THE CASE FOR WALTER BAGEHOT
By G. M. YOUNG
MR. S. K. RATCLIFFE, courteously but bluntly, says that to call Bagehot the greatest Victorian is nonsense, and the Editor chivalrously subjoins that it was his nonsense and not mine. Yet I think I could defend the title. It is like the distinction in the Latin grammar between Qui philosophus? and Quis philosophus ? I expressly did not assert that Bagehot was the greatest man alive and working between 1837 and inor : I am not sure that the statement would mean anything : and I agree with Mr. Ratcliffe that the landscape of that age is a range of varied eminences with no dominating peak. Indeed, in a footnote to my Portrait, which somehow got lost in the proofs, I suggested that anyone who wished to understand the Victorian mind should turn away from the remembered names and survey the careers of three men : Whitwell Elwin, Alderman Thomasson of Bolton, and Charles Adderley, first Lord Norton : reflecting, as he went, on the breadth of their interests, from sound prose to sound religion, and from town planning to Imperial policy, and the quiet and substantial permanence of what they did. It is along this level that we must look, to find " if not the greatest, at least the truest " Victorian. As I looked, my eye fell on Walter Bagehot and there it stayed. Victoriarzorum maximus, no. But Victorian- = maxime I still aver him to be.
Of the Victorian mind, by which I mean the kind of intelligence that one learns to look for and recognise in the years of his maturity, say, from 1846 when he was twenty to 1877 when he died, the characteristics that most impress me are capaciousness and energy. It had room for so many ideas, and it threw them about as lustily as a giant baby playing skittles, The breadth and vigour of Bagehot's mind appear on every page he has left, and they were, we know, not less conspicuous in his conversation and the conduct of affairs. But what was peculiarly his own was the perfect management of all this energy and all these resources. He was as well aware of his superiority in intelligence as Matthew Arnold of his -superiority in culture. But he carried it with such genial and ironic delight, that his influence—and he was through the Economist and the Reviews a very influential man—encountered no resistance. His paradoxes became axioms : and there are thousands of people thinking and even speaking Bagehot today, who might be hard put to it to say when exactly he lived and what exactly he did. Let me give an illustration :
" If one makes a close study of a society different from one's own, one finds that institutions the very opposite of one's own are defended by the people to whom they belong with as much fervour as that with which we defend ours. They do not seek to be delivered from them and endowed with something better. Self-government, in fact, does not mean responsible government : it means government by the authority you have been brought up to respect, whom you obey readily because you as well as he take the obedience for granted, who is hallowed by all the dignity of tradition and religious belief and is a symbol of national pride and achievement. Above all in a period of rapid change such as is confronting men today, the preservation of such continuity with the past, with the standards they are used to, and the social world where they can find their way about, is essential if the transition is to be effected without producing mere confusion and chaos."
That is pure Bagehot. Observe the psychological realism which is concerned only to discover how men in societies actually do behave, and the unpretentious colloquialism of the style. No one ever thought or wrote quite like that before : and it contains the gist of the famous doctrine, which he first propounded, with much youthful flippancy, after observing the coup d'etat of 185 t, and restated more gravely in Physics and Politics, that the surest guarantee of stability and freedom in a State is " stupidity," or the general habit of identical response. And today, will anyone deny it ? But the odd thing, to use a common phrase of his, is that the passage I have quoted is not Bagehot at all. It is Dr. Lucy Mair, speaking a few months ago on the native admin- istration of Tanganyika.
But Bagehot was no lonely thinker, anticipating the common- places of another age. He was as thoroughly immersed in the Victorian matter as the most pugnacious, self-satisfied, dogmatic business man of his day. In his profession as ' banker, economist and editor he was highly successful, his word carried equal weight in Threadneedle Street and Downing Street. He could even write verses, beginning, (or ending, I forget which) Thou Church of Rome !
and it was his affectionate and humorous interest in all the doings of his time that furnished him with the material of his philosophy. Of Macaulay he acutely says that he lacked " the experiencing mind." Bagehot's mind was always experiencing, and always working its observation into pattern, into system, but—and here we touch on his central excellence or virtue—into a system open towards the future. He distrusted swift; unreflecting action. Equally he dis- trusted all dosed, dogmatic combinations : here picking up the true English tradition which the Radicals had done their best to sever, the tradition of Burke :
" When - he forewarns, denounces, launches forth Against all systems built on abstract rights Keen ridicule : the majesty proclaims Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time : Declares the vital power of social ties Endeared by Custom ; and with high disdain Exploding upstart Theory, insists Upon the allegiance to which men are born,"
—which laborious flight of Wordsworthian chquence Bagehot would probably have countered with his favourite " How much ? " Uncorrected, this insistence on habit leads to an unthinking Liverpudlian conservatism, and Bagehot was a Liberal. What, then, is the correction ? In his answer, I confess I see no flaw, and I think that the experience of sixty years has established its truth and disclosed its pro- fundity. People do like splendour, distinction, and authority in their rulers. This is their natural allegiance. Very well ; then see to it that the allegiance of the rulers them- selves is rightly directed. And to what ? You will find the answer in a brief paper published in 1871, and called " The Emotion of Conviction." And if there be in English a more " wholesome doctrine or necessary for these times " than is contained in the last pages of that essay, perhaps Mr. S. K. Ratcliffe will tell me where I can find it.
Previous page
