March 9th 1948, 2 pages folio in ink with attached autograph letter of 1 page, from Maidstone.
"Here is a short note on J.M_K. which you may think worth passing on to Harrod."
"Although M[aynard] was loyal to Eton, and was genuinely gratified when he was made a fellow of the College. I don't think Eton can claim to have sown in him the seeds of those interests which gave him such a full life. The range of the curriculum was very narrow, and it was not greatly widened by what we learnt for ourselves, by reading, or from each other...the ordinary Colleger attended a few lessons in very elementary chemistry.... Somebody told us that Adam Smith had drawm attention to the Division of Labour, and the harm done by restraints of trade, and that was all the Political Economy we knew. We heard of the Crusades vaguely, because some English princes took the cross, and we knew the names of two or three Popes who gave trouble to England, and that was all we knew of European History from 100 A.D. to 1453 A.D. Of the history of Asia and America, outside the British Empire, we learnt nothing. Of Architecture we learnt literally nothing: of how to look at pictures, or listen to music, only a few, who had a natural bent, learnt anything at all. Our classical reading may have been intrusive, certainly it was not extensive... There was a feeling that it was a good thing to read. 'English Literature' in one's spare time: here, duty only occasionany merged into pleasure.
"I record all this to show that M. did not get from Eton his medievalism (Bernard of Cluny, Abelard etc), his bibliophily, his interest in genealogy...still less his interest in painting, music and ballet.
"In College, emotion and desire were directed almost exclusively towards the male sex--I knew hardly anyone who even thought of women. This does not mean that there was a great deal of 'vice'; indeed, it was looked on with disapproval, not untinged with envy, by the many who repressed their desires through shyness or virtue. M. shared the general feeling: I do not know that he was reputed to indulge it. At Cambridge, he was deeply moved by Plato's pictures of passion spiritualized. He told me the history of his love for a fellow-undergraduate, who liked and admired him, but refused physical relations.
"I stayed with him at Cambridge in those days more than once, and he with me at Oxford. I remember his taking me to a Society which had a new name at each meeting: on that occasion, it was called 'The Confessional'. The regular Society toast was 'That Bird. the Holy Ghost'. I think Lytton Strachey, L.S. Woolf, and H. Lamb were there. Not H. Lamb I think!...
"...He showed me a solid volume by his grandfather. the Congregationalist Minister, disproving the Apostolical Succession.
"When I was in England-probably in 1923-he told me that eminent Americans were continually coming to him to be told what they should think about this question or that: he said they seemed to have no intuitions. He was attracted by the theory that the human race could not thrive in N. America (when it was 'discovered', the population was extraordinarily small) and that it would gradually die out."
Keynes went to Eton in 1897-1902 and Cambridge 1902-1905.
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