We were, it appears, extremely social. For some months in the winter of 1904—051 kept a diary from which I find that we were for ever lunching and dining out and loitering about the book shops – “Bloomsbury is ever so much more interesting than Kensington”, I wrote – or going to a concert or visiting a picture gallery and coming home to find the drawing room full of the oddest collections of people. “Cousin Henry Prinsep, Miss Millais, Ozzie Dickinson and Victor Marshall all came this afternoon and stayed late, so that we had only just time to rush off to a Mr Rutter’s lecture on Impressionism at the Grafton Gallery . . . Lady Hylton, V. Dickinson and E. Coltman came to tea. We lunched with the Shaw Stewarts and met an art critic called Nicholls. Sir Hugh seemed nice but there isn’t much in him . . . I lunched with the Protheroes and met the Bertrand Russells. It was very amusing. Thoby and I dined with the Cecils and went on to the St Loe Stracheys where we knew a great many people . . . I called for Nessa and Thoby at Mrs Flower’s and we went on to a dance at the Hobhouses’. Nessa was in a state of great misery today waiting for Mr Tonks who came at one to criticise her pictures. He is a man with a cold bony face, prominent eyes and a look of serenity and boredom. Meg Booth and Sir Fred Pollock came to tea. . .” So it goes on; but among all these short records of parties, of how the chintzes came home and how we went to the Zoo and how we went to Peter Pan, there are a few entries which bear on Bloomsbury. On Thursday March 2nd 1905 Violet Dickinson brought a clergyman’s wife to tea and Sydney-Turner and Strachey came after dinner and we talked till twelve. On Wednesday the 8th of March: “Margaretfn8 sent round her new motor car this afternoon and we took Violet to pay a series of calls, but we, of course, forgot our cards. Then I went on to the Waterloo Road and lectured (a class of working men and women) on the Greek Myths.fn9 Home and found Bell, and we talked about the nature of good till almost one!”
On the 16th [of] March Miss Power and Miss Malone dined with us. Sydney-Turner and Gerald came in after dinner – the first of our Thursday evenings. On the 23rd [of] March nine people came to our evening and stayed till one.
A few days later I went to Spain, and the duty which I laid on myself of recording every sight and sound, every wave and hill, sickened me with diary writing so that I stopped – with this last entry: May the 11th – “Our evening: gay Bell, D. MacCarthy and Gerald – who shocked the cultured.”
So my diary ends just as it might have become interesting. Yet I think it is clear even in this brief record in which every sort of doing is piled up higgledy-piggledy that these few meetings of Bloomsbury in its infancy differed from the rest. These are the only occasions when I do not merely say I had met so and so and thought him long-faced like Reginald Smith or pompous like Moorsom, or quite easy to get on with, but nothing much in him, like Sir Hugh Shaw Stewart. I say we talked to Strachey and Sydney-Turner. I add with a note of exclamation that we talked with Bell about the nature of good till one! And I did not use notes of exclamation often – and once more indeed – when I say that I smoked a cigarette with Beatrice Thynne!fn10
These Thursday evening parties were, as far as I am concerned, the germ from which sprang all that has since come to be called – in newspapers, in novels, in Germany, in France – even, I daresay, in Turkey and Timbuktu – by the name of Bloomsbury. They deserve to be recorded and described. Yet how difficult – how impossible. Talk – even the talk which had such tremendous results upon the lives and characters of the two Miss Stephens – even talk of this interest and importance is as elusive as smoke. It flies up the chimney and is gone.
In the first place it is not true to say that when the door opened and with a curious hesitation and self-effacement Turnerfn11 or Strachey glided in – that they were complete strangers to us. We had met them – and Bell, Woolf, Hilton Youngfn12 and others in Cambridge at May Week before my father died. But what was of much greater importance, we had heard of them from Thoby. Thoby possessed a great power of romanticizing his friends. Even when he was a little boy at a private school there was always some astonishing fellow, whose amazing character and exploits he would describe hour after hour when he came home for the holidays. These stories had the greatest fascination for me. I thought about Pilkington or Sidney Irwin or the Woolly Bear whom I never saw in the flesh as if they were characters in Shakespeare. I made up stories about them myself. It was a kind of saga that went on year after year. And now just as I had heard of Radcliffe, Stuart, or whoever it might be, I began to hear of Bell, Strachey, Turner, Woolf. We talked of them by the hour, rambling about the country or sitting over the fire in my bedroom.
