IT WAS SUGGESTED MORE THAN ONCE that the sons of Bishop Knox, like the sons of Bishop Benson, ought to form some kind of firm or co-operative with their intelligence as capital; in that case, Wilfred said, it would have to be called Knoxes and Brother. He was acknowledging the tendency to think of him as the most reliable, quietest, but least brilliant, and so forth. This was a misconception, but certainly, in the decade before the First World War, Dilly and Wilfred seemed as far apart in their spheres of life as it was possible for the family temperament to be.
Dilly was very happy at King’s, where Monty James was now the genial Provost (the Lodge door was never locked, and whisky, cards and tobacco were always ready in the hall). True, James was said to be disturbed by intellectualism and to rap sharply on the table with his pipe: “No thinking, gentlemen, please!” and Dilly blamed him for the intrusion of ghosts, mysterious footfalls and general peering into the Beyond which was to disturb the college in future years. But the atmosphere, even without the irrecoverable charm of Headlam, was lively. Maynard Keynes, now in impetuous pursuit of reform, pressed for a higher dividend for the Fellows, reorganization of the catering, enquiry into the working conditions of the staff and the resignation of the Bursar. Dilly was one of the “Young Turks” in support of Keynes against what was said to be the leading principle of King’s—never to do anything for the first time. Although he found it almost impossible to be in time for the Councils of War, held before the college meetings, he attacked the Bursar through the columns of Basileon. In successive numbers he appealed to the Bursar to inspect the rats in the Fellows’ bedrooms, then to come to the rescue of the rats because the rooms were now so damp that they were being driven out by water rats, lastly to provide better care for the water rats whose “nasty cough” kept the younger Fellows awake at night. At the same time he felt a deep, though cautious, admiration for Keynes’s insistence that money, including the college funds, was there to be spent. Keynes had succeeded in pushing up the Fellows’ dividend from £110 to £150, ensuring, as Moore would have recommended, an increased distribution of what is intrinsically good.
Cambridge was still, as a contemporary put it, suffused with the golden glow of homosexuality in its most creative aspect, a source of emotion and art, and a relief from hard thinking. The amiable abstracted figure of Dilly, among many shifting intrigues, impressed Lytton Strachey, with his highly developed sense of comic structure. He had not objected to Dilly’s presentation of him as Screachey in The Limit; he had been certain, in 1906, that Walter Lamb, Henry’s brother, was in love with the “divine ambiguous Knox”. “Knox very graciously asked me to lunch on Sunday,” he wrote to Duncan Grant. “Lamb and Keynes were there too. I was of course too timid to say much, and Keynes and I soon departed, leaving the lovers, or quasi-lovers, nose to nose upon a green velvet divan. I hoped for at least a declaration; but alas! they merely talked (as I learnt afterwards from Walter) about the Cambridge Review.” The following January Dilly appeared “wonderfully décolleté” (which probably meant that, as occasionally happened, he had forgotten his tie) at one of the evening “salons” held by the amiable classicist John Sheppard, who later became Provost. “Sheppard remained a block. Good God Almighty!” But Dilly, as his letters show, had only come to discuss the gross errors in the Crusius edition of Herodas.
By February, Strachey himself had fallen in love with Dilly. “You must forgive me, please,” he wrote, “if I can talk of nothing but Knox. I came back from Cambridge having only seen him once—but the impression was so wonderful! Oh dear! You needn’t be jealous! I’m as far away from him as from you!” Walter Lamb had tried to dissuade him by swearing that “Knox liked everyone equally”, but what enraged Strachey was that he would never have a chance to find out; and meanwhile he was routed by the arctic cold and—though he does not mention rats—the pervasive damp of King’s. In February, however, he was offered a room at Trinity, and knew that he must put his fortunes, and the “Knox question”, to the test. He stayed several weeks, and had begun to regard Dilly (or Dolfus, or Adolphe, as he preferred to call him) as an Endless Possibility. But in March 1907 he tore himself away “with infinite tears”.
My beloved Adolphe, too, it was sad to part with, though I quite failed to find more in him that I had always found before. Did I tell you that he had a wonderful veil of ugliness that he is able to lower at any minute over his face? His method is, you see, to lure you on with his beauty, until at last, just as you step forward to seize a kiss, or whatever else you may want to seize, he lets down a veil, and you simply fall back disgusted. Isn’t it a horrid trick? And then, of course, when you’ve decided that the whole thing’s absurd, and begin to wonder what you could have found in him, he removes the veil, and says he must go back to King’s.
The veil may have been partly composed of pipe smoke, since Dilly told Eddie that Lytton, although exceedingly jolly, needed “fumigating” at times. Strachey was perplexed, too, by the elusive quality of Dilly’s mind, approaching every problem by indirections. In May, however, came a much worse shock. “Did I tell you the dreadful news about Knox?” he asked Grant. “He’s taken to nippers! Yes, permanently—and that dreadful kind without rims!”
It was true that Dilly’s eyesight was strained, and although he soon exchanged the nippers for horn-rimmed spectacles, without the slightest idea of the effect produced in either case, Strachey could not bear to go and see him on his next visit to King’s, in June. The episode ended for him in London, as he sat in St James’s Park with his friend Swithinbank.
How nice to sit with Swithin in the sunshine! I talked to him about Knox, and told him about the nippers, and how appalling it was for me, because I’d had a passion for him. He said, ‘I have a passion for him too, sometimes.’ I replied, ‘Well, you’ll never have one again! You’ll never get over the eye-glasses.’ He said, calmly, ‘Oh, I should take them off.’ Rather wonderful? Can you imagine us talking about Knox on our penny seats, and forgetting all about the Colonial office?
“I want to write a moral story on the subject,” Strachey added, “but I suppose I shall be too lazy—called ‘The Spectacles.’ ” It would certainly have given an example of the imperviousness which carried Dilly through the pressures of life as though over charmed ground. He became, however, a good friend of Strachey’s, at one with him over the matter of “the deluded individual J.C.”, and continuing to hope against hope that Strachey might one day finish his projected Life of Jesus.
In 1910–11 two newcomers to Cambridge had a considerable influence on Dilly. One was an undergraduate of King’s, Frank Birch (Francis Lyall Birch). Birch was a many-sided human being—a rather dull historian, an acceptable drinking companion, a mysterious private personality, a brilliant talker and a born actor. In his impersonations, as in those of all great comedians, there was a frightening element. He excelled in “doing” one of his classical tutors, J. E. Nixon, who had only one eye and one hand, and was reputed to be taken to bits altogether at night, so that nothing could be seen in the room at all. Birch liberated in Dilly the vein of wild fantasy which Wilfred had showed in his letters from Rugby, and Eddie in his contributions to Punch.
The other arrival in Cambridge was A. E. Housman, who took up the Kennedy Professorship in 1911, and from whom Dilly counted himself lucky to receive a glacial few words, now and then, at the Classical Club. Housman’s poetry was important to all the brothers, but particularly so to Dilly, who revelled in its sombre advice. On the flyleaf of a copy of Manilius which he had given to Headlam, Housman had counselled him to confine himself to the things of this earth; with this Dilly sympathized and still more with the tension of A Shropshire Lad arising from the balance between reason and unhealed emotion:
And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night.
Housman, too, could be allowed to understand English metre. The three-stress rhythm of Is my team ploughing affected Dilly so much that he bit right through the amber mouthpiece of his pipe, which was heard by those in the rooms below him to crash to the ground.
This was Dilly between 1907 and 1914—expanding cautiously in the Apostolic friendship, encouraged by Birch to appear as, for instance, Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest, carried away by poetry and motor-bicycles, and beginning his career in pure scholarship. His Fellowship dissertation had been on the prose rhythms of Thucydides; his argument was said to be unacceptable, but so clever that nobody could contradict it. Then he returned to Greek poetry. Mr Ian Cunningham, a recent editor of Herodas, writes:
He discovered, more or less simultaneously with one of the greatest, if not the greatest, modern classical scholars, U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, what is now known as the Wilamowitz-Knoxian bridge. This is a highly technical point of Greek metre. A bridge is a point in the verse where word-end is forbidden. This one relates to the iambic trimeter of the early period—Archilochus, Solon, Semonides, Hipponax.
To be remembered by a few because of a rule about a word that doesn’t end in lines of poetry that scarcely anyone reads—if Dilly ever desired immortality, it would be of this kind. In Housman’s words, all exact knowledge “pushes back the frontiers of the dark,” and consoles mankind for his discovery that “he does not come from the high lineage he fancied, nor will inherit the vast estate he looked for.”
The “vast estate”—the belief in life after death—Dilly, ever since his second year at Cambridge, had decisively resigned. In the Lent term of 1906 Dean Inge, who had himself been a Fellow of King’s and was the most intelligent preacher that the Church could put into the field, had been asked to speak in chapel on the errors of intellectualism. The Dean appealed for a working faith, “in fact, if not in name, Christian”; evidently he was prepared to settle for this, but he failed to move the rationalists of King’s. He told them that the intelligence should not be insulted by the apparent contradictions of faith—the mathematical concept of infinity itself involved contradictions. But the mathematicians remained firm. Georg Cantor had shown them that it didn’t.
“I do not know myself where dear Dilly is in these matters,” the Bishop wrote to Ronnie, “and he gives me no encouragement in trying to help him.” More comforting was the knowledge that Wilfred’s time of blank disbelief was over. After three years without faith in anyone or anything in particular, Wilfred was drawing to the end which Ronnie had set for himself ever since they had been small boys together at Edmundthorpe: the priesthood.
This does not mean that, at this stage in their life, either of these young men was an ascetic. On going down from Trinity, with a first-class degree, Wilfred had in mind a career in the Civil Service, and took a post as junior Examiner at the Board of Education. Hard though it is for anyone who knew him in later life to credit it, he was known in those years as “the dandy of the Board”. Ronald and he went to buy silk ties together in the Burlington Arcade, under the guidance of Eddie, who knew about these things. Ronnie, moreover, although he had friends of all kinds and was so popular that he hardly ever took a meal by himself, was, as has been said, warmly accepted into the Coterie, that is, the children of the Souls. The fathers of the Coterie fished and shot tirelessly, administered the country, and, like Chesterton’s Man Who Knew Too Much, “were born knowing the Prime Minister,” while their dominating wives, with an air of authority, almost of divinity, diffused an atmosphere of spiritual refinement and joy, uninhibited gossip and an overwhelming interest in each other. The difficulty of growing up in these circumstances was great, and the Coterie felt it; it could be seen in Julian Grenfell’s noble savagery and his determination to dominate wild nature by shooting and killing, and in Charles Lister’s erratic socialism. Ronnie, to them, was “golden” because of his wit and sympathy; they asked no more, but a visit to one of their great country houses could be formidable. There was, for example, the question of practical jokes, a constant threat to the weekend guests of Edwardian society. Ronnie recollected one sumptuously formal dinner party, at which he took his seat after grace, only to realize that a “plate-lifter” had been hidden under the stiff damask tablecloth to upset his soup plate; but, warned by years of rough-and-tumble at Bishopscourt, he was able to cut surreptitiously through the rubber tube which connected it, while his host was left at the head of the table, operating it in vain.
It was the ease with which Ronnie did everything, the shy and almost apologetic way in which his witticisms appeared, the sudden bursts of high spirits and improvisation which seemed to come from nowhere, which made him a legend in his own generation. His limericks seemed to materialize out of thin air, and no one could remember when he first said them. Frances Cornford, in a letter of 1910 to Miss Jourdain, recorded that there was “a man called R. A. Knox” at Oxford, who had written
There was a young man who said: ‘Damn!
I have suddenly found that I am
A creature that moves
On predestinate grooves,
Not a bus, as one hoped, but a tram.’
(Ronald used to say later that he supposed he must have written this, but regretted the implied betrayal of the Birmingham tram system.) Lytton Strachey, coming to Oxford straight from Cambridge and Dilly, had called Ronnie “a Christian and a prig”, but unless he simply equated the two things, it is hard to see where his impression came from. Ronnie spoke everywhere, debated everywhere, on both sides of the question if necessary, canoed through every lock and reach (he was not strong enough to row, as Wilfred did, but made use of his uncanny sense of balance), bicycled everywhere, was welcome everywhere, but he did not talk, except to those few who would understand it, about his spiritual life. Here the current was set. Both he and Wilfred, though from quite different points of approach, were becoming “Romanizers”—that is, convinced Anglo-Catholics. If they offered themselves for ordination as priests, they would be undertaking something totally different from what was understood as ordination at Edmundthorpe, or by their father in Manchester.
The Anglo-Catholic movement (Wilfred objected to this term, and preferred “English Catholics” to show that we were still divided from the rest of Europe, but shouldn’t be)—the Anglo-Catholics felt, and feel themselves to be, not outside but inside the Catholic Church. The Reformation, in their view, made no decisive break, nor did the establishment of the Church of England under Elizabeth. The Pope had declared that the ordinations of Anglican priests were invalid and that they were not truly priests, but the Pope was wrong, and could be shown historically to be wrong. The tradition had not been broken; indeed, man could not break it. The English Church retains its ancient authority to guide and rule, and its religion must be, as it has always been, sacramental. The priest renews the crucifixion of Christ every time he blesses the bread and wine. In the sacrament of penance he conveys the power of God to forgive sin and heal the soul.
Sacramentalism had never been totally extinguished in England. Again and again people had rediscovered it. As T. S. Eliot was to put it: “I made this; I had forgotten.” The Anglo-Catholics looked back, in particular, to the royalist priestly Church of Charles I. The family community of Little Gidding, whose chapel was desecrated and destroyed in 1647, was a sad memorial of this time. Then, in the early nineteenth century, the Tractarians had asserted the authority of the Church against any worldly power (this was the subject of Tract 1) and proclaimed a Church of England which would not be half-asleep, but “the living representative of God on earth.” Then Newman offered the vision of the via media, a Church with Catholic doctrine and a Protestant freedom to inquire and choose. But the Oxford Movement could never have made its electric impact on Victorian England through doctrine and historical knowledge alone. It impressed through the personalities of its leaders, and by the beauty of holiness, which, once recognized, can never be forgotten.
The English are said to be the least theological nation on earth, and it was only as a means to an end, and a clearer method of explanation, that the Tractarians turned to Ritualism. Eucharistic vestments, holy water, candles, bells, incense and so forth were simply a way of showing truth through symbols which anyone could grasp. Unfortunately Ritualism shaded into the aesthetic movements of the late nineteenth century, and the desire for beauty, or at any rate some sensation, to break the tedium of everyday life. The Ritualists had expected to be misunderstood, and were not surprised at violent opposition. They were accused of mumbo jumbo, of fancy dress, or betraying the country to Rome, whereas they had tried to show that England had always been European and Catholic. They knew that they were risking prosecution in celebrating the English mass. There was considerable support for legal action against them by the Bishops of their dioceses.
The Anglo-Catholics of the early twentieth century felt that they were fighting a “soldier’s battle” with the Church and State on one hand, and on the other with Rome, who rejected them unless they would agree to submit to reordination. The object of the struggle was always to draw English Christians closer to European Catholicism, so that we could stand together against a materialist Western world. It was here that the real confrontation lay. “The Catholic religion is a life,” Wilfred wrote, “and its rules are a way to secure that life.”
Authority in an industrial society can be claimed only by those who understand its effects. After the secession of Newman, the movement had ceased to be academic; it turned to the ordinary parishes, and above all to missions to industrial cities. This concern for the bottom of the heap was one of the true signs of life in Anglo-Catholicism.
It can be seen how Evangelicalism, of Bishop Knox’s sturdy old-fashioned sort, was shocked and wounded by every one of these developments. To the Evangelical the reservation of the sacraments was deeply objectionable, because to him the whole of life, not only the bread and wine, was sacramental, and God was equally present everywhere. The emphasis on penance and absolution, with the priest as intermediary, did away, it seemed, with the old direct relationship of the Christian and his God, with the words of the Bible to guide him. Newman, whom the Bishop regarded as a misguided weakling, had certainly been a man of holy life, but then, he had been brought up as a child in a good pious Low Church vicarage. European Catholicism was hatefully un-English; so, of course, was Ritualism; plainness—the Bishop had hesitated even about wearing a surplice at the beginning of his ministry—was also a way of showing truth. As for the social mission, concern for the poor had found, for more than a century, its champions among the Quakers and Evangelicals.
