A superlatively civilized Red Indian living apart from the vulgar world
in an elegant and park-like reservation, Mr. Strachey rarely looks over
his walls at the surrounding country. It seethes, he knows, with crowds
of horribly colonial persons. Like the hosts of Midian, the innumerable
“poor whites” prowl and prowl around, but the noble savage pays no
attention to them.
In his spiritual home—a neat and commodious Georgian mansion in the
style of Leoni or Ware—he sits and reads, he turns over portfolios of
queer old prints, he savours meditatively the literary vintages of
centuries. And occasionally, once in two or three years, he tosses over
his park palings a record of these leisured degustations, a judgment
passed upon his library, a ripe rare book. One time it is Eminent
Victorians; the next it is Queen Victoria herself. To-day he has given
us a miscellaneous collection of _Books and Characters_.
If Voltaire had lived to the age of two hundred and thirty instead of
shuffling off at a paltry eighty-four, he would have written about the
Victorian epoch, about life and letters at large, very much as Mr.
Strachey has written. That lucid common sense, that sharp illuminating
wit which delight us in the writings of the middle eighteenth
century—these are Mr. Strachey’s characteristics. We know exactly what
he would have been if he had come into the world at the beginning of the
seventeen hundreds; if he is different from the men of that date it is
because he happens to have been born towards the end of the eighteens.
The sum of knowledge at the disposal of the old Encyclopædists was
singularly small, compared, that is to say, with the knowledge which we
of the twentieth century have inherited. They made mistakes and in their
ignorance they passed what we can see to have been hasty and very
imperfect judgments on men and things. Mr. Strachey is the eighteenth
century grown-up; he is Voltaire at two hundred and thirty.
Voltaire at sixty would have treated the Victorian era, if it could have
appeared in a prophetical vision before his eyes, in terms of “La
Pucelle”—with ribaldry. He would have had to be much older in knowledge
and inherited experience before he could have approached it in that
spirit of sympathetic irony and ironical sympathy which Mr. Strachey
brings to bear upon it. Mr. Strachey makes us like the old Queen, while
we smile at her; he makes us admire the Prince Consort in spite of the
portentous priggishness—duly insisted on in the biography—which
accompanied his intelligence. With all the untutored barbarity of their
notions, Gordon and Florence Nightingale are presented to us as
sympathetic figures. Their peculiar brand of religion and ethics might
be absurd, but their characters are shown to be interesting and fine.
It is only in the case of Dr. Arnold that Mr. Strachey permits himself
to be unrestrainedly Voltairean; he becomes a hundred and seventy years
younger as he describes the founder of the modern Public School system.
The irony of that description is tempered by no sympathy. To make the
man appear even more ridiculous, Mr. Strachey adds a stroke or two to
the portrait of his own contriving—little inventions which deepen the
absurdity of the caricature. Thus we read that Arnold’s “outward
appearance was the index of his inward character. The legs, perhaps,
were shorter than they should have been; but the sturdy athletic frame,
especially when it was swathed (as it usually was) in the flowing robes
of a Doctor of Divinity, was full of an imposing vigour.” How
exquisitely right those short legs are! how artistically inevitable! Our
admiration for Mr. Strachey’s art is only increased when we discover
that in attributing to the Doctor this brevity of shank he is justified
by no contemporary document. The short legs are his own contribution.
Voltaire, then, at two hundred and thirty has learned sympathy. He has
learned that there are other ways of envisaging life than the
common-sense, reasonable way and that people with a crack-brained view
of the universe have a right to be judged as human beings and must not
be condemned out of hand as lunatics or obscurantists. Blake and St.
Francis have as much right to their place in the sun as Gibbon and Hume.
But still, in spite of this lesson, learned and inherited from the
nineteenth century, our Voltaire of eleven score years and ten still
shows a marked preference for the Gibbons and the Humes; he still
understands their attitude towards life a great deal better than he
understands the other fellow’s attitude.
In his new volume of _Books and Characters_ Mr. Strachey prints an essay
on Blake (written, it may be added parenthetically, some sixteen years
ago), in which he sets out very conscientiously to give that disquieting
poet his due. The essay is interesting, not because it contains anything
particularly novel in the way of criticism, but because it reveals, in
spite of all Mr. Strachey’s efforts to overcome it, in spite of his
admiration for the great artist in Blake, his profound antagonism
towards Blake’s view of life.
He cannot swallow mysticism; he finds it clearly very difficult to
understand what all this fuss about the soul really signifies. The man
who believes in the absoluteness of good and evil, who sees the universe
as a spiritual entity concerned, in some transcendental fashion, with
morality, the man who regards the human spirit as possessing a somehow
cosmic importance and significance—ah no, decidedly no, even at two
hundred and thirty Voltaire cannot whole-heartedly sympathize with such
a man.
And that, no doubt, is the reason why Mr. Strachey has generally shrunk
from dealing, in his biographies and his criticisms, with any of these
strange incomprehensible characters. Blake is the only one he had tried
his hand on, and the result is not entirely satisfactory. He is more at
home with the Gibbons and Humes of this world, and when he is not
discussing the reasonable beings he likes to amuse himself with the
eccentrics, like Mr. Creevey or Lady Hester Stanhope. The portentous,
formidable mystics he leaves severely alone.
One cannot imagine Mr. Strachey coping with Dostoevsky or with any of
the other great explorers of the soul. One cannot imagine him writing a
life of Beethoven. These huge beings are disquieting for a Voltaire who
has learned enough sympathy to be able to recognize their greatness, but
whose temperament still remains unalterably alien. Mr. Strachey is wise
to have nothing to do with them.
The second-rate mystics (I use the term in its widest and vaguest
sense), the men who believe in the spirituality of the universe and in
the queerer dogmas which have become tangled in that belief, without
possessing the genius which alone can justify such notions in the eyes
of the Voltaireans—these are the objects on which Mr. Strachey likes to
turn his calm and penetrating gaze. Gordon and Florence Nightingale, the
Prince Consort, Clough—they and their beliefs are made to look rather
absurd by the time he has done with them. He reduces their spiritual
struggles to a series of the most comically futile series of gymnastics
in the void. The men of genius who have gone through the same spiritual
struggles, who have believed the same sort of creeds, have had the
unanswerable justification of their genius. These poor absurd creatures
have not. Voltaire in his third century gives them a certain amount of
his newly learned sympathy; but he also gives them a pretty strong dose
of his old irony.