Letters of Lord Acton Part 5

Liddon repeated at Munich the story of Carnarvon. He also gave the excuse which I suggested--that Chamberlain, Fawcett, Dilke alarmed him.

But it is not a pretty story as he tells it, considering the way Carnarvon turned against the new Ministry.

[Sidenote: _Tegernsee July 10, 1880_]

I am heartily glad to hear what you say of Mr. Gladstone's health and strength and spirits, and of the {25} nook behind Hampstead,[31] so much better than the dull air of the Thames Valley. There must be so much to hara.s.s him besides what appears, and what he can wind up and swamp in dazzling speech. Rosebery's anxiety is shared by many thorough Liberals, and it is not, perhaps, unfortunate that the perils of the position have made themselves felt at once, that the full warning comes in time, and the remedy can be taken early.

I wonder whether, for a reason you know as well as I do, a thing we all perceive remains a mystery to the person most concerned to know it.

The Liberal party is held together, not by forces within, but by a force above it. It consists, like the being that declined a chair, of two wings and a head. Without Mr. Gladstone's ascendency and the l.u.s.tre of his fame, Harcourt, Argyll, and Bright would soon offend every group into insubordination and incohesion. The jealousy between the old Liberals, who are losing ground, and the usurping Radicals, and all other familiar elements of discontent, cannot be restrained by Parliamentary management alone. There remains a great sphere for direct personal influence. The men Mr. Gladstone used to look up to, Peel and Aberdeen, had not much of this, and I fancy he takes from them the belief that it is unnecessary or undignified. He has been so long without holding the threads of party: it is so natural, in one who writes and speaks so much, to suspect those who misunderstand him doing it voluntarily: it is so natural to him to underrate the effect of personal contact, that he may think that the sole legitimate method of mastering men is Parliamentary speaking, or writings addressed to mankind. But it is worth anything that people should know and see more of him, in society if possible. {26} First, because people are flattered. Next, because they are awed. Last, because they are conciliated, and so disciplined. And this applies to three sorts especially--members, diplomatists, and journalists. I am sure all that public policy can do to strengthen the Government will be done. But I note an unhappy impatience of those inferior arts my earthy spirit relies on.

I see how willing the _Times_ is to be taken in hand, in spite of Walter. Sir Henry Maine, like Stephen, used to write in the _Pall Mall_. I don't know whether he has joined Morley. Maine's nature is to exercise power, and to find good reasons for adopted policy.

Augustus or Napoleon would have made him Prime Minister. He has no strong sympathies, and is not at heart a Liberal, for he believes that Manchesterism will lose India. He considers also that the party, especially Lowe, has treated him less well than Salisbury. He is intensely nervous and sensitive. After that, I may say that I esteem him, with Mr. Gladstone, Newman, and Paget, the finest intellect in England. For some reason he is one of the men whom Lord Granville's arts do not reach. I wish you would see him....

It would be very kind of you indeed to ask the Lathburys some Tuesday or Tuesdays. I say that because he is so much my friend, but he is also an eminently useful and trustworthy man. His wife wrote much in the _Sat.u.r.day_--I don't remember the article you speak of. When I am a little in doubt about anything I consult Lathbury, who steadies and encourages me. When I feel very sure of some conclusion I go to Maine, who always knocks it to pieces. He is much the more instructive of the two. The other is more pleasant.

With Maine, above him indeed at the India Office, {27} is Sir Louis Mallet, a thoughtful economist, a sincere, almost pa.s.sionate Liberal, but under Cobden's influence, one of those sincere Liberals least attracted by your father. He is very sound beyond the Indus, and I wish you sometimes saw him; but I ought not, perhaps, to say it, for I half suspect the Prime Minister has some ancient reason for objecting to him.

The breakfast with the archbishop,[32] the philosopher,[33] the Frenchman,[34] and even with G---- does not suggest hilarity. What you will do for sketches of character after the Reays leave England, I cannot imagine.

[Sidenote: _Marienbad August 8, 1880_]

I don't know how to thank you for thinking of me at such a moment.[35]

It was hard to bear being away just then, and you must have gone through a dreadful time. Even with the sc.r.a.ps of information that reach one here, I have been able to realise much of it. Almost the first consoling thing was the report of your escapade with Wolverton.

