Chapter I: Front Matter (1)

LITERARY STUDIES

VOL. I.

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LITERARY STUDIES

BY THE LATE
WALTER BAGEHOT
M.A. AND FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON

_WITH A PREFATORY MEMOIR_

EDITED BY
RICHARD HOLT HUTTON

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I.

_FOURTH EDITION_

LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16th STREET
1891

_All rights reserved_

ADVERTISEMENT TO THE FOURTH EDITION.

The only changes that have been made in this edition are corrections of the press, the need of which has been discovered since the third edition was issued. For a few of these I have been indebted to the very carefully annotated American edition of Mr. Bagehot’s works brought out at Hartford, Connecticut, by Mr. Forrest Morgan, of the Travellers’ Insurance Society. In some cases I think that the American editor has missed Mr. Bagehot’s meaning, and have not, therefore, accepted his corrections.

R. H. H.

_November 1, 1890._

ADVERTISEMENT.

Several of the following Essays were published by Mr. BAGEHOT himself in a volume which appeared in 1858, entitled ‘Estimates of some Englishmen and Scotchmen’—a volume which has now long been out of print. A good many others are republished, now for the first time, from _The National Review_, in which they appeared, while one other,—that on Henry Crabb Robinson,—is taken, with the kind permission of the Editor, from _The Fortnightly Review_; two short metaphysical papers are from the _Contemporary Review_, and three—one biographical and two political—from the _Economist_. The Prefatory Memoir is also republished, with the Editor’s permission, from _The Fortnightly Review_. In all cases the date of the first publication has been appended to each Essay. The Portrait was taken in photography by Monsieur Adolphe Beau, in 1864. It has been printed by Messrs. Locke & Whitfield by the Woodbury process.

_November 1878._

CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

PAGE

PRELIMINARY MEMOIR ix

ESSAY

I. THE FIRST EDINBURGH REVIEWERS (1855) 1

II. HARTLEY COLERIDGE (1852) 41

III. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1856) 75

IV. SHAKESPEARE—THE MAN (1853) 126

V. JOHN MILTON (1859) 173

VI. LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU (1862) 221

VII. WILLIAM COWPER (1855) 255

_APPENDIX._

I. LETTERS ON THE FRENCH COUP D’ÉTAT OF 1851 (1852) 309

II. CÆSARISM AS IT EXISTED IN 1865 361

III. MEMOIR OF THE RIGHT HON. JAMES WILSON (1860) 367

MEMOIR BY THE EDITOR.[1]

It is inevitable, I suppose, that the world should judge of a man chiefly by what it has gained in him, and lost by his death, even though a very little reflection might sometimes show that the special qualities which made him so useful to the world implied others of a yet higher order, in which, to those who knew him well, these more conspicuous characteristics must have been well-nigh merged. And while, of course, it has given me great pleasure, as it must have given pleasure to all Bagehot’s friends, to hear the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s evidently genuine tribute to his financial sagacity in the Budget speech of 1877, and Lord Granville’s eloquent acknowledgments of the value of Bagehot’s political counsels as Editor of the _Economist_, in the speech delivered at the London University on May 9, 1877, I have sometimes felt somewhat unreasonably vexed that those who appreciated so well what I may almost call the smallest part of him, appeared to know so little of the essence of him,—of the high-spirited, buoyant, subtle, speculative nature in which the imaginative qualities were even more remarkable than the judgment, and were, indeed, at the root of all that was strongest in the judgment,—of the gay and dashing humour which was the life of every conversation in which he joined,—and of the visionary nature to which the commonest things often seemed the most marvellous, and the marvellous things the most intrinsically probable. To those who hear of Bagehot only as an original political economist and a lucid political thinker, a curiously false image of him must be suggested. If they are among the multitude misled by Carlyle, who regard all political economists as ‘the dreary professors of a dismal science,’ they will probably conjure up an arid disquisitionist on value and cost of production; and even if assured of Bagehot’s imaginative power, they may perhaps only understand by the expression, that capacity for feverish preoccupation which makes the mention of ‘Peel’s Act’ summon up to the faces of certain fanatics a hectic glow, or the rumour of paper currencies blanch others with the pallor of true passion. The truth, however, is that the best qualities which Bagehot had, both as economist and as politician, were of a kind which the majority of economists and politicians do not specially possess. I do not mean that it was in any way an accident that he was an original thinker in either sphere; far from it. But I do think that what he brought to political and economical science, he brought in some sense from _outside_ their normal range,—that the man of business and the financier in him fell within such sharp and well-defined limits, that he knew better than most of his class where their special weakness lay, and where their special functions ended. This, at all events, I am quite sure of, that so far as his judgment was sounder than other men’s—and on many subjects it was much sounder—it was so not in spite of, but in consequence of, the excursive imagination and vivid humour which are so often accused of betraying otherwise sober minds into dangerous aberrations. In him both lucidity and caution were directly traceable to the force of his imagination.

