Still there is a piece of truth in this paganism. Looking at history, not at biography, taking societies, and not individuals, we cannot deal with things seen by God alone; things take other proportions; the scale of vice and virtue is not that of private life; we judge of it by its outward action, and hesitate to penetrate the secrets of conscience. The law of visible retribution is false even there. But it is true that the test and measure of good and evil is not that of the spiritual biographer.
I shall punish Sir H. Maine with your very striking remark about Toryism.
*****
That is a perilous point, about suspiciousness. By all means we should think well until forced to think ill of people. But we must be prepared for that compulsion; and the experience of history teaches that the uncounted majority of those who get a place in its pages are bad. We have to deal chiefly, in life, with people who have no place in history, and escape the temptations that are on the road to it. But most assuredly, now as heretofore, the Men of the Time are, in most cases, unprincipled, and act from motives of interest, of passion, of prejudice cherished and unchecked, of selfish hope or unworthy fear.
Cannes Feb. 20, 1882
I spent at Rome a most interesting fortnight, explaining the history of the Church and of the world to M., listening to a great debate on the representation of minorities, and hearing a good deal of the M.P.[[162]] who neither has nor has not a mission. We wound up with two days at Florence, and I accompanied M. to Genoa, along the finest part of the Riviera, and then went to Bologna, to a dying relation. All which has stood in the way of coming home, of writing, and of knowing what is going on. I am reading up the debates, and your letters light up the task.
*****
Bonghi, who has a volume of Roman History ready, spent an afternoon with me in the Forum; but proved unsound about Ireland. Minghetti took us over the palace of the Cæsars, as they call the Palatine. I took M. the round of imperial statues and monuments of the Popes, hanging a tale to each, and I am afraid her impressions of history are gloomy. We made up for it a little at Santa Croce, with Dante and Fossombroni; and in Savonarola's cell at S. Marco, I sat in his chair, and told her of the friar who died for his belief that the way to make men better was to make them free.
I was not happy about Errington. Everybody spoke well of him. But there was too manifest a desire to amplify the significance of his position, and to entangle him in Roman schemes and views.