Every line of your letter is a monument of your goodness, even your disinclination to go into details. But I am afraid you must have been terribly knocked up--so soon, too, after your own illness, of which I will not speak now, but which, indeed, I was very sorry to hear of.

And I do trust that Mrs. Gladstone was enabled to go through it all without excessive alarm or fatigue. She will not need words to be a.s.sured of all my sympathy. I am persuaded that your greatest pleasure, just now, comes from the expressive conduct of adversaries, not from the vain words of friends.

{28}

Our defeat in the Lords[36] opens a wide vista of difficulty and trouble--partly because it injures the Government, but not much, and will probably increase the ascendency of the P.M.; particularly because of the H. of Lords itself. n.o.body will ever believe that such a majority was due to honest and disinterested motives. People will say, and will say truly, that an a.s.sembly which is moved by selfish and sordid motives, when there is a question of preventing ruin and starvation, is not only an injury to the poor, but a disgrace to the community, and there is no way out of it. Small majorities may give way or abstain; but after so determined a demonstration, repentance will be suicidal. And the one instance in modern times where the Lords have proved stronger than the Commons, because postponement here was prohibition, is a question of helping the poor who suffer, at a slight sacrifice and slighter danger to people immensely rich.

We are only beginning with questions of this kind. Did you hear the speech at the end of May in which Mr. Gladstone spoke of that cla.s.s which is so numerous that it is virtually the entire nation? Graver words were never spoken in Parliament, for the entire land is virtually in the hands of another cla.s.s. The considerations which this contrast, this contradiction suggests, have a mighty future before them, a future damaging to my boy's prospect of ever sitting on a red leather bench.

I am sorry we were not 52.[37] It would have been impressive, like the Doctrinaires of whom it was said: "Ils sont quatre; mais quand ils veulent imposer par {29} le nombre, ils pretendent etre cinq." Indeed, for all the reasons which Argyll repudiates, justifying my prophecy about him in the spirit, if not to the letter, there has been no measure for which I should be so anxious to vote. I wrote to Lord G.[38] to send me timely warning, as there was no trouble I would not take.

Having been to a doctor, without any idea that I was seriously out of order, I was sent here suddenly, and am forbidden, for reasons I must acknowledge, to move for some weeks to come. It could not have happened at a worse moment for me.

I was sorry for Frere, and should probably have allowed his daughter to come round me....

It is too kind of you to remember, after all that has pa.s.sed over you and the nation, details of former letters. Unless there has been a change lately, there are two editors of the _Economist_, one for money matters and the other for politics. Maine will be proud and happy, and ought to be much obliged to me for supplying a topic for so pleasant a conversation. I wonder whether he showed you the luminous side of his mind, whether you saw why he always disagrees with me, and why some people are more afraid than fond of him. Whatever pa.s.ses at the end of the Session, I do hope that a season of rest is included in our friend Dr. A. Clark's prescriptions. It might give me some remote chance of seeing you again.

That Dutch Interior is charming, and I hope you enjoyed the circle of widowers as much as I did your graphic account of them. It is delightful to think of the repose after the storm has been weathered so {30} well. Argyll practising his next speech in the solitude of night, ----'s diplomatic deafness and yet more artful slumber, his brother with a hook placidly fixed in Bright's aggressive nose, the refined American[39] offended by the rigidity of the Democrat, the group of listening Senators, the harmless youth, the envious beauty--and then the great historic background and the one overshadowing figure--there is not a page in Mme. de Remusat approaching it. Do you write like this to other people? Do you write at least six pages of diary every night? Please do; and let me read it now and then. And remember that one touch of ill-nature makes the whole world kin. If you are really going to be left at Hawarden, you ought to shut your door, shut your eyes, recall all that you have seen and heard during the last six months, and write it carefully down. You have such an opportunity and such a power. I am not like the Roman:[40] I envy almost as much as I admire.

You make me happy by allowing me to conclude that I gave no offence by what I wrote of our exalted House. I don't mean that your uneasiness was quite unreasonable. When a Bill[41] gets knocked about in Committee, even when an artful Minister means it to be knocked about, it can never go up to the Lords harmonious, consistent, and the genuine expression of a policy. There are not two sides to every question, but there is always an opening, in such cases, for sincere criticism. The way out of that is to pa.s.s the second reading, and to correct in Committee what was done wrong in Committee. What I mean in this case is that the Bill involved a principle of infinite force and {31} value, which the Ministry probably veiled to their own eyes, and which the Lords were right to resist as a private a.s.sociation, which they are not; wrong to resist as a disinterested national inst.i.tution, which is their claim to exist.

It is impossible to exaggerate the depth of aversion the Bill has evoked. You must have heard enough of it. One man has spent two days here for the purpose of telling me how wrong it was. Another writes to me that he has paired for the session, feeling that Government will be obliged to those who help them when they are hopelessly wrong, although the help consists in pairing and going to Vichy. These are idle men, representative of thousands.

It reminds me of the great landowner, Bedford, who reminds me of Arthur,[42] who reminds me of Maine. I suppose it was a refuge in Piccadilly that revealed the secret to me. Arthur's one fault is a delight in secrets. Although Maine is unfitted to be P.M. (under any but a despotic monarch), n.o.body has so large a conception of all questions relating to the tenure of land. I dare say he has been asked to say what he knows about Ireland. What pure reason and boundless knowledge can do, without sympathy or throb, Maine can do better than any man in England.

I am sorry to think of Lowell's sun sinking behind your horizon. At first sight one always fancies that those who question the certainty of history sap the certainty of religion, or are the victims of those who do, and I fancy I should have had a word (with corners) to throw at him. The Remusat volumes are one of my landmarks in judging Napoleon.

It is, of all accounts by competent people, the most injurious to his memory, as {32} Segur's are the most favourable. Until I read them, I thought the fixed intention to put Enghien to death, the charge of murder, not proven. If the authority of these recollections breaks down, I must invent for myself a new Napoleon. After allowing for the fact that they were written, or re-written, years later, like the Diary of John Adams, the Memoirs of S. Simon, the History of Burnet, of Clarendon, the Annals of Tacitus, the Nine Muses of Herodotus, the Eight Books of Thucydides, which are the most conspicuous sources of all history, and for the suspicion that there was a great secret she not only could not tell, but wrote in order to obliterate, and after giving whatever weight it deserves to the little joke that calls it: "Souvenir d'une femme de chambre renvoyee," I am so persuaded that the book is authentic and true, that I should have liked to hear the argument. But this is true, history does not stand or fall with historians. From the thirteenth century we rely much more on letters than on histories written for the public. I need not add that the history of our Lord which we find in the Epistles is one most valuable testimony in favour of the Gospels. So that even if Lowell can damage the reports in this book, we can restore the certainty of history by the aid of letters, of doc.u.ments and of those facts in which independent witnesses agree.

Is it not heroic of your sister renouncing a life like your own for the toil of Newnham? I wish her success and happiness in her pilgrimage most sincerely. By-the-bye your other sister is the real pilgrim, and I wish I had known in time to warn my belongings of her movements.

My time here is up, and I go home to-morrow. As a proper P.M.'s daughter you ought to say you hope {33} I was really ill, to justify fifty-one.... It is absurd to come all the way to England and not to see you; so I shall come only if I am ideally wanted. I write at once to discover whether and when. Your telegram is a great disappointment.

I wonder where they will go. Cannes is the place I recommend, but not till October. If I am not summoned home from Tegernsee for Hares or Burials,[43] I look forward to Ammergau, and wish you were coming.

[Sidenote: _Tegernsee Sept. 21, 1880_]

I ought to write no more. I ought to hide my useless hand altogether.

There was a week during which I looked forward to a summons home, a summons that never came; and after having persistently applied for it, I thought that it was better not to make the offer of my vote more urgent than the demand for it. I know how much I have missed and lost.

Circ.u.mstances over which I have no control would probably have arrested my maritime enterprise at Gravesend.[44] But how pleasant Holmbury would have been! And then there was, and is, so much to talk to you about, so much that evaporates in writing and will not keep, so much that will. As there can hardly be an autumn session after prorogation in September, I must wait for the end of January. Meanwhile I hope you will cultivate the notion of Tegernsee. Such a break with the great world would do Mr. Gladstone good, and I fancy we could make you like the place once more. Let me have that hope before me.

