To J. Morley.
Jan. 10.—I hope you have had faith enough not to be troubled about my supposed utterances on the temporal power.... I will not trouble you with details, but you may rest assured I have never said the question of the temporal power was anything except an Italian question. I have a much greater anxiety than this about the Italian alliance with Germany. It is in my opinion an awful error and constitutes the great danger of the country. It may be asked, “What have you to do with it?” More than people might suppose. I find myself hardly regarded here as a foreigner. They look upon me as having had a real though insignificant part in the Liberation. It will hardly be possible for me to get through the affair of this visit without making my mind known. On this account mainly I am verging towards the conclusion that it will be best for me not to visit Rome, and my wife as it happens is not anxious to go there. If you happen to see Granville or Rosebery please let them know this.
We have had on the whole a good season here thus far. Many of the days delicious. We have been subjected here as well as in London to a course of social kindnesses as abundant as the waters which the visitor has to drink at a watering place, and so enervating from the abstraction of cares that I am continually thinking of the historical Capuan writer. I am in fact totally demoralised, and cannot wish not to continue so. Under the circumstances Fortune has administered a slight, a very slight physical correction. A land-slip, or rather a Tufo rock-slip of 50,000 tons, has come down and blocked the proper road between us and Naples.
To Lord Acton.
Jan. 23, 1889.—Rome is I think definitely given up. I shall be curious to know your reasons for approving this gran rifiuto. Meantime I will just glance at mine. I am not so much afraid of the Pope as of the Italian government and court. My sentiments are so very strong about the present foreign policy. The foreign policy of the government but not I fear of the government only. If I went to Rome, and saw the King and the minister, as I must, [pg 415] I should be treading upon eggs all the time with them. I could not speak out uninvited; and it is not satisfactory to be silent in the presence of those interested, when the feelings are very strong....
These feelings broke out in time in at least one anonymous article.[258] He told Lord Granville how anxious he was that no acknowledgment of authorship, direct or indirect, should come from any of his friends. “Such an article of necessity lectures the European states. As one of a public of three hundred and more millions, I have a right to do this, but not in my own person.” This strange simplicity rather provoked his friends, for it ignored two things—first, the certainty that the secret of authorship would get out; second, if it did not get out, the certainty that the European states would pay no attention to such a lecture backed by no name of weight—perhaps even whether it were so backed or not. Faith in lectures, sermons, articles, even books, is one of the things most easily overdone.
Most of my reading, he went on to Acton, has been about the Jews and the Old Testament. I have not looked at the books you kindly sent me, except a little before leaving Hawarden; but I want to get a hold on the broader side of the Mosaic dispensation and the Jewish history. The great historic features seem to me in a large degree independent of the critical questions which have been raised about the redaction of the Mosaic books. Setting aside Genesis, and the Exodus proper, it seems difficult to understand how either Moses or any one else could have advisedly published them in their present form; and most of all difficult to believe that men going to work deliberately after the captivity would not have managed a more orderly execution. My thoughts are always running back to the parallel question about Homer. In that case, those who hold that Peisistratos or some one of his date was the compiler, have at least this to say, that the poems in their present form are such as a compiler, having liberty of action, might have aimed at putting out from his workshop. Can that be said of the Mosaic books? Again, are we not to believe in the second and [pg 416] third Temples as centres of worship because there was a temple at Leontopolis, as we are told? Out of the frying-pan, into the fire.
When he left Amalfi (Feb. 14) for the north, he found himself, he says, in a public procession, with great crowds at the stations, including Crispi at Rome, who had once been his guest at Hawarden.
After his return home, he wrote again to Lord Acton:—