by Doug Munro
But it was primarily as a historian and biographer that he meant to
galvanise ‘the modern democratic spirit’. His books were all designed as
public statements, books that would ‘make a difference’, Liberal ‘tracts for
40 Russell, Autobiography, I, 74; Cannadine, Trevelyan, 42; Richard Deacon, The Cambridge Apostles: A History of Cambridge University’s Élite Intellectual Secret Society (London: R. Royce, 1985), 55–68 overstates the case.
41 G.M. Trevelyan, ‘The Latest View of History’, IR, 1 (1903), 395–414. On the marriage with Janet Ward, see 56 letters between T and Janet Ward in 1903 and 1904; also Janet Ward to Mary Ward, 9 February, 3 April 1904, PRL, Trevelyan Mss, MM 2/2/1; T’s letters to his parents, 1903–4, PRL, Trevelyan Mss, GOT 96. Strachey’s take on the wedding is found in S to Leonard Woolf, 20
March 1904, in Paul Levy, ed., The Letters of Lytton Strachey (London: Penguin 2005), 23–4.
42 ‘A Plea for a Programme’, IR, 1 (1903), 1–27; T to S, October 1903, BL, Add.Ms., 70,732, f. 187; Moorman, George Macaulay Trevelyan, 51; John Sutherland, Mrs. Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Janet Penrose Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward (London: Constable, 1923).
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the times’. He honestly believed that the lives of the heroes he laid before
the public – freedom fighters such as Garibaldi or reformers such as John
Bright, teaching by example – could transform brutalised artisans into
good citizens and culturally fulfilled human beings. ‘Service to mankind,’
he wrote, ‘though it may be the same thing as service of truth, must be
put first, in so far as the two are separate. I do not mean I should falsify
history to serve any end, but that I must act as an interpreter of history,
in the truest sense, to all those who … read books.’ But to reach the
reading public, history must be accessible. Hence, Trevelyan’s opposition
to the new ‘scientific’ orthodoxy promoted by Bury – to the methods
of painstaking research and dry ‘objectivity’, which so easily turned into
‘unenlightened pedantry’.43
He had inherited Macaulay’s view of history as a branch of literature and
an essential part of the national culture, and he was a great believer in the
symbiosis of literary history and progressive politics. But he surpassed
his great-uncle in his enthusiasms and sensibilities. Unlike Macaulay, he
genuinely warmed to the freedom fighters and radicals of the past. Much
of his enthusiasm came from Carlyle. The greatest of Victorian prophets,
the Sage of Chelsea was at the height of his repute in Trevelyan’s early
years. And Trevy was a fervent disciple. Like Carlyle, he believed that
history was ‘the essence of innumerable biographies’, that its function was
to ‘breed enthusiasm’ and that its method was imaginative, empathetic,
rhetorical and exemplary. History, he said, was ‘a perpetual evangel’:
it was ‘man’s … attainment that [was] the great lesson of the past and
the great theme of history’. Here too, one can sense the presence of Lord
Acton, the presiding genius of the Cambridge History, who first set him
on the path of historical writing. For Acton insisted on the importance of
individuality, morality and free choice: ‘soul cannot be mixed with soul’,
he declared, ‘each individual stands apart’.44
43 Moorman, George Macaulay Trevelyan, 51–2; T to G.O. Trevelyan, 1 August 1895, [undated]
1896, PRL, Trevelyan Mss, GOT 88, ff. 11–13, 89, ff. 30ff; Vincent, ‘G.M. Trevelyan’s Two
Terrible Things’.
44 Victor Feske, From Belloc to Churchill: Private Scholars, Public Culture and the Crisis of English Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 4–5, 141–2, 150; Cannadine, Trevelyan, 26–31; Trevelyan’s passion for Carlyle can best be followed in his correspondence with his parents and brothers between 1895 and 1901: see PRL, Trevelyan Mss, GOT 88–94; CPT, Ex 195–7; Raina, George Macaulay Trevelyan, 21, 82; G.M. Trevelyan, ‘Carlyle as an Historian’, The Nineteenth Century, 48 (September 1899), 493–503; Trevelyan, ‘Carlyle, Cromwell and Professor Firth’, IR, 4
(1904–5), 302–8; Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe (London: Longmans, Green, 1899), 3–5; Trevelyan, ‘Lord Acton’s Liberalism’, IR, 2 (1904), 651–6.
