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        The art of biography writing is a comparatively new one. Out of the multitude of lives on which or about which biographies are written, only very few survive the test of time. Interest in ourselves and in other people's selves is a late factor in human history. Curiosity did not express itself in writing about the lives of people till the beginning of the 18th Century. This curiosity was born in England in a definitive sort of way only after 1700 AD. Only in the 19th Century was biography fully grown and became hugely prolific.

        Till 1900, only three biographies were considered as masterpieces in English literature. Samuel Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets' published in 1781, Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' published in 1791 and Lockhart's 'Life of Sir Walter Scott' published in 1838. J A Froude's 'Life of Carlyle', published in 1882-84 can also be added to this category. Barring these sepctacular exceptions, the art of biography during the Victorian Age from 1837 to 1901 had degenerated into the craft of hagiography. Most of the biographies belonging to the Victorian Age were written in multi-volumes with decorative bindings and were dull, lifeless and unreadable.

        In the second decade of the 20th Century, a young man in England in his early 30s revolutionised the writing of historical biography. He was Lytton Strachey (1880-1932). Born in London on 1 March 1880, Lytton Strachey came of an exceptional family. He was the son of General Sir Richard Strachey, an Indian administrator, and Lady Jane Strachey, a distinguished writer and essayist. St Loe Strachey, the editor of the 'Spectator' and John Strachey, the eminent political economist, were his cousins. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Lytton Strachey made a reputation while an undergraduate, with a prize-winning poem. It was a traditional poem about traditional values. The judges who gave the award to Lytton Strachey at that time would never have thought that he would become one of the period's most famous tradition-smashers. As soon as he came out of the university, Strachey forgot his old gentle stanzas and devoted himself to writing a stabbing prose. He wrote with deliberation, he was 32 before his first volume appeared and it was not until he was 40 that a collection of his essays, innocuously entitled 'Eminent Victorians' caused a critical furore. These were strange biographical studies of four great Victorian characters, Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold and General Gordon. These biographical portraits were caustic and probing, sly and savage; they bewildered the cautious scholiasts and delighted the young rebels. In Lytton Strachey they saw a historian who dared to make an art of biography, that ill-digested mass of material, slipshod style, tedious panegyric, and turn the expose from a sensation into a school. His only previous published book was 'Landmarks in French Literature', first published in an inexpensive edition by the Home University Library in 1912. Lytton Strachey's path-breaking book 'Eminent Victorians', which opened new vistas for the art of biography writing was published in 1918.

Lytton Strachey (1880 - 1932)

When Lytton Strachey submitted the draft of his 'Eminent Victorians' to his publisher in December 1917, they passed on the typescript to the novelist and critic Frank Swinnerton. According to Frank Swinnerton: 'The first few pages written by Strachey were so enchanting that, I continued, and when night fell I could not leave the book, but took it carefully home...I had hardly taken the typescript up again after dinner when... there was an air raid by Germans. The whirring of aeroplanes overhead, the rattle of machine-gun fire, and finally the frightful thunder of a gun in the field at the bottom of our garden, would all have served to distract a mind less happily engaged; but as it was, with curtain closely drawn to prevent the escape of light, I consorted that evening with Cardinal Manning, Thomas Arnold, Florence Nightingale, and General Gordon. The 19th Century had come alive again'.         According to Michael Holroyd, 'these four pen portraits corresponded to the movements of a symphony, or perhaps more appropriately to the more intimate pattern of a string quartet: Cardinal Manning - allegro vivace; Florence Nightingale - andante; Dr Arnold - scherzo; The End of General Gordon -rondo'. Lytton Strachey had already become a cult-figure to Cambridge undergraduates before the I World War. Publication of his 'Eminent Victorians' in 1918 made him a cult-figure to the nation as a whole. Frank Swinnerton penned a detailed, lively portrait of Lytton Strachey, the new author, in these words: 'His excessive thinness, almost emaciation, caused him to appear endless. He had a rather bulbous nose, the spectacles of a British Museum bookworm, a large and straggly dark brown beard (with a curious rufous tinge); no voice at all. He drooped if he stood upright, and sagged if he sat down. He seemed entirely without vitality... Sad merriment was in his eye, and about him a perpetual air of sickness and debility'.

        Lytton Strachey followed his brief indictments of a snobbish, scheming society made in his 'Eminent Victorians', with biographical works of greater scope and larger dimensions: 'Queen Victoria', 'Alexander Pope' and 'Elizabeth and Essex'. In these magisterial works, he applied the then revolutionary psycho-analytical method of Sigmund Freud to historical figures which had previously resisted analysis of any kind. With uninhibited candour, fierce curiosity, and a touch of milicious glee, Strachey tore veil after veil from sacrosanct shrines. It was done not with rude iconoclasm. However, with a surgeon's detachment and a scholar's precision, he cut through the rigid pietism, the swaddled sentiment, and the prudish reticences. Seeking unsuspected truths rather than glibly restated conclusions, Strachey's aim was speculative rather than pre-determined, aesthetic and not ethical.

        Lytton Strachey insisted that biography should be made at least as interesting and even as exciting as fiction and the results were spectacular. His slogans for new biography writing; clean brevity, dispassionate truth, free spirit of inquiry, became the literary manifesto of a new school. Using words with poetic finesse, he swiftly flashed a personality on to the page. To cite an example by way of illustration; according to Lytton Strachey, the verses which Alexander Pope aimed at his enemies are 'spoonfuls of boiling oil, ladled out by a fiendish monkey at an upstairs window'. In the same fashion he referred to Moliere's comedies as 'light and frivolous things as eternal as the severest and weightiest works of men'.

        Several things were charged against Lytton Strachey. It was said that he wrote (or rewrote) history like a novelist, that he used facts only to negate them with fanciful conclusions, that his forte was a kind of feline praise which was worse than a forthright attack, that he dipped his pen in vitriol to write letters about the defenceless dead. It was also said that Strachey cultivated a style for style's sake, that he saw life in terms of literature, and, although, he prided himself upon his restraint, he distorted details and turned character into caricature. But what is most vital about his art is that in the very act of examining his subjects, he often fell in love with them.

        No one can doubt that Lytton Strachey is an important figure in the history of biography. His three famous books, 'Eminent Victorians', 'Queen Victoria', and 'Elizabeth and Essex', are of a stature to show what biography can do and what biography cannot do. Biography had never had a fairer chance of showing what it could do. For, it was now being put to the test by a writer who was capable of making use of all the liberties that biography had won: he was fearless; he had proved his brilliance; and he had learned his job. The result throws great light upon the nature of biography.

        Here are a few flashes from his biographical writings:

        'Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian —ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art'.

        'It is not the historian's business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them dispassionately, impartially and without ulterior motives'.

        'Perhaps of all the creations of man language is the most astonishing'.

        'Discretion is not the better part of biography'.

        With his power of revaluation, incisive skepticism, and challenging imagination, he not only changed the biographer's approach, but also made the reader look for the living men and women often buried in the stolidly official biographies. His influence has been international. It is a sheer pleasure to read Lytton Strachey even today. His timeless brilliance will survive all his mannerisms. His narrative power, his penetrating irony, his dramatic and, at times, melodramatic effectiveness will continue to speak for ages.