Chapter 47

In his early childhood he was subject to occasional experiences—asense of spiritual isolation with poignancy amounting to awe. Although he devotes several pages to them he does not succeed in describing his sensations, but in characterising them. One day while standing in a passage he suddenly had a sensation of being alone, not merely in the house, but in the world, the universe. With this came a sense of exaltation and magnification of personality so ample that it was difficult to describe. He felt then, though he was only six, that his soul had become naked. The effect on him was intensely awe-inspiring, so much so as to be disturbing in a high degree. Though not terrified, he experienced a kind of rawness and sensitiveness of soul, such as when a supersensitive mucous membrane is touched roughly by a hand or instrument. In addition to this awe and sensitiveness, was a sudden realisation of the appalling greatness of the issues of living, not only of the imminence but of the ineffable greatness of the whole of which he was a part. He felt that what he was “in for” as a sentient human being was immeasurably great. It was thence that the sense of awe came, thence the extraordinary sensitiveness, thence the painful exhilaration, the spiritual sublimation. “As a human being I was not only immortal butcapax imperii,—a creature worthy of a heritage so tremendous.”

Mr. Strachey defines his state as one ofisolement, and further defines it as ecstasy. The latter term has probably been borrowed from current psychoanalytic terminology. It is purely a subjective term, and as this is a subjective autobiography, satisfies his needs, though it puts us only a little way on the road to understanding.

No objective description of this state has been worked out. A scheme for it would be elaborate and require more patience than the behaviourists have so far displayed. They know some things in an exact way about organic reactions to simplified laboratory situations. They have never followed out the life history of any of the reactions they describe, either exactly orin tentative descriptive terms. Autobiographic writings furnish rich material for an objective psychologist. Mr. Strachey, for instance, has an unusual memory, has never suffered any serious breaks in his reaction system, and would seem not to be subject to any wealth of parallel reactions. The objective psychologists may, in the not distant future, work out a description ofisolementin terms of organic reactions, and their life histories in terms of organic memory. I do not see how a highly organised intelligence in such a setting—reminiscent father, tradition-ladened background, cultivated and uncultivated mysticism of his nurse—could have failed to develop some such moments.

It is quite likely that the main outlines of Mr. Strachey's intelligence as a working mechanism had been laid down, even at this early age. It was said of him that when a little more than two and a half years old, when his family was starting on a long journey to Pau, he insisted that his father should take with him Spenser's “Faerie Queene!” He must have had in late childhood a rich freight of memories. An elaborate and delicate set of reaction mechanism, spontaneously called forth these definite movements of detachment in the interests of further internal organisation. Moreover, it seems to me entirely a normal experience, in view of the fact that there was so much incentive to fantasy and so little progress beyond mere normal ecstasy.

It is a fearsome thing to contemplate how little fruit the arrival of powers of abstraction bring with them. Immediately Mr. Strachey was plunged into the artificial region of letters and politics, he made no effective contacts with scientific and social thinking of his period. His whole mental career from this standpoint was a gradually elaborated detachment, significant mainly for its richness, brilliancy, and generally prevailing consistency.

One other psychic experience he records, a dream during an afternoon nap: His wife came to him with a telegram in herhand which related that his son had been killed in a hunting accident in France. The incident of this telepathic dream from the objective standpoint is not very significant. The dreamer had plenty of reasons for apprehension over the welfare of his son, who was in a country where hazards were of frequent enough occurrence to make some time identity between dream and occurrence possible. The form of the hazard in the dream could probably have been traced at the time to some recent event or hearsay, and was gratuitously attached to the state of apprehension which came to the surface in the dream state.

The story of one who for a third of a century has been in British journalism while the world was being recast and remoulded must of necessity be rich in the raw material of “human interest,” as well as of history and politics. But it is not this material which the author of the subjective autobiography has chosen to present. It is with the adventure of his own life that he would interest the reader. He says,

“Every life is an adventure, and if a sense of this adventure cannot become communicated to the reader, any one may feel sure that it is the fault of the writer, not of the facts.”

