The Knox Brothers

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  By February, Strachey himself had fallen in love with Dilly. “You must forgive me, please,” he wrote, “if I can talk of nothing but Knox. I came back from Cambridge having only seen him once—but the impression was so wonderful! Oh dear! You needn’t be jealous! I’m as far away from him as from you!” Walter Lamb had tried to dissuade him by swearing that “Knox liked everyone equally”, but what enraged Strachey was that he would never have a chance to find out; and meanwhile he was routed by the arctic cold and—though he does not mention rats—the pervasive damp of King’s. In February, however, he was offered a room at Trinity, and knew that he must put his fortunes, and the “Knox question”, to the test. He stayed several weeks, and had begun to regard Dilly (or Dolfus, or Adolphe, as he preferred to call him) as an Endless Possibility. But in March 1907 he tore himself away “with infinite tears”.

  My beloved Adolphe, too, it was sad to part with, though I quite failed to find more in him that I had always found before. Did I tell you that he had a wonderful veil of ugliness that he is able to lower at any minute over his face? His method is, you see, to lure you on with his beauty, until at last, just as you step forward to seize a kiss, or whatever else you may want to seize, he lets down a veil, and you simply fall back disgusted. Isn’t it a horrid trick? And then, of course, when you’ve decided that the whole thing’s absurd, and begin to wonder what you could have found in him, he removes the veil, and says he must go back to King’s.

  The veil may have been partly composed of pipe smoke, since Dilly told Eddie that Lytton, although exceedingly jolly, needed “fumigating” at times. Strachey was perplexed, too, by the elusive quality of Dilly’s mind, approaching every problem by indirections. In May, however, came a much worse shock. “Did I tell you the dreadful news about Knox?” he asked Grant. “He’s taken to nippers! Yes, permanently—and that dreadful kind without rims!”

  It was true that Dilly’s eyesight was strained, and although he soon exchanged the nippers for horn-rimmed spectacles, without the slightest idea of the effect produced in either case, Strachey could not bear to go and see him on his next visit to King’s, in June. The episode ended for him in London, as he sat in St James’s Park with his friend Swithinbank.

  How nice to sit with Swithin in the sunshine! I talked to him about Knox, and told him about the nippers, and how appalling it was for me, because I’d had a passion for him. He said, ‘I have a passion for him too, sometimes.’ I replied, ‘Well, you’ll never have one again! You’ll never get over the eye-glasses.’ He said, calmly, ‘Oh, I should take them off.’ Rather wonderful? Can you imagine us talking about Knox on our penny seats, and forgetting all about the Colonial office?

  “I want to write a moral story on the subject,” Strachey added, “but I suppose I shall be too lazy—called ‘The Spectacles.’ ” It would certainly have given an example of the imperviousness which carried Dilly through the pressures of life as though over charmed ground. He became, however, a good friend of Strachey’s, at one with him over the matter of “the deluded individual J.C.”, and continuing to hope against hope that Strachey might one day finish his projected Life of Jesus.

  In 1910–11 two newcomers to Cambridge had a considerable influence on Dilly. One was an undergraduate of King’s, Frank Birch (Francis Lyall Birch). Birch was a many-sided human being—a rather dull historian, an acceptable drinking companion, a mysterious private personality, a brilliant talker and a born actor. In his impersonations, as in those of all great comedians, there was a frightening element. He excelled in “doing” one of his classical tutors, J. E. Nixon, who had only one eye and one hand, and was reputed to be taken to bits altogether at night, so that nothing could be seen in the room at all. Birch liberated in Dilly the vein of wild fantasy which Wilfred had showed in his letters from Rugby, and Eddie in his contributions to Punch.

  The other arrival in Cambridge was A. E. Housman, who took up the Kennedy Professorship in 1911, and from whom Dilly counted himself lucky to receive a glacial few words, now and then, at the Classical Club. Housman’s poetry was important to all the brothers, but particularly so to Dilly, who revelled in its sombre advice. On the flyleaf of a copy of Manilius which he had given to Headlam, Housman had counselled him to confine himself to the things of this earth; with this Dilly sympathized and still more with the tension of A Shropshire Lad arising from the balance between reason and unhealed emotion:

  And fire and ice within me fight

  Beneath the suffocating night.

