Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey

Todd Avery

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781848931411
• eBook ISBN: 9781315478234
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

A core member of the Bloomsbury Group, Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) is recognized for his radical influence on the new school of psychological biography. This volume collects for the first time Strachey's previously unpublished essays, dialogues and stories.

Cambridge Society Papers

A Sermon Preached Before The Midnight Society

Delivered on 5 May 1900, this is the first of the twenty-three papers that Strachey read to the three Cambridge discussion groups of which he was a member. Gabriel Merle, in the only published commentary on it, describes it as ‘a parody of a sermon’. He adds, ‘it is so well done that one seems to remember having heard this preacher somewhere in a country parish. But, really, it is the trappings of religious apparel and the hum of mechanical speech that one hears here.’¹ Strachey had never practised or accepted religion with anything more than a tepid formality when he was young. As an adolescent, his discovery of Plato confirmed his complete rejection of Christianity as a reasonable metaphysical or ethical system. Later, the – to Strachey – revelations contained in G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica would to a great extent supplant even that affinity; however, in a ‘confession of faith’ that he sent to Moore upon the publication of Principia, Strachey excused Plato from the list of ‘all writers on Ethics from Aristotle and Christ to Herbert Spencer and Mr. Bradley’ that Moore’s ‘book has … wrecked and shattered’. And, as he told Leonard Woolf the same day, ‘Plato seems to be the only person who comes out even tolerably well’.²

Written shortly after Strachey’s twentieth birthday, and only months after entering Trinity College (it is hard not to read his mock paean to ‘the almighty Trinity’ (below, p. 7) as also a pun in celebration of his new college), ‘A Sermon’, together with several other essays included here, shows that his Mephistophelean modernism, far from involving the expression of a reflexive atheism, was in fact grounded in a studied consideration of religious rhetoric and preoccupations. With its focus on the putative dangers of worldly temptation, this paper is notable for several other reasons: for its use of melodrama, a rhetorical mode and a structuring principle that Strachey would later deploy to devastating satirical ends in his major biographies; for its attentiveness to the place of science in the shaping of religious debate in the late Victorian age; for its echoes of Arnoldian rhetoric in its characterization of ‘the age we live in [as] one of struggle, of confusion, of infidelity’ (below, p. 5); and for the evidence it contains, however ironically presented, not of Strachey’s aestheticist detachment from ‘the world’ but of his deep ethical investment in it.

In the 37^th verse of the 18^th Chapter of the Holy Gospel according to St. John, it is written ‘To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate said unto him “What is truth?”’

My brethren, a terrible cloud of doubt and hesitation has once more descended upon the world. The age we live in is one of struggle, of confusion, of infidelity, and the anxious shepherd as he gazes forward into the darkness of the future is assailed on every side by the bleating cries of his flock – ‘Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night’ (Isaiah 21:11)? The air is filled with wars and rumours of wars (Matthew 24:6; Mark 13:7; Luke 21:9); the nations of the earth are disturbed by new doctrines and dangerous knowledge; and the holy Church herself – I mean the holy Protestant Church – is distracted by disputes, by schisms, and by revolts.¹ What wonder is it then that men should hesitate and be perplexed, or that, amid the conflicting turmoils of the spiritual world, they should sometimes shrug their shoulders in despair, and ask with the impatient Pilate ‘What is truth?’ My brethren, if it should chance that there is anyone among us here today. I say if it should chance, for God knows how unwilling I should be to make a positive assertion – if it should happen that among those gathered together here this evening to hear God’s word and worship his holy name there is one – one lost sheep (Matthew 10:6) who has strayed, if even for a moment, from the safety of the fold, it would be to him more particularly that I would wish to address these feeble words of mine – words bearing with them a message of encouragement and of hope.