Walter Bagehot was born at Langport on February 3, 1826. Langport is an old-fashioned little town in the centre of Somersetshire, which in early days returned two members to Parliament, until the burgesses petitioned Edward I. to relieve them of the expense of paying their members,—a quaint piece of economy of which Bagehot frequently made humorous boast. The town is still a close corporation, and calls its mayor by the old Saxon name of Portreeve, and Bagehot himself became its Deputy-Recorder, as well as a Magistrate for the County. Situated at the point where the river Parret ceases to be navigable, Langport has always been a centre of trade; and here in the last century Mr. Samuel Stuckey founded the Somersetshire Bank, which has since spread over the entire county, and is now the largest private bank of issue in England. Bagehot was the only surviving child of Mr. Thomas Watson Bagehot, who was for thirty years Managing Director and Vice-Chairman of Stuckey’s Banking Company, and was, as Bagehot was fond of recalling, before he resigned that position, the oldest joint-stock banker in the United Kingdom. Bagehot succeeded his father as Vice-Chairman of the Bank, when the latter retired in his old age. His mother, a Miss Stuckey, was a niece of Mr. Samuel Stuckey, the founder of the Banking Company, and was a very pretty and lively woman, who had, by her previous marriage with a son of Dr. Estlin of Bristol, been brought at an early age into an intellectual atmosphere by which she had greatly profited. There is no doubt that Bagehot was greatly indebted to the constant and careful sympathy in all his studies that both she and his father gave him, as well as to a very studious disposition, for his future success. Dr. Prichard, the well-known ethnologist, was her brother-in-law, and her son’s marked taste for science was first awakened in Dr. Prichard’s house in Park Row, where Bagehot often spent his half-holidays while he was a schoolboy in Bristol. To Dr. Prichard’s ‘Races of Man’ may, indeed, be first traced that keen interest in the speculative side of ethnological research, the results of which are best seen in Bagehot’s book on ‘Physics and Politics.’

I first met Bagehot at University College, London, when we were neither of us over seventeen. I was struck by the questions put by a lad with large dark eyes and florid complexion to the late Professor De Morgan, who was lecturing to us, as his custom was, on the great difficulties involved in what we thought we all understood perfectly—such, for example, as the meaning of 0, of negative quantities, or the grounds of probable expectation. Bagehot’s questions showed that he had both read and thought more on these subjects than most of us, and I was eager to make his acquaintance, which soon ripened into an intimate friendship, in which there was never any intermission between that time and his death. Some will regret that Bagehot did not go to Oxford; the reason being that his father, who was a Unitarian, objected on principle to all doctrinal tests, and would never have permitted a son of his to go to either of the older Universities while those tests were required of the undergraduates. And I am not at all sure that University College, London, was not at that time a much more awakening place of education for young men than almost any Oxford college. Bagehot himself, I suspect, thought so. Fifteen years later he wrote, in his essay on Shelley: ‘A distinguished pupil of the University of Oxford once observed to us, “The use of the University of Oxford is that no one can over-read himself there. The appetite for knowledge is repressed.”’ And whatever may have been defective in University College, London—and no doubt much was defective—nothing of the kind could have been said of it when we were students there. Indeed, in those years London was a place with plenty of intellectual stimulus in it for young men, while in University College itself there was quite enough vivacious and original teaching to make that stimulus available to the full. It is sometimes said that it needs the quiet of a country town remote from the capital, to foster the love of genuine study in young men. But of this, at least, I am sure, that Gower Street, and Oxford Street, and the New Road, and the dreary chain of squares from Euston to Bloomsbury, were the scenes of discussions as eager and as abstract as ever were the sedate cloisters or the flowery river-meadows of Cambridge or Oxford. Once, I remember, in the vehemence of our argument as to whether the so-called logical principle of identity (A is A) were entitled to rank as ‘a law of thought’ or only as a postulate of language, Bagehot and I wandered up and down Regent Street for something like two hours in the vain attempt to find Oxford Street:—

‘And yet what days were those, Parmenides,
When we were young, when we could number friends,
In all the Italian cities like ourselves,
When with elated hearts we joined your train,
Ye sun-born virgins, on the road of truth!
Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
Nor outward things were closed and dead to us,
But we received the shock of mighty thoughts
On single minds with a pure natural joy;
And if the sacred load oppressed our brain,
We had the power to feel the pressure eased,
The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again
In the delightful commerce of the world.’

Bagehot has himself described, evidently from his own experience, the kind of life we lived in those days, in an article on Oxford Reform: ‘So, too, in youth, the real plastic energy is not in tutors, or lectures, or in books “got up,” but in Wordsworth and Shelley, in the books that all read because all like; in what all talk of because all are interested; in the argumentative walk or disputatious lounge; in the impact of young thought upon young thought, of fresh thought on fresh thought, of hot thought on hot thought; in mirth and refutation, in ridicule and laughter; for these are the free play of the natural mind, and these cannot be got without a college.’[2]

The late Professor Sewell, when asked to give his pupils some clear conception of the old Greek Sophists, is said to have replied that he could not do this better than by referring them to the Professors of University College, London. I do not think there was much force in the sarcasm, for though Professor T. Hewitt Key, whose restless and ingenious mind led him many a wild dance after etymological Will-of-the-wisps—I remember, for instance, his cheerfully accepting the suggestion that ‘better’ and ‘bad’ (_melior_ and _malus_) came from the same root, and accounting for it by the probable disposition of hostile tribes to call everything bad which their enemies called good, and everything good which their enemies called bad—may have had in him much of the brilliance, and something also, perhaps, of the flightiness, of the old sophist, it would be hard to imagine men more severe in exposing pretentious conceits and dispelling dreams of theoretic omniscience, than Professors De Morgan, Malden, and Long. De Morgan, who at that time was in the midst of his controversy on formal logic with Sir William Hamilton, was, indeed, characterised by the great Edinburgh metaphysician as ‘profound in mathematics, curious in logic, but wholly deficient in architectonic power;’ yet, for all that, his lectures on the Theory of Limits were a far better logical discipline for young men than Sir William Hamilton’s on the Law of the Unconditioned or the Quantification of the Predicate. Professor Malden contrived to imbue us with a love of that fastidious taste and that exquisite nicety in treating questions of scholarship, which has, perhaps, been more needed and less cultivated in Gower Street than any other of the higher elements of a college education; while Professor Long’s caustic irony, accurate and almost ostentatiously dry learning, and profoundly stoical temperament, were as antithetic to the temper of the sophist as human qualities could possibly be.

The time of our college life was pretty nearly contemporaneous with the life of the Anti-Corn-Law League and the great agitation in favour of Free-trade. To us this was useful rather from the general impulse it gave to political discussion, and the literary curiosity it excited in us as to the secret of true eloquence, than because it anticipated in any considerable degree the later acquired taste for economical science. Bagehot and I seldom missed an opportunity of hearing together the matchless practical disquisitions of Mr. Cobden—lucid and homely, yet glowing with intense conviction,—the profound passion and careless, though artistic, scorn of Mr. Bright, and the artificial and elaborately ornate periods, and witty, though somewhat _ad captandum_, epigrams of Mr. W. J. Fox (afterwards M.P. for Oldham). Indeed, we scoured London together to hear any kind of oratory that had gained a reputation of its own, and compared all we heard with the declamation of Burke and the rhetoric of Macaulay, many of whose later essays came out and were eagerly discussed by us while we were together at college. In our conversations on these essays, I remember that I always bitterly attacked, while Bagehot moderately defended, the glorification of compromise which marks all Macaulay’s writings. Even in early youth Bagehot had much of that ‘animated moderation’ which he praises so highly in his latest work. He was a voracious reader, especially of history, and had a far truer appreciation of historical conditions than most young thinkers; indeed, the broad historical sense which characterised him from first to last, made him more alive than ordinary students to the urgency of circumstance, and far less disposed to indulge in abstract moral criticism from a modern point of view. On theology, as on all other subjects, Bagehot was at this time more Conservative than myself, he sharing his mother’s orthodoxy, and I at that time accepting heartily the Unitarianism of my own people. Theology was, however, I think, the only subject on which, in later life, we, to some degree at least, exchanged places, though he never at any time, however doubtful he may have become on some of the cardinal issues of historical Christianity, accepted the Unitarian position. Indeed, within the last two or three years of his life, he spoke on one occasion of the Trinitarian doctrine as probably the best account which human reason could render of the mystery of the self-existent mind.

In those early days Bagehot’s manner was often supercilious. We used to attack him for his intellectual arrogance—his ὕβρις we called it, in our college slang—a quality which I believe was not really in him, though he had then much of its external appearance. Nevertheless his genuine contempt for what was intellectually feeble was not accompanied by an even adequate appreciation of his own powers. At college, however, his satirical ‘Hear, hear,’ was a formidable sound in the debating society, and one which took the heart out of many a younger speaker; and the ironical ‘How much?’ with which in conversation he would meet an over-eloquent expression, was always of a nature to reduce a man, as the mathematical phrase goes, to his ‘lowest terms.’ In maturer life he became much gentler and mellower, and often even delicately considerate for others; but his inner scorn for ineffectual thought remained, in some degree, though it was very reticently expressed, to the last. For instance, I remember his attacking me for my mildness in criticising a book which, though it professed to rest on a basis of clear thought, really missed all its points. ‘There is a pale, whitey-brown substance,’ he wrote to me, ‘in the man’s books, which people who don’t think take for thought, but it isn’t;’ and he upbraided me much for not saying plainly that the man was a muff. In his youth this scorn for anything like the vain beating of the wings in the attempt to think, was at its maximum. It was increased, I think, by that which was one of his greatest qualities, his remarkable ‘detachment’ of mind—in other words, his comparative inaccessibility to the contagion of blind sympathy. Most men, more or less unconsciously, shrink from even _thinking_ what they feel to be out of sympathy with the feelings of their neighbours, unless under some strong incentive to do so; and in this way the sources of much true and important criticism are dried up, through the mere diffusion and ascendancy of conventional but sincere habits of social judgment. And no doubt for the greater number of us this is much the best. We are worth more for the purpose of constituting and strengthening the cohesive power of the social bond, than we should ever be worth for the purpose of criticising feebly—and with little effect, perhaps, except the disorganising effect of seeming ill-nature—the various incompetences and miscarriages of our neighbours’ intelligence. But Bagehot’s intellect was always far too powerful and original to render him available for the function of mere social cement; and full as he was of genuine kindness and hearty personal affections, he certainly had not in any high degree that sensitive instinct as to what others would feel, which so often shapes even the thoughts of men, and still oftener their speech, into mild and complaisant, but unmeaning and unfruitful, forms.

Thus it has been said that in his very amusing article on Crabb Robinson, published in the _Fortnightly Review_ for August 1869, he was more than a little rough in his delineation of that quaint old friend of our earlier days. And certainly there is something of the naturalist’s realistic manner of describing the habits of a new species, in the paper, though there is not a grain of malice or even depreciatory bias in it, and though there is a very sincere regard manifested throughout. But that essay will illustrate admirably what I mean by saying that Bagehot’s detachment of mind, and the deficiency in him of any aptitude for playing the part of mere social cement, tended to give the impression of an intellectual arrogance which—certainly in the sense of self-esteem or self-assertion—did not in the least belong to him. In the essay I have just mentioned he describes how Crabb Robinson, when he gave his somewhat famous breakfast-parties, used to forget to make the tea, then lost his keys, then told a long story about a bust of Wieland during the extreme agony of his guests’ appetites, and finally, perhaps, withheld the cup of tea he had at last poured out, while he regaled them with a poem of Wordsworth’s or a diatribe against Hazlitt. And Bagehot adds, ‘The more astute of his guests used to breakfast before they came, and then there was much interest in seeing a steady literary man, who did not understand the region, in agonies at having to hear three stories before he got his tea, one again between his milk and his sugar, another between his butter and his toast, and additional zest in making a stealthy inquiry that was sure to intercept the coming delicacies by bringing on Schiller and Goethe.’ The only ‘astute’ person referred to was, I imagine, Bagehot himself, who confessed to me, much to my amusement, that this was always his own precaution before one of Crabb Robinson’s breakfasts. I doubt if anybody else ever thought of it. It was very characteristic in him that he should have not only noticed—for that, of course, anyone might do—this weak element in Crabb Robinson’s breakfasts, but should have kept it so distinctly before his mind as to make it the centre, as it were, of a policy, and the opportunity of a mischievous stratagem to try the patience of others. It showed how much of the social naturalist there was in him. If any race of animals could understand a naturalist’s account of their ways and habits, and of the devices he adopted to get those ways and habits more amusingly or instructively displayed before him, no doubt they would think that he was a cynic; and it was this intellectual detachment, as of a social naturalist, from the society in which he moved, which made Bagehot’s remarks often seem somewhat harsh, when, in fact, they were animated not only by no suspicion of malice, but by the most cordial and earnest friendliness. Owing to this separateness of mind, he described more strongly and distinctly traits which, when delineated by a friend, we expect to find painted in the softened manner of one who is half disposed to imitate or adopt them.

Yet, though I have used the word ‘naturalist’ to denote the keen and solitary observation with which Bagehot watched society, no word describes him worse, if we attribute to it any of that coldness and stillness of curiosity which we are apt to associate with scientific vigilance. Especially in his youth, buoyancy, vivacity, velocity of thought, were of the essence of the impression which he made. He had high spirits and great capacities for enjoyment, great sympathies indeed with the old English Cavalier. In his Essay on Macaulay he paints that character with profound sympathy:—

‘What historian, indeed,’ he says, ‘has ever estimated
the Cavalier character? There is Clarendon, the grave,
rhetorical, decorous, lawyer—piling words, congealing
arguments—very stately, a little grim. There is Hume, the
Scotch metaphysician, who has made out the best case for
such people as never were, for a Charles who never died, for
a Strafford who could never have been attainted, a saving,
calculating North-countryman, fat, impassive, who lived
on eightpence a day. What have these people to do with an
enjoying English gentleman? Talk of the ways of spreading a
wholesome Conservatism throughout the country ... as far as
communicating and establishing your creed is concerned, try a
little pleasure. 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 that 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.’[3]

