The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2

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He delighted in having near him the pictures of his friends, and there
were many on the next landing, in the vestibule and the Blue Room to
which it led. Mr. Chamberlain, keen-eyed and alert, looked out from
Frank Holl's canvas. Fawcett, [Footnote: Now in the National Portrait
Gallery, as also Holl's 'Chamberlain,' by Sir Charles's bequest.]
painted by Ford Madox Brown in 1871, recalled an earlier friendship, as
did the portrait of John Stuart Mill, who, never having sat to any
painter, just before his death allowed Watts to paint this for Sir
Charles. The picture came home on the day Mill died, and is the
original. It was left by will to the Westminster Town Hall. The picture
in the National Portrait Gallery is a replica, painted by Sir Charles's
leave. By Watts was also a beautiful portrait of Sir Charles himself,
the pendant to another which has gone. He and his first wife were
painted for each other, but the portrait of her seemed to him so
inadequately to render the 'real charm' of the dead woman that he
destroyed it. The illustrations of this book contain some reproductions
of pictures mentioned here.

Reminiscent of earlier family friendships were the Keats relics here and
in Sir Charles's own study. Many of these had been bought by old Mr.
Dilke from Keats's love, Fanny Brawne, to save them from the indignity
of an auction.

In the Blue Room also hung some extraordinarily fine pictures by Blake,
who was the friend of Sir Charles's grandfather--among them 'The
Crucifixion,' 'The Blasphemer,' and 'The Devil,' [Footnote: 'I gave four
of my Blakes to the South Kensington Museum in 1884.'] The best loved
both by the grandfather and by Sir Charles was the beautiful 'Queen
Catherine's Dream.' A precious copy of _The Songs of Innocence_,
hand-painted by Blake and his wife, completed the collection. There were
several reliefs by Dalou in the house, the finest let in over the
mantelpiece of the Blue Room, a copy of Flaxman's Mercury and Pandora.
They were executed for Sir Charles when the sculptor was in London in
great distress after the Commune, before the amnesty which retrieved his
fortunes.

Here also were reminiscences of Provence. One side of the wall was
largely covered by a picture of Frejus by Wislin, painted in the days
when St. Raphael and Valescure did not exist, and when the old town rose
clear from the low ground as Rome rises from the Campagna, the beautiful
Roquebrune, a spur of Sir Charles's beloved Mountains of the Moors,
behind it. Sevres china, vases, bronzes, filled the window ledges,
presents to the first Baronet from the Emperor of Austria, Napoleon
III., the Crown Prince of Prussia (afterwards the Emperor Frederick),
and other royal persons and Governments, with whom his Exhibition work
brought him into touch.

At the time when Horace Walpole's collection at Strawberry Hill was
sold, Sir Charles's grandfather had stayed at Twickenham, and had
brought away many purchases, which peopled the Red and Green
Drawing-rooms on the next landing. There was a little group of
miniatures in which the 'Beautiful Gunnings' and a charming 'Miss
Temple' figured; in another group, miniatures of Addison, of Mme. Le
Brun, of Moliere, came from Lady Morgan, whose pen of bog-oak and gold,
a gift to her from the Irish people, hung in Sir Charles's own study.
The best of the miniatures were those by Peter Oliver, and portrayed
Frederick of Bohemia, Elector Palatine, and his wife Elizabeth, Princess
Royal of England, afterwards married to Lord Craven; while the finest of
all was 'a son of Sir Kenelm Digby, 1632.' It was one of 'several
others' which Walpole 'purchased at a great price,' a purchase which was
thus chronicled 'by Mason (Junius) in a letter to Walpole: 'I
congratulate you on the new miniatures, though I know one day they will
become Court property and dangle under the crimson-coloured shop-glasses
of our gracious Queen Charlotte.' The set were all brought together for
the first time since 1842 at the Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition.

