Queen Victoria

L >> Lytton Strachey >> Queen Victoria


III

And so, after the toils and tempests of the day, a long evening
followed--mild, serene, and lighted with a golden glory. For an
unexampled atmosphere of success and adoration invested the last period
of Victoria's life. Her triumph was the summary, the crown, of a greater
triumph--the culminating prosperity of a nation. The solid splendour of
the decade between Victoria's two jubilees can hardly be paralleled in
the annals of England. The sage counsels of Lord Salisbury seemed to
bring with them not only wealth and power, but security; and the country
settled down, with calm assurance, to the enjoyment of an established
grandeur. And--it was only natural--Victoria settled down too. For
she was a part of the establishment--an essential part as it seemed--a
fixture--a magnificent, immovable sideboard in the huge saloon of
state. Without her the heaped-up banquet of 1890 would have lost
its distinctive quality--the comfortable order of the substantial
unambiguous dishes, with their background of weighty glamour, half out
of sight.

Her own existence came to harmonise more and more with what was around
her. Gradually, imperceptibly, Albert receded. It was not that he was
forgotten--that would have been impossible--but that the void created
by his absence grew less agonising, and even, at last, less obvious.
At last Victoria found it possible to regret the bad weather without
immediately reflecting that her "dear Albert always said we could not
alter it, but must leave it as it was;" she could even enjoy a good
breakfast without considering how "dear Albert" would have liked the
buttered eggs. And, as that figure slowly faded, its place was taken,
inevitably, by Victoria's own. Her being, revolving for so many years
round an external object, now changed its motion and found its centre
in itself. It had to be so: her domestic position, the pressure of
her public work, her indomitable sense of duty, made anything else
impossible. Her egotism proclaimed its rights. Her age increased still
further the surrounding deference; and her force of character, emerging
at length in all its plenitude, imposed absolutely upon its environment
by the conscious effort of an imperious will.

Little by little it was noticed that the outward vestiges of Albert's
posthumous domination grew less complete. At Court the stringency of
mourning was relaxed. As the Queen drove through the Park in her open
carriage with her Highlanders behind her, nursery-maids canvassed
eagerly the growing patch of violet velvet in the bonnet with its jet
appurtenances on the small bowing head.

It was in her family that Victoria's ascendancy reached its highest
point. All her offspring were married; the number of her descendants
rapidly increased; there were many marriages in the third generation;
and no fewer than thirty-seven of her great-grandchildren were living at
the time of her death. A picture of the period displays the royal family
collected together in one of the great rooms at Windsor--a crowded
company of more than fifty persons, with the imperial matriarch in
their midst. Over them all she ruled with a most potent sway. The small
concerns of the youngest aroused her passionate interest; and the oldest
she treated as if they were children still. The Prince of Wales, in
particular, stood in tremendous awe of his mother. She had steadily
refused to allow him the slightest participation in the business of
government; and he had occupied himself in other ways. Nor could it
be denied that he enjoyed himself--out of her sight; but, in that
redoubtable presence, his abounding manhood suffered a miserable
eclipse. Once, at Osborne, when, owing to no fault of his, he was too
late for a dinner party, he was observed standing behind a pillar and
wiping the sweat from his forehead, trying to nerve himself to go up to
the Queen. When at last he did so, she gave him a stiff nod, whereupon
he vanished immediately behind another pillar, and remained there until
the party broke up. At the time of this incident the Prince of Wales was
over fifty years of age.

