Walter Bagehot was born February 3d, 1826, at Langport, Somersetshire,
England; and died there March 24th, 1877. He sprang on both sides from,
and was reared in, a nest of wealthy bankers and ardent Liberals,
steeped in political history and with London country houses where
leaders of thought and politics resorted; and his mother's
brother-in-law was Dr. Prichard the ethnologist. This heredity,
progressive by disposition and conservative by trade, and this
entourage, produced naturally enough a mind at once rapid of insight and
cautious of judgment, devoted almost equally to business action and
intellectual speculation, and on its speculative side turned toward the
fields of political history and sociology.
[Illustration: WALTER BAGEHOT]
But there were equally important elements not traceable. His freshness
of mental vision, the strikingly novel points of view from which he
looked at every subject, was marvelous even in a century so fertile of
varied independences: he complained that "the most galling of yokes is
the tyranny of your next-door neighbor," the obligation of thinking as
he thinks. He had a keen, almost reckless wit and delicious buoyant
humor, whose utterances never pall by repetition; few authors so abound
in tenaciously quotable phrases and passages of humorous
intellectuality. What is rarely found in connection with much humor, he
had a sensitive dreaminess of nature, strongly poetic in feeling, whence
resulted a large appreciation of the subtler classes of poetry; of which
he was an acute and sympathizing critic. As part of this temperament, he
had a strong bent toward mysticism,--in one essay he says flatly that
"mysticism is true,"--which gave him a rare insight into the religious
nature and some obscure problems of religious history; though he was too
cool, scientific, and humorous to be a great theologian.
Above all, he had that instinct of selective art, in felicity of words
and salience of ideas, which elevates writing into literature; which
long after a thought has merged its being and use in those of wider
scope, keeps it in separate remembrance and retains for its creator his
due of credit through the artistic charm of the shape he gave it.
The result of a mixture of traits popularly thought incompatible, and
usually so in reality,--a great relish for the driest business facts and
a creative literary gift,--was absolutely unique. Bagehot explains the
general sterility of literature as a guide to life by the fact that "so
few people who can write know anything;" and began a reform in his own
person, by applying all his highest faculties--the best not only of his
thought but of his imagination and his literary skill--to the theme of
his daily work, banking and business affairs and political economy.
There have been many men of letters who were excellent business men and
hard bargainers, sometimes indeed merchants or bankers, but they have
held their literature as far as possible off the plane of their
bread-winning; they have not used it to explain and decorate the latter
and made that the motive of art. Bagehot loved business not alone as the
born trader loves it, for its profit and its gratification of innate
likings,--"business is really pleasanter than pleasure, though it does
not look so," he says in substance,--but as an artist loves a
picturesque situation or a journalist a murder; it pleased his literary
sense as material for analysis and composition. He had in a high degree
that union of the practical and the musing faculties which in its (as
yet) highest degree made Shakespeare; but even Shakespeare did not write
dramas on how to make theatres pay, or sonnets on real-estate
speculation.
Bagehot's career was determined, as usual, partly by character and
partly by circumstances. He graduated at London University in 1848, and
studied for and was called to the bar; but his father owned an interest
in a rich old provincial bank and a good shipping-business, and instead
of the law he joined in their conduct. He had just before, however,
passed a few months in France, including the time of Louis Napoleon's
_coup d'état_ in December, 1851; and from Paris he wrote to the London
Inquirer (a Unitarian weekly) a remarkable series of letters on that
event and its immediate sequents, defending the usurpation vigorously
and outlining his political creed, from whose main lines he swerved but
little in after life. Waiving the question whether the defense was
valid,--and like all first-rate minds, Bagehot is even more instructive
when he is wrong than when he is right, because the wrong is sure to be
almost right and the truth on its side neglected,--the letters are full
of fresh, acute, and even profound ideas, sharp exposition of those
primary objects of government which demagogues and buncombe legislators
ignore, racy wit, sarcasm, and description (in one passage he rises for
a moment into really blood-stirring rhetoric), and proofs of his
capacity thus early for reducing the confused cross-currents of daily
life to the operation of great embracing laws. No other writing of a
youth of twenty-five on such subjects--or almost none--is worth
remembering at all for its matter; while this is perennially wholesome
and educative, as well as capital reading.
