BOOKS.

" VICTORIA ; OR, THE FORCE OF CHARACTER."• Jr the recorder of her life from the personal side had written in her own epoch he might well have called his book in the fashion of the times Victoria; or, the Force of Character. That conveys the essential, the dominant feature of the -book. It was the Queen's force of charaoter which made her the great and splendid figure which she was to her .contemporaries and which she will remain as long as men read the records of the past. Mr. Lytton Strachey puts the whole matter with admirable force, precision, and conciseness. " The girl, the wife, the aged woman were the same : vitality, conscientiousness, pride, and simplicity were hers to the latest hour." That is a true verdict, and Victoria's latest biographer deserves high praise for his intimate compre- hension of the woman whose life is the subject of his analysis.

• Queen victoria. Ay Lytton Strachey. London: CUM* and Windom. Ills. net.]

This sympathy of comprehension is indeed conspicuous through- out the work. It ie, the quality which keeps a true balance in the book.

Mr. Strachey, as his readers noted in his former book, has been apt to give too much play to the sense of irony in mortal things. But it is the supreme irony of all that life is not so ironic as it seems. Therefore the anatomist of the human heart who Jets irony run away with him may easily get his portrait out of focus, and fill his readers with irritation and dismay instead of with the ecstasy of insight and illumination. It would have been fatally easy to indulge in a riot of irony over the Queen. The circumstances of her time, her intense pride of place, her ignorance of life, her want of education, her perpetual and intimate association after her succession with her intellectual superiors, her rigid limitations of outlook, her indiscriminating sense of personal dignity, her belief that she was designed by Providence for a. great purpose and that her responsibility was to Heaven, not to mere men, all tended in the haphazard of life to produce those incidents which are the prizes of the ironist at large. To these occasional inclinations to situations humorous or even grotesque we must add the Queen's vitality amounting almost to wilfulness, her whirlwind impetuosity when her emotions were touched, her liability to blunder hotfoot into unqualified devotion for, or the fiercest dislike of, persons who in truth demanded neither one nor the other. The Queen on one side of her nature was like the lady in Pope, for ever in a passion or a prayer--:now touched to the point of tears by happiness or regret, now setting her teeth in a violent determination that she never would, never could, and never should do what these wicked people wanted her to do. The Queen as a young woman liked to think herself a Whig, but in truth no one ever had less of the trimmer about her. By luck and a good heart she very seldom took the wrong side, but she never could bring herself to see that there were two sides, and that only a very little difference often severs them in the abstract. She could never have even begun to understand what Halifax meant when he said that in this world, at any rate, men must be saved by their want of faith. Her power of under- standing was low. There were hundreds of things she took on trust from Prince Albert which she not only did not but could not comprehend. But this, thanks to her eagerness and energy and simplicity, did not depress her or devitalize her Her very ignorance and want of mental grasp turned to an armour of proof in one so truthful and so honest.

If Mr. Strachey had yielded to the temptation to exploit the Queen's blunders he could no doubt have raised a tempest of ill-tempered laughter loud or suppressed. He would, however, have spoiled his book. He would have produced not a true por- trait, but a very untrue caricature. He would have distorted his subject by dwelling upon the unessential. He would have failed to give that extreme characteristic impression which is as much wanted in the picture in words as on the canvas. That Mr. Strachey did not yield to a temptation which, with a man of his special temperament, must have been potent is a great tribute to his intellectual power as well as to his literary discretion. It is perhaps a still greater tribute to the Queen. It is clear that the noble spirit • which he has called up from- the arid if heavily documented wilderness of the Victorian Age has captivated him, as it captivated so many men before him, princes and councillors, captains and statesmen, noble and simple, old and young. He may have gone to scoff, but he has certainly remained often to smile, but always to honour and to understand.

That is a proof in little of the Queen's essential greatness. There is apparent the power of one who was pure in heart, The Queen conquered all the terrible list of disabilities imposed on her by her sex, her youth, her place in the world, her defects of personality because of her absolute truthful- ness and sincerity. If there were a word of art to express the exact opposite to a sophist the Queen was born to illustrate that word. She had not a touch of sophistry in her nature. She r ever paltered with her conscience. S-te never knowingly did a little wrong in order to accomplish a great and good end. She never explained things away to herself or to others. She was never forced either by men or circumstances to dilute the truth. She was often mistaken and sometimes through ignorance did cruel and unjust things, but never without being fully convinced she was doing right.

