Picnic in Bloomsbury

Abstract

LITERARY cliques come and go. It is inconceivable that we should ever be without them. Sheep calls unto sheep; boobs of a feather flock together: the principle needs no elaboration. They appear from nowhere, they mutter among themselves in a strange hieratic jargon, they burgeon with aesthetic theories, and then lapse back into obscurity. There were the Imagists, who dug up one or two rancid theories from the French, wrote little pamphlets of the sort of verse long beloved by Magazines For Young Ladies, and passed away. There were the Vorticists, who presented the world with the munificent gift of an assortment of isosceles triangles. The Georgians put straw in their ears and held conversations with academic sheep and cows. More recently the London Aphrodite group insisted upon being both obscene and heard; and appointed themselves, as it were, a sort of Cook's Tourist Agency to a corybantic paradise whose sole recommendation was a profusion of bosoms and beer. And there have been others too numerous to mention. United they stand, derided they fall: and indeed it is ridicule that kills them off. The Bloomsbury Group, however, have had a long reign, and are by this time rather firmly entrenched. They cannot merely be disregarded. They cannot, like many other cliques, be laughed out of court. They are not clamorous. They do not make a parade of absurdities. Their influence is all the more potent for being, as it were, subterranean.

Citation

SNAITH, S. (1931), "Picnic in Bloomsbury", Library Review, Vol. 3 No. 3, pp. 105-110. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb011932