BOOK REVIEWS
MR STRACHEY'S PAST
Books and Characters. By Lytton Strachey. 8vo. 318 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $3.50.
THE author of Queen Victoria and Eminent Victorians has invented a new manner, if not a new genre, of history; and in face of the imitations, often so vulgar, that are already appearing, the word Stracheyesque seems an inevitable addition to our critical vocabulary.
The first characteristic of Mr Strachey's art is the startling vividity with which he paints his personages. They satisfy the eye. You feel you can walk round them. His Lord Melbourne, his Disraeli, are as real as any characters in fiction. They are almost too lifelike, one feels, too good to be true. But they are hypotheses that work: and work neatly and gracefully, so that if we sometimes suspect that the whole truth would be something very different, what matter? Is not Mr Strachey—are we not all—too sensible and philosophic to take History for more than a sober, daylight fiction, as Mr Santayana calls it? The trouble comes with certain other figures, Manning, for instance, and Gladstone. Mr Strachey's touch remains delicate, his technique unfaltering, but something is missing. And what but a little sympathy on the showman's part with the moral standpoint and inspiring faith of his puppets? Where there is no belief in law, a lawyer seems a ridiculous figure; where there is no belief in God, a saint is frankly grotesque. And it is the weakness of Mr Strachey's histories that he is a worshipper of Reason, who can no more understand the attraction and power of other faiths than he can the stupider instincts of the brute creation.
The second characteristic of Mr Strachey is his attitude of ironic detachment. In view of this it is natural that he should be accused of lacking seriousness. He would appear to approach his subjects without a prejudice, a prevention, or a moral theory; and often after a detailed statement of the facts, sometimes given in the actual words of the character concerned, he will leave them sans com-