That great, that terrible, and to us that most triumphant conversation, from which I have taken the words of my text, that meeting in the Praetorium of Jerusalem, that conflict between the powers of Darkness and the powers of Light, between the flesh and the spirit, between the Empire of the World and our blessed Saviour, how many times since then has it been repeated in the heart of man! And now, perhaps, more than ever do we feel the stress of that spiritual battle, now when the whole world has been deluded and snared by foul depths of idolatry and superstition, or cankered and corrupted by the false glamour of what has been called the gospel of science. But, my brethren, there is no need for fear, there is no need for questioning, there is no need for doubt, for have we not ever by us a Presence whose inward promptings serve as a constant guide to the higher conceptions of our being, whose healing salve will draw us away from the disturbing speculations of our too restless nature, whose recreating vigour and persuasive voice will soothe the ulcerous wounds to which the frailty of our flesh has been subjected at the ravening hands of our eternal Foe? I speak – though to you, my flock, such an explanation is hardly necessary – of that mystic Presence, which at the close of the first day when earth was yet without form and void ‘moved upon the face of the waters’ (Genesis 1:2), of that divine essence of the celestial being, of that Spirit, of whom it is written ‘he will guide you into all truth’ (John 16:13). And so, when we are assailed by the temptations and the wiles of the arch-deceiver, by the arguments and laughter of the world, we will not listen, we will not answer: no! We will turn away our eyes from that ribald throng; we will stop our ears with the divine teaching of the gospel; and we will press forward to the truth untrammeled by human reason, putting our trust alone in the unerring guidance of the Holy Ghost.

The world is strong – they say – those deluding voices – the world is powerful, the world is great; the world with its empires, and its palaces, and its pomp; the world with its dazzling streams of riches, its fleets laden with precious merchandise, its mighty armies trampling with horse and foot, its towering mountains, its great rivers, and the enormous sea – Follow the world! they cry, and it will reward you – the glorious, the golden world! … No! we answer, the truth is stronger than the world. We cling to that God who leveled the walls of Jericho to the earth at the sound of the trumpet (Joshua 6:20), and made the Sun and the Moon stand still at the command of his servant (Joshua 10:12). We cling to the truth, and we await a more splendid life than any in this world. We look forward with humble hope to the golden harps, the white robes, and the shining pavement of the City of God.

But the world, they tell us, is full of wisdom. The sages and the philosophers, the men of science and the men of law, the statesmen and the historians, who have lived upon the earth, what stores of knowledge and of wisdom have their labours accumulated together! The ancient manners of Greece and Rome, the mysterious civilisations of the East, the abandoned and barbarous institutions of primeval man, all lie before you in their profusion – inestimable treasures of the human race. Life in its multitudinous forms of vigour and decay, the laws that rule the motions of the universe, the path of the stars in the void of space, all these things and more will the world teach you. No! we answer again, no! There is more wisdom in the truth than in all the philosophies of the world. We cling to God, whose transcendent wisdom has conceived the mystery of the Trinity, that crowning proof of the superhuman mind.

But – and this is the last and most insidious of their arguments – the world, they say, is the only thing you have for certain. Enjoy it while it is with you, for when it is gone, who knows?, the time for enjoyment may be passed for ever. Enjoy the world and all the beauty that you find there; the poets, the painters, the forests and the flowers, the breath of the west wind, and the calm blue of the middle sea. Rejoice in wine, and friends and laughter, and the human warmth of love. No, no! ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ (Matthew 16:23; Mark 8:33; Luke 4:8). I cling to the truth. What do I care for worldly love? I have the love of God. The love of God, which, as has been so justly said, passeth all understanding. That love for which all else must be given up, more sacred than the ties of friendship or of home – transcendent in its mystery. For did not the almighty Father himself give us the highest example of divine love, by willingly sacrificing his only son to a life of sorrow and a death of shame? Yes, my brethren, this is the love of Heaven. Admire it, wonder at it! It tells us with no uncertain voice that while those mockers are burning in the eternal flames of Hell, we the elect of the Lord shall sit crowned and radiant in the glittering mansions of the blest. We cling to the truth. And they, the questioners, the scoffers, they ask ‘What is truth?’ We know what is truth. But we look for it – not where they look for it – in the world, the flesh, and the Devil – no, we look for it – aye, and we find it – in the power and the wisdom and the love of the almighty Trinity.

And now to God the father, God the son, and God the holy ghost, to whom be ascribed all might, majesty, power, dominion and glory, now and for ever more. Amen.

Notes

1. Merle, Lytton Strachey, p. 101.

2. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, pp. 17, 19.

