Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

has done since has greatly excelled those products of his unspoiled youth. Where, after all, in the greater body of his verse is there a completer poem than his very wellknown, yet never-to-be-hackneyed stanzas, beautiful in their simplicity, on the Island Lake of Inisfree; or where in his prose is there a jollier little story than, say, 'The Man and his Boots,' wherein the doubter of Donegal, who would not hear of ghosts or fairies, entered a haunted house and made a fire? He had taken off his boots and stretched his feet to the warmth, when one of the invisible beings, whose existence he had denied, put on the discarded boots and kicked him out of the house. There is plenty of force and humour, seriousness and poetry, in these pages. It is good to meet again Red Hanrahan and such creatures of Ireland and fantasy as the Outcast, Cumhal; but-oh, that Mr Yeats had grown as far beyond these beginnings as in the golden days he promised to do, for then he would have won a greatness of imagination and achievement as would have heartened the world mightily in these confused and materialistic times!

Lastly, tragedy. How long, O Lord, how long! Not only from Russian hearts does that plea go up, for, indeed, the continuance of the worst, the bloodiest tyranny that man has ever suffered-an organisation of cruelty, lust, and treachery, unexampled in the chronicles, and still strongly effective, in spite of prayers and curses -is almost to be numbered among the miracles. Much has been published of the blood-rule of the Bolshevists; so much that those who have read tend to avoid a further reading. It all appears so odious, horrible, hopeless. Yet still the tale is told of new and unending horrors. Mr Sergev P. Melgounov's book is the latest to detail some of the evils wrought by the tyrants of the Soviets. 'The Red Terror in Russia' (Dent) is a document, searching, terrible, and convincing. Let those few-the flabby sentimentalists and the obstinate who refuse to learnlook at the photographs of this book, and realise how murder has stalked through Russia and strewn its pathway with multitudinous victims. The bones of the innocent cry out: How long, O Lord, how long!

I

THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW
QUARTERLY

No. 488.-APRIL, 1926.

Art. 1.-QUEEN VICTORIA.

1. The Letters of Queen Victoria (Second Series). A Selection from Her Majesty's Correspondence and Journals between the years 1862 and 1878. Published by authority of His Majesty the King. Edited by George Earle Buckle. In Two Volumes. Murray, 1926.

By

2. Idealism and Foreign Policy. A Study of the Relations
of Great Britain with Germany and France.
A. A. W. Ramsay, Phil.D. Murray, 1925.

It is not inappropriate that the two new volumes of Queen Victoria's Letters should appear within a few weeks of the funeral of Queen Alexandra. The engagement of the Prince of Wales and the coming of the Princess are among the first events discussed and described in the new Letters. And throughout the two volumes the Princess makes not infrequent appearances. There is indeed only one political controversy in which she is at all involved, the Schleswig-Holstein affair. But the births of her children, and above all the dangerous illness of her husband, were political events, and her relation to her husband's mother was a political fact: so that even in this politically restricted selection from the Queen's correspondence, she inevitably has at least an occasional place. More than that she could not have : for she had neither the inclination, nor the ability, nor the opportunity for engaging in the domestic and foreign political activities which are the almost exclusive subject of these volumes. Nor had Mr Buckle any opportunity to speak of her in the lucid and admirable introductions with which he has prefaced each section of the Letters. Vol. 246.-No. 488.

Her part lay almost entirely outside the sphere of the Queen's correspondence as these volumes present it. But it is not too much to say that without her the Queen could not have lived the life we here see her living. The two women, who always felt for each other a beautiful motherly and daughterly affection, were, in fact, except in their goodness, entirely unlike. And that was the Queen's great good fortune. What she would not do, what she persuaded herself that she could not do, her son, and above all her daughter-in-law, did as it had never been done before. The Queen did not encourage them: did not, it is plain, ever fully perceive how important it was for her and for England that they should do what they did and be what they were. But the fact remains. The Queen did not escape reproach and something like partial unpopularity for her obstinate refusal to make more than the rarest appearances in public during the first ten or fifteen years after her great sorrow. How far would that unpopularity have gone if she had not had a son of incomparable tact and urbanity, a daughter-in-law of the rarest beauty and charm, to replace her at the innumerable ceremonies and functions by which Royalty now gathers a whole people round it and makes itself the visible centre of the national life? 'Replace' her is not perhaps the right word: they could not replace her and did not try or wish to do so. She and no one else could be the Queen. But they never forgot that or allowed others to forget it. Their perfect loyalty and affection kept them from ever playing at any kind of rivalry with her: they never for a moment aimed at being more than her dutiful children and deputies and, as faithful deputies, they carried to her credit all they won of affection and loyalty, and laid it at her feet. Probably only Royal personages fully know the gulf which separates a head which has been crowned from any other, however near it in place or kin. That has, of course, often led to bitter jealousies and even to ugly crimes. But in this happy case it only led to a grown man who was no fool, and a grown woman who was one of the beauties of her generation, submitting patiently to a kind of supervision which ordinary young people escape when they leave school; and to their gladly and gracefully doing in the name and to the

