shows more approbation than usual, this portrait has not given universal
satisfaction. It has rather surprisingly called forth an indignant
protest from Dr. Arnold's granddaughter. Yet such is the perversity of
the human mind that the mode in which Mrs. Humphry Ward "perstringes"
the biographer brings us round to that biographer's side. For Mrs. Ward
has positively the indiscretion, astounding in a writer of her learning
and experience, to demand the exclusion of irony from the legitimate
weapons of the literary combatant. This is to stoop to sharing one of
the meanest prejudices of the English commonplace mind, which has always
resented the use of that delicate and pointed weapon. Moreover, Mrs.
Ward does not merely adopt the plebeian attitude, but she delivers
herself bound hand and foot to the enemy by declaring the use of irony
to be "unintelligent." In support of this amazing statement she quotes
some wandering phrase of Sainte-Beuve. By the light of recent
revelations, whether Sainte-Beuve was ironical or not, he was certainly
perfidious. But, to waive that matter, does Mrs. Humphry Ward consider
that Swift and Lucian and Machiavelli were, as she puts it, "doomed to
failure" because they used irony as a weapon? Was Heine and is Anatole
France conspicuous for want of intelligence? And, after all, ought not
Mrs. Ward to remember that if she had a very serious grandfather, she
had a still more celebrated uncle, who wrote _Friendship's Garland_?
While no one else will seriously blame Mr. Strachey for employing irony
in his investigation of character, the subject leads on to what may be
regarded as a definite fault in his method. A biographer should be
sympathetic; not blind, not indulgent, but _sympathetic_. He should be
able to enter into the feelings of his subjects, and be anxious to do
so. It is in sympathy, in imaginative insight, that Mr. Strachey fails.
His personages are like puppets observed from a great height by an
amiable but entirely superior intelligence. The peculiar aim of Mr.
Strachey, his desire to lower our general conception of the Victorian
Age, tempts him to exaggerate this tendency, and he succumbs to the
temptation. His description of Lord Acton at Rome in 1870--"he despised
Lord Acton almost as much as he disliked him"--is not ironic, it is
contemptuous. Arthur Hugh Clough presents no aspect to Mr. Strachey but
that of a timid and blundering packer-up of parcels; one might conceive
that the biographer had never contemplated the poet in any other
capacity than, with sealing-wax in his hand and string between his lips,
shuddering under the eye of Miss Nightingale. The occasional references
to Lord Wolseley suggest an unaccountable hurrying figure of pygmy size,
which Mr. Strachey can only just discern. This attitude of hovering
superiority is annoying.
But it reaches a more dangerous importance when it affects spiritual
matters. The author interests himself, from his great height, in the
movements of his Victorian dwarfs, and notices that they are
particularly active, and prone to unusual oddity of movement, when they
are inspired by religious and moral passion. Their motions attract his
attention, and he describes them with gusto and often with wit. His
sketch of Rome before the Oecumenical Council is an admirably studied
page. Miss Nightingale's ferocity when the War Office phalanx closed its
ranks is depicted in the highest of spirits; it is impossible not to be
riveted by the scene round Cardinal Manning's death-bed; but what did
those manifestations mean? To Mr. Strachey it is evident that the fun of
the whole thing is that they meant nothing at all; they were only part
of the Victorian absurdity. It is obvious that religious enthusiasm, as
a personal matter, means nothing to him. He investigates the feelings
of Newman or Keble as a naturalist might the contortions of an insect.
The ceremonies and rites of the Church are objects of subdued hilarity
to him, and in their presence, if he suppresses his laughter, it is
solely to prevent his missing any detail precious to his curiosity. When
the subject of Baptismal Regeneration agitates the whole pious world of
England Mr. Strachey seems to say, looking down with exhilaration on the
anthill beneath him, "The questions at issue are being taken very
seriously by a large number of persons. How Early Victorian of them!"
Mr. Strachey has yet to learn that questions of this kind are "taken
seriously" by serious people, and that their emotion is both genuine and
deep. He sees nothing but alcoholic eccentricity in the mysticism of
Gordon. His cynicism sometimes carries him beyond the confines of good
taste, as in the passage where he refers to the large and dirty ears of
the Roman cardinals. Still worse is the query as to what became of the
soul of Pope Pius IX. after his death.
