Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

This practical preaching, which Clough urges in season and out of season, met an answering chord in Bagehot’s mind, not so much in relation to religious belief as in relation to the over-haste and over-eagerness of human conduct, and I can trace the effect of it in all his writings, political and otherwise, to the end of his life. Indeed, it affected him much more in later days than in the years immediately following his first friendship with Clough. With all his boyish dash, there was something in Bagehot even in youth which dreaded precipitancy, and not only precipitancy itself, but those moral situations tending to precipitancy which men who have no minds of their own to make up, so often court. In later life he pleased himself by insisting that, on Darwin’s principle, civilised men, with all the complex problems of modern life to puzzle them, suspend their judgment so little, and are so eager for action, only because they have inherited from the earlier, simpler, and more violent ages, an excessive predisposition to action unsuited to our epoch and dangerous to our future development. But it was Clough, I think, who first stirred in Bagehot’s mind this great dread of ‘the ruinous force of the will,’ a phrase he was never weary of quoting, and which might almost be taken as the motto of his ‘Physics and Politics,’ the great conclusion of which is that in the ‘age of discussion,’ grand policies and high-handed diplomacy and sensational legislation of all kinds will become rarer and rarer, because discussion will point out all the difficulties of such policies in relation to a state of existence so complex as our own, and will in this way tend to repress the excess of practical energy handed down to us by ancestors to whom life was a sharper, simpler, and more perilous affair.

But the time for Bagehot’s full adoption of the suspensive principle in public affairs was not yet. In 1851 he went to Paris, shortly before the _coup d’état_. And while all England was assailing Louis Napoleon (justly enough, as I think) for his perfidy, and his impatience of the self-willed Assembly he could not control, Bagehot was preparing a deliberate and very masterly defence of that bloody and high-handed act. Even Bagehot would, I think, if pressed judiciously in later life, have admitted—though I can’t say he ever _did_—that the _coup d’état_ was one of the best illustrations of ‘the ruinous force of the will’ in engendering, or at least crystallising, a false intellectual conclusion as to the political possibilities of the future, which recent history could produce. Certainly he always spoke somewhat apologetically of these early letters, though I never heard him expressly retract their doctrine. In 1851 a knot of young Unitarians, of whom I was then one, headed by the late Mr. J. Langton Sanford—afterwards the historian of the Great Rebellion, who survived Bagehot barely four months—had engaged to help for a time in conducting the _Inquirer_, which then was, and still is, the chief literary and theological organ of the Unitarian body. Our _régime_ was, I imagine, a time of great desolation for the very tolerant and thoughtful constituency for whom we wrote; and many of them, I am confident, yearned, and were fully justified in yearning, for those better days when this tyranny of ours should be overpast. Sanford and Osler did a good deal to throw cold water on the rather optimist and philanthropic politics of the most sanguine, because the most benevolent and open-hearted of Dissenters. Roscoe criticised their literary work from the point of view of a devotee of the Elizabethan poets; and I attempted to prove to them in distinct heads, first, that their laity ought to have the protection afforded by a liturgy against the arbitrary prayers of their ministers; and next, that at least the great majority of their sermons ought to be suppressed, and the habit of delivering them discontinued almost altogether. Only a denomination of ‘just men’ trained in tolerance for generations, and in that respect, at least, made all but ‘perfect,’ would have endured it at all; but I doubt if any of us caused the Unitarian body so much grief as Bagehot, who never was a Unitarian, but who contributed a series of brilliant letters on the _coup d’état_, in which he trod just as heavily on the toes of his colleagues as he did on those of the public by whom the _Inquirer_ was taken. In those letters he not only, as I have already shown, eulogised the Catholic Church, but he supported the Prince-President’s military violence, attacked the freedom of the Press in France, maintained that the country was wholly unfit for true Parliamentary government, and—worst of all perhaps—insinuated a panegyric on Louis Napoleon himself, asserting that he had been far better prepared for the duties of a statesman by gambling on the turf, than he would have been by poring over the historical and political dissertations of the wise and the good. This was Bagehot’s day of cynicism. The seven letters which he wrote on the _coup d’état_ were certainly very exasperating, and yet they were not caricatures of his real thought, for his private letters at the time were more cynical still. Crabb Robinson, in speaking of him, used ever afterwards to describe him to me as ‘that friend of yours—you know whom I mean, you rascal!—who wrote those abominable, those most disgraceful letters on the _coup d’état_—I did not forgive him for years after.’ Nor do I wonder, even now, that a sincere friend of constitutional freedom and intellectual liberty, like Crabb Robinson, found them difficult to forgive. They were light and airy, and even flippant on a very grave subject. They made nothing of the Prince’s perjury; and they took impertinent liberties with all the dearest prepossessions of the readers of the _Inquirer_, and assumed their sympathy just where Bagehot knew that they would be most revolted by his opinions. Nevertheless, they had a vast deal of truth in them, and no end of ability, and I hope that there will be many to read them with interest now that they are here republished. There is a good deal of the raw material of history in them, and certainly I doubt if Bagehot ever again hit the satiric vein of argument so well. Here is a passage that will bear taking out of its context, and therefore not so full of the shrewd malice of these letters as many others, but which will illustrate their ability. It is one in which Bagehot maintained for the first time the view (which I believe he subsequently almost persuaded English politicians to accept, though in 1852 it was a mere flippant novelty, a paradox, and a heresy) that free institutions are apt to succeed with a stupid people, and to founder with a ready-witted and vivacious one. After broaching this, he goes on:—

