THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, June 19, 1937. A VICTORIAN RETROSPECT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23221, 19 June 1937, Page 12

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, June 19, 1937. A VICTORIAN RETROSPECT

One hundred years have passed since a youthful princess came to the Throne of England, with a simple, forthright promise on her lips: “ I will be good.” If was on June 20, 1837, that Queen Victoria acknowledged the oath of fealty of the Lords, and set her hand, with a resolution that never weakened, to the duties of sovereignty. In a century’s remorseless progression England has learned many lessons, some bitter, but others making for the enlightenment of mankind; and it is impossible to think of any historically significant occasion in the larger part of that span of years in which the figure of the Queen was not imprinted on her people’s consciousness. Not that she was a saint, nor hallowed as one. There is, in the newspaper files touching on the Queen’s accession, a salutary reminder, for those whose memory takes them to the adulatory days of the Diamond Jubilee, that the Monarchy in England was an institution held in small esteem when Victoria accepted the Crown. The Spectator’s files reveal a contemptuous tolerance for the spectacle of the Coronation. The Times could find only an “ inoffensive nature” to commend her predecessor. Sir Sidney Lee may have exaggerated the sentiment of the people, but not its tenor, when he declared of those who preceded her that “ one was long an imbecile, the second won the reputation of a profligate, and the third was regarded as little better than a buffoon.”

So it was inauspiciously, in a nation ill-pleased with kingship, that the young Queen commenced the reign which was to witness the building of the greatest Empire the world has known. What credit in the rich story of this period of solid, farsighted expansion must go to the Queen, what share to statesmen, merchant-adventurers, to explorers, governors and pioneers, is beyond human computation. The Queen’s part may have been small, and magnified by the dominance of her personality; it may have been greater than Gladstone could allow. But it will be conceded to-day, when the historians of Victorian England have had their opportunity to turn the searchlight of criticism upon her person and her age, that her part was always faithfully played. She found a country hesitant upon the brink of opportunity, and when she died she left it the leader of the new industrialism at Home and master of untold resources abroad. There could be few to deny for her, the self-opinionated, dignified and painstakingly zealous little lady whose reign had brought England to the meridian in industry and commerce, the tribute of the dutiful poet as one

Who knew the season when to take Occasion by the hand and make The bounds of freedom wider yet. And as the imprint of her compelling, peremptory character is scored across half a century and more of great enterprise, so is her name given to an era unmatched in material progress, and notable for its awakening of a social consciousness.

The word “ Victorian ” lias a doubtful definitive value to-day, wheh it is used to deride any censorious attitude, whether towards women in politics or concerning literary licence. But a term which covers broadly a full six decades of steady national growth, in the period of the world’s most amazingly fecund development in science, in labour and in resources, deserves more respect. True, the Victorian age was one of excesses. There was, notably, an excess of profit-making and of smug respectability in trade, which brought its inevitable reactions. There was a surfeit of pride, perhaps, engendered in the new ruling class of bourgeois people, who in their quick translation tended to mistake prosperity for virtue, and manners for breeding. There was a failing in humane characteristics in the individual, but it must also be remembered that in Victoria’s reign the spirit of democracy had its flowering. In social legislation the later nineteenth century saw a revolution. The Queen’s reign commenced with the paltry sum of £20,000 a year devoted to education, and before its close knowledge was offered free to all. It opened with the wealth of England still vested in the land-owning aristocracy, and passed with the wealth distributed among the individual captains of industry, builders of their own fortunc. At its beginning the franchise was the abused privilege of the few. By (lie century’s end it belonged equally to lord and labourer, and the structure of representative local government had been set up. And if the Victorian age was of great consequence in the true broadening of democracy, it was no less notable in singular achievement in science, in invention turned to practical needs, and in enterprise across the seas. While Britons prospered and evolved a new social system at Home, Britons abroad brought fallow lands to bearing and created vigorous young democracies, ardent for freedom, bold in experiment. The spirit of adventure which inspired the explorers and navigators may have given way, in the Victorian essays abroad, to a resolute search for gain, but before the reign was over the principle of Empire, of independent nations unified under the flag* was estab-

lished. Those social-minded moderns who look back with unclouded eyes across the barrier which by general custom is intervened between the Victorian age and the Edwardian that followed it may see less of the attributes of prudery and dullness to scoff at, and more of forceful, independent accomplishment to commend, than may -be realised in the common connotations of a word. If to-day it appears a strangely pretentious, stifling age to which the great Queen gave her name, it is well to remember also that this era not only marked the change in the methods of material prosperity, but enriched mankind with the dawning of new social concepts. The age of Victoria, complained Lytton Strachey, its most polished analyst, was “ unaesthetic to its marrow-bones,” and will never shine in history with the glamour of the age of Pericles, or the brilliance of the eighteenth century. “ But,” he added, “if men,, of science and men of action were not inarticulate, we should hear a different story.”