Eminent Victorians

Eminent Victorians, by Lytton Strachey

The last post from the History Book Club, and my favorite.

Let’s begin with a quote from Bertrand Russell, writing from Brixton Prison, where he was serving a sentence for pacificism in 1918:

It is brilliant, delicious, exquisitely civilized. I enjoyed as much as any the Gordon, which alone was quite new to me. I often laughed out loud in my cell while I was reading the book. The warder came to my cell to remind me that prison was a place of punishment.

The American critic Edmund Wilson later rendered this judgement:

Lytton Strachey’s chief mission, of course, was to take down once and for all the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral superiority… neither the Americans nor the English have ever, since Eminent Victorians appeared, been able to feel quite the same about the legends that had dominated their pasts. Something had been punctured for good.

The verb “puncture” appears in nearly every evaluation of Eminent Victorians.

Lytton Strachey both wrote history and was history. As a leading light of the Bloomsbury group, he figures prominently in the cultural history of 1920s, with a lasting influence on both the art of biography and our perception of the Victorian era.

But Eminent Victorians also expands beyond the contours of its four biographical subjects, painting a succinct but indelible portrait of the age just passed. Strachey announces his purpose clearly in the opening sentences of the preface:

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits … It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy … He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. Guided by these considerations, I have written the ensuing studies.

As this and the quotes to come show, Strachey was blessed with a superb style. Strachy himself said, “the first duty of a great historian is to be artist”. Some accused him of sacrificing the history to the art. As Michael Holroyd’s biography shows, outright factual errors in Eminent Victorians are rare and mostly trivial: was General Gordon’s favorite tipple brandy and soda, or sherry, or whiskey? Or all three? Strachey achieved his iconoclastic ends by subtler means, a combination of selectivity (but what history doesn’t practice selectivity?) and armchair psychologizing. A slanted treatment, perhaps, but a considerable improvement on the bloated hagiographies then prevalent.

Strachey wrote Eminent Victorians from 1912 to 1917; it was published in 1918. Originally he planned twelve “silhouettes”, many favorable, but the Great War soured his outlook.

Eminent Victorians finally contained four biographical sketches: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon. I shall say little about the famous nurse. Florence Nightingale comes across as even more impressive than her conventional image; Strachey saves his sharpest barbs for the government officials she contends with. He describes one as “a man … in … consummate command of all the arts of officially sticking in the mud”. If she is driven and humorless, these character traits find justification as prerequisites for her accomplishments.

Strachey’s biography of Cardinal Manning is the longest in the book. Strachey encompasses not just Manning’s life, but the history of the Oxford religious movement, much of Cardinal Newman’s life, and sharp sketches of half a dozen other significant ecclesiastics. Strachey achieves remarkable economy. I knew little of 19th century Anglican church history beforehand, and lacked the background that Strachey could assume of his 1920s English audience. But the chapter flowed smoothly with only a couple of dips into Wikipedia.

The most dramatic event in Manning’s life was his conversion to Catholicism, at a time when he had already risen to the post of Archdeacon of Chichester in the Anglican church. Strachey writes:

When Manning joined the Church of Rome, he acted under the combined impulse of the two dominating forces in his nature. His preoccupation with the supernatural might, alone, have been satisfied within the fold of the Anglican communion; and so might his preoccupation with himself … The Church of England is a commodious institution; she is very anxious to please, but somehow or other, she has never managed to supply a happy home to superstitious egotists.

… it is difficult to feel quite sure that Manning’s plunge was as hazardous as it appeared. Certainly he was not a man who was likely to forget to look before he leaped, nor one who, if he happened to know that there was a mattress spread to receive him, would leap with less conviction.

Cardinal Newman leaped a few years before Manning. These clerics were two of the leading lights of the Oxford movement, which held that the Church of England was one of the three equal branches of the Apostolic Church (the other two being the Roman and Eastern Orthodox). The Oxford movement functioned primarily as a conservative force, pushing for a return to ritual as practiced in the Middle Ages. Here is how Strachey describes Newman’s conversion to Catholicism:

For some time it had been obvious to every impartial onlooker that Newman was slipping down an inclined plane at the bottom of which lay one thing, and one thing only—the Roman Catholic Church … After months spent in the study of the Monophysite heresy, the alarming conclusion began to force itself upon him that the Church of England was perhaps in schism. Eventually he read an article by a Roman Catholic on St. Augustine and the Donatists, which seemed to put the matter beyond doubt. St. Augustine, in the fifth century, had pointed out that the Donatists were heretics because the Bishop of Rome had said so. The argument was crushing; it rang in Newman’s ears for days and nights; and, though he continued to linger on in agony for six years more, he never could discover any reply to it.

