Letters of Lord Acton Part 21

The Dean a.s.sures me that, Pusey being gone, Liddon will be under no personal influence, that he has more confidence in himself and more backbone than I was able to discover for myself.

[Sidenote: _La Madeleine Jan. 22, 1885_]

Of course I know very well that we shall not make our Bishop of London; and ever since I wrote to you I have been seeking points of consolation, and magnifying to myself my own sources of misgiving.

Yesterday I chanced to see, at Mentone, the best of the Anglican clergy that I have ever known, a Mr. Sidebotham. He told me of a luncheon at Bishop Hamilton's, where he sat, a young clergyman, between Liddon and Tait. Liddon, after a few words, shut up like an oyster; and Tait took a good deal of pains to please his neighbour and to draw him out. From which experience, my friend, himself a truly Catholic Anglican, thinks that Liddon, whom he deems the greatest preacher living, would not make a good Bishop of London. This testimony, from a personal admirer and theological adherent, was rather welcome to me. When I asked him whether there was any dark horse, any candidate not obvious to outsiders, he said "No"; but seemed to think that _Bedford_[249] would be the sort of strong-backed prelate you mean. He fully expected Temple's appointment. Thank you so much for speaking of Morier. You know that for all people not private friends of his {205} own ---- is disappointing. He is a bad listener, easily bored, and distrustful of energetic men who make work for themselves and for the Foreign Office.

Morier, in particular, has force without tact, and stands ill with a chief who has tact without force. He feels that he is unsupported and not much appreciated. A few friendly words from above would set him up wonderfully.

Although Chamberlain is not the only source of weakness in the Government, he will be the cause of dissolution if your threat is executed at Easter! I really must come over and make myself very disagreeable if that goes on. It is time to play the last card in one's hand, for one year more of office and power, for the sake of the indefinite future. But perhaps the Vyner Cottage[250] may give me the desired opportunity.

For this is a very central part of Europe. I have had Dilke and Ripon; I saw Salisbury yesterday; and Scherer dines here on Sat.u.r.day.

Cross is coming with his book[251] next week.

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Club Pall Mall Feb. 26, 1885_]

I shall be delighted to dine in bad company on Thursday. Goschen will speak against Government to-morrow, but will vote for them. I dined there yesterday with Morier, Milner,[252] and Albert Grey;[253] and the same party dines with Morier this evening as soon as the P.M. sits down. Several Ministers (Hartington, Spencer, and others) have said too much that they wish to be beaten.

A very strong speech to-night would retrieve the {206} position. If the enemy came in now, England would soon become no better than the Continental powers, and our true greatness and prosperity would depart from us.

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum March 3_]

I am so glad to know that he is getting better.

If you will burn my letters there will be less difficulty in voting for Government. Certainly a peer cannot vote absolutely only as he approves or disapproves--or I must have voted on the other side. I shall be delighted to call at 12, and also to be your escort.

[Sidenote: _La Madeleine April 9, 1885_]

The book[254] reveals a mental flaw I had not suspected. Because Newman, or some of Newman's set, Faber, Ward, Morris, were narrow and fanatical, he concludes that their doctrine is that of narrow-minded fanatics. This is stumbling at the a.s.s's bridge. Scientific thought begins with the separation between the idea and its exponent, just as much as religious thought; and our peculiar difficulty in keeping them apart is notoriously the great elementary defect of the English--not the Scottish--mind.

Pattison himself suffers from the extreme narrowness of the Oxford horizon in his time. He knows nothing about the other side of the hill; and when he came to know, in later years, his religious spirit was extinct. Newman had unfitted him for Rothe. A strong mind cannot rest without thinking out its thoughts. But Pattison rests without caring to explain which of the several systems which exist outside of the churches {207} satisfied his conscience. He grew impatient of theology. He does not recognise the great importance of Casaubon in religious history, or of Milton's theological treatise on the progress of his mind. Once, having reviewed Pascal, he said to me that he thought, after all, the Jesuits were in the right. I disagreed, but I remember that I was delighted at the openness of his mind. But now I again find him hooded with prejudice. He rightly discerned that the French Protestants created independent scientific learning, and glorifies Scaliger as the type of them: and then he treats Petavius as an impostor, got up by the Jesuits in defiance of Scaliger. Whereas the Jesuit was one of the most deeply learned men that ever lived, by no means inferior to Grotius or Ussher or Selden.

