Letters of Lord Acton Part 2

His adhesion to the cause, though it had no weight with the ma.s.s of electors, who did not know his name, had a deep meaning of another kind. When many men of the lettered, scientific, and learned cla.s.ses left the Liberal party rather than vote for Home Rule, one of the few English names that enjoyed a European reputation did something to counterbalance others which were paraded so often that they seemed indefinitely numerous.

Lord Acton, however, did not come forward as a popular champion of Home Rule, for which he could have furnished a host of historic precedents.

In the sphere of action he was too apt to distrust himself. The House of Lords was not favourable for the purpose, and he never appeared on public platforms. He was more congenially occupied in founding the _English Historical Review_, of which the late Bishop Creighton, then Professor of Ecclesiastical History at {lxv} Cambridge, was the first editor. In 1887 he criticised, not without severity, the third and fourth volumes of the editor's great work on the Papacy. Some editors might have demurred to the insertion of the article. But Creighton was far above all petty and personal feelings of that or any kind. Among the other books noticed by Acton in the _Historical Review_ were Seeley's "Life of Napoleon," Bright's "History of England" (by the Master of University), and Bryce's "American Commonwealth." Academic honours were now coming in rapid succession. In 1888 Lord Acton was made an Honorary Doctor of Laws at Cambridge, in 1889 a Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford, and in 1890 an Honorary Fellow of All Souls, thereby becoming Mr. Gladstone's colleague. For a man who had published scarcely anything in his own name these compliments were as rare as they were just.

When Mr. Gladstone formed his final Administration in 1892, Lord Acton was appointed a Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen. This may seem a singular method of rewarding literary merit. But the circ.u.mstances were peculiar. Lord Acton was desirous of showing his devotion to the Prime Minister, and his belief in the cause of Home Rule. His Parliamentary career had not been distinguished enough for more purely political office, and I am told by those who understand such matters that the lowness of his rank in the Peerage precluded him from a higher place in the Household. The incongruity, however, though Lord Acton felt it himself, was not quite so great as it looked. Besides their month's attendance at the Court, the Lords-in-Waiting are sometimes employed to represent public departments in the House of Peers, and Lord Acton represented the Irish Office for the Chief Secretary, Mr. Morley. In that character he showed, when occasion came, that his {lxvi} long silence in Parliament had not been due to incapacity for public speaking. At Windsor he was agreeable to the Queen from his German tastes and sympathies, not to mention the fact that he could speak German as fluently as English. Every moment of leisure during his "wait" there was spent in the Castle library. Yet the position was an unnatural one, and Lord Acton soon became anxious to escape from it.

His thoughts turned to his favourite Bavaria, and he humbly suggested the Legation at Stuttgart as a possible sphere.

But something infinitely better than any political or diplomatic post remained for this born student and truly learned man. In 1895, just a year after Mr. Gladstone's resignation, Sir John Seeley, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, departed this life. The Chair was in the gift of the Crown, that is, of the Prime Minister, and Lord Rosebery appointed Lord Acton. The appointment was singularly felicitous, and the opportunity came in the nick of time. For the Liberal Government was tottering to its fall, and Lord Salisbury was not wont to overlook the claims of political supporters. Lord Rosebery's choice was bold and unexpected. But it was more than successful; it was triumphant.

Lord Acton was of the same age as his predecessor, and it is a dangerous thing for a man to begin the business of teaching at sixty.

An academic Board would not have had the courage to appoint Lord Acton.

They would have dreaded his want of experience. The advantage of retaining a connection of this kind with the State is that a Minister, rising above the purely academic point of view, will sometimes overlook or ignore technical disqualifications in favour of learning or genius.

Even Cambridge herself was at first a little startled by the nomination of this famous, but rather mysterious stranger. Lord Acton had to make his own way, and he was not long in making it. The opening {lxvii} sentences of his Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History put him at once on good terms with his audience, and through his audience with the University. "I look back to-day," he said (June 11, 1895), "to a time before the middle of the century, when I was reading at Edinburgh, and fervently wishing to come to this University. At three Colleges I applied for admission, and, as things then were, I was refused by all.

