to and taught. The pupils’ work was usually lost and rapidly disappeared under the mass of papers, but Headlam sat “balancing an ink-pot on one knee,” as Shane Leslie described him, “and scribbling words into Greek texts, missing since the Renaissance, with the other. His famous emendations, in exquisite script, were allowed to float about the room until gathered for the Classical Review. A year later they became the prey of German editors.”
Headlam taught both by night and by day, for both were the same to him. His knowledge of Greek literature was enormous and consisted quite simply of knowing everything that had been written in ancient Greek, down to the obscurest Rhetoricians; he had no need for a dictionary. But Greece, to him, was not a dead civilization. He taught the Eleusinian mysteries with reference to ghost-raising and The Golden Bough, Greek obscenities were collated with Burton’s Arabian Nights, he strummed on a hired piano to illustrate the music of the tragic chorus, and, draped in his own beautiful faded crimson curtains, demonstrated how they should enter. Enthusiasm, however, combined with meticulous exactness. Headlam’s vast learning told him infallibly what an author could not have written, his artist’s eye helped him to supply missing letters. And only here, in matters of textual criticism, a battlefield of giants in those days when reputations were lost and won and German and English scholars faced each other in mighty competition, did Headlam make enemies. Confronted with an inaccurate text, his charming, sunny temperament disappeared and was replaced by a concentration of scorn. Afterwards he would be mildly surprised at the resentment of those he had called “idiotic pedants” and “illiterate amateurs”; a party had formed against him, even in King’s itself. Meanwhile his own undertakings, and in particular his edition of Aeschylus, remained unfinished; his own sense of perfection made it impossible for him to finish anything.
Dilly did not find Dr Headlam’s rooms unusual at all, or even untidy. They were exactly the kind of rooms he would have liked himself, and he responded at once to the problems of emendation, which, as Headlam wrote to Professor Postgate, “are, I suppose, empiric; what you call ‘instinct,’ I should rather call ‘observation.’ ” The borderland where the mind, prowling among misty forms and concepts, suddenly perceives analogies with what it already knows, and moves into the light—this was where Dilly was most at home. And he was able to help Headlam to find his notes. They are, after all, always more or less where you left them last night, as long as no one is allowed to tidy them away.
As far as friends were concerned, the college, as E. M. Forster put it, was divided into the excluded and the included, and Dilly, as an Etonian, was included, though this was of singularly little importance to him. The prodigiously brilliant and impatient Keynes had arrived in The Drain a year earlier, and had made his classic comment: “This place seems pretty inefficient to me.” With Lytton Strachey, who had already been up at Trinity for three years, he had taken readily to the Apostolic atmosphere of intense friendship and mutual criticism, based on a very natural desire to talk about each other’s shortcomings, and on a convenient version of some of the notions of their captive philosopher, G. E. Moore. Moore, diffident and speechless himself, was confidently interpreted by the brilliant Kingsmen. His proposition that it is useless to discuss what is meant by “I’ve got sixpence,” but useful to think what we mean by saying it, led to endless variations of “What do you mean by … ?” and “You don’t really mean … ?” His recognition of goodness and beauty (Moore did not think they could be defined) as inherent qualities of things, in some ways like blueness or squareness, and his insistence that it was actually wrong to be in a state of contemplating ugliness, meant that those who could recognize beauty must be in a superior class apart, as, indeed, the Apostles already felt they were. This particularly infuriated Dilly. “Knox, of course, was highly enraged at anyone’s writing such rubbish,” Keynes wrote to Strachey, after a reading of his paper on Beauty. Furthermore, the search for beauty tended to become narrowed to a search for fresh-faced undergraduates with whom one could fall in love.
Homosexuality appeared in many shades in early-twentieth-century Cambridge, linking more than one generation, from the outrageous Oscar Browning, wallowing naked, though by this time decrepit, in the Cam, to the “charmed life”, sometimes more a matter of imagination than of fact, of the Apostles themselves. Headlam himself had found, as he told Mrs Leslie Stephen, that “life is not simple for those who have to choose between conflicting tendencies,” and had expressed this in the finest of his English poems, on the death of John Addington Symonds:
I go mourning for my friend
That for all my mourning stirs nor murmurs in his sleep …
Dilly regarded the subject with detachment, knowing that it explained why Lytton Strachey should at first dislike him violently and describe him as “gravely inconsiderate”. Dilly never became an Apostle, although his name was more than once put forward.
But, in spite of his hesitations (one of his nicknames at home was Erm), he was a speaker much in demand at college societies. Of these there were many, including one organized by Lowes Dickinson (it was here that Keynes had read his paper on Beauty) which was known as the “As It Were In Contradistinction Society”.
The adjective “noxian”, applied to Dilly in Basileon
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