He quotes Sir Thomas Browne's advice to a son about to write an account of his travels in Hungary

“not to trouble about methods of extracting iron and copper from the ores, or with a multitude of facts and statistics, but not to forget to give a full description of the 'Roman alabaster tomb in the barber's shop at Pesth.'”

The alabaster tomb in the barber's shop, rather than high politics or even high literature, is the goal which he has set before him in writing this book. The test by which he invites judgment of it is the power to enthrall the imagination of the reader with the sense of adventure.

The “supreme good luck to be born the second son of a Somersetshire squire and to be brought up in a Somersetshirecountry-house” was reinforced by the influence of parents to whose qualities he pays tribute in a chapter devoted to memories of his parents, and in another devoted to the stories told him as a child by his father. These stories serve to cloak the genealogical facts that always flavour so keenly, to the adventurer himself, the zest of his adventure. In this case they leave the reader free to trace, should he possess a relish for such a trail, through the rattling rust of ancient armour, the spell of great country houses and other symbols of authority. One may also trace Mr. Strachey's hereditary urge for literature, for there was a certain ancestor who “almost certainly knew Shakespeare” and “had a considerable amount of book-writing to his credit,” including “two or three pamphlets written by him and published as what we should now call 'Virginia Company propaganda.'” No light is thrown upon the heritage, guardian angel, or kind fate which was responsible for providing the adventurer at the outset of his journey with the most fortunate of all possessions, the temperament to “take the good the gods provide,” and for relieving him of all encumbrances in the way of “inferiority” and other complexes, which have become so fashionable a part of the modern adventurer's equipment.

If, indeed, anything in the way of good fortune was wanting in the gifts of fate to the author of the autobiography, he was more than compensated by a disposition which made it easy for him to appreciate the good qualities of others, even of his mother-in-law—that usually most unappreciated of all human relations—and to live in unimpaired serenity in her family. Of her we are told that

“she was an admirable talker and full of clear and interesting memories. I had no sooner entered the Simpson house and family than I found that there were a hundred points of sympathy between us. She had known everybody in London who was worth knowing ... and had visited most of thepolitical country houses in England on the Whig side, and most of the neutral strongholds.”

Aside from the chapters on his parents and old nurse, only a few glimpses are given of a normal and happy childhood passed in the good old days when ladies still had time to cultivate the art of correspondence—of which he says, “I have no time to dwell on my mother's most intimate friendship with Lady Waldegrave and with their habit of writing daily letters to each other.” The salient point of his childhood seems to be that he was saturated with precocity and filial piety. He was not quite so strong as other boys and was not sent to public school, and “the irony of accident,” he says, “had designed my mental equipment to be of a kind perfectly useless for the purposes of the preliminary Oxford examinations.” Knowledge of literature, a power of writing, a not inconsiderable reading in modern history, and a commendable grasp of mathematics were of no use whatever for the purpose of matriculation. So the youthful Strachey turned to Latin and Greek and finally entered Balliol as an unattached student. The first discord in the harmony of his relations with life was sounded when he became a student at Balliol, where he did not get on well with the Dons.

“I can say truthfully that I never received a word of encouragement, of kindly direction, or of sympathy of any sort or kind from any of them in regard to work or anything else. The reason, I now feel sure, was that they believed that to take notice of me would have only made me more uppish.”

His recollections of Jowett, the Master of Balliol, are tempered by the successes and the good fortune that have come to him in the intervening forty years, but he remains convinced that “the Master of Balliol evidently felt the Stracheyphobia very strongly, or perhaps I should say felt it his duty to express it very strongly.” The sarcasm that Jowett poured upon him on his return to Balliol after his first year as anunattached student still rankles. But in those early days there must have been an atmosphere of self-sufficiency, complacency, possibly one might be justified in saying conceit, that dissolved the testy Master's inhibitions.

Mr. Strachey is never tired of emphasising the good fortune of his friendships.

“I have no doubt I was considered odd by most of my contemporaries, but this oddness and also my inability to play football or cricket never seemed to create, as far as I could see, any prejudice. Indeed I think that my friends were quite discerning enough and quite free enough from convention to be amused and interested by a companion who was not built up in accordance with the sealed pattern.”

