MR. LYTTON STRACHEY'S ESSAYS.*
VOLTAIRE, Racine, Dr. Johnson, Blake, Beddoes, Lady Hester Stanhope and Mr. Creevey—such are the subjects of Mr. Lytton Strachey's new book of essays. It is a delightful collection, though slighter and less considered than Eminent Victorians. It is, as we might expect, not to be put into the class—the very small class—that holds Mr. Strachey's epoch-making Queen Victoria, a book in which we see renewed and repristinated the true art of biography. Those of us who take most delight in his work will probably not be sorry to find that Books and Cha- racters is a set of reprinted magazine articles. It would be a grief to his admirers if he made the fatal mistake of trying to turn out an important book in his characteristic manner every year. We all know too well the fate of authors who are ready
to attempt this. • No one who is interested in his career as a writer must fail to read the book ; but, judging him by his own high standard, there is perhaps only one essay in it which is of first-rate intrinsic Importance—of remarkable interest, that is, apart from the light which it may throw on the habits of mind of its author. That exception is the essay on Racine. Mr. Lytton Strachey is, of course, a practised appraiser of books, having long plied the reviewer's " slighted trade " ; therefore, to those who are familiar with his early work, it is no surprise to find in him a first-rate literary critic. The essay is, indeed, a perfect specimen of what, in the present writer's opinion, criticism ought to be— in Matthew Arnold's words :- " A disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."
Racine is a writer who is steadily misunderstood in England. We realize that he is considered great by his compatriots, but we ourselves seem unable to get the focus. We have never .really discovered what he is at when he is being most character- istic. Mr. Lytton Strachey has expounded Racine's objects and his methods of attaining them, in a manner which must, we believe, by any person of open mind, be considered satisfactory. It is impossible, in the apace at our disposal, to do justice to an exposition so delicate, so reinforced by copious references to the material of which it treats ; but, very shortly, the argument is this : Racine is first and last a psychologist. Mr. Strachey gives us the following stage direction, which is typical :--
" La scene est a Buthrote, villa d'Epire. dans une salle du palace do Pyrrhus '—could anything be more discouraging than such an announcement Y Here is nothing for the imagination -to feed on, nothing to raise expectation, no wondrous vision of blasted heaths ' or the seaboard of Bohemia ' ; here is only a hypothetical drawing-room conjured out of the void for live acts, simply in order that the persons of the drama may 4bave a place to meet in and make their speeches. The three unities ' and the rest of the rules ' are a burden which the .English reader finds himself quite unaccustomed to carry ; he grows impatient of them ; and, if he is a critic, he points out the futility and the unreasonableness of those antiquated .conventions."
Or, again, Racine wishes to conjure up a silent and ominous night :—
" Mais tout dort, et Tarmee, et lea vents, et Neptune !' What a flat and feeble net of expressions ! is the Englishman's first thought--.with the conventional Neptune,' and the vague armee,' and the commonplace vents.' " • Book," mut Visarackrt. By Lytton Strachey. London ; Chatto and Windus. 112a. ad. sea.]
All art is a process of selection and isolation. Now, Racine desires to show us states of intense human passion. He chooses, therefore, some episode which will show us an heroic personage at some dramatic and fatal turning-point in his career. His characters are illuminated by lightning flash. They are dramatic —seen for a moment only by an intense and unfamiliar light battling in the agony of some desperate emotional crisis. Racine will,therefore, allow nothing in his verse or his stage directions or his plot which might distract the reader from his principal figures : everything is to be fined down, cut away. Thus we are undistracted, as we are in Shakespeare, by "side shows" which tend to make us follow up some irrelevant line of thought which is evoked by, say, a train of comparisons, or even by the association of the scene where the drama is sup- posed to take place. He rejects the aid of " a platform at Elsinore," with its suggestion of the sea and of strange forces. Racine will, with an incredible audacity of austerity, limit him- self to the " hypothetical drawing-room." His very heroes and heroines themselves must have everything that is irrelevant trimmed away. In the end we are shown, not so much men and women, as subtle and intensified personifications of which- ever of the ruling passions Racine chooses to display to us.
By such an argument Mr. Lytton Strachey puts us in a position to enjoy the work of the Frenchman whom French- men are inclined to hold to be the greatest dramatic writer of his nation. We guarantee that any unprejudiced reader will be completely carried away by the brilliance and convincing good sense of the essay. Possibly second thoughts may suggest to the reader that there is, however, one fundamental difficulty which stands between English readers and Racine and which can never be explained away ; it is the difference between two conceptions of life which we may roughly label the classical and the romantic. The true classical writer is concerned only with the difficulties of expression ; his conceptions are clear ; to put it crudely, he knows what he wants to say. Broadly speaking, the romantic writer, on the other hand, does not. He is engaged upon a double task. He is as much concerned with learning as with exposition ; his works are experiments. He is a man who is daring the amplitudes of night with a tallow candle ; he has felt more than he has seen, seen more than he can report.
But if the essay on Racine is from one aspect the most im- portant in Mr. Strachey's book, those on Beddoes, Sir Thomas Browne, Blake and " Shakespeare's later manner " have an extraordinary biographical interest. They show the solid catholicism of Mr. Strachey's taste. It is a remarkable feat to interpret so subtly and intelligently writers who are such poles apart as Voltaire and Beddow. One might have imagined that Mr. Strachey'e classical mind would have had no under- standing for the marsh lights and the tenebrous prodigalities of the ultra-Gothic. That, he understands, is a most delightful proof of the breadth and power of his mind, Those of us who love literature watch the writers of the younger generation with an anxious solicitude. We want so much of them, we desire so intensely the pleasure that they can give us. We watch perpetually for omens of the future of this or that man. Now, it was not impossible that the author of Eminent Victorians and of Queen Victoria might, despite the exquisite nicety and subtlety of his genius, in time have become a little old-nraidish, have ossified, have shrivelled. The author of the appreciation of Beddoes and of Sir Thomas Browne might, on the other hand, have grown blowsy. But the man who could write them both has not only an admirably-balanced brain, but a wide power of appreciation and a taste at once generous and perfectly under control. Books and Characters is the best augury for Mr. Lytton Strachey's future.
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