The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke Volume I Part 4

Even in his earliest term Dilke soon pa.s.sed out of the role 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. .h.i.therto, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 ill.u.s.tration, 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 a.s.sociated 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 a.n.a.lysis of Coleridge's political system; a note on the views of the Abbe Morellet, with essays on comparative psychology, the a.s.sociation 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 quant.i.ty 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 compet.i.tor, 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 att.i.tude 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 cla.s.sical 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 compet.i.tor 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 a.s.s, my friend, a great a.s.s, 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_."

APPENDIX

Sir Charles Dilke's a.s.sociation with the river and with rowing men was so constant that we ate justified in preserving this contemporary report of his first race for the Grand Challenge, on which he always looked back with pride:

"It was," says the report, which Dilke preserved, "one of the finest and fastest races ever seen at Henley, and the losers deserve as much credit as the winners. The Oxford crew were on the Berks side, Kingston on the Oxon, and Cambridge in the middle. It was a very fine and even start, and they continued level for about 50 yards, when Brasenose began to show the bow of their boat in front, the others still remaining oar and oar, rowing in fine form and at a great pace.

So finely were the three crews matched, that, although Brasenose continued to increase their lead, it was only inch by inch. At the end of about 400 yards Brasenose were about a quarter of a length only ahead. The race was continued with unabated vigour, Brasenose now going more in front, and being a length ahead at the Poplars, where they began to ease slightly. The contest between Cambridge and Kingston was still admirable; Cambridge had made some fine bursts to get away from them, but they were not to be shaken off, and the gallant effort of the one crew was met by a no less gallant effort on the part of the other. The Cambridge crew began to show in front as they neared Remenham, and a most determined race was continued to the end. Brasenose won by a length clear, and the Cambridge boat was not clear of the Kingston, only having got her about three-quarters of their length."

The time--seven minutes, twenty-six seconds--was the fastest that had been rowed over that course, and more than half a minute faster than that of the final heat, in which Brasenose were beaten by University. But next day in the Ladies' Plate University brought down the record by three seconds.

Trinity Hall had the worst station, and if they were beaten by only a length, must have been as fast as Brasenose. Kingston was stroked by L.

Pugh Evans, Brasenose by D. Pocklington (W. B. Woodgate rowing 4). The Trinity Hall eight were as follows: