more. Dr. Shaw's careful Bibliography, my obligations to which I have
already acknowledged, contains nothing between 1877 and 1885 except a
review of Sir Erskine May's "Democracy in Europe" for the _Quarterly_
of January 1878. Sir Erskine May, the well-known Clerk of the House,
was a pleasant and popular writer, who dealt largely in
generalisations, and sometimes condescended to platitudes. He was an
earnest Liberal, though his office imposed some restraint upon his
opinions, and it is creditable to the impartiality of the late Sir
William Smith that he should have allowed a Liberal critic to deal with
a Liberal author in the traditional organ of Conservatism. He
certainly had his reward. For it would be difficult to find in the
_Quarterly Review_ from the days of Gifford and Southey to our own an
article of more fascinating interest and more solid value than this
masterly essay, which its author never took the trouble to republish.
{lix} Notwithstanding Lord Acton's minute and conscientious accuracy in
points of detail, he is always best and most characteristic in broad,
luminous inferences from large masses of history and long periods of
time. He contented himself on this occasion with a few civil remarks
about the public servant who made so industrious a use of his leisure,
and devoted the rest of his space, which was far too small, to a
comparison or contrast of democracy with freedom. He showed that for
eleven hundred years, from the first Constantine to the last, the
Christian Empire was as despotic as the pagan; that it was Gregory the
Seventh who made the Papacy independent of the empire; that Luther
bequeathed as his political testament the doctrines of Divine right and
passive obedience; and that Spanish Jesuits, in arguing against the
title of Henry the Fourth to the throne of France, had anticipated the
doctrines of Milton, Locke, and Rousseau. Passing on, with the ease of
a man at home in all periods of history, to the dynastic change of
1688, he described the Whig settlement not as a Venetian oligarchy, but
as an aristocracy of freeholders, while from the American rebellion of
the following century he drew the moral that a revolution with very
little provocation may be just, and a democracy of very large
dimensions may be safe. The defect in the principles of 1789 was that
they exalted equality at the expense of liberty, and subjected the free
will of the individual to the unbridled power of the State.
After 1879 Lord Acton ceased to live at his country house in
Shropshire, dividing the months when he was not in London between
Germany and the Riviera. Besides his great Library at Aldenham, there
was a smaller but complete library in each of his three houses. He
usually spent the winter at Cannes, and the autumn in Bavaria, at
Tegernsee, which belonged to the family of his wife. This {lx}
cosmopolitan existence was by no means uncongenial to him, and,
correspondence apart, he was not cut off from his English friends.
Cannes in the season is as much English as French, and when Lord Acton
was in London he made the best use of his time. The hours he spent in
reading were so disposed that he could enjoy at the close of the day
the sort of society he liked best. He was a member of Grillions, and
of The Club. He knew almost everybody worth knowing, and no one so
fond of study was ever more sociable. But, as these letters show, the
man whom above all others he esteemed and revered was Mr. Gladstone.
Mr. Gladstone, with characteristic humility, always deferred to Lord
Acton's judgment in matters historical. On the other hand, Lord Acton,
the most hypercritical of men, and the precise opposite of a
hero-worshipper, an iconoclast if ever there was one, regarded Mr.
Gladstone as the first of English statesmen, living or dead. The
reason for this opinion will be found in the following pages. The
opinion itself is not the less important because Lord Acton was in many
respects cautious to a fault, and had little of the enthusiasm which
sustained his idol. Except Doellinger, "the glory of Catholic
learning," as Mr. Bryce well calls him, there was no other contemporary
for whom Lord Acton felt unqualified reverence. Mere oratory had not
much effect upon him, even if it were John Bright's or the Duke of
Argyll's. Admiring, as he could not but admire, the charm and power of
Newman's style, he considered Newman himself to be a "sophist, the
manipulator, and not the servant, of truth." Knowing Mr. Gladstone
from the inside, as few outside his own family knew him, he felt his
simplicity as well as his greatness, and realised that he had no object
except to learn what was true, and to do what was right. In politics
there was no difference between the two men, unless it were that Lord
Acton could never {lxi} quite forgive Mr. Gladstone's eulogistic
tribute to the memory of Lord Beaconsfield. Even in religion that
which divided them was small indeed when compared with that which
united them. Lord Acton was as staunch a believer in religious liberty
as any Protestant, and no Catholic could desire more fervently the
reunion of Christendom. In politics, as I have said, the sympathy was
complete. Unlike most Catholics, Acton had been in favour of Italian
independence, so dear to Mr. Gladstone's heart. He had always belonged
to the school of Liberals who put the rights of the individual above
the claims of the State, and he had as little liking for Socialism as
Mr. Gladstone himself. He held in utter detestation the foreign policy
of Lord Beaconsfield, and that temper of mind which goes by the cant
term of "Jingoism." No one rejoiced more heartily over the Liberal
victory of 1880, or attributed it more exclusively to Mr. Gladstone.
No one worked harder to keep him at the head of the Liberal party, and
no one can have foreseen more clearly the disastrous consequences of
his final retirement. Perhaps the nearest approach to a schism between
Lord Acton and his political chief was that each had a favourite
novelist, and that neither would acknowledge the transcendent merits of
the rival. Lord Acton was unjust to Scott. Mr. Gladstone underrated
George Eliot. Lord Acton's estimate of George Eliot may be found in
some of the ensuing letters, and in the _Nineteenth Century_ for March
1885. This article, one of the most elaborate Lord Acton ever wrote,
was translated into German, and, so far as the general public were
concerned, might as well have appeared in that language at first. It
is an extreme and provoking instance of the writer's passion for
condensation, reference, and innuendo. It is well worth the trouble of
reading, although fiction is not the province in which Lord Acton's
opinion was most {lxii} valuable. But the trouble is due to congested
sentences, and might easily have been spared.
When in 1886 Mr. Gladstone made his great attempt to settle the Irish
question by Home Rule, Lord Acton gave him a zealous and cordial
support. Although, as we have seen, he was far from holding the
doctrine of nationality in an unqualified form, he had grasped for many
years with increasing strength the conviction that Ireland could be
orderly and peaceably governed by Irishmen alone. So far back as
October 1881, when the Liberal Government and the Land League were in
open hostility, and Mr. Parnell was arrested under the Coercion Act, he
wrote, "The treatment of Home Rule as an idea conceivably reasonable
(in the speech at Leeds) which was repeated at the Guildhall, delighted
me." There were not many readers besides Lord Acton who discerned at
that time the trend of Mr. Gladstone's ideas. But a very few months
later, in February 1882, Mr. Gladstone, speaking on the Address, used
language of a much more significant kind, to Lord Acton's great
delight. "I have long wished," he wrote on the 20th of February, "for
that declaration about self-government.... The occasion last week gave
extraordinary weight to the words.... The risk is that he may seem to
underrate the gravity of a great constitutional change in the
introduction of a federal element." Lord Acton, it will be observed,
much as he desired the change, did not ignore its risks, or even its
perils. When the decisive moment came, which Mr. Morley has described
with so much eloquence and power ("Life of Gladstone," vol. iii. pp.
311-12), Lord Acton sounded a note of warning in the midst of his
felicitations. "From the point of view of the ages," he wrote on the
18th of March 1886, "it is the sublime crown of his work, and there is
a moral grandeur about it which will, I hope, strengthen and console
him under any amount of difficulty, and even disaster." It was {lxiii}
this faculty of seeing the case against his own most deeply cherished
principles and predilections which made Lord Acton so valuable a friend
and counsellor to Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone's splendid enthusiasm,
and indomitable optimism, sometimes led him to ignore obstacles against
which he might have provided. Acton, whose temperament was critical,
as his mind was judicial, pointed out, with the sincerity of true
friendship, though with unfailing tact, the clouds above, and the rocks
ahead. No man admired Mr. Gladstone more. No man flattered him less.
The following letter to Mrs. Drew expresses his opinion at the time,
and also the judgment of a distinguished Italian statesman who was
always friendly to England:--
"Your letter comes in the midst of the living echoes of the speech, and
of the uncertainty that follows, and does not quite relieve my feeling
of apprehension. Rome is not a good place for accurate news, and I
hope for more letters at Cannes in a couple of days. My old friend,
Minghetti, is sinking under an incurable illness. The other night,
when several people were attacking me about the Irish Bill, he said,
very solemnly and in his best Italian: 'The one will be happy even if
he fails, and the other will repent even of his success.' The other
was Bismarck. Next morning came Herbert's letter saying that he feels
that for himself the best thing would be defeat.
"I hope that there is not any real inconsistency in my language or in
my thoughts at this crisis. I am more decidedly in favour of the
principle of the measure than anybody; and there can hardly be one
among your father's friends who urged it more decidedly, though some
followed more or less contentedly. The Bill is better than I sometimes
expected it to be, on one or {lxiv} two important points. It is not
only right in my eyes, but glorious as the summit of his career, and if
I was on the spot I should be the warmest and the most convinced of its
supporters.
"But what makes it more admirable to me is that the stimulus is not
hope but duty; that it is very much more clearly dictated by principle
than by expediency, that the supreme motive is not strongly sustained
by sordid calculation. I do not see a real likelihood of its
succeeding in this Session, and I am not sanguine about success in
Ireland.
"Arguments founded on the presumed good qualities of the Irish do not
go very far with me, and I am ready to find the vices of the national
character incurable. Especially in a country where religion does not
work, ultimately, in favour of morality; therefore I am not hopeful,
and it is with a mind prepared for failure and even disaster that I
persist in urging the measure."
His adhesion to the cause, though it had no weight with the mass of
electors, who did not know his name, had a deep meaning of another
kind. When many men of the lettered, scientific, and learned classes
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 circumstances 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 encumbered 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 mass 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 unobtrusive 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 accumulated facts, passed 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.