‘I see you are surprised. You are going to say to me as
Socrates did to Polus, “My young friend, _of course_ you are
right, but will you explain what you mean, as you are not yet
intelligible?” I will do so as well as I can, and endeavour to
make good what I say, not from a prior demonstration of my own,
but from the details of the present and the facts of history.
Not to begin by wounding any present susceptibilities, let me
take the Roman character, for, with one great exception—I need
not say to whom I allude—they are the great political people
of history. Now is not a certain dulness their most visible
characteristic? What is the history of their speculative
mind? A blank. What their literature? A copy. They have left
not a single discovery in any abstract science, not a single
perfect or well-formed work of high imagination. The Greeks,
the perfection of human and accomplished genius, bequeathed
to mankind the ideal forms of self-idolising art; the Romans
imitated and admired. The Greeks explained the laws of nature;
the Romans wondered and despised. The Greeks invented a system
of numerals second only to that now in use; the Romans counted
to the end of their days with the clumsy apparatus which
we still call by their name. The Greeks made a capital and
scientific calendar; the Romans began their month when the
Pontifex Maximus happened to spy out the new moon. Throughout
Latin literature this is the perpetual puzzle—Why are we free
and they slaves?—we prætors and they barbers? Why do the stupid
people always win and the clever people always lose? I need
not say that in real sound stupidity the English people are
unrivalled. You’ll have more wit, and better wit, in an Irish
street-row than would keep Westminster Hall in humour for five
weeks.... These valuable truths are no discoveries of mine.
They are familiar enough to people whose business it is to
know them. Hear what a douce and aged attorney says of your
peculiarly promising barrister. “Sharp? Oh! yes, yes: he’s too
sharp by half. He isn’t _safe_, not a minute, isn’t that young
man.” “What style, sir,” asked of an East India Director some
youthful aspirant for literary renown, “is most to be preferred
in the composition of official despatches?” “My good fellow,”
responded the ruler of Hindostan, “the style _as we_ like, is
the Humdrum.”’[11]

The permanent value of these papers is due to the freshness of their impressions of the French capital, and their true criticisms of Parisian journalism and society; their perverseness consists in this, that Bagehot steadily ignored in them the distinction between the duty of resisting anarchy, and the assumption of the Prince-President that this could only be done by establishing his own dynasty, and deferring _sine die_ that great constitutional experiment which is now once more, no thanks to him or his Government, on its trial; an experiment which, for anything we see, had at least as good a chance then as now, and under a firm and popular chief of the executive like Prince Louis, would probably have had a better chance then than it has now under MacMahon. I need hardly say that in later life Bagehot was by no means blind to the political shortcomings of Louis Napoleon’s _régime_, as the article republished from the _Economist_, in the second appendix to this volume, sufficiently proves. Moreover, he rejoiced heartily in the moderation of the republican statesmen during the severe trials of the months which just preceded his own death, in 1877, and expressed his sincere belief—confirmed by the history of the last year and a half—that the existing Republic has every prospect of life and growth.

During that residence in Paris, Bagehot, though, as I have said, in a somewhat cynical frame of mind, was full of life and courage, and was beginning to feel his own genius, which perhaps accounts for the air of recklessness so foreign to him, which he never adopted either before or since. During the riots he was a good deal in the streets, and from a mere love of art helped the Parisians to construct some of their barricades, notwithstanding the fact that his own sympathy was with those who shot down the barricades, not with those who manned them. He climbed over the rails of the Palais Royal on the morning of December 2nd to breakfast, and used to say that he was the only person who did breakfast there on that day. Victor Hugo is certainly wrong in asserting that no one expected Louis Napoleon to use force, and that the streets were as full as usual when the people were shot down, for the gates of the Palais Royal were shut quite early in the day. Bagehot was very much struck by the ferocious look of the Montagnards.

‘Of late,’ he wrote to me, ‘I have been devoting my entire
attention to the science of barricades, which I found amusing.
They have systematised it in a way which is pleasing to the
cultivated intellect. We had only one good day’s fighting,
and I naturally kept out of cannon-shot. But I took a quiet
walk over the barricades in the morning, and superintended the
construction of three with as much keenness as if I had been
clerk of the works. You’ve seen lots, of course, at Berlin, but
I should not think those Germans were up to a real Montagnard,
who is the most horrible being to the eye I ever saw,—sallow,
sincere, sour fanaticism, with grizzled moustaches, and a
strong wish to shoot you rather than not. The Montagnards are a
scarce commodity, the real race—only three or four, if so many,
to a barricade. If you want a Satan any odd time, they’ll do;
only I hope that _he_ don’t believe in human brotherhood. It
is not possible to respect any one who does, and I should be
loth to confound the notion of _our_ friend’s solitary grandeur
by supposing him to fraternise,’ &c. ‘I think M. Buonaparte is
entitled to great praise. He has very good heels to his boots,
and the French just want treading down, and nothing else—calm,
cruel, business-like oppression, to take the dogmatic conceit
out of their heads. The spirit of generalisation which, John
Mill tells us, honourably distinguishes the French mind, has
come to this, that every Parisian wants his head _tapped_ in
order to get the formulæ and nonsense out of it. And it would
pay to perform the operation, for they are very clever on what
is within the limit of their experience, and all that can be
“expanded” in terms of it, but beyond, it is all generalisation
and folly.... So I am for any carnivorous government.’

