Books and Characters

French and English, by Lytton Strachey. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1922. 8vo, xv + 324 pp. $3.50.

WHILE waiting to complete the elaborate and broadly conceived work which will doubtless form a worthy successor to his Queen Victoria, Mr. Strachey has gathered in the present volume a collection of studies — Racine, Sir Thomas Browne, Voltaire, William Blake, and others — that have appeared in various periodicals during the last dozen years. It is of very great interest to trace in these earlier writings the beginnings of the power and insight which have given Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria their widely popular success. The earlier essays are, indeed, mainly critical rather than biographical; but this only adds to the interest, since we see in Mr. Strchey’s approach to literature precisely the same qualities that impart such a fascination to his approach to life.

What attracts him above all things in both is evidently humanity, the passionate palpitating heart of man and woman, whether it shows itself in detached portrayal of enduring beauty, or in the quick contact and violent, reaction of practical dealing and great affairs of state. He is interested in the surface of life, and depicts it with extraordinary vividness its lights, its shadows, its sinuous, subtle play of perplexing, disconcerting change. He is still more interested in what is deeper, quieter, more hidden; in the fierce and sudden revelation of man’s intimate being; in what Sainte-Beuve calls ‘the exposure of bare soul.’ And, in accomplishing this, he has an admirable tact in the selection of illustrative quotations, knows how to choose the significant word from a mass of rubbish, to find the key phrase which will suddenly and simply unlock the deeper and darker chambers, where lurk the untold secrets and the uncoufided hopes.

What makes all this analysis not only valuable, but readable, is Mr. Strachey’s singularly vivid manner of presentation. All the power, all the splendor, all the rich resources of words are his, and he well understands intensifying their force of meaning by those subtle devices of rhythm, which so much affect the casual reader, even while he thinks of them so little. It is of immense interest to see Mr. Strachey explaining in other writers these mysteries which he so well appreciates himself.

And back of the style, back of the detailed analysts, is the sense of the larger attitude toward life, which every writer must have whose work is to endure. In Mr. Strachey this is evidently not a matter of explicit, dogmatic theory, of passionate desire or design to impose any personal explanation of the universe. But you get everywhere the impression of a man who is perpetually pondering the graver questions of the world, to whom his own soul and God are ever-present, perplexing, teasing problems, never to be settled, never to be put aside, only to be rendered tolerable by the light, delicate, gracious, irradiating play of a penetrating irony, which clothes all life like a color and permeates all life like a perfume, —

GAMALIEL BRADFORD.