Letters of Lord Acton Part 7

I am under the shock of the sudden Cabinet and of {55} the Standard article, and am waiting for an answer to a telegram to know whether I must come at once. If not now, then on Monday or Tuesday before the opening, for I want to get the cue of the situation from the P.M. (an affair of five minutes), to see you, not quite so rapid a proceeding, and to hear the first debates.

[Sidenote: _Cannes Dec. 27, 1880_]

Your patient and forgiving letter is my best Xmas gift. It will be a joy indeed to see you again next week. I hope not only in the midst of gilded ceremonial.

It is so like you to take my nonsense kindly and only to dispute the praise. But I am not quite so far off as you imagine. In speaking of home I must have indicated by a--break, that there was a change of key; that I could not stay among the lofty ent.i.ties that surround Tennyson even when he b.u.t.ters toast, that I was coming down from the silver side of the clouds and groping for things of earth. So that my climax is not quite literally meant. Having thus paved the way to retreat from an exposed position, let me take my stand for a moment, and say that I think it not quite untenable.... You yourself, who have shared so much of your father's thoughts and confidence, have hardly adapted yourself to his chosen tastes and special pursuits? In more than one of the later phases of his life, I fancy you hardly recognised the secret laws of the growth of his mind, and join him sometimes by an effort, over a gap. There is an ancient scholar at Cannes, who told me that he has such confidence in the P.M. that he feels sure he will succeed in defending his policy. I partly said and partly thought that anybody can be on {56} Mr. Gladstone's side who waits to be under the thrall of his speech. The difficulty is to hear the gra.s.s growing, to know the road by which he travels, the description of engine, the quality of the stuff he treats with, the stars he steers by. The scholar is old and ugly, and, it may be, tiresome. It is impossible to be less like you.

But is there not one bit of likeness--in the stars?

Really it is time for me to adopt the Carey tactics and run away from my post of defiance.

You know one of the two subjects. You will know the other on the last night of the debate on the address. I am only listening to the gra.s.s.

You will not resist what I said of our five Ministers if you will consider one word. I think I spoke of their best qualities, not of all their qualities. Pitt's art of making himself necessary to the King and the const.i.tuencies is unapproached. But then it is a vice, not a merit, to live for expedients, and not for ideas. Chatham was very successful as a War Minister. Mr. Gladstone has not rivalled him in that capacity. I fancy that both Pitt and Peel had a stronger hold than he has on the City. Please remember that I am possessed of a Whig devil, and neither Peel nor Pitt lives in my Walhalla. The great name of Mr. Canning and the greater name of Mr. Burke[63] are the only names that I hold in highest honour since party government was invented.

You can hardly imagine what Burke is for all of us who think about politics, and are not wrapped in the blaze and the whirlwind of Rousseau. Systems of scientific thought have been built up by famous scholars on the fragments that fell from {57} his table. Great literary fortunes have been made by men who traded on the hundredth part of him. Brougham and Lowe lived by the vitality of his ideas.

Mackintosh and Macaulay are only Burke trimmed and stripped of all that touched the skies. Montalembert, borrowing a hint from Dollinger, says that Burke and Shakespeare were the two greatest Englishmen.

But when I speak of Shakespeare the news of last Wednesday[64] comes back to me, and it seems as if the sun had gone out. You cannot think how much I owed her. Of eighteen or twenty writers by whom I am conscious that my mind has been formed, she was one. Of course I mean ways, not conclusions. In problems of life and thought, which baffled Shakespeare disgracefully, her touch was unfailing. No writer ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold, but disinterested and impartially observant sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival.

I do think that, of the three greatest Liberals, Burke is equally good in speaking and writing; Macaulay better in writing, and Mr. Gladstone better in speaking. I doubt whether he feels it; and if he does not feel it, then I should say that there is a want of perfect knowledge and judgment. That want I see clearly in his views as to other men.

He hardly ever, I think, judges them too severely. Sometimes I am persuaded he judges with an exceeding generosity, and I fancy it is because he will not charge his mind with uncharitableness, because he {58} does not allow for the wind, that he does not always make bull's eyes.

