uninsistent upon anything too serious. Certainly to the taste
of that period Strachey, with his light touch, his apparent
insouciance, his telling but not bitter epigrams, was likely to
appeal and did appeal. But it was not in 1918 that he started
writing thus. In some of its essentials the style which was
noticed and praised then had exactly the characteristics which
marked his work a dozen years earlier. The difference was,
not that he had become mature -- in his youth he was pre-
cociously near maturity -- but that the public taste had
changed, and he had passed from writing about people whom
he liked to writing about people whom he disliked. That
was just what the iconoclasts wanted -- amusement at the
expense of their grandfathers. Eminent Victorians gave them
this, not in the debating manner of Shaw -- who had taught
them much -- but more delicately, with a more intimate
approach to human beings.

He was interested in the first place in personalities, whether
he was writing literary criticism or biography. He never
attempted in his criticism to apply fixed principles of art.
In that respect he was like Sainte-Beuve, who preferred to
pursue every human clue that might point to a writer's
genre d'émotion. For Sainte-Beuve, to understand the work
of a man of letters it was necessary to know the man him-
self; the critic should endeavour to know all about him,
scrutinizing his origins, his parents, his friends, and especially
the group with which he associated himself as a young man.
Perhaps for us, too, in considering the work of so idiosyn-
cratic a person as Strachey, it would be well to ask a few
questions about the man himself.

When he was a freshman at Cambridge the Head Porter,
looking at him, thought it a very odd fact that he was the
son of a General. General Sir Richard Strachey was of a
line of Stracheys several of whom during the last two hun-
dred years had done distinguished service in India. Lytton's
grandfather, Edward Strachey -- as Lytton tells us -- was 'an
Anglo-Indian of cultivation and intelligence' whose know-
ledge of French, however, was limited. Indeed, in rebuking

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