Lytton Strachey Research Articles

Biographer and subject: Lytton Strachey and Van Wyck Brooks∗

<i>Biographer and subject: Lytton Strachey and Van Wyck Brooks</i>∗

The Influence of Forster's "Maurice on Lady Chatterley's Lover"

The matter of H. Lawrence's homosexual predisposition has, in recent years, received a significant amount of critical notice; and in this respect his life and work are undergoing a new review. Margaret Bolsterli has reminded us (The Homosexual Ambience of Twentieth Century Literary Culture,' 1973) that, despite a conspiracy of silence on the part of writers and commentators of the period, the influence of homosexuality on Edwardian-Georgian intellectual and social life was widespread. Lytton Strachey, Edward Carpenter, and Aubrey Beardsley were well-known and their views widely discussed. Emile Delavenay's speculative H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter (1971)2 attempts, of course, to establish very substantive links between the man who inspired Forster's Maurice and Lawrence. As Jeffrey Meyers has pointed out in his informative study, D. H. Lawrence and Homosexuality, Lawrence himself wrote often and rather freely upon the subject of manly love3:

The Early Fiction of William Gerhardie

William Gerhardie's first novel, Futility (1922), was described by Katherine Mansfield, who was in large part responsible for its publication, as living book.... [O]ne can put it down and it goes on breathing. ' Edith Wharton's preface to novel applauded the fun, pathos and irony of thronged sprawling tale, 2 and in a letter to Gerhardie she too commented on novel's vital quality: You not only make your people live, but move and grow-and that's very devil to achieve. 3 These remarks are significant because they point to particular merit of Gerhardie's fiction and presage his importance for subsequent novelists. The reaction of general public, however, never approached literary response, as H. G. Wells's query reveals: Why was there no shouting about Gerhardie's Futility-shouting to reach suburbs and country towns? 4 His second novel, The Polyglots (1925), was similarly received: praised by Bennett, Shaw, and Lytton Strachey, ignored by larger reading public. More recent criticism indicates that this pattern persists. While several appreciative essays lament public's neglect of Gerhardie, C. P. Snow documents his importance to novelists:

The Shaping of the Biographer: Lytton Strachey's "Warren Hastings, Cheyt Sing, and the Begums of Oude"

The Shaping of the Biographer: Lytton Strachey's "Warren Hastings, Cheyt Sing, and the Begums of Oude"

Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art , and: Bloomsbury: A House of Lions (review)

