doubts and heresies without reserve when they stood on the hearth-rug, although, until religious tests were abolished in 1871, doctrinal conformity was obligatory in Cambridge. The secrecy of the Apostles was therefore a precaution which allowed impartial analysis and fearless speculation during the half-century when the university authorities penalized religious dissent and repressed scepticism. The Cambridge outsiders who knew of the Apostles’ existence tended to mock the society’s self-mystification: in the late twentieth century, after the unmasking of the Apostle Sir Anthony Blunt as a communist spy, English journalists, with their hatred of locked doors, denounced the society as a nursery of espionage.
Although most Apostles in Keynes’s time were vehement in their rejection of Christianity, and loathed the penitential temper, they had many residual Christian beliefs. Arthur Benson in 1905 noted that McTaggart ‘tho’ an Agnostic Philosopher is at heart a medieval prelate, a believer in privilege and tradition. “I believe in the Apostolic succession, but I don’t believe in God” is one of McT’s dicta.’ Christianity stressed the importance of every moment: time was precious, and accounting for one’s well-spent hours was the mark of a good Christian. There were few time-wasters among the Apostles: Keynes’s fatal regime of overwork was instilled in him by ambitious, nonconformist parents, sermons heard in boyhood, but also by the example of his fellow Apostles. ‘Most people can do nothing at all well,’ wrote Hardy in true Apostolic spirit. ‘Perhaps five or even ten per cent of men can do something rather well. It is a tiny minority who can do anything really well, and the number of men who can do two things well is negligible. If a man has any genuine talent, he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.’41
The Apostles could seem too isolated, rootless, impressionable and fervent. Virginia Woolf once watched Dickinson in intellectual contention: ‘poor old Goldie wrinkled his forehead & flung himself lightly & ardently into one question after another in his usual way – the way of a bachelor who lives by plying his mind & moving by that means from person to person, having no settled abode’. Christians had been taught for nearly two millennia that they were never alone, because God was always with them; but the Apostles faced the metaphysical loneliness of a godless existence. They accentuated their isolation even as they sought to mitigate it by intellectual intensity. A pupil of McTaggart’s described him: ‘he did not smile or attempt to put you at your ease by any arts whatever; his manner of speaking was dry and terse; he appeared to care nothing for your feelings or your past history or tastes or anything like that; you knew at once that none of that was to the point – it had better not be spoken about; and yet you got an impression of utter benevolence’.42
The lovelorn earnestness of the Edwardian Apostles is indicated by Keynes’s account of a conversation between McTaggart and a younger Apostle, Harry Norton, in 1908.
McT has been in love five times and is still in love with all of them, one is now a farmer in New Zealand, two live together in London, one is his wife and the fifth I don’t know about. Every week he writes to each of them and has these last twenty years, but some never reply. Very occasionally he meets them and is in a fever of excitement. At the end of the conversation he and Norton fell on one another’s necks and shook one another warmly by the hand.
A year later, in 1909, Rupert Brooke described two Apostles, Jack Sheppard and Gerald Shove, walking round a country garden in pure-minded dispute about a candidate for the Apostles with whom Sheppard was in love.
They were both talking confusedly at once, expostulating ‘Yes, but don’t you see …’, ‘I cannot allow …’, ‘I don’t think you quite understand …’ They were always arm-in-arm, Gerald’s left in Sheppard’s right, and, very painfully, looking outwards, Gerald to his right, Sheppard to his left, and occasionally each on the ground, – but always each at his own toes, never at the other’s. I think they never saw each other at all, much less met each other’s eyes … Both faces were red (especially Gerald’s) with nobility, and just perceptibly nervous.43
Collectively the Edwardian Apostles were intellectually aggressive, physically clumsy and timid, and prone to hypochondria and melancholy. With a few poetic exceptions, such as Rupert Brooke and Ferenc Békássy, they were charmless, gawky and unlovely. Keynes was convinced of his repulsiveness: he slouched. Lytton Strachey knew that he was ugly and maladroit, with a namby-pamby voice. Norton was a tall, round-faced, bespectacled invalid, disfigured by acne, who walked with comically small steps. Woolf had the face of an anxious, ill-used basset-hound and hands that shook uncontrollably. McTaggart was agoraphobic, and scuttled along streets with his backside to the wall like a crab scrabbling against the side of a bucket: he was too, said Lowes Dickinson, ‘the poet of pedantry’. Virginia Woolf wondered at the anaemic ugliness of cloistered young Cambridge intellectuals: ‘whether it was necessary that thought and scholarship should maltreat their bodies, and should thus elevate their minds to a very high tower from which the human race appeared to them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.’ Their communal cleverness provided therapeutic compensation for their individual maladjustments: together they felt less embarrassing and exposed than as lone hobbledehoys. Their integrity, their moral courage, their ideals were cherished and magnified as a group. They claimed to be incorruptible. Many of them aspired to be numinous in a secularized vocabulary.44
Gossiping in 1904 about Etonian undergraduates at King’s, Montague Rhodes James mused that ‘Keynes seems to be an Apostle, full of argument & with no interest in humanity.’ He was talking to Arthur Benson, who as an Eton beak had taught Keynes before migrating to Cambridge. Dialectical, robotic and therefore displeasing to his waggish elders Keynes seemed at twenty-one. This was midway through a three-year interval when (as described in chapter 5) he had no sexual partners: once he jettisoned celibacy in 1906, his racing mind and his angularities were somewhat slaked and softened. At an early age he was a noteworthy figure in the university. On a hot summer day in 1905, Benson met ‘odd, shy, clever, influential Keynes’ at Cambridge railway station, travelled to Royston with him and thought it worthwhile to jot his impressions of a youth of twenty-two. ‘He had Jevons’ Economy in his pocket; & was going to play golf. He talked: but his utterance is so low & rapid that the train, not I, had the benefit.’45
Some of the Edwardian intelligentsia outside Cambridge fretted about the Apostles – and especially at the conquest of their morals by the doctrines of G. E. Moore. ‘There is a pernicious set presided over by Lowes Dickinson, which makes a sort of ideal of anarchic ways in sexual questions – we have, for a long time, been aware of its bad influence on our young Fabians,’ Beatrice Webb wrote in 1911. ‘The intellectual star is the metaphysical George Moore with his Principia Ethica – a book they all talk of as “The Truth”! I never can see anything in it, except a metaphysical justification for doing what you like and what other people disapprove of!’46
Just before the start of Keynes’s second undergraduate year, in October 1903, he read Moore’s recently published Principia Ethica. It came on him, and on his fellow Apostles, as a revelation that dominated their hearts and minds. A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic published in 1936 was a similar colossus for the next generation. Good was undefinable, Moore proposed, because it is an attribute which cannot be stated in terms of anything else. It must never be defined as that which promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number, as Benthamites did. For Moore, states and emotions with intrinsic value – worth having for their own sakes, and capable of exact definition – were preferable to states or emotions that were judged best for society, and could only be described in woozy language.
‘Its effect on us, and the talk which proceeded and followed it, dominated … everything else,’ Keynes recalled of Principia Ethica
