CHAPTER XLVII
LADY DILKE—76, SLOANE STREET
Sir Charles Dilke's marriage in 1885 extended rather than modified his sphere of work. Lady Dilke, the Emilia Strong who was studying drawing in 1859 at South Kensington, [Footnote: See Chapter 11. (Vol. 1., p. 17).] had submitted herself in these long intervening years to such scholarly training and discipline as gave her weight and authority on the subjects which she handled.
The brilliant girl's desire to take all knowledge for her kingdom had been intensified by her marriage at twenty-one to the scholar more than twice her age. In the words of Sir Charles's Memoir: 'She widened her conception of art by the teaching of the philosopher and by the study of the literatures to which the schooling of Mark Pattison admitted her. She saw, too, men and things, travelled largely with him, became mistress of many tongues, and gained above all a breadth of desire for human knowledge, destined only to grow with the advance of years.' [Footnote: The Book of the Spiritual Life, by the late Lady Dilke, with a Memoir of the Author by Sir Charles W. Dilke, p. 18.]
At twenty-five years of age she was contributing philosophical articles to the Westminster Review, and for years she wrote the review of foreign politics for the Annual Register. Later she furnished art criticisms to the Portfolio, the Saturday Review, and the Academy, of which last she was art editor. It was as an art critic that she had come to be known, and to this work she brought a remarkable equipment; for to her technical knowledge and artist's training was added a deep study of the tendencies of history and of human thought. Art in the Modern State, in which she wrote of the art of the 'Grand Siècle' in its bearing on modern political and social organizations, has been quoted as the book most characteristic of the philosophical tendency of her writing, but this did not appear till 1888. The Renaissance of Art in France, which had been published in 1879, was illustrated by drawings from her own pencil, and in 1884 had appeared Claude Lorrain, written by herself in the pure and graceful French of which she was mistress.
She had been a pupil of Mulready, whose portrait still decorates the mantelpiece of her Pyrford home, and in the early South Kensington days had come much under the influence of Watts and Ruskin. There were numbered among her friends many who had achieved distinction in the art, literature, or politics of Europe. Her letters on art to Eugène Müntz, preserved in the Manuscript Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale, commemorate the friendship and assistance given to her by the author of the History of the Italian Renaissance, whose admiration for her work made him persuade her to undertake her Claude. It was Taine who bore witness to her 'veritable erudition on the fine arts of the Renaissance,' when in 1871, lecturing in Oxford, he used to visit Mark Pattison and his young wife at Lincoln College, and described the 'toute jeune femme, charmante, gracieuse, à visage frais et presque mutin, dans le plus joli nid de vieille architecture, avec lierre et grands arbres.' [Footnote: 'The Art Work of Lady Dilke,' Quarterly Review, October, 1906.] It was Renan, a friend of later years, whom as yet she did not know, who 'presented' her Renaissance to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
But there was another side to her activities, as intense. Public service was to her a duty of citizenship, and her keen sympathy with suffering had inspired her to such study of economic and industrial questions that, in her effort for the development of organization among women workers, she was for years 'the practical director of a considerable social movement.' Her four volumes on Art in France in the Eighteenth Century, which occupied her from this time onwards, were not more absorbing to her than was the growth of the Women's Trade Union League.
She had concentrated her powers on a special period of French art, just as she concentrated them on a certain phase of industrial development; but her reverence for and pursuit of all learning persisted, and, in the words of the Memoir written by Sir Charles, 'she was master enough of human knowledge in its principal branches to know the relation of almost every part of it to every other.' [Footnote: Book of the Spiritual Life, Memoir, p. 70.]
The intense mental training of the years of her first marriage had given her a grasp of essential facts and a breadth of outlook most unusual in women, and rare among men. She always correlated her own special work to that of the larger world. She found in the Women's Protective and Provident Union a little close corporation, full of sex antagonism and opposition to legislative protection, but under her sway these limitations gradually disappeared, and the Women's Trade Union movement became an integral part of industrial progress. It is difficult to realize now the breadth of vision which was then required to see that the industrial interests of the sexes are identical, and that protective legislation does not hamper, but emancipates. It was this attitude which brought to her in this field of work the friendship and support of all that was best in the Labour world of her day henceforth to the end.
'It is delightful to talk to Mrs. Mark Pattison,' said Sir Charles Dilke years before to Sir Henry James. 'She says such wonderful things.' She had the rare power of revealing to others by a few words things in their true values, and those who came within the sphere of her influence try still to recover the attitude of mind which she inspired, to remember how she would have looked at the fresh problems which confront them, and to view them in relation to all work and life.
It was this knowledge and breadth of view which told. A perfect speaker, with tremendous force of personality, charm of manner, beauty of voice, and command of emotional oratory, her power was greatest when she preferred to these methods the force of a reasoned appeal. Conviction waited on these appeals, and in early days, at a public meeting, a group of youthful cynics, 'out' for entertainment, dispersed with the comment: 'That was wonderful—you couldn't heckle a woman like that.'
Her serious work never detracted from her social charm, which was influenced by her love and study of eighteenth century French art. Her wit, gaiety, and the sensitive fancy which manifested itself in her stories, [Footnote: The Shrine of Love, and Other Stories; and The Shrine of Death, and Other Stories.] made up this charm, which was reflected in the distinction and finish of her appearance. Some touches seemed subtly to differentiate her dress from the prevailing fashion, and to make it the expression of a personality which belonged to a century more dignified, more leisured, and less superficial, than our own. [Footnote: Book of the Spiritual Life, p. 120.] Her dress recalled the canvases of Boucher, Van Loo, and Watteau, which she loved.
She played as she worked, with all her heart, delivering herself completely to the enjoyment of the moment. 'Vous devez bien vous amuser, Monsieur, tous les jours chez vous,' said a Frenchwoman to Sir Charles one night at a dinner in Paris. [Footnote: Book of the Spiritual Life, Memoir, p. 96.] In this power of complete relaxation their natures coincided. Her gaiety matched Sir Charles's own. This perhaps was the least of the bonds between them. The same high courage, the same capacity for tireless work, the same sense of public duty, characterized both.
Sir Charles's real home was the home of all his life, of his father and grandfather—No. 76, Sloane Street. Pyrford and Dockett were, like La Sainte Campagne at Toulon, mainly places for rest and play. This home was a house of treasures—of many things precious in themselves, and more that were precious to the owners from memory and association. Through successive generations one member of the family after another had added to the collection. Many had been accumulated by the last owner, who slept always in the room that had been his nursery. He believed he would die, and desired to die, in the house where he was born. The desire was accomplished, for he died there, on January 26th, 1911, a few months before the long lease expired.
Partly from its dull rich colouring of deep blues and reds and greens, its old carpets and tapestries, partly from the pictures that crowded its walls, the interior had the air rather of a family country-house than of a London dwelling in a busy street.
Pictures, lining the walls from top to bottom of the staircase, represented a medley of date and association. Byng's Fleet at Naples on August 1st, 1718, with Sir Thomas Dilkes second in command, hung next to a view of the Château de la Garde, near Toulon. This picturesque ruin rose clear in the view from Sir Charles's house at Cap Brun, 'La Sainte Campagne,' and figures as an illustration in one of Lady Dilke's stories; 'Reeds and Umbrella Pines' at Carqueiranne, by Pownoll Williams, kept another memory of Provence. Next to a painting, by Horace Vernet, of a scene on the Mediterranean coast, little Anne Fisher, born 1588, exhibited herself in hooped and embroidered petticoat, quaint cap and costly laces, a person of great dignity at six years old. She was to be Lady Dilke of Maxstoke Castle and a shrewd termagant, mother of two sons who sided, one with the Commonwealth, the other with the King. The Royalist Sir Peter Wentworth was a great friend of Milton, with whom he came in contact on the Committee of State when Milton was Secretary for the Council of Foreign Tongues. But Cromwell turned him off the Council, and he was arrested and brought to London for abetting his Warwickshire tenantry in refusal to pay the Protector's war-taxes. Her Puritan son, Fisher Dilke, followed, with a sour-faced Puritan divine, and then came a group of water-colours by Thomas Hood, the author of 'The Song of the Shirt,' and an intimate friend of the Dilkes.
One of the ancestors, an earlier Peter Wentworth, son of Sir Nicholas Wentworth (who was Chief Porter of Calais, and knighted by Henry VIII. at the siege of Boulogne), bore the distinction of having been three times sent to the Tower. The first was for a memorable speech on behalf of the liberties of the House of Commons, in 1575. Imprisonment does not seem to have taught him caution, for he was last imprisoned in 1593, because he had 'offended Her Majesty,' and a prisoner he remained till his death in 1596, occupying the period by writing a Pithie Exhortation to Her Majesty for Establishing her Successor to the Crowne.