“There’s an astonishing fellow called Bell”, Thoby would begin directly he came back. “He’s a sort of mixture between Shelley and a sporting country squire.”
At this of course I pricked up my ears and began to ask endless questions. We were walking over a moor somewhere, I remember. I got a fantastic impression that this man Bell was a kind of Sun God – with straw in his hair. He was an [illegible] of innocence and enthusiasm. Bell had never opened a book till he came to Cambridge, Thoby said. Then he suddenly discovered Shelley and Keats and went nearly mad with excitement. He did nothing but spout poetry and write poetry. Yet he was a perfect horseman – a gift which Thoby enormously admired – and kept two or three hunters up at Cambridge.
“And is Bell a great poet?” I asked.
No, Thoby wouldn’t go so far as to say that; but it was quite on the cards that Strachey was. And so we discussed Strachey – or ‘the Strache’, as Thoby called him. Strachey at once became as singular, as fascinating as Bell. But it was in quite a different way. ‘The Strache’ was the essence of culture. In fact I think his culture a little alarmed Thoby. He had French pictures in his rooms. He had a passion for Pope. He was exotic, extreme in every way – Thoby described him – so long, so thin that his thigh was no thicker than Thoby’s arm. Once he burst into Thoby’s rooms, cried out, “Do you hear the music of the spheres?” and fell in a faint. Once in the midst of a dead silence, he piped up – and Thoby could imitate his voice perfectly – “Let’s all write Sonnets to Robertson.”fn13 He was a prodigy of wit. Even the tutors and the dons would come and listen to him. “Whatever they give you, Strachey,” Dr Jackson had said when Strachey was in for some examination, “it won’t be good enough.” And then Thoby, leaving me enormously impressed and rather dazed, would switch off to tell me about another astonishing fellow – a man who trembled perpetually all over. He was as eccentric, as remarkable in his way as Bell and Strachey in theirs. He was a Jew. When I asked why he trembled, Thoby somehow made me feel that it was part of his nature – he was so violent, so savage; he so despised the whole human race. “And after all,” Thoby said, “it is a pretty feeble affair, isn’t it?” Nobody was much good after twenty-five, he said. But most people, I gathered, rather rubbed along, and came to terms with things. Woolf did not and Thoby thought it sublime. One night he dreamt he was throttling a man and he dreamt with such violence that when he woke up he had pulled his own thumb out of joint. I was of course inspired with the deepest interest in that violent trembling misanthropic Jew who had already shaken his fist at civilisation and was about to disappear into the tropics so that we should none of us ever see him again.fn14 And then perhaps the talk got upon Sydney-Turner. According to Thoby, Sydney-Turner was an absolute prodigy of learning. He had the whole of Greek literature by heart. There was practically nothing in any language that was any good that he had not read. He was very silent and thin and odd. He never came out by day. But late at night if he saw one’s lamp burning he would come and tap at the window like a moth. At about three in the morning he would begin to talk. His talk was then of astonishing brilliance. When later I complained to Thoby that I had met Turner and had not found him brilliant Thoby severely supposed that by brilliance I meant wit; he on the contrary meant truth. Sydney-Turner was the most brilliant talker he knew because he always spoke the truth.
Naturally then, when the bell rang and these astonishing f
ellows came in, Vanessa and I were in a twitter of excitement. It was late at night; the room was full of smoke; buns, coffee and whisky were strewn about; we were not wearing white satin or seed-pearls; we were not dressed at all.fn15 Thoby went to open the door; in came Sydney-Turner; in came Bell; in came Strachey.
