ABSTRACT
With the exception of W. H. Salter and Cleopatra, Giovanni Boccaccio and General Robert E. Lee is surely the least likely pairing in Strachey's dialogues and conversations. Boccaccio's enjoyment of sensual and domestic pleasures contrasts sharply with Lee's sober embrace of the fulfilment of duty as 'all the pleasure, all the comfort, all the glory that we can ever enjoy'. Or so it seems. Lee, who commanded the Confederate armies during the American Civil War, fiercely adhered to a code of duty and honour, and of respect for deserving authority, as the best regulator of conduct. Such a reading would confirm Strachey's generally satirical impulse towards eminent figures of the nineteenth century, his principled opposition to war as a means of settling political, economic or other disputes, and his typical elevation, from around 1910 onwards, of art over action in a moral value hierarchy.
