Daily Inspiration Quote by Lytton Strachey

There is something deliberately provocative in Strachey’s breezy certainty: “Englishmen have always loved Moliere.” The line flatters the national palate while quietly needling it, a very Strachey move. It reads like a compliment to English “good sense” and taste, but it also smuggles in an accusation: if Englishmen really have loved Moliere, then they’ve been selectively loving him - admiring the elegance of his comedy while dodging the sting of his target.

Moliere is not just “continental wit.” He is a diagnostician of hypocrisy, social climbing, piety-as-performance, and money as moral alibi. For an English readership that liked to imagine itself sturdier, less theatrical, less corrupted by courtly manners, Moliere offers the pleasure of superiority: laugh at the French fop, the sanctimonious fraud, the ridiculous doctor. Strachey’s genius is to imply that the joke lands at home, too. The English have “always loved” him because they can pretend he is safely foreign, even as he describes their own institutions with frightening accuracy.

Context matters: Strachey, the Bloomsbury critic, specialized in puncturing Victorian solemnity with elegance and understatement. “Always” is doing comic work here - an overreach that exposes how national myths get built: continuity, taste, tradition. The sentence is a miniature manifesto for cosmopolitanism disguised as a shrug. It suggests that English culture is at its best when it admits it’s been borrowing its sharpest tools all along.