BOOKS.

WALTER BAGEHOT.* a sense, it may be said that all writings are biographical, because to those who are prepared by due exercise of sensibility, the character of the writer will disclose itself. And it will disclose itself the most truly where there was no intention of self-por- traiture or self-confession. In a time like our own, of great artifici- ality, of complex relationships, when separate faculties are lifted into prominence by constant exercise, and morbid developments are positively encouraged, when it is difficult even to mark the line that divides the field of lyrical poetry from that of society- Terse, the true critic, perforce, becomes more and more the biographer. This means simply that his sympathies, the wider and more spontaneous they are, must be the more severely edu- cated, and that his enjoyments must be the more strictly restrained and modified by efforts to detect the man behind the printed page, so that he may fill up the lacuna, and complete in his im- agination that which was, perhaps intentionally, withheld or only dimly suggested. If one thinks for a moment of Thackeray, or better still, of Heine, this will be readily realised. Mr. Walter Bagehot was a very eminent instance of this form of critic- biographer, very faithfully endeavouring in all instances to construct for himself as complete a picture as was possible of the man who wrote, that by it he might at least mentally annotate the writing. In this volume we have several more or less hurried but faithful transcripts of those mental

• Literary Studies. By the late Walter Bagehot. With a Prefatory Memoir. Edited by R. H. Hutton. 2 vols. London-: Longmans, Green, and Co.

annotations, and yet perhaps they are as complete as is necessary, if we are to be allowed to apply to Mr. Bagehot what he so vividly and effectively applied to many others. We cannot study the writer without being led back to the man, simply because he himself never exhausted his curiosities in a merely literary gratification, and was never bound by any of the narrow rules of criticism which sharply distinguish between the personal characteristics of the author and his product. His earlier and his later literary studies have this mark in common, whatever else they may differ in.

In the outset, and to put it in few words, we may say that Mr. Bagehot was pre-eminently a student of "atmosphere,"—of that personal force, or rather attractiveness, which properly lies in a nice adjustment of sensibility with strength, imparting not only a cer- tain fineness and charm, but also, in most instances, a breadth of character, and necessity for extensive and unaffected association with others. In speaking, for example, of Horner, amongst the old Edinburgh Reviewers, Mr. Bagehot says :—

,‘ The fact is that Horner is a striking example of the advantage of keeping an atmosphere. There is around some men a kind of circle or halo of influences, and traits, and associations, by which they infallibly leave a distinct and uniform impression on all their contemporaries. It is very difficult even for those who have the best opportunities, to analyse exactly what this impression consists in, or why it was made,— but it is made. There is a certain undefinable keeping in the traits and manner, and common speech and characteristic actions of some men, which inevitably stamps the same mark and image. It is like a man's style. There are some writers who can be known by a few words of their writing ; each syllable is instinct with a certain spirit ; put it into the hands of any one chosen at random, the same impression will be produced by the same casual and felicitous means. Just so in character,—the air and atmosphere, so to speak, which are around a man, have a delicate and expressive power, and leave a stamp of unity on the interpretative faculty of mankind."

Mr. Bagehot is never fully satisfied with any writer till he has found some trace of this atmosphere. He is very persistent in his hopefulness of finding it, and does not easily relinquish his pursuit. Failing absolutely, he then sets himself in the most English-like fashion to meet his subject on his own ground, to measure him by application of the very weapons he has wielded. We have heard of some deltoid rivers in India, that in face of obstacles of a certain kind, work gradually back into their former course,—and this sometimes reminds us a little of Mr. Bagehot's method. A vein of the most composed and impartial logic lies alongside of the finest and most delicate appreciation of poetic and even mystical natures, with some sense of inconsistency and exclusiveness, which will hardly be altogether removed until we have apprehended the place which the biographic element holds in his mind, and his determination to find in it the reconciling element. Having once perceived this, we can read these literary studies with the fuller understanding, alike when the writer is tracing out the fantastic subtlety, the abstractness, the lyrical glow and unearthly fervour of Shelley's genius, no leas than his peculiar return to earth, folding his wing, as it were, and nestling for a moment in lowly place ; or the cold unconcernedness, the self- satisfaction, and eighteenth-century pose and stateliness of Gibbon. Both to Mr. Bagehot, at first-sight, seem equally attractive, and as subjects suited to his very efficient analysis they are so ; but he leaves the impression on the mind of a careful reader that the erratic and world-reforming poet is more kindred to the side of his own nature that he would be most proud to acknowledge, than is the cold and sceptical historian of the "Decline and Fall." For after all, though Shelley looked at life through the medium of abstractions, there lay in him the possibility of large and bountiful interests,—you would like to know what he would have become ; whereas of Edward Gibbon, literally you know all he could have been ; no possibility is opened. "The appeal to those high instincts, before which our mortal nature did tremble like a guilty thing sur- prised," was not exactly in Gibbon's way," says Mr. Bagehot, "and he does not seem to have been able to conceive that it was in any one else's. Why his chapters had given offence he could hardly make out. It actually seems that he hardly thought that other people believed more than he did." It is the wide horizon that attracts Mr. Bagehot, in spite of the exact and rigorous logical bent of his understanding ; and his highest delight is when the under- standing is compelled to admit itself non-suited, and simply to admire and enjoy. This is the secret of his force as a critic, and accounts for his admiration of Wordsworth and his complete under- standing of Clough; and it lies very close to his beautiful and lofty character, only the exigent demands of his intellectual being held it well in reserve, and kept him from any unnecessary demonstration or parade of it. Nevertheless, he is at once finely sensitive and sym- pathetic, and much of the knowledge that he brings so admirably to aid his critical judgments is distinctively of the quick, pene-

