Clio's Lives
Page 22
108 Cook, ‘Canadian Liberalism in Wartime’, 233, 237, 278, 279.
109 Ibid., 238, 268, 270. His point about the apathy of Canadians was confirmed at his thesis defence in the fall of 1955 when the chair, a distinguished Queen’s mathematician, admitted that ‘he had lived through the war without ever knowing that the War Measures Act or the Defence of Canada Regulations existed’. Ramsay Cook, email to author, 29 May 2015.
110 Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays, 22.
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Cook began his PhD at the University of Toronto in the fall of 1955 and in
time became the leading historian and public intellectual of his generation
by developing the themes in his MA thesis – equality, minority rights,
anti-nationalism and the benefits of what Lord Acton called ‘divided
patriotism’. But have I committed the biographer’s sin, the one Cook
cautioned me against when he told me to read The Rise of the Indian Rope
Trick by Peter Lamont? Has my reconnaissance – carried out at moment
in history when security concerns mean that even the Supreme Court of
Canada can hold a secret hearing – determined what evidence I found
and how I interpreted it? Maybe. But that is the question all biographers
confront. And is my biographical reconnaissance of Ramsay Cook not
Ramsay Cook in the same way that Magritte’s pipe is not a pipe? Yes, of
course: the problem of biography is the problem of Magritte’s pipe. Then
why write biography? Because like the rise of the Indian rope trick, it is
‘a victory of imagination over reality’.111
111 Lamont, The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, 232.
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Discipline-Defining
Authors
7
Intersecting and Contrasting
Lives: G.M. Trevelyan
and Lytton Strachey
Alastair MacLachlan
This essay is about history and biography in two senses. First, it examines
two parallel and intersecting, but contrasting lives: that of George
Macaulay Trevelyan (b. 1876), probably the most popular historian and
political biographer of early twentieth-century England – a Fellow and in
old age the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, an independent scholar
for 25 years and, for 12 years, Regius Professor of Modern History –
and that of his slightly younger Trinity protégé, Giles Lytton Strachey
(b. 1880), a would-be academic rejected by the academy, who set himself
up as a critical essayist and a historical gadfly – the writer credited with
the transformation of a moribund genre of pious memorialisation into
a ‘new’ style of biography. Second, the essay explores their approaches to
writing nineteenth-century history and biography, and it assesses their
works as products of similar but changing times and places: Cambridge
and London from about 1900 to the 1930s.1
1 I shall therefore ignore Trevelyan’s later writings (he died in 1962), and concentrate on the biographies written by Strachey (S) and Trevelyan (T), with a focus on their nineteenth-century studies.
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‘Read no history’, advised Disraeli, ‘nothing but biography, for that is life
without theory’. But ‘life without theory’ can be intellectually emaciated,
and a comparative biography may have the advantage of kneading into the
subject theoretical muscle sometimes absent in single lives, highlighting
the points where the two lives intersected and what was common and
what distinctive about them. As such, it may limit what Terry Eagleton
called ‘the remorseless linearity and covert anti-intellectualism of the
biographical form’, and may provide some of the broader contexts
Trevelyan found through an engagement with geography and history,
and some of the clarity and coherence Strachey sought through ‘the new
biography’.2
The two men had much in common. Born within four years of each other,
they belonged to the late Victorian intellectual aristocracy. They shared
common Whig ancestries, home lives steeped in literature and history,
and curiously coincident but contrasting Anglo-Indian backgrounds.
Both were residual, godless products of the early nineteenth-century
evangelical movement. At Cambridge, they were scholars of Trinity
College, graduates of the tiny as yet unnamed History Faculty, and
defenders of the belletristic tradition of historical writing against the
new gospel of scientific history proclaimed by Professor J.B. Bury in
a famous inaugural of 1903. Above all, they both were members of the
elite ‘Cambridge Apostles’: a society with a distinctive collective identity
at the turn of the twentieth century, marked by intense devotion to the
ethical and philosophical values formulated by G.E. Moore, shared by
their friends, ‘Goldie’ Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, Leonard Woolf and
Maynard Keynes, and subsequently embraced by ‘Bloomsbury’.
A comparative study, however, needs to address difference as well as
similarity, and I shall also suggest divergences of nature and nurture,
which helped to shape their distinctive styles of living, thinking and
writing. Some were perhaps biologically or at least sexually determined;
some went back to the distinctive features of their homes, families and
early educational experiences. Others were developed in Cambridge,
where despite close elective affinities, there were acute tensions between
the two men, articulated in radically dissimilar ideals of ‘reality’ and
2 Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming (New York: Harper, 1832), Part 1, ch. 23; Ray Monk ,
‘Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding’, Poetics Today,
28:3 (2007), 527–70, doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2007-007; Terry Eagleton, ‘First Class Fellow Traveller’, review of Patrick Hamilton: A Life by Sean French, London Review of Books ( LRB), 15:23, 2 December 1993.
