^{Note 1 in page 295} Arthur Waugh, “Mr. Lytton Strachey,” a letter to the Spectator, CXLVIII (30 Jan-1932), 146. John Russell's comment on Strachey in the following passage is excellent: “Other writers have used portraits to give pause to their narratives; but with Strachey the narrative is all portrait, and if we look into the eyes of his Voltaire or, more surprisingly, of his Prince Consort, we seem to see, reflected in their pupils, the gaze of their bland inquisitor. All the other facts of history are dimmed and thrust backward by this intense and continuous scrutiny of individuals.”—“Lytton Strachey,” Horizon, xv (Feb. 1947), 93.

^{Note 2 in page 295} Preserved among Strachey's MSS. are 88 numbered aphorisms which Strachey seems to have composed when he was still at Cambridge. Aphorism 32 reads: “The worst and best parts of us are the secrets we never reveal.”

^{Note 3 in page 296} The last clause is quoted almost verbatim from Strachey's Aphorism 63.

^{Note 4 in page 296} “The Wrong Turning,” Independent Rev., ii (Feb. 1904), 169–173. In the same article Strachey objected to Burke's praise of the unreal characters in Fanny Burney's later novels: “ by ‘characters’ Burke meant just what he should not have meant—descriptions, that is to say, of persons who might exist.”

^{Note 6 in page 296} “Shakespeare's Final Period,” Independent Rev., iii (Aug. 1904), 405 ff.

^{Note 8 in page 296} Strachey's Introd. to G. H. W. Rylands' Words and Poetry, rptd. in Characters and Commentaries (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933), p. 287.

^{Note 7 in page 296} “The Wrong Turning.” Strachey believed that Carlyle had many faults as a writer but that when he drew his “inimitable portrait-sketches” he was at his best: “Some New Carlyle Letters,” Spectator, cii (10 April 1909), 577 ff. I have been able to identify this and a number of other unsigned reviews in the Spectator as Strachey's partly through the help of Mr. James Strachey, Lytton Strachey's brother and literary executor (who has very generously given me permission to quote from the unpublished MSS. and from these reviews, most of which have not been collected) and partly through access to the private file of the Spectator kindly granted to me by the present editor of that periodical, the Honorable H. Wilson Harris, M. P. For bibliographical information concerning the short writings which have been collected and some of the others, see my “A Chronological Check List of Lytton Strachey's Writings,” MP, XLIV (Feb. 1947), 189–192.

^{Note 8 in page 297} Preface to Eminent Victorians.

^{Note 9 in page 297} “Gibbon,” Portraits in Miniature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), p. 158.

^{Note 10 in page 297} “The Italian Renaissance,” Spectator, ci (21 Nov. 1908), 838 ff. “It was Mr. Strachey's distinction in reinstating biography as an art to draw attention to the formlessness of literature generally. He did this in common with writers very unlike him, for whom he could have had little sympathy: with such writers as Mr. Joyce and Mr. Eliot”—Edwin Muir, “Lytton Strachey,” Nation and Athenaeum, xxxvn (25 April 1925), 102. “ if Strachey was to influence biographical art dangerously, at least his influence was deliberate, and not a chance bomb thrown on the highway by a lunatic. He knew perfectly well what he was about, and announced his intentions as clearly in his Preface as Milton in his Foreword to Paradise Lost”—Guy Boas, Lytton Strachey, English Association Pamphlet No. 93, Nov. 1935, p. 10. When the University of Edinburgh awarded Strachey the Order of Merit in literature, 20 July 1926, the citation read in part: “Mr. Strachey has blazed a trail through the thicket of this crowded epoch for which every future explorer passing that way will have reason to thank him. He is eminently worthy of our Order of Merit in the department of letters, if only for restoring to the delectable but almost forgotten art of biography its proper style, proportion, and attitude.”

^{Note 11 in page 297} Preface to Eminent Victorians.

^{Note 12 in page 298} “The Author of ‘Hudibras’,” Spectator, cii (6 Feb. 1909), 224 ff. (a review of A. R. Waller's Samuel Butler: Characters and Passages from the Notebooks).

