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PARTISAN REVIEW
somewhat arrogant old man when he was very young and a youthful
idealist at sixty-five.
There
is
nothing arbitrary in this development, no capricious
shifts, no embracing of the fashionable. Acton's intellectual life was
lived in deep, almost paralyzing earnest. He did not fool himself with
one-sided opinions made secure through willpower; hence his actuality
today. The great simplifications become stale when their historical
moment is over. The intensity with which the contradictions are seen
and borne, neither denied nor solved by dialectical hocus-pocus, lives
on. Acton, Miss Himmelfarb rightly observes, "is of this age, more than
of his. He is, indeed, one of our great contemporaries."
Not all the conflicts which agitated his life are of equal interest
now. His fantastic family background alone-English, French, Neapol–
itan, Rhine-German, Bavarian-would make him a very untypical per–
son. He was an aristocrat and a hater of Toryism; a German scholar
and a British parliamentarian; a rich man and, toward the end of his
life, almost a socialist. Above all, he was a passionate Liberal and a
faithful Catholic at a time when the last, most solemn battle was
joined between the Roman Church and liberal civilization. To Acton's
"Conflicts with Rome" Miss Himmelfarb has dedicated considerable
space and that was inevitable, for these conflicts meant very much for
Acton. They do not mean so much for us. What does make Acton
our contemporary and teacher is the way he wrestled with the great
problems of history: ends and means, power, the state, good and evil,
freedom.
Here, he went indeed far beyond Burke, partly because, a hundred
years later, he knew far more, and partly because his mind, less vital
and more delicate, demanded more. Burke was no pessimist at all;
things as they were, made by history, colorful and venerable, suited
him.
If
great undertakings like the French Revolution brought great
mischief that was nothing to become pessimistic about; it merely meant
that crazy people, trying to apply crazy ideas, received their just pun–
ishment. But for Acton these ideas were not crazy. He became a pes–
simist precisely in the measure in which he rid himself of Burke's in–
fluence. For now he believed in the validity of ideas and of constitutions
made for the sake of the idea. Too honest to defend the Ancien Regime,
he was at the same time too firm in his moral principles to condone
the horrors and infamies produced by the Revolution. Even had the
Revolution been a neater success, the essential problem of power, abso–
lute power, would have re-emerged and, as absolute power of the
majority, would have become a new, even more brutal threat to human
