reading Law in London, and hesitating between the Bar and the family
bank, there came as Principal to University Hall (which is a hall of
residence in connection with University College, London, established by
the Presbyterians and Unitarians after the passing of the Dissenters’
Chapel Act), the man who had, I think, a greater intellectual fascination
for Bagehot than any of his contemporaries—Arthur Hugh Clough, Fellow
of Oriel College, Oxford, and author of various poems of great genius,
more or less familiar to the public, though Clough is perhaps better
known as the subject of the exquisite poem written on his death in
1861, by his friend Matthew Arnold—the poem to which he gave the name
of ‘Thyrsis’—than by even the most popular of his own. Bagehot had
subscribed for the erection of University Hall, and took an active
part at one time on its council. Thus he saw a good deal of Clough,
and did what he could to mediate between that enigma to Presbyterian
parents—a college-head who held himself serenely neutral on almost
all moral and educational subjects interesting to parents and pupils,
except the observance of disciplinary rules—and the managing body who
bewildered him and were by him bewildered. I don’t think either Bagehot
or Clough’s other friends were very successful in their mediation, but
he at least gained in Clough a cordial friend, and a theme of profound
intellectual and moral interest to himself which lasted him his life, and
never failed to draw him into animated discussion long after Clough’s
own premature death; and I think I can trace the effect which some of
Clough’s writings had on Bagehot’s mind to the very end of his career.
There were some points of likeness between Bagehot and Clough, but many
more of difference. Both had the capacity for boyish spirits in them,
and the florid colour which usually accompanies a good deal of animal
vigour; both were reserved men, with a great dislike of anything like
the appearance of false sentiment, and both were passionate admirers of
Wordsworth’s poetry; but Clough was slightly lymphatic, with a great
tendency to unexpressed and unacknowledged discouragement, and to the
paralysis of silent embarrassment when suffering from such feelings,
while Bagehot was keen, and very quickly evacuated embarrassing
positions, and never returned to them. When however, Clough was happy
and at ease, there was a calm and silent radiance in his face, and his
head was set with a kind of stateliness on his shoulders, that gave him
almost an Olympian air; but this would sometimes vanish in a moment into
an embarrassed taciturnity that was quite uncouth. One of his friends
declares that the man who was said to be ‘a cross between a schoolboy
and a bishop,’ must have been like Clough. There was in Clough, too, a
large Chaucerian simplicity and a flavour of homeliness, so that now
and then, when the light shone into his eyes, there was something, in
spite of the air of fine scholarship and culture, which reminded one of
the best likenesses of Burns. It was of Clough, I believe, that Emerson
was thinking (though, knowing Clough intimately as he did, he was of
course speaking mainly in joke) when he described the Oxford of that day
thus:—‘“Ah,” says my languid Oxford gentleman, “nothing new, and nothing
true, and no matter.”’ No saying could misrepresent Clough’s really
buoyant and simple character more completely than that; but doubtless
many of his sayings and writings, treating, as they did, most of the
greater problems of life as insoluble, and enjoining a self-possessed
composure under the discovery of their insolubility, conveyed an
impression very much like this to men who came only occasionally in
contact with him. Bagehot, in his article on Crabb Robinson, says that
the latter, who in those days seldom remembered names, always described
Clough as ‘that admirable and accomplished man—you know whom I mean—the
one who never says anything.’ And certainly Clough was often taciturn to
the last degree, or if he opened his lips, delighted to open them only
to scatter confusion by discouraging, in words at least, all that was
then called earnestness—as, for example, by asking, ‘Was it ordained that
twice two should make four, simply for the intent that boys and girls
should be cut to the heart that they do not make five? Be content; when
the veil is raised, perhaps they will make five! Who knows?’[10]
Clough’s chief fascination for Bagehot was, I think, that he had as
a poet in some measure rediscovered, at all events realised, as few
ever realised before, the enormous difficulty of finding truth—a
difficulty which he somewhat paradoxically held to be enhanced rather
than diminished by the intensity of the truest modern passion for it.
The stronger the desire, he teaches, the greater is the danger of
illegitimately satisfying that desire by persuading ourselves that what
we _wish_ to believe, is true, and the greater the danger of ignoring the
actual confusions of human things:—
‘Rules baffle instincts, instincts rules,
Wise men are bad, and good are fools,
Facts evil, wishes vain appear,
We cannot go, why are we here?
‘Oh, may we, for assurance’ sake,
Some arbitrary judgment take,
And wilfully pronounce it clear,
For this or that ’tis, we are here?
‘Or is it right, and will it do
To pace the sad confusion through,
And say, it does not yet appear
What we shall be—what we are here?’
