Miss Sitwell's Victoria BOOKS OF THE DAY

By JOHN SPARROW

IT is not difficult to forecast the line which will be taken by

those who wish to denigrate Miss Sitwell's latest book : she will be taken to task because, though not by nature or by training a historian, she has chosen a historical subject ; because she relies largely on secondary sources ; and because

(it will be said) she has borrowed from the work of others, in particular from Mr. Lytton Strachey. It would be. a pity if criticism of this kind obscured from appreciation the qualities of Victoria of England. For it is a book of great

beauty, and it reveals not only a power over language which makes remarkable everything Miss Sitwell writes, but a depth of imaginative sympathy which is a no less valuable and, in the degree in which she possesses it, a still rarer poetic gift. The answer to the suggested criticism is simply this : Miss Sitwell is not writing history, she is exploring it with her own sensibility. Eager, observant, with all her five senses wide awake, and a temperament alive both to humour and to suffering, she is accompanying her heroine (for Queen Victoria is to her a heroine) through the nineteenth century. The book consists, therefore, of her own realisation of Victorian scenes, Victorian figures, Victorian landscapes, Victorian factories and slums ; above all, it is a re-creation of Victoria herself, seen not from outside, but with the eye of sympathy.

-To paint picture it is necessary to have senses preter- naturally acute, and a historical imagination—gifts the lack

of which no encyclopaedia will supply. And if you have them, it is no matter whether your authorities are first hand or -second hand, for you will detect and keep what is true and

what is significant, and that truth and its significance will e what matters, and not where you find it. And your success or failure lies simply in what you make of this material.

Miss Sitwell's task and her achievement, therefore, are not unlike those of a painter who takes a traditional subject and gives to it his own interpretation. Her subject, her gallery of persons, are familiar enough-familiar to many readers from the pages of Lytton Strachey, to whom she acknowledges her debt. But to call her Victoria a plagiarism of the Victoria of Strachey would be as sensible as to say that Rembrandt's Holy Family was a plagiarism of a Holy Family of Raphael. Not only this ; it would betray a blindness to the infinite superiority of her creation as the portrait of a living woman. Quotation can best display the difference between a sensitiveness which is, indistinguishably, both physical and emotional, and an agility and awareness that are purely of the mind. This is how these two writers treat the Queen's reaction to the death of the Prince Consort :

" In her utter misery, in the ' two dreadful first years of anguish,' she would have liked to have obliterated every feature of the face that had once been so happy, lest she should see in the mirror some memory of what once had been. The presence of strangers, the • duty of facing a crowd, these brought an additional pang, for they gave her the knowledge of her utter desolation, the realisation that she, who until she was seventeen years of age had never walked downstairs without 'having her hand hold, had now no one to direct or guide her. She was alone; and,had she but known it, would be alone for forty more long years."

On the other hand :

" With appalling suddenness Victoria had exchanged tho serene radianco of happiness for the utter darkness of woe. In the firSt dreadful moments those about her had feared, that she might lose her reason, but the iron strain within her. held firm, and in the intervals between the intense paroxysms of grief it was observed that the Queen was calm."

'What is the difference between these two passages ? Simply that what Mr. Strachey observed Miss Sitwell has felt. The

Victoria of England. By Edith Sitwell. (Faber and Faber. 158.)

pattern of his style (and his book was faultlessly written) seems machine-made when compared with her heartfelt cadences; his phrases—" appalling suddenness," " the utter darkness of woe," "the first dreadful moments," "intense paroxysms of grief "—seem clichés ; echoes, perhaps, of Macaulay or of Gibbon, but cliches still.

Strachey's style was suited to the attitude which he main- tained : that of the detached, serene, malicious recorder of events. Is it the secret of the justly famous peroration in which he conjures up the images that followed each other through the consciousness of the dying Queen, that there for the first time he entered not unsympathetically into the feelings of a woman towards whom throughout his book he had preserved the attitude of an observer ? The sympathy that Strachey hardly achieves elsewhere informs every page of Miss Sitwell's book ; she owes nothing to him execpt an easy approach to her material ; her recreation of it is her own.

Let it not be thought that the vividness of Miss Sitwell's sympathy blinds her to the humour of much that she describes : of " good Brown," who had " the pleasing gift of being in a state of overwhelming distress on all melancholy occasions " ; of the boudoir which was " an exact reproduction of .the waiting room at the Great Western Station " ; of Gladstone's inability to win the confidence of his Sovereign.

Let it not on the other hand be thought that this book- is circumscribed by the personality of the Queen.. The chapter " March Past " is a panorama of the slums of England in the mid-nineteenth century, as moving by its very language' as all the statistics collected by the Hammonds. Why ? Because .the writer has felt, as nearly as it is possible to feel withbut experiencing them in the flesh, the things she is -describing. She sees with a poet's inner eye the bodies of the sufferers and the places in which they live and work, and the sight arouses in her a horror which she transmits in the choice and cadence of her words :

- " The huge procession wends on its way, darkening the earth with its misery, destroying the natural rhythm of life with thersound of its weary footsteps, putting. out the lights of heaven with its fluttering, stained, and blackened rags."

Compare, to show the range of Miss Sitwell's •sensibility, a passage from a companion chapter, " Fashionable Intelligence " :

" The carriages, the victories and caleches, are driving slowly, for now, it is late afternoon, and their occupants hope to see a Victoria pass bearing the Queen and the Empress of the French.

Here it comes, driving a little faster than the rest. The v

mi stubbornlittle figure of the Queen looks strange beside the Emprei's exquisite air-bright beauty ; yet still more strange is the fact that, having cast one look at the beauty of the Empress, with her hair of rosy gold, her languid grace, all eyes return to the homelier figure, and this is not only-because she is Queen of England, but because of her dignity and consummate grace."

Considered merely as a succession of such pictures, this-book will compare with Miss Sitwell's study of Bath ; but it is more than that : it is I think, a more successful book even than her biography of Pope. - Miss Sitwell was drawn towards. Pope by a sympathy, which, while it was founded on a real simi- larity of circumstance—the sympathy of one artist for another - similarly misunderstood—made her-hostile to the age in which he lived. - She saw his surroundings with something of his own distorted vision. Here she has no -temptation to identify herself with her central figure she can see for herself,. and the range of her vision is as wide as her own sensibility; yet her sympathy with the woman who lives. in her pages -gives the book an unfailing unity which justifies-its title.