LITERARY STUDIES
VOL. I.
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
[Illustration: (signed) Yours, Walter Bagehot.
Woodburytype Company.]
LITERARY STUDIES
BY THE LATE
WALTER BAGEHOT
M.A. AND FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON
_WITH A PREFATORY MEMOIR_
EDITED BY
RICHARD HOLT HUTTON
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
_FOURTH EDITION_
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16th STREET
1891
_All rights reserved_
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE FOURTH EDITION.
The only changes that have been made in this edition are corrections
of the press, the need of which has been discovered since the third
edition was issued. For a few of these I have been indebted to the very
carefully annotated American edition of Mr. Bagehot’s works brought out
at Hartford, Connecticut, by Mr. Forrest Morgan, of the Travellers’
Insurance Society. In some cases I think that the American editor has
missed Mr. Bagehot’s meaning, and have not, therefore, accepted his
corrections.
R. H. H.
_November 1, 1890._
ADVERTISEMENT.
Several of the following Essays were published by Mr. BAGEHOT himself in
a volume which appeared in 1858, entitled ‘Estimates of some Englishmen
and Scotchmen’—a volume which has now long been out of print. A good
many others are republished, now for the first time, from _The National
Review_, in which they appeared, while one other,—that on Henry Crabb
Robinson,—is taken, with the kind permission of the Editor, from
_The Fortnightly Review_; two short metaphysical papers are from the
_Contemporary Review_, and three—one biographical and two political—from
the _Economist_. The Prefatory Memoir is also republished, with the
Editor’s permission, from _The Fortnightly Review_. In all cases the date
of the first publication has been appended to each Essay. The Portrait
was taken in photography by Monsieur Adolphe Beau, in 1864. It has been
printed by Messrs. Locke & Whitfield by the Woodbury process.
_November 1878._
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
PAGE
PRELIMINARY MEMOIR ix
ESSAY
I. THE FIRST EDINBURGH REVIEWERS (1855) 1
II. HARTLEY COLERIDGE (1852) 41
III. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1856) 75
IV. SHAKESPEARE—THE MAN (1853) 126
V. JOHN MILTON (1859) 173
VI. LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU (1862) 221
VII. WILLIAM COWPER (1855) 255
_APPENDIX._
I. LETTERS ON THE FRENCH COUP D’ÉTAT OF 1851 (1852) 309
II. CÆSARISM AS IT EXISTED IN 1865 361
III. MEMOIR OF THE RIGHT HON. JAMES WILSON (1860) 367
MEMOIR BY THE EDITOR.[1]
It is inevitable, I suppose, that the world should judge of a man chiefly
by what it has gained in him, and lost by his death, even though a
very little reflection might sometimes show that the special qualities
which made him so useful to the world implied others of a yet higher
order, in which, to those who knew him well, these more conspicuous
characteristics must have been well-nigh merged. And while, of course,
it has given me great pleasure, as it must have given pleasure to all
Bagehot’s friends, to hear the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s evidently
genuine tribute to his financial sagacity in the Budget speech of 1877,
and Lord Granville’s eloquent acknowledgments of the value of Bagehot’s
political counsels as Editor of the _Economist_, in the speech delivered
at the London University on May 9, 1877, I have sometimes felt somewhat
unreasonably vexed that those who appreciated so well what I may almost
call the smallest part of him, appeared to know so little of the essence
of him,—of the high-spirited, buoyant, subtle, speculative nature in
which the imaginative qualities were even more remarkable than the
judgment, and were, indeed, at the root of all that was strongest in
the judgment,—of the gay and dashing humour which was the life of every
conversation in which he joined,—and of the visionary nature to which the
commonest things often seemed the most marvellous, and the marvellous
things the most intrinsically probable. To those who hear of Bagehot
only as an original political economist and a lucid political thinker,
a curiously false image of him must be suggested. If they are among the
multitude misled by Carlyle, who regard all political economists as ‘the
dreary professors of a dismal science,’ they will probably conjure up
an arid disquisitionist on value and cost of production; and even if
assured of Bagehot’s imaginative power, they may perhaps only understand
by the expression, that capacity for feverish preoccupation which makes
the mention of ‘Peel’s Act’ summon up to the faces of certain fanatics
a hectic glow, or the rumour of paper currencies blanch others with the
pallor of true passion. The truth, however, is that the best qualities
which Bagehot had, both as economist and as politician, were of a kind
which the majority of economists and politicians do not specially
possess. I do not mean that it was in any way an accident that he was
an original thinker in either sphere; far from it. But I do think that
what he brought to political and economical science, he brought in some
sense from _outside_ their normal range,—that the man of business and
the financier in him fell within such sharp and well-defined limits,
that he knew better than most of his class where their special weakness
lay, and where their special functions ended. This, at all events, I
am quite sure of, that so far as his judgment was sounder than other
men’s—and on many subjects it was much sounder—it was so not in spite of,
but in consequence of, the excursive imagination and vivid humour which
are so often accused of betraying otherwise sober minds into dangerous
aberrations. In him both lucidity and caution were directly traceable to
the force of his imagination.