Here, from the first, I vainly fixed my hopes, and here, in a happier hour, after five-and-forty years, they are at last fulfilled." It is probable that the happiest hours of Lord Acton's life were spent at Cambridge. As the writer in the _Edinburgh Review_, so often quoted, says, "He loved Cambridge from his soul; loved the grounds and the trees, the buildings and the romance of the old colleges, the treasures of the libraries, the intercourse with scholars." In his first lecture he tried to find some point of agreement with Seeley. But their views of History were fundamentally different. To Seeley, History was purely political. In Lord Acton's view it included social and intellectual movements neither propelled nor impeded by the State. Lord Acton reckoned Modern History as beginning with the close of the fifteenth century, "when Columbus subverted the notions of the world, and reversed the conditions of production, wealth, and power; Machiavelli released Government from the restraint of law; Erasmus diverted the current of ancient learning from profane into Christian channels; Luther broke the chain of authority and tradition at the strongest link; and Copernicus erected an invincible power that set for ever the mark of progress upon the time that was to come." That "history is the true demonstration of religion" was one of the maxims which Lord Acton impressed upon his pupils at the first opportunity. But perhaps the most characteristic feature of the discourse is his insistence upon the necessity of keeping {lxviii} up the moral standard. Better, he exclaimed, err, if at all, on the side of rigour. For "if we lower our standard in history, we cannot uphold it in Church or State." When this brilliant and fascinating lecture came to be published, it was unfortunately enc.u.mbered by more than a hundred notes, all quotations, many of which merely expressed Lord Acton's meaning in language less forcible than his own. "As if," says Macaulay of some pointless reference to a Greek play by a Shakespearean commentator, "as if only Shakespeare and Euripides knew that mothers loved their children."

Lord Acton was rather too apt to think that an expression of opinion, like a statement of fact, required an authority to support it.

Even under the stimulus of Cambridge Lord Acton did not work quickly.

During the five years of his active professorship he only delivered two courses of lectures. The first was on the French Revolution. The second was on Modern History as a whole. He would naturally and by preference have begun with the more general subject. But the exigencies of the Tripos, or of the Curriculum, prevailed, and the thoroughbred animal was put, not for the first time in this world, into the harness of a hack. Lord Acton's lectures were, as they were bound to be, crowded. But they were only a small part of what he did for Cambridge. An Honorary Fellow of Trinity, he received graduate or undergraduate visitors with equal courtesy and kindness at his rooms in Nevill's Court. To them, and to any one who could appreciate it, he would always readily impart the knowledge he had spent his life in acquiring. He was not merely a willing answerer of questions, and a generous lender of books. He had boxes full of the notes he had made since boyhood, each box appropriated to its peculiar subject, and these notes were at the disposal of all historical {lxix} students who could make a proper use of them. His pupils were, as Mr. Bryce puts it, "awed by the majesty of his learning." "When Lord Acton answers a question put to him," said one of them, "I feel as if I were looking at a pyramid. I see the point of it clear and sharp, but I see also the vast subjacent ma.s.s of solid knowledge."[3]

The following letter from Dr. Henry Jackson, Fellow of Trinity, for which my warmest thanks are due to the distinguished writer, will be interesting to all who desire to know more of Lord Acton's Cambridge life:--

"You ask me for information about Acton's life and work at Cambridge.

I am not competent to write anything systematic about either the one or the other; but it is a pleasure to me to put down some of my recollections and impressions, and I shall be glad if my jottings are of any use to you.

"When Seeley died in 1895, my first thought was--'If they are good to us, they will send us Acton;' but I hardly hoped that he would be thought of, and I did not expect that, if he had the offer, he would accept it. So the news of his appointment was to me a very joyful surprise. When he came, he appeared heartily to like his new surroundings--his rooms at Trinity, the collegiate life, the informal conversation, his lectures, his pupils, and the University library.

Quietly but keenly observant of men and things, he was very soon completely at home in the University, with which, as he related in his inaugural lecture, he had wished to connect himself forty years before.

"In hall, in combination-room, and where men smoked and talked, he took an un.o.btrusive but effective part in conversation. His utterances, always terse and epigrammatic, were sometimes a little oracular: {lxx} 'I suppose, Lord Acton,' said some one interrogatively, 'that So-and-so's book is a very good one?' 'Yes,' was the reply; 'perhaps five per cent. less good than the public thinks it.' But a casual question not seldom drew from him an acute comment, an interesting reminiscence, or a significant fact. 'When was London in the greatest danger?' asked some one rather vaguely. 'In 1803,' was the immediate answer, 'when Fulton proposed to put the French army across the Channel in steamboats, and Napoleon rejected the scheme.'

