Clio's Lives

by Doug Munro

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  7 . INTERSECTING AND CoNTRASTING LIvES

  materialism, self-denial and self-expression, which, like the meeting

  of two weather systems, generated what he called an ‘atrocious fog …

  of sentiment’.54

  These were the characteristics he explored in a number of different guises

  in some of the writers Trevelyan particularly admired: Scott, Carlyle,

  Tennyson, Sidgwick, Morley, Maitland.55 But Strachey singled out three for

  particular disparagement. One was George Meredith. In 1906, Trevelyan

  had written a study of The Poetry and Philosophy of Meredith. Strachey’s

  response was scathing, for typically, instead of focusing on the poetry, Trevy

  filled his book with its ‘social messages’ and ‘moral teaching’, crushing

  ‘all sense of art between the millstones of [his] earnest moral endeavour

  and deep political conviction’. Six years later, when he contributed to

  the Memorial Edition of Meredith’s works, Strachey’s criticism extended

  from the expositor to the subject: the Victorians, he remarked to Virginia

  Woolf, ‘seem to me a set of mouthing, bungling hypocrites’. Another

  target was Macaulay, with whom he warred all his life: a Puritan turned

  Philistine, who invariably confused culture with better street lighting and

  morality with middle-class respectability.56 But the most scathing of his

  essays was reserved for Trevelyan’s other great-uncle, Matthew Arnold, the

  high priest of Victorian cultural criticism who had popularised the idea

  of great literature as a form of moral uplift. Entitled ‘A Victorian Critic’,

  and opening with the suggestion that ‘an Old Victorian Club’ should be

  started in ‘some quiet corner of Pimlico’, the essay asked sarcastically,

  ‘how could anyone … take literature seriously’, when there was life to be

  54 Holroyd, LSNB, 139–40; S to Leonard Woolf, 9 September 1904, in Levy, The Letters of Lytton Strachey, 32–3; Lytton Strachey, ‘A Statesman: Lord Morley’, War and Peace, 5 (February 1918), in Strachey, Biographical Essays ( BE) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), 281–4; Strachey, ‘A Victorian Critic’, NS, 1 August 1914, in Strachey, Literary Essays ( LE) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), 209–13.

  55 Lytton Strachey, ‘Not by Lockhart’, The Speaker, 15 October 1906; Strachey, ‘Some New Carlyle Letters’, Spectator, 10 April 1909; Strachey, ‘Catullus and Lord Tennyson’, in Avery, Lytton Strachey: Early Papers, 159–64; for Sidgwick, see Holroyd, LSNB, 139–40; S to John Maynard Keynes, 11 March 1906, and Keynes to S, 8 March 1906, KC, Keynes Mss, PP/45/316/2, ff. 152–3, 158–9;

  S to G.E. Moore, 28 March 1906, CUL, Moore Mss, T8/44/7; for Maitland, see Apostles’ Paper, 20

  May 1911, in Paul Levy, ed., The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), 121–6.

  56 S to Leonard Woolf, 2 December 1905, HRHC, Strachey Mss, Box 4, folder 5; G.M. Trevelyan, The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith (London: Constable, 1906); Clive Bell, Review, in Cambridge Review, April 1906; S to Clive Bell, 17 March 1906, BL, Add.Ms. 71,104, ff. 13–14; S to Woolf, 8 November 1912, in Leonard Woolf and Lytton Strachey, eds, Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey: Letters (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), 42–3; Strachey, ‘Macaulay’s Marginalia’, Spectator, 16 November 1908; S to G.L. Dickinson (on ‘the damned weed of Macaulayism’), 26 May 1918, KC, Dickinson

  Papers, GLD/5/23; Strachey, ‘Congreve, Collier and Macaulay’, Nation & Athenaeum (Nation), (34), 13

  October 1923, ‘Macaulay’, Nation, (42), 21 January 1928, both in LE, 53–7, 195–201.

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  lived, action to be taken, duty to be done? Hence ‘that ingenious godsend,

  the theory of the Criticism of Life’, which enabled one to write poetry and

  be ‘an inspector of schools’, admire Shakespeare and Samuel Smiles, serve

  the Muses and Mammon.57

  ‘A Victorian Critic’ was published on 1 August 1914, and the differences

  between Strachey and Trevelyan were sealed by the outbreak of the First

  World War. Six months earlier, the two of them had discussed Bury’s

  A History of Freedom of Thought, which described the growth of religious

  toleration in early modern Europe. Bury explained how ‘religious warfare

  and persecution had been abolished by the quiet thinking of rationalists

  and sceptics’ who showed that intolerance simply did not work. Trevelyan

  was convinced that the same transformation could take place in military

  thought, and he declared himself a convert to Norman Angell’s ‘practical’

  pacifism, which argued that war was counterproductive, unsustainable

  and hence impossible. Strachey’s response to the congratulatory story

  of ‘Toleration Victorious, all coleur de rose’ was quite different. Was it

  really possible, he asked, that ‘such [a] deeply rooted instinct as the love

  of persecution … should have disappeared?’ Intolerance had merely

  ‘shifted its concern’ from metaphysics and science to life and literature;

  instead of burning heretics and imprisoning astronomers, the authorities

  now persecuted writers and suppressed indecency: if not Galileo, then

  Oscar Wilde.58

  In August 1914, after a brief opposition to British intervention in the

  name of practical pacifism and international rationality, Trevelyan

  became an ardent liberal warrior. Granted his commitment to public

  duty and progressive causes, his activism and his need to improve the

  world, he was programmed to subscribe to most wartime ‘myths’. He

  was soon convinced that this was a war of duty and national honour,

  of little peoples against ancient dynastic empires, of self-determination,

  liberty and democracy against militarism and autocracy. It was, for him,

  a war that would complete the progressive nineteenth-century story and

  eventually through the foundation of a new international order lead to

  the ending of war itself. Too blind for active service, he spent his war in

  57 Lytton Strachey, ‘A Victorian Critic’, LE, 209–14.

  58 T to S, 16 December 1913, BL, Add.Ms., 60,732, ff. 193–4 (arranging a meeting at Strachey’s country retreat); J.B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought (London: Home University Library, 1913); G.M. Trevelyan, ‘Norman Angell’s New Book’, War & Peace, 2 (March 1914), 164–5;

  [Strachey], ‘ Avons-nous changé tout cela’, NS, 22 November 1913, 204–6; Strachey, ‘Bonga-Bonga in Whitehall’, NS, 17 January 1914, 459–60.

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  non-stop public service: diplomatic and military missions to Serbia and

  Romania; propaganda activities in Rome and the United States; and for

  three years Commandant of the British Red Cross Unit on the Italian

  Front. He also wrote morale-boosting articles on behalf of Britain’s allies,

  and a series of upbeat essays that combined metahistory and propaganda

  on the meaning and significance of the war.59

  Strachey, on the other hand, after a frisson of patriotism in August 1914, was

  almost as overdetermined by his scepticism to become a pacific bystander

  and a conscientious objector on non-religious grounds. Convinced that

  the war was a cock-up not a conspiracy, that it constituted a relapse from

  cosmopolitan civility into superstition and barbarism and that the real

  enemies of freedom were conformity, censorship and conscription – that

  Puritanism was more p
ernicious than Prussianism – he wrote anti-war

  essays, dialogues and poems, retired to oases like Garsington where he

  could enjoy the comforts of prewar civilisation, and turned his appearance

  before a military tribunal in 1916 into a pacifist farce. In his writings, he

  argued that self-righteous activism was more likely to bring misery than

  was self-indulgent harmlessness, that the private pleasures of friendship,

  love and beauty were preferable to the duties of patriotism, comradeship,

  honour and self-sacrifice, that the wartime abuse of language and

  manipulation of literary greats for nationalist purposes was ridiculous, but

  that militarism like religious intolerance could vanish – that the pen could

  prove mightier than the sword. And, in Eminent Victorians, he toppled

  wartime idols.60

  Eminent Victorians is not simply revisionist biography. It is primarily a

  polemic, intimately linked to militant pacifism. Under pressure of war,

  Strachey had reduced the 12 Victorian ‘silhouettes’, with which he had

  started in 1913, into a study of just four ‘disagreeable’ ones. The aim, said

  Strachey, shortly after the book’s publication in May 1918, was ‘to make

  59 I have examined Trevelyan’s wartime experiences and writings at length in MacLachlan,

  ‘Becoming National’, 23–44.

