rom the
purveyors of indiscriminate praise, and in adopting it he emphasises 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 St. 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 current authors of detestable pseudo-Meredithian
and decayed Paterese. His narrative style is concise and brisk. His book
may undoubtedly best be compared among English classics with _Whiggism
in its Relations to Literature_, although it is less discursive and does
not possess the personal element of that vivacious piece of polemic. In
this recurrence of Mr. Strachey to a pellucid stream of prose we see an
argument against his own theory of revolt. The procedure of the arts,
the mechanical tricks of the trade, do they really improve or decline
from age to age? Are they not, in fact, much more the result of
individual taste than of fashion? There seems to be no radical change in
the methods of style. The extravagant romanticism of rebellion against
the leaders of the Victorian Age finds at length an exponent, and behold
he writes as soberly as Lord Morley, or as Newman himself!

The longest of these biographies is that of Cardinal Manning, and it is
the one with which Mr. Lytton Strachey has taken most pains. Briefer
than the briefest of the _English Men of Letters_ series of biograp