The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke Volume II Part 26

'Chamberlain wrote to me (May 20th, 1886) about the attacks which were being made on him:

'"I was disgusted at the brutality of some of the attacks. I am only human, and I cannot stand the persistent malignity of interpretation of all my actions and motives without lashing out occasionally. You will see that I met your letter with an apology. I might complain of its tone, but I don't. This strain and tension is bad for all of us.

I do not know where it will ultimately lead us, but I fear that the mischief already done is irretrievable.

'"I shall fight this matter out to the bitter end, but I am getting more and more doubtful whether, when it is out of the way, I shall continue in politics. I am 'wounded in the house of my friends,' and I have lost my interest in the business."

'In another letter (May 21st) Chamberlain said: "Your note makes everything right between us. Let us agree to consider everything which is said and done for the next few weeks as a dream.

'"I suppose the party must go to smash and the Tories come in. After a few years those of us who remain will be able to pick up the pieces. It is a hard saying, but apparently Mr. Gladstone is bent on crowning his life by the destruction of the most devoted and loyal instrument by which a great Minister was ever served." [Footnote: In a letter of January 2nd, 1886, Lord Hartington, writing to Lord Granville, said: "Did any leader ever treat a party in such a way as he (Mr. Gladstone) has done?" (_Life of Granville_, vol. ii., p.

478).]

'On June 2nd Chamberlain wrote: "I suppose we shall have a dissolution immediately and an awful smash." On that day I spoke on the Irish Registration Bills in the House of Commons--almost the only utterance which I made in the course of this short Parliament.

'On June 4th Sir Robert Sandeman, who had sought an interview with me to thank me for what I had done previously about the a.s.signed districts on the Quetta frontier, came to see me, to tell me the present position and to discuss with me Sir Frederick Roberts's plans for defence against the eventuality of a Russian advance.'

The defeat of the Home Rule Bill by a majority of thirty came on June 8th, and the General Election followed. [Footnote: See Morley's _Life of Gladstone_, vol. iii., p. 337, which gives one o'clock on the morning of the 8th as the time of decision. Sir Charles's Memoir contains among its pages an article from _Truth_ of October 14th, 1908, marked by him. The article, which is called 'The Secret History of the First Home Rule Bill,' states that Mr. Gladstone's language did not make clear that the proposal to exclude Irish representatives from the Imperial Parliament was given up. Mr. Chamberlain, who had made the retention of the Irish members a condition of giving his vote for the second reading, left the House, declaring that his decision to vote against the Bill was final.

The _Life of Labouchere_, by Algar Thorold, chap, xii., p. 272 _et seq_., gives the long correspondence between Mr. Chamberlain and Mr.

Labouchere prior to this event.] Sir Charles voted for the Bill.

'On July 5th I was beaten at Chelsea, and so left Parliament in which I had sat from November, 1868.

'The turn-over in Chelsea was very small, smaller than anywhere else in the neighbourhood, and showed that personal considerations had told in my favour, inasmuch as we gained but a small number of Irish, it not being an Irish district, and had it not been for personal considerations should have lost more Liberal Unionists than we did.

'Some of my warmest private and personal friends were forced to work and vote against me (on the Irish Question), as, for example, John Westlake, Q.C., and Dr. Robert Cust, the learned Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Sir Henry Gordon--General Charles Gordon's brother--who soon afterwards died, remaining my strong friend, as did these others.

'James wrote to Lady Dilke, July 26th:

'"No one but your husband could have polled so many Gladstonian votes. London is dead against the Prime Minister."'

Mr. Chamberlain wrote of his deep regret and sympathy that the one Ministerialist seat which he had earnestly hoped would be kept should have gone. He pointed out that the falling off in this case was less than in other London polls; but the reactionary period would continue while Mr. Gladstone was in politics. If he retired, Mr. Chamberlain thought the party would recover in a year or two.

There is a warm letter from Mr. Joseph Cowen of Newcastle, who wrote:

'Chelsea has been going Tory for some time past, and only you would have kept it Liberal at the last election.... If you had not been one of the bravest men that ever lived, you would have been driven away long ago. I admire your courage and sincerely sympathize with your misfortunes.... I always believed you would achieve the highest position in English statesmanship, and I don't despair of your doing so still.'

For a final word in this chapter of discouragement may be given a letter from Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, who wrote from a detached position, having been prevented by illness from standing both in 1885 and 1886:

'What a delightful leader of a party is the G.O.M.! It is an interesting subject of speculation, though, thank G.o.d, it is one of speculation only, what might happen to this country if, like the old Red Indian in Hawthorne's novel, he lived to be 300 years old.... My own opinions about setting up a Parliament in Dublin are quite unchanged, but I look on the G.O.M. as the great obstacle to any satisfactory settlement. I see nothing but pandemonium ahead of us.'

The question was whether the future a.s.sembly in Dublin was to be called a 'Legislature' or a 'Parliament.'

Sir Charles, as a Gladstonian Liberal politician, was involved in the misfortune of his party. But in the first weeks of July he hoped that justice in the court of law might soon relieve his personal misfortunes.

That antic.i.p.ation was rudely falsified. Within a fortnight after he had lost the seat which had been won and held by him triumphantly in four General Elections, the second trial of his case was over, and had followed the course which has been already described.

CHAPTER XLVII

LADY DILKE--76, SLOANE STREET

Sir Charles Dilke's marriage in 1885 extended rather than modified his sphere of work. Lady Dilke, the Emilia Strong who was studying drawing in 1859 at South Kensington, [Footnote: See Chapter 11. (Vol. 1., p.

17).] had submitted herself in these long intervening years to such scholarly training and discipline as gave her weight and authority on the subjects which she handled.

The brilliant girl's desire to take all knowledge for her kingdom had been intensified by her marriage at twenty-one to the scholar more than twice her age. In the words of Sir Charles's Memoir: 'She widened her conception of art by the teaching of the philosopher and by the study of the literatures to which the schooling of Mark Pattison admitted her.

She saw, too, men and things, travelled largely with him, became mistress of many tongues, and gained above all a breadth of desire for human knowledge, destined only to grow with the advance of years.'

[Footnote: _The Book of the Spiritual Life_, by the late Lady Dilke, with a Memoir of the Author by Sir Charles W. Dilke, p. 18.]

At twenty-five years of age she was contributing philosophical articles to the _Westminster Review_, and for years she wrote the review of foreign politics for the _Annual Register_. Later she furnished art criticisms to the _Portfolio_, the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, and the _Academy_, of which last she was art editor. It was as an art critic that she had come to be known, and to this work she brought a remarkable equipment; for to her technical knowledge and artist's training was added a deep study of the tendencies of history and of human thought. _Art in the Modern State_, in which she wrote of the art of the 'Grand Siecle' in its bearing on modern political and social organizations, has been quoted as the book most characteristic of the philosophical tendency of her writing, but this did not appear till 1888. The _Renaissance of Art in France_, which had been published in 1879, was ill.u.s.trated by drawings from her own pencil, and in 1884 had appeared _Claude Lorrain_, written by herself in the pure and graceful French of which she was mistress.

She had been a pupil of Mulready, whose portrait still decorates the mantelpiece of her Pyrford home, and in the early South Kensington days had come much under the influence of Watts and Ruskin. There were numbered among her friends many who had achieved distinction in the art, literature, or politics of Europe. Her letters on art to Eugene Muntz, preserved in the Ma.n.u.script Department of the Bibliotheque Nationale, commemorate the friendship and a.s.sistance given to her by the author of the _History of the Italian Renaissance_, whose admiration for her work made him persuade her to undertake her _Claude_. It was Taine who bore witness to her 'veritable erudition on the fine arts of the Renaissance,' when in 1871, lecturing in Oxford, he used to visit Mark Pattison and his young wife at Lincoln College, and described the 'toute jeune femme, charmante, gracieuse, a visage frais et presque mutin, dans le plus joli nid de vieille architecture, avec lierre et grands arbres.'

[Footnote: 'The Art Work of Lady Dilke,' _Quarterly Review_, October, 1906.] It was Renan, a friend of later years, whom as yet she did not know, who 'presented' her _Renaissance_ to the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.

But there was another side to her activities, as intense. Public service was to her a duty of citizenship, and her keen sympathy with suffering had inspired her to such study of economic and industrial questions that, in her effort for the development of organization among women workers, she was for years 'the practical director of a considerable social movement.' Her four volumes on Art in France in the Eighteenth Century, which occupied her from this time onwards, were not more absorbing to her than was the growth of the Women's Trade Union League.

She had concentrated her powers on a special period of French art, just as she concentrated them on a certain phase of industrial development; but her reverence for and pursuit of all learning persisted, and, in the words of the Memoir written by Sir Charles, 'she was master enough of human knowledge in its princ.i.p.al branches to know the relation of almost every part of it to every other.' [Footnote: _Book of the Spiritual Life,_ Memoir, p. 70.]

