the law for the life of commerce, he thoroughly enjoyed his legal studies
in his friend the late Mr. Justice Quain’s chambers, and in those of the
present Vice-Chancellor Sir Charles Hall, and he learnt there a good deal
that was of great use to him in later life. Moreover, in spite of his
large capacity for finance and commerce, there were small difficulties in
Bagehot’s way as a banker and merchant which he felt somewhat keenly. He
was always absent-minded about _minutiæ_. For instance, to the last, he
could not correct a proof well, and was sure to leave a number of small
inaccuracies, harshnesses, and slipshodnesses in style, uncorrected.
He declared at one time that he was wholly unable to ‘add up,’ and in
his mathematical exercises in college he had habitually been inaccurate
in trifles. I remember Professor Malden, on returning one of his Greek
exercises, saying to him, with that curiously precise and emphatic
articulation which made every remark of his go so much farther than
that of our other lecturers, ‘Mr. Bagehot, you wage an internecine war
with your aspirates’—not meaning, of course, that he ever left them out
in pronunciation, but that he neglected to put them in in his written
Greek. And to the last, even in his printed Greek quotations, the slips
of this kind were always numerous. This habitual difficulty—due, I
believe, to a preoccupied imagination—in attending to small details, made
a banker’s duties seem irksome and formidable to him at first; and even
to the last, in his most effective financial papers, he would generally
get some one else to look after the precise figures for him. But in
spite of all this, and in spite of a real attraction for the study of
law, he was sure that his head would not stand the hot Courts and heavy
wigs which make the hot Courts hotter, or the night-work of a thriving
barrister in case of success; and he was certainly quite right. Indeed,
had he chosen the Bar, he would have had no leisure for those two or
three remarkable books which have made his reputation,—books which have
been already translated into all the literary and some of the unliterary
languages of Europe, and two of which are, I believe, used as text-books
in some of the American Colleges.[12] Moreover, in all probability,
his life would have been much shorter into the bargain. Soon after his
return from Paris he devoted himself in earnest to banking and commerce,
and also began that series of articles, first for the _Prospective_ and
then for the _National Review_ (which latter periodical he edited in
conjunction with me for several years), the most striking of which he
republished in 1858, under the awkward and almost forbidding title of
‘Estimates of some Englishmen and Scotchmen’—a book which never attracted
the attention it deserved, and which has been long out of print. In
republishing most of these essays as I am now doing,—and a later volume
may, I hope, contain those essays on statesmen and politicians which
are for the present omitted from these,—it is perhaps only fair to say
that Bagehot in later life used to speak ill, much too ill, of his own
early style. He used to declare that his early style affected him like
the ‘jogging of a cart without springs over a very rough road,’ and no
doubt in his earliest essays something abrupt and spasmodic may easily
be detected. Still, this was all so inextricably mingled with flashes of
insight and humour which could ill be spared, that I always protested
against any notion of so revising the essays as to pare down their
excrescences.
I have never understood the comparative failure of this volume of
Bagehot’s early essays; and a comparative failure it was, though I do not
deny that, even at the time, it attracted much attention among the most
accomplished writers of the day, and that I have been urged to republish
it, as I am now doing, by many of the ablest men of my acquaintance.
Obviously, as I have admitted, there are many faults of workmanship
in it. Now and then the banter is forced. Often enough the style is
embarrassed. Occasionally, perhaps, the criticism misses its mark, or
is over-refined. But taken as a whole, I hardly know any book that is
such good reading, that has so much lucid vision in it, so much shrewd
and curious knowledge of the world, so sober a judgment and so dashing a
humour combined. Take this, for instance, out of the paper on ‘The First
Edinburgh Reviewers,’ concerning the judgment passed by Lord Jeffrey on
the poetry of Bagehot’s favourite poet, Wordsworth:—
‘The world has given judgment. Both Mr. Wordsworth and Lord
Jeffrey have received their rewards. The one had his own
generation—the laughter of men, the applause of drawing-rooms,
the concurrence of the crowd; the other, a succeeding age,
the fond enthusiasm of secret students, the lonely rapture of
lonely minds. And each has received according to his kind. If
all cultivated men speak differently because of the existence
of Wordsworth and Coleridge; if not a thoughtful English
book has appeared for years without some trace for good or
for evil of their influence; if sermon-writers subsist upon
their thoughts; if “sacred” poets thrive by translating their
weaker portions into the speech of women; if, when all this
is over, some sufficient part of their writing will ever be
fitting food for wild musing and solitary meditation, surely
this is because they possessed the inner nature—an “intense
and glowing mind”—“the vision and the faculty divine.” But,
if perchance in their weaker moments the great authors of the
Lyrical ballads did ever imagine that the world was to pause
because of their verses, that “Peter Bell” would be popular
in drawing-rooms, that “Christabel” would be perused in the
City, that people of fashion would make a hand-book of the
“Excursion,” it was well for them to be told at once that it
was not so. Nature ingeniously prepared a shrill artificial
voice, which spoke in season and out of season, enough and
more than enough, what will ever be the idea of the cities of
the plain concerning those who live alone among the mountains;
of the frivolous concerning the grave; of the gregarious
concerning the recluse; of those who laugh concerning those who
laugh not; of the common concerning the uncommon; of those who
lend on usury concerning those who lend not; the notions of the
world, of those whom it will not reckon among the righteous.
