- 1 Richard Buckle, ‘On Loving Lydia,’ Essays on John Maynard Keynes, ed. Milo Keynes (Cambridge: Cambr (...)
- 2 Quentin Bell, ‘A Letter from Quentin Bell. Bloomsbury and Lydia,’ Lydia Lopokova, ed. Milo Keynes ( (...)
1In 1925, Lydia Vasilievna Lopukhova, legally known as Lydia Lopokova after she anglicised her name in 1914, London’s then favourite ballet dancer, married John Maynard Keynes, the world-famous economist. Lydia Lopokova, later Lady Keynes, very rarely met the Cambridge scholars her husband spent the second half of his weeks with. She either stayed in their Tilton home or in London, more specifically in the Bloomsbury area where he arranged for her to share flats or houses with some of his friends. However, her successive addresses prove that the Bloomsbury set hardly welcomed the Russian dancer warm-heartedly. Quarrels between Lydia Lopokova and Vanessa Bell have remained so notorious that Quentin Bell felt he had to stand up for his departed mother after Richard Buckle labelled her ‘the autocrat of the Bloomsbury tea-table’1 and blamed mainly her for Bloomsbury’s rejection of the wronged ballet dancer. In Milo Keynes’s more recent Lydia Lopokova, Quentin Bell half-convincingly argues that his mother did not resent Lydia Lopokova’s personality but, more pragmatically, her prattling interruptions which kept the painter from her work.2 As for David Garnett, he minimizes the significance of the occasional tiff and insists on Bloomsbury’s acceptance of Lopokova:
- 3 Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes had been lovers, which might account for Grant’s reaction.
- 4 David Garnett, ‘Lydia Lopokova’ (Milo Keynes 1983, 154).
I have been asked about ‘her non-acceptance by Bloomsbury’. Unless it is a polite euphemism for Vanessa’s violent opposition to Maynard’s marriage, I do not know what is meant. Clive Bell and Duncan Grant were charmed by her from the first moment. Vanessa always opposed the marriages of her friends, although she herself accepted the social convenience of being a married woman. But her opposition to Maynard’s marriage was more violent and embittered than usual, because she had come to feel over the years that he was part of her household. Duncan3 was acutely distressed by Vanessa’s hostility to the marriage, and when I once referred to it, wept and could not reply.4
2He suggests that she was either accepted or rejected by the members of the Bloomsbury group on emotional grounds rather than on account of her intellectual or artistic capabilities. Bloomsbury’s love-hate relationship with Lydia Lopokova should not be dismissed out of hand. Obviously, the personal and psychological reasons for the antogonism or attraction she aroused in Keynes’s Bloomsbury friends ought not to be played down for they symptomize the hard time most Bloomsbury members had coming to terms with dancing as an art form none was conversant with on a professional basis. It may be argued that Vanessa Bell simply voiced the other Bloomsberries’ feelings in a more straightforward way.
- 5 All these press cuttings are to be found in The Papers of Lydia Lopokova Keynes, King’s College Arc (...)
- 6 Polly Hill and Richard Keynes eds., Lydia and Maynard. Letters between Lydia Lopokova and John Mayn (...)
