History and the Human

From the Preface of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1933):

“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”

“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”

“Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes–which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake”