Clio's Lives
Page 27
As the war showed, credal societies kill, and Eminent Victorians, which
started with the credulous clerics of Oxford, ended amidst the catacombs
of Omdurman. Submerged for most of the book, the killing gradually
worked its way into its fabric, finally coming out into the open in the
last paragraph when the ‘future lay with … Kitchener and his Maxim-
Nordenfeldt guns’, and in a last bathetic shrug of the shoulders, ‘it all
ended very happily – in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast
addition to the British Empire, and a step in the peerage for Sir Evelyn
Baring’.66
If Eminent Victorians was a wartime polemic, pervaded by the vehemence
of conscientious objection, Queen Victoria (1921) was clearly a book of
peace. It was ‘a five act comedy,’ Lytton told Leonard Woolf, not a satire.
Anatomical dissection made way for ‘a more subjective spirit of romance’,
65 Strachey, EV, 15–35; Gosse, ‘The Agony of the Victorian Age’, 278–9; Strachey, ‘Militarism and Theology’, 249–50. On history as flux and reflux, Lytton Strachey, ‘The Eighteenth Century’, Nation,
(45), 29 May 1929, in BE, 199–202; Strachey, ‘Congreve, Collier and Macaulay’, 55–7.
66 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York/London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 7–8; Strachey, EV, 243. Churchill, Bottomley and Lloyd George feature as Moloch, Beelzebub and Belial in Strachey’s ‘hellish’ anti-war poem. He also wrote a fragment on Churchill in 1921, which formed the basis of E.M. Forster’s 1922 Dialogue, ‘Our Graves in Gallipoli’, All in BL, Add.Ms., 91,908; see also S to John Maynard Keynes, 10 December 1919 (on Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace), 5 May 1923 (on Churchill’s war memoirs), KC, Keynes Mss, PP 45/316/5, ff. 64, 158.
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and melodramatic exposure for a cadenced narrative, initially whimsical
and playful, mildly subversive and malicious at its core, but at the end
and in memory, roseate and nostalgic.67 Yet if the play of accident is more
nuanced, and the breaks between acts less violent, the themes of Eminent
Victorians are still visible. For Strachey, it was ‘the interplay of circumstance
and character that makes up the sum of every human life’. And, as with
the story of his eminences, Queen Victoria opened with a series of chance
events, starting with the sudden death of the Prince Regent’s only child,
Princess Charlotte, and followed by the unlikely chance of Victoria’s
birth.68 Ruptures became ‘turning points’, and the great turning points
of the reign were connected with the Prince Consort.
Albert, not Victoria – a responsive but not a creative character – was the
true begetter of the Victorian age. Victoria, for Strachey, was not very
Victorian – but Albert was. With his arrival in 1840, Lord Melbourne
– an eighteenth-century survivor: cynical, civilised, slightly sentimental,
‘an autumn rose’ – was swept aside. Victoria was transformed from feisty,
young Hanoverian queen into staid Victorian ‘Hausfrau … walking …
her children [and] inspecting … lifestock’. Soon:
The last vestige of the eighteenth century had disappeared; cynicism and
subtlety were shrivelled into powder; and duty, industry, morality and
domesticity triumphed over them. Even the chairs and tables had assumed
in singular responsiveness, the forms of prim solidity. The Victorian age
was in full swing.69
Albert appears as a kinder version of Dr Arnold, and his attempts to
educate and indoctrinate court and government are frustrated by some very
un-Victorian characters – by Palmerston, a jaunty Regency throwback,
and by Edward VII, a post-Victorian who proved ‘strangely resistant’ to
his father’s moral engineering, and grew into something very different,
67 S to Leonard Woolf, 16 December 1919, Berg Collection, Strachey Mss, Strachey–Woolf
Letters; TLS, 7 April 1921, 215; Times, 7 April 1921; Nation, (31), 16 April 1921; Clive Bell to S,
‘Saturday’, April 1921, BL, Add.Ms., 50,559, ff. 126; Dorothy Bussy to S, 17 April 1921, BL, Add.