He deplored all Wilfred’s doctrines, but could not disapprove of what he was doing. During his Oxford vacations, and even after he went to the Board of Education, Wilfred lived at the Trinity Mission, in what is now Oxford Road, Stratford E5. In these surroundings he immediately felt at home.
The University Missions were then at the height of their activity, and—except for King’s Mission, which was agitating to get rid of religion altogether—they were based on a chaplaincy with meeting rooms and boys’ clubs. Trinity Mission was in the charge of a very large Old Etonian, the Rev. “Pombo” Legge, not at all spiritually inclined. He told Eddie, who came down to see how things stood with his younger brother, that he considered religion a matter of hygiene; services, like cold baths, were necessary, but should be over as quickly as possible. The rest of the day could be spent in relaxation, for Pombo’s powers of doing nothing were quite exceptional. He was happy to leave everything to Wilfred.
Stratford, West Ham, is not in the dock area itself but on the “back rivers”, supposed to have been made by King Alfred to drain the Thames and leave the Danish fleet high and dry. In the 1900s these streams were used for particularly noisome small businesses—fat melting, creosote boiling, tanning and the manufacture of sausage skins and sulphuric acid. The whole area rested on what George Lansbury called “rather shaky marsh land”. Drainage was bad, and the sewage ventilators discharged gas, rather than letting air into the sewers; the incidence of infectious illness, particularly diphtheria, was high, and in many of the little houses a stretcher could not be turned round, so that hospital cases simply had to be carried out by porters. In spite of the 1906 Education Act, schooling was uncertain, and although there was the “Truancy” for habitual absentees, most of the children were part-time attenders, working a twenty-hour week for about eightpence. Philanthropists objected to this more than did the children themselves. Crimes were mostly what the police called “family cases”—wife-beating, attacks with fishmongers’ knives and dockers’ hooks, cruelty to donkeys, children drunk in the streets on Saturday nights. A recurrent problem was the cheap “low-flash” American oil at fivepence halfpenny a gallon, which warmed the house effectively, but tended to explode; after an accident women and children looked “like a heap of burnt rags” on the floor.
Wilfred was struck by the East Enders’ sense of life as a spectacle. They knew it would be a struggle, and had the measure of it. When a woman told him that she didn’t so much mind being knocked down with a flatiron, but “drew the line” at a wooden leg, she showed the West Ham instinct for comic drama. As to missions, everyone was used to them. The Salvation Army took their stand on the corner, the secularists attacked all religion from the Cromwell Club. The very name “settlement” suggested dwellers in an alien land, and “mission” was worse, implying that the missioners had been sent from a better place, and would return there. Wilfred objected, too, to the notion that they were “doing good”. Doing good, like saving one’s soul, ought to be the by-product of activity, not the reason for it.
Eddie recalled that what the Stratford boys really wanted to know was what brought anyone down there at all. “You’re not doing this for nothing. What are you getting out of it? Are you writing a book about it?” They respected only those who could keep order. The Rev. Pombo Legge, who had done a bit of heavyweight boxing, sometimes bestirred himself to knock their heads together. Wilfred was too slightly built for this. He remembered that, to quieten the unruly Sunday school at Aston, his father had employed a curate who was “something of a mesmerist”, but he did not believe the East End boys could be mesmerized. At football matches, he said, he made it a principle to send somebody off in the first five minutes, to assert authority. But the survival test was to go swimming with them in “The Bricks”, a murky pool on Wanstead Flats which they much preferred to the new Municipal Baths. This was rough, but no rougher than his first term at Rugby, and much less so than a seaside holiday with Eddie and Dilly.
To his father, he tried to explain in what way he had become a convinced supporter of Labour. At Oxford, Ronnie and he and Charles Lister had founded the Orthodox Club, which pretended to be socialist and printed its invitations on red cards, but it was time now to put away childish things. West Ham was one of the classic training grounds of the Labour movement, and the corner of Beckton Road was one of its first schools of oratory. Wilfred believed that Christianity could work with it and through it. In 1910, when the unions were restrained from contributing to the party funds, he invited his father to give something to the expenses of George Lansbury, who was standing for Bow and Bromley. The Bishop replied that by socialism he understood the exaltation of “society” at the expense of the individual, both body and soul. Had Wilfred considered this?
In 1911 and 1912 the shipbuilding company at Canning Town closed down, and there was unemployment all over the East End; the National Insurance Bill seemed to come only just in time. Ronnie felt that “The Bill is the best we can do, but we can’t expect to like it.” Eddie was prepared to rejoice with Wilfred, but added: “How are we going to pay the salaries of all the officials?”
Wilfred’s moral guides at this time were Billy Temple, now President of the Workers’ Educational Association, and Lansbury. Temple’s fearless idealism has been described as comic, but church history should be judged, not by whether it is successful, but by whether it is right or wrong. George Lansbury was an Anglo-Catholic, whose attitude in 1909 was defined in his The End of Pauperism: “Kneeling with others at the altar of the sacraments will and can bring no real peace unless those who so kneel spend their lives as brothers and sisters, and this is quite impossible within a system of life which depends on the ability of the children of God to dispute, quarrel and fight for their daily bread.” Both Temple and Lansbury saw that society must be unified before it could be healed, or, in Lansbury’s frighteningly simple words, “a poor man or woman must be held of equal social value with a rich man or woman.” Both dreaded, however, the idea of the state as a vast soup kitchen, believing, as Wilfred most consistently did, that the only valuable help is what we give each other. But to preserve the ethos of the old Friendly Societies and coal clubs in large-scale politics would, as he foresaw, require a miracle.
If the concept of wholeness drew Wilfred towards the sacramental church, for Ronnie it was the ideal of authority. All four brothers had brought impatience to a fine art. Ronnie felt something like despair at the English genius for irreligion—the comfortable feeling that there is a good deal of truth in all religions, but not enough to affect practical conduct. This seemed to him the legacy of Protestantism. “If you have a sloppy religion you get a sloppy atheism.” If truth existed, then there must be one truth and one only, handed down in an unbroken line, a truth about which “theorising is forbidden and speculation unnecessary”. It was as a champion of authority that Ronnie prepared for the priesthood.
He was indulged—or so, at any rate, his brothers thought—in not being required to enter a theological college or to do a year’s parish work as a deacon. He had been offered the chaplaincy of Trinity, and he was to tutor in logic, divinity and classics while he prepared himself for ordination by meditation and study, in his own way.
Even as a schoolboy, long before his vocation was clear, he had seen that close human relationships might be an impediment to his service of God. Deeply attached to his friends, and “conscious for the first time how much my nature craved for human sympathy and support, I thought it my obvious duty to deny myself that tenderest sympathy and support which a happy marriage would bring.” His intimation was justified in 1912, when, as an English Catholic priest, he took a vow of celibacy.
The feeling among Anglo-Catholics was one of ferment and hope, a determination to defy the Establishment and press their cause. The campaign had its advance guard of young curates, committed—with a public still keenly interested in church affairs—to set their world on fire. Certain churches, at strategic points throughout England, were felt to be advance posts, which must be held at all costs. One of them was St Mary’s in Graham Street (now Graham Terrace). Ronnie had no connections there, but the Vicar, J. C. Howell, was an understanding friend, and it was here that he said his first mass, in September 1912.
