BOOKS.
THE LIFE OF QUEEN VICTORIA.*
SHAKESPEARE and Queen Victoria, two of the very greatest and most glorious names in the annals of Britain and the English-speaking race, yet glorious and great in how different ways ! What, we are tempted to wonder, would have been Shakespeare's feelings if he had been told that three hundred years after his death his Life would be written, with a care and completeness unknown before, by the same hand which was to go on to trace the story of a great Queen, a second and better Elizabeth (oddly enough, as this book tells us, she only just escaped the name and title of Elizabeth II.); like her, in the words of Spenser's dedication, " a most High, Mightie, and Magnificent Empresse, renowmed for Pietie, Vertue, and all Gratious Government "; like her, " Queene of England and Ireland and Defendour of the Faith"; and if not still " Queene of Fraunce and Virginia," yet Empress of India and Sovereign over a large part of North America, of the " still-vex'd Bermoothes," and of islands and dominions beyond the seas of which even the writer of The Tempest had hardly begun to dream? The collocation is certainly a striking one, and Mr. Sidney Lee is assuredly a lucky man if he is to go down to posterity as the writer of two such Lives. But he deserves his fortune, since it is hardly less striking that he should have succeeded equally with both. For the problems pre- sented to the biographer in the two cases are absolutely divergent. About the one life we know, roughly speaking, nothing, about the other everything. What we really know about Shakespeare, the late Master of Balliol used to say, could be written on a half-sheet of notepaper. What we know about Queen Victoria would fill, nay, does fill, endless archives and whole libraries. The one life probably, though we cannot be sure, contained, like the lives of other poets and artists, little event and few points of public interest. Of event, of public interest, at any rate, no life was in a sense ever fuller than the , other. When Queen Victoria died at the age of eighty-one, after a longer life and a longer reign than any other British, and virtually than any other European, Sovereign, there passed away the most amazing accumulation of human • Queen Victoria: a Biography. By Sidney Lee. With Portraits, Facsimile.'
experience that the world had ever known. She who had played with Wilberforce as a baby, and entertained Sir Walter Scott as a child, had been for some seventy years at the centre of things, and had had the opportunity of seeing and judging all the greatest men, of hearing and learning from the prime actors at first hand about all the most important move- ments, of her time. The immense careers of men like Glad- stone and Bismarck were but episodes in her own. She had seen them come and she saw them go, even as she saw Napoleon IIL move on from exile through Empire to exile again, or Tennyson and Browning move on from youth and promise to Westminster Abbey and immortality. She had seen her own territories increased by four million square miles, her subjects grow from about a hundred millions to something like two hundred and eighty millions. Herself a solitary child and heir, the single slender thread on which the succession had hung, she left at her death thirty-one grandchildren, and nearly forty great-grandchildren, one of whom had already married.
The biographer might seem indeed a bold man who should venture to tell so soon after her death, within one moderate and modest volume, the story of such a life. Both Mr. Lee's own skill, and the methods of the monumental Dictionary for which this Life was first written, are excellently vindicated by his success. His book is a miracle of condensation. There is perhaps almost too great a self-repression and absence of ornament or enthusiasm. The motto of the great Dictionary, as Canon Ainger so wittily put it at one of the authors' dinners, was " No flowers, by request." And that motto has been most faithfully followed. The style inclines to what the ancients called the " lean and spare," and there is sometimes a want of warmth and colour in the general treatment. To use another metaphor, those who like a sweet champagne will find this a trifle too dry. But if dry, it is sound, spark- ling, and brisk ; for the book is, if severe, emphatically not dull ; if brief, it is not obscure. It gets over the ground in a marvellous way, yet without any sense of hurry. And in:this plain, unpretending style, in this eminently sincere and scientific biography, the great and good lady who was for the major part of a solid century a Queen, and Queen of England, appears to conspicuous advantage. Before all things a lover herself of truth, of frankness and naturalness, she is seen here in the main as what she was. For she was at all times that which to be, whether in a palace or a cottage, is to possess the secret of success and the most attractive of qualities,—she was herself. And it is herself that is given us here. The book is not a history of her reign, it is her own Life. As Mr. Lee admirably says in his preface, "the circumstance [he might have added, the pomp] of politics is to a large extent the scenery of every sovereign's biography, but it is the duty of a biographer sternly to subordinate his scenery to the actor who alone is his first concern." And that duty he has discharged with unflinching fidelity. He has spared no pains to get at the truth where diligent research will reach it. Hereafter the possibilities will doubtless be larger, when more of what are most characteristic and charming wherever they appear—the Qaeen's own words, in her own letters and diaries—are given to the world; when, too, the Lives not only of her earlier, but also of her later, Ministers and servants have been written ; when to the biographies of Lord Melbourne and Lord Palmerston, and