From this on he devoted most of his spare time to literature: that he
found so much spare time, and produced so much of a high grade while
winning respect as a business manager, proves the excellent quality of
his business brain. He was one of the editors of the National Review, a
very able and readable English quarterly, from its foundation in 1854 to
its death in 1863, and wrote for it twenty literary, biographical, and
theological papers, which are among his best titles to enduring
remembrance, and are full of his choicest flavors, his wealth of
thought, fun, poetic sensitiveness, and deep religious feeling of the
needs of human nature. Previous to this, he had written some good
articles for the Prospective Review, and he wrote some afterwards for
the Fortnightly Review (including the series afterwards gathered into
'Physics and Politics'), and other periodicals.
But his chief industry and most peculiar work was determined by his
marriage in 1858 to the daughter of James Wilson, an ex-merchant who had
founded the Economist as a journal of trade, banking, and investment,
and made it prosperous and rather influential. Mr. Wilson was engaging
in politics, where he rose to high office and would probably have ended
in the Cabinet; but being sent to India to regulate its finances, died
there in 1860. Bagehot thereupon took control of the paper, and _was_
the paper until his death in 1877; and the position he gave it was as
unique as his own. On banking, finance, taxation, and political economy
in general his utterances had such weight that Chancellors of the
Exchequer consulted him as to the revenues, and the London business
world eagerly studied the paper for guidance. But he went far beyond
this, and made it an unexampled force in politics and governmental
science, personal to himself. For the first time a great political
thinker applied his mind week by week to discussing the problems
presented by passing politics, and expounding the drift and meaning of
current events in his nation and the others which bore closest on it, as
France and America. That he gained such a hearing was due not alone to
his immense ability, and to a style carefully modeled on the
conversation of business men with each other, but to his cool moderation
and evident aloofness from party as party. He dissected each like a man
of science: party was to him a tool and not a religion. He gibed at the
Tories; but the Tories forgave him because he was half a Tory at
heart,--he utterly distrusted popular instincts and was afraid of
popular ignorance. He was rarely warm for the actual measures of the
Liberals; but the Liberals knew that he intensely despised the
pig-headed obstructiveness of the typical Tory, and had no kinship with
the blind worshipers of the _status quo_. To natives and foreigners
alike for many years the paper was single and invaluable: in it one
could find set forth acutely and dispassionately the broad facts and the
real purport of all great legislative proposals, free from the rant and
mendacity, the fury and distortion, the prejudice and counter-prejudice
of the party press.
An outgrowth of his treble position as banker, economic writer, and
general littérateur, was his charming book 'Lombard Street.' Most
writers know nothing about business, he sets forth, most business men
cannot write, therefore most writing about business is either unreadable
or untrue: he put all his literary gifts at its service, and produced a
book as instructive as a trade manual and more delightful than most
novels. Its luminous, easy, half-playful "business talk" is irresistibly
captivating. It is a description and analysis of the London money market
and its component parts,--the Bank of England, the joint-stock banks,
the private banks, and the bill-brokers. It will live, however, as
literature and as a picture, not as a banker's guide; as the vividest
outline of business London, of the "great commerce" and the fabric of
credit which is the basis of modern civilization and of which London is
the centre, that the world has ever known.
Previous to this, the most widely known of his works--'The English
Constitution,' much used as a text-book--had made a new epoch in
political analysis, and placed him among the foremost thinkers and
writers of his time. Not only did it revolutionize the accepted mode of
viewing that governmental structure, but as a treatise on government in
general its novel types of classification are now admitted commonplaces.
Besides its main themes, the book is a great store of thought and
suggestion on government, society, and human nature,--for as in all his
works, he pours on his nominal subject a flood of illumination and
analogy from the unlikeliest sources; and a piece of eminently
pleasurable reading from end to end. Its basic novelty lay in what seems
the most natural of inquiries, but which in fact was left for Bagehot's
original mind even to think of,--the actual working of the governmental
system in practice, as distinguished from legal theory. The result of
this novel analysis was startling: old powers and checks went to the
rubbish heap, and a wholly new set of machinery and even new springs of
force and life were substituted. He argued that the actual use of the
English monarchy is not to do the work of government, but through its
roots in the past to gain popular loyalty and support for the real
government, which the masses would not obey if they realized its
genuine nature; that "it raises the army though it does not win the
battle." He showed that the function of the House of Peers is not as a
co-ordinate power with the Commons (which is the real government), but
as a revising body and an index of the strength of popular feeling.
