Sept 23 1900
Dear Mother,
I don’t quite understand the way the forms go, but Dilly says I am in the bottom division of Fifth Form as a matter of course. I hope this letter will reach you early, but I am only writing at 18 3/4 minutes past 8 p.m.… Yesterday I played in a game of Eton field game. I was put to hold a person up on one side, then someone threw the ball in among us, and by the time we were all sitting on top of one another the ball was far away.
We won apparently by three to none. I am very happy here. My love to Winnie,
your very sleepy son,
R. A. Knox
P.S. Floreat Etona.
He was possessed by a kind of pleasurable anxiety to do the right thing, and yet not to waste money at home, asking diffidently for a Liberty’s armchair for his room “to get something in accordance with the rules of taste. Mr Goodhart [the Master in College] is always calling chairs ‘horrible!’, because he makes little expeditions into one’s room just as one is getting into bed, and remarks on pictures and things. He told me the picture of Rembrandt was the sort of thing you could look at for hours. I’ve never tried.” But if Ronnie was eager to conform, he felt free to be happy at Eton. The romantic in him, the inconvenient love of mystery and beauty—inconvenient, that is, to one who thought he mistrusted enthusiasm and only valued a reasonable faith—began to spread its wings. He felt a devotion to Henry VI, the Sorrowful King, the Founder of Eton, which merged, in his thirteenth year, with his feeling for the poetry of the Rossettis and for the splendour of the west window at St Philip’s, the Burne-Jones window through whose ruby-red glass the light streamed in at evensong.
To outward appearances he was still the brilliant, dutiful and rather delicate prizewinner, petted by the Matron in College and still kept firmly in order by his brothers. As the cold of winter approached, Wilfred had “borrowed” his gloves, Dillwyn his cherished new overcoat, which he had christened Alitat, the name of a goddess in Herodotus. Alitat was returned, but Ronnie was often in the sickroom. He meditated anxiously on his resources. “I have bought all my birthday presents, expending 10/- on the whole lot,” he wrote home in June 1902. “I shall have to send Eddie his to-morrow; I have got him a knife-sharpener and strop combined, and also a little pendant for his watch chain.”
Eddie’s departure to Oxford meant that the first of the Bishop’s sons was at University, and he could not help recalling his own achievements there and Bishop Chavasse’s letter to him: “Thank God, thank God, dear old boy, that you have got a First.” Might not this very real triumph be repeated, in four years’ time? Corpus was the Bishop’s own college, and the President, Dr Thomas Fowler, was an old friend. Fowler was one of the great men of the University, a grammar-school boy from Lincolnshire who had become Professor of Logic, but valued philosophy principally as a means of training character; in his famous “private hours” he drew out his young men, and made them apply thought to conduct. To parents he made the terrifying observation, that if they failed to give their children a good education they were no better than the parents in primitive societies, who were permitted to put their children to death. He was both conscientious and sympathetic, and the terrible responsibility of choosing undergraduates for commissions for the Boer Wars was said to have shortened his life.
Eddie went up to Corpus not only as a good classical scholar, but as an Edwardian elegant. He had never bought any clothes for himself before he was sixteen. Mrs K. made large orders at the drapers and outfitters as required, while in the “girls’ room” Winnie pinned and sewed, with Dilly intervening to adapt the sewing-machine to steam power. But the Bishop, who had suffered himself from reach-me-down clothes and “boots heeled, and, I think, tipped with iron—in vain did I attempt to deaden the hateful noises that attended my movements”—was sympathetic to his own boys, all of whom, except the lounging Dilly, had the instincts of a dandy. Eddie was made an allowance of a hundred pounds per annum, to be deducted from his share of the money left in trust by their mother. To the awe of the younger ones, he opened an account with a Birmingham tailor and a cigar merchant, and indulged his good taste in eau-de-Cologne and silk handkerchiefs.
The Oxford to which he went up, on the other hand, was still a slumbrous place where the old eccentrics, whom Lewis Carroll had compared to caterpillars and fantastic birds, emerged from the “sets” which they had occupied for some forty years, complaining at the disturbance of young bloods. The University was still slowly digesting the Commission of 1877, aimed at diverting wealth from the colleges, to expanding the sciences and giving increased chances to poorer students. In 1893 the mighty Jowett had died, glad to have lived to interpret the ideas of Plato to the world, and Corpus itself, which up to 1850 had never had more than twenty undergraduates, had cautiously followed the times, and had expanded into Merton Street. The college remained small, all the members could be gathered at once on the secluded green lawn under the old mulberry tree, and the record of scholarship, as always, stood high.