  Housman, too, could be allowed to understand English metre. The three-stress rhythm of Is my team ploughing affected Dilly so much that he bit right through the amber mouthpiece of his pipe, which was heard by those in the rooms below him to crash to the ground.

  This was Dilly between 1907 and 1914—expanding cautiously in the Apostolic friendship, encouraged by Birch to appear as, for instance, Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest, carried away by poetry and motor-bicycles, and beginning his career in pure scholarship. His Fellowship dissertation had been on the prose rhythms of Thucydides; his argument was said to be unacceptable, but so clever that nobody could contradict it. Then he returned to Greek poetry. Mr Ian Cunningham, a recent editor of Herodas, writes:

  He discovered, more or less simultaneously with one of the greatest, if not the greatest, modern classical scholars, U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, what is now known as the Wilamowitz-Knoxian bridge. This is a highly technical point of Greek metre. A bridge is a point in the verse where word-end is forbidden. This one relates to the iambic trimeter of the early period—Archilochus, Solon, Semonides, Hipponax.

  To be remembered by a few because of a rule about a word that doesn’t end in lines of poetry that scarcely anyone reads—if Dilly ever desired immortality, it would be of this kind. In Housman’s words, all exact knowledge “pushes back the frontiers of the dark,” and consoles mankind for his discovery that “he does not come from the high lineage he fancied, nor will inherit the vast estate he looked for.”

  The “vast estate”—the belief in life after death—Dilly, ever since his second year at Cambridge, had decisively resigned. In the Lent term of 1906 Dean Inge, who had himself been a Fellow of King’s and was the most intelligent preacher that the Church could put into the field, had been asked to speak in chapel on the errors of intellectualism. The Dean appealed for a working faith, “in fact, if not in name, Christian”; evidently he was prepared to settle for this, but he failed to move the rationalists of King’s. He told them that the intelligence should not be insulted by the apparent contradictions of faith—the mathematical concept of infinity itself involved contradictions. But the mathematicians remained firm. Georg Cantor had shown them that it didn’t.

  “I do not know myself where dear Dilly is in these matters,” the Bishop wrote to Ronnie, “and he gives me no encouragement in trying to help him.” More comforting was the knowledge that Wilfred’s time of blank disbelief was over. After three years without faith in anyone or anything in particular, Wilfred was drawing to the end which Ronnie had set for himself ever since they had been small boys together at Edmundthorpe: the priesthood.

  This does not mean that, at this stage in their life, either of these young men was an ascetic. On going down from Trinity, with a first-class degree, Wilfred had in mind a career in the Civil Service, and took a post as junior Examiner at the Board of Education. Hard though it is for anyone who knew him in later life to credit it, he was known in those years as “the dandy of the Board”. Ronald and he went to buy silk ties together in the Burlington Arcade, under the guidance of Eddie, who knew about these things. Ronnie, moreover, although he had friends of all kinds and was so popular that he hardly ever took a meal by himself, was, as has been said, warmly accepted into the Coterie, that is, the children of the Souls. The fathers of the Coterie fished and shot tirelessly, administered the country, and, like Chesterton’s Man Who Knew Too Much, “were born knowing the Prime Minister,” while their dominating wives, with an
air of authority, almost of divinity, diffused an atmosphere of spiritual refinement and joy, uninhibited gossip and an overwhelming interest in each other. The difficulty of growing up in these circumstances was great, and the Coterie felt it; it could be seen in Julian Grenfell’s noble savagery and his determination to dominate wild nature by shooting and killing, and in Charles Lister’s erratic socialism. Ronnie, to them, was “golden” because of his wit and sympathy; they asked no more, but a visit to one of their great country houses could be formidable. There was, for example, the question of practical jokes, a constant threat to the weekend guests of Edwardian society. Ronnie recollected one sumptuously formal dinner party, at which he took his seat after grace, only to realize that a “plate-lifter” had been hidden under the stiff damask tablecloth to upset his soup plate; but, warned by years of rough-and-tumble at Bishopscourt, he was able to cut surreptitiously through the rubber tube which connected it, while his host was left at the head of the table, operating it in vain.

