To understand the relevancy of the Bloomsbury Group must be placed within their intellectual context. As already discussed, Bloomsbury had a deep connection with its Victorian predecessors. The most significant Victorian influences were Leslie Stephen and G. E. Moore. Other important Victorian influences include critic Walter Pater, philosopher Bertrand Russell, and novelist Henry James. However, the contemporary context in which Bloomsbury worked and lived also gives great insight into their goals and perceptions.

The time in which Bloomsbury created its work is known as the modernist period. Other important modernist writers include H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis. Though all of these writers are considered modernist, they did not agree on the function of art in society nor on the criteria to be used to determine what is beautiful. Bloomsbury's answers to these questions are no more correct than the others; they are only different. It is up to the individual reader of their works to decide with what they agree or disagree.

THE VICTORIAN INFLUENCE

Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), after Matthew Arnold, was one of the most significant men of letters at the end of the nineteenth century. He was the first literary critic of the relatively new art form, the novel. The novel, which had evolved into existence during the eighteenth century, was until that time considered a lower art form, much in the same way that television or music videos are considered today. Leslie looked at the novel in a more serious and methodical way, and he helped to give the novel its status. He was also a great scholar of eighteenth-century literature and thought. Bloomsbury as a whole had an affinity and interest in the eighteenth century as well.

Leslie, as his biographer Noel Annan has stated, was part of an “intellectual aristocracy.”¹ This began with his roots in the Clapham Sect, a class of well-to-do men in the eighteenth century who struggled to abolish the slave trade, organized evangelical philanthropic societies, and had enthusiasm for humanitarianism. Stephen's inheritance from the Clapham Sect can be found in his tendency to evangelize on behalf of the North in the American Civil War or in his desire to propagate agnosticism. He also inherited the sense of belonging to a chosen body. There was a clannishness about the Claphamites and they formed a kind of coterie. Bloomsbury was also a coterie. It was exclusive and clannish and it was always skeptical about outsiders. Like the Claphamites, they criticized each other honestly and with affection. Bloomsbury can in many ways be considered the fourth generation of the Clapham Sect. They rejected the moral code of their forefathers and replaced the doctrine of original sin with the eighteenth century's belief in man's fundamental reasonableness and sanity.

Leslie was influenced in his early Cambridge years by a utilitarian way of thinking. He was a Victorian radical. In Cambridge his dislike for the examination system and his rejection of the university's Anglicanism were well known. He eventually resigned from his position as don and renounced his holy orders. He became editor of Cornhill Magazine, which was a family magazine. Cornhill was designed for the drawing-room tables of the upper class. Therefore, he could not publish in the areas of his real interest, politics and religion. He was, however, a clear-thinking and articulate editor, and worked with such writers as Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1882, the year of his daughter Virginia's birth, he was asked by his publisher George Smith to step down from the editorship at Cornhill. Smith then offered him the editorship of a new project, the Dictionary of National Biography. The dictionary eventually captured 29,120 biographies in sixty-three volumes, and it was Leslie's most enduring contribution to Victorian culture. As editor, Leslie insisted that the life of each writer be readable, a biography in itself. Stephen saw biography as a moral force, and biography became a genre that Bloomsbury also embraced. From Virginia Woolf's biographical sketches to Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians to the Memoir Club, Bloomsbury prized biography as a place to communicate morals and values in their otherwise secular world.

It is probably Leslie's secularized version of morality—that is, his agnosticism—that most greatly influenced the Bloomsbury Group. In addition to the utilitarian influences he found in Cambridge, he was also moved and influenced by Darwin's Origin of Species. Darwin introduced the idea that chance begot order, and so the links of the Chain of Being lost their stability. Leslie read and used Darwin as evidence that metaphysics—the belief in a rational and universal world sanctioned by God—could be confuted, and that it was possible to show that all other metaphysical explanations were of no value. Darwin's Origins showed Leslie the way to develop his own theory of agnosticism.

In addition to Darwin's influence on Leslie's developing agnosticism was the impact of British rationalism and German transcendentalism. The transcendentalism came from Leslie's reading of Thomas Carlyle's work, including Sartor Resartus. The largest British rationalist influence came from J. S. Mill's System of Logic. At the end of Leslie's life he considered System of Logic to be the most important manifesto of utilitarian philosophy. From Mill, Leslie learned there are not different modes of thinking but different premises from which to argue, that science alone gives us true propositions since it is conceived as a system of absolute and inflexible rules, and that beyond scientific truth there are the dead studies and books on ontology and the nature of God. Leslie ultimately married Darwin and Mill in his idea that reason and morality are linked, that certain types of behavior are dubbed virtuous when they are recognized by society to be useful because they preserve the race. Leslie was making the social sciences do the work of religion—evolution replaced God.

Leslie wrote An Agnostic's Apology (1900) as a case against Christianity. As an agnostic Leslie believed there were in fact limits to human knowledge and that beyond those limits no one had the right to insist on the truth. He believed also that the Christian morality of rewards and punishments was immoral and antisocial. Religious belief was the parent of intolerance. On the other hand, Christians held that rationalists such as Leslie were guilty of the sin of materialism, of neglecting spiritual values, and of worshiping the carnal. Leslie countered with the idea that religion was nothing if it could not answer the deep-seeded, constant questions that troubled men throughout history. He believed in the moral and immoral, but felt that these were choices that came from within man himself. Leslie found biographical writing the most effective place to illustrate moral behavior. It was in the portraits of flawed but good men that readers could witness moral behavior. In this way, Leslie fell in line with eighteenth-century aesthetics, which stated that only moral men should be portrayed in art since art placed the mirror up to nature. With these ideas, Leslie anticipated the secularization of society and Bloomsbury's irreverence toward religion.

As a literary critic, Leslie's influence was significant. In addition to being the first critic to write about and discuss the novel in a serious manner, he was also the first Englishman to argue that the reading public influenced literary expression. Though he would never identify himself as a Marxist, Leslie explained changes in literary taste by tracing social relationships and liberated literary history by suggesting that it is more than a search for influences and movements. He believed that literary form followed social class and that it was the critic's job to ask himself whether the work was a good moral influence.

Leslie's two-volume The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) not only discusses the philosophers and theologians of the time, but also deals with moralists, economists, political theorists, preachers, poets, novelists, and writers. In these volumes Leslie has two rationalist heroes, Adam Smith and David Hume. He discusses the rise of skepticism and the conflict of the classes. He describes how the patronage system broke down and how a new middle-class audience arose. Leslie further discusses how the popular press developed in the eighteenth century, how the nature of literature changed, and how the novel began to grace the tables of the upper class. These changes, he argues, are not because of philosophical inquiry but because of racial, historical, and social relations.

He was equally as hard on the deists as he was on the ethos of the ruling class. He exposed the assumption of the aristocracy that they were destined to rule. Ultimately, Leslie, like the Bloomsbury Group, says that the reader is the arbiter of great literature, not the critic. This would later translate into Virginia Woolf's “common reader.” Leslie also thought that criticism had little value and that there should be humor and irony in criticism. This inheritance we find in the work of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey in particular, and the group as a whole. Unlike Bloomsbury, however, Leslie did not make a shrine of art.

It is interesting to note Leslie's reputation after his death. The main debate over Leslie's value as a critic was between Desmond MacCarthy and Queenie (Q. D.) Leavis. In 1937 Desmond delivered the Leslie Stephen Lecture in Cambridge, and he chose Leslie as his subject. Desmond, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, was critical of Leslie. He called Leslie the least aesthetic of critics and said that Leslie talked more about human nature and morals than about art. Leslie himself would have probably agreed with this assessment. He very much represented the conservative strain in literary criticism; Bloomsbury represented the opposite by emphasizing the aesthetic experience in art, the range of emotion and response one experiences, and the formal aspects (technique, shape, and structure) used by the artist. Desmond complained that Leslie could not communicate any emotion he derived from literature. Leslie preferred to exercise his intellect.

Two years later, Q. D. Leavis took up the mantle for Leslie Stephen. She called Desmond's response an insult to Leslie's memory and stated that what Desmond saw as flaws were actually his strengths. Q. D. praised Leslie for rejecting aesthetic criticism and for seeing criticism as an intellectual process. One can immediately see that the debate between Desmond and Q. D. is not necessarily over the meaning of Leslie's criticism—they both agree on what Leslie's priorities were—but rather over the value of art in their own time. By 1939 modernism and aestheticism had reached their height. The role of aestheticism in art had established itself. Q. D. and her husband F. R. Leavis had a critical perspective that was grounded in a late-Victorian point of view. In fighting over Leslie's criticism, Q. D. (as well as Desmond) was arguing over the values of the past.

Between the two world wars there developed another school of criticism that rejected both Bloomsbury aesthetics and Leslie's emphasis on human character and morals. I. A. Richards, a Cambridge critic, took up Leslie's rational approach for literature. Richards was famous for his attempt to bring psychology and logic to bear on meaning and on the reader's response to poetry. He eventually abandoned the quest for a theory of value in favor of close reading of the text to reveal texture, pattern, and symbolism. This was the founding of New Criticism, a completely avant-garde and cutting edge approach during its time, but now considered to be conservative and out of fashion.

Another critic who had a great influence on twentieth-century criticism and who partially comes out of a Stephens' tradition is T. S. Eliot. Eliot, a friend of the Bloomsbury Group, also rejected aestheticism and dismissed fashionable liberalism for Anglo-Catholicism. Like Leslie, he saw the function of literature as carrying moral implications, and he emphasized the role of reason and logic in his criticism. What made Eliot's criticism unique is his rejection of the argument of persuasion for the argument of assertion. He dismissed romanticism, destroyed the pantheon of writers that Victorian and Georgian critics had erected, and served as a model of a new generation of critics, among them the Leavises.

F. R. and Q. D. Leavis edited a magazine called Scrutiny, and in it they managed to assemble a group of like-minded critics who were going to establish, once and for all, who were the significant writers and who were the trivial ones. Serious writers, according to the Leavises, were ones who were concerned with moral problems. In establishing the criteria for the ideal critic, the Leavises also helped to define the new critical method. According to the Leavises, the only reason for studying a writer's style was to expose his morality through it. A writer's personality and life were irrelevant. Criticism as elegant writing was conceited and egotistical. Criticism alone could save the nation's culture. With these precepts, the Leavises and Scrutiny exposed how Bloomsbury's claim to be cultured and civilized was an untrue claim made by a disgusting upper-middle-class coterie.

Leslie holds a paradoxical relationship with the Bloomsbury Group. On the one hand he had great influence on the development of Bloomsbury's identity. As a descendent of the Claphamites, Leslie passed on a sense of privilege which came from belonging to a well-knit group of social reformers—Bloomsbury too saw itself as a kind of coterie, a group of special and unique friends. His emphasis on biography is reflected again and again in the writing of Bloomsbury biographies and memoirs. He emphasized the role of the common reader and ultimately believed that the role of the critic was insignificant. Ironically, his agnosticism led Bloomsbury into their theories of aestheticism. Also ironically, Leslie and his writing were used by Bloomsbury detractors to argue Bloomsbury's immorality and self-indulgence. Leslie, like any other influence, affected Bloomsbury in constructive and unconstructive ways.

Henry James (1843-1916) was born in America. In 1875 he settled in Europe, lived in London for more than twenty years, and in 1915 became a naturalized British citizen. In 1898 he moved to Rye, where he wrote his later novels, such as The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Later critics compared Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse to these novels and called it her most Jamesian in design. Henry knew the Stephen family well, and Virginia and Vanessa saw him at Hyde Park Gate when they were young. Leslie Stephen nurtured Henry when Leslie was editor of Cornhill Magazine.

Leonard Woolf later wrote about Henry's influence on the Apostles. According to S. P. Rosenbaum, his later works “exhibited the limits of the art of fiction for the would-be novelists of Bloomsbury before they read the Russians or their own modernist contemporaries.”² Leonard felt that he and his Cambridge friends lived in a “Jamesian phantasmagoria.” Leonard Woolf and Lytton Strachey invented a writing “method” that incorporated the techniques of Henry James, Socrates, and G. E. Moore. Henry's analyses of moral and aesthetic impressions made the connection between his art and G. E. Moore's philosophy for the Bloomsbury Group. Desmond MacCarthy wrote a celebrated Apostle paper on the change of personal relations in society and took its title and theme from James's The Awkward Age (1899). Virginia Woolf wrote a number of reviews of Henry's work for the Guardian.. Her responses to Henry throughout her life ranged from utter admiration for his genius to impatience and disregard for what she thought was James's superficial and Victorian perspective. E. M. Forster was the only one who did not show himself to be influenced by Henry at Cambridge.

In the end, however, these ambivalent reactions to Henry by Bloomsbury reveals the impact and intensity of his influence. His work is close in its moral, aesthetic and even social values to the fiction of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf; Forster found in Henry someone writing about international themes while Virginia found the most complex representations of female consciousness. Their response was a natural consequence of their difficulty in assimilating his influence without being overwhelmed by it.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was born in Wales. He was a philosopher, mathematician, and pacifist, and is usually linked to G. E. Moore as one of the greatest influences on early twentieth-century philosophy. His Principia Mathematica, which he wrote with Alfred North Whitehead, was published in 1903, the same year as Moore's Principia Ethica. Russell was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was an Apostle and familiar with many members of the Bloomsbury Group. He had an intense love affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell and this brought him into continuing contact with people associated with Bloomsbury.

The other Apostles—Desmond MacCarthy, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and J. M. Keynes—were all closer to G. E. Moore than Bertrand was. He saw supreme good not only in love and beauty, as Moore and his followers saw it, but also in truth and knowledge, which were abstractions. He was also less tolerant toward homosexuality than Moore and the other heterosexuals in the society. One of the last essays he wrote for the Apostles demonstrates his independence of thought. “Seems Madam? Nay, It Is” argued in 1894 for the election of women to the Apostles on the grounds that freedom of discussion would be inimical to love, and furthermore that their participation would assist the discussions of metaphysical and sexual matters. The Apostles eventually voted against the election of women.