It is easy to laugh at her girlish determination to be good, but in reality that orientation of her mind was quite as important an event as the winning of a great battle or the enactment of a great law. Fortunately, it was in her power to keep her promise. She could not have kept a vow to be wise or prudent, but she could and did keep a vow to be of a pure intent. Instine. tively she realized that just as a lie is a handle that fits every tool of evil, so truth is a bar to every door that opens on the road to Hell. If a man is never a defaulter in the court of truth, he will never cease to be child of the light.

And the Queen had her reward. In spite of her tempestuous-

ness of will, her liability to prejudices, unintelligent as they were violent, her mischievous obstinacy, her instinctive pride, her jealousy of power, her belief that her way was the right way and that she knew -best ; in spite, too, of a ruthlessness occasionally verging on oppression, she made almost no enemies.

There were very few people who could complain that she had been unjust or unkind. There were none who could say that she had betrayed them, or used them and- then thrown them aside, who could complain of ingratitude, or of levity, or of

cynicism, or even . of forgetfulness. But think- what that means. Of how many sovereigns or statesmen or great men

or great women could that be said Y Of almost none. Here Victoria stands alone in glorious isolation.

We have praised Mr. Strachey for his skill in not forcing the ironic note, but it must not be inferred that he has never used it. To have done that would have falsified the picture as much as to " guy " the Queen, because she took so regal a view of herself. When it is appropriate to do so, he makes full use of the humorous side of the situation. But if there is enjoyment in his descriptions of some absurd collision when the Queen, like gallant Mrs. Partington' tried to stem the Atlantic, or let Mr. Disraeli treat her as a Peery, or enthused over the commonplace, or kicked with ungrammatical vigour against the pricks of progress, there is always also kindliness, sympathy, and understanding in his irony. There is no touch of contempt or mockery, but a real delight in the mental gallantry of the Queen. She was brave by nature, not by will or ambition.

She knew no doubts, she knew no fears. And so her apparently impossible biographer leaves her with a heartfelt salute, and with perhaps the most magnificent compliment ever paid by an absolutely independent and unhampered man of letters to a sovereign.

While the Queen gets a great tribute the public get a great piece of interpretation at a time when it was much needed in the interests of historic truth. We were fast approaching, the

period when nations forget or ignore or belittle the great figures of a former day. Victoria was not only becoming a vague

memory, but a dull lay figure—the symbol of consequential dullness and respectability. The alchemy of style, insight into human action, a clear sympathy and a vivid comprehension have changed all that. The most accomplished of our younger men of letters has given the nation back our great Queen of happy memory, for so we must take leave to call her.

Our readers have got to read Mr. Lytton Strachey's book for themselves. It would be doing them very ill-service to give them by a specially elaborate review the impression that they had got the cream of the book. No précis however laborious, no quotations however long, could do that with a

book so concise and so full of the vitamins of literature.

The only quotations we shall give are meant not as tit-bits, but as illustrations of the excellence and appropriateness of Mr. Strachey's style. The first shall be the witty and yet kind and delicate sketch of Lord Melbourne :-

"Whatever else he might be, one thing was certain ; Lord Melbourne was always human, supremely human—too human, perhaps. And now, with old_age upon him, his life took a sudden, new, extraordinary turn. He became, in the twinkling of an eye, the intimate adviser and the daily companion of a young girl who had stepped all at once from a nursery to a throne. His relations with women had been, like everything else about him, ambiguous. Nobody had ever been able quite to gauge the shifting, emotional complexities of his married life ; Lady Caroline vanished ; but his peculiar susceptibilities remained. Female society of some kind or other was necessary to him, and ho did not stint himself ; a great part of every day was invariably spent in it. The feminine element in him made it easy, made it natural and inevitable for him to be the friend of a great many women ; but the masculine element in him was strong as well. In such circumstances it is also easy, it is even natural, perhaps it is even inevitable, to be something more than a friend. There were rumours and combustions- Lord Melbourne was twice a co-respondent in a divorce action ; but on each occasion he won his suit. The lovely Lady Brandon, the unhappy and brilliant Mrs. Norton . . . the law exonerated them both. Beyond that hung an impenetrable veil. But at any rate it was clear that, with such a record, the Prime Minister's position in Buckingham Palace must be a highly delicate one. However, he was used to delicacies, said he met the situation with consummate success. His- behaviour was from, the first moment impeccable. His manner towards the young Queen mingled, with perfect facility, the watchfulness and the respect of a statesman and a courtier with the tender solicitude of a parent. He was at once reverential and affection- ate, at once the servant and the guide. At the same time the habits of his life underwent a surprising change. His comfort- able, unpunctual days became subject to the unaltering routine of a palace ; no longer did he sprawl on sofas ; not a single damn ' escaped his lips. The man of the world who had been the friend of Byron and the Regent, the talker whose paradoxes had held Holland House enthralled, the cynic whose ribaldries had enlivened so many deep potations, the lover whose soft words had captivated such beauty and such passion and such wit, might now be seen, evening after evening, talking with infinite politeness to a schoolgirl, bolt upright, amid the silence and the rigidity of Court etiquette."

