BOOKS
541
it is true, wrote nothing which can be called a book; innumerable essays
and reviews, yes, but not a single volume of his own. "He won an immense
reputation," rlln · one flippant obituary, "by doing nothing". Yet Acton
lived-and
by force of personality and drama of intellectual life achieved
for himself a curious historical greatness.
·
Acton
is
indeed a complex and difficult figure-a liberal and yet not
a democrat, a Catholic and yet not an authoritarian, a 19th Century
Englishman yet not a narrow nationalist and provincial but a truly cosmo–
politan scholar. Mr. Lally's book, I am afraid, does not help us very
much, but we must in all truth be grateful for a complete bibliography,
and for some biographical details not available in such standard sketches
as G. P. Gooch's
(i~
History and Historians )
or in those brief popular
portraits which merely fill in around his famous aphorism about power
corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely. Acton was an
Englishman, born in Italy, of a German mother, and educated _in Rome,
Berne, Paris and Munich. Unlike most scientific historians, he had a
lively career as a journalist; and his
w~kly
pieces
wen~
all
ch 'lHICtP.r–
istically informed by his deep knowledge and play of mind. The Vatican,
unfortunately, put an end to that. The Church censured him, suppressed
him, continually tripped him up, and each time, of course, Acton picked
himself up off the floor, obsequious and apologetic. It is a shameful story,
and one of the key controversies in the ultimate victory of the Popes (Pius
IX, Leo XIII, Pius X) over the modern-minded religious avant-garde,
inaugurating Neo-scholasticism. The Pope, in fact, was probably the
villain in the story of Acton's sterility, a loss to historical literature more
regrettable in many ways than the void of the lost books of
Livy
or
Polybius.
It was in 1880 that Acton started his encyclopedic, 50,000 page history
of liberty, his exhaustive treatise on human freedom. Suddenly, dramatic–
ally, after four solid years of work, he abandoned the project, never to
return or speak of it. Why? The mystery has prompted many theories
and hypotheses. Some say that he couldn't understand the French Revo–
lution, and its historical intricacies broke his intellectual spirit. Others
that he was depressed by his discovery that the writing of a Universal
history of freedom for the greatest part "would be a history of the ·thing
that was not!" Still others that Acton was caught in the morass of his
own infinite scholarship, his incessant note-taking and cross-teferencing
and sticking endless slips of paper into innumerable books and files of
pigeon-holes, cabinets, compartments and big black boxes. Arnold Toyn–
bee argues that it was the misapplied industrial ideals of the exploitation
of raw materials and the division of labor that paralyzed his individual
creative effort and turned him to collaborative writing: "The association
of his name with the Cambridge Modern History is an' enduring monument
to Industrialism's victory over an historian of heroic build." But the most
convincing explanation involves the Church. Not that Acton was an inno–
cent, or a pliant tool. He showed a fine kind of independence as an Oppo-
