THE DEATH OF THE PRINCESS ALICE.
WE do wish the English people, and more especially their Premier, would learn that grief, even deep grief, is coin- patible with ordinary self-respect ; that it is not for them, when they mourn, to cut their faces like the priests of Baal, or cast ashes on their heads like Hebrew widows, but to weep secretly and in silence, as men obeying an emotion they would fain repress. We heartily sympathise with the universal sorrow felt at the death of the Grand Duchess of Hesse-Darmstadt, and rejoice that its expression was so completely national. It was right and natural, though the words read grandiose, that on the same day flags should be lowered half-mast in harbours all round the world, in Port Jack- son, and Halifax, and Rio, as in Hamburg, because a daughter of England was dead. That was done as by instinct, and the marvel of the doing is but a result of the new victories over time and space. The Queen is not only the symbol of our unity, but a Sovereign in whose sorrows an entire nation, wherever scattered, may justifiably and honourably be sad. We shall none of us, not even the youngest, ever live under such a reign again, and for much of its order, its prosperity, and its splendour we are indebted to the virtues of the occupant of the Crown. No acknowledgment of that fact by demonstrations of joy in the Queen's gladness, or of hope for her progeny, or of sympathy in her household suffering, can be unbecoming in the British people, which has been so favoured under her reign, and which, in accepting the Sovereign as the near relative of all, rises from time to time out of its otherwise some- what narrow and selfish individualism. Sympathy for the Queen was most natural and right, as was deep regret for the lady called away so prematurely, and in circumstances of such pathetic pain. The Princess Alice was the one of all the Royal House who, as daughter, as sister, as mother, and as head of a Court, had most attraction for English sym- pathies, and had done most to justify them. Her devotion to her father on his death-bed had been watched by all England. She watched devotedly by the bedside of the Prince of Wales. Her devotion to her children cost her her life. Her devotion to Liberal principles brought on her at one time a storm of clerical obloquy, both in Germany and England, and created an impres- sion that a Princess who really, we are told, held her father's and mother's creed, an undogmatic, but deeply pious, form of Christ- ianity, was the head of the unbelievers for whom, in pro- tecting Strauss, she insisted on toleration. Her whole history made her a worthy object of a nation's regret, and if the whole nation had expressed it in a fitting way, we should have felt proud of such a proof of its unity and tenderness of feeling. But grief, like joy, should have its decencies of expres- sion, and many of the papers violated these decencies by an ex- aggeration which made all sensible readers feel as if the grief of the nation could not be sincere, because the sorrow of those who represented it was so obviously artificial. It is disgusting, not moving, to watch journals exuding sentimental unctuousness. There was so much of the Palace in these effusions, that sympathy seemed absorbed in a reverence for rank as abject as that of the bulletin- makers, who telegraphed that the Princess " deceased " at seven o'clock. So high a person could not "die." One thought of Maria Theresa rushing into her opera-box, with "My boy Fritz has a son !" and wondered whether the sense of real rank, the reverence for place in the world, so great that the world feels a blank when it is vacated by a death, had not altogether disappeared. It is because death is universal, that all men sympathise when death strikes the national household, and every expression of grief lacking simplicity does but betray a failure of the sympathy as of a great family, which is alone a consolation. The costermonger who, as one re- porter declares, heard of the Princess's death with the exclama- tion, " Well, I am sorry !" and stopped calling his wares for three streets, lest "his row" should disturb the solemnity which he felt instinctively ought to reign, displayed more genuine feeling than all the manufacturers of mourning " leaders " or mourning sermons.
