Knightsbridge, then “a very humble place”, but the best he could manage. “My landlady had three classes. The highest were ‘carriage folk.’ Beneath them were what she called ‘middle-class people like myself.’ And the third was the Poor, in speaking of whom she mingled a certain amount of sympathy with a tinge of contempt. The trouble was that of course I never knew where I belonged; every time I paid my bill I knew very well that I was in the third grade, but I could never find out where she placed me.” Soho attracted Eddie, who had a keen appreciation of its cheese and wine shops, but the district was favoured by Dilly’s Apostolic friends, in whom he detected an unwelcoming coldness. He decided to try Bayswater; the atmosphere of the Edwardian boarding house is preserved in a letter from a fellow lodger, about a bet on the Derby:
I am sending you 12/6 and sticking to the other 10/6 for the present, and as I want to pay Frank as soon as possible I owe you now exactly £1—what ho! I am having a monopoly of the beautiful women in this house now you are gone and [the landlady] says every day ‘What a small party we are now, you will have to do all the talking for those that are away Mr. Brownfield.’ But they haven’t got much out of me yet in the conversation line. Miss Battle says she is pining for you and hopes you will soon be back.
But outside the lace curtains was the poverty of the pavements, barefoot children, the terrible bedraggled feathers of the unsuccessful prostitutes. In his notebook Eddie wrote verses which he never published, in which the muddy street-market in women is forced by the light of its own gas-lamps, “as out of steel and stone grow fire,” to confess the squalid truth.
A poet at heart, he did not expect to be one by profession. At this point he was sending out twenty contributions a week, of which one might be accepted (though payment was sometimes “overlooked”), three “held for consideration”, and the rest rejected.
Like every freelance, he could tell the sound of them as they fell through the letterbox on to the doormat. He was prepared to write on anything. The Tribune favoured political issues, the Observer wanted epigrams on Women’s Rational Dress, “which,” J. L. Garvin wrote to him, “is diverting to me.” Fiction was always a possibility, and Eddie began a novel:
‘Edward Smith stood on the top step of his house in Berkeley Square on a late November evening of 189–. He was immaculately dressed. A fine drizzling rain was falling.’
I never went further than that. There were so many reasons why. What does ‘immaculately dressed’ mean? Wasn’t I merely giving a hint to the reader that the fine drizzling rain would spoil Edward Smith’s clothes? And if so, Edward Smith ought to have called a cab. I was sick of him. I hated him.
Eddie tore up his manuscript, forswore fiction, and determined to lead his life as a truth-teller, as indeed all the four brothers, in their different ways, were to do.
Not surprisingly his digestion, always a weak point, began to break down, and he was advised to try the fashionable vegetarian régime of Eustace Miles. Ronnie, still at Eton, and up in London to see his writer brother, was somewhat disappointed to be taken to the Eustace Miles restaurant, where charcoal biscuits, grass and raisin salads, and “peptonised cocoa” were served; another hazard was the Sunshine Apostle, dressed (according to Eddie’s diary) “as John the Baptist, or even more sacredly,” who commanded the customers to eat fruit and go naked, as in the Garden of Eden. After Ronnie had been sent safely back to Bishopscourt, Eddie felt impelled to go to the Gaiety, drink too much brandy, and return to Bayswater at five in the morning.
“October 7: Started Eustace Miles diet in earnest. Feel like a cow … Went to call at Miss B.’s flat. No response to the bell. Began an ode to a bus-horse. Subject promises well. Can find no news in today’s papers. Bored.”
Punch accepted the ode. But he needed regular commissions, and if possible a job, and he began, with his distinctive mixture of modesty and dash, to try his luck at personal interviews.
“When I began to write,” he observed dryly in 1952, “it was much easier to get advice than payment. I do not know whether that is still so today.” Robertson Nichol, the fluent editor of The Bookman, warned him never to exceed three thousand words a day, advice which Eddie had no difficulty in taking. He was depressed by the hall of Nichol’s house, piled with review copies and leaving only a narrow tunnel for entrance and exit, which seemed altogether symbolic of the fate of a book reviewer. The most important introduction he had, however, was to Edward Hulton, proprietor of the Daily Despatch. Through the manager of the Manchester Guardian, Eddie was told: “You should be prepared to explain fully to Mr. Hulton what you think you could do, and ready also to volunteer a specimen of your own work.” Shrinking from the prospect of the specimen, he was ushered into the room:
To my surprise it was not a very large room. There were two chairs in it, one in which he sat at the desk, and one close beside it. I thought he would ask me to sit in the second chair and talk to me about my life and my art. He did not do this. He left me standing where I was, and pulling the second chair rather closer, placed his own feet upon it. I did not feel that I should do any good work for that paper, and the whole interview was a failure.
