‘Have you noticed that one’s always waggling between two extremes – one’s own opinion of oneself, and everyone else’s? Sometimes I get so fascinated by the latter that I’m quite carried away and begin to act up to it, as if I really thought it true … We are all cupboards – with obvious outsides which may be either beautiful or ugly, simple or elaborate, interesting or unamusing – but with insides mysteriously the same – the abodes of darkness, terror and skeletons.’
Lytton Strachey to John Sheppard (1902)
Late Victorian Cambridge was a pretty market town in the Fen country populated by East Anglian shopkeepers who supplied the university. Bicycles, trams and horses shared the streets, gently coming and going as though in some holiday resort, while through the courts and quadrangles floated the strange crustacea of academic life. Students in their summer straw boaters, flannels and high collars, and professors in their brilliant plumage, paraded over the Palladian bridges and along the college lawns in a predominantly male procession.
For the fifth time in six years, Lytton faced the ordeal of being a new member of an unknown community. But on this occasion, owing partly to Walter Raleigh’s thoughtfulness, his solitude did not last long. At Cambridge he seemed to know from the first that he had entered a milieu which suited him. The civilized sunny atmosphere was wonderful after the damp breezes of Liverpool. His letters home are almost jovial: ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! How proud I was as I swept through the streets of Cambridge yesterday, arrayed for the first time in cap and gown!’ he wrote to his mother on 3 October. ‘To my great surprise and delight the gown is blue! Lovely!’ A fortnight later, he wrote again: ‘I am enjoying myself deeply … and am just beginning to enter into things. Everyone is the pique of politeness and kindness.’
After a few days, Lytton came across his Liverpool friend Lumsden Barkway, who was studying near by at the Westminster Theological College. In these weeks, before he made any new friends, the two of them would have tea in Lytton’s rooms. These rooms, like everything else at Cambridge, immediately delighted him. ‘They are very nice – on the 2nd floor – the sitting-room facing the Court [New Court], the bedroom the backs – with a beautiful view of weeping willows.’ The following term he was transferred to rather darker rooms on the ground floor of New Court. These he did not care for so much and since, in the opinion of his mother, they were detrimental to his health, arrangements were made early in 1901 for him to lodge at a set of first-floor attics on Staircase K (where Byron had rooms, in the topmost one of which he was said to have kept a bear) within the south-east corner turret of the Great Court of Trinity – ‘rather quaint with sloping roofs, etc.’ Here, in what for unknown reasons used to be known as ‘mutton-hole corner’, he remained for over four years.
Lytton’s tutor at Trinity was J.D. Duff’,1 nicknamed ‘Plum Duff. He ‘cooes like a dove’, Lytton told his mother, and was fond of long soothing conversations ‘chiefly about persons – ranging from Heine to Sidney Lee’. The professor from whom he learnt history, (Sir) Stanley Leathes – ‘Mr Stand-at-ease’2 – was ‘rather severe, and hideously ugly, but very much on the spot’. Every week Lytton took him an essay which he had to read aloud – a painful experience which he later turned to use as a means of testing his publications.
With his ungainly body, short sight and rather prim manner, Lytton was an intimidating undergraduate. ‘His impact upon Cambridge when he came up was of a man from a different planet,’ wrote H.O. Meredith, ‘human, but not of our humanity, who belonged in his speech, gestures, poses and opinions to no recognized category of adolescence or maturity. The Strachey “voice” (which became so deservedly famous: faint echoes of it are still discoverable in contemporary society) was only one of his “differentials”. His ways of standing, or sitting in a chair, or helping himself to bread and butter – briefly everything about him differentiated him from the crowd. The impression was not however (at least not primarily) one of originality; there was about him not much suggestion of a genius and still less of a crank. He gave rather the feeling of one who brought with him the ways and manners of an unsurmised and different civilization.’
Inevitably such a man charmed some and irritated others. The most usual reaction was to be more or less intrigued: here was a new animal in their midst, alien yet inoffensive, whom it was not easy to accept and impossible to ignore.
Despite the ripples of disturbance he produced, the Cambridge community, with its many vocational bachelors,3 accommodated Lytton far better than anything he had yet experienced. Within a few weeks he had struck up several new friendships; and during the six years he was there, the number of his friends increased as his influence within the university widened. These companionships were often lifelong and, as Desmond MacCarthy observed, very like loves.
*
Early in Lytton’s second term, he and four other undergraduates marshalled themselves into a small society which met in Clive Bell’s rooms. ‘The Reading Club consists of 5 members,’ Lytton wrote to his mother soon after its formation (February 1900). ‘Myself, Robertson,4 Sydney-Turner (very distinguished and with immense knowledge of English Literature), Bell (a curious mixture of sport and reading) and Woolf (nothing particular). Last night we read J[ohn] G[abriel] B[orkman] – my Foldal being considered very life-like. I died of internal laughter every 5 minutes … They are all very amusing and pleasant.’
With Robertson, whom he originally described as ‘a most entertaining personage … very tall, with a round cherubic face’, Lytton’s friendship did not develop far after he made the discovery that his father was a clergyman. But he quickly introduced into the group a sixth member, Thoby Stephen, who, he told his mother (18 October 1899), ‘looked a charmer, and the image of the others5… He is rather strange but I think sensible and the best I have yet met.’
