Mr. Benson's Victoria
Queen Victoria. By E. F. Benson. (Longman. las.) Ma. E. F. BENSON may not have written the last book, but he has anyhow written the best, about a Sovereign who still excites such large public interest that the chronicler canrot as yet be invited to give up his pen to the historian. Two distinguished writers, among many, have undertaken and accomplished the same task as Mr. Benson ; their ability and industry were no less than his, but while Mr. Strachey was perhaps a little too critical and Sir Sidney Lee a little cold, Mr. Benson, with peculiar knowledge of his subject, has painted a portrait warm in colour, rich, but not over- burdened, with detail, and furnished with a well-filled-in background. He may possibly have found that the -chief difficulty in writing of Queen Victoria lies in deciding how far it is right to distinguish the Sovereign from the woman, the reign from the ruler.- No hues -are of course too vivid with which to depict her wholly beneficent sway over a constantly swelling people, but Mr. Benson is quick to see and to delineate with sharp pencil some of the shadows which fall across the character of a Queen, much of whose life claims our entire sympathy no less than our unstinted admiration.
From beginning to end of her long reign Victoria was sure— and here she was indisputably right—that it was for the happiness of England and for the prosperity of the Empire that her tiny hands should grip the sceptre as long as there was a grain of strength left in them ; she was equally sure— and here she was on less firm ground—that, this being so, her state of health—real or imaginary—her wishes, her convenience, her adopted routine of life must rank before all other considerations. The Prince Consort's will had been the law which she had gladly, if sometimes unconsciously, obeyed, and his death rendered that law more binding on her than ever. " No human power," she told the King of the Belgians with some asperity, " will make me swerve from what he planned and wished." The curious point is that anyone so entirely honest with herself, as with everyone else, should have translated those plans and wishes into an excuse for holding herself, through a long period of years, austerely aloof from all mundane happenings other than those forced upon her by circumstance. So early as in 1864 The Times was unsparing in advice, little removed from censure, as to the necessity of discarding the " indulgence of an unavailing grief," and it fell to the Radical orator John Bright to defend the Queen, to whom Radicalism was abhorrent, for the " injustice done to her in reference to her desolate and widowed position."
Mr. Benson very aptly suggests that the alternate moods of irritation and depression induced by the political contro- versies which fitfully raged round the Queen, and which especially marked her attitude to Mr. Gladstone, were due, in no little degree, to conditions beyond her control ; he is especially happy in underlining the new creation of a sense of enjoyment, the complete turning over, so to speak, of a new leaf in the chapter of life which came with the marriage of the Queen's youngest daughter to a highly attractive and amiable Prince. With the death of Lord Beaconsfield in 1881, there had passed the last of the men who exercised any direct influence on the Queen's personal doings ; now there was, to use a homely phrase, a " man about the house " again and, whether at Windsor, Osborne or Balmoral, there was to be noticed a sparkle of gaiety and a fund of hearty goodwill unknown for nearly a quarter of a century. Victoria loved children and children, who are quick to detect true motherliness in a woman's breast, be she never so exalted, loved her ; in the nursery and schoolroon, in the grand- children's ailments and amusements, their lessons and their holidays, the Queen found a new interest which went to soften any little crusts of hardness she had allowed to form and which might well be attributed to the heavy respon- sibilities and the unceasing, and as she thought often un- requited, labours which had beset her. Mr. Benson alludes more than once to the vein of iron to be detected in a character essentially feminine and he has a word for the youthful vindictiveness which caused the temporary estrangement between Victoria and her mother, the not-too-tactful Duchess of Kent. Vindictiveness was perhaps the one fault against which Victoria had to fight and evidently not to fight in vain. For in her later correspondence there- is no trace of any such feelings as, for instance, marked her refusal to allow an officer, who had surely purged his offence in blood and fire, to be employed even in the service of the Khedive of Egypt, or again when she forbade from Court a lady who had instituted well-justified proceedings for a separation from her husband, the offence here being that the husband was at that time the Sovereign's representative in one of the Dominions.
The sun which had shone almost continuously during Victoria's reign was to set under clouds which -at times were black with menace ; no reverse or disappointment in the weary Boer warfare was to damp her spirits or to daunt her courage, but the strain told sorely on an already tired woman and, in the beginning of 1000, it was clear that a life, still -very precious to the country, was fast ebbing out. The Queen's lack of sympathy with the Heir Apparent, despite her genuine affection for him, is a point which of course no biographer can fail to score, but at least be it remembered that it was with the name of her eldest son on her lips that the mother passed to her rest.
Whatever faults or failings Mr. Benson, or anyone else, may assign to Queen Victoria, this at least is irrefutably true : she had just passed her eighteenth birthday when she mounted a Throne which, largely owing to its misuse by her predecessors, was almost immediately to creak even under her slender weight ; she had passed her eightieth winter when she left, as a legacy, an Empire for which the history of the world ran furnish no parallel and whose grandeur was largely due to her own effortsto identify the British-Sovereign with the unifying spirit of Imperialism. Through 60 years she laboured incessantly, untiringly, and every year was to deepen the impression that-the Sovereign typified all the common interests of all the people who own that Sovereign's sway.
Mr. Benson may find some to disagree with certain points in his treatment of a stately figure ; he will find a great many more to thank him heartily for having, with such elaborate pains, attempted to show us what manner of woman Queen Victoria was and what were the ineffable glories of her reign.
GEORGE ARTHUR..
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