THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
bury," a name which I did not begin to hear until the 1930's. These
writers did not admit that they were a group any more than
writers of my own generation thought of themselves as such. However,
like us they had certain qualities in common in the conditions of
their lives (particularly in their being a generation which had grown
up during the war), their tastes and their interests.
Perhaps the outstanding quality which defined Bloomsbury as
a group, is that they were consciously
in
revolt against the tradition
of Victorian realism in fiction and of romantic diction in poetry
which still lingered on after the war. E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf,
Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell shared with T. S. Eliot
(who can scarcely be included within this group) an interest in
re-examining the principles and aims of art, and support of art which
was consciously built up on defined principles. Although the thought
and the achievement of these writers differ greatly, they all made
new starts from carefully considered premises, their attitude to tradi–
tion was critical and discriminating. They were not content, as many
contemporaries had been, to accept tradition as literary good manners
handed down to them by the Victorians. They selected amongst their
ancestors and tried to interpret what they considered best in the past
within the conditions of the present.
Also the Bloomsbury writers had in common an admiration for
France, where they found the supreme achievements of the European
tradition. For values, in questions of style, for intellectual attitudes,
they turned always to French civilization. They simplified consider–
ably the task of modernizing English literature by making French
modernism in painting and poetry accessible to English artists and
writers.
It
may be that some of them watered down the French
penetration and passion to mere elegance and "good taste." Never–
theless, English culture owes an enormous debt to the opening up of
English life to French influences by this generation, and by several
other groups, especially the three Sitwells (who formed a kind of
family movement on their own).
The best works of Bloomsbury-the novels of E. M. Forster and
Virginia Woolf, the critical writing and historical biography of Lytton
Strachey, the art criticism of Roger Fry, the critical journalism of
Raymond Mortimer- are the works of individuals who excel any
grouping or movement which can be labeled, and yet they exist
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