The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1

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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 progres 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, Fenelon, Helvetius, 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--Emile 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 Helvetius: _Works_.
"Victor Hugo: _Les Miserables_.
"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.