Some Intimate Memoirs
THE Princess Victoria of Prussia, sister of the ex-Kaiser William II. and grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, has written a most readable book. My Memoirs amble pleasantly along through royal nurseries, and schoolrooms, drawing-rooms, ball-rooms_ and banqueting halls. We see Queen Victoria through the eyes of grandchildren, who really loved her, and William of Prussia from the point of view of a not uncritical sister, whose engagement he was instrumental in breaking off, but who never lost her sense of his fascination, nor her delight in his stimulating company. She draws a very different picture of the daily life of the Hohenzollern' Children from the one her brother gave to the world. By her account, though they had to work over hard at their lessons, they had a great deal of amusement and pleasure among themselves, and were always in -riotous spirits, boys and girls riding, picnicking and playing together.
The tragedy of the Emperor Frederick's death is told with a terrible simplicity. The devotion to duty which made him continue to transact political business, after a cruel disease had made him dumb, is indeed heart-rending. She alludes the want of sympathy between him and his son, but Without detail, or bitterness. "Impulsive and self-willed" as William was, his sister, while she will not enter into "the rights and wrongs of the War," finds it almost " unbearable " to see "the whole weight of the world's greatest misfortune put upon him." He has always been, she vehemently maintains, a kind-hearted and a pious man. "The one great regret of my brother's life is that he was compelled to draw the sword against England."
Princess Victoria's own love of her mother's country is obvious and genuine, and has, as she openly says, caused her often to be mistinderstood in the Fatherland, and perhaps on one occasion even by her brother.
Of life in the smaller German Courts her descriptions are homely and charming. Her first visit after her marriage with Prince Adolf of Schaumburg Lippe to her husband's home is most pleasantly described. "At that period, 1890, electric light had not yet been installed -in the Schloss. There were innumerable candles in my sitting-room burning away brightly', but I, thinking it very wasteful, promptly got on a chair and
with a silver tea-spoon and the help of my lady-in-waiting, extinguished many of them as best I could." So few royal memoir writers know how to take their readers into their confidence. Princess Victoria of Prussia knows that intimacy between writer and reader consists, not in talking scandal, nor in revealing secrets, but in eliciting sympathy. In other words she has that literary touch which is in reality simply the touch of nature.
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