The Life of Walter Bagehot

Emily Barrington

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783849648541
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

Mrs. Emily Barrington was the daughter of James Wilson MP, Liberal politician and founder of The Economist, and sister of Eliza Wilson, who married Walter Bagehot. Her intimate biography is one of the best ever written about the English economist, journalist and prolific author on government and finance.

CHAPTER I.: INTRODUCTORY.

Had Walter Bagehot now been alive, he would have reached the age of 86. Every year robs the world of contemporaries who knew him personally. From the time he married my sister in 1858 till his death in 1877, I was constantly living with them, both before and after my own marriage. My sister’s wish is that I should endeavour to give some written record of him as he was known by those who shared his home life, together with selections from the letters which he wrote and received. His mother kept not only all his letters to herself and to his father, but those which they wrote to him from his earliest school-days: and from these a very clear picture of his nature and character, as a boy and as a youth, can be gathered at first hand. His intellect developed early, and from childhood his striking individuality displayed itself. He was worshipped by both his parents, but the manly fibre of his character was enriched and strengthened rather than weakened by this worship.

Those who know Walter Bagehot only through his best-known writings have a way of referring to him, which to our ears has a curiously far-off sound. This is inevitable. The two short memoirs written by his intimate friend, Mr. Richard Holt Hutton, treat but of the bare facts of his family life, and do not even allude—for obvious reasons, Walter Bagehot’s father being still alive when they were written—to a fact which, perhaps, influenced his home life more than any other, namely, his mother’s occasional fits of insanity. The subsequent essays written on Walter Bagehot have a still less personal note. The reviews which Sir Robert Giffen ^{Endnote 002} and Leslie Stephen ^{Endnote 003} wrote, and the address Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff ^{Endnote 004} gave, did not touch on his home life, though all three writers were his personal friends. Mr. Forest Morgan, ^{Endnote 005} Mr. Augustine Birrell, ^{Endnote 006} the Rev. Dr. Kolbe, ^{Endnote 007} the writer of the article “Walter Bagehot and his attitude towards the Church” in the Catholic Magazine and Review, The Month, April, 1896, Mr. Israel Zangwill, ^{Endnote 008} President Woodrow Wilson, who wrote in the November number of the Atlantic Monthly, 1895, the Essay “A Literary Politician,” and in the October number, 1898, another entitled “A Wit and a Seer,” were all personally unknown to Walter Bagehot, belonging, as they did, to a later generation. Mr. Birrell’s estimate does not create a complete picture of him, but as far as it goes the resemblance it recalls is very good. He says: “Every one who has read Mr. Bagehot’s books will agree at once that he is an author who can be known from his books,” and Mr. Birrell’s own paper proves this up to a certain point. He adds: “Give the world time and it will be right, and the last person it will willingly forget is a writer like Mr. Bagehot, who loved life better than books”; and again, “to know Walter Bagehot through his books is one of the good things of life”. It is quite clear that Mr. Birrell’s appreciation of these books is on the same lines as the appreciation which his intimate personal friends accorded to the man. Still there is something wanting even here, for those who knew him in his family life could not, I think, fail to recognise that Walter Bagehot himself was even greater than his books.

With reference to President Wilson’s two estimates of Walter Bagehot, it was surprising to learn that they never met, so strikingly does he portray those attributes in Bagehot’s writings which recall most closely the more personal side of Bagehot’s life; but in a letter written at the time he forwarded the two