The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke Volume I Part 7

"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 G.o.dwin: _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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ma.n.u.script note describes his varying att.i.tude 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 pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.suming 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 s.e.x. 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 pa.s.sage 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, Aga.s.siz, 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 Ca.s.swell" (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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 circ.u.mstances.

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 ash.o.r.e 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 G.o.dliness.'

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 const.i.tutional 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-cla.s.s man'--then you can give up cla.s.sics 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 G.o.d-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.