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7 . INTERSECTING AND CoNTRASTING LIvES
The familiar nodal points of the Whig story naturally formed the substance
of Trevy’s early writing. But his treatment of these episodes broadened and
radicalised ancestral themes in a way that reflected the social, economic
and international preoccupations of his age. His histories focused on the
heroic action of individuals – Wycliffe, Hampden, Bright, Grey, above all
Garibaldi, whose career he celebrated in three vivid volumes from 1906
to 1911 – to bring about religious and political freedom, democracy,
reform and national liberation against the odds. As such, they illustrated
a fundamentally optimistic storyline: a progressive morality tale wrought
by heroes against injustice.45 But just as important to him as ‘Clio the
evangel’ was ‘Clio the muse’. Trevelyan was a poet manqué: to study the past
was to experience ‘the poetry of Time’. History for him was the repository
of ‘rest and beauty so alien to the spirit of our age’, ‘an ever-present
antidote’ to its ‘social ills’ and ‘visions of ugliness’. So his progressivism
was undercut by nostalgia. In recapturing the landscapes of the past – and
his sense of place was far more acute than his understanding of persons
– Trevelyan, the celebrant of unspoilt nature, critic of industrialisation,
would-be rescuer of ordinary lives from the urban ‘abyss’, also mourned
the collapse of traditional communities and the passage of time itself.46
Biographers are in the character business, and Trevy’s heroes were
impossibly noble . He was baffled by psychological complexity, divided
loyalties, mixed motives, worldliness, cynicism. Sexual relations
disturbed him. Private life lay outside his brief. His idealisation of, and
self-identification with, Garibaldi was especially strong. But it was
also, in Richard Holmes’s telling epithet, ‘pre-biographic’: a form of
self-projection never counterbalanced by the process of distancing or
disillusion. By rewalking all Garibaldi’s marches across Italy – reliving
and internalising the story – Trevelyan acquired a second, adventitiously
heroic, identity. By fusing his persona as a frustrated political activist with
his protagonist’s, and his protagonist’s agency with Italy’s, he joined the
personal with the national. Conversely, Garibaldi’s enemies were villains
out of grand guignol, building futile barriers against the flow of history.
Trevelyan’s biographies were very successful, but in the long run their
45 G.M. Trevelyan, Wycliffe; Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts (London: Methuen, 1904); Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913); Trevelyan, Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (London: Longmans, Green, 1920; partly written before 1914). For Garibaldi, see below, fn. 47.
46 G.M. Trevelyan, ‘The Latest View of History’, 412–14; Trevelyan, Clio, A Muse and Other Essays, 140–76; Trevelyan, ‘The Present Position of History’, Inaugural Lecture, Cambridge 1927, 15–16, also published in Clio, A Muse and Ot
her Essays (2nd ed.; London: Longmans, 1930), 177–96; Cannadine, Trevelyan, ch. 4; Trevelyan, ‘The White Peril’, 1043–55.
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success was intellectually disabling. He went on telling familiar reverential
stories into the 1920s – adding further slabs to the public tombstones
Strachey ridiculed in Eminent Victorians.47
Strachey was one of those whom Trevy had lined up to write against the
new scientific orthodoxy in The Independent Review. But Strachey’s view of
the journal was ambivalent – he called it ‘The Phenomenal Review’ – and
his response to Bury was never published. For his essay on ‘The Historian
of the Future’ found both Bury and Trevelyan guilty of confusing identity
and purpose, the nature of history with the good it was supposed to do.
