by Doug Munro
which advertised itself as ‘an advanced Educational Laboratory’, devoted
to producing the cultural missionaries who would rescue the Empire
from degeneracy through ‘the natural method’ of physical and mental
toughening later associated with ‘Outward Bound’. After two terms,
Lytton’s health gave way completely. So he was sent instead to Leamington
College, a demi-semi public school that practised the more traditional
arts of philistinism, buggery and bullying. Here he learnt to deflect peer
hostility by playing clever court jester, a role that soon became second
nature. Here, too, he experienced ‘that extraordinary sense of melt[ing]
into a body literally twice as big as one’s own’ – boys blessed with the
looks, physiques and popularity he so lacked.26 The discovery of Plato’s
Symposium in 1896 came to him ‘with a rush of … surprise [and] relief
to know what I feel now, was felt 2000 years ago in glorious Greece’.
But living in the shadow of Reading Gaol, he had to fight a sense of
uncleanness. By the time he left school, he was an unusual mix: timid,
irresolute, insecure, ‘naturally biddable’, but also self-dramatising, droll,
outrageous and secretly rebellious. With his supercilious talk, stick-insect
physique, and give-away voice – described as the ‘breathless squeak of an
asthmatic rabbit’ – he was also a provocation: a ‘queer’ who made even
discreet homosexuality dangerous.27
25 Moorman, George Macaulay Trevelyan, 21–2; T to G.O. and C. Trevelyan, 23 February, 9 November, [n.d.] November 1892, 5 July 1893, PRL, Trevelyan Mss, GOT 87; T to C.P. Trevelyan, 23 January, 13 February, 19 March, ‘Easter’, ‘April-May’, 13, 14, 17, 21 May, 1, 18, 25, 29 June, 5, 19 July 1893 (all from Harrow), PRL, Trevelyan Mss, CPT, Ex 194; Trevelyan, An Autobiography and Other Essays, 3, 9, 15.
26 Holroyd, LSNB, 28–32; Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury, 113–15.
27 S, Diary, 13 November 1996, in Holroyd, Lytton Strachey by Himself, 86; Julie Anne Taddeo, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2002), 22–3; Holroyd, LSNB, 42–3; W.G. Robertson, Time Was: The Reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1931), 16–17.
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Trevelyan was a ‘serious gowk’: irreligious, but terribly earnest. And he
recognised it: ‘I am forced to confess,’ he wrote his brother, ‘we inherit the
moral stamina produced in Grandpa by religion and apply it straight to
our infidel sense of duty.’ Shortly before going up to Cambridge, he told
Charles of his tasks in ‘the battle for life’. His ideal was ‘the wedding of the
modern democratic spirit, the spirit of duty in its highest form, to modern
literature’. But, he wrote, ‘literary people are not most of them, democratic’,
and ‘Cambridge people are intellectual but not serious’. So, ‘unless I keep
my fire ever kindled within me, I shall soon forget my “motif” and become
a mere “littérateur”’!28 In addition to the hard work that earned him a First,
a Prize essay and a Trinity fellowship at the age of 21, he was active in many
progressive causes – Irish Home Rule, opposition to British policies in
Egypt, India and, above all, ‘the Devil’s kitchen in South Africa’. He wrote
passionately on the ‘Condition of England’ problem, and devoted much of
his spare time to adult education, organising Trinity summer schools and
teaching at the Working Men’s College in London.29
Strachey arrived in Cambridge seven years later, in 1899. University for
him was not ‘a battle for life’, still less a test of political engagement or
good works. Rather it was a liberation, a place of unrestrained talk and
enduring friendships – with the male core of ‘Old Bloomsbury’ – or, as
Leon Edel puts it, ‘a romp, a lark, a phallic universe’.30 Early in his first year,
he was ‘taken up’ by Trevelyan. As a junior fellow, Trevy was responsible for
sponsoring Lytton’s election to a College Scholarship, to the elite Sunday
Essay Club and, above all, to the Cambridge Apostles. He was greatly
impressed with Lytton’s poetic and literary abilities, and he looked to him
as a potential ally in the defence of the literary and humane traditions of
English historical writing. ‘He will write history well some day, and I am
leading him out of cynicism into the dry land of Carlylean defiance and
pity,’ Trevelyan told his mother, ‘he is worth leading and I am getting very
fond of him.’ He is most friendly and kind,’ Strachey told his mother,
‘and very much like I imagined his father to be.’ But there was an undertow
of passive aggression in his response: ‘He is very eager’, he wrote, but ‘too
28 T to C.P. Trevelyan, 19 July, 4 August 1893, PRL, Trevelyan Mss, CPT, Ex 194; Moorman,
George Macaulay Trevelyan, 35–6; L. Trevelyan, A Very British Family, 117.
