The Hanging Judge

From any other boy of ten, the letter might have sounded fantastic, but not from young John Acton. "I am a perfect linguist," he wrote his mother one day in 1844, "knowing perfectly . . . English, French, German, and can almost speak Latin. I can speak a few words of Chinese, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Irish. I also know Chemistry, Astronomy, Mechanics, and many other sciences, but do not know botany ... I am in a hurry, therefore good-bye."

As he grew older, Lord Acton was still in a hurry to know more. As a courtly, bearded scholar, he eventually won the reputation of being the most erudite man in England and one of its most impressive historians. But for all his learning, Acton never published a book in his own lifetime; and for all its brilliance, his rigidly ethical philosophy seemed out of step with the complacent new materialism of his age. "I am," he once wrote," absolutely alone in my essential ethical position . . . I never had any contemporaries."

Last week, with the publication of two biographical studies--Acton's Political Philosophy, by sometime Oxford Lecturer G. E. Fasnacht (Hollis & Carter; 215.), and Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics, by U.S. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (University of Chicago; $3.75)--modern readers on both sides of the Atlantic could review Acton's position. Some would find him no longer out of step. "He is of this age, more than of his," says Biographer Himmelfarb. "He is, indeed, one of our great contemporaries."

Two Books a Day. Even without his vast knowledge, Acton might have become a famous man. One of his grandfathers was a Roman Catholic baronet who won the favor of the Queen of Naples and became her Prime Minister. His maternal grandfather was a duke of the Holy Roman Empire who won the favor of Talleyrand and became a peer of France. To all this, Acton's stepfather added another note: he was Lord Granville, one of the most influential of Britain's Whigs.

With such a background, young Acton was destined to have a curious education. He studied with Catholic scholars in France, England and Germany, and by the time he finished, he had delved deep into every aspect of history. He could read and all but memorize two books a day. He was said to have known everyone worth knowing and to have read everything worth reading. He was a familiar figure in the great Whig houses, at Windsor Castle and the papal court. He spoke English to his children, German to his wife, French to his sister-in-law, and Italian to his mother-in-law. But in none of these places and languages was Acton fully at home. His story, he said, was "the story of a man who started in life ... a sincere Catholic and a sincere Liberal; who therefore renounced everything in Catholicism which was not compatible with Liberty, and everything in Politics that was not compatible with Catholicity."

As a Catholic, he barely escaped excommunication for his stubborn stand against Pius IX's pronouncement of the doctrine of papal infallibility. As a Liberal (he served in Parliament for six years), he was a failure, for he loathed making either speeches or compromises ("If I could only get turned out of Parliament in an honest way and settle down among my books!"). It was not until 1895, when he was made regius professor of modern history at Cambridge University, that he found his proper niche. There he finally revealed his "essential ethical position."

"What We Ought." To Acton, there was one constant in history: the idea of liberty. But this liberty involved far more than the rights of man or the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, said Acton, "if happiness is the end of Society, then liberty is superfluous . . . Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought."

Every age, said Acton, had witnessed man's struggle for freedom, but man would never find it within social or political frameworks alone. Athenian liberty failed, for instance, because it belonged "to an age which possessed no fixed standard of right and wrong," and modern democracies would also fail if they insisted that "the will of man, not the will of God, was the rule of life." True political freedom, Acton insisted, depended on quite another principle--"the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made by man."

Tablets of Eternity. The historian's function, under this definition, is to do more than study facts for their own sake, for "universal history is a continuous development; it is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul." A slavish objectivity subverts the purpose of history: a historian must not only be a judge, but a "hanging judge" as well. "The inflexible integrity of the moral code," said Acton, "is, to me. the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history . . . Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity."

Perhaps, Acton admitted, man would never find this moral law, but should he ever cease trying, all true progress would cease, too. Progress is nothing less than the "striving to know and to love God," and the human conscience is nothing less than God's "ambassador." The study of history, therefore, is essentially the study of conscience. "The weight of opinion is against me," cried Acton to his students, "when I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong."

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