rumors. Those that I mention I give simply as rumors--not, indeed, the
mere babble of the streets, but as the kind of thing which people told
you who professed to know--the talk of the House of Commons, and the
clubs, and the fashionable drawing-rooms and smoking-rooms. People told
you that the Prince and his father had had many quarrels arising out of
the extravagance, dissipation, and wrong-headedness of the former; and
there was even a painful and cruel report thus whispered about that the
death of Prince Albert was the result of a cold he had taken from
walking incautiously in a heavy rain during excitement caused by a
quarrel with his son. Stories were told of this and that _amour_ and
_liaison_ in Ireland when the Prince of Wales was with the camp on the
Curragh of Kildare; of his excesses when he was a student at the
University; of his escapades at many other times and places. Certain
actresses of a low class, and other women of a still lower class, were
pointed out in London as special favorites of the Prince of Wales. Of
course every man of sense knew, first, that stories of this kind must be
taken with a large amount of allowance for exaggeration; and, next, that
the public must not expect all the virtues of a saint to belong to the
early years of a prince of the family of Guelph. In England public
opinion, although it has grown much more exacting of late years on the
score of decorum than it used to be, is still disposed to look over
without censure a good deal of extravagance and dissipation in young and
unmarried men, especially if they be men of rank. Therefore, if the
rumors which attended the early career of the Prince of Wales had not
followed him into his married years, the world would soon have forgotten
all about his youthful indiscretions. But it became a serious question
for the whole nation when it began to be whispered everywhere that the
Prince was growing worse instead of better during his married life, and
when to the suspicion that he was wasting his own youth and his own
credit came to be added the belief that he was neglecting and injuring
the young and beautiful woman whom state reasons had assigned to him as
a wife. In good truth, it is really a question of public and historical
interest whether the Queen of England is likely to be succeeded by an
Albert the Good or another George the Fourth; and I am not therefore
inviting the readers of THE GALAXY to descend to the useless discussion
of a mere piece of idle court scandal when I ask them to consider with
me the probabilities of the future from such survey as we can take of
the aspects of the present.
Those who saw the Prince of Wales when he visited this country, would
surely fail to recognize the slender, fair-haired, rather graceful youth
of that day in the heavy, fat, stolid, prematurely bald,
elderly-young-man of this. It would not be easy to see in any assembly a
more stupid-looking man than the Prince of Wales is now. On horseback he
shows to best advantage. He rides well, and the pleasure he takes in
riding lends something of animation to his usually inexpressive face.
But when his eyes and features lapse into their habitual condition of
indolent, good-natured, stolid repose, all light of intellect seems to
have been banished. The outline of the head and face, and the general
expression, seemed to me of late to be growing every day more and more
like the head and face of George the Third. Anybody who may happen to
have a shilling or half-crown of George the Third's time, can see on the
coin a very fair presentment of the countenance of the present
heir-apparent of the English throne. Whether the Prince of Wales
resembles George the Fourth in character and tastes or not, he certainly
does not resemble him in face. Even a court sycophant could not pretend
to see beauty or grace in our present Prince.
I think that to the eye of the cynic or the satirist the Prince of Wales
shows to greatest advantage when he sits in his box at an advanced hour
of some rather heavy classic opera, or has to endure a long succession
of speeches at a formal public dinner. The heavy head droops, the heavy
jaws hang, the languid eyes close, the heir-apparent sinks into a doze.
