Vorwort zu Eminent Victorians [1918]

‘A Perfect Contradiction is Mysterious for the Clever and for Fools Alike’: Did Hegel Contradict Aristotle?

“…The flame shot out on every side, scorching and brilliant; but in the midst there was a darkness. (Strachey 1918: 264f. )…”

“…A quotation from Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians exemplifies this use of the word. Speaking of General Gordon, Strachey says: ‘In the depths of Gordon's soul there were intertwining contradictions – intricate recesses where egoism and renunciation melted into one another, where the flesh lost itself in the spirit and the spirit in the flesh’ (Strachey 1918: 222f.). Strachey describes Gladstone in similar terms, though here he speaks misleadingly of ‘incompatibles’ rather than ‘contradictions’: ‘the elements’ were ‘so mixed’ in Mr Gladstone that his bitterest enemies and his warmest friends could justify, with equal plausibility, their denunciations or their praises.…”

“Not walled facts, their essence”: Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound and Camille Pissarro

“…encourages biographers not to use half-measures: “the method of enormous and elaborate accretion which produced the Life of Johnson is excellent, no doubt”, he writes, “but, failing that, let us have no half-measures; let us have the pure essentials — a vivid image, on a page or two, without explanations, transitions, commentaries or padding”. Broadly speaking, however, if Strachey can be invoked as a promoter of “pure essentials and vivid images”, one must note that (his satiric approach notwithstanding) Eminent Victorians (1918) is devoted to notable and important — indeed, “eminent” — people, namely Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold, and General Gordon. Holroyd (1994: n.p.…”

Towards a realistic approach to medical biography

“…The most compelling biographies, however, have portrayed the ambitions, passions, disappointment and the ‘peaks and valleys of one's life’, as Sigerist says, 4 and the moral choices that characterize a scientist's life. The outline of these elements, with appropriate brevity and an objective, sincere description of the facts, as described by Strachey, 5 serves to create a good biography.…”

“…This balancing point might demythologize a figure, bringing the subject closer to the reader, by feeling his successes and sympathizing with his struggles, failures and setbacks; by learning that, ‘like us, he fought and erred, that like us he experienced joy and sorrow’; 4 and by searching ‘the inner truth by deconstruction of the good and great to unmask the foibles of an age’, 5 as Lytton Strachey suggests, assigning to modern biographies the role of a moral tale. This approach also accords with Thomas' argument that modern biography creates interest by looking at the individual human agency and the constraints under which it operated, subverting the ‘Great Man’ tradition of biography with an anti-heroic and democratizing age.…”