PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS
EMINENT VICTORIANS
Giles Lytton Strachey, the son of General Sir Richard Strachey, FRS, was born in 1880. He showed a gift for writing from his earliest youth. After leaving Cambridge, where he was at Trinity College, in 1905, he became known in literary circles in London for his essays and book reviews; for two years he was a regular contributor to the Spectator. In 1912 he published his first book, Landmarks in French Literature. This caused no sensation, and gained very little recognition till after the publication of Eminent Victorians in 1918, which was an immediate and spectacular success, and of Queen Victoria in 1921. These two books on Victorian England made him famous, at once securing for him a position as biographer and stylist which the ensuing years have served to consolidate.
In 1928 Elizabeth and Essex appeared, followed in 1931 by Portraits in Miniature. Lytton Strachey died in 1932. Much of his outstanding work as a literary critic was included in a collection of studies published under the title Books and Characters in 1922 and in a posthumous volume, Characters and Commentaries. His biography, by Michael Holroyd, has also been published in Penguin.
The eminent biographer Leon Edel wrote of him: ‘What Strachey understood, for all his abrasiveness, was the principle of human volatility; he knew that the ego seeks at all costs its basic defences; and he knew what other biographers had not learned – that a biographical subject is consistently ambiguous, irrational, inexplicable, self-contradicting; hence it truly lends itself to irony and to delicacies of insight and sentiment.’
Michael Holroyd, who was born in 1935, is half-Swedish and partly Irish. He studied science at Eton College and read literature at the Maidenhead Public Library. As well as an acclaimed biography of Bernard Shaw, he has written biographies of Hugh Kingsmill, Lytton Strachey and Augustus John, and an autobiography, Basil Street Blues. He has been Chairman of the Society of Authors, the Royal Society of Literature and the Advisory Council on Public Lending Right, and President of English PEN. He is married to the novelist Margaret Drabble.
LYTTON STRACHEY
Eminent Victorians
With an introduction by
Michael Holroyd
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017. India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published by Chatto & Windus 1918
Published in Penguin Books 1948
Reprinted with an introduction by Michael Holroyd 1986
20
Introduction copyright © Michael Holroyd 1986
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-195884-2
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE
Cardinal Manning
Florence Nightingale
Dr Arnold
The End of General Gordon
INTRODUCTION
LYTTON STRACHEY was one of the youngest sons of a large and distinguished upper-middle-class family. His father, who was a general in the army, had spent much of his career in India, and it was the presence of his much younger mother that was more thoroughly felt in their London house. The atmosphere was cultivated, eccentric, crowded, claustrophobic; and Lytton’s health deteriorated after the birth of his younger brother James, possibly as a competitive bid for his mother’s attention.
His upbringing at an experimental ‘New School’ at Abbotsholme, a ‘semi-demi public school’ at Leamington, and two isolated years at Liverpool University College was predictably miserable. It was not until the age of twenty, when he went up to Cambridge in the Michaelmas term of 1899, that he found lifelong friends – including Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, who were later to form the core of the Bloomsbury Group.
At Cambridge he joined the famously secret Conversazione Society, known as theApostles, and was transformed from a socially timid outcast of Victorian society into the leader of an intellectual elite that was to change the 1890s aesthetic cult of homosexuality into a twentieth-century weapon of social revolt. Among the Apostles he was particularly impressed by the philosopher G. E. Moore, an unworldly guru whom he saw as another Plato and whose Principia Ethica he greeted as a new Symposium. From its publication in 1903 Strachey dated the coming of the Age of Reason – that is, the end of the Victorian Age. He predicted an epoch in which his own qualities could be turned from disadvantages into positive assets in society. In so far as Principia Ethica led on to Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, it may be said to have lighted a long fuse exploding those Victorian values that eighty years later were to be reassembled and reintroduced into Britain by Mrs Thatcher – giving Eminent Victorians a renewed topical interest. What had appealed to Strachey was G. E. Moore’s lack of vulgar ambition, his intellectual force and purity, his celebration of friendship and aesthetic sensibility as principal ingredients of the good life. These ingredients seemed to him singularly absent from late-Victorian materialist England and imperialist Britain.
