BOOKS.
WALTER BAGEHOT.* No writer of the Victorian era whose work was principally done in weekly reviews or occasional articles has had an influence comparable with Bagehot's in shaping the thoughts of his countrymen. Thirty years before his death his greatest friend, R. H. Hutton—through whom Bagehot was intimately associated with the Spectator—prophesied that he would have a permanent influence "over us all as a nation "; and today we find Bagehot held in higher esteem than ever. A complete edition of his works is shortly to be issued by the publishers of this biography. The United States, we believe, has already led the way with a complete edition. During the last eighteen months, as Mrs. Russell Barrington—Bagehoes sister-in-law—tells us, many thousand copies of one of Bagehoes books, The English Constitution, hare been sold. The structure, and even the exact language, of Bagehot's thought hare been accepted -so widely among political journalists that frequently his ideas and his happy phrases are reproduced unconsciously. While thin result is not more than justice to Bagehot, it does some credit to the perception of those who voluntarily, if gradually, have chosen for their lasting instruction what was never forced upon them. Bagehot wrote on grave subjects. But no English journalist ever lightened gravity, so to speak, with such ease and such captivating turns of thought as he did. He could make even the "gloomy science" a thing of dash and gaiety, without injuring his sense of its importance.
The secret of his power was that he always made, as Lord Bryce says (using Aristotle's phrase about Plato), a "new cut" into things. He could not look at a subject, or a fresh situation in politics or finance, without instantly perceiving that a-fundamental principle was tied up in it, and entertaining both himself and his friends by applying that principle to the life immediately around him. We must quote Lord Bryce, for what he says is very good :— "Two features in him used to strike me which do not always go with originality. One was his wit, which played quickly sad lightly round the least promising materials, a wit that never seemed forced, but scintillated as naturally as sunshine is reflected from crystaL The other was the soundness of his judgment. Original minds often find paradox a good way of showing the hollowness or inadequacy of current doctrines and are apt to carry it to excess. Bagehot used this expedient effectively but sparingly, and only when the paradox contained at least a substantial kernel • LW. of Wolter Bengsket. By Mrs. Rumell Barzio_gton. With Portraits wad othertmk„..zroes. -London; Louvre:wand CO. Elks. lid. wt.) of truth. In his hands the method never lost its value by de- generating into a habit. Nor did he, like not a few men who have been both ingenious and fertile, cease to discriminate between the relative importance of the ideas he poured forth so profusely. Hie ingenuity never ran away with him. In the midst of brilliancy lie remained sober, wise, penetrating. Thus it is a epecial charm of hie writings that while you are carried en by the sense of novelty and vivacity you are all the time receiving the fruit of exact knowledge and solid thought. Few books have had more in- fluence than his in moulding the minds of students and suggesting new lines or methods of inquiry. Physics and Politics was, forty years ago, almost a voyage of discovery for most English madere.'
Bagehot's mind absorbed knowledge as a sponge water. Nothing human was foreign to him—literature, metaphysics mysticism, religion, economics, politics, history, poetry. Yet none of these things seemed to him important unless it really was human—that is to say, unless it was considered in its applications to the everyday lives of men and women. To many it seemed a paradox that when he became editor of the Economist he should publish reviews of verse and articles on pure literature in that journal; to anyone it must seem an unconventional departure, if delightful in its practice. But Bagehot was probably hardly conscious of any declension from the normal, because economics and literature were to him only varying aspects of men's attempts to cultivate and enrich the system which we have set about ourselves and call society. Literature, art, finance, politics, overlap at innumerable points The Constitution has been drastically changed since Bagehot wrote, yet such was his enlightening method of dealing with principles that his book on The English Constitution may be read just as profitably to-day as when he wrote it. The same thing is true of his two other most famous works, Lombard Street and Physics and Polities. Lombard Street is an exposi- tion of the principles of banking at once scientific and romantic. We see human needs, mental methods, moral con- duct, all reflected in the system which serves commerce and private life while it protects and preserves itself. We see into the soul of finance. This book about banking is also a book about life. Perhaps all this may be summed up by saying that Bagehot was a wise man with a sense of humour. Like Bastiat, he could make political economy entertaining; but he was more human than Bestial, He was humorous even more than he was witty. Sensitiveness and tender consideration were never sacrificed to the bright flash of words. T. Smith Osler described Bagehot's conversation in remarkable words which are reproduced in R. H. Hutton's Memoir of Bagehot :— " As an instrument for arriving at truth, I never knew anything like a talk with Bagehot. It had just the quality which the farmers deeiderated in the claret of which they complained that though it was very nice, it brought theta 'no forradoe ; 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 a 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 boring 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."