{34}

My children went to Ammergau and came back not deeply moved, but strongly impressed. I let them go without me from a sort of dread many people must have felt, not because of the chief actor, for a pious, simple-minded peasant's conception of the two natures is probably not more inadequate than my own, but what we do gradually realise in meditating the Pa.s.sion is the character and experience of the disciples, the effect of that companionship, the utter human weakness that survived in the midst of the intense feelings it must have awakened in them. Those are contrasts that can be expressed, and are apparently too subtle for the performers at Ammergau. I am told that, on the whole, the audience remained cold.

The answer to my telegram was signed in a way that led me to doubt whether it came from you. I trust it was sent by your brother, and that Mr. Gladstone was not molested by my inquiries on the top of so many more. It is beginning at the wrong end to read David Copperfield first, but he is worth anything to busy men, because his fun is so hearty and so easy, and he rouses the emotions by such direct and simple methods. I am ashamed to think how much more often I return to d.i.c.kens than to George Eliot.

Do some of the brothers or secretaries make a point of reading the _Temps_? Of all that is written against the Ministry and its general policy, the _Temps_ articles seem to me the most serious and suggestive, and at Marienbad I went through a course of Austrian newspapers, which are very hostile, and better written than our Tory organs, but not near so good as the _Temps_. I am afraid it is my friend Scherer. Not being a Frenchman, his patriotism is peculiarly lively. Don't call Chenery my friend. I have never seen him, and {35} only know that he is making a mess of the _Times_. But my reasons were those you know well, and they will hold good next year.

You are quite right in all your corrections. ---- ---- is a very good fellow. His only artifice is his discretion. His mind is accustomed to travel along roads straight, and wide, and beaten, so that it acc.u.mulates conventional truths and borrowed convictions, but he is as well meaning and as sincere as a man can well be who is not on the watch to root up prejudices. His son is threatened with Toryism as with the gout. I don't know which is worse.... I talk nonsense at times, because sense is monotonous. It won't do to shrink from hard speeches and judgments when they are necessary. But it is horrible to make them when one is not compelled. Do believe me when I say that is what makes you delightful, and a certain generous, unselfish, courageous credulity is part of it. Commynes says: "It is no shame to be suspicious, but only to be deceived." That is a contemporary of Machiavelli. Two centuries later you will find in Telemaque these words: "Celui qui craint avec exces d'etre trompe merite de l'etre, et l'est presque toujours grossierement." That is the progress of 200 years. Don't you think you see the distance between Bismarck and your father?

You have had an excellent idea about those letters. If you go on and arrange them, it will be very precious to him some idle day, if that should ever come, and to you all. The inner reality of history is so unlike the back of the cards, and it takes so long to get at it, which does not prevent us from disbelieving what is current as history, but makes us wish to sift it, and dig through mud to solid foundations. I conclude that all {36} political correspondence has been set in order regularly, otherwise that ought to be thought of too.

The bit of scandal suspected in the unwritten part of the Remusat Memoirs, was supposed to have belonged to the time of the camp at Boulogne, of which she gives very full accounts. But it is not necessary to believe all those things. There would be no pure reputations. I suspend my belief even about Fersen.... They cannot publish Talleyrand's Memoirs because he tells so many tales of that kind, and people still living would be surprised to find out who they are.

I was flattered to know that I had supplied topics of conversation and even of dispute at Holmbury. I should like always to be accused by Lord Granville, defended by your father, and sentenced by you. But don't always a.s.sociate me with bottles of physic, even in dreams.

From something you wrote I gather that Mr. Gladstone did not altogether disagree with Forster's sentiments; I am sure I did not; yet it seemed to me very hazardous to make such a speech in Mr. Gladstone's absence, suggesting wide differences in the Ministry, rousing expectations which will go on growing through the autumn, making the Lords more angry than repentant, using terms so vague that they can be almost honestly misrepresented, and a great deal more. Home Rule will make great capital out of the events that happened after your father fell ill.

J. McCarthy's two last volumes[45] are not equal to the first, but you will be interested in reading them. But here is post-time, and I cannot say one-half.

{37}

[Sidenote: _Tegernsee Sept. 27, 1880_]