Old Age


I



Meanwhile in Victoria's private life many changes and developments had

taken place. With the marriages of her elder children her family

circle widened; grandchildren appeared; and a multitude of new domestic

interests sprang up. The death of King Leopold in 1865 had removed the

predominant figure of the older generation, and the functions he had

performed as the centre and adviser of a large group of
elatives in

Germany and in England devolved upon Victoria. These functions she

discharged with unremitting industry, carrying on an enormous

correspondence, and following with absorbed interest every detail in

the lives of the ever-ramifying cousinhood. And she tasted to the full

both the joys and the pains of family affection. She took a particular

delight in her grandchildren, to whom she showed an indulgence which

their parents had not always enjoyed, though, even to her

grandchildren, she could be, when the occasion demanded it, severe.

The eldest of them, the little Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, was a

remarkably headstrong child; he dared to be impertinent even to his

grandmother; and once, when she told him to bow to a visitor at

Osborne, he disobeyed her outright. This would not do: the order was

sternly repeated, and the naughty boy, noticing that his kind

grandmama had suddenly turned into a most terrifying lady, submitted

his will to hers, and bowed very low indeed.






It would have been well if all the Queen's domestic troubles could have

been got over as easily. Among her more serious distresses was the

conduct of the Prince of Wales. The young man was now independent and

married; he had shaken the parental yoke from his shoulders; he was

positively beginning to do as he liked. Victoria was much perturbed,

and her worst fears seemed to be justified when in 1870 he appeared as

a witness in a society divorce case. It was clear that the heir to the

throne had been mixing with people of whom she did not at all approve.

What was to be done? She saw that it was not only her son that was to

blame--that it was the whole system of society; and so she despatched a

letter to Mr. Delane, the editor of The Times, asking him if he would

'frequently write articles pointing out the immense danger and evil

of the wretched frivolity and levity of the views and lives of the

Higher Classes.' And five years later Mr. Delane did write an article

upon that very subject. Yet it seemed to have very little effect.



Ah! if only the Higher Classes would learn to live as she lived in the

domestic sobriety of her sanctuary at Balmoral! For more and more did

she find solace and refreshment in her Highland domain; and twice

yearly, in the spring and in the autumn, with a sigh of relief, she set

her face northwards, in spite of the humble protests of Ministers, who

murmured vainly in the royal ears that to transact the affairs of State

over an interval of six hundred miles added considerably to the cares

of government. Her ladies, too, felt occasionally a slight

reluctance to set out, for, especially in the early days, the long

pilgrimage was not without its drawbacks. For many years the Queen's

conservatism forbade the continuation of the railway up Deeside, so

that the last stages of the journey had to be accomplished in

carriages. But, after all, carriages had their good points; they were

easy, for instance, to get in and out of, which was an important

consideration, for the royal train remained for long immune from modern

conveniences, and when it drew up, on some border moorland, far from

any platform, the high-bred dames were obliged to descend to earth by

the perilous foot-board, the only pair of folding steps being reserved

for her Majesty's saloon. In the days of crinolines such moments were

sometimes awkward; and it was occasionally necessary to summon Mr.

Johnstone, the short and sturdy Manager of the Caledonian Railway, who,

more than once, in a high gale and drenching rain with great difficulty

'pushed up'--as he himself described it--some unlucky Lady Blanche or

Lady Agatha into her compartment. But Victoria cared for none of

these things. She was only intent upon regaining, with the utmost

swiftness, her enchanted Castle, where every spot was charged with

memories, where every memory was sacred, and where life was passed in

an incessant and delightful round of absolutely trivial events.



And it was not only the place that she loved; she was equally attached

to 'the simple mountaineers,' from whom, she said, 'she learnt many a

lesson of resignation and faith.' Smith and Grant and Ross and

Thompson--she was devoted to them all; but, beyond the rest, she was

devoted to John Brown. The Prince's gillie had now become the

Queen's personal attendant--a body servant from whom she was never

parted, who accompanied her on her drives, waited on her during the

day, and slept in a neighbouring chamber at night. She liked his

strength, his solidity, the sense he gave her of physical security; she

even liked his rugged manners and his rough unaccommodating speech.

She allowed him to take liberties with her which would have been

unthinkable from anybody else. To bully the Queen, to order her about,

to reprimand her--who could dream of venturing upon such audacities?

And yet, when she received such treatment from John Brown, she

positively seemed to enjoy it. The eccentricity appeared to be

extraordinary; but, after all, it is no uncommon thing for an

autocratic dowager to allow some trusted indispensable servant to adopt

towards her an attitude of authority which is jealously forbidden to

relatives or friends: the power of a dependant still remains, by a

psychological sleight-of-hand, one's own power, even when it is

exercised over oneself. When Victoria meekly obeyed the abrupt

commands of her henchman to get off her pony or put on her shawl, was

she not displaying, and in the highest degree, the force of her

volition? People might wonder; she could not help that; this was the

manner in which it pleased her to act, and there was an end of it. To

have submitted her judgment to a son or a Minister might have seemed

wiser or more natural; but if she had done so, she instinctively felt,

she would indeed have lost her independence. And yet upon somebody she

longed to depend. Her days were heavy with the long process of

domination. As she drove in silence over the moors she leaned back in

the carriage, oppressed and weary; but what a relief!--John Brown was

behind on the rumble, and his strong arm would be there for her

to lean upon when she got out.



He had, too, in her mind, a special connection with Albert. In their

expeditions the Prince had always trusted him more than anyone; the

gruff, kind, hairy Scotsman was, she felt, in some mysterious way, a

legacy from the dead. She came to believe at last--or so it

appeared--that the spirit of Albert was nearer when Brown was near.

Often, when seeking inspiration over some complicated question of

political or domestic import, she would gaze with deep concentration at

her late husband's bust. But it was also noticed that sometimes in

such moments of doubt and hesitation Her Majesty's looks would fix

themselves upon John Brown.



Eventually, the 'simple mountaineer' became almost a state personage.