And again, in the same letter:—

‘Till the Revolution came I had no end of trouble to find
conversation, but now they’ll talk against everybody, and
against the President like mad—and they talk immensely well,
and the language is like a razor, capital if you are skilful,
but sure to cut you if you aren’t. A fellow can talk German
in crude forms, and I don’t see it sounds any worse, but this
stuff is horrid unless you get it _quite_ right. A French lady
made a striking remark to me:—“_C’est une révolution qui a
sauvé la France. Tous mes amis sont mis en prison_.” She was
immensely delighted that such a pleasing way of saving her
country had been found.’

Of course the style of these familiar private letters conveys a gross caricature not only of Bagehot’s maturer mind, but even of the judgment of the published letters, and I quote them only to show that at the time when he composed these letters on the _coup d’état_, Bagehot’s mood was that transient mood of reckless youthful cynicism through which so many men of genius pass. I do not think he had at any time any keen sympathy with the multitude, _i.e._, with masses of unknown men. And that he ever felt what has since then been termed ‘the enthusiasm of humanity,’ the sympathy with ‘the toiling millions of men sunk in labour and pain,’ he himself would strenuously have denied. Such sympathy, even when men really desire to feel it, is, indeed, very much oftener coveted than actually felt by men as a living motive; and I am not quite sure that Bagehot would have even wished to feel it. Nevertheless, he had not the faintest trace of real hardness about him towards people whom he knew and understood. He could not bear to give pain; and when, in rare cases by youthful inadvertence, he gave it needlessly, I have seen how much and what lasting vexation it caused him. Indeed, he was capable of great sacrifices to spare his friends but a little suffering.

It was, I think, during his stay in Paris that Bagehot finally decided to give up the notion of practising at the Bar, and to join his father in the Somersetshire Bank and in his other business as a merchant and ship-owner. This involved frequent visits to London and Liverpool, and Bagehot soon began to take a genuine interest in the larger issues of commerce, and maintained to the end that ‘business is much more amusing than pleasure.’ Nevertheless, he could not live without the intellectual life of London, and never stayed more than six weeks at a time in the country without finding some excuse for going to town; and long before his death he made his home there. Hunting was the only sport he really cared for. He was a dashing rider, and a fresh wind was felt blowing through his earlier literary efforts, as though he had been thinking in the saddle, an effect wanting in his later essays, where you see chiefly the calm analysis of a lucid observer. But most of the ordinary amusements of young people he detested. He used to say that he wished he could think balls _wicked_, being so stupid as they were, and all ‘the little blue and pink girls, so like each other,’—a sentiment partly due, perhaps, to his extreme shortness of sight.

Though Bagehot never doubted the wisdom of his own decision to give up the law for the life of commerce, he thoroughly enjoyed his legal studies in his friend the late Mr. Justice Quain’s chambers, and in those of the present Vice-Chancellor Sir Charles Hall, and he learnt there a good deal that was of great use to him in later life. Moreover, in spite of his large capacity for finance and commerce, there were small difficulties in Bagehot’s way as a banker and merchant which he felt somewhat keenly. He was always absent-minded about _minutiæ_. For instance, to the last, he could not correct a proof well, and was sure to leave a number of small inaccuracies, harshnesses, and slipshodnesses in style, uncorrected. He declared at one time that he was wholly unable to ‘add up,’ and in his mathematical exercises in college he had habitually been inaccurate in trifles. I remember Professor Malden, on returning one of his Greek exercises, saying to him, with that curiously precise and emphatic articulation which made every remark of his go so much farther than that of our other lecturers, ‘Mr. Bagehot, you wage an internecine war with your aspirates’—not meaning, of course, that he ever left them out in pronunciation, but that he neglected to put them in in his written Greek. And to the last, even in his printed Greek quotations, the slips of this kind were always numerous. This habitual difficulty—due, I believe, to a preoccupied imagination—in attending to small details, made a banker’s duties seem irksome and formidable to him at first; and even to the last, in his most effective financial papers, he would generally get some one else to look after the precise figures for him. But in spite of all this, and in spite of a real attraction for the study of law, he was sure that his head would not stand the hot Courts and heavy wigs which make the hot Courts hotter, or the night-work of a thriving barrister in case of success; and he was certainly quite right. Indeed, had he chosen the Bar, he would have had no leisure for those two or three remarkable books which have made his reputation,—books which have been already translated into all the literary and some of the unliterary languages of Europe, and two of which are, I believe, used as text-books in some of the American Colleges.[12] Moreover, in all probability, his life would have been much shorter into the bargain. Soon after his return from Paris he devoted himself in earnest to banking and commerce, and also began that series of articles, first for the _Prospective_ and then for the _National Review_ (which latter periodical he edited in conjunction with me for several years), the most striking of which he republished in 1858, under the awkward and almost forbidding title of ‘Estimates of some Englishmen and Scotchmen’—a book which never attracted the attention it deserved, and which has been long out of print. In republishing most of these essays as I am now doing,—and a later volume may, I hope, contain those essays on statesmen and politicians which are for the present omitted from these,—it is perhaps only fair to say that Bagehot in later life used to speak ill, much too ill, of his own early style. He used to declare that his early style affected him like the ‘jogging of a cart without springs over a very rough road,’ and no doubt in his earliest essays something abrupt and spasmodic may easily be detected. Still, this was all so inextricably mingled with flashes of insight and humour which could ill be spared, that I always protested against any notion of so revising the essays as to pare down their excrescences.

