14) The Garsington set and the religion of Life Worship
This is the 14th entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project, which looks at the overlap between New Age spirituality and eugenics. For a definition of these terms, an intro to the project, and preceding chapters, go here.
As children of one of the most intellectually distinguished families in Britain, Julian and Aldous were immediately accepted as part of the intellectual aristocracy. Aldous was still an undergraduate at Oxford when he was invited to Garsington Manor, a beautiful country house in Oxfordshire. Garsington was owned by Lady Ottoline Morrell, a six-foot aristocrat with a penchant for dressing up, and her obliging husband Philip, a liberal MP. Ottoline turned Garsington into a salon-refuge for artists and thinkers during the Great War.
At Garsington, Aldous recalled, ‘I had the extraordinary fortune to meet a great many of the ablest people of my time’. Aged just 20, he and Julian met and became friends with Bloomsbury figures like Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes, as well as TS Eliot, Bertrand Russell, DH Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edith Sitwell, and others.
Lady Ottoline Morrel
Both Julian and Aldous also met their wives at Garsington. Julian courted the Morrells’ beautiful Swiss governess, Juliette Baillot. He gave her a copy of his first book, The Individual and the Animal Kingdom, with an inscription, ‘For JB — to improve her mind’. Theirs would prove a difficult marriage right from the honeymoon, when Julian took his bride on a bird-watching trip, during which he spent most of his time chronicling the mating rituals of the great-crested grebe. Juliette would write in her memoir that ‘Julian had a brilliant ability to understand animals, but he understood nothing about humans.’ Soon after, he announced to his wife that he wanted an open marriage. She was devastated.
Aldous, meanwhile, fell in love with a 17-year-old Belgian refugee who was staying at Garsington, called Maria Nys. It was not the most obvious match: he was an icy intellectual, she an intuitive, passionate lesbian. She was in love with Ottoline Morrell, and attempted suicide with sleeping pills when she felt rejected. Yet it would turn out to be a wonderful marriage, for him at any rate. Maria was devoted to him and his career, acting as the mediator between Aldous the icy intellectual and the rest of the human race (she even initiated and broke up love affairs for him).
They shared at least one lover — the model, Mary Hutchinson. There was nothing unusual about that in the Garsington / Bloomsbuery network. Hutchinson was also having an affair with the art critic Clive Bell, who was married to Vanessa Bell, who was also having an affair with Duncan Grant, who was also having an affair with John Maynard Keynes…and so on. As Dorothy Parker is supposed to have said of the Bloomsbury group, ‘they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
Both brothers met their wives at Garsington. On the left, Julian and Juliette, on the right, Aldous and Maria
Modernists in general, and the Bloomsbury / Garsington group in particular, violently rejected the values of their Victorian grandparents, which they blamed for the catastrophe of World War One. They mocked Victorian earnestness, Victorian respectability, and Victorians’ clinging to Christianity. Responding to TS Eliot’s religious conversion in 1927, for example, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that Eliot was ‘dead to us all from this day forward,’ as ‘there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.’ Many Modernists — inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche — also rejected Victorian philanthropy and a sense of duty to the masses. They drew a line between ‘highbrow’ elite culture and ‘lowbrow’ mass culture, pouring scorn on the latter.
The science-religion of Life Worship
If the Bloomsbury / Garsington set had an unofficial substitute-religion, it could be described as ‘Life Worship’. The aim of life, for the conscious and cultivated elite, is the development of close personal relations, cultural pursuits, and vivid life experiences. The bohemian elite should live as vividly and fully as possible, develop their selves, expand their consciousness, become more alive, more individualized and actualized.
Life Worship grew out of Romanticism and became a post-Darwinian science-religion in the 1880s. By 1912, the poet TE Hulme noted that the British intelligentsia had become fixated on ‘Life’. Once, Hulme wrote, all intellectual life revolved around the word ‘God’ and then ‘for a hundred years it was Reason, and now all the best people take off their hats and lower their voices when they speak of Life’.
The prophets of Life Worship included Friedrich Nietzsche, DH Lawrence and, above all, the French philosopher Henri Bergson. In 1907, Bergson published a book called Creative Evolution, the success of which turned him into the most popular intellectual in the western world. There was a ‘Bergson boom’, a ‘cult of Bergson’ — one of his lectures led to the first recorded traffic jam in Manhattan. Bergson was so popular because he offered a more spiritual and teleological version of evolution than Darwin had. He turned evolution into a mystical religion. Nature, he claimed, is swept along by a spiritual urge, an elan vital:
A great impulse carries beings and things along. We feel ourselves uplifted, carried away, borne along by it. We are more fully alive.
