LORD ACTON'S LETTERS.* IT is impossible not to regret that

this first instalment of the letters written by the late Lord Acton to Miss Mary Gladstone should have been edited with so considerable a disregard for the feelings of persons now living. All the blame for this is certainly not to be attached to Mr. Herbert Paul, who has done much to add to the value of the letters by his informing and valuable introductory memoir of Lord Acton. Mrs. Drew in her preface says that "it does not seem likely that any one, after reading these letters, would question the desirability of their publication. In general they speak for themselves ; a few notes have been added to explain allusions which by lapse of time have become obscure ; some names and passages, and some letters, have been omitted." Mrs. Drew is, therefore, ultimately re- sponsible for the editing, and we can only regret that the omissions were not extended to a considerable number of names and passages which add little to the historical value of the book, but occasion pain to the worthiest people. There are references to Lord Goschen, Sir Bartle Frere, Lord Wolseley, M. de Laveleye, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Matthew Arnold, Lord Tennyson, Sir Robert Morier, Dr. Mozley, Lord Macaulay, and many others which, while perfectly permissible in private letters, ought not to have been published. We make this pro- test not only with respect to this book, but in support of a principle which has until quite recent years been uninfringed, —the principle that if letters of persons of importance are published, there should be omitted all passages dealing with, or calculated to hurt, the feelings of living persons.

As we have already said, Mr. Paul's introductory memoir is extremely good. It throws much light on the letters and on the writer of the letters, and should be read before them, even by those who knew Lord Acton personally. Lord Acton was the only son of Sir Richard Acton, and was born at Naples on January 10th, 1834. His mother was a German, and his father's family had lived much abroad. The chief languages of Europe were thus at his command, and this fact played a great part in the accumulation of his vast knowledge. He lost his father in childhood. In 1843 he was sent to the Roman Catholic College at Oscott, under Dr. Wiseman. Thence, being unable to enter Cambridge, he passed to Munich and sat at the feet of Dollinger, where he learnt to look at life historically and laid the foundation of his great learning. From Munich he went on to most of the capitals of Europe, and acquired that knowledge of, and love for, affairs which he never lost. Life to him was always history, and affairs were the machinery of (at least) political life. The letters teem with his almost singular curiosity with respect to the courses and springs of cur- rent political events. He brought to bear on public life exactly the same mental attitude that be brought to bear on the history of the past. "It is puerile to write modern history from printed books," he exclaimed in 1882. His object was ever to look into the life of movements; but it must be con- fessed that though he had better opportunities of doing this perhaps than any man of his time, his prophecies of the immediate future were oftener than not wrong. It is one thing to look into the mainsprings of accomplished facts—in such analysis Lord Acton has had no equal—it is another thing to prophesy even the nearest future from what seem to be the mainsprings of movement at the moment. Causes in the complexity of history only become clear, if ever, in the presence of effects. Lord Acton's judgment, moreover, was extraordinarily biassed by his natural worship of Mr. Glad- stone. The overpowering personality and the splendid moral standard of Mr. Gladstone took away all light and shade from the picture of public life as Lord Acton saw it. He could not understand what Sir Henry Maine meant when he said : "You seem to use Tory as a term of reproach." "I was much struck by this answer—much struck to find a philosopher, entirely outside party politics, who does not think

• Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, Daughter of the Eight Hon. W. E. Gladstone. Edited, with an Introductory Memoir, by Herbert PauL London: G. Allen. Liz.. net.]

Toryism a reproach." The truth was that Sir John Acton was from the earliest age a Continental Liberal. His visits to the United States and Russia, both then in the thraldom of slavery, were not likely to shake his Liberalism ; and when in 1859 he entered the House of Commons his golden silence did not disguise the fact that politically he agreed with nobody and nobody agreed with him. Mr. Gladstone was the great exception. Holding the same Liberalism, they both also "desired the reunion of Christendom, and both held that religion was the guiding star in public as in private life." From the date of entering Parliament until 1865, when he was unseated for Bridgnorth, Sir John Acton was also engaged in journalistic work in connection with Newman's paper, the Rambler, which subsequently coalesced with the Home and Foreign Review. Acton's Liberalism appeared in every line he wrote. The fact that be was by conviction a Roman Catholic never for one moment stood between the pursuit of historical truth and what appeared to be the highest political morality. The end came when Pius IX. declared that "the opinions of Catholic writers were subject to the authority of the Roman Congregations."

Acton could neither admit the doctrine nor dispute the authority. The Home and Foreign Review therefore dis- appeared from the scene. Henceforth he devoted himself to research, to the accumulation of material for his great unborn book, The History of Liberty, and to the formation of an annotated library that should supply the authorities for this work. Nor was his pen idle. Great numbers of anonymous articles, most of which are identified, were written for weighty Reviews, and his stores of knowledge he was always ready to lavish on the humblest student.

Moreover, in his letters, side by side with the pleasantest chat and the most amusing, and at times caustic, comment on books, people, and current events, he poured out his knowledge with unequalled ease and certainty. In the letters before us passage after passage reveals a width of judgment in historical scholarship and a grasp of detail that certainly few other historians of the nineteenth century exhibited. Singularly interesting and valuable is the passage where Lord Acton discusses (in the learned criticism on John Inglesant)" what might have occurred two centuries and a half ago to a sincere and upright [Roman Catholic] priest" :—

"I will presume that he took the oath of allegiance, for, in 1635, the Jesuits allowed their penitents to take it. He would even admit the Royal Supremacy, like Father Caron, as not ex- ceeding the prerogative of Kings in France and Spain. He would drop the imputation of schism, seeing that Bramhall wrote that there was no formed difference with the Church of Rome about any point of faith. Finding that an Archbishop denied any necessary articles of faith beyond the Apostles' Creed, he would regard the 39 Articles as Hall, Chillingworth, Bramhall, Stilling- fleet, and, according to Bull, all that are well advised, considered them—pious opinions which no man was obliged to believe. With Bossuet, he would acknowledge the force of the case in favour of Anglican orders, and with Richard Simon he would admit that the Caroline divines had not their equals in his own Church, and would revere them as the strongest enemies of the specific heresies of Luther and Calvin, as the force that would sap the fabric against which Rome still contended in vain. If he heard that there was a bishop [Anglican] who begged prayers for his soul, another who tolerated the Invocation of Saints, a third who allowed Seven Sacraments, and so on, ho might be willing to believe, with Davenport, that the chasm was filled that had separated England from Trent. To reach that point of concilia- tion it would be necessary to make the best of everything, so far as could be without sophistry, violence, or conceal- ment. And the same rule of favourable interpretation would be applied by the same man to his own Theology. He would be bound by the limits of Richelieu's proposals, and would keep within the lines of Bossuet, and those which Spinola afterwards drew, with the assent of Pope and General. He would have been confirmed in this method by the response it drew from such eminent Protestants as Grotius, Bramhall, La Bastide, Praetorius, Fabricius, and Leibniz. Their judgment would have encouraged him to abide in his own communion, and would have taught him that he was as safe as his friend on the other side. The same impartiality would have led to the same result. There were even Protestant divines who sanctioned conversions to Rome."

This long passage is an example of Lord Acton's manner, of his wide, deep, yet easy learning, and of his deduction of

principles from practice. He was certainly the intellectual modern counterpart of the " sincere and upright priest" that he drew. He considered that the only obstacle to a union of the Churches was "the moral obstacle ; to put it compendiously the Inquisition." Lord Acton's horror of Yaticanism was only equalled by his hatred of Ultramontanism. The following passage throws, indeed, a Rood of light on the attitude of Acton's school,—the saving leaven of modern Roman Catholicism :-

"4 speculative Ultramontanism separate from theories of tyranny, mendacity, and murder, keeping honestly clear of the Jesuit with his lies, of the Dominican with his fagots, of the Popes with their massacres, has not yet been brought to light. Dollinger, who thinks of nothing else, has never been able to define it, and I do not know how to distinguish a Vaticanist of that sort, a Vaticanist in a state of grace, from a Catholic."

Lord Acton was "a Vaticanist in a state of grace." Such a person could scarcely have been welcome to the Vatican when he went to Rome in the autumn of 1869 to work for reform and righteousness in connection with the astounding Council which before the New Year had made Pio Nono the sole legislative authority in the Roman Church. The apostle of liberty kept Dr. Dollinger and Mr. Gladstone closely informed of the proceedings of the Council. "We have to meet," he wrote, "an organised conspiracy to establish a power which would be the most formidable enemy of liberty as well as science throughout the world." On July 18th, 1870, the dogma of Infallibility was finally carried. Dollinger, with an honesty of conviction that knew no fears, refused to accept the decree, and was, says Mr. Paul, "cut off, like Spinoza, to his eternal honour, from the congregation of the faithful." The most curious part of the whole affair was that Acton, who in the previous November had been made a Peer by Mr.

Gladstone, was not attacked, though he had organised the opposition to the most ruinous step that the Vatican had ever made. The Pope and his English friends were presumably afraid of the immense learning, the great power, and the unquenchable honesty that Lord Acton possessed. Manning attempted to attack him, but witlArew from the contest in time. As Mr. Paul says, "the new cardinal, if he had indulged in an historical controversy with Quirinus,' might have emerged from it with less credit to himself than amuse- ment to the learned society of Europe." But Lord Acton was absolutely loyal to the religious principles that attached him to the Roman Communion. "Communion with Rome is

dearer to me than life." It has never been suggested that his projected History of Liberty was left unwritten through the

fact of his unfaltering loyalty to what we may call a Platonic Vatican. Yet it is impossible not to feel that the startling contrast between such a work, which must have been placed on the "Index," and his loyalty to an institution which in practice tended to make Roman Catholics, to use his own words, "irredeemable enemies of civil and religious liberty," must at least have hampered his project. The recent action taken against Mivart shows that the policy of Rome has not changed, and it is certain that the storm which would have

followed the publication of Lord Acton's history would have done the Roman Church in England infinite harm.

When Lord Acton turned from the stir of public life to his books, it was, therefore, sufficient for his purpose to collect the material that later historians would be compelled to use ; and his library, now at Cambridge, so fully annotated, is more than a monument to his memory. It will ensure the ultimate fulfilment of the task that he had so longed to perform. If he himself was not to enter the Promised Land, he made sure that the land would be reached. His position as the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge—an ideal appointment—enabled him to give new life to the History School at that University. The great history that he pro- jected in twelve volumes, and of which he moulded the shape and method, will be a significant tribute to the memory of this learned man. The achievements of his life are nobler than we yet realise. The crumbs from the table of his