Bagehot right or wrong
BOOKS
ROBERT BLAKE
On his own definition Bagehot was not strictly an historian at all. He observes in his essay on Lord Brougham, published in 1857 when he was thirty-one, that 'the first of the modem Whig ministries is in the post-historical period.' Of the forty-eight pieces on English statesmen which occupy volume three of this series* only three (those on Bolingbroke, Adam Smith and the younger Pitt) concern persons whose importance lay solely in the years before 1830. Volume four, which covers his essays on Napoleon HI, the American Civil War and an assortment of foreign figures including Marshal Prim, Guizot, Mazzini and Cardinal Antonelli, deals exclusively with 'post- historical' events and people.
One need not, of course, accept Bagehot's definition. Certainly today it is possible to write historical studies of episodes which have occurred within the last thirty years, although for various reasons it may have been more difficult in the Victorian era. But the truth is that Bagehot was not an historian nor was he trying to produce works of historical scholar- ship. He was not a Macaulay, a Freeman or a Fronde. His essays in these two volumes should be regarded more in the light in which we look at Sir Winston Churchill's great Contem- poraries—short biographical studies based not on documentation and research but on public knowledge, acute observation, personal acquain- tance (in some cases) and above all on flair; on the ability to discern what lies behind super- ficial aspects, to bring out the reality obscured by the orthodox portrait.
This search for reality as opposed to appear- ance is almost an obsession with Bagehot. Again and again he tells us quietly and conversation- ally, wittily and epigrammatically, that things are not quite what they seem, that people do not play the part assigned to them by conven- tional wisdom, that political man seldom behaves exactly according to the book. His very titles are suggestive: 'What Lord Lyndhurst really was'; 'Adam Smith as a Person'; 'The Character of Sir Robert Peer; 'Why Mr Disraeli has succeeded'; 'The True Issue between North and South' These essays are essentially the product of a highly intelligent editor and man of affairs, shrewd, worldly, tolerant and understanding. As Mr R. H. S. Crossman puts it, in his admirable introduction to The English Constitution, `Bagehot, in fact, was one of the greatest political journalists of his—or indeed of any—age . .
The virtues of such a man do not necessarily include notable powers of imagination. Bagehot could observe with great acumen the nature of contemporary institutions, but he was not gifted with the insight to predict their future develop- ment. His classic work on the constitution was the description of a system which was passing away even as he wrote in 1867. He himself was wise enough to guess that the Reform Act of that year would lead to great changes but, in his * The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot: Volumes III and IV, The Historical Essays edited by, Norman St John-Stevas (The Eca- pomist £7). introduction to the second edition published five years later, he shows no sign of perceiving what those changes would be, dwelling as he does on the altered position of the House of Lords, which was perhaps the least significant ' consequence of the extension of the franchise.
Likewise in these essays he could be curiously shortsighted. Until the very eve of the victory of the North he remained convinced that the Civil War would end in a stalemate, and his low opinion of Lincoln's capacity makes very odd reading today. Indeed the whole of this section of Volume IV is interesting not for the acumen of Bagehot's views but for the extent to which such an intelligent man could misjudge personalities and events outside his personal experience.
Bagehot never visited America. France, on the other hand, he knew well. He was actually an eyewitness in Paris of the coup d'etat of Decem- ber 1851, and his seven letters on the subject to the editor of the Inquirer, a Unitarian organ, are rightly described by Mr Stevas as 'an extra- ordinary combination of rollicking cynicism and profound good sense.' Bagehot was much better on France than on America. He refused to join in the unthinking condemnation with which Englishmen of almost every political shade greeted the establishment of the Second Empire. On the contrary he considered Louis Napoleon's action justified: 'My reasons for so believing I shall in this letter endeavour to explain, except that I shall not, I fancy, have room to say much on the moral defensibility or indefensibility of the coup d'etat; nor do I imagine that you will want from me any ethical speculation;—that is manufac- tured in Printing-house-square; but I shall give the best account I can of the matter-of-fact Walter Bagehot consequences and antecedents of the New Revolution . .
There is an agreeable lack of both insularity and humbug in Bagehot's treatment of this subject: `The first duty of society is the preservation of society . . . Six weeks ago society was living from hand to mouth : now she feels sure of her next meal. And this in a dozen words is the real case—the political excuse for Prince Louis Napoleon.'
Not that be was an uncritical admirer of the new regime. He was aware of its basic defect and, in a passage which might well apply to President de Gaulle, wrote : 'A government, moreover, like that of Louis Napoleon, though it may be and is most intelli- gent, and most suitable to its subjects is sure to be an uneasy government. It prohibits daily and efficient discussion, and the instructed classes who love discussion . . . become its irreconcilable enemies. . . . But no despotic government can afford to despise the opinion of the instructed classes. They may be a minority in the nation but they are the most formidable of minorities, for they contain the greater part of its intelligence . . . It [the Second Empire] cannot even be a firm and easy government because it is always conscious that there is a natural conspiracy plotting against it—a con- spiracy of mind.'
But, although Bagehot was far shrewder, thanks to personal knowledge, in'his analysis of current French than of current American politics, he was equally lacking in prescience. He had not the slightest inkling of the disasters which the Mexican adventure was to bring upon the Second Empire, and the upshot of the Franco- Prussian War took him as much by surprise as that of the American Civil War.
The same strengths and limitations are shown in his essays on English statesmen. Just as he lacked the imaginative power of a Tocqueville to discern the pattern of the future, so, too, he lacked the historical imagination of a Macaulay or a Carlyle to project himself into the past. His famous pieces on Bolingbroke and Pitt do not show a real sense of history or an apprecia- tion of the wholly different political and con- stitutional framework in which the two men's careers were set. What they do afford is a series of splendid opportunities to point a moral— and one by no means always acceptable to the current orthodoxy of his own time. Bolingbroke is the Alcibiades of his day. Bagehot points out his moral failings and observes that 'He had been at Eton and Oxford [actually it is doubt- ful whether he ever went to the latter], but he had not learned what is often learned there, a decorum in profligacy.' Yet, although Bagehot comes down on the side of Victorian morality in his closing sentence—Three years of eager unwise power, and thirty-five of sickly longing and impotent regret—such or something like it, will ever be in this cold modem world the fate of an Alcibiades'—he sees the other side of the coin : `We see in Bolingbroke's case that a life of brilliant licence is really compatible with a life of brilliant statesmanship; that licence itself may even be thought to quicken the imagina- tion for oratorical efforts; that an intellect similarly aroused may, at exciting conjunctions, perceive possibilities which are hidden from duller men; that the favourite of society will be able to use his companionship with men and his power over women so as much to aid his strokes of policy; but, on the other hand .
But it is essentially in his studies of contem- porary or very recent statesmen that Bagehot is at his beet. His portrait of Peel is masterly in its analysis of Peel's strength and weakness. His study of Lord Althorp and the Reform Bill of 1832 is packed with good things, and so too is his piece on a very different character, Lord Brougham, who was still alive when he wrote. These are all fairly long essays, but the short sketches—some of which Mr Stevas has 'dis- covered' for the first time, in the sense that they had not previously been attributed to Bagehot —are excellent too. The one on Lyndhurst says everything which needs to be said on that remarkable character, and I like his explanation of the success of Lord Derby's leadership of the Conservative party: `Conservatives desire mainly, four things: that the social system should not be materially changed; ... that the established church should retain a definite and legal preeminence; ... that land should be made of all kinds of property the safest and most dignified; and that Liberals should be defeated whenever possible and snubbed always; and Lord Derby desired all these things as strongly as they did.'
The Economist deserves high praise for pro- ducing this work of pietas to its greatest editor. Bagehot is never dull and often fascinating. Mr Stevas has made a good job of editing, though the biographical notes are none too accurate: for example, Disraeli's father did not make a fortune as a London merchant, Disraeli did not become leader of the Tory MPS in 1846, nor did he die at Hughenden. But in general the work is excellently done and the volumes are an ornament to any library.
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