In these two drawing-rooms, among the medley of enamelled and inlaid
tables, royal gifts and collectors' purchases, pictures by Cranach,
Mabuse, Van Goyen, Mignard, and many more, some special objects stood
out. These were a beautiful Madonna by Memling, on a circular panel,
from Lord Northwick's collection; the Strawberry Hill marble version of
the famous Bargello relief by Donatello, of the head of the infant St.
John the Baptist; and a portrait ascribed to Cornelius Jansen, which,
owing to the fleurs-de-lis on the chair, passed by the name of 'the
Duchess,' a portly lady of some dignity, with beautiful white hands and
tapering fingers. Lady Dilke's researches, however, placed the lady as
Anne Dujardin, an innkeeper of Lyons. The painter, young Karl Dujardin,
unable to pay his reckoning, had settled it by marrying his hostess and
taking her to Amsterdam, and the fleurs-de-lis on the chair explained
that the lady was of French extraction. A Flemish head of Margaret of
Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, had come from the Gwydyr Collection.
She was much exhibited, but her main interest was due to Sir Charles's
intense admiration for the governing capacity and the overshadowed life
of the woman. He made two pilgrimages to the church at Brou, near
Bourg-en-Bresse, where her sculptured face, closely resembling that of
the portrait, looks out from tomb and windows, as she lies side by side
with Philibert le Beau, the husband of her love and of her youth, in the
magnificent shrine she built for him.

Tapestry hangings divided the rooms from each other, and in many cases
only heavy curtains divided them from the stairs.

Above these rooms, Sir Charles's little study, occupied all day by his
secretary or himself, was lined with books of reference and piles of
despatch-boxes, while every spare foot on the wall held relics of the
past. There was the Herkomer portrait of his second wife, there also a
copy of a favourite picture, Bellini's Doge Leonardo Loredano; the
portrait of Keats, the only one Severn did from the life--now on loan at
the National Portrait Gallery--old political cartoons of Chelsea days,
portraits and prints of John Wilkes, and a head of Mazzini. Felix
Moscheles (the nephew of Mendelssohn and baby of the Cradle Song)
painted Mazzini. Concerning its subject the Memoir notes: 'In the course
of 1872 I lost a good friend in Mazzini, whose enthusiasms, Italian and
religious, I at that time scarcely shared, but whose conversation and
close friendship I deeply valued.... The modernness of the Universal
Cigarette Smoking Craze may be judged by the fact that Mazzini was the
first man I ever knew who was constantly smoking cigarettes.'

The rest was a medley impossible to catalogue: portraits of Charles
Lamb, who had been the grandfather's friend; a scarce proclamation by
the Pretender; medals and other 'Caryll' relics; rapiers, pistols which
had travelled with Sir Charles through America; a section of the Trinity
Hall boat which was head of the river in 1862 and 1864; seven cups,
trophies of rowing, walking, fencing, and shooting matches, with shots
dug up on his Toulon estate which were mementoes of the British
blockades of the town. Apart from works of reference, a special case was
given to autographed books from Hood, Rogers the poet, Gambetta,
Laveleye, Louis Blanc, Castelar, Cardinal Manning, Queen Victoria, and
many more. In this collection figured all Sir Charles's college prizes,
carefully preserved; the family Bible of Lord Leicester, uncle to Sir
Philip Sidney, with Dilke family entries; and a little volume in which
his second wife had written for him some of the most beautiful passages
from 'Queens' Gardens' in _Sesame and Lilies_; it was bound in white
vellum and 'blessed by Ruskin.' Here, too, were many Keats letters and
books afterwards left by will to Hampstead.

A hoard of treasures filled a little book-room above--his mother's
sketches, drawings of his first wife driving her ponies in Sloane
Street, photographs and trinkets of hers, old family caricatures, and
also some original sketches by Leech. In the room next to it, occupied
by his grandmother till her death in 1882, was a John Collier of the
first Lady Dilke.

When the grandmother's sitting-room was used later by Sir Charles's
second wife, its main features were a small reference library of French
art and a collection of books on Labour. Before the fireplace, on the
writing-table as it was in 1885, were bowls of French porcelain filled
once a week with fresh flowers from the Toulon garden--paper white
narcissus and purple anemones or big violets of Provencal growth.

