The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Volume 1
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Title: The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Volume 1
Author: Stephen Lucius Gwynn
Editor: Gertrude M. Tuckwell
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7382]
Most recently updated: December 30, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7382
Credits: Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF THE RT. HON. SIR CHARLES W. DILKE, VOLUME 1 ***
Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE LIFE OF THE RT. HON. SIR CHARLES W. DILKE, BART., M.P.
[Illustration: RT. HON. SIR CHARLES W. DILKE, BART., M.P., IN THE
YEAR 1873.
From the painting by G. F. Watts in the National Portrait Gallery.
Frontispiece, Vol. I.]
THE LIFE OF THE RT. HON. SIR CHARLES W. DILKE
BART., M.P.
BEGUN BY STEPHEN GWYNN, M.P.
COMPLETED AND EDITED BY
GERTRUDE M. TUCKWELL.
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
PREFACE
The following Life of Sir Charles W. Dilke consists mainly of his own
Memoirs and of correspondence left by him or furnished by his friends.
The Memoirs were compiled by Sir Charles Dilke from his private diaries
and letters between the years 1888 and his return to Parliament in 1892.
The private diaries consisted of entries made daily at the dates dealt
with. Of the Memoirs he says: "These notes are bald, but I thought it best
not to try, as the phrase goes, 'to write them up.'" In some cases the
Memoirs have been condensed into narrative, for Sir Charles says of the
periods his "notes" cover: "These chapters contain everything that can be
used, and more than is needed, and changes should be by way of 'boiling
down.'" The Memoirs were unfinished. He writes in May, 1893: "From this
time forward I shall not name my speeches and ordinary action in the
House, as I had now regained the position which I held up to 1878, though
not my position of 1878-1880, nor that of 1884-85;" and as from this point
onwards there are few entries, chapters treating of his varied activities
have been contributed by those competent to deal with them.
Sir Charles Dilke's will, after giving full discretionary powers to his
literary executrix, contains these words: "I would suggest that, as
regards those parts relating to Ireland, Egypt, and South Africa, the same
shall be made use of (if at all) without editing, as they have been agreed
to by a Cabinet colleague chiefly concerned." A further note shows that,
so far as Ireland was concerned, the years 1884-85 cover the dates to
which Sir Charles Dilke alludes. The part of the Memoirs dealing with
these subjects has therefore been printed _in extenso_, except in the case
of some detailed portions of a discussion on Egyptian finance.
The closing words of this part of Sir Charles Dilke's will point out to
his executrix that "it would be inconsistent with my lifelong views that
she should seek assistance in editing from anyone closely connected with
either the Liberal or Conservative party, so as to import into the
publications any of the conventional attitude of the old parties. The same
objection will not apply to members of the other parties." In consequence
of this direction, Mr. Stephen Gwynn, M.P., whose name was among those
suggested by Sir Charles Dilke, was asked to undertake the work of
arranging the Memoirs, and supplementing them where necessary. This work
was already far advanced when Mr. Gwynn joined the British forces on the
outbreak of the War. His able and sympathetic assistance was thus
withdrawn from the work entailed in the final editing of this book--a work
which has occupied the Editor until going to press.
A deep debt of gratitude is due to Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, who has
contributed the chapters on "The British Army" and "Imperial Defence." Sir
George Askwith was good enough, amidst almost overwhelming pressure of
public duties, to read and revise the chapter entitled "The Turning-
Point." Sir George Barnes and Sir John Mellor have also freely given
expert advice and criticism. Mrs. H. J. Tennant, Miss Constance Smith, Mr.
E. S. Grew, Mr. H. K. Hudson and Mr. John Randall have given much valuable
assistance. The work of reading proofs and verifying references was made
easy by their help.
While thanking all those who have placed letters at her disposal, the
Editor would specially acknowledge the kindness with which Mr. Austen
Chamberlain has met applications for leave to publish much correspondence.
Mr. John Murray's great experience has made his constant counsel of the
utmost value; and from the beginning to the close of the Editor's task the
literary judgment of the Rev. W. Tuck well has been placed unsparingly at
her service. Sir H. H. Lee and Mr. Bodley, who were Sir Charles Dilke's
official secretaries when he was a Minister, have given her useful
information as to political events and dates.
To the many other friends, too numerous to name, who have contributed
"recollections" and aid, grateful acknowledgments must be made.
Finally, the Editor expresses her warmest thanks to Lord Fitzmaurice, who
has laid under contribution, for the benefit of Sir Charles Dilke's Life,
his great knowledge of contemporary history and of foreign affairs,
without which invaluable aid the work of editing could not have been
completed.
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.
G. M. T.
CONTENTS OF VOL. 1
I. EARLY LIFE
II. EDUCATION
III. CAMBRIDGE
IV. CAMBRIDGE (_continued_)
V. LAST TERMS AT THE UNIVERSITY
VI. "GREATER BRITAIN"
VII. ELECTION TO PARLIAMENT
VIII. THE EDUCATION BILL OF 1870--THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR
IX. THE BLACK SEA TREATY--THE COMMUNE
X. THE CIVIL LIST
XI. PERIOD OF FIRST MARRIAGE
XII. RE-ELECTION TO PARLIAMENT--DEATH OF LADY DILKE
XIII. RENEWAL OF ACTIVITY
XIV. REVIVAL OF THE EASTERN QUESTION
XV. HOME POLITICS AND PERSONAL SURROUNDINGS
XVI. THE EASTERN QUESTION--TREATY OF SAN STEFANO AND CONGRESS OF BERLIN
XVII. POLITICS AND PERSONS
XVIII. THE ZULU WAR AND THE GREEK COMMITTEE
XIX. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL INTERESTS
XX. THE FORMATION OF A MINISTRY
XXI. AT THE FOREIGN OFFICE
XXII. HOME POLITICS--COMMERCIAL TREATY--PERSONAL MATTERS
XXIII. COERCION--CLOSURE--MAJUBA
XXIV. EUROPEAN POLITICS
XXV. COMMERCIAL RELATIONS WITH FRANCE
XXVI. GAMBETTA, DISRAELI, ROYAL PERSONAGES, MORIER
XXVII. DIFFICULTIES OF THE LIBERAL GOVERNMENT
XXVIII. THE PHOENIX PARK MURDERS
XXIX. EGYPT (JANUARY TO SEPTEMBER, 1882)
XXX. ENTRY INTO THE CABINET (SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 1882)
XXXI. AT THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD
XXXII. FOREIGN AND COLONIAL AFFAIRS (OCTOBER, 1882, TO DECEMBER, 1883)
XXXIII. EGYPT AFTER TEL-EL-KEBIR (SEPTEMBER, 1882, TO DECEMBER, 1883)
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. I
RT. HON. SIR CHARLES W. DILKE, M.P., IN THE YEAR 1873
Photographed by F. Hollyer from the painting by G. F. Watts, R.A., in the
National Portrait Gallery.
SIR CHARLES W. DILKE AS A CHILD
From the miniature by Fanny Corbaux.
MR. CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE (SIR CHARLES W. DILKE'S GRANDFATHER)
Photographed by F. Hollyer from the painting by Arthur Hughes.
SIR C. WENTWORTH DILKE (SIR CHARLES W. DILKE'S) FATHER
Photographed by F. Hollyer from the painting by Arthur Hughes.
LADY DILKE (MISS KATHERINE SHEIL)
From a photograph by Hills and Saunders.
JOHN STUART MILL
Photographed by F. Hollyer from the painting by G. F. Watts, R.A.,
bequeathed by Sir Charles W. Dilke to the Westminster Town Hall.
RT. HON, JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN, M.P.
Photographed by F. Hollyer from the painting by Frank Holl, R.A.,
bequeathed by Sir Charles W. Dilke to the National Portrait Gallery.
LÉON GAMBETTA
Photographed by F. Hollyer from the painting by Legros, bequeathed by Sir
Charles W. Dilke to the Luxembourg and Louvre Museums.
THE LIFE OF SIR CHARLES DILKE
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE
The man whose history is here recorded was for more than forty years a
commanding figure upon the theatre of English public life; a politician,
who in the councils of a powerful Ministry exercised an influence more
than proportioned to the offices he held; a statesman, who brought to
triumphant issue many wise projects, and whose authority, even when he was
a private member of Parliament, continued to be recognized not only among
all parties of his countrymen, but also throughout Europe: yet, when he
died, all thought and spoke not of what he had achieved, but of what he
had missed.
To write the biography of one so marked by a special malignity of fate is
a difficult task. That bare justice may be done, it is necessary not only
to follow out his openly recorded successes, things done in his own name
and of his own right, but also to disentangle, as far as may be, the part
which his authority, his knowledge, and his ceaseless industry played in
framing and securing measures whose enactment redounded to the credit of
other men. But above all, since a man's personality signifies far more
than his achievements, and this man stands before the world overshadowed
by a dishonouring accusation, it is necessary to establish by facts and by
testimony not so much what he did as what he was.
Yet it must not be supposed that he himself counted his career among
life's failures. The record will tell of close and affectionate family
ties; of a wonderfully vivid and varied experience acquired in many lands
and through many phases of activity; and, even in his blackest hour, of a
noble love retained and richly repaid. No trace will be found of a nature
soured or warped by balked ambition, nor any resentful withdrawal from the
public stage.
In the story that has to be told, proof will emerge indisputably that,
without affected indifference to the prizes of a public career, his
passion was for work, not for its attendant honours; that he valued office
as an opportunity to advance, not himself, but the causes which he had at
heart; and that when further tenure of power was denied him, he abated no
jot of his lifelong labours. The main purpose of his life was 'to revive
true courage in the democracy of his country,' [Footnote: Throughout these
volumes single quotation marks without further indication signify an
excerpt from the Manuscript Memoir (compiled by Sir Charles, as explained
in the Preface, from original diaries and letters), or (as here) from
notes left with that document, but not embodied in it. Double quotation
marks signify Correspondence and Memoranda found in the despatch-cases and
letters sent by correspondents, etc.] and his immediate object always and
everywhere to defend the weak. For the protection of toilers from their
taskmasters at home and abroad, in the slums of industrial England and in
the dark places of Africa, he effected much directly; but indirectly,
through his help and guidance of others, he effected more; and in the
recognition of his services by those for whom he worked and those who
worked with him he received his reward.
Charles Wentworth Dilke was born into a family of English gentlefolk,
which after a considerable period of comparative obscurity had won back
prosperous days. The baronetcy to which he succeeded was recent, the
reward of his father's public services; but a long line of ancestors
linked him to a notable landed stock, the Dilkes of Maxstoke.
This family was divided against itself in the Civil Wars; and the brother
of the inheritor of Maxstoke, Fisher Dilke, from whom Sir Charles
descended, was a fanatical Puritan, and married into a great Puritan
house. His wife, Sybil Wentworth, was granddaughter to Peter Wentworth,
who led the Puritan party of Elizabeth's reign: she was sister to Sir
Peter Wentworth, a distinguished member of Cromwell's Council of State.
Property was inherited through her under condition that the Dilke heirs to
it should assume the Wentworth name; and in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries Fisher Dilke's descendants were Wentworth Dilke or Dilke
Wentworth from time to time.
In George II.'s reign one Wentworth Dilke was clerk to the Board of Green
Cloth at Kew Palace: his only son, Wentworth Dilke Wentworth, was
secretary to the Earl of Litchfield of the first creation, and left an
only son, Charles Wentworth Dilke, who was a clerk in the Admiralty. This
Dilke was the first of five who successively have borne this combination
of names. [Footnote: For convenience a partial table of descent is
inserted, showing the five Dilkes who bore the same combination of names.
CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE, b. 1742, d. 1826.
---------------------------------------------
| |
Charles Wentworth Dilke = Maria Dover William Dilke, b. 1796,
b. 1789, d. 1864. | Walker. d. 1885.
|
|
-------------------------------------------------------
| |
Charles Wentworth Dilke = M. Mary William Wentworth
first Baronet, b. 1810, Chatfield. Grant Dilke, killed in
d. 1869. Crimea, b. 1826, d. 1854
|
|
------------------------------------------------------------
| |
Charles Wentworth Dilke = (1) Katherine Ashton Dilke,
second Baronet, | M. E. Sheil. b. 1850, d. 1883.
b. 1843, d. 1911. | (2) Emilia F. S.
| Pattison.
|
Charles Wentworth Dilke,
present Baronet, b. 1874.]
The second of them, Charles Wentworth Dilke, his eldest son, and
grandfather to the subject of the memoir, was, like his father, a clerk in
the Admiralty; but early in life showed qualities which fitted him to
succeed in another sphere of work--qualities through which he exercised a
remarkable influence over the character and career of his grandson. So
potent was this influence in moulding the life which has to be chronicled,
that it is necessary to give some clear idea of the person who exercised
it.
Mr. Dilke--who shall be so called to distinguish him from his son
Wentworth Dilke, and from his grandson Charles Dilke--at an early period
added the pursuit of literature to his duties as a civil servant. By 1815,
when he was only twenty-six, Gifford, the editor of the _Quarterly
Review_, already spoke highly of him; and between that date and 1830 he
was contributing largely to the monthly and quarterly reviews. In 1830 he
acquired a main share in the _Athenaeum_, a journal 'but just born yet
nevertheless dying,' and quickly raised it into the high position of
critical authority which it maintained, not only throughout his own life,
but throughout his grandson's. So careful was Mr. Dilke to preserve its
reputation for impartial judgment, that during the sixteen years in which
he had virtually entire control of the paper, he withdrew altogether from
general society "in order to avoid making literary acquaintances which
might either prove annoying to him, or be supposed to compromise the
independence of his journal." [Footnote: From _Papers of a Critic_, a
selection of Mr. Dilke's essays, edited, with a memoir, by Sir Charles
Dilke, See _infra_, p. 184.]
After 1846 the editorship of the _Athenaeum_ was in other hands, but the
proprietor's vigilant interest in it never abated, and was transmitted to
his grandson, who continued to the end of his days not only to write for
it, but also to read the proofs every week, and repeatedly for brief
periods to act as editor.
When in 1846 Mr. Dilke curtailed his work on the _Athenaeum_, it was to
take up other duties. For three years he was manager of the recently
established _Daily News_, working in close fellowship with his friends
John Forster and Charles Dickens.
From the time when he gave up this task till his death in 1864 Mr. Dilke's
life had one all-engrossing preoccupation--the training of his grandson
Charles. But to the last, literary research employed him. In 1849 he
helped to establish _Notes and Queries_ 'to be a paper in which literary
men could answer each other's questions'; and his contributions to this
paper [Footnote: Its founder and first editor, Mr. W. J. Thorns
(afterwards Librarian of the House of Lords), had for three years been
contributing to the _Athenaeum_ columns headed "Folk-Lore"--a word coined
by him for the purpose. The correspondence which grew out of this
threatened to swamp other departments of the paper, and so the project was
formed of starting a journal entirely devoted to the subjects which he had
been treating. Mr. Dilke, being consulted, approved the plan, and lent it
his full support. In 1872, when Mr. Thorns retired from control of the
paper, Sir Charles Dilke bought it, putting in Dr. Doran as editor; and
thenceforward it was published from the same office as the _Athenaeum_.]
and to the _Athenaeum_ never ceased; though so unambitious of any personal
repute was he that in all his long career he never signed an article with
his own name, nor identified himself with a pseudonym. A man of letters,
he loved learning and literature for their own sake; yet stronger still
than this love was his desire to transmit to his heirs his own gathered
knowledge, experience, and convictions.
He had become early 'an antiquary and a Radical,' and this combination
rightly indicated unusual breadth of sympathy. The period in which he was
born favoured it: for, keen student as he was of the eighteenth century--
preserving in his own style, perhaps later than any other man who wrote in
England, that dignified but simple manner which Swift and Bolingbroke had
perfected--he yet was intimately in touch with the young genius of an age
in revolt against all the eighteenth-century tradition. Keats, only a few
years his junior, was his close friend; so was John Hamilton Reynolds, the
comrade of Keats, and author of poems known to every student of that
literary group. Thomas Hood and Charles Lamb had long and near association
with him. Lover of the old, he had always an open heart for the new; and,
bookish though he was, no one could be less a bookworm. The antiquary in
him never mastered the Radical: he had an unflagging interest in the large
facts of life, an undying faith in human progress. Slighting his own
lifework as he evidently did--for he never spoke of it to his son or his
son's son--he was yet prompted by instinct to kindle and tend a torch
which one after him should carry, and perhaps should carry high. It would
be difficult to name any man who had a stronger sense of the family bond.
He had married very young--before he was nineteen--Maria Dover Walker, the
beautiful daughter of a Yorkshire yeoman, still younger than he. This
couple, who lived together "in a most complete happiness" for forty years,
had one child only, born in 1810, Charles Wentworth Dilke, commonly called
Wentworth. [Footnote: _Papers of a Critic_, vol. i., p. 13.] Mr. Dilke
sent his son to Westminster, and removed him at the age of sixteen,
arranging--because his theory of education laid great stress on the
advantage of travel--that the lad should live for a while with Baron
Kirkup, British Consul and miniature painter, in Florence, as a
preparatory discipline before going to Cambridge. What he hoped and
intended is notably expressed in a letter written by him at Genoa on his
return journey to his son in Florence in 1826: [Footnote: _Ibid_., p. 18.]
"I ought to be in bed, but somehow you are always first in my thoughts
and last, and I prefer five minutes of gossiping with you.... How,
indeed, could it be otherwise than that you should be first and last
in my thoughts, who for so many years have _occupied all_ my thoughts.
For fifteen years at least it has been my pleasure to watch over you,
to direct and to advise. Now, direct and personal interference has
ceased.... It is natural, perhaps, that I should take a greater
interest than other fathers, for I have a greater interest at stake. I
have _but one _son. That son, too, I have brought up differently from
others, and if he be not better than others, it will be urged against
me, not as a misfortune, but as a shame. From the first hour I never
taught you to believe what I did not myself believe. I have been a
thousand times censured for it, but I had that confidence in truth
that I dared put my faith in it and in you. And you will not fail me.
I am sure you will return home to do me honour, and to make me respect
you, as I do, and ever shall, love you."
It was a singular letter for a man of thirty-seven to write--singular in
its self-effacement before the rising generation, singular, too, in the
intensity of its forecast. Yet, after all, a measure of disappointment was
to be his return for that first venture. The son to whom so great a cargo
of hopes had been committed was a vigorous lad, backed when he was fifteen
'to swim or shoot or throw against any boy of his age in England,' and he
developed these and kindred energies, accepting culture only in so far as
it ministered to his fine natural faculty for enjoyment. He acquired a
knowledge of Italian and of operatic music at Florence; but when
afterwards at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he was, to his father's despair,
very idle, and during his early years in London 'was principally known to
his friends for never missing a night at the Opera.'
That interest in things of the mind which he could hardly have failed to
inherit had made of him a dilettante rather than a scholar; but later he
became very active in promoting those ideals which appealed to his taste.