  60 Lytton Strachey, ‘Voltaire and Frederick the Great’, Edinburgh Review, 222 (October 1915), 351–73; Strachey, ‘King Herod and The Rev. Mr. Malthus’, undated but probably late 1914, BL,

  Add.Ms., 81,892, no. 6 (shorter version in Levy, The Really Interesting Question, 107–10); Strachey,

  ‘Boccaccio and General Lee’, ‘Sennacherib and Rupert Brooke’ (both mid-to-late 1915), BL, Add.

  Ms., 81,892, nos. 5, 2; Levy, The Really Interesting Question, 40–44; Strachey, ‘Militarism and Theology’, May 1918, ‘Peace and Peace Traps’, June 1918, ‘The Claims of Patriotism’, July 1918: all in War & Peace, 5 (1918), 249–50, 269–70, 292–3. His most extreme pacifist views can be found in his unpublished 300-line poem, ‘Last Night I Dreamt I went to Hell’, BL, Add.Ms. 91,908 (unfoliated), written between 1915 and 1922.

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  a protest’ against ‘a whole set of weaknesses which ha[d] been hitherto

  either ignored or treated as virtues’. Starting with the worldly ecclesiastic

  (Cardinal Manning) and moving on to the pitiless humanitarian

  (Florence Nightingale), the obtuse educationalist (Thomas Arnold) and

  the maverick crusader (General Gordon), Strachey’s portrait gallery

  anatomised four power-hungry public figures and four instrumental

  philosophies – religious ambition, self-promoting philanthropy, public

  school morality and missionary imperialism – that had led Britain into

  war and deluged it in blood.61

  Mary Ward accused Strachey of ‘literary Prussianism’, and her son-in-law

  – despite his approbation on a first reading – came to agree.62 For Strachey

  placed under the microscope much that Trevy held most dear. While both

  men might deplore prelatical religiosity and missionary imperialism, for

  Trevy liberal reformism had not only inspired his prewar writing but also,

  in the shape of public school chivalry and conscience-salving humanitarian

  service, had informed his activities during the war. Alongside Manning, the

  ambitious ecclesiastic, and Gordon, the bible-bashing adventurer, were the

  great vocational do-gooders of the age: Florence Nightingale and Thomas

  Arnold. Lytton’s Dr Arnold had no obvious redeeming features. All hustle

  and bustle, bursting with sexual fears, obsessed by ‘moral evil’, he was an

  obtuse, sanctimonious humbug, who ‘strove to make his pupils Christian

  gentlemen’, but proved only ‘the founder of the worship of athletics and …

  good form’. Eminent Victorians is an anti-heroic text. Like Trevelyan, the

  Victorians loved heroes, and with Arnold the pedestal was set particularly

  high. He, most clearly of all the eminences, was commemorated in one

  of those pious ‘obituary notice[s]’ Strachey lambasted in his Preface,

  Dean Stanley’s Life and Correspondence of Dr. Arnold – the work used

  almost exclusively for his study, and one that he manifestly despised.

  Chronologically barely a Victorian – born in 1795 he died four years into

  Victoria’s reign – Arnold was the most Victorian of them all: the most

  61 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians ( EV), ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xi–xii; Noel Annan provides what is still the best brief introduction to EV, in Strachey, EV (London: Collins, 1959), see esp. 9–12; Blanche Athena Clough to S, 1 October 1918, S to Clough, 20 October 1918, BL, Add.Ms., 60,662, ff. 108–10.

  62 Mary Ward in TLS, 11 July 1918, in Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward, 201; ‘Is there a Menace of Literary Prussianism?’, Current Opinion, 65 (October 1918), 253–4; ‘Literary Shock Tactics’, Current Opinion, 65 (July 1918), 182–3; Trevelyan’s initial approval probably derived from his avuncular attitude to Strachey, his misjudgment of Strachey’s underlying motives, and the fact that he was just returning from front-line carnage.