It was inevitable that the Queen's domestic activities should
occasionally trench upon the domain of high diplomacy; and this was
especially the case when the interests of her eldest daughter, the
Crown Princess of Prussia, were at stake. The Crown Prince held liberal
opinions; he was much influenced by his wife; and both were detested by
Bismarck, who declared with scurrilous emphasis that the Englishwoman
and her mother were a menace to the Prussian State. The feud was still
further intensified when, on the death of the old Emperor (1888), the
Crown Prince succeeded to the throne. A family entanglement brought on
a violent crisis. One of the daughters of the new Empress had become
betrothed to Prince Alexander of Battenberg, who had lately been
ejected from the throne of Bulgaria owing to the hostility of the Tsar.
Victoria, as well as the Empress, highly approved of the match. Of the
two brothers of Prince Alexander, the elder had married another of her
grand-daughters, and the younger was the husband of her daughter, the
Princess Beatrice; she was devoted to the handsome young man; and she
was delighted by the prospect of the third brother--on the whole the
handsomest, she thought, of the three--also becoming a member of her
family. Unfortunately, however, Bismarck was opposed to the scheme.
He perceived that the marriage would endanger the friendship between
Germany and Russia, which was vital to his foreign policy, and he
announced that it must not take place. A fierce struggle between the
Empress and the Chancellor followed. Victoria, whose hatred of her
daughter's enemy was unbounded, came over to Charlottenburg to join in
the fray. Bismarck, over his pipe and lager, snorted out his alarm. The
Queen of England's object, he said, was clearly political--she wished to
estrange Germany and Russia--and very likely she would have her way. "In
family matters," he added, "she is not used to contradiction;" she would
"bring the parson with her in her travelling bag and the bridegroom in
her trunk, and the marriage would come off on the spot." But the man
of blood and iron was not to be thwarted so easily, and he asked for a
private interview with the Queen. The details of their conversation are
unknown; but it is certain that in the course of it Victoria was forced
to realise the meaning of resistance to that formidable personage, and
that she promised to use all her influence to prevent the marriage. The
engagement was broken off; and in the following year Prince Alexander of
Battenberg united himself to Fraulein Loisinger, an actress at the court
theatre of Darmstad.

But such painful incidents were rare. Victoria was growing very old;
with no Albert to guide her, with no Beaconsfield to enflame her, she
was willing enough to abandon the dangerous questions of diplomacy
to the wisdom of Lord Salisbury, and to concentrate her energies upon
objects which touched her more nearly and over which she could
exercise an undisputed control. Her home--her court--the monuments
at Balmoral--the livestock at Windsor--the organisation of her
engagements--the supervision of the multitudinous details of her daily
routine--such matters played now an even greater part in her existence
than before. Her life passed in an extraordinary exactitude. Every
moment of her day was mapped out beforehand; the succession of her
engagements was immutably fixed; the dates of her journeys--to Osborne,
to Balmoral, to the South of France, to Windsor, to London--were hardly
altered from year to year. She demanded from those who surrounded her
a rigid precision in details, and she was preternaturally quick in
detecting the slightest deviation from the rules which she had laid
down. Such was the irresistible potency of her personality, that
anything but the most implicit obedience to her wishes was felt to be
impossible; but sometimes somebody was unpunctual; and unpunctuality
was one of the most heinous of sins. Then her displeasure--her dreadful
displeasure--became all too visible. At such moments there seemed
nothing surprising in her having been the daughter of a martinet.

But these storms, unnerving as they were while they lasted, were quickly
over, and they grew more and more exceptional. With the return of
happiness a gentle benignity flowed from the aged Queen. Her smile, once
so rare a visitant to those saddened features, flitted over them with an
easy alacrity; the blue eyes beamed; the whole face, starting suddenly
from its pendulous expressionlessness, brightened and softened and cast
over those who watched it an unforgettable charm. For in her last years
there was a fascination in Victoria's amiability which had been lacking
even from the vivid impulse of her youth. Over all who approached
her--or very nearly all--she threw a peculiar spell. Her grandchildren
adored her; her ladies waited upon her with a reverential love. The
honour of serving her obliterated a thousand inconveniences--the
monotony of a court existence, the fatigue of standing, the necessity
for a superhuman attentiveness to the minutia: of time and space. As one
did one's wonderful duty one could forget that one's legs were aching
from the infinitude of the passages at Windsor, or that one's bare arms
were turning blue in the Balmoral cold.

What, above all, seemed to make such service delightful was the detailed
interest which the Queen took in the circumstances of those around
her. Her absorbing passion for the comfortable commonplaces, the small
crises, the recurrent sentimentalities, of domestic life constantly
demanded wider fields for its activity; the sphere of her own family,
vast as it was, was not enough; she became the eager confidante of
the household affairs of her ladies; her sympathies reached out to
the palace domestics; even the housemaids and scullions--so it
appeared--were the objects of her searching inquiries, and of her
heartfelt solicitude when their lovers were ordered to a foreign
station, or their aunts suffered from an attack of rheumatism which was
more than usually acute.