3Lydia married Maynard and the press relished the unexpected contrast: ‘Star of the Ballet to Marry Economics Expert’ (World’s Pictorial News 02/08/25), ‘Ballerina to Wed Professor’ (People 02/08/25), ‘Gold Expert and Dancer’ (Evening Standard 28/07/25), even the French Petit Journal (30/07/25) proclaimed: ‘Le calculateur et la danseuse. Le célèbre économiste anglais J. M. Keynes va épouser la célèbre danseuse Lopokova.’5 Those headlines highlight the pleasant oddity of the match, but was it really as beautifully odd as the ‘chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,’ to quote from Lautréamont’s sixth Canto in Les Chants de Maldoror? If the media could hardly have been expected to notice affinities between dancing and writing, what was the couple’s perception of their relationship with regard to their respective occupations? The letters they almost daily wrote to one another before their wedding shed an interesting light on their stance on the association, which turned out to be more than a mere case of opposites attracting, despite what one of Lydia’s letters suggests: ‘Is there any resemblance between you and me. No! So different that it becomes attractive.’6
4Lydia Lopokova’s letters show that she enjoyed playing with the English language. On a professional trip to Paris, when asked by another dancer why her luggage was so bulky, she replied: ‘“shoes and dictionaries”, both important elements in human nature’ (Hill 174). Maynard Keynes offered her a dictionary in December 1924, and in a letter in which he compared Mrs Marshall to Lydia ‘at [her] frenziliest’ (268), he bantered that ‘[s]ince this word doesn’t exist, [he] expect[ed she would] find it in [her] dictionary.’ Indeed, her use of words verged on the poetical. On Sunday 20th May 1923, she wrote to Keynes: ‘I came home a dead body, however I looked into The Nation, quite a weight to read it all through; but the game in speculations/will add a few more patients/as the readers of the Nation’s. You can drop the ‘s’ out of Nation. I used from a rhyme point of view’ (90). That is what he playfully referred to as the ‘pure Lydian language’ (137), which he ‘plagiarise[d]’ (208). ‘I enclose a suggestion for you to consider whether you like to write something like the enclosed to Barrie, or would you go to see him. (It is an elaborate imitation of your prose style!)’ (105), he wrote to her in September 1923. She carefully chose the words she used in her dictionary, remarking, about the bust Frank Dobson was carving that: ‘she is such as her mother nursed her in her womb (dictionary also gives uterus but womb is such a beautiful word if I would be a poetess I would use it in great many works)’ (119). As it happens, her fiancé called her ‘dearest poet’ (121) and repeatedly praised her literary frame of mind: ‘I am sure that when you make your contribution to the population, it will be a poet that comes out’ (121), he wrote to her in November 1923. He favourably compared her style with Elizabeth Bibesco’s in The Fir and the Palm, a novel he was reading in January 1924: ‘I found the dialogue extraordinarily tiresome and empty; and there is more literature in your last night’s letter than in that whole concoction’ (143). Of course, those letters partook of ‘wooing in absence’ (217), after Lydia’s phrase; nevertheless, their common interest in language did not only amount to Keynes’s sending of ‘a crossword Valentine’ (289) in February 1925; it led to more theoretical remarks.
- 7 The editors of Lydia Lopokova’s letters have preserved most of her misspellings.
- 8 ‘The Negress Dance’ was part of The Cockatoo’s Holiday she was dancing in at the time.
- 9 Polly Hill claims that ‘exhausted by flattering Maynard, Lydia lacked the strength to flatter his B (...)
5‘The fountainpen’ and ‘the metronome’ (38), as they affectionately called one another, reflected on the possible interplay between their professional activities. Lydia Lopokova in particular conceived of dance and writing as complementary activities: ‘To-night I feel so exhilarating—I want so much [to] step into your dwelling, if you feel intelectual7 I would produce just opposite for instance my negress dance.8 It might amuse you’ (33). However, she did not merely depict her art as a distraction, but meant to share her creative energy with her addressee, repeatedly signing: ‘I give you my pulsations’ (84), or ‘[r]hythmical mental flux to you’ (160). Maynard Keynes also rooted the creativeness of their relationship in physicality, telling her: ‘You and the new book too are a little mixed in my dozing imagination. I stand over and touch you with fertilising drops and water you like a plant’ (181). Lydia Lopokova even attempted to theorise about the similarities between their professions: ‘I see how a composition creeps out into a forme out of your lectures; in a different and lesser degree it is when I make exercises and then compose dance, of course your head is infinitely more elastic than my legs’ (182); she was however impeded by her continual self-deprecating remarks, considering herself to be inferior to Keynes, or even to his students: ‘Your pupils do they show intelect? If only I had intelect, could such a day arrive?’9 (76) Obsessed by her supposed lack of academic intelligence—’[w]hat a pity I have not the gift for words’ (51), she lamented—she failed to acknowledge that she was articulate in another kind of language, that of the dancer: ‘Why do I say all this to you? I do not show you any new way of thinking, I wish I would know Chinese or Sumerian, then I would be on a better level with you and be ‘big bellied’ in my brain’ (233). She consequently tended to shy away from Bloomsbury—’Your party is the dear old Bloomsbury, I would not be suitable’ (195), she wrote from Paris—instead of trying to ‘fertilise’ their ‘brains’ with the idiosyncrasy of her grammar of dance.