It said, “This won’t do.” And so in all times will the lovers
of polished Liberalism speak concerning the intense and lonely
“prophet.”’[13]
I choose that passage because it illustrates so perfectly Bagehot’s
double vein, his sympathy with the works of high imagination, and his
clear insight into that busy life which does not and cannot take note
of works of high imagination, and which would not do the work it does,
if it could. And this is the characteristic of all the essays. How
admirably, for instance, in his essay on Shakespeare, does he draw out
the individuality of a poet who is generally supposed to be so completely
hidden in his plays; and with how keen a satisfaction does he discern and
display the prosperous and practical man in Shakespeare—the qualities
which made him a man of substance and a Conservative politician, as well
as the qualities which made him a great dramatist and a great dreamer.
No doubt Bagehot had a strong personal sympathy with the double life.
Somersetshire probably never believed that the imaginative student, the
omnivorous reader, could prosper as a banker and a man of business,
and it was a satisfaction to him to show that he understood the world
far better than the world had ever understood him. Again, how delicate
is his delineation of Hartley Coleridge; how firm and clear his study
of ‘Sir Robert Peel;’[14] and how graphically he paints the literary
pageant of Gibbon’s tame but splendid genius! Certainly the literary
taste of England never made a greater blunder than when it passed by this
remarkable volume of essays with comparatively little notice.
In 1858 Bagehot married the eldest daughter of the Right Honourable
James Wilson, who died two years later in India, whither he had gone as
the financial member of the Indian Council, to reduce to some extent
the financial anarchy which then prevailed there. This marriage gave
Bagehot nineteen years of undisturbed happiness, and certainly led to the
production of his most popular and original, if not in every respect his
most brilliant books. It connected him with the higher world of politics,
without which he would hardly have studied and written as he did on the
English Constitution; and by making him the Editor of the _Economist_ it
compelled him to give his whole mind as much to the theoretic side of
commerce and finance, as his own duties had already compelled him to give
it to the practical side. But when I speak of his marriage as the last
impulse which determined his chief work in life, I do not forget that he
had long been prepared both for political and for financial speculation
by his early education. His father, a man of firm and deliberate
political convictions, had taken a very keen interest in the agitation
for the great Reform Bill of 1832, and had materially helped to return
a Liberal member for his county after it passed. Probably no one in all
England knew the political history of the country since the peace more
accurately than he. Bagehot often said that when he wanted any detail
concerning the English political history of the last half-century, he had
only to ask his father, to obtain it. His uncle, Mr. Vincent Stuckey,
too, was a man of the world, and his house in Langport was a focus of
many interests during Bagehot’s boyhood. Mr. Stuckey had begun life at
the Treasury, and was at one time private secretary to Mr. Huskisson; and
when he gave up that career to take a leading share in the Somersetshire
Bank, he kept up for a long time his house in London, and his relations
with political society there. He was fond of his nephew, as was Bagehot
of him; and there was always a large field of interests, and often there
were men of eminence, to be found in his house. Thus Bagehot had been
early prepared for the wider field of political and financial thought, to
which he gave up so much of his time after his marriage.
I need not say nearly as much on this later aspect of Bagehot’s life as
I have done on its early and more purely literary aspects, because his
services in this direction are already well appreciated by the public.
