EMINENT VICTORIANS

by Lytton Strachey




Preface

THE history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know
too much about it. For 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. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our
fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so
vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would
be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail
before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous
narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that
singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy.
He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall
upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing
searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will
row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into
it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the
light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths,
to be examined with a careful curiosity. Guided by these
considerations, I have written the ensuing studies. I have
attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some
Victorian visions to the modern eye. They are, in one sense,