I have never understood the comparative failure of this volume of Bagehot’s early essays; and a comparative failure it was, though I do not deny that, even at the time, it attracted much attention among the most accomplished writers of the day, and that I have been urged to republish it, as I am now doing, by many of the ablest men of my acquaintance. Obviously, as I have admitted, there are many faults of workmanship in it. Now and then the banter is forced. Often enough the style is embarrassed. Occasionally, perhaps, the criticism misses its mark, or is over-refined. But taken as a whole, I hardly know any book that is such good reading, that has so much lucid vision in it, so much shrewd and curious knowledge of the world, so sober a judgment and so dashing a humour combined. Take this, for instance, out of the paper on ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers,’ concerning the judgment passed by Lord Jeffrey on the poetry of Bagehot’s favourite poet, Wordsworth:—

‘The world has given judgment. Both Mr. Wordsworth and Lord
Jeffrey have received their rewards. The one had his own
generation—the laughter of men, the applause of drawing-rooms,
the concurrence of the crowd; the other, a succeeding age,
the fond enthusiasm of secret students, the lonely rapture of
lonely minds. And each has received according to his kind. If
all cultivated men speak differently because of the existence
of Wordsworth and Coleridge; if not a thoughtful English
book has appeared for years without some trace for good or
for evil of their influence; if sermon-writers subsist upon
their thoughts; if “sacred” poets thrive by translating their
weaker portions into the speech of women; if, when all this
is over, some sufficient part of their writing will ever be
fitting food for wild musing and solitary meditation, surely
this is because they possessed the inner nature—an “intense
and glowing mind”—“the vision and the faculty divine.” But,
if perchance in their weaker moments the great authors of the
Lyrical ballads did ever imagine that the world was to pause
because of their verses, that “Peter Bell” would be popular
in drawing-rooms, that “Christabel” would be perused in the
City, that people of fashion would make a hand-book of the
“Excursion,” it was well for them to be told at once that it
was not so. Nature ingeniously prepared a shrill artificial
voice, which spoke in season and out of season, enough and
more than enough, what will ever be the idea of the cities of
the plain concerning those who live alone among the mountains;
of the frivolous concerning the grave; of the gregarious
concerning the recluse; of those who laugh concerning those who
laugh not; of the common concerning the uncommon; of those who
lend on usury concerning those who lend not; the notions of the
world, of those whom it will not reckon among the righteous.
It said, “This won’t do.” And so in all times will the lovers
of polished Liberalism speak concerning the intense and lonely
“prophet.”’[13]

I choose that passage because it illustrates so perfectly Bagehot’s double vein, his sympathy with the works of high imagination, and his clear insight into that busy life which does not and cannot take note of works of high imagination, and which would not do the work it does, if it could. And this is the characteristic of all the essays. How admirably, for instance, in his essay on Shakespeare, does he draw out the individuality of a poet who is generally supposed to be so completely hidden in his plays; and with how keen a satisfaction does he discern and display the prosperous and practical man in Shakespeare—the qualities which made him a man of substance and a Conservative politician, as well as the qualities which made him a great dramatist and a great dreamer. No doubt Bagehot had a strong personal sympathy with the double life. Somersetshire probably never believed that the imaginative student, the omnivorous reader, could prosper as a banker and a man of business, and it was a satisfaction to him to show that he understood the world far better than the world had ever understood him. Again, how delicate is his delineation of Hartley Coleridge; how firm and clear his study of ‘Sir Robert Peel;’[14] and how graphically he paints the literary pageant of Gibbon’s tame but splendid genius! Certainly the literary taste of England never made a greater blunder than when it passed by this remarkable volume of essays with comparatively little notice.

