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SEEN THROUGH THE INDISPENSABLE BUT SLIGHTLY BLURRED lens of biographical generalization, Thomas Carlyle and John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton (1834-1902), present a study in contrasts with few overlapping features. Their respective modern images could not be more dissimilar. On one hand, there is Carlyle, the intractable Puritanic apologist of despotic "heroes" and drill-sergeants; the champion of Luther, Cromwell, and Frederick the Great; and in his own era of Bismarck and Governor Eyre. On the other, there is Acton, the cosmopolitan English liberal, the tenacious Roman Catholic opponent of absolutist Ultramontanism, and the confidant and adviser of Gladstone. Personally and temperamentally, they also convey very different impressions. Whereas Carlyle spoke in unstoppable jeremiads, bristling with Swiftian satire and humor, Acton's language was spare, elliptical, elegant, and enigmatic.
Herbert Paul recalled that to "draw Acton out, to make him declare himself upon some doubtful or delicate point, was a hopeless task. His face at once assumed the expression of the Sphinx" (Letters xiv). When he met Carlyle for the first and only time at a dinner given by their mutual friend Richard Monckton Milnes (1809-85) in the Spring of 1865, Acton was unimpressed. To his future wife Marie Arco he described Carlyle, "who is one of the most original and celebrated English writers, and who first introduced into England those German studies to which I am so devoted. He was clever, but grotesque, and often absurd. He has just written a long life of Frederic the Great, about whom his judgment is very different from mine" (qtd. in Hill 163).
In spite of their differences, the two historians were bound together by Carlylean "Organic Filaments" (Sartor Resartus 180) that informed their deep spiritual apprehension of the past. Acton recognized that Carlyle was a paradoxical thinker, but he was loathe to acknowledge the extent to which he himself was influenced by the Scotman's baffling view of history, which was a highly idiosyncratic mixture of liberal and illiberal ideas. Both men grasped that religion, or "religiosity" (Heroes 42) as Carlyle preferred to call it, operated in contradictory ways in the study of the past. They both knew it could blind historians to the complexity of truth-although Acton believed that Carlyle was guilty of "the euthanasia of metaphysic" ("German...