The intense mental training of the years of her first marriage had given her a grasp of essential facts and a breadth of outlook most unusual in women, and rare among men. She always correlated her own special work to that of the larger world. She found in the Women's Protective and Provident Union a little close corporation, full of s.e.x antagonism and opposition to legislative protection, but under her sway these limitations gradually disappeared, and the Women's Trade Union movement became an integral part of industrial progress. It is difficult to realize now the breadth of vision which was then required to see that the industrial interests of the s.e.xes are identical, and that protective legislation does not hamper, but emanc.i.p.ates. It was this att.i.tude which brought to her in this field of work the friendship and support of all that was best in the Labour world of her day henceforth to the end.

'It is delightful to talk to Mrs. Mark Pattison,' said Sir Charles Dilke years before to Sir Henry James. 'She says such wonderful things.' She had the rare power of revealing to others by a few words things in their true values, and those who came within the sphere of her influence try still to recover the att.i.tude of mind which she inspired, to remember how she would have looked at the fresh problems which confront them, and to view them in relation to all work and life.

It was this knowledge and breadth of view which told. A perfect speaker, with tremendous force of personality, charm of manner, beauty of voice, and command of emotional oratory, her power was greatest when she preferred to these methods the force of a reasoned appeal. Conviction waited on these appeals, and in early days, at a public meeting, a group of youthful cynics, 'out' for entertainment, dispersed with the comment: 'That was wonderful--you couldn't heckle a woman like that.'

Her serious work never detracted from her social charm, which was influenced by her love and study of eighteenth century French art. Her wit, gaiety, and the sensitive fancy which manifested itself in her stories, [Footnote: _The Shrine of Love, and Other Stories_; and _The Shrine of Death, and Other Stories_.] made up this charm, which was reflected in the distinction and finish of her appearance. Some touches seemed subtly to differentiate her dress from the prevailing fashion, and to make it the expression of a personality which belonged to a century more dignified, more leisured, and less superficial, than our own. [Footnote: _Book of the Spiritual Life,_ p. 120.] Her dress recalled the canvases of Boucher, Van Loo, and Watteau, which she loved.

She played as she worked, with all her heart, delivering herself completely to the enjoyment of the moment. 'Vous devez bien vous amuser, Monsieur, tous les jours chez vous,' said a Frenchwoman to Sir Charles one night at a dinner in Paris. [Footnote: _Book of the Spiritual Life,_ Memoir, p. 96.] In this power of complete relaxation their natures coincided. Her gaiety matched Sir Charles's own. This perhaps was the least of the bonds between them. The same high courage, the same capacity for tireless work, the same sense of public duty, characterized both.

Sir Charles's real home was the home of all his life, of his father and grandfather--No. 76, Sloane Street. Pyrford and Dockett were, like La Sainte Campagne at Toulon, mainly places for rest and play. This home was a house of treasures--of many things precious in themselves, and more that were precious to the owners from memory and a.s.sociation.

Through successive generations one member of the family after another had added to the collection. Many had been acc.u.mulated by the last owner, who slept always in the room that had been his nursery. He believed he would die, and desired to die, in the house where he was born. The desire was accomplished, for he died there, on January 26th, 1911, a few months before the long lease expired.

Partly from its dull rich colouring of deep blues and reds and greens, its old carpets and tapestries, partly from the pictures that crowded its walls, the interior had the air rather of a family country-house than of a London dwelling in a busy street.

Pictures, lining the walls from top to bottom of the staircase, represented a medley of date and a.s.sociation. Byng's Fleet at Naples on August 1st, 1718, with Sir Thomas Dilkes second in command, hung next to a view of the Chateau de la Garde, near Toulon. This picturesque ruin rose clear in the view from Sir Charles's house at Cap Brun, 'La Sainte Campagne,' and figures as an ill.u.s.tration in one of Lady Dilke's stories; 'Reeds and Umbrella Pines' at Carqueiranne, by Pownoll Williams, kept another memory of Provence. Next to a painting, by Horace Vernet, of a scene on the Mediterranean coast, little Anne Fisher, born 1588, exhibited herself in hooped and embroidered petticoat, quaint cap and costly laces, a person of great dignity at six years old. She was to be Lady Dilke of Maxstoke Castle and a shrewd termagant, mother of two sons who sided, one with the Commonwealth, the other with the King. The Royalist Sir Peter Wentworth was a great friend of Milton, with whom he came in contact on the Committee of State when Milton was Secretary for the Council of Foreign Tongues. But Cromwell turned him off the Council, and he was arrested and brought to London for abetting his Warwickshire tenantry in refusal to pay the Protector's war-taxes. Her Puritan son, Fisher Dilke, followed, with a sour-faced Puritan divine, and then came a group of water-colours by Thomas Hood, the author of 'The Song of the Shirt,' and an intimate friend of the Dilkes.