These are errors in discretion. A fault in art is the want of care which
the author takes in delineating his minor or subordinate figures. He
gives remarkable pains, for example, to his study of General Gordon, but
he is indifferent to accuracy in his sketches of the persons who came
into contact, and often into collision, with Gordon. In this he
resembles those French painters, such as Bastien Lepage, who focus their
eye on one portion of their canvas, and work that up to a high
perfection, while leaving the rest of the picture misty and vague. Even
in that case the subordinate figures, if subdued in fogginess, should
not be falsely drawn, but Mr. Strachey, intent upon the violent portrait
of Gordon, is willing to leave his Baring and Hartington and Wolseley
inexact as well as shadowy. The essay on General Gordon, indeed, is the
least successful of the four monographs. Dexterous as he is, Mr.
Strachey has not had the material to work upon which now exists to
elucidate his other and earlier subjects. But it is difficult to account
for his apparently not having read Mr. Bernard Holland's life of the
Duke of Devonshire, which throws much light, evidently unknown to Mr.
Strachey, on the Gordon relief expedition. He ought to know that Sir
Evelyn Baring urged the expedition, while Chamberlain was one of its
opponents. Mr. Strachey does not seem to have noticed how much the issue
was confused by conflicting opinions as to whether the route to be taken
should be by Suakin or up the Nile.
No part of his book is more vigorous or picturesque than the chapter
dealing with the proclamation of Papal Infallibility. But here again one
is annoyed by the glibness with which Mr. Strachey smoothly asserts what
are only his conjectures.
In his account of Manning's reception in Rome--and this is of central
importance in his picture of Manning's whole career--he exaggerates the
personal policy of Pio Nono, whom he represents as more independent of
the staff of the Curia than was possible. Rome has never acknowledged
the right of the individual, even though that individual be the Pope, to
an independent authority. Mr. Odo Russell was resident secretary in Rome
from 1858 to 1870, and his period of office was drawing to a close when
Manning arrived; he was shortly afterwards removed to become Assistant
Under Secretary of State at our Foreign Office. The author of _Eminent
Victorians_ is pleased to describe "poor Mr. Russell" as little better
than a fly buzzing in Manning's "spider's web of delicate and clinging
diplomacy." It is not in the memory of those who were behind the scenes
that Odo Russell was such a cipher. Though suave in address, he was by
no means deficient in decision or force of character, as was evidenced
when, some months later, he explained to Mr. Gladstone his reasons for
stating to Bismarck, without instructions from the government, that the
Black Sea question was one on which Great Britain might be compelled to
go to war with or without allies. Lord Morley's _Life of Gladstone_
(vol. ii., p. 354) is explicit on this interesting point. The
information which, by special permission of the Pope, Cardinal Manning
was able to give to him on all that was going on in the Council was, of
course, of great value to Odo Russell, but his views on other aspects of
the question were derived from quite different sources.
In this respect he had the advantage of the Cardinal, both on account of
his diplomatic position and of his long and intimate knowledge both of
Vatican policy and of the forces which the Curia has at its command. On
the strength of those forces, and on the small amount of effective
support which British opposition to the Decree of Infallibility was
likely to receive from the Catholic Powers, he no doubt held strong
opinions. Some years later he did not conceal his conviction that Prince
Bismarck would be worsted in his conflict with Rome on the Education
Laws, and the event proved his forecast to be perfectly correct. This is
an example of the dangers which beset a too glib and superficial
treatment of political events which were conducted in secret, and with
every circumstance of mystery.
Several of the characteristics which diversify Mr. Strachey's remarkable
volume are exemplified in the following quotation. It deals with the
funeral of Cardinal Manning:--
"The route of the procession was lined by vast crowds of working
people, whose imaginations, in some instinctive manner, had been
touched. Many who had hardly seen him declared that in Cardinal
Manning they had lost their best friend. Was it the magnetic vigour
of the dead man's spirit that moved them? Or was it his valiant
disregard of common custom and those conventional reserves and
poor punctilios, which are wont to hem about the great? Or was it
something untameable in his glances and in his gestures? Or was it,
perhaps, the mysterious glamour lingering about him of the antique
organisation of Rome? For whatever cause, the mind of the people
had been impressed; and yet, after all, the impression was more
acute than lasting. The Cardinal's memory is a dim thing to-day.
And he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which Manning
never lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche with the
sepulchral monument, that the dust lies thick on the strange, the
incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with its
elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault
like some forlorn and forgotten trophy, the Hat."
