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 ............