INTRODUCTION
The papers from which the following Memoir is written were left to my exclusive care because for twenty-five years I was intimately associated with Sir Charles Dilke's home and work and life. Before the year 1885 I had met him only once or twice, but I recall how his kindness and consideration dissipated a young girl's awe of the great political figure.
From the year 1885, when my aunt, Mrs. Mark Pattison, married Sir Charles, I was constantly with them, acting from 1893 as secretary in their trade- union work. Death came to her in 1904, and till January, 1911, he fought alone.
In the earlier days there was much young life about the house. Mrs. H. J. Tennant, that most loyal of friends, stands out as one who, hardly less than I, used to look on 76, Sloane Street, as a home. There is no need to bear witness to the happiness of that home. The Book of the Spiritual Life, in which are collected my aunt's last essays, contains also the Memoir of her written by her husband, and the spirit which breathes through those pages bears perfect testimony to an abiding love.
The atmosphere of the house was one of work, and the impression left upon the mind was that no life was truly lived unless it was largely dedicated to public service. To the labours of his wife, a "Benedictine, working always and everywhere," Sir Charles bears testimony. But what of his own labours? "Nothing will ever come before my work," were his initial words to me in the days when I first became their secretary. Through the years realization of this fact became complete, so that, towards the last, remonstrances at his ceaseless labour were made with hopeless hearts; we knew he would not purchase length of life by the abatement of one jot of his energy. He did not expect long life, and death was ever without terror for him. For years he anticipated a heart seizure, so that in the complete ordering of his days he lived each one as if it were his last.
The house was a fine school, for in it no waste of force was permitted. He had drilled himself to the suppression of emotion, and he would not tolerate it in those who worked with him except as an inspiration to action. "Keep your tears for your speeches, so that you make others act; leave off crying and think what you can do," was the characteristic rebuke bestowed upon one of us who had reported a case of acute industrial suffering. He never indulged in rhetoric or talked of first principles, and one divined from chance words of encouragement the deep feeling and passion for justice which formed the inspiration of his work.
He utilized every moment. The rapidity of his transition from one kind of work to another, and his immediate concentration on a subject totally different from that which he had previously handled, were only equalled by the rapidity with which he turned from work to play.
With the same unerring quickness he would gather up the contents of a book or appreciate the drift of a question. This latter characteristic, I fear, often disconcerted disputants, who objected to leave their nicely turned periods incomplete because he had grasped the point involved before they were halfway through a sentence; but his delight in finding this same rapidity of thought in others was great, and I remember his instancing it as a characteristic of Mr. Asquith.
His wide grasp of every question with which he dealt was accompanied by so complete a knowledge of its smallest details that vague or inaccurate statements were intolerable to him; but I think the patience with which he sifted such statements was amongst the finest features in the discipline of working under him. One felt it a crime to have wasted that time of which no moment was ever deliberately wasted by himself.
The spirit in which he approached his work was one of detachment from all personal considerations; the introduction of private feuds or dislikes into public service was a thing impossible to him and to be severely rebuked in those who helped him. He never belittled antagonists, underrated his opponents' ability, or hesitated to admit a mistake. Others will testify in the pages which follow to the warmth and generosity of his friendship, but that which stands out in memory is his forbearance to his foes.
Just as his knowledge was complete in its general grasp as in its smallest detail, so was his sympathy all-embracing. No suffering, says the Secretary of the Anti-Sweating League, was too small for his help; the early atrocities of Congo misrule did not meet with a readier response than did the wrongs of some heavily fined factory girl or the sufferings of the victim of a dangerous trade.
For his own achievements he was curiously regardless of fame. He gave ungrudgingly of his knowledge to all who claimed his help and direction, and he trained many other men to great public service. In Mr. Alfred Lyttelton's happy phrase, he possessed "rare self-effacement." There are many instances in his early career of this habit of self-effacement, and the habit increased with years. Remonstrance met with the reply: "What does it matter who gets the credit so long as the work is done?"
It is for this reason that we who love him shall ever bear in affectionate memory those who brought his laurels home to him in their celebration of the passing of the Trade Boards Act in 1910—that first instalment of the principle of the minimum wage, on which he united all parties and of which he had been the earliest advocate.
It has been said of his public life that he knew too much and interested himself in too many things; but those coming after who regard his life as a whole will see the connecting link which ran through all. I can speak only of that side of his activities in which I served him. He saw the cause of labour in Great Britain as it is linked with the conditions of labour throughout the globe; his fight against slavery in the Congo, his constant pressure for enlightened government in India, his championship of the native races everywhere, were all part and parcel of the objects to which he had pledged himself from the first. For progress and development it is necessary that a country should be at peace, and his study of military and naval problems was dictated by the consideration of the best means under existing conditions to obtain that end for England.