After leaving Cambridge, Strachey used the reading room of the British Museum as his university. The first idea of Eminent Victorians was conceived in the autumn of 1912. It was to contain, under the title Victorian Silhouettes, highly condensed biographies of a dozen or so Victorians notables, some of whom (such as Darwin and Mill) were to be admired and others exposed. ‘I am… beginning a new experiment in the way of a short condensed biography of Cardinal Manning – written from a slightly cynical point of view,’ he wrote to Ottoline Morrell on 17 October 1912:
My notion is to do a series of short lives of eminent persons of that kind. It might be entertaining if properly pulled off. But it will take a very long time.
The First World War, in which he was a prominent conscientious objector, was a catalyst in the writing of Eminent Victorians, altering Strachey’s original concept of the book so that its theme became the ironic sifting of those Victorian pretensions that seemed to him to have led civilization into such a holocaust. It took an even longer time. He wrote at home and made the first audience his friends. This was part of the process of replacing in the minds of his readers the ambitions of public life with the civilized values of private life. In the summer of 1917 he read out the first two essays at Charleston, the home in Sussex of Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, who shared it with her husband Clive Bell and her fellow-painter Duncan Grant. Those who view the Bloomsbury Group as little more than a society for mutual admiration should look at their reaction to this reading. Duncan Grant fell asleep (which is a form of criticism) and Vanessa Bell was critical of the informalities and colloquialisms of Strachey prose. Only David Garnett among the Charleston audience realized that ‘Lytton’s essays were
designed to undermine the foundation on which the age that brought war about had been built’.
Eminent Victorians was first published on 9 May 1918. Its impact was tremendous. The world was weary of big guns and big phrases, and Strachey’s witty polemic was especially attractive to the jaded palate of the younger generation. In his preface, which has been a manifesto for twentieth-century biographers, Strachey wrote:
Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes – which is eternal and must be felt for its own sake.
Yet the four Victorians he chose for treatment were not independent of the moral system of the Victorian age. His polemic against Cardinal Manning is an attack on the evangelicism that was to be the defining characteristic of nineteenth-century culture, an exposure of its hypocrisy and the emptiness of self-regarding ambitions. In toppling Florence Nightingale from the pedestal where she posed as the legendary lady with the lamp, saintly and self-sacrificing, and replacing her with a twentieth-century neurotic, Strachey struck directly at the popular mythology of Victorian England, in particular its conscience-saving humanitarianism. His enmity towards the third eminent Victorian, Dr Arnold, probably arose from his own unhappy schooldays. He depicts Arnold as the most influential teacher of the Victorians. His target was not only the public school system, the cult of which stultified middle-class intelligence and set hard the ethos of Victorianism into the twentieth century, but the whole movement of nineteenth-century liberalism based not on the principles of progress but on a variation of old and debased routines. Finally, he shows us General Gordon indulging his secret passion for fame and becoming a willing instrument not of God but of the extreme imperialist faction of the British Government. The Messianic religiosity motivating Gordon was all too well recognized by a weary generation just back from the trenches and sickened by the chauvinism of bishops and journalists declaring that God (if not themselves) had been in the trenches on their side. Evangelicism, liberalism, humanitarianism, education, imperialism – these were Strachey’s targets, and he struck them beautifully.
In his preface Strachey wrote that the historian
will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.
To extend Strachey’s metaphor, he presents us with his Victorian aquarium full of characteristic odd fish and a host of smaller fry. Robbed of their awful surroundings in the depths, they no longer appear the formidable creatures of sea legend, with their comic grimaces, their futile perambulating to and fro, their crazy retinue of dabs and squids. They are a circus spectacle, half amusing, half grotesque. Only the good-natured, uncompetitive sole, content to lie modestly in the sand, is seen with any real affection – the finest example being Lord Hartington, who emerges as a figure comparable to P. G. Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth.
Objections to Eminent Victorians centred on its alleged inexactness of fact and language, and on the false moral basis from which this inexactness arose. Strachey had taken liberties, for example, in his sinister picture of Manning’s audience with the Pope; and his creation, as a melodramatic foil to the ‘eagle’ Manning, of Newman as a ‘dove’. But many of the charges brought against the book were more trivial. Critics speculated as to whether Florence Nightingale’s bedroom was really as ‘shaded’ as Strachey made out or whether it faced the sun; or precisely how short or long Dr Arnold’s legs had been; and whether General Gordon actually drank sherry or brandy-and-soda. Strachey was accused of being a debunker. That is an interesting word. Though now pejorative, it was an American colloquialism that originally meant someone who took the bunkum or humbug out of a subject – not such a bad thing after all.
