Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Archives

BertrandRussellin Bloomsbury S. P. ROSENBAUM I The topic of this paper is not topographical. But if it were, perhaps the first thing to be said about Bertrand Russell in Bloomsbury is that his family owned a good part of the place. There were Russells in Bloomsbury long before there were Stephens or Stracheys. The Dukes of Bedford were Bloomsbury's landlords, and the squares and streets that the Group inhabited bore names associated with Russell's family-Bedford, Tavistock, Woburn, and Russell itself. But my title ofcourse is metonymic and stands for the significance of Bertrand Russell's thought and character in relation to the Bloomsbury Group, especially their literary history. That is an involved subject, and in order to survey it here I have had to concentrate on Russell's ideas rather than their embodiment in the philosophical assumptions of Bloomsbury's work. I have tried elsewhere to describe the particular nature of the Bloomsbury Group, the complicated interaction of puritanism, Utilitarianism, liberalism, and aestheticism in their intellectual background, and the literary uses to which Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster put Moore's and Russell's Realism.! A more immediate context for Russell's influences on Bloomsbury that must also be taken for granted here is the Cambridge setting in which Bloomsbury encountered Russell. He was one of four philosophers, all members of the celebrated, now notorious, Cambridge Conversazione Society, a.k.a. the Apostles or the Society. Like Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, and G. E. Moore, Russell's influence on the Apostolic brothers who came to make up the male contingent of Bloomsbury was both intellectual and personal. This needs to be insisted upon because recent studies of the Apostles have tended to emphasize the personal interrelations of the II 12 S. P. Rosenbaum brothers at the expense ofthe intellectual ones. Henry Sidgwick and Lytton Strachey, to take two Apostolic boundaries of Russell's time in the Society, were agreed that the one absolutely essential Apostolic quality was the pursuit oftruth. What truth was underwent considerable modification from Sidgwick to Strachey, but it cannot responsibly be reduced to the merely personal. Russell, especially, exerted less personal attraction for Bloomsbury than Dickinson or Moore, but his fame easily leads to interpretations that overemphasize his biographical involvement in Bloomsbury and underestimate his intellectual importance for them. The variety and complexity, not to mention the longevity of his thinking were unequalled by anyone ofhis time. Russell's impact on Bloomsbury extends far beyond the Cambridge years, when he and Moore made their philosophical revolution, to the Great War, when Bloomsbury strongly supported Russell's crusading pacifism, and on into the Twenties and Thirties, when Russell's social, historical, and popular philosophical writings were more appealing to Bloomsbury than the work in logic and epistemology which the Group had originally found so interesting. But to argue for the significance of Russell's ideas for Bloomsbury runs counter to the division sometimes made between Russell's historical, literary , and personal aspects on the one hand, and his philosophical and mathematical ones on the other. As with the Apostles, there is a danger in this division of personalizing Russell's historical and literary significance by dissociating it from his philosophical thought. For Russell studies, the thesis of my paper is a holistic historical one: Russell the writer, the reformer, the educator, the moralist-Russell the lunatic, the lover, and the poet ought to be all compact in our historical imagination with Russell the philosopher, or we shall never properly understand his unique importance. Instead of separating off Russell's tough from his tender-minded thoughts, I want to try and use some distinctions from his own work as a means of organizing an examination ofhis significance for Bloomsbury.2 In his two full-length autobiographical works Russell drew a clear distinction between his personal and his philosophical developments. He says relatively little about his philosophical work in The Autobiography ofBertrand Russell, published from 1967 to 1969but originally written in 1931 and then extended to cover the last forty years ofhis life as well as supplemented with letters and with autobiographical essays written later. In 1959, however , Russell devoted a book...