Loyalty itself can see nothing dignified or kingly in him then. I have
watched him thus as he sat in his box during some high-class, and to
him, doubtless, very heavy performance at the Italian opera, and have
thought that at times he might remind irreverent and disloyal observers
of Pickwick's immortal fat boy. I have sometimes observed that his
little dozes appeared to afford innocent amusement to his sisters, if
any of them happened to be in the box; and occasionally one of the
Princesses would playfully poke her slumbering brother in the princely
ribs, and the Heir of all the Ages would open his eyes and smile
languidly, and try to look at the stage and listen to the music; and
then, after a while, the heavy head would sink once more on the vast
expanse of shirt-front in which the Prince seems to delight, and the fat
boy would go to sleep again. But this would only happen at certain
performances. There were times when the Prince had eyes and ears open
and attentive, even in the opera house. His tastes in general, however,
are not for high art in music or the drama. He is very fond of the
little theatres where the vivacious blondes display their unconcealed
attractions. There are, as everybody knows, several minor theatres in
London where the audience, or, I should say more properly, the
spectators, will be found to consist chiefly of men, while, on the other
hand, the performers are chiefly women. These are the temples of the leg
drama. "_Piece aux jambes? Piece aux cuisses!_" indignantly exclaims
Eugene Pelletan, denouncing such performances in his "Nouvelle
Babylone"; and he goes on to add some cumulative illustrations which I
omit. Well, the Prince of Wales loves the _piece aux jambes_, and the
theatres where it flourishes. He constantly visits theatres at which his
wife and sisters are never seen, and in which it would be idle to deny
that there are actresses who have made themselves conspicuous objects of
popular scandal.
Now, I am far from saying that this necessarily implies anything worse
than a low taste on the part of the Prince of Wales. But there are
stations in life which render private bad taste a public sin. In London,
of late, there has been a just outcry against a certain kind of
theatrical performance. It is held to be demoralizing and degrading that
the stage should be made simply a show-place for the exhibition of
half-naked women, for the audacious display of legs and bosoms. Now, I
beg to say for myself that I have entire faith in the dramatic as in
every other art; that I believe it always when truthfully pursued
vindicates itself, and that I think any costume which the true and
legitimate needs of the drama require is fitting, proper, and modest. I
regard the ballet, in its place, as a graceful and delightful
entertainment; and I do not believe that any healthy and pure mind ought
to be offended by the kind of costume which the dance requires. But
artists and moralists in London alike objected, and justly objected, to
performances the whole purpose, and business, and attraction of which
was the exhibition of a crowd of girls as nearly naked as they could
venture to show themselves in public.
Now this was undoubtedly the kind of exhibition which the Prince of
Wales especially favored and patronized. Night after night, even during
the long and lamentable illness of his young wife, he visited such
theatres, and gazed upon "those prodigies of myriad nakednesses."
Likewise did he much delight in the performances of Schneider--that high
priestess of the obscene, rich with the spoils of princes. I say
emphatically that there were actions, gestures, _bouffonneries_
performed amid peals of laughter and thunders of applause by this fat
Faustina in the St. James's Theatre, London, which were only fit to have
gladdened the revels of Sodom and Gomorrah. And this woman was,
artistically at least, the prime favorite of the Prince of Wales; and
when his brother, the Duke of Edinburgh, reached England for the first
time after his escape from the Fenian bullet in Sydney, the _par nobile
fratrum_ celebrated the auspicious event by hastening to the theatre
where Schneider kicked and wriggled and helped out the point of
lascivious songs by a running accompaniment of obscene gestures.
So much at least has to be said against the Prince of Wales, and cannot
be gainsaid. All that he could do by countenance and patronage to
encourage a debauching and degrading style of theatric entertainment, he
has done. He is said to be fond of the singing of the vulgar and low
buffoons of the music-halls, and to have had such persons brought
specially to his residence, Marlborough House, to sing for him. I have
been assured of this often by persons who professed to know; but I do
not know anything of it myself, nor is it indeed a matter of any
importance. The other facts are known to everybody who reads the London
papers. The manager or manageress of a theatre takes good care to
announce in the journals when a visit from the Prince of Wales has taken
place, and we all thus come to know how many times a week the little
theatric temples of nakedness have been honored by his presence.
Am I attaching too much importance to such matters as this? I think not.