He had a shrewd business eye, and showed it in founding the _Gardeners'
Chronicle_ and the _Agricultural Gazette_, both paying properties. He had,
moreover, a talent for organization, and a zeal in getting things done,
acknowledged in many letters from persons of authority in their
recognition of those services to the International Exhibitions of 1851 and
1862 which were rewarded by his baronetcy. An interesting National
Exhibition of 'Art Manufactures' had already been held by the Society of
Arts, on whose Council Wentworth Dilke was an active worker, at the time
when he, with two other members of the Council and the secretary, Mr.
Scott Russell, met the Prince Consort on June 30th, 1849, and decided to
renew the venture on a scale which should include foreign nations. When
the executive committee of four (to whom were added a secretary and a
representative of the contractors) was named in January, 1850, the work
practically fell on three persons--Sir William Reid communicating with the
public departments, Mr. Henry Cole settling questions of space and
arrangement, [Footnote: Mr. Cole, afterwards Sir Henry Cole, K.C.B., was,
says the Memoir, 'commonly known as King Cole,' and was afterwards
secretary to the South Kensington School of Design.] and Wentworth Dilke
'having charge of the correspondence and general superintendence,' and
attending 'every meeting of the executive except the first.'
Wentworth Dilke worked hard for this and for other objects. But his public
activities had to be fitted in with a great deal of shooting and other
sport at Alice Holt, the small house in Hampshire, with adjacent
preserves, which he rented, and which became the family's country home.
In 1840 he married, and, after the birth of Charles Wentworth Dilke, the
subject of this Memoir, on September 4th, 1843, all the grandfather's
thought centred on the child. His daughter-in-law became, from then till
her death, his chief correspondent, and the master of the house was
'completely overshadowed' in the family group.
That group was so large as to be almost patriarchal. Wentworth Dilke, when
he married, and established himself at 76, Sloane Street, took under his
roof his wife's mother, Mrs. Chatfield, her grandmother, Mrs. Duncombe,
and also her unmarried cousin, Miss Folkard. All these ladies lived out
their lives there, Mrs. Chatfield and Miss Folkard surviving till Charles
Dilke had become a Minister of State.
Up to 1850 old Mr. Dilke and his wife lived at their house in Lower
Grosvenor Place, which was a second home for their grandson Charles. But
in 1850 the wife died, and Mr. Dilke 'spent sixteen months in wandering
through the remoter parts of Scotland, and along the north and west coast
of Ireland, but corresponded ceaselessly with his daughter-in-law, to whom
he was much attached.' During a great part of this time he was accompanied
by his grandson. Mrs. Wentworth Dilke, after giving birth in 1850 to her
second child, Ashton Dilke, had 'fallen into a deep decline'; and Charles
Dilke, at the age of seven, was handed over to his grandfather's charge,
partly to solace the old widower's loneliness, partly to relieve the
strain on his mother.
The peculiar relation between grandfather, mother, and son, stands out
clearly from the letter which that mother wrote shortly before her death
in September, 1853, to be delivered to the boy Charles. After some tender
exhortation, she added:
"But moral discipline your grandfather will teach you. What I wish
particularly to impress on you is the _necessity_ of worshipping God."
And at the end:
"My own boy, there is another thing still to name, for none can say
whether this letter may be required soon, or whether I may have the
delight of seeing my children grow up, but this last and cherished
subject is my little Ashton. When he is old enough, dear, to
understand, let him read this letter, and by his mother's blessing
teach him to think and feel that all that I have said applies equally
to him. Set him a good example in your own conduct, and be always
affectionate brothers."
Of the father, not a word--and for care of the younger boy, the dying
woman's hope is in his brother. It will be shown how studiously the ten-
year-old boy, on whom his mother so leant, fulfilled that charge. But he
himself felt, in later life, that scant justice had been done to the man
who was 'overshadowed' in his home, and wrote in 1890:
'My father loved my grandfather deeply, but my grandfather was greatly
disappointed in him, and always a little hard towards him: my father
suffered through life under a constant sense of his inferiority. He
suffered also later from the fact that while his elder son was the
grandfather's and not the father's boy, his younger son was as
completely under my influence in most matters, as I was under the
influence of my grandfather.'
Yet in a sense the relation between old Mr. Dilke and the son whom he
unconsciously slighted was strangely intimate and confiding. For in 1853
the elder man gave up his own house in Lower Grosvenor Place, made over
all his money to his son, and came to live under the son's roof in Sloane
Street for the remainder of his life. His confidence in the patriarchal
principle justified itself. 'My father,' writes Sir Charles, 'for eleven
years consulted his father--dependent on him for bread--in every act of
his life.'
To the world at large, Wentworth Dilke was a vastly more important person
than the old antiquary and scholar. After his services in organizing the
Great Exhibition of 1851, he declined a knighthood and rewards in money;
but he accepted from the French Government a gift of Sèvres china; from
the King of Saxony, the Collar of the Order of Albertus Animosus; from the
King of Sweden and from the Prince Consort, medals; and from Queen
Victoria, a bracelet for his wife. These remained among the treasures of
76, Sloane Street. But he acquired something far more important in the
establishment of friendly relations with persons of mark and influence all
over the Continent; for these relations were destined to be developed by
Charles Dilke, then a pretty-mannered boy, who was taken everywhere, and
saw, for instance, in 1851, the Duke of Wellington walk through the
Exhibition buildings on a day when more than a hundred thousand people
were present. He could remember how the Duke's 'shrivelled little form'
and 'white ducks' 'disappeared in the throng which almost crushed him to
death' before the police could effect his rescue.
Wentworth Dilke's association in the Prince Consort's most cherished
schemes had brought him on a footing of friendship with the Royal Family;
and on July 25th, 1851, his wife wrote that the Queen had come over and
talked to her in the Exhibition ground. Long afterwards, when the pretty-
mannered boy had grown into a Radical, who avowed his theoretical
preference for republican institutions, Queen Victoria said that "she
remembered having stroked his head, and supposed she had stroked it the
wrong way."
[Illustration: Sir Charles as a child from the miniature by Fanny Corbin.]
CHAPTER II
EDUCATION
The earliest memory that Sir Charles Dilke could date was 'of April 10th,
1848, when the Chartist meeting led to military preparations, during which
I' (a boy in his fifth year) 'saw the Duke of Wellington riding through
the street, attended by his staff, but all in plain clothes.' In 1850 'No
Popery chalked on the walls attracted my attention, but failed to excite
my interest'; he was not of an age to be troubled by the appointment of
Dr. Wiseman to be Archbishop of Westminster. In 1851 he was taken to a
meeting to hear Kossuth.
From this year--1851--date the earliest letters preserved in the series of
thirty-four boxes which contain the sortings of his vast correspondence.
There is a childish scrap to his grandfather, and a long letter from the
grandfather to him written from Dublin, which lovingly conjures up a
picture of the interior at Sloane Street, with 'Cousin' (Miss Folkard)
stirring the fire, 'Charley-boy' settling down his head on his mother's
lap, and 'grandmamma' (his mother's mother, Mrs. Chatfield) sitting in the
chimney-corner.
For the year 1852 there are no letters to the boy; it was the time of his
mother's failing health, and he was journeying with his grandfather all
over England, 'reading Shakespeare, and studying church architecture,
especially Norman.' It was a delightful way of learning history for a
quick child of nine:
'We followed Charles II. in his flight, and visited every spot that has
ever been mentioned in connection with his escape--a pilgrimage which took
me among other places to my future constituency of the Forest of Dean. We
went to every English cathedral, and when my grandfather was at work upon
his Pope investigations, saw every place which was connected with the
history of the Carylls.' [Footnote: John Caryll suggested to Pope the idea
of the "Rape of the Look"; and many of the poet's letters were written to
his son, a younger John Caryll. They were an ancient and distinguished
Roman Catholic family, devoted partisans of, and centres of correspondence
with, the exiled Stuarts.]
Mr. Dilke combined his desire to instruct the child with the frankest
interest in his play. Here, for instance, is a letter to Charles of
October 15th, 1853:
"DEAR OLD ADMIRAL,
"Hope you found all right and tight: a gallant vessel--tackle trim--
noble crew of true blue waters--guns shining and serving for looking--
glasses to shave by--powder dry--plenty in the locker. Wishing you
favourable gales,
"I remain,
"Your old friend and rough and tough
"GRANDFATHER."
It is worth while giving the reply--precocious for a boy of ten:
"BEDHAMPTON,
"HAVANT,
"_October 16th, 1853._
"MY DEAR GRANDPAPA,
"We arrived quite safely on Friday night, and were astonished to find
that my Aunt and Uncle and Cousin Letitia were gone to Brighton and
then to Hastings, and Godpapa had a letter this morning to say that
they found it so hot at Hastings that they went on to Folkestone, and
they are there now. The Admiral has to report for the information of
his Cockney readers that he hoisted his Flag yesterday at the main
peak. The weather was, however, so windy and wet that after hiding
himself with his honoured father under the cuddy for half an hour, the
Admiral thought that prudence was part of his duty, therefore struck
his Pocket-handkerchief and retired to luncheon. A Salute from a black
cloud hastened his departure.
"Your affectionate grandson,
"C. W. DILKE."
The boy was his grandfather's to educate, and there has not often been
such an education. A man ripe in years, still vigorous--for Mr. Dilke was
only fifty-three when his elder grandson was born--yet retired from the
business of life, and full of leisure, full of charm, full of experience,
full of knowledge, devoted his remaining years to the education of his
grandson. It may be held that he created a forcing-house of feeling, no
less than of knowledge, under which the boy's nature was prematurely drawn
up; but there can be no doubt as to the efficacy of the method. It was not
coddling--Mr. Dilke was too shrewd for that--and if at a certain stage it
seemed as though excessive stimulus had been given, maturity went far to
contradict that impression.
'After my mother's death I began classics and mathematics with Mr.
Bickmore, at that time a Chelsea curate and afterwards Vicar of
Kenilworth. At the same time I took charge of teaching letters to my
brother. I had few child friends, and used to see more of grown-up
people, such as Chorley, [Footnote: Musical critic for the
_Athenaeum._] Thackeray, and Dickens, of whom the latter was known to
us as "young Charles Dickens," owing to my great-grandfather having
known "Micawber."'
Old Mr. Dilke's father had been employed in the Admiralty along with the
father of Dickens. As for Thackeray, it was probably about this time that
he came on the boy stretched out upon grass in the garden of Gore House,
resting on elbows, deep in a book, and looked over his shoulder. "Is it
any good?" he asked. "Rather!" said the boy. "Lend it me," said Thackeray.
The book was _The Three Musketeers_, and we all know _The Roundabout
Papers_ which came out of that loan.
Charles Dilke had his free run of novels as a boy, and not of novels only.
In 1854, when he was only eleven:
'I began my regular theatre-going, which became a passion with me for
many years, and burnt itself out, I may add, like most passions, for I
almost entirely ceased to go near a theatre when I went to Cambridge
at nineteen. Charles Kean, and Madame Vestris, and Charles Mathews,
were my delight, with Wright and Paul Bedford at the Adelphi, Webster
and Buckstone at the Haymarket, and Mrs. Keeley. Phelps came later,
but Charles Kean's Shakespearian revivals at the Princess's from the
first had no more regular attendant. My earliest theatrical
recollection is Rachel.
'I was a nervous, and, therefore, in some things a backward child,
because my nervousness led to my being forbidden for some years to
read and work, as I was given to read and work too much, and during
this long period of forced leisure I was set to music and drawing,
with the result that I took none of the ordinary boy's interest in
politics, and never formed an opinion upon a political question until
the breaking-out of the American Civil War when I was eighteen. I then
sided strongly with the Union, as I showed at the Cambridge Union when
I reached the University. Even in this question, however, I only
followed my grandfather's lead, although, for the first time, in this
case intelligently. So far indeed as character can be moulded in
childhood, mine was fashioned by my grandfather Dilke.'
It was not only character that Mr. Dilke formed. He made the boy the
constant companion of his own intellectual pursuits, imbued him deeply
with his own tastes, his own store of knowledge. In the summer of 1854 he
had taken his pupil to 'Windsor, Canterbury, Rochester, Bury St. Edmunds,
St. Albans, and many other interesting towns.' That autumn the pair went
to France together--apparently the beginning of Charles Dilke's close
acquaintance with that country, which was extended in the following year,
1855, when Wentworth Dilke was named one of the English Commissioners for
the French International Exhibition, and took his family to live in Paris
from April to August.
'We were all with him at Paris for some time, and I acquired a
considerable knowledge of the antiquities of the town, before the
changes associated with the name of Haussmann, by rambling about it
with my grandfather, who, however, soon got sick of Paris and went
home to his books, while we remained there for four months. I was at
the party given at the Quai d'Orsay by Walewski, the son of Napoleon;
at that given at the "Legion of Honour" by Flahaut, the father of
Morny; at the Ball at the Hôtel de Ville to the Emperor and Empress
and Queen Victoria; at the review; and at the Queen's entry and
departure. The entry was the finest display of troops which I ever
witnessed, as the National Guard of the City and its outskirts turned
out in great form, and raised the numbers to 120,000, while the
costumes both of the Guard and of the National Guard were very showy.
There paraded also two hundred veterans of the wars of the First
Empire in all the uniforms of the period. I heard Lablache in his last
great part, and in this year I think I also saw Rachel for the last
time; but I had seen her in England, I believe, in 1853. I certainly
had seen her in a part in which many years later I remember Sarah
Bernhardt, and can recall Rachel well enough to be able to institute a
comparison entirely to Rachel's advantage.
'After our visit to Paris in 1855 my brother and I had taken to
speaking and to writing to one another in French, and this practice we
kept up until his death, even when he was Member of Parliament for
Newcastle-on-Tyne, and I a member of the Government.'
One memory of that year never left Sir Charles Dilke. In the evenings he
used to go to the Place Vendôme to hear the Guards' combined tattoo. Every
regiment was represented, and the drummers were a wonderful show in their
different brilliant uniforms--Chasseurs of the Garde, Dragoons, Lancers,
Voltigeurs, and many more. In the midst was the gigantic sergeant-major
waiting, with baton uplifted, for the clock to strike. At the first stroke
he gave the signal with a twirl and a drop of his baton, and the long
thundering roll began, taken up all round the great square. Sir Charles,
as he told of this, would repeat the tambour-major's gesture; and the
boy's tense, eager look of waiting, and flash of satisfaction when the
roll broke out, revived on the countenance of the man.
'In 1856 I became half attached to a day-school, which had for its
masters, in mathematics a Mr. Acland, a Cambridge man, and in classics
a Mr. Holme, a fellow of Durham, and for several years I used to do
the work which they set in the school without regularly attending the
school, which, however, my brother attended. My health at that time
was not supposed to be sufficiently strong to enable me even to attend
a day-school, and still less to go to a public school; but there was
nothing the matter with me except a nervous turn of mind,
overexcitable and overstrained by the slightest circumstance. This
lasted until I was eighteen, when it suddenly disappeared, and left me
strong and well; but the form which this weakness took may be
illustrated by the fact that, although I did not believe in ghosts, I
have known myself at the age of sixteen walk many miles round to avoid
passing through a "haunted" meadow.'
Also he made the experiments in literature common with clever lads:
'In 1856 I wrote a novel called _Friston Place_, and I have a sketch
which I made of Friston Place in Sussex in August of that year, but
the novel I have destroyed, as it was worthless.'
Another aspect of his education is recalled by drawings preserved in the
boxes from 1854 onwards--conscientious delineations of buildings visited,
representing an excellent training for the eye and observation.
In 1857 his grandfather took him to Oxford (where he rambled happily about
the meadows while Mr. Dilke read in the Bodleian) and to Cambridge, going
on thence to Ely, Peterborough, and Norwich. Later in the same year the
pair travelled all over South Wales, everywhere rehearsing the historical
memories of the place, everywhere mastering the details of whatever
architecture presented itself.
Each return home brought experiences of a different kind. 'I have known,'
he says, 'everyone worth knowing from 1850 to my death.' At seven years
old he was seeing and hearing the famous persons of that time, either at
the home in Sloane Street, to which Wentworth Dilke's connection with the
Exhibition drew men eminent in the world of physical science and
industrial enterprise, as well as the artists with whom his
connoisseurship brought him into touch; or else at old Mr. Dilke's house
in Lower Grosvenor Place. He remembered visits with his grandfather to
Gore House, 'before Soyer turned it into the Symposium,' and to Lady
Morgan's. The brilliant little Irishwoman was a familiar friend, and her
pen, of bog-oak and gold, the gift to her of the Irish people, came at
last to lie among the treasures of 76, Sloane Street. Also there remained
with him
"memories from about 1851 of the bright eyes of little Louis Blanc, of
Milner-Gibson's pleasant smile, of Bowring's silver locks, of
Thackeray's tall stooping figure, of Dickens's goatee, of Paxton's
white hat, of Barry Cornwall and his wife, of Robert Stephenson the
engineer, to whom I wanted to be bound apprentice, of Browning (then
known as 'Mrs. Browning's husband'), of Joseph Cooke (another
engineer), of Cubitt the builder (one of the promoters of the
Exhibition), of John Forster the historian, of the Redgraves, and of
that greater painter, John Martin. Also of the Rowland Hills, at
Hampstead.
"1859 was the height of my rage for our South Kensington Trap-Bat
Club, which I think had invented the name South Kensington. It was at
it that I first met Emilia Francis Strong. We played in the garden of
Gore House where the Conservatory of the Horticultural Society, behind
the Albert Hall, was afterwards built."
In the memoir of the second Lady Dilke, prefixed to _The Book of the
Spiritual Life_, Sir Charles writes of this time, 1859 to 1860, when he
"loved to be patronized by her, regarding her with the awe of a
hobbledehoy of sixteen or seventeen towards a beautiful girl of nineteen
or twenty." But at one point she bewildered him; for in those days Emilia
Strong was devout to the verge of fanaticism:
"We were all puzzled by the apparent conflict between the vitality and
the impish pranks of the brilliant student, expounding to us the most
heterodox of social views, and the 'bigotry' which we seemed to
discern when we touched her spiritual side." [Footnote: _Book of the
Spiritual Life_, Memoir, p. 10.]
No doubt the fastings and mortifications which Emilia Strong practised at
that period of her youth would seem 'bigotry' to a lad brought up under
influences which, in so far as theology entered into them, had an
Evangelical bent. Charles Dilke thus summed up his early prepossessions
and practices in this respect:
'My mother had been a strong Low Church woman, and those of her
letters which I have destroyed very clearly show that her chief fear
in meeting death was that she would leave me without that class of
religious training which she thought essential. My grandfather and my
father, although both of them in their way religious men (and my
grandfather, a man of the highest feeling of duty), were neither of
them churchgoers, nor of her school of thought; and ... as I was till
the age of twenty a regular church attendant and somewhat devout for a
boy of that age, it was a grief to me to find that my brother's turn
of mind as he grew up was different, and that he naturally thought his
judgment on the subject as good as that of the mother whom he had lost
at three years old, and could hardly be said to have known.'
But the true spiritual influence on Charles Dilke's early life was derived
from his grandfather, whose nature had in it much of the serenity and wise
happiness which go to the making of a saint. This influence was no doubt
ethical in its character rather than religious; but it can be traced, for
example, in a humane scruple which links it with Dilke's affectionate cult
of St. Francis of Assisi:
'In 1856 I had begun to shoot, my father being passionately fond of
the sport, and I suppose that few people ever shot more before they
were nineteen than I did. But about the time I went to Cambridge I
found the interference with my work considerable, and I also began to
have doubts as to considerations of cruelty, and on points affecting
the Game Laws, which led me to give up shooting, and from 1862 I
hardly ever shot at all, except, in travelling, for food.'
The taste for travel, always in search of knowledge, but followed with an
increasing delight in the quest, began for him in the rovings through
England with his grandfather. As early as his seventeenth year he was out
on the road by himself; and this letter written from Plymouth, April 5th,
1860 after a night spent at Exeter, indicates the results of his training:
"This morning we got up early, and went to the Northerny [Footnote:
Northernhay, or Northfield, a pleasure-ground at Exeter.] and
Cathedral. Nothing much. Took the train at quarter before ten. Railway
runs along the shore under the cliffs and in the cliffs. We saw a
rather large vessel wrecked on the sands. Teignmouth pretty. Got to
Totnes before twelve. Hired a boat and two men, 10s. 6d. Down the
river to Dartmouth, twelve miles. The Dart is more like a series of
lakes than a river; in some of the reaches it is impossible to see
what way you are to get out. Very like the Wye until you get low down,
then it opens into a lake about two miles across, free from all mud,
nothing but hills and cliffs. Then it again contracts, and passes
through a gorge, which is said to be very like parts of the Rhine.
"The scene here is splendid. Dartmouth now comes, but the river,
instead of spreading and becoming ugly, as most tidal rivers do,
remains narrow and between cliffs, until you have the great sea waves
thundering up against them. Dartmouth contains a church more curious
than half the cathedrals in the kingdom: Norman (Late), fine brasses,
barrel roof with the paint on, and stone pulpit painted, etc., etc.
There are some very fine old houses also. The place is the most lovely
by far of any that I ever saw--Paradise.
"We have had a bad day--real Devonshire--where they say that they must
have one shower every day and two on Sundays. 'Shower' means about six
hours' quiet rain, _vide_ 'Murray' and our experience of to-day. The
boatmen say 'it rains most days.' I hope Mrs. Jackson is going on
well. Trusting you are all well, I send my love to all and remain
"Your affectionate grandson,
"CHARLES W. DILKE."
A scrap from one of the grandfather's letters, April 25th, 1859, which
points to the terms of intellectual equality that existed in the
correspondence between the two, has also some historical interest:
"Hope your news of the French troops landing in Genoa is premature.
War, however, seems inevitable; but I hope on, hope ever. I should be
sorry to see the Austrians triumph over the Sardinians, for then they
would fasten the chains on Italy tighter than ever. Yet I cannot hope
that the worst man in Europe, the Emperor of the French, should
triumph."
At the close of 1860, the lad set out on a more adventurous excursion to
France, in a storm of snow so tremendous that trains were blocked in many
places. However, he reached Amiens safely, saw and described it dutifully,
then made for Paris.
Charles Dilke's familiarity with France was destined to be extended year
by year till the end of his life. This visit of Christmas 1860 was the
first which he made alone to that country; but part of the summer of 1859
had been spent by him with his family at Trouville, whence he wandered
over Normandy, adding detail to his knowledge of Norman architecture.
But even stronger than the interest in historic architecture which his
grandfather had imparted to him was the interest in men and affairs; above
all, in those men who had assisted at great events. Throughout his life
his love of travel, his taste for society, and his pursuit of first-hand
information upon political matters helped to enlarge his list of
remarkable acquaintances; and during this stay in France a new name was
added to the collection of celebrities:
'At Havre I got to know King Jerome, father to "Plon-Plon" and father-
in-law to my friend Princess Clothilde, and was duly interested in
this last of the brothers of Napoleon. The ex-King of Westphalia was a
wicked old gentleman; but he did not let a boy find this out, and he
was courteous and talkative. We long had in both years, I think, the
next rooms to his at Frascati's; and he used to walk in the garden
with me, finding me a good listener. The old Queen of Sweden was still
alive, and he told me how Désirée Clary [Footnote: Eugénie Bernardine
Désirée Clary married, August 16th, 1798, Marshal Jean-Baptiste
Bernadotte, afterwards Charles XIV., King of Sweden. Her elder sister
Julie had become the wife of Joseph Bonaparte in 1794.] had thrown
Bonaparte over for him, and then had thrown him over for Bernadotte.
He also described riding through Paris with Bonaparte on the day of
Brumaire.'
Having completely outgrown the nervous invalidishness of his earlier
boyhood, Dilke at eighteen years of age was extending his activities in
all directions.
'In 1861 I find by my diaries that I was at the very height of my
theatre-going, attending theatres in Paris and in London with equal
regularity; and in this year I wrote an elaborate criticism of
Fechter's Hamlet, which is the first thing I ever wrote in the least
worth reading, but it is not worth preservation, and has now been
destroyed by me. At Easter, 1861, I walked to Brighton in a single day
from London, and the next day attended the volunteer review. I was a
great walker, and frequently walked my fifty miles within the day. My
interest in military affairs continued, and I find among my letters of
1861 passages which might have formed part of my writings on military
subjects of 1887 to 1889. I went down to see the new Tilbury forts,
criticized the system of the distribution of strength in the Thames
defences, advocated "a mile of vigorous peppering as against a slight
dusting of feathers every half-hour"; and went to Shoeburyness to see
the trial of the Whitworth guns.'
His cousin, William Wentworth Grant Dilke, was Captain and Adjutant of the
77th Regiment, and Charles Dilke remembered the young officer's visit to
bid good-bye before he departed for the Crimea, where he met his death.
Though old Mr. Dilke had sympathized with the wonderful manoeuvres of the
child's armies of leaden soldiers, and had added to them large
reinforcements, he became troubled by his grandson's keen and excited
following of all the reports from the Crimea. He had a terror of the boy's
becoming a soldier, and 'used to do his best to point out the foolish side
of war.' But this, as the passage already quoted shows, did not deter his
pupil from beginning, while still a growing youth, detailed study of
military matters.
Under normal conditions, an undergraduate going up to an English
University without public school friendships is at a disadvantage: and
this was Charles Dilke's case. But he went to his father's college,
Trinity Hall; and his father was a very well known and powerfully
connected man. Offer of a baronetcy had been made to Wentworth Dilke in
very unusual and gratifying terms. General Grey, the Queen's secretary,
wrote:
"ST. JAMES'S PALACE,
"_January 1st_, 1862.
"MY DEAR DILKE,
"The Queen cannot forget for how many years you have been associated
with her beloved husband in the promotion of objects which were dear
to his heart; and she would fain mark her sense of the valuable
assistance you have ever given him in his labours in some manner that
would be gratifying to your feelings.
"I am therefore commanded by Her Majesty to express the hope that the
offer of a Baronetcy which she has informed Lord Palmerston of her
desire to confer upon you, coming direct from Her Majesty herself, and
as her own personal act, may be one which it will be agreeable to you
to accept."
Proof of the Queen's strong feeling for the man who had been so closely
associated with the Prince Consort in his work of popularizing the arts
and crafts had already been given by the fact that Wentworth Dilke was,
except for those whom she was obliged to meet on business, the first
person from the outside world whom she saw after the Prince Consort's
death. And indeed, but for his sense of a personal graciousness in the
offer, Wentworth Dilke would scarcely have departed from his lifelong
habit of deference to his father's wish and judgment. Old Mr. Dilke,
though gratified by the compliment, wrote to a friend:
"My son's fortune is not strong enough to enable his children to carry
such a burthen with ease; and as to the waifs and strays which it may
help them to, I would rather see them fight their good fight
unshackled."
There came a time when the baronetcy was something of an encumbrance to
one of these children:
'When I was accused of attacking the Queen, which I never did,
somebody--I forget who--went further, and said I had "bitten the hand
which fed me," and I really believe that this metaphor expressed
publicly a private belief of some people that my father had made money
by his labours. All I can say is that he never made a farthing by them
in any form at any time, and that in '51 and in '62 he spent far more
than his income on entertainments.... He wished for no reward, and he
knew the conditions under which his life was given to public rather
than to private service: but he killed himself at it; he left me much
less rich than I should otherwise have been, and it is somewhat hard
to find myself told that if I call attention to notorious illegalities
I am "biting the hand that fed me." The Queen herself has, as I happen
to know, always spoken in a very different sense.'
The newly made Baronet, in the course of his labours for the second
Great Exhibition, added to his already very numerous friendships.
'My father's chief foreign friends in '62 were Prince Napoleon,
Montésinos, Baron Schwartz (Austria), Baron von Brünen von Grootelind
(Holland), Prince Oscar (afterwards King of Sweden), and Senator
Fortamps (Belgium).'
Finally, there is this entry, written in 1890:
'Just as I had made the acquaintance of the Duke of Wellington through
father in the Exhibition of 1851, so I made that of Palmerston in the
Exhibition of 1862. He was still bright and lively in walk and talk,
and was extremely kind in his manner to me, and asked me to one of
Lady Palmerston's Saturday nights at Cambridge House, to which I duly
went. I should think that there is no one living but myself who was at
the Ball to the Queen at the Hotel de Ville in 1855, at the famous
Guards' Ball in 1862, and also at one of Lady Palmerston's evenings.'
Charles Dilke matriculated at Trinity Hall in October 1862.
CHAPTER III
CAMBRIDGE
Charles Dilke was sent in 1862, as in later days he sent his own son, to
his father's college. Trinity Hall in the early sixties was a community
possessing in typical development the combination of qualities which
Cambridge has always fostered. Neither very large nor very small, it had
two distinguishing characteristics: it was a rowing college, and it was a
college of lawyers. Although not as a rule distinguished in the Tripos
Lists, it was then in a brilliant period.
The Memoir will show that in Dilke's first year a Hall man was Senior
Wrangler, and that the boat started head of the river. Such things do not
happen without a cause; and the college at this moment numbered on its
staff some of the most notable figures in the University. The Vice-Master,
Ben Latham, for thirty-five years connected with the Hall, was of those
men whose reputation scarcely reaches the outside world; but he had found
the college weak, he had made it strong, and he was one of the
institutions of Cambridge.
Among the junior Fellows were Fawcett and Leslie Stephen. Both were
profound believers in hard tonic discipline of mind and body, inculcating
their belief by doctrine and example; and both, with great diversity of
gifts, had the rough strong directness of intellectual attack which
Cambridge, then perhaps more than at any other time, set in contrast to
the subtleties of Oxford culture.
Leslie Stephen in particular, who had been a tutor and who was still a
clerical Fellow, made it his business to meet undergraduates on their own
ground. Hard work and hard bodily exercise--but, above all, hard bodily
exercise--made up the gospel which he preached by example. No one ever did
more to develop the cult of athletics, and there is no doubt that he
thought these ideals the best antidote to drunkenness and other vices,
which were far more rife in the University of that day than of this.
Both he and Fawcett were strenuous Radicals, and contact with them was
well fitted to infuse fresh vitality into the political beliefs which
Charles Dilke had assumed by inheritance from his grandfather. In these
ways of thought he met them on ground already familiar and attractive to
him. His introduction to Fawcett was at the Economics and Statistics
Section of the British Association, which he attended at Cambridge in the
first week of his first term. "I am one of the few people who really enjoy
statistics," he said, long years after this, in a presidential address to
the Statistical Society. But it was early at nineteen to develop this
exceptional taste.
In another domain of modern thought these elder men affected his mind
considerably and with a new order of ideas. Old Mr. Dilke seems to have
left theology out of his purview altogether; and it was at Cambridge that
Charles Dilke first met the current of definitely sceptical thought on
religious matters.
Fawcett was aggressively unorthodox. But far more potent was the influence
of Leslie Stephen, then with infinite pain struggling under the yoke that
he had taken on himself at ordination, and had not yet shaken off. The
effect of Stephen's talk--though he influenced young men as much by his
dry critical silence as by his utterances--was heightened by admiration
for his athletic prowess. He coached the college Eights: anyone who has
been at a rowing college will realize how commanding an ascendancy is
implied. But his athletics covered every phase of muscular activity; and
Fawcett joined him in encouraging the fashion of long walks.
Another of the long-walkers whom the Memoir notes as among the chief
influences of those days was Leslie Stephen's pupil Romer, the Admirable
Crichton of that moment--oarsman, cricketer, and Trinity Hall's hope in
the Mathematical Tripos. The future Lord Justice of Appeal was then
reading for the Tripos, in which he was to be Senior Wrangler; and,
according to Cambridge custom, took a certain amount of coaching as part
of his work. Charles Dilke was one of those whom he instructed, and it was
the beginning of a friendship which lasted many years.
Looking back, Sir Robert Romer says that most undergraduates are simply
grown-up boys, and that at Trinity Hall in his day there was no variation
from this type till Dilke came there--a lad who, to all appearance, had
never associated with other lads, whose companions had been grown-up
people, and who had mature ideas and information on everything. But,
thrown among other young men, the young man found himself with surprising
rapidity. Elements in his nature that had never been brought out developed
at once; and one of these was a great sense of fun. Much stronger than he
looked, he plunged into athletics with a perfectly simple delight.
"Nobody," says Sir Robert Romer, "could make more noise at a boating
supper." This frank natural glee remained with him to the end. Always
disputatious, always a lover of the encounter of wits, he had none the
less a lifelong gift for comradeship in which there was little clash of
controversy and much hearty laughter.
One of the eight-and-twenty freshmen who matriculated at Trinity Hall
along with Charles Dilke in 1862 was David Fenwick Steavenson, a dalesman
from Northumberland, with whom he formed a lasting friendship. The two had
seemingly little in common. Dilke to all appearance was "very serious,"
and in disposition of mind ten years older than his fellows, while the
young Northumbrian's whole preoccupation was to maintain and enlarge the
fame of his college on the river. If the friendship was to develop,
Steavenson must undoubtedly become interested in intellectual matters, but
not less certainly Dilke must learn to row. It was a very useful
discipleship for the future politician. Sloping shoulders, flat and narrow
chest, height too great for his build: these were things that Cambridge
helped to correct. Dilke, a willing pupil, was diligently coached by the
stronger man, until he became an accomplished and effective oar. In
general Judge Steavenson's recollection confirms Sir Robert Romer's, and
gives precision to one detail. In their second year, upon the occasion of
some triumph on the river, there was to be a bump supper, but the college
authorities forbade, whereupon an irregular feast was arranged--this one
bringing a ham, that a chicken, and so on. When the heroes had put from
them desire of eating and drinking, they sallied out, and after a vigorous
demonstration in the court, proceeded to make music from commanding
windows. It was Charles Dilke who had provided the whistles and toy drums
for this ceremony, and Judge Steavenson retains a vision of the future
statesman at his window [Footnote: Dilke's rooms were on Staircase A, on
the first floor, above the buttery. They have not for very many years been
let to an undergraduate, as they are too near the Fellows' Combination
Room.] blowing on a whistle with all his might. The authorities were
vindictive, and Dilke suffered deprivation of the scholarship which he had
won at the close of his freshman year.
Such penalties carry no stigma with them. It should be noted, too, that at
a period of University history when casual excess in drink was no
reproach, but rather the contrary, Charles Dilke, living with boating men
in a college where people were not squeamish, drank no wine. Judge
Steavenson adds that the dislike of coarse talk which was marked with him
later was equally evident in undergraduate days.
Charles Dilke's own ambition and industry were reinforced by the keen
anxiety of his people. Concealing nothing of their eagerness for him to
win distinction, those who watched his career with such passionate
interest set their heart, it would seem, on purely academic successes. Sir
Wentworth Dilke may well have feared, from his own experience, that old
Mr. Dilke's expectations might again be disappointed by a student who
found University life too full of pleasure. At all events it was to his
father that the freshman wrote, October 24th, 1862, a fortnight after he
had matriculated:
"I am very sorry to see by your letter of this morning that you have
taken it into your head that I am not reading hard. I can assure you,
on the contrary, that I read harder than any freshman except Osborn,
who takes no exercise whatever; and that I have made the rowing-men
very dissatisfied by reading all day three days a week. On the other
three I never read less than six hours, besides four hours of lectures
and papers. I have not missed reading a single evening yet since I
have been here; that is, either from six, or seven, till eleven,
except Saturday at Latham's. This--except for a fourth-year man--is
more than even the tutors ask for.... I hope I have said enough to
convince you that you are entirely wrong; what has made you so has
been my account of breakfasts, which are universal, and neither
consume time nor attract attention. I was at one this morning--I left
my rooms at twenty-five minutes to nine, and returned to them at five
minutes to nine, everything being over."
This scrupulous economy of time was to be characteristic of Charles
Dilke's whole life, and nothing impressed his contemporaries more at all
times than the "methodical bee-like industry" attributed to him by the
present Master of Trinity Hall. Mr. Beck, who came up to the college just
after Dilke left it, thus expands the impression:
"There remained in Trinity Hall in 1867 a vivid tradition that he was
one of the few men who never lost a minute, would even get in ten
minutes of work between river and Hall (which was in those days at
five o'clock); and much resembled the Roman who learned Greek in the
time saved from shaving. On the doorpost inside his bedroom over the
Buttery there remained in pencil the details of many days of work thus
pieced together." [Footnote: _Cambridge Review_, February 2nd, 1911.]
Judge Steavenson recalls how he used to be "bundled out" of his friend's
rooms the instant that the appointed hour for beginning to read had
arrived, and he did his best to mitigate the strenuousness of that
application. But there were stronger influences at work than his: Sir
Wentworth Dilke was fully satisfied with the assurance he had received, as
well he might be; but the grandfather never ceased to enforce the claims
of study. He wrote ceaselessly, but with constant exhortations that he
should be answered only when work and play allowed.
When the letters from Cambridge told of success in athletics, he
responded, but with a temperate rejoicing. Here, for instance, is his
reference to the news that the freshman had rowed in the winning boat of
the scratch fours on March 14th, 1863:
"I am glad that you have won your 'pewter'--as I was glad when you
took rank among the best of the boating freshmen--although I have not
set my heart on your plying at Blackfriars Bridge, nor winning the
hand of the daughters of Horse-ferry as the 'jolly young waterman,' or
old Doggett's Coat and Badge. But all things in degree; and therefore
I rejoice a hundred times more at your position in the college Euclid
examination."
There was no mistaking old Mr. Dilke's distaste for all these athletics,
and it was to his father, on this one point more sympathetic, that the
freshman wrote this characteristic announcement of a great promotion:
"Edwards" (captain of the Trinity Hall Boat Club) "has just called to
inform me that I am to row in the head-of-the-river boat to-
morrow, and to go into training for it.
