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In the short preface to his Eminent Victorians, Mr. Lytton Strachey speaks of the great biological tradition of the French, of “their incomparable éloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men.” And he speaks of biography as “the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing.” The tribute of a distinguished master of biographical literature was recalled to me as I read André Maurois’s Ariel, The Life of Shelley, so ably translated by Ella D’Arcy. Here are a comparatively few, but gloriously shining pages. This biography has burst upon us with an effect as surprising and luminous as Shelley himself. It is written on gauze and its transparency shows opaline colors. The picture it gives us is of Matthew Arnold’s “beautiful and ineffectual angel beating his wings in a luminous void”; but I should delete the word “ineffectual.” If Shelley was ineffectual, then the soul goes out of the world.
It needed a Frenchman, perhaps, to do the subject justice. Mr. Strachey, as Aldous Huxley has remarked, is congenitally incapable of penetrating the mystical mind. André Maurois was already known to some English and American readers by the humorous and profound novels studying an inarticulate English army officer. No one who read The Silences of Colonel Bramble can have forgotten its delicate portraiture. But such fiction was a pastime beside Ariel.
I could, of course, quote the praise of Arnold Bennett and other acute judges, but it seems to me a lame thing to do. Nor is there space to quote from Maurois’s book, and it hurts me not to be able to transcribe some things he has written. Any attempt to convey the quality of his book reduces me to despair; and yet I am used—perhaps too well used—to such attempts. Maurois is gleeful, tender, ironical; he recalls in his delicate but firm art Mr. Strachey more than anyone else, but he is more sympathetic, and so more just, than Strachey. This perhaps is because he has that side which Strachey, with his Voltaire-like intellect, quite lacks. Shelley’s pathetic youth, his three-cornered marriage, his elopement with Mary Godwin, his few life-long friendships, his strange contacts with Byron, the brief happiness in Italy and the ultimate, tragic release of the captive soul to its flight in immortality—all these are told with a sense of proportion and an effect unsurpassable. The incidental portrait of Byron is more clear than any—yes, any!—of the ponderous biographies that have saluted his centenary.