God / Evolution does not a have fixed plan or goal for the universe. Rather, like a jazz improviser, God / Evolution is feeling its way, dissolving and creating anew. But there does seem to be an ascent into forms of higher complexity and greater consciousness.
With humans, evolution enters a new phase. We have the capacity for consciousness, and this makes us co-creators with God / Creative Evolution. Consciousness gives humans the freedom to choose and experiment with modes of being, to develop new potentialities: ‘Artisans of our life . . . we work continually, with the material furnished us by the past and present, by heredity and opportunity, to mould a figure unique, new, original, as unforeseeable as the form given by the sculptor to the clay’.
How exactly should we live in accordance with God / Evolution? We should try to go beyond the ‘superficial ego’ and descend to the depths of the creative self. We should live with passion, attention, effort, creativity, alive to the radical freshness of each moment and every passing state of consciousness. Bergson was fascinated by psychical research — he would eventually be made president of the SPR — and the evidence of telepathy supported his sense that the mind is far bigger than the brain, and far greater than everyday consciousness. His mystical philosophy would prove popular with occultists — his sister, Moina, was one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
By the end of his life Bergson had moved to a more religious vision, in which mystics are the peak of evolution. Mystics are beings of ‘exceptional moral nature’, ‘geniuses of the will’, who have gone beyond their habitual ego and attained ‘a superabundance of life’ and ‘vast expenditure of energy’. They are ‘conquerors’ who have ‘broken down natural resistance and raised humanity to a new destiny’ — if all humans could follow their lead, then ‘nature would not have stopped at the human species’, we would evolve into ‘divine humanity’. In other words, the mystic has so developed their personality that it transcends the body and survives death. That’s the ultimate purpose of the universe — it is a ‘machine for making gods’.
This mystical-evolutionary philosophy was a big influence on the young Julian Huxley. In his notebook of 1916, he wrote ‘Great is Darwin, and Bergson his poet’. Julian became a fellow in biology at Oxford, then at the Rice Institute in Houston, and his first book, The Individual and the Animal Kingdom (1912), quotes Bergson on the first page (along with Nietzsche). Julian follows Bergson in seeing evolution as a search for self-actualization. Evolution is a spiritual movement towards higher consciousness, higher complexity, greater individuality, from the amoeba all the way up to the human, and perhaps beyond that — to the superhuman, who has so developed himself, so actualized himself, that he could be regarded as the acme of evolution.
Another great apostle of Life Worship was the novelist DH Lawrence, who Aldous and Julian met through the Garsington network. Aldous in particular fell under Lawrence’s influence. He revered him as someone deeply alive, writing: ‘He is one of the few people I feel real respect and admiration for…this man has something different and superior in kind, not degree.’ After Lawrence’ death in 1930, Aldous wrote:
To be with Lawrence was a kind of adventure, a voyage of discovery into newness and otherness…To be with him was to find oneself transported to one of the frontiers of human consciousness.
Aldous with DH Lawrence
Lawrence was a deeply religious writer, who nonetheless couldn’t accept traditional Christianity, and made ‘Life’ his alternative religion. He uses the word ‘Life’ over 100 times in his 1915 novel The Rainbow. Like Nietzsche, Lawrence believed the development of the superior individual was the only thing that really mattered — more than family, church or state. He declared: ‘The final aim of every living thing, creature or being is the full achievement of itself’. Like Bergson, he believed in a hierarchy of consciousness and actualization. Some humans are more alive, more real, than others. He writes in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, and Other Essays (1925):
It is nonsense to declare there is no higher and lower. We know full well that the dandelion belongs to a higher cycle of existence than the hartstongue fern; that the ant’s is a higher existence than the dandelion; that the thrush is higher than the ant; that Timsy the cat is higher than the thrush; and that I, a man, am higher than Timsy…What do we mean by higher? Strictly, we mean more alive. More vividly alive.
Later in the same book, he writes: ‘Among men, the difference in being is infinite. One man is, in himself, more, more alive, more of a man, than another.’
The dark side of Life Worship
The dark side of this cult of the actualized superior individual was that the Bloomsbury / Garsington elite tended to think that they were actualized and ‘fully human’ individuals, while the vast majority of humanity didn’t really exist at all. There is a spiritual hierarchy — at one end, the bohemian elite, and at the other, the moronic masses.
The Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell, for example, says that true art does not consist in ‘what the grocer thinks he sees’ but only in the ‘sense of ultimate reality’ that art reveals to ‘educated persons of extraordinary sensibility’. He adds: ‘The mass of mankind will never be capable of making delicate aesthetic judgements’. There’s a similar spiritual hierarchy in the works of Bell’s friend, Virginia Woolf. On the one hand, there is the artistic elite, capable of developing their consciousness to a peak of actualization. On the other hand, the moronic masses. Woolf wrote in a diary entry of 1915:
we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. the first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; and then one realised that everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.
As I mentioned in the earlier chapter of Nietzsche’s cult of the superman, one finds this distaste for the masses in Lawrence’s novel, Women in Love, in which Ursula rails against ‘these ugly, meaningless people…She would have liked them all to be annihilated, cleared away, so that the world was left clear for her.’ Her lover agrees: ‘Not many people are anything at all…It would be much better if they were just wiped out.’
Lawrence, like Nietzsche, had a visceral contempt for mass democracy, calling instead for a natural aristocracy. He writes in Reflections:
Bah! Enough of the squalor of democratic humanity. It is time to begin to recognize the aristocracy of the sun. The children of the sun shall be lords of the earth.
It’s no surprise, then, that several members of the Garsington / Bloomsbury network actively supported eugenics and campaigned for the sterilization (or worse) of the ‘unfit’. Lady Ottoline Morrell was one of the founders of the Eugenics Education Society. John Maynard Keynes was a supporter of eugenics through his membership of the Malthusian League. WB Yeats, as already discussed, argued for the sterilization of the ‘unfit’ in the last years of his life. This was the culture which shaped Aldous and Julian, and through them, the human potential movement.
The roots of that movement lie not in Aldous’ essays on the 1950s, as historians have usually assumed, but in Julian’s early writings. In his first book, The Individual and the Animal Kingdom (1912), he is already — under the influence of Bergson and Nietzsche — talking about how evolution can lead to the superior individual developing their ‘vast potentialities’, even to the point of becoming immortal.
Then, in his 1927 book Religion and Revelation, he describes how he emerged from a ‘hellish’ nervous breakdown determined to create a new ‘religion for humanity’, based on science and evolution. His new creed is a religion of ‘fuller life’ — we must try to develop ourselves, develop new potentialities. He follows Bergson in seeing mind and matter as one substance, driven by creative evolution, in which nature endlessly experiments with new forms and new potentialities.
The shadow side of this religion of ‘fuller life’ is that, while the bohemian elite develop themselves into actualized superbeings, the poor and ignorant masses have no real shape, no individuality. Indeed, their sheer number threaten to overwhelm the actualized elite. So the elite need to manage the masses through eugenics and birth control. In 1924, when he was a fellow at New College, Oxford, Julian wrote a letter to the New Statesman, objecting to an article that had tried to downplay the power of heredity in forming humans. He wrote:
during the last fifty or sixty years the tendency has become even more accentuated for the poorest and, on the whole, least desirable elements of the population to have the largest families. Thus, in so far as new deleterious mutations crop out or deleterious recessives appear, they will tend to drift to where selection is least rigorous, and to be exempted from selection or even to multiply with excess rapidity. There is the problem, and, as I said, a very disagreeable one it is.
The solution, Julian argues, is sterilization of the unfit. It ‘has already been tried in Switzerland and various American states for certain delinquents, and has, on the whole, worked well, and it need not be in the least cruel.’ The alternative might be the ‘ruin of our civilization’.
It is a paradox, to me, that a man whose own mental health was so frail should be so quick to dismiss others as evolutionary failures. He ignored his grandfather Thomas’ criticism of eugenics:
Surely, one must be very ‘fit’ indeed, not to know of an occasion, or perhaps two, in one’s life, when it would have been only too easy to qualify for a place among the ‘unfit.’
I think perhaps (and this is just a theory) that Julian’s enthusiasm for eugenics emerged out of his own inner divisions, his tendency to grandiose self-inflation on the one hand, and suicidal self-loathing on the other. I think he identified with the former and projected the latter onto the ‘moronic masses’. But this is just a theory.
In the next chapter, we’ll examine how Julian left academia and launched himself as a public scientist, under the patronage of HG Wells. He became a prophet of the new religion of human potential, and eugenics became an ever-more-central part of his creed. Aldous, his younger brother, would adopt this creed and carry it into the heart of the Californian counter-culture.