"The time wasted if I row in it will not be greater than in the 2nd,
but there is one difference--namely, that it may make me more sleepy
at nights. I must read hard before breakfast. Romer--who is my master
and pastor--tells me of all things to row in it,--this year at all
events."
He did row in the May races of his first year, and with so little
detriment to his work that in the following month he secured the first
mathematical scholarship in the college examination. This triumph may well
have disposed old Mr. Dilke to accept a suggestion which is recorded in
the correspondence. On June 2nd it was decided that Trinity Hall should
send an eight to Henley, and the letter adds: "I should think my
grandfather would like to come and stay at or near Henley while I am
there."
Before the date fixed, the oarsman had been inducted scholar, and so Mr.
Dilke could go with a free heart to see his grandson row in the Grand
Challenge against Brasenose and Kingston, where Trinity Hall defeated
Kingston, but were themselves defeated by Brasenose in a very fast race.
It was not only in the examination halls and on the river that Charles
Dilke was winning reputation. He had joined the Volunteers, and proved
himself among the crack rifleshots of the University corps; he had won
walking races, but especially he had begun to seek distinction in a path
which led straight to his natural goal.
The impression left on Sir Robert Romer's mind was that Dilke came up to
the University elaborately trained with a view to a political career. This
is to read into the facts a wrong construction; the purpose, if it existed
at all, was latent only in his mind. The training which he had received
from his grandfather lent itself admirably, it is true, to the making of a
statesman; but it was the pupil's temperament which determined the
application of that rich culture.
The first debate which he had the chance to attend at the Union was on
October 28th, 1862, the motion being: "That the cause of the Northern
States is the cause of humanity and progress, and that the widespread
sympathy with the Confederates is the result of ignorance and
misrepresentation."
The discussion gained in actuality from the fact that the President of the
Union was Mr. Everett, son of the distinguished literary man who had been
America's representative in London, and was at this time Secretary of
State in the Federal Government. But the South had a notable ally. Mr.
George Otto Trevelyan, author of some of the best light verse ever written
by an undergraduate, was still in residence, though he had before this
taken his degree; and he shared in those days the sentimental preference
for the South. Dilke reported to his grandfather: "Trevelyan's speech was
mere flash, but very witty." "Mere flash" the freshman was likely to think
it, for he shared his grandfather's opinions, and gave his first Union
vote for the North--in a minority of 34 against 117. "Very witty" it was
sure to be, and its most effective hit was a topical allusion. The Union
Society of those days had its quarters in what had originally been a
Wesleyan chapel--a large room in Green Street, the floor of which is now
used as a public billiard saloon, while the galleries from which applause
and interruption used to come freely now stand empty. There had long been
complaint of its inadequacy; Oxford had set the example of a special
edifice, and as far back as 1857 a Building Fund had been started, which,
however, dragged on an abortive existence from year to year, a constant
matter of gibes. 'Can the North restore the Union?' Mr. Trevelyan asked.
'Never, sir; they have no Building Fund'; and the punning jest brought
down a storm of applause.
But when Mr. Trevelyan, after a year spent in India, came back to England
and to Cambridge gossip in the beginning of 1864, he learnt that this
despised Building Fund had been taken seriously in hand, that one
undergraduate in particular was corresponding with all manner of persons,
and that this Union also was going to be restored. That was how the
present Sir George Trevelyan first heard the name of Charles Dilke.
Even in his earliest term Dilke soon passed out of the rôle of a mere
listener and critic. The Commissioners of the International Exhibition of
1862 were then being sharply criticized, and on November 25th "a man of
the name of Hyndman" (so the undergraduate's letter described this other
undergraduate, afterwards to be well known as the Socialist writer and
speaker) moved "a kind of vote of censure" upon them. It was natural
enough that Sir Wentworth Dilke's son should brief the defence, and among
the papers of 1862 is a bundle of "Notes by me for Everett's speech." Next
he was trying his own mettle; and opposed a motion "that Prince Alfred
should be permitted to accept the throne of Greece." His own note is:
'On the 8th December I made my first speech, advocating a Greek
Republic, and suggesting that if they must have a King, they had
better look to the northern nations to supply one. I was named by
Everett, the President, as one of the tellers in the Division.'
Probably the speech had been no more of a success than most maiden
speeches, for Mr. Dilke's letter reads like a consolation:
"The Greek debate I care little about. I would much rather have _read_
a paper on the subject. _Till a man can write he cannot speak_--
except, as Carlyle would say, 'in a confused babble of words and
ideas.'"
The main part of the grandson's letters were concerned with the topics
handled and the speeches made at the Union.
"_November 7th_, 1862.
"How wavering and shortsighted the policy of England in Turco-Grecian
matters has been of late! Compare Navarino and Sebastopol. Palmerston
will, if he has his way, oblige the Greeks to continue in much the
same state of degradation as hitherto, and will go on holding up the
crumbling Turkish Empire till some rising of Christians occurs at a
time when we have our hands full and cannot afford to help our 'old
friend.' Then Turkey-in-Europe will vanish. I do not myself believe in
the Pan-Slavonic Empire. The Moldavians, Hungarians, and Greeks could
never be long united; but I think that Greece might hold the whole of
the coast and mountain provinces without containing in itself fatal
elements of disunion.
"Brown--No. 3 of our four--broke from his training to-day, and spent
the whole day with the hounds. That will never do."
Mr. Dilke in reply did not conceal the amusement which was awakened in him
by the rowing man's deadly seriousness:
"_November 9th_, 1862.
"I agree with you. No Browns, no hunting fellows, no divided love!! If
'a man' goes in 'our boat' he goes in to win. "Broke from his
training!" Abominable! Had he 'broke from his training' when standing
out for Wrangler, why so be it, _his_ honour only would be concerned;
but here it is _our_ honour, T. H. for ever, and no fox-hunting!
"After this, the Greek question falls flat on the ears, but I will
suggest..."
and thereupon he goes into hints for research, very characteristic in
their thoroughness, ending with a practical admonition:
"Now comes 'The Moral.' As you could not speak on the great Ionian
question, why not _write_ on it? Write down what you would or could
have said on the subject. Take two or three hours of leisure and
quiet; write with great deliberation, but _write on_ till the subject
is concluded. No deferring, no bit by bit piecework, but all offhand.
No _correction_, not a word to be altered; once written let it stand.
Put the Essay aside for a month. Then criticize it with your best
judgment--the order and sequence of facts, its verbal defects, its
want or superabundance of illustration, its want or superabundance of
detail, etc., etc."
Another letter of Dilke's in his freshman year concerns the art of debate:
"What is wanted is common-sense discussion in well-worded speeches
with connected argument, the whole to be spoken loud enough to be
heard, and with sufficient liveliness to convince the hearers of the
speaker's interest in what he is saying. So far as this is oratory, it
is cultivated (with very moderate success) at the Union."
From the ideal here indicated--an accurate analysis of 'the House of
Commons manner'--Charles Dilke never departed, and his grandfather in
replying eagerly reinforced the estimate:
"I agree to all you say about that same Union, and about the Orators
and Oratory. I should have said it myself, but thought it necessary to
_clear the way_. I rejoice that no such preliminary labour was
required. I agree that even Chatham was a 'Stump'--what he was in
addition is not our question. I hope and believe he was the last of
our Stumpers. Burke, so far as he was an Orator, was a Stump and
something more, and the more may be attributed to the fact that he was
a practised _writer,_ where Chatham was not, and that he reported his
own speeches. Latterly his _writings_ were all Stump. I had not
intended to have written for a week or more, for you have so many
correspondents and are so punctual in reply that I fear the waste of
precious time; but I am as pleased with your letter as an old dog-
fancier when a terrier-pup catches his first rat--it is something to
see my boy hunt out and hunt down that old humbug Oratory."
Charles Dilke's own mature judgment on the matters concerned was expressed
in a letter to the _Cantab_ of October 27th, 1893:
"The value of Union debates as a training for political life? Yes, if
they are debates. There is probably little debate in the Union. There
was little in my time. There is little real debating in the House of
Commons. But debating is mastery. The gift of debate means the gift of
making your opinion prevail. Set speaking is useless and worse than
useless in these days."
Dilke was elected to the Library Committee of the Union in his second
term, and in his third to the Standing Committee. At this moment a
decision was taken to make a determined effort for new buildings, and it
was suggested that he should stand for the secretaryship. Declining this
as likely to engross more time than he could spare, he was put forward for
the Vice-Presidency, and elected at the beginning of October, 1863. His
prominence in the negotiations which followed may be inferred from the
fact that he was re-elected. This was in itself a rare honour; but in his
case was followed by election and re-election to the Presidency, a record
unique in the Society's annals.
It was through this phase of his activity that Charles Dilke took part in
the general life of the University. At the Union he was closely associated
with men outside his own college, one of whom, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice,
was destined to be a lifelong friend and fellow-worker. But his College
meant more to him than the University. A conservative in this, he
resented, and resisted later on, all tendencies to make the teaching of
the place communal by an opening of college lectures to students from
other colleges; he valued the distinctiveness of type which went with the
older usage, under which he himself was nurtured. Trinity Hall was a
lawyers' college; it had a library specially stored with law books, and it
was early determined that he should conform to the _genius loci_ so far at
least as to be called to the Bar. In his first Christmas vacation he began
to eat his dinners at the Middle Temple, where his nomination paper was
signed by John Forster; and in June, 1863, after he had spent a year at
mathematics and won his college scholarship, he took stock of his
position, and felt clear as to his own powers. He might, he thought,
attain to about a tenth wranglership in the Mathematical Tripos, which
would insure him a fellowship at his college; but this, although he valued
academic distinctions very highly, did not seem an end worth two years of
work, and he determined to devote the remainder of his time at the
University to the study of law and history.
He had not at any time limited himself to mathematics. Both before his
freshman year and during it he had read hard and deeply on general
subjects. His habit was to analyze on paper whatever he studied, and he
had dealt thus in 1861 (aged eighteen) with all Sir Thomas More,
Bolingbroke, and Hobbes. Among the papers for 1862 there is preserved such
an analysis of Coleridge's political system; a note on the views of the
Abbé Morellet, with essays on comparative psychology, the association of
ideas, and the originality of the anti-selfish affections. These are
deposits of that course of philosophic reading over which, says the
Memoir, 'I wasted a good deal of time in 1862, but managed also to give
myself much mental training.'
The determination to abandon mathematics for a line of study more germane
to that career of which he already had some vision met with no resistance
from his people; but it did not altogether please the college authorities.
He wrote to old Mr. Dilke:
"When I told Hopkins" (his tutor) "that I was not going out in
mathematics, he was taken aback, and seemed very sorry. He urged me to
_read law_, but still to go out as a high senior optime, which he says
I could be, without reading more than a very small quantity of
mathematics every day. My objection to this was that I knew myself
better than he did; that were I to go in for mathematics, I should be
as high in that tripos as my talents would let me, and that my law and
my life's purpose would suffer in consequence.
"He said--'You will be very sorry if it happens that you are not first
legalist of your year--that is the only place in the Law Tripos that
you can be content with--and yet remember you have Shee in your year,
who is always a dangerous adversary, and who starts with some little
knowledge on the subject.'
"I said I should read with Shee, and make him understand that I was
intended by Nature to beat him."
The dangerous Shee had been thus announced in a letter of February, 1863:
"Shee--son of the well-known Serjeant, [Footnote: Mr. Serjeant Shee was
later a Judge--the first Roman Catholic since the time of the Stuarts to
sit on the English Bench.] has come up and taken the rooms over me. He
seems a nice kind of fellow; of course, a strong Romanist."
Shee remained till the end Dilke's chief competitor, and he was also one
of the band of friends who met each other incessantly, and incessantly
talked over first principles till the small hours of morning. Perhaps it
is not without importance that Charles Dilke should have had the
experience, not very common for Englishmen, of living on terms of intimacy
with an Irish Roman Catholic: at all events, his relations in after-life,
both with Irishmen and with Roman Catholics, were more friendly than is
common. For the moment Shee made one factor in the discussions upon
theology which are inevitable among undergraduates, and which went on with
vigour in this little group, according to the recollection of Judge
Steavenson, who in those days, faithful to the orthodoxy of his Low Church
upbringing, found himself ranged by the side of the 'strong Romanist'
against a general onslaught upon Christianity. Charley Dilke himself had
come under the influences of the place and the time. There is an entry
headed May, 1863: "I find a fair argument against miracles in my notes for
this month." He had abandoned attendance at Communion, but, according to
Judge Steavenson, did not go further in opinions or in talk than a vague
agnosticism--which was also the attitude of another subtle and agile
intelligence in that circle.
Turning over, in 1891, the boxes which held his letters and papers of
college days, Charles Dilke wrote:
"1863.
"In every page of the destroyed notebooks of this year I could see the
influence of two men--my grandfather and H. D. Warr." [Footnote: Mr.
H. D. Warr became a journalist. In 1880 Sir Charles secured him the
post of Secretary to the Royal Commission upon City Companies, of
which Lord Derby was Chairman.]
Warr was a classical exhibitioner of Trinity Hall in Dilke's year, and was
not among the few who are named at first as likely friends,
though he figures early as a competitor in the Euclid and Algebra 'fights'
at his tutor's. In February, 1863, his name must have been on Dilke's
tongue or pen, since this is evidently a reply to inquiries:
"Warr is a clergyman's son. He will probably be about fourth or fifth
for the Bell (Scholarship)."
It is not till the October term of his second year that more explicit
notice of this friend occurs, when Dilke is giving an account of his first
speech as Vice-President of the Union. He opened a debate on the metric
system, concerning which he had solid and well-thought-out opinions:
"My speech was logical but not fluent. Warr says it was the best
opening speech he ever listened to, but by no means the best speech.
Warr is a candid critic whom I dread, so that I am glad he was
satisfied."
Of this candour Dilke has preserved some specimens which show that Warr's
influence was mainly used in laughing his friend out of his solemnity.
Thus Warr characterizes him as a dealer in logic," and, breaking off from
some fantastic speculation as to the future of all their college set,
January 9th, 1864, moralizes.
"I am an ass, my friend, a great ass, to write in this silly strain to
you, but you must not be very angry, though I own now to a feeling of
_having half insulted your kind serious ways by talking nonsense to
them on paper_."
APPENDIX
Sir Charles Dilke's association with the river and with rowing men was so
constant that we ate justified in preserving this contemporary report of
his first race for the Grand Challenge, on which he always looked back
with pride:
"It was," says the report, which Dilke preserved, "one of the finest
and fastest races ever seen at Henley, and the losers deserve as much
credit as the winners. The Oxford crew were on the Berks side,
Kingston on the Oxon, and Cambridge in the middle. It was a very fine
and even start, and they continued level for about 50 yards, when
Brasenose began to show the bow of their boat in front, the others
still remaining oar and oar, rowing in fine form and at a great pace.
So finely were the three crews matched, that, although Brasenose
continued to increase their lead, it was only inch by inch. At the end
of about 400 yards Brasenose were about a quarter of a length only
ahead. The race was continued with unabated vigour, Brasenose now
going more in front, and being a length ahead at the Poplars, where
they began to ease slightly. The contest between Cambridge and
Kingston was still admirable; Cambridge had made some fine bursts to
get away from them, but they were not to be shaken off, and the
gallant effort of the one crew was met by a no less gallant effort on
the part of the other. The Cambridge crew began to show in front as
they neared Remenham, and a most determined race was continued to the
end. Brasenose won by a length clear, and the Cambridge boat was not
clear of the Kingston, only having got her about three-quarters of
their length."
The time--seven minutes, twenty-six seconds--was the fastest that had been
rowed over that course, and more than half a minute faster than that of
the final heat, in which Brasenose were beaten by University. But next day
in the Ladies' Plate University brought down the record by three seconds.
Trinity Hall had the worst station, and if they were beaten by only a
length, must have been as fast as Brasenose. Kingston was stroked by L.
Pugh Evans, Brasenose by D. Pocklington (W. B. Woodgate rowing 4). The
Trinity Hall eight were as follows:
st. lb.
E. F. Dyke 9 12
H. W. Edwardes 10 13
W. H. Darton 11 2
C. W. Dilke 11 5
D. F. Steavenson 12 1
R. E. Neane 11 0
W. J. S. Cadman 10 6
R. Richardson 9 10
A. A. Berens (cox.) 9 8
CHAPTER IV
CAMBRIDGE (_Continued_)
In these years of all-round training Cambridge was doing for Charles Dilke
what it has done for hundreds of other young men. The exceptional in his
case sprang from the tie which linked this young athlete to the old
scholar who, in his library at Sloane Street, or among his flowers at
Alice Holt, was ceaselessly preoccupied with detail of the undergraduate's
life and work. From the first there was a pathos in his eagerness to
follow and understand all the minutiae of an unfamiliar scene. At the
close of Charles Dilke's first term he wrote (December 1st, 1862):
"Your letter gave me great pleasure, as indeed for one reason or
another, or for no reason if you please, your letters always do;
though not being a Cambridge man, I am at times a little puzzled....
What a bore I shall be after the 13th with my endless enquiries."
Ten days later he is jubilant over the results of the college examination
which closed the first term:
"Hurrah! hurrah! my dear grandson. Ninety-seven out of a hundred--
eleven above the second 'man'--is a position that would satisfy a
whole family of loving friends, even if they were all grandfathers."
After every college examination the grandson sent lists of results,
compiled with elaborate detail. The grandfather studied them, treasured
them, compared them, wanted to know why this man had fallen back, how the
other had advanced, and always with the same warm outflow of sympathy and
pride over his own pupil. There they lie to-day in the despatch-boxes,
preserved as a memorial of that love by the man on whom it was expended.
On one is noted:
"Many scraps such as this, and his letters, show the loving care with
which my grandfather watched over my progress at the University."
The beginning of his first Long Vacation he spent in travelling through
Germany, Holland, and Belgium with his father. Later, in August, he
visited Jersey and Guernsey, and went to France alone, making pilgrimage
from Cherbourg to Tocqueville's two houses, and filling notebooks with
observations on Norman architecture at St. Lô, Coutances, and elsewhere.
He was perfecting his mastery of the language, too, and notes long after:
"On this journey I was once taken for a Frenchman, but my French was not
so good as it was about 1870." But always and everywhere he observed; and
sent back the results of his observation to the man who had trained it. On
June 30th, 1863, he writes:
"I have been all over Brussels to-day. My previous estimate of the
place is confirmed. It apes Paris without having any of the Parisian
charms, just as its people speak French without being able to
pronounce it.
"The two modern pictures in the Palais de Justice are to me worth all
the so-called Rubenses in the place. They are by Gallait and de
Biefve, and the one is our old friend of last year in London, 'The
Abdication of Charles V.'
"Rogier--the great Belgian Minister--has failed to secure his return
in the late elections, owing to his having given a vote unpopular to
his constituents on the fortification scheme. The Catholics lost three
votes (regained by the advanced party) in the Senate these elections.
"The names of the sides of the chambers are significant:
"Liberals. -- Catholics.
