by Wendy Moffat
At the head of stairway W7 lived a handsome, genial young man with pale skin, a flop of dark hair, and angular eyebrows that telegraphed his exquisite skepticism about things as they are. Hugh Owen Meredith, known by his initials as HOM, was one of the new breed of genuinely brilliant Cambridge undergraduates. His father was an Irish shorthand clerk who sacrificed a great deal to educate his eldest son. To Morgan, HOM’s brains, beauty, and grace were intoxicating. Meredith was a college Scholar, he had racked up prizes in classics and every kind of sport, and he had a shattering confidence about his own beliefs that belied a parallel habit of self-scrutiny amounting to self-hatred. The model for both George Emerson in A Room with a View and Clive Durham in Maurice, HOM loved to “épater the narrow-minded.”
Within weeks of meeting Morgan, Hugh boldly announced he was an atheist, and proceeded to separate Morgan from the last remnants of his faith. To HOM it was clear that not only was church practice hypocrisy, but the very concept of Christ was humbug. Along with John Maynard Keynes, who would become perhaps the greatest economist of the century, HOM led a public attack under the banner of secularism on the college’s sponsorship of a Christian mission in the slums of East London. Like many undergraduate political protests, the atheists’ “sincere and bellicose” display verged on comedy. They sent a representative to present a petition of grievances timed to interrupt prayers at High Table. Just as the provost intoned, “In the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord,” there was a scuffle; the rude emissary was escorted out of the hall, and a don piped up loudly: “Would you mind passing the potatoes?” The renegades won the day; it was decided that college work with the London poor could be done through a secular organization.
Under Hugh Meredith’s influence, Morgan lost his faith “quietly and quickly.”
The idea of a god becoming a man to help man is overwhelming to anyone possessed of a heart. Even at that age I was aware that this world needs help. But I had never much sense of sin, and when I realised that the main aim of the Incarnation was not to stop war or pain or poverty, I became less interested and ended by scrapping it.
Examining the Gospels carefully to discern the personality of Christ ended the matter permanently: “So much moving away from worldliness towards preaching and threats, so much emphasis on followers, on an elite, so little intellectual power . . . such an absence of humour and fun that my blood chilled.”
The Meredith family had been scandalized by the news of HOM’s atheism, but Lily responded more phlegmatically to Morgan’s “pompous” pronouncement that he had lost his faith. His mimicry of rebellion, though sincere, proved a bit of an anticlimax. “It so happened . . . that my father had lost his faith about 30 years previously and had recovered it after a short interval. My family assumed that I should follow the paternal pattern.”
Losing his faith cleared the way for Morgan to divine a new philosophy. It is hard to imagine that a young man so kind, so bright, so sensitive could live to the age of twenty with no real experience of friendship, but it was so. With “no formula for unknown experience,” Morgan used the tools at hand. He discovered the beautiful ideas of ancient Athens just at the moment he found the brilliant and beautiful Hugh, and in the alchemy of mind and heart he began to inch toward an ethics of human “warmth.”
Hellenism was an intermediate step toward his personal philosophy. For many a late-Victorian man, the classics served as an excellent looking glass. If you were inclined toward empire, the study of ancient Greece reinforced your belief in the inevitability of Britain’s wealth, the rectitude of its ideals, and the justice of its global sway. Young men like Morgan, wrestling with how to be, and how to be good, found that “Athens in particular had expressed our problems with a lucidity beyond our power.” And for homosexual men, Hellenism served as both an ideal and a disguise. From J. A. Symonds to Oscar Wilde himself, they justified the legitimacy of their desire by invoking the halcyon days of ancient Greece. Just two years before Morgan entered King’s, speaking from the dock, Wilde had summoned the redoubtable troika of the Bible, Hellenic practice, and Shakespeare himself to defend his love affair with the young Alfred Lord Douglas:
The love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is a deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect . . . It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it.