The value of Mrs. Russell Barrington's most interesting book is that it shows us more of the man in his private life, more details of the personality which has already been correctly enough described in its outlines. Indeed, Bagehot's character may be read in his own works. As Mr. Birrell has said, that is almost more true of Bagehot than of anyone. There are some delightful touches in Mrs. Russell Barring- ton's reminiscences which make one associate with Bagehot Pitt's words: "Anyone can talk sense. Can he talk non- sense? " We should like to develop the theme that anyone who is capable of talking first-rate nonsense must of absolute necessity be a man of sense. Bagehot might always be cited in proof. No one could fail to like the man who wrote to his mother that M. Meynieux, whom he had just visited in Paris, was "a round man, fit to bowl with." Or, again, take this captivating incident. When Bagehot visited for the first time the house of Mr. James Wilson, the founder and pro- prietor of the Economist, it was to talk over a aeries of articles on banking which Bagehot had proposed to write. He did not meet the young ladies of the household (one of whom -afterwards became his wife) till the next morning at breakfast, Then:they were startled by the behaviour of this young man, versed in the solemnities of banking, and political economy, who "turned big dark eyes quickly round " on them and said, as their GelMan governess went out of the room : "Your governess is like an egg !" Mrs. Russell Barrington adds : "We at once saw she was like an egg." A few years later, ishen Bagehot had just become engaged to Miss Elizabeth Wilson, and was in a state of exhilaration at having received the sanotion of her father, be wrote to her:— " What do yoU think your father and myself did the moment you were gone? We Trent to see the antiquities of Halicarnassus!! They are a set of odd legs and bodies of great statues just arrived, and they alleviated our feelings very much. It happened in this way. We drove past the British Museum on our way home, and Mr. Wilson asked if I had seen' the new reading-room, and as I had not, he forthwith took me to see it. We were ushered into old Panizzi, who was doing nothing in a fine armchair, and he proposed we should see the venerable fragments just arrived from Greece. I am not sure, however, that we appreciated them. I have an unfortunate prejudice in favour of statues in one piece —at least in not more than six pieces, and these are broken up very small indeed—and it is a controversy whose arm belongs to whose body ; but 1 believe real lovers of art admire these perplexi- ties. On the whole, however, we spent our hour cheerfully, and, in consequence, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a heap of Scotch bankers were kept half an hour waiting."
On another occasion he announced at one of Gladstone's volitical breakfasts that he knew what a nut felt like when it was going to he cracked, as he bad once got his head caught between a cart-head and a lamp-post. Mrs. Russell Barrington does not, we think, mention the delightful pronouncement in which Bagehot hit off the fact that Socialism, in providing for all, would reduce the total suns of wealth : " Socialism means that every man would have one boot." He once said to a friend who had a church in the grounds near his house 'Ab, you're 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." He used to say banteringly to this mother when she wanted him to marry : "A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault." Writing to his another from Paris in 1851, be described his experiences as a dancer "I have added what I call waltzing to my other accomplish- ments. It differs from what other people call by that name, not only in the atop which is of my own invention, but also in its having no relation whatever to the music, and by preserving its rotatory motion in a great measure by collisions with the other couples. It's very amusing running small French girls against some fellow's elbow, it's like killing flies years ago. There is, how- ever, the inconvenience that one does not like to ask the same girl twice ; she might say she had not insured her life, but if you are careful to select a fresh subject for each experiment, the pastime will succeed. I do not fancy it pleases the girls; he dances tout seta ('all by himself') I heard one of them say with great indig- nation to her female friends, as if a fellow of my age could be expected to keep time with her or with the music either, and it pleases me, it being a new, if not humane excitement, and is better than talking feeble philosophy in out of the way corners."
Everything Bagehot did he did with the gusto of a boy. He hunted his own pack of harriers and rode bard. Mrs. Russell Barrington perhaps says barely enough about the exhilara- tion be found in the hunting field, just as she says, we think, too little about his writings on pure literature by comparison with the space she allows to his economic writings.
