You describe the Professor[[3]] most justly. Serenity has grown on him with years, although they were years of conflict and of the great grief that men who do not live for themselves can feel for the cause they have lived for. Strength, too, though in less degree, by reason of a vice which besets another great man. From a sense of dignity and of charity he refuses to see all the evil there is in men; and in order that his judgments may be always charitable, generous, and leaning to the safer side, he is not always exact in definitions or rigorous in applying principles. He looks for the root of differences in speculative systems, in defect of knowledge, in everything but moral causes, and if you had remained with us longer you would have found out that this is a matter on which I am divided from him by a gulf almost too wide for sympathy.
Boutney I never saw. But he is a sound and useful man, who makes it his business to spread political knowledge among those classes that govern France. A cousin of ours lectures, under his auspices, to half-educated Parisians.
"Le Gendre de M. Poirier" at the Français is one of the greatest treats imaginable. Your stay at Paris must have been full of new impressions and experiences, even in its levity.
And now, after a short interval of Victor Hugo at Keble, I fancy you will start for the Midlothian campaign. You were very wrong to suppress that second sheet of your letter, and I hope you will make up for it by letting me know how things go on, and bearing in mind that one learns nothing at Mentone, except the bare outside of public events.
Mentone March 15, 1880
There is so much to ask and say that I have not the courage to begin. I am afraid you will forgive the length neither of my letter nor of my silence, and will be as much bored by the silver of the one as by the golden of the other. But when all the world has its rendezvous in Harley Street, admit me, perdu in the crowd.
In this out-of-the-way region we have been kept up to the mark in home politics by pleasant visits from Freddy Leveson—a robust Gladstonian—Cowper Temple, who told me more than I knew about the world of spirits; Goschen, who spent several days with us, and whose footsteps are very visible on the road that leads away from the Liberal party, through Brookes's, to a moderado coalition; Reay, ... fresh from Midlothian; Mallet,[[4]] doctrinaire, disputatious and desponding, but abounding in criticism of the policy which he represents. Lord Blachford passed, but I did not see him. Nothing carried me back to England more than the two Italians[[5]] whom you overheard at Venice, who were here when I was very ill, but who took me over the whole ground traversed since 1842. Bonghi's essays[[6]] are appearing successively, and they are meant as a lesson for Italians, and break up the career in a way which loses the thread of continuity and the law of its progress and the wealth of the unity therein. But he is exceedingly intelligent and sympathetic, and I hope that he will recast his materials when he puts them together in a volume. When he asked me: Why is Mr. Gladstone so much attached to the Church and so much against establishments? Why is he so generous towards R. Catholics and so hard on the Pope? Why is not Ireland reconciled? Why is not England won?—you will believe that I found my voice again. I don't think the book will ever suit our public, but I should like it to appear in French.
*****
A certain letter of mine acknowledging the gift of the Lancashire Canvassing Speeches was written between the election and the summons to Windsor, in November 1868.[[7]] If it leads you to look at the Bristol electioneering speeches mentioned in it, you will be disappointed; for they will seem to you poor in comparison. In reality, they are an epoch in constitutional history. Burke there laid down, for ever, the law of the relations between members and constituencies, which is the innermost barrier against the reign of democratic force. Charles Sumner once said to me: "Mr. Burke legislated from those hustings." When you met John Morley at Glasgow he had just written a very good life of Burke. It is impossible not to be struck by the many points of resemblance between Burke and your father—the only two men of that stature in our political history—but I have no idea whether they would have been friends or bitter enemies.
Madame de Staël is the author of that saying about liberty, whom I commemorate in terms studiously excluding rivalry with George Eliot.