The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Volume 1

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

CHAPTER III

CAMBRIDGE

Charles Dilke was sent in 1862, as in later days he sent his own son, to his father's college. Trinity Hall in the early sixties was a community possessing in typical development the combination of qualities which Cambridge has always fostered. Neither very large nor very small, it had two distinguishing characteristics: it was a rowing college, and it was a college of lawyers. Although not as a rule distinguished in the Tripos Lists, it was then in a brilliant period.

The Memoir will show that in Dilke's first year a Hall man was Senior Wrangler, and that the boat started head of the river. Such things do not happen without a cause; and the college at this moment numbered on its staff some of the most notable figures in the University. The Vice-Master, Ben Latham, for thirty-five years connected with the Hall, was of those men whose reputation scarcely reaches the outside world; but he had found the college weak, he had made it strong, and he was one of the institutions of Cambridge.

Among the junior Fellows were Fawcett and Leslie Stephen. Both were profound believers in hard tonic discipline of mind and body, inculcating their belief by doctrine and example; and both, with great diversity of gifts, had the rough strong directness of intellectual attack which Cambridge, then perhaps more than at any other time, set in contrast to the subtleties of Oxford culture.

Leslie Stephen in particular, who had been a tutor and who was still a clerical Fellow, made it his business to meet undergraduates on their own ground. Hard work and hard bodily exercise—but, above all, hard bodily exercise—made up the gospel which he preached by example. No one ever did more to develop the cult of athletics, and there is no doubt that he thought these ideals the best antidote to drunkenness and other vices, which were far more rife in the University of that day than of this.

Both he and Fawcett were strenuous Radicals, and contact with them was well fitted to infuse fresh vitality into the political beliefs which Charles Dilke had assumed by inheritance from his grandfather. In these ways of thought he met them on ground already familiar and attractive to him. His introduction to Fawcett was at the Economics and Statistics Section of the British Association, which he attended at Cambridge in the first week of his first term. "I am one of the few people who really enjoy statistics," he said, long years after this, in a presidential address to the Statistical Society. But it was early at nineteen to develop this exceptional taste.

In another domain of modern thought these elder men affected his mind considerably and with a new order of ideas. Old Mr. Dilke seems to have left theology out of his purview altogether; and it was at Cambridge that Charles Dilke first met the current of definitely sceptical thought on religious matters.

Fawcett was aggressively unorthodox. But far more potent was the influence of Leslie Stephen, then with infinite pain struggling under the yoke that he had taken on himself at ordination, and had not yet shaken off. The effect of Stephen's talk—though he influenced young men as much by his dry critical silence as by his utterances—was heightened by admiration for his athletic prowess. He coached the college Eights: anyone who has been at a rowing college will realize how commanding an ascendancy is implied. But his athletics covered every phase of muscular activity; and Fawcett joined him in encouraging the fashion of long walks.

Another of the long-walkers whom the Memoir notes as among the chief influences of those days was Leslie Stephen's pupil Romer, the Admirable Crichton of that moment—oarsman, cricketer, and Trinity Hall's hope in the Mathematical Tripos. The future Lord Justice of Appeal was then reading for the Tripos, in which he was to be Senior Wrangler; and, according to Cambridge custom, took a certain amount of coaching as part of his work. Charles Dilke was one of those whom he instructed, and it was the beginning of a friendship which lasted many years.

Looking back, Sir Robert Romer says that most undergraduates are simply grown-up boys, and that at Trinity Hall in his day there was no variation from this type till Dilke came there—a lad who, to all appearance, had never associated with other lads, whose companions had been grown-up people, and who had mature ideas and information on everything. But, thrown among other young men, the young man found himself with surprising rapidity. Elements in his nature that had never been brought out developed at once; and one of these was a great sense of fun. Much stronger than he looked, he plunged into athletics with a perfectly simple delight. "Nobody," says Sir Robert Romer, "could make more noise at a boating supper." This frank natural glee remained with him to the end. Always disputatious, always a lover of the encounter of wits, he had none the less a lifelong gift for comradeship in which there was little clash of controversy and much hearty laughter.

