Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers 9781848931411, 9781315478258

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Editorial Principles
Bibliography
Cambridge Society Papers
A Sermon Preached before the Midnight Society
Conversation and Conversations
Christ or Caliban?
The Colloquies of Senrab
Is Death Desirable?
Dignity, Romance, or Vegetarianism?
The Historian of the Future
Should We Have Elected Conybeare?
Shall We Be Missionaries?
The Ethics of the Gospels
Shall We Go the Whole Hog?
When Is a Drama not a Drama?
Was Diotima Right?
Do Two and Two Make Five?
Ought Art to Be Always Beautiful?
Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses (fragment) and Art Has No Concern with Morals (fragment)
Dialogues
Julius Caesar and Lord Salisbury
Cleopatra and Mrs. Humphry Ward
Salter and Cleopatra. An Imaginary Conversation
Catullus and Lord Tennyson
Boccaccio and General Lee
Headmaster and Parent (fragment)
Gibbon, Johnson, and Adam Smith
Good God
Stories
The Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood
The Story of A and B
Tragedy
Interesting Letter from Madame La Comtesse de — to Lady X
Letter. From an Inhabitant of another World
Editorial Notes
Index

Citation preview

THE PICKERING MASTERS

UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF LYTTON STRACHEY: EARLY PAPERS

UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF LYTTON STRACHEY: EARLY PAPERS

edited by Todd Avery

First published 2011 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Taylor & Francis 2011 © Editorial material Todd Avery 2011 All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

british library cataloguing in publication data Strachey, Lytton, 1880–1932. Unpublished works of Lytton Strachey: early papers. – (The Pickering masters) I. Title II. Series III. Avery, Todd, 1968– 828.9’1208-dc22

ISBN-13: 978-1-84893-141-1 (hbk) Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Editorial Principles Bibliography Cambridge Society Papers A Sermon Preached before the Midnight Society Conversation and Conversations Christ or Caliban? The Colloquies of Senrab Is Death Desirable? Dignity, Romance, or Vegetarianism? The Historian of the Future Should We Have Elected Conybeare? Shall We Be Missionaries? The Ethics of the Gospels Shall We Go the Whole Hog? When Is a Drama not a Drama? Was Diotima Right? Do Two and Two Make Five? Ought Art to Be Always Beautiful? Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses (fragment) and Art Has No Concern with Morals (fragment) Dialogues Julius Caesar and Lord Salisbury Cleopatra and Mrs. Humphry Ward Salter and Cleopatra. An Imaginary Conversation Catullus and Lord Tennyson Boccaccio and General Lee Headmaster and Parent (fragment)

vii ix xi xxxiii xxxvii 1 3 9 17 25 41 45 51 65 75 81 97 105 111 117 125 133 137 139 145 151 159 165 171

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Gibbon, Johnson, and Adam Smith Good God Stories The Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood The Story of A and B Tragedy Interesting Letter from Madame La Comtesse de — to Lady X Letter. From an Inhabitant of another World

177 183 189 195 199 201 203 207

Editorial Notes Index

209 231

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Lytton Strachey called conversation ‘the unique privilege of souls which we inalienably inherit’. This collection, which continues the editorial tradition begun by James Strachey and carried on by Leonard Woolf, Michael Holroyd, Paul Levy and George Simson, has been a privilege to edit, precisely because it embodies many conversations that have both made it possible and enriched its content: I hope to have lived up to the standards of my predecessors. First and foremost, I want to offer generous thanks to the Strachey Trust for its enthusiastic embrace of this project, and for the copyright permission without which it would not exist. Jeremy Crow, Head of Literary Estates for the Society of Authors, responded meticulously and with infinite patience to repeated queries and deftly facilitated publication. Michael Holroyd, both independently and as a Trustee, offered most generous support from the moment when I first approached him about the possibility of bringing to light these unpublished works by the biographer whose own life, fortunate in this respect no less than in many others, formed the subject of another revolution in twentieth-century life-writing. A number of colleagues and friends provided valuable help at various stages of conception, acquisition, organization and composition: Christopher Reed, who introduced me to Bloomsbury, offered early and sustained encouragement in my work on Strachey and convinced me of the necessity to publish this edition; Patrick Brantlinger, Susan Gubar, Brenda Helt, Mark Hussey, Bob Langenfeld, Jane Lilienfeld, Melissa Pennell, John Stape, Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf have offered in different ways sustaining intellectual interest and generous practical assistance; at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Breon Mitchell, Cherry Williams and David Frasier found the image of Strachey used to advertise this volume, and allowed Pickering & Chatto to use it gratis; Richard Christophers and Richard Walker at the British Library aided me in the rapid location and procurement of documents, both at the Library and by post, over a period of two years; the students in my Spring 2010 Bloomsbury Group seminar, and especially Andy Bass, set their stamp on several of the volume’s footnotes with their perceptive questions. Financial support for this project came from the Office of the Provost at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Three of the introduc-

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tory passages include abbreviated versions of material previously published in the following journals: Journal of the History of Sexuality, 13:2 (2004); ELH: English Literary History, 77:4 (2010); and (with Gigi Thibodeau) Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, 25:1 (2011). For help in preparing this text, I want to thank Julie Wilson and the editorial staff at Pickering & Chatto, where Mark Pollard brought a vigorous enthusiasm and patient help to the entire process. Finally, my warmest thanks to Robert and Virginia Avery and to Pauline Thibodeau for their immeasurable support, and to Gigi Thibodeau, harmonical and sublime, who makes possible so many of life’s joys.

ABBREVIATIONS

Holroyd, The Unknown Years

M. Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, 2 vols (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967–8), vol. 1: The Unknown Years, 1880–1910. Holroyd, The Years of Achievement M. Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, 2 vols (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967–8), vol. 2: The Years of Achievement, 1910–1932. The Letters of Lytton Strachey The Letters of Lytton Strachey, ed. P. Levy (London: Viking, 2005). Merle, Lytton Strachey G. Merle, Lytton Strachey (1880–1932): Biographie et critique d’un critique et biographe, 2 vols (Lille: Atelier Reproduction des thèses, Université de Lille III, 1980), vol. 1. Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury S. P. Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group, Vol. 2 (Hampshire: Macmillan, 1994).

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INTRODUCTION

Lytton Strachey was young once.1 Before he became the celebrated – or, depending on one’s perspective, the notorious – author of Eminent Victorians (1918), Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928); before he inspired the development of the academic field of Victorian studies; before he became a core member of the Bloomsbury Group, that equally celebrated or notorious constellation of friends, artists, writers and intellectuals whose members included Clive and Vanessa Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf; before embarking on nearly a decade of apprenticeship as a literary journalist at the end of which time the publication of Landmarks in French Literature in 1912 began to establish his reputation – in short, before he became the Lytton Strachey we know, Lytton Strachey was young. That statement flounders in the shallows of banality. Or, rather, it would, except that the literary remains of Strachey’s late adolescence and young adulthood open an intriguing window into the early development of Bloomsbury values, of the critical assumptions that guided Strachey’s later transformative contributions to biography, and of literary modernism in general. Strachey was born into the English intellectual aristocracy, and he was a student at Liverpool University College, a Cambridge University undergraduate and, perhaps most importantly for his early intellectual development, he was also a member of several Cambridge University reading and discussion groups, including, pre-eminently, the Cambridge Conversazione Society – the Apostles. When he was elected the 239th Apostle in early 1902, Strachey joined a company whose membership stretched back to the 1820s and included such figures as Tennyson and Hallam, James Clerk Maxwell, Oscar Browning, Alfred North Whitehead, J. M. E. McTaggart, Henry Sidgwick, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and several young men who would shortly join Strachey among the Bloomsburys as the group coalesced over the first decade of the twentieth century: Fry, MacCarthy, Forster, Woolf and Keynes. Strachey went up to Cambridge in 1899, and officially concluded his studies in 1903. By 1904, he was living in a rented cottage outside of Cambridge and revising a dissertation on the eighteenth-century imperial administrator War-

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ren Hastings, in hopes of obtaining a fellowship at Trinity College, where he had completed his undergraduate career with second-class honours in history the previous year. In October 1905, Strachey’s dissertation failed, for the second time, to secure a fellowship, leaving him, as he told Leonard Woolf, ‘nominally a journalist, really, as far as I can see, a complete drifter, without any definite hopes, and the New Age as far off as ever’.2 The years when he was working on his fellowship dissertation marked a transitional period characterized by acute intellectual and emotional uncertainty. He responded to the fellowship examiners’ rejection of his academic work in part by self-administering what his biographer Michael Holroyd calls ‘palliative doses of reassurance to bolster up his self-esteem’.3 The largest and most potent of these doses may be found in another letter to Leonard Woolf, this one from September 1904, just after the first version of his dissertation had been rejected. In this letter, which Paul Levy, the editor of Strachey’s correspondence, characterizes as ‘manic’, and which also vibrates with youthful hyperbole and no small volume of irony, Strachey bolsters himself up by rhapsodizing over what he sees as his and his Apostolic brothers’ intellectual abilities and cultural achievements. ‘Our supremacy is great’, he writes: I sometimes feel as if it were not only ourselves who are concerned, but that the destinies of the whole world are somehow involved in ours. WE are – oh! in more ways than one – like the Athenians of the Periclean Age. We are the mysterious priests of a new and amazing civilisation. We are greater than our fathers; we are greater than Shelley; we are greater than the Eighteenth Century; we are greater than the Renaissance; we are greater than the Romans and the Greeks. What is hidden from us? We have mastered all. We have abolished religion, we have founded ethics, we have established philosophy, we have sown our strange illuminations in every province of thought, we have conquered art, we have liberated love. It would be pleasant to spend one’s days in a perpetual proclamation of our magnificence; shouldn’t all our works be inscribed with the signs of our grandeur; our splendours, our affirmations, and our desires?4

That arch-nemesis of Bloomsbury, F. R. Leavis, once weighed Strachey against several eminent Victorian Cantabrigians and asked, ‘Can we imagine Sidgwick or Leslie Stephen or [F. W.] Maitland being influenced by, or interested in … Lytton Strachey?’ Had Leavis known this letter, he no doubt would have found in it further damning evidence, though of an unusually bombastic type, of intellectually aristocratic, proto-Bloomsbury snobbery, self-absorption and self-aggrandizement – confirmation of, as he saw it, the Bloomsbury Group’s, and especially Strachey’s own, ‘articulateness and unreality cultivated together; callowness disguised from itself in articulateness; conceit encasing itself safely in a confirmed sense of sophistication’.5 Even allowing for the emotionally charged context of its composition, Strachey’s assertion of the global importance and of the intellectual, moral and

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aesthetic supremacy and ‘grandeur’ possessed by himself, Woolf and their fellow Apostles seems excessive. And yet, for all its boisterous juvenescence, its exuberant unreasonableness, does it not also contain a germ of truth? It would be ludicrous to suggest that the Apostles of Strachey’s generation and of the generation that immediately preceded his own and impacted it so forcefully, especially in the person and ethical writings of G. E. Moore – whose Principia Ethica (1903) is commonly referred to as the Bloomsbury Bible – surpassed, whatever that means, all the accomplishments of Western civilization. It would be plain silly to claim that, as modern hierophants of unapprehended inspiration, they achieved unprecedented magnificence, grandeur and splendour. Strachey’s specific claims are palpably absurd, as he well knew. In his letters as elsewhere, he was a keenly self-conscious ironist and a master of camp – of a style that Barry Spurr has dubbed ‘Camp Mandarin’6 – who often produced devastating satirical effects through an ironic rhetoric of excess. But however effusive, his ejaculation, as he might have called it, does voice several of the real issues, questions and concerns that not only occupied Strachey as a student but also informed his later work as a literary critic, a miniature portraitist and, above all, an innovator in the art of biography who helped to shape the terrain of literary modernism. Specifically, Strachey was perennially fascinated – and disturbed – by the lingering hold of religious belief in the post-Enlightenment, post-Darwinian world, belief he thought absurd but which he studied carefully during his Cambridge years. He returned over and again to fundamental questions in aesthetics and in ethics, and in relations between them, and sometimes examined ethical questions in the light of theology. Characteristically of Bloomsbury and under the powerful influence of Moore, he was also deeply committed to exploring the complex imbrications and subtle nuances of intimate personal relationships, both in his writings and during a lifelong and repeatedly frustrated but persistent search for harmonious, loving, intimate relationships of his own. It is debatable whether Strachey’s mature works inscribe either his own or a general Apostolic splendour or grandeur (or whether his works or the Apostolic ethos themselves deserve the epithets grand or splendid). However, they certainly inscribe a set of committed and carefully considered affirmations and desires, and they contain the fullest expressions of the questions that Strachey had begun exploring, and of the opinions on them that he had begun developing, at Cambridge or even earlier, at the turn of the twentieth century, as a young man. Strachey’s Cambridge writings for the Midnight Society, the Sunday Essay Society and the Apostles represent the seed from which emerged the critical essays, brief lives and major biographies that he produced from the 1910s until his early death in 1932 and for which he is best known. In other words, it is impossible fully to understand Strachey’s later works or the trajectory of his career as both an innovative practitioner and a self-conscious theorist of biog-

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raphy and as a social and cultural critic without knowing in their entirety the discussion society essays, as well as the dialogues and short stories, that he wrote at Cambridge as a student and in the years immediately following, between roughly 1900 and 1912. In her recent biography of the Strachey family, Bombay to Bloomsbury (2005), Barbara Caine observes of Strachey’s writings from this time that ‘It was in the twenty papers he delivered to the Apostles that Lytton began to interrogate accepted religious ideas, to question the Victorian morality which had been so central in his youth, and to explore new approaches to sexuality and to art’. But, Caine contends, despite the vigorous process of exploration that these essays represent, Strachey ‘was less inclined to analyse or even to think about the broad political, social, and economic frameworks in which they were located’.7 In general, Caine is right. Strachey was not a systematic thinker in politics, sociology or economics. Nor did he analyse these broad frameworks with the expository patience of a Roger Fry or Clive Bell, a Maynard Keynes or the Woolfs. As Michael Holroyd argues in a related vein, though in a claim challenged by some of the papers in this collection, ‘Lytton did not have a truly speculative mind; he was not really interested in religious, philosophical or even historical theory’.8 Strachey was, first and foremost, an artist in biography. However, the many essays, dialogues and stories that he wrote during or around the Edwardian years – a period Caine calls one of ‘intellectual and emotional awakening’9 – offer further insight into the aesthetic, ethical, ideological and social issues and investments that spurred so much of Strachey’s later work. This span of time encompasses his student years, the two years during which he was writing his dissertation on Warren Hastings and the period of what John Ferns calls Strachey’s literary apprenticeship,10 up until the publication of his first book, Landmarks in French Literature, and marked, as Holroyd puts it, ‘a major point of transition in Lytton’s career’. This was a transition that Strachey described as a ‘Spiritual Revolution’ and that might equally well be described as a moral one. It was a time, Holroyd explains, when Strachey began to experience a firm belief in the writer’s essential worth in the hierarchy of the world’s values … He had now entered upon a period of his literary development which, beginning with a rhapsodic acclamation of men of letters [in Landmarks], would lead up to his flank and rear attack on the legendary reputation of men of action and affairs. It was a time of self-justification and gathering confidence in the successful application of his own powers, a time when he would turn the tables on that type of willful person who set out to govern the world, and by intolerance and prejudice added unnecessarily to the world’s stock of avoidable inhumanity.11

By the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War, Strachey had developed into a modernist who was committed absolutely to the cultivation of himself as a simultaneously ethical and aesthetic endeavour – as he explained in his final Apostles paper, ‘Godfrey, Cornbury, or Candide?’ in

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1912 – and who also embraced writing, and especially biography, as a mode of social, cultural and ideological critique. His intentions, however, were not wholly destructive, but also constructive. His ‘attack on the legendary reputation of men [and women] of action and affairs’, made most forcefully in Eminent Victorians, quickly earned Strachey his reputation as a subversive, a destroyer, an objector, an anarchist, a revolutionary, a sniggering debunker, an iconoclast and a rebel. This reputation lingers still, even as the centennial of Eminent Victorians approaches, when it remains a major tendency in academic criticism to expose the cultural work that literary texts perform: on the one hand, to celebrate the subversive qualities of literary texts, to show how specific texts contest, challenge or critique dominant social and cultural values – or, on the other hand, to expose the ways that literary texts reinscribe those values. For all Strachey’s iconoclasm – one that he assiduously cultivated – there was also a constructive aspect to his reflections on and dramatizations of moral values at work, especially though not exclusively when his subjects were Victorian: he was as sharp a critic of twentieth-century prudery, moral reprobation and fanaticism as he was of the Victorian variety. Strachey’s reputation as a rebel is not undeserved. He was deeply critical of certain values and mores that permeated the Victorian and Edwardian ages and that he believed had been in great part responsible for the carnage of the Great War. This is a story familiar to readers of Strachey, but one worth retelling in its general outlines. In early March 1916, while the Great War raged and Strachey was hard at work on the satirical portraits in Eminent Victorians, he was called before a tribunal in Hampstead after engaging in a decidedly anti-militaristic manoeuvre: he had applied for release from the compulsory military service mandated by the recent passage of two Military Service Acts. Although Strachey did this on the grounds of both health (‘I am a martyr to the piles’, he archly remarked, to the amusement of his Bloomsbury friends in attendance) and conscience, it was the latter he emphasized in his carefully balanced testimony to the magistrates. A mere two paragraphs and 254 words long, Strachey’s statement is his first public expression of the ethical ground of his opposition to international violence and, in fact, his first public expression of the ethical concerns that inform his work as a biographer. ‘I have a conscientious objection’, Strachey told the tribunal: to assisting, by any deliberate action of mine, in carrying on the war. This objection is not based on religious belief, but upon moral considerations, at which I arrived after long and careful thought. I do not wish to assert the extremely general proposition that I should never in any circumstances, be justified in taking part in any conceivable war; to dogmatize so absolutely upon a point so abstract would appear to me to be unreasonable. At the same time, my feeling is directed not simply against the present war: I am convinced that the whole system by which it is sought to settle interna-

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Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers tional disputes by force is profoundly evil; and that, so far as I am concerned, I should be doing wrong to take any active part in it.12

In this statement, Strachey foregrounds the ethical beliefs that informed his opposition to the Great War. These same beliefs motivate the double-edged – the simultaneously critical (of Victorian moral conventions) and constructive (of a modernist ethics of friendship) – ethical system he was beginning to work out, for public consumption, in the pages of one of the twentieth century’s first important contributions to life-writing. For example, his refusal to dogmatize about his opposition to war parallels, in an ethical register, the proto-postmodern methodological claim he would shortly publish in his preface to Eminent Victorians regarding the impossibility of gaining total knowledge of the Victorian age: ‘The history of the Victorian age will never be written; we know too much about it’.13 The order of his argument to the Hampstead tribunal also parallels the order in which he treats his eminent Victorian subjects. For instance, his immediate refusal, in his second sentence, to base his case for conscientious objection on religious grounds, indeed his implicit dismissal of the possibility or desirability of appealing to religion to justify his opposition, calls to mind his dismissive caricature of Cardinal Manning’s moral failings resulting from a fervently religious anti-intellectualism; while the issues Strachey raises in his second paragraph encapsulate the political tenor of his portraits of Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon. ‘These conclusions’ regarding his moral opposition to war, as Strachey explains: have crystallized in my mind since the outbreak of war. Before that time, I was principally occupied with literary and speculative matters; but, with the war, the supreme importance of international questions was forced upon my attention. My opinions in general have been for many years strongly critical of the whole structure of society; and, after a study of the diplomatic situation, and of the literature, both controversial and philosophical, arising out of the war, they developed naturally with those which I now hold. My convictions as to my duty with regard to the war have not been formed either rashly or lightly; and I shall not act against those convictions, whatever the consequences may be.14

Following a short deliberation, the tribunal declared Strachey totally unfit to contribute to the war effort – not because of his ethical views, but on grounds of poor health. Paul Levy writes that ‘the members of the tribunal were not much impressed’ by Strachey’s appeal to ethical considerations.15 Strachey himself may have been partly responsible for the tribunal’s reluctance to accept his moral argument. His performance during his hearing was, by all accounts, deliberately mocking in tone. For example, in an oft-cited episode, Strachey was asked by a member of the tribunal what he would do if he were to see a German soldier raping his sister (a question typically asked of conscientious objectors). Strachey

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offered up a startling pun that cemented his image as a transgressor of traditional sexual mores: ‘I should try to come between them’. ‘No one’, the historian Paul Johnson writes, ‘had transfixed a courtroom in quite that way since the days of Oscar Wilde’.16 Although he was pleased with his exemption from military service, and despite the mockery he had made of the tribunal’s proceedings, Strachey was nevertheless angry that the tribunal, in making its decision, had paid closer attention to his haemorrhoids than to his ethical beliefs, his ‘convictions as to my duty’. ‘It was’, he wrote to his brother, James, ‘unreasonable of them to withhold from me the only form of exemption which would appropriately meet my objection’.17 But despite Strachey’s dissatisfaction with the grounds for the tribunal’s decision, the tribunal’s reason for declaring him unfit for service fails to impugn the intensity and integrity of Strachey’s ethical beliefs at this time, which he expressed at considerable risk to himself. Like Bertrand Russell and others, Strachey faced possible imprisonment for refusing to serve the British war effort. As a way of working through his experience before the Hampstead tribunal and his increasing conviction of the immorality of war, Strachey turned once again to ‘literary and speculative matters’ – primarily to Eminent Victorians, but also to a series of ‘dialogues of the dead’, a satirical genre tracing to classical times which had flowered briefly in Strachey’s beloved eighteenth century, but had fallen into general disuse by the early twentieth century. This genre was originally polished to a high sheen in the second-century writings of the Greeklanguage poet Lucian. As Levy explains the ‘conventions governing the form’, they ‘have the ghosts of historical characters conversing in the classical underworld, are written in prose, and have no preceding narrative to set the scene or to expound the circumstances of the conversation’.18 They are, in other words, contextless discussions of precisely selected questions, sometimes serious, other times light-hearted, but always designed to expose fundamental beliefs held by the participants. In his imaginary underworld conversation between the ancient Assyrian King Sennacherib and Strachey’s recently deceased acquaintance, the poet and fellow Apostle Rupert Brooke, Strachey satirizes Brooke’s attitude to the war, and the idea popularized by H. G. Wells that the Great War would end all wars. Brooke tells Sennacherib that the war I fought in was like none that you were ever concerned with. It was a war to bring peace and justice into the world. And how can I doubt that it has done so? … how could I dream for a moment that England should fail?

Sennacherib’s response to Brooke’s bellicose jingoism, with which Strachey concludes his satire, is a sigh of relief that warriors are perpetuating his legacy 2,600 years later. ‘That is the spirit!’ the old warrior tells his new friend in the

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underworld: ‘Excellent. I shall always be perfectly contented so long as there are soldiers such as you.’19 Given Strachey’s lifelong hostility to empire, God and war, it seems fitting that two of his most pointed early political satires, ‘Sennacherib and Rupert Brooke’ and ‘The End of General Gordon’, should be linked not only thematically and biographically, but also through their subjects’ respective connections with Saint Paul’s Cathedral. For it was but a few feet from General Gordon’s memorial effigy that William Inge, the Dean of Saint Paul’s, delivered his rousing Easter Sunday, 1915, sermon to his congregation and the nation. Inge’s stated text was Isaiah 36:19: ‘The dead shall live, my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust.’ But his sermon quickly became famous for its celebration of England’s patriotic youth. Brooke biographer Christopher Hassall explains that ‘As the Dean reached the pulpit, a man jumped to his feet and began a loud harangue against the war’. Inge then mollified the congregation by reading Brooke’s poem ‘The Soldier’, which he praised by saying that ‘the enthusiasm of a pure and elevated patriotism had never found a nobler expression’ than in the lines whose wartime popularity in England was rivalled only perhaps by those of John McCrae’s preferred poem of military recruiters, ‘In Flanders Fields’.20 Brooke had written: If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by sons of home.21

Brooke, as Strachey and his Bloomsbury friends widely believed at the time, had also included a veiled, masculinist attack on Bloomsbury values (and especially their homosexuality) in the first of his war sonnets, ‘Peace’, with his critique of ‘half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, / And all the little emptiness of love’.22 But notwithstanding the difficulties of his friendship with Brooke and his distaste for Brooke’s celebration of war, Strachey was saddened by the news of Brooke’s death three weeks after Inge’s sermon, from blood-poisoning on board ship in the Aegean, en route to Gallipoli, an event that caused Strachey to lament ‘The meaninglessness of Fate’ and, in Holroyd’s phrase, ‘the monstrous futility of human affairs’: ‘it’s a grim affair … it’s all muddle and futility’, Strachey told Duncan Grant.23 Faced with the muddle and futility of the Great War, Strachey responded with a mixture of satirical bitterness and scorn on the one hand, and unflagging hope and faith in humanity’s capacity for ethical goodness on the other. In the

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biographies that he wrote during the Great War and then in the inter-war era of literary modernism, Strachey struggled to balance these two conflicting emotions. One inspired some of the finest satirical biography in English literature and led to a transformation of the genre. The other fuelled an equally passionate desire to theorize a new ethics of friendship that rested in an uneasy relation with the Johannine belief that ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’.24 Eminent Victorians, the first of Strachey’s groundbreaking biographical works, was published in late 1918, at a time when he believed that the reified pretensions of certain ecclesiastics, educational authorities and men and women of action were ideologically and practically responsible for the Great War. Eminent Victorians represents his ‘greatest and most prolonged onslaught upon the [religious, economic, and imperial] evangelicalism that was the defining characteristic of Victorian culture, and which, in his view, had been indirectly responsible for the First World War’.25 Strachey’s response was to fight real fire with rhetorical flame. If evangelical fervour had indirectly caused the Great War, then, to his mind, the best way for him to expose this fact to his readers was through the equally fervent though mocking indirectness of satirical portraiture. In this work, however, Strachey combines his tenacious assertion of artistic ‘freedom of spirit’ as an interpreter of lives – one, moreover, whose duty was to expose, debunk or subvert the religious, political and educational chauvinisms of an era through case studies of Victorian England’s ‘characteristic specimens’, Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon – with an equally fierce ethical concern for the inherent value of individual lives. In the preface to Eminent Victorians, Strachey makes what was for him a fundamental ethical claim: ‘Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes – which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.’26 Thus, Strachey clearly intended his portraits to be read not merely for the amusement they provide through their often relentless satire, nor simply as exercises in debunking, but also, and of equal importance, as a series of ethical investigations. Behind Strachey’s often savage indictments in Eminent Victorians lies an unmistakable preoccupation with ‘the claims of personal affection’, as he writes in his portrait of Cardinal Manning.27 Throughout his biographies of these four Victorians and, later, of Queen Victoria herself, Strachey criticizes his subjects for living obedient to the ‘prim solidity’ of predetermined, absolute moral duties.28 The frequency with which the word ‘moral’ and its cognates appears in these works, and especially in Eminent Victorians, with invariably vituperative overtones, emphasizes his ethical concern. However, though he perennially ridicules such obedience, he does so for a constructive purpose: namely, to articulate his belief that friendship, and intimate, affectionate relationships in general,

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could both subvert – and ought to take precedence over – obedience to conventional morality and challenge the imperial ambitions of a state whose social and cultural apparatuses demanded such obedience. Of Strachey’s reputation, one may observe, as he wrote of the Elizabethans, ‘It is so hard to gauge, from the exuberance of their decoration, the subtle, secret lines of their inner nature’. And it is enlightening, to understand the underlying reality of the case, to ‘look beneath the robes’.29 There we find, in Holroyd’s formulation, Strachey’s ‘real ambition – the education of the public to more humane views’.30 Or, as Strachey told his lover Roger Senhouse in 1929, summing up his moral intentions then and over the course of his relatively short but entire adult life, ‘I long to do some good to the world – to make people happier – to help to dissipate this atrocious fog of superstition that hangs over us and compresses our breathing and poisons our lives’.31 Notwithstanding the iconoclastic modernism that led Strachey to assert, in various ways, his own non serviam, and despite his reflexive distrust of and contempt for the religious, moral and aesthetic values that he had inherited from his Victorian forebears, he was also an artist, a social critic and an ethical thinker whose works continually celebrate the supreme value of friendship and human intimacy. *** The purpose of this collection is to make available, for the first time, thirty of Lytton Strachey’s previously unpublished essays, dialogues, stories and fragments – and, by so doing, to provide a lens through which we may more clearly see those stylistic qualities and intellectual concerns that compose the Stracheyesque. In fact, these works do not merely supplement or flesh out the conventional understanding of Strachey as an artist. They accomplish this, to be sure. But they also encourage a revised and enriched understanding of the ways that in his early, pre-professional career as a writer and a student Strachey began conscientiously developing the ethical and aesthetic beliefs that would sustain his writing, his friendships and his political stances during his adult life. As such, Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers continues the recuperative editorial work of Leonard Woolf and James Strachey, Michael Holroyd, Paul Levy and George Simson that, since the mid-1950s, has gradually but persistently expanded the corpus of Strachey’s published writings and made possible a more thorough understanding of the issues, questions and concerns that motivated him over the course of his writing career.32 All of the works in this collection have been selected from the Strachey archives at the British Library, the major repository of his work. To contextualize this collection historically, it may be useful briefly to review the history of previous recuperative efforts.

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Jason Harding, in a recent review essay on several new books about T. S. Eliot, joins Ronald Schuchard in affirming that ‘it is in the unread archives and in the unexamined histories of modernist texts that scholars will recover the riches of modernist literature’.33 Strictly speaking, none of the texts in this collection are unread, and few of them remain entirely unexamined. James Strachey, Lytton’s younger brother, to whom he left his literary remains, read all of them and grouped and made typescripts of some of them in the decades after his brother’s death in anticipation of publishing one or more volumes of the essays. Michael Holroyd knew all of them when he was writing his groundbreaking biography in the 1960s and briefly comments on most of them in his chapters on Strachey’s Cambridge years. Paul Levy, with Holroyd, is co-literary executor of Strachey’s estate and a co-founder of the Strachey Trust, as well as an editor or, again with Holroyd, co-editor of two collections of Strachey’s short works, and the editor of his letters and of the definitive edition of Eminent Victorians; he too is familiar with the contents of the Strachey archive. Gabriel Merle, also, includes a list of Strachey’s Cambridge society papers as an appendix in his two-volume study of Strachey published in 1980. And S. P. Rosenbaum offers brief summaries of and glosses on several of these works in his three-volume study of early Bloomsbury. In the past decade, Julie Anne Taddeo and Barbara Caine have examined the Strachey archives while researching their respective studies of Strachey and of the Strachey family, and Taddeo very briefly comments on some of the essays included here in her study of Strachey’s lingering Victorianism, a topic that she popularized with Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian (2002), aspects of which have since been taken up by Caine and Simon Joyce. Nevertheless, with that handful of exceptions, all of these texts remain unread and unexamined. These new works enable a fresh and even more nuanced appreciation of Strachey’s stylistic maturity as a young man and a fuller critical understanding than has yet been demonstrated of the origins, early development and depth of his engagements with, opinions on and attitudes towards aesthetics, ethics, homosexuality and, perhaps surprisingly, religion. For even if these essays, dialogues and stories are not completely unknown, neither, to all intents and purposes, have they been available to Strachey, Bloomsbury or modernist scholars, or to the large numbers of ‘common readers’ who share an abiding fascination with all things Bloomsbury. It is not surprising that many of the pieces address ethical and aesthetic questions, and aesthetics in the context of morality. As not only a modernist and a Bloomsburyan but also a writer who was born into the Victorian intellectual aristocracy and was only weeks from his twenty-first birthday when Queen Victoria died in 1901, Strachey grew up during a fascinating transitional moment in literary theory, when the flowering of aestheticism and decadence challenged

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the dominant understanding of literature as a moral endeavour as much as an aesthetic one. This was an attitude he would later attack in a slashing essay on Matthew Arnold. Strachey wrote his essay ‘A Victorian Critic’ in 1914, at the moment when structuralism and the other ostensibly scientific modes of criticism and theory being developed in an increasingly academic critical world had begun to displace the predominantly moralizing, impressionistic and appreciative criticism of the end of the century. This was also, of course, the moment of the emergence in Britain of literary modernism, which in many ways embraced a parricidal attitude towards its Victorian predecessors. In this same year, for instance, Wyndham Lewis BLASTed the entire span of Victoria’s reign (as well as, it must be said, the entire Strachey family). Strachey used Arnold’s criticism as a starting-point from which to examine the essential and fatal weakness of the Victorian Age – its incapability of criticism. If we look at its criticism of literature alone, was there ever a time when the critic’s functions were more grievously and shamelessly mishandled? When Dryden or Johnson wrote of literature, they wrote of it as an art; but the Victorian critic had a different notion of his business. To him literature was always an excuse for talking about something else.34

Taking as his critical occasion a typical Arnoldian dictum – from his 1879 essay on Wordsworth, ‘The world is forwarded by having its attention fixed on the best things’ – Strachey provides a cutting, ironic gloss: Yes; the world is forwarded. Here, plainly enough, is the tip of the Victorian ear peeping out from under the hide of the aesthetic lion … But when he proceeds to suggest yet another test for literature, when he asserts that, in order to decide upon the value of any piece of writing, what we must do is to ask ourselves whether or not it is a ‘Criticism of Life’ – then, indeed, all concealment is over; the whole head of the animal is out.35

Having expressed, in his opening paragraphs, some bemusement over Arnold’s being better known as a Victorian thinker in the early twentieth century than ‘Lyell, for instance, who revolutionized geology’, and then criticized Arnold’s overmastering concern with ‘utility’, Strachey concludes by suggesting that Arnold’s native temperament and talents, the qualities that had rendered him so unfit for genuine aesthetic criticism, might have made him a capable scientist. However, ‘unfortunately, he mistook his vocation. He might, no doubt, if he had chosen, have done some excellent and lasting work upon the movements of glaciers or the fertilization of plants … But no; he would be a critic’.36 Notwithstanding the ironic fact that Strachey hoped his own work would help to ‘forward the world’ by serving as a sort of criticism of life, Strachey was critical of the Arnoldian tradition in literary criticism; in the 1930s, this attitude landed him squarely in the crosshairs of the Leavisite Scrutineers. But he

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was also an inheritor of the aestheticist tradition as it was embodied in the lives and works of Walter Pater (whose style he nevertheless detested), Algernon Charles Swinburne (whose musicality he adored) and Oscar Wilde (for whom he expresses great sympathy in his letters and for whom he possessed a special affinity). For all of these writers, the pursuit of style in life and art was a matter both of aesthetic and ethical self-cultivation, an effort to discover fulfilling new modes of art and life outside of the strictures of conventional moral codes. (The quintessential fictional expression of this tendency during the modernist period may be found in Stephen Dedalus’s famous non serviam in James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can.’)37 Whatever other traditions that pursuit may be located within, the ethics that all of these writers embraced fits comfortably within the virtue ethics tradition which, beginning with Aristotle, places a premium on the cultivation of intrinsic virtues and on the fullest possible development of those tendencies in which one’s character is grounded. For all of these writers, too, such cultivation takes the form of a vigorous individualism. Wilde most intensely, but Strachey, too, to a certain extent, articulates this fervent individualism (as an end and not as a means – a goal to be achieved rather than a means of achieving other goals) with a socialist politics. In addition to participating in this general ethical and aesthetic revaluation of values, Strachey also helped to forge a more specifically homosexual one – what he and his Cambridge friends called the Higher Sodomy, which Taddeo defines as ‘an alternative creed of manliness and transcendental love’,38 and which owed its origins equally to an interest in aestheticism and to their reading of Plato’s Symposium – while embracing a lower, more purely physical variety. And the influence on Strachey of G. E. Moore’s ethics cannot be stated too strongly. The fact of this influence is a truth universally acknowledged and often repeated, to the extent that a list of works addressing this issue would correspond almost exactly to the list of titles in the history of Strachey criticism. The intensity of this influence can be gauged from a well-known letter that Strachey wrote to Moore immediately following the publication of Principia Ethica: I am carried away. I think your book has not only wrecked and shattered all writers on Ethics from Aristotle and Christ to Herbert Spencer and Mr Bradley, it has not only laid the true foundations of Ethics, it has not only left all modern philosophy bafouée … The truth; there can be no doubt, is really now upon the march. I date from October 1903 the beginning of the Age of Reason … This is a confession of faith, from your brother.39

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This was a faith that, for Strachey, never wavered; its persistence may be observed in letters, essays and biographies that he published over the following thirty years. But if the papers included here pursue ethical and aesthetic questions, they also engage with religious ones. It is here, perhaps, that these works most fully enable a critical reassessment and fleshing out of Strachey’s life and works. George Gordon, in the BBC’s National Lecture for 1932, delivered in tribute just weeks following Strachey’s death, spoke on the topic ‘Art and Ethics of Biography’. Gordon’s reflections centre on Strachey’s contributions to the genre. These reflections are largely sympathetic, but Gordon is no hagiographer; he sharply criticizes Strachey for what he sees as the absence of religion in Strachey’s world view. ‘The great weakness of Strachey, as master and as model’, Gordon writes: was his lack of what can only be called religion. He has neither gods nor heroes, and with this equipment operates confidently on people who had both. The gain in irony is immense; but the gain to truth is more doubtful. It can hardly be supposed that a writer who not only has no religion of his own, but is honestly incapable of understanding it in others, should be wholly successful as a biographer of a religious man. His group of eminent Victorians – Manning, Arnold, and Gordon especially – present him at every turn with this insuperable difficulty.40

In this assessment, it is easy to hear an echo of D. H. Lawrence’s complaint that Bloomsbury possessed ‘no reverence, not a crumb or grain of reverence’ – and this, despite the fact that, as Keynes recalled in his memoir ‘My Early Beliefs’, the young men who would become Bloomsbury ‘accepted Moore’s religion’.41 As Levy points out, Strachey is still criticized ‘as though he had only a superficial knowledge of Christianity … but this is simply not true’. In support of his claim, Levy adduces the fact that Strachey’s ‘reading for “Cardinal Manning” alone was prodigious, and included several works on several branches of theology, as well as a good deal of Church history. He believed in knowing the enemy.’ Levy adds that ‘it is wrong’ to suppose that Strachey ‘was unable to see any merit in Christianity’.42 As a strident atheist, Strachey certainly saw little to celebrate in what he perceived as organized Christianity’s production of an ‘atrocious fog of superstition’ that for nearly two thousand years had blanketed basic, inevitable, enthralling and multifarious human desires and activities with suspicion and contempt. At the same time, despite his categorical disapproval of religious faith, he knew and appreciated, both intellectually and emotionally, how Christianity had helped to shape the world that he inhabited, and he closely studied the New Testament to tease out the ethics of Christianity in a bravura performance on ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’ before the Sunday Essay Society in 1905. He was fascinated by the social, cultural and philosophical impact of Christianity, while believing its theological claims to be absurd. And yet, in a further aestheticist

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twist, it was the very absurdity of certain dogmatic claims that gave them, as he put it in his elucidation of some of the complexities of Papal Infallibility, their astounding ‘charm’.43 In a letter to Leonard Woolf in 1904, Strachey says that he only managed to ‘pull through’ his recent reading of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa ‘by intermittent doses of the New Testament’. It is quite possible that these doses had a salutary effect only because Strachey found Clarissa supremely boring, and that he really meant this comment to suggest the tediousness of the Gospels. But he uses this confession as the spur to a rumination on Christian ethics. ‘My theory of Christ’, he writes: is that he merely preached a doctrine of ends, and I now think that the secret of the Christian religion is that it entirely disregards means of every sort, and gives itself up to the cultivation of ends which are hopelessly inadequate even if they were possible, without telling one how they are to be got. The result of course is complete anarchy; but the theory must have been comparatively sensible when one thought that the world would be abolished the year after next.44

Elsewhere, in his essays, biographies and letters, Strachey condemns Christianity in order, Holroyd writes, ‘to jolt people out of their automatic conventional morality and persuade … them to accept more personal, enlightened attitudes’.45 Nevertheless, if ‘Christianity offended his intellect and oppressed his emotions’,46 it was a belief system, a social organization and a repository of alluring ritual in which, as with so many aesthetes, he was keenly interested, and about which he thought a great deal at Cambridge and afterwards. In the early 1970s, following the publication of his two-volume life of Strachey, Michael Holroyd began the process of recovering Strachey’s unpublished writings from the Cambridge years, including the ‘First and Last Will and Testament’, the ‘Trinity Diary Nov 1902’, and the ‘Examination Papers in Sex Education’ in the collection Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self-Portrait (1971). Shortly thereafter, Paul Levy’s edition The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers (1972) continued the process of recuperation, including seven of the essays that Strachey wrote for the Cambridge societies of which he was a member. This was followed by a publication designed to commemorate the centennial of Strachey’s birth, Holroyd and Levy’s The Shorter Strachey (1980), which included Strachey’s first Apostles paper, ‘Ought the Father to Grow a Beard?’ as well as the introduction to his fellowship dissertation on Warren Hastings. The past thirty years have seen no additions to this corpus. To date, then, only eight of Strachey’s twenty-three Cambridge society papers have been published, a situation that cannot but issue in an incomplete understanding of Strachey’s early intellectual development. In Lytton Strachey (1880–1932): Biographie et critique d’un critique et biographe (1980), Gabriel Merle chronologically lists the papers (including one dialogue, ‘The Colloquies of Senrab’) that Strachey is

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known to have read before the Midnight Society, the Sunday Essay Society and the Apostles; Merle’s list includes the date (or approximate date) of composition or delivery and the specific society for which each was written. With a few minor corrections, which have been enabled by a collative consideration of internal evidence in the holograph manuscripts in the British Library as well as by reference to Holroyd’s biography and Levy’s edition of Strachey’s letters, Merle’s list is as follows (with parentheses indicating the location of previously published papers: ‘(S)’ indicates The Shorter Strachey, ‘(R)’ The Really Interesting Question): 1. A Sermon Preached before the Midnight Society 2. Conversation and Conversations 3. Ought the Father to Grow a Beard? 4. Christ or Caliban? 5. The Colloquies of Senrab 6. Is Death Desirable? 7. Dignity, Romance, or Vegetarianism? 8. The Historian of the Future 9. Should We Have Elected Conybeare? 10. He, She, and It 11. Shall We Be Missonaries? 12. Does Absence Make the Heart Grow Fonder? 13. The Ethics of the Gospels 14. Shall We Go the Whole Hog? 15. Shall We Take the Pledge? 16. When Is a Drama not a Drama? 17. Was Diotima Right? 18. Do Two and Two Make Five? 19. Will It Come Right in the End? 20. Ought Art to Be Always Beautiful? 21. Art and Indecency 22. The Really Interesting Question 23. Godfrey, Cornbury, or Candide?

5 May 1900

Midnight

3 November 1901 10 May 1902 25 October 1902 9 November 1902 31 January 1903 14 March 1903 6 November 1903 14 November 1903 20 February 1904 1904 19 November 1904

Sunday Essay Apostles Apostles Sunday Essay Apostles Apostles Sunday Essay Apostles ? Apostles Apostles

19 February 1905 25 February 1905 2 December 1905 1905 2 March 1907 25 March 1907 c. 1908 c. 1908 c. 1908 20 May 1911 11 May 1912

Sunday Essay Apostles Apostles Apostles Apostles Apostles Apostles Apostles ? Apostles Apostles

(S)

(R) (R)

(R)

(R) (R) (R) (R)

The present volume is divided into three sections, primarily by genre: Cambridge Society Papers, Dialogues and Stories. The first section, Cambridge Society Papers, includes all fifteen of Strachey’s remaining discussion society papers. It also includes two very short and undated essay fragments, ‘Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses’ and ‘Art Has No Concern with Morals’. These works are incomplete, the latter comprising only a brief set of notes. Nevertheless, together they show a debt to two central works in aestheticism – Oscar Wilde’s aestheticist manifesto, the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray; and Walter Pater’s conclusion to The Renaissance – and provide further evidence of Strachey’s abiding interest in what it means to be an artist and in relations between art and ethics. Of special note in this first section are ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’ and

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‘The Historian of the Future’. Respectively, they represent Strachey’s most sustained theoretical and expository engagements with Christianity and ethics and with historiographical theory, from his Cambridge period or, indeed, in general. Merle groups Strachey’s Cambridge society papers into five categories: 1. Problems of relations between individuals; 2. Religion; 3. Politics; 4. Art; and 5. Essays on the Apostolic ethos.47 All six of the papers that fall under the category of Religion appear here for the first time – ‘A Sermon Preached before the Midnight Society’, ‘Christ or Caliban?’ ‘The Colloquies of Senrab’, ‘Is Death Desirable?’, ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’ and ‘Do Two and Two Make Five?’ Strachey would later articulate his historiographical convictions in a 1909 review essay, ‘A New History of Rome’, and then, most famously, in the preface to Eminent Victorians; and he would return near the end of his life to explicitly theoretical considerations of the nature of history in a series of essays collected as ‘Six English Historians’ – his subjects are David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Froude and Mandell Creighton – in Portraits in Miniature, the final book that he published during his lifetime, in 1931. All of Strachey’s later reflections on the art of history constitute elaborations on the central themes of ‘The Historian of the Future’. It was in history that Strachey was educated at Cambridge; and, in the genre of biography, it was as a historian that he developed his talent for narrative drama most fully. This Sunday Essay Society paper was written in late 1903, when Strachey was developing his historiographical notions both in the context of turn-of-thecentury debates among English historians about whether history was properly an art or a science, and under the sway of G. E. Moore’s ethics. An abiding concern with fundamental questions in historiography, and with biography as a compound of historiography and psychology, constitutes a central fact of Strachey’s life and work. Strachey’s approach to historiography, first formulated over a century ago, remains relevant today, when debates continue among historians about the complex relations between ‘fact’ and interpretation. In the late 1970s, John Clive observed of this contest, ‘The old battle against those who wished to make history a science has been fought and won. A new battle may be shaping up, against those who wish to make it into pure literature’.48 The battle continues, however, at a time when ‘science’ absorbs ever more of the terrain traditionally associated with humanistic modes of inquiry, and Strachey’s contribution to its Cantabrigian configuration at the turn of the century pinpoints several of its perennial characteristics. As is well known, Moore inspired Strachey to see conversation as one of the two highest ethical goods. However, even before he joined the Apostles or knew Moore, Strachey had already assigned conversation the supreme human value in a hierarchy of aesthetic types. In ‘Conversation and Conversations’, seventeen years before the publication of Eminent Victorians (where he describes biogra-

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phy as ‘the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing’),49 two years before the appearance of Principia Ethica, and the year before he was elected an Apostle, he called conversation ‘the most human … of all arts’. Given his own powerfully fanciful imagination, it is not surprising that in ‘Conversation and Conversations’ he should also have expressed his fascination with imaginary conversations. They are, he writes, ‘the amusement of many. To construct them, with all their elaborate chains of hypotheses, is a fascination too enthralling to resist; and a great part of literature is simply their crystalisation.’50 Strachey’s own attraction to imaginary conversation, as more than a literary amuse bouche, crystallized itself in more than a dozen dialogues. ‘None of them’, Levy notes, ‘bears a date, and it may be that they were undertaken as exercises in literary discipline’.51 Several of Strachey’s imaginary conversations exemplify the genre of the dialogue of the dead. In this form, as Strachey practised it, the circumstance is the conversation, which illustrates a generally satirical point on an ethical, aesthetic, religious or social theme, or combination of themes. Strachey himself published only one of his dialogues of the dead. ‘A Dialogue between Moses, Diogenes, and Mr. Loke [Locke]’ appeared in Books and Characters: French and English (1922), with the unpaginated prefatory note, ‘The “Dialogue” is now printed for the first time, from a manuscript, apparently in the handwriting of Voltaire and belonging to his English period’. This dialogue was strategically placed among three essays on Voltaire, and written entirely by Strachey, who closely and powerfully identified with Voltaire, as can be seen more fully below in the headnotes and texts of ‘Christ or Caliban?’ ‘The Colloquies of Senrab’, ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’ and ‘Ought Art to Be Always Beautiful?’ This dialogue was later reprinted by James Strachey in Biographical Essays (1948). Two of Strachey’s other dialogues of the dead, ‘Sennacherib and Rupert Brooke’ and ‘King Herod and the Rev. Mr. Malthus’, were included by Levy in The Really Interesting Question. (That volume also contains a dialogue probably from 1914 titled ‘According to Freud’, and a February 1904 Cambridge society dialogue, ‘He, She, and It’.) The dialogues included here have until now ‘linger[ed] in the discreet oblivion of my chest of drawers’, to borrow Strachey’s phrase from a 1916 letter to Virginia Woolf on his insufficiently ‘pompous’ dialogue between Sennacherib and Brooke.52 In addition to the dialogues of the dead, this collection includes three additional dialogues. ‘Gibbon, Johnson, and Adam Smith’ is an imaginary conversation centring on education; ‘Headmaster and Parent’, also on the general subject of education, involves fictional characters from the Victorian age or the turn of the century; and the third, ‘Good God’, notwithstanding its dubious authorship, captures a conversation apparently among Strachey and three friends. All eight dialogues are satirical to a greater or lesser degree, and, with the exceptions of ‘Gibbon, Johnson, and Adam Smith’ and ‘Headmaster and Parent’, exist in what appears to be a finished form. Strachey possessed a deep

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fascination with the eighteenth century – a time when the dialogue of the dead flourished53 – and believed in the great ethical and aesthetic value of conversation. It is reasonable to assume, even if Strachey wrote these dialogues as literary exercises, that as a meticulous craftsman he hoped to achieve in them something of the stylistic and critical quality that he found in the prose of David Hume, and that he cultivated over the course of his writing career, across the range of his published writings. ‘The grace and clarity of exquisite writing’, Strachey writes in his portrait of Hume, ‘are enhanced by a touch of colloquialism – the tone of a polished conversation. A personality – a most engaging personality – just appears. The cat-like touches of ironic malice – hints of something very sharp behind the velvet – add to the effect.’54 The third and final section, Stories, gathers five examples from a genre that Strachey often practised but in which he never published. The first of the stories, ‘The Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood’, pre-dates his Cambridge years, is the earliest text included here and represents ‘Lytton’s most considerable piece of writing up to the age of seventeen’.55 Written in 1897, while Strachey was a student at Leamington College, ‘The Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood’, in both its title and form, speaks to the emerging influence of Edward Gibbon on Strachey’s style; this was an influence that would shape much of his writing all through his adult life. (This interest in Gibbon also finds expression in the dialogue ‘Gibbon, Johnson, and Adam Smith’, which he wrote for a Fellowship Examination in September 1904, the month that his dissertation was first rejected, and which may or may not be the same as the short dialogue of that name included here.) As I explain further in the headnote to the Stories section, Strachey’s version of Red Riding Hood also represents a significant and innovative contribution to this popular fairy tale, and Strachey uses it as an opportunity to begin defining his historiographical philosophy. ‘The Story of A and B’ is a schematic, almost mathematical account of stages in a (presumably) homosexual relationship, coded in genderless names represented by letters of the alphabet; while ‘Tragedy’ is a poignant but also arch examination of middle-aged regret and gay longing. Finally, ‘Interesting letter from Madame La Comtesse de — to Lady X’ shows Strachey at his bawdy best – he considered himself a ‘member’ of the ‘Bawdy class’, as he confesses in his suggestively titled c. 1908 Apostles essay ‘Will It Come Right in the End?’;56 and ‘Letter. From an Inhabitant of another World’ takes a fanciful look at the complexities of human intimacy from a radically alternative – in fact, an extraterrestrial – perspective. Lytton Strachey wrote voluminously and continually, but many of his writings were never either prepared or intended for publication. And yet most of his unpublished writings possess intrinsic literary merit, as Levy’s and Holroyd’s collections, as well as the fanciful Ermyntrude and Esmeralda, the recently published letters and the play A Son of Heaven have shown over the past thirty years.

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In addition to their intrinsic aesthetic merit, Strachey’s Cambridge writings and those that flank it chronologically are also interesting as evidence of the character of the early intellectual development of the writer who would revolutionize biography in the late 1910s. The only significant unpublished works of Strachey’s that remain are the scores of poems in the Strachey Papers at the British Library; scraps, orts and fragments of lists, speeches, essays and stories reside there, too – a few of which may be found in my headnotes to ‘Shall We Go the Whole Hog?’ ‘Christ or Caliban?’ and to the Stories section. As a companion volume to The Really Interesting Question and The Shorter Strachey, Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers begins with the assumption, which Strachey himself borrowed from the historian Lord Acton, that, as Strachey phrased it, ‘Uninterpreted truth is as useless as buried gold; and art is the great interpreter’.57 A corollary to this claim is that truth itself, however artfully presented, can only be known through a process of archaeological investigation, the work of sifting through unread archives and of examining the unexamined histories of texts. If, as scholars such as Ronald Schuchard and Jason Harding argue, it is also the case that ‘the riches of modernist literature’ as a whole will be discovered through just such work of digging, sifting and artful interpretation, then the same surely holds true for the formative works in which the young Lytton Strachey began forging a literary identity whose precise character remains a matter of question, of interpretation and of invitation. Spanning several genres and including all of the previously unpublished papers that Strachey wrote for the Cambridge discussion societies to which he belonged, these works by one of British modernism’s galvanizing writers enable a more complete understanding of modernist historiography, aesthetics and ethics, and of the place of religion in the formation of the Bloomsbury Group. Notes 1.

I have borrowed this opening formulation from the title of J. W. Bicknell’s essay on Leslie Stephen, ‘Mr. Ramsay Was Young Once’, in J. Marcus (ed.), Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 52–67. 2. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 81. 3. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 89. 4. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 32. 5. F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952), p. 160. 6. B. Spurr, ‘Camp Mandarin: The Prose Style of Lytton Strachey’, ELT, 33:1 (1990), pp. 31–45. 7. B. Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 134. 8. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 163. 9. Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury, p. 129. 10. J. Ferns, Lytton Strachey (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1988), p. 24. 11. Holroyd, The Years of Achievement, p. 41.

Introduction

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12. L. Strachey, The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers, ed. P. Levy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), p. xiii. 13. L. Strachey, Eminent Victorians: The Definitive Edition (1918), ed. P. Levy (London: Continuum, 2002), p. vi. 14. Strachey, The Really Interesting Question, p. xiii. 15. Ibid., p. 21. 16. P. Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), p. 168. 17. Strachey, The Really Interesting Question, p. 22. 18. Ibid., p. 40. 19. Ibid., p. 44. 20. C. Hassall, Rupert Brooke: A Biography (London: Faber, 1972), p. 502. 21. R. Brooke, ‘The Soldier’, in T. Cross (ed.), The Lost Voices of World War I (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1989), p. 55. 22. R. Brooke, ‘Peace’, in Cross (ed.), The Lost Voices of World War I, p. 55. 23. Holroyd, The Years of Achievement, p. 145. 24. John 15:13. 25. Holroyd, The Years of Achievement, p. 267. 26. Strachey, Eminent Victorians, p. vi. 27. Ibid., p. 67. 28. L. Strachey, Queen Victoria (New York: Harcourt, 1921), p. 195. 29. L. Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (New York: Harcourt, 1928), pp. 10–11. 30. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 162. 31. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 594. 32. I discuss Holroyd’s and Levy’s individual and collaborative contributions to this effort in greater detail below – though Holroyd’s introduction to Ermyntrude and Esmeralda (London: Anthony Blond, 1969) should be mentioned here. James Strachey and Leonard Woolf collaboratively edited the letters of Strachey and Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press/Chatto & Windus, 1956). Most recently, Simson has edited and introduced Strachey’s previously performed but unpublished play A Son of Heaven in the Bloomsbury Heritage Series (London: Cecil Woolf, 2005). 33. J. Harding, ‘Eliot without Tears’, Modernism/Modernity, 13:1 ( January 2006), pp. 917– 24, on p. 918. 34. L. Strachey, The Shorter Strachey, ed. M. Holroyd and P. Levy (London: Hogarth Press, 1989), p. 178. 35. Ibid., pp. 180–1; italics in original. 36. Ibid., pp. 177, 178, 182; italics in original. 37. J. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), ed. J. Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 202. 38. J. A. Taddeo, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian (New York: Haworth Press/Harrington Park Press, 2002), p. 15. 39. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, pp. 17–18; italics in original. 40. G. Gordon, ‘Art and Ethics of Biography’, Listener, 7:167 (Wednesday, 23 March 1932), pp. 401–3, 444, on p. 402. 41. Leavis, The Common Pursuit, p. 259. 42. Strachey, Eminent Victorians, p. xxvi. 43. Ibid., p. 79.

xxxii 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 29; italics in original. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 200. Ibid., p. 203. Merle, Lytton Strachey, p. 98. J. Clive, Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), pp. 34–5. Strachey, Eminent Victorians, p. 4. ‘Conversation and Conversations’, below, pp. 13, 15. Strachey, The Really Interesting Question, p. 41. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 309. Strachey, The Really Interesting Question, p. 40. L. Strachey, Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1931), p. 146. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 72. Strachey, The Really Interesting Question, pp. 71–81. L. Strachey, ‘A New History of Rome’, in L. Strachey, Spectatorial Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 13.

EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES

This edition is guided by the dual intention to determine and to represent as accurately as possible Lytton Strachey’s intentions regarding the final state of each manuscript. None of these texts were intended for publication. Many of them were produced as occasional pieces to be read aloud to the Cambridge University reading societies of which Strachey was a member in the first few years of the twentieth century; others represent exercises in fiction and dialogue, and likely span the period 1897 to the early 1910s. As far as I have been able to determine, only one draft exists for each of these texts: all of the original holograph manuscripts transcribed here (and, in the case of the short story ‘Tragedy’, one typescript) may be found, generally in very good condition, in the Strachey Papers at the British Library. In all cases I worked first from the original manuscripts at the British Library, where I made many of the transcriptions. I then worked from photocopies of all the texts. Some of the manuscripts are perfectly clear, containing no revisions and written in a polished hand. Others bear the traces of extensive revision. With few exceptions, however, these revisions are less substantive than stylistic – evidence of Strachey’s painstaking effort, manifest also in his published works, to find the most just and elegant word, phrase or syntax for a given situation. The spectrum of emendation on the manuscripts suggests not only that they represent different stages of drafting, but also that Strachey made a habit of continual and careful revision. The relative clarity of the manuscripts also speaks to Strachey’s method of composition. In her autobiographical Memories (1981), Frances Partridge recalls Strachey once explaining that when writing a book he would pace up and down the room thinking out a whole paragraph in his head, and not put pen to paper until it was complete. This, he felt, was conducive to the enchaînement as he always called it.1

The manuscripts transcribed here contain almost no major structural alterations; predominantly, Strachey appears to have revised as he went along, tweaking rather than rewriting, in a way that suggests the accuracy of Partridge’s recollection.

– xxxiii –

xxxiv

Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers

Strachey’s handwriting is almost always eminently legible, even elegant, which helps to ensure a high degree of accuracy in transcription. At the time in his life from which these works are drawn, and before switching later to a fountain pen, he seems to have written with a straight pen fitted with a fine cursive or stub italic nib, which invariably lends a certain grace to an already easy hand. When Strachey wrote (as can be determined from internal evidence) in haste, for example to complete a paper for oral delivery, or when, very rarely, he switches to pencil, his handwriting unsurprisingly becomes less neat, but remains almost always perfectly legible. Because this volume comprises transcriptions of manuscript sources, and therefore operates at one remove from the originals, a perfectly identical presentation of the appearance of the original texts is impossible. However, to attempt such a presentation has not been my aim. My goal has been to present Strachey’s final intentions as well as I can determine them and in as clear a form as possible. This means that I have ignored insignificant, or accidental, elements, concentrating instead on significant, or substantive, ones. Accordingly, I have omitted to transcribe either the occasional slip of the pen or words or phrases that Strachey crosses out and replaces when he is obviously searching for a satisfactory expression but where the sense is not meaningfully altered. For example, the manuscript version of ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’ includes the following passage, which I transcribe here using strikethroughs to indicate the words that Strachey originally drafted but then crossed out, in order to show the difference between original and final draft: all these persons are agreed upon one point, namely this important point – that, the best and truest moral teaching that exists is the moral teaching of Christ in the domain of moral teaching, Christ reigns absolutely supreme.

This passage represents an editorial threshold: in this volume, I do not indicate any alterations intellectually less significant than these, and include all that are at least as significant as this one. In other words, I have ignored similar and briefer alterations, when Strachey’s final intention is clear and when the original and final meanings are to all intents and purposes identical. I have, however, visibly crossed out all words, phrases, sentences, strings of sentences, paragraphs or passages of dialogue omitted by Strachey whose content contains a nuance or an intellectual subtlety that he did not intend to be included in his final draft but which may be useful and interesting for Strachey scholars to know of. I have followed the same practice with respect to Strachey’s additions. That is to say, I have tried accurately to preserve the spirit of Strachey’s emendations while sometimes ignoring the letter of the law regarding perfectly faithful transcription. Thus, for instance, in some papers Strachey’s careted superscript additions suggest a pattern of intensification of expression, or of the enhancement of descriptive detail.

Editorial Principles

xxxv

At the slight expense of readability, I have indicated such intellectually significant additions only where patterns like these are evident. Otherwise, superscript, subscript and marginal emendations have been silently absorbed into the transcribed text. It is the just formulation that Strachey finally arrives at that most interests me, and that I believe will most interest Strachey scholars. With respect to other, relatively minor instances of editorial intrusion: Strachey’s punctuation, capitalization and spelling have been followed exactly, except in the cases of obvious mistakes or mere idiosyncrasies: an occasional errant capital may be silently supplied or altered to lower-case, and where it is impossible to determine whether a letter is capital or lower-case, I have followed standard usage; I have also silently removed quotation marks from indented quotations. Strachey inconsistently underlines foreign words and phrases; I have italicized them consistently. He typically does not underline book titles; I have followed his practice. Also, editorial insertions have been placed in square brackets [ ], and the very few uncertain readings are indicated by curly brackets { }. Strachey’s biblical citations are idiosyncratic (e.g., Mat. 5. 45.) and inconsistent; these have been standardized in the following way: Matthew 5:45. With two exceptions, the format of the dialogues follows that of Strachey’s one published work in this genre, ‘A Dialogue between Moses, Diogenes, and Mr. Loke [Locke]’, in the 1922 volume Books and Characters: French and English, where he centres the names of the speakers. Some of the manuscripts follow this form; others justify the speakers’ names on the left margin, and some abbreviate the names. I have spelled out the names in full and centred them, except in two cases: that of ‘Salter and Cleopatra. An Imaginary Conversation’, which appears just as it is in the manuscript, its simple but definite dramatic apparatus making this work a playlet more than a dialogue – and that of ‘Good God’, a dialogue of dubious authorship and uncertain date on religion and science among four people identified only by initial. Notes 1.

F. Partridge, Memories (London: Robin Clark, 1982), p. 78.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acton, J., Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History: Selected Papers, ed. W. McNeill (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Altick, R., ‘Eminent Victorianism: What Lytton Strachey Hath Wrought’, American Scholar, 64:1 (1995), pp. 81–9. Avery, T., ‘“This Intricate Commerce of Souls”: The Origins and Some Early Expressions of Lytton Strachey’s Ethics’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 13 (2004), pp. 183–207. —, ‘“The Historian of the Future”: Lytton Strachey and Modernist Historiography between the Two Cultures’, ELH: English Literary History, 77:4 (2010), pp. 841–66. Bacon, F., Essays (London and Melbourne: Dent/Everyman, 1986). Bell, V., Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. R. Marler (New York: Pantheon, 1993). Bicknell, J. W. ‘Mr. Ramsay Was Young Once’, in J. Marcus (ed.), Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 52–67. Boulger, D. C., A Short History of China (London: W. H. Allen, 1893). Bristow, J., ‘Fratrum Societati’, in R. K. Martin and G. Piggford (eds.), Queer Forster (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 113–36. Brooke, R., ‘Peace’ and ‘The Soldier’, in T. Cross (ed.), The Lost Voices of World War I (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1989), p. 55. Browne, T., Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall: A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk (1658; n.p: The Riverside Press, 1907). Caine, B., Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). —, ‘Bloomsbury Masculinity and Its Victorian Antecedents’, Journal of Men’s Studies, 15:3 (2007), pp. 271–81. Cameron, J. M., Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women (1926; Boston, MA: D. R. Godine, 1973). Carlyle, T., and J. W. Carlyle, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. I. Campbell et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Clive, J., Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989).

– xxxvii –

xxxviii

Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers

Condorcet, N. de., Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A. C. O’Connor and F. Arago, 12 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1847–9). Connolly, C., Enemies of Promise (New York: Persea Books, 1983). Connor, W. R., ‘A Post-Modern Thucydides?’, in J. S. Rusten (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Thucydides (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 29–43. Cuddy-Keane, M., Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Dostoevsky, F., Notes from Underground, trans. C. Garnett (Stilwell, KS: Digireads Publishing, 2008). Edmonds, J. M. (ed. and trans.), The Greek Bucolic Poets, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 28 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912). Ehrman, B. D., The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Ferns, J., Lytton Strachey (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1988). Forster, E. M., The Longest Journey (New York: Vintage, 1922). —, ‘What I Believe’ (1938), in E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1966), pp. 67–76. —, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962). —, ‘Lytton Strachey’, in The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1929–1960: A Selected Edition, ed. M. Lago, L. K. Hughes and E. M. Walls (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008), pp. 243–7. Glendinning, V., Leonard Woolf: A Life (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006). Goldsmith, O., The Vicar of Wakefield (Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1876). Gordon, G., ‘Art and Ethics of Modern Biography’, Listener, 7:167 (Wednesday, 23 March 1932), pp. 401–3, 444. Green, A., and K. Troup (eds.), The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Hall, S. M., Before Leonard: The Early Suitors of Virginia Woolf (London: Peter Owen, 2005). Hamilton, N., Biography: A Brief History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Harding, J., ‘Eliot without Tears’, Modernism/Modernity, 13:1 ( January 2006), pp. 917–24. Hassall, C., Rupert Brooke: A Biography (London: Faber, 1972). Holroyd, M., Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, 2 vols (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967–8). —, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (London: Vintage, 1994). Honan, P., Matthew Arnold: A Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). Huxley, T., ‘Science and Culture’, Science and Education: Essays (n.p.: Bibliobazaar, 2006), pp. 96–111.

Bibliography

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Ibsen, H., The Master Builder (1892), trans. E. Gosse and W. Archer (London: Macmillan, 1901). Johnson, P., Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992). Joyce, J., A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), ed. J. Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Joyce, S., ‘On or About 1901: The Bloomsbury Group Looks Back at the Victorians’, Victorian Studies, 46 (2004), pp. 631–54. Lamb, C., ‘New Year’s Eve’, in The Essays of Elia, First Series (London: Edward Moxon, 1840), pp. 17–20. Leavis, F. R., The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952). Levey, M., Painting and Sculpture in France, 1700–1789 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Levy, P., Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Lewis, W., Blast I (1914; Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1997). Lubenow, W. C., The Cambridge Apostles, 1820–1914: Liberalism, Imagination and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Lucretius, Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, trans. W. E. Leonard (New York: Everyman, 1921). McAuliffe, J. D., et al. (eds), Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an (Leiden: Brill, 2007). MacCarthy, M., Fighting Fitzgerald and Other Papers (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1931). McTaggart, J. M. E., Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901). Maeterlinck, M., The Treasure of the Humble, trans. A. Sutro, intro. A. B. Walkley (London: George Allen, 1897). Meredith, G., An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897). Merle, G., Lytton Strachey (1880–1932): Biographie et critique d’un critique et biographe, 2 vols (Lille: Atelier Reproduction des thèses, Université de Lille III, 1980). Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). —, ‘An Autobiography’, in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of G. E. Moore (Evanston and Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1942), pp. 3–39. Morley, J., Recollections, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1921). Partridge, F., Memories (London: Robin Clark, 1982). Pascal, B., Pensées, ed. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995). Pater, W., The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1899). Phillips, S., Ulysses: A Drama in a Prologue and Three Acts (London: Macmillan, 1902).

xl

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Plato, Symposium, trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Pope, A., The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. to which is Prefixed the Life of the Author by Dr. Johnson (London: Jones & Co., 1824). Renan, E., The Life of Jesus, intro. J. H. Holmes (New York: Modern Library, 1955). Robbins, K., England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church, 1900–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Rosenbaum, S. P., Edwardian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group, Vol. 2 (Hampshire: Macmillan, 1994). Russell, B., The Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). Sanders, C. R., Lytton Strachey: His Mind and Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). Shelley, P. B., The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. R. H. Shepherd (London: Chatto & Windus, 1894). Smith, D. N. (ed.), Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1903). Smith, W. (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 3 vols (Boston, MA: C. Little & J. Brown, 1870). Spencer, C., Vegetarianism: A History (Cambridge, MA, and New York: Da Capo Press, 2004). Spurr, B., ‘Camp Mandarin: The Prose Style of Lytton Strachey’, ELT, 33:1 (1990), pp. 31–45. Stevenson, R. L., ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882), Memories and Portraits, Virginibus Puerisque, Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (New York: A. L. Burt Co., n.d.), pp. 119–31. Strachey, L., Landmarks in French Literature (New York: Henry Holt & Co.; London: Williams & Norgate, 1912). —, Eminent Victorians: The Definitive Edition (1918), ed. P. Levy (London: Continuum, 2002). —, Queen Victoria (New York: Harcourt, 1921). —, Books and Characters: French and English (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922). —, Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (New York: Harcourt, 1928). —, Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1931). —, Literary Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1949). —, Biographical Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960). —, Spectatorial Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965). —, Ermyntrude and Esmeralda: An Entertainment, intro. M. Holroyd (London: Anthony Blond, 1969). —, Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self-Portrait, ed. M. Holroyd (London: Heinemann, 1971).

Bibliography

xli

—, The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers, ed. P. Levy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972). —, The Shorter Strachey, ed. M. Holroyd and P. Levy (London: Hogarth Press, 1989). —, The Letters of Lytton Strachey, ed. P. Levy (London: Viking, 2005). —, A Son of Heaven: A Tragic Melodrama, ed. G. Simson, Bloomsbury Heritage Series, 39 (London: Cecil Woolf, 2005). —, ‘Lytton Strachey’s “The Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood”’, ed. G. Thibodeau and T. Avery, Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, 25:1 (2011, forthcoming). Taddeo, J. A., Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian (New York: Haworth Press/Harrington Park Press, 2002). Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London: C. Dais & A. Lyon, 1733). Whitehead, K., ‘Broadcasting Bloomsbury’, in A. Gurr (ed.), The Yearbook of English Studies. Literature in the Modern Media: Radio, Film, and Television Special Number (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1990), pp. 121–31. Whitely, A., The Shortest Route and Fastest Time to Health and Strength; or Practical Athletics for Busy People (St Louis, MO: Continental Printing Company, 1891). Wilde, O., The Picture of Dorian Gray (1895), ed. D. L. Lawler (New York: Norton, 1988). —, Intentions (Portland, ME: Thomas Mosher, 1904). Woolf, L., Sowing (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). Woolf, V., ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader: First Series, ed. A. McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, 1984), pp. 146–54. —, ‘Old Bloomsbury’, in Moments of Being, ed. J. Schulkind (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1985), pp. 179–201. —, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in A Bloomsbury Group Reader, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 233–49. Woolf, V., and L. Strachey, Virginia Woolf & Lytton Strachey: Letters, ed. L. Woolf and J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press/Chatto & Windus, 1956). Yeats, W. B., ‘The Scholars’, in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, ed. R. J. Finneran (New York, Macmillan, 1989), p. 141.

CAMBRIDGE SOCIETY PAPERS

–1–

A SERMON PREACHED BEFORE THE MIDNIGHT SOCIETY

Delivered on 5 May 1900, this is the first of the twenty-three papers that Strachey read to the three Cambridge discussion groups of which he was a member. Gabriel Merle, in the only published commentary on it, describes it as ‘a parody of a sermon’. He adds, ‘it is so well done that one seems to remember having heard this preacher somewhere in a country parish. But, really, it is the trappings of religious apparel and the hum of mechanical speech that one hears here.’1 Strachey had never practised or accepted religion with anything more than a tepid formality when he was young. As an adolescent, his discovery of Plato confirmed his complete rejection of Christianity as a reasonable metaphysical or ethical system. Later, the – to Strachey – revelations contained in G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica would to a great extent supplant even that affinity; however, in a ‘confession of faith’ that he sent to Moore upon the publication of Principia, Strachey excused Plato from the list of ‘all writers on Ethics from Aristotle and Christ to Herbert Spencer and Mr. Bradley’ that Moore’s ‘book has … wrecked and shattered’. And, as he told Leonard Woolf the same day, ‘Plato seems to be the only person who comes out even tolerably well’.2 Written shortly after Strachey’s twentieth birthday, and only months after entering Trinity College (it is hard not to read his mock paean to ‘the almighty Trinity’ (below, p. 7) as also a pun in celebration of his new college), ‘A Sermon’, together with several other essays included here, shows that his Mephistophelean modernism, far from involving the expression of a reflexive atheism, was in fact grounded in a studied consideration of religious rhetoric and preoccupations. With its focus on the putative dangers of worldly temptation, this paper is notable for several other reasons: for its use of melodrama, a rhetorical mode and a structuring principle that Strachey would later deploy to devastating satirical ends in his major biographies; for its attentiveness to the place of science in the shaping of religious debate in the late Victorian age; for its echoes of Arnoldian rhetoric in its characterization of ‘the age we live in [as] one of struggle, of confusion, of infidelity’ (below, p. 5); and for the evidence it contains, however –3–

4

Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers

ironically presented, not of Strachey’s aestheticist detachment from ‘the world’ but of his deep ethical investment in it. Notes 1. 2.

Merle, Lytton Strachey, p. 101. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, pp. 17, 19.

In the 37th verse of the 18th Chapter of the Holy Gospel according to St. John, it is written ‘To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate said unto him “What is truth?”’ My brethren, a terrible cloud of doubt and hesitation has once more descended upon the world. The age we live in is one of struggle, of confusion, of infidelity, and the anxious shepherd as he gazes forward into the darkness of the future is assailed on every side by the bleating cries of his flock – ‘Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night’ (Isaiah 21:11)? The air is filled with wars and rumours of wars (Matthew 24:6; Mark 13:7; Luke 21:9); the nations of the earth are disturbed by new doctrines and dangerous knowledge; and the holy Church herself – I mean the holy Protestant Church – is distracted by disputes, by schisms, and by revolts.1 What wonder is it then that men should hesitate and be perplexed, or that, amid the conflicting turmoils of the spiritual world, they should sometimes shrug their shoulders in despair, and ask with the impatient Pilate ‘What is truth?’ My brethren, if it should chance that there is anyone among us here today. I say if it should chance, for God knows how unwilling I should be to make a positive assertion – if it should happen that among those gathered together here this evening to hear God’s word and worship his holy name there is one – one lost sheep (Matthew 10:6) who has strayed, if even for a moment, from the safety of the fold, it would be to him more particularly that I would wish to address these feeble words of mine – words bearing with them a message of encouragement and of hope. That great, that terrible, and to us that most triumphant conversation, from which I have taken the words of my text, that meeting in the Praetorium of Jerusalem, that conflict between the powers of Darkness and the powers of Light, between the flesh and the spirit, between the Empire of the World and our blessed Saviour, how many times since then has it been repeated in the heart of man! And now, perhaps, more than ever do we feel the stress of that spiritual battle, now when the whole world has been deluded and snared by foul depths of idolatry and superstition, or cankered and corrupted by the false glamour of what has been called the gospel of science. But, my brethren, there is no need for fear, there is no need for questioning, there is no need for doubt, for have we not ever by us a Presence whose inward promptings serve as a constant guide to the higher conceptions of our being, whose healing salve will draw us away from the disturbing speculations of our too restless nature, whose recreating vigour and

–5–

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persuasive voice will soothe the ulcerous wounds to which the frailty of our flesh has been subjected at the ravening hands of our eternal Foe? I speak – though to you, my flock, such an explanation is hardly necessary – of that mystic Presence, which at the close of the first day when earth was yet without form and void ‘moved upon the face of the waters’ (Genesis 1:2), of that divine essence of the celestial being, of that Spirit, of whom it is written ‘he will guide you into all truth’ ( John 16:13). And so, when we are assailed by the temptations and the wiles of the arch-deceiver, by the arguments and laughter of the world, we will not listen, we will not answer: no! We will turn away our eyes from that ribald throng; we will stop our ears with the divine teaching of the gospel; and we will press forward to the truth untrammeled by human reason, putting our trust alone in the unerring guidance of the Holy Ghost. The world is strong – they say – those deluding voices – the world is powerful, the world is great; the world with its empires, and its palaces, and its pomp; the world with its dazzling streams of riches, its fleets laden with precious merchandise, its mighty armies trampling with horse and foot, its towering mountains, its great rivers, and the enormous sea – Follow the world! they cry, and it will reward you – the glorious, the golden world! … No! we answer, the truth is stronger than the world. We cling to that God who leveled the walls of Jericho to the earth at the sound of the trumpet ( Joshua 6:20), and made the Sun and the Moon stand still at the command of his servant ( Joshua 10:12). We cling to the truth, and we await a more splendid life than any in this world. We look forward with humble hope to the golden harps, the white robes, and the shining pavement of the City of God. But the world, they tell us, is full of wisdom. The sages and the philosophers, the men of science and the men of law, the statesmen and the historians, who have lived upon the earth, what stores of knowledge and of wisdom have their labours accumulated together! The ancient manners of Greece and Rome, the mysterious civilisations of the East, the abandoned and barbarous institutions of primeval man, all lie before you in their profusion – inestimable treasures of the human race. Life in its multitudinous forms of vigour and decay, the laws that rule the motions of the universe, the path of the stars in the void of space, all these things and more will the world teach you. No! we answer again, no! There is more wisdom in the truth than in all the philosophies of the world. We cling to God, whose transcendent wisdom has conceived the mystery of the Trinity, that crowning proof of the superhuman mind. But – and this is the last and most insidious of their arguments – the world, they say, is the only thing you have for certain. Enjoy it while it is with you, for when it is gone, who knows?, the time for enjoyment may be passed for ever. Enjoy the world and all the beauty that you find there; the poets, the painters, the forests and the flowers, the breath of the west wind, and the calm blue of the

A Sermon Preached before the Midnight Society

7

middle sea. Rejoice in wine, and friends and laughter, and the human warmth of love. No, no! ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ (Matthew 16:23; Mark 8:33; Luke 4:8). I cling to the truth. What do I care for worldly love? I have the love of God. The love of God, which, as has been so justly said, passeth all understanding. That love for which all else must be given up, more sacred than the ties of friendship or of home – transcendent in its mystery. For did not the almighty Father himself give us the highest example of divine love, by willingly sacrificing his only son to a life of sorrow and a death of shame? Yes, my brethren, this is the love of Heaven. Admire it, wonder at it! It tells us with no uncertain voice that while those mockers are burning in the eternal flames of Hell, we the elect of the Lord shall sit crowned and radiant in the glittering mansions of the blest. We cling to the truth. And they, the questioners, the scoffers, they ask ‘What is truth?’ We know what is truth. But we look for it – not where they look for it – in the world, the flesh, and the Devil – no, we look for it – aye, and we find it – in the power and the wisdom and the love of the almighty Trinity. And now to God the father, God the son, and God the holy ghost, to whom be ascribed all might, majesty, power, dominion and glory, now and for ever more. Amen.

CONVERSATION AND CONVERSATIONS

This richly allusive paper, which Strachey read to the Sunday Essay Society on 3 November 1901, is sparely described by Charles Richard Sanders as ‘a thoughtful consideration of conversation as an art’.1 In a close paraphrase of the original text, Gabriel Merle offers a fuller gloss, writing that in this essay Strachey presupposes that communication is indispensable, and that the imprisonment that accompanies solitude may conduce to madness. He examines the difficulties of speaking and defines good conversation as a mélange, at once delicious and inextricable, of egoism and altruism, a combination that permits of the simultaneous play of one’s own vanity and that of the other, of one’s own appreciation of the other and of the other’s appreciation of oneself.2

‘Conversation and Conversations’ begins with an elaboration of the Paterian idea that art aspires to the condition of music. ‘To feel to the full’, Strachey writes, the magnificent fuguality of Bach is to realise … the immeasurable heights which can be reached by true conversation. For the fugue is, to me at any rate, the grand triumph, the crowning consummation, of all that is perfect in converse (below, p. 11)

Later, still pursuing this line of thought, he calls ‘the highest form of conversation … the harmonical, which … owns no distant connection with music itself ’, and observes, ‘when two or three of us are gathered together we may perhaps sometimes attain almost to the level of music’ (below, pp. 14, 15). But as the argument proceeds, Strachey discusses ‘the most human … of all arts’ as not only an aesthetic but also an ethical activity, in which achieving musicality in conversation with another person involves the ‘subtl[e] intermingling [of ] our various strains’ (below, pp. 13, 15). He again echoes Pater in the claim that ‘to pass, as soon as may be beyond these barren but necessary outposts of intercourse, which stand sentinel-like about the intrenched camp which is ourselves, is the aim of all true artists in conversation’ (below, p. 12). Strachey figures this quintessentially human art as a paradigmatic ethical endeavour, one in which one discovers, or crafts, one’s identity in sympathetic interactions with the other. As such, it also implies a politics, as when Strachey argues that the –9–

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finest conversations cultivate sympathy for and even empathy with another person – ‘to see as clearly with someone else’s eyes as with your own, and to know that someone else is seeing with yours as clearly as with his’ – and then goes on to claim, to bring about so happy a result what is above all necessary is a balance. All emphasis of one personality at the cost of another, or, in a general conversation, all emphasis of the minority at the expense of the majority … are fatal deviations of the Golden Rule which alone leads towards perfection. (below, p. 13)

In these claims, and in this essay in general, Strachey carries on the aestheticist tradition. But, while remaining firmly humanist in his assumption of coherent and intrinsic individual identities, he also anticipates poststructuralist ethical philosophy in the equally active assumption that those very identities are forged in the act of interrelation between persons (see also the headnote to ‘Dignity, Romance, or Vegetarianism?’, below, for a further elaboration of this idea). It is impossible not to notice that Strachey’s egalitarianism is forcibly and dismissively male. Like the famous winged beadle barring the way to the library in Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, Strachey explicitly excludes women from the sublimest reaches of this highest art. He seconds the opinion of the Roman historian Theocritus ‘that the tittle-tattle of women [does] not differ … much … from that of … ancestral apes’, and, in contrast to boys’ ‘fine and honest interchange of thought’, he opposes ‘the conversation of girls [which] is a scraping on paltry fiddles’ (below, pp. 11, 14). The argument, therefore, is shot through with an overt misogyny which problematizes its ethical and democratic appeal to empathy. Overall, this essay represents Strachey’s first sustained effort – and perhaps his first effort – to think through some of the complexities of an art that would become central to the self-identity of the Bloomsbury Group. As Kate Whitehead has written, conversation may even be said to constitute Bloomsbury’s ‘most prolific output’.3 ‘Conversation and Conversations’ also suggests why Strachey – who in 1901 had yet to meet G. E. Moore or join the Apostles – was so susceptible to Moore’s celebration of conversation, or ‘the pleasure of human intercourse’, as one of ‘the greatest … goods we can imagine’, two years later.4 Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

C. R. Sanders, Lytton Strachey: His Mind and Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 21. Merle, Lytton Strachey, p. 99. K. Whitehead, ‘Broadcasting Bloomsbury’, in A. Gurr (ed.), The Yearbook of English Studies. Literature in the Modern Media: Radio, Film, and Television Special Number (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1990), pp. 121–31, on p. 121. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), p. 176.

To feel to the full the magnificent fuguality of Bach1 is to realise – what perhaps one had never realised before – the immeasurable heights which can be reached by true conversation. For the fugue is, to me at any rate, the grand triumph, the crowning consummation, of all that is perfect in converse; and to hear one is to listen, amid those sparkling heights and those impenetrable abysses, to a colloquy more rapturous than any of Alexandria,2 more intimate than the first one of Richard and Lucy,3 and more sublime than ‘that transcendental interlude of antiphonal music’ which passes between the earth and the moon in the last act of the Prometheus Unbound.4 Yet the conversation of lovers is older than the conversation of fugues; men spoke before they sang and loved before they spoke; Antony swooned in the arms of Cleopatra nearly two Methuselahs before the birth of Palestrina;5 and how many millions of generations lie between that chattering of tail-swung apes which falls on our ears the latest of all pre-human gossip, and the contrapuntal sublimities of John Sebastian? Lovers and fugues, indeed, do not make up between them the sum of conversations; and there must always remain to be considered that unfaltering and unalterable mass of human speech which babbles brook-wise through ages. Theocritus shows us that the tittle-tattle of women6 was the same 2000 years ago as it is now, not differing much, we may suppose, from that of the aforementioned ancestral apes: and it is at least a strange consideration that we all of us have this much in common with Shakespeare, that we mouth, every day of our lives the very syllables which he did. Nevertheless the conversation of the world is not a stagnant pool to be sniffed at but a rushing river to be followed fed by the innumerable tributaries of human thought and action. Every word we utter adds to the volume of the flood, and in the dream of God, which is, Brahminically,7 the Universe, the speech of man must sound upon those divine but drowsy ears a mysterious and perpetual accompaniment to the phantasmagoric rest. Whether, after all, the conveyance of thought is not more important than thought itself is a question which may be left to logicians. But that ideas, like men, are engendered by contact is a truth that demands no frigid affirmation; nor can it be denied that madness is the most common issue of solitary confinement. Whether speech or reason first came into the world were a problem for soothsayers and not easily to be determined beneath the moon; but there is only one part of him that a man would not lose sooner than his tongue; and who would venture on a more embracing description of life itself than that it is simply a vast conversation?

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But it is time to descend from these regions of the upper air to the vulgar earth of human intercourse: and here it would be vain to deny the sterility which marks the mass of conversations. The small change of talk is cast in so worn and debased a coinage that its only use is, in fact, to be got rid of. Nor will the possession of any quantity of the rarer metals avail when a halfpenny is all that is demanded; and to put down, with something of a flourish a golden sovereign on the counter is simply to court derision. The agonising dilemma of having to say something when there is nothing to say has, I suppose, tossed most of us, one of the horrors of the situation so often being that the very necessity of speech induces a paralytic silence. Such devastating moments occur when, in the stiffness of Sunday clothes, one finds oneself tongue-tied at tea-tables, or when – and this is perhaps the more harrowing experience – one gradually realises that there is nothing but a cup of coffee between oneself and a freshman. Then it is that the human spirit revolts against all conversation, impotently wishing that men had been created dumb, and conversed by gesture and hieroglyphical images. The invention of a universal formula of signs by which some interesting motion of the hand would silently express the inexpressible were indeed a consummation devoutly to be wished. But such imaginings are, after all, a dream and folly of expectation. For who would read aright such Babylonian mysteries? For one Daniel there [are] a thousand Belshazzars;8 an eternal profession of friendship might be mistaken for a request for the potatoes, and a remark on the weather would run the risk, as in Chinese diplomacy,9 of confounding Empires. Nor must it be lightly thought that anxiety ceases with the first successful step; a safe embarkation is no guarantee against the perils of the voyage; and, despite the aid of those hand-books, which would arm us, like generals, with weapons for every contingency, it is still true that it is often as difficult to end a conversation as to begin one. To pass, as soon as may be beyond these barren but necessary outposts of intercourse, which stand sentinel-like about the intrenched camp which is ourselves,10 is the aim of all true artists in conversation. This may be sometimes done by a sudden coup de main, by which, like Satan, ‘with one slight bound’ one can ‘high overleap all bounds.’11 Sometimes a happy accident or a rash disclosure delivers up the nakedness of one’s enemy. Sometimes one never penetrates beyond his clothes. The game is, precisely, not a game of chess because to win is the last thing the good player plays for. He aims entirely at magnificence of situation, at brilliancy of move, at subtlety of finesse. If pieces are ever taken in this royal encounter it is only owing to some insidious sacrificial plan which lures one to laugh in the long run, and kaleidoscopically do it. As in chess to give a stale mate is to lose shamefully enough; resignation is a sign of fear or weakness; but the main difference is in the end, which only magnificently occurs when the

Conversation and Conversations

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pawns of each player have traversed the board and stand, crowned and triumphant, at their destination. But to shadow forth by analogy the most human at any rate of all arts is a fallacy in proportion. It were perhaps wiser to attempt a definition of that fundamental principle without which it ceases to be an art and becomes either a scramble or a smudge. This, to me at least, consists in a nice balancing of persons, a delicate adjustment of the conflicting entities which between them make up a conversation. For the very essence of a good one is simply this – an inextricable and delicious mixture of egotism and altruism, of selfishness and affection. To indulge at the same time your own and someone else’s vanity; to satisfy at once your own appreciation of someone else, and someone else’s appreciation of you; to see as clearly with someone else’s eyes as with your own, and to know that someone else is seeing with yours as clearly as with his; this, with all the infinite reverberations and flattering reflections which must, as between looking-glasses, proceed from so mutual an understanding, is the real joy of conversation. But to bring about so happy a result what is above all necessary is a balance. All emphasis of one personality at the cost of another, or, in a general conversation, all emphasis of the minority at the expense of the majority; any weakness in one or many of the interlocutors; are fatal deviations from the Golden rule which alone leads towards perfection. In these circumstances a conversation may be instructive and even pleasant, but it hardly remains a conversation in the true sense, approaching either a confused medley of tongues or a sermon. General conversations labour under such almost essential disadvantages, and even the conversations of two are liable to degenerate into monologue. Yet the monologue is a kind of conversation by no means to be contemned, always allowing that the single speaker can of himself keep on the combined level of his audience. Such solitary kings of converse are not easily to be found in a lifetime, and demand a special adoration; but their rarity is its own preserver; they live in books longer than in life; and their words, embalmed more lastingly than Pharaoh, posthumously survive the tongues that uttered them. But who shall speak of the sermonical monologue, or, below annihilation, adequately suggest the punishment of the bore? Here somnolence is a merciful dispensation to the victim, who, amid the gaseous fumes which surround him, may find an escape in sleep. Yet not to feel that this abomination almost outweighs all the benefits of speech were to be more than human; in these moments the body of an ass is a thing less burdened and degraded than the soul of a man, for who would not rather be an ass beaten by a man than a man talked to by an ass? The confidence is a more comfortable form of one-sided conversation, taking its charm from a gentle titillation of the organs of self-esteem. The event presupposes a drama, and to be the conveyor or the sharer of something at once new and secret is no unworthy distinction, and privilege of intimacy. Who does not

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know the rapid rush of such confidential out-pourings which whirl both speaker and listener along breathless paths amid vanishing surroundings to plant them at last palpitatingly together, beyond the reach of the vulgar? To have attained this stage is to have traveled far in the art of conversation and perhaps in the art of life: for he who confides is at least within range of a friendship, and the confidant, to deserve so intimate an honour, must at least have learnt that primal law of human intercourse that advice is the last thing that is wanted when – don’t you understand? – it is asked for. A mathematician may discern in the mass of conversations a treble division corresponding, perhaps fantastically, to the three mathematical progressions. The first or arithmetical form of conversation proceeds slowly by the irksome mode of addition towards the gradual attainment of an end. Such are all formal conversations, and those preliminary ones which are necessary to all acquaintance. The second form of conversation marches geometrically, with the swift steps of multiplication, often covering acres at a stride, and far outstripping the other. The talk of dinner-tables is at its best geometrical, springing as it does from the contact of acute intelligences, each independent of the other, and all moving through a common plane of convention. But the highest form of conversation is the harmonical, which depends for its progress on a mystical proportion between its parts, and owns no distant connection with music itself. But before the consideration of these sublimities which we have already but lightly touched on, it were well to notice some further points which are common to most conversations. Smiles are the oil which lubricates the train of conversation; laughter is the green flag which waves safely to it as it passes; tears are the red one which may foretell a crash. Rage in conversation magnificently raises it above the common level, and sounds a splendid note; but to employ it other than sparingly were to play with gunpowder and run the risk of a general conflagration. Sex in conversation is the spice which makes it commonly bearable, and brings it sometimes to the stars. No comedy can be high without a woman; Célimène and Millamant12 glitter like gems from out the vulgar stuffs of most conversers; and tragedy itself must bow before the wit of Cleopatra. The conversation of men with men inevitably reverts to facts, canvassing the doubtful questions as to where tea comes from or the length of the Pyrenees. That of women with women transcends the bounds of intimacy, and shudders perpetually on the brink of explanations. The conversation of girls is a scraping on paltry fiddles; that of boys a fine and honest interchange of thought, remarkable for a subtle strength and young employment of venerable words. Anecdotes are the flowers lightly strewn in the path of conversations.

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Argument is what conversations often come to and as often end in. Discussions rarely produce converts or results, and all that can be safely hoped for is a mutual understanding of views. Imaginary conversations are, I suppose, the amusement of many. To construct them, with all their elaborate chains of hypotheses, is a fascination too enthralling to resist; and a great part of literature is simply their crystalisation. The Drama is conversation treated architecturally. But here we approach the highest levels, and last sublimities of speech. The analogy of music again becomes a necessity; the tremendous quadralogues of Beethoven13 sound on our ears as the conversation of Giants or the thunders of Aeschylean Gods; Sophocles trembles in the balance with Mozart; and who would willingly decide between the overwhelming conversations of King Lear, and the overwhelming conversation of the Fifth Symphony? Nor need the terrestrial conversation of you and me differ quintessentially from such immortal and eternal types. To converse is the unique privilege of souls which we inalienably inherit. The flame which is within us may once have fired Achilles, or dwindled through the centuries of Methuselah. Phèdre lived again in Racine;14 Cleopatra in Shakespeare; and the forgotten voices of all the innumerable dead spoke anew in one chapter of Sir Thomas Browne.15 Before such noble instances of transmigratory perpetuation none of us need stand aghast; we may learn from them at least by imitation, and the harmonical reproduction of tones. When two or three of us are gathered together we may perhaps sometimes attain almost to the level of music, subtly intermingling our various strains, rising together through magnificent crescendos, and ending triumphantly in a chord. But it is only after midnight that one begins to catch a glimpse of the true ideal of conversation. Then it is that one sees that it is something which was hardly to have been expected, a strange reality in paradoxes. It is silence. Such indeed is the perfection of conversation, to which all variously approach. No conversation is a high one which does not allow for prolonged silences; and that conversation is the lowest which demands an unnecessary flow of words. As the clock strikes three it may be well to wander out into the Great Court,16 and, if it is summer, to watch the dawn growing over the chapel, or, passing into the cloisters, to accept the library’s benediction. One’s companions will not speak, and, in that mysterious twilight, one will perhaps feel something of the Pythagorical conversation,17 and the singing together of the morning stars.

CHRIST OR CALIBAN?

Strachey read his first Apostles paper, ‘Ought the Father to Grow a Beard?’, to the society on 10 May 1902. In it, he examines the general topics of the ‘conversation’ between artists and life and of the ‘limits of art’. Specifically, he explores both a moral question and a purely aesthetic one – respectively, ‘whether there may not be some parts of life with which the artist should never deal’, and ‘whether there is any subject which is per se incapable of artistic treatment’. Strachey’s own treatment of these questions was probably intended to shock, or at least to startle, his audience, and is written in the camp conversational style that he was honing. As Holroyd and Levy write, ‘the paper … captures well the tone of voice, informal, witty, and louche, with which he captivated the group’.1 Indeed, it works at a high pitch of bawdiness and of earthiness, in its celebration of ‘the undiscovered country’ of sexuality, on the one hand, and of the artistic possibilities of ‘forthing’ (defecating), on the other: ‘For me at least’, Strachey writes: that mysterious and intimate operation has always exercised an extraordinary charm. I seem to see in it one of the last relics of our animalic [sic] ancestry – a strange reminiscence of the earth from which we have sprung. The thought of every member of the human race – the human race which has produced Shakespeare, and weighed the stars – retiring every day to give silent and incontestable proof of his matinal mould is to me fraught with an unutterable significance. There, in truth, is the one touch of Nature which makes the whole world kin! There is enough to give the Idealist perpetual pause! There – in that mystic unburdening of our bodies – that unanswerable reminder of mortality!2

To judge by several examples from the range of his writings, published and unpublished, and across several genres, the ‘mysterious and intimate operation’ of defecation always ‘exercised an extraordinary charm’ on Strachey – as did many of the body’s basic functions and practices. An undated, untitled and (mostly) alphabetical list in the Strachey papers at the British Library attests to this susceptibility: Abuse, Self-abuse, etc.; Arse; Arse-hole; Anus; Bestiality; Balls; Bugger; Buggery; Bush; Busy; Bumf [toilet paper]; Clap; Come; Copulate; Cunt; Emission; Erection; Fart; Fuck; French letter; Grope; Horn; Have; John; Lie with; Massacism [sic]; Ped– 17 –

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Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers erasty; Penis; Prick; Pump; Pumpship [urinate]; Parts; Privy; Piss; Pox; Randy; Shit; Sodomy; Stiff ; Stand; Spunk; Spend; Semen; Suckoff ; Sapphism; Sadism; Syph; Toss off ; Turd; Unnatural vice; Wet dream.3

‘Ought the Father to Grow a Beard?’ introduces the broad theme of art and indecency to which Strachey would repeatedly return in his Cambridge papers and later, and expresses an axiomatic dedication to frankness of expression. Five months later, in ‘Christ or Caliban?’ his second Apostles paper, delivered on 25 October 1902, Strachey produced what both Sanders and Holroyd have called ‘a Swinburnian essay in which Caliban symbolizes freedom from all restraint’.4 This essay restates on different ground the defence of freedom contained in ‘Ought the Father to Grow a Beard?’ The terrain of ‘Christ or Caliban?’ is politics, and in particular the value of Liberalism as a political vehicle for worthwhile freedoms. The essay also attacks Liberalism’s utilitarian underpinnings and asks the question whether there is any hope of redemption for modern Western civilization, with its pervasive elevation of pleasure as the highest good. A decade or so later, around 1910, when Strachey experienced his ‘Spiritual Revolution’, he came to embrace the idea of the supremacy of the artist over the man or woman of action. Here, though, the case is more ambivalent, and probably irresolvably ambiguous. Strachey worries that the success of Liberalism over the course of the nineteenth century had determined ‘the whole tendency of modern life … towards the realisation of pleasure’ (below, p. 24). This tendency is pernicious, Strachey writes, because it means that ‘Freedom has conquered; but what a very different sort of Freedom is the Freedom that has conquered from the Freedom that first began the fight’ (below, p. 21). For Strachey, this victorious freedom is a ‘vulgar’ type of democratic liberty. His argument that the increasingly ‘equal distribution of political rights’ has coincided with – or, rather, produced – a trammelling of the ‘intellectual and artistic faculties’ (below, p. 22) is one that, as numerous critics and historians have argued, was common to many modernist writers. For these critics, and according to the conventional understanding of ‘High’ modernism from the mid-twentieth century until the growth of the New Modernist Studies in the past two decades, one of the distinguishing characteristics of modernism is its ostensible hostility to mass culture and, by extension, to that nebulous group of people known as the ‘masses’. Strachey’s elevation here of action over pleasure, and of Elizabethan and Italian Renaissance ‘paganism’ over Christian humanitarianism – because the former inspire such qualities as courage and beauty whereas the latter produces a pious artificiality – also carries perhaps a faint echo of H. G. Wells’s critique of modernity in the figures of the pale, effete and weak Eloi of The Time Machine. The argument of ‘Christ or Caliban?’, as S. P. Rosenbaum writes, ‘is rather confusing, but the performance is noteworthy … for its allusions and for its

Christ or Caliban?

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advocacy of an individualism beyond utilitarianism’5 – an individualism that is explicitly ethical in conception, that recalls Oscar Wilde’s conceptualization of individualism as an end rather than a means in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, and that would find its strongest articulation in Strachey’s preface to Eminent Victorians, where he claims that ‘Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes – which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.’6 It is also worth noting that in this essay Strachey recognizes the fact that his own identity is implicated in and a function of Liberalism: ‘the fruits of its victory are ourselves’, and ‘We are both artificial and comatose at the same time’ (below, pp. 21, 23). At moments like these, beneath the grand rhetorical gestures and what Holroyd calls ‘the whole fulminating composition’,7 the emergence is visible of a historiographical method that challenges the then-dominant positivist model in favour of ‘artistic’ history (see also ‘The Historian of the Future’, below), and that embodies a critique of liberal individualism. Strachey believed that human beings possessed intrinsic value (this is a moral judgement), but he also understood (this is an ontological assumption) how his identity and the identities of his listeners, his biographical subjects and of all individuals were both embedded in and symptomatic of larger social and political forces. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

The Shorter Strachey, ed. M. Holroyd and P. Levy (London: Hogarth Press, 1989), p. vii. Ibid., p. 19. Strachey Papers, British Library, Add. MS 81943. C. R. Sanders, Lytton Strachey: His Mind and Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 21; Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 163. Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury, pp. 257–8. Strachey, Eminent Victorians: The Definitive Edition (1918), ed. P. Levy (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 4. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 164.

In the History of Western Civilisation Lord Acton, in common with other historians, has discerned (we are told by Mr. Morley) one great tendency and two opposing principles. ‘To be the material for a history of Liberty, the emancipation of Conscience from Power, and the gradual substitution of Freedom for Force in the government of men’ – such was the end for which our new 60,000 volumes or so were gathered together.1 And though those formidable words – Liberty, Conscience, Power, Freedom, Force, – are, with the violence of their capitals, at first a little dazzling, it is perhaps not difficult to understand, after some reflection, what, in reality at all events, they must be meant to mean. For the grand movement is simply the Liberal movement, that movement which showed itself in the French Revolution, in the Reform Bill, in the Repeal of the Corn Laws, in the Risings of ’48, in the Revision of the Dreyfus Verdict.2 It is the thing, in short, which has made us what we are. And now it is hardly a movement any more. It has conquered, and fallen arrived – what better proof of its arrival would you have than the fact that it has taken up its really rather dreary place among the rest of the objects of historical study? It has arrived, it has vanquished; and the fruits of its victory are ourselves. But to achieve the result Liberalism has had to unite for the moment, and I think only for the moment – though the moment has of course been a long one – two entirely different parties. Now that the victory is assured it has become possible to perceive the bridgeless gulf which divides the artist from the socialist, the intellectual from the demagogue, the illuminist3 from the sentimentalist; yet it was only by their combination that the victory was obtained; and it is just as certain as it is that the great victory was only reached by the union of these two all but irreconcilables, that another a still greater victory will be gained by one of them over and every day it is becoming clearer that, just as the last great struggle ended in the victory of these two all but irreconcilables so the next great struggle will can only possibly end in the victory of one of them over the other. Perhaps, indeed, it has ended already. One almost hears, in the daily yell of the Daily Mail the cry of triumph ascending proudly unashamed to the Philistian Heaven.4 The truth is that Democracy, turning inevitably against its old ally Intelligence, has united itself just as inevitably with a new one of its own concoction – Vulgarity. The gradual substitution of Freedom for Force has certainly taken place; but it has taken place in a much more complicated way than was at all indicated by Mr. Morley’s indication of Lord Acton’s views. Freedom has conquered: but what a very different sort of Freedom is the Freedom that has conquered from the Freedom that first began the fight! What did Voltaire5 care for the Freedom which consists in the equal

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distribution of political rights? That is the Freedom we have gained. What does the Daily Mail care about the Freedom which consists in the untrammeled exercise of the intellectual and the artistic faculties? That is the Freedom we have lost. Here, surely, are two principles as much opposed to one another as any which can be illustrated and unearthed by the aid of our new 60,000 volumes. The first of these principles – and the victorious one – may I think be called Humanitarianism. It aims at the perpetual amelioration of the conditions of life; its ideal state is that end is a state in which pain shall be abolished, and every human being shall enjoy the greatest amount of pleasure possible. This is the ideal of Christianity and the ideal of Socialism. Strange Mysterious plant, whose seed scattered first by Jesus beside the Lake of Galilee, blossomed burst forth into flower under the hand of Jean-Jacques beside the Lake of Geneva!6 For why should Rousseau be forever forgotten? Why has not he too his myth, his altar, his holy sacrament? He, socialist, sentimentalist, educationist, was the grand fountain of all their later rivers seas! But alas! his name passes not the lips of the Member of the Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals, of the anti-vivisectionist, of the vegetarian.7 Humanitarianism, heedless of its second founder, passes on, to consider the question whether, as not only human beings men but animals are to be brought, so to speak, within the painless area, there is any reason why the same law should not apply with equal force to vegetables, and possibly to the poor dumb minerals as well. It is important to notice – because it is really rather difficult to believe – that there have been other ideals besides the Humanitarian one, which have played their part in the history of Civilisation. The Elizabethans were not humanitarian; nor were the Italians of the Renaissance, nor was the ancient world. The spirit of paganism may in fact be taken as the complete antithesis to the spirit of the modern world present day . It was anti-socialistic, for its political conceptions were based on slavery, and it was anti-christian, for it valued most precisely those qualities – such as courage, pride, cunning, beauty, etc. – which the progress of Christianity inevitably tends to abolish altogether. For what is the price we must be prepared to pay for those splendid acquisitions of Order, of Conscience, of Political Freedom, which our forefathers have – whether we liked or not – handed down to us? If we are to do away with pain we must at the same time do away with action, and if every one of us is to be as comfortable as it is possible for he or she to be, all superfluous comfort must be surrendered, all purely personal interests must be dropped, everyone must conscientiously give way to everyone else. It is obvious enough that this is exactly what is happening more and more every day. Our activity is gradually being reduced to the activity of machines. The object of machinery is to lessen human labour, and the day is easy to look forward to when machines will be everywhere and do everything, and when to

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watch them will be the only occupation left for man a completely bored humanity. At the same time our artificiality is reaching heights which past ages could hardly have guessed at in their dreams. We have already left the eighteenth century far behind; we are rapidly soaring towards the elaborate summits of Chinese phonamology.8 We have examinations, we have trowsers, and even Meredith has eye-glasses.9 Every day something is being added to that wonderful list of subjects about which it is totally impossible to speak. What does it matter about the truth? What we want is to be happy. How unkind to offend those pious, sensitive, worthy souls by the crudities of the vie de Jesus!10 Let us hasten to bring out an entirely emasculated edition! These matrons, these virgins, why should they be exposed to such unpleasant jars? Why indeed? In future let us only write for the nursery. Really at times the complete absurdity of the whole thing hits one in the face; at other moments one is merely bored. ‘Do you read much?’ asks Master Builder Solness in Ibsen’s most astounding play. ‘I used to’, is the answer, ‘but now everything it all seems so irrelevant.’11 Isn’t this, one feels, what the Angel Gabriel may be saying about the Book of Life?12 My dear Trevy13 – you are here in the spirit – what can you expect of an art, of a literature, existing under such conditions? Of course it’s thin, and of course it’s rank. If one can’t find straw to make one’s bricks with, I suppose one must fall back on dung. Even the Roman Empire in its most comatose moments was not quite so badly off for straw as we. It was at least not artificial, and it produced some great artists. We are both artificial and comatose at the same time. And the reason? We want to enjoy ourselves; we have the right to enjoy ourselves. And if we have that right, why has not everyone else? Everybody else obviously has, and no sacrifice is too great to make if it ensures that we and everybody else shall and it is our plain duty to see that these universal rights, these universal desires, are satisfied. When they are, let us rejoice, throw off our hats, and write the history of the great movement with the 60,000 volumes provided for that purpose. It is really a little amazing to see such reasoning swallowed down so nakedly and so innocently. The pill is disguised in such transparent jam. The statement that pleasure is the chief good is, in the mouth of the Historian, the bleakest of assertions; but it is unquestioned, it is accepted, it is welcomed with joy. If pleasure is the chief good, of course it is our duty to strive for it; but whether it is, is a question which [is] still in discussion among philosophers. There can be no good history until the philosophical basis of history is an admitted fact; and until there is good history there will be no true understanding of our present Age. If pleasure is good – and I admit it is – it appears to me that Action is another at least as great as it. Action involves pain; and therefore complete pleasure would involve the abolition of Action. The ultimate end of action is pleasure, that is to say the abolition of itself. In the history of civilization, it is the desire for Action which, in the earliest ages, is most clearly seen to be pre-

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dominant; the growth of civilization means the growth of the desire for pleasure. There comes a point when – as in the ages of Pericles and Elizabeth14 – these two desires are almost equally balanced, and those are the moments which are the best. Later, the desire for pleasure predominates more and more, until at last, as in China or later Roman Empire, the desire for action has completely disappeared. This then is the question which divides as acutely as they are united the two parts which make up what is called the Liberal Movement – is Action as great a good as Pleasure? The question is of course a philosophical one; but it is no less a practical one. If pleasure is not the chief good, and if the whole tendency of modern life is towards the realisation of pleasure, is there anything that can be done to improve a bad state of things perpetually getting worse? I, at any rate, would be willing with all the alacrity in the world to put myself back into one or other of those more violent ages where railways and fig leaves were equally unknown. ‘– But if you were a slave? I would be willing to risk that, for I should perhaps creep in to see the first performance of The Birds,15 or I might be doorkeeper at the Globe, or with some luck I might get to a gladiatorial show. – How terrible! But supposing you were a gladiator yourself you wouldn’t enjoy that! Perhaps not; but at any rate I should die a violent death. – Well then, what about the forths?16 … My dear friend, at least I should have no braces.’ Unfortunately there is no possibility of getting back: we can only go forward. What mainly astounds one is the panacea of education so glibly offered and talked about and taken. Of course it only accentuates all the tendencies towards inactivity and artificiality that already exist. In England the only good sign that can be seen is that education is particularly rotten. We still have field sports, we still hunt; and if I had even been allowed to choose my life anywhere in my own age I should have been a stout athletic boxer. That too has been denied us. Nor have we even the comfort of the decaying Roman; the future for us has none of those ‘grands Barbares blancs’ Verlaine speaks of;17 we have no chance of shaking fists at some yellow-haired ancestor of Shakespeare or Beethoven; the savage races are played out. But if external help is lacking, is there no chance of some swift internal disintegration? Is there no possibility of a break-up so general and so complete that the entire reorganisation of society would be a necessary sequence? Personally, I welcome any endeavour, conscious or unconscious, to bring about such an end. I welcome thieves, I welcome murderers, above all I welcome anarchists. I prefer anarchy to the Chinese Empire. For out of anarchy good may come, but out of the Chinese Empire nothing. There is a kind of freedom that is rarely mentioned or discussed – a kind very different from either political freedom or intellectual freedom. I mean freedom from all restraint.18 That is the anarchic view of freedom, the view expressed to us so magnificently, and with such mysterious pathos, in the wild triumphant cry of Caliban. – Freedom, hey-day! Hey-day, freedom! Freedom, hey-day, freedom! – ‘O brave monster,’ shall we respond with Stephano? – ‘Lead the way!’19

THE COLLOQUIES OF SENRAB

It is a ‘great truth’, Strachey writes in the opening paragraph of this generic blend of dialogue and story that he read to the Sunday Essay Society on 9 November 1902, ‘that holiness and tediousness are, essentially, the same thing’. (‘Colloquies’ is included in this section because it was one of Strachey’s society papers.) This claim is presented as one of the ‘thoughts that flitted through the mind of Senrab’ the Arabian on his pilgrimage to Mecca (below, p. 27); but it is also an accurate expression of Strachey’s own attitude towards organized religion and religious piety. As Merle writes, Strachey always felt this way about ‘religion, considered as an institution’, in addition to thinking it simply irrational. Moreover, Merle continues, there is also ‘the religious spirit, which is another thing. To read his works and his correspondence, one cannot but conclude … that Lytton never possessed a mystical dimension.’1 Strachey himself called this paper a ‘scurrilous’ one.2 Attacking the unreasonableness of religious belief and implicitly defending the critical application of what Senrab calls ‘logic run mad’ to dogmatic religious claims, it pits ‘absurd’ doctrine against the claim that, as the Philosopher tells Senrab, ‘If there is anything to which reason is not applicable, it is not applicable to anything’ (below, p. 36). Through a series of encounters – with two other pilgrims, a philosopher, a prince and a minstrel – Strachey exposes a stubborn reflexivity of belief or what Merle calls ‘superstition, intolerance, and religious fanaticism’.3 ‘I change my opinion? Never!’ Senrab says to the philosopher (below, p. 30). In a final encounter between Senrab and the prophet himself, Mohammad paradoxically deconstructs, in defence of unreasoning acceptance of ‘the truth of my holy religion’, the reasons, themselves paradoxical, that the unreasoning Senrab had given in his previous encounters (below, p. 40). Finding himself exposed, Senrab lamely retracts his opinions and disappears – just as, no doubt, Strachey, motivated here by a personal desire for revenge, wished all such opinions and their possessors would do. (‘Senrab’, Holroyd explains, is ‘the backward spelling of Barnes, a brother of the future bishop of Birmingham, who had previously delivered a paper on ‘Intellectual Snobs’ directed against Lytton’).4 As in ‘A Sermon Preached before the Midnight Society’, ‘Christ or Caliban?’, ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’ and other essays, including ‘Is Death Desirable?’

– 25 –

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which follows this one, in ‘The Colloquies of Senrab’ Strachey fashions himself as a twentieth-century Voltairean scourge of organized religion. Here, too, as in those pieces, he is developing his mastery of irony and paradox in the manner of Wilde. Most importantly, however, with respect to the early development of Strachey’s ethical views, ‘Senrab’ provides further evidence that this development occurred in part through a sustained, informed and intelligent grappling with religious themes. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Merle, Lytton Strachey, p. 102. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 142. Merle, Lytton Strachey, p. 102. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 142.

Honi soit qui mal y pense!1

Senrab the Arabian, on his pilgrimage to the holy shrine of Mecca, pitched his tent, one summer evening, not far from the banks of the Jordan. That remarkable river does not, it is true, lie on the direct route between Mecca and Arabia, but it has always been one of the peculiarities of pilgrims that the direct route is the last they ever think of taking. A pilgrimage is, in fact, one of the many instances of the great truth that holiness and tediousness are, essentially, the same thing. When every mile of the road is an added glory, and when to arrive simply means to be forgotten, the long way round is obviously the one to take. Such were the thoughts that flitted through the mind of Senrab, as he sat at the door of his tent and watched the stream of travelers trudging past him along the great high road which leads from Jerusalem to Jericho. A traveler who was, like Senrab, obviously a pilgrim, stopped, and addressed him thus. ‘Friend, I am a poor pilgrim, who hopes before he ends his days to behold the unspeakable glory of the holy sepulcher.2 Grant me, I pray you, the wherewithal to satisfy a hunger whose fury has been unappeased for forty days.’ Senrab Who would let such piety pass unrewarded? You have traveled far, friend? For I see you are footsore and weary, and wish for rest. The Pilgrim I have indeed traveled for many hundreds of miles. I have passed through India, Hungary, Peru, and Constantinople, and I am now at length arriving within measurable distance of my blessed goal. What is more remarkable is that I have subsisted during all this time solely upon the peas it has been my penance to carry with me in my shoes. For the last three years one pea a day has been my fixed allowance; but forty days ago my little stock was exhausted, there was not a pea left. I welcomed the opportunity of a complete abstinence, and these dates of yours are the first food that has passed my lips since I left the shores of the Baltic.