They called themselves the Midnight Society since it was their custom to meet each Saturday night at twelve o’clock. Having first strengthened themselves ‘with whisky or punch and one of those gloomy beef-steak pies which it was the fashion to order for Sunday lunch’, Clive Bell recounts, they would proceed ‘to read aloud some such trifle as Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, The Return of the Druses, Bartholomew Fair or Comus. As often as not it was dawn by the time we had done; and sometimes we would issue forth to perambulate the courts and cloisters, halting on Hall steps to spout passages of familiar verse, each following his fancy as memory served.’
Perhaps the most unlikely member of the group was Clive Bell himself. ‘A gay and amiable dog’, as Maynard Keynes described him, he seemed a ‘mixture between Shelley and a sporting country squire’ according to Thoby Stephen. Before baldness had begun prematurely to advance, his hair was luxuriant golden-brown above a spacious, pink and polished face and most of his friends belonged to the hunting and shooting set.
When Bell was his natural breezy self, flamboyantly holding forth in his ‘so-happy-that-I-don’t-care-whether-I-impress-you-or-not’ sort of mood, Lytton thought him splendid, writing after one evening together: ‘He was divine – in a soft shirt, & hair & complexion that lifted me & my penis to the heights of heaven. Oh! Oh! Oh!’ In due course Bell planned to deliver himself of a magnum opus on modernism, the importance of which seemed to justify its eternal postponement. The grandeur of these aspirations displeased Lytton, whose own romantic ideals they parodied: ‘He’s really rather a mystery,’ he told Leonard Woolf (July 1905), ‘– what can be his raison d’être? He takes himself in deadly earnest, I’ve discovered, as Art Critic and litterateur. Very queer – and he likes, or says he likes, such odd things – Gluck, Racine, Pope and Gibbon. If it’s mere imitation of us, the question remains – why the dickens should he imitate us?’
Booming and rubicund, Bell was unrestrained in general conversation. After knowing him for some five or six years, Lytton concluded (1 July 1905) that:
‘his character has several layers, but it is difficult to say which is the fond. There is the country gentleman layer, which makes him retire into the depths of Wiltshire to shoot partridges. There is the Paris decadent layer, which takes him to the quartier latin where he discusses painting and vice with American artists and French models. There is the eighteenth-century layer, which adores Thoby Stephen. There is the layer of innocence which adores Thoby’s sister. There is the layer of prostitution, which shows itself in an amazing head of crimped straw-coloured hair. And there is the layer of stupidity, which runs transversely through all the other layers.’
Clive Bell got to know the original members of the group through Saxon Sydney-Turner, whose rooms were near his own, and he soon became friendly with Thoby Stephen. The presence within this intellectual fraternity of someone like Thoby Stephen, with his athletic prowess and love of the open air, must have facilitated Clive Bell’s bold faltering footsteps into the world of the literati. The two of them would smoke cigars and discuss points of hunting, watched by the others with a mingling of envy and disapproval. ‘Lytton, however, liked us for that,’ Clive Bell shrewdly observed; while Leonard Woolf noticed that ‘in those early days, and indeed for many years afterwards, intellectually Clive sat at the feet of Lytton and Thoby’.
Thoby Stephen was the elder son of Sir Leslie Stephen. Over six feet tall and of a somewhat ponderous build, he had a physical magnificence that put some of his friends in mind of Samuel Johnson, without the Doctor’s infirmities yet with the same monumental good sense. He was a frequent target of hero-worship. It was really his masculinity that enchanted Lytton. In a letter (1 July 1905) written to an Oxford undergraduate, B.W. Swithinbank, he describes the admiration Thoby inspired in him: ‘He has a wonderful and massive frame, and a face hewn out of the living rock. His character is as splendid as his appearance, and as wonderfully complete. In fact, he’s monolithic. But, if it were not for his extraordinary sense of humour, he would hardly be of this world. We call him the Goth; and when you see him I’m sure you’ll agree that he’s a survival of barbaric grandeur. He’ll be a judge of great eminence, and, in his old age, a sombre family potentate. One day we composed each other’s epitaphs. He said that mine should be “The Universal Exception”; and mine for him was “The Forlorn Hope”.’
Lytton idealized Thoby. Different in almost every respect from himself, he represented what was unattainable in life. He seemed the perfect human specimen, an aesthetic ideal. ‘Don’t you think that if God had to justify the existence of the world,’ he asked Leonard Woolf, ‘it would be done if he were to produce the Goth?’
In Leonard Woolf the Midnight Society had a freshman who was, so he later explained, in a curious psychological state. Having inherited a highly-strung intellect from his father, and rejected his mother’s squeamish sentimentality, he was growing up a rather dry, nervously repressed young man, in appearance lean, with a long nose, sombre eyes and pale ascetic lips. The pendulum of his emotions appeared to swing through a fairly small arc, but in moments of stress they found an outlet in the involuntary trembling of his hands. To Lytton’s relief, he never believed in God, and considered the whole paraphernalia of prayer as ‘one of the oddest freaks in human psychology’.
It was Woolf whom Lytton singled out to act as his confessor, the reliable friend to whom, during his first three years at Cambridge, he confided his secret passions. This outlet to his feelings provided a relief which his early diaries had failed to give him. For diaries, as he now knew, tended to redouble one’s self-preoccupation. Through communion with a sympathetic friend, he hoped to lose part of his isolation. The reasoning was sound; and the choice of Leonard Woolf was partially successful. He had much to recommend him – a good brain, a lack of prejudice, a detachment of manner, an impressive honesty. But his puritanism stood as an obstacle to complete and spontaneous confidence. Often Lytton would tease him about it, suggesting that he should join a League for the Advancement of Social Purity, or refusing to send him ‘an Etude quasi sadiste’ which he had written, ‘as I’m afraid you might think it improper’. Leonard Woolf reacted indignantly to such jibes. But whenever Lytton tested him with some specially obscene piece of gossip, he would sense Leonard’s fractional recoil. ‘It is hopeless,’ he told his brother James, his next confessor but one, ‘– what can one expect in even a remote future, when Woolf thinks that people ought to be “punished” for incest?’
