II.
Sir Charles, as representing the Foreign Office in the House of Commons, was naturally in close touch with Mr. Gladstone; in addition, the commercial negotiations necessitated frequent interviews. The admiration which Sir Charles felt for his chief was, however, frequently crossed by differences of opinion, especially as to his method of approaching foreign affairs.
'Writing to express his concurrence in my action with regard to the commercial negotiations, Mr. Gladstone went on to say: "I am glad Gambetta says that he is in the same boat as us as to Panama. Our safety there will be in acting as charged with the interests of the world minus America." This was a curious example of the world of illusions in which Mr. Gladstone lives. The Americans had informed us that they did not intend to be any longer bound by the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, and that in the event of the completion of the Panama Canal they intended virtually to keep it in their own hands. Mr. Gladstone called in France in joint protest with us against this view, although he might have foreseen the utter impossibility in the long-run of resisting American pretensions on such a point, and although he himself would have been the first, when the Americans threatened war (as they would have done later on), to yield to threats that which he would not yield to argument. It amused Harcourt, however, to concoct with the Chancellor and the Foreign Office portentous despatches to Mr. Blaine, in which we lectured the Americans on the permanency of their obligations. How childish it all was! Moreover, the Monroe doctrine suits our interests.'
Sir Charles's letters to Mr. Gladstone, even when short and business-like, are marked by a deference which he used to no one else; and the deference at times has the accent of affection. Sir Charles always enjoyed Mr. 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 Duchess 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.'