The influence which he wielded was not to be overlooked. Lord

Beaconsfield was careful, from time to time, to send courteous messages

to 'Mr. Brown' in his letters to the Queen, and the French Government

took particular pains to provide for his comfort during the visits of

the English Sovereign to France. It was only natural that among the

elder members of the royal family he should not have been popular, and

that his failings--for failings he had, though Victoria would never

notice his too acute appreciation of Scotch whisky--should have been

the subject of acrimonious comment at Court. But he served his

mistress faithfully, and to ignore him would be a sign of disrespect in

her biographer. For the Queen, far from making a secret of her

affectionate friendship, took care to publish it to the world. By her

orders two gold medals were struck in his honour; on his death, in

1883, a long and eulogistic obituary notice of him appeared in

the Court Circular; and a Brown memorial brooch--of gold, with the

late gillie's head on one side and the royal monogram on the other--was

designed by her Majesty for presentation to her Highland servants and

cottagers, to be worn by them on the anniversary of his death, with a

mourning scarf and pins. In the second series of extracts from the

Queen's Highland Journal, published in 1884, her 'devoted personal

attendant and faithful friend' appears upon almost every page, and is

in effect the hero of the book. With an absence of reticence

remarkable in royal persons, Victoria seemed to demand, in this private

and delicate matter, the sympathy of the whole nation; and yet--such is

the world!--there were those who actually treated the relations between

their Sovereign and her servant as a theme for ribald jests.





II



The busy years hastened away; the traces of Time's unimaginable touch

grew manifest; and old age, approaching, laid a gentle hold upon

Victoria. The grey hair whitened; the mature features mellowed; the

short firm figure amplified and moved more slowly, supported by a

stick. And, simultaneously, in the whole tenour of the Queen's

existence an extraordinary transformation came to pass. The nation's

attitude towards her, critical and even hostile as it had been for so

many years, altogether changed; while there was a corresponding

alteration in the temper of Victoria's own mind.



Many causes led to this result. Among them were the repeated strokes

of personal misfortune which befell the Queen during a cruelly

short space of years. In 1878 the Princess Alice, who had married in

1862 the Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, died in tragic circumstances.

In the following year the Prince Imperial, the only son of the Empress

Eugenie, to whom Victoria, since the catastrophe of 1870, had become

devotedly attached, was killed in the Zulu War. Two years later, in

1881, the Queen lost Lord Beaconsfield, and, in 1883, John Brown. In

1884 the Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, who had been an invalid from

birth, died prematurely, shortly after his marriage. Victoria's cup of

sorrows was indeed overflowing: and the public, as it watched the

widowed mother weeping for her children and her friends, displayed a

constantly increasing sympathy.



An event which occurred in 1882 revealed and accentuated the feelings

of the nation. As the Queen, at Windsor, was walking from the train to

her carriage, a youth named Roderick Maclean fired a pistol at her from

a distance of a few yards. An Eton boy struck up Maclean's arm with an

umbrella before the pistol went off; no damage was done, and the

culprit was at once arrested. This was the last of a series of seven

attempts upon the Queen--attempts which, taking place at sporadic

intervals over a period of forty years, resembled one another in a

curious manner. All, with a single exception, were perpetrated by

adolescents, whose motives were apparently not murderous, since, save

in the case of Maclean, none of their pistols was loaded. These

unhappy youths, who, after buying their cheap weapons, stuffed them

with gunpowder and paper, and then went off, with the certainty of

immediate detection, to click them in the face of royalty, present a

strange problem to the psychologist. But, though in each case

their actions and their purposes seemed to be so similar, their fates

were remarkably varied. The first of them, Edward Oxford, who fired at

Victoria within a few months of her marriage, was tried for high

treason, declared to be insane, and sent to an asylum for life. It

appears, however, that this sentence did not commend itself to Albert,

for when, two years later, John Francis committed the same offence, and

was tried upon the same charge, the Prince pronounced that there was no

insanity in the matter. 'The wretched creature,' he told his father,

was 'not out of his mind, but a thorough scamp.' 'I hope,' he added,

'his trial will be conducted with the greatest strictness.' Apparently

it was; at any rate, the jury shared the view of the Prince, the plea

of insanity was set aside, and Francis was found guilty of high treason

and condemned to death; but, as there was no proof of an intent to kill

or even to wound, this sentence, after a lengthened deliberation

between the Home Secretary and the Judges, was commuted for one of

transportation for life. As the law stood, these assaults, futile as

they were, could be treated only as high treason; the discrepancy

between the actual deed and the tremendous penalties involved was

obviously grotesque; and it was, besides, clear that a jury, knowing

that a verdict of guilty implied a sentence of death, would tend to the

alternative course, and find the prisoner not guilty but insane--a

conclusion which, on the face of it, would have appeared to be the more

reasonable. In 1842, therefore, an Act was passed making any attempt

to hurt the Queen a misdemeanour, punishable by transportation for

seven years, or imprisonment, with or without hard labour, for a term

not exceeding three years--the misdemeanant, at the discretion of the

Court, 'to be publicly or privately whipped, as often, and in

such manner and form, as the Court shall direct, not exceeding

thrice.' The four subsequent attempts were all dealt with under

this new law; William Bean, in 1842, was sentenced to eighteen months'

imprisonment; William Hamilton, in 1849, was transported for seven

years; and, in 1850, the same sentence was passed upon Lieutenant

Robert Pate, who struck the Queen on the head with his cane in

Piccadilly. Pate, alone among these delinquents, was of mature years;

he had held a commission in the Army, dressed himself as a dandy, and

was, the Prince declared, 'manifestly deranged.' In 1872 Arthur

O'Connor, a youth of seventeen, fired an unloaded pistol at the Queen

outside Buckingham Palace; he was immediately seized by John Brown, and

sentenced to one year's imprisonment and twenty strokes of the birch

rod. It was for his bravery upon this occasion that Brown was

presented with one of his gold medals. In all these cases the jury had

refused to allow the plea of insanity; but Roderick Maclean's attempt

in 1882 had a different issue. On this occasion the pistol was found

to have been loaded, and the public indignation, emphasised as it was

by Victoria's growing popularity, was particularly great. Either for

this or for some other reason the procedure of the last forty years was

abandoned, and Maclean was tried for high treason. The result was what

might have been expected: the jury brought in a verdict of 'not guilty,

but insane'; and the prisoner was sent to an asylum during Her

Majesty's pleasure. Their verdict, however, produced a remarkable

consequence. Victoria, who doubtless carried in her mind some

memory of Albert's disapproval of a similar verdict in the case of

Oxford, was very much annoyed. What did the jury mean, she asked, by

saying that Maclean was not guilty? It was perfectly clear that he was

guilty--she had seen him fire off the pistol herself. It was in vain

that Her Majesty's constitutional advisers reminded her of the

principle of English law which lays down that no man can be found

guilty of a crime unless he be proved to have had a criminal intention.

Victoria was quite unconvinced. 'If that is the law,' she said, 'the

law must be altered': and altered it was. In 1883 an Act was passed

changing the form of the verdict in cases of insanity, and the

confusing anomaly remains upon the Statute Book to this day.



But it was not only through the feelings--commiserating or

indignant--of personal sympathy that the Queen and her people were

being drawn more nearly together; they were beginning, at last, to come

to a close and permanent agreement upon the conduct of public affairs.