Nevertheless the due distinctions of rank were immaculately preserved.
The Queen's mere presence was enough to ensure that; but, in addition,
the dominion of court etiquette was paramount. For that elaborate code,
which had kept Lord Melbourne stiff upon the sofa and ranged the other
guests in silence about the round table according to the order of
precedence, was as punctiliously enforced as ever. Every evening after
dinner, the hearth-rug, sacred to royalty, loomed before the profane in
inaccessible glory, or, on one or two terrific occasions, actually lured
them magnetically forward to the very edge of the abyss. The Queen, at
the fitting moment, moved towards her guests; one after the other they
were led up to her; and, while dialogue followed dialogue in constraint
and embarrassment, the rest of the assembly stood still, without a word.
Only in one particular was the severity of the etiquette allowed to
lapse. Throughout the greater part of the reign the rule that ministers
must stand during their audiences with the Queen had been absolute. When
Lord Derby, the Prime Minister, had an audience of Her Majesty after
a serious illness, he mentioned it afterwards, as a proof of the royal
favour, that the Queen had remarked "How sorry she was she could not ask
him to be seated." Subsequently, Disraeli, after an attack of gout
and in a moment of extreme expansion on the part of Victoria, had
been offered a chair; but he had thought it wise humbly to decline the
privilege. In her later years, however, the Queen invariably asked Mr.
Gladstone and Lord Salisbury to sit down.

Sometimes the solemnity of the evening was diversified by a concert, an
opera, or even a play. One of the most marked indications of
Victoria's enfranchisement from the thraldom of widowhood had been
her resumption--after an interval of thirty years--of the custom of
commanding dramatic companies from London to perform before the Court at
Windsor. On such occasions her spirits rose high. She loved acting; she
loved a good plot; above all, she loved a farce. Engrossed by everything
that passed upon the stage she would follow, with childlike innocence,
the unwinding of the story; or she would assume an air of knowing
superiority and exclaim in triumph, "There! You didn't expect that, did
you?" when the denouement came. Her sense of humour was of a vigorous
though primitive kind. She had been one of the very few persons who had
always been able to appreciate the Prince Consort's jokes; and, when
those were cracked no more, she could still roar with laughter, in the
privacy of her household, over some small piece of fun--some oddity of
an ambassador, or some ignorant Minister's faux pas. When the jest grew
subtle she was less pleased; but, if it approached the confines of the
indecorous, the danger was serious. To take a liberty called down at
once Her Majesty's most crushing disapprobation; and to say something
improper was to take the greatest liberty of all. Then the royal
lips sank down at the corners, the royal eyes stared in astonished
protrusion, and in fact, the royal countenance became inauspicious in
the highest degree. The transgressor shuddered into silence, while the
awful "We are not amused" annihilated the dinner table. Afterwards,
in her private entourage, the Queen would observe that the person in
question was, she very much feared, "not discreet"; it was a verdict
from which there was no appeal.

In general, her aesthetic tastes had remained unchanged since the days
of Mendelssohn, Landseer, and Lablache. She still delighted in the
roulades of Italian opera; she still demanded a high standard in the
execution of a pianoforte duet. Her views on painting were decided;
Sir Edwin, she declared, was perfect; she was much impressed by Lord
Leighton's manners; and she profoundly distrusted Mr. Watts. From time
to time she ordered engraved portraits to be taken of members of
the royal family; on these occasions she would have the first proofs
submitted to her, and, having inspected them with minute particularity,
she would point out their mistakes to the artists, indicating at the
same time how they might be corrected. The artists invariably discovered
that Her Majesty's suggestions were of the highest value. In literature
her interests were more restricted. She was devoted to Lord Tennyson;
and, as the Prince Consort had admired George Eliot, she perused
"Middlemarch:" she was disappointed. There is reason to believe,
however, that the romances of another female writer, whose popularity
among the humbler classes of Her Majesty's subjects was at one time
enormous, secured, no less, the approval of Her Majesty. Otherwise she
did not read very much.

