Book No. - {> SantKBarbara Free Public Lirary .V- V tARY HOURS; Holidays 9 a. or to 9 p. m. of ten years, who shall have shed an acceptable guarantor, 1 for home use. fherwise specified on their date .ftfy books may be renewe 9, nui*.t?6s>mnped for twenty-eight days 1 plainly on cTa not have their classes labeled, and that the scramble to acquire a better standing, and the pre- mium on pretending to a better standing than one has, give rein to some of the meanest passions of human nature ; brains and character count for as much or as little in one society as in the other ; there is nothing* more essentially ennobling in trying to get rich enough to be made a baronet or a lord, than in trying to get rich enough to be invited to the Jones's receptions or to refuse to invite them to your own ; and aping the manners of lords is no more refining than aping those of the "first families" of Boston, New York, or Virginia. Bagehot's contention, in fact, reduces to two points : that there being several labeled ranks of society makes the boundaries of classes among the unlabeled one less doubtful ; VOL. I. B Xviii THE TRAVELERS INS. CO.'S BAGEHOT. and that the effort to get out of the latter into the former is more improving than the effort to climb from one of the latter to another, both which need only statement for disproof. Plainly enough, he built an ingenious theory on the names aristocracy and democracy, without comparing either with facts. The biographical papers vary much in merit ; but the best of them are of the very first rank, among not only his writings but all writings of the kind. Like the literary essays, they are at once helped and harmed by his passion for making the facts support a theory ; but the benefit is much greater than the injury. They have two special merits in great strength : they are wonderfully vivid in portrayal of character, the subjects stand out like sil- houettes, and one knows them almost like the hero of a novel ; and they present the important political features of the times with stereoscopic and unforgetable clearness. In these respects he far surpassed the most famous master in this line, Lord Macaulay. One cannot form nearly so full and just an idea of the younger Pitt's equipment, or so clear an image of his personality, from Macaulay's biography as from Bagehot's ; and the insight into the problems of Queen Anne's time to be gained from the "War of the Succession " is very superficial compared with that given by the masterly exposition in Bagehot's Bolingbroke. Bagehot, too, has an unequaled skill in so stating his facts and his deductions as to force one to remember them, the highest triumph of a literary style. A careless person may read an essay of Macaulay's with great delight, carry away a wealth of glittering sentences, and be absolutely unable to remember the course or connection of events, the uniform brilliancy destroying the perspective and leaving nothing salient for the mind to grasp ; but nobody who reads one of Bagehot's historical papers can lose the clue to the politics of the time any more than he can forget his name. The sketch of his father-in-law, Mr. Wilson, it would be unfair to judge by pure abstract standards. Its chief interest to me is its unconscious picture of the complacent provinciality, the applica- tion of their local standards to everything in the world, which has made the English government and many of the most high-minded and well-meaning English officials hated by every subject people in every age. Mr. Wilson was an able, upright, and utterly consci- entious public man ; he never had a doubt that the administrative machinery of England was the best possible for any country or people, that the taxes ought to be raised everywhere just as they were raised in England, that the way anything was done in Eng- land was the way it should be done everywhere ; he was made EDITOR S PREFACE. XIX financial dictator of India, and proceeded to duplicate the English system there, in unruffled disregard both of the people and of the resident English officials who declared it unsuitable to the coun- try : and his biographer, who has devoted his best powers else- where to exposing the folly of abstract systems, calmly tells us that if it did not work well it was the people's own fault, and they must not complain if the government put on the screws harder. Both may have been entirely right but it is all very English, and an excellent object lesson. The literary essays are unfailingly charming, and exhibit Bage- hot's wit and freshness of view and keenness of insight, and the wide scope of his thought, more thoroughly than any other of his writings ; and their criticism is often of the highest value. Yet I do not rate them his best. They have the merit and the defect of a consistent purpose, a central theory which the details are mar- shaled to support. The merit is, that it makes them worth writing at all ; the defect, that the theory may be wrong or incomplete, and the facts garbled to make out a case for it. For example, Macaulay's character and views are both distorted to round out Bagehot's theory of the literary temperament and its effects. The theory is only half true to begin with : the shrinking from life and preference for books which he attributes to an unsensitive disposition is often enough the result of the exact reverse, an over-sensitive one, like a flayed man, which makes it hard to dis- tinguish impressions because all hurt alike ; Southey, the extreme type of the book man, exemplifies this. Macaulay could not have been the able administrator and effective parliamentary speaker he was, without much more capacity to see life and men with his own eyes than Bagehot allows him ; and how any one can read the "Notes on the Indian Penal Code" and still maintain that Mac- aulay's residence in India taught him nothing, I cannot compre- hend. And his judgment of the Puritans is grossly perverted : he, and not Carlyle, was the first to sweep away the current view that they were canting hypocrites whose religion makes their success- harder instead of easier to understand ; and both in the essays and in the "History of England" he attributes their power directly to their religious fervor, his lack of sympathy with which makes his hearty appreciation of its effects all the more striking a proof of his intellectual acuteness. Bagehot more than atones for this, however, by a signal service to Macaulay's repute in pointing out that the vulgar cant which rates him as a mere windy rhetorician is the exact reverse of the truth, and that the source of his merits and defects alike was a hard unspiritual common-sense. XX THE TRAVELERS INS. CO.'S BAGEHOT. The miscellaneous nature of the essays was a great advantage to a shrewd and humorous mind like his, by not exacting a petty surface consistency : he could utter all sorts of contradictory or complementary half-truths, shoot the shafts of his wit at friend and foe alike, and gibe at all classes of society as their ridiculous aspects came into view. Any one dull enough to take all his fleers for cold and final judgments, and try to weave them into a con- sistent whole, would have a worse task than Michael Scott's devil. He seems to me to have had also, as such a mind often has, a strong element of sheer perversity. One of his chief delights by a reactionary sympathy rather odd in a great thinker and literary man, and specially so in him as contrary to his whole theory of modern society was to magnify the active and belittle the intel- lectual temperament ; he is never tired of glorifying fox-hunters and youths who hate study, and sneering at the intellectual class, from Euclid and Newton, Macaulay and Mackintosh, to college tutors and impotent litterateurs. Yet in "Physics and Politics," where his serious purpose curbs his reckless wit, he credits the "pale pre- liminary students " with the main share in developing civilization ; and in a remarkable passage makes the active temperament a seri- ous drawback and evil temptation in modern life, and the increase _of thoughtful quiet our great desideratum. The natural deduction would be, that the best work has been done by the best men, and that a class we need to have multiplied is a superior class. Surely it is an exception to everything else in the universe if the small body of pioneers have been the weakest part of the race, if the scarcest mental qualities are the least valuable, if