Longinus tells us that "a just judgment of style is the final fruit of
long experience." In the measured utterances of Mr. Asquith we recognise
the speech of a man to whom all that is old and good is familiar, and in
whom the art of finished expression has become a habit. No more
elegantly balanced, no more delicately perceptive mind than his has
appeared of recent times in our midst, and there is something in the
equipoise of his own genius which points Mr. Asquith out as a judge
peculiarly well fitted to sit in judgment upon rival ages. In his
Romanes lecture there was but one thing to be regretted: the restricted
space which it offered for the full expansion of the theme. Mr. Asquith
excels in swift and rapid flights, but even for him the Victorian Age is
too broad a province to be explored within one hour. He endeavoured to
lighten his task by excluding theology and politics, and indeed but for
such self-denial he could scarcely have moved at all in so dense an air.
He was able, however, having thrown out so much formidable ballast, to
rise above his subject, and gazing at the Victorian Age, as it recedes,
he declared it to have been very good. The young men who despise and
attack that Age receive no support in any particular from Mr. Asquith.
He dwells on the fecundity of the literature of the Victorian Age in its
middle period, and especially on the publications which adorned the
decade from 1850 to 1859. He calls those years, very justly, "marvellous
and almost unexampled" in their rich profusion. I may suggest that the
only rival to them in our history is the period from 1590 to 1600, which
saw the early plays of Shakespeare, the _Faerie Queene_, the _Arcadia_,
the _Ecclesiastical Polity_, _Tamburlaine_, _The Discovery of Guiana_,
and Bacon's _Essays_. If the works catalogued by Mr. Asquith do not
equal these in intensity, they excel them by the breadth of the ground
they cover, extending from Browning to Darwin and from Thackeray to
Ruskin. Moreover, the Oxford list might have included _Lavengro_ and
Newman's _Lectures_, and Herbert Spencer's _Social Statics_. The only
third decade worthy to be named with those of 1590 and 1850 is that
which opens in 1705, and is illuminated by the names of Pope,
Shaftesbury, Swift, Arbuthnot, Defoe, Steele, Addison, and Berkeley. It
is pleasant to compare these three magnificently flowering epochs, but
not profitable if we attempt to weigh one against the other. They are
comparable only in the splendour of their accomplishment.
It is more difficult to fit science into our scheme of the Victorian Age
than to find places there for Art and Literature. Perhaps the reason of
this is that the latter were national in their character, whereas
scientific inquiry, throughout the nineteenth century, was carried on
upon international lines, or, at least, in a spirit unprecedentedly
non-provincial. The vast achievements of science, practical and
theoretical, were produced for the world, not for a race. Mr. Asquith
speaks with justice and eloquence of the appearance of Darwin's _Origin
of Species_ which he distinguishes as being "if not actually the most
important, certainly the most interesting event of the Age," and his
remarks on the fortune of that book are excellent. No one can
over-estimate the value of what we owe to Darwin. But perhaps a
Frenchman might speak in almost the same terms of Claude Bernard, whose
life and work ran parallel with Darwin's. If the _Origin of Species_
made an epoch in 1859, the _Introduction a la medicine experimental_
made another in 1865. Both these books, as channels by which the
experimental labours of each investigator reached the prepared and
instructed public, exercised at once, and have continued ever since to
exercise, an enormous effect on thought as well as on knowledge. They
transformed the methods by which man approaches scientific
investigation, and while they instructed they stimulated a new ardour
for instruction. In each case the value of the discovery lay in the
value of the idea which led to the discovery, and, as some one has said
in the case of Claude Bernard, they combined for the first time the
operations of science and philosophy. The parallel between these two
contemporaries extends, in a measure, to their disciples and successors,
and seems to suggest that Mr. Asquith in his generous and difficult
estimate may have exaggerated the purely Victorian element in the
science of the age of Darwin. This only accentuates the difficulty, and
he may perhaps retort that there is an extreme danger in suggesting what
does and what does not form a part of so huge a system.
Justifiably Mr. Asquith takes it for granted that the performance of the
central years of the Victorian Age was splendid. With those who deny
merit to the writers and artists of the last half century it is
difficult to reach a common ground for argument. What is to be the
criterion of taste if all the multiform exhibitions of it which passed
muster from 1840 to 1890 are now to be swept away with contumely?
Perhaps indeed it is only among those extravagant romanticists who are
trying to raise entirely new ideals, unrelated to any existing forms of
art and literature, that we find a denial of all merit to the Victorian
masters. Against this caricature of criticism, this Bolshevism, it would
be hopeless to contend. But there is a large and growing class of more
moderate thinkers who hold, in the first place, that the merit of the
leading Victorian writers has been persistently over-estimated, and that
since its culmination the Victorian spirit has not ceased to decay,
arriving at length at the state of timidity and repetition which
encourages what is ugly, narrow, and vulgar, and demands nothing better
than a swift dismissal to the dust-bin.
