The great 'inopportunist'. - Review - book review

Commonweal, Sept 8, 2000 by James Finn

Lord Acton
Roland Hill
Yale University Press, $39.95, 523 pp.

Queen Victoria's long reign extended from 1837 to 1901. Born three years before Victoria's ascendancy and dying a year after she died, Lord Acton was undeniably a Victorian. Equally undeniable, he was an eminent Victorian, whose enigmatic greatness is only now being fully measured. He was "a sincere Catholic and a sincere liberal," as he described himself, at a time when liberals looked askance at Catholics, who returned the favor. With no earned degrees and not a single book to his credit, he became the esteemed Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. Mandell Creighton said he was the most learned person in England. (It was in a letter to Creighton, whom he was taking to task for not judging the Inquisitors strictly enough, that Acton wrote the often misquoted: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.")

A reluctant and bored member of Parliament, Acton was a long-time friend and close advisor to William Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister. Asserting that his religion meant more to him than his life, at one point he risked being excommunicated. He was deeply skeptical of concentrated power in church or state, and insisted on making strict moral judgments on historical actors--monarch, emperor, or pope. He did not fit comfortably into his own time. After the horrors of the twentieth century and after Vatican II, there is a sense in which he can speak more directly to us than he did to his contemporaries.

Gertrude Himmelfarb's Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics, which she termed a biography of a mind, has generally been regarded as the most subtle and incisive study of this complex man. Since 1952, when that book was published, however, much more material has become available. Roland Hill, who has written extensively on Acton, has used it to present a rounded portrait, including Acton's social and family life.

It was said of John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton--to give his full and illustrious name--that he had read everything worth reading and that he had met everyone worth meeting. Hyperbole, of course, but it points in the right direction. Acton was a true cosmopolite who was equally at home in England, France, Germany, and Italy, and in each country he had relatives of exalted position. (It was said of him, according to Himmelfarb, that at home he spoke English with his children, German with his wife, French with his sister-in-law, and Italian with his mother-in-law.) His close connections were to afford him easy and early entry into the highest circles of his time--intellectual, social, political, and ecclesiastical.

Acton's early education was shaped by Monsignor Felix Dupanloup, Father (later Cardinal) Nicholas Wiseman, and Ignaz von Dollinger. Each of these three played a prominent role in the Catholic life of his respective country--France, England, Germany--and each would play a notable role in Vatican I. The lives of these men would, by themselves, constitute a good history of mid-nineteenth-century Catholicism in Western Europe. It was under Dollinger's discipline that Acton learned to consult primary sources and archives, determined to be a scholar-historian, developed a lifelong passion for liberty, and began the collection of books that led to his seventy-thousand-volume library.

When he reached his twenty-first year he took charge of an inherited six-thousand-acre estate at Aldenham, which had been run by his stepfather, Lord Granville. He consulted John Henry Newman about how, as the new squire and a Catholic, he should propose the obligatory loyal toast. Newman replied that it might be best to avoid the subject of religion altogether; that he should respect the Queen's good family life, but enthusiasm might be difficult "knowing how opposed she is to the Catholic religion." At Lord Granville's urging Acton then made a trip to America, where he met among others, Orestes Brownson, Archbishop John Hughes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the U.S. secretary of state, and where he deepened his interest in American history. This was followed by a trip to Russia, where Granville was to represent the Queen at the coronation of Tsar Alexander II. Acton was assigned the task of finding suitable living quarters for the extensive English delegation and a palace suitable for balls, parties, and dinners for up to seventy. He next went with Dollinger to Rome, where he met Italian rationalists and high ecclesiastics. He had three audiences with Pius IX, the last alone. They discussed the new Parliament and what English Catholics could expect. Acton saw little evidence of real ability in the pope, found him "less banally good-natured" than his pictures suggested, and noted that he did not speak French well.

Acton returned to England at the age of twenty-three with high energy and a clear purpose. Agreeing with Newman on the value of educating English Catholics, Acton planned on introducing them to some of the ideas that were renewing European Catholicism and to do it through fair, impartial, but morally informed journalism. Periodicals were then the prime means of communicating ideas among the informed and cultured elites. But the times were not propitious for the young man. The Oxford Movement had brought highly educated Anglicans into the Catholic church, but the associated Catholic renewal had not penetrated deeply the insular, parochial attitudes of most English Catholics. In both England and Rome there were divided calls for reform. The Papal States had been attacked. In 1849 a Roman Republic had been proclaimed and with it the end of the church's temporal power. This engendered great debates about the concept of the temporal power of the papacy, support of which became a test of Catholic loyalty.