"This intricate commerce of souls": The Origins and Some Early Expressions of Lytton Strachey's Ethics

Adescendant of Britain's nineteenth-century intellectual aristocracy, a dandy, a core member of the Bloomsbury Group, and the inadvertent originator, in Richard Altick's words, of "a major new field of historiography," namely, Victorian studies, Lytton Strachey is best known as a sardonic and iconoclastic biographer and as a master of a "sophisticated" prose style the effectiveness of which relies on a delicate intermixture of melodrama, caricature, irony, and innuendo. He is best known, that is to say, as a stylist in life and literature; for many, including Altick, who finds Strachey's groundbreaking work, Eminent Victorians (1918), "almost unreadable," he is a writer whose once-fashionable and, for a time, immensely popular biographical dissections of "curious" Victorians and Elizabethans have become merely historical curiosities themselves.¹ Even Strachey's few sympathetic readers, most notably, Michael Holroyd, often succumb to the popular image of Strachey conjured up by the numerous photographs of him that one finds in a score of Bloomsbury biographies; I am thinking especially of a series of pictures, taken by an anonymous photographer from several angles, of Strachey and Virginia Woolf at Philip and Ottoline Morrell's home at Garsington in 1923.² They sit, prim and self-contained, beside each other on a simple wooden bench in the garden; both languorously smoke cigarettes, which, life imitating art, they hold delicately between Beardsleyesque fingers. Woolf is radiant in white lace and stockings, the latter glowing above avian ankles and thin feet dangling from the ends of long, demurely crossed legs; while Strachey, apparently in myriad shades of brown, sits turned toward Woolf, knees pressed together with spinsterly propriety and liquid feet, as delicate as Woolf's own, curled beneath the bench at a seemingly unnatural but at any rate odd angle.

This essay addresses a series of related questions about Strachey's life and work that call into question that standard image of him and of his work. In the final analysis ("in the end"), is Strachey merely a stylist? Is it really as easy to dismiss Strachey as Altick thinks it is? More importantly, is it critically honest to perpetuate the common, ahistorical view of Strachey as a socially and politically indifferent and an ethically undisturbed writer just because today, as E. M. Forster remarked long ago of the moment when, in the mid-1940s, Strachey's reputation went into sharp decline, "people are again taking themselves very, very seriously, and don't like the human race to be laughed at"?³ What might our politically vigilant and arguably hyper-"Hebraic" and hypo-"Hellenic" critical age (in Matthew Arnold's sense of the terms) learn from Lytton Strachey's brand of laughter? What ethical and political beliefs informed his often sardonic but, in the end, deeply compassionate view of humanity? What were the origins of these beliefs, and how did they play out in his writings before the publication of Eminent Victorians made him famous?

Indecent and Monumental Erection

Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, Christopher Wren's imposing edifice to Empire, God, war, and British culture, contains hundreds of tombs, effigies, plaques, and other memorials to the English great of the past two centuries. An entire room in the crypt is devoted to holders of the Order of the British Empire; the visitor to this room is greeted by a plaque containing a decidedly "Lady of the Lamp"-like bas-relief of Florence Nightingale offering a cup of water to a soldier whose eyes are barely open beneath a heavily bandaged head. The inscription reads, "Blessed are the merciful." Wren himself is buried in the crypt, which also contains memorials to figures as diverse as Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin (whose ashes rest behind his plaque), and the "incomparable" Max Beerbohm. Upstairs in the nave, almost directly...