Every stratum of society, particularly if it is at all sophisticated,
contains a body of barbarians who are usually silent from lack of
occasion to express themselves, but who are always ready to seize an
opportunity to suppress a movement of idealism. We accustom ourselves to
the idea that certain broad principles of taste are universally
accepted, and our respectable newspapers foster this benevolent delusion
by talking habitually "over the heads," as we say, of the majority of
their readers. They make "great music for a little clan," and nothing
can be more praiseworthy than their effort, but, as a matter of fact,
with or without the aid of the newspapers, the people who really care
for literature or art, or for strenuous mental exercise of any kind, are
relatively few. If we could procure a completely confidential statement
of the number of persons to whom the names of Charles Lamb and
Gainsborough have a distinct meaning, and still more of those who can
summon up an impression of the essays of the one and of the pictures of
the other, we should in all probability be painfully startled. Yet since
these names enjoy what we call a universal celebrity, what must be the
popular relation to figures much less prominent?
The result of this tyranny of fame, for so it must appear to all those
who are inconvenienced by the expression of it, is to rouse a sullen
tendency to attack the figures of art and literature whenever there
arrives a chance of doing that successfully. Popular audiences can
always be depended upon to cheer the statement of "a plain man" that he
is not "clever" enough to understand Browning or Meredith. An assurance
that life is too short to be troubled with Henry James wakes the lower
middle class to ecstasy. An opportunity for such protests is provided by
our English lack of critical tradition, by our accepted habit of saying,
"I do hate" or "I must say I rather like" this or that without reference
to any species of authority. This seems to have grown with dangerous
rapidity of late years. It was not tolerated among the Victorians, who
carried admiration to the highest pitch. They marshalled it, they
defined it, they turned it from a virtue into a religion, and called it
Hero Worship. Even their abuse was a kind of admiration turned inside
out, as in Swinburne's diatribes against Carlyle, who himself fought
against the theory of Darwin, not philosophically, but as though it were
a personal insult to himself. Such violence of taste is now gone out of
fashion; every scribbler and dauber likes to believe himself on a level
with the best, and the positive criterion of value which sincere
admiration gave is lost to us. Hence the success of Mr. Lytton Strachey.
But the decline of ardour does not explain the whole position, which we
have to face with firmness. Epochs come to an end, and before they have
their place finally awarded to them in history they are bound to endure
much vicissitude of fortune. No amount of sarcasm or of indignant
protest will avail to conceal the fact that we stand to-day at the
porch, that much more probably we have already penetrated far into the
vestibule, of a new age. What its character will be, or what its
principal products, it is absolutely impossible for us as yet to
conjecture. Meanwhile the Victorian Age recedes, and it loses size and
lustre as we get further and further away from it. When what was called
"Symbolism" began to act in urgent and direct reaction to the aims of
those still in authority, the old order received its notice to quit, but
that was at least five and twenty years ago, and the change is not
complete. Ages so multiform and redundant and full of blood as the
Victorian take a long time to die; they have their surprising recoveries
and their uncovenanted convalescences. But even they give up the ghost
at length, and are buried hastily with scant reverence. The time has
doubtless come when aged mourners must prepare themselves to attend the
obsequies of the Victorian Age with as much decency as they can muster.
1918.