Walter Bagehot was born at Langport on February 3, 1826. Langport is an
old-fashioned little town in the centre of Somersetshire, which in early
days returned two members to Parliament, until the burgesses petitioned
Edward I. to relieve them of the expense of paying their members,—a
quaint piece of economy of which Bagehot frequently made humorous boast.
The town is still a close corporation, and calls its mayor by the old
Saxon name of Portreeve, and Bagehot himself became its Deputy-Recorder,
as well as a Magistrate for the County. Situated at the point where the
river Parret ceases to be navigable, Langport has always been a centre
of trade; and here in the last century Mr. Samuel Stuckey founded the
Somersetshire Bank, which has since spread over the entire county, and
is now the largest private bank of issue in England. Bagehot was the
only surviving child of Mr. Thomas Watson Bagehot, who was for thirty
years Managing Director and Vice-Chairman of Stuckey’s Banking Company,
and was, as Bagehot was fond of recalling, before he resigned that
position, the oldest joint-stock banker in the United Kingdom. Bagehot
succeeded his father as Vice-Chairman of the Bank, when the latter
retired in his old age. His mother, a Miss Stuckey, was a niece of Mr.
Samuel Stuckey, the founder of the Banking Company, and was a very pretty
and lively woman, who had, by her previous marriage with a son of Dr.
Estlin of Bristol, been brought at an early age into an intellectual
atmosphere by which she had greatly profited. There is no doubt that
Bagehot was greatly indebted to the constant and careful sympathy in
all his studies that both she and his father gave him, as well as to a
very studious disposition, for his future success. Dr. Prichard, the
well-known ethnologist, was her brother-in-law, and her son’s marked
taste for science was first awakened in Dr. Prichard’s house in Park Row,
where Bagehot often spent his half-holidays while he was a schoolboy in
Bristol. To Dr. Prichard’s ‘Races of Man’ may, indeed, be first traced
that keen interest in the speculative side of ethnological research,
the results of which are best seen in Bagehot’s book on ‘Physics and
Politics.’
I first met Bagehot at University College, London, when we were neither
of us over seventeen. I was struck by the questions put by a lad with
large dark eyes and florid complexion to the late Professor De Morgan,
who was lecturing to us, as his custom was, on the great difficulties
involved in what we thought we all understood perfectly—such, for
example, as the meaning of 0, of negative quantities, or the grounds of
probable expectation. Bagehot’s questions showed that he had both read
and thought more on these subjects than most of us, and I was eager to
make his acquaintance, which soon ripened into an intimate friendship, in
which there was never any intermission between that time and his death.
Some will regret that Bagehot did not go to Oxford; the reason being that
his father, who was a Unitarian, objected on principle to all doctrinal
tests, and would never have permitted a son of his to go to either of the
older Universities while those tests were required of the undergraduates.
And I am not at all sure that University College, London, was not at that
time a much more awakening place of education for young men than almost
any Oxford college. Bagehot himself, I suspect, thought so. Fifteen years
later he wrote, in his essay on Shelley: ‘A distinguished pupil of the
University of Oxford once observed to us, “The use of the University
of Oxford is that no one can over-read himself there. The appetite
for knowledge is repressed.”’ And whatever may have been defective in
University College, London—and no doubt much was defective—nothing of
the kind could have been said of it when we were students there. Indeed,
in those years London was a place with plenty of intellectual stimulus
in it for young men, while in University College itself there was quite
enough vivacious and original teaching to make that stimulus available
to the full. It is sometimes said that it needs the quiet of a country
town remote from the capital, to foster the love of genuine study in
young men. But of this, at least, I am sure, that Gower Street, and
Oxford Street, and the New Road, and the dreary chain of squares from
Euston to Bloomsbury, were the scenes of discussions as eager and as
abstract as ever were the sedate cloisters or the flowery river-meadows
of Cambridge or Oxford. Once, I remember, in the vehemence of our
argument as to whether the so-called logical principle of identity (A is
A) were entitled to rank as ‘a law of thought’ or only as a postulate of
language, Bagehot and I wandered up and down Regent Street for something
like two hours in the vain attempt to find Oxford Street:—
‘And yet what days were those, Parmenides,
When we were young, when we could number friends,
In all the Italian cities like ourselves,
When with elated hearts we joined your train,
Ye sun-born virgins, on the road of truth!
Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
Nor outward things were closed and dead to us,
But we received the shock of mighty thoughts
On single minds with a pure natural joy;
And if the sacred load oppressed our brain,
We had the power to feel the pressure eased,
The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again
In the delightful commerce of the world.’