Unfortunately, he continued – drawing on Moore’s distinction between
intrinsic and instrumental value – people were never satisfied with things
of value, but had to question their uses or the ends they served. Literature,
music and art, however, were simply good in themselves; it was otiose to
show they produced good results. So, too, history: it was not a vocational
discipline like law or medicine, nor was it a moral parade ground or
a social service industry. Its role was to amuse and delight. Its value was
purely aesthetic. ‘The past is irrevocable,’ Strachey wrote, ‘its good and
evil are fixed and done with; and we can look at it dispassionately as if it
were a work of art.’48
Yet Lytton’s first formal attempt at writing history was far from
dispassionate. Rather, it was a piece of family piety. Both Lytton’s uncle
and family friend Fitzjames Stephen had written in defence of Hastings’s
policies in India and against his detractors. So Lytton’s fellowship essay on
‘Warren Hastings, Cheyt Sing and the Begums of Oude’ was a chip off
the family block. Written at a time when enlightened colonial despotism
was being celebrated as never before, it was engaged and partisan.49
47 G.M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), 2–4, 7, 23–4; Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Thousand (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), 3, 7–9; Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (London: Longmans, Green, 1911), 289–91, 296; Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: The Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 13–14; Richard Holmes, Footsteps, Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (London: Penguin, 1985), 66–8; Alastair MacLachlan, ‘Becoming National: G.M. Trevelyan, The Dilemmas of a Liberal (Inter) nationalist’, in ‘Nationalism and Biography: European Perspectives’, Jonathan Hearn and Christian Wicke, eds, Humanities Research, XIX:1 (2013), 28.
48 S to Leonard Woolf, 28 August 1903, HRHC, Strachey Mss, Box 4, folder 5; Lytton Strachey,
‘The Historian of the Future’, BL, Add.Ms., 81,893, no. 2; Avery, Lytton Strachey: Early Papers, 51–64; S to J.T. (‘Frank’) Sheppard, 17 March 1906, KC, Sheppard Papers, JTS 2/194.
49 Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey (2 vols; London: Macmillan, 1885); Sir John Strachey, Hastings and the Rohilla War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892). Strachey acknowledged the advice of his uncle in the writing of his thesis. For the ‘imperial moment’ in biography, see Sir William Hunter’s Rulers of India series (28 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889–1902), including L.J. Trotter, Warren Hastings (1890); John Knox Laughton’s English Men 156
7 . INTERSECTING AND CoNTRASTING LIvES
Hastings had fallen foul of the prevailing parliamentary and commercial
mode of governance advocated by Burke and the Whig managers at the
time of his impeachment in 1786, and subsequently endorsed by James
Mill and Macaulay in their utilitarian evaluations of Hastings’s rule.50
Picking through the controversies of Hastings’s eight-year trial required
painstaking research and close forensic analysis, but superseding Macaulay
required more than scientific weighing of evidence. To Lytton:
In general, books are read solely for the pleasure they give; and …
Macaulay will triumph, until there arises a greater master of the art of
writing, who will … invest the facts of Indian history with the glamour
of literature, and make truth more attractive than fiction.
So his account transformed his hero from the autocrat of orthodox Whig
accounts into benevolent imperial icon, and substituted a morality tale
on malignant political partisanship for one on Oriental despotism. Like
Macaulay and Trevelyan, he could not bear history to be dull; like them
he was inclined to substitute ornate description, rhetoric and melodrama
for cool analysis. Torn between documentary fact-finding and dramatic
storytelling, between history as science and history as art, his essay was
characterised by a confusion of styles and targets – a narrative puffed out
by heated refutations of Burke or Mill, and critical evaluation of evidence
subverted by elaborate literary tableaux. The examiners were unimpressed,
and twice he was denied a fellowship.51
of Action series (16 vols; London: Macmillan, 1889–1905), including Sir Alfred Lyall, Warren Hastings (1891); and the Builders of Greater Britain series (12 vols; London: Chapman & Hall, 1890–1904), including G.B. Malleson, Life of Warren Hastings: First Governor-General of India (1894).
