Intellectual Backgrounds
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Notes NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION l. These are Renato Poggioli's terms in The Theory ofthe Avant-Garde. eh. 2. Poggioli's entire account illuminates how Bloomsbury was and was not avant-garde. 2. Bloomsbury writers were closely associated at times with the Nation and the New Statesman, but the political and even parts ofthe literary halves ofthese periodicals were edited and written by journalists largely unassociated with the Group. Desmond MacCarthy edited two periodicals that might be considered small magazines, and, though both had Bloomsbury con tributors, neither the Speaker nor Lift and Letters could be called a Blooms bury magazine. 3. Desmond MacCarthy can serve as an illustration of what is involved in determining the membership of Bloomsbury. Recently MacCarthy's son in-law David Cecil has denied his connection with Bloomsbury: 'As he bimself said, "Bloomsbury has never been a spiritual horne to me'" (Cecil, 'Introduction', p. 15). Cecil omits the other half of the sentence from MacCarthy's Bloomsbury memoir, wbich is 'but let me add that I have not got one, although at Cambridge for a few years I fancied that I had'. MacCarthy goes on to call Bloornsbury ahorne away frorn horne and note how he converged on the Group through the Apostles, Clive Bell and the Stephen sisters (SPRlBG, p. 28). To these connections could be added bis association with Roger Fry, wbieh led to bis writing the introduction for the catalogue of the first post-impressionist exhibition. Like Strachey, MacCarthy was more closely involved in Old than New Bloomsbury, but in both he edited periodicals that depended on bis Bloomsbury friends for contributions. One of Mary MacCarthy's purposes in founding the Memoir Club was, as with its precursor the Novel Club, to encourage her husband to write. That MacCarthy moved in other circles as weIl as Bloomsbury is not, of course, a sufficient reason for excluding bim from the Group, because all the members had friends outside Bloomsbury. In his associations, bis values and, most importantly, bis writings, Desmond MacCarthy displays as many affinities with Bloomsbury as anyone in the Group, whieh is why Leonard Woolf, Raymond Mortimer and Quentin Bell, among others, include bim in Bloomsbury. NOTES TO CHAPTER 1: INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUNDS l. The connection between Virginia Woolfand Caroline Emelia Stephen has been overdeveloped by Jane Marcus, who thinks that 'we need search no 279 280 Notes further for the origins of Virginia Woolf's pacifism and mysticism' than her aunt's books (p. 27). The evidence is mostly indirect (though there are unmistakable indications of a dislike of her aunt's personality and writings in Virginia Woolf's early letters), and there are other, more obvious sources in Virginia Woolf's quite different mystical experiences, in her study of Plato, in the pacifism of the women's movement, in the anti-militarism ofher father and in the Quaker heritage ofRoger Fry, who influenced her so profoundly. 2. The interesting connections between Moore, Russell and phenomenolog ists, especially Franz Brentano with bis influential concept of intentional ity, have been set forth in Roderick Chisholm's Realism anti the Background of Phenomenology . 3. Raymond Williams has described Bloomsbury's liberalism as a bourgeois ideology ofpluralistic civilised individualism and noted some ofthe ironies of its current influence: Indeed the paradox of many retrospective judgements of Bloomsbury is that the group lived and worked this position with a now embarrassing whole-heartedness: embarrassing, that is to say, to those many for whom 'civilised individualism' is a mere flag to fly over a capitalist, imperialist and militarist social order; embarrassing, also, to those many others for whom 'civilised individualism' is a summary phrase for a process of privileged consumption. (p. 63) 4. The essay, reprinted in The Captain's Death Bed and Collected Essays, reads 'in or about December, 1910', but the original Hogarth Essay text says 'on or about December, 1910'. 5. Pater was one of the few influential Victorian prose authors about whom Virginia Woolf did not write. In The Ahsent Father: Virginia Woolf anti Waller Pater, Perry Meisel finds her silence an indication ofPater's importance for her. Some ofthe connections Meisel finds significant can also be located in the work of Virginia Woolf's present father, wbich Meisel does not examine; other similarities are to be found in the influence of such writers as Henry James and G. E. Moore, wbich Meisel also ignores wbile finding additional evidence for Pater's influence in the deep differences between bis work and Virginia Woolf's. NOTES TO CHAPTER 2: LESLIE STEPHEN l. See Lowell's 'Verses Intended to Go with aPosset Dish to My Dear Little God-Daughter, 1882', as printed in Maitland (pp. 318-19), with its description ofthe gifts he wishes her - her father's wit, her mother's beauty - and the faintly ominous prophetie warning, I simply wish the child to be A sampie of Heredity Enjoying to the full extent Life's best, the Unearned Increment, ... Notes 281 Thus, then, the cup is duly filled; Walk steady, dear, lest all be spilled. 