Bagehot on Books
By ANTHONY BURGESS
TrTHERE was a time when reviewing was a I branch of criticism; but nowadays criticism is only a branch of reviewing. We can spare whole plains of esparto grass for books, but only the odd inch to say just how and why those books are good or bad. A couple of slow sessions with a contemporary equivalent of the old Edinburgh Review, and some of our jauntier reputations would go sprawling. As it is, the exiguity of reviewing space in the journals, and the paucity of periodicals, which, granting space, are not uneasy at talk of values, have a great deal to do with our present literary debility. Writers get away with too much because reviewers get away with too little—a few orts of jargon from sociology or depth-psychology, highly emotive clichés, boutique novelties, cold scraps from public-relations luncheons, the daring of a sneer if a book has been read, the caution of praise if it hasn't. As for critical principles, these have all been deposited in the bank, and the lack of space declares a perpetual moratorium.
Reviewers would like reviewing better if they could engage their whole personalities on it, revel in real exhibitionism: the art of love is best learned at night in a big bed, not through a furtive ten minutes in a back alley. Victorian England had the big beds (which have all now gone to America), and the Economist cordially invites you to watch Walter Bagehot at work in some of them. These first two volumes of his Collected Works* are devoted entirely, after Norman St. John-Stevas's editorial preface and biography, and Sir William Haley's literary appreciation, to Bagehot's literary essays. The Economist is to be warmly commended on so courageously (perhaps quixotically) undertaking this act of homage to the memory of its third editor. The quality of the production is superb. the choice of editor less inspired than inevitable. since Mr. St. John-Stevas has made the life and work of Bagehot his peculiar province and has already exhibited, most brilliantly, the extent of his sympathy with Bagehot's personality and aims and understanding of his achievement. The whole edition will be a great act of scholarship. My present question is: has Walter Bagehot anything to say to the ordinary literati of our own age?
It has to be confessed that Bagehot's literary criticism has been suspect to a large body of men of letters, and for two reasons--the fact of Bagehot's polymathy, which makes literature merely one of his interests, and the evidence of his enjoyment of reading books and writing about them, which smacks of the amateur. But it is doubtful whether criticism has ever been a professional art in the sense that, say, the writing of fiction has been and still is; and the aesthetic philosophy of Aristotle is not invalidated, but rather given more authority, by the fact of its forming part of a bigger corpus of speculation. Matthew Arnold seems to many to be the one Victorian critical voice we ought to listen to. chiefly because his approach to literature antici- pates those wider social and cultural inquiries which the Cambridge school, as well as T. S.
* THE COLLECTE.D WORKS 01' WALTER BAGEHOT. VOLUMES 1 AND II. (The Economist. £2 10s. each.) Eliot, has taught us to regard as a proper con- cern of criticism. Arnold rings with the authority of a 'professional' (perhaps because he was an Inspector of Schools and a very serious poet); Bagehot merely seems to fill great tracts of space in the various Reviews (National, Prospective and Saturday), as well as (ah, there was room in those day) the SPECTATOR.
It has been held against Bagehot that his taste was not sound, but this is perhaps solely on the grounds that he found both Hartley Coleridge and Bailey's Festus worth writing about. Now, everybody was taken in by Festus, which was commonly mentioned in the same breath as Goethe's Faust, just as everybody was once taken in by Christopher Fry; as for Hartley Coleridge, his 'gentle and minute genius' was worth examining out of devotion to his father and his father's friends. Anyway, Bagehot gets over these enthusiasms—if they can really be called that—in his two earliest essays, and then he is ready for Shakespeare, Bishop Butler, Dickens, Milton and Shelley. He is also ready, or rather unready, for Arthur Hugh Clough (Clough influenced him greatly; his essay on his poems was occasioned by Clough's premature death), and it is his examination of poems like Amours de Voyage which must commend him to modern readers—specifically, those modern readers who owe a great deal to Michael Roberts's Faber Book of Modern Verse, whose introduction, quoting Clough at length, cannot avoid also quoting Bagehot. It does not quote the following summation of Clough's talent: By fate he was thrown into a vortex of
theological and metaphysical speculation, but his genius was better suited to be the spectator of a more acting and moving scene. The play of mind upon mind; the contrasted view which contrasted minds take of great subjects; the odd irony of life which so often thrusts into conspicuous places exactly what no one would expect to find in those places,—those were his subjects.