50 For the Strachey and Stephen families’ hostility to ‘the great criminals’ (Lytton’s term) Burke, Mill and Macaulay, see K.J.M. Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen: Portrait of a Victorian Rationalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 6, doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511558597;
Lytton Strachey, ‘The Political Wisdom of Burke’, Spectator, 31 October 1908; Strachey, Letter (in reply to Professor J.B. Bury), 7, 14 November 1908 (both signed Z); Sophia Weizman, Warren Hastings and Philip Francis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1929); F.G. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1996); Edward Strachey, ‘James Mill’, Spectator, 15 April, 1 July 1882.
51 Lytton Strachey, ‘Warren Hastings, Cheyt Sing and the Begums of Oude’ (1905, 1906),
unpublished, two versions in Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton University, Robert Taylor
Collection, Mss, 121, 122; ‘Introduction’ of the later version in Michael Holroyd and Paul Levy, eds, The Shorter Strachey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 225–32 at 225; earlier version in BL, Add.Ms., 81,890 (Greaves Essay Prize, September 1901); later version, Spectator, 12 March 1910; S.P. Rosenbaum, ‘Lytton Strachey and the Prose of Empire’, in Susan Dick, Declan Kiberd, Dougald McMillan and Joseph Ronsley, eds, Omnium Gatherum: Essays for Richard Ellmann (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 122–33; Bruce B. Redford, ‘The Shaping of the Biographer: Lytton Strachey’s Warren Hastings, Cheyt Sing and the Begums of Oude’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 43 (1981), 38–52.
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Cast back into ‘a limbo of unintimacy’ at Lancaster Gate, Lytton had to
earn a living with periodic short essays and book reviews. At Cambridge,
in his scatalogical verses, smutty dialogues, short stories and especially
his papers to the Apostles – on bodily functions and propriety, art and
indecency, aesthetics and morality, progress and savagery, self-control and
self-expression, marriage and the death of love – he had learnt that the
best way to startle, amuse and delight his peers was to deploy humour,
irony, mockery, a sense
of paradox and of disproportion; qualities he was
to perfect in Eminent Victorians.52 And from 1904 on, in essays and book
reviews – 10 for Trevelyan’s journal – he began to apply his iconoclasm to
historical and literary subjects, and to complement his subversive stance
with a style that Barry Spurr has aptly termed ‘camp mandarin’.53 Over
the next decade, he cultivated a cosmopolitan, Francophone persona,
and he fine-tuned his exotically ‘queer’ sensibility in recoil from what he
depicted as Victorianism.
‘To someone born in 1880,’ he wrote, ‘the Victorian age has the odd
attractiveness of something at once very near and very far off; like … those
queer fishes one sees behind glass at an aquarium.’ Simultaneously modern
and ancient, an age of science and faith, it was somehow ‘unaesthetic to its
marrow bones’. The Victorian age, he wrote, ‘great in so many directions’
– he was thinking of its scientists and empire builders – ‘was not great in
criticism, in humour, in the realistic apprehension of life’. The Victorians
were ineradicably ‘phenomenal’. From this deficiency flowed multiple
defects: the crushing conventionality, the Puritan morality, the work
ethic, the infinite deferment of pleasure, the intellectual dishonesty, the
lack of self-awareness, intuition or psychological insight, the ‘ineradicable
instinct for action and utility’ that destroyed all sense of art. Victorianism,
he suggested, was shaped by a tug of war between Puritanism and
Romanticism, propriety and conviction, excessive moralism and rampant
52 Apostles’ Essays 1902–1912, Dialogues, Short Stories, all in Avery, Lytton Strachey: Early Papers, 1–199; Cambridge Apostles’ Papers, Minute Books 1902–9, 1909–1914: 10 May, 25 October 1902;
31 January, 14 March, 16 May, 14 November 1903; 20 February, 21 May, 19 November 1904; 25
February, 27 May, 2 December 1905; 27 October 1906; 27 May 1907; 24 October 1908; 28 May
1910; 20 May 1911; 27 January, 11 May 1912, KC: KCAS/39/1/14-15.
53 Barry Spurr, ‘Camp Mandarin: The Prose Style of Lytton Strachey’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920, 33:1 (1990), 31–45; G.L. Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912).