The remaining member of the Midnight Society, Saxon Sydney-Turner, was still-born into the Midnight. ‘When I first knew him he was a wild and unrestrained freshman,’ Lytton remembered, ‘who wrote poems, never went to bed, and declaimed Swinburne and Sir Thomas Browne till four o’clock in the morning in the Great Court at Trinity. He is now … quite pale and inanimate, hardly more than an incompletely galvanized dead body.’ To those who had not known him early on he seemed an automaton of a man, endlessly crossword puzzling and opera-accumulating as he moved indecisively through the shadows until the last years of his life when, in retirement from the Treasury, he took disastrously to gambling. With the members of the Midnight Society he would talk on subjects of the greatest tedium, such as the use by Tacitus of the dative case. Everything around him was static. The furniture in his room never moved. He ate little, without relish, infrequently. He was short, thin, with an anaemic pallor and fading hair.
At times Lytton felt that he might go under in the same way as his friend. ‘It would never do to become Turnerian,’ he wrote to his brother James (October 1912), ‘and I feel it’s a danger that hangs over all of us.’ To Saxon himself a few years earlier he had written: ‘Time and Space for you do not exist, and perhaps not for me either, who feel myself fleeting towards your philosophy. What this is you have never told me, but it occurred to me the other day, and though it made me feel very ill, perhaps I agree.’
Occasionally Lytton and the others would catch a glimpse of the Saxon they first knew. ‘He looks sometimes’, wrote Leonard Woolf, ‘like a little schoolboy whom life has bullied into unconsciousness;’ while to Lytton he appeared ‘like some puzzled night-animal blinking in the unaccustomed daylight’. So they stayed loyal to him, though in their fashion denouncing him violently to his other friends.
One other companion Lytton met during his first months at Trinity. This was the historian, George Trevelyan, who was some four years older than himself and from a similar West Country landed dynasty. He would be invited over to Trevelyan’s rooms for breakfast and a lengthy walk; and when he inquired whether he might enjoy the food without the exercise, was told: ‘No walk, no breakfast.’ Lytton thought him rather earnest, ‘and somewhat patristic towards me’, as he told his sister Pernel.
Sometimes the two of them went off bicycling together, Trevelyan talking about Cromwell, Milton, Cardinal Newman, Oxford and the Early Christians. ‘He is most friendly and kind,’ Lytton wrote to his mother (March 1900), ‘and very like what I imagined his father to be.’6 But in time, this kindness, with its overtones of avuncular authority – so welcome when he still felt lonely and unknown in Cambridge – began to pall. He seemed set on a career as the nation’s chronicler that would crown him Historian Laureate. He was gravely methodical, and rather tedious too when taking it on himself to explain that the pleasure which people derived from dancing came from the legitimate physical contact it afforded partners of the opposite sex. Lytton did not dance. Besides it was impossible as yet to explain that his preference lay in contact with his own sex.
During the Easter term of 1900, there was always something happening. Lytton went to hear Stephen Phillips read his Paolo and Francesca7 in a sonorous monotone which hushed the jangling ornaments of his female audience, but sent Lytton off to sleep. Less soporific, though rather more disagreeable, was a Newnham lecture given by Edmund Gosse on Leigh Hunt. ‘Law! He did think himself clever!’ Lytton wrote to Pernel. ‘After 3 sentences he suddenly said, “I was never in such a draught in the whole course of my life!” Katherine [Stephen] and Sharpley ran forward and screwed ventilators (apparently). After a long time he said, “Oh, it really doesn’t matter.” Grossly rude, I thought.’ Every Wednesday and Thursday, he attended lectures on Early Florentine Art given by Roger Fry. ‘These are very interesting and good though somewhat abstruse,’ he told his mother (15 May 1900).
When the summer vacation came he joined his family at a country house they had rented at Kingston Lisle Park, ‘in the Berkshire downs near the White Horse,’ he wrote to Lumsden Barkway, ‘– a beautiful park and beautiful country.’ While here, during the hot weather of July, he was assailed by violent palpitations of the heart. A doctor was called to examine him, but could find no specific cause for these attacks, which he put down to ‘nerves’.* Sir Richard Strachey was also laid up at the time, and two nurses moved into the house, which was converted into a makeshift sanatorium. Doses of digitalis and bromide were prescribed for Lytton. ‘The disease is mysterious’, he explained to Lumsden Barkway from his sick-bed, ‘– of no very definite nature – fainting and general weakness. Nothing is radically wrong say the doctors, but it has been settled that I shall not go back to Cambridge next term so as to make a complete recovery. This is I suppose the wisest thing – but I am very, very sad at the thought of it.’
Instead of returning to Cambridge that autumn he was mewed in by female relatives who forbade him all exertion, even reading. ‘Everyone and thing missed you last term,’ wrote Leonard Woolf, to whom, in his letterless condition within Lancaster Gate, Lytton had cried out for the lifeblood of Trinity gossip, ‘and I am sure the temporary death of the Midnight Society might have been avoided if we had had you to back up those members who are not afraid of late hours.’
