d
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 cortege 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!"