'What a delightful leader of a party is the G.O.M.! It is an interesting subject of speculation, though, thank God, it is one of speculation only, what might happen to this country if, like the old Red Indian in Hawthorne's novel, he lived to be 300 years old…. My own opinions about setting up a Parliament in Dublin are quite unchanged, but I look on the G.O.M. as the great obstacle to any satisfactory settlement. I see nothing but pandemonium ahead of us.'
The question was whether the future Assembly in Dublin was to be called a 'Legislature' or a 'Parliament.'
Sir Charles, as a Gladstonian Liberal politician, was involved in the misfortune of his party. But in the first weeks of July he hoped that justice in the court of law might soon relieve his personal misfortunes. That anticipation was rudely falsified. Within a fortnight after he had lost the seat which had been won and held by him triumphantly in four General Elections, the second trial of his case was over, and had followed the course which has been already described.
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.