BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXX, Issue 14977, 24 April 1909, Page 12

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

QUEEN VICTORIA'S DIARIES. A REMARKABLE COLLECTION. Lecturing at the Royal Institution in London last month, Lord Esher spoke of the remarkable diary kept by Queen Victoria through her long life. Lord Esher, who is- Keeper of the Royal papers, had the King's permission to quote from the volumes—there are 100 of them in existence—and the interest attaching to his lecture is shown by the fact that the "Times" devoted eis columns to its report. " On the day, May 24, 1832, that the little Princess' Victoria .was thirteen years old, her life, as described by herself, began," said Lord Esher. "As described by herself, because on that day her mother gave the child a small octavo volume, half-bound in red morocco, with the words ' Princess Victoria ' stamped on the side. The first entry ig as follows: " ' This book mama gave me that I might write the journal of my journey to Wales in it.—Victoria.' "Prom this timo forward, in volumes which, as years rolled on, vary much in shape, but were uniform in so far as the pages were invariably plain and unruled, the Princess and Queen wrote the account of every day until within a few days of her death. " Of the Queen's journals there are altogether over 100 volumes all closely written in her small running-hand. The last entry is dictated and dated January 12, and the Queen died on January 22, 1901. When Louis XIII. of France was born, the medical attendant of Queen Maria of Medici began to keep a journal in which he day by day recorded, until the hour of the King's death his master's life. Tliat journal, the most minute I know of, is a poor and meagre record compared with the journals of Queen Victoria. "Perhaps it is well here to mention that these journals will never be seen hereafter in their entirety. By Queen Victoria's express wish they have been carefully examined by her youngest daughter, who, with infinite labour, has copied in her own hand many volumes, although excising passages which the Queen desired should not be seen by any eye but hers. Still, when this pious work is complete the story of a Royal and noble life will be without any parallel. All the earlier journals, certainly up to the date of the Queen's marriage—and during that year she began her twenty-fourth volume—are untouched, and remain in her own handwriting. .... ~. Imagine the small, fair child, fatherless and companioidess, escept for her devoted mother, and her faithful Lchzen—as she always called the lady who> watched ovvir her youth—sitting at the window of a rather plain room in Kensington Palace on those Juno days ft 1532. The echoes of the. great Reform controvertv raging out of doors iailcd to penetrate those quiet precincts as she wrote her first entries in those journals. ' " For live years this daily record continues, and we have a simple and extraordinarily graphic picture of a young girl whose high destiny was but halrrovealed. here enjoying the theatre, fine niusio with passion, galloping about ou her pony, reading history with the Dean of Chester, washing her pet dog, and making short abstracts of the sermon on Sunday. Then, suddenly, this voung girl was wakened out of sleep, and found an archbishop kneeling at her slippered feet acclaiming her Queen. , , „ „,. " She plaved with her dolls There were hundreds of them—small dolls, moat of which ehe dressed herself, and ticketed with well-known names of illustrious persons whom she had seen dining at Kensington Palace, or whom sho had watched from the Duchess of Kent's box at the opera. All these dolls are carefully preserved, and are alive to this day, numbered and catalogued in the young Princess's chuuhand. Then suddenly she was Queen. With her accession her life completely changed. To comparative isolation and greyness succeeded a period of high tension and keen enjoyment. Roso, not grey, became the prevailing colour. Her mind expanded at the touch of this wonderful spring-time. A secluded maiden, whose only draught at the fountain of life had been an evening at the theatre, was suddenly translated from the schoolroom to the most exciting spheres of politics and of regal state. " Her companions were thenceforth Ministers of State—her Ministers. She no longer drfcseed dolls, but presided at Councils. She, who had never walked down the staircase at Kensington Palace unless held by the hand like a little child, rode twenty miles of a morning at the head of a cavalcade of courtiers. She, who had spent her mornings with the excellent Dean of Chester reading geography, now spent her afternoons with Prime Ministers, discussing the affairs of Europe. "There are in the archives at Windsor, of which I havo charge, 1050 volumes of papers, the correspondence of Queen Victoria, bound in large folio volumes, and there will be another 200 volumes to be added when the arrangement of these papers is complete. Through them all, from the earliest letters to and from Lord Melbourne, some of which have been included in the book published last year, to the last letters to and from Lord Salisbury, run the sentiment and convictions I have described. The Queen, with unconscious heroism, not only was always herself, but thoroughly" believed in herself as Sovereign of these realms. Passages in her journal 6how how thorough- i ly as a youn« girl,.almost a child, she 'took herself seriously,' to use her own phrase, and her point of view never changed as time rolled on." Lord Esher went on to speak of the correspondence between the Queen and her Prime Ministers, and before he concluded he paid two notable tributes L o her Majesty's political work. In ->ne he spoko of her love of peace, and in tho other of her wisdom.

