Dilke (5 page)

It was notably exercised upon the city of New York, which he thought corrupt, vulgar and, except for its striking physical beauty, generally undesirable. New York drawing-rooms, he was prepared to concede, might already be the most exclusive in the world, but this was no sign of grace, for those who were kept out included the most eminent and the most intellectually distinguished, while those who did the keeping out were marked by none of that special merit which alone could make aristocracy tolerable. The expatriate New Yorkers aroused his especial contempt:

“Many American men and women, who have too little nobility of soul to be patriots, and too little understanding to see that theirs is already, in many points, the master country of the globe, come to you, and bewail the fate that has caused them to be born citizens of a republic, and dwellers in a country where men call vices by their names. The least educated of their countrymen, the only grossly vulgar class that America brings forth, they fly to Europe ‘to escape democracy,' and pass their lives in Paris, Pau, or Nice, living libels on the country they are supposed to represent.”
⁷

Boston he greatly preferred, on account both of its moral tone and of its intellectual quality.

“. . . I met there,” he wrote, “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, Agassiz, Longfellow, Wendell Holmes, Asa Gray, Lowell, Hosea Biglow, Dr. Collyer the Radical Unitarian, and Dr. Hedges 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 Hedges and Collyer were full of an intellectual energy which was new to me, and which had a powerful effect on my work of the time.”
⁸

Unfortunately it subsequently appeared that, in matters of moral tone at least, Dilke did not make so favourable an impression upon President Lowell as that which the President's colleagues, and to a lesser extent the President himself, made upon Dilke.

Harvard evoked from Dilke the curiously premature comment that it showed an air of classic repose which was lacking in the English universities. Cambridge, Massachusetts, he thought much more conducive to quiet study than the intolerable noise of Oxford High Street. But he found New England academic life sadly lacking in a proper respect for athleticism, and rowing assigned a place far below that which it deserved. This he saw as one facet of an excessive regard for brains as opposed to brawn, and, in consequence, of a generally declining standard of health, which he believed to be a feature of New England and to some extent of America as a whole. “The women show even greater signs of weakness than the men,” he added, “and the high undulating tones which are affectation in the French are natural to the ladies of America; little can be expected of women whose only exercise is excessive dancing in overheated rooms.”
⁹
Part of the trouble he was prepared to attribute to the fact that the Americans as a people were prospectors of virgin land. The turning of untilled soil he believed to be one of the unhealthiest occupations in the world. The first beams of sunlight upon hitherto untouched mould were apt to release harmful, malarious gases.

After New England and his short visit to Canada, Dilke moved about the Middle West until, in late August, he went to St. Louis to meet Hepworth Dixon, who had just arrived from England. Dixon was at that time forty-five years of age and the editor of the Dilke family journal, the
Athenœum
. He had come out in order to travel across the great plains with Dilke and to penetrate as far into the mountains as Salt Lake City. This was a more vital point in his itinerary than in Dilke's, for he was particularly concerned to study the position of women in American society, and the Mormons offered important even if peripheral evidence. By the beginning of the following year—1867—Dixon had published in London a two-volume account of his travels.
^[1]
This was a tolerably shrewd and interesting account of what he had seen, but it was hardly a book of outstanding quality. Nevertheless it was a great success, and ran into five editions during its first year of publication. It was in the hands of the public long before Dilke himself could publish anything, before he had returned to England indeed, and it is doubtful whether he regarded a warm dedication as an adequate recompense for this jumping of the gun. In 1869 he dismissed Dixon from the editorship of the
Athenœum
, citing as a reason that the latter wrote books without leave. But in 1866 this trouble was all in the future. Dilke and Dixon found each other agreeable enough travelling companions under very difficult circumstances, although Dilke thought that Dixon's insistence on changing his shirt once a fortnight betrayed an excessive rigidity of mind.

