Review: Another Chapter on Bloomsbury

Author(s): William Van O'Connor

Reviewed work(s):
Men, Books and Mountains by Leslie Stephen ;S. O. A. Ullman
Old Friends by Clive Bell
Virginia Woolf & Lytton Strachey, Letters by Leonard Woolf ; James Strachey ;
Virginia Woolf ; Lytton Strachey
Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Spring, 1957), pp. 329-330+332-336
Published by: Kenyon College
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4333763
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A. ALVAREZ 329
tiny hard core of experience.It is not generalized, but it gives the im-
pressionof being just prior to generalities:
The halt looks into the eyes of the halt and looks away.
No response there that he can see
To receive amply or repay.
But the halt will lead the blind; indeed
Note how the generous stick gestures to precede
The blind, blundering in his black, black, need.

Miss Miles'sstyle depends on her effort to whittle away every unnecessary

elegance until she is left with a poignant, bare, minimal poetry of judg-
ments. This is why I called her a Puritan, and why she seems so close
to Imagism while sharing none of its details. For a Puritan could not, out
of conscience,be interestedin the things with which Imagismso raptlycon-
cerned itself. But she is very strictly taken up with the morality of the
things.

William Van O'Connor

ANOTHER CHAPTER
ON BLOOMSBURY
MEN, BOOKS AND MOUNTAINS. ByLeslie Stephen. Edited, with
an introduction,by S. 0. A. Ullman. Hogarth Press, and University
of MinnesotaPress. $4.00.
OLD FRIENDS. By Clive Bell. Chatto and Windus, and Harcourt,
Brace. $4.50.
VIRGINIA WOOLF & LYTTON STRACHEY, LETTERS. Edited by
Leonard Woolf and James Strachey. Hogarth Press, Chatto and
Windus, and HarcourtBrace. $4.50.
N OT SO VERYmanyyearsago literaryhistorians,manyof them
convinced that 20th Century literature was an aberrationand a
great mistake, were quite certainthat English literatureexisted in a fixed
hierarchy. Every sophomore who had finished his two-volume survey
course knew that English literaturewas divided into two parts: volume
one began with Anglo Saxon and ended with the beginningsof Romanti-
330 BOOKS
cism; volume two began with the Romantics and ended with Thomas
Hardy. Those Romanticsand those Victorianswho had been elected to
immortality were immensely there. As the new generation made itself
felt, early x7th Centurywritersemergedfrom the shadows;despiteArnold,
it became possible to talk admiringly about Dryden, Swift, Pope and
Johnson; and, finally, Arnold himself (along with many of his famous
contemporaries)was not merelybroughtto judgmentbut, as Auden has it,
he was "punishedunder a foreign code of conscience."
Very influential figures in the new generation belonged to the
BloomsburyGroup (Leonard and Virgina Woolf, Roger Fry, Clive and
VanessaBell, John MaynardKeynes,Desmond MacCarthy,Duncan Grant,
E. M. Forster,RaymondMortimer,David Garnett,and, at the edge, T. S.
Eliot). They stood for the "highbrow,"and they deplored "middlebrow"
and "lowbrow." They asked for cxperimentation.In painting and in
literature they explored the meanings of modernism. And they won a
great victory. Sentimentalityand philistinismbeat a retreat-even off the
book pages of newspapers.The Bloomsburygroup brought their weight
to bear on the British Council, on the B.B.C., and on the galleries.Their
influencecontinues.But probablythis influenceis in a transitionalstage.
Even in the days of their unquestionedeminence, the Bloomsbury
group tended to invite adversecriticism.There were a numberof reasons
for this, one of them being that almost every member of the group took
pride in coming from one or another of those gifted upper middle class
families that collectively dominated the intellectual life of Victorian
England. One of these of course was the Stephen family. Every student
of Virginia Woolf knows that she engaged in a life-long struggle with
the ghost of her father, sometimes satirizing him and sometimes saying
how fine it was to have been brought up in a bookish family that put
great stresson the importanceof each one seeking the truth for himself.
As our centuryhas moved along, the sentencesof Carlyleand Ruskin
have come to seem rather ornate and idiosyncratic.There has been an
attempt to find other Victorian figures who can speak across the years
to us in an idiom that is closer to our own. One of the men most often
singled out is Stephen,and since its publicationin 1951 Noel Anan'sLeslie
Stephenhas had a good deal of attention.S. 0. A. Ullman'sMen, Books and
Mountains,from Stephen'smagazinearticles,now makes it easierto formu-
late a judgment for ourselves. Stephen's History of Eighteenth Century
Thought,in partan effortto show his contemporaries the debt owed to their
332 BOOKS
predecessors,made it clearthat Stephenwas not the stickykind of Victorian
whom Stracheydelighted in lambasting.In "The Study of English Litera-
ture," the first essay in this collection, there is further evidence of his
understandingof and admirationfor certain i8th Centurywriters.Perhaps
more interestingfor us are the distinctionsStephenmade between a philo-
logical and a criticalapproachto literature;many of the observationsmade
in criticaljournalsduring the past fifteen or twenty years can be found in
Stephen'sarticle (I887). Similarly in his article on Taine's History,the
usefulnessof which he accepts,he shows that the theory is frequentlytoo
loose and too general to account for the facts.
In readingcertainof the other essaysin this collectionone learnsthat
Stephenbelieved that the best a critic could do was to expressthe reasons
behind his matured taste-and hope that his judgmnentwould stand the
test of time; and that the biographer'schief task was to "choosewhat is
characteristic,with just enough of the trifling matter in which it is em-
bedded to make it natural."The person of Stephen, as he emerges from
these essays, is not so very different from the man Virginia Woolf wrote
about in her fiction, essays, and in A Writer'sNotebook. He relieveshis
melancholyby a sardonicbut not bitter irony and by an enjoymentof the
paradoxical.Stephen appreciatesthe fact that passion and an idiosyncratic
view contributeto a writer'sunique quality, but he himself is so sensible
and so fair-mindedthat in his own writing passion and the idiosyncratic
are held tightly in check. He does not allow himself the little excesses
that make for uniqueness. If he had coined such memorablephrases as
"high seriousness"and "poetryis a criticismof life" he would not have
been satisfiedmerely to justify them; he would also have shown wherein
they are excessive. And one infers that if Stephen had had the sort of
imagination necessaryto write in the Mandarinmanner, he would have
chosen not to indulge himself. Perhaps the chief paradox in Stephen's
careeris that he was so very sensiblethat, whether consciouslyor not, he
kept himself from joining the front rank of the eminent Victorians.
Probablythis is anotherway of saying that if the studentsa generationor