Yet to imagine that his life was all work would be to wrong the balance of his nature. He turned from letters and papers to his fencing bout, his morning gallop, or his morning scull on the river, with equal enthusiasm, and his great resonant boyish laugh sounded across the reach at Dockett or echoed through the house after a successful "touch." His keenness for athletic exercises, dating from his early Cambridge days, lasted, as his work did, to the end. In spite of the warnings of an overtaxed heart, he sculled each morning of the last summer at Dockett, and in Paris he handed over his foils to his fencing-school only a month before his death, leaving, like Mr. Valiant-for-Truth before he crossed the river, his arms to those who could wield them. It was well for him; he could not have borne long years of failing strength and ebbing mental energy. Anything less than life at its full was death to him.
Released from work, he was intensely gay, and his tastes were sufficiently simple for him to find enjoyment everywhere. He loved all beautiful things, and, though he had seen everything, the gleam of the sinking sun through the pine aisles at his Pyrford cottage would hold him spellbound; and in summer he would spend hours trying to distinguish the bird notes, naming the river flora, or watching the creature life upon the river banks. So in the Forest of Dean, that constituency which he loved well and which well deserved his love, his greatest pleasure was to set himself as guide to all its pleasant places, rehearsing the name of each blue hill on the far horizon, tracing the windings and meeting of the rivers, loving all best, I think, when the ground was like a sea of bluebells and anemones in the early year. He watched eagerly each season for the first signs of spring, and when he was very ill he told me that it must ever be a joy untouched by advancing years. But indeed he had in him the heart of the spring. I think it was largely this simple love of nature which kept him always strong and sweet even after the deep blow of his wife's death in 1904.
Wherever he was, life took on warmth and colour. Travel with him was a revelation, trodden and hackneyed though the road might be. In his vivid narrative the past lived again. Once more troops fought and manoeuvred as we passed through stretches of peaceful country which were the battlefields of France; Provence broke on us out of a mist of legendary lore, the enchantment deepening as we reached the little-traversed highlands near the coast—those Mountains of the Moors where in past days, connu comme le loup blanc among the people, he had wandered on foot with his old Provençal servant before motors and light railways were.
His care for the Athenaeum, inspired by the more than filial love he bore his grandfather, its earlier proprietor, led to continual reading and reviewing, and he would note with interest those few Parliamentarians who, keeping themselves fresh for their work of routine by some touch with the world of Literature, thereby, as he phrased it, "saved their souls."
Of the events which cut his public life asunder it is sufficient to say here that those nearest him never believed in the truth of the charges brought, finding it almost inconceivable that they should have been made; while the letters and records in my hands bear testimony to that great outer circle of friends, known and unknown, who have expressed by spoken or by written word, in public and in private, their share in that absolute belief in him which was a cardinal fact of our work and life.
The fortitude which gave to his country, after the crash of 1886, twenty- five years of tireless work, was inspired, for those who knew him best, by that consciousness of rectitude which holds a man above the clamour of tongues, and finds its reward in the fulfilment of his life's purpose.
"To have an end, a purpose, an object pursued through all vicissitudes of fortune, through heart's anguish and shame, through humiliation and disaster and defeat—that is the great distinction, the supreme justification of a life." So wrote his wife in her preface for The Shrine of Death.
The service of his country was the purpose of his life. Nor was that life justified alone by his unswerving pursuit of its great aim; it was justified also in its fulfilment, for his service was entirely fruitful— he wrested success from failure, gain from loss.
It has been said that in 1886 the nation lost one who would have been among its greatest administrators. Yet when we look back on all that was inspired and done by him, on the thousand avenues of usefulness into which his boundless energy was directed, there is no waste, only magnificent achievement.
An independent critic both by pen and speech inside and outside the House of Commons, the consolidator of whatever Radical forces that chamber held, the representative of labour before the Labour Party was, he stood for all the forces of progress, and when his great figure passed into the silence his place was left unfilled.
One writing for an African journal the record of his funeral, dreamed that as the strains of the anthem poured their blessings on "him that hath endured," there rose behind the crowd which gathered round him dead a greater band of mourners. "A vast unseen concourse of oppressed mankind were there, coming to do homage to one who had ever found time, amidst his manifold activities, to plead their cause with wisdom, unfailing knowledge, and with keen sympathy of heart."
I commit his memory to the people whom he loved and served.