tranquil as it appeared to be to outsiders. Perhaps her extreme and
almost abnormal sense of responsibility was hardly compatible with the
joyousness of childhood. There is a story that it was not till the
Princess was eleven years old that her future destiny was revealed to
her. Her governess then purposely put a genealogical table of the royal
family into her history book. The child gazed earnestly at it, and by
degrees she comprehended what it meant, namely, that she herself was
next in succession to the ancient crown of England; she put her hand
into her governess’s and said, “I will be good. I understand now why you
wanted me to learn so much, even Latin.... I understand all better now.”
And she repeated more than once, “I will be good.” The anecdote shows an
unusually keen sense of duty and of conscientiousness in so young a
child, and there are other anecdotes which show the same characteristic.
Who, therefore, can wonder at the unbounded joy which filled all hearts
in England when this young girl, pure, sweet, innocent, conscientious,
and unselfish, ascended the throne of George IV. and William IV.? Her
manners were frank, natural, simple, and dignified. The bright young
presence of the girl Queen filled every one, high and low, throughout
the nation with enthusiasm.
The American author, Mr. N. P. Willis, republican as he was, spoke of
her in one of his letters as “quite unnecessarily pretty and interesting
for the heir of such a crown as that of England.” Daniel O’Connell, then
the leader of the movement for the repeal of the union between England
and Ireland, was as great an enthusiast for her as any one in the three
kingdoms. His stentorian voice led the cheering of the crowd outside of
St. James’s Palace who welcomed her at the ceremony of proclamation. He
said, when some of the gossips of the day chattered of a scheme to
depose “the all but infant Queen” in favour of the hated Duke of
Cumberland, “If necessary I can get 500,000 brave Irishmen to defend the
life, the honour, and the person of the beloved young lady by whom
England’s throne is now filled.”
The picture of the Queen’s first council by Wilkie was shown in 1887 in
the winter exhibition at the Royal Academy. It helps one very much to
understand the sort of enthusiasm which she created. The sweet, girlish
dignity and quiet simplicity with which she performed all the duties of
her station filled every one with admiration. Surrounded by aged
politicians, statesmen, and soldiers, she presides over them all with
the grace and dignity associated with a complete absence of affectation
and self-consciousness. Greville, the Clerk of the Council then, and for
many years before and after, writes of this occasion: “Never was
anything like the impression she produced, or the chorus of praise and
admiration which is raised about her manner and behaviour, and certainly
not without justice. It was something very extraordinary and far beyond
what was looked for.” Melbourne, her first Prime Minister, loved her as
a daughter; the Duke of Wellington had a similar feeling for her, which
she returned with unstinted confidence and reliance. The first request
made by the girl Queen to her mother, immediately after the
proclamation, was that she might be left for two hours quite alone to
think over her position and strengthen the resolutions that were to
guide her future life. The childish words, “I will be good,” probably
gave the forecast of the tone of the young Queen’s reflections. She must
have felt the difficulties and peculiar temptations of her position very
keenly, for when she was awakened from her sleep on the night of the
20th June 1837, to be told of William the Fourth’s death, and that she
was Queen of England, her first words to the Archbishop of Canterbury,
who made the announcement, were, “I beg your Grace to pray for me.”
The Queen was very careful from the beginning of her reign thoroughly to
understand all the business of the State, and never to put her signature
to any document till she had mastered its contents. Lord Melbourne was
heard to declare that this sort of thing was quite new in his experience
as Prime Minister, and he said jokingly that he would rather manage ten
kings than one Queen. On one occasion he brought a document to her, and
urged its importance on the ground of expediency. She looked up quietly,
and said, “I have been taught to judge between what is right and what is
wrong; but ‘expediency’ is a word I neither wish to hear nor to
understand.” Thirty years later one of the best men who ever sat in the
House of Commons, John Stuart Mill, said, “There is an important branch
of expediency called justice.” But this was probably not the kind of
expediency that Lord Melbourne recommended, and the Queen condemned.
