The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2

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In influencing the choice of contributors to his paper, he threw his
weight always on the side of the man who had complete knowledge of his
subject. No brilliancy of style could make up in his eyes for lack of
precision in thought or inaccuracy in statement. Next in order he
appeared to value in a reviewer a judicial quality of mind, as essential
to a sane and balanced criticism. "He disapproved"--to quote Mr. C. A.
Cook again--"of anything fanciful in expression or any display of
sentiment;" but, so long as writers kept clear of these literary
pitfalls, he let them go their own road of style, with ready
appreciation for any freshness or liveliness they exhibited on the
journey. Reviews of French books were a special object of care, and for
the _Athenaeum's_ annual survey of French literature he bestirred
himself to secure the best hand available. In a letter to M. Joseph
Reinach, dated July, 1888, he gives a list of the distinguished
men--including MM. About, De Pressense, and Sarrazin--who had written
this survey in past years, ending with a suggestion that M. Reinach
himself might perhaps be willing to undertake the task.

In his writing, as in his speaking, his object was always either to
place facts before his audience, or to develop a closely reasoned
argument based upon the facts. He took no trouble to cultivate literary
graces in this connection; rather he seemed to distrust them, as in his
speeches he distrusted and avoided appeals to the feelings of his
hearers. But it would be a great mistake to infer from his own practice
that he was insensible to beauty of form and style. The literature he
cared for most, that which roused his enthusiasm and provoked the
expression of emotion so rare with him in the later years of his
life--the literature of France before the Renaissance, the poetry of
Keats and Shelley, some of the lyrics of the Felibres--is of the kind in
which content owes so much to beauty of form that it is impossible to
conceive of the one without the other; and he certainly took quite as
much delight in the sound as in the sense of his favourites. Even in
those favourites he was quick to detect a flaw. His grandfather's
introduction of him to the best in literature had not been wasted; and
his own early reading had given him a touchstone of taste which he used
freely as a standard, although it was powerless to obtain admission to
his accepted company of men of letters for those who made no appeal to
him individually. The Memoir shows that his self-training in literature
(for the grandfather did no more than indicate the way) was carried out
in youth; it was at Cambridge, while still an undergraduate, that he
read Shakespeare 'for pleasure.' And this was true also of the great
authors of his own time. The results of that reading remained with him
through life.

The Memoir dwells little upon his literary interests, and contains few
literary judgments. He himself gives the reason:

'They do not pretend to be critical memoirs.... I have known
everyone worth knowing from 1850 to my death; but, as I knew the
most distinguished of my own country in childhood or early manhood,
my judgments have changed. I have either to give crude judgments
from which I dissent, or later judgments which were not those of the
time. I have omitted both.... I knew the great Victorian authors.
Thackeray I loved: _Vanity Fair_ delighted me, and _Esmond_ was
obviously a great work of art; the giant charmed me by his kindness
to me as a boy. But Dickens was to me a sea-captain with a taste for
melodrama, and the author of _Pickwick_. It is only in old age that
I have learnt that there was real beauty and charm in _David
Copperfield_. So, too, Mill I worshipped; and Carlyle, though I knew
him, I despised--perhaps too much. Mat. Arnold was to me, in his day
and my day, only a society trifler, whereas now ... after for years
I have visited his tomb, I recognize him as a great writer of the
age in which he lived.'

Here and there in the Memoir are glimpses of the world of literature
with which he was often in touch. He discusses with Swinburne a much-
disputed reference in Shelley's _Epipsychidion_. In 1872 Browning reads
his _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_ at 76, Sloane Street. There are
admiring references to the work of George Eliot, and to Mrs. Lynn
Linton--'perhaps the cleverest woman I know.' When he goes to the United
States, we get his warmly drawn picture of the Boston group--Emerson,
Agassiz, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Asa Gray, Longfellow, Lowell, Dr.
Collyer, and Dr. Hedge.

[Footnote: See Chapter VI. (Vol. I., p. 60).]

Recording Stepniak's suggestion that Bismarck, Mazzini, and Oliver
Wendell Holmes were the three greatest conversationalists of our times,
'I said that, having known all three, I agreed that they were
remarkable, although I myself found Mazzini a little of the bore.
Disraeli was sometimes very good, although sometimes singularly silent;
but there were once two Russians that I put in the first rank--Herzen
and Tourgenief.'