6Despite her passion for language, Lydia Lopokova’s letters to Maynard Keynes show how thoroughly she had internalized her role as a mute muse, even fancying herself in jest as Maynard’s carpet in January 1924: ‘When you go to the East do you carry a small carpet? if so I like to become such an object for you’ (142). She was aware of the female stereotypes she conformed to. In November 1923 she experimented with new hairdos and reported to Keynes that: ‘the best seems an old fashioned one, Alfred de Musset time perhaps, where the knot of hair lies very low on the neck, and well, there is a scent of virginity around such a frame’ (125). The ‘virginal’ (156) look surfaces again in February 1924. Another stereotype which was projected onto her, apparently with her consent, was that of the femme fatale. In December 1923, she wrote: ‘W. S. [Sickert] was in a good mood saying that it was very important for Dobson to do me well, because already 3 English painters ruined their reputation (Vanessa, Roger, Duncan) and that is why he does not show his work of me, that I was artist’s doom and tomb’ (133). The poetess who loved a good rhyme gave in to the antagonistic stereotypical figures of the Madonna and the devourer.
- 10 He ‘married Jessie Hankinson, who was for some time an opera singer, in 1908,’ The Reader’s Compani (...)
7The part of the mute muse seems to have been assigned to her by the male members of the Bloomsbury group. The Papers of Lydia Lopokova, appended to the Papers of John Maynard Keynes, King’s College Archive Center, Cambridge, comprise several poems which were dedicated and sent to her by admirers who used her as the pretext of some poetical competition. In 1919, Clive Bell sent her a letter written in French, in which he quoted lines dedicated to her by Francis [Brett] Young10:
Voici des vers.
Mais répondez. Lydia.
Vous viendrez dimanche? [. . .]
To Lydia Lopokova
Soft as a pale moth flitting in moonshine
I saw thee flutter to the shadowy call
That beckons from this string of Carnaval,
O frail and fragrant image of Columbine:
So, when the spectre of the rose was thine,
A flower wert thou: and last I saw thee fall
In Cleopatra’s stormy bacchanal
Flown with the red insurgence of the vine . . .
O moth, O flower, O Maenad, which art thou?
Shadowy, beautiful, or leaping wild
As stormlight over savage Tartar skies?
Such were my ancient questionings; but now
I know that you are nothing but a child
With a red flower’s mouth and hazel eyes.
- 11 Denys Sutton’s 1972 edition of Fry’s letters (Chatto & Windus) mentions no letter he may have sent (...)
8An ‘image of Columbine’ in ‘Cleopatra’s stormy bacchanal,’ she embodies multifaceted, artificially natural, unintellectual womanhood, ‘[s]hadowy, beautiful, or leaping wild,’ ‘nothing but a child.’ In one of his letters, Maynard Keynes also ascribes the role of the eternal feminine to her: ‘I [. . .] thought that you combined all ages,—a very old woman, a matron, a debutante, a girl, a child, an infant; so that you are universal. What defence can you make against such praises?’ (216) Indeed, Lydia Lopokova might have felt the urge to wave aside such double-edged compliment: being all those women, how could she have been herself? Roger Fry also took part in the poetical contest. In December 1919, he wrote her a poem11 which is preserved at King’s College:
Chère Mlle
Voici le petit poème en réponse à celui de Clive Bell, que je trouvais tout à fait charmant, mais qui n’exprimait pas pour moi l’émotion que produit votre merveilleuse danse dans le Soleil de Nuit. Donc j’ai cherché ici d’exprimer ce qu’il y a pour moi de primitif et d’inquiétant dans cette création.