Occasionally he had a stroke of luck. A friend asked him to do the theatre notices for the Standard while he was away, and in this way Eddie saw the early appearances of the enchanting Irish Stage Society at the Court. In those days the critic had to leave by the end of the second act to get his copy in by midnight—which was why Act Three was often said to be “much inferior to the others”—and was obliged to wear full evening dress with a “gibus”, a top hat with springs, which could be folded and sat upon. This was necessary, even for wild Celtic and nationalist drama. A little later, he had an interview with the Saturday Review, but they offered only a hundred pounds a year for three articles a week, including the political column, and he would have to learn shorthand typing at once.
Desmond MacCarthy, the most genial of Irish critics, had been at King’s, and wanted to help Dilly’s brother, as he wanted to help everybody he met. He also knew everybody. Eddie must come with him and ask advice from James Barrie, who was at the height of his fame, though he could sometimes be a little disconcerting, unless the side of him which spoke to adults, and which he called “McConachie”, happened to be foremost. Buoyed up by Mac-Carthy’s confidence, the two of them called at 133 Gloucester Terrace, where they found the room empty, except for a large dog, with which Barrie used to play hide-and-seek in the Park. While they waited, Eddie in sheer nervousness hit his hand on the marble mantelpiece. It began to bleed profusely. MacCarthy was aghast. Barrie could not bear the sight of blood. They tried to staunch it with handkerchiefs, and with the cuffs of MacCarthy’s soft shirt, which became deeply stained. Barrie appeared in the doorway, took one look at them, and withdrew. Kind-hearted though he was, he was obliged to send down a message that he could not see them.
Eddie judged it was time to call upon Owen Seaman, the editor of Punch, who now reigned, heavy, scrupulous and autocratic, in the Bouverie Street office. Eddie described to him the Saturday Review’s offer. “And what did you say to this indecent proposal?” Seaman asked.
He himself did not pay high rates, but he knew that in this young man he had a writer of light verse whom he could not afford to overlook. He hinted, in a tone as serious as the Bishop’s when addressing ordinands, that there might, in time, be a vacancy on the staff. Meanwhile, Eddie succeeded in getting his first job, as sub-editor on The Pall Mall Magazine.
The Pall Mall first appeared in 1893, running stories by Hardy and Conan Doyle, Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads and illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley; and in 1907 it was still a “quality read”. The editor was Sir Douglas Straight, now at the end of a varied and successful career, and passionately interested, for the moment, in bicycling and in exploring the Thames in his steam-launch. Much of the work was left to his assistant. “Two vast hampers stood upon the floor, one of manuscripts coming in, the other for those to be sent back. I had to pass them from one to the other, and there was a danger that on very hot afternoons, when one was sleepy, one would accidentally reverse the process and have all the stories to read again.” Most were historical romances, “with rescued heroines and overturned wine-glasses. We were much inhibited in those days.” On the other hand, Straight would have moments of great attention to detail; when they printed an illustrated story in which the hangman “quite naturally” happened to live next door to the condemned man, he was worried as to whether a hangman ought to wear gloves. Eddie was dispatched to find out, and walked up and down all day outside Pentonville, “not liking to go in and ask.”
His own contributions, whether signed or not, were all read at Bishopscourt, and he wrote home dutifully; he knew he had justified himself in the eyes of his father. But lodgings in London could be lonely, and in search of sympathetic companionship, Eddie would do much. For the sake of Mary Creighton, who lived with her mother, the widow of the Bishop of London, he endured visits to their terrifying house, where you had to go through the drawing room to get to the lavatory, and where the Bishop’s study was kept exactly as it had been on the day he died. Mrs Creighton crushed him, and so did Mary, because he was only a journalist. Very different was Peggy Beech, the spirited actress daughter of the Rector of Great Bealings. Her most successful part, one of few, was Beauty in Pinkie and the Fairies. She refused Eddie’s proposal of marriage, but then changed her mind. “How awkward it is,” Eddie noted in his diary, “when you have led a lady who has rejected you to suppose that you will love her for ever, and then find that you were mistaken—but she fails to realise it.” Arriving, entirely self-invited, at Bishopscourt, where the lawns were “infested with missionary garden-parties” and Mrs K. was almost at her wits’ end, Peggy threw open her travelling-bag and took out a large Bible. “I know how to behave in a Bishop’s household!” she cried. But if she was disappointed in her reception, Peggy Beech was not likely to lose heart. “LIFE interests me vividly,” she wrote, “PEOPLE—THE PRESENT—THE FUTURE—for me THE PAST IS over and done with—DUSTY AND SAD.”