Once, however, the Queen's attention was drawn to a publication which it
was impossible for her to ignore. "The Greville Memoirs," filled with a
mass of historical information of extraordinary importance, but filled
also with descriptions, which were by no means flattering, of George
IV, William IV, and other royal persons, was brought out by Mr. Reeve.
Victoria read the book, and was appalled. It was, she declared, a
"dreadful and really scandalous book," and she could not say "how
HORRIFIED and INDIGNANT" she was at Greville's "indiscretion,
indelicacy, ingratitude towards friends, betrayal of confidence and
shameful disloyalty towards his Sovereign." She wrote to Disraeli to
tell him that in her opinion it was "VERY IMPORTANT that the book should
be severely censured and discredited." "The tone in which he speaks of
royalty," she added, "is unlike anything one sees in history even,
and is most reprehensible." Her anger was directed with almost equal
vehemence against Mr. Reeve for his having published "such an abominable
book," and she charged Sir Arthur Helps to convey to him her deep
displeasure. Mr. Reeve, however, was impenitent. When Sir Arthur told
him that, in the Queen's opinion, "the book degraded royalty," he
replied: "Not at all; it elevates it by the contrast it offers between
the present and the defunct state of affairs." But this adroit defence
failed to make any impression upon Victoria; and Mr. Reeve, when he
retired from the public service, did not receive the knighthood which
custom entitled him to expect. Perhaps if the Queen had known how many
caustic comments upon herself Mr. Reeve had quietly suppressed in the
published Memoirs, she would have been almost grateful to him; but, in
that case, what would she have said of Greville? Imagination boggles at
the thought. As for more modern essays upon the same topic, Her Majesty,
it is to be feared, would have characterised them as "not discreet."

But as a rule the leisure hours of that active life were occupied with
recreations of a less intangible quality than the study of literature or
the appreciation of art. Victoria was a woman not only of vast property
but of innumerable possessions. She had inherited an immense quantity
of furniture, of ornaments, of china, of plate, of valuable objects of
every kind; her purchases, throughout a long life, made a formidable
addition to these stores; and there flowed in upon her, besides, from
every quarter of the globe, a constant stream of gifts. Over this
enormous mass she exercised an unceasing and minute supervision, and the
arrangement and the contemplation of it, in all its details, filled her
with an intimate satisfaction. The collecting instinct has its roots in
the very depths of human nature; and, in the case of Victoria, it seemed
to owe its force to two of her dominating impulses--the intense sense,
which had always been hers, of her own personality, and the craving
which, growing with the years, had become in her old age almost an
obsession, for fixity, for solidity, for the setting up of palpable
barriers against the outrages of change and time. When she considered
the multitudinous objects which belonged to her, or, better still, when,
choosing out some section of them as the fancy took her, she actually
savoured the vivid richness of their individual qualities, she saw
herself deliciously reflected from a million facets, felt herself
magnified miraculously over a boundless area, and was well pleased.
That was just as it should be; but then came the dismaying
thought--everything slips away, crumbles, vanishes; Sevres
dinner-services get broken; even golden basins go unaccountably astray;
even one's self, with all the recollections and experiences that make
up one's being, fluctuates, perishes, dissolves... But no! It could
not, should not be so! There should be no changes and no losses! Nothing
should ever move--neither the past nor the present--and she herself
least of all! And so the tenacious woman, hoarding her valuables,
decreed their immortality with all the resolution of her soul. She would
not lose one memory or one pin.

