The English Governess at the Siamese Court: Being Recollections of Six Years in the Royal Palace at Bangkok
By . With Illustrations from Photographs presented to the Author by the King of Siam. Boston : Fields, Osgood, & Co.
SOME passages of this unique narrative of Mrs. Leonowens we have already had the pleasure of offering our readers, who can hardly have forgotten them. They characterize very fairly the whole book, which is a description of things as remote from our conventional ideas of an Eastern court as from any experience of our Western lives. The author’s six years’ service as instructress of the wives and children of the Siamese king in the English language enabled her to see intimately the life of that grotesque and cruel, yet most amusing despot, and the life of the slaves of high and low degree that trembled about him, and oppressed and wronged each other, as he oppressed and wronged them all. The spectacle presented is one of the most tragical, varied by touches of fantasticality and absurdity as extraordinary as the features of terror and violence. The king was a man of the sublimest morals in theory, of tender affections in many ways, of a literary and scientific ambition, of aspirations for something like European culture and civilization, but bound down by the traditions of his race and the love of power to the practise of wanton and repulsive tyrannies, and steeped in the sensuality of the East. He bewails with affecting sorrow the loss of one daughter, and causes the mother of another to be scourged in her sight. His palace is a prison for the multitudes of his wives and concubines, any of whom may pass in a moment from his embrace to the whip of the executioner, if it is the caprice of his lawless temper. Under him is the wretched shadow of royalty called the Second King, who miserably exists in the fear of the Supreme King’s fear of him; and the scale descends with illimitable oppression everywhere, from the various ministers and judges to the abject populace, who still have slaves of their own. Yet there is one grand check upon this monstrous system : the prosperity of European commerce with Siam. This is so important that consuls are empowered to give any desired protection to foreign residents, and the despotism ceases with the Asiatics. A quiet gentleman of the civil service of England, France, or the United States Suffices to stay this tyrant in the full tide of his fury ; and there is an English paper published at Bangkok, in which the relations of the king to his own subjects is sharply and wholesomely criticised ; so that the late king, who was very proud of his English, had the advantage of a free press as concerned himself. Thanks to the residence of a British Consul in the city, Mrs. Leonowens was enabled to maintain the independent bearing in the king’s service which alone made it endurable, to oppose his fantastic will, and somewhat to soften the rigors of the pedantic despot − a kind of Siamese James I. − towards others. Her position was a very strange one, and by no means pleasant, in most things : the potentate who respected her as an Englishwoman despised her as a woman, and his divided mind was shared by all the despots under him. Yet after being received with insolent neglect by the king’s minister, and with various arbitrary proceedings (duly resisted) by the king himself, she made herself a place in his strange regard, and when her six years’ service came to an end she quitted his employ, with of course the lamentations of all the helpless women and children, and also with this quaint compliment in English from royalty itself: “Mam ! you are much beloved by our common people, and all inhabitants of palace and royal children. Every one is in affliction of your departure. It shall be because you must be a good and true lady. I am often angry on you, and lose my temper, though I have large respect for you. But nevertheless you ought to know you are difficult woman, and more difficult than generality. But you will forget and come back to my service, for I have more confidence on you every day. Good by.”
The book alone can convey a just idea of the life that the author saw in palace and city, and we leave it, with hearty commendation, to do so to all readers. But there is one glimpse of the grotesqueness of the national mind which we cannot forbear giving, because it seems fairly to express in a little the whole amusing invertedness of the East. “One cannot but be struck,” wrote a member of the Siamese embassy after his return from London, “ with the aspect of the august queen of England, or fail to observe that she must be of pure descent from a race of goodly and warlike kings and rulers of the earth, in that her eyes, complexion, and above all her bearing, are those of a beautiful and majestic white elephant.”