county of old England whose coast towns look across Bristol Channel to
the highlands of Wales: a county of small farms, and pastures that keep
their promise of fatness to many generous milkers; a county broken into
abrupt hills, and sodden moors hardly kept from the inroads of the sea,
as well as rural valleys open to the sun; a county visited by mists
from the sea, and bathed in a fine soft atmosphere all its own; visited
also by people of fashion, for it contains Bath; visited now also by
those who have read Lorna Doone, for within it lies part of that Exmoor
Forest in which stalwart John Ridd lived and wrought his mighty deeds
of strength and love: a land which the Celts kept for long against both
Saxon and Roman, but which Christianity easily conquered, building
Wells Cathedral and the monastery at Glastonbury. Nowhere else, in days
of travel, could Bagehot find a land of so great delight save in the
northwest corner of Spain, where a golden light lay upon everything,
where the sea shone with a rare, soft lustre, and where there was a
like varied coast-line to that he knew and loved at home. He called it
“a sort of better Devonshire:” and Devonshire is Somersetshire,--only
more so! The atmospheric effects of his county certainly entered the
boy Bagehot, and colored the nature of the man. He had its glow, its
variety, its richness, and its imaginative depth.
But better than a fair county is a good parentage, and that, too,
Bagehot had; just the parentage one would wish to have who desired
to be a force in the world’s thought. His father, Thomas Watson
Bagehot, was for thirty years managing director and vice-president of
Stuckey’s Banking Company, one of the oldest and best of those sturdy
joint-stock companies which have for so many years stood stoutly up
alongside the Bank of England as managers of the vast English fortune.
But he was something more than a banker. He was a man of mind, of
strong liberal convictions in politics, and of an abundant knowledge
of English history wherewith to back up his opinions. He was one of
the men who think, and who think in straight lines; who see, and
see things. His mother was a Miss Stuckey, a niece of the founder
of the banking company. But it was not her connection with bankers
that made her an invaluable mother. She had, besides beauty, a most
lively and stimulating wit; such a mind as we most desire to see in
a woman,--a mind that stirs without irritating you, that rouses but
does not belabor, amuses and yet subtly instructs. She could preside
over the young life of her son in such a way as at once to awaken his
curiosity and set him in the way of satisfying it. She was brilliant
company for a boy, and rewarding for a man. She had suggestive people,
besides, among her kinsmen, into whose companionship she could bring
her son. Bagehot had that for which no university can ever offer an
equivalent,--the constant and intelligent sympathy of both his parents
in his studies, and their companionship in his tastes. To his father’s
strength his mother added vivacity. He would have been wise, perhaps,
without her; but he would not have been wise so delightfully.
Bagehot got his schooling in Bristol, his university training in
London. In Bristol lived Dr. Prichard, his mother’s brother-in-law,
and author of a notable book on the Physical History of Men. From him
Bagehot unquestionably got his bent towards the study of race origins
and development. In London, Cobden and Bright were carrying on an
important part of their great agitation for the repeal of the corn
laws, and were making such speeches as it stirred and bettered young
men to hear. Bagehot had gone to University Hall, London, rather than
to Oxford or Cambridge, because his father was a Unitarian, and would
not have his son submit to the religious tests then required at the
great universities. But there can be no doubt that there was more to be
had at University Hall in that day than at either Oxford or Cambridge.
Oxford and Cambridge were still dragging the very heavy chains of a
hindering tradition; the faculty of University Hall contained many
thorough and some eminent scholars; what was more, University Hall was
in London, and London itself was a quickening and inspiring teacher for
a lad in love with both books and affairs, as Bagehot was. He could
ask penetrating questions of his professors, and he could also ask
questions of London, seek out her secrets of history, and so experience
to the full the charm of her abounding life. In after years, though
he loved Somersetshire and clung to it with a strong home-keeping
affection, he could never stay away from London for more than six weeks
at a time. Eventually he made it his place of permanent residence.
His university career over, Bagehot did what so many thousands of
young graduates before him had done,--he studied for the bar; and
then, having prepared himself to practice law, followed another large
body of young men in deciding to abandon it. He joined his father in
his business as ship-owner and banker in Somersetshire, and in due
time took his place among the directors of Stuckey’s Company. For the
rest of his life, this man, whom the world knows as a man of letters,
was first of all a man of business. In his later years, however,
he identified himself with what may be called the literary side of
business by becoming editor of that great financial authority, the
“London Economist.” He had, so to say, married into this position.
His wife was the daughter of the Rt. Hon. James Wilson, who was
the mind and manager, as well as the founder of the “Economist.”