Mr. Gladstone's second administration (1880-85) was a succession of

failures, ending in disaster and disgrace; liberalism fell into

discredit with the country, and Victoria perceived with joy that her

distrust of her Ministers was shared by an ever-increasing number of

her subjects. During the crisis in the Sudan, the popular temper was

her own. She had been among the first to urge the necessity of an

expedition to Khartoum, and, when the news came of the catastrophic

death of General Gordon, her voice led the chorus of denunciation which

raved against the Government. In her rage, she despatched a

fulminating telegram to Mr. Gladstone, not in the usual cypher, but

open; and her letter of condolence to Miss Gordon, in which

she attacked her Ministers for breach of faith, was widely published.

It was rumoured that she had sent for Lord Hartington, the Secretary of

State for War, and vehemently upbraided him. 'She rated me,' he was

reported to have told a friend, 'as if I'd been a footman.' 'Why

didn't she send for the butler?' asked his friend. 'Oh,' was the

reply, 'the butler generally manages to keep out of the way on such

occasions.'



But the day came when it was impossible to keep out of the way any

longer. Mr. Gladstone was defeated, and resigned. Victoria, at a

final interview, received him with her usual amenity, but, besides the

formalities demanded by the occasion, the only remark which she made to

him of a personal nature was to the effect that she supposed Mr.

Gladstone would now require some rest. He remembered with regret how,

at a similar audience in 1874, she had expressed her trust in him as a

supporter of the throne; but he noted the change without surprise.

'Her mind and opinions,' he wrote in his diary afterwards, 'have since

that day been seriously warped.'



Such was Mr. Gladstone's view; but the majority of the nation by no

means agreed with him; and, in the General Election of 1886, they

showed decisively that Victoria's politics were identical with theirs

by casting forth the contrivers of Home Rule--that abomination of

desolation--into outer darkness, and placing Lord Salisbury in power.

Victoria's satisfaction was profound. A flood of new unwonted

hopefulness swept over her, stimulating her vital spirits with a

surprising force. Her habit of life was suddenly altered; abandoning

the long seclusion which Disraeli's persuasions had only

momentarily interrupted, she threw herself vigorously into a multitude

of public activities. She appeared at drawing-rooms, at concerts, at

reviews; she laid foundation-stones; she went to Liverpool to open an

international exhibition, driving through the streets in her open

carriage in heavy rain amid vast applauding crowds. Delighted by the

welcome which met her everywhere, she warmed to her work. She visited

Edinburgh, where the ovation of Liverpool was repeated and surpassed.

In London, she opened in high state the Colonial and Indian Exhibition

at South Kensington. On this occasion the ceremonial was particularly

magnificent; a blare of trumpets announced the approach of Her Majesty;

the 'National Anthem' followed; and the Queen, seated on a gorgeous

throne of hammered gold, replied with her own lips to the address that

was presented to her. Then she rose, and, advancing upon the platform

with regal port, acknowledged the acclamations of the great assembly by

a succession of curtseys, of elaborate and commanding grace.



Next year was the fiftieth of her reign, and in June the splendid

anniversary was celebrated in solemn pomp. Victoria, surrounded by the

highest dignitaries of her realm, escorted by a glittering galaxy of

kings and princes, drove through the crowded enthusiasm of the capital

to render thanks to God in Westminster Abbey. In that triumphant hour

the last remaining traces of past antipathies and past disagreements

were altogether swept away. The Queen was hailed at once as the mother

of her people and as the embodied symbol of their imperial greatness;

and she responded to the double sentiment with all the ardour of her

spirit. England and the people of England, she knew it, she felt

it, were, in some wonderful and yet quite simple manner, hers.

Exultation, affection, gratitude, a profound sense of obligation, an

unbounded pride--such were her emotions; and, colouring and

intensifying the rest, there was something else. At last, after so

long, happiness--fragmentary, perhaps, and charged with gravity, but

true and unmistakable none the less--had returned to her. The

unaccustomed feeling filled and warmed her consciousness. When, at

Buckingham Palace again, the long ceremony over, she was asked how she

was, 'I am very tired, but very happy,' she said.





III



And so, after the toils and tempests of the day, a long evening

followed--mild, serene, and lighted with a golden glory. For an

unexampled atmosphere of success and adoration invested the last period

of Victoria's life. Her triumph was the summary, the crown, of a

greater triumph--the culminating prosperity of a nation. The solid

splendour of the decade between Victoria's two jubilees can hardly be

paralleled in the annals of England. The sage counsels of Lord

Salisbury seemed to bring with them not only wealth and power, but

security; and the country settled down, with calm assurance, to the

enjoyment of an established grandeur. And--it was only

natural--Victoria settled down too. For she was a part of the

establishment--an essential part as it seemed--a fixture--a

magnificent, immovable sideboard in the huge saloon of state. Without

her the heaped-up banquet of 1890 would have lost its distinctive

quality--the comfortable order of the substantial unambiguous

dishes, with their background of weighty glamour, half out of sight.



Her own existence came to harmonise more and more with what was around

her. Gradually, imperceptibly, Albert receded. It was not that he was

forgotten--that would have been impossible--but that the void created

by his absence grew less agonising, and even, at last, less obvious.

Eventually Victoria found it possible to regret the bad weather without

immediately reflecting that her 'dear Albert always said we could not

alter it, but must leave it as it was'; she could even enjoy a good

breakfast without considering how 'dear Albert' would have liked the

buttered eggs. And, as that figure slowly faded, its place was

taken, inevitably, by Victoria's own. Her being, revolving for so many

years round an external object, now changed its motion and found its

centre in itself. It had to be so: her domestic position, the pressure

of her public work, her indomitable sense of duty, made anything else

impossible. Her egotism proclaimed its rights. Her age increased

still further the surrounding deference; and her force of character,

emerging at length in all its plenitude, imposed itself absolutely upon

its environment by the conscious effort of an imperious will.



Little by little it was noticed that the outward vestiges of Albert's

posthumous domination grew less complete. At Court the stringency of

mourning was relaxed. As the Queen drove through the Park in her open

carriage with her Highlanders behind her, nursery-maids canvassed

eagerly the growing patch of violet velvet in the bonnet with its jet

appurtenances on the small bowing head.