Ms., 60,661, f. 237.
68 Strachey, Queen Victoria, Manuscript Preface (unpublished), HRHC, Strachey Mss, Box 2,
folder 7; Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria ( QV) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971; first published 1921), 10–12, 21, 24. See A.N. Wilson, The Victorians (London: Hutchinson, 2002), 24–6 for the much-repeated speculation that Victoria was not the Duke of Kent’s daughter; for speculation about Albert’s birth, Strachey, QV, 82.
69 Strachey, QV, 54–7, 118.
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at once another George IV and the exemplar of a more modern kingship.70
Unlike Arnold, Albert is a tragic as well as a comic figure. The pressure
of unrelenting duty, endless activity and constant dissatisfaction destroys
his health and brings about his early death, the other great turning point
of the reign. Had he lived, Strachey asked in an unusual counterfactual,
‘perpetually at the centre of affairs … virtuous, intelligent … with the
unexampled experience of a whole lifetime of government’, would not
‘such a ruler’, armed with ‘the prescriptive authority’ of wisdom and age,
have ‘convert[ed] England into a State as … organized, as elaborately
trained and as autocratically controlled as Prussia herself’? But, as it
was, ‘what chance gave, chance took away. The Consort perished in his
prime; and the English Constitution, dropping the dead limb with hardly
a tremor, continued its mysterious life as if it had never been’.71
The death of Albert put Victorianism in aspic or black crepe for nearly
a generation, as the widowed queen’s mawkish grief reached its hideous
apotheosis in the Albert Memorial.72 But, politically, Victoria lacked the
directing intelligence, skill and perseverance to manipulate ‘the complex
and delicate principles of the Constitution’ to the Crown’s advantage.
Rather, ‘the threads of power which Albert had so laboriously collected,
fell from her hands into the vigorous grasp of … Mr. Gladstone, Lord
Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury’. Then, gradually Albert’s dead hand
loosened and a third Victoria emerged, as the product not of an abrupt
transformation but a gradual metamorphosis: a reflection of Albert
70 Strachey, QV, 123–50, 151, 154; on Edward VII, Lytton Strachey, ‘A Frock-Coat Portrait of a Great King’, Daily Mail, 15 October 1927; Leonard Woolf, ‘To See the Kings Go Riding By’, Nation, (42), 22 October 1927, 118; David Cannadine, ‘The Last Hanoverian Sovereign?: The Victorian
Monarchy in Historical Perspective’, in A.L. Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim, eds, The First Modern Society: Essays in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 138–9, 158–9.
71 Strachey, QV, 147–8, 176–8. Strachey’s counterfactual was based largely on Baron Stockmar, Denkwürdigkeiten aus den Papieren des Freiherrn Christian Friedrich von Stockmar (Braunschweig: F.
Vieweg und Sohn, 1872) which he read with some difficulty, ‘about 1 page an hour’. See S to Dora Carrington, 26 February 1919, BL, Add.Ms., 62,890; Frank Hardie, The Political Influence of Queen Victoria, 1861–1901 (London: Oxford University Press, 1935); Cannadine, ‘The Last Hanoverian Sovereign?’, 139–46. Cannadine modified his position in ‘From Biography to History: Writing the Modern British Mon
archy’, Historical Research, 77:197 (August 2004), 289–312, doi.org/10.1111/
j.1468-2281.2004.00211.x.
72 Strachey, QV, 190–1; S to Dora Carrington, 21 September 1919, BL, Add.Ms. 62,891; S to Vanessa Bell asking her opinion of the Albert Memorial, 1 March 1919, Robert Taylor Collection, Princeton, Strachey Mss, Letters to Vanessa Bell; Strachey started to lampoon the Albert Memorial very early: in his first Apostle’s Paper, he imagined the Prince Consort rising from his seat and standing naked in front of shocked Victorians.
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still, but also of Disraeli, that most un-Victorian of characters.73 So, to
the last years of her reign, which in their ‘solid splendour’ seemed, in
Strachey’s opinion, ‘hardly paralleled’ in England’s history; so also to the
iconic figure of the Golden and Diamond Jubilees. Amid the ‘established
grandeur’ of Lord Salisbury’s imperial Britain, Victoria had become
a fixture, ‘a magnificent immovable sideboard in the huge saloon of state’.
In many ways, it was an affectionate portrait – half ironic, half-admiring.
Trevelyan, who typically missed the subversive undertow and believed
that Strachey had come to scoff but stayed to admire, told a friend that
the most important event in the history of twentieth-century English
biography was ‘the conquest of Strachey by Queen Victoria’. To the more
committedly anti-Victorian among his Bloomsbury friends, Lytton had
lost his passion. ‘Carrington and the young men’, they thought, had taken
the edge off his writing, and changed the claws of Eminent Victorians into
the soft-pawed pussy touch of Queen Victoria.74
After the war, Trevelyan had expected to go on writing in the same manner
as before, returning to the ‘world of reform [he] so loved’. But fashion had
changed, and the public had no time for his prewar heroes. Commented
Harold Laski in 1919, for example, ‘I re-read Trevelyan on Italy, and to
my astonishment, found a large part of it merely brilliant rhetoric, where
ten years ago I remember being swept off my feet by it’.75 When Grey
of the Reform Bill was eventual y published early in 1920, it sold poorly.
The writing – literary, rhetorical, respectful, a frock-coat biography with
all the proprieties intact – seemed irredeemably Victorian. And Trevelyan’s
‘dignified aristocrat’, whose career ‘ennoble[d] the annals of English
statecraft’, was more of an effigy than a man. In Grey’s case, this was
especially unfortunate. As a young man, he was overbearing, vain and
moody. He had fallen passionately in love with the fashion icon of the
age, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. Thereafter, even in Fox’s louche
73 Strachey, QV, 238–9; Lytton Strachey, ‘Dizzy’, The Woman’s Leader, 12, 16 July 1920, in BE, 264–7.
74 Strachey, QV, 224–5, 240–1; T to S, 6 May 1921, BL, Add.Ms., 60,732, f. 198; Trevelyan, quoted in Charles Richard Sanders, Lytton Strachey: His Mind and Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 227; Leonard Woolf, ‘The Biography of Kings’, Nation, (36), 21 March 1925, 859; Anne Bell and Andrew McNeillie, eds, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume III (London: Hogarth Press 1980), 28 November 1928, 208–9.
75 Cannadine Trevelyan, 15, 101–4; Moorman, George Macaulay Trevelyan, 129; T to G.O.
Trevelyan, 1 April 1919, PRL, Trevelyan Mss, GOT 107; Harold Laski to Oliver Wendell Holmes,
14 December 1920, quoted in Feske, F rom Belloc to Churchill, 167.
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circle, he had a reputation, and his affairs continued well into his 70s.
None of this made its way into Trevelyan’s biography, which was written
well within the ‘Great Wall of Victorian respectability’.76
Absent from Trevelyan’s work were precisely the features that concerned
Strachey: the play of personality, the texture of a life, psychic interiority
in all its contradictions, rather than the spurious coherence retrospectively
given to a public career. Also missing were the qualities Lytton had made
fashionable, enabling him to strip away the Victorian varnish from political
biography: irreverence, a probing imagination, a sense of irony, ambiguity
and paradox. With all their talk of liberty, democracy, reform and free
trade, Trevelyan’s ancestral Whig heroes had become derided Eminent
Victorians – or, as Leonard Woolf put it when John Bright was reissued in
1927, ‘antediluvians and patriarchs’. So Trevelyan backed off. His need
for heroes never entirely dissipated, but they were now heroes in eclipse:
not Garibaldi the heroic national unifier, but Manin, the noble republican
failure; not Lord Grey of reform, but Edward Grey, the man of good
intentions who was powerless as the lamps went out. The heroes of the
Risorgimento or English Liberalism were always shaping or imposing
themselves on events; now they could only respond to or flee from them.