Wilson’s death seemed to leave the great financial weekly by natural
succession to Bagehot; and certainly natural selection never made a
better choice. It was under Bagehot that the “Economist” became a
sort of financial providence for business men on both sides of the
Atlantic. Its sagacious prescience constituted Bagehot himself a sort
of supplementary chancellor of the exchequer, the chancellors of
both parties resorting to him with equal confidence and solicitude.
His constant contact with London, and with the leaders of politics
and opinion there, of course materially assisted him also to those
penetrating judgments touching the structure and working of English
institutions which have made his volume on the English Constitution and
his essays on Bolingbroke and Brougham and Peel, on Mr. Gladstone and
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the admiration and despair of all who read
them.
Those who know Bagehot only as the writer of some of the most
delightful and suggestive literary criticisms in the language wonder
that he should have been an authority on practical politics; those who
used to regard the “London Economist” as omniscient, and who knew him
only as the editor of it, marvel that he dabbled in literary criticism,
and incline to ask themselves, when they learn of his vagaries in that
direction, whether he can have been so safe a guide as they deemed him,
after all; those who know him through his political writings alone
venture upon the perusal of his miscellaneous essays with not a little
surprise and misgiving that their master should wander so far afield.
And yet the whole Bagehot is the only Bagehot. Each part of the man
is incomplete, not only, but a trifle incomprehensible, also, without
the other parts. What delights us most in his literary essays is their
broad practical sagacity, so uniquely married as it is with pure taste
and the style of a rapid artist in words. What makes his financial and
political writings whole and sound is the scope of his mind outside
finance and politics, the validity of his observation all around the
circle of thought and affairs. He was the better critic for being a
competent man of business and a trusted financial authority. He was the
more sure-footed in his political judgments because of his play of mind
in other and supplementary spheres of human activity.
The very appearance of the man was a sort of outer index to the
singular variety of capacity that has made him so notable a figure in
the literary annals of England. A mass of black, wavy hair; a dark eye,
with depths full of slumberous, playful fire; a ruddy skin that bespoke
active blood, quick in its rounds; the lithe figure of an excellent
horseman; a nostril full, delicate, quivering, like that of a blooded
racer,--such were the fitting outward marks of a man in whom life and
thought and fancy abounded; the aspect of a man of unflagging vivacity,
of wholesome, hearty humor, of a ready intellectual sympathy, of wide
and penetrative observation. It is no narrow, logical shrewdness or
cold penetration that looks forth at you through that face, even if a
bit of mockery does lurk in the privatest corner of the eye. Among the
qualities which he seeks out for special praise in Shakespeare is a
broad tolerance and sympathy for illogical and common minds. It seems
to him an evidence of size in Shakespeare that he was not vexed with
smallness, but was patient, nay, sympathetic even, in his portrayal
of it. “If every one were logical and literary,” he exclaims, “how
would there be scavengers, or watchmen, or caulkers, or coopers? A
patient sympathy, a kindly fellow-feeling for the narrow intelligence
necessarily induced by narrow circumstances,--a narrowness which, in
some degrees, seems to be inevitable, and is perhaps more serviceable
than most things to the wise conduct of life,--this, though quick and
half-bred minds may despise it, seems to be a necessary constituent
in the composition of manifold genius. ‘How shall the world be
served?’ asks the host in Chaucer. We must have cart-horses as well as
race-horses, draymen as well as poets. It is no bad thing, after all,
to be a slow man and to have one idea a year. You don’t make a figure,
perhaps, in argumentative society, which requires a quicker species of
thought, but is that the worse?”
One of the things which strike us most in Bagehot himself is his
capacity to understand inferior minds; and there can be no better test
of sound genius. He stood in the midst of affairs, and knew the dull
duty and humdrum fidelity which make up the equipment of the ordinary
mind for business, for the business which keeps the world steady in its
grooves and makes it fit for habitation. He perceived quite calmly,
though with an odd, sober amusement, that the world is under the
dominion, in most things, of the average man, and the average man he
knows. He is, he explains, with his characteristic covert humor, “a
cool, common person, with a considerate air, with figures in his mind,
with his own business to attend to, with a set of ordinary opinions
arising from and suited to ordinary life. He can’t bear novelty or
originalities. He says, ‘Sir, I never heard such a thing before in my
life;’ and he thinks this a _reductio ad absurdum_. You may see his
taste by the reading of which he approves. Is there a more splendid
monument of talent and industry than the ‘Times’? No wonder that
the average man--that any one--believes in it.... But did you ever
see anything there you had never seen before?... Where are the deep
theories, and the wise axioms, and the everlasting sentiments which the
writers of the most influential publication in the world have been the
first to communicate to an ignorant species? Such writers are far too
shrewd.... The purchaser desires an article which he can appreciate
at sight, which he can lay down and say, ‘An excellent article, very
excellent; exactly my own sentiments.’ Original theories give trouble;
besides, a grave man on the Coal Exchange does not desire to be an
apostle of novelties among the contemporaneous dealers in fuel; he
wants to be provided with remarks he can make on the topics of the
day which will not be known not to be his, that are not too profound,
which he can fancy the paper only reminded him of. And just in the
same way,”--thus he proceeds with the sagacious moral,--“precisely as
the most popular political paper is not that which is abstractedly the
best or most instructive, but that which most exactly takes up the
minds of men where it finds them, catches the floating sentiment of
society, puts it in such a form as society can fancy would convince
another society which did not believe, so the most influential of
constitutional statesmen is the one who most felicitously expresses
the creed of the moment, who administers it, who embodies it in laws
and institutions, who gives it the highest life it is capable of, who
induces the average man to think, ‘I could not have done it any better
if I had had time myself.’”
