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Lytton Strachey's “Point of View”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
What did Lytton Strachey mean when he insisted in the Preface to Eminent Victorians and elsewhere that the biographer should have a clear and definite point of view? When we have answered this question, we are certain to encounter another: Was Strachey right? Should biography be written from a fixed point of view? Is there a danger that the biographer with a rigid point of view will treat his subject as a victim forced to lie upon the bed of Procrustes?
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953
References
1 Outlook, 23 Aug. 1922, pp. 681-682. Morris also said: “Irony is the quality for which he has been most highly praised, but his irony is the instinctive desperate gesture of an austere and celibate intelligence trapped in a single illicit relation with sentimentality.”
2 Spectator, ci (3 Oct. 1908), 502-503. This and other unsigned contributions to the Spectator I have been able to identify as Strachey's partly through the help of Mr. James Strachey, his brother and literary executor (who has generously given me permission to quote from them and from unpublished MSS.) and partly through access to a marked file of the Spectator, kindly granted to me by the present editor, Mr. H. Wilson Harris, M. P.
3 From the MS. Note Strachey's Wordsworthian comment on Rousseau after he had gone through intense mental suffering: “The perplexed and tortured spirit could still find rest among the simple vegetable things he loves so well,—the flowers, and the mosses, and the humblest offspring of the earth.” “Three Frenchmen in England,” Spectator, c (30 May 1908), 866-867.
4 Queen Victoria (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), pp. 287-288.
5 From the MS. One of the 88 “aphorisms” probably written when Strachey was at Cambridge. Compare the following passage which Strachey wrote with the first World War in mind : “Ultimately the world is governed by moderate men. Extremists and fanatics and desperadoes may make a noise or a disturbance, they may even at times appear to control the course of events; but in reality they are always secondary figures—either symptoms or instruments; whatever happens, the great mass of ordinary, stolid, humdrum, respectable persons remains the dominating force in human affairs.” “Militarism and Theology,” War and Peace, May 1918, p. 223. There is much here to suggest Arnold's dislike of “Jacobinism,” particularly its fierceness and its way of going to extremes.
6 “Cambridge,” Spectator, xcix (2 Nov. 1907), 668-669. One of a number of passages in which Strachey showed himself peculiarly susceptible to the charm of places. He liked to speculate upon a “philosophy of places.” He would not have agreed with Milton's Satan that “The mind is its-own place” but has something in common with Thomas Hardy here.
7 “L'Art Administratif,” Spectator, xciv (18 Dec. 1907), 1093-94.
8 “One of the Victorians” (republished as “Froude” in Portraits in Miniature), Sat. Rev. of Lit., 6 Dec. 1903, pp. 418-419.
9 “A Frock-Coat Portrait of a Great King,” Daily Mail, 11 Oct. 1927, p. 10.
10 “Voltaire,” Athenaeum, 1 Aug. 1919, pp. 677-678.
11 “The Age of Louis XIV,” Spectator, c (11 April 1908), 577-578.
12 See J. M. Keynes, Two Memoirs (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949), pp. 88-89. See also the extremely valuable treatment of Bloomsbury and its values in R. F. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), pp. 172-194 et passim.
13 Landmarks in French Literature, pp. 70, 201.
14 “Wordsworth's Letters,” Spectator, c (21 March 1908), 460-461.
15 “Shakespeare on Johnson,” Spectator, ci (1 Aug. 1908), 164-165.
16 “Dostoievsky,” Spectator, cix (28 Sept. 1912), 451-452.
17 “The Claims of Patriotism,” War and Peace, 4 July 1918, pp. 292-293.
18 “John Aubrey,” Nation and Athenaeum, xxxiii (15 Sept. 1923), 741-742.
19 The Development of English Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1933), p. 150. The personality, ideas, and idealism of G. Lowes Dickinson became another potent influence on Strachey and his Cambridge friends. It is clearly reflected in a letter from Strachey to Keynes written in late 1905. Prof. Walter Raleigh, Strachey declared, had “consummate brilliance”; nevertheless, he belonged to “the age before the flood—the pre-Dickinsonian era, which is really fatal. … He might be one's father.” Harrod (see n. 13), p. 111.
20 From the MS.
21 “Hume,” Nation and Athenaeum, xxii (7 Jan. 1923), 536-538.
22 “A Victorian Critic,” New Statesman, 1 Aug. 1914, pp. 529-530.
