PRINCE VICTOR OF WALES.
n'ONSIDERING that he is heir of the Monarchy, and reust V' one day be among the inost conspicuous and, it may be, the most influential figures intheworld, very little has been hitherto eaid: about Prince Victor of Wales. He has been loft, by some deoidental failure on the part of reporters, intervieWers, Ametican visitors, and EngliSh flunkeys, in a healthy obscurity; at obscurity 80 deep that reporters are not certain of his wine ; and though he is now approaching sixteen, and his characten and capacities must be thoroughly known to those around him, he iii, to the British people at large, little more than a name. In less than six years he will lse the most important person in English social life, and the chances of his marriage, the character of his establishment, his political ideas; and his mental powers, will be subjects of eager, though possibly of private discussion ; but up to this time, beyond a statement that he has been " trained " on board the Britannia,' very little has been said of him. It is not often even that he is mentioned in the Court Yournal. The silence has, however, been partly broken this week, the young Prince having sailed in the 'Bacchante' for a voyage round the world, which will include Sydaey ; and some of the reporters having caught, with char- acteristic eagerness, at the opportunity for fine-writing, amidst which, however, we Miss any description of any kind of the Prince himself. As reporters never mist a chance, and know
perfectly well what will interest the public, we may conjecture either that they did not see Prince Victor, or that they received a hint that his parents wished still to keep him behind the cloud of privacy which from his early childhood has, in all probability most wisely, been allowed to shroud him from the general stare. They are compelled, therefore, to rest satis- fied with telling us about the Bacchante,' and the "vicious" ring of her guns in saluting; and the effort at Portsmouth to beat a general tattoo, German fashion, which did • not quite succeed, the people being kept too' far off to hear; and the scones through which the Bacchante' may be about to pass on her long voyage. Those descriptions, we may remark en paseant, are really delicious ; one writer in particular, who has apparently been making a study of Thackeray's " Little Billee," talking of the Straits of Magellan and their "weird majesty," and japan "the land of grotesque marvel," and the "nutmeg-groves of Zanzibar," and the "sound of the saver?' lap of the water against the good ship's sides "—as if the colour of the water altered its sound, and as if ho hati not just said that the sun was. down—and finally, , completely carried out of himself, declaring that "a voyage such as that on. Which the Bacchante ' is bent is, for a lad, an education in. itself. He returns- from it with the experience of a Ulysses and the youth of Hermes,"— a miraculous, effect, even if slightly unintelligible, at which the citizen fathers of sailorsboys, of whom some hundreds sail round the world esfery year, will be inclined to smile. They find their tall lads very healthy, very hungry, anti about as empty' of knowledge of the world and defi- cieut in the power of "multiform counselling" as it
is well possible to be. The writer, however, who is allowed to appear, not in the Telegraph, Where one is micas- tented to rhythmic travesties of Lemprisere, but in the grave and usually sensible Stanclatecl,, doubtless knows his Conservative readers well ; and he certainly reflects, in however absurd a form, one of the oddest opinions of the British public. They think it very right indeed-to bring up a King as a sailor. There was quite a chorus of approval when it was known that Prince Victor was to be educated in a hulk instead of a school ; and now that, having learned, as one reporter says enthusiastically; how to go aloft, and all else that a sailor-boy knows, he is to sail round the world, public gratification is so great that even the rub- bish we have quoted will not seem to many Englishmen any- thing worse than slightly exuberant and poetic. Why ?
With the education of Prince George, or any other Prince of the Blood, the public has nothing to do, but it is interested naturally and rightly about its future King ; and its reason for ap- proving a life on board ship, lived under exceptional conditions, as the beet training for a monarch, is certainly matter for in- telligent curiosity, What is the ideal' of a Xing in the general mind which can make such an education seem a good one P It is not from any precedent that the fancy arises, for there has
been no great, sailor-king in history; and 'the only sailor of our
time who has made a deep' mark in polities, Joseph Garibaldi popular as he is, is not the kind of man Englishmen would like for King. Canute, we dare say, understood the management of the swift barges in which he embarked his swordsmen, but he is nearly forgotten ; and William 'V.'s accidental and factitious popularity has, as suteetserive memoirs appear, quite died away. No one has over described that rough sea-captain as a great King. It cannot be merely liking for sailors, for the English ideal of a sailor—the man brave as a lion and simple as a child, knowing nothing of mankind anti believing everything he hears—ifs' as far as pos- sible removed from the British conception of ts perfedt King, the quiet, wise, thoughtful man', who can temper politics and moderate passions, and listen unfretting to disagreeable advice, and watch that all Departments keep step, and be, in fact, a more sagacious and far-seeing kind of Judge. William III., with English speech and genial matners, is the British ideal ; and the British naval officer, able and cultivated though he often is, does not present exactly that figure. He has, what- ever his qualities, always the precise defect, or, if you will,
merit, which Kings should be without,—something of separate- TIORPI, something which marks him as in some way outside the
world in which other men live and work. No one ever mistakes an Admiral; though he be as cultivated as any Oxford Don, No cachet of that sort can be anything but a drawback to a Kiug, who should be, before all things, a man of the world, in its best seises), and who should judge all things, even the Service's, with the cool, intellectual detachment which a professional education -renders so difficult or impossible. That in a military monarchy a King should be a fair officer may be advisable or even necessary, but training in any profession can but narrow the Inez who is first of auto be a reflective, but wholly detached states, man. As to a voyage round the world at fifteen doing a lad any mental good, we do not find, as we said, that cadets who have made it are very wise, and should imagine that its only effect would be a certain dissipation and confusion of mind, as of a man who has glanced over many pictures too quickly, or has devoted a few hours to Hakluyt's collection of voyages and travels. One does not know Australia, from seeing Sydney for a few days, and those days lost in ceremonial; one only becomes lase conscious of ignorance, and less dispoeed to consult the far
completer information to be ifoundin books or the conversation of the experienced. In a ship, as n a prison, one may learn to think ; but it is not in a ship that experience of men, and more especially of politicians, is to be gained.
Great attention is now being paid all over the Continent to the education. of Princes. It is felt everywhere that Kings are no longer reverenced simply for being, and that they must possess, if not groat qualities—which, unfortunately for put into human beings by any monarchy, cannot be machine, however skilfully devised—at least the capacity to make the best of what they hive. The tendency, therefore, is to over-educate, to teach too, many things, to utilise time too much ; and, above all, to impart too many languages. The " Governors " are too con- scientious, and too much penetrated with admiration for the knowledge which they seldom themselves possess. The effect of the system, which has occasionally, as in Austria, been carried very far, would be to produce student kings or literary kings, who would be very dangerous rulers, but that fortunately the two families, Catholic and Protestant, who compose the Royal caste, have a fine resisting-power against instruction, and are not likely to be over-educated for their intellects. We may get here and. there a Prince Albert on a throne, which would he a, good thing, and hero and legislator, which an efficient leglator,
which would be an excellent thing, but the majority will be -very like average young officers weighted 'with some sense of responsibility. But the Courts of the Continent, though not very suoceseful in their efforts, have seen that mental force, much knowledge, much experience, much habit of reflection, are the powers which are useful to Kings, and would regard the theory that it was useful to teach the ruler of a fourth of the world how to hold on aloft, at the cost of years of time and separation from men and the educational machi- nery of his time, with amused amazement; and if Germans, per- haps with a query whether the Vikings' days were expected back again, or whether Rolf the Ganger wouid. win a sovereignty now. The English think them wrong, but it may be feared they are right, and that the only advantages gained by making Heirs- Apparent into sailor-boys are, that in England their future Eng- lish subjects like it, and that eadors very rarely catch the royal mental disease which Englishmen, loyal as they are, would hardly hear, maetaresmae. We do not know that any special harm will be done to Prince Victor. Fortunately, education is not a speci, fie, or all the world would be driven into a uniform mould, and Princes, like -other lads, are mainly and first of all what they are; but thoughtful Englishmen, observant of the days that are to come, would not have been sorry to know that the training of their. future King was likely to make of him something more than a soldier, or a sailor, or a straightariding squire. He may have questions to settle with which only a thinker on a throne could effectively deal, and will then greatly need the materials for thought which, in the society of the able, he would have accumulated.
Previous page