Nothing better illustrates his mental endowment and his cultural equipment as estimated by himself than this statement:

“In my day we would talk about anything, from the Greek feeling about landscape to the principles the Romans would have taken as the basis of actuarial tables, if they had had them. We unsphered Plato, we speculated as to what Euripides would have thought of Henry James, or whether Sophocles would have enjoyed Miss ——'s acting, and felt that it was of vital import to decide these matters.”

Good old days, indeed! We can imagine what the fate of the student at Harvard, let us say, would be today if he shaped his talk to indicate that “the most important thing in the world” was talk of this kind.

At an early age Mr. Strachey yielded to the urge of poetry writing, and even had a book of verses printed by a local publisher, of which he says:

“The thing that strikes me most, on looking back at my little volume of verse, is its uncanny competence, not merely from the point of view of prosody, but of phraseology and what I may almost term scholarship.”

Omne ignotum pro magni-(ormiri)fico. In spite of this he felt no great desire to adopt poetry-making as his profession.

“Possibly I thought the trade was a bad one for a second son who must support himself. It is more probable that I instinctively felt that although it was so great a source of joy to me, poetry was not my true vocation. Perhaps, also, I had already begun to note the voice of pessimism raised by the poets of the seventies, and to feel that they did not believe in themselves.”

“The pivot of my life has beenThe Spectator, and soThe Spectatormust be the pivot of my book.” His connection with it began when he was about twenty-six, after he had settled in London to study for the Bar. The book opens with an account of the spectacular success of his first adventure of writing for this journal. Armed with a formal introduction from his father, who had been a friend of the joint editors, Mr. Hutton and Mr. Townsend, and a frequent contributor to the paper, Mr. Strachey called atThe Spectatoroffice in Wellington Street and listened to the well-worn story—no less true thirty years ago than it is today—of “more outside reviewers than they could possibly find work for,” and received, out of friendship for his father alone, the choice of five volumes to notice. One of them was an edition of “Gulliver's Travels,” and it was destined to play a leading rôle in the adventure of John St. Loe Strachey. Nothing daunted by the indifferent encouragement, he promptly despatched the completed reviews, and in due time again presented himself at the office for the sole purpose of returning the books. Great was his amazement when, instead of a lukewarm reception, he was immediately asked to select anything he would like to review, from a new pile of books. When he protested that he had not come to ask for more books to review, he learned that the position of the editors had been entirely changed by the review of “Gulliver's Travels,” and “they hoped very much that I should be able to do regular work forThe Spectator. I was actually hailed as 'a writer and critic of the first force.'” Evena stronger head might have been turned by such praise from such a source.

This, however, was only the first chapter of his successful adventure withThe Spectator. Shortly afterwards, he received a letter from Mr. Hutton asking him to write a couple of leaders a week and some notes while Mr. Townsend was away for a holiday. His first leader brought a delighted response from Mr. Townsend, who requested him to remain as his assistant while Mr. Hutton was away, and soon afterward suggested,

“with a swift generosity that still warms my heart, that if I liked to give up the Bar, for which I was still supposing myself to be reading, I could have a permanent place atThe Spectator, and even, if I remember rightly, hinted that I might look forward to succeeding the first of the two partners who died or retired, and so to becoming joint editor or joint proprietor.”

His second political leader, entitled the “Privy Council and the Colonies,” brought down even bigger game than the first. Fate, always the ally of Mr. Strachey, so arranged that Lord Granville, then Colonial Secretary, had been prevented by a fit of gout from preparing a speech which he was to deliver when he received the Agents-General of the self-governing Colonies, and he supplied the hiatus by beginning his speech with the words: “In a very remarkable article which appeared in this week'sSpectator”—and then going on “to use the article as the foundation of his speech,” with the result that Mr. Hutton was “greatly delighted, and almost said in so many words that it wasn't every day that the editors ofThe Spectatorcould draw Cabinet Ministers to advertise their paper.”

So the “first two leaders had done the trick.” Still, as the young adventurer was soon to learn, it was possible for an aspirant to success to get by both editors, and even a Cabinet Minister, and still fail of entire recognition from the mostcritical member ofThe Spectatorstaff. Even this distinction, however, Mr. Strachey was destined promptly to achieve. “The last, the complete rite of initiation atThe Spectatoroffice,” occurred one day as he was talking over articles, when

“a large, consequential, not to say stout black tom-cat slowly entered the room, walked around me, sniffed at my legs in a suspicious manner, and then, to my intense amazement and amusement, hurled himself from the floor with some difficulty and alighted upon my shoulder.... The sagacious beast had realised that there was a new element in the office, and had come to inspect it and see whether he could give it his approval. When that approval was given, it was conceded by all concerned that the appointment had received its consecration.”

And so, having received the unqualified endorsement of the office cat, the future “editor and sole proprietor” ofThe Spectator, within a few weeks of his introduction to the office, had his career mapped out for him. That Mr. Strachey has been content with that career this subjective autobiography is likely to convince the most sceptical.

Two chapters are devoted to an estimate of Meredith Townsend, who was successively his chief, his partner, and later—after Mr. Strachey became “sole proprietor and editor-in-chief”—merely leader-writer forThe Spectator. The sketch of Mr. Townsend, which will undoubtedly appeal more to British than to American readers, is vivid and sympathetic, bringing into high relief the rather picturesque side of an altogether lovable and thoroughly practical personality—although any weak points which he may have displayed as leader-writer are not blurred over. His fairness, both toward his junior partner and toward those who differed with him, is emphasised, as well as his sound philosophy, his wit, his capacity for felicitous epigram, and his mental directness and forcefulness.

Mr. Strachey has the same pleasure in recalling his earlydays withThe Spectatorthat the aged courtesan is alleged to have in telling of her youthfulamours.

“When an occasion like this makes me turn back to my old articles, I am glad to say that my attitude, far from being one of shame, is more like that of the Duke of Wellington. When quite an old man, somebody brought him his Indian dispatches to look over. As he read, he is recorded to have muttered: 'Damned good! I don't know how the devil I ever managed to write 'em.'”

When Mr. Strachey became “proprietor, editor, general manager, leader-writer, and reviewer” ofThe Spectatorhe naturally asked himself: “What is the journalist's function in the State, and how am I to carry it out?” After reflection and deliberation he decided that the journalist must be the watch-dog of society, and this in full recognition of the fact that the watch-dog is generally disliked, often misunderstood, and burdened with a disagreeable job, even with its compensations. He defends the watch-dog for barking,

“in a loud and raucous way, even for biting occasionally. It is good for the dog and it is good for the one who is barked at or bitten, though the latter, like the boy who is being flogged for his good, neither sees it nor admits it.”

Mr. Strachey recites a specific instance of his watch-dog methods in dealing with Cecil Rhodes, whose methods of expanding the British Empire seemed toThe Spectatordangerous and inconsistent with the sense of national honour and good faith. He therefore

“warned the British public that Rhodes, if not watched, would secretly buy policies behind their backs and that the party machine, when in want of money, would with equal secrecy sell them. And I proved my point, incredible as it may seem.”

Mr. Strachey says that he could, of course, mention other examples of the way in which this particular watch-dog gave trouble and got himself heartily disliked, but recounting themwould touch living people. Mr. Strachey does not bow the knee to archaic conventions like “De mortuis nil nisi bonum.”

Next to the watch-dog function of the journalist is that of publicity. Publicity is one of the pillars of society, and while this has long been recognised in America, Mr. Strachey says, it is only very recently that it has come to be thoroughly appreciated in his country. Publicity is as important a thing as the collection and preservation of evidence at a trial, but it is not the whole of journalism. Comment is an important part, and infinitely more important apparently in Britain than in this country. The journalism of comment may be divided into two parts: judicial, and the journalism of advocacy. It is the former that Mr. Strachey has practised or that he has meant to practise.

