Essays in Biography

John Maynard Keynes

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781787209558
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Of the fifteen famous scientists, economists and statesmen sketched in this collection of essays, which was first published in 1933, John Maynard Keynes was directly acquainted with all but three. The unique quality of immediacy in these biographical fragments contributes immensely to our more intimate appreciation of the historical significance of these men.
This volume is made up of two parts:
The first part, titled Sketches of Politicians, includes chapters on Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Lord Oxford and Sir Winston Churchill.
The greater portion of the second part, Lives of Economists, is taken up with the lives of Robert Malthun, Alfred Marshall and F. Y. Edgeworth.
All are literature, and the reader needn't be an economist or a specialist to enjoy the excellent flavor of Keynes' style of writing.

II—LIVES OF ECONOMISTS

(Dedicated to Mary Paley Marshall, great-granddaughter of William Paley and wife of Alfred Marshall)

ROBERT MALTHUS{10} THE FIRST OF THE CAMBRIDGE ECONOMISTS

BACCHUS—when an Englishman is called Bacchus—derives from Bakehouse. Similarly the original form of the rare and curious name of Malthus was Malthouse. The pronunciation of English proper names has been more constant one century with another than their spelling, which fluctuates between phonetic and etymological influences, and can generally be inferred with some confidence from an examination of the written variations. On this test (Malthus, Mawtus, Malthous, Malthouse, Mauthus, Maltus, Maultous) there can be little doubt that Maultus, with the first vowel as in brewer’s malt and the h doubtfully sounded, is what we ought to say.

We need not trace the heredity of Robert Malthus{11} further back than to the Reverend Robert Malthus who became Vicar of Northolt under Cromwell and was evicted at the Restoration. Calamy calls him “an ancient divine, a man of strong reason, and mighty in the Scriptures, of great eloquence and fervour, though defective in elocution.” But his parishioners thought him “a very unprofitable and fruitless minister,” perhaps because he was strict in the exaction of tithes, and in a petition for his removal complained of him as having “uttered invective expressions against our army while they were in Scotland,” and also that “Mr. Malthus is one who hath not only a low voice but a very great impediment in his utterance”; from which it seems probable that he shared with his great-great-grandson not only the appellation of the Reverend Robert Malthus, but also the defect of a cleft palate. His son Daniel was appointed apothecary to King William by favour of the celebrated Dr. Sydenham and afterwards to Queen Anne,{12} and became a man of sufficient substance for his widow to own a coach and horses. Daniel’s son Sydenham further improved the family fortunes, being a clerk in Chancery, a director of the South Sea Company, rich enough to give his daughter a dowry of £5000, and the proprietor of several landed properties in the Home Counties and Cambridgeshire.{13}

The golden mediocrity of a successful English middle-class family being now attained, Sydenham’s son Daniel, our hero’s father, found himself in a position of what is known in England as “independence” and decided to take advantage of it. He was educated at Queen’s College, Oxford, but took no degree, “travelled much in Europe and in every part of this island,” settled down in a pleasant neighbourhood, led the life of a small English country gentleman, cultivated intellectual tastes and friendships, wrote a few anonymous pieces,{14} and allowed diffidence to overmaster ambition. It is recorded that he “possessed the most pleasing manners with the most benevolent heart, which was experienced by all the poor wherever he lived.”{15} When he died the Gentleman’s Magazine (February 1800, p. 177) was able to record that he was “an eccentric character in the strictest sense of the term.”

In 1759 Daniel Malthus had purchased a “small elegant mansion” near Dorking “known by the name of Chertgate Farm, and taking advantage of its beauties, hill and dale, wood and water, displaying them in their naked simplicity, converted it into a gentleman’s seat, giving it the name of The Rookery.”{16} Here on February 13,{17} 1766, was born Thomas Robert Malthus, his second son, the author of the Essay on the Principle of Population. When the babe was three weeks old, on March 9, 1766, two fairy godmothers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, called together at The Rookery,{18} and may be presumed to have assigned to the infant with a kiss diverse intellectual gifts.

