Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines

‘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

      Luxmoore, who had polished Keynes’s mind at Eton, liked to spend his Christmas holidays at King’s. ‘It is like a most splendidly appointed club in which each member has a suite of noble rooms to himself & is paid an income instead of subscribing,’ he wrote in 1902 at the end of Keynes’s first term. One night Montague Rhodes James, the first man to be successively Provost of King’s and Provost of Eton, read a blood-curdling horror story, which he had written, to the other senior members of the college who had dined together in hall. Afterwards they played a card-game called ‘animal grab’ in which victorious players had to make the noises of animals and birds: ‘Moo-Moo’, they shouted for a cow, ‘Hee-Haw’ for a donkey, ‘Hobble-gobble’ for a turkey and so forth. ‘The cleverness & gaiety of them all is wonderful & yet if it goes on like this in term time – & it does – where is the strenuous [intellectual] life, & search for truth & for knowledge that one looks for at College?’ Luxmoore wondered. ‘Chaff & extravagant fancy & mimicry & camaraderie & groups that gather & dissolve first in this room & then in that like the midges that dance their rings in the sunshine, ought to be only the fringe of life & I doubt if here it does not cover the whole, or nearly so.’ Yet for all this frivolity, King’s excelled most Cambridge colleges by standing out against the prevalent culture of insularity, obscurity, opacity and smugness. ‘There are three things that no Cambridge man can endure,’ one Fellow of King’s, Oscar Browning, told another, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. ‘One is, that a man should know anything outside his own subject. The second is, that his name should be known outside the University. The third, that he should be able to express himself lucidly, either in speech or writing.’ Rhodes James, Browning, Dickinson and other King’s men did not bundle themselves inside the college, but pursued wide questing interests and national fame.36

      Maynard Keynes was bought life membership of the Cambridge Union debating society by his father at the time of his matriculation in the university. There, in November 1902, he gave his maiden speech, four minutes long, in support of a motion deploring party government. This speech, which presaged a lifelong distaste for the waste of partisanship, drew the admiration of the Union’s president, Edwin Montagu, who fostered him as a speaker at the Union, of which he was elected president in the Lent term of 1905. ‘I owed – rather surprisingly – nearly all my steps up in life to him,’ Keynes said of Montagu. He had his first experiences of electioneering in support of Montagu as (the successful) Liberal parliamentary candidate in 1905 for West Cambridgeshire (‘the home of a peculiarly sturdy type of Nonconformity’). Later Montagu sponsored him as a Whitehall man of influence. As Under-Secretary of State for India, Montagu got Keynes on to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency in 1913. As Financial Secretary of the Treasury in 1915, he clinched his appointment as a Treasury official. Montagu introduced him to the world of political dinners, official secrets and confidential plans. ‘He was so moody and temperamental and unhealthy and ugly to look at,