as Maynard reported to his parents: ‘For once his words have had effect and people are joining or being coerced into joining in throngs including all the Sixth Form and the greater part of the College. Am I to join? I am not keen and the drills will be a nuisance but I am perfectly willing to do so if I ought. It would be unpleasant to be almost the only non-shooter.’ His parents, who loathed jingoism, replied that they preferred him not to enlist: ‘but we pronounce no veto; he may join if his not joining would make him feel very much out of it’. In the event, less than half of the boys in Keynes’s school year enlisted in the corps: he held out, thinking boy-soldiers no more useful than patriots flourishing Union Jacks.31
‘Maynard’s work seems to improve visibly every half,’ Lubbock reported in 1901. ‘It says a great deal for him that he has got on so thoroughly well with Luxmoore: certainly he has a remarkable mind, full of taste & perception, with all its precision and accuracy.’ At English boarding-schools throughout the twentieth century it was the acme of splendour to be casual. Boys had to achieve their laurels by effortless talent: those who cultivated their nonchalance were preferred by masters as well as fellow pupils; swots who publicly strove in mental exertion were condemned as prigs. This sentiment underlay Lubbock’s further approving comment on Maynard: ‘there is never the slightest trace of the prig about him, a fact which I notice with continually increasing pleasure. No doubt he has a great deal of success before him.’ There were imagined to be physiological arguments against priggery. ‘On the whole,’ Luxmoore wrote of Eton boys in 1905, ‘they will resent any steady hard thorough study, whether cricket or farming or French or physics or Greek. Children have vast curiosity and eagerness, but after about 14 as the physique changes I believe intellectual application becomes tiresome generally except in a more or less desultory way.’ It was because Luxmoore thought English literature so precious, and drilled subjects were so disliked by adolescent boys, that he opposed English becoming a standard subject in their teaching. ‘History is less resented because it is easier … & science sometimes because there is more to do with the hands.’32
Maynard Keynes won ten prizes during his first year at Eton, and eighteen in the next. By the time that he left Eton, he owned over 300 books: about half of them school prizes. In 1901 he achieved his greatest schoolboy triumph by his election to the most exclusive of the Eton societies, Pop. This was a self-selected group of leading boys, who monitored the other pupils as a preparation for running the country as adults. Usually members of Pop were sporting heroes in the school, and it was testimony to Keynes’s power of leadership that he was elected without having athletic prowess. After his election, he sported white duck trousers with an ornate waistcoat and braid-edged tailcoat, and placed a daily order with a florist for a flower to sport in his buttonhole. ‘This costume’, as his mother proudly noted, ‘was the outward mark of a position which entitled the wearer to certain privileges, such as the right to stand in the front row to watch matches, and to carry a small cane with which to castigate the ankles of unauthorised intruders, also to walk with other boys of similar standing arm in arm in the street.’ Maynard was a good manager who, for example, organized the Collegers’ Christmas supper in 1901: soup, fish, turkeys, partridges, plum puddings, mince-pies, pâté de foie gras and dessert were washed down by claret, moselle, champagne and coffee. He joined school committees, and was elected president of the Eton Literary Society in 1902. ‘I am finding that’, he told his father, ‘when I am appointed to a committee I am invariably made to do all the work.’33
Harvey Road was a formative influence on Keynes, but neither the Salisbury nurseryman’s son nor the Bedford minister’s daughter gave him any expectation of governing. Eton did. It initiated him into notions of statecraft and techniques of rule. When later he became an economist, he did not give himself to analysis for its own sake, but directed his fertility of ideas towards problems of governance. He respected neutrality, and upheld practical justice, as an Olympian ruler should. Always, with his ruling assumptions, he devised economic solutions and recommended policies that promoted efficient administration.
Historically there was such a close connection between Eton and King’s College, Cambridge that Isaac Newton had been rejected as Provost of the college because he was not an Etonian. Until the late Victorian period King’s was perhaps the most intimate and cohesive of the Cambridge colleges because of the Eton schooling that united both Fellows and undergraduates. In the mid-1880s, with the increasing admission of non-Etonians, the undergraduates had split into two warring camps, Etonian and non-Etonian, bent on exasperating one another; and only the humorous tact of an outstanding Old Etonian undergraduate, John Withers, conciliated the factions. It was never doubted at Eton that Maynard would aim for King’s. Armed with a scholarship in classics and mathematics, he began his undergraduate career there in the Michaelmas term of 1902.
The classical and mathematical tripos at Cambridge, like the Literae Humaniores course at Oxford, trained undergraduates in abstract thought, taught them to evaluate evidence, and to frame proofs and disproof. Studying the languages of ancient Greece and Rome was seen as a civilizing course: it clarified the English prose of able undergraduates, which helped to make them more honest in their thinking. By contrast, as Bertrand Russell noted with dismay in 1907, educated people were oblivious to the importance of mathematics to civilization. Numbers and calculations were treated as means to promote mechanization, faster transport and victory over foreigners in business or war. These ends seemed degrading to Russell, who found in mathematics ‘a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show’. Mathematics, for Russell, redeemed existence from being a useless chore. ‘Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs.’ Although Keynes appreciated the stern perfection and implacable rationality of mathematics, he felt unfulfilled by undergraduate work in the subject. He stuck with it until his final examinations in 1905, but never gave more than six hours a day to routine cramming. In college he found livelier interests.34
Although King’s welcomed sturdy, open-air youngsters as well as studious, hunch-shouldered types, it discouraged lusty athletes who came to squander three years on the playing-fields, and condemned wasters slumped in tobacco-stained, drink-sodden lounging, with no more study of books than enabled them to scrape a pass degree. At most colleges, the dons were aloof and suspicious of the undergraduates, whom they punished for breaches of rules with fines, confinement within the college gates and expulsion. But, at King’s, the Eton background shared by Fellows and undergraduates meant that the senior men aimed to treat their juniors with trust and informality as members of the same community.
William Herrick Macaulay, who as Senior Tutor of King’s during 1902–13 was responsible for preserving order, was admired by Keynes for respecting the privacy of young minds, and for extruding mindless, iron-clad discipline from the college. ‘Rules, rules, what are rules for?’ Macaulay would ask before answering himself: ‘To be broken, to be broken.’ This exemplary man, with his intuitive sense of justice, convinced Keynes that ‘we most of us pay either too much or too little attention to rules’. The sentiment that creative minds were justified in breaking rules, when the results might be productive, was to underlie Keynes’s rethinking of economic laws after 1924. Macaulay detested imprecision, insincerity and unfinished thoughts – all of which he challenged by feigning obtuseness. Deliberate miscomprehension ‘was partly used by him as a form of criticism, not only of muddle and pretended knowledge, but of all kinds of nonsense and humbug, of conventional feeling, false sentiment and over-statement’, Keynes wrote. He admired Macaulay’s clear-cut feelings which ‘made him live in a purer world than those who see round the corner of everything and know themselves and other people too much’.35
