Lytton Strachey and the Eighteenth Century

CLIVE BELL

The Engaging Survival of Voltaire's Mordantly Persuasive Scepticism in the Art of His British Prototype

AGAINST the popular conception of him, a sublimely disinterested person who sits godlike and unmoved, stroking his beard and contemplating the fussy activities of this disintegrated ant-hill which men call earth, I have nothing to say except that it is false. It is pretty, it is rational, and to me it is sympathetic; but it is incorrect. They liken him to Gibbon and Voltaire—his style, to be sure, owes something to both—but from the Frenchman only is he directly descended. That famous irony, that devastating sarcasm, are not the product of an immense indifference coupled with a mild Gibbonian surprise, but spring, like Voltaire's, from indignation. It is not because he thinks of them as insects that he makes so many eminent Victorians look small; it is because, in his heart, he cannot help comparing them with full-sized human beings. Lytton Strachey is no more indifferent and passionless than Voltaire himself. He might have taken Ecrasez Vinfâme for his motto: I am not sure that he has not.

Like all moralists, he has his standards; unlike most, he keeps his temper and is never selfrighteous. His standards come of no wretched personal fads or mediocre prejudices; they are almost as remote from the distinguished provincialism of Macaulay as from the underbred silliness of Carlyle, because—and here I believe I may be nearing the root of the matter— because they are based, not on a mere knowledge of history, but on a realization of the past. This, I fancy, is what conditions our author's critical attitude: to him the Athens of Socrates and the Paris of the Encyclopaedists are as real as the Oxford of Newman or the London of Lord Morley. And if you believe in the continuous identity of the race, if you believe that the human heart and brain have not contracted nor the glands dried up, if you believe that the Athenians in their passionate search for truth and their endeavor to realize their ideal in life were using faculties similar to those bestowed on Dr. Jowett and Mr. Gladstone, and if you have admired the broad grin of fatuity conferred by the nineteenth century on itself; why, then, you will have a subject for high and bitter comedy, out of which, if you happen to be Lytton Strachey, you may create a work of manifest beauty and implicit admonition.

A Voltaire in the Modern World

IT is reasonable to regard this humane and witty historian, who contrives to enlighten without for a moment boring, as the descendant of Voltaire, provided you do not forget that he is at nearest a great-great-grandson. Between them lie the discoveries of psychology; which make it impossible for Mr. Strachey to treat life with the intellectual confidence of his ancestor. Life, he knows, is something of which the smallest comprehension—to say nothing of the least amelioration—is more difficult than, to the mind of the eighteenth century, were its complete explanation and perfection.

Overlook the fact that Mr. Strachey has defended Rousseau on the ground that he was "a modem man" and as such incomprehensible to his contemporaries, and you miss inevitably his point of view. For the notion that he is insensitive or unjust to that side of life for which Rousseau stands is the most misleading nonsense. Voltaire is not his only ancestor; he descends from Rousseau as well, not to say Chateaubriand. So do we all, alas! Wherefore, the Victorian age is not misjudged by its historian as it must have been by the Rip Van Winkle Mr. Strachey is sometimes supposed to be. There is no failure to appreciate or sympathize with its modernity; with all its good and bad luck it is tried fairly in the scales and, compared with great ages, found—silly.

The Fable of Meticulous Style

HIS being so, the style in which its story was to be told could not have been precisely that in which Voltaire did justice to the grand siecle or Gibbon unrolled the doom of the Roman Empire; and though, like most good styles, Mr. Strachey's acknowledges its ancestry, it is as personal as that of any educated author alive. To hear some critics talk you might suppose it was precious; whereas, in fact, Mr. Strachey is rather careless about words: and minute attention to words is, I take it, the essence of preciosity. Mr. Strachey writes in sentences and paragraphs.

In the prose of one who has an acute sense of words you will generally find a concatenation of half-buried metaphors which escapes casual observation. You will find words conditioning words by recondite influences; the artist having been so intensely aware of their precise and original meanings and their acquired associations that he has felt bound to relate each to some other which recognizes its original meaning and honors the implicit association. Thus do the sentences of the more elaborate stylists tend to become a series of almost imperceptibly cognate relations which, when forced on the attention of an insensitive reader, tend to annoy. Let me give a glaring example: "If anyone were so sanguine, a glance at the faces of our Conscript Fathers along the benches would soon bleed him". Mr. Strachey would hardly have written that, though it is not to be supposed that he is less aware than Mr. Beerbohm of the meaning of the word "sanguine". Similarly, Mr. Beerbohm is so acutely and persistently conscious of the exact and original meaning of words that I doubt whether he would speak of "this singular opinion" when he meant this unusual and slightly ludicrous one; but Mr. Strachey does, and so for that matter does Gibbon.

Writing in sentences rather than words, and in paragraphs rather than sentences, Mr. Strachey is nearer to Macaulay than to Gibbon; and, I should say, freer, though more elaborate, than Macaulay. The paragraph is his pattern, and he a mosaicist on the grand scale, one who is willing to compose out of the oddest bits—no matter the intrinsic quality of a cube, provided it does its work. Readymade phrases, exclamatory interjections, dramatic aposiopesis and frank journalese, all will serve his turn; and so masterly is his art that he makes all tell, a lump of broken bottle here foiling there a die of purest lapis.

Mr. Strachey is a master, but a dangerous one to learn of. No precious author, and very few careful ones, would write "The light thrown by the Bible upon the whole matter seemed somewhat dubious"; "the influential circles of society"; "an excellent judge of horse-flesh". In full dress, Gibbon would never have written, "Ward forced him forward step by step towards—no! he could not bear it"; nor would Macaulay. But Dr. Johnson himself might have observed with pleasure that "Dyspeptic by constitution, melancholic by temperament, he could yet be lively on occasion, and was known as a wit in Coburg". For my part, I would change nothing in Mr. Strachey's style; the stock phrase and the costumier's adjective used for purposes of irony and sarcasm are exquisite weapons in the hand of a master: only I would observe that they are much too treacherous to be used by boys and girls.

It is in his wit that Mr. Strachey" comes nearest the eighteenth century. With demurest deference he will expose the outrageous follies of mankind as though he were recording the fruits of profound cogitation and ripest political wisdom—as, indeed, he often is. He is almost as clever as Voltaire at making people look silly. What is more curious, however, is a turn of peculiarly English (should I say English-speaking?) humor, a kind of pleasantry which is an extension into the universal of what is sometimes called coterie humor and sometimes a family Joke. In every school and college, in every clique and set, there are jokes and sources of ridicule which for the outside world do not exist. But there are writers—and in this, English writers seem particularly gifted—who can make a coterie of all the world.

Classic Jest and Dionysian Quip

THE esoteric joke depends, not only on a common experience, but on a mass of common assumptions; and certain writers— Sterne and Charles Lamb, for instance, Byron and Peacock—persuade us, without apparent intention, to accept and even to divine theirs: they make us, while we read, of their set. So, at the twitch of an eyebrow or an inflection of the voice, we are prepared for a peep at one of our pet laughing-stocks. You might have supposed that, only a group of people, living in the first part of the nineteenth century and personally exasperated by those tricks of thought and expression which emanating from Edinburgh pervaded England, would have laughed aloud at Mr. Asterias and his "young Spaniard, named Francis de la Vega, who, bathing with some of his friends in June, 1674, suddenly dived under the sea and rose no more: his friends thought him drowned: they were plebeians and pious Catholics; but a philosopher might very legitimately have drawn the same conclusion": yet we laugh as loudly. Peacock makes the surprising irrelevancy of " I have danced you on my knee, and fed you with marrow" as manifestly amusing as an epigram. No one but a Shakespearian scholar ever inquired wherein lay the joke of Falstaff's inviting us to call him horse. And we are already so much in Mr. Strachey's humor that when, on the fourth page of his essay, he remarks of Dr. Arnold that "his legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been", we know that it is all up with the headmaster of Rugby.

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It is a mistake to call the art of Lytton Strachey cynical or precious or dixhuitieme. It belongs to no particular school; all one can say of it is that it is in the great tradition. That does not mean that Mr. Strachey is old-fashioned or reactionary. The tradition is a live thing, growing always. It is like a tree, growing and spreading; and the ape who would creep back into the trunk is as surely lost as the fool who would detach himself from the twig. Mr. Strachey is not at odds with his age: if he can see that there is much to be said for the Whig oligarchy and the system it maintained, he can see that there is much to be said for revolutionary socialism also.

In art or life or politics it is always silly to be a reactionary crying for last month's moon; and it is if possible sillier to cut loose from the tradition and lay at being Adam and Eve. Mr. trachey is a good deal less silly than most of us; his attitude to life, his art, therefore, is based on a critical appreciation of the past, an interest in the present, and a sense of human possibilities, the amalgam bound together and tempered by a fine pervasive scepticism. He writes out of knowledge and sympathy and doubt; and because he understands what human beings have achieved he is not indifferent to their fate. He cannot well be classified; one can say only that he inherits the tradition and hands it on