See how his knowledge of politics proceeds out of his knowledge of men.
“You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius,” he exclaims, “but
the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor. What law is
so cruel as the law of doing what he does? What yoke is so galling as
the necessity of being like him? What espionage of despotism comes to
your door so effectually as the eye of the man who lives at your door?
Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to
itself; it requires us to think other men’s thoughts, to speak other
men’s words, to follow other men’s habits. Of course, if we do not, no
formal ban issues, no corporeal pain, the coarse penalty of a barbarous
society, is inflicted on the offender, but we are called ‘eccentric;’
there is a gentle murmur of ‘most unfortunate ideas,’ ‘singular young
man,’ ‘well intentioned, I dare say, but unsafe, sir, quite unsafe.’
The prudent, of course, conform.”
There is, no doubt, a touch of mockery in all this, but there is
unquestionable insight in it, too, and a sane knowledge also of the
fact that dull, common judgments are, after all, the cement of society.
It is Bagehot who says somewhere that it is only dull nations, like the
Romans and the English, who can become or remain for any length of time
self-governing nations, because it is only among them that duty is done
through lack of knowledge sufficient or imagination enough to suggest
anything else to do: only among them that the stability of slow habit
can be had.
It would be superficial criticism to put forward Bagehot’s political
opinions as themselves the proof of his extraordinary power as a
student and analyst of institutions. His life, his broad range of
study, his quick versatility, his shrewd appreciation of common
men, his excursions through all the fields that men traverse in
their thought of one another and in their contact with the world’s
business,--these are the soil out of which his political judgments
spring, from which they get their sap and bloom. In order to know
institutions, you must know men; you must be able to imagine histories,
to appreciate characters radically unlike your own, to see into
the heart of society and assess its notions, great and small. Your
average critic, it must be acknowledged, would be the worst possible
commentator on affairs. He has all the movements of intelligence
without any of its reality. But a man who sees authors with a
Chaucerian insight into them as men, who knows literature as a realm of
vital thought conceived by real men, of actual motive felt by concrete
persons, this is a man whose opinions you may confidently ask, if not
on current politics, at any rate on all that concerns the permanent
relations of men in society.
It is for such reasons that one must first make known the most masterly
of the critics of English political institutions as a man of catholic
tastes and attainments, shrewdly observant of many kinds of men and
affairs. Know him once in this way, and his mastery in political
thought is explained. If I were to make choice, therefore, of extracts
from his works with a view to recommend him as a politician, I should
choose those passages which show him a man of infinite capacity to
see and understand men of all kinds, past and present. By showing in
his case the equipment of a mind open on all sides to the life and
thought of society, and penetrative of human secrets of many sorts, I
should authenticate his credentials as a writer upon politics, which is
nothing else than the public and organic life of society.
Examples may be taken almost at random. There is the passage on Sydney
Smith, in the essay on the First Edinburgh Reviewers. We have all
laughed with that great-hearted clerical wit; but it is questionable
whether we have all appreciated him as a man who wrote and wrought
wisdom. Indeed, Sydney Smith may be made a very delicate test of sound
judgment, the which to apply to friends of whom you are suspicious.
There was a man beneath those excellent witticisms, a big, wholesome,
thinking man; but none save men of like wholesome natures can see and
value his manhood and his mind at their real worth.
