Author: Robjn Cantus

Alfred Waldron was a talented printmaker born 1912. Born in the suburbs of Birmingham, he attended the local Art School, at that time famous for pushing the boundaries of graphic design and flaunting it in their annuals The Torch. Waldron studied under Eric Malthouse (taught at Birmingham from 1931-7), who’s estate these prints come from. Waldron was at the Birmingham School of Art from 1931-4. Graduating from the art school Waldon travelled to stay at the artists’ colony on Sark, in the Channel Islands.

In the 1930s many British artists worked on Sark for the good light but these were traditionalists such as Arthur Royce Bradbury, who spent most of the summers there. Eric Drake was a teacher at the Slade School of Art and had married a talented graphic artist, Lisel, and moved to the island too. Eric invited many artists to the island, including the groups most famous member, the author and artist Mervyn Peake in 1932. Peake spent the next five years on the island.

These young artists were shook up with new and bold styles of printmaking and painting and bought this to the island. Waldron joined the Sark Group of Artists in 1934, the same time as Guy Mallet, and they both exhibited prints at the newly built art gallery that acted as the centre for the artists on the island. They were joined by frequent guests on the island, Sybil and Cyril Andrews.

Other artists on the island included Medora Heather, Stanley Royal, C. T. Fay and George Elmslie Owen.

The teacher Eric Drake and his rich American wife Eloise, ‘Lisel’, an ex-Slade student, had started the Sark Art Group a few years earlier, hoping to imitate the artists’ colony in St Ives in Cornwall, and had built a studio.

Sybil & Cyril: Cutting through Time

In London the Sark Group exhibited at the Cooling Galleries, New Bond Street, London from May to June 1934. This exhibition created a lot of press coverage, and in an interview Drake tried to encourage young artists to come to Sark but suggesting that men could get money and credit on the island by taking on manual jobs such as gardening on the island “between his spells of artistic creation“.

Alfred Waldron was known as ‘Pip’ on the island. It’s claimed that Mervyn Peake based the character of Mr Pye (1953) on him.

Eric Drake wrote about Waldron: ‘he seemed to live in a world of fantasy that was private to him, if not completely autistic. I think we all felt his innate ability, but we also knew of his traumatic childhood; I hoped Sark would snap him out of it, but I guess it needed more than that’.

Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake – Page 72

Drake continues: Pip brought with him Alex Gannon to the Colony – ‘the two were hand in glove; I never tried to probe the relationship’. ‘Once Pip had seen Sark, he could hardly be made to go back to Birmingham, yet Gannon could hardly be made to give up his business [also in Birmingham] and kick his heels in Sark.”

Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake

A critic of one of the artists group shows said this of Waltron’s linocuts: ‘The perfect balance of the black and white, the vitality of the figures, the texture, and the composition as a whole, is amazing.’

The group stuck together until the war sealed the fate of the community on the island, as well as Eric Drakes’s separation with his wife in 1937.

Waldron also showed his work widely in North America including in the British Pavilion at the World’s Fair in New York 1939, National Gallery of Canada 1939, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1940, and the Arts Club of Chicago 1940. His work is in the collection of the British Council.

The last record of him exhibiting his work is in an exhibition in Puru, Exposición de arte Británico Contemporáneo with his linocuts for a planned book of the Omar Khayyam. The work was donated to the British Council by Mrs Douglas Mitchell.

Alfred Waldron’s last works were of Linocuts. It could be he died of natural causes or in the war but the British Council also have no record of what happened to him after 1945.

In the 1940s Piper had left the Cornish abstraction style of painting he had picked up in the 7&5 Society for the world of neo-romanticism. He started to paint the gothic buildings of his friends houses and really mastered the effect of light. Being able to use light dramatically might have been why he was tempted into design sets for the ballet, The Quest by William Walton, but more of that later.

John Piper – The Gothic Archway, Renishaw, 1942

Both Piper and Walton were guests of the Sitwells at the family home, Renishaw. Walton when interviewed at the end of his life remembered himself as a “scrounger” on their company in the 1920s and 30s and that they used him for his talents as a composer and he used them for access to others, such as Stravinsky, but he admitted, they knew everyone. The Sitwell’s were very keen to have creative people around them (rather like the Morrell’s a generation before). In the nature of friendships, collaborations happened.