It was in her family that Victoria's ascendancy reached its highest

point. All her offspring were married; the number of her descendants

rapidly increased; there were many marriages in the third generation;

and no fewer than thirty-seven of her great-grandchildren were living

at the time of her death. A picture of the period displays the royal

family collected together in one of the great rooms at Windsor--a

crowded company of more than fifty persons, with the imperial matriarch

in their midst. Over them all she ruled with a most potent sway. The

small concerns of the youngest aroused her passionate interest; and the

oldest she treated as if they were children still. The Prince of

Wales, in particular, stood in tremendous awe of his mother. She had

steadily refused to allow him the slightest participation in the

business of government; and he had occupied himself in other ways. Nor

could it be denied that he enjoyed himself--out of her sight; but, in

that redoubtable presence, his abounding manhood suffered a miserable

eclipse. Once, at Osborne, when, owing to no fault of his, he was too

late for a dinner party, he was observed standing behind a pillar and,

wiping the sweat from his forehead, trying to nerve himself to go up to

the Queen. When at last he did so, she gave him a stiff nod, whereupon

he vanished immediately behind another pillar, and remained there until

the party broke up. At the time of this incident the Prince of Wales

was over fifty years of age.



It was inevitable that the Queen's domestic activities should

occasionally trench upon the domain of high diplomacy; and this was

especially the case when the interests of her eldest daughter, the

Crown Princess of Prussia, were at stake. The Crown Prince held

liberal opinions; he was much influenced by his wife; and both were

detested by Bismarck, who declared with scurrilous emphasis that the

Englishwoman and her mother were a menace to the Prussian State. The

feud was still further intensified when, on the death of the old

Emperor (1888), the Crown Prince succeeded to the throne. A family

entanglement brought on a violent crisis. One of the daughters of the

new Empress had become betrothed to Prince Alexander of Battenberg, who

had lately been ejected from the throne of Bulgaria owing to the

hostility of the Tsar. Victoria, as well as the Empress, highly

approved of the match. Of the two brothers of Prince Alexander, the

elder had married another of her grand-daughters, and the younger was

the husband of her daughter, the Princess Beatrice; she was devoted to

the handsome young men; and she was delighted by the prospect of the

third brother--on the whole the handsomest, she thought, of the

three--also becoming a member of her family. Unfortunately, however,

Bismarck was opposed to the scheme. He perceived that the marriage

would endanger the friendship between Germany and Russia, which was

vital to his foreign policy, and he announced that it must not take

place. A fierce struggle between the Empress and the Chancellor

followed. Victoria, whose hatred of her daughter's enemy was

unbounded, came over to Charlottenburg to join in the fray. Bismarck,

over his pipe and his lager, snorted out his alarm. The Queen of

England's object, he said, was clearly political--she wished to

estrange Germany and Russia--and very likely she would have her way.

'In family matters,' he added, 'she is not used to contradiction'; she

would 'bring the parson with her in her travelling-bag and the

bridegroom in her trunk, and the marriage would come off on the

spot.' But the man of blood and iron was not to be thwarted so easily,

and he asked for a private interview with the Queen. The details of

their conversation are unknown; but it is certain that in the course of

it Victoria was forced to realise the meaning of resistance to that

formidable personage, and that she promised to use all her influence to

prevent the marriage. The engagement was broken off; and in the

following year Prince Alexander of Battenberg united himself to

Fraeulein Loisinger, an actress at the court theatre of Darmstadt.



But such painful incidents were rare. Victoria was growing very old;

with no Albert to guide her, with no Beaconsfield to enflame her, she

was willing enough to abandon the dangerous questions of diplomacy to

the wisdom of Lord Salisbury, and to concentrate her energies upon

objects which touched her more nearly and over which she could exercise

an undisputed control. Her home--her court--the monuments at

Balmoral--the livestock at Windsor--the organisation of her

engagements--the supervision of the multitudinous details of her daily

routine--such matters played now an even greater part in her existence

than before. Her life passed in an extraordinary exactitude. Every

moment of her day was mapped out beforehand; the succession of her

engagements was immutably fixed; the dates of her journeys--to Osborne,

to Balmoral, to the South of France, to Windsor, to London--were hardly

altered from year to year. She demanded from those who surrounded her

a rigid precision in details, and she was preternaturally quick in

detecting the slightest deviation from the rules which she had laid

down. Such was the irresistible potency of her personality, that

anything but the most implicit obedience to her wishes was felt to be

impossible; but sometimes somebody was unpunctual; and unpunctuality

was one of the most heinous of sins. Then her displeasure--her

dreadful displeasure--became all too visible. At such moments there

seemed nothing surprising in her having been the daughter of a

martinet.



But these storms, unnerving as they were while they lasted, were

quickly over, and they grew more and more exceptional. With the return

of happiness a gentle benignity flowed from the aged Queen. Her smile,

once so rare a visitant to those saddened features, flitted over them

with an easy alacrity; the blue eyes beamed; the whole face, starting

suddenly from its pendulous expressionlessness, brightened and softened

and cast over those who watched it an unforgettable charm. For in her

last years there was a fascination in Victoria's amiability which had

been lacking even from the vivid impulse of her youth. Over all who

approached her--or very nearly all--she threw a peculiar spell. Her

grandchildren adored her; her ladies waited upon her with a reverential

love. The honour of serving her obliterated a thousand

inconveniences--the monotony of a court existence, the fatigue of

standing, the necessity for a superhuman attentiveness to the minutiae

of time and space. As one did one's wonderful duty one could forget

that one's legs were aching from the infinitude of the passages at

Windsor, or that one's bare arms were turning blue in the Balmoral cold.



What, above all, seemed to make such service delightful was the

detailed interest which the Queen took in the circumstances of those

around her. Her absorbing passion for the comfortable commonplaces,

the small crises, the recurrent sentimentalities, of domestic

life constantly demanded wider fields for its activity; the sphere of

her own family, vast as it was, was not enough; she became the eager

confidante of the household affairs of her ladies; her sympathies

reached out to the palace domestics; even the housemaids and

scullions--so it appeared--were the objects of her searching inquiries,

and of her heartfelt solicitude when their lovers were ordered to a

foreign station, or their aunts suffered from an attack of rheumatism

which was more than usually acute.



Nevertheless the due distinctions of rank were immaculately preserved.

The Queen's mere presence was enough to ensure that; but, in addition,

the dominion of court etiquette was paramount. For that elaborate

code, which had kept Lord Melbourne stiff upon the sofa and ranged the

other guests in silence about the round table according to the order of

precedence, was as punctiliously enforced as ever. Every evening after

dinner, the hearth-rug, sacred to royalty, loomed before the profane in

inaccessible glory, or, on one or two terrific occasions, actually

lured them magnetically forward to the very edge of the abyss. The

Queen, at the fitting moment, moved towards her guests; one after the

other they were led up to her; and, while duologue followed duologue in

constraint and embarrassment, the rest of the assembly stood still,

without a word. Only in one particular was the severity of the

etiquette allowed to lapse. Throughout the greater part of the reign

the rule that ministers must stand during their audiences with

the Queen had been absolute. When Lord Derby, the Prime Minister, had

an audience of Her Majesty after a serious illness, he mentioned it

afterwards, as a proof of the royal favour, that the Queen had remarked

'How sorry she was she could not ask him to be seated.' Subsequently,

Disraeli, after an attack of gout and in a moment of extreme expansion

on the part of Victoria, had been offered a chair; but he had thought

it wise humbly to decline the privilege. In her later years, however,

the Queen invariably asked Mr. Gladstone and Lord Salisbury to sit

down.



