BOOKS Last words from Bloomsbury

QUENTIN BELL

Tt is some consolation for his friends and for his public that Leonard Woolf was able to finish the fifth and last volume of his auto- biography, The Journey, Not the Arrival,

Matters (Hogarth Press 42s), a few months before his death. The monument is therefore complete. We can stand back and see it as a whole; how admirable it appears, how solid, pungent, lucid, wise and humane. In its way it is a masterpiece.

In all his autobiographical works Leonard Woolf writes in an easy, garrulous and dis- cursive manner. This volume is no excep- tion, but it is perhaps a little more orderly than its immediate predecessors; without attempting a connected history he discusses his main concerns during the thirty years under review: the Second World War, Virginia Woolf's death, the fortunes of the Hogarth Press, politics and the pleasures of old age.

In a book no part of which can be called dull the chapter devoted to the Hogarth Press is, I think, the least interesting (a pub- lisher might very likely disagree). It seems to be written without the vivacity and passion that we find elsewhere and it suffers from the fact that it follows a deeply moving account of Virginia Woolf's sucide; and this is one of the finest things that he ever wrote.

Virginia Woolf was amazingly fortunate in her husband—a husband who, for almost thirty years, supported, protected and sometimes endured her, who kept her from making herself ill, who saved her from suicide, a great part of whose fantastically active life was spent in looking after her and who in the end, in an infinitely tragic way, lost her. Nor did his services end with her life for he has commemorated her in an accu- rate, sensitive anti skilful narrative. One of the excellencies of this series of books, and of this final volume, is that it gives us by far the most trustworthy account of Virginia Woolf and also of her friends and relations —of what, in short, we have to call 'Blooms- bury'. Leonard Woolf's autobiography is, prob- ably, the last of Bloomsbury's contributions to English letters and as such it has been a source of some perplexity to those who imagined Bloomsbury to be a tea party in a drawing room. Leonard Woolf's ceaseless political work which, as he grimly estimates, occupied 150,000 to 200,000 hours of his life, his meetings in committee rooms, in village schools, on platforms and on door- steps with civil servants, hes, co-operators, trade unionists and delegates from colonial territories, are not easily accommodated in the small, snobbish, upper middle class group to which, so journalists tell us, he and they were confined. And yet it is true that Leonard and Virginia Woolf were at the very heart of Bloomsbury and any defini- tion of that group which excludes them is meaningless. Insofar as Bloomsbury can be said to have had an ideology it was shared by Leonard Woolf and in fact I believe that both his virtues and his limitations as a political worker and a political thinker are those that we might expect to find in the husband of Virginia Woolf, the disciple of G. E. Moore.

He himself ended by seeing his political work as a useless activity: `Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over fifty-seven years of my political work in England . . . I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing.' Here I think that he was mistaken, quite apart from the fact that he probably saved the Labour party from committing even worse blunders than it did commit, and dis- counting the fact that he was the architect of an 'international government' that may one day be used, he fails to appreciate the implications of the fact—and it is a remark- able fact—that when he, the agent of British imperialism, returned after half a century to Ceylon, he was treated almost as a national hero. It is not often that an empire dissolves in such kindly fragrance. Here, at least, Leonard Woolf achieved the kind of rational and benevolent solution which was his political aim.

Reason and benevolence are not the exclusive property of Cambridge and Bloomsbury. What was more peculiarly the property of the group was an insistence upon the supreme importance of reason to a point at which the irrational was treated with contemptuous bewilderment and sheer irreverence. Thus, to Leonard Woolf, religi- ous faith appeared simply ludicrous: `The credulity of human beings is so gigantic and unquenchable that millions of them not only accept the dictates of an old gentleman in Rome about contraceptives, but also believe that he is in direct communication with the Deity who created the universe, with its suns and galaxies and comets flam- ing through infinite space . .

In the same way he simply fails to under- stand those intuitive, visceral feelings which lead to political consequences such as this: . . A Jew being dragged by storm troopers out of a shop in one of the main streets of Berlin ; the fly buttons of the man's trousers had been torn open to show that he was circumcised and therefore a Jew. On the man's face was the horrible look of blank suffering and despair which from the begin- ning of human history men have seen under the crown of thorns . . . what was even more horrible was the look on the faces of respectable men and women, standing on the pavement, laughing at the victim' One may be amazed and saddened by such

things, one may also be angry ; but although Leonard Woolf felt anger (in the case of the Nazi storm troopers) he mistrusted the emotion: 'I feel the hatred welling up in myself, and yet I hate the hatred, knowing it to be neither rational nor objective. There is an old well-worn tag which says that one cannot condemn a nation, and there is some truth in it' (my italics).

In this refusal to be angry, this avoidance of moral indignation, he was a true follower of G. E. Moore: righteous anger is not a `good state of mind'. The rest of us oscillate between communal affection and communal hatred ; we love Jesus and hate the pill. we love the Fiihrer and hate the Jew, or, it may be, find other gods and other devils. Our emotions transcend reason and on cer- tain points we refuse to argue. Leonard Woolf never refused to argue.

This refusal to surrender to the great vulgar emotions made him a very clear- sighted political commentator. He never thought that, because a thing was desirable, it would probably happen, or even that it could possibly happen. He was for many years the Cassandra of our modern Troy but. like Cassandra, he was not a politician. He distrusted the unreason of the extreme left almost as much as he distrusted the unreason of the extreme right: they both led to beastliness and barbarism and he was too much of a realist to put any faith in the tiny minority with which he was in agree- ment.

His political message was, therefore, extremely uncomfortable. I suspect also that the high austerity of his rationalism was at times politically sterile because he could not accommodate himself to human stupidity. He was a firSt-rate administrator; he could diagnose the maladies of the body politic with dreadful accuracy ; but he would never consent to homoeopathic treatment nor would he ever commit those crimes against truth and reason by which political spells are bound.

Something of the same kind is true of his political theory. He was perhaps too much out of sympathy with social passions to probe deeply into their origins. It is not true, as one reviewer said, that Principle Politica is 'the stupid interpretation of his tory' in the sense that all events are explain by human stupidity ; but I think that it i true that he could have gone more deepl into the nature of political folly.

He was an analytical rather than a per suasive writer and this is evident not onll

in his political writings but in his fictions

The Village in the Jungle is a novel ot superbly dispassionate observation, a great novel and one that has been grail neglected, whereas The Wise Virgins and The Hotel, being more didactic, are far less convincing ; in his autobiography his on character emerges with great clarity becau he is meditative rather than hortatory.

He had a genius for friendship (an essen fiat qualification for entry into Bloomsbury) but in his youth and middle years he was more impatient, a more angular characte than he was in his old age ; also, of course fate gave him a task, wearing, exasperati and heart-breaking enough to make anyon permanently aggrieved by life. It did ne have that effect upon him: he only bee wiser, happier and more kindly. In oth words he 'mellowed', but whereas most of when we mellow, become rather sill Leonard Woolf, as readers of this book find, was never silly.