One of the eight-and-twenty freshmen who matriculated at Trinity Hall along with Charles Dilke in 1862 was David Fenwick Steavenson, a dalesman from Northumberland, with whom he formed a lasting friendship. The two had seemingly little in common. Dilke to all appearance was "very serious," and in disposition of mind ten years older than his fellows, while the young Northumbrian's whole preoccupation was to maintain and enlarge the fame of his college on the river. If the friendship was to develop, Steavenson must undoubtedly become interested in intellectual matters, but not less certainly Dilke must learn to row. It was a very useful discipleship for the future politician. Sloping shoulders, flat and narrow chest, height too great for his build: these were things that Cambridge helped to correct. Dilke, a willing pupil, was diligently coached by the stronger man, until he became an accomplished and effective oar. In general Judge Steavenson's recollection confirms Sir Robert Romer's, and gives precision to one detail. In their second year, upon the occasion of some triumph on the river, there was to be a bump supper, but the college authorities forbade, whereupon an irregular feast was arranged—this one bringing a ham, that a chicken, and so on. When the heroes had put from them desire of eating and drinking, they sallied out, and after a vigorous demonstration in the court, proceeded to make music from commanding windows. It was Charles Dilke who had provided the whistles and toy drums for this ceremony, and Judge Steavenson retains a vision of the future statesman at his window [Footnote: Dilke's rooms were on Staircase A, on the first floor, above the buttery. They have not for very many years been let to an undergraduate, as they are too near the Fellows' Combination Room.] blowing on a whistle with all his might. The authorities were vindictive, and Dilke suffered deprivation of the scholarship which he had won at the close of his freshman year.

Such penalties carry no stigma with them. It should be noted, too, that at a period of University history when casual excess in drink was no reproach, but rather the contrary, Charles Dilke, living with boating men in a college where people were not squeamish, drank no wine. Judge Steavenson adds that the dislike of coarse talk which was marked with him later was equally evident in undergraduate days.

Charles Dilke's own ambition and industry were reinforced by the keen anxiety of his people. Concealing nothing of their eagerness for him to win distinction, those who watched his career with such passionate interest set their heart, it would seem, on purely academic successes. Sir Wentworth Dilke may well have feared, from his own experience, that old Mr. Dilke's expectations might again be disappointed by a student who found University life too full of pleasure. At all events it was to his father that the freshman wrote, October 24th, 1862, a fortnight after he had matriculated:

"I am very sorry to see by your letter of this morning that you have taken it into your head that I am not reading hard. I can assure you, on the contrary, that I read harder than any freshman except Osborn, who takes no exercise whatever; and that I have made the rowing-men very dissatisfied by reading all day three days a week. On the other three I never read less than six hours, besides four hours of lectures and papers. I have not missed reading a single evening yet since I have been here; that is, either from six, or seven, till eleven, except Saturday at Latham's. This—except for a fourth-year man—is more than even the tutors ask for…. I hope I have said enough to convince you that you are entirely wrong; what has made you so has been my account of breakfasts, which are universal, and neither consume time nor attract attention. I was at one this morning—I left my rooms at twenty-five minutes to nine, and returned to them at five minutes to nine, everything being over."

This scrupulous economy of time was to be characteristic of Charles Dilke's whole life, and nothing impressed his contemporaries more at all times than the "methodical bee-like industry" attributed to him by the present Master of Trinity Hall. Mr. Beck, who came up to the college just after Dilke left it, thus expands the impression:

"There remained in Trinity Hall in 1867 a vivid tradition that he was one of the few men who never lost a minute, would even get in ten minutes of work between river and Hall (which was in those days at five o'clock); and much resembled the Roman who learned Greek in the time saved from shaving. On the doorpost inside his bedroom over the Buttery there remained in pencil the details of many days of work thus pieced together." [Footnote: Cambridge Review, February 2nd, 1911.]

