Fooks of the Day

WAL fER BAGEHOT, Christopher Hobhouse

381

MEN AND THE FIELDS, Honor Croome

382

SULNCE MARCHES ON, F. Sherwood Taylor

382

Clitt.DREN IN THE CINEMA, Philip Toynbee

384

A NOVEL IN VERSE, Derek Verschoyle

384

FicrioN, Kate O'Brien

386

A GREAT VICTORIAN

By CHRISTOPHER HOBHOUSE

ONE of the shrewdest of modern critics has chosen Walter Bagehot as being the most characteristic representative of the Victorian age. Mr. William Irvine is content to treat him as a brilliant and many-sided writer. His approach is both biographical and critical ; and it is the only fault of an otherwise admirable work that he dwells too little upon the actual facts of Bagehot's easy and enviable career. Three chapters are devoted to his youth, and only one to the achieve- ments of his mature years ; while the rest of the book is given to a critical discourse on his writings. It would have been better to tell more of the period of Bagehot's fame, when he was known as a prosperous banker, an influential journalist and a brilliant talker.

Bagehot came of a family of bankers, merchants and ship- owners in the little Somerset town of Langport. His father being a stern Unitarian, he received his education at Bristol and at London University. Though called to the Bar, he never practised law. His working life was given to finance. At the age of twenty-five his literary reputation was well launched by a series of letters on the Coup d'etat of 1851. Through a fortunate marriage he became Editor of the Economist ; and he published some four or five important works. It was a short life of but fifty years ; and almost to the end his career was overshadowed, and no doubt in many ways actually frustrated, by the insanity of his mother, to whom he devoted the most unfailing care. But for this burden he might have achieved as great a position in the world of action as in the world of letters. As it was, he made four desultory attempts to enter the House of Commons ; and he refused to succeed his father-in-law as Financial Member on the Council of India.

Bagehot's writings are most notable for their variety of subject. Though he may have lacked ambition, he must have been a man of most prodigious industry, for he scarcely gave two volumes to the same branch of knowledge. If his books are nowadays little read, it is not through any fault of style. Bagehot was an excellent prose-writer, and all his work was full of the keenest humour and observation. Mr. Irvine is inclined to censure him for being repetitive and over- colloquial ; but after a dose of nineteenth-century prose it is fairly easy to condone either of these shortcomings. And it is quite unfair to accuse an author of the use of clichés just beeause he brings in an expression such as "the sort of thing" at the very point where the reader is least expecting to find a slang phrase. A common expression, after all, cannot be ruled out ; it does not become a cliché until the author has got into the habit of relying on it.

The comparative oblivion that has overtaken Bagehot's writings is due to their very excellence. He wrote for his own day, in that the whole method of his thought was to build up from minute facts and observed details to a cautious and very limited conclusion. He was in the very best tradi- tion of British thinkers, a paragon among empiricists. His generalisations, such as they are, rest upon a microscopic survey of the facts. And as the facts have changed, Bagehot has become more amusing than instructive to read. His English Constitution, as appears from his long preface, had lost much of its validity within five years of its first publica- tion. It is excellent entertainment to follow Bagehot's minute examination of the political system of the 1136o's. But already bY the i88o's his readers were taken aback by that celebrated account of the monarchy which begins : "It is nice to trace how the actions of a retired widow and an unemployed youth become of such importance." Already the widow had ceased Walter Bagehot. By William Irvine. (Longmans. 'as. 6d.) to retire ; and the youth, though still unemployed, was no longer young. The theory of the constitution needed to be wholly reconsidered if its workings were to be subjected to so close an observation. Mr. Irvine shrewdly contrasts

Bagehot's methods with those of J. S. Mill :

"Few nineteenth-century political philosophers were content with so little abstract 'system.' One has only to compare The English Constitution with Mill's Representative Government. The first is the flesh and bone of factual analysis. The other seems in con- trast but a skeleton of theory. Bagehot analyses the representative government immediately before him. Mill arrives at the ultimate conditions necessary for all good representative governments. Un- doubtedly, for much the same reasons as Burke, Bagehot tends to be an obscurantist."

Mill would never have exhorted his readers, as Bagehot did, to go into their own kitchens to find out a few truths about the popular suffrage. Such an experiment might have

disturbed the symmetry of his argument. He plumped for Mr. Hare's scheme of proportional representation because it looked well on paper ; Bagehot ridiculed it because of his far more intelligent estimate of its working in practice.

Where the great Victorians undoubtedly excelled was in the convincing expression of sustained and powerful argu- ments. In this respect Bagehot was something of a renegade. The tendency of his times was to exaggerate the importance of the general rules which had been hammered out with so .• much vigour and patience. But Bagehot, even at the end .cf

a convincing demonstration, would never accept a do c- He

would point out instead some slight alteration in the premises, by which the conclusions would be taiiiteu as soon as they were reached. If there was one thing of which his contem- poraries were certain, it was that they had attained to the fundamental economic truths. Bagehot's retort was that a fundamental truth is not necessarily universal as well. He

would point to some little difference in custom or climate whereby the economic laws of Europe lost all their value when applied to India. Such a talent is more in keeping with the methods of the present day. The book on Lombard Street was accepted as an admirable essay on a branch of finance : but it was impossible for a generation of such colossal dogmatists to take it any more seriously.

With these and Bagehot's other writings, Mr. Irvine deals in a just and scholarly manner. It is not easy to assign to Bagehot any particular " place " in literature, and Mr. Irvine does not attempt to do so. His promise was too unevenly fulfilled ; he remained always a critic, and of partierlar facts at a particular period. But Mr. Irvine dui:s draw two most significant comparisons : Bagehot, he says, was deeply influ- enced, and not only in religious thought, by Bishop Butler : "Butler was a shy, lonely, melancholy man, essentially a scholar, readier with his pen than his tongue, and caring little for the world or society. As a thinker he was confused and obscure—in Bage- hot's vivid phrase, a groper,' feeling his way slowly and painfully to truth and fallacy. On the other hand, he also resembled Bagehot

in many ways. He was cautious conservative, and practical. Though not a man of the world, he was as Bishop of Durham necessarily a man of affairs, and, like Bagehot, always wrote with a vivid sense of the everyday world outside his study window. . . . He tended to see truth and virtue in dull, prosaic people. He detested facile, abstract speculation, and preferred humble and reverent common sense to confident and presumptuous talent. Alto- gether he was the kind of man whom Bagehot would consider solid,' and from whom he would be inclined to take suggestions."

In the second place, Mr. Irvine suggests that Bagehot owes far more to Burke than his prose style and his aristocratic prejudice :

"His philosophy is so like Burke's that if the latter could be called the poetry, Bagehot might be called the prose, of Con- servatism. Their approach to the study of politics is in many respects the same. Both insist upon constant observation of the facts, upon constant reference of idea to reality. Both are reluctant to enunciate a universal principle. Both abhor that abstract, a priori type of reasoning which deduces a whole theory from a few half-truths, or produces an elaborate paper constitution from a logical vacuum.

"'I must see the men, I must sec the things,' exclaims Burke. No rational man ever did govern himself by abstractions and universals.'

"'Nothing,' writes Bagehot, is such a bore as looking for your principles—nothing so pleasant as working them out.'" If Bagehot as a thinker is neglected, it is because of these

very limits which he imposed upon himself. But he deserves to be remembered as a follower in the great tradition of the

British empiricists ; and Mr. Irvine's analysis of his thought and writing is an excellent piece of criticism.