His father, of course, could not possibly lend countenance to such a ceremony by attending it. He had prayed since Ronnie’s nursery days that this favourite youngest son, this naturally religious young soul, should one day enter the Church, but Ronnie’s ordination, when it came, was the culmination of years of bitter argument. At home in Manchester Winnie tried to take the brunt of it, to help the hard-pressed Mrs K. By now she had taken a degree in history and was beginning, in the intervals of parish work, to write her own books. But she worked on her Life of St. Louis with her ear open for disputes, ready to fly down from her room to act as peacemaker, and dreading Sundays, which Dilly, if he was there, persisted in treating exactly like any other day, while Wilfred and Ronnie bicycled round Manchester to find a church which observed the Seven Points of Ritual. At first the Bishop showed open bewilderment. “Between ourselves, Winnie, I cannot understand what it is that the dear boys see in the Blessed Virgin Mary.” He conceded point after point. He said nothing about Ronnie’s rosary, which could be heard clicking in the intervals of the daily family prayers. Alice and Richmond exchanged glances; Eddie’s terrier, which was accustomed to wake up only at the familiar intonation of “And now to God the Father”, growled ominously. As a deacon, Ronnie wore, even at home, a version of the priests’ dress which he had seen on holiday visits to Oberammergau and Bruges. “Someone said,” he told Winnie, “I can’t remember who, that there are only three cities in the world, Paris (I think, or maybe Rome), Oxford and Bruges.” He had acquired a cassock, knee breeches, black silk stockings and buckled shoes. The Bishop, who had to wear silk stockings himself on public occasions, could not imagine why anyone should want to. Ronnie’s clothes were looked after by Winnie, who dared not entrust them to the outspoken Richmond. At a much deeper level, the Bishop never forbade his sons to go to confession, which was not forbidden in the Prayer Book. He desired to leave every possible way open by which Ronnie might come back to him.
Certainly, Ronnie never concealed anything. All his new “Romanizing” friends were asked to Bishopscourt, and, in spite of everything, his heart was high. “It was almost a part of ‘rags’ and shocking the elders,” Winnie thought, “coming back in soutanes and buckles after huge meetings of the Christian Students’ Union to uproarious meetings in the Bishopscourt smoking-room. I was very flattered that Ronnie insisted that I must be at home to make things go! And Wilfred talking about equal distribution of means of production and profits.” They drank cocoa (which Wilfred recalled as the great conspiratorial drink of the early twentieth century; trade union meetings in West Ham were usually held at cocoa-rooms). Over the cocoa Ronnie and his circle planned “outrages”—looking back at his younger self, he called it “snapping at all the gaiters in a cloud of dust.” In his study the Bishop heard the laughter, and marvelled at it.
It would have mattered less if they had loved each other less, or, indeed, if they had had less ability to love. Both of them would have given anything earthly—anything their consciences would allow them to give—to make the other happy. To the end of his life Ronnie tenderly gave credit, whenever he could, to his father’s work, and in particular to his gallant fight for the independence of the Church schools. Nevertheless, they were destined to lose each other.
Oxford was Ronnie’s chosen ground, and, like Newman before him, he expected that it always would be. In his rooms in Trinity, always open to anyone who called in for “teas” or “wines”, he had begun to take up his characteristic position, sitting on the fender, the “warmest place” which his elder brothers had never allowed him at St Philip’s. Now he talked, smoked, listened and advised from this point of vantage. Some of his circle might take a more extreme course. His old and true friend Vernon Johnson, always seen before in a correct bowler, suddenly appeared “in an unbecoming brown habit, with a stiff hood looking like an extinguisher, his hair cropped quite close, wearing rough boots like a workman’s.” He had joined an Anglican community under strict Franciscan rule. This was not Ronnie’s way. He was the sparkling preacher of the hour, the irresistible apologist of the English Catholics.
His high spirits seemed to overflow, so that his daily life, even his life of prayer, seemed not enough to contain them. The Oxford Union has probably never had such a brilliant speaker as this fragile, seemingly insignificant figure, trembling from head to foot with sheer love of controversy, supporting himself casually against the table and speaking, as all the brothers did, apparently without moving his lips. The whole House listened and listened, spellbound by the power of mind. Ronnie read his speeches, but allowed himself sometimes to mime. Memorable, to give one example, was a passage on the disadvantages of clerical dress—beggars single you out, waiters know that you cannot lose your temper and serve you last, people try not to sit in your carriage in the train, except spinsters—and each situation was given simply by a slight change of expression. The things he wrote at this time give the delightful impression simply of being young. Some of these were papers and addresses to University clubs. In 1911 he expanded the letter with the dried orange pips, which the four brothers had sent to Conan Doyle, into his Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes. This was intended as a satire, not so much, as has been suggested, upon the Higher Criticism of the Bible, but upon all higher scholarship—including the work which Dilly was now embarking on, the recension of Headlam’s Herodas. Dilly was engaged in correspondence with Professors Bilabel and Greeneboom; Ronnie invented, as his opponents, Professors Ratzegger and Sauwosch. He set out to show, strictly from internal evidence, that the Return stories are clumsy inventions by Watson, who had taken to drink. This would account, for instance, for his neglect of his practice, and the ludicrous errors he makes in the colour of Holmes’s dressing gown.
Conan Doyle, to the brothers’ disappointment, had not answered the letter with the five orange pips, but he did write to Ronnie when the Studies were published in 1912:
I cannot help writing to you to tell you of the amusement—and also the amazement—with which I read your article on Sherlock Holmes. That anyone should spend such pains on such material was what surprised me. Certainly you know a great deal more about it than I do, for the stories have been written in a disconnected (and careless) way, without referring back to what had gone before. I am only pleased that you have not found more discrepancies, especially as to dates. Of course, as you seem to have observed, Holmes changed entirely as the stories went on. In the first one, the ‘Study in Scarlet’, he was a mere calculating machine, but I had to make him more of an educated human being as I went on with him. He never shows heart save in the play—which one of your learned commentators condemned truly as a false note.
One point which has not been remarked by the learned Sauwosch … is that in a considerable proportion of the stories—I daresay a quarter—no legal crime has been committed at all. Another point —one of the few in which I feel satisfaction but which I have never seen mentioned—is that Watson never for one instant as chorus and chronicler transcends his own limitations. Never once does a flash of wit or wisdom come from him. All is remorselessly eliminated so that he may be Watson.
Conan Doyle also explained the vexed point about the impressions of the bicycle tracks. Holmes was “too indolent” to explain that one can only tell which way a bicycle is going if marks are left on a steep uphill or downhill track. And this, he felt, “with many thanks and renewed amazement,” was quite enough on the subject of Sherlock Holmes.
With the same deceptively easy-looking agile brilliance, Ronnie entered the field of theological controversy. In 1912 he had been asked to join a group of eight Oxford Fellows who met in each other’s rooms each Friday. The object was to work out a minimum doctrine which would be acceptable to all Christians. Ronnie was there to represent the extreme young High Church position. There was an idea of preparation against the future, when Christianity would have to struggle for a hearing in a world where most would regard it not as untrue or even as unthinkable, but simply irrelevant. Was it possible to arrive at the “foundations”—the minimum of doctrine with which those who could not accept miracles, or the Resurrection of the body, could still feel themselves Christians? Surely it was neither weakness nor compromise to try to reach this kind of unity, with millions of the half-persuaded and the scientifically minded not far from the brink of belief? The moving spirit of the group was Billy Temple.
This open frame of mind was known in the early twentieth century as modernism, and it soon became clear that Ronnie was quite out of place on the committee. Modernism was explained to him, he said, by a member of the group while they were walking along the track of the new electric railway from Rossall to Blackpool, and he felt an actual sense of physical revulsion. To him it sounded like treachery. All compromise in religion was treachery. Faith was a gift, but also a force, which must be exercised by difficulties, the more the better. The committee were like a crazy, leaky vessel, throwing out Authority with trembling hands to lighten ship, while they should be plugging the leaks and throwing out the bilge. When their joint book, Foundations, by Seven Oxford Men, was due for publication, Ronnie went joyously to the attack with a verse satire in the manner of Dryden, “Absolute and Abitofhell”. He himself felt proudly absolute; the modernists were timidly retreating towards a bit of doctrine and a bit of faith.
