Lytton Strachey's ironic attitude

Lytton Strachey, an English biographer, critic and essayist, is best known

for his ironic attitude towards the subject of his biographical studies.
Strachey’s targets of irony were evangelicalism, liberalism,
humanitarianism, education and imperialism. Strachey proposed to write
lives with brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and
nothing that is significant. He is best known for “Eminent Victorians”.

Treating his subject ironically he was fascinated by personality and

motive. His aim was to paint a portrait; and through this he led to an
ironical caricaturing. He taught biographers a sense of form and of
background, and he sharpened their critical insight.

Strachey ironically shows us General Gordon including in his secret

passion for fame and becoming a willing instrument not of God but of the
extreme imperialist faction of the British Government. The messianic
religiosity inspiring Gordon was well known by a weary generation just
back from the trenches and sickened by the chauvinism of bishops and
journalists declaring that God had been in the trenches on their side.

Strachey said:

“My notion is to do a series of short lives of eminent persons of

that kind. It might be entertaining if properly pulled off. But if will
take a very long time.”

Some of the eminent persons were to be admired while others like

Manning were to be exposed ironically. To Ottoline Morrell he wrote:

“I am … beginning a new experiment in the way of a short

condensed biography of Cardinal Manning – written from a slightly
cynical point of view.”

The impact of ‘Eminent Victorians’ on literary circles was tremendous. The

world was weary of big guns and big phrases, and Strachey’s witty
polemic was especially attractive to the younger generation. In his
preface, which was a manifesto for 20th century biographers, Strachey
wrote:

“Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms

of the past. They have a value which is independent of any
temporal process.”

Yet the four Victorians he chose for treatment were not independent of
the moral system of the Victorian Age. His verbal attack against Cardinal
Manning is an attack on the evangelicalism that was to be the defining
characteristic of 19th century culture, an exposure of its hypocrisy and
the emptiness of self-regarding ambitions.

Strachey toppled Florence Nightingale from the pedestal where she was
placed as the legendary lady with the lamp, having saintly and self-
sacrificing qualities. He replaced her with a twentieth century neurotic.
Thus Strachey struck ironically at the popular mythology of Victorian
England, in particular its conscience-saving humanitarianism.

His irony towards the Dr. Arnold probably arose from his own unhappy
schooldays. He depicted Arnold as the most influential teacher of the
Victorian public school system whose cult distorted middle-class
intelligence and set hard the principle of Victorianism into the 20th
century.

Strachey has ironically presented his sinister picture of Manning’s formal

interview with the Pope. He ironically mentioned Manning as an ‘eagle’
and Newman as a ‘dove’.

There are times, however, when Strachey’s sharp sense of the ridiculous
does find its way into his irony. It is a definite undercurrent in this
treatment of the Chinese diplomatist Li Hung Chang:

“It was Gordon who gave him his first vision of Europe. Nothing
could be more ironical. The half-inspired, half-crazy Englishmen,
… the irresponsible knight-errant whom his countrymen first
laughed at and neglected, then killed and canonized – a figure
staying through the perplexed industrialism of the nineteenth
century like some lost “natural” from an earlier Age.”

Thus irony with its marked possibilities for variation, served Strachey
admirable not only for comic purpose of suggesting change and
dissimilarity which could be significantly and effectively relate to a
background of uniformity in style.

Strachey’s great weapon was irony and ‘Eminent Victorians’ set the tone
for subsequent biographers. It made ‘debunking’ fashionable. Few of
Strachey’s imitators possessed his gift of sharp irony or his picturesque
humour. They inherited from him nothing but his shallow scepticism.
Strachey was in high favour with the wound because they relished the
breaking of ‘Eminent Victorians’ praised till then like idols.

P. M. Jack wrote in praise of Strachey that he had a faculty for sharpening

the readers’ critical sense and often proved to be right.

“We doubt if another miscellany of this sort could possess half the
wit and distinction of a biographical style that we find here.”
In 1937 Edgar Johnson praised Strachey’s ironical sense of values and the
largeness of his opinion:

“In Strachey the old Elizabethan lion refines down to a cat. The
lion singles out the enemy to be destroyed; it is the cat, however,
that plays slyly and patiently with the victim.”

Andre Maurois had already spoken of him not only as an iconoclast using
the method of irony but also as a highly gifted writer in the tradition of
the great humorist and as “a very deep psychologist”.

In fact, Lytton Strachey is best known for his ironic attitude towards the
subjects of his biographical studies. His point of view was highly personal
and some of his judgments have been described as exaggerated. But his
sense of form and his witty, ironic style inspired a host of imitators who
were eager to reduce historical figures to life size. He established the
ironical writing of biography as a literary art.

Lytton Strachey as a biographer

The biographer Lytton Strachey belonged to the Bloomsbury Group. He

inaugurated the new era of biographical writing at the close of World War
I. In his preface, Strachey enunciated the two fold principle of selection
and scrutiny which was to mark all his work.

Strachey proposed a briefness which excludes everything that is

superfluous and nothing that is significant. The completion of this mission
made Strachey the greatness of modern biographers.

Strachey has certainly revolutionized the art of writing a biography.

Before him, the biographer used to neglect like a hagiographer the darker
side of their heroes because they generally used to idealize their heroes
by representing them as angels of virtue. Strachey was the first to realize
that in order to give a complete and human portrait.

Strachey did not hesitate to include in his biographies the failings, jokes
and whims of his heroes. He believed that a biographer must have a
psychological insight into his character.

A biographer must neither suppress vital facts nor obscure those aspects
of his character which help us visualize his true picture as he lived.
Instead of giving abstractness, Strachey indeed gave a creature of flesh
and blood.

Strachey has suggested that the biographies must be primarily a form of

literary art capable of giving the pleasure. In biography, it is not so much
the subject as the treatment of the subject that really matters.

Strachey suggested that the biographies of eminent men should not be

immediately written after their death because their relatives and friends
are naturally reluctant to disclose the relevant confidential details. Thus
he was of the opinion that:

“First class biographies can only be written long after the hero’s
death.”

Strachey had a gift of irony which has hardly been equaled in literature by
anyone since the eighteenth century masters.

Strachey has made biography a literary medium. His biographical style

has the appeal of a fine work of art.

Strachey has brought us face to face with men and women, who are
nonetheless fallible human beings and not infallible saints or gods. We
watch them live, think, and quarrel like us. Sometimes they behave
meanly and foolishly and sometimes nobly and wisely.

Strachey’s objectives were to make biography an unmistakable channel

for the truthful transmission of personality; to write it as the most
authentic footnote to history; to make it a vivid and complete story; to
make it a source of inner satisfaction to the reader. In most of his
experiments in biography Strachey certainly succeeded in attaining them.
Strachey’s achievement in biography was indeed a challenge to dullness
and incompetence.

Charles Richard Sander says:

“Throughout his career Strachey protested against the lengthy,

formless, badly written biographies produced by the Victorians.
He insisted that the spirit of the biographer should be free and
that he should write from a definite point of view, should select
and include only the essential materials of a subject, should give
to a work good structure and excellence of style.”

His intensely personal sketches shocked many critics but delighted many
readers. M. Forster says:

“Strachey helped sweep away the ponderous Victorian approach

to the writing to biography, replacing it with a witty and with
impressionistic style that was widely imitated and studied at the
University of Cambridge.”
Instead of using the conventional method of detailed chronological
narration, Lytton Strachey carefully selected his tact to present “Eminent
Victorians”.

These deliberations suffice to signify that Strachey is the greatest

biographer of the Victorian age.