In 1858 Bagehot married the eldest daughter of the Right Honourable James Wilson, who died two years later in India, whither he had gone as the financial member of the Indian Council, to reduce to some extent the financial anarchy which then prevailed there. This marriage gave Bagehot nineteen years of undisturbed happiness, and certainly led to the production of his most popular and original, if not in every respect his most brilliant books. It connected him with the higher world of politics, without which he would hardly have studied and written as he did on the English Constitution; and by making him the Editor of the _Economist_ it compelled him to give his whole mind as much to the theoretic side of commerce and finance, as his own duties had already compelled him to give it to the practical side. But when I speak of his marriage as the last impulse which determined his chief work in life, I do not forget that he had long been prepared both for political and for financial speculation by his early education. His father, a man of firm and deliberate political convictions, had taken a very keen interest in the agitation for the great Reform Bill of 1832, and had materially helped to return a Liberal member for his county after it passed. Probably no one in all England knew the political history of the country since the peace more accurately than he. Bagehot often said that when he wanted any detail concerning the English political history of the last half-century, he had only to ask his father, to obtain it. His uncle, Mr. Vincent Stuckey, too, was a man of the world, and his house in Langport was a focus of many interests during Bagehot’s boyhood. Mr. Stuckey had begun life at the Treasury, and was at one time private secretary to Mr. Huskisson; and when he gave up that career to take a leading share in the Somersetshire Bank, he kept up for a long time his house in London, and his relations with political society there. He was fond of his nephew, as was Bagehot of him; and there was always a large field of interests, and often there were men of eminence, to be found in his house. Thus Bagehot had been early prepared for the wider field of political and financial thought, to which he gave up so much of his time after his marriage.

I need not say nearly as much on this later aspect of Bagehot’s life as I have done on its early and more purely literary aspects, because his services in this direction are already well appreciated by the public. But this I should like to point out, that he could never have written as he did on the English Constitution without having acutely studied living statesmen and their ways of acting on each other; that his book was essentially the book of a most realistic, because a most vividly imaginative, observer of the actual world of politics—the book of a man who was not blinded by habit and use to the enormous difficulties in the way of ‘government by public meeting,’ and to the secret of the various means by which in practice those difficulties had been attenuated or surmounted. It is the book of a meditative man who had mused much on the strange workings of human instincts, no less than of a quick observer who had seen much of external life. Had he not studied the men before he studied the institutions, had he not concerned himself with individual statesmen before he turned his attention to the mechanism of our Parliamentary system, he could never have written his book on ‘the English Constitution.’

I think the same may be said of his book on ‘Physics and Politics,’ a book in which I find new force and depth every time I take it up afresh. It is true that Bagehot had a keen sympathy with natural science, that he devoured all Mr. Darwin’s and Mr. Wallace’s books, and many of a much more technical kind, as, for example, Professor Huxley’s on the ‘Principles of Physiology,’ and grasped the leading ideas contained in them with a firmness and precision that left nothing to be desired. But after all, ‘Physics and Politics’ could never have been written without that sort of living insight into man which was the life of all his earlier essays. The notion that a ‘cake of custom,’ of rigid, inviolable law, was the first requisite for a strong human society, and that the very cause which was thus essential for the _first_ step of progress—the step towards unity—was the great danger of the second step—the step out of uniformity—and was the secret of all arrested and petrified civilisations, like the Chinese, is an idea which first germinated in Bagehot’s mind at the time he was writing his cynical letters from Paris about stupidity being the first requisite of a political people; though I admit, of course, that it could not have borne the fruit it did, without Mr. Darwin’s conception of a natural selection through conflict, to help it on. Such passages as the following could evidently never have been written by a mere student of Darwinian literature, nor without the trained imagination exhibited in Bagehot’s literary essays:—

‘No one will ever comprehend the arrested civilisations unless
he sees the strict dilemma of early society. Either men had
no law at all and lived in confused tribes, hardly hanging
together, or they had to obtain a fixed law by processes of
incredible difficulty. Those who surmounted that difficulty
soon destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not.
And then they themselves were caught in their own yoke. The
customary discipline which could only be imposed on any early
men by terrible sanctions, continued with those sanctions, and
killed out of the whole society the propensities to variation
which are the principle of progress. Experience shows how
incredibly difficult it is to get men really to encourage the
principle of originality;’[15]

and, as Bagehot held, for a very good reason, namely, that without a long accumulated and inherited tendency to discourage originality, society would never have gained the cohesion requisite for effective common action against its external foes. No one, I think, who had not studied as Bagehot had in actual life, first, the vast and unreasoning Conservatism of politically strong societies, like that of rural England, and next, the perilous mobility and impressibility of politically weak societies, like that of Paris, would ever have seen as he did the close connection of these ideas with Mr. Darwin’s principle of natural selection by conflict. And here I may mention, by way of illustrating this point, that Bagehot delighted in observing and expounding the bovine slowness of rural England in acquiring a new idea. Somersetshire, he used to boast, would not subscribe 1,000_l._ ‘to be represented by an archangel;’ and in one letter which I received from him during the Crimean War, he narrated with great gusto an instance of the tenacity with which a Somersetshire rustic stuck to his own notion of what was involved in conquering an enemy. ‘The Somersetshire view,’ he wrote, ‘of the chance of bringing the war to a successful conclusion is as follows:—_Countryman_: “How old, zir, be the Zar?”—_Myself_: “About sixty-three.”—_Countryman_: “Well, now, I can’t think however they be to take he. They do tell I that Rooshia is a very big place, and if he doo goo right into the middle of’n, you could not take he, not nohow.” I talked till the train came (it was at a station), and endeavoured to show how the war might be finished without capturing the Czar, but I fear without effect. At last he said, “Well, zir, I hope, _as you do say, zir_, we shall take he,” as I got into the carriage.’ It is clear that the humorous delight which Bagehot took in this tenacity and density of rural conceptions, was partly the cause of the attention which he paid to the subject. No doubt there was in him a vein of purely instinctive sympathy with this density, for intellectually he could not even have understood it. Writing on the intolerable and fatiguing cleverness of French journals, he describes in one of his Paris letters the true enjoyment he felt in reading a thoroughly stupid article in the _Herald_ (a Tory paper now no more), and I believe he was quite sincere. It was, I imagine, a real pleasure to him to be able to preach, in his last general work, that a ‘cake of custom,’ just sufficiently stiff to make innovation of any kind very difficult, but not quite stiff enough to make it impossible, is the true condition of durable progress.