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7 . INTERSECTING AND CoNTRASTING LIvES
‘phenomena’, goodness and the proper ends of life. Some of these tensions
focused on their ‘Apostolic’ characters and their relationship with Moore,
while others were the products of constructed identities: the increasingly
different personae they forged for themselves in the decades before, during
and after the First World War.
These temperamental differences resulted in two very different ‘archives’.
Shortly before he died, Trevelyan burned virtually all his personal papers.
He could not, of course, destroy what he had written to other people.
Genuinely self-effacing and incurious about himself, he never in his
opinion ‘wrote a private letter worth printing’. He did not keep a diary;
his sex life was unrecorded and unremarkable. On the other hand, in
the period up to the First World War, he aspired to the role of a public
man of letters, and he viewed his writings not as disinterested research,
but as ‘Tracts for the times’. Before, during and after the war, he was
a committed internationalist, an active conservationist and a recreational
champion. So his life is imbedded in the history of English politics and
society to a degree unusual in a conventional academic historian.3
Strachey kept virtually all his papers
. Unlike Trevelyan, he was immensely
curious about himself: ‘I am an egoist’, he told his sister, and everything
he wrote – biographies, literary essays, plays, dialogues, poems – bore the
imprint of his idiosyncratic personality. He was an inveterate gossip and
a prolific, candid letter writer; his personal archive consisted ultimately of
over 30,000 items stored in boxes, trunks and suitcases. Unlike Trevelyan,
Strachey was an aesthete and intellectual mandarin: public life repelled
him. He shrank from contact with what he called ‘the phenomenal world’
– a world, as he saw it, marked by ‘stupidity, vulgarity and falseness’.
Like many chronically sick people, he found it hard to cope with healthy,
boisterous, interfering people like Trevelyan. If, as Leonard Woolf claimed,
he was ‘keenly interested’ in politics, he was also acutely aware of the costs
of social activism. Though public affairs impinged on his life more than
he recognised, notably during the First World War, what he really valued
3 G.M. Trevelyan, An Autobiography and Other Essays (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), 1–2; GMT to Robert Calverley Trevelyan, 20 May 1949, in Peter Raina, George Macaulay Trevelyan: A Portrait in Letters (Edinburgh: Pentland, 2001), 154; David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London: HarperCollins, 1992), xiv, 1–55.
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was literature, music, art and talk. His ethic was one of beauty, truth and
friendship, focused on ‘good states of mind’ rather than on public duty
and good conduct.4
Thus, increasingly, Strachey scorned the civic sermons and literary
pretentions of would-be mentors like Trevelyan and, since he could
be witheringly dismissive, there is much comedy in their mésalliance.5
To some degree, this then is a study in contrasts. Trevelyan had a career;
Strachey a life. ‘Trevy’, as he was known to friends, found fulfilment
outside writing in a wide range of political, social, international and
institutional activities; Strachey found his in conversation, correspondence
and personal relationships.
In August 1918, the 42-year-old Trevelyan – author of three reverential
biographies of nineteenth-century liberal heroes: Garibaldi, John Bright
and Grey of the Reform Bill – was sitting in a railway carriage in northern
Italy, on his way home from front-line duties. On his lap was an exceedingly
unreverential study of four nineteenth-century lives, Eminent Victorians,
by Lytton Strachey. The train was slow, and he was able to finish it at ‘one
long sitting,’ he told Lytton, ‘with the most intense pleasure, approval and
admiration’. He congratulated Strachey on his ‘judgement’ and ‘historical
sense’, and concluded in his most avuncular manner: ‘you have found
a method of writing about history which suits you admirably, and I hope
you will pursue it’. In Brixton Prison, another ‘Angel’ or ex-‘Apostle’, the
philosopher Bertie Russell, was chortling over Lytton’s pages, only to be
told by a warder that incarceration for wartime sedition was no laughing
matter. Second thoughts convinced Trevy that Eminent Victorians was no
laughing matter either.6
Why Trevelyan came to deplore Strachey’s biographical style can partly
be explained by homes and families. In an essay read to the Bloomsbury
‘Memoir Club’ in 1922, Strachey remarked that ‘the influence of houses
4 S to D. Bussy, 8 January 1908, Robert Taylor Mss, Princeton, Box 18/12; Leonard Woolf, review of Lytton Strachey, Vol 1: The Unknown Years, 1880–1910 by Michael Holroyd, New Statesman ( NS), 26 November 1965.
5 S to L. Woolf, 24 February 1905, Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center, University of
Texas at Austin (HRHC), Strachey Mss, Box 4, folder 4; ‘Shall We Go the Whole Hog?’, Paper to the Cambridge Apostles, 25 February 1905, British Library (BL) Strachey Mss, Additional Mss (Add.
Ms.), 81,890; Todd Avery, ed., The Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers (London: Pickering Masters, 2011), 99–104.
6 T to S, 12 August 1918, BL, Add.Ms., 60,732, ff. 195–6; Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (3 vols; London: Allen & Unwin, 1951–69), vol. 1, 34; Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography ( LSNB) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 427.