This warning to withhold judgment and not cheat ourselves into beliefs
which our own imperious desire to believe had alone engendered, is given
with every variety of tone and modulation, and couched in all sorts of
different forms of fancy and apologue, throughout Clough’s poems. He
insists on ‘the _ruinous_ force of the will’ to persuade us of illusions
which please us; of the tendency of practical life to give us beliefs
which suit that practical life, but are none the truer for that; and is
never weary of warning us that a firm belief in a falsity can be easily
generated:—
‘_Action will furnish belief_,—but will that belief be the true one?
This is the point, you know. However, it doesn’t much matter.
What one wants, I suppose, is to predetermine the action,
So as to make it entail, not a chance belief, but the true one.’
This practical preaching, which Clough urges in season and out of season,
met an answering chord in Bagehot’s mind, not so much in relation to
religious belief as in relation to the over-haste and over-eagerness of
human conduct, and I can trace the effect of it in all his writings,
political and otherwise, to the end of his life. Indeed, it affected him
much more in later days than in the years immediately following his first
friendship with Clough. With all his boyish dash, there was something
in Bagehot even in youth which dreaded precipitancy, and not only
precipitancy itself, but those moral situations tending to precipitancy
which men who have no minds of their own to make up, so often court. In
later life he pleased himself by insisting that, on Darwin’s principle,
civilised men, with all the complex problems of modern life to puzzle
them, suspend their judgment so little, and are so eager for action,
only because they have inherited from the earlier, simpler, and more
violent ages, an excessive predisposition to action unsuited to our epoch
and dangerous to our future development. But it was Clough, I think,
who first stirred in Bagehot’s mind this great dread of ‘the ruinous
force of the will,’ a phrase he was never weary of quoting, and which
might almost be taken as the motto of his ‘Physics and Politics,’ the
great conclusion of which is that in the ‘age of discussion,’ grand
policies and high-handed diplomacy and sensational legislation of all
kinds will become rarer and rarer, because discussion will point out all
the difficulties of such policies in relation to a state of existence
so complex as our own, and will in this way tend to repress the excess
of practical energy handed down to us by ancestors to whom life was a
sharper, simpler, and more perilous affair.
But the time for Bagehot’s full adoption of the suspensive principle in
public affairs was not yet. In 1851 he went to Paris, shortly before
the _coup d’état_. And while all England was assailing Louis Napoleon
(justly enough, as I think) for his perfidy, and his impatience of
the self-willed Assembly he could not control, Bagehot was preparing
a deliberate and very masterly defence of that bloody and high-handed
act. Even Bagehot would, I think, if pressed judiciously in later life,
have admitted—though I can’t say he ever _did_—that the _coup d’état_
was one of the best illustrations of ‘the ruinous force of the will’ in
engendering, or at least crystallising, a false intellectual conclusion
as to the political possibilities of the future, which recent history
could produce. Certainly he always spoke somewhat apologetically of
these early letters, though I never heard him expressly retract their
doctrine. In 1851 a knot of young Unitarians, of whom I was then one,
headed by the late Mr. J. Langton Sanford—afterwards the historian of
the Great Rebellion, who survived Bagehot barely four months—had engaged
to help for a time in conducting the _Inquirer_, which then was, and
still is, the chief literary and theological organ of the Unitarian
body. Our _régime_ was, I imagine, a time of great desolation for the
very tolerant and thoughtful constituency for whom we wrote; and many of
them, I am confident, yearned, and were fully justified in yearning, for
those better days when this tyranny of ours should be overpast. Sanford
and Osler did a good deal to throw cold water on the rather optimist and
philanthropic politics of the most sanguine, because the most benevolent
and open-hearted of Dissenters. Roscoe criticised their literary work
from the point of view of a devotee of the Elizabethan poets; and I
attempted to prove to them in distinct heads, first, that their laity
ought to have the protection afforded by a liturgy against the arbitrary
prayers of their ministers; and next, that at least the great majority
of their sermons ought to be suppressed, and the habit of delivering
them discontinued almost altogether. Only a denomination of ‘just men’
trained in tolerance for generations, and in that respect, at least,
made all but ‘perfect,’ would have endured it at all; but I doubt if
any of us caused the Unitarian body so much grief as Bagehot, who never
was a Unitarian, but who contributed a series of brilliant letters on
the _coup d’état_, in which he trod just as heavily on the toes of his
colleagues as he did on those of the public by whom the _Inquirer_ was
taken. In those letters he not only, as I have already shown, eulogised
the Catholic Church, but he supported the Prince-President’s military
violence, attacked the freedom of the Press in France, maintained
that the country was wholly unfit for true Parliamentary government,
and—worst of all perhaps—insinuated a panegyric on Louis Napoleon
himself, asserting that he had been far better prepared for the duties of
a statesman by gambling on the turf, than he would have been by poring
over the historical and political dissertations of the wise and the good.
This was Bagehot’s day of cynicism. The seven letters which he wrote on
the _coup d’état_ were certainly very exasperating, and yet they were
not caricatures of his real thought, for his private letters at the time
were more cynical still. Crabb Robinson, in speaking of him, used ever
afterwards to describe him to me as ‘that friend of yours—you know whom
I mean, you rascal!—who wrote those abominable, those most disgraceful
letters on the _coup d’état_—I did not forgive him for years after.’ Nor
do I wonder, even now, that a sincere friend of constitutional freedom
and intellectual liberty, like Crabb Robinson, found them difficult to
forgive. They were light and airy, and even flippant on a very grave
subject. They made nothing of the Prince’s perjury; and they took
impertinent liberties with all the dearest prepossessions of the readers
of the _Inquirer_, and assumed their sympathy just where Bagehot knew
that they would be most revolted by his opinions. Nevertheless, they had
a vast deal of truth in them, and no end of ability, and I hope that
there will be many to read them with interest now that they are here
republished. There is a good deal of the raw material of history in
them, and certainly I doubt if Bagehot ever again hit the satiric vein
of argument so well. Here is a passage that will bear taking out of its
context, and therefore not so full of the shrewd malice of these letters
as many others, but which will illustrate their ability. It is one in
which Bagehot maintained for the first time the view (which I believe he
subsequently almost persuaded English politicians to accept, though in
1852 it was a mere flippant novelty, a paradox, and a heresy) that free
institutions are apt to succeed with a stupid people, and to founder with
a ready-witted and vivacious one. After broaching this, he goes on:—
‘I see you are surprised. You are going to say to me as
Socrates did to Polus, “My young friend, _of course_ you are
right, but will you explain what you mean, as you are not yet
intelligible?” I will do so as well as I can, and endeavour to
make good what I say, not from a prior demonstration of my own,
but from the details of the present and the facts of history.
Not to begin by wounding any present susceptibilities, let me
take the Roman character, for, with one great exception—I need
not say to whom I allude—they are the great political people
of history. Now is not a certain dulness their most visible
characteristic? What is the history of their speculative
mind? A blank. What their literature? A copy. They have left
not a single discovery in any abstract science, not a single
perfect or well-formed work of high imagination. The Greeks,
the perfection of human and accomplished genius, bequeathed
to mankind the ideal forms of self-idolising art; the Romans
imitated and admired. The Greeks explained the laws of nature;
the Romans wondered and despised. The Greeks invented a system
of numerals second only to that now in use; the Romans counted
to the end of their days with the clumsy apparatus which
we still call by their name. The Greeks made a capital and
scientific calendar; the Romans began their month when the
Pontifex Maximus happened to spy out the new moon. Throughout
Latin literature this is the perpetual puzzle—Why are we free
and they slaves?—we prætors and they barbers? Why do the stupid
people always win and the clever people always lose? I need
not say that in real sound stupidity the English people are
unrivalled. You’ll have more wit, and better wit, in an Irish
street-row than would keep Westminster Hall in humour for five
weeks.... These valuable truths are no discoveries of mine.
They are familiar enough to people whose business it is to
know them. Hear what a douce and aged attorney says of your
peculiarly promising barrister. “Sharp? Oh! yes, yes: he’s too
sharp by half. He isn’t _safe_, not a minute, isn’t that young
man.” “What style, sir,” asked of an East India Director some
youthful aspirant for literary renown, “is most to be preferred
in the composition of official despatches?” “My good fellow,”
responded the ruler of Hindostan, “the style _as we_ like, is
the Humdrum.”’[11]
The permanent value of these papers is due to the freshness of their
impressions of the French capital, and their true criticisms of Parisian
journalism and society; their perverseness consists in this, that
Bagehot steadily ignored in them the distinction between the duty of
resisting anarchy, and the assumption of the Prince-President that this
could only be done by establishing his own dynasty, and deferring _sine
die_ that great constitutional experiment which is now once more, no
thanks to him or his Government, on its trial; an experiment which, for
anything we see, had at least as good a chance then as now, and under
a firm and popular chief of the executive like Prince Louis, would
probably have had a better chance then than it has now under MacMahon.
I need hardly say that in later life Bagehot was by no means blind to
the political shortcomings of Louis Napoleon’s _régime_, as the article
republished from the _Economist_, in the second appendix to this volume,
sufficiently proves. Moreover, he rejoiced heartily in the moderation
of the republican statesmen during the severe trials of the months
which just preceded his own death, in 1877, and expressed his sincere
belief—confirmed by the history of the last year and a half—that the
existing Republic has every prospect of life and growth.
