Letters of Lord Acton Part 18

[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 Professors.h.i.+p. As to Freeman, I am not quite sure. There can be no real compet.i.tor 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. Muller, 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 pa.s.ses 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 Const.i.tution {179} is not to be carried by enemies of the Const.i.tution until the country has p.r.o.nounced.

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, n.o.body 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 statesmans.h.i.+p.

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 n.o.body 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 s.h.i.+p 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 d.u.c.h.ess-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. Dollinger'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 n.o.bleness 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body; 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sented 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 inst.i.tution, no doctrine, no ceremony is so distinctly the individual creation of the papacy, except the Dispensing power. It is the princ.i.p.al thing with which the papacy is identified, and by which it must be judged.