  It was the ease with which Ronnie did everything, the shy and almost apologetic way in which his witticisms appeared, the sudden bursts of high spirits and improvisation which seemed to come from nowhere, which made him a legend in his own generation. His limericks seemed to materialize out of thin air, and no one could remember when he first said them. Frances Cornford, in a letter of 1910 to Miss Jourdain, recorded that there was “a man called R. A. Knox” at Oxford, who had written

  There was a young man who said: ‘Damn!

  I have suddenly found that I am

  A creature that moves

  On predestinate grooves,

  Not a bus, as one hoped, but a tram.’

  (Ronald used to say later that he supposed he must have written this, but regretted the implied betrayal of the Birmingham tram system.) Lytton Strachey, coming to Oxford straight from Cambridge and Dilly, had called Ronnie “a Christian and a prig”, but unless he simply equated the two things, it is hard to see where his impression came from. Ronnie spoke everywhere, debated everywhere, on both sides of the question if necessary, canoed through every lock and reach (he was not strong enough to row, as Wilfred did, but made use of his uncanny sense of balance), bicycled everywhere, was welcome everywhere, but he did not talk, except to those few who would understand it, about his spiritual life. Here the current was set. Both he and Wilfred, though from quite different points of approach, were becoming “Romanizers”—that is, convinced Anglo-Catholics. If they offered themselves for ordination as priests, they would be undertaking something totally different from what was understood as ordination at Edmundthorpe, or by their father in Manchester.

  The Anglo-Catholic movement (Wilfred objected to this term, and preferred “English Catholics” to show that we were still divided from the rest of Europe, but shouldn’t be)—the Anglo-Catholics felt, and feel themselves to be, not outside but inside the Catholic Church. The Reformation, in their view, made no decisive break, nor did the establishment of the Church of England under Elizabeth. The Pope had declared that the ordinations of Anglican priests were invalid and that they were not truly priests, but the Pope was wrong, and could be shown historically to be wrong. The tradition had not been broken; indeed, man could not break it. The English Church retains its ancient authority to guide and rule, and its religion must be, as it has always been, sacramental. The priest renews the crucifixion of Christ every time he blesses the bread and wine. In the sacrament of penance he conveys the power of God to forgive sin and heal the soul.

  Sacramentalism had never been totally extinguished in England. Again and again people had rediscovered it. As T. S. Eliot was to put it: “I made this; I had forgotten.” The Anglo-Catholics looked back, in particular, to the royalist priestly Church of Charles I. The family community of Little Gidding, whose chapel was desecrated and destroyed in 1647, was a sad memorial of this time. Then, in the early nineteenth century, the Tractarians had asserted the authority of the Church against any worldly power (this was the subject of Tract 1) and proclaimed a Church of England which would not be half-asleep, but “the living representative of God on earth.” Then Newman offered the vision of the via media, a Church with Catholic doctrine and a Protestant freedom to inquire and choose. But the Oxford Movement could never have made its electric impact on Victorian England through doctrine and historical knowledge alone. It impressed through the personalities of its leaders, and by the beauty of holiness, which, once recognized, can never be forgotten.

  The English are said to be the least theological nation on earth, and it was only as a means to an end, and a clearer method of explanation, that the Tractarians turned to Ritualism. Eucharistic vestments, holy water, candles, bells, incense and so forth were simply a way of showing truth through symbols which anyone could grasp. Unfortunately Ritualism shaded into the aesthetic movements of the late nineteenth century, and the desire for beauty, or at any rate some sensation, to break the tedium of everyday life. The Ritualists had expected to be misunderstood, and were not surprised at violent opposition. They were accused of mumbo jumbo, of fancy dress, or betraying the country to Rome, whereas they had tried to show that England had always been European and Catholic. They knew that they were risking prosecution in celebrating the English mass. There was considerable support for legal action against them by the Bishops of their dioceses.