2. The typescript (Add. MS 61973 in the British Library) is a revised version ofpp. 107-37 of'A Sketch ofthe Past' in the first edition of Mommts ojBeing (1976) and includes an additional twenty-seven-page section on Leslie Stephen and Hyde Park Gate. The typescript has been incorporated into the second edition of Mommts oj Being (1985), wbich is the text cited here. 3. Hardy thought Stephen's pbilosophy influenced bim more than that ofany other contemporary (F. Hardy, p. 100). 4. In The English Utilitarians Stephen wrote of Mill's The Subjection of Women, None ofhis writing is more emphatically marked by generosity and love of justice. A certain shrillness of tone marks the recluse too little able to appreciate the animal nature of mankind. Yet in any case, he made a most effective protest against the prejudices wbich stunted the develop ment and limited careers ofwomen. (m281) 5. See Noel Annan's The Curious StTength ojPositivism in English Political Thought and bis Introduction to Stephen's Selected Writings in British Intellectual History; Leonard Woolf is not discussed specifically in these, but Annan's criticisms clearly apply to bis work. 6. Two unreprinted essays in the Cornhill give Stephen's views on literature and morality quite clearly: 'Art and Morality' was written shordy after the publication ofPater's The Renaissance; 'The Moral Element in Literature' is a defence ofthe ideas in 'Wordsworth's Etbics' that Amold had criticised. 7. Stephen's letters to bis wife, now in the Berg Collection, reveal hirn to be unhappy with omissions he feit forced to make, and, in his DNB account of bis grandfather James Stephen, he concealed the parentage of an illegiti mate son. NOTES TO CHAPTER 3: SOME VICTORIAN VISIONS l. One reason why Forster seems not to have forgotten the details of Rooks nest is that he kept an account of it written when he was fifteen, just after leaving the house, and then continued more than a half century later. See the Appendix to Howards End. 2. When A Nineteenth-Century Childhood was reissued in 1948 (with an intro duction by John Betjeman describing it as 'a work of genius'), Mary MacCarthy changed some of the fictitious tides and place names to their originals but kept the family name of Kestrell. 3. According to Keynes's mother, Florence Ada Keynes. Mark Rutherford portrayed John Brown in The Revolution in Tanner's une (F. A. Keynes, pp. 21-2). 4. In 1899 Virginia Woolftumed a copy ofIsaac Watts's famous Logic! into a palimpsest by pasting the pages of a fragmentary holiday diary into it, anticipating in a symbolic mann er, perhaps, the way in which G. E. Moore's epistemology would underlie her later fiction. This Warboys diary 282 Notes contains various kinds of writing, such as Ruskinian nature sketches (QB/VW, 165-6) and another early satire, 'A Terrible Tragedy in a Duck Pond', which makes fun ofthe Duckworths' name by imagining its origin in the saving of a duck for a king (pNY). 5. Virginia Woolf's obituary is reprinted in Winifred Gerin's Anne Thackeray Ritclrie, a good biography for the Victorian backgrounds ofVirginia Woolf. 6. Spilka notes the connection between this passage and Virginia Woolf's suicide (p. 124). 7. Leslie Stephen's side ofthe correspondence is now in the Berg, and Julia Stephen's manuscripts are in the library of Washington State University, Pullman, Washington. 8. See Virginia Woolf's 'Nurse Lugton's Curtain' and 'The Widow and the Parrot' (CSF). One of Julia Stephen's stories has some faint connections with To the Ligkthouse. In 'Emily Caunt', the name ofa fairyland haven for animals imagined by Vanessa and Thoby when they were very young (according to a note on the manuscript), the boy who visits this land on a rocking horse has a sister named Lily; just before the visit he receives a toy sailing boat for his birthday, but is told that because ofthe fog it cannot be sailed on the Round Pond that day. An example of the pervasive social milieu of these stories, together with what must have been an allusion to Virginia, occurs in the beginning of a story about a monkey on a moor. A young child named 'Ginia' buries her shoes and stockings in the sand, and is likened to a bare-Iegged little beggar girl when she has to be carried horne. 9. In 'A Sketch ofthe Past' Virginia Woolfalso says he never went to Italy or stayed in Paris (MB, p.