Bertrand expressed the values inherent in the pursuit of mathematics in an essay originally written in 1902 but published in 1907 as “The Study of Mathematics.” Rosenbaum tells us that Lytton liked the comparison “of the understanding of mathematics with the emergence of an Italian palace out of the mist before a traveler.”³ Lytton did not agree with Bertrand that mathematics was superior to literature. “The Study of Mathematics” is the most Platonic of Bertrand's essays, since he idealizes a timeless realm to be contemplated by pure reason only. Virginia Woolf agreed with Bertrand and made her protagonist of Night and Day, Katherine Hilbery, a mathematician. After Bertrand turned away from mathematics, he wrote The Problems of Philosophy (1912), which discussed the notion of sense data in perception, and this stimulated Bloomsbury's intellectual imagination. His distinctions between perception and recollection, knowing and what is known, are fundamental for the fiction of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf.

Bertrand also emerged as a social thinker in Bloomsbury with Principles of Social Reconstruction. It was during the First World War that Bertrand became most closely involved with Bloomsbury. The early 1916 lectures he gave in London, published in Principles of Social Reconstruction, are considered by Bloomsbury members to be his most important writings. In this work he develops his own kind of socialism, which includes a kind of world government to end the international anarchy that caused World War I. Bertrand believed that individuals must learn to revere authority and the spirit of life in others.

As they did with Henry James, the Apostles ultimately had an ambivalent response to Bertrand. Bertrand criticized J. M. Keynes and Lytton Strachey for abandoning the Victorian idea of progress and for indulging themselves and degrading Moore's ethics. It is quite clear from Bertrand's and D. H. Lawrence's letters that, despite their differences, both disliked homosexuality, though for different reasons. J. M. Keynes and Lytton Strachey were of course aware of Bertrand's disapproval. Bertrand wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell, stating, “I hate all the Bloomsbury crew, with their sneers at anything that has live feeling in it.”⁴ Rosenbaum says that when Bertrand referred to the Bloomsbury crew he probably did not mean Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, or E. M. Forster. He did mean J. M. Keynes and Lytton Strachey, as well as Clive Bell and maybe the Woolfs. Ultimately, however, it was the scope and versatility of Bertrand's writing, not his character, that impressed and attracted Bloomsbury members.

A Cambridge philosopher and Apostle, G. E. Moore (1873-1958) had a great impact on Bloomsbury. It was the Cambridge Apostles—Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, J. M. Keynes, and Roger Fry—who brought Moore's ideas to Bloomsbury as a whole. Though Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, and Virginia Woolf never had direct influence from Moore, they read his Principia Ethica shortly after the Thursday evenings began. Eventually they all got to know Moore and were as enamored of his personality and character as they were of his philosophy. Though Moore had written other works in his lifetime, Principia Ethica is considered his most significant. In it he tries to explain the nature of “good” by discussing “good as means” and “good as end.”⁵ He also addresses the philosophical “naturalistic fallacy” (62) and the Ideal. His argument is a detailed and specific one, and what follows is a general explanation. To understand the development of his ideas, one must really read Principia Ethica in its entirety.

Moore's philosophy can be viewed as representative of a Cambridge body of utilitarian and Platonic thought, and many of his influential ideas can be found in the philosophic work of Henry Sidgwick, G. Lowes Dickinson, John McTaggart, and Bertrand Russell. But it is through Moore that Bloomsbury received these ideas. His general conception of philosophy is most aligned with Bertrand's in its emphasis on the real rather than the ideal. Moore's thought and personality shaped Bloomsbury's beliefs in perception and mysticism, the nature of consciousness (which is found in the stream-of-consciousness technique of Virginia Woolf's novels), the distinctions between right and good, the importance of human relations, the function of criticism, and the value of art.

Moore's methodology, that is the method with which he constructed his arguments, was not systematized or self-conscious. Moore was concerned with the quest for clear, exact meaning. Thus we have Moore's response, “What exactly do you mean?”⁶ It was a question which initially intimidated the Stephen sisters because of their lack of knowledge of its origin, but later became a question they would ask both themselves and others. This question may have become the basis for Bloomsbury's lack of sympathy from those outside the group. Moore denied having a “method” per se, but his philosophy is related to a commonsense conception of the world, a conception that Leslie Stephen learned from the eighteenth century.

Principia Ethica was published in 1903. It is important for the ethical theory it proposes and for its privileging of art and love. Its influence was restricted to the Bloomsbury Group until 1922 when it was reprinted and recognized as a classic text in analytic ethical theory. In chapter one of Principia Ethica Moore addresses the subject matter of ethics. As Moore himself writes, “I intend to use ‘Ethics’ to cover. … an enquiry for which, at all events, there is no other word: the general enquiry into what is good” (54). The question then becomes how human beings determine how to lead their lives. Moore's initial thesis is that goodness is unanalyzable. Therefore, the content of ethical thought is irreducible. The things to which we attribute goodness, according to Moore, do not possess intrinsic value—nothing is in itself internally good.

In chapters two, three, and four of his book he discusses the naturalistic fallacy, hedonism, and the metaphysical fallacy. The naturalistic fallacy is the theory that goodness is neither a natural nor a metaphysical property. By this Moore means that to believe that something from nature or a transcendent (spiritual) being are intrinsically good is a false assumption. His claim is that anything good is composed of various parts, some of which are good and some of which are not. The value of an object rests in its parts, but ultimately the sum of its parts does not equal the whole. In other words, because the object is composed of a majority of good parts does not necessarily mean that the object is good as a whole. This concept is what Moore terms the “organic whole” (he later dropped the adjective “organic” since it is itself a metaphor based on nature). The principle of wholeness and the naturalistic fallacy both have implications for Bloomsbury's formalist aesthetics.

Chapter three of Principia Ethica deals with hedonism. Hedonism is the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life. Moore refutes hedonism with Plato's argument that pleasure alone cannot be good because memory and consciousness are also required for it. According to Moore, “The theory that nothing but pleasure is desired seems largely due to a confusion between the cause and the object of desire: pleasure is certainly not the sole object of desire, and, even if it is always among the causes of desire, that fact would not tempt anyone to think it good” (42). It is common sense to regard mere consciousness of pleasure as the sole good. Moore contrasts hedonism with egoism, the doctrine that one's own pleasure is the sole good, and utilitarianism, the doctrine that the useful is the good and that the determining consideration of right conduct should be the usefulness of its consequences.

