THE AIR OF BLOOMSBURY
…still they were hardly a group, Mr. Bell maintains. Yes, they met often and were intimate friends. Yes, they did like each other; also they shared a taste for discussion in pursuit of truth and a contempt for conventional ways of thinking and feeling. But, he asks, is there anything specific in this? Could not as much be said of many collections of young people in many ages? Here Virginia Woolf seems to chime in with him. ln Jacob's Room there is a tenderly mocking glimpse of her
hero as he sits reading in the British Museum. And Jacob surely suggests an early Bloomsbury figure ? Indeed, from the fleeting touches which convey so well the effect of his presence, those who can remember her brother Thoby,and a certain hewn grandeur in his appearance, are tempted to read him back into Jacob, thus giving Jacob an independent existence, which her characters rarely possess in their own right. "Life on the page," says Mr. Forster, she could always give her characters, "but rarely life eternal..She could seldom so portray a character that it was remembered afterwards on its own account as Emma is remembered for
instance ... "
..All the same, Mr.Johnstone succeeds in showing that when they happened to live in Bloomsbury they shared a common mystique, which really does entitle him to call them a group. But still Mr. Bell will not have it. "..Undoubtedly the Bloomsbury mind was permeated by what Keynes called "the fundamental intuitions of Principia Ethica. And what were they? A reviewer can only extract unmethodically a few relevant passages from Mr. Johnstone's able summary.
