Free A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster by Wendy Moffat Page A

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’sfriend 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