Questions relating to one literary personality alone receive full-length
treatment in the Memoir. On any point that concerned Keats Sir Charles
was always keenly interested. He may be said to have inherited the Keats
tradition and the Keats devotion from his grandfather, and anyone
connected with Keats found easy way to his sympathy and attention. It
was his intervention which finally obtained for Keats's sister, Mme.
Llanos, a regular Civil List pension in 1880. When the Lindon family
sold to Mr. Buxton Forman Keats's letters to Miss Brawne, Mme. Llanos
wrote 'from Madrid saying how greatly she was vexed that her brother's
love-letters should have been placed before the world,' and 'I had a
good deal of correspondence with Lord Houghton over this matter....
[Lord Houghton] wrote:

'"My Dear Dilke,

'"Since the _Athenaeum_ fixed my place in poetical literature
between Rogers and Eliza Cook, I have naturally not read that
journal, but I have been shown a capital flagellation of those
unfilial wine-merchants. [Footnote: Miss Brawne married Louis
Lindon, a wine-merchant.] I thought I had even gone too far in my
elegant extracts--with which you furnished me. I have, alas! no
poetical amours to be recorded, out of which my family can make
anything handsome."'

The letter ends with an invitation to lunch and 'talk Keats.'

Sir Charles notes further:

'About this time (1878) Mr. Buxton Forman announced for publication
the Keats Love-Letters, which I certainly thought I had in a vague
way bought for the purpose of preventing publication. They had been
long in my possession, but the son of Fanny Brawne had claimed them,
and I, having no written agreement, had found it necessary to give
them up--although what I had bought and paid for, unless it was the
right to prevent publication, I do not know.'

About this time Mr. John Morley proffered a request that Sir Charles
would write a monograph on Keats for his _English Men of Letters_. Lord
Houghton thought that a "new view" from Sir Charles "would have great
interest"; but he decided to decline the undertaking.

The Memoir records at length the course of a correspondence with Joseph
Severn, on the subject of his portraits of Keats, about which the old
man's memory, in his last days at Rome, had grown very hazy. He thought
that the miniature from which the engraving for Mr. Buxton Forman's
edition had been made was the original presented to Fanny Brawne,
whereas it was the copy made for old Mr. Dilke from that original, which
itself was afterwards 'bought by my grandfather to prevent its being
sold by auction.' There was also at Pyrford a copy in oils made for Mr.
Moxon, which Sir Charles had obtained by exchange from Mr. Frederick
Locker-Lampson.

'After completing my investigations as to the portraits, I placed
them on record in a letter to my old friend Scharf, the Keeper of
the National Portrait Gallery, who replied: "Thanks for your
interesting note, which we will duly place upon record. The portrait
which we have here is posthumous. Severn painted it in 1821, and we
hold a very curious letter from him describing the circumstances
under which he painted it." Here, therefore, is another undoubted
Severn in addition to the three which I possess. But I know myself
of at least one other.'

The gift of his collection of Keats relics to Hampstead has been
elsewhere recorded. In deciding on Hampstead for its resting-place, he
brought it within the circle of local associations with Keats himself,
and with the grandfather who had been Keats's friend. [Footnote: The
Memoir records, in 1878, a visit paid with his great-uncle, William
Dilke, to Wentworth Place, 'the little house at Hampstead in which for a
time Mr. C. W. Dilke and his brother were Keats's next-door
neighbours.']

Modern French authors interested him more than their English
contemporaries. In the former case he found, perhaps, less declension
from the standard of the giants of whom he had been an eager student in
his early manhood, when he read "all Balzac," and recorded his
admiration for the "dignity" of Mme. de Stael's _Germany_. Dumas he
loved then and always, returning to him with ever new delight, and
utilizing the rare periods of inaction imposed upon him at intervals by
illness to read the whole of _The Three Musketeers_ series 'through
again--properly.' Where other writers who held sway over the mind of
France during the nineteenth century were in question, his independence
of taste came into play. Sainte-Beuve he could 'make nothing of.' For
Chateaubriand he felt something like contempt: 'Equally feeble as a
maker and a writer of history ... the inventor of a drawing-room
Christianity without Christ;' but he recognized the high quality to be
found in the early writings of Senancour. In later days the revival of a
Stendhal cult filled him with wondering amusement. To the best work of
Renan his affections were always faithful: _Souvenirs d'Enfance et de
Jeunesse_ was among his favourite volumes. Anatole France gave him
exquisite pleasure, and it is hard to say whether he most enjoyed the
wit, the irony, or the style of that great writer. He had his
favourites, too, among the minor gods, and was always ready to introduce
a new-comer to the charms of _Francois de Barbizanges_ or the fun of
Alfred Capus.

