Historian in the Seat of God

Paul Smith

• Acton and History by Owen Chadwick
  Cambridge, 270 pp, £30.00, August 1998, ISBN 0 521 57074 3

To be the author of the best-known work of history never written is a guarantee of enduring celebrity, but also of lasting ridicule. On the marble bench in Venice where, by moonlight, in 1879, he expounded to an enthralled Herbert and Mary Gladstone the project of his great history of liberty, his ‘Madonna of the Future’, as he called it, Lord Acton was courting nemesis. For ‘moonlight’ his detractors have tended to read ‘moonshine’. His defenders have countered the impression that he wrote no history by representing that in fact he wrote a good deal; but they are heavily dependent on his early journalism and on the lectures published after his death by J.N. Figgis and R.V. Laurence. There is no great work to count in the research assessment exercise of the ages, only a vast assembly of materials, to some grand in the nobility of conception and thrilling in the promise of transcendental wisdom which they convey, to others a profoundly depressing monument to the union of pedantic burrowing with lack of will and courage for composition. Even Acton’s best friends sometimes despaired. Asked maliciously by Eddie Hamilton ‘whether there was to be any result from such wondrous accumulations of knowledge’, W.E. Gladstone thought that Acton would have difficulty in finding a publisher for a dozen volumes on liberty, ‘but being so well versed in history, especially that of last century, why should he not write a memoir of Madam Dubarry?’