Spearhead of British Modernism:

...The author follows with contagious persistence the course of Fry's reasoning from the initial premise that "real art is concerned with the contemplation of formal relations" to his final summation of the artist as one who seeks emotional harmonies with the same intensity and purpose as the scientist seeks causal harmonies, the aim of both being a deeper understanding of reality...

...Johnstone achieves perspective when he places Bloomsbury midway between Victorian and modern values...

...Johnstone, who is currently on the faculty of Boston University, is not impervious to the charm and color of that diverse group which combined, among others, the talents of biographer Lytton Strachey, art critic Roger Fry, novelists Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, Socialist historian Leonard Woolf and economist John Maynard Keynes...

...The belief that only in an atmosphere of relaxed intimacy could the truth be successfully pursued became Blooms bury's creed even before it had felt the influence of G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica...

...In the 100 pages on Forster and the 50 each on Strachey and Virginia Woolf, his stated intention is to analyze their works in terms of their composition...

...Although he gives us fresh insights into Forster's world with its focus on human relationships, its faith in "the aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, the plucky," he never quite conveys the particular quality of Forster's prose...

...This was not, strictly speaking, "art for art's sake...

...The Group's impassioned faith in art, too often identified with an effete bohemianism, is at last revealed for what it was: the vigorous beginning of a new tradition in literature which (to paraphrase Mr...

...We have had many individual studies of the writers and artists who comprised the British spearhead of the Modernist movement, but of the group as a whole, aside from D. S. Mirsky's The Intelligentsia of Great Britain (which was too damaging to count as criticism), we have had only fragments that have played up the personalities in the cast...

...But he deliberately avoids the anecdotal approach to give us the sterner stuff of criticism: exposition, interpretation and synthesis...

...Reviewed by Nona Balakian Staff member, New York "Times Book Review" J. K. JOHNSTONE'S The Blooms-bury Group has the intrinsic merit of all studies which break ground...

...Though esthetics for these young intellectuals became more important than conventions and propriety, its pursuit had much more than pleasure as its aim...

...Only perspective can bring validity to literary judgments...

...The novelty was not Bloomsbury's preoccupation with form but, as suggested earlier, the new concept of form which it evolved...

...But, though he implies it, he does not substantially make the point that in the end she transcended Blooms-bury, seeking in the artist's vision not a pathway to reality but reality itself...

...They were in tune with other aspects of Moore's philosophy: his repudiation of the utilitarian function of good, his identification of the good and the beautiful...

...They saw, in his insistence on intrinsic values, a radical departure from Victorian standards of morality, though not from morality itself...

...It remains for Mr...

...Johnstone becomes generally a less exacting critic...

...Johnstone is at pains to show us how the three separate influences that created Bloomsbury were connected...

...Johnstone's analytical approach suggests, in a way that Virginia Woolf's biographical one could not, the extent of the art critic's impact on the new literature...

...Vividly but briefly, he sets the stage of those inspired meetings held in the sedate Victorian atmosphere of the late Sir Leslie Stephen's home??with shy young Virginia Stephen (the future Mrs...

...The first of these he sees as deriving from the ideal of friendship which Keynes and Strachey, to mention only two, transmitted to Bloomsbury as former members of the elite undergraduate society at Cambridge known as the Apostles...

...It is only for the sake of these things that anyone can be justified in performing any public or private duty," he was at the same time strengthening the Apostles' belief in the value of friendship and paving the way for the third important influence, Roger Fry's creed of art...

...Johnstone to admit this, and to admit along with that fact the ultimate impact of modern values on Blooms-bury and particularly on Forster and Mrs...

...The final chapter on Virginia Woolf, though the best of the three, draws attention to one other weakness of this generally important work...

...If beauty led the way to truth, sincerity in human relationships was the criterion of both...

...But, then, you want to say, structure has always been important to good fiction...

...It was Fry who, by examining the structure of art, finally traced a systematic relationship between beauty and truth (the latter being synonymous with the highest good...

...Johnstone to show??through the interpretation of particular works??the artistic validity of Bloomsbury's teachings...

...Moore's new ethics, with its emphasis on the affinity between feeling and thought, seemed ready-made for this close-knit group...

...This becomes by far the more challenging portion of the study, for at least two of the three writers he has chosen to examine closely make the highest demand of esthetic appreciation...

...When Moore wrote: "By far the most valuable things are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects...

...What they sought through art was a heightened awareness of life that would make moral responsibility instinctive and natural...

...Woolf was Blooms-bury incarnate...

...Johnstone underestimates Henry James's earlier contribution to the art of fiction, he leaves little doubt in our minds that it is to Fry we owe our most advanced concept of the novel as an "autonomous" work of art??and by "work of art" Fry meant something "completely self-consistent, self-supporting and self-contained," detached from the values and demands of ordinary, "instinctive" life...

...Johnstone) aimed at making art moral while at the same time freeing it from morals...

...Woolf) absorbing alike the gay and serious talk of her brothers' Cambridge friends...

...Johnstone does not fail to indicate the many points on which she agreed with Fry...

...Woolf...

...With Strachey he is less distracted by "content," but, while he demonstrates that the biographies employed the selectivity and organic unity of art, we are not persuaded that the result in each instance was art...

...Only a more comprehensive view would have allowed Mr...

...Quoting extensively from her essays, Mr...

...Actually, he does little more on this score than labor the point that they are well-constructed "wholes...

...With her rare gift for transforming feeling into form and her superior grasp of the logic of the emotions, Mrs...

...When faced with the work of art itself??with A Passage to India or To the Lighthouse or Eminent Victorians??Mr...

...If Mr...

...This does not, however, diminish the book's considerable achievement as the first objective analysis of Bloomsbury philosophy and of the literature it nurtured??as, indeed, a very readable addition to the still meager volume of scholarship in modern literature...