The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [115]
These letters are delicious period pieces, and they show Lady Lyttelton’s continuing fondness for “dear Prince Albert.” But what is so striking is the way Strachey selects his details from this wealth of correspondence (scrupulously footnoting each) and resists distraction. Lady Lyttelton, so tempting an epistolary subject, disappears; what is retained, pared down, and made significant are the evidences of Albert’s musical solace, domestic liveliness, and private melancholy. In a passage of two hundred words, the biographer distills material gleaned from letters that span ten years of the royal marriage.
Strachey made his reputation on two biographies, both Victorian in subject matter though emphatically not in style. Eminent Victorians, his brief but telling narratives of the lives of Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, Cardinal Manning, and General Gordon (the “four stout Victorians” wittily described in Woolf’s essay) was a bombshell and an instant success. Queen Victoria, a few years later, secured both his reputation and his income. As Woolf wrote in her essay “The Art of Biography,” “Anger and laughter mixed; and editions multiplied.”60 Here is Strachey’s own account of Victorian biography and its discontents, from the preface to Eminent Victorians:
… the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; 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 panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism.61
For Strachey, “the first duty of the biographer” is to preserve “a becoming brevity—a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant,” and the second duty, “no less significant,” is “to maintain his own freedom of spirit.”62 He considers his job “to lay bare the facts of the case,” not to extrapolate or fantasize. He appends a list of principal sources at the end of each biography in Eminent Victorians. His art is in the arrangement of details, and in letting the telling detail speak. Although his book has been described as ironic, he calls it dispassionate and impartial. Often the wit inheres in what he does not say.
After Eminent Victorians, aptly described by Virginia Woolf as “short studies with something of the over-emphasis and the foreshortening of caricatures” (we might compare them to modern-day New Yorker profiles), Strachey turned to larger projects, and here, as Woolf observes, the challenges of the genre became evident:
In the lives of the two great Queens, Elizabeth and Victoria, he attempted a far more ambitious task. Biography had never had a fairer chance of showing what it could do. For it was now being put to the test by a writer who was capable of making use of all the liberties that biography had won: he was fearless; he had proved his brilliance; and he had learned his job. The result throws great light upon the nature of biography. For who can doubt that after reading the two books again, one after the other, that the Victoria is a triumphant success, and that the Elizabeth by comparison is a failure? But it seems too, as we compare them, that it was not Lytton Strachey who failed; it was the art of biography. In the Victoria he treated biography as a craft; he submitted to its limitations. In the Elizabeth he treated biography as an art; he flouted its limitations.63
About Victoria, much was known, much recorded, much available