's side. For Mrs. Ward
has positively the indiscretion, astounding in a writer of her learning
and experience, to demand the exclusion of irony from the legitimate
weapons of the literary combatant. This is to stoop to sharing one of
the meanest prejudices of the English commonplace mind, which has always
resented the use of that delicate and pointed weapon. Moreover, Mrs.
Ward does not merely adopt the plebeian attitude, but she delivers
herself bound hand and foot to the enemy by declaring the use of irony
to be "unintelligent." In support of this amazing statement she quotes
some wandering phrase of Sainte-Beuve. By the light of recent
revelations, whether Sainte-Beuve was ironical or not, he was certainly
perfidious. But, to waive that matter, does Mrs. Humphry Ward consider
that Swift and Lucian and Machiavelli were, as she puts it, "doomed to
failure" because they used irony as a weapon? Was Heine and is Anatole
France conspicuous for want of intelligence? And, after all, ought not
Mrs. Ward to remember that if she had a very serious grandfather, she
had a still more celebrated uncle, who wrote _Friendship's Garland_?

While no one else will seriously blame Mr. Strachey for employing irony
in his investigation of character, the subject leads on to what may be
regarded as a definite fault in his method. A biographer should be
sympathetic; not blind, not indulgent, but _sympathetic_. He should be
able to enter into the feelings of his subjects, and be anxious to do
so. It is in sympathy, in imaginative insight, that Mr. Strachey fails.
His personages are like puppets observed from a great height by an
amiable but entirely superior intelligence. The peculiar aim of Mr.
Strachey, his desire to lower our general conception of the Victorian
Age, tempts him to exaggerate this tendency, and he succumbs to the
temptation. His description of Lord Acton at Rome in 1870--"he despised
Lord Acton almost as much as he disliked him"--is not ironic, it is
contemptuous. Arthur Hugh Clough presents no aspect to Mr. Strachey but
that of a timid and blundering packer-up of parcels; one might conceive
that the biographer had never contemplated the poet in any other
capacity than, with sealing-wax in his hand and string between his lips,
shuddering under the eye of Miss Nightingale. The occasional references
to Lord Wolseley suggest an unaccountable hurrying figure of pygmy size,
which Mr. Strachey can only just discern. This attitude of