" A point well worth noting," he said, "is that tho most careful scrutiny of the published and unpublished letters shows beyond dispute that the influence of tho Crown was uniformly asserted in the interests of peace, and against action which might lead to war. Although no one could show rarer determination when once the die was cast, and moro firmness to reap the fruit of national sacrifices than the Queen, there is no instance in tho whole of. tho reign where she can be 'own to havo favoured war 5> or encouraged those who were anxious for it."

" I have had exceptional opportunities.," Lord Esher said later " of examining at first hand the inner history of a reign extending over sixty years, 1 during which every document was preserved, even the least important of telegrams. It has been my duty to arrango this vast mas 3 of political papers with as much care S 8 I could devote to tho task, and 1 i.an 'a:.sert with the fullest conviction that I have I found no trace of any grave mistake 1 committed by the Queen in her capacity of Sovereign." MR AND, MRS~ROOSEVELT SKETCHED. In her new novel, "Marriage a la Mode," Mrs Humphry Ward, continuing the method of contemporaneous portraiture, which stood her in good stead in "Tho Marriage of William Ashe," describes a recoption at the White House. " Washington." at this time of the world's history, she says, "was the scone of one of those episodes—those j brisker moments-in the human comedy I—which every now and then revive

among us an almost forgotten belief Hi personality an almost forgotten rcspec. for the mysteries behind it. The guest::; streaming through the White House defiled past a man who, in a level and docketed world, appeared to his generation as the reincarnation of forces primitive, over-mastering and heroic. An honest Odysseus I—toil-worn and storm-beaten, yet still with the spirit and strength, the many devices, of a boy; capable, like his prototype, in one short day, of crushing his enemies, upholding his friends, purifying his house; and then, with the heat of righteous battle still upon him. with its gore, so to speak, still upon his hands, of turning his mind, without a pause and without hypocrisy, to things intimate and soft and pure—tho domestic sweetness of Penelope, the young promise of Telemacluis. The President stood, a rugged figure, amid the cosmopolitan crowd, breasting the modern world like some ocean headland, yet not truly of it, one of the groat fighters and workers of mankind, with a laugh that pealed above the noise, blue eyes that seemed to pursue some converse of their own, and a hand that grasped and cheered, where other hands withdrew and repelled. This one man s will had now, for some years, made the pivot on which vast issues turned—issues of peace and war, of policy embracing the civilised.world; and hero one saw him in drawing-rooms, discussing Alaric's campaigns with an Oxford professor or chatting with a young mother about her children. "Beside him the human waves, as they met and parted, disclosed a woman's faco, modelled by nature in one of her lightest and deftest moods, a trifle detached, humorous also, as though the world's strange sights stirred a gentle and kindly mirth behind its sweet composure. The dignity of tho President's wife was complete, yet it had not extinguished the personality it clothed; and where Royalty, as the European knows it, would havo donned its mask find stood on its defence, Republican Royalty dared to be its amused, confiding, natural self." And then Mrs Ward goes on to describe " this tall, black-haired man with the method of meditation, and the equal, social or intellectual, of any foreign minister that Europe might pit against him, or any diplomat that might be sent to handle him." She declares that America need make no excuses whatever for her best men. that she has evolved the leaders she wants, and Europe has nothing to teach them. MR HARDY'S PESSIMISM. A writer in the "Academy" has a word to say concerning '' the bleat of the Cotswold lions to the offect that Mr Thomas Hardy is a cynic and a misanthrope and a pessimist." " For an author to bo a pessimist," he says, "it is not enough that he should deal with the darker side of life: he must show that his own personal feeling is inclined in that direction, and there is a detachment about Mr Hardy's work which does not warrant such a conclusion. "In Mr William Archer's 'Real Conversatiops.' we find Mr Hardy expresses himself clearly on the point:— ' I believe,' ho says, ' that a good deal of tho robustious, swaggering optimism of recent literature is at bottom cowardly and insincere. . . . My pessimism, if pessimism it be, does not involve the assumption that the world is going to the dogs, and that Ahriman is winning all along the line. On the contrary, my practical philosophy is distinctly meliorist.' It is too often forgotten that he has given us some idylls, such as ' Under tile Greenwood Tree,' wherein scarcely any sorrow enters, and that the happy ending is by no moans unknown in his books. . "We are free to admit, on the other hand, that in the depiction of tho sombre configurations of life, its predicaments, its tangled threads, its spoiled patterns, lies Mr Hardy's strength; and often if it were not for the humour and the play of fancy which intersperse his gloomier scenes, the Heartbreak ol it aIT would be well-night intolerable. " Then Mr Hardy has another power which ho shares with few—the faculty of calling into his service things insensate, outside the sphere of humanity, and investing them with a strange and prodigious significance: trees and clouds, rain and sunshine, night and mornins, are deflected from their normal course and informed with a mood. a meaning, that urges his characters on or works in subtle connection with them at critical points in their careens a Tho method is the antithesis of Ruskin's efflorescent language; it has none of the tenderness of Richard Jetferies' earthward'pen ; yet how it sets the stage for the actors 1 No one who has once read 'The Return of the Native' can fail to remember how wonderfully the whole narrative is haunted bv the melancholy expanse of Egdon Heath."

