Clio's Lives

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).