"What a fine country Belgium would be if it could get rid of its
priests a little more. The people understand freedom. In Ghent the
priests are rich, but utterly powerless owing to the extent of the
manufacturing interest."
When he returned to Cambridge for the October term of 1863, his hard
reading did not satisfy his prodigious power for work. He was Vice-
President of the Union, and he undertook the more arduous duties of
Secretary and Treasurer of the College Boat Club. When at the beginning of
1864 he was re-elected Vice-President of the Union, his grandfather wrote:
"Your University career has proved to me that you have a happiness of
manner that wins friends." Mr. Dilke's health began to decline notably in
the early part of 1864, and loss of sight menaced him. He took the
doctor's sentence, that he must refrain altogether from reading, with
characteristic philosophy, but added: "I have ordered that newspapers are
not to be sent here, so you must excuse it if, when we meet, I am a little
in arrear of the course of life."
Early in February, 1864, Charles Dilke had entered without training for a
walking race, and had beaten the University champion, Patrick, covering
the mile ("in a gale of wind and over heavy slush") in eight minutes and
forty-two seconds. [Footnote: Mr. Patrick, afterwards member of
Parliament, and from 1886 Permanent Under-Secretary for Scotland.] To this
announcement his grandfather made pleasant reply, threatening to come up
and compete in person, but three days later wrote:
"I wish you had sent me a Cambridge paper which contained an account
of your Olympic games. It is not too late now if you can get one; _I
reserve the right of reading everything that relates to you and your
concerns_."
Meanwhile Charles Dilke's reading went on with feverish energy. The
dangerous rival was closely watched. "Shee has been sitting up till
ominously late hours for some nights past. His father came up last night
and left again to-night, but I fear he did not make his son waste much
time." The competitors were straining then for a college law prize, but
the letter goes on to observe very sagely:
"The law is of little consequence, as neither of us can know anything
about it at present; but I should like to win the essay prize."
The prize was the annual college prize for the best English essay, and
that year's subject was "Sir Robert Walpole." Compositions were presumably
sent in after the Christmas vacation, for on February 29th, 1864, a
fortnight after the announcement as to the walking race, comes this
laconic bulletin:
"MY DEAR GRANDFATHER,
"English Essay Prize: Dilke.
Honourably mentioned: Osborn, Shee.
Latin Essay Prize: Warr.
Honourably mentioned: Casswell. [Footnote: A scholar of Sir Charles's
year, and one of his most frequent associates in undergraduate days.]
"They say that parts of my essay were vulgar.
"Your affectionate grandson,
"CHAS. W. DILKE."
That last sentence roused the old critic:
"I should like to read the _whole_ essay. My especial interest is
aroused by the charge of occasional _vulgarity_. If it be true, it is
not improbable that the writer caught the infection from his
grandfather. With one half the world, in its judgment of literature
and of life, vulgarity is the opposite of gentility, and gentility is
merely negative, and implies _the absence of all character_, and, in
language, of all idiom, all bone and muscle. I have a notion--only do
not whisper such heresy within college walls--that a college tutor
must be genteel in his _college judgments_, that 'The Polite Letter
Writer' was the work of an M.A. in the 'Augustan Age.' You may find in
Shakespeare household words and phrases from every condition and walk
in life--as much coarseness as you please to look for--anything and
everything except gentility and vulgarity. Occasional vulgarity is,
therefore, a question on which _I_ refuse to take the opinion of any
man not well known to me."
On one matter the pupil was recalcitrant. Mr. Dilke begged him to give
"one hour or one half-hour a day" to mastering Greek, so as to be able to
read it with pleasure--a mastery which could only be acquired "before you
enter on the direct purpose and business of life." But "insuperable
difficulties" presented themselves. "It is of considerable importance that
I should be first in the college Law May examination." Hopes of compliance
in a later period were held out, to which Mr. Dilke replied shrewdly that
"insuperable difficulties" were often temperamental, and that during the
whole period of study equally strong reasons for postponement would
continue to present themselves; and then would come "the all-engrossing
business of life, and there is an end of half-hours."
In May, 1864, Mr. Dilke was present on the bank at 'Grassy' when, on the
second night of the races, Trinity Hall, with his grandson rowing at No.
3, went head of the river.
"_The ever-memorable May 12th_, 1864.
"MY DEAR FATHER,
"Last night we gained on 3rd Trinity all the way to Ditton Corner,
where we were overlapping. Our coxswain made a shot, missed them, and
we went into the mid-stream. After our misfortune we paddled slowly
over the long reach, and came in half a length behind 3rd Trinity and
2 lengths ahead of 1st Trinity. To-night we did not gain much up to
the Plough, where we spurted and caught up 3rd directly; we rowed
round Ditton Corner overlapping, and so for 100 yds. more, and then
made our bump. The whole of the crew and Stephen were chaired and
carried round the quad. [Footnote: Leslie Stephen had coached the
boat, which stayed head throughout the races. Judge Steavenson rowed
in it at No. 5, where he had rowed earlier in the year for the
University. In 1868 it was settled that 'the outrigger which was rowed
head of the river in 1864 should be cut up, and the pieces distributed
amongst the members of the crew who rowed in her in that year.'
Dilke's piece always hung against the wall in his study in Sloane
Street.] Our 2nd has made its bump each night, and is 8th on the
river!!!"
Hardly were the May races over before the college Law examination began.
On May 31st Charles Dilke wrote to his grandfather:
"The results will be known to-morrow. I have worked as hard as it is
possible for me to do, for I have worked till I became almost deprived
of memory.... Shee has worked, too, as hard as he could, and was in a
dreadful state of nervous excitement this evening. I almost hope that
he is first, for I should like to see him get his scholarship. Warr
tried to get me to refuse to go in for the examination, or find some
pretext for being away, in order to let our common friend get his
scholarship; but I said that I thought he would beat me, and that he
should have the glory of beating my _best_ efforts if he beat me at
all."
An underlying reason against his acceptance of Warr's advice may be found
in this letter from Mr. Dilke at Alice Holt to his son Wentworth:
"_June 3rd_, 1864.
"If you carried out your intention of going to and returning from
Cambridge this day, you know, and all in Sloane Street know, that our
noble fellow has again won the prize. But the weather may have
deterred you, and on the possible chance I copy the results:
"1. Chas. Dilke, 570 marks. Prize.
Shee, 440
"What a blessing that boy has been to my old age! May God reward him!
I feel for Shee! for he has laboured long and zealously. I wish there
had been two prizes.
"I will not mix the subject with baser matter, so shall write my
memoranda on another sheet.
"Your affectionate father,
"C. W. D."
After the May term came Henley Regatta, and Trinity Hall was again entered
for the Grand Challenge. Many of the friends, Shee amongst them, had taken
up their quarters there, along with the oarsmen; and Warr, who was not at
Henley, wrote pressing a prompt return to Cambridge for the Long Vacation
term. As the Henley week progressed [Footnote: Dilke rowed again both for
the Grand Challenge and the Ladies' Plate. In each Trinity Hall met the
ultimate winner in the trial heat, and were defeated by Kingston and by
Eton, but beat London and Radley.] Mr. Dilke writes:
"My movements may be absolutely regulated by your wishes or
convenience. If you desire to pay a visit to the Holt, I have there
the chance of a quicker recovery, if I am to go on well; whereas if
there be more inducements to visit London, why here I have the benefit
of the doctors should I not make progress. The pleasure and the
advantages being _equal_ to me, you have only to decide. Let me know
your decision by return of post."
Charles Dilke decided for London, and there spent three or four days in
the company of his family, and, above all, of his grandfather. Then he
went back to Cambridge, and lived the life of strenuous, healthy young men
in the summer weather; getting up at five o'clock in the mornings,
bathing, reading long hours, walking long walks, talking the long talks of
youth. The correspondence with his grandfather centred chiefly now on the
subject for the next year's essay competition, which had been announced at
the close of the May term, and which, as Charles Dilke said, "seems to be
rather in my line."
It was Pope's couplet:
"For forms of government let fools contest,
Whatever is best administered is best."
It was no less in old Mr. Dilke's line than in his grandson's. He wrote on
July 14th from Alice Holt a page of admirable criticism on the scheme as
outlined by his grandson, and concludes in his habitual tone of
affectionate self-depreciation:
"This is another of my old prosings--another proof that love and good
will and good wishes remain when power to serve is gone...."
With the precocious maturity of Charles Dilke's intellect had gone a
slowness of development in other directions. It is true that those
Cambridge men who remember him as an undergraduate remember him as
serious, but full of high animal spirits and sense of fun; while everyone
speaks of his charm and gaiety. "We were all in love with him," says one
vivacious old lady, who belonged to the circle of connections and
relatives that frequented 76, Sloane Street. But the letters of his early
days at Cambridge hardly show that 'happiness of manner' which his
grandfather attributed to him. Only now does the whole personality begin
to emerge, as in a letter of 1864, in which he begs his grandfather,
because "writing is irksome to you," to send two very short letters rather
than one longer one; "for the receipt of a letter gives me an excuse to
write again, while on the other hand I can by habit catch your meaning by
the first words of your shortest criticisms."
The rest of the sheet was occupied by very able analysis of an article
which had been published in the _Athenaeum_--criticism mature and manly
both in thought and expression. The change did not escape the shrewd
observer. Mr. Dilke replied:
"ALICE HOLT,
"BY FARNHAM, SURREY,
"_July 28th_, 1864.
"MY VERY DEAR GRANDSON,
"Your letters give me very great pleasure, not because they are kind
and considerate, of which I had evidence enough long since, not
because they flatter the vanity of the old man by asking his opinion,
which few now regard, but because I see in them a gradual development
of your own mind."
He added a few words in praise of the analysis, but pointed out that the
reviewer, whom Charles Dilke censured, was treating a well-worn subject--
Bentham's Philosophy--and therefore needed to aim at freshness of view
rather than thoroughness of exposition. He added:
"I, however, am delighted with the Article, which is full of promise
of a coming man by which the old journal may benefit."
Save for a final "God bless you!" from "as ever, your affectionate
Grand.," that was the last word written by Mr. Dilke to his grandson.
Within a week he was struck down by what proved to be his fatal illness.
Early on August 8th Charles Dilke wrote to his father that he was deterred
from coming home only by the fear lest his sudden arrival might "frighten
grandfather about himself and make him worse." A few hours later he was
summoned. The rest may be given in his own words:
'_August 8th, Monday_.--I received a telegram from my father at noon:
"You had better come here." I left by the 1.30 train, and reached
Alice Holt at half-past six. My Father met me on the lawn: he was
crying bitterly, and said, "He lives only to see you." I went upstairs
and sat down by the sofa, on which lay the Grand., looking haggard,
but still a noble wreck. I took his hand, and he began to talk of very
trivial matters--of Cambridge everyday life--his favourite theme of
old. He seemed to be testing his strength, for at last he said: "I
shall be able to talk to-morrow; I may last some weeks; but were it
not for the pang that all of you would feel, I should prefer that it
should end at once. I have had a good time of it."
'He had been saying all that morning: "Is that a carriage I hear?" or
"I shall live to see him."
'_Tuesday_.--When I went in to him, he sent away the others, and told
me to look for an envelope and a key. I failed to find it, and fetched
Morris, who after a careful search found the key, but no envelope. We
had both passed over my last letter (August 6th), which lay on the
table. He made us both leave the room, but recalled me directly, and
when I entered had banknotes in his hand, which he must have taken
from the envelope of my letter. (This involved rising.) He said: "I
cannot live, I fear, to your birthday--I want to make you a present--I
think I have heard you say that you should like a stop-watch--I have
made careful inquiries as to the price--and have saved--as I believe--
sufficient." He then gave me notes, and the key of a desk in London,
in the secret drawer of which I should find the remaining money. He
then gave me the disposition of his papers and manuscripts, directing
that what I did not want should go to the British Museum. He then
said: "I have nothing more to say but that you have fulfilled--my
every hope--beyond all measure--and--I am deeply--grateful."
'He died in my presence on Wednesday, 10th, at half-past one, in
perfect peace.'
[Illustration: MR. C. W. DILKE.
From the painting by Arthur Hughes ]
CHAPTER V
LAST TERMS AT THE UNIVERSITY
After his grandfather's death Charles Dilke went away alone on a walking
tour in Devon. The death of his grandfather was hardly realized at first;
'the sense of loss' deepened: 'it has been greater with me every year that
followed.' He corresponded with his college friends, and of this date is a
letter of remonstrance at his overstudious habits from the sententious H.
D. Warr:
"My dear Dilke will forgive me if I say that, though I honour him much
for his many strong and good qualities, I think he is far too given to
laborious processes in work and social life.... My warm regard for you
rests to some extent on my very high appreciation of your strength and
consistency of character: you have always appeared to me to be a
supremely honest man, almost comically so, at least when I am in a
profane humour: I do not know that anything you could do would
possibly make me like you better. But I think if you gave yourself a
little wider fling and liberty, and did not walk always as it were on
the seam of the carpet, it would be better; there would be less to
lean on in you, perhaps, but if possible more to love."
Charles Dilke used to say that Fawcett and Warr had between them cured him
of that priggishness which he often recalled with amusement. Almost
inevitably his grandfather's devotion, the absolute engrossment of so
considerable a personality in his least important concerns, would
emphasize the inclination to take himself over-seriously which is marked
in every clever and resolute young man.
In the beginning of 1865 he won the college essay prize for the second
time. A pile of dockets from the British Museum shows that, as soon as
coming of age qualified him to be a reader there, he plunged deep into all
the works on ideal commonwealths to complete his survey of 'forms of
government'--the subject indicated by Pope's couplet, which had appealed
so strongly both to his grandfather and himself. This was a side issue.
Beading for his Tripos went on with unremitting energy, and he had in use
ninety-four notebooks crammed with analyses. In June, 1865, he was
announced Senior Legalist, easily at the head of the law students of his
year, thus crowning his college successes by the highest University
distinction open to a man who followed that course.
A month before he entered for the Tripos, he had stroked the college boat,
which was head of the river. Trinity Hall, however, retained its pride of
place only for one day, and it was no small achievement to accomplish even
this, since Third Trinity, who bumped them on the second night, were a
wonderful crew, with five University oars, 'including some of the most
distinguished Eton oars that ever rowed.' [Footnote: The Memoir details
them: 'Chambers, the winner of the pairs, sculls, and "walk," President of
the University Boat Club, and afterwards Secretary of the Amateur Athletic
Club; Kinglake, afterwards President of the University Boat Club; W. E.
Griffith, afterwards President of the University Boat Club, and
formerly stroke of the finest Eton eight ever seen; Selwyn, afterwards
Bishop of Melanesia, stroke of the University eight; and C. B. Lawes,
afterwards the well-known sculptor, who had been captain of the Boats at
Eton, and who had won the Diamond Sculls and the amateur championship of
the Thames, and had rowed stroke of the University crew the year after
Selwyn.'] The Hall had only one 'blue,' Steavenson, but to Charles Dilke
himself had been offered in February, 1865, and was offered again in 1866,
the place of 'seven' in the University eight. He declined on grounds of
health, fearing the strain of the four-mile course on his heart. A note
added later says regretfully: 'I believe that I was unduly frightened by
my doctor, and that I might have rowed.'
To be Senior Legalist and to stroke the first boat on the river in the
same term was an unusual combination: in the next Charles Dilke added to
it the Presidency of the Union. The new Union buildings were now in
process of construction, and he had done more than any other man to bring
them from a derisive by-word into solid realization of brick and mortar.
He took credit to himself for 'the selection of Waterhouse as architect
against Gilbert Scott and Digby Wyatt.' Care to see this business fully
through was one of the reasons which determined him to come up for a
fourth year, and to hold the Presidency a second time in the Lent term of
1866. On his retirement he proposed Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice for his
successor, and thus left the lead in hands he could trust.
Of his own speeches he has preserved some detail, showing how early his
opinions displayed the character which was to be constant in them:
'In 1864-65 I spoke twice at the Union [Footnote: After Dilke's death,
when a resolution of regret was carried at the Union, the Vice-
President, Mr. J. H. Allen of Jesus, said in moving it: "Sir Charles
was in a double sense the architect of the fortunes of the Society,
because he was responsible for the superintendence of the change from
the old inadequate home in Queens' Street into the more glorious
building which they now enjoyed. It was for that reason that on two
occasions the Society elected him to the highest position which they
could confer."] in favour of the foreign policy of Lord Palmerston,
opposing several of my friends who were condemning it. Cobden at the
time was attacking supposed extravagance, based, as he thought, on
panic, and I sided with Palmerston in thinking that the enormous
increase of the French Navy could only be intended for an anti-English
policy, while in the event of even the temporary loss of the command
of the Channel, invasion by an immense French army would become
possible. To Poland I was friendly, but unwilling to contemplate, as
Lord Palmerston was unwilling to contemplate, interference by England
in alliance with the Emperor Napoleon. I was so far from strongly
taking the Danish side in the war that I chose the opportunity to put
up in my rooms at Cambridge a photograph of Bismarck, for whom I had a
considerable admiration. I had made Lord Palmerston's acquaintance
during the Exhibition in '62 (to the ceremonies of which I also owed
that of Auber, Meyerbeer, and many other distinguished people), but I
do not think that the chat of the jaunty old gentleman in his last
days had had any effect upon my views, and I was certainly more pro-
German than was Palmerston, who was not pro-anything except pro-
English.'[Footnote: For Sir Charles's opinion of Lord Palmerston, see
vol. ii., p. 493. ]
The best speech, in Dilke's own opinion, that he made during 1866 was in
opposition to the proposal to congratulate Governor Eyre upon his
suppression of 'the supposed insurrection in Jamaica.' This was the first
of the many occasions on which Sir Charles Dilke criticized the severity
of white men towards natives in the name of civilized government.
Fuller anticipation of the views he supported in Parliament is to be found
in his speeches on home politics. In the spring of 1866 the country was
violently agitated over the Reform Bill introduced by Lord Russell, who
had become Prime Minister on the death of Lord Palmerston in 1865. Of
course there was a debate at the Union, and it was prolonged to a second
night. Dilke writes:
'I took up for the first time broad democratic ground. Attacking the
famous speech of Mr. Lowe, [Footnote: Mr. Lowe had asked in the debate
on the "Representation of the People Bill," as reported in Hansard, on
March 13th, 1866: "If you want venality, ignorance, drunkenness; if
you want impulsive, unreflecting, violent people, where do you look
for them? Do you go to the top, or to the bottom?"] I declared that so
far was I from agreement with these calumnies, that I was of opinion
that those homely and truly English qualities which had to some slight
extent grown slack among the upper classes were to be met with in all
their strength as much in the more intelligent portion of the now
unrepresented classes, as among those familiarly styled "their
betters." With regard to the question of the fitness of the artisans
for the franchise, I argued that they had not to decide for themselves
between Austria and Prussia in the Holstein question, but had to
decide between candidates who would settle the more abstruse questions
for them. The middle classes, I contended, could as a body do no more,
and the artisan was just as competent to judge of honesty and ability
as the £10 householder; and less likely to be influenced by bribery
and intimidation, as being more independent and more fearless of
consequences. Moreover, any attempt to keep the great mass of the
people from all share of political power seemed to me idle: whether we
liked their advent to government or whether we feared it, it was
inevitable, and the longer we delayed to prepare for it the worse it
would be for so-called Conservative interests when it came. I
contended that the working man had proportionately a greater stake in
the country than the rich; that the taxes which he paid were a vastly
more serious matter to him than those which the rich paid were to
them, and that a hundred of the laws passed by Parliament vitally
affected the interests of the working people to one which injured
those of the upper class.'