Moore's fourth chapter, on metaphysical ethics, defines metaphysical as “having reference primarily to any object of knowledge which is not a part of Nature—does not exist in time, as an object of perception” (44). Metaphysicians “have always supposed that what does not exist in Nature, must, at least, exist, the term also has reference to a supposed ‘supersensible reality’” (44). Rosenbaum explains how Moore refutes metaphysical ethics by distinguishing between existence and perception, between thought and truth. Moore attacks the claim that we cannot separate a thing's being good from our preferring it, or between something being true and our thinking it true.⁷

The last two chapters of Principia Ethica bring us back to two original questions: what are ethics in relation to conduct and what is the Ideal? J. M. Keynes argues in his essay “My Early Beliefs” that the chapter on ethical conduct was not really important to the Bloomsbury Group, while Leonard Woolf, in his autobiography, disagrees with Keynes. Leonard argues that in fact the chapter on ethics and conduct was of concern to the group. They very often argued about correct behavior under real and hypothetical circumstances. Moore did acknowledge the difficulty of calculating the consequences of human conduct and actions. Keynes says in his memoir that “we entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its own merits and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully” (61). According to Keynes, every action is individual and must be considered as such, rather than viewing all human conduct as under some general rule.

The final chapter, on the Ideal, is agreed upon by members of Bloomsbury to have had the greatest influence. Moore defines the Ideal as a thing that “is good in itself in a high degree” (233). The objective of the chapter is to answer the fundamental question of ethics, “What things are goods or ends in themselves?” (233). Thus far, Moore has come only to one negative answer, “the answer that pleasure is certainly not the sole good” (233). According to his principle of organic wholes, “the intrinsic value of a whole is neither identical with nor proportional to the sum of the values of its parts” (233). Therefore, though something may be good in itself in a high degree, it does not necessarily mean that all of its parts may be good. Our search for the Ideal must be restricted to that one thing, among all the wholes known to us, which seems better than the rest.

It is at this point in Principia Ethica that Moore makes his most famous proclamation, a proclamation that may be said to define Bloomsbury as a whole.

By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. (237)

Here Moore describes the best good as found in states of consciousness, human relationships, and art. He feels that these have been forms of good that have been overlooked. Experiments in states of consciousness can be seen in the postimpressionist paintings of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, the art criticism of Roger Fry, and the unconventional narrative techniques in Virginia Woolf's novels. The emphasis on human intercourse and relationships is reflected in the bonds of friendship that members of the Bloomsbury Group maintained throughout their lives. Enjoyment of beautiful objects is found in the group's obsession with theories of art and beauty, specifically their preference for aestheticism (the theory of art for art's sake). The work of Walter Pater, and his interest in the aesthetic moment, also overlaps here.

Walter Pater (1839-1894) is recognized by many as one of the founding fathers of the aesthetic movement. Chronologically his work precedes that of Leslie Stephen, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore. Some Bloomsbury scholars argue that Walter actually had little influence on the group, while others argue that Walter had a profound effect on them. When Walter's “Conclusion” in The Renaissance is carefully analyzed, one discovers how his articulation of the aesthetic experience seeps into Bloomsbury's expression of the aesthetic moment. Though Moore emphasizes the appreciation of beauty, it is Walter who explains how that process works.

The real connection between Walter and Bloomsbury was made by Wyndham Lewis. In 1913 Wyndham had a fallout with Roger Fry and the Omega Workshops. In 1934 Wyndham attacked Bloomsbury in his book Men without Art. Wyndham disliked the Bloomsbury members personally, and despised their views on aesthetics. He found those views to be archaic and retrograde. For Wyndham, “‘aestheticism,’ though in truth rampant and ubiquitous, is on all hands violently disowned, and although the manner of Walter is today constantly imitated, on the sly, and his teaching absorbed along with his style, he is scarcely respectable in the intellectual sense.”⁸ By 1934 aestheticism and Bloomsbury's influence were out of vogue, and Virginia Woolf was attacked by the younger generation of writers who were interested in politics in a much more explicit way.

Walter at first appears to be totally antithetical to Bloomsbury. He wanted to study theology when he entered Queen's College, Oxford in 1858. He was, in many ways, a misogynist and university man, and represented the Victorian patriarchy against which Bloomsbury members rebelled. However, Walter was also a rebel in his own time. The more conservative movement of Tractarianism began to wane when Walter entered Queen's. Oxford was being influenced by the spirit of rationalism, new geological and biological investigations, and the philosophical writings of J. S. Mill and G. W. F. Hegel, which served to weaken faith in absolute standards of moral conduct and in the literal truth of the Bible. Through the work of John Ruskin, Walter learned to appreciate the criticism of beauty and to allow his impressions of art to be shaped not by classical rules but by the suggestiveness of the aesthetic object. Later, this emphasis on impression became the leading tenet to Walter's aesthetic criticism and the foundation of the aesthetic movement.

Walter's most significant contribution to aestheticism is The Renaissance. In 1865 Walter paid his first visit to Italy with his friend C. L. Shadwell, and they visited Ravenna, Pisa, and Florence. Italy's art began to have a strong and powerful influence over Walter. He began to think of the Renaissance as the period when aesthetic, religious, and practical concerns were harmoniously balanced. The Renaissance has eight chapters—“Aucassin and Nicolette,” “Pico della Mirandula,” “Sandro Botticelli,” “Luca della Robbia,” “The Poetry of Michelangelo,” “Lionardo da Vinci,” “Joachim du Bellay,” and “Wincklemann”—and treats impressionistically the life and works of the writers and artists from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. The book became a manifesto for aestheticism and it influenced many students, such as Oscar Wilde, who appreciated its controversial nature. The most important part of the study was the “Conclusion,” in which Walter describes the aesthetic moment as the ultimate experience for which to strive, and in this explanation Walter implicitly replaced religion with art, the eternity with the here and now, and the supernatural with visible creation.

Only four pages long, the “Conclusion” contains some of the most powerful and sustained descriptions of the aesthetic moment. Walter asks us to turn away from the everyday, concrete world to the impressions of experience that make up our lives. These impressions live within the individual's subjectivity, “ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no voice has ever pierced on its way to us.”⁹ The most famous passage is the following:

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be always present at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

(60)

In this description we find Virginia Woolf's “moment” and James Joyce's “epiphany.” This notion of art is also echoed in the work of Clive Bell and Roger Fry, Bloomsbury's art critics. The image of the “hard, gemlike flame” is literally repeated in the work of these writers. Walter's style, flights of fancy, diaphanous images, and ornate prose are also imitated in the writings of the Bloomsbury members. Whether they explicitly ever discuss Walter's influence on them is unimportant, for we know that the Bloomsbury Group was intimately connected to the philosophical movements of the university and could not have avoided coming across Walter's work. Though G. E. Moore was directly connected to the group, he never explained the detail of his emphasis on beauty. Walter's description of experience is branded throughout Bloomsbury's writing and art.

THE EDWARDIANS AND THE GEORGIANS

Virginia Woolf took the time in two essays, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and “Modern Fiction,” to describe the differences between the Edwardian and Georgian writers. Ultimately her goal was to describe her own theory of the novel, but along with that she managed to place her contemporaries on the map of literary history. Virginia's mapping, though particular to her, can help us to understand the intellectual context in which Bloomsbury was writing; the writers who were their peers; who they respected; and who they criticized.

