Dilke (15 page)

Dilke went on to note two houses in which Gladstone talked particularly well: “In those two houses he was supreme; but if Coleridge or the Viper (Abraham Hayward) or Browning were present, who talked better than he did, and would not give way to him, he was less good.”
²⁸
A little later Dilke was struck by one of Gladstone's social peculiarities. The Duke of Cambridge, on arriving at a dinner party, gave Gladstone his left hand, saying that his right was too painful through gout. “Mr. Gladstone,” Dilke wrote, “threw his arms up to the sky, as though he had just heard of the reception of Lord Beaconsfield in heaven, or of some other similar terrible news. His habit of play-acting in this fashion, in the interest of a supposed politeness, is a very odd one, giving a great air of unreality to everything he does; but of course it is a habit of long years.”
²⁹
Nevertheless Dilke's judgment of Gladstone became increasingly favourable during these years. He thought that, in contrast with Bright, who was seldom in earnest, Gladstone had real moral force, mainly because he always believed passionately in whatever he was speaking about at any particular moment. In 1879, characterically mixing his praise with a sharp job of criticism, he wrote to Mrs. Pattison: “Gladstone is still a great power, and but for his Scotch toadyism to the aristocracy, which is a bad drawback, I could admire him with little reserve.”
³⁰

Dilke's own dinner parties were frequent, with a great variety of guests, although after 1876 they were exclusively male. During that year—the first since the death of his wife in which he had entertained on any scale—he had tried holding parties with ladies, but with only a grandmother to help him found the plan “so uncomfortable that I dropped it.” At one stage it looked as though Dilke's sister-in-law might move into 76, Sloane Street with her husband and act as hostess, but eventually this came to nothing. Ashton Dilke, soon to be elected member of Parliament for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, had married Maye Smith in the spring of 1876. She was the eldest of six daughters of Thomas Eustace Smith, a prosperous but extravagant North of England shipbuilder, who was himself Liberal member for Tyne-mouth. Charles Dilke, who already knew the family and who was destined never to forget them, did not approve of the alliance.

“In April there occurred the marriage of my brother,” he rather mysteriously wrote, “which was a cause of considerable distress to me as he had been very good to me, and, on the other hand, there were circumstances (not connected with his wife or with himself) which made me unable to approve his marriage. As, however, he immediately quarrelled with these others, I contemplated for some months the possibility of asking him and his wife to come and live with me.”
³¹

The only hint at the circumstances in the Dilke papers for these years is in a letter which he wrote to Mrs. Pattison at the beginning of 1880. He was relating a conversation with Mrs. Grant Duff, and reported her as having said to him: “. . . and that set Ellen (Mrs. Eustace) Smith chattering, and you know—you know by your own case—what Ellen Smith's chatter is.”
³²

Despite the absence of women from his parties, Dilke was far from moving in an exclusively male society. From Mrs. Langtry to Miss Rhoda Broughton he met almost everyone. Of the former he wrote in 1877: “Persons had begun to rave at
the beauty of Mrs. Langtry, whom I had known as an ugly child in Jersey and whom I had met in 1876 at Lord Houghton's before she had become a beauty and before anyone had noticed her”; and of the latter—“a very ignorant, very honest, good-hearted sort of woman, with loud, abrupt country-family sort of manners.” A closer friendship was with Miss Alice de Rothschild, a daughter of Baron Lionel de Rothschild and a first cousin of Lady Rosebery. Dilke described her as “a clever and agreeable lady of whom I saw a great deal for several years” until they both began to be disturbed by a spate of congratulations on their approaching marriage. This, Dilke recorded, brought their acquaintance gradually to an end, to his great regret.

A few years later, in 1879, Dilke was writing to Mrs. Pattison, who was certainly herself an exception to his statement, that “the only woman with whom I am now on terms which can be called ‘intimate' is our Lady Venetia.”
*
But this did not prevent his sending to Mrs. Pattison a whole series of very sharp comments upon others. Sometimes these comments were merely engagingly disrespectful, as when after meeting the Roseberys at dinner, he recorded the presence of “fat Hannah and her lord.” At other times he was more severe and built up an impression of himself as a rather censorious individual. After a Sunday with old Lady Russell (the widow of the Prime Minister) at Pembroke Lodge, which in 1879 replaced Strawberry Hill for him as a week-end rendezvous, he wrote of the presence of Miss Laffan,
12
to whom he “did not quite take.” “She is great fun,” he added, “but she looks immodest. . . .” Later in that year he entered into a long discussion, again in a letter to Mrs. Pattison, of the morals of a Mrs. Ronalds. He drew a distinction between her and the Duchess of Manchester, whom “I believe for many years to have been faithful to L(or)d H(artingto)n and he to her,”
and ended by announcing firmly that Mrs. Ronalds ought to be cleared of the charges levelled against her “or else not received.” Again in the next year he wrote: “At the State dinner last night Corti (Italian ambassador to the Porte), who is here for a few days . . . was the most interesting guest. But he is one of those clever, ugly, cynical men, who tho' interested in politics are more interested in the chatter of any and every woman, and so he rushes off to be chattered to.”
³³
The picture of Dilke trying vainly to get some detailed conversation about the intricacies of Near Eastern politics is a vivid one.

Another subject on which Dilke wrote to Mrs. Pattison, was his personal financial position. He was always rather neurotic about this, not out of meanness, but because of an ill-defined fear that some misfortune, perhaps political, perhaps personal, might befall him, which would make the possession of a liquid reserve highly desirable. He therefore began to hoard gold—and continued the practice for several years—depositing his reserves partly in England and partly in France. “I have saved very greatly on clothes and underclothes, and a little as yet on
everything
this year,” he wrote in April, 1879. “I do not use nearly all I put down for ‘self' (which includes luncheons and dinners at the House)—but at present I am hoarding it in cash to have a reserve.”
³⁴

Apart from his neurosis there was little need for Dilke to economise. By the end of the 'seventies, in contrast with the position when his first wife had been alive, he was living within his income, even though this had fallen substantially. In 1880, for instance, he saved £1,650, quite apart from his “hoarding.” But he was not living in a particularly modest way. He kept nine servants at 76, Sloane Street, including a coachman who was paid £70 a year and a stable lad who received £58. The butler's rate was £60 plus 3s. a week for beer money, and the footman's £28 plus 2s. 6d. for beer. The cook was paid £40 a year, the upper housemaid £24, and the under housemaid and the kitchenmaid each received £14. The ninth servant was a nurse for the child who was given,
no wages as such, but who, in addition to her board, was clothed and given a small amount of pocket-money by Mrs. Chatfield.

A sample of how Dilke's other expenses ran is provided by the following schedule of payments for April, 1880:

The total, at £640, is somewhat larger than the monthly average for the year, but this is to be explained by a number of quarterly or half-yearly payments having fallen due.

Dilke's French visit was one of a regular series at this time. In the late summer of 1876 he had rented for four months La Sainte Campagne, a small Provençal property near Toulon. It was a small, grey-walled, eighteenth-century manor of a type more common amidst the poplars of the lie de France than in the harsher landscape of die Midi. The situation was magnificent. The house stood high on the cliffs of Cap Brun, and its terrace commanded one of the best views on the whole coast. In the following year he bought the property, and for some time made a habit of spending several weeks there both at Christmas and Easter. One of his neighbours was Émile Ollivier, who fascinated Dilke because of his knowledge of the origins of the Franco-Prussian War; but for the most part Dilke's visits to Provence were periods of respite both from politics and from his normal social activities. He travelled alone, he rarely had guests in the house, and he lived a quiet and almost solitary life.
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But on his way to and from the South of France he usually spent a few days in Paris, staying at first in the Grand Hôtel, as he had done at the time of the Commune and after his wife's death, but later at the St., James et d'Albany in the Rue St. Honoré; and during these halts he plunged into a life as animated as that of La Sainte Campagne was quiet. Gambetta remained his closest French political friend, but there were many others as well.

During one of these visits to France—perhaps as early as 1874—Dilke was initiated into the art of fencing. He took to the sport immediately, although his style was somewhat boisterous, but for several years it provided him only with occasional holiday relaxation. During the autumn of 1878,
however, he suffered unusually from want of exercise, and in the following February he sought to repair his deficiency by instituting a daily period of fencing at 76, Sloane Street, At the back of the house on the ground floor the dining-room gave out through french windows on to a paved terrace, a few steps above the small garden which lay beyond. Here on the terrace, each morning during the parliamentary session, at least five and sometimes as many as eight or nine
escrimeurs
would assemble for an hour or more. They came at half past nine or ten o'clock and they left at about eleven. In addition to a fencing master, the regular participants included Sir Julian Pauncefote, later permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Lord Desborough, and Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, later French Ambassador at The Hague but at that time a first secretary at Albert Gate. There were other more occasional visitors, amongst them any of the great French or Italian masters who happened to be in London. The clash of the foils and shouts of laughter from Dilke himself were recalled many years later as being familiar sounds in the neighbouring gardens.

His guests may have been earlier risers, but Dilke normally came straight from his bed to the fencing. When it was nearly over he would return to his room to bath and dress, before breakfasting alone, at about 11.15 a.m. This routine he maintained for nearly a decade, including the period when he was in office. He continued to fence, although not with equal regularity, for much longer. Even in the last decade of his life he kept an outfit at one of the best-known Paris fencing establishments, and used frequently to appear there. He was one of the first Englishmen to use the
épée
, and he acquired a considerable skill with this weapon, although he was less good with foils.

The first results of the new fencing régime at Sloane Street appeared to be excellent. Within six weeks Dilke secured by far the greatest parliamentary triumph that his career had known. When Parliament reassembled in February, 1879, the Zulu War had just begun. It was a conflict to which the Government, against the wishes of the Prime Minister and
most of the Cabinet, had been committed by the impetuous local leadership of Sir Bartle Frere. And it had begun badly with defeat at Isandhlwana. Hartington was uncertain what line to take; Gladstone's eye was temporarily much more on Midlothian than on Westminster; and Dilke, who had a clear view that the war was as foolish as it was unjust, was able to take the lead. He was put up to reply to the statement with which Sir Stafford Northcote, as leader of the House, opened on the day of the re-assembly; and this led on to his tabling a motion which was certainly one of censure on Frere and might have been considered to be one upon the Government too. After some delay this came up for debate on March 27th and was the occasion of Dilke's triumph. “I write to you under the violent excitement of a splendid personal success,” he informed Mrs. Pattison that night. “I had an extraordinary oratorical triumph, and received the congratulations of the leading men of both parties.”
³⁶

Elsewhere he wrote rather more calmly of the speech:

“I spoke for two hours and a half, and kept the House full, without ever for an instant being in doubt as to the complete success of the speech; greatly cheered by my own side, without being once questioned or interrupted by the other. But the speech was far from being my best speech, although it was by far my greatest success. It was an easy speech to make—a mere Blue Book speech. The case from the papers was overwhelming. . . . While I was gratified by the success of the speech, I could not help feeling how completely these things are a matter of opportunity, inasmuch as I had made dozens of better speeches in the House, of which some had been wholly unsuccessful.”
³⁷

The newspapers did not share all of Dilke's own reservations. There was general comment that he was the only successful young man that Parliament had produced in recent years; and the
Scotsman
said that no other speech had excited such general admiration since Gladstone's denunciation of the Treaty of
Berlin in the previous summer. This suggestion that Dilke had attained great oratorical heights does not ring true, however.
Truth
, with a piece of Hiawathan verse,* caught much more accurately the note of keen, industrious efficiency which was the real characteristic of his speaking.

Another result of the Zulu debate was the offer to Dilke of a safe seat in Manchester, with the promise that his election expenses would be paid by the local committee. He was attracted by the offer, not least because he was expecting to be beaten at Chelsea. But he had given an undertaking to his supporters there that he would not move until this event actually occurred, which he did not attempt to evade.