Judge Steavenson recalls how he used to be "bundled out" of his friend's rooms the instant that the appointed hour for beginning to read had arrived, and he did his best to mitigate the strenuousness of that application. But there were stronger influences at work than his: Sir Wentworth Dilke was fully satisfied with the assurance he had received, as well he might be; but the grandfather never ceased to enforce the claims of study. He wrote ceaselessly, but with constant exhortations that he should be answered only when work and play allowed.

When the letters from Cambridge told of success in athletics, he responded, but with a temperate rejoicing. Here, for instance, is his reference to the news that the freshman had rowed in the winning boat of the scratch fours on March 14th, 1863:

"I am glad that you have won your 'pewter'—as I was glad when you took rank among the best of the boating freshmen—although I have not set my heart on your plying at Blackfriars Bridge, nor winning the hand of the daughters of Horse-ferry as the 'jolly young waterman,' or old Doggett's Coat and Badge. But all things in degree; and therefore I rejoice a hundred times more at your position in the college Euclid examination."

There was no mistaking old Mr. Dilke's distaste for all these athletics, and it was to his father, on this one point more sympathetic, that the freshman wrote this characteristic announcement of a great promotion:

"Edwards" (captain of the Trinity Hall Boat Club) "has just called to inform me that I am to row in the head-of-the-river boat to- morrow, and to go into training for it.

"The time wasted if I row in it will not be greater than in the 2nd, but there is one difference—namely, that it may make me more sleepy at nights. I must read hard before breakfast. Romer—who is my master and pastor—tells me of all things to row in it,—this year at all events."

He did row in the May races of his first year, and with so little detriment to his work that in the following month he secured the first mathematical scholarship in the college examination. This triumph may well have disposed old Mr. Dilke to accept a suggestion which is recorded in the correspondence. On June 2nd it was decided that Trinity Hall should send an eight to Henley, and the letter adds: "I should think my grandfather would like to come and stay at or near Henley while I am there."

Before the date fixed, the oarsman had been inducted scholar, and so Mr.
Dilke could go with a free heart to see his grandson row in the Grand
Challenge against Brasenose and Kingston, where Trinity Hall defeated
Kingston, but were themselves defeated by Brasenose in a very fast race.

It was not only in the examination halls and on the river that Charles Dilke was winning reputation. He had joined the Volunteers, and proved himself among the crack rifleshots of the University corps; he had won walking races, but especially he had begun to seek distinction in a path which led straight to his natural goal.

The impression left on Sir Robert Romer's mind was that Dilke came up to the University elaborately trained with a view to a political career. This is to read into the facts a wrong construction; the purpose, if it existed at all, was latent only in his mind. The training which he had received from his grandfather lent itself admirably, it is true, to the making of a statesman; but it was the pupil's temperament which determined the application of that rich culture.

The first debate which he had the chance to attend at the Union was on October 28th, 1862, the motion being: "That the cause of the Northern States is the cause of humanity and progress, and that the widespread sympathy with the Confederates is the result of ignorance and misrepresentation."

The discussion gained in actuality from the fact that the President of the Union was Mr. Everett, son of the distinguished literary man who had been America's representative in London, and was at this time Secretary of State in the Federal Government. But the South had a notable ally. Mr. George Otto Trevelyan, author of some of the best light verse ever written by an undergraduate, was still in residence, though he had before this taken his degree; and he shared in those days the sentimental preference for the South. Dilke reported to his grandfather: "Trevelyan's speech was mere flash, but very witty." "Mere flash" the freshman was likely to think it, for he shared his grandfather's opinions, and gave his first Union vote for the North—in a minority of 34 against 117. "Very witty" it was sure to be, and its most effective hit was a topical allusion. The Union Society of those days had its quarters in what had originally been a Wesleyan chapel—a large room in Green Street, the floor of which is now used as a public billiard saloon, while the galleries from which applause and interruption used to come freely now stand empty. There had long been complaint of its inadequacy; Oxford had set the example of a special edifice, and as far back as 1857 a Building Fund had been started, which, however, dragged on an abortive existence from year to year, a constant matter of gibes. 'Can the North restore the Union?' Mr. Trevelyan asked. 'Never, sir; they have no Building Fund'; and the punning jest brought down a storm of applause.

