Bertie

VICTORIA'S HEIR--George Danger-field--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Victoria's Heir, a life of Edward VII, is almost worthy to be a sequel to Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria, for the stuffy, portentous Victorian age seems peculiarly able to inspire some of the best writing of the 20th Century. The late Lytton Strachey's roguish mandarinism seemed gently but fatally borne along on the undertow of a dying civilization. George Dangerfield writes with the desperate blandness of a man who has heard even in the U.S. (where he has resided since 1931) the thud of London's falling walls and the stridency of gutting flames. Victoria's Heir is a biography both of Edward VII and of the critical period of European history through which he dallied and diplomatized--the period which prepared those flames.

Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, was born in 1841, in the Queen's apartments which "were ventilated from the common sewer. ... It was a grey morning. London, whose inhabitants were rarely quite well in those days, brooded over its poisonous river."

But the Queen was happy. She prayed that the Prince of Wales might resemble his "angelic, dearest father in every, every respect, both in body and mind." The ladies in waiting were reassuring. Everybody detected in little Bertie's features a striking resemblance to his father. "In this, as it turned out," says Author Dangerfield, "they were incorrect."

Britons liked little Bertie. Sometimes on their progresses, the royal family would be "almost mobbed by the Queen's subjects . . . those exuberant outcasts--the early Victorian poor." But as he grew up, Bertie did not seem very bright. His ponderous Teutonic father had outlined for him a crushing program for royal studies. Tutors came & went. Bertie remained unchanged.

Even the Great Exposition and the Crystal Palace, his father's pet hobby, left Bertie unmoved. "And then, one day, wandering through the tedious immensity of the East India Company's exhibit, he discovered ... a lively group representing the murderous Thugs at their work. He was enchanted." It was almost as shocking as the only other incident that marred the Exposition--the assault on some ladies by a party of Welsh teetotalers.

During the Crimean War, the royal Britons visited their French ally, Napoleon III. "When Bertie knelt, in kilts, before the tomb of Napoleon I, the Parisian sky produced an authentic clap of thunder, and all the French generals burst into tears." It was the beginning of a life-long love for Bertie, but not for his father. Napoleon III "was simply not a respectable ally." For one thing, there had been that "rather dreadful fete champetre . . . when the Emperor disappeared all evening with Madame Castiglione in the shrubbery, and the Empress fainted with mortification, and all the gentlemen danced with their hats on."

Almost as questionable an acquaintance for Bertie was Britain's other ally, King Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia, "a hairy man, of a virile physique, an amorous nature, and an indiscriminate affability." Bertie was much taken with him too, "chiefly because of his boast that he could decapitate an ox with one blow of his sword."

Mr. John Ruskin, when consulted, declared that Bertie should be taught that "one of the principal duties of Princes was to provide for the preservation of perishing frescoes and monuments." So he visited Rome, which had plenty of such objects, "many of them in a suitably perishing condition." They only gave Bertie fits of temper. But in the studio of John Gibson, R.A., "he was much struck by three portraits of a beautiful Italian woman."

It was clear to everybody that Bertie was "backward, frivolous, vain." They tried sending him to Edinburgh and Oxford, to Canada, to the U.S. He planted a chestnut tree at George Washington's grave, and on one occasion, according to rumor, eluded his guardians "and indulged his abounding manhood in the bagnios of New York."

Of seven marriageable princesses Bertie quickly picked Alexandra of Denmark. The choice was biologically a good one, but it headed Bertie and Britain, through Europe's interlocking dynastic feuds and Bismarck's intricate Machtpolitik, straight for World Wars I and II.

Though her father was Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluecksburg, Alexandra had been strictly brought up in the vikingly virtues of sewing and Swedish movements. Sometimes Hans Christian Andersen would drop in to read her one of his morbid little masterpieces for children. In England his place was less excitingly filled by Lord Tennyson who hailed Alexandra's marriage with these lines:

For Saxon or Dane or Norman we,

Teuton or Celt, or whatever we be,

We are all of us Danes in our welcome to thee, Alexandra!

One day, years afterwards, Alexandra asked Tennyson to read this poem to her.

"When he had finished, there was a silence, and then they both began to shake with helpless laughter."

One of the guests at the royal wedding was little Prince William of Prussia (later the German Kaiser) who was seated between two of his British uncles who were wearing kilts. "The little boy amused himself by sinking his teeth and his nails alternately into the bare legs of his relatives . . . [who] were only restrained by the solemnity of the occasion from uttering cries of anguish."

"Alix," wrote the Queen, "is a most noble, excellent, dear creature ... a realization of what my dear Angel so ardently wished, and I doubt not he sees and knows this, and that it is one of his rewards." But "like a mayfly the Prince of Wales danced idly in the sun." He also danced under the gas lights of questionable houses in Second Empire Paris, until Bismarck, having discovered the riddle of Napoleon III (he was "the sphinx without a secret"), destroyed France at Sedan and created the Second Reich at Versailles. Then "from these flames there stepped a slightly discredited phoenix, the portentous phenomenon of modern Europe."

The great event of Bertie's life was Victoria's death in 1901 when he was 60. At last he was out of metaphorical short pants. He was even master in Buckingham Palace--"the Sepulcher" as he called it--and could enter ("one can well believe with reluctance") his awe-inspiring father's private apartments. "Nothing had been moved since Albert's death: the ink had hardened in the inkstands; intimate letters, yellow with age, lay just as he had left them; the chairs, the desk, the carpets seemed to have been waiting for forty years for Albert to return."

Edward VII ordered everything to be packed up and put away with care. "And then the electrician, the plumber, and the cleaner, and the Twentieth Century came in."

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