THE ROYAL WEDDING.
WE must "say something," we are told, about the wedding of Tuesday. It is one of the few etiquettes supposed to be binding on journalists that they must "say something" about the topic of the day or week, whether they are interested in it or not, and whether or not they have anything to say that it is worth anybody's while to read. If they do not, their readers feel as old ladies do when somebody has neglected to call. They do not want to see him, they are heartily glad he did not come, but still they are entitled to be affronted, and they use their privilege. We suppose the etiquette binds us as much as our confreres of the daily Press, and we declare we are nearly as much embarrassed to fulfil it as they are,—a very strong simile, for most of them appear to have been nearly crazed with the effort to rise to the level of the occasion, and to say something that should be polite, and pretty, and ceremonious, and even a little brilliant, and say it through a column, while conscious that a line would contain all the thoughts they had upon the matter. We are quite certain it would con- tain all ours, the line being, " This wedding terminates the separateness of the Royal caste, and that is a very good thing "; but what would our lady readers say to that bit of prophetic his- tory? We must, like everybody else, do our duty, which in this country means we must do what we are expected to do, and the only point for consideration is how to do it, for they will not let us say the simple truth, that the country heartily wishes pro- sperity to its most popular princess. Shall we be polite and eloquent—in the Oriental fashion of eloquence—and then impertinent after the fashion of clubs, and tell the country that " on the wedding-day a ray of sunshine gladdened every habitation in this island, and forced its way even where uninvited," and then proceed to say that there are Princesses whose " real position is in the very outside circle of the Royal sphere, whose hopes are all dependence, whose duties are subser- vience," and to hint that though Lord Lorne "has that undeniable wealth of character which cannot be squandered," he has much too little wealth of any more concrete kind. That would be a piquant line to take perhaps, but then it has been anticipated by the Times, in an article which reads as if it had been written by a cynical democrat turned courtier for the day, and so bewildered by his new position and by that particular " ray of sunshine" that, in bold contempt of history, the Almanach, and common-sense, he calls bride and bridegroom the "Royal Pair,"—and declares that the Queen's family is distinctively an English family. We thought Lord Lorne had been a Commoner—at least Mr. Disraeli certainly said so—and that the Queen's family was the House of Hanover, of unbroken German descent from the Electreas, who was herself only one-fourth English, but there is no knowing anything. Or shall we try the softly sentimental line, and say, with the Telegraph, " as for the happy bridegroom, his magnificent good-fortune is such that felicitations would fall upon him like flowers upon a garden, or rain upon a river. To deserve and to have won such a bride, he must be so good, so gallant, and so worthy that the obvious course is to trust to the Royal young lady's choice out and out, and to be quite sure that he is all this, and more. On both of them descends this day the mighty, yet unseen, weight of a nation's tenderness, desiring for them that the pleasantest roses of life may grow with the old heraldic roses about their home, and that their union may prove as happy as it is romantic and illustrious." That is very nice, not to say delicious ; but then it is so entirely beyond our powers, or the powers of any human being, except the man who has seen heraldic roses grow, and has weighed a nation's tenderness, and has found it heavy, though invisible—like air, we presume—and has recorded both marvels in a single sentence. We might possibly imitate his lower flights, and pen a column about Love, " the young Magus "—not Simon, mind—who has "an equal contempt for etiquette and armour cap-ii-pie,"—not agree- ing, it would seem, with the Grand Duchess of Gerolatein, who "doted on the military "—but it would be a repetition, and one has an idea that for Princes the first necessity is not love, but duty, and so that will not do. Or shall we follow our little friend of the Echo, who has mixed up Darwin and Ovid into the most wonderful electuary ever offered for human digestion, hinting that the bridegroom's coat and the bride's veil were conferred on them by nature for the occasion. At least it says, " Nature has settled all such details long ago, and with the utmost taste and splendour. Crowns of honour and tails of glory bedeck the bridegrooms in some cases, and the brides in others. Insects, like poets, acquire temporary wings ; and a general concert breaks out from thousands of tuneful throats, singing the sweetest of epithalamiums." The poor dear Phi- losopher ! Is it not enough to have reduced man to the monkey, that he should have reduced leader-writing to this for we have cut it from a fall-grown big-type leader. Or shall we try to be at once gentle and grand, something between "sweet seventeen" and a Roman augur, as the re- porter of the Standard tries to be in this delicious bit of tittle- tattle :—" When the time came for putting on the ring the bride took off her glove, which, with the bouquet, the Queen offered to take. The Princess, however, evidently did not observe the gracious attention, and handed them to Lady Florence Lennox, who let them drop. May this be an omen that flowers may strew the ground wherever the Princess's future life may lead her!" The height of sublimity must surely be reached there, but no, here is one more little bit, the first sentence in the report of the event published in large type by the Morning Advertiser:—" In depict- ing Arcadia the fancy of the poet exhausts itself in the union of Youth with Beauty. That is the ultimate of the poetic con- ception of idealized life. If it may be exceeded, it is when Youth is the representative of a noble ancestry, and the affianced one is a Princess of Royal birth." We have touched ground at last. Below that there can be no depth. And all this is supposed to be read and accepted as complimentary by members of a caste which is trained by its very position, by the weight of ceremonious bore- dom it has to endure, to relish and admire simplicity. We do not particularly object to the long accounts of the ceremonial, undignified though they certainly are, or to any congratulations, however fervent, if they are felt, or even if they are not felt but are essential to conventional decorum and to the social kindliness which a little artifice so often helps to preserve. Ceremonies in- terest some men and all women very much, and the business of reporters is to describe that which interests their readers, but we may fairly protest against journalists bringing their art into con- tempt by such tawdry vulgarisms as we have quoted,, If they must write of weddings they care nothing about, can they not write simply?
The extraordinary clumsiness which affects most Englishmen when they try to arrange a ceremonial or write a formal congratu- lation seems to extend into all classes. Here are the ladies of Dublin accompanying their congratulations with a prayer for the release of the Fenians, whom the Princess has no more power to release than any other subject, and typifying Ireland, in their splendid present to the bride, under the form of the Irish wolf- bound, instead of any of her milder and less menacing emblems ; while the mystic Court authority who presides over such matters is about, it is said, to make the Princess's title almost unmanage- able. We must leave it to the Morning Post to be certain, but according to report, the Princess is not to remain Princess Louise, which would be in accordance with precedent, or to sink her rank in her husband's, but to be described by a barbarous admix- ture of both titles, as the Princess-Marchioness of Lorne, exactly as if a countess who had married a commoner were to be styled the Countess-Mrs. Smith. Take it from the heralds' point of view, and till there can be in England no higher title than Princess ; and what is the use, in the " Court Guide " sense, of this new bit of ceremonial cumbersomeness, this introduction of new and indefinite grades into the social hierarchy ? Nobody forgets that the Duke of Cambridge is of the Royal blood, though he is not called a Prince-Duke. Or, if the intention is to honour the Marquis, why not use the far simpler and more effective style, Princess Louise (of Lorne)? The matter is of no importance, but Courts should certainly not increase the tendency to ponderous awkwardness already so strong in Englishmen whenever they attempt to obey an unaccustomed etiquette. Titles will not be more respected, nor will they endure the longer, because they are made unpronounceable, and loyalty would not last a week if every- body who mentioned the Queen had to describe her not by the simple greatness of the old Saxon word, but by all the titles which no doubt are hers of right, but which are for the people lost in the higher monosyllable.
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