^{Note 13 in page 298} “A New Book on Sir Thomas Browne,” Speaker, 3 Feb. 1906, p. 441.

^{Note 14 in page 298} Ibid. Compare this passage from Strachey's review of Mary E. Coleridge's poems: “The greatest poetry is always impersonal. The biographies of great poets are of interest merely from the historical and psychological point of view; so far as poetry is concerned they are, so to speak, works of supererogation; we could do very well without them. The voice of Homer will ring for ever in the ears of the world, though it be a voice and nothing more .. But there is another kind of poetry, which depends less on pure artistic achievement than on the power of personal revelation. It is on this select and quiet shelf of the Muses that the late Miss Mary Coleridge's little volume of poems will find a place”—“The Late Miss Coleridge's Poems,” Spectator, c (4 Jan. 1908), 19.

^{Note 15 in page 298} “A New Book on Sir Thomas Browne.”

^{Note 16 in page 299} “The Poetry of Thomson,” Spectator, c (14 March 1908), 421–422.

^{Note 17 in page 299} “Not by Lockhart,” Speaker, 20 Oct. 1906, pp. 82–83. Strachey also reviewed G. L. G. Norgate's abridgment to Lockhart's Scott in this article and was able to commend it as “simply what it pretends to be, a condensation of Lockhart's life. It is straightforward, ordinary, and (like all condensations) dull. But it is neither careless, nor affected, nor pretentious; it is an honest piece of work.”

^{Note 18 in page 299} “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Albany Review, i (Sept. 1907), 708 ff. When Strachey reviewed George Paston's Mr. Pope: His Life and Times over two years later, he objected to its rambling structure but, despite its two volumes, praised its “easy, unaffected style.” —“Alexander Pope,” Spectator, ciii (20 Nov. 1909), 847–848.

^{Note 19 in page 299} “Some Napoleonic Books,” Spectator, ci (26 Dec. 1908), 1100–01. In the same review Strachey gave Joseph Turquan's The Sisters of Napoleon credit for being amusing. As for his opinion concerning the Bonapartes themselves, he wrote: “ the fundamental characteristic of the Bonaparte family was meanness. Really, it is difficult to decide which was the more remarkable thing about Napoleon—his generalship or his lack of humor.”

^{Note 20 in page 300} “The Life of Henry Irving,” Spectator, ci (26 Dec. 1908), 1104.

^{Note 21 in page 301} i,361–384. Here given the title “The Poetry of Racine,” but collected with alterations as “Racine” in Books and Characters (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922).

^{Note 22 in page 301} Landmarks in French Literature, Home Univ. Library (New York: Henry Holt; London: Thornton Butterworth, 1912), pp. 150–151.

^{Note 23 in page 301} “The Author of ‘Hudibras’.” In Landmarks in French Literature Strachey wrote that La Bruyère's character studies were “caricatures rather than portraits—records of the idiosyncrasies of humanity rather than of humanity itself” (p. 125). D. S. (Prince) Mirsky goes too far when he says that Saint-Simon, dealing with history and biography as a complex thing, is “the only author to whom Mr. Strachey is essentially indebted”—“Mr. Lytton Strachey,” London Mercury, viii (June 1923), 175 ff.

^{Note 24 in page 302} “John Aubrey,” Portraits in Miniature, pp. 28–29 (first published in the Nation and the Athenaeum, xxxiii, 15 Sept. 1923, 741–742). Cf. Strachey's much earlier comment on William Barry's Newman: “The author of this readable monograph writes in fetters and is quite aware of the fact.” He “writes eloquently, occasionally rather too eloquently. But, on the whole, the book is a sound performance in every sense, and hits the happy medium between scrappiness and oppressive amplitude.” “Cardinal Newman,” Spectator, XCIII (1 Oct. 1904), Suppl., 457.

^{Note 25 in page 302} “The Lives of the Poets,” Independent Review, x (July 1906), 108 ff. In the same article Strachey wrote: “It is sufficient for us to recognize that he [Johnson] is a mountain, and to pay all the reverence that is due.”

^{Note 28 in page 302} “A Sidelight on Frederick the Great,” New Statesman (27 Jan. 1917), pp. 397 ff. In the diary which Strachey, at the age of eighteen, kept for a while during 1898, when he was attending Liverpool College, he wrote that Boswell's Johnson was “the best biography ever written” and expressed his indignation over the poor format of a copy which he had recently examined. See also “James Boswell,” Nation (London), xxxvi (31 Jan. 1925), 609–610, a review of C. B. Tinker's Letters of James Boswell.

^{Note 27 in page 303} See notes 7 and 17 and Harold Nicolson, The Development oj English Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1933), pp. 117, 143, 153. Nicolson maintains that Lockhart and Boswell, unlike Strachey, had no thesis but worked entirely through the inductive method.

^{Note 28 in page 303} Ibid., p. 143, and “Some New Carlyle Letters.”

^{Note 29 in page 303} Nicolson, op. cit. For Gosse's identification of himself as the author of the article on Queen Victoria in the Quarterly Renew for April 1901, see his More Books upon the Table (London: Heinemann 1923), pp. 3–10, where he speaks with some gratification of Strachey's borrowings from the article. E. F. Benson has written that Gosse in Fallter and Son was really the first to revolt against the Victorian method of biography. “It was Gosse who broke through that tradition of pious unreality. Strachey undoubtedly followed Gosse, though without sacrificing one whit of his own originality” (“Strachey and Gosse,” London Sunday Times, 4 Sept. 1932, p. 4). Strachey's antipathy for Gosse was partly personal and partly a feeling that Gosse's scholarship could not be trusted. On one occasion something by Gosse was published with his name misspelled “Goose.” Henceforth to Strachey he was always “Goose Gosse.”

^{Note 30 in page 303} “Dostoievsky,” Spectator, cix (28 Sept. 1912), 451–452. See also “A Russian Humorist,” Spectator, cxii (11 April 1914), 610–611, where Strachey maintained that Dostoievsky had not only psychological insight but humor: “ and so it happens that, by virtue of that magic power, his wildest fancies have something real and human in them, and his moments of greatest intensity are not melodramatic but tragic.” There is little evidence that Strachey was influenced directly by George Eliot, but his mother knew and admired her as a person and was enthusiastic about her novels; Strachey surely must have read them. He and his brothers and sisters grew up reading Henry James, and preserved among his MSS. is a short piece entitled “The Fruit of the Tree” (dated June 1901) which he wrote in imitation of James.

^{Note 31 in page 304} “Sir Henry Wotton,” Spectator, xcix (23 Nov. 1907), 821–822. Strachey also spoke here of the pleasure which he had received from reading Walton's Reliquiae Wottonianae. It must have pleased Strachey to find that one of the documents which Smith had unearthed was a letter from John Donne to Wotton, then British Ambassador at Venice, recommending to him his friend William Strachey, the biographer's ancestor and the author of one of the best early histories of the Virginia colony.

^{Note 32 in page 305} “The Art of Biography,” Atlantic Monthly, CLXIII (April 1939), 506 ff. Some of Strachey's shorter plays were actually produced by the Bloomsbury group at Ham Spray House, his country home in Wiltshire; and at Charleston, the home of the Clive Bells in Sussex. His full-length play The Son of Heaven was enacted twice at the Scala Theater, London, on 12 and 13 July 1925, and was revived for three weeks in London in 1949.

^{Note 33 in page 306} Op. cit., pp. 103–104.

^{Note 34 in page 306} Note Strachey's Aphorism 22: “We meet people about whom we cannot make up our minds; their features, their manners, and their dress might equally be those of a vulgar or a cultivated person, and, observe as we may, we can find no detail of their appearance which is not as indeterminate as the rest; we search, we balance, we hesitate, we rack our imaginations, we are on the point of giving up in despair; when they speak, and we know at once that they are impossible.”

