Prophets of a New Age

Lytton Strachey, famed as a member of the “Bloomsbury Group” and for his war against Victorian values, wrote to Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf in 1904:

“I sometimes feel as if it were not only ourselves who are concerned, but that the destinies of the whole world are somehow involved in ours. We are – oh! in more ways than one –  like the Athenians of the Pericles Age. We are the mysterious priests of a new and amazing civilization. We are greater than our fathers; we are greater than Shelley; we are greater than the eighteenth century; we are greater than the Renaissance; we are greater than the Romans and the Greeks. What is hidden from us? We have mastered all. We have abolished religion, we have founded ethics, we have established philosophy, we have sown our strange illumination in every province of thought, we have conquered art, we have liberated love. It would be pleasant to spend our days in a perpetual proclamation of our magnificence” (quoted in Michael Holroyd’s biography, 100).

How much of this is tongue in cheek? It’s hard to tell, though Strachey’s letters tend toward the histrionic. If his overwrought prose isn’t sincere, it doubtful there’s any sincerity anywhere.

Strachey didn’t think his band would triumph immediately, especially in that area where they are “like the Athenians,” a not-so-veiled reference to his homosexuality. Two years later, he wrote presciently to Maynard Keynes, another member of the group who was also a homosexual:

“We can’t be content with telling the truth – we must tell the whole truth; and the whole truth is the Devil. Voltaire abolished Christianity by believing in god. It’s madness of us to dream of making dowagers understand that feelings are good, when we say in the same breath that the best ones are sodomitical. If we were crafty and careful, I dare say we’d pull it off. But why should we take the trouble? On the whole I believe that our time will come about a hundred years hence, when preparations will have been made, and compromises come to, so that, at the publication of our letters, everyone will be, finally, converted” (Holroyd, 92).

Holroyd’s biography was controversial when first published in 1973. At the beginning of the 21st century – right on cue – virtually everyone has been “converted.” If Strachey is full of himself, we can say that history has somewhat vindicated his prophecy.