If, indeed, anything in the way of good fortune was wanting in the gifts of fate to the author of the autobiography, he was more than compensated by a disposition which made it easy for him to appreciate the good qualities of others, even of his mother-in-law—that usually most unappreciated of all human relations—and to live in unimpaired serenity in her family. Of her we are told that
“she was an admirable talker and full of clear and interesting memories. I had no sooner entered the Simpson house and family than I found that there were a hundred points of sympathy between us. She had known everybody in London who was worth knowing ... and had visited most of the political country houses in England on the Whig side, and most of the neutral strongholds.”
Aside from the chapters on his parents and old nurse, only a few glimpses are given of a normal and happy childhood passed in the good old days when ladies still had time to cultivate the art of correspondence—of which he says, “I have no time to dwell on my mother's most intimate friendship with Lady Waldegrave and with their habit of writing daily letters to each other.” The salient point of his childhood seems to be that he was saturated with precocity and filial piety. He was not quite so strong as other boys and was not sent to public school, and “the irony of accident,” he says, “had designed my mental equipment to be of a kind perfectly useless for the purposes of the preliminary Oxford examinations.” Knowledge of literature, a power of writing, a not inconsiderable reading in modern history, and a commendable grasp of mathematics were of no use whatever for the purpose of matriculation. So the youthful Strachey turned to Latin and Greek and finally entered Balliol as an unattached student. The first discord in the harmony of his relations with life was sounded when he became a student at Balliol, where he did not get on well with the Dons.
“I can say truthfully that I never received a word of encouragement, of kindly direction, or of sympathy of any sort or kind from any of them in regard to work or anything else. The reason, I now feel sure, was that they believed that to take notice of me would have only made me more uppish.”
His recollections of Jowett, the Master of Balliol, are tempered by the successes and the good fortune that have come to him in the intervening forty years, but he remains convinced that “the Master of Balliol evidently felt the Stracheyphobia very strongly, or perhaps I should say felt it his duty to express it very strongly.” The sarcasm that Jowett poured upon him on his return to Balliol after his first year as an unattached student still rankles. But in those early days there must have been an atmosphere of self-sufficiency, complacency, possibly one might be justified in saying conceit, that dissolved the testy Master's inhibitions.
Mr. Strachey is never tired of emphasising the good fortune of his friendships.
“I have no doubt I was considered odd by most of my contemporaries, but this oddness and also my inability to play football or cricket never seemed to create, as far as I could see, any prejudice. Indeed I think that my friends were quite discerning enough and quite free enough from convention to be amused and interested by a companion who was not built up in accordance with the sealed pattern.”
Nothing better illustrates his mental endowment and his cultural equipment as estimated by himself than this statement:
“In my day we would talk about anything, from the Greek feeling about landscape to the principles the Romans would have taken as the basis of actuarial tables, if they had had them. We unsphered Plato, we speculated as to what Euripides would have thought of Henry James, or whether Sophocles would have enjoyed Miss ——'s acting, and felt that it was of vital import to decide these matters.”
Good old days, indeed! We can imagine what the fate of the student at Harvard, let us say, would be today if he shaped his talk to indicate that “the most important thing in the world” was talk of this kind.