By the middle of October he felt better. He had been moved to a nursing home in Queen’s Gate Terrace8 where Dr Roland Brinton, the family physician, gave him a thorough examination before reporting to Lady Strachey (18 October 1900) that he could ‘have a little light literature – after the business of the day is over – and before it is time for him to settle down for the night. He still has occasional attacks of palpitations – and his heart certainly has a tumultuous action – but I can find no reason to think that there is any structural disease there. So I feel fairly confident that all his uncomfortable sensations will disappear. He likes a little claret – but a pint bottle lasts him two days – so there is no excess.’
After six weeks Lytton’s weight increased from nine to eleven stone, his old clothes now failing conspicuously to meet across his manly chest. ‘I feel much stronger,’ he assured Lumsden Barkway (23 November 1900), ‘– but not yet quite natural or ordinary – something of a portent or monster still … last Summer still remains a nightmare.’
At the beginning of December he went down to St-Jean-de-Luz, near Biarritz, in the Basses Pyrénées. His mother went with him, and having deposited him at the Hôtel d’Angleterre and introduced him to some cousins living near by, she returned to England.
There was little to do but write letters. ‘The only man of amusement (barring a decayed millionaire and a gouty Baron)’, he wrote to Leonard Woolf, ‘is an Oxford person who teaches little boys and in intervals writes poems for the Spectator … He gives me his poems to read (bad enough), and good advice (rather worse) and his views on Shakespeare (quite ridiculous). We talked the other day of people we should like to meet – I mentioned Cleopatra. He said, “I should rather see Our Lord to anyone else.” I had to reply, “Oh, I put him on one side as inhuman.”
‘The people at the hotel are more than fearful. I often wish I was a snake and could wriggle on the ground.’
The few residents of the hotel would seat themselves for meals at a long table and stare hopelessly into a looking-glass past tall pots with strangled chrysanthemums peeping out and a few bleak cruet-stands. At breakfast, lunch and dinner Lytton listened to monotonous golf and social gossip. ‘I have no one on my right,’ he wrote to Lumsden Barkway, ‘on my left an old Irish squire of sorts – dull as ditchwater but good-natured enough – as I suppose all dullards are. He repeats indefinitely, and I dare say winds himself up before he hops into bed at night. Next him an old maid – very thin, and rather pitiful, then her two nieces – vulgar, very good, and very, very stupid. Poor people! At the head of the table a Captain (Caulfield by name) in the Navy – but I believe the Marines – or even Horse Marines. Terrible! Impossible to mention anyone who is not his bosom friend. As conceited as a cock-a-doodle-do, and as brainless. These are the English inhabitants of this house. Oh! I’ve forgotten one – Miss Roper, who looks like a governess, but who isn’t, and wears curious tails to her jackets, and talks sensibly enough. I fear I am rude to some of them sometimes. I often want to make faces, and sometimes do – when nobody’s looking.’
The town itself, with its old narrow streets, its quay, its square, and the ancient galleried church where Louis XIV was married, delighted him. But nothing happened there. Sometimes he would go for long walks to surrounding villages and ‘once I got on a merry-go-round at a fair and revolved to my heart’s content’. His happiest hours were spent bicycling among the hills. One day he went by train to Biarritz which, as a fashionable seaside resort, had a splendid sea-front with magnificent waves coming up in a continual procession. ‘Their thunder was enormous, and their foam beautiful,’ he wrote to Lumsden Barkway.
‘… Talking of great volumes of sound, isn’t it extraordinary that some poetry really makes as much noise as anything else? I mean Milton for instance – the quantity of sound appears to me often as vast as that of a full symphony of Beethoven or the enormous roaring of the sea …
Coming back in the train the sunset was miraculous – hardly credible – dark purply grey – rose – pale saffron – altogether with the mountains an effect of great peace. I wondered why all the heads I passed were not turned towards it – but nature grows familiar and so I suppose contemptible to country-dwellers – and this is one of the advantages of travelling – one is woken up to the marvel of things.’
Lytton’s days were made congenial by the hospitality of his cousins, Mrs King9 – Lady Strachey’s first cousin – Irish and gay and bright, and her daughter Janie – married to a young Irishman named McGusty – an amusing girl with gold hair and a pink-and-white complexion. They introduced him to some of the inhabitants at St-Jean-de-Luz including several bachelors ‘or people who ought to be bachelors – generals, bankers, loungers of all sorts. The man of business is Bellairs – half French and half English – talks French with an English accent, and English with a French, as Janie says, lays down the law on everything, says “damn it my dear fellow” a good deal, and is altogether a windy but not unimaginative fool … Have I mentioned Mr Penny? a commercial gentleman staying here with a wife and child. He has, as he says, “knocked about all over the world”, and now I suppose is settling down. His wife leads a sad life I fear, for even to us he is liable to give long lectures on the Roman Catholic religion and how to drive an omnibus. He is a Master of Platitude.’
Chaperoned by his cousins, Lytton went off once a week to play roulette which he described as ‘very soothing’. On one occasion a tremor of excitement went around at the arrival of ex-Queen Nathalie of Serbia, at that time living in retirement near by. Lytton marked the waves of thrilled obsequiousness produced by her regal entry:
‘As the game was proceeding, suddenly “la Reine” was whispered, and everyone rising to their feet, Her Majesty, accompanied by her suite, entered the apartment. She looked pleasant and stupid – rather bulky and well-dressed – stayed for so long that I was late for dinner and consequently fined a franc and relegated to a side-table. People kissed her gloved hand when saying How-do-you-do, and curtseyed and shook hands at the same time on her leaving. I must say if I were a retired sovereign I should give up such airs and graces, and try to slip into a room like an ordinary mortal.’
On 9 January 1901 Lytton travelled back to London and a little later returned to Trinity where the Midnight Society resumed its nocturnal readings, Lytton taking the part of Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. He was now studying Walter Pater. ‘As for Pater,’ he wrote to Lumsden Barkway, ‘though I have not read much of him he appears to me so deathly – no motion, no vigour – a waxen style … And after all does he say so very much that is worth hearing? In short I do not like the man.’ In the vacation his mother read to him from The Ring and the Book, which pleased him more. ‘What a work!’ he commented. ‘No one but R[obert] B[rowning] could ever have dreamt of writing it.’ With Henry James, whose early novels Lady Strachey was also fond of reading aloud, he was even more fascinated, opening one of his letters to Leonard Woolf in imitation of the master:
‘In settling the great question, at any rate, is there more than one answer of the many which, as a serious solution, can add more than nothing to an after all admitted ignorance? Do not, in their hubbub, the thousand vociferations only succeed in missing the failure by which they are self-condemned by satisfactorily proving even to the least experienced auditor the correctness of the one? Will you not agree that boredom is, essentially, life? Sleep, I think, and death are the only states of which a limited consciousness can speak without it.’
That year Lytton passed the summer holidays with his family at Cuffnells, a country house with vast gardens, near Lyndhurst, ten miles from Southampton. Much of this time was occupied in writing an essay on Warren Hastings for the Greaves Prize at Trinity (which he failed to win), and in attempting to learn German. In his solitary moments he was ‘reading Keats in raptures’ and going off for long walks in the Hampshire countryside. His happiness over these weeks was increased by the presence of the Stephen family, including the radiant Thoby, whom he saw several times, once at a fair where the Goth was sporting himself very splendidly among village boys and coconuts. ‘Here it is delicious,’ he told Leonard Woolf, ‘the New Forest – beautiful trees and weather. The Goth within five miles with his family. It is a school they live in, and the Goth at night retreats to the dormitory where he magnificently sleeps among the small surrounding beds.’
Once or twice he was invited across by Thoby to the Stephen schoolhouse where, for the first time, he met Thoby’s two aloof and lovely sisters, Vanessa – later to marry Clive Bell – and Virginia – who subsequendy married Leonard Woolf – together with Adrian, their brother, and the awe-inspiring Leslie Stephen – ‘quite deaf and rather dangerous’ – who insisted on Lytton repeating all his falsetto remarks down a formidable ear-trumpet.10 ‘It is a nice though wild family,’ Lytton reported to Leonard Woolf, ‘– 2 sisters very pretty – a younger brother Adrian, and Leslie with his ear-trumpet and tam-o’-shanter. What is rather strange is the old man – older than he really is – among so young a family. He is well kept in check by them, and they are well bustled by him. They know each other very well I think.’
For the Christmas vacation of 1901, Lytton was packed off to the Villa Himalaya, above Menton in the South of France with two of his sisters, Dorothy and Marjorie. The blue sea, the sky and the hills were so enchanting that he dreaded returning to England. ‘This is heavenly! Yes, heavenly! The best of what one imagines the Riviera!’ he enthused to Lumsden Barkway (on 29 December 1901). ‘… Mountains! Yes! And some with snow! They tower! The sea glows and shimmers and swells! The sky is a marvel! … we continue our rounds of pleasure – among which I don’t think I mentioned to you the fascination of food. Omelettes! Wines – sparkling and sweet like ginger-beer! Rolls! All quite absolute! Especially after one has been toiling on legs or donkeys up precipitous paths under tropical suns. One falls on food voracious as lions.’ In such conditions the first necessity was idleness. It was a time for dreaming rather than work. ‘I turned the Cape the other day, and there was Monte Carlo,’ he wrote to Leonard Woolf. ‘One wouldn’t go there.’ All the same, he went there several times, gambled and lost a little, listened to the orchestra, took his ease in the Royal Palace, and saw the delicious orangeries – trees crowded together on bright grass and the wall dropping to the sea a thousand feet below.
Out of the idleness and dreaming emerged a riotous three-act tragedy to be performed by the Midnight Society in the Lent term. But writing did not come easily. ‘The air is strangely lowering,’ he told Leonard Woolf who had inquired after the progress of the play. ‘I write the tragedy and walk – either strollingly or up steep hills to absurd villages.’ A favourite destination was Eze-en-haut, which hangs dramatically from a cliff top between Cap Ferrat and Monte Carlo. ‘There are the ruins of a Moorish Castle there,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘also the foundations of a temple to Isis, now converted to a Church to the Holy Virgin.’ One other village also caught his imagination. This was Castellar, ‘in the depths – or heights? – of the hills. Very small and pleasant. With 4,000 children all shrieking and yelling – also a damp, tinsel R.C. Church – also one room of a mediaeval palace belonging to a family whose last descendant was hung from its own window in the time of the Revolution.’
With his sisters he crossed the frontier into Italy reaching the old Roman post, Ventimiglia. ‘Italy pleases me,’ he wrote to Leonard Woolf.
