BOOKS.
THE ADVENTURE OF LIVING.*
fThe present review by the President of Magdalen College, Oxford, will be followed next week by a review by Mr. I. A. Spender dealing with the political aspect of the book.] THE Spectator, as those who love it know best, but as all who pay any attention to it know, has long held a peculiar position among the journals of the English-speaking world. It may be liked or it may not be liked, but it is recognized as that curious thing which man somehow creates in different fields and endows with his own personality, an institution, which becomes an entity per se, with a life and attractions and repulsions of its own. It acquired this character within living memory, some sixty years ago, under the direction of two very remarkable co-editors, Mr. Richard Holt Hutton and Mr. Meredith Townsend. It had been started some thirty years earlier, but it was they who then made it a distinct and notable force in English life. Its history ought to be written, if only briefly, perhaps will be written, say when it reaches its centenary in 1928. Meanwhile, the unusual and exhilarating volume, with its happy and descriptive title, The Adventure of Living, with which this notice attempts to deal, is not its history, though it is very closely connected with its history. Indeed, as its other title, A Subjective Autobiography, suggests, it is not exactly a narrative history at all. It is rather a declaration of faith and works. It is what the ancients called "the figure of a soul," a spirit made visible and legible. The faith and works are the faith and works of the Spectator, and the spirit is the spirit of the Editor. "The pivet of my life has been the Spectator," Mr. Strachey writes, "and the Spectator must be the pivot of my book." What, then, was the original essential character of the Spectator in the days of Mr. Hutton and Mr. Townsend when Mr. Strachey joined it ? It can best be described as being "prophetic." It was "otherworldly." It "judged all things" by standards of its own. It was religious, but it was not ecclesiastical, it left that to the Guardian. It was political, but it was not worldly, it left that to the Saturday Review. Always and before all it had a conscience. Indeed, it brought to the support of Mr. Gladstone, with whom in the 'sixties it was spiritually, even more than temporally, in strong sympathy, much of that, as many thought, somewhat tiresome element. People used to complain that the Spectator "preached." Some said that, like Wordsworth, another of its heroes, it "never did anything else." Many Liberals, Jewett, for instance, did not quite like it, and it did not quite like Jewett. It was too fond of Dean Church and Cardinal Newman for him. Hutton was a warm friend of Matthew Arnold and praised his "literature," though he keenly combated his " dogma " or want of it. Arnold was a little ungratefuL When Hutton wrote a laudatory review of his Essays in Criticism he said :—" The Spectator is very well, but the article has Hutton's fault of seeing so very far into a millstone." There was truth in this. The two Editors—Hutton especially—were rather abstracted and aloof. They dwelt apart and trod the "high priori" road. They looked on every-day, mundane things with keen interest and much insight, and humour too, but like Plato's "spectator," they were thinking the while "of all time and all existence." They lived quietly, they were not indifferent to money, but they did not make haste to be rich. They "did not advertise." The temperament of one of them, Mr. Townsend, is happily sketched in this book. Hutton charac- teristically laid an embargo on his friends' lips. No life of him was ever to be written.
Mr. Strachey's volume opens dramatically with the story of his introduction to the paper. He tells it very simply, but it reads like a fairy-tale. He wrote four several articles, on Gulliver's Travels, on "Tory Democracy," on "The Privy Council and the Colonies," and on "Barnes, the Dorset Poet." Each proved a brilliant and astonishing success. The Editors took him to their bosom. They placed him on the steps of the throne. They promised him their kingdom. To complete the fairy-tale the Spectator cat—needless to say, a specially sagacious animal— jumped on his shoulder and purred approval. The succession was settled. No wonder Mr. Strachey was surprised and could hardly believe his senses. Indeed, he is surprised still, and exclaims not once but twice, 0 sancta simplicitas I And we may well ask what did these two shrewd if philosophic sages,
• The Adventure of Living : a Subjective Autobiography. By John St. Loe Strachey, Editor of the Spectakw, London ; Hodder and Stoughton, [20a. net]
these Grand Lamas of the Victorian literary world, think they were doing when they thus took in a young man of five-and- twenty, fresh from the University, not yet called to the Bar, and gave him in a moment everything they had to give ?
It is true they knew his father, but that was, as Mr. Strachey says, a bare introduction. What were his characteristics ? This book tells us from a hundred different angles, and is one long and ample justification of their divining insight. Could they have foreseen the future of their paper, could they have read the last two pages of the chapter, "On My Political Opinions," they m'eit indeed have felt they could sing their Nunc dimittis, in which a deeper note than that of mere politics is struck. Of course, the paper changed in many ways. It became more business-like, less oracular. The old esoteric illumination faded somewhat into the light of common day. With Mr. Hutton's death its more definite Church views disappeared. But it retained its essential character, its conscience, its independence, its "liberty of prophesying," its almost provoking critical fertility, its moral energy, its courage, its courteous but uncompromising arraign- ment of what it seriously doubted or disliked. At the moment, of course, all this could not be foreseen. Mr. Strachey was then, and has always been, very different from his predecessors. But some things he had which must have attracted them. He had, very patently, absolute sincerity. He had a chivalrous and generous heart. He had, as was said of one of his ancestors, an "eager, earnest and pointed spirit " ; he had an ardent love of letters, a thoroughly healthy interest in life and a passionate desire to put his own impress upon it. If there is one word which seems to breathe in every page of his "subjective autobiography," to sum up his attitude towards life, it is "gusto." Appetite, relish for life's varied banquet, an intellectual and moral joie de vivre, this is Mr. Strachey's secret. In its portrait of a happy and confident zest his book reminds us of that delightful biography, Trevelyan's Macaulay. And if he is a less powerful literary artist and genius, Mr. Strachey has a wider range of interest than Macaulay. He is less merely bookish ; he is more of a sportsman and man of action. The Adventure of Living—it is an apposite title. The feeling that life is indeed an adventure, a succession of fresh and romantic experiences, to be met ever with Tennyson's "frolic welcome" is the clue that runs through all. It was not for nothing that Mr. Strachey was born and bred within Elizabethan walls, the son of an old Somerset family, counting among his ancestors the seaman who told Shakespeare the story of the Tempest, and again Olive's private secretary and Shelburne's envoy to America ; that he absorbed all Fdizabethanism at a
gulp :— "I am Strachey, never bored
With Webster, Massinger or Ford," as a fellow undergraduate wrote of him ; that the love of the new worlds, of Voiages, Traffigues and Discoveries, the glamour of the Indies, the vision of Empire as first conceived by the Tudors, came to him in his childhood's day, to ripen later into a sane constitutional Imperialism and a large-hearted outlook towards the United States.
