BIOGRAPHY AND STYLE IN EMINENT
VICTORIANS
Lytton Strachey, an English biographer, critic and essayist, is
best known for his ironic attitude towards the subject of his biographical
studies. Strachey’s targets of irony were evangelicalism, liberalism,
humanitarianism, education and imperialism. Strachey proposed to write lives
with brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is
significant. He is best known for “Eminent Victorians”. Treating
his subject ironically he was fascinated by personality and motive. His aim was
to paint a portrait; and through this he led to an ironical caricaturing. He
taught biographers a sense of form and of background, and he sharpened their
critical insight.
Strachey ironically shows us General Gordon including in his secret passion for fame and becoming a willing instrument not of God but of the extreme imperialist faction of the British Government. The messianic religiosity inspiring Gordon was well known by a weary generation just back from the trenches and sickened by the chauvinism of bishops and journalists declaring that God had been in the trenches on their side.
Strachey said: “My notion is to do a series of short lives of eminent persons of that kind. It might be entertaining if properly pulled off. But if will take a very long time.”
Some of the eminent persons were to be admired while others like Manning were to be exposed ironically. To Ottoline Morrell he wrote: “I am … beginning a new experiment in the way of a short condensed biography of Cardinal Manning – written from a slightly cynical point of view.”
The impact of ‘Eminent Victorians’ on literary circles was tremendous. The world was weary of big guns and big phrases, and Strachey’s witty polemic was especially attractive to the younger generation. In his preface, which was a manifesto for 20th century biographers, Strachey wrote: “Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process.”
Yet the four Victorians he chose for treatment were not independent of the moral system of the Victorian Age. His verbal attack against Cardinal Manning is an attack on the evangelicalism that was to be the defining characteristic of 19th century culture, an exposure of its hypocrisy and the emptiness of self-regarding ambitions.
Strachey toppled Florence Nightingale from the pedestal where she was placed as the legendary lady with the lamp, having saintly and self-sacrificing qualities. He replaced her with a twentieth century neurotic. Thus Strachey struck ironically at the popular mythology of Victorian England, in particular its conscience-saving humanitarianism. His irony towards the Dr. Arnold probably arose from his own unhappy schooldays. He depicted Arnold as the most influential teacher of the Victorian public school system whose cult distorted middle-class intelligence and set hard the principle of Victorianism into the 20th century. Strachey has ironically presented his sinister picture of Manning’s formal interview with the Pope. He ironically mentioned Manning as an ‘eagle’ and Newman as a ‘dove’.
There are times, however, when Strachey’s sharp sense of the ridiculous does find its way into his irony. It is a definite undercurrent in this treatment of the Chinese diplomatist Li Hung Chang: “It was Gordon who gave him his first vision of Europe. Nothing could be more ironical. The half-inspired, half-crazy Englishmen, … the irresponsible knight-errant whom his countrymen first laughed at and neglected, then killed and canonized – a figure staying through the perplexed industrialism of the nineteenth century like some lost “natural” from an earlier Age.”
Thus irony with its marked possibilities for variation, served Strachey admirable not only for comic purpose of suggesting change and dissimilarity which could be significantly and effectively relate to a background of uniformity in style. Strachey’s great weapon was irony and ‘Eminent Victorians’ set the tone for subsequent biographers. It made ‘debunking’ fashionable. Few of Strachey’s imitators possessed his gift of sharp irony or his picturesque humour. They inherited from him nothing but his shallow scepticism. Strachey was in high favour with the wound because they relished the breaking of ‘Eminent Victorians’ praised till then like idols.
P. M. Jack wrote in praise of Strachey that he had a faculty for sharpening the readers’ critical sense and often proved to be right. “We doubt if another miscellany of this sort could possess half the wit and distinction of a biographical style that we find here.”
In 1937 Edgar Johnson praised Strachey’s ironical sense of values and the largeness of his opinion:
“In Strachey the old Elizabethan lion refines down to a cat. The lion singles out the enemy to be destroyed; it is the cat, however, that plays slyly and patiently with the victim.”
Andre Maurois had already spoken of him not only as an iconoclast using the method of irony but also as a highly gifted writer in the tradition of the great humorist and as “a very deep psychologist”.
In fact, Lytton Strachey is best known for his ironic attitude towards the subjects of his biographical studies. His point of view was highly personal and some of his judgments have been described as exaggerated. But his sense of form and his witty, ironic style inspired a host of imitators who were eager to reduce historical figures to life size. He established the ironical writing of biography as a literary art. The biographer Lytton Strachey belonged to the Bloomsbury Group. He inaugurated the new era of biographical writing at the close of World War I. In his preface, Strachey enunciated the two fold principle of selection and scrutiny which was to mark all his work.
Strachey proposed a briefness which excludes everything that is superfluous and nothing that is significant. The completion of this mission made Strachey the greatness of modern biographers. Strachey has certainly revolutionized the art of writing a biography. Before him, the biographer used to neglect like a hagiographer the darker side of their heroes because they generally used to idealize their heroes by representing them as angels of virtue. Strachey was the first to realize that in order to give a complete and human portrait.
Strachey did not hesitate to include in his biographies the failings, jokes and whims of his heroes. He believed that a biographer must have a psychological insight into his character. A biographer must neither suppress vital facts nor obscure those aspects of his character which help us visualize his true picture as he lived. Instead of giving abstractness, Strachey indeed gave a creature of flesh and blood.
Strachey has suggested that the biographies must be primarily a form of literary art capable of giving the pleasure. In biography, it is not so much the subject as the treatment of the subject that really matters.
Strachey suggested that the biographies of eminent men should not be immediately written after their death because their relatives and friends are naturally reluctant to disclose the relevant confidential details. Thus he was of the opinion that: “First class biographies can only be written long after the hero’s death.”
Strachey had a gift of irony which has hardly been equaled in literature by anyone since the eighteenth century masters. Strachey has made biography a literary medium. His biographical style has the appeal of a fine work of art. Strachey has brought us face to face with men and women, who are nonetheless fallible human beings and not infallible saints or gods. We watch them live, think, and quarrel like us. Sometimes they behave meanly and foolishly and sometimes nobly and wisely.
Strachey’s objectives were to make biography an unmistakable channel for the truthful transmission of personality; to write it as the most authentic footnote to history; to make it a vivid and complete story; to make it a source of inner satisfaction to the reader. In most of his experiments in biography Strachey certainly succeeded in attaining them. Strachey’s achievement in biography was indeed a challenge to dullness and incompetence.
Charles Richard Sander says: “Throughout his career Strachey protested against the lengthy, formless, badly written biographies produced by the Victorians. He insisted that the spirit of the biographer should be free and that he should write from a definite point of view, should select and include only the essential materials of a subject, should give to a work good structure and excellence of style.”
His intensely personal sketches shocked many critics but delighted many readers. M. Forster says:
“Strachey helped sweep away the ponderous Victorian approach to the writing to biography, replacing it with a witty and with impressionistic style that was widely imitated and studied at the University of Cambridge.”
Instead of using the conventional method of detailed chronological narration, Lytton Strachey carefully selected his tact to present “Eminent Victorians”. These deliberations suffice to signify that Strachey is the greatest biographer of the Victorian age.
Strachey ironically shows us General Gordon including in his secret passion for fame and becoming a willing instrument not of God but of the extreme imperialist faction of the British Government. The messianic religiosity inspiring Gordon was well known by a weary generation just back from the trenches and sickened by the chauvinism of bishops and journalists declaring that God had been in the trenches on their side.
Strachey said: “My notion is to do a series of short lives of eminent persons of that kind. It might be entertaining if properly pulled off. But if will take a very long time.”
Some of the eminent persons were to be admired while others like Manning were to be exposed ironically. To Ottoline Morrell he wrote: “I am … beginning a new experiment in the way of a short condensed biography of Cardinal Manning – written from a slightly cynical point of view.”
The impact of ‘Eminent Victorians’ on literary circles was tremendous. The world was weary of big guns and big phrases, and Strachey’s witty polemic was especially attractive to the younger generation. In his preface, which was a manifesto for 20th century biographers, Strachey wrote: “Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process.”
Yet the four Victorians he chose for treatment were not independent of the moral system of the Victorian Age. His verbal attack against Cardinal Manning is an attack on the evangelicalism that was to be the defining characteristic of 19th century culture, an exposure of its hypocrisy and the emptiness of self-regarding ambitions.
Strachey toppled Florence Nightingale from the pedestal where she was placed as the legendary lady with the lamp, having saintly and self-sacrificing qualities. He replaced her with a twentieth century neurotic. Thus Strachey struck ironically at the popular mythology of Victorian England, in particular its conscience-saving humanitarianism. His irony towards the Dr. Arnold probably arose from his own unhappy schooldays. He depicted Arnold as the most influential teacher of the Victorian public school system whose cult distorted middle-class intelligence and set hard the principle of Victorianism into the 20th century. Strachey has ironically presented his sinister picture of Manning’s formal interview with the Pope. He ironically mentioned Manning as an ‘eagle’ and Newman as a ‘dove’.