Reviews Leon Edel, Justin Kaplan, Alfred Kazin, Doris Kearns, Theodore Rosengarten, Barbara Tuchman, and Geoffrey Wolff, Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art. Ed. Marc Pachter. Washington, D.C: New Republic Books/National Portrait Gallery, 1979. 155 pp. $9.95. Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. New York: J. B. Lippincott , 1979. 288 pp. $12.95. In the now famous codicil to his will, T. S. Eliot forcefully objected to the writing of any study of his life. In death, he held tenaciously to his earlier distinction between "the man who suffers and the mind which creates." Like Matthew Arnold before him, Eliot wished to be remembered for his "creative literature," not for the quality of his life. Many other outstanding figures—artists and statesmen alike—have cast a cold eye on the biographer's art, a fear of the inquisitorial and adversary nature of biography. This impulse, in part, may be viewed as an instinct for self-protection, and in the case of the literary artists, as an insistence on the value of literature as literature. From a series of lectures first presented at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. in November 1978, Telling Lives is a provocative exploration by accomplished biographers into the nature and form of the art of life study. In his compact and brilliant essay, "The Figure Under the Carpet," Leon Edel conceives biography as a "young" art form, still evolving. As an art form, biography has been, until recent years, an amorphous effort based upon no standard or crit- 358 biography Vol. 3, No. 4 ical principles. Past biography has all too frequently assumed its shape and form from the view and intentions of the biographer, each holding a different mission, a different rationale for exploring the private life of a subject. In a tentative and theorizing approach to the biographer's art, Telling Lives offers a series of reflections on "the joys, limitations, and challenges of defining a life." Echoing Lytton Strachey's comment "that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as it is to live one," Marc Pachter in his opening essay, "The Biographer Himself: An Introduction ," defines the distinction between biography as an element in popular culture and fine biography: "Distinguished biography . . . bears no resemblance to the voluminous, indiscriminate compendia of facts-shoveled-on-facts in which the writer buries alive both his hero and the reader." The current rage of biographies and autobiographies of movie celebrities, famous gangsters and killers, and notables of the jet set exists mainly for expose and exploitation. They are factoids of popular culture, and unrelated to the art of distinguished biography. Such works are not the concern of Telling Lives. In creating fine biography today, it is no longer true that a subject's public career is selfsufficient and central in the drama of life. In the 19th century, the biographer generally saw his task as "testimonial" and the fundamental drama of a life consisted of the narration of a great public event. "The idealizing biography, like the standard boardroom portrait and other totems of respectability, begs to be ignored." The biographical studies of Lytton Strachey have radicalized modern biography because he opens the biographer's art to new possibilities, to an "honest evocation of the truth of a life." The modern biographer must portray "the whole sense of a person." Only as the biographer comprehends the dynamic in a personality—its evolving sense of itself as it is and as it would like to be—is the vital truth uncovered. The biographer's drive is our human curiosity made intense and particular; his "passion for life" is a will to know the true shape of another's experience. In Pachtern words, fine biography challenges the pose to find the personality. W. H. Auden once complained that biography was "always superfluous " and "usually in bad taste." In "The Figure Under the Carpet ," Leon Edel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the life of Henry James, re-affirms Andre Maurois' metaphor of the relationship between the portrait painter/sculptor and the biographer. Some painted portraits are "mere facades," suited more for an archive or a family album. Edel believes that...

D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War by Paul Delany

was required to make. That spirit of irreverence survived. In Bleak House, to point up errant Lady Dedlock’s fate, Dickens required a gloomy plate of the Dedlock mausoleum to which Lady Dedlock comes at last. It’s a sombre affair. “That Phiz found the subject excessively sombre is indicated by the working drawing. . . in the margin of which he has sketched three mocking devils, one thumbing his nose with both hands, one laughing directly at the mausoleum, and the third peeking around the border of the drawing with a smirk on his face. How Dickens felt if he in fact saw this drawing we cannot know, but his doubts about Browne, expressed at least as long before as Mrs. Pipchin, would not have been lessened by it” (p. 156). To conclude, this is a thorough, innovative, astute and informative book, a scholarly oasis in the desert of readings, rereadings, and rerereadings of Dickens. It is a pity that cost presumably limited the number of illustrations, but the 126 included are well-produced. In addition to restoring for us an artistic tradition, showing us in lively detail how it works, and making a case for the collaborative efforts of Dickens and Phiz as a new kind of art, Steig’s book provides interesting material for anyone puzzling over the question of whether art refers to life or to other art and convention, a question perennial but, in ways Miller’s essay demonstrates, newly alive. r . d. m c m a st e r / University of Alberta Paul Delany, D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1978). xvii, 420. $ 15-95 For all the current interest in literary theory, we still lack even the rudiments of a poetics of biography. Lytton Strachey’s manifesto appeared more than sixty years ago but there is still considerable disagreement among those who write, read, and review biographies over his dictum that “ to preserve a be­ coming brevity — a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant — that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer.” Those who bear witness to Strachey’s influence by deploring it think that truth rather than art is the biographer’s first duty; the biographer as artist is a figure of suspicion for them, especially when, as with Strachey, the art is ironic. The state of biographical criticism is so primitive that there is no customary distinction even between biographies whose subjects led lives of action that we cannot directly know, and those whose work we can study independently of their lives. Strachey did not write literary biographies, and he has nothing to say about the dispute over the priority of art or truth that often settles on the biographer’s treatment of the writer’s work. Johnson had no hesitation judging the poetry along with the life of the poet, but his de­ tached criticism has not inspired modern literary biographers. A very few appear to have managed the discussion of the writer’s life and work without losing a becoming brevity, but most recent literary biographies that undertake an analysis of the writing as well as the life, approach, in some degree, the form of Victorian biographies “with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection.” This is what happens, Strachey suggests, when the biographer functions as an undertaker rather than an artist, and it still applies — except that after Strachey no serious modem biographer dares to be tediously panegyric. Those literary biographies that leave the work alone achieve their becoming brevity at the cost of leaving out precisely that which explains our interest in the life. The second duty of the biographer, according to Strachey, is “to maintain his own freedom of spirit.” One rather recent kind of literary biography ful­ fills this duty as well as the first one while discussing the writer’s work. In this sub-genre the biographer, typically a literary critic, usually emphasizes the work to the detriment of the life. A pattern derived from the work is often used to order the...

