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

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He recalled the Cambridge Union debates of his time: the best he
ever heard was on a personal question, the impeachment of a man
named Harris for some breach of rule. Henry Sidgwick was in the
chair, the speaking extraordinarily animated and well sustained. The
finest orator of his time was a man called Payne. [Footnote: Payne
belonged to the same college as Dilke, Trinity Hall, and was
bracketed Senior in the Law Tripos of 1868. He had begun to make his
mark both at the Bar and in the Press, when, still a very young man,
he was killed in a mountaineering accident in Wales.] I said our
best speaker in my day was Goschen; his Union reports caused
Gladstone to pick him out and bring him forward. He said yes, but
that Goschen never fulfilled his promise until his really powerful
speech on Free Trade in 1903.

He enumerated the Jewish types in England. There is (1) the sallow
Jew with a beak; (2) the same without a beak; (3) the "hammy" Jew,
with pink face like a _cochon-a-lait_. The Florentine type, with
fair hair and beautiful clear face, is not seen in England.

His criticism of a certain lady led me to ask who, of people he had
known, possessed the most perfect manners. He said Lord Clarendon,
who had the old carefully cultivated Whig manners, yet with the
faintest possible tendency to pomposity. This style became
unfashionable, and was succeeded by what he called the "early
Christian" or "Apostolic" manners, of which the late Lord Knutsford
was a perfect exemplar. The best-mannered woman he had known was the
late Lady Waterford. Domestic servants too, he said, have manners;
he instanced as magnificent specimens Turner, Lady Waldegrave's
groom of the chambers, and Miss Alice Rothschild's Jelf. Lady
Lonsdale once spoke of the latter as "Guelph, or whatever member of
the Royal Family it is that waits on Alice."

Sir Charles talked about the Wallace Collection. Sir Richard was not
the natural son either of the fourth Lord Hertford, or of his father
the third Lord, Thackeray's Steyne and Disraeli's Monmouth. He was
brought up by the fourth Lord Hertford, under the name of Monsieur
Richard, not by any means as the expectant heir; yet, excepting the
settled estates, which went to the fifth Marquis, all was left to
him. Part of the great art collection remained at Bagatelle, which
became the property of a younger Wallace, an officer in the French
army; the rest has come to the English nation through Lady Wallace,
to whom her husband left the whole. Why Sir Richard assumed the name
Wallace no one knows. He was French, not English, speaking English
imperfectly: a kind, cheery, polished gentleman.

Apropos of the Education Bill: old Lady Wilde from her window in
Tite Street heard a woman bewailing herself in the street--her son
had been "took away," to gaol that is. "He was a good boy till the
Eddication came along;" then, kneeling down on the pavement and
joining her hands, she prayed solemnly "God damn Eddication."

Sir Charles contrasted the idiosyncrasies of some politicians: Grey
reserved, Balfour telling everything to everybody; Arnold-Forster
closely "buttoned up," Gorst dangerously frank. On Gorst he
enlarged: a nominal Tory, in fact a Radical, ever battering his own
side for the mere fun of the operation; old in years, young in
activity of brain and body; a poor man all his life.

He said that the two incomparable sights which this country could
show to a foreigner were (1) Henley in regatta week; (2) the Park on
a fine summer day: everyone out riding, and the Life Guards' band
going down to a Drawing-room.

I asked if he had heard a certain London preacher who was drawing
large audiences. He said yes, and that he was well worth hearing.
"He is High Church and anti-ritualist, Socialist and aristocrat,
orthodox while holding every heresy extant, not cultured or
literary, slovenly and almost coarse; yet grasping his listeners by
the feeling impressed on each that the preacher knows and is
describing his (the hearer's) experiences, troubles, hopes,
life-history."

I questioned him about Leonard Montefiore, a memoir of whom had
caught my eye in one of the bookcases. He was a man of brilliant
promise, unpopular at Balliol, giving himself intellectual airs;
went unwashed, with greenish complexion and generally repulsive
appearance; would have been prominent had he lived; was much petted
by Ruskin.

He said that, if London were destroyed to-morrow, in ten years' time
its site would be covered with a forest of maple, sycamore, robinia,
showing an undergrowth of Persian willow-herb.

He told of a man whom his groom pronounced to be "the footiest gent
on a 'oss and the 'ossiest gent on foot as he ever see."

He spoke of the "Local Veto Bill," forced by Harcourt on a reluctant
Cabinet; Harcourt was, he said, a genuine convert to the principle--
a curious intellectual phenomenon, this development of a belated
conviction in a mind hitherto essentially opportunist. It cost him
his seat later on.

Sir Charles described Speaker Peel's farewell to the House: said
that it was quite perfect in every way. He thought Gully undesirable
as his successor, and should not vote for him.

Of the rising I.L.P. he said once, in early days, they had done
wrongly in formulating a programme. Their name was a sufficient
programme; now they would indirectly help the Tories.

He had an extraordinary insight into the mental habits and emotions
of domestic animals, interpreting the feelings and opinions of his
horses when out riding, of his Pyrford dog Fafner, of his Sloane
Street cat Calino, in a manner at once graphic and convincing. His
love for cats amounted to a passion; a menagerie of eight or ten
tailless white or ginger Persians was kept in an enclosure, at
Pyrford. Once, when exploring a fine Ravenna church, we missed him,
returning from our round to find him near the door, caressing a cat
belonging to the custodian, which he had inveigled into his lap.

His literary dislikes and preferences were numerous and frankly
expressed, deeply interesting as the idiosyncrasies of a rich and
highly trained intelligence, even when to myself somewhat
unaccountable. While keenly appreciating the best in modern French
literature, he could see no charm in Corneille or Racine. Quite
lately Rabelais, reopened after many years, appealed to him
strongly, as keen satire and invective veiled by wit, and, so only,
tolerated by those scourged. To be laid hold of and temporarily
possessed by a book was as characteristic of him as of old
Gladstone; in their turn, _Pantagruel_, Anatole France's _Penguins_,
most of all _The Blue Bird_, which he read delightedly, but would
not see acted, formed of late the breakfast equipage as certainly as
the eggs and toast: any utterance of conventional apology or regret
was expressed by, "Voulez-vous que j'embrasse le chat?"

His acquaintance with English literature was intermittent. He was
apparently a stranger to our eighteenth-century authors, both in
poetry and prose; of those who followed them in time, he undervalued
Scott, disliked Macaulay, admired Napier, admired Trollope.
Wordsworth he condemned as puerile, inheriting the _Edinburgh
Review_ estimate of his poetry, and often called on me ecstatically
to repeat Hartley Coleridge's parody of _Lucy_. Of Keats he was
immeasurably fond, drawn to him by the poet's relation to his
family, declaiming his lines often--as he did sometimes those of
Shelley, whose verses in his own copy of the poems are heavily and
with wise selection scored--in tones which showed a capacity for
deep poetic feeling. A quotation would accidentally arrest him, and
he would call for the book, usually after short perusal discarding
the author as a "poopstick," a favourite phrase with him. I remember
this occurring with the _Rejected Addresses_, though he knew and
loved James Smith. A travesty of Omar Khayyam, called _The Rubaiyat
of a Persian Kitten_, he read delightedly, much preferring it to the
original. He professed contempt for the study of English grammar,
more especially for the scientific analysis of English
sentence-structure, which plays so large a part in modern education.
The contempt was certainly, as Osborne Gordon said, not bred of
familiarity. I fear that, like most University or public school men,
he would have been foiled by the simplest Preliminary Grammar Paper
of a University Local Examination to-day.

But his knowledge of political history, foreign and domestic, during
the last centuries was marvellously extensive and minute. In earlier
history he was oblivious often of his own previous knowledge,
argumentatively maintaining untenable propositions. Though fortified
by Freeman and Bryce, I could never get him to admit that all the
historic "Emperors," from Augustus Caesar in 27 B.C. down to
Francis, King of Germany, who gave up the Empire in A.D. 1806, were
Emperors, not of Germany or Austria, but of Rome; or that the
Reformed English Church of Tudor times, with all its servility, had
never relinquished, but steadily held and holds, its claim to
continuous Catholicity. But a query as to the French Revolution, the
Napoleonic dynasties, the Vienna Congress, the South African or
Franco-Prussian War, or the developments in India, Canada, Egypt,
would draw forth a stream of marshalled lucid information, which it
was indeed a privilege to hear.

"Neque ille in luce modo atque in oculis civium magnus, sed intus
domique praestantior. Qui sermo! quae praecepta! quanta notitia
antiquitatis! quae scientia juris! Omnia memoria tenebat, non
domestica solum, sed etiam externa bella. Cujus sermone ita tunc
cupide tenebar, quasi jam divinarem, id quod evenit, illo exstincto
fore unde discerem neminem" (Cicero, _De Senectute_).

APPENDIX

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF MR. GLADSTONE BY
SIR CHARLES DILKE

The difficulty in the way of furnishing reminiscences of Mr. Gladstone
in Cabinet is in part the Privy Council oath, but still more the fact
that, where the matters that would be touched are of interest, they
often affect individuals or parties. I saw the most of Mr. Gladstone
between 1880 and 1886, and to this period the restrictions imposed by
the considerations named are most highly applicable. In the earlier days
when I sat in Parliament with him, from 1868 to 1880, we were, though
sitting on the same side of the House, frequently opposed to one
another, for I was often fighting for the claims of independent
Radicalism as against his commanding personality. This was especially
the case from 1868 to 1874; and his retirement after his defeat in 1874,
when Lord Hartington became the leader of the Liberal party, was so
complete that it was not until Mr. Gladstone was aroused by the
development of the Eastern Question in 1877 that we again saw much of
him in the House of Commons. An interesting reminiscence of the great
struggle of 1878 is afforded by the copy in my possession of the Whips'
list of the Liberal party marked by Mr. Gladstone and myself. I was
acting for him, against the party Whips, in the preparations for the
division upon his famous Resolutions. We daily went through the promises
of the members who had undertaken to support his Resolutions, of those
who remained steadfast in adhesion to Lord Hartington and who were
prepared to vote against the Resolutions, and of those who would vote
neither way. The changes from day to day in the ascertained opinions of
the party were most strange. Family was divided against family--for
instance the family of Cavendish--and the cleavage followed no line that
corresponded with shades of Liberalism. The pro-Turks upon the Liberal
side were joined in their support of Lord Hartington by the "peace at
any price" section of the Radicals. Curiously enough, the division of
the party was exactly equal, and remained equal through all the changes
of individual promises. On the day on which peace was made, and (to Mr.
Gladstone's immense relief) the chances of a complete disruption
averted, the number of members pledged to Mr. Gladstone was 110, and an
exactly equal number of members was pledged to Lord Hartington and the
Whips.

Coming to later times, a reminiscence is one of April, 1893, when Mr.
Gladstone sent for me to discuss a motion of which I had given notice
upon the Egyptian occupation. He talked on that occasion with that
absolute frankness which accompanied the confidence he always placed in
others. It was not peculiar to him, but belongs more, perhaps, to the
old days in which he received the training of his mind than to present
times. We are told that democratic diplomacy is to be outspoken. But, so
far as Parliament is concerned, the older leaders were, I think, like
Mr. Gladstone, more given to outspokenness than the newer men, who find
themselves forced by the ubiquity of the Press to a greater reserve than
was formerly necessary to be maintained. Mr. Gladstone was always of a
playful mind, and it would be impossible ever to fully relate any of his
conversations without recalling the manner in which, however absorbed in
his subject, he always would break off to discuss some amusing
triviality. Sir William Harcourt has touchingly recalled Mr. Gladstone's
old-world courtesy, which was in private life his distinguishing
characteristic.--_Daily News_, May 24_th_, 1898.