Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays
by
[Harcourt, Brace, $2.50]
SOME readers of Mr. Strachey’s books no doubt find their enjoyment flecked by the clamor of ‘O Master! Master!’ arising from the reviewers. Mr. Strachey is diverting enough; he has read widely in the history and biography of England and France since the Renaissance, and so acquired a great store of curious learning; he writes neatly and with animation. He is not, one would think, a man to get really serious over, but nevertheless a minor figure to rejoice in. But his admirers dub him Sir Oracle, and that provokes a submission of his work to standards higher than those by which it would ordinarily be tried.
It is when Mr. Strachey essays the minor task —the making of vignettes of picturesque subsidiary characters on the stage of history, as in the new book from his pen —that all his good qualities come out and his faults are in abeyance. Such subjects as the Elizabethan wit and sanitary innovator, Sir John Harington, or the Abbé Morellet, friend and disciple of Diderot, or the last of the salon mistresses, Madame de Lieven, are the very subjects for him. He can do the ’prophet’ Muggleton or the Reverend Dr. Colbatch of Trinity College to a turn; the anecdote of how the President de Brosses got the better of Voltaire lends itself perfectly to the Stracheyan treatment. But these and other miniature portraits are followed by six essays on English historians, and as one studies the grounds of Mr. Strachey’s approval of Hume and Gibbon and the kind of disapproval he has for Carlyle, Fronde, and Bishop Creighton — I leave out his just estimate of Macaulay — the question is raised once more about Mr. Strachey’s point of view and powers of penetration.
I cannot think that he penetrates very far into psychology. When in Eminent Victorians he remarked of Hurrell Froude that ‘the sort of ardour which impels more normal youths to haunt Music Halls and fall in love with actresses took the form, in Froude’s case, of a romantic devotion to the Deity and an intense interest in the slate of his own soul,’one could let it pass as a nasty dip, but, considered as a piece of religious psychology, it had no insight whatever. And Mr. Strachey has not improved in this respect; he asserts in Portraits in Miniature that J. A. Froude’s ‘ethical conceptions, though they were not quite so crude, belonged to the same infantile species as his master’s, Froude’s remarkable essay on Reynard the Fox would seem to establish him as more than an infant in morals and ethics.
As for Mr. Strachey’s point of view, that is not so much his own as the point of view of the twentieth century-with a difference. It is sham eighteenth century. He cultivates eighteenth-century graces of expression and wit, but he lacks the essence of that masculine time, he lacks gusto and what Coleridge called ‘manly reflection and robustness of mental constitution. Underneath the graces there is a twentieth-century complacency (produced by a sense of progress), a weakness of emotional fibre, the tea-table æstheticism and mockery of a comfortable browsing scholar. But to hang a criticism of Mr. Strachey on so slight a peg as Portaits in Miniature is not quite sporting. The book is entertaining in the Henry Jamesian sense of the word, and let the matter rest there.
GORHAM MUNSON