Every year some zealous Frenchman exposes the iniquities of the Tudors, hoping to discredit the Church of England; and Taine fancies that to show the horrors of the Revolution is a good argument against democracy. Pattison must have stood, as to his inner man, nearly on the same level of logic.

[Sidenote: _Cannes April 22, 1885_]

Scherer writes that he is going to publish a new volume, in which his recent essay on the Life of George Eliot will be included. You will read it with interest and surprise at the moral judgment.

He is also the great patron of Amiel, whom I read with delight as having a savour of Vinet--with more serious culture and curiosity, and inferior understanding for religion. There is a plot in Arnold's circle to make him known and popular in England. n.o.body thought anything of him in his lifetime, at Geneva.

{208}

A careful study of my _Pall Mall_ has left me quite in the dark as to Zulfikar, &c.[255] I thought there was a deliberate intention to force us into war, and I did not imagine that there was any way out of it.

To my cheap and pacific mind it seemed a disaster not only without remedy, but without even a remote compensation or consolation, in which victory could do us no good, and in which the mere conflict would degrade us to the brutal level of continental powers.

Nothing has so completely puzzled me for the last two years as the hesitation of Russia to re-open the San Stefano question, while we are not only at Cyprus, but in Egypt, and without any moral vantage ground from which we can resist the overthrow of the European Turk. I would willingly give up the whole country from Bulgaria to the aegean for a few miles of Afghan desert.

But it would be bad policy to give up both and have to fight for existence in India whenever a capricious bell rings at Petersburgh.

[Sidenote: _Cannes April 27, 1885_]

I cannot imagine Russia drawing back in so supremely favourable a position. What is hard to understand is her having gone so far, and deliberately resolved on war. But I see that there is something in all this that has entirely escaped me. It seems so clear that our policy is to restore Russia to the position she had attained before the Congress of Berlin, that, therefore, we are not only her best, but her only friends--that I am quite bewildered, and half {209} suspect that there has been some tremendous mistake in our management. I should like to have the chance of distracting Mr. Gladstone with various talk, in all this anxiety. Probably I shall be at Carlton H. Terrace on Friday week. Will you tell me there when we can meet? ... Tennyson's really profound animosity[256] against the P.M. has long been known to people in his confidence, and has come out at last. It was one reason, but not the only one, of my dislike to his peerage.

Maine, whose series of articles form in reality an a.s.sault on the Government, promises to adopt all my remonstrances in the reprinting of them. These filled twenty-six of my pages, in all; so I count on a considerable modification of the text.

I hope there will be a possible play ... when we come to town.

---- is very intelligent, agreeable, amiable, a little complex in design; accurate calculation sometimes resides in the corner of her eye, and she knows how to regulate to a hair's breadth, when she smiles, the thin red line of her lips.

[Sidenote: _Prince's Gate June 20, 1885_]

No one ever saw Mr. Gladstone in better spirits than he was at dinner yesterday. I hope it was the hitch.[257] It is a bore to be away when the thing is to be decided. May agrees with me, and with that other Radical[258] from Cambridge, that even the ingeniously remodelled a.s.surances ought not to be given; when we {210} have preserved peace with so much difficulty, no concession not absolutely required should be made to these dangerous successors.[259] But it will need great fort.i.tude, and I do not seriously hope for success against the strong wish of so many colleagues.

[Sidenote: _April, 1885_]

I have said that I am divided from G. Eliot by the widest of all political and religious differences, and that political differences essentially depend on disagreement in moral principles. Therefore I cannot be suspected of blindness to her faults. More particularly because I have insisted on another grave delinquency which has struck few persons, her tolerance for Mazzini. That is a criminal matter, independent of the laws of states and churches, which no variety of theological opinion can by any means affect. We must never judge the quality of a teaching by the quality of the Teacher, or allow the spots to shut out the sun. It would be unjust, and it would deprive us of nearly all that is great and good in this world. Let me remind you of Macaulay. He remains to me one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious for certain reasons which you know. And I might say as much of many other men. To be truly impartial, that is, to be truly conscientious and sincere, we must be open equally to the good and evil of character....

{211}

[Sidenote: _Cannes Nov. 11, 1885_]

I wish I had been with you in Norway or could have seen Hawarden during this most interesting time. Other trouble and travel have made havoc of my correspondence, and when you receive these superfluous lines, the die will have been cast in Midlothian. For I fancy that the enemy's only hope now is that Mr. Gladstone will not be able to address his audience.