Headmaster

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE--Lytton Strachey--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Lytton Strachey, who started a new school of biography, is still headmaster of it. Learned dilettante of history, he is no ghoulish exhumer of dead facts but a mildly malicious wizard who summons very lifelike ghosts. Says he: "The virtues of a metaphysician are the vices of a historian. A generalized, colorless, unimaginative view of things is admirable when one is considering the law of causality, but one needs something else if one has to describe Queen Elizabeth." That Something Else, as every Stracheyite knows, Strachey has.

Portraits in Miniature is a short book (214 small pages) but contains 18 biographies in parvo. They are like unusually well-written, extremely urbane short stories. Some of their subjects: Elizabethan Sir John Harington, who, "suddenly inspired," invented the water-closet. Jacobean Dr. North, Master of Trinity College (Cambridge), whom illness transmogrified from a scrupulous moralist into a ribald debauchee. The President de Brosses, the man who got the better of Voltaire over a bill for firewood. Mary Berry, last survivor of the 18th Century, who "could even make Frenchmen hold their tongues; she could even make Englishmen talk." Strachey pays his unrespectful but never impertinent respects to six fellow-historians: Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude, Creighton. He calls Macaulay's brisk rhetoric "that style which, with its metallic exactness and its fatal efficiency, was certainly one of the most remarkable products of the Industrial Revolution."

When Strachey quotes, his are not like other historians' appeals to original sources: "Anno 1670, not far from Cirencester, was an Apparition; Being demanded, whether a good Spirit, or a bad? Returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious Perfume and most melodious Twang." Strachey's apophthegmatic irony is reminiscent of the 18th Century (which he calls "that most balmy time"): "To confess is the desire of many; but it is within the power of few." "In Latin countries--the fact is significant--morals and manners are expressed by the same word; in England it is not so; to some Britons, indeed, the two notions appear to be positively antithetical."

Strachey's amused detachment never falters, but he can rarely resist making a point, especially against the late great Victorian Age. In this summation his virtues and defects all appear: "A most peculiar age [the Victorian]; an age of barbarism and prudery, of nobility and cheapness, of satisfaction and desperation; an age in which everything was discovered and nothing known; an age in which all the outlines were tremendous and all the details sordid; when gas-jets struggled feebly through the circumambient fog, when the hour of dinner might be at any moment between two and six, when the doses of rhubarb were periodic and gigantic, when pet dogs threw themselves out of upper storey windows, when cooks reeled drunk in areas, when one sat for hours with one's feet in dirty straw dragged along the streets by horses, when an antimacassar was on every chair, and the baths were minute tin circles, and the beds were full of bugs and disasters."

The Author. If you had never seen a picture of Giles Lytton Strachey you would never think from reading his books that he is spindle-shanked and spectacled, with a long red beard and a falsetto voice. Cousin of the late John St. Loe Strachey, editor of the London Spectator, Lytton Strachey first made a name for himself by writing Landmarks in French Literature (1912); nine years later Queen Victoria made him a bestseller. Unmarried, 51, Strachey lives in London but goes to the country to work; "it isn't so much the noises of London that prevent concentration, but the constant social calls on one's time--the exits and the entrances." Other books: Books and Characters, Eminent Victorians, Elizabeth and Essex.

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