When on his throne at Lambeth Solomon
Uneasy murmur’d Something must be done;
When suave politeness, temp’ring bigot Zeal,
Corrected I believe to One does feel. …
Published in the Oxford Magazine for October 1913, which sold out in consequence in one day, “Absolute and Abitofhell” became immediately a collector’s item. “I went to the author’s rooms,” wrote Eric Hamilton, later Dean of Windsor, “in case he had a spare copy to give me. Instead he handed me his own corrected proof, which I have ever since treasured. For all his brilliance, Ronnie was never overwhelming.” It was reprinted, in the correct seventeenth-century format, by the Anglo-Catholic Society of St Peter and St Paul, who had begun as a small church-furnishing shop, part of the Medici Society, and now had an elegant private press and offices of their own.
Billy Temple did not resent the pamphlet, he was the last person in the world to do so. Nevertheless, Ronnie was aware of suggestions that he was frivolous, or did not dare to put his views seriously. In 1913, therefore, he wrote Some Loose Stones—loose stones, that is, that would bring down the Foundations.
Some Loose Stones is perhaps the best book he ever wrote—it is so fresh, so earnest, so full of light and shadow, each dependent on the other. He has, he tells us, the utmost sympathy with those who have no belief, “because I can give no clear explanation of how I came by it myself.” But he cannot think that the Church’s main concern should be, “How much can Jones swallow?” Unbelievers want answers: “Why does God allow cancer?” They want definition, not accommodation. “The modern church is like a cosy doctor saying: ‘Tell us what you want to believe, and we will see about it.’ ” How half-hearted, how useless, to concede that the miracles of Jesus are exceptions to the laws of nature! “You only mean by that that things do work by a law, but you haven’t found the law.” Foundations had said that where a natural explanation of an event can be suggested “there must be very special reasons for falling back on explanations of a supernatural character.” Ronnie calls this a disastrous piece of bad logic. “Miracles cannot be probable or improbable. They can only be possible or impossible.”
To be a Christian does not mean that one thinks that things are getting better. “Surely,” he adds, in a most characteristic phrase, “there is room for pessimism.” But if the Church holds to its duty to tell people what is true, he hopes, by the far distant time he is sixty, to see the tradition restored.
Some Loose Stones was his first serious book, and his first appearance before a wider public, at a time of furious interest in church affairs and in religious controversy. Wilfred, although he was more interested in reunion and communication than in doctrine, congratulated his brother warmly. Dilly thought the book touching but ridiculous, and wrote “Some Floating Pebbles”, designed to wash the whole question out of existence. He showed this only to his friends at King’s.
Dilly was travelling to and from Cambridge to work on the Herodas papyri in the British Museum. His eyesight was affected already; he ate in small cafés in Soho—Henry Lamb had moved back to Fitzroy Street—and took the first steps towards the total ruin of his digestion.
By this time his collaborator, John Sheppard, had so many commitments that he was obliged to leave Dilly to complete the edition by himself. Dilly had, of course, the expert help of the Museum staff and of scholars at home and abroad, with whom he sometimes corresponded in that inferior but international language, Latin, and sometimes in his stiff German. But for weeks and months on end he was alone with the seedy and oversophisticated little mimes—the pander who sues for assault because a girl has been stolen from the brothel; the mother with a delinquent son; the woman whose slave has proved an unsatisfactory lover, and wants him whipped, but doesn’t want anyone else to see him naked; the women who complain about servants, visit the temple, can’t wait to see the expert leatherworker in the sex-shop—heavens, what a crew! Dilly never became reconciled to Herodas as a writer, but he respected him as a familiar foe. The mimes provided an intensely difficult game in which nearly all the rules were missing, but Dilly intended to win.
Beyond the sorting out of Headlam’s papers, crossed and recrossed by the dead master’s exquisite Greek and English script, he had six main tasks. First he had, since this was still an accepted convention of classical scholarship, to conduct an attack on all previous editors of Herodas. Dilly was, in fact, rather less violent than most when he wrote of the “stream of editions” based on “illiterate” texts, “Bücheler, more sober, and with an extensive knowledge of obscene literature, but mostly Latin and therefore irrelevant,” the “quite inconsistent” efforts of Dr Nairn, and so forth. Next, having cleared the field, he had to arrive as nearly as possible to the correct text. The strips of papyrus had been knocked about a good deal before reaching the Museum, but had been carefully mended. The Mimiambi was a copy which had been corrected, at least twice, in a smaller handwriting in the second century ad. The correctors were not grammarians, and not much good at metre either, as they overlooked a number of “false verses”. The original copy (P) was made by a slave, probably of average inattentiveness. (Anyone who has taught a class—most scholars have, and Dilly had—can guess how inattentive.) The problem was (and still is) to deduce, from his errors in copying, what the original (P1) in front of him was like, eighteen centuries ago. What kind of handwriting was it, and which words might be written alike, so that the not very intelligent (P) might have confused them? And what missing words—taking into consideration the whole of ancient Greek literature—must have been written in the holes and rubbings and missing portions of (P)? Thirdly, after a painstaking recension of the first seven mimes, Dilly had to make clear who was responsible for the emendations. Headlam’s (collected from scattered publications, or found on the floor, or remembered from conversation) Dilly decided to mark [ ], while his own would be [[ ]], and [[[ ]]] represented a mixture of both. To Dilly this system appeared beyond any possibility of confusion; he never confused them, after all.
Next, the speeches, since the text ran on without a break, must be correctly assigned to their speakers. Headlam had called this “the most baffling problem in Herodas”. Did the gaps in the text indicate hesitations or a change of speaker? And might it not be useful, Headlam had added, warming to his subject, to read the novels of “Gyp”, a French lady who wrote salon romances, almost entirely in dialogue? Without trying Gyp, Dilly allocated and reallocated the speeches into what is now accepted as the best arrangement we can get.
Then there were Headlam’s notes, which again had to be recovered. They were far too long, but none of them ought to be lost. Dilly added a few on his own account, which could only have been written by him; for example: “To the Greek humorists appropriate misfortune was an enthralling joke. The Greek book of jests called Philogelus says: ‘A drunkard who had bought a vineyard died before vintage.’ We are not amused. Or rather we use different forms … ‘Have you heard about poor old X?’ …”
Every generation gets the version of Greece and Rome which it deserves, and so does every scholar. Dilly’s judgment of the ancient Greeks was apparently dispassionate, as though they had been his own family. He by no means saw Greece, as some did, as a long golden Cambridge afternoon without Puritan inhibitions. He was somewhat depressed by E. M. Forster’s early short stories in which Pan, or a naked faun, tends to put to confusion the stuffy and tiresome English. Dilly was surprised that Forster should have been a pupil of Wedd.
The last major problem of Herodas was the assembling of the fragments. These Headlam had never had time to study, but a complete text would be impossible until they were fitted into their proper places. Most of the damage was at the edge of the rolls, and the larger pieces, which still kept their original shape, could be treated much like a jigsaw puzzle. The real trouble arose with the badly worn portions. Lamacraft, the Museum’s papyrus expert, had no great knowledge of Greek letters; Sir Frederick Kenyon knew everything about Greek and palaeography, but little about papyrus or jigsaw puzzles. In working on the first two mimes, Dilly had noticed something wrong about the strips which Kenyon had already mounted. They had been put close together, whereas there should have been a gap of one letter between them—you could just see the beginnings of the “shadow letter” on the edges—and they had stretched unevenly, so that strip B was a whole line wrong at the top, and a third of a letter too low at the bottom. After some persuasion, the courteous Kenyon agreed to realign the precious crumbling strips. Mimes VIII and IX, however, consisted of fragments only, and in Dilly’s view they were, as they had been arranged, a complete hash, but they were so brittle that the Museum would not consider remounting. The last two mimes, therefore, became a crisis area, and years of work, perhaps a lifetime, stretched ahead. Papyri were still coming in from Oxyrhynchus. He must examine everything of roughly the right date and familiarize himself with every possible variety of scribe’s handwriting. Even then, he might need an inspired guess.
Sometimes Dilly relaxed. In the summer of 1912 Maynard Keynes reserved the whole of the Crown Hotel at Everleigh, in the middle of Salisbury Plain, for six weeks. Some of his guests behaved badly and with such reckless disregard of his landlady’s feelings that Keynes had to pay forty pounds extra, but the mid-July party, with Dilly, John Sheppard and Duncan Grant—no women—was one of uninterrupted happiness.
