The great 'inopportunist'. - Review - book review

Lord Acton
Roland Hill
Yale University Press, $39.95, 523 pp.

Queen Victoria's long reign extended from 1837 to 1901. Born three years before Victoria's ascendancy and dying a year after she died, Lord Acton was undeniably a Victorian. Equally undeniable, he was an eminent Victorian, whose enigmatic greatness is only now being fully measured. He was "a sincere Catholic and a sincere liberal," as he described himself, at a time when liberals looked askance at Catholics, who returned the favor. With no earned degrees and not a single book to his credit, he became the esteemed Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. Mandell Creighton said he was the most learned person in England. (It was in a letter to Creighton, whom he was taking to task for not judging the Inquisitors strictly enough, that Acton wrote the often misquoted: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.")

A reluctant and bored member of Parliament, Acton was a long-time friend and close advisor to William Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister. Asserting that his religion meant more to him than his life, at one point he risked being excommunicated. He was deeply skeptical of concentrated power in church or state, and insisted on making strict moral judgments on historical actors--monarch, emperor, or pope. He did not fit comfortably into his own time. After the horrors of the twentieth century and after Vatican II, there is a sense in which he can speak more directly to us than he did to his contemporaries.

Gertrude Himmelfarb's Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics, which she termed a biography of a mind, has generally been regarded as the most subtle and incisive study of this complex man. Since 1952, when that book was published, however, much more material has become available. Roland Hill, who has written extensively on Acton, has used it to present a rounded portrait, including Acton's social and family life.

It was said of John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton--to give his full and illustrious name--that he had read everything worth reading and that he had met everyone worth meeting. Hyperbole, of course, but it points in the right direction. Acton was a true cosmopolite who was equally at home in England, France, Germany, and Italy, and in each country he had relatives of exalted position. (It was said of him, according to Himmelfarb, that at home he spoke English with his children, German with his wife, French with his sister-in-law, and Italian with his mother-in-law.) His close connections were to afford him easy and early entry into the highest circles of his time--intellectual, social, political, and ecclesiastical.

Acton's early education was shaped by Monsignor Felix Dupanloup, Father (later Cardinal) Nicholas Wiseman, and Ignaz von Dollinger. Each of these three played a prominent role in the Catholic life of his respective country--France, England, Germany--and each would play a notable role in Vatican I. The lives of these men would, by themselves, constitute a good history of mid-nineteenth-century Catholicism in Western Europe. It was under Dollinger's discipline that Acton learned to consult primary sources and archives, determined to be a scholar-historian, developed a lifelong passion for liberty, and began the collection of books that led to his seventy-thousand-volume library.

When he reached his twenty-first year he took charge of an inherited six-thousand-acre estate at Aldenham, which had been run by his stepfather, Lord Granville. He consulted John Henry Newman about how, as the new squire and a Catholic, he should propose the obligatory loyal toast. Newman replied that it might be best to avoid the subject of religion altogether; that he should respect the Queen's good family life, but enthusiasm might be difficult "knowing how opposed she is to the Catholic religion." At Lord Granville's urging Acton then made a trip to America, where he met among others, Orestes Brownson, Archbishop John Hughes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the U.S. secretary of state, and where he deepened his interest in American history. This was followed by a trip to Russia, where Granville was to represent the Queen at the coronation of Tsar Alexander II. Acton was assigned the task of finding suitable living quarters for the extensive English delegation and a palace suitable for balls, parties, and dinners for up to seventy. He next went with Dollinger to Rome, where he met Italian rationalists and high ecclesiastics. He had three audiences with Pius IX, the last alone. They discussed the new Parliament and what English Catholics could expect. Acton saw little evidence of real ability in the pope, found him "less banally good-natured" than his pictures suggested, and noted that he did not speak French well.

Acton returned to England at the age of twenty-three with high energy and a clear purpose. Agreeing with Newman on the value of educating English Catholics, Acton planned on introducing them to some of the ideas that were renewing European Catholicism and to do it through fair, impartial, but morally informed journalism. Periodicals were then the prime means of communicating ideas among the informed and cultured elites. But the times were not propitious for the young man. The Oxford Movement had brought highly educated Anglicans into the Catholic church, but the associated Catholic renewal had not penetrated deeply the insular, parochial attitudes of most English Catholics. In both England and Rome there were divided calls for reform. The Papal States had been attacked. In 1849 a Roman Republic had been proclaimed and with it the end of the church's temporal power. This engendered great debates about the concept of the temporal power of the papacy, support of which became a test of Catholic loyalty.

The English hierarchy was not disposed to have a Catholic layman instruct other Catholics in affairs of the church, and the ordinary Catholic was inclined, submissively, to agree.