For Daniel Malthus was not only a friend of Hume,{19} but a devoted, not to say passionate, admirer of Rousseau. When Rousseau first came to England, Hume endeavoured to settle him in Surrey in the near neighbourhood of Daniel Malthus, who, “desirous of doing him every kind of service,” would have provided congenial company and kept upon him a benevolent eye.{20} Like most of Hume’s good intentions towards his uneasy visitant, the project broke down. The cottage at the foot of Leith Hill pointed out to Fanny Burney in later years as l’asile de Jean-Jacques{21} was never occupied by him, but was, doubtless, the retreat which Daniel Malthus had fixed upon as suitable and Jean-Jacques had inspected{22} on March 8, 1766, but afterwards rejected. A fortnight later Rousseau had begun his disastrous sojourn at Wootton{23} in the Peak of Derbyshire, where, cold and bored and lonely, he brewed within a few weeks his extraordinary quarrel with Hume.{24}

This most famous of literary causes might never have occurred, I think, if only Jean-Jacques had accepted Daniel Malthus’s most pressing invitation. For he would have had affection poured out upon him, and have been amused and within reach. Daniel Malthus’s passionate declarations of devotion to Jean-Jacques were, probably, the only occasion in his life in which his reserves were fully broken down.{25} I think that they met three times only,—when Malthus paid a tourist’s visit to Môtiers in the spring of 1764, when Hume brought Rousseau to The Rookery in March 1766, and when Malthus travelled up to see him at Wootton in June of the same year. But to judge from thirteen letters from Malthus to Rousseau, which have been preserved, and one from Rousseau to Malthus,{26} the meetings were a great success. Malthus worshipped Jean-Jacques, and Jean-Jacques was cordial and friendly in return, speaking of “les sentiments d’estime et d’attachement que vous m’avez inspirés,” and of Malthus’s “hospitalité si douce.” Malthus was even able to defend the character of Hume without becoming embroiled in the quarrel. There are many references to their botanising together, and Rousseau complains what a nuisance it is that he cannot identify the names of what he sees on his walks in Derbyshire; for he needs, he says, “une occupation qui demande de l’exercice; car rien ne me fait tant de mal que de rester assis, ou d’écrire ou lire.” Later on (in 1768) we find Daniel Malthus taking great pains to complete Rousseau’s botanical library for him, at a time when Rousseau was probably contemplating his Letters to a Lady on the Elements of Botany, which were dated 1771; and two years later Rousseau, who had a craze for dispossessing himself of his books from time to time, sold the whole library back to Malthus, adding to it the gift of a part of his herbarium.{27} These books reappear in Daniel Malthus’s will, where we find the following provision: “To Mrs. Jane Dalton{28} I give all my botanical books in which the name of Rousseau is written and a box of plants given me by Mons. Rousseau.” Two of these books are still to be found in the library of Dalton Hill, Albury, now owned by Mr. Robert Malthus,{29} namely, Ray’s Synopsis methodica stirpium Brittanicarum and de Sauvage’s Méthode pour connoître les plantes par les feuilles, both inscribed with the name of Rousseau and heavily scored.{30}

Otter relates that Daniel Malthus was a literary executor of Rousseau. This seems improbable.{31} But Daniel Malthus’s loyalty lasted to the end, and he subscribed for six copies, at a cost of thirty guineas, of Rousseau’s posthumous Consolations des misères de ma vie. And now in these few pages I piously fulfil his wish: “Si jamais je suis connu, ce seroit sous le nom de l’ami de Rousseau.”

