Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, Daughter of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone

From this time forward Lord Acton wrote less, and read, if possible, 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. 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 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 Döllinger, "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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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: '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 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.

"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 assassinations?' '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 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 attitude 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 documentary 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, 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 associated 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 encyclopædic knowledge, we must remember also how much that Lord Acton knew was for them practically unknowable." His reading was not for amusement. 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 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 associate 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 accumulation 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 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.