WRITERS AND POLITICS
361
Clive and Vanessa Bell and the Cornford parents disagreed with the
younger generation's anti-Fascist politics (they sympathized with them).
But they regarded politicians as philistine and the artist in politics as
betraying the pure cause of individualist art. Leftish political sympa–
thies were almost a part of the ethos of literary Bloomsbury, but
political action seemed vulgar. Art had no connection with political
action, nor with the good life of personal relations and refined sensa–
tions which could only be enjoyed by the individual in isolation or
among friends.
J.
M. Keynes and Leonard Woolf were, of course, in
their different ways, politically involved and influential but they were
so without lowering their intellectual values or sacrificing personal
relationships.
These attitudes are reflected in Forster's novels, in which the good
characters have liberal values but realize them only through the medium
of personal relations. Business, power, government for Forster belong
to the w.orld of "telegrams and anger." That Margaret or Helen Schlegel
should carry their socialism further than a few committees, and those
personal relations with Henry Wilcox and Leonard Bast which test
their principles, seems unthinkable. And although Fielding, Aziz and
the other characters who fight on the side of the angels are opposed
to the British Raj, it is difficult to think of them taking any effective
political action: they attempt to resolve their problems through per–
sonal relations between British and Indians. One of their chief griev–
ances against the British occupiers is that they have made relations
perhaps impossible.
Forster's antipolitics, antipower, antibusiness attitude is implicit
also in the novels of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Aldous
Huxley, which have so little else in common. The fact is that the separa–
tion of the world of private values imagined in art from the world
of the public values of business, science, politics was an essential part
of the victory of the generation for whom "the world changed in
1910" against their elders Shaw, Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. The
accusation leveled against the "Georgian" novelists was that they de–
picted characters who were the social average of the material circum–
stances in which they lived. They interpreted human beings as walking
functions of the society that conditioned them with body, soul, sensi–
bility and sex, common denominators of the general gritty smog,
stabbed through with steely rays of scientific materialist social progress.
The aim of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf was to create char–
acters who were isolated creatures of unique awareness with sensibility
transcending their material circumstances.