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Jan. 14, 1881_]

It is impossible to leave England without emotion, when my last glimpse of your father was lying in bed and in the great doctor's hands. It will indeed be such a charity if you will send a line on a P.C. by to-morrow, Sat.u.r.day's post, to me at Goschen's, Seac.o.x Heath, Hawkhurst, Kent, that we may have Sunday's comfort in good news, and I say advisedly a P.C. that you may not suspect me of an artifice to obtain that other delight, of an early letter, such as those you write.

Don't let the lesson of suspicion turn against the teacher. Don't even let it damage anybody much. I will not spoil my own ideal. That American book is too wicked![65]

Forgive me if there is one point, if only one, on which I do not agree with Ruskin, who never writes to any one what might hot be written to the world, on the fly-leaves of books.

Your mother must think me an ill-mannered wretch, even if she did not discover it before--for going away without thanking her for that beautiful photograph. I did not feel sure, at first, how much she was weighted with trouble, for I had never witnessed her serene courage. I will leave it to you, if you please, mindful of an exquisite proverb quoted this evening in the House as follows: Speech is silence, but silver is golden.

{59}

[Sidenote: _La Madeleine Jan. 20, 1881_]

What I said of Ruskin was only to excuse the plat.i.tude I wrote in his book, not to rescue my letters from appropriate destruction.

You evidently think that George Eliot is not the only novelist at whose feet I have sat, and that I have learned from "Endymion" the delicate art of flattery. So that the seed of suspicion has taken root after all, and I hang by my own rope.

We might perhaps agree about Trevelyan better than you suppose. I probably started from a lower estimate of the man, and was astonished at his fulness of knowledge and the vigour of his pen. The oblique style of narrative is said to be an invention of Gibbon, and Trevelyan is of course full of Gibbon's times and writings. And I quite agree with you that the business of historians is to get out of the way, and, like the man who plays Punch, to concentrate attention on their personages. n.o.body, however, did this less than his ill.u.s.trious uncle.

I shall look out with extreme interest for your kinsman's[66] review of George Eliot. I heard so many hard things said of her by Arnold and Palgrave, but Wolseley is one of her admirers.

[Sidenote: _La Madeleine Jan. 21, 1881_]

My letter was hardly posted when yours arrived. Besides what you mention, Arthur Lyttelton would find an important paper in the _Pall Mall_ of the last week of the year, on the early Warwicks.h.i.+re life of George Eliot, and a letter of hers on the original of Dinah. I fancy it would be worth while to look up {60} some of her Westminster reviews between 1850 and 1854; and the last word of her philosophy is more outspoken in Lewes's scientific writings than in her own.

It is hard to say why I rate "Middlemarch" so high. There was a touch of failure in the two preceding books, in "Felix Holt," and even in "Romola." And it was "Middlemarch" that revealed to me not only her grand serenity, but her superiority to some of the greatest writers.

My life is spent in endless striving to make out the inner point of view, the _raison d'etre_, the secret of fascination for powerful minds, of systems of religion and philosophy, and of politics, the offspring of the others, and one finds that the deepest historians know how to display their origin and their defects, but do not know how to think or to feel as men do who live in the grasp of the various systems. And if they sometimes do, it is from a sort of sympathy with the one or the other, which creates partiality and exclusiveness and antipathies. Poets are no better. Hugo, who tries so hard to do justice to the Bishop and the Conventionnel, to the nuns and the Jacobinical priest, fails from want of contact with the royalist n.o.bleman and the revolutionary triumvirate, as Shakespeare fails ign.o.bly with the Roman Plebs. George Eliot seemed to me capable not only of reading the diverse hearts of men, but of creeping into their skin, watching the world through their eyes, feeling their latent background of conviction, discerning theory and habit, influences of thought and knowledge, of life and of descent, and having obtained this experience, recovering her independence, stripping off the borrowed sh.e.l.l, and exposing scientifically and indifferently the soul of a Vestal, a Crusader, an Anabaptist, an Inquisitor, a Dervish, a Nihilist, or a Cavalier without {61} attraction, preference, or caricature. And each of them should say that she displayed him in his strength, that she gave rational form to motives he had imperfectly a.n.a.lysed, that she laid bare features in his character he had never realised.

