Chapter L: S. G

_Books and Characters._ By LYTTON STRACHEY. (Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York.)

A reference, in the present volume, to Thomas Beddoes as “the last Elizabethan” suggests, at once, Mr. Lytton Strachey’s preëminent right to the title of “the last Victorian”—using the word in its best sense, to denote an individual very far removed indeed from any desire to go “tobaggoning down Parnassus”. Mr. Strachey’s bland progress through the realm of letters is, in fact, the very antithesis of that adopted by the tobaggoning school of modern critics. To analyze the characteristics of his style is to call up a host of adjectives long all but forgotten amid the present scramble for pseudo-culture. He is scholarly without being pedantic, erudite without being obscure. And the queer, musing, almost anecdotal manner in which he rambles from Johnson’s wit to Madame du Deffand’s, from Shakespeare’s tragedies to Voltaire’s, is always giving way to lightning flashes of true critical insight expressed with the netteté of a Racine.

As might be gathered from the foregoing remarks, “Books and Characters” is a volume of collected critical essays, which first appeared individually between the years 1905 and 1919 in various publications, such as the _Edinburgh Review_. Incidentally, it is a book which should have an especial and peculiar appeal to the college man. For the books and characters touched upon are, one or two excepted, the very ones with which the reading essential to a college course has made him most familiar. He will thus have freshly in mind the background of literary acquaintanceships, which the guileless Mr. Strachey apparently supposes is possessed by everyone, and upon which he proceeds to etch his portraits with the aid of a wit so delightful and so acutely sharpened as to be quite irresistible. For it was true wit, in the Victorian sense, mingled with a quaint, sly humor, which made Strachey’s “Queen Victoria” the consummate master-portrait that it is, and which reappears in “Books and Characters”. Perhaps a quotation from the chapter entitled, “The Lives of the Poets”, may show what we mean:

“Johnson’s aesthetic judgments are almost invariably subtle, or
solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend
them—except one. They are never right. That is an unfortunate
deficiency; but no one can doubt that Johnson has made up for
it, and that his wit has saved all. He has managed to be wrong
so cleverly, that nobody minds. When Gray, for instance, points
the moral to his poem on Walpole’s cat with a reminder to the
fair that all that glisters is not gold, Johnson remarks that
this is ‘of no relation to the purpose; if what glistered had
been gold, the cat would not have gone into the water; and, if
she had, would no less have been drowned.’ Could anything be
more ingenious, or more neatly put, or more obviously true? But
then, to use Johnson’s own phrase, could anything be of less
‘relation to the purpose’?”

Well, we only restrain ourselves with difficulty from seeming to commit sacrilege upon Johnson by proclaiming the rightness of Mr. Strachey’s aesthetic judgments, as well as their wit.

The essays dealing with French life and letters, just prior to the revolution, are equally a mine of interest. They are all brilliant pieces of writing; from the flickering sidelights thrown upon the undignified and incredible squabbles of Voltaire and Frederick the Great, to the half-pitiful, half-comic details concerning the salon of Madame du Deffande—Madame du Deffande, who was for twenty years, at once, blind, hopelessly in love with Walpole, and the cultural autocrat of Paris. Skeptics, all of them—and skeptics essentially Gallic, before whose unabashed indifference to God, and cynical contempt for man the Anglo-Saxon mind is apt to recoil, gymnastically unable to assume the necessary shift in point of view. For instance, there is Madame La Maréchale de Luxembourg:

“‘Quel ton! Quel effroyable ton!’ she is said to have exclaimed
after a shuddering glance at the Bible. ‘Ah, Madame, quel
dommage que la Sainte Esprit eut aussi peu de gout!’”

At least they seem to have been sincere, these most un-Victorian French. And they round out Mr. Strachey’s book into something which really must not be missed.