The coolness of his judgment, and his power of seeing both sides of a question, undoubtedly gave Bagehot’s political opinions considerable weight with both parties, and I am quite aware that a great majority of the ablest political thinkers of the time would disagree with me when I say, that personally I do not rate Bagehot’s sagacity as a practical politician nearly so highly as I rate his wise analysis of the growth and _rationale_ of political institutions. Everything he wrote on the politics of the day was instructive, but, to my mind at least, seldom decisive, and, as I thought, often not true. He did not feel, and avowed that he did not feel, much sympathy with the masses, and he attached far too much relative importance to the refinement of the governing classes. That, no doubt, is most desirable, if you can combine it with a genuine consideration for the interests of ‘the toiling millions of men sunk in labour and pain.’ But experience, I think, sufficiently shows that they are often, perhaps even generally, incompatible; and that democratic governments of very low tone may consult more adequately the leading interests of the ‘dim common populations’ than aristocratic governments of very high calibre. Bagehot hardly admitted this, and always seemed to me to think far more of the intellectual and moral tone of governments, than he did of the intellectual and moral interests of the people governed.

Again, those who felt most profoundly Bagehot’s influence as a political thinker, would probably agree with me that it was his leading idea in politics to discourage anything like too much action of any kind, legislative or administrative, and most of all anything like an ambitious colonial or foreign policy. This was not owing to any _doctrinaire_ adhesion to the principle of _laissez-faire_. He supported, hesitatingly no doubt, but in the end decidedly, the Irish Land Bill, and never belonged to that straitest sect of the Economists who decry, as contrary to the laws of economy, and little short of a crime, the intervention of Government in matters which the conflict of individual self-interests might possibly be trusted to determine. It was from a very different point of view that he was so anxious to deprecate ambitious policies, and curb the practical energies of the most energetic of peoples. Next to Clough, I think that Sir George Cornewall Lewis had the most powerful influence over him in relation to political principles. There has been no statesman in our time whom he liked so much or regretted so deeply; and he followed him most of all in deprecating the greater part of what is called political _energy_. Bagehot held with Sir George Lewis that men in modern days do a great deal too much; that half the public actions, and a great many of the private actions of men, had better never have been done; that modern statesmen and modern peoples are far too willing to burden themselves with responsibilities. He held, too, that men have not yet sufficiently verified the principles on which action ought to proceed, and that till they have done so, it would be better far to act less. Lord Melbourne’s habitual query, ‘Can’t you let it alone?’ seemed to him, as regarded all new responsibilities, the wisest of hints for our time. He would have been glad to find a fair excuse for giving up India, for throwing the Colonies on their own resources, and for persuading the English people to accept deliberately the place of a fourth or fifth-rate European power—which was not, in his estimation, a cynical or unpatriotic wish, but quite the reverse, for he thought that such a course would result in generally raising the calibre of the national mind, conscience, and taste. In his ‘Physics and Politics’ he urges generally, as I have before pointed out, that the practical energy of existing peoples in the West is far in advance of the knowledge that would alone enable them to turn that energy to good account. He wanted to see the English a more leisurely race, taking more time to consider all their actions, and suspending their decisions on all great policies and enterprises till either these were well matured, or, as he expected it to be in the great majority of cases, the opportunity for sensational action was gone by. He quotes from Clough what really might have been taken as the motto of his own political creed:—

‘Old things need not be therefore true,
O brother men, nor yet the new;
Ah, still awhile, th’ old thought retain,
And yet consider it again.’

And in all this, if it were advanced rather as a principle of education than as a principle of political practice, there would be great force. But when he applied this teaching, not to the individual but to the State, not to encourage the gradual formation of a new type of character, but to warn the nation back from a multitude of practical duties of a simple though arduous kind, such as those, for example, which we have undertaken in India—duties, the value of which, performed even as they are, could hardly be overrated, if only because they involve so few debatable and doubtful assumptions, and are only the elementary tasks of the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the civilisation of the future—I think Bagehot made the mistake of attaching far too little value to the moral instincts of a sagacious people, and too much to the refined deductions of a singularly subtle intellect. I suspect that the real effect of suddenly stopping the various safety-valves, by which the spare energy of our nation is diverted to the useful work of roughly civilising other lands, would be, not to stimulate the deliberative understanding of the English people, but to stunt its thinking as well as its acting powers, and render it more frivolous and more vacant-minded than it is.