For Walton and Sitwell this started with ‘Façade – An Entertainment’; a mixture of poems by Edith Sitwell recited over the music of William Walton. Sitwell penned some of the poems in 1918 and music was put to them in 1922, and a public performance the following year. The poems were recited behind the curtain with a band behind. Using a sangaphone. (A Megaphone made of paper mache to project the voice) Edith spoke out her poems in rhythm to the music and all the audience saw was a sheet, with a face painted on it and a hole for the megaphone.

Piper remembered his time at Renishaw in the Second World War as a shelter from chaos, and was also commissioned to paint the hall. Soon he found himself as a good friend of Osbert Sitwell and found the families high-brow conversation an education. In 1942 Edith revived Façade and Piper was commissioned to paint a curtain. Below is a screenprint made in 1987 to the same design as the 1942 performance. The black hole is where the sangaphone was placed.

John Piper – Façade, 1987 (A Screen Print based on the original curtain design)

The façade in Piper’s design was inspired by the entrance front of Eaton Hall in William Porden’s Regency Gothic incarnation. Eaton came into the possession of the Grosvenor family in the 1440s, and the first house on the present site was built in 1675-82. The house was transformed in 1804-14 by William Porden for the 2nd Earl Grosvenor, and in 1823-5 wings were added by Benjamin Gummow. The result was a spectacular Gothic mansion with spiky buttresses, pinnacles, battlements and turrets. The house was remodelled in 1846-51 by William Burn, and in 1869-83 Alfred Waterhouse transformed it into a Wagnerian palace for the 1st Duke of Westminster. This was demolished in 1961-3, leaving only the chapel and stables. A modern house was built in 1971-3, which in turn was transformed in 1989-91 for the present Duke.

Newspaper quote.

Now back to our Quest. It might have been Façade or just knowing the Sitwells that Piper became exposed to Walton but they ended up working together on The Quest, a ballet, scored by William Walton, designed by Piper with lost choreography by Frederick Ashton in 1943. The ballet, with a scenario by Doris Langley Moore, was based on The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. It was first given by the Sadler’s Wells Ballet company with Margot Fonteyn as the lead dancer.

The buildings sketched out in the illustration above were reproduced as the white tower in the centre and early designs for the follies to the side below.

John Piper – The House of Holinesse, 1943

This same image above, like Façade was made into a screenprint in 1986. Below you can see the design in the background of the dancers, with differences to the lake and the sky, the design is mostly accurate to Pipers drawings.

John Piper – The Place of Rocks near the Palace of Pride, 1943

You can see how the designers translated Pipers designs below, the shape of the grotto doors, allowing the players to move on and off the set.

The large leaf design on the left grotto door here shows the scale of the design and how well it was translated for the stage. Here Margot Fonteyn holds and sword above Robert Helpmann.

In another scene below you can see how Piper used light for drama on the stage.

John Piper – The Magician’s Cave, 1943

Below you can just see the wisps of the trees from The Magician’s Cave.

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In this last background painting is The House of Pride. The final version became a lot more refined and you can see it in the background of these promotional photographs.

John Piper – The House of Pride, 1943

Below is one of the costume designs by Piper for the Ballet. You can see feathers of the head-dress and the ruffals of the arms.

John Piper – Sloth, 1943

I have mentioned this many times before, Eric Ravilious, who was an artist in a hurry, used to replicate his work a great deal for different commissions. And here are a few examples of them. Most artists have themes and motifs in their work, but I don’t think I have come across any other artists who plagiarised themselves to this degree.

Above is a design he made for Wedgwood’s Travel series in 1938, a side plate and as you can see below it was a woodcut from The Hansom Cab and the Pigeons (1935) a book he illustrated by L. A. G. Strong.

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Another fine example is also from a book, Martin Armstrong’s Fifty-Four Conceits (1933) illustrated by Eric Ravilious of an biplane flying.

Below you can see the same image used for the Wedgwood Travel series, with clouds added because the transphers Wedgwood used couldn’t process black areas very well, even with halftone details. The same illustration was used for the Thomas Hennell’s book. Poems (1936).

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The woodcut above is one of the many designs Ravilious made for the Kynoch Press Notebook (1933). The three trees in the pond appear again here, with the snow falling in this design for the 1938 Wedgewood Travel series plate.

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Above is a watercolour that has been turned into a wood-engraving before for the London Transport walk books. The cows are thought to have been from Great Bardfield Hall and the farm connected on the side. You can also see he has copied the same cow twice but painted it in a different colour.

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Here you can see a mirror image of this Wedgwood design and the train in the plate. It is thought he copied his wood-engraving design, and when it was printed by Wedgwood the transfer made the design reverse.