Wilde’s greatest error had been to believe that the homophilia of his cloistered Magdalen College life could be practiced in the public world. The men of King’s would not make the same mistake. Anxiety and fascination with homosexuality reverberated just under the surface, but the subject itself was carefully contained. Describing tutorials at Cambridge in Maurice, Morgan would demonstrate the knowing evasions of the dons: “They attended the Dean’s translation class, and when one of the men was forging quietly ahead Mr. Cornwallis observed in a flat toneless voice: ‘Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.’”
Such behavior deflected attention from the homophilia at the heart of the King’s notion of friendship between the faculty and students. The college’s most famous don, Oscar Browning, “saw in King’s the material of a new Athens.” Practically speaking, this meant that he loved both Greek literature and beautiful boys. Browning’s reverence for young men was eccentric and pronounced. He had retreated to King’s in 1876 in a spectacular scandal, claiming his life fellowship in the wake of being fired as a master at Eton. At that time he was forty, but he had already earned the jocular nickname “The O.B.,” and he had swelled to the vast walrus bulk that made him the recognizable subject of caricature in undergraduate magazines.
Browning’s ostentatious romance with a pupil, Lord Curzon’s son George—who, at fifteen, was decades away from his lofty position as the viceroy of India—had proved to be too much for his colleagues at Eton. Not that the relationship was overtly sexual. Browning never laid a hand on an English boy. That he reserved for the safer, grubbier Greek and Italian boys he encountered on holiday. But his chaste pedophilia might best be described as “soul-fingering.” This practice he continued with the slightly older students at King’s. Morgan understood and appreciated Browning’s fractious power: he found him to be “a deposit of radium, a mass of equivocal fire.” Browning generated a torrent of adjectives—one colleague’s list included “Falstaffian, shameless, affectionate, egoistic, generous, snobbish, democratic, witty, lazy, dull, worldly, academic,” to which Morgan later in life added “a bully and a liar.” Despite these shortcomings, Morgan believed, “Whatever his make up, he did manage to educate young men.”
Browning was “the hero of a lost play by Shakespeare.” The memoirs of his colleagues and students are studded with extraordinary vignettes. “His corpulent person was consistently to be found in a state of primitive nudity,” either sporting with undergraduates in the Cam or holding impromptu office hours in his rooms en déshabille. He habitually chose handsome young men with indeterminate skills to be his secretaries. His student (and later Morgan’s great friend) Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson recalled finding him undressed “in his inner room, where he slept behind a screen, in the act of getting up. On one side of him was a secretary writing letters to dictation, and on the other another [boy] playing the violin.” Browning may have been unregenerate, but his younger colleague Nathaniel Wedd, always alert to hypocrisy, defended him. Wedd observed trenchantly, “Eton sacked OB for introducing the very things on which it now prides itself.”
Inside the insular all-male world of King’s, Browning ruled. The college was virtually cloistered; the gates were locked at nine in the evening. Within this world freedom was defined in part by extravagant misogyny. There is nothing so sure to make a young man feel invincible and important as the cocoon of excluding others. The college porter is always
ready to spot you the money for a cab if you should arrive late and penniless in the fog; outsiders—even, famously, Virginia Woolf—are scooted off the lawns in front of your eyes. Fewer than a tenth of the university’s students were women, who were denied degrees and were contained in two women’s colleges at the margin of the city; Browning, who marked their exams for extra money, announced that the best woman’s essay was markedly inferior to the worst of the men’s. He prided himself on his ignorance of women. When asked if he found the Venus of Botticelli to be lifelike, Browning replied that he could not answer the question, since he had never seen a woman naked.
In the city, too, women were curtailed in unconscionable ways. University rules superseded British common law and applied to all inhabitants. Under rules established in the Elizabethan era, university proctors were empowered to arrest women “suspected of evil” (that is, presumed to be prostitutes), hold them without notice to civil authorities or their families, and incarcerate them in a private prison known as the Spinning House. In the 1890s Cambridge was transfixed by lawsuits brought in Crown Court by two innocent young women who sued the university for false imprisonment. Jane Elsden and Daisy Hopkins lost their cases, but the publicity incited political pressure to limit the university’s power to control civil life. By the time Morgan left King’s, the Spinning House courts had been abolished by Act of Parliament.
