An Empress and a Princess FEW books published in recent

years will interest the older generation more than these intimate and self-revealing letters of the charming and artistic Englishwoman who was destined for a tragic hundred days to become the German Empress.

We may take it that these letters of hers, rescued from the clutches of the young Emperor who had the castle of Fried- richskron surrounded by cavalry and by cordons of special police while searchers ransacked the palace for his mother's private papers, are the first instalments of a whole series that the Empress wrote to the royal family of England, for hardly a day passed that she did not write to her mother or her brother.

Sir Rennell Rodd, we believe, is editing the letters which the Empress Frederick wrote at a subsequent period to King Edward : they will form a fitting sequel to the present instal- ment. For the present what we have here affords much material for reflection, for these letters reopen many of the most controversial issues of another days, such as the attitude

of Bismarck to the Emperor Frederick, the vexed question of Sir Morel! Mackenzie, the unmannerly behaviour of young.

Prince William, and the subsequent intrigues of the Kaiser against his mother.

The smuggling of the letters contained in this volume from Friedrichskron show how bitterly aware was the Dowager- Empress of the suspicion which surrounded her. Dying, during a brief interlude when morphia eased her pain, she charged Sir Frederick to carry her correspondence secretly to England. The German Emperor, she said, must on no account have the letters nor must he ever know that they were in England. Had he had access to this correspondence undoubtedly he would have burned it, for he appears therein in a positively odious light :—

" You ask how Willie was when he was here (she writes to the Queen from San Remo on November 15th, 1883j—he was as rude, as disagreeable and as impertinent to me as possible when he arrived, but I pitched into him, with, I am afraid, considerable via. lance, and he became quite nice and gentle- and amiable (for him)-- at least quitp-natural.

The future Emperor had come down with a Court. doctor to make his own enquiries and no doubt to urge his father to undergo the operation for the removal of the larynx, which might have saved his life, though it would have deprived him of speech and probably the throne. To subunit to the Berlin surgeons " would simply have assassinated Fritz;" she writes-- and the infinite pathos of these letters must not blind us to the fact that the future Empress is revealed in them as an unwise woman. • The Queen, with her usual common sense wrote to

her as follows :— •

" You have every reason to feel angry and annoyed at the excite. meat and shameful publicity and disgraceful arguments respecting our beloved Fritz's illness. But on the other hand some allowance must be made for the fearful -anxiety of the nation about their beloved, noble and heroic Prince.. I hope, however, that dear Fritz knows the alternatives and thal it is he who has decided not to have the operation Y for else the responsibility of others in posi- tively deciding against it would be fearful. The German surgeons and many, I believe, in England, do not consider that operation so dangerous and there are many instances of its success, for in that way the disease can be really eradicated. Some people also think that Sir M. Mackenzie's judgment is not quite equal to his great skill in the internal operation. I only feel it my duty out of love for you both to say openly what strikes me, for the importance and value of beloved Fritz's precious life is such that one must overlook nothing. Of course, I am still greatly in the dark as to the exact state of everything and therefore only write this to you as I know you would wish me to be quite open."

Of the Emperor Frederick's illness we will not write at length (the question has only recently been discussed at length, both in the Spectator and elsewhere) and will confine ourselves to an opinion which will probably be endorsed in Germany as well as here, that Sir Frederick sums up the whole matter in a thoroughly judicial fashion in a .little less than two pages. " I must not die—what would become of Ger- many ? " was the Emperor Frederick's comment when he heard that he had cancer. His words were prophetic. But for a time all went well. What a meeting that must have been on April 25th, 1888, between Queen Victoria and Count Bismarck—the man of blood and iron confronted by that majestic little person who had written only a few days before, "How Bismarck and still more William can play such a double game it is impossible for us honest straightforward English to understand. Thank God we are English ! " There was much chicanery in Berlin in those days, but there were diffi- culties both for Bismarck and for the young Emperor, which the Dowager-Empress did little to alleviate by her manner.

When the German Envoy came to announce the accession of a new sovereign, Queen Victoria gave him an extremely cold reception. Our Military Attaché in Berlin thereupon wrote the Queen's Private Secretary asking him to pour oil on the troubled waters. The letter was passed to Queen Victoria who appended the laconic comment. " The Queen intended it to be cold." She knew the Emperor had behaved like a cad and, with the utmost dignity, she made him feel it. Yet throughout her life her influence was used for promoting reconciliation between the Empress Frederick and her son.

The last quarter of the book deals with the War Diary of

the Emperor Frederick, whose publication caused such a sensation in 1888, the Emperor William's visit to England, the fall of Prince Bismarck, Caprivi's Chancellorship, and, in less detail, the sad and beautiful closing years of her life. The Empress Frederick was married to a great and noble man, but as her son said of her, " she was always most German in England and most English in Germany," and to that her unpopularity was certainly due. She waited thirty years for the position her husband would have adorned with benefit to the whole world. At the last moment the cup was dashed from their lips. If in after life she was sometimes tactless, she was always honest, always true to the qualities of her race. We can be proud of her memory and Sir Frederick Ponsonby

has enshrined it in a worthy volume.

