At an early age Mr. Strachey yielded to the urge of poetry writing, and even had a book of verses printed by a local publisher, of which he says:
“The thing that strikes me most, on looking back at my little volume of verse, is its uncanny competence, not merely from the point of view of prosody, but of phraseology and what I may almost term scholarship.”
Omne ignotum pro magni- (or miri) fico. In spite of this he felt no great desire to adopt poetry-making as his profession.
“Possibly I thought the trade was a bad one for a second son who must support himself. It is more probable that I instinctively felt that although it was so great a source of joy to me, poetry was not my true vocation. Perhaps, also, I had already begun to note the voice of pessimism raised by the poets of the seventies, and to feel that they did not believe in themselves.”
“The pivot of my life has been The Spectator, and so The Spectator must be the pivot of my book.” His connection with it began when he was about twenty-six, after he had settled in London to study for the Bar. The book opens with an account of the spectacular success of his first adventure of writing for this journal. Armed with a formal introduction from his father, who had been a friend of the joint editors, Mr. Hutton and Mr. Townsend, and a frequent contributor to the paper, Mr. Strachey called at The Spectator office in Wellington Street and listened to the well-worn story—no less true thirty years ago than it is today—of “more outside reviewers than they could possibly find work for,” and received, out of friendship for his father alone, the choice of five volumes to notice. One of them was an edition of “Gulliver's Travels,” and it was destined to play a leading rôle in the adventure of John St. Loe Strachey. Nothing daunted by the indifferent encouragement, he promptly despatched the completed reviews, and in due time again presented himself at the office for the sole purpose of returning the books. Great was his amazement when, instead of a lukewarm reception, he was immediately asked to select anything he would like to review, from a new pile of books. When he protested that he had not come to ask for more books to review, he learned that the position of the editors had been entirely changed by the review of “Gulliver's Travels,” and “they hoped very much that I should be able to do regular work for The Spectator. I was actually hailed as 'a writer and critic of the first force.'” Even a stronger head might have been turned by such praise from such a source.
This, however, was only the first chapter of his successful adventure with The Spectator. Shortly afterwards, he received a letter from Mr. Hutton asking him to write a couple of leaders a week and some notes while Mr. Townsend was away for a holiday. His first leader brought a delighted response from Mr. Townsend, who requested him to remain as his assistant while Mr. Hutton was away, and soon afterward suggested,
“with a swift generosity that still warms my heart, that if I liked to give up the Bar, for which I was still supposing myself to be reading, I could have a permanent place at The Spectator, and even, if I remember rightly, hinted that I might look forward to succeeding the first of the two partners who died or retired, and so to becoming joint editor or joint proprietor.”
His second political leader, entitled the “Privy Council and the Colonies,” brought down even bigger game than the first. Fate, always the ally of Mr. Strachey, so arranged that Lord Granville, then Colonial Secretary, had been prevented by a fit of gout from preparing a speech which he was to deliver when he received the Agents-General of the self-governing Colonies, and he supplied the hiatus by beginning his speech with the words: “In a very remarkable article which appeared in this week's Spectator”—and then going on “to use the article as the foundation of his speech,” with the result that Mr. Hutton was “greatly delighted, and almost said in so many words that it wasn't every day that the editors of The Spectator could draw Cabinet Ministers to advertise their paper.”
So the “first two leaders had done the trick.” Still, as the young adventurer was soon to learn, it was possible for an aspirant to success to get by both editors, and even a Cabinet Minister, and still fail of entire recognition from the most critical member of The Spectator staff. Even this distinction, however, Mr. Strachey was destined promptly to achieve. “The last, the complete rite of initiation at The Spectator office,” occurred one day as he was talking over articles, when
“a large, consequential, not to say stout black tom-cat slowly entered the room, walked around me, sniffed at my legs in a suspicious manner, and then, to my intense amazement and amusement, hurled himself from the floor with some difficulty and alighted upon my shoulder.... The sagacious beast had realised that there was a new element in the office, and had come to inspect it and see whether he could give it his approval. When that approval was given, it was conceded by all concerned that the appointment had received its consecration.”