I am reading Michael Holroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey in a disintegrating copy that was apparently produced for the fallout from the movie 'Carrington', a weird inversion of the book, since Carrington only appears for less than the final half - at least as the book stands now. I got the used paperback cheap, so I shouldn't complain; but it has all the oversize features that suggest a quality book. But it's disintegrating at the three photo-print sections, apparently in the course of a second reading.
            Holroyd acknowledges in the pre-matter that the text has been extensively rewritten over the near thirty years of the book's published life. He speaks of the earlier editions as emphasizing a 'dark period' in Lytton's early life - a darkness now largely missing from the narrative. I have the sense that I might have wanted at least some of the darkness, since Lytton here appears as brilliant and immanent but also somehow deflected. But, at the same time, the presentation does something no other writing has been able to do, namely, make me find the 'Bloomsberries' attractive.
            Approaching originally from Bertrand Russell, who was not only alive, but a living public presence in my youth, the Bloomsbury group first appeared to me as slightly illusory, a fading mirage beyond the desert dryness of his intellect. And as I began to enter into the background of modern literature, moving away from my first relatively shallow interests in the most contemporary writers and the equally shallow editorial choices of contemporary anthologists, I'm afraid that my reaction paralleled those of D. H. Lawrence, only from a greater distance. From my perspective, the Bloomsberries seemed to lack blood and bone, the human body.
            But what Holroyd's biography does is bring the essence to the fore, although the focus on Strachey and his circle does not necessarily draw the larger inferences. Perhaps Lytton Strachey was not a one-trick pony, as we say, but the blunt force of his public career turns on the Eminent Victorians, his savaging of the Victorian self-righteous smugness through the sardonic presentation of four central biographies. The figures he chooses now seem largely secondary to the era, although, at the time, they stood shoulder to shoulder with the figures who have since emerged as primary. But the fact is of some importance.
            I have slightly more than 200 pages to go in this 700 page text (plus apparatus), so I shouldn't infer Holroyd's conclusions. But thus far, the context has been the contemporary England of the Bloomsberries, with appropriate descants upon current events on the Continent. Whether he will eventually discuss the peculiarly situated cultural pivot of England and London at this specific juncture remains to be seen. At this point, we have just arrived at the publication of Eminent Victorians, and the fairly extraordinary public reaction to it.
            England, of course, is experiencing a late-blooming cycle of creativity; at the time sufficient, for example, to attract the American poets, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In terms of the history as we now view it, the Victorian blends into this post-Victorian 'awakening'. But obviously for contemporaries, particularly as seen from the shores of the United States, pre-war England seemed like a vital cultural center, a unique locus of creative energy. It is this peculiar fact which now propels Eminent Victorians into its special place in cultural development.
            After the Great War, France and Paris become the logical locations for the nursery of the modernists. France clearly has a longer and deeper history of consciously modernist experimentation. And the physical devastation of France undoubtedly played a role in its willingness to accept and welcome the new. The war devastated the population, but not the land of England, creating an essentially reactionary force in terms of the arts. But, for that brief pre-war moment, England was the attractive center and seedbed for modernism as an English language movement. And at the end of that moment and London's force as a center, Eminent Victorians arrived like a Zeppelin-delivered bomb of its own.

            The Great War, of course, was not all that different, in terms of warfare, from what had been happening, militarily, for more than 50 years. What occurred in Flanders, during the course of the war, had occurred to a lesser extent half a century earlier as Sherman marched to the sea and as Grant held the line in front of Richmond, losing nearly a hundred thousand casualties in three months of trench warfare. And the brutality of the Great War had been signaled by its predecessor, the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath.
            But the Victorians, particularly the second-level Victorian figures culturally, had codified and bureaucratized the shallowest optimism of the Romantics, wrapping a policy of brutal military, economic and cultural imperialism not only in flag and Cross but also in presumptions of cultural and racial superiority. While the loss of human life on the fields of France is inconceivable, a great deal more was lost as well.
            In this respect, almost paradoxically, Strachey's Eminent Victorians became the first shot in a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners revolt against the old order.

