Disciples
Alan Watkins
Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles Paul Levy (Weidenfeld £12.50) 'It is not far-fetched', Mr Levy writes, 'to see the current domestic habits of middle-class Englishmen and Americans as owing a great deal to Bloomsbury's discovery of such things as French provincial and peasant cooking and culture ... Bloomsbury, whose well-publicised private lives were and still are emulated in the suburbs of New York as well as those of London, created the climate [italics supplied] in which middleclass families eat for their Sunday lunch boeufen daube, made to an Elizabeth David or Julia Child recipe, on a plain pine farmhouse (American "life style") table brought [sic] from Habitat or New York's Conran shop.' Hm. Not sure about that. Most members of the Bloomsbury Group — though Duncan Grant in his later years was one of the exceptions — could hardly boil an egg, though as it happens, boiling an egg is quite a tricky operation.
There is, however, a more interesting question than the culinary influence (if, indeed, it existed) of Bloomsbury. It concerns their moral influence. Mr Levy's book appeared before the affair of Professor Blunt. It therefore appeared before the leader in The Times blaming Professor Blunt, Philby, Burgess et al, on Cambridge moral philosophy at the turn of the century. In this article Mr William Rees-Mogg (for surely it was he who penned it) advanced the view that G.E. Moore and his disciples so comprehensively destroyed the Victorian moral order that educated persons — uneducated too, for that matter — were left rudderless, and accordingly liable to do all manner of wicked things, such as give 'secrets' to the Russians. Mr Levy, among others, wrote a letter in reply.
In this controversy I find myself on the whole on Mr Levy's side. Blaming an art historian who goes wrong on G.E. Moore strikes me as being as silly, if Mr Levy will forgive me for putting it this way, as blaming a ratatouille that goes wrong on Virginia Woolf. For Moore did not believe in doing your own thing, as the phrase of a few years ago used to have it, Nor was he an exponent of thoroughgoing moral relativism as popularised (though Sir Alfred Ayer subsequently modified this position) in Language, Truth and Logic. Above all, Moore, at least for a time, overturned philosophical idealism. Mr Rees-Mogg seems to believe that a commitment to some system of philosophical idealism is a necessary condition of sound morals. If this is so, why stop at poor Moore? Why not blame Locke, Berkeley, Hume and J.S. Mill as well? Perhaps Mr Rees-Mogg does.
But the matter goes further than this. Philosophical idealism may or may not produce people of sound persf-nal morals. It also tends to produce a disposition towards totalitarian or authoritanan political systems. The point about Professor Blunt and the rest was not only that they betrayed their country — though it is highly doubtful whether they were ever guilty of treason in the legal sense. The point was also that they betrayed it to a totalitarian regime which they admired. There is, of course, the argument — Mr Malcolm Muggeridge is particularly fond of deploying it — that liberals are specially susceptible to totalitarian systems, that liberalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. This argument does not match the known view and actions of the Bloomsbury Group.
Most of them (there were naturally exceptions) were opposed both to the first World war and to the imposition of conscription in 1916. They were in retrospect probably right on both counts: on the first, because an unnecessary involvement in the war effectively destroyed Great Britain and, on the second, because conscription, far more than the pre-1914 insurance stamps and so forth, clearly marked the transition of Great Britain from a liberal to a collectivist state. Or take, again, the personal records. Leonard Woolf (the only Bloomsburyite Mr Muggeridge liked) remained a liberal to the end, Keynes was not only a liberal but a Liberal who consistently refused to join the Labour Party. Bertrand Russell (not a fully paid up Bloomsburyite admittedly) was one of the first observers to see through Soviet Russia and to say so. It really will not do to blame either Moore or Bloomsbury generally for a disposition to Marxism: their entire philosophy was antipathetic to Marx. Indeed, Mr Rees-Mogg's admired idealist philosophers' provide a much sounder — some would say, an essential —foundation for anyone wishing to enter into the service of the Kremlin.
However, homosexuality is, as they say, something else again. Moore was not homosexual. He married in his forties, and was a devoted father and husband. In early manhood he had a passionate attachment, caused principally by loneliness, to a schools inspector and former Apostle, A.R. Ainsworth. Yet, before this, Moore would read papers to the Society in which he refers to sexual intercourse as 'sodomising'. According to Mr Levy, this meant very little: it was merely the convention of the Society that sex should be discussed in homosexual terms. One accepts that this was so and that Moore was not himself homosexual. What is more difficult to understand is why Moore submitted himself to this convention. Not only was he passionately concerned about truth, accuracy, the correct use of words, He also had his prim, even priggish side.
For instance, Mr Levy tells us of an evening when Moore and Russell were staying at a country hotel. There was a man there, a low type, who told dirty stories and boasted of his sexual adventures. Russell encouraged the man, led him on, partly out of a desire to tease and discomfit Moore, partly because he thought Moore, as a moral philosopher, ought to learn what ordinary people were really like. As Russell himself said of the episode, the low type was not a bad sort of chap in his way: he was like most men. Yet Moore was revolted, almost physically ill. It is, when you come to think about it, a bit odd to be made almost sick by a little silly heterosexual boasting and then to proceed, as Moore did, to talk hypocritically to your friends about 'sodomising'. The oddness seems to escape Mr Levy. He also blames Russell for destroying part of Moore's innocence, while I find myself, in this matter, largely on Russell's side. Relations between Russell and Moore were never easy, and the book as a whole is marred by an inequity in Mr Levy's treatment of the two: the worst construction is invariably placed on any action of Russell's and the best on any action of Moore's.
Russell was no innocent, any more than Keynes was. Yet both were frightened of Moore. Mr Levy rightly says — though it is not, as he seems to think, a wholly original interpretation — that the awe which Moore inspired was due more to the integrity of his character than to the content of his philosophy. Indeed, for the last 50 years of his life he wrote hardly anything about ethics and devoted himself mainly to technical problems of perception and so forth. Mr Levy has provided a conscientious and competent account of Moore's influence on the Apostles up to the first World war. The Appendix of pre-1914 Apostles would have been more instructive if it had included their schools, their colleges and what, briefly, they did afterwards.
The book is also marred by a certain knowingness of tone. Mr Levy, for instance, tells us that Keynes's Treatise on Probability 'is for the most part, seriously underestimated outside philosophical circles'. For the most part? Seriously underestimated? And which circles, apart from philosophical ones, are competent to form an estimate of any kind? Mathematical ones, maybe? I have the Treatise on my shelves, and it contains some daunting mathematics. I assume Mr Levy can follow it all. Mr Levy is a bit of a snob too. He writes of a minor philosopher: 'Waterlow's reports of Moore's views were so unreliable that he might almost have been a journalist.' What else,! should like to know, is Mr Levy?
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