The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1

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'In 1856 I became half attached to a day-school, which had for its
masters, in mathematics a Mr. Acland, a Cambridge man, and in classics
a Mr. Holme, a fellow of Durham, and for several years I used to do
the work which they set in the school without regularly attending the
school, which, however, my brother attended. My health at that time
was not supposed to be sufficiently strong to enable me even to attend
a day-school, and still less to go to a public school; but there was
nothing the matter with me except a nervous turn of mind,
overexcitable and overstrained by the slightest circumstance. This
lasted until I was eighteen, when it suddenly disappeared, and left me
strong and well; but the form which this weakness took may be
illustrated by the fact that, although I did not believe in ghosts, I
have known myself at the age of sixteen walk many miles round to avoid
passing through a "haunted" meadow.'

Also he made the experiments in literature common with clever lads:

'In 1856 I wrote a novel called _Friston Place_, and I have a sketch
which I made of Friston Place in Sussex in August of that year, but
the novel I have destroyed, as it was worthless.'

Another aspect of his education is recalled by drawings preserved in the
boxes from 1854 onwards--conscientious delineations of buildings visited,
representing an excellent training for the eye and observation.

In 1857 his grandfather took him to Oxford (where he rambled happily about
the meadows while Mr. Dilke read in the Bodleian) and to Cambridge, going
on thence to Ely, Peterborough, and Norwich. Later in the same year the
pair travelled all over South Wales, everywhere rehearsing the historical
memories of the place, everywhere mastering the details of whatever
architecture presented itself.

Each return home brought experiences of a different kind. 'I have known,'
he says, 'everyone worth knowing from 1850 to my death.' At seven years
old he was seeing and hearing the famous persons of that time, either at
the home in Sloane Street, to which Wentworth Dilke's connection with the
Exhibition drew men eminent in the world of physical science and
industrial enterprise, as well as the artists with whom his
connoisseurship brought him into touch; or else at old Mr. Dilke's house
in Lower Grosvenor Place. He remembered visits with his grandfather to
Gore House, 'before Soyer turned it into the Symposium,' and to Lady
Morgan's. The brilliant little Irishwoman was a familiar friend, and her
pen, of bog-oak and gold, the gift to her of the Irish people, came at
last to lie among the treasures of 76, Sloane Street. Also there remained
with him

"memories from about 1851 of the bright eyes of little Louis Blanc, of
Milner-Gibson's pleasant smile, of Bowring's silver locks, of
Thackeray's tall stooping figure, of Dickens's goatee, of Paxton's
white hat, of Barry Cornwall and his wife, of Robert Stephenson the
engineer, to whom I wanted to be bound apprentice, of Browning (then
known as 'Mrs. Browning's husband'), of Joseph Cooke (another
engineer), of Cubitt the builder (one of the promoters of the
Exhibition), of John Forster the historian, of the Redgraves, and of
that greater painter, John Martin. Also of the Rowland Hills, at
Hampstead.

"1859 was the height of my rage for our South Kensington Trap-Bat
Club, which I think had invented the name South Kensington. It was at
it that I first met Emilia Francis Strong. We played in the garden of
Gore House where the Conservatory of the Horticultural Society, behind
the Albert Hall, was afterwards built."

In the memoir of the second Lady Dilke, prefixed to _The Book of the
Spiritual Life_, Sir Charles writes of this time, 1859 to 1860, when he
"loved to be patronized by her, regarding her with the awe of a
hobbledehoy of sixteen or seventeen towards a beautiful girl of nineteen
or twenty." But at one point she bewildered him; for in those days Emilia
Strong was devout to the verge of fanaticism:

"We were all puzzled by the apparent conflict between the vitality and
the impish pranks of the brilliant student, expounding to us the most
heterodox of social views, and the 'bigotry' which we seemed to
discern when we touched her spiritual side." [Footnote: _Book of the
Spiritual Life_, Memoir, p. 10.]

No doubt the fastings and mortifications which Emilia Strong practised at
that period of her youth would seem 'bigotry' to a lad brought up under
influences which, in so far as theology entered into them, had an
Evangelical bent. Charles Dilke thus summed up his early prepossessions
and practices in this respect:

'My mother had been a strong Low Church woman, and those of her
letters which I have destroyed very clearly show that her chief fear
in meeting death was that she would leave me without that class of
religious training which she thought essential. My grandfather and my
father, although both of them in their way religious men (and my
grandfather, a man of the highest feeling of duty), were neither of
them churchgoers, nor of her school of thought; and ... as I was till
the age of twenty a regular church attendant and somewhat devout for a
boy of that age, it was a grief to me to find that my brother's turn
of mind as he grew up was different, and that he naturally thought his
judgment on the subject as good as that of the mother whom he had lost
at three years old, and could hardly be said to have known.'

