Lusty Letters

An additional series of the letters of Queen Victoria have just been published and simultaneously the life correspondence of Miss Gertrude Bell. The present generation fancies Miss Bell as a superwoman of the desert who died (TIME, July 26, 1926), some time after she and certain British expeditionary forces had set King Faisal of Irak on his throne. Interesting is the fact that the sheltered Queen wrote letters no less lusty than those of the feminine "king maker:"

Victoriana. Her Majesty never possessed higher or more passionate epistolary powers than at the period covered by these letters (1879-1885).* Slashingly she underlines whole sentences and underscores two or three times her more emphatic phrases. The grand themes are first her grief at the political eclipse and final death of Benjamin Disraeli, "dear Lord Beaconsfield;" and secondly her rage at William Ewart Gladstone whom she would certainly have called a Bolshevik had the word then been invented.

Just before Disraeli left the Prime Ministry in 1880 he struck definitely the tone of their correspondence thus: "Lord Beaconsfield, no longer in the sunset but in the twilight of existence, must encounter a life of anxiety and toil; but this, too, has its romance, when he remembers that he labors for the most gracious of beings."

Upon the death of this so suave and perfect gallant, Her Majesty wrote:

"I am most terribly shocked and grieved, for dear Lord Beaconsfield was one of my best, most devoted and kindest of friends, as well as the wisest of councillors."

Against Gladstonian reforms she raged as follows in a letter to Lord Granville, Gladstone's Foreign Secretary: "The Queen herself can never have any confidence in the men who encourage reform for the sake of alteration and pulling down what exists. . . . A democratic monarchy she will not consent to belong to . . . Others must be found if that is to be."

Though not even Queen Victoria could concoct a more terrifying threat than this--that she might abdicate--the new series of letters is starred with innumerable dynamic and forceful passages, many urging that the most truculently repressive measures be taken against natives in India, Africa, Egypt or Ireland, where "the more one does for the Irish the more unruly and ungrateful they seem to be."

Miss Bell. Very natural and to be expected is the discovery that Miss Bell, who labored so long amid aboriginal peoples, did not advocate their ruthless repression,* as did the Queen. For one thing, Gertrude Bell's whole life was led in perfect intellectual freedom and with few curbs upon her remarkable physique. After taking a brilliant First at Oxford she was for a time coquette enough to refuse to ride alone, one evening, with a young man in a hansom cab; but not long thereafter her loves became Persia and Palestine and the wild crags of the Swiss Alps.

Twice she circled the globe, and many times she wandered off into Arabia on a quest for pure joy. "Can you picture," she cries, "the singular beauty of these moonlight departures! The frail Arab tents falling one by one . . . dark masses of the kneeling camels . . . shrouded figures . . ." These things lured Gertrude Bell into desert lands and kept her prowling there, writing books on archeology, writing others on the land & people which British officers later conned furiously as they set sail to fight the Near Eastern campaigns of the World War.

Naturally Miss Bell could not--like the irrepressible Colonel T. E. Lawrence (TIME, April 11)--engage in active warfare with the Turks or indulge in dynamiting their railway trains. Her important war role came later, in helping to tidy up the British victories and install the Government of Irak at Bagdad. Very womanly at heart and just a shade Victorian, she thus describes the arrival at Bagdad of her chief, the first High Commissioner to Irak, Sir Percy Cox:

"I thought as he stood there in his white and gold lace, with his air of fine and simple dignity that there had never been an arrival more momentous--never anyone on whom more conflicting emotions were centered, hopes and doubts and fears, but above all confidence in his personal integrity and wisdom. . . . While I made my curtsy, it was all I could do not to cry."

Very typical are these lines. Miss Bell was loyal to a fault toward those she trusted, womanly, and at times highly emotional. She came upon the scene in Irak after the tumult and the shooting had begun to wane; but the present prevailing peace in King Faisal's realm is very largely founded on her broad conciliatory liaison work. Dozens of the letters are pure feminine chatter, but it is never idle chatter.

* LETTERS OF QUEEN VICTORIA, 1879-1885 (Second Series--Vol. 3)--Edited by George Earle Buckle--Longmans, Green ($9).

*LETTERS OF GERTRUDE BELL OF ARABIA (2 vols.)--Edited by Lady Bell--Boni & Liveright ($10).