Archbishops Tait and Benson; are added those of Mr. Gladstone and of Lori Beacons- field, if this last is ever written, and Lord Salisbury, and Arch- bishop Temple and Bishop Davidson. But meanwhile Mr. Lee's exhaustive command of the existing material, and his discriminating use of it, are very noticeable and praiseworthy. The outlines are here fairly and firmly traced, even if here- after they be more amply filled in. We see the great, capable, living personality, the same all through : the fine animated child, the high-spirited girl, the young maiden rejoicing in the heyday of first queenhood, the bride, the wife, the mother, the Empress.Queen. As by slow, imperceptible degrees she passes frotn youth to middle and old ace, and meets in turn Lord Melbourne's fatherly chivalry, the shy and prim but safe and Constitutional loyalty of Peel, the nonchalance of Palmerston, the craft of Louis Napoleon; the grin; cynicism of Bismarck, the artful ingratiations of Lord Beaconsfield, the copious energy and insistence of Mr. Gladstone, the sagacity of Lord Salisbury, we see how her character is dis- played in all these changing relations, even as again she
passed from the Duke of Wellington and Lord Hill to Earl Roberts and Lord Kitchener, and from the war in the Crimea to the war in South Africa. We see her in joy and sorrow. She had it in her to feel both very keenly. In her first two years she thought she had enjoyed herself almost too much, or, at any rate, too lightly. Then came her marriage, and her one-and-twenty years of deep, unalloyed conjugal felicity. The measure of her happiness became the measure of her grief. Even now it may be doubted if it is realised what personally that meant to her.
Her very simplicity and sincerity show us in these pages what it really is to be a Monarch, and a Constitutional Monarch; and "how unenviable," as she wrote herself, "is a crown." She was saved perhaps from the fierce trials, as from the fierce joys, of a despot. She enjoyed again and again in increasing degree the sense of the loyalty and sympathy and deep love of her people. But she had much to endure and suffer. The spell of her closing years, the sunset splendour of her end, which like a physical sunset filled the whole sky and went round the globe, have tended to make us forget the heavy glooms, and still more the passing clouds, of earlier days. The perusal of this story shows within what strict limits she had for the most part to move, and should make us admire all the more the much she was able to effect despite a hundred obstacles. Alike at home and abroad she was con- stantly thwarted ; struck at again and again through those dearest to her; disappointed, opposed, ignored. " Will they do him justice now ? " she cried, as her beloved husband lay on the bed of death. The Princess Royal, whose wedding was the second great joy of her life, became "my poor persecuted daughter."
But she persevered, and if her efforts were often apparently unavailing, it is notable that in the cases in which they had the greatest effect it was signally for the advantage of Britain and the world. She intervened to secure justice and toleration to the Roman Catholics at home, whether in Ireland or England, and to her Hindoo and Mahommedan subjects in India ; to promote Free-trade ; to compose the strife of parties and reconcile the jarring Estates of Lords and Commons in the dispute over the Irish Church and the extension of the franchise. Abroad she intervened to restrain France from attacking Austria in 1859, and Germany from attacking France in 1875. Above and before all, with her husband, she undoubtedly in the Trent affair of 1861 prevented, as Americ ans like Walt Whitman recognised, that most awful of calamities, and rendered it, we hope, for ever impossible,—war between two nations, as she had described them herself, " of kindred origin and character," Britain and the United States. If she had achieved no more than this one last result, she would have laid the world under endless obligation. Not, indeed, that she was always right, or ever laid claim to any infallibility. She naturally came to trust her own long experience and often-proven judgment. But when her people acclaimed her most she said amid her satis- faction : " If they only knew me as I am ! " What she did she did by ordinary means. Her road to glory was no more a royal one than that of any of her subjects. It was the hard and thorny path of duty. Schooled alike by prosperity and adversity, she followed it step by step unfalteringly, toiling far into the night, living by rule, that she might, as she said, "get through her work " ; ever with courage and fairness and excellent temper addressing herself uncomplainingly to the tasks great or small, the cares of the Empire or of her family, which each day or minute brought upon her.
It is thus we see her in this volume,—a woman and a Queen, and the woman not lost in the Queen. It was this loss that she disliked in her great predecessor, Queen Elizabeth. It was the preservation of this womanliness that some of her Ministers recognised and some did not, foremost among those who discerned it being the Minister who, strange and bizarre figure as he was, became her greatest favourite. It was the preservation of this that made her what—to use, while varying it, the famous phrase employed of Washington—she was : great in'war, but greater in peace, and greatest of all in the heart of her people. As we close this book, brief, businesslike, un- varnished as it is, we feel once more that sense of gratitude and affection which at her •death was so palpable, and which must always rise in the heart of any sensible and appreciative son of this Empire, nay, of any man, whatever be his nationality, who studies impartially the life of Queen Victoria.
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