two after us continue to single out "memorablepassages"they will prefer
Carlyle and Ruskin and Arnold to Stephen, just as we prefer the prose
of Sir Thomas Browne to the prose of Cowley.
Sir Leslie Stephen is mentionedonly very brieflyin the new volume
Old Friends writtenby his son-in-law,Clive Bell. This is hardlysurprising,
because what has come to be known as Bloomsburybegan only after
WILLIAMVAN O'CONNOR 333
Stephen'sdeath, in I904, when his children, Adrian, Thoby, Virginia and
Vanessa moved from the family house at Hyde Park Gate to 46 Gordon
Square,Bloomsbury.The BloomsburyGroup belonged to the new century,
so it is to be expectedthat when Desmond MacCarthywrote about Stephen
(the only one other than Virgina Woolf to write about him), he em-
phasized Stephen'sethical preoccupations,implying of course that his own
criticismput more emphasison aestheticand more purelyliteraryvalues.
Old Friends is not a book of criticism,nor is it an autobiography,but
it does providea numberof close-upviews of membersof Bloomsbury.One
could wish that Bell had chosen to write a history of Bloomsbury,since
he was one of the original group of friends at Cambridge (including
Thoby Stephen, Strachey, and Leonard Woolf) and is one of the few
surviving members. Forster, MacCarthy,Garnett, Woolf, and Mortimer
are mentioned,but Bell does not undertaketo sketch them nor to suggest
the ways in which all of their lives have touched. In certain instancesthis
may seem especiallysurprising.The Bells and the Woolfs were related by
blood and marriageand were fairly close neighbors,and Garnett'ssecond
wife is Bell's own daughter.But Old Friends is Bell's book, and probably
we should be thankfulfor the sketcheshe has written.Five of the chapters
are mostly concernedwith artists, art critics, and the Parisian art world.
The chapteron Paris in the 1920'S, a melange of anecdotesabout Gertrude
Stein, Joyce, Proust, Picasso, Matisse, Isadora Duncan, Stravinsky and
others, gives a steamy view of artists and writers talking, drinking, and
sometimesworking, and it has a kind of interest. But it is when Bell is
writing about his intimate friends, Fry, Strachey, and Virginia Woolf,
that he is most interestingand adds most to our understanding.
Stracheyand Bell met each other during their first year (I899) at
Cambridgeand continued friends until Strachey'sdeath in 193I. Bell is
not the artist that Stracheywas and his little biographieslack the finish,
the faiFnce quality, that Strachey gave to his biographies,but even so
they are effective sketches. Bell obviously understoodStracheyvery well,
and, if one is free to say so in this era of the biographicalfallacy, the man
presentedhere is quite in keeping with what one might have inferredupon
readingEminent Victoriansor Portraitsin Miniature.
"MaynardKeynes"is also the result of long and intimate association.
Bell is candid enough to say that betweenthem there was not the affection
that Keynes gave to certain of his other frends and they to him. If Bell
is right, Keynes had little innate sensitivity about the visual arts and he
334 BOOKS
had such faith in the soundnessof his own opinions that he wvouldnot
listen to opinionscounterto his own. He was howevera man of genius in
his own profession, and behind his affection there was, oddly enough,
"a touch of humility." Bell also says that Keynes wrote a "fine, lucid
style," but he demurs from the usual opinion that the satirical sketches
in The Economic Conseqtuences of the Peace are "masterpieces." Bell suc-
ceeds in creating an image of Keynes that is very engaging. And it is
sufficientlycomplex to enable the reader to like the man despite Bell's
emphasison his annoyingcharacteristics.
Roger Fry is also presentedin a complex image; no one was easier to
gull, he had an iron will that carriedall before him, and yet he was pos-
sessedof such a disinterestedmind that he was willing to turn away from
the complicatedtheoriesof his own constructionand begin again as though
he were Adam looking at a pictureor consideringa question for the very
first time.
Keynesand Fry emerge from under Bell's pen as "greatmen" walking
around the living room in their socks, and he seems to enjoy putting their
weaknesson display. But when he writes about Virginia Woolf the tone
is different,possiblyout of affectionfor her but more likely out of a sense
that she was a very rare creature.Bell says of her that she was somehow
different in kind. Her talk he describesas "dazzling," and he quotes a
long letter to a sick friend that does have an amazing vitality and out-
goingness to it. Critics differ about Mrs. Woolf's position among modern
novelists and about the "magic" of her phrases, but Bell is convinced that
in art as well as in life she was a "magician." This reader finished "Vir-
ginia Woolf" convinced that Mrs. Woolf did have a great gift for making
people feel intense excitement but no more convinced than he was before,
despite Bell's quotations, that Mrs. Woolf's brightly colored metaphors
make her a great artist.
"Encounters with T. S. Eliot" is less ambitious than the other biog-
raphies, but it does give a sense of the odd conjunctions in him of sly wit,
conversational brilliance, and sedate primness. There is one small item
that may interest students of The Waste Land. In his recent lecture, "The
Frontiers of Criticism," Eliot said he included the famous Notes in order
to give bulk to the book, but according to Bell he supplied them as a way
of satisfying Fry's request that the poem be elucidated.
The longish essay "Bloomsbury" tells the history of the Blooms'Dury
group, listing the figures, the years when certain of them wvere most
 WILLIAMVAN O'CONNOR 335
closelyassociated,and asks whether there was a Bloomsburydoctrine.It is
a useful documentfor anybodyinterestedin the group.
Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey,Letters contain the correspond-
ence, presumablyall or most all of it, written between I903, when she was
twenty-fourand he twenty-six, and I93I. For the most part, they are
"literary"letters, for as the editors, Leonard WVoolf and James Strachey,
indicate"eachwas a little wary of the other: in writing to each other they
were always on their best behavior,and never felt so much at ease as they
did in their dealings with people whom they admired and respectedless."
Most of the names that occur in the Letters are the same people that
Bell mentions in his "Bloomsbury"and the biographies,but occasionally
an unexpectedfigure turns up. For example,in a I909 letter Stracheywrote
from Rye he told of seeing Henry Jamesin the window of Lamb House:
Talking of Great Authors, I've seen Henry James twice since I came, and was
immensely impressed. I mean only seen with the eye-I wish I knew himl He
appeared at the window the other day-most remarkablel So conscientious and
worried and important-he was like an admirable tradesman trying his best to
give satisfaction, infinitely solemn and polite....
In an earlierletter, 1908, Stracheywrote about meeting "a young under-

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336 BOOKS
graduate called Rupert Brooke-isn't it a romantic name?-with pink
cheeks and bright yellow hair...."
We also learnfrom the Lettersthat VirginiaStephenand Stracheywere
engaged for a brief period to be married,but Stracheywas convincedthey
had made a mistake. That would have made a choice menage to con-
template.
Stracheymakes a referenceto a conversationhe had had with Virginia
during which he had criticized the Victorians, including some "rather
curt remarkson ton pe're."In her reply she says
I don't suppose I altogether agree with you about the igth Century. It's a good
deal hotter in the head than the 18th. But you didn't shock my feelings as a
daughter. The difference probably is that I attach more importance to his divinity
"qua man" even in his books than you do. It always seems to me to count con-
siderably. But my feeling for literatureis by no means pure.

Many books are mentioned, with Mrs. Woolf giving great praise to
the Russiannovelists,dismissingJames,and explainingthat Ulysses is not
good enough to justify Hogarth Press taking it on, and with Strachey
praising the French, or disliking Wilfred Blunt. The letters are sent not
merely from their regular addressesbut country houses, inns, and places
on the continent.There is a lot of gossip and chitchat.The names of the
great and the near great fleck the letters. There are rathernumerousref-
erencesto the illnessesthat beset the lives of both of them-until the final
letter from Virgina Woolf, which reached Stracheywhen he was too ill
to read it.
Yes, Stracheyand Virginia Woolf were good letter writers,and they
belonged to a world that both had the leisure for and put stock in the
importance of entertaining letters. Even though a good many of the people
they mention are still alive-there are a number of elisions in the text,
suggesting that something libelous or somethingthat might give pain has
been omitted-the world of Virginia Woolf and Strachey, wonderfully
evoked by the letters themselves,seems a little far back, just after James,
Hardy and Bennett,all of whom seemeda little "farback"to these faithful
correspondents.