"Others will tell you of his influence upon the historical studies of the University, of his help given freely to teachers and to learners, and of his judgment and skill in planning and distributing the sections and the subsections of the 'Modern History,' which he did not live to edit. He was an active member of the committee which recommends books for purchase by the University Library. But, in general, he shunned the routine of business. Even at the Library Syndicate, though he followed the proceedings attentively, he seldom or never took part in discussion or voted. Indeed, I thought that I noticed in him a paradox which extended beyond the limits of academic affairs. On the one hand, he was observant of everything, and he made up his mind about everything. On the other hand, except where supreme principles--Truth, Right, Toleration, Freedom--were in question, he was cautious and reserved in the expression of opinion, and he always preferred to leave action to others.

"Like other specialists, I found that my own study had not escaped his attention. He had a good general knowledge of the work done by modern students of ancient philosophy, and his criticisms of them showed a sound, clear, and independent judgment. One or two trifling incidents seemed to me significant. The first time that he came to my rooms, looking quickly along {lxxi} a bookshelf, he soliloquised: 'I never knew that Bonitz had translated the _Metaphysics_.' It surprised me, not that Acton did not know of the posthumous publication of this work, but that he expected to remember all that a specialist in Greek philosophy had written. On another occasion he was talking of German professors--first of professors of history, afterwards of others. He could tell us about all: he had heard many. At last it occurred to me to ask him about a forgotten scholar who had written a treatise about Socrates. The book was in no way important, but it had given me a very agreeable impression of the writer's personality. I found that Acton had known the man, had attended his lectures, and could testify to the personal attraction which I had surmised.

"When Acton died, writers of obituary notices appeared to regard him as one who, while he devoured books and acc.u.mulated facts, pa.s.sed no judgments, framed no generalisations, and cherished no enthusiasms; and I fancied that Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, in his very interesting letter to the _Spectator_, unconsciously encouraged this misapprehension. Nothing could well be further from the truth. To me it seemed that Acton never read of an action without appraising its significance and morality, never learnt a fact without fitting it into its environment, and never studied a life or a period without considering its effect upon the progress of humanity.

"His judgments were severe but just. Neither glamour of reputation nor splendour of achievement blinded him to moral iniquity. He had a wealth of righteous indignation which upon occasion blazed out fiercely. 'Are you aware,' he once asked, 'that Borromeo was a party to a scheme of a.s.sa.s.sinations?' 'But,' said some one, 'must we not make allowance for the morality of the time?' 'I make no allowance for that sort of thing,' was the emphatic answer; and {lxxii} the contrast with the measured and sedate tones of Acton's ordinary utterance made the explosion all the more impressive.

"This righteous indignation carried with it a corresponding appreciation of anything good. I remember well how he told me the supplement to the old story of the Copenhagen signal--that Parker made it with the expressed intention of relieving Nelson from responsibility, but in the confident expectation that, if skill and daring could do anything, Nelson would disobey. Acton could admire Parker's magnanimity as well as Nelson's genius.

"It would be presumption in me to say anything about Acton's historical attainments; but I may note one or two peculiarities which I noticed in his att.i.tude to the study. History, as he conceived it, included in its scope all forms of human activity; so that scholars whom others would describe as theologians or jurists were in his eyes great departmental historians. This, I thought, was the explanation of his miscellaneous reading; for he was always methodical, never desultory.

"But despite this width of view, he did not grudge the expenditure of time and trouble upon details. On the contrary, he would not only ransack archives, but also interrogate those who had witnessed, or been concerned in, great events. Of course he minutely scrutinised and scrupulously weighed the testimony thus obtained; but when once he was satisfied of the accuracy of his information, he was prepared to use it for the interpretation and explanation of doc.u.mentary evidence.

"Acton could never have written anything which was not literature of a high order--dignified, incisive, vigorous; and yet history was to him, not literature, but political philosophy; not an interesting narrative, but a scientific study of cause and effect. He had, {lxxiii} however, no faith in political forecasts about anything more than the immediate future.

"It is impossible not to regret that Acton has not made his mark in literature as the writer of a great book, or in politics as a great statesman; but he preferred to _know_, and the men who know as Acton knew are few. The world is the richer whilst they are with us, and the poorer when they go. Acton will not be forgotten at Cambridge."

A brilliant and penetrating judgment of Lord Acton's services to Cambridge was paid in the _Cambridge Review_ a few months after his death (October 16, 1902) by Professor Maitland, who had been a.s.sociated with him in preparing the "Cambridge History" as a Syndic of the Press.