^{Note 35 in page 307} 27 June 1918, p. 301. Gosse had written an article entitled “Lord Cromer as a Man of Letters,” published in the Fortnightly Review for March 1917 (collected in Some Diversions of a Man of Letters two years later). Ironically, much of what he said about Cromer can be applied to Strachey himself. Witness the following excerpts: “He would have been at home in the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century, before the French Revolution.” “I have always found him amusingly impervious to ideas of a visionary or mystical order.” “He himself hated mere eulogy, which he said had ruined most of the biographies of the world. 'I don't want Mr.—,' he would say, 'to tell me what I can learn for myself by turning up the file of the Morning Post. I want him to tell me what I can't find out elsewhere. And he need not be so very much afraid of hinting that his hero had faults, for if he had not had defects we should never have heard of his qualities. We are none of us perfect, and we don't want a priggish biographer to pretend that we are.” Cromer was an intimate friend of St. Loe Strachey, editor of the Spectator and first cousin of Lytton Strachey. St. Loe Strachey once said that Cromer and Lytton Strachey were the best reviewers that he had ever had. Was there professional rivalry between the two, or could there have been an unpleasant meeting, say, in the Spectator office? For Gosse's condemnation of Hallam Tennyson's life of his father as one of the worst “two-fat-volume” Victorian biographies, see Some Diversions of a Man of Letters, pp. 320–321.

^{Note 36 in page 308} “The Character of Lord Cromer,” a letter to the editor, TLS, 4 July 1918, pp. 313–314. Consider in this connection Strachey's Aphorism 31: “Is it not true that a man's tables and chairs know more about him than his most intimate friends? When he is left alone, who can guess what words escape him? What gestures he gives vent to? What strange expressions come into his face? His looking-glass, perhaps, could tell us most. When he dies, those unfathomable depths are abolished, that multitude of secrets is extinguished, that whole vast universe of mysteries too mysterious to be revealed; and what do the friends about the bed know of all these things? It is the bed itself that knows.” May we assume, then, that Strachey believed personal intimacy such as Johnson had with Savage, Boswell with Johnson, and Froude with Carlyle to be of little value to the biographer? Possibly so, since the ideal of detachment meant much to him. Certainly he chose his own . subjects from the dead whom he could have never known. Yet much of the “private information” referred to in the notes to Queen Victoria, probably his best work, came from Lady Lytton, whom he visited frequently when he was writing this biography and who was one of Queen Victoria's Ladies-in-Waiting. For a friendly, conciliatory letter from Gosse to Strachey, dated 21 May 1922, see Evan Charteris, The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse (New York and London: Harper, 1931), pp. 464–465.

^{Note 37 in page 309} “Florence Nightingale according to Mr. Strachey,” Nineteenth Century, ciii (Feb. 1928), 258–265. Concerning two of Strachey's victims to whom I happen to have given some study I must say a word of defense. Dr. Arnold had a vigor and breadth of intellect and a human warmth which are entirely lacking in Strachey's caricature. And Julius Charles Hare, introduced as a minor character in “Cardinal Manning,” was not a fanatical Low Churchman, as Strachey represented him as being, but a scholarly Broad Church latitudinarian, thoroughly steeped in Plato and in British, French, and German liberal theology, a disciple of Coleridge, and the friend of F. D. Maurice and John Sterling.

^{Note 38 in page 309} “Elizabeth and Her Court,” Spectator, CXLI (24 Nov. 1928), 777. Cf. E. G. Clark, “Mr. Strachey's Biographical Method,” Catholic World, cxxix (May 1929), 129–135; Christopher Hollis, “Elizabeth and Mr. Strachey,” Dublin Review, CLXXXVI (Jan. 1930), 21–30; Edmund Wilson, “Lytton Strachey,” New Republic, LXXII (21 Sept. 1932), 146–148. Max Beerbohm wrote in 1943 that Elisabeth and Essex was “a finely constructed work, but seems to me to be essentially guess-work.” Lytton Strachey, Rede Lecture for 1943 at Cambridge University (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), p. 20. For an accusation that

Strachey was guilty of both carelessness and deliberate falsification in his “Cardinal Manning,” see F. A. Simpson, “Methods of History,” Spectator, CLXXII (7 Jan. 1944), 7–8. A similar attack, but with other points added to the indictment, is made by James Pope-Hennessy in “Strachey's Way,” Spectator, CLXXXII (25 Feb. 1949), 264. On the other hand, Desmond MacCarthy has written: “I believe that as time goes on Elizabeth and Essex will be rated much higher.” “Lytton Strachey: The Art of Biography,” Sunday Times (London), 5 Nov. 1933, p. 8. In 1947 a distinguished British historian told me that he had found Elizabeth and Essex to be essentially true, that he admired it very much, and that “Dr. Arnold” was the only one of Strachey's characterizations which seemed to him seriously distorted and unfair.

