THE END
The evening had been golden; but, after all, the day was to close in
cloud and tempest. Imperial needs, imperial ambitions, involved the
country in the South African War. There were checks, reverses, bloody
disasters; for a moment the nation was shaken, and the public
distresses were felt with intimate solicitude by the Queen. But her
spirit was high, and neither her courage nor her confidence wavered for
a moment. Throwing herself heart and soul into the struggle, she
laboured with redoubled vigour, interested herself in every detail of
the hostilities, and sought by every means in her power to render
service to the national cause. In April 1900, when she was in her
eighty-first year, she made the extraordinary decision to abandon her
annual visit to the South of France, and to go instead to Ireland,
which had provided a particularly large number of recruits to the
armies in the field. She stayed for three weeks in Dublin, driving
through the streets, in spite of the warnings of her advisers, without
an armed escort; and the visit was a complete success. But, in the
course of it, she began, for the first time, to show signs of the
fatigue of age.[1]
For the long strain and the unceasing anxiety, brought by the war, made
themselves felt at last. {308} Endowed by nature with a robust
constitution, Victoria, though in periods of depression she had
sometimes supposed herself an invalid, had in reality throughout her
life enjoyed remarkably good health. In her old age, she had suffered
from a rheumatic stiffness of the joints, which had necessitated the
use of a stick, and, eventually, a wheeled chair; but no other ailments
attacked her, until, in 1898, her eyesight began to be affected by
incipient cataract. After that, she found reading more and more
difficult, though she could still sign her name, and even, with some
difficulty, write letters. In the summer of 1900, however, more
serious symptoms appeared. Her memory, in whose strength and precision
she had so long prided herself, now sometimes deserted her; there was a
tendency towards aphasia; and, while no specific disease declared
itself, by the autumn there were unmistakable signs of a general
physical decay. Yet, even in these last months, the vein of iron held
firm. The daily work continued; nay, it actually increased; for the
Queen, with an astonishing pertinacity, insisted upon communicating
personally with an ever-growing multitude of men and women who had
suffered through the war.[2]
By the end of the year the last remains of her ebbing strength had
almost deserted her; and through the early days of the opening century
it was clear that her dwindling forces were kept together only by an
effort of will. On January 11, she had at Osborne an hour's interview
with Lord Roberts, who had returned victorious from South Africa a few
days before. She inquired with acute anxiety into all the details of
the war; she appeared to sustain the exertion successfully; but, when
the audience was over, there was a collapse. On the {309} following
day her medical attendants recognised that her state was hopeless; and
yet, for two days more, the indomitable spirit fought on; for two days
more she discharged the duties of a Queen of England. But after that
there was an end of working; and then, and not till then, did the last
optimism of those about her break down. The brain was failing, and
life was gently slipping away. Her family gathered round her; for a
little more she lingered, speechless and apparently insensible; and, on
January 22, 1901, she died.[3]
When, two days previously, the news of the approaching end had been
made public, astonished grief had swept over the country. It appeared
as if some monstrous reversal of the course of nature was about to take
place. The vast majority of her subjects had never known a time when
Queen Victoria had not been reigning over them. She had become an
indissoluble part of their whole scheme of things, and that they were
about to lose her appeared a scarcely possible thought. She herself,
as she lay blind and silent, seemed to those who watched her to be
divested of all thinking--to have glided already, unawares, into
oblivion. Yet, perhaps, in the secret chambers of consciousness, she
had her thoughts, too. Perhaps her fading mind called up once more the
shadows of the past to float before it, and retraced, for the last
time, the vanished visions of that long history--passing back and back,
through the cloud of years, to older and ever older memories--to the
spring woods at Osborne, so full of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield--to
Lord Palmerston's queer clothes and high demeanour, and Albert's face
under the green lamp, and Albert's first stag at Balmoral, and Albert
in his blue and silver uniform, and the Baron coming in through {310} a
doorway, and Lord M. dreaming at Windsor with the rooks cawing in the
elm-trees, and the Archbishop of Canterbury on his knees in the dawn,
and the old King's turkey-cock ejaculations, and Uncle Leopold's soft
voice at Claremont, and Lehzen with the globes, and her mother's
feathers sweeping down towards her, and a great old repeater-watch of
her father's in its tortoise-shell case, and a yellow rug, and some
friendly flounces of sprigged muslin, and the trees and the grass at
Kensington.
[1] _Quarterly Review_, CXCIII, 318, 336-7.
[2] Lee, 536-7; private information.
[3] Lee, 537-9; _Quarterly Review_, CXCIII, 309.
{311}
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Printed by SPOTTISWOODE, BALLANTYNE & CO. LTD.
Colchester, London & Eton, England
_SOME OPINIONS ON 'EMINENT VICTORIANS'_
_NOW IN ITS NINTH EDITION_
'Mr. Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians" has had, I suppose, the
most instant success that any book of account has won in this
generation. Some of Mr. Strachey's incidental portraits are of
astonishing brilliancy--notably that of Mr. Gladstone, and the book is
sure of long life. This it will owe to its felicity of style and its
finish and delicacy of moulding, no less than to its cynical wit and
its perfectly serious and critical intention.'--_The Nation_.
'A brilliant and extraordinarily witty book. Mr. Strachey's method of
presenting his characters is both masterly and subtle. His purpose is
to penetrate into the most hidden depths of his sitters' characters.
There is something almost uncanny in the author's detachment.'--_The
Times_.
'An unusually interesting volume in a department of literature which,
in England, has fallen to a grievously low level.'--_Manchester
Guardian_.
'Four short biographies which are certainly equal to anything of the
kind which has been produced for a hundred years. He elucidates with
consummate dexterity--the book is a masterpiece of its kind.'--Mr. J.
C. Squire, in _Land and Water_.
'A brilliant book has recently appeared which illustrates in very
vigorous and striking fashion the interval which seems to divide the
twentieth century from the nineteenth. Mr. Lytton Strachey's book has
attained a celebrity quite remarkable for literary work produced in
times of war. There is no doubt as to its literary merits.'--Leading
Article in _The Daily Telegraph_.
'This book is brilliant and witty and iconoclastic enough, but it has
also something in it which gives it greatness. Regarded as an example
of the manner in which biography can be written, it is almost
unparalleled in English; and many readers will be rejoiced if Mr.
Strachey can be induced to become a Plutarch of the modern
world.'--_Westminster Gazette_.
'It is impossible here even to outline the precise, vivid, and witty
essays which Mr. Strachey has devoted to his four characters. But he
has certainly done something to redeem English biography from the
reproach under which it suffers when compared with the art as practised
in France; and he comes close to the standard which he sets himself
when he speaks of the "Fontenelles and Condorcets."'--_New Statesman_.
'Mr. Strachey's subtle and suggestive art.'--_Mr. Asquith's Romanes
Lecture at Oxford_.
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