Dr Johnson suggested that fame was a shuttlecock that needed determined play from the opposite side of the net to keep it in lively contention. The polemic of Eminent Victorians, followed by the perfectly constructed romanticism of his biography of Queen Victoria and the experiment in psychological melodrama of Elizabeth and Essex, has proved a fine combination to keep the rally going. Strachey has not lacked formidable opponents, and it is partly to them that he owes his controversial prestige. He was attacked by Dr Leavis and had his authenticity as a historian challenged by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who, as Lord Dacre, was to be associated with the authenticity of the Hitler Diaries. But there are dangers in attacking a master of irony, and a number of unforced errors were made of the sort students had been taught to call ‘Stracheyesque’ – that is, setting up a caricature of your adversary, a puppet, and having knocked it down, declaring him dead.
But Eminent Victorians is not dead. Increasingly, it has come to be recognized, in the words of Cyril Connolly, as
the work of a great anarch, a revolutionary textbook on bourgeois society written in the language through which the bourgeois ear could be lulled and beguiled, the Mandarin style.
Strachey’s reputation has come to rest on an interesting revaluation of him by Noël Annan, who argued that the First World War, in which Strachey had been a conscientious objector, seemed to have severed the 1920s from the past.
The profound emotional impact of the horror and slaughter convinced many that the values which held good before the war must now by definition be wrong, if indeed they were not responsible for the war. A society which permitted such a catastrophe to occur must be destroyed, because the presuppositions of that comfortable prewar England were manifestly false.
Searching for a way in which to regard conduct and replace Victorian values, people came to see it either through the eyes of the Fabians, led by Bernard Shaw and the Webbs, or through the eyes of the Bloomsbury Group, led by Virginia Woolf and Strachey: the Apostles of Communism versus the Apostles from Cambridge.
Despite his lack of a university, Strachey’s role was largely that of an educator, whose influence may be seen in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Maynard Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace, and was to have its part in the subsequent sexual law reforms of Britain. Eminent Victorians had marvellously anticipated the modern disarmament plea: ‘make love, not war’. Indeed, with his pacifism, homosexuality and that split between the classical mind and romantic imagination, Strachey might have become a folk hero of the 1960s. That he did not quite do so has been attributed by Piers Brendon to Dr Leavis, who actually told some of his Cambridge students that Strachey had been responsible, through his influence on Keynes, for the outbreak of the Second World War.
Our reaction to that is now one of laughter: and it is Strachey’s amusement we feel in that laughter. His capacity for seeing people in terms of being ridiculous is one of his most endearing and enduring attributes. In Eminent Victorians he had used it to pull down the mighty from their high places, but ten years later in his Portraits in Miniature he raised up the victims of life – pedagogues and antiquaries pushed by circumstances into dreadful shapes – and treated them with humorous tenderness. In the public arena laughter was his weapon – ‘that idiot, laughter,’ as Shakespeare makes his despot King John call it,’ ‘… A passion hateful to my purposes’. But in private life it was a life-enhancing gift. Strachey was, as Carrington once said of him, ‘the only person to whom I never needed to lie’, which suggests that humour of this quality is an instinct for truth as well as a weapon against all forms of despotism.
MICHAEL HOLROYD
1986
PREFACE
THE history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon
would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. Guided by these considerations, I have written the ensuing studies. I have attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorian visions to the modern eye. They are, in one sense, haphazard visions – that is to say, my choice of subjects has been determined by no desire to construct a system or to prove a theory, but by simple motives of convenience and of art. It has been my purpose to illustrate rather than to explain. It would have been futile to hope to tell even a précis of the truth about the Victorian age, for the shortest précis must fill innumerable volumes. But, in the lives of an ecclesiastic, an educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, I have sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth which took my fancy and lay to my hand.
I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of interest from the strictly biographical no less than from the historical point of view. Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes – which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had, it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable éloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men. With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead – who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortége of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. One is tempted to suppose, of some of them, that they were composed by that functionary, as the final item of his job. The studies in this book are indebted, in more ways than one, to such works – works which certainly deserve the name of Standard Biographies. For they have provided me not only with much indispensable information, but with something even more precious – an example. How many lessons are to be learnt from them! But it is hardly necessary to particularize. To preserve, for instance, a becoming brevity – a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant – that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer. The second, no less surely, is to maintain his own freedom of spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them. That is what I have aimed at in this book – to lay bare the facts of some cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions. To quote the words of a Master – ‘Je n’impose rien; je ne propose rien: j’expose.’
Eminent Victorians Page 1