In the _Memoirs of Mrs. Jameson_, by Mrs. Macpherson, there is a letter,
dated December 1838, containing the following illustration of the way in
which the Queen regarded the duties of her position. “Spring Rice told a
friend of mine that he once carried her (the Queen) some papers to sign,
and said something about managing so as to give Her Majesty less
trouble. She looked up from her paper and said quietly, ‘Pray never let
me hear those words again; never mention the word “trouble.” Only tell
me how the thing is to be done, to be done rightly, and I will do it if
I can.’” Everything that is known of the Queen at that time shows a
similar high conception of duty and right. She was resolved to be no
mere pleasure-seeking, self-indulgent monarch, but one who strove
earnestly to understand her duties, and was determined to throw her best
strength into their fulfilment.
It is this conscientious fulfilment of her political duties which gives
the Queen such a very strong claim upon the gratitude of all her
subjects. People do not always understand how hard and constant her work
is, nor how deeply she feels her responsibilities. She is sometimes
blamed for not leading society as she did in the earlier years of her
reign, and it is no doubt true that her good influence in this way is
much missed. Mrs. Oliphant has spoken of the way in which in those early
years of her married life she was “in the foreground of the national
life, affecting it always for good, and setting an example of purity and
virtue. The theatres to which she went, and which both she and her
husband enjoyed, were purified by her presence; evils which had been the
growth of years disappearing before the face of the young Queen.” That
good influence at the head of society has been withdrawn by the Queen’s
withdrawal from fashionable life; and there is another disadvantage
arising from her seclusion, in the degree to which it prevents her from
feeling the force and value of many of the most important social
movements of our time. Except in opening Holloway College, and in the
impetus which she has given to providing medical women for the women of
India, she has never, for instance, shown any special sympathy with any
of the various branches of the movement for improving and lifting up the
lives of women. Still, fully allowing all this, it is beyond doubt that
her subjects, and especially her women subjects, have deep cause for
gratitude and affection to the Queen. She has set a high example of duty
and faithfulness to the whole nation. The childish resolve, “I will be
good,” has never been lost sight of. With almost boundless opportunities
for self-indulgence, and living in an atmosphere where she is
necessarily almost entirely removed from the wholesome criticism of
equals and friends, she has clung tenaciously to the ideal with which
she started on her more than fifty years of sovereignty. Simplicity of
daily life and daily hard work are the antidotes which she has
constantly applied to counteract the unwholesome influences associated
with royalty. Women have special cause for gratitude to her, because she
has shown, as no other woman could, how absurd is the statement that
political duties unsex a woman, and make her lose womanly tenderness and
sympathy. The passionate worship which she bestowed upon her husband,
the deep love she constantly shows for her children and grandchildren,
and the eager sympathy which she extends to every creature on whom the
load of suffering or sorrow has fallen, prove that being the first
political officer of the greatest empire in the world cannot harden her
heart or dull her sympathy. A woman’s a woman “for a’ that.”
So much has lately been written about the supreme happiness of the
Queen’s married life, and so much has been revealed of her inner family
circle, that no more is needed to make every woman realise the anguish
of the great bereavement of her life. In earlier and happier years she
wrote to her uncle Leopold on the occasion of one of the Prince
Consort’s short absences from her: “You cannot think how much this costs
me, nor how completely forlorn I am and feel when he is away, or how I
count the hours till he returns. All the numerous children are as
nothing to me when he is away. It seems as if the whole life of the
house and home were gone.” Poor Queen, poor woman! Surely it is
ungenerous, while she so strenuously goes on working at the duties of
her position, to blame her because she cannot again join in what are
supposed to be its pleasures.
One of the princesses lately spoke of the loneliness of the Queen. “You
can have no idea,” she is reported to have said, “how lonely mamma is.”