There is a charming account of Daniel’s way of life in his letter to Rousseau of January 24, 1768.{32} In the summer botanising walks,

ma chère Henriette et ses enfants en prenoient leur part, et nous fûmes quelque fois une famille herborisante, couchée sur la pente de cette colline que peut-être vous vous rappelez….L’hiver un peu de lecture (je sens déjà l’effet de votre lettre, car je me suis saisi de l’Émile). Je fais des grandes promenades avec mes enfants. Je passe plus de temps dans les chaumières que dans les châteaux du voisinage. Il y a toujours à s’employer dans une ferme et à faire des petites expériences. Je chasse le renard, ce qui je fais en partie par habitude, et en partie de ce que cela amuse mon imagination de quelque idée de vie sauvage.

With this delightful thought our gentle foxhunting squire could picture himself as Rousseau’s Noble Savage.

As a friend of the author of the Émile, Daniel Malthus was disposed to experiments in education; and Robert, showing a promise which awakened his father’s love and ambition, was educated privately, partly by Daniel himself and partly by tutors. The first of these was Richard Graves, “a gentleman of considerable learning and humour,” a friend of Shenstone and author of The Spiritual Quixote, a satire on the Methodists. At sixteen he was transferred to Gilbert Wakefield, an heretical clergyman, “wild, restless and paradoxical in many of his opinions, a prompt and hardy disputant,” a correspondent of Charles Fox and a disciple of Rousseau, who stated his principles of education thus:

The greatest service of tuition to any youth is to teach him the exercise of his own powers, to conduct him to the limits of knowledge by that gradual process in which he sees and secures his own way, and rejoices in a consciousness of his own faculties and his own proficiency.{33}

In 1799, Wakefield was imprisoned in Dorchester gaol for expressing a wish that the French revolutionaries would invade and conquer England.

Some schoolboy letters of Robert Malthus still extant{34} show that he was much attached to Wakefield. Wakefield had been a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge; and as a consequence of this connection Robert Malthus, the first of the Cambridge economists, came up to Jesus as a pensioner in the winter term of 1784, being eighteen years of age. On November 14, 1784, he wrote home as follows:

I am now pretty well settled in my rooms. The lectures begin tomorrow; and, as I had time last week to look over my mathematics a little, I was, upon examination yesterday, found prepared to read with the year above me. We begin with mechanics and Maclaurin, Newton, and Keill’s Physics. We shall also have lectures on Mondays and Fridays in Duncan’s Logick, and in Tacitus’s Life of Agricola on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I have subscribed to a bookseller who has supplied me with all the books necessary. We have some clever men at college, and I think it seems rather the fashion to read. The chief study is mathematics, for all honour in taking a degree depends upon that science, and the great aim of most of the men is to take an honourable degree. At the same time I believe we have some good classics. I am acquainted with two, one of them in this year, who is indeed an exceedingly clever man and will stand a very good chance for the classical prize if he does not neglect himself. I have read in chapel twice.

His expenses came to £100 a year. If it rose higher, Daniel Malthus wrote, the clergy could not go on sending their sons to college; abroad at Leipzig it could be done for £25.{35}

At this time the University was just stirring from a long sleep, and Jesus, which had been among the sleepiest, was becoming a centre of intellectual ferment. Malthus probably owes as much to the intellectual company he kept during his years at Jesus as to the influence and sympathy of his father. His tutor, William Frend, who had been a pupil of Paley’s and was an intimate of Priestley’s, became in Malthus’s third year (1787) the centre of one of the most famous of University controversies, through his secession from the Church of England and his advocacy of Unitarianism, freedom of thought, and pacifism. Paley{36} himself had left Cambridge in 1775, but his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, or, as it was originally called, the Principles of Morality and Politics, was published in Malthus’s first year (1785) at Cambridge, and must be placed high,{37} I think, amongst the intellectual influences on the author of the Essay on Population{38} Moreover, he found himself in a small group of brilliant unde...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• PLATES
• I-SKETCHES OF POLITICIANS
• II-LIVES OF ECONOMISTS
• REFERENCES
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER