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

"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.