Constitutional governments he divides into Cabinet, where the people can
change the government at any time, and therefore follow its acts and
debates eagerly and instructedly; and Presidential, where they can only
change it at fixed terms, and are therefore apathetic and ill-informed
and care little for speeches which can effect nothing.
Just before 'Lombard Street' came his scientific masterpiece, 'Physics
and Politics'; a work which does for human society what the 'Origin of
Species' does for organic life, expounding its method of progress from
very low if not the lowest forms to higher ones. Indeed, one of its main
lines is only a special application of Darwin's "natural selection" to
societies, noting the survival of the strongest (which implies in the
long run the best developed in all virtues that make for social
cohesion) through conflict; but the book is so much more than that, in
spite of its heavy debt to all scientific and institutional research,
that it remains a first-rate feat of original constructive thought. It
is the more striking from its almost ludicrous brevity compared with the
novelty, variety, and pregnancy of its ideas. It is scarcely more than a
pamphlet; one can read it through in an evening: yet there is hardly any
book which is a master-key to so many historical locks, so useful a
standard for referring scattered sociological facts to, so clarifying to
the mind in the study of early history. The work is strewn with fertile
and suggestive observations from many branches of knowledge. Its leading
idea of the needs and difficulties of early societies is given in one of
the citations.
The unfinished 'Economic Studies' are partially a re-survey of the same
ground on a more limited scale, and contain in addition a mass of the
nicest and shrewdest observations on modern trade and society, full of
truth and suggestiveness. All the other books printed under his name are
collections either from the Economist or from outside publications.
As a thinker, Bagehot's leading positions may be roughly summarized
thus: in history, that reasoning from the present to the past is
generally wrong and frequently nonsense; in politics, that abstract
systems are foolish, that a government which does not benefit its
subjects has no rights against one that will, that the masses had much
better let the upper ranks do the governing than meddle with it
themselves, that all classes are too eager to act without thinking and
ought not to attempt so much; in society, that democracy is an evil
because it leaves no specially trained upper class to furnish models
for refinement. But there is vastly more besides this, and his value
lies much more in the mental clarification afforded by his details than
in the new principles of action afforded by his generalizations. He
leaves men saner, soberer, juster, with a clearer sense of perspective,
of real issues, that more than makes up for a slight diminution of zeal.
As pure literature, the most individual trait in his writings sprang
from his scorn of mere word-mongering divorced from actual life. "A man
ought to have the right of being a Philistine if he chooses," he tells
us: "there is a sickly incompleteness in men too fine for the world and
too nice to work their way through it." A great man of letters, no one
has ever mocked his craft so persistently. A great thinker, he never
tired of humorously magnifying the active and belittling the
intellectual temperament. Of course it was only half-serious: he admits
the force and utility of colossal visionaries like Shelley, constructive
scholars like Gibbon, ascetic artists like Milton, even light dreamers
like Hartley Coleridge; indeed, intellectually he appreciates all
intellectual force, and scorns feeble thought which has the effrontery
to show itself, and those who are "cross with the agony of a new idea."
But his heart goes out to the unscholarly Cavalier with his dash and his
loyalty, to the county member who "hardly reads two books per
existence," and even to the rustic who sticks to his old ideas and whom
"it takes seven weeks to comprehend an atom of a new one." A petty
surface consistency must not be exacted from the miscellaneous
utterances of a humorist: all sorts of complementary half-truths are
part of his service. His own quite just conception of humor, as meaning
merely full vision and balanced judgment, is his best defense: "when a
man has attained the deep conception that there is such a thing as
nonsense," he says, "you may be sure of him for ever after." At bottom
he is thoroughly consistent: holding that the masses should work in
contented deference to their intellectual guides, but those guides
should qualify themselves by practical experience of life, that poetry
is not an amusement for lazy sybarites but the most elevating of
spiritual influences, that religions cut the roots of their power by
trying to avoid supernaturalism and cultivate intelligibility, and that
the animal basis of human life is a screen expressly devised to shut off
direct knowledge of God and make character possible.
To make his acquaintance first is to enter upon a store of high and fine
enjoyment, and of strong and vivifying thought, which one must be either
very rich of attainment or very feeble of grasp to find unprofitable or
pleasureless.