I heard the close of Friday's debate, and was much distressed at the hopeless badness of C----'s speech. But the situation gained by the result, and still more by what pa.s.sed on Monday.

The topic of the reason for delay is, as I hinted at my last moment, a very delicate one, and not to be discussed lightly. Suppose there is bloodshed in Ireland before the Protection Bill pa.s.ses; then a reproach would lie at their door for thinking more of eventualities that regard themselves than of the immediate danger to life, and the heavy strain on families of small means dependent on their own or other people's rents. And there will be this argument to meet, that less severity in October or November would go farther than greater severity in March.

The journey across France was really freezing. So I remained at Paris for a few hours' rest and no visits. Bisaccia came south in the same train, and Goldsmid, who gives me a dinner to-night. I see by the papers that it is still too cold for your pony-carriage.

My whole social philosophy consists in the desire not merely to gratify by civilities, but to bring men into contact with Mr. Gladstone--be it by breakfast, dinner, or small and early, or even by a formal talking to like ----'s--and your best art, together with the due discharge of pasteboard, will be to bring him to bear, directly, on the seventy or eighty men who want it, and are fit for it, and don't neglect Lady Spencer's {62} parties, or Lady Granville's less multifarious evenings.

It is the confrontation, not the ceremony, that matters. False believer,[67] because impostor, not to say hypocrite. I mean that, beyond his charitableness and a written eloquence that always fills me with an unspeakable admiration and delight, I do not believe in your artful philosopher; that the differences revealed to us by his writings, his conversation at Hawarden, the letter you treated so generously, cut down to the bone, and leave me no s.p.a.ce or patience for anything better than a gracious courtesy. Therefore, in abetting your studies in Ruskinese, I am no better than a humbug, which is not a word to be written in books that will live and will irritate as long as the language.

[Sidenote: _La Madeleine Jan. 28, 1881_]

My faults are to you an opportunity of displaying those qualities to which you will not let me allude.

Those are not truisms about George Eliot. The reality of her characters is generally perfect. They are not quite always vivid, or consistent. They degenerate sometimes into reminiscences. But they live a life apart from hers, and do not serve her purposes. I wonder whether Arthur Lyttelton knows any good German criticism of her; I don't think I have seen any.

The Tories were sure to cheer as wildly as the Irish hit. You have, I fancy, felt the weakness of Forster's great speech,[68] which, to the eye of a practised revolutionist, slightly disparages the Government.

He makes out an irresistible case against those who {63} think all is right in Ireland, so far at least as to need nothing exceptional from Parliament. He thinks little of the man--the imaginary hearer--who thinks that the Irish peasants have a case; that the suffering and the wrong are real, and are partly the work of the law; that the horrors which fill us with impatience are the direct--though not the unmixed--consequence thereof; that the first way to remove effects is to remove the cause; that, whereas all this is certain, it remains to be proved that the evil is beyond that treatment; and that the movement which has its root in the soil, cannot be so dissociated from the movement that has its root in America, that the one may heal and the other may starve. Probably he does not wish to speak of remedial measures beforehand, and in the same comminatory breath, or to dwell too much on the purely revolutionary peril, which is a delicate topic, about which people are not agreed, and which it is awkward to prove.

But he is so little occupied with the one real objection, in this speech charged with the wisdom of many Cabinet discussions, that one wonders whether that other line of thought, so repugnant to the Castle,[69] was ever forcibly put forward in the Cabinet.

What you say of great men manifesting only themselves in their works--the predominance, one should say, of the lyrical mood--is profoundly true. Milton and Byron are supreme examples. It is the reason why there are so few great epics, and so few great--there are many good--histories. It is, in higher literary work, the same solicitude that makes it almost impossible for men to think of the right instead of the expedient. You can hardly imagine how people wondered what Mr. Gladstone's motives were in the {64} Bulgarian affair. Most politicians would be ashamed of having done any considerable thing because it was right, from no motive more clever than duty.

Fancy the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ asking me to do their article on Jesuits! I answered that I hoped they would have one on Mrs. Lewes. I have written my testimony to Mr. Cross,[70] encouraging him about the intended life.... Thank you a thousand times beforehand for every chance line you promise me. You do not know how to say things that are not interesting.