I EMINENT VICTORIANS YTTON STRACHEY, the author of Eminent Γ Strachey, the editor of The Spectator: he is as much like him as liqueur brandy is like tea, as the reader will discover from the short foreword with which he prefaces his first essay in biography. "The history of the Victorian Age," he begins, 66 will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historianignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. . . . It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. . . . It has been my purpose to illustrate rather than to explain. In the lives of an ecclesiastic, an educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, I have sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth which took my fancy and lay to my hand. . . The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England: . . . we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult 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 know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? ... What I have aimed at in this book is to lay bare the facts of some cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions. To quote the words of a master- Je n'impose rien; je ne propose rien: j'expose.' There is a "bite" about these remarks which prepares us for a very definite ulterior intention: whatever else Mr Strachey does not do he certainly means to lacerate an age on which, one would have thought, enough scorn had been heaped since the nineties. Bitterly ironical, he portrays the lives of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold, and General Gordon from a most peculiar and highly individual angle for his own very definite purposes. It is as an amusing example of what perverted cleverness can do that I would recommend this book. In the initial essay (which is also the longest) on Manning I was not at first interested: it is said to be the best. For the late R. H. Benson and the living R. A. Knox it would provide very great attraction, but most of us are not deeply concerned in the struggles which take place in the minds of men who begin life as members of the Established Church and ultimately veer round to Rome. It is like reading of sportsmen who played Soccer at school, and later found "Rugger the better game. So long as a man is enthusiastically a lover of games, or is possessed of a deeply religious sense, that is all that the majority of us worry our heads about. Sectarianism or partisanship of this sort seems a rather stupid splitting of hairs, and long arguments about it "much ado about nothing." On the other hand, it is entertaining to read of young men who are impelled with the sort of ardour which drives normal youths to haunt music-halls and fall in love with actresses to form a romantic attachment with the Deity and find an intense interest in the states of their own souls. It is refreshing to view the lives of Froude, Newman, and Manning through the eyes of a sceptic: it is better than reading Gibbon on Christianity: the way in which Manning made his spiritual side toe the line to forward his temporal ambitions is inimitably suggested in this most typical passage : "In such a situation the voice of self-abnegation must needs grow still and small indeed. Yet it spoke on, for it was one of the paradoxes in Manning's soul that that voice was never silent. Whatever else he was, he was not unscrupulous. Rather, his scruples deepened with his desires: and he could satisfy his most exorbitant ambitions in a profundity of selfabasement. And so now he vowed to Heaven that he would seek nothing-no, not by the lifting of a finger or the speaking of a word. But, if something came to him-? He had vowed not to seek; he had not vowed not to take. Might it not be his plain duty to take? Might it not be the will of God?" Equally deft are the strokes with which Newman's characteristics are limned: "When he had left the Church of England he was its most distinguished, its most revered member, whose words, however strange, were listened to with a profound attention, and whose opinions, however dubious, were followed in all their fluctuations with an eager and indeed a trembling respect. He entered the Church of Rome, and found himself forthwith an unimportant man. He was received at the Papal Court with a politeness which only faintly concealed a total lack of interest and understanding. His deli cate mind, with its refinements, its hesitations, its complexities-his soft, spectacled, Oxford manner, with its half-effeminate diffidence such things were ill-calculated to impress a throng of busy Cardinals and Bishops, whose days were spent amid the practical details of ecclesiastical organisation, the long-drawn involutions of papal diplomacy, and the delicious bickerings of personal intrigue. And when, at last, he did succeed in making some impression upon these surroundings, it was no better; it was worse. uneasy suspicion gradually arose; it began to dawn upon the Roman authorities that Dr Newman was a man of ideas. Was it possible that Dr. Newman did not understand that ideas in Rome were, to say the least of it, out of place?" An Mr Strachey's opinion of the Church of Rome, as may be guessed, is not high. But his ironic attacks are far more effective than the bludgeon hatred of George Borrow. He is, at any rate, logical in his disdain. We are shown Newman as a thoroughbred harnessed to a four-wheeled cab and being used as a pawn in a political game. Not only was he a thorn in Manning's path to be plucked and destroyed, but Charles Kingsley attacked his good faith and drew from him the world-famous Apologia pro Vita Sua, of which Mr Strachey writes: "The success of the book, with its transparent candour, its controversial brilliance, the sweep and passion of its rhetoric, the depth of its personal feeling, was immediate and overwhelming," and brought him a triumph which Manning had to exert all his powers to defeat. 'It is remarkably interesting," he observed of the book, "it is like listening to the voice of one from the dead." Luckily for Manning 66 the contest was unequal owing to the dove-like nature of Newman and his own eagle qualities. Some very shrewd hits are levelled by Mr Strachey at the subject of a controversy which then perplexed the Roman Church-namely, the Infallibility of the Pope. "It is not," he writes, "because he satisfies the reason, but because he astounds it, that men abase themselves before the Vicar of Christ." Lord Acton, who in Mr Strachey's words "swallowed the camel of the Roman Catholic Faith," had also "strained at the gnat of Infallibility," but then 66 there are some who know how to wear their Rome with a difference; and Lord Acton was one of these." It was of Acton that Manning said, "such men are all vanity they have the inflation of German professors, and the ruthless talk of undergraduates.' As a result of the controversy several canons were laid down, of one of which the biographer caustically writes: "In other words, it became an article of Faith that Faith was not necessary for a true knowledge of God." To return to the subject of the biography. We are shown in picturesque phrase the old Manning as the ordinary Englishman knows him. "The spare and stately form, the head, massive, emaciated, terrible, with the great nose, the glittering eyes, and the mouth drawn back and compressed into the grim rigidities of age, self-mortification, and authority-such is the vision that still lingers in the public mind-the vision which, actual and palpable like some embodied memory of the Middle Ages, used to pass and repass through the streets of London." We see him sitting on Royal Commissions, lecturing on temperance, writing books, quelling strikes, haunt |