Lytton Strachey and his collection of ‘miniature portraits’

Taken together, La Bruyère’s seventeenth-century traits gradually give rise to the modern novel, which in the 20th century, as traditional psychology dissolved, broke down once more into its constituent parts. Standing before Giuseppe Pontiggia’s “La Grande Sera”, Moravia remarked that rather than a novelistic plot, it was a series of medallions: and a few years later, Pontiggia did indeed publish “Vite di uomini non illustri” (“Lives of Unremarkable Men”). The incunabula of the novel were disguised as ‘lives’; and this stratagem, on another level of illusion, reappears today. One might speak of a portrait, where character and destiny merge: perhaps of a real figure, described in a truthful or legendary manner. It is a genre that has been nurtured without fanfare even during the glory days of modern fiction: the critical genre of Hazlitt and Sainte-Beuve, or the fable-like genre of Schwob and Savinio – right up to the blend of history and reinvention found in Sebald, Kiš and Carrère.

A case that is purely essayistic in nature, originating in that Bloomsbury group in which the novel broke away from its classical form, concerns Lytton Strachey. In his "Eminent Victorians" (1918), Strachey observes that we now know too much to be able to write history – a discipline that is, in fact, aided by that touch of ignorance which helps to simplify and make choices: we must therefore approach the subject by capturing it from foreshortened and unexpected perspectives. The same theme recurs in "Miniature Portraits" (1931), now published in a sumptuous volume by Palingenia and translated into Mario Fortunato’s beautiful Italian. In the second section, devoted specifically to historians, the author writes of Gibbon that, fortunately for him, ‘the material he had to deal with was not yet so voluminous as to be beyond the capacity of a single, highly gifted mind’, whereas ‘in the following century’ even he ‘would have buckled under the weight of the accumulated knowledge’. As in the work of his mentor Aubrey, brevity lends a humorous touch to the biographies here, as well as to the vast historical panoramas summarised in a single paragraph (the one on the transition from feudalism to the bourgeoisie – that is, from ‘armour’ to ‘wigs’ to ‘good manners’ – is masterful). This is a very English brand of humour, just as English are the attention to customs, the pride in eccentricity and local traditions, the amused pragmatism (which, in the chapter on Harington, brings together the invention of the flush toilet and the translation of Orlando Furioso), as well as the portraits of the Cambridge pedants – irascible big kids fixated on a sort of meta-historical Victorianism that, by poetic justice, descends into madness. After all, the most frequently cited period is the 17th century, when, amidst new science and esoteric legacies, it was the English themselves who ensured the triumph of the individual, whilst sects ran riot in the streets of London and heretics, in keeping with the race’s compromising habits, were neither left in peace nor put to death, but were merely annoyed in moderation: it was then that an inelegant, anti-mystical National Church, composed entirely of bourgeois scholars and organisers, came fully to light.

When faced with his subjects, Strachey insists on asking the questions one would expect of a worthy grandson of Montaigne. What is the relationship between what people believe and their private or social behaviour? And between physical features and thought – for example, between Hume’s dull-witted face and his mental agility? How do ideas change as we move from season to season, or from place to place? Why do intellectuals so often choose subjects so far removed from their own world? Which cultural ‘foods’ are beneficial or harmful to a particular type of person? Is there a link between a narrow outlook and productive happiness? Gibbon’s egotism was capable of ‘turning even an absurdity into a virtue’ – and it was precisely the incongruity between his milieu and his subject matter, namely the decline of the Roman Empire, that yielded his masterpiece. Boswell was aided by his lack of modesty, and Macaulay even by his liberal philistinism, which cost him a lack of understanding, though this was offset by the robustness of his style. The same would have held true for the thunderous Carlyle, had he known himself better – that is, had he possessed the one quality that enables one to remain credible even when venturing into an almost unknown realm. Portrait after portrait, an implicit and mischievous comparison emerges with the other architects of modernity, the French, who are branded as grotesquely frivolous. Thus, in the piece on de Brosses and Voltaire, caught up in a long-standing dispute between landowners, the author strikes a blow against both: the President of Dijon loses his seat at the Académie, and the doyen of the Enlightenment loses face. Never, however, as much as Abbé Morellet – the Enlightenment thinker who, when the Revolution snatched away the priory he had only just acquired, shamelessly turned against the new era he had once extolled.