And that aptly represents himself. Such arrogance as he seemed to have in early life was the arrogance as much of enjoyment as of detachment of mind—the _insouciance_ of the old Cavalier as much at least as the calm of a mind not accessible to the contagion of social feelings. He always talked, in youth, of his spirits as inconveniently high; and once wrote to me that he did not think they were quite as ‘boisterous’ as they had been, and that his fellow-creatures were not sorry for the abatement; nevertheless, he added, ‘I am quite fat, gross, and ruddy.’ He was, indeed, excessively fond of hunting, vaulting, and almost all muscular effort, so that his life would be wholly misconceived by anyone who, hearing of his ‘detachment’ of thought, should picture his mind as a vigilantly observant, far-away intelligence, such as Hawthorne’s, for example. He liked to be in the thick of the _mêlée_ when talk grew warm, though he was never so absorbed in it as not to keep his mind cool.

As I said, Bagehot was a Somersetshire man, with all the richness of nature and love for the external glow of life which the most characteristic counties of the South-west of England contrive to give to their most characteristic sons:—

‘This north-west corner of Spain,’ he wrote once to a newspaper
from the Pyrenees, ‘is the only place out of England where I
should like to live. It is a sort of better Devonshire; the
coast is of the same kind, the sun is more brilliant, the sea
is more brilliant, and there are mountains in the background.
I have seen some more beautiful places and many grander, but I
should not like to live in them. As Mr. Emerson puts it, “I do
not want to go to heaven before my time.” My English nature by
early use and long habit is tied to a certain kind of scenery,
soon feels the want of it, and is apt to be alarmed as well as
pleased at perpetual snow and all sorts of similar beauties.
But here, about San Sebastian, you have the best England can
give you (at least if you hold, as I do, that Devonshire is
the finest of our counties), and the charm, the ineffable,
indescribable charm of the South too. Probably the sun has some
secret effect on the nervous system that makes one inclined to
be pleased, but the golden light lies upon everything, and one
fancies that one is charmed only by the outward loveliness.’

The vivacity and warm colouring of the landscapes of the South of England certainly had their full share in moulding his tastes, and possibly even his style.

Bagehot took the mathematical scholarship with his Bachelor’s degree in the University of London in 1846, and the gold medal in Intellectual and Moral Philosophy with his Master’s degree in 1848, in reading for which he mastered for the first time those principles of political economy which were to receive so much illustration from his genius in later years. But at this time philosophy, poetry, and theology had, I think, a much greater share of his attention than any narrow and more sharply defined science. Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Martineau and John Henry Newman, all in their way exerted a great influence over his mind, and divided, not unequally, with the authors whom he was bound to study—that is, the Greek philosophers, together with Hume, Kant, J. S. Mill, and Sir William Hamilton—the time at his disposal. I have no doubt that for seven or eight years of his life the Roman Catholic Church had a great fascination for his imagination, though I do not think that he was ever at all near conversion. He was intimate with all Dr. Newman’s writings. And of these the Oxford sermons, and the poems in the _Lyra Apostolica_ afterwards separately published—partly, I believe, on account of the high estimate of them which Bagehot had himself expressed—were always his special favourites. The little poetry he wrote—and it is evident that he never had the kind of instinct for, or command of, language which is the first condition of genuine poetic genius—seems to me to have been obviously written under the spell which Dr. Newman’s own few but finely-chiselled poems had cast upon him. If I give one specimen of Bagehot’s poems, it is not that I think it in any way an adequate expression of his powers, but for a very different reason, because it will show those who have inferred from his other writings that his mind never deeply concerned itself with religion, how great is their mistake. Nor is there any real poverty of resource in these lines, except perhaps in the awkward mechanism of some of them. They were probably written when he was twenty-three or twenty-four.

‘TO THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.

‘“Casta inceste.”—_Lucretius._

‘Thy lamp of faith is brightly trimmed,
Thy eager eye is not yet dimmed,
Thy stalwart step is yet unstayed,
Thy words are well obeyed.

‘Thy proud voice vaunts of strength from heaven,
Thy proud foes carp, “By hell’s art given:”
No Titan thou of earth-born bands,
Strange Church of hundred hands.

‘Nursed without knowledge, born of night,
With hand of power and thoughts of light,
As Britain seas, far reachingly
O’er-rul’st thou history.

‘Wild as La Pucelle in her hour,
O’er prostrate realms with awe-girt power
Thou marchest stedfast on thy path
Through wonder, love, and wrath.

‘And will thy end be such as hers,
O’erpowered by earthly mail-clad powers,
Condemned for cruel, magic art,
Though awful, bold of heart?

‘Through thorn-clad Time’s unending waste
With ardent step alone thou strayest,
As Jewish scape-goats tracked the wild,
Unholy, consecrate, defiled.

‘Use not thy truth in manner rude
To rule for gain the multitude,
Or thou wilt see that truth depart,
To seek some holier heart;

‘Then thou wilt watch thy errors lorn,
O’erspread by shame, o’erswept by scorn,
In lonely want without hope’s smile,
As Tyre her weed-clad Isle.

‘Like once thy chief, thou bear’st Christ’s name;
Like him thou hast denied his shame,
Bold, eager, skilful, confident,
Oh, now like him repent!’

That has certainly no sign of the hand of the master in it, for the language is not moulded and vivified by the thought, but the thought itself is fine. And there is still better evidence than these lines would afford, of the fascination which the Roman Catholic Church had for Bagehot. A year or two later, in the letters on the _coup d’état_, to which I shall soon have to refer, there occurs the following passage. (He is trying to explain how the cleverness, the moral restlessness, and intellectual impatience of the French, all tend to unfit them for a genuine Parliamentary government):—

‘I do not know that I can exhibit the way these qualities of
the French character operate on their opinions better than by
telling you how the Roman Catholic Church deals with them.
I have rather attended to it since I came here. It gives
sermons almost an interest, their being in French, and to those
curious in intellectual matters, it is worth observing. In
other times, and even now in out-of-the-way Spain, I suppose
it may be true that the Catholic Church has been opposed to
inquiry and reasoning. But it is not so now and here. Loudly
from the pens of a hundred writers, from the tongues of a
thousand pulpits, in every note of thrilling scorn and exulting
derision, she proclaims the contrary. Be she Christ’s workman
or Antichrist’s, she knows her work too well. “Reason, reason,
reason!” exclaims she to the philosophers of this world. “Put
in practice what you teach if you would have others believe
it. Be consistent. Do not prate to us of private judgment,
when you are but yourselves repeating what you heard in the
nursery, ill-mumbled remnants of a Catholic tradition. No;
exemplify what you command; inquire and make search. Seek,
and we warn you that ye will never find, yet do as ye will.
Shut yourselves up in a room, make your mind a blank, go
down (as you speak) into the depth of your consciousness,
scrutinise the mental structure, inquire for the elements of
belief,—spend years, your best years, in the occupation,—and
at length, when your eyes are dim, and your brain hot, and
your hands unsteady, then reckon what you have gained. See
if you cannot count on your fingers the certainties you have
reached; reflect which of them you doubted yesterday, which
you may disbelieve to-morrow; or rather, make haste—assume at
random some essential _credenda_,—write down your inevitable
postulates, enumerate your necessary axioms, toil on, toil
on, spin your spider’s web, adore your own soul, or if ye
prefer it, choose some German nostrum; try an intellectual
intuition, or the pure reason, or the intelligible ideas, or
the mesmeric clairvoyance, and when so, or somehow, you have
attained your results, try them on mankind. Don’t go out into
the byeways and hedges; it is unnecessary. Ring a bell, call in
the servants, give them a course of lectures, cite Aristotle,
review Descartes, panegyrise Plato, and see if the bonne will
understand you. It is you that say _Vox populi, vox Dei_. You
see the people reject you. Or, suppose you succeed,—what you
call succeeding. Your books are read; for three weeks or even
a season you are the idol of the _salons_. Your hard words are
on the lips of women; then a change comes—a new actress appears
at the Théâtre Français or the Opéra; her charms eclipse your
theories; or a great catastrophe occurs; political liberty, it
is said, is annihilated. _Il faut se faire mouchard_, is the
observation of scoffers. Anyhow you are forgotten. Fifty years
may be the gestation of a philosophy, not three its life.
Before long, before you go to your grave, your six disciples
leave you for some newer master, or to set up for themselves.
The poorest priest in the remotest region of the Basses-Alpes
has more power over men’s souls than human cultivation. His
ill-mouthed masses move women’s souls—can you? Ye scoff at
Jupiter, yet he at least was believed in, you never have been.
Idol for idol, the _de_throned is better than the _un_throned.
No, if you would reason, if you would teach, if you would
speculate,—come to us. We have our premises ready; years
upon years before you were born, intellects whom the best of
you delight to magnify, toiled to systematise the creed of
ages. Years upon years after you are dead, better heads than
yours will find new matter there to define, to divide, to
arrange. Consider the hundred volumes of Aquinas. Which of
you desire a higher life than that;—to deduce, to subtilise,
discriminate, systematise, and decide the highest truth, and
to be believed? Yet such was his luck, his enjoyment. He was
what you would be. No, no, _credite, credite_. Ours is the
life of speculation. The cloister is the home for the student.
Philosophy is stationary, Catholicism progressive. _You_ call.
_We_ are heard,” &c. So speaks each preacher, according to his
ability. And when the dust and noise of present controversies
have passed away, and, in the interior of the night, some grave
historian writes out the tale of half-forgotten times, let him
not forget to observe that, profoundly as the mediæval Church
subdued the superstitious cravings of a painful and barbarous
age, in after-years she dealt more discerningly still with the
feverish excitement, the feeble vanities, and the dogmatic
impatience of an over-intellectual generation.’[4]