‘But everything is strange, almost lurid with contrasts, and the sense of abounding life. Coming down a winding hill-road through a valley, we heard the other day the noises of a butchery. The surroundings were so bathed in country peace, the sky was so blue, the vegetation so green and florid, that the sound struck as a horror. I imagined, in some recess, whence – believe it! – rose shouts of fiendish human exultations, an obscene and reeking sacrifice to a still remembered pagan god. Above us perhaps loomed (beneath the walls of Madonna’s edifice) the hoary temple of Isis; who knows whether through the remoteness of these secluded years some worship had not lingered; some mystic propitiation and reconciliation of the hideous mysteries of life and death.’
The death of the Midnight Society11 was hastened by the regular week-end visits from London of three former undergraduates, Desmond MacCarthy, Bertrand Russell and E.M. Forster, all of whom got to know Lytton well during his early years at Cambridge. After the conversation of MacCarthy, especially, it was difficult to carry on with the formality of prepared literary readings. He would bring along his friend, the philosopher G.E. Moore, not primarily to debate questions of philosophy but to play with gusto upon the piano and to sing. After this musical entertainment, MacCarthy himself would come forward with a string of stories, often admittedly unfinished, but always ending in laughter. When he and Moore had done with their cabaret performance, the volumes of Bartholomew Fair and The Cenci remained unopened.
MacCarthy’s reputation as a brilliant raconteur was partly rooted in his skill as a practised listener. He achieved the feat of talking just enough to suggest a beguiling flow of story telling, and was at his best with people to whom he owed no special obligation. On these Saturday visits to Trinity, the apparent play of his soft Irish humour, the seeming grace and quickness of his speech, cast round him a haze of geniality.
In later years, as literary editor of The Speaker, the New Quarterly and the New Statesman he was punctilious in giving his friends commissions. But other reviewers were sometimes reduced to despair by his invariably courteous procrastination; and one of them, A.G. Macdonell, was eventually moved to retaliate with a satirical portrait of him as Charles Ossory in his celebrated comic novel, England, Their England.
MacCarthy soon took to Lytton and began to draw him out. But it was a long business. At first Lytton remained suspicious. He had an automatic disdain for those who could command instant popularity, and did not feel really at home in MacCarthy’s vague and expansive presence. MacCarthy’s stories, while they lasted, soothed him. But when they trailed off, and MacCarthy left, he felt the burden of his solitude reinforced. ‘The curious thing,’ Lytton observed, ‘is that when one’s with him it all seems very amusing, and that afterwards one can only look back on a dreary waste.’ In a letter to Maynard Keynes (18 November 1905), he described the same paradox. ‘He’s a curious figure – very dull and amusing. Also rather desolate.’ This feeling of desolation arose from the sense that talking with MacCarthy meant little more than carrying on an animated dialogue with oneself – in Lytton’s case the one person from whom he wished to escape.
But gradually he thawed. ‘I liked him much better than before,’ he was able to tell Leonard Woolf by the end of 1904. ‘He seemed to understand a good deal, and want to be liked.’ ‘The thing is to keep him off literature,’ Lytton later explained to Virginia Woolf, ‘and insist on his doing music-hall turns: if only he’d make that his profession he’d make thousands. Can’t you see him coming on in a macintosh?’
Bertrand Russell, who used to travel down with MacCarthy at weekends, was, in the opinion of D.H. Lawrence, ‘all Disembodied Mind’. Actually the dazzling clarity of his mind was to be exceeded by the violence of his moral and sexual passions. He had, in James Strachey’s phrase, a ‘most marvellous mental apparatus’, his intelligence appearing to shine through his large dark eyes. But as a young man he suffered greatly from loneliness, abandoning himself to the beauty of mathematics ‘because it is not human’.
Later on, reading Eminent Victorians in Brixton gaol, Russell was to record that, ‘It caused me to laugh so loud that the officer came to my cell, saying I must remember that prison is a place of punishment.’12 But his amusement did not blind him to other facets of Lytton’s writing – the rhetorical flourishes borrowed from Macaulay, the girls’ school sentimentality. It may have been, as James Strachey believed, that he resented the greater influence of G.E. Moore over Lytton. Moore would sometimes rebuke Desmond MacCarthy for inviting Russell to his reading parties during the Cambridge vacations, feeling that his own patient method of analysis was disrupted by Russell’s quick-fire arguments. Russell must have been aware of this coolness. He once asked him: ‘You don’t like me, do you, Moore?’ Moore deliberated for several minutes, and then replied with a pregnant monosyllable: ‘No.’ After which the two philosophers went on chatting amiably enough. Russell never actively disliked Moore, but he seems to have considered that Lytton perverted Moore’s ethics so as to exalt his own homosexuality.
He disliked, too, the arrogant tone which Lytton sometimes assumed in these undergraduate days and the deliberate affectation with which he fashioned his idiosyncrasies into a subtly pervasive style.
This style also disconcerted E.M. Forster. His alarming silences, spread like an eiderdown over frivolous chatter, and the piercing little shrieks with which he would greet any vaguely mystical observation unnerved Forster who was already, as Maynard Keynes described him, ‘the elusive colt of a dark horse’. He reacted towards Lytton with the wariness of unspoken intimacy. In some of his letters to mutual friends, Lytton criticized Forster fiercely – his quaint timidity, his old-maidish liberalism. But what he really objected to was having a mirror held up to the more negative features of his own image. ‘Excessive paleness is what I think worries me most,’ he wrote to Leonard Woolf. ‘The Taupe [Forster] in his wonderful way I imagine saw this about me, and feeling that he himself verged upon the washed-out, shuddered.’
