Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (33 page)

Temple’s philosophy enshrined the belief, so characteristic of the twentieth century, that Christian morality was reflected in the pursuit of secular economic ‘solutions’. The Christian notion of guilt, embodied in the unease of comfortable, well-fed Anglican dignitaries,
powerfully reinforced the feeling of obligation which the possessing classes and the better-off nations were beginning to entertain towards the deprived, at home and abroad. Economics was not about wealth-creation, it was about duty and righteousness. Naturally Temple found eager allies on the agnostic side of the progressive spectrum. Keynes wrote him a remarkable letter, which hotly denied that economics was a morally neutral science: ‘… economics, more properly called political economy, is a side of ethics.’
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That was what the prelate wished to hear and the Fellow of King’s was anxious to teach.

As such Keynes spoke for the insidious anti-establishment which in the 1920s emerged from the privacy of Cambridge and Bloomsbury to effect a gradual but cumulatively decisive reversal in the way the British ruling class behaved. Hitherto, the axioms of British public policy at home, and of British imperialism abroad, had reflected the moral climate of Balliol College, Oxford, under the Mastership of Benjamin Jowett. Its tone was judicial: Britain’s role in the world was to dispense civilized justice, enforced if necessary in the firmest possible manner. It was epitomized in the person of Lord Curzon, fastidious, witty, urbane and immensely cultured but adamant in the upholding of British interests, which he equated with morality as such. ‘The British government’, he minuted to the cabinet in 1923, ‘is never untrue to its word, and is never disloyal to its colleagues or its allies, never does anything underhand or mean … that is the real basis of the moral authority which the British Empire has long exerted.’
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Naturally, when need arose, that moral authority had to be stiffened by tanks and aeroplanes and warships operating from the string of bases Britain maintained throughout the world.

At Cambridge a rather different tradition had developed. While Oxford sent its stars to parliament, where they became ministers and performed on the public stage, Cambridge developed private groups and worked by influence and suggestion. In 1820 a Literary Society had been formed, of twelve members known as the Apostles, which propagated the early heterodoxies of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Its recruits, collectively chosen and secretly elected – not even the mere existence of the society was ever acknowledged – were of high calibre but teachers and critics rather than major creators: the one massive talent, Alfred Tennyson, quickly slipped away in 1830.
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The Apostles’ world-picture was diffident, retiring, unaggressive, agnostic, highly critical of pretensions and grandiose schemes, humanitarian and above all more concerned with personal than with public duties. It cultivated introspection; it revered friendship. It was homosexual in tone though not often in practice. Tennyson captured its mood in his poem ‘The Lotus Eaters’.

In 1902 the Apostles elected a young Trinity undergraduate called Lytton Strachey. His father had been a general in India for thirty years – Curzon’s world, in fact – but his intellectual and moral formation was that of his mother, an agnostic stalwart of the Women’s Progressive Movement, and a free-thinking French republican schoolmistress called Marie Silvestre.
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Two years before being elected to the Apostles he had formed, with Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, a ‘Midnight Society’ which later devolved into the Bloomsbury Group. Both the Apostles and Bloomsbury, one secret and informal, the other informal and admitting a few women, revolved for the next thirty years round Strachey. Initially, however, he was not the philosopher of the sect. That was the role of G.E.Moore, a Trinity don and fellow-Apostle whose major work,
Principia Ethica
, was published the autumn after Strachey’s election. Its last two chapters, ‘Ethics in Relation to Conduct’ and ‘The Ideal’, were, by implication, a frontal assault on the Judaeo-Christian doctrine of personal accountability to an absolute moral code and the concept of public duty, substituting for it a non-responsible form of hedonism based on personal relationships. ‘By far the most valuable things which we know or can imagine’, Moore wrote, ‘are certain states of consciousness which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of personal objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art and Nature are good in themselves.’
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Strachey, who was a propagandist of genius rather than a creator, pounced on this discreet volume with the same enthusiasm Lenin showed for Hobson’s
Imperialism
, published the year before. It was just the argument he wanted and could preach. To his fellow-Apostle Keynes he wrote urgently of ‘the business of introducing the world to Moorism’. The book was the ideology not of odious Victorian duty, but of friendship; and, as he confided to Keynes, with whom he was already competing for the affections of handsome young men, of a very special kind of friendship: ‘We can’t be content with telling the truth – we must tell the whole truth: and the whole truth is the Devil…. It’s madness for us to dream of making dowagers understand that feelings are good, when we say in the same breath that the best ones are sodomitical … our time will come about a hundred years hence.’
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Not only did friendship have higher claims than conventional morality, it was ethically superior to any wider loyalty. The point was to be made by Strachey’s fellow-Apostle, E.M.Forster: if I had to choose between betraying my
country
and betraying my
friend
, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’
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Moore’s doctrine, outwardly so un-political, almost quietist, was in practice an excellent formula for an intellectual take-over. It provided ethical justification not merely for a society of mutual admirers, as the Apostles had been in the past, but for the formation of a more positive and programmatic freemasonry, a mafia almost. The Apostles system gave it access to some of the best brains Cambridge could provide: Bertrand Russell, Roger Fry, Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance. A network of links by friendship and marriage produced convivial metropolitan centres – 21 Fitzroy Square, 38 Brunswick Square, 10 Great Ormond Street, 3 Gower Street, 46 Gordon Square, 52 Tavistock Square – as well as hospitable Trinity and King’s, and such rural hostelries as Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington, publicized in
Crome Yellow.
Apostles (or their relations) held strategic positions: Strachey’s uncle controlled the
Spectator
, Leonard Woolf the literary pages of the
Nation
, Desmond MacCarthy (and later Raymond Mortimer) those of the
New Statesman.
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There were several friendly publishing houses.

