Clio's Lives by Doug Munro & John G. Reid

Author:Doug Munro & John G. Reid [Munro, Doug & Reid, John G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History, Australian History, Historians
ISBN: 9781760461430
Amazon: 1760461431
Publisher: ANU Press
Published: 2017-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

of persecution … should have disappeared?’ Intolerance had merely

‘shifted its concern’ from metaphysics and science to life and literature;

instead of burning heretics and imprisoning astronomers, the authorities

now persecuted writers and suppressed indecency: if not Galileo, then

Oscar Wilde.58

In August 1914, after a brief opposition to British intervention in the

name of practical pacifism and international rationality, Trevelyan

became an ardent liberal warrior. Granted his commitment to public

duty and progressive causes, his activism and his need to improve the

world, he was programmed to subscribe to most wartime ‘myths’. He

was soon convinced that this was a war of duty and national honour,

of little peoples against ancient dynastic empires, of self-determination,

liberty and democracy against militarism and autocracy. It was, for him,

a war that would complete the progressive nineteenth-century story and

eventually through the foundation of a new international order lead to

the ending of war itself. Too blind for active service, he spent his war in

57 Lytton Strachey, ‘A Victorian Critic’, LE, 209–14.

58 T to S, 16 December 1913, BL, Add.Ms., 60,732, ff. 193–4 (arranging a meeting at Strachey’s country retreat); J.B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought (London: Home University Library, 1913); G.M. Trevelyan, ‘Norman Angell’s New Book’, War & Peace, 2 (March 1914), 164–5;

[Strachey], ‘ Avons-nous changé tout cela’, NS, 22 November 1913, 204–6; Strachey, ‘Bonga-Bonga in Whitehall’, NS, 17 January 1914, 459–60.

160

7 . INTERSECTING AND CoNTRASTING LIvES

non-stop public service: diplomatic and military missions to Serbia and

Romania; propaganda activities in Rome and the United States; and for

three years Commandant of the British Red Cross Unit on the Italian

Front. He also wrote morale-boosting articles on behalf of Britain’s allies,

and a series of upbeat essays that combined metahistory and propaganda

on the meaning and significance of the war.59

Strachey, on the other hand, after a frisson of patriotism in August 1914, was

almost as overdetermined by his scepticism to become a pacific bystander

and a conscientious objector on non-religious grounds. Convinced that

the war was a cock-up not a conspiracy, that it constituted a relapse from

cosmopolitan civility into superstition and barbarism and that the real

enemies of freedom were conformity, censorship and conscription – that

Puritanism was more pernicious than Prussianism – he wrote anti-war

essays, dialogues and poems, retired to oases like Garsington where he

could enjoy the comforts of prewar civilisation, and turned his appearance

before a military tribunal in 1916 into a pacifist farce. In his writings, he

argued that self-righteous activism was more likely to bring misery than

was self-indulgent harmlessness, that the private pleasures of friendship,

love and beauty were preferable to the duties of patriotism, comradeship,

honour and self-sacrifice, that the wartime abuse of language and

manipulation of literary greats for nationalist purposes was ridiculous, but

that militarism like religious intolerance could vanish – that the pen could

prove mightier than the sword. And, in Eminent Victorians, he toppled

wartime idols.60

Eminent Victorians is not simply revisionist biography. It is primarily a

polemic, intimately linked to militant pacifism. Under pressure of war,

Strachey had reduced the 12 Victorian ‘silhouettes’, with which he had

started in 1913, into a study of just four ‘disagreeable’ ones. The aim, said

Strachey, shortly after the book’s publication in

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