But this I should like to point out, that he could never have written
as he did on the English Constitution without having acutely studied
living statesmen and their ways of acting on each other; that his book
was essentially the book of a most realistic, because a most vividly
imaginative, observer of the actual world of politics—the book of a
man who was not blinded by habit and use to the enormous difficulties
in the way of ‘government by public meeting,’ and to the secret of the
various means by which in practice those difficulties had been attenuated
or surmounted. It is the book of a meditative man who had mused much
on the strange workings of human instincts, no less than of a quick
observer who had seen much of external life. Had he not studied the men
before he studied the institutions, had he not concerned himself with
individual statesmen before he turned his attention to the mechanism of
our Parliamentary system, he could never have written his book on ‘the
English Constitution.’
I think the same may be said of his book on ‘Physics and Politics,’ a
book in which I find new force and depth every time I take it up afresh.
It is true that Bagehot had a keen sympathy with natural science, that
he devoured all Mr. Darwin’s and Mr. Wallace’s books, and many of a
much more technical kind, as, for example, Professor Huxley’s on the
‘Principles of Physiology,’ and grasped the leading ideas contained in
them with a firmness and precision that left nothing to be desired. But
after all, ‘Physics and Politics’ could never have been written without
that sort of living insight into man which was the life of all his
earlier essays. The notion that a ‘cake of custom,’ of rigid, inviolable
law, was the first requisite for a strong human society, and that the
very cause which was thus essential for the _first_ step of progress—the
step towards unity—was the great danger of the second step—the step
out of uniformity—and was the secret of all arrested and petrified
civilisations, like the Chinese, is an idea which first germinated in
Bagehot’s mind at the time he was writing his cynical letters from Paris
about stupidity being the first requisite of a political people; though I
admit, of course, that it could not have borne the fruit it did, without
Mr. Darwin’s conception of a natural selection through conflict, to
help it on. Such passages as the following could evidently never have
been written by a mere student of Darwinian literature, nor without the
trained imagination exhibited in Bagehot’s literary essays:—
‘No one will ever comprehend the arrested civilisations unless
he sees the strict dilemma of early society. Either men had
no law at all and lived in confused tribes, hardly hanging
together, or they had to obtain a fixed law by processes of
incredible difficulty. Those who surmounted that difficulty
soon destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not.
And then they themselves were caught in their own yoke. The
customary discipline which could only be imposed on any early
men by terrible sanctions, continued with those sanctions, and
killed out of the whole society the propensities to variation
which are the principle of progress. Experience shows how
incredibly difficult it is to get men really to encourage the
principle of originality;’[15]
and, as Bagehot held, for a very good reason, namely, that without a long
accumulated and inherited tendency to discourage originality, society
would never have gained the cohesion requisite for effective common
action against its external foes. No one, I think, who had not studied as
Bagehot had in actual life, first, the vast and unreasoning Conservatism
of politically strong societies, like that of rural England, and next,
the perilous mobility and impressibility of politically weak societies,
like that of Paris, would ever have seen as he did the close connection
of these ideas with Mr. Darwin’s principle of natural selection by
conflict. And here I may mention, by way of illustrating this point, that
Bagehot delighted in observing and expounding the bovine slowness of
rural England in acquiring a new idea. Somersetshire, he used to boast,
would not subscribe 1,000_l._ ‘to be represented by an archangel;’ and in
one letter which I received from him during the Crimean War, he narrated
with great gusto an instance of the tenacity with which a Somersetshire
rustic stuck to his own notion of what was involved in conquering an
enemy. ‘The Somersetshire view,’ he wrote, ‘of the chance of bringing
the war to a successful conclusion is as follows:—_Countryman_: “How
old, zir, be the Zar?”—_Myself_: “About sixty-three.”—_Countryman_:
“Well, now, I can’t think however they be to take he. They do tell I that
Rooshia is a very big place, and if he doo goo right into the middle
of’n, you could not take he, not nohow.” I talked till the train came
(it was at a station), and endeavoured to show how the war might be
finished without capturing the Czar, but I fear without effect. At last
he said, “Well, zir, I hope, _as you do say, zir_, we shall take he,” as
I got into the carriage.’ It is clear that the humorous delight which
Bagehot took in this tenacity and density of rural conceptions, was
partly the cause of the attention which he paid to the subject. No doubt
there was in him a vein of purely instinctive sympathy with this density,
for intellectually he could not even have understood it. Writing on the
intolerable and fatiguing cleverness of French journals, he describes
in one of his Paris letters the true enjoyment he felt in reading a
thoroughly stupid article in the _Herald_ (a Tory paper now no more), and
I believe he was quite sincere. It was, I imagine, a real pleasure to him
to be able to preach, in his last general work, that a ‘cake of custom,’
just sufficiently stiff to make innovation of any kind very difficult,
but not quite stiff enough to make it impossible, is the true condition
of durable progress.