– 27 –

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Senrab You surprise and delight me. Such miraculous piety combined with such profound humility! Have we not here one more proof – if proof were needed – of the truth of our holy religion? And yet, alas! there are some who would shrug their shoulders at your story, and even openly disbelieve it. But of me you need have no such fears. I have faith. I too am voyaging towards the sacred tomb. Let us make the rest of our journey together. The Pilgrim Willingly. I only regret there is so little left of it to make. Another twenty miles and – Senrab Twenty miles? My dear friend, you are mistaken. Twenty days will have passed before we have prostrated ourselves at the shrine of the Prophet in his holy Mosque at Mecca.3 The Pilgrim Prophet! Mosque! Mecca! Oh, heavens! Senrab What! You are amazed? Can it be then? – Is it possible? Nay, answer me not. I see it stamped upon your countenance; – you are a Christian! Most miserable imposter! And is this the pilgrimage you are making? Oh, wretch! to Jerusalem! And you have eaten of my food, and you have drunk of my water, and you have sought to deceive me, uncircumcised dog, by your trumpery tales of journeys and peas and fastings! Am I a child, thank you, to swallow down such stuff ? A pea a day for three years, fast for forty days, the Baltic! Out of my sight! Or shall I beat you hence as you deserve? The Pilgrim Mercy! Mercy! I am poor, I am old – At this moment, just as Senrab was preparing so to let fly his foot as to bring it into contact with the lower part of the Christian’s anatomy, a third pilgrim appeared upon the scene. ‘What is the matter?’ asked the third Pilgrim.

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Senrab There is but one God, and Allah is God Mahomet is the prophet of God. If you are a true Mahommetan, help me to destroy this Christian. The 3rd Pilgrim With pleasure. But the Christian, having taken advantage of the interruption, had already disappeared. Senrab May my food choke in his throat. 3rd Pilgrim May he die the death of a dog. Senrab May he – and yet let us restrain ourselves. For does not the Koran tell us that Paradise is for those who command their anger?4 3rd Pilgrim Very true; though for his own sake it were well to convince him of his error. And we must remember that lack of zeal is as hateful in the eyes of Allah as excess of it. Senrab How fortunate to have met with so subtle an expounder of God’s law! And how deep a truth that we should not let slip for a moment from our minds the fearful, the unutterable, danger of Eternal Punishment! 3rd Pilgrim Eternal? Has not the prophet promised that all his disciples, whatever may be their sins, shall be saved from eternal damnation? Have courage, friend; for I am informed on credible authority that the term of expiation will in no case exceed the limit of seven thousand years. After that, Paradise. Senrab Can I believe my ears? Is this the true believer, the ardent defender of our holy religion? Say rather the unfortunate follower victim of a debased and sordid super-

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stition. Do you not deny that Ali is the vicar of God? Do you not worship the execrable Omar? Enough! No more! How can I defile my lips by argument with such a deluded wretch as you? 3rd Pilgrim But am I not at least a Mahometan? Senrab That is known to God alone. Enough for me that your faith is rendered void by a thousand degrading practices and puerile beliefs. Nay! I have heard in your Mosques what miracles the holy prophet performed; that water gushed from his fingers, that he was saluted by stones, that a beam groaned to him, that a shoulder of mutton informed him of its being poisoned. I have heard how his resistless word split asunder the orb of the moon; how that planet saluted him in the Arabian tongue; and how, suddenly contracting her dimensions, she entered at the collar, and issued forth through the sleeve, of his shirt.5 This is what your doctors teach you every day of your lives. This is what you would make us – for you are as intolerant as you are foolish – believe on pain of burning. Thank heaven I am not one of you. At this point Senrab could not refrain from stretching forth his hand in order to pull the nose of his enemy. What would have followed had he accomplished his intention must forever remain in darkness, for just as he was about to do so, an old man whose long beard and venerable aspect proclaimed him a philosopher laid his hand upon the shoulder of the infuriated pilgrim, and addressed him as follows. ‘Peace, my son, peace. Remember the thoughtlessness of passion, the overpowering vehemence of prejudice, and the infinite delicacy of the scales of justice. Who knows? When you awake tomorrow, your fresher and more calm intelligence may perhaps tell you that it was you who were mistaken, and that it was the adversary, whose nose you were about to pull with such uncompromising vigour, who was in the right.’ Senrab I change my opinion? Never! – Behold, deluded wretch, how I teach you – But Senrab, turning hastily about, found that he was addressing the air, for his enemy, seizing the opportunity afforded him by the exhortation of the philosopher, had, with extraordinary celerity, altogether disappeared. ‘He’s gone’, exclaimed Senrab.

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The Philosopher And I shall follow his example. Senrab Will you not grant me for a few moments longer the benefit of your conversation? The Philosopher This hour of evening meditation is very dear to me. It has already been interrupted more than I might have wished. So, if you have nothing of especial import to convey to me – Senrab I want to talk to you about God. And, as in these questions I think one’s own point of view is perhaps the most essential, I shall begin with myself. I was born – The Philosopher Dear me. Are you sure this is important? Senrab Important? How can you doubt it? – I was born of poor but honest parents in the year – The Philosopher We will take that for granted. Senrab At school I was chiefly remarkable for proficiency in reading, writing, and compound addition. At this point it suddenly occurred to me that there were, after all, other people in the world besides myself. The realisation of this fact led me by an inevitable train of thought to the reflection that I was not alone in the world; and thence, by a similar series of considerations, that no one else was either. I attained the notions of time and space at about the period of my first being put into trousers; and at the age of puberty – but I am afraid I weary you. The Philosopher On the contrary; this is most interesting.

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Senrab I suddenly grasped the distinction of the sexes. After that the steps were few and easy to the conception of a Father who was at the same time a God. The feeling was irresistibly borne in upon grew up within me that I myself actually was, or at least might at any moment become, such a deity; and the truth of my conviction was amply borne out by practical experiment. From this time onwards everything was made became plain to me. I saw – with what absolute clarity simplicity! – how God had made himself visible on earth in the shape of our holy Prophet, and how he in his turn had propounded the law of Allah by means of the Sacred Book. When I had reached maturity I discovered to my infinite satisfaction that I had arrived by a chain of irreproachable considerations at the exact point from which I had started. The Philosopher You amaze me. I have rarely heard an exposition at once so ingenious, so ingenuous, and so admirably convincing. I understand then that you have always believed what you believe at present? Senrab Certainly. The Philosopher And this process, which you have just so kindly described to me, what, precisely, is its nature? But what were the precise grounds for your belief that the Prophet was the Prophet of God? Senrab Who could doubt it, who had read the Koran? Who could doubt that He was no ordinary man mortal to whom such powers, such virtues, had been given? Did he not feed the hungry, cure the sick, and raise the dead from the grave? Did he not, in company with the Angel Gabriel, ascend successively the seven heavens, receive and repay the salutations of the patriarchs, the prophets, and the angels, in their respective mansions, and, passing the veil of unity and approaching at last within two bow-shots of the throne, feel a cold that pierced him to the heart, when his shoulder was touched by the hand of God?

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The Philosopher Such accomplishments are undoubtedly astounding. But I am surprised you puzzle me . Was it not his belief in these very occurrences that made you wish to pull the nose of your friend the Pilgrim? Senrab These occurrences? These miracles? Certainly not. Do you see no difference between religion and superstition? Compared with mine, how childish, how paltry, how unnecessary, were the miracles of his Mahomet! The Philosopher So you believe only rational miracles? But is there not at least one – or am I confused? – believed even by you, which can hardly be founded upon either wisdom or benevolence? I refer to a certain fig tree – Senrab There are doubtless exceptions. But there are no exceptions to the one fundamental rule of my belief – that the authority of the Koran alone is to be trust believed in. The Philosopher That volume was, I believe, composed of the records kept of his words by the diligent disciples of Mahomet upon palm-leaves and the shoulder-bones of diseased sheep. These fragments were cast, without order or connexion into a domestic chest, in the custody of one of his wives. Two years after the prophet’s death the sacred book was collected and published. Senrab Perfectly true; and such is the basis of my belief. The Philosopher If, then, the entire Koran were proved a forgery? Senrab Unimaginable thought! I could believe no longer; for what would there be left to believe?

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The Philosopher Exactly. So that your belief rests upon the truth or falseness of human investigation? Senrab Human investigation? By no means. Have you forgotten the evidence of the book itself ? Does it not bear upon every page of it the visible mark of inspiration? Does not every line show upon it the ineffaceable trace of the spirit of the Prophet of God? The Philosopher I see. You believe in Mahomet because you believe in the Koran, and you believe in the Koran because you believe in Mahomet. I need hardly point out to you that reason – Senrab My dear friend, reason has nothing to do with this question. It is purely one of faith. I believe in the Koran, and I believe in Mahomet, and that is all that can be said. The Philosopher And yet, I think, you have been reasoning. But there is one other point I did not quite clearly understand. You have always believed what you believe at present? Senrab I should hardly put it like that. The Koran does not include Mahomet, but Mahomet does include the Koran. The Philosopher And why is that? Senrab Because he includes everything. In fact – let me tell it you in confidence – Mahomet and God are the same thing. The Philosopher You don’t say so.

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Senrab Or rather, Mahomet is one aspect of God. There is another aspect, even more mysterious, which I don’t often care to mention, because its very mystery is liable, to some minds, to appear ridiculous. I refer to the aspect which consists in the spiritual relation between God and the other aspect of him, which is Mahomet. Do I make myself clear? You may understand the question better when I tell you that all these different aspects of the same thing are not only all the same as each other, but the same as the thing itself. The Philosopher I am certainly rather perplexed. But I quite agree with you that it is the point of view one takes that makes the difference. There are some points of view from which it is impossible to see anything at all but one’s own reflections. Senrab Ah! my poor friend, if you could only get to know God as well as I do! Then you would feel how petty, how unimportant, how utterly irrelevant were all your arguments, your distinctions, your words! I, who have been merged into Perfection itself, see now how trifling were the poor human reasons which brought me to the conclusion that he existed; I have picked away the ladder, now that I have reached my pinnacle. Prove to me by reason the impossibility of miracles: I do not care. I am beyond the reach of reason now. The Philosopher I should very much like to improve as you suggest my acquaintance with Allah. I only find it a little difficult to recognise him. He is, you say, Perfection. But how am I to know Perfection when I see it him, unless I employ my reason? It would be very awkward if one made a mistake. Senrab How do I know Perfection? By intuition. The Philosopher You know a Houri6 is good by intuition. You know 72 Houris are good by intuition. But you only know that 72 Houris are better than one by reason. And it is only by the aid of reason that you know an infinite number of Houris to be better than 72. Does not the same argument apply to Perfection as to Allah, for is not Perfection, or Allah, simply that which is infinitely good?

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Senrab Your illustrations are not only distressing, but misleading. It is necessary to draw a distinction. Reason can be used with Houris; it cannot be used with God. The Philosopher Then there are some things to which reason is not applicable? You objected to my last illustration. Allow me, therefore, to employ formulae which can give offense to no one. Let G. O. D. be a thing to which reason is not applicable. Then – pray notice – it follows that there can be no mark to distinguish G. O. D. from another thing D. O. G. For, if it is asserted that G. O. D. is Y, and that D. O. G. is U, that is an application of reason to G. O. D. But to G. O. D. reason cannot be applied. It is therefore impossible to distinguish G. O. D. from D. O. G. So that, as reason is inapplicable to G. O. D., it may be equally inapplicable to D. O. G. Thus there is only one conclusion at which we can possibly arrive – and it is this. If there is anything to which reason is not applicable, it is not applicable to anything. Senrab It is my turn to be amazed. The Philosopher If reason were not applicable to everything, that sect of the Christians would be perfectly justified who assert that they eat their God every Sunday in a piece of bread, which yet remains a piece of bread all the time. Senrab That doctrine is certainly absurd, but its absurdity neither proves nor disproves yours. I have rarely heard such an extraordinary farrago. It was logic run mad, and is a fair specimen of the methods of philosophers. The Philosopher You read philosophy then? Senrab Certainly not. I have better ways than that of employing my time.

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The Philosopher Would it not be perhaps fairer to judge after you have read, and not before? And, if it is a question of how time should be employed, would it not be better to occupy at least some of the time you now spend in enveighing against the doctrines of philosophers, in trying to discover what those doctrines are? Senrab They do not concern me. As I began by telling you, I am merely interested in myself. I know that Allah is the one God and that Mahomet is the prophet of God; and that is all that can be said upon the subject. The Philosopher A great deal more than that can be said. You know that Allah is the one God and that Mahomet is the Prophet of God; but the Christian knows that Jehovah is the one God and that Christ is the son of God; the Greek knows that there are at least ten Gods of the first rank, and hundreds more of the second, and that though none of the Gods had prophets, they most of them had more sons than they should have was fitting ; the follower of Zoraster knows that there are two Gods, and that one of those is the Devil; the Platonist knows that everything is a God; the Atheist knows there is no God; and the Athenian knows that there are some Gods who are unknown. Senrab This will never do: you are making fun of me. If you have no better occupation than that, I bid you good evening. The Philosopher I shall be delighted to go. But there is just one question I should like to ask – Why, if these are your views, did you begin the conversation? To this question Senrab was, for some moments, at a loss for a suitable reply. By the time he had thought of one, he perceived that the Philosopher had disappeared. ‘Now, by Allah’, he exclaimed; – but he never finished the sentence. For he was interrupted by a voice of peculiar suavity addressing him thus – ‘And who may Allah be?’ Senrab, looking round, saw at once that the speaker was a young foreign Prince of much distinction and some beauty.

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‘He is the Creator of the World’, said Senrab, after having, very properly, prostrated himself. The Prince Indeed. And is his character as mixed as that of his creation? Senrab Certainly not. He is perfectly good, perfectly merciful, and perfectly powerful. Those who believe in him, and in his holy Prophet, he rewards with eternal bliss, those who do not, with eternal torment. I myself – The Prince One moment. If your Allah is perfectly merciful why does he punish those who do not believe in him? And if he is perfectly powerful why do they exist? Senrab Such questions are undoubtedly difficult to answer; and indeed the modern expounders of our law have agreed to put them on one side as insoluble. Perhaps every one of God’s creatures may at length attain to Heaven; perhaps eternal punishment is simply annihilation; perhaps no disbeliever does, in reality, exist. The Prince Perhaps. And this law you speak of, what is its most important commandment? Senrab That we should love our neighbours as ourselves. This was once interpreted as meaning that we should not allow {them} to let slip the chance of our neighbours to stray from the narrow path leading to salvation. But which was that path? A large part of the world was occupied for many hundreds of years in deciding by means of argument, of persuasion, of war, and of torture, this most important point. At present, however, we interpret the command as enjoining a general love of mankind. It is a much simpler and more satisfactory interpretation, for it enables one, with the best grace in the world, to be completely tolerant and completely self-absorbed at the same time. The Prince I am glad to have met you. There are at present none of your sect in my country. You may be sure that I shall take steps to return to their homes any who, in the future, may inadvertently arrive there.

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Senrab The Mahomettans are strong; they have armies, fleets. Beware, oh Prince, lest your pride be brought low, your country conquered, and your subjects converted! But the Prince was already out of earshot. Indeed Senrab could see nothing on the road except the shabby dirty figure of a Minstrel, who twanged his guitar and sang snatches of songs as he approached. Senrab Poor Unhappy, starving creature. Here are a few mouldy dates left at the bottom of my knapsack. Take them, and in Allah’s name stop that lamentable noise. The Minstrel Perhaps I am starving; but why am I unhappy? Senrab Because you are starving. You tramp, you beg, you live from hand to mouth. And your comfort? What is it but those jingling, worn-out old songs of yours, which you squeak away to that cracked guitar from years end to years end? The Minstrel And your comfort? Senrab My hope in heaven. My knowledge that, though all things appear to be e however evil of the world, everything will come right in the end. I look forward, ever forward, to my heavenly goal. great is the

The Minstrel And I continue to sing. Senrab turned away in disgust, and was about to enter his tent. But before retiring to rest he was destined to have one more conversation. In the door of the tent a towering form of awful and mysterious majesty loomed forth upon the astonished eyes of Senrab. He paused, stepped back, and at last gasped ‘Who are you?’

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‘Most miserable man’, replied the mystic form, ‘do you not know me? I, whose name you bear, whose law you follow, whose tomb you search; – I am the Prophet.’ Senrab (prostrating himself ) Prophet of Prophets, Lord of Lords, Law-giver of Law-givers, most sublime of sublimities, most supreme of supremacies, most excellent of excellences, most perfect of – The Prophet Enough! But answer me these questions. Am I at the same time God and not God? Did I perform miracles and are miracles at the same time impossible to be performed? Am I the witness of the Koran, and is at the same time the Koran the witness of me? Is Allah all-merciful and all-powerful, and is there at the same time a hell? Is charity the chief tenet of my religion, and can at the same a true Mahometan be uncharitable? Is it right to condemn what you do not know, and is it possible to know what you cannot understand? Is it a good way of establishing the truth of my holy religion to carry on arguments when all arguments are unnecessary and to attempt to be reasonable when all reason is absurd? Senrab Most sacred Prophet, you are laboring under an unfortunate misapprehension. One moment of patience, and everything shall be explained. I did indeed give utterance to these statements opinions you have taxed me with, I did indeed appear to believe them – they are indeed self-contradictory, humiliating, and false. But why did you imagine that those opinions were necessarily mine? How could you dream that I could hold such doctrines? Alas, I was merely repeating, for the sake simply of amicable discussion, opinions which are very far from being mine. The Prophet Then whose, in the name of Allah, are they? Senrab My great-grandmother’s. The Prophet And what are yours? But the affable Arabian had disappeared.

IS DEATH DESIRABLE?

According to Holroyd, this Apostles essay from early in the philosophically momentous year 1903 – which saw the publication not only of Principia Ethica but also of Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics – ‘reaffirms [Strachey’s] settled agnosticism’.1 Rosenbaum focuses on the Silenian wisdom expressed in the paper – the best thing is never to have been born; the next best thing is to leave this world as soon as possible. He notes, ‘Immortality is but an improbable possibility, and annihilation’s eventuality affects action, Strachey finds. It would have been better not to have been born; when people realise this they will stop copulating.’2 For her part, Taddeo takes a broader view, situating this essay in the context of internal shifts in the Apostolic ethos. The Edwardian Apostles, she says, mocked the religious roots of their group yet still adhered to a sense of mission. They maintained the secrecies and ceremonial procedures, but these new Brothers prided themselves on ushering in ‘the death of God.’ Truth and Love, Strachey preached, could not coexist with the hypocrisy of Victorian Christianity.3

The vocabulary of means and ends that Strachey adopts for this brief typology of the potential ethical consequences that attend the consciousness of death owes much to G. E. Moore – whose work dominated discussions of the early Edwardian Apostles, when his influence was at its peak. In a letter to Leonard Woolf from August 1902, Strachey had written, ‘Today we have discovered how dismally and bitterly virtue is its own reward’.4 ‘Is Death Desirable?’ is primarily interesting for the evidence it provides of the persistence of the unrepentingly atheistic Strachey’s concern with fundamental questions of ethics in a world where ‘It is no longer, for me at any rate, either interesting or profitable to pretend to believe in the immortality of the soul’ (below, p. 43). He asks later, ‘Why should we be good?’ (below, p. 44). It is a basic question to which he would often return. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 164. Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury, p. 258. J. A. Taddeo, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian (New York: Haworth Press/Harrington Park Press, 2002), pp. 19, 157, n. 17. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 12. – 41 –

Death, though it is usually considered as an End, can, I think, only properly be regarded as a means; for how is it possible to postulate anything of Death in itself ? With regard to Death considered as a means my inquiry is limited to the effect, if any, which it produces on our view of life. It is no longer, for me at any rate, either possible interesting or profitable to pretend to believe in the immortality of the soul. It is not even interesting to speculate as to the truth of that doctrine. The problem has, I consider, been solved; immortality has been relegated simply to the position of mere possibility, absolutely devoid of any particle of probability; the only thing there is left to be interested in is the solution itself. I suppose the consideration that one’s life is going to be annihilated has no effect at all on any given action at any given moment. The majority of actions are either automatic, or the result of merely temporary motives. We continue to breathe because our lungs take in the air; we continue to work because we want to pass the next examination. But it seems unlikely that belief in a general proposition of such interest as the annihilation of life at Death should exercise no effect at all. Its results would be important if it only indirectly brought about a general depression of spirits. But its direct results must I think be limited to some such general attitude of mind, and cannot be taken to extend to particular actions. Particular actions, however, though their immediate causes may be either automatic or motives which are merely temporary, are themselves indirectly influenced by states of mind. Thus the result of depression might be that instead of working one plays cards, though the immediate motive of card-playing would be merely to pass the time. Thus, in the long run and very indirectly, it seems clear that belief in annihilation might influence not only sates of mind but action. The particular state of mind which appears to me most naturally to follow from a belief in absolute Death is that nothing matters. If, for you, all consciousness of pleasure or of pain, of God or of evil, will cease for ever in fifty years, why trouble about what, in those fifty years, may happen to you? Why are you making this constant effort to keep alive, to give yourself pleasure, to be virtuous, when you know quite well that you are sowing the wind? You say it would be just as much of an effort to do anything else. Very well, then, when next you lie in bed thinking whether it’s worth while to get to up for a ten o’clock lecture, remember me! Remember me, when you’re wondering whether it’s really worth while to learn to dance! Whether after all it matters very much if you are rude to that next irritating

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freshman! Remember me! Tell Bring up your children to remember me; let them tell their children to remember me; let me be remembered by the entire world … McTaggart1 yesterday said that irrespective of the question whether good or evil would eventually triumph, it was clearly better to get off a person’s toe if you trod on it. But why should you, if you happen to find yourself on a person’s toe, take the trouble to get off it merely to save him pain? He’d probably only have to put up with it for thirty years more; and after that he wouldn’t even know that he might have avoided it. To say that during those thirty years he would have been suffering is no argument, because it can be answered with perfect justice that you would have been saved the trouble of moving. To that it may of course be replied ‘then that at least was a gain’; the rejoinder is obvious (1) it was a gain fully compensated by the loss caused by his anguish; and (2) the point is not that it is better that you should stay on his toe than get off, but that it is quite indifferent which course of action you adopt. I can’t help feeling that this is the rational point of view, and that all our noble actions and all our aspirations towards perfection are simply so many weaknesses of the flesh. There is no question as to the triumph of either Evil or Good; there is only the certainty of the triumph of Death. One may be magnificent if one likes, one will be magnificent if one wants to be; but why, after all, should one want to be? This question, hopelessly unanswerable, must in the long run undermine the magnificent desire. Why should we be happy? Why should we be unhappy? Why should we be evil? Why should we be good? Why, above all, should we go on asking why? If there is no reason for anything, it is clear that Death is the most reasonable state; and never to have been born more reasonable than to have lived. Some day, there can be no doubt, people will be able to act upon this view, and simply cease to copulate. Such a solution of such a problem has something charmingly neat about it. It is infinitely appropriate that the human race mind will should end through a means so essentially physical. Also, the Universe with its unanswerable riddle will have got what it deserves. The riddle will continue to be aimlessly put – but this time there’ll be no one to hear it. The universe will simply be enormously ignored.

DIGNITY, ROMANCE, OR VEGETARIANISM?

Like ‘Is Death Desirable?’ this Apostles essay from 14 March 1903 is, as Rosenbaum puts it, relatively ‘slight’. He also observes, though, that ‘Dignity’ represents a continuation of ‘some of the themes of “Christ or Caliban?” and argues for a romantic discarding of timid dignity for the freedom of knowing people intimately’.1 As with all of Strachey’s Apostles essays, this one was written with a keen sense of audience: he often includes his ‘brothers’ in his reflections. In the present case, this rhetorical gesture is a stylistic choice that, given his theme, also possesses an ethical dimension. Early in the essay Strachey celebrates the society’s high valuation of ‘human intercourse’; the idea that ‘the attraction of conversation is unique’, he writes, ‘can only be taken to apply to a certain class of persons, of whom the present society is, I think, fairly typical’ (below, p. 48). However, in the final paragraph, he gestures towards a morally inflected critique of Apostolic exclusivity and parochialism when he asks ‘A question – Do we think about ourselves and each other too much? There’s no doubt, I think, that we do specialise in that direction. Ought we to?’ (below, p. 50). In the context of Strachey’s developing ethical views, it is worth remarking that, as a companion-piece to ‘Conversation and Conversations’, this paper figures the ‘process of discovery’ through conversation as providing an ‘extraordinary sense of infinitude … It is the infinity of two looking-glasses endlessly reverberating themselves’ (below, p. 49). This rich metaphor itself reverberates, pointing in its invocation of ‘infinity’ in interpersonal relations towards an ethical position that harmonizes with the late twentieth-century poststructuralist, posthumanist ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, with its formulation of ‘ethics as first philosophy’ and of the idea that ‘ethics precedes existence’. To set Strachey and Levinas in a motion of endless reverberation is to posit that one exists in proportion as one discovers one’s ‘infinitude’ in conversation, itself endlessly reverberating, with the face of the other. Notes 1.

Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury, p. 258.

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The question I want to ask is such a wide one that I’m not quite sure whether I know what it is. It was suggested by the following passage in a hitherto unknown author. ‘And on the third night the Sultan Mombazulu1 dreamt a dream. And he dreamt that he was Allah, the one, the all, the absolute Being, the Universe itself; and there was nothing outside of him, for he was infinite. And he was neither hot nor cold, happy nor satisfied, good nor evil, for he was all of these things. And he said ‘Do,’ and it was done, and he said ‘Undo,’ and it was undone. And his wisdom and his power and his glory were infinite. Yet was there one thing wherein he was powerless, and wherein his wisdom was of no avail. He could not speak; and is not the reason clear? There was no one to speak to. So that he was silent; and a million years passed, and still he was silent; and another million, and still he was silent; and yet another million, and still he was silent. And after a million million years had passed in this way, he awoke. And behold! it was morning, and Zima his favourite concubine embraced him, saying “Has my Lord slept well?” And the Sultan replied “Let the Princes, and the Counsellors, and the Captains be summoned.” And they were summoned. And he said “Behold I have dreamt a dream.” And he told them his dream, saying “Let the secretaries inscribe it in letters of gold.” And when the secretaries had inscribed it in letters of gold, the Sultan said “By Allah, there is one thing better than wisdom and power and glory, and that is speech. And it were better for a man to be a beggar talking to a beggar in the streets of Ispahan than Allah in his heaven, who must be silent for ever.”’ Most of us would I think agree with the Sultan’s dictum, but could we exactly say why? Why on earth do we talk to people, and why do we want to talk to people, and why do we want to talk to people so much? It would be easy enough to produce excellent reasons to show that on many occasions intercourse with one’s fellows is both profitable and entertaining; but the same thing might be said with equal propriety of the judicious use of Mr. Whitely’s Exercises.2 The fact remains that the attraction of conversation is unique; the causes which lead us to converse are not the causes which lead us to do anything else; and if we were told that for the future we should be cut off from all human intercourse, we should feel a pang certainly quite different from and probably more powerful than any other feeling of regret that it is possible to conceive. But these statements have to be immensely limited by saying that it is only to us that they apply. Whether they even apply to all of us is doubtful.

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It may be admitted, however, that these statements can only be taken to apply to a certain class of persons, of whom the present society is, I think, fairly typical. Undoubtedly some people put their friends on the same level as their books, others considerably below their horses. I don’t think our brother Duff,3 for instance, was ever as much excited by a conversation as he habitually is by the appearance every spring of the first crocus in his garden. This is what I call the Vegetarian state of mind. It simply, instinctively abstains from those coarse slices of animal food, those succulent juices, those savours of flesh and blood, which are so dear to other palates; and it cannot understand that there really is any greater pleasure to be got than what it gets every day of the year from its cauliflowers, its radishes, and its mustard and cress. This sort of Vegetarianism is in many cases the unfortunate accompaniment of middle age; but it is by no means limited to that period of life; and I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that the ordinary undergraduate was a confirmed vegetarian. But there is another class of people as distinct from these as they are from us. They abstain from joints not because they don’t like them, but because they think it would be vulgar to be seen eating them. But to eat vegetables would be vulgarer still. On what then do they subsist? Merely on made dishes, so artificially concocted that it is as impossible for them to perceive to conceal to the greatest possible degree any connection their real and beastly origin. This class – the truly aristocratic class – is a very small one and is continually decreasing. Its watchword is Dignity. Dignity demands, in one’s intercourse with others, a great restraint, a great reserve, and a fundamental sense of one’s own absolute rightness. To be dignified is to be uncompromising, but at the same time enormously tolerant, because it is undignified to be annoyed or even disturbed. When a dignified man talks to you, he simply ignores what is bad in you, and what is good in you he simply accepts. He is magnificent; but can he ever make friends? Thirdly, there are ourselves, and we are all for Romance. Isn’t that true? Haven’t we cast off the last shreds of our dignity, even as our blessed saviour cast off his grave-clothes on the morning of the Resurrection? Are we not untrammeled, unshackled, free? Free to pursue whom what we like, and in whatever way we like; and isn’t this precisely the Romantic method? But after all, why do we employ any method at all? Why do we ever speak to anyone? Why do we want to ‘know’ people? Why are we in the Society? It is easy enough to see what answer a Vegetarian would give to these questions. He gets just the same sort of pleasure and instruction from his friends as he gets from his novels or his collection of butterflies. The position of Dignity is different, because it is so intensely egotistic. It is too egotistic to admit of real friendship at all; and it only really condescends to speak at all to other people because it would be so very marked and disturbing not to do so. The Romantics, however, not only want to speak to people, but they think their relations with people are

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quite different from anything else. What then is the distinguishing characteristic of these relations? Is seems easiest to determine this by considering what it is we desire when we like someone sufficiently to want to ‘make friends’ with him. We clearly do not desire mere intellectual intercourse, because we can get that equally well from books, or from people whom we don’t like, and in those cases any excitement we may feel is very much smaller than the excitement we feel when we are talking to someone we do like. Nor do we simply desire physical contact, because (1) very often we don’t desire it at all and we very often desire it in connection with persons whom we should be really rather bored to have to speak to, or even whom we shouldn’t like to speak to at all. Nor do we desire a mixture of intellectual intercourse and physical contact, because our friends are very often stupid, and even more often ugly. What it seems to me we really do desire is simply to know the person. That is to say to find out with perpetually increasing exactitude what his character really is, in all its depths, in all its secret recesses, in all its uncertain and amazing turns. We want to be able to be always on the spot; to ‘place’ everything just as it comes out; we want never to be stumped. I presuppose that we like the person – that he’s nice – we should never have begun the process at all if he hadn’t been that. But it’s not his niceness that we’re interested in; we know how nice he is already. What we don’t know is how are all the ways in which his niceness works, and that’s what we want to discover. What is affected is much more our aesthetic sense than anything else. We are like picture-restorers before a Velasquez4 completely overlaid with dirt. Our chemicals lay bare first one part and then another of the canvas; we get wonderful glimpses of brushwork and of tone; we see at last something of a connection – a scheme of colour, a design; our hands tremble as we remove the last obliterations; the picture is complete. It is of course this final moment – the moment when everything really is laid bare – that we are working up to. It may come gradually or it may come in a rush; it may come only after years, or it may come in a day; but after it has come, if it ever comes at all, the relations between the two persons are radically altered. It is important to note the additional complications which ensue when – as is often the case – this process of discovery is mutual. It is only then that human intercourse reaches its most attractive levels; for it is only then that that extraordinary sense of infinitude resulting from mutual knowledge is to be felt. It is the infinity of two looking-glasses endlessly reverberating themselves. It is the grand triumph of Egoism and Altruism at the same time. If, then, this mutual intimacy is the end of all our conversations, it should be our object to be as unreserved as possible to our friends; for we cannot expect all the frankness to be on one side. Of course unreserved has obvious difficulties and dangers – the difficulty of giving exactly the impression you want to; the

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danger of having made a mistake as to your wanting to know the person you are confiding in at all. But if Intimacy is really what you desire, then there can be no doubt that you should be always trying to become less and less reserved. It is clear that Dignity, and all the accompaniments of Dignity – the grand manner, any sort of pose, even politeness – must go. Everything must go, but yourself and the other person. Two more or less sad reflections follow. (1) If the Romantic method is the right one, aristocracy appears to be doomed. (2) When intimacy is reached, it often happens that the relationship between the two persons deteriorates. Either because one of the persons is found by the other to be after all not quite a Velasquez, or because familiarity may breed, not contempt, but boredom. The excitement of discovery is gone; and admiration of the discovered is very liable to become a habit rather than a conviction. This is especially the case when the persons are no longer young. A question – Do we think about ourselves and each other too much? There’s no doubt, I think, that we do specialise in that direction. Ought we to?

THE HISTORIAN OF THE FUTURE

It is an anecdote that has often been repeated. One autumn day at the end of the nineteenth century, as ‘the long and sinister figure’ of the young Lytton Strachey loped across the Great Court of Trinity College, Cambridge, the head porter there remarked to Clive Bell, ‘You’d never think he was a General’s son’.1 Strachey’s hostility towards militarism, imperialism and other ‘fashionable ideals’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certainly implies in good modernist fashion a sharp break from his paternal lineage. The truth of the matter is both more complicated and more interesting – not because the head porter misjudged Lytton Strachey’s anti-militarism, but because he simplified the identity of Lytton’s father: Richard Strachey’s own ‘real leaning was towards science, and he liked to think that his more lasting achievements lay in this field’. Among other scientific accomplishments, he was twice elected president of the Royal Geographical Society, and he was a fellow of the Royal Society, a ‘zealous’ meteorologist, and a botanist after whom at least thirty-two Himalayan plants are named.2 For his part, Lytton Strachey was a modernist biographer who forged his historiographical methods in a world that, during the previous century, had witnessed the ‘victories of Science’.3 As he saw it, this victory represented the culmination of a movement that had begun two centuries earlier. At that time, he writes in his miniature portrait of John Aubrey (1923), the founding of the Royal Society on 15 July 1662 marked ‘the beginning of the modern world … and the place of Science in civilization became a definite and recognized thing’.4 This was in the same year, coincidentally, that the concept of biography in its modern form was introduced to the English lexicon by Thomas Fuller, in his coinage of the term ‘biographist’. The emergence of the modern understanding of life-writing to which this new word spoke, no less than the founding of the Royal Society, was one expression of what Nigel Hamilton has recently called ‘the growing Enlightenment mania for scientific taxonomies’.5 Strachey himself, of course, as E. M. Forster said of him in a 1943 radio broadcast, ‘wasn’t a scientist’, and appears to have had a congenital inaptitude for scientific studies. ‘[B]ut’, Forster adds, ‘he was sensitive to what was going on around him, he breathed it in and breathed it out in his art’.6 Forster is speaking

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explicitly of Strachey’s interest in Freudian psychology. But implicit in Forster’s comment is the recognition he shared with Strachey of the centrality of science to the modern world: by ‘what was going on around him’ Forster means not only psychoanalysis but science in general. As Strachey puts it in his portrait of Aubrey, ‘the scientific movement which gave the Royal Society its significance’ was an inextricable aspect of ‘our civilization’.7 As a student of history at Cambridge, and as a sensitive observer of and then a leading innovator in the practice of biography from his undergraduate years until his death in 1932, Strachey was also keenly attuned to contemporary theoretical debates in historiography. His participation in one of the most prominent of these debates helps to illuminate the critical, aesthetic and ethical complexity of his engagement with and attitude towards science as well as his practice of historical and biographical writing. Just as Strachey would satirize the imperial values that had enabled his father’s thirty-year career in Indian administration,8 so too would he take sides, though not altogether unambiguously, in defence of ‘art’, in one of the major debates in British historiography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This debate centred on the question, ‘Is history an art, or is it a science?’ Thirty years ago, in ‘Why Read the Nineteenth-Century Historians?’, John Clive observed, in the context of the structuralist turn towards a view of history as ‘pure literature’, that ‘The old battle against those who wished to make history a science has been fought and won’.9 It was in the thick of that battle, which persisted over the first three decades of the twentieth century – the period of Strachey’s writing career as well as that of modernism itself – that Strachey developed his ideas about historiography and crafted his innovative approach to biography. However vigorously Strachey would defend the artistic nature of historical writing, watching him stride across Trinity Great Court the head porter might have remarked, with slightly less precision than he in fact remarked the unlikeliness of Strachey’s military parentage, ‘You’d never think he was a scientist’s son’. This was because, as a participant in the ‘battle’ between scientific and literary historians, Strachey located himself firmly among the artists – but he did so while accepting as inevitable certain ‘scientific’ aspects of historiography and also retaining a lifelong respect for science as a way of knowing. He often, in fact, invoked science to criticize the intellectual or moral shortcomings of those who, in his view, had failed to appreciate its importance to ‘our civilization’. In several passages in Eminent Victorians, Strachey points to this fact of civilization to help advance his critique of his subjects and of the age that had produced them. Of the British nineteenth century in general, for example, he asks in his portrait of Cardinal Manning, ‘Was there something in it, scientific and progressive as it was, which went out to welcome the representative of ancient tradition

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and uncompromising faith?’10 Florence Nightingale, also driven by a religious ‘Demon’ and unable theoretically to transcend her native empiricism, was better qualified to dissect the concrete and distasteful fruits of actual life than to construct a coherent system of abstract philosophy … Thus, though the great achievement of her life lay in the immense impetus which she gave to the scientific treatment of sickness, a true comprehension of the scientific method itself was alien to her spirit.11

Thomas Arnold, who ‘would found a theocracy’,12 banished science from the Rugby curriculum because, as he wrote, in a passage that Strachey quotes, Rather than have physical science the principal thing in my son’s mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth … Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian and moral and political philosophy.13

And as for General Gordon – well, his own attitude towards scientific reasoning may be inferred from his susceptibility to the supernatural at a historical moment when, as Thomas Huxley put it in 1880, The distinctive character of our own times lies in the vast and constantly increasing part which is played by natural knowledge … Our whole theory of life has long been influenced … by the general conceptions of the universe, which have been forced upon us by physical science.14

By contrast, Gordon ‘ruminated upon the mysteries of the universe, and … religious tendencies … became a fixed and dominating factor in his life’. In the Bible, ‘he was convinced, all truth was to be found’.15 Later, in Queen Victoria (1921), Strachey once again would echo Huxley, and perhaps allude to the title of Huxley’s book, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), in order both to critique Victoria’s lack of interest in the world-transformative impact of nineteenth-century science and technology, and to credit Prince Albert for his percipience in the matter. ‘The immense industrial development of the period’, Strachey writes, the significance of which had been so thoroughly understood by Albert, meant little indeed to Victoria. The amazing scientific movement, which Albert had appreciated no less, left Victoria perfectly cold. Her conception of the universe, and of man’s place in it, and of the stupendous problems of nature and philosophy remained, throughout her life, entirely unchanged.16

Richard Altick, in ‘Eminent Victorianism: What Lytton Strachey Hath Wrought’ (1995), a generally unforgiving critique of Strachey as a historian, argues that Eminent Victorians, which ironically gave birth to Victorian Studies, ‘could be read, on one level, as a covert attack on [Strachey’s] own family … The violent revulsion from ancestor worship, it seemed, ended in denigration’.17 Certainly Strachey’s opinion of the Victorians was in many ways not exactly

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charitable. ‘Is it prejudice, do you think’, he asked Virginia Woolf, ‘that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites.’18 But despite this general hostility Strachey showed at least a mingled sympathy for many Victorians, including Nightingale, John Henry Newman and Queen Victoria herself. Moreover, Strachey built his fame writing Victorian lives – ‘an Eminent Victorian might be defined … as the sort of person whose life would be likely to be written by Lytton Strachey’, he told the Cambridge Apostles in 1918.19 Thus, despite the fact that he possessed his share of characteristically modernist parricidal tendencies, Strachey was far too enthralled with the Victorian age ever unconditionally to have exclaimed, with the bellicose Wyndham Lewis, ‘BLAST years 1837 to 1900’, let alone ‘BLAST … Clan Strachey’. Strachey was also too aware of the social and cultural value of science to have BLASTed, say, ‘FRATERNIZING WITH MONKEYS’.20 Besides being ‘enthralled’ by ‘Darwin, whom he came to consider one of the greatest stylists in English literature’,21 Strachey was sympathetic to Huxley’s estimate of the large part that science had played in shaping ‘the distinctive character’ of his own time – though, ambivalent towards the Victorian age, Strachey was also vexed by the faith in science that ‘Pope’ Huxley personified, and which permeated late Victorian historiography. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Eminent Victorians, Clive challenged the critical orthodoxy that saw Strachey as a mere debunker or, in Cyril Connolly’s estimation, ‘a great anarch’, observing that Strachey’s ‘portraits communicated more than contempt and amusement. In them he raised problems of character and circumstance, reason and unreason, the individual in relation to the spirit of his age, and ideas in relation to action’. For these reasons, ‘Strachey succeeded in reabsorbing English biography into the realm of literature’.22 Strachey himself saw this ‘reabsorption’ as, in fact, a rescue, a liberation of artistic ‘spirit’ not only from the gross clutches of ‘undertaker’biographers,23 but also from the more refined chains of ‘scientific’ historians devoted Gradgrind-like to the empirical ‘truth’ – to what Leopold von Ranke had famously described as ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ – what actually happened – or what a French historian at the first International Congress of Historians in 1900 had called ‘Facts, facts, facts – which carry within themselves their lesson and their philosophy. The truth, all the truth, nothing but the truth.’24 Strachey bristled at this conflation of fact and truth. In his late miniature portrait of Edward Gibbon (1928), he composed his most succinct, combative, exasperated, and arch rebuttal to such claims: That the question has ever been not only asked but seriously debated, whether History was an art, is certainly one of the curiosities of human ineptitude. What else can it possibly be? It is obvious that History is not a science: it is obvious that History is not the accumulation of facts, but the relation of them. Only the pedantry of incom-

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plete academic persons could have given birth to such a monstrous supposition. Facts relating to the past, when they are collected without art, are compilations; and compilations, no doubt, may be useful; but they are no more History than butter, eggs, salt and herbs are an omelette. That Gibbon was a great artist, therefore, is implied in the statement that he was a great historian.25

Generalizing from essays that Strachey wrote for the Apostles and other Cambridge discussion groups, Holroyd argues that ‘Lytton did not have a truly speculative mind; he was not really interested in … historical theory’.26 It is true that, despite his attentiveness to current trends and movements in historiography, Strachey never published a sustained argument detailing his position on the history as art or science debate that exercised the minds of many of his prominent historian contemporaries – most notably, given Strachey’s Cambridge ties, J. B. Bury and Strachey’s fellow Apostle G. M. Trevelyan. This essay, in fact, is Strachey’s response to Bury’s inaugural address as Regius professor of history at Cambridge on ‘The Science of History’. Nevertheless, his position may be inferred from several sources, both published and unpublished. These include brief but suggestive reflections on historiography and on science in his major biographical works, and in a dozen or so essays, including the preface to Eminent Victorians, one early book review, a series of miniature portraits from the late 1920s and the early 1930s collectively titled ‘Six English Historians’ – and, especially, ‘The Historian of the Future’, which he read to the Sunday Essay Society in November 1903, and which represents his earliest as well as his most fully developed set of reflections in historiographical theory generally, and, specifically, on the question whether history was a science or an art. This essay helps to illuminate, on the one hand, Strachey’s attitude towards science and, on the other, the early development of his innovative approach to biography at a time that saw a widening gap between ‘scientific’ and ‘artistic’ theories of historiography. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

V. Woolf, ‘Old Bloomsbury’, in Moments of Being, ed. J. Schulkind (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1985), pp. 179–201, on p. 195; M. Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 3. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, pp. 14–15. Strachey, Eminent Victorians: The Definitive Edition (1918), ed. P. Levy (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 9. Strachey, Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1931), p. 20. N. Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 80–1. E. M. Forster, ‘Lytton Strachey’, in The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1929–1960: A Selected Edition, ed. M. Lago, L. K. Hughes, and E. M. Walls (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008), pp. 243–7, on p. 245. Strachey, Portraits in Miniature, p. 21. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 15.

56 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers J. Clive, Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), pp. 34–5. Strachey, Eminent Victorians, p. 9. Ibid., p. 164. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., pp. 192–3. T. H. Huxley, ‘Science and Culture’, Science and Education: Essays (n.p.: Bibliobazaar, 2006), pp. 96–111, on p. 105. Strachey, Eminent Victorians, pp. 230–1. Strachey, Queen Victoria (New York: Harcourt, 1921), p. 406. R. Altick, ‘Eminent Victorianism: What Lytton Strachey Hath Wrought’, American Scholar, 64:1 (1995), pp. 81–9, on p. 85. In four of the most interesting recent contributions to Strachey scholarship, Julie Anne Taddeo, Simon Joyce and Barbara Caine question the extent of the Bloomsbury Group’s, and especially Strachey’s, break from their Victorian forebears. All three writers focus on this general question in the more specific context of gender politics. Taddeo’s Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian (New York: Haworth Press/Harrington Park Press, 2002); Joyce’s ‘On or About 1901: The Bloomsbury Group Looks Back at the Victorians’, Victorian Studies, 46 (2004), pp. 631–54; and Caine’s ‘Bloomsbury Masculinity and Its Victorian Antecedents’, Journal of Men’s Studies, 15:3 (2007), pp. 271–81, and Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) suggest a close affinity between Strachey and his Victorian predecessors. Caine notices that ‘Recently … a number of historians and literary critics have questioned the depth and meaning of Bloomsbury modernity, pointing … to the strong continuities with Victorian values and codes of behavior’ (‘Bloomsbury Masculinity’, p. 271). The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 211. Holroyd, Strachey: The New Biography, p. 419. W. Lewis, Blast I (1914; Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1997), pp. 18, 21. Holroyd, Strachey: The New Biography, p. 149. C. Connolly, Enemies of Promise (New York: Persea Books, 1983), p. 47; Clive, Not by Fact Alone, p. 230. Strachey, Eminent Victorians, p. 4. A. Green and K. Troup, (eds.), The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in TwentiethCentury History and Theory (New York: New York University Press, 1999), p. 3. Strachey, Portraits in Miniature, p. 158. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 163.

It is doubtless a providential dispensation which has laid down that the practice of an art or a science should precede the theory. The independence of practice and theory in most of the pursuits of this world, is, we may take it, a dispensation of providence. It is fortunate that Sappho1 was able to compose lyrics before the discovery of the true theory of lyric poetry; that Shakespeare was able to write plays without knowing the rules of the drama; that Caesar was able to govern unaided by text books on government; and that the human species has been able to propagate itself successfully without the smallest acquaintance with the laws of reproduction. These things are fortunate for two reasons: in the first place it is clearly fortunate that practice is possible without theory, when we consider that theory is because if practice were always obliged to wait for theory it might in many cases have to wait for ever, for a theory which might never be obtained. There is only one thing, perhaps, more difficult than to paint a beautiful picture, and that is to discover what a beautiful picture is. How glad we ought to feel when we remember this, and reflect that a Velasquez or a Turner may produce innumerable pictures in complete ignorance of artistic laws upon all the artists of the world who have lived and died in utter ignorance of those aesthetic laws which even we have not yet discovered! But besides the difficulty of arriving at a theory, there is the danger of arriving at a wrong one. If practice depended upon theory, whenever a theory was found to be false it would follow that the practice which had depended on it would be necessarily completely worthless. But here too we must thank a beneficent creator power; however false were the pagan theories of Ethics it was possible to lead a good life before the institution of christianity; and however false preceding historical dogmas may have been it was possible to write good history before Professor Bury’s inaugural address.2 Yet a little theorising is I think useful now and then. If it cannot lead us into the path of virtue, if it cannot even keep us from the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire, it can at any rate point out to us in general the vanity of human wishes, and in particular the vanity of our friends. We can use our own theories to rebut and refute other theories. In so far as we attack and disprove other people’s theories, we shall be theorising, and, though our own theories may be shown to be as false as theirs, we shall at least have had the satisfaction of refuting someone, and of arriving, if only by that humble degree, nearer to the truth. The theory I want at present to discuss is, briefly, the theory that History is a science. What that phrase precisely means is certainly doubtful, and it is just

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this very doubt which makes me particularly inclined to discuss it. What do we mean by History? What do we mean by science? What, if you like, do we mean by ‘is’? These are all interesting questions, and questions which, considering their importance in any discussion of this sort, are singularly rarely asked, and even more rarely answered. Nevertheless it seems to me that to answer them is in reality a quite simple matter, and that having once accomplished this the true answer to the more complex question ‘Is History a Science?’ will follow naturally and almost of its own accord. What, then, do we mean by History? It may be pointed out that this question may be taken in two entirely different ways. If we were asked ‘What do you mean by a steam engine?’ we would probably point to one, and say ‘that’; and in this sense it would be a perfectly adequate reply, if we were asked ‘What do you mean by History?’ to say simply ‘Gibbon.’ But the question may be taken differently. One might be expected not merely to point to a steam engine, but to give a complete description of its parts, and of how those parts interacted upon each other so as to produce the desired result. This would be a serious undertaking, and it would be even more serious in the matter of History. To answer the question from this point of view, we should have to give a complete account of the materials employed by History, and we should also have to give a complete account of the way in which History employs them. It is clear, therefore, that the question ‘What do we mean by History?’ is capable of two very different interpretations, interpretations which I think are always liable, in discussion, to become confused. But there is another source of difficulty and error which it is necessary to indicate. The question ‘What do we mean by History?’ is constantly accompanied by another question, totally different from it, yet constantly taken as in some way throwing some sort of light upon it – the question ‘What is the good of History?’ If in response to the question ‘What do you mean by a steam engine?’ one were to say ‘a steam engine is an excellent thing because it moves quickly from place to place’ that reply would be doubtless true, but it would not be an answer to the question. One would have described one of the functions of a steam engine, but not the steam engine itself: one would have omitted to mention that it was an engine and that it was worked by steam. One would also perhaps have created a false impression; one might have seemed to say that a steam engine was more of a steam engine in proportion as the speed of its locomotion increased; and this is manifestly untrue, for though Puffing Billy went only ten miles an hour, and though the Flying Dutchman goes 60,3 and though the electric car of the future may go 600, nevertheless Puffing Billy will remain a steam engine to the end of time. I should be almost ashamed to mention such an obvious point if it were not that quite often it does appear to contain matter for confusion. Professor Bury,

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for instance, in his inaugural lecture seemed to say (I admit it is difficult to be certain) that if we could once grasp what the good of history really is, we should then immediately know what history is itself; and he accordingly seemed to spend the greater part of his lecture in discussing the question – ‘What is the good of History?’ That is an interesting question to discuss, but what I wish to state is that its solution does not inevitably bring about the solution of the other question ‘What do we mean by History?’ (You can prove if you like that the use of history is to produce x; and you can prove that the works of Tacitus4 produce hardly any x at all; but you cannot go on to say from those propositions that the works of Tacitus are hardly history.) But there is another and more important confusion which is liable to occur in discussions as to the value of history. That unhappy instinct implanted in human beings which never allows them to be satisfied with what they have got seems to show itself in matters of speculation as much as in practical life. No sooner is a thing which we value ours than we begin to feel uneasy about it; we begin to think that perhaps there is no reason for our esteem; and we begin to ask ‘What is the good of it?’ Art, we feel, is good; ‘but what’, we can’t help wondering, ‘is the good of Art?’ We may perhaps conclude that it gives us pleasure, and be satisfied: indeed this seems to be the attitude of most inquirers. But what is to prevent us asking the same question about pleasure, and inquiring, as we assuredly must directly it occurs to us to do so ‘What is the good of it?’ To this we may or may not find an answer, but if we ever do it is clear that we have embarqued [sic] upon a progression of questions which can never end. Tired out at last, we shall perhaps exclaim with the gentleman in the song ‘What’s the good of anyfink? Why, nuffink!’;5 and this would be a satisfactory conclusion enough if we were not really quite convinced at the back of our minds that some things, after all, are good. The truth is, it is often quite unnecessary to ask any of these questions at all. Some things are simply good, and that is all, if one looks the matter fairly in the face, one can say about it. Art is good, it is good that there should be such a thing as Art; why should we inquire further? Better, surely, to bear those goods we have, than fly to others that we know not of. This principle once clearly grasped, the great mass of speculations as to the value of history will disappear into the thinnest vapour. It is quite unnecessary to show laboriously that history produces good results, directly it is admitted that history is good in itself; that is quite a sufficient justification. Perceive that, and the futility of all the current arguments in favor of History becomes obvious. Professor Bury has, in his lecture, devoted much space to arguments of this kind; it may be worth while to examine what he says more closely, in order to show the shifts and ambiguities to which it is necessary to resort in this kind of attempt to justify something, where no justification at all is needed.

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The first step in Professor Bury’s argument is a mere assumption: it is that the same sort of evolutionary process exists with regard to man as the Darwinian Theory has shown to exist with regard to other forms of life. Man, according to this argument is developing; but how is he developing? The second step follows, and the second step is, like the first, a mere assumption: Man is developing, through immense cycles of time, in an upward direction; this is the new transfiguring conception which has, within the memory of the last generation, recreated history, for it is clear (and this is the third step in the argument, and the third assumption) that our conception of the past, to use Professor Bury’s own words, ‘is itself a distinct factor in guiding and moulding our evolution.’ and must become a factor of greater and increasing potency.’ Our conception of the past is of course given us by history, and thus the value of history has been shown to consist in its power of guiding and moulding our evolution. To prove that the study of history has any effect whatever upon our action in the future would I think be a difficult task; but Professor Bury has made it almost impossible. History, he says, ‘was generally regarded in Greece and Rome as a storehouse of concrete instances to illustrate political and ethical maxims … And this view, which ascribed to it … the function of teaching statesmen by analogy … prevailed generally till the last century. Of course’, he goes on, ‘it contained a truth which we should now express in a different form by saying that history supplies the material for political and social science. This is a very important function; but, if it were the only function, if the practical import of history lay merely in furnishing examples of causes and effects, then history, in respect of practical utility, would be no more than the handmaid of social science.’ But in what other way, unless by furnishing examples of causes and effects, is it possible for history to influence our future action? This we are nowhere told, so that I think it is justifiable to take the last step in the argument – that which states that the study of history has a direct bearing on our evolution – as, at the least, a mere assumption, or, at the most, only a very doubtful and partial truth. But there is one more point which it is necessary to notice. ‘The study of history,’ says the argument, ‘will help us to advance’; but it has already been assumed that we are advancing anyhow; and if we are advancing anyhow why should we be at the trouble of studying history? This question the argument nowhere faces, though by using the ambiguous phrase ‘guiding and moulding our evolution’ it skims over it as best it may. But in truth the question cannot be faced, unless it be admitted that this argument which begins with an assumption, which continues with an assumption, which ends with an assumption, is also self-contradictory and absurd. Such is the utter confusion of this elaborate structure which it has been found necessary to erect in order to make manifest to all the world ‘the good of history.’

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Professor Bury, as I have pointed out, is careful not to base the practical utility of history in the fact that it supplies the material for political and social science, or, as he says, that it furnishes examples of causes and effects. Yet this, I think, is the safest position to take up; at any rate it does not involve quite so much assumption as the other theory, and it involves no contradictions at all. It is clear that our experience of past events does enable us more or less to judge correctly as to the results of our actions, the burnt child, for instance, notoriously dreads the fire. But unfortunately the sort of experience which we gain from history is precisely that sort which helps us least to make correct judgments with regard to the future. We know, if we put our fingers in the candle, that we shall be hurt; we know this from experience; we know that from the same conditions, there must follow the same results. But in history the conditions are, as a matter of fact, never the same; history never really repeats itself; there are always some new elements in every case, – which may make it an entirely different case from any other, and must make it different in some degree; so that it is only with great reservations and some vagueness that we can say that history is useful because it furnishes examples of causes and effects. And there is one other point which is too often overlooked. The study writing of history involves enormous labour; it involves vast researches stretching over long periods of time; it involves the expenditure of energy, of talent, and of genius, of an unknown amount; and properly to study and digest the results of all these labours is itself a great and difficult task. What I want to ask is this – is it conceivable that all this huge expenditure of vital force, nearly all of which might perfectly well be employed in other ways, is merely justified by the fact of its enabling us in a somewhat doubtful manner to draw true conclusions as to the results of some of our acts? It appears to me that there can be no doubt that it is not; that we must affirm that if this is all the good history is to do us, the game is not worth the candle; and that, if we are to justify history at all, we must do so by some other method than by trying to prove its practical utility. But what, it may be asked, should people be so anxious to prove that history is useful? Why cannot they be contented with the intrinsic value which it so obviously contains? Why cannot they admit that the history of Gibbon is in itself something good, and be satisfied by that? These appear to be difficult questions, but I think their solution will be found to lie in those sorts of confusions which were indicated earlier in the paper. If everyone were quite clear as to what is meant by history, everyone, it seems to me, would be quite satisfied that some history is good. But everyone is not clear. ‘The exclusive idea of political history’ says Professor Bury ‘to which Ranke6 held so firmly, has been gradually yielding to a more comprehensive definition which embraces as its material all records, whatever their nature may be, of the material and spiritual development, of the culture and the works, of man in society, from the stone age onwards.’ In other

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words, any event in the past, so long as it is true, and so long as it concerns man in society, may be the subject matter of history; The business of history and what we mean by history is nothing more nor less than to relate the relation narration [of ] such events. This is certainly a ‘comprehensive definition’, but I for one am perfectly ready to accept it. But it is important to notice just how much it comprehends. Supposing it to be true for instance that a lady in Babylon named Alipharmutosis7 did, on the 3rd day of December B. C. 3006, at half past four o’clock p. m. drop one hairpin upon the floor of her apartment, then the narration of that event is history. I am willing to admit this; and more. It is easy to suppose a vast multitude of past events all equally true, all equally connected with man in society, and all absolutely unconnected with each other. One of these events might be for instance that I, three weeks ago, very rashly engaged to read a paper to this Society; and it is easy to suppose that event, and the event which happened in Babylon to Alipharmutosis, and many other past events, of greater or of less importance, but all true and all connected with man in society. I say it is easy to suppose these events strung together in any order, without any internal connection, recorded, printed, and published; it is easy to imagine this volume; and it is history. Such is Professor Bury’s view, and I wish today to say it is certainly true I daresay it is the true one. But that persons holding this view should soon begin to ask themselves the question ‘what is the good of history?’ is really not very surprising. It would be only natural to wish to prove that, if the volume I have outlined has very little value in itself, at any rate its effects will be good, that the study of it will produce good results, that it will be found, in fact, to be practically useful. I have tried to point out the inherent weakness of all such attempts; but this appears to me to be the reason why they are made with such persistency. This paper began by asking the question ‘Is history a Science?’ That it is was the theme of Professor Bury’s lecture, and such is a widely received opinion. The vigour with which the theory is held seems to point to some ulterior motive, and, if one looks into the matter, it is difficult not to suspect that even the upholders of the utility of history are themselves half aware of the weakness of their case. ‘Perhaps, after all’, they seem to be murmuring, ‘history isn’t as useful as all that. But it really doesn’t matter, because, take my word for it, history is really a science, and so you see it is good in itself.’ This, at any rate, is the constant implication. It is constantly implied by those who declare that history is a science that science is good for no other reason than because it is good – a perfectly reasonable implication. Astronomy cannot be said to be of practical utility; and astronomy is the most magnificent of sciences. Beside her, apparently, history has been enthroned and ensphered; is history then, after all, valuable for its own sake, because it is a science, and for no other reason? There can be no doubt It is admitted that a great part of the business of a historian is the discovery of past events, and the ascertaining establishment of their truth.