In French poetry his taste was eclectic. His feeling for Charles
d'Orleans and his contemporaries barely stopped on this side idolatry;
but the classics of the seventeenth century had no message for him, and
Victor Hugo as a poet left him, for the most part, unmoved. Indeed, he
asserted that all French verse between Ronsard and Verlaine was purely
rhetorical, and without genuine poetic quality. But in some modern
poets, he thought, the true spirit of French poetry had revived. Early
he proclaimed the genius of Charles Guerin, whose claim to high place in
his country's literature remained unrecognized till after his death;
early, too, he hailed a new poetic star in Francois Porche. The star
seemed to him later to wane in brilliancy, but the disappointment with
which he read the poems of M. Porche's second period never weakened his
admiring recollection of the splendour of the poet's Russian verses and
the searching pathos of _Solitude au Loin_.

His familiarity with French literature, his hearty affection for it, his
understanding of the national spirit by which it is informed and
quickened, constituted one of the strongest ties which bound him in
sympathy to his French friends. The literary forms which have had so
much attraction for the best French minds both before and after 1789--
the chronicle and the memoir--were precisely those to which his
unfailing interest in human nature led him by choice. Paradin and
Froissart were companions of whom he never grew tired; and it would be
difficult to decide whether he found more absorbing matter of
entertainment in Sully or Mme. de Dino.

But if he read these authors for delight, he read them also as a serious
student. On this point the testimony of one of the most learned men in
contemporary France is clear. M. Salomon Reinach writes: [Footnote: In a
letter addressed to the editor, and written in English.]

"Talking with Sir Charles Dilke about Renaissance and modern
history, I soon perceived that he had taken the trouble of going to
the sources, and that he had read and knew many things of importance
which a man of letters, and even a scholar, are apt to ignore. It
was Sir Charles, to give only one instance, who revealed to me the
value of Guillaume Paradin's _Histoire de Notre Temps_ and
_Chronique de Savoie_, which he admired to such a degree that he put
the now forgotten author (the name of whom is not in the British
Encyclopaedia) on the same level as Guicciardini and the great
historians of antiquity. I would like to know how he discovered
Paradin, and if copies of his rare works were in his library. When I
happened to get hold of Major Frye's manuscript, afterwards
published by me (thanks to Sir Charles Dilke's recommendation) at
Heinemann's, he was the first to appreciate its interest, and gave
me much information about abbreviated names and other allusions
which occur in that diary. He chanced to dine with me the very
evening when I first had brought the manuscript to my house, and he
remained till past one in the morning, picturesquely seated on the
edge of a table, reading passages aloud and commenting upon them. He
also knew many secret and unrecorded facts about recent French
history; some of them have been given by him in unsigned articles of
the _Athenaeum_, in reviews of books relating to the Franco-German
War. I hope he may have left some more detailed notes on that
subject. I would have had the greatest pleasure in corresponding
with him, and regret I did not do so; but his handwriting was as
mysterious as his mind was clear, and I soon found that I could not
make it out."

CHAPTER LXI

TABLE TALK

After Lady Dilke's death, the Rev. W. and Mrs. Tuckwell, her brother-
in-law and her elder sister, made their home with Sir Charles Dilke at
Pyrford; and notes of his talk put together from memory and from diaries
by the old scholar give a vivid impression of the statesman as seen in
intimacy. Mr. Tuckwell says:

During the last five years of his life I breakfasted alone with Sir
Charles whenever he was at Pyrford. It was his "softer hour," and
showed him in a specially endearing light. Not only was he fresh
from his night's rest, full, often, of matter interesting or amusing
in his letters which he had just read, but the tete-a-tete brought
out his finest social nature. In large companies, as we saw him at
Dockett, he was occasionally insistent, iterative, expressing
himself, to use a term of his own, with a "fierceness" corresponding
to the strength of his convictions. With me at our breakfasts he was
gentle, tolerant, what Sydney Smith called "amoebean," talking and
listening alternately. I was told that before his death the two
experiences to which he referred in anticipating a return to his
Pyrford home were the forestry among his pines and the early
breakfast table.