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Though not a copy of his own work, it is an inspiration from his home. Ravilious had this print of a Race on the Mississippi above the fireplace in his living room, and I always believed this to be the inspiration of the boat design in the plate above, without the paddle engine to make it look more European.

Here is an invitation to the International Exhibition, Paris 1937, that the USSR would also use as an international gathering for the 20th anniversary of the USSR.

Below is the Eric Ravilious designed cover for the British version of the guide. There was also a cover in French.

The booklet below is where many of the photographs from this booklet come from. They have simple colour tints.

The booklet is full of interesting photos of the pavilions of each country. What visitors would have found most interesting that in 1937 both the Russian and German powers had key spots and so made towering entrances facing each other.

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The front view of the British Pavilion is above and the side view below.

The Finnish Pavilion below was designed by Alvar Aalto.

In June 1918, Sargent traveled to France as an official war artist for the British government. Commissioned to paint a picture commemorating the joint efforts of American and British troops, he spent four months along the Front, sketching and painting in watercolor as he searched for a subject.

What remains is a sensational series of paintings of conditions of the men, men off duty and situations of camp life.

John Singer Sargent – Studies for Gassed, 1919

John Singer Sargent – Gassed, 1919

John Singer Sargent – Studies for Gassed, 1919

John Singer Sargent – Wheels in Vault, 1918

John Singer Sargent – Truck Convoy, 1918

John Singer Sargent – Trucks, 1918

John Singer Sargent – Camp with Ambulance, 1918

John Singer Sargent – Tommies Bathing, 1918

John Singer Sargent – Tommies Bathing, 1918

John Singer Sargent – Landscape in ein Ruderer, 1918

John Singer Sargent – Dugout, 1918

Many artists have obsessions, painting the same subjects over and over. The Palais de la Jetee was an obsession for Raoul Dufy. A set of tea rooms, promenade and casino, it stood on a pier off the Nice seafront.

The pier was designed in 1870 and built in 1883, though four days before it’s opening it burnt down. This design was in an indian style, likely influenced on the Brighton Pavilion.

The pier, smoldering after the fire.

It was then redesigned and completed in 1891. This new construction was likely made more of cast-iron, for a quicker build. After the Great Exhibition of 1851, glass and iron buildings became popular for exhibition sites as they were quick to construct and cheaper to make. Part of the intention to build it was to attract tourists to Nice and this new build was dubbed the ‘crystal casino’.

The pier after the fire, 1888

Below is another postcard, likely mis-coloured by someone who had never been, but it shows the casino in the full summer season with the cafes lining the coast. The pier was closed during the Second World War and the German army stripped it of metal. There was then a bond scheme for people to reinvest in it, but this failed and it was then dismantled.

It is this second pier that fascinated Dufy. Was it so mesmeric to him? Or was it that it was a popular subject and easier to sell paintings of a happy holiday location? The fashion of the Côte d’Azur coast was at its peak at this time.

I thought I would also show one of the proposed designs for the pier and then some postcards of the interior.

Here are some of the paintings of bathtubs by Bonnard. These chart the relationship he had with his model, muse and later, wife, Marthe. Her legacy has been somewhat distorted by history as Dr Lucy Whelan has lately highlighted due to an immense amount of research. But the paintings of this singular subject are not alien to impressionist painters. It is true that Monet painted many subjects at the same time in different lights, but I am thinking more of Raoul Dufy who painted the Casino de la Jetée, Nice, over and over again, even after it had burnt down.

Marthe met Bonnard in 1893, and is at the centre of his work until around the time she signs herself as married in 1899 (when she appears to disappear for a while before gradually coming back). We do not know what caused the pair to split, but certainly the hard conditions of life for women in Marthe’s position left her at the mercy of proposals. And Bonnard, although from a bourgeois background, would not have earned much during the 1890s from his fledgling artistic career producing book illustrations and posters. In 1899, he was living in apartment 12, on the fifth floor of 65 rue Douai, not far from Montmartre – then a rather seedy district of Paris.

Pierre Bonnard – La Grande Baignoire, 1937.

Pierre Bonnard – Baignoire (Le Bain), c1940-46

Pierre Bonnard – Nu dans le bain, 1936

Pierre Bonnard – Baignoire (Le Bain), 1925.