Bagehot has himself described, evidently from his own experience, the
kind of life we lived in those days, in an article on Oxford Reform: ‘So,
too, in youth, the real plastic energy is not in tutors, or lectures, or
in books “got up,” but in Wordsworth and Shelley, in the books that all
read because all like; in what all talk of because all are interested;
in the argumentative walk or disputatious lounge; in the impact of
young thought upon young thought, of fresh thought on fresh thought, of
hot thought on hot thought; in mirth and refutation, in ridicule and
laughter; for these are the free play of the natural mind, and these
cannot be got without a college.’[2]
The late Professor Sewell, when asked to give his pupils some clear
conception of the old Greek Sophists, is said to have replied that he
could not do this better than by referring them to the Professors of
University College, London. I do not think there was much force in the
sarcasm, for though Professor T. Hewitt Key, whose restless and ingenious
mind led him many a wild dance after etymological Will-of-the-wisps—I
remember, for instance, his cheerfully accepting the suggestion that
‘better’ and ‘bad’ (_melior_ and _malus_) came from the same root, and
accounting for it by the probable disposition of hostile tribes to call
everything bad which their enemies called good, and everything good which
their enemies called bad—may have had in him much of the brilliance,
and something also, perhaps, of the flightiness, of the old sophist,
it would be hard to imagine men more severe in exposing pretentious
conceits and dispelling dreams of theoretic omniscience, than Professors
De Morgan, Malden, and Long. De Morgan, who at that time was in the
midst of his controversy on formal logic with Sir William Hamilton, was,
indeed, characterised by the great Edinburgh metaphysician as ‘profound
in mathematics, curious in logic, but wholly deficient in architectonic
power;’ yet, for all that, his lectures on the Theory of Limits were a
far better logical discipline for young men than Sir William Hamilton’s
on the Law of the Unconditioned or the Quantification of the Predicate.
Professor Malden contrived to imbue us with a love of that fastidious
taste and that exquisite nicety in treating questions of scholarship,
which has, perhaps, been more needed and less cultivated in Gower Street
than any other of the higher elements of a college education; while
Professor Long’s caustic irony, accurate and almost ostentatiously dry
learning, and profoundly stoical temperament, were as antithetic to the
temper of the sophist as human qualities could possibly be.
The time of our college life was pretty nearly contemporaneous with
the life of the Anti-Corn-Law League and the great agitation in favour
of Free-trade. To us this was useful rather from the general impulse
it gave to political discussion, and the literary curiosity it excited
in us as to the secret of true eloquence, than because it anticipated
in any considerable degree the later acquired taste for economical
science. Bagehot and I seldom missed an opportunity of hearing together
the matchless practical disquisitions of Mr. Cobden—lucid and homely,
yet glowing with intense conviction,—the profound passion and careless,
though artistic, scorn of Mr. Bright, and the artificial and elaborately
ornate periods, and witty, though somewhat _ad captandum_, epigrams of
Mr. W. J. Fox (afterwards M.P. for Oldham). Indeed, we scoured London
together to hear any kind of oratory that had gained a reputation of
its own, and compared all we heard with the declamation of Burke and
the rhetoric of Macaulay, many of whose later essays came out and
were eagerly discussed by us while we were together at college. In
our conversations on these essays, I remember that I always bitterly
attacked, while Bagehot moderately defended, the glorification of
compromise which marks all Macaulay’s writings. Even in early youth
Bagehot had much of that ‘animated moderation’ which he praises so highly
in his latest work. He was a voracious reader, especially of history, and
had a far truer appreciation of historical conditions than most young
thinkers; indeed, the broad historical sense which characterised him
from first to last, made him more alive than ordinary students to the
urgency of circumstance, and far less disposed to indulge in abstract
moral criticism from a modern point of view. On theology, as on all other
subjects, Bagehot was at this time more Conservative than myself, he
sharing his mother’s orthodoxy, and I at that time accepting heartily the
Unitarianism of my own people. Theology was, however, I think, the only
subject on which, in later life, we, to some degree at least, exchanged
places, though he never at any time, however doubtful he may have become
on some of the cardinal issues of historical Christianity, accepted the
Unitarian position. Indeed, within the last two or three years of his
life, he spoke on one occasion of the Trinitarian doctrine as probably
the best account which human reason could render of the mystery of the
self-existent mind.
