Jacques Rousseau. It is evident that Mr Strachey prefers such simian society to that of the solemn-eyed goats and monogamous penguins in the Victorian enclosure.
The new book is a collection of papers written at intervals during the last seventeen years, and arranged in the historical order of their subjects. But to show the development of Mr Strachey's interests, I will catalogue them in the order in which they were composed. The years 1905 to 1908 give essays on Voltaire's tragedies, Shakespeare's last period, Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Blake, Rousseau, Beddoes, and Racine. This may be considered the first period of Mr Strachey's work; and the papers, with the exception of that on Rousseau, are all chiefly concerned with the criticism of literature. Then in 1913 there is an essay on Mme du Deffand, followed in turn by Voltaire in England, Henri Beyle, Voltaire and Frederic, and lastly, in 1919, by Lady Hester Stanhope and Mr Creevey. All the papers in this group are primarily biographical and portray individual and social character. There only remains to mention a quite exquisite little pastiche of a Voltairean dialogue between Moses, Diogenes, and Locke: it is undated and has not appeared before.
This book then shows the transference of Mr Strachey's activity from the study of style to that of character. Also here, in contrast with the books he wrote later, he is chiefly occupied with persons and books sympathetic to him. Thus it is pleasant, though surprising, to find that his appreciation of language should lead him to write so enthusiastically of Beddoes, though his description of him as a belated Elizabethan seems to me at least one-sided. This essay will certainly drive every reader to penetrate the Gothic gloom and macabre magnificence of Death's Jest-Book, in which they will find one of the most impressive and continuous cataracts of romantic poetry in English. Even of Blake he writes with sympathy, though he confesses that he finds a little goes a long way—"Such music is not to be lightly mouthed by mortals; for us, in our weakness, a few strains of it, now and then, amid the murmur of ordinary converse, are enough."
All the essays are written in the witty and precise style we have come to expect from Mr Strachey, but it is easy to see his standpoint becoming more definite, and his idiosyncracies more marked. The two latest papers have exactly the same quality and texture as the big work on Queen Victoria. Still I consider that the finest character study in this collection, that of Mme du Deffand (and how fine it