Wo have said enough to prove, even to a reader who had never heard of him, that Bagehot was a man quite out of the ordinary. A country gentleman by birth and training, a banker by profession, he became a journalist by choice. His intellect developed early, and he scarcely knew that phase in which most very clever youug men are the victims of eloquence, paradox, or mere showiness. The nearest approaches in his writings to extravagance or cynicism were his descriptions of the coup d'etat in Paris when Napoleon III. became Emperor, and a paper on Oxford, which was abbreviated in its second form, but is, we learn, to appear in full in the complete edition of Bagehot's writings. The beat passages in the descriptions of the French coup d'i tat proclaim the influence of Burke in their teaching that politics are note subdivision of immutable .ethics, but are made of time and place. Bagehot ridiculed the pernicious mistake that" a single stereotyped Government is to make the tour of the world," or that "you have no more right to deprive a Dyak of his vote in a 'possible' Polynesian Parliament than you have to steal his mat." Three times Bagehot failed to get into Parliament, though he would have satisfied to admiration Burke's definition of what a Member of Parliament ought to be. Perhaps the loss to politica was
not so great as one is tempted at first to assume. Such a man discharged an invaluable office as outside critic and impartial friend. In a delightful phrase lie confessed that be was " between sizes " in politics, As it was, he was consulted by Chancellors of the Exchequer of both parties. Lord Welby has said that Bagehot was the only person outside the Treasury who ever mastered its financial machinery. In 1877 Bagehot proposed a new form of security to be known as Treasury Bills, and for the purposes of the Floating Debt the Treasury has ever since borrowed mainly on the credit of those Bills. They have proved themselves, a popular, because intelligible, form of investment, and they have stood every strain that has been put upon them.
We might quote countless examples of Bagehot's glorious common-sense. He had the Whig temperament with imagine. tion—in our judgment, an almost perfect combination. No doubt it is a rare one. Take his comment on Bright's speech on Reform in 1866 "Yon must pass such a Bill," he writes, "that the class now excluded from the representation shall no longer be excluded ; and you must pass such a Bill that the classes now included in the representation shall still be included, and shall be in no danger of gradual exclusion by the further extension of your method. . . . Mr. Bright, like the Radical Party in general, in their absurd superstition as to the vote, either forgets or contrives to ignore, the only purpose for which a vote is really useful— representation. He proposes quite rightly to take guarantees that no clam shall be excluded from the polling booths, but he is by no means anxious to take any guarantees that no class shall be excluded from being fully heard in the House."
His higher power of common-sense, shot through and through with an adorning fancifulness, was also the strength of his literary criticism. It may perhaps be seen best in his famous essay on "Shakespeare—the Man." Anyone who reads this essay will recognize how long and often Bagehot must have perpended the thoughts it contains. They are a good instance of his recreation of what he called "playing with his mind." His humour excluded all pomposity, and he mistrusted eloquence, in spite of all his own vividness which makes one think that he could have been "eloquent" if ever be had wished to be. He predicted much that came true in Gladstone's career, because he saw that Gladstone was, in certain respects, the servant of his own phrases. How good is this criticism, for example :— " He bates the very rumour of war ; he trusts in moral influence ; he detests the bare idea of military preparations. He will not believe that preparations are necessary till the enemy is palpable. . At the present moment no Englishman, not Mr. Bright him- self, jests so little the impulse to arm. 'He will not believe in a war till he sees men fighting."
These words might have been written to fit the Arabi and Gordon episodes.
We will end by quoting Bagehot's fine and indignant retort to Jeffrey's criticism of Wordsworth
"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 con- cerning the grave ; of the gregarious concerning the recluse ; Of those who laugh concerning those who laugh not; of the common concerning the uncommon; of those who lend on usury concerning those who lend not; the notion of the world of those whom it will not reckon among the righteous—it said, 'This won't do.' And so in all times will the lovers of polished Liberalism speak concerning the intense and lonely prophet" Bagehot's political writing was like perfect talk. Every article was an adventure into new territory, or territory that seemed new. His answer to a question, as one of his friends said, made you either think or laugh, or both think and laugh together. He knew the best of books, and counted among his intimates such rare minds as Matthew Arnold and Clough, but to him life was of infinitely greater value than books,
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