The Adventure of Living : a Subjective Autobiography

by John St. Loe Strachey

Another uncle was Mr. George Strachey, a diplomat, and for some thirty years Her Britannic Majesty's representative at Dresden,—a man of great ability, but with a nature better fitted to a man of letters than to an official. Of Strachey great-uncles I could tell many a curious and entertaining tale, and especially of the man whom my father succeeded,— the man we called "the second Sir Henry." It has been said of him that he was "odd even for a Strachey," and I could prove that up to the hilt. Almost as odd, from many points of view, though much more human, was his brother, Richard Strachey, one of the prize figures of the Military and Diplomatic Service of the East India Company. He is still commemorated in Persia on the leaden water-pipes of Ispahan, but how and why is too long a story for a chapter of apology.

Dearly should I have loved to write a chapter on "The Art of Living," for unquestionably "life demands art,"—an aphorism, by the way, not, as most people think, of Pope but of Wordsworth. (Wordsworth, remember, had a great deal of the Eighteenth Century in him.) That chapter, however, would easily become a book or a serpent, as says the Italian proverb.

Last of all, how many are the men and women, now dead, whom I should like to have mentioned and of whom I have something worth saying. They are included in a rough list which I drew up when I first thought of writing my autobiography. I give these names written down just as they occurred to me. Some of them have been referred to in the body of this book, but most of them are not even mentioned. Lord Roberts; Watts the painter; Sir John Millais; Sir William Harcourt; Lord Houghton; Walter Bagehot; Lord Carlingford; Lord Goschen; the Duke of Argyll of Gladstone's Cabinets; Mr. Macmillan, the publisher; Mr. George Smith; Lady Stanley of Alderley; Lord Carlisle; Lord Morpeth; Sir Edward Cook; Lord Kitchener; the late Duke of Northumberland; Admiral Dewey; Mr. William Arnold; Lord Burghclere; Sir William Jenner; Miss Mary Kingsley; Lord Glenesk; the late Lord Grey; the late Lord Astor; Sir William White, the naval constructor; the late Lord Sligo; Dean Beeching; Bishop Perceval; Archbishop Temple; my uncle, Professor T. H. Green; Professor Dicey; Professor Freeman; Bishop Stubbs; Mr. Lecky; Mrs. Humphry Ward; Lord Bowen; Mr. Baugh Allen, the last of the Special Pleaders; Professor Henry Smith, the mathematician; Lord Justice Fry, and Lord Balfour of Burleigh.

There was another man, too little and too lately known, with whom I wanted to deal at length, for he exercised a distinct and special influence on my life. I mean Donald Hankey, "The Student in Arms." I had, indeed, designed to speak of him in a special chapter on the effect of the War on my life, but that chapter did not get written, or, rather, remains over to be written when the perspective is easier and better, and the world has given up its last, and to me very futile and foolish, mode of talking as if we ought to be ashamed of the War, or, at any rate, as if we ought to treat it as an utterly tiresome subject.

Here, then, I shall say only that the essential thing about Hankey was that he was one of the true saints of the world, or, rather, one of the saints who matter. Yet never was there a less saintly saint. He was a man you could talk to rationally on any subject. I, who really knew him, would not have called him a man of the world, because it would have been in essence misleading; but I should have quite understood someone else saying it and should have known exactly what he meant. Not only had he not the temper of the zealot or the fanatic, but he was a kindly man, with no fierceness about him. Yet somehow, and this was the miracle, he contrived to have none of the easy unction of the pushing man of holiness who realises that if he is to succeed in accomplishing what he wants accomplished, he must assume a certain cunning suavity of manner which is really foreign to his character. Hankey had no pose. He was at bottom what Walt Whitman calls a "natural and nonchalant" person, who happened to be made all through of sweetness and light, though never the superior person, and never, as it were, too good for this world. Not for one moment did you find in him the chill of sanctity. In the phrase of John Silver, "he kept company very easy."

I should imagine that confession was the very last thing that Hankey would ever have encouraged in anyone, for it is the most debilitating of the virtues. All the same, a penitent would have found him an extraordinarily easy occupant of the box. He was warm-hearted, sympathetic, and full of the victorious spirit. One felt with Hankey that he was born for whatever was arduous. In truth he was "God's soldier." What gives the extreme characteristic impression of Hankey is that last vision of him set forth in a letter by the soldier who, happening to look into a trench, saw him kneeling in prayer with his company gathered round him, just before they went over the parapet.

If he had lived, he would, I am sure, have talked about the scene. I never saw a man so natural and so little embarrassed in discussing such matters as prayer or other spiritual experiences. He had in a marked degree that absence of mauvaise honte which marks the good man at all times, in all places, in all religions, and in all races.

There is a man, now dead, who told me something which I want to record in this very convenient chapter. His words impressed me out of all proportion to their intrinsic importance. I feel indeed that there must be something in them which I cannot analyse, but which makes them worth preserving. The vitamines of food, we know, are not strictly analysable, though their presence can be detected. No one knows of what they consist, but, nevertheless, we know two things about them. They exist, and they have a great influence upon metabolism. So in the food of the mind there are vitamines which we can recognise, but not analyse, and, therefore, cannot wholly understand. My readers, if they will look into their own memories, will, I am sure, recall experiences of these mental vitamines, trivial or ordinary in themselves, and yet holding a place so clear and often indeed so vehement as to suggest that they contain some quickening quality of their own.

The man with whom I connect certain of these vitamines of the mind was Sir George Grove, the compiler of the Dictionary of Music. I did not know him well; but, as a boy, he did me a kindly service. He accepted the first poem of any length that I ever published. When I was seventeen, that is a year before I went to Oxford, I sent him a poem, alluded to in another chapter of this book, called "Love's Arrows." He liked it and published it in Macmillan's Magazine, of which he was then Editor. Macmillan's was a magazine given up to good literature, and to get a place in it was considered no small honour.

Grove possessed a keen sense of literature, and he had known many of the famous people of the Victorian era. True to my plan of asking questions, I asked him whether he had ever seen Cardinal Newman. He replied by a story which was revealing as to a certain fierceness in Newman's character and mental configuration. In any case, it had both rhetorically and intellectually a considerable influence on my mind.