The coolness of his judgment, and his power of seeing both sides of a
question, undoubtedly gave Bagehot’s political opinions considerable
weight with both parties, and I am quite aware that a great majority of
the ablest political thinkers of the time would disagree with me when
I say, that personally I do not rate Bagehot’s sagacity as a practical
politician nearly so highly as I rate his wise analysis of the growth
and _rationale_ of political institutions. Everything he wrote on the
politics of the day was instructive, but, to my mind at least, seldom
decisive, and, as I thought, often not true. He did not feel, and avowed
that he did not feel, much sympathy with the masses, and he attached far
too much relative importance to the refinement of the governing classes.
That, no doubt, is most desirable, if you can combine it with a genuine
consideration for the interests of ‘the toiling millions of men sunk in
labour and pain.’ But experience, I think, sufficiently shows that they
are often, perhaps even generally, incompatible; and that democratic
governments of very low tone may consult more adequately the leading
interests of the ‘dim common populations’ than aristocratic governments
of very high calibre. Bagehot hardly admitted this, and always seemed to
me to think far more of the intellectual and moral tone of governments,
than he did of the intellectual and moral interests of the people
governed.
Again, those who felt most profoundly Bagehot’s influence as a political
thinker, would probably agree with me that it was his leading idea
in politics to discourage anything like too much action of any kind,
legislative or administrative, and most of all anything like an ambitious
colonial or foreign policy. This was not owing to any _doctrinaire_
adhesion to the principle of _laissez-faire_. He supported, hesitatingly
no doubt, but in the end decidedly, the Irish Land Bill, and never
belonged to that straitest sect of the Economists who decry, as contrary
to the laws of economy, and little short of a crime, the intervention of
Government in matters which the conflict of individual self-interests
might possibly be trusted to determine. It was from a very different
point of view that he was so anxious to deprecate ambitious policies,
and curb the practical energies of the most energetic of peoples. Next
to Clough, I think that Sir George Cornewall Lewis had the most powerful
influence over him in relation to political principles. There has been no
statesman in our time whom he liked so much or regretted so deeply; and
he followed him most of all in deprecating the greater part of what is
called political _energy_. Bagehot held with Sir George Lewis that men
in modern days do a great deal too much; that half the public actions,
and a great many of the private actions of men, had better never have
been done; that modern statesmen and modern peoples are far too willing
to burden themselves with responsibilities. He held, too, that men have
not yet sufficiently verified the principles on which action ought to
proceed, and that till they have done so, it would be better far to act
less. Lord Melbourne’s habitual query, ‘Can’t you let it alone?’ seemed
to him, as regarded all new responsibilities, the wisest of hints for our
time. He would have been glad to find a fair excuse for giving up India,
for throwing the Colonies on their own resources, and for persuading the
English people to accept deliberately the place of a fourth or fifth-rate
European power—which was not, in his estimation, a cynical or unpatriotic
wish, but quite the reverse, for he thought that such a course would
result in generally raising the calibre of the national mind, conscience,
and taste. In his ‘Physics and Politics’ he urges generally, as I have
before pointed out, that the practical energy of existing peoples in the
West is far in advance of the knowledge that would alone enable them to
turn that energy to good account. He wanted to see the English a more
leisurely race, taking more time to consider all their actions, and
suspending their decisions on all great policies and enterprises till
either these were well matured, or, as he expected it to be in the great
majority of cases, the opportunity for sensational action was gone by. He
quotes from Clough what really might have been taken as the motto of his
own political creed:—
‘Old things need not be therefore true,
O brother men, nor yet the new;
Ah, still awhile, th’ old thought retain,
And yet consider it again.’
And in all this, if it were advanced rather as a principle of education
than as a principle of political practice, there would be great force.
But when he applied this teaching, not to the individual but to the
State, not to encourage the gradual formation of a new type of character,
but to warn the nation back from a multitude of practical duties of a
simple though arduous kind, such as those, for example, which we have
undertaken in India—duties, the value of which, performed even as they
are, could hardly be overrated, if only because they involve so few
debatable and doubtful assumptions, and are only the elementary tasks
of the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the civilisation of the
future—I think Bagehot made the mistake of attaching far too little value
to the moral instincts of a sagacious people, and too much to the refined
deductions of a singularly subtle intellect. I suspect that the real
effect of suddenly stopping the various safety-valves, by which the spare
energy of our nation is diverted to the useful work of roughly civilising
other lands, would be, not to stimulate the deliberative understanding
of the English people, but to stunt its thinking as well as its acting
powers, and render it more frivolous and more vacant-minded than it is.
