➢ LYTTON STRACHY’S IRONICAL STYLE OF BIOGRAPHY
➢ STRACHY’S IRONIC ATTITUDE
➢ IRONY IN STRACHY’S WRITINGS AS A LIERARY ART
By Kamran Aslam Lecturer.
INTRODUCTION:
“Irony arises from contrast. Contrast between appearance and reality”
Lytton Strachey, an English biographer, critic and essayist, is best known for his
ironic attitude towards the subject of his biographical studies. Strachey’s targets of irony
were evangelicalism(stresses the importance of personal conversion or faith as
a mean of salvation) , liberalism(A political orientation that favours the social
progress by reforms and by changing laws rather than by revolution) ,
humanitarianism(The doctrine that people’s duty is to promote human welfare)
, education and imperialism(The policy extending a nations authority by
territorial gain, or by establishment of economic and political dominance over
other nations). Strachey proposed to write lives with brevity which excludes everything
that is redundant and nothing that is significant. He is best known for “Eminent
Victorians”.
USE OF IRONY:
Treating his subject ironically he was fascinated by personality and motive. His
aim was to paint a portrait; and through this he led to an ironical caricaturing. He taught
biographers a sense of form and of background, and he sharpened their critical insight.
Strachey ironically shows us General Gordon including in his secret passion for
fame and becoming a willing instrument not of God but of the extreme imperialist faction
of the British Government. The messianic religiosity inspiring Gordon was well known by
a weary generation just back from the trenches and sickened by the chauvinism of
bishops and journalists declaring that God had been in the trenches on their side.
Strachey said:
“My notion is to do a series of short lives of eminent persons of that kind. It
might be entertaining if properly pulled off. But if will take a very long time.”
Some of the eminent persons were to be admired while others like Manning were to be
exposed ironically. To Ottoline Morrell he wrote:
“I am … beginning a new experiment in the way of a short condensed
biography of Cardinal Manning – written from a slightly cynical point of view.”
IMPESSSION OF EMINENT VICTORIANS:
The impact of ‘Eminent Victorians’ on literary circles was tremendous. The
world was weary of big guns and big phrases, and Strachey’s witty polemic was
especially attractive to the younger generation. In his preface, which was a manifesto for
20th century biographers, Strachey wrote:
“Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past.
They have a value which is independent of any temporal process.”
IRONY ON EVANGELIACALISM:
Yet the four Victorians he chose for treatment were not independent of the
moral system of the Victorian Age. His verbal attack against Cardinal Manning is an
attack on the evangelicalism that was to be the defining characteristic of 19th century
culture, an exposure of its hypocrisy and the emptiness of self-regarding ambitions.
IRONY ON HUMAITARIANISM:
Strachey toppled Florence Nightingale from the pedestal where she was placed
as the legendary lady with the lamp, having saintly and self-sacrificing qualities. He
replaced her with a twentieth century neurotic. Thus Strachey struck ironically at the
popular mythology of Victorian England, in particular its conscience-saving
humanitarianism.
IRONY ON EDUCATION:
His irony towards the Dr. Arnold probably arose from his own unhappy
schooldays. He depicted Arnold as the most influential teacher of the Victorian public
school system whose cult distorted middle-class intelligence and set hard the principle of
Victorianism into the 20th century.
Strachey has ironically presented his sinister picture of Manning’s formal interview with
the Pope. He ironically mentioned Manning as an ‘eagle’ and Newman as a ‘dove’.
IRONY ON IMPERIALISM:
There are times, however, when Strachey’s sharp sense of the ridiculous does
find its way into his irony. It is a definite undercurrent in this treatment of the Chinese
diplomatist Li Hung Chang:
“It was Gordon who gave him his first vision of Europe. Nothing could be
more ironical. The half-inspired, half-crazy Englishmen, … the irresponsible
knight-errant whom his countrymen first laughed at and neglected, then killed
and canonized – a figure staying through the perplexed industrialism of the
nineteenth century like some lost “natural” from an earlier Age.”
Thus irony with its marked possibilities for variation, served Strachey admirable
not only. for comic purpose of suggesting change and dissimilarity which could be
significantly and effectively relate to a background of uniformity in style.
IRONY AS A WEAPON:
Strachey’s great weapon was irony and ‘Eminent Victorians’ set the tone for
subsequent biographers. It made ‘debunking’ fashionable. Few of Strachey’s imitators
possessed his gift of sharp irony or his picturesque humour. They inherited from him
nothing but his shallow scepticism. Strachey was in high favour with the wound because
they relished the breaking of ‘Eminent Victorians’ praised till then like idols.
VIEWS OF CRITICS:
P. M. Jack wrote in praise of Strachey that he had a faculty for sharpening the
readers’ critical sense and often proved to be right.
“We doubt if another miscellany of this sort could possess half the wit and
distinction of a biographical style that we find here.”
In 1937 Edgar Johnson praised Strachey’s ironical sense of values and the
largeness of his opinion:
“In Strachey the old Elizabethan lion refines down to a cat. The lion
singles out the enemy to be destroyed; it is the cat, however, that plays slyly
and patiently with the victim.”
Andre Maurois had already spoken of him not only as an iconoclast using the
method of irony but also as a highly gifted writer in the tradition of the great humourist
and as
“a very deep psychologist”.
CONCLUSION:
In fact, Lytton Strachey is best known for his ironic attitude towards the subjects
of his biographical studies. His point of view was highly personal and some of his
judgments have been described as exaggerated. But his sense of form and his witty,
ironic style inspired a host of imitators who were eager to reduce historical figures to life
size. He established the ironical writings of biography as a literary art.
