Produced by E-Text prepared by Martin Adamson;
martin@grassmarket.freeserve.co.uk
by Lytton Strachey
Preface
THE history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too muchabout it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance,which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placidperfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which hasjust passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth andaccumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of aRanke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon wouldquail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulousnarration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singularepoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attackhis subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or therear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscurerecesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean ofmaterial, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, whichwill bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, fromthose far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. Guided bythese considerations, I have written the ensuing studies. I haveattempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorianvisions to the modern eye. They are, in one sense, haphazardvisions—that is to say, my choice of subjects has been determined by nodesire to construct a system or to prove a theory, but by simple motivesof convenience and of art. It has been my purpose to illustrate ratherthan to explain. It would have been futile to hope to tell even a precisof the truth about the Victorian age, for the shortest precis must fillinnumerable volumes. But, in the lives of an ecclesiastic, aneducational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, I havesought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth whichtook my fancy and lay to my hand.
I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of interestfrom the strictly biographical, no less than from the historical pointof view. Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptomsof the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporalprocesses—which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. The artof biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had,it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French,a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles andCondorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a fewshining pages the manifold existences of men. With us, the most delicateand humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegatedto the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps asdifficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes,with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not knowthem, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style,their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, ofdetachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of theundertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. One istempted to suppose, of some of them, that they were composed by thatfunctionary as the final item of his job. The studies in this book areindebted, in more ways than one, to such works—works which certainlydeserve the name of Standard Biographies. For they have provided me notonly with much indispensable information, but with something even moreprecious—an example. How many lessons are to be learned from