Eminent Victorians | Page 3

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E-Text prepared by Martin Adamson
[email protected]

EMINENT VICTORIANS
by Lytton Strachey

Preface
THE history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too
much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the
historian--ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and
omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.
Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our
grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of
information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and
the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct
method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope
to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler
strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall
upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight
into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that
great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little
bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic
specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful
curiosity. Guided by these considerations, I have written the ensuing
studies. I have attempted, through the medium of biography, to present
some Victorian visions to the modern eye. They are, in one sense,
haphazard visions-- that is to say, my choice of subjects has been
determined by no desire to construct a system or to prove a theory, but
by simple motives of convenience and of art. It has been my purpose to
illustrate rather than to explain. It would have been futile to hope to tell
even a precis of the truth about the Victorian age, for the shortest precis
must fill innumerable volumes. But, in the lives of an ecclesiastic, an
educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, I
have sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth
which took my fancy and lay to my hand.

I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of interest
from the strictly biographical, no less than from the historical point of
view. Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms
of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal
processes-- which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. The art
of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have
had, it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the
French, a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and
Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a few
shining pages the manifold existences of men. With us, the most
delicate and humane of all the branches of