BOOKS

A Walk in Parliament Street

By RICHARD WOLLHE1M

TN his preface to this meticulous anthology I of Walter Bagehot* Mr. Norman St. John- Stevas lets us in on the various stages by which he came to the task. The 'final impetus' which 'drove' him to read Bagehot's works was, it appears, an essay by Mr. G. M. Young called The Greatest Victorian, in which, having con- sidered the claims of George Eliot, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Darwin and Ruskin to that title, he passes them all over in favour of Bagehot. Mr. Young had written : We arc looking for a man who was in and of his age, and who could have been of no other; a man with sympathy to share, and genius to judge, its sentiments and movements; a man not too illustrious or too consummate to be companionable, but one, nevertheless, whose ideas took root and are still bearing; whose in- fluence, passing from one fit mind to another, could transmit, and still impart, the most precious moments in Victorian civilisation, its robust and masculine sanity. Such a man there was : and I award the place to Walter Bagehot.

Is this mellifluous claim justified? BagehOt is by now a half-forgotten writer; he occupies, I suspect, a larger place in dictionaries of quotations than in histories of thought. Is a man of Mr. St. John- Stevas's energy and learning gainfully employed in disinterring him?

The most striking thing about Bagehot was his immense intelligence: to start reading him is immediately to find oneself in communication with a powerful mind—and 'communication' is just the word, for it is a characteristic of Bagehot's style that he manages to capture and set down in what seems at first sedate prose the directness, the inventiveness, the rapidity, the amusement of clever conversation. But though he was highly intelligent, he was by no means an intellectual. In neither economics, politics nor literature did he have much time for theory, and he believed that the proper field for intelligence was the world of affairs. Of course, practicality could go too far, and the claims of leisure and contemplation be cruelly overridden; but there was always this to be said for business, that it en- gaged the whole man in a way that the intellectual life never could. Books are of immense, value, but to extract their value one must know and like and indeed admire those things .which they are about : 'those who really enjoy the best books,' he wrote, 'take an interest in human life, con- cerning which these books are entirely written : and it is not likely that such will be content to hear in the cloister the second-hand stories of others when the gates are open, the train passes by, and in an hour they can walk in Parliament Street themselves.'

Nor did the private life, the life of personal relations, possess much appeal for Bagehot. He was a great admirer of Wordsworth and believed that solitary, contemplation with Nature was a

WALTER BAGEHOT A STUDY OF HIS LIFE AND HOUGHT TOGETHER WITH A SELECTION FROM HIS POLITICAL WRITINGS. By NOrman St. John-Stevas. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 36s.) way of communing directly with God. But the life of personal communication and friendship he saw as perhaps a necessity, but certainly not as a value, of life itself. In a revealing essay on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (reprinted here) he discusses the merits and defects of eighteenth- century London society. Its great merit, he says, was its 'intellectuality,' by which he didn't mean mere cleverness, tout the fact that everything in it was discussed in political terms, in 'the fanguage of political business.' Its great defect, the defect of all aristocratic societies, was its 'frivolity,' by which he meant specifically its interest in personal relations and intrigue. 'All talk has tended to become gossip; it has ceased to deal with im- portant subjects, and has devoted itself entirely to unimportant incidents. Whether the Due de — has more or less prevailed with the Marquise de — is a sort of common form into which any details may be fitted, and any names inserted.' What, one wonders, would Bagehot have said, if one had inserted the names of the Duc de Nemours and the Princesse de Cleves? One won- ders only momentarily, for it is too easy to guess.

Bagehot, with his immense intelligence, his pre- occupation with activity, his practical attitude towards art, his rejection of the personal life, his indifference to theory and scholarship, belongs to a type that, as the nineteenth century wore on, became increasingly defined. At least one in- stitution in one of the older universities specialised in its production. And that type is best known as the Higher Philistine. 'Philistine' in that it turns its back successively on the values of the intellect, of art, of privacy, and substitutes the values of the world : 'higher' in that it does not pick up the values of the world, as many do, carelessly, engagingly perhaps, in the world itself, but adopts them, knowingly and deliberately, on principle, in the study. 'The appeal of Bagehot, both as a man and, as a writer, is,' according to Mr. St. John-Stevas, 'irresistible.'

But, it may be urged, such objections to Bagehot are ludicrously aesthetic. For, whatever their ulti- mate human defects may be, he and his type are invaluable in that sphere of life to which they have dedicated themselves and by whose standards they should be judged. Political life depends for its sanity, its integrity, indeed its existence, on the , existence of a number of wry, detached, clever, unimpressible, uninflammable men of the world, possessed of a certain sense of order and tradition, who can see things as they are and will see to it that they are not otherwise without good reason.

The plea for 'conservative realism' or 'realistic conservatism' is again in the air, and the case of Bagehot is as good an opportunity as any other for reconsidering it. We may ask two questions. Was Bagehot a significant political thinker? If he wasn't, were the .significant political thinkers of his age of the same cast of mind? The answer to both questions is, No.

Let us in assessing Bagehot do him the courtesy of adopting a 'realistic' criterion of signifiqance, and instead (A. praising him for vague qbalities like shrewdness and insight and common sense, ask what propositions he asserted that were both true and interesting. Mr. St. John-Stevas's selection provides us with enough material on which to base a reasoned judgment.

In _Physics and Politics he presents his most general speculation about politics in the form of

laws describing social evolution : praised as a bold attempt to apply Darwinian theory to society, these laws seldom rise above the level of Toynbeean tautology. 'In every particular state of the world, the nations which are strongest tend to prevail over the others.' On the next line of generality, we have Bagehot's views about democracy, which seem straightforwardly contra- dictory. For on the one hand Bagehot asserted that 'the most essential mental quality for a free people' is 'much stupidity': on the other hand, he objected to 'ultra-democracy'—by which he meant democracy—because under it 'the rich and wise are not to have . . . more votes than the .poor and stupid.' The only way of resolving the contradiction would be to assume that Bagehot,

like most conservatives, liked and admired the, stupidity of the upper classes and disliked and

feared the stupidity of the lower classes : an assumption which is confirmed by the fact that when Bagehot came to electoral reform, the only way he could think of getting the kind of elec- torate he wanted was a property qualification. Further, Bagehot never saw that the spread of democracy would mean the spread of education, and therefore a more intelligent working class.

Bagehot's great political work is thought to be The English Constitution. The most general

proposition he asserted there—that the English constitution is not an example either of the Separation of Powers or of a mixed government —was true but not new : it had been asserted nearly a hundred years before by a thinker whom those who admire Bagehot tend not to admire : Bentham. Secondly, Bagehot suggested his own analysis of the constitution into the 'efficient' and the 'dignified' elements. The idea is good, but Bagehot's application of it is marred by two :serious errors. On the one hand, he thought that those two elements appealed, respectively, to the

educated and the uneducated sections of the population, and failed to see the general psycho-

logical significance of ceremony. On the other hand,'he was quite wrong in the way he divided up the constitution between those two elements; for he regarded the monarchy of his day as alto- gether deprived of 'efficiency,', whereas we now know that Queen Victoria was a highly partisan

sovereign, and he absurdly underrated the power and vigour of the Lords. Thirdly, Bagehot asserted that the main function of the House of Commons was to choose the Prime Minister; this was false even in his own day, for nomination" . already lay jointly with the party and with the electorate; and if Bagehot had . really been prescient he would have foreseen the growing power of the, party in a democracy.

There are, of course, many interesting and just and enjoyable observations in Bagehot's writings, as is to be expected of a man so intelligent and so articulate, but none of it amounts to a serious vision of what was going on around him.

If we want that, we must move outside the charmed circle of 'superior,' urbane knowingness and consult the committed thinkers to whom Bagehot always felt 'inclined to say "Go 'home, Sir, and take a dose of salts, and see if it won't clear it all out of 'you"': Gladstone, Mill, Ruskin, even in his crazy way Carlyle. To 'realists' like Bagehot it is granted to become judges, am- bassadors, respected bankers, editors of serious papers, drawing-room sages : they affect the world a little, at the edges, laugh at it somewhat, and the world has the last laugh.