CHAPTER V
LAST TERMS AT THE UNIVERSITY
After his grandfather's death Charles Dilke went away alone on a walking tour in Devon. The death of his grandfather was hardly realized at first; 'the sense of loss' deepened: 'it has been greater with me every year that followed.' He corresponded with his college friends, and of this date is a letter of remonstrance at his overstudious habits from the sententious H. D. Warr:
"My dear Dilke will forgive me if I say that, though I honour him much for his many strong and good qualities, I think he is far too given to laborious processes in work and social life…. My warm regard for you rests to some extent on my very high appreciation of your strength and consistency of character: you have always appeared to me to be a supremely honest man, almost comically so, at least when I am in a profane humour: I do not know that anything you could do would possibly make me like you better. But I think if you gave yourself a little wider fling and liberty, and did not walk always as it were on the seam of the carpet, it would be better; there would be less to lean on in you, perhaps, but if possible more to love."
Charles Dilke used to say that Fawcett and Warr had between them cured him of that priggishness which he often recalled with amusement. Almost inevitably his grandfather's devotion, the absolute engrossment of so considerable a personality in his least important concerns, would emphasize the inclination to take himself over-seriously which is marked in every clever and resolute young man.
In the beginning of 1865 he won the college essay prize for the second time. A pile of dockets from the British Museum shows that, as soon as coming of age qualified him to be a reader there, he plunged deep into all the works on ideal commonwealths to complete his survey of 'forms of government'—the subject indicated by Pope's couplet, which had appealed so strongly both to his grandfather and himself. This was a side issue. Beading for his Tripos went on with unremitting energy, and he had in use ninety-four notebooks crammed with analyses. In June, 1865, he was announced Senior Legalist, easily at the head of the law students of his year, thus crowning his college successes by the highest University distinction open to a man who followed that course.
A month before he entered for the Tripos, he had stroked the college boat, which was head of the river. Trinity Hall, however, retained its pride of place only for one day, and it was no small achievement to accomplish even this, since Third Trinity, who bumped them on the second night, were a wonderful crew, with five University oars, 'including some of the most distinguished Eton oars that ever rowed.' [Footnote: The Memoir details them: 'Chambers, the winner of the pairs, sculls, and "walk," President of the University Boat Club, and afterwards Secretary of the Amateur Athletic Club; Kinglake, afterwards President of the University Boat Club; W. E. Griffith, afterwards President of the University Boat Club, and formerly stroke of the finest Eton eight ever seen; Selwyn, afterwards Bishop of Melanesia, stroke of the University eight; and C. B. Lawes, afterwards the well-known sculptor, who had been captain of the Boats at Eton, and who had won the Diamond Sculls and the amateur championship of the Thames, and had rowed stroke of the University crew the year after Selwyn.'] The Hall had only one 'blue,' Steavenson, but to Charles Dilke himself had been offered in February, 1865, and was offered again in 1866, the place of 'seven' in the University eight. He declined on grounds of health, fearing the strain of the four-mile course on his heart. A note added later says regretfully: 'I believe that I was unduly frightened by my doctor, and that I might have rowed.'
To be Senior Legalist and to stroke the first boat on the river in the same term was an unusual combination: in the next Charles Dilke added to it the Presidency of the Union. The new Union buildings were now in process of construction, and he had done more than any other man to bring them from a derisive by-word into solid realization of brick and mortar. He took credit to himself for 'the selection of Waterhouse as architect against Gilbert Scott and Digby Wyatt.' Care to see this business fully through was one of the reasons which determined him to come up for a fourth year, and to hold the Presidency a second time in the Lent term of 1866. On his retirement he proposed Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice for his successor, and thus left the lead in hands he could trust.
Of his own speeches he has preserved some detail, showing how early his opinions displayed the character which was to be constant in them:
'In 1864-65 I spoke twice at the Union [Footnote: After Dilke's death, when a resolution of regret was carried at the Union, the Vice- President, Mr. J. H. Allen of Jesus, said in moving it: "Sir Charles was in a double sense the architect of the fortunes of the Society, because he was responsible for the superintendence of the change from the old inadequate home in Queens' Street into the more glorious building which they now enjoyed. It was for that reason that on two occasions the Society elected him to the highest position which they could confer.">[ in favour of the foreign policy of Lord Palmerston, opposing several of my friends who were condemning it. Cobden at the time was attacking supposed extravagance, based, as he thought, on panic, and I sided with Palmerston in thinking that the enormous increase of the French Navy could only be intended for an anti-English policy, while in the event of even the temporary loss of the command of the Channel, invasion by an immense French army would become possible. To Poland I was friendly, but unwilling to contemplate, as Lord Palmerston was unwilling to contemplate, interference by England in alliance with the Emperor Napoleon. I was so far from strongly taking the Danish side in the war that I chose the opportunity to put up in my rooms at Cambridge a photograph of Bismarck, for whom I had a considerable admiration. I had made Lord Palmerston's acquaintance during the Exhibition in '62 (to the ceremonies of which I also owed that of Auber, Meyerbeer, and many other distinguished people), but I do not think that the chat of the jaunty old gentleman in his last days had had any effect upon my views, and I was certainly more pro- German than was Palmerston, who was not pro-anything except pro- English.'[Footnote: For Sir Charles's opinion of Lord Palmerston, see vol. ii., p. 493. ]
The best speech, in Dilke's own opinion, that he made during 1866 was in opposition to the proposal to congratulate Governor Eyre upon his suppression of 'the supposed insurrection in Jamaica.' This was the first of the many occasions on which Sir Charles Dilke criticized the severity of white men towards natives in the name of civilized government.
Fuller anticipation of the views he supported in Parliament is to be found in his speeches on home politics. In the spring of 1866 the country was violently agitated over the Reform Bill introduced by Lord Russell, who had become Prime Minister on the death of Lord Palmerston in 1865. Of course there was a debate at the Union, and it was prolonged to a second night. Dilke writes:
'I took up for the first time broad democratic ground. Attacking the famous speech of Mr. Lowe, [Footnote: Mr. Lowe had asked in the debate on the "Representation of the People Bill," as reported in Hansard, on March 13th, 1866: "If you want venality, ignorance, drunkenness; if you want impulsive, unreflecting, violent people, where do you look for them? Do you go to the top, or to the bottom?">[ I declared that so far was I from agreement with these calumnies, that I was of opinion that those homely and truly English qualities which had to some slight extent grown slack among the upper classes were to be met with in all their strength as much in the more intelligent portion of the now unrepresented classes, as among those familiarly styled "their betters." With regard to the question of the fitness of the artisans for the franchise, I argued that they had not to decide for themselves between Austria and Prussia in the Holstein question, but had to decide between candidates who would settle the more abstruse questions for them. The middle classes, I contended, could as a body do no more, and the artisan was just as competent to judge of honesty and ability as the £10 householder; and less likely to be influenced by bribery and intimidation, as being more independent and more fearless of consequences. Moreover, any attempt to keep the great mass of the people from all share of political power seemed to me idle: whether we liked their advent to government or whether we feared it, it was inevitable, and the longer we delayed to prepare for it the worse it would be for so-called Conservative interests when it came. I contended that the working man had proportionately a greater stake in the country than the rich; that the taxes which he paid were a vastly more serious matter to him than those which the rich paid were to them, and that a hundred of the laws passed by Parliament vitally affected the interests of the working people to one which injured those of the upper class.'
For a young man whose political views were so maturely thought out, debate was no mere exercitation; his education was fast passing into apprenticeship for public life; and in February, 1865, his father, Sir Wentworth Dilke, coming forward at a by-election in the Liberal interest for Wallingford, gave the Union debater his first chance on a public platform.
Long afterwards, when Sir Charles Dilke was travelling down to the Forest of Dean with a party of guests and friends, one of them, looking out as the train swept along the Thames Valley, caught sight of a little white church nestling under a hill and asked, "Is that Cholsey?" Sir Charles turned round in his eager way: "What, do you know this district? Yes, that is Cholsey;" and went on to tell how intimate he had become with all the villages round Wallingford when speaking and canvassing for his father, and how the experience gained among the Berkshire peasants had supplied valuable lessons for his own contests in later years.
Sir Wentworth was elected, and Lord Granville, who had a real friendship for him, wrote, in a spirit very typical of the traditional view: "I know no one to whom Parliamentary life will afford more interest and amusement." Charles Dilke's conception of Parliamentary life was very different from that of his father, and from that which Lord Granville indicated. On the other hand, the son seemed to the father deficient in appreciation of the pleasures acceptable to himself:
'One of the difficulties between my father and myself about this period arose from his vexation at my refusing to take part in the shooting-parties at Alice Holt. He was passionately fond of shooting; … I had now but little sympathy with the amusement, and had shown my dislike for it in many ways.'
Yet despite differences, the father was immensely proud of his son, and consulted him in regard to the younger brother's education. In his reply Charles Dilke discussed the view of certain Dons who held that the cultivated English gentleman ought not to go in for honours at all, and admitted that "reading for a high place here involves loss of many pleasures, of almost all society; it makes a man fretful, and often leaves him behind the world; as an education for the mind it is not so good as the self-education of a non-honours man ought to be, but never is." He thought, nevertheless, that classics—of which he avowed himself "more ignorant than an English gentleman ought to be"—offered the field in which success was best worth having. He himself "would gladly be put back to fourteen or fifteen, and 'grind my life out' till two-and-twenty, in order to get a high place in the first-class classics." But it must be all or nothing. A second-class he dismissed as not worth winning. Moreover, "if the boy has not a high standard set up for him, he will do nothing whatever, which is far worse than doing too much."
Meanwhile, in the midst of all that full college life which was becoming more and more definitely a preparation for the political career, he was trying his strength in the field of journalism.
His grandfather had never ceased to impress upon him that every public man should have learned and practised thoroughly the craft of writing. This precept allied itself with the inherited ownership of a great literary journal; and very shortly after old Mr. Dilke's death the undergraduate, as he then was, began to associate himself actively with the work of the Athenaeum. His first published writing in it appeared on October 22nd, 1864, when he reviewed a well-known work on economics by the writer whom the Memoir styles 'that dull Frenchman, Le Play.' [Footnote: French Senator, son-in-law of the celebrated economist Michel Chevalier. He wrote works on the principles of agriculture, the application of chemistry to agriculture, and kindred subjects.] Le Play wrote from Paris to thank Sir Wentworth Dilke for a copy of the article which had been sent him, and had already attracted attention in France:
"On y trouve un sentiment de vrai progrès et une intelligence de la vie pratique qui se rencontrent rarement chez nos critiques."
The British Museum tickets show the course of reading which Charles Dilke was pursuing at this period: Bacon, Filmer, Mandeville, Hume, represent the older English writers on Commonwealths, ideal and actual; Crousaz, Condorcet, Diderot, Linguet, Fénelon, Helvétius, stood for the influences of eighteenth-century France. With them were writers more recondite; the Mundus Alter et Idem of "Britannicus," Barclay his Argenis, Holberg's Journey in the Underworld, Sadeur's Terre Australe Connue, Ned Lane's Excellencie of a Free State, were all out-of-the-way books with an antiquarian flavour. Of recent or contemporary authors, Montalembert was included, with Proudhon, as were men whom Charles Dilke came to know personally—Émile de Girardin, Michel Chevalier, and, a close friend afterwards, Louis Blanc. Works of Mohl and Willick brought in the Germans, and a volume of the Federalist introduced him to that great American commonwealth which he was soon to visit. A sheaf of dockets for works upon the Swedenborgian Association and theories complete this very extensive range of reading, which may be supplemented by the following note of his own:
"Favourite books, 1864 (in themselves—for no object):
"Shakespeare.
"The Bible.
"J. S. Mill: Political Economy; On Liberty; Dissertations.
"Longfellow: Evangeline and Miles Standish.
"Homer: Works.
"Tennyson: nearly all.
"Plato: Republic.
"Sir P. Sidney: Arcadia.
"Claude Adrien Helvétius: Works.
"Victor Hugo: Les Misérables.
"William Godwin: Political Justice."
He notes also in the Memoir that the reading of Mill at this period marked the beginning of Mill's influence over him. This influence was a great factor in Dilke's life, and, when it passed into a personal relation, became almost one of discipleship.
His taste for Victor Hugo led him to write in the Athenaeum a long notice of Les Travailleurs de la Mer in 1866, when that romance appeared; but another article about the same period on international law indicates the main bent of his studies.
As early as the Long Vacation of 1864, in the course of preparing his essay on forms of government, he had found himself tracing 'the future of the Anglo-Saxon race both in the United States and Australasia'; and he thus, without knowing it, laid the foundation lines of Greater Britain. Also, in 1865, 'I had already dreamt of visiting and writing upon Russia, a country which always had a great hold on my imagination.' Another project of these undergraduate years was less his own than his grandfather's. Old Mr. Dilke contemplated a universal catalogue of books, to be prepared by international action. This scheme was completely abandoned, yet it is interesting that the grandson entertained it. The scholar, not merely the lover, but the active servant, of learning, was always present in Charles Dilke's many-sided personality, though never dominant. We approach the central preoccupations of his mind with the History of Prevalent Opinions in Politics, towards which 'a great deal of work' was done by him in the winter of 1864-65. In 1866 the same underlying group of ideas took form in the outline of a treatise on Radicalism.
In working for this he read 'most of the writers upon the theory of politics—Hooker, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Linguet, Locke, Bentham, and many more.' 'Many more' included some very unusual reading; for the plan of his book was in three chapters, 'the first chapter being upon the Radicalism of the days before the coming of Jesus; the second chapter upon the period between the teaching of our Lord and 1789; and the third on Radicalism in modern history.' In the second part he 'gave much space to Arius, Huss, Wyclif, Savonarola, Vane, Roger Williams, Baxter, Fox, Zinzendorf, and other religious reformers.' All this reading taught him the 'extent to which forgotten doctrines come up again, and are known by the names of men who have but revived them'; and, on the other hand, how doctrines change and degenerate while keeping the original name.
'In the sketch of my book, so far as it was worked out, I gave much space to the falling-off in the Church from the Radicalism of primitive Christianity…. It began with a definition of Radicalism as a going to the root of things, which naturally led to the doctrine of the perfectibility of man, and, quoting the gospels freely, I attempted to prove the essential Radicalism of Christ's teaching.'
Here, then, is suggested another aspect of his mind's history. He notes:
'As I rejected at this period of my life the Divinity of Christ, I sought, under Renan's guidance, more fully than I need have done, the origin of Christ's teaching and of that of Paul, in the doctrines previously taught by the Essenes and the Sadducees.'
Elsewhere a manuscript note describes his varying attitude towards
Christianity:
'In the course of 1863 I ceased my attendance upon Holy Communion, and fell into a sceptical frame of mind which lasted for several years, was modified in 1874, and came to an end in 1875. I had been a very strong believer, and in the loss of my belief in the supernatural, as it is called—i.e., in the Divinity of our Blessed Lord—I kept an unbounded admiration for His words, as recorded in the Sermon on the Mount, and belief in duty towards others. From 1885 to 1888 the Holy Sacrament was a profound blessing to me, but in 1905 I ceased again to find any help in forms.'
To what he called in 1865 the essential Radicalism of Christ's teaching— to-day it would be called Christian Socialism—he was always constant. It was the guiding principle of that inner idealism which underlay his whole life and which strengthened with his maturity. The world was for him 'a Christian' world. But acceptance not so much of the dogma as of the mystical faith of Christians would seem to have varied with him from time to time, and to have varied also in its formal expression. His mind was too positive, too much occupied in the detail of life, to have time either for brooding meditation or for the metaphysics of religious inquiry; and, at least in 1866, Christianity interested him mainly as one of the most potent shaping forces of human society. The desire to follow out and investigate at first hand certain of its modern manifestations helped to direct the impulse for travel which was already prompting him.
The Long Vacation of 1865 had found him tramping, first with Warr in Guernsey, afterwards alone 'through Brittany and Normandy and partly into the provinces south of the Loire,' eloquent on the charms of travelling without luggage, sketching also, and increasing his carefully gathered knowledge of French architecture.
He had explored France very thoroughly before he found the part of it which was to become almost a second homeland in his affections; and he had the Frenchman's appreciation of what was most characteristically France. "I think the better of the French," he wrote at this time, "for their admiration of the scenery of the Loire, the Indre, and the Vienne. Few English people are capable of appreciating the scenery of Anjou…. I never saw anything more lovely than the scenery of the Vilaine south of Guichen and Bourg des Comptes."
But this was only an excursion. The whole bent of his desire lay towards serious travel, in which he should pass from the training- ground of the University to that wider school where knowledge was to be gained, applied, and perfected. In the early part of 1866 he was talking only of a journey in America, and it was a journey with a literary purpose. In his History of Radicalism he had given much space to the Revivals in Prussia led by Ebel, and also to the rise in America of the school of the Perfectionists in 1834. He proposed to take with him the sketch of this book, and work into it the results of inquiry made on the spot as regards the communistic experiments which had been tried in the United States.
But travel for its own sake tempted him, and even before he set out, 'I fancy,' he writes, 'my intention was already to go round the world: but if I had asked my father's leave to do so, I should have been refused.'
At all events, when once fairly launched, the interest of travelling absorbed his mind; and accordingly the book on Radicalism was finally put aside, though not before some work had been done on it at Quebec and Ottawa. Nor was it altogether abandoned; for, he says, in treating of 'Radicalism in modern history':
'I discussed it under various heads, of which the first was Great Britain, the second the British Colonies, the third the United States, showing, as this table was made before I left England, the predominance which Colonial questions were already assuming in my mind.' Also: 'In the last part of the sketch of the work I dealt with the political Radicalism of the future. I wrote strongly in favour of the removal of the disabilities of sex. I took the Irish Catholic view of the Irish question, and I commenced the discussion of some of those questions which made the freshness and the success of Greater Britain—for example, "Effects upon Radicalism of Increased Facility of Communication," and "Development of the Principle of Love of Country into that of Love of Man."'
'Such,' he writes, at the end of that passage which describes the purposes and the labours of his last academic terms—'such were the dispositions in which I commenced my journey round the world.'