In 1897 it appears the most natural and suitable thing in the world that a Royal Prince should vary the more strictly ceremonial functions of State by opening an art gallery in London, a science school in the provinces, an Imperial Institute, a Fisheries Exhibition in South Kensington. Fifty years since such a part seemed of questionable wisdom to some, of dangerous precedent for the monarchy to others; at the best a foreign experiment which the Queen's husband would most wisely have left unmade. In the sixtieth year of the reign, there is no social gathering or private dwelling, there is scarcely a village inn, or country cottage, or a seaside lodging house, that by the paper on its walls, the designs of its furniture, the suspended pictures cut from illustrated prints, fails to remind one with eyes to see such things the extent to which ideas of art or ornament that began with the Prince and Sir Henry Cole have directly from South Kensington penetrated into every corner of the land, and made their humanizing influence felt beneath the roof of peasant as well as of peer.
Even in the thirtieth year of the reign, these forces had scarcely advanced beyond the embryonic stage. Had the Prince Consort himself claimed visibly to exercise the Royal prerogative, on which as a fact he never presumed, he could scarcely have given a greater shock to the prejudices of those high in social position and near the Court who inherited from Hanoverian times a contempt for all distinctions save those of birth and rank.
Up to the moment of his death the Queen's husband was endeavouring to make his wife's Court a centre not only of achievement in war, of statesmanship in peace, but of letters, art, science, and of the most famous among their contemporary ornaments. Death prevented the design from ever being carried out completely. The names of Alfred Tennyson and of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley are enough to remind one of the direction actually travelled by the Prince in producing some resemblance between the Windsor where a Victoria reigned, and the Weimar whose intellectual glories, a Goethe had typified. Here again the intellectual revolution which the Court began has been continued by those who represent the Crown to-day.