'but what becomes of the headship of our Lord Jesus 'Christ?'

If the Victorian Age opened in a tempest of theology, it was only natural that it should cultivate a withering disdain for those who had attempted to reform society on a nontheological basis. In sharp contradistinction to the indulgence of the Georgian period for philosophic speculation, England's interest in which not even her long continental wars had been able to quench, we find with the accession of Victoria the credit of the French thinkers almost abruptly falling. Voltaire, never very popular in England, becomes as mischievous a monkey as any of them'; the enthusiasm for Rousseau, which had reached extravagant proportions, completely disappears, and he is merely the slanderous sceptic, who, after always soaking people's waistcoats with his tears, sent his own babies to the Foundling Hospital. The influence of the French eighteenth-century literature on the mind of England was first combated and then baldly denied. The premier journalist of the age declared, with the satisfaction of a turkey-cock strutting round his yard, that no trace of the lowest level of what could be called popularity remained in England to the writers of France, and he felt himself 'entitled to treat as an imbecile conceit the pretence' that a French school of thought survived in Great Britain. Such was the Podsnappery of the hour in its vigilance against moral and religious taint.

Notwithstanding, or perhaps we ought to say inevitably conducted by these elements of passion and disdain, the infant Victorian Age passed rapidly into the great political whirlpool of 1846, with its violent concentration of enthusiasm on the social questions which affected the welfare of the masses, with, in short, its tremendous upheaval of a practical radicalism. From that time forth its development baffles analysis. Whatever its present enemies may allege to its discredit, they cannot pretend that it was languid or monotonous. No Age hitherto lived out upon the world's surface has been so multiform or so busy; none defies the art of the historian to such a bewildering degree. Its latest critic does not exaggerate when he says that our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information concerning it that the industry

of a Ranke would be submerged by it and the perspicacity 'of a Gibbon would quail before it.' This is manifestly true, and it is evident that an encyclopædia would be required to discuss all the divisions of so tremendous a subject. If we look over too wide a horizon we lose our bearings altogether. We get a hopelessly confused notion of the course of progress; we see experiments, criticisms, failures, but who is to assure us what was the tendency of evolution?

Mr. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians' has arrived at the very moment when all readers are prepared to discuss the age he deals with, and when public opinion is aware of the impatience which has been ' rising in the bosom of a man 'like smoke' under the pressure of the insistent praise of famous men. The book has attracted a very remarkable degree of notice; it has been talked about wherever people have met together; and has received the compliment of being seriously displayed before the University of Oxford by one of the most eminent of the Victorian statesmen whom Oxford has produced. If we look into the causes of this success, enjoyed by the earliest extended book of a writer almost unknown, a book, too, which pretends to no novelty of matter or mystery of investigation, we find them partly in the preparedness of the public mind for something in the way of this exposure, but partly also in the skill of the writer. Whatever else may be said of Mr. Lytton Strachey, no one can deny that he is very adroit, or that he possesses the art of arresting attention.

It is part of this adroitness that he contrives to modify, and for a long time even to conceal the fact that his purpose is to damage and discredit the Victorian Age. He is so ceremonious in his approach, so careful to avoid all brusqueness and coarseness, that his real aim may be for awhile unobserved. He even professes to speak 'dispassionately, 'impartially, and without ulterior intentions.' We may admit the want of passion and perhaps the want of partiality, but we cannot avoid seeing the ulterior intention, which is to undermine and belittle the reputation of the great figures of the Victorian Age. When the prodigious Signor Marinetti proposes to hurl the 'leprous palaces' of Venice into her 'fetid canals,' and to build in their place warehouses and railway stations, he does not differ in essential attitude from

Mr. Lytton Strachey, delicately 'laying bare the facts of some cases.' The only real difference consists in the finer tact, the greater knowledge of history-in short, the superior equipment of the English iconoclast. Each of them-and all the troop of opponents who grumble and mutter between their extremes-each of them is roused by an intense desire to throw off the shackles of a dying age, in which they have taught themselves chiefly to see affectation, pomposity, a virtuosity more technical than emotional, and an exasperating monotony of effect.

Mr. Strachey has conducted his attack from the point of view of biography. He realizes the hopelessness of writing a history of the Victorian Age; it can only be dealt with in detail; it must be nibbled into here and there; discredited piecemeal; subjected to the ravages of the white ant. He has seen that the lives of the great Victorians lend themselves to this insidious kind of examination, because what was worst in the pretentiousness of their age is to be found enshrined in the Standard Biographies (in two volumes, post octavo) under which most of them are buried. Mr Strachey has some criticism of these monsters which could hardly be bettered:

'Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead-who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker, and bear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism.'