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In order to effect these two objects a method which may legitimately be called scientific must be largely employed. All such functions of the historian’s work as, for instance, relate to the authenticity of documents, are clearly ‘scientific’; and methods must here be adopted closely analogous to those used in scientific research. But it must be noticed that there is one class of past objects whose truth cannot properly be investigated by what is termed ‘the scientific method.’ I refer to individual minds. Upon consideration, cannot it doubted it seems plain that the method by which true conclusions are reached with regard to individual minds of the past cannot be termed a scientific method; it is a totally different method. Suppose the letters of Cleopatra were discovered; their authenticity would of course be proved by scientific study; but how would it be possible to draw a correct conclusion as to the character they revealed by any of the methods of science? Yet it might be possible, by other methods, [to] draw a perfectly correct conclusion. The truth is the human mind must always be a stumbling-block to scientific historians. A necessary part of history it has been admitted consists in the narration of the past facts. And it is surely true that the only possible way of narrating the characteristics of human minds is by the aid of – not the scientific – but the artistic method. If this is the case it is true that history must be scientific to some extent, and, on the other hand, to some extent it must be artistic too. But, in so far as it is scientific, is history valuable? It must be confessed that those facts which the scientific method enables history to discover, seem to have, in themselves, very little value. The human mind is debarred; and all general laws such as it is the highest aim of science to propound, are, in history, out of the question. All, therefore, that science helps history to give us is the bare knowledge of certain facts, and those not the most interesting of the facts with which history deals. It is plain, then, that is history were only a science, it would have very little value at all. In what, then, does the true value of history lie? In order to answer this question it is useless, in the manner of the scientific historian, to examine the most general definition of history we can think of, and attempt from that to draw correct conclusions as to history’s worth; it is clear that the proper course for us to take is to fix our eyes minds upon what appears to us, putting all questions of utility upon one side, to be an instance of history which is we actually feel to be valuable in itself. Adopting this method we shall I think find that the intrinsic value of history depends upon two conditions – first, the interest of the facts narrated, and secondly, the beauty of the narration. If in any given piece of history the interest of the facts narrated is great, and if the beauty of the narration is great, the history is good history. If however the facts narrated have little or no interest, and if the narration itself is devoid of beauty then the history under consideration is (except for the hardly perceptible value which resides in the knowledge of mere facts) completely worthless. Mere history, as Professor Bury defines it (and I am willing to

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accept his definition) is therefore practically of no value at all. But history, made interesting by judicious selection, and made beautiful by art, is one of the most valuable things we know. It is in the contemplation of these great heights of history, these gracious and noble monuments of human thought, that one feels a sort of wonder at the state of mind which, regarding them, can yet search for justifications, and proofs of practical use. The magnificent procession of a Gibbon, the sombre and superb intensity of a Michelet8 or a Tacitus, the elaborate grandeur of a Thucydides,9 the upheaving strength of a Carlyle,10 are these to be our ideals, are these to be the bright stars in our highest heaven, or are they to be extinguished, degraded, profaned, cast out from the brilliant company of their fellows, and relit as miserable candles to illume the arid workshop of the historian of the future? Such, it is suggested, should be their fate; and surely it is worth while to indulge in a little theorising, if only to show how devoid of any reasonable foundation such a suggestion is. The main points which I have endeavoured to establish in this paper are as follows – 1. That history is a relate narrative of true past events 1. The value of history as a means to good is doubtful (a) because of the difficulty of proving that the study of history does actually can affect our future action, and (b) because the great output of energy which history makes necessary does not appear to counterbalance any good which it might cause. 2. The intrinsic value of history rises in proportion as the facts it narrates are interesting, and the narrative itself is beautiful. 3. If history be defined as the narration of true past events connected with man in society, it is necessarily scientific in so far as it employs the scientific method to discover the truth of those events. 4. But, as the truth of propositions with regard to individual minds cannot be inferred by the scientific method, but only by an artistic method, and as the narration of these truths can only be effected by means of art, history is, so far as it deals with individuals minds, artistic.

SHOULD WE HAVE ELECTED CONYBEARE? 1

For Lytton Strachey, November 1903 was a speculatively productive month. Addressing the Apostles in the middle of the month, four weeks following the publication of Principia Ethica and a week after reading ‘The Historian of the Future’ to the Sunday Essay Society, Strachey includes his brothers in his opening observation on the religious character of Apostolicism and on the conversion experience attendant upon election. ‘In the serene air of absolute existence’, he writes, amid the spacious heights of complete being, far, far removed from the phenomenal and the inane, it is our pleasure and our privilege to wander, to linger, and to repose … Had any of us, I wonder, in our old dead days, ever dreamt of such triumphant ecstasies, such magnificent impossibilities? But now we have seen, now we have understood, and now we believe. (below, p. 69)

As not only his essays but also his letters show, in 1902–5 Strachey was occupied, even obsessed, with the manifold tensions between flesh and spirit – or, in Apostolic argot, between the phenomenal (unreal) and real worlds. In January 1904, for example, in a letter to Leonard Woolf, he uses the occasion of a London exhibition of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker and other sculptures to reflect on ‘material’ versus ‘spiritual’ tendencies in art. ‘The French imagination’, he writes: is nearly always material. Rodin’s is grossly so. Imagine, if Shelley had been a sculptor, how he would have done Le Baiser – a winged Eros just touching the earth; Rodin has a thick man cuddling a thick woman. Le Penseur is rigid banks and heaps of muscle. The imagination of Michael Angelo was ‘spiritual’ in some way that R’s isn’t. What it means I don’t know – but the spiritual imagination suggests things which are not material … That’s the grand triumph!2

And in February he writes, again to Woolf, ‘Only two things I find amuse me … wit and the flesh’.3 Rosenbaum writes that Strachey’s Edwardian essays frequently articulate ‘a divorce of the outer from the inner. His dissertation is almost exclusively concerned with … [Warren] Hastings’s actions, whereas his essays for discussion

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societies are mostly about states of mind’. ‘Should We Have Elected Conybeare?’ centres on what the Apostles should be and what they should value, [and] argues that the Society is really a kind of religion, whose essence is identified as an abnormal sense of true values … All that the Apostles seem to share in their religion … is an incapacity for phenomenal existence; they need to become more mystical, ecstatic, eternal.4

Additionally, this essay asks whether it is possible for an Apostle to preserve the society’s noumenal values in a phenomenal world and, specifically, in the context of marriage to a, by definition, phenomenal wife. Thus, a politics of gender also underwrites Strachey’s paean to the essentially religious, and exclusively male, Apostles’ ‘abnormal sense of the true values of things’ (below, p. 71) – a sense that makes these adherents of the ‘new religion’ even ‘more religious’ than Thomas Aquinas while being inspired by a similar, and equally intense, sense of noumenal reality (below, p. 72). ‘[S]ome brothers’, Strachey writes in his concluding paragraphs, ‘may think it queer that I of all people should want to be religious’ (below, p. 73). But as so many of these essays show, Strachey was, if not religious in a conventional sense, then at least preoccupied, sometimes sympathetically, with spiritual questions during the first decade of the century. By aesthetically and ethically redefining the religious impulse as one that ‘admits of so much that is varied, and ridiculous, and strange’, and that permits ‘the art of being holy with a scoff, of penetrating the secret places with an obscenity, of elevating the host … upon a foundation of intolerable puns’ (below, p. 73), Strachey finesses the conflicting demands of the unreal and real, material and immaterial, mundane and eternal, flesh and spirit. And he does so in a way that speaks to the fascination and ardour with which, despite their genuine disbelief, so many fin-de-siècle and modernist aesthetes inoculated themselves with spiritual virtues and religious jargon and ritual against what they perceived as the pervasively ‘phenomenal’ and philistine core concerns of the modern Western world. Strachey would extend this fascination with religious iconography into the physical realm of sexual experiment in the late 1920s, when, with himself as a sort of Christian doppelgänger and victim, he engaged in sadomasochistic mock-crucifixion activities with his lover Roger Senhouse.5 Awed by the sublimity of the place, he thought of Senhouse, too, when he visited Chartres Cathedral in 1930. ‘Oh, my dearest creature’, Strachey enthused, I wished so much for you to be with me as I stood at that most impassioned point – the junction of the transept and the nave, where the pillars suddenly soar and rush upwards to an unbelievable height, and one is aware of the whole structure in its power and splendour. The christian [sic] religion itself positively almost justified.6

Almost.

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Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The reference is apparently to John William Edward Conybeare (1843–1931), a Victorian Apostle (elected 1865), writer and Cambridgeshire parish vicar. See P. Levy, Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 137. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 21. Ibid., p. 22. Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury, p. 133. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 625. Ibid., p. 631.

In the serene air of absolute existence, amid the spacious heights of complete being, far, far removed from the phenomenal and the inane, it is our pleasure and our privilege to wander, to linger, and to repose. There is nothing, at these altitudes, to perplex our vision or to retard our easy flight; the elements obey us, and the laws of nature bow below us like oaks below the wind blast before us; without wings we soar, we scatter whales like snow upon the moveless sphere; and we love one another. Had any of us, I wonder, in our old dead days, ever dreamt of such triumphant ecstasies, such magnificent impossibilities? But now we have seen, now we have understood, and now we believe. ‘La vie’, says St. Thomas Aquinas in one of his happiest passages, ‘La vie, c’est une sale chose. Elle commence par la copulation; elle finit par la putréfaction. Quelle horreur! Quelle degradation! Et enfin quelle saleté.’1 The poor saint was in fact infinitely distressed by the contemplation of this miserable world. What could be worse more humiliating, he very properly wondered, than the ignominy which surrounds our birth, or more disgusting than the filth which accentuates our dissolution? And between this wretched beginning and this loathsome end, what an intolerable middle! St. Thomas, dispassionately regarding the world, felt himself overwhelmed by that vast lump of inert matter, that perpetual procession of sordid trivialities, that vain coagulation of desires, of disappointments, of disgusts, of hopes that forever languish, and of endeavours that for ever fail. What a disreputable mixture of hypocrisies and of lusts, of silly sacrifices, of embittered laughter, of blowings of ugly noses, and of droppings of dirty tears! Was it not natural that the saint should turn away in horror? That he should subside at last into the quiet bosom of the Church, and into the hands of Almighty God? Unfortunately, of course, the poor man was a Christian. But Christians may be divided into two classes – those who are Christians, and those who are not; and it is just possible that he may, at the crack of doom, be reckoned among the latter. One can imagine his puzzled, incredulous face. ‘But, my dear friend, surely this is all a mistake – I thought I believed –’ ‘Ah, you thought! Excellent St. Thomas, you thought a lot of things; you thought you were going to heaven; well, in spite of that, you are!’ These two last words were uttered so loudly by the Celestial Porter that, reechoing through the timeless and unextended void, they struck hard upon the ears of my true being, just as my phenomenal one veered round into the great gate with a bag of eggs between its fingers, which it had been buying at Matthews2 for its Sunday breakfast. ‘Who are?’ I could not help murmuring, and

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added mechanically, ‘We are; Eh? What? No? Yes?’ I tripped over my bootlace and fell; the eggs broke upon the cobbles; my hat fell off ; a phenomenal porter laughed; I rose covered with egg and dust; it was a horrible occurrence; I returned to my rooms, and had a complete bath. ‘Can there be any doubt at all’, I found myself still muttering, as I dried my toes, ‘that we are? Of course we are’, I concluded, as I did up my fly-buttons. In my present condition I find it singularly difficult to conduct a connected argument, especially as I can’t help rather feeling that there is very little argument to conduct. If one could only suggest things –! Suggest, for instance, one of those enchanted vistas that seem, in one’s own mind, to open so mysteriously into the very dimmest recesses of all! If one could do that –! But it is not given to everyone to be Mr. Michaelides.3 I shall therefore only attempt to put some sort of question, though I am conscious that, like most questions, an answer to it may appear either utterly unnecessary, or hopelessly impossible to give. The path of wisdom lies midway between a platitude and a paradox; but if I am not Mr. Michaelides, still less am I Mr. Ulysses; and I usually find myself, on these occasions, instead of passing between them, merrily hopping from Scylla to Charybdis, and back again from Charybdis to Scylla. I wish to suppose a case in which it was necessary or highly advisable that I should divulge the nature of the Society to an intelligent phenomenon. This phenomenon must not be a newly-elected brother, for it is my object to exclude the element of personal experience altogether from my considerations. Suppose it be a wife. What I want to know is by what possible means am I to make that lady understand the particular value I put on the Society. It seems inevitable that one of two things must result from all my explanations. She will either think that the Society is simply a Society and that that is all I really think about it, or that it is an elaborate arrangement for perpetuating a most extraordinary form of fatuous delusion. All of us who maintain the slightest pretensions to existence would perceive at once that both these views were completely false. Yet I think we should find it very difficult to know quite what to say when she insisted that we were really nothing more than a set of friends connected by a similarity of tastes, who pretended, for some absurd reasons of our own, to be the only people who really existed. How hard it is to parry such assertions is shown by the notorious fact that many even of us our brothers come almost to believe in them at last, when they are old, and overcome by the continued pressure of a phenomenal world. It is of course impossible to pretend in cold blood that we are the only people who exist, that we have overcome time and space, or even that we love one another. The truth is we are as dirty sordid and as unhappy miserable as other mortals, and that our tempers as bad are possibly rather worse. What, then, am I to say when my wife, after all my detailed and accurate descriptions, insists upon asking in a somewhat aggrieved voice, ‘Well, dear, and then –?’ And then, precisely, what?

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To St. Thomas, my suggestion is, a similar question might be put, and it seems to me he would find just the same sort of difficulty in making an answer. If a fat sensible burgess were to ask him why he had renounced the world, why he had retired to a monastery, and why he now only conversed with the Holy Ghost, what reply could he make which would satisfy the inquirer? Looked at from a common sense point of view his position must indeed appear exaggerated and absurd. You are not the less in the world for being in a stuff y cell; you are not the happier for wearing a hair shirt; and death is relentless, whether you wash or not. In answer, St. Thomas might allege those Christian justifications, in whose truth it was hoped he might, though perhaps unconsciously, not believe; but, putting those on one side, is his case very different from our own? Both he and we find ourselves face to face with questions which we cannot satisfactorily solve. Both he and we seem to be setting a value which we cannot explain on something which no one else can understand. What is this something, this perplexing, this mysterious, something? Are we mad? Or is the rest of the world blind? Or what? If it is true that our case is the same as St. Thomas’s, the solution is of course a very easy one: we are simply religious. And that I believe is what we are. If one looks into it, the whole system of the Society appears curiously analogous to a religious system, clearly is, in fact, a religious system, nothing less and nothing more. The distinctive characteristics of all religions have dogma, ritual, and faith; and dogma, ritual, and faith are the only names that can possibly be given to the inner sanctities of the Society. The theory of true belief and of a phenomenal world is pure dogma, with precisely the quality necessary to dogma – that of untruth. The hearthrug, whales, the curse, all the formalities of a meeting, are simply ritual of the most ordinary type.4 And our faith – have we not faith too, faith in the truth of our dogmas, faith in the society, faith which seems to us to be somehow in need of no rational explanation, faith, which may grow weak or disappear like any other faith, faith without which we know quite well that nobody will ever understand? Such things, though they are not the essence of religion, are important parts of it, and as far as they are concerned it seems clear that the Society may be truly said to be religious. But this does not carry one very far. It would be absurd, for instance, to call the majority of persons who go to Church on Sunday ‘religious’ because they turn to the East during the Creed, and believe in the dogmas of Christianity; and a truly religious person might do none of these things. But what is it without which a truly religious person would cease to be religious at all? My theory is that it is exactly the same thing as that without which a truly apostolic person would cease to be apostolic – I mean an abnormal sense of the true values of things. It may be objected, first, that such an abnormal sense of values cannot be truly said to be the essential part of the religious mind; but I think, if any selection of persons usually considered religious be made – such

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as Socrates, Shelley, and Our Blessed Saviour – it will be seen at once that this abnormal sense is precisely what distinguishes them from other men, and links them with each other. On the other hand, it seems rash to assert that in order to be ‘apostolic’ it is simply necessary to possess this abnormal sense; do we not obviously imply, when we use the term, a certain sort of intellect, and to some extent a certain sort of imagination? I think we generally do; but this intellect, and this imagination, would by themselves clearly not make a man apostolic; it is even conceivable that he might be apostolic without them. But there is to my mind one distinguishing mark which he must possess; he must have, much more than other men, a sense of the true values of things; he must be, in fact, religious. I know the phrase ‘abnormal sense of the true values of things’ is open to many difficulties. One might, I suppose, have an abnormal sense of the true value of a potato; but that would hardly seem to make one religious, or even apostolic. The ambiguity lies in the word abnormal sense: do I mean ‘an unusually acute sensation feeling of the true values goodness of certain things’? or ‘an unusually strong power of making correct judgments of value’? I think I mean both, but the important thing is, I suppose, the feeling. With regard to a potato, it would be quite possible to make a correct judgment of value, but as that value would be exceedingly small, one’s feeling about it could not be acute, and, so far, one would not be religious. One’s religion can really only show itself with things of great value, and it is the acuteness of one’s feelings with regard to these enormous goods that makes one, in my sense, and I think the true sense, ‘religious.’ To feel to the full the vast value of some things: what these goods are That some things have a vast and incalculable value will be admitted by all religious persons; what those things exactly are is the question which divides them, and puts them into the ranks of the different religions. But it is a difference of detail and they will agree in the main as to what roughly the sort of things these are; that some sorts of thought or emotion, for instance, are immeasurably superior to pleasures of the body; and their disagreements will be disagreements of detail only – as to the particular thoughts and emotions of which they predicate this enormous value. St. Thomas was doubtless wrong and we are doubtless right as to the relative values of such feelings as the love of God and the love of man; and to that extent we may consider ourselves more religious – always supposing, of course, that our feelings are as acute as his. But the main point is that he and we possess these feelings, and thereby differ from the rest of the phenomenal world. It is now easy to see why I shall be totally unable to explain the Society to my hypothetical and phenomenal wife. I shall certainly never be able to make her recognise its immense value. If she could recognise it, if she could feel it, then, can there be any doubt, she ought to be elected? She is religious, she is apostolic, she exists.

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Have I been writing platitudes or paradoxes? Have I been reading a paper, or delivering a sermon? Perhaps it doesn’t much matter, though some brothers may think it queer that I of all people should want to be religious. Such a thought would be an empty thought and a fallacy in perception; for, don’t you see? the great beauty of the new religion is that it admits of so much that is varied, and ridiculous, and strange. Have we not found out, we of the new religion, the art of being holy with a scoff, of penetrating the secret places with an obscenity, of elevating the host, so to speak, upon a foundation of intolerable puns? We have learnt to do this – and more. But there are moments when even we grow weary and impatient, when even we forget, when even we seem to believe no longer. What is there, after all, to believe in? What an absurdity to talk of real existence, when the only thing that is clear about us is our density, and our incapacity is all that really makes us different from the phenomenal world! Our ritual is too holy to touch, and our whales are too nasty to eat! We are brothers, and we perpetually quarrel; we are friends, and we are for ever cold! Such, in these moments, appear the impediments of the flesh, cruel and insurmountable barriers guarding from us for ever the most cherished of our visions, and our most beautiful dreams. But, if we have faith, if, like children, we tell ourselves day and night, till we believe them, those mysterious stories which we know are mystically true, if we remember that such things can never be explained, but that, in spite of all, they are infinitely and ineffably the best, then we shall once more triumph, then we shall soar again above the Empyrean, then, ecstatic and eternal, we shall be, we who have travailed much, who have sought, and who have miraculously attained.

SHALL WE BE MISSIONARIES?

The title of this essay suggests a continuation of the religious theme that runs through several earlier essays. It was a long-standing Apostolic tradition, however, that papers need not address the question determined by vote at an earlier meeting; and Strachey begins with a curt dismissal of the thought of religion: ‘This is not, of course, the question I want to discuss. I am sure we shall never be missionaries, and never ought to be’ (below, p. 77). The topic of ‘Shall We Be Missionaries?’ is not religion but imperialism, and Strachey wrote it while he was working on his dissertation on Warren Hastings. He asks two questions in his opening paragraphs: ‘What … do those missionaries mean who call themselves missionaries of Empire?’ and What … do various persons mean by declaring that these gentlemen of great distinction [the governors of imperial dependencies] are thieves, vagabonds, and murderers, that they are abominably corrupt, and that nothing could be more wicked than conquering neighbouring states except sending expeditions to the tops of mountains? (below, p. 77)

Then, after recalling a number of probably fictional conversations with ‘several humble missionaries of Empire’, and dissatisfied with the reasons they give for their enthusiasm, he ‘only natural[ly]’ considers the question of the possible moral justification for imperialism by examining it under a lens provided by Principia Ethica (below, pp. 77, 78). G. E. Moore is as unhelpful as the imperialists themselves, however, and Strachey offers a series of reflections on the ethics of imperialism from what appears to be, finally, a sympathetic perspective. He describes the British empire as incommensurable with the Roman – ‘we are not the heralds of a great civilisation; we are merely policemen, and railway-makers and benevolent merchants … We have no sufficient reason for wishing England to conquer the whole world’ (below, p. 79). And yet, despite the actual shortcomings of the British empire, Strachey sympathizes with the idea of it; he associates intellectual improvement with a government policy ‘aimed at our own aggrandisement’, and concludes, ‘If anything is proved by history it is that civili-

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sation without activity’ – the ‘utopia’ of Little Englanders – ‘produces a state of things only less intolerable than barbarism with it’ (below, p. 80). Critics have been unusually divided on the meaning and purpose of this essay. Is it a justification for imperialism written by a defender of Warren Hastings and a member of a prominent nineteenth-century imperial family? Is it an ironic critique of the ethics of imperialism by the future author of Eminent Victorians? Does it fall somewhere between these poles? Holroyd calls it simply ‘an attack on imperialism’.1 Rosenbaum argues that this paper ‘displays a noticeable diminishment of the imperial argument for civilisation that Strachey had followed elsewhere’.2 Merle points out only that it considers the usefulness of Principia Ethica in addressing the question of the moral desirability or undesirability of imperialism.3 However, at the other extreme from Holroyd, Taddeo, unwilling to grant an ironic impulse, asserts that in this essay ‘Strachey … articulated his theories on the advantages of empire’.4 It is difficult and perhaps impossible to determine from this essay alone precisely where Strachey stands on the question of the social and intellectual benefits and of the moral goodness of imperialism. But it is worth considering two strong echoes that, together, lend some support to Taddeo’s unconventional position. First, ‘Shall We Be Missionaries?’ represents a further effort to wrestle, as in ‘Should We Have Elected Conybeare?’, with tensions between action and contemplation, the merely phenomenal and the real worlds. Strachey seems to tend towards the life of action and, therefore, towards empire, and away from the life of intellectual pursuits which he associates with a complacent Little Englandism. Second, this essay echoes the embrace of action in ‘Christ or Caliban?’ and its own echo of H. G. Wells, whose effete Eloi are unfit for survival in a world governed by evolutionary struggle. ‘What’, Strachey asks in his closing sentences, is to become of us – self-conscious, morbid, indecent, refined, hypersensitive, creatures – if we can’t sometimes rush out into the backwoods, and wrestle with the savages? Are we deliberately to cut off our own opportunity for healthy exercise, because we are anxious to spend all our time in loving one another? (below, p. 80)

Does this essay evince Strachey’s straightforward belief, as Taddeo would have it, in the goodness of imperialism, or does it suggest, as Holroyd and Rosenbaum think, a definite hostility to imperialism, ironically expressed? Strachey strikes no balance here; as in his preface to Eminent Victorians, his purpose may be not to propose a solution, but rather to expose the terms of debate. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 164. Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury, pp. 135–6. Merle, Lytton Strachey, pp. 103–4, 111–12. J. A. Taddeo, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian (New York: Haworth Press/Harrington Park Press, 2002), p. 56.

This is not, of course, the question I want to discuss. I am sure we shall never be missionaries, and never ought to be. ‘Un enthousiaste ignorant’, our brother Turgot Condorcet says ‘est la plus des bêtes féroces’;1 and missionaries certainly come under the category. We are all of us so very ignorant that whenever we are enthusiastic, it seems to me we are skimming dangerously near the category ourselves. It is obvious that we are principally ignorant about what we mean. Let us try to find out what we mean, and then, when we have found out, let us throw up our hats as high as we can – if there is anything to throw them up about. What, for instance, do those missionaries mean who call themselves missionaries of Empire? Mr. Rudyard Kipling is a missionary of Empire; he has devoted his life to the cause, he spends eight hours a day in composing in writing works which will spreading the light, and he makes 60,000 pounds a year; but what does he mean? There are other more mysterious persons problems. A certain large Empire has several dependencies: these dependencies are governed by excellent gentlemen [illeg.] gentlemen of great distinction; these gentlemen of great distinction find it necessary, for the protection of the dependencies, to advise the large Empire to conquer a neighbouring state, or to send an expedition to the top of a mountain. What, I am anxious to learn, do various persons mean by declaring that these gentlemen of great distinction are thieves, vagabonds, and murderers, that they are abominably corrupt, and that nothing could be more wicked than conquering neighbouring states except sending expeditions to the tops of mountains? I am terrified, when I read some newspapers, to think of the horrible enormities which have been committed by these gentlemen of great distinction, I am scandalised, when I read others, at the degraded and mean wallowing manoeuvres so constantly practised by their detractors; and I wonder what it means. I tried to discover the views of several humble missionaries of Empire; but I was not very successful. ‘Why are you an Imperialist?’ I asked the first. ‘Because I believe that nothing is so good for a man’, he replied, ‘as Imperialism; it braces the moral tone. Look at Rhodes; did you ever see a Frenchman like Rhodes?’2 The argument seemed unanswerable, so I passed on a little disheartened. ‘Why do you think the Empire is a good thing?’ I asked the next missionary. ‘Because I believe the lower races have need of us’, was his reply. ‘It is our duty to govern the lower races. Take up the –’3 But before he could finish his sentence I was out of earshot. ‘Why do you believe in Imperialism?’ I again inquired. ‘Because I believe in freedom’, was his answer. ‘If we don’t keep up our Empire, we’ll lose our wealth; if we’re not rich, how can we have a navy? If we didn’t have a navy London would

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be occupied by the Russians in a week. And then where would our freedom be, I should like to know?’ It was a wonderful piece of ratiocination, and I could only gasp out in answer, ‘But why do you believe in freedom?’ ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘freedom is the sole good.’ I was beginning to feel a little weak when I tackled the fourth missionary. In answer to my usual question, he said ‘I am an Imperialist because I believe the Teutonic races are bound to win. The Teutons are the only people whose average birth-rate is greater than two per female; and it is clear that no race whose birth-rate is two or less than two can possibly increase. Now the average Teuton birth-rate is two point two for every female; therefore the Teutons must win in the long run, and I am an Imperialist.’ I was horrified at the endless vistas of perplexity he opened up, and hurried on to the last missionary. ‘I want to paint the map red’ was his answer, and I fainted. It was only natural that after that I should turn for comfort and consolation to Moore’s book. It is one of the characteristics of that work that it deludes you with hopes of being able to solve every problem, and finally informs you that the solution of every problem is already known. His theory of ‘good as a means’ must, at first sight, convince any reader that it is the key to all discussions about what actions are proper to be performed; those, of course, which will produce the greatest amount of good. That is the obvious solution of every problem in practical life, and it leaves one exactly where one was before. One always knew that one ought not to commit murder; but ought one to run away with one’s neighbour’s wife? To that question ordinary morality replies in a most uncertain voice; and so, of course, does Moore. Exactly the same difficulty meets one in relation to the ethics of international politics. I believe, indeed, that some Englishmen do sincerely hold that if England conquered the whole world the greatest possible amount of good would be produced. If that were true we should at any rate have something to go upon. Nor is it an absolutely absurd proposition. It would be generally admitted that the Roman Empire did a great deal more good than harm; and that the rule of the English in India is analogous to that of the Romans in Europe. It is true that the whole world is not in the condition of India, yet It might be maintained with some show of reason that the rest of the world would be better governed if they were governed by the English than if they were governed by themselves or by anyone else. And isn’t good government the necessary condition for the highest sorts of goods? And does it matter who it is that governs so long as the highest sorts of goods are produced? For forms of government let fools contest; Whate’er is best administered is best.4

But a million obvious considerations, on which it is unnecessary to dwell, at once expose the vanity of such speculations. Our Empire cannot be properly compared to the Roman Empire, even in India; we are not the heralds of a great

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civilisation; we are merely policemen, and railway-makers and benevolent merchants; and there can be very little doubt that if we did succeed in conquering Europe, we should be obliged to govern it in such a way as would effectually prevent diminish the production of the highest sorts of goods. It seems therefore clear that we have no sufficient reason for wishing England to conquer the whole world. And the same thing, of course, may be said of every other nation. Nor does there appear to be any principle of conduct for a nation to adopt which more than any other may be rationally supposed to lead to the best possible result. There is no use in consulting ordinary international morality, for it is perfectly vague. It refuses to tell us whether we ought or ought not to conquer the Transvaal, just as ordinary private morality refuses to tell us whether we ought or ought not to run away with Mrs. Smith. Upon consideration, I disavow everything that I have previously said and fling myself into the arms of Principia Ethica. The whole question simply resolves itself into this: government produces certain effects upon nations, and in any particular case we have to ask ourselves, will the effects be better under our government than another? Now it is quite obvious that no one allows that, in every case, a nation would be better for governing itself: the actual condition of a country inhabited by cannibals addicted to all the most loathsome vices imaginable would certainly be better under the firm rule of a foreign nation composed entirely of apostolic persons than if the cannibals ruled themselves. The rights of nationality are therefore chimaeras when they are employed in politics to controvert all Imperialism. If the total state of the Transvaal is better now than it would be under Mr. Kruger5 and the surplus of good is sufficient to outweigh the evil of war, then everyone who is an Imperialist on this question and for these reasons is right, and it is futile to tell him that freedom is a good thing. And the same argument ought to be applied to all cases. If one really has come to the conclusion, as I have, that the total state of the world would be better if England ruled Germany and Russia and Constantinople and America and Spain and Portugal, then if he is Prime Minister or Secretary of Foreign Affairs and has weighed the chances of defeat of the direct evils of war, he ought without hesitation to send ultimata to Berlin and St. Petersburg, to Washington, Lisbon, and Madrid.6 But not only does it seem to be true that the whole state of the world would be better if we consistently aimed at our own aggrandisement; it appears to me also to be the case that such a system of policy would tend to the improvement of our own minds. I know that opponents of Imperialism hold a diametrically opposite opinion; indeed I believe that it is the idea that an active foreign policy necessarily prevents the development of the highest goods which is really at the bottom of most of the moral indignation of intelligent Little Englanders.7 What they appear to want is a condition of affairs in which everyone will sit down quietly and cultivate the highest goods as hard as they possibly can. Their utopia

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is an enormous Cambridge a judicious mixture of Cambridge and McTaggart’s heaven.8 But what an unattainable ideal! If anything is proved by history it is that civilisation without activity produces a state of things only less intolerable than barbarism with it. What is to become of us – self-conscious, morbid, indecent, refined, hypersensitive, creatures – if we can’t sometimes rush out into the backwoods, and wrestle with the savages? Are we deliberately to cut off our own opportunity for healthy exercise, because we are anxious to spend all our time in loving one another? Our love, of course, will simply end in copulation, just as my papers do.

THE ETHICS OF THE GOSPELS

This paper, Strachey’s longest, most patient and complex early treatment of a religious theme – equalled in later years only by his examination of the theological cum political intricacies of Papal Infallibility in ‘Cardinal Manning’ – is described by Rosenbaum as an ‘elaborate analysis of the moral teachings of Christ’; he also judges it ‘one of Strachey’s better analytical papers’.1 Holroyd offers a fuller summary and a more detailed interpretation, emphasizing Strachey’s polished style, ironic mode and argumentative method in this attack on Christianity which delighted some and outraged others, and which in later years he was sometimes prevailed upon to deliver again. It is a painstaking and well-finished piece of work, but its assumed tone of detached clinical inquiry is very obviously sham – a stylistic device employed so as to exaggerate the devastating effect and findings of the paper. Its main aim purports to be an impartial consideration of the value of Christ’s teaching, chiefly through a detailed examination of his commandments. By means of a rigidly austere, literal interpretation of meaning, and by ingeniously setting scripture against scripture, he leads his audience logically and infallibly on, deeper and deeper into a bewildering tangle of obscurities and confusions from which it can only reasonably conclude that Christ, as represented in the Bible, put forward ‘no statement of principles upon which feelings and actions ought to be guided.’2

This paper, as such, had apparently been gestating for several months before Strachey read it to the Sunday Essay Society on 19 February 1905. The previous April he had adumbrated his thoughts on Christian ethics – or on ethics considered in relation to Christianity – to Leonard Woolf, in the letter in which he confesses he had found the wherewithal to read Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa only ‘by intermittent doses of the New Testament’. He explains: My theory of Christ is that he merely preached a doctrine of ends, and I now think that the secret of the Xtian religion is that it entirely disregards means of every sort, and gives itself up to the cultivation of ends which are hopelessly inadequate even if they were possible, without telling one how they are to be got. The result of course is complete anarchy.3

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This statement of the indeterminate ethical conclusions to be drawn from the New Testament represents a summary of the core argument of ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’. To take a longer view, this argument had been developing for some years. As early as 1900, in ‘A Sermon Preached before the Midnight Society’, and almost two years before he met G. E. Moore, Strachey had begun independently articulating his ethical views, which later harmonized well with Moore’s, in the context of religion, and in direct opposition to Christianity. Just over a month before he delivered ‘Ethics’, he asked Leonard Woolf, ‘Are we the Voltaires of the future – freers of the emotions, as he freed the intellect?’4 At that time, Strachey was steeped in Voltaire; he was writing an article, ‘Voltaire’s Tragedies’, which had been commissioned by G. M. Trevelyan for the Independent Review where it was published in April 1905. In the final paragraph of that essay, Strachey argues that, as a dramatist, the ideological circumstances Voltaire inhabited had hampered the full expression of his attitudes in drama: it was his misfortune to be clogged by a tradition of decorous restraint … The Classical tradition has to answer for many sins … [I]ts most astonishing one was to have taken – if only for some scattered moments – the sense of the ridiculous from Voltaire.5

Strachey, who revered Voltaire, shared his general outlook on life, modelled his iconoclasm to a great extent on Voltaire’s example and was determined not to be thwarted by any externally imposed demand of ‘decorous restraint’. As a reminder, a print of Voltaire hung near Strachey’s writing desk at Ham Spray House. He also was driven by a Voltairean ‘sense of the ridiculous’, especially in religious matters but also in institutions and persons that claimed transcendent justification for moral principles that, in appealing to Nature, would contemn as perverse any active manifestations of what Strachey believed to be the fundamental ethical commandment or obligation. As he put it in a letter to Maynard Keynes in August 1905, ‘I want to go into the wilderness, or the world, and preach an infinitude of sermons on one text – Embrace one another! It seems to me the grand solution.’6 Strachey finds the Gospels wanting in this respect, as they ‘fail to draw any attention whatever to what are probably the two most important classes of goods with which we are acquainted – love or friendship, and the contemplation of beauty’ (below, p. 95). This is an explicitly Moorean critique. But Strachey had another master, too. ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’ represents his fullest attempt to écraser l’infâme of Christian metaphysics as the basis of ethical practice. In this, Strachey clearly follows a third influence. The epigraph, from the first-century bc Roman philosopher Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), suggests the attractiveness to Strachey of Epicurean philoso-

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phy’s preeminent attack on ‘religio’ – or religious superstition. In William Ellery Leonard’s translation, these lines read: I fear perhaps thou deemest that we fare An impious road to realms of thought profane; But ’tis that same religion oftener far Hath bred the foul impieties of men. (ll. 81–4)7

In subsequent lines, Lucretius points to the episode of Agamemnon’s divinely inspired, inhuman sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia – ‘With solemn rites and hymeneal choir / … Making his child a sacrificial beast’ (ll. 99, 102) – as evidence of ‘the crimes to which Religion leads’ (l. 104), and in support of his opening observation that ‘human kind / Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed / Before all eyes beneath Religion’ (ll. 1–3). Holroyd argues that Strachey’s Cambridge-period essays, despite their frequent ‘sentimental fallacies and inconsistencies’, are ‘saved … from ultimate absurdity by the unanalysed force of feeling which thrusts its way through every line – a belief in the superabundant importance of the individual, his dignity and his rights’. But it is misleading to see the distinctive quality of ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’ as a stylistic one; to locate the significance of ‘The Historian of the Future’ in its style; or to qualify Strachey’s ‘force of feeling’ in these essays as ‘unanalysed’, in order to defend the broader assertion that he ‘was not really interested in religious, philosophical or even historiographical theory’.8 To make this claim is to ignore the fact that in these Sunday Essay Society papers Strachey develops, on the one hand, a patient, detailed analysis of fundamental problems in historiography and, on the other, a restrained but trenchantly ironic analysis of basic questions in Christian ethics. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury, p. 134. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 142. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 29. Ibid., p. 46. Strachey, Literary Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1949), p. 119. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, pp. 74–5. See Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, trans. W. E. Leonard (New York: Everyman, 1921). Holroyd, The Unknown Years, pp. 163–4.

Illud in his rebus vereor, ne forte rearis Impia te rationis inire elementa, viamque Indugredi sceleris: Quod contra, saepius olim Religio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta. (Lucr. I. 81–4)1

The tenets of the Christian religion may be held in many different ways; and this fact adds considerably to the confusion which usually arises whenever those tenets are discussed. The doctrine of the Virgin Birth, for instance, must always be a mysterious one; but its mystery is decidedly increased when one learns, from equally respectable authorities, on the one hand that it is, and on the other hand that it is not, implied by the Divinity of Christ. It is, indeed, easy to observe that all such differences fall under two main heads of religious opinion, which we may call the Orthodox and the Advanced. Both parties may justly lay claim to one common characteristic; they both, as we know, rejoice in the attributes of childhood; the distinction between them may, however, be clearly noticed in their clothes. The garments of the followers of Orthodoxy are nothing if not well fitted. The little limbs are neatly and comfortably covered; the little jackets are admirably cut; the little knicker-bockers hang to perfection. But if we turn our eyes towards the children who have reached the Advanced Class, a very different spectacle meets our gaze. What are we to say when we are confronted by so many healthy young bodies rigged out in apparel which they have only too obviously outgrown? What are we to say of those expanding chests buttoned firmly down under the waistcoats of the year before last? Or of those ungainly wrists? Or of the shameful exhibition of those exposed and naked thighs? – May we not suggest to these growing lads that they should follow our example as soon as possible, and go into trousers? It is not, however, the purpose of this paper to consider any of the questions upon which, at the present moment, Christendom is divided and perplexed.2 It will attempt, on the contrary, to discuss one of the very few subjects upon which the whole of Christendom is agreed. Those who are orthodox and those who are advanced, High churchmen, low churchmen, broad churchmen, dissenters, members of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, members of the Established Church of Scotland, members of the United Free Church of Scotland, members of the Free Church of Scotland, members of the Greek Church, members of the Church of Rome, those who are divided from each other for ever in the articles

– 85 –

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those who believe in the inspiration of the Bible, those who believe in the inspiration of the Church up to the year 600 A. D.,4 those who believe in all the miracles,5 those who believe in six of the miracles, and those who believe in only four – all these persons are agreed upon this important point – that, the best and truest moral teaching that exists is the moral teaching of Christ in the domain of moral teaching, Christ reigns absolutely supreme. The main object of this paper is to consider the value of the moral teaching of Christ. It commonly occurs that the question of the value of this teaching in itself is either connected or confused with two other somewhat different questions, namely, (1) the effect for good or for evil which Christ’s teaching has had upon subsequent generations, and (2) the extent to which it is carried out at the present day. Upon neither of these topics shall I at present enlarge. There are two (further) points on which it will be well to avoid misunderstandings. In the first place, I have referred to the moral teaching of Christ. The phrase is ambiguous, and I shall make no attempt to discriminate between the doctrines of Christ himself, and those reported as his in the four Gospels. Putting aside the invidiousness of such a task, it seems clear that it is the ethical system embodied in the Gospels, and not some other ethical system, which must be regarded as forming the true basis of Christian morals. Secondly, I have avoided all reference to biblical commentaries and other works of an explanatory nature. The Gospels, it is hardly necessary to point out, are not addressed to an esoteric body of learned persons, but to the ordinary man, and it is from his standpoint that this paper will try to discuss them. My ignorance of everything that all previous writers have written upon this subject is indeed as complete as that of the new-born babe; but this is to be counted to me, not as a matter for reprobation, but as a merit. ‘I thank thee, O Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, that thou didst hide these things from the wise and understanding, and didst reveal them unto babes: yea, Father, for so it was well-pleasing in thy sight’ (Matthew 11:25–6; Luke 10:21). There can be no doubt that all the most striking and novel teaching of the gospels is based upon the recognition of one important fact – that the value of individuals is to be judged, not by their actions, but by their states of mind. What then are the main ethical doctrines laid down in the Gospels? In other words, which is the great commandment in the law? To this question it is fortunately possible to provide an explicit answer. ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hangeth the whole law, and the prophets’ (Matthew 22:37–40). To love God, therefore, is the first duty

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of man. The precise significance of this precept it is, indeed, a little difficult to analyse; but all that need concern us now is the fact that it enjoins us to have a feeling of love towards some person, or persons, whom we believe to exist. In this connection, the actual existence of God is a matter of no importance. We can love God, whether he exist or no, so long as we believe he does; but, directly our belief ceases, our love must cease too, even though God may continue to exist. Everyone, therefore, who is unable to believe in God is unable to obey the first and great commandment but, what nobody can do is to love God without believing in his existence. The moment that our belief ceases, whether rightly or wrongly, at that moment our love must cease as well. Thus everyone who is unable to believe in God is unable to obey the great and first commandment of the Gospels. Only less important, we are told, than the love we should bear towards God is the love we should bear towards our neighbour; and indeed it is upon this latter subject that the most distinctive pronouncements of Christian Ethics are to be found and indeed to judge from the number and variety of the pronouncements to be found in the Gospels upon this latter topic, a careless reader might well fall into the error of supposing that it was actually the most important of all. At any rate it is clearly true that the ethical doctrines which we all think of as most distinctively Christian are those that are concerned with the feelings which a man ought to have towards his fellow men. Unfortunately, however, the more one examines into the precise nature of these doctrines, the more difficult it becomes to arrive at any exact conclusion as to what it actually is. Those who desire to follow out correctly the teaching of the Gospels upon this most important point will find themselves involved in an number of ever-thickening tangle of obscurities and confusions; and their plight must seem to them all the more deplorable when they remember that they have good reason to believe that any false step in this moral labyrinth may bring them at least into danger of hell fire. ‘And who is my neighbour?’ asked a certain pharisaical lawyer when he was informed that he should love his neighbour as himself. The answer was conveyed in the form of a parable (Luke 10:30). ‘A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho; and he fell among robbers, which both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance a certain priest was going down that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And in like manner a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he was moved with compassion, and came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on them oil and wine; and he set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow he took out two pence, and gave them to the host and said Take care of him.’ ‘Which of these three, thinkest then’, said Christ to the lawyer, ‘proved

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neighbour unto him that fell among robbers?’ ‘He that shewed mercy on him’, was the lawyer’s reply, and such, of course was the only possible answer. The parable had pointed out, in a vivid and unmistakable manner, that a man’s true neighbour is he who helps him in distress; and from this it immediately follows that the maxim ‘Love your neighbour’ can only mean ‘love him who helps you in distress.’ The traveller was not to love the Priest or the Levite – they were not his neighbours; he was to love the good Samaritan, who had taken care of him, and paid twopence for him at the Inn. All this is quite obvious, and there would have been no need to lay any stress upon it, were it not for the fact that Christ himself, in the very same breath, as it were, in which he points this moral, completely contradicts it. ‘Go, and do thou likewise’, he said to the lawyer, meaning that he was to act as the Samaritan had acted. But according to the parable, the Samaritan had shown no love for his neighbour at all. The wounded traveler was certainly not his neighbour; the wounded traveler had not shown mercy on him in any way whatever; in fact we may suppose that the wounded traveler as a jew was in the habit of neglecting and despising Samaritans in general, so that he occupied approximately the same relation towards the Samaritan as the Priest and the Levite occupied towards him. And the whole point of the parable had been to show that the Priest and the Levite were not the neighbours of the wounded traveler. Either, therefore, the Samaritan’s conduct was not an instance of the law that we should love our neighbours, or the definition of neighbour put forward in the parable was utterly mistaken. Doubtless the Samaritan’s action was a praiseworthy one; he had generously assisted somebody who had no claim on him whatever. But, if one wished to hold up such generosity as an example to be followed, would one adopt the method of deliberately pointing out that it is only towards persons who have a claim on one that generosity need be shown? Surely in any other instance such a method of exhortation would be taken as testifying to a gross confusion of mind. But the difficulties of the earnest enquirer after the Narrow Way do not cease here. He has been told first, that his neighbour is the person who shows mercy on him; second, that his neighbour is the person on whom he shows mercy; he is now told that his neighbour is the person who does him an injury. ‘I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you’ (Luke 6:27–8). ‘Lord’, said Peter, ‘how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? until seven times?’ Jesus saith unto him ‘I say not unto thee Until seven times; but Until seventy times seven’ (Matthew 19:21–2). That these precepts are not universally binding must, I think, be clear to every unbiassed reader of the Gospels. But before discussing their truth it may be worth while to glance at the reasons put forward for accepting them.

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In the first place, it is pointed out that the love of enemies is the only form of affection which cannot come under the imputation of being interested. ‘If ye love them that love you, what thank have ye? for even sinners love those that love them. And if you do good to them that do good to you, what thank have ye? for even sinners do the same. And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? even sinners lend to sinners to receive again as much. But love your enemies, and do them good, and lend never despairing.’ The next sentence, however, throws an entirely new light upon the whole question. Do all these things, and ‘your reward shall be great, and ye shall be sons of the Most High’ (Luke 6:32–5). After all, it seems that inducements are not lacking which may make it worth one’s while to love one’s foes. But there are further considerations. We must remember that our own sins are great, so that, from our own point of view, it is most important to maintain the principle of the forgiveness of sins. ‘Judge not, and ye shall not be judged’ (Luke 6:7). Let us condemn no one, let us hush everything up, who knows what might not come out? My dear friend, you leave the court without a stain upon your character. Might I ask you for a testimonial as to mine? This point of view could hardly, perhaps, be called a courageous one; and it seems to have left out of account one somewhat important principle of conduct – justice. The truth is that the maxim ‘Love your enemies’ seems to be based upon the theory that everyone is really equally wicked and equally good. Are there not beams in the eyes of the best of us? What business have we, miserable sinners that we are, to discriminate, to pick and choose, between our fellow miserable sinners? Why, if we love some, should we not love all? We shall be following the divine Example, who ‘maketh his son to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust’ (Matthew 5:45). That we should love everybody, then, our friends and our enemies, the just and the unjust, the good and the wicked, appears to be the interpretation which we must put upon the second great commandment. Further investigation, however, shows that if we adopt this view we are liable to fall into grave error. ‘A new commandment I give unto you’, said Christ to his disciples, ‘that ye love one another’ ( John. 13:34). Now it is clear from the context that this injunction was issued merely to his disciples and to no one else. ‘By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.’ And again ‘If the world hateth you, ye know that it hath hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love its own: but because ye are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you’ ( John 15:18–19). It would be impossible to make a more marked distinction. A rigid line is drawn between the World and the followers of Christ, and it is expressly stated that it is only to the latter that the new commandment applies. The true believer is to love other true believers, and that is all. Within the charmed house of Faith sit the elect;

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the windows are shut, the blinds drawn, the candles lighted; all is happy concord and brotherly love; outside, in the darkness, the World. This view of things is certainly in flagrant contradiction to any theory which tends to obliterate all distinction between the good and the bad. Yet it is supported by a great mass of authority. Who cannot remember a score of metaphors exemplifying the two eternal classes into which all humanity is divided? – The sheep and the goats, the wheat and the tares, the wise virgins and the foolish virgins, the wedding-guests who had previous engagements and those who had not. It is true that the impartiality of God was put forward as a reason for our own impartiality. He sends his rain on the just no less than on the unjust; should not we, therefore, love sinners and righteous alike? But, if we look into the matter, the impartiality of God begins to wear a somewhat doubtful complexion. What happened, we should like to know, to the goats, and the tares, and the foolish virgins, and the guest without a garment? Really, if we are to follow the divine Example, it is impossible not to observe that there are plenty of excellent precedents for laying upon one side the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins. Nor is it only in what relates to the after life that we find tendencies of this nature in the divine mind. The very teacher who laid down so clearly and forcibly that we should turn the other cheek to the smiter showed just as clearly and forcibly that he realised the limitations of his own injunction. No one, surely, would deny that, on a great many occasions, he gave as good as he got. ‘I say unto you love your enemies.’ Certainly; but let us turn over a few pages, and what do we find? ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inwardly are full of dead bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but inwardly ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye build the sepulchers of the prophets, and garnish the tombs of the righteous, and say If we had been in the days of our fathers, we should not have been partakers with them of the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye witness to yourselves, that ye are sons of them that slew the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how shall ye escape the judgment of hell? Therefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes, some of them shall ye kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city: that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of Abel the righteous to the blood of Zachariah son of Barachiah, whom ye slew between the sanctuary and the altar. Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation’ (Matthew 23:27–36). Did Christ love the Pharisees? I hope I have now justified my assertion that with regard to the important question as to what sort of feelings a man ought to have towards his fellow men,

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the teaching of the Gospels is obscure and confused. It would indeed be absurd to assert that the whole of this teaching is devoid of value. Doubtless we need to have it impressed upon us forcibly that we ought to feel grateful to those who are kind to us, and that we ought to go out of our way to help others, whether they are kind to us or not and that we ought to love the good and the wicked equally, and that we ought to love the good more than the wicked, and that we ought not to hate our enemies, and that we ought to hate our enemies. These are all important truths; but they inevitably suggest a question the answer of which would be more important still: – how are we to know when one of these precepts rather than another is to be applied? If my enemy hits me in the face, am I to hit him back, or am I to forgive him? If a man commits a series of wicked, low, mean, and cowardly actions, am I to despise that man, or am I not? These are questions of the utmost practical importance; they are ones to which I should naturally expect answers to be forthcoming from any work purporting to contain a complete code of morality. I consult that work, and I find, after a great deal of laborious investigation, that it is proper for me sometimes to do the one thing and sometimes the other; and that is all. It would of course be exorbitant to expect a catalogue of all possible circumstances, with a list of the proper feelings and actions annexed. All I ask is for a clear statement of the principles upon which my feelings and actions ought to be guided. Such a statement is denied me in the Gospels, and I must search for it elsewhere. ‘Consult your conscience’, remarks my religious friend, ‘when you are in a moral difficulty.’ Willingly; for doubtless my conscience will help me some of the way towards the right conclusion. But I thought it was the Gospels that you wished me to consult. There is one other question of interest regarding the second great commandment. Hitherto our difficulty has been to put a clear and consistent interpretation on the word ‘neighbour’; but what is the precise meaning which we are to attach to the word ‘love’? This is certainly an intricate point; but one fact seems to stand out plainly – Christ did not mean by ‘love’ either that passionate emotion which finds its truest expression in lyrical poetry, or that intimate form of relationship which is sometimes enjoyed by a small body of friends. The very essence of the neighbourly love of the Gospels is its catholicity: a good Christian will love his greengrocer. But the tangles of Neaera’s hair6 demand a very different sort of affection, and it would be no compliment to one’s best friend to assure him that one loved him as one loved – let us say – Elijah Johnson.7 But, if one were to ask the question – what is, after all, the best form of love that one human being can have for another? – would not the answer be that it is precisely this love which is only given to one or two, and not that larger indiscriminate kind of love which embraces indifferently whole households and streets and post-office directories? If this is so, it is surely a serious omission in the teaching of the Gospels that,

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when so much is said of love in general, the best kind of love should be left out of account altogether. I have been hitherto considering the attitude of the Gospels towards those states of mind which relate directly to other persons. Something must be said as to its attitude towards other states of mind of a more general nature – such as humility, innocence, and unworldliness. The great emphasis which is laid upon the value of humility is perhaps the most striking and original part of the Gospels’ teaching. In the first place we find the important truth distinctly recognised that a man’s individual worth depends, not so much on his circumstances or his actions, as upon the goodness or badness of his states of mind. You may be a beggar or a publican or sinner, and yet you may enter the kingdom of heaven, while the cruel plutocrat and the hypocritical observer of the law find themselves doomed to eternal torments. In the second place, it is constantly pointed out that by far the best states of mind which it is possible to have are the humble ones. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven … Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’ Etc. (Matthew 5:3, 5). ‘Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 18:4). It is, in fact, only these sorts of feelings – the humble, the innocent, the child-like – which receive systematic and direct encouragement in the Gospels. (I put on one side love of and belief in God.) Feelings of pride and scorn and wisdom are often spoken of as being essentially bad. We are, therefore, brought face to face with the same sort of difficulty as that which met us in the case of neighbourly love. On the one hand we are told that humility is the only feeling which is really worth having, and that pride is wicked. On the other hand we have (1) our own clear perception that pride is often an admirable quality, and (2) this perception substantiated in a remarkable way by the conduct of Christ himself. Thus, to take a single instance, we find him addressing the Jews with the following language: – ‘Why do you not understand my speech? Even because you cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and stood not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own; for he is a liar and the father thereof. But because I say the truth, ye believe me not. Which of you convicteth me of sin? If I say truth, why do you not believe me? He that is of God heareth the words of God: for this cause ye hear them not, because ye are not of God. The Jew answered and said unto him, Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil’ ( John 8:43–8)? Thus we must either suppose that Christ mistakenly attributed a unique value to humility, or that he recognised that some proud states of mind might be equally good, but refrained from saying so, from a wish to lay special stress on the value of humbleness. In the latter case we are still left without a clue

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as to the answer to the important practical question – When ought we to be humble, and when ought we to be proud? A difficulty of a somewhat different nature arises over the praise which we find so often bestowed upon innocence. Is the innocence which we are to seek the innocence of a child who has never known evil, or the innocence of a man who has come scathless through temptation? The distinction is surely obvious; yet it is nowhere clearly pointed out in the Gospels. ‘Of such is the kingdom of heaven’, Christ said, pointing to a little child (Matthew 19:14). This seems to settle the question; but then we find ‘Verily I say unto you, Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven.’ And this clearly refers to a state of repentance after sin. Again, it is pointed out with a great variety of illustration, that ‘there shall be joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth more than over ninety and nine righteous persons which need no repentance’ (Luke 15:7). Yet we must remember that we are commanded to pray that we may not be brought into temptation. The question is important, because it is a very real problem whether it is best to seek to avoid temptation and thus maintain the innocence of childhood intact, or to face the dangers of temptation in the hope of gaining a truer excellence. Though most people would, I think, consider the latter course to be the best to pursue, it seems at least provable that this was not the opinion of Christ. The best way to avoid temptation and to maintain a childlike innocence is to shut oneself off as much as possible from the world and all its wickedness. Is not this precisely what Christ would have us do? At any rate the one part of the Gospels’ teaching which is open to no sort of doubt is that part which denies all value to the world and worldly things. Here at least there is no room for doubt. No language can be found strong enough to picture the abominable nature of the world and everything in it; no punishments can be found bad enough for worldly men. What, then, are we to understand by these phrases? What things are preeminently of the world? – Clearly all luxury, all gorgeous raiment, all splendour and display, all great palaces, all noble banquetings, all the glories and decorations of life. The whole spirit of the Renaissance, for instance, was worldly. and so was the Eighteenth Century. What would Christ have said, one would like to know, to Lord Bacon’s Essay of building and of gardens?8 Of the whole alleys that you are to set of burnet, wild-thyme, and water-mints, and such sweet-smelling herbs ‘to have the pleasure when you walk or tread’? Or when he read of the ‘kind of fountain which we may call a bathing pool;’ that ‘it may admit much curiosity and beauty; wherewith we will not trouble ourselves: as, that the bottom be finely paved, and with images; the sides likewise; and withal embellished with coloured glasses, and such things of luster; encompassed also with fine rails of low statues.’ Should we not have speedily heard some mention of wailing and gnashing of teeth? ‘Pyramids, arches, obelisks, the wild enormities of ancient magnanimity’9 – all these things alas! are of

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the world. The statesman, too, is certainly a worldly person; and those feelings which take delight in the mere contemplation of natural material objects or of human things apart from any spiritual significance they may have. ‘Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests’10 – must not the enjoyment of such things as these be set down as worldly? At any rate such feelings find no place in the moral scheme of the Gospels. There is no mention of them; and here we come at once to what is perhaps the most glaring of the faults in the Gospels’ teaching – the complete failure to indicate the great value of aesthetic states of mind. The love of beauty is never once so much as alluded to. Nor, indeed, is the love of scientific truth. It does not, however, require any great acumen in a reader of the Gospels to observe that neither of these passions was very strong in the minds of their compilers. Among feelings which are positively bad, it is necessary to mention, besides worldly ones pure and simple, the feeling of unbelief. A very large part of the Gospels is taken up by fulminations against unbelievers; it is pointed out over and over again that unbelievers can never be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven; they are confounded with the most atrocious criminals in an eternity of torture. ‘I said therefore unto you, ye shall die in your sins: for except that ye believe that I am he, ye shall die in your sins’ ( John 13:24). ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves’ ( John 6:53). ‘This is a hard saying’, replied Christ’s disciples, ‘who can hear it?’ Passing from goods and evils considered as ends in themselves, I wish now to give a brief glance towards the Gospels’ teaching with regard to the question as to what actions are calculated to produce the greatest amount of good and the least amount of evil. Besides a general approval of the moral code contained in the Decalogue, the following points appear to be of special interest in this part of the Gospels’ teaching. (1) No clear distinction is made between good as ends and means. (2) The extreme value put upon some good states of mind (e.g. repentance) seems to give a dangerous encouragement to wrong actions. While the doctrine embodied in the precept ‘Judge not, and ye shall not be judged’ strikes at the root of the administration of justice. A remarkable instance of this occurs in the case of the woman taken in adultery ( John 8:1–11). Christ’s injunction to the scribes and Pharisees – ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’ – seems more admirable as a tactical move in the flying fight of repartees and objurgation which was always going on between him and his enemies than as a serious contribution to the ethics of public law. The fact – if it was a fact – that the scribes and Pharisees were not altogether without sin does not appear to be really relevant to the question whether there should be a legal

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penalty for adultery. And the dilemma inevitably suggests itself – If Christ was actually of opinion that adultery should not be punished, why did he not say so? If he was of opinion that it ought to be punished, why did he invent repartees in order to prevent the punishment? Only when he was left alone with the woman did he observe that he did not condemn her. But for him, after all, perhaps, that was not so difficult; he was not her husband. (3) The social doctrines of the Gospels are simply socialistic. (4) Good works are actually identified with belief in Christ. ‘Work not for the meat which perisheth, but for the meat which abideth unto eternal life … They said therefore unto him, What must we do, that we may work the works of God? Jesus answered and said unto them This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.’ Whether we should not perhaps regard the whole of our life on earth as a mere means toward the life hereafter is a doubtful question. But it is certainly curious to note that upon this view the whole of Christian morality becomes frankly hedonistic. The worthless worldly things which the virtuous have scorned during their lives, they will be rewarded with in the Kingdom of Heaven. ‘Verily I say unto you There is no man that hath left home or brethren, or sisters, or mother, or father, or children, or lands, for my sake and for the Gospels sake, but he shall receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters and mothers, and children, and lands …’ (Mark 10:29–30). It is of course possible that such a pronouncement should be taken allegorically; certainly when we are told that one of the rewards of the true believer will be that ‘out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water’ ( John 7:38), the obvious truth that this phenomenon is not limited to the case of the true believer, leads us to look for a metaphorical interpretation with which, indeed, we are immediately supplied. But we are supplied with no metaphorical interpretation of the houses and the sisters and the mothers which await the good man in the Kingdom of Heaven. We can only guess. To sum up, we find that, while the Gospels fail to recognise or to indicate clearly the most important and far-reaching of all ethical distinctions – that between good as an end and good as a means, they at the same fail to draw any attention whatever to what are probably the two most important classes of goods with which we are acquainted – love or friendship, and the contemplation of beauty. In place of these, emphasis is laid in the first place on a feeling which cannot exist unless a particular form of metaphysical belief is held at the same time – the feeling, that is to say, of Love of God; and it is asserted with the utmost force that the inability to hold this particular form of metaphysical belief constitutes in itself a sin whose gravity can hardly be exaggerated. Secondly, attention is drawn to the high value of certain states of mind, such as charity, forbearance, humility, unworldliness and innocence, upon which it is provable that sufficient stress had never before been laid. But the merit of fully recognising the impor-

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tance of these virtues is seriously diminished by the exaggerated, and one may almost say perverse, method in which they are enjoined. Not only is the statement of their nature painfully confused, but they are insisted upon with a degree of intensity which undoubtedly implies that the class of states of mind of which they form a part is the only class of importance from the ethical standpoint. But the slightest consideration is sufficient to make it obvious that feelings of an entirely opposite nature, – feelings of pride, of knowledge, of self-reliance, of scorn and hatred of what is bad, of delight in the pomps and splendours of the world – are also of the highest value; and we are constantly reminded of the fact that this is so by the conduct of Christ himself. Finally, the doctrine of means indicated by the Gospels is far from satisfactory. There is one other aspect of the moral teaching of the Gospels which seems to be important. I mean the example presented to us by the conduct of Christ himself. I wish merely to draw attention to a side of Christ’s character which has not, it seems to me, received sufficient attention – I refer to his cruelty. The origin of this trait seems indeed a little difficult to discover. There is no reason to believe that either of Christ’s earthly parents possessed it. It is, however, a striking confirmation of the Dogmas of Christianity – I quote from a University Sermon – that they enable us to account for this characteristic according to the ordinary laws of heredity. Christ’s teaching has often been called the Gospel of pity; but I believe it would be possible to parallel every passage in the Gospels which exhibits a love of pity by a passage which exhibits callousness of heart. As one reads these works, one seems to be perpetually accompanied by imprecations, by fulminations, by wholesale condemnations, by virulent floods of invective, by biting sarcasms, by sentences to death by drowning and burning, by deliverances over to the tormenters, by eternal wailings and infinite gnashings of teeth. The rich man, the Pharisee, the unbeliever, are overwhelmed in the common catastrophe: the fiery gulph of objurgation11 swallows them up. One puts down the book with mingled feelings of terror, of horror, and of relief.

