The early Victorians liked what was definable and tangible; they were "ponderous mechanists of style." Even in their suggestions of change they preserved an impenetrable decorum of demeanour, a studied progress, a deep consciousness of the guiding restraint of tradition upon character. Their preoccupation with moral ideas tinged the whole of their surroundings, their literature, their art, their outlook upon life. That the works of Mr. Charles Dickens, so excruciatingly funny, should have been produced and appreciated in the midst of this intense epoch of exhortation seems a paradox, till we recollect how careful Dickens is, when his laughter is loudest, never to tamper with "the deep sense of moral evil." This apprehension of the rising immorality of the world, against which the only rampart was the education of "a thorough English gentleman, Christian, manly and enlightened" was dominant in no spirit more than in that of Mr. Thomas Arnold, of whom Mr. Strachey gives a somewhat deterrent portrait. It is deterrent, because we have passed, in three-quarters of a century, completely out of the atmosphere in which Dr. Arnold moved and breathed. We are not sure that Mr. Strachey acted very wisely in selecting Dr. Arnold for one of his four subjects, since the great schoolmaster was hardly a Victorian at all. When he entered the Church George III. was on the throne; his accomplishment at Rugby was started under George IV.; he died when the Victorian Age was just beginning. He was a forerunner, but hardly a contemporary.

Although in his attitude to the great Rugby schoolmaster Mr. Strachey shows more approbation than usual, this portrait has not given universal satisfaction. It has rather surprisingly called forth an indignant protest from Dr. Arnold's granddaughter. Yet such is the perversity of the human mind that the mode in which Mrs. Humphry Ward "perstringes" the biographer brings us round to that biographer'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 hovering superiority is annoying.

But it reaches a more dangerous importance when it affects spiritual matters. The author interests himself, from his great height, in the movements of his Victorian dwarfs, and notices that they are particularly active, and prone to unusual oddity of movement, when they are inspired by religious and moral passion. Their motions attract his attention, and he describes them with gusto and often with wit. His sketch of Rome before the Œcumenical Council is an admirably studied page. Miss Nightingale's ferocity when the War Office phalanx closed its ranks is depicted in the highest of spirits; it is impossible not to be riveted by the scene round Cardinal Manning's death-bed; but what did those manifestations mean? To Mr. Strachey it is evident that the fun of the whole thing is that they meant nothing at all; they were only part of the Victorian absurdity. It is obvious that religious enthusiasm, as a personal matter, means nothing to him. He investigates the feelings of Newman or Keble as a naturalist might the contortions of an insect. The ceremonies and rites of the Church are objects of subdued hilarity to him, and in their presence, if he suppresses his laughter, it is solely to prevent his missing any detail precious to his curiosity. When the subject of Baptismal Regeneration agitates the whole pious world of England Mr. Strachey seems to say, looking down with exhilaration on the anthill beneath him, "The questions at issue are being taken very seriously by a large number of persons. How Early Victorian of them!" Mr. Strachey has yet to learn that questions of this kind are "taken seriously" by serious people, and that their emotion is both genuine and deep. He sees nothing but alcoholic eccentricity in the mysticism of Gordon. His cynicism sometimes carries him beyond the confines of good taste, as in the passage where he refers to the large and dirty ears of the Roman cardinals. Still worse is the query as to what became of the soul of Pope Pius IX. after his death.

These are errors in discretion. A fault in art is the want of care which the author takes in delineating his minor or subordinate figures. He gives remarkable pains, for example, to his study of General Gordon, but he is indifferent to accuracy in his sketches of the persons who came into contact, and often into collision, with Gordon. In this he resembles those French painters, such as Bastien Lepage, who focus their eye on one portion of their canvas, and work that up to a high perfection, while leaving the rest of the picture misty and vague. Even in that case the subordinate figures, if subdued in fogginess, should not be falsely drawn, but Mr. Strachey, intent upon the violent portrait of Gordon, is willing to leave his Baring and Hartington and Wolseley inexact as well as shadowy. The essay on General Gordon, indeed, is the least successful of the four monographs. Dexterous as he is, Mr. Strachey has not had the material to work upon which now exists to elucidate his other and earlier subjects. But it is difficult to account for his apparently not having read Mr. Bernard Holland's life of the Duke of Devonshire, which throws much light, evidently unknown to Mr. Strachey, on the Gordon relief expedition. He ought to know that Sir Evelyn Baring urged the expedition, while Chamberlain was one of its opponents. Mr. Strachey does not seem to have noticed how much the issue was confused by conflicting opinions as to whether the route to be taken should be by Suakin or up the Nile.

No part of his book is more vigorous or picturesque than the chapter dealing with the proclamation of Papal Infallibility. But here again one is annoyed by the glibness with which Mr. Strachey smoothly asserts what are only his conjectures.

In his account of Manning's reception in Rome—and this is of central importance in his picture of Manning's whole career—he exaggerates the personal policy of Pio Nono, whom he represents as more independent of the staff of the Curia than was possible. Rome has never acknowledged the right of the individual, even though that individual be the Pope, to an independent authority. Mr. Odo Russell was resident secretary in Rome from 1858 to 1870, and his period of office was drawing to a close when Manning arrived; he was shortly afterwards removed to become Assistant Under Secretary of State at our Foreign Office. The author of Eminent Victorians is pleased to describe "poor Mr. Russell" as little better than a fly buzzing in Manning's "spider's web of delicate and clinging diplomacy." It is not in the memory of those who were behind the scenes that Odo Russell was such a cipher. Though suave in address, he was by no means deficient in decision or force of character, as was evidenced when, some months later, he explained to Mr. Gladstone his reasons for stating to Bismarck, without instructions from the government, that the Black Sea question was one on which Great Britain might be compelled to go to war with or without allies. Lord Morley's Life of Gladstone (vol. ii., p. 354) is explicit on this interesting point. The information which, by special permission of the Pope, Cardinal Manning was able to give to him on all that was going on in the Council was, of course, of great value to Odo Russell, but his views on other aspects of the question were derived from quite different sources.

In this respect he had the advantage of the Cardinal, both on account of his diplomatic position and of his long and intimate knowledge both of Vatican policy and of the forces which the Curia has at its command. On the strength of those forces, and on the small amount of effective support which British opposition to the Decree of Infallibility was likely to receive from the Catholic Powers, he no doubt held strong opinions. Some years later he did not conceal his conviction that Prince Bismarck would be worsted in his conflict with Rome on the Education Laws, and the event proved his forecast to be perfectly correct. This is an example of the dangers which beset a too glib and superficial treatment of political events which were conducted in secret, and with every circumstance of mystery.

Several of the characteristics which diversify Mr. Strachey's remarkable volume are exemplified in the following quotation. It deals with the funeral of Cardinal Manning:—

"The route of the procession was lined by vast crowds of working people, whose imaginations, in some instinctive manner, had been touched. Many who had hardly seen him declared that in Cardinal Manning they had lost their best friend. Was it the magnetic vigour of the dead man's spirit that moved them? Or was it his valiant disregard of common custom and those conventional reserves and poor punctilios, which are wont to hem about the great? Or was it something untameable in his glances and in his gestures? Or was it, perhaps, the mysterious glamour lingering about him of the antique organisation of Rome? For whatever cause, the mind of the people had been impressed; and yet, after all, the impression was more acute than lasting. The Cardinal's memory is a dim thing to-day. And he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which Manning never lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche with the sepulchral monument, that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with its elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some forlorn and forgotten trophy, the Hat."