Bloomsbury and the Revolution in Aesthetics

Given the importance of the bonds of community and friendship it would have been strange if graduation from Cambridge had caused the Apostles to lose touch with each other. In fact, Moore’s ‘highest good’ proved strong enough to withstand the requirements of making a living. As is well known, most of the Apostles of Keynes’s generation settled in London in close proximity to each other, and from the original ‘at homes’ of some of them a new association eventually sprang up, looser than the Society, but one that, in time, would be a very important force in the cultural life of Britain. Perhaps because the influence of Bloomsbury — in view of some — was not totally wholesome, there has been an unnecessary effort, even on the part of some Bloomsberries, to deny its very existence. Thus Clive Bell asks, ‘Who are the members of Bloomsbury? For what do they stand?’ Both questions are easy to answer. The core of Bloomsbury comprised Roger Fry, the Stephen sisters — Vanessa and Virginia — their husbands, Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey and Keynes. And they stood quite simply for changing the cultural values of the nation away from utilitarianism and towards Moorean ultimates. They were in the anti-Benthamite tradition of those writers who viewed themselves as having a mission to teach higher values to the masses, and especially to prevent their being swallowed up by the crassness of a commercial civilisation.