Montreux I met a newly-married young clergyman whose ugliness almost
made me take him for ----, and who assured me that it was offered to
Holland. The dean of St. Paul's[204] was at Munich the other day, and
delighted Doellinger, who believes, in consequence, that a more
mischievous fellow than Chamberlain does not eat bread. He also sent
him, and enabled me to read, Mozley's washy "Recollections." Liddon, I
see, is busy with Rosmini, in the intervals of {171} Pusey.[205]
Rosmini will interest you if the book ripens. He had much of Newman,
and nearly reformed the papacy. But I am troubled with a doubt. His
book was answered, by Passaglia, Thenier, Curci, and others, and it was
condemned by the Index. Rosmini wrote a long and curious defence of
it, which he printed, but did not publish, so as not to defy his
censors. Liddon ought to have this defence before him, to strengthen
his text withal. Perhaps Lockhart, and the other English Rosminians,
may scruple to give it to him, lest they break the measured silence of
their chief. It may be worth while to ask the eloquent and impulsive
Canon, whenever you see him, whether he knows of it. Do let me thank
you warmly for speaking of me to Mrs. Craven. She was almost my
earliest friend, and I am shocked to think that I seemed unfaithful to
memories forty years old. She was intimate with my mother before I was
born. What does it matter that she also bores me a good deal by her
restlessness, her curiosity and indiscretion, her want of serenity,
&c.? I always liked her in spite of it, and she was always a great,
but uncomfortable, admirer of Mr. Gladstone. Not so Waddington. You
must have seen at once that he is a very estimable, solid, deeply
religious man. There is hardly so great a scholar in France, and I
think he is the only Frenchman before whom Mommsen has retracted a
statement. That indeed is his proper line. Like George Lewis, he is
really happiest among his coins and inscriptions, and was never made
for the active life in which his high character, his knowledge, and now
his willingness to serve a party not his own, have carried him so far.
He has more caution than go, and has neither eloquence, nor influence
over men. {172} Above all things, he is cautious to do nothing that
would enable adversaries to accuse his patriotism. His language about
Egypt, and the future of France in the East, would seem exaggerated,
but I dare say you have read "Memories of Old Friends," a book meant
for invalids at Bohemian wells, and curiously displaying English minds
as they were about 1840. In the second edition Mill's letters are
appended, in one of which he describes Tocqueville's opinion that one
must not lower national pride, "almost the only elevated sentiment that
remains in considerable strength." Waddington might adopt those words
with even greater justice now. He once befriended me, so that I am
bound to speak up for him. We had met but once, at the Embassy, when
he asked me to dinner, and arranged that I should meet, besides Lyons,
Wimpfen and Hohenlohe, whom he knew to be old friends of mine, Louis
Arco, and the three most learned men in Paris, and then he gave me his
box at the Francais. But whilst I testify what a good fellow he is, it
is necessary, highly necessary, to add that he is not a friend of Mr.
Gladstone. That class of scholars to which he belongs, men busy with
inscriptions, ruins, medals, vases, contriving thereby to amend a text
or fix a date, inevitably resent the spirit in which Mr. Gladstone
studies antiquity, carrying with him emotions and ideals derived from
elsewhere, and considerably disturbing accepted habits and conclusions.
Then it is very hard for an extra patriotic Frenchman to see with
patience a powerful government that does not always use its strength,
that accepts rebuke and repulse, and is ready to draw in the outposts
of the empire. Whatever the true cause, I am pretty sure of the fact
that he will come to Hawarden, like Ruskin, curious to probe the great
Gladstonian {173} mystery, not favourably prepossessed. I hope you
will have him soon, and deal justly with him.