All who were her elders, and in a sense her guardians and protectors in
the earlier part of her reign, have been removed by death. Her strongest
affections are in the past, and with the dead. She is reported to have
said on the death of one of those nearest to her: “There is no one left
to call me Victoria now!” The etiquette which, in public at any rate,
rules the behaviour of her children and grandchildren to the Queen,
seems to render her isolation more painful than it would otherwise be.
Lady Lyttelton, who was governess to the royal children, is stated in
the _Greville Memoirs_ to have said that “the Queen was very fond of
them, but severe in her manner, and a strict disciplinarian.” This may
have perhaps increased her present loneliness, if it created a sense of
reserve and formality between her children and herself.
The Queen has always shown a truly royal appreciation of those who were
great in art, science, or literature. It is well known that she sent her
book, _Leaves from our Journal in the Highlands_, to Charles Dickens,
with the inscription, “From one of the humblest of writers to one of the
greatest.” Mrs. Somerville, in her _Reminiscences_, speaks of the
gracious reception given to herself by the Queen while she was still
Princess Victoria, when the authoress presented a copy of her _Mechanism
of the Heavens_ to the Duchess of Kent and her daughter. More than
twenty years later Mrs. Somerville wrote, “I am glad to hear that the
Queen has been so kind to my friend Faraday. It seems she has given him
an apartment at Hampton Court, nicely fitted up. She went to see it
herself, and having consulted scientific men as to the instruments
necessary for his pursuits, she had a laboratory fitted up with them,
and made him a present of the whole. That is doing things handsomely,
and no one since Newton has deserved so much.” The Queen was also very
ready to show her warm appreciation of Carlyle and other eminent
writers. In an interview with Carlyle, at the Deanery, Westminster, she
quite charmed the rugged old philosopher by her kind and gracious
manner. Many years ago, when the fame of Jenny Lind was at its height,
she was invited to sing in private before the Queen at Buckingham
Palace. Owing to some contemptible spite or jealousy, her accompanist
did not play what was set down in the music, and this of course had a
very discomposing effect upon the singer. The Queen’s quick ear
immediately detected what was going on, and at the conclusion of the
song, when another was about to be commenced, she stepped up to the
piano and said, “I will accompany Miss Lind.”
The Queen’s strong personal interest in all that concerns the welfare of
her kingdom is well known. She became almost ill with anxiety about the
sufferings of our troops in the Crimea, and she wrote frequently to Lord
Raglan on the subject. Before the end of the siege of Sebastopol, Lord
Cardigan returned from the Crimea on a short visit to England, and came
to see the Queen at Windsor. One of the royal children said to him, “You
must hurry back to Sebastopol and take it, else it will kill mamma!” In
the summer of 1886, during the anxious political crisis of that time, a
gentleman, who had just seen the Queen, was asked how she looked. “Ten
years younger than she did a fortnight ago,” was the reply. The severity
of the crisis was for the time averted, and the relief of mind it
brought to the Queen could be plainly read in the change in her aspect.
A wise and good clergyman, who was also a witty and powerful writer, the
Rev. Sydney Smith, preached a sermon in St. Paul’s Cathedral on the
Queen’s accession, in which he gave utterance to the hope that she would
promote the spread of national education, and would “worship God by
loving peace.” “The young Queen,” he said, “at that period of life which
is commonly given up to frivolous amusement, sees at once the great
principles by which she should be guided, and steps at once into the
great duties of her station.” He then spoke again of peace and of
education as the two objects towards which a patriot Queen ought most
earnestly to strive, and concluded: “And then this youthful monarch,
profoundly but wisely religious, disdaining hypocrisy, and far above the
childish follies of false piety, casts herself upon God, and seeks from
the Gospel of His blessed Son a path for her steps and a comfort for her
soul. Here is a picture which warms every English heart and could bring
all this congregation upon their bended knees before Almighty God to
pray it may be realised. What limits to the glory and happiness of our
native land, if the Creator should in His mercy have placed in the heart
of this Royal Woman the rudiments of wisdom and mercy; and if giving
them time to expand, and to bless our children’s children with her
goodness, He should grant to her a long sojourning on earth, and leave
her to reign over us till she is well stricken in years! What glory!
what happiness! what joy! what bounty of God!”
The preacher’s anticipations of a long reign have been fulfilled, and
the bright hopes of that seedtime of promise and resolution can now be
compared with the harvest of achievement and fulfilment. There is always
a great gap between such anticipations and the accomplished fact; but it
will be well for us all, high or low, if we are able, when we stand near
the end of life and review the past, to feel that we have been equally
steadfast to the high resolves of our youth, as the Queen has been to
the words, “I will be good,” which she uttered sixty years ago.
Footnote 1:
Written for the Jubilee, June 1887.
VII
HARRIET MARTINEAU
HARRIET MARTINEAU is one of the most distinguished literary women this
century has produced. She is among the few women who have succeeded in
the craft of journalism, and one of the still smaller number who
succeeded for a time in moulding and shaping the current politics of her
day. There are many things in her career which make it a particularly
instructive one. Her vivid remembrance of her own childhood gave her a
very strong sympathy with the feelings and sufferings of children; all
mothers, especially the mothers of uncommonly intellectual children,
ought to read, in the early part of Harriet Martineau’s autobiography,
her record of her own childhood, and its peculiar sufferings.
The Martineaus were descended from a French Huguenot surgeon, who left
his native country in 1688, after the revocation of the edict of Nantes.
He settled at Norwich, and became the progenitor of a long line of
distinguished surgeons in that city. Harriet’s father was a
manufacturer; she was born on the 12th June 1802, the sixth of eight
children. There is nothing in the outward circumstances of her youth to
distinguish it from that of the substantial but simple comfort of any
middle class family of that period, save that her education was above
the average. The independence of judgment in religious matters that had
made their ancestor a Huguenot, made the latter Martineaus Unitarians;
and it was to this fact that the excellence of the education of the
family was in part due. For the Rev. Isaac Perry, the head of a large
and flourishing boys’ school in Norwich, became converted to the
principles of Unitarianism, with the consequence of losing nearly all
his pupils. The Unitarian community felt it their duty to rally round
him, and support him to the utmost of their power. Hence those who, like
the Martineaus, had children to educate sent them, girls as well as
boys, to him. Harriet therefore had the inestimable advantage of
beginning her career with a mind well equipped with stores of knowledge
that were at that time usually considered quite outside the range of
what was necessary for a woman.
She speaks of herself as having, especially in her childhood, “a
beggarly nervous system”; and her description of her utterly
unreasonable terrors, which she bore in silence, because of the want of
insight and sympathy around her, ought to be a lesson to every parent.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I was panic-struck at the head of the stairs,
and was sure I could never get down; and I could never cross the yard
into the garden without flying and panting, and fearing to look behind,
because a wild beast was after me. The starlight sky was the worst; it
was always coming down to stifle and crush me, and rest upon my head.”
“The extremest terror of all,” she says, was occasioned by the dull thud
of beating feather beds with a stick, a process in which the housewives
of Norwich were wont to indulge on the breezy area below the Castle
Hill. A magic-lantern, or the prismatic lights cast by glass lustres
upon the wall, threw her into the same unaccountable terror-stricken
state. If she could have been coaxed into speaking of these panics, they
might probably have ceased to assail her. But this she never dreamed of
doing. There was too little tenderness in her family life to overcome
her natural timidity. Once when her terror at a magic-lantern so far
overcame her as to find vent in a shriek of dismay, “a pretty lady, who
sat next us, took me on her lap, and let me hide my face in her bosom,
and held me fast. How intensely I loved her, without at all knowing who
she was.”
When Harriet Martineau was more than fifty, she wrote a detailed account
of all she had suffered in childhood, not from any want of gratitude or
affection to her parents, but because she felt that mothers ought to
know what their children sometimes suffer, so that they might protect
them by tender watchfulness from becoming victims of these imaginary
terrors. It is not, it must be remembered, stupid children who are most
subject to these “ghostly enemies,” but much more frequently it is the
children of vivid imagination and bright intelligence who are most
subject to them. A child who is frightened of the dark ought not to be
unkindly ridiculed or forced to endure what terrifies it; it ought to be
helped by all gentle means to overcome its fear, and all other
unreasonable fears conjured up by its imagination.
That Harriet Martineau showed in early childhood that she was gifted
with extraordinary mental powers cannot be doubted. At seven years old
she “discovered” _Paradise Lost_. She had been left at home one Sunday
evening, when all the rest of the family had gone to chapel, and she
began looking at the books on the table. One of them was turned down
open. She took it up, and began looking at it. It was _Paradise Lost_.
The first thing she saw was the word “Argument” at the head of a
chapter, which she thought must mean a dispute, and could make nothing
of; but something about Satan cleaving Chaos made her turn to the
poetry, and, in her own words, that evening’s reading fixed her mental
destiny for the next seven years; the volume was henceforth never to be
found, but by asking her for it. “In a few months, I believe there was
hardly a line in _Paradise Lost_ that I could not have instantly turned
to. I sent myself to sleep by repeating it, and when my curtains were
drawn back in the morning, descriptions of heavenly light rushed into my
memory.” Her keen appreciation of Milton’s great poem was the
compensation nature provided for the imaginative terrors which made her
childhood such a sad one.
Another misfortune was in store for her, which might have embittered the
whole of her future existence. When she was about twelve years old it
was recognised that her hearing was not good; by sixteen her deafness
had become very noticeable, and excessively painful to herself; and
before she was twenty she had become extremely deaf, so that she could
hear little or nothing without the help of a trumpet. Few people can
realise how much the loss of this all-important sense must have cost
her. At the outset of life, to be deprived of a faculty on which almost
all free and pleasant social intercourse depends must be a bitter trial.
One striking characteristic of Harriet Martineau’s mind was brought into
relief by it. Throughout her life a misfortune never overtook her
without calling out the strength necessary to bear it, not only with
patience, but with cheerfulness. As soon as it was clear that her
deafness was a trial that would last as long as her life, she made a
resolution with regard to it. She determined never to inquire what was
said, but to trust to her friends to repeat to her what was important
and worth hearing. This she rightly regarded as the only way of
preventing her deafness becoming as irksome and trying to her companions
as it was to herself. It was not till she was nearly thirty that she
began to use a trumpet, and she blamed herself seriously for the delay;
for she felt it to be the duty of the deaf to spare other people as much
fatigue as possible, and also to preserve their own natural capacity for
sound, and the habit of receiving it, as long as possible.
Harriet’s first attempt at authorship was undertaken at the age of
nineteen; she was tenderly devoted to her brother James, who was two
years her junior. When he left home for college, the brightness of her
life departed; he told her she must not permit herself to be so
miserable, and advised her to take refuge, each time he left her, in
some new pursuit; her first new pursuit was writing, and with a beating
heart she posted her manuscript to the Editor of the _Monthly
Repository_, a Unitarian magazine of that day. She adopted the signature
of “V. of Norwich”; all authors will sympathise with what she felt when
her manuscript was accepted, and she saw herself for the first time in
print. She had not told any member of her family of her enterprise.
Imagine therefore her delight when her eldest brother, whom she regarded
with the utmost veneration, selected this article by V. of Norwich for
special commendation, reading passages from it aloud, and calling upon
Harriet to say whether she did not think it first-rate. After a brief
attempt to keep her secret, she blurted out, “I never could baffle
anybody. The truth is, that paper is mine.” The kind brother read on in
silence, and as she was going he laid his hand on her shoulder and said
gravely (calling her “dear” for the first time), “Now, dear, leave it to
other women to make shirts and darn stockings; and do you devote
yourself to this.” “I went home,” she adds, “in a sort of dream, so that
the squares of the pavement seemed to float before my eyes. That evening
made me an authoress.”