.00 K S
239
brings it to the reader's notice, half-sympathizes with it, and then runs
away as soon as the problems become really urgent."
Today, when the Socratic question mark seems an inadequate
armor against the evils that surround us, we are inclined to blame
Gide for its inadequacy. For the generations of the first part of our
century, however, his art was the key of delivery from the stifling
prison houses of the nineteenth century, Puritan or materialist. The
fault, it may be suggested, lies rather in us who wish to turn artists
into prophets, to demand answers where none are intended.
Angus Wilson
HISTORY AND LORD ACTON
LORD ACTON. A STUDY IN CONSCIENCE AND POLITICS. By
Gertrude Himmelfarb. The Un iversity of Chi cogo Press. $3.75.
The study of intellectual growth, development, change is the
despair of classical logic. An idea preserves its identity and doesn't.
Opinions and moods of an earlier age are corrected, conquered, denied;
yet they persist. A mind that would no longer develop is dead. But from
early youth on we are what we are and all that comes later is but
an
explanation of what has gone before.
It is one of the merits of Miss Himmelfarb's excellent study that
it gives us the history of Lord Acton's thought as something which
always grew and was never completed. This, to my knowledge, has not
been done before. To be sure, Acton's philosophy of history had to be
gleaned from various fragments, lectures, articles, book reviews. Yet it
invited systematization. Those who attempted it relied heavily on his
early essays, written in a period when the historian was under the
spell of Burke. I must myself confess to this error. Of course I knew
that the aging Acton was more of a "Liberal" than the young one, that
Gladstone played a great role in his later life. In the main, however,
I considered him as one of Burke's disciples, faithful to Burke's basic
positions: History versus Revolution, Plurality versus Sovereignty, Prac–
ticability versus Theory, and so on. Having read Miss Himmelfarb's
biography one can no longer hold this view. Acton's intellectual history
is
richer, more contradictory, more tragic, not to say pathetic, than
his
classification as a Burkean conservative would make it. And his
development took a course that is rare; not from principle to matter–
of-factness but from matter-of-factness to principle. He was a brilliant,