For Morgan it was a relief to live in a world so different from the one dominated by Lily and the Aunts. True, he was steeped in the reflexive misogyny of Edwardian culture. When discord in any relationship occurred he would believe that “as usual the women have precipitated the trouble.” But he was attuned to bigotry and aware of his own ignorance of women. In a few years he would begin to explore why the price of justifying oneself as a homosexual should be exacted in the hatred of women. In The Longest Journey he would show Rickie Elliot to be obtuse and discourteous when Agnes Pembroke came to visit King’s. The Schlegel sisters, two of the most complex and sympathetic female characters in any novel, would anchor Howards End. One New Year’s resolution in December 1904 would be to “get a less superficial idea of women.”
The diary entries from Morgan’s second year at King’s read like the letters of the young Keats: absorbed in ideas, reading rapaciously, unaware that the whole world is not composed of art and literature. The Boer War had just begun, but Morgan was oblivious to political events. All his attention went to his widening circle of friends. There was Sydney Waterlow, who seemed preternaturally middle-aged—he had grown a huge mustache while at Eton, was a great talker, and would take any side of an argument, even both sides. (Later in life, he was embroiled in two simultaneous lawsuits: the first to annul his marriage on the grounds of impotence, the second a breach-of-promise case brought by his pregnant mistress.) And there was Waterlow’s friend Edward Dent, who shared both an unrequited crush on HOM and a deep love of music with Morgan. A brilliant musicologist who followed all the latest European composers, Dent played piano with Morgan, and invited him to the university’s weekly chamber recitals. And Malcolm Darling, generous of spirit, who would soon serve in the Indian civil administration (and invite Morgan to come visit). Darling was sweet-natured, unworldly, and resolutely heterosexual. When two of his friends were expelled from Eton and left the college in the same car, Darling “could not make out why their friends should have pelted them with rice.”
There was always company, always music, always laughter in Morgan’s rooms in Bodley’s Building. Every day consisted of long walks through the city, a disquisition or a dispute on art with a friend. Morgan sublimated his love for HOM, watching him dominate passionate discussions. Daily life was a sort of modern symposium.
5 Nov. (Sunday) [1899] Spencer, Mounsey & Gardner to breakfast. Lunched with Meredith . . . Wilderness in the afternoon . . . 20th Nov. . . . Ainsworth came in & ate bacon; then he and Meredith argued about beauty. Enter MacMunn with whom I walked up Huntington Road . . . Tea with Miss Stephen [Virginia Woolf’s aunt]: talked of Tenn. & Browning. Coffee with Lubbock: beautiful rooms and books; admirer of R[obert] L[ouis] S[tevenson] . . . 27th Nov. . . . Debate going on: “Trinity is too big.” Worked. Meredith came in and discussed beauty again.
Morgan was fortunate to be assigned Nathaniel Wedd as his supervisor. Wedd balanced the bad news—that Morgan’s education at Tonbridge had not taught him how to think, and thus that he was likely to do poorly on the looming Tripos—with a wholehearted recognition that his student had a delicate, unusual, promising mind. “To him more than to anyone,” Morgan later wrote, “I owe such awakening as has befallen me.”
Wedd was a perfect mentor. Morgan’s first impression was of a young Mephistopheles. Wedd smoked excessively. He grew a huge walrus mustache and wore bright red ties. Only thirty-five, he was not far past his radical Fabian days. As a King’s undergraduate in 1882, Wedd had goaded the college elders by inviting G. B. Shaw to lecture at King’s, prompting the provost to object unless Shaw wrote to reassure him that he did not plan to “dynamite” the college. Wedd was asked to query the incendiary speaker on his “moral basis” for coming to King’s. Shaw duly responded by mail that his moral basis was the same as Wedd’s, an equivocal response if a gentlemanly one.