SHALL WE GO THE WHOLE HOG?

‘The phenomenal world oppresses me like an undigested nightmare’, Strachey writes midway through this defence of the Apostolic spirit and of ‘going the whole hog’ in embracing it (below, p. 102). ‘Shall We Go the Whole Hog?’ is also a lecture and a harangue, intended especially for the edification of the newest Apostle, Arthur Hobhouse (1886–1965, in later life a Liberal politician and the architect of the National Parks of England and Wales). He had been elected the week before as a freshman, an unprecedented act in the history of the society. In late 1904, as Michael Holroyd writes, a ‘new star’ entered into Strachey’s firmament of desire and fantasy. Strachey described him to Leonard Woolf: Hobhouse is fair, with his frizzy hair, a good complexion, an arched nose, and a very charming expression of countenance. His conversation is singularly coming on, he talks a good deal, in a somewhat ingenuous way, but his youth is balanced by great cleverness and decided subtlety in conversation. He’s interested in metaphysics and people, he’s not a Christian, and sees quite a lot of jokes. I’m rather in love with him.

So too, it transpired, was Keynes, and a struggle ensued over ‘who should act as sponsor for [the] Apostolic “birth” of the young man whom Strachey called “the Hope of the World”’. In the end, Keynes was victorious, and ‘For two months following the election of Hobhouse, Lytton was consumed with hatred for Keynes. On 25 February 1905, only a week after the election, he launched an extraordinary onslaught upon his friend before the assembled Apostles.’1 That attack comprises the paragraph beginning, ‘Another of my brothers thought that a good deal of the paper was amusing, and very like Strachey’ (below, p. 102). Strachey indirectly but unambiguously addresses several fellow Apostles, Hobhouse, Keynes, Moore and Hugh Owen Meredith, in this paper that in its entirety is very much like Strachey, indeed – even as, in Rosenbaum’s formulation, it ‘contradicts not simply the previous … missionary paper but also the ethical assumptions of the dissertation he was reworking’.2 In its concern to preserve a sharp distinction between the ‘real’ and ‘phenomenal’ worlds, and in its anxiety about the phenomenal world’s threat to the real one as Apostles graduated, ‘took wings’ from the society and went out into the world beyond

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Cambridge, this testament to the society’s core values also represents one of the clearest – and most vehement – articulations of the Apostolic ethos, standing beside passages in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Henry Sidgwick’s Memoir. In an earlier paper, ‘Dignity, Romance, or Vegetarianism?’, Strachey had wondered whether the Apostles thought ‘about ourselves and each other too much’ (above, p. 50). The society was the intellectual and social centre of Strachey’s life for most of the first decade of the century, and remained important to him in later years as well. An undated, unpublished address he delivered as president of the Apostles, perhaps at one of the society’s annual dinners, expresses, despite its hyperbolic insularity and patent irony, his attitude of near-mystical veneration: If the phenomenon known as Sir James Frazer could have become acquainted with the mysteries of the Society, I think he would have added another Chapter to the Golden Bough. He probably would have explained the apostolical process by which President succeeds to President as a last lingering survival of the myth of the KingGod, and the rites of the Grove of Africa. Of course he would have been wrong. Of course the ritual of the society, far from being a survival of anything, is an everlasting type – an eternal ideal – to the likeness of which various dim and transitory buzzings in the chimaera of history vainly aspire.3

And of course, Strachey is only half joking. Did the Apostles of Strachey’s generation, having turned, under the influence of Moore and the pressures of history, inward and away from the great political (and religious) questions that had motivated the society’s early members, think about themselves and each other too much? That is an open question. What is the worth of Apostolic values, in themselves and as an inoculation against phenomenal preoccupations? For Strachey, it was immeasurable; their defence was a theme he had addressed before; he would return to it two years later, in ‘Was Diotima Right?’ Notes 1. 2. 3.

M. Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 106–9. Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury, p. 136. Strachey Papers, British Library, Add. MS 81928.

It is quite true that I am a religious maniac, but I decline to be a missionary. Indeed, my contention is that every mission involves a degradation of the religious spirit. Mr. Paul was a great missionary; and what would Christ have said to Mr. Paul? Our brothers X, Y, and Z, are missionaries; what does the Society say to our brothers X, Y and Z? One word of explanation. I have begun my paper in the middle, because I had only made up my mind to begin it at all six hours before it had to be finished. It is usual, in such not unusual cases, to break off one’s paper before one has reached the end, to leave the final paragraphs unwritten. But in this paper, it is only the end which is going to be of any interest, so it would never do to leave that out. I must leave out the beginning instead. I hope, then, that brothers will understand that this paper really began with a somewhat banal parallel between the religious, and the apostolic, spirits. That from this analogy, it drifted into a discussion of the ethics of propagation, and thence, by an easy transition, into a general view of the relations between the phenomenal and the real. It was just at this point, as I was indicating the essential opposition between the man whose nature it is to be wise and good, and the man whose nature it is to persuade others to be wise and good, that my phenomenal pen was at last induced to begin writing. What it wrote was perhaps a little unfortunately put; it suggested too much what was after all only a side issue; and, if one must have issues, let them come either fruitfully from in front, or resoundingly from behind. But it is clear that my phenomenal pen has a habit of running away with itself. It has now filled two phenomenal pages, and has failed to make any real advance whatever. The most foolish remark that was ever made was that one should define one’s terms before beginning an argument. The whole point of an argument is that it defines them for one. I decline to define ‘apostolic’ or ‘phenomenal’; if brothers want to know what I mean by those words, I reply, à la Mr. Balfour,1 ‘let them listen to my paper.’ It is true that the first part of my paper is only to be found among the mystical pages of the Book of Heaven; but then that only makes the rest so much the easier to understand. It is, of course, generally asserted and conventionally believed that the real is better than the phenomenal; but it is obvious that this proposition is constantly implicitly denied. In the first place, how many angels have plucked the feathers from their wings, and lost all remembrance of their heavenly origin! We say that they have fallen off, that they are lost to us, we sometimes curse them, or curse

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them under our breaths, or laugh at them, or wonder how the devil they came there.2 But, if we could creep into their secret places, if we could question their own unconscious inner beings, what should we hear? I believe we should hear a frank confession that they were phenomenal, and a downright denial that they were any the worse for it. ‘Yes, if you will have it’, they would say, ‘we do believe that reality is a mere fantasia, and that the important thing is to be Colonial Secretary or President of the Board of Trade.’ What a miserable confession! Very likely; yet there it is. And who knows whether we too, someday, may not come to make it? Next, we have the spectacle of brothers who, while recognised as apostolic, seem to dwell in a sort of phenomenal borderland, a twilight where the light of real being is half submerged in the dim penumbra of a buzz. They secretly believe that an Apostle is like gold, that he must be mixed with phenomenal alloy before he is fit for the currency of life; that it is not good to dwell always behind sported doors, that too many whales narrow the sympathies, that the hearthrug needs an occasional shaking. Their doctrine is – oh! their inner unconscious doctrine – that the state of mind which is partly real and partly phenomenal is better in itself than the state of mind which is simply real. They consider – in their heart of hearts – that you are definitely improved if you do social work (whatever that may be) and go into Parliament, and govern niggers in Ceylon.3 They consider – and sometimes say so on the hearthrug – that the dynamic life is the proper one to lead. They do not go the whole hog. This point of view seems to me detestable. I want to throttle it, to transfix it, to put it out of the way. The phenomenal world oppresses me like an undigested nightmare, it rises up against me a vast impalpable nothing, it shakes a dreadful dart. Whence and what are thou, execrable shape, That dar’st, though grim and terrible, advance Thy miscreated front athwart my way?4

The essence of the apostolic state is that it is both analytic and passionate, that it combines acute feelings with acute thoughts. It seems to me far the best kind of state possible, and I want to have as much of it as I possibly can. I refuse to be virtuous or to be powerful or to be active, if by being these things even for a moment I cease even for a moment to be apostolic. The borderland brothers have indeed adopted a very singular attitude. We say ‘Life ought to be an endless conversation.’ They acquiesce. ‘Let us converse then’, we say. ‘Certainly’, they reply, and set to with a will. After a week or two, they suddenly jump up, and say they must go to a Cabinet Council. This is perplexing, but in a few hours they return, and go on talking as if nothing had happened. ‘I’m sorry’, they say, in ten days’ time, ‘we’ve an engagement at the Working Men’s College.’5 Next morning they return, but no sooner has the con-

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versation begun where it was last interrupted than they exclaim that they have not read the papers for the last three weeks. ‘Take them, then, and be damned to you!’ we answer. ‘You said you were going to talk, and this is the third time in three weeks that you’ve lost the thread of the conversation.’ But they don’t hear. They’re buried in the Morning Leader. If it is admitted that the Apostolic state is the best, there are only two reasons which lead one to be unapostolic. First, it may be impossible to keep up a perpetual apostolicity; one needs relaxation, refreshment, external stimulus; it is only in heaven that one is never bored when other people are talking. But, if it must be admitted that these phenomenal considerations exist which may lead us for instance to rag with an occasional Mr. Lyttleton,6 let us recognise them as what they are – as means to an end; means, of course, not devoid of value in themselves, but always less good than that to which they are a means. Secondly, it is doubtless true that phenomenal occupations are good as means towards the general good of the Universe; and I believe it is chiefly this fact which gives them such a false air of intrinsic value. Yet, admitting the immense importance of the whole phenomenal machinery of means, it still seems open to question whether any but exceptional apostolic persons ought to have anything to do with it. The sort of ability required for success in practical affairs is surely highly unapostolic. Of course it may be incidentally attached to an apostolic person, and it is probable that such a person ought to throw himself into practical affairs, for his apostolic wisdom would then enable him to be of infinitely greater use than the most acute of phenomena. But such a course of action ought to be regarded as a lamentable concession to duty, as a sacrifice to unknown future goods, as a dead loss of present good. A great Greek scholar was lost to the world when Mr. Warren Hastings went to India.7 It was a good thing that he went; and so, I suppose, it is a good thing that Theodore is at the Treasury.8 The question of my paper seems to me a most important one. For, in so far as one is not bound down into slavery by poverty – the worst of all phenomenal ills – one has the power of making such an important choice. Shall one be ambitious, and enter parliament? Shall one be useful, and go into a profession? Shall one be philanthropic, and lecture to working men? Or shall one be apostolic, and talk to Moore and paint pictures, and write the Principles of Mathematics?9 I am violently for the last alternative. Nor am I deterred by the spectacle of so many wrecks and ruins upon the path which I want to tread. That there are false images of the apostolic mind, that there are aesthetes and incompetent introspective drivellers, that there is Mr. Deut[eronymy], that there is Mr. Harvard,10 that there is the Independent Review11 – these facts I recognise and deplore, but pass by, comparatively undisturbed. For my part I am sure enough that I am not mixed with seconds. My wine is not, on the one hand, weakened with water,

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nor, on the other, strengthened with cheap gin; it is the blood of God, pure and simple, which I drink to your worships. I am going the whole hog. Presumably I have said nothing about which it will be possible to say anything; but I have said what I think. And now, to cut off the last chance of a discussion, I shall give a short account of what my brothers think. One of my brothers12 only believes that the distinction between the real and the phenomenal exists because he knows that other people believe that it does. And besides, he is not sure what those words mean. At any rate he finds it difficult to be certain about any judgments of value. He prefers to judge that a thing ought to be good than that it is; and, though he is so fond of drawing distinctions, he cannot bear to make them. If he were not quite so virtuous, he would think it a little absurd to try and do away with cakes and ale. Bread and wine, he would allow, are finer quality, but then, can one live upon them? Only these are not his reflexions, because he is so virtuous, and so nice. Another of my brothers13 thought that a good deal of the paper was amusing, and very like Strachey. As he drew number one and was forced, he took care to remember some points in the paper, upon which to speak on the hearthrug. He will say that he agrees with the moderator on the whole; and doubtless he will be telling the truth. Yet there is only one subject upon which the moderator and he are in fundamental agreement, and that subject was not – oh! well just once – referred to in the paper. It would not have been natural for him to have adventures; yet, without them, he has learnt that most things are valueless; though perhaps a malicious person might add that he will never know how valuable some things are. For it is one of his queer characteristics that one often wants, one cannot tell why, to make a malicious attack upon him, and that, when the time comes, one refrains, one cannot tell why. His sense of values, and indeed all his feelings, offer the spectacle of a complete paradox. He is a hedonist and a follower of Moore; he is lascivious without lust; he is an Apostle without tears. He will end as an old Civil Servant, and will regret that he never was able to go into the House of Commons, for then he would have ended as an old parliamentary hand. Another of my brothers14 will be inclined to disagree with the moderator altogether, and will recognise that he is right. He will disapprove of the exclusive tone of the paper, wonder whether the whole world is not apostolic, and doubt whether he himself comes within the category. He will wish to uphold everything that the paper says, and yet to deny its truth. Finally he will find himself obliged (against his will) to vote on the side on which he wants to vote. In spite of what phenomena might think, his sense of the society is almost perfect, and, like all his feelings, instinctive. As an elderly don, he will look back with pleasure on his days in the society, which, he will remember, met on Saturday nights. But

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will he remember how remarkably near he, at any rate, once was to the whole hog? There is one other brother whom I should like to mention,15 though I don’t know whether he’ll be here, because he formed the background of my paper. I say the background, but that is a silly term; he was the spirit of it. Though his judgment of every detail of the paper may be wrong, his judgment of the essentials of it must be right. And he will agree with the essentials. It is something, after all, to have one’s essentials agreed to by this brother. It is true that the easiest things are so difficult to him that he cannot perform them; but then the most difficult are so easy to him that he does them offhand. He possesses the element of greatness. He has looked on tempests and has never shaken. He has been able to make up his mind. Is there anything to add? He is perhaps the grand triumph of the Society.

WHEN IS A DRAMA NOT A DRAMA?

Sanders states, without defending the case, that this is one of Strachey’s Cambridge essays – together with ‘Do Two and Two Make Five?’, ‘Ought Art to Be Always Beautiful?’ ‘Shall We Be Missionaries?’ and ‘Christ or Caliban?’ – that deals ‘with more serious questions’ than such papers as ‘Ought the Father to Grow a Beard?’, ‘Dignity, Romance or Vegetarianism?’ or ‘Does Absence Make the Heart Grow Fonder?’1 Holroyd makes a more convincing case for the relative value of this paper, delivered to the society probably in 1905, in describing a typology of Strachey’s Apostles essays. These essays, Holroyd writes, ‘illustrate something of a discrepancy. At their best these Apostolic addresses dredge up to the light of day the sour effluence of a bitter and repressed revolutionary spirit.’ ‘Christ or Caliban?’ is, for Holroyd, a prime example of this type of essay. Another group of essays, and ‘the least revolutionary of all his papers’, Holroyd continues, comprises ‘those which deal directly with human relationships. Altogether different from so much that he wrote in private letters to his closest friends, these personal reflections are qualified, mild, almost apologetic.’ Holroyd selects ‘Does Absence Make the Heart Grow Fonder?’ as representative of this type of essay. Finally, ‘in contrast to all [the] belligerence and declared apostasy’ of the first group of essays, Strachey’s papers on aesthetics ‘are orthodox, even diffident’. Following a brief discussion of ‘Ought Art to Be Always Beautiful?’ he states that Strachey’s ideas about dramatic art are ‘hardly revolutionary’, and merely reiterate ‘a well-tried theory’.2 Following the final rejection of his fellowship dissertation, Strachey was, as he told Duncan Grant, ‘twenty-five, dejected, uncouth, unsuccessful … humble and wretched and lonely’.3 At this time, his intellect and emotions were apparently more invested in questions of ethics in general and sexual ethics in particular – in the desire ‘to preach an infinitude of sermons on one text – Embrace one another!’4 – than they were in purely aesthetic matters. At this time he was also writing book reviews, some of them biographical essays, for the Independent Review, and, as always, trying his hand at various plays. But despite his preoccupation with ethical matters, ‘When Is a Drama not a Drama?’ fails to follow

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through in elucidating the last of the three questions that it proposes to address. ‘What I want to know’, Strachey writes, seems to fall, like the Trinity, under three heads. (1.) Is there a specific quality to be found in plays or works of fiction which may be called ‘dramatic’? (2.) If so, what is its nature? (3.) Supposing its nature discoverable, is it good in itself ? (below, p. 107)

After addressing the first two questions, the paper comes to an abrupt end: ‘But how far is mere drama any good in itself ? This question is the holy ghost of my trinity, and like jesting Pilate I cannot stay for an answer’ (below, p. 110). Because it avoids engaging with this final question, and indeed in its general treatment of the nature of drama, the essay is not so much orthodox, or diffident, as rather perfunctory – which is perhaps surprising given Strachey’s genuine passion for drama, as both a spectator and a writer: he completed several plays and started several others, the most notable full-length work being A Son of Heaven, written in 1913, first produced in 1925, and recently (2005) edited by George Simson and published by Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson in the Bloomsbury Heritage Series. The most notable aspect of the essay is its proto-modernist emphasis on ‘states of mind of the characters’ as the sine qua non of the dramatic art, either in the theatre or in narrative fiction. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

C. R. Sanders, Lytton Strachey: His Mind and Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 20. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, pp. 164–5. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 79. Ibid., p. 75.

The question, I can’t help feeling, is not as interesting to other people as it is to me; when one is really absorbed it’s difficult to imagine who else can be as much as all that; and it’s only when one is bored that one has to believe that somebody must be interested. What I want to know seems to fall, like the Trinity, under three heads. (1.) Is there a specific quality to be found in plays or works of fiction which may be called ‘dramatic’? (2.) If so, what is its nature? (3.) Supposing its nature discoverable, is it any good in itself ? (1.) I think it clear that there is something besides the form which distinguishes an epic or a narrative poem, or a novel of adventure, from what is usually called a drama. It would be impossible to make a play out of the Iliad or Don Quixote; the only way to do so would be to write what was really an independent work only incidentally connected with the original. The Ulysses of Mr. Phillips,1 the Troilus and Cresida of Mr. Shakespeare, bad though they both be as dramas, yet occupy a class obviously distinct from that of Mr. Homer’s poems. (2.) Of what then does this difference consist? In other words, what are the essential qualities of a drama? It is plain in the first place that the derivation of the word is absurdly misleading. The drama is not principally concerned with action; and this appears to me to be a fundamental distinction between it and narrative fiction. In drama there is no interest whatever in action qua action; in narrative it is very often the only interest there is. Thus the Agamemnon is essentially undramatic, because very nearly the only interest it arouses is interest simply in what occurs. It belongs to the same class of fiction as the Faerie Queen and Alice in Wonderland and the Pilgrim’s Progress – the narrative class; it is a presentment of events as they may be thought to have taken place; and that is really all, in the Agamemnon, that’s given you to be interested in. But what then are you to be interested in if not in events? Is there not always action of some sort in every play? And isn’t it upon the action that everything hinges? Precisely. But what is everything? There can be no doubt, I think, that in drama it is the state of mind of the characters which is everything. It is there that the interests of the audience must be concentrated; and it is only in so far as it affects these states of mind that action is of any importance at all. In this respect most novels occupy an intermediate position between merely narrative fiction and the Drama. In a novel interest is felt mainly for the characters but also to a great extent for the action and in varying degrees for the author as well. In a Drama, however, not only is the

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interest felt for the characters proportionately much greater, but the conditions of the stage make it possible to present the characters in a much more definite way. To the spectator of a play there seems to be literally nothing between himself and the stage-character so violently emphasised and exposed under the full blaze of the dramatic lime-light. To the reader of a novel, however, it is precisely in proportion as the author is psychologically expert that his presence is inevitably felt. The playgoer can really believe that he has got the data before him, and draw his own conclusions; the novel-reader must simply accept the conclusions of someone else. Nor is this all; it also follows from the conditions of the stage that practically the only way of presenting a character is by means of speech. But the one thing that speech necessarily expresses is the state of mind of the speaker; so that in a drama the whole emphasis is thrown not upon the actions of a character nor upon his general qualities, but upon the actual state of his mind at any particular moment in the play. Of the many distractingly oracular utterances of Mr. Aristotle upon this subject perhaps the most generally appreciated has been the pronouncement that all plays must possess ‘unity of action.’ What he means by action does not indeed appear; nor do I think it necessary really to inquire. That he defines a unity as that which has a beginning and a middle and an end, and that he defines a beginning as that which comes before the middle, and an end as that which comes after the middle, and a middle as that which comes between the two is only interesting, as McTaggart2 would say, to biographers of Mr. Aristotle. But the doctrine of unity of action, adopted by the French, came to mean something perfectly definite, and at first sight, if not quite convincing, at least exceedingly attractive. The Doctrine is that every drama should begin by stating certain conditions, and that from these conditions and these alone the whole of the rest of the drama should causally follow. The charm of this theory is obvious. It gives to Tragedy something of the fascination of a detective story – the sense of a hidden end only waiting to be revealed; it obtains, by means of its machinery of the inevitable, a pleasant atmosphere of Fatality; and at the same time it seems to secure that every drama shall be a symmetrical and isolated whole. It is sufficiently shattered, of course, by the mere fact that a large number of dramas which must be admitted to be dramatic obviously violate it. In the Trachiniae,3 for instance, the discovery of Deianeira that she has murdered her husband without having had any such intention would not be allowed by the theory of unity of action unless the audience had been particularly informed at the beginning of the play that what she thought was a love-potion was really a poison. But such a proviso is obviously absurd. If it is true that a good play will never surprise an intelligent audience it is obvious that an intelligent audience will cease to take tickets for good plays.

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But there is another consideration even more fatal to the theory, and that is that it is impossible to state enough of the conditions at the beginning of the play to be able to know what will causally follow. There can be no real inevitability because there can be no real certainty as to why anything did happen exactly as it did. There can only be the probability that such and such a thing might follow from the circumstances displayed. The most that the dramatist can do, therefore, is to produce the impression of an inevitability which really isn’t there at all; which amounts to saying that however much he tries he can do no more than make his sequence of events appear to be natural; but that the sequence of events should appear to be natural is a rule that applies equally to every form of fiction. Is there then no meaning in the phrase unity of action? I think there is (if action is taken in a sense so wide that it probably bursts); but only a comparatively limited one. If the main interest of a drama centres on the characters, the unity of the drama would seem to depend on the unity of that interest. That is to say it would depend on the interest being felt towards the same characters throughout the course of the drama. But the interest is not distributed equally among the characters; so that the unity of interest would only be preserved so long as the proportion of interest felt for each character remained the same. An instance of a play which seems to me to be without unity of action is the Hippolytus of Euripides, where the interest centres during the first half of the play on Phaedra and during the second half on Hippolytus. But this is not the only G[ree]k play with this fault – for fault I conceive it to be. But the fundamental quality of the dramatic has yet to be discovered. A drama whose main interest was not in the characters, and which was devoid of unity, might still be a drama, though it would be a bad drama. Is there not something without which a drama wouldn’t be a drama at all? My theory is that the essential point about a drama is that it should be composed of two parts, during the first of which the states of mind of the characters should be entirely different from their states of mind during the second. The transition from the first part to the second part is the culminating point of the drama – the climax. The important thing according to me is the entire change of the states of mind after the climax. The climax is the moment when the pattern in the kaleidoscope suddenly shifts and as suddenly forms up into a new one; only the dramatic climax may last for more than a moment. In Macbeth the climax is the murder of Duncan, after which the states of mind of the characters is entirely changed; in Lear it is the whole time that it takes for Lear to realise his daughters’ ingratitude. In the Oedipus Rex it occurs when Oedipus discovers whose son he is. The dramatic character interest of the part preceding the climax consists of the expectation felt by the audience that is caused by the knowledge that the climax is coming; after it the interest lies in discovering what the new state of mind is. The interest of the two prts need not be equal. In the Oedipus the first part is by far the most

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important, and is the greatest instance of working up preparation for the climax in all dramatic literature. In Lear it is in the second part that most of the interest lies. The climax need not be caused merely by what precedes it; but what follows it must be the result of the climax and nothing else. A drama then is a drama only if it contains a complete change in the states of mind of the characters; and it is dramatic in proportion to the expectation excited by the approach of the change, and to the interest of the changed state when it has come. Thus a man is building a house of cards. Expectation is aroused as to how long he will be able to go on building. The change in his state of mind comes when the house falls. The interest of his changed state depends on the interest of his character. If his character is interesting, I think you have all the elements of a drama. (3.) But how far is mere drama any good in itself ? This question is the holy ghost of my trinity, and like jesting Pilate I cannot stay for an answer.4

WAS DIOTIMA RIGHT?

As a guide to conduct, a conduit of ethical insight and a philosophical legitimation of homosexuality for Strachey’s generation of Apostles, Plato’s Symposium was less important than only Principia Ethica. In it Diotima is an itinerant mystic who, having taught Socrates ‘the ways of love’ – a phrase that Robin Waterfield cites for its ‘delicious ambiguity’1 – then inspires his speech on love’s proper object and value. Diotima’s premise, Waterfield explains, ‘is that we can transfer the affection which carries our love from a given object on to another, more capacious object, and so ascend through various levels to a vision of absolute beauty’.2 This ascent also leads to a vision of the associated qualities of goodness and truth. The ascent up Diotima’s ladder enables the progressive liberation of reason from ‘the lower parts of the mind until it is free to do its proper job and take control of a person’s life’. ‘Love is what gives us the potential … to pull ourselves out of the mire of the bestial side of our nature’ because it eventually turns the lover towards ‘philosophy and the means of man’s fulfillment as a human being’.3 In Strachey’s late adolescence, Holroyd writes, the Symposium ‘became for him a new Bible’.4 This was in 1896; on 2 March 1907 Strachey asks, ‘Was Diotima right in her account of the Universe?’ as a way to introduce a series of reflections on relations among the real, the beautiful and the good; to assert his belief that what unites ‘all beautiful objects’ is their ‘reality’ (below, pp. 114, 113); and once again to figure the society as the exclusive home of the real. At one point in his paper, Strachey wonders whether the term ‘significant’ might not better express the idea of the ‘reality’ that represents one’s sensation of ‘a sort of concentrated essence of the meaning of life’ that one feels when in love or in the presence of a great work of art (below, p. 114). Merle writes that this passage points to the influence of Clive Bell, who would coin the phrase ‘Significant Form’ several years later in Art (1914).5 It is unlikely, though Bell and Strachey were close though sometimes combative friends, that the non-Apostolic and, therefore, ultimately ‘unreal’ Bell would have exercised this influence at this time. At any rate, having just completed a transformative year in Paris learning about modern art, Bell had not yet begun developing his influential formalism.

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By the time of ‘Was Diotima Right?’ Strachey had distanced himself from his earlier uncertainty about the relative value of action and aesthetic contemplation; he had come fully to embrace the latter as the best mode of apprehending ‘the concentrated essence of the meaning of life’. To ‘really live’, he thought, ‘In the light of real being’ was also to witness an ideological, even metaphysical spectacle in which ‘the old deities in whom we trusted shrivel into ghosts’ (below, p. 115). He confesses utter ignorance as to whether Diotima was right, but affirms the supreme reality of a quasi-mystical condition attendant upon the experience of beauty. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Plato, Symposium, ed. R. Waterfield (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. xxv. Ibid., p. xxviii. Ibid., pp. xxxi, xxxiv. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 72. Merle, Lytton Strachey, p. 107.

What do we mean, I should like to know, by reality? Is everything that exists real, and is it anything but jargon to say that reality is in the Society alone? Is it true that the hearthrug is the one reality, or are there degrees of real being, radiating out in ever lessening intensity towards the eternal buzz? No, it is not the society that I want to discuss, or, if at all, only incidentally; it is the Universe itself. It strikes me often – I think other brothers may have had such feelings too – that, in the world of our experience, it is somehow or other mysteriously true that some things are more ‘real’ than others, that, though it may be the case that these things are always either beautiful or good, it still does mean something when we say that they are ‘real’ as well – ‘real’ in a way in which other things are not. I cannot help feeling – am I mad or muddled? – that the great air in the Ninth Symphony is, besides being more beautiful, also really more real than Mr. Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, just as I am pretty sure that the feelings of Romeo and Juliet are more real than those of Mr. Arthur Benson.1 Sentimentality I believe the Society has discussed lately; the phenomenal coil shuffled me off the hearthrug, so that I know not what were the pronouncements of true being; but does not true being agree that the sentimental feeling may exist apart from any object, and that it is a feeling that is essentially false? What I maintain is that there are many other things besides feelings which possess this quality of falseness, or unreality, or whatever you like to call it; but am I muddled or mad? My theory is that there is one characteristic common to all beautiful objects, besides their beauty, and it is precisely this of ‘reality.’ The relation between truth and beauty is queer enough. The accounts which people give of it are queerer. Was Keats right, are the impressionists right? Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.2

It seems clear that they are wrong. Some things are ugly, and these things are no more the figments of imagination than beautiful ones; if beautiful things do truly exist, so do ugly things too. On the other hand, there is the view that things are more beautiful in proportion as they are distant from the actual facts of the universe. The real world is the clog and the barrier, which beauty surmounts, borne aloft on the wings of false imagination. Watteau3 and Shelley and Mozart are the greatest artists, because they have deliberately ignored the world of experience and created a beautiful untrue world of their own. But according to this view a lunatic’s incoherent ravings, completely disconnected with every known

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fact, might be perfectly beautiful; and that is what I don’t believe. The more one considers the more certain one becomes that such artists as Mozart and Watteau are only superficially unreal, and that the very essence of their beauty is that it is charged with actual things. Blake’s ravings possess the same quality, and when they lose it, and topple headlong into empty gesticulation, they lose their beauty at the same time. I want to know whether King Lear would be as beautiful as it is if the world were absolutely good. Would it be? And, if not, does it not follow that beauty does, in some way or another, hang upon truth? It will be very easy to shatter this confused little creation of soft and strawless bricks. It will be easy to point out that the moderator has been talking platitudes, or paradoxes, to agree with him and to disagree with him, to cross-examine him and to ignore him. What he humbly begs is that the Society should bring its mind to bear upon the question of what is the precise relation between truth and beauty, and tell him what it thinks. If it will do this, if a single everlasting spark of the divine fire lights up, if only for a single eternal second, a single speck or spot of the dark mystery, he will not have written in vain. The first paper the moderator wrote for the Society4 tried to show that ugly things are beautiful if you could only see their real relations to the rest of the world. But the Society would have none of that: if the real relations were not the only relations, how could they be distinguished from the rest? And if the rest existed were they not also part of reality? And how could some reality be real, and some not real? Well! I think perhaps I may have chosen my words badly, and that ‘real’ may not be the right description of a quality which I still believe exists. Perhaps ‘significant’ would be a better word; but Heavens! how Hegelian I am getting! Only what I feel is that it is a peculiar sort of significance – a sort of concentrated essence of the meaning of life. Intolerably Hegelian! But I beseech brothers to look into their inmost hearts, and see whether they don’t find there the recognition of some such quality, when they are reading splendid poetry, or hearing a great symphony, or when they are in love. If they do find something like what I have tried to describe, doesn’t it follow that, after all, the Universe is queerer than we’ve been in the habit of supposing? If what is most beautiful and best is the really real thing – how amazing, and how supreme! Was Diotima right in her account of the Universe? Oh, I haven’t an idea; but, at any rate, I am sure of one thing, and that is that to talk as our brother Raleigh5 talks – in his never-ending reaction against aestheticism – about life being better than art is to commit the most dismal of fallacies. Life can no more get outside of art than art can get outside of life The beauty which art creates is not a ring on life’s finger – a mere appendage which can be put on and taken off ; it is compounded of the very essence of life’s body – the living child of life, which can no more be inferior to life than life itself.

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But we have lingered too long among thoughts and phantoms, among crepuscular images and vanities, and dreams that fly out by the Gate of Horn.6 Let us cast off those faded shreds and patches which bear upon them the mask of Death; let us cast them off from us and utterly forget them; let us really live. In the light of real being the old deities in whom we trusted shrivel into ghosts. The hearthrug turns our ambitions to powder, annihilates our fears, and crowns our nakedness with beauty. ‘To subsist in lasting monuments, to live in their productions, to exist in their names and predicament of chimeras, was large satisfaction unto old expectations, and made one part of their Elysiums. But all this is nothing in the metaphysics of true belief. To live indeed is to be again ourselves.’ Our brother Browne7 would have understood this paper a good deal better, I suppose, than the Moderator. But still it’s all really very simple and it comes to this – that it is not mere jargon to say that reality is in the Society alone.

DO TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE?

A sequel and companion-piece to ‘Was Diotima Right?’ this paper was written for the Apostles three weeks later, at the end of March 1907. In his opening sentences, Strachey playfully expresses a mild consternation that, despite his express wishes on the earlier occasion, ‘the Society wouldn’t go near the main point of my paper, but pranced round it, just as if it hadn’t been there’. He decides, then, ‘to put the point again … and, this time, make them face it’ (below, p. 119). However, whereas the earlier paper had asked what reality is, and what the relation is between reality, goodness and beauty, in this essay Strachey turns a prism and asks whether everything is reasonable. I want to know whether the whole world is simply the ordinary world as ordinary people know it … or whether there are some things in the world quite extraordinary, which lie outside the common rules of life, which reason cannot tamper with, and which only the most mysterious apprehensions and the strangest images can discover and express. (below, pp. 119–20)

In the context of major movements in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century British literature, Strachey’s question articulates the contest between, on the one hand, realism and naturalism, and, on the other, symbolism as the best method for capturing ‘reality.’ This was a contest that Virginia Woolf, first in ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919) and then in ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ (1924), figures as an Oedipal struggle between the realists Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H. G. Wells, and modernist writers such as James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Woolf herself, for the soul of art. She describes the moderns as ‘spiritual’ writers and includes Strachey in their ranks; they are, unlike their ‘materialist’ predecessors and contemporaries, pre-eminently interested in psychological reality.1 Without overtly taking sides in this contest, Strachey describes its terms and its stakes. He also does so partly by way of commentary on his fellow Apostle and Bloomsbury friend E. M. Forster’s new novel, The Longest Journey. Despite momentary intuitions to the contrary, ordinary or common-sense reason, he argues, will always insist that two and two invariably make four; mystical or ‘religious’ reason – the reason of symbolists and of the ‘spiritual’ moderns

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– habitually encounters the world from within a framework of ‘belief ’ which adds differently: for the believer in ‘an underlying secret divinity in things’, the sum of two and two is sometimes five, sometimes three (below, p. 121). One might think here of George Orwell’s employment of this mathematical trope in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Winston Smith is coerced into agreeing that the sum of two and two is five – an example of how totalitarian power manipulates common-sense reality to achieve and preserve social control. From a very different perspective and one that more closely resembles Strachey’s, one might think of Dostoevsky’s use of the same trope in Notes from Underground, where, he writes, ‘sometimes two times two makes five is a very charming thing’, an expression of spiritual freedom.2 Strachey exposes the difficulties of both positions. The common-sense materialist is immune to those occasions when, in a state of belief – regardless whether the belief corresponds to truth – ‘one actually seems to experience’ transcendent mysteries (below, p. 121). The mystic, however, is hampered both by ‘the extreme nebulosity of the thing of which [he] declares he has an “indubitable direct experience”’ and by the extreme difficulty of ever convincing a non-mystic of the truth of the mystical position (below, p. 121). Strachey’s enjoyment of Manichaean drama is palpable here, as he describes, with seemingly disinterested amusement, a fundamental conflict between Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics. This is only an apparent disinterest, though, which is belied by the force of the rhetoric with which he outlines the mystical, religious, visionary, symbolist, spiritual position. Notes 1.

2.

V. Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader: First Series, ed. A. McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, 1984), pp. 146–54, quotes on pp. 147, 151; ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in A Bloomsbury Group Reader, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 233–49. F. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. C. Garnett (Stilwell, KS: Digireads Publishing, 2008), p. 20. Strachey’s resemblance to Dostoevsky in this respect bears a closer look. Here it is enough to mention that, in 1912, five years after writing this paper, Strachey published a review in the Spectator of Constance Garnett’s new translation of The Brothers Karamazov. In this paean to Dostoevsky’s imaginative power, Strachey employs, if not a mathematical, then at least a geometrical trope to explain the character of this power: ‘His mind, by its very nature, did not move on the lines of judicious design and careful symmetry; it brought forth under the stress of an unbounded inspiration, and according to the laws of an imaginative vision in which the well-balanced arrangements of the ordinary creative artist held no place’ (Spectatorial Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 176).

The last paper I wrote for the Society was interesting: – perhaps too interesting. I suspect this because – the incident is common enough – the Society wouldn’t go near the main point of my paper, but pranced round it, just as if it hadn’t been there. Was it because I failed to put the point clearly enough, or was it because the point, put with uncompromising clearness, was simply far too interesting to mention? The Society won’t remember, so the question’s of no importance, especially as I shall try to put the point again tonight, and, this time, make them face it. Whether I’m wise in doing so is another matter; for I rather believe the Society is like an Eastern potentate, to whom no one may put an unanswered question a second time. ‘Thick or clear, your Highness?’ was the innocent question which his Grand Vizier addressed one evening to the Sultan Bizibec XXIV.1 But the Sultan, thinking of the lips and the eyes of the beautiful Shiraz, answered not, so that at length the Grand Vizier, forgetful of what was fitting and right, raising his voice, asked again – ‘Your Highness, clear or thick?’ – ‘Let the slave be disemboweled’ was Bizibec’s reply; ‘and bring me the fish.’ And besides, in this particular case there are particular difficulties. It is so difficult to explain what it is that I want to ask, and, when I’ve explained it, it will be so difficult to say anything to the point. Oh! Why should it be the case that all that’s most absorbing, and most questionable, seems, when one comes to speak about it, to transmute itself into a tedious platitude? The weighty problems upon which our whole universe is founded and built up, vanish, when one actually reaches them, into thin air. Compared to them, the question of the extension of the franchise to women is a tangible reality, bristling with pegs for every sort of witty and profound remark.2 Well, one must do one’s best. My question, it seems to me, lies at the root of all philosophies, dominates every creed, and, according as it may be answered, colours the whole of life. The mere thought of it makes all other speculations vain, and to solve it would be to discover Heaven or to leave everything just as it was before. Most people are quite sure that they know the answer to it, and, if you ask them why they believe the answer to be what they say it is, half of them would give reasons quite irrelevant, and half of them would have no reason to give. My own opinion is sufficiently doubtful; but perhaps the Society will be able to help me to make up my mind. What I want to know is whether everything is reasonable. I want to know whether the whole world is simply the ordinary world as ordinary people know it, a plain-sailing, matter-of-fact affair, every part of which we could, if we were clever enough, examine and understand by means of the ordinary methods of

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our intelligence; or whether there are some things in the world quite extraordinary, which lie outside the common rules of life, which reason cannot tamper with, and which only the most mysterious apprehensions and the strangest images can discover and express. Let me make it clear that when I ask whether the world is an ordinary world I do not mean to ask ‘Is the world dull?’ My world might be full of excitement and of complication, of the intensity of goodness and of evil, of beauty and of ugliness, of pleasure and of pain; but it would still be an ordinary world, so long as it was never true to say in it (as the poet has said in ours) that ‘things are not what they seem.’ When McTaggart, talking of love and immortality, says, ‘these however are questions which philosophy can presume neither to neglect nor to discuss at length’, and adds in a note ‘a more adequate consideration of this subject than is possible in prose will be found in the “Lost Leader” and ‘“Evelyn Hope”’ – it is clear enough that he at any rate does not think the world an ordinary one. He is obliged to refer his reader for the elucidation of a philosophical question to Mr. Browning’s poetry.3 In other words he thinks that there are mysteries in love and immortality which ordinary reason cannot solve. His attitude is the same as Mr. Maeterlink’s who explains the discomforts of silence between people by the statement that when one is silent one’s soul is laid bare to the contact of other souls.4 Mr. Maeterlink believes that silence is not what it seems, and McTaggart believes that love contains secrets which can only be revealed by poetry. In short, they are both mystics, just as Plato is a mystic in the Symposium, and just as Forster is a mystic in The Longest Journey.5 What makes it so difficult to decide whether this view of things is true or not is partly the fact that mystics are not mystics by convention but by birth. The common remark that everyone is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian simply means that everyone is born either believing the world ordinary or believing it odd. Anyone could tell after half an hour’s conversation upon indifferent topics that Hawtrey was not a mystic; and that Dickinson was.6 If one asked Hawtrey why he thinks that twice two invariably makes four, he would certainly give one the most excellent reasons; but if one asked Forster why he believed in symbolic moments he would have no excellent reasons, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Hawtrey’s reasons would have as much effect on him as his own no-reasons would have on Hawtrey. The question is, if one is a mystic, and believes that some things are beyond reason, how is one to convince other people that this is so, or, on the other hand, how is one to be convinced that it isn’t? It is clear that no a priori argument can possibly meet the case, because it is precisely the validity of argument that the mystic calls into question. What then is to be done? I suppose the most obvious method is McTaggart’s. Set down your common sense man to a poem by Blake, take him to a concert and make him listen to the fifth Symphony. What will happen then? No doubt in many cases, he will go out as he came in, still thinking that this is a very ordinary world, no doubt

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he will often clap up your Blake with a snort that the fellow’s a lunatic. But it is certain that many men – perhaps most – are affected differently. They do believe, at any rate while they are reading the poem or hearing the music, that there is something strange in the world after all, that they were wrong, that things are not what they seem, and that two and two make – what do they make? … Oh, is that the end of the song? – thank you so much … yes, of course, two and two make four. One of the great difficulties in discussing the question is that it is almost impossible to express precisely what it is that one comes involuntarily to believe when one hears some sorts of music, and reads certain poetry. But I think it is certain that there is a state of the kind which I am trying to indicate, and that this state is one of belief. The difficulty is to say belief in what. I hope some at any rate of the brothers have been in this condition of mind; and if so perhaps they will agree with me that what happens is that they have the belief that the world – oh! but it is much vaguer than that – that there is something about the world which is extraordinarily and mysteriously good. One seems to realise that it is true that there is – somehow or another – an underlying secret divinity in things. What ambiguous phrases! But of course no mystic worthy of the name can ever put his mysticism into accurate words. But it is not only by means of art that our minds catch glimpses of these mysteries. If I am right, art makes us, sometimes, believe that they exist; but there are other occasions on which one actually seems to experience them. As Mr. Carlyle observes, in a passage which I suppose every mystic would subscribe to: – ‘Remember always that the deepest truth, the truest of all, is actually “unspeakable”, cannot be argued of, dwells far below the region of articulate demonstration; it must be felt by trial and indubitable direct experience; then it is known once and for ever.’7 So says Mr. Carlyle; and I think it is easy to recognise the state of mind he is referring to. It is the state of mind of the Christian when he has a personal revelation of the existence of God; it is the state of mind of the enthusiastic young man alone on a moor, when he suddenly feels that he’s at one with the universe; it is the state of the lover when, in a moment of transport, he realises that everything is really good. These are all instances of the ‘indubitable direct experience’ of which Mr. Carlyle speaks. Can we ignore them? Can we satisfy ourselves by saying – ‘Oh well, if you really do have these experiences, it’s certainly very interesting – to the writer of your biography’? And, if we have them ourselves, can we simply conclude that when we do we are suffering from fantasia, and that is all? Oh dear! How easy it would be for me to make up my mind, if I was, what everyone is supposed to be: either a little liberal or little conservative: I beg pardon – either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. But I seem to be a cross. There is, of course, one way in which I might manage to make up my mind with some sort

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of appearance of wisdom; but that way I absolutely refuse to take. I will not be an ‘Agnostic.’ I will not walk about in the starlight, admiring the beauty of the scene, and waiting for something to turn up. As a matter of fact, it can’t be done; and one may be quite sure that whoever calls himself an Agnostic is simply a mystic who’s afraid to say so. When one asks ‘What is twice two?’ and the reply is – ‘Well, I won’t say that it’s not four, though I can’t be sure that it isn’t five’ – isn’t it clear enough that one’s dealing with someone who does not believe that things are what they seem? In fact that ‘honest doubt’ is simply another name for dishonest mysticism. The truth is I do make up my mind; but I make it up differently every other minute. How often have I thought since I began to write this paper – ‘Oh! What utter balderdash it all is! What sensible person would hesitate for a second? This is a tea-cup; that is a supporter of women’s suffrage; I am bored to extinction; et voilà tout!’ And then, the other day, in some strange concatenation of circumstances – I don’t know what – some sudden physical happiness, some vision in the street, and memories perhaps of Heaven, and a barrel-organ, and an exquisite butcher – well! it did all come over me, an indubitable direct experience, and I said to myself ‘What a dunderheaded fool I must have been ever to have imagined that things were what they seemed!’ If I have to judge between the two moments, the two moods; if I have to say one is right and one is wrong – how am I to decide it? It is true that in one mood I am calm, and in the other I am excited; does it follow then that my judgments during the calm mood are the true ones? Most people would say it did (though of course they would be calm themselves when they are saying it); but, if one considers, how can one be sure? Surely it is certain that one’s judgment is at any rate more active during excitement, and one’s perception of values is more intense. How often, when one is calm and trying to make judgments about the perceptions that one had when one was excited, one fails altogether, because one can’t bring those perceptions before one’s mind, but only vague and dim imitations of them. If one could bring them before one’s mind, wouldn’t one see the heavens open through as one did before? It seems to me that the real strength of the common sense position lies in the extreme nebulosity of the thing of which the mystic declares he has an ‘indubitable direct experience.’ Is it God, is it the goodness of the universe, is it the eternal and infinite spirit of Love? If it is absurd to suppose that anyone really has an experience of the existence of God, why stop there? Isn’t every other ‘experience’ of this sort equally suspect? And, is it not at least a suspicious circumstance that all these experiences, however much they may differ, always agree in this – that the object experienced is good. There seems room for the presumption that the true explanation of the experience is a desire that what is experienced may be believed to be true; and this presumption becomes I think more probable owing

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to another fact. I believe that, as a matter of fact, one’s ‘experiences’ of this kind are not all rose-colour; I think one sometimes does have revelations of horror; one suddenly discovers that twice two, so far from making five, makes three. But these one forgets, because one does not like to think about them, and one only remembers the experiences of good. The Aristotelian would explain the matter by saying that one was always subject to disordered imaginations; one usually believed two and two made four, but sometimes one thought it made three, and on other occasions one couldn’t resist the conclusion that they made five. But one wants them to make five; and so one forgets that they ever made three, one swears they don’t really make four, and then, of course, five is the only thing left for them. This would be the account of the matter the Aristotelian would give; and, by Tomlinson!8 I think the Aristotelian would be right. But, if that is the case, if it is true that mysticism is a mere delusion, if things are really what they seem, then shouldn’t our view of those forms of art which involve a belief in mysticism become changed? If it is true that by reading the poetry of Blake, you are induced to have false beliefs, can you admire that poetry as much as if the beliefs it gave you were the true ones? I think you can, because, so long as one does actually have the belief, whether it is true or not, one’s feelings towards the poetry are just the same as they always were. Thus the truth of mysticism is irrelevant to the highest forms of art. But there are some forms of art to which it seems to be relevant; – those which attempt to produce a belief in the truth of mysticism, and do not succeed: Forster’s novel I think comes into this class. The common sense Aristotelian remains a common sense Aristotelian all through, with the result that he judges the novel to be nonsense. The Platonist however, who already believes that twice two makes five, is delighted when Forster tells him so. The goodness, therefore, of Forster’s novel depends upon the question whether two and two make five. If they do, it is a work of genius; if they do not – but it is 9:30.

OUGHT ART TO BE ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL?

Strachey’s aesthetic imagination was fundamentally literary, occupied with biography and history. Despite his close relationships with Carrington, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and many other artists, he seems never to have developed a really sophisticated theoretical understanding of art, or a love of modern art. Holroyd observes that ‘In company with Clive Bell he had begun to develop by this time a rather literary appreciation for the visual arts [but] his taste was, and always remained, conservative’. Merle has it that this Apostles essay is a later paper, from 1908; Holroyd places it among Strachey’s early essays and briefly summarizes it: ‘he spoke out against Manet and the Impressionist school of painting, arguing that although it was theoretically possible for good painting not to treat a subject inherently beautiful in itself, in practice it must always be otherwise’.1 Sanders writes that this essay deals with a ‘serious question’.2 In fact, ‘Ought Art to Be Always Beautiful?’ poses three central questions among a host of others: Ought the objects that artists represent to be beautiful in themselves? To what extent does the aesthetic ‘value of a picture depend … not only on its decorative qualities, but also on the objects which it represents’ (below, p. 129)? And, finally, ‘What is there, in the mere existence of an object, to make its representation so valuable’ (below, p. 131)? Most of the essay is occupied with the concept of beauty; but just as in ‘Was Diotima Right?’ Strachey shifts the emphasis from beauty to ‘significance’, so too here he shifts his focus in the final paragraphs away from beauty and towards ‘interest’ as the nebulous ‘quality whose presence in an object justifies the artistic representation of that object no less than the quality of pure beauty’ (below, p. 131). In its invocation of questions of value and justification, ‘Ought Art to Be Always Beautiful?’ represents a further variation on Strachey’s perennial interest in ethical aspects of the aesthetic. Strachey’s substitution of ‘interest’ for ‘beauty’ as the most valuable element of an artwork enables him to shift the conceptual ground of his speculations implicitly – it is never explicitly stated – from aesthetics to ethics, and thereby to critique not only impressionism but also radical aestheticism. There always lingers, in Stra-

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chey’s writings on art, the residue, or what he might have considered the taint, of pre-art for art’s sake – of Ruskinian and Arnoldian – moralism. Notes 1. 2.

Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 165; Merle, Lytton Strachey, p. 107. C. R. Sanders, Lytton Strachey: His Mind and Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 21.

