The 5th of April is not only the end of the tax year, but to some of us, a realisation that we suffer from a chronic papers out of order condition. Collating and shredding are the activities of the day, week, month etc…
It is also on the 5th April in 1895, that Oscar Wilde (at the height of his popularity, with the Importance of Being Earnest enjoying great success at the St James Theatre, in London) lost his criminal libel action against the Marquess of Queensbury. Queensbury was found not guilty, as the Court declared that his accusation that Wilde was "posing as a Somdomite" was justified, "true in substance and in fact". It was not long after that Wilde was himself charged "gross indecency" under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. He was convicted and sentenced to two years hard labour.
 |
| The Marquess' offending card |
He had not reckoned on the influence and power of the aristocracy. A mistake made by many.
It was also recorded that on the 5th April 1887, John Dalberg-Acton a.k.a Lord Acton, the eminent historian, sent a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, containing one of the most often quoted statements in the English language. Acton had written a review of Creighton's book A History of the Papacy during the Period of Reformation in three volumes.
Acton Creighton
Creighton at first wrote to Lord Acton simply acknowledging the receipt of the review.
‘March 26, 1887
Thank you for your review.
‘... I wish I could induce you some day to put forward your philosophy of history in a substantial form. I am often called upon to explain it, and can only dimly guess; but many would like to know more of it.
For myself I know my own limitations, and I also know that my view of history pleases nobody; but I cannot help thinking that there must be something in it because it so much displeases opposite characters. In haste,
Yours ever,
'M. Creighton
A few days later he wrote again more fully, but his letter unfortunately as not been preserved. Lord Acton made many corrections in the review, and wrote that he had 'altered every passage which could be construed or misconstrued into hostility.' He explained his point of view at great length in a letter from which the following extracts are given to make Creighton's answer more clear.
‘What is not at all a question of opportunity or degree is our difference about the Inquisition…The point is not whether you like the Inquisition …but whether you can without reproach to historical accuracy speak of the later mediaeval Papacy as having been tolerant and enlightened…We are not speaking of the Papacy towards the end of the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, when for a couple of generations and down to 1542 there was a decided lull in the persecuting spirit. Nor are we speaking of the Spanish Inquisition…I mean the Popes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from Innocent III down to the time of Hus. These men instituted a system of persecution ... it is the most conspicuous fact in the history of the mediaeval Papacy… that is the breaking point, the article of their system by which they stand or fall. ... I do not complain that it does not influence your judgment;…but what amazes and disables me is that you speak of the Papacy not as exercising a just severity, but as not exercising any severity…You ignore, you even deny, at least implicitly, the existence of the torture chamber and the stake…The same thing is the case with Sixtus IV and the Spanish Inquisition. ... In what sense is the Pope not responsible for the Constitution by which he established the new Tribunal? …The person who authorises the act shares the guilt of the person who commits it. Now the Liberals think persecution a crime of a worse order than adultery, and the acts done by Ximenes considerably worse than the entertainment of Roman courtesans by Alexander VI. The responsibility exists whether the thing permitted be good or bad. If the thing be criminal, then the authority permitting it bears the guilt. Whether Sixtus is infamous or not depends on our view of persecution and absolutism. Whether he is responsible or not depends simply on the ordinary evidence of history…Upon these two points we differ widely; still more widely with regard to the principle by which you undertake to judge men. You say that people in authority are not to be snubbed or sneered at from our pinnacle of conscious rectitude. I really don't know whether you exempt them because of their rank, or of their success and power, or of their date…But if we might discuss this point until we found that we nearly agreed, and if we do agree thoroughly about the impropriety of Carlylese denunciations and Pharisaism in history, I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favoured presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority…The inflexible integrity of the moral code is to me the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history. If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius or success or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man's influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then History ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the wanderer;. .it serves where it ought to reign, and it serves the worst cause better than the purest.... Of course I know that you do sometimes censure great men severely ; but the doctrine I am contesting appears in your preface. ... I am sure you will take this long and contentious letter more as a testimony of hearty confidence and respect than of hostility, although as far as I grasp your method I do not agree with it. Mine seems to me plainer and safer, but it has never been enough to make me try to write a history, from mere want of knowledge…
‘I remain yours most sincerely,
' Acton.'
Its a pretty good letter. Creighton replied at length on the 9th April beginning:
My dear Lord Acton, Your letter is an act of true friendliness, and I am very grateful to you for it more grateful than I can say. It is a rare encouragement to me to have such a standard set up as you have put before me.
It is also on this day 5th April 1908 that a great actress was born in Lowell Massachusetts:
This is not really a bitch about ingratitude and it leads to a host of interviews and clips of herself, but it's also about the influence and power of celebrity.
No comments:
Post a Comment