trating kind, which could only have been gained by a mind not -only observant, but with warm, social impulses, and full of sensi- bility and imaginative atmosphere :—

' " If we would study the lives of others," he writes, "it seems essen- tial that we should begin with our own. If we study this our datum, if we attain to see and feel how this influences and evolves itself in our social and (so to say) public life, then it is possible that we may find in the lives of others the same or analogous features ; and if we do not, then at least we may suspect that those who want them are deficient likewise in the secret agencies which we feel produce them in ourselves."

Mr. Bagehot thus starts from the personal experience, tests it by the lives of others first, and then finally tests the lives of others by it ; developing, as he proceeds, the true principles of criticism in relation not only to the individual work in hand, but to that wide and varied life of man, with which all true works of genius should more or less decisively bring us into contact.

A healthy and genial relationship with men in many conditions is, then, discovered to be a direct qualification and stimulus to literary work, which in its higher forms is the fluent conducting medium between the inner life of the writer and the social life of his period. We may study both there. Even history should, in his idea, realise this. Gibbon and Macaulay are both deficient as respects inner life, deficient, therefore, also of interest in the movements of the society around them. Aloofness, cold uncon- cern for ordinary and common interests and opinions, is for him a sign of a narrow and unimaginative nature. It was something snore than the love of a smart saying which led Mr. Bagehot to deal at once so severely and so wittily with Lord Macaulay's serene dedication of himself and his writings to posterity. The root of it lay in a bookish tendency that he deprecated. If Macaulay had been less self-satisfied, and known more of inner conflicts, he would have spoken more to the intellectual wants of his time. But Mr. Bagehot avers that Macaulay has no passion- ate self-questionings, no indomitable fears, no tasking perplexities ; there is a want of graduation in his intellect, and this allies itself with a far deeper defect,—he does not grow, he stands remote from life ; he makes, he paints, he describes men and things with a glow of rhetoric, and mixes their minutiae with metaphor and classical allusion, but there are no hints of deep or rare experi- ences, no horizons opened, and though the mass may be delighted, our critic is not fully stisfied. In a qualified way, he has to con- fess to some similar defects in Scott. Much as he admires the healthy perception, the faculty for portraying life as if he had actually lived through it, he finds Scott deficient in the religious sense, and instinctive perception of the finer traits, in women and, is, thus far, barren of those finer and rarer suggestions which give a halo of completeness, and yet of mystery, to the loftiest works of art.

A literalistic Biblical materialism ; a severe, lofty, self-restrained elevation, from which the affairs of men are coldly contemplated, robs Milton, in Mr. Bagehot's view, of the highest elements of interest and attraction. The Paradise Lost is a great Court debate, in which the father patronises the son, and the theological interest weighs down the poetical one. Yet how admirable is his final judgment on Milton !—

"His words, we may half-fancifully say, are like his character. There is the same austerity in the real essence, the same exquisiteness of sense, the same delicacy of form, which we know that he had, the same music which we imagine there was in his voice. In both his character and his poetry there was an ascetic nature in a sheath of beauty."

He finds it a great defect that there, is nothing of the "poetic religion" in Butler. "If the world were a Durham mine or an

exact square, if no part of it were more expressive than a gravel- pit or a chalk-quarry, the teaching of Butler would be as true as it is now A most ugly and stupid world one would fancy his books had been written in." This indicates the first thing that Mr. Bagehot demanded from a Christian thinker, if not even from an apologist. But, by way of compensation, he finds Butler strong in the religion of superstition, or of the con- science, of fear and penalty ; and certainly the weakness inevitable in the argument which Butler brought to establish this religion of the conscience was never more incisively exposed :—

"The whole argument is one of preconception, presumption, and probability. It claims to establish a principle which may be used in defence of any revelation, the Mohammedan as well as the Christian ; according to it, as soon as you can show that a difficulty exists in nature, you may immediately expect to find it in revelation. If carried out to its extreme logical development, it would come to this,—that if a catalogue were constructed of all the inexplicable arrangements and difficulties of nature, you might confidently anticipate that these very same difficulties, in the same degree and in the same points, would be found in revelation. Both being from the same author, it is presumed that each would resemble the other Yet surely what can be more monstrous than that a supernatural communication from God

should simply enumerate all the difficulties of his natural governmenf, and not enlighten as to any of them,—should revive our perplexities without removing them,—should not satisfy one doubt or one anxiety, but repeat and proclaim every fact that can give a basis to them both."