As a don, Wedd remained steadfastly “cynical, aggressive,” and anticlerical. He would ostentatiously spit on the ground when he saw the procession lining up for chapel. He swore and blasphemed liberally, and even taught his colleague the mild-mannered Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson to swear too—which Morgan found “a desirable accomplishment for a high-minded young don.”
Wedd “gave all his time and energies to undergraduates, was at home to them at all hours of the night, stimulated, comforted, amused” them. He encouraged Morgan to write not only academic essays but small pieces for the Basileon and other Cambridge undergraduate magazines. Morgan adopted the pseudonym of Peer Gynt, the Ibsen character whose dark search for identity ends in despair, burying his head in his mother’s lap. But despite the serious pen name, his incidental essays were light ephemera: “On Bicycling”; “On Grinds,” a whimsical skit based on Agamemnon. In letters home to Lily he was already beginning to display a distinctive sensitivity to literature; he was reading Shaw’s plays, he told her, and they were “wonderfully clever & amusing, but they make me feel bad inside.” Alongside his syllabi for lectures and essays, Morgan was greedily reading for pleasure. He plowed through Milton and Shakespeare; Sophocles and Pindar; Robert Browning and Rosetti; Housman’s new book of poems, A Shropshire Lad; Tennyson, Maeterlinck, Pinero, and Ibsen; and all the great eighteenth-century English novels.
He developed a knack for pulling together a compelling essay, provided he could choose the subject. At the end of his second year, Morgan won a college prize for a stylish paper on the history of the novel. But he faced the unrelenting Tripos in his third year, and Wedd was not sanguine about his chances of doing well. His poor performance on the interim exams in May 1899 rendered him ineligible for the plum home civil service jobs, like the one his friend Leonard Woolf would take on in Ceylon. Morgan wrote Lily that Wedd “advises me to think of journalistic work as one of the things I might do . . . I don’t think I shall be good enough.” Though he could live frugally on the legacy from Aunt Monie, it began to be clear that he must choose some sort of profession. When the marks for the Tripos were announced, Morgan was relieved to have earned a solid upper-second-class Honours. But still, what to do? He had little confidence and no vocation.
The better part of valor is discretion, Falstaff mutters as he tentatively pokes Hotspur’s corpse with his sword. In the absence of any solid idea about the future, Morgan decided to stay on at King’s for another year. He changed his subject to history. Though he hoped to work with Wedd, Oscar Browning buttonholed him instead, insisting he must supervise his reading. Browning was viewed by most students as entertaining but harmless, but as a tutor he was nugatory: “While his pupil read out his essay he would put a red spotted handkerchief over hi
s face and go to sleep. Awakened by the cessation of the droning, he would exclaim ‘My boy, you’re a genius!’”
Morgan later wrote charitably, “I came towards the end of O. B.’s glory, nor was I ever part of its train.” Which is to say that by the time they encountered each other—when Browning was in his sixties and Morgan just twenty-one—Morgan was neither seductive enough for the old man nor callow enough to be seduced by Browning’s dodgy ideas of romantic boy-worship. In any case, Browning’s instruction was beside the point. For his birthday, Aunt Laura Forster had bought him a sensitive and fortuitous gift—a life membership in the London Library. In Morgan’s last year at King’s, Wedd and HOM opened new doors for him.
It was not so much what Wedd taught him as how Wedd encouraged his intellectual hunger that Morgan remembered in later years. He “had helped me” by casually observing “in a lecture that we all know more than we think. A cry of relief and endorsement arose from my mind, tortured so long by being told that it knew less than it pretended.” Gently, understatedly, Wedd encouraged Morgan:
He tells me that I might write, could write, might be a writer. I was amazed yet not overawed. Like other great teachers of the young, Wedd always pointed to something already existing. He brought not only help but happiness. Of course I could write—not that anyone would read me, but that didn’t signify . . . I had a special and unusual apparatus, to which Wedd called my attention . . .