But when Mr. Trevelyan, after a year spent in India, came back to England and to Cambridge gossip in the beginning of 1864, he learnt that this despised Building Fund had been taken seriously in hand, that one undergraduate in particular was corresponding with all manner of persons, and that this Union also was going to be restored. That was how the present Sir George Trevelyan first heard the name of Charles Dilke.

Even in his earliest term Dilke soon passed out of the rôle of a mere listener and critic. The Commissioners of the International Exhibition of 1862 were then being sharply criticized, and on November 25th "a man of the name of Hyndman" (so the undergraduate's letter described this other undergraduate, afterwards to be well known as the Socialist writer and speaker) moved "a kind of vote of censure" upon them. It was natural enough that Sir Wentworth Dilke's son should brief the defence, and among the papers of 1862 is a bundle of "Notes by me for Everett's speech." Next he was trying his own mettle; and opposed a motion "that Prince Alfred should be permitted to accept the throne of Greece." His own note is:

'On the 8th December I made my first speech, advocating a Greek
Republic, and suggesting that if they must have a King, they had
better look to the northern nations to supply one. I was named by
Everett, the President, as one of the tellers in the Division.'

Probably the speech had been no more of a success than most maiden speeches, for Mr. Dilke's letter reads like a consolation:

"The Greek debate I care little about. I would much rather have read a paper on the subject. Till a man can write he cannot speak— except, as Carlyle would say, 'in a confused babble of words and ideas.'"

The main part of the grandson's letters were concerned with the topics handled and the speeches made at the Union.

"November 7th, 1862.

"How wavering and shortsighted the policy of England in Turco-Grecian matters has been of late! Compare Navarino and Sebastopol. Palmerston will, if he has his way, oblige the Greeks to continue in much the same state of degradation as hitherto, and will go on holding up the crumbling Turkish Empire till some rising of Christians occurs at a time when we have our hands full and cannot afford to help our 'old friend.' Then Turkey-in-Europe will vanish. I do not myself believe in the Pan-Slavonic Empire. The Moldavians, Hungarians, and Greeks could never be long united; but I think that Greece might hold the whole of the coast and mountain provinces without containing in itself fatal elements of disunion.

"Brown—No. 3 of our four—broke from his training to-day, and spent
the whole day with the hounds. That will never do."

Mr. Dilke in reply did not conceal the amusement which was awakened in him by the rowing man's deadly seriousness:

"November 9th, 1862.

"I agree with you. No Browns, no hunting fellows, no divided love!! If 'a man' goes in 'our boat' he goes in to win. "Broke from his training!" Abominable! Had he 'broke from his training' when standing out for Wrangler, why so be it, his honour only would be concerned; but here it is our honour, T. H. for ever, and no fox-hunting!

"After this, the Greek question falls flat on the ears, but I will
suggest…"

and thereupon he goes into hints for research, very characteristic in their thoroughness, ending with a practical admonition:

"Now comes 'The Moral.' As you could not speak on the great Ionian question, why not write on it? Write down what you would or could have said on the subject. Take two or three hours of leisure and quiet; write with great deliberation, but write on till the subject is concluded. No deferring, no bit by bit piecework, but all offhand. No correction, not a word to be altered; once written let it stand. Put the Essay aside for a month. Then criticize it with your best judgment—the order and sequence of facts, its verbal defects, its want or superabundance of illustration, its want or superabundance of detail, etc., etc."