But the true spiritual influence on Charles Dilke's early life was derived
from his grandfather, whose nature had in it much of the serenity and wise
happiness which go to the making of a saint. This influence was no doubt
ethical in its character rather than religious; but it can be traced, for
example, in a humane scruple which links it with Dilke's affectionate cult
of St. Francis of Assisi:

'In 1856 I had begun to shoot, my father being passionately fond of
the sport, and I suppose that few people ever shot more before they
were nineteen than I did. But about the time I went to Cambridge I
found the interference with my work considerable, and I also began to
have doubts as to considerations of cruelty, and on points affecting
the Game Laws, which led me to give up shooting, and from 1862 I
hardly ever shot at all, except, in travelling, for food.'

The taste for travel, always in search of knowledge, but followed with an
increasing delight in the quest, began for him in the rovings through
England with his grandfather. As early as his seventeenth year he was out
on the road by himself; and this letter written from Plymouth, April 5th,
1860 after a night spent at Exeter, indicates the results of his training:

"This morning we got up early, and went to the Northerny [Footnote:
Northernhay, or Northfield, a pleasure-ground at Exeter.] and
Cathedral. Nothing much. Took the train at quarter before ten. Railway
runs along the shore under the cliffs and in the cliffs. We saw a
rather large vessel wrecked on the sands. Teignmouth pretty. Got to
Totnes before twelve. Hired a boat and two men, 10s. 6d. Down the
river to Dartmouth, twelve miles. The Dart is more like a series of
lakes than a river; in some of the reaches it is impossible to see
what way you are to get out. Very like the Wye until you get low down,
then it opens into a lake about two miles across, free from all mud,
nothing but hills and cliffs. Then it again contracts, and passes
through a gorge, which is said to be very like parts of the Rhine.

"The scene here is splendid. Dartmouth now comes, but the river,
instead of spreading and becoming ugly, as most tidal rivers do,
remains narrow and between cliffs, until you have the great sea waves
thundering up against them. Dartmouth contains a church more curious
than half the cathedrals in the kingdom: Norman (Late), fine brasses,
barrel roof with the paint on, and stone pulpit painted, etc., etc.
There are some very fine old houses also. The place is the most lovely
by far of any that I ever saw--Paradise.

"We have had a bad day--real Devonshire--where they say that they must
have one shower every day and two on Sundays. 'Shower' means about six
hours' quiet rain, _vide_ 'Murray' and our experience of to-day. The
boatmen say 'it rains most days.' I hope Mrs. Jackson is going on
well. Trusting you are all well, I send my love to all and remain

"Your affectionate grandson,

"CHARLES W. DILKE."

A scrap from one of the grandfather's letters, April 25th, 1859, which
points to the terms of intellectual equality that existed in the
correspondence between the two, has also some historical interest:

"Hope your news of the French troops landing in Genoa is premature.
War, however, seems inevitable; but I hope on, hope ever. I should be
sorry to see the Austrians triumph over the Sardinians, for then they
would fasten the chains on Italy tighter than ever. Yet I cannot hope
that the worst man in Europe, the Emperor of the French, should
triumph."

At the close of 1860, the lad set out on a more adventurous excursion to
France, in a storm of snow so tremendous that trains were blocked in many
places. However, he reached Amiens safely, saw and described it dutifully,
then made for Paris.

Charles Dilke's familiarity with France was destined to be extended year
by year till the end of his life. This visit of Christmas 1860 was the
first which he made alone to that country; but part of the summer of 1859
had been spent by him with his family at Trouville, whence he wandered
over Normandy, adding detail to his knowledge of Norman architecture.

But even stronger than the interest in historic architecture which his
grandfather had imparted to him was the interest in men and affairs; above
all, in those men who had assisted at great events. Throughout his life
his love of travel, his taste for society, and his pursuit of first-hand
information upon political matters helped to enlarge his list of
remarkable acquaintances; and during this stay in France a new name was
added to the collection of celebrities:

'At Havre I got to know King Jerome, father to "Plon-Plon" and father-
in-law to my friend Princess Clothilde, and was duly interested in
this last of the brothers of Napoleon. The ex-King of Westphalia was a
wicked old gentleman; but he did not let a boy find this out, and he
was courteous and talkative. We long had in both years, I think, the
next rooms to his at Frascati's; and he used to walk in the garden
with me, finding me a good listener. The old Queen of Sweden was still
alive, and he told me how Desiree Clary [Footnote: Eugenie Bernardine
Desiree Clary married, August 16th, 1798, Marshal Jean-Baptiste
Bernadotte, afterwards Charles XIV., King of Sweden. Her elder sister
Julie had become the wife of Joseph Bonaparte in 1794.] had thrown
Bonaparte over for him, and then had thrown him over for Bernadotte.
He also described riding through Paris with Bonaparte on the day of
Brumaire.'

Having completely outgrown the nervous invalidishness of his earlier
boyhood, Dilke at eighteen years of age was extending his activities in
all directions.

