Lytton Strachey Reviewer
By GUY BOAS
IT is probably little known that between the years 1904 and 1914 Lytton Strachey contributed to the Spectator, under di, editorship of his cousin, St. Loe Strachey, some ninety full- length reviews, more than half of which appeared during 1908. In view of his later development much interest attaches to his reviews of books dealing with history, and especially with historical bio- graphy, for in the course of his articles he reveals clearly the stars which later, in his own works, he set himself to follow. Reviewing The Greatness and Decline of Rome, by Guglielmo Ferrero, he states his historian's creed :
" When Livy said he would have made Pompey win the battle of Pharsalia if the turn of the sentence required it, he was not talking utter nonsense, but simply expressing an important truth in a highly paradoxical way—that the first duty of a historian is to be an artist. The function of art in history is something much more profound than mere decoration ; to regard it as if it were the jam put round the pill of fact by cunning historians is to fall into grievous error ; a true analogy would be to compare it to the process of fermentation which converts a raw mass of grape-juice into a subtle and splendid wine. . . . Art can throw over the historian's materials the glamour of a personal revelation, and display before the reader great issues and catastrophes as they appear, not to his own short sight, but to the penetrating vision of the most soaring of human spirits. That is the crowning glory of Thucydides, or Tacitus, or Gibbon. . . . Every history worthy of the name is, in its own way, as personal as .poetry, and its value ultimately depends upon the force of the character behind it."
Could the theory of the historian's business, which Strachey him- self was to practise on a smaller scale, be more clearly proclaimed, or a better defence be advanced against those who now criticise him because he did not write history in a manner which he had no wish to attempt ?
But if history is to be seen through the vision of soaring spirits, it is essential that the spirits should soar. If they only flap or flutter, or at best glide, they had better remain on the firm ground of scientific fact. Macaulay soared, but as a rocket impelled by artifice rather than genius. Reviewing Macaulay's Marginal Notes, Strachey comments: "As a thinker, Macaulay was neither original nor profound ; but he possessed a compensating gift—the power of expressing the most ordinary ideas in the most striking ways. . . . Macaulay brought to the making of a platitude more fire and zest than most writers can summon up for their subtlest and most surprising thoughts."
Here from Strachey's early pen is the crux of the matter.
Strachey was essentially always in spirit, if not in time, of the Edwardian age. He was a leisured artist, writing to amuse, not Infrequently to shock, a leisured intelligentsia, but never to instruct. In these 1908 reviews his art of conjuring up the quiet glamour of the long past is already developed :
" What a pleasant thing life must have been in the Court of Don Federigo—he whose features still live for us in the bright and tranquil air of Picro della Francesca's paintings— to wander, book in hand, down the palace cloisters, or to linger out the evening in quiet conversation with a cardinal or a poet or a princess."
The forty years which have elapsed since Strachey's creed was first expressed have seen a revulsion against it. The scientific historians had never shared the delight of the reading public in the impish sketches of the eminent as seen through the distorting binoculars of what St. John Ervine described as " tee-heeing literary gents." If they have now succeeded in causing a swing of the pendulum away from the Strachey manner, it is chiefly on account of the danger from inferior imitators. Also, the generation that is learning history now does not need war and political turmoil and adventurers thrown up by such upheavals brought to life by artificial means ; it is a generation that has lived on battlefields and in occupied capitals, a generation to whom a coup d'etat is as common
in the evening paper as a football result, a generation which has seen great men rise and fall within the space of its young memory. It only needs to be given the historical facts of a period ; it can fill in the pictures for itself.
This was also true of the generation on which Eminent Victorians burst like a bomb ; but, thinking there would be no more wars, the public of 1918 reverted easily to the. relaxed security of the Edwardian greenhouse. What a contrast to Lytton Strachey search- ing among age-cold letters and documents, and filling in the colour from his own imagination, is presented by Mr. Trevor Roper, author of The Last Days of Hitler (to which has been appended the not inapt sub-title: "Exit, pursued by a Bear "). His material was gathered red-hot from the ruins of the Berlin bunker and from survivors under sentence of death.
Yet Strachey, the artist, in his discussion of the Prose Style of Men of Action, showed his appreciation of the highest type of historical prose, which he recognised as being beyond 'the scope of his own experience.
"Some writers," he says, "seek through a lifetime, with all
the laborious refinements of scholarship and taste, to achieve style, while a Bunyan, tinkering in the highways, flows at will with every perfection of language. . . . Nothing is more interesting than to watch the magic of style springing out un- expectedly from the utterances of great men of action, bringing an alien sweetness into the hard world of fact, and wonder- fully lending to expression of business and of duty the glamour of passion and romance. . . . It would have needed a Shakespeare or a Scott at the height of inspiration to coin such a phrase as Cromwell's injunction 'Put your trust in God and keep your powder dry.' The mere writer who must, like a silkworm, spin out his precious material from inside him, can hardly hope to rival the man of genius whose imagination has been quickened and whose tongue has been loosened by what Burke calls the overmastering necessities of events.' Who does not feel, however humbled his pretensions, that he might, after all, write splendid prose if he had just won a splendid victory ? "
So. the " silkworm " pays homage to the man of action, but he never allowed his chair-borne state to deflect him from his spinning, and he has left us for our relaxation in our days of blood and sweat the multi-coloured silks of his leisured weaving—the purple and scarlet of his cardinal's robes, the sombre black of the doctor's gown, the white kerchiefs of queens and nurses and the tartan upholstery of Balmoral. The artist envies the man of action ; the scientist envies the artist ; but there should be no enmity between them, for each has his function to fulfil. Only one thing is necessary to all three, as Strachey himself points out in a review of Lorenzo the Magnificent, by E. L. S. Horsburgh : "Unfortunately, Mr. Horsburghs' book is devoid of one quality, without which no history can be altogether satisfactory—it is never exciting."
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