Another letter of Dilke's in his freshman year concerns the art of debate:

"What is wanted is common-sense discussion in well-worded speeches with connected argument, the whole to be spoken loud enough to be heard, and with sufficient liveliness to convince the hearers of the speaker's interest in what he is saying. So far as this is oratory, it is cultivated (with very moderate success) at the Union."

From the ideal here indicated—an accurate analysis of 'the House of Commons manner'—Charles Dilke never departed, and his grandfather in replying eagerly reinforced the estimate:

"I agree to all you say about that same Union, and about the Orators and Oratory. I should have said it myself, but thought it necessary to clear the way. I rejoice that no such preliminary labour was required. I agree that even Chatham was a 'Stump'—what he was in addition is not our question. I hope and believe he was the last of our Stumpers. Burke, so far as he was an Orator, was a Stump and something more, and the more may be attributed to the fact that he was a practised writer, where Chatham was not, and that he reported his own speeches. Latterly his writings were all Stump. I had not intended to have written for a week or more, for you have so many correspondents and are so punctual in reply that I fear the waste of precious time; but I am as pleased with your letter as an old dog- fancier when a terrier-pup catches his first rat—it is something to see my boy hunt out and hunt down that old humbug Oratory."

Charles Dilke's own mature judgment on the matters concerned was expressed in a letter to the Cantab of October 27th, 1893:

"The value of Union debates as a training for political life? Yes, if they are debates. There is probably little debate in the Union. There was little in my time. There is little real debating in the House of Commons. But debating is mastery. The gift of debate means the gift of making your opinion prevail. Set speaking is useless and worse than useless in these days."

Dilke was elected to the Library Committee of the Union in his second term, and in his third to the Standing Committee. At this moment a decision was taken to make a determined effort for new buildings, and it was suggested that he should stand for the secretaryship. Declining this as likely to engross more time than he could spare, he was put forward for the Vice-Presidency, and elected at the beginning of October, 1863. His prominence in the negotiations which followed may be inferred from the fact that he was re-elected. This was in itself a rare honour; but in his case was followed by election and re-election to the Presidency, a record unique in the Society's annals.

It was through this phase of his activity that Charles Dilke took part in the general life of the University. At the Union he was closely associated with men outside his own college, one of whom, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, was destined to be a lifelong friend and fellow-worker. But his College meant more to him than the University. A conservative in this, he resented, and resisted later on, all tendencies to make the teaching of the place communal by an opening of college lectures to students from other colleges; he valued the distinctiveness of type which went with the older usage, under which he himself was nurtured. Trinity Hall was a lawyers' college; it had a library specially stored with law books, and it was early determined that he should conform to the genius loci so far at least as to be called to the Bar. In his first Christmas vacation he began to eat his dinners at the Middle Temple, where his nomination paper was signed by John Forster; and in June, 1863, after he had spent a year at mathematics and won his college scholarship, he took stock of his position, and felt clear as to his own powers. He might, he thought, attain to about a tenth wranglership in the Mathematical Tripos, which would insure him a fellowship at his college; but this, although he valued academic distinctions very highly, did not seem an end worth two years of work, and he determined to devote the remainder of his time at the University to the study of law and history.

He had not at any time limited himself to mathematics. Both before his freshman year and during it he had read hard and deeply on general subjects. His habit was to analyze on paper whatever he studied, and he had dealt thus in 1861 (aged eighteen) with all Sir Thomas More, Bolingbroke, and Hobbes. Among the papers for 1862 there is preserved such an analysis of Coleridge's political system; a note on the views of the Abbé Morellet, with essays on comparative psychology, the association of ideas, and the originality of the anti-selfish affections. These are deposits of that course of philosophic reading over which, says the Memoir, 'I wasted a good deal of time in 1862, but managed also to give myself much mental training.'