Himself one of the most learned men in the University, Mr. Maitland was amazed by the extent of Lord Acton's range. "If," he writes, with a laudable wish to avoid extravagance, "we recall the giants of a past time, their wondrous memories, their encyclopaedic knowledge, we must remember also how much that Lord Acton knew was for them practically unknowable." His reading was not for amus.e.m.e.nt. His daily consumption of a German octavo meant mastery of the book, with copious notes in a neat handwriting on slips of paper, which were always, like his books, at the disposal of his pupils. He "toiled," as Professor Maitland says, "in the archives, hunting the little fact that makes the difference." He was "deeply convinced that the history of religion lies near the heart of all history," while it was his fate to be suspected by Catholics as a Liberal, and by Liberals as a Catholic.

"This man," I again quote the Professor, "who has been called a miser was in truth a very spendthrift of his hard-earned treasure, and ready to give away in half-an-hour the substance of an unwritten book." Some writers, especially bad writers, do not shine in conversation, because {lxxiv} they are keeping their best things for the public. Lord Acton would pour out to a sympathetic listener the most recondite history, or, on a different occasion, the spiciest gossip, if that were the commodity in demand. So far as knowledge and power went, and if time had served, Professor Maitland is convinced that Lord Acton could himself have written all the twelve volumes of the "Cambridge History."

The "History" is his best memorial. Another memorial is the famous Aldenham Library, bought by Mr. Carnegie, and presented by Mr. Morley to the University of Cambridge.

The article which I have ventured to a.s.sociate with the name of Professor Maitland is signed "F.W.M.," a signature which the writer would not have adopted if he had desired to preserve his anonymity.

The authorship of a letter signed "H.J.," and written from Cambridge, which appeared almost simultaneously in the _Daily News_, is not more difficult to identify. "H.J.'s" words are a memorable and eloquent protest against the ignorant fancy that Lord Acton spent his life in the mere acc.u.mulation of learning. The exact opposite, as he says, was the truth. Lord Acton "was no mere Dryasdust: he was a watchful observer of men and affairs. If he studied the detail of history, it was in order that he might the better elicit its significance and its teaching. He was slow to express an opinion; but in his judgments there was never any indecision. In the advocacy of intellectual freedom he was eager: in the denunciation of tyranny and persecution he was at a white heat. He was a man who loved to prove all things, and to hold fast that which is good." Every one who knew Lord Acton, or at least every one who could appreciate him, must recognise the justice and fidelity of this eloquent tribute. But it was at Cambridge that he put forth to the utmost the whole power of his mind. It was at Cambridge that he showed most clearly how his whole {lxxv} life had been devoted to the cause of freedom and of truth. It was there that he planned the "Cambridge History" in twelve volumes, of which two, the first and the seventh, have already appeared. Unhappily they were posthumous. Lord Acton did not live to see them, nor to write the Introduction. At the age of sixty-seven he was suddenly struck down by paralysis, and, after lingering for more than a year, died at Tegernsee on the 19th of June 1902. He was "buried by the side of the daughter whose deathbed he had comforted with the words, 'Be glad, my child, you will soon be with Jesus Christ.'"[4] Such through life and in death was his simple faith.

The l.u.s.tre which Lord Acton's name reflected upon Cambridge was not felt more deeply, or more sincerely, than the higher standard of learning which he introduced into a learned professoriate. He was the one man in England, if not in Europe, who could have brought with him from the outside an equal knowledge of books and of the world.

Cambridge saw his weak side quickly enough. The keen-witted men who enjoyed and appreciated his talk, or watched him listening with an attention that nothing escaped, could understand why Dollinger predicted that if he did not write a great book before he was forty he would never write one at all. As a matter of fact he did not write a book of any kind, small or great. He did not even, as he once thought of doing, republish his Essays. His contemplated Life of Dollinger dwindled into an article of forty pages on Dollinger's Historical Work for the _English Historical Review_.

But the article, which appeared in October 1890, shows Lord Acton at his best. His affectionate reverence for his great master gives a colour and animation to his style, which it often lacked. This is by far the most readable of all his essays, and by no means {lxxvi} the least instructive. Dollinger was in some respects like himself.

"Everybody felt that he knew too much to write," and the best part of his erudition was given to his pupils at Munich. In tracing the course of Dollinger's studies, and of his mental development, Lord Acton wrote the best, because the most characteristic, biography of the Old Catholic leader. Besides the interest of the subject itself, Lord Acton contrived to bring into this wonderful summary a number of judgments on other things and persons as vivid as they are acute.

