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."