Eddie thought that Dilly ought to get married, perhaps to Henry Lamb’s unconventional sister Dorothy. But nothing came of this, and casual meetings, in the London of 1907, were difficult. Eddie described, in A Little Romance, his introduction, in a crowded room, to a charming Miss Robinson—“The weather is dreadful, is it not?”—and how he had to wait for several weeks, and another introduction, before he could reply—“What else is to be expected of an English summer?” Dilly, in company, was always gravely charming, but stammered and became “Erm”, and he never seemed to be alone with a young lady for any length of time. In Eddie’s opinion, if ever this should happen, Dilly would be defenceless.
Eddie felt that marriage must be the best solution for his brother for the very human reason that he wanted to get married himself. In his letters to Mrs K. from Balliol, in 1908, Ronnie mentions more than once that Eddie had appeared in Oxford, but could not stay long; he had to find a chaperon; he had to find a straw hat; he had to take out Christina in a punt.
Christina Hicks had come up to Somerville to read English in 1904, with a scholarship, five pounds a year for clothes and books, and a letter from the college reminding her that she must change her dress for dinner, but “must bring no fal-lals, as they only collect dust.” She was a gentle, spirited, scholarly, hazel-eyed girl, a lover of poetry and music, and a determined, though not a militant, suffragette. She was also particularly ready to laugh at herself. When the Holbein Christina of Denmark arrived at the National Gallery in 1907, her friends noticed the resemblance, not in the face, but in the tranquillity of the hands.
Like Eddie, Christina was one of a large vicarage family. Her father, Canon Edward Hicks, was a rector in Salford, one of the poorest parishes in the Manchester area.
Thomas French himself was not more unworldly than Edward Hicks. Son of a small Oxford tradesman who got into difficulties, he had struggled for years to get the family out of debt. He entered Magdalen Choir School knowing practically nothing, for he had been taught nothing, and within a few years was a Fellow of Corpus and a leading expert on Greek inscriptions. In fact, he had helped Kenyon to assemble the Aristotle and Herodas papyri for the Museum.
At Corpus he became deeply attached to Ruskin, who had a set of rooms in the Fellows’ Buildings. Though he found it needful to check some of Ruskin’s extravagances (the Professor had wanted to go out and harangue the Oxford farmers into planting “the lovely red clover” instead of the pale variety) he reverenced the great teacher who “showed him a pathway through life.” In 1872 Ruskin gave him a number of Fors Clavigera in which he had marked a passage contrasting the peasant with the scholarly recluse, “the peasant being always content to feed the recluse, on condition of his becoming venerable.” “I am not ashamed to confess,” Hicks wrote, “that this piece of irony has haunted me through life.”
He turned his back on a college living and went first to the exceedingly rural parish of Fenny Compton, then, after thirteen years’ hard parish work, to industrial Salford. The Greek inscriptions had to be fitted into what spare time he had. Perhaps his greatest sacrifice was in 1906, when he was asked once again to work on the papyri, and to collaborate on a dictionary of Hellenistic Greek which would show, for the first time, what many of the words in the New Testament really meant. But he did not feel justified in leaving Salford.
Hicks and his wife, Agnes, for the first thirty years of their married life, were as poor as church mice. “I never heard my father say he regretted the life of scholarship,” Christina wrote, “or make great reference to it.” The rule was “plain but good”. Music the children taught themselves, and they were never short of that. Occasionally they would write down a list of all the things they wanted but couldn’t afford, and then burn the piece of paper. This is a device which is always worth trying.
Poverty affected the Hicks children, however, in different ways. Neither Christina nor her elder sister ever felt it as a hardship, although they found it impossible, to the end of their lives, to take a cab or a taxi without feeling guilty. “Cabby” was their word for “expensive”. Edwin and Bede, on the other hand, the two elder sons, were sent out to Rangoon as clerks in a shipping firm, and it was their intention to make as much money as they could, and enjoy themselves as returning Nabobs. Ned, the youngest, was cheerful and musical, happy, as a small boy, to carry their music and their shoebags round to parish concerts. A scholar of Magdalen Choir School, he made friends with another young tenor, Ivor Novello. Ivor was a holiday visitor at Salford, where he followed Christina round like a faithful pet dog, begging her to marry him.
Ned was now at Oxford, and was thought to be, like so many other young men, under Ronnie’s influence. To the Hicks family, whose religion was “the beauty of holiness, quiet worship and the steady discharge of common duties”, Ronnie seemed nothing but a wild extremist, who might, they feared, be “getting at” their youngest.
Edward Hicks was not made a bishop until he was sixty-seven. He was regarded, because of his Ruskinian socialism and his opposition to the Boer War, as a dangerous man, but by 1910 his wisdom and scholarship could hardly be put on one side any longer, and he was appointed Bishop of Lincoln. There was satisfaction both in the world of scholarship and at Fenny Compton, where the villagers said: “Hicks is our bishop; we broke him in.”
By this time, Eddie had admitted to Christina that he had once felt strongly about Peggy Beech, but could not now imagine why, because it was impossible for him to think of marrying anyone but herself. They loved each other; but Eddie’s only regular job was still with The Pall Mall Magazine, and he did not think he could look after her on his salary of two hundred pounds a year.
Eddie was, however, placing more verse and prose in Punch, and improving his acquaintanceship with Owen Seaman.
I was determined to do the thing in style [he wrote of an early visit to the old offices at 10 Bouverie Street], and I chartered a hansom cab for the occasion. ‘Many and many a time’, said the driver, ‘I have driven the great artist, Mr Phil May, to this address.’ When I told Seaman of this strange coincidence he said, ‘The Cabmen always tell one that. They all have the notion that Phil May went to sleep in their cab after the Punch dinner, and spent the night in the mews.’
It was the old office in Bouverie Street, with small rooms, except for the dining-room, and narrow and rather perilous stairs. The machines were on the premises, so that the jokes, however long they had been in arriving, did not have very far to travel.
Knowing the Editor only as a brilliant satirist who had been a schoolmaster, I was still more impressed by the stag’s head which was almost the only ornament in his sanctum. I told him that I was writing verses for Garvin, the omnipotent editor of the Observer, and I told him why. Garvin had explained that a few verses here and there would help the look of the page and form a good break in the editorial columns.
This shocked Owen, who controlled the politics of England entirely in verse. He had, indeed, a strong sense of vocation, and I remember his saying sadly about somebody or other, ‘he is the kind of man who doesn’t take his humour seriously’.
Eddie, grateful for the encouragement, went up to Fleet Street to find another of Phil May’s cabs. Evidently, Seaman had formed his life on a solemn, indeed heroic, vision of what a Punch editor should be. At one time, he told Eddie, he had been a member of the Samurai, a society who had vowed themselves, through meditation and clean living, to evolve a “higher human type”. No one must know that his family had been “in trade”—a ladies’ haberdashers, Stagg & Mantle; this was one of Owen’s endearing weaknesses. Punch, under his guidance, forgot its early rollicking days, and became a supporter of the Constitution. Owen took his correspondence away at weekends, like a cabinet minister, and answered it from country houses. Here he was a valued inmate of the bachelors’ wing; indeed he apparently ousted Max Beerbohm as a favourite guest, driving him into exile in Italy; this episode was described by Beerbohm in Maltby and Braxton. By now, Seaman was nearly sixty, and apparently installed in the editorship forever. It was clear that Punch was no country for young men, but Eddie was prepared to serve his apprenticeship, hoping in time to join the staff and to work with Seaman’s assistants, the bland E.V. Lucas and the young and radical A. A. Milne.
Eddie’s early contributions to Punch were often imitative of Calverley, of Barry Pain’s Eliza, even of Seaman himself. Later on he considered that imitation was not a bad thing for a young writer—“it increases the word-hoard”. But his own distinctive style emerged. He had an ear for rhyme superior even to Ronnie’s, so ingenious, so delicate—indeed, Ronnie and he claimed that there was no word, in English, Greek or Latin, to which they could not find a rhyme. In the fogs of the London winter, Eddie made “nimbus” rhyme with “knocked down by a dim bus”. When the birds sang, “soloist” rhymed with “blow lowest”. When he watched a young lady “crimping” her red hair at a neighbour’s window, he wrote
Phyllis, farewell, if that’s the name
By which your parents had you christened,
Long ere your beauty flashed to fame—
Or even if it isn’t.
The skill in rhyming Owen Seaman appreciated, though he usually made a number of schoolmasterly alterations. He was more doubtful about a kind of lunatic fantasy to which Eddie was inspired by quite ordinary domestic incidents, perhaps the words on the side of a bus, or on a packet of something. Then his thoughts took wing, like swifts in late summer, and made a kind of crazy sweep, skimming back in the end to their starting point. At one of the large Kensington stores, for example, there was a Great White Sale; Eddie imagined this Great White Sale travelling through glittering seas, ever onward, fleeing from the harpoons of a thousand lady shoppers.
Pseudonyms were much used in Edwardian Fleet Street, and were part of the powerful mystery of the Press. Eddie took the pen name “Evoe”, partly to distinguish himself from E.V. Lucas, partly because, according to the dictionary, “Evoe” was “a cry of rejoicing uttered by the followers of the wine-god.” The word was pronounced “E.V.”, but as most of his public read it as “Ev-oey,” or “Eave-oh” (a variant of “Heave-ho!” he thought), the little joke fell flat, a good training for a professional humorist.
Bishopscourt was sympathetic to the idea of marriage. After a formal tea party, the Bishop pressed Christina’s hand and said: “Well, my dear, I believe your influence is good; God moves in mysterious ways.” Christina, though a little dashed at being called a mysterious way, was not at all vain, and remained firm even when Mrs K. added: “I have always heard it said that your elder sister is handsomer, but I tell them the younger has more spirit.”
The engagement seemed long. In the June of 1912 Mrs Hicks wrote from Lincoln to Mrs K.:
My husband and I are beginning to think that it is too long to put off the wedding to next May! They are both getting worried, I think. Eddie is coming here on Sat: next and we think it will be as well to settle something by then. He can’t get anything more certain in the way of working at present but after all they have enough to begin with (if it only continues!) and perhaps if the furnishing can be arranged it would be best to let them start. Xtina is not aware of this letter nor (of course) is Edmund and you won’t mention it. Xtina says ‘it does seem a long time till May’. She is anxious because he is lonely. They might begin in a flat she thought.
A small Hampstead house was found, No. 55 Haverstock Hill. Hampstead was not too “cabby” in 1912, and both families contributed odds and ends of furniture. Mrs Hicks sent the second-best forks from Lincoln, and had electric light installed. Eddie brought with him all the bills and papers in two hat boxes. When he was obliged to answer a business letter he emptied the hat boxes onto the floor, and began: “Sir, On consulting my files …”
The wedding, on 20 September, aroused “extraordinary interest” in the Lincoln Chronicle, who were able to use the headline bishop’s son weds bishop’s daughter. The bells of the cathedral were “fired”—that is, the whole peal rung at once—and, almost equally remarkable, Dilly was induced to enter St Hugh’s Chapel, and to act as best man. The young couple departed to “an awfully jolly farmhouse on the moor” near Porlock. It poured with rain, and they were extremely happy.
Winnie, too, was thinking of marriage. The strain of the endless discussions between Ronald, Wilfred and the Bishop was beginning to tell. “I began to think,” she recalled, “that it would be a relief not to have theological discussions at every meal.” Out of her admirers she had almost decided on a small, quiet, reliable, clever and honourable Scotsman. James Peck’s father had been a ruined shipbuilder, who at one time had taken refuge in drink, but the son had emerged all the stronger from his misfortunes. “I do feel that one would be absolutely safe with him. Every time I see him it seems more possible in a queer sort of way,” Winnie wrote to her father. James Peck had a sound old-fashioned Scottish appreciation of literature, and hoped to share, through poetry, the emotions which he found it hard to express. Winnie and he corresponded by postcard, giving the page and line number in The Golden Treasury. This was too much of a temptation for her brothers, who made trifling alterations to the postcards as they lay in the hall, so that Shelley’s
No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruin’d cell,
was answered by Wordsworth’s
For still, the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell.
In the end, Winnie was glad to get away from them all, but only for the time being, then her affection poured out again. She was married to James in the autumn of 1912, at Manchester Cathedral. Eddie, who was one of the ushers, found that the crowd of well-wishers was so great that he had to go back to Bishopscourt, in his hired frock coat, by tram. Scotland seemed far away. They all, but Ronnie in particular, missed her. To his studies of Bradshaw he now added a minute knowledge of all the railway connections to Edinburgh.
Ronnie, it may be remembered, had taken stock, while he was still at Eton, of his own temperament, which “craved for human sympathy and support”. While his elder brother and sister were finding happiness in marriage, his tender nature (“He was the kindest person I ever met,” Winnie said) searched his environment for a response.
His new friendships, though in no way sensual, were deeply emotional, and although physical presence was in no way part of them, he believed that they would survive death. “The love of friends,” he wrote, “which in this world depends so much on a trivial communication like the curl of a lip, or the lighting up of an eye, will somehow be a thing more immediate and more intimate when we are true selves.” “I am a personal person,” he wrote to another friend, “whatever I haven’t got, I think I have sympathy.”
There was a circle of undergraduates who came up to Oxford in 1911–12, whom Ronnie loved and influenced, and who came to love and influence him. “It is hard to give a definition or even a description of them,” he wrote in 1917, “except perhaps to say that in a rather varied experience I have never met conversation so brilliant—with the brilliance of humour, not of wit. The circle is broken now by distance and by death … At the time of which I am speaking two of them had already adopted what I heard (and shuddered to hear) described as ‘Ronnie’s religion.’ ” These two were Harold Macmillan and Guy Lawrence.
The friendship with Harold Macmillan had begun with a disaster, wounding to Ronnie, and the first real check in his career. Macmillan left Eton in 1910, and that autumn his family wanted a private tutor to coach him at home for a Balliol scholarship. At first Dilly, who was a friend of the elder brother, Daniel, came for a few weeks. This was a failure, Dilly was found austere and uncongenial. Then Ronnie came. There was an immediate sympathy between teacher and pupil, and Ronnie, feeling that the seventeen-year-old boy was in need of spiritual guidance as well as coaching in the classics, begin to explain the hopes and the beliefs of Anglo-Catholics. Then, at the boy’s request, he took him to an Anglo-Catholic mass.
“Could you rather pray for me?” he wrote to Winnie at the end of October. “I’ve a most heart-rending and nerve-racking dispute going on with Mrs Macmillan, not about money this time, but about things 7000 times more important. Don’t tell anyone.” In reply to Winnie’s anxious inquiry he explained that the family had asked him to give his word never to mention religion to Harold again. This Ronnie could not do, so he had had to leave, and “by now I’m extremely (and not unreturnedly) fond of the boy, and it’s been a horrid wrench to go without saying a word to him of what I wanted to say.” But when, two years later, Harold Macmillan came up to Balliol the friendship between them returned, unbroken.
My dear, of course don’t stop coming to Mass [Ronnie wrote in January 1914 to another of the group, Dick Rawstorne], I think it will get more familiar as you go on—Harold will be serving me, I expect, every Saturday next term at a quarter to nine. Only don’t expect to understand all about it until you are part of it all … I can’t allow, with any patience, your idea that the way I worship God is good for me, but not for other people. I know you think I’m prepared to make fun of everybody and everything, but I mean what I do, and I am quite deliberately staking my soul on the result. Do come and talk to me sometimes next term. I shall be at home every Wednesday, and always lonely for you.
This letter, and many others like it, conveyed Ronnie’s hopeful affection and enthusiasm as he gathered round him his company of souls.
Of all this company the one that Ronnie loved best was Guy Lawrence, who came up to Trinity as senior classical scholar in 1912. Guy Francis Lawrence was a brilliant, brave and athletic, but also a nervous and delicate, young man. He was the son of a Chancery lawyer and a grandson of George Lawrence, the romantic historical novelist. He was very fair, very handsome and highly strung. At Winchester he had been made to take the female parts in Shakespeare productions, but he hastened, with relief, to discard these as soon as he joined O.U.D.S. His temperament was deeply religious, and by the time he left school he was thinking of taking orders.
During his second term at Trinity, Guy broke down, and had to be sent to San Remo to recuperate. “I think it is disgraceful of Ronnie to absent himself from Manchester for Christmas,” Eddie wrote to the Bishop, but Ronnie was at the Hôtel de Londres in San Remo, where Guy was gradually recovering the strength to return to University. The hotel was a kind of genteel rest home, the management requesting priests not to appear there too often for fear the guests should think somebody was dying. While Guy rested, Ronnie wrote a short story, once again in the style of Hugh Benson. A young man accompanies his friend, who is suffering from a nervous breakdown, to the Côte d’Azur. On a tour of the hill villages he visits a ruined church, haunted by the spirits of dead peasants who were attending mass there when an earthquake swept them away. Trapped in the church, alone in the darkness, he struggles to control his fear.
He tried hard not to think of his friends, but it was no use; one by one they came and took his brain by storm. In an agony of loneliness he stretched out his arms as if to fling them round some warm protecting body, and when they closed upon air he shook with sobbing. His whole body shook with the unquenchable thirst for human contact … Yet when his brain cleared, it cleared completely.
To Guy, Ronnie was his spiritual director, but, from an earthly point of view, it was with a certain wistfulness that Ronnie wrote, “I have a theory that everybody in the world really wants to run errands for him, and it’s only the people whom he doesn’t deign to fag who come to dislike him.” As always, he dreaded the undue interference of emotion, yet now he allowed himself to trust it, and it did not betray him. A prayer which he sent that year to Rawstorne begins:
Oh God, I submit my affections to Thee, beseeching Thee to take from me all particular objects of my desire, all friendships and acquaintance, however harmless in themselves, which Thou seest to be a distraction to my soul, or to interfere with my love for Thee … I desire to love even my enemies for Thee, and my friends only to Thee.
As 1913 turned into 1914, the character patterns of the four brothers had taken shape for their lifetime. Eddie could never forget that he was the eldest, Dilly that he was the second, Wilfred that he was the cheerfully and necessarily philosophic third, Ronnie that he was the baby. Eddie looked for responsibility, Dilly for independence, Wilfred for reunion, Ronnie for authority. All needed love, Wilfred and Ronnie because they had had so much in childhood, Eddie and Dilly because they had had rather too little.
Wilfred, down at the Stratford Mission, had taken the first steps towards ordination. His bishop directed him to study theology at St Anselm’s in Cambridge. Here, entirely on his own decision, he took a vow not only of celibacy, but of poverty. Celibacy, he once suggested at a conference, was only an aspect of that difficult frame of mind, humility—an attitude to created things, including friendship and love, which made it possible to renounce them. This did not mean he underestimated the strength of what he called “the temptations of the flesh incidental to youth and liable to return with equal severity in middle life; we simply have to recognize them for what they are, and take appropriate means to cope with them.” Wilfred, at this time of his life, resembled Dilly in hardly ever speaking to a woman at all, except for Winnie, Mrs K., his aunts at Edmundthorpe and Christina, who won him over without difficulty.
By poverty he meant something specific. Whatever he earned, he would never keep more than a hundred pounds a year (this was in 1912; he had to put it up later), except for a small sum to guard against being a burden to others in old age. With this vow went the duty not to indulge in regrets on the subject, not to become stingy—“the danger,” he called it, “of clinging unduly to what remains”—and, hardest of all, not to mind being regarded as a delightful eccentric who, like the birds of the air, neither knows nor cares what comfort is. This idea was particularly irritating. Wilfred was the young man who had chosen his ties in the Burlington Arcade, and he loved good wine, good tea and the best tobacco. But renunciation must never be seen in terms of loss.
What did the brothers expect from the next five years? Wilfred would be a deacon in 1914, a priest in 1915, and his dearest hope was to work side by side with Ronnie in the Anglo-Catholic movement. This did not mean that he saw eye to eye with his brother in everything. Ronnie was mistaken when he told Evelyn Waugh that Wilfred was “like me, only more so”. Wilfred had grave doubts about the Society of St Peter and St Paul—for example, about one of its publisher’s announcements for 1912:
In this twentieth century the Society of St Peter and St Paul would seek to rouse Catholics from their sad worship of material things, from the strife of strikes and haunting Insurance Acts, to some degree of merriness, by printing for them the Hours of Blessed Mary in the vernacular. How sad Caxton would be if he were to come again to visit this merrye England and find all merriness gone from us!
This reference to the dock and rail strikes of 1911 caused Wilfred to use two favourite words, “bilge” and “tripe”. Yet he believed, without sentimentality, that he and Ronnie could work together, as brothers and priests, on their own lines, and remain as close as they had been in Uncle Lindsey’s garden. The failure of this hope was the greatest blow of Wilfred’s life.
Eddie, the journalist, saw more clearly into the future. He had already felt a premonitory gloom in 1907, when Straight had commissioned for The Pall Mall Magazine a feature article on a visit to the German Navy:
My friend the Kapitän-sur-Zee delivered his soul with a fiery eye, and an inexpressible emphasis, in that little white-painted cabin set with photographs of British naval officers.
‘The German Navy,’ he said to me, ‘is strictly for defence. These people who write for the newspapers—yes, on both sides—they lie. The Emperor himself told me, walking on this quarterdeck, that his intention was peace … We are a serious people.’ The captain called a midshipman. ‘Show this gentleman all—everything—alles!’ he cried.
Eddie had been very much more impressed by H. G. Wells’s War in the Air, which he persuaded his editor, with difficulty, to print as a serial in the following year. In 1912 he wrote to his father that he could only hope that the cousins (George V and Kaiser Wilhelm) would decide to be polite to each other; otherwise he would be obliged to join the Territorials, the last thing he wanted to do. His job hardly seemed to cover his Tube fares into London, and Christina was expecting a baby.
Wilfred was what was then called a “Lansburyite”—a total pacifist—but, somewhat inconsistently, he went to Territorial camp every summer with the East Enders. Early in 1914 he and Ronnie were both at Bishopscourt “holding the fort”—not very efficiently, one would have thought—while Mrs K. went up to Edinburgh; Winnie, too, was expecting her first baby. This was a chance to talk at length, but, whatever they discussed, it seems not to have been the possibilities of war. Ronnie had expectations of a peaceful summer term, with only three lectures a week, and six pupils, and he had devised a method of teaching logic by card games, which he copied out onto rather perishable slips of cardboard. In the Long Vacation, the August, that is, of 1914, there was to be a reading party at More Hall, a country house retreat in Gloucestershire. Guy Lawrence was coming with some of his closest friends, Harold Macmillan perhaps, although his family were likely to disapprove. Ronnie was to choose the wine, and the housework would be done by resident lay-brothers. All was set fair.
I never read the papers at this time [Ronnie wrote in A Spiritual Aeneid], and it was only in casual conversation I learned that all was not well with Europe. Then the bugles went round to call up the Naval Reserves, a big German cargo ship sulkily submitted to be towed across the Sound to its long resting-place and as I travelled north to stay with [Guy] in the Midlands, I read the Foreign Secretary’s speech.
As for Dilly, one never knew what he would think or say. Cambridge, as 1914 approached, was in a delicious turmoil over the rumour that the Master of Trinity had gone mad, and was shooting at the Fellows as they came through the Great Gate. “Ah, there is dear Dr Jackson! Bang!” King’s was convulsed by new appointments as Bursar and junior Dean, and by the disappearance of the porter’s cat. When darker clouds gathered, Dilly surprised his family by declaring that he thought “the whole of Cambridge” should join the Territorials, including Lytton Strachey. But Erm did not really believe that his future would be interrupted. By 1916 he confidently expected to have finished editing Herodas.