In the field of economy there are so many thinkers who are far better
judges of Bagehot’s invaluable work than myself, that I will say a very
few words indeed upon it. It is curious, but I believe it to be almost
universally true, that what may be called the primitive impulse of all
economic _action_, is generally also strong in great economic _thinkers_
and financiers—I mean the saving, or at least the anti-spending,
instinct. It is very difficult to see why it should be so, but I think
it _is_ so. No one was more large-minded in his view of finance than
Bagehot. He preached that, in the case of a rich country like England,
efficiency was vastly more important than the mere reduction of
expenditure, and held that Mr. Gladstone and other great Chancellors of
the Exchequer made a great deal too much of saving for saving’s sake.
None the less he himself had the anti-spending instinct in some strength,
and he was evidently pleased to note its existence in his favourite
economic thinker, Ricardo. Generous as Bagehot was—and no one ever
hesitated less about giving largely for an adequate end—he always told
me, even in boyhood, that spending was disagreeable to him, and that it
took something of an effort to pay away money. In a letter before me,
he tells his correspondent of the marriage of an acquaintance, and adds
that the lady is a Dissenter, ‘and therefore probably rich. Dissenters
don’t spend, _and quite right too_.’ I suppose it takes some feeling of
this kind to give the intellect of a man of high capacity that impulse
towards the study of the laws of the increase of wealth, without which
men of any imagination would be more likely to turn in other directions.
Nevertheless, even as an economist, Bagehot’s most original writing was
due less to his deductions from the fundamental axioms of the modern
science, than to that deep insight into men which he had gained in many
different fields. The essays, published in the _Fortnightly Review_ for
February and May 1876[16]—in which he showed so powerfully how few of
the conditions of the science known to us as ‘political economy’ have
ever been really applicable to any large portion of the globe during
the longest periods of human history—furnish quite an original study in
social history and in human nature. His striking book, ‘Lombard Street,’
is quite as much a study of bankers and bill-brokers as of the principles
of banking. Take, again, Bagehot’s view of the intellectual position and
value of the capitalist classes. Every one who knows his writings in
the _Economist_, knows how he ridiculed the common impression that the
chief service of the capitalist class—that by which they _earn_ their
profits—is merely what the late Mr. Senior used to call ‘abstinence,’
that is, the practice of deferring their enjoyment of their savings
in order that those savings may multiply themselves; and knows too
how inadequate he thought it, merely to add that when capitalists are
themselves managers, they discharge the task of ‘superintending labour’
as well. Bagehot held that the capitalists of a commercial country do—not
merely the saving, and the work of foremen in superintending labour,
but all the difficult intellectual work of commerce besides, and are so
little appreciated as they are, chiefly because they are a dumb class
who are seldom equal to explaining to others the complex processes by
which they estimate the wants of the community, and conceive how best
to supply them. He maintained that capitalists are the great generals
of commerce, that they plan its whole strategy, determine its tactics,
direct its commissariat, and incur the danger of great defeats, as well
as earn, if they do not always gain, the credit of great victories.
Here again is a new illustration of the light which Bagehot’s keen
insight into men, taken in connection with his own intimate understanding
of the commercial field, brought into his economic studies. He brought
life into these dry subjects from almost every side; for instance, in
writing to the _Spectator_, many years ago, about the cliff scenery of
Cornwall, and especially about the petty harbour of Boscastle, with its
fierce sea and its two breakwaters—which leave a mere ‘Temple Bar’ for
the ships to get in at—a harbour of which he says that ‘the principal
harbour of Liliput probably had just this look,’—he goes back in
imagination at once to the condition of the country at the time when a
great number of such petty harbours as these were essential to such trade
as there was, and shows that at that time the Liverpool and London docks
not only could not have been built for want of money, but would have been
of no use if they had been built, since the auxiliary facilities which
alone make such emporia useful did not exist. ‘Our old gentry built on
their own estates as they could, and if their estates were near some
wretched little haven, they were much pleased. The sea was the railway of
those days. It brought, as it did to Ellangowan, in Dirk Hatteraick’s
time, brandy for the men and pinners for the women, to the loneliest
of coast castles.’ It was by such vivid illustrations as this of the
conditions of a very different commercial life from our own, that Bagehot
lit up the ‘dismal science,’ till in his hands it became both picturesque
and amusing.