From St. Louis they went, mostly by rail, to Atchison on the Kansas bank of the Missouri, which they believed to be the starting-point of the overland mail to Salt Lake City and San Francisco. On arrival they were told that, by a sudden decision of Congress, this route, the Platte route, had been abandoned in favour of the shorter but more hazardous Smoky Hill route. They therefore moved south to Leavenworth, the new starting-point. While waiting in this Kansas town Dilke wrote two important letters. In the first he told his father of his intention, conceived but not announced
before he left home, to extend his journey to Australia and to make a complete circle of the globe before returning home. In the second, with more than a touch of the old priggishness, he gave his brother Ashton a great deal of advice on his Cambridge career, and in the course of doing so announced his own plans for the longer-term future. “My aim in life,” Charles Dilke wrote, “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.”
^[2]
10

On August 28th Dilke and Dixon left Leavenworth. The journey across the plains took place first in an old Concord coach and then in a light prairie wagon, with no doors and very bad springs. Their only companions were the driver and forty-two unsealed bags of United States mail. The former was an inadequate substitute for the impressive mounted guard which they were promised would join them at Junction City, but which never arrived. The latter made the interior of the coach still more uncomfortable than it would otherwise have been. For the opportunity of travelling in such circumstances they were charged the enormous fare of 500 dollars a head, from Leavenworth to Salt Lake City. It was a high price to pay, as they both observed, for the privilege of guarding the mail.

The first major stage of the journey, to Denver, took just over four days and nights. During this stage they were subjected to the constant danger of Indian attack. The Platte route to the north and the Santa Fé route to the south had
both been accepted, but the use of this central Smoky Hill route was still bitterly contested by the Cheyennes. It ran through excellent buffalo country, and the Indians rightly thought that the coaches would be merely the forerunners of a railway. In the event Dilke and Dixon saw nothing of marauding tribes, but several of the posts at which they stopped were to be wiped out within a few weeks. Despite the teeming animal, bird and reptile life of the plains, food was a great problem. They got no full meal between breakfast on their first morning out and their arrival in Denver. Occasional rather inadequate helpings of prairie dog were the best that they could do. Great herds of buffalo, each about three hundred strong, were in sight most of the time, but their hides could not be pierced with ordinary rifles.

Once in Denver, Dilke's health and spirits recovered rapidly under the influence of the mountain air and “the heaven-blessed climate,” as he expressed it. He was soon in a sufficiently buoyant mood to assure the Governor of Colorado, who pressed him to settle in Denver with the offer to name a mountain peak after him, that this was not enough. “I told him that unless he would carry a constitutional amendment allowing a foreign-born subject to be President of the United States, he would not receive my services,”
¹¹
he wrote.

From Denver to Salt Lake City the journey took five days. Here, after interviews with Brigham Young and other appropriate investigations into Mormonism, Dixon and Dilke separated. The former made his way back to the East Coast and to England. The latter pushed on to the Californian gold-workings and eventually to San Francisco. He began by reducing himself to a state of desperate tiredness with another sleepless five days and nights stage across Nevada to Virginia City. “The brain seemed divided into two parts,” he wrote, “thinking independently, and one side putting questions while the other answered them; but this time there was also a sort of half insanity, a not altogether disagreeable wandering of the mind, a replacing of the actual by an imagined ideal scene.”
¹²
Later, however, the going was much easier. First, between Virginia City and Carson City, he struck a reasonable
road, with grades and bridges. Then, from Placerville to Sacramento, he was able to take a train for the first time for 1,800 miles. Finally he steamed down the Sacramento River to reach San Francisco Bay and the Pacific. California, he decided rather surprisingly, was “too British to be typically American.”