Conversation And Conversations

This richly allusive paper, which Strachey read to the Sunday Essay Society on 3 November 1901, is sparely described by Charles Richard Sanders as ‘a thoughtful consideration of conversation as an art’.¹ In a close paraphrase of the original text, Gabriel Merle offers a fuller gloss, writing that in this essay Strachey presupposes that

communication is indispensable, and that the imprisonment that accompanies solitude may conduce to madness. He examines the difficulties of speaking and defines good conversation as a mélange, at once delicious and inextricable, of egoism and altruism, a combination that permits of the simultaneous play of one’s own vanity and that of the other, of one’s own appreciation of the other and of the other’s appreciation of oneself.²

‘Conversation and Conversations’ begins with an elaboration of the Paterian idea that art aspires to the condition of music. ‘To feel to the full’, Strachey writes,

the magnificent fuguality of Bach is to realise … the immeasurable heights which can be reached by true conversation. For the fugue is, to me at any rate, the grand triumph, the crowning consummation, of all that is perfect in converse (below, p. 11)

Later, still pursuing this line of thought, he calls ‘the highest form of conversation … the harmonical, which … owns no distant connection with music itself’, and observes, ‘when two or three of us are gathered together we may perhaps sometimes attain almost to the level of music’ (below, pp. 14, 15).

But as the argument proceeds, Strachey discusses ‘the most human … of all arts’ as not only an aesthetic but also an ethical activity, in which achieving musicality in conversation with another person involves the ‘subtl[e] intermingling [of] our various strains’ (below, pp. 13, 15). He again echoes Pater in the claim that ‘to pass, as soon as may be beyond these barren but necessary outposts of intercourse, which stand sentinel-like about the intrenched camp which is ourselves, is the aim of all true artists in conversation’ (below, p. 12). Strachey figures this quintessentially human art as a paradigmatic ethical endeavour, one in which one discovers, or crafts, one’s identity in sympathetic interactions with the other. As such, it also implies a politics, as when Strachey argues that the finest conversations cultivate sympathy for and even empathy with another person – ‘to see as clearly with someone else’s eyes as with your own, and to know that someone else is seeing with yours as clearly as with his’ – and then goes on to claim,

to bring about so happy a result what is above all necessary is a balance. All emphasis of one personality at the cost of another, or, in a general conversation, all emphasis of the minority at the expense of the majority … are fatal deviations of the Golden Rule which alone leads towards perfection. (below, p. 13)

In these claims, and in this essay in general, Strachey carries on the aestheticist tradition. But, while remaining firmly humanist in his assumption of coherent and intrinsic individual identities, he also anticipates poststructuralist ethical philosophy in the equally active assumption that those very identities are forged in the act of interrelation between persons (see also the headnote to ‘Dignity, Romance, or Vegetarianism?’, below, for a further elaboration of this idea).

It is impossible not to notice that Strachey’s egalitarianism is forcibly and dismissively male. Like the famous winged beadle barring the way to the library in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Strachey explicitly excludes women from the sublimest reaches of this highest art. He seconds the opinion of the Roman historian Theocritus ‘that the tittle-tattle of women [does] not differ … much … from that of … ancestral apes’, and, in contrast to boys’ ‘fine and honest interchange of thought’, he opposes ‘the conversation of girls [which] is a scraping on paltry fiddles’ (below, pp. 11, 14). The argument, therefore, is shot through with an overt misogyny which problematizes its ethical and democratic appeal to empathy. Overall, this essay represents Strachey’s first sustained effort – and perhaps his first effort – to think through some of the complexities of an art that would become central to the self-identity of the Bloomsbury Group. As Kate Whitehead has written, conversation may even be said to constitute Bloomsbury’s ‘most prolific output’.³ ‘Conversation and Conversations’ also suggests why Strachey – who in 1901 had yet to meet G. E. Moore or join the Apostles – was so susceptible to Moore’s celebration of conversation, or ‘the pleasure of human intercourse’, as one of ‘the greatest … goods we can imagine’, two years later.⁴

To feel to the full the magnificent fuguality of Bach,y¹ is to realise – what perhaps one had never realised before – the immeasurable heights which can be reached by true conversation. For the fugue is, to me at any rate, the grand triumph, the crowning consummation, of all that is perfect in converse; and to hear one is to listen, amid those sparkling...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Editorial Principles
• Bibliography
• Cambridge Society Papers
• Dialogues
• Stories
• Editorial Notes
• Index