In the dialectic between predestination and free will, Trevelyan, once the
champion of moral choice and free action, moved towards determinism.77
Perhaps then, it was better to avoid biography. So the focus of Trevy’s
writing altered, as did its tone and texture. British History in the Nineteenth
Century (1922) coincided chronologically with his work on Bright and
Lord Grey, but it could hardly have been more different. This was a book
shorn of rhetoric and imaginative colour, lacking obvious artistic form.
It was impersonal, undramatic, dry – almost ‘dry-as-dust’ – without heroes
or villains, or with plaudits so widely and evenly spread as to be virtually
neutral. Pitt and Fox, Grey and Canning, Melbourne and Peel, Aberdeen
and Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli were all well-meaning men of
principle and courage who ‘in the main wrought greatly and beneficently’.
76 G.M. Trevelyan, Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, passim; one reviewer complained that Grey was
‘morally … about ten foot tall’, Nation, (27), 26 March 1920, 159; TLS, 25 March 1920. For the skeletons in Lord Grey’s cupboard: Amanda Foreman, Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (London: HarperCollins, 1998). The Duchess, the movie of 2008, presents a very different Charles Grey; see
www.imdb.com/title/tt0864761/ (accessed 8 October 2016).
77 Leonard Woolf, ‘John Bright and Liberalism’, in Woolf, Essays in History, Literature, Politics, Etc.
(London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 218–22; G.M. Trevelyan, Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848
(London: Longmans, Green, 1924); Trevelyan, Grey of Fallodon (London: Longmans, Green, 1937).
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Thus described, modern British political history embodied the philosophy
both of Burke and Bentham: the ‘conservative principles which constitute
one half of our social happiness’, and ‘the spirit of liberalism … never
neglected without disaster’. Historical change was brought about not by
the triumph of progressive heroes, but through the interplay of reformers
and stabilisers – ‘the two party system’. Trevelyan had once written that
genuine wisdom ‘does not always consist in sympathy and tolerance.
The world is moved in the first instance by those who see one side of
a question only’. Now, he believed it was the consensualists who were the
wisest: ‘no one party could cover all the g
round’.78
He still saw the nineteenth century – which he opened in 1782 on the eve
of reform – in evolutionary, liberal terms. Whereas Strachey’s Victorian
age was saturated in theology, his was a secular, improving society. Indeed,
coming after Strachey’s corrosive anatomy, Trevelyan’s, for all its spiritual
anaemia and industrial ugliness, was upbeat and reassuring. But it was an
academic rather than a literary portrait. Strachey and his literary imitators
viewed Trevelyan’s history as a ‘tiresome’ Victorian relic. Trevy, for his part,
was convinced that ‘Lytton had poisoned history, traduced the Victorians
and created a fashion for cheap … nasty … one volume biographies,
designed to meet the demand for sensational literature’.79 Just how far
the rot had gone – how far standards were set by the ‘suave practitioners
of denigration’ – was illustrated in 1923 by the fate of a book dedicated
to Trevelyan, F.A. Simpson’s Louis Napoleon. Simpson was a scrupulous
literary historian in the Trevelyan mould – a Trinity don who, thanks
to Trevy, had landed the life Fellowship that passed Lytton by. But his
publishing career was abruptly terminated by a destructive anonymous
review in the Times Literary Supplement:
History (there is no use denying it) is mainly about dead people. But
it is the duty of historians to convince us that they were once alive …
Mr Simpson’s … grave narrative disdain[s] the bright colours, the quick,
undignified movement of reality, without [which] one may write sound
history but never get [the past] to live.
78 G.M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century (1782–1901) (London: Longmans, Green, 1922); Cannadine, Trevelyan, 107–9, 120–1; Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe, 181; Trevelyan, ‘The Latest View of History’, 412; G.M. Trevelyan, The Two-Party System in English Political History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926); Feske, Belloc to Churchill, 175–8.
79 Cannadine, Trevelyan, 44.
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Trevelyan was outraged: the Strachey-esque comments were a call for
a history that was all sail but no ballast, all ‘personality and pageant’
but no politics, ‘unimaginable in a serious study’.80 Convinced that the