The death of General Grey in the spring of the year was deeply felt by the Queen. The Princess Louis in one of her letters to her mother says, “Lady Car (Barrington) wrote to me how very grateful Mrs. Grey was to you for your great kindness and consideration. In trouble no one can have a more true and sympathising friend than my beloved mamma always is. How many hearts has she not gained by this, and how many a poor sufferer’s burdens has she not lightened!” General Grey’s services as Private Secretary to the Sovereign, indeed, were such as to render his death a matter of serious political interest. At this time the Queen exercised a personal supervision over every department of State, more especially over the Foreign Office, War Office, Admiralty, and Poor Law Board. On all matters of importance connected with the administration of these offices it was her custom to send to the Government of the day her own views, and such notes of precedents and of the opinions of former Ministers, as her carefully-kept series of State commonplace books supplied. It was the duty of General Grey to take the rough drafts of memoranda as they came from the Queen’s hand, and give them the form of State papers. In fact, he did the work which the Prince Consort had been in the habit of doing, and his position was really that of a supernumerary Minister in attendance at Court, but without a seat in the Cabinet, and without any responsibility to Parliament. After General Grey’s death it was suggested that a new Cabinet office should be created, to be held by a Minister who should have no other duty than that of residing in personal attendance on the Queen, and acting as her Private Secretary. The suggestion was happily not pressed, because it would obviously have led to Constitutional difficulties. The new Minister must have become either the Queen’s clerk, in which case he would have been an encumbrance to the Cabinet, or he must have become a real Minister of State confidentially representing the Sovereign, in which case he would have become its master. Colonel Ponsonby was therefore selected to succeed General Grey, and the revival of Government by favourites, which was the bane of the early years of George III.’s reign, was prevented.
The death of Charles Dickens on the 9th of June robbed England of a great humourist, whose genius was consecrated not only to the delight, but to the service of the English people. It was his mission to soften the harsh contrasts of society, and quicken the consciences, and touch the hearts of the governing classes, to whose apathy and ignorance of life among the poor he traced most “of the oppression that is done under the sun.” Whether Dickens will survive as an English classic has been doubted. But no doubt exists as to the qualities which gave him an unique position among men of letters in the Victorian period. His sense of humour was singularly keen and delicate. His faculty of observation exceeded that ever given to mortal man; in fact, what he saw, he saw so vividly that by his descriptive method he could print it on his reader’s mind with photographic fidelity. His power of characterisation, it is true, was limited, but that was because his characterisation was invariably idiosyncratic. It was always an isolated phase of a character that impressed him—a single trait to which he gave corporeal reality. On the other hand,
CHARLES DICKENS.
there was no limit to his power of producing fresh illustrations of this phase or trait under an infinite variety of circumstances and conditions. If he rang the changes on one theme, his capacity for producing variations on the original air with unfailing freshness, and seductive spontaneity, imparted some semblance of the roundness and many-sidedness of Nature even to the oddest of his oddities. But his sense of colour was faulty, and his passion for melodramatic effect, and his habit of harping too much on one string of feeling, gave to his pathos, a false note of theatrical sentimentality. None of his
GARDEN PARTY AT WINDSOR CASTLE.
readers in England, it may fairly be said, was a more consistent and devoted admirer of the genius of Dickens than the Queen. Next to Scott and George Eliot, Dickens was her favourite novelist. It had been her desire in the early days of her married life to make his acquaintance personally, but the touch of false pride which marred Dickens’s character, and rendered him morbidly sensitive as to “patronage,” prevented their meeting. In 1857, the Queen had been compelled to refuse her name for the dramatic performance of the Frozen Deep, given for the benefit of Douglas Jerrold,[340] but she offered to allow Dickens and his company of players to select a room in the Palace and perform the play there before her and the Court. Dickens begged leave to decline the offer, as he could not feel easy about the social position of his daughters at a Court under such circumstances. He suggested that the Queen might come to the Gallery of Illustrations a week before the subscription night, with her own friends, and witness a private performance of the play. “This,” writes Dickens, “with the good sense that seems to accompany her good nature on all occasions, she resolved within a few hours to do.” So delighted was the Queen with the performance that she sent round a kind message to Dickens asking him to come and see her and receive her thanks personally. “I replied,” says Dickens, in his account of the affair, “that I was in my farce dress, and must beg to be excused. Whereupon she sent again, saying that the dress ‘would not be so ridiculous as that,’ and repeating the request. I sent my duty in reply, but again hoped her Majesty would have the kindness to excuse myself presenting myself in a costume and appearance that was not my own. I was mighty glad to think, when I awoke this morning, that I had carried the point.” This incident occurred in 1857.