ABSTRACT
On 25 February 1905, only a week after the election, he launched an extraordinary onslaught upon his friend before the assembled Apostles. The society was the intellectual and social centre of Strachey's life for most of the first decade of the century, and remained important to him in later years as well. He probably would have explained the apostolical process by which President succeeds to President as a last lingering survival of the myth of the King-God, and the rites of the Grove of Africa. Of course the ritual of the society, far from being a survival of anything, is an everlasting type – an eternal ideal – to the likeness of which various dim and transitory buzzings in the chimaera of history vainly aspire. The borderland brothers have indeed adopted a very singular attitude. He is a hedonist and a follower of Moore; he is lascivious without lust; he is an Apostle without tears.