To Mlle Lopokova in the ‘Midnight Sun’
Not Procne you
Nor Ariel
Nor did Mozart
Beget your ash
Nor Mediterranean Theocritus.
But the autumn
Whose melody missed
Even Ionian seas
Wandering sullenly
Through Cheronese?
Came to the Scythian plains,
Heard wettering storms
And galloping hoofs,
Saw utter cruelties
And infinite forgivenesses,
Felt more immediate souls
Than we can fathom.
Centuries afterwards his dream came true
And it was you. . .
9Just as in Clive Bell’s poem, the ballerina is a ‘dream come true,’ straight out of a long history of male fantasy of woman. Keynes himself appears to have consciously conceived of her as the stimulus of male emulation. In the train that was taking him from London to Edinburgh in December 1924, he used her as a pretext to cast himself in the part of the poet, comparing himself with Eliot and quoting from Bishop Henry King’s ‘Exequy on his Wife’ (ll. 85–89):
I read Eliot’s ‘Homage to John Dryden’—very good, I have never read better criticism. Now I write to you.
But hark! My Pulse, like a soft Drum,
Beats my approach, tells Thee I come;
And slow however my marches be,
I shall at last sit down by Thee. (Hill 271)
- 12 Milo Keynes, ‘Lydia Lopokova’ (Milo Keynes 1983, 18).
10He envisioned their relationship in the light of courtly literature, as evidenced by another letter in which he played the part of the knight, while Lydia was again given the role of the passive lady: ‘She had dreams all yesternight/Of her own betrothed knight/And she in the midnight wood will pray/For the weal of her lover that’s far away’ (211). For a Bloomsbury party in December 1927, Maynard Keynes wrote the following lines for himself: ‘For the gay days are over/When economists courted the fair Lopokova,’12 jocularly dramatising his own literary conception of his relationship with Lydia. That poetry contest, which allowed close friends to compete playfully, exemplifies how the male Bloomsberry reified the female dancer.
- 13 The Papers of Lydia Lopokova Keynes, LLK/3/17.
11Lydia Lopokova herself considered that it was not for a ballerina to speak her mind, submissively abiding by her master’s conservative recommendations. In the typescript of the speech she gave on the opening night of the Camargo Society, which, like all her speeches, was revised by Keynes, a deleted passage illustrates her self-restraint: ‘It is contrary to good manners for a dancer to open her lips. It is for her to beckon with silent and mysterious movements. Marchi. Ceccheti would have thought it as improper [?] for a dancer to speak as to dance Sylphides without tights.’13 The simile unmistakably equates the voicelessness of the ballerina with the propriety of the virtuous woman.
- 14 Frederick Ashton, ‘Lydia the Enchantress’ (Milo Keynes 1983, 121).
- 15 Ninette de Valois, ‘Lydia Lopokova and the English Ballet’ (Milo Keynes 1983, 109).
12Voluntarily voiceless during her lifetime for modesty’s sake, Lydia Lopokova was to be silenced by posterity. Leafing through Milo Keynes’s tribute to his aunt is illuminating in this respect. Milo Keynes sounds highly impressed with her dedication as her husband’s nurse, after she gave up her career as a dancer: ‘As my father, Geoffrey Keynes, pointed out,’ he uncritically quotes, ‘through her protection of Maynard Lydia had become once again, and quite unknowingly, a figure of international importance’ (Milo Keynes 1983, 16). In ‘Lydia the Enchantress,’ an article with an unintentionally ironic title, Frederick Ashton disparages her value as a dancer: ‘She was not really a great ballerina, nor was she among the most technically expert of dancers’14 only to foreground her ‘incredible charm’ as a woman and her capabilities as a nurse: ‘Someone told me that on an aeroplane journey it was incredible how she looked after him [J. M. Keynes], getting ice packs to put on his head. She cosseted him and covered him with wool’ (121). Even Ninette de Valois lavishes praise on her for the thoughtful care she took of her husband.15 It is revealing to find that one box of the Papers of Lydia Lopokova, labelled ‘Diaries’ (LLK/6/3), contains tear-off calendars on which she kept track of her husband’s diet and health whereas, in contrast, only one black notebook (LLK/1/1) has been preserved in which she jotted down her thoughts on the influence of the Russian Ballet and of Stravinsky’s compositions and the modern interplay between music and dance.
13However dismissive of Lydia Lopokova’s professional knowledge of dance, Bloomsbury’s attitude to ballet was more complex than meets the eye. They did not conceive of ballet as purely and simply inspirational to other art forms; Bloomsbury parties staged entertainments which more often than not included dances. Some were mere pranks, and in December 1927, Maynard wrote ‘The Economic Consequence of the Piece,’ which derided his own taste for spoof ballet: ‘Yet when Company’s here, I’m still told that I must/Try to kick up my heels, as I stir up the dust./So I’ll do what I can with my wobbly old knees,/Still showing myself off, still anxious to please’ (Milo Keynes 1983, 18). Some of those humorous pieces, however, allow a more polemical reading.
- 16 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, eds. Nigel Nicolson & Joanne Trautmann (Lond (...)
14In September 1927, after a party at 46 Gordon Square, Virginia Woolf wrote to Lytton Strachey: ‘We had a brilliant entertainment afterward in the new Loggia, with a rustic audience. Sheppard half naked, tightly swathed in red silk, shingled as to his head, with coloured garters, was Miss T[odd?] to perfection; Maynard was crapulous and obscene beyond words, lifting his left leg and singing a song about women. Lydia was Queen Victoria dancing to a bust of Albert.’16 Two years after their wedding, the Keyneses were debunking the Victorian values of truthfulness and modesty associated with marriage. One entertainment in particular could be read as more than an amusing trifle.
15The ‘Bloomsbury Burlesque’ which was performed in Vanessa Bell’s studio and is preserved in the Papers of Lydia Lopokova (LLK/2/7), starred Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Duncan Grant. Vanessa and Roger are ‘painting away’ and discussing the light. Enters ‘Horace of Pippingford Park’ thinking he ‘[m]ight pick up a lady who isn’t afraid of the dark (bis).’ He asks her: ‘Forgive me, Madam, are you turned sixteen?’ and then shows up at Charleston in order to lure her to his place which he wants her to decorate and where she may look at his paintings. The brief second act shows Bell, Grant and Fry looking for Vanessa and dancing the ‘Ballet of the Dogs.’ The third act shows Vanessa very much at home at Pippingford Park, painting and looking after dogs, away from indifferent Bloomsbury. The script closes on her song:
Bloomsbury never gave me a bow-wow bow-wow.
Painters by the score
And often quite a bore
So I’d rather stay with bow-wow wow-wow
(Chorus of hidden dogs)
16In his memoirs, David Garnett remembers that the plot was after a scandal that had made front page news:
- 17 David Garnett, The Familiar Faces (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962) 64.
The topical references which need explanation are that Mr Hayley Morris, a wealthy gentleman who had retired from the trade with China, and lived at Pippingford Park near Uckfield, had received unwelcome notoriety in the gutter press while being convicted for an offence against ‘les mœurs’ involving a young woman under the age of consent. He also kept a number of large dogs which featured in the case.17
- 18 If David Garnett’s memories are accurate, some name variations between his account of the play and (...)
