His method, then, is ironic. pears to say, or whether he And the irony of his 'Queen is laughing at himself and Victoria' is far subtler and less malicious than was the irony of a previous book. Mr Strachey's Eminent Victorians was a collection of superficial exercises. He did not know enough about his subjects to justify him in being witty or malicious at their expense. In each case he fastened upon some vice or foible, wholly useless for the understanding of this character or that, and plagues you with its repetition. In 'Queen Victoria' he has (we believe) kept his irony within limits, and has produced a portrait, charged with caricature, it is true, and yet fruitful. We say that "we believe" his irony is kept within limits, because danger is inherent in the use of irony. When irony is consistent without lapse or faltering, as it is in certain works of Swift and Fielding, it is the best of literary artifices. In Jonathan Wild,' as in 'A Tale of a Tub,' there should be no chance of doubt or misunderstanding. The personages of these histories move and have their whole being in an atmosphere of irony. In Mr Strachey's Queen Victoria' the irony is, we suppose, intermittent, like flashes of lightning in a grave and serious sky. The flashes dazzle your eyes suddenly, and without preparation. And they leave you in a state of uncertainty. You ask yourself as you read whether Mr Strachey means what he ap you. When he tells you that, the voice of panegyric. We have said that he has detached Victoria from her environment. He has also exaggerated her manifest simplicities, until now and again she appears a little ridiculous. And here again he makes for misunderstanding. Simplicity is very often the reaction from high responsibility, and Mrs P. Farquharson's red-flannel petticoat is perhaps too heavily insisted upon. But in contemplating the Queen as in contemplating Prince Albert, Mr Strachey changed his vision. He saw her now and again in the light of romance. He described her, as he should, in terms of the picturesque. She comes before his eyes, as long ago she came before the eyes of her people, a kind of fetish. And as she lay on her deathbed, blind and silent, seeming to those about divested of all thought, she had thoughts too, says Mr Strachey in a final passage of eloquence. "Perhaps her fading mind," says he, "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 historypassing 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 stay at Balmoral, and Albert in his blue and silver uniform, and the Baron coming in through 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 of Kensington." A just conclusion to a sketch, if not of a great Queen, as it might have been, of a living breathing woman. MUSINGS WITHOUT METHOD: January, Negro's paradise, the, 701. SAVOYARD COMMUNITY, A, 112. STUDY IN GREEN, A, 88, 273, 812. Northumberland, speech of the Duke TALES OF THE MA'ADAN, 705. of, 831 et seq. ON HAZARDOUS SERVICE, 54, 213, 378, ON JUNGLE TRAILS IN CEYLON, 510. Pater, Walter, and the Army, 405. PEPYS, MRS SAMUEL AS BEFITS MY Psychoanalysis, 132 et seq. QUEEN OF TRAGEDY, A, 245. Rachel, 245. RAISULI, 28, 172. REGIMENTAL DURBAR, THE, 617. SAGA OF A SHIP, THE, 628. Printed by William Blackwood and Sons. भई |