In the field of economy there are so many thinkers who are far better judges of Bagehot’s invaluable work than myself, that I will say a very few words indeed upon it. It is curious, but I believe it to be almost universally true, that what may be called the primitive impulse of all economic _action_, is generally also strong in great economic _thinkers_ and financiers—I mean the saving, or at least the anti-spending, instinct. It is very difficult to see why it should be so, but I think it _is_ so. No one was more large-minded in his view of finance than Bagehot. He preached that, in the case of a rich country like England, efficiency was vastly more important than the mere reduction of expenditure, and held that Mr. Gladstone and other great Chancellors of the Exchequer made a great deal too much of saving for saving’s sake. None the less he himself had the anti-spending instinct in some strength, and he was evidently pleased to note its existence in his favourite economic thinker, Ricardo. Generous as Bagehot was—and no one ever hesitated less about giving largely for an adequate end—he always told me, even in boyhood, that spending was disagreeable to him, and that it took something of an effort to pay away money. In a letter before me, he tells his correspondent of the marriage of an acquaintance, and adds that the lady is a Dissenter, ‘and therefore probably rich. Dissenters don’t spend, _and quite right too_.’ I suppose it takes some feeling of this kind to give the intellect of a man of high capacity that impulse towards the study of the laws of the increase of wealth, without which men of any imagination would be more likely to turn in other directions. Nevertheless, even as an economist, Bagehot’s most original writing was due less to his deductions from the fundamental axioms of the modern science, than to that deep insight into men which he had gained in many different fields. The essays, published in the _Fortnightly Review_ for February and May 1876[16]—in which he showed so powerfully how few of the conditions of the science known to us as ‘political economy’ have ever been really applicable to any large portion of the globe during the longest periods of human history—furnish quite an original study in social history and in human nature. His striking book, ‘Lombard Street,’ is quite as much a study of bankers and bill-brokers as of the principles of banking. Take, again, Bagehot’s view of the intellectual position and value of the capitalist classes. Every one who knows his writings in the _Economist_, knows how he ridiculed the common impression that the chief service of the capitalist class—that by which they _earn_ their profits—is merely what the late Mr. Senior used to call ‘abstinence,’ that is, the practice of deferring their enjoyment of their savings in order that those savings may multiply themselves; and knows too how inadequate he thought it, merely to add that when capitalists are themselves managers, they discharge the task of ‘superintending labour’ as well. Bagehot held that the capitalists of a commercial country do—not merely the saving, and the work of foremen in superintending labour, but all the difficult intellectual work of commerce besides, and are so little appreciated as they are, chiefly because they are a dumb class who are seldom equal to explaining to others the complex processes by which they estimate the wants of the community, and conceive how best to supply them. He maintained that capitalists are the great generals of commerce, that they plan its whole strategy, determine its tactics, direct its commissariat, and incur the danger of great defeats, as well as earn, if they do not always gain, the credit of great victories.

Here again is a new illustration of the light which Bagehot’s keen insight into men, taken in connection with his own intimate understanding of the commercial field, brought into his economic studies. He brought life into these dry subjects from almost every side; for instance, in writing to the _Spectator_, many years ago, about the cliff scenery of Cornwall, and especially about the petty harbour of Boscastle, with its fierce sea and its two breakwaters—which leave a mere ‘Temple Bar’ for the ships to get in at—a harbour of which he says that ‘the principal harbour of Liliput probably had just this look,’—he goes back in imagination at once to the condition of the country at the time when a great number of such petty harbours as these were essential to such trade as there was, and shows that at that time the Liverpool and London docks not only could not have been built for want of money, but would have been of no use if they had been built, since the auxiliary facilities which alone make such emporia useful did not exist. ‘Our old gentry built on their own estates as they could, and if their estates were near some wretched little haven, they were much pleased. The sea was the railway of those days. It brought, as it did to Ellangowan, in Dirk Hatteraick’s time, brandy for the men and pinners for the women, to the loneliest of coast castles.’ It was by such vivid illustrations as this of the conditions of a very different commercial life from our own, that Bagehot lit up the ‘dismal science,’ till in his hands it became both picturesque and amusing.

Bagehot made two or three efforts to get into Parliament, but after an illness which he had in 1868 he deliberately abandoned the attempt, and held, I believe rightly, that his political judgment was all the sounder, as well as his health the better, for a quieter life. Indeed, he used to say of himself that it would be very difficult for him to find a borough which would be willing to elect him its representative, because he was ‘between sizes in politics.’ Nevertheless in 1866 he was very nearly elected for Bridgewater, but was by no means pleased that he was so near success, for he stood to lose, not to win, in the hope that if he and his party were really quite pure, he might gain the seat on petition. He did his very best, indeed, to secure purity, though he failed. As a speaker, he did not often succeed. His voice had no great compass, and his manner was somewhat odd to ordinary hearers; but at Bridgewater he was completely at his ease, and his canvass and public speeches were decided successes. His examination, too, before the Commissioners sent down a year or two later to inquire into the corruption of Bridgewater was itself a great success. He not only entirely defeated the somewhat eagerly pressed efforts of one of the Commissioners, Mr. Anstey, to connect him with the bribery, but he drew a most amusing picture of the bribable electors whom he had seen only to shun. I will quote a little bit from the evidence he gave in reply to what Mr. Anstey probably regarded as home-thrusts:—

‘42,018. (_Mr. Anstey._) Speaking from your experience of
those streets, when you went down them canvassing, did any
of the people say anything to you, or in your hearing, about
money?—Yes, one I recollect standing at the door, who said,
“I won’t vote for gentlefolks unless they do something for
I. Gentlefolks do not come to I unless they want something
of I, and I won’t do nothing for gentlefolks, unless they do
something for me.” Of course, I immediately retired out of that
house.