When you sit down to Macaulay, remember that the Essays are really
flashy and superficial. He was not above par in literary criticism;
his Indian articles will not hold water; and his two most famous
reviews, on Bacon and Ranke, show his incompetence. The essays are
only pleasant reading, and a key to half the prejudices of our age. It
is the History (with one or two speeches) that is wonderful. He knew
nothing respectably before the seventeenth century, he knew nothing of
foreign history, of religion, philosophy, science, or art. His account
of debates has been thrown into the shade by Ranke, his account of
diplomatic affairs, by Klopp. He is, I am persuaded, grossly, basely
unfair. Read him therefore to find out how it comes that the most
unsympathetic of critics can think him very nearly the greatest of
English writers.
My good friend Bright[206] got me into controversy by sending me
Beard's "Hibbert Lectures," on the Reformation. There was a great deal
to say, with the usual result; but you would think them interesting as
a stimulant. Have I ever told you that I have read the Diaries,
letters, &c., of G. Eliot? Cross wants me to review them in the
_Nineteenth Century_, or at least wanted; but I know not where he is,
or whether he still wishes it.
I always see Miss Helen Gladstone in the papers, and suppose she is
with you. I don't know whether Miss Renouf is in her house.[207] She
is a sort of god-child of mine, and her father is, without exception,
the most learned Englishman I know. The daughter of {174} such a man
should be something unusual; the mother, too, is of a clever family, a
Brentano.
Lady Blennerhassett gave me some accounts of you at Holmbury.
Minghetti, whom I saw lately, tells me that our friend Bonghi has a
Roman History in the press, which the Italians hope to set up against
Mommsen. I forgot, to complete my confession, that I have never been
happy about our policy with Cetewayo. But the general result of the
session cannot be lamented, only it is not heroic success, such as Mr.
Gladstone's supremacy and the flatness of the Opposition would demand.
The great thing is his health. I did not come over, not being once
summoned, so that we shall only meet at Cannes. Do talk about plans.
Can there be anything before Cannes? It can never be too soon to meet.
[Sidenote: _La Madeleine Feb. 9, 1884_]
You make writing as difficult as living afar, by your unspeakable
goodness, but also by the infusion of the contrary quality. If I
promise not to attack the Government, and to believe in Lord Derby,
will you agree not to hit me so hard? I cannot well help doing what I
do, taking all things into consideration; and as to my tiresome
book,[208] please to remember that I can only say things which people
do not agree with, that I have neither disciple nor sympathiser, that
this is no encouragement to production and confidence, that grizzled
men, except ----, grow appalled at the gaps in their knowledge, and
that I have no other gift but that which you pleasantly describe, of
sticking eternal bits of paper into innumerable books, and putting
larger papers into black boxes. There is no help for it. But your
reproaches are much more {175} distressing to read than you suppose,
and make me think them better to read than to hear. Otherwise, I too
would have a dream, to describe, and wish that yours came true from
January 1 to December 31.
George[209] did not catch me at Marienbad, and came from Munich in a
big box, only the other day. I had partly read him, but I was in a
difficulty about thanking you for it with full honesty as long as I
only knew it casually, by unhallowed copies. But I do thank you, if I
may do so even now, most gratefully for the kindness of it altogether,
and particularly for your belief that I should understand it, and care
for it apart from the sender. Although in this you have flattered me;
for there are points in which I dare say I do not like him as much as
you do.
Do not think ill of the people they call academic Socialists. It is
only a nickname for the school that is prevailing now in the German
universities, with a branch in France and another in Italy, a school
whose most illustrious representative in England, whose most eminent
practical teacher in the world, is Mr. Gladstone. In their writings,
inspired by the disinterested study of all classic economists, one
finds most of the ideas and illustrations of Mr. George, though not,
indeed, his argument against Malthus. This makes him less new to one;
but nobody writes with that plain, vigorous directness, and I do
believe that he has, in a large measure, the ideas of the age that is
to come.
I am glad, too, that you like Seeley's book. It is excellent food for
thought. But so is the first article in the January _Quarterly_.[210]
I wrote eight pages of criticism and should have liked to send them to
{176} you instead of Maine, but perhaps you have not read him.