Sometimes the solemnity of the evening was diversified by a concert, an

opera, or even a play. One of the most marked indications of

Victoria's enfranchisement from the thraldom of widowhood had been her

resumption--after an interval of thirty years--of the custom of

commanding dramatic companies from London to perform before the Court

at Windsor. On such occasions her spirits rose high. She loved

acting; she loved a good plot; above all, she loved a farce. Engrossed

by everything that passed upon the stage, she would follow, with

childlike innocence, the unwinding of the story; or she would assume an

air of knowing superiority and exclaim in triumph, 'There! You didn't

expect that, did you?' when the denouement came. Her sense of

humour was of a vigorous though primitive kind. She had been one of

the very few persons who had always been able to appreciate the Prince

Consort's jokes; and, when those were cracked no more, she could still

roar with laughter, in the privacy of her household, over some small

piece of fun--some oddity of an ambassador, or some ignorant

Minister's faux pas. When the jest grew subtle she was less pleased;

but, if it approached the confines of the indecorous, the danger was

serious. To take a liberty called down at once Her Majesty's most

crushing disapprobation; and to say something improper was to take the

greatest liberty of all. Then the royal lips sank down at the corners,

the royal eyes stared in astonished protrusion, and in fact the royal

countenance became inauspicious in the highest degree, The transgressor

shuddered into silence, while the awful 'We are not amused' annihilated

the dinner table. Afterwards, in her private entourage, the Queen

would observe that the person in question was, she very much feared,

'not discreet'; it was a verdict from which there was no appeal.



In general, her aesthetic tastes had remained unchanged since the days

of Mendelssohn, Landseer, and Lablache. She still delighted in the

roulades of Italian opera; she still demanded a high standard in the

execution of a pianoforte duet. Her views on painting were decided;

Sir Edwin, she declared, was perfect; she was much impressed by Lord

Leighton's manners; and she profoundly distrusted Mr. Watts. From time

to time she ordered engraved portraits to be taken of members of the

royal family; on these occasions she would have the first proofs

submitted to her, and, having inspected them with minute particularity,

she would point out their mistakes to the artists, indicating at the

same time how they might be corrected. The artists invariably

discovered that Her Majesty's suggestions were of the highest value.

In literature her interests were more restricted. She was devoted to

Lord Tennyson; and, as the Prince Consort had admired George

Eliot, she perused 'Middlemarch': she was disappointed. There is

reason to believe, however, that the romances of another female writer,

whose popularity among the humbler classes of Her Majesty's subjects

was at one time enormous, secured, no less, the approval of Her

Majesty. Otherwise she did not read very much.



Once, however, the Queen's attention was drawn to a publication which

it was impossible for her to ignore. 'The Greville Memoirs,' filled

with a mass of historical information of extraordinary importance, but

filled also with descriptions, which were by no means flattering, of

George IV, William IV, and other royal persons, was brought out by Mr.

Reeve. Victoria read the book, and was appalled. It was, she

declared, a 'dreadful and really scandalous book,' and she could not

say 'how horrified and indignant' she was at Greville's

'indiscretion, indelicacy, ingratitude towards friends, betrayal of

confidence and shameful disloyalty towards his Sovereign.' She wrote

to Disraeli to tell him that in her opinion it was 'very important

that the book should be severely censured and discredited.' 'The tone

in which he speaks of royalty,' she added, 'is unlike anything one sees

in history even, and is most reprehensible.' Her anger was directed

with almost equal vehemence against Mr. Reeve for his having published

'such an abominable book,' and she charged Sir Arthur Helps to convey

to him her deep displeasure. Mr. Reeve, however, was impenitent. When

Sir Arthur told him that, in the Queen's opinion, 'the book degraded

royalty,' he replied: 'Not at all; it elevates it by the contrast it

offers between the present and the defunct state of affairs.' But

this adroit defence failed to make any impression upon Victoria; and

Mr. Reeve, when he retired from the public service, did not receive the

knighthood which custom entitled him to expect. Perhaps if the

Queen had known how many caustic comments upon herself Mr. Reeve had

quietly suppressed in the published Memoirs, she would have been almost

grateful to him; but, in that case, what would she have said of

Greville? Imagination boggles at the thought. As for more modern

essays upon the same topic, Her Majesty, it is to be feared, would have

characterised them as 'not discreet.'



But as a rule the leisure hours of that active life were occupied with

recreations of a less intangible quality than the study of literature

or the appreciation of art. Victoria was a woman not only of vast

property but of innumerable possessions. She had inherited an immense

quantity of furniture, of ornaments, of china, of plate, of valuable

objects of every kind; her purchases, throughout a long life, made a

formidable addition to these stores; and there flowed in upon her,

besides, from every quarter of the globe, a constant stream of gifts.

Over this enormous mass she exercised an unceasing and minute

supervision, and the arrangement and the contemplation of it, in all

its details, filled her with an intimate satisfaction. The collecting

instinct has its roots in the very depths of human nature; and, in the

case of Victoria, it seemed to owe its force to two of her dominating

impulses--the intense sense, which had always been hers, of her own

personality, and the craving which, growing with the years, had become

in her old age almost an obsession, for fixity, for solidity, for

the setting up of palpable barriers against the outrages of change and

time. When she considered the multitudinous objects which belonged to

her, or, better still, when, choosing out some section of them as the

fancy took her, she actually savoured the vivid richness of their

individual qualities, she saw herself deliciously reflected from a

million facets, felt herself magnified miraculously over a boundless

area, and was well pleased. That was just as it should be; but then

came the dismaying thought--everything slips away, crumbles, vanishes;

Sevres dinner-services get broken; even golden basins go unaccountably

astray; even one's self, with all the recollections and experiences

that make up one's being, fluctuates, perishes, dissolves ... But no!

It could not, should not be so! There should be no changes and no

losses! Nothing should ever move--neither the past nor the

present--and she herself least of all! And so the tenacious woman,

hoarding her valuables, decreed their immortality with all the

resolution of her soul. She would not lose one memory or one pin.