“Sydney Smith was an after-dinner writer. His words have a flow, a
vigor, an expression, which is not given to hungry mortals.... There
is little trace of labor in his composition; it is poured forth like an
unceasing torrent, rejoicing daily to run its course. And what courage
there is in it! There is as much variety of pluck in writing across a
sheet as in riding across a country. Cautious men ... go tremulously,
like a timid rider; they turn hither and thither; they do not go
straight across a subject, like a masterly mind. A few sentences are
enough for a master of sentences. The writing of Sydney Smith is suited
to the broader kind of important questions. For anything requiring fine
nicety of speculation, long elaborateness of deduction, evanescent
sharpness of distinction, neither his style nor his mind was fit. He
had no patience for long argument, no acuteness for delicate precision,
no fangs for recondite research. Writers, like teeth, are divided into
incisors and grinders. Sydney Smith was a molar. He did not run a long,
sharp argument into the interior of a question; he did not, in the
common phrase, go deeply into it; but he kept it steadily under the
contract of a strong, capable, jawlike understanding,--pressing its
surface, effacing its intricacies, grinding it down. Yet this is done
without toil. The play of the molar is instinctive and placid; he could
not help it; it would seem that he had an enjoyment in it.”
One reads this with a feeling that Bagehot both knows and likes
Sydney Smith, and heartily appreciates him as an engine of Whig
thought; and with the conviction that Bagehot himself, knowing thus
and enjoying Smith’s freehand method of writing, could have done the
like himself,--could himself have made English ring to all the old
Whig tunes, like an anvil under the hammer. And yet you have only to
turn back a page in the same essay to find quite another Bagehot,--a
Bagehot such as Sydney Smith could not have been. He is speaking of
that other militant Edinburgh reviewer, Lord Jeffrey, and is recalling,
as every one recalls, Jeffrey’s review of Wordsworth’s “Excursion.”
The first words of that review, as everybody remembers, were, “This
will never do;” and there followed upon those words, though not a
little praise of the poetical beauties of the poem, a thoroughly
meant condemnation of the school of poets of which Wordsworth was the
greatest representative. Very celebrated in the world of literature is
the leading case of Jeffrey _v._ Wordsworth. It is in summing up this
case that Bagehot gives us a very different taste of his quality:--
“The world has given judgment. Both Mr. Wordsworth and Lord Jeffrey
have received their reward. 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 forty years without some trace for good
or 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 found 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 handbook of ‘The Excursion,’ it was well
for them to be told at once that this 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 notion of the world of those whom it
will not reckon among the righteous,--it said, ‘This won’t do!’ And so
in all time will the lovers of polished Liberalism speak concerning the
intense and lonely prophet.”
This is no longer the Bagehot who could “write across a sheet” with
Sydney Smith. It is now a Bagehot whose heart is turned away from the
cudgeling Whigs to see such things as are hidden from the bearers of
cudgels, and revealed only to those who can await in the sanctuary of a
quiet mind the coming of the vision.
Single specimens of such a man’s writing do not suffice, of course,
even as specimens. They need their context to show their appositeness,
the full body of the writing from which they are taken to show the mass
and system of the thought. Even separated pieces of his matter prepare
us, nevertheless, for finding in Bagehot keener, juster estimates of
difficult historical and political characters than it is given the
merely exact historian, with his head full of facts and his heart
purged of all imagination, to speak. There is his estimate of the
cavalier, for example: “A cavalier is always young. The buoyant life
arises before us, rich in hope, strong in vigor, irregular in action:
men young and ardent, ‘framed in the prodigality of nature;’ open
to every enjoyment, alive to every passion, eager, impulsive; brave
without discipline, noble without principle; prizing luxury, despising
danger; capable of high sentiment, but in each of whom the
‘addiction was to courses vain;
His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow;
His hours filled up with riots, banquets, sports,
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity.’
The political sentiment is part of the character; the essence of
Toryism is enjoyment.... 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 the present 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.”
Is it not most natural that the writer of a passage like that should
have been a consummate critic of politics, seeing institutions through
men, the only natural way? It was as necessary that he should be able
to enjoy Sydney Smith and recognize the seer in Wordsworth as that he
should be able to conceive the cavalier life and point of view; and
in each perception there is the same power. He is as little at fault
in understanding men of his own day. What would you wish better than
his celebrated character of a “constitutional statesman,” for example?
“A constitutional statesman is a man of common opinions and uncommon
abilities.” Peel is his example. “His opinions resembled the daily
accumulating insensible deposits of a rich alluvial soil. The great
stream of time flows on with all things on its surface; and slowly,
grain by grain, a mould of wise experience is unconsciously left on the
still, extended intellect.... The stealthy accumulating words of Peel
seem like the quiet leavings of some outward tendency, which brought
these, but might as well have brought others. There is no peculiar
stamp, either, on the ideas. They might have been any one’s ideas. They
belong to the general diffused stock of observations which are to be
found in the civilized world.... He insensibly takes in and imbibes the
ideas of those around him. If he were left in a vacuum, he would have
no ideas.”