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Ariane Bankes on Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, Slightly Foxed Issue 33

Lytton’s Characteristic Specimen

Rereading ‘The End of General Gordon’, the fourth of Lytton Strachey’s portraits in Eminent Victorians (1918), is an awful reminder of our failure to learn from history. Gordon’s and Gladstone’s ill-fated machinations in the Sudan are so redolent of Britain’s recent misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq as almost to take one’s breath away: substitute either country for Khartoum, and you have an example fearsome enough to deter any but the most fatuous sabre-rattler from going near the place, let alone attempting to influence its political fate from thousands of miles away.

Yet it was the recent past, not the future, that preoccupied Strachey when, in the run-up to the First World War, he squirrelled himself away in a cottage near Marlborough to compose this and its companion essays on Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale and Thomas Arnold. Honesty being the byword of the Bloomsberries, he decided to re-evaluate with an untarnished gaze the gilded reputations of these éminences grises from the recent past, all of them prominent members of a British Establishment whose collective failings had brought the country to its knees in the supremely pointless conflict that raged about him as he wrote.

And this he set about with relish. The mighty were delicately dislodged from their pinnacles, cut down to size by the waspish wit and gleeful scrutiny of this most laconic member of the Bloomsbury set. His companion Dora Carrington’s best-known portrait depicts him lying under a coverlet, his foxy ginger beard spread neatly before him,his long and delicate fingers clasping a book, his eyes behind owlish spectacles utterly absorbed in its contents. From this languorous and pensive figure would come a volume that would upend and overturn all decorous assumptions of biography to date, a volume to set tongues wagging, repu

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Rereading ‘The End of General Gordon’, the fourth of Lytton Strachey’s portraits in Eminent Victorians (1918), is an awful reminder of our failure to learn from history. Gordon’s and Gladstone’s ill-fated machinations in the Sudan are so redolent of Britain’s recent misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq as almost to take one’s breath away: substitute either country for Khartoum, and you have an example fearsome enough to deter any but the most fatuous sabre-rattler from going near the place, let alone attempting to influence its political fate from thousands of miles away.

Yet it was the recent past, not the future, that preoccupied Strachey when, in the run-up to the First World War, he squirrelled himself away in a cottage near Marlborough to compose this and its companion essays on Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale and Thomas Arnold. Honesty being the byword of the Bloomsberries, he decided to re-evaluate with an untarnished gaze the gilded reputations of these éminences grises from the recent past, all of them prominent members of a British Establishment whose collective failings had brought the country to its knees in the supremely pointless conflict that raged about him as he wrote. And this he set about with relish. The mighty were delicately dislodged from their pinnacles, cut down to size by the waspish wit and gleeful scrutiny of this most laconic member of the Bloomsbury set. His companion Dora Carrington’s best-known portrait depicts him lying under a coverlet, his foxy ginger beard spread neatly before him,his long and delicate fingers clasping a book, his eyes behind owlish spectacles utterly absorbed in its contents. From this languorous and pensive figure would come a volume that would upend and overturn all decorous assumptions of biography to date, a volume to set tongues wagging, reputations spinning and tills ringing. For Eminent Victorians proved a wild success on publication and went into multiple editions straight away. Given his iconoclastic approach, Strachey was rather miffed to get mainly enthusiastic reviews; he had expected to stir up a storm of controversy, but, he confessed to Lady Ottoline Morrell, ‘the reviewers are so extraordinarily gushing that I think something must be wrong’. It was with some relief that he read a broadside from Edmund Gosse in the TLS and carping reviews from other critics, concerned at his lack of historical method, which indeed he would not have got away with today: he eschewed all notes and used only secondary sources, embroidering freely on these when he felt the story might benefit from some imagined aside or other. But then his methods fitted the objectives that he laid out with such brio in his Preface. Claiming that too much was already known about the Victorian age for it to be truly understood, he suggested it was not by ‘the direct method of scrupulous narration’ that the historian would unlock the past, but by a ‘subtler strategy’.

He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear . . . 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 into the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

