i8 
Land & Water 
May 30, 191 8 
Life and Letters ^ J. C Squire 
Victorians with the Gilt Off 
THE "standard biography," in two volumes, so 
large as to be nn readable, so discreet as to be 
misleading, and so inartistically done as to convey 
no clear portrait of its subject, is one of the 
commonest products of our Press. The good 
biography is very rare. The good short biography, though 
we were better at it in earlier centuries, has been almost 
extinct for generations. Mr. I-ytton Strachey's book 
Eminenl Victorians (Chatto & Windus, los. 6d. net) contains 
four short biographies whicli are certainly equal to anything 
of the kind which has been jjroduced for a hundred years. 
His subjects are Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, 
General Gordon, and Arnold of Kugby ; and in the course 
of his narratives he gives portraits, large or small, of many 
other influential or popular Victorians. Opinions will differ as 
to his fairness. But he has certainly created the living images 
of human beings ; his writing is deliciously restrained, 
persuasive without being rhetorical, epigrammatic without 
being showy, witty without being flippant ; and he handles 
his stories like a master. One, at least, of these narra- 
tives — that of Gordon's end and the precedent events — is 
extraordinarily complex and difficult. But he elucidates it 
with consummate dexterity ; and, wha,t is more, proportions 
it so fairly and states the. problems involved so carefully, 
that he makes us understand that there was something 
— a great deal — to be said for the opinion and the view of 
almost everj^ man prominently involved in the tangle. 
****** 
He is drawn to Gordon by his recklessness and fire and 
unworldliness ; he is drawn to Florence Nightingale by 
similar qualities in her, though the picture he draws of that 
fierce spirit flogging Sidney Herbert to his death is veiy 
different from the popular sentimental vision of "The Lady 
with the Lamp." The traits for which he has most distaste 
are smugness, prudence, and material ambition ; and, finding 
these in many of the people about whom he writes, he tends 
rather to iconoclasm. Iconoclasm is, perhaps, too strong a 
word. His practice, rather, is to rub the whitewash off 
gently. Sometimes he rubs too long and too often ; and a 
little of the solid substance comes off. His Arnold, for 
instance, is not a man who could have been the power that 
Arnold was : he is merely a self-satisfied and bigoted donkey. 
Hii general influence, his personal hold over boys are men- 
tioned ; but they are certainly not brought home or 
explained. His dislike of Lord Cromer leads him too far 
there. To Manning, too, he is not quite fair ; and he goes a 
little beyond his self-defined sphere by putting words into 
the Pope's mouth at the famous interview with Pio Nono. 
Granted, however, its limitations — the limitations* of a 
corrective — the book is a masterpiece of its kind. 
****** 
One would like to quote freely in illustration of the ameni- 
ties of Mr. Strachej^'s style. Here is a sentence on Keble : 
' He had a thorough knowledge of the contents of the Prayer 
Book, the ways of a Common Room, the conjugations of 
Greek irregular verbs, and the small jests of a countrj' parson- 
age ; and the defects of his experience in other directions 
were replaced by a zeal and a piety which were soon to prove 
themselves equal, and more than equal, to whatever calls 
night be made upon them." Here is a sly reference to 
Dr. Arnold : 
It was no wonder that Cai-lyle, after a visit to Rugby, 
should have characterised Dr. Arnold as a man of "un- 
hasting, unresting diligence." 
Mrs. Arnold, too, no doubt agreed with Carlyle. During 
the first eight years of their married life she bore him six 
children ; and four more were to follow. 
For a specimen of his sustained style one can quuU' iioiliing 
better than a portion of his fine passage on Newman : 
If Newman had never lived, or if his father, wheil-*the 
gig came round on the fatal morning, still undecided between 
the two Universities, had chanced to turn the horse's head 
in the direction of Cambridge, who can doubt that the 
Oxford Movement would have flickered out its little (lame 
unobserved in the Common Room of Oriel ? And how 
different, too, would have been the fate of Newman himself ! 