‘42,019. That man did not give you his promise?—I retired
immediately; he stood in the doorway sideways, as these rustics
do.

‘42,020. Were there many such instances?—One or two, I
remember. One suggested that I might have a place. I
immediately retired from him.

‘42,021. Did anybody of a better class than those voters,
privately, of course, expostulate with you against your
resolution to be pure?—No, nobody ever came to me at all.

‘42,022. But those about you, did any of them say anything
of this kind: “Mr. Bagehot, you are quite wrong in putting
purity of principles forward. It will not do if the other side
bribes?”—I might have been told that I should be unsuccessful
in the stream of conversation; many people may have told me
that; that is how I gathered that if the other side was impure
and we were pure, I should be beaten.

‘42,023. Can you remember the names of any who told you
that?—No, I cannot, but I daresay I was told by as many as
twenty people, and we went upon that entire consideration.’

To leave my subject without giving some idea of Bagehot’s racy conversation would be a sin. He inherited this gift, I believe, in great measure from his mother, to whose stimulating teaching in early life he probably owed also a great deal of his rapidity of thought. A lady who knew him well, says that one seldom asked him a question without his answer making you either think or laugh, or both think and laugh together. And this is the exact truth. His habitual phraseology was always vivid. He used to speak, for instance, of the minor people, the youths or admirers who collect round a considerable man, as his ‘fringe.’ It was he who invented the phrase ‘padding,’ to denote the secondary kind of article, not quite of the first merit, but with interest and value of its own, with which a judicious editor will fill up perhaps three-quarters of his review. If you asked him what he thought on a subject on which he did not happen to have read or thought at all, he would open his large eyes and say, ‘My mind is “to let” on that subject, pray tell me what to think;’ though you soon found that this might be easier attempted than done. He used to say banteringly to his mother, by way of putting her off at a time when she was anxious for him to marry, ‘A man’s mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.’ He told me once, at a time when the _Spectator_ had perhaps been somewhat more eager or sanguine on political matters than he approved, that he always got his wife to ‘break’ it to him on the Saturday morning, as he found it too much for his nerves to encounter its views without preparation. Then his familiar antitheses not unfrequently reminded me of Dickens’s best touches in that line. He writes to a friend, ‘Tell —— that his policies went down in the _Colombo_, but were fished up again. _They are dirty, but valid._’ I remember asking him if he had enjoyed a particular dinner which he had rather expected to enjoy, but he replied, ‘No, the sherry was bad; tasted as if L—— had dropped his h’s into it.’ His practical illustrations, too, were full of wit. In his address to the Bridgewater constituency, on the occasion when he was defeated by eight votes, he criticised most happily the sort of bribery which ultimately resulted in the disfranchisement of the place.

‘I can make allowance,’ he said, ‘for the poor voter; he is
most likely ill-educated, certainly ill-off, and a little
money is a nice treat to him. What he does is wrong, but it
is intelligible. What I do not understand is the position
of the rich, respectable, virtuous members of a party which
countenances these things. They are like the man who stole
stinking fish; they commit a crime, and they get no benefit.’

But perhaps the best illustration I can give of his more sardonic humour was his remark to a friend who had a church in the grounds near his house:—‘Ah, you’ve got the church in the grounds! I like that. It’s well the tenants shouldn’t be _quite_ sure that the landlord’s power stops with this world.’ And his more humorous exaggerations were very happy. I remember his saying of a man who was excessively fastidious in rejecting under-done meat, that he once sent away a cinder ‘because it was red;’ and he confided gravely to an early friend that when he was in low spirits, it cheered him to go down to the bank, and dabble his hand in a heap of sovereigns. But his talk had finer qualities than any of these. One of his most intimate friends—both in early life, and later in Lincoln’s Inn—Mr. T. Smith Osler, writes to me of it thus:—

‘As an instrument for arriving at truth, I never knew anything
like a talk with Bagehot. It had just the quality which the
farmers desiderated in the claret, of which they complained
that though it was very nice, it brought them “no forrader;”
for Bagehot’s conversation did get you forward, and at a most
amazing pace. Several ingredients went to this; the foremost
was his power of getting to the heart of the subject, taking
you miles beyond your starting point in a sentence, generally
by dint of sinking to a deeper stratum. The next was his
instantaneous appreciation of the bearing of everything you
yourself said, making talk with him, as Roscoe once remarked,
“like riding a horse with a perfect mouth.” But most unique of
all was his power of keeping up animation without combat. I
never knew a power of discussion, of co operative investigation
of truth, to approach to it. It was all stimulus, and yet no
contest.’