            If I continue to denigrate the Bloomsberries, one cannot deny the potency of the cultural moment in terms of its effects. In isolation, one could hardly anticipate that Bertrand Russell would become anything more than a significant chapter in a recondite text on the history of logic. But, instead, he has become the English language pivot in the history of the analytical philosophy that has dominated England and America for the last century and continues to act as the bedrock of presumption, even among those who now try to dispossess the analytical infection from within the field of philosophy. He could not have done it alone, of course. American and Continental figures were moving toward the analytical premise long before Russell and Moore reacted against contemporary Hegelian Idealism. But the peculiar cultural situation of England propelled Russell into the center, historically.
            The same is true of Strachey, but with this difference, that Strachey's name is no longer attached to the array of effects he finally achieved. The Victorians still lie beyond a barrier for us, a kind of Hadrian's Wall, a demarcation and shield extender rather than a formal barrier, but a barrier nevertheless. Strachey's work has prevented us, for nearly a century, from taking the best of the Victorians for what they are, legitimate figures in the development of the modern.
            For the most part, only the second order Victorians bought into the full bore imperialist mentality of mid to late 19th century British jingoism. Undoubtedly some of the best Victorian writers portray English culture, including English political culture, lovingly, in their way, but almost inevitably with an element of satire, if not outright caricature. But the best Victorian literature takes up the premises of the modern intuitively and overtly expressed by the Romantics and begins to refine and develop them, as well as add elements essentially unforeseeable from the original work. But Strachey's attitudes, having become pervasive in the modernist view, have prevented us from investigating these creative changes. We tend to view the Victorian era as a kind of late replication of the Augustan, a slightly updated version of the18th century neoclassicism of Johnson, Addison and Pope.
            I hold the Bloomsberries responsible.
            The same peculiar cultural moment that threw Bertrand Russell up as the exemplar of analytical philosophy, threw Strachey's attitudes toward the Victorians up as the touchstone for modernism. The result was a false revolution, a revolution that eviscerated its own base. If I say that modernism is a perversion of the modern, it is because the modern itself is a new classicism. The modern is a real change. Human history has undergone a real change in the last two or three centuries. But the change is not embodied in analytical philosophy. Analytical philosophy is a radical corruption of the change. Analytical philosophy emerges out of a wholesale rejection of the past, a wholesale rejection based as much, finally, on the cultural disaster of the Great War as upon the historical developments of critical philosophy.
            And therefore analytical philosophy and modernism are twins. As the other partner in the pair, cultural modernism rejects its real roots in the 19th century as fully as does analytical philosophy. Thus, in modernist literature, we have brilliant technical developments that in fact embody a kind of mirror image for the new classicism emerging in the modern, but the body of the modern itself is missing. We cannot assemble a whole person, culturally, out of the wholesale rejection. Ezra Pound can reach back to Browning. But he cannot embrace the 19th century. In a sense, his madness, however we choose to assess it, is the cultural void at the center of his persona, a void that all his modernist posturing and theorizing cannot fill. He savages the black / white judgments of the past. But in that middle void in his persona, he falls into a far worse, scatter-brained anathematizing and scapegoating.

            Without a substantive core, we have no culture. We cannot build a culture on rejection. Perhaps it's time we started to look at what we rejected and see if, in fact, perhaps we missed something.

[11/19/2008 : At the time that I wrote this, I was under the impression that Hadrian's wall was never more than a trench and a three or four foot high structure. I believe I saw this in a textbook once, but, of course, that does not prevent it from being essentially folkloric. The odd inference I drew from it was my own.
            I have since learned that the wall was actually twenty or thirty feet high, a formidable structure. Apparently it has suffered the effects of time and depredations for building stone.
            Rather than rewrite the errant paragraph, I decided to add this note.]