THE HOMELINESS OF THE QUEEN.
THE fresh " Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the High- lands,"* which the Queen has just given to her people, are,. as a contemporary has pointed out, carefully weeded of almost
all the higher political criticisms which must have occurred to the Sovereign during the autumn holidays here recorded. Doubt- less, her diary contained ample records of what she thought concerning the American Civil War, the Schleswig-Holstein War, the war between Prussia and Austria ; the Reform Bill of 1867, the Irish policy of Mr. Gladstone's first Government, the Franco-German War ; the Tory victory of 1874, the Conferences at Constantinople, and the war between Russia and Turkey ; the defeat of the Tory Government in 1880; and the death of Lord Beaconsfield in 1881. In relation to none of these events, however, are we allowed any glimpse of the Sovereign's reflec- tions, except only an indirect glimpse of her deep sympathy with Germany in 1870; and probably even that glimpse had better have been withheld from us, or rather from a neighbouring nation, to whom it is certain to give needless umbrage. The Queen was quite right not to give her confidence to her subjects on questions on which her subjects are themselves passionately divided, for her doing so could not but have tended to alienate the hearty loyalty either of the one party or of the other. What, then, is the value of this fragmentary record of the Queen's thoughts and feelings, during her autumn holidays, on matters of almost exclusively private interest P
We should say that it will be of great use to the many who find it difficult, if not impossible, to realise that the Sovereign, in spite of her unique station, and her official relation to matters of great moment, is none the less a very natural-minded woman, of strong feelings and great simplicity of nature. Some people imagine that Royalty is apt to rob human nature of its best and most sterling characteristics. Others imagine that even if this is not the case, it makes life so artificial that there can be hardly • (Smith, Elder, and Co.)
any common ground between an ordinary mother and the mother of princes, between an ordinary traveller and a traveller who passes from one palace to another with all the world on the watch to find opportunities of serving her; between an ordinary listener to sermons and a listener for whose ears every word is carefully prepared. For those who have this difficulty of the imagination,—and it is very real in a great many people,—these fresh "Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands," will provide a very effectual, if only a temporary remedy. The use of the book is to demonstrate the hearty homeliness of the Queen,—the absolute identity between her views and feelings on all the ordinary subjects of. domestic life, and the views and feelings of nine hundred and ninety-nine good women out of a thousand.
To a great many persons the vague notion of the divinity that doth "hedge a king" proves a bar to the effectual action of the imagination. To a great many others, the false conviction that continual deference and reverence must distort and in a sense obstruct the flow of natural feeling, proves a serious obstacle to interpreting a monarch's feelings aright. It is true that the Queen has continually proved to us, not only by her first High- land Journal, but by her constant efforts to show her sympathy with the numerous friends she has among her subjects, and to express her grief when any great calamity overtakes them, that she is not at heart different from the best among her own.
people. But the impression produced by these manifesta- tions of feeling fades rapidly away. The one thing that remains is the remembrance of her exalted position, of the despatches
which are addressed to her, of the advice which is tendered to her, of the prerogative which she exercises ; and this remembrance is constantly at work to create a non-con- ducting medium between the heart of the Queen and the feelings of her subjects. To any one who, being aware of
this isolation of the Queen, fancies that it makes her less of a woman than she would otherwise be, this book of hers
will bring, for the time at least, a complete undeceiving. To hear how unfortunately long she found Principal Campbell's prayer, delivered in pouring rain; how the midges bit her so dreadfully when she was sketching, that she was obliged to desist; how she enjoyed seeing the servants dance reels, and propose healths in whiskey toddy; how deeply interested she was in seeing the sheep " juiced ;" how practical was her sym- pathy with a little boy whose nosegay Colonel Ponsonby had failed to catch, and who screamed out " Stop !" to the Royal carriage ; how she took her little Beatrice to see death for the first time, in its most attractive and peaceful form ; how she admired a daughter's cleverness, and exulted over a son's courage,—all this will make every one who reads this record of her life in the Highlands feel that the Queen is altogether motherly and human, and that a very large proportion of her interests are just as domestic as those of any of her subjects.
