BOOKS
Little Mysterious Victoria
BY CHRISTOPHER SYKES NETHER one likes Queen Victoria or not,
there is no denying that she is extraordinar= HY interesting. A great deal has been and will be written about her, but she has so far baffled her chroniclers. They can do everything except explain her. She was a wonderful mixture of opposite qualities. She presented an image of sterling good sense, but at the same time she was not only a pathetically neurotic person but could sometimes be assailed by fear of insanity. Yet the sterling good sense was no myth; it was there, side by side wih the fantasy and morbidity. She was the embodiment of moral correctitude, yet her conduct in the John Brown affair does strongly suggest the opposite, whether rightly or wrongly it is hard to say. She was very open and yet she keeps her secret. One thing about her must always be borne in mind : she was by no means a typical Victorian. Prince Albert was; Queen Victoria was something else.
The present Leaves from a Journal,* published for the first time, with an excellent introduction by Mr. Raymond Mortimer, contains the Queen's own account of one of the numerous surprises to be 'found in her life and character : the begin- ning of her deep and unlikely friendship for Louis Napoleon and Eugenie. The Emperor and Empress came to England in the spring of 1855 and the Queen and her husband returned the visit in the August of the same year when they went on a State visit to Paris. In those days the majority of English people thought of the Emperor as a treacherous warmonger, and the Queen and the Prince went along with them. In 1855 the Prince seems to have modified but not changed his opinion, but the Queen completely reversed all her ideas after the first meeting. Many reasons suggest themselves. Napoleon and Eugenie were both highly intelligent, and their conversation and company must have come as a wonderful refreshment after the tedium and banality of other visiting sovereigns; but accord- ing to Lord Clarendon what really clinched the matter was the fact that the Emperor made love to the Queen! She was not, as said, a true Victorian. Eugenie was to remain the closest friend of her old age.
The Queen's account of the festivities on both sides of the Channel are written in her inimitable style which, thank heavens, she never submitted professional revision. She was a born writer, 0.1, to be more precise, a literary self-portraitist bY nature, and one may regret that she was per- suaded to destroy her last book, a life of John Brown. Sir Henry Ponsonby and Dr. Randall llavidson braved her anger and prevailed on her riot to commit so grave an indiscretion. She * LEAVES FROM A JOURNAL, 1855. By Queen Vie- t'Ina. Edited by Raymond Mortimer. (Deutsch, 21s.)
all but sent them packing for their temerity, but when the storm was over, the sterling good sense reasserted itself and she showed her grati- tude.
Mr. Tisdall's book about Queen Victoria's private lifet is largely concerned with John Brown's private life. The author's most sen- sational chapters (and sensationalism seems to be his main purpose) are concerned with the mutual relationship of the Queen and her whisky-swilling Highland favourite. Mr. Tisdall takes the view that they were lovers. He claims to have seen the photostat of a love letter from the Queen to Brown, but as the photostat is now lost, and we are not assured that an authentic copy was made, this remarkable evidence, taking into account the fallibility of memory, cannot be treated as conclusive. The relationship was certainly very strange, but the fact that Brown was allowed and even encouraged to address the Queen with rude familiarity does not necessarily prove anything. Behaviour of that kind in those circumstances is not the unusual phenomenon that Mr. Tisdall seems to think it is. Many people in exalted positions enjoy a holiday from re- spect, and the court jester is a common necessity.
A much stranger thing is the reverence and even veneration of the Queen for this unpleasant man. It is widely supposed, though again on inconclusive evidence, that the reason for this was that Brown had or pretended to have mediumistic powers and that the Queen saw in him a spiritual link with Albert. Mr. Tisdall points out that, according to what evidence there is, the suggestion of occult powers in Brown came when the relationship was already fully established, so that by itself it does not definitely explain anything.
The whole incident is mysterious, and Mr. Tisdall would have been wiser to have left the question unanswered, but like many carelessly conceived and carelessly written books, his suffers from being opinionated. His aim is to debunk the Queen Victoria myth, a superfluous task surely, but as he rarely quotes any authority for what he says, and is guilty of some extra- ordinary inaccuracies, it is hard to know when he is relying on sound documentation, when on gossip, when on speculation. He seems to have no point of view. He is ribald, priggish, irreverent or courtier-like as the mood takes him. All this is exasperating, since when he is writing at the top of his form, notably in the passage describing the Prince Consort's death, he is extremely good; and then—what a marvellous subject he has chosen—and muffed ! A well-drawn picture of the private life of 'little mysterious Victoria,' as Henry James once called her, would be fascinat-
t QUEEN VICIORIA'S PRIVATE LIFE. By E. E. P. Tisdall. (Jarrolds, 21s.)
ing. Mr. Tisdall wastes his opportunity, most of the time, with cheap caricaturing.
The most curious and inexplicable thing in Queen Victoria's life (so it seems to me) was her enmity towards Gladstone. She was not what we usually mean by a 'prejudiced woman.' She certainly had prejudices, but if she was apt to give way to them, she was more apt, as in the case of Louis Napoleon and Eugenie, to over- come them. Because she loved 'dear Lord M' she hated Peel, but it was not long before Peel was Four faithful Sir Robert.' She was originally prejudiced against Disraeli. She had good reason, both on political and personal grounds, for dis- liking Palmerston, but she came round to him in the end. She never for one moment came round to the far more estimable Gladstone.
Why not? It is possible and even likely that she had heard and believed the stories about Gladstone frequenting brothels, but this would probably have shocked her far less than we might imagine. Failures in chastity did not rouse her anger to any extraordinary extent, and she could show surprising breadth of mind on the subject. It has been urged that she may have hated Gladstone primarily for championing the rights of the Prince of Wales to State employ- ment, a subject which Mr. Tisdall, playing for laughs, badly misrepresents, and on which Sir Philip Magnus repays study, but other people unsuccessfully urged the Prince's rights without incurring the Queen's personal loathing. When she was left a Widow Queen Victoria resolved to be faithful throughout life to the wishes of her husband. Did it never occur to her that the People's William was just the sort of man whom Albert the Good would have cherished above all her subjects? But then Albert, like Gladstone, was a real Victorian.
Part of her trouble may have been that for all her abundant love she never understood Albert. Greville said of them : 'He is become so identified with her that they are one person.' This was a considerable misjudgment. They were wholly dissimilar; the bond between them was the attraction of opposites. They rarely saw things through the same spectacles. This comes out tellingly in one extremely curious and illuminat- ing little incident described by the Queen in her account of Napoleon III's visit to England. The occasion was breakfast on April 21 immediately before the departure of the French sovereigns. They discussed the negotiations then going for- ward in Vienna for bringing the Crimean War to an end. Napoleon talked like a true Bonaparte : he was afraid, he said, that peace might be con- cluded before the capture of Sebastopol, in which case `les deux annees se trouveront dans une position bien facheuse,"I feel this too,' com- mented the royal diarist.
So far so good. But then Napoleon went on to make one of the most shocking remarks ever recorded of him. He proposed that even if the preliminaries for peace were signed, he might nevertheless join the armies in the Crimea, assume command, 'go on with the siege, and pos- sibly take the town' ! He was, in fact, proposing to commit the most dastardly political crime of the nineteenth century. The Prince Consort 'very properly observed' that such conduct would not be wise and the Emperor laughed off his mon- strous gaffe. What is curious is that Victoria's 'very properly' is the only hint of disapproval. The remark seems to have made no great im- pression on her. On Albert it did, as also on Victorian statesmen in general. It affronted everything they believed in. But the niece of William IV and George IV never wholly shared their beliefs.
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