International Government

The meagre financial returns from Leonard’s two novels and short stories led him to abandon fiction, but reviews and articles for the Nation and the New Statesman meant steady employment as a political journalist, while leaving time for his involvement with the Women’s Co-operative Guild. Beatrice and Sidney Webb enlisted him in Fabian research on international control of foreign policy and ways of eliminating war. Leonard’s 1916 study International Government became his most influential book. Immediately regarded as authoritative, it shaped British proposals for a League of Nations and was cited by British delegates to the Versailles conference. His basic premise was that the only way to prevent war was to establish machinery for the peaceful settlement of conflicts, including an International High Court to resolve justiciable disputes. His contribution was acknowledged in his appointment as secretary to the Labour Party’s Advisory Committee on International Questions, a post that he retained from 1918 to 1946.

Virginia and After

When Leonard returned from Ceylon after seven years on home leave, his growing doubts about a career in the civil service, and his falling in love with Virginia Stephen, led him to resign. For the rest of his life he would be a central member of the Bloomsbury Group and deeply involved in its cultural and literary activities. On his marriage in 1912, he devoted himself to enabling his wife to become an extremely important writer and to being the custodian of her work after her suicide in 1941. Together they founded the small but highly successful publishing house, the Hogarth Press. Through his innumerable reviews he was a major literary figure, but he abandoned fiction after his second novel, The Wise Virgins. After Virginia’s death, his life was enriched through the companionship of Trekkie Parsons. Also in his last decade he wrote five superb short volumes of autobiography.

Cambridge

Woolf went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read Classics. There probably the more important part of his education was the close friendships he formed with Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell as well as John Maynard Keynes from King’s College, Cambridge. Leonard, Strachey, and Keynes were all members of the Apostles, a small select secret discussion group, very much under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore. This shaped his ideas about politics, art, and the importance of friendship. At Trinity he also became a good friend of Thoby Stephen, brother of Virginia and Vanessa Stephen. Through these friendships the Bloomsbury Group would come into existence some years later. He also began to write, but in the first instance largely poetry.

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.

Ceylon

Leonard Woolf was an extremely successful civil servant in Ceylon, developing highly efficient and demanding methods of administration. He was first posted in the north of the island, where his obligations included the administration of its famous pearl fisheries. Then he went to Kandy, where his skills much impressed his superiors, leading to his being the chief administrator in the south for the Hambantota district. At a young age, he then virtually ruled a large territory with a population of more than a hundred thousand. He no doubt could have gone on to a distinguished career in government service. His experience in Ceylon provided the material for his powerful novel The Village in the Jungle and for four short stories.

The Wars for Peace

To Leonard, the outbreak of war in 1914 meant the destruction of civilization and way of life he had known. In contrast to Bloomsbury friends, he felt that German aggression should be resisted and could not claim conscientious objection on pacifist principles. He was exempted from military service because of his inherited nervous tremor. It was his writings about international government and the prevention of war that constituted his contribution to the British cause. In the 1920s he held out hope for the new internationalist spirit and looked to the League of Nations to mitigate national antagonism. Like others on the left, he perceived the failure to disarm as the root cause of mutual hostilities but refused to sanction rearmament under the National Government. By 1936 he had begun to despair at the impossibility of collective security under the auspices of the League of Nations and pressed for a policy of alliances with anti-Fascist powers, including the Soviet Union. Soon disabused of hopes for collaboration with Stalinist Russia, he advocated drastic changes in Labour attitudes towards rearmament and collective security, including a willingness to enter a coalition under Churchill. During the Second World War, Leonard urged Labour to work to revive international institutions and later opposed British building of nuclear weapons.

Anti-Imperialist

During his years as a colonial servant Leonard was an efficient and conscientious administrator, but he gradually became disenchanted with imperialism, with its paternalism and arrogance. When he came to analyse imperialism in three books after the First World War, he was prepared to disavow it as immoral, injurious to native culture, and economically oppressive. He advocated the introduction of self-government at a pace that conformed to colonial realities. In Empire and Commerce in Africa, based on massive research, he underscored how European control exploited African natives without enriching the imperial powers. His proposals included reserving African land for the natives, education with a view to training for eventual self-government, and the ultimate expropriation of European capitalists. As secretary to the Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions, Woolf prodded Labour Party leaders to advocate immediate independence for India, Ceylon, and Burma.

Youth

Leonard Woolf was born in London in 1880 to a prosperous Jewish family, whose roots went back for several generations. His father was a very successful barrister but his early death left the family in more straitened circumstances, forcing a move from Kensington to Putney. Though shaped by being Jewish, Leonard abandoned his faith in his early teens. Nevertheless his strict moral sense and his ideas were heavily influenced by his Jewish heritage, as they were also by his classical education at the eminent public school St Paul’s in London. It was during his time at St Paul’s that he developed the intellectual interests that provided the foundation for both his undergraduate years at Cambridge and his career as a writer, editor, and publisher.

Socialism and Civilized Society

Leonard’s autobiography reveals his apolitical upbringing, although exposure to East End poverty and the experience of the First World War turned him into a political animal. The Fabian Society and the Cooperative movement converted him to socialism, while he continued to cherish the conviction that there is no higher value than the individual. He always defined civilization by reference to fifth-century Athens, which embraced freedom, equality, and tolerance. It was this belief that led him to deplore Stalinism as a travesty of Marxist objectives. In his later political writings, imbued with anti-communist sentiments, he argued that it was never right to do a great evil so that a greater good might result, a view that prompted heated exchanges with Kingsley Martin. In addition to writing polemical books and articles, he devoted more than thirty years to his magnum opus, the two-volume After the Deluge and its successor Principia Politica, a resounding defense of liberal values in the face of human aggression and an exploration of communal psychology, whose prolixity received a cool reception from critics.