Written in 1924 as a paper read at Cambridge, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” was a response to Arnold Bennett's criticism that Woolf did not know how to create realistic characters. In effect, this essay became Woolf's literary manifesto as she proceeded to describe what is meant by the term “realistic” and what is meant by the concept of “character.” She begins by placing the Edwardians and Georgians into two camps: “Mr. [H. G.] Wells, Mr. [Arnold] Bennett, and Mr. [John] Galsworthy I will call the Edwardians; Mr. [E. M.] Forster, Mr. [D. H.] Lawrence, Mr. [Lytton] Strachey, Mr. [James] Joyce, and Mr. [T. S.] Eliot I will call the Georgians.”¹⁰

Virginia then notes, in a well-quoted statement, “that on or about December, 1910, human character changed” (96). What she means by this is that

[a]ll human relations have shifted—those 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.

(96-7)

This moment in time represents the shift from the Edwardians—representative of a Victorian culture—to Georgians, representative of the twentieth-century modern culture. It is a move from repression, secrets, and silence to one of sunshine and fresh air. The modern period brought a sense of openness about social class, women's rights, and a new approach to creating character in literature.

In “Modern Fiction” Virginia makes the same distinction with the term “materialist” to represent the Edwardians and the term “spiritualist” to represent the Georgians. The materialist conceives character by describing both the physical environment in which a character lives and the character's physical body. The belief is that the more detail a reader has about the character's physical qualities the more a reader will understand and get to know him or her. The spiritualists, on the other hand, concentrate on the internal workings and psychology of the character. Virginia's greatest contribution to the novel is her notion that character is found inside an individual and that it is the responsibility of the novelist to create that internal reality in language. From this came the development of the stream-of-consciousness technique, a technique that strives to represent the psychological reality of a character. Though Joyce is probably the only Georgian writer to apply a stream-of-consciousness technique, others attempted to represent the inner workings of character through various experimental methods.

Virginia's splitting of her contemporaries into the two groups is essential for her definition of the new kind of literature, art, and writing that she and her friends were trying to create. Though Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy were successful writers during their own time, they came to represent a Victorian age gone by.

THE EDWARDIANS: H. G. WELLS (1866-1946), ARNOLD BENNETT (1867-1931), AND JOHN GALSWORTHY (1867-1933)

H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy, though read and studied very little anymore, were very popular during their own time. Virginia Woolf grouped them under the category Edwardian even though as individuals these writers did not place themselves together in a coherent group. They did share some things in their technique, style, and content, but all three were distinctly different from each other as well as from members of the Bloomsbury Group.

H. G. Wells has been described as the most serious of the popular writers and the most popular of the serious writers of his time. It is Wells's earlier works of science fiction that have retained their popularity for almost a century. Like the Bloomsbury Group, he rebelled against his parents' piety and maintained a lifelong hostility toward Christianity, which he saw as the official myth of a certain social order. Rather than turning to agnosticism or aestheticism, as Bloomsbury members did, he turned to science.

Virginia slightly misjudged him as an individual stuck in a Victorian way of thinking. Though the technique of his novels and his approach to character may appear conventional, he questioned Victorian culture, morality, and views of reality as rigorously as any Bloomsbury member. His first substantial novel was The Time Machine: An Invention (1895), in which a scientist travels through time to the future. The main appeal of the book is in its persuasive unfolding of fantastic events through Wells's prose and in the hero who defies established notions of reality for a greater one revealed through science. Wells wrote other famous novels that were, along with The Time Machine, later made into films, including The Island of Dr. Moreau: A Possibility (1896), The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898; which Orson Well's later used for his infamous radio dramatization on Halloween, 1938).

Arnold Bennett, as the point has already been made, was a target for Virginia's criticism. It could be because he was so widely known, read, and published. In a way, he had been too successful: his essays published on both sides of the Atlantic; his novels—The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911), and These Twain (1915)—were considered masterpieces; and his book reviews were published every Thursday in the London Evening Standard and were so influential that when he died in 1931, he was considered the most important critic in Europe. The Bloomsbury set consistently ridiculed him because he was from the lower-class pottery district and retained his Northern accent throughout his life.

Though Arnold's literary style is as conventional and Victorian as Virginia describes it, his views toward women and war set him in the progressive world of modernism. His preoccupations are reflected in his earliest journalism. One of his earliest works was Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide (1898), and he wrote a series called “Love and Life” in 1900 for the English woman's magazine Hearth & Home. His first three serious novels were about women, Anna of the Five Towns (1902), Leonora (1903), and Sacred and Profane Love: A Novel in Three Episodes (1905). Hilda Lessways was part of his Clayhanger trilogy. It continued his strong interest in the psychological situation of women and his technique foreshadows the stream-of-consciousness method to be used by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

The First World War brought an abrupt change to Arnold's life. Though not a radical nationalist, he was activist in nature. He believed the war was a mistake, and he expected positive social revolution to come from it. He began to write a series of political articles for the Daily News that ran more or less for the duration of the war. In 1915 he became director of the New Statesman and traveled to the war front as a propagandist for the government. In 1918 Arnold was appointed first director of British propaganda in France, and then director of propaganda for the ministry of information. He continued his involvement in the war effort until the last year of the war.

John Galsworthy was also widely regarded as one of England's leading writers. He was commercially successful, critically esteemed, and widely translated. His parents intended that John would become a lawyer, but he had literary aspirations. In November 1892 John sailed to Australia. For the voyage home he boarded the celebrated clipper Torrens, whose first mate was the as-yet-unpublished Polish author Joseph Conrad. John and Conrad formed a friendship that deepened over the next three decades. It was Joseph Conrad who eventually brought John into a literary circle that included such figures as Ford Madox Ford. In 1932 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature. By 1950, however, his reputation had radically declined, especially after critics had followed the lead of his earlier detractors—Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence—and pointed toward his Victorian tendency to “over-write.”

Like Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy broke from Victorian convention by becoming an active participant in the revolution concerning the sexes that transformed the patterns of middle-class life in England. His characters often suffer guilt, disrepute, and destruction as a result of breaking Victorian standards of sexual behavior. His first novel, Jocelyn (1898; originally published under the pseudonym John Sinjohn), conveys his interest in dealing with illicit sexual passion and its consequences. Some of his other novels question the Victorian exploitation of the under classes. The Island Pharisees (1904) was John's most autobiographical work and it revealed John's impatience with the middle class and his awareness of the plight of London's poor. The Man of Property (1906) is frank about the representation of marriage and is a savage attack on the middle-class Victorian; it was very popular among university students of the first decade of the twentieth century, who proved receptive to attacks on their parents' generation.

By 1933, when John received the Nobel Prize and was being praised with reverence by foreign critics, his reputation in England had suffered a blow. Virginia Woolf's Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown argued that John, like Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, was a well-meaning but superficial writer whose novels were full of stereotypical characters. A few years later D. H. Lawrence described John as a cynical and sentimental vulgarian. It is not surprising that Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence should have thrashed John, since they were advocates of a new modern artistic revolution and considered him old fashioned. His real reputation rests securely, one of his critics suggest, as the last major Victorian writer.

