Dilke (3 page)

At Trouville in 1860 Charles Dilke came to know the Duc de Morny and “hopelessly lost my heart to his lovely young Troubetsky wife, afterwards Duchess of Sesto”—“a fact of which she was probably unaware,” he added. At the end of that year he set out for the first time on his own to Paris, and after being blocked by snow at Amiens, arrived safely, and paid calls upon his acquaintances. In England in 1862 the Exhibition of that year gave him an opportunity to meet Palmerston, whom he found “still bright and lively in walk and talk and . . . extremely kind in his manner to me,” and from whom he received an invitation to one of Lady Palmer-ston's Saturday evening parties at Cambridge House, which was duly accepted.

In the autumn of 1862 Charles Dilke went up to Cambridge. He was matriculated as a member of Trinity Hall, his father's college. It was (and is) a medium-sized college with a strong legal connection. It had been founded in the fourteenth century by a bishop who had been so
alarmed by the ravages of the Black Death that he thought it necessary to make provision against a possible shortage of lawyers. In Wentworth Dilke's day it had been a college of little distinction, but by the time of his son's entry its academic standards had considerably improved; and its rowing reputation stood extremely high.

In part it owed both these attributes to Leslie Stephen, a typical if not altogether attractive Cambridge nineteenth-century figure. Stephen had been elected to a Trinity Hall fellowship in 1854, and had been ordained in the following year so that he might retrospectively qualify for the office. Of a figure so characteristic of his age it is hardly necessary to say that no sooner had he become a priest than he began to torment himself with religious doubt. By the time of Charles Dilke's arrival in Cambridge he was already deeply influenced by Darwinism and profoundly shocked by the levity of Bishop Wilberforce's famous jest against Huxley in the Oxford debate.
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But the force of Stephen's reaction against his cloth was as little compared with his determination not to appear before the world as a sensitive intellectual. Perhaps because he had been remorsely bullied as a day-boy at Eton, he developed an almost pathetic desire to be liked by the rowing men of his college and thought of as an acceptable figure in a world of hearty, masculine good fellowship. He was a poor oar as an undergraduate, but he later made himself into one of the great rowing coaches of the century; and he further expiated the sin of his own lack of prowess by writing the college boating song. He thought a thirty-mile walk the most agreeable way of passing a quiet Sunday afternoon, and he was known on occasion to walk from Cambridge to London during the day, attend a dinner in the evening, and walk back during the night. It was natural that, later in his life, he should become a leading exponent of that
great English, Victorian, upper-middle class sport of alpine climbing.

Stephen, despite his growing agnosticism, has been described by one of his biographers as the true founder of muscular Christianity. He was also a strong formative influence in a Cambridge intellectual tradition which has extended to the present day. He believed in plain living and hard work. He had a high respect for the discipline of the mathematical tripos and the habit of cool, detached enquiry, founded upon intensive application, to which it led. He was as distrustful of enthusiasm in affairs of the intellect as he was respectful towards its exhibition on the tow-path.
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He disliked obscurity and ambiguity of expression, and thought of them as inevitable results of speculative generalisation. Let a man stick to his last, write or talk only about those subjects to which he had applied himself (without attempting to weave them all into a single metaphysic), and it could all be done in good, calm, clear, Cambridge English. Stephen was almost perfectly suited to the Cambridge tripos system of the day, under which a man reading for honours was toned up like an athlete and won his awards by a combination of staying power during the long period of preliminary work and speed in the examination room. He was well placed in the first class list himself and he subsequently helped a growing number of Trinity Hall men to similar positions.

The other dominant influence in the Trinity Hall of Charles Dilke's day was Henry Fawcett, the son of a Salisbury shopkeeper, who had been blinded in a shooting accident at the age of twenty-five and who was soon to be elected Liberal member of Parliament for Brighton. Later he became Postmaster-General in the second Gladstone Government. Fawcett was a similar if by no means an identical influence to Stephen. His blindness meant that he could not be equally athletic, but he was in many ways an even more extreme example of the
Cambridge habit of mind. He believed in a severe stoicism and regarded all expressions of emotion as unmasculine and un-English. He saw the mathematical tripos as the most perfect and complete intellectual training to which a man could be subjected, and had little patience with those whose minds were not attuned to it. He shared Stephen's radicalism and he shared also a certain insularity which went with it. Stephen only knew one foreigner well in the course of his life, and that was his alpine guide. Fawcett visited Paris for six weeks at the age of twenty-four, but formed such an unfavourable view of the characteristics of the French that he never returned.

There could, therefore, hardly have been a sharper contrast between the Trinity Hall atmosphere into which Charles Dilke was immersed in the autumn of 1862 and the life which he had glimpsed as a boy. But there is no evidence that, as might perhaps have been expected, he rebelled against Cambridge, and particularly his own little corner of it, as being austere, provincial and dull. He was certainly capable of bursts of uncompromising nonconformity. Thus, in the same year that he went up to Cambridge he decided that shooting, of which he had done a great deal since the age of fourteen, and to which his father's country estate near Farnham was largely devoted, was an undesirable pastime. This was in spite of, or perhaps because of, his father's increasing absorption in the sport. But Charles Dilke's mind was clearly made up. He would have no more of it. Equally he would drink no wine during his time at Cambridge, although in later life he was to become a connoisseur of note.
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In the case of shooting a humanitarian objection was a mild contributory cause, but in the case of drink moral objections played no
part. It was simply that Dilke liked to decide what he thought best for himself and to present the result to the world with an unyielding self-confidence.

