assailants of humbug. "Cynic," indeed, has a very variable connotation, and it would be altogether wrong to apply the epithet to Bagehot without qualification. In Hutton's life of his friend the word inevitably comes up, but with the explanation that it refers to a youthful failing, more or less outlived. Bagehot, he admits, always scorned a fool, and in early days the scorn was not yet tempered by the compassion which is the growth of later yearswhen we have come to know how many and what excellent people belong to that class. Bagehot's satirical "hear, hear," he tells us, took the heart out of young orators at debating societies and reduced the over-eloquent man to his "lowest terms." His "cynicism” meant anything but indifference. It was combined with exuberantly high spirits and intense enjoyment of intellectual combats. University College, in Gower Street, was then, if Hutton is right, a far more "awakening" place than most Oxford colleges. Bagehot, like all clever lads, owed less to lecturers than to his contemporaries; to the impact, as he says, of thought upon thought, to "mirth and refutation, ridicule and laughter," which are the "free play of the natural mind." The young men discussed every topic, from the Corn Laws to the question whether "A is A" can be properly called a "law of thought." Oxford, on the contrary, according to Bagehot, was recommended by authorities as a place where "the appetite for knowledge was repressed," a sleeply hollow in which the Thirtynine Articles were taken to represent ultimate logical categories. An orthodox University, of course, looked stupid enough in Gower Street, the natural home of heterodoxy. Oxford men were deeply agitated by what they innocently took to be thought, but to Bagehot, in spite of certain faint proclivities towards Catholicism, the Oxford speculations appeared to be

futile danglings after extinct phantasms. Oxford, indeed, provided him with one most congenial friend in Arthur Clough. But Clough represented the revolt against the Oxford of Newman, developing into a mellow, allround cynicism. The true cynic should perceive that neither side has a monopoly of humbug. Bagehot's views of many things might be expressed, as Hutton remarks, in Clough's lines:

Old things need not be therefore true, O brother man! nor yet the newwhich some people, like Emerson, translate as really meaning that "Nothing is either true or new." Clough, says his friend, was led to a certain discouragement-a disenchantment; a "fatigued way of looking at great subjects"-partly, as Bagehot thought, because he had been prematurely forced by Arnold's training into "moral earnestness." In fact, he had learnt that Arnold's disciples could be prigs. From that fate Bagehot was preserved by his vivid interest in life. If humbugs abounded all round, he did not become indifferent and fastidious, but only found an ampler field for his combative propensities. How little he was tainted by priggishness or "moral earnestness" appears from the curious set of letters from Paris upon the coup d'état in 1851. Bagehot there came out as a thorough cynic, and his private letters, Hutton tells us, were even more cynical than those published in the Inquirer. The readers of that papergood sound believers in The Times and the British Constitution-were naturally scandalized by the audacious young gentleman who argued that it was quite right to gag the Press and to ship off Leaders of the Opposition to Cayenne. Most young Liberals had been roused to enthusiasm by the revolutionary movements of 1848. Bagehot could only see the absurdities and the failures. He superintended the con

struction of the barricades at Paris to amuse himself; but he was revolted by the "sallow, sincere, sour fanaticism" behind them: the real Montagnards, who would rather shoot him than not. It is not possible, he observes, "to respect anyone who believes in human brotherhood." That faith is too obviously nonsensical. "M. Buonaparte is entitled to very great praise. He has very good heels to his boots, and the French just want treading down and nothing else calm, cruel, business-like oppression to take the dogmatic conceit out of their heads." J. S. Mill had praised the French spirit of generalization. That spirit had come to this, that every Parisian wanted his head tapped in order to get the formulæ and nonsense out of it. Bagehot thoroughly accepted the view of the shopkeepers, that revolutions were bad for trade, and that Louis Napoleon, who put them down, was a genuine "Saviour of Society." A really eloquent passage upon the power of the Catholic Church suggests the more serious side of his doctrine. You may, he tells the Freethinker, disprove the creeds as much as you please; but in the end you find that the "poorest priest in the remote region of the Basses Alpes has more power over men's souls than human cultivation; his ill-mouthed masses move women's souls; can you? Ye scoff at Jupiter, yet he at least was believed in; you never have been. Idol for idol, the dethroned is better than the unthroned." Superstition, that is, may be ridiculous to the reasoner; but to the politician it is a vast and living force to be reckoned with, and there. fore to be respected. Bagehot's early leaning to Catholicism meant that he was susceptible to the historical prestige and imaginative fascinations of the Catholic Church. But then he was too thorough a Rationalist to accept Newman's recipe for suppressing doubt --that is, putting it down by an "act of

will." In point of logic, the creed was false, though in practice, the Church might be not the less useful in its proper place. Though humbug, as Hosea Biglow remarked, has a "solid value," he won't believe it for himself. Some humbug, moreover, is purely mischievous. Both in religion and in politics dogmatism pretends to make absolute truths out of any principles that will lead to the desired conclusion. The Revolutionists illustrated the political evil; for in politics all absolute principles are necessarily absurd. Politics, as Burke had first shown, are "made of time and place;" they are "a piece of business to be determined by sense and circumstance." The one question is whether institutions will work; not whether they can be ostensibly deduced from some arbitrary bit of abstract logic.