THE GEORGIANS: E. M. FORSTER (1879-1970), D. H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930), T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965), AND JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941)

E. M. Forster is by many critics considered a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group. His most significant novels are Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924), and Maurice (1971). He also wrote biographies and criticism, and his Aspects of the Novel (1927) became a classic for teachers and critics for several generations.

An Apostle and visitor to Bloomsbury Thursday evenings, he was more independent than the others. Though it is often argued that his novels most clearly represent G. E. Moore's emphasis on human relationships and art, Forster claims he did not read Moore. Nor did Forster actually spend that much time with the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf describes Forster's participation in Bloomsbury as follows:

And once at least Morgan [Forster] flitted through Bloomsbury lodging a moment in Fitzroy Square on his way even then to catch a train. … I felt as if a butterfly … had settled on the sofa; if one raised a finger or made a movement the butterfly would be off. … And I listened—with deepest curiosity, for he was the only novelist I knew … the only one anyhow who wrote about people like ourselves.¹¹

In a sense Bloomsbury was too intellectual in orientation to gain Forster's allegiance. He valued more fully the visionary and transcendent than did most of his associates. Forster was busy building another life, but because his background is so similar to those of the Bloomsbury Group and his work incorporated many of their aesthetic principles, histories of Bloomsbury often include him as a major figure of the group. Virginia Woolf described him as a fellow Georgian, a writer who represents the innovations of modernist literature.

Forster attended King's College, Cambridge, where he met Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Desmond MacCarthy, and Saxon Sydney-Turner. His dons and fellows included philosophers John McTaggart and G. E. Moore, teacher G. Lowes Dickinson, classicist Nathaniel Webb, and historian Oscar Browning. His closest friend was H. O. Meredith, who helped make Forster aware of his homosexual leanings and who served as a model for the protagonist in Forster's posthumous novel Maurice. Through Meredith, Forster became a member of the Apostles.

His relationship with Bloomsbury members began in Cambridge. Though he may not have not have spent a lot of time with the group, he did maintain a longstanding publishing connection to them. He was the first of the group to be published by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press—in 1920 with The Story of the Siren. In all, he published seven works with Hogarth. He also became very close to Leonard Woolf after Leonard returned from Ceylon in 1911. Forster turned to Leonard when he returned from India with A Passage to India unfinished. Leonard encouraged him to give up reviewing and concentrate on his novel.

Later, after the various Bloomsbury members had established their reputations and were prepared to recount their memories, Forster became a more active member through their Memoir Club. In “Bloomsbury, An Early Note,” written in 1929 but not published until 1956, Forster described Bloomsbury as “the only genuine movement in English civilization.”¹² Like the sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Forster had roots in the Clapham Sect. Virginia found Forster to be one of her first and most important critics. She saw him as a mentor and her feelings about her own work were often determined by Forster's views. In Forster's Rede lecture on Virginia, he surveyed her work and found that her greatest weakness was that she was a poet who wanted to write something as close to a novel as she could.

Forster was a compassionate man who, as a homosexual with the status of an outsider, was a great champion of civil liberties. He sought the support of the Bloomsbury Group during the 1930s. In 1928 he and Leonard protested against the suppression of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, considered by many to be a lesbian classic. He and Leonard wrote a letter about Hall's obscenity trial under the title “The New Censorship,” which was published in the Nation & Athenaeum. Forster, however, had a deaf ear in terms of Virginia's feminism and found that it crippled her work. It is ironic that Virginia's most famous feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own, contains within its title an allusion to Forster's A Room with a View.

Of all the figures that had contact with Bloomsbury, Forster seems to be the most respected. He was a writer who used both the old and the new, who valued friendship and art, who showed sympathy toward the underclass members and outsiders, and whose opinion was valued as among the most important of the Bloomsbury members.

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), though placed sympathetically among Virginia Woolf's Georgian writers, was one of Bloomsbury's greatest detractors. As an English novelist, short-story writer, and poet, he is considered one of modernism's most significant writers. He is author of The White Peacock (1911), Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). Lawrence's main connection to Bloomsbury was David Garnett. D. H. Lawrence was mentored by important literary critic Edward Garnett, David's father, and he took a personal interest in David's well being. Lawrence was also part of the circle around Lady Ottoline Morrell and interacted with Bloomsbury through her.

It is difficult to gauge Bloomsbury's response to Lawrence. Virginia Woolf's published work states that she detested Lawrence and that his novels bored her with their preoccupation with sex, though in her diary and letters she expressed admiration for Sons and Lovers. Clive Bell and Lytton Strachey publicly opposed the suppression of The Rainbow. E. M. Forster stated that Lawrence was “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.” After Lawrence read Forster's Passage to India, he wrote that Forster's was the only voice that had anything to say to him from England. Desmond MacCarthy was described by Lawrence as “one of my most sympathetic critics.”

Lawrence was invited to Cambridge by Bertrand Russell, a friend of Lady Ottoline Morrell's. Both David Garnett and John Maynard Keynes have written about the infamous visit in their memoirs since it was a quick and sure turning point in Lawrence's attitude toward Bloomsbury. In Cambridge, Lawrence met J. M. Keynes and G. E. Moore. One morning Keynes opened the door of his room provocatively underdressed (he was in his pajamas at eleven in the morning). Lawrence wrote to Ottoline Morrell first, revealing his homophobic panic by complaining of “Bloomsbuggery.” But he did not stop there. He then wrote to David Garnett about his Cambridge friends in an April 1915 letter: “You must leave these friends, these beetles, Birrell and Duncan Grant are done forever. Keynes I am not sure—when I saw Keynes that morning in Cambridge it was one of the crises of my life. It sent me mad with misery and hostility and rage.”¹³ More recently published letters from Russell and Lawrence to Lady Morrell indicate that homosexuality was one of the reasons why Lawrence disliked David Garnett's Bloomsbury. David had no interest in heeding Lawrence's advice and their friendship was irrevocably ruptured; it led to the breakdown of Lawrence's tentative relationship with Bloomsbury.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) is recognized as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. A poet, critic, and playwright, he was born in St. Louis, Missouri, though his family was originally from Massachusetts. His family tree includes settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, prominent clergymen and educators, a Harvard University president, and three United States presidents (John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Rutherford B. Hayes). Eliot's grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, was a Unitarian minister and had moved to St. Louis to establish its first Unitarian Church. Eliot eventually received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University, and spent some time at both the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and Oxford University. He completed a doctoral dissertation on F. H. Bradley.

In 1910 and 1911, while still a student, he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” as well as other poems that are landmarks in the history of literature. In these poems Eliot articulates distinctly modern themes in forms that are both a development and departure from nineteenth- century poetry. The style of these poems reflects the inner consciousness of the narrators, conveyed through fragments of images juxtaposed against each other. Like the modern novelists and painters of Bloomsbury, Eliot responded to the more linear forms of Victorian poetry. The ultimate expression of Eliot's experimental poetry came in his classic poem The Waste Land (1923), which was edited by Ezra Pound and expressed what Eliot saw as the fragmented and lifeless culture of contemporary society.