Despite the satirical tone, Strachey does regard Newman’s conversion as sincere. Manning he paints as an opportunist. Naturally this has come in for severe criticism. Strachey marshalls much evidence, often taken from Manning’s own correspondence. But Strachey shades his account with free entry into Manning’s private thoughts, making for a delicious but not entirely convincing narrative.

Thomas Arnold, the reforming headmaster of Rugby, failed to reform what most needed changing. Strachey describes life in Arnold’s Rugby thus:

It was … a life in which licensed barbarism was mingled with the daily and hourly study of the niceties of Ovidian verse. … the savage ritual of the whipping-block would remind a batch of whimpering children that, though sins against man and God might be forgiven them, a false quantity could only be expiated in tears and blood. …

Dr Arnold styles himself a Liberal, but Strachey writes that

He believed in toleration too, within limits; that is to say, in the toleration of those with whom he agreed.

One quote from Dr Arnold sums up the Victorian ethos perfectly:

[A] thorough English gentleman—Christian, manly, and enlightened … is a finer specimen of human nature than any other country, I believe, could furnish.

The tale of General Gordon is filled with more sheer incident than all three other biographies combined. Strachey titles the chapter “The End of General Gordon”, for Gordon’s last stand at Khartoum occupied a place as iconic for the English as the Alamo for Texans.

After seeing action in the Crimean war, Gordon achieved fame as a “general for hire” in charge of the Chinese “Ever Victorious Army”, putting down the Taiping Rebellion against the Emperor. This rebellion had been lead by a religious fanatic, the self-styled younger brother of Jesus and Celestial King. Strachey recounts this delightful scene to illustrate Gordon’s diplomatic talents:

In an interview with the Ministers, Gordon’s expressions were such that the interpreter shook with terror, upset a cup of tea, and finally refused to translate the dreadful words; upon which Gordon snatched up a dictionary, and, with his finger on the word ‘idiocy’, showed it to the startled Mandarins.

Gordon served for a time for the Khedive of Egypt (the Ottoman viceroy) and later as the Governor-General of Sudan, before retiring to England. Then the Sudan crisis intervened.

Sudan, south of Egypt, was ruled by it, Egypt itself being under British control. Around 1880, a Sudanese cleric announced that he was the Mahdi, the prophesied redeemer of Islam, and organized a revolt. The British government, under Gladstone, ordered the Egyptian government to withdraw from the Sudan. Gordon was sent to supervise the orderly withdrawal of Anglo-Egyptian forces from the Sudan.

This was an absurd choice. Strachey outdoes himself describing the internal machinations of the “imperialist section” (as he calls it) of the government, the minority that wanted a strong interventionist policy. Although Gordon was already on record opposing any Sudanese withdrawal, the imperialist section forced Gladstone’s hand with a newspaper campaign. Gordon promised to follow official policy, then promptly ignored this commitment. To quote Strachey channeling Gordon’s thoughts:

He was Gordon Pasha, he was the Governor-General, he was the ruler of the Sudan. He was among his people—his own people, and it was to them only that he was responsible—to them, and to God.

Gordon ended up besieged in Khartoum surrounded by the Mahdi’s forces. He refused many opportunities for safe passage home, hoping to force the British government to send an expedition. He wrote an extraordinary series of letters home (never sent, but recovered later), including this passage:

‘I dwell on the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with its horrid, wearisome dinner-parties and miseries. … I hope, if any English general comes to Khartoum, he will not ask me to dinner. Why men cannot be friends without bringing the wretched stomachs in, is astounding.’

Eventually Khartoum fell, Gordon was killed, Gladstone was vilified as the “murderer of Gordon”, the Mahdi died, and in 1898 the British reconquered the Sudan, ruling it until 1956.

Strachey seems to view Gordon with fascinated horror. On the one hand, he provides a perfect specimen of the attitudes that led to the Great War. On the other hand, his particularity and humanity awakened Strachey’s sympathy. Strachey wrote in the preface, after the passage about drawing buckets from the deep:

Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past.

Eminent Victorians is faithful to this precept.