Sir Charles's bedroom above was the old nursery, connected with his
mother's room, in which he was born, and out of which opened a little
room where as a child he slept. His memories of that room were the
terrors of a nervous boy, lying alone in the dark, creeping downstairs
to sit--a tiny white-robed figure--as near as possible to the
drawing-room door, to get comfort from the hum of talk or thunder of the
four-handed piano pieces of the period.

His own room for many years was full of drawings by his second wife--her
studies under Mulready, her drawings for her _Renaissance_, and other
pen-and-ink sketches by her hand, as well as two miniatures of her by
Pollet. Some of Frank Dicey's Thames water-colours, one showing Sir
Charles's river house at Dockett Eddy, and sketches from his own pen or
brush made in his Russian, American, and world-wide wanderings, were
here also. In a tiny glazed bookcase by the fire were some 'favourite
books,' a volume or two of Kipling, two volumes of Anatole France, next
to a cookery book of 1600, Renan's _Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse_,
and a volume of Aubanel. The place of honour was given to a deeply
scored copy of Jeremy Taylor's _Golden Grove_.

Beside his great-uncle's Peninsular medal and clasps hung one of Roty's
medals, a present from the artist. There were several of Roty's
beautiful medallions in the house, the finest one of Sir Charles
himself, explained by the legend on the back as 'done for his wife.' She
had it made, and it was always with her.

There were a good many of W. E. F. Britten's pictures, painted for Sir
Charles; the finest was that of 'St. Francis preaching to the Birds,' a
thing of delicate colour and taste, which fitted with his love of the
Umbrian Holy Land and went later to the country cottage at Pyrford.
There was more force in a large crayon drawing of the Earl of
Southampton in the Tower: 'his cat had just arrived down the chimney,
probably saving his master's reason by relief of the intolerable tension
of lonely confinement.'

The painted cats, or Miss Chaplin's modelled pussies, of which there
were many, were seldom without some magnificent living representative at
76, Sloane Street. Zulu, an enormous dark long-haired cat, was very
popular; but the last of the 'Head Cats,' Calino, was so engaging that,
at his death about 1908, Sir Charles decided that he should never be
replaced. The sway of these cats was despotic, but there were occasions
on which their own territory was too limited for them, and messages
would come from far down the street demanding the removal of the
reigning favourite from some article of furniture where it had ensconced
itself with such majesty that a show of violence was out of the
question. Among his precious books was a cat story--privately printed
and bound--which his second wife had gradually evolved among the
wonderful essays in story-telling with which, when he was jaded, she
diverted him. This held so large a share in his affection that it nearly
displaced his little French copy of the _Contes de Perrault_, containing
the adventures of the Marquis of Carabas and Puss in Boots. At the
winter cottage at Pyrford, among the pines, was a cattery, where Persian
tailless cats, some ginger and some white, were bred. A list of names
was kept ready for them, and Babettes, Papillons, Pierrots and
Pierrettes, Mistigrises and Beelzebubs, were distributed to friends and
acquaintances. Among the treasured pathetic scraps kept in his father's
desk, his executors found a pencil drawing by his wife, the closed
window of a silent house, into which the perfectly sketched figure of a
little kitten was trying to enter.

In the gracious setting of this house the pervading atmosphere was that
of work. The three generations of Dilkes whom it had sheltered had each
found the sphere for which he was best fitted, and pursued it
tirelessly. The grandfather, beloved old scholar and critic; the father,
indefatigable organizer of international exhibitions, horticulturist,
newspaper proprietor, member of Parliament--both passed on the
traditions of strenuous labour to the great Parliamentarian who was now
the occupant of the house. He had absorbed those traditions and far
outvied his predecessors, working day and night, bringing down from his
bedroom almost illegible memoranda to be deciphered by his secretary in
the morning.

From 1880 to 1885 his accession to public office had intensified the
work. Messengers with official boxes waited in the hall; callers on
political or electoral business, to be interviewed by him or his
secretaries, filled the Blue and Red Rooms. After the morning's fencing
he passed rapidly from letters to interviews till the Office or the
House of Commons claimed him, and his faithful coachman, Charles Grant,
who when he died in 1901 had served his master for thirty years, waited
for him at the door. Yet with all this the house continued, as in his
father's day, to be noted for its hospitality, and the lists of guests
in the tattered diaries bear witness to the enormous and varied circle
of Sir Charles's friends. Here met foreign diplomatists and artists,
English statesmen, and men of letters. Even Cardinal Manning broke his
rule against dining out, as 'yours is a Cabinet dinner,' to come to 76,
Sloane Street; but as he met M. de Franqueville, Baron Ferdinand de
Rothschild, and the friend whom the Cardinal designated to be his
biographer, the future author of _France_, J. E. C. Bodley, there must
have been talk of other subjects than 'Housing of the Poor.' Indeed,
absence of 'shop' seems to have been one of the charms of these dinners,
and Mr. G. W. Osborn, the Chairman of the Chelsea Liberal Association,
records that, even when the local leaders met there, some outside
element was always introduced which made the talk general.

On another occasion Sir Charles notes: 'July 9th, 1884. On this day
Cardinal Manning dined with me, and gave me, in return for a Spanish
crucifix with which I had presented him, a miniature of "our patron, St.
Charles,"' which now, he adds, '(1891 and 1903) hangs in my bedroom.
Manning and H. von Bismarck met at my table--I think for the first
time.'

His first invitation to Mr. Gladstone, of October 26th, 1882, was to
meet the Duc de Broglie: 'the leader of the Conservative party in France
is at this moment a sufficiently interesting figure for me to think you
may like to come to meet him, if you are not engaged.'

Such social life, like the morning's rapid turn with the foils or the
Sunday afternoon on the river, helped to save him from breakdown under a
strain of work persistently intense. Another quality which saved him was
his power of turning at once and completely from one occupation to
another.

A friend thus describes him as he appeared in 1885: 'There was in him a
quality of boyishness I have never seen in any other man, coupled with
deep gravity and seriousness, and the transition from one mood to the
other came with lightning rapidity. Appeal to him on some question of
high politics, even at a moment of the most joyous relaxation, and his
face gravened, his bearing changed; he pulled himself together with a
trick of manner habitual to the end, and the 'boy' became the statesman
before it seemed the last echoes of his laughter had died away. We all
prophesied for him accession to the highest offices of the State; for
though so far the offices which he had held had been of but minor rank,
yet he had magnified these offices till they became of the first
importance, and his knowledge and authority were as great as were his
charm and his power of gathering round him supporters and friends. He
spoke with the authority of one who knows his value to the nation which
he serves.'

So with Sir Charles's second marriage the house entered on its last
phase, and the dark days which followed were lightened for its two
occupants by mutual confidence and the support of an abiding love.

CHAPTER XLVIII

FOREIGN POLICY

After a brief stay at Royat, whither doctor's orders had sent Lady
Dilke, Sir Charles returned with her, in September, 1886, to the little
riverside cottage at Dockett. Thence, as autumn drew on, they moved to
the other cottage that had been built among the pines on the sandy ridge
near Woking.

No longer having a seat in the House of Commons, Sir Charles again
resumed the pen, by which he had first gained distinction.

In the English home politics of 1887, the Irish Question predominated as
it had never done before: Home Rule was being thrashed out on every
platform. This was a matter on which Sir Charles, to use his own words,
'never clearly saw his way'; it was one that he naturally avoided, for
it had separated him from his most intimate political associate, and he
turned to the field of foreign affairs which had continuously occupied
him during his tenure of office, and which, save during the episode of
the franchise negotiations, had been his central concern.

For a moment he had the notion of entering into the business of
newspaper management. His object was not to secure literary reputation,
but to direct and influence public opinion. Early in 1887 he wrote to
his friend Mr. Thursfield of the _Times_:

'What I want is work on foreign affairs, or rather external affairs,
or foreign and colonial. I would prefer not to write, but to suggest
and supervise foreign news, and to work up the subjects of the
leaders which others would write. If I wrote, I think I should write
less well than other people, because I always write as I speak, and
not as people are taught to write.'

Nothing came of this idea; but it was a proposal remarkable in its
self-depreciation, because it was made when work from his pen was
already having a conspicuous success. Beginning in January, 1887, a
series of six articles dealing with the existing position of the six
Great Powers appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_, anonymously, but the
author was at once identified. They sent the _Review_ into repeated
editions. They appeared translated into French in the _Nouvelle Revue_,
and were discussed all over Europe. Later in the summer they were
published in book form, and called in English _The Present Position of
European Politics_ and in French _L'Europe en 1887_.

In the author's own words, the articles dealt with 'facts and
tendencies'; and though he would have been the last to hold himself a
prophet, saying that in the nature of things 'two years meant for ever
in politics,' much that he wrote is still of interest, and the
suggestion of Mr. Erskine Childers' hero that we should 'Read Dilke' is
not yet out of date. [Footnote: _Riddle of the Sands_, by Erskine
Childers, popular edition, p. 127. First published March, 1903.]

The keynote of the book is contained in the opening words, 'The present
position of the European world is one in which sheer force holds a
larger place than it has held in modern times since the fall of
Napoleon.' This reign of force the author traced back to 1878, the date
of the Treaty of Berlin, but it was originally due, as he pointed out,
to the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, which had left a permanent
source of irritation in the European States system. Nevertheless, he
recognized that for the time the continuance of Prince Bismarck's
policy, based as it was on the maintenance of the Treaty, meant peace,
because Prince Bismarck believed peace to be necessary for the
maintenance in undiminished strength of the German Empire, wedged in
between France and Russia, the former always hostile, the latter an
uncertain quantity. An alliance with Austria-Hungary was necessary to
this policy: an alliance dictated by the fact that no other was likely
to be permanent. Italy, it was true, had recently joined the alliance;
but Italy, like Russia, was an uncertain factor, and Sir Charles Dilke
believed that, if a critical moment were to come, the desire to get the
Trentino would be stronger than the ties of any alliance. The policy of
Prince Bismarck was accordingly to prevent a Russo-French alliance, and
to help Russia to push into the Far East; to help her also in the
Balkans, but not beyond the point at which Austria might remonstrate;
and to prevent Austria from seeking anything calculated to precipitate a
war between herself and Russia, such as an attempt to add to the
position which she had obtained in the Balkan Peninsula under the Treaty
of Berlin. This policy also involved keeping Turkey quiet and preventing
a league of the Balkan States, lest such a league should irritate Russia
and Austria and produce a European conflagration.

General Fadejew, in a celebrated pamphlet [Footnote: General Fadejew,
_Ueber Russland's Kriegsmacht und Kriegspolitik_, Leipzig, 1870,
translated from the Russian.] which fluttered all the Chancelleries of
Europe in the early seventies, had said that the road from Russia to
Constantinople lay through Vienna; and Vienna, Sir Charles agreed with
the Russian general, was the centre to be watched, for it was there that
the key of European policy was to be found. 'Austria interests me,' he
wrote, when preparing his book, to Sir William White, the Ambassador at
Constantinople. 'I can't leave London, but I'm thinking of sending a man
to Vienna to tell me certain things. If so, to whom should he go?' And
he watched the strange development of events in Bulgaria. Early in
January he notes an interview with 'Dr. Stoiloff, the ablest man except
the brutal Stambuloff, and the leader of the Conservative party' in
Bulgaria, where the perpetual intrigues of Russian agents, official and
unofficial, had recently culminated, in August, 1886, in the kidnapping
of the reigning chief of the State, Prince Alexander of Battenberg, and
had thereby created an Austrian party: events which were to have many
long-drawn-out consequences, as the following century to its own cost
was to find out. Bulgaria from this time began to move in an orbit of
her own, distinct from, and often unfriendly to, the other Balkan
States.

In 1887 it was still a current belief--especially on the part of many of
Sir Charles's own political friends--that Germany was eagerly watching
for an opportunity to seize the German provinces of Austria, and that
Austria was eagerly watching for an opportunity 'to go to Salonica,' as
the current phrase had it. The two propositions were almost mutually
destructive, but, without insisting on this rather obvious
consideration, Sir Charles was well aware that (even apart from reasons
of international policy) Germany could not desire the disruption of
Austria, because the German provinces of Upper and Lower Austria and
Styria did not lie next to North Germany, but were cut off from it by
countries in which the most enterprising of all Slavonic peoples--the
Czechs of Bohemia--'hated the Germans with a deadly hatred,' and
already, even in 1887, had got the upper hand. Count Bismarck himself
had resisted--and successfully--the desire of the military party to
annex Bohemia in 1866 after Sadowa. The permanent exclusion of Austria
and the House of Hapsburg from Germany was also no sudden or ephemeral
policy. In the middle of the seventeenth century, as the author of the
_Holy Roman Empire_ had reminded his readers, it had been proposed by
the famous publicist Philippe Chemnitz, who wrote under the name of
'Hippolytus a Lapide,' as the surest means of securing a permanent unity
of some kind in Germany. [Footnote: See Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_,
chap. xx., p. 386; Louis Leger, _Histoire de l'Autriche-Hongrie_, chap.
xv., p. 258.] It had been adopted by the leaders in the Frankfurt
Parliament of 1848-49, and Count Bismarck was the inheritor of these
traditions when he finally expelled the House of Hapsburg in 1866, and
thus translated ancient theories into modern facts. It was therefore
highly improbable, to say the least, that only a few years after the
Treaty of Berlin he should be engaged in an attempt to nullify his own
work. [Footnote: On January 14th, 1849, the Frankfurt Parliament voted
the exclusion of Austria from Germany.]

Austria, Sir Charles Dilke pointed out, some day by mere competition
with Russia, if that Power made further advances, might perhaps be
forced forward unwillingly to Salonica; but by thus seizing Macedonia--a
far larger proposition than that of the annexation of Bosnia and the
Herzegovina, and in many respects a different one--it was clear she
would 'increase her military weakness, would deeply offend the Servians,
the Greeks, and the Bulgarians, and by increasing the number of her
Slavonic subjects would only hasten her own break-up.' Here, in fact,
lay the real danger to the 'Eastern Empire.' Prince Bismarck, as a
matter of fact, was of all men in Europe the man who most desired to
keep Austria alive. 'It is a necessity to him that she should continue
to exist. Once destroy Austria, and Germany is left to fight it out with
France and Russia without assistance, for in this case Italy would not
move,' notwithstanding the recently renewed Triple Alliance. That a
military party existed in Austria which might desire to go to Salonica,
and would also rejoice in a war with Italy, Sir Charles was well aware;
but he saw no reason to believe that it would succeed in forcing these
adventures on the Ballplatz, or on the statesmen of Hungary, who above
all things dreaded an increase of the Slavonic elements in the Empire.
The Austria-Hungary of 1887 was the Austria-Hungary of the long rule of
Count Taafe at Vienna, of M. Koloman Tisza at Buda-Pesth, and of Count
Kalnoky at the Ballplatz; and it was not unreasonable at that time to
consider it possible that, 'after the division of the respective spheres
of influence of Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, in Macedonia, Austria
might gradually increase her influence in the Balkan States; and if she
would take the bold step of making up an arrangement for evacuating part
of Bosnia and the Herzegovina, so as to show she had no intention of
going southwards to Salonica, she might bring together in a general
understanding with herself the small States and the Turks.' This,
however, Sir Charles admitted, was probably impracticable, 'as Austro-
Hungarian pride would effectually prevent the abandonment of any portion
of Bosnia.' But so late as 1909 Dilke told Lord Fitzmaurice, when, at
the time of her final annexation of Bosnia and the Herzegovina,
Austria-Hungary had retired from the Sandjak of Novi Bazar, that he
thought the British Foreign Office 'had made too great a fuss' over the
annexation, which had been certain to come, sooner or later. [Footnote:
Lord Fitzmaurice was then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and
represented the Foreign Office in the House of Lords. See further as to
Sir Charles Dilke's' views on the events of 1908, Chapter LVIII.]