Mr. Martin was rewarded by a knighthood; and yet it was sadly evident that neither Sir Theodore nor his predecessors had achieved the purpose which the Queen had in view.  Perhaps she was unfortunate in her coadjutors, but, in reality, the responsibility for the failure must lie with Victoria herself.  Sir Theodore and the others faithfully carried out the task which she had set them—­faithfully put before the public the very image of Albert that filled her own mind.  The fatal drawback was that the public did not find that image attractive.  Victoria’s emotional nature, far more remarkable for vigour than for subtlety, rejecting utterly the qualifications which perspicuity, or humour, might suggest, could be satisfied with nothing but the absolute and the categorical.  When she disliked she did so with an unequivocal emphasis which swept the object of her repugnance at once and finally outside the pale of consideration; and her feelings of affection were equally unmitigated.  In the case of Albert her passion for superlatives reached its height.  To have conceived of him as anything short of perfect—­perfect in virtue, in wisdom, in beauty, in all the glories and graces of man—­would have been an unthinkable blasphemy:  perfect he was, and perfect he must be shown to have been.  And so, Sir Arthur, Sir Theodore, and the General painted him.  In the circumstances, and under such supervision, to have done anything else would have required talents considerably more distinguished than any that those gentlemen possessed.  But that was not all.  By a curious mischance Victoria was also able to press into her service another writer, the distinction of whose talents was this time beyond a doubt.  The Poet Laureate, adopting, either from complaisance or conviction, the tone of his sovereign, joined in the chorus, and endowed the royal formula with the magical resonance of verse.  This settled the matter.  Henceforward it was impossible to forget that Albert had worn the white flower of a blameless life.

The result was doubly unfortunate.  Victoria, disappointed and chagrined, bore a grudge against her people for their refusal, in spite of all her efforts, to rate her husband at his true worth.  She did not understand that the picture of an embodied perfection is distasteful to the majority of mankind.  The cause of this is not so much an envy of the perfect being as a suspicion that he must be inhuman; and thus it happened that the public, when it saw displayed for its admiration a figure resembling the sugary hero of a moral story-book rather than a fellow man of flesh and blood, turned away with a shrug, a smile, and a flippant ejaculation.  But in this the public was the loser as well as Victoria.  For in truth Albert was a far more interesting personage than the public dreamed.  By a curious irony an impeccable waxwork had been fixed by the Queen’s love in the popular imagination, while the creature whom it represented—­the real creature, so full of energy and stress and torment, so mysterious and so unhappy, and so fallible and so very human—­had altogether disappeared.