That is the kind of thing Bagehot is capable of, but only after protracted examination of the work, and much quotation. You are not allowed to take anything on trust.
The essay on Dickens was written before the publication of A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, yet its tone suggests not just a posthumous assessment but a revaluation in a cool time, long after the settling of the turbid pool of popular worship: `Mr. Dickens was too much inclined by natural disposition to lachry- mose eloquence and exaggerated caricature. Such was the kind of writing which he wrote most easily. He found likewise that such was the kind of writing that was read most easily; and of course he wrote that kind.' I don't think any later critical judgment on Dickens—not even Orwell's—adds anything to Bagehot's, and the occasional Johnsonian stricture—'there was a weakness of fibre unfavourable to the longevity of excellence' -is usually qualified by a rather un-Johnsonian charity: 'No other Englishman has attained such a hold on the vast populace; it is little, therefore, to say that no other has surmounted its attendant temptations.'
The presence of this charity in Bagehot may be taken by some, later and harsher, critics as a weakness, but the essence of his approach to an author is human: he sees the works as an emanation of personality. It is perhaps sig- nificant that his most telling essays are those whose subjects have what we may call a pre- literary appeal--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Laurence Sterne, Shelley and Gibbon. His study of Shakespeare anticipates Frank Harris and, for that matter, the Dublin symposium of June 16, 1904. in concentrating on the enigmatic personality (his title is 'Shakespeare—The Individual). Where Shakespeare and Scott are brought together, we do not have to excuse Bagehot's Victorian taste. since on the level of humanity (a love of field sports. shoulder-rubbing with the low, affability with servants, and so on) the two may legitimately be compared. The danger of becoming 'mystical and confused' over the greater genius is admirably, and con- sciously, skirted. Bagehot was brought up on the Romantics but, at the time of writing on Shakespeare, he had published 'The Currency Monopoly,' been called to the bar and to Stuckey's Bank, and was only eight years off his editorship of the Economist. It is good to read, in 1853, that 'Shakespeare was worldly, and the proof of it is, that he succeeded in the world. . . . It was a great thing that he . . . should return upon the old scene a substan- tial man, a person of capital, a freeholder, a gentleman to be respected, and over whom even a burgess could not affect the least superiority.' Bagehot doesn't let this satisfaction at a poet's financial success condition his aesthetic judg- ments (any more than in the Dickens essay), but he evidently admires the integrated man who can beat both the aesthetes and the magnates at their own games. 'Why did Mr. Disraeli take the duties of the Exchequer with so much relish'? Because people said he was a novelist, an ad captanduin man, and. ministrant horren- dam! a Jew, that could not add up. No doubt it pleased his inmost soul to do the work of the red-tape people better than those who could do nothing else. And so with Shakespeare. . . So, also, in reverse, with Bagehot.
As for what Bagehot thought of the reviewer's art, it is all in 'The First Edinburgh Reviewers': 'The modern man must be told what to think, —shortly no doubt—but he must be told it. The essay-like criticism of modern times is about the length which he likes.' Our response to this is a wry one: 'shortly' can mean as much as 20,000 words. How Bagehot would have re- sponded to an invitation to consider, say. Lord Jeffrey or Sydney Smith in just over 1,000 words can easily be guessed at. It was essential to his leisurely craft to be able to work out his general principles in full view of his audience and, so far as their practical application to the sub- ject in hand was concerned, to be able to lay before the reader ample specimens of the author's style and content. There is in Bagehot a sufficiency of the epigrammatical and the gnomic, but these are the seasoning of, not a substitute for, the long-drawn expatiation of a summer afternoon or a winter evening. There is room enough for the disclosure of foibles and the hinting at fields of experience beyond the immediate and nominal; there is all the time in the world for the digression which eventually is shown to illuminate the central theme. It is civilised and humane writing, of a kind that has long disappeared. One is glad to have it etern- ised in this altogether admirable edition, a gift to literature from men to whom literature is not a primary concern. Perhaps all the best things are done on a sort of margin.
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