'In 1861 I find by my diaries that I was at the very height of my
theatre-going, attending theatres in Paris and in London with equal
regularity; and in this year I wrote an elaborate criticism of
Fechter's Hamlet, which is the first thing I ever wrote in the least
worth reading, but it is not worth preservation, and has now been
destroyed by me. At Easter, 1861, I walked to Brighton in a single day
from London, and the next day attended the volunteer review. I was a
great walker, and frequently walked my fifty miles within the day. My
interest in military affairs continued, and I find among my letters of
1861 passages which might have formed part of my writings on military
subjects of 1887 to 1889. I went down to see the new Tilbury forts,
criticized the system of the distribution of strength in the Thames
defences, advocated "a mile of vigorous peppering as against a slight
dusting of feathers every half-hour"; and went to Shoeburyness to see
the trial of the Whitworth guns.'

His cousin, William Wentworth Grant Dilke, was Captain and Adjutant of the
77th Regiment, and Charles Dilke remembered the young officer's visit to
bid good-bye before he departed for the Crimea, where he met his death.

Though old Mr. Dilke had sympathized with the wonderful manoeuvres of the
child's armies of leaden soldiers, and had added to them large
reinforcements, he became troubled by his grandson's keen and excited
following of all the reports from the Crimea. He had a terror of the boy's
becoming a soldier, and 'used to do his best to point out the foolish side
of war.' But this, as the passage already quoted shows, did not deter his
pupil from beginning, while still a growing youth, detailed study of
military matters.

Under normal conditions, an undergraduate going up to an English
University without public school friendships is at a disadvantage: and
this was Charles Dilke's case. But he went to his father's college,
Trinity Hall; and his father was a very well known and powerfully
connected man. Offer of a baronetcy had been made to Wentworth Dilke in
very unusual and gratifying terms. General Grey, the Queen's secretary,
wrote:

"ST. JAMES'S PALACE,
"_January 1st_, 1862.

"MY DEAR DILKE,

"The Queen cannot forget for how many years you have been associated
with her beloved husband in the promotion of objects which were dear
to his heart; and she would fain mark her sense of the valuable
assistance you have ever given him in his labours in some manner that
would be gratifying to your feelings.

"I am therefore commanded by Her Majesty to express the hope that the
offer of a Baronetcy which she has informed Lord Palmerston of her
desire to confer upon you, coming direct from Her Majesty herself, and
as her own personal act, may be one which it will be agreeable to you
to accept."

Proof of the Queen's strong feeling for the man who had been so closely
associated with the Prince Consort in his work of popularizing the arts
and crafts had already been given by the fact that Wentworth Dilke was,
except for those whom she was obliged to meet on business, the first
person from the outside world whom she saw after the Prince Consort's
death. And indeed, but for his sense of a personal graciousness in the
offer, Wentworth Dilke would scarcely have departed from his lifelong
habit of deference to his father's wish and judgment. Old Mr. Dilke,
though gratified by the compliment, wrote to a friend:

"My son's fortune is not strong enough to enable his children to carry
such a burthen with ease; and as to the waifs and strays which it may
help them to, I would rather see them fight their good fight
unshackled."

There came a time when the baronetcy was something of an encumbrance to
one of these children:

'When I was accused of attacking the Queen, which I never did,
somebody--I forget who--went further, and said I had "bitten the hand
which fed me," and I really believe that this metaphor expressed
publicly a private belief of some people that my father had made money
by his labours. All I can say is that he never made a farthing by them
in any form at any time, and that in '51 and in '62 he spent far more
than his income on entertainments.... He wished for no reward, and he
knew the conditions under which his life was given to public rather
than to private service: but he killed himself at it; he left me much
less rich than I should otherwise have been, and it is somewhat hard
to find myself told that if I call attention to notorious illegalities
I am "biting the hand that fed me." The Queen herself has, as I happen
to know, always spoken in a very different sense.'

The newly made Baronet, in the course of his labours for the second
Great Exhibition, added to his already very numerous friendships.

'My father's chief foreign friends in '62 were Prince Napoleon,
Montesinos, Baron Schwartz (Austria), Baron von Brunen von Grootelind
(Holland), Prince Oscar (afterwards King of Sweden), and Senator
Fortamps (Belgium).'

Finally, there is this entry, written in 1890:

'Just as I had made the acquaintance of the Duke of Wellington through
father in the Exhibition of 1851, so I made that of Palmerston in the
Exhibition of 1862. He was still bright and lively in walk and talk,
and was extremely kind in his manner to me, and asked me to one of
Lady Palmerston's Saturday nights at Cambridge House, to which I duly
went. I should think that there is no one living but myself who was at
the Ball to the Queen at the Hotel de Ville in 1855, at the famous
Guards' Ball in 1862, and also at one of Lady Palmerston's evenings.'

Charles Dilke matriculated at Trinity Hall in October 1862.

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: