The Knox Brothers. Richard Holmes

to get too clever”. But on his return to Oxford Dr Fowler informed him, in a spirit of anxious justice, that his scholarship had been suspended.

      To retrieve himself he must come back in September and take an examination on the whole of Herodotus and the whole of Plato’s Republic, with a fine to be paid if he did not pass, “which I fear would fall on your father rather than on yourself”—and Dr Fowler would be unable to supply him with testimonials of any kind. As a threat this would have had no effect on Eddie, but as an appeal to his affection it could and did. He gave up his “habitually late hours” (the records by now refer to him as “Mr Knox’s case”), spent only eightpence a week on bread and beer in Hall, and he passed his Honour Mods. A further letter from the Doctor recalls the pastoral atmosphere of Edwardian Oxford:

      Dear Mr Knox,

      I sincerely hope that our relations may be more pleasant in future, and that the discipline you have been under, and will continue to be under, in a modified form, this term, may turn out to be for your good, not only by teaching you the useful lessons of obedience and submission to authorities, but also by procuring for you more opportunities of reading undisturbed by callers, during the solitary hours in your rooms, as well as by leading you to reflect on, and I trust to repent of, the folly of some part of your conduct in the past.

      If all goes well for the rest of the term, I shall regard your present punishment and the spirit in which you have received it as purging your offences of the past, and, I trust, giving me the opportunity of speaking well of you to any one who may make enquiries as to your character.

      Those who were expected to make enquiries were the examiners for the Indian Civil Service, for which Eddie was destined. But now he knew—and, indeed, he had told Miss Stevenson—that he was going to be a writer, and one good enough to justify his choice of career to his father. He never took his final degree, but spent his last two years at Oxford training himself as a debater, essayist and poet by practising, as an apprentice has to do, in the styles he admired most—Swinburne, A. E. Housman, the young W. B. Yeats, the later George Meredith. Confined to his rooms by nine-fifteen every evening, he wrote alcaics:

      I am dumb to-night, I cannot sing your praises,

      Only feel this cool sweet-smelling silence,

      Between leaf-lattices, upward and upward …

      Wilfred was left stolidly behind at Rugby, working towards his turn for a scholarship. He was not very interested in school teams, and not very successful in getting prizes. But the placid exterior was deceptive, for Wilfred, like his brothers, had to come to terms with an inner struggle between reason and emotion, and between emotion and the obligation not to show it. From his letters it appears that his solution, for the time being, was a strange fantasy life entirely of his own devising. He refused to join the school debating society, “as if one who has spoken in all the Parliaments of Europe would condescend to speak at a petty school society!” When his box arrived and the Railway Company had demanded four shillings and ninepence he had “flung the minion out of the window for his presumptuous demands.” The heat had been appalling for October and during a rugby match several players melted into pools of water, drowning one of the onlookers, “a double tragedy which has cast a gloom over the whole community.” The Bishop complained about his spelling, and was told that “as soon as my friend Joseph Chamberlain has finished with Free Trade I shall instruct him to introduce a bill for spelling reform.” No alterations were to be undertaken at St Philip’s Rectory until Wilfred had come home to direct the workmen with a few well-chosen words, and if too many visiting clergymen arrive, he advises that it will be best to poison them with white arsenic.

      In contrast to this, Wilfred showed the humility of the “in-between” child in a large family when he insisted that he doesn’t need a new bicycle—the old Raleigh will do quite well “for something I have always rather wanted to do, ride back from Rugby to Birmingham,” and his only request for new clothes is when the time comes for him to sit for his University scholarship.

      The problem which had begun to occupy Wilfred’s inmost thoughts was moral and social, rather than religious. It was the question of poverty, which concerned him at the simplest and perhaps the only important level: is it tolerable that anyone should be truly poor? At Edmundthorpe he had asked Aunt Fanny whether it was right that the village children should be lifting potatoes until it was too dark to see, and had received the reply, “Nonsense, Wilfred! It will teach them habits of industry!” Since then he had seen the frightening slum poverty of Aston, where the women gathered round the stalls on Friday nights to fight for scraps of bone and offal. He did not, of course, underestimate his father’s tireless work in the grimy parish, but the Evangelical Movement, with all its wonderful record of service to humanity, did not go as far as Wilfred wanted. He felt that a new century needed a new direction.

      Of all the older boys at Rugby, the one who had impressed him most had been Billy Temple. Temple, even as a schoolboy, had steadfastly refused to discuss “the Christian solution” for any specific problem; there was only one solution, and that was a total change of heart in society. From this idea, for which he had an ungrudging respect, and from what he had read of Ruskin and F. D. Maurice, Wilfred, at the age of seventeen, began to arrive at his own vision of the socialism of the future. In March 1903 he wrote to Ronnie about the Woolwich by-election in which Will Crooks, brought up in the workhouse, had just won the seat for Labour in what had always been considered a safe Conservative stronghold. Ronnie was not sure whether to rejoice or not. He was struggling, for his part, with a “Sunday Question” on the subject “What do you understand by Socialism and by the doctrines of Nietzsche?” Ronnie’s suggestion was that the poor and habitually unemployed might be shipped to Canada “or other places”. “This would only be applicable to the young,” Mr Goodhart wrote in the margin.

      In the August of 1903 Wilfred and Ronnie were sent abroad together on a trip down the Rhine in the perennial hope of parents that they would “improve their German”. They were to photograph the churches and to keep a Tagebuch. They began by drawing up elaborate rules and regulations for calculating the number of lemon squashes consumed and the probable weight of the very stout German ladies on the boat. The tramway systems were, they thought, unimpressive, but they dutifully did the sights. Cologne was “clean but papistical”—and Ronnie, very much the junior, was made to sew on Wilfred’s buttons. The diary soon became light-headed:

      August 5: Wilfie asks for beer at Gurzenich restaurant. Thrown downstairs. [Ronnie] … Ronnie evicted from St. Somebody’s by sacristan for sitting on tomb and intoning from Baedeker during mass. [Wilf] … W. excommunicated by Archbp. of Cologne for photographing him in Compline. [Ronnie] … Pulled Archbp’s mitre about his ears and beat him with a beadle’s bargepole. [Wilf] … Got W. out of military prison on plea of insanity. [Ronnie] …

      As the trip went on, however, Ronnie grew serious. Not very sensitive, in later life, to the language of painting, he was touched, during those hot summer days, by the unmistakably direct appeal of what religious pictures he saw. On 16 August he wrote: “We went to the church of Notre Dame in Bruges, where there is a glorious Van Dyke Crucifixion with a very dark background and no one else except Our Lord in the picture. It makes one feel terribly lonely.” Although Ronnie, as he wrote in A Spiritual Aeneid, “then as always dreaded the undue interference of emotion in religion,” he bought a small silver crucifix in Bruges which he put first on the wall, then on his watch chain, then round his neck. Such an object had never been seen before at St Philip’s Rectory. He found himself responsive also to the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. “I should like books for presents; obscurer English poets, esp. before and just after the Revolution,” he wrote to Mrs K. He was still very ready to become a finished product of Eton; he still valued highly the power of Etonian understatement. (The best reproof for a violent offender, A. C. Benson tells us, is “I believe, Smith, we do not see you quite at your best today.”) Ronnie’s heart was given to Eton, but it was also open to the poetry of Henry Vaughan and his emblems of light and “dazzling darkness”, the night-time when “spirits their fair kindred catch”. He read for the first time, and memorized, Vaughan’s “Peace”:

      My soul, there is a country

      Far