Leonard Woolf was impressed by “Prufrock” and wrote to Eliot inviting him to send some poems to Hogarth Press. The letter led to a meeting, and in 1919 Hogarth Press published Eliot's Poems. Hogarth Press also published The Waste Land and Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century(1924), which included Eliot's landmark essay “The Metaphysical Poets.” When Eliot read The Waste Land to the Woolfs and others, they were convinced of his importance. Eliot worked at Lloyd's Bank at the time, desperately trying to make financial ends meet. The Woolfs entered a scheme with Ottoline Morrell to create an endowment that would allow Eliot to write full time. In 1925 Eliot annoyed the Woolfs when he failed to inform them that Faber & Gwyer was bringing out his Collected Poems—including The Waste Land, which had been allowed to go out of print.

In the beginning of their friendship, the Woolfs were drawn to Eliot and began inviting him to spend weekends at Monk's House in the early 1920s. Virginia Woolf was initially impressed by Eliot; she found him extremely formal and reserved, and she was uncharacteristically intimidated by him. His opinion and championing of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce loomed over Virginia's work, who was worried that Joyce, for example, was doing what she was doing, only better. Later, the members of Bloomsbury would complain of Eliot's prudishness, and when Eliot converted to Anglicanism in 1927, they were mystified. After his conversion, Eliot began to distance himself from the group.

James Joyce (1882-1941) wrote the classic twentieth-century novel Ulysses (1922). T. S. Eliot raved about the novel and suggested to the Woolfs in 1918 that Hogarth Press print it. Virginia's response to Joyce was always overshadowed by Eliot's, since Eliot's view meant so much to her. Virginia was distressed that Eliot found “Ezra Pound & Wyndham Lewis as great poets, or in the current phrase ‘very interesting’ writers. He admires Mr. Joyce immensely.”¹⁴ Sylvia Beach delivered the manuscript of Ulysses to them. Leonard took it to some printers, who refused to print it because of its “indecency” and the Woolfs decided publication would not benefit their press (not to mention the fact that Leonard and Virginia, themselves, would have to lay the type of Joyce's radical prose style backwards).

Ulysses is one of the most enigmatic and difficult novels ever written. Originally printed in parts in the Little Review, the experimentation with style in each of its chapters was baffling to most readers. Eventually Joyce released a key or map to the book that showed how each chapter corresponded with chapters of the Greek text The Odyssey, written by Homer. There are also different colors, parts of the body, and art forms associated with each chapter. The plot is simple and clear. It is classically unified by taking place within twenty-four hours. The protagonist is Leopold Bloom, who spends the day roaming around Dublin, Ireland. Along the way he runs into Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, who is a poet. They spend the last part of the day together; Stephen returns home, and Leopold goes to bed with his wife Molly.

What struck closest to home for Virginia Woolf was that the style of each chapter was an attempt at representing the unconscious, an attempt at a style termed “stream-of-consciousness.” Virginia and Joyce never coined a term for their styles. But Virginia was trying to accomplish the same thing Joyce was, and she knew it, and her competitive nature surfaced. Joyce's novel was, in Virginia's words, “out of keeping,” “filth,” “indecent,” and “trash.” Some critics have argued that her response to Joyce was a reflection of her own inability to write about sex. Virginia's work touches on the essential human condition, but she never addresses the physical aspects of sex. However, Virginia was really not so much a prude—Bloomsbury talked about sex all the time—as she was jealous.

Leonard Woolf showed his wife a review of Ulysses from the American Nation that was “very intelligent.” Her response was to write in her diary that probably “the final beauty of writing is never felt by contemporaries. … Then again, I had my back up on purpose; then again I was overstimulated by Tom's praises.”¹⁵ Eliot later reevaluated his judgment. Months after he compared Ulysses to Tolstoy's War and Peace, he said that Joyce had “left out many things that were important … [Eliot] did not think that he gave a new insight into human nature” (203). Eliot had turned Virginia's way, but both had to cope with Joyce's genius.

BLOOMSBURY'S DETRACTORS

F. R. (Frank Raymond; 1895-1978) and Q. D. (Queenie Dorothy; 1906-1981) Leavis were bitter critics of the Bloomsbury Group who, through their journal Scrutiny (1932-53), had a profound influence on Bloomsbury's reputation from the 1930s to the 1970s. By the end of the 1920s Bloomsbury was famous and surrounded by imitators. Their relationships with D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, however, were the beginnings of a strong and vicious movement against the group personally and against their aesthetics. Lawrence broke from Bloomsbury even before he became a part of them—he was disgusted by their morality and judgments. Eliot, a close friend of the Bloomsbury Group, eventually converted to Anglicanism and distanced himself gently but decisively from the group as a whole. In the meantime there was the rise of a movement that would attempt to call attention to Bloomsbury's limitations; this was the Cambridge literary criticism represented by the Leavises.

To appreciate the role of the Leavises readers must understand that the function of English departments in British universities was taking the form familiar to most in the twenty-first century. Before the 1920s English departments promoted the study of the history of the English language (philology) and literature. In the 1920s, English departments set up a syllabus that did not require students to learn Anglo-Saxon. It ranged the whole of English literature to the present day, and it related it to the literature of Greece and Rome and to English moralists such as Matthew Arnold.

In 1920 T. S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood, criticism written in the Cambridge tradition, was published. A few years later I. A. Richards published Principles of Literary Criticism. Almost every year throughout the 1920s pronouncements on literature were made by Eliot and Richards, and their theories developed into what they called a “practical criticism.” When these theories reached American universities it was called “New Criticism.” The Leavises contributed to the new critical tradition. As the tradition of belles lettres began to be displaced by the Cambridge movement, F. R. Leavis became a technical critic of the first rank. He stated that the activity of criticism was the most important of all the activities in the humanities and that English faculty should be at the center of every university curriculum. Many of F. R. Leavis's students went into state schools to pass on these lessons, lessons that included the view that Bloomsbury had been dangerous to British culture.

The Leavises' goal was to indict the aesthetic theory of Bloomsbury by pointing out the essential immorality and immaturity of the art, work, and lives of Bloomsbury members. F. R. Leavis describes their morality in the following famous passage:

Articulateness and unreality cultivated together: callowness disguising itself in articulateness; conceit casing itself safely in a confined sense of high sophistication; the uncertainty as to whether one is serious or not taking itself for ironic pose; who has not at some time observed the process?¹⁶

Leavis and his wife saw great hypocrisy and snobbery in the Bloomsbury Group. Their views are very much a product of the difference in social class. Bloomsbury was part of an upper-middle class, an intellectual aristocracy; F. R. Leavis was the son of a piano dealer and Queenie was Jewish. The Leavises saw Bloomsbury as a group that had formed a coterie, or a clique, that inherited cultural and intellectual capital through entitlement. The irony and high sophistication on which Bloomsbury prided itself was merely, according to F. R. Leavis, uncertainty and conceit.