Pity his ‘characteristic specimens’ – one would probably not want to be examined by Lytton Strachey with ‘careful curiosity’ if one had the choice. On the other hand, he was intensely interested in human nature, believing that ‘Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past,’ and these examinations made for marvellously entertaining and instructive essays that illuminate as clearly the motives and manners of his subjects as the times in which they served – for they all did serve, in true Victorian style, some greater good, whether it be Empire, Queen or God. God, it must be said, was one of the sticking-points. As an avowed non-believer, Strachey deplored the pseudo-Christianity that underpinned Europe’s war and that provoked the Bishop of London to claim in 1915, ‘This is the greatest fight ever made for the Christian religion.’ Humbug and hypocrisy were the twin targets on which Strachey skewered the Machiavellian Cardinal Manning, shadowing his sinuous climb up the greasy pole of nineteenth-century Evangelism to become a leading intellectual light of the Victorian age. Sticklers might well have accused Strachey of flippancy for comments such as the following, on the demise of the Oxford Movement: ‘The University breathed such a sigh of relief as usually follows the difficult expulsion of a hard piece of matter from a living organism, and actually began to attend to education.’ But the majority of readers relished his wit, while his frank dissection of Manning’s ambitious manoeuvrings and dastardly campaign to unseat his erstwhile mentor Cardinal Newman – last seen sobbing in defeat and despair over a garden gate – made for compelling reading. Florence Nightingale, the saintly ‘Lady of the Lamp’, had a slightly easier time of it. Due credit was given to her extraordinary transformation of the infernal hospitals at Scutari, a task normal mortals would hesitate even to contemplate, but Strachey goes on to dissect her peculiar brand of double-edged heroism: certainly not ‘that simple sort so dear to the readers of novels and the compilers of hagiologies . . . it was made of sterner stuff ’. He continues, ‘Beneath her cool and calm demeanour lurked fierce and passionate fires,’ and her complete mastery of officialdom he could only put down to ‘the fixed determination of an indomitable will’. Back in England, half-dead from exhaustion (indeed she was to remain half-dead for the rest of her long life), her will became, if anything, more indomitable, and from her sick-bed she continued to be the scourge of the military hospital establishment, of government and indeed of all the powers that be. Woe to her opponents, such as the unfortunate Lord Panmure at the War Office (known as ‘The Bison’) who stood ‘four square and menacing, in the doorway of reform’ – the wily Miss Nightingale discovered his Achilles heel, and soon made swift work of him. But her supporters and friends deserve even more sympathy: the faithful Sidney Herbert was driven to an early grave by her impossible demands, and her devoted disciple Dr Sutherland, who once had the temerity to take a holiday, was swiftly recalled and ‘did not repeat the experiment’. The adage ‘No man is a hero to his valet’ comes to mind here, although Strachey does concede that through her tireless bullying she managed to move administrative mountains, and that her obsessive, indeed neurotic need to subdue others to her will eventually gave way to a more conciliatory stance, if only at the cost of going soft in the head. Strachey’s most pointed barbs are aimed at Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School. Perhaps memories of his own unhappy schooldays intensified his criticism – ‘At school I used to weep – oh! for very definite things – bitter unkindness and vile brutality,’ he once wrote to Leonard Woolf. His portrait of Arnold is of a man one would draw lots not to sit next to at dinner: pious, pompous, self-righteously severe and nursing a horror of ‘what St Paul calls revelling’ – and with short legs, to boot. Arnold’s ambition ‘to make the school a place of really Christian education’ left little room in the curriculum for fact or observation; he would much rather his charges believed that the sun went round the earth than skimp on ‘Christian and moral and political philosophy’. So much for Darwin and the new science of evolution, so much for spirited and timely debate. Arnold’s sermons were legendary and awe-inducing, and were collected in five large volumes among his many other works of scholarship, for like Florence Nightingale he could not tolerate a moment’s idleness and was forever expatiating on learned subjects that he had recently mastered, Sanskrit and the Slavonic languages among them. Credit where credit is due, however – the public-school system was in a state of virtual anarchy before Arnold’s arrival at Rugby; Eton was a human bear-pit presided over by the ineffectual Mr Keate, whose only remedy for everything was to flog his boys until they wept. Arnold’s fervent belief in higher things did bring his school within the bounds of civilization, and by sheer force of character his fame spread far and wide. He made schooling respectable, he introduced the prefectorial system and put games on a par with godliness, but Strachey’s contention is that he funked true liberal educational reform. He certainly left England’s public schools in that strange limbo between the old order and the new, places where arcane traditions lived on still, and where generations of boys wept into their pillows by night while being inducted into the dubious values of superannuated belief systems by day. Which brings me back full-circle to General Gordon, and specifically his End. How did a man so clever, so shrewd, so experienced in the paths of imperial politics (in the Sudan as much as China and elsewhere) end up marooned in the backwater of Khartoum, besieged by thousands of enraged followers of his opponent the Mahdi, to the point where all was lost? According to Strachey, the problem lay in Gordon’s obsessive religiosity – this was a man who read almost nothing but the Bible, over and over again – allied to manic self-belief; when bent to the service of colonial hubris, and in particular to the implacable will of that gimlet-eyed statesman Gladstone, who proved his nemesis, Gordon’s fate was sealed. Eminent Victorians has been credited with reforming the genre of biography, but while it broke the mould it did not chart wholly new ground: Boswell had, after all, written a refreshingly unvarnished life of Dr Johnson, and John Aubrey had invented the ‘brief life’ over a hundred years before that. A fashion for fervent obsequies and reverent tomes had then become fashionable, however, and in taking a considered swipe at those four grandees of a grandiloquent age (it was to have been eight, but he ran out of steam), Strachey was also undermining the whole edifice that had supported (and, in Gordon’s case, destroyed) them. In doing so he ushered in a new era, of more transparent values, of less cant and humbug, of deft selection and interpretation rather than dogged regurgitation of fact. Brevity, he claimed, was the first duty of the biographer; his second was ‘to maintain his own freedom of spirit’. If only ‘life writing’ would more faithfully observe the first – but there is no shortage of the second these days, and for that at least we must be grateful.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 33 © Ariane Bankes 2012


About the contributor

Ariane Bankes edits Canvas, the Friends’ magazine of the Charleston Trust, when not running some festival or other.

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