They came in hesitatingly, self-effacingly, and folded themselves up quietly [in] the corners of sofas. For a long time they said nothing. None of our old conversational openings seemed to do. Vanessa and Thoby and Clive, if Clive were there – for Clivefn16 was always ready to sacrifice himself in the cause of talk – would start different subjects. But they were almost always answered in the negative. “No”, was the most frequent reply. “No, I haven’t seen it”; “No, I haven’t been there.” Or simply, “I don’t know.” The conversation languished in a way that would have been impossible in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate. Yet the silence was difficult, not dull. It seemed as if the standard of what was worth saying had risen so high that it was better not to break it unworthily. We sat and looked at the ground. Then at last Vanessa, having said perhaps that she had been to some picture show, incautiously used the word “beauty”. At that, one of the young men would lift his head slowly and say, “It depends what you mean by beauty.” At once all our ears were pricked. It was as if the bull had at last been turned into the ring.
The bull might be ‘beauty’, might be ‘good’, might be ‘reality’. Whatever it was, it was some abstract question that now drew out all our forces. Never have I listened so intently to each step and half-step in an argument. Never have I been at such pains to sharpen and launch my own little dart. And then what joy it was when one’s contribution was accepted.fn17 No praise has pleased me more than Saxon’s saying – and was not Saxon infallible after all? – that he thought I had argued my case very cleverly. And what strange cases those were! I remember trying to persuade Hawtreyfn18 that there is such a thing as atmosphere in literature. Hawtrey challenged me to prove it by pointing out in any book any one word which had this quality apart from its meaning. I went and fetched Diana of the Crossways. The argument, whether it was about atmosphere or the nature of truth, was always tossed into the middle of the party. Now Hawtrey would say something; now Vanessa; now Saxon; now Clive; now Thoby. It filled me with wonder to watch those who were finally left in the argument piling stone upon stone, cautiously, accurately, long after it had completely soared above my sight. But if one could not say anything, one could listen. One had glimpses of something miraculous happening high up in the air. Often we would still be sitting in a circle at two or three in the morning. Still Saxon would be taking his pipe from his mouth as if to speak, and putting it back again without having spoken. At last, rumpling his hair back, he would pronounce very shortly some absolutely final summing up. The marvellous edifice was complete, one could stumble off to bed feeling that something very important had happened. It had been proved that beauty was – or beauty was not – for I have never been quite sure which – part of a picture.
From such discussions Vanessa and I got probably much the same pleasure that undergraduates get when they meet friends of their own for the first time. In the world of the Booths and the Maxses we were not asked to use our brains much. Here we used nothing else. And part of the charm of those Thursday evenings was that they were astonishingly abstract. It was not only that Moore’s bookfn19 had set us all discussing philosophy, art, religion; it was that the atmosphere – if in spite of Hawtrey I may use that word – was abstract in the extreme. The young men I have named had no ‘manners’ in the Hyde Park Gate sense. They criticised our arguments as severely as their own. They never seemed to notice how we were dressed or if we were nice looking or not. All that tremendous encumbrance of appearance and behaviour which George had piled upon our first years vanished completely. One had no longer to endure that terrible inquisition after a party – and be told, “You looked lovely.” Or, “You did look plain.” Or, “You must really learn to do your hair.” Or, “Do try not to look so bored when you dance.” Or, “You did make a conquest”, or, “You were a failure.” All this seemed to have no meaning or existence in the world of Bell, Strachey, Hawtrey and Sydney-Turner. In that world the only comment as we stretched ourselves after our guests had gone, was, “I must say you made your point rather well”; “I think you were talking rather through your hat.” It was an immense simplification. And for my part it went deeper than this. The atmosphere of Hyde Park Gate had been full of love and marriage. George’s engagement to Flora Russell, Stella’s to Jack Hills, Gerald’s innumerable flirtations were all discussed either in private or openly with the greatest interest. Vanessa was already supposed to have attracted Austen Chamberlain. My Aunt Mary Fisher, poking about as usual in nooks and corners, had discovered that there were six drawings of him in Vanessa’s sketchbook and [had] come to her own conclusions. George rather suspected that Charles Trevelyan was in love with her. But at Gordon Square love was never mentioned. Love had no existence. So lightly was it treated that for years I believed that Desmond had married an old Miss Cornish, aged about sixty, with snow-white hair. One never took the trouble to find out. It seemed incredible that any of these young men should want to marry us or that we should want to marry them. Secretly I felt that marriage was a very low down affair, but that if one practised it, one practised it – it is a serious confession I know – with young men who had been in the Eton Eleven and dressed for dinner. When I looked round the room at 46 I thought – if you will excuse me for saying so – that I had never seen young men so dingy, so lacking in physical splendour as Thoby’s friends. Kitty Maxse who came in once or twice sighed afterwards, “I’ve no doubt they’re very nice, but, oh darling, how awful they do look!” Henry James, on seeing Lytton and Saxon at Rye, exclaimed to Mrs Prothero, “Deplorable! Deplorable! How could Vanessa and Virginia have picked up such friends? How could Leslie’s daughters have taken up with young men like that?” But it was precisely this lack of physical splendour, this shabbiness! that was in my eyes a proof of their superiority. More than that, it was, in some obscure way, reassuring; for it meant that things could go on like this, in abstract argument, without dressing for dinner, and never revert to the ways, which I had come to think so distasteful, at Hyde Park Gate.