Much of his talk was, of course, Parliamentary, bearing on incidents
or persons from the House. He often spoke of Harcourt, whom he
dearly loved. When Harcourt's death was announced to a party at
breakfast in Speech House, several in the company told anecdotes of
the dead man or commented on his character. One lady spoke of him
harshly. Sir Charles remained silent, but more than once during the
meal his eyes filled with tears. He told me on another occasion that
"Lulu" promised to be a greater man than his father, just as Winston
Churchill is a greater man than Randolph. Lulu resembles his father
curiously in all things except in the paternal habit of swearing.
Once, when an attempt by the Opposition to snatch a victory in a
thin House had been foiled, Harcourt said savagely across the table:
"So that d----d dirty trick has failed!" Hicks Beach sprang up to
ask the Speaker if such language were Parliamentary. Speaker Gully
was too discreet to have heard the words. Dilke remembered being in
company with Harcourt and Mrs. Procter, amongst several more. As she
left the room, Harcourt said: "There goes one of the three most
charming women I ever knew; the other two"--a pause, during which
the ladies present looked keenly expectant--"the other two are
dead!"

He turned to talk of Dizzy, to whom he had first been introduced in
his early days by Lady Lonsdale, the great man wishing to know him.
He quoted some of Dizzy's sayings. Dizzy called Spencer Walpole and
Russell Gurney "those two whited sepulchres of the House of
Commons." Walpole, consequential and lugubrious, he spoke of as "the
high-stepping hearse-horse of public life." Of deaf Mr. Thomasson,
who, ear-trumpet in hand, was wont to place himself near every
speaker, he said that "no man had ever so neglected his natural
advantages."

Of Gladstone Dilke rarely spoke, but used to describe the periodical
entrance of Mrs. Gladstone into the meetings of the Cabinet with a
large basin of tea for the old man. [Footnote: In the last years of
Sir Charles's life, at a party given by Mr. and Mrs. Herbert
Gladstone at Downing Street, he stopped in the room where Cabinet
meetings used to be held, and pointed out to the editor of this book
the door through which Mrs. Gladstone used to enter bearing the bowl
of tea. For Sir Charles's recollections of Mr. Gladstone, see
appendix at end of this chapter.] Once he had to work out with his
chief some very difficult question. As they sat absorbed, Hamilton,
the private secretary, entered with an apologetic air to say that
----, a well-known journalist, had called, pressingly anxious to see
the Prime Minister on an important subject. Without raising his
head, Gladstone said: "Ask him what is his number in the lunatic
asylum."

He told of a Cabinet in 1883 at which ---- talked a great deal, "and
I told Chamberlain that at the Political Economy Club, where I had
been dining on the previous night, there was a closure of debate in
the shape of the introduction of hot muffins, which I thought would
be excellent for Cabinets." At this Cabinet Lord Granville said: "We
all agree that ---- is a bore, but I have never been able to make up
my mind whether that is a drawback or a qualification so far as
public service is concerned."

Asquith he looked upon as one of the greatest Parliamentarians he
had known, much superior in that capacity to Gladstone. His
allocution on the King's death was noble; still finer his
introduction of the Veto Bill in December, 1909. "His speech was
perfect: forcible in manner, statesmanlike in argument, felicitous
in epithet and phrasing." Balfour on the same occasion was at his
worst: "hampered by his former contrary declarations, trivial in
reasoning, feeble in delivery." He was ill, and ought not to have
come. I asked if Balfour's frequent inconsistencies and vacillations
were due to carelessness. He said no, but to the necessity imposed
upon him, not of proclaiming principles, but of keeping together a
divergent party. I asked what other notable recent speeches he could
recall. He said the Archbishop of Canterbury's [Footnote: Dr.
Randall Davidson.] on the Congo scandal, in the House of Lords: "a
marvellous performance, nothing said which should not have been
said, everything said which required saying; the speech of a great
statesman." Bishop ---- followed him with a mere piece of missionary
claptrap. In the Commons on the same occasion our charming friend
Hugh Law distinguished himself, silencing some of his compatriots,
the Irish Roman Catholics, whose line was to support Leopold because
the Protestant missionaries abused him. Leopold II. Sir Charles
called "the cleverest--and wickedest--man living." He broke off to
speak of the Archbishop, whom he met weekly at Grillion's, as a
delightfully instructive talker, not only full, that is, of light
agreeableness, but supporting the opinions he advances with
convincing, cogent, logical force, yet never boring his hearers. As
another powerful speech he instanced T. P. O'Connor on Sir R.
Anderson's indiscretions, "most terribly crushing in its grim,
ruthless exposition," Anderson sitting in the Gallery to hear it.

In his own great speech on Army Reform in April, 1907, Sir Charles
said that Haldane was "all things to all men." His hearers perceived
it to be a quotation (which in fact I had furnished), but no one
localized it! An amusing misquotation was Arnold-Forster's in the
same debate: he said that Haldane was like King David, who drilled
his men by fifties in a cave. In March, 1909, Sir Charles told me
sadly of Arnold-Forster's sudden death, which he had just learned.
"With some defects of manner, he was very clever, writing and
speaking well. As War Minister Balfour gave him no chance. His last
speech in the House, a fortnight before his death, just preceded
mine. 'I must speak,' he said to me, 'on those damned Special
Reservists;' and speak he did for a good, well-sustained half-hour,
going out as soon as he had finished." He had been with us at
Dockett. He and Sir Charles sparred continually and amusingly, both
equally aggressive, imperious, stentorian, iterative, each insistent
on his own declamation and inattentive to his opponent's.

Sir Charles, while on this topic of oratory, went on to quote with
much hilarity a speech by Lord ---- in the Lords: "This Liberal
Government injures friends no less than enemies. Look at me! I am a
passive resister; I belong to the National Liberal Club; I have
married my deceased wife's sister; and none of my children are
vaccinated; yet they are meddling with my rights as a landlord." The
Lords did not see the fun, the papers did not report it, but it is
to be found in Hansard.

I asked Dilke how my old pupil, Sir Richard Jebb, comported himself
in Parliament. He said: "Handsome, beautifully groomed, with a
slight stoop, slow delivery, speaking rarely and on subjects which
he thoroughly understood, his phrasing perfect, manner engaging: a
man reserved and shy, not seeking acquaintance, but, if sought,
eminently agreeable." University members, he added, should come
always in pairs: one to represent the high University ideal,
embodied only in a very few; his colleague reflecting the mob of
country parsons who by an absurd paradox elect to Parliament. Jebb
was the ideal Cantab.; didactic, professorial, the Public Orator;
seeming incomplete without a gown: but for his rare and apt
appearances, he might have overdone the part.

He told a story of Major O'Gorman. A professed Roman Catholic, he
was dining in the House one Friday on a devilled chicken, when his
parish priest was announced. "Waiter," he said, "take away the
devil, and show in the priest."

When Sir Charles first took office, he was cautioned by his
colleague, Lord Tenterden, not to read the newspapers: "If you do,
you will never distinguish between what you know and what you have
just read."

He mentioned ----. I said that his elaborate manners and bridegroom
dress marked him out as _natus convivio feminali_, meant by nature
to be a guest at ladies' tea-tables. Dilke assented, adding that he
was less bland to men than to women. "Tommy" Bowles said of him in
the House: "The right honourable gentleman answers, or, rather, does
not answer, my questions with the pomposity of a Belgravian butler
refusing twopence to a beggar."

He spoke of the decadence in costume characteristic of the present
day. I said that, according to Wraxall, we must go back for its
beginnings to Charles Fox, who came down to the House in boots. I
added that, when I first went up to Oxford, a frock-coat and tall
hat were imperative in walking out; that a "cut-away" coat, as it
was called, would have been "sconced" in Hall; that men even kept
their boating-dresses at King's or Hall's, changing there; that a
blazer in the High would have drawn a crowd. He said that till very
lately--he was speaking in 1907--the custom of dress in Parliament
had been equally rigid; that Lord Minto had recently scandalized his
peers by wearing a straw hat; that when, some years before, a member
whose name I forget had taken the same liberty in the Commons, the
Speaker sent for him, and begged that he would not repeat the
offence.