The greatest Victorian
Paul Johnson
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WALTER BAGEHOT XII-XIII: THE LETTERS XIV-XV: MISCELLANY edited by Norman St John-Stevas
The Economist, f80 per set
It pays to belong to an institution, especially when you are dead. A freelance holy man has little chance of canonisation.
But if he is, say, a Jesuit or a Dominican, generations of his brethren will work hard until Rome gives him his due and so adds lustre to their order. It is the same with writers. There is poor Anthony Trollope, one of our very greatest novelists, still without a collected edition, and a dozen of whose works are virtually unobtainable outside the British Library. Here, on the other hand, is Walter Bagehot, a fine but secondary writer, who had the practical sense to marry the daughter of the Eco- nomist's owner. He not only edited it for the rest of his life but his works, down to the meanest ephemera, have now been expensively collected and beautifully anno- tated in 15 elegant volumes. Not that I grudge Bagehot his good fortune. The Economist could not have put its profits to better use. Papers with cash to spare habitually waste it: they buy the Duchess of Windsor's love-letters or hire Norman Mailer or, more usually, over-pay their printers. The Economist has financed a sound and durable piece of academic publishing for which it will be long blessed by scholars and, I suspect, a surprising number of ordinary readers. Mr Stevas, whose resignation as Minister for the Arts made possible the completion of the ven- ture, has been well employed too. Far better to make a workmanlike job of Bagehot than spend his time giving away the public's money to the Bread-and- Marmite Street Theatre.
These last four volumes of the edition contain Bagehot's letters, miscellaneous articles and speeches, and a collection of obituaries and tributes. There is nothing here of tremendous importance but much of interest. Bagehot seems to have been admired by his contemporaries, and by the next two generations, for exactly the same reasons he is admired now: his ability to explain lucidly and even wittily complex or intangible institutions like the money mar- ket and the British constitution, his English pragmatism, his fairmindedness and com- monsense, and the range of his interests. Women liked him because he was hand- some, had a flashing eye and seemed interested in them: his love-letters to his wife, printed here, stand up well, being tender without mawkishness. Men liked him because he knew his stuff and always talked sense. In his excellent tribute in the Atlantic, Woodrow Wilson quotes a friend: `As an instrument for arriving at truth, I never knew anything like a talk with Bagehot.' That is enviable praise. G.M. Young called him 'the greatest Victorian' because of his ability to impart 'the most precious element in Victorian civilisation, its robust and masculine sanity'.
Readers liked him because he was never dull and often funny. The best thing in these volumes is a hilarious essay on travelling in Spain, first published in the Spectator. His work is dotted with natural epigrams which do not smell of the oil. Thus on Brougham: 'If he were a horse nobody would buy him; with that eye, no one would answer for his temper.' On Wordsworth: 'The misfortune is that mys- ticism is true.' Scott's great virtue was his `healthiness' — 'an author for the sick- room'. Bagehot loved writers but was sharp in spotting their weaknesses. In his fine essay on Gibbon he points out that the historian had no feeling at all for either the Romans or the Christians: he was rather `an orderly narrator of great events'. Southey was too busy imparting informa- tion ever to acquire any. 'The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.' In a splendid passage he notes that Macaulay could learn from books but not from experience: he wrote more sense about India before he went there than after- wards. Bagehot liked to describe taking a famous author on his first visit to a police court where he watched a stipendiary sent- ence a pickpocket. The author was fascin- ated and afterwards declared he wished he had been a magistrate. What, said Bage- hot, after all those books? 'Hang my books,' said the author. 'When that fellow sends a poor devil to prison for six weeks, to prison he goes. But when I publish a book, nothing happens.'
That is a typical Bagehot story. He was a non-intellectual intellectual. He could see the case for a banker or a stockjobber as well as the case for a poet. He and George Orwell had a lot in common. Orwell, too, was a man of his times — leftish times but stood outside them, saw through them, and so survived them because he was honest, candid and hated cant. Bagehot's active career almost exactly coincided with mid-Victorian prosperity, from the repeal of the Corn Laws to the big slump of the mid-1870s. He belonged to this period, wrote about it with unequalled perception, but he was never taken in by the omnipo- tence of the pound sterling, any more than Orwell was deceived by Stalinism. As Woodrow Wilson said, he was a conserva- tive with a radical wit (just as Orwell was a socialist with a conservative wit) and the wit was as much the key to the man as his well-informed empiricism.
All the same, even at the end of Mr Stevas's 15 volumes, I am not sure that we fully understand this likeable Victorian, to whom the terms robust, moderate, reason- able, commonsensical adhere so naturally. It is clear, as Stevas says, that he lacked compassion. That was why, unlike Orwell, he could not see the point of Dickens. He had a harsh streak and could write: 'Ugly men are and ought to be ashamed of their existence.' But there is also a bit of a mystery about Bagehot. No man, you might think, was more fitted for public life. Yet he remained an eminence grise. Wood- row Wilson explained this by saying he had `the genius to see deep into affairs and the discretion to keep out of them'. But this is not true. He was anxious to enter parlia- ment. He seems to have failed because he could not go through the solicitous mo- tions. At bottom, he did not like people much. A revealing fragment of a letter to his wife reads: 'It is inconceivable to me to like to see many people and even to speak to them. Every new person you know is an intellectual burden because you may see them again, and must be able to recognise and willing to converse with them.' He much admired the systematic aloofness of William Pitt the Younger: 'It is easy to conceive the mental exhaustion which this well-managed reserve spared him, the number Of trivial conversations which it economised, the number of imperfect ambitions which it quelled before they were uttered.' In an age of pocket boroughs a chilly Pitt could flourish by sheer brainpower but Bagehot had to cope with the committee-mongering and hand- shaking of an incipient democracy and he could not do it. Behind the masculine, no-nonsense facade there was a shy and sensitive heart, a mind easily bored and a spirit which (I think) did not care a damn about the world. A pity Bagehot did not live longer: he might have written a book giving remarkable expression to his elusive inner man.
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