I was wrong. One afternoon that first summer Vanessa said to Adrian and me and I watched her, stretching her arms above her head with a gesture that was at once reluctant and yielding, in the great looking-glass as she said it – “Of course, I can see that we shall all marry. It’s bound to happen” – and as she said it I could feel a horrible necessity impending over us; a fate would descend and snatch us apart just as we had achieved freedom and happiness. She, I felt, was already aware of some claim, some need which I resented and tried to ignore. A few weeks later indeed Clive proposed to her. “Yes,” said Thoby grimly when I murmured something to him very shyly about Clive’s proposal, “That’s the worst of Thursday evenings!” And her marriage in the beginning of 1907 was in fact the end of them. With that, the first chapter of Old Bloomsbury came to an end. It had been very austere, very exciting, of immense importance. A small concentrated world dwelling inside the much larger and looser world of dances and dinners had come into existence. It had already begun to colour that world and still I think colours the much more gregarious Bloomsbury which succeeded it.
But it could not have gone on. Even if Vanessa had not married, even if Thoby had lived,fn20 change was inevitable. We could not have gone on discussing the nature of beauty in the abstract for ever. The young men, as we used to call them, were changing from the general to the particular. They had ceased to be Mr Turner, Mr Strachey, Mr Bell. They had become Saxon, Lytton, Clive. Then too one was beginning to criticise, to distinguish, to compare. Those old flamboyant portraits were being revised. One could see that Walter Lamb whom Thoby had compared to a Greek boy playing a flute in a vineyard was in fact rather bald, and rather dull; one could wish that Saxon could be induced either
to go or to say something perhaps that was not strictly true; one could even doubt, when Euphrosyne was published, whether as many of the poems in that famous book were sure of immortality as Thoby made out.fn21 But there was something else that made for a change though I at least did not know what it was. Perhaps if I read you a passage from another diary which I kept intermittently for a month or two in the year 1909 you will guess what it was. I am describing a tea-party in James Strachey’s rooms at Cambridge.fn22
“His rooms,” I wrote, “though they are lodgings, are discreet and dim. French pastels hang upon the walls and there are cases of old books. The three young men – Norton,fn23 Brooke and James Strachey – sat in deep chairs; and gazed with soft intent eyes into the fire. Mr Norton knew that he must talk; he and I talked laboriously. The others were silent. I should like to account for this silence, but time presses and I am puzzled. For the truth is that these young men are evidently respectable; they are not only able but their views seem to me honest and simple. They lack all padding; so that one has convictions to disagree with if one disagrees. Yet we had nothing to say to each other and I was conscious that not only my remarks but my presence was criticised. They wished for the truth and doubted if I could speak it or be it. I thought this courageous of them but unsympathetic. I admired the atmosphere – was it more? – and felt in some respects at ease in it. Yet why should intellect and character be so barren? It seems as if the highest efforts of the most intelligent people produce a negative result; one cannot honestly be anything.”