The difference lay perhaps in the absence of passion in Acton's education and life, a passion that was present in the lives of both Kimball O'Hara and John Henry Newman. Acton was just old enough to have been Kipling's father, but even in the rapidly changing nineteenth century, education did not change all that much. It was only in the last decades of that century, after much debate, that the curriculum was opened up at Oxford and Cambridge. More important, education was then, as it is now, under the best of circumstances a wise or fortuitous choice of masters. The world may have changed from that day to our own, but it is still true that there can be no genuine education without the generous and dedicated master.
Talk is one of the most important aspects of education.
To hone one mind against the gritty stone of another is the surest path to intellectual excellence. We do not have a record of Acton's conversations, though we can guess their quality from his letters. Surely there was no more social an intellectual than the young Johnny Acton who was acquainted with half the aristocracy of Europe and many of the best minds of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Kim is the greatest conversational novel of the Edwardian era. In Kipling's novel we experience directly the importance of conversation on the development of life and thought, action and experience.