TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE QUEEN'S FUNERAL. TO-DAY the Queen's body will be laid to. rest at Frogmore with expressions of national reverence and sorrow such as have been bestowed on few Sovereigns. The ceremonial which has been arranged well befits the occasion. It is dignified as becomes her who was the soul of dignity, and yet it is simple in character, and so appro- priate to one who, though she gave its true weight to ceremonial, never fell into the vice of Kings, and attached an undue importance to the trivialities of Royal pomp. The Queen never tolerated anything that was mean, or squalid, or ill-ordered in her surroundings, but she never let her mind and judgment be ' sapped by the vain nothings of ceremonial. Here, as elsewhere, the sense of proportion, of moderation, of the just mean, which belonged to her character was strongly marked. She no more made a parade of simplicity than she did of pomp. In her posi- tion a studied and artificial plainness would have been as great an affectation as an excess of magnificence. In a military funeral it is possible to preserve the pomp and ceremony which must accompany the burial of a Queen while avoiding an unmeaning and cumbrous pageantry, and therefore it is most appropriate that she should be borne to her tomb as are borne great soldiers who have served their country.
As we have pointed out elsewhere, the work of the nation must go on in spite of loss and grief, and public opinion must again be focussed and directed upon the needs and duties of the country. But to-day, at any rate, we cannot be accused of an excess of personal mourning for the greatest and most vigilant of public servants if we return to the private character of the Queen, and deal with aspects of that character which we were unable to notice last week. The Queen has been called " a great statesman." That is true in a sense, but if it is taken to imply that the Queen achieved her triumphs of statesmanship through any masculine traits in her mind, it is an entire mistake. The Queen's successes in statesmanship came from her womanliness. She was the most womanly of women, and this fact gave her qualities and powers in dealing with public affairs which were invaluable. Sympathy is essentially the woman's virtue, and sympathy the Queen possessed in the highest degree. Statesmen marvelled at her penetration, her intuition, her wonderful knowledge of her people and their feelings, and her power of divining what they would do under given circumstances, and whether they would accept or refuse to accept certain political projects. But the Queen possessed these things, not through any strange or abnormal gift, but because she possessed sympathy in a high degree, and could feel with, and enter into, the hopes and fears and sorrows of others. And the Queen was fortu- nate in possessing, besides this quality of sympathy, an absolutely unsophisticated nature. Many people who have the power of sympathy cannot make full use of it because they let it be overclouded by a hundred trivial sophistries. Cynicism, even though in no exag- gerated form, personal pride, amour propre, vanity, self- complacency, uneasy diffidence, self-distrustfulness, moral cowardice, want of mental balance,—all and any of these are enough to render nugatory the quality of sympathy. For sympathy to do its full work it must be coupled with an absolute truthfulness and sincerity of vision, and with a perfect straightforwardness of nature. A man or woman may be brimming over with sympathy, but if he or she possesses in any degree the Hamlet temperament, can- not, that is, act without mental triflinga and reservations, without doubts and wonderings, without self-accusations and querulous introspections, the gift of sympathy loses half its force. It is "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," and becomes an errant and useless guide. But the Queen knew nothing of such disintegrating mental forces. She was never " in endless mazes lost," or felt the mental stagnation that comes to the restless and irresolute mind,—afraid to trust itself. She was able, owing to her openness and truthfulness of character, to give her heart its rights. No doubt she sometimes made mistakes and her sympathies sometimes led her wrong, but she gained that "insight," 'intuition," and "penetration" which astonished men of infinitely greater mental calibre than the Queen because she was not afraid of herself, and because she had not sophisticated her mind. We will not say that an nn. sophisticated sympathy will always show the right road, but we do say that when it is coupled with truthfulness and fearlessness, and followed with singleness of heart, it is a far safer guide in the labyrinth of human life than mere reason, even though reason be applied by the most powerful and alert of mental organisms. And her right-minded sympathy gave the Queen more than insight, intuition, and penetration in public affairs. It gave her also the sense of justice. Justice has been defined as " a finer knowledge through love," and this justice the Queen possessed. Here, again, she no doubt made individual mistakes, both in judging sometimes too hardly and some- times too leniently, but on the whole she maintained the essential spirit of justice in her dealings with the world. She applied no hard mechanical code, but used her sym- pathy, her " finer knowledge through love," as the divining. rod for judging men's actions,—and remember that to a Sovereign with a high sense of duty this exercise of justice is no light and easy task. A Sovereign cannot say "I judge no man." The Sovereign is obliged to judge those who are serving or may serve the State.
In exercising her gift of sympathy, the Queen gained greatly owing to the fortunate circumstances of her own domestic life. When all is said and done, the mass of mankind are formed and bent by their relations to those around them. They are all profoundly influenced and affected by their positions as sons or daughters, husbands or wives, fathers or mothers, brothers or sisters, and by the less close, but often hardly less strong, ties of family. But the Queen's experience of these human relationships was wide and profound. She was no isolated inhuman Sovereign like Queen Elizabeth, with her pathetic heart- cry, " The Queen of Scots has a brave son, but I am but a barren stock." Our Queen knew all the sacred charities of the hearth. She knew the joys as well as the sorrows of marriage and motherhood, and in her own family experi- ence realised all the primal and essential ties that bind men on this earth. When you go deep enough, a Royal family is only a family. But the mother in any well-ordered family is essentially the focus of all sympathy. Others may understand; she feels. When the Victorian poet made the mother in her agony of woe use the soul-shaking words, " bones that have ached in my side," he only showed by the lightning flash of poetry what many a mother has felt. The Queen with a. truthful rhetoric has been called the mother of her people. But she could not have been this had she not been a mother indeed, and so been able to sympathise not merely with every mother, but with every father, with every son and daughter, and with every husband and wife.
With all attempts to eulogise the Queen comes the sense that even praise the most sincere is out of place, and looks mean and pale. Her strong sincerity bade her turn instinctively from all forms of artificial or systema- tised adulation. She was pleased no d.'ubt by her people's admiration, and she was deeply touched by the spon- taneous exhibition of popular feeling, but she was apt to leave on one side anything approaching the set phrases of panegyric, even when quite sincere,—not with contempt, for that was foreign to her nature, but with a courteous and sincere humility. "They are much too kind to me," is said to have been her comment on some outburst of national feeling in the newspapers. Therefore we will say no more, lest we lose touch of that directness and simplicity which should belong to all that concerns the Queen. Only will we say of her and her death :— " Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast ; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise, or blame; nothing but well and fair And what may quiet us in a death so noble."
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