The Leavises did not have the same feeling for all of the Bloomsbury members. Though they recognized the value and brilliance of E. M. Forster and J. M. Keynes, they reviled Lytton Strachey and intensely disliked Virginia Woolf. F. R. Leavis's initial regard for Forster and Keynes was eventually reconsidered. Noel Annan explains that “Leavis wrote, in 1938, a genuinely appreciative essay in Scrutiny on Forster. … after the war, when Forster lived at King's College, he revised his view and denigrated him.”¹⁷ His respect for Keynes diminished after Keynes's death and the publication of Keynes's memoir, “My Early Beliefs.” In that memoir, Keynes writes about the fallout between David Garnett and D. H. Lawrence. Leavis agreed with Lawrence and criticized Bloomsbury for its moral stance and penchant for homosexuality.

Q. D. Leavis took Virginia Woolf to task in “Caterpillars of the Commonwealth Unite!”—her Scrutiny review of Virginia's Three Guineas. Q. D. Leavis also wrote a famous response to Desmond MacCarthy's lecture on Leslie Stephen at Cambridge. The Leavises, strangely, were grounded in Victorian roots, and they shared Leslie Stephen's view that literature had a role in morality. Aestheticism, the divorce between art and morality, was distasteful to the Leavises.

This sense that aesthetic art lacked morality explains the Leavises' distaste for Lytton Strachey, whom they probably disliked more than any other member of Bloomsbury. Both Lytton Strachey and F. R. Leavis focused on the individual man in their work; they both “considered people as specimens for the moralist's dissecting-table” (36). However, unlike Lytton, “there could never be for [Leavis] the slightest discrepancy between the artist and the man. What the artist wrote was the man. A great artist must a fortiori be a good man, a bad artist must by definition be despicable” (36). F. R. Leavis found Lytton to be too ironic and irreverent—he dismissed British historical icons as flawed human beings, as morally corrupt at times as Lytton himself. The role of F. R. and Q. D. Leavis was to move artistic taste from the more sensual and immoral aestheticism to a practical mode of literary criticism that helped readers to understand the values art is supposed to espouse.

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a critic, artist, and novelist. He was included in Roger Fry's second postimpressionist exhibition, and was associated with the Omega Workshops, which he left after an infamous dispute with Roger. With Ezra Pound (who also had no use for Bloomsbury), he was the leader of the vorticist movement, an offshoot of the futurist movement founded by Marinetti. Soon after he left Omega he began the Rebel Arts Center and published BLAST 1 and BLAST 2, literary journals of the vorticist movement that viciously criticized the aesthetics of the Bloomsbury Group. Later, his novel The Apes of God (1930) satirized Bloomsbury, and his book of criticism, Men without Art (1934), scathingly criticized Virginia Woolf and others of the group.

Wyndham's fallout with the Bloomsbury Group began because of an incident with Roger Fry over a commission from the Daily Mail for the 1913 “Ideal Home” exhibition that he claimed had been given to him. This controversy, both political and aesthetic, was to last for half a century. There were a number of letters exchanged between the Daily Mail, Wyndham, Roger, and other members of Bloomsbury. Wyndham and three other artists—C. J. Hamilton, Frederick Etchells, and E. Wadsworth—wrote a letter to Omega complaining of unfair practices. This letter Wyndham referred to as the “Round Robin.” In it the artists claimed that the “Direction of the Omega Workshops secured the decoration of the ‘Post-Impressionist’ room at the Ideal Home Exhibition by a shabby trick, and at the expense of its members.”¹⁸ The artists also complained that Roger Fry had prevented Frederick Etchells from exhibiting at the Leeds Art Gallery. Roger had told the curator from Leeds that Frederick had no pictures ready and would have none until the following year. This statement was “not only unauthorized but untrue” (337).

In the Round Robin, the authors also took the opportunity to criticize Omega's (and therefore Bloomsbury's) aesthetics:

As to its tendencies in Art, they alone would be sufficient to make it very difficult for any vigorous art-instinct to long remain under that roof. The Idol is still Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish of the neck, and its skin is “greenery-yallerly,” despite the Post- What-Not fashionableness of its draperies. This family part of strayed and Dissenting Aesthetes, however, were compelled to call in as much modern talent as they could find, to do the rough and masculine work without which they knew their efforts would not rise above the level of a pleasant tea-party, or command more attention.

(337)

Aesthetically, Wyndham was opposed to the concept of “beauty” in art. He probably would have broken from Omega, incident or not. When he left and formed the Rebel Arts Center, he and others, including Ezra Pound, studied the work of Italian futurist Marinetti, who believed in the values of technology, force, movement, and war. Wyndham, unable to follow anyone else's precepts, soon after denied association with Marinetti and proclaimed a new English movement called vorticism. A difficult and cryptic literary movement, vorticism did not last very long, especially since it was a more theoretical aesthetic and not easily put into practice.

Later in his life, Wyndham's friend Sir John Rothenstein reported him as saying that “Roger Fry and his ‘Bloomsbury’ circle had ruined his life that had he known how much he would have suffered, in his words, ‘by a sneer of hatred or by a shy Bloomsbury sniff’ he would have never attacked Roger Fry.”¹⁹ Many critics have written on Wyndham's potentially paranoid nature. In his lifetime, he was an artistic loner, never really comfortable with following a movement or crowd. Bloomsbury was a way for Wyndham to describe himself as an outsider, a position he cherished for its status as the “enemy” of the status quo.

Notes

1. Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 5.

2. S. P. Rosenbaum, “Henry James,” in Victorian Bloomsbury (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), p. 148.

3. S. P. Rosenbaum, “Bertrand Russell,” in Victorian Bloomsbury (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), p. 199.

4. Quoted in S. P. Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), p. 211.

5. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 75.

6. J. M. Keynes, “My Early Beliefs,” in The Bloomsbury Group, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), p. 56.

7. S. P. Rosenbaum, “G. E. Moore,” in Victorian Bloomsbury (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), p. 231.

8. Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art (London: Cassell, 1934), p. 145.

9. Walter Pater, “Conclusion,” in The Renaissance, in Selected Writings of Walter Pater, edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 60.

10. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in The Captain's Deathbed, edited by Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950), p. 95.

11. Virginia Woolf, “Old Bloomsbury,” in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, edited and introduced by Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 176.

12. E. M. Forster, “Bloomsbury, An Early Note,” in The Bloomsbury Group, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), p. 25.

13. D. H. Lawrence to David Garnett, Letters, edited by G. Zytaruk and J. Boulton (New York: Cambridge University of Press, 1972), “April 19, 1915.”

14. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984), 1: 219.

15. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984), 2: 200.

16. F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (New York: New York University Press, 1964), p. 257.

17. Noel Annan, “Bloomsbury and the Leavises,” in Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration, edited by Jane Marcus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 28.

18. Quentin Bell and Stephen Chaplin, “The Ideal Home Rumpus,” in The Bloomsbury Group, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), p. 336.

19. Quoted in S. P. Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), p. 334.