29 T to G.O. Trevelyan, 12 May, 17, 20 October, 12 December 1900, PRL, Trevelyan Mss, GOT 91; G.M. Trevelyan, ‘Past and Future’, in C.F.G. Masterman, ed., The Heart of Empire (London: Unwin, 1901), 398–415; G.M. Trevelyan, ‘The White Peril’, The Nineteenth Century, 50 (1901), 1043–55.
30 Edel, Bloomsbury, 39, 44; Lytton Strachey, ‘A Sermon Preached before the Midnight Society’, 5 May 1900; Strachey, ‘Conversation and Conversations’, 3 November 1901, BL, Add.Ms., 81,813, folder 1, 8.
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earnest, patristic and virulent’ and ‘somewhat piteous’.31 Lytton found the
‘overwhelming enthusiasm’ and heavy-handed mentoring ‘alarming’, and
he started poking fun, as in the parable of ‘Cleanthes the Stoic’:
‘For the last six months,’ said Cleanthes, ‘I have been very busy. I have
written four more chapters of my history of Cos … I have given several
lectures … attended countless … committees, boards and syndicates …
walked from Athens to Corinth … twenty five times … taken a great
deal of exercise, and done a great deal of work, a great deal of talking and
a great deal of good.’32
The tension reflected not only temperamental dissonance, but also
generational change. Generational rupture was to become one of
the leitmotifs of Strachey’s thought. His father, born within months of the
battle of Waterloo, was too old. So were the ‘bilious’ uncles he recalled
at Lancaster Gate. Admittedly, his mother was younger, and Lytton
was strongly tied to her aesthetically and emotionally; however, she was
‘a consenting and approving Victorian’, was ‘not up to date in morals’, and
‘ha(d) never heard of buggery – at any rate in her own family’. There was
much he could not tell her: ‘Oh, how dreadful to be a mother,’ he said
to Maynard Keynes, ‘how terrible to love so much and know so little.’33
According to Russell’s somewhat jaundiced verdict:
J.M. Keynes and Lytton Strachey both belonged to the Cambridge
generation about ten years junior to my own. We were still Victorian; they
were Edwardian. We believed in ordered progress by means of politics
and open discussion … The generation of Keynes and Strachey … aimed
rather at a life of retirement among fine shades and nice feelings, and
conceived of the goo
d as consisting in the passionate mutual admirations
of a clique of the elite.34
31 T to S, 2 March 1900, 22 March 1902, BL, Add.Ms, 60,732, ff. 180–5; T to Caroline Trevelyan, 1 December 1900, PRL, Trevelyan Mss, GOT 94; S to Joan Pernel Strachey, 10 March, 3 May 1900, BL, Add.Ms., 60,724, ff. 86–92; S to Jane Strachey, 11 March, 29 April 1900, 24 March 1902,
HRHC, Strachey Mss, Box 4, folder 2; Holroyd, LSNB, 61–2; Cannadine, Trevelyan, 41–2.
32 Strachey, ‘Aphorisms’, BL, Add.Ms., 81,916, no. 40; partly printed in Gabriel Merle, Lytton Strachey (1880–1932): Biographie et critique d’un critique et biographe (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1980), 911.