The next is the account of the Queen's character in her old age :-

"Such qualities were obvious and important ; but, in the impact of a personality, it is something deeper, something fundamental and common to all its qualities, that really tells. In Victoria, it is easy to discern the nature of this underlying element : it was a peculiar sincerity. Her truthfulness, her single-mindedness, the vividness of her emotions and her unrestrained expression of them, were the varied forms which this central characteristic assumed. It was her sincerity which gave her at once her impressiveness, her charm, and her absurdity. She moved through life with the imposing certitude of one to whom concealment was impossible—either towards her surroundings or towards herself. There she was, all of her —the Queen of England, complete and obvious ; the world might take her or leave her ; she had nothing more to show, or to explain, or to modify ; and, with her peerless carriage, she swept along her path. And not only was concealment out of the question ; reticence, reserve, even dignity itself, as it sometimes seemed, might be very well dispensed with. As Lady Lyttelton said : ' There is a transparency in her truth that is very striking—not a shade of exaggeration in describing feelings or facts ; like very few other people I ever knew. Many may be as true, but I think it goes often along with some reserve. She talks all out ; just as it is, no more and no less.' She talked all out ; and she wrote all out, too. Her letters, in the surprising jet of their expression, remind one of a turned-on tap. What is within pours forth in an immediate, spontaneous rush. Her utterly unliterary style has at least the merit of being a vehicle exactly suited to her thoughts and feelings ; and even the platitude of her phraseology carries with it a curiously personal flavour. Undoubtedly it was through her writings that she touched the heart of the public. Not only in her Highland Journals,' where the mild chronicle of her private proceedings was laid bare without a trace either of affectation or of embarrassment, but also in those remarkable messages to the nation which, from time to time, she published in the newspapers, her people found her very close to .them indeed. They felt instinctively Victoria's irresistible sincerity, and they responded. And in truth it was an endearing trait."

The third quotation is Mr. Strachey's description of the Queen immediately after her marriage :—

" The past—the past of only three years since—when she looked back upon it, seemed a thing so remote and alien that she could explain it to herself in no other way than as some Lind of delusion—an unfortunate mistake. Turning over an old volume of her diary, she came upon this sentence—' As for " the confidence of the Crown," God knows ! No Minister, no friend EVER possessed it so entirely as this truly excellent Lord Melbourne possesses mine ' A pang. shot through her—she seized a pen, and wrote upon.the margin= Reading this again, I cannot forbear remarking what an artificial sort of happiness mine was then, and what a blessing it is I have now in my beloved Husband real and solid happiness, which no Politics, no worldly reverses can change ; it could not have lasted long as it was then, for after all, kind and excellent as Lord M. is, and kind as he was to me, it was but in Society that I had amusement, and I was only livin,g on that superficial resource, which I then fancied was happiness ! Thank God ! for me and others, this is changed, and I know what rim happiness is—V.R.' How did she know ? What is the distinction between happiness that is real and happiness that is felt ? So a philosopher— Lord M. himself perhaps—might have inquired. But she was no philosopher, and Lord M. was a phantom, and Albert was beside her, and that was enough."

Mr. Strachey's style is poignant without. being aggressive, simple without triviality or a feigned innocence, captivating without being luxuriant or over-done. It is, in fact, like the talk and the dress and thb gestures of a well-bred woman of the world, who would far rather die at the stake than seem "showy." But Mr. Strachey has more than the power of style. He can select. Ho has refused to write a history of the Queen's reign. His is a personal not a political portrait. That is a necessity in the lives of kings and queens. Having acquired the art, Mr. Strachey should be requisitioned by a kind but imperious public to write the lives of our sovereigns. No one really knows what Queen Elizabeth was like. He could give us the truth. Charles IL, as we know from Halifax's inimitable study, would reward any sincere biographer. So would Cromwell. George HL cries aloud for a biographer 'of genius. He is well worth interpreting. In spite of his stupidities and obstinacies, he had in him something that needs to be made clear. Let us hope that Mr. Strachey will consider our appeal.