THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Watson) have slumped disastrously. To readers with sensibilities moulded by books which have since been deemed to
be characteristic of the early 1930s — Eliot’s Ash Wednesday (1930) and Burnt Norton (1935), Woolf’s The Waves
(1931), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Auden’s Poems (1930) and The Orators (1932) — the Illustrated
London News’s canon looks stillborn. It may still be possible that posterity will find Ezra Pound’s insistence on new
beginnings and a new kind of post-war writing misguided, but it seems unlikely. What the age ‘demanded’ when the
guns fell silent in November 1918 still seems to us to have called forth a particularly influential form of rearticulation.
‘Bloomsbury’ and beyond: Strachey, Woolf, and Mansfield
When the narrator of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited goes up to Oxford as an undergraduate in 1922 he
decorates his college rooms with objects indicative of his ‘advanced’ but essentially derivative taste. Charles Ryder
hangs up a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, a painting which had been
[p. 513]
shown at the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, and he displays a screen painted by Roger Fry that he has acquired at
the closing sale at Fry’s pioneering Omega Workshops (a byword for the clumsily experimental interior design of the
period). He also shows off a collection of books which he later embarrassedly describes as ‘meagre and
commonplace’. These books include volumes of Georgian Poetry (the last in the series of which had just appeared),
once popular and mildly sensational novels by Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972) and Norman Douglas (1868-1952),
Roger Fry’s Vision and Design of 1920 and Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians of 1918. These last two volumes,
issued in a similar popular format in the early 1920s, are the clearest signals of the extent to which the young Ryder
has been influenced by the canons of taste enunciated by the group of writers and artists who have come to be known
as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’.
‘Bloomsbury’ was never a formal grouping. Its origins lay in male friendships in late nineteenth-century
Cambridge; in the early 1900s it found a focus in the Gordon Square house of the children of Leslie Stephen in
unfashionable Bloomsbury; it was only with the formation of the ‘Memoir Club’ in 1920 that it loosely defined the
limits of its friendships, relationships, and sympathies. The ‘Memoir Club’ originally centred on Leslie Stephen’s two
daughters Virginia and Vanessa, their husbands Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, and their friends and neighbours
Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes. The group was
linked by what Clive Bell later called ‘a taste for discussion in pursuit of truth and a contempt for conventional ways
of thinking and feeling, contempt for conventional morals if you will’. Their discussions combined tolerant
agnosticism with cultural dogmatism, progressive rationality with social snobbery, practical jokes with refined self
advertisement. When in 1928 Bell (1881-1964) attempted to define ‘Civilization’ (in a book of that name) he
identified an aggrandized Bloomsbury ideal in the douceur de vivre and witty iconoclasm of the France of the
Enlightenment (though, as Virginia Woolf commented, ‘in the end it turns out that civilization is a lunch party at No
50 Gordon Square’). To its friends ‘Bloomsbury’ offered a prevision of a relaxed, permissive, and elitist future; to its
enemies, like the once patronized and later estranged D. H. Lawrence, it was a tight little world peopled by uppermiddle-class
‘black beetles’.
The prime ‘Bloomsbury’ text, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, suggests that it is easier to see what the
group did not represent than what it did. Strachey’s book struck a sympathetic chord with both his friends and the
public at large. Eminent Victorians (1918), a collection of four succinct biographies of Cardinal Manning, Florence
Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon, seemed to many readers to deliver the necessary coup de grâce to
the false ideals and empty heroism of the nineteenth century. These were principles which seemed to have been tried
on the Western Front and found disastrously wanting. Strachey (1880-1932) does not so much mock his subjects as let
them damn themselves in the eyes of their more enlightened successors.
[p. 514]
He works not by frontal assault but by means of the sapping innuendo and the carefully placed, explosive epigram. His
models, like Bell’s, are the Voltairean conversationalists of the Paris salons of the eighteenth century, not the earnest
Carlylean lecturers of Victorian London. When, for example, he speculates about Florence Nightingale’s conception
of God he jests that ‘she felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer’. In a review
written in 1909 Strachey had endorsed the idea that ‘the first duty of a great historian is to be an artist’. As his later
studies of Queen Victoria (1921) and of Elizabeth and Essex (1928) suggest, Strachey was neither a great historian
nor, ultimately, a great biographer, but he was undoubtedly an innovative craftsman. The ‘art’ of biography has never