There are times, however, when Strachey’s sharp sense of the ridiculous does find its way into his irony. It is a definite undercurrent in this treatment of the Chinese diplomatist Li Hung Chang: “It was Gordon who gave him his first vision of Europe. Nothing could be more ironical. The half-inspired, half-crazy Englishmen, … the irresponsible knight-errant whom his countrymen first laughed at and neglected, then killed and canonized – a figure staying through the perplexed industrialism of the nineteenth century like some lost “natural” from an earlier Age.”
Thus irony with its marked possibilities for variation, served Strachey admirable not only for comic purpose of suggesting change and dissimilarity which could be significantly and effectively relate to a background of uniformity in style. Strachey’s great weapon was irony and ‘Eminent Victorians’ set the tone for subsequent biographers. It made ‘debunking’ fashionable. Few of Strachey’s imitators possessed his gift of sharp irony or his picturesque humour. They inherited from him nothing but his shallow scepticism. Strachey was in high favour with the wound because they relished the breaking of ‘Eminent Victorians’ praised till then like idols.
P. M. Jack wrote in praise of Strachey that he had a faculty for sharpening the readers’ critical sense and often proved to be right. “We doubt if another miscellany of this sort could possess half the wit and distinction of a biographical style that we find here.”
In 1937 Edgar Johnson praised Strachey’s ironical sense of values and the largeness of his opinion:
“In Strachey the old Elizabethan lion refines down to a cat. The lion singles out the enemy to be destroyed; it is the cat, however, that plays slyly and patiently with the victim.”
Andre Maurois had already spoken of him not only as an iconoclast using the method of irony but also as a highly gifted writer in the tradition of the great humorist and as “a very deep psychologist”.
In fact, Lytton Strachey is best known for his ironic attitude towards the subjects of his biographical studies. His point of view was highly personal and some of his judgments have been described as exaggerated. But his sense of form and his witty, ironic style inspired a host of imitators who were eager to reduce historical figures to life size. He established the ironical writing of biography as a literary art. The biographer Lytton Strachey belonged to the Bloomsbury Group. He inaugurated the new era of biographical writing at the close of World War I. In his preface, Strachey enunciated the two fold principle of selection and scrutiny which was to mark all his work.
Strachey proposed a briefness which excludes everything that is superfluous and nothing that is significant. The completion of this mission made Strachey the greatness of modern biographers. Strachey has certainly revolutionized the art of writing a biography. Before him, the biographer used to neglect like a hagiographer the darker side of their heroes because they generally used to idealize their heroes by representing them as angels of virtue. Strachey was the first to realize that in order to give a complete and human portrait.
Strachey did not hesitate to include in his biographies the failings, jokes and whims of his heroes. He believed that a biographer must have a psychological insight into his character. A biographer must neither suppress vital facts nor obscure those aspects of his character which help us visualize his true picture as he lived. Instead of giving abstractness, Strachey indeed gave a creature of flesh and blood.
Strachey has suggested that the biographies must be primarily a form of literary art capable of giving the pleasure. In biography, it is not so much the subject as the treatment of the subject that really matters.
Strachey suggested that the biographies of eminent men should not be immediately written after their death because their relatives and friends are naturally reluctant to disclose the relevant confidential details. Thus he was of the opinion that: “First class biographies can only be written long after the hero’s death.”
Strachey had a gift of irony which has hardly been equaled in literature by anyone since the eighteenth century masters. Strachey has made biography a literary medium. His biographical style has the appeal of a fine work of art. Strachey has brought us face to face with men and women, who are nonetheless fallible human beings and not infallible saints or gods. We watch them live, think, and quarrel like us. Sometimes they behave meanly and foolishly and sometimes nobly and wisely.
Strachey’s objectives were to make biography an unmistakable channel for the truthful transmission of personality; to write it as the most authentic footnote to history; to make it a vivid and complete story; to make it a source of inner satisfaction to the reader. In most of his experiments in biography Strachey certainly succeeded in attaining them. Strachey’s achievement in biography was indeed a challenge to dullness and incompetence.
Charles Richard Sander says: “Throughout his career Strachey protested against the lengthy, formless, badly written biographies produced by the Victorians. He insisted that the spirit of the biographer should be free and that he should write from a definite point of view, should select and include only the essential materials of a subject, should give to a work good structure and excellence of style.”
His intensely personal sketches shocked many critics but delighted many readers. M. Forster says:
“Strachey helped sweep away the ponderous Victorian approach to the writing to biography, replacing it with a witty and with impressionistic style that was widely imitated and studied at the University of Cambridge.”
Instead of using the conventional method of detailed chronological narration, Lytton Strachey carefully selected his tact to present “Eminent Victorians”. These deliberations suffice to signify that Strachey is the greatest biographer of the Victorian age.
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