Thus the priesthood circled round their idol, waving their censers and shouting their hymns of praise, while their ample draperies effectively hid from the public eye the object which was really in the centre of their throng, namely, a gaunt, black, touzled man, rough in speech, brooding like an old gipsy over his inch of clay pipe stuffed with shag, and sucking in port wine with gusto--"so long as it is black and sweet and strong, I care not!" Their fault lay, not in their praise, which was much of it deserved, but in their deliberate attempt in the interests of what was Nice and Proper--gods of the Victorian Age--to conceal what any conventional person might think not quite becoming. There were to be no shadows in the picture, no stains or rugosities on the smooth bust of rosy wax.
On the pretext, therefore, of supplying a brief and above all a complimentary set of portraits, Mr. Strachey takes the biography of an ecclesiastic, an educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, and tells them over again in his own way. The four figures he chooses are all contemporary, and yet, so implacably does time hurry us along, all would be very old if they still survived. Three of them could hardly survive, for Cardinal Manning and Dr. Arnold would be far over a hundred, and Florence Nightingale in her ninety-ninth year; the fourth, General Gordon, would be eighty-five. The motto of Mr. Strachey is "Put not your trust in the intellectual princes of the Victorian Age," or, at least, in what their biographers have reported of them; they were not demi-gods in any sense, but eccentric and forceful figures working dimly towards aims which they only understood in measure, and which very often were not worth the energy which they expended on them. This attitude alone would be enough to distinguish Mr. Strachey from the purveyors of indiscriminate praise, and in adopting it he emphasises his deliberate break with the age of which they were the envy and the ornament. Given his 1918 frame of mind, no blame can attach to him for adopting this gesture. At moments when the tradition of a people has been violently challenged there have always ensued these abrupt acts of what to the old school seems injustice. If Mr. Lytton Strachey is reproached with lack of respect, he might reply: In the midst of a revolution, who is called on to be respectful to the fallen monarch? Extreme admiration for this or that particular leader, the principle of Victorian hero-worship, is the very heresy, he might say, which I have set out to refute.