Forster was by no means the only person to be criticized in Lytton’s correspondence. No one escapes. It is the writing of someone hypersensitive and insecure. Surrounded by many new friends, Lytton could never be certain that they liked him or be sure that he admired them for liking him. There is often something forced about his relationships. He is impatient for intimacy, on guard against rejection. His life, after coming up to Trinity, was for the most part dominated by two types of people. There was the young man who, approximating to his ideal, excited his lust and adoration; there was the person to whom he confessed these feelings, and on whose sympathy, commiseration and encouragement he relied. Sometimes variations appear in the pattern and the borderline between these two is not distinct.
Among others who shared the risky distinction of appearing in Lytton’s correspondence were C.P. Sanger,13 a gnomelike figure with bright sceptical eyes, rather older than Lytton, who had shown exceptional promise at Trinity and was now a barrister; Walter Lamb who was ‘like a fellow with one leg who’s not only quite convinced that he’s got two but boasts of his walking exploits’; R.C. Trevelyan (usually referred to as Bob Trevy), the whimsical, bookish poet and elder brother of George Trevelyan, whose poetry no one liked and whose personality was ‘amusing but vague to a degree’; and J.E. McTaggart, the redoubtable Hegelian philosopher, whose rooms Lytton, in company with Leonard Woolf, Saxon Sydney-Turner and a few other chosen undergraduates, would visit every Thursday evening. McTaggart14 was a shy immobile figure with an artillery of rapid talk as well as a limitless capacity for provocative silence. An atheist who believed in God, he intrigued Lytton until, coming under the greater influence of G.E. Moore, he was to see him off in four lines:
McTaggart’s seen through god
And put him on the shelf;
Isn’t it rather odd
He doesn’t see through himself.
After matriculating in the autumn of 1899, Lytton was made an Exhibitioner the following year. In between the meetings of the Midnight and other societies, he was reading history in a rather desultory manner, and in June 1901 he took the first part of his History Tripos. ‘My tripos begins tomorrow,’ he wrote to his mother (21 May 1901), ‘and lasts till Thursday. I am calm and with the aid of chocolate will I hope weather it.’ To the general disappointment, he obtained only a Second Class. ‘It was exactly what I expected’, he wrote to Lumsden Barkway, ‘– and I think on the whole inevitable.’
Early in the Lent term he embarked on his most ambitious exercise in verse. Entitled ‘Ely: An Ode’, the piece was written for the Chancellor’s Medal which is awarded each year for the best ode or poem in heroic verse and of less than two hundred lines submitted by a resident undergraduate. ‘Ely’ is set in the strophes, antistrophes and epode of the Pindaric metre. The subject of Lytton’s entry was the cathedral of Ely, and throughout the composition one feels that he is on his very best behaviour. It is the only Cambridge poem in which he addresses God with a capital ‘G’. Characteristically he left himself very little time to complete this ode. ‘Ely, if it is, will have to be written by next Saturday,’ he told his mother (26 January 1902). But all went well and the next month he learnt that he had won the award, narrowly beating Sheppard of King’s into second place.15 ‘I could dance with joy,’ Lady Strachey wrote to him from Lancaster Gate, ‘and we are all in the greatest delight.’16 On 2 June the family came up to Cambridge and heard him read his winning ode in the Senate House.
Despite his Second Class, he was elected to a Scholarship at Trinity, receiving a homily from G.M. Trevelyan that stressed his obligation to ‘do credit to us’. He must ‘get a First now’, Trevelyan insisted (22 March 1902). ‘To do that, you will have to work reasonably hard … Your answers are all essays – clever essays to cover a good deal of ignorance. Please regard yourself as married to the College and to History – bigamy has its duties as well as privileges.’ His fellow scholar was Thoby Stephen. ‘The ceremony was not particularly impressive,’ he informed his mother (28 April 1902), ‘in fact particularly absurd. We all had to be dressed in black and white ties and bands – mystical articles which much increased the ludicrosity of the performance. We all assembled at the Lodge first, where the Master received us in his usual charming method. We then proceeded to Chapel. Various grinning dons occupied the pews. Each scholar advanced and read aloud his names in a book, and then knelt down on both knees before the Master, placing his hands between his, while he (the M) said in Latin, “I admit thee a scholar of the College.” But the whole thing was hurried over as quickly as possible – no pomp or even pomposity.’
It was generally expected that Lytton would obtain a First Class in Part II of the History Tripos and then go on to become a Fellow of the College. Already, by the autumn of 1902, he had a particular Fellowship dissertation in mind and asked his mother to find out from Sir John Strachey – the author of Hastings and the Rohilla War (1892) – whether he considered Warren Hastings and the Begums of Oude a good subject. Neither his uncle’s book, nor the work of the other great champion of Hastings, James Fitzjames Stephen, dealt with the charge made against Hastings in the House of Lords that he had engineered the despoliation of the Begums of Oude, the mother and grandmother of the reigning Vizier. ‘Lytton’s idea seems to me an excellent one,’ his uncle replied. ‘With the exception of Stephen’s Nundkomar17 and my own Rohillas there has been, in my belief, little or no original research into the history of these times. I never looked into the great mass of Hastings’s papers at the British Museum or the India Office Records for any time after that with which I was concerned, but there can be no doubt that they are a mine out of which a vast amount of knowledge can be dug.’