Not for nothing was Strachey the son of a general. He had a genius for narcissistic élitism and ran the coterie with an iron, though seemingly languid, hand. From the Apostles he grasped the principle of group power: the ability not merely to exclude but to be seen to exclude. He perfected the art of unapproachability and rejection: a Bloomsbury mandarin could wither with a glance or a tone of voice. Within his magic circle exclusiveness became a kind of mutual life-support system. He and Woolf called it ‘the Method’.
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Strachey, moreover, did not have to wait ‘a hundred years’ before his time came. The war brought his moment, for it allowed him to publicize his counter-establishment philosophy in the form of avoiding national service. His method of doing so was subtle and characteristic. With other Bloomsberries, he belonged to the No-Conscription Fellowship and the National Council against Conscription. He did not play an active part in their campaign, which might have been legally dangerous, and which he left to more energetic souls like Russell.
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But he made a sensational appearance before a tribunal in Hampstead Town Hall in March 1916, fortified by special vitamin-food and Swedish exercise and flanked by his three adoring sisters. ‘Tell me, Mr Strachey,’ he was asked by the chairman, ‘what would you do if you saw a German soldier attempting to rape your sister?’ ‘I should try to come between them.’ The joke was much relished; the high, squeaky voice universally imitated; no one had transfixed a courtroom in quite that way since the days of Oscar Wilde. In fact Strachey did not in the end stand on his pacifist principles at all but obtained exemption thanks to
‘sheaves of doctors’ certificates and an inventory of his medical symptoms’.
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He spent the entire war writing his quartet of biographical essays,
Eminent Victorians
, which, by holding up Thomas Arnold, Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning and General Gordon to ridicule and contempt, was, in effect, a wholesale condemnation of precisely those virtues and principles the men in the trenches were dying to uphold. He finished it in December 1917, just as the calamitous battle of Passchendaele ended in a sea of blood and mud. It was published the following year to immediate acclaim and lasting influence. Few books in history have ever been better timed.