The determination to abandon mathematics for a line of study more germane to that career of which he already had some vision met with no resistance from his people; but it did not altogether please the college authorities. He wrote to old Mr. Dilke:

"When I told Hopkins" (his tutor) "that I was not going out in mathematics, he was taken aback, and seemed very sorry. He urged me to read law, but still to go out as a high senior optime, which he says I could be, without reading more than a very small quantity of mathematics every day. My objection to this was that I knew myself better than he did; that were I to go in for mathematics, I should be as high in that tripos as my talents would let me, and that my law and my life's purpose would suffer in consequence.

"He said—'You will be very sorry if it happens that you are not first legalist of your year—that is the only place in the Law Tripos that you can be content with—and yet remember you have Shee in your year, who is always a dangerous adversary, and who starts with some little knowledge on the subject.'

"I said I should read with Shee, and make him understand that I was intended by Nature to beat him."

The dangerous Shee had been thus announced in a letter of February, 1863: "Shee—son of the well-known Serjeant, [Footnote: Mr. Serjeant Shee was later a Judge—the first Roman Catholic since the time of the Stuarts to sit on the English Bench.] has come up and taken the rooms over me. He seems a nice kind of fellow; of course, a strong Romanist."

Shee remained till the end Dilke's chief competitor, and he was also one of the band of friends who met each other incessantly, and incessantly talked over first principles till the small hours of morning. Perhaps it is not without importance that Charles Dilke should have had the experience, not very common for Englishmen, of living on terms of intimacy with an Irish Roman Catholic: at all events, his relations in after-life, both with Irishmen and with Roman Catholics, were more friendly than is common. For the moment Shee made one factor in the discussions upon theology which are inevitable among undergraduates, and which went on with vigour in this little group, according to the recollection of Judge Steavenson, who in those days, faithful to the orthodoxy of his Low Church upbringing, found himself ranged by the side of the 'strong Romanist' against a general onslaught upon Christianity. Charley Dilke himself had come under the influences of the place and the time. There is an entry headed May, 1863: "I find a fair argument against miracles in my notes for this month." He had abandoned attendance at Communion, but, according to Judge Steavenson, did not go further in opinions or in talk than a vague agnosticism—which was also the attitude of another subtle and agile intelligence in that circle.

Turning over, in 1891, the boxes which held his letters and papers of college days, Charles Dilke wrote:

"1863.

"In every page of the destroyed notebooks of this year I could see the influence of two men—my grandfather and H. D. Warr." [Footnote: Mr. H. D. Warr became a journalist. In 1880 Sir Charles secured him the post of Secretary to the Royal Commission upon City Companies, of which Lord Derby was Chairman.]

Warr was a classical exhibitioner of Trinity Hall in Dilke's year, and was not among the few who are named at first as likely friends, though he figures early as a competitor in the Euclid and Algebra 'fights' at his tutor's. In February, 1863, his name must have been on Dilke's tongue or pen, since this is evidently a reply to inquiries:

"Warr is a clergyman's son. He will probably be about fourth or fifth for the Bell (Scholarship)."

It is not till the October term of his second year that more explicit notice of this friend occurs, when Dilke is giving an account of his first speech as Vice-President of the Union. He opened a debate on the metric system, concerning which he had solid and well-thought-out opinions:

"My speech was logical but not fluent. Warr says it was the best opening speech he ever listened to, but by no means the best speech. Warr is a candid critic whom I dread, so that I am glad he was satisfied."

Of this candour Dilke has preserved some specimens which show that Warr's influence was mainly used in laughing his friend out of his solemnity. Thus Warr characterizes him as a dealer in logic," and, breaking off from some fantastic speculation as to the future of all their college set, January 9th, 1864, moralizes.

"I am an ass, my friend, a great ass, to write in this silly strain to you, but you must not be very angry, though I own now to a feeling of having half insulted your kind serious ways by talking nonsense to them on paper."