Mr. Bagehot had no particular liking for the firm and hard mind which finds it easy to despise the minutias of life, and to pore and brood over an abstract proposition. He does not care for an empty house, though now and then he may wish for a quiet hour. It is through common sympathy and kindly companion- ship that he would like to grow, to become matured. Here it is that men of the Guizot stamp, according to him, are wrong.

"As somebody said, Guizot did not grow, he was cast. Experi- ence taught him nothing, and he did not believe that he had any-

thing to learn. Hazlitt tells a story of West, the painter, that is in point. When some one asked him if he had ever been to,

Greece, he answered,—' No, I have read a descriptive catalogue of the principal objects in that country, and I believe I am as well conversant with them as if I had visited it."

His regard for the social influences as a medium of development is so great, that though he has no admiration for some elements in the French character, he can do justice to their gregariousness, their sociability, and the cleverness that comes of it, so we find him writing :—

" This quickness of taking in—so to speak—the present, which so. distinguishes the French, gives a corresponding celerity of intellectual apprehension, an amazing readiness in catching new ideas and main- taining new theories, a versatility of mind which enters into and com- prehends everything as it passes, a concentration in what seems, so as to use it for every purpose of illustration, and consequently (if it hap- pen to be combined with the least fancy) quick repartee on the subject of the moment, and bons-mots also without stint and without end ; and these qualities are like what we style cleverness."

Mr. Bagehot's idea that the artistic or creative faculty was not only dependent on observation, but rather on sympathy—on the power of healthily passing into the lives of those who were to be pictured —is quite consistent with this :—" However strong in any poet may be the higher qualities of abstract thought or conceiving fancy, unless he can actually sympathise with those around him, he can never describe those around him." He finds that Goethe is deficient in this power, and quotes Niebuhr, who compared Wilhelm Meister to a "menagerie of tame animals," and goes on to trace this to no lack of imaginative power, but "to the tone of Goethe's character and the habits of his mind. In every scene he made it clear that he was there with a reserve, and as a stranger. He went there to experience. 'If I did not see the heather once a year, I should die,' said Scott ; but Goethe could have lived without it, and it would not have cost him much trouble."

At this point, we can understand how Mr. Bagehot came to write that truly masterly essay on "Shakespeare, the Man," than which nothing more full of insight, more critically comprehensive, or more exquisite in touches of personal delineation, has been written on the subject in English. In itself, it is the finest and fullest illustration of all that we have said of Mr. Bagehot's peculiar method, and insight, and power. But we must be con- tent to refer the reader to the essay itself, only preparing the way by this little passage, that comes with a slight feeling of surprise, which, however, only finally emphasises its truth, after Mr. Bagehot has spoken of Shakespeare's capacity to mix with men as a man, and to enjoy ordinary things with the dash of quiet abandon which comes of humorous perceptiveness :—

" I certain constitutional though latent melancholy is essential to such a nature. This is the exceptional characteristic of Shakespeare. All through his works you feel you are reading the popular author, the successful man ; but through them all there is a certain tinge of musing sadness pervading, and, as it were, softening their gaiety. Not a trace can be found of 'eating cares,' or narrow and mind-contracting toil ; but everywhere there is, in addition to shrewd sagacity and buoyant wisdom, a refining element of chastening sensibility, which prevents sagacity from being rough, and shrewdness from becoming cold."

We could wish we had had more space in which farther to illus- trate by extracts the peculiar bent and penetration of Mr. Bagehot's critical genius. It was at once fine and robust, at once graceful, independent, and acute. We cannot help wondering that essays so full of masculine thought, delicacy, wit, and suggestiveness should not already have received more attention. Now that they are presented in a complete form, with some very substantial helps to a full understanding of their author's mind and purposes, we are hopeful that they will take the place in the public mind that they so well deserve. It is _little to say that there is not a loose sentence in the volumes ; they are fall of refinement and grasp, and are relieved by the happiest anecdotes and humorous turns. The earlier ones, though they may occa- sionally have the defect of somewhat over-sudden transitions, are as suggestive and valuable as the later, particularly when viewed as interpreters of the writer's character, which is so well worthy of study.