When last I visited my Great Aunt, I found to my surprise that she had been to the exhibition of French Impressionists.1 ‘And what did you think of Degas?’ I inquired. ‘My dear’, she replied, ‘I thought him horrible.’ Mr. Haward2 was there – I think it was Mr. Haward. – ‘Surely Degas is one of our greatest artists’, he said. ‘Artist!’ ejaculated my Great Aunt. ‘How can you call a man an artist when all the pictures he paints are too frightful to look at?’ ‘But dear lady’, said Mr. Haward; I don’t know – it may have been Mr. Dent3 – ‘the designs, the composition, the chiaroscuro, the harmony of tones –.’ ‘You may say what you like,’ she interrupted, ‘but you will never convince me that a prostitute in a bath isn’t an ugly spectacle. In my young days, if an artist had to paint a bath at all, he was at least careful to make it a marble one and to put Diana in it. But nowadays’ – ‘Diana has been relegated’, I put in, ‘to the Royal Academy.’ ‘Nowadays’, she proceeded, ‘it is only the hideous that is really admired.’ ‘Say rather, the rhythmic, the passionate, the true’, murmured Mr. Michaelides.4 But at that moment, just as I was beginning to doubt whether after all my Great Aunt wasn’t simply Forster under a very thin disguise, I woke up, and found myself in bed, still wondering what I should write about for the Society. I think I shall begin by drawing attention to my Great Aunt – whoever she may be. To my mind she represents the Classical view of art. The Classical doctrine held as one of its most important tenets that the objects with which art concerned itself ought always to be beautiful in themselves. It is true that when the Classical doctrine was most flourishing it was often disobeyed; for there can be little doubt, I think, that when Pope, for instance, described the pissing match in the Dunciad,5 he was more or less unconsciously deviating from his own canons. Pope in his youth composed a set of ‘Pastorals’, and his introduction to these contains some instances of the conventional Classical view. ‘If we would copy Nature’, he says, ‘it may be useful to take this idea along with us, that the Pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been; when the best of men followed the employment. To carry this resemblance yet further it would not be amiss to give these shepherds some skill in astronomy, as far as it may be useful to that sort of life … We must therefore use some illusion’, Pope adds, ‘to render a pastoral delightful; and this consists in exposing the best side only of a shepherd’s life, and in concealing its miseries.’6 This Pastoral theory is typical of the Classical view of art. It is not sufficient to represent beautifully an ugly shepherdess; the shepherdess herself must be a

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thing of beauty. The 18th century outcry against Shakespeare’s ‘irregularities’7 was to a great extent based upon this kind of feeling. To Voltaire it was a breach of the established canons of art to introduce a drunken porter into a tragedy.8 The fact that the porter was represented with consummate skill was for him an irrelevant consideration; and if you had pointed out to him that this porter’s presence upon the stage heightened the effect of the tragedy, his answer would have been the same. ‘I cannot help it. The porter is a low disagreeable hideous object. You have no business to produce your effects by such means as he. Away with him!’ And to this, what could you reply? The reply of the impressionist is of a very sweeping character. He says (at any rate he sometimes says) – ‘Your whole theory of art is entirely mistaken. You seem to fix your mind upon the objects represented; but what do the objects represented matter? The only really important thing is the representation. If my picture is made up of beautiful curves, of finely contrasted colours, and striking managements of form, – why should it make any difference whether it is a picture of a prostitute in a tin bath or of Diana in a marble one? And, if my lines, my colours, and my composition were hideous, would the fact that they represented Venus herself save my picture from being a very bad one?’ This, I think, is an unexaggerated account of what may be called the extreme Impressionist position. Manet once painted a picture called ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’, which represented several gentlemen in top hats and frock coats having breakfast on the grass with a lady who was completely naked. Of course there was an indignant outcry against such an immoral spectacle. But Manet failed to understand. ‘Why immoral?’ he said. ‘My intention in painting this picture was to produce a certain colour effect composed of bright patches of sunlight, black, green, and flesh tints. I may or may not have succeeded in producing this effect; I hope I have; but no one can prove that I haven’t by saying that one oughtn’t to paint naked ladies having breakfast out of doors.’9 It seems to me clear that Manet was in the wrong. His defence – the impressionist defence – simply amounts to the statement that the best works of art do not differ in kind from a beautiful carpet or wall-paper – that they are decorative and nothing more. Now in the first place, even if we regard a picture as a mere scheme of decoration, it is obvious that there is at least one important decorative quality the possession of which distinguishes a picture quite clearly from a wall-paper – I mean perspective. There can be no doubt that perspective is an important constituent in the decorative scheme of the vast majority of pictures. The pattern is not two-dimensional; it is three-dimensional; and the notion of distance is necessary for its proper appreciation. Nor, if decoration is all that is wanted, would it be reasonable to object to a decoration which happens to involve three dimensions instead of two. But, if it is once allowed that the notion of distance may legitimately form part of a picture, where is one to stop? Why may not a pic-

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ture contain all sorts and varieties of mental ideas; and, if these ideas are valuable, or the reverse, will not their presence necessarily affect the value of the picture? In the second place, it seems pretty plain that impressionist artists are simply deluding themselves when they say that they are painting pictures merely as decorations. If Manet was really aiming at a combination of sunlight, black, green, and flesh-colour and nothing more, is it conceivable that he would have happened to arrange these colours – as he actually did – so as to represent a company of more or less naked ladies and gentlemen having breakfast on the grass? And, after all, the intentions of an artist are of very little moment. If Manet had been colour-blind, and all the tints of his pictures merely the result of chance, would they be less beautiful? Similarly, the fact that he only intended to produce a scheme of colours, while he actually produced a naked lady on the grass, cannot excuse that fault in the picture – if fault it be. Another consideration exposes even more clearly the fallacies of the Impressionists. No school of artists has ever insisted more urgently on the importance of Truth in art. Their most striking departure from their predecessors is to be seen in their treatment of light, and their treatment of light is entirely based on theories as to its actual appearance. But, according to their own doctrines, why should it matter a twopenny damn what light really looks like? Surely one can make beautiful decorative patterns without a knowledge of the laws of Helmholtz10 – patterns whose particular beauty might be that they involved false lights, lights that no one had ever seen; or no light at all. The two statements – ‘This picture is good simply because it is a beautiful decoration,’ and ‘This picture is good because it represents things as they really are’ – are hopelessly inconsistent. If the first is true, the second is absurd; if the second is true, the first is false. This much, at any rate, seems certain: the ordinary man is right when he asserts that the value of a picture depends not only on its decorative qualities, but also on the objects which it represents. Yet it seems equally certain that the Classical school is wrong when it condemns impressionist pictures on the score of the ugliness of their subjects. There is no great difficulty in reconciling these assertions. It is easy enough to point out that ideas as to the nature of beauty are constantly changing, and that all that is the matter with the Classical school is that it is a little out of date. Thus it may be pointed out that minds which have long feasted upon the Classic form of Diana are unfit to appreciate the subtler beauties of Mademoiselle Fifi’s naked, yellow, and somewhat unhealthy body. The younger generation has got used to these things; it has learnt to find beauty even in a tin bath. This seems to be an easy way out of the difficulty; but I don’t believe that it’s the true one. I believe there is a real opposition between the Classical school and its successors – an opposition which cannot be bridged over by an enlargement of the notion of Beauty. On the contrary I wish to suggest that the Classical

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notion of Beauty is a distinct one, that when a Classical artist states that a thing is beautiful he means to attribute to it a definite quality which really does exist, and that he is right when he says that modern pictures generally do not possess it. It is impossible to describe this specific quality, but I think a clear idea can be given of it by mentioning some of the works of art which seem to me to possess it to a remarkable degree. The poetry of Keats, for instance, and of Milton, the pictures of Gainsborough and Turner, and the music of Mozart – all these things appear to be peculiarly distinguished by this quality, which one would naturally be apt to describe as ‘pure beauty.’ A line like ‘Aeaea’s isle was wondering at the moon’11 is valuable because of just this quality; but it is certainly not this quality which makes us admire the following passage – If, swollen with poison, he lay in his last bed, His body with a sere bark covered, Drawing his breath as thick and short as can The nimblest crocheting musician, Ready with loathsome vomiting to spew His soul out of one hell into a new, Made deaf with his poor kindred’s howling cries, Begging with few feigned tears great legacies, – Thou wouldst not weep, but jolly, and frolic be, As a slave, which to-morrow should be free.12

If then there really is such a thing as this quality, which may be called ‘pure beauty’, is it true that it must be present in all good works of art? In the first place, ought all art to be beautiful in its expression? Can a picture be a good picture, though it is ugly decoratively, can a poem be a good poem, if its sounds are hideous? In short, is good technique essential to a work of art? I think there can be no doubt that in the immense majority of instances it is true that the form of all valuable works of art does possess this quality of pure beauty, and it seems probable that this is the reason of the immense importance which is usually given to pure beauty in art. Yet there appears to be no reason why an unbeautiful form might not express objects whose nature was such that even an unbeautiful expression of them would be artistically valuable. I think some of Mr. Watts’s pictures,13 and some of Donne’s poems may come under this head. But as far as the objects represented by works of art are concerned, there can surely be no doubt at all that the Classical school is mistaken when it asserts that unless these have the quality of pure beauty, the representation of them is without value. For nothing is easier than to think of a multitude of undoubted artistic masterpieces which represent objects altogether devoid of beauty. Thus a portrait by Rembrandt does not cease to be valuable because it happens to be the portrait of a hideous old jew.14 Nor is it merely the pure beauty of the decorative effect in such a portrait that we admire, for it would be absurd to deny that

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our admiration is enormously heightened by our perception that the picture is a representation of a real person. The truth I believe is that there is another quality whose presence in an object justifies the artistic representation of that object no less than the quality of pure beauty: – it is that of interest. That a thing can be interesting without being beautiful is obvious enough – and vice versa; though whether – as I suppose – there is such a thing as a specific quality ‘interesting’ is a question I much want to hear discussed by the Society. If, however, such a quality does exist, its importance in questions of aesthetics must surely be very great. An argument which may be employed with success against the Classical school is the following: – why, if the representation of beautiful objects is all you aim at, are you so careful to copy exactly and minutely the appearance of things as they actually exist? What does it matter whether the things you represent exist or not so long as they are beautiful? Why do you not paint landscapes with the sky at the bottom of the picture, and the trees growing downwards from the top? Why do you learn anatomy in order to paint the muscles of the human body correctly when you know quite well that it is easy enough to imagine muscles of a much more beautiful shape than any which really exist? There are, of course, no satisfactory answers to these questions; it is an obvious truth that the mere fact of a thing existing does seem, in some way, to justify its representation in art. But if the further question be put – why should this be so? What is there, in the mere existence of an object, to make its representation so valuable? then the only reply seems to be that as a matter of fact an object that exists is more ‘interesting’ than one that does not. And indeed it seems to be true that the more interesting an existing object is the more valuable is its representation; while on the other hand the representation of an unreal and an ugly object may yet be valuable if only the object be interesting. Lastly, in the case of what is usually admitted to be the most valuable class of artistic productions – those which seem to be concerned with the universe as a whole – such as the C Minor Symphony,15 or King Lear – in this case I believe that the overwhelming value of the work of art depends upon the overwhelming interest of the object. If these remarks, then, are true, it always may be an irrelevant question to ask, with reference to the value of a work of art – is it beautiful? The work of art may be simply interesting – and that is all. It may of course be merely beautiful; it may be both beautiful and interesting. But, to my mind at least, it ought not to be judged on its beauty alone. I fear I have been blatantly discussing painting under a thin veil of generality. But I think and hope that literature at least may – like Mrs. Gamp’s umbrella16 – I don’t know who Mrs. Gamp was, but I’m sure she must have had an umbrella, and if she had an umbrella I’m convinced the simile will be perfect – fit in.

SHAKESPEARE AND THE MUSICAL GLASSES (FRAGMENT) AND ART HAS NO CONCERN WITH MORALS (FRAGMENT)

‘The artist’, Oscar Wilde writes in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘is the creator of beautiful things’.1 The idea in itself seems innocuous, even banal. But in its literary-historical context – that of late nineteenth-century aestheticism, which still bore the traces of earlier, high Victorian aestheticisms – it was provocative. Strachey was obviously sympathetic to it, as when he writes, in the first of these fragments, ‘It seems clear that when we talk of artists we are thinking of persons who exercise a conscious power of selection from various materials, who intend to produce beautiful objects, and deliberately do so’ (below, p. 135). But whereas Wilde aggressively disavowed art’s morality or immorality and counted the ‘elect’ as those ‘to whom beautiful things mean only beauty’,2 Strachey, in the second fragment, seems inclined to view art through a moral lens. The first meaning of art has it that there is ‘no connexion with morals’ when art is merely the ‘arrangement of physical things’. However, the third meaning, and the ‘highest’ one, has art in a Keatsian manner ‘touch[ing] morals’ and connected also with truth. Finally, beauty and truth, independently and together, are ‘expressions of what is divine in man’ (below, p. 135). Strachey, who is often thought of as a Wildean aesthete, may in the end bear at least as close a resemblance, intellectually speaking, to Pater, who in The Renaissance (1873) celebrated ‘the love of art for its own sake’ as the highest form of wisdom, while also placing an implicit ethical injunction at the core of his aestheticism: Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.3

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For Pater, not to see the face of the other, not to sympathize and even empathize with the other, is to fail as an ethical being. Strachey deplored Pater’s style, calling it ‘waxen’.4 His own was lapidary. Yet they were both struck by – and both quoted – the line from Victor Hugo, ‘Nous sommes toutes condamnés’ (‘we are all condemned’; Pater, in the conclusion to The Renaissance, and Strachey in a 20 November 1904 letter to Leonard Woolf ),5 and responded to this existential insight by placing an equally ardent hope in the redemptive power of art and of an ethical code free of religious or other transcendent claims. The ethical was central to Strachey’s conception of life as well as of art. Like Pater, he saw works of art and literature – and life itself – as both aesthetic objects and ethical endeavours. The ‘divinity’ he writes of in ‘Art Has No Concern with Morals’ is both immanent (as opposed to transcendent) and the product of intimate personal relations; he often figured the latter, in his letters, in religious language. In Virginia Woolf ’s sense of the term, this divinity is surely a ‘spiritual’ rather than a religious notion.6 The Cambridge-period essays collected here and elsewhere vibrate with a developing critical intelligence that was searching out ways both to expose the ideological impairments to the fulfilment of this divinity and to discover its simultaneously ethical and aesthetic qualities. The title of the first fragment comes from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and denotes ‘fashionable’ but insignificant conversation: ‘The two ladies threw my girls quite into the shade, for they would talk of nothing but high life, and high-lived company; with other fashionable topics, such as pictures, taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses’.7 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1895), ed. D. L. Lawler (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 3. Ibid., p. 3. W. Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1899), p. 250. Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 118. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 251; The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 36. V. Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader: First Series, ed. A. McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, 1984), pp. 146–54, on p. 147. O. Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1876), p. 54.

Man, it is generally admitted, is a rational animal and perhaps it will be allowed for purposes of argument that I am a man. It then follows that I am a rational animal. This, I agree, may appear a singular conclusion to so trite a syllogism; but what is one to do? There seems to be nothing for it but to bow to the decision of an all-powerful Providence, and to be rational, damned rational, to the end of the Chapter. I merely say this to forestall the irritation of my auditors. If what I am going to say appears to be foolish, or paradoxical, or monstrous, or blasphemous, or simply dull – how can I help it? These things do not affect me; I am a rational animal. I wish to ask, first of all, what you mean by an artist? Don’t please reply that you mean someone who produces works of art, because I can’t believe that you really think that. Surely it would be rash to affirm that God was an artist because he made Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs; and who calls the skylark an artist, for all the melodies that he produces?1 Is the frost an artist when it draws those exquisite designs upon our window-panes?2 And am I an artist, because, on Wednesday last, I forthed a turd3 which was beautiful to behold? It seems clear that when we talk of artists we are thinking of persons who exercise a conscious power of selection from various materials, who intend to produce beautiful objects, and deliberately do so. *** Both Art and Morals should be defined. But only possible to define Art – a definition of Morality has been searched for in vain throughout the ages. Art 3 meanings (1) arrangement of physical things. Has no connexion with morals, as M.[orality] above all spiritual. (2) ------------------------------------- to cause an emotion. This emotion must be of a certain kind – very great not mean or petty. But not confined to moral emotions – may be dramatic or musical. End of art to produce an emotion – this not end of morality. (3) Higher sense. Here may touch morals. Same sensation given. Truth beauty – beauty truth. Both expressions of what is divine in man.

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DIALOGUES

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JULIUS CAESAR AND LORD SALISBURY

Several of Strachey’s dialogues, like a number of his Cambridge-period essays, address religious themes – or, more precisely, the general theme of religion. Often, they articulate it with such moral concepts as duty, reverence and propriety. One of these dialogues, ‘Julius Caesar and Lord Salisbury’, also represents the first of five that together compose a series of critiques of Victorian morality; Strachey saw himself as a scourge of ‘the Victorians … They seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites’ – as he put it in a 1912 letter to Virginia Woolf.1 Lord Salisbury (Robert Cecil third Marquess of Salisbury; 1830–1903), leader of the British Conservative Party for the last two decades of the nineteenth century and chancellor of Oxford, among many other political accomplishments, was three times prime minister between 1885 and 1902. His longest term spanned seven years across the turn of the century, from 1895 to 1902. Strachey presumably wrote this dialogue after Salisbury’s death in 1903, and probably after Strachey’s fellowship dissertation was finally rejected in 1905 and his attitude towards imperialism had begun to shift towards vehement opposition. In this clash of Epicureanism and Christianity, Strachey suggests the absurdity of Christian dogma in order to undercut both Salisbury’s own ideological commitments as an icon of Victorian aristocratic conservatism and, more broadly, any theological justification for imperialism as such, Victorian or otherwise. Notes 1.

The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 211.

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Julius Caesar My dear Lord Salisbury, do not let us talk about politics. Lord Salisbury Very well. But what shall we talk about. Julius Caesar The choice is large. Lord Salisbury There is only one subject that is more important than politics. Let us talk about that. Julius Caesar Certainly; but what is it? Literature? Lord Salisbury No. Julius Caesar Philosophy? Lord Salisbury No. Julius Caesar Love? Lord Salisbury Oh, no.

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Julius Caesar What, then? Lord Salisbury Religion. Julius Caesar Religion! But surely, between sensible men, religion is of no importance whatever. Lord Salisbury It is of the utmost importance. Julius Caesar Ah! I understand you! The vagaries of the multitude – however absurd, however egregious – do indeed possess a profound significance for the statesman and the philosopher. We must study the errors and the follies of mankind if we would understand humanity. Religion is like to the mind as disease is to the body, and we shall never get rid of either until we have is the most dangerous of those errors and follies; and if we would cure the human mind of it, we must do as a physician does, when he cures a disease in a human body – we must become acquainted with its nature and discover its origin. Lord Salisbury That was not at all my meaning. The importance I attribute to religion depends on its truth, not its falsehood. Julius Caesar Indeed! But what means can we possibly have for determining whether any religion is true or not? distinguishing between truth and falsehood in such a question? What can we know of the Gods? The teaching of Epicurus1 is irrefutable. The Gods, by the very nature of things, can have no concern with the universe. Matter is indestructible and eternal, and all the processes of nature are determined by unchanging law. The mind and the soul, being the product of the friction of atomic particles, when that friction ceases themselves no longer exist. Man, like every other object known to us, is subject to time, and time decrees that man, like every other object, shall end by disintegrating into the elements out of which he was composed. It is given to man, before he is abolished for ever, to feel, to know, and to desire; but he can no more reach out beyond his own

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nature to the gods than the Gods themselves – if Gods indeed there be – can alter by one single hairsbreadth the infinite and eternal succession of events. Lord Salisbury Yes, that is the philosophy of Epicurus; but Epicurus was mistaken. He knew nothing of the religion I was speaking of, and neither, I perceive, do you. Yet that religion exists, and its truth is beyond a doubt. Julius Caesar You surprise me exceedingly. I have heard much of your sagacity, your knowledge of the world, your supreme common sense; and if you tell me that this is indeed the case – that by some process unimaginable to me human beings have discovered – but I am all impatience. Tell me, I beseech you, what your religion is. Lord Salisbury I will tell you. The world was created in seven days by an all-powerful and faultless God, who is at the same time three Gods, and whose son, Christ, who is also God himself, was born on earth of a virgin. Christ’s purpose in this was to redeem mankind from the punishment meted out to them by God for the disobedience of Adam, their original ancestor, eating an apple, contrary to God’s injunction. He attained his end by being crucified in Jerusalem, after which mankind was divided into two portions – those who believed in Christ and followed his teaching, and those who did not – in other words, the good and the evil. Eventually the world will come to an end, every human spirit that ever lived will be re-clothed with its material body, and Christ will separate the good from the evil in a final judgement. Then the evil, who will be in the majority, will go down to Hell, where they will suffer the greatest possible torment eternally, while the good will ascend to Heaven and be perpetually happy for ever after. That is my religion. Julius Caesar And for many years you ruled over a great Empire, and under your government that Empire reached a height of power and prosperity it had never known before. So I am told. And that is your religion. Is it possible? Lord Salisbury I assure you that during the whole course of my life I have never for one instant doubted it. Julius Caesar My dear Lord Salisbury, let us talk about politics.

CLEOPATRA AND MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

Given the use of the past tense that suggests it is a dialogue of the dead, ‘Cleopatra and Mrs. Humphry Ward’ was probably written sometime after the death of Mary Augusta Ward in 1920, and perhaps as late as the mid-1920s, following that of Marie Corelli in 1924. If this is true, then it is likely the latest paper in this collection, and one that provides further evidence of Strachey’s persistent interest in Christian morality. Here Strachey employs the same mocking tone as in ‘Julius Caesar and Lord Salisbury’ to attack Victorian values as Strachey understood them. The focus shifts in this dialogue from religious dogmatism and imperial conservatism to popular moralism as an expression of conventional Christian belief. ‘Reverence! Rank! Morality! Established institutions!’ The notorious Strachey voice – here, a bemused shriek – is audible in Cleopatra’s response to Ward’s proud assertion of conventional moral rectitude and her disavowal of religious doubt as the unfortunate product of ‘youthful impetuosity’ (below, p. 148). Mary Augusta Ward (1851–1920) was the daughter of Matthew Arnold’s brother Thomas and a popular novelist known for her religious and moral earnestness. Robert Elsmere (1888), probably the best known of her more than thirty books, explores the theme of religious crisis in the age of Darwin. Oscar Wilde, in ‘The Decay of Lying’, described it as ‘simply Arnold’s Literature and Dogma with the literature left out’.1 The History of David Grieve (1892) examines the value of marriage as an institution. Marie Corelli (1855–1924) was one of the most widely read writers of fiction in the late Victorian period, and known for her melodramatic novels. The Sorrows of Satan (1895), one of the greatest best-sellers of the time, is a Faustian novel that traces the fall and redemption of a starving writer named Geoffrey Tempest who is befriended by the devil incarnate as a foreign aristocrat. Lytton Strachey’s mother, Lady Jane Strachey, thought Corelli ‘a literary scullery maid’, as she told him in 1890.2 In addition to its obvious attack on Victorian moral values, this dialogue offers, as does the next one, vivid and witty evidence of Strachey’s long-time fascination with Cleopatra herself and of his strong if not unambivalent sus-

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ceptibility to iconic powerful women in general, such as Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth. Notes 1. 2.

O. Wilde, Intentions (Portland, ME: Thomas Mosher, 1904), p. 14. B. Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 356.

Cleopatra At last! At last I meet the paragon of our sex, the divine authoress! How much I owe you! How many of my weary hours have been illumined by your magic and your wisdom! Through the long Stygian evenings what would I have done without you? I thank you – I thank you from my heart. Mrs. Humphry Ward Your Majesty overwhelms me. Cleopatra Ah, no! Who am I to overwhelm anybody? I am unworthy – utterly unworthy – I hardly dare to speak to you! But let me tell you one thing that will give you pleasure. Queen Victoria shares my admiration for you. The only books she ever reads are yours. Mrs. Humphry Ward Indeed! Queen Victoria! I was not aware … But you are too modest, your Majesty. You are a woman of the world, and praise from a woman of the world is praise indeed. You have read David Grieve, you admire Robert Elsmere; it is clear that you have a serious mind. No doubt your actions were not in all respects such as I should have wished to imitate myself. But temperaments differ; you lived in a deplorable epoch; your home surroundings were irregular; and you never went to Oxford. I fear my grandfather1 would have disapproved of you. My uncle, on the other hand, would have enjoyed your conversation very much. Cleopatra Your uncle? Mrs. Humphry Ward Yes, my uncle, Mr. Matthew Arnold, with whose works your Majesty is doubtless familiar. He possessed two handsome dogs. I often went down to visit him in the country, but unfortunately, whenever the conversation began to grow interesting – whenever we approached some general question in religion or politics or philosophy – my uncle’s attention was claimed by his dogs. I took him out for walks – but the same thing happened. It was in vain that I led him on towards – 147 –

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the Higher Criticism2 – he suddenly found that he had lost his dogs. And so I never was able to discover my uncle’s views upon the Virgin birth, Mr. Gladstone’s Irish policy,3 or the authenticity of the Epistle to the Hebrews.4 Cleopatra The dogs had much to answer for. But you were in no need of guidance from your uncle. Your own genius made you the inspirer and the consoler of your generation. For I have been told that an enormous public delighted in your books. Mrs. Humphry Ward True, your Majesty; my efforts were not unrewarded. My sales were the highest known; and, though I was attacked at first as an innovator, the true character of my work was soon understood. I admit that in Robert Elsmere I ventured with youthful impetuosity to suggest doubts about Christianity; my audacity interested and alarmed Mr. Gladstone; my sales went up; and for a moment I was almost a Unitarian. But with age, I came to understand the value of orthodoxy, and I think I may say that during the closing years of the reign of Victoria no writer more consistently inculcated the necessity of morality, the value of reverence, the importance of rank, and the respect due to established institutions. The public followed me; and my sales rose higher and higher every day. Cleopatra Ah! Reverence! Rank! Morality! Established institutions! Those are very wonderful things! How happy I am to have [before] me the divine authoress of The Sorrows of Satan! Mrs. Humphry Ward The Sorrows of Satan! That is no work of mine. Cleopatra What! Have I made a mistake? Surely, surely, I am addressing Miss Corelli. Mrs. Humphry Ward Your Majesty has made a mistake indeed. No, I am not – and to think that I should have credited you with a serious mind! Didn’t I say that my grandfather would have disapproved of you? My grandfather was always right. And then, Queen Victoria, too! – Oh! – I beg to take leave of your Majesty.

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Cleopatra Please, please, do not let us quarrel. I have been very foolish. Pray forgive me. You have written novels? Yes? Well, I have a great treat in store. I am going to read them all, and, when I have finished them, I am sure that I shall feel more certain than ever that reverence, rank, morality, and established institutions are very wonderful things.

SALTER AND CLEOPATRA. AN IMAGINARY CONVERSATION

William Henry Salter (1880–1969) appears only once in Strachey’s biography. In a 10 November 1906 letter to Leonard Woolf, Strachey describes his afternoon at the Old Bond Street picture dealer Agnew’s: I went to Agnew’s this afternoon, to look at some pictures. I’d hardly got into the room, when I heard ‘Hullo, Strachey!’ in familiar tones. I looked round, and there was Salter. He looked perhaps a little less infirm, but his mind was certainly identical. – ‘Have you seen the picture of the old lady? It’s absurdly like Haldane [presumably, the Liberal and later Labour politician, and translator of Schopenhauer, Viscount Haldane (1856–1928)]. He must be her reincarnation.’ It was a wonderful Franz Hals, and while I was gazing Salter vanished. I’ve never known him so tactful before.1

This passage points to several salient points about Salter with respect to the attitude that Strachey expresses towards him in his encounter with Cleopatra in this, the most sexually suggestive of Strachey’s dialogues (but also see ‘Catullus and Lord Tennyson’). Salter was, in reality, a student at Cambridge during Strachey’s time there, earning first-class honours in Classics in 1901 and then going on to practise law. Beginning in the mid-1910s, Salter was an active figure in the Society for Psychical Research, and served as its president in 1947–8 – though, to judge from Strachey’s letter, he was already actively thinking about spiritualist matters a decade before joining the SPR. Perhaps because of this predilection, Strachey, who was a modernist ‘spiritualist’ of the psychological type, attributes to Salter a certain mental ‘infirmity’; Strachey also thought that Salter lacked tact. This undated ‘imaginary conversation’ is not a dialogue of the dead, though Strachey maliciously wishes that it were: the place of the conversation is ‘The Infernal Regions’ and the time, ‘The Future (It is hoped the near future)’ (below, p. 153). It seems to have been intended not as an ideological critique but as a personal attack. However, if any broader symbolic message is intended, it may be something like this – that if, as

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Strachey writes in ‘Conversation and Conversations’, even ‘tragedy … must bow before … Cleopatra’ (above, p. 14), then so too must the mental vagaries and infirmities of psychical research. Notes 1.

The Letters of Lytton Strachey, pp. 111–12.

Scene: The Infernal Regions. Time: The Future (It is hoped the near future). --Cleopatra discovered. Cleo. Char. Cleo. Char. Cleo. Char. Cleo. Char. Cleo. Char. Cleo. Char. Cleo. Char. Cleo. Char. Cleo. Char. Cleo.

Charmian!1 – Is it possible? Again? He – Charmian, I say! [Enter Charmian. Yes, Madam? Not back yet? Who, Madam? What a question! You know quite well there’s only one person – Ah! He is still closeted with that Cardinal – Cardinal? Yes, I’ve forgotten his name. That is if it’s Caesar you mean – Fool! Caesar! Have I ever thought of anyone but Antony? Antony, Madam, is still out. He went walking with Madame – Madame – a Marquise – Yes, yes. – an hour ago. He’s not yet returned. This is the third time this week – What do I care? Do you think it makes any difference to me if Antony likes to make a fool of himself ? You’re too clever! Who is there today? This is the list, Madam. (reading) H’m. Marcus Aurelius, Louis XIV, Lucian, Sir John Lubbock,2 Pope Alexander II, St. Thomas Aquinas, W. H. Salter – Who’s he? I don’t know, Madam. An Englishman, I believe. He seems impatient. He told me he couldn’t wait long. Couldn’t – …? That’s original at least. In with him, Charmian. He may be amusing. But if – if they should come back from their walk – Exactly. I’ll let you know. At once. Or even – you might as well – if the Cardinal were to leave his friend – you understand me, Charmian. And now Mr. – Mr. – What is it – oh yes – Salter! Mr. Salter – – 153 –

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[Exit Charmian. Enter Salter. What a comfort to see an English face! Sal. Well, they know how to keep you waiting down here, at any rate. Cleo. Waiting means expectation, and isn’t expectation – Sal. Oh, yes, I know. As a matter of fact I went to see Octavia3 and as she wasn’t in I thought I’d come on here. But they said she’d be back in half an hour, so – Cleo. Ah! That is convenient! I too have an engagement. When that waterclock behind you has run out, I fear I must leave you. Though I daresay you’ll be tired enough of me by that time. Sal. Oh, I don’t know. Do you mind my smoking, I say? Cleo. What! Smoke in the presence of a lady? You surprise me, Mr. Salter. Sal. No, of course I didn’t mean to. I only wanted to see what you’ld say. Cleo. Ah! Sal. You have rather a reputation for being funny, up there, you know. Cleo. Oh! Sal. I don’t know why, I’m sure. Cleo. No! Sal. After all no woman can ever be really amusing. Cleo. Ah! Perhaps if she smoked more – Sal. – And talked less. Oh, quite so. Cleo. Shall I begin? You have a cigarette? Sal. Yes, do you want to smoke one? Cleo. I’m afraid I shall shock you, Mr, Salter. Sal. Me? Oh no. I’m used to these things. Cleo. But I’m not, you see. So you must teach me how to do it. Sal. Oh, you are comic! Don’t you know how to smoke a cigarette? Cleo. I’m glad I amuse you. But I don’t think you’re very gallant. Dear me, if I were a young man, and a pretty woman asked me to light her cigarette, I shouldn’t – Sal. Oh! So you call yourself pretty! Cleo. What? Sal. Well, if you ask me to find fault, I – Cleo. You – you – you – ?

Salter and Cleopatra

Sal.

Cleo. Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo.

Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo.

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As a matter of fact I think your nose is too long.4 [A pause, at last broken by Salter] And your upper lip too short. And your hair too – At last! What? At last! At last! What do you mean? At last! At last! At last! Oh, after all these years of weary waiting – these wretched, odious, dull years – after all the mean flattery, the base adulation, the sickly praise – now, now, at last, I have found a true man! Oh! Do not answer, I know your modesty! But if you could only guess how much I have loathed it – detested it all, how tired I got of it! Perhaps you won’t believe me, but I have heard myself described as beautiful! Caesar even – oh I laugh to think of it – was stupid enough to imagine I was pleased when he praised my good looks. Antony – ah! don’t speak of him! – he was the worst of all. One constant flow of flattery, flattery, flattery. But you –! Dear friend, I had almost given up hope – for thousands of years I had heard nothing but the most shamefaced compliments. I really believe that in time I might myself have begun to dream – but no! that is too horrible – and it is you – you – who have delivered me from this bondage – this slavery. I little thought when I described myself as pretty – I always do, you know, in a sort of hopeless hope that I shall be contradicted – I little thought you would have the courage – the boldness – pardon, my prince, that I did not see at once – the very moment you entered – who you were! Prince indeed! Fairy Prince, who has conquered the dragon, and won the Princess! Oh, I say, this is too funny –! You haven’t taught me to smoke yet, Prince! Haven’t I, Princess? Well, first you light a match – A match! Funny girl! Yes like that – And then –? You put the cigarette into your mouth – so. Ah, so! You make a little hole, and in pops the cigarette – I see! Yes, and now, you puff. Puff ? Oh, Prince, how do I do that? It doesn’t seem to draw. Don’t you think if we sat a little nearer each other –? This sofa.

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Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo.

Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo. Sal. Cleo.

Sal. Cleo.

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Yes, that’s better. Don’t you think, perhaps, if I sat on your knee –? Then we might puff in turns – All right – but, I say, – do you think anyone’s looking? Looking? Impossible! And besides why shouldn’t a Princess sit on her Prince’s knee? Oh, quite so. Now, I’m getting on beautifully, beautifully – but I shall never do it so beautifully as you, dear Prince. Look how the smoke curls, ah! But I think there’s something – something – just one thing, Prince, that I can do better than you – What’s that? I’m going to teach it you. It’s so easy. What’s that? So delightfully simple. You do it very much in the same way as you smoke a cigarette. What’s – that? Well, first you get your match. Match! Naughty boy! Yes, like that – Oho! And then – And then you take the cigarette – Oh, I say, you know – like that? Like that. And then – And then – ? Oh, oh, oh, what do you do then? You find a little hole, stupid. And – and – ah! – pop in the cigarette like – No you don’t though. You don’t pop in the cigarette at all. Oh you fool! You fool! You’ve got a face like a parrot! And you think you can do that to Cleopatra! You! You! You! Who dared to insult me, Egypt; – to say my nose was too long, my lip too short! I reel when I think of it. And my hair! – What was the matter with my hair, dolt? You don’t know! I say, what was the matter with my hair? I will be answered! What was the matter? Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know! Shall I strike you, chuff-head?

Salter and Cleopatra

Sal. Cleo.

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I’m very sorry. Take that! Oh, have you no tact, not a scrap, not an atom? Can’t you see that the water-clock is as empty as your skull? Go! [Exit Salter] Ah, Charmian! Charmian! Take me to Caesar! Take me to Antony! Ah!

CATULLUS AND LORD TENNYSON

In this farcical indictment of prudery in literature and life and a further critique of Victorian ideals, Strachey sets the first-century bc Roman lyric poet, famous for his erotic and obscene writings, against the most widely revered poet of – the personification of poetry in – the Victorian age. A friend of Julius Caesar, who himself defends Epicureanism in ‘Julius Caesar and Lord Salisbury’, Catullus too subscribed to Epicureanism, with its elevation of personal relationships over political or religious investments. This was a sentiment that also helped to define Bloomsbury; its most direct expression is found in E. M. Forster’s manifesto ‘What I Believe’, where he writes, ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country’.1 Given its spiritual affinity with W. B. Yeats’s question of dessicated scholars, ‘Lord, what would they say / Did their Catullus walk that way?’,2 the message speaks clearly enough for itself in this dialogue, which dramatizes a subject that Strachey returned to repeatedly throughout his adult life, from Cambridge onwards. Notes 1. 2.

E. M. Forster, ‘What I Believe’ (1938), in E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1966), pp. 67–76, on p. 68. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Scholars,’ in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, ed. R. J. Finneran (New York, Macmillan, 1989), p. 141.

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Catullus Why did you call me ‘the tenderest of Roman poets’?1 Have you read my lines on Aurelius and Furius?2 Lord Tennyson I am sorry to say I have – and many other painful passages which I should have wished absent from your pages. But I preferred to ignore them, and to concentrate my attention on your lines hendecasyllables on the death of Lesbia’s sparrow,3 which seemed to me more worthy of a distinguished poet; and hence my epithet. Catullus Then you do not agree with my remark that the distinguished poet should himself be chaste, but that his verses have no need to be?4 Lord Tennyson Certainly not. In fact I almost hold the contrary. So far as the conversation of the poet goes, at any rate, I see no reason for strictness – so long, of course, as he remains in the smoking-room; but his poetry is another matter – that should be as pure as the rose-tinct marble of Pentelicus.5 Catullus A singular doctrine. But you puzzle me. What is the smoking-room? Lord Tennyson It is the room which the ladies never enter. Catullus The ladies! Lord Tennyson Precisely, the ladies. Your lot fell in an unfortunate age – half-barbarous, violent, and extraordinarily coarse. You never had the benefit of those refining influences which surrounded me from my cradle. You never knew what the companion– 161 –

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ship of a modest, gracious gentlewoman was. You wrote for brutal soldiers and voluptuous patricians; I wrote for noble mothers and delicate daughters – for fair women with long, sloping shoulders, stately presences, and absolutely virtuous instincts – for Lady Somers,6 Mrs. Cameron,7 Mrs. Freshfield,8 Queen Victoria, and my wife.9 Catullus You forget that I had Lesbia. Lord Tennyson Please do not drag in Lesbia. I assure you that Lesbia and Queen Victoria had nothing whatever in common. Catullus At any rate they were both women; so that there was one thing at least they – Lord Tennyson Hush! You go too far, even for the smoking-room. But let me continue: How could I possibly, even if I had wished, have allowed anything gross, impure, or ignoble into my poetry, when it was to come under the eyes of such lovely creatures as I have described to you? Put yourself in my place. What would you have written, if you had lived in the Isle if Wight at the end of the nineteenth century? Catullus Either poetry or nothing. But by poetry I do not mean a concoction of pretty verses flavoured to the taste of atrophied females. Lord Tennyson You are rude and crude, Catullus. But proceed. What do you mean by poetry? Catullus I mean something free, strong, and fortunate – something vital – a natural and beautiful creation, like the human body, which has the whole of life in it and is perfect in all its parts. Lord Tennyson The whole of life! Is there to be no selection, then?

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Catullus No, none. You may not put fig-leaves on the statues of the Gods. I think it was your age and not mine that was the unlucky one; for in your poetry it only allowed you to be select, and if you wanted to express yourself with freedom it made you go into the smoking-room. I can think of nothing more pitiable than that. Lord Tennyson You are quite wrong, I assure you. There was nothing pitiable about me. If you had ever visited Faringford,10 you would never have made such a mistake. Everyone who did realised at once that I was a great poet, and – I think I may add – a great man. You had only to look at my profile to be convinced of it. Dean Inge11 is convinced of it still. Catullus Please do not drag in Dean Inge. I like your ladies better; and I have a theory that after all you did them an injustice. I believe that if, as you said, you had allowed your verses to be a little gross, impure, and ignoble, the ladies would not have minded – that perhaps they would even rather have liked it; for my fancy is that in reality they had a smoking-room of their own. Lord Tennyson Lady Tennyson smoke! You shock me. Catullus I shall shock you more before long. I have decided to write another poem in [blank] and its hero will not be Atys.12

BOCCACCIO AND GENERAL LEE

With the exception of W. H. Salter and Cleopatra, Giovanni Boccaccio and General Robert E. Lee is surely the least likely pairing in Strachey’s dialogues and conversations. Or so it seems. Boccaccio (1313–75), one of the earliest Renaissance humanists, was a friend of Petrarch and the author of The Decameron (1349–51), which explores various vicissitudes of human life ruled by the three Forces or Laws of Fortune, Intelligence and Love. In this dialogue, Boccaccio’s enjoyment of sensual and domestic pleasures contrasts sharply with Lee’s sober embrace of the fulfilment of duty as ‘all the pleasure, all the comfort, all the glory that we can ever enjoy’ (below, p. 169). Lee (1807–70), who commanded the Confederate armies during the American Civil War, fiercely adhered to a code of duty and honour, and of respect for deserving authority, as the best regulator of conduct. Boccaccio [W]hat supports you? General Lee The approbation of my own heart. (below, p. 169)

Is there a parting flick of Strachey’s ironic whip in this reduction of high moral principle to individual feeling – and therefore a moral critique of a military leader’s rigid adherence to duty? Such a reading would confirm Strachey’s generally satirical impulse towards eminent figures of the nineteenth century, his principled opposition to war as a means of settling political, economic or other disputes, and his typical elevation, from around 1910 onwards, of art over action in a moral value hierarchy. But this dialogue does not represent an assault on bellicosity or an altogether unambiguous celebration of Boccaccio’s ‘trivial’ life of art. Unlike many of the other dialogues, this one approaches the condition that Strachey described in ‘Dignity, Romance, or Vegetarianism?’ of ‘two lookingglasses endlessly reverberating themselves’ (above, p. 49). In doing so, it reveals as many fundamental similarities in its participants as it exposes real differences.

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Boccaccio I have heard of you, most magnanimous American; and there is a question I have long wished to ask you. I have heard of your defeat and your glory; your courage, your high bearing, your equanimity, your gentleness, and your prowess; I have heard of your indomitable struggle against dreadful odds, and, when the force of Fate overwhelmed you, the nobility of your surrender. But tell me this: All that you did was useless; your virtue was wasted like spilt water; the North triumphed and the South was crushed. You were splendid, but you were a failure. Well, do you not bitterly regret that you ever played a part in that disastrous history? Are you not certain now that your whole life was nothing more nor less than a mistake? General Lee By no means. If it were all to be done over again, I should act in precisely the same manner. Boccaccio And yet you will allow that you were a failure – a splendid failure, but a complete one. General Lee What, pray, has that to do with it? Do you imagine that it is for the sake of success that a good man fights? Boccaccio For what else, then? General Lee Sir, there is an English word, with which, perhaps, you are not acquainted: duty. It is the sublimest word in the language. I did what I did because it was my duty, and for no other reason.

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Boccaccio Because it was your duty. I see. General Lee But do you see? You are an Italian, I believe, who has written some pretty stories, and some that are not so pretty. Pardon me if I doubt your ability to understand my point of view. Boccaccio I certainly find it difficult. But then, how much do you understand of mine? I was in my time a story-teller, as you say, and, for one reason or another, great adventures and great self-sacrifices were outside the circle of my experience. I lived from day to day as best I could, thinking myself lucky if I got through the hours of light without disaster and the hours of darkness without disgrace. If, now and then, I could drink a glass of good wine, or read a poem of Petrarch’s, or laugh with a lady in a garden, so much the better. And were those such small things, after all? Perhaps it is true that I had very little sense of duty; but it is also true that I had some sense of art, and that I wrote a book which will entertain my fellow-creatures so long as the world endures. General Lee Of that I know nothing; but it is clear to me, from your own description, that the life you led was one of self-indulgence and triviality. Boccaccio Self-indulgence – perhaps. But self-indulgence may be wise and kind. Would you not have been wiser, would you not have been kinder even, if you had never become a General? If you had stayed at home in Virginia with your family, looking after your estates, going out to dances on moonlight nights, and feasting on buttermilk and steamed fowls? All that may be triviality, but I confess, if it comes to a choice, I prefer such triviality to the terrible significance of carrying on a hideous war. General Lee Heaven knows that if I had followed my personal wishes I took no delight in ruin and slaughter; and I loved my family. But to have refused that awful responsibility would have been impossible. If I had, I should have been dishonoured; and then what sort of happiness could I have found at home? As it was, I did my

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duty, and it was enough; for, believe me, to do our duty is all the pleasure, all the comfort, all the glory that we can ever enjoy. Boccaccio All the pleasure, all the comfort, all the glory –! Oh, magnanimous American! I honour you, I admire you, I bow before you; but as for agreeing with you – General Lee Do not trouble, I beg. Agree or disagree as it pleases you. The opinions of others leave me utterly indifferent. Boccaccio Then what supports you? General Lee The approbation of my own heart.

HEADMASTER AND PARENT (FRAGMENT)

‘We do not merely impart knowledge’, the Headmaster tells the solicitous Parent in this dialogue which, given its attitude towards the ‘Public School Spirit’, was likely composed during or around the time when Strachey was writing his portrait of Thomas Arnold for Eminent Victorians. The headmaster continues, ingenuously: ‘We turn out here … truthful, self-respecting, disciplined Englishmen. We give them a love of truth … we encourage their self-respect … and we make them disciplined’ (below, p. 175). This parody of a headmaster includes echoes of ‘Dr. Arnold’. His anti-intellectualism recalls Strachey’s mocking quotation of the Arnoldian dictum, ‘What we must look for here is, first religious and moral principle; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual ability’. ‘What Arnold set out to accomplish’, Strachey writes, was to ‘turn out brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishmen and Christians’.1 If Strachey’s Arnold was – to a greater degree than his other eminent Victorians – a parody, then the evasive Headmaster of this dialogue is a parody of a parody; he certainly possesses none of Arnold’s genuine intellectual accomplishments or the moral earnestness that Strachey deplored in Arnold. He also provides Strachey with the opportunity to mock the type of classical, pre-utilitarian education that, despite reforms and movements that transformed the educational landscape of industrialized Victorian England, had to a great extent managed – still – to resist the influence of the sciences and social sciences. Finally, the Headmaster’s approving and unironic adjuration, ‘Look at the Bishops, who are all classical scholars, if you want to see what the Classics can do for the reasoning faculties’, together with his insistence on the Classics as ‘the basis of every sound education’ (below, p. 173), recalls Matthew Arnold’s early 1880s debate with Thomas Huxley on the relative merits of classical and scientific education with respect to producing ‘cultured’ individuals in the modern world. In that world, Strachey thought that traditional classical and public school education represented, as a page of notes appended to the manuscript indicate for this unfinished piece, ‘stupidity, barbarism, narrowness – lack of culture + savoirvivre, unoriginality, class hatred’ – and ‘Dangers’. Notes 1.

Strachey, Eminent Victorians: The Definitive Edition (1918), ed. P. Levy (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 187–8. – 171 –

Headmaster I assure you, my dear sir, you will find everything precisely as it should be. The system is the best in the world, and You may have complete confidence in my unremitting care that I shall carry it out with unremitting zeal. Parent Your fees are heavy. I have a right to expect that you will give my boy a really good education. Headmaster Exactly: and what could be better than the education which is provided here? Our system is admitted to be unapproachable. It is the backbone of the country. Physically, intellectually, spiritually, it has made us Englishmen what we are. Need I say more? Parent Perhaps not. But let me hear what you are prepared to do for my boy’s intellect. Headmaster His intellect! My dear sir, I flatter myself that our intellectual training has now reached perfection. Once perhaps we clung too tenaciously to a narrow ideal. But that is no longer so; we have widened our range; and we have now constructed a curriculum which combines an astonishing variety of modern subjects with those classical studies which, as I maintain, must always form the basis of every sound education. Parent Why do you maintain that? Headmaster Because the classics alone at once train the reason and improve the taste. Could anything be more certain? Look at the Bishops, who are all classical scholars, if you want to see what the Classics can do for the reasoning faculties. And as

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for good taste, need I refer you to that spirit of refined and progressive culture which distinguishes the resident fellows of our ancient Universities, those seats of Classical learning? Parent What percentage of your boys attain to distinction in Classics? Headmaster A very small percentage, no doubt. But observe the beauty of our system. If a boy has no aptitude for Classics or mathematics, he may spend several hours a week over such interesting and valuable subjects as Chemistry, Geography, Scripture Knowledge, Carpentry, or French. Parent Ah! French! Can you promise me that my boy will be able to speak French easily or at least read it fluently, when he leaves your school? Headmaster My dear sir, you shock me! If an utilitarian education is what you want, you must certainly look elsewhere. Parent I want an education that teaches something. Apart from Classics and mathematics for which, as you tell me, the bulk of your boys show no special aptitude, can you mention a single subject in which any of them become thoroughly proficient while they are under your charge? Headmaster A single subject? Are you joking? Of course I can. I can absolutely guarantee that every boy committed to my charge will acquire before he leaves me a complete and unrivalled knowledge of first-class cricket averages. Parent What! Is that one of the subjects of your curriculum? Headmaster Not at all, not at all. But here again, my dear sir, you touch upon one of the beauties of our system. It is not upon what is taught in class that we rely for

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the excellence of our results. No; our aim is more comprehensive; we create an atmosphere; we attack, so to speak, the whole life of the boy. We do not merely impart knowledge; we build up character. Parent A very laudable object. But what has character to do with cricket averages? Headmaster Everything in the world. But let me explain. We flatter ourselves that the boys we turn out here are, if they are nothing else, truthful, self-respecting, disciplined Englishmen. We give them a love of truth by the simple method of punishing them severely if we catch them telling lies; we encourage their self-respect by assiduously instilling into their minds the important principle that the class they belong to is the only one that deserves to be respected; and we make them disciplined by sending them out into a field for five or six hours every afternoon to run after cricket-balls. Can you imagine any better training for the character? But that is not all. Our great object is to encourage what I may briefly call the Public School Spirit.

GIBBON, JOHNSON, AND ADAM SMITH

At the end of September 1904, after spending several months away from Cambridge working on his fellowship dissertation on Warren Hastings, ‘Lytton returned once more to Trinity’, Holroyd explains, ‘to compose an essay for the Fellowship Examination in the form of a dialogue between Johnson, Gibbon and Adam Smith on the uses and abuses of universities’.1 Strachey does not, in fact, seem to have devoted a great deal of time to this issue, unlike many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century educational theorists and educators with whom his work intersects, and who directly or indirectly influenced either the structure of his own education or his developing ideas about aesthetics, ethics and historiography. Matthew Arnold comes immediately to mind, for example, as do Thomas Huxley and, pre-eminently, the Cambridge historian G. M. Trevelyan. Liverpool University College, which Strachey attended for two years before going to Cambridge, was a miserable place for him, redeemed in part only by the presence of Walter Raleigh, a former Apostle who taught him English literature. However, his years at Cambridge had as powerful an impact on his life as any experience. He never, though, produced a sustained examination of the benefits and hazards, the use and value, of contemporary university education. And, with respect to the discipline of history, there was little to recommend to him in the increasingly ‘scientific’ method ( J. B. Bury) or the pragmatic, earnest approach (G. M. Trevelyan) that were dominant at the turn of the century on ‘the banks of the Isis and the Cam’, where he found Clio dozing (below, p. 179). Strachey made his reputation writing about the Victorians, then turned his attention to the Elizabethan age. And yet, from at least late adolescence until the end of his life, he clearly felt more at home in the eighteenth century; he wrote dozens of essays and brief portraits on eighteenth-century figures. In this dialogue, Strachey’s passion for what he calls in his late portrait of Edward Gibbon ‘the sweet reasonableness of the eighteenth century’ intersects for a brief moment with the question of the value of modern university education.2 This dialogue is narrow in scope and slight in treatment – without the moral complexity of ‘Boccaccio and General Lee’, the ribaldry of ‘Salter and Cleopatra’, the tight focus of ‘Catullus and Lord Tennyson’, or the satirical edge of ‘Julius Caesar

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and Lord Salisbury’. One of the interlocutors, Adam Smith, plays hardly any role at all. If Strachey thought that Johnson was a writer whose ‘entire point of view is out of date’, he also thought that his ‘brilliant sentences seem to come to one, out of the Past, with the friendliness of a conversation’.3 The dialogues evinces admiration for the ‘sensibility’ and, as he puts it in an essay on Walpole’s letters, ‘the humanity of Johnson’.4 The dialogue shows a particular affinity for Gibbon, whose ‘misadventures at Oxford saved him from becoming a don’,5 and whom Strachey considered one of the greatest of artists in history. ‘There is History and History’, Gibbon says in this dialogue (below, p. 180). Strachey vigorously opposed ‘scientific’ historiography, seeing his discipline and genre as fundamentally ‘artistic’. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 196. Strachey, Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1931), p. 155. Strachey, Books and Characters: French and English (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922), pp. 60, 64. Strachey, Biographical Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), p. 196. Ibid., p. 152.

Gibbon Well, Doctor; and what is your opinion of our modern Universities? I am told strange tales of them. Can it be true that the banks of the Isis and the Cam1 are once more consecrated to the Muses, that the Divines of Oxford are now the Historians of the Papacy or the Constitution, that it is possible to be at once a Fellow of King’s and an honest man, and, in short, that we can no longer say, with Mr. Pope, that ‘Alma Mater lies dissolved in port’?2 Johnson No, sir, pudding. Dissolved in pudding. Adam Smith May I suggest, with all submission, that the line would not scan so? Johnson I didn’t mean it to scan, sir; I meant it to make sense. And that is more than was ever done by a Fellow of a College. Sir, the Universities may have been seats of learning in the past; they may be seats of learning now; I do not deny that. What I deny is that they ever have been, or ever will be, seats of sense. Gibbon Not so quickly, Doctor; for I do not altogether admit your distinction. The edifice of wisdom can only be built upon a foundation of knowledge; and a Shakespeare or a Homer, for all the wit of the one, and the fancy of the other, make but a poor display before the more solid brilliance of a Johnson or a Burke. If I may refer, at once with modesty and pride, to my own situation, it must be admitted by all who trouble to make the enquiry that whatever distinction I have since achieved was the result of the diligence and the accuracy of my early years. Babylonia was my ball; Egypt and Assyria were my peg-top; and, during the manoeuvres in Berkshire,3 my Horace was often in my hand, and always in my pocket. Johnson Yes, sir; and at Oxford? What did you learn of Babylonia at Oxford? – 179 –

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Gibbon That is precisely the point I have been attempting to make. It is quite true that I learnt nothing at Oxford. But the days of chivalry, and of stupidity, are gone; and I am informed that at the present moment the names of Sargon and of Sennacherib4 may be heard in the cloisters of Magdalen. Johnson And if they are, sir? For I am willing to take you on your own ground. If it is true that a few Professors, a few dons, have been reclaimed from idleness and port, what have you to say for the Undergraduates? Why, sir, the Undergraduates were never so idle as they are now. They go to the river, sir, but they do not go to their books. The modern University is like the Chimaera; it is neither one thing nor the other. Adam Smith Or shall we say like the Sheffield Programme?5 Johnson What you like, sir. But my quarrel is with Mr. Gibbon; and, as he is a historian, I suppose he is glad that now they study History at the Universities. Now History is good enough to read, but is it good to learn? Why should Undergraduates learn History? They might as well learn whisk. Gibbon There is History and History. There is Mr. Tout’s History of the Dark Ages,6 and there is the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But, Doctor, I agree with you that much of the time of our youth is still ill-spent. They exercise their arms more than their brains and, I believe, their tongues more than either. It is not their business to dispute, but to learn. Johnson Nay, if History makes them dispute I am with it; and, sir, with them too. Give me a discussion. Gibbon There is some distinction between discussions carried on by a Johnson, a Smith, and a Gibbon, and those which are indulged in by the idle cubs of the Univer-

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sities. They have alike no desire to learn, and no power to know; and, where ignorance is bliss, it is certainly folly to be wise. Johnson Sir, you are mistaken. And, as far as I am concerned, there is nothing I should like better than to be an undergraduate at one of our modern universities. Gibbon Well, Doctor, I confess I should be pleased, and amused, were I made a Professor there. Adam Smith That is precisely what has happened to me.7 And, indeed, though Mr. Gibbon has been so obliging as to include me in the conversation – and any part I have taken in it has, I trust, been strictly impartial – I am at a loss to guess at the precise reason of my presence here, unless it was to make this interesting announcement. I leave for Cambridge tomorrow. Gibbon You have no place to offer me, sir? Adam Smith Not at present, Mr. Gibbon; though doubtless you will be always quoted with respect. But, Doctor, if I found the Professorship of Lexicography vacant at Cambridge, would you accept the post? Johnson I, sir? No, sir, certainly not.

GOOD GOD

After Lytton Strachey died in 1932, his brother James sorted Lytton’s papers in anticipation of organizing selections from them for publication. To this dialogue, James appended a pencilled note: ‘All of this, except the title, seems to me to be in the handwriting of W. R. M. Lamb. The title is written by L. S.’ In fact, two distinct handwriting styles are evident in this piece. One of them is possibly, though not likely, Lytton Strachey’s; but the degree of uncertainty, together with this dialogue’s presence in the Strachey Papers, is such as to justify the inclusion of the dialogue here. Walter Lamb (1882–1961), though he was never elected to the Apostles, was a member, with Strachey, of the Shakespeare Society and of the Cambridge X Society, a play-reading group, and a contributor of several poems to Euphrosyne: A Collection of Verse (1905), which includes some of the earliest publications by the proto-Bloomsburys Clive Bell, Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Saxon SydneyTurner. A suitor of Virginia Stephen for several years before the intensification of her relationship with Leonard Woolf,1 Lamb also served from 1913 to 1951 as secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts, and had an early intimate relationship with James Strachey. Walter Lamb’s younger brother Henry, with whom Lytton Strachey was intimate, painted a provocative portrait of Lytton over a period of several years; finally displayed in 1922, it shows Strachey as, in Michael Holroyd’s description, a ‘sinuously reclining figure in front of [a] toy-like landscape’, in which ‘two figures have emerged from behind a tree … perhaps Mrs. Humphry Ward and St. Loe Strachey [Lytton’s cousin and editor of the Spectator], having called to inquire after his well-sounding new book’.2 In the past seventy-five years, no evidence has emerged to clarify the authorship or the date of composition of ‘Good God’. The role that Strachey played in its composition, therefore, remains uncertain. Was it written by Lamb but instigated by Strachey? Was it dictated by Strachey on one of his many meetings or holidays with Lamb and recorded by the latter? Was it a collective conversation among not two but four friends – ‘S’, ‘H’, ‘L’ and ‘W’ – and transcribed by Lamb? If it may reasonably be assumed that ‘L’ is Lamb and ‘S’ Strachey, nevertheless the identity of ‘H’ is as uncertain as the nature and extent of Strachey’s

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contribution. Is it Henry Lamb? Arthur Hobhouse? Is ‘W’ Leonard Woolf ? It is unlikely that the question of authorship, of the identity of those conversing, or of the date of composition will be answered, and possible that Strachey had nothing to do with this dialogue beyond writing the title. It is included here, however, because the general subject matter of theological issues is addressed by Strachey in several of the essays and dialogues that he wrote during his Cambridge years, because the bemused scepticism of ‘S’ clearly resembles the attitude towards religious and theological issues that Strachey expresses in these pieces and elsewhere, and because of Strachey’s perennial interest in the significance of science to modern civilization. Notes 1. 2.

