imagination which illuminates them. And it is an imagination with a
practical character all its own. It is not a creating, but a conceiving
imagination; not the imagination of the fancy, but the imagination
of the understanding. Conceiving imaginations, however, are of two
kinds. For the one kind the understanding serves as a lamp of guidance;
upon the other the understanding acts as an electric excitant, a
keen irritant. Bagehot’s was evidently of the first kind; Carlyle’s,
conspicuously of the second. There is something in common between the
minds of these two men as they conceive society. Both have a capital
grip upon the actual; both can conceive without confusion the complex
phenomena of society; both send humorous glances of searching insight
into the hearts of men. But it is the difference between them that most
arrests our attention. Bagehot has the scientific imagination, Carlyle
the passionate. Bagehot is the embodiment of witty common sense; all
the movements of his mind illustrate that vivacious sanity which he
has himself called “animated moderation.” Carlyle, on the other hand,
conceives men and their motives too often with a hot intolerance;
there is heat in his imagination,--a heat that sometimes scorches
and consumes. Life is for him dramatic, full of fierce, imperative
forces. Even when the world rings with laughter, it is laughter which,
in his ears, is succeeded by an echo of mockery; laughter which is
but a defiance of tears. The actual which you touch in Bagehot is the
practical, operative actual of a world of workshops and parliaments,--a
world of which workshops and parliaments are the natural and desirable
products. Carlyle flouts at modern legislative assemblies as “talking
shops,” and yearns for action such as is commanded by masters of
action; preaches the doctrine of work and silence in some thirty
volumes octavo. Bagehot points out that prompt, crude action is the
instinct and practice of the savage; that talk, the deliberation of
assemblies, the slow concert of masses of men, is the cultivated fruit
of civilization, nourishing to all the powers of right action in a
society which is not simple and primitive, but advanced and complex.
He is no more imposed upon by parliamentary debates than Carlyle is.
He knows that they are stupid, and, so far as wise utterance goes, in
large part futile, too. But he is not irritated, as Carlyle is, for,
to say the fact, he sees more than Carlyle sees. He sees the force
and value of the stupidity. He is wise, along with Burke, in regarding
prejudice as the cement of society. He knows that slow thought is
the ballast of a self-governing state. Stanch, knitted timbers are
as necessary to the ship as sails. Unless the hull is conservative
in holding stubbornly together in the face of every argument of sea
weather, there’ll be lives and fortunes lost. Bagehot can laugh at
unreasoning bias. It brings a merry twinkle into his eye to undertake
the good sport of dissecting stolid stupidity. But he would not for the
world abolish bias and stupidity. He would much rather have society
hold together; much rather see it grow than undertake to reconstruct
it. “You remember my joke against you about the moon,” writes Sydney
Smith to Jeffrey; “d--n the solar system--bad light--planets too
distant--pestered with comets--feeble contrivance; could make a better
with great ease.” There was nothing of this in Bagehot. He was inclined
to be quite tolerant of the solar system. He understood that society
was more quickly bettered by sympathy than by antagonism.
Bagehot’s limitations, though they do not obtrude themselves upon
your attention as his excellencies do, are in truth as sharp-cut and
clear as his thought itself. It would not be just the truth to say
that his power is that of critical analysis only, for he can and does
construct thought concerning antique and obscure systems of political
life and social action. But it is true that he does not construct for
the future. You receive stimulation from him and a certain feeling of
elation. There is a fresh air stirring in all his utterances that is
unspeakably refreshing. You open your mind to the fine influence, and
feel younger for having been in such an atmosphere. It is an atmosphere
clarified and bracing almost beyond example elsewhere. But you know
what you lack in Bagehot if you have read Burke. You miss the deep
eloquence which awakens purpose. You are not in contact with systems of
thought or with principles that dictate action, but only with a perfect
explanation.
You would go to Burke, not to Bagehot, for inspiration in the infinite
tasks of self-government; though you would, if you were wise, go to
Bagehot rather than to Burke if you wished to realize just what were
the practical daily conditions under which those tasks were to be
worked out.
Moreover, there is a deeper lack in Bagehot. He has no sympathy with
the voiceless body of the people, with the “mass of unknown men.” He
conceives the work of government to be a work which is possible only
to the instructed few. He would have the mass served, and served with
devotion, but he would trouble to see them attempt to serve themselves.
He has not the stout fibre and the unquestioning faith in the right
and capacity of inorganic majorities which make the democrat. He has
none of the heroic boldness necessary for faith in wholesale political
aptitude and capacity. He takes democracy in detail in his thought, and
to take it in detail makes it look very awkward indeed.
And yet surely it would not occur to the veriest democrat that ever
vociferated the “sovereignty of the people” to take umbrage at anything
Bagehot might chance to say in dissection of democracy. What he says is
seldom provokingly true. There is something in it all that is better
than a “saving clause,” and that is a saving humor. Humor ever keeps
the whole of his matter sound; it is an excellent salt that keeps sweet
the sharpest of his sayings. Indeed, Bagehot’s wit is so prominent
among his gifts that I am tempted here to enter a general plea for
wit as fit company for high thoughts and weighty subjects. Wit does
not make a subject light; it simply beats it into shape to be handled
readily. For my part, I make free acknowledgment that no man seems
to me master of his subject who cannot take liberties with it; who
cannot slap his propositions on the back and be hail-fellow well met
with them. Suspect a man of shallowness who always takes himself and
all that he thinks seriously. For light on a dark subject commend me
to a ray of wit. Most of your solemn explanations are mere farthing
candles in the great expanse of a difficult question. Wit is not, I
admit, a steady light, but ah! its flashes give you sudden glimpses of
unsuspected things such as you will never see without it. It is the
summer lightning, which will bring more to your startled eye in an
instant, out of the hiding of the night, than you will ever be at the
pains to observe in the full blaze of noon.
Wit is movement, is play of mind; and the mind cannot get play without
a sufficient playground. Without movement outside the world of books,
it is impossible a man should see aught but the very neatly arranged
phenomena of that world. But it is possible for a man’s thought to be
instructed by the world of affairs without the man himself becoming a
part of it. Indeed, it is exceedingly hard for one who is in and of
it to hold the world of affairs off at arm’s length and observe it.
He has no vantage-ground. He had better for a while seek the distance
of books, and get his perspective. The literary politician, let it be
distinctly said, is a very fine, a very superior species of the man
thoughtful. He reads books as he would listen to men talk. He stands
apart, and looks on, with humorous, sympathetic smile, at the play of
policies. He will tell you for the asking what the players are thinking
about. He divines at once how the parts are cast. He knows beforehand
what each act is to discover. He might readily guess what the dialogue
is to contain. Were you short of scene-shifters, he could serve you
admirably in an emergency. And he is a better critic of the play than
the players.
Had I command of the culture of men, I should wish to raise up for
the instruction and stimulation of my nation more than one sane,
sagacious, penetrative critic of men and affairs like Walter Bagehot.
But that, of course. The proper thesis to draw from his singular
genius is this: It is not the constitutional lawyer, nor the student
of the mere machinery and legal structure of institutions, nor the
politician, a mere handler of that machinery, who is competent to
understand and expound government; but the man who finds the materials
for his thought far and wide, in everything that reveals character and
circumstance and motive. It is necessary to stand with the poets as
well as with lawgivers; with the fathers of the race as well as with
your neighbor of to-day; with those who toil and are sick at heart as
well as with those who prosper and laugh and take their pleasure; with
the merchant and the manufacturer as well as with the closeted student;
with the schoolmaster and with those whose only school is life; with
the orator and with the men who have wrought always in silence; in the
midst of thought and also in the midst of affairs, if you would really
comprehend those great wholes of history and of character which are the
vital substance of politics.
V.
THE INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY.
In the middle of the last century two Irish adventurers crossed over
into England in search of their fortunes. Rare fellows they were,
bringing treasure with them; but finding it somehow hard to get upon
the market: traders with a curious cargo, offering edification in
exchange for a living, and concealing the best of English under a rich
brogue. They were Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith.
They did not cross over together: ’twas no joint venture. They had
been fellow students at Trinity College, Dublin; but they had not,
so far as we can learn, known each other there. Each went his own
way till they became comrades in the reign of Samuel Johnson at the
Turk’s Head Tavern. Burke stepped very boldly forth into the exposed
paths of public life; Goldsmith plunged into the secret ways about
Grub Street. The one gave us essays upon public questions incomparable
for their reach of view and their splendid power of expression; the
other gave us writings so exquisite for their delicacy, purity, and
finish as to incline us to love him almost as much as those who knew
him loved him. We could not easily have forgiven Ireland if she had
_not_ given us these men. The one had grave faults of temper; the other
was a reckless, roystering fellow, with a most irrepressible Irish
disposition; but how much less we should have known without Burke, how
much less we should have enjoyed without Goldsmith! They have conquered
places for themselves in English literature from which we neither can
nor would dislodge them. For their sakes alone we can afford to forgive
Ireland all the trouble she has caused us.
There is no man anywhere to be found in the annals of Parliament who
seems more thoroughly to belong to England than does Edmund Burke,
indubitable Irishman though he was. His words, now that they have cast
off their brogue, ring out the authentic voice of the best political
thought of the English race. “If any man ask me,” he cries, “what a
free government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is
what the people think so,--and that they, and not I, are the natural,
lawful, and competent judges of the matter.” “Abstract liberty, like
other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty adheres in
some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some
favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of
their happiness.” These sentences, taken from his writings on American
affairs, might serve as a sort of motto of the practical spirit of our
race in affairs of government. Look further, and you shall see how his
imagination presently illuminates and suffuses his maxims of practical
sagacity with a fine blaze of insight, a keen glow of feeling, in which
you recognize that other masterful quality of the race, its intense
and elevated conviction. “My hold on the colonies,” he declares, “is
in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred
blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are the
ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let
the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with
your government,--they will cling and grapple to you, and no force
under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But
let it once be understood that your government may be one thing and
their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any
mutual relation,--and the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and
everything hastens to decay and dissolution. So long as you have the
wisdom to keep the sovereign power of this country as the sanctuary of
liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever
the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn
their faces towards you.” “We cannot, I fear,” he says proudly of the
colonies, “we cannot falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and
persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins
the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear
you tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would
betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue
another Englishman into slavery.” Does not your blood stir at these
passages? And is it not because, besides loving what is nobly written,
you feel that every word strikes towards the heart of the things that
have made your blood what it has proved to be in the history of our
race?
These passages, it should be remembered, are taken from a speech in
Parliament and from a letter written by Burke to his constituents
in Bristol. He had no thought to make them permanent sentences of
political philosophy. They were meant only to serve an immediate
purpose in the advancement of contemporaneous policy. They were framed
for the circumstances of the time. They speak out spontaneously amidst
matter of the moment: and they could be matched everywhere throughout
his pamphlets and public utterances. No other similar productions that
I know of have this singular, and as it were inevitable, quality of
permanency. They have emerged from the mass of political writings put
forth in their time with their freshness untouched, their significance
unobscured, their splendid vigor unabated. It is this that we marvel
at, that they should remain modern and timely, purged of every element
and seed of decay. The man who could do this must needs arrest our
attention and challenge our inquiry. We wish to account for him as we
should wish to penetrate the secrets of the human spirit and know the
springs of genius.
Of the public life of Burke we know all that we could wish. He became
so prominent a figure in the great affairs of his day that even the
casual observer cannot fail to discern the main facts of his career;
while the close student can follow him year by year through every
step of his service. But his private life was withdrawn from general
scrutiny in an unusual degree. He manifested always a marked reserve
about his individual and domestic affairs, deliberately, it would seem,
shielding them from impertinent inquiry. He loved the privacy of life
in a great city, where one may escape notice in the crowd and enjoy
a grateful “freedom from remark and petty censure.” “Though I have
the honor to represent Bristol,” he said to Boswell, “I should not
like to live there; I should be obliged to be _so much upon my good
behavior_. In London a man may live in splendid society at one time,
and in frugal retirement at another, without animadversion. There, and
there alone, a man’s house is truly his _castle_, in which he can be
in perfect safety from intrusion whenever he pleases. I never shall
forget how well this was expressed to me one day by Mr. Meynell: ‘The
chief advantage of London,’ he said, ‘is, that a man is always _so
near his burrow_.’” Burke took to his burrow often enough to pique
our curiosity sorely. This singular, high-minded adventurer had some
queer companions, we know: questionable fellows, whose life he shared,
perhaps with a certain Bohemian relish, without sharing their morals
or their works. It seems as incongruous that such wisdom and public
spirit as breathe through his writings should have come to his thought
in such company as that an exquisite idyll like Goldsmith’s “Vicar of
Wakefield” should have been conceived and written in squalid garrets.
But neither Burke nor Goldsmith had been born into such comradeships
or such surroundings. Doubtless, as sometimes happens, their minds
kept their first freshness, taking no taint from the world that touched
them on every hand in their manhood, after their minds had been
formed. Goldsmith, as everybody knows, remained an innocent all his
life, a naïf and pettish boy amidst sophisticated men; and Burke too,
notwithstanding his dignity and commanding intellectual habit, shows
sometimes a touch of the same simplicity, a like habit of unguarded
self-revelation. ’Twas their form, no doubt, of that impulsive and
ingenuous quality which we observe in all Irishmen, and which we often
mistake for simplicity. ’Twas a flavor of their native soil. It was
also something more and better than that, however. Not every Irishman
displays such hospitality for direct and simple images of truth as
these men showed, for that is characteristic only of the open and
unsophisticated mind,--the mind that has kept pure and open eyes. Not
that Burke always sees the truth; he is even deeply prejudiced often,
and there are some things that he cannot see. But the passion that
dominates him when he is wrong, as when he is right, is a natural
passion, born with him, not acquired from a disingenuous world that
mistakes interest for justice. His nature tells in everything. It is
stock of his character which he contributes to the subjects his mind
handles. He is trading always with the original treasure he brought
over with him at the first. He has never impaired his genuineness, or
damaged his principles.
Just where Burke got his generous constitution and predisposition to
enlightened ways of thinking it is not easy to see. Certainly Richard
Burke, his brother, the only other member of the family whose character
we discern distinctly, had a quite opposite bent. The father was a
steady Dublin attorney, a Protestant, and a man, so far as we know, of
solid but not brilliant parts. The mother had been a Miss Nagle, of
a Roman Catholic family, which had multiplied exceedingly in County
Cork. Of the home and its life we know singularly little. We are told
that many children were born to the good attorney, but we hear of only
four of them that grew to maturity, Garret, Edmund, Richard, and a
sister best known to Edmund’s biographers as Mrs. French. Edmund, the
second son, was born on the twelfth of January, 1729, in the second
year of the reign of George II., Robert Walpole being chief minister
of the Crown. How he fared or what sort of lad he was for the first
twelve years of his life we have no idea. We only know that in the
year 1741, being then twelve years old, he was sent with his brothers
Garret and Richard to the school of one Abraham Shackleton, a most
capable and exemplary Quaker, at Ballytore, County Kildare, to get, in
some two years’ time, what he himself always accounted the best part
of his education. The character of the good master at Ballytore told
upon the sensitive boy, who all his life through had an eye for such
elevation and calm force of quiet rectitude as are to be seen in the
best Quakers; and with Richard Shackleton, the master’s son, he formed
a friendship from which no vicissitude of his subsequent career ever
loosened his heart a whit. All his life long the ardent, imaginative
statesman, deeply stirred as he was by the momentous agitation of
affairs,--swept away as he was from other friends,--retained his love
for the grave, retired, almost austere, but generous and constant man
who had been his favorite schoolfellow. It is but another evidence of
his unfailing regard for whatever was steady, genuine, and open to the
day in character and conduct.
At fourteen he left Ballytore and was entered at Trinity College,
Dublin. Those were days when youths went to college tender, before they
had become too tough to take impressions readily. But Burke, even at
that callow age, cannot be said to have been teachable. He learned a
vast deal, indeed, but he did not learn much of it from his nominal
masters at Trinity. Apparently Master Shackleton, at Ballytore, had
enabled him to find his own mind. His four years at college were years
of wide and eager reading, but not years of systematic and disciplinary
study. With singular, if not exemplary, self-confidence, he took his
education into his own hands. He got at the heart of books through
their spirit, it would seem, rather than through their grammar. He
sought them out for what they could yield him in thought, rather than
for what they could yield him in the way of exact scholarship. That
this boy should have had such an appetite for the world’s literature,
old and new, need not surprise us. Other lads before and since have
found big libraries all too small for them. What should arrest our
attention is, the law of mind disclosed in the habits of such lads:
the quick and various curiosity of original minds, and particularly
of imaginative minds. They long for matter to expand themselves upon:
they will climb any dizzy height from which an exciting prospect is
promised: it is their joy by some means to see the world of men and
affairs. Burke set out as a boy to see the world that is contained
in books; and in his journeyings he met a man after his own heart in
Cicero, the copious orator and versatile man of affairs,--the only man
at all like Burke for richness, expansiveness, and variety of mind in
all the ancient world. Cicero he conned as his master and model. And
then, having had his fill for the time of discursive study and having
completed also his four years of routine, he was graduated, taking his
degree in the spring of 1748.