From a blonde and witty English girl, spending perhaps

£100 a year on dress, Miss Daisy Cornwallis-West became suddenly translated (in 1895) into the stiff formalities and semi-barbarisms of a German Princeling's court—with an income of 1100,000, She was never out of the sight of servants, except in bed. Even in her bedroom two maids awaited her to turn her sheets down when she was ready to retire. Travelling, a retinue of a dozen followed her.

Walking in the grounds of Ffirstenheim (there were twenty miles of them) she found lackeys in every bush. Her cellars and kitchens cost £30,000 a year. She had a castle in Saxony, another in Ffirstenhehn with its six hundred rooms (the biggest private house in Europe), the ancestral Pless, a chateau on the Riviera, a palace in Berlin—and with it all she was homesick and unhappy. Once, just before the War, she had a picnic with her boys in the woods : there was "only one servant," she writes delightedly, and hot

soup, crawfish, onion salad. That was a gorgeous evening. for our fairy princess but not a very simple picnic, to our mind.

If all the English were made to live abroad for a time, how they would adore their own land ! " Staying at Eaton Hall with her sister, the Princess of Pless records in her diary that she felt younger than she had felt for years. " I am never frivolous in Germany, nor do I laugh and make silly jokes and amuse them all, as I do here." She had all the privileges which youth and rank and beauty have claimed in every age, but claimed especially in fin de gide Europe. But she did not marry for love. On the very afternoon of her marriage, her husband commented on the fact that she had put on her going-away dress back to front, and there was a scar on her heart.

She was utterly ignorant of life and love, but her beauty and brains and a quick Irish wit soon made her one of the most accomplished women of Europe. She met everybody

who was " worth-while," went everywhere, did everything. Her picture of the German Emperor is certainly not flattering, yet she is careful to tell us of the Kaiser's tact and considera-

tion in her regard. In general, however, he was vain, indiscreet and the centre of much stupid intrigue. All the news he ever received of the outside world came to him by means of a special newspaper printed in gold. " He con- ceived of himself as a much bigger man than God had made him. A clever man—and the Emperor was extraordinarily clever—may deceive other clever men, but not a woman's intuition." Once at Pless, the Kaiser wept when talking to her after dinner about the way he was misunderstood in England, and a tear fell on his cigar. " I was at once touched and antagonized "—and no wonder ! :—

" When one looks back, a most extraordinary thing about the yews immediately proceeding the Great War is that, although many highly placed European personages were alive to the danger, no one did anything very definite to prevent it. I think that the young of all succeeding generations will ask accusingly why we were so timid, inert, and fatalistic."

Sir Ernest Cassel knew war was coming, and said so quite bluntly to the Princess (" I could have thrown a knife at him "), and King Edivard, of whom we have some delightful and characteristic glimpses, was never under any delusions about the German state of mind. There is a pleasant glimpse of the late King when he visits the author's grandmother, then a very old lady, and takes tea with her. The incident is too long to tell here, but it shows most vividly King Edward's simple kindliness of heart. An incident at the King's deathbed has not been told in print before : it concerns Mrs. Keppel •

" When the King was dying and unconscious the Queen sent for her and herself led Alice to his bedside. I say God bless her for it. I find this natural somehow, but few women would have done it."

With Edward VII. passed an age which, to those of us who were then in their prime, might now be some wholly other age of history.: The Princess of Pless, in the centre of

the brilliant international stage, brings back that glittering Sad prosperous time, with its undercurrent of menace and intrigue, and the German Emperor as a " cork on the top of a wave that was about to submerge himself, his dynasty

and Empire." The Princess had a house in Savile Row that summer of 1914. On July 25th she wrote to Lord

Roberts, asking him to a shooting party in November, to meet the Emperor. A week later, just as she was preparing to leave for Berlin, a telegram came to say her chauffeur and car were to be sent home immediately. " I was very

surprised no message came for me. It was one of those Surprises one remembers all one's life : and when I arrived - here in Berlin there was still no message for me." She

found her husband at last—he was not particularly pleased. to see her, apparently.

Her life during the- War must -have-been a torment.--The letters she quotes in 1914 are of interest ; thereafter both

hei correspondence and her movements became more and more confused, and we are left abruptly, a little bewildered and disappointed, in Niivember, 1918, with the Princess entertaining a Workmen and Soldiers'. Council in Bavaria. One cannot help feeling that, if the War did no other good, it did at least wipe out some absurd Courts and stupid customs in Europe, and a certain unhealthy luxury in England. Now the Princess is living quietly at Munich. What her Silesian and other " in-laws " will think of her memoirs we can only guess : as to the public, it will certainly besiege the libraries for them, for they are both history and a charming human document. The moral of the story is that it is risky to marry a foreigner.