ON THOMAS ARNOLD, THE CELEBRATED HEADMASTER OF RUGBY SCHOOL, AND HIS VIEWS ON THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), Mathew Arnold's father, served as headmaster of Rtigby School from 1828 until 1841. During his stiperintendence Rugby attained a widespread reputation as a place of intellectual, moral, and religiotis discipline, where healthy characters were formed, and young men were trained for the duties, struggles, and responsibilities of life. Lytton Strachey in his Eminent Victorians1 writes as follows about Arnold's ideas of education: He was convinced of the necessity for reform. But it was only natural that to one of his temperament and education it should have been the moral rather than the intellectual side of the question which impressed itself upon his mind. Doubtless it was important to teach boys something more than the bleak rigidities of the ancient tongues; but how much more important to instil into them the elements of character and the principles of conduct! His great object, throughout his career at Rugby, was, as he repeatedly said, to "make the school a place of really Christian education." To introduce "a religious principle into education," was his "most earnest wish," he wrote to a friend when he first became headmaster; "but to do this would be to succeed beyond all my hopes; it would be a happiness so great, that, I think, the world would yield me nothing comparable to it." And he was constantly impressing these sentiments upon his pupils. "What I have often said before," he told them, "I repeat now: what we must look for here is, first, religious and moral principle; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual ability."

Gibbon and the Publication of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 1776-1976

IN 1976 we celebrate bicentenary of--among other events-the publication of first volume of The Decline and Fall of Roman Empire. 1 That publication, as is well known, created an immediate sensation. It was a succks de scandale. In this lecture, if I speak briefly of that sensation, it is in order to look past it and see what I believe is far more important and has been far less generally recognised, then or now: revolutionary historical philosophy which, in that year, almost unnoticed in noise of sectarian battle, moved in to command field. Yes, almost unnoticed. For who, in eighteenth century England, either among those who welcomed new book, or among those who attacked it, showed any appreciation of its true character, its real novelty? (I say England advisedly for Scotland, of course, was different.) Those who praised Gibbon's work, at time, praised it for its style. Some also-like Porson and Coleridge--deplored its style.2 Horace Walpole, arbiter of contemporary taste, thought there was nothing new in it except style.3 Even in our century, Lytton Strachey, a literary man of 1920s, dogmatically stated that foundation of Gibbon's work was its style: the style once fixed, everything else followed.4 What rubbish! Reading such judgments, I am inclined to agree with that learned but tart Italian scholar, Signor Giarrizzo, who exclaims against the trite and vulgar judgments and insipid chatter of most Anglo-Saxon writers on Gibbon.s If Gibbon's contemporaries extolled him mainly for his style, they attacked him mainly for his infidelity. This entrancing style, they protested, was used to recommend most pernicious doctrines. The book had scarcely been published when outcry began. In same letters in which