MR HENRY JAMES'S METHOD. Mr Henry James is not nowadays a "popular" novelist. The reader requires a good deal of patience to contend with tho intricacies of his later

.■iylo. But his earlier work was unquestionably charrnmg, and it is doubtless on the strength of his earlier work that Mr Max Beerbohm grows enthusiastic in the "Saturday Review."

" When I think of Mr James's books," writes Max," " and try to Evaluate the imense delight I have had in that immense array of volumes, it seems to me that in my' glow of gratitude the thing I am most of all grateful for is not the quality of the work itself, but the quality of the man revealed through that work. Greater than all my {esthetic delight in the books is my moral regard for the author.

" I am sorry for anyone who, having read oven but ono or two of Mr James's earlier short stories, could find no other epitftet to affix. And you need search heart and brain for epithets to describe the later James—the James who has patiently evolved a method of fiction entirely new, entirely his own, a method that will probably perish with him, since none but he, one thinks, could handle it; that amazing method by which, a novel competes not with other novels, but with life itself; making people known to us as we grow to know thorn in real life, by hints, by glimpses, here a little and there a little, leaving us always guessing and wondering, till, in the fulness of timo, all these seraph of revelation gradually resolve themselves into one large and luminous whole, just as in real life. . " I know no fictionist so evidently steeped as he is in the passion for literature as a fine art—none who has taken for his theme writers and writing so often, and with such insight. " Mr James does not deal with raw humanity, primitive emotions and so on. Civilisation, and a high state of it at that, is 1.10 indispensable milieu for him; and just when the primitive emotions surge up in the complex bosoms of his c itures, to cause an explosion, Mr Ji. .nes escapes with us under his wing, and does not lead us back until the crisis is over—until the results, the to nim so much more interesting results, may bo quietly examined." SUPREME COURT PRACTICE. The authoritative work on the practice of the Supremo Court and the Appeal Court in New Zealand is the treatise by Sir Robert Stout and Mr Justice Sjm, first issued in 1892. A second edition was issued in 1902. The recent consolidation of the Acts and Rules relating to the Supreme Court has rendered the second edition out of date in somo important respects, and a third edition, carefully supervised by Mr Justice Sim, has now been published. (Christchurcb: ! Whitecombe and Tombs, Limited. 305.) The new rules came into force on April 1, and tho flections of the work dealing with exparte and consent motions, the undertaking as to damages to be embodied in certain orders, probate and administration generally, and the form and writing of all documents to be filed in the Supreme Court Office, have been re-written. There should be no need to dwell on the general merits of the work. It is indispensable to every practitioner and it may be regarded, of course, as absolutely authoritative.