Bloomsbury Group - Criticism

Criticism

If "the contempt or suspicion - the environment that a person or group creates around itself - is always a kind of alter ego, an essential and revealing part of the production", there is perhaps much to be learnt from the (extensive) criticism that the Bloomsbury Group aroused. Early complaints focused on a perceived cliquiness: "on personal mannerisms - the favourite phrases ('ex-quisitely civilized', and 'How simply too extraordinary!'), the incredulous, weirdly emphasised Strachey voice". After World War I, as the members of the Group "began to be famous, the execration increased, and the caricature of an idle, snobbish and self-congratulatory rentier class, promoting its own brand of high culture began to take shape": as Forster self-mockingly put it, "In came the nice fat dividends, up rose the lofty thoughts".

The growing threats of the 1930s brought new criticism from younger writers of "what the last lot had done (Bloomsbury, Modernism, Eliot) in favour of what they thought of as urgent hard-hitting realism"; while "Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, which called Bloomsbury élitist, corrupt and talentless, caused a stir" of its own. The most telling criticism, however, came perhaps from within the Group's own ranks, when on the eve of war Keynes gave a "nostalgic and disillusioned account of the pure sweet air of G. E. Moore, that belief in undisturbed individualism, that Utopianism based on a belief in human reasonableness and decency, that refusal to accept the idea of civilisation as 'a thin and precarious crust' ... Keynes's fond, elegiac repudiation of his "early beliefs", in the light of current affairs ("We completely misunderstood human nature, including our own")".

After the outbreak of war, with the group accused of "intellectual elitism its reputation faltered in the 1940s and 1950s, but from the 1960s critical interest in their achievements began to revive". However controversy continues to accompany Bloomsbury wherever it goes. Much work on Bloomsbury continues to focus on the group’s class origins and alleged elitism, their satire, their atheism, their oppositional politics and liberal economics, their non-abstract art, their modernist fiction, their art and literary criticism, and their non-nuclear family and sexual arrangements.