For details about Lamb’s relationship with Virginia Stephen, see S. M. Hall, Before Leonard: The Early Suitors of Virginia Woolf (London: Peter Owen, 2005). M. Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 252.

S. H. S. H. L. S. H.

S. H. S.

H.

L. H.

S.

I’m sorry to hear you have entered the Church of Rome. Well it’s the only organization that can claim any right to represent God nowadays. Then you think nothing of Buddha, of Confucius, of Mahomet, or of Tya-bo?1 They were all very well in their way, but they didn’t know the nature of God. The true nature of God? Please explain. You mean that God isn’t one god, but three Gods, and that these three Gods are not three Gods, but one man? On the contrary, I do not believe in one person and three Gods, but in three persons and one God; just as the British elector believes in 19 persons and one Cabinet, not one person and 19 Cabinets. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are solid only responsible. You mean irresponsible. They are not popularly elected, often the only opposition to them is the people who don’t believe that they exist. They may not be responsible to us, but they are responsible to their own ideals, and their own ideals are perfection. They didn’t then create perfection, because if they had, there must have been a time when perfection didn’t exist, and then they couldn’t have been perfect. So that either they are not perfect, or they didn’t create everything in the world. You apparently suppose that creation must be instantaneous. But it began with the beginning of the world, and will finish with the millennium; the appearance of evil is one merely to the incompleteness of the stage which the process has as yet reached. For my part, I fail to comprehend the meaning of creation. God has always existed, and has always been conscious of the idea of the perfect world. Creation began when he willed that the perfect world should exist. From that moment the whole course of evolution was set in motion, and will finish when God’s idea of perfect men has been realised. I see. God willed that the perfect world should exist, and it didn’t. I think that is the best position for you to take up. God was a person with very good intentions, but too stupid to carry them out. Poor person, or rather persons! What a dismal tragedy!!

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I see. You have the old idea that God is a magician with a wand. He has only to wave the wand, and anything he wishes, is done. The fact is that God is only all-powerful in the sense that whatever he wills, eventually comes to pass; though matter is stubborn, and it may take a few hundreds of millions of years. Then you do admit for the thousandth time that he is either grossly incapable or monstrously wicked. Because why the dickens shouldn’t Thank you. Having now admitted that God is not all-powerful, we will Precisely. But what’s the good of a God unless he’s a magician with a wand? The only claim he has to one’s attention is that he can answer one’s prayers, raise one from the dead, and send one’s devils into a herd of swine. If he can’t do that, he might as well be a proposition in Euclid, for all I care about him. Then you admit that God may exist, but you don’t care about him. What do you expect to be the ‘good of a God’? I don’t admit anything. My point is, that Mr. H. believes in a God because he thinks he will do him good, and at the same time doesn’t believe that he can. But God can perform all these miracles – With a wand? He can perform miracles, but they take less time than creating a perfect world. He doesn’t often perform them, lest they should interfere with the general scheme. It must have been a very unfortunate scheme, then, if any improvement in it was calculated to make it worse. Not at all. Evolution depends upon causal laws; exceptions to the laws, even if good in themselves, retard the progress which the laws make possible. I am still waiting to hear why God didn’t create a perfect world at once. The fact that the world is not perfect, proves that he didn’t; the fact that he didn’t proves that he couldn’t. All Christians implicitly admit this, though they occasionally misunderstand his omnipotence. As a matter of fact his power is doubly limited, on the one hand by the need for time, on the other by the independent existence of matter from eternity. Then God and matter have always existed together? We are told in Genesis not that the world was not, but that it was without form and void. But were you ever told that your unhappy, well-meaning God, wouldn’t be smashed up by matter in the end? You admit that he has only got a certain amount of power; how do you know that he has got enough?

Good God

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The whole point is that though the mills of God grind slowly, they certainly do grind exceeding small. Subject to the 2 limitations, he is omnipotent, and the limitations are both passive. Evil being incompleteness There is no active principle of evil. Then you’re at any rate chucked to the Devil. But I don’t want to quarrel over a word. Active or passive, evil exists; and I can’t see that you have any reason for supposing that it will ever be conquered. You assume a good beginning and you assume a good end; but the middle, which is the only thing you know anything about, you admit to be thoroughly degraded. I take my stand upon human experience, and deny that the world is any better now than it was when Noah first put forth upon the flood. It may not be better, regarded as an end, but the complexity of civilisation is the medium through which the Millennium will be realised. And so you think that we shall mount on the tophats of our dead selves until we reach MacTaggart’s heaven?2 But to start a fresh hare – do you believe in the efficacy of prayer? Yes, subject to necessary limitations. As I said before God’s miracles mustn’t interfere with the steady progress through universal laws to perfection. Then you do admit that it is a mistake to pray for the King or the weather? I admit that God may have good reasons for not answering such prayers, but at the worst they do no harm, if we frankly recognise this. Are you maintaining then that the value of a prayer is due to the effect of the utterance on yourself rather than to its fulfillment? To this extent the value of prayer is subjective, that an event which is otherwise bad or indifferent may form, with a prayer to which it is an answer, a whole which is very good. For instance the birth of Samuel, as an answer to prayer, produced quite different feelings in his mother’s mind from any which could have been present in other circumstances.3 But do you maintain that this additional good is great enough to justify in God’s opinion an event which would otherwise be pernicious in its ultimate consequences? Indeed I do. Well, I differ on that – In my opinion the real dilemma in this matter of prayer is somewhat thus: – Either God can benefit by taking expert advice, or the advantages of prayer are subjective. In the first case you are contradicting attributes with which you have previously credited your God, in the second you are supplying a subjective influence of the same nature as the realisation of what is good and the belief that you ought to do it; but much less strong because he who is prayerful is the more likely to confuse his desires with his true ends.

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I accept horn number two, but you must remember that there is no conflict of jurisdiction between moral consciousness and the desires which find expression in prayer. One should only pray for events which are beyond the sphere of voluntary action. Now you are maintaining that the weather and His Majesty are the proper type of petition. The details of our own conduct over which you hold that we have some control are not equally proper objects. That is precisely my position. But you have already declared that the benefits of prayer are subjective and I see no subjective benefit from meteorological prayers. Your position concerning subjective benefits is only plausible in the case of petitions dealing with your own actions which you now repudiate. I attach no importance to prayer as a means of strengthening the will against evil. The subjective value lies in the feeling which accompanies the knowledge that our prayers are answered, a kind of religious gratitude. But have you not already admitted that our prayers very seldom are answered? I have only admitted that God may have good reason for not answering our prayers, but I have said nothing as to how often these good reasons may interfere. A good Christian who understands that his prayer may not be answered appreciates the fact that even this must be a manifestation of God’s goodness. The virtuous Christian prays then in the pious expectation that God’s goodness will be shown by his failure to answer.

STORIES

Several unfinished pieces of fiction reside in the Strachey Papers in the British Library. Categorized under the rubrics Strachey Papers Add. MS 81895, 81929 and 81943, they range from an abandoned novel or novella playfully and elaborately titled ‘Bonziana or the Bonze: His Habits, Life and Acquirements, by an Admirer’ (1900), which after a dozen or so pretty unsubstantial pages trails off wondering what it itself is all about, to short story fragments such as ‘The Intermediaries, or Marriage à la Mode’ and ‘Under the Moon’. ‘The Intermediaries’ is a frame tale which begins to tell the story of a former Trinity College undergraduate and young imperial administrator, Tubbs, who had travelled to and died in (presumably) India or Africa. Tubbs’s typed letters, with their ‘curious, very curious’ contents, have been brought back to England by Braithwaite, who, having known Tubbs at university and abroad, has returned to England after six years away and entrusted the papers to the narrator, suspecting that he will experience ‘the queer effect the reading of these things had on me, out there, in that wide flat broiling dazzling desert, among those jibbering savages, and those stagnant lagoons’. We never, alas, learn the contents of Tubbs’s letters. However, it is possible to infer from the ‘queer effect’ they have on Braithwaite and the narrator, from other internal evidence and from cross-references to ‘The Intermediaries’, that they relate to a homosexual relationship. Given the precise length of Braithwaite’s tenure in imperial service, it is likely that his character was modelled on Leonard Woolf and that the fragment was written either during Woolf ’s time in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) or after his return to England in 1911 after almost seven years away. For its part, ‘Under the Moon’, despite its fragmentary state, provides further evidence of Strachey’s aestheticist interest in religion during the first decade of the century. With its indebtedness to the aestheticism of Beardsley and Wilde and the reference to Swinburne, this fragment likely belongs to Strachey’s Cambridge period. The only extant chapter, the first, is titled ‘Hildebrand Hunts’, and reads in its entirety as follows: The Saint – for of course it was a Saint – first put on his sandals. His feet were as white and as beautiful as even our Swinburne could desire; and his face and his fin-

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Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers gers bending down towards them gave to his attitude a kind of drooping grace which brought to the mind the tenderness and the modesty of a lovely flower. A soft darkness whispered among the trees; dark too was the pool with a glimmering blackness which spoke of strange depths disturbed and not yet calm; but here and there amidst the warmth of the night, on leafy branches, on flowers, on grass, and on the covered body of the young Saint, fell a cold, mysterious, almost mocking light – the light of the moon. ‘Holy Mary,’ said the youth, as he rose up and stood erect in his nakedness, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, bless me and purify me forever!’

The completed stories gathered here address, with one exception, a single topic – intimate personal relationships – from multiple perspectives and in a variety of modes. The exception is the first story, ‘The Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood’, which Michael Holroyd calls ‘Lytton’s most considerable piece of writing up to the age of seventeen’,1 and which demands further commentary. Strachey wrote this piece in 1897; it is an exercise in style under the emerging influence of Edward Gibbon. More significantly, however, it represents an exercise in the writing of history according to methodological principles that Strachey would later state explicitly in ‘The Historian of the Future’, ‘A New History of Rome’, the preface to Eminent Victorians and his late portrait-essay on Edward Gibbon in ‘Six English Historians’. Moreover, it is not only an interesting addition to the corpus of Little Red Riding Hood literature but also a significant contribution to the development of fairy tales at the fin de siècle by an embryonic historian. The precise character of this contribution can be seen in specific textual details that continue the process of revision that is of the essence of the fairy tale genre, and in the narrative strategies that Strachey employs. In the history of this fairy tale, for example, the woodsman is a later addition; he is not typically related to Little Red Riding Hood; and he conventionally symbolizes a Christian saviourfigure. Strachey personalizes the relationship by making the woodsman Red Riding Hood’s father, and, writing in the age of realism and naturalism, he works against the tradition of overt symbolism by giving the characters a greater degree of psychological motivation and development than is contained in traditional versions of the story. Strachey’s version retains the Christian symbolism to a certain degree, however, and explicitly engages with the Christian moral impulse that animates Western versions of the tale, in particular that of the Brothers Grimm. The narrative, too, shifts in several places into meta-narrative, but also into an interpretive mode that is generally foreign to the fairy tale. The statement, for instance, that ‘Little Red Riding Hood paved the way for her early doom by entirely ignoring the holy and unreasoning precepts of Christianity’ (below, p. 196), makes explicit the Christian morality that motivates most versions of the tale, while serving also as a bemusedly ironic criticism of Christianity – as

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might be expected from a young atheist under the influence of Gibbon. The language of Strachey’s tale, also, is much more decorative than that of the canonical versions by Charles Perrault and the Grimms. This linguistic exuberance is, no doubt, in part simply the expression of a hyper-literate seventeen-year-old boy’s intrinsic rhetorical cleverness. But if it represents a virtuoso performance, it also serves to shift attention away from the precise details of the story as they have been passed down, with inevitable modifications, and onto the manner of telling. ‘History does not reveal the details of the interview’ between Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, Strachey writes (below, p. 197). Strachey is working in two registers here. Of course, history reveals the details of this interview, if history means all of the versions of the tale that have been told, most of which do in fact reveal these details. But the specific details of the story seem in Strachey’s own version to be less important than the way they are related. Strachey’s selective use of the ‘historical’ details of the story in ‘The Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood’ in the interest of narrative efficiency and artistic coherence thus implies an argument about the nature of history as a practice; also, this tale employs similar strategies of selection and organization to those he would employ in Eminent Victorians and his other major works and that many of his historian detractors would later bemoan. Ultimately, the traditional fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, in whatever versions he knew, is treated by Strachey in the retelling as raw material for historical and psychological commentary, and for an experiment in historiographical method that anticipates the self-reflexivity and meta-historical strategies of the late twentieth century. It may be going too far to say that ‘The Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood’ marks the birth of a historian; it nevertheless shows the young Strachey beginning to develop his historiographical theory and method with the help of a historian who was fundamentally a ‘great artist’, as Strachey calls Gibbon in his portrait of ‘Rome’s historian’.2 The resonant symbols of the dark forest and the beaten path serve Strachey’s artistic purposes well in his retelling, and retooling, of the fairy tale; it is interesting that he returns to these very metaphors near the end of his life in his portrait of Gibbon. ‘By dint’, Strachey writes: of a superb constructive vision, a serene self-confidence, a very acute judgment, and an astonishing facility in the manipulation of material, he was able to dominate the known facts. To dominate, nothing more; anything else would have been foreign to his purpose. He was a classicist; and his object was not comprehension but illumination. He drove a straight, firm road through the vast unexplored forest of Roman history; his readers could follow with easy pleasure along the wonderful way.3

‘The Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood’ is the historically most significant story collected here and one that invites closer scrutiny for the light it sheds in several directions: on Strachey’s development as a historian; on the evolution

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of turn-of-the-century historiography as such; and on the evolution of the fairy tale genre in the late nineteenth century. The other stories offer a glimpse into Strachey’s overriding interest in the psychosexual complexities of intimate personal relations. ‘The Story of A and B’, undated, is a schematic, numbered, almost propositional and ultimately humorous diagram that marks a dozen stages in an intimate relationship between two generic, genderless persons. ‘Tragedy’, written in 1902, and placed in a setting reminiscent of the lush decadence of Wilde (think, for example, of the opening scene of The Picture of Dorian Gray), portrays a friendship between a ‘young man and a middle-aged gentleman’ (below, p. 201) and quietly, heart-rendingly dramatizes an epiphanic moment in a life of sexual repression. This was written in a year when Strachey wrote to Leonard Woolf, ‘I cannot fall in love with’ women. ‘Oughtn’t I to be in love’ with them? ‘Oughtn’t I – ? It’s my disease, I’m afraid, not to be’. He went on, in the same letter, to speak of wanting to write a tragedy: My tragedy I want to write – a new one – but I don’t think I ever shall. If I did – as I want to – it would be more utterly horrible and more supremely [rude (?)] than anything ever before heard of. But I shan’t of course.4

Whatever exactly this unwritten tragedy may have been, Strachey did produce one tragedy at least in this year – one of gay longing and emotional and sexual unfulfilment. Next, ‘Interesting Letter from Madame La Comtesse de — to Lady X’, written in November 1904, recounts with hilarious lasciviousness the Countess’s seduction of, and ultimate rejection by, a young Eton graduate who, before going to university, spends a year abroad in the Countess’s house in France, speaks little French while there, exhausts her with his sexual prowess – and, like Strachey himself, really prefers boys. Some of the material from ‘Interesting Letter’, or at least some of its spirit, tempered by occasion, would find its way into Strachey’s 1913 portrait of Madame du Deffand; in it he writes vividly of ‘the renowned salon’ which exerted a gravitational pull on ‘influential parents in England [who] obtained leave for their young sons to be admitted into the centre of Parisian refinement’ in the years immediately preceding the Revolution. There, the ‘English cub, fresh from Eton, was introduced by his tutor into … the great circle of a dozen or more elderly important persons, glittering in jewels and orders, pompous in powder and rouge’. Unlike Madame La Comtesse de —, Madame du Deffand apparently ‘could not tolerate young people’.5 Nevertheless, the obvious connections between these pieces illustrate the extent to which Strachey’s early writings were already informed by his fascination with the French eighteenth century. More importantly, these connections illuminate the manner in which it was an artistic impulse, and not necessarily a desire to tell the positive truth, that guided Strachey’s work as biographer and historian.

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Finally, the undated ‘Letter. From an Inhabitant of another World’ melodramatically treats the theme of unrequited love between human ‘blobs’ and represents a fleshing-out, though with an opposite dénouement, of the scheme of ‘The Story of A and B’. In a November 1912 letter to the newly married Virginia Woolf, Strachey took the occasion of a reflection on the ‘mouthing bungling hypocrites’ of the Victorian age – specifically, Mrs Humphry Ward, Thackeray and George Meredith – to speculate about ‘the literature of the future’. It will, he foresees in this anticipatory paean, be amazing. At last it’ll tell the truth, and be indecent, and amusing, and romantic, and even (after about 100 years) be written well. Quelle joie! – To live in those days, when books will pour out from the press reeking with all the filth of Petronius, all the frenzy of Dostoevsky, all the romance of the Arabian Nights, and all the exquisiteness of Voltaire!6

Four years earlier, Strachey had announced to Virginia his intention to write ‘a novel about a Lord Chancellor and his naughty son’;7 he later updated her on its progress: I forgot to tell you how extraordinary my novel about the Lord Chancellor is becoming, as I lie in bed creating it after breakfast. You never heard such conversations, or imagined such scenes! But they’re most of them a little too scabreux, and they’re none of them written. What’s so remarkable is the way in which I penetrate into every sphere of life. My footmen are amazing, and so are my prostitutes. There’s a Prime Minister who should be fine, and a don’s wife à faire mourire de rire. But it’s impossible to get any of it together.8

Strachey’s fictional ambitions always outstripped his persistence; he never got this novel, ‘Lord Pettigrew’, together (though he wrote four chapters, selections from which may be found in The Really Interesting Question, with a useful commentary by Paul Levy). Nor, with the exception of the ‘conte drôlatique entitled “Ermyntrude and Esmeralda”’ – which Holroyd calls ‘Lytton’s most entertaining fiction, a genuine work of soft pornography’9 – did he ever pursue narrative fiction seriously after the mid-1910s. It seems fitting that the short fiction that this historian of the future (as he imagined himself ) did complete was never intended for publication, but only for his own occupation or for the amusement of his friends. Holroyd and Levy may well be right to claim that ‘None of [Strachey’s] attempts at fiction … can be counted a success’.10 Be that as it may, they articulate poignantly (as in ‘Tragedy’), lasciviously (‘Interesting Letter’), fantastically (‘Letter’) and exquisitely some of the filth, frenzy and romance that he valued in the literature of the past and that he hoped for in the literature of the future – taking as his theme, as he told Virginia, ‘the only thing worth writing about, in my opinion – the human heart!’11

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 72. Strachey, Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1931), p. 158. Ibid., p. 159. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, pp. 9–10; italics in original. Strachey, Biographical Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), p. 174. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 211; italics in original. Ibid., p. 163. Ibid., p. 168. M. Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 279–80. P. Levy and M. Holroyd, ‘Introduction’, in The Shorter Strachey, ed. M. Holroyd and P. Levy (London: Hogarth Press, 1989), p. vii. 11. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 141.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

In the long distant age of fable there dwelt, happy and secure, a woodman and his family. The house which he inhabited was built on the outskirts of a great forest, and was well appointed though small and unpretentious. His wife was an excellent woman of good heart and of meager capacity. His mother-in-law, harmless, but not unforgotten, dragged out her old age on the remote side of the forest. His only daughter, whose vivacity seemed to illumine her surroundings, and whose charm was felt by all with equal intensity, had just entered on her thirteenth year; and it is the purpose of this work to describe, with as much exactitude as possible, those circumstances which had so direct a bearing on her life, and which were ultimately the cause of her dissolution. The mother devoted herself principally to cheese making: the woodman himself spent his time according to the customs of his class, in felling the trees which had fallen into decay, in preserving the game to the best of his ability, and in destroying with the utmost vigour the wild animals of the forest. The child had no settled task to perform, no daily duty to neglect; her scarlet cloak, no less from the beauty of the material than the brilliance of the colouring was the cause of envy and admiration alike, and had procured for her the remarkable agnomen of Little Red Riding Hood. The day on which our narrative commences was an auspicious one for the small family; the old lady, who had lived for so many years on the other side of the forest, had, by a signal act of senility, reached her eightieth birthday. Little Red Riding Hood wished to be the first to salute her grandmother. Before she made her departure she was given a basket containing eggs, butter, and cheese to present to her aged relative. Her father reminded her of the messages and congratulations that it was proper to give on such an occasion. Throwing her cloak about her shoulders, she stepped out of the cottage: but her mother had yet to give a last and most salutary piece of advice. She pointed out to the child with all the earnestness of maternal solicitude (at her command) the perils of the wood, and the dangers of the walk; she implored her neither to deviate from the beaten track, nor to linger on the way; above all she warned her daughter – 195 –

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against the wild beasts of the forest; and bade her beware of the fierce savagery of the lion, the fatal embraces of the bear, and the crafty malignity of the wolf. Happily for her own peace of mind, Little Red Riding Hood paid no immediate attention to the injunctions of her father, or the fears of her mother. She walked on with intrepid footsteps towards the centre of the forest; but she soon perceived, at a little distance from the path, some flowers of rare beauty and peculiar conformation. Her desire to pluck them was only equaled by the difficulty of reaching them. A large blackberry bush seemed effectively to prevent her approach. She had almost given up the attempt in despair when help came from an unexpected quarter. It has already been indicated that Red Riding Hood had as yet not given a thought to the beasts of the forest, and there can be no doubt that at that moment she was not expecting an interview with one. Her surprise may therefore be judged when on looking round she beheld the crafty eye, the sinister jowl, and the gaunt form of a wolf aged alike in years and in deceit. Her first deed should doubtless have been to have poured forth her soul in a humble prayer for help to the mighty Ruler of all human destinies. If she had followed this course of action, who will hesitate to affirm that her sanctity would have been rewarded by some signal manifestation of the divine assistance? Unfortunately this history is designed to illustrate not only the admirable actions but the deplorable crimes of mankind, and Little Red Riding Hood paved the way for her early doom by entirely ignoring the holy and unreasoning precepts of Christianity; she gave way to that natural and pernicious instinct of curiosity which has conferred so many inestimable benefits on the human race; and she asked, little knowing that she was violating the most sacred ordinances of the Creator, the most express injunction of the Church, ‘Who are you?’ Any doubts that she might have entertained were dispelled by the gentle answer of her companion. His suave tones and insinuating demeanour reassured and flattered his victim. He offered her the flowers with a punctilious deference almost amounting to a chivalrous politeness. The pair resumed their walk amidst confidence on the one hand, and flattery on the other. It was not long before the wolf had ascertained the precise nature of the child’s mission, and he at once proposed that a plan should be put into execution as harmless in appearance as it was diabolical in reality. The old lady’s residence was but a short distance away; he declared that by taking a road which he pointed out, the house could be reached with increased celerity. He suggested that a race would no doubt amuse little Missy, and speed the time very agreeably; that he, being the swiftest, would take the longest road, while his fair companion with more graceful steps proceeded straight to the cottage.

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Little Red Riding Hood, with a credulous simplicity perhaps worthy of a better cause, agreed to the proposal and was soon buried in the depths of the forest. The wolf, on the other hand, saw the success of his plan with the approving eye of a skilful strategist; he started off along the path, the violence of his rapacity continually increasing the swiftness of his foot; until at last, having traversed twice as quickly as Red Riding Hood a road twice as short as that which she had taken, he arrived in triumph at the house of the redoubtable though comatose octogenarian. History does not reveal the details of the interview. It can only be gathered that it was a short and stormy one. It is known for certain, however, that the wolf attained at the same moment a victory and a meal, and that when Little Red Riding Hood entered her grandmother’s abode, the arch deceiver, occupying the bed, and arrayed in the nightgown, of his unfortunate victim, was prepared to receive the child with a smile of outward welcome and of inward derision. The latter approached the bed of her supposed relative. She gave her the butter, the cheese, and the eggs. The messages were delivered in the manner which her father had advised and her reverence exacted. Her grandmother thanked her in terms both gruff and to the point. On being asked the reason of her deep voice she replied that she was afflicted with a throat so sore that speech was almost impossible. And then began that celebrated conversation which has been handed down from age to age with such peculiar care, and to which it is difficult indeed for the pen of the historian to do justice even if it is imbued with the highest talent and the most gorgeous imagination. It is reported by unimpeachable authority that the child, little suspecting her imminent peril, made a series of ejaculations which diverted for a moment her approaching doom. ‘Grandmama’, she said as she approached the fatal bed, ‘What big eyes you have!’ The wolf, willing to delay the abominable deed in order to prolong the delicious expectation, replied ‘Yes; the better so see with, my dear.’ ‘Grandmama’, said the persistent child, ‘what large ears you have!’ ‘No doubt’, replied the other with cynical grin distorting his gaunt features, ‘the better to hear with, my child.’ ‘But Grandmama’, said Little Red Riding Hood, gazing with consternation on the glistening fangs of her interlocutor, ‘what big teeth you have!’ ‘The better’, answered the wolf, seeing the culmination of his plan coincide with the humour of the situation, ‘the better to eat you, my dear!’ Suiting the action to the word, he leapt out of bed, and with incredible savageness threw himself upon his victim. Then he divested himself of his borrowed raiment and slipped quietly out of the cottage. The woodman arrived on the scene a few hours later: he discovered with dismay that his mother-in-law and his child had disappeared, and he could find no clue, as he gazed on the dismantled furniture, of the whereabouts of his ill-fated daughter.

THE STORY OF A AND B

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

B was attracted to A because of A’s mental superiority. A was attracted to B because of a curve in B’s cheek. B was flattered by A’s acquaintanceship. A was delighted at being able to look at B’s cheek so often. B began to hope that A admired B’s intellect. A began to hope that someday B would kiss the curve. B let A kiss the curve. A became almost persuaded that B’s intellect was admirable. B began to like A for A’s own sake. A began to like B for B’s own sake. But B still wanted A to admire B’s intellect. And A still wanted to kiss B’s curve. Unfortunately B’s liking of A for A’s own sake was not strong enough to make up for the nuisance of A’s perpetual kissings. Unfortunately A’s liking of B for B’s own sake was not strong enough to make up for the boredom of B’s perpetual conversation. ‘If A would only be satisfied with intellectual friendship,’ thought B. ‘If B would only be satisfied with tucking up!’ thought A. It appeared at last that B preferred C’s kisses to A’s and that A thought B rather stupid. Then B began not to care very much what A thought of B’s intellect. And A began to take more interest in D’s neck than in B’s cheek. So they parted – gradually, and not in anger; for B still liked A for A’s own sake, and A still liked B for B’s. And now, when they think of each other, it is with affection

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TRAGEDY

The young man and the middle-aged gentleman sat down together on the couch. They both felt, as they prepared their cigars, the intimate and enveloping luxury of the place, which seemed to be folding them to its bosom with arms of welcome. The heavy odour of the smoke, the softness of the carpets and the voices, lingered about them and enwrapped them with all the obvious placidity of wealth; and the delicate excitement of the strings carried them along, with an enchanting subtlety, the sparkling path of their champagne. The two, taking in the presence of other comfortable lunchers merely to ignore it, understood that they were alone; knew that the women and the men and the waiters were, just as much as the music and the furniture, only a delicious setting for themselves. ‘Friends …’ murmured the elder, as he sent out his first puff, ‘friends … You have friends … a friend …’ and his pause seemed to give the words an intonation which was half a question and half a reminiscence. Then, with what was almost a sigh, he added ‘You’re still young enough for that. I expect you’re happy.’ ‘Happy?’ The young man smiled. ‘I suppose I am. Aren’t you?’ The other looked for a long time at the pointed ash of his cigar before he answered. At last he put up his hand to his head and touched the thin lock of hair so carefully plastered across his baldness. ‘I’m getting old’, he said. ‘Nonsense’, said the young man, summing up in one negligent glance the palpable deficiencies of his companion – his signet ring, his heavy gold watchchain, his waistcoat broader than it was high, his fat legs and massive boots – ‘you can’t be fifty.’ ‘More’, said the old gentleman softly. Then, casting a look which was almost nervous on the composure of his friend, ‘you see’, he went on, ‘I feel I’ve missed so much – so much that I shall never get now – so much that I should have enjoyed … Sensations, perhaps you’ld call them … emotions … experiences … How shall I express it?’ he added, touching for a second the immaculate trowser of the young man, ‘what I expect you feel every day … And to think’, and this time there was no doubt that a sigh engulfed the smoke of his cigar, ‘to think that I only missed it by the narrowest shave.’ ‘A romance?’ murmured his companion.

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‘Perhaps one would hardly call it that. A love-affair …’ he paused. Then, looking up towards the ceiling through the drifts of smoke, he went on. ‘It was when I was at school. There was a boy there, who – what shall I say? – … interested me. I liked him – you know how. He was older than I was – almost a young man; but I guessed – one does guess things like that – that he was interested in me. One day I thought I’d find out. It was in the summer, and some of us – there was a river there – went out bathing. It was a delightful, happy, summer morning – green fields, blue sky, and the river where we splashed and laughed. You can imagine it. After a little it wasn’t difficult to manage that my friend and I should be left alone together. The others, I suppose, had business of their own. When I had got out, and saw my friend come up the bank towards me, I don’t think I was ever so happy, so excited, so exalted, in my life. I laughed, and ran at him, as boys do run at each other. We were both wet and both naked, and we tumbled and struggled and fell over one another on the grass. I don’t know how long we’d struggled for, when suddenly I felt my friend’s breath on my neck, and his arms clasping me round the body harder than he’d ever clasped me before. I knew in a moment what sort of a crisis I’d reached; I knew how much … how much …’ he stopped, seeming suddenly to notice the distance he had traveled from the heavy atmosphere about him. ‘And then?’ said the young man. ‘I was a fool’, was the answer. ‘Can I ever forgive myself ? I thought it was all right; I thought … I stopped screaming, stopped laughing, stopped moving, stopped breathing almost. I was clay in his hands – clay! Oh, I can feel the silence of it all now! It was as silent … as silent as if the real thing … And then he left me like a stone. Put on his clothes, went … we never spoke again … Can I ever forgive myself ?’ His voice rose almost to a wail. The young man, gazing at the blue smoke curling from his cigar, appeared to be lost in some mysterious and delightful dream. ‘And was it your last chance?’ he said at length. The middle-aged gentleman brushed the ashes from his waistcoat. ‘My last’, he said; then taking out his watch he looked at it. ‘I must go’, he added rather hurriedly, rising and buttoning up his coat; and the young man thought he heard him mutter, as he disappeared, something that sounded like ‘My wife …’

INTERESTING LETTER FROM MADAME LA COMTESSE DE — TO LADY X

Oh my dear, though I cannot write English properly, I must write it. I must tell you, though perhaps I shan’t be able to, the whole absurd story, because I’m sure that you’ll really appreciate it – that you’ll really gather what I have to say. You remember that Honourable Philip whom you sent to me with an introduction? Well, it’s about him I want to talk, and if you don’t remember him, you must seriously try to think of that half-boy and half-man with the child’s face who had only just left your wonderful Eton, and had been sent to travel, before going to your wonderful Cambridge, in this ridiculous France. I should very much like to pay a visit to your wonderful Eton, if that is the place where Honourable Philips are usually produced; but perhaps you will think, when you have finished this letter, that it would be safer for me, and pleasanter for me on the whole, to remain in Paris. Very likely; but how often one particularly wishes to do what one knows quite well to be the dangerous and the unpleasant thing! When I first saw him I knew at once that I had found a treasure. Of course you’re well aware – and of course you don’t mind my saying you are – that the older one gets the younger one likes people to be. I don’t even pretend to be so young as not to like people who are very much younger than myself; and the Honourable Philip was the youngest person, I believe, that I had ever seen. The ordinary way of talking of people’s ages appears to me a very misleading one; for who can seriously pretend that a schoolgirl of fourteen is really younger than her sister who has just come out? And who denies, what your own Poet so admirably says, that the child is father to the man?1 From this point of view you’ll understand me when I tell you that the Honourable Philip was not eighteen, or seventeen, or sixteen, but that he was simply a new-born babe. Oh! Can’t you see that soft oval face of his, with its peach-skin down, and its complexion of perfect health? Don’t you remember those long dark eyelashes, and those long dark eyes? Those eyes! How seraphically they opened and looked at one, in their slow solemn ingenuous charming way! What questions they would have asked, one felt, if they had only known that there were any to be answered! And his mouth,

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with that curious receptive curve – but no! I must restrain myself, because I’m sure that you have not forgotten the Honourable Philip. But there was one thing about him which I must tell you, for that you couldn’t know. I mean his way of talking French. He was so ridiculously shy that I believe he had only one French word really at his command, but the way he said that one word was quite enough to make up for all the rest. Indeed everyone agreed, I think, that his ‘oui’ was the most exquisite thing which even he possessed; and it was not only exquisite, it was curiously characteristic of his own peculiar self. For it was devoid of every inflection of worldliness, of cynicism, of subtlety, of knowledge even; it was almost expressionless it was so pure; it was, as la Marquise de Makaka said, a virgin ‘oui.’ How we wanted for it to come out! What traps we laid to surprise it! And how often we were rewarded! For he was not chary with his assents, he was goodnature itself; he was like a child who agreed to everything out of sheer innocence of heart. And so, my dear, when we had become, the Honourable Philip and I, very much better acquainted, and when, at the critical moment – the moment we know so intimately how to seize – I had managed to suggest – well, you know what, I was not in the least surprised to hear him answer, just as usual, ‘oui.’ But I must confess that when the really critical moment of all was approaching, I did feel a little nervous. I made every sort of preparation, of arrangement; I tried to think everything out so that it should all pass off as easily as possible; but still I couldn’t help being a little afraid. Supposing nothing were to happen at all? Could I be certain that the Honourable Philip, however well disposed he might be, would be able – would know how – to put his words (or rather his word) into action? He could say ‘oui’ – oh, of course! – but could he do it? And, even if he could, how difficult, how very difficult, to do it well! My dear, I have not yet recovered from the shock; and I promise you I at least shall never forget the Honourable Philip as long as I live. I have had many such little affairs – need I hide that from you? – in my time. It will be enough to say that I knew the redoubtable Admiral Zinski in his prime, that I was intimately acquainted with Prince F., that the amazing Carnucci himself adored me, that I have been pursued – yes, and captured – by no less a person than the Grand Duke Hercules of Borodovna. Well, what will you answer, when I tell you that all these accomplished and powerful personages, these consummate connoisseurs in the art of loving, these redoubtable champions and conquerors over the whole extraordinary field of this extraordinary subject, compared to the Honourable Philip were simply nothing, nothing, nothing at all? At the first moment, I really thought I should be killed; but the first moment was not the worst. Oh, that Honourable Philip! That virgin, that new-born babe! I was stifled, I was ruined, I was overwhelmed; I cannot think to this day of all the incredible variety of the sufferings he put me through without the blushes coming into my cheeks. I had

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no breath left to expostulate with, even for a second; and his forces seem never to fail him or even to begin to fail him, he worked, perpetually and indomitably, like – it is the only simile I can think of – a devil in Hell. I don’t know in the very least how many hours, or nights or weeks, may have passed before I was able to utter something. But I did eventually manage to remark that he seemed to have had some experience of these affairs. He replied with his usual answer, and in precisely his usual voice, ‘oui.’ There was something in his complete detachment which suddenly nettled me; after all, what was he but an English schoolboy? I made a sudden movement from him, exclaiming vaguely that after all he didn’t seem to care for women. ‘Oui’ he replied again, and then, as he seized me, crushed me, stunned me, deluged me, for the thousandth time, he added one short sentence, which I give you, my dear, exactly as he uttered it, in all its Anglo-French absurdity, in all its native impudence, in all its brutal cynicism. ‘Mais je préfère les garçons’,2 said the Honourable Philip.

LETTER. FROM AN INHABITANT OF ANOTHER WORLD

I perceive this Universe, my dear friend, to be nothing but a multitude of blobs. These blobs are of all sizes and shapes, of varying hues and powers, and they are endowed with the most diverse natures, functions, and propensities. Their number appears to be infinite, but among them I discern some whose influence is more extended and whose movements are more active than the rest. These superior blobs demean themselves proudly towards their fellows, receive their obedience, and dictate to them their laws; they are blobs among blobs, the blobs par excellence, both in their own eyes, and in the eyes of the other blobs of this remarkable world. You will be surprised to hear of how much these blobs are capable; that they can be both happy and unhappy, angry and pleased, listless and excited, hopeful and alarmed. Their mutual relations cause these passions to arise, and indeed the superior blobs seem to be as much interested in one another as if they were not blobs at all. It is no rare thing, for instance, for a blob to hate a blob, to shrink from it with repulsion and to vow its ruin or its death. Some blobs, on the other hand, exercise an attraction over the blobs of their acquaintance, which urges these acquaintances to touch them, to fondle them, to caress them, to embrace them, and to show to them their most secret parts. I have heard of a blob, who, on being insulted by its enemy, attacked it, beat it, and stamped upon it, so that it was necessary to remove this wretched blob and to place it under the ground, where it might forthwith be converted into those smaller and less distinguished blobs which occupy the most degraded portions of this world. I have known a blob fall upon another blob in a different manner; these blobs have mutually embraced; as a result of their embraces, a lesser blob has at last emerged from the midst of one of them; it has grown, and in its turn has done what those have done from whom it issued. I met a blob who seemed to be lonely and depressed. I ventured to ask it the reason of its melancholy, and it replied as follows. ‘I am certainly the most miserable blob who has ever lived. What misfortunes! What delusions! What despairs! I can hardly think of what I have suffered without rage or tears; alas! – 207 –

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alas! how can I bear this intolerable grief ?’ I pressed it for particulars, and it continued, ‘I was much attracted by a most beautiful blob. I loved this blob more than all the world, I was willing to perish for its sake, and I thought that I was the happiest of blobs whenever it chanced to look upon me. One day I visited it, we talked intimately and long, it touched me, it kissed me, it clasped me to itself; I could hardly believe that it was pleased to do to me what I had never dreamed of doing to it; but my wonder was not so great as my joy. Henceforth we often met, and we often sought each other’s embraces. You can imagine how eagerly I waited for those hours which gave me my beautiful blob, how I sought to increase those hours, to prolong them, to make them stretch, like a rosy garland, over all my life. In one of those hours it pushed me from it, with horror and with shame; I asked the reason for this cruelty, and learnt that my embraces were odious to it, that I should never touch it more, and that it loved me as much as ever. I wept, and though I trembled to lose the blob which was dearer to me than myself, I offered never to come into its sight again. But it declared that it loved me, and I satisfied myself with its love. I conversed with it, I gazed at it, I was almost contented; ‘if this is life,’ I said to myself, ‘I shall be happy.’ Alas! In a little time I noticed that its visits were fewer and shorter, and that its occupations often kept it from my sight. I trembled, I hoped for the best, I went to it at last determined to know the worst. I found it closeted with another blob; I waited, and at last the intruder left us alone together. Then that perfidious blob turned to me and upbraided me for driving its friend away; I said at last ‘do you care for it, then, more than for me?’; it was silent; I fell back, and knew no more. When I awoke, I was alone, and I have been alone ever since.’ Who, my friend, could have helped smiling at such a recital, from such a personage? Should I have told him that such grief was thrown away upon a blob? Would he not have reminded me that he was a blob himself ?

EDITORIAL NOTES

Cambridge Society Papers A Sermon Preached before the Midnight Society 1.

new doctrines … revolts: Given the later allusion to ‘the gospel of science’, it seems clear that Strachey is thinking here at least of Darwinism. It is unclear what ‘disputes, schisms, and revolts’ Strachey is referring to. However, for a useful overview of tensions in the Anglican Church in the first decade of the twentieth century, see ‘A Crisis of Christendom: 1900–1914’, the first chapter of K. Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church, 1900–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Conversation and Conversations 1.

2.

3.

4.

magnificent fuguality of Bach: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) is generally acknowledged to have been the greatest practitioner of the fugue form during the Baroque period. Strachey’s choice of Bach to introduce his theme of conversation is appropriate, given the fugue’s foundation in counterpoint, which describes the relation between two or more voices. any of Alexandria: As the last pharaoh of Egypt, Cleopatra ruled from Alexandria, where, following the assassination of Julius Caesar, she became from 41 to 30 bc the lover of Mark Antony, whose suicide precipitated her own. Presumably this allusion anticipates the one at note 5 below. Richard and Lucy: The first encounter between the eponymous protagonist and his lover Lucy Desborough in George Meredith’s tragic 1859 novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of Father and Son is a scene described by Robert Louis Stevenson as ‘pure romance’ (‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882), in R. L. Stevenson, Memories and Portraits, Virginibus Puerisque, Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (New York: A. L. Burt Co., n.d.), pp. 119–31, on p. 126). that transcendental interlude … Prometheus Unbound: The intensely sensual, even erotic exchange between moon and earth near the end of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) was glossed by A. C. Swinburne in a note included by R. H. Shepherd in his 1894 edition of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Chatto & Windus), pp. 419–20. The relevant parts of the note appear as follows: ‘At the close of that transcendent interlude of antiphonal music in the fourth act, the Earth takes up and gives back the

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Notes to pages 11–12

last notes of the Moon’s chant before resuming a graver and deeper strain … to me there has always seemed to be a sweet and subtle miracle of music in the text’. An antiphon is a type of generally religious song that involves call and response. 5. Antony … Palestrina: Methuselah, the oldest person whose age is given in the Bible, lived 969 years. The music of Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina (1525–94), a Renaissance composer of sacred music, is regarded as the epitome of polyphonic composition, which is described as a texture composed of two or more independent melodic voices. For Antony and Cleopatra, see note 2 above. 6. Theocritus … women: In his Idyll XV, ‘The Women at the Adonis Festival’, Theocritus, the third-century bc Greek inventor of pastoral poetry, produced a work that the translator J. M. Edmonds called in the early twentieth century ‘entirely modern in spirit, and the chief characters … closely resemble the average educated Englishwoman’. See The Greek Bucolic Poets, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 28 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912), p. xxvi. 7. Brahminically: i.e., from the perspective and within the prayers of the highest caste of Hindu priests. 8. For who would … Belshazzars: i.e., for everyone who possesses interpretive ability, there are a thousand without it. Set against the backdrop of the impending arrival of the Persian army, Daniel 5 tells the story of the Babylonian King Belshazzar’s feast in 539 bc during which a hand emerges from a wall and inscribes upon it a message indecipherable by the king, who calls in Daniel, in whom are found ‘an excellent spirit, and knowledge, and understanding and wisdom, like the wisdom of the gods’ (5:12). Daniel interprets the mysterious message, ‘mene, mene, tekel upharsim’ (5:25) – God has counted and weighed the kingdom, and found it wanting; and it will be divided – as an announcement of the imminent division and collapse of Babylon and its conquest by Cyrus the Great of Persia. 9. Chinese diplomacy: In A Short History of China (London: W. H. Allen, 1893), p. 278, D. C. Boulger comments on this issue in a passage that traces the nuances of the nineteenth-century Prince Kung’s dealings with Lord Elgin and other British diplomats and whose style bears at moments a striking resemblance to that of Strachey: ‘even at this supreme moment of doubt and danger, the subtlety of Chinese diplomacy would have free play’. The phrase Chinese diplomacy in the early twentieth century connoted almost infinite complexity, synonymous with Byzantine. In 1918 Strachey himself, writing on ‘something fascinating about the diplomatic art’ as ‘skillfully’ practised by the Chinese nineteenth-century ‘diplomatist’ Li Hung-Chang, saw China through Orientialist eyes: ‘China is still so distant, its language is so incomprehensible, its customs are so singular, its whole civilization has such an air of topsy-turvydom about it, that our Western intelligence can survey it with a remote disinterestedness hardly less complete than if it were a part of Laputa or the moon’. See ‘A Diplomatist: Li Hung-Chang,’ in The Shorter Strachey, ed. M. Holroyd and P. Levy (London: Hogarth Press, 1989), pp. 49, 52. 10. To pass … which is ourselves: The language in which Strachey expresses his assumption of individual isolation within an ‘intrenched camp’ closely resembles that of the earlier aesthete Walter Pater, who had expressed much the same idea thirty years earlier and placed it at the centre of his aestheticism: ‘Experience … is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping

Notes to pages 12–15

211

as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.’ See The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1899), p. 248. 11. like Satan … overleap all bounds: J. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV.178–83. Satan enters the Garden of Eden: One Gate there only was, and that look’d East On th’ other side: which when th’ arch-felon saw Due entrance he disdained, and in contempt, At one slight bound high over leap’d all bound Of Hill or highest Wall, and sheer within Lights on his feet. 12. Célimène and Millamant: characters, respectively, in Molière’s (1622–73) Misanthrope (1666) and William Congreve’s (1670–1729) Way of the World (1700). For all of his reservations about George Meredith, Strachey undoubtedly agreed with Meredith’s description of these characters as ‘those two ravishing women, so copious of speech, who fence with men and pass their guard’. ‘Comedy’, Meredith adds, in a statement that lends support to Strachey’s claim about the necessity of women to comedy, ‘is an exhibition of [heroines’] battle with men, and that of men with them’. See Meredith, An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), pp. 92–3. 13. quadralogues of Beethoven: alternately, quadrilogue or quadrologue, a conversation between four voices. Strachey is likely thinking of the Ninth Symphony (1824), whose final movement (the ‘Ode to Joy’) features four vocal soloists. 14. Phèdre lived again in Racine: The French playwright Jean Racine (1639–99) wrote Phèdre in 1677. Strachey was an ardent admirer of both the play and the playwright. In Landmarks in French Literature, for example, he calls Phèdre herself a woman of ‘dark, incomparable splendour’. Of Racine he writes, ‘there can be no doubt that it is the name of Racine that would first rise to the lips of an educated Frenchman if he were asked to select the one consummate master from among all the writers of his race’. Racine was, Strachey argues, ‘a new kind of artist’, whose development of the ‘drama of crisis’ became and, at the turn of the century remained, ‘the accepted model of what a stage-play should be’. Strachey was equally enthralled by Racine’s ‘extraordinary powers as a writer’ and his ‘supreme mastery … over the human heart – the subtleties, the profundities, the agonies, the triumphs, of love’. Strachey told Virginia Woolf that these were ‘the only thing worth writing about’ (The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 141). See Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature (New York: Henry Holt & Co.; London: Williams & Norgate, 1912), pp. 89–110. 15. Sir Thomas Browne: According to Strachey, Browne (1605–82) ‘dug deeply into so many subjects, he touched lightly upon so many more, that his works offer innumerable openings for those half-conversational digressions and excursions of which perhaps the pleasantest kind of criticism is composed’. Browne left what Strachey describes as ‘scanty and unexciting materials’ for the biographer, but a body of work that he calls extraordinary, sublime, wonderful, triumphant, grand’. In the final, ‘astonishing’ chapter of Hydrotaphia, or Urn Burial (1658), Brown explores the subject of mortality and parades what Strachey calls ‘an extraordinary procession of persons … before one’s eyes’, with Methuselah, the ‘centre and symbol of all the rest’, ‘flickering over every page’. These pages convey, in Strachey’s final estimation, ‘an indelible impression of the vast and comprehensive grandeur of his soul’. See ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, in Books and Characters: French and English (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922), pp. 27–38. For further refer-

212

Notes to pages 15–21

ences to Browne, see note 1 to ‘Shall We Be Missionaries?’, note 8 to ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’ and note 7 to ‘Was Diotima Right?’, below, pp. 219, 219, 222. 16. the Great Court: the main courtyard of Trinity College, Cambridge. Strachey occupied rooms here for almost his entire time as a student. 17. Pythagorical conversation: The fifth-century bc philosopher Pythagoras of Samos imagined, on mathematical principles, that the universe produced a ‘music of the spheres’. If, as was a basic tenet of aestheticism, all art aspired to the condition of music, and if conversation aspires to the condition of art, then the highest type of conversation achieved a transcendent, mystical and ‘mysterious’ musicality.

Christ or Caliban? 1.

2.

History of Western Civilisation … gathered together: Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834–1902) served as Regius professor of history at Cambridge from 1895 until 1902 (in which post he was succeeded by J. B. Bury: see note 2 to ‘The Historian of the Future’, below, p. 217); he was in good part responsible for the professionalization, or scientization, of historical research in England; he planned the Cambridge Modern History series; and he was famous for his failure to produce his magnum opus on The History of Liberty. As William McNeill writes, Acton ‘attained a great reputation as a historian, mainly on the strength of a book he never wrote’. See Acton, Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History: Selected Papers, ed. W. McNeill (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. ix. Over the course of the decades during which Acton was planning his History, he amassed a private library of approximately 60,000 volumes, which the Liberal writer and politician John Morley (1838–1923) inherited following Acton’s death. In presenting it to Cambridge University, Acton wrote to the chancellor, the Duke of Devonshire, explaining the reasons for his gift. Among Morley’s ‘operative words’: ‘The library has none of the treasures that are the glory of your Chatsworth. Nor is it one of those noble and miscellaneous accumulations … It was collected by Lord Acton to be the material for a history of Liberty, the emancipation of Conscience from Power, and the gradual substitution of Freedom for Force in the government of men. That guiding object gives to these sixty or seventy thousand volumes a unity that I would fain preserve’ ( J. Morley, Recollections, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1921), vol. 1, p. 210). An interesting study might be made of the trajectory in English historiographical theory represented by Acton’s and Bury’s respective inaugural addresses, by Strachey’s ‘Historian of the Future’ and by G. M. Trevelyan’s ‘Clio, a Muse’, an essay written, like Strachey’s, in response to Bury and engaging with some of the same fundamental issues as Acton’s lecture. the grand movement … Dreyfus Verdict: All of these events, which occurred, respectively, in 1798, 1832, 1846, 1848 and 1900, represent important signposts in the development of modern democracy, broadly conceived. The ‘Revision of the Dreyfus Verdict’ demands further comment. In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, an officer in the French army, was wrongly convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. Evidence shortly thereafter emerged that would have exonerated him, but it was suppressed by military authorities. After Émile Zola and other anti-authoritarian intellectuals mounted a loud and sustained protest, Dreyfus was finally exonerated and, in 1906, reinstated in the army, which he served during the First World War. Leonard Woolf, in the first volume of his autobiography, remembered the Dreyfus Affair as being ‘a kind of cosmic conflict [that] went on year after year between the establishment of Church, Army, and State on

Notes to pages 21–2

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

213

the one side and the small band of intellectuals who fought for truth, reason, and justice, on the other’. It was a ‘struggle between right and wrong, justice and injustice, civilization and barbarism’. Of equal importance with respect to Strachey’s biography and the history of Bloomsbury, Woolf situates the affair in the context of his and his proto-Bloomsbury friends’ ‘contempt’ for authority at the turn of the century in England: ‘we were struggling against a religious and moral code of cant and hypocrisy which produced and condoned such social crimes and judicial murders as the condemnation of Dreyfus’. See Sowing (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), pp. 151–3, 161–2. illuminist: i.e., Enlightenment rationalist. the Daily Mail … Philistian Heaven: Founded in 1896 by Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, the populist, and immensely popular, Daily Mail aimed at a lower-middleclass or what might be called a lowbrow or relatively uncultured – and thus ‘philistine’ – readership. Voltaire: François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire (1694–1778). For a fuller discussion of the significance of the eighteenth-century French philosopher and writer to Strachey, see the headnote to ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’, above. In this context, however, it is useful to note Strachey’s deep and lifelong admiration for the controversialist whose ‘constant exclamation’ was ‘Écrasez l’infame!’ This ‘infamous thing’ was, in brief, religion, and specifically ‘the orthodox dogmas of the Catholic Church’. As Strachey explains Voltaire’s driving motivation, ‘It became the great object of his life to convince public opinion that those dogmas were both ridiculous and contemptible in themselves, and abominable in their results … the one dominating motive in all that he wrote … was a passionate desire for the welfare of mankind’. Also, his works ‘are informed with a high purpose, and a genuine love of humanity and the truth’. See Landmarks in French Literature, pp. 144, 175, 178–9. Jean-Jacques beside the Lake of Geneva: In Landmarks in French Literature, Strachey writes of the ‘revolutionary’ significance of the Genevan Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) not only to French literature but to European thought, in terms that suggest an impact as profound as that of Jesus, or at least qualitatively similar: ‘He neither represented his age, nor led it; he opposed it. His outlook upon the world was truly revolutionary … He believed that it was necessary to start altogether afresh. And what makes him so singularly interesting a figure is that, in more than one sense, he was right … and the new world which was to spring from the old one was to embody, in a multitude of ways, the visions of Rousseau. He was a prophet, with the strange inspiration of a prophet – and the dishonour in his own land.’ The nature of Rousseau’s ‘revolt’, Strachey adds, was ‘spiritual’; it was in the interest of forwarding ‘the spiritual nature of man’ that Rousseau ‘detested and condemned … the restrictions upon the free play of the human spirit which seemed to be inherent in civilised life’ (pp. 185–6, 188–9). Society for the Protection … the vegetarian: The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) was founded in 1824 by a group of animal rights activists led by William Wilberforce, Richard (‘Humanity’) Martin and others. For an interesting treatment of Martin’s life, see Strachey’s fellow Bloomsburyan Mary (Molly) MacCarthy, Fighting Fitzgerald and Other Papers (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1931), pp. 185–219. MacCarthy writes, in her concluding paragraph: ‘Throughout the British Isles, United States and Canada, it should now at this day be known that it was “Humanity Martin” who raised the whole standard of the feeling of mankind for “the dumb creation”’ (pp. 218–19). Partly as a result of RSPCA activities, Parliament in 1876 passed the Cruelty to Animals Act, which placed some controls on animal experimentation and vivisection,

214

Notes to pages 22–3

at a time when vegetarianism as a social movement was growing steadily in popularity, the first Vegetarian Society having been founded in Britain in 1847. See C. Spencer, Vegetarianism: A History (Cambridge, MA, and New York: Da Capo Press, 2004), pp. 238–9. 8. phonamology: presumably, ‘phenomenology’. 9. Meredith has eye-glasses: probably Hugh Owen Meredith (1874–1964), a student at King’s College, Cambridge; an Apostle elected two years before Strachey; a Fellow of King’s from 1903 to 1908; and later, a lecturer in economics at Cambridge and, finally, professor of economics at Queens University, Belfast, for thirty-five years. For a fuller discussion of Meredith’s impact on Strachey by way of his influence on G. E. Moore, see note 15 to ‘Shall We Go the Whole Hog?’, below, p. 221. 10. crudities of the vie de Jesus: In 1863, the French historian Ernest Renan (1823–92) published his Vie de Jésus, ‘the first biography of Jesus, in the modern historical and literary sense of that word … He treated Jesus as other biographers had treated other great and famous men. Jesus, to him, was not divine, but human’. When it was published, ‘the world simply gasped in astonishment and horror … This was a story never written before. It discovered a new phenomenon – the Jesus of History! And it shook the world like an earthquake.’ See J. H. Holmes, Introduction, The Life of Jesus (New York: Modern Library, 1955), pp. 17–19. The apparent irreverence with which Renan treated his subject, together with the urbane style in which he wrote, certainly influenced the Francophile Strachey’s own approach to the writing of history and biography. Strachey writes of Renan in his Landmarks in French Literature, under the heading ‘The Age of Criticism’, that his work was marked by ‘an elaborate examination of detail, a careful, sober, unprejudiced reconstruction of past conditions, an infinitely conscientious endeavour to tell the truth and nothing but the truth … [i]t is informed with an untiring sympathy; and … a suave and lucid style adds the charm and amenity which art alone can give’ (pp. 233–4). 11. ‘Do you read … seems so irrelevant’: By the turn of the century at Cambridge, as Michael Holroyd writes, ‘the new literary idols of the undergraduate [were] Ibsen and Shaw, Samuel Butler and H. G. Wells, [who] were flying in the face of Victorianism’ (The Unknown Years, p. 10). Holroyd also recounts Strachey’s earlier participation in a family performance of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the end of 1896 (p. 75). The lines from The Master Builder (1892) that Strachey quotes here read, in Edmund Gosse and William Archer’s translation (London: Macmillan, 1901), as follows: Hilda. What a lot of books you have. Solness. Yes, I’ve got together a good many. Hilda. Do you read them all, too? Solness. I used to try to. Do you read much? Hilda. No, never! I’ve given it up. For it all seems so irrelevant. Solness. That’s just my feeling. (p. 108) 12. Angel Gabriel … Book of Life: If even the Archangel Gabriel, the Messenger of God, has lost interest in the book containing the names of all people who have been created, then the general state of intellectual curiosity at the present time must be rather dismal. 13. My dear Trevy: The prolific historian George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962) was elected to the Apostles in 1895 and enjoyed an embattled relationship with Strachey over the Apostolic ethos, especially with respect to Strachey’s homosexuality, as well as an intense ambivalence regarding the historical and aesthetic value of Strachey’s later

Notes to pages 23–7

14.

