The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke Volume I Part 44

Gladstone's old-world courtesy, and especially his playfulness.

"It would be impossible," he said, "to give a true account of Mr.

Gladstone without recalling the manner in which, however absorbed he might be in his subject, he would break off to discuss some amusing triviality. When we were talking once of the real and inner views of French statesmen with regard to our occupation of Egypt, some chance expression suddenly diverted Mr. Gladstone's mind to the subject of rowing; and he began recalling in the most amusing way incidents of his own Eton days of some sixty-eight or sixty-nine years previously, shivering at the thought of his sculling in cold weather against strong stretches of the stream near Monkey Island."

But the elder statesman who fascinated Sir Charles's imagination was the great Tory chief; and in 1881 came at last the realization of a wish long entertained by him for a meeting with Lord Beaconsfield. More than once he had been balked of the opportunity by his punctilio of holding rigidly to even the most ordinary social engagements. After one of these disappointments he wrote:

'I should like to talk to the most romantic character of our time, but I fear it is only vulgar curiosity, for I really know a great deal more already about him than I could find out in conversation.'

The curiosity had been sharpened by the publication of _Endymion_, for Sir Charles thought that in devising the story of Endymion Ferrars Lord Beaconsfield had taken a general suggestion from the career of the Radical who, like Endymion, had made his debut as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs; and the novelist admitted the debt.

The meeting took place on Sunday, January 30th, at Lady Lonsdale's house.

'Wolff, Chaplin and Lady Florence, Hartington, the d.u.c.h.ess of Manchester, Lord and Lady Hamilton, and Captain and Lady Rosamond Fellowes (Randolph Churchill's sister) were there. Arthur Balfour and the Randolph Churchills came in after dinner. Lord Beaconsfield told me that he had been very anxious to meet me, since he had taken the liberty of writing about me without my leave in his novel _Endymion_, and that he thought we wore never destined to meet, for he had twice asked Alfred de Rothschild to invite me, and that I had not "been" on those two or on a third occasion which he had made. He was, as usual, over-complimentary and over-anxious to captivate, but was certainly most pleasant. He praised my grandfather, a sure way to my heart, and said that my grandfather and his own father were "the last two men in England who had a thorough knowledge of English letters." The talk at dinner was dull, in spite of Wolff's attempts to enliven it, but Arthur Balfour and the Randolph Churchills brightened it afterwards, and Dizzy said a good many rather good things--as, for example, that he should like to get married again for the purpose of comparing the presents that he would get from his friends with the beggarly ones that he had got when he had married. Also that he "objects to the rigid bounds of honeymoons as an arbitrary attempt to limit illimitable happiness." I thought him very polite and pretty in all his ways and in all he said.'

On Sunday evening, February 20th, Sir Charles dined with Mr. Alfred de Rothschild to meet the Prince of Wales;

'but was more pleased with again meeting Lord Beaconsfield.'...

'After dinner I was next him. When he was offered a cigar, he said: "You English once had a great man who discovered tobacco, on which you English now live, and potatoes, on which your Irish live, and you cut off his head." This foreign point of view of Sir Walter Raleigh was extremely comical, I think.'

Finally there is this entry:

'Having made no note in my diary, I cannot tell if it was on Sunday, April 3rd, or on Sunday, March 27th, that Lord Barrington met Edmond Fitzmaurice and me in Curzon Street, where Lord Beaconsfield's house was, and said: "Come in and see him; he's ill, but would like to see you." He was on a couch in the back drawing-room, in which he died, I think, on April 19th. There was a bronchitis kettle on the hob, and his breathing was difficult, but he was still the old Disraeli, and, though I think that he knew that he was dying, yet his pleasant spitefulness about "Mr. G." was not abated. He meant to die game.'

Lord Beaconsfield made no secret of his liking for Sir Charles, but is said to have doubted the permanency of his Radicalism. "The sort of man who will die a Conservative peer," is said to have been his commentary after their first meeting, echoing an idea then widespread in the fashionable world, that of the two men so often compared, Sir Charles would gravitate towards the opinions of the _Times_, leaving his colleague 'to the una.s.sisted championship of democratic rights.'

To the greatest of all European statesmen Dilke did not at this time become known; but Bismarck watched his career, and in the early part of this year, after the Prince of Wales's visit to Berlin,

'On March 16th Arthur Ellis, who had been with the Prince at Berlin, came to me from the Prince to say that the Prince had had much talk with Lord Ampthill (Odo Russell) about me. Our Amba.s.sador was most anxious that I should visit Berlin, and thought that I could do much then with Bismarck, and usefully remove prejudices about myself at the Court. Ellis was the bearer of an invitation from the Emba.s.sy for me to stay there, and of a message that Bismarck much wished to make my acquaintance.'

There was no doubt as to the attractiveness of the invitation, but it was at once ruled out on public grounds.

'The visit, however, would give rise to much speculation in the Press, and would also make the Queen angry and Mr. Gladstone most uneasy.

"But," I added in my diary, "if we want to stop the French from going to Tunis, there is a safe and easy way to do it--_i.e.,_ let me go to Berlin for one day and see Bismarck and talk about the weather, and then to Rome for one hour and see, no one, merely to let the fact get into the newspapers."'

In December

'Dufferin wrote to me from Paris: "The Sultan is besotted with the notion of a German alliance against France, and of obtaining the a.s.sistance of Germany in freeing himself from foreign control in Asia."'

On New Year's Day, 1882, Sir Charles, while accompanying Lord Lyons on his round of official New Year visits, saw a despatch from Lord Odo Russell.

[Footnote: Amba.s.sador at Berlin.] In it Bismarck described his att.i.tude towards the Turks, who had "asked him for protection against their protectors, who, with the sole exception of Germany, in their opinion, wanted 'to cut slices out of their skin.'" Bismarck had a.s.sured the Turks that he should never attack France unless seriously threatened by France, and would never in any circ.u.mstances "fire a cartridge for Turkey."

In the course of the summer of 1881 Sir Charles had become acquainted with a great personage in whom Bismarck always saw an enemy of his policy, and in so far as it was hostile to France the Memoir bears out his judgment.

'On July 13th the Prince of Wales introduced me to his sister, the Crown Princess of Germany. [Footnote: Though this was Sir Charles's first meeting with the Crown Princess, she had at the time of his father's death 'telegraphed her condolences to me at St. Petersburg, and to the Emba.s.sy, asking them to call on me and help me in the matter.'] She talked to me at length in the most friendly way with regard to France and Gambetta. She told me that she had been secretly to Cherbourg to hear Gambetta's famous speech, which he himself called "the first gla.s.s of wine administered to the convalescent." But she added that she stood absolutely alone in Germany in her pro-French opinions.

'The Crown Princess seemed very able, but inclined to sacrifice anything in order to produce an effect. I was afterwards sent for by them, and had a long talk in what are called the Belgian Rooms at the back of Buckingham Palace, on the gardens.

'On Monday, August 22nd, I called at Buckingham Palace by the wish of the Crown Prince, and saw him and the Crown Princess together. I thought him a dull, heavy German, and noted in my diary: "He dare not speak before he sees that she approves of his speaking." But he was a nice-minded, kind, and even pleasant man in his way.'

Sir Charles's formal summing-up of his impressions is to be found in his work on _The Present Position of European Politics_ (1887):

"It is no secret that at times the Crown Princess has been unfriendly to Prince Bismarck. They are perhaps two personalities too strong to coexist easily in the same Court.... The Crown Prince, it must be admitted, intellectually speaking, is, largely by his own will, the Crown Princess. But that most able lady, when she shares the German throne, must inevitably have for her policy the Bismarck policy--the strength and glory of the German Empire."

Sir Charles notes that, although he was hard-worked in Parliament and in the Office, the peculiar nature of the Foreign Office work brought him necessarily a good deal into contact with royal personages and foreigners of distinction visiting London, and forced him 'to go out a good deal and burn the candle at both ends.' Of these official gaieties he gives no very grateful impression:

'Some of the parties to which the Prince of Wales virtually insisted that I should go were curious; the oddest of them a supper which he directed to be given on July 1st, 1881, for Sarah Bernhardt, at the wish of the Duc d'Aumale, and at which all the other ladies present were English ladies who had been invited at the distinct request of the Prince of Wales. It was one thing to get them to go, and another thing to get them to talk when they were there; and the result was that, as they would not talk to Sarah Bernhardt and she would not talk to them, and as the Duc d'Aumale was deaf and disinclined to make conversation on his own account, n.o.body talked at all, and an absolute reign of the most dismal silence ensued....

'On March 13th we had received news of the murder of the Emperor of Russia; and when Lord Granville came to dinner with me (for he dined with me that night to meet the French Amba.s.sador), he told me that I must attend in the morning at a Ma.s.s at the Russian Chapel, and attend in uniform. I had two of these Ma.s.ses at the Russian Chapel in a short time, one for the Emperor and one for the Empress, and painful ceremonies they were, as we had to stand packed like herrings in a small room, stifled with incense, wearing heavy uniform, and carrying lighted tapers in our hands. On this occasion I saw the Prince of Wales go to sleep standing, his taper gradually turn round and gutter on the floor.'

Two months later, Friday, May 27th,

'I dined with Lord and Lady Spencer to meet the King of Sweden and the Gladstones....

'The King talked to me after dinner about the murder of the Emperor of Russia.... It was clear that the Swedish loathing for Russia on account of the loss of Finland was not over. The King might, however, have reflected upon his own popularity in Norway, a country which had been given to his grandfather because the people used to hate the Danes. They now hated the Swedes still more.'

A royalty known to Sir Charles by correspondence was King Mtsa of Uganda, 'who had been presented by us in 1880, at the request of the Queen and the Church Missionary Society, with a Court suit, a trombone, and an Arabic Bible,' but who relapsed early in 1881, and became again the chief pillar of the slave trade in his district. Another strange monarch played his part that year in London society.

'On Sunday, July 10th, Lord Granville wrote to me to ask me to lunch with him the next day to meet "the King of the Cannibal Islands [Footnote: Sandwich Islands, in reality.] at 12.55, an admirable arrangement, as he must go away to Windsor at 1.20." I went, but unfortunately was not able to clear myself of all responsibility for Kalakaua so rapidly, for I was directed to show him the House of Commons; and when he parted from me in the evening in St. Stephen's Hall he asked me for a cigar, and on my offering him my case he put the whole of its contents into his pocket. The Crown Prince of Germany and the Crown Princess (Princess Royal of England) were in London at the same time, and at all the parties the three met. The German Emba.s.sy were most indignant that the Prince of Wales had decided that Kalakaua must go before the Crown Prince. At a party given by Lady Spencer at the South Kensington Museum, Kalakaua marched along with the Princess of Wales, the Crown Prince of Germany following humbly behind; and at the Marlborough House Ball Kalakaua opened the first quadrille with the Princess of Wales. When the Germans remonstrated with the Prince, he replied, "Either the brute is a King or else he is an ordinary black n.i.g.g.e.r, and if he is not a King, why is he here at all?" which made further discussion impossible. Kalakaua, however, having only about 40,000 nominal subjects, most of them American citizens who got up a revolution every time he went away, his kingship was very slight.'

May 20th:

'At this Cabinet a curious matter came up, though not for decision.

The Cabinet had been intending to give the commission for the public statue of Lord Beaconsfield to a British sculptor, and I had been trying hard to get it for Nelson Maclean; but a communication from the Queen settled the matter, she absolutely insisting that Boehm should do the statue. Everybody felt that it was wrong that she should interfere, but n.o.body, of course, resisted.'

On May 27th we hear that the Queen, having received

'warning in an anonymous letter of threats against her life by "persons of rank," wrote to Harcourt to say she did not see who could be meant "unless it were Lord Randolph Churchill"!'

Elsewhere Sir Charles noted:

'The only subjects upon which the Prince of Wales agreed with any Liberals were (1) detestation of Randolph Churchill; (2) the government of London. But then, as I personally, although a.s.sailed by Randolph Churchill and not then on speaking terms in consequence, did not dislike him, there remained only the government of London, and the topic became well worn between us, for we had found by experience that it was the only one upon which we could safely talk.'

III.

One correspondent, the length of whose letters was 'fabulous,' was Sir Robert Morier, then Minister at Lisbon, 'an old friend.'

'He had more brains than all the other Foreign Office servants put together (excepting Lord Lyons and 'old White' and Lord Odo Russell), but, although "impossible" in a small place, he was afterwards a success at St. Petersburg.... He used to send ultimatums to any weak Government to which he was despatched, and he used to treat the Foreign Office almost as badly, for he was the only Minister given to swearing at the Office in despatches.'

Comment on this is afforded by a note of Lord Granville's to Sir Charles in 1884, when the Emba.s.sy at Constantinople was vacant: "The Turks had been behaving so badly, we should send Morier, to pay them out." Sir Charles's respect for his friend's 'immense ability' led to his taking great trouble in dealing with Sir Robert Morier's difficulties, put before him in a voluminous correspondence, both private and public, and in return he received 'a veritable testimonial on February 22nd, 1881: "You have done the right thing at exactly the right moment, and this is to me so utterly new a phenomenon in official life that it fills me with admiration and delight."' He had previously noted a letter in which, describing himself as "a shipwrecked diplomat on the rocks of Lisbon," Morier wrote:

"To have for once in my life received help, co-operation, and encouragement in a public work from a man _in the Office_, instead of the cuffs and snubs I am used to, is so altogether new a sensation that you must excuse my being gushing."

In an earlier letter of the same year there is complaint of the "utter absence of co-operation" between the Foreign Office at home and its servants abroad:

"You who are still a human being and able to see things from the general home point of view, will be over-weighted by two such bureaucrats as ---- and ---- ."

Morier's plea for reorganization which should ensure "intercommunion and intercommunication" was emphasized a few weeks later by