He was a child of the Romantic lievival, a creature of 
emotion and of memory, a dreamer whose secret spirit 
dwelt apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose subtle 
senses caught, like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable 
rainbow of the immaterial world. In other times, under 
other skies, his days would have been more fortunate. He 
might have helped to weave the garland of Meleager, or 
to mix the lapia lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to chase the 
delicate truth in the shade of an Athenian palaestra, or 
bis hands might have fashioned those ethereal faces that 
smile in the niches of Chartres. Even in his own age he 
might, at Cambridge, whose cloisters have ever been con- 
secrated to poetry and common sense, have followed quietly 
in Gray's footsteps and brought into flower those seeds oi 
inspiration which now lie embedded amid the faded devo- 
tion of the Lyra Apostolica. At Oxford, he was doomed. 
He could not withstand the last enchantment of the Middle 
Age. It was in vain that he plunged into the pages of 
Gibbon or communed long hours with Beethoven over his 
beloved violin. The air was thick with clerical sanctity, 
heavy with the odours of tradition and the soft warmth 
of spiritual authority ; his friendship with Hurrell Froude 
did the rest. All that was weakest in him hurried him 
onward, and all that was strongest in him, too. 
And this one has cut .short at its best. 
It is a noticeable thing that the figures which Mr. Strachey 
has selected for study were all of them devout Christians ; 
and he is continually returning tb the phenomena of religious 
introspection and the niceties of religious dogma. For the 
sincere self-examiner he has a certain sympathy, as indeed 
any humane man must, whatever his own position and habit. 
The measure of sympathy Varies. Perhaps it varies too 
much. Nothing could be more comprehending and tender 
than his references to the self-tortures of Newman, but his 
dislike of Manning is such (he slips, in one place, into a refer- 
ence to "superstitious egotists" — an unusual lapse from 
urbanity) that his attitude towards Manning's ruthless and 
undoubtedly conscientious analysis of his own motives is 
coloured too much by his conviction that Manning was alway - 
bound to cheat himself into the selfish course of action. His 
sympathetic comprehension of struggles about motive and 
conduct, however, does not extend to disputes about dogma. 
He is interested in dogma, but his interest is the interest of 
Gibbon. It is all very well for him to quote " Je n'impose 
rien ; je ne propose rien : j' expose," but he cannot helj) 
having his point of view. He regards all dogmas as an 
amusing kind of nonsense ; he loves to look on and see how 
far the doctrinal disputants can carry the splitting of hairs, 
their efforts to reconcile things difficult of reconciliation, to 
deduce a certainty from an ambiguity, to find support for 
their positions in the remotest corners of patristic literature. 
The odd nanres of early bishops and mediaeval scholastics 
appeal to him ; he rolls them off with an outward solemnity 
that docs not conceal the inward smile. He cannot 
quite regard a believer as an intellectual equal ; and he 
tends to exhibit the whole body of believers as odd insects 
performing strange evolutions for his benefit. But one is 
not so sure that were he to turn his microscope in other direc- 
tions he would find other classes of persons less ridiculous. 
I suggest with deference, that he might set out on a new 
line. An observer with his detachment, his keen sense of 
the ludicrous, his eye for httle intellectual and moral weak- 
nesses, might give us an original \'iew of the members of his 
own sceptical camp. They have never turned their own 
guns upon themselves ; and their opponents are incapable of 
this kind of cool daylight writing. If Mr. Strachey would 
devote his attention to a few "pioneers" of the anti-religious 
movements, and examine their characters and mental pro- 
cesses with the scientific conscientiousness of which he has 
shown himself capable, one 'imagines that the general run 
of them, from Voltaire to Bradlaugh, will be left with even 
less of th? monumental about them than the others. His 
treatment is a valuable treatment. A man who can remain 
heroic— as both General Gordon and Miss Nightingale do- 
after being subjected to it has passed a very severe test, and 
his really heroic qualities have been, in effect, glorified. But 
the one striking and inevitable defect of his method is that 
in failing to communicate in their full force the emotions 
by virtue of which persons have been great and impressed 
their contemporaries as great, by throwing a high light 
upon habitual weaknesses and blind spots, it tends to make 
both the great and the half-great seem more fooUsh than 
they were, and to give one the idea that our fathers were 
very simple-minded to be imposed upon by such persons. 
A biographer who looks down on his subject can contribute 
much to our knowledge of him ; but the biographer who 
looks at him with level ^yes and the biographer who looks 
up at him are also useful. 
