Chapter I

Henri Bergson and the Invention of the Modern

In her essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," Virginia Woolf boldly
announced that On or about December 1910, human character changed. I
am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw
that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not
sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and
since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. [...] In life
one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character
of one's cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths,
formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of
sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing room, now to borrow the
Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn
instances of the power of the human race to change? Read the Agamemnon,
and see whether, in process of time, your sympathies are not almost entirely
with Clytemnestra. [...] All human relations have shiftedthose between
masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when
human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion,
conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes
about the year 1910. Woolfs comments pertained to more than the
behavior of downstairs staff, of course. The First Post-Impressionist
Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, organized by Bloomsbury art historian
Roger Fry, whose biography Virginia Woolf would write, opened in London
in November of 1910 and, it might be argued that such shows, despite, or
rather perhaps because, of the opposition they generated, represented a
shift in human perception, altered our ways of seeing, and hence knowing,
taught the public powerful alternatives to photographic realism in the visual
and narrative arts. The 1910 Exhibition, which featured the likes of
Cezanne, Manet, Van Gogh, and Picasso, was important enough to lead to a

Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912. Moreover, May of 1910 saw

the death of Edward VII, who, although he gave his name to the first decade
of the twentieth century in Britain, is often seen as an extension of his
mothers reign. His son, George V would rename the British Royal family
the House of Windsor to distance the British royal family from its Germanic
ties to the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. May 1910 saw the beginning
of a new Georgian era.
1910 also saw the translation into English of three major and
dominant works by French philosopher Henri Bergson (18 October 18594
January 1941). Beginning with his doctoral thesis, Time and Free Will: An
Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), its follow up Matter
and Memory (1896), and his most famous book, Creative Evolution (1907),
all appeared in English for the first time quite suddenly in or just after 1910
(Matter and Memory appearing in 1911, but as Virginia Woolf noted, one
must be arbitrary) and our sense of consciousness, memory and
perception, our ways of knowing, all changed. In A New Philosophy: Henri
Bergson (1912), Edouard Le Roy, Bergsons chief disciple, noted that
Beyond any doubt, and by common consent, Mr Henri Bergson's
work will appear to future eyes among the most characteristic,
fertile, and glorious of our era. It marks a never-to-be-forgotten
date in history; it opens up a phase of metaphysical thought; it
lays down a principle of development the limits of which are
indeterminable; and it is after cool consideration, with full
consciousness of the exact value of words, that we are able to
pronounce the revolution which it effects equal in importance to
that effected by Kant, or even by Socrates. . . . The curtain
drawn between ourselves and reality, enveloping everything
including ourselves in its illusive folds, seems of a sudden to fall,
dissipated by enchantment, and display to the mind depths of
light till then undreamt, in which reality itself, contemplated

face to face for the first time, stands fully revealed. The
revelation is overpowering, and once vouchsafed will never
afterwards be forgotten.
In short, Le Roy argues, that with the advent of Bergson, the revolution
Le Roy announces on a never-to-be-forgotten date in history, has occurred
and human character changed.

Like these paintings, Woolf was trying "to liberate the more substantial
reality that lurked behind appearances."

Le Roy, Edouard. A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson, trans. By Vincent

Benson (1912)
Stansky, Peter. On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its
Intimate World (Studies in Cultural History). Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1997.