Liddon's objection to saying what may damage a very meritorious body of
surviving friends of Rosmini is practically reasonable; but it is
rather a reason for not writing at all on the subject. Rosmini made a
vigorous attempt to reform the Church of Rome. He was vehemently
attacked, repelled, censured; and he defended himself in a work more
important, argumentatively, than the first. If this dramatic incident
is left untold, if his stronger statements are omitted from his case,
we shall get an imperfect notion of a memorable transaction, and of an
interesting, if not a great, divine.
I am so very glad that Mr. Gladstone is in his best health, and that
the troubled times have put out of sight the notion of retirement. For
that reason I could almost console myself in looking at the Soudan.
That affair has been in the hands of a colleague without much original
resource, attentive to the wind, and glad to follow the advice of local
agents. It chances that I have been reading ----'s confidential
letters written to a friend sure not to show them to Ministers; and I
have thought him deficient in imagination--in the discovering
faculty--and also in independence. There is no denying that there has
been a lack of initiative genius in the last few weeks, and that Mr.
Gladstone would have done more if Bonaparte had been his departmental
colleague.
Of all critics of my list,[211] Lubbock is best informed in a vast
region where I am a stranger. I by no means disregard his criticisms.
I have not got the list myself, and should like nothing in the world so
much as to sit {177} with you and talk over the objections you have
collected. But will that, or will anything like it, ever be? If it
may, do send one line on Tuesday to wait arrival at 18 Carlton House
Terrace.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _18 Carlton House Terrace S.W. Feb. 13, 1884_]
Here is a ceremonious invitation to dine to-morrow, which I most gladly
accept.
I gather, from something I have just heard, that Froude will not wish
for the Professorship. As to Freeman, I am not quite sure. There can
be no real competitor but Gardiner.
Dinner without any prospect beyond will be mere dust and ashes; but
what awful fun Oxford[212] would be!
[Sidenote: _Feb. 15, 1884_]
... It was such a delight to meet the greatest of all our
historians[213] at this particular moment. There never was so much
kindness in this world. I can think of nothing but our journey, and
the wretchedness of having only one day there. Of course I am going to
live at the Clarendon. If any doubt arises, do not let it exist for a
moment. Then I must visit the Bodley for an hour, and Stubbs, Liddon,
M. Mueller, Jowett, Brodrick, Bright of University.
But these are my private wanderings. Do remember that, and let them
not spoil the _cachet_ of their own grouping. As all passes through
you, do take an opportunity to say how thankfully and joyously I accept
his invitation.
{178}
[Sidenote: _La Madeleine March 17, 1884_]
May I employ the fleeting and disrespectful pencil to express
sentiments of the most opposite kind? I am still so stupidly weak,
unaccountably pulled by an illness which is an anachronism here, that I
am afraid to wait till I am quite ripe for ink, to speak of the happy
time I owed to your companionship in the two capitals of greater
Britain. There has never been anything like it, and I wonder when
there will again. Cambridge is in reserve; but nothing can ever equal
the sensation of festive home among people I had never seen, that you
procured for me at Keble. The worst recollection is the parting at
Paddington. I chose my hour next day so badly that, coming at 6, I
found your mother invisible, yourself out, and your sister gone. I
have said nothing yet to M----; but I do look forward two months to
another meeting. I am very glad that my last conversation with Mr.
Gladstone left no worse impression, for in the obscurity of St. James I
preached heavily on my favourite text: "apres moi le deluge;" and on my
favourite preacher.
Meanwhile the troublesome question of retirement is in a new phase.
The half Reform bill is floated by a half pledge as to redistribution
which is personal to himself. He cannot leave it to be redeemed by
others, who, he expressly stated, are not parties to it. He is
virtually pledged to complete the work himself; that is, to meet the
next Parliament. For they will inevitably force him to dissolve in the
autumn, if they do not succeed in crowding out the Reform question. If
not carried by an immense majority, it will be carried by Irish votes.
The Lords will be able to say that England ought to be consulted
definitely, that it ought not to be overruled by Ireland, in an old
Parliament, and that such a change in the Constitution {179} is not to
be carried by enemies of the Constitution until the country has
pronounced.
I don't imagine that it is a bad point to dissolve upon--at any rate,
there is no swopping in such a crossing.
But I suppose he has abandoned the hope of himself retiring from Egypt,
and if he does not, nobody else will; and so one must begin to face
what is inevitable, and to acknowledge that the Soudan has altered our
position in Egypt. A further complication cannot be far off. The best
time to re-open the Turkish question will be whilst we are a little
damaged as to disinterestedness by Cyprus and Egypt, whilst our
increased security makes us less anxious and less nervous about
Constantinople, and whilst the censor of the Turk resides at No. 10.
The position in the East is so much altered since Berlin[214] that
Russia will not long be bound by that Treaty, having a price by which
Austria can be won. Every step of that sort will help to fix us in
Egypt.
And as long as we are at Alexandria or even at Souakim, the future of
Central Africa will depend on us, or at least on our people. I do not
believe that Mr. Gladstone would revive John Company and send him to
the Equatorial lakes; and yet I fancy there is an opening there for
inventive statesmanship.
My eagerness about Liddon's elevation does not mean that my head was
turned by the ambush of that deferential Sacristan at Oxford
Station,[215] or that the Warden[216] talked me over--though he talked
wisely. For I am not in harmony with Liddon, and scarcely in sympathy.
He has weak places that nobody sees and resents so sharply as I do; and
he has got {180} over, or swallowed, such obstacles on the road to Rome
that none remain which, as it seems to me, he ought logically or
legitimately to strain at. I will even confess to you alone--that that
affair of Rosmini leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. But one might
pick holes in any man, even in the new Bishop of Chester.[217] Nothing
steadies a ship like a mitre--and as to his soundness, his
determination to work in and through the Church, and not on eccentric
courses, I satisfied myself with the supreme authority of Dean Church,
on my last night in town. One cannot help seeing that Liddon is a
mighty force, not yet on its level. He knows how to kindle and how to
propel. Newman and Wilberforce may have had the same power, but one
was almost illiterate; the other knows what he might have learnt in the
time of Waterland or Butler; whereas Liddon is in contact with all that
is doing in the world of thought....
* * * * *
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _La Madeleine March 30, 1884_]
... You ask a question on which I can express unexpected agreement. As
long as property is the basis of representation, I think it hard to
exclude female owners. There is an obvious principle in it, of course.
But though obvious it is not stringent; because female influence is not
excluded. We not only have no Salic Law, but we allow women to vote on
matters not political, and we have attached political influence to
property so closely, that rich old women, like the
Duchess-Countess,[218] or Lady Londonderry, are {181} dreadful powers
in the land. The argument from consistency does not, therefore, make
for exclusion.
At the same time, I think it an evil in many ways. Girls and widows
are Tories, and channels of clerical influence, and it is not for them
so much as for married women that your argument tells. If we ever have
manhood suffrage--dissociating power from property altogether, it will
be difficult to keep out wives. The objections to voting wives are
overwhelming.
* * * * *
You open a delightful vista of Colleges and Chapels at Cambridge. It
is not so easy to answer quite definitely. If the Reform Bill, read a
second time before Easter, is sent up by Whitsuntide, the division in
the Lords will be early in June. My difficulty would then be that,
having to come in June, I could hardly come to England in May.
Supposing my Reform vote to be wanted only after Midsummer, then my
probable plan would be to come to London by the middle of May; and I
should be at your orders for Cambridge any time between 20th and 30th
May....
Subject to these conditions, I shall be only too happy to escort you
down to the Sidgwicks', to whom, please present my best thanks. If
Maine is there, I dare say we can count on a luncheon there.... I am
talking of myself and own plans; but all the time I am thinking of your
cares and troubles, of which you say so little. If you can send me a
line of good news to Rome, I shall be so glad.
[Sidenote: _La Madeleine June 19, 1884_]
You will be careful, another time, I hope, as to the enclosures you
forward, seeing how long a reply they involve, and how great a delay.
The difficulty which prolongs and has delayed my letter {182} will be
very apparent to you before you reach the end.
First, as to the personal question:--
It was not my purpose to depreciate Canon Liddon. I came over with the
highest opinion of him--an opinion higher perhaps than Dr. Doellinger's,
or even than Mr. Gladstone's, whose ostensible preference for divines
of less mark has sometimes set me thinking. Impressed by his
greatness, not as a scholar to be pitted against Germans, but as a
spiritual force, and also by a certain gracious nobleness of tone which
ought to be congenial, I tried, at Oxford and in London, to ascertain
whether there is some element of weakness that had escaped me.
Evidently, Liddon is in no peril from the movement of modern Science.
He has faced those problems and accounted for them. If he is out of
the perpendicular, it is because he leans the other way.
The question would rather be whether a man of his sentiments, rather
inclined to rely on others, would be proof against the influence of
Newman, or of foreign theologians like Newman.
On the road Bishops and Parliament were taking a few years since, there
would be rocks ahead, and one might imagine a crisis in which it would
be doubtful who would be for maintaining the National Church and who
would not. I have chanced to be familiar with converts and with the
raw material of which they are made, and cannot help knowing the
distinct and dissimilar paths followed by men like Newman himself,
Hope, Palmer, R. J. Wilberforce, Ward, Renouf, many of whom resembled
Liddon in talent and fervour, and occupied a position outwardly not far
from his own.
{183}
He once called the late Bishop of Brechin[219] the first divine in the
Church. I knew the Bishop well, and am persuaded that the bond that
held him in the Anglican Communion might easily have snapped, under
contingencies to which he was not exposed.
Putting these questions not quite so crudely as they are stated here, I
thought that I obtained an answer. At any rate, I was assured that
Liddon is made of sterner stuff than I fancied, that he knows exactly
where he stands, where others have stood before him, and where and why
he parts with them; that the course of Newman and the rest has no
secrets and no surprises for him; that he looks a long way before him,
and has no disposition to cling to the authority of others. In short,
it appeared very decidedly that he is--what Bishop Forbes was
not--fixed in his Anglican position.
Under this impression, I could not help wondering why Wilkinson,
Stubbs, and Ridding are judged superior to Liddon. I could have felt
and have expressed no such wonder if I had not taken pains to discover
that he has tried and has rejected the cause of Rome, and that neither
home difficulties nor external influence are at all likely to shake him.
Far, therefore, from meaning disparagement, I rate him higher than any
member of the English clergy I know; and touching the question of
stability, I have the sufficient testimony of his friends, of men
naturally vigilant on that point, of which I am not competent to judge
or to speak.
So little competent, indeed, that I should be at a loss to define his
system, or to corroborate, of my own knowledge, the confidence which
others have {184} expressed. It seemed to me necessary to indicate
that, for myself, I could not speak without some qualification or
reserve, such as perhaps would only occur to a close student of Roman
pathology. To do more, will be giving undue and unfair prominence to a
parenthesis. It lays stress where there ought to be none, makes the
deduction, the exception, greater than the positive statement, and
gives me the air of a man whose praise is designed to convey a slur of
suspicion.
That is why your letter with its formidable enclosure has afflicted me
with dumbness. The doubt which I indicated in writing to you has been
suggested chiefly by what passed in reference to Rosmini.
You will remember that you sent Liddon word that Rosmini wrote a very
long defence of the little book which he was translating. He preferred
not to make use of the information and not to see the book; and he
avoided the subject when we met at Oxford. The reason is, that the
Rosminians wish the Defence to be ignored, as it qualifies the
submission of the author when the book defended was condemned.
The suppression injures nobody; it only puts the readers of the
translation slightly off the scent, and gives an imperfect article
instead of none. There is some trace of complicity with those who are
interested in a _suppressio veri_. But it may have been due, as he was
under obligations to them, and this is only preliminary matter.
My real difficulty is, that he speaks of his author with great respect,
and evidently thinks his doctrine sound and profitable.
{185}
Now Rosmini, allowing for some superficial proposals of reform, was a
thorough believer in the Holy See. His book itself, by the nature of
the reforms proposed, implies that no other defects of equal magnitude
remain to be remedied. Apart from the Five points he accepts the
papacy as it stands; and he has no great objection to it, Five points
included.
He was what we vulgarly call an ultramontane--a reluctant ultramontane,
like Lacordaire. An Anglican who views with satisfaction, with
admiration, the moral character and spiritual condition of an
Ultramontane priest, appears to me to have got over the principal
obstacle on the way to Rome--the moral obstacle. The moral obstacle,
to put it compendiously, is the Inquisition.
The Inquisition is peculiarly the weapon and peculiarly the work of the
Popes. It stands out from all those things in which they co-operated,
followed, or assented as the distinctive feature of papal Rome. It was
set up, renewed, and perfected by a long series of acts emanating from
the supreme authority in the Church. No other institution, no
doctrine, no ceremony is so distinctly the individual creation of the
papacy, except the Dispensing power. It is the principal thing with
which the papacy is identified, and by which it must be judged.
The principle of the Inquisition is the Pope's sovereign power over
life and death. Whosoever disobeys him should be tried and tortured
and burnt. If that cannot be done, formalities may be dispensed with,
and the culprit may be killed like an outlaw.
That is to say, the principle of the Inquisition is murderous, and a
man's opinion of the papacy {186} is regulated and determined by his
opinion about religious assassination.
If he honestly looks on it as an abomination, he can only accept the
Primacy with a drawback, with precaution, suspicion, and aversion for
its acts.
If he accepts the Primacy with confidence, admiration, unconditional
obedience, he must have made terms with murder.
Therefore, the most awful imputation in the catalogue of crimes rests,
according to the measure of their knowledge and their zeal, upon those
whom we call Ultramontanes. The controversy, primarily, is not about
problems of theology: it is about the spiritual state of a man's soul,
who is the defender, the promoter, the accomplice of murder. Every
limitation of papal credit and authority which effectually dissociates
it from that reproach, which breaks off its solidarity with assassins
and washes away the guilt of blood, will solve most other problems. At
least, it is enough for my present purpose to say, that blot is so
large and foul that it precedes and eclipses the rest, and claims the
first attention.
I will show you what Ultramontanism makes of good men by an example
very near home. Saint Charles Borromeo, when he was the Pope's nephew
and minister, wrote a letter requiring Protestants to be murdered, and
complaining that no heretical heads were forwarded to Rome, in spite of
the reward that was offered for them. His editor, with perfect
consistency, publishes the letter with a note of approval. Cardinal
Manning not only holds up to the general veneration of mankind the
authority that canonised this murderer, but makes him in a special
manner his own patron, joins the Congregation of Oblates of {187} St.
Charles, and devotes himself to the study of his acts and the
propagation of his renown.
Yet I dare say I could find Anglican divines who would speak of the
Cardinal as a good man, unhappily divided from the Church of which he
was an ornament, and living in error, but yet not leading a life of
sin--I should gather from such language that the speaker was not
altogether averse from the distinctive characteristic of
Ultramontanism, and had swallowed far the largest obstacle on the road
to Rome.
The case of Rosmini is not so glaring, but it is substantially the
same. Language implying that an able and initiated Italian priest
accepting the papacy, with its inventory of systematic crime, incurs no
guilt, that he is an innocent, virtuous, edifying Christian, seems to
me open to grave suspicion. If it was used by one of whom I knew
nothing else, I should think ill of him. If I knew him to be an able
and in many ways an admirable man, I should feel much perplexity, and
if I heard on the best authority that he deserved entire confidence, I
should persuade myself that it is true, and should try to quiet my
uneasiness.