33 Vanessa Bell to Virginia Woolf, 18 January 1918, New York Public Library, Berg Collection, Virginia Woolf Papers, Incoming Correspondence; Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf, A Biography (2 vols; London: Hogarth Press, 1972), vol. 2, 60; Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, 17 January 1918, in Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, eds, Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume II (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), 212–13; S to John Maynard Keynes, 27 February 1906, King’s College, Cambridge, (KC),
Keynes Mss, PP/45/316/2, f. 130.
34 Bertrand Russell, ‘Portraits from Memory’, The Listener, 17 July 1952, 97, reprinted in Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), 73–5.
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In Trevelyan, this sense of generational rupture was whol y absent.
Independent he might be; rebel he was not. George Otto, born in 1838,
active in politics and history writing until the First World War, was his
natural confidante on matters literary, historical and political, as was Lady
Caroline, born in 1849 and into the 1920s an advanced reformer, on his
social, educational and personal concerns. And if his parents’ interests
reached into the twentieth century, his own reached back to the nineteenth,
through his father to Macaulay and Holland House, and through his
mother to the Manchester mercantile dynasties and the world of the First
Reform Bill. So completely did he project the values of his elders that by
the time he reached his 30s, he was seen by his Cambridge juniors as an
‘old dear’ – an anachronism.35
By 1900, the Trevelyans had become very wealthy. Frugal habits, astute
marriages, culminating in George Otto’s to Caroline Philips, the inheritor
of a cotton fortune, and a large copyright income from Macaulay’s and
George Otto’s books saw to it that the brothers enjoyed large private
incomes. But George was too angular a character, too complicit with
the demise of privilege, too much a son of Clapham simply to enjoy his
position. Somehow he had to earn it. So, he spoke of the need for self-
discipline and drove himself all his life.36 The Stracheys were relatively
poor, and Lytton was painfully aware that his family had come down in the
world. Long before Virginia Woolf patented the phrase, he wrote of his
longing for ‘a room of one’s own’, and he envied the ‘uncontending ease’
of the Trevelyans. But he had none of their guilts either. Cosseted from
infancy, he believed he had a right to the good things of life. It could never
be said of him as of Trevelyan, ‘his was a character inadequately warmed
by self-indulgence’. Like the Carpenter, he wanted another slice.37
It was in the Apostles that the differences between Trevelyan’s late Victorian
angst and Strachey’s Edwardian levity came to a head. Discussions
at the turn of the century, under the influence of G.E. Moore – the
great Cambridge guru of the era – focused on the distinction between
35 S to Leonard Woolf, 23 March 1903, 1 June 1905 (on Russell as ‘a medieval figure’), 6 February 1907 (Rupert Brooke on Trevy as ‘an old dear’), HRHC, Strachey Mss, Box 4, folder 5.
36 Cannadine, Trevelyan, 47; John Burrow, review of George Macaulay Trevelyan by Mary Moorman, The Times, 1 July 1980; John Vincent, ‘G.M. Trevelyan’s Two Terrible Things’, LRB, 2:12, 19 June 1980.
37 S to Duncan Grant, 23 August 1909, BL, Add.Ms., 57,932; ‘Walruses and Carpenters’, Spectator, 9 December 1911. This article was signed ‘Z’, as were a number of Strachey’s other contributions to the Spectator between 1908 and 1912. In this article, S refers to Trevelyan and Dickinson as ‘Walruses’
and to himself and some of his fellow Apostles as ‘Carpenters’.
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‘reality’ and ‘phenomena’, and on the nature of ‘the good’. Was ‘reality’
a timeless area of truth and contemplation or was it the material world?
And was being good or doing good more important: was the active or
the contemplative life the ideal? Trevelyan was fully convinced that ‘the
only way of getting at reality, was by the phenomenal expression of it’.