INDEX
Abbaye de Creteil, 303-4
Acton, Lord, 328
Addison, J., relation of, to Romanticists, 70-1; 68, 76, 82
_Agnes de Castro_, by Catharine Trotter, 43-5
Akenside, 74
Allard-Meeus, J., 273
_Alroy_, by B. Disraeli, 161
American criticism, and Edgar Allan Poe, 104, 105
Anne, Queen, 58
_Annabel Lee_, by E.A. Poe, 103, 112
Argyll, Duke of, 320
Ariosto, 84, 85
Arnauld, Angelique, 39
Arnold, M., 3, 68, 71, 133, 267
Arnold, Dr. T., Mr. Strachey's portrait of, 326-7
Asquith, Mr., Romanes lecture of, 332-5
Bacon, 17
Bagehot, W., 96
Balfour, A.J., _re_ standards of taste, 4, 5, 10
Ballenden, Sarah, 40
Baring, M., poems of, 265, 273-5
Barrie, Sir J., 100
Barry, Mrs., 57
Batsford, Lord Redesdale at, 217-8, 222, 224-8, 229
Baudelaire, 106
Bayle, 59
Behn, Aphra, 39
Bell, T., of Selborne, 182
Berkeley, 98
Betterton, 48, 57
Birch, Rev. Dr., 61
Blake, W., 5, 90
Blessington, Lady, 131
Boileau, 70, 77, 82
Booth, 57
Bottomley, G., 262
Bridges, R., War poetry of, 161; 110
de Brillac, Mlle., 44
Bronte, Charlotte, dislike of Dewsbury, 142-3;
message of, arose from pain and resistance, 144;
her unhappiness, its causes, 145-6;
defiance the note of her writings, 146-50
Bronte, Emily, 149
Brontes, The Challenge of the, address delivered on, 141-50;
their connexion with Dewsbury, 141-2
Brooke, Rupert, poems of, 268-70
Browning, R., 9, 81, 132
Brunetiere, 7
Bruxambille, 95
Bryant, 107, 108
Bulwer-Lytton, E., ambiguity of his position in literature, 117;
R. Lytton's biography, 118, 121;
Lord Lytton's biography, 117, 118-9, 120, 122, 129, 130, 131, 133, 137;
autobiography, 119-20;
story of matrimonial troubles, 121-9;
character, 129-30;
acquaintances and friends, 130-2;
relations with contemporary writers and poets, 132-4;
stormy life, 134;
unfavourable attitude of critics towards, 134-5;
popularity of his writings, 135-6;
versatility and merits, 136-7; 178
Bulwer-Lytton, Mrs., opposition to Bulwer-Lytton's marriage, 124-7
Burghclere, Lady, open letter to, on Lady D. Nevill, 181-96
Burnet, George, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60
Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop, patron of the Trotters, 41, 52, 53
Burnet, Mrs., 52, 53
Burney, Dr., 33
Burton, 96
Byron, 76, 104, 108, 148, 161-2
Carlyle, 100
Carlyle, Mrs., her opinion of Keats, 9
Catullus, 84
Charles II, 40, 41
Chateaubriand, 74
Chatterton, 87
Cibber, Colley, 44
Classic poetry, Romanticists' revolt against principles of, 70-90
Clough, A.H., 325, 328
Cockburn, Mr., 60, 61
Coleridge, 104, 108, 274
Collier, Jeremy, attack on stage immorality, 47
Collins, 86, 110
Colonisation, England's debt to Walter Raleigh, 24-5
Congreve, Catherine Trotter's relations with, 43, 47, 48, 50; 57, 58
_Coningsby_, by B. Disraeli, 153, 164, 165-6, 169, 170-2, 173
_Contarini Fleming_, by B. Disraeli, 159-61, 162
Corbett, N.M.F., poems of, 275
Cowes in war time, 219-21
Cowley, 82
Cowper, 253
Crabbe, G., Hardy compared with, 248
Cranch, C.P., 105
Cromer, Lord, essay on, 196-216;
intellectual and literary activity, 197-8;
as a speaker, 198-200;
interest in House of Lords Library, 200;
classical tastes, 200-203;
conversation, attitude to life and letters, 204-8;
correspondence and reflections, 208-10;
humour, 210-12;
verse, 212-15;
literary activities, 215-16
Dacier, Mme., 52
_Dacre_, by Countess of Morley, 153, 156
Dante, 225-6
Dartmouth, George, Earl of, 40, 42
D'Aubigne, 78
Daudet, A., 252
Daudet, E., 229-30
Davies, W.H., 262
De Vere, Mrs., 59
Devey, Miss, "Life of Rosina, Lady Lytton," by, 121
Dewsbury, the Brontes' connexion with, 141-2
Dickens, C, 100, 128, 131
Disraeli, B., novels of, address, 153-78;
not taken seriously as an author, 153-4;
three periods of writing, 154-5;
contemporary fiction, 155-6;
_Vivian Grey_, 156-9;
_The Young Duke_, 157;
_Henrietta Temple_, 159;
_Contarini Fleming_, 159-60;
Byron's influence on, 161;
Voltaire's influence on, 162;
fascinated by Venice, 163;
_Venetia_, 163;
Parliamentary experience and literary results, 164;
_Coningsby_, 165-6;
_Sybil_, 167-8;
_Tancred_, 169-72;
Prime Minister, 172;
_Lothair_, 173-8; 131, 135
Donne, J., 78, 111, 236, 244, 252
Dorset, Charles, Earl of, 43
Dowden, 34
Doyle, Sir A.C., 103
Dryden, 34, 49, 50, 70, 82, 274
Du Bos, Abbe, 90
Durham, Lord, 131
Dyer, 70