"In reference to your request that in good feeling and friendship towards you I should defer the publication of my Russia from February 1st, 1870 (the date fixed with Macmillan), to a later period, I have carefully thought the matter over, and have decided to do as you wish. The only condition that I make is that you will write to me by return of post saying whether, if I fix January 1st, 1871, as my day, you will date your preface not later than February 1st, 1870, and issue your first edition not more than a week after that date."
Dixon wrote back on the same day:
"My Dear Charles,
"I am more pleased at your resolution than words can say. It is more than right. It is friendly and noble."
'Mr. Dixon immediately went to Russia, where we met in the course of the autumn, and speedily published his New Russia, a remarkable book considering the haste with which it was prepared. After five visits to Russia, I handed over the whole of my notes to my brother, who spent two years at one time in that country, and who finished the book.' [Footnote: Only two chapters ever appeared—in magazines.]
Sir Charles's contributions to the Athenaeum began while he was still at Cambridge. His article of October 22nd, 1864, [Footnote: See Chapter V. (Vol. I.)] was the first of a long series of reviews and notices, which continued unbrokenly till within a week of his death. It was natural that, as years went by, his knowledge and experience should be drawn upon for reviews of important political biographies, and of books on imperial and colonial questions or military history. But he did not confine himself entirely to such grave topics. The files of the Athenaeum contain many columns from his hand dealing with the lighter matters of topography (especially in France), travel, and fiction. The fiction was mainly French, modern English novels commending themselves little to his liking, though he was among the earliest and steadiest, if also among the more discriminating, admirers of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Prince Otto had a place with his favourite books. Another subject which attracted his pen was the local and legendary history of his beloved Provence. His intimate acquaintance with the beliefs and fancies of that region could be gathered from his slightest notice of an ephemeral book on the country, as readily as his store of political knowledge and familiarity with the events that made history in his time from an extended review of a volume of L'Empire Libéral or the life of a leading contemporary in the House of Commons. In neither case could his hand be hid.
In influencing the choice of contributors to his paper, he threw his weight always on the side of the man who had complete knowledge of his subject. No brilliancy of style could make up in his eyes for lack of precision in thought or inaccuracy in statement. Next in order he appeared to value in a reviewer a judicial quality of mind, as essential to a sane and balanced criticism. "He disapproved"—to quote Mr. C. A. Cook again—"of anything fanciful in expression or any display of sentiment;" but, so long as writers kept clear of these literary pitfalls, he let them go their own road of style, with ready appreciation for any freshness or liveliness they exhibited on the journey. Reviews of French books were a special object of care, and for the Athenaeum's annual survey of French literature he bestirred himself to secure the best hand available. In a letter to M. Joseph Reinach, dated July, 1888, he gives a list of the distinguished men—including MM. About, De Pressensé, and Sarrazin—who had written this survey in past years, ending with a suggestion that M. Reinach himself might perhaps be willing to undertake the task.
In his writing, as in his speaking, his object was always either to place facts before his audience, or to develop a closely reasoned argument based upon the facts. He took no trouble to cultivate literary graces in this connection; rather he seemed to distrust them, as in his speeches he distrusted and avoided appeals to the feelings of his hearers. But it would be a great mistake to infer from his own practice that he was insensible to beauty of form and style. The literature he cared for most, that which roused his enthusiasm and provoked the expression of emotion so rare with him in the later years of his life—the literature of France before the Renaissance, the poetry of Keats and Shelley, some of the lyrics of the Félibres—is of the kind in which content owes so much to beauty of form that it is impossible to conceive of the one without the other; and he certainly took quite as much delight in the sound as in the sense of his favourites. Even in those favourites he was quick to detect a flaw. His grandfather's introduction of him to the best in literature had not been wasted; and his own early reading had given him a touchstone of taste which he used freely as a standard, although it was powerless to obtain admission to his accepted company of men of letters for those who made no appeal to him individually. The Memoir shows that his self-training in literature (for the grandfather did no more than indicate the way) was carried out in youth; it was at Cambridge, while still an undergraduate, that he read Shakespeare 'for pleasure.' And this was true also of the great authors of his own time. The results of that reading remained with him through life.
The Memoir dwells little upon his literary interests, and contains few literary judgments. He himself gives the reason:
'They do not pretend to be critical memoirs…. I have known everyone worth knowing from 1850 to my death; but, as I knew the most distinguished of my own country in childhood or early manhood, my judgments have changed. I have either to give crude judgments from which I dissent, or later judgments which were not those of the time. I have omitted both…. I knew the great Victorian authors. Thackeray I loved: Vanity Fair delighted me, and Esmond was obviously a great work of art; the giant charmed me by his kindness to me as a boy. But Dickens was to me a sea-captain with a taste for melodrama, and the author of Pickwick. It is only in old age that I have learnt that there was real beauty and charm in David Copperfield. So, too, Mill I worshipped; and Carlyle, though I knew him, I despised—perhaps too much. Mat. Arnold was to me, in his day and my day, only a society trifler, whereas now … after for years I have visited his tomb, I recognize him as a great writer of the age in which he lived.'