II.
On returning to London after the Easter recess of 1872, Sir Charles resumed his political duties in and out of Parliament. The Radical Club, of which he remained Secretary till he took office in 1880, exercised some little influence in the House of Commons, and was of some value in bringing men together for the exchange of ideas, but began to present difficulties in its working, and soon 'dropped very much into the hands of Fawcett. Fitzmaurice, and myself.'
Apart from weekly attendance at its meetings, Sir Charles did not go out much. 'We were so wrapped up in ourselves,' he says, 'that I have no doubt we were spoken of as selfish.' The marriage had resulted in a tie much closer than the simple union of two people who would "get on very well together." Lady Dilke was a creature of glowing life. Those who remember her say that when she entered a room the whole atmosphere seemed to change: she was so brilliant, so handsome, so charged with vitality, so eager always in everything.
From this period there were dinners at 76, Sloane Street, twice a week, and among those who gathered about the Dilkes 'were Harcourt; Kinglake, the historian; Stopford Brooke (who had not then left the Church of England), Brookfield, the Queen's chaplain, commonly known as the "naughty parson," and husband of Thackeray's Amelia, Fitzmaurice; Charles Villiers; Mrs. Procter (widow of Barry Cornwall); Miss Tizy Smith, daughter of Horace Smith, of Rejected Addresses; James (afterwards Sir Henry James).' Browning also 'was constantly at the house,' and read there his "Red Cotton Nightcap Country"—'at his own request.' Lord Houghton began in these days an intimacy which lasted till his death. Of Americans, there were Leland ("Hans Breitmann") and Mark Twain, and with these are named a number of foreign guests: Émile de Laveleye, the economist; Ricciotti Garibaldi; Moret, the Spanish Minister.
'We used to judge the position of affairs in Spain by whether Moret wore or did not wear the Golden Fleece when he came to dinner. When Castelar was dictator and the Republic proceeding upon conservative lines, the sheep hung prominently at his side. When the Republic was federalist and democratic, as was the case from time to time, the sheep was left at home in a box.'
Others in the list of guests were Taglioni, 'in her youth the famous dancer, and in her old age Comtesse Gilbert de Voisins, the stupidest and most respectable of old dames,' and Ristori, the tragedian, who stayed at Sloane Street 'with her husband, the Marquis Capranica del Grillo, and their lovely daughter Bianca.'
A novel feature at some of Lady Dilke's evenings was the production of French comedies by M. Brasseur, the celebrated comedian, and father of the well-known actor of the present day. At all times in Sir Charles Dilke's life his house was a great meeting-place for those who loved and knew France and the French tongue.
Many painters were among the Chelsea constituents, and in 1868 Rossetti, having been pressed to vote, replied:
"I think if Shakespeare and Michael Angelo were going to the poll, and if the one were not opposing the other, and if there were no danger of being expected to take an active part in the chairing of either, I might prove for once to have enough political electricity to brush a vote out of me, like a spark out of a cat's back. But I fear no other kind of earthly hero could do it."
Another constituent was Carlyle, who in 1871 came to Dilke with a memorial in favour of a Civil List pension for Miss Geraldine Jewsbury. Out of him also no vote had been "brushed": he had exercised the franchise only once in his life. Passing through his native village, he had seen a notice that persons who would pay half a crown could be registered, and he had paid his fee and had been registered. He had thought at the time, so he told Sir Charles, that "heaven and hell hung on that vote," but he "had found out afterwards that they did not."
It was in the course of 1872 that Sir Charles carried out one of his grandfather's instructions by distributing old Mr. Dilke's books—
'in those quarters where I thought they would be useful in the cause of historic research, or where they would be best preserved. The British Museum had the first choice, and took those of the books relating to the Commonwealth, to the Stuarts, to Pope, and to Junius, which they had not already on their shelves. [Footnote: 'The Stuart papers consisted of the Caryll papers and the Seaforth Mackenzie papers, which last were first used by the Marchesa Campana da Cavelli in the preparation of a great work on the Stuart documents, in which they were fully quoted.'] I then offered the remainder of the Junius collection to Chichester Fortescue, at that time President of the Board of Trade (afterwards Lord Carlingford), husband of the famous Lady Waldegrave, and tenant in consequence of Strawberry Hill, where he was reforming Horace Walpole's library.'
It was a house at which Sir Charles became very intimate but not till some years later. About this time Lady Strachie remembers the interest with which, as a young girl at her aunt's table, she glanced down the row of guests to catch the profile of 'Citizen Dilke,' who, with his wife, was dining there for the first time.
Lord Carlingford believed that Francis wrote Junius, a view which old Mr.
Dilke opposed.
'But Abraham Hayward, who was constantly with him, held anti- Franciscan opinions, and he would, I knew, have the full run of the books, which I was certain in Fortescue's hands would be carefully preserved. My arrangements were not concluded until the end of the following year, 1873, when I presented the last of the Pope books and all my grandfather's Pope manuscripts to John Murray, the publisher, in consequence of his great interest in the new edition.' [Footnote: Elwin and Courthope's edition of Pope's works.]
In the same year Sir Charles Dilke made another arrangement which testified to the strength of his brotherly affection. Wentworth Dilke had left his personal property in the proportion of two-thirds to the elder son and one-third to the younger; and had also exercised a power of appointment which he held by dividing his wife's property in the same way. Charles Dilke now decided that the shares should be equalized, and secured this by handing over one-sixth of his property to Ashton, who was at this time in Russia, on a journey of exploration extending over the greater part of that Empire.
About this time also Sir Charles purchased Notes and Queries for £2,500 from its founder, Mr. Thoms, the Librarian of the House of Lords, 'one of the dearest old men that ever was worshipped by his friends,' and a devoted admirer of old Mr. Dilke. He appointed Dr. Doran to be editor, "partly as consolation for having refused him the editorship of the Athenaeum, for which he had asked as an old contributor and as the yearly acting editor in the 'editor's holiday.'" But Sir Charles's choice had fallen on Mr. Norman MacColl, 'that Scotch Solomon,' as he sometimes called this admirable critic, who conducted the paper for thirty years.
'In the autumn we went abroad again, and took a letter of introduction to George Sand, for whose talent Katie had a great admiration. We missed her at Trouville, but found her afterwards in Paris—an interesting person, hideously ugly, but more pleasant than her English rival novelist, the other pseudonymous George. They had few points in common except that both wrote well and were full of talent of a different kind and were equally monstrous, looking like two old horses.'
Of George Eliot's "talent" he wrote to Hepworth Dixon in 1866:
"The only fact of which I am at this present very certain … is that Miss Evans is not far from being the best indirect describer of character and the wittiest observer of human nature that has lived in England since Shakespeare, and I think that there are touches in Amos Barton, Scenes from Clerical Life, and in the first few chapters of The Mill on the Floss quite worthy of Shakespeare himself."
Also there is reference to a letter quoted in George Eliot's Life which tells that the year 1873 "began sweetly" for her, because "a beautiful bouquet with a pretty legend was left at my door by a person who went away after ringing." 'It was I,' says Sir Charles, 'who left that bouquet and I who wrote that legend. It was Katie who prepared the bouquet and asked me to take it.'