In those early days Bagehot’s manner was often supercilious. We used
to attack him for his intellectual arrogance—his ὕβρις we called it,
in our college slang—a quality which I believe was not really in him,
though he had then much of its external appearance. Nevertheless his
genuine contempt for what was intellectually feeble was not accompanied
by an even adequate appreciation of his own powers. At college, however,
his satirical ‘Hear, hear,’ was a formidable sound in the debating
society, and one which took the heart out of many a younger speaker;
and the ironical ‘How much?’ with which in conversation he would meet
an over-eloquent expression, was always of a nature to reduce a man, as
the mathematical phrase goes, to his ‘lowest terms.’ In maturer life he
became much gentler and mellower, and often even delicately considerate
for others; but his inner scorn for ineffectual thought remained, in
some degree, though it was very reticently expressed, to the last. For
instance, I remember his attacking me for my mildness in criticising a
book which, though it professed to rest on a basis of clear thought,
really missed all its points. ‘There is a pale, whitey-brown substance,’
he wrote to me, ‘in the man’s books, which people who don’t think take
for thought, but it isn’t;’ and he upbraided me much for not saying
plainly that the man was a muff. In his youth this scorn for anything
like the vain beating of the wings in the attempt to think, was at
its maximum. It was increased, I think, by that which was one of his
greatest qualities, his remarkable ‘detachment’ of mind—in other words,
his comparative inaccessibility to the contagion of blind sympathy. Most
men, more or less unconsciously, shrink from even _thinking_ what they
feel to be out of sympathy with the feelings of their neighbours, unless
under some strong incentive to do so; and in this way the sources of much
true and important criticism are dried up, through the mere diffusion
and ascendancy of conventional but sincere habits of social judgment.
And no doubt for the greater number of us this is much the best. We
are worth more for the purpose of constituting and strengthening the
cohesive power of the social bond, than we should ever be worth for the
purpose of criticising feebly—and with little effect, perhaps, except the
disorganising effect of seeming ill-nature—the various incompetences and
miscarriages of our neighbours’ intelligence. But Bagehot’s intellect
was always far too powerful and original to render him available for the
function of mere social cement; and full as he was of genuine kindness
and hearty personal affections, he certainly had not in any high degree
that sensitive instinct as to what others would feel, which so often
shapes even the thoughts of men, and still oftener their speech, into
mild and complaisant, but unmeaning and unfruitful, forms.
Thus it has been said that in his very amusing article on Crabb Robinson,
published in the _Fortnightly Review_ for August 1869, he was more than a
little rough in his delineation of that quaint old friend of our earlier
days. And certainly there is something of the naturalist’s realistic
manner of describing the habits of a new species, in the paper, though
there is not a grain of malice or even depreciatory bias in it, and
though there is a very sincere regard manifested throughout. But that
essay will illustrate admirably what I mean by saying that Bagehot’s
detachment of mind, and the deficiency in him of any aptitude for playing
the part of mere social cement, tended to give the impression of an
intellectual arrogance which—certainly in the sense of self-esteem or
self-assertion—did not in the least belong to him. In the essay I have
just mentioned he describes how Crabb Robinson, when he gave his somewhat
famous breakfast-parties, used to forget to make the tea, then lost his
keys, then told a long story about a bust of Wieland during the extreme
agony of his guests’ appetites, and finally, perhaps, withheld the cup
of tea he had at last poured out, while he regaled them with a poem of
Wordsworth’s or a diatribe against Hazlitt. And Bagehot adds, ‘The more
astute of his guests used to breakfast before they came, and then there
was much interest in seeing a steady literary man, who did not understand
the region, in agonies at having to hear three stories before he got
his tea, one again between his milk and his sugar, another between his
butter and his toast, and additional zest in making a stealthy inquiry
that was sure to intercept the coming delicacies by bringing on Schiller
and Goethe.’ The only ‘astute’ person referred to was, I imagine, Bagehot
himself, who confessed to me, much to my amusement, that this was always
his own precaution before one of Crabb Robinson’s breakfasts. I doubt
if anybody else ever thought of it. It was very characteristic in him
that he should have not only noticed—for that, of course, anyone might
do—this weak element in Crabb Robinson’s breakfasts, but should have
kept it so distinctly before his mind as to make it the centre, as it
were, of a policy, and the opportunity of a mischievous stratagem to
try the patience of others. It showed how much of the social naturalist
there was in him. If any race of animals could understand a naturalist’s
account of their ways and habits, and of the devices he adopted to get
those ways and habits more amusingly or instructively displayed before
him, no doubt they would think that he was a cynic; and it was this
intellectual detachment, as of a social naturalist, from the society in
which he moved, which made Bagehot’s remarks often seem somewhat harsh,
when, in fact, they were animated not only by no suspicion of malice, but
by the most cordial and earnest friendliness. Owing to this separateness
of mind, he described more strongly and distinctly traits which, when
delineated by a friend, we expect to find painted in the softened manner
of one who is half disposed to imitate or adopt them.