Engravings of Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Harry Vane, Fulk Greville, Lord Burleigh, William Warham (the friend of Erasmus, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Chancellor), Queen Katharine Parr, Robert Devereux (Earl of Essex), who all came into the Dilke pedigree, hung on the walls. But the most interesting portrait might have been that of Sir Charles himself in fancy dress, the Sir Charles of the early eighties before trouble had lined his face or silvered his hair. This was the painting of Sir Thomas, afterwards Lord Wentworth, who died in 1551 and lies in Westminster Abbey. The reversion to type was so striking that guests would often ask to see again 'the best portrait of Sir Charles.' [Footnote: This first Baron Wentworth had been knighted for his bravery in the taking of Braye and Montdidier in the expedition to France of 1523, and in 1529 was summoned to Parliament under the title of Lord Wentworth of Nettlestead. He attended Henry VIII. in his interview with the French King at Calais, and under Edward VI. was Lord Chamberlain of the Household and a member of the Privy Council.]
Among more recent portraits and drawings were a group of trophies, illustrating Sir Charles's experiences in the Franco-German War. Of three passes, the first was carried when he was with the Crown Prince Frederick and the Knights of St. John; the other two showed the change in his sympathies from Germany to France—one from the Commune, the other from the national headquarters at Versailles. Here lay a bullet which struck the wall beside him at Clamart Railway Station, just missing him; pens taken from the table of the Procureur Impérial at Wissembourg when the first French town was entered by the Germans; and a trophy of his birthday in 1871, a bit of the Napoleonic Eagle from the Guard-room at the Tuileries, smashed by the crowd on that day, September 4th, when the Third Republic was proclaimed.
Then followed old photographs of members of Parliament and Cabinet Ministers; pictures of Maxstoke Castle, where the elder branch of the Dilkes had its home; etchings by Rajon; framed numbers of Le Vengeur, printed after the entry of the Versailles army into Paris during the 'semaine sang-lante'; addresses, including some in Greek, presented to Sir Charles on various occasions. In the double dining-room a famous portrait of Gambetta—the only portrait taken from life—hung over one mantelpiece. A favourite citation might have been upon the lips: 'La France était à genoux. Je lui ai dit, "Lève-toi".' In 1875 Sir Charles asked Professor Legros to go to Paris and paint Gambetta, who never sat to any other artist. This portrait hangs now in the Luxembourg, and will ultimately be transferred to the Louvre, its destination by Sir Charles's bequest. The only other portrait of Gambetta is that by Bonnat, painted after death. It was the property of Dilke's friend M. Joseph Reinach, and the two had agreed to bequeath these treasured possessions to the Louvre. But the Legros was the more authentic. M. Bonnat said to Sir Charles: 'Mine is black and white; I never saw him. Yours is red as a lobster. Mais il paraît qu'il était rouge comme un homard.' Sir Charles himself wrote: 'It is Gambetta as he lives and moves and has his being. What more can I ask for or expect?' He always predicted that its painter, whose merit had never in his opinion been adequately recognized, would after death come to his due place.
The rooms had been lined with the grandfather's books, but soon after he came into possession Sir Charles disposed of them. He had a strong belief in keeping round him only the necessary tools for his work, and a large library was an encumbrance to him. But sentiment was strong, and for some time they remained, till a comment of George Odger's sealed their fate. Looking round the shelves, he remarked with wonderment on the number of the books and the wisdom of the friend who had read them all. Sir Charles, conscious that he had not done so, and that he never should lead the life of a purely literary man, gave away the more valuable, and sold the rest of the collection. Lord Carlingford profited by the Junius papers; Mr. John Murray by the Pope manuscripts; the British Museum by the Caryll papers; and pictures took the place of shelves. [Footnote: See Chapter XI. (Vol. I., pp. 161, 162).]
A number of fine old prints after Raphael were there, and also a photograph of the head of Fortune in Burne-Jones's 'Wheel.' Sir Charles had commissioned Burne-Jones to paint a head of Fortune, and the correspondence on the subject was sufficiently complete to suggest that the commission had been executed, though as a fact it was never carried out. Sir Charles, who knew something of the difficulty of tracing and attributing pictures, used to declare laughingly that the correspondence might go far to mislead some critic of the future into search after a non-existent original. Anyway, the beautiful head with its closed eyes hung there always, presiding over the varying fortunes of the last tenants of the house.
The far dining-room opened with French windows on a paved terrace, which led by steps to a little garden and to the stables beyond. This terrace was the scene of the morning fencing, when the clashing of foils and Sir Charles's shouts of laughter resounded to the neighbouring gardens. Lord Harcourt recalls the parties in the eighties, as one of the characteristic features of life at 76, Sloane Street. Lord Desborough, then Mr. W. Grenfell, a first-rate fencer, came frequently, and he chronicles the 'deadly riposte' of Sir Julian Pauncefote, a regular attendant when he was in town. Mr. R. C. Lehmann, best known as oarsman and boxer, but a fencer as well, came whenever he could. A great St. Bernard, lying waiting for him in the entrance hall, announced his master's presence.
Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, of the French Embassy, was one of the most regular attendants. When M. d'Estournelles left London it was to go to Tunis; and further reference in one of Sir Charles's letters betrays the pride with which he learnt that this frequenter of his school had done it credit by 'pinking his man' in a duel. M. Joseph Reinach came to fence whenever he was in London; so did Italian masters—for example, the Marchese Fabrizio Panluoci de' Calboli, 'who wants to set up here.'
The maitre d'armes was senior master at the London Fencing Club, and many young fencers joined these parties to gain experience. Sir Charles was one of the first Englishmen to use the épée; he fenced always when in Paris, as in London, and any famous French fencer who visited this country received as a matter of course an invitation to the morning meetings at No. 76. [Footnote: Sir Charles fenced whenever he was abroad, if he could get an opponent. There is a note of 1881: 'August 29th-September 3rd, fenced with de Clairval at La Bourboule.' As late as 1907 he was fencing at Hyères with a master who came over from Toulon on certain days in the week. Also at the end of 1881 he 'started a local fencing club in my own street, and trained some good fencers there, and used to get away to fence there whenever I could find time in the evening hours.' He took part in a competition at this club, and 'won the prize for rapier fencing, being beaten, of course, for foil fencing.'] Sir Theodoré Cook, now editor of the Field, an antagonist of a later date, and captain of the first international fencing team of 1903, speaks of the considerable reputation of Sir Charles as a fencer, 'taking the same place in a quiet way as that Lord Howard de Walden takes towards the public now' (1913).
It was the 'unconventional style and the boyish enjoyment of his pastime'—to use Lord Desborough's words—which were characteristic of Sir Charles. His mischievous attempts to distract his adversary's attention, his sudden drops to the ground and bewildering recoveries, his delight at the success of his feints, and contagious merriment, must have gained the sympathy of even the most formal fencer. Many stories of these bouts are told. One is that, having driven an antagonist from the terrace into the Garden Room, into which he was followed by his favourite cat, Sir Charles caught up and threw the protesting animal at his opponent, and dealt his final blow at a foe embarrassed by the double onslaught. Those, however, who know his respect for the dignity of cats will always regard the story as apocryphal.
He delighted in having near him the pictures of his friends, and there were many on the next landing, in the vestibule and the Blue Room to which it led. Mr. Chamberlain, keen-eyed and alert, looked out from Frank Holl's canvas. Fawcett, [Footnote: Now in the National Portrait Gallery, as also Holl's 'Chamberlain,' by Sir Charles's bequest.] painted by Ford Madox Brown in 1871, recalled an earlier friendship, as did the portrait of John Stuart Mill, who, never having sat to any painter, just before his death allowed Watts to paint this for Sir Charles. The picture came home on the day Mill died, and is the original. It was left by will to the Westminster Town Hall. The picture in the National Portrait Gallery is a replica, painted by Sir Charles's leave. By Watts was also a beautiful portrait of Sir Charles himself, the pendant to another which has gone. He and his first wife were painted for each other, but the portrait of her seemed to him so inadequately to render the 'real charm' of the dead woman that he destroyed it. The illustrations of this book contain some reproductions of pictures mentioned here.
Reminiscent of earlier family friendships were the Keats relics here and in Sir Charles's own study. Many of these had been bought by old Mr. Dilke from Keats's love, Fanny Brawne, to save them from the indignity of an auction.
In the Blue Room also hung some extraordinarily fine pictures by Blake, who was the friend of Sir Charles's grandfather—among them 'The Crucifixion,' 'The Blasphemer,' and 'The Devil,' [Footnote: 'I gave four of my Blakes to the South Kensington Museum in 1884.'] The best loved both by the grandfather and by Sir Charles was the beautiful 'Queen Catherine's Dream.' A precious copy of The Songs of Innocence, hand-painted by Blake and his wife, completed the collection. There were several reliefs by Dalou in the house, the finest let in over the mantelpiece of the Blue Room, a copy of Flaxman's Mercury and Pandora. They were executed for Sir Charles when the sculptor was in London in great distress after the Commune, before the amnesty which retrieved his fortunes.
Here also were reminiscences of Provence. One side of the wall was largely covered by a picture of Fréjus by Wislin, painted in the days when St. Raphael and Valescure did not exist, and when the old town rose clear from the low ground as Rome rises from the Campagna, the beautiful Roquebrune, a spur of Sir Charles's beloved Mountains of the Moors, behind it. Sèvres china, vases, bronzes, filled the window ledges, presents to the first Baronet from the Emperor of Austria, Napoleon III., the Crown Prince of Prussia (afterwards the Emperor Frederick), and other royal persons and Governments, with whom his Exhibition work brought him into touch.
At the time when Horace Walpole's collection at Strawberry Hill was sold, Sir Charles's grandfather had stayed at Twickenham, and had brought away many purchases, which peopled the Red and Green Drawing-rooms on the next landing. There was a little group of miniatures in which the 'Beautiful Gunnings' and a charming 'Miss Temple' figured; in another group, miniatures of Addison, of Mme. Le Brun, of Molière, came from Lady Morgan, whose pen of bog-oak and gold, a gift to her from the Irish people, hung in Sir Charles's own study. The best of the miniatures were those by Peter Oliver, and portrayed Frederick of Bohemia, Elector Palatine, and his wife Elizabeth, Princess Royal of England, afterwards married to Lord Craven; while the finest of all was 'a son of Sir Kenelm Digby, 1632.' It was one of 'several others' which Walpole 'purchased at a great price,' a purchase which was thus chronicled 'by Mason (Junius) in a letter to Walpole: 'I congratulate you on the new miniatures, though I know one day they will become Court property and dangle under the crimson-coloured shop-glasses of our gracious Queen Charlotte.' The set were all brought together for the first time since 1842 at the Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition.
In these two drawing-rooms, among the medley of enamelled and inlaid tables, royal gifts and collectors' purchases, pictures by Cranach, Mabuse, Van Goyen, Mignard, and many more, some special objects stood out. These were a beautiful Madonna by Memling, on a circular panel, from Lord Northwick's collection; the Strawberry Hill marble version of the famous Bargello relief by Donatello, of the head of the infant St. John the Baptist; and a portrait ascribed to Cornelius Jansen, which, owing to the fleurs-de-lis on the chair, passed by the name of 'the Duchess,' a portly lady of some dignity, with beautiful white hands and tapering fingers. Lady Dilke's researches, however, placed the lady as Anne Dujardin, an innkeeper of Lyons. The painter, young Karl Dujardin, unable to pay his reckoning, had settled it by marrying his hostess and taking her to Amsterdam, and the fleurs-de-lis on the chair explained that the lady was of French extraction. A Flemish head of Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, had come from the Gwydyr Collection. She was much exhibited, but her main interest was due to Sir Charles's intense admiration for the governing capacity and the overshadowed life of the woman. He made two pilgrimages to the church at Brou, near Bourg-en-Bresse, where her sculptured face, closely resembling that of the portrait, looks out from tomb and windows, as she lies side by side with Philibert le Beau, the husband of her love and of her youth, in the magnificent shrine she built for him.
Tapestry hangings divided the rooms from each other, and in many cases only heavy curtains divided them from the stairs.
Above these rooms, Sir Charles's little study, occupied all day by his secretary or himself, was lined with books of reference and piles of despatch-boxes, while every spare foot on the wall held relics of the past. There was the Herkomer portrait of his second wife, there also a copy of a favourite picture, Bellini's Doge Leonardo Loredano; the portrait of Keats, the only one Severn did from the life—now on loan at the National Portrait Gallery—old political cartoons of Chelsea days, portraits and prints of John Wilkes, and a head of Mazzini. Felix Moscheles (the nephew of Mendelssohn and baby of the Cradle Song) painted Mazzini. Concerning its subject the Memoir notes: 'In the course of 1872 I lost a good friend in Mazzini, whose enthusiasms, Italian and religious, I at that time scarcely shared, but whose conversation and close friendship I deeply valued…. The modernness of the Universal Cigarette Smoking Craze may be judged by the fact that Mazzini was the first man I ever knew who was constantly smoking cigarettes.'
The rest was a medley impossible to catalogue: portraits of Charles Lamb, who had been the grandfather's friend; a scarce proclamation by the Pretender; medals and other 'Caryll' relics; rapiers, pistols which had travelled with Sir Charles through America; a section of the Trinity Hall boat which was head of the river in 1862 and 1864; seven cups, trophies of rowing, walking, fencing, and shooting matches, with shots dug up on his Toulon estate which were mementoes of the British blockades of the town. Apart from works of reference, a special case was given to autographed books from Hood, Rogers the poet, Gambetta, Laveleye, Louis Blanc, Castelar, Cardinal Manning, Queen Victoria, and many more. In this collection figured all Sir Charles's college prizes, carefully preserved; the family Bible of Lord Leicester, uncle to Sir Philip Sidney, with Dilke family entries; and a little volume in which his second wife had written for him some of the most beautiful passages from 'Queens' Gardens' in Sesame and Lilies; it was bound in white vellum and 'blessed by Ruskin.' Here, too, were many Keats letters and books afterwards left by will to Hampstead.
A hoard of treasures filled a little book-room above—his mother's sketches, drawings of his first wife driving her ponies in Sloane Street, photographs and trinkets of hers, old family caricatures, and also some original sketches by Leech. In the room next to it, occupied by his grandmother till her death in 1882, was a John Collier of the first Lady Dilke.
When the grandmother's sitting-room was used later by Sir Charles's second wife, its main features were a small reference library of French art and a collection of books on Labour. Before the fireplace, on the writing-table as it was in 1885, were bowls of French porcelain filled once a week with fresh flowers from the Toulon garden—paper white narcissus and purple anemones or big violets of Provençal growth.
Sir Charles's bedroom above was the old nursery, connected with his mother's room, in which he was born, and out of which opened a little room where as a child he slept. His memories of that room were the terrors of a nervous boy, lying alone in the dark, creeping downstairs to sit—a tiny white-robed figure—as near as possible to the drawing-room door, to get comfort from the hum of talk or thunder of the four-handed piano pieces of the period.
His own room for many years was full of drawings by his second wife—her studies under Mulready, her drawings for her Renaissance, and other pen-and-ink sketches by her hand, as well as two miniatures of her by Pollet. Some of Frank Dicey's Thames water-colours, one showing Sir Charles's river house at Dockett Eddy, and sketches from his own pen or brush made in his Russian, American, and world-wide wanderings, were here also. In a tiny glazed bookcase by the fire were some 'favourite books,' a volume or two of Kipling, two volumes of Anatole France, next to a cookery book of 1600, Renan's Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse, and a volume of Aubanel. The place of honour was given to a deeply scored copy of Jeremy Taylor's Golden Grove.
Beside his great-uncle's Peninsular medal and clasps hung one of Roty's medals, a present from the artist. There were several of Roty's beautiful medallions in the house, the finest one of Sir Charles himself, explained by the legend on the back as 'done for his wife.' She had it made, and it was always with her.
There were a good many of W. E. F. Britten's pictures, painted for Sir Charles; the finest was that of 'St. Francis preaching to the Birds,' a thing of delicate colour and taste, which fitted with his love of the Umbrian Holy Land and went later to the country cottage at Pyrford. There was more force in a large crayon drawing of the Earl of Southampton in the Tower: 'his cat had just arrived down the chimney, probably saving his master's reason by relief of the intolerable tension of lonely confinement.'