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  earnest, morally embattled, ‘disagreeable’ – and influential. He disciplined

  and indoctrinated the Victorians and made them dutiful, pharisaical,

  conformist, emotionally stunted – and immensely energetic.63

  Strachey had started his book with Cardinal Manning. It seemed a curious

  choice, for on the face of it, here was a totally unrepresentative figure:

  a Catholic Cardinal in an overwhelmingly Protestant country, a revival of

  ‘that long line of … clerics which … had come to an end … with Cardinal

  Wolsey … coming to maturity with the first onrush of Liberalism and

  living long enough to witness the victories of Science and Democracy’. But

  the choice was deliberate. Begun shortly after a visit to Rome in 1913 –

  the Rome of St Pius X, the anti-modernist Catholic warrior – Strachey’s

  Manning was a representative not an aberrant figure: at once a modern

  figure fighting alongside London dock-workers for social justice and an

  ambitious, superstitious medieval relic. For al its seeming progressivism

  and modernity, Victorian England in Strachey’s view was fundamentally

  a credal society, a society of believers, and it had more in common with the

  thirteenth than with the eighteenth century.64

  How Manning, the champion of Papal infallibility and defender of

  the Syllabus Errorum – Rome’s denunciation of ‘the favourite beliefs of the

  modern world’ – came to be buried as a hero in the world’s first modern

  metropolis, Strachey explored initially through an account of the Oxford

  Movement. Again, it was no accident that he began his study with the

  spiritual and theological agonies of the Tractarians. For, as Sir Edmund

  Gosse explained, the Victorian age proper opened not, as liberal historians

  had it, in an atmosphere of parliamentary, economic and administrative

  reform but ‘in a tempest of theology’. And the Oxford Movement, ‘as might

  be expected from the place and time of its birth’, was ‘very remote from

  modern and secular influences’; indeed, it was the work of superstitious

  freaks at war with the values of modern, civilised behaviour. Thus

  described, Strache
y’s Victorian age was a rupture or a relapse in English

  history: a religious throw-back or a counter-enlightenment, sandwiched

  63 Edmund Gosse, ‘The Agony of the Victorian Age’, Edinburgh Review, 228 (October 1918), 276–95; John Gardiner, The Victorians, An Age in Retrospect (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2003), 4–5, 131–2; Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D.

  (London: B. Fellows, 1845); A.O.J. Cockshut, Truth to Life: The Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century (London: Collins, 1974), 87–105.

  64 Strachey, EV, 9–10; Holroyd, LSNB, 285–6; on Pius X and the ‘grim Cardinals’, see Leonard Woolf to S, 4 January 1915, in Frederic Spotts, ed., Letters of Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt, 1989), 210; on ‘Old Catholic’ versus ‘New National Rome’, R.J.B. Bosworth, The Whispering City: Rome and its Histories (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 141–4.

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  between one age of secular cosmopolitan enlightenment and what he

  had hoped, writing early in 1914, would be another. But as 1914–18

  showed, ‘militarism and theology’ were recurring vices: progress in morals

  and civilisation was an illusion, and history moved in a cycle of flux and

  reflux, ages of agnosticism and disbelief interspersed with ages of faith, and

  peaceful progress with war.65

  ‘Every war’, writes Paul Fussell, ‘is ironic because … its means are so

  dramatically disproportionate to its ends. But the Great War was more

  ironic than any before or since. It was a hideous embarrassment to the

  prevailing meliorist myth … It reversed the idea of Progress.’ Strachey

  was well attuned to this irony. History for him was continually ironic and

  disproportionate in its effects – for it was invariably the outcome of chance,

  circumstance and personality. If there was any meaningful movement to

  the relationship of past and present, it was not an evolutionary continuum,

  a benign Whig narrative of progress or of liberalism and reform, but one

  of generational rupture, a seesaw or a cyclical affair, as David Hume had

  proposed. Victorian England was a credal society; so was the England of

  1917 – the England of Horatio Bottomley, Churchill and Lloyd George.