In Paris, where we went first, Royalty has no problems. Being for ever dispossessed of its claims in France, it is accepted there without awe and without enmity. It flees to Paris from the dulness of its official life in every monarchy of Europe; and at times it seems that more royalties are there than in all the other capitals of the Continent together. Paris has become a holiday rendezvous for them; and it needs them as little as it does its tourists. They can meet and dine and gossip, unobserved even by the Press. They can find circles of aristocracy in which they will be received as formally as they would be in their Courts. Or they may enjoy, if they can, on terms of some human naturalness, the life of salons and studios. And if they desire the crowded solitude of the streets, they will rarely find any one to stare. Paris is freedom, even for princesses. It was, for me, on that first return, an old home of childhood that I was revisiting; and I went to the convent to see the nuns who had taught me, and hunted up some of my playmates to recall myself to them after the nine years that seemed a lifetime that had passed. Then, in a week, we set out for England; and there we were Royalty again.
It was then I first saw Queen Victoria, and I shall not easily describe what a surprise it was. She had been for a long time the great Queen in my thoughts, on the throne of an empire beyond imagination in
Dowager Queen Alexandra of England, Queen Maud of Norway and Prince Olaf, Crown Prince of Norway
wealth and power, and ruling so many millions of the most civilised people devoted in their loyalty. I had formed a mental picture of I do not know what majesty and grandeur for her. We came to her from the City of London (so impressive after Paris) to have luncheon with her in Windsor Castle, that is so noble a seat of sovereignty; and when I entered the room in which she waited to receive us, I had a shock of pity and dismay. She was so small that I thought at first she must be sitting down. And she was not only feeble with age, but evidently ill, her eyes dulled, her hands swollen, her face as if feverish. Her merely human aspect of infirmity was increased by the black dress of mourning and widow’s cap that she wore; and standing with her two Indian servants behind her, leaning on her short cane, in that magnificent apartment that would have dwarfed a giant, holding out a tired hand to you vaguely as if she did not clearly see you—it brought a lump to the throat. Here was Royalty then! The greatest and most famous of us all! Queen Victoria!
My father-in-law and she had known each other many years, and at the luncheon table he sat beside her and kept up a conversation with her. She said very little, and with her eyes most often on her plate, like a person who is polite, but distracted by illness, and incapable of rousing the mind. The English Royal Family has the sensible habit of dining without the ladies-in-waiting, who take their meals in another room; so we were en famille; and the conversation was that of intimate domestic interests and the little social happenings of the day. One could hardly find a family more charming, more serene, more simply happy.
And the explanation of this air of the English Court is easily found. England is a country of accepted classes, of which each class makes no infringement on the rights of the class above it and fears none from the class below. There are even upper and lower servants in a household. And each class receives servility from the class below it to reimburse it for the servility that it pays to the class above. Royalty is just a final upper class, neither envied by an aristocracy which cannot aspire to it, nor feared by the lower classes over which it has no authority. It is a social ornament of government, a symbol of national majesty.
The aristocracy is almost equally ornamental, with certain appearances of power that are allowed it by the sufferance of the rest. The real government is the commerce and industry of the nation. It is a commercial empire, ruled by considerations of trade, but disguising itself, even to itself, by forms of administration that are aristocratic, with an established church in a nation largely nonconformist, a military power that in the main engages in wars for the extension or protection of commercial interests, and an ideal of empire for humanitarian ends—at the same time making it pay. You will always hear, for example, of the devoted self-sacrifice of the British rule in India, which carries the peaceful blessings of civilisation to natives incapable of self-government; but if India were being held at a continual loss to the British tax-payer—if he had to pay out of his own purse, without return, to protect the natives from their own incapacity—I wonder whether the British Empire in India would last a year. It is this faculty of almost honest self-deception which makes the Englishman so insoluble a puzzle to the foreigner.