15. 16. 17.

215

work. For a fuller comparison of Strachey’s and Trevelyan’s historiographical attitudes, see the headnote to ‘The Historian of the Future’, above. Pericles and Elizabeth: Pericles (c. 495–429 bc), the legendary statesman and orator who presided over the Athenian Golden Age. Queen Elizabeth (1533–1603) reigned from 1558 until her death. For many in Strachey’s generation of the Apostles, and especially for Leonard Woolf, the Athens of Pericles represented the pinnacle of Civilization (as opposed to Barbarism), and the speech of Pericles in Book II of Thucydides’s History of the Pelopponesian War was, for Woolf, ‘the greatest masterpiece of historical literature’. See V. Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Life (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 34. For Strachey, the Elizabethan Age was ‘singular’ and ‘baroque’ in its ‘contradictions … that baffle our imagination and perplex our intelligence’. But it was also a time, he writes, during which ‘the whole energies of the country could find free scope’ (Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (New York: Harcourt, 1928), pp. 7–10). The Birds: comedy by Aristophanes (c. 446–386 bc), first performed in 414 bc. forths: lavatories/defecating. ‘grands Barbares blancs’ Verlaine speaks of: Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) was one of the leading theorists and practitioners of Symbolism. Much of his work registers the late nineteenth-century and fin-de-siècle fascination with social and cultural decadence, disintegration, and, in Max Nordau’s term, ‘degeneration’. Strachey quotes from Verlaine’s 1884 poem ‘Langueur’ (‘Languor’), whose explicit subject is the end of the Roman Empire: Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la decadence, Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs En composant des acrostiches indolents D’un style d’or ou la langueur du soleil danse. I am the Empire at the end of decadence Who watches the large white barbarians go by, While composing lazy acrostics In a gilded style where the languor of the sun dances.

18. freedom from all restraint: Strachey elaborates on this theme in an explicitly sexual-cumethical register in his late (c. 1908) Apostles essay ‘Will It Come Right in the End?’ where he argues, ‘If good literature is to flourish it is absolutely essential that there should be no restraint upon literature that is bad. The same rule applies to conduct; and the only hope of our ever getting a really beautiful and vigorous and charming civilization is to allow the whole world to fuck and bugger and abuse themselves in public and generally misbehave to their hearts’ content’ (Strachey, The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers, ed. P. Levy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), p. 80). 19. the wild triumphant cry … ‘Lead the way!’: The Tempest, II.ii.190–2.

The Colloquies of Senrab 1.

2.

Honi soit qui mal y pense: the motto of the English chivalric Order of the Garter, it appears on the garter that surrounds the shield on the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom, and may be translated ‘Shame to him who thinks evil of it’. holy sepulcher: the sacred tomb in Jerusalem, and most important Christian shrine, in the location where according to tradition Jesus was crucified and buried, and where he rose from the dead.

216 3. 4. 5.

6.

Notes to pages 28–47 the shrine … at Mecca: The Kaaba, the cube-shaped building in Mecca towards which Muslims face during daily prayers, is the most sacred site in Islam. Paradise is for those who command their anger: Koran 3:134. I have heard … of his shirt: a miracle associated with Muhammad, though performed by God, and central to Islamic tradition, the splitting of the moon is mentioned at Koran 54:1. For useful discussions of miracles in the Koran and in Islamic tradition, see D. Gril, ‘Miracles’, and related entries in J. D. McAuliffe, et al. (eds), Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an (Leiden: Brill, 2007). Houri: Islamic tradition regarding Houris is complex and much debated, but Strachey is referring to the common belief that Muslim men in heaven receive voluptuous, beautiful, alluring virgins – in some versions, seventy-two of them – as a reward.

Is Death Desirable? 1.

McTaggart: James McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866–1925) was a Hegelian philosopher, an Idealist metaphysician and the dominant intellectual influence on the Apostolic generation preceding that of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. Strachey, in the final weeks of his life, lying ill at Ham Spray House, discussed with his sister Pippa ‘the merits of McTaggart’s philosophy’ (M. Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 672). Levy writes that Strachey never ‘dismiss[ed] Christian belief and dogma with a cursory wave of the hand’ (Strachey, Eminent Victorians: The Definitive Edition (1918), ed. P. Levy (London: Continuum, 2002), p. xxv). But, unlike McTaggart, Strachey was not an atheist who believed in God. Presumably, his conversation with his sister did not result in a deathbed conversion to a belief in heaven, McTaggart’s or otherwise. On occasion, for all McTaggart’s Idealism, Strachey found him ‘a little phenomenal’ (The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 106). Strachey also, as Holroyd points out, ‘seems to have had little use’ for McTaggart’s philosophy, ‘and after hearing him lecture on the nature of good and evil, he soliloquized: ‘McTaggart’s seen through God / And put him on the shelf; / Isn’t it rather odd / He doesn’t see through himself.’ For more information about Strachey’s earliest encounters with McTaggart, see Holroyd, The Unknown Years, pp. 131–2. It is also interesting to note that, despite Strachey’s resistance to McTaggart’s Idealism, there is one aspect of McTaggart’s thinking that could not have failed to impress Strachey – namely, the early Apostolic defence of homosexuality contained in McTaggart’s paper ‘Violets or Orange Blossoms?’. For a fuller examination of McTaggart’s significance to the Apostles of his own and subsequent generations, see P. Levy, Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 100–9.

Dignity, Romance, or Vegetarianism? 1. 2.

Sultan Mombazulu: a fictitious character. Mr. Whitely’s Exercises: Like Eugen Sandow, William Gilbert Anderson and other Physical Culturalists at the turn of the nineteenth century in the United States, Alex Whitely advocated a rapid, easy, simple and effective route to muscle strength and overall physical fitness, in his book The Shortest Route and Fastest Time to Health and Strength; or Practical Athletics for Busy People (St Louis, MO: Continental Printing Company, 1891). It is possible that the often unhealthy and always less than robust Strachey was familiar with Whitely’s exercises from the incongruous time he spent in the early 1890s at the

Notes to pages 47–61

3.

4.

217

New School, Abbotsholme, which, under the leadership of the utopian Dr Cecil Reddie, ‘described itself as an advanced “Educational Laboratory” which aimed at producing wholesome, healthy citizens by what was known as “the natural method”’ – a method that included strenuous physical exercise, games and manual labour. See Holroyd, The Unknown Years, pp. 55–65. our brother Duff: J. D. Duff (1860–1940). Elected to the Apostles in 1884, Duff was a classical scholar and translator, a Fellow who taught Latin and Greek at Trinity and Girton Colleges from 1883 until his death, and one of those instrumental in recruiting G. E. Moore to the Apostles. Velasquez: Diego Velasquez (1599–1660), Spanish painter. There does not appear to be any special significance to Strachey’s two references to Velasquez here (or to the one struck out in the next essay), though it is worth remembering Velazquez’s potent influence on Manet, and thus on the trajectory of modern painting from realism to impressionism and post-impressionism. Vanessa Bell writes, in one of her letters, of Velasquez’s ability to capture ‘personal character’. See Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. R. Marler (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 13.

The Historian of the Future 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

Sappho: Sappho was a seventh-century bc Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos. The term ‘Sapphic’ became synonymous during the nineteenth century with female homosexuality. Professor Bury’s inaugural address: John Bagnell Bury (1861–1927) was elected Regius professor of modern history at Cambridge at the end of 1902, and delivered his inaugural address, ‘The Science of History’, at the Divinity School, Cambridge, on 26 January 1903. Strachey clearly explains Bury’s position; it was central to early twentieth-century debates about whether history as a discipline and a practice was an artistic or a scientific endeavour. For a fuller discussion of the significance of Bury’s lecture to Strachey’s developing ideas about historiography in the first decade of the twentieth century, see my ‘“The Historian of the Future”: Lytton Strachey and Modernist Historiography between the Two Cultures,’ ELH: English Literary History, 77:4 (2010), pp. 841–66. Puffing Billy … Flying Dutchman goes 60: Puffing Billy is an early nineteenth-century steam locomotive; the Flying Dutchman a later nineteenth-century passenger train from London Paddington to Exeter. In the 1840s, the Flying Dutchman set speed records of almost 60 miles per hour. Tacitus: Publius Cornelius Tacitus or Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (ad c. 56–c. 120), probably classical Rome’s greatest historian, as well as an orator and public official. ‘What’s the good … nuffink!’: lines from the popular turn-of-the-century music hall song, ‘What’s the Good of Anyfink? or A Cockney Complaint’, by the ‘Coster’s Laureate’, Albert Chevalier. Ranke: Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), German historian and one of the founders of empiricist, primary source-based history. Strachey pays tribute to Ranke’s powers of research as well as to his preference for narrative history in the preface to Eminent Victorians, where he adduces him as a limit case and an outdated model: ‘Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it … It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch’ (p. 3).

218

Notes to pages 62–71

7.

Alipharmutosis: a fictional creation, though Strachey likely knew of the reference to Alipharmutosis, the well-complexioned ancestor of the Egyptian King Thetmosis in the seventeenth-century French writer Jean de la Bruyère’s Les Caractères: Les Moeurs de ce siècle (Characters: Manners and Morals of the Seventeenth Century (1688)). 8. Michelet: According to Strachey, Jules Michelet (1798–1874) was the only historian of genius that France produced during the Romantic period. In Landmarks in French Literature he describes Michelet’s nineteen-volume history of France in terms relevant to the present context: ‘The great history of Michelet, with its strange, convulsive style, its capricious and imaginative treatment of facts, and its undisguised bias, shows us the spectacle of the past in a series of lurid lightning-flashes – a spectacle at once intensely vivid and singularly contorted; it is the history of a poet rather than of a man of science’ (p. 233). 9. Thucydides: Thucydides (c. 460–c. 400 bc), the Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War, with his seeming impartiality and dispassion, and his innovative use of sources, was traditionally considered to have inaugurated the tradition of scientific history. Despite his undoubted ‘elaborate grandeur’, that reputation seems to make for a certain incongruity here. Strachey, by focusing on Thucydides’s style, anticipates later twentieth-century historians for whom Thucydides is as much a critic as a proponent of a scientific attitude towards history. See, for example, W. R. Connor, ‘A Post-Modern Thucydides?’, in J. S. Rusten (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Thucydides (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 29–43. 10. Carlyle: Strachey found Thomas Carlyle’s (1795–1881) moralizing both tiresome in itself and disruptive to his artistic powers. However, he possessed a real admiration for Carlyle’s sheer powers as a writer, as may be seen in his essay on Carlyle published in Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1931), in the section on ‘Six English Historians’ (pp. 178–90). Chronologically, ‘The Historian of the Future’ and the ‘English Historians’ essays represent the book-ends of Strachey’s historiographical thinking.

Should We Have Elected Conybeare? 1.

2. 3.

4.

‘La vie … quelle saleté’: ‘Life is a dirty thing. It starts with copulation; it ends in putrefaction. What horror! What degradation! And finally, what dirt.’ This quotation appears to be a fabrication by Strachey. Matthews: unidentified. Mr. Michaelides: Constantine Cleanthes Michaelides (later Constantine Cleanthes Graham; c. 1883–1934), an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, and a contemporary of Strachey. Later, he contributed to his wife Aelfrida Tillyard’s collection Cambridge Poets, 1900–1913 (1913), and held diplomatic posts in the United States, Germany and Russia. If one looks into it … most ordinary type: Much commentary has been made on the quasireligious quality of the Cambridge Conversazione Society. ‘The whole system of the Apostles’, as Holroyd writes in one of the best summaries of the case, ‘appears curiously analogous to a religious system; clearly is, in fact, a parody of religion’. For Holroyd’s more detailed analysis, see The Unknown Years, pp. 166–7.

Notes to pages 77–94

219

Shall We Be Missionaries? 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

‘Un enthousiaste … bêtes féroces’: Nicolas Condorcet (1743–94), philosopher, mathematician, political scientist and leader during the French Revolution, was, like other select figures, granted honorary Apostolic status (for another example, that of Thomas Browne, see note 15 to ‘Conversation and Conversations’, above, p. 211, note 8 to ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’ and note 7 to ‘Was Diotima Right?’, below, pp. 219, 222). The precise quotation is this: ‘l’enthousiaste ignorant n’est plus un homme; c’est la plus terrible des bêtes féroces’; ‘the ignorant enthusiast is no longer a man; he is the most terrible of ferocious beasts’. See Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A. C. O’Connor and F. Arago, 12 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1847–9), vol. 5, p. 360. Rhodes: Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), English imperialist in South Africa. Take up the –: ‘White Man’s burden’, the first line of Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, a moral justification of imperialism. For forms … administered is best: Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle 3, ll. 303–4. Mr. Kruger: Paul Kruger (1825–1904), President of the South African Republic and leader of Boer resistance against Britain in the second Boer War of 1899–1902. Upon consideration … and Madrid: This paragraph is in Leonard Woolf ’s handwriting. Little Englanders: a term associated with anti-imperialism in general and during the period of the second Boer War in particular. McTaggart’s heaven: see note 1 to ‘Is Death Desirable?’, above, p. 216.

The Ethics of the Gospels 1.

Illud in his … (Lucr. I. 81–4): ‘I fear perhaps thou deemest that we fare / An impious road to realms of thought profane; / But ’tis that same religion oftener far / Hath bred the foul impieties of men.’ Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, trans. W. E. Leonard (New York: Everyman, 1921), ll. 81–4. The final word in l. 83 should read ‘illa’. 2. the questions … divided and perplexed: see note 1 to ‘A Sermon Preached before the Midnight Society’, above, p. 209. 3. Of providence … mazes lost: Milton, Paradise Lost, II.559–61. 4. the inspiration … 600 A. D.: In ad 600 Pope Gregory I imposed Latin as the language of Catholic prayer and worship. It was also in approximately this year that Gregory began the missionary work of converting Anglo-Saxon Britain to Christianity, an endeavour led by Augustine of Canterbury. 5. all the miracles: The Gospels record thirty-five miracles performed by Jesus. 6. Neaera’s hair: Milton, Lycidas, l. 69. Amaryllis and Neaera are conventional names of nymphs, borrowed by Milton from Virgil’s Eclogues. 7. Elijah Johnson: unidentified. 8. Lord Bacon’s essay … of gardens: The passages on pleasure and fountains are taken from Francis Bacon’s essay ‘Of Gardens’, in Essays (London and Melbourne: Dent/Everyman, 1986), pp. 137–43. 9. ‘Pyramids … ancient magnanimity’: ‘Pyramids, Arches, Obelisks, were but the irregularities of vainglory, and wilde enormities of ancient magnanimity’: Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall: A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk (1658; n.p: Riverside Press, 1907), p. 53. 10. ‘Sun, and sky … and jests’: Charles Lamb, ‘New Year’s Eve’, in The Essays of Elia, First Series (London: Edward Moxon, 1840), pp. 17–20, on p. 18. Given Strachey’s habitual

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Notes to pages 94–101

adoption of an ironic stance, and in particular his embrace of it in this essay, it is worth noting that he omits the phrase that follows ‘jests’ and completes Lamb’s sentence: ‘and irony itself – do these things go out with life?’ 11. gulph of objurgation: a category that includes the litany of synonyms – imprecations, fulminations, etc. – in the previous sentence.

Shall We Go the Whole Hog? 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

Mr. Balfour: Gerald Balfour (1853–1945), an Apostle elected to the society in 1872, was, along with Alfred Lyttleton (see note 6 below), one of the Apostles of the generation preceding that of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and J. M. E. McTaggart. According to Holroyd, Balfour and Lyttleton’s generation ‘evolved into a more sophisticated and urbane group’ before the election of the later philosophers caused a ‘react[ion] against this “top hat epoch” and reintroduced more austere doctrines’. See Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 161. In after years, Balfour was a Fellow of Trinity, an MP for Central Leeds, Chief Secretary for Ireland and President of the Board of Trade. In the first place … came there: see note 4 to ‘Should We Have Elected Conybeare?’, above, p. 218. govern niggers in Ceylon: Leonard Woolf had departed England for Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on 19 November 1904, three months before Strachey presented this paper. Strachey told G. E. Moore that in Ceylon Woolf was ‘absolute lord there of a million blacks’. See Holroyd, The Unknown Years, p. 186. Whence and what … athwart my way: Milton, Paradise Lost, II.681–3. Working Men’s College: Founded in 1854 by F. D. Maurice, F. J. Furnivall, Thomas Hughes and others from King’s College, London, as an institution for adult education, the Working Men’s College was supported during the Victorian age by such cultural figures as D. G. Rossetti, J. S. Mill, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, T. H. Huxley and others, who taught or lectured there. Still thriving in the early twentieth century, E. M. Forster, G. M. Trevelyan and Adrian Stephen taught classes at the college, while Virginia Woolf offered courses at the related Morley College, which served both men and women. For Bloomsbury Group connections to these colleges, see M. Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 81–2. Mr. Lyttleton: Alfred Lyttleton (1857–1913), an Apostle elected in 1878, was a lawyer, statesman, head of the Colonial Office and, especially, an eminent cricketer. Mr. Warren Hastings went to India: Warren Hastings (1732–1818), the first Governor-General of India, from 1773 to 1785. Earlier, Hastings had attended Westminster School. At the time he delivered this paper, Strachey was busy revising his (ultimately failed) fellowship dissertation, ‘Warren Hastings, Cheyt Sing and the Begums of Oude’. For an interesting discussion of Strachey’s attitudes towards Hastings in particular and British imperialism in general, and those attitudes in relation to those of his Bloomsbury friends the Woolfs and Forster, see B. Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 339–42. Theodore is at the Treasury: Theodore Llewelyn Davies (1870–1905) was elected to the Apostles in 1889 and joined the Treasury in 1894. According to W. C. Lubenow, ‘He had a radical reputation in the civil service’, having come from a family with a long record of dedication to workers’ and women’s rights. He drowned in 1905, after serving as private secretary to a succession of Conservative Chancellors of the Exchequer. See Lubenow,

Notes to pages 101–3

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

221

The Cambridge Apostles, 1820–1914: Liberalism, Imagination and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 163–5, for a discussion of the history of Apostles’ involvement in the Treasury and in the Civil Service generally. Principles of Mathematics: B. Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903): the ‘other book’ of 1903 among the Apostles. Mr. Harvard: possibly John Harvard (1607–78), London-born benefactor of Harvard College. Independent Review: a journal founded in 1904 by G. M. Trevelyan; its editorial board included G. L. Dickinson and C. F. G. Masterman, and Roger Fry designed the cover of the first issue. Beginning in August 1904, Strachey contributed several literary and biographical essays to the Review. One of my brothers: ‘Hobby’ pencilled by Strachey in margin. This is Arthur Hobhouse (on whom, see headnote). Another of my brothers: ‘Keynes’ pencilled by Strachey in margin. Another of my brothers: ‘Sh.’ pencilled by Strachey in margin. Presumably, this is John Tressider Sheppard (1881–1968), who was elected to the Apostles with Strachey in February 1902. An eminent classicist, a lecturer and then provost at King’s College, Cambridge, Sheppard was ‘for almost two years … the chief figure in Lytton’s emotional life’, though one whom Strachey sometimes found exasperating: ‘Lytton attached Sheppard for keeping company with his intellectual inferiors, jealously objecting to his friend going off on walks with non-Apostolic companions’. They remained friendly, though, and Sheppard visited Strachey and Carrington at Ham Spray House in the 1920s. See Holroyd, Strachey: The New Biography, pp. 93–4, 545. There is one brother … to mention: In the margin, Strachey has pencilled ‘Hom. (in excelsis)’ – i.e., Hugh Owen Meredith (1878–1964), who was elected to the Apostles in 1900. See note 9 to ‘Christ or Caliban?’, above, p. 214, for further biographical information. The significance of Meredith in the present context is to be found in G. E. Moore’s autobiography, where he attributes to Meredith a central role in the development of the final chapter of Principia Ethica, ‘The Ideal’. Moore writes: ‘the whole plan of the last chapter of Principia was formed in conversation with a friend’. Paul Levy explains, ‘The name of that friend was Hugh Owen Meredith … E. M. Forster’s greatest friend and one time lover’. He continues: Meredith (or HOM, as he was always known, at least in writing, to his friends) played a crucial part in this story – he is the missing piece in the Principia Ethica jig-saw puzzle. For it was Meredith who was the friend in conversation with whom Moore formed ‘the whole plan of the last chapter of Principia.’ The date of this history-making conversation was a Sunday in Lent term 1903, when Moore recorded: ‘Meredith to tea, talks of intrinsic goods.’ Meredith is also generally understood to have been the model for Rickie Elliot, the protagonist of Forster’s 1907 novel The Longest Journey. See Moore, ‘An Autobiography’, in The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston and Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1942), pp. 3–39, on pp. 24–5; and Levy, Moore, pp. 202, 215–17.

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Notes to pages 107–51

When Is a Drama not a Drama? 1. 2. 3. 4.

Ulysses of Mr. Phillips: Stephen Phillips, Ulysses: A Drama in a Prologue and Three Acts (London: Macmillan, 1902). McTaggart: See note 1 to ‘Is Death Desirable?’ above, p. 216. In the Trachiniae: Sophocles, Trachiniae (The Women of Trachis), a tragedy centring on the marriage of Heracles and his wife, the protagonist, Deianeira. like jesting Pilate … an answer: This final clause echoes the opening sentence of Francis Bacon’s essay ‘Of Truth’: ‘What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer’. See Bacon, Essays, p. 3. Bacon himself is alluding to John 18:38: ‘Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.’

Was Diotima Right? 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

Mr. Arthur Benson: Arthur Benson (1862–1925), writer and master of Magdalen College, Cambridge, and author of the imperial anthem ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Benson belonged to a notable literary and religious family: a son of E. W. Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, his brothers were E. F. Benson, the author of the Mapp and Lucia stories, and R. H. Benson, a novelist and prominent convert to Roman Catholicism. Beauty is truth … need to know: J. Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ll. 49–50. Watteau: Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), a French painter and important figure in the development of the Rococo style. In a passage that to a certain extent echoes Strachey’s judgement, the art critic Michael Levey writes that Watteau is ‘an artist so personal, independent, and great that he keeps transcending the context of his period’. See Levey, Painting and Sculpture in France, 1700–1789 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 29. The first paper … for the Society: ‘Ought the Father to Grow a Beard?’; see headnote to ‘Christ or Caliban?’ above, pp. 17–19. our brother Raleigh: Sir Walter Raleigh (1861–1922), elected to the Apostles in 1882, was a distant relation of Strachey and ‘the chief and most influential figure in his life before he went up to Cambridge’. In 1897, Strachey went to Liverpool University College where he remained for two years, studying Greek, Latin, mathematics, history and English literature. Raleigh instructed him in English literature, later going on to a post at Oxford, where he helped to found the English school, thus making it possible to take a degree in English literature there. On the relation between Raleigh and Strachey, including a brief discussion of Raleigh’s ‘tende[ncy] to suppress his buoyant powers of imagination in the supposed interests of promoting sound literary instruction’ – the tendency to which Strachey alludes here – see Holroyd, The Unknown Years, pp. 79–82. Gate of Horn: The gates of horn and ivory, from the Odyssey, XIX.560–9, denote mental portals through which emerge, respectively, true and false dreams. It would seem that Strachey intends Gate of Ivory here. Our brother Browne: Sir Thomas Browne. For notes on Browne’s works and his honorary Apostolic status, see note 15 to ‘Conversation and Conversations’, note 1 to ‘Shall We Be Missionaries?’ and note 8 to ‘The Ethics of the Gospels’, above, pp. 211, 219, 219.

Notes to pages 119–20

223

Do Two and Two Make Five? 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

Sultan Bizibec XXIV: a fictitious character. the question … profound remark: A month and a half after delivering this paper, Strachey wrote a letter to Leonard Woolf dated 6 February 1907 that includes just such witty remarks, notwithstanding the question of their profundity. ‘Everyone in this household’, he writes, of the Strachey family home at 69 Lancaster Gate, London, ‘is a “Suffragette”, or at least a Suffragist. Pippa [Strachey, his sister] is organizing a vast procession, which is to march to Exeter Hall next Saturday, in order to impress the public with the necessity of giving women votes. As for me, je ne vois pas la nécessité, but I do think it would be an excellent thing. Whether I shall join the procession or not is another question. As a matter of fact, I shan’t, as only women are allowed. But I suppose I shall find myself in Exeter Hall, waving a banner, inscribed with the words “File the Fetters!” or something of the sort.’ Then, on 26 March, in another letter to Leonard Woolf, on Strachey’s belief in democracy – ‘purely as a gamble’ – he extends his democratic sympathy to women: ‘if we’re going in for the gamble, let’s do it thoroughly – that’s I’m sure our only chance now. Votes for Women!’ See The Letters of Lytton Strachey, pp. 121, 123. Along with her sister-in-law Ray Strachey (1887–1940), the author of ‘The Cause’: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (1928), Pippa – Philippa Strachey (1872–1968) – was a leading figure in the early twentieth-century movement for women’s rights. When McTaggart … Mr. Browning’s poetry: The quotations are from J. M. E. McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), p. 44. Browning’s 1845 poem ‘The Lost Leader’ expresses disillusionment with William Wordsworth’s retreat from liberal politics; ‘Evelyn Hope’ is Browning’s 1855 dramatic monologue on the immortality of a love that only intensifies after death. Mr. Maeterlink’s … other souls: Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), Belgian playwright who, influenced by such French symbolists as Villiers de l’Isle Adam and Octave Mirbeau, beginning in the early 1890s wrote a series of symbolist plays with mystical themes and characters moved by external forces like ‘marionettes’. Given the date of the composition of ‘Do Two and Two Make Five?’, it is possible that Strachey is thinking of Maeterlinck’s The Treasure of the Humble, trans. A. Sutro, intro. A. B. Walkley (London: George Allen, 1897). Maeterlinck’s idea of the communion of souls in silence is expressed with an especially potent symbolist sense of spiritual mystery in the volume’s opening essay, ‘Silence’: ‘It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another. The lips or the tongue may represent the soul … but from the moment that we have something to say to each other, we are compelled to hold our peace: and if at such times we do not listen to the urgent commands of silence, invisible though they be, we shall have suffered an eternal loss that all the treasures of human wisdom cannot make good; for we shall have let slip the opportunity of listening to another soul, and of giving existence, be it only for an instant, to our own’ (p. 5). Later in the essay, Maeterlinck adds: ‘If it be indeed your desire to give yourself over to another, be silent’ (p. 13). Forster … The Longest Journey: For Forster, ‘eternal moments’ – much like Joycean epiphanies, Woolfian ‘moments of being’, Conradian ‘convincing moments’ or other examples from the modernist canon – provide sudden access to spiritual truths existing beyond or within the mundanity of quotidian life. In The Longest Journey (1907), Forster details his protagonist Rickie Elliot’s shifting but persistent fascination with and hunger for the ‘poetry, not prose, [that] lies at the core’ of life – the spiritual truth that defines ‘the sym-

224

6.

Notes to pages 120–3 bolic moment, which, if a man accepts, he has accepted life’. ‘It seems to me’, says Rickie, apparently speaking for Forster, ‘that here and there in life we meet with a person or incident that is symbolical. It’s nothing in itself, yet for the moment it stands for some eternal principle. We accept it, at whatever costs, and we have accepted life.’ See The Longest Journey (New York: Vintage, 1922), pp. 189, 274, 149. When The Longest Journey was published, Strachey wrote to Leonard Woolf, ‘I think it’s a good deal worse than the last [i.e., Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)], and it certainly contains things infinitely more foul. There’s a great deal about Cambridge and the Society, and Hom [Hugh Owen Meredith: see note 9 to ‘Christ or Caliban?’ and note 15 to ‘Shall We Go the Whole Hog?’, above, pp. 214, 221] is one of the principal figures. The morals, the sentimentality, and the melodrama are incredible, but there are even further depths of fatuity and filth – but you’ll see. I believe that in time he’ll become a popular author, and rake in cash. How horrible!’ See The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 126. Hawtrey was not … Dickinson was: (Sir) Ralph Hawtrey (1879–1975), an Apostle elected in 1900, became an economist and a civil servant in the decidedly non-mystical Treasury. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862–1932), elected to the Apostles in 1885, was, among other things, a historian, political activist, lifelong Fellow at Cambridge, contributor to the scheme for the League of Nations, radio broadcaster, and a writer of books and dialogues, such as The Greek View of Life (1896), that advocated the embrace of pagan values. Dickinson, whose biography was written by E. M. Forster, was also one of the homosexual Apostles who, in the generation preceding Strachey’s, helped to develop the Society’s ‘own distinctive and unashamed homoerotic ethos’. See J. Bristow, ‘Fratrum Societati’, in R. K. Martin and G. Piggford (eds), Queer Forster (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 113–36, on p. 115. In his biography of Dickinson, Forster speaks thus of his ‘mystical’ tendencies, in a passage pertinent here for its reference to Plato: ‘he approached Plato not as a writer of dialogues, or as a depictor of Athenian society, or a logician, or a publicist, but as an adept who was in the possession of absolute truth, which he had concealed in his writings, probably in his myths. At any moment the universe might open. And though he modified this view, it tinged his future studies with poetry.’ Later he adds: All through his life Dickinson had this hope that, at a touch, the world of matter would be – not annihilated but transformed. No, not the hand of death! some other power Summon to aid thee in the day of doom; Earth shall reveal in one immortal hour More than was ever garnered in the tomb.

7. 8.

See Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962), pp. 43, 54. As Mr. Carlyle … once and forever: The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. I. Campbell et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 122. by Tomlinson!: an affectionate curse upon the name of George Tomlinson (d. 1863), later Archbishop of Gibraltar, who, together with eleven other members of St John’s College, founded the Apostles in 1920. For the most detailed account of the early Apostles, see Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles.

Notes to pages 127–31

225

Ought Art to Be Always Beautiful? 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

exhibition of French Impressionists: In early 1907, the French art dealer and leading promoter of the Impressionists Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922) organized an exhibition of Impressionist art at the Grafton Galleries, London. Mr. Haward: Lawrence Haward (1878–1957), writer, translator, art critic, noted collector of art, close friend and bibliographer of Edward Dent (see note 3 below) and the first director of the Manchester Art Gallery. Mr. Dent: Edward Dent (1876–1957) was educated at Eton and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary of Strachey. Elected a Fellow of King’s in 1902, he lectured on music history and theory, before going on to have a long and influential career as an educator, writer, translator and music critic. Dent was also a close friend of Lawrence Haward (see note 2 above) and E. M. Forster. Mr. Michaelides: see note 3 to ‘Should We Have Elected Conybeare?’, above, p. 218. Pope … in the Dunciad: the booksellers’ pissing contest in The Dunciad, Book II. The challenge of ‘Who best can send on high / The salient spout, far streaming to the sky’ (ll. 161–2), certainly describes a less than conventionally beautiful event. ‘If we would copy … its miseries’: Pope, ‘A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry’, in The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. to which is Prefixed the Life of the Author by Dr. Johnson (London: Jones & Co., 1824), p. 3. The 18th century … ‘irregularities’: In the preface to his 1725 edition of Shakespeare, Pope writes, of Shakespeare’s ‘irregularity’, that it causes his works to resemble ‘an ancient majestick piece of Gothick Architecture, compar’d with a neat Modern building: The latter is more elegant and more glaring, but the former is more strong and more solemn’. See D. N. Smith (ed.), Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1903), p. 62. To Voltaire … a tragedy: see Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London: C. Dais & A. Lyon, 1733), ch. XVIII, ‘On Tragedy’. ‘Why immoral? … out of doors’: This quotation is apparently Strachey’s invention. the laws of Helmholtz: H. L. F. von Helmholtz (1821–94), German scientist whose contributions to various fields include inventions (the ophthalmoscope) and discoveries in the study of sense-perception. ‘Aeaea’s isle … the moon’: Keats, Endymion, III.415. If, swollen … be free: Donne, Elegy I (‘Jealousy’), ll. 3–12. Mr. Watts’s pictures: G. F. Watts (1817–1904), Victorian artist best known for portraits and allegorical paintings. In the 1870s and later – that is, following the advent of aestheticism and impressionism – Watts developed a style that combined allegorical subject matter with rough presentation. Thus a portrait … old jew: Rembrandt, Portrait of an Old Jew (1654). C Minor Symphony: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Mrs. Gamp’s umbrella: Strachey is clearly jesting. In Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1843– 4), Sarah Gamp is the alcoholic nurse inseparable from her unmanageable umbrella, which often refuses to ‘fit in’. So closely connected were Sarah Gamp and her umbrella in the popular imagination that the term ‘Gamp’ began in the 1860s to be used as a synonym for umbrella (OED).

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Notes to pages 133–54

Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses and Art Has No Concern with Morals 1. 2. 3.

the skylark … he produces: see Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘To a Skylark’ (1820), whose speaker calls the bird the producer of ‘unpremeditated art’ (l. 5). the frost … window-panes?: see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798). forthed a turd: defecated. See headnote and note 16 to ‘Christ or Caliban?’, above, pp. 17, 215.

Dialogues Julius Caesar and Lord Salisbury 1.

Epicurus: Epicurus (341–270 bc), Greek philosopher who developed an ethical philosophy grounded in the pursuit of happiness through the moderation of desires and the liberation of self from anxiety. Epicurus frequently acknowledges the existence of gods, but he believes they are not involved in human affairs. Strachey’s summary is of Epicurus’s materialism and empiricism.

Cleopatra and Mrs. Humphry Ward 1. 2.

3. 4.

my grandfather: Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), the father of Matthew Arnold and the subject of Strachey’s Eminent Victorians portrait ‘Dr. Arnold’. Higher Criticism: The critical and historical study of (primarily) biblical texts, which emerged in the eighteenth century in Europe (and especially in Germany) and flourished over the course of the nineteenth, the Higher Criticism was provocative because it historicized texts that were widely believed to have been the product of divine inspiration. Far from avoiding the Higher Criticism, Matthew Arnold attempted to reconcile it with religious belief as a way of preserving a ‘source of religious and poetic insight which might correct [the public’s] deadly literal-mindedness’. See P. Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), pp. 364–72, quote on p. 365. Mr. Gladstone’s Irish policy: i.e., the complexities of the Irish Home Rule debate between the late 1860s and the early 1890s. the authenticity of the Epistle to the Hebrews: St Paul’s authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews remains a matter of debate. See B. D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 411.

Salter and Cleopatra 1. 2. 3.

Charmian: Cleopatra’s servant and advisor. Sir John Lubbock: Sir John Lubbock (1834–1913) was a Liberal politician and respected scientist, a neighbour of Darwin and a member of Thomas Huxley’s X Club. Octavia: Mark Antony’s wife was traditionally seen as the embodiment of Roman female virtue, in contrast to Cleopatra’s puissance and sexuality. According to W. Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 3 vols (Boston, MA: C. Little & J. Brown,

Notes to pages 154–61

4.

227

1870), Octavia ‘possessed all the charms, accomplishments and virtues likely to fascinate the affections and secure a lasting influence over the mind of a husband. Her beauty was universally allowed to be superior to that of Cleopatra, and her virtue was such as to excite even admiration in an age of growing licentiousness and corruption’ (vol. 3, p. 2). your nose is too long: Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) writes, in several relevant passages, including the following: Anyone who wants to know the full extent of man’s vanity has only to consider the causes and effects of love. The cause is a je ne sais quoi. (Corneille.) And its effects are terrifying. This indefinable something, so trifling that we cannot recognise it, upsets the whole earth, princes, armies, the entire world. Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been different. Vanity. – The cause and effect of love. Cleopatra. See Pascal, Pensées, ed. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 120, 13.

Catullus and Lord Tennyson 1.

‘the tenderest of Roman poets’: a phrase from Tennyson’s ‘Frater, Ave atque Vale’ (‘Brother, Hail and Farewell’). Tennyson borrowed this phrase from the last lines of Catullus’s poignant poem 101 that bids a final good-bye to his brother’s ashes. Catullus’s and Tennyson’s poems run, in their entirety and respectively, as follows: Through many countries and over many seas I have come, Brother, to these melancholy rites, to show this final honour to the dead, and speak (to what purpose?) to your silent ashes, since now fate takes you, even you, from me. Oh, Brother, ripped away from me so cruelly, now at least take these last offerings, blessed by the tradition of our parents, gifts to the dead. Accept, by custom, what a brother’s tears drown, and, for eternity, Brother, ‘Hail and Farewell.’

2.

Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row! So they row’d, and there we landed, ‘O venusta Sirmio!’ There to me thro’ all the groves of olive in the summer glow, There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers grow, Came that ‘Ave atque Vale’ of the Poet’s hopeless woe, Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen-hundred years ago, ‘Frater Ave atque Vale’ as we wander’d to and fro Gazing at the Lydian laughter of the Garda Lake below Sweet Catullus’s all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio! Aurelius and Furius: Aurelius and Furius appear in several of Catullus’s poems. Strachey is likely thinking of the one that begins, ‘Aurelius and Furius, true comrades’: Aurelius & Furius, true comrades, whether Catullus penetrates to where in outermost India booms the eastern ocean’s wonderful thunder;

228

Notes to pages 161–3

whether he stops with Arabs or Hyrcani, Parthian bowmen or nomadic Sagae; or goes to Egypt, which the Nile so richly dyes, overflowing; even if he should scale the lofty Alps, or summon to mind the mightiness of Caesar viewing the Gallic Rhine, the dreadful Britons at the world’s far end – you’re both prepared to share in my adventures, and any others which the gods may send me. Back to my girl then, carry her this bitter message, these spare words: May she have joy & profit from her cocksmen, go down embracing hundreds all together, never with love, but without interruption wringing their balls dry; nor look to my affection as she used to, for she has left it broken, like a flower at the edge of a field after the plowshare brushes it, passing. 3. your lines … Lesbia’s sparrow: Lesbia, a lover of Catullus whose exact identity is uncertain, inspired many of his poems. ‘On the Death of Lesbia’s Sparrow’ tenderly evokes the life and death of the ‘hapless birdie’ of ‘my love’ as a vehicle for the expression of his jealousy and desire. 4. my remark … to be: a translation of lines 5–6 in Catullus’s poem 16: ‘Nam castum esse decet pium poetam / ipsum, versiculos hihil necessest’. 5. the rose-tinct marble of Pentelicus: Mount Pentelicus lies just north-east of Athens and has been the location of marble quarries since antiquity. 6. Lady Somers: Lady Somers (Virginia Pattle Somers-Cocks; 1827–1910) was described by Leslie Stephen as the loveliest Pattle sister (the Pattle sisters were the aunts of Julia Stephen, Virginia Woolf ’s mother). Virginia Woolf was named after her great-aunt. 7. Mrs. Cameron: Julia Margaret Cameron (née Julia Margaret Pattle; 1815–79), another of the Pattle sisters, was the most influential English portrait photographer of the late nineteenth century. Tennyson, one of her subjects, was a neighbour of Cameron’s on the Isle of Wight, where he lived at Faringford. Woolf wrote of her great aunt in a 1926 Hogarth Press collection of Cameron’s photographs, ‘In the trio where Lady Somers was Beauty; and Mrs. Prinsep, Dash; Mrs. Cameron was undoubtedly Talent’. See J. M. Cameron, Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women (Boston, MA: D. R. Godine, 1973), p. 14. 8. Mrs. Freshfield: Augusta Charlotte Ritchie (1847–1911), who married the mountaineer, writer and editor of the Alpine Journal Douglas Freshfield, was a descendant of the eleventh-century King Malcolm III of Scotland and a correspondent of Henry James – and one of Tennyson’s ‘noble mothers and delicate daughters’. 9. my wife: née Emily Sarah Sellwood (1813–96). 10. Faringford: Tennyson’s home on the Isle of Wight. 11. Dean Inge: William Ralph Inge (1860–1954), a professor of divinity at Oxford and the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. See also the introduction, above, p. xviii.

Notes to pages 163–87

229

12. Atys: Atys is the subject of Catullus’s poem ‘The Adventures of Atys’. A religious enthusiast who castrates himself to extinguish his sexual desires, he founds a fanatical religious sect. It is clear from Catullus’s final line in this dialogue that, inspired by Tennyson’s relative prudery, his next poem about Atys will be anything but ‘pure as the rose-tinct marble of Pentelicus’.

Gibbon, Johnson, and Adam Smith 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

Isis … Cam: respectively, the part of the Thames that runs through Oxford University and the river that runs through Cambridge University. ‘Alma Mater … port’: Pope, The Dunciad, III.329–34: Proceed great days! till Learning fly the shore, Till birch shall blush with noble blood no more, Till Thames see Eton’s sons forever play, Till Westminster’s whole year be holiday; Till Isis’ elders reel, their Pupils sport; And Alma Mater lye dissolv’d in Port! manoeuvres in Berkshire: Gibbon is speaking here of his three years around 1760 when he served on active duty with the South Hampshire militia. Sargon … Sennacherib: Sargon of Akkad (reigned c. 2334–2279 bc) was a legendary ruler of Assyria, one of the world’s first empire-builders, and the founder of the Mesopotamian military tradition. Strachey may be referring to Sargon II, who reigned in the late eighth-century bc over a vast empire and was the father of Sennacherib, whose story is told, among other documents, in 2 Kings and in Isaiah. See also Strachey’s dialogue ‘Sennacherib and Rupert Brooke,’ in The Really Interesting Question, pp. 40–4. Sheffield Programme: unidentified. Mr. Tout’s History of the Dark Ages: With his colleague James Tait (1863–1944), Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929), a professor of history at Owens College, University of Manchester, contributed to the development at the turn of the century of the new ‘scientific’ historiography; this was promoted at Cambridge by J. B. Bury, whose approach to historiography Strachey critiques in ‘The Historian of the Future’. Among other works, Tout is known for The Political History of England, 1216–1377 (1905) and the six-volume Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England (1920–33). That is … happened to me: Adam Smith studied in Glasgow and Oxford, was a professor of logic and then of moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1751 to 1764, and was never offered a professorship at Cambridge.

Good God 1. 2. 3.

Tya-bo: or Tyabo, a nineteenth-century Congolese chieftain. McTaggart’s heaven: see note 1 to ‘Is Death Desirable?’, above, p. 216. For instance … other circumstances: see 1 Samuel 1, especially 26–8: ‘And she [Hannah, Samuel’s mother] said, O my lord, as thy soul liveth, my lord, I am the woman that stood by thee here, praying unto the LORD. For this child I prayed; and the LORD hath given me my petition which I asked of him: Therefore also I have lent him to the LORD; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the LORD. And he worshipped the LORD there.’

230

Notes to pages 203–5

Stories Interesting Letter from Madame La Comtesse de — to Lady X 1.

2.

your own Poet … father to the man: William Wordsworth, ‘My heart leaps up’: ‘The Child is father of the Man; / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety’ (ll. 7–9). Mais je préfère les garcons: But I prefer boys.

INDEX

Abel, 90 Acton, John, 21 Adam, 135, 143 Aeschylus, 15 Agamemnon, 107 agnosticism, 41, 122 Alexander II, Pope, 153 Allah, 29, 32, 35, 37–40, 47 Antony, Mark, 11, 153, 155, 157 Apostles, Cambridge, xi, xii, xiv, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxix, 10, 17–18, 41, 45, 48, 54–5, 65–6, 70–3, 77, 97–100, 102–3, 105, 111, 113–15, 117, 119, 121, 125, 127, 131, 183 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 66, 69, 71–2 Aristophanes Birds, The, 24 Aristotle, xxiii, 3, 108, 118, 120–1, 123 Arnold, Thomas, xix, xxiv, 53, 171 Arnold, Matthew, xxii, 3, 126, 145, 147, 177 Atheism, xxiv, 3, 37, 41, 191 Aubrey, John, 51–2 Aurelius, Marcus, 153 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 11 Bacon, Francis, 93 Balfour, Gerald, 99 Barachiah, 90 Beardsley, Aubrey, 189 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 15, 24, 131 Bell, Clive, xi, xiv, 51, 111, 125, 183 Bell, Vanessa, xi, 125 Belshazzar, 12 Bennett, Arnold, 117 Benson, Arthur, 113 Bible, 53, 81, 86, 111

Blake, William, 114, 120–1, 123 Bloomsbury Group, xi–xv, xviii, xxi, xxiv, xxx, 10, 106, 117, 159, 183 Bradley, F. H., xxiii, 3 Brooke, Rupert, xvii–xviii, xxviii Brothers Grimm, 190–1 Browne, Thomas, 15, 115 Browning, Oscar, xi Browning, Robert, 120 Burke, Edmund, 179 Bury, J. B., 55, 57–63, 177 Caesar, Julius, 153, 155, 157 Cambridge Conversazione Society see Apostles, Cambridge Cameron, Julia Margaret, 162 Carlyle, Thomas, xxvii, 64, 121 Carrington, Dora, 125 Christ, 5, 22–3, 28–9, 36–7, 48, 57, 69, 71–2, 85–96 Cleopatra, 11, 14–15, 63 Condorcet, Nicolas, 77 Connolly, Cyril, 54 Corelli, Marie, 145, 148 Creighton, Mandell, xxvii Daily Mail, 21–2 Daniel, 12 Darwin, Charles, xiii, 54, 60, 145 Davies, Theodore Llewellyn, 101 democracy, 10, 18, 21 Dent, Edward, 127 Deuteronymy, 101 devil, 7, 37, 92, 100, 187, 205 see also Satan Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 120

– 231 –

232

Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers

Donne, John, 130 Dreyfus, Alfred, 21 Dryden, John, xxii du Deffand, Madame, 192 Duff, J. D., 48 Eliot, T. S., xxi, 117 Elizabeth I, Queen, 22, 24 empire, 5–6, 12, 23–4, 75–8, 143, 180 see also imperialism Epicurus, 142–3 Euripides, 109 Eve, 135 Forster, E. M., xi, 51–2, 117, 120, 123, 127 Frazer, James, 98 freedom, xix, 18, 21–2, 24, 45, 77–8, 118, 163 Freshfield, Augusta Charlotte, 162 Freud, Sigmund, xxviii, 52 Froude, Anthony, xxvii Fry, Roger, xi, xiv, 125 Fuller, Thomas, 51 Gabriel, Archangel, 23, 32 Gainsborough, Thomas, 130 Galsworthy, John, 117 Genesis, 6, 186 Gibbon, Edward, xxvii–xxix, 54–5, 58, 61, 64, 177–8, 190–1 Gladstone, William, 148 God, 5–7, 11, 15, 29–32, 34–8, 40, 43, 69, 72, 86–7, 90, 92, 95, 102, 121–2, 135, 142–3, 163, 185, 188 Goldsmith, Oliver, 134 Good Samaritan, 87–8, 92 Gordon, General Charles George, xvi, xviii– xix, 53 Gordon, George, xxiv Grant, Duncan, xi, xviii, 105, 125 Great War, xv–xix Hallam, Arthur Henry, xi Harvard, John, 101 Hastings, Warren, xii, xiv, xxv, 65, 75–6, 101, 177 Haward, Lawrence, 127 Hawtry, Ralph, 120 Hegel, G. W. F., 114

Hobhouse, Arthur, 102 Homer, 107, 179 Horace, 179 Hugo, Victor, 134 Hume, David, xxvii, xxix Huxley, Thomas, 53–4, 171, 177 Ibsen, Henrik, 23 imperialism, xi, xix–xx, 51–2, 75–9, 139, 145, 189 see also empire impressionism, xxii, 113, 125, 127–9 Independent Review, 101 Inge, William, xxii, 113, 125, 127–9, 163 Iphigenia, 83 Isaiah, 5 Jesus see Christ John, Saint, xix, 5–6, 89, 92, 94–5 Johnson, Samuel, xxii, xxviii–xxix, 177–8 Joshua, 6 Joyce, James, xxiii, 117 Keats, John, 113, 130 Keynes, John Maynard, xi, xiv, xxiv, 82, 97, 102 Kipling, Rudyard, 77 Koran, 29, 32–4, 40 Kruger, Paul, 79 Lady Somers, 162 Lamb, Henry, 183–4 Lamb, Walter, 183 Lawrence, D. H., xxiv Leavis, F. R., xii, xxii Lesbia, 162 Levites, 87–8 Lewis, Wyndham, xxii, 54 Liberalism, 21, 24, 121 Louis XVI, King, 153 Lubbock, John, 153 Lucian, 153 Lucretius, 82–3, 85 Luke, Saint, 5, 7, 86–90, 93 Lyell, Charles, xxii Lyttleton, Alfred, 101 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, xxvii MacCarthy, Desmond, xi

Index MacCarthy, Mary (Molly), xi McCrae, John, xviii McTaggart, J. M. E., xi, 44, 80, 108, 120 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 120 Mahomet, 29–30, 33–5, 37, 39–40, 185 Maitland, F. W., xii Manet, Edouard, 128–9 Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward, xvi, xix, xxiv, 52, 81 Mark, Saint, 95, 99 Matthew, Saint, 5, 7, 86, 88–90, 92–3 Maxwell, James Clerk, xi Mecca, 27–8 Mendelssohn, Felix, 113 Meredith, George, 11 Meredith, Hugh Owen, 23, 103 Michaelangelo, 65 Michaelides, Constantine, 70, 127 Michelet, Jules, 64 Midnight Society, xiii, xxvi–xxvii, 25, 82 Milton, John, 12, 86, 91, 100, 130 Moore, G. E., xi, xiii, xxiii–xxiv, xxvii, 3, 10, 41, 75, 78–9, 82, 97–8, 101–2 Principia Ethica, xiii, xxiii, xxviii, 3, 41, 65, 75–6, 78–9, 111 Morley, John, 21 Morning Leader, 101 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 15, 113–14, 130 New Testament, xxiv, xxv, 81–2 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 54 Nightingale, Florence, xvi, xix, 53–4 Noah, 187 Octavia, 154 Orwell, George, 118 Palestrina, 11 Partridge, Frances, xxxiii Pater, Walter, xxiii, xxvi, 9, 133–4 Pericles, 24 Perrault, Charles, 191 Petrarch, Francis, 165, 168 Pharisees, 87, 90, 94, 96 Phillips, Stephen, 107 Pilate, 5, 110 Plato, xxiii, 3, 37, 111, 118, 120–1, 123 Symposium, xxiii, 111

233

Pope, Alexander, 127–8, 130, 179 Principia Ethica see Moore, G. E. Pythagoras, 15 Racine, Jean, 15 Raleigh, Walter, 114 Rhodes, Cecil, 77 Richardson, Samuel, xxv, 81 Rodin, Auguste, 65 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 22 Ruskin, John, 126 Russell, Bertrand, xi, xvii, 41, 101 Salisbury, Lord, 139, 145, 159, 178 Salter, William Henry, xxxv, 151, 165, 177 Sappho, 57 Satan, 7, 12 see also devil Senhouse, Roger, xx, 66 Sennacherib, xvii–xviii, xxviii, 180 Shakespeare, William, 11, 15, 24, 57, 107, 128, 133–4, 179 King Lear, 109–10, 114 Romeo and Juliet, 113 Macbeth, 109 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 11, 72, 113 Sheppard, John Tressider, 102 Sidgwick, Henry, xi–xii, 98 Smith, Adam, xxviii–xxix, 177–8 Society, The see Apostles, Cambridge Socrates, 72 Somers-Cocks, Virginia Pattle see Lady Somers Sophocles, 15 Trachiniae, 108 Oedipus Rex, 109 Spencer, Herbert, xxiii, 3 Stephen, Leslie, xii Strachey, James, xvii, xx–xxi, xxviii, 183 Strachey, Jane, 145 Strachey, Lytton (works discussed) ‘Abuse, Self-abuse’ list, 17–18 ‘Art and Indecency’, xxvi ‘Art Has No Concern with Morals’, xxvi, 134 Biographical Essays, xxviii ‘Bonziana or the Bonze’, 189 Books and Characters, xxviii, xxxv

234

Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers

‘Christ or Caliban?’, xxvi–xxviii, xxx, 18, 25, 45, 76, 105 ‘Colloquies of Senrab, The’, xxv–xxviii, 25–6 Conscientious objection statement, xv–xvi ‘Conversation and Conversations’, xxvi– xxviii, 9–10, 45, 151 ‘David Hume’, xxvii, xxix ‘Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood, The’, xxix, 190–1 ‘Dialogue between Moses, Diogenes, and Mr. Loke’, xxviii, xxxv ‘Dignity, Romance, or Vegetarianism’, xxvi, 10, 45, 98, 105, 165 ‘Do Two and Two Make Five?’, xxvi– xxvii, 105, 117–18 ‘Does Absence Make the Heart Grow Fonder?’, xxvi, 105 ‘Edward Gibbon’, xxvii, 54–5, 177, 190–1 Elizabeth and Essex, xi, xx Eminent Victorians, xi, xv–xvii, xix, xxi, xxiv, xxvii, 19, 52–5, 76, 171, 190–1 Ermyntrude and Esmaralda, xxix, 193 ‘Ethics of the Gospels, The’, xxiv, xxvi– xxvii, 25, 81–3 ‘Gibbon, Johnson, and Adam Smith’, xxviii–xxix, 177–8 ‘Godfrey, Cornbury, or Candide’, xiv, xxvi ‘Good God’, xxviii, xxxv, 183–4 ‘He, She, and It’, xxvi, xxviii ‘Headmaster and Parent’, xxviii, 171 ‘Hildebrand Hunts’, 189 ‘Historian of the Future, The’, xxvi–xxvii, 19, 51–5, 65, 83, 190 ‘Interesting Letter from Madame La Comtesse de — to Lady X’, xxix, 192–3 ‘Intermediaries, or Marriage à la Mode, The’, 189 ‘Is Death Desirable?’, xxvi–xxvii, 25, 41, 45 ‘John Aubrey’, 51–2 Landmarks in French Literature, xi, xiv ‘Letter. From an Inhabitant of another World’, xxix, 193

Letters of Lytton Strachey, xii–xiii, xxi, xxiii–xxvi, xxviii–xxix, 3, 41, 54, 65, 81–2, 105, 134, 139, 151, 192–3 ‘Lord Pettigrew’, 193 Lytton Strachey by Himself, xxv ‘Madame du Deffand’, 192 ‘New History of Rome, A’, xxvii, 190 ‘Ought Art to Be Always Beautiful?’, xxvi, xxviii, 105, 125–6 ‘Ought the Father to Grow a Beard?’, xxv–xxvi, 17–18, 105 Presidential address to the Apostles, 98 Queen Victoria, xi, xix, 53 Really Interesting Question, The, xxv, xxviii, xxx, 193 ‘Sennacherib and Rupert Brooke’, xvii– xviii ‘Sermon Preached before the Midnight Society, A’, xxvi–xxvii, 3–4, 25, 82 ‘Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses’, xxvi, 133–4 ‘Shall We Be Missionaries?’, xxvi, 75–6, 105 ‘Shall We Go the Whole Hog?’, xxvi, xxx, 97–8 ‘Shall We Take the Pledge?’, xxvi Shorter Strachey, The, xxv–xxvi, xxx ‘Should We Have Elected Conybeare?’, xxvi, 65–7, 76 ‘Six English Historians’, xxvii, 55, 190 Son of Heaven, A, xxix, 106 ‘Story of A and B, The’, xxix, 192–3 ‘Tragedy’, xxix, xxxiii, 192–3 ‘Under the Moon’, 189 ‘Victorian Critic, A’, xxii ‘Voltaire’s Tragedies’, 82 ‘Walpole’s Letters’, 178 ‘Was Diotima Right?’, xxvi, 98, 111–12, 117, 125 ‘When Is a Drama not a Drama?’, xxvi, 105–6 ‘Will It Come Right in the End?’, xxvi, xxix Strachey, Richard, 51 Strachey, St Loe, 183 Sunday Essay Society, xiii, xxiv, xxvi–xxvii, 9, 25, 55, 65, 81, 83 Swinburne, A. C., xxiii, 18, 189 Sydney-Turner, Saxon, 183

Index Tacitus, 10, 59, 64 Tennyson, Alfred, xi, 98, 151, 177 Tennyson, Emily Sarah, 162 Theocritus, 11 Tomlinson, George, 123 Tout, Thomas Frederick, 180 Trevelyan, G. M., 23, 55, 82, 177 Trinity College, Cambridge, xii, xxv, 3, 15, 51–2, 177, 189 Turner, J. M. W., 57, 130 van Rijn, Rembrandt, 130 Velasquez, Diego, 49–50, 57 Verlaine, Paul, 24 Victoria, Queen, xi, xix, xxi–xxii, 53–4, 146–8, 162 Voltaire, xxviii, 21, 26, 82, 128, 193 von Ranke, Leopold, 54, 61

235

Ward, Mary Augusta, 145, 183, 193 Watteau, Antoine, 113–14 Watts, G. F., 130 Wells, H. G., xvii, 18, 76, 117 Whitehead, Alfred North, xi Whitely, Alexander, 47 Wilde, Oscar, xvii, xxiii, xxvi, 19, 26, 133, 145, 189, 192 Woolf, Leonard, xi–xiv, xx, xxv, 3, 41, 65, 81–2, 97, 134, 151, 183–4, 189, 192 Woolf, Virginia, xi, xiv, xxviii, 10, 54, 117, 134, 139, 193 Wordsworth, William, 203 Yeats, W. B., 117, 159 Zachariah, 90 Zoroaster, 37