Lytton took the second part of the History Tripos in the early summer of 1903, and once again, to everyone’s dismay, he obtained only Second Class Honours. In a letter to Lady Strachey (30 June 1903), J.D. Duff described the result as coming as a complete surprise. ‘That he is a First Class man is a point on which I feel no doubt at all,’ he wrote. ‘Of course I have never seen his work, except an Essay on Warren Hastings some years ago; but I judge from our personal intercourse, and say that in quality of intellect he is superior to any pupil I have had in my four years; and I have had dozens of Firsts and Double Firsts.
‘Nor do I think it was a matter of health. He was not pressed for time: most men have only one year for the second part of the Tripos: and he kept well during the two years and I don’t mink he suffered during the examination.
‘From what he has said to me, I believe the real reason to be that his Tripos involved a good deal of task work, books to be got up and definite facts to remember, and that he did not do this work. I had no notion of this beforehand, though perhaps I should have found it out.’
Though Lytton affected not to care much about the Tripos result, a Double Second could well influence Fellowship Electors against him. They were a body of about sixteen dons representing all subjects, and all keen for their own candidates. Two, probably, would represent history; but all heard the evidence for each candidate before voting. ‘I think Lytton might do so good a Dissertation as to overcome this prejudice,’ Duff told Lady Strachey, ‘but it will undoubtedly be felt and expressed.’
Lady Strachey was also anxious lest this indifferent degree should impede his entry into the Civil Service, her original choice of career for him when he was applying to Balliol and one which she now revived. Cambridge at this time trained a large proportion of its undergraduates for careers in public service, and several of Lytton’s friends were conscripted into some branch of the Civil Service – A.R. Ainsworth, Ralph Hawtrey and Robin Mayor going to the Education Office; Theodore Llewelyn Davies and Saxon Sydney-Turner to the Treasury; Maynard Keynes for a couple of years to the India Office; and Leonard Woolf, for seven years, to the Ceylon Civil Service. Competition was keen and most successful applicants had been awarded Firsts or Double Firsts. ‘Personally,’ wrote G.M. Trevelyan to Keynes, ‘I think it most distressing the way the civil service swallows nearly all the best Cambridge men.’
Lytton felt no desire to join the Civil Service. His mother, however, wanted him to join the Board of Education, as it was then called, and Lytton appeared to fall in with her wishes. For the next few months she waged an energetic campaign on his behalf, knowing that these things were still largely arranged by private influence. While his parents were sending letters to their friends and relations, Lytton busied himself getting testimonials from the dons under whom he had studied. These letters of recommendation are naturally flattering. But, after allowances are made for the spirit of helpfulness normally motivating such testimonials, they do seem to show that he was held in high esteem. J.D. Duff, more well-meaning than well-informed, wrote again along the lines of his earlier letter to Lady Strachey. Stanley Leathes, who had been an examiner for both parts of the History Tripos, wrote of him as an undergraduate whose abilities deserved a higher place than that recorded in his examination results:
‘He is a man of unusually wide culture, of considerable originality, and unusual literary gifts … he is in every sense a well-educated man, and worthy to rank with first-class men, as is shown by his being elected to a Scholarship to Trinity. I think that his intelligence, wide reading, versatility, and cultivation would render him a good public servant in the Education Department. His intellectual capacity is far above his University degree.’
From the University of Glasgow, where he was now Professor of English Language and Literature, Walter Raleigh added a more personal note in support of Lytton’s application:
‘I have known Mr Strachey for years and I cannot think of anyone among my numerous past pupils, whom I should prefer to him for work requiring ability, tact and judgement. He has a mind of rare power and distinction, a character of great decision, and a temper so reasonable and gentle that it is a delight to work with him. I hope that he may be successful in obtaining the appointment that he seeks, where I am sure he would quickly gain the confidence and esteem of all who should have to do with him.’
The briefest and least helpful testimonial was provided by William Cunningham, a Trollopian clergyman, later Archdeacon of Ely, known as ‘Parson Bill’, who had succeeded Stanley Leathes as Lytton’s director of studies.
While Lytton was canvassing these opinions, Lady Strachey got in touch with Sidney Webb, who was chairman of the London County Council’s technical education board; and he in turn introduced her at a dinner given on 18 November to Sir Robert Laurie Morant, Permanent Secretary of the Board of Education, who agreed to interview Lytton once he returned to London for the vacation. Lady Strachey was jubilant. ‘I believe I have done the trick,’ she wrote to Lytton the day after meeting Morant.
What transpired at Lytton’s meeting with Sir Robert Morant is not now known. He was never invited to join the Board of Education and Lady Strachey finally abandoned her hopes of a career for him in the Civil Service. The similarity between this unsuccessful petition and his equally fruitless application to Balliol is striking. In each case it is his mother who, as the driving force behind the scheme, brings it near completion. Both plans ultimately depend upon the personal impression created by Lytton. It was the maladroit figure he presented in these interviews that seems to have damned his chances of gaining the advancement he did not want. Was it shyness or an obstinate line of subterfuge? Either would account for these failures and both were characteristic.
With a career in public service gone, Lytton now prepared himself to pursue another of his mother’s schemes – a Fellowship. Once again he was not entirely pleased by the prospect. He had no great desire to be a don. But Cambridge itself he loved as no other place. With rooms at Trinity he could escape the gloom of Lancaster Gate. Besides, what future could there be for him beyond the university?
‘After Cambridge,’ he wrote to Leonard Woolf, ‘blank, blank, blank.’