17David Garnett gives the outline of the piece, which suggests that the Cambridge photocopy of the typescript18 is incomplete:
18— Act I. The Front at Brighton
-
Beauty (Welcome to Brighton)
-
Art (Abide with me)
-
Truth (I simply should like to remark)
-
Ensemble (Come, come, come to the Metropole)
19— Act II. The Drawing-Room at Georgeston
-
The abduction
-
The rescue party sets out (Is Clarissa still alive?)
Ballet The London Group—Messrs Sickert, Fry and Grant disguised as dogs.
20— Act III. The Park at Pippington
-
Clarissa settles down (Bloomsbury never gave me a bow-wow)
-
The dogs arrive (Take her back to dear old Bloomsbury)
Interval
21— Act IV. Garden Square rejoices. Clarissa’s friends arrive to a select entertainment ‘A little bit of sea-weed’.
Pas-de-deux The Keynes-Keynes.
A Veteran does her best (Taraboumtia) (65)
- 19 At the time, she was waiting for the nullity of her marriage to Barocchi to be decreed.
22Interestingly enough, David Garnett suggests that the play about the abduction of a girl ended with a Cancan (‘Keynes-Keynes’) so as to condemn the double-faced Victorian morality. Reading the news in the light of popular songs was part of Bloomsbury’s strategy to question the universality of the morality society was imposing upon them. This attitude is also to be found in Lydia Lopokova’s letters, herself a lover of music hall songs such as ‘J’ai deux amants’ (Hill 138), ‘girls, girls, you take this warning from me, never trust a sailor one inch above your knee’ (151), or ‘I’d be a butterfly born in a bower’ (159). In April 1924, she wrote to Maynard Keynes: ‘Did you see in yesterday’s papers House of Lords, nullity of marriage happening,19 brought on a desertion idea of ‘wife who wilfuly and maliciously refused the carnal intercourse.’ It does not follow the Victorian song “she treated him with kindness, she could not give him pain”’ (172). However, the ‘Bloomsbury Burlesque’ calls for a less straightforward interpretation, which draws attention to Bloomsbury’s repressive attitude to women artists. In articulating Vanessa’s abduction for explicitly sexual reasons and her creativity as an artist as well as in disguising her oppressors/rescuers as abject/affectionate dogs, the burlesque indirectly addresses the alienated position of female creators inside the Bloomsbury set.
23Lydia Lopokova might very well have been a victim of Vanessa Bell’s jealousy, but both were victims of Bloomsbury’s phallocentric conception of art and the intellect. That is exactly what Austin Robinson, assistant director of the Economic Journal after 1934, suggests in his recollection of the ‘[e]conomist’s [w]ife’:
- 20 Austin Robinson, ‘The Economist’s Wife’ (Milo Keynes 1983, 166).
I have always thought that Lydia was the only possible wife for Maynard. I cannot imagine him married to a blue stocking, least of all to an economist blue stocking. If she were less than completely first-rate he would have despised her. If she had been first-rate he would have broken her heart. All first-rate economic theorists (I hasten to say that I have no claim to be one) have been egocentrics. [. . .] What he needed, and found in Lydia, was a person as outstandingly professional as himself in an art in which he was intensely interested, but knew himself to be a layman.20
- 21 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, eds. Nigel Nicolson & Joanne Trautmann (Lond (...)
24Even Virginia Woolf concurred, depriving Lydia Lopokova of a voice, a brain and a life of her own in a 1923 letter to Vanessa Bell: ‘Poor little parrokeet—there she sits at the window in a pink kimono awaiting him I suppose. ‘Maynar liked your article so much Leonr. What a good paper it is! No no, I cant come out to tea. I am awaiting someone! I suppose she has to read the Nation now. What tragedies these parrokeets go through!’21 Her private gossip is very much in keeping with Bloomsbury’s contempt for the dancer; yet, in Orlando (1928), the figure of the ballerina symbolises the force that sees art through reality, poetry behind ordinary life:
- 22 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928; London: Vintage, 2000) 206.
when the shrivelled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly. This was true indeed of every movement and action now, usual though they were; so that to see Orlando change her skirt for a pair of whipcord breeches and leather jacket, which she did in less than three minutes, was to be ravished with the beauty of movement as if Madame Lopokova were using her highest art.22
- 23 See in particular the letter she wrote to Jacques Raverat while on holiday with Lydia Lopokova and (...)