Pierre Bonnard – Nu Dans La Baignoire, 1940

Pierre Bonnard – La Baignoire, 1942

Pierre Bonnard – Femme assise dans sa baignoire, 1925

Pierre Bonnard – Femme assise dans sa baignoire, 1942

Pierre Bonnard – Fontenay aux Roses, 1936

Pierre Bonnard – La toilette

Pierre Bonnard – Femme Debout Dans sa Baugnoire, c1925

Pierre Bonnard – Leaving the Bath (La Sortie Du Bain), 1930.

Pierre Bonnard – La salle de bain, 1932

As the title suggests, this is a lecture by Quentin Bell on his family that I haven’t found online, so using a text scanner, I have put it online for you all.

When it was known that the exhibition which you see around you would come to Leeds, Mr. Rowe suggested that I, as the son of the artist, should open it. I resisted this notion. A filial tribute is, of all literary forms, the most difficult and the most perilous censure is out of place and praise
is discounted; impersonality is absurd and intimacy is embarrassing. Thus it appeared, thus it appears to me and I felt that I could not undertake the task. Our Director is, however, a remarkably persuasive and persistent character. When he had twisted my arm very nearly clean out of its socket I agreed to talk, not about my mother, but about the circle of friends to which she belonged, that which the world knows as “Bloomsbury”. I have now become aware that, in accepting this proposition, I made a careful withdrawal from the frying pan into the fire. I shall again be forced into the compromising situation of an advocate; moreover there must be a
certain air of irrelevance about what I say. We are here in a picture gallery and you naturally expect me to talk about pictures, whereas in fact I must talk about writers and politicians, about philosophy and about sex (I shall probably be thrown out before I have done). But here I must ask you to bear with me, the incongruity between that which you see before you
and that which you will hear, is in truth, a part of my argument; it will help me to explain the nature of what they call the ‘Bloomsbury Group’.

Vanessa Bell – Virginia Woolf, 1912

I shall have to use the word ‘group’, but it is something of a misnomer; when one speaks of ‘a member of the group’ one suggests an organisation with rules, membership cards, and a programme. Bloomsbury had none of these things and it is not at all easy to say who was or who was not within that circle of friends, most of whom lived in Bloomsbury. Circles of friends are not usually perfect circles, in fact they are more like spirals which
extend further and further from their centres in a progressively widening helix. But even this image will not serve, for a spiral departs from a centre and in Bloomsbury there was no centre. I have heard Virginia Woolf described as the ‘Queen of Bloomsbury’ this is pure nonsense; Bloomsbury was never a Monarchy – neither was it a Republic. It was an anarchic entity in so far as it was an entity —without laws or leaders or a common doctrine. The inhabitants themselves differ when it comes to making a list of the so-called members.

Let me play safe: no account of Bloomsbury could omit Lytton Strachey and his cousin Duncan Grant, the two daughters of Leslie Stephen, Vanessa and Virginia, and their two husbands, Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf; to these we may certainly add Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry.

During the years between 1904 and 1914, these were very closely linked by friendship with Desmond MacCarthy and his wife Molly, Saxon Sidney Turner, Gerald Shove and H. T. J. Norton, E. M. Forster, and, until his early death, Thoby Stephen, the brother of Vanessa and Virginia.

During and after the First World War there were many other close contacts and the list could be enormously widened, but at this period, as I hope to show, the method of classification has to be altered. Now I was born in Bloomsbury and am related to or have been a close friend of all the people whom I have placed on my ‘shortlist’ and some of those in the more
extended catalogue. But I am very far from being an authority on this subject. I was only four years old when the first and most characteristic phase came to an end; and today a great deal has been written on the subject, so that a complete bibliography would, I suppose, be quite an
extensive document. I have read very little but I have read enough to gain the impression that Bloomsbury was, in the opinion of most critics, an unhealthy neighbourhood. Let me quote from one of these critics, Sir john Rothenstein:

Vanessa Bell – Lytton Strachey, 1911

“I doubt… whether more than a few people are even now aware how closely knit an association ‘Bloomsbury’ was, how untiring its members were in advertising one another’s work and personalities. Most people who came into casual contact with members of this gifted circle recall its charm, its candour, its high intelligence; few…suspected how ruthless and businesslike were their methods. They would have been surprised if they had known of the lengths to which some of these people were prepared to go in order to ruin, utterly, not only the ‘reactionary’ figures whom they publicly denounced, but young painters and writers who showed themselves too independent to come to terms with the canons observed by ‘Bloomsbury’ or, more precisely, with the current ‘party line’…. If such independence was allied to gifts of an order to provoke rivalry, then so much the worse for thc artists. And bad for them it acts, for there was nothing in the way of slander and intrigue to which certain of the ‘Bloomsburys’ were not willing to descend. I rarely knew hatreds pursued with so much malevolence over so many years; against them neither age nor misfortune offered the slightest. protection.”

Rothenstein’s hard words certainly prove how much Bloomsbury has been
disliked. I do not think that they prove very much more than that because,
when it comes to the awkward business of supporting his accusations with evidence, Sir John is completely at a loss. He has in fact been challenged to make good his words and has failed to do so. I understand that in a later edition of his book they have been omitted. But the fabrication, for it certainly is a gross and impertinent fabrication, has been widely circulated and I take this opportunity to deny it.

Now let me turn to a more common and more reasonable line of criticism which is expressed well enough by Mr. A. D. Moody in a study of Virginia Woolf. Mr. Moody describes the origins of Bloomsbury in the Victorian middle class, that section of it which produced the Darwins, the Haldanes, thc Huxleys, the Strachey’s, and the Stephens, academics and civil servants who “became the top layer of the middle class, primarily by virtue of intellectual ability and moral responsibility, though inevitably this later took the form of social exclusiveness.” Mr. Moody sees Bloomsbury as a fraction of this part of the establishment.

“The distinguishing character of the Bloomsbury group derived largely from King’s College, Cambridge, and principally from the philosopher, G. E. Moore, author of ‘Principia Ethica’. The influence of G. E. Moore can be described as a turning back within the ‘intellectual aristocracy in a rather ideal form of Arnold’s ‘Culture’, or rather in that aspect of it which led Eliot to connect Arnold with Pater. The ideal of Moore’s followers was the exclusive and strictly non-practical pursuit of ‘sweetness and light’ ‘love, beauty and truth’ were their own terms. They had the requisite residue of Hebraic conscience, expressed mostly in righteous scorn for the barbarian, philistine and populace, to which all outsiders were consigned; and they subscribed to the Greek heritage. Since their concern was all for a civilisation of the mind, they regarded as outsiders the main body of the Establishment who were concerned with the more practical problems of governing and civilising. Thus they set up a cultural elect within the Establishment elite.”

Vanessa Bell – Leonard Woolf, 1940

Mr. Moody overlooks an important element in the formation of Bloomsbury and his generalisations can hardly be applied even to the short list that I have made. I am not quite sure what he means when he says that ‘they subscribed to the Greek heritage’, but certainly the phrase could hardly be used of Roger Fry nor could he be described as a follower of G. F. Moore. But I think that Mr. Moody’s principal criticism, and it is a common one, is that Bloomsbury lived in an ivory tower, that it scorned the populace, and that it disdained the ‘practical problems of governing and civilising’. It is a criticism with which I have some sympathy. I remember that when Maynard Keynes read his essay entitled My Early Beliefs to a group which included what we called ‘Old Bloomsbury’ and also to some much younger persons, we, the young, agreed that it was a fantastically reactionary document and revealed a politically innocent and parochial attitude on the part of Cambridge at the beginning of the century which we deplored. Nevertheless, whether their political beliefs were right or wrong, we could hardly maintain that our elders had withdrawn from political action. Neither Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf nor Lytton Strachey could be described as being indifferent to the practical problems of governing and civilising; Keynes and Woolf were in fact public servants. The suffrage movement, the foreign and colonial policy of the Labour Party, the credit structure of the Western world have all felt their influence.
The third critic whom I would like to mention was D. H. Lawrence.

Lawrence went to Cambridge in 1915 and met a number of people, some of whom Keynes, Duncan Grant and, perhaps, Francis Birrell, the son of Augustine Birrell may fairly be described as ‘members of Bloomsbury’, others, such a Bertrand Russell, who can not. His reaction was sharp and decisive:

“…to hear these young people talk really fills me with black fury: they talk endlessly, but endlessly and never, never a good thing said. They are cased each in a hard little shell of his own and out of this they talk words. There is never for one second any outgoing or feeling and no reverence, not a crumb or grain of reverence. I cannot stand it. I will not have people like this….”

And to David Garnett who had brought about this unlucky meeting:

“Never bring Birrell to see me any more. There is something nasty about him like black beetles. He is horrible and unclean. I feel I should go mad when I think of your set, Duncan Grant and Keynes and Birrell. It makes me dream of beetles….”

Keynes, in the work to which I have already alluded, considers Lawrence ignorant, jealous, irritable and hostile (and, as one who remembers the charm, sincerity and good humour of Birrell, I should add: blind), but he goes on to ask whether there was not “something true and right in what Lawrence felt? There generally was. His reactions were incomplete and unfair, but they were not usually baseless.” In a brilliant analysis of the influence of Moore on Cambridge and of the way in which the profoundly unworldly teachings of that philosopher changed in the hands of a generation which found that it could not accept the high seriousness or the
austerity of its starting point, Keynes concludes that Lawrence was not altogether wrong. The criticism may be just, but is it a criticism of Bloomsbury? Could it be directly applied to, shall we say, Roger Fry
or Virginia Woolf’? I doubt it. Is there in fact enough community of thought and feeling in Bloomsbury to make any criticism of this kind valid?
I think that perhaps there is, that the quality which Lawrence called ‘irreverence common to all; but one cannot understand Bloomsbury unless one begins by acknowledging its heterogeneous character and observing that it was heterogeneous in a very special way. It is because this has not been understood that so many of the criticisms that are aimed at it fall partly or wholly outside the target area. I think I may come at the nature of
Bloomsbury by looking at its origins. In so doing I must again admit that I do not speak as an authority, in fact I rely very largely upon a volume which Sir Leslie Stephen wrote for his children after his wife’s death. It gives a sufficiently vivid picture of one of the families from which Bloomsbury sprang but it is, of course, concerned only with this one family. I will try, however, to confine myself to those transactions which were reasonably typical of many such families and which set the
tone for Cambridge and for London at the end of the Victorian Age.
What kind of people were they? They had money, not enough to keep them in idleness but enough to enable them to choose the kind of work that they would do in the world. They went into the Universities, into the Civil Service —-above all into the Indian Civil Service—they wrote books, they edited journals. The great intellectual adventure of their lives was
the struggle between faith and reason. The struggle was an arduous one and certainly it would be a mistake to think of our grandfathers as living a sheltered life—it was the very opposite for they looked out with dismay into an empty universe. But it was a private struggle. By this I mean that, unlike continental atheists, English freethinkers were not naturally drawn to a political position and that, although they had changed their views
concerning the origin and destiny of men and women, this in no way altered their views concerning the proper relationship between ladies and gentlemen. The enlightened English home at the end of the century might be, and very often was, a benevolent despotism; but it was and it remained despotic. Our Father in heaven might be removed to the world of myth,
but our father at the breakfast table persisted. Just what this could mean in practice in what was, taking one thing with another, a happy family, we may see from Virginia Woolf’s portrait of Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Stephen worshipped his wife;

“He desired,” writes Noel Annan, “to transform her into an apotheosis
of motherhood, but treated her in the home as someone who should
be at his beck and call, support him in every emotional crisis, order the
minutiae of his life and then submit to his criticism in those household
matters of which she was mistress… he was for ever trampling upon her feelings, wounding the person who comforted him, half conscious of his hebetude, unable to contain it.”

This was the paternalist structure of society in action as the Stephen children saw it and they did not have to look very far afield in order to see how the conventional morality in which they had been reared could turn to unreasoning savagery. A short entry in my grandfather’ private memoir reads thus:

“There happened a terrible scandal in consequence of which Lady
Somers daughter, Lady Henry Somerset, was separated from her husband —a blackguard.”

Behind this brief statement lies a Victorian tragedy. My grandmother’s
cousin had married a man who, in so far as he was unfaithful to her, might fairly be termed ‘a blackguard’, but the terribly scandalous nature of his ‘blackguard’, but the terribly ‘blackguardism’ lay in the fact that his partner in sin was of his own sex.

Now observe the workings of Victorian morality: when the scandal broke, and it was the young wife’s mother who made it public, the censure of society was brought to bear, not on the husband, who escaped to Italy and ended his days in cultured ease, but upon the wife. Her guilt consisted in the fact that she reminded society of something that it preferred to disregard. She was cut, ignored and as far as possible forgotten by good society. I am happy to say that my grandparents proved on this occasion that they were not really members of good society. I do not think it will be denied that, with very few exceptions, the hard thinking, bravely speculative intellectual elite when confronted with that which it considered ‘morbid’ or ‘unnatural’ was, like the rest of good society, bereft of courage, humour, compassion and reason.