The social influence and moral example of a royal personage in England
are now almost the only agencies by which the royal personage can affect
us for good or evil. I hold that no man thoughtful or prudent enough, no
matter what his morals, to be fit to occupy the position assigned to the
Prince of Wales, would be guilty of lending his public and constant
patronage to such exhibitions and amusements as those which he
especially patronizes. Moreover, the Prince has often shown a disregard,
either cynical or stupid--probably the latter--for public opinion, a
heedlessness of public scandal, in other matters as well. He has made
companionship for himself among young noblemen conspicuous for their
debauchery. At a time, not very long ago, when the Divorce Court was
occupied with the hearing of a scandalous cause, in which a certain
young duke figured most prominently and disgracefully, this young duke
was daily and nightly to be seen the close companion of the Prince of
Wales.
Let me touch upon another subject, of a somewhat delicate nature. I have
said that there were times when our Prince was always wide awake at the
opera house. There is a certain brilliant and capricious little singer
whom all England and Germany much admire, and who in certain operatic
parts has, I think, no rival. Now, public scandal said that the Prince
of Wales greatly admired this lady, and paid her the most marked
attentions. Public scandal, indeed, said a great deal more. I hasten to
record my conviction that, so far as the fair artiste was concerned, the
scandal was wholly unfounded, and that she is a woman of pure character
and honor. But the Prince was credited with a special admiration for
her; and I am sure the Prince's father under such circumstances would
have taken good care to lend no foundation, afford no excuse, for
scandal to rest upon. Now, I speak of what I have myself observed when I
say that the Prince of Wales, whenever he had an opportunity, always
demeaned himself as if he really desired to give the public good reason
for believing the scandal, or as if he was too far gone in infatuation
to be able to govern his actions. For he was always at the opera when
this lady sang; and he always conducted himself as if he wished to
blazon to the world his ostentatious and demonstrative admiration. When
the prima donna went off the stage, the Prince disappeared from his box;
when she came on the stage again, he returned to his seat; he lingered
behind all his party at the end, that he might give the last note of
applause to the disappearing singer; he made a more pertinacious show of
his enthusiasm than even the military admirer of Miss Snevellicci was
accustomed to do. Now, all this may have been only stolidity or
silliness, and may not have denoted anything like cynicism or coarse
disdain of public opinion; but whatever it indicated, it certainly did
not, I think, testify to the existence of qualities likely to be found
admirable or desirable in the heir to a throne.
Of the truth or falsehood of the private scandals in general circulation
concerning the Prince of Wales I know nothing whatever. But everybody in
England is aware that such stories are told, and can name and point out
this or that titled lady as the heroine of each particular story. It
need hardly be said that when a man acquires the sort of reputation
which attaches to the Prince of Wales, nothing could be more unjust or
unreasonable than to accept, without some very strong ground of belief,
any story which couples his name with that of any woman belonging to the
society in which he moves. Obviously, it would be enough, in the eyes of
an English crowd, that the Prince should now pay any friendly attention
to any handsome duchess or countess in order to convert her into an
object of scandal. I am myself morally convinced that some of the titled
ladies who are broadly and persistently set down by British gossip as
mistresses of the Prince of Wales are as innocent of such a charge as if
they had never been within a thousand miles of a court. But the Prince
is a little unlucky wherever he goes, for scandal appears to pursue him
as Horace's black care follows the horseman. When the Prince of Wales
happens to be in Paris, he seems to be surrounded at once by the same
atmosphere of suspicion and evil report. Some two years ago I chanced to
be in Paris at the time the Prince was there, and I can answer for it
that observers who had never heard or read of the common gossip of
London formed the same impression of his general character that the
public of London had already adopted. The Prince was then paying special
attention to a brilliant and beautiful lady moving in the court circles
of the French capital, a lady who had but very recently distinguished
herself by appearing at one of the fancy balls of the Tuileries in the
character of the Archangel Michael or Raphael--it does not much matter
which--and attired in a costume which left the company no possibility of
doubting the symmetry of her limbs and the general shapeliness of her
person. Malicious satirists circulated thereupon an announcement that
the lady was to appear at the next fancy ball as "La Source," the
beautiful naked nymph so exquisitely painted by Ingres. This lady
received the special attentions of the Prince of Wales. He followed her,
people said, like her shadow; and a smart pun was soon in circulation,
which I refrain from giving because it contrives ingeniously to blend
with his name the name of the lady in question, and I am not writing a
scandalous chronicle. This was the time when the Prince made his royal
mother so very angry by attending the Chantilly races on a Sunday. When
he came back to London he had to take part in some public ceremonial--I
forget now what it was--at which the Queen had consented to be present.
