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.