One of the ancestors, an earlier Peter Wentworth, son of Sir Nicholas Wentworth (who was Chief Porter of Calais, and knighted by Henry VIII.

at the siege of Boulogne), bore the distinction of having been three times sent to the Tower. The first was for a memorable speech on behalf of the liberties of the House of Commons, in 1575. Imprisonment does not seem to have taught him caution, for he was last imprisoned in 1593, because he had 'offended Her Majesty,' and a prisoner he remained till his death in 1596, occupying the period by writing a _Pithie Exhortation to Her Majesty for Establishing her Successor to the Crowne_.

Engravings of Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Harry Vane, Fulk Greville, Lord Burleigh, William Warham (the friend of Erasmus, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Chancellor), Queen Katharine Parr, Robert Devereux (Earl of Ess.e.x), who all came into the Dilke pedigree, hung on the walls. But the most interesting portrait might have been that of Sir Charles himself in fancy dress, the Sir Charles of the early eighties before trouble had lined his face or silvered his hair. This was the painting of Sir Thomas, afterwards Lord Wentworth, who died in 1551 and lies in Westminster Abbey. The reversion to type was so striking that guests would often ask to see again 'the best portrait of Sir Charles.'

[Footnote: This first Baron Wentworth had been knighted for his bravery in the taking of Braye and Montdidier in the expedition to France of 1523, and in 1529 was summoned to Parliament under the t.i.tle of Lord Wentworth of Nettlestead. He attended Henry VIII. in his interview with the French King at Calais, and under Edward VI. was Lord Chamberlain of the Household and a member of the Privy Council.]

Among more recent portraits and drawings were a group of trophies, ill.u.s.trating Sir Charles's experiences in the Franco-German War. Of three pa.s.ses, the first was carried when he was with the Crown Prince Frederick and the Knights of St. John; the other two showed the change in his sympathies from Germany to France--one from the Commune, the other from the national headquarters at Versailles. Here lay a bullet which struck the wall beside him at Clamart Railway Station, just missing him; pens taken from the table of the Procureur Imperial at Wissembourg when the first French town was entered by the Germans; and a trophy of his birthday in 1871, a bit of the Napoleonic Eagle from the Guard-room at the Tuileries, smashed by the crowd on that day, September 4th, when the Third Republic was proclaimed.

Then followed old photographs of members of Parliament and Cabinet Ministers; pictures of Maxstoke Castle, where the elder branch of the Dilkes had its home; etchings by Rajon; framed numbers of _Le Vengeur_, printed after the entry of the Versailles army into Paris during the 'semaine sang-lante'; addresses, including some in Greek, presented to Sir Charles on various occasions. In the double dining-room a famous portrait of Gambetta--the only portrait taken from life--hung over one mantelpiece. A favourite citation might have been upon the lips: 'La France etait a genoux. Je lui ai dit, "Leve-toi".' In 1875 Sir Charles asked Professor Legros to go to Paris and paint Gambetta, who never sat to any other artist. This portrait hangs now in the Luxembourg, and will ultimately be transferred to the Louvre, its destination by Sir Charles's bequest. The only other portrait of Gambetta is that by Bonnat, painted after death. It was the property of Dilke's friend M.

Joseph Reinach, and the two had agreed to bequeath these treasured possessions to the Louvre. But the Legros was the more authentic. M.

Bonnat said to Sir Charles: 'Mine is black and white; I never saw him.

Yours is red as a lobster. Mais il parait qu'il etait rouge comme un homard.' Sir Charles himself wrote: 'It is Gambetta as he lives and moves and has his being. What more can I ask for or expect?' He always predicted that its painter, whose merit had never in his opinion been adequately recognized, would after death come to his due place.

The rooms had been lined with the grandfather's books, but soon after he came into possession Sir Charles disposed of them. He had a strong belief in keeping round him only the necessary tools for his work, and a large library was an enc.u.mbrance to him. But sentiment was strong, and for some time they remained, till a comment of George Odger's sealed their fate. Looking round the shelves, he remarked with wonderment on the number of the books and the wisdom of the friend who had read them all. Sir Charles, conscious that he had not done so, and that he never should lead the life of a purely literary man, gave away the more valuable, and sold the rest of the collection. Lord Carlingford profited by the Junius papers; Mr. John Murray by the Pope ma.n.u.scripts; the British Museum by the Caryll papers; and pictures took the place of shelves. [Footnote: See Chapter XI. (Vol. I., pp. 161, 162).]