She gave orders that nothing should be thrown away--and nothing was.

There, in drawer after drawer, in wardrobe after wardrobe, reposed the

dresses of seventy years. But not only the dresses--the furs and the

mantles and subsidiary frills and the muffs and the parasols and the

bonnets--all were ranged in chronological order, dated and complete. A

great cupboard was devoted to the dolls; in the china-room at Windsor a

special table held the mugs of her childhood, and her children's mugs

as well. Mementoes of the past surrounded her in serried

accumulations. In every room the tables were powdered thick with the

photographs of relatives; their portraits, revealing them at all

ages, covered the walls; their figures, in solid marble, rose up from

pedestals, or gleamed from brackets in the form of gold and silver

statuettes. The dead, in every shape--in miniatures, in porcelain, in

enormous life-size oil-paintings--were perpetually about her. John

Brown stood upon her writing-table in solid gold. Her favourite horses

and dogs, endowed with a new durability, crowded round her footsteps.

Sharp, in silver-gilt, dominated the dinner-table; Boy and Boz lay

together among unfading flowers, in bronze. And it was not enough that

each particle of the past should be given the stability of metal or of

marble: the whole collection, in its arrangement, no less than its

entity, should be immutably fixed. There might be additions, but there

might never be alterations. No chintz might change, no carpet, no

curtain, be replaced by another; or, if long use at last made it

necessary, the stuffs and the patterns must be so identically

reproduced that the keenest eye might not detect the difference. No

new picture could be hung upon the walls at Windsor, for those already

there had been put in their places by Albert, whose decisions were

eternal. So, indeed, were Victoria's. To ensure that they should be

the aid of the camera was called in. Every single article in the

Queen's possession was photographed from several points of view. These

photographs were submitted to Her Majesty, and when, after careful

inspection, she had approved of them, they were placed in a series of

albums, richly bound. Then, opposite each photograph, an entry was

made, indicating the number of the article, the number of the room in

which it was kept, its exact position in the room and all its principal

characteristics. The fate of every object which had undergone this

process was henceforth irrevocably sealed. The whole multitude,

once and for all, took up its steadfast station. And Victoria, with a

gigantic volume or two of the endless catalogue always beside her, to

look through, to ponder upon, to expatiate over, could feel, with a

double contentment, that the transitoriness of this world had been

arrested by the amplitude of her might.



Thus the collection, ever multiplying, ever encroaching upon new fields

of consciousness, ever rooting itself more firmly in the depths of

instinct, became one of the dominating influences of that strange

existence. It was a collection not merely of things and of thoughts,

but of states of mind and ways of living as well. The celebration of

anniversaries grew to be an important branch of it--of birthdays and

marriage days and death days, each of which demanded its appropriate

feeling, which, in its turn, must be itself expressed in an appropriate

outward form. And the form, of course--the ceremony of rejoicing or

lamentation--was stereotyped with the rest: it was part of the

collection. On a certain day, for instance, flowers must be strewn on

John Brown's monument at Balmoral; and the date of the yearly departure

for Scotland was fixed by that fact. Inevitably it was around the

central circumstance of death--death, the final witness to human

mutability--that these commemorative cravings clustered most thickly.

Might not even death itself be humbled, if one could recall enough?--if

one asserted, with a sufficiently passionate and reiterated emphasis,

the eternity of love? Accordingly, every bed in which Victoria slept

had attached to it, at the back, on the right-hand side, above the

pillow, a photograph of the head and shoulders of Albert as he

lay dead, surmounted by a wreath of immortelles. At Balmoral,

where memories came crowding so closely, the solid signs of memory

appeared in surprising profusion. Obelisks, pyramids, tombs, statues,

cairns, and seats of inscribed granite, proclaimed Victoria's

dedication to the dead. There, twice a year, on the days that followed

her arrival, a solemn pilgrimage of inspection and meditation was

performed. There, on August 26--Albert's birthday--at the foot of the

bronze statue of him in Highland dress, the Queen, her family, her

Court, her servants, and her tenantry, met together and in silence

drank to the memory of the dead. In England the tokens of remembrance

pullulated hardly less. Not a day passed without some addition to the

multifold assemblage--a gold statuette of Ross, the piper--a life-sized

marble group of Victoria and Albert, in medieval costume, inscribed

upon the base with the words: 'Allured to brighter worlds and led the

way'--a granite slab in the shrubbery at Osborne, informing the visitor

of 'Waldmann: the very favourite little dachshund of Queen Victoria;

who brought him from Baden, April 1872; died, July 11, 1881.'



At Frogmore, the great mausoleum, perpetually enriched, was visited

almost daily by the Queen when the Court was at Windsor. But there

was another, a more secret and a hardly less holy shrine. The suite of

rooms which Albert had occupied in the Castle was kept for ever shut

away from the eyes of any save the most privileged. Within those

precincts everything remained as it had been at the Prince's death; but

the mysterious preoccupation of Victoria had commanded that her

husband's clothing should be laid afresh, each evening, upon the

bed, and that, each evening, the water should be set ready in the

basin, as if he were still alive; and this incredible rite was

performed with scrupulous regularity for nearly forty years.



Such was the inner worship; and still the flesh obeyed the spirit;

still the daily hours of labour proclaimed Victoria's consecration to

duty and to the ideal of the dead. Yet, with the years, the sense of

self-sacrifice had faded; the natural energies of that ardent being

discharged themselves with satisfaction into the channel of public

work; the love of business which, from her girlhood, had been strong

within her, reasserted itself in all its vigour, and, in her old age,

to have been cut off from her papers and her boxes would have been, not

a relief, but an agony to Victoria. Thus, though toiling Ministers

might sigh and suffer, the whole process of government continued, till

the very end, to pass before her. Nor was that all; ancient precedent

had made the validity of an enormous number of official transactions

dependent upon the application of the royal sign-manual; and a great

proportion of the Queen's working hours was spent in this mechanical

task. Nor did she show any desire to diminish it. On the contrary,

she voluntarily resumed the duty of signing commissions in the Army,

from which she had been set free by Act of Parliament, and from which,

during the years of middle life, she had abstained. In no case would

she countenance the proposal that she should use a stamp. But, at

last, when the increasing pressure of business made the delays of the

antiquated system intolerable, she consented that, for certain classes

of documents, her oral sanction should be sufficient. Each paper was

read aloud to her, and she said at the end 'Approved.' Often, for

hours at a time, she would sit, with Albert's bust in front of her,

while the word 'Approved' issued at intervals from her lips. The word

came forth with a majestic sonority; for her voice now--how changed

from the silvery treble of her girlhood!--was a contralto, full and

strong.





IV



The final years were years of apotheosis. In the dazzled imagination

of her subjects Victoria soared aloft towards the regions of divinity

through a nimbus of purest glory. Criticism fell dumb; deficiencies

which, twenty years earlier, would have been universally admitted, were

now as universally ignored. That the nation's idol was a very

incomplete representative of the nation was a circumstance that was

hardly noticed, and yet it was conspicuously true. For the vast

changes which, out of the England of 1837, had produced the England of

1897, seemed scarcely to have touched the Queen. The immense

industrial development of the period, the significance of which had

been so thoroughly understood by Albert, meant little indeed to

Victoria. The amazing scientific movement, which Albert had

appreciated no less, left Victoria perfectly cold. Her conception of

the universe, and of man's place in it, and of the stupendous problems

of nature and philosophy remained, throughout her life, entirely

unchanged. Her religion was the religion which she had learnt from the

Baroness Lehzen and the Duchess of Kent. Here, too, it might be

supposed that Albert's views would have influenced her. For Albert, in

matters of religion, was advanced. Disbelieving altogether in

evil spirits, he had had his doubts about the miracle of the Gadarene

Swine. Stockmar, even, had thrown out, in a remarkable memorandum

on the education of the Prince of Wales, the suggestion that while the

child 'must unquestionably be brought up in the creed of the Church of

England,' it might nevertheless be in accordance with the spirit of the

times to exclude from his religious training the inculcation of a

belief in 'the supernatural doctrines of Christianity.' This,

however, would have been going too far; and all the royal children were

brought up in complete orthodoxy. Anything else would have grieved

Victoria, though her own conceptions of the orthodox were not very

precise. But her nature, in which imagination and subtlety held so

small a place, made her instinctively recoil from the intricate

ecstasies of High Anglicanism; and she seemed to feel most at home in

the simple faith of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. This was

what might have been expected; for Lehzen was the daughter of a

Lutheran pastor, and the Lutherans and the Presbyterians have much in

common. For many years Dr. Norman Macleod, an innocent Scotch

minister, was her principal spiritual adviser; and, when he was taken

from her, she drew much comfort from quiet chats about life and death

with the cottagers at Balmoral. Her piety, absolutely genuine,

found what it wanted in the sober exhortations of old John Grant and

the devout saws of Mrs. P. Farquharson. They possessed the qualities,

which, as a child of fourteen, she had so sincerely admired in the

Bishop of Chester's 'Exposition of the Gospel of St. Matthew'; they

were 'just plain and comprehensible and full of truth and good

feeling.' The Queen, who gave her name to the Age of Mill and of

Darwin, never got any further than that.



From the social movements of her time Victoria was equally remote.

Towards the smallest no less than towards the greatest changes she

remained inflexible. During her youth and middle-age smoking had been

forbidden in polite society, and so long as she lived she would not

withdraw her anathema against it. Kings might protest; bishops and

ambassadors, invited to Windsor, might be reduced, in the privacy of

their bedrooms, to lie full-length upon the floor and smoke up the

chimney--the interdict continued. It might have been supposed that

a female sovereign would have lent her countenance to one of the most

vital of all the reforms to which her epoch gave birth--the

emancipation of women--but, on the contrary, the mere mention of such a

proposal sent the blood rushing to her head. In 1870, her eye having

fallen upon the report of a meeting in favour of Women's Suffrage, she

wrote to Mr. Martin in royal rage--'The Queen is most anxious to enlist

everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked

folly of "Woman's Rights," with all its attendant horrors, on which her

poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and

propriety. Lady ---- ought to get a good whipping. It is a subject

which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God

created men and women different--then let them remain each in their own

position. Tennyson has some beautiful lines on the difference of men

and women in "The Princess." Woman would become the most hateful,

heartless, and disgusting of human beings were she allowed to

unsex herself; and where would be the protection which man was intended

to give the weaker sex? The Queen is sure that Mrs. Martin agrees with

her.' The argument was irrefutable; Mrs. Martin agreed; and yet

the canker spread.



In another direction Victoria's comprehension of the spirit of her age

has been constantly asserted. It was for long the custom for courtly

historians and polite politicians to compliment the Queen upon the

correctness of her attitude towards the Constitution. But such praises

seem hardly to be justified by the facts. In her later years Victoria

more than once alluded with regret to her conduct during the Bedchamber

crisis, and let it be understood that she had grown wiser since.

Yet in truth it is difficult to trace any fundamental change either in

her theory or her practice in constitutional matters throughout her

life. The same despotic and personal spirit which led her to break off

the negotiations with Peel is equally visible in her animosity towards

Palmerston, in her threats of abdication to Disraeli, and in her desire

to prosecute the Duke of Westminster for attending a meeting upon

Bulgarian atrocities. The complex and delicate principles of the

Constitution cannot be said to have come within the compass of her

mental faculties; and in the actual developments which it underwent

during her reign she played a passive part. From 1840 to 1861 the

power of the Crown steadily increased in England; from 1861 to 1901 it

steadily declined. The first process was due to the influence of the

Prince Consort, the second to that of a series of great Ministers.

During the first Victoria was in effect a mere accessory; during the

second the threads of power, which Albert had so laboriously collected,

inevitably fell from her hands into the vigorous grasp of Mr.

Gladstone, Lord Beaconsfield, and Lord Salisbury. Perhaps, absorbed as

she was in routine, and difficult as she found it to distinguish at all

clearly between the trivial and the essential, she was only dimly aware

of what was happening. Yet, at the end of her reign, the Crown was

weaker than at any other time in English history. Paradoxically

enough, Victoria received the highest eulogiums for assenting to a

political evolution which, had she completely realised its import,

would have filled her with supreme displeasure.



Nevertheless it must not be supposed that she was a second George III.

Her desire to impose her will, vehement as it was, and unlimited by any

principle, was yet checked by a certain shrewdness. She might oppose

her Ministers with extraordinary violence; she might remain utterly

impervious to arguments and supplications; the pertinacity of her

resolution might seem to be unconquerable; but, at the very last moment

of all, her obstinacy would give way. Her innate respect and capacity

for business, and perhaps, too, the memory of Albert's scrupulous

avoidance of extreme courses, prevented her from ever entering an

impasse. By instinct she understood when the facts were too much for

her, and to them she invariably yielded. After all, what else could

she do?



But if, in all these ways, the Queen and her epoch were profoundly

separated, the points of contact between them also were not few.

Victoria understood very well the meaning and the attractions of power

and property, and in such learning the English nation, too, had grown

to be more and more proficient. During the last fifteen years of the

reign--for the short Liberal Administration of 1892 was a mere

interlude--imperialism was the dominant creed of the country. It was

Victoria's as well. In this direction, if in no other, she had allowed

her mind to develop. Under Disraeli's tutelage the British Dominions

over the seas had come to mean much more to her than ever before, and,

in particular, she had grown enamoured of the East. The thought of

India fascinated her; she set to, and learnt a little Hindustani; she

engaged some Indian servants, who became her inseparable attendants,

and one of whom, Munshi Abdul Karim, eventually almost succeeded to the

position which had once been John Brown's. At the same time, the

imperialist temper of the nation invested her office with a new

significance exactly harmonising with her own inmost proclivities. The

English polity was in the main a common-sense structure; but there was

always a corner in it where common-sense could not enter--where,

somehow or other, the ordinary measurements were not applicable and the

ordinary rules did not apply. So our ancestors had laid it down,

giving scope, in their wisdom, to that mystical element which, as it

seems, can never quite be eradicated from the affairs of men.

Naturally it was in the Crown that the mysticism of the English polity

was concentrated--the Crown, with its venerable antiquity, its sacred

associations, its imposing spectacular array. But, for nearly two

centuries, common-sense had been predominant in the great building, and

the little, unexplored, inexplicable corner had attracted small

attention. Then, with the rise of imperialism, there was a change.

For imperialism is a faith as well as a business; as it grew, the

mysticism in English public life grew with it; and simultaneously a new

importance began to attach to the Crown. The need for a

symbol--a symbol of England's might, of England's worth, of England's

extraordinary and mysterious destiny--became felt more urgently than

ever before. The Crown was that symbol: and the Crown rested upon the

head of Victoria. Thus it happened that while by the end of the reign

the power of the sovereign had appreciably diminished, the prestige of

the sovereign had enormously grown.



Yet this prestige was not merely the outcome of public changes; it was

an intensely personal matter, too. Victoria was the Queen of England,

the Empress of India, the quintessential pivot round which the whole

magnificent machine was revolving--but how much more besides! For one

thing, she was of a great age--an almost indispensable qualification

for popularity in England. She had given proof of one of the most

admired characteristics of the race--persistent vitality. She had

reigned for sixty years, and she was not out. And then, she was a

character. The outlines of her nature were firmly drawn, and, even

through the mists which envelop royalty, clearly visible. In the

popular imagination her familiar figure filled, with satisfying ease, a

distinct and memorable place. It was, besides, the kind of figure

which naturally called forth the admiring sympathy of the great

majority of the nation. Goodness they prized above every other human

quality; and Victoria, who, at the age of twelve, had said that she

would be good, had kept her word. Duty, conscience, morality--yes! in

the light of those high beacons the Queen had always lived. She had

passed her days in work and not in pleasure--in public responsibilities

and family cares. The standard of solid virtue which had been set up

so long ago amid the domestic happiness of Osborne had never been

lowered for an instant. For more than half a century no divorced

lady had approached the precincts of the Court. Victoria, indeed, in

her enthusiasm for wifely fidelity, had laid down a still stricter

ordinance: she frowned severely upon any widow who married again.

Considering that she herself was the offspring of a widow's second

marriage, this prohibition might be regarded as an eccentricity; but,

no doubt, it was an eccentricity on the right side. The middle

classes, firm in the triple brass of their respectability, rejoiced

with a special joy over the most respectable of Queens. They almost

claimed her, indeed, as one of themselves; but this would have been an

exaggeration. For, though many of her characteristics were most often

found among the middle classes, in other respects--in her manners, for

instance--Victoria was decidedly aristocratic. And, in one important

particular, she was neither aristocratic nor middle-class: her attitude

toward herself was simply regal.



Such qualities were obvious and important; but, in the impact of a

personality, it is something deeper, something fundamental and common

to all its qualities, that really tells. In Victoria, it is easy to

discern the nature of this underlying element: it was a peculiar

sincerity. Her truthfulness, her single-mindedness, the vividness of

her emotions and her unrestrained expression of them, were the varied

forms which this central characteristic assumed. It was her sincerity

which gave her at once her impressiveness, her charm, and her

absurdity. She moved through life with the imposing certitude of one

to whom concealment was impossible--either towards her surroundings or

towards herself. There she was, all of her--the Queen of England,

complete and obvious; the world might take her or leave her; she

had nothing more to show, or to explain, or to modify; and, with her

peerless carriage, she swept along her path. And not only was

concealment out of the question; reticence, reserve, even dignity

itself, as it sometimes seemed, might be very well dispensed with. As

Lady Lyttelton said: 'There is a transparency in her truth that is very

striking--not a shade of exaggeration in describing feelings or facts;

like very few other people I ever knew. Many may be as true, but I

think it goes often along with some reserve. She talks all out; just

as it is, no more and no less.' She talked all out; and she wrote

all out, too. Her letters, in the surprising jet of their expression,

remind one of a turned-on tap. What is within pours forth in an

immediate, spontaneous rush. Her utterly unliterary style has at least

the merit of being a vehicle exactly suited to her thoughts and

feelings; and even the platitude of her phraseology carries with it a

curiously personal flavour. Undoubtedly it was through her writings

that she touched the heart of the public. Not only in her 'Highland

Journals,' where the mild chronicle of her private proceedings was laid

bare without a trace either of affectation or of embarrassment, but

also in those remarkable messages to the nation which, from time to

time, she published in the newspapers, her people found her very close

to them indeed. They felt instinctively Victoria's irresistible

sincerity, and they responded. And in truth it was an endearing trait.



The personality and the position, too--the wonderful combination of

them--that, perhaps, was what was finally fascinating in the case. The

little old lady, with her white hair and her plain mourning clothes, in

her wheeled chair or her donkey-carriage--one saw her so; and

then--close behind--with their immediate suggestion of singularity, of

mystery, and of power--the Indian servants. That was the familiar

vision, and it was admirable; but, at chosen moments, it was right that

the widow of Windsor should step forth apparent Queen. The last and

the most glorious of such occasions was the Jubilee of 1897. Then, as

the splendid procession passed along, escorting Victoria through the

thronged re-echoing streets of London on her progress of thanksgiving

to St. Paul's Cathedral, the greatness of her realm and the adoration

of her subjects blazed out together. The tears welled to her eyes,

and, while the multitude roared round her, 'How kind they are to me!

How kind they are!' she repeated over and over again. That night

her message flew over the Empire: 'From my heart I thank my beloved

people. May God bless them!' The long journey was nearly done. But

the traveller, who had come so far, and through such strange

experiences, moved on with the old unfaltering step. The girl, the

wife, the aged woman, were the same: vitality, conscientiousness,

pride, and simplicity were hers to the latest hour.



More

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