The painted cats, or Miss Chaplin's modelled pussies, of which there were many, were seldom without some magnificent living representative at 76, Sloane Street. Zulu, an enormous dark long-haired cat, was very popular; but the last of the 'Head Cats,' Calino, was so engaging that, at his death about 1908, Sir Charles decided that he should never be replaced. The sway of these cats was despotic, but there were occasions on which their own territory was too limited for them, and messages would come from far down the street demanding the removal of the reigning favourite from some article of furniture where it had ensconced itself with such majesty that a show of violence was out of the question. Among his precious books was a cat story—privately printed and bound—which his second wife had gradually evolved among the wonderful essays in story-telling with which, when he was jaded, she diverted him. This held so large a share in his affection that it nearly displaced his little French copy of the Contes de Perrault, containing the adventures of the Marquis of Carabas and Puss in Boots. At the winter cottage at Pyrford, among the pines, was a cattery, where Persian tailless cats, some ginger and some white, were bred. A list of names was kept ready for them, and Babettes, Papillons, Pierrots and Pierrettes, Mistigrises and Beelzebubs, were distributed to friends and acquaintances. Among the treasured pathetic scraps kept in his father's desk, his executors found a pencil drawing by his wife, the closed window of a silent house, into which the perfectly sketched figure of a little kitten was trying to enter.
In the gracious setting of this house the pervading atmosphere was that of work. The three generations of Dilkes whom it had sheltered had each found the sphere for which he was best fitted, and pursued it tirelessly. The grandfather, beloved old scholar and critic; the father, indefatigable organizer of international exhibitions, horticulturist, newspaper proprietor, member of Parliament—both passed on the traditions of strenuous labour to the great Parliamentarian who was now the occupant of the house. He had absorbed those traditions and far outvied his predecessors, working day and night, bringing down from his bedroom almost illegible memoranda to be deciphered by his secretary in the morning.
From 1880 to 1885 his accession to public office had intensified the work. Messengers with official boxes waited in the hall; callers on political or electoral business, to be interviewed by him or his secretaries, filled the Blue and Red Rooms. After the morning's fencing he passed rapidly from letters to interviews till the Office or the House of Commons claimed him, and his faithful coachman, Charles Grant, who when he died in 1901 had served his master for thirty years, waited for him at the door. Yet with all this the house continued, as in his father's day, to be noted for its hospitality, and the lists of guests in the tattered diaries bear witness to the enormous and varied circle of Sir Charles's friends. Here met foreign diplomatists and artists, English statesmen, and men of letters. Even Cardinal Manning broke his rule against dining out, as 'yours is a Cabinet dinner,' to come to 76, Sloane Street; but as he met M. de Franqueville, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, and the friend whom the Cardinal designated to be his biographer, the future author of France, J. E. C. Bodley, there must have been talk of other subjects than 'Housing of the Poor.' Indeed, absence of 'shop' seems to have been one of the charms of these dinners, and Mr. G. W. Osborn, the Chairman of the Chelsea Liberal Association, records that, even when the local leaders met there, some outside element was always introduced which made the talk general.
On another occasion Sir Charles notes: 'July 9th, 1884. On this day Cardinal Manning dined with me, and gave me, in return for a Spanish crucifix with which I had presented him, a miniature of "our patron, St. Charles,"' which now, he adds, '(1891 and 1903) hangs in my bedroom. Manning and H. von Bismarck met at my table—I think for the first time.'
His first invitation to Mr. Gladstone, of October 26th, 1882, was to meet the Duc de Broglie: 'the leader of the Conservative party in France is at this moment a sufficiently interesting figure for me to think you may like to come to meet him, if you are not engaged.'
Such social life, like the morning's rapid turn with the foils or the Sunday afternoon on the river, helped to save him from breakdown under a strain of work persistently intense. Another quality which saved him was his power of turning at once and completely from one occupation to another.
A friend thus describes him as he appeared in 1885: 'There was in him a quality of boyishness I have never seen in any other man, coupled with deep gravity and seriousness, and the transition from one mood to the other came with lightning rapidity. Appeal to him on some question of high politics, even at a moment of the most joyous relaxation, and his face gravened, his bearing changed; he pulled himself together with a trick of manner habitual to the end, and the 'boy' became the statesman before it seemed the last echoes of his laughter had died away. We all prophesied for him accession to the highest offices of the State; for though so far the offices which he had held had been of but minor rank, yet he had magnified these offices till they became of the first importance, and his knowledge and authority were as great as were his charm and his power of gathering round him supporters and friends. He spoke with the authority of one who knows his value to the nation which he serves.'
So with Sir Charles's second marriage the house entered on its last phase, and the dark days which followed were lightened for its two occupants by mutual confidence and the support of an abiding love.