British Political Biography as History

On the evening of 5 June 1923, Art of Biography was spiritedly debated at the London School of Economics. The honors were shared by A. G. Gardiner, who had recently published a double-decker life of Sir William Harcourt, and by Philip Guedalla, who made his reputation with books on Wellington, Palmerston, and Napoleon III. The chair was taken by H. H. Asquith, an autobiographer whose volumes were twice as many, twice as heavy, and not half so popular as his wife's. With Guedalla's concurrence, Gardiner gave generously of his advice to any prospective biographers in the audience. Boswell and Carlyle, he declared, had achieved immortal successes because each had been anxious to do his best for his subject; Lytton Strachey, on the other hand, was too concerned with parading his own wit, and, consequently, never rose above caricature. Every biography, he insisted, like every good picture, was a portrait of two persons-the writer and its subject-and, in the vast majority of cases, it was

Literary History: Non-Subject Par Excellence

HY par excellence? For two reasons: one (the topic to which this essay is principally devoted), because it glosses over a logical contradiction between two opposed modes of thought; two, because literature and history are both excellent things in themselves-provided they are considered (and practiced) separately. Literary history is merely a by-product, a disreputable though not entirely useless by-product. It can be compared to the Philosophers' Stone. Though the medieval alchemists never discovered how to transmute lead into gold, the science of chemistry is directly descended from their failures. In the same way literary history, though a futile occupation in itself (one of the jokes of modern academic life), has had its own valuable by-products. For one thing, it has sharpened our chronological sense; Old Style is no longer confused with New Style, as Thackeray confused them in the evening preceding the duel in Esmond. 1 Literary history has also played its part in encouraging habits of accurate documentation and a general consciousness of the relativity of critical values; we would never say-as Lytton Strachey did in a review of Birkbeck Hill's edition of The Lives of the Poets in 19o6-that Johnson's aesthetic judgments are almost invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend them-except one: they are never right. 2 Against these incidental blessings must be set certain incidental scandals. Literary history has provided an umbrella of respectability under which are still crowded teachers of literature who, have outgrown their adolescent enthusiasms without acquiring a mature critical sense. It was against these unfortunate misfits that the New Criticism

A Tale of Sprights and Goblins

CCORDING to E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale resembles an entire Aeschylean trilogy packed into one play, with both destruction and new creation presented full view of the audience. In seeing the play as a compressed trilogy, Professor Tillyard dealt in a new way with a problem long discussed by critics of The Winter's Tale: the problem of the play's awkward dramatic structure and its consequent lack of tonal unity. Readily admitting that the play is composite in form and tone, he found the first part seriously tragic and saw in the second good earthy comedy and regeneration. Many had felt that the play was first tragic, then comic. Professor Tillyard insisted that, since the vision ideally includes both destruction and reconciliation, the composite form and shifting tone of The Winter's Tale are but signs of its greatness and of the breadth of Shakespeare's vision.' This view of The Winter's Tale as expanded tragedy is an attractive one. It lends significance to the play by attaching it to the great tragedies; it answers critics of the Lytton Strachey school, who see Shakespeare in his last years as a bored, disgusted old man with dimming poetic vision and failing powers; and it seems to explain away that dramatic anomaly: the casual yoking of tragedy and comedy. It holds special attractions for those critics who view the play as dramatized allegory or symbol, and who interpret it in terms of

The role of Jean Monnet

The future historian of European integration is likely to suffer from a surplus of documentation and a shortage of facts. If a certain kind of ignorance, as Lytton Strachey once remarked, is essential to the writing of intelligible history, it has little hope of survival amid the vast accumulation of newspaper cuttings, official statistics, policy speeches, annual reports and statesmen's memoirs with which the present-day scholar must contend. One expert has calculated that ‘the volume of official documents produced by the United Kingdom Government and its agencies during the six war years 1939–45 equalled, in cubic content, the volume of all previous archives of the United Kingdom and of its constituent kingdoms England and Scotland that had survived down to the date of the outbreak of war.’

