Lord Salisbury, he fully believed, had become acquainted in 1877, if not

before, with the substance of an agreement between Russia and Austria

which contemplated, amongst other things, the annexation by the latter

of the Provinces; and it was perfectly clear, from what passed at the

Berlin Congress, that in 1878, before the meeting, Lord Salisbury must

himself have concluded an engagement with Austria-Hungary, though the

word "annexation," no doubt, did not appear in it, and more general

terms probably were used, but containing no reservation, and promising

support to the Austrian policy in those Provinces. Technically the

engagement might have lapsed with the treaty, and probably it had; but

the fact remained, with its moral consequences. Meanwhile Lord

Beaconsfield had taken Cyprus from Turkey, and had given a greater shock

to Europe, by the form and the secrecy of the proceedings, than could

possibly attach to the recent unilateral action of Austria-Hungary.

During the proceedings at Berlin, it must also be remembered, Lord

Salisbury had practically promised Tunis to France. Turkish sovereignty

was technically, indeed, still maintained in Cyprus, as it also had been

for thirty years in Bosnia and the Herzegovina, [Footnote: See, on the

whole subject. Hanotaux, _La France Contemporaine_, vol. iv., pp. 314,

363-370; _Etudes Diplomatiques: La Politique de l'Équilibre_, by the

same author, p. 184. A secret clause was signed on July 13th, 1878, by

the Austro-Hungarian Plenipotentiaries, in which the occupation was

described as temporary and ordered to be the subject of a special

arrangement with Turkey. The secret clause was really made to save the

face of the Turkish Plenipotentiaries on their return to

Constantinople.] and as it was at that time in the Sudan; but at no time

did the Turks expect to see those territories again under their

effective sovereignty. Insistence on the letter of the treaty also

weakened our position in regard to Crete, where, as he had so frequently

contended, nobody could wish or believe the position made by the treaty

to be permanent. Lastly, he insisted that the policy into which we had

been drawn by M. Isvolski had been damaging to our interests, not only

because it had strengthened the ties between the members of the Triple

Alliance, but because it assisted the popularity in Germany of a naval

rivalry, which oppressed us with the cost of ever-increased armaments at

sea.

Sir Edward Grey, he went on to say, had taken for his text the

declaration of the London Conference of 1871 as to the denunciation by

Russia, in 1870, of the Black Sea clauses of the treaty of 1856. But

Russia got her way, and had practically been told she would get it on

the main question before the Conference met. When in 1885 Eastern

Roumelia was swallowed by Bulgaria, all the Great Powers theoretically

protested, but nothing came of their remonstrance. In 1886 Russia broke

the article of the treaty which related to the port of Batoum; and Lord

Rosebery, no doubt, wrote a despatch based on the same doctrine as that

now adopted by Sir Edward Grey. But Lord Rosebery at least avoided

introducing new matters. His final despatch concluded with the words:

"It must be for other Powers to judge how far they can acquiesce in this

breach of an international engagement." Russia again succeeded. Why,

then, have complicated the original issue in the present case by joining

with Russia and France, at the instigation of the former, in putting

forward suggestions to be considered at a European Conference for the

territorial expansion of Servia, if possible to the Adriatic, and in

regard to the Danube, that thorniest of diplomatic subjects? [Footnote:

"L'indépendance des bouches du Danube est pour nous un dogme" were the

words attributed to Count Andrassy in June, 1877 (Hanotaux, _La France

Contemporaine_, iv. 315). See, too, the opinion of Radetzki, quoted by

René Henry, _Questions d'Autriche-Hongrie_, p. 128.]

"Our action," Dilke argued, "in such matters ought to be, as it

generally is, to bring people together for public peace, and not to

interfere with matters where our interfering in details is certain to be

resented. Of course, there was more than this in the German resistance.

That resistance was always, I think, certain. It was certain to be

provoked by common action on the part of the three Powers in such

matters, but it was doubly caused by the indiscreet language used, not

by us, but by the Press, in support of the three Governments, and

officially in Russia. We heard talk about Russia having at last

completely joined two Western Powers in an anti-Austrian movement, and

articles headed 'Revelations of a New Triple Alliance' were calculated

to intensify opposition on the part of Austria and Germany.

"The net result has been a set-back, not so much for us as for our

supposed and suspected client, Servia. Servia has had her position

very much worsened by our interference on her behalf. It is

unfortunate that small Provinces in the Balkans should be in this

position, that when Powers who are not going to fight appear to take

up their cause against neighbouring Powers, however natural and wise

it may be in the abstract, the result is almost certain to be to

make their position worse; and undoubtedly there has been a set-

back, caused by us and Russia, to Servia. We have not even with us

our Mediterranean ally Italy, because Italy herself abstained from

supporting us in this matter, as she was bound to abstain under her

engagements. I therefore end this part of the matter by saying I

think we have set the doctrine of the sacredness of the Treaty of

Berlin, in the circumstances, too high. We have had two previous

examples of the risk of setting up that doctrine, and pressing it

too far, in such a case. We have tried to set it up on two previous

occasions, and have failed. The second of those two occasions, in

1886, is very clear. There was a distinct violation of an article of

the Treaty of Berlin, and of the protocol outside that article. Lord

Rosebery wrote a strong despatch with regard to that violation, and

he raised the same comparison of 1871 as we raised on this question,

but nothing happened. That is a very long time ago, and the Treaty

of Berlin has not become more sacrosanct since 1886 than it was at

that time, which was more near its conclusion. My main point is, we

have supported principles that we could not justifiably or wisely

support. If we had had any political or European idea behind us, any

idea of improving the conditions of peoples, or of giving greater

liberty to the peoples, the country would have been more inclined to

give support than it is on the mere bare doctrine of the sacredness

of a treaty. On the last occasion when these matters were discussed,

the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs made a most brilliant

speech on the Naval Vote of Censure. In that speech he defended what

is very near the old doctrine of the balance of power in Europe. No

one will take exception to his statement of the effect of the

existing balance upon our position in Europe. The danger is now, as

it was 100 years ago, and still more 120 or 130 years ago, that you

may be tempted by these understandings, which are good, to convert

them into something very near, but not quite, an alliance, and to

pursue a policy in support of the balance of power which will keep

you in permanent hot water all round with everybody, and will risk

war."

How far the belief in the existence of a policy of encirclement, as the

current phrase went, which existed in Germany from 1905 to 1909,

[Footnote: See Hanotaux, _La Politique de l'Équilibre_, chap, xxiii.;

Reventlow, 279, 296-305; Baron Beyens, _L'Allemagne avant la Guerre_,

pp. 220-221.] was justified is a matter which the historian of the

future will have to discuss. Certain it is, however, that the British

Foreign Office after 1909 gave no just cause of offence to Germany. The

disappointing outcome of supporting Russia in the negotiations connected

with Bosnia; the failure at this time of the Entente to produce any

satisfactory results in Crete and in various negotiations at

Constantinople, where French policy was deemed to be influenced by

considerations more financial than political; the friendly reception of

King Edward VII. at Berlin in February, 1909, and the great changes

which death or retirement brought about, in the years immediately

succeeding, in the personnel of the Ministries of Germany, France,

Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Italy--amongst others the retirement of the

German Chancellor--produced a new situation. [Footnote: Hanotaux, _La

Politique de l'Équilibre_, chap, xviii.; Reventlow, p. 339. Prince von

Bülow resigned on July 20th, 1909; M. Clemenceau on July 14th, 1909; M.

Isvolski and M. Tittoni in October, 1910; and Count Aerenthal in

February, 1912.]

In 1910 things seemed to point again to the possibility of clearer

skies. The negotiations between Germany and Great Britain in regard to

the Bagdad Railway and the still outstanding African questions were

resumed, and proceeded without any serious hindrance. Favourable results

seemed, and with good reason, to be in sight. There were also

negotiations between Germany and Russia. Thus it was that, a few days

before he passed away, Sir Charles was justified in still writing in a

hopeful strain that the Great War could and would be avoided--fortunate

at least in this, that he did not live to see the breaking up of the

foundations of the great deep. [Footnote: In his recently published

work, _England and Germany_, 1740-1914, Mr. Bernadotte Schmitt says,

speaking of the beginning of the year 1911--prior, it is to be

remembered, to the Agadir incident: "In the early summer of 1911,

Anglo-German relations, if not cordial, had lost much of the animosity

engendered by the Bosnian troubles of 1908 and the naval scare of 1909.

The German Emperor had been well received when he attended the obsequies

of his uncle, Edward VII., and again on the occasion of the unveiling of

the national monument to Queen Victoria in May, 1911. On the 13th of

March of the same year, Sir Edward Grey had remarked upon the friendly

relations obtaining with all the Powers.... In Germany the death of

Edward VII., who passed for the inspirer of the _Einkreisungs Politik_,

caused a feeling of relief." Speaking of the period immediately

preceding the outbreak of the war, the same author observes: "Whatever

Germany's motives may have been, the fact remained that in July, 1914,

Anglo-German relations were more cordial than they had been at any time

since the Boer War.... The tragedy of the Great War lies in the fact

that early in the summer of 1914 a substantial agreement had been

reached between Great Britain and Germany on those matters about which

they had previously disagreed" (pp. 195, 373). This book, by an American

Rhodes Scholar of the Western Reserve University, is a very valuable and

impartial contribution to the history of recent events. On the condition

of things in 1911 and 1912, see also the despatches of Count Lalaing and

Baron Beyens, from London and Berlin, to M. Davignon, the Belgian

Minister for Foreign Affairs, published in the official German White

book, _Belgische Actenstücke_, 1905-1914, pp. 85, 113.]

CHAPTER LIX

THE LAST YEARS

I.

Call no man happy or unhappy, said the philosopher, till you see his

end. With Sir Charles Dilke's life clear before us, if the question be

put, "Was he happy?" only one answer can be given. He was happy. With a

power of suffering which made bereavement poignant, with tragic

experience of disappointment and distress, he never lost the faculty of

enjoyment: he touched the world at many points, and his contact was

complete and vital.

Therefore, in the life that he lived after his second wife's death there

was nothing gloomy or half-hearted. At Pyrford and Dockett the same

interests continued to hold their charm, though in his home of homes,

the home that he did not make, but was born into, there was a change. At

76, Sloane Street, he still slept, breakfasted, and did his morning's

work; but he would never willingly return there for dinner, except on

very rare occasions when he entertained guests, or spend the evening

there.

He still enjoyed the life of the House of Commons. Old friends were a

pleasure, new-comers a fresh spring of interest, and the younger men

naturally drew round this most willing teacher. One of the young

Liberals [Footnote: Mr. A. F. Whyte, M.P.] who came within his influence

describes the amazing interest of his talk, with its personal memories

of the leading personalities in Europe during half a century past. But

the true attraction was something simpler than that. "He made you

extraordinarily fond of him."

What is implied in that very simple phrase has been set out by another

friend of an opposing political school, brought into touch with him by a

common interest in Social Reform: [Footnote: Mr. J. W. Hills, M.P.]

"What first brought us together I forget; I think it was some action

I took with regard to sweated trades. At any rate he asked me to

stay for a Sunday at Dockett Eddy; and after my first visit I went

often. For one thing, we were both devoted to rowing; he was, of

course, a far more distinguished and accomplished oarsman than I,

but he and I went extraordinarily well together in a pair. Everyone

who has rowed knows that pair-oar rowing is the most difficult, as

it is the most fascinating, form of the art. We had many long rows

together.

"The life at Dockett Eddy had an atmosphere and a colour different

from that of other houses. Breakfast was at a fairly early hour.

After breakfast, Dilke was invisible till lunch. Lunch was at 12.30,

French in character, and always, wet or fine, took place on the

broad verandah which ran along one side of the house. During the

afternoon Dilke rowed on the river, walked about the green and

winding paths of his beloved willow-clad island, and talked to his

friends. The prevailing recollection that I shall always have of

Dockett Eddy is good talk. No one who did not talk to Dilke knew the

man. His speeches--at any rate, from 1906 to his death--did not give

all his qualities. These came out in his talk. His amazing

knowledge, which occasionally overloaded his speeches and diverted

them from their main argument, wove itself naturally into the

texture of his talk and gave it a wonderful richness and depth. And

he talked to everybody and on all subjects; and to all he brought

his tremendous vitality and his vivid and many-sided personality.