  The Anglo-Catholics of the early twentieth century felt that they were fighting a “soldier’s battle” with the Church and State on one hand, and on the other with Rome, who rejected them unless they would agree to submit to reordination. The object of the struggle was always to draw English Christians closer to European Catholicism, so that we could stand together against a materialist Western world. It was here that the real confrontation lay. “The Catholic religion is a life,” Wilfred wrote, “and its rules are a way to secure that life.”

  Authority in an industrial society can be claimed only by those who understand its effects. After the secession of Newman, the movement had ceased to be academic; it turned to the ordinary parishes, and above all to missions to industrial cities. This concern for the bottom of the heap was one of the true signs of life in Anglo-Catholicism.

  It can be seen how Evangelicalism, of Bishop Knox’s sturdy old-fashioned sort, was shocked and wounded by every one of these developments. To the Evangelical the reservation of the sacraments was deeply objectionable, because to him the whole of life, not only the bread and wine, was sacramental, and God was equally present everywhere. The emphasis on penance and absolution, with the priest as intermediary, did away, it seemed, with the old direct relationship of the Christian and his God, with the words of the Bible to guide him. Newman, whom the Bishop regarded as a misguided weakling, had certainly been a man of holy life, but then, he had been brought up as a child in a good pious Low Church vicarage. European Catholicism was hatefully un-English; so, of course, was Ritualism; plainness—the Bishop had hesitated even about wearing a surplice at the beginning of his ministry—was also a way of showing truth. As for the social mission, concern for the poor had found, for more than a century, its champions among the Quakers and Evangelicals.

  He deplored all Wilfred’s doctrines, but could not disapprove of what he was doing. During his Oxford vacations, and even after he went to the Board of Education, Wilfred lived at the Trinity Mission, in what is now Oxford Road, Stratford E5. In these surroundings he immediately felt at home.

  The University Missions were then at the height of their activity, and—except for King’s Mission, which was agitating to get rid of religion altogether—they were based on a chaplaincy with meeting rooms and boys’ clubs. Trinity Mission was in the charge of a very large Old Etonian, the Rev. “Pombo” Legge, not at all spiritually inclined. He told Eddie, who came down to see how things stood with his younger brother, that he considered religion a matter of hygiene; services, like cold baths, were necessary, but should be over as quickly as possible. The rest of the day could be spent in relaxation, for Pombo’s powers of
doing nothing were quite exceptional. He was happy to leave everything to Wilfred.

  Stratford, West Ham, is not in the dock area itself but on the “back rivers”, supposed to have been made by King Alfred to drain the Thames and leave the Danish fleet high and dry. In the 1900s these streams were used for particularly noisome small businesses—fat melting, creosote boiling, tanning and the manufacture of sausage skins and sulphuric acid. The whole area rested on what George Lansbury called “rather shaky marsh land”. Drainage was bad, and the sewage ventilators discharged gas, rather than letting air into the sewers; the incidence of infectious illness, particularly diphtheria, was high, and in many of the little houses a stretcher could not be turned round, so that hospital cases simply had to be carried out by porters. In spite of the 1906 Education Act, schooling was uncertain, and although there was the “Truancy” for habitual absentees, most of the children were part-time attenders, working a twenty-hour week for about eightpence. Philanthropists objected to this more than did the children themselves. Crimes were mostly what the police called “family cases”—wife-beating, attacks with fishmongers’ knives and dockers’ hooks, cruelty to donkeys, children drunk in the streets on Saturday nights. A recurrent problem was the cheap “low-flash” American oil at fivepence halfpenny a gallon, which warmed the house effectively, but tended to explode; after an accident women and children looked “like a heap of burnt rags” on the floor.