a superlatively civilized red indian living apart from the vulgar world in an elegant and park-like reservation, mr. strachey rarely looks over his walls at the surrounding country. it seethes, he knows, with crowds of horribly colonial persons. like the hosts of midian, the innumerable “poor whites” prowl and prowl around, but the noble savage pays no attention to them.
in his spiritual home—a neat and commodious georgian mansion in the style of leoni or ware—he sits and reads, he turns over portfolios of queer old prints, he savours meditatively the literary vintages of centuries. and occasionally, once in two or three years, he tosses over his park palings a record of these leisured degustations, a judgment passed upon his library, a ripe rare book. one time it is eminent victorians; the next it is queen victoria herself. to-day he has given us a miscellaneous collection of books and characters.
if voltaire had lived to the age of two hundred and thirty instead of shuffling off 137at a paltry eighty-four, he would have written about the victorian epoch, about life and letters at large, very much as mr. strachey has written. that lucid common sense, that sharp illuminating wit which delight us in the writings of the middle eighteenth century—these are mr. strachey’s characteristics. we know exactly what he would have been if he had come into the world at the beginning of the seventeen hundreds; if he is different from the men of that date it is because he happens to have been born towards the end of the eighteens.
the sum of knowledge at the disposal of the old encyclop?dists was singularly small, compared, that is to say, with the knowledge which we of the twentieth century have inherited. they made mistakes and in their ignorance they passed what we can see to have been hasty and very imperfect judgments on men and things. mr. strachey is the eighteenth century grown-up; he is voltaire at two hundred and thirty.
voltaire at sixty would have treated the victorian era, if it could have appeared in a prophetical vision before his eyes, in terms of “la pucelle”—with ribaldry. he would have had to be much older in knowledge and inherited experience before he could have approached it in that spirit of sympathetic 138irony and ironical sympathy which mr. strachey brings to bear upon it. mr. strachey makes us like the old queen, while we smile at her; he makes us admire the prince consort in spite of the portentous priggishness—duly insisted on in the biography—which accompanied his intelligence. with all the untutored barbarity of their notions, gordon and florence nightingale are presented to us as sympathetic figures. their peculiar brand of religion and ethics might be absurd, but their characters are shown to be interesting and fine.
it is only in the case of dr. arnold that mr. strachey permits himself to be unrestrainedly voltairean; he becomes a hundred and seventy years younger as he describes the founder of the modern public school system. the irony of that description is tempered by no sympathy. to make the man appear even more ridiculous, mr. strachey adds a stroke or two to the portrait of his own contriving—little inventions which deepen the absurdity of the caricature. thus we read that arnold’s “outward appearance was the index of his inward character. the legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been; but the sturdy athletic frame, especially when it was swathed (as it usually was) in the flowing robes of a doctor of 139divinity, was full of an imposing vigour.” how exquisitely right those short legs are! how artistically inevitable! our admiration for mr. strachey’s art is only increased when we discover that in attributing to the doctor this brevity of shank he is justified by no contemporary document. the short legs are his own contribution.
voltaire, then, at two hundred and thirty has learned sympathy. he has learned that there are other ways of envisaging life than the common-sense, reasonable way and that people with a crack-brained view of the universe have a right to be judged as human beings and must not be condemned out of hand as lunatics or obscurantists. blake and st. francis have as much right to their place in the sun as gibbon and hume. but still, in spite of this lesson, learned and inherited from the nineteenth century, our voltaire of eleven score years and ten still shows a marked preference for the gibbons and the humes; he still understands their attitude towards life a great deal better than he understands the other fellow’s attitude.
in his new volume of books and characters mr. strachey prints an essay on blake (written, it may be added parenthetically, some sixteen years ago), in which he sets out very conscientiously to give that disquieting poet 140his due. the essay is interesting, not because it contains anything particularly novel in the way of criticism, but because it reveals, in spite of all mr. strachey’s efforts to overcome it, in spite of his admiration for the great artist in blake, his profound antagonism towards blake’s view of life.
he cannot swallow mysticism; he finds it clearly very difficult to understand what all this fuss about the soul really signifies. the man who believes in the absoluteness of good and evil, who sees the universe as a spiritual entity concerned, in some transcendental fashion, with morality, the man who regards the human spirit as possessing a somehow cosmic importance and significance—ah no, decidedly no, even at two hundred and thirty voltaire cannot whole-heartedly sympathize with such a man.
and that, no doubt, is the reason why mr. strachey has generally shrunk from dealing, in his biographies and his criticisms, with any of these strange incomprehensible characters. blake is the only one he had tried his hand on, and the result is not entirely satisfactory. he is more at home with the gibbons and humes of this world, and when he is not discussing the reasonable beings he likes to amuse himself with the eccentrics, like mr. creevey or lady hester stanhope. 141the portentous, formidable mystics he leaves severely alone.
one cannot imagine mr. strachey coping with dostoevsky or with any of the other great explorers of the soul. one cannot imagine him writing a life of beethoven. these huge beings are disquieting for a voltaire who has learned enough sympathy to be able to recognize their greatness, but whose temperament still remains unalterably alien. mr. strachey is wise to have nothing to do with them.
the second-rate mystics (i use the term in its widest and vaguest sense), the men who believe in the spirituality of the universe and in the queerer dogmas which have become tangled in that belief, without possessing the genius which alone can justify such notions in the eyes of the voltaireans—these are the objects on which mr. strachey likes to turn his calm and penetrating gaze. gordon and florence nightingale, the prince consort, clough—they and their beliefs are made to look rather absurd by the time he has done with them. he reduces their spiritual struggles to a series of the most comically futile series of gymnastics in the void. the men of genius who have gone through the same spiritual struggles, who have believed the same sort of creeds, have 142had the unanswerable justification of their genius. these poor absurd creatures have not. voltaire in his third century gives them a certain amount of his newly learned sympathy; but he also gives them a pretty strong dose of his old irony.