Freeman rather horrified him by preferring printed books to ma.n.u.scripts as material for history. But then he "mixed his colours with brains."

Lord Acton was inclined to think Stahl, the philosophical and Conservative statesman of Prussia, "the greatest man born of a Jewish mother since t.i.tus." Dollinger, however, considered that this was unjust to Disraeli, and most Englishmen will probably agree with him in opinion.

Whether Lord Acton ought to have left the Church of Rome when Dollinger was excommunicated, or when the Vatican decrees were p.r.o.nounced, is a question which it would not become a Protestant to ask, much less to answer. He did not shrink from the risk of speaking out, and it was not his fault that he escaped. No earthly reward or peril would have induced him to say what he did not think, or to profess what he did not believe. The truths which all Christians hold in common, and the moral principles to which Sophocles ascribes an unknown antiquity, guided him in history as in life. His emphatic statement that he had never felt any doubt about any Roman doctrine was made some years before 1870, and the secession of the Old Catholics, which failed for want of an Episcopate. In 1878 Pio Nono died, and was succeeded by a more liberal Pontiff. Manning lost his influence at Rome, Newman was made a cardinal, and the Broad Churchmen {lxxvii} in the Roman communion were tolerated, if not encouraged. Even Lord Acton's old enemy, Manning, turned from theological controversy to movements of social philanthropy, to Irish politics, in which he agreed with Acton, and to good works among the poor. The strictest of Roman Catholics were not sorry to think that the most learned Prelates of the Anglican Church were less learned than a Catholic layman. The more a man knew, the larger was his idea of Lord Acton's knowledge. But for the years between 1895 and 1900 that knowledge would have been comparatively wasted. It would have profited only a few readers here and there beyond the circle of Lord Acton's friends. At Cambridge, the Professor of History was in perpetual contact with fresh minds eager to know, and to transmit what they acquired. He did not altogether understand the Greek mind, for he told Mr. Gladstone that it was unscientific. But he had this much in common with Socrates, the father of science, that he required the clash of dialectic to bring out his full force. When ignorant people laid down the law, Lord Acton smiled, and, it is to be feared, enjoyed himself in an almost sinful degree. When scholars and philosophers conversed with him, they found him often indeed more inclined to listen than to talk, but always appreciative, suggestive, and awakening. To genuine students he was a mine of information, and would give what was asked tenfold. n.o.body ever entrapped him into a path which for good reasons he was disposed to avoid. Attempt to draw him into controversy, and he became cautious, subtle, enigmatic. But every one who came to him, as his Cambridge pupils came, for a.s.sistance and instruction, went away not merely satisfied and enlightened, but moved and touched by the profundity of his knowledge, the generosity of his temper, and the humility of his soul.

[1] I owe the opportunity of reading and quoting from this lecture, reported in the _Bridgnorth Journal_ of the 14th, to the kindness of Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff.

[2] His wife had become insane on the failure of her mission to France.

[3] "Studies in Contemporary Biography," 398.

[4] _Edinburgh Review_, 404, page 534.

[Ill.u.s.tration:

Mary Gladstone Herbert Gladstone Mr. Gladstone Mrs. Gladstone Dr. Dollinger Lord Acton

Group at Tegernsee, 1879.]

{1}

LETTERS OF LORD ACTON

[Sidenote: _Mentone Oct. 31, 1879_]

You were threatened with a long letter from me, about people at Paris, but I could not finish it, ... and so I lost the only days on which Paris information could be of any use. After a week of care, varied by pleasant visits from Lacaita, F. Leveson, and H. Cowper, we started, and rested at Milan and Genoa, and yet were nearly the first arrivals here. We expect to have the Granvilles for neighbours at Cannes, as well as Westminsters.

Let me first of all transcribe a pa.s.sage from my unsent letter: "If you see Madame Waddington you will find her a very pleasant specimen of American womanhood. Her husband wants the qualities that charm and win at first, and I suppose he will not hold his own long. He has no dash, no _entrain_, no personal ascendency, like the men who succeed in France; but there is not a deeper scholar, or a more sincere and straightforward Christian in the country." I see from your letter that the unfavourable part of my remarks came true more than the praise.

Something may be due to awkwardness connected with the Ferry[1] Bill.

The interview with Scherer consoles me. He is a man of the first order as far as that can be without showy gifts. But he is guarded, cold, unsympathising, and {2} the intellectual crisis by which he came to repudiate the Christian faith was so conspicuous that he is embarra.s.sed with people who are notable for religious conviction.