The younger generation was confronted, then, by a system of morality which was by no means purely ethical, it was a system which allowed the strong and the fortunate to injure the weak, the herd to dominate and destroy the individual. This, it may be objected, is still the case but today audible protests are made, eighty years ago they were not. G. E. Moore did not offer an escape from this system, as Keynes has pointed out ‘he found a place in his religion for vindictive punishment’ and no place at all one may add for l’homme moyen sensuel. But his disciples could find in his concern with passionate states of contemplation and communion, with love and with beauty, enough to write into his teachings a doctrine of complete nonconformity in faith and morals. It is interesting to notice that Bertrand Russell came to the same position via Spinoza. The a priori moral judgment, unquestioned acceptance of established patterns of behaviour, the taboo that forbids further discussion of a subject, all were discarded and the burden of making ethical decisions was taken from society and thrust upon the individual. This I think was characteristic of Bloomsbury
at the beginning of the century. I think it had a deep effect upon the habits
of speech and thought of the group and that its influence is discernible in the writings of Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and even of
Roger Fry.

This then brings me to the first common characteristic of the group, its readiness to talk about anything:

“They showed 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” says Clive Bell and adds:

“Does it not strike you that as much could be said of many collections of young and youngish people in many ages and many lands? For my part, I find nothing distinctive here.”

Personally I doubt whether any group had ever been quite so radical in its approach to sexual taboos. I am not sure. But I am sure that in this country, at all events, there had never before been a moral adventure of this kind in which women were on a completely equal footing with men with, so to speak, no holds barred. It was this which, after 1903 at all events, made Bloomsbury very unlike any other Cambridge group, made it in fact ‘un-Cambridge’. But there was something else, something even more important, an influence which was in a sense anti-Cambridge, and this I think has been overlooked by most of the people who have written about Bloomsbury. It is here that I would ask you to look at the pictures on the walls. You will search in vain I think for the influence of G. F. Moore or Bertrand Russell, you will find that of Cezanne and Matisse, of Velasquez and of Duncan Grant. Vanessa and Virginia Stephen were from the first. affected by two parental influences. From their father they imbibed and reacted against a purely Cambridge doctrine, the doctrine of men such as Fav cett and Maitland, which was concerned entirely with the world of literature and of ideas. From their mother they learnt of a very different society, the society of Little Holland House, of Watts and Woolmer, Val Prinsep and Burne Jones. They reacted against this too, in so far as it represented the late Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, but their reaction was an aesthetic reaction. Leslie Stephen climbed the Alps, at his feet lay Milan and Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Turin and Bergamo. But never, in all his life, did he go down to visit these cities of the plain. For him Paris was a station between London and Geneva, the fine arts a mystery that he did not care
to examine. His children did not climb the Alps, they hastened past them to Arezzo and to Padua; above all they journeyed to Paris and there, with Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, established friendships with Picasso, Derain, Andre Marchand, Segonzac and Matisse such as have seldom existed between artists on opposite sides of the Channel.

The great and moving spirit in all this was Roger Fry and, to my mind, the
great and decisive act of Bloomsbury was the Post Impressionist exhibition of 1910. The exhibition itself represented comparatively little to those of the group who were neither artists nor art critics. But the reaction to the exhibition was important. Desmond MacCarthy, who was secretary of the first exhibition, has left his account of the laughter and abuse with which it was greeted. Leonard Woolf has recently published his account of the
second exhibition —in 1912.

“The first room was filled with Cezanne watercolors. The highlights in the second room were two enormous pictures of more than life-size figures by Matisse and three or four Picassos. There was also a Bonnard, and a good picture by Marchand. Large numbers of people came to the exhibition and nine out of ten of them either roared with laughter at the pictures or were enraged by them…. The whole business gave me a lamentable view of human nature, its rank stupidity and uncharitableness… hardly any of them made the slightest attempt to look at, let alone understand the pictures and the same inane remarks were repeated to me all day long. And every now and then some well-groomed, redfaced gentlemen, oozing the undercut of the best beef and the most succulent of chops, carrying his top hat and grey suede gloves, would come up to the table and abuse the pictures and me with the greatest rudeness.”

The intensely individualist revolt against Victorian morality is paralleled by the equally individualist revolt against Victorian aesthetics. In both cases Bloomsbury is on the side of the individual and against what it sees as the irrational power of the establishment. In both cases it stands on the side of reason and tolerance and against authority. Such an affirmation of individualism implies, in the absence of any alternative system of ethics and belief, irreverence. And I think that Lawrence was right when he found Bloomsbury lacking in that quality. I think also that critics of Bloomsbury are right when they accuse it of a centripetal, a clannish tendency, although here, if one is to be fair, it is necessary to make
all kinds of reservations and qualifications. To some extent the mere fact that Bloomsbury was committed to an attitude which was fiercely resented by the majority of ‘right-thinking people’ made it more compact. The experience of the two post-Impressionist exhibitions augmented that
feeling; but the really formative moment, in this respect, was the war, that war which was humorously styled ‘the war to end war’.

