THE PRINCE CONSORT ON PAPER

BOOKS OF THE DAY

By CHRISTOPHER HOBHOUSE Da. KURT JAGow has extracted from the Brandenburg-Prussian archives a large number of hitherto unpublished letters written by the Prince Consort to the members of the Prussian royal family ; he has obtained the King's permission to include a few additional documents from Windsor ; and he has mixed these in about equal proportions with the material already made public in the works of Sir Theodore Martin and others. In all, this volume constitutes a full and extremely valuable summary of the Prince Consort's life and labours. An exhaustive edition would be something too enormous even for the scholar : the present collection is ample from the point of view of the ordinary reader.

For with all his abilities the good Albert was nothing if not a bore. His mind was like a Baedeker, stored with vast 'tocks of the obvious and the conventional. Within a few months of his marriage, he was writing from the " world- renowned city of Rome," and envying a friend in Berlin his proximity to " the University and the many distinguished and celebrated men who labour there." And as a man of forty, he could still strike the same toneless note : " Your letter has found me in the enjoyment of the most glorious air, the most fragrant odours, the merriest choirs of birds, and the most luxuriant verdure." An immense amount of his corre- spondence is 'taken up with the recollection of family anni- versaries ; while he never failed to extract the last drop of satisfaction from any bereavement, however remote. For him as for all Germans the written word possessed a magic of its own ; and the mere act of committing an idea to paper atoned for any lack of originality that might otherwise have dis- tinguished it.

This addiction to the pursuit of platitudes, together with his literal German mind and his elephantine sense of humour, caused the Prince at times to cut a very odd figure in the eyes of- the English. He himself records how disconcerted Peel had been to find that his conversation had been made the subject of one of the Prince's eternal memoranda. Long before his position in the country was established, before he himself had attained his twenty-fifth birthday, he favoured the Duke of Wellington (more than fifty years his senior) with a paper upon duelling and the honour of officers which would hardly have deserved a prize at a girls' school. One can imagine the whimsical astonishment with which the old Duke must have read this rechauffe of time-honoured senti- ments, and the amusement with which he may have shown it to his friends.

If these propensities must have militated against the Prince's success, they certainly recoiled upon his own happiness ; for he took the written words of others quite as seriously as his own. He was truly German in his overestimate of the importance of the Press. With all his insight into English affairs, he never fully realised that in a country where repre- sentative institutions flourished, a newspaper could represent nobody but its owner, and that the voice of a leader-writer had no more importance than that of any private member of the House of Lords. In Coburg or in Prussia, it would be natural for him to look to the newspapers to ascertain the views-of authority ; but it was pathetic that in England he should have continued to the end of his life to wince at the thunderbolts of a self-appointed Jupiter. His letters were filled with complaints of such ill-treatment ; and not even the sincere tributes which he later earned from the tribunes of the people could compensate him for the misery that was caused him by these wretched squibs let off by a journalist who spoke for nobody and was answerable to nobody but himself.

Letters of the Prince Consort. Selected and edited by Dr. Kurt Jagow. (John Murray. as.)

Dr. Jagow, as in duty bound, lays stress upon Prince Albert's German qualities, and points two directions in which they were conspicuous. It is suggested, in the first place, that Albert was the true creator of the Victorian age, in that he retrieved the English throne from a discredit which had previously threatened its very existence. In the second place, Dr. Jagow attempts to portray his hero as a loyal friend of Prussia, who saw no future for his native land save under " the only German State that could rank as a great power, and which united in itself the hopes of all German patriots—Prussia."

The latter of these contentions, certainly, is far from being borne out by Prince Albert's own words. He always had close friends in Prussia ; and he always longed for the regeneration of Germany. Since Austria set herself to " impede and stifle " every initiative, he faced the fact that Prussia was the obvious candidate for leadership. But it is clear that he accepted this conclusion with some reluctance, and that he looked for a very different development from that which has come about :

" The Germanising of Prussia is the condition of her greatness and power, and of bringing peace to Germany ; the aspiration to Prussianise Germany is the weakness of Prussia and of Germany . . . . Prussia will become the chief if she stands at the head of Germany : if she merely seeks to drag Germany down to herself, she will not herself ascend."

The Prince not only detested and ridiculed the policy pursued by Prussia in his own lifetime : he had no illusions about her

historic role :

" If it is a struggle of Prussia, the Prussia that seized Pomerania from the Swedes, Silesia from Austria, and the best part of their country from the poor Saxons, concluded a separate peace with the French Republic, partitioned Poland, and took Hanover as compen- sation ; if it is a Prussian struggle for aggrandisement, I say, and for more power and prestige, then all Europe will be against her."

The Prince would have had even less claim to be regarded as a " good German," had he occasion to prolong the catalogue of Prussian infamy to the extent which it has since attained.

As for Dr. Jagow's other point, that Prince Albert is to be regarded as the regenerator of the British monarchy, the contention is by no means new among his adulators. It would be ungenerous to minimise the very useful part that he un-

doubtedly played. The Queen could scarcely have found a husband whose influence would have been more beneficial ; and his character was thrown into a particularly favourable light by the grossness of George IV, the oddity of William IV, and the universal unpopularity of the King of Hanover. But he was not the inventor of constitutional monarchy. The first two Georges had established the position which Victoria inherited. If George III had rebelled against it, his son's conduct in 5832 shows how little he had succeeded. It is interesting in this connexion to find that Victoria made a present of Blackstone's Commentaries to the Prince to read during their

engagement.

Still less was the Prince Consort the first to introduce the Victorian standards of morality. The reaction towards religion and strict behaviour had begun in the eighteenth century, and spread slowly upwards through society ever since. Jane Austen's works show how far it had gone even before Albert was born. He may have been a restraining influence at first ; but he merely bowed before the strong wind of a growing con-

vention.

Dr. Jagow may be guilty of exaggeration ; but there is no denying the nobler aspects of the Prince's character, or the great part he played. With all their absurd mawkishness and platitude, these letters form an impressive memorial to his capacity, his energy, and his devotion to a sometimes thankless task.