It was Winnie, the most loyal of sisters, who had to entertain the colourful visitor, for Eddie suddenly found himself called away. Wilfred was at student camp that summer. Dilly, lingering at Talgarth Road, had news from Cambridge of Headlam and his imaginary ailments. He was convinced that he was dangerously ill, but his pupils had contrived to steal his medical dictionary, after which he had been perfectly happy again. He had flirted mildly with the young Virginia Stephen, had chalked a young lady’s nose in a billiards-room, and had appeared at the college ball to dance the post-horn gallop. In June 1908 Dilly was hoping to meet him in London; he was coming up for a conference.
Headlam reached London without mishap, which in itself was a matter for congratulation, but that night he collapsed in his hotel bedroom, and died. He was forty-two, and he had not yet edited Herodas.
Dilly went up to King’s for the rest of the summer vacation, and was given the room directly under Maynard Keynes, now a lecturer in economics. Shortly afterward, Keynes moved into Headlam’s old rooms, and the faded crimson curtains were rapidly cleared away, with the familiar muddle of years. George Thompson, another of Headlam’s pupils, inherited the notes on Aeschylus; John Sheppard and Dilly set to work on Herodas. Dilly became a Fellow in the following year, 1909.
Ronnie, in an affectionate attempt to please everybody, went to camp (which he hated) with Wilfred, then to Blackpool to help with the Mission, but he was not quite in a settled frame of mind. He was reconciled to Balliol, though he still regretted its great days under Jowett:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow over Balliol Hall,
As though the Cosmos were controlled
By Dr Jowett, after all …
His academic career, however, had met with a slight but noticeable setback. He had got only a second class in Honour Mods, not because, like Dilly, he had lost interest, but because he had been so confident of his knowledge that he had not bothered to re-read his texts. No one doubted that he was an exceptional scholar, but the second class distressed him. He would have preferred, like Newman, to fail altogether.
His faith was undisturbed—it was necessary for him, he said, to believe either everything or nothing—but he had come to feel the need not only for ritual but for private confession and absolution. He had told his father, who had not forbidden it—but how long would it be before the situation at home grew unendurably painful?
In other ways he must, at twenty years old, come to terms with his emotions. At school he had felt, like most sensitive boys, intense affections. On this subject A. C. Benson wrote: “I do not fail to ask the younger boys, especially those that are likely to be exposed to temptation and who make friendships easily and widely, two or three times in a half whether they are on the right path.” But he need not have been disturbed about Ronnie, to whom these innocent obsessions had been part of “youth all round you and within you, and the river flowing through it all to remind you of transcience and eternity.” Now at Oxford he still made friends “easily and widely”, and his mantelpiece was invisible beneath his many invitation cards to conferences, lectures and debates. He did not see Wilfred as much as before—as he put it to Mrs K., “there have been less meetings of the Oxford branch,” partly because they no longer believed the same things, partly because Wilfred looked with some reservations on the “carriage folk”—the golden generation, charming and spirited, but undisputably “other”, who were Ronnie’s closest circle. Julian Grenfell and Charles Lister, Lord Ribblesdale’s second son, had been at Eton with him and had come up to Balliol in the same year; though Ronnie certainly did not cultivate these people—they loved him unreservedly and wanted him for a friend—it was still true that he romanticized them, just a little.
What was he to do with his life? He had to work for his Finals, but already there were suggestions of a Fellowship at Balliol or Trinity, and both Balfour and F. E. Smith had conveyed hints that he would be acceptable as a private secretary. That would mean a glittering future in the world outside Oxford, and outside the Church. The idea of the priesthood, in fact, had scarcely occurred to him as yet.
“I have had a romance,” he wrote to Mrs K., in June 1908; he had been bicycling with an Oxford friend, Guy Field, and had had a puncture:
We coasted into the next village, called Oakley, and asked a cart if there was a pub about. The cart said that there were five. When it had gone a little way, two people out of it came back and said ‘Wouldn’t we like to mend the puncture at the Vicarage?’ They were the Vicar’s two daughters. We said ‘Delighted’. So I mended the puncture very efficiently, while they held lanterns and conversed with us.
True, an impartial critic could not call either of them extremely beautiful. True, also, that we left without any exchange of addresses. True, that a young man helped me remove the mud-guard, whom Guy Field takes to be a fiancé of one. But who shall say it was not a romance, because the threads were broken?
Such things, of course, had to be treated light-heartedly, in the style of the fragrant Edwardian tales of summer which Eddie was still putting into his hamper of rejected manuscripts. But it shows Ronnie delicately poised, in spite of all his achievements, between this way and that. God speaks to us through the intellect, and through the intellect we should direct our lives. But if we are creatures of reason, what are we to do with our hearts?