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7 . INTERSECTING AND CoNTRASTING LIvES
on their inhabitants might well be the subject of a scientific investigation’.
And he explored the atmospherics of place and the formation of personality
in his own case at 69 Lancaster Gate, the huge Victorian terrace, where
he grew up. ‘To reconstruct that grim machine’, he suggested, ‘would be
to realize with … real distinctness the essence of my biography.’ It was
a building where ‘size (had) gone wrong’ and had become ‘pathological’.
At once too large with seven floors and half-landings it was also pokey,
dowdy and rundown. There were times when he and his sisters wondered if
it was ‘one vast “filth packet,” and we the mere disjecta membra of vanished
generations’. Yet alongside Dickensian decomposition, went a Victorian
assurance and stability that came from the house as ‘an imperturbable mass
– the framework, almost the very essence – so it seemed – of our being’.7
Trevelyan’s formative experiences, in some respects curiously similar, in
their setting and ambience were very different. He grew up largely at
Wallington, the family home on the edge of the Northumbrian moors.
Built ‘on the model of great French chateau’, Wal ington is stately,
commodious, compact. Begun in 1688, the red-letter year of aristocratic
liberation, by the mid-eighteenth century it had become a quintessentially
Whig home, improved in fashionable Palladian style. It was crowned in
the nineteenth century, by the creation of a great central saloon – ‘one of
the most remarkable rooms in any English country house’, its balustrades
decorated by the family’s Pre-Raphaelite friends with ‘portrait medallions
of famous Northumbrians, culminating in the mid-nineteenth-century
Trevelyans’. Like the drawing-room at Lancaster Gate, it was ‘a temple
erected to the spirit of Victorianism’. But the Trevelyans loved it. Trevy’s
father, George Otto, thought it the finest room in England. In the writing
room stood the desk where Trevy’s great-uncle, Thomas Macaulay, wrote
his History of England; in the study, the table on which his father completed
his Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay two weeks before Trevy’s birth. Little
wonder Trevy was convinced at the age of 18 that history would be his
‘task in life’, and that he wrote as if before ‘a bust of Lord Macaulay’.8
7 Lytton Strachey, ‘Lancaster Gate’, in Michael Holroyd, ed., Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self-Portrait (London: Heinemann, 1971), 16–28; S.P. Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 110–12.
8 George Otto Trevelyan, ‘Wallington’, Country Life, 53 (1918), 22, 29 June 1918; R. Trevelyan, Wallington, The National Trust (London: The National Trust, 1994), 56–63; Stefan Collini, ‘Like Family, like Nation’, review of G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History by David Cannadine, Times Literary Supplement ( TLS), 16 October 1992, 3–4; Collini, English Pasts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 10; John Batchelor, Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphae
lite Brotherhood (London: Chatto
& Windus, 2006); Cannadine, Trevelyan, 11, 28.
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Like many elite British families, the Trevelyans cared as much for the rural
surrounds as for bricks and mortar. Although he lived much of his life in
urban settings, Trevelyan thought of himself as a countryman. He was one
of those late Victorian ‘pilgrims of scenery’, for whom ‘landscape theology’
served as a substitute religion. So, when he thought of Wallington, he
thought immediately of the gardens, park and the estate, as it eased
out to the ‘moors and sheep runs that sweep up to the Scottish border’,
which he evoked in some of his best early essays. So home and nature
coalesced: if Lancaster Gate for Strachey connoted rupture, disintegration,
‘ degringolade’, here was repose, fusion, seamless continuity.9
The Stracheys were an old, West Country gentry family and, according to
their most recent biographer, were ‘extremely conscious of their heritage
and of their extensive familial connections’. To an outsider such as Leonard
Woolf, ‘the atmosphere of the dining room at Lancaster Gate was that of
British history and of the comparatively small ruling middle class which
for the last hundred years had been [its] principal makers’.10 Lytton’s oldest
uncle, Sir Edward, lived in Sutton Court, the ancestral home at Stowey in
Somerset – a largish fifteenth-century country house, greatly extended in
Elizabethan times by the formidable Bess of Hardwick. Though modest
by the standards of Bess’s other homes, it reminded Lytton that his ‘father
and mother belonged by birth and breeding to the old English world
of country-house gentlefolk’. But it also ironically highlighted the gap
between their straightened material circumstances and the ‘secure world
of dynastic strength, piety and imperial power’ whence they came.11
For the Stracheys were a large, long-lived dynasty – 10 or more children
were common, and all five of Lytton’s uncles lived into their 80s – so
that his father, Richard, a third son, had to make his own way in the
world. The same was true of his mother’s immediate family, the Grants
9 Collini, ‘Like Family, like Nation’; T to G.O. Trevelyan, 2 June 1918, Philip Robinson Library, University of Newcastle (PRL), Trevelyan Mss, GOT 94; G.M. Trevelyan, ‘The Middle Marches’,