The idea that a son of Bishop Knox could be “frivolous and extravagant” did not cross Dr Fowler’s mind. But the President’s regulations, even by the standards which Edwardian Oxford tried to impose, were strict to excess. He had a horror of even the mildest forms of gambling, and imposed penalties on the undergraduates for playing the dreaded new game of “Bridge” and for attending the theatre in gowns “on the pretext that they thought the play was by Shakespeare”. Eddie could not conform. He stayed out late. The most difficult route for climbing in at night was across the wall from Merton, where the less agile were sometimes impaled on revolving iron spikes; he became an expert, only damaging his wrists during the last few feet when his friends dragged his light weight across the windowsill.
With these friends, and in particular with Alan Barlow, later Secretary of the Treasury and Trustee of the National Gallery, Eddie passed golden hours. He was the unobtrusive wit of the dining clubs, organized races in hansom cabs, and introduced Miss Mabel Love, a music-hall performer, into the college. But he was aware of a document headed Communication to Mr E.V. Knox, Scholar, after complaints by the Tutors on his Idleness, and of the bitter disappointment that this was likely to cause at home. The summer of 1901 was spent at Glencrippsdale, where in the course of damp picnics and fishing expeditions Eddie fell into the melancholy which lay in wait for all the brothers. In an elegant version of the Greek Anthology, not the less true because it was a commonplace, he wrote,
Leaf and bud, ah quick, how quick returning
Here is visaged immortality;
Freshly from the dark soil sunward yearning
Lifts the ageless green; and must I die?
The natural confidante for these moods would be a young woman, in this case a girl called Evelyn Stevenson, who was also staying at Glencrippsdale, a spirited creature who played billiards and tramped over the heather in an “artistically simple” outfit from Liberty’s. “Do you know, I actually read your letter right through?” she wrote to him. “Awfully good of me, wasn’t it? I hope you are taking a generally less gloomy view of life and things in general … it’s really easier than one thinks to go on living—at least it seems to me to be so.” She also advised him “not 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:
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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 beyond the stars,
Where stands a wingèd sentry
All skilful in the wars …
But the book which moved him most at this time was a present from his sister Winnie, a volume of unashamedly sentimental short stories, Hugh Benson’s The Light Invisible, a book abounding in wise, tobacco-stained old priests, one of whom tries and fails to save a child in danger of being crushed by a cart: an angel appears and gently guides the child, not away from, but underneath the wheels.
This story particularly struck Ronnie. We have no idea what God intends for us; we have no right to ask for safety, perhaps we do not even know what it is. A lifelong enthusiasm for unpopular causes awoke in him. He borrowed a history of the Tractarian Movement, and, as he put it, “trembled for Newman, mourned for him as lost to the Church, and rose with the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the circles I moved in, there was a cause for which clergymen had been sent to prison and noble lives spent; a cause which could be mine.” To his father, to all the Evangelical homes of his childhood, the Tractarians were traitors from which English Christianity must be rescued. Ronnie’s changing views were “known at home, and doubtless regretted”, but he was only sixteen, the favourite child, the youngest, and these notions of his would surely pass.
Meantime the Bishop’s field of activity grew even wider when he was appointed, in the autumn of 1903, to the see of Manchester. He accepted by return of post, knowing that Balfour’s ministry might fall and the offer might not be repeated by a new Prime Minister less favourable to the Evangelicals. The bishopric had been constituted only fifty years earlier, and covered a huge district of east and central Lancashire, caring for three million souls. The great Lancashire battle to keep its own religious education, of which the Bishop was to be a staunch champion, had only just begun. There were unshepherded multitudes in Blackpool, where in Wakes Week the landladies let their beds for half the night, then put in a new relay of holidaymakers while the first lot were turned out in the backyard. Manchester, with God’s help, would be a worthy opportunity for his energy and splendid powers of organization.
The Knox Brothers Page 7