Bagehot's youthful audacity applied this to defend the indefensible. He was, as Hutton says, "exasperating." He sang the praises of an "unprincipled adventurer," and made light of perjury and violence. His cynicism was flourished with excessive levity, and good people's scruples needlessly flouted. Yet, assuming that Louis Napoleon deserved everything that even Victor Hugo could say of him, the letters show the real value of good, sweeping, outrageous cynicism. They raise the question which, sooner or later, has to be answered. The viler the despot the more important it is to enquire, What is the secret of his despotic power? It is all very well for popular orators to answer, "Alliance with the devil." A more philosophic observer will remark that a state of things in which the devil has such power must be radically wrong. In proclaiming the wickedness of the successful you are proving the imbecility of the virtuous. Your own principles may be irrefragable. Then why are they impracticable? The lofty idealist refuses to

consider such questions. The error, he assumes, cannot be in his theories, wherever else it may be. The function of the cynic is to force him to descend from the clouds and explain instead of simply denouncing. Bagehot, that is, was really putting a grave difficulty. He was only giving the most paradoxical turn to the convictions which found fuller expression in his later writing. The weaknesses of French politicians, which he described with such singular vigor, have certainly not wanted illustration from later experience. Nobody could describe more clearly some causes of the instability of the political order in France. Politics means business, and therefore compromise. When every man is so logical that compromise becomes a deadly sin, how can the antagonists be held together except by a despotism which at least offers material prosperity? Bagehot's special way of putting it is characteristic. Theory in the lump is bad. The most essential quality for a free people, he declares, "is much stupidity." points his moral by describing the pleasure with which, after a surfeit of brilliant French journalism, he came across an article in The Morning Herald. There was no "sharp theory" in it, "no pointed expression, no fatiguing brilliancy," only "a dull, creeping, satisfactory sensation that there was nothing to admire." There was some good in the coup d'état, which at least suppressed the useless, endless, empty logic-chopping of smart Parisian theo

rizers.

He

Bagehot is seeking point at the expense of accuracy, and will not take the sting out of his paradoxes. His wiser readers may supply the qualifications for themselves. If the less wise are shocked, he will only smile in his sleeve. He had far too much intellect to accept the thoroughly cynical conclusions that since we can know nothing we may believe anything, and since

philosophy is delusive give up the attempt to theorize at all. On the contrary, his weakness is a rather excessive tendency to theorize. It appears in the literary criticisms, at which I can here only glance as illustrations of his habitual mental attitude. They have, above all things, the essential merits of freshness and sincerity. If he has not the special knowledge, he is absolutely free from the pedantry, of the literary expert. He has none of the cant of criticism, and never bores us with "romantic and classical" or "objective and subjective." When he wants a general theory-as he always does he strikes one out in the heat of the moment. He has almost a trickas I have hinted—of dividing all writers into two classes: philosophers are either "seers" or "gropers;" novelists are "miscellaneous" or "sentimental;" genius is symmetrical or irregular, and so forth. Such classifications will not always bear reflection; they only give emphasis to a particular aspect; but they show how his mind is always swarming with theories, and how he looks upon literature as a man primarily interested in the wider problems of life and character which literature reflects. Critics, of course, might find fault with many of his dicta. He is sometimes commonplace because he tells us how things strike him, and not the less that they have struck every competent writer in much the same way; he writes of Shakespeare and Milton as if he had discovered them for the first time; he can at times utter a crude judgment, because he is too indifferent-if that be possible-to orthodox literary authority, and his literary criticism diverges into psychological or political speculations which are hardly relevant. That means that he is really most interested in the man behind the books. It is characteristic that he attacks the common statement about Shakespeare which declares the

man to be unknowable. Matthew Arnold's phrase, "Others abide our question, thou art free!" is used, rightly or wrongly, to justify a theory which Bagehot holds-and I confess that I agree with him-to involve a complete fallacy. It is this interest in character, the comparative indifference to the technical qualities of books, and their value as bringing us into relations with living human beings, that gives a special interest to Bagehot's work. It implies no want of enthusiasm. Bagehot admires some men who had a personal interest for him, Clough and Hartley Coleridge, even more warmly than most authorities would sanction. He shows at any rate-and that is the vital point-how they affected one of their ablest contemporaries.

Bagehot's strong point, indeed, is insight into character; what one of his critics has called his "Shakespearean" power of perceiving the working of men's minds. To possess that power a man must be a bit of what is harshly called a cynic. He must be able to check the sentimentalist tendency to lose all characterization in a blaze of light. His hero-worship must be restrained by humor and common-sense. Carlyle, the great prophet of that creed, could draw most admirable portraits because there was a Diogenes behind the enthusiast; and an underlying shrewdness was always asserting itself behind the didactic panegyric. Bagehot's case, again, this quality shows itself in the curious attractiveness for him of the more prosaic type of intellect. His article, for example, upon Macaulay, shows the struggle in his mind. He accepts the contemporary estimate of that "marvellous" book-the History-as was natural to a man whose youth coincided with Macaulay's culmination. He especially esteems a writer who can describe a commercial panic as accurately as McCulloch, the "driest of political econo

In

mists," and yet make his account as picturesque as a Waverley Novel. Yet he feels keenly the limitations of Macaulay's mind; the incapacity ever to develop his early opinions; the "bookishness" which made him the slave of accepted Whig formulæ; the "chill nature" (perhaps the word is hardly fair) which made him prefer the prosaic and respectable to the "passionate eras of our history." Yet he also recognized what is perhaps too much overlooked, Macaulay's solid commonsense, obscured as it may be by the defects which give so antiquated and wooden an aspect to his political doctrine. Bagehot, on one side, had strong affinities with the old-fashioned Liberalism in which he had been educated. Macaulay showed its merits as well as its defects. He represents that kind of "stupidity" which Bagehot so thoroughly appreciated - the stupidity which is a safeguard against abstract theories. Macaulay, as Emerson observes, praised Baconian philosophy precisely because it meant by "good," good to eat or good to wear; and thought that its merit was "to avoid ideas and avoid morals." Bagehot could agree with Macaulay that "ideas" were dangerous things. He shows in one essay how Bolingbroke was too clever by half. He complains in another that Lowe "cannot help being brilliant." He cannot talk "the monotonous humdrum" which sends men to sleep, and which they suppose must be "all right." He has not the "invaluable faculty" of diffusing the "oppressive atmosphere of business-like dulness" which is "invaluable to a Parliamentary statesman." Lord Althorp was the ideal leader of the Reform Bill time because he was so intellectually clumsy. His mind "had not an epigram in the whole of it; everything was solid and ordinary." So Bagehot criticized Gladstone in a very interesting article (1860), complaining of his "incessant

come

use of ingenious and unqualified prin. ciples," combined with a "scholastic" skill which enables him to prove that any two principles may be consistent. In an earlier article he had analyzed with singular acuteness the character of Sir Robert Peel, to illustrate the truth that a "constitutional statesman is a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities." He has to represent public opinion-the opinion, that is, of the average man; and it will naturally to him to be converted quite honestly and yet just at the right time, that is just when other men of business are converted. Originality and Byronic force and fervor would make that impossible. Byron's mind was volcanic, and flung out thoughts which crystallized into indestructible forms like lava. Peel's was one in which opinions resembled the "daily accumulating insensible deposits of a rich alluvial soil."

Articles in this vein, full of brilliant flashes of insight, show Bagehot's peculiar power. It is quaint enough to observe the audacious, rapid theorist devoting his brightest insight to a serious "encomium moriæ" and becoming paradoxical in praise of the commonplace. He was quite in earnest. He admired no one more than Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, the very type of the thoroughly prosaic, solid, utilitarian mind; and not the less that he was himself imaginative and, if not a poet, had marked poetical sensibility. The explanation may be suggested by the doctrine which he applied in his most valuable works. A scientific enquirer must accumulate knowledge of facts, for the whole fabric of science is based upon experience. But he must also be always speculating, co-ordinating and combining his experience; his mind must be incessantly suggesting the theories till he hits upon the one clue that leads through the chaotic labyrinth which experience presents to puzzle us. Bagehot denounced and ridiculed the

So

theorists who asked for no base of experience, and placidly assumed that the fact would conform to the theory. long as such theories prevail, there can be no stability and therefore no progress. "Stupidity" is invaluable just so far as it involves a tacit demand that theories should be checked by plain practical application. But stupidity absolute sheer impenetrability to ideas-was so little to his taste that a main purpose of his writing is to consider how it can be effectually kept under. As a dumb instinctive force, it wants a guide, and he is terribly afraid that it will become refractory and end by being master. There is the problem which he has to solve.

First of all, we must see the facts before our eyes. Bagehot's greatest merit is that he perceives and complies with this necessary condition of useful inquiry. He illustrates a maxim which he is fond of quoting from Paley. It is much harder to make men see that there is a difficulty than to make them understand the explanation when once they see the difficulty. We build up elaborate screens of words and formulæ which effectively hide the facts, and make us content with sham explanations. "The reason," he says, "why so few good books are written is that so few people that can write know anything." An author "has always lived in a room," he has read books and knows the best authors, but he does not learn the use of his own ears and eyes. That is terribly true, as every author must sorrowfully admit; and probably it is nowhere truer than of English political philosophers. English statesmen had made any number of acute remarks behind which, one supposes, there ought to lie some general theory; but when they tried to say what it was, they fell into grievous platitudes and the conventional twadIdle which is a weariness to the flesh. They took their general principles