The Premier was, however, the worst. Lord Beaconsfield has a certain genius for ceremonial when the ceremonial ought to be artificial, but when feeling ought to be real, and only expressed with an accompanying ceremoniousness, he almost invariably breaks down. A master of stately words, he stole an e'loge on the Duke of Wellington from M. Thiers ; and though a master of form, he made his first announcement of his regret for the Prin- cess Alice sickeningly turgid. A deputation from California had been appointed to wait upon him with a testimonial to his per- sonal honour, and of course could not be received ; so the Prime Minister wrote :—" Dear Sir,—A terrible calamity has fallen upon the country. An English Princess—one of the most noble- minded and most gifted of women—endeared to the people of this country by her rich intelligence and her life of perfect domestic bliss and duty, has fallen a victim to the terrible disease
which had already ravaged her hearth, and which she met by her devotion to her children." "A terrible calamity has fallen upon
the country." What more could Lord Beaconsfield have said if the Queen had died, or if the country had sustained a severe defeat in battle ? The Princess's death is a "terrible calamity' indeed to the Queen, but to the country is only a melancholy occa- sion for regret that a charming and useful life has been prematurely cut short, and that a Sovereign whom it loves has suffered a heavy addition to an unquenched sorrow. The " hearth " of the Grand Duchess had not been " ravaged " by disease, for of all her children one had fallen and four survived ; and though death may be "met," in colloquial English, by disease, disease cannot, in any English, be " met " from children. Such language goes so far beyond the feeling it depicts, that it checks emotion, by rousing in its subjects a fear lest, in giving way, they also should be suspected of artificiality. On Monday, Sir Stafford Northcote and Lord Hartington were both of them at once sympathetic and dignified in their reference to the event ; but Lord Beacons- field had another day to wait, and the additional time in- creased his natural tendency to artificiality. He had an incident to recount of almost unique pathos, an incident the baldest statement of which might draw tears from every mother in Great Britain, and make every man feel how feeble even poetry is to express the deepest tragedy :—" My Lords, there is something wonderfully piteous in the immediate cause of the Princess's death. The physicians who permitted her to watch over her suffering family, enjoined her under no circumstances whatever to be tempted into an embrace. Her admirable self- restraint guarded her through the crisis of this terrible com- plaint in safety. She remembered and observed the injunctions of her physicians. But it became her lot to break to her son, quite a youth, the death of his youngest sister, to whom he was devotedly attached. The boy was so overcome with misery, that the agitated mother clasped him in her arms, and thus she received the kiss of death." Lord Beaconsfield's artificiality was proof even against that story. Will it be believed that his comment on it was in these words?— " My Lords, I hardly know an incident more pathetic. It is one by which poets might be inspired, and in which the professors of the fine-arts, from the highest to the lowest branches, whether in painting, sculpture, or gems, might find a fitting subject of com- memoration." Could any genius not essentially vulgar have thought, first, how a kiss of death given by son to mother on such an occasion would look in a picture, in marble, or on a cameo ? Did anybody, even an artist, when really moved, ever think of cutting the emotion, the spectacle of which had over- come him, in lines of microscopic beauty on a sard? Could any artist do it, if he had the genius of all sculptors combined ? How much less could an overcome bystander suggest to the engraver, as it were, in a whisper behind his hand, that here was a subject for his art! We do not say it in any censure of Lord Beaconsfield, except for his failure in artistic expression, for his nature has long since been known, and is unchangeable ; but we regret that words so artificial, so clearly prepared and pumped-up, should be put before Englishmen as fitting expressions for those griefs which, though not, perhaps, deep, are sincere, and tender, and universal. The people should at least be simple when they are moved, but how is simplicity to survive when the most pathetic of incidents is considered to be best described through its relation to the most artificial of all pictorial arts ? It is as if a preacher, recounting the story of the "still, small voice," suggested that it might have formed a subject for one of Raphael's Cartoons.
We rather regret also, though we do not blame, the allusion made by the Premier and Lord Granville, whose response, though a little stiff, was simple and unaffected, to the anniversary of the Prince Consort's death. It was not intended for the public, but to the public, and to all descendants of the Prince Consort, it will suggest a needless and a trying superstition,—that there is a day recurring at intervals of a decade which is critical or deadly for the House of Coburg. When December 14th is also a Saturday, something will happen to them. That is not a strengthening belief, even if held only as one of those beliefs which are not beliefs,—beliefs upon which no one acts ; and as it is not true, the day having previously recurred for generations unmarked, the reference would have been better spared. That, however, is a trifle. What is not a trifle is, that the most repre- sentative expression of a sincere and a national sentiment of sorrow for the dead and pity for the living should have been marred by such unreal and factitious artificiality. It is as though a nation's Dies Irie had been chanted by a singer dressed as a skeleton to increase the effect.
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