Later, Cyril Connolly was to call
Eminent Victorians
‘the first book of the Twenties … he struck a note of ridicule which the whole war-weary generation wanted to hear …. It appeared to the postwar young people like the light at the end of a tunnel.’ The sharper members of the old guard instantly saw it for what it was – ‘downright wicked in its heart’, wrote Rudyard Kipling in a private letter.
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Everyone else loved it, often for that very reason. Even among the soft underbelly of the establishment there was a self-indulgent welcome. H.H.Asquith, once the star of Jowett’s Balliol, now rosy-plump and bibulous, ousted from the premiership by Lloyd George for lack of energy, gave the book what Strachey termed ‘a most noble and high-flown puff in the course of his Romanes Lecture. It appeared as Ludendorff’s last offensive tore through the British Fifth Army; new editions poured out long after the Germans had begun their final retreat, and it proved itself far more destructive of the old British values than any legion of enemies. It was the instrument by which Strachey was able to ‘introduce the world to Moorism’, becoming in the process the most influential writer of the Twenties. As Keynes’s biographer Roy Harrod later wrote: ‘The veneration which his young admirers accorded [Strachey] almost matched that due to a saint.’
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Strachey became the ruling mandarin of the age and the Bloomsberries his court – for, as has been well observed, ‘their unworldliness was in fact a disguise for a thoroughgoing involvement with the world of fashion’.
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Yet their power was not directly exerted on public policy, as a rule. Keynes said that Strachey regarded politics as no more than ‘a fairly adequate substitute for bridge’. Even Keynes never sought government office. They moved behind the scenes or in print and sought to create intellectual climates rather than shape specific policies. Keynes’s
Economic Consequences of the Peace
rammed home the message of
Eminent Victorians
just as it made brilliant use of Strachey’s new literary techniques. In 1924 E.M.Forster published
A Passage to India
, a wonderfully insidious assault on the principle of the Raj, neatly turning upside down the belief in British superiority
and maturity which was the prime justification of the Indian Empire. Two years later Forster’s Apostolic mentor, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who invented the term ‘A League of Nations’ and founded the League of Nations Union, published his
The International Anarchy 1904–14
, a grotesquely misleading account of the origins of the Great War, which superbly reinforced the political moral of Keynes’s tract.
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The foreign policy of Bloomsbury was that Britain and Germany were on exactly the same moral plane up to 1918 and that, since then, Britain had been at a moral disadvantage, on account of an iniquitous peace, a continuing imperialism and armaments which, in themselves, were the direct cause of war. To a great mass of educated opinion in Britain this slowly became the prevailing wisdom.

In a deeper sense, too, Bloomsbury represented an aspect of the nation now becoming predominant. Like the shattered ranks of the old gentry, like the idle acres, like the dole-queues, Bloomsbury lacked the energizing principle. It is curious how often in photographs Strachey is shown, supine and comatose, in a low-slung deckchair. Frank Swinnerton recorded that, at their first meeting, ‘He drooped if he stood upright, and sagged if he sat down. He seemed entirely without vitality.’
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He ‘dragged his daddy longlegs from room to room’, wrote Wyndham Lewis, ‘like a drug-doped stork.’ Strachey himself admitted to his brother: ‘We’re all far too weak physically to be any use at all.’
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Few Bloomsberries married; and even those not addicted to what was termed ‘the higher sodomy’ lacked the philoprogenitive urge. The circle was outraged when Keynes, for reasons which are still mysterious, married the bouncing Russian dancer Lydia Lopokova.

What is perhaps even more striking is the low productivity of Bloomsbury, so curiously akin to Britain’s exhausted industries. Strachey himself produced only seven books, two of them collected articles. MacCarthy’s expected major work never materialized: there were volumes of pieces but no original book. Raymond Mortimer followed exactly the same pattern. Forster, known as the
Taupe
(the Mole), was another low-voltage writer: five novels only (apart from his homosexual fiction,
Maurice
, published posthumously). He was made a Fellow of King’s in 1946 and thereafter he wrote nothing, pursuing a mole-like existence for a quarter of a century, emerging only to collect honorary degrees. Another member of the group, the philosopher J.E.McTaggart, was able to work only two or three hours a day and spent the rest of his time devouring light novels at the rate of nearly thirty a week. He ‘walked with a strange, crab-like gait, keeping his backside to the wall’.
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Lowes Dickinson, too, was an etiolated, lethargic figure in a Chinese mandarin’s cap. Virginia
Woolf wrote of him, ‘What a thin whistle of hot air Goldie lets out through his front teeth!’
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Above all, Moore himself became virtually sterile after he had delivered his
Principia.
All that followed was a popular version, a collection of essays, a set of lecture notes – then silence for forty years, ‘I’m afraid I have nothing to say,’ he wrote to Woolf, ‘which is worth saying; or, if I have, I can’t express it.’
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He terminated an Apostolic paper with this characteristic Bloomsbury maxim: ‘Among all the good habits which we are to form we should certainly not neglect the habit of indecision.’
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