I knew him first at this early moment when he was passing from boy to man. He was my unofficial pupil. He had a voracious memory crammed already with quotations, and the eye of a hawk for a good phrase or bit of litera- ture. He keenly enjoyed the famous stories in Homer or Livy, Ulysses making the Cyclops drunk, or the geese saving the Capitol ; he saw, too, what good topical points they were. It was a puzzle to me why, with his rare sense of style, he had such difficulty with language. He was delightful company, and his friends will recall, with something of the pleasure his book perpetuates, hours on the river, or in the hospitable rooms of himself and his comrade—now Sir Bernard Mallet,—with their books of verse, their Italian photographs and their Greek plaster casts. Literature and life, politics or poetry ; he had an equal rest then as he has now, for them all. The joyousness of his Oxford time appears in his pages, but I think he does less than justice to his official " dons " and to himself as a student. Any- how, he passed out finally with a First Class and flying colours into the great world, carrying, as he tells us, his relish for life from Oxford to London. The great part he has played there must be read in his own language and presentation. It is a most varied and engaging story, full, as the popular saying is, as an egg is of meat. He speaks at the end of many "Unwritten Chapters," of many men and matters on which he would have liked to touch. I hope he may hereafter fine
Lime to set down not a few of these. But, meanwhile, the pattern of his life, which is pre-eminently a character In action, is here. He appears in the opening pages as somewhat of the "Fortunate Youth," and in the closing, as the successful man who has achieved and arrived. His is certainly one of the careers of his time. He had no doubt advantages— Quern pater Aeneas et avunculus excitat Hector. His father was a man of culture and position, and deep, while wide-minded piety ; his uncle, John Addington Symonds, a brilliant historian and critic. His mother had the happy art of hospitality. His wife's family (she was a grand-daughter of Nassau-Senior) brought other literary connexions both in England and in France. To have known Abraham Hayward, Henry Reeve, Lord and Lady Arthur Russell, Lord and Lady Sligo, and Madame de Peyronnet, this was no doubt to have the best of introductions. But the secret of a man's life is less its opportunities than the use he makes of them. And let no young journalist suppose that Mr. Strachey has not toiled and drudged and endured hardship and met with many a difficulty and set-back, because, such being his temper, he has "welcomed each rebuff, that turned earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bade nor sit, nor stand, but go." He speaks cheerily and with just pride of his "early press work in London," when he wrote simultaneously for the Spectator, the Standard, the Observer, and the Economist, and at the same time sent articles to the Quarterly and Edinburgh and Nineteenth Century, said later, edited the Cornhill and the Liberal Unionist. It meant incessant industry and strenuous strain. He lived simply and frugally. It was this that made him ready to purchase the Spectator in 1897. Then, indeed, he blossomed out and took his natural position. He tells us of many happenings and hazards to the paper. He suffered, and his paper suffered, more than once for its conscience. Perhaps sometimes he was in error, but in the kind of error we could wish was more often made. He gives us sketches of five great men from whom he learnt and with whom he worked—Lord Cromer, Mr. Chamberlain, the Duke of Devon- shire, Col. John Hay, Mr. Roosevelt. The sketches are full of appreciation and the selection is very significant. We said, by the way, that Mr. Strachey is a master of quotation. The book abounds with good ones. Perhaps the best of the best is that from Pope applied to the Duke. But, whatever were his heroes or his models, he remained always himself, Nullius addict= jurare in verba magistri. What I think he has not told us sufficiently fully—what I hope he will give us next—is his literary friendships and experiences. In the days of Hutton and Townsend the great Victorians, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Ruskin, George Eliot and the others, held the field and were the Spectator's figures and friends. The first time I saw Tennyson he had it in his hand. To these have succeeded Kipling, Watson, Newbolt, Binyon, de is Mare, Masefield, many another. What their generation owes to the Spectator has still to be told.
Again, Mr. Strachey tells us of his love for the Classics and their "consolations." He has not told us what a friend of the scholar the Spectator has always been. He describes his discovery of Dean Beeching and Bullen (through Mr. Graves) and Mr. de la Mare. He reveals by an allusion the connexion with the paper of his brilliant cousin, Mr. Lytton Strachey. To-day, perhaps even more than ever, the Spectator is the friend of the young un- friended prose-writer or poet, especially of the poet. I have said it is nearing its centenary. May its life and the life of my old pupil, its inspiring genius, flow together to make that hour auspicious, and on into the opening of yet another century of service and success, is a wish that every regular reader, and many another reader too, will echo.
HERBERT WARREN.
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