For a young man whose political views were so maturely thought out, debate
was no mere exercitation; his education was fast passing into
apprenticeship for public life; and in February, 1865, his father, Sir
Wentworth Dilke, coming forward at a by-election in the Liberal interest
for Wallingford, gave the Union debater his first chance on a public
platform.
Long afterwards, when Sir Charles Dilke was travelling down to the Forest
of Dean with a party of guests and friends, one of them, looking out as
the train swept along the Thames Valley, caught sight of a little white
church nestling under a hill and asked, "Is that Cholsey?" Sir Charles
turned round in his eager way: "What, do you know this district? Yes, that
is Cholsey;" and went on to tell how intimate he had become with all the
villages round Wallingford when speaking and canvassing for his father,
and how the experience gained among the Berkshire peasants had supplied
valuable lessons for his own contests in later years.
Sir Wentworth was elected, and Lord Granville, who had a real friendship
for him, wrote, in a spirit very typical of the traditional view: "I know
no one to whom Parliamentary life will afford more interest and
amusement." Charles Dilke's conception of Parliamentary life was very
different from that of his father, and from that which Lord Granville
indicated. On the other hand, the son seemed to the father deficient in
appreciation of the pleasures acceptable to himself:
'One of the difficulties between my father and myself about this
period arose from his vexation at my refusing to take part in the
shooting-parties at Alice Holt. He was passionately fond of
shooting; ... I had now but little sympathy with the amusement, and
had shown my dislike for it in many ways.'
Yet despite differences, the father was immensely proud of his son, and
consulted him in regard to the younger brother's education. In his reply
Charles Dilke discussed the view of certain Dons who held that the
cultivated English gentleman ought not to go in for honours at all, and
admitted that "reading for a high place here involves loss of many
pleasures, of almost all society; it makes a man fretful, and often leaves
him behind the world; as an education for the mind it is not so good as
the self-education of a non-honours man ought to be, _but never is_." He
thought, nevertheless, that classics--of which he avowed himself "more
ignorant than an English gentleman ought to be"--offered the field in
which success was best worth having. He himself "would gladly be put back
to fourteen or fifteen, and 'grind my life out' till two-and-twenty, in
order to get a high place in the first-class classics." But it must be all
or nothing. A second-class he dismissed as not worth winning. Moreover,
"if the boy has not a high standard set up for him, he will do nothing
whatever, which is far worse than doing too much."
Meanwhile, in the midst of all that full college life which was becoming
more and more definitely a preparation for the political career, he was
trying his strength in the field of journalism.
His grandfather had never ceased to impress upon him that every public man
should have learned and practised thoroughly the craft of writing. This
precept allied itself with the inherited ownership of a great literary
journal; and very shortly after old Mr. Dilke's death the undergraduate,
as he then was, began to associate himself actively with the work of the
_Athenaeum_. His first published writing in it appeared on October 22nd,
1864, when he reviewed a well-known work on economics by the writer whom
the Memoir styles 'that dull Frenchman, Le Play.' [Footnote: French
Senator, son-in-law of the celebrated economist Michel Chevalier. He wrote
works on the principles of agriculture, the application of chemistry to
agriculture, and kindred subjects.] Le Play wrote from Paris to thank Sir
Wentworth Dilke for a copy of the article which had been sent him, and had
already attracted attention in France:
"On y trouve un sentiment de vrai progrès et une intelligence de la
vie pratique qui se rencontrent rarement chez nos critiques."
The British Museum tickets show the course of reading which Charles Dilke
was pursuing at this period: Bacon, Filmer, Mandeville, Hume, represent
the older English writers on Commonwealths, ideal and actual; Crousaz,
Condorcet, Diderot, Linguet, Fénelon, Helvétius, stood for the influences
of eighteenth-century France. With them were writers more recondite; the
_Mundus Alter et Idem_ of "Britannicus," _Barclay his Argenis_, Holberg's
_Journey in the Underworld_, Sadeur's _Terre Australe Connue_, Ned Lane's
_Excellencie of a Free State_, were all out-of-the-way books with an
antiquarian flavour. Of recent or contemporary authors, Montalembert was
included, with Proudhon, as were men whom Charles Dilke came to know
personally--Émile de Girardin, Michel Chevalier, and, a close friend
afterwards, Louis Blanc. Works of Mohl and Willick brought in the Germans,
and a volume of the _Federalist_ introduced him to that great American
commonwealth which he was soon to visit. A sheaf of dockets for works upon
the Swedenborgian Association and theories complete this very extensive
range of reading, which may be supplemented by the following note of his
own:
"Favourite books, 1864 (in themselves--for no object):
"Shakespeare.
"The Bible.
"J. S. Mill: _Political Economy; On Liberty; Dissertations._
"Longfellow: _Evangeline_ and _Miles Standish_.
"Homer: _Works_.
"Tennyson: nearly all.
"Plato: _Republic_.
"Sir P. Sidney: _Arcadia_.
"Claude Adrien Helvétius: _Works_.
"Victor Hugo: _Les Misérables_.
"William Godwin: _Political Justice_."
He notes also in the Memoir that the reading of Mill at this period marked
the beginning of Mill's influence over him. This influence was a great
factor in Dilke's life, and, when it passed into a personal relation,
became almost one of discipleship.
His taste for Victor Hugo led him to write in the _Athenaeum_ a long
notice of _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ in 1866, when that romance
appeared; but another article about the same period on international law
indicates the main bent of his studies.
As early as the Long Vacation of 1864, in the course of preparing his
essay on forms of government, he had found himself tracing 'the future of
the Anglo-Saxon race both in the United States and Australasia'; and he
thus, without knowing it, laid the foundation lines of _Greater Britain_.
Also, in 1865, 'I had already dreamt of visiting and writing upon Russia,
a country which always had a great hold on my imagination.' Another
project of these undergraduate years was less his own than his
grandfather's. Old Mr. Dilke contemplated a universal catalogue of books,
to be prepared by international action. This scheme was completely
abandoned, yet it is interesting that the grandson entertained it. The
scholar, not merely the lover, but the active servant, of learning, was
always present in Charles Dilke's many-sided personality, though never
dominant. We approach the central preoccupations of his mind with the
_History of Prevalent Opinions in Politics_, towards which 'a great deal
of work' was done by him in the winter of 1864-65. In 1866 the same
underlying group of ideas took form in the outline of a treatise on
_Radicalism_.
In working for this he read 'most of the writers upon the theory of
politics--Hooker, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Linguet, Locke, Bentham, and many
more.' 'Many more' included some very unusual reading; for the plan of his
book was in three chapters, 'the first chapter being upon the Radicalism
of the days before the coming of Jesus; the second chapter upon the period
between the teaching of our Lord and 1789; and the third on Radicalism in
modern history.' In the second part he 'gave much space to Arius, Huss,
Wyclif, Savonarola, Vane, Roger Williams, Baxter, Fox, Zinzendorf, and
other religious reformers.' All this reading taught him the 'extent to
which forgotten doctrines come up again, and are known by the names of men
who have but revived them'; and, on the other hand, how doctrines change
and degenerate while keeping the original name.
'In the sketch of my book, so far as it was worked out, I gave much
space to the falling-off in the Church from the Radicalism of
primitive Christianity.... It began with a definition of Radicalism as
a going to the root of things, which naturally led to the doctrine of
the perfectibility of man, and, quoting the gospels freely, I
attempted to prove the essential Radicalism of Christ's teaching.'
Here, then, is suggested another aspect of his mind's history. He notes:
'As I rejected at this period of my life the Divinity of Christ, I
sought, under Renan's guidance, more fully than I need have done, the
origin of Christ's teaching and of that of Paul, in the doctrines
previously taught by the Essenes and the Sadducees.'
Elsewhere a manuscript note describes his varying attitude towards
Christianity:
'In the course of 1863 I ceased my attendance upon Holy Communion, and
fell into a sceptical frame of mind which lasted for several years,
was modified in 1874, and came to an end in 1875. I had been a very
strong believer, and in the loss of my belief in the supernatural, as
it is called--_i.e._, in the Divinity of our Blessed Lord--I kept an
unbounded admiration for His words, as recorded in the Sermon on the
Mount, and belief in duty towards others. From 1885 to 1888 the Holy
Sacrament was a profound blessing to me, but in 1905 I ceased again to
find any help in forms.'
To what he called in 1865 the essential Radicalism of Christ's teaching--
to-day it would be called Christian Socialism--he was always constant. It
was the guiding principle of that inner idealism which underlay his whole
life and which strengthened with his maturity. The world was for him 'a
Christian' world. But acceptance not so much of the dogma as of the
mystical faith of Christians would seem to have varied with him from time
to time, and to have varied also in its formal expression. His mind was
too positive, too much occupied in the detail of life, to have time either
for brooding meditation or for the metaphysics of religious inquiry; and,
at least in 1866, Christianity interested him mainly as one of the most
potent shaping forces of human society. The desire to follow out and
investigate at first hand certain of its modern manifestations helped to
direct the impulse for travel which was already prompting him.
The Long Vacation of 1865 had found him tramping, first with Warr in
Guernsey, afterwards alone 'through Brittany and Normandy and partly into
the provinces south of the Loire,' eloquent on the charms of travelling
without luggage, sketching also, and increasing his carefully gathered
knowledge of French architecture.
He had explored France very thoroughly before he found the part of it
which was to become almost a second homeland in his affections; and he had
the Frenchman's appreciation of what was most characteristically France.
"I think the better of the French," he wrote at this time, "for their
admiration of the scenery of the Loire, the Indre, and the Vienne. Few
English people are capable of appreciating the scenery of Anjou.... I
never saw anything more lovely than the scenery of the Vilaine south of
Guichen and Bourg des Comptes."
But this was only an excursion. The whole bent of his desire lay towards
serious travel, in which he should pass from the training-
ground of the University to that wider school where knowledge was to be
gained, applied, and perfected. In the early part of 1866 he was talking
only of a journey in America, and it was a journey with a literary
purpose. In his _History of Radicalism_ he had given much space to the
Revivals in Prussia led by Ebel, and also to the rise in America of the
school of the Perfectionists in 1834. He proposed to take with him the
sketch of this book, and work into it the results of inquiry made on the
spot as regards the communistic experiments which had been tried in the
United States.
But travel for its own sake tempted him, and even before he set out, 'I
fancy,' he writes, 'my intention was already to go round the world: but if
I had asked my father's leave to do so, I should have been refused.'
At all events, when once fairly launched, the interest of travelling
absorbed his mind; and accordingly the book on Radicalism was finally put
aside, though not before some work had been done on it at Quebec and
Ottawa. Nor was it altogether abandoned; for, he says, in treating of
'Radicalism in modern history':
'I discussed it under various heads, of which the first was Great
Britain, the second the British Colonies, the third the United States,
showing, as this table was made before I left England, the
predominance which Colonial questions were already assuming in my
mind.' Also: 'In the last part of the sketch of the work I dealt with
the political Radicalism of the future. I wrote strongly in favour of
the removal of the disabilities of sex. I took the Irish Catholic view
of the Irish question, and I commenced the discussion of some of those
questions which made the freshness and the success of _Greater
Britain_--for example, "Effects upon Radicalism of Increased Facility
of Communication," and "Development of the Principle of Love of
Country into that of Love of Man."'
'Such,' he writes, at the end of that passage which describes the purposes
and the labours of his last academic terms--'such were the dispositions in
which I commenced my journey round the world.'
CHAPTER VI
"GREATER BRITAIN"
In June, 1866, Charles Dilke, not yet twenty-three, started on the travels
which are recorded in the first and most popular of his books, _Greater
Britain_. Its original draft was in reality the numbered series of long
descriptive letters which he sent home to Sloane Street.
His first prolonged absence, coupled with the unspent shock of his
grandfather's death, had bred in him a homesickness, which under the
influence of a Virginian summer he tried to dissipate by an outburst of
verse; but the medium was unsuited to his pen, and he soon returned to the
'dispositions' with which he started on his journey.
'Leaving England as I did with my mind in this kind of ferment, my
visit to Boston became deeply interesting to me, as I met there a
group of men undoubtedly, on the whole, the most distinguished then
collected at any city in the world. At one party of nine people, at
Cambridge, I met Emerson, Agassiz, Longfellow, Wendell Holmes, Asa
Gray, Lowell ("Hosea Biglow"), Dr. Collyer the Radical Unitarian, and
Dr. Hedge the great preacher. It is hard to say by which of them I was
the most charmed. Emerson, Longfellow, Asa Gray, and Wendell Holmes
seemed to me equal in the perfection of their courtesy, the grace of
their manner, and the interest of their conversation, while Hedge and
Collyer were full of an intellectual energy which was new to me, and
which had a powerful effect upon my work of the time; to be traced
indeed through the whole of the American portion of _Greater
Britain_.'
There is no need here to attempt any sketch of a journey which is
described in a book which is still read after half a century. Charles
Dilke began with the South, where the earth had scarcely closed over the
graves of the great war, where the rebel spirit still smouldered fiercely,
and where reorganization was only beginning to establish itself. He went
on to New York, to New England, and to Canada; then, crossing the line of
the Great Lakes, followed that other highway of the northern continent,
the Mississippi, to St. Louis. Here he met with Mr. Hepworth Dixon, then
editor of the _Athenaeum_, and the character of his journey changed: he
travelled in company, and he travelled for the first time under privations
and in real danger. Together they crossed the plains from the eastern head
of the Pacific Railway at a period of Indian war, and parted at Salt Lake
City.
This is a marking-point in the experience. Before Charles Dilke set out to
cross a land still debatable, where travel still was what travel had been
for the pioneers, he wrote home two letters. Both are dated August 26th,
1866, from Leavenworth in Kansas, now a sober town of twenty thousand
inhabitants, then carrying recent memories of the days "when the Southern
'Border Ruffians' were in the habit of parading its streets, bearing the
scalps of Abolitionists stuck on poles," and even after the war basing its
repute for health on the story that, when it became necessary to
"inaugurate" the new graveyard, "they had to shoot a man on purpose."
The first of these letters is to his father:
"MY DEAR FATHER,
"I have been for some days considering whether I would write to you
upon my present theme before or after my journey across the plains,
but I have come to the conclusion that it is in every way better that
I should do it now. Before leaving you, I had prepared, with the
knowledge only of Casswell" (one of his Trinity Hall set), "elaborate
plans for my long-thought-of visit to Australia.
"After landing in the States, I came to think that, in spite of the
evident advantages to be gleaned by taking the two tours in one, you
might be seriously averse to my more lengthy absence. When, however, I
came to sketch out plans for the great work which I have long intended
some day to write, and of which I completed the first map during my
stay at Ottawa, I found that I must go to Australia before getting
very far through with the book, and that I could not be even so much
as certain of my basement and groundwork until after such a visit.
"Were I to postpone my trip to Australia, I might find it impossible
ever to go there, remembering that it is not a tour which can be made
from England, at any time, much more quickly than I shall have made it
now; and whenever I did make it, you would have to expect an absence
more prolonged than that for which this letter will prepare you. Of
course that absence is fully as grievous to me as to you, and nothing
but necessity would drive me to it. Of course my going will depend
upon my health, and upon the letters I shall receive at San Francisco.
I have ample funds to take me as far as Sydney, and to enable me to
live there a long time, were anything to prevent your letters reaching
there as soon as I do. I enclose a letter to Knight for Tasmanian
introductions; you can no doubt get me Australian from Sir Daniel
Cooper and others. I propose to visit Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne,
Geelong, Adelaide, Hobart Town, Wellington, and Auckland, but the
order in which I take them, of course, depends on local circumstances.
Will you send me some money to Sydney, with such introductions as you
can get? If they don't turn up, I shall start a Shaker colony, or a
newspaper, or row people ashore from the emigrant ships."
When the travellers halted to rest for some time at Denver, after six
days' journey across the plains, Charles Dilke, with a brain excited by
the keen atmosphere of the prairie, "sketched out many projects of a
literary kind."
'In addition to my book on Radicalism, there was a plan for a book of
"Political Geography" based on the doctrine that geographical centres
ultimately become political centres--ideas which are also to be traced
in _Greater Britain_ under the name of Omphalism; and a scheme for a
book to be called "The Anglo-Saxon Race or The English World," which
is noted as dating from June, 1862, and being a head under which
should be treated the infusion of foreign elements into the Saxon
world--such as, for example, Chinese immigration. A fifth work was to
be on "International Law," in two parts--"As it is," and "As it might
be." Another was to be on the offer to an unembodied soul of the
alternatives of non-existence, or of birth accompanied by free-will,
followed by life in sin or life in Godliness.'
But all the time literature figured in his mind only as an accompaniment
to political life. There was more than jest in the young man's answer to
Governor Gilpin of Colorado, when that dignitary suggested permanent stay
in Denver, with promise of all sorts of honours and rewards in his infant
state. Charles Dilke writes home:
"I told him that unless he would carry a constitutional amendment
allowing a foreign-born subject to be President of the United States,
he would not receive my services. This he said he would 'see about.'"
What underlay the jesting is set out in this letter to his brother Ashton,
sent by the same mail that carried to his father news of the projected
journey to Australia:
"MY DEAR ASHTON,
"I write in English [Footnote: The brothers usually corresponded with
each other in French; see Chap. II., p. 15.] because I write of
serious matters, best to be talked over in our serious mother-tongue.
I shall also write very simply, saying exactly what I want you to
hear, and that in the plainest manner.
"I have been thinking of late that in talking to you I may have failed
to make you comprehend why 'I wanted to make you do things that would
pay,' and that if I failed to lead you to look at these things as I
do, I must have debased your mind and done you as much harm as any man
can do his dearest friend. I will, then, in this memorandum explain my
views about you and your future, leaving it to you, my dear brother,
to apply or reject them as your judgment prompts, without letting your
love for me bias you in favour of my argument.