^{Note 39 in page 310} “The Modern Biographer,” Yale Review, N.S. xvii (Jan. 1928), 231 ff. Maurois also wrote here that Strachey was “a very deep psychologist” and was “the father and master of modern biography.” A little later he wrote: “A biographer, such as Mr. Strachey, who has the power to diffuse through his record of facts the poetic idea of Destiny, of the passage of Time, of the fragility of human fortune, brings us in fact a secret comfort. There is no such thing as progress in literature. Tennyson is not greater than Homer, Proust is not greater than Montaigne, Strachey is not greater than Boswell. They are different.” Aspects of Biography, transi. S. C. Roberts (New York: D. Appleton, 1929), pp. 142, 203.

^{Note 40 in page 310} “An Eminent Post-Victorian,” Yale Review, N.S., xxx (Winter 1941), 321–322. Bacon has also taken exception to Strachey's Cromer and suspects “some personal animosity” (p. 318).

^{Note 41 in page 310} One Mighty Torrent: The Drama of Biography (New York: Stackpole, 1937), pp. 511, 520. But Johnson praised Strachey for insisting that the biographer must have a clear and definite point of view. “No portrayal of character can be purely objective, because our conception of a personality is the intersection between it and ourselves. Strachey's great achievement was that he forced this fact into the open. The author's point of view became explicit instead of being a muzzy, unacknowledged projection of his personality” (pp. 522–523). Among others who have attacked Strachey are James Truslow Adams and Hugh Kingsmill. Adams wrote: “Among the psychological school of biographers the unquestioned leader and by far the most influential practitioner is Lytton Strachey. Strachey

develops in his own mind a psychological character for his heroine and makes his selection of facts fit into this character his influence has been little short of disastrous.“ ”New Modes in Biography,“ Current History, xxxi (Nov. 1929), 258. Kingsmill was vehement in his dislike for Strachey. He first parodied Strachey's style in ”Joseph, from Eminent Egyptians,“ English Review, LIV (April 1932), 399–404; and then attempted to turn the tables on a biographer who had taken great liberties with Victorian subjects by having him annihilated in an imaginary passage by Carlyle: ”Our Wart-School of Modern Portraiture I name Biographer Strachey and his apes, blasphemously scribbling for pence their Acta Stultorum, or Deeds of the Fools. As tho there were no other veracity about a Hero but his warts! As tho brave Oliver's monition to Court Painter Lely has been: ‘Meddle not with my face! Paint my warts only‘!“ ”Some Modern Light-Bringers Extinguished by Thomas Carlyle,“ English Review, LVI (Jan. 1933), 25–26. ⁴² ”Lytton Strachey,“ SRL, viii (-6 Feb. 1932), 501.

^{Note 43 in page 311} “Lytton Strachey: An Artist in History,” Observer (London), 24 Jan. 1932, p. 5. ⁴⁴ Private information.

^{Note 45 in page 311} “The Poetry of Blake,” Books and Characters, pp. 222–223. First published in the Independent Review, May 1906.

^{Note 46 in page 312} “Creighton,” Portraits in Miniature, pp. 204–206. First published as “Mandell Creighton,” N. Y. Herald Tribune Books, 26 May 1929, p. 6.

^{Note 47 in page 312} “A Frock-Coat Portrait of a Great King,” Daily Mail, 11 Oct. 1927, p. 10. A review of Lee's King Edward VII, Vol. ii.

^{Note 48 in page 313} It is important to note his manner of reading here. His friend Desmond MacCarthy said that he was not “a born scholar” and that “though he read immensely, lazily, attentively, he was not learned.” “Lytton Strachey,” Sunday Times (London), 24 Jan. 1932, p. 8. An excellent obituary.

^{Note 43 in page 313} “A New History of Rome,” Spectator, cii (2 Jan. 1909), 20–21.