You always felt that the whole force of the man was behind what he

said--the active, eager, questioning mind, determined to master all

facts that gave true knowledge, and when this was done, when all

facts were noted and weighed, coming to a conclusion which was both

clear-cut and unalterable. He was most tolerant of the views of

others, and never overwhelmed with greater knowledge; but all that

he had in him he gave freely and without stint. The talks I

recollect best are either on industrial conditions in other

countries, or on French history from 1848 onwards, or on English

politics. On French history I always listened to him with delight;

he not only knew literally every fact and every date, but he also

knew personally most of the great men who had latterly played

leading parts. On English politics it was characteristic of the man

to have a tremendous belief in the present. For instance, I said

something about the decadence of Parliament and Parliamentary

speaking. He at once burst out: 'You are quite wrong. The men of

to-day are much greater than their predecessors'; and then he went

through all our prominent politicians and compared them with the men

of the past. The only comparisons I remember are Winston Churchill

with his father, and Asquith with Disraeli and Gladstone, in each

instance to the advantage of the present generation.

"Dilke was a great man, if ever there was one. He was a man of big

ideas, too big for prejudice or suspicion or self-interest. His mind

was at once imaginative and matter-of-fact, making him that rare

combination, a practical idealist. But the abiding memory which I

shall retain of him as long as I live is not his wide knowledge, his

singleness of purpose, his vital energy and driving force, so much

as the friendship he gave me. He put the whole of himself into his

friendship, and gave himself abundantly and without reserve. He was

so great a man, and meant so much to his friends, that he played a

large part in the lives of all he honoured with his regard. Though I

only knew him during the last three years, he filled so big a place

in my life that his death left a wide and empty gap. I regarded him

with love and veneration."

"He talked to everybody and on all subjects," and he talked to everybody

on a common ground of fellowship. Newman, the cabdriver at Shepperton,

beside whom he always insisted on sitting when he came to Dockett; Jim

Haslett, his ferryman; Busby, his old gardener and lodge-keeper at

Pyrford: these no less than "Bill" East who rowed with him, and "Fred"

Macpherson with whom he fenced, keep the same memory of his friendliness

and of the pleasure that they had in being with him. For his

constituents he was more than a representative: he was their friend, a

personal influence, a centre of affection in the lives of many among

them. "I hardly know what to do or say," wrote one of them after his

death. "For one man to say of another it seems strange, but I _loved_

Sir Charles."

Into this affection there entered that peculiar tenderness of loyalty to

the wronged which finds fit expression in these words of his old

comrade, Judge Steavenson, who had known his life since they were young

athletes together in the Trinity Hall boat: "I loved him, my oldest and

best friend, and how I mourn him! The tragedy of his life has been pain

and suffering to me for more years than I care to remember. Some say a

little band of friends never wavered in their belief in his innocence. I

am one, and so believing in good time I shall go to my grave."

Many a brave man has under the sense of injustice grown hard and bitter;

it was not so with Sir Charles. After his death a friend's widow wrote

to one who mourned him: "I should like to tell you how divinely kind he

was to me in my great grief." A lady who for long years had been on a

bed of pain said of his visits to her: "He seems to take your suffering

from you and give it back to you on a higher plane. I think he

understands because he has suffered so much himself."

In these last years after Lady Dilke's death, Sir Charles resumed, in

some moderate degree, the old habit of travel. From 1906 it grew to be

an institution that, when the Trade-Union Congress closed its sittings

in autumn, he should meet the editor of this book and her friend Miss

Constance Hinton Smith, [Footnote: Who attended these Congresses as

visitors representing the Women's Trade-Union League.] and with them

proceed leisurely from the trysting-place to Dean Forest for his annual

visit to the constituency. Thus in different years they set out from

Tewkesbury, from Bath, from Leicester, from Ipswich, and explored towns

and country places of beauty or historic interest, under the guidance of

one who had the gift for placing every detail in its setting, whether on

the physical map of England or on that crowded chart which depicts the

long course of British history. For him these journeys were each a

revisiting of places seen before--seen, as he would often recall, under

his grandfather's guidance in boyhood.

The annual Christmas visit to Paris, where his son often joined him, was

revived in company of his secretary, Mr. Hudson, and his wife. In more

than one autumn, after his stay in the Forest of Dean was completed, he

made a journey through Switzerland to the Italian lakes. He journeyed

under a resolution not to visit any gallery of pictures, for these must

recall too poignantly the companionship which had made the special joy

of all his picture-seeing. But he sent his companions that they might

compare their impressions with his memory, always astonishingly vivid

and exact. The sights to which he gave himself were sun and air,

mountain and lake. Here, as in England, trees especially appealed to

him, and in the famous garden of the Isola Madre on Lago Maggiore he

amazed the gardener by his acquaintance with all the collection, from

the various kinds of cypress and cedar down to the least impressive

shrub. But what gave him most pleasure was the actual journeying,

awakening not only associations with the places seen, but memories of

other places in far-off corners of the earth.

In the last year of his life the International Association for Labour

Legislation met at Lugano, and he stopped there on his autumn tour. His

health was already failing, he attended no meetings and received few

visitors; but experts in the subject, Ministers and ex-Ministers of

Labour from Prussia, France, Canada, and other countries, sought him, to

consult him on points of international policy. Two years later, when the

Congress met again at Zurich, M. Fontaine recalled the memory of Sir

Charles and the "conseils précieux" which other workers drew from him in

their interviews. It was only when the Congress was over that the

holiday really began, with a day on Maggiore and two days on Orta,

before the travellers made for their real destination, Aosta among its

hills, a scene new to him as to them, that filled him with fresh life.

All about it charmed him: the mountains, the Roman gateways, the

mediaeval cloisters, the long procession of the cattle coming down from

the hill-slopes during the night; the keen air gave him energy to walk

as he had never thought to walk again; and, for a touch of familiar

humours, the landlord of the rough little inn where they stayed had been

in his day a waiter in Willis's Rooms and remembered his guest among the

diners there.

An accident to one of his companions had caused him to go on alone, and,

accordingly, when he came back to Turin to fetch them it was as a guide

already fully qualified. On the drive up from Ivrea, in a valley whence

can be seen at the same moment Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, and the glacier

of the Gran Paradiso, he could show them the fort of Bard, blocking the

gorge just as in the days when it checked Napoleon on his road to

Marengo. But the memories awakened in him were not only of Napoleon; the

valley of the Dora Baltea was a complete image of the Khyber Pass, and

Bard the very counterpart of Ali Musjid.

As they came home through France, halt was made at Lyons, and, though he

refused to see the gallery, he could describe almost every canvas and

the place where it hung; but best of all he remembered Charlet's great

picture of the retreat from Moscow and the army that "dragged itself

along like a wounded snake." In Paris, too, on that homeward journey a

stop was made, and since few of his friends were yet back from the

country, there was more theatre-going than usual. Guitry, his favourite

actor, was not playing, but Brasseur and Eve la Vallière amused him, and

he found special delight in the _Mariage de Mademoiselle Beulemans_. Yet

not even the acting of Jaques as the good-natured, choleric old Belgian

brewer could induce him to depart from his practice of going away after

the first act.

Three times in the last years of his life he went back to Provence. The

first of these visits was in the January of 1909, and he with his

companions set out from Paris on the last day of the old year,

travelling by motor-car in defiance of heavy snow and frost. These made

obstacles which only gave piquancy to his journey through scenes where

stories of the Franco-German War crowded to his tongue, and when

difficulties delayed the car he struck up wayside intimacies--once with

an old non-commissioned officer now transformed into a _Garde

Champêtre_, anon with a peasant couple from whose cottage he begged hot

water to make tea. In one such household, arriving with beard and

moustache frozen white, he announced himself to the children of the

family group as Father Christmas, and made good his claim with

distribution of little gifts.

At Hyères he was rejoined by the old servant, once his gardener and

vine-dresser, who had marketed the produce of La Sainte Campagne in the

days when Sir Charles was trading, like any other petty Provençal

landowner, in grapes and artichokes, mimosa and roses and violets, for

the Toulon market. That former life lived again in his talk as he

recalled those whom he had known in his Provençal home: neighbours,

servants, local politicians; and from his hotel at Hyères he never

failed to make excursions to Toulon, and to visit his old friend and

sometime man of business, M. Bertrand, who would carry him to the café

frequented by the leading citizens, to feast on a Provençal déjeuner

with red mullet and bouillabaisse. Another recurring visit was to Émile

Ollivier at La Moutte, his beautiful seaward-facing house on the

promontory beyond Saint Tropez.

"Sir Dilke" had friends everywhere in that corner of the world. His near

neighbour at Cap Brun, M. Noël Blache, leader of the local bar, a famous

teller of Provençal stories and declaimer of Provençal verse, said of

him: "He knows our country and our legends better than we know them

ourselves." In the years during which he lived for part of the

twelvemonth at Toulon he had followed every winding of the coast, had

explored all the recesses of the hills.

"It is my boast, probably vain," he wrote to M. André Chevrillon in

1909, "to have invented the Mountains of the Moors. Sizeranne had been

staying there for six weeks before he came into the British Hyères, but,

_he_, only on the coast. When I first showed that coast to Émile

Ollivier, Noël Blache, then President of the Conseil-Général of the Var,

and Félix Martin, the latter advised the narrow-gauge railway which

ruined the politicians of the Var, and became 'le Panama du Midi.' My

journey this time was to assure myself that the road and railway along

the coast had not spoilt the _interior_. They have improved indeed, and

I was glad, a road from the entrance to the forest on the main road from

Hyères to Cogolin, turning to the north over two cols to Collobrières.

The T.C.F. has made a road from Collobrières up the hill to the

south-east, whence the walk to La Chartreuse de la Verne is easy. I used

to have to reach that spot from Campo, the police post on the stream,

called Campeaux upon the maps. The whole forest is unharmed. It is

unknown to the British inhabitants of Hyères. Not one had been there,

or, I think, heard of it; and I met no human creature upon some twelve

miles of the finest parts of the improved road. Grimaud, at the other

end, I have no doubt you know. It was the Moorish capital. I went there

the day that I lunched with Émile Ollivier this time. There was a foot

of ice on the top, at La Garde-Freinet, and one looked back, down on to

Grimaud, standing baked by an African sun, and could make out the ripe

oranges and the heads of the great cactus."

"Why does not someone 'discover' France?" he writes to M. Joseph

Reinach. "How few Frenchmen know the sunset view _north_ from St. Tropez

in January!" And again to M. Chevrillon in 1909: "I adore the solitude

of Sainte Baume, and believe in Marie Madeleine--except her head and

tomb at St. Maxime, where Brutus Bonaparte helped keep the inn.

[Footnote: The eldest of the Bonapartes was not the only person of the

Napoleonic days as to whom stories were told in the neighbourhood.

Désirée Clary was said to have lived at the inn of St. Maxime, and Sir

Charles wrote to Mr. Morley concerning La Sainte Campagne: "My old

cottage is supposed to be that where Murat was concealed after the 100

days."] Intellect is represented here by Robert de la Sizeranne, _but_

it is only two and a half hours in motor or two and a half by rail to La

Moutte, where I make É. Ollivier read his fourteenth volume!"

All the little hill towns were known to him, and their history; he could

show the spot at Cavalaire where the Moorish lords of Provence trained

their famous horses; he knew the path at Le Lavandou, worn into the

solid rock by the bare feet of countless generations. It irked him that

the plain of Fréjus was spoilt by the intrusion of white villas on what

had once been called "a better Campagna." But these changes were of the

surface only. Provence was still Provence, its people still unchanged

from the days when Gambetta said to Sir Charles of one who projected a

watercourse at Nice: "Jamais il ne coulera par cette rivière au tant

d'eau qu'il n'en dépensera de salive à en parler." There was still the

local vintage in every inn, still the _beurre du berger_, the cheese and

the conserves of fruit which every housewife in Provence sets out with

pride in her own making; still the thin breeze of the mistral through

the tree-tops, still the long white roads running between fields of

violets and narcissi, and still white farmhouses among the terraced

oliveyards and vines. All these things were an abiding joy, but a

greater joy than all, and still more unchangeable, was the daily

oncoming of light, the subtle flush and gradations of colour before the

sun rose from that beloved sea.

II.

In the year 1908 Sir Charles's health had been very bad, and he risked

his life in attending the annual miners' meeting at the Speech House,

leaving Dockett Eddy, as his custom was, at six in the morning, and

returning home the same night. But by the following year he had regained

his physical condition and his cheerfulness. The aspect of politics,

too, had been transfigured. Speaking to his constituents in September,

1909, he reminded them how a year earlier the Liberal party had been

despondent.

'This year all of them felt that the Government, with the country

behind it--for the country was thoroughly behind the Government in

the matter of the Budget--had taken, not only a new lease of life,

but had adopted an attitude which on the whole, apart from any

little doubts in reference to particular details, commanded a

confident and an enthusiastic support on the part of a wider

majority of people than any other movement of modern times.'

He told them of his own objections to the famous Budget--one in regard

to the cider duty, upon which he had carried his point, the other to the

increased tax on tobacco, which he had unsuccessfully resisted. So long

as tea and tobacco were taxed as they were, the working classes, in his

judgment, paid more than their just proportion. Still, a great stride

forward had been taken. As for the House of Lords throwing out the

Budget, "those who did not like that Chamber wanted that fight, but it

did not seem to him natural that the House of Lords would desire it,

because it appeared to him to be a fight in which the Peers were

perfectly certain to be beaten." Nevertheless it came to pass, a General

Election followed, and the huge independent Liberal majority

disappeared. Sir Charles was active to keep together the various

sections which most desired to limit the power of the House of Lords,

and on February 22nd, 1910, he, on behalf of the Radicals, held an

interview with the Labour and Irish leaders together, to ascertain and

discuss the line of action contemplated. Also, since there was a

proposal that Government should, as a matter of urgency, oust private

members and take all the time of the House, he saw Mr. J. S. Sandars,

Mr. Balfour's chief private secretary, and in Sir Charles's phrase

"factotum," to find out what the Opposition was going to do.

In the debates upon the Government's Resolutions which laid the

foundation for the Parliament Act, Sir Charles took no part. The matter

had gone as he desired.

By April the Resolutions were adopted; but before action by Bill could

be begun, the Parliamentary struggle was suspended by the death of King

Edward. In that national loss Sir Charles Dilke felt special sorrow.

Whether as Prince of Wales or as King, the dead Sovereign had

consistently shown him, not merely consideration, but friendship. It was

among the satisfactions of Sir Charles's last years of life that the

principle, for which he had incurred odium by contending forty years

earlier, now came to be fully recognized as that most respectful to the

Crown. Lord Knollys writes that on the accession of King Edward VII.,

Sir Charles had called and "offered to support any reasonable Civil List

which might be proposed." A Civil List Committee was appointed, on which

Sir Charles served, and the result of its deliberations was to recommend

a discontinuance of occasional grants from Parliament to members of the

Royal Family. It did not, indeed, go to the length of making adequate

provision for the family and leaving its distribution to the King, which

was what Sir Charles always recommended; but it moved far in that

direction, and to that extent carried out his views.

The royal funeral brought to London another Sovereign with whom Sir

Charles had friendly personal relations, and the last page in his Memoir

tells of a 'long talk with King George of Greece at Buckingham Palace.'

The King was inclined to deprecate the summoning of a National Assembly

for that autumn. He called it "stupid," whereat, says Sir Charles,

'blank look on my part.' Then, after a pause ('whereas till then we had

talked in a perpetual duet'), the King went on to admit that the

National Assembly was his own creation.

"Well, I was against it at first because we can do by law already

everything that is to be done by the National Assembly. But I saw that

it was the only way out."

"I am glad, Sir," Sir Charles quickly rejoined, "that I was not

'stupid,' for I attributed the invention to" (and he pointed) "its

author."

The King, however, was afraid that some might "blame him," and when Sir

Charles answered, "No one," he quoted the phrase once applied to him:

"Bon petit roi, manque d'énergie." The reply was: "I don't know who said

that, Sir! Your prestige is exactly opposite to the German Emperor's

prestige, but equally important to your country and to peace. It may

have been a fool who said it, but it was probably chaff."

"... My family?"

"Oh, well, that is chaff--that is what I meant by chaff."

But Sir Charles took occasion to tell a very important member of the

"family" that "Berlin and Athens were different."

When autumn came, the sitting of the Constitutional Conference silenced

Sir Charles and all men who desired a fair field for that great

experiment. Its failure precipitated a new General Election.

By this time there was no doubt in Sir Charles's mind as to the gravity

of his physical condition. To a friend, who in October was setting out

for extended travel in West Africa, he wrote these words in a letter

wishing him God-speed:

"You are much more likely to come back alive than I am to be alive

to welcome you. Yet I _hope_ that the less likely survival _may_ be,

and of the other I feel pretty sure."

Knowing what he did of his own health, knowing the loyalty of his

constituents, who had within a few months returned him by a majority of

over two thousand, he might well have consented, as his friends wished,

to fight the new election by deputy. It was not his way. Haggard and

physically oppressed, he spent a fortnight in that bitter December going

the round of meetings, addressing his supporters as best his bodily

weakness allowed that strong will and fine courage to have their way.

The result was foregone: his majority was triumphant; but the exertion

killed him. None the less, he came out of the fray jubilant; his side

had won, the victory had been decisive. In Paris, where he went with Mr.

Hudson, the journalists came to him for his accustomed review of the

total situation. "Depuis que je suis au Parlement, je n'ai pas connu un

Ministère aussi solide que le Ministère présidé par M. Asquith," was his

emphatic word to M. Leudet in the _Figaro_.

The strain had in no way impaired his intellectual vitality. Those of

his old friends who saw him, such as M. Reinach, had never known him

more animated. To M. André Chevrillon, a newer friend by whom he had

been greatly attracted, he wrote:

"I see in the _Times_ that you are writing on Russian literature and

_music_. Please, then, include _Bell_ music: a saint's eve at

Troitsa Sergeifski! The silver notes floating in the dusty--or the

frozen--air. I've been there in September, and I've been there in

December.

"Any chance of seeing you--without moving, for I'm suffering from

weak heart, after two winter-contested elections in one year? I'm

extraordinarily better to-day, but am apt to 'blow' in other than

the Australian sense."

M. Chevrillon has written his impression of the gravity which lay behind

that cheery tone.

"J'allai le voir à l'Hôtel St. James. Je n'oublierai jamais

l'impression que m'a laissée cette visite. II était d'une pâleur de

marbre; il m'a dit brièvement qu'il se savait en danger immédiat,

que le médecin l'avait averti; et tout de suite, quittant ce sujet,

il m'a parlé avec son animation, sa verve et sa précision habituelle

de la situation politique en Angleterre. II y avait ce jour--là sur

cette noble figure toute blême, une dignité, j'ose dire une majesté,

extraordinaire; il était déjà marqué par la mort; il la regardait

venir avec une tranquillité et un courage absolu; j'emportai de

cette visite le douloureux sentiment que je ne le reverrais pas, et

une admiration qui me restera toujours pour ce que je venais

d'entrevoir de son caractère."

From Paris he insisted on moving South once more. He travelled now as an

invalid; but when morning light came into the compartment where he lay,

he made his way to the window and beheld again cypress and olive,

sun-baked swarthy soil, little hills with rocky crests fantastically

chiselled, all bathed in the dazzling sunshine of the South. Leaning his

face against the window, he said: "Provence always plays up."

At Hyères he was kept in bed. But he still read the books that came to

him by post, still dictated his reviews for the _Athenaeum_, and still

enjoyed the reading aloud of French plays, which had become a habit of

holiday time. And, above all, from his window as he lay he watched with

delight unjaded the spectacle of sea and sky. "Am I not a fortunate

invalid," he said, "to have the most beautiful view in the world to look

at?"

Now and then his shout of laughter would be heard and the old spirit of

fun would assert itself. When the journey home in January, 1911, had to

be faced, he rallied for it, came to the restaurant on the train, and

during the crossing sat on deck with Miss Constance Smith, who writes:

"At that time his thoughts seemed to stray from this last journey

back to that which we had taken in the autumn. 'It is worth while,'

he said, 'to have seen Aosta. I am glad to have done it. It is not

often at my age that one can get so much pleasure out of a new

thing.' I think he had a double motive in mentioning Aosta. He put

it forward partly to obliterate for me the sadness of the past three

weeks by raising the memory of the pleasant times that lay behind."

When he reached London he was happy to be again at home and he felt

better. Those with him had no fear for the immediate future, and he

himself fully expected to take his place in Parliament when it met.

Friends would have induced him to consider what part of his work could

be abandoned, but his answer was peremptory: "I won't be kept alive to

do nothing." Confined to bed as he was, work still went on; he received

and answered letters, read and annotated Blue-books. Curiously and

almost dramatically, the occupations of these last days sifted

themselves out in such fashion that the very latest things he handled

became, in some sort, an epitome of his life's work. M. Michelidakis,

President of the Cretan Executive Committee, had written to complain, on

behalf of the Cretan people, that the last note of the Powers seemed to

reverse their policy of slowly transferring Crete to a local government.

On January 24th Sir Charles answered this appeal for his help. It was

the last letter that he signed with his own hand--fit close to a

lifelong championship.

Other clients were knocking at his door that same day, other voices from

that strange retinue of petitioners who brought from all quarters of the

world to this one man their cry for protection and redress. What they

asked was no romantic action, nothing stirring or picturesque, but

simply the weight of his authority exhibited on their side, and the

wisdom of his long practice in public life for their guidance. He was to

fix a date for introducing a deputation concerning certain grievances of

the coloured people in Jamaica, and was to advise upon the best way to

raise a number of minor West African questions in the new Parliament.

His answer was sent from 76, Sloane Street:

_January 24th_, 1911.

"I am still lying up, but I think that I could answer any ordinary

call to duty, and I am trying a small private meeting to-morrow

afternoon, though I shall return to bed here.

"I will note Thursday, 2nd, at noon, on the chance of being well

enough.

"The questions which personally interest me the most are those

affecting the concessionary companies, and I should be glad if you

would ask Wedgwood to keep very close touch with me on these. He

likes me, and is quite willing to show me things; but he does too

much and, like myself, is always tired, and the result is that he

has to be reminded as to consultation in advance, though he does not

mind this being done.

"I doubt there being much danger about the Gambia. As for the

Southern Nigerian ordinances, I am not competent, and have a general

impression that as a rule we do best on more general lines, though

some of the concessionary companies make such 'cases' as to form

exceptions."

His strength was far spent. This letter, says Mr. Hudson, writing two

days later to the President of the Aborigines' Protection Society, "he

asked me to sign, after wishing to sign himself."

Yet the brain was clear and the will unshaken. The "small private

meeting" of which he wrote was a committee of directors of the

_Gardeners' Chronicle_, and on the 25th he was preparing to rise and

dress to attend this, but was persuaded to go back to bed. In bed, he

was still busy reading and marking Blue-books which bore upon the case

of the unorganized workers. The papers so prepared were, by his

direction, set aside for the service of the Women's Trade-Union League.

They were delivered next morning, but the messenger who took them

carried with them the tidings of Sir Charles Dilke's death. He had

slipped suddenly out of life, his heart failing, soon after four o'clock

on the morning of Thursday, January 26th, 1911.

* * * * *

To the funeral service at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, on January 30th,

there came from the House of Commons members of the Cabinet and of the

Ministry, representatives of Liberalism and Labour, the Irish leader

with several of his colleagues, while from the Unionist benches also men

paid this tribute to an honoured opponent. But the Parliamentary figure

of most interest was Mr. Austen Chamberlain, who carried from a

sick-room to the graveside the farewell of old comrade to old comrade.

Among the congregation were men who had been official representatives of

great dominions of the Empire or of foreign Governments. These came in

their private capacity, but one nation as a nation was represented

there. The King of the Hellenes sent his Minister in London to be his

deputy, and the Greek Government ordered a wreath, the token of their

sorrow and gratitude, to be laid upon the bier.

Tributes poured in from the great mass of his fellow-countrymen; from

philanthropic societies; from those who, in or out of Parliament, had

worked with his help and guidance. But above all there were messages

from every trade union and organization of wage-earners, letters from

men and from women in every kind of employ, testifying of service done,

of infinitely varied knowledge, of devotion that knew no limit, and that

had not gone without the one reward acceptable to the man they honoured,

their responsive love and gratitude.

So closed a life across which many commentators of the moment wrote,

some lightly, some in sincere regret, the word Failure. It was

ill-chosen. They should have written Loss. His career had not fulfilled

the promise of its opening; his abilities had never found the full scope

which once seemed assured to them; he had done for his country only what

his country permitted him to do. Over this it was natural, it was

reasonable, to speak words of sorrow. Those who said--and there were not

a few who said it--that he had accomplished more out of office than he

could ever have achieved in office, paid a tribute to the greatness of

his work, but they did not understand the force which had been wasted.

He combined two gifts rarely found in combination--the gift of

Parliamentary leadership and a profound knowledge of foreign affairs.

Amongst the men of his time he stood out as essentially a House of

Commons man, but he was also a European personality. In these

characteristics he recalls Lord Palmerston. Whether to foreign or to

domestic affairs, he brought a knowledge, a judgment, and a mastery of

detail, which none of his contemporaries surpassed and few equalled; and

he added to these the priceless gift of tact in dealing with men and

with bodies of men. In the only Parliament which knew him as an

administrator his advance was rapid and decisive: five years placed him

by universal admission in the front rank; and yet the general opinion

was not less clear than that of the few great ones. Beaconsfield and

Bismarck singled him out by their special interest; Gladstone looked to

him as probably his own ultimate successor.

Then came the day when there was taken from him for ever the opportunity

of directing great affairs, and Sir Charles Dilke's career must be

numbered among things that might have been. Yet was his "the failure"?

"It was England's misfortune, and perhaps her fault," wrote one

[Footnote: Mr. Spenser Wilkinson.] who knew him intimately and shared

but few of his political opinions, "that she could thus have been

deprived of the services of one of her best statesmen."

All that he could do to repair the misfortune to his country was done

without stint. Dismissed from his high command by a scandal, the truth

of which he persistently denied, when a life of ease was open to him he

chose, in spite of obloquy, to return to the ranks. Of what he

accomplished in the ranks some outline has been given; its record stands

as an answer to those who think, as many are tempted to think, that work

in Parliament without office is, in these days, foredoomed to futility.

Yet not in the external results of his wisdom and his labour, but in

another sphere, lies his supreme achievement. The same fate which

obscured the statesman's greatness revealed, what prosperity must have

hidden, the full measure of the man. To have requited public contumely

with public service; in the midst of humiliation to have kept his nature

unspoilt, unimbittered, every faculty bright and keen; to have abated no

jot of his happiness; and at the last to have passed away in serene

dignity, all the voices of reproach hushed and overawed--this was not

defeat, but victory; this, complete in its fulfilment, was the triumph

of Sir Charles Dilke's life.

CHAPTER LX

LITERARY WORK AND INTERESTS

[Footnote: By Miss Constance Hinton Smith.]

No view of Sir Charles Dilke's life can be complete which fails to take

account of his literary interests and activities. He disclaimed the

title of man of letters. [Footnote: 'Except in editing some of my

grandfather's papers, I never myself at all ventured into the paths of

pure literature; but I have lived near enough to it and them ... to be

able to enjoy.'] Except for the little memoir of his second wife, all

the books he gave to the world, as well as the larger part of his

periodical writing, were inspired by political, though not by party,

considerations. And throughout the years of his public career the

pressure of daily work inside and outside Parliament left him small

leisure for reading other than that through which he kept himself

acquainted with every movement, and as far as was humanly possible with

every fact, that seemed to bear upon the wide range of subjects handled

by him. So prodigious was his industry, however--only Dominie Sampson's

adjective will serve--and so quick his faculty for detecting at a glance

the quality of a book and extracting from it the pith and marrow, that

even in the busiest periods of his life he contrived to keep abreast of

the things best worth knowing, not only in English, but also in French

literature. From the time when, by his father's death, he inherited the

proprietorship of the _Athenaeum_, he exercised, through that journal, a

definite if indirect influence in the maintenance of the high standards

of literary honesty, accuracy, and taste in which he had been brought

up. This was done partly by means of his own contributions to the paper,

which covered a field which included history, travel, art, poetry, and

archaeology in two languages, and partly through "his comments and

suggestions on the proofs," of which Mr. C. A. Cook, a former acting

editor, writes with abiding gratitude. Other newspaper proprietors have

doubtless done as much to preserve uniformity of tone and principle;

few, if any, have probably brought such close and unwearied care to bear

upon those details in which tone is audible and principle expresses

itself.

Sir Charles Dilke's attitude towards literature, like his attitude to

politics and art, was peculiar to himself. He judged books, as he judged

men, not by the conventional verdict of the world--in this case the

world of critics--but by the quality his own mind discerned in them. His

judgments, therefore, were personal judgments, uncoloured, as far as

human judgments can be, by traditional respect or prejudice. This does

not mean that he had no literary canons: his grandfather's pupil could

hardly have left old Mr. Dilke's hands so unfurnished; but he never

became the slave of a rule or the docile worshipper of any reputation,

however well established. This mental freedom was partly due to

intellectual courage. The humour of Lamb, for example, delights the

majority of educated Englishmen: it had no charm for Sir Charles, and he

was not afraid to say so. But his liberty of appreciation owed something

also to the circumstances of his education. The fact that he had never

been at a public school--thus missing, in the plastic years of a

sensitive boyhood, the influences which make most strongly for

conventionality of outlook among men of a certain class--made it easier

for him than it might otherwise have been to examine literary questions

with his own eyes, and not through the medium of special glasses imposed

by authority. By the time he went up to Cambridge this habit of judging

for himself was already formed; and although Cambridge did much to

mould, she did not remake him.

The catalogue of his published writings, apart from those contributed to

magazines and newspapers, is brief. It consists practically of the early

book that made him famous as a political thinker, _Greater Britain_; the

brilliant satire, _Prince Florestan_, published anonymously in 1874, of

which he subsequently acknowledged the authorship; and the few volumes

written after the close of his official career, each of which deals with

large questions of public and international interest. _Problems of

Greater Britain_ and _Imperial Defence_ (the latter written in

collaboration with Mr. Spenser Wilkinson) were the most important of

these works, which do not represent fully the literary ambition of his

earlier years. There is plenty of evidence in the Memoir to show that,

at the time of that journey round the world of which _Greater Britain_

was the result, he had not only formed, but had begun to carry out,

several literary projects. Some of these, essays in verse, story-

writing, and metaphysical speculation, belong to the category of

experiment or amusement, and represent nothing more than the natural

activity of a fertile mind trying its powers now in this direction, now

in that. Others are more characteristic: a History of Radicalism, a

Political Geography, a book to be called _The Anglo-Saxon Race_ or _The

English World_, and a work on _International Law_. [Footnote: See

Chapter VI. (Vol. I.)]

As late as 1878 he was 'working hard at' a _History of the Nineteenth

Century_ 'for three or four months' in Provence, 'besides managing to do

some little work towards it when I was in London.' At this time he was

engaged upon the History of Germany in the early part of his chosen

period, and was corresponding with Professor Seeley as the highest

authority on that subject.

'My history of events began with 1814. I showed that the doctrine of

nationality had been made use of for their own purposes by the Kings

in 1812-13, and crushed by them at congresses between 1814 and 1822,

and then appealed to by the revolutionary party in 1823, and in a

less degree in 1848. That doctrine of nationality was described even

in our own times by Heine as a dead thing, when it was yet destined

to prove, in 1859 and 1866 and 1870 and 1878, the phenomenon of the

century, and nowhere to work such change as in Heine's own Germany.

Heine thought that the idea of the emancipation of nationality had

already in his day been replaced by the emancipation of humanity;

but, whatever may be the case in the long-run, the emancipation of

nationalities was destined to prove the more lasting side of the

movement of 1848.'

After stating that the nineteenth century must be held to have begun in

1814, he writes:

'History to me was one and could know no commencements, yet in the

development of a concerted action of the Powers I found 1814 so

convenient a starting-point as to be as good as a real beginning. In

the rise of the new society, the social revolution,'

he found himself less fortunate. There was no clear starting-point, and

when he selected August 4th, 1789, as his,

'I felt that I chose only the moment of the springing of the plant

from the soil ... and stood in some danger of neglecting the

previous germination of the seed beneath the soil.'

After delivering a lecture on "Old Chelsea," in which 'I made a

considerable attempt to clear up some points in the life of Sir Thomas

More, for whom I have a great admiration ... I conceived ... the idea of

writing a Life of More, whose life has never been well told since it was

written by his son-in-law at the time; but the immense difficulty of

writing any Life which would stand a comparison with the son-in-law's

notes ultimately deterred me.'

It is easy to understand why the foregoing projects were dropped; but

why Sir Charles never published the book on Russia which he was known to

have had in preparation is not so apparent. He had paid four protracted

visits to the country, travelled over a great part of it, and was

intimately acquainted with Russians of the most widely differing

opinions. Obviously he would have enjoyed writing the book that he had

planned. He had actually fixed the date of publication, when he found

that Mr. Hepworth Dixon had come, almost at the same time, to a decision

to write on his subject. On August 3rd, 1869, he wrote to Mr. Dixon:

"My Dear Dixon,

"In reference to your request that in good feeling and friendship

towards you I should defer the publication of my _Russia_ from

February 1st, 1870 (the date fixed with Macmillan), to a later

period, I have carefully thought the matter over, and have decided

to do as you wish. The only condition that I make is that you will

write to me by return of post saying whether, if I fix January 1st,

1871, as my day, you will date your preface not later than February

1st, 1870, and issue your first edition not more than a week after

that date."

Dixon wrote back on the same day:

"My Dear Charles,

"I am more pleased at your resolution than words can say. It is more

than right. It is friendly and noble."

'Mr. Dixon immediately went to Russia, where we met in the course of

the autumn, and speedily published his _New Russia_, a remarkable

book considering the haste with which it was prepared. After five

visits to Russia, I handed over the whole of my notes to my brother,

who spent two years at one time in that country, and who finished

the book.' [Footnote: Only two chapters ever appeared--in

magazines.]

Sir Charles's contributions to the _Athenaeum_ began while he was still

at Cambridge. His article of October 22nd, 1864, [Footnote: See Chapter

V. (Vol. I.)] was the first of a long series of reviews and notices,

which continued unbrokenly till within a week of his death. It was

natural that, as years went by, his knowledge and experience should be

drawn upon for reviews of important political biographies, and of books

on imperial and colonial questions or military history. But he did not

confine himself entirely to such grave topics. The files of the

_Athenaeum_ contain many columns from his hand dealing with the lighter

matters of topography (especially in France), travel, and fiction. The

fiction was mainly French, modern English novels commending themselves

little to his liking, though he was among the earliest and steadiest, if

also among the more discriminating, admirers of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and

Robert Louis Stevenson's _Prince Otto_ had a place with his favourite

books. Another subject which attracted his pen was the local and

legendary history of his beloved Provence. His intimate acquaintance

with the beliefs and fancies of that region could be gathered from his

slightest notice of an ephemeral book on the country, as readily as his

store of political knowledge and familiarity with the events that made

history in his time from an extended review of a volume of _L'Empire

Libéral_ or the life of a leading contemporary in the House of Commons.

In neither case could his hand be hid.

In influencing the choice of contributors to his paper, he threw his

weight always on the side of the man who had complete knowledge of his

subject. No brilliancy of style could make up in his eyes for lack of

precision in thought or inaccuracy in statement. Next in order he

appeared to value in a reviewer a judicial quality of mind, as essential

to a sane and balanced criticism. "He disapproved"--to quote Mr. C. A.

Cook again--"of anything fanciful in expression or any display of

sentiment;" but, so long as writers kept clear of these literary

pitfalls, he let them go their own road of style, with ready

appreciation for any freshness or liveliness they exhibited on the

journey. Reviews of French books were a special object of care, and for

the _Athenaeum's_ annual survey of French literature he bestirred

himself to secure the best hand available. In a letter to M. Joseph

Reinach, dated July, 1888, he gives a list of the distinguished

men--including MM. About, De Pressensé, and Sarrazin--who had written

this survey in past years, ending with a suggestion that M. Reinach

himself might perhaps be willing to undertake the task.

In his writing, as in his speaking, his object was always either to

place facts before his audience, or to develop a closely reasoned

argument based upon the facts. He took no trouble to cultivate literary

graces in this connection; rather he seemed to distrust them, as in his

speeches he distrusted and avoided appeals to the feelings of his

hearers. But it would be a great mistake to infer from his own practice

that he was insensible to beauty of form and style. The literature he

cared for most, that which roused his enthusiasm and provoked the

expression of emotion so rare with him in the later years of his

life--the literature of France before the Renaissance, the poetry of

Keats and Shelley, some of the lyrics of the Félibres--is of the kind in

which content owes so much to beauty of form that it is impossible to

conceive of the one without the other; and he certainly took quite as

much delight in the sound as in the sense of his favourites. Even in

those favourites he was quick to detect a flaw. His grandfather's

introduction of him to the best in literature had not been wasted; and

his own early reading had given him a touchstone of taste which he used

freely as a standard, although it was powerless to obtain admission to

his accepted company of men of letters for those who made no appeal to

him individually. The Memoir shows that his self-training in literature

(for the grandfather did no more than indicate the way) was carried out

in youth; it was at Cambridge, while still an undergraduate, that he

read Shakespeare 'for pleasure.' And this was true also of the great

authors of his own time. The results of that reading remained with him

through life.

The Memoir dwells little upon his literary interests, and contains few

literary judgments. He himself gives the reason:

'They do not pretend to be critical memoirs.... I have known

everyone worth knowing from 1850 to my death; but, as I knew the

most distinguished of my own country in childhood or early manhood,

my judgments have changed. I have either to give crude judgments

from which I dissent, or later judgments which were not those of the

time. I have omitted both.... I knew the great Victorian authors.

Thackeray I loved: _Vanity Fair_ delighted me, and _Esmond_ was

obviously a great work of art; the giant charmed me by his kindness

to me as a boy. But Dickens was to me a sea-captain with a taste for

melodrama, and the author of _Pickwick_. It is only in old age that

I have learnt that there was real beauty and charm in _David

Copperfield_. So, too, Mill I worshipped; and Carlyle, though I knew

him, I despised--perhaps too much. Mat. Arnold was to me, in his day

and my day, only a society trifler, whereas now ... after for years

I have visited his tomb, I recognize him as a great writer of the

age in which he lived.'

Here and there in the Memoir are glimpses of the world of literature

with which he was often in touch. He discusses with Swinburne a much-

disputed reference in Shelley's _Epipsychidion_. In 1872 Browning reads

his _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_ at 76, Sloane Street. There are

admiring references to the work of George Eliot, and to Mrs. Lynn

Linton--'perhaps the cleverest woman I know.' When he goes to the United

States, we get his warmly drawn picture of the Boston group--Emerson,

Agassiz, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Asa Gray, Longfellow, Lowell, Dr.

Collyer, and Dr. Hedge.

[Footnote: See Chapter VI. (Vol. I., p. 60).]

Recording Stepniak's suggestion that Bismarck, Mazzini, and Oliver

Wendell Holmes were the three greatest conversationalists of our times,

'I said that, having known all three, I agreed that they were

remarkable, although I myself found Mazzini a little of the bore.

Disraeli was sometimes very good, although sometimes singularly silent;

but there were once two Russians that I put in the first rank--Herzen

and Tourgénief.'

Questions relating to one literary personality alone receive full-length

treatment in the Memoir. On any point that concerned Keats Sir Charles

was always keenly interested. He may be said to have inherited the Keats

tradition and the Keats devotion from his grandfather, and anyone

connected with Keats found easy way to his sympathy and attention. It

was his intervention which finally obtained for Keats's sister, Mme.

Llanos, a regular Civil List pension in 1880. When the Lindon family

sold to Mr. Buxton Forman Keats's letters to Miss Brawne, Mme. Llanos

wrote 'from Madrid saying how greatly she was vexed that her brother's

love-letters should have been placed before the world,' and 'I had a

good deal of correspondence with Lord Houghton over this matter....

[Lord Houghton] wrote:

'"My Dear Dilke,

'"Since the _Athenaeum_ fixed my place in poetical literature

between Rogers and Eliza Cook, I have naturally not read that

journal, but I have been shown a capital flagellation of those

unfilial wine-merchants. [Footnote: Miss Brawne married Louis

Lindon, a wine-merchant.] I thought I had even gone too far in my

elegant extracts--with which you furnished me. I have, alas! no

poetical amours to be recorded, out of which my family can make

anything handsome."'

The letter ends with an invitation to lunch and 'talk Keats.'

Sir Charles notes further:

'About this time (1878) Mr. Buxton Forman announced for publication

the Keats Love-Letters, which I certainly thought I had in a vague

way bought for the purpose of preventing publication. They had been

long in my possession, but the son of Fanny Brawne had claimed them,

and I, having no written agreement, had found it necessary to give

them up--although what I had bought and paid for, unless it was the

right to prevent publication, I do not know.'

About this time Mr. John Morley proffered a request that Sir Charles

would write a monograph on Keats for his _English Men of Letters_. Lord

Houghton thought that a "new view" from Sir Charles "would have great

interest"; but he decided to decline the undertaking.

The Memoir records at length the course of a correspondence with Joseph

Severn, on the subject of his portraits of Keats, about which the old

man's memory, in his last days at Rome, had grown very hazy. He thought

that the miniature from which the engraving for Mr. Buxton Forman's

edition had been made was the original presented to Fanny Brawne,

whereas it was the copy made for old Mr. Dilke from that original, which

itself was afterwards 'bought by my grandfather to prevent its being

sold by auction.' There was also at Pyrford a copy in oils made for Mr.

Moxon, which Sir Charles had obtained by exchange from Mr. Frederick

Locker-Lampson.

'After completing my investigations as to the portraits, I placed

them on record in a letter to my old friend Scharf, the Keeper of

the National Portrait Gallery, who replied: "Thanks for your

interesting note, which we will duly place upon record. The portrait

which we have here is posthumous. Severn painted it in 1821, and we

hold a very curious letter from him describing the circumstances

under which he painted it." Here, therefore, is another undoubted

Severn in addition to the three which I possess. But I know myself

of at least one other.'

The gift of his collection of Keats relics to Hampstead has been

elsewhere recorded. In deciding on Hampstead for its resting-place, he

brought it within the circle of local associations with Keats himself,

and with the grandfather who had been Keats's friend. [Footnote: The

Memoir records, in 1878, a visit paid with his great-uncle, William

Dilke, to Wentworth Place, 'the little house at Hampstead in which for a

time Mr. C. W. Dilke and his brother were Keats's next-door

neighbours.']

Modern French authors interested him more than their English

contemporaries. In the former case he found, perhaps, less declension

from the standard of the giants of whom he had been an eager student in

his early manhood, when he read "all Balzac," and recorded his

admiration for the "dignity" of Mme. de Staël's _Germany_. Dumas he

loved then and always, returning to him with ever new delight, and

utilizing the rare periods of inaction imposed upon him at intervals by

illness to read the whole of _The Three Musketeers_ series 'through

again--properly.' Where other writers who held sway over the mind of

France during the nineteenth century were in question, his independence

of taste came into play. Sainte-Beuve he could 'make nothing of.' For

Chateaubriand he felt something like contempt: 'Equally feeble as a

maker and a writer of history ... the inventor of a drawing-room

Christianity without Christ;' but he recognized the high quality to be

found in the early writings of Sénancour. In later days the revival of a

Stendhal cult filled him with wondering amusement. To the best work of

Renan his affections were always faithful: _Souvenirs d'Enfance et de

Jeunesse_ was among his favourite volumes. Anatole France gave him

exquisite pleasure, and it is hard to say whether he most enjoyed the

wit, the irony, or the style of that great writer. He had his

favourites, too, among the minor gods, and was always ready to introduce

a new-comer to the charms of _François de Barbizanges_ or the fun of

Alfred Capus.

In French poetry his taste was eclectic. His feeling for Charles

d'Orléans and his contemporaries barely stopped on this side idolatry;

but the classics of the seventeenth century had no message for him, and

Victor Hugo as a poet left him, for the most part, unmoved. Indeed, he

asserted that all French verse between Ronsard and Verlaine was purely

rhetorical, and without genuine poetic quality. But in some modern

poets, he thought, the true spirit of French poetry had revived. Early

he proclaimed the genius of Charles Guérin, whose claim to high place in

his country's literature remained unrecognized till after his death;

early, too, he hailed a new poetic star in François Porché. The star

seemed to him later to wane in brilliancy, but the disappointment with

which he read the poems of M. Porché's second period never weakened his

admiring recollection of the splendour of the poet's Russian verses and

the searching pathos of _Solitude au Loin_.

His familiarity with French literature, his hearty affection for it, his

understanding of the national spirit by which it is informed and

quickened, constituted one of the strongest ties which bound him in

sympathy to his French friends. The literary forms which have had so

much attraction for the best French minds both before and after 1789--

the chronicle and the memoir--were precisely those to which his

unfailing interest in human nature led him by choice. Paradin and

Froissart were companions of whom he never grew tired; and it would be

difficult to decide whether he found more absorbing matter of

entertainment in Sully or Mme. de Dino.

But if he read these authors for delight, he read them also as a serious

student. On this point the testimony of one of the most learned men in

contemporary France is clear. M. Salomon Reinach writes: [Footnote: In a

letter addressed to the editor, and written in English.]

"Talking with Sir Charles Dilke about Renaissance and modern

history, I soon perceived that he had taken the trouble of going to

the sources, and that he had read and knew many things of importance

which a man of letters, and even a scholar, are apt to ignore. It

was Sir Charles, to give only one instance, who revealed to me the

value of Guillaume Paradin's _Histoire de Notre Temps_ and

_Chronique de Savoie_, which he admired to such a degree that he put

the now forgotten author (the name of whom is not in the British

Encyclopaedia) on the same level as Guicciardini and the great

historians of antiquity. I would like to know how he discovered

Paradin, and if copies of his rare works were in his library. When I

happened to get hold of Major Frye's manuscript, afterwards

published by me (thanks to Sir Charles Dilke's recommendation) at

Heinemann's, he was the first to appreciate its interest, and gave

me much information about abbreviated names and other allusions

which occur in that diary. He chanced to dine with me the very

evening when I first had brought the manuscript to my house, and he

remained till past one in the morning, picturesquely seated on the

edge of a table, reading passages aloud and commenting upon them. He

also knew many secret and unrecorded facts about recent French

history; some of them have been given by him in unsigned articles of

the _Athenaeum_, in reviews of books relating to the Franco-German

War. I hope he may have left some more detailed notes on that

subject. I would have had the greatest pleasure in corresponding

with him, and regret I did not do so; but his handwriting was as

mysterious as his mind was clear, and I soon found that I could not

make it out."

CHAPTER LXI

TABLE TALK

After Lady Dilke's death, the Rev. W. and Mrs. Tuckwell, her brother-

in-law and her elder sister, made their home with Sir Charles Dilke at

Pyrford; and notes of his talk put together from memory and from diaries

by the old scholar give a vivid impression of the statesman as seen in

intimacy. Mr. Tuckwell says:

During the last five years of his life I breakfasted alone with Sir

Charles whenever he was at Pyrford. It was his "softer hour," and

showed him in a specially endearing light. Not only was he fresh

from his night's rest, full, often, of matter interesting or amusing

in his letters which he had just read, but the tête-à-tête brought

out his finest social nature. In large companies, as we saw him at

Dockett, he was occasionally insistent, iterative, expressing

himself, to use a term of his own, with a "fierceness" corresponding

to the strength of his convictions. With me at our breakfasts he was

gentle, tolerant, what Sydney Smith called "amoebean," talking and

listening alternately. I was told that before his death the two

experiences to which he referred in anticipating a return to his

Pyrford home were the forestry among his pines and the early

breakfast table.

Much of his talk was, of course, Parliamentary, bearing on incidents

or persons from the House. He often spoke of Harcourt, whom he

dearly loved. When Harcourt's death was announced to a party at

breakfast in Speech House, several in the company told anecdotes of

the dead man or commented on his character. One lady spoke of him

harshly. Sir Charles remained silent, but more than once during the

meal his eyes filled with tears. He told me on another occasion that

"Lulu" promised to be a greater man than his father, just as Winston

Churchill is a greater man than Randolph. Lulu resembles his father

curiously in all things except in the paternal habit of swearing.

Once, when an attempt by the Opposition to snatch a victory in a

thin House had been foiled, Harcourt said savagely across the table:

"So that d----d dirty trick has failed!" Hicks Beach sprang up to

ask the Speaker if such language were Parliamentary. Speaker Gully

was too discreet to have heard the words. Dilke remembered being in

company with Harcourt and Mrs. Procter, amongst several more. As she

left the room, Harcourt said: "There goes one of the three most

charming women I ever knew; the other two"--a pause, during which

the ladies present looked keenly expectant--"the other two are

dead!"

He turned to talk of Dizzy, to whom he had first been introduced in

his early days by Lady Lonsdale, the great man wishing to know him.

He quoted some of Dizzy's sayings. Dizzy called Spencer Walpole and

Russell Gurney "those two whited sepulchres of the House of

Commons." Walpole, consequential and lugubrious, he spoke of as "the

high-stepping hearse-horse of public life." Of deaf Mr. Thomasson,

who, ear-trumpet in hand, was wont to place himself near every

speaker, he said that "no man had ever so neglected his natural

advantages."

Of Gladstone Dilke rarely spoke, but used to describe the periodical

entrance of Mrs. Gladstone into the meetings of the Cabinet with a

large basin of tea for the old man. [Footnote: In the last years of

Sir Charles's life, at a party given by Mr. and Mrs. Herbert

Gladstone at Downing Street, he stopped in the room where Cabinet

meetings used to be held, and pointed out to the editor of this book

the door through which Mrs. Gladstone used to enter bearing the bowl

of tea. For Sir Charles's recollections of Mr. Gladstone, see

appendix at end of this chapter.] Once he had to work out with his

chief some very difficult question. As they sat absorbed, Hamilton,

the private secretary, entered with an apologetic air to say that

----, a well-known journalist, had called, pressingly anxious to see

the Prime Minister on an important subject. Without raising his

head, Gladstone said: "Ask him what is his number in the lunatic

asylum."

He told of a Cabinet in 1883 at which ---- talked a great deal, "and

I told Chamberlain that at the Political Economy Club, where I had

been dining on the previous night, there was a closure of debate in

the shape of the introduction of hot muffins, which I thought would

be excellent for Cabinets." At this Cabinet Lord Granville said: "We

all agree that ---- is a bore, but I have never been able to make up

my mind whether that is a drawback or a qualification so far as

public service is concerned."

Asquith he looked upon as one of the greatest Parliamentarians he

had known, much superior in that capacity to Gladstone. His

allocution on the King's death was noble; still finer his

introduction of the Veto Bill in December, 1909. "His speech was

perfect: forcible in manner, statesmanlike in argument, felicitous

in epithet and phrasing." Balfour on the same occasion was at his

worst: "hampered by his former contrary declarations, trivial in

reasoning, feeble in delivery." He was ill, and ought not to have

come. I asked if Balfour's frequent inconsistencies and vacillations

were due to carelessness. He said no, but to the necessity imposed

upon him, not of proclaiming principles, but of keeping together a

divergent party. I asked what other notable recent speeches he could

recall. He said the Archbishop of Canterbury's [Footnote: Dr.

Randall Davidson.] on the Congo scandal, in the House of Lords: "a

marvellous performance, nothing said which should not have been

said, everything said which required saying; the speech of a great

statesman." Bishop ---- followed him with a mere piece of missionary

claptrap. In the Commons on the same occasion our charming friend

Hugh Law distinguished himself, silencing some of his compatriots,

the Irish Roman Catholics, whose line was to support Leopold because

the Protestant missionaries abused him. Leopold II. Sir Charles

called "the cleverest--and wickedest--man living." He broke off to

speak of the Archbishop, whom he met weekly at Grillion's, as a

delightfully instructive talker, not only full, that is, of light

agreeableness, but supporting the opinions he advances with

convincing, cogent, logical force, yet never boring his hearers. As

another powerful speech he instanced T. P. O'Connor on Sir R.

Anderson's indiscretions, "most terribly crushing in its grim,

ruthless exposition," Anderson sitting in the Gallery to hear it.

In his own great speech on Army Reform in April, 1907, Sir Charles

said that Haldane was "all things to all men." His hearers perceived

it to be a quotation (which in fact I had furnished), but no one

localized it! An amusing misquotation was Arnold-Forster's in the

same debate: he said that Haldane was like King David, who drilled

his men by fifties in a cave. In March, 1909, Sir Charles told me

sadly of Arnold-Forster's sudden death, which he had just learned.

"With some defects of manner, he was very clever, writing and

speaking well. As War Minister Balfour gave him no chance. His last

speech in the House, a fortnight before his death, just preceded

mine. 'I must speak,' he said to me, 'on those damned Special

Reservists;' and speak he did for a good, well-sustained half-hour,

going out as soon as he had finished." He had been with us at

Dockett. He and Sir Charles sparred continually and amusingly, both

equally aggressive, imperious, stentorian, iterative, each insistent

on his own declamation and inattentive to his opponent's.

Sir Charles, while on this topic of oratory, went on to quote with

much hilarity a speech by Lord ---- in the Lords: "This Liberal

Government injures friends no less than enemies. Look at me! I am a

passive resister; I belong to the National Liberal Club; I have

married my deceased wife's sister; and none of my children are

vaccinated; yet they are meddling with my rights as a landlord." The

Lords did not see the fun, the papers did not report it, but it is

to be found in Hansard.

I asked Dilke how my old pupil, Sir Richard Jebb, comported himself

in Parliament. He said: "Handsome, beautifully groomed, with a

slight stoop, slow delivery, speaking rarely and on subjects which

he thoroughly understood, his phrasing perfect, manner engaging: a

man reserved and shy, not seeking acquaintance, but, if sought,

eminently agreeable." University members, he added, should come

always in pairs: one to represent the high University ideal,

embodied only in a very few; his colleague reflecting the mob of

country parsons who by an absurd paradox elect to Parliament. Jebb

was the ideal Cantab.; didactic, professorial, the Public Orator;

seeming incomplete without a gown: but for his rare and apt

appearances, he might have overdone the part.

He told a story of Major O'Gorman. A professed Roman Catholic, he

was dining in the House one Friday on a devilled chicken, when his

parish priest was announced. "Waiter," he said, "take away the

devil, and show in the priest."

When Sir Charles first took office, he was cautioned by his

colleague, Lord Tenterden, not to read the newspapers: "If you do,

you will never distinguish between what you know and what you have

just read."

He mentioned ----. I said that his elaborate manners and bridegroom

dress marked him out as _natus convivio feminali_, meant by nature

to be a guest at ladies' tea-tables. Dilke assented, adding that he

was less bland to men than to women. "Tommy" Bowles said of him in

the House: "The right honourable gentleman answers, or, rather, does

not answer, my questions with the pomposity of a Belgravian butler

refusing twopence to a beggar."

He spoke of the decadence in costume characteristic of the present

day. I said that, according to Wraxall, we must go back for its

beginnings to Charles Fox, who came down to the House in boots. I

added that, when I first went up to Oxford, a frock-coat and tall

hat were imperative in walking out; that a "cut-away" coat, as it

was called, would have been "sconced" in Hall; that men even kept

their boating-dresses at King's or Hall's, changing there; that a

blazer in the High would have drawn a crowd. He said that till very

lately--he was speaking in 1907--the custom of dress in Parliament

had been equally rigid; that Lord Minto had recently scandalized his

peers by wearing a straw hat; that when, some years before, a member

whose name I forget had taken the same liberty in the Commons, the

Speaker sent for him, and begged that he would not repeat the

offence.

In February, 1908, we talked of the Sweating Bill. Two years before,

he said, it could command so little support that, having obtained

for it the first private members' night, he withdrew it. Now it was

accepted with enthusiasm, and the second reading passed without a

division--the change, he added, entirely due to the Women's

Trade-Union League.

He expressed satisfaction with the stiffening procedure rules of

April, 1906, but added that they would make great Parliamentary

orations impossible. I said: "All the better, we want business in

the Commons; for oratory there are other occasions." He said how

transient is the public interest in men and questions; the community

is like a kitten playing with a cork: so soon as it is tempted off

by something else, the cork becomes dead to it. He instanced

Rosebery; the Aliens Act; Tariff Reform, in spite of Chamberlain's

galvanizing efforts. Of Campbell-Bannerman, then alive and well, he

said that all his work was done for him by his subordinates: "he had

only to read novels, prepare jokes, look inscrutable and fatherly."

In July, 1909, he attended the memorial service for Lord Ripon at

the Roman Catholic Cathedral. Knowing that the leading statesmen on

both sides, Protestant to a man, would be present, the ecclesiastics

made the show as fine as they could, bringing out all their

properties. All the monks and priests in London attended; the

Archbishop, in gorgeous attire, sat on a stool, with two boys behind

holding up his train. The music was exquisite; Sir Charles had never

heard anything so sweet as the warbling of the Requiem by the

chorister boys. But the whole was palpably a show, the actors intent

on their acting, never for a moment devotional; where changes in the

service involved changes in position, they were prepared while the

part before was still unfinished, so that the stage might never be

empty nor the transformations lag: the whole thing a Drury Lane

pageant; while the richly decorated catafalque in the centre, on

which the ceremonial supposed itself to converge, was empty--

_sepulchri supervacuos honores_--the body being at Studley. Of Ripon

himself, whom everyone loved, he spoke affectionately.

Of talks on miscellaneous topics I recall the following. We spoke of

the Tilsit Secret Articles, revealed mysteriously to the English

Government. Sir Charles thought the informant was a Russian officer,

betraying it with or without the connivance of the Tsar. Evidence

has since come out connecting the disclosure with a Mr. Mackenzie,

who is supposed to have obtained the secret from General Benningsen.

Or Canning may have learned it through the Russian Ambassador in

England, who was his intimate friend, and strongly adverse to his

master's French policy. [Footnote: See for a recent discussion of

the evidence J. Holland Rose's _Life of Napoleon_, ii. 135-140.] Sir

Charles went on to say that in history lies find easier credit than

truth. All the books have said and say that England refused to buy

Delagoa Bay from Portugal. He always denied this alleged refusal;

and now Lord Fitzmaurice has caused search to be made, and finds no

confirmatory evidence. Again, he maintained in Paris, against all

the experts, that Nigra engineered the Franco-Prussian War. His

words were repeated to the Empress Eugénie, who said, "Yes, he is

right: Nigra was a false friend."

He talked of the Japanese, whom he had known in England and lived

with in Japan.... Their only religion is patriotism, and their

prayers to the Emperor are formal merely, yet they are reckless of

life and eager to die for Fatherland; indeed, so incapable of

retreating before an enemy as sometimes seriously to damage

strategic plans. Were they launched against the West, they would go

through any European army.

He spoke of the durability of the Third French Republic. It will be

unbroken while peace lasts. War may bring a temporary Dictatorship,

but the republic will of necessity revive again. The immense

majority of Frenchmen are opposed unalterably to a monarchy.

He quoted what was said to be Napoleon's only joke. In opening

negotiations with the British Government, he found it to be demanded

as a preliminary that, as matter of principle and without prejudice,

he should formally recognize the Bourbon rights, "Most certainly,"

he said, "if, also as matter of principle and without prejudice, the

British Government would formally recognize the Stuart rights."

Dilke spoke of the old Political Economy Club, to which he was

introduced by John Stuart Mill. The President was Lord Bramwell; its

dominant member William Newmarch, a rough man of powerful intellect,

of whose ferocious criticisms everyone stood in awe, and who was

habitually hard on Mill.

He told a story of a well-known dandy, now a peer. The talk turned

on "Society" in the second intention of the word ---- had

enumerated certain houses in which you must be at home if pretending

to the exclusive social set. It was objected that the inmates of

some amongst these houses were persons whom the Queen (Victoria)

would not receive. "The Queen!" said ---- in a tone of pained

surprise--"the Queen was _never_ in Society."

I had been to church unwittingly on "Empire Day," and reported a

sermon stuffed with militarism. He poured cold water on the idea.

"Ireland won't have it; Canada won't have it; South Africa loathes

it; India has an Empire Day of its own. Only Australia cares for it.

It is a vulgar piece of Tory bluff, and a device for annoying the

Dutch."

He had lately visited Dropmore: said how frequently the Dropmore

Papers upset accepted history, but that the historian will answer,

_Mon siege est fait_. He explained the phrase. A man had written a

history of some famous siege; after it was published fresh facts

were brought to his notice: he declined them--"Mon siege est fait."

[Footnote: Ascribed to the Abbé Dubois.]

He talked of Marlborough's victories: he hummed the opening verse of

"Malbrook s'en va-t-en guerre." I said it was our "For he's a jolly

good fellow": he said yes, but the tune goes back to the time of the

Crusaders. I asked who wrote the words. He said an unknown French

soldier on the night of Malplaquet, when Marlborough was believed to

have been killed. Napoleon, who knew no music, often mounted his

horse at the opening of a campaign singing the first line as he put

his foot into the stirrup.

He spoke often of Grillion's which he habitually frequented and much

enjoyed. He told of its formation in 1812; of old members whom he

had known--Sir Robert Inglis, Chenery of the _Times_, regal old Sir

Thomas Acland, Fazakerley, Gally Knight, Wilmot Horton; of its

effect in socially harmonizing men bitterly opposed in politics. He

told the story of "Mr. G." dining there by accident alone, and

entering himself in the club book as having drunk a bottle of sherry

and a bottle of champagne. He said what care was taken to exclude

undesirables, preserving thereby a high tone of company and of talk.

I asked him what was the finest conversation to which he had ever

listened. "In Boston," he said; "at Lowell's breakfast-table; the

company Lowell, Wendell Holmes, Longfellow, Agassiz, Asa Gray."

[Footnote: See Vol. I., Chapter VI.]

We talked of precious stones, recalling the Koh-i-noor in its small

gas-lighted tent at the 1851 Exhibition. He said that modern paste

is more beautiful and effective than diamonds. The finest pearls

known belonged to the Duchess of Edinburgh: she showed Sir Charles a

collar valued at two millions sterling. I named the Hope jewels,

shown also in 1851. He knew the "rich Hope," Henry, who built the

house in Piccadilly. The "poor Hope," Beresford, had only £30,000 a

year. They were a Dutch family, "Hoop" by name. Beresford's wife,

Lady Mildred, aped the Queen, driving in the Park dressed in black,

with a large hat, and finely mounted outriders. The same thing was

done by Mme. Van de Weyer. Beresford bought the _Morning Chronicle_

in order to promulgate his High Church views, writing under the

signature D.C.L. He ruined the paper.

He more than once sang the praises of Sir George Grey--honoured in

South Africa, Australia, New Zealand; statesman, aristocrat,

Radical, creator of the Australian Labour Party, terror of our

Colonial Office at home; one of the few men who have done great

things by themselves. Bismarck told Sir Charles that Cavour, Crispi,

Kruger, were greater than himself. "I had the army and the State

behind me; these men had nothing." Amongst Bismarck's minor desires

was a hope that he might outlive his physician, Dr. Schweininger,

who plagued him with limitations as to diet. "To-day potatoes will

we eat; to-morrow comes Schweininger." He owned to having over-eaten

himself once, and only once: "Nine nine-eyes (lampreys) did I eat."

"People," he said, "look on me as a monarchist. Were it all to come

over again, I would be republican and democrat: the rule of kings is

the rule of women; the bad women are bad, the good are worse."

Sir Charles spoke of Botha, whom he met here in 1907. People were

unexpectedly charmed with him: they anticipated a replica of old

Kruger; instead of that they beheld a handsome man, with the most

beautiful eyes and mouth ever seen. His daughter with him was very

pretty; fashionably dressed, in the style of a French American.

He told of an Indian official under the old East India Company

stationed in a remote place, a "Boggley Wallah," who for several

years sent in no reports, money, or accounts. An emissary,

commissioned to bring him to book, found him living in great luxury

on the borders of a lake. He said that he did his work and kept his

papers on an island in the lake, and sent a boat for them; but the

returning boat somehow sank in mid-water, and books and papers went

to the bottom. The Company dismissed him without a pension: he came

to London, took his seat daily in ragged clothes just outside the

offices in Leadenhall Street, standing up to salaam when any

Director or official passed in or out, but speaking no word. People

gathered to look at him, and at last the Company gave him £1,000 a

year. He drove down in a carriage and four, and handed in a letter

stating that he had already amassed £5,000 a year in their service,

that they had now raised it to £6,000, and that he desired to

express his gratitude.

I quoted from some book I was reading a dictum that no woman

nowadays can be called perfectly beautiful. He said he had known

only two, Lady Dudley and Madame Castiglione. The latter was in the

pay successively of Victor Emanuel and Louis Napoleon; in the second

capacity supposed to have been a spy employed by Cavour.

He spoke of John Forster, biographer of Dickens, an intimate friend

of his own grandfather and father, as a man of violent, noisy

passions, but very lovable; his attitude towards Dickens

pathetically affectionate.

He described two German Princesses whom he had met at lunch; dowdy

and of the ordinary Teutonic type, looking on their brother "Billy"

as the greatest of mortals. They had been shopping up and down

Oxford Street, delighted with their purchases, and with their escape

from Court ceremonial. He went on to say how common every Prussian

officer looks when in plain clothes. Wearing them very rarely, the

officers never look at ease in them; and the swagger which they

adopt in uniform is highly ridiculous in mufti.

When Napoleon's death was known, one of George IV.'s Ministers went

to his master with the news: "Sir, your greatest enemy is dead."

"Good G---! they told me she was better," was the royal answer. Sir

Charles spoke of Jerome Bonaparte, whom he knew; a dull man, a thorn

in the side of Napoleon III. "You have nothing of the great Napoleon

about you," Jerome said one day. "I have his family," answered the

worried Emperor. From him we passed to the death of the Duc

d'Enghien. The Princes were notoriously plotting against Napoleon's

life; by slaying a Prince of the blood he made it clear that two

could play the game. The first copy of Mme. de Rémusat's book was

thought to deal too plainly with this and other topics; it was

destroyed, and rewritten in a softer tone.

In November, 1909, Sir Charles spent some days in the Record Office,

coming back each time in much need of a bath, after rummaging

amongst papers which had not been disturbed for a century. He found

amongst other papers a letter from a Grand Duke of Modena to

Castlereagh, written just after Napoleon's fall, saying how exultant

were his subjects at his return to them, and asking Castlereagh to

lend him £14. With the letter was the draft of Castlereagh's answer,

congratulating the Duke's subjects and himself, but adding that

there would be difficulty in applying to Parliament for the loan.

Sir Charles remarked on my _Athenaeum_ review of Francis Newman's

Life. He said that when he himself was in bad odour for his early

Civil List speeches, so that he had been exposed to serious

disturbances, and a break-up of his intended meeting at Bristol was

threatened, Newman, from sheer dislike to mob tyranny, came forward

to take the chair; and through a tempest of shouts and rushes, and

amid the stifling smell of burnt Cayenne pepper, sat in lean

dignity, looking curiously out of place, but serene in vindication

of a principle. [Footnote: See Vol. I, Chapter IX.]

The publication of the Life of Goldwin Smith led us to talk of

University reform. I said how by means of it my own college had

become _ex humili potens_, had arisen from depths to heights, from

obscurity to fame. Of his, he said, the contrary was true: his

college had been ruined by Parliamentary interference. Trinity Hall

was founded for the study and teaching of jurisprudence, the old

Roman canon and civil law, on which all modern law is based. It was

the only institution of the kind, a magnificent and useful monopoly.

This exclusive character was destroyed by Parliament; scholarships

in mathematics and classics were instituted; it is now like other

colleges, and men who wish to study law at its source no longer

frequent it. He talked to me of Cambridge, and related with mimicry

anecdotes of "Ben" Latham, Master of Trinity Hall. Dining at Trinity

Hall one Sunday in 1883, he said Latham told him that he had lately

been sitting on an inter-University committee with Jowett, and that

Jowett was so sharp a man of business that "it is like sitting to

represent the Great Northern against the London and North-Western.

His one idea is to draw away passengers from the rival line." Latham

went on to say that the students for India who were made to stay two

years at Cambridge or Oxford, under Jowett's scheme, "the first year

learn _Sandford and Merton_ in Tamil, translated by a missionary;

and the second year _Sandford and Merton_ in Telugu, translated by

the same missionary. Thus they acquire a liberal education."

He talked of Waterloo, the battlefield being known to us both. It

was, he said, as the Duke always owned, a wonderfully near thing. If

Napoleon had had with him the two army corps left in France to

overawe insurrectionary districts, who would have joined him in a

week; and if at Ligny he had persevered in so smashing the Prussians

as to leave them powerless--if these two "if's" had become

realities, Napoleon must have driven Wellington back on Brussels.

Then the Belgians would have joined him, and the Austrians would

have forsaken the Allies, Metternich wishing well to Bonaparte for

the sake of his wife and child. The mystery of his escape from Elba,

which the English fleet might easily have prevented, remains still

to be explained: for the Vienna Congress was riddled with intrigue.

[Footnote: Sir Charles Dilke discussed the whole question of

Napoleon's escape from Elba in an article in the _Quarterly Review_,

January, 1910, entitled "Before and After the Descent from Elba."]

He made me laugh at a parson who in moments of provocation used to

say "Assouan!" His friends at last remembered that at Assouan was

the biggest dam in the world.

He gave me a recipe for beefsteak pudding: _no beef_, fresh kidney,

fresh mushrooms, fresh oysters, great stress laid on the epithet:

serve the pudding in its basin.

He came in to breakfast one morning whistling an attractive air. I

asked what it was; he said from _Carmen_, and hummed the air

through. He went on to say that he had well known the composer,

Bizet, who founded his opera on Mérimée's romance. It fell flat, and

Bizet died believing it a failure; afterwards it became the rage.

This whistling of music was a favourite practice with him. His

accurate ear enabled him to reproduce any tune which had at any time

impressed him. He would give Chinese airs, would go through parts of

a Greek Church service, would sing words and music of the _Dies Iræ.

On the Sunday following the death of Florence Nightingale our

Chertsey organist played Chopin's Funeral March. Sir Charles said

its _motifs_ were Greek rustic popular airs, each of which he

hummed, showing how Chopin had worked them in.

The dinner given to him in April, 1910, in connection with the Trade

Boards Bill was a great success, and much delighted him. He said

Bishop Gore had made a splendid speech. Sir Charles had a long chat

with Gore, and was, as always, delighted with his information and

bonhomie.

He talked of a Parisian jeweller who lived by selling jewels and by

lending money to the great Indian native potentates, and had

establishments for that purpose in India. This man wished to be

employed by our Government as a spy: Sir Charles applied on his

behalf to Lord George Hamilton, who handed to him the man's

_dossier_, an appalling catalogue of crimes and misdemeanours. He

had an extraordinarily noble presence; Sir Charles said to him:

"_You_ ought to be Amir of Afghanistan." "No," he replied; "I should

never have the patience to kill a sufficient number of people."

Of a French gentleman who had come to tea, recommended by the French

Ambassador, Sir Charles said that he was a French fool, the worst

kind of fool, _corruptio optimi_.

He showed the number of peerages having their origin in

illegitimacy, although the official books conceal the fact where

possible. The facts come out in such memoirs as Lady Dorothy

Nevill's. He went on to talk of divorce in the Roman Church, and to

scout their boast that with them marriage is an indissoluble

sacrament. The Prince of Monaco was for years the husband of Lady

Mary Hamilton. They tired of each other, wished for a divorce; the

Pope, with heavy fees for the transaction, declared the marriage to

have been for some ecclesiastical reason null and void. Each married

again; but the son of the nominally annulled union succeeded his

father as legitimate heir.

Sir Charles spoke--this was in 1906--of Bülow's speech in the German

Parliament, as one of the best ever made by any statesman, and

creating universal astonishment. Its appreciation of France and of

Gambetta was magnificent as well as generous. The French, after the

_débâcle_, behaved as a nation self-respecting and patriotic ought

to have behaved. His hint at the bad feeling between the Kaiser and

King Edward was dexterous; it was real and insuperable; none of our

Royal Family can forgive the seizure of Hanover by Prussia; and

added to this was our King's indignation at the Kaiser's treatment

of the Empress Frederick, a member of his family for whom he felt

strong affection.

Of Morny he said that he was very handsome, but in an inferior

style. His beautiful Russian wife never cared for him, but in

obedience to Russian custom cut off her wonderful hair to be laid

with him in his coffin.

He spoke of the brothers Chorley, one the supreme musical critic of

his time, the other a profound Spanish scholar, shut up through life

in his library of 7,300 volumes.

Dilke told me one morning that he had been writing since five

o'clock an article for the _United Service Gazette_, and had

finished it to his satisfaction, adding that papers dashed off under

an impulse were always the best. I demurred. "Those papers of mine,"

I said, "specially praised by you have been always the fruit of long

labour." "Ah!" he answered, "but you have style--a rare

accomplishment; that is what I have admired in yours." "Would you,"

I said, "admire the style if the matter were ill considered?" "Yes."

He often talked admiringly of the Provençal language, declaiming

more than once what he called a fine Homeric specimen:

"Pesto, liona, sablas, famino, dardai fou,

Avie tout affronta."

(Pestilence, lions, sandy deserts, famine, maddening sun-heat,

Ye have all this faced.)

He was fond, too, of quoting Akbar's inscription on the Agra bridge:

"Said Jesus, on whom be peace, Life is a bridge: pass over!"

He described the French Foreign Legion: two regiments employed by

the French chiefly among the natives in the Tonquin settlement--

desperate men most of them, many of high social position and of army

rank, who had "done something" and had gone wrong; disgraced, hiding

from society, criminals escaped from justice, with a sprinkling of

young adventurers and riotous Germans. No enormity they would not

commit, no danger they would not court; some even seeking death; all

knowing that if left wounded in the bush by retreating comrades they

would be tortured horribly by the Tonquin women. They had a hospital

served by Roman Catholic nurses, to whom they paid every respect.

When a man newly joined once whistled rudely while the Sister was

praying, as was her custom before leaving the ward, his comrades

severely punished him. Intra-regimental offences, such as theft,

were visited with death.

He mentioned one morning that he had just received a Privy Council

summons. I asked why the Bidding Prayer held a petition for the

Lords _and others_ of Her Majesty's Privy Council: old Regius

Professor Jacobson used to tell us that it was a mistake, that all

Privy Councillors were "Lords" of the Privy Council. He thought that

the word "others" represented the Lord Mayor, who attends Accession

Councils and signs the parchment, but, not being a Lord of Council,

is then required to leave, while other business proceeds.

Twice in these years he dined at Oxford--once at All Souls as the

guest of Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, again on the invitation of some

undergraduates, sons mostly of his political acquaintances. He

greatly enjoyed both; the young men were the pick and flower of

Oxford; the All Souls high table was full of young teachers and

professors. What a change from the aristocratic college of my time,

whose head was Lewis Sneyd, its Fellows William Bathurst, Henry

Legge, Sir Charles Vaughan, Augustus Barrington, etc.! Anson very

charmingly presided; the talk was everything except political.

He was extraordinarily impressed by the funeral of the King--a

wonderful and novel ceremony he called it. As a senior Privy

Councillor he had an excellent place with Asquith close to the

coffin. The most magnificent figure in the show was Garter

King-of-Arms, but all the heralds were splendid. The Archbishop,

with the Dean of Westminster and a cross-bearer, was the only

prominent ecclesiastic, the Bishops in their places as peers being

crowded out of sight. The colouring was most effective, black

setting off the scarlet. The singing was somewhat drowned by the

Guards' bands, but the Dead March came in grandly through the

windows from Palace Yard. He mentioned a curious fact: that

Westminster Hall is controlled, not by Parliament, not by any

Government department, but by the Great Chamberlain. It is the sole

remaining part of the royal palace, which was lent to Parliament by

our early Kings. I said that it had not witnessed such a scene

since, on Mary's accession, the Sovereign and the two Houses met

there to receive Papal absolution from the Legate Pole. He wished I

had told him so before.

He recalled the Cambridge Union debates of his time: the best he

ever heard was on a personal question, the impeachment of a man

named Harris for some breach of rule. Henry Sidgwick was in the

chair, the speaking extraordinarily animated and well sustained. The

finest orator of his time was a man called Payne. [Footnote: Payne

belonged to the same college as Dilke, Trinity Hall, and was

bracketed Senior in the Law Tripos of 1868. He had begun to make his

mark both at the Bar and in the Press, when, still a very young man,

he was killed in a mountaineering accident in Wales.] I said our

best speaker in my day was Goschen; his Union reports caused

Gladstone to pick him out and bring him forward. He said yes, but

that Goschen never fulfilled his promise until his really powerful

speech on Free Trade in 1903.

He enumerated the Jewish types in England. There is (1) the sallow

Jew with a beak; (2) the same without a beak; (3) the "hammy" Jew,

with pink face like a _cochon-à-lait_. The Florentine type, with

fair hair and beautiful clear face, is not seen in England.

His criticism of a certain lady led me to ask who, of people he had

known, possessed the most perfect manners. He said Lord Clarendon,

who had the old carefully cultivated Whig manners, yet with the

faintest possible tendency to pomposity. This style became

unfashionable, and was succeeded by what he called the "early

Christian" or "Apostolic" manners, of which the late Lord Knutsford

was a perfect exemplar. The best-mannered woman he had known was the

late Lady Waterford. Domestic servants too, he said, have manners;

he instanced as magnificent specimens Turner, Lady Waldegrave's

groom of the chambers, and Miss Alice Rothschild's Jelf. Lady

Lonsdale once spoke of the latter as "Guelph, or whatever member of

the Royal Family it is that waits on Alice."

Sir Charles talked about the Wallace Collection. Sir Richard was not

the natural son either of the fourth Lord Hertford, or of his father

the third Lord, Thackeray's Steyne and Disraeli's Monmouth. He was

brought up by the fourth Lord Hertford, under the name of Monsieur

Richard, not by any means as the expectant heir; yet, excepting the

settled estates, which went to the fifth Marquis, all was left to

him. Part of the great art collection remained at Bagatelle, which

became the property of a younger Wallace, an officer in the French

army; the rest has come to the English nation through Lady Wallace,

to whom her husband left the whole. Why Sir Richard assumed the name

Wallace no one knows. He was French, not English, speaking English

imperfectly: a kind, cheery, polished gentleman.

Apropos of the Education Bill: old Lady Wilde from her window in

Tite Street heard a woman bewailing herself in the street--her son

had been "took away," to gaol that is. "He was a good boy till the

Eddication came along;" then, kneeling down on the pavement and

joining her hands, she prayed solemnly "God damn Eddication."

Sir Charles contrasted the idiosyncrasies of some politicians: Grey

reserved, Balfour telling everything to everybody; Arnold-Forster

closely "buttoned up," Gorst dangerously frank. On Gorst he

enlarged: a nominal Tory, in fact a Radical, ever battering his own

side for the mere fun of the operation; old in years, young in

activity of brain and body; a poor man all his life.

He said that the two incomparable sights which this country could

show to a foreigner were (1) Henley in regatta week; (2) the Park on

a fine summer day: everyone out riding, and the Life Guards' band

going down to a Drawing-room.

I asked if he had heard a certain London preacher who was drawing

large audiences. He said yes, and that he was well worth hearing.

"He is High Church and anti-ritualist, Socialist and aristocrat,

orthodox while holding every heresy extant, not cultured or

literary, slovenly and almost coarse; yet grasping his listeners by

the feeling impressed on each that the preacher knows and is

describing his (the hearer's) experiences, troubles, hopes,

life-history."

I questioned him about Leonard Montefiore, a memoir of whom had

caught my eye in one of the bookcases. He was a man of brilliant

promise, unpopular at Balliol, giving himself intellectual airs;

went unwashed, with greenish complexion and generally repulsive

appearance; would have been prominent had he lived; was much petted

by Ruskin.

He said that, if London were destroyed to-morrow, in ten years' time

its site would be covered with a forest of maple, sycamore, robinia,

showing an undergrowth of Persian willow-herb.

He told of a man whom his groom pronounced to be "the footiest gent

on a 'oss and the 'ossiest gent on foot as he ever see."

He spoke of the "Local Veto Bill," forced by Harcourt on a reluctant

Cabinet; Harcourt was, he said, a genuine convert to the principle--

a curious intellectual phenomenon, this development of a belated

conviction in a mind hitherto essentially opportunist. It cost him

his seat later on.

Sir Charles described Speaker Peel's farewell to the House: said

that it was quite perfect in every way. He thought Gully undesirable

as his successor, and should not vote for him.

Of the rising I.L.P. he said once, in early days, they had done

wrongly in formulating a programme. Their name was a sufficient

programme; now they would indirectly help the Tories.

He had an extraordinary insight into the mental habits and emotions

of domestic animals, interpreting the feelings and opinions of his

horses when out riding, of his Pyrford dog Fafner, of his Sloane

Street cat Calino, in a manner at once graphic and convincing. His

love for cats amounted to a passion; a menagerie of eight or ten

tailless white or ginger Persians was kept in an enclosure, at

Pyrford. Once, when exploring a fine Ravenna church, we missed him,

returning from our round to find him near the door, caressing a cat

belonging to the custodian, which he had inveigled into his lap.

His literary dislikes and preferences were numerous and frankly

expressed, deeply interesting as the idiosyncrasies of a rich and

highly trained intelligence, even when to myself somewhat

unaccountable. While keenly appreciating the best in modern French

literature, he could see no charm in Corneille or Racine. Quite

lately Rabelais, reopened after many years, appealed to him

strongly, as keen satire and invective veiled by wit, and, so only,

tolerated by those scourged. To be laid hold of and temporarily

possessed by a book was as characteristic of him as of old

Gladstone; in their turn, _Pantagruel_, Anatole France's _Penguins_,

most of all _The Blue Bird_, which he read delightedly, but would

not see acted, formed of late the breakfast equipage as certainly as

the eggs and toast: any utterance of conventional apology or regret

was expressed by, "Voulez-vous que j'embrasse le chat?"

His acquaintance with English literature was intermittent. He was

apparently a stranger to our eighteenth-century authors, both in

poetry and prose; of those who followed them in time, he undervalued

Scott, disliked Macaulay, admired Napier, admired Trollope.

Wordsworth he condemned as puerile, inheriting the _Edinburgh

Review_ estimate of his poetry, and often called on me ecstatically

to repeat Hartley Coleridge's parody of _Lucy_. Of Keats he was

immeasurably fond, drawn to him by the poet's relation to his

family, declaiming his lines often--as he did sometimes those of

Shelley, whose verses in his own copy of the poems are heavily and

with wise selection scored--in tones which showed a capacity for

deep poetic feeling. A quotation would accidentally arrest him, and

he would call for the book, usually after short perusal discarding

the author as a "poopstick," a favourite phrase with him. I remember

this occurring with the _Rejected Addresses_, though he knew and

loved James Smith. A travesty of Omar Khayyám, called _The Rubaiyat

of a Persian Kitten_, he read delightedly, much preferring it to the

original. He professed contempt for the study of English grammar,

more especially for the scientific analysis of English

sentence-structure, which plays so large a part in modern education.

The contempt was certainly, as Osborne Gordon said, not bred of

familiarity. I fear that, like most University or public school men,

he would have been foiled by the simplest Preliminary Grammar Paper

of a University Local Examination to-day.

But his knowledge of political history, foreign and domestic, during

the last centuries was marvellously extensive and minute. In earlier

history he was oblivious often of his own previous knowledge,

argumentatively maintaining untenable propositions. Though fortified

by Freeman and Bryce, I could never get him to admit that all the

historic "Emperors," from Augustus Caesar in 27 B.C. down to

Francis, King of Germany, who gave up the Empire in A.D. 1806, were

Emperors, not of Germany or Austria, but of Rome; or that the

Reformed English Church of Tudor times, with all its servility, had

never relinquished, but steadily held and holds, its claim to

continuous Catholicity. But a query as to the French Revolution, the

Napoleonic dynasties, the Vienna Congress, the South African or

Franco-Prussian War, or the developments in India, Canada, Egypt,

would draw forth a stream of marshalled lucid information, which it

was indeed a privilege to hear.

"Neque ille in luce modo atque in oculis civium magnus, sed intus

domique præstantior. Qui sermo! quæ præcepta! quanta notitia

antiquitatis! quæ scientia juris! Omnia memoria tenebat, non

domestica solum, sed etiam externa bella. Cujus sermone ita tunc

cupide tenebar, quasi jam divinarem, id quod evenit, illo exstincto

fore unde discerem neminem" (Cicero, _De Senectute_).

APPENDIX

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF MR. GLADSTONE BY

SIR CHARLES DILKE

The difficulty in the way of furnishing reminiscences of Mr. Gladstone

in Cabinet is in part the Privy Council oath, but still more the fact

that, where the matters that would be touched are of interest, they

often affect individuals or parties. I saw the most of Mr. Gladstone

between 1880 and 1886, and to this period the restrictions imposed by

the considerations named are most highly applicable. In the earlier days

when I sat in Parliament with him, from 1868 to 1880, we were, though

sitting on the same side of the House, frequently opposed to one

another, for I was often fighting for the claims of independent

Radicalism as against his commanding personality. This was especially

the case from 1868 to 1874; and his retirement after his defeat in 1874,

when Lord Hartington became the leader of the Liberal party, was so

complete that it was not until Mr. Gladstone was aroused by the

development of the Eastern Question in 1877 that we again saw much of

him in the House of Commons. An interesting reminiscence of the great

struggle of 1878 is afforded by the copy in my possession of the Whips'

list of the Liberal party marked by Mr. Gladstone and myself. I was

acting for him, against the party Whips, in the preparations for the

division upon his famous Resolutions. We daily went through the promises

of the members who had undertaken to support his Resolutions, of those

who remained steadfast in adhesion to Lord Hartington and who were

prepared to vote against the Resolutions, and of those who would vote

neither way. The changes from day to day in the ascertained opinions of

the party were most strange. Family was divided against family--for

instance the family of Cavendish--and the cleavage followed no line that

corresponded with shades of Liberalism. The pro-Turks upon the Liberal

side were joined in their support of Lord Hartington by the "peace at

any price" section of the Radicals. Curiously enough, the division of

the party was exactly equal, and remained equal through all the changes

of individual promises. On the day on which peace was made, and (to Mr.

Gladstone's immense relief) the chances of a complete disruption

averted, the number of members pledged to Mr. Gladstone was 110, and an

exactly equal number of members was pledged to Lord Hartington and the

Whips.

Coming to later times, a reminiscence is one of April, 1893, when Mr.

Gladstone sent for me to discuss a motion of which I had given notice

upon the Egyptian occupation. He talked on that occasion with that

absolute frankness which accompanied the confidence he always placed in

others. It was not peculiar to him, but belongs more, perhaps, to the

old days in which he received the training of his mind than to present

times. We are told that democratic diplomacy is to be outspoken. But, so

far as Parliament is concerned, the older leaders were, I think, like

Mr. Gladstone, more given to outspokenness than the newer men, who find

themselves forced by the ubiquity of the Press to a greater reserve than

was formerly necessary to be maintained. Mr. Gladstone was always of a

playful mind, and it would be impossible ever to fully relate any of his

conversations without recalling the manner in which, however absorbed in

his subject, he always would break off to discuss some amusing

triviality. Sir William Harcourt has touchingly recalled Mr. Gladstone's

old-world courtesy, which was in private life his distinguishing

characteristic.--_Daily News_, May 24_th_, 1898.