It is obvious, I think, both from the poem, and from these reflections, that what attracted Bagehot in the Church of Rome was the historical prestige and social authority which she had accumulated in believing and uncritical ages for use in the unbelieving and critical age in which we live,—while what he condemned and dreaded in her was her tendency to use her power over the multitude for purposes of a low ambition.

And as I am on this subject, this will be, I think, the best opportunity I shall have to say what I have got to say of Bagehot’s later religious belief, without returning to it when I have to deal with a period in which the greatest part of his spare intellectual energy was given to other subjects. I do not think that the religious affections were very strong in Bagehot’s mind, but the primitive religious instincts certainly were. From childhood he was what he certainly remained to the last, in spite of the rather antagonistic influence of the able scientific group of men from whom he learned so much—a thorough transcendentalist, by which I mean one who could never doubt that there was a real foundation of the universe distinct from the outward show of its superficial qualities, and that the substance is never exhaustively expressed in these qualities. He often repeats in his essays Shelley’s fine line, ‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live call life,’ and the essence at least of the idea in it haunted him from his very childhood. In the essay on ‘Hartley Coleridge’—perhaps the most perfect in style of any of his writings—he describes most powerfully, and evidently in great measure from his own experience, the mysterious confusion between appearances and realities which so bewildered little Hartley,—the difficulty that he complained of in distinguishing between the various Hartleys,—‘picture Hartley,’ ‘shadow Hartley,’ and between Hartley the subject and Hartley the object, the enigmatic blending of which last two Hartleys the child expressed by catching hold of his own arm, and then calling himself the ‘catch-me-fast Hartley.’ And in dilating on this bewildering experience of the child’s, Bagehot borrows from his own recollections:—

‘All children have a world of their own, as distinct from
that of the grown people who gravitate around them, as the
dreams of girlhood from our prosaic life, or the ideas of the
kitten that plays with the falling leaves, from those of her
carnivorous mother that catches mice, and is sedulous in her
domestic duties. But generally about this interior existence
children are dumb. You have warlike ideas, but you cannot say
to a sinewy relative, “My dear aunt, I wonder when the big
bush in the garden will begin to walk about; I’m sure it’s a
Crusader, and I was cutting it all the day with my steel sword.
But what do you think, aunt? for I’m puzzled about its legs,
because you see, aunt, it has only _one_ stalk—and besides,
aunt, the leaves.” You cannot remark this in secular life, but
you hack at the infelicitous bush till you do not wholly reject
the idea that your small garden is Palestine, and yourself the
most adventurous of knights.’[5]

They have a tradition in the family that this is but a fragment from Bagehot’s own imaginative childhood, and certainly this visionary element in him was very vivid to the last. However, the transcendental or intellectual basis of religious belief was soon strengthened in him, as readers of his remarkable paper on Bishop Butler will easily see, by those moral and retributive instincts which warn us of the meaning and consequences of guilt:—

‘The moral principle,’ he wrote in that essay, ‘whatever may
be said to the contrary by complacent thinkers, is really
and to most men a principle of fear.... Conscience is the
condemnation of ourselves; we expect a penalty. As the Greek
proverb teaches, “Where there is shame, there is fear.”... How
to be free from this is the question. How to get loose from
this—how to be rid of the secret tie which binds the strong man
and cramps his pride, and makes him angry at the beauty of the
universe, which will not let him go forth like a great animal,
like the king of the forest, in the glory of his might, but
which restrains him with an inner fear and a secret foreboding
that if he do but exalt himself he shall be abased, if he do
but set forth his own dignity he will offend ONE who will
deprive him of it. This, as has often been pointed out, is the
source of the bloody rites of heathendom.’[6]

And then, after a powerful passage, in which he describes the sacrificial superstitions of men like Achilles, he returns, with a flash of his own peculiar humour, to Bishop Butler, thus:—

‘Of course it is not this kind of fanaticism that we impute
to a prelate of the English Church; human sacrifices are not
respectable, and Achilles was not rector of Stanhope. But
though the costume and circumstances of life change, the human
heart does not; its feelings remain. The same anxiety, the same
consciousness of personal sin, which lead, in barbarous times,
to what has been described, show themselves in civilised life
as well. In this quieter period, their great manifestation is
scrupulosity;’[7]

which he goes on to describe as a sort of inexhaustible anxiety for perfect compliance with the minutest positive commands which may be made the condition of forgiveness for the innumerable lapses of moral obligation. I am not criticising the paper, or I should point out that Bagehot failed in it to draw out the distinction between the primitive moral instinct and the corrupt superstition into which it runs; but I believe that he recognised the weight of this moral testimony of the conscience to a divine Judge, as well as the transcendental testimony of the intellect to an eternal substance of things, to the end of his life. And certainly in the reality of human free-will as the condition of all genuine moral life, he firmly believed. In his ‘Physics and Politics’—the subtle and original essay upon which, in conjunction with the essay on the ‘English Constitution,’ Bagehot’s reputation as a European thinker chiefly rests—he repeatedly guards himself (for instance, pp. 9, 10) against being supposed to think that in accepting the principle of evolution, he has accepted anything inconsistent either with spiritual creation, or with the free will of man. On the latter point he adds,

‘No doubt the modern doctrine of the “conservation of force,”
if applied to decision, is inconsistent with free-will; if you
hold that force is “never lost or gained,” you cannot hold that
there is a real gain, a sort of new creation of it in free
volition. But I have nothing to do here with the universal
“conservation of force.” The conception of the nervous organs
as stores of will-made power, does not raise or need so vast a
discussion.’[8]

And in the same book he repeatedly uses the expression ‘Providence,’ evidently in its natural meaning, to express the ultimate force at work behind the march of ‘evolution.’ Indeed, in conversation with me on this subject, he often said how much higher a conception of the creative mind, the new Darwinian ideas seemed to him to have introduced, as compared with those contained in what is called the argument from contrivance and design. On the subject of personal immortality, too, I do not think that Bagehot ever wavered. He often spoke, and even wrote, of ‘that vague sense of eternal continuity which is always about the mind, and which no one could bear to lose,’ and described it as being much more important to us than it even appears to be, important as that is; for, he said, ‘when we think we are thinking of the past, we are only thinking of a future that is to be like it.’ But with the exception of these cardinal points, I could hardly say how much Bagehot’s mind was or was not affected by the great speculative controversies of later years. Certainly he became much more doubtful concerning the force of the historical evidence of Christianity than I ever was, and rejected, I think, entirely, though on what amount of personal study he had founded his opinion I do not know, the Apostolic origin of the fourth Gospel. Possibly his mind may have been latterly in suspense as to miracle altogether, though I am pretty sure that he had not come to a negative conclusion. He belonged, in common with myself, during the last years of his life, to a society in which these fundamental questions were often discussed; but he seldom spoke in it, and told me very shortly before his death that he shrank from such discussions on religious points, feeling that, in debates of this kind, they were not and could not be treated with anything like thoroughness. On the whole, I think, the cardinal article of his faith would be adequately represented even in the latest period of his life by the following passage in his essay on Bishop Butler:—

‘In every step of religious argument we require the assumption,
the belief, the faith, if the word is better, in an absolutely
_perfect_ Being; in and by whom we are, who is omnipotent
as well as most holy; who moves on the face of the whole
world, and ruleth all things by the word of his power. If we
grant this, the difficulty of the opposition between what
is here called the natural and the supernatural religion is
removed; and without granting it, that difficulty is perhaps
insuperable. It follows from the very idea and definition of
an infinitely perfect Being, that he is within us as well as
without us,—ruling the clouds of the air and the fishes of
the sea, as well as the fears and thoughts of men; smiling
through the smile of nature as well as warning with the pain
of conscience,—“sine qualitate, bonum; sine quantitate,
magnum; sine indigentiâ, creatorem; sine situ, præsidentem;
sine habitu, omnia continentem; sine loco, ubique totum; sine
tempore, sempiternum; sine ullâ sui mutatione, mutabilia
facientem, nihilque patientem.” If we assume this, life is
simple; without this, all is dark.’[9]

Evidently, then, though Bagehot held that the doctrine of evolution by natural selection gave a higher conception of the Creator than the old doctrine of mechanical design, he never took any materialistic view of evolution. One of his early essays, written while at college, on some of the many points of the Kantian philosophy which he then loved to discuss, concluded with a remarkable sentence, which would probably have fairly expressed, even at the close of his life, his profound belief in God, and his partial sympathy with the agnostic view that we are, in great measure, incapable of apprehending, more than very dimly, His mind or purposes:—‘Gazing after the infinite essence, we are like men watching through the drifting clouds for a glimpse of the true heavens on a drear November day; layer after layer passes from our view, but still the same immovable grey rack remains.’

After Bagehot had taken his Master’s degree, and while he was still 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.’