He was by no means unyielding to the Trinity Hall influence, however. In some ways, despite his francophilia and his nervous sensibility, he was already well-suited to it. He was a great walker—in 1861 he had covered the distance from London to Brighton in a single day in order to attend a Volunteer Review—and he was by nature a very hard worker, more attracted by facts than by generalisations, and deeply imbued with the competitive spirit. He took to rowing with an immediate and successful enthusiasm which persisted for nearly forty years. And although he claimed to have been abnormally uninterested in politics as a boy and never to have formed an opinion until the outbreak of the American Civil War, he was soon active—and loquacious—in the Cambridge Union Society. These three activities—the tripos, the river and the Union—were the core of Dilke's life at Cambridge; and he took them all a little too seriously.

So far as his work was concerned he was subjected to constant pressure from home. Not only Mr. Dilke, until he died in the summer of 1864, but Sir Wentworth Dilke, too, despite his own extreme idleness at a similar stage in life, were constantly urging him on to still greater academic efforts. Concern that he should not overstrain his health seemed completely to have disappeared. Thus within a fortnight of his arrival in Cambridge he was writing defensively (and a little pompously) to his father:

“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. . . .”
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Certainly this account of Charles Dilke's undergraduate days left more room for doubt about his sense than his assiduity. Nevertheless, Mr. Dilke at least, who as befitted a friend of Keats and Lamb was by far the least athletic of the three generations, remained constantly afraid that his grandson would be diverted by the pleasures of rowing from the rigours of mathematics. Charles Dilke often had to reassure him that this was not the case. He soon accumulated a substantial basis of achievement on which to do so. At the end of his first year he won a college mathematical scholarship, but he then deserted the subject, not for the river but for the law. This change brought with it the beginning of an intensely concentrated personal rivalry with George Shee, an Irishman whose father was later to be the first Roman Catholic since the time of the Stuarts to sit on the English Bench.

Dilke was warned by his tutor when he gave up mathematics that if he took to the law he would have Shee, a dangerous adversary who started with the advantage of some knowledge of the subject, in his year. He returned an aggressive answer: “I said I should read with Shee; and make him understand that I was intended by Nature to beat him.”
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Later, watching Shee with intense concern, he had occasional bursts of worry. “Shee has been sitting up till ominously late hours for some nights past. His father came up last night and left again to-night, but I fear he did not make his son waste much time.”
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The worry proved misplaced. Dilke triumphed over Shee and other lesser contenders at almost every stage. In 1864 he won the college annual English Essay prize with a piece on Sir Robert Walpole and in the following year he was again successful, this time with an essay on the theory of government. At the end of his second year at Trinity Hall (and his first year reading law) he gained the college law prize, and at the end of the following year he was announced Senior Legalist, the highest University distinction open to a law student. He achieved his academic results not by effortless bursts of imaginative thought, but by the continuous, painstaking accumulation of knowledge—and this remained his approach throughout his life. He thought that the surest
way to be wise about a subject was to know as much about and around it as possible.
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There were clearly limitations to such an attitude, but the Cambridge examination system did not recognise them, and he emerged from Trinity Hall (in 1866, for he stayed up for two terms after taking his degree, reading moral science and presiding over the Cambridge Union) as a man of high academic distinction and self-confident ability.

On the river he was little less successful. When he first arrived in Cambridge Dilke knew nothing about rowing. But it offered exactly the sort of purposive, vigorous, comparatively non-time-wasting athleticism which he wanted. He was inducted into the sport by D. F. Steavenson, a Trinity Hall freshman from Northumberland, who in later years was to serve him with an almost canine fidelity. By the summer term of his first year Dilke was rowing No. 4 in the Trinity Hall first boat, and in the same season he took part in a notably fast Grand Challenge heat at Henley. In the following year, when Dilke rowed No. 3, Trinity Hall went head of the river on the second night and stayed there for the rest of the week. He wrote to his father (who on this subject was a more sympathetic audience than his grandfather), dating his letter “the ever-memorable May 12th, 1864,” and described how the “whole of the crew and Stephen were chaired and carried round the court.”
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Four years later the boat in which they had rowed was cut up and distributed amongst the crew which had performed these feats. Dilke piously kept his piece hanging against the wall of his study in Sloane Street until the end of his life.

In his third year Dilke was promoted to the position of stroke, but the boat, under his leadership, did not do so well as in the previous year. On the second night it was bumped by Third Trinity, a strikingly good crew containing five University
oars. Trinity Hall had only one—Steavenson—although Dilke himself, both in this year and in 1866, had been offered his “blue” and the place of No. 7. “I declined on the score of constitution,” he wrote. “I was strong, but afraid of the rowing in training over the long course, although perfectly able to stand up to the short course work of Cambridge or of Henley.” Later he added: “I believe that I was unduly frightened by my doctor, and that I might have rowed.”
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The Union, the third of Charles Dilke's principal Cambridge activities, had its premises in a former Wesleyan chapel in Green Street. They were clearly unsatisfactory, the more so as a few years earlier the Oxford Union, already a more distinguished nursery of politicians and ecclesiastics, had erected its own elaborate gothic structure. A building fund had been in existence in Cambridge since 1857, but it had produced no physical result.
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Nor did it do so until Dilke had risen to a high place in the Union hierarchy. This he did quite quickly, being elected to the Library and Standing Committees in his first year, and becoming Vice-President for the second term of his second year. At this stage serious negotiations to bring the fund to fruition and to set the builders to work were undertaken. Dilke was the leading figure in these negotiations. He was re-elected to the Vice-Presidency and then, in October, 1864, was elected unopposed to the Presidency. In the following academic year he was re-elected to the office, a most unusual event, and came back to Cambridge for two terms of a fourth year largely in order to fill it. By this time the work was almost complete, but Dilke nominated his successor—Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice
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—in order to guard against anything going wrong with the final stages.