g 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
his native city 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 realises the hopelessness of writing a history of the
Victorian Age; it can only be dealt with in detail; it must be nibble