The house was dark because the street was so narrow that one could see Mrs Redgrave washing her neck in her bedroom across the way; also because my mother who had been brought up in the Watts-Venedan-Little Holland House tradition had covered the furniture in red velvet and painted the woodwork black with thin gold lines upon it. The house was also completely quiet. Save for an occasional hansom or butcher’s cart nothing ever passed the door. One heard footsteps tapping down the street before we saw a top hat or a bonnet; one almost always knew who it was that passed; it might be Sir Arthur Clay; the Muir Mackenzies or the white-nosed Miss or the red-nosed Mrs Redgrave. Here then seventeen or eighteen people lived in small bedrooms with one bathroom and three water-closets between them. Here the four of us were born; here my grandmother died; here my mother died; here my father died; here Stella became engaged to Jack Hills and two doors further down the street after three months of marriage she died too. When I look back upon that house it seems to me so crowded with scenes of family life, grotesque, comic and tragic; with the violent emotions of youth, revolt, despair, intoxicating happiness, immense boredom, with parties of the famous and the dull; with rages again, George and Gerald; with love scenes with Jack Hills; with passionate affection for my father alternating with passionate hatred of him, all tingling and vibrating in an atmosphere of youthful bewilderment and curiosity — that I feel suffocated by the recollection. The place seemed tangled and matted with emotion. I could write the history of every mark and scratch in my room, I wrote later. The walls and the rooms had in sober truth been built to our shape. We had permeated the whole vast fabric — it has since been made into an hotel — with our family history. It seemed as if the house and the family which had lived in it, thrown together as they were by so many deaths, so many emotions, so many traditions, must endure for ever. And then suddenly in one night both vanished.
When I recovered from the illness which was not unnaturally the result of all these emotions and complications, 22 Hyde Park Gate no longer existed. While I had lain in bed at the Dickinsons’ house at Welwyn thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using, the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas, Vanessa had wound up Hyde Park Gate once and for all. She had sold; she had burnt; she had sorted; she had torn up. Sometimes I believe she had actually to get men with hammers to batter down — so wedged into each other had the walls and the cabinets become. But now all the rooms stood empty. Furniture vans had carted off all the different belongings. For not only had the furniture been dispersed. The family which had seemed equally wedged together had broken apart too. George had married Lady Margaret. Gerald had taken a bachelor flat in Berkeley Street. Laura had been finally incarcerated with a doctor in an asylum; Jack Hills had entered on a political career. The four of us were therefore left alone. And Vanessa — looking at a map of London and seeing how far apart they were — had decided that we should leave Kensington and start life afresh in Bloomsbury.
It was thus that 46 Gordon Square came into existence. When one sees it today, Gordon Square is not one of the most romantic of the Bloomsbury squares. It has neither the distinction of Fitzroy Square nor the majesty of Mecklenburgh Square. It is prosperous middle class and thoroughly mid-Victorian. But I can assure you that in October 1904 it was the most beautiful, the most exciting, the most romantic place in the world. To begin with it was astonishing to stand at the drawing room window and look into all those trees; the tree which shoots its branches up into the air and lets them fall in a shower; the tree which glistens after rain like the body of a seal — instead of looking at old Mrs Redgrave washing her neck across the way. The light and the air after the rich red gloom of Hyde Park Gate were a revelation. Things one had never seen in the darkness there — Watts pictures, Dutch cabinets, blue china — shone out for the first time in the drawing room at Gordon Square. After the muffled silence of Hyde Park Gate the roar of traffic was positively alarming. Odd characters, sinister, strange, prowled and slunk past our windows. But what was even more exhilarating was the extraordinary increase of space. At Hyde Park Gate one had only a bedroom in which to read or see one’s friends. Here Vanessa and I each had a sitting room; there was the large double drawing room; and a study on the ground floor. To make it all newer and fresher, the house had been completely done up. Needless to say the Watts-Venetian tradition of red plush and black paint had been reversed; we had entered the Sargent-Furseera; white and green chintzes were everywhere; and instead of Morris wall-papers with their intricate patterns we decorated our walls with washes of plain distemper. We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins, we were to have [large supplies of] Bromo instead; we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.
We were, it appears, extremely social. For some months in the winter of 1904-05 I 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 and 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: “Margaret 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, f 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!
These Thursday evening parties were, as far as I am concerned, the germ fro
m 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 Turner or Strachey glided in — that they were complete strangers to us. We had met them and Bell, Woolf, Hilton Young 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.” 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. 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 fellows 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. 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 comers 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 Clive 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. 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 Hawtrey 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 t
ime. 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 book 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.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 554