During that residence in Paris, Bagehot, though, as I have said, in a
somewhat cynical frame of mind, was full of life and courage, and was
beginning to feel his own genius, which perhaps accounts for the air of
recklessness so foreign to him, which he never adopted either before
or since. During the riots he was a good deal in the streets, and from
a mere love of art helped the Parisians to construct some of their
barricades, notwithstanding the fact that his own sympathy was with those
who shot down the barricades, not with those who manned them. He climbed
over the rails of the Palais Royal on the morning of December 2nd to
breakfast, and used to say that he was the only person who did breakfast
there on that day. Victor Hugo is certainly wrong in asserting that no
one expected Louis Napoleon to use force, and that the streets were as
full as usual when the people were shot down, for the gates of the Palais
Royal were shut quite early in the day. Bagehot was very much struck by
the ferocious look of the Montagnards.
‘Of late,’ he wrote to me, ‘I have been devoting my entire
attention to the science of barricades, which I found amusing.
They have systematised it in a way which is pleasing to the
cultivated intellect. We had only one good day’s fighting,
and I naturally kept out of cannon-shot. But I took a quiet
walk over the barricades in the morning, and superintended the
construction of three with as much keenness as if I had been
clerk of the works. You’ve seen lots, of course, at Berlin, but
I should not think those Germans were up to a real Montagnard,
who is the most horrible being to the eye I ever saw,—sallow,
sincere, sour fanaticism, with grizzled moustaches, and a
strong wish to shoot you rather than not. The Montagnards are a
scarce commodity, the real race—only three or four, if so many,
to a barricade. If you want a Satan any odd time, they’ll do;
only I hope that _he_ don’t believe in human brotherhood. It
is not possible to respect any one who does, and I should be
loth to confound the notion of _our_ friend’s solitary grandeur
by supposing him to fraternise,’ &c. ‘I think M. Buonaparte is
entitled to great praise. He has very good heels to his boots,
and the French just want treading down, and nothing else—calm,
cruel, business-like oppression, to take the dogmatic conceit
out of their heads. The spirit of generalisation which, John
Mill tells us, honourably distinguishes the French mind, has
come to this, that every Parisian wants his head _tapped_ in
order to get the formulæ and nonsense out of it. And it would
pay to perform the operation, for they are very clever on what
is within the limit of their experience, and all that can be
“expanded” in terms of it, but beyond, it is all generalisation
and folly.... So I am for any carnivorous government.’
And again, in the same letter:—
‘Till the Revolution came I had no end of trouble to find
conversation, but now they’ll talk against everybody, and
against the President like mad—and they talk immensely well,
and the language is like a razor, capital if you are skilful,
but sure to cut you if you aren’t. A fellow can talk German
in crude forms, and I don’t see it sounds any worse, but this
stuff is horrid unless you get it _quite_ right. A French lady
made a striking remark to me:—“_C’est une révolution qui a
sauvé la France. Tous mes amis sont mis en prison_.” She was
immensely delighted that such a pleasing way of saving her
country had been found.’
Of course the style of these familiar private letters conveys a gross
caricature not only of Bagehot’s maturer mind, but even of the judgment
of the published letters, and I quote them only to show that at the time
when he composed these letters on the _coup d’état_, Bagehot’s mood was
that transient mood of reckless youthful cynicism through which so many
men of genius pass. I do not think he had at any time any keen sympathy
with the multitude, _i.e._, with masses of unknown men. And that he ever
felt what has since then been termed ‘the enthusiasm of humanity,’ the
sympathy with ‘the toiling millions of men sunk in labour and pain,’
he himself would strenuously have denied. Such sympathy, even when men
really desire to feel it, is, indeed, very much oftener coveted than
actually felt by men as a living motive; and I am not quite sure that
Bagehot would have even wished to feel it. Nevertheless, he had not the
faintest trace of real hardness about him towards people whom he knew
and understood. He could not bear to give pain; and when, in rare cases
by youthful inadvertence, he gave it needlessly, I have seen how much
and what lasting vexation it caused him. Indeed, he was capable of great
sacrifices to spare his friends but a little suffering.
It was, I think, during his stay in Paris that Bagehot finally decided
to give up the notion of practising at the Bar, and to join his father
in the Somersetshire Bank and in his other business as a merchant and
ship-owner. This involved frequent visits to London and Liverpool, and
Bagehot soon began to take a genuine interest in the larger issues of
commerce, and maintained to the end that ‘business is much more amusing
than pleasure.’ Nevertheless, he could not live without the intellectual
life of London, and never stayed more than six weeks at a time in the
country without finding some excuse for going to town; and long before
his death he made his home there. Hunting was the only sport he really
cared for. He was a dashing rider, and a fresh wind was felt blowing
through his earlier literary efforts, as though he had been thinking
in the saddle, an effect wanting in his later essays, where you see
chiefly the calm analysis of a lucid observer. But most of the ordinary
amusements of young people he detested. He used to say that he wished he
could think balls _wicked_, being so stupid as they were, and all ‘the
little blue and pink girls, so like each other,’—a sentiment partly due,
perhaps, to his extreme shortness of sight.