It will be a positive revelation to some of them to find that her servants can get her into a scrape like other persons' ser- vants; that she can be thankful for so much as a little claret to wash her bruises with, when she has been upset in her car- riage; that the reporters can annoy her by dogging her steps, as they annoy her nobles and her statesmen ; that she is as pleased with the baby at a decent cottager's christening as any other mother, and kisses it as kindly; that she can admire an effective preacher, and cry gently over her griefs in the presence of sympa- thising friends like any other mourner. There is something touching, too, in the simplicity of her pleasure at the thought that she represents the Stuart no less than the Hanoverian line, and has a claim to the throne which even the Pretender, if he could haunt the scene of his former adventures, would be glad to acknowledge. There is a great deal of human nature even in the following passage, which is one of the few bits in her book which nobody but the Queen could have written: She is talking with Cameron of Lochiel, among the hiding-places of Prince Charlie :—
" It was, as General Ponsonby observed afterwards, a striking scene. 'There was Lochiel,' as he said, ` whose great-grand-uncle had been the real moving cause of the rising of 1745—for without him Prince Charles would not have made the attempt—showing your. Majesty (whose great-great-grandfather he had striven to dethrone) the scenes made historical by Prince Charlie's wanderings. It was a scene one could not look on unmoved' Yes ; and I feel a sort of reverence in going over these scenes in this most beautiful country, which I am proud to call my own, where there was such devoted loyalty to the family of my ancestors—for Stuart blood is in my veins, and I am now their representative, and the people are as de-
voted and loyal to me as they were to that unhappy race As we suddenly came upon Loch Shiel from the narrow glen, lit up by a bright sunshine, with the fine long loch and the rugged mountains, which are about three thousand feet high, rising all around, no habita- tion or building to be seen except the house of Glenaladale, which used to be an inn, and a large picturesque Catholic church, reminding one, from its elevated position to the right and above the house, of churches and convents abroad, I thought I never saw a lovelier or more romantic spot, or one which told its history so well. What a scene it must have been in 1745 ! And here was I, the descendant of the Stnarta and of the very king whom Prince Charles sought to over- throw, sitting and walking about quite privately and peacefully."
One sees, there, how human even the Queen, writing as Queen, is,—how it delights her even better to think that she represents the romantic, discrowned wanderer, than it does to know that she represents the humdrum Sovereigns who vastly preferred Hanoverian drill and beer to all the chances and perils of a career dependent on Highland loyalty for its best hopes. That is exactly how any other woman would feel who has a claim to a romantic as well as a prosaic inheritance in her pedigree; and no one could express that feeling with greater simplicity than the Queen.
In one word, Queen though she be, she is in everything a woman of homely impressions and homely affections. She thinks no domestics to be compared with her most devoted domestic, no girls cleverer and sweeter than her daughters, no courage more admirable than her son's. She was as pleased with getting Dr. Norman MacLeod's authority for being as much at Balmoral as she desired, as if Dr. Norman MacLeod had been her constitutional adviser, instead of one of her spiritual advisers. She is far from feeling too exalted to take pleasure in being advised to do what she wishes to do. She is far from feeling too exalted to be vexed by continual rain in beautiful country, or by losing her luggage so that she cannot retire to rest without inconvenient special arrangements. In Church matters she is thoroughly religious, without being able to see any vital distinction between her own Church and that of the Presbyterians. In a word, she is in everything a warm-hearted, natural, simple-minded, undogmatic woman, as well as a Queen. And that is so difficult for the world in general to realise, that this book will probably give as much pleasure by convincing its readers of this, as it would have done if it had contained a great amount of new and original matter on the subject of the Queen's deepest and most carefully- considered convictions,—which, however, it is certain that she could never have given us, without doing far more mischief than she could have done good.
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