Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 162.djvu/249

Rh staring before him for an hour, his hands sunk idly on his knees — which was not like his usual habits. He hardly ever addressed his wife directly, but he watched her with gloomy, frowning brow as she toiled along the road, bearing her burden of wood and water with increased difficulty day by day, but never offering to assist her.

From The Fortnightly Review. PRINCESS ALICE. No sovereign of our time, and few of any time, have taken their subjects so completely into their confidence as Queen Victoria has taken hers. "There's such divinity doth hedge a king," that it re- quires an effort for ordinary mortals to realize that royal personages are, after all, creatures of flesh and blood like them- selves — sensitive to the same pains, soothed by the same pleasures, vexed by the same worries that beset humanity at large. It is, perhaps, still more uncom- mon, obvious as it is when one thinks of it, to realize the pathetic loneliness which must ever haunt the wearer of a crown. It haunted Princess Alice while she was yet merely on the threshold of a throne, and filled her with alarm when she found herself actually on the throne. "Private individuals," she says, " are of course [note the 'of course'] far the best off; our privileges being more duties than ad- vantages. And their absence would be no privation compared to the enormous advantage of being one's own master, and of being on equality with most people, and able to know men and the world as they are, and not merely as they please to show themselves to please us." That was before she became grand duchess. After her accession she wrote : " I am so dread- ing everything, and, above all, the respon- sibility of being the first in everything." Here we see concisely stated the twofold aspect of the loneliness which must always be more or less the heritage of royalty; first, the responsibility of always occupy- ing the first place ; secondly, the sense of unreality which sovereignty engenders — the feeling that it is impossible "to know men and the world as they are" — that it is all an endless masquerade. This yearn- ing for equality, for stooping to a lower sphere in order to know men and things as they really are, is evidently a much larger element than is commonly supposed in the "uneasiness" of "the head that wears a crown." After all, the deepest longing of the human heart is not to pos- sess, but to be possessed. It craves for the spontaneous offering of a love and trust that the offerer is free to refuse; and one of the penalties of royalty is that it can seldom tell for certain when the offering is really spontaneous and genu- ine. To be misunderstood sincerely and in good faith by those whose good opinion one values is hard to bear in any case, but much harder in the case of a sovereign, since the consequences may affect the welfare of an empire. That this is the explanation of the somewhat startling frankness with which the public have been admitted behind the scenes of English royalty is no longer a matter of conjecture ; the queen avows it in a letter to Princess Alice; and the publication of that letter — the only letter other than the princess's own which is published in this volume — is clearly a message from the queen to her people. Some of the prince consort's friends had taken exception to the "unreserved ful- ness of details" published in Sir Theo- dore Martin's volumes. The queen de- fends this absence of reserve as indis- pensable to the purpose she had in view in publishing the prince's "Life;" namely, that his whole life should be made known in all its fulness, and, as a consequence, the irreparable void which the premature death of the prince made in the queen's own life : — You must remember that endless false and untrue things have been written and said about us, public and private, and that in these days people will write and will know. Therefore the only way to counteract this is to let the real, full truth be known, and as much be told as can be told with prudence and discretion ; and then no harm, but good, will be done. This forecast will doubtless be verified by events, and the publication of Princess Alice's letters is an important contribu- tion towards it. I am not going to at- tempt a review of a book which has been sufficiently reviewed already, and which most people have now read. The task which I propose to myself is a humbler one, namely, to follow the reapers, and see if I cannot glean here and there some- thing which does not lie obviously on the surface, yet which it may be well to re- member. The first thing I note is the striking revelation which this volume makes of strong political differences in the bosom of the royal family, without apparently overshadowing, even with a fleeting cloud,