the world's admiration is given to those who as a whole do not deserve it, if the fortunes of the world have depended and still depend on the fiberless and the purblind. Like others, Bagehot sometimes preferred one-sided wit to judicial truth. After this, it will seem like wanton paradox to say that I think his utterances on this point much more valuable and better worth heeding than most of those on the other side ; but it is not. We hear quite enough of the other, and feeble recluse literary talent gets fully as much reverence as it earns ; it is very wholesome to have it shrunk a little by a cold shower-bath of mockery, and a practical experience of life set up as the inexorable condition of having anything to say worth listening to. It is exaggerated, of course, but one must exaggerate to gain a hearing, refined truth is not exciting ; and there is no truer or weightier remark than Bage- hot's, that literature is so comparatively sterile because ' ' so few people that can write know anything." EDITOR S PREFACE. XXI His own "Lombard Street" is a splendid material argument of the above position : as he says, most business men cannot write, most writers know nothing of business, therefore most writing about business is either unreadable or untrue ; he devoted the high- est literary talent to the theme of his daily business, and has produced a book as solid as a market report and more charming than a novel. It is one of the marvels of literature. There has rarely been such an example of the triumph of style over matter, Macaulay himself never succeeded in giving more exhaustless charm to things which few can make readable at all ; and it is a striking example of his great faculty of illuminating every question by illus- trations from the unlikeliest sources. There is a fascination about it surpassing that of any other of his writings : its luminous, easy, half- playful "business talk" is irresistibly captivating, and after reading it a hundred times, I cannot pick it up without reading a good share of it again. As to the validity of its criticisms or advice on banking matters, I know nothing and shall say nothing. The only strong review of the book was by Professor Bonamy Price in Fraser's ; and while some of the professor's observations are highly acute and valuable, one grudges to admit any merit at all in the article on account of its virulent bitterness of tone, the extreme opposite to that of the book reviewed. The business man discusses his subject like a gentleman, and the professor like a termagant, nothing new in controversies ; and the latter becomes ponderously sarcastic with rage every time he thinks of the "insult" offered to the management of the Bank of England by the suggestions for bettering it, something the author probably never dreamed of and the public certainly never noticed. Even a much smaller man is entitled to say. without committing the stupendous folly of expressing an opinion on the Bank case, that Professor Price's assault on Bagehot for confusion of technical terms is over-captious (the passage on this subject in the " Transfera- bility of Capital " is evidently intended as an answer to it) ; that some of his assertions are simply angry reiterations, without fresh argument, of points Bagehot has contested ; that others attack things in one part of the book which are cleared up in another part ; and that nothing in it warrants any such amount of bad temper. Moreover, his position on the subject of panics, considered as a reply to Bagehot, makes one open his eyes very wide : it is the same thing in essence as telling the corpse of a man dead from fright that since all his organs are sound, he has no business to be. dead, and in point of fact is not dead, and could perfectly well go on living if he chose. The obvious answer is, that none xxii THE TRAVELERS INS. CO.'S BAGEHOT. the less he is dead. If a panic results in reducing a host of merchants to bankruptcy and small salaries, in reducing thousands of families from affluence to poverty, in destroying elegant homes and sending their inmates to tenements, in depriving boys of university educations and girls of social chances, it is a tremen- dous misfortune, even though, as Professor Price maintains, not a particle of actual capital is lost; it is to be averted by every possible means ; and it is not presumptuous to say that Bagehot's preventives are much sounder than Professor Price's, which seem to consist of telling people that if they would have sense enough not to be scared they would not be harmed. This is of course true, but also worthless; it is excellent as general teaching, but childish in any particular crisis : and if business is based on a probability of facts instead of directly on the facts, it is inevi- table that an apparent failure of the probability should produce for the time the same result as an actual failure of the facts. But all this is beside the vital qualities of "Lombard Street": its merits or defects as a banker's manual will have nothing to do with its immortality, for sooner or later its use in that capacity must pass away. It will live as a picture, not as a text-book; ages after the London of our time is as extinct as the Athens of Pericles, it will be read with delight as incomparably the best description of that London's business essence that anywhere exists. Of the "Articles on the Depreciation of Silver," it must be said that the course of events has not thus far supported their thesis. It seems most probable that the increased use of tools of credit which is the same thing as the growth of mutual confidence, bred by civilization and commerce has permanently lessened the need- ful stock of coin, and that consequently the use and value of the bulkier metal have started on a downward road which can never ascend. If the great silver-using countries develop increased trade, they will probably use less silver instead of more, simply drawing more bills. But aside from their main purpose, the articles con- tain much admirable exposition of trade facts and principles, richly worth studying. Of the "Letters on the French Coup d'fitat," there is not much to add to what Mr. Hutton and others have said. They are per- ennially entertaining and wholesome reading, full of racy wit and capital argument ; they contain the essence of all his political philosophy, and he swerved very little from their main lines ; and with all their limitations and perversities, they would be an inval- uable manual for our politicians and legislators, their faults are too opposed to our rooted instincts to do the smallest harm, and EDITOR'S PREFACE. xxiii they harp on those primary objects of all government which demagogues and buncombe representatives forget or never knew. They are still more remarkable as the only writings of so young a man on such a subject whose matter is of any permanent value, and as showing how early his capacity for reducing the confused details of life to an embracing principle gained its full stature. As theological opinions rarely please any one but the holder, I may perhaps indulge in the luxury of pleasing myself in com- menting on Bagehot's, without expecting concurrence from others. He was much too cool, skeptical, practical, and humorous for a great theologian or religious leader ; but his acute and original intellect suffered no paralysis in this field, and he had one factor of the highest religious temperament, a strong bent toward and liking for mysticism. Indeed, in the "First Edinburgh Reviewers" he asserts flatly that "mysticism is true," which is a matter of definition. This raised him far above Paley and his group in spiritual insight, and gave him a sympathetic understanding of some very obscure problems in religious history. The best of his polemic work is the unanswerable piece of destructive criticism on Professor Rogers and the extreme supporters of the "Analogy" in the essay on Bishop Butler; his best positive contribution to theology is the explanation why religion does not destroy morality, in the "Ignorance of Man." This essay is wonderfully ingenious and plausible, but not always convincing or satisfying. For ex- ample, the "screen" theory is excellent for the screened, but hard on the screen ; in fact, it is simply our old friend the Calvinistic doctrine of election over again, in a less extreme and shocking form. That ninety-nine per cent, of all immortal souls were cre- ated simply to agonize the remaining one per cent, into elevated spirituality, is not quite so bad as that they were created for nothing except to be damned ; but there is the same division into small aristocracy and vast rabble, both fixed as such by the Creator. It is the same old altar-piece toned down, with rags and crusts in place of the flames of hell. The truth is, a thinker reared under an aristocratic polity can hardly ever get it out of his head that there must be a small favored "upper class" in the divine councils, for whose behoof the great mass exist. The in- fluence of earthly on divine constitutions will bear more analysis than it has received : that there has been so little democracy here is unquestionably the reason there has been so little in the theo- ries of the hereafter. Perhaps God is more of a democrat than is currently allowed, and it may be reserved for the United States to renovate theological as it has political speculation. That the XXIV THE TRAVELERS INS. CO. S BAGEHOT. dirty crowd was ever meant to be let into the fine parks of the future, is too shocking an idea from the aristocratic standpoint to be admitted, and rarely has been ; Bagehot does not shut them out wholly, but preserves due subordination of ranks by reserving the 'grand stand" for the spiritual nobility, evidently holding that the spiritual world is organized on a "deferential" system like the English government, which by a happy chance is the best model not only for this world but the next. There would be no difficulty in extending these comments to any length, the difficulty is to stop ; but I have said quite enough, and perhaps on some points too much. And after all, what has been said of other great writers is true of Bagehot and indeed of every great writer, the best answer to all fault-finding is to read him. His untimely death lost the world a great store of high and fine enjoyment, as well as strong and satisfying thought ; and closing my intimate daily companionship with him seems like parting from one who is at once a powerful teacher and a beloved comrade. F. M. BY RICHARD HOLT HUTTON.* IT is inevitable, I suppose, that the world should judge of a man chiefly by what it has gained in him and lost by his death, even though a very little reflection might sometimes show that the special qualities which made him so useful to the world implied others of a yet higher order, in which, to those who knew him well, these more conspicuous characteristics must have been well-nigh merged. And while of course it has given me great pleasure, as it must have given pleasure to all Bagehot's friends, to' hear the Chancel- lor of the Exchequer's evidently genuine tribute to his financial sagacity in the Budget speech of 1877, and Lord Granville's eloquent acknowledgments of the value of Bagehot's political counsels as editor of the Ecmwmht in the speech delivered at the London Uni- versity on May 9, 1877, I have sometimes felt somewhat unreasonably vexed that those who appreciated so well what I may almost call the smallest part of him, appeared to know so little of the essence of him, of the high-spirited, buoyant, subtle, speculative nature, in which the imaginative qualities were even more remarkable than the judgment, and were indeed at the root of all that was strongest in the judgment; of the gay and dashing humor which was the life of every conversation in which he joined ; and of the vision- ary nature to which the commonest things often seemed the most marvelous, and the marvelous things the most intrinsically probable. To those who hear of Bagehot only as an original political econo- mist and a lucid political thinker, a curiously false image of him must be suggested. If they are among the multitude misled by Carlyle, who regard all political economists as "the dreary professors of a dismal science," they will probably conjure up an arid dis- quisitionist on value and cost of production; and even if assured of Bagehot's imaginative power, they may perhaps only understand by the expression that capacity for feverish preoccupation which makes the mention of "Peel's Act" summon up to the faces of certain fanatics a hectic glow, or the rumor of paper currencies blanch * Originally published in the Forlnii/My Review; republished with a few changes as an introduction to the "Literary Studies." Some of his allusions pertain only to that edition, but I have left them untouched. En. > (xxv) XXVI THE TRAVELERS INS. CO. S BAGEHOT. others with the pallor of true passion. The truth, however, is that the best qualities which Bagehot had, both as economist and as politician, were of a kind which the majority of economists and politicians do not specially possess. I do not mean that it was in any way an accident that he was an original thinker in either sphere; far from it. But I do think that what he brought to politi- cal and economic science he brought in some sense from outside their normal range, that the man of business and the financier in him fell within such sharp and well-defined limits that he knew better than most of his class where their special weakness lay, and where their special functions ended. This, at all events, I am quite sure of: that so far as his judgment was sounder than other men's, and on many subjects it was much sounder, it was so not in spite of, but in consequence of, the excursive imagination and vivid humor which are so often accused of betraying otherwise sober minds into dangerous aberrations. In him both lucidity and caution were directly traceable to the force of his imagination. Walter Bagehot was born at Langport, on Feb. 3, 1826. Lang- port is an old-fashioned little town in the center of Somersetshire, which in early days returned two members to Parliament, until the burgesses petitioned Edward I. to relieve them of the expense of paying their members, a quaint piece of economy of which Bagehot frequently made humorous boast. The town is still a close corporation,* and calls its mayor by the old Saxon name of "Portreeve"; and Bagehot himself became its "deputy recorder," as well as a magistrate for the county. Situated at the point where the river Parret ceases to be navigable, Langport has always been a center of trade; and here in the last century Mr. Samuel Stuckey founded the Somersetshire Bank, which has since spread over the entire county, and is now the largest private bank of issue in England. Bagehot was the only surviving child of Mr. Thomas Watson Bagehot, who was for thirty years managing director and vice-chairman of Stuckey's Banking Company, and was (as Bagehot was fond of recalling), before he resigned that position, the oldest joint-stock banker in the United Kingdom. Bagehot succeeded his father as vice-chairman of the bank when the latter retired in his old age. His mother, a Miss Stuckey, was a niece of Mr. Samuel Stuckey, the founder of the Banking Company, and was a very pretty and lively woman, who had, by her previous marriage with a son of Dr. Estlin of Bristol, been brought at an early age into an intellectual atmosphere by which she had greatly profited. There * The corporation of Langport was done away with, as was that of every one of the few remaining close corporations in England, during Mr. Gladstone's government, by the Municipal Corporation Act of 1883. E. H. H. MEMOIR. XXV11 is no doubt that Bagehot was greatly indebted to the constant and careful sympathy in all his studies that both she and his father gave him, as well as to a very studious disposition, for his future success. Dr. Prichard, the well-known ethnologist, was her brother- in-law; and her son's marked taste for science was first awakened in Dr. Prichard's house in Park Row, where Bagehot often spent his half-holidays while he was a schoolboy in Bristol. To Dr. Prichard's "Races of Man" may indeed be first traced that keen interest in the speculative side of ethnological research, the results of which are best seen in Bagehot's book on "Physics and Politics." I first met Bagehot at University College, London, when we were neither of us over seventeen. I was struck by the questions put by a lad with large dark eyes and florid complexion to the late Professor De Morgan, who was lecturing to us, as his custom was, on the great difficulties involved in what we thought we all understood perfectly, such, for example, as the meaning of 0, of negative quantities, or the grounds of probable expectation. Bage- hot's questions showed that he had both read and thought more on these subjects than most of us ; and I was eager to make his acquaintance, which soon ripened into an intimate friendship in which there was never any intermission between that time and his death. Some will regret that Bagehot did not go to Oxford ; the reason being that his father, who was a Unitarian, objected on prin- ciple to all doctrinal tests, and would never have permitted a son of his to go to either of the older universities while those tests were required of the undergraduates. And I am not at all sure that University College, London, was not at that time a much more awakening place of education for young men than almost any Oxford college. Bagehot himself, I suspect, thought so. Fifteen years later he wrote, in his essay on Shelley: "A distinguished pupil of the University of Oxford once observed to us, 'The use of the University of Oxford is, that no one can overread himself there. The appetite for knowledge is repressed.'" And whatever may have been defective in University College, London, and no doubt much was defective, nothing of the kind could have been said of it when we were students there. Indeed, in those years London was a place with plenty of intellectual stimulus in it for young men, while in University College itself there was quite enough vivacious and original teaching to make that stimulus available to the full. It is sometimes said that it needs the quiet of a country town, remote from the capital, to foster the love of genuine study in young men. But of this at least I am sure : that Gower Street and Oxford Street, and the New Road, and the dreary chain of XXviii THE TRAVELERS INS. CO.'S BAGEHOT. squares from Euston to Bloomsbury, were the scenes of discussions as eager and as abstract as ever were the sedate cloisters or the flowery river meadows of Cambridge or Oxford. Once, I remember, in the vehemence of our argument as to whether the so-called logical principle of identity (A is A) were entitled to rank as "a law of thought" or only as a postulate of language, Bagehot and I wan- dered up and down Regent Street for something like two hours in the vain attempt to find Oxford Street. "And yet what days were those, Parmenides, When we were young, when we could number friends In all the Italian cities like ourselves ; When with elated hearts we joined your train, Ye sun-born virgins, on the road of truth ! Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought Nor outward things were closed and dead to us, But we received the shock of mighty thoughts On single minds with a pure natural joy ; And if the sacred load oppressed our brain, We had the power to feel the pressure eased, The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again In the delightful commerce of the world."* Bagehot has himself described, evidently from his own expe- rience, the kind of life we lived in those days, in an article on "Oxford Reform " : f " So too in youth, the real plastic energy is not in tutors or lectures or in books ' got up, ' but in Wordsworth and Shelley ; in the books that all read because all like ; in what all talk of because all are interested ; in the argumentative walk or disputatious lounge ; in the impact of young thought upon young thought, of fresh thought on fresh thought, of hot thought on hot thought ; in mirth and refutation, in ridicule and laughter : for these are the free play of the natural mind, and these cannot be got without a college." The late Professor Sewell, when asked to give his pupils some clear conception of the old Greek sophists, is said to have replied that he could not do this better than by referring them to the professors of University College, London. I do not think there was much force in the sarcasm; for though Professor T. Hewitt Key, whose restless and ingenious mind led him many a wild dance after etymological Will-of-the-Wisps, I remember, for instance, his * Matthew Arnold, "Empedocles on Etna," an early poem, omitted from some later editions, but included in that of 1888 (Macraillan's, 3 vols.). t Prospective Review for August, 1852 ; a paper too strictly temporary and practical in its aim for republication now. R. H. H. [See extract follow- ing this memoir.] MEMOIR. XXIX cheerfully accepting the suggestion that "better" and "bad," melior and malus, came from the same root, and accounting for it by the probable disposition of hostile tribes to call everything bad which their enemies called good, and everything good which their enemies called bad, may have had in him much of the brilliance, and something also, perhaps, of the flightiness of the old sophist, it would be hard to imagine men more severe in exposing pretentious conceits and dispelling dreams of theoretic omniscience than Pro- fessors De Morgan, Maiden, and Long. De Morgan, who at that time was in the midst of his controversy on formal logic with Sir William Hamilton, was indeed characterized by the great Edinburgh metaphysician as "profound in mathematics, curious in logic, but wholly deficient in architectonic power" ; yet for all that, his lec- tures on the Theory of Limits were a far better logical discipline for young men than Sir William Hamilton's on the Law of the Unconditioned or the Quantification of the Predicate. Professor Maiden contrived to imbue us with a love of that fastidious taste and that exquisite nicety in treating questions of scholarship, which has perhaps been more needed and less cultivated in Gower Street than any other of the higher elements of a college education ; while Professor Long's caustic irony, accurate and almost ostentatiously dry learning, and profoundly stoical temperament, were as antithetic to the temper of the sophist as human qualities could possibly be. The time of our college life was pretty nearly contemporaneous with the life of the Anti-Corn-Law League and the great agitation in favor of Free Trade. To us this was useful rather from the general impulse it gave to political discussion, and the literary curiosity it excited in us as to the secret of true eloquence, than because it anticipated in any considerable degree the later acquired taste for economic science. Bagehot and I seldom missed an oppor- tunity of hearing together the matchless practical disquisitions of Mr. Cobden, lucid and homely, yet glowing with intense con- viction, the profound passion and careless though artistic scorn of Mr. Bright, and the artificial and elaborately ornate periods, and witty though somewhat ad captamdum epigrams, of Mr. W. J. Fox (afterwards M. P. for Oldham). Indeed, we scoured London together to hear any kind of oratory that had gained a reputation of its own, and compared all we heard with the declamation of Burke and the rhetoric of Macaulay, many of whose later essays came out and were eagerly discussed by us while we were together at college. In our conversations on these essays, I remember that I always bitterly attacked, while Bngehot moderately defended, the glorification of compromise which marks all Macaulay's writings. XXX THE TRAVELERS INS. CO.'S BAGEHOT. Even in early youth Bagehot had much of that "animated modera- tion" -which he praises so highly in his latest work. He was a voracious reader, especially of history, and had a far truer apprecia- tion of historical conditions than most young thinkers; indeed, the broad historical sense which characterized him from first to last made him more alive than ordinary students to the urgency of cir- cumstance, and far less disposed to indulge in abstract moral criti- cism from a modern point of view. On theology, as on all other subjects, Bagehot was at this time more conservative than myself, he sharing his mother's orthodoxy, and I at that time accepting heartily the Unitarianism of my own people. Theology was, how- ever, I think, the only subject on which in later life we to some degree, at least exchanged places ; though he never at any time, however doubtful he may have become on some of the cardinal issues of historical Christianity, accepted the Unitarian position. Indeed, within the last two or three years of his life, he spoke on one occasion of the Trinitarian doctrine as probably the best account which human reason could render of the mystery of the self-existent mind. In those early days Bagehot's manner was often supercilious. We used to attack him for his intellectual arrogance, his vftpig we called it in our college slang ; a quality which I believe was not really in him, though he had then much of its external appearance. Nevertheless, his genuine contempt for what was intellectually feeble was not accompanied by an even adequate appreciation of his own powers. At college, however, his satirical "Hear, hear" was a formidable sound in the debating society, and one which took the heart out of many a younger speaker; and the ironical "How much ? " with which in conversation he would meet an ovQr-eloquent expression, was always of a nature to reduce a man, as the mathe- matical phrase goes, to his "lowest terms." In maturer life he became much gentler and mellower, and often even delicately con- siderate for others; but his inner scorn for ineffectual thought remained in some degree, though it was very reticently expressed, to the last. For instance, I remember his attacking me for my mildness in criticizing a book which, though it professed to rest on a basis of clear thought, really missed all its points. "There is a pale, whity -brown substance," he wrote to me, "in the man's books, which people who don't think take for thought, but it isn't ; " and he upbraided me much for not saying plainly that the man was a muff. In his youth this scorn for anything like the vain beating of the wingrs in the attempt to think was at its maximum. It was increased, I think, by that which was one of his greatest qualities, MEMOIR. XXXi his remarkable ' ' detachment " of mind ; in other words, his compara- tive inaccessibility to the contagion of blind sympathy. Most men, more or less unconsciously, shrink from even thinking what they feel to be out of sympathy with the feelings of their neighbors, unless under some strong incentive to do so; and in this way the sources of much true and important criticism are dried up through the mere diffusion and ascendancy of conventional but sincere habits of social judgment. And no doubt for the greater number of us this is much the best : we are worth more for the purpose of con- stituting and strengthening the cohesive power of the social bond than we should ever be worth for the purpose of criticizing feebly and with little effect, perhaps, except the disorganizing effect of seeming ill-nature the various incompetencies and miscarriages of our neighbors' intelligence. But Bagehot's intellect was always far too powerful and original to render him available for the function of mere social cement; and full as he was of genuine kindness and hearty personal affections, he certainly had not in any high degree that sensitive instinct as to what others would feel which so often shapes even the thoughts of men, and still oftener their speech, into mild and complaisant but unmeaning and unfruitful forms. Thus it has been said that in his very amusing article on Crabb Robinson, published in the Fortnightly Review for August, 1869, he was more than a little rough in his delineation of that quaint old friend of our earlier days ; and certainly there is something of the naturalist's realistic manner of describing the habits of a new species in the paper, though there is not a grain of malice or even depreciatory bias in it, and though there is a very sincere regard manifested throughout. But that essay will illustrate admirably what I mean by saying that Bagehot's detachment of mind, and the deficiency in him of any aptitude for playing the part of mere social cement, tended to give the impression of an intellectual arro- gance which certainly in the sense of self-esteem or self-assertion did not in the least belong to him. In the essay I have just men- tioned he describes how Crabb Robinson, when he gave his some- what famous breakfast parties, used to forget to make the tea, then lost his keys, then told a long story about a bust of Wieland during the extreme agony of his guests' appetites, and finally, perhaps, withheld the cup of tea he had at last poured out while he regaled them with a poem of Wordsworth's or a diatribe against Hazlitt. And Bagehot adds : "The more astute of his guests used to break- fast before they came : and then there was much interest in seeing a steady literary man, who did not understand the region, in ago- nies at having to hear three stories before he got his tea, one again XXX11 THE TRAVELERS INS. CO. S BAGEHOT. between his milk and his sugar, another between his butter and his toast, and additional zest in making a stealthy inquiry that was sure to intercept the coming delicacies by bringing on Schiller and Goethe." The only "astute" person referred to was, I imagine, Bagehot himself, who confessed to me, much to my amusement, that this was always his own precaution before one of Crabb Robinson's breakfasts. I doubt if anybody else ever thought of it. It was very characteristic in him that he should have not only noticed for that, of course, any one might do this weak element in Crabb Robinson's breakfasts, but should have kept it so distinctly before his mind as to make it the center, as it were, of a policy, and the opportunity of a mischievous stratagem to try the patience of others. It showed how much of the social naturalist there was in him. If any race of animals could understand a naturalist's account of their ways and habits, and of the devices he adopted to get those ways and habits more amusingly or instructively displayed before him, no doubt they would think that he was a cynic ; and it was this intellectual detachment, as of a social naturalist, from the society in which he moved, which made Bagehot's remarks often seem somewhat harsh, when in fact they were animated not only by no suspicion of malice, but by the most cordial and earnest friendliness. Owing to this separateness of mind, he described more strongly and distinctly traits which, when delineated by a friend, we expect to find painted in the softened manner of one who is half disposed to imitate or adopt them. Yet, though I have used the word "naturalist" to denote the keen and solitary observation with which Bagehot watched society, no word describes him worse if we attribute to it any of that cold- ness and stillness of curiosity which we are apt to associate with scientific vigilance. Especially in his youth, buoyancy, vivacity, velocity of thought were of the essence of the impression which he made. He had high spirits and great capacities for enjoyment ; great sympathies, indeed, with the old English Cavalier. In his essay on Macaulay he paints that character with profound sympathy. " What historian, indeed," he says, " has ever estimated the Cavalier character ? There is Clarendon, the grave, rhetorical, decorous lawyer ; piling words, congealing arguments ; very stately, a little grim. There is Hume, the Scotch metaphysician, who has made out the best case for such people as never were, for a Charles who never died, for a Strafford who could never have been attainted; a saving, calculating North-countryman, fat. impassive, who lived on eightpence a day. What have these people to do with an enjoying English gentleman ? Talk of the ways of spread- ing a wholesome Conservatism throughout the country : ... as far as com- municating and establishing your creed is concerned, try a little pleasure. MEMOIR. XXX111 The way to keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs ; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is, to enjoy that state of things. Over the 'Cavalier' mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the 'regular thing,' joy at an old feast." And that aptly represents himself. Such arrogance as he seemed to have in early life was the arrogance as much of enjoyment as of detachment of mind ; the insouciance of the old Cavalier as much at least as the calm of a mind not accessible to the contagion of social feelings. He always talked, in youth, of his spirits as incon- veniently high : and once wrote to me that he did not think they were quite as "boisterous" as they had been, and that his fellow- creatures were not sorry for the abatement ; nevertheless, he added, "I am quite fat, gross, and ruddy." He was indeed excessively fond of hunting, vaulting, and almost all muscular effort ; so that his life would be wholly misconceived by any one who, hearing of his "detachment" of thought, should picture his mind as a vigilantly observant, far-away intelligence, such as Hawthorne's, for example. He liked to be in the thick of the melee when talk grew warm, though he was never so absorbed in it as not to keep his mind cool. . As I said, Bagehot was a Somersetshire man, with all the rich- ness of nature and love for the external glow of life which the most characteristic counties of the Southwest of England contrive to give to their most characteristic sons. "This northwest corner of Spain," he wrote once to a newspaper from the Pyrenees, "is the only place out of England where I should like to live. It is a sort of better Devonshire : the coast is of the same kind, the sun is more brilliant, the sea is more brilliant, and there are mountains in the background. I have seen some more beautiful places, and many grander ; but I should not like to live in them. As Mr. Emerson puts it, ' I do not want to go to heaven before my time.' My English nature, by early use and long habit, is tied to a certain kind of scenery, soon feels the want of it, and is apt to be alarmed as well as pleased at perpetual snow and all sorts of similar beauties. But here, about San Sebastian, you have the best England can give you (at least if you hold, as I do, that Devonshire is the finest of our counties), and the charm, the ineffable, indescribable charm of the South too. Probably the sun has some secret effect on the nerv- ous system that makes one inclined to be pleased ; but the golden light lies upon everything, and one fancies that one is charmed only by the outward loveliness." The vivacity and warm coloring of the landscapes of the South of England certainly had their full share in molding hie tastes, and possibly even his style. Bagehot took the mathematical scholarship with his Bachelor's degree in the University of London in 1846, and the gold medal in VOL. I. c XXXvi THE TRAVELERS INS. CO.'S BAGEHOT. eo the Catholic Church was opposed to inquiry and reasoning; but it is not so now and here : loudly, from the pens of a hundred writers, from the tongues of a thousand pulpits, in every note of thrilling scorn and exulting derision, she proclaims the contrary. Be she Christ's workman or Antichrist's, she knows her work too well. ' Reason, reason, reason 1 ' ex- claims she to the philosophers of this world ; ' put in practice what you teach, if you would have others believe it; be consistent; do not prate to us of private judgment when you are but yourselves repeating what you heard in the nursery, ill-mumbled remnants of a Catholic tradition. No ! exemplify what you command, inquire and make search; seek, though we warn you that ye will never find yet do as ye will. Shut yourself up in a room, make your mind a blank, go down (as ye speak) into the " depths of your consciousness," scrutinize the mental structure, inquire for the ele- ments of belief, spend years, your best years, in the occupation ; and at length, when your eyes are dim and your brain hot and your hand un- steady, then reckon what you have gained : see if you cannot count on your fingers the certainties you have reached ; reflect which of them you doubted yesterday, which you may disbelieve to-morrow : or rather, make haste, assume at random some essential credettda, write down your inevitable postulates, enumerate your necessary axioms ; toil on, toil on, spin your spider's-web, adore j'our own souls ; or if ye prefer it, choose some German nostrum, try the "intellectual intuition," or the "pure reason," or the "intel- ligible ideas," or the mesmeric clairvoyance, and when so or somehow you have attained your results, try them on mankind. Don't go out into the highways and hedges, it is unnecessary: ring the bell, call in the servants, give them a course of lectures ; cite Aristotle, review Descartes, panegyrize Plato, and see if the bonne will understand you. It is you that say, "Vox populi, vox Dei " ; but you see the people reject you. Or suppose you succeed, what you call succeeding : your books are read ; for three weeks or even a season you are the idol of the salons; your hard words are on the lips of women, then a change comes: a new actress appears at the Theatre Francais or the Opera, her charms eclipse your theories; or a great catas- trophe occurs, political liberty (it is said) is annihilated, "II faut se faire mouchard" is the observation of scoffers: anyhow, you are forgotten; fifty years may be the gestation of a philosophy, not three its life; before long, before you go to your grave, your six disciples leave you for some newer master or to set up for themselves. The poorest priest in the remotest 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 wwthroned. No : if you would reason, if you would teach, if you would speculate, come to us. We have our premises ready : years upon years before you were born, intellects whom the best of you delight to magnify, toiled to systematize the creed of ages ; years upon years after you are dead, better heads than yours will find new matter there to define, to divide, to arrange. Consider the hundred volumes of Aquinas: which of you desire a higher life than that, to deduce, to subtilize, discriminate, systematize, and decide the highest truth, and to be believed ? yet such was his luck, his enjoyment ; he was what you would be. No, no: credile, credite. Ours is the life of speculation; the cloister is the home for the student. Philosophy is stationary, Catholicism progressive. MEMOIR. XXXV11 You call, we are heard ' etc., etc. So speaks each preacher according to his ability. And when the dust and noise of present controversies have passed away, and in the silence of the night some grave historian writes out the tale of half-forgotten times, let him not forget to observe that skill- fully as the mediaeval Church subdued the superstitious cravings of a pain- ful and barbarous age, in after years she dealt more discerningly still with the feverish excitement, the feeble vanities, and the dogmatic impatience of an over-intellectual generation." It is obvious, I think, both from the poem and from these reflec- tions, that what attracted Bagehot in the Church of Rome was the historical prestige and social authority which she had accumulated in believing and uncritical ages for use in the unbelieving and criti- cal age in which we live; while what he condemned and dreaded in her was her tendency to use her power over the multitude for purposes of a low ambition. And as I am on this subject, this will be, I think, the best opportunity I shall have to say what I have got to say of Bagehot's later religious belief, without returning to it when I have to deal with a period in which the greatest part of his spare intellectual energy was given to other subjects. I do not think that the religious affections were very strong in Bagehot's mind; but the primitive religious instincts certainly were. From childhood he was what he certainly remained to the last, in spite of the rather antagonistic influence of the able scientific group of men from whom he learned so much, a thorough transcendentalist ; by which I mean, one who could never doubt that there was a real founda- tion of the universe distinct from the outward show of its superficial qualities, and that the substance is never exhaustively expressed in these qualities. He often repeats in his essays Shelley's fine line, "Lift not the painted veil which those who live call life;" and the essence at least of the idea in it haunted him from his very childhood. In the essay on Hartley Coleridge, perhaps the most perfect in style of any of his writings, he describes most power- fully, and evidently in great measure from his own experience, the mysterious confusion between appearances and realities which so bewildered little Hartley: the difficulty that he complained of in distinguishing between the various Hartleys, "picture Hartley," "shadow Hartley," ["echo Hartley,"] and between Hartley the subject and Hartley the object, the enigmatic blending of which last two Hartleys the child expressed by catching hold of his own arm, and then calling himself the " catch-me-fast Hartley." And in dilating on this bewildering experience of the child's, Bagehot bor- rows from his own recollections: XXXviii THE TRAVELERS INS. CO.'S BAGEHOT. "All children have a world of their own, as distinct from that of the grown people who gravitate around them as the dreams of girlhood from our prosaic life, or the ideas of the kitten that plays with the falling leaves from those of her carnivorous mother that catches mice and is sedulous in her domestic duties. But generally, about this