Yet, though I have used the word ‘naturalist’ to denote the keen and
solitary observation with which Bagehot watched society, no word
describes him worse, if we attribute to it any of that coldness and
stillness of curiosity which we are apt to associate with scientific
vigilance. Especially in his youth, buoyancy, vivacity, velocity of
thought, were of the essence of the impression which he made. He had
high spirits and great capacities for enjoyment, great sympathies indeed
with the old English Cavalier. In his Essay on Macaulay he paints that
character with profound sympathy:—
‘What historian, indeed,’ he says, ‘has ever estimated
the Cavalier character? There is Clarendon, the grave,
rhetorical, decorous, lawyer—piling words, congealing
arguments—very stately, a little grim. There is Hume, the
Scotch metaphysician, who has made out the best case for
such people as never were, for a Charles who never died, for
a Strafford who could never have been attainted, a saving,
calculating North-countryman, fat, impassive, who lived
on eightpence a day. What have these people to do with an
enjoying English gentleman? Talk of the ways of spreading a
wholesome Conservatism throughout the country ... as far as
communicating and establishing your creed is concerned, try a
little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is to enjoy
old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of
things, is to enjoy that state of things. Over the “Cavalier”
mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an
exultation in a daily event, zest in the “regular thing,” joy
at an old feast.’[3]
And that aptly represents himself. Such arrogance as he seemed to have
in early life was the arrogance as much of enjoyment as of detachment
of mind—the _insouciance_ of the old Cavalier as much at least as the
calm of a mind not accessible to the contagion of social feelings. He
always talked, in youth, of his spirits as inconveniently high; and
once wrote to me that he did not think they were quite as ‘boisterous’
as they had been, and that his fellow-creatures were not sorry for the
abatement; nevertheless, he added, ‘I am quite fat, gross, and ruddy.’
He was, indeed, excessively fond of hunting, vaulting, and almost all
muscular effort, so that his life would be wholly misconceived by anyone
who, hearing of his ‘detachment’ of thought, should picture his mind as
a vigilantly observant, far-away intelligence, such as Hawthorne’s, for
example. He liked to be in the thick of the _mêlée_ when talk grew warm,
though he was never so absorbed in it as not to keep his mind cool.
As I said, Bagehot was a Somersetshire man, with all the richness
of nature and love for the external glow of life which the most
characteristic counties of the South-west of England contrive to give to
their most characteristic sons:—
‘This north-west corner of Spain,’ he wrote once to a newspaper
from the Pyrenees, ‘is the only place out of England where I
should like to live. It is a sort of better Devonshire; the
coast is of the same kind, the sun is more brilliant, the sea
is more brilliant, and there are mountains in the background.
I have seen some more beautiful places and many grander, but I
should not like to live in them. As Mr. Emerson puts it, “I do
not want to go to heaven before my time.” My English nature by
early use and long habit is tied to a certain kind of scenery,
soon feels the want of it, and is apt to be alarmed as well as
pleased at perpetual snow and all sorts of similar beauties.
But here, about San Sebastian, you have the best England can
give you (at least if you hold, as I do, that Devonshire is
the finest of our counties), and the charm, the ineffable,
indescribable charm of the South too. Probably the sun has some
secret effect on the nervous system that makes one inclined to
be pleased, but the golden light lies upon everything, and one
fancies that one is charmed only by the outward loveliness.’
The vivacity and warm colouring of the landscapes of the South of England
certainly had their full share in moulding his tastes, and possibly even
his style.
Bagehot took the mathematical scholarship with his Bachelor’s degree in
the University of London in 1846, and the gold medal in Intellectual and
Moral Philosophy with his Master’s degree in 1848, in reading for which
he mastered for the first time those principles of political economy
which were to receive so much illustration from his genius in later
years. But at this time philosophy, poetry, and theology had, I think,
a much greater share of his attention than any narrow and more sharply
defined science. Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Martineau and John Henry Newman, all in their way exerted a great
influence over his mind, and divided, not unequally, with the authors
whom he was bound to study—that is, the Greek philosophers, together
with Hume, Kant, J. S. Mill, and Sir William Hamilton—the time at his
disposal. I have no doubt that for seven or eight years of his life the
Roman Catholic Church had a great fascination for his imagination, though
I do not think that he was ever at all near conversion. He was intimate
with all Dr. Newman’s writings. And of these the Oxford sermons, and the
poems in the _Lyra Apostolica_ afterwards separately published—partly,
I believe, on account of the high estimate of them which Bagehot had
himself expressed—were always his special favourites. The little poetry
he wrote—and it is evident that he never had the kind of instinct for,
or command of, language which is the first condition of genuine poetic
genius—seems to me to have been obviously written under the spell which
Dr. Newman’s own few but finely-chiselled poems had cast upon him. If
I give one specimen of Bagehot’s poems, it is not that I think it in
any way an adequate expression of his powers, but for a very different
reason, because it will show those who have inferred from his other
writings that his mind never deeply concerned itself with religion, how
great is their mistake. Nor is there any real poverty of resource in
these lines, except perhaps in the awkward mechanism of some of them.
They were probably written when he was twenty-three or twenty-four.
‘TO THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.
‘“Casta inceste.”—_Lucretius._
‘Thy lamp of faith is brightly trimmed,
Thy eager eye is not yet dimmed,
Thy stalwart step is yet unstayed,
Thy words are well obeyed.
‘Thy proud voice vaunts of strength from heaven,
Thy proud foes carp, “By hell’s art given:”
No Titan thou of earth-born bands,
Strange Church of hundred hands.
‘Nursed without knowledge, born of night,
With hand of power and thoughts of light,
As Britain seas, far reachingly
O’er-rul’st thou history.
‘Wild as La Pucelle in her hour,
O’er prostrate realms with awe-girt power
Thou marchest stedfast on thy path
Through wonder, love, and wrath.
‘And will thy end be such as hers,
O’erpowered by earthly mail-clad powers,
Condemned for cruel, magic art,
Though awful, bold of heart?
‘Through thorn-clad Time’s unending waste
With ardent step alone thou strayest,
As Jewish scape-goats tracked the wild,
Unholy, consecrate, defiled.
‘Use not thy truth in manner rude
To rule for gain the multitude,
Or thou wilt see that truth depart,
To seek some holier heart;
‘Then thou wilt watch thy errors lorn,
O’erspread by shame, o’erswept by scorn,
In lonely want without hope’s smile,
As Tyre her weed-clad Isle.
‘Like once thy chief, thou bear’st Christ’s name;
Like him thou hast denied his shame,
Bold, eager, skilful, confident,
Oh, now like him repent!’
That has certainly no sign of the hand of the master in it, for the
language is not moulded and vivified by the thought, but the thought
itself is fine. And there is still better evidence than these lines
would afford, of the fascination which the Roman Catholic Church had for
Bagehot. A year or two later, in the letters on the _coup d’état_, to
which I shall soon have to refer, there occurs the following passage.
(He is trying to explain how the cleverness, the moral restlessness,
and intellectual impatience of the French, all tend to unfit them for a
genuine Parliamentary government):—
‘I do not know that I can exhibit the way these qualities of
the French character operate on their opinions better than by
telling you how the Roman Catholic Church deals with them.
I have rather attended to it since I came here. It gives
sermons almost an interest, their being in French, and to those
curious in intellectual matters, it is worth observing. In
other times, and even now in out-of-the-way Spain, I suppose
it may be true that the Catholic Church has been opposed to
inquiry and reasoning. But it is not so now and here. Loudly
from the pens of a hundred writers, from the tongues of a
thousand pulpits, in every note of thrilling scorn and exulting
derision, she proclaims the contrary. Be she Christ’s workman
or Antichrist’s, she knows her work too well. “Reason, reason,
reason!” exclaims she to the philosophers of this world. “Put
in practice what you teach if you would have others believe
it. Be consistent. Do not prate to us of private judgment,
when you are but yourselves repeating what you heard in the
nursery, ill-mumbled remnants of a Catholic tradition. No;
exemplify what you command; inquire and make search. Seek,
and we warn you that ye will never find, yet do as ye will.
Shut yourselves up in a room, make your mind a blank, go
down (as you speak) into the depth of your consciousness,
scrutinise the mental structure, inquire for the elements of
belief,—spend years, your best years, in the occupation,—and
at length, when your eyes are dim, and your brain hot, and
your hands unsteady, then reckon what you have gained. See
if you cannot count on your fingers the certainties you have
reached; reflect which of them you doubted yesterday, which
you may disbelieve to-morrow; or rather, make haste—assume at
random some essential _credenda_,—write down your inevitable
postulates, enumerate your necessary axioms, toil on, toil
on, spin your spider’s web, adore your own soul, or if ye
prefer it, choose some German nostrum; try an intellectual
intuition, or the pure reason, or the intelligible ideas, or
the mesmeric clairvoyance, and when so, or somehow, you have
attained your results, try them on mankind. Don’t go out into
the byeways and hedges; it is unnecessary. Ring a bell, call in
the servants, give them a course of lectures, cite Aristotle,
review Descartes, panegyrise Plato, and see if the bonne will
understand you. It is you that say _Vox populi, vox Dei_. You
see the people reject you. Or, suppose you succeed,—what you
call succeeding. Your books are read; for three weeks or even
a season you are the idol of the _salons_. Your hard words are
on the lips of women; then a change comes—a new actress appears
at the Théâtre Français or the Opéra; her charms eclipse your
theories; or a great catastrophe occurs; political liberty, it
is said, is annihilated. _Il faut se faire mouchard_, is the
observation of scoffers. Anyhow you are forgotten. Fifty years
may be the gestation of a philosophy, not three its life.
Before long, before you go to your grave, your six disciples
leave you for some newer master, or to set up for themselves.
The poorest priest in the remotest region of the Basses-Alpes
has more power over men’s souls than human cultivation. His
ill-mouthed masses move women’s souls—can you? Ye scoff at
Jupiter, yet he at least was believed in, you never have been.
Idol for idol, the _de_throned is better than the _un_throned.
No, if you would reason, if you would teach, if you would
speculate,—come to us. We have our premises ready; years
upon years before you were born, intellects whom the best of
you delight to magnify, toiled to systematise the creed of
ages. Years upon years after you are dead, better heads than
yours will find new matter there to define, to divide, to
arrange. Consider the hundred volumes of Aquinas. Which of
you desire a higher life than that;—to deduce, to subtilise,
discriminate, systematise, and decide the highest truth, and
to be believed? Yet such was his luck, his enjoyment. He was
what you would be. No, no, _credite, credite_. Ours is the
life of speculation. The cloister is the home for the student.
Philosophy is stationary, Catholicism progressive. _You_ call.
_We_ are heard,” &c. So speaks each preacher, according to his
ability. And when the dust and noise of present controversies
have passed away, and, in the interior of the night, some grave
historian writes out the tale of half-forgotten times, let him
not forget to observe that, profoundly as the mediæval Church
subdued the superstitious cravings of a painful and barbarous
age, in after-years she dealt more discerningly still with the
feverish excitement, the feeble vanities, and the dogmatic
impatience of an over-intellectual generation.’[4]
It is obvious, I think, both from the poem, and from these reflections,
that what attracted Bagehot in the Church of Rome was the historical
prestige and social authority which she had accumulated in believing and
uncritical ages for use in the unbelieving and critical age in which we
live,—while what he condemned and dreaded in her was her tendency to use
her power over the multitude for purposes of a low ambition.
And as I am on this subject, this will be, I think, the best opportunity
I shall have to say what I have got to say of Bagehot’s later religious
belief, without returning to it when I have to deal with a period in
which the greatest part of his spare intellectual energy was given to
other subjects. I do not think that the religious affections were very
strong in Bagehot’s mind, but the primitive religious instincts certainly
were. From childhood he was what he certainly remained to the last, in
spite of the rather antagonistic influence of the able scientific group
of men from whom he learned so much—a thorough transcendentalist, by
which I mean one who could never doubt that there was a real foundation
of the universe distinct from the outward show of its superficial
qualities, and that the substance is never exhaustively expressed in
these qualities. He often repeats in his essays Shelley’s fine line,
‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live call life,’ and the
essence at least of the idea in it haunted him from his very childhood.
In the essay on ‘Hartley Coleridge’—perhaps the most perfect in style
of any of his writings—he describes most powerfully, and evidently in
great measure from his own experience, the mysterious confusion between
appearances and realities which so bewildered little Hartley,—the
difficulty that he complained of in distinguishing between the various
Hartleys,—‘picture Hartley,’ ‘shadow Hartley,’ and between Hartley the
subject and Hartley the object, the enigmatic blending of which last
two Hartleys the child expressed by catching hold of his own arm, and
then calling himself the ‘catch-me-fast Hartley.’ And in dilating on
this bewildering experience of the child’s, Bagehot borrows from his own
recollections:—
‘All children have a world of their own, as distinct from
that of the grown people who gravitate around them, as the
dreams of girlhood from our prosaic life, or the ideas of the
kitten that plays with the falling leaves, from those of her
carnivorous mother that catches mice, and is sedulous in her
domestic duties. But generally about this interior existence
children are dumb. You have warlike ideas, but you cannot say
to a sinewy relative, “My dear aunt, I wonder when the big
bush in the garden will begin to walk about; I’m sure it’s a
Crusader, and I was cutting it all the day with my steel sword.
But what do you think, aunt? for I’m puzzled about its legs,
because you see, aunt, it has only _one_ stalk—and besides,
aunt, the leaves.” You cannot remark this in secular life, but
you hack at the infelicitous bush till you do not wholly reject
the idea that your small garden is Palestine, and yourself the
most adventurous of knights.’[5]
They have a tradition in the family that this is but a fragment from
Bagehot’s own imaginative childhood, and certainly this visionary
element in him was very vivid to the last. However, the transcendental
or intellectual basis of religious belief was soon strengthened in him,
as readers of his remarkable paper on Bishop Butler will easily see, by
those moral and retributive instincts which warn us of the meaning and
consequences of guilt:—
‘The moral principle,’ he wrote in that essay, ‘whatever may
be said to the contrary by complacent thinkers, is really
and to most men a principle of fear.... Conscience is the
condemnation of ourselves; we expect a penalty. As the Greek
proverb teaches, “Where there is shame, there is fear.”... How
to be free from this is the question. How to get loose from
this—how to be rid of the secret tie which binds the strong man
and cramps his pride, and makes him angry at the beauty of the
universe, which will not let him go forth like a great animal,
like the king of the forest, in the glory of his might, but
which restrains him with an inner fear and a secret foreboding
that if he do but exalt himself he shall be abased, if he do
but set forth his own dignity he will offend ONE who will
deprive him of it. This, as has often been pointed out, is the
source of the bloody rites of heathendom.’[6]
And then, after a powerful passage, in which he describes the sacrificial
superstitions of men like Achilles, he returns, with a flash of his own
peculiar humour, to Bishop Butler, thus:—
‘Of course it is not this kind of fanaticism that we impute
to a prelate of the English Church; human sacrifices are not
respectable, and Achilles was not rector of Stanhope. But
though the costume and circumstances of life change, the human
heart does not; its feelings remain. The same anxiety, the same
consciousness of personal sin, which lead, in barbarous times,
to what has been described, show themselves in civilised life
as well. In this quieter period, their great manifestation is
scrupulosity;’[7]
which he goes on to describe as a sort of inexhaustible anxiety for
perfect compliance with the minutest positive commands which may be
made the condition of forgiveness for the innumerable lapses of moral
obligation. I am not criticising the paper, or I should point out that
Bagehot failed in it to draw out the distinction between the primitive
moral instinct and the corrupt superstition into which it runs; but I
believe that he recognised the weight of this moral testimony of the
conscience to a divine Judge, as well as the transcendental testimony of
the intellect to an eternal substance of things, to the end of his life.