"I believe that the bent of your mind is not unlike that of mine. My
aim in life is to be of the greatest use I can to the world at large,
not because that is my duty, but because that is the course which will
make my life happiest--_i.e._, my motives are selfish in the wide and
unusual sense of that word. I believe that, on account of my
temperament and education, I can be most useful as a statesman and as
a writer. I have, therefore, educated myself with a view to getting
such power as to make me able at all events to teach men my views,
whether or not they follow them. I believe that you and I together
would be more than twice as strong as each of us alone; I, therefore,
if you are not disinclined, wish to see you acting with me and ever
standing by my side in all love and happiness. To do this you must
make a name, and you must begin by making a name at Cambridge. If you
can go up to college 'a certain future first-class man'--then you can
give up classics if you like, and read other and more immediately
useful things--be President of the Union, and so on; but you cannot do
that from a god-like height unless you are 'a certain first.' So with
music, if you play at all, you must play like a whole band of seraphs
(as, indeed, you seem in a fair way to do). Of course, it is very easy
to say--Music is an art which, if cultivated merely because it will
'pay,' ceases to be either art or music. True! Quite true!! But only
true if you insert merely--merely because it will 'pay.' I think (I
may be wrong) that it is possible to cultivate it so as to 'pay,' and
yet love and reverence it (and yourself in it) as the highest form of
art.
"Now I come to riding. I do most earnestly suggest that if you can
bring yourself to learn to ride so as to be able to ride an ordinary
horse along a road with perfect safety, you should do so. I am clear
that you cannot go into the diplomatic service without it. In travel
you must ride. If you can bring yourself to it at all, it must be at
once.
"Now for my absence. Part of my plan is the writing of serious and
grave works, neither of which can be written until I have seen
Australia as well as America. I find it, then, a necessity to go
there; and I go there now, firstly because I have it within reach, and
secondly, because absence from all, and above all from you, dearest,
would be worse at any future time than now.
"Keep, however, constantly before you the ultimate doing good or being
useful--which is (for I firmly hold the Jesuit doctrine, if it be
rightly understood) to justify the means.
"I need hardly say that this talk is for you, and not even for father,
nor for Casswell.
"Your devoted friend and brother,
"CHARLES."
"What a prig he was!" is scrawled across the page, as Charles Dilke's
judgment on himself, when later the letter fell into his hands.
But, happily, in all the ordinary intercourse of life, ease and geniality
were native to him; he got on readily with all manner of men; and nothing
could have been better for him than the plunge into a society where all
was in the rough. He shed his priggishness once and for all somewhere on
the "Great Divide." What makes the permanent charm of _Greater Britain_ is
its sense of enjoyment, its delighted acceptance of new and unconventional
ways. In crossing the plains, he first made the experience of actual
physical privations, and for the first time saw and fell in love with "the
bright eyes of danger."
Through all the seriousness and solid concentration of _Greater Britain_
there runs a vein of high spirits. Facts are there, but with them is a
ferment of ideas and of feeling. Part of that feeling is just a contagious
delight in the joyous business of living. But the strong current which
lifted him so buoyantly was an emotion which no shyness or stiffness
hampered in the expression--in its essence an exultant patriotism of race.
Democracy meant to him in this stage of his development, not any abstract
theory of government, but the triumph of English ideas.
California, then in the full rush of mining, was the touchstone of
Democracy; where, out of the chaos of blackguardism, through lynchings and
vigilance committees, judge and jury were at work evolving decent security
and settled government.
"The wonder is" (he wrote) "not that, in such a State as California
was till lately, the machinery of government should work unevenly, but
that it should work at all. Democracy has never endured so rough a
test as that from which it has triumphantly emerged in the Golden
State and City....
"California is too British to be typically American: it would seem
that nowhere in the United States have we found the true America or
the real American. Except as abstractions, they do not exist; it is
only by looking carefully at each eccentric and irregular America--at
Irish New York, at Puritan New England, at the rowdy South, at the
rough and swaggering Far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States--
that we come to reject the anomalous features, and to find America in
the points they possess in common. It is when the country is left that
there rises in the mind an image that soars above all local prejudice
--that of the America of the law-abiding, mighty people who are
imposing English institutions on the world." [Footnote: _Greater
Britain_ (popular edition), p. 193.]
The same thought is summed up in the chapter where he sets down his
recollected impressions on board the ship that carried him southwards
along the shores of America from the Golden Gate towards Panama:
"A man may see American countries, from the pine-wastes of Maine to
the slopes of the Sierra; may talk with American men and women, from
the sober citizens of Boston to Digger Indians in California; may eat
of American dishes, from jerked buffalo in Colorado to clambakes on
the shores near Salem; and yet, from the time he first 'smells the
molasses' at Nantucket light-ship to the moment when the pilot quits
him at the Golden Gate, may have no idea of an America. You may have
seen the East, the South, the West, the Pacific States, and yet have
failed to find America. It is not till you have left her shores that
her image grows up in the mind.
"The first thing that strikes the Englishman just landed in New York
is the apparent Latinization of the English in America; but before he
leaves the country, he comes to see that this is at most a local fact,
and that the true moral of America is the vigour of the English race--
the defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples, the victory of the
man whose food costs four shillings a day over the man whose food
costs four pence."[Footnote: _Ibid_., p. 216.]
That is the governing idea of the book--an idea in which were merged those
other projects which passed before him when he halted at Denver; and it is
set forth with most fulness and vigour in the opening chapters, which deal
with a "Greater Britain" that is outside the British Empire--with the
Britain that no longer dwells under the British flag.
He left the Pacific shores in tremendous spirits, and on the voyage to New
Zealand was a provider of entertainment for his fellow-
passengers, writing an _opéra bouffe_, _Oparo, or the Enchanting Isle_, in
which he himself spoke the prologue as Neptune, 'two hundred miles west-
sou'-west of Pitcairn Island.' His head might be full of politics and of
the ethics which touch on politics; but he was in the humour to turn his
mind to jesting and to find material for comedy as well as for grave
discourse in the advent of white men to cannibal islands.
The rest of the book is a sequel or corollary. English institutions are
studied in New Zealand and in Australia, among autonomous communities of
Britons. Later on they are studied in Ceylon and India, where they have
their application to white men, living not as part of a democracy, but as
the arbiters of their fate to Orientals.
Dilke's own exposition of this governing conception was set out in the
preface to the book:
"In 1866 and 1867 I followed England round the world: everywhere I was
in English-speaking or in English-governed lands. If I remarked that
climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples, had
modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was
always, one.
"The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my
fellow and my guide--a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of
strange new lands--is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur
of our race, already girdling the earth, which it is destined perhaps
eventually to overspread.
"In America the peoples of the world are being fused together, but
they are run into an English mould: Alfred's laws and Chaucer's tongue
are theirs whether they would or no. There are men who say that
Britain in her age will claim the glory of having planted greater
Englands across the seas. They fail to perceive that she has done more
than found plantations of her own--that she has imposed her
institutions upon the offshoots of Germany, of Ireland, of
Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America, England is speaking to the
world.
"Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon humbler grounds:
the development of the England of Elizabeth is to be found, not in the
Britain of Victoria, but in half the habitable globe. If two small
islands are by courtesy styled 'Great,' America, Australia, India,
must form a 'Greater Britain.'"
He wrote of this passage in his Memoir:
'The preface of _Greater Britain_, in which the title is justified and
explained, is the best piece of work of my life. It states the
doctrine on which our rule should be based--remembered in Canada--
forgotten in South Africa--the true as against the bastard
Imperialism. As will be seen from it, I included in my "Greater
Britain" our Magna Graecia of the United States. As late as 1880,
twelve years after the publication of my book, not only was the title
"Greater Britain" often used for the English world--as I used it--but,
speaking at the Lotus Club of New York, Mr. Whitelaw Reid used it
specially of the United States. Tom Hughes, he declared, "led a
pioneer English colony to this Greater Britain, to seek here a fuller
expansion." It is contracting an idea which, as its author, I think
lofty and even noble, to use "Greater Britain" only of the British
Empire, as is now done.'
The touch of enthusiasm in this book lifted his writing to its highest
plane. He himself was specially proud of the praise which P. G. Hamerton
bestowed on the landscape passages: [Footnote: See Appendix, pp. 72, 73.]
and they have the quality, which his grandfather schooled him in, of being
really descriptive. But his characteristic excellence is found far more in
such a passage as that which follows his sketch of the time when "the
thinking men of Boston and the Cambridge professors, Emerson, Russell
Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen more ... morally seceded from their
country's councils," because in those councils the slave-holders still had
the upper hand. Here are a few of its ringing sentences:
"In 1863 and 1864 there came the reckoning. When America was first
brought to see the things that had been done in her name, and at her
cost, and, rising in her hitherto unknown strength, struck the noblest
blow for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had been urging
on the movement from without at once re-entered the national ranks,
and marched to victory. Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and
Agassiz, and Emerson, whole battalions went forth to war. From Oberlin
almost every male student and professor marched, and the University
teaching was left in the women's hands. Out of 8,000 school-teachers
in Pennsylvania, of whom 300 alone were drafted, 3,000 volunteered for
the war. Everywhere the students were foremost among the Volunteers,
and from that time forward America and her thinkers were at one."
[Footnote: _Greater Britain_ (popular edition), p. 41.]
The book was written at high pressure--in twelve months of desk work,
beginning in June, 1867, when the traveller returned from his year's
wandering--and it was not written under favourable conditions. He had
contracted malaria in Ceylon, which gradually destroyed his appetite, and
so induced a state of weakness leading to delirium at night. The end was
an attack of typhoid fever, which came on while the book was still in the
press; and his father, thinking it important to hurry the publication,
took on himself to correct the proofs while his son was ill. The result
was a crop of blunders; but nothing interfered with the unforeseen success
of the book, which was published in the last months of 1868. Large
portions of the work were translated into Russian, its circulation in
America was enormous (under a pirate flag), and in England it rapidly ran
through three editions, and was praised in the newspapers almost without
exception.
In the reviews which appeared there stood out a general acceptance of the
book as fair and friendly to all. In spite of its audacious patriotism, it
was no way limited in sympathy. This fairness of mind received the homage
of Thiers in a great defence of his Protectionist budget. "Un membre du
parlement d'Angleterre, qui est certainement un des hommes les plus
éclairés de son pays, M. Wentworth Dilke, vient d'écrire un livre des plus
remarquables," he said, and pressed the argument that Charles Dilke's
defence of Protection from the American and Australian point of view
gained authority by the very fact that its author was _libre-échangiste
d'Europe_. Dilke always called himself, more accurately, "a geographical
Free Trader." He accepted, that is to say, the doctrine for Great Britain
unreservedly, only because of Great Britain's geographical conditions.
This was very different from the orthodox English Liberal's view of Free
Trade as a universal maxim to be accepted under penalty of political
excommunication.
On a matter of even wider import for Imperial statesmanship his sympathies
were at once and clearly declared. From this his first entry into the
arena of public debate he was the champion of the dark-skinned peoples--
all the more, perhaps, because he recognized clearly that the Anglo-Saxons
were "the only extirpating race." In lands where white men could rear
their children it seemed to him inevitable that the Anglo-Saxon race
should replace the coloured peoples as, to take his own illustration, the
English fly was superseding all other flies in New Zealand. Yet at least
while the American-Indians or the Maoris remained, he was determined to
secure justice for them; and he incurred angry criticism for outspoken
condemnation of English dealing with the natives in Tasmania. But a great
part of his book is devoted to discussion of questions which must be of
constant recurrence, affecting the relations of Englishmen to natives in
lands where the English are only a governing handful. These matters
received special comment in a letter from John Stuart Mill at Avignon on
February 9th, 1869. Mill, although a stranger to Dilke, was moved to write
his commendation in the most ungrudging terms:
"It is long" (he said) "since any book connected with practical
politics has been published on which I build such high hopes of the
future usefulness and distinction of the writer, showing, as it does,
that he not only possesses a most unusual amount of real knowledge on
many of the principal questions of the future, but a mind strongly
predisposed to what are (at least in my opinion) the most advanced and
enlightened views of them.
"There are so few opinions expressed in any part of your book with
which I do not, so far as my knowledge extends, fully and heartily
coincide, that I feel impelled to take the liberty of noting the small
number of points of any consequence on which I differ from you. These
relate chiefly to India; though on that subject also I agree with you
to a much greater extent than I differ. Not only do I most cordially
sympathize with all you say about the insolence of the English even in
India to the native population, which has now become not only a
disgrace, but, as you have so usefully shown, a danger to our dominion
there; but I have been much struck by the sagacity which, in so short
a stay as yours must have been, has enabled you to detect facts which
are as yet obvious to very few: as, for instance, the immense increase
of all the evils and dangers you have pointed out by the substitution
of the Queen's army for a local force of which both men and officers
had at least a comparatively permanent tie to the country; and again,
that the superior authority in England, having the records of all the
presidencies before it, and corresponding regularly with them all, is
the only authority which really knows India; the local governments and
offices only knowing, at most, their own part of it, and having
generally strong prejudices in favour of the peculiarities of the
system of government there adopted, and against those of the other
party." [Footnote: James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, was the
historian of India, and for a long time one amongst its official
rulers at the India House.]
Then followed an exhaustive and very friendly criticism, in which the most
interesting points are his challenge of Dilke's proposal to make the
Secretary of State for India a permanent office, not changing with party
upheavals, and, lastly, this:
"If there is any criticism of a somewhat broader character that I
could make, I think it would be this--that (in speaking of the
physical and moral characteristics of the populations descended from
the English) you sometimes express yourself almost as if there were no
sources of national character but race and climate, as if whatever
does not come from race must come from climate, and whatever does not
come from climate must come from race. But as you show in many parts
of your book a strong sense of the good and bad influences of
education, legislation, and social circumstances, the only inference I
draw is that you do not, perhaps, go so far as I do myself in
believing these last causes to be of prodigiously greater efficacy
than either race or climate, or the two combined."
The writing of this letter marked the beginning of a friendship which
lasted till Mill's death. If the book had done nothing but secure Dilke
this friend, it would have been well rewarded. But rewards were not
lacking. The fortunate author was crowned with a great popular success
invaluable for a young man about to enter political life. Yet more
important even than the prestige acquired was the sum of experience
gained.
APPENDIX
EXTRACT FROM "LANDSCAPE," BY PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
A traveller who did not set out with the intention of word-painting, but
to see how men of English race fared wherever they had settled, said that
'travellers soon learn, when making estimates of a country's value, to
despise no feature of the landscape.' If Sir Charles Dilke wrote that
rather from the political than the artistic point of view, it is not the
less accurate in any case, for the landscape, however uninteresting it may
seem, or even ugly, is never without its great influence on human
happiness and destiny. The interest in human affairs which Sir Charles
Dilke has in common with most men of any conspicuous ability, does not
prevent him from seeing landscape-nature as well as if his travels had no
other object. His description of the Great Plains of Colorado is an
excellent example of that valuable kind of description which is not merely
an artful arrangement of sonorous words, but perfectly conveys the
character of the landscape, and makes you feel as if you had been there.
"Now great roaring uplands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy
plains; there is all the grandeur of monotony and yet continual
change. Sometimes the distances are broken by blue buttes, or rugged
bluffs. Over all there is a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing
breeze; the air is bracing even when most hot, the sky is cloudless,
and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can paint, the boundless
prairie swell conveys an idea of vastness which is the overpowering
feature of the Plains.... The impression is not merely one of size.
There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the lonely steppe; no
patriotism, no love of home, can prevent the traveller wishing here to
end his days.
"To those who love the sea, there is here a double charm. Not only is
the roll of the prairie as grand as that of the Atlantic, but the
crispness of the wind, the absence of trees, the multitude of tiny
blooms upon the sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the
ocean, the effect of which is that we are always expecting to hail it
from the top of the next hillock....
"The colour of the landscape is, in summer, green and flowers; in
fall-time, yellow and flowers, but flowers ever." [Footnote: _Greater
Britain_, p. 80 (popular edition).]
If the reader will take the trouble to analyze this description, he will
perceive that, although powerful, it is extremely simple and sober. The
traveller does not call in the aid of poetical comparisons (the only
comparison indulged in is the obvious one of the Atlantic), and the effect
of the description on the mind is due to the extreme care with which the
writer has put together in a short space the special and peculiar
characteristics of the scenery, not forgetting to tell us everything that
we of ourselves would naturally fail to imagine. He corrects, one after
another, all our erroneous notions, and substitutes a true idea for our
false ones. The describer has been thoroughly alive; he has travelled with
his eyes open; so that every epithet tells. The reader feels under a real
obligation; he has not been put off with mere phrases, but is enriched
with a novel and interesting landscape experience.
In a good prose description, such as these by Kingsley and Sir Charles
Dilke, the author has nothing to do but to convey, as nearly as he can, a
true impression of what he has actually seen. The greatest difficulties
that he has to contend against are the ignorance and the previous
misconceptions of his readers. He must give information without appearing
didactic, and correct what he foresees as probable false conceptions,
without ostentatiously pretending to know better. His language must be as
concise as possible, or else important sentences will be skipped; and yet
at the same time it must flow easily enough to be pleasantly readable. It
is not easy to fulfil these conditions all at once, and therefore we meet
with many books of travel in which attempted descriptions frequently
occur, which fail, nevertheless, to convey a clear idea of the country. A
weak writer wastes precious space in sentimental phrases or in vain
adjectives that would be equally applicable to many other places, and
forgets to note what is peculiarly and especially characteristic of the
one place that he is attempting to describe.
CHAPTER VII
ELECTION TO PARLIAMENT
I.
While engaged in the writing of Greater Britain, Charles Dilke entered
upon the main business of his life by coming forward as a candidate for
the House of Commons. Immediate action was necessary; for the position of
parties indicated the near approach of a General Election.
The constituency to which he addressed his candidature in the autumn of
1867 was the borough of Chelsea, a new Parliamentary division created by
the Reform Act of that year. It was of vast extent, embracing Chelsea,
Fulham, Hammersmith, Kensal Town, and Kensington. In Chelsea Charles Dilke
had his home, and, as representing the Parliamentary borough, he would
speak "backed by the vote and voice of 30,000 electors." "I would
willingly wait any time," he said in his opening address on November 25th,
in the Vestry Hall at Chelsea, "rather than enter the House of Commons a
member for some small trumpery constituency." The electors should hear his
opinions, "not upon any one subject or upon any two subjects or any three,
but as nearly as might be upon all."
His speech began with the electoral machinery of democracy--questions of
franchise and redistribution.
Purity of election he laid down as a necessary condition of reform, and to
that end two points must be assured: the removal of election petitions
from the House of Commons to a legal tribunal, [Footnote: A Bill with that
object was at the time passing through Parliament.] and, secondly, the
security of the ballot. Upon the first matter he came perhaps to doubt the
new system after he had seen it tried; upon the second he was able to tell
his audience from first-hand knowledge that in Australia opposition to the
ballot was unknown, and that in Virginia a conquered minority looked to it
as their best defence against oppression.
From the machinery of Government he passed to its application. Ireland was
then the burning question, and Dilke's attitude upon Ireland may be
indicated in a sentence. After the Church should have been disestablished,
the land system reformed, [Footnote: His views on the Irish Land Question
had been stated in _Greater Britain_ (popular edition), p. 209: "Customs
and principles of law, the natural growth of the Irish mind and the Irish
soil, can be recognized and made the basis of legislation without bringing
about the disruption of the Empire. The first Irish question that we shall
have to set ourselves to face is that of land. Permanent tenure is as
natural to the Irish as free-holding to the English people. All that is
needed of our statesmen is that they recognize in legislation that which
they cannot but admit in private talk--namely, that there may be essential
differences between race and race."] and a wide measure of Parliamentary
reform given to Ireland; after they should have passed Fawcett's Bill "for
throwing open Trinity College, Dublin, and destroying the last trace of
that sectarian spirit which has hitherto been allowed to rule in Ireland"
--they might hope "not perhaps for instant quiet in the country, but at
least for the gradual growth of a feeling that we have done our duty, and
that we may well call upon the Irish to do theirs."