Her Majesty was present, and I have been assured by a friend who stood
quite near that a sort of little scene was enacted which much
embarrassed those who had to take part in the official pageantry of the
occasion. Up came the Prince, who had travelled in hot haste from Paris,
and with a somewhat abashed and sheepish air approached his royal
mother. She looked at him angrily, and turned away. The Duke of
Cambridge, her cousin, made an awkward effort to mend matters by
bringing up the Prince again, and with the action of a friendly and
deprecating intercessor presenting the delinquent. This time, I am
assured, the Queen, with determined and angry gestures, and some words
spoken in a low tone, repelled intercessor and offender at once; and the
Prince of Wales retired before the threatened storm. The Duke of
Edinburgh, who had been lingering a little in the background--he, too,
had just come from Paris, and he had been to Chantilly--anxious to see
what kind of reception would be accorded to his brother, thought,
apparently, that he had seen enough to warrant him in keeping himself at
a modest distance on that occasion, and not encountering the terrors of
what Thackeray, in "The Rose and the Ring," describes as "the royal
eye."
I have little doubt that Queen Victoria is a somewhat rigorous and
exacting mother, and I should be far from accepting her frown as
decisive with regard to the delinquencies of one of her sons.
Cigar-smoking alone would probably be accounted by the Queen a sin
hardly allowing of pardon. Her husband, Prince Albert, was a man so pure
of life, so free from nearly all the positive errors of manhood, so
remarkably endowed with at least all the negative virtues, that his
companionship might easily have spoiled her for the toleration of
natures less calm and orderly. I suspect that the Queen is one of that
class of thoroughly good women who, from mere lack of wide sympathies
and genial toleration, are not qualified to deal to the best advantage
with children who show a little inclination for irregularity and
self-indulgence. Nor do I believe that the Prince of Wales is the wicked
and brutal profligate that common libel makes him out. The shocking
story which one sees so often alluded to in the London correspondence of
certain American papers, and which attributes the long illness of the
Princess of Wales to the misconduct of her husband, I believe to be
utterly unfounded and unjustifiable. One of the London medical journals,
the "Lancet" I think it was, had the courage to refer directly to this
monstrous statement, and to give it an emphatic and authoritative
refutation. If the worst things said of the Prince of Wales with any
appearance of foundation were true, it is certain that he would still
not be any worse than many other European princes and sovereigns. I have
never heard anything said of the Prince of Wales half so bad as the
stories which are believed everywhere in Paris of the enormous
profligacies of Prince Napoleon; and it would be hardly possible for
charity itself to doubt that up to a very recent period the private life
of the Emperor of the French himself was stained with frequent and
reckless dissipation. Those who were in Vienna anywhere about the autumn
of 1866, will remember the stories which were told about the fatal
results of the exalted military command given by the imperial will to
certain favored generals, and the kind of influence by which those
generals had acquired imperial favor. Common report certainly describes
the Empress of Austria as being no happier in her domestic relations
than the Princess of Wales. Everybody knows what Victor Emanuel's
private character is, and what sort of hopeful youth is his eldest son,
Umberto. Therefore, the Prince of Wales could doubtless plead that he is
no worse than his neighbors; and even in his own family he might point
to other members no better than himself. The Duke of Cambridge, for
instance, has often been accused of profligacy and profligate
favoritism. I wish I could venture to repeat here, for the sake of the
genuine wit and keen satire of it, a certain epigram in Latin, composed
by an English military officer, to describe the influence which brought
about the sudden and remarkable promotion of another officer who was not
believed to be personally quite deserving of the rank conferred on him
by the Duke of Cambridge, commander-in-chief of the British army. But
the position of the Prince of Wales is very different from that of the
Duke of Cambridge, and he has to face a public opinion quite unlike that
which surrounds Prince Napoleon or the Emperor of the French. People in
France are not inclined to make any very serious complaint about the
amours of a prince, or even of an emperor. I do not venture to say that
there is much more of actual immorality in Paris than in London; but,
assuredly, a man may, without harm to his public and political
influence, acknowledge an amount of immorality in Paris which would be
utterly fatal to his credit and reputation in London. Moreover, some of
the illustrious profligates I have mentioned are distinguished by other
qualities as well as profligacy; but I cannot say that I have ever heard
any positively good quality, either of heart or intellect, ascribed to
the Prince of Wales.
