Studies in Contemporary Biography

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

With this close hold upon practical life and this constant interest in the politics of the world, especially of England and the United States, no one could be less like that cloistered student who is commonly taken as the typical man of learning. But Lord Acton was a miracle of learning. Of the sciences of nature and their practical applications in the arts he had indeed no more knowledge than any cultivated man of the world is expected to possess. But of all the so-called “human subjects” his mastery was unequalled. Learning was the business of his life. He was gifted with a singularly tenacious memory. His industry was untiring. Wherever he was—in London, at Cannes in winter, at Tegern See in summer, at Windsor or Osborne with the Queen, latterly (till his health failed) at Cambridge during the University terms—he never worked less than eight hours a day. Yet, even after making every allowance for his memory and his industry, his friends stood amazed at the range and exactness of his knowledge. It was as various as it was profound, and much of it bore on recondite matters which few men study to-day. Though less minute where it touched the ancient and the early mediæval world than as respected more recent times, it might be said to cover the whole field of history, both civil and ecclesiastical, and became wonderfully 387 full and exact when it reached the Renaissance and Reformation periods. It included not only the older theology, but modern Biblical criticism. It included metaphysics; and not only metaphysics in the more special sense, but the abstract side of economics and that philosophy of law on which the Germans set so much store. Most of the prominent figures who have during the last half-century led the march of inquiry in these subjects, men like Ranke and Fustel de Coulanges in history, Wilhelm Roscher in economic science, Adolf Harnack in theology, were his personal friends, and he could meet them as an equal on their own ground. On one occasion I had invited to meet him at dinner the late Dr. (afterwards Bishop) Creighton, who was then writing his History of the Popes, and the late Professor Robertson Smith, the most eminent Hebrew and Arabic scholar in Britain. The conversation turned first upon the times of Pope Leo the Tenth, and then upon recent controversies regarding the dates of the books of the Old Testament, and it soon appeared that Lord Acton knew as much about the former as Dr. Creighton, and as much about the latter as Robertson Smith. The constitutional history of the United States is a topic far removed from those philosophical and ecclesiastical or theological lines of inquiry to which most of his time had been given; yet he knew it more thoroughly than 388 any other living European, at least in England and France, for of the Germans I will not venture to speak, and he continued to read most of the books of importance dealing with it which from time to time were published. So, indeed, he kept abreast of nearly all the literature of possible utility bearing on history (especially ecclesiastical history) and political theory that appeared in Europe or America, reading much which his less diligent or less eager friends thought scarcely worthy of his perusal. And it need hardly be said that his friends found him an invaluable guide to the literature of any subject. In the sphere of history more especially, one might safely assume that a book which he did not know was not worth knowing, while he was often able to indicate, as being the right book to consult, some work of which the person who consulted him, albeit not unversed in the subject, had never heard. He had at one time four libraries, the largest at his family seat, Aldenham in Shropshire, others at Tegern See, at Cannes, and in London; and he could usually tell in which of these the particular book he named was to be found. Unlike most men who value their libraries, he was fond of lending books, and would sometimes put a friend to shame by asking some weeks afterwards what the latter thought of the volumes he had almost forced on the borrower, and which the borrower had not found 389 time to read. After saying this, I need scarcely add that he was not a book collector in the usual sense of the word. He did not care for rare editions, and still less did he care about bindings.

His Aldenham library was itself a monument of learning and industry.[60] In forming it he sought to bring together the books needed for tracing and elucidating the growth of formative ideas and of institutions in the sphere of ecclesiastical and civil polity, and to attain this he made it include not only all the best treatises handling these large and complex subjects, but a mass of original records bearing as well on the local histories of the cities and provinces of such countries as Italy and France as on the general history of the great European States and of the Church. This magnificent design he accomplished by his own efforts before he was forty. What was still more surprising, he had found time to use the books. Nearly all of them show by notes pencilled or marks placed in them that he had read some part of them, and knew (so far as was needed for his purpose) their contents.

Vast as his stores of knowledge were, they were opened only to his few intimate friends. It was not merely that he, as Tennyson said of Edmund Lushington, “bore all that weight of learning lightly, like a flower.” No one could 390 have known in general society that he had any weight of learning to bear. He seemed to be merely a cultivated and agreeable man of the world, interested in letters and politics, but disposed rather to listen than to talk. He was sometimes enigmatic and “not incapable of casting a pearl of irony in the way of those who would mistake it for pebbly fact.”[61] A great capacity for cynicism remained a capacity only, because joined to a greater reverence for virtue. In a large company he seldom put forth the fulness of his powers; it was in familiar converse with persons whose tastes resembled his own that the extraordinary finesse and polish of his mind revealed themselves. His critical taste was not only delicate, but exacting; his judgments leaned to the side of severity. No one applied a more stringent moral standard to the conduct of men in public affairs, whether to-day or in past ages. He insisted upon this, in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, as the historian’s first duty. “It is,” said he, “the office of historical science to maintain morality as the sole impartial criterion of men and things.” When he came to estimate the value of literary work he seemed no less hard to satisfy. His ideal, both as respected thoroughness in substance and finish in form, was impossibly high, and he noted every failure to reach it. No one appreciated merit more 391 cordially. No one spoke with warmer admiration of such distinguished historians and theologians as the men whom I have just named. But the precision of his thinking and the fastidiousness of his taste gave more than a tinge of austerity to his judgment. His opinions were peculiarly instructive and illuminative to Englishmen, because he was only half an Englishman in blood, less than half an Englishman in his training and mental habits. He was as much at home in Paris or Berlin or Rome as he was in London, speaking the four great languages with almost equal facility, and knowing the men who in each of these capitals were best worth knowing. He viewed our insular literature and politics with the detachment not only of a Roman Catholic among Protestants, of a pupil of Döllinger and Roscher among Oxford and Cambridge men, but also of a citizen of the world, whose mastery of history and philosophy had given him an unusually wide outlook over mankind at large.

His interest in the great things, so far from turning him away from the small things, seemed to quicken his sense of their significance. It was a noteworthy feature of his view of history that he should have held that the explanation of most of what has passed in the light is to be found in what has passed in the dark. He was always hunting for the key to secret chambers, preferring to believe that the grand staircase is only for show, 392 and meant to impose upon the multitude, while the real action goes on in hidden passages behind. No one knew so much of the gossip of the past; no one was more intensely curious about the gossip of the present, though in his hands it ceased to be gossip and became unwritten history. One was sometimes disposed to wonder whether he did not think too much about the backstairs. But he had seen a great deal of history in the making.

The passion for acquiring knowledge which his German education had fostered ended by becoming a snare to him, because it checked his productive powers. Not that learning burdened him, or clogged the soaring pinions of his mind. He was master of all he knew. But acquisition absorbed so much of his time that little was left for literary composition. (Döllinger saw the danger, for he observed that if Acton did not write a great book before he reached the age of forty, he would never do so.) It made him think that he could not write on a subject till he had read everything, or nearly everything, that others had written about it. It developed the habit of making extracts from the books he read, a habit which took the form of accumulating small slips of paper on which these extracts were written in his exquisitely neat and regular hand, the slips being arranged in cardboard boxes according to their subjects. He had hundreds of these boxes; and though much 393 of their contents must no doubt be valuable, the time spent in distilling and bottling the essence of the books whence they came, might have been better spent in giving to the world the ideas which they had helped to evoke in his own mind. If one may take the quotations appended to his inaugural lecture as a sample of those he had collected, many of them were not exceptionally valuable, and did little more than show how the same idea, perhaps no recondite one, might be expressed in different words by different persons. When one read some article he had written, garnished and even overloaded with citations, one often felt that his own part was better, both in substance and in form, than the passages which he had culled from his predecessors. It becomes daily more than ever true that the secret of historical composition is to know what to neglect, since in our time it has become impossible to exhaust the literature of most subjects, and, as respects the last two centuries, to exhaust even the original authorities. Yet how shall one know what to neglect without at least a glance of inspection? Acton was unwilling to neglect anything; and his ardour for completeness drew him into a policy fit only for one who could expect to live three lives of mortal men.

The love of knowledge grew upon him till it became a passion of the intellect, a thirst like the thirst for water in a parching desert. What 394 he sought to know was not facts only, but facts in their relations to principles, facts so disposed and fitly joined together as to become the causeway over which the road to truth shall pass. For this purpose events were in his view not more important than the thoughts of men, because discursive and creative thought was to him the ruling factor in history. Hence books must be known—books of philosophic creation, books of philosophic reflection, no less than those which record what has happened. The danger of this conception is that everything men have said or written, as well as everything they have done, becomes a possibly significant fact; and thus the search for truth becomes endless because the materials are inexhaustible.

He expressed in striking words, prefixed to a list of books suggested for a young man’s perusal, his view of the aim of a course of historical reading. It is “to give force and fulness and clearness and sincerity and independence and elevation and generosity and serenity to his mind, that he may know the method and law of the process by which error is conquered and truth is won, discerning knowledge from probability and prejudice from belief, that he may learn to master what he rejects as fully as what he adopts, that he may understand the origin as well as the strength and vitality of systems and the better motive of men who are 395 wrong ... and to steel him against the charm of literary beauty and talent.”[62]

Neither his passion for facts nor his appreciation of style and form made him decline to the right hand or to the left from the true position of a historian. He set little store upon what is called literary excellence, and would often reply, when questioned as to the merits of some book bearing an eminent name, “You need not read it: it adds nothing to what we knew.” He valued facts only so far as they went to establish a principle or explained the course of events. It was really not so much in the range of his knowledge as in the profundity and precision of his thought that his greatness lay.

His somewhat overstrained conscientiousness, coupled with the practically unattainable ideal of finish and form which he set before himself, made him less and less disposed to literary production. No man of first-rate powers has in our time left so little by which posterity may judge those powers. In his early life, when for a time he edited the Home and Foreign Review, and when he was connected with the Rambler and the North British Review, he wrote frequently; and even between 1868 and 1890 he contributed to the press some few historical essays and a number of anonymous letters. But the aversion 396 to creative work seemed to grow on him. About 1890 he so far yielded to the urgency of a few friends as to promise to reissue a number of his essays in a volume, but, after rewriting and polishing these essays during several years, he abandoned the scheme altogether. In 1882 he had already drawn out a plan for a comprehensive history of Liberty. But this plan also he dropped, because the more he read with a view to undertaking it the more he wished to read, and the vaster did the enterprise seem to loom up before him. With him, as with many men who cherish high literary ideals, the Better proved to be the enemy of the Good.

Twenty years ago, late at night, in his library at Cannes, he expounded to me his view of how such a history of Liberty might be written, and in what wise it might be made the central thread of all history. He spoke for six or seven minutes only; but he spoke like a man inspired, seeming as if, from some mountain summit high in air, he saw beneath him the far-winding path of human progress from dim Cimmerian shores of prehistoric shadow into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time. The eloquence was splendid, but greater than the eloquence was the penetrating vision which discerned through all events and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now creating, now destroying, always transmuting, which had moulded and remoulded 397 institutions, and had given to the human spirit its ceaselessly-changing forms of energy. It was as if the whole landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst of sunlight. I have never heard from any other lips any discourse like this, nor from his did I ever hear the like again.