And certainly in the reality of human free-will as the condition of all
genuine moral life, he firmly believed. In his ‘Physics and Politics’—the
subtle and original essay upon which, in conjunction with the essay on
the ‘English Constitution,’ Bagehot’s reputation as a European thinker
chiefly rests—he repeatedly guards himself (for instance, pp. 9, 10)
against being supposed to think that in accepting the principle of
evolution, he has accepted anything inconsistent either with spiritual
creation, or with the free will of man. On the latter point he adds,
‘No doubt the modern doctrine of the “conservation of force,”
if applied to decision, is inconsistent with free-will; if you
hold that force is “never lost or gained,” you cannot hold that
there is a real gain, a sort of new creation of it in free
volition. But I have nothing to do here with the universal
“conservation of force.” The conception of the nervous organs
as stores of will-made power, does not raise or need so vast a
discussion.’[8]
And in the same book he repeatedly uses the expression ‘Providence,’
evidently in its natural meaning, to express the ultimate force at work
behind the march of ‘evolution.’ Indeed, in conversation with me on this
subject, he often said how much higher a conception of the creative mind,
the new Darwinian ideas seemed to him to have introduced, as compared
with those contained in what is called the argument from contrivance and
design. On the subject of personal immortality, too, I do not think that
Bagehot ever wavered. He often spoke, and even wrote, of ‘that vague
sense of eternal continuity which is always about the mind, and which no
one could bear to lose,’ and described it as being much more important to
us than it even appears to be, important as that is; for, he said, ‘when
we think we are thinking of the past, we are only thinking of a future
that is to be like it.’ But with the exception of these cardinal points,
I could hardly say how much Bagehot’s mind was or was not affected by
the great speculative controversies of later years. Certainly he became
much more doubtful concerning the force of the historical evidence of
Christianity than I ever was, and rejected, I think, entirely, though
on what amount of personal study he had founded his opinion I do not
know, the Apostolic origin of the fourth Gospel. Possibly his mind may
have been latterly in suspense as to miracle altogether, though I am
pretty sure that he had not come to a negative conclusion. He belonged,
in common with myself, during the last years of his life, to a society
in which these fundamental questions were often discussed; but he seldom
spoke in it, and told me very shortly before his death that he shrank
from such discussions on religious points, feeling that, in debates of
this kind, they were not and could not be treated with anything like
thoroughness. On the whole, I think, the cardinal article of his faith
would be adequately represented even in the latest period of his life by
the following passage in his essay on Bishop Butler:—
‘In every step of religious argument we require the assumption,
the belief, the faith, if the word is better, in an absolutely
_perfect_ Being; in and by whom we are, who is omnipotent
as well as most holy; who moves on the face of the whole
world, and ruleth all things by the word of his power. If we
grant this, the difficulty of the opposition between what
is here called the natural and the supernatural religion is
removed; and without granting it, that difficulty is perhaps
insuperable. It follows from the very idea and definition of
an infinitely perfect Being, that he is within us as well as
without us,—ruling the clouds of the air and the fishes of
the sea, as well as the fears and thoughts of men; smiling
through the smile of nature as well as warning with the pain
of conscience,—“sine qualitate, bonum; sine quantitate,
magnum; sine indigentiâ, creatorem; sine situ, præsidentem;
sine habitu, omnia continentem; sine loco, ubique totum; sine
tempore, sempiternum; sine ullâ sui mutatione, mutabilia
facientem, nihilque patientem.” If we assume this, life is
simple; without this, all is dark.’[9]
Evidently, then, though Bagehot held that the doctrine of evolution by
natural selection gave a higher conception of the Creator than the old
doctrine of mechanical design, he never took any materialistic view of
evolution. One of his early essays, written while at college, on some of
the many points of the Kantian philosophy which he then loved to discuss,
concluded with a remarkable sentence, which would probably have fairly
expressed, even at the close of his life, his profound belief in God,
and his partial sympathy with the agnostic view that we are, in great
measure, incapable of apprehending, more than very dimly, His mind or
purposes:—‘Gazing after the infinite essence, we are like men watching
through the drifting clouds for a glimpse of the true heavens on a drear
November day; layer after layer passes from our view, but still the same
immovable grey rack remains.’