Under these unfavorable conditions, Acton nevertheless edited two periodicals that were highly praised by many informed readers, including Matthew Arnold--but not by English Catholic church authorities. With the support of Newman and an intellectually distinguished staff, Acton took over The Rambler, an already controversial journal soon made even more so, and roused the fury of church authorities. Nicholas Wiseman, now cardinal, forced the resignation of Acton and fellow editor Richard Simpson. To save the magazine, they turned it over to the less confrontational Newman. However, when Newman published On Consulting the Faithful, in Matters of Doctrine, it was delated to Rome, and he was charged with subverting just authority. This was a blow from which the already dispirited Newman never fully recovered. Acton and Simpson resumed editorship, but when they boldly published Dollinger's views on the temporal power of the papacy, which he described as a historical accident, they were told to declare openly in favor of the temporal power of the papacy or to cease publication. They obeyed the letter of the injunction, closed The Rambler, and, with the same editors and the same staff, started The Home and Foreign Review. Untamed, the Review would refer directly to the son of Paul III (1468-1549), avoiding the customary euphemism of "cousin." And Acton would write: "The Catholic is subject to the correction of the church when he is in contradiction with her truth, not when he stands in the way of her interests." Such actions did not please the church authorities in England or in Rome. When eleven bishops and Cardinal Manning urged Rome to condemn the periodical, Acton gave up the Review rather than his principles, and after a few more forays his aspirations of gradually educating his English co-religionists drew to a close.

Acton then turned his attention and formidable energies to Rome and Vatican

I. The stage had been set--some said rigged--by Pius IX and his supporters for a favorable consideration of infallibility. There were roughly three factions: the infallibilists, the noninfallibilists, and the inopportunists. Many of the last group supported infallibility but thought it was not a good time to promote it. Acton, then in his midthirties, took it upon himself to be the "minority whip." With high connections, theological acumen, and social skills, plus his ability to cross linguistic and national barriers, he brought a degree of unity to the minority opposed to the declaration of infallibility. His efforts were doomed to failure, however.

Acton had a habit of turning on former intellectual idols and Newman's turn had come. They had worked together over a long period. Acton warmly admired his sermons and would refer to him as "my dear friend." He had even advised Newman on the last chapter of his Apologia. But he distrusted Newman's feelings toward authority and thought he had been opportunistic in his handling of infallibility. Subsequently he was to refer to Newman as the "subtle sophist" and to describe him as a "brutal liar, and the artful deceiver." Even Dollinger who, to his deep sadness, had been excommunicated for not accepting the constitution on infallibility, came under Acton's disapprobation.

During these years of almost frantic activity, Acton had, after a long siege, married Marie Arco. (Hill delicately hints that it was the Countess Arco, Acton's cousin and Marie's mother, whom Acton truly loved.) It was a "sensible" marriage that produced six children, two of whom died very young. In later years Acton and his wife lived much apart. Their letters disclose no hint of discord, except, Hill tells us, of one "strange batch" that was torn into bits and then saved in an envelope. They reveal a severe rupture, the cause of which remains unknown, but which apparently healed.

After Vatican I, Acton continued to travel and write, but not with the same missionary zeal. He became an even closer adviser and friend to Gladstone, and his consultant on Catholic matters, in which the prime minister was intensely interested. Gladstone did not offer Acton an embassy position he very much wanted, but through his intervention Acton was appointed lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, who came to like him. His most satisfying appointment was undoubtedly that to the Chair of Regius Professor of History at Cambridge (which many years earlier had rejected him as a student because of his Catholicism). There he proved to be a popular and influential teacher. He agreed to be general editor of The Cambridge Modern History, but he was to die before he could see the first volume. He maintained to the end his proclaimed standard of absolute moral judgment--a standard not contingent upon time, place, or circumstance--by which the historian could pass sure moral judgment on historical actions and actors. This the History did not, and could not possibly, attain.

Acton, as well as many of his admirers, felt that his accomplishments fell far short of his abilities and ambitions, that in some important sense he was a failure. He started and left unfinished a number of projects. His magnum opus, The History of Liberty, remains scattered in thousands of boxes of notes in the library. His view of moral judgment in history has been rejected even by sympathetic historians, some of whom have edited into books his essays and articles. These constitute not a coherent theory of history or of liberty but a series of insights that continue to enlighten and inspire. He foresaw, for example, the dangers of nationalism, state absolutism, and concentrated power that were to devastate the twentieth century. Vatican II and its aftermath have confirmed many of the views that Acton, Newman, and Dollinger expounded.

Roland Hill tells this story well in a straightforward manner, although he occasionally slips into a loose vernacular, referring to one person as a "nut case," and reporting that Acton was once "roped into" the Saint Vincent de Paul Society. He also writes of the "often misquoted sense of Madame de Stael's" maxim. (To misquote the sense of a maxim would be a neat trick indeed.) But he is also capable of terse, astringent judgments and an incisive turn of phrase. But these--the good and the not-so-good--are minor aspects of a work that demanded plowing through the vast horde of Acton's notes; the frequent translation of a number of languages; knowledge of large sweeps of history, secular and ecclesiastical, the savory and the unsavory; evaluations of still controversial leaders in a number of countries; and a familiar knowledge of a great and complex man who baffled friend and critic alike, and who still resists a ready label.

James Finn, formerly a Commonweal editor, is chairman of the Puebla Institute.

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