teachers, there are no books nor slates nor pencils; discipline is wholly lacking; and the poor children are irregular in attendance, because they are hungry, and have no boots wherewith to cover their feet. What sort of a generation will grow up that is thus starved, frozen, and neglected? The results of the work accomplished by Lenin and Trotsky are thus made clear to us, and clear as they are, they appear to inspire our Labour leaders with admiration and envy. We do not suppose that the working men of England desire to die in the streets with their wives and children for the mere want of food. But every time they applaud the new administration of Russia, every time they listen to the vile propaganda sent over here by Lenin, every time they talk glibly of general strikes and revolutions, they are attempting to ensure for themselves all the misery and distress depicted in the white book. If they are agreed upon the ruin of England, they may be able to achieve it, though not beyond repair. But in ruining England, they will most certainly ruin themselves, and be lost in the débris as though they had never existed. When Queen Victoria read the Grenville Memoirs,' she was appalled. She condemned the book as "dreadful and really scandalous." She was "horrified and indignant" at Grenville's "indiscretion, indelicacy, ingratitude towards friends, betrayal of confidence, and shameful disloyalty towards his sovereign." Mr Lytton Strachey, who has just published his Queen Victoria' (London: Chatto & Windus), fears that she would have characterised more modern essays on the same topic as "indiscreet." The epithet could not be applied with justice to Mr Strachey's sketch of the Queen. He betrays no secrets, for he seems to have none in his keeping. He depends faithfully upon wellknown letters and memoirs, very largely upon the familiar words of Charles Grenville him. self. If he be indiscreet, it is in the selection of his facts, in the method of his biography. He is not deeply concerned with what is commonly known as history. Indications that Victoria was a queen at all are not frequent in his book. He seems purposely to ignore the larger "events" in her reign. She is set by him against no background of material or political splendour. He chooses for his purpose the familiar gossip which he thinks will best explain her character to those who knew her not. And he has succeeded in presenting us with a portrait, in which the elements of truth are compounded with a kind of ironic humour. At least he has the merit of not writing upon bended knees. For him biography is something more than an act of homage. 66 you. When he tells you that, as Prince Albert "decided that the Gainsboroughs must be hung higher up so that the Winterhalters might be properly seen," Victoria "felt perfectly certain that no other wife ever had such a husband," you know that the ironist is at work. But you are constantly asking yourself whether the author does not after all mean what he says, and you perceive easily the pitfall that is irony. All or none is a safe rule for the ironist, and on many a page Mr Strachey is betrayed to irony's antithesis plain and genuine eulogy. 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 For instance, his sketch of Lord Melbourne is a little masterpiece, wise and sympathetic. He indicates the great man's last days with a touching brevity. He shows you that he appreciates his greatness and deplores his eclipse. And yet, and yet, you find yourself searching beneath the surface for the irony that may lurk there, and resenting a little a perplexity thrust upon you by the author. However, as Mr Strachey approaches nearer to his chief personages, he seems to grow in admiration. There is a visible conflict in his mind between appreciation and depreciation. It is as though he came to scoff and remained to pray. His character of Prince Albert mellows as it goes on, and when the Prince dies, Mr Strachey, in his own despite, can hardly still 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 66 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 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. INDEX TO VOL. CCIX. AS BEFITS MY POSITION. By Mrs BASHFORD, Major LINDSAY: IN THE BERNARD, J. H., Provost of Trinity, Bolshevism, the triumphs of, 838. Brazil, history and romance of, 695. BUSSEY, GILBERT: FROM THE CONGO BUTLER, Lieut.-Colonel P. R.: GRIEF BY DAY WITH THE PEKING DRAG, A, 804. CEYLON, ON JUNGLE TRAILS IN, 510. DANCING, THE LITTLE ROCK of the, 1. EXPERIENCES OF AN OFFICER'S WIFE IN 593. Freud, Herr, the writings of, 133. THE MARKSMAN, 118. LAMB, MERVYN: ON HAZARDOUS SER- LUCAS, ST JOHN: VAGABOND IMPRES- MA'ADAN, TALES OF THE, 705. MARKSMAN, THE, 118. Monroe Doctrine, the worn-out, 544 et |