As he put it to his mother, ‘If life consisted of right thinking, it might be
successfully lived; but, it consists also of right doing and right creating,
a very different matter’. There was no point in feeling or even being good
if one did not improve the world. ‘Action’, he told the Apostles, was ‘the
main thing in life’: it was only by action, that one could make oneself
a human agent capable of ethical thinking at all. Doing good also meant
fighting evil: ‘Liberalism,’ he told Moore was ‘the forcible social realization
of the principle of Hatred of Evil, which I take … to be an essential part
of love of good.’38
For Moore and Strachey, however, the ultimate realities were ‘good states
of mind’. These were intrinsic and were not associated with ‘instrumental
actions’. They consisted of timeless, passionate states of contemplation
and communion. The appropriate subjects of contemplation and
communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and the ‘prime
objects in life were love, the enjoyment of aesthetic experiences and the
pursuit of knowledge’ – to the exclusion of all else. Strachey deplored the
belief that ‘you are definitely improved if you do social work and go into
Parliament or an engagement at the Working Men’s College’, and that ‘the
dynamic life is the proper one to lead’. This view was, for him, ‘detestable.
I want to throttle it’, he said, ‘put it out of the way. The phenomenal
world oppresses me like an undigested nightmare’.39 According to Russell,
there was ‘a long drawn out battle’ between Trevelyan and Strachey for
the soul of the Apostles, ‘in which Lytton was on the whole victorious’.
38 T to Caroline Trevelyan, April–May 1896, PRL, Trevelyan Mss, GOT 89, ff. 84–5; T to G.E.
Moore, July–September 1895, esp. 26 July 1896 (a 20-page letter); Moore Papers, Cambridge
University Library (CUL), Additional Mss, 8330, 8T/12/4-8; Cambridge Apostles’ Papers, Minute Books, 1893–1898, KC: KCAS/39/1/12: 6 June 1896, 13 February, 1 May 1897, and esp. 21 May
1898 in response to Moore’s paper entitled, ‘Shall we think without acting, or act without thinking?’.
39 John Maynard Keynes, ‘My Early Beliefs’, a paper read to the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in
1938, is the classic formulation. See S.P. Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism (revised ed.; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 82–95; S to G.E.
Moore, 11 October 1903, CUL, Moore Papers, Additional Mss, 8330, 8T/44/1; Leonard Woolf,
‘George or George or Both’ Paper to the Cambridg
e Apostles, 9 May 1903, summarises the conflict between George Trevelyan and George (or, as he preferred, G.E.) Moore: Leonard Woolf Archive, Part 2, O/2 University of Sussex Special Collections; Strachey, ‘Shall We Go the Whole Hog?’, Paper to the Cambridge Apostles, 25 February 1905, BL, Add.Ms., 81,890, in Avery, The Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers, 99–103.
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Russell thought it was all about sex – and homosexual relations, hitherto
dormant, became rampant in the society under the influence of Strachey
and Keynes – but it ranged more widely: it was also about art and politics,
good states of mind and good deeds, the active and the passive life.40
At this stage in his career, Trevelyan, according to Leonard Woolf, was
‘a fiercely political young man’. In 1903, in protest at Bury’s inaugural
on ‘the science of history’, he left the introverted world of academe to
devote himself to public writing and good works, and in 1904, he married
Janet, daughter of Mary Ward, the celebrated novelist, philanthropist
and grandchild of Dr Arnold.41 Living on the edge of Pimlico, they were
both prominent in a range of progressive causes – children’s play centres,
conservation, land reform, open diplomacy. And George was a member
of various organisations formed in support of national independence
and reform movements in Europe and the Middle East. In 1903, he had
established and funded a new progressive journal, The Independent Review,
a twentieth-century ‘ Edinburgh’ review of ‘advanced views on politics
and ideas … above party’, and he recruited congenial Apostles including
Russell, Dickinson, Roger Fry and Strachey to write for it. Infused with
the ethic of service to the people, and by the philosophe ideal of stamping
out ignorance and prejudice through education – inspired, he said, by ‘the
career and example’ of Voltaire to put his ‘wealth’ and ‘talent’ to more
than ‘the selfish … egotism which we know as “academic”’ – he also
lectured many times a week at adult educational institutions: the Working
Men’s and Morley Colleges, Toynbee Hall, and Mary Ward’s charitable
foundation, the Passmore Edwards Settlement in Bloomsbury.42