The Sound of Stubbs

“The biscuit is certainly exceedingly dry; but at any rate there are no weevils in it,” Lytton Strachey wrote, praising slightly one “scientific” historian that he might more thoroughly attack another. Strachey's amusing, contorted, perceptive, and sometimes ignorant burlesques of Victorian behaviour have lost favor; but they remain, more brightly outlined and self-mocking versions of common prejudices. Certainly the belief that the “scientific” historians produced dry biscuit is still commonly held even among those who one would suppose had read them; and the belief is probably held more clearly and widely about William Stubbs than about either Mandell Creighton or S. R. Gardiner, because as an historian his name is more eminent, more people have heard of him, or more people who have heard of him know that he is a “scientific” historian from the authoritative, the “dry” period. He was born in 1825 and died in 1901.In fact the problem with Stubbs is in quite a different direction. Stubbs is more compelling than his evidence demands and more fascinating than his subject would predict. F. W. Maitland, before he was forced by profession to that sort of reading, found Stubbs's Constitutional History “in a London club, and read it because it was interesting.” Even at his weakest and dullest Stubbs is interesting; at his strongest and most flamboyant, as in his Benedict of Peterborough and Walter of Coventry introductions in the Rolls Series and in parts of his Constitutional History, he is dazzling. The problem is not overcoming Stubbs's dullness but explaining his brilliance.

South from Granada

Between 1920 and 1934, Gerald Brenan lived in the remote Spanish village of Yegen and South of Granada depicts his time there, vividly evoking the essence of his rural surroundings and the Spanish way of life before the Civil War. Here he portrays the landscapes, festivals and folk-lore of the Sierra Nevada, the rivalries, romances and courtship rituals, village customs, superstitions and characters. Fascinating details emerge, from cheap brothels to archaeological remains, along with visits from Brenan's friends from the Bloomsbury group - Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf among them. Knowledgeable, elegant and sympathetic, this is a rich account of Spain's vanished past.

Biography as an Instrument of Moral Instruction

FROM days of Plutarch (46-120) to days of Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) almost all biography was written either for purpose of making love with virtue, or to point out to them the hateful and horrid consequences of vice.' The didactic strain entered stream of English biography as early as sixth century and for more than a thousand years English biographers, dominated with idea of moral edification and religious instruction, wrote only things of good men and evil things of wicked persons.2 Even after other purposes for writing were introduced in eighteenth century,3 didactic remained major purpose and, during Victorian era, both English and American biographers produced almost nothing but panegyrics.4 But during revolutionary years immediately following First World War, new biographers, proclaiming that biography was first of all art, violently attacked this time-honored purpose on ground that any moral intention destroyed delicate art of biography. Harold Nicolson,

Lytton Strachey and the Victorians

Lytton Strachey and the Victorians

Lytton Strachey and French Literature

Research Article| April 01 1954 Lytton Strachey and French Literature Charles Richard Sanders Charles Richard Sanders Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1954) 53 (2): 238–259. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-53-2-238 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Charles Richard Sanders; Lytton Strachey and French Literature. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 April 1954; 53 (2): 238–259. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-53-2-238 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1954 by Duke University Press1954 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Lytton Strachey's “Point of View”

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?

Lytton Strachey's "Point of View"

Lytton Strachey's "Point of View"

Notes on the Libretto of “Gloriana”

Lytton Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex is not a book which has pleased everybody, but it was the starting-point of this opera. This is not the place to analyse the book's deficiencies, real or alleged, but to assert that it tells skilfully a tense and dramatic story based upon historical persons and happenings. The late Sir Desmond MacCarthy, in his recently published Memories, recalls an interesting opinion that Elizabeth and Essex is almost a sketch for a play and that Strachey's method was inspired by or borrowed from the Elizabethan stage. Both the composer and the librettist of Gloriana were able to see in the book a sketch for an opera, and both are ready to acknowledge their debt to Strachey's dramatic sense. This does not mean that Gloriana is wholly based upon Elizabeth and Essex, or that it has emerged merely as an operatic version of that book. In the first place the makers of an opera are not under the obligation of even a picturesque biographer like Strachey to stick closely to history or chronology. Secondly, the makers of this particular opera came to be less concerned than Strachey with the amatory motives of the two principal characters and more concerned with the Queen's pre-eminence as a Queen, a woman, and a personality.