From San Francisco he continued to follow “England round the world.” By November he was in New Zealand, by the end of December in Sydney, and by April in Calcutta. He remained a vigorous traveller and a keen observer, but his descriptions, his judgments and his comments lost something of the sharpness and spirit they had possessed in North America. Perhaps he was growing tired of being away, perhaps the scenes he now saw would at any time have been less interesting to his eyes. Whatever the reason, his writings lost something of their earlier verve. There were occasional familiar Dilke touches, however. In New Zealand he saw in the gradual replacement of the native fly by the imported English fly a parallel with the relative performances of the indigenous and immigrant races. In Victoria and South Australia he accumulated a great deal of detailed and useful information on the working of the secret ballot and the machinery of registration. In the Ganges Valley he expatiated on the ill-health of the British in the sub-continent, and decided that most of it was due to a combination of carelessness and over-indulgence. “If a man wears a flannel belt and thick clothes when he travels by night, and drinks hot tea,” he concluded, “he need not fear India.”
¹³

He returned from Bombay by way of Egypt—where he thought he saw French influence overseas at its worst—and Italy. In June, 1867, he was back in London. He had been away a full year. His general summing-up was that the future belonged in an unrealised degree to the Anglo-Saxon race. “No possible series of events,” he wrote, “can prevent the English race itself in 1970 numbering 300 millions of beings—of one national character and one tongue. Italy, Spain, France, Russia become pigmies by the side of such a people.”
¹⁴

Immediately upon his return, Dilke set to work to construct
out of the letters which he had written home a book of travel reminiscences and political judgments. The work took him a year, being a good deal interrupted by ill-health. He had been infected with malaria in Ceylon,
^[3]
and this led to a long period of weak appetite and delirious sleeplessness at night. Finally, in the summer of 1868, he developed typhoid, but by that time the book was already in the press, and the only permanent result was that, in consequence of the proofs being corrected by his father, the first edition contained what Charles Dilke regarded as a gross crop of errors. Dilke had signed an agreement with Macmillans in March, 1868, under the terms of which they were to print a first impression of 1,500 copies, and the author was to receive an advance of £200 and no less than 200 free copies. The terms were highly favourable to a young man of twenty-four, publishing his first book, but they were more than justified by the success which was achieved.
Greater Britain
, the title chosen by Dilke to sum up not only his itinerary but a large part of his political philosophy, was extremely well received by the Press. It quickly ran through four editions in England, and remained a widely read book for nearly fifty years. In America it sold even more copies, but as the editions were pirated this brought no financial benefit to Dilke. A truncated version was translated and published in Russia.

The book gave Dilke not only a considerable politico-literary reputation, but also a wide range of new contacts. Perhaps the 200 free copies helped here, for throughout the winter months of 1868-9 a steady stream of letters of thanks and commendation poured into 76, Sloane Street. The most important came from J. S. Mill, then at Avignon. On February 9th, 1869, Mill, who had never met Dilke, wrote in the following terms:

“It is long since any book connected with practical politics has been published on which I build such high
hopes of the future usefulness and distinction of the writer, shewing, as it does, that he not only possesses a most unusual amount of real knowledge on many of the principal questions of the future, but a mind strongly predisposed to what are (at least in my opinion) the most advanced and enlightened views of them.”
¹⁵

This letter, which went on to make some criticism, including the point that the author attributed far too exclusive an influence upon national character to race and climate, was the beginning, for Dilke, of a most valuable and formative relationship. As soon as Mill returned to England he invited Dilke to dine at Blackheath. On Easter Day, 1869, the meeting took place. Thereafter the acquaintance rapidly developed into a close friendship, with Dilke happily accepting the role of disciple. In May of the same year Mill secured Dilke's election to the Political Economy Club, his candidature prevailing over that of such distinguished if heterogeneous rivals as Shaw Lefevre, Louis Mallet, Monckton Milnes and John Morley. At that time Mill was endeavouring to lead the club away from the rigidly individualist doctrine which it had been taught by Ricardo, Malthus, and his own father and towards his own, recently developed, semi-socialist views. He was strongly opposed by Henry Fawcett. Dilke, however, had little difficulty in deciding to support his new master rather than his old teacher. “I gradually deserted Fawcett,” he wrote, “and, more and more influenced by Mill's later views, finally came to march even in front of Mill in our advance.”
¹⁶