My children went to Ammergau and came back not deeply moved, but strongly impressed. I let them go without me from a sort of dread many people must have felt, not because of the chief actor, for a pious, simple-minded peasant's conception of the two natures is probably not more inadequate than my own, but what we do gradually realise in meditating the Passion is the character and experience of the disciples, the effect of that companionship, the utter human weakness that survived in the midst of the intense feelings it must have awakened in them. Those are contrasts that can be expressed, and are apparently too subtle for the performers at Ammergau. I am told that, on the whole, the audience remained cold.
The answer to my telegram was signed in a way that led me to doubt whether it came from you. I trust it was sent by your brother, and that Mr. Gladstone was not molested by my inquiries on the top of so many more. It is beginning at the wrong end to read David Copperfield first, but he is worth anything to busy men, because his fun is so hearty and so easy, and he rouses the emotions by such direct and simple methods. I am ashamed to think how much more often I return to Dickens than to George Eliot.
Do some of the brothers or secretaries make a point of reading the Temps? Of all that is written against the Ministry and its general policy, the Temps articles seem to me the most serious and suggestive, and at Marienbad I went through a course of Austrian newspapers, which are very hostile, and better written than our Tory organs, but not near so good as the Temps. I am afraid it is my friend Scherer. Not being a Frenchman, his patriotism is peculiarly lively. Don't call Chenery my friend. I have never seen him, and only know that he is making a mess of the Times. But my reasons were those you know well, and they will hold good next year.
You are quite right in all your corrections. —— —— is a very good fellow. His only artifice is his discretion. His mind is accustomed to travel along roads straight, and wide, and beaten, so that it accumulates conventional truths and borrowed convictions, but he is as well meaning and as sincere as a man can well be who is not on the watch to root up prejudices. His son is threatened with Toryism as with the gout. I don't know which is worse.... I talk nonsense at times, because sense is monotonous. It won't do to shrink from hard speeches and judgments when they are necessary. But it is horrible to make them when one is not compelled. Do believe me when I say that is what makes you delightful, and a certain generous, unselfish, courageous credulity is part of it. Commynes says: "It is no shame to be suspicious, but only to be deceived." That is a contemporary of Machiavelli. Two centuries later you will find in Télémaque these words: "Celui qui craint avec excès d'être trompé merite de l'être, et l'est presque toujours grossièrement." That is the progress of 200 years. Don't you think you see the distance between Bismarck and your father?
You have had an excellent idea about those letters. If you go on and arrange them, it will be very precious to him some idle day, if that should ever come, and to you all. The inner reality of history is so unlike the back of the cards, and it takes so long to get at it, which does not prevent us from disbelieving what is current as history, but makes us wish to sift it, and dig through mud to solid foundations. I conclude that all political correspondence has been set in order regularly, otherwise that ought to be thought of too.
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The bit of scandal suspected in the unwritten part of the Rémusat Memoirs, was supposed to have belonged to the time of the camp at Boulogne, of which she gives very full accounts. But it is not necessary to believe all those things. There would be no pure reputations. I suspend my belief even about Fersen.... They cannot publish Talleyrand's Memoirs because he tells so many tales of that kind, and people still living would be surprised to find out who they are.
I was flattered to know that I had supplied topics of conversation and even of dispute at Holmbury. I should like always to be accused by Lord Granville, defended by your father, and sentenced by you. But don't always associate me with bottles of physic, even in dreams.
From something you wrote I gather that Mr. Gladstone did not altogether disagree with Forster's sentiments; I am sure I did not; yet it seemed to me very hazardous to make such a speech in Mr. Gladstone's absence, suggesting wide differences in the Ministry, rousing expectations which will go on growing through the autumn, making the Lords more angry than repentant, using terms so vague that they can be almost honestly misrepresented, and a great deal more. Home Rule will make great capital out of the events that happened after your father fell ill.