honour of the Queen whatever she did not wish to do herself. No doubt they partly liked it: certainly the Prince enjoyed Mayfair and Newmarket, entertaining and being entertained: and the Princess would not have been feminine, or even human, if she had found no pleasure in the universal admiration which her beauty (and her dresses !) everywhere aroused, and in the universal affection which she won and kept to the day of her death. But many of the functions at which they had to take the Queen's place must have been dull enough. And now that we have laid the Princess of Wales (to give her the title which she bore so long and as no one else ever bore it) in her grave it is right to remember how much Queen Victoria and all of us owed to her and to the Prince whom we afterwards knew as Edward VII. Their gifts were the necessary complement of the Queen's. Without them she might have failed. They helped her to make the transformed Monarchy not only possible but triumphant, by providing it with the active ubiquity and popular visibility without the balance of which dangers might too easily have lurked in the Queen's life of obstinate retirement and devoted but entirely invisible industry.

That is the life which these two new volumes once more depict. After her husband's death the Queen tried to rule this country by incessant reading and writing. An absentee from her capital and her Ministers, she tried, by an endless and indefatigable industry, to make her pen do the work which properly belonged to her voice and presence. So we see her here writing letters to her Ministers day by day, sometimes several in a day, first to Palmerston and Russell and Derby, and then to Gladstone, Disraeli, Salisbury and the second Derby. And all this was in addition to a continual correspondence with foreign personages like her uncle and cousin, the first and second Kings of the Belgians, and her married daughters, especially the Crown Princess of Prussia. There are also occasional letters to foreign Sovereigns, with whom she was less intimate, such as the first German Emperor, the Emperor of Russia, and the King of Italy. And there are many Memoranda written by the Queen and many extracts from her journal. The whole gives a very detailed picture of the

[graphic]

public and political history of England and indeed of Europe between 1862 and 1878, so far-and that includes a great deal-as the Queen played any part in it. We have had that history told us by Lord Morley with Gladstone as the central figure, and by Mr Buckle with Disraeli. Here we have it told once more by Mr Buckle, or rather by the Queen herself and her correspondents, as she and they saw it at the time, and largely from the point of view of her concern in it. Mr Buckle's part in the book has been the all-important one of selecting from the vast stores of material placed at his disposal by the King, and of providing brief introductions to each chapter and occasional explanatory notes. In all this he has followed the example of Lord Esher and Mr Benson who edited the earlier volumes: and, though of course no selection can ever be completely judged by those who do not know what was rejected, it is at least certain that in what he has given us, and in the introductions and notes which he has provided for it, Mr Buckle has performed his difficult task with the accuracy, skill, and judgment which his name had led every one to expect. He seldom, perhaps never, expresses any judgment of his own on the successive controversies, home and foreign, which are discussed in the letters which his introductions precede. The self-effacing modesty, which he perhaps carried too far in his Life of Disraeli, is here obviously the right editorial spirit. We get enough facts about Schleswig-Holstein, Reform, Irish Church, and the other subjects of the letters, to enable us to understand what the Queen and her correspondents wrote about them: for a judgment on their views and actions Mr Buckle leaves us to ourselves.

The selected letters are almost wholly political. But they are letters, not State-papers; that is, they are not dead but alive. And therefore we get from them an impression of the character and personality of the Queen and the other writers, especially Palmerston, Granville, Gladstone, Disraeli, and the Crown Princess. That is inevitable in reading a long series of letters on whatever subject. Naturam expellas furcâ: you may forbid a man to write to you on any subject except finance or metaphysics, but he will not be able to keep himself out of his letters. Certainly the Queen is always

« VorigeDoorgaan »