23 See the Preface to Eminent Victorians.
24 “Lytton Strachey,” Sunday Times (London), 24 Jan. 1932, p. 8
25 “Mr. Lytton Strachey,” a letter to the Spectator, cxlviii (30 Jan. 1932), 146. Compare a letter from Strachey's cousin, Miss Edith Plowden, published in the London Times on 28 Jan. 1932, p. 6. Strachey observed significantly in his last diary (at Nancy, 13 Sept. 1931) : “In this wretched world unkindness is out of place.”
26 William Wordsworth (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 186.
27 Mr. Galsworthy's Plays,“ Spectator, cii (27 March 1909), 498-499.
28 “Lytton Strachey,” New Statesman and Nation, iii (30 Jan. 1932), 118. See also Vincent Sheean's excellent article on the same group: “Lytton Strachey: Cambridge and Bloomsbury,” New Republic, lxx (17 Feb. 1932), 19-20.
29 Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926), p. 119.
30 I Remember, I Remember (New York and London: Harper, 1942), pp. 140-142.
31 “ANew History of Rome,” Spectator, cii (2 Jan. 1909), 20-21.
32 “Mademoiselle de Lespinasse,” Independent Review, x (Sept. 1906), 345 ff.
33 From the MS.
34 “Macaulay,” Nation and Athenaeum, xlii (21 Jan. 1928), 596-597. Compare this early comment on the style of Sidney Lee: “After all, is not even the most succulent of meats liable to be tasteless without a pinch or two of salt? In other words, Mr. Lee, in his hatred of rhetoric, of sentimentalism, and of ‘gush,‘ is sometimes carried too far towards the opposite extremes of the frigid and the commonplace.” “Mr. Sidney Lee on Shakespeare,” Spectator, xcvii (1 Dec. 1906), 887-888.
35 “Some New Carlyle Letters,” Spectator, cii (10 April 1909), 577-578.
36 “Alexander Pope,” Spectator, ciii (20 Nov. 1909), 847-848.
37 “The Poetry of John Donne,” Spectator, cx (18 Jan. 1913), 102-103.
38 “Music and Men,” Spectator, ci (19 Dec. 1908), 1059-60.
39 Clifford Bower-Shore, Lytton Strachey: An Essay (London: Fenland Press, 1933), p. 92. I find this in the main an excellent piece of criticism.
40 The Poetry of Blake,“ Books and Characters (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), p. 229.
41 “Caran D'Ache,” Spectator, cii (6 March 1909), 371-372. Strachey also wrote that “in the wonderful pages on Friendship one sees in all its charm and all its sweetness that beautiful humanity which is the inward essence of Montaigne.” Landmarks in French Literature (New York and London: Henry Holt and Thornton Butterworth, 1912), p. 41.
42 “Molière,” Spectator, xcix (26. Oct. 1907), 612-613.
43 “John Milton,” Spectator, ci (5 Dec. 1908), 933-934. Strachey praises Milton for not being cynical.
44 “A Mirror for Gentlefolks,” Spectator, ci (24 Oct. 1908), 630-631.
45 “Avons-nous Changé Tout Cela?” Characters and Commentaries (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933), pp. 152-154.
46 “Bonga-Bonga in Whitehall,” Characters and Commentaries, pp. 162-167.
47 After Sir Edmund Gosse in a letter to the TLS (27 June 1918, p. 301) had protested that Strachey had been unfair in his treatment of Lord Cromer in Eminent Victorians, Strachey replied in a letter to the same paper (4 July 1918, pp. 313-314) to defend his treatment of Cromer and to condemn Cromer further as one the temper of whose mind was “essentially secretive, cautious, and diplomatic.”
48 “A Diplomatist: Li Hung-Chang,” Characters and Commentaries, pp. 219-220. First published in War and Peace, March 1918, pp. 208-210. Strachey also indicted the diplomatists of 1918 for being “the humble pupils of journalists,” the essential characteristic of whose style and thought was speciousness. “Traps and Peace Traps,” War and Peace, June 1918, pp. 269-270. For further evidence of Strachey's consistency in referring to his norms, see my articles “Lytton Strachey as a Critic of Elizabethan Drama,” PQ, xxx (Jan. 1951), 1-21; “Lytton Strachey's Conception of Biography,” PMLA, lxvi (June 1951), 295-315; and “Lytton Strachey's Miniature Portraits,” Emory Univ. Quart., viii (Dec. 1952), 196-207.