PARTISAN REVIEW
within a movement, a meeting of friends and colleagues. These friends
were an influence which helped other writing: the novels of Evelyn
Waugh and Aldous Huxley, the lyrical essays in several manners
of Cyril Connolly.
This generation had ideas of living and art which were very
different from ours, though it took me long to realize the difference.
Making modest claims on their time, they yet felt they had the right
-indeed the duty-to cultivate themselves on a moderate diet of the
arts, learning, pleasure and travel. In order to produce a few master–
pieces and a great quantity of amusing and intelligent discussion of
ideas, they maintained a modest standard of middle-class gentility.
They certainly were not great exploiters and they lived far more
modestly and expected less from society than the bureaucratic favored
Soviet writer receives today. At the same time, their standard of "400
pounds a year and a room of one's own" (Virginia Woolf's figure
in
a famous essay ) , decisively removed their work and their leisure
from the struggle of the great mass of mankind. They were decidedly
class conscious, conscious even of a social gulf which divided them
from a writer who had risen from the miners- D. H. Lawrence.
Socialist in sympathy, the atmosphere of Bloomsbury was one of
mild social snobbishness. These friends liked aristocratic elegance,
and Clive Bell-the rather embarrassing self-appointed definer of
Civilization- wrote
that civilization depended on slavery. They were
tolerant in their attitude towards morals, scrupulous in personal rela–
tions with each other, lacking in religious passion.
Bloomsbury has been sneered at, but there was a great deal to
be said
in
its favor. It revived the principles of a tradition of genteel
living, put such a life on a modest and moderate basis where it was
still possible for cultivated people, living
in
charming country or in
pleasant parts of London, to write well, decorate their houses agree–
ably, and entertain friends who could converse as well as they did
themselves. Despite their tendency to be cliquish and their sense
of their own superiority, they were essentially kind, human, loyal
and considerate. Rather too conscious perhaps of being the last
Romans iurrounded by tottering Empires, nevertheless they could
reasonably claim to be really civilized.
To them, there was something barbarous about our generation.
For in us it appeared that the thin wall carefully constructed since
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