On the ethics of newspaper proprietorship he thinks that it makes for soundness that newspaper proprietors should be pecuniarily independent. It is also most important that they should be men whose money is derived from their newspapers, and not from other sources. A great newspaper in the hands of a man who does not look to it for profit, but owns it for external reasons, is a source of danger. In view of this opinion, it is interesting to recall that the control of the greatest newspaper in the world has recently passed, in great part, into the hands of a man who possesses a considerable portion of one of America's greatest fortunes.

The chapters of Mr. Strachey's book which should have been most interesting are those entitled “Five Great Men,” in which he discusses Lord Cromer, John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt, Cecil Rhodes, and Joseph Chamberlain. Many will find them the most disappointing, particularly those who knew in the flesh any of these great men. They would be less disappointing, perhaps, if they were not so palpably self-laudatory. Mr. Strachey had a profound admiration for Lord Cromer and he shared it with thousands of his countrymenand Egyptian well-wishers the world over. Recalling a visit to Lord Cromer in Cairo, he says:

“Inexperienced as I then was in public affairs, it was a matter of no small pleasure and of no small amount of pride to find my own special opinions, views, and theories as to political action plainly endorsed by an authority so great. In not a single case was I disappointed or disillusioned either with what had been my own views or with what were Lord Cromer's.”

This reminds strangely of Mr. Strachey's opinion of the Dons in his youthful days at Oxford. Future biographers of Lord Cromer will have to note the fact that “he was, with the single exception of my cousin, Lytton Strachey, the most competent reviewer I ever had,” and that “he wrote a review every week forThe Spectatoron some important book,” also that “he took an immense amount of trouble to realise and understandThe Spectatorview, and to commit me to nothing which he thought I might dislike.”

In the same way, Mr. Strachey tells with great relish how he won the approval of Roosevelt with his tact and discretion when the President invited him to be present at one of his Cabinet meetings, and of Roosevelt's admiration when Mr. Strachey went with him in floods of rain for a ride on a dark November evening. In curious contrast to his statement that on this occasion he was mounted on a superb Kentucky horse procured from the cavalry barracks, “a creature whose strength and speed proved how well deserved is the reputation of that famous breed,” is the photograph of Mr. Strachey on his pony at the end of the chapter, from which one would not readily gather that he had been selected by Mr. Roosevelt to accompany him “on these afternoon winter rides” as a test of men.

Mr. Strachey says that the bed-rock of his political opinions is a whole-hearted belief in the principles of democracy, and he defines his conception of democracy as being

“not devotion to certain abstract principles or views of communal life which have the label 'democratic' placed upon them, but a belief in the justice, convenience and necessity of ascertaining and abiding by the lawfully and constitutionally expressed Will of the Majority of the People.”

He states his belief in the referendum

“in order to free us from the evils of log-rolling and other exigencies of the kind which Walt Whitman grouped under the general formula of 'the insolence of elected persons.'”

He admits, however, that a whole-hearted belief in the democratic principles need not prevent one from having strong views on special points of policy, and one of his special points of policy is in regard to Ireland.

“I objected to Home Rule as bad for the Empire, bad for the United Kingdom, and bad in an even extremer degree for Ireland herself. If, however, it should be determined that some measure of Home Rule must be passed, then the existence of the two Irelands must be recognised in any action which should be determined upon. When, therefore, the support which the Unionist party decided on giving to Mr. Lloyd George at the end of the war made some form of Home Rule seem almost inevitable, I strongly advocated the division of Ireland as the only way of avoiding a civil war in which the merits would be with Northern Ireland.”

One who comes to this delightful narrative as an admirer of the author may feel, on taking leave of it, that what Mr. Strachey has said of a famous fellow editor, William T. Stead, might also be said of him:

“Stead, though a man of honest intent, and very great ability, was also a man of many failings, many ineptitudes, many prejudices and injustices. Further, there was an element of commonness in his mental attitude, as in his style.”

Yet this would not be quite fair or accurate. Mr. Strachey is a man of honest intent and very great ability, but thereis no element of “commonness” in his mental attitude. His admirers would not admit that he is a man of many failings and many injustices. The word “some” should be substituted for “many,” in any case. But then there are his pronunciamentos on Ireland and his recollections of Cecil Rhodes.

Back to Index Next