Journey’s End

In this concluding chapter the book elucidates the tension in Leonard’s life between Hebraism and Hellenism, which provided the dynamic for his moral and spiritual evolution. His Jewish background helped shape his identity, imposing on him an obligation to duty and strictness of moral conscience, while the Hellenism, imparted by his education, his membership of the Apostles, and his Bloomsbury friends, opened him to ideals of beauty, rationality, and human progress. Abandoning religious belief at an early age, Leonard retained a “Semitic vision” of justice and mercy as the foundation of civilized life. His ethical values drew partly from parental influence, but even more from that of the philosopher G. E. Moore. In maturity he came to believe that “nothing matters” and developed a fatalistic view of death, his own and those who pre-deceased him, especially his father and his wife. In the final volume of his autobiography, he concludes that the thousands of hours he devoted to political activity and writing were ultimately futile, but that for him it was right that he should have done it. This book contends that his significant accomplishments were multifaceted—personal, political, literary, and commercial. As a publicist for the League of Nations and as a Labour activist, he strove to achieve international peace and to undermine faith in the merits of British imperialism. He also provided the security and support in which Virginia could flourish as a writer.