- 24 See Carol Loeb Shloss, Lucia Joyce. To Dance in the Wake. Tragic Muse and Wild Beauty: the Story of (...)
25Virginia Woolf’s contrasted attitude to Lydia Lopokova, despising her in private23 yet turning her into a metaphor of art in a published work of fiction, epitomizes Bloomsbury’s failure to fully acknowledge that the Russian prima ballerina could somehow enrich their artistic conceptions and practices. It may help understand that, however noteworthy, the Bloomsbury group ‘often missed the point’, as Richard Buckle claims: ‘They missed it over Lydia Lopokova—all of them, that is, except Maynard Keynes, whose marriage to the ballerina aroused their incredulous disapprobation’ (Milo Keynes 1975, 49). Probably even Keynes missed part of the point, failing to understand what Lydia’s knowledge of ballet could teach him, in the way it may be argued that James Joyce learnt from his daughter’s love of dance.24 Buckle then muses on the reasons why Bloomsbury should have looked down on her personality and art:
I find it hard to see why. It cannot have been for the eminently Victorian reason that she was a dancer. If Lytton Strachey had had an affaire with aerial Idzikovski—to name the most uxorious and least available of the Russian dancers—they would surely have been delighted. Was it because she was a woman? I wonder if they would have accepted more readily the beautiful and intellectual Karsavina. Possibly: but Karsavina, so aristocratic by instinct, so fastidious in the conduct of personal relationships, would probably not have accepted them. (49)
26Perhaps, Buckle seems to be suggesting, they did not welcome Lydia in their midst because they were snobs; perhaps it was because they were more endogamous than is generally considered:
- 25 Duncan Grant by Alan Clutton-Brock. Duncan Grant. A Retrospective Exhibition. The Tate Gallery 12 M (...)
It was not generally recognized, until the present Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, published his ingenious research into the genealogy of Sir Lesley Stephen and his circle, how much the ties that held these men and women together depended on heredity and family connections; they appeared on the face of it to be a small group united by similar tastes and opinions and it hardly seemed necessary to look for any other reason for their association. Yet their most conspicuous characteristic, a kind of antinomianism, a refusal to accept any standard, intellectual, artistic or moral, unless it met with the approval of their own unaided judgement, seems in itself to have been hereditary.25
27Perhaps it was because they looked down on women in general and on women artists in particular, systematically depriving them of a voice.
28The prejudices of the Bloomsbury group were those of their time. Just like Lydia Lopokova, Isadora Duncan met with Edward Gordon Craig’s desire to silence the dancer. While Isadora Duncan, who appears to have been far less subdued than Lopokova, published an autobiography in which she elaborated on her personal theory of movement, Edward Gordon Craig wrote about his former mistress that:
- 26 Edward Gordon Craig, ‘August 25 1944. Paris,’ Isadora. The Picture, First Unfinished State. Two col (...)
Isadora was magnificent—until she began to talk:
The moment she began to talk—to discourse
on things—she became nobody.
Her powers were exceptional as long as she was silent. She could walk into a room and listen to people
talking—though as a rule people near to her stopped
talking—& she might put in a yes or a no or a quiet word or two in answer
to some
question—amusing—always quiet and wise.26
29Bloomsbury’s unconventional attitude to conventional genres such as painting and literature is a much-discussed topic; it is high time their perhaps not so unconventional attitude to less canonical arts were explored. That would pave the way for a reassessment of the influence of the performing arts on modernism as well as a reassessment of the forces that opposed that influence. In a broader perspective, it would contribute to the as-yet unsatisfactorily addressed question: why have literature and dance been defined as irreconcilable art forms whereas literature and painting are viewed as closely cooperating sister arts?