364
STEPHEN SPENDER
Though parting's as cruel as the surgeon's knife,
It's better than ingrown canker, the rotten leaf·
All that I know is I have got to leave.
There's new lite fighting in me to get at the air,
And I can't stop its mouth with the rags of old love.
Clean wounds are easiest to bear.
The adroitness with which he establishes the superiority of the ideo–
logical "new life" struggling in
him
to the real new life-a child–
struggling in her, tells a lot about young human nature dominated by
an ideology.
To say that Julian Bell could not, except through a distortion
of his nature, have discovered such impersonal grounds for apparent
callousness is not to say that he might not have behaved just as
egotistically to any of his mistresses (whom Stansky and Abrahams list
as A, B, C, D, etc., far down the alphabet). The difference
is
that
Bell would have found a personal reason for justifying conduct that
Cornford justified by an "objective" one.
To most literary-minded readers, Bell will seem more interesting
than Cornford because he
is
the more self-searching and Hamletian
and literary character. Certainly his personality and his relations with
his relations make fascinating reading. It is part of the excellence of
their book that the authors, having put the reader
in
possession of
some of the facts, often leave him wondering. For instance, when
Bell
wrote that dissertation
The Good and All That
which, it was hoped,
would get him a fellowship at Kings, there were plenty of psychological
reasons why he should make a hash of it.
On
the one hand he wished
to please his Cambridge mentors by writing an essay on good and evil
in the manner of the discussions of the Apostles, but on the other
hand "more perhaps than he himself realized, Julian was in full revolt
against his Bloomsbury philosophical background, and its static con–
ception of 'states of mind' as values in themselves, or consequences that
might ensue from them." The confusedness was perhaps in part the
result of a naive desire not to shock Roger Fry, to whom the disserta–
tion was sent for a report. This was of course a model of tolerance and
fair-mindedness. How
liberal!
Anna Russell in her famous burlesque expose of Wagner's operas
points out (rightly or wrongly) that Siegfried had the misfortune never
to have met a lady who was not his aunt. There was something of such
a burlesque Siegfried about the young Julian Bell, who gives one the
impression of always encountering very understanding Bloomsbury aunts.
He certainly developed something of an anti-aunt complex. But, as
