No objective description of this state has been worked out. A scheme for it would be elaborate and require more patience than the behaviourists have so far displayed. They know some things in an exact way about organic reactions to simplified laboratory situations. They have never followed out the life history of any of the reactions they describe, either exactly or in tentative descriptive terms. Autobiographic writings furnish rich material for an objective psychologist. Mr. Strachey, for instance, has an unusual memory, has never suffered any serious breaks in his reaction system, and would seem not to be subject to any wealth of parallel reactions. The objective psychologists may, in the not distant future, work out a description of isolement in terms of organic reactions, and their life histories in terms of organic memory. I do not see how a highly organised intelligence in such a setting—reminiscent father, tradition-ladened background, cultivated and uncultivated mysticism of his nurse—could have failed to develop some such moments.
It is quite likely that the main outlines of Mr. Strachey's intelligence as a working mechanism had been laid down, even at this early age. It was said of him that when a little more than two and a half years old, when his family was starting on a long journey to Pau, he insisted that his father should take with him Spenser's “Faerie Queene!” He must have had in late childhood a rich freight of memories. An elaborate and delicate set of reaction mechanism, spontaneously called forth these definite movements of detachment in the interests of further internal organisation. Moreover, it seems to me entirely a normal experience, in view of the fact that there was so much incentive to fantasy and so little progress beyond mere normal ecstasy.
It is a fearsome thing to contemplate how little fruit the arrival of powers of abstraction bring with them. Immediately Mr. Strachey was plunged into the artificial region of letters and politics, he made no effective contacts with scientific and social thinking of his period. His whole mental career from this standpoint was a gradually elaborated detachment, significant mainly for its richness, brilliancy, and generally prevailing consistency.
One other psychic experience he records, a dream during an afternoon nap: His wife came to him with a telegram in her hand which related that his son had been killed in a hunting accident in France. The incident of this telepathic dream from the objective standpoint is not very significant. The dreamer had plenty of reasons for apprehension over the welfare of his son, who was in a country where hazards were of frequent enough occurrence to make some time identity between dream and occurrence possible. The form of the hazard in the dream could probably have been traced at the time to some recent event or hearsay, and was gratuitously attached to the state of apprehension which came to the surface in the dream state.
The story of one who for a third of a century has been in British journalism while the world was being recast and remoulded must of necessity be rich in the raw material of “human interest,” as well as of history and politics. But it is not this material which the author of the subjective autobiography has chosen to present. It is with the adventure of his own life that he would interest the reader. He says,
“Every life is an adventure, and if a sense of this adventure cannot become communicated to the reader, any one may feel sure that it is the fault of the writer, not of the facts.”
He quotes Sir Thomas Browne's advice to a son about to write an account of his travels in Hungary
“not to trouble about methods of extracting iron and copper from the ores, or with a multitude of facts and statistics, but not to forget to give a full description of the 'Roman alabaster tomb in the barber's shop at Pesth.'”
The alabaster tomb in the barber's shop, rather than high politics or even high literature, is the goal which he has set before him in writing this book. The test by which he invites judgment of it is the power to enthrall the imagination of the reader with the sense of adventure.
The “supreme good luck to be born the second son of a Somersetshire squire and to be brought up in a Somersetshire country-house” was reinforced by the influence of parents to whose qualities he pays tribute in a chapter devoted to memories of his parents, and in another devoted to the stories told him as a child by his father. These stories serve to cloak the genealogical facts that always flavour so keenly, to the adventurer himself, the zest of his adventure. In this case they leave the reader free to trace, should he possess a relish for such a trail, through the rattling rust of ancient armour, the spell of great country houses and other symbols of authority. One may also trace Mr. Strachey's hereditary urge for literature, for there was a certain ancestor who “almost certainly knew Shakespeare” and “had a considerable amount of book-writing to his credit,” including “two or three pamphlets written by him and published as what we should now call 'Virginia Company propaganda.'” No light is thrown upon the heritage, guardian angel, or kind fate which was responsible for providing the adventurer at the outset of his journey with the most fortunate of all possessions, the temperament to “take the good the gods provide,” and for relieving him of all encumbrances in the way of “inferiority” and other complexes, which have become so fashionable a part of the modern adventurer's equipment.