It is impossible not to agree with this pungent criticism. Every candid reader could point to a dozen Victorian biographies which deserve Mr Strachey's condemnation. For instance, instead of taking up any of the specimens which he has chosen for illustration, we need only refer the reader's memory to the appendix of 'Impressions,' by a series of elderly friends, which closes the official Life of Tennyson, published in 1897. He will find there an expression of the purest Victorian optimism. The great object being to foist on the public a false and superhuman picture of the deceased a set of illustrious contemporaries,-who themselves expected to be, when they died, transfigured in like manner,-form a

bodyguard around the corpse of the poet and emit their ' tedious panegyric.' In this case, more even than in any of the instances which Mr. Strachey has taken, the contrast between the real man and the funereal image is positively grotesque. Without question this contrast is not a little responsible for the discredit into which the name of Tennyson has fallen. Lord Selborne found nothing in Tennyson 'inconsistent with the finest courtesy and the gentlest heart.' Dr. Jowett had preserved through forty years an ever' increasing wonder at the depth of his thought,' and emphatically stated that he was above such feelings as a 'desire of praise, or fear of blame.' (Tennyson, who was thirsty for ceaseless laudation, and to whom a hint of censure was like the bite of a mosquito!) Frederick Myers ejaculated, 'How august, how limitless a thing was Tennyson's own 'spirit's upward flight!' The Duke of Argyll, again, during the space of forty years, had found him 'always reverent, ' hating all levity or flippancy,' and was struck by his possessing' the noblest humility I have ever known.' Lord Macaulay, who had stood absolutely aloof,' once having been permitted to glance at the proof-sheets of Guenevere,' was 'absolutely 'subdued' to 'unfeigned and reverent admiration.' The duke was the glad emissary who was the medium of intro'duction,' and he recognized in Macaulay's subjugation a premonition' of Tennyson's complete 'conquest over 'the living world and over the generations that are to come.' Thus the priesthood circled round their idol, waving their censers and shouting their hymns of praise, while their ample draperies effectively hid from the public eye the object which was really in the centre of their throng, namely, a gaunt, black, touzled man, rough in speech, brooding like an old gipsy over his inch of clay pipe stuffed with shag, and sucking in port wine with gusto-so long as it is black and sweet 'and strong, I care not!' Their fault lay, not in their praise, which was much of it deserved, but in their deliberate attempt in the interests of what was Nice and Proper-gods of the Victorian Age-to conceal what any conventional person might think not quite becoming. There were to be no shadows in the picture, no stains or rugosities on the smooth bust of rosy wax.

On the pretext, therefore, of supplying a brief and above

all a complimentary set of portraits, Mr. Strachey takes the biography of an ecclesiastic, an educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, and tells them over again in his own way. The four figures he chooses are all contemporary, and yet, so implacably does time hurry us along, all would be very old if they still survived. Three of them could hardly survive, for Cardinal Manning and Dr. Arnold would be far over a hundred, and Florence Nightingale in her ninety-ninth year; the fourth, General Gordon, would be would be eighty-five. The motto of Mr. Strachey is Put not your trust in the intellectual 'princes of the Victorian Age,' or, at least, in what their biographers have reported of them; they were not demigods in any sense, but eccentric and forceful figures working dimly towards aims which they only understood in measure, and which very often were not worth the energy which they expended on them. This attitude alone would be enough to distinguish Mr. Strachey from the purveyors of indiscriminate praise, and in adopting it he emphasizes his deliberate break with the age of which they were the envy and the ornament. Given his 1918 frame of mind, no blame can attach to him for adopting this gesture. At moments when the tradition of a people has been violently challenged there have always ensued these abrupt acts of what to the old school seems injustice. If Mr. Lytton Strachey is reproached with lack of respect, he might reply: In the midst of a revolution, who is called on to be respectful to the fallen monarch? Extreme admiration for this or that particular leader, the principle of Victorian hero-worship, is the very heresy, he might say, which I have set out to refute.

When S. John the Divine addressed his Apocalypse to the Angels of the Seven Churches, he invented a system of criticism which is worthy of all acceptation. He dwelt first upon the merits of each individual church; not till he had exhausted them did he present the reverse of the coin. In the same spirit, critics who, in the apostle's phrase, have 'something against Mr. Lytton Strachey, will do well to begin by acknowledging what is in his favour. In the first place, he writes sensibly, rapidly, and lucidly, without false ornament of any kind. Some of his pages might, with advantage, be pinned up opposite the writing-tables of our