Here again the reactions of Bloomsbury were not uniform, some opposed the war and became conscientious objectors, others joined in the war effort. But there was, I think, a common reaction to the communal spirit of that time, a spirit of unreasoning devotion to the Fatherland and equally unreasoning hatred of the enemy. My generation has seen a war which was, in all conscience, horrible enough and in many ways more terrible than that which preceded it; but at least it was not obviously and hopelessly futile, the generals could at least lead armies and win victories. From December 1914 to March 1918 the pointless and gigantic butchery was organised by elderly gentlemen who remained at a safe distance from the firing line, in order that the business —and it was a profitable business —might continue. The press, the publicists and the politicians had continually to proclaim the unspeakable wickedness of the enemy, the purity of our intentions, the stirring integrity of our allies, and the fact that we were in some mysterious, imperceptible and yet indubitable fashion, winning. It was this the hatred and the hubris of the home front that Bloomsbury refused to accept, it was here that it proved its final and complete irreverence for anything save the intellect. Lytton Strachey ordering a glass of lager beer in a restaurant found himself faced by the protests of his neighbour, protests which ended with the half apologetic admission, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but it drives me silly with rage to see a Britisher drinking a hun beer.” “So I observe,” replied Strachey. The refusal of the intellectual to be stampeded by a collective emotion whether it be of love or of hatred, is exasperating to the ordinary man and calls forth all his witch hunting instincts; but it is even more exasperating to the intellectual who has accepted the collective emotion. There is, I think, no more touching record of D. H. Lawrence than his letter to Ottoline Morrell of 14th May, 1915, after the sinking of the Lusitania: There had been riots in London, German shops or at least shops with German names, were smashed and looted and Lawrence wrote:

“I cannot bear it much longer, to let the madness get stronger and stronger possession. Soon we in England shall go fully mad, with hate. I too hate the Germans so much, I could kill every one of them. Why should they goad us to this frenzy of hatred, why should we be tortured to bloody madness, when we are only grieved in our souls, and heavy? They will drive our heaviness and our grief away in a fury of rage. And we don’t want to be worked up into this fury, this destructive madness of rage. Yet we must, we are goaded on and on. I am mad with rage myself. I would like to kill a million Germans —two millions….”

and then at the end of the letter:

“Don’t take any notice of my extravagant talk -one must say something.”

If one is D. H. Lawrence one must, even if one knows at bottom that what one is saying is stupid and odious, for it is produced by a real sentiment of anger and of affection, real sentiments are holy things, things to be treated with reverence. It is not surprising that Lawrence detested Bloomsbury, nor is it surprising that under the stress of war Bloomsbury became increasingly separated from the main current of intellectual life, for it was the liberals the progressively minded people who were loudest in their rage against the Germans and who, unlike Lawrence, mistook their emotions for patriotism and sanity. Apart from religious and political extremists, Bloomsbury had no allies. Bloomsbury, according to Vanessa Bell, ended in 1915. In a sense it is true and yet the achievements of Bloomsbury were
still to come. It was the war itself which, more than anything, brought Leonard Woolf into practical politics; it was Versailles which impelled Keynes to make his celebrated attack upon a peace which he saw as vindictive and unworkable. Eminent Victorians was, I think, published
in the same year. By the mid nineteen twenties, the communal feeling that had made the war and made the treaty was dissipated, people began to wonder whether there might not, after all, be something to be said for reason and critical detachment. At the same time the war itself shook the patriarchal morality of the nineteenth century to its foundations. The libertarian spirit of Bloomsbury was no longer exceptional, neither was it any longer so odd a thing to admire Cezanne or even Picasso. A new generation arose which has sometimes been identified with Bloomsbury but for which I think that one ought to find another name, even though the older members were often very intimate with their younger contemporaries. Bloomsbury had ended by the twenties in the sense that its always very tenuous common qualities ceased to be meaningful; its beliefs were shared by many people and as the individuals who had originally made it developed, they became less and less capable of being contained within any generalisation. A group of friends continued to meet, held together by old affections and, perhaps, by the memory of a time when they had been unified in moral isolation; but by the 1930’s it was no longer possible to find any intellectual attitude that would distinguish them from their fellows. Thereafter the group itself rapidly changed character as it fell beneath the sentence of the President of the Immortals.