She gave orders that nothing should be thrown away--and nothing was.
There, in drawer after drawer, in wardrobe after wardrobe, reposed the
dresses of seventy years. But not only the dresses--the furs and the
mantles and subsidiary frills and the muffs and the parasols and the
bonnets--all were ranged in chronological order, dated and complete. A
great cupboard was devoted to the dolls; in the china room at Windsor a
special table held the mugs of her childhood, and her children's mugs as
well. Mementoes of the past surrounded her in serried accumulations.
In every room the tables were powdered thick with the photographs of
relatives; their portraits, revealing them at all ages, covered the
walls; their figures, in solid marble, rose up from pedestals, or
gleamed from brackets in the form of gold and silver statuettes. The
dead, in every shape--in miniatures, in porcelain, in enormous life-size
oil-paintings--were perpetually about her. John Brown stood upon her
writing-table in solid gold. Her favourite horses and dogs, endowed with
a new durability, crowded round her footsteps. Sharp, in silver gilt,
dominated the dinner table; Boy and Boz lay together among unfading
flowers, in bronze. And it was not enough that each particle of the
past should be given the stability of metal or of marble: the whole
collection, in its arrangement, no less than its entity, should be
immutably fixed. There might be additions, but there might never be
alterations. No chintz might change, no carpet, no curtain, be replaced
by another; or, if long use at last made it necessary, the stuffs and
the patterns must be so identically reproduced that the keenest eye
might not detect the difference. No new picture could be hung upon the
walls at Windsor, for those already there had been put in their places
by Albert, whose decisions were eternal. So, indeed, were Victoria's.
To ensure that they should be the aid of the camera was called in. Every
single article in the Queen's possession was photographed from several
points of view. These photographs were submitted to Her Majesty, and
when, after careful inspection, she had approved of them, they were
placed in a series of albums, richly bound. Then, opposite each
photograph, an entry was made, indicating the number of the article, the
number of the room in which it was kept, its exact position in the room
and all its principal characteristics. The fate of every object which
had undergone this process was henceforth irrevocably sealed. The
whole multitude, once and for all, took up its steadfast station. And
Victoria, with a gigantic volume or two of the endless catalogue always
beside her, to look through, to ponder upon, to expatiate over, could
feel, with a double contentment, that the transitoriness of this world
had been arrested by the amplitude of her might.

Thus the collection, ever multiplying, ever encroaching upon new fields
of consciousness, ever rooting itself more firmly in the depths of
instinct, became one of the dominating influences of that strange
existence. It was a collection not merely of things and of thoughts,
but of states of mind and ways of living as well. The celebration of
anniversaries grew to be an important branch of it--of birthdays and
marriage days and death days, each of which demanded its appropriate
feeling, which, in its turn, must be itself expressed in an appropriate
outward form. And the form, of course--the ceremony of rejoicing
or lamentation--was stereotyped with the rest: it was part of the
collection. On a certain day, for instance, flowers must be strewn on
John Brown's monument at Balmoral; and the date of the yearly departure
for Scotland was fixed by that fact. Inevitably it was around the
central circumstance of death--death, the final witness to human
mutability--that these commemorative cravings clustered most thickly.
Might not even death itself be humbled, if one could recall enough--if
one asserted, with a sufficiently passionate and reiterated emphasis,
the eternity of love? Accordingly, every bed in which Victoria slept had
attached to it, at the back, on the right-hand side, above the pillow,
a photograph of the head and shoulders of Albert as he lay dead,
surmounted by a wreath of immortelles. At Balmoral, where memories came
crowding so closely, the solid signs of memory appeared in surprising
profusion. Obelisks, pyramids, tombs, statues, cairns, and seats of
inscribed granite, proclaimed Victoria's dedication to the dead. There,
twice a year, on the days that followed her arrival, a solemn
pilgrimage of inspection and meditation was performed. There, on August
26--Albert's birthday--at the foot of the bronze statue of him in
Highland dress, the Queen, her family, her Court, her servants, and her
tenantry, met together and in silence drank to the memory of the dead.
In England the tokens of remembrance pullulated hardly less. Not a
day passed without some addition to the multifold assemblage--a gold
statuette of Ross, the piper--a life-sized marble group of Victoria and
Albert, in medieval costume, inscribed upon the base with the words:
"Allured to brighter worlds and led the way-" a granite slab in the
shrubbery at Osborne, informing the visitor of "Waldmann: the very
favourite little dachshund of Queen Victoria; who brought him from
Baden, April 1872; died, July 11, 1881."

At Frogmore, the great mausoleum, perpetually enriched, was visited
almost daily by the Queen when the Court was at Windsor. But there was
another, a more secret and a hardly less holy shrine. The suite of rooms
which Albert had occupied in the Castle was kept for ever shut away
from the eyes of any save the most privileged. Within those precincts
everything remained as it had been at the Prince's death; but the
mysterious preoccupation of Victoria had commanded that her husband's
clothing should be laid afresh, each evening, upon the bed, and that,
each evening, the water should be set ready in the basin, as if he were
still alive; and this incredible rite was performed with scrupulous
regularity for nearly forty years.