There went with that a moderate censure upon the lawlessness of Fenianism.
But the Irish question did not occupy so much space in his discourse as in
those of most speakers at that moment, and this for a reason which he gave
later in his life: 'About Ireland I was never given to saying much,
because, except for a short time in 1885, when moderate Home Rule could
have been carried, I never thoroughly saw my own way.' But as early as
1869 he deplored the lack of local deliberative bodies which elsewhere did
much of the State's work, and in 1871 he advocated their creation as a
means of relieving Parliament. This, rather than any special sympathy with
Nationalism as such, was always the governing consideration with him on
the Irish question. 'I showed in this way,' he notes, 'a working of the
opinion which in 1874 caused me to vote, alone of English members
unpledged by their constituents, in support of Mr. Butt when he brought
forward his Home Rule Bill.' [Footnote: Eight in all voted; all except
Dilke represented Northern constituencies, with a large Irish vote among
miners or operatives.]
He foreshadowed also his attitude towards Labour questions. He proposed,
as early as 1867, that the Factory Acts should be extended to all
employment; the best way of compelling children to attend school was, he
thought, to prohibit their employment as premature wage-earners. Another
declaration set forth that Trade Unions must be recognized, and their
funds protected just as much as those "of any association formed for
purposes not illegal." By no means were all Liberals in 1867 ready to
distinguish between Trade Unions and criminal conspiracies.
Taxation came next. His desire to "sweep away many millions of Customs and
Excise," and to establish a system so far as possible of direct taxation,
is notable because it was put forward at the very moment when he was
explaining in _Greater Britain_ to the precisians of Free Trade that young
countries, like America and the Colonies, had reasonable grounds for
maintaining a rigid Protective system.
Questions put at this first meeting with the electors elicited a
declaration for triennial Parliaments; if these failed, then for annual;
for payment of members, with preference for the plan of payment by the
constituency, advocated by "Mr. Mill, the great leader of political
thinkers." As to manhood suffrage, the candidate held "that the burden of
proof lies on those who would exclude any man from the suffrage; but I
also hold that there is sufficient proof for the temporary exclusion of
certain classes at the present time."
This, with some other points in the exposition of his political creed,
needs to be read in the light of a passage in the Memoir:
'I tried to be moderate in order to please my father, and not to lose
the general Liberal vote; my speeches are more timid than were my
opinions.'
Yet for all his efforts after moderation he was too extreme for his
father, who probably was shocked to hear that the Game Laws "needed an
amendment, which should extend perhaps to their total abolition." Sir
Wentworth Dilke remonstrated. His son replied in December, 1867:
"I am a Radical, I know; still I have for your sake done everything I
can to speak moderately. I have spoken against Fenianism in spite of
my immense sympathy for it. For my own part, though I should immensely
like to be in Parliament, still I should feel terribly hampered there
if I went in as anything except a Radical.... Radicalism is too much a
thing of nature with me to throw it off by any effort of mine. If you
think it a waste of money for me to contest Chelsea, I will cheerfully
throw the thing up and turn to any pursuit you please."
Many other matters which were to occupy Charles Dilke later are mentioned
in this first and detailed exposition of his political faith. He dealt
with army reform: would abolish "purchase of commissions and flogging"; he
condemned "an army in which we systematically deny a man those advantages
that in entering an employment he naturally looked to receive," and the
double responsibility of the Horse Guards and the War Office as "a system
which is in its very essence costly and inefficient." On Foreign Affairs
he said: "I am very wishful indeed for peace, but a peace more dignified
than that which has of late prevailed." [Footnote: Speech in Chelsea,
November 25th, 1867.]
He spoke at Chelsea, Kensington, Hammersmith, Fulham, Brompton, Notting
Hill, and Walham Green, earning from the electors the name of Mr.
Indefatigable Dilke. The borough deserved that a man who sought to
represent it should state his case thoroughly, and there was an uncommon
degree of truth in a not uncommon compliment when he called it "the most
intelligent constituency in England." South Kensington was the home of
many judges and other important lawyers, many great merchants and men of
business; Brompton was still a literary quarter; Holland Park and Notting
Hill the home of the artists who figured largely on Dilke's committee--the
names of Leighton, Maclise, Faed, and other Academicians are among the
list. The honorary committee was made up almost entirely of resident
Members of Parliament.
In Kensal Town was a very strong artisan element, and at one time a
working-man candidate was before the electors, George Odger, who was 'the
best representative of the Trade Unions, and a man of whom the highest
opinion was entertained by Mr. Mill.' He not only withdrew, but became
also an active supporter.
Of the Tory candidates, perhaps the more important was Mr. Freake, a big
contractor who had built Cromwell Road, in which he lived, and who was not
on the best of terms with his workmen. Some of this unpopularity reflected
itself on the allied candidature of Dr. W. H. Russell, whose expenses Mr.
Freake was said to be paying. But the contest led to a lasting friendship
between Charles Dilke and the famous war correspondent. The other Liberal
candidate was Sir Henry Hoare, a Radical baronet, twenty years older than
Dilke, who had for a short time sat as member for Windsor. So long as he
represented Chelsea he voted with the extreme Radicals, and his name may
be found in many division lists in the minority along with that of his
colleague. But later in life he changed his politics, joined the Carlton
Club, and was a member of it for many years. Charles Dilke always spoke of
him in terms of cordial friendship even after their political association
had long been ended.
Their candidature was not a joint one, as Dilke put himself forward
independently; but when the election actually came the Liberal candidates
joined forces, and two picture-cards represent the contest as between
rival teams of cocks. In one the Odger cock is seen retreating; Freake is
on his back, gasping; Russell and Hoare still contend, while under the
banner "Dilke and Hoare for ever," Dilke crows victorious. In the second
card Odger has no place, and Russell is as dead as Freake.
This graphic forecast was justified by the result. Polling took place on
Wednesday, November 18th, 1868, and, according to a local paper, "the
proceedings were of a most orderly character; indeed, the absence of
vehicles, favours, etc., made the election dull." The voting was open. The
results were published from hour to hour at the booths, and the unpopular
candidates were in one or two places driven away by hisses. Even in
Cromwell Road Dilke and Hoare led, and Dilke's advantage in his own
district of Chelsea proper was conspicuous. The final figures were:
Dilke........ 7,374
Hoare........ 7,183
Russell...... 4,177
Freake....... 3,929
The triumph was all the more gratifying because it had been achieved by a
volunteer canvass. No member has ever been bound to a constituency by
closer ties of personal feeling than those which linked Charles Dilke,
first to Chelsea and later to the Forest of Dean. He worked for his
constituents, and taught them to work for him.
At this same General Election Sir Wentworth Dilke lost his seat, and Lord
Granville sent him a note "to condole with you and to congratulate you. I
suspect that the cause of the latter gives you more pleasure than the
cause of the former gives you regret. How very well your son seems to have
done!"
After the election Charles Dilke sought a rest by one of his flying trips
abroad. He stopped a day in Paris to examine the details of the French
registration system. Thence he proceeded to Toulon, 'to which I took a
fancy, which ultimately led, many years after, to my buying a property
there'; the scenery of Provence captured him from the first moment.
Parliament was summoned to meet on December 10th for the election of a
Speaker, and for the swearing-in of members. By the beginning of December
the member for Chelsea was on the eve of return, rejoicing in the news of
Mr. Gladstone's defeat in South-West Lancashire and election for
Greenwich. "He is much more likely to become a democratic leader now that
he sits for a big town."
A note preserved in one of the boxes gives Charles Dilke's first
impressions of the party and Government to which he had vowed a somewhat
qualified allegiance.
"_December 10th_, 1868.--House met for election of Speaker. The
Liberal party is more even in opinion than ever before. No
Adullamites, no Radicals but myself. The Cabinet is somewhat behind
the party, which is bad. Too many peers."
The House of Commons of 1868 was superficially very much like any of its
predecessors. Dilke notes that it 'contained some survivals of the old
days, such as Mr. Edward Ellice, son of "Bear" Ellice [Footnote: This was
Mr. Edward Ellice, who had been in the House since 1836, and who continued
to represent St. Andrews till 1879. He was sometimes called "the young
Bear." See _Life of Lord Granville_, i. 80, 81, 141, 171, 175, as to the
"old Bear."] of the days of Lord Melbourne,' a consistent and typical
Liberal. The Liberal party consisted then mainly of men born into that
governing class which Lord Melbourne had in mind when he said "that every
English gentleman is qualified to hold any post which he has influence
enough to secure." This element was accompanied by a fair sprinkling of
manufacturers and other business men, for the most part Nonconformists.
But no separate Irish party existed to complicate the grouping; indeed,
the Irish were much less a corps apart than they had been in O'Connell's
time. Labour had not one direct representative, though the importance of
the artisan vote had made itself felt; and this was recognized by the
choice of Mundella, then returned as a new member for Sheffield, to second
the address at the opening of the session.
The personal composition of the assembly had greatly altered. More than a
third of its members were new to Parliament. W. Vernon Harcourt, Henry
James, and Campbell-Bannerman, sat then for the first time, and sat, as
did Charles Dilke, below the gangway. In the same quarter was Fawcett, who
helped them in creating the new phenomenon of a House of Commons alive in
all its parts.
Sir George Trevelyan, who almost alone of living men can compare from
experience the House of Commons before the Reform Bill of 1867 and after,
holds that it would be difficult to overstate the contrast. The House was
no longer an arena for set combat between a few distinguished
parliamentarians, whose displays were watched by followers on either side,
either diffident of their ability to compete, or held silent by the
unwritten rule which imposed strict reserve upon a new member. For the
greater number promotion had come through slow and steady service in the
lobbies.
Charles Dilke from the first was always in his place--that corner seat
below the gangway which became gradually his traditional possession; and
from the first he assumed a responsible part in all Parliamentary
business. "He was the true forerunner, in his processes, his industry, his
constant attendance, and his frequent speaking, of Lord Randolph
Churchill." The revolt against 'the old gang' began on the Liberal side,
and Charles Dilke was the chief beginner of it. Although the new Reform
Act had led to far-reaching change in the quality of the House of Commons,
the choice by Mr. Gladstone of the members of the Ministry made it plain
that no break with the past was contemplated by the leaders. Lowe, whose
anti-democratic utterances on Reform had been denounced by Dilke at the
Cambridge Union, was Chancellor of the Exchequer; and only half the
Cabinet were commoners. Among these was indeed Bright; but the only other
Minister whose name carried a hint of Radicalism was Forster, Vice-
President of the Council of Education, and he was not in the Cabinet when
it was first formed.
On the other hand, Bright and Forster were to an exceptional degree
responsible for the general trend of the Government policy. The
dissolution and election had turned with more than usual definiteness on a
clear issue--the proposal to conciliate Ireland by disestablishing the
privileged Church of the minority; and behind this immediate proposal lay
a less clearly defined scheme for giving security of tenure to Irish
tenants. Ireland was the first business of Charles Dilke's first
Parliament, and it was Bright more than any other man who had stirred
English feeling with the sense that England had failed in her duty to the
smaller country, and that an attempt to do justice must be made. Yet in
both Church reform and land reform the actual brunt of the Parliamentary
struggle fell upon Mr. Gladstone. Bright had a marvellous gift for rousing
political emotion, but he had not the application necessary to give
legislative effect to his aims; and Charles Dilke, though fully sensitive
to the beauty of cadence in Bright's language, and enthusiastic for the
music of "his unmatched voice," nevertheless inherited something of his
grandfather's suspicion of "that old humbug Oratory"--at all events, when
the oratorical gift was not allied with executive capacity.
There was no lack of masterful grip and handling of detail in the other
great orator of the Liberal party, yet the young Radical's attitude to his
leader was one of admiration indeed, but always of limited sympathy. Not
only did a long generation lie between them, but Charles Dilke had been
bred a Radical, and Gladstone had been bred a Tory. The Government policy
after 1868 was dominated by the education controversy, and was dictated by
Forster. There was probably no man among his colleagues with whom Dilke
more often came into collision. Forster was a strong natural Conservative,
though he had been brought up in the traditions of Radicalism, and Mr.
Gladstone was suspected of not being willing to abolish Collegiate as well
as University tests.
On the Opposition front bench Disraeli's primacy was not less marked than
Mr. Gladstone's, and his romantic figure always fascinated Dilke. But his
special admiration was for Gathorne Hardy (afterwards Lord Cranbrook), in
whom High Toryism found its most eloquent and sincerest spokesman. Later,
in 1876, Sir Charles was to complain ironically that the Conservatives
"never will be able to employ the services of the man best fitted by
nature to be their leader. Mr. Gathorne Hardy will never lead the
Conservative party because he is not a Liberal."
In 1869 he saw little of either the Tories or the Whigs, 'but acted with
the Radicals.' He had modified his first estimate of the composition of
the House. This Radical group largely represented the industrial towns and
Nonconformist interests. It included Peter Rylands, member for Warrington;
Peter Taylor, member for Leicester; Henry Richard, member for Merthyr
Tydvil; George Anderson, member for Glasgow; and Llewellyn Dillwyn, member
for Swansea. Some, such as Peter Taylor, were theoretical Republicans, but
all were peace-at-any-price men, Bright's votaries, though when Bright
joined the Government they were ready to vote against Bright.
The group contained also some men of Charles Dilke's own stamp, with whom
Cambridge associations created a bond. 'Harcourt, of whom I saw much, was
then a below-the-gangway Radical.' He, though sixteen years Dilke's
senior, was also a newcomer, but a newcomer well known already at
Westminster by his famous letters to the _Times_, signed "Historicus," and
by his career at the Parliamentary bar. Another was Lord Edmond
Fitzmaurice, who had been Charles Dilke's contemporary and coadjutor at
the Union. A great figure in the Radical group came from Trinity Hall--
Fawcett, who had first won his seat for Brighton in 1865.
Among Government Liberals, Lord Granville in the House of Lords was an
hereditary friend, through his attachment to Dilke's father, but belonged
to a much older generation. Grant Duff, a man to whom later on Dilke came
to be strongly attached, was Under-Secretary of State for India. From the
first, however, a close alliance formed itself between Charles Dilke and a
junior member of the Government, who had still been debating at the Union
when Dilke came to Trinity Hall. Entering Parliament in 1865, Mr.
Trevelyan had distinguished himself by a vigorous campaign against the
system of purchase in the Army, and, in 1868, he was put in office as
Junior Lord of the Admiralty. Senior to Charles Dilke by five years, he
had not known him at Cambridge; but they "speedily became very intimate."
So writes Sir George Trevelyan in a letter of 1911:
"I was a very young Minister, worked hard all day by Mr. Childers, a
very strict but very friendly taskmaster, and never, according to the
Treasury Bench discipline of those heroic times, allowed to be absent
from the House of Commons for a single moment. I used to come to the
House unlunched, and desperately hungry; and I got my dinner at four
o'clock in an empty dining-room. Afternoon after afternoon, Charles
Dilke used to come and sit with me; and a greater delight than his
company, young to the young, I can hardly describe. But it does not
need description to you, for never did anyone's talk alter less as
time went on. The last time I saw him was at the swearing-in of Privy
Councillors last May (1910), when we talked for half an hour as if we
were respectively thirty and five-and-twenty years old."
An enrichment of that talk, as his friend remembers it, lay in Charles
Dilke's multifarious knowledge. "This man seems to know all about
everything in the world," someone remarked in those days. "Yes," was the
answer, "and last week we were talking about the other world: Dilke seemed
to know all about that too."
It was characteristic of Charles Dilke to choose for his maiden effort the
most highly technical of subjects, and one which lent itself as little as
possible to tricks of oratory. He would recall how Mr. George Melly, the
member for Stoke-on-Trent, had cautioned him: "Don't talk to them about
God Almighty; even Mr. Gladstone can't; they'll only stand it from John
Bright." On March 9th, 1869, Mr. William Vernon Harcourt (as he then was)
came forward with a motion for the appointment of a Select Committee to
inquire into registration in Parliamentary boroughs. Upon this Charles
Dilke made his first speech, filled with detailed knowledge, and with
suggestions drawn from French procedure. Later speakers recognized the
special competence shown, and when the Select Committee was appointed, he
was named to serve on it--thus taking his place at once in the normal
working life of the House.
'I acquired in the early months of this Session a knowledge of the
registration and rating systems which lasted for a good many years,
and the plan for the restoration of compounding, which was accepted by
Mr. Goschen and moved by him in the form of new clauses in his Bill in
April, 1869, was of my suggestion. By the joint operation of this
plan, and of the Registration Act of 1878, which was my own, an
immense increase of the electorate in boroughs was effected.'
No subject could have appeared less attractive than all this dull lore of
compound householders and lodger's franchises.
But the spirit of official Liberalism was constantly at war with Radical
views.
'My diary continually expressed my regret at what I thought the
timidity of Mr. Gladstone's Government.' Thus, when it was beaten by
the abstention of Liberals on Fawcett's Election Expenses Bill, which
proposed to throw the necessary expenses of returning officers on the
local rates, Charles Dilke 'was angry with the Government for not
having so much as named the Bill upon their Whip.' Again, when his
group had proposed to penalize a corrupt borough, the member for which
had been unseated on petition, the entry ran: 'We Radicals beaten by
Government and Tories on the Bewdley writ,' the issue of which the
Radicals had moved to postpone for twelve months.
In the case of Fawcett's motion to abolish University Tests, of whose
injustice Dilke had personal experience: [Footnote: Having taken his
Master's degree at Cambridge in this year, Dilke was 'immediately
nominated to the Senate as an examiner for the Law Tripos by the Regius
Professor of Laws.' But on further inquiry it appeared that an examiner
for honours in Law must be a member of the Senate, and that a member of
the Senate must declare himself a member of the Church of England. Dilke,
strongly objecting to this exclusiveness, had refused to make the required
profession. The 'grace,' therefore, was withdrawn, and he was not allowed
to examine. Sir Roundell Palmer became Chancellor in 1872, on the
retirement of Lord Hatherley. He was again Chancellor from 1880 to 1885.]
'My diary records a division in connection with which Sir Roundell
Palmer did us some harm, the fact being that the great lawyer, who was
afterwards Lord Selborne, was one of those gentlemen calling
themselves Liberals in whom it was difficult to find any agreement
with Liberal principles at any time or upon any subject. He was, in
fact, a High Church Tory, as I found when I served with him in a
Liberal Cabinet.'
On yet another motion of Fawcett's the Radicals found themselves in
collision with the head of the Liberal Government. This advocated open
competition for the Civil Service, and Dilke supp
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