|
I'll just elaborate my feelings about Albert in the context of Bookpossum's point:
While Queen Victoria is certainly the main character, she shares a great deal of the story with her husband, Prince Consort Albert. In fact, he dominates a section of the biography, {Chapters 4 through 7} much as he dominated Victoria--who was certainly madly in love with him throughout their entire marriage.
While Strachey’s ironic tone is far more muted and controlled in Queen Victoria than in Eminent Victorians, we do see it in certain descriptions of Prince Albert. An example occurs when Albert indulges in his {possibly limited} “artistic appreciation”:
“ . . .she listened to him cracking his jokes . . . or pointing out the merits of Sir Edwin Landseer’s pictures, as she followed him round while he gave instructions about the breeding of cattle, or decided that the Gainsboroughs must be hung higher up so that the Winterhalters might be properly seen--she felt perfectly certain that no other wife had ever had such a husband. His mind was apparently capable of everything, and she was hardly surprised to learn that he had made an important discovery for the conversion of sewage into agricultural manure . . . Unfortunately, owing to a slight miscalculation, the invention proved to be impracticable . . . but Albert’s intelligence was unrebuffed, and he passed on . . . into a prolonged study of the rudiments of lithography.”
Of course, Strachey is using Victoria’s admiration ironically: J.B. Priestly points out that Strachey “ . . . is telling us that Albert was an industrious, solemn prig, without taste and artistic judgement.”
Here is another example. Albert was asked to preside over a commission dealing the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament with a view to the encouragement of Fine Arts in the United Kingdom. Since Albert had an “extraordinary technical acquaintance with the processes of fresco painting”, his suggestion that they be used to encourage morally uplifting thoughts in the observer was accepted.
“The frescoes were carried out in accordance with the commission’s instructions, but unfortunately before very long they had become, even to the most thoughtful eyes, totally invisible. It seems that His Royal Highness’s technical acquaintance with the processes of fresco painting was incomplete!”
On a deeper level, the point has been made that Albert was King of England in all but name and Strachey states: “ . . . from 1840 to 1861 [the year of Albert’s death] the power of the Crown steadily increased in England; from 1861 to 1901 it steadily declined.” If Albert had lived on it is possible that he could have transformed England “ . . . into a State as exactly organised, as elaborately trained, as efficiently equipped, as autocratically controlled as Prussia herself”-- having what what Disraeli himself described as “the blessings of absolute government.” Thus, the pupil of Baron Stockmar would have conquered England. But Strachey points out another equally dark possibility.
“ . . . perhaps eventually, under some powerful leader--a Gladstone or a Bright--the democratic forces might have rallied together, and a struggle might have followed in which the Monarchy would have been shaken to its foundations.”
Strachey, I feel, believes that is was the gook luck of England that the Prince died when he did.
After the death of the Prince, Victoria was in a paroxysm of grief which bordered on denial; when at Balmoral, she had his clothes laid out for him every morning for the rest of her life. She attempted to make certain that the entire population would never forget him and would share
“her overmastering determination to continue, absolutely unchanged, and for the rest of her life on earth, her reverence, her obedience, her idolatry.”
She did this with the building of the Albert Memorial and also by bringing out a collection of the Prince’s speehes, having a biography written and even getting the cooperation of the Poet Laureate to praise Albert in verse.
All this was to show “that Albert had worn the white flower of a blameless life.”
Of course, the attempt simply didn’t work.The public weren’t interested in “the sugary hero of a moral story-book” The enormous irony is that in attempting to recreate the Albert of her imagination, Victoria destroyed the very interesting Albert of reality.
This Albert becomes a focus for the very real and deep love the Queen had as well as an illustration of her quite obvious limitations.
|