interior existence, children are dumb. You have warlike ideas ; but you cannot say to a sinewy relative, ' My dear aunt, I wonder when the big bush in the garden will begin to walk about ; I'm sure it's a crusader, and I was cutting it all the day with my steel sword. But what do you think, aunt? for I'm puzzled about its legs, because you see, aunt, it has only one stalk ; and besides, aunt, the leaves.' You cannot remark this in secular life; but you hack at the infeli- citous bush till you do not altogether reject the idea that your small garden is Palestine, and yourself the most adventurous of knights." They have a tradition in the family that this is but a fragment from Bagehot's own imaginative childhood, and certainly this vis- ionary element in him was very vivid to the last. However, the transcendental or intellectual basis of religious belief was soon strengthened in him, as readers of his remarkable paper on Bishop Butler will easily see, by those moral and retributive instincts which warn us of the meaning and consequences of guilt : "The moral principle," he wrote in that essay, "(whatever may be said to the contrary by complacent thinkers,) is really and to most men a princi- ple of fear. . . . Conscience is the condemnation of ourselves ; we expect a penalty. As the Greek proverb teaches, ' Where there is shame there is fear.' . . . How to be free from this, is the question ; how to get loose from this ; how to be rid of the secret tie which binds the strong man and cramps his pride, and makes him angry at the beauty of the universe, which will not let him go forth like a great animal, like the king of the forest, in the glory of his might, but restrains him with an inner fear and a secret foreboding that if he do but exalt himself he shall be abased, if he do but set forth his own dignity he will offend ONE who will deprive him of it. This, as has often been pointed out, is the source of the bloody rites of heathendom." And then, after a powerful passage, in which he describes the sacrificial superstitions of men like Achilles, he returns, with a flash of his own peculiar humor, to Bishop Butler, thus: "Of course it is not this kind of fanaticism that we impute to a prelate of the English Church : human sacrifices are not respectable, and Achilles was not rector of Stanhope. But though the costume and circumstances of life change, the human heart does not; its feelings remain. The same anxiety, the same consciousness of personal sin which lead in barbarous times to what has been described, show themselves in civilized life as well. In this quieter period, their great manifestation is scrupulosity ; " which he goes on to describe as a sort of inexhaustible anxiety for perfect compliance with the minutest positive commands which may MEMOIR. XXXIX be made the condition of forgiveness for the innumerable lapses of moral obligation. I am not criticizing the paper, or I should point out that Bagehot failed in it to draw out the distinction between the primitive moral instinct and the corrupt superstition into which it runs; but I believed that he recognized the weight of this moral testimony of the conscience to a divine Judge, as well as the transcendental testimony of the intellect to an eternal substance of things, to the end of his life. And certainly, in the reality of human free-will as the condition of all genuine moral life he firmly believed. In his "Physics and Politics" the subtle and original essay upon which, in conjunction with the essay on the "English Constitution," Bagehot's reputation as a European thinker chiefly rests he repeatedly guards himself (for instance, pages 432, 433) against being supposed to think that in accepting the principle of evolution, he has accepted anything inconsistent either with spirit- ual creation or with the free-will of man. On the latter point he adds : "No doubt the modern doctrine of the 'conservation of force,' if applied to decision, is inconsistent with free-will : if you hold that force is 'never lost or gained,' you cannot hold that there is a real gain, a sort of new creation of it in free volition. But I have nothing to do here with the universal ' conservation of force ' : the conception of the nervous organs as stores of will-made power does not raise or need so vast a discussion." And in the same book he repeatedly uses the expression "Provi- dence," evidently in its natural meaning, to express the ultimate force at work behind the march of "evolution." Indeed, in conver- sation with me on this subject, he often said how much higher a conception of the creative mind the new Darwinian ideas seemed to him to have introduced, as compared with those contained in what is called the argument from contrivance and design. On the subject of personal immortality, too, I do not think that Bagehot ever wavered. He often spoke, and even wrote, of "that vague sense of eternal continuity which is always about the mind, and which no one could bear to lose," and described it as being much more important to us than it even appears to be, important as that is; for, he said, "when we think we are thinking of the past, we are only thinking of a future that is to be like it." But with the exception of these cardinal points, I could hardly say how much Bagehot's mind was or was not affected by the great speculative con- troversies of later years. Certainly he became much more doubtful concerning the force of the historical evidence of Christianity than THE TRAVELERS INS. CO.'S BAGEHOT. I ever was, and rejected, I think entirely, though on what amount of personal study he had founded his opinion I do not know, the Apostolic origin of the fourth Gospel. Possibly his mind may have been latterly in suspense as to miracle altogether, though I am pretty sure that he had not come to a negative conclusion. He belonged, in common with myself, during the last years of his life, to a society in which these fundamental questions were often dis- cussed ; but he seldom spoke in it, and told me very shortly before his death that he shrank from such discussions on religious points, feeling that in debates of this kind they were not and could not be treated with anything like thoroughness. On the whole, I think the cardinal article of his faith would be adequately repre- sented even in the latest period of his life by the following pass- age in his essay on Bishop Butler : "In every step of religious argument we require the assumption, the belief the faith, if the word is better in an absolutely perfect Being, in and by whom we are, who is omnipotent as well as most holy, who ' moves on the face ' of the whole world and ruleth ' all things by the word of his power.' If we grant this, the difficulty of the opposition between what is here called the 'natural' and the 'supernatural' religion is removed; and without granting it, that difficulty is perhaps insuperable. It follows from the very idea and definition of an infinitely perfect Being, that he is with- out us as well as within us : ruling the clouds of the air and the fishes of the sea as well as the fears and thoughts of man ; smiling through the smile of nature as well as warning with the pain of conscience ; ' sine qualitate bonum, sine quantitate magnum, sine indigentia creatorem, sine situ praesidentem, sine habitu omnia continentem, sine loco ubique totum, sine tempore sempiternum, sine ulla sui mutatione mutabilia facientem ; nihilque patientem.' If we assume this, life is simple; without this all is dark." Evidently, then, though Bagehot held that the doctrine of evolution by natural selection gave a higher conception of the Creator than the old doctrine of mechanical design, he never took any material- istic view of evolution. One of his early essays, written while at col- lege, on some of the many points of the Kantian philosophy which he then loved to discuss, concluded with a remarkable sentence, which would probably have fairly expressed even at the close of his life his profound belief in God, and his partial sympathy with the agnostic view that we are in great measure incapable of apprehending, more than very dimly, his mind or purposes : "Gazing after the infinite essence, we are like men watching through the drifting clouds for a glimpse of the true heavens on a drear November day ; layer after layer passes from our view, but still the same immovable gray rack remains." MEMOIR. Xli After Bagehot had taken his Master's