Unless his face, his head, his manners in public, and the tastes he so
conspicuously manifests wholly belie him, the heir to the British throne
is a remarkably dull young man. He cannot even deliver with any decent
imitation of intelligence the little speeches which Arthur Helps or
somebody else usually gets up for him when the exigencies of the
situation compel the Prince to make a speech in public. He is reputed to
be parsimonious even in his pleasures, and has managed to get himself
deeply into debt without being supposed to have wasted any of his
substance in obedience to a generous impulse. The Prince inherited a
splendid property. His prudent father had looked well after the revenues
of the duchy of Cornwall, which is the appanage of the Prince of Wales
(even in some very dingy parts of London you may if you hire a house
find that you have the Prince of Wales for a landlord), and the property
of the heir must have been raised to its very highest value. Yet it is
notorious that a very few years after he had attained his majority,
Albert Edward had contrived to get deeply immersed in debt. There was
for some time a scheme in contemplation to apply to Parliament for an
addition to the huge allowance made to the Prince of Wales; and the
"Times" and other newspapers were always urging the fact that the Queen
left the Prince to perform nearly all her social duties for her, as a
reason why the nation ought to award him an augmented income. It puzzles
people in London, who read the papers and who study, as most Britons do,
the occupations and pastimes of royalty, to know where the lavish and
regal hospitalities take place which the Prince of Wales is supposed to
dispense on behalf of his mother. However, the project for appealing to
the generosity of Parliament seems to have been put aside or to have
fallen through--I have read somewhere that the Queen herself has agreed
to increase her son's allowance out of her own ample and well-hoarded
purse--and the English public are not likely to be treated to any
Parliamentary debate on the subject just yet. But this much is certain,
that the same almost universal rumor which attributes coarse and
dissipated habits to the Prince of Wales attributes to him likewise a
mean and stingy parsimony where aught save his own pleasure is
concerned; and even there, if by any possibility the pleasure can be
obtained without superfluous cost.
This then is the character which the son of the Queen of England bears,
in the estimation of the vast majority of his mother's subjects. Almost
any and every one you meet in London will tell you, as something beyond
doubt, that the Prince of Wales is dull, stingy, coarse, and profligate.
As for the anecdotes which are told of his habits and tastes by the
artists and officials of the theatres which he frequents, I might fairly
leave them out of the question, because most of them that I have heard
seem to me obvious improbabilities and exaggerations. They have
nevertheless a certain value in helping us to a sort of historical
estimate of the Prince's character. Half the stories told of the humors
and debaucheries of Sheridan and Fox are doubtless inventions or
exaggerations; but we are quite safe in assuming that the persons of
whom such stories abound were not frugal, temperate, and orderly men. If
the Prince of Wales is not a young man of dissipated habits, then a
phenomenon is exhibited in his case which is, I fancy, without any
parallel in history--the phenomenon of a whole watchful nation,
studying the character and habits of one whose position compels him to
live as in a house of glass, and coming, after years of observation, to
a conclusion at once unanimous and erroneous. But were it proved beyond
the remotest possibility of doubt that the Prince is personally chaste
as a Joseph, temperate as Father Mathew, tender to his wife as the elder
Hamlet, attached to his mother as Hamlet the younger, it would still
remain a fact indisputable to all of us in London, who have eyes to see
and ears to hear, that the Prince is addicted to vulgar amusements; that
he patronizes indecent exhibitions; that he is given to the
companionship of profligate men, and lends his helping hand to the
success and the popularity of immoral and lascivious women.