degree, and while he was still reading law in London, and hesitating between the bar and the family bank, there came as principal to University Hall (which is a hall of residence in connection with University College, London, established by the Presbyterians and Unitarians after the passing of the Dissenters' Chapel Act), the man who had, I think, a greater intellectual fascination for Bagehot than any of his contem- poraries, Arthur Hugh Clough, Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and author of various poems of great genius more or less familiar to the public ; though Clough is perhaps better known as the sub- ject of the exquisite poem written on his death in 1861 by his friend Matthew Arnold the poem to which he gave the name of "Thyrsis" than by even the most popular of his own. Bagehot had subscribed for the erection of University Hall, and took an active part at one time on its council. Thus he saw a good deal of Clough, and did what he could to mediate between that enigma to Presbyterian parents a college head who held himself serenely neutral on almost all moral and educational subjects interesting to parents and pupils, except the observance of disciplinary rules and the managing body, who bewildered him and were by him bewildered. I don't think either Bagehot or Clough's other friends were very successful in their mediation : but he at least gained in Clough a cordial friend, and a theme of profound intellectual and moral interest to himself which lasted him his life, and never failed to draw him into animated discussion long after Clough's own premature death ; and I think I can trace the effect which some of Clough's writings had on Bagehot's mind to the very end of his career. There were some points of likeness between Bagehot and Clough, but many more of difference. Both had the capacity for boyish spirits in them, and the florid color which usually ac- companies a good deal of animal vigor ; both were reserved men, with a great dislike of anything like the appearance of false senti- ment, and both were passionate admirers of Wordsworth's poetry : but Clough was slightly lymphatic, with a great tendency to un- expressed and unacknowledged discouragement, and to the paralysis of silent embarrassment when suffering from such feelings ; while Bagehot was keen, and very quickly evacuated embarrassing positions and never returned to them. When however, Clough was happy and at ease, there was a calm and silent radiance in his face, and his head was set with a kind of stateliness on his shoulders, that gave him almost an Olympian air; but this would sometimes van- ish in a moment into an embarrassed taciturnity that was quite uncouth. One of his friends declares that the man who was said xlii THE TRAVELERS INS. CO.'S BAGEHOT. to be "a cross between a schoolboy and a bishop" must have been like Clough. There was in Clough, too, a large Chaucerian simplicity and a flavor of homeliness ; so that now and then, when the light shone into his eyes, there was something, in spite of the air of fine scholarship and culture, which reminded one of the best likenesses of Burns. It was of Clough, I believe, that Emerson was thinking (though, knowing Clough intimately as he did, he was of course speaking mainly in joke) when he described the Oxford of that day thus: "'Ah,' says my languid Oxford gentleman, 'nothing new or true and no matter.'"* No saying could mis- represent Clough's really buoyant and simple character more com- pletely than that ; but doubtless many of his sayings and writings, treating as they did most of the greater problems of life as insolu- ble, and enjoining a self-possessed composure under the discovery of their insolubility, conveyed an impression very much like this to men who came only occasionally in contact with him. Bagehot, in his article on Crabb Robinson, says that the latter, who in those days seldom remembered names, always described Clough as "that ad- mirable and accomplished man you know whom I mean the one who never says anything." And certainly Clough was often taciturn to the last degree, or if he opened his lips, delighted to open them only to scatter confusion by discouraging, in words at least, all that that was then called "earnestness"; as for example by asking, " Was it ordained that twice two should make four, simply for the intent that boys and girls should be cut to the heart that they do not make five ? Be content ; when the veil is raised, perhaps they will make five ! Who knows ? " t Clough's chief fascination for Bagehot was, I think, that he had as a poet in some measure rediscovered, at all events realized as few ever realized before, the enormous difficulty of finding truth, a difficulty which he somewhat paradoxically held to be enhanced rather than diminished by the intensity of the truest modern passion for it. The stronger the desire, he teaches, the greater is the dan- ger of illegitimately satisfying that desire by persuading ourselves that what we wish to believe is true, and the greater the danger of ignoring the actual confusions of human things : " Rules baffle instincts, instincts rules, Wise men are bad, and good are fools, Facts evil, wishes vain appear, We cannot go, why are we here? "Oh, may we, for assurance' sake, Some arbitrary judgment take, * Essay on Montaigne, in "Representative Men." t" Clough's Poems and Prose Remains," Vol. i., page 175. MEMOIR. xliii And willfully pronounce it clear, For this or that 'tis, we are here ? "Or is it right, and will it do, To pace the sad confusion through, And say, It does not yet appear What we shall be what we are here?" This warning to withhold judgment, and not cheat ourselves into beliefs which our own imperious desire to believe had alone engendered, is given with every variety of tone and modulation^ and couched in all sorts of different forms of fancy and apologue, throughout dough's poems. He insists on "the ruinous force of the will" to persuade us of illusions which please us; of the tend- ency of practical life to give us beliefs which suit that practical life, but are none the truer for that; and is never weary of warning us that a firm belief in a falsity can be easily generated : "Action will furnish belief, but will that belief be the true one? This is the point, you know. However, it doesn't much matter. What one wants, I suppose, is to predetermine the action, So as to make it entail, not a chance belief but the true one." This practical preaching, which Clough urges in season and out of season, met an answering chord in Bagehot's mind, not so much in relation to religious belief as in relation to the over-haste and over- eagerness of human conduct; and I can trace the effect of it in all his writings, political and otherwise, to the end of his life. Indeed, it affected him much more in later days than in the years immediately following his first friendship with Clough. With all his boyish dash, there was something in Bagehot even in youth which dreaded precipitancy; and not only precipitancy itself, but those moral situations tending to precipitancy which men who have no minds of their own to make up, so often court. In later life he pleased himself by insisting that on Darwin's principle, civilized men, with all the complex problems of modern life to puzzle them, suspend their judgment so little and are so eager for action only because they have inherited from the earlier, simpler, and more violent ages an excessive predisposition to action, unsuited to our epoch and dangerous to our future development. But it was Clough, I think, who first stirred in Bagehot's mind this great dread of "the ruinous force of the will"; a phrase he was never weary of quoting, and which might almost be taken as the motto of his "Physics and Politics," the great conclusion of which is that in the "age of discussion," grand policies and high-handed diplo- macy and sensational legislation of all kinds will become rarer and Xliv THE TRAVELERS INS. CO.'S BAGEHOT. raror, because discussion will point out all the difficulties of such policies in relation to a state of existence so complex as our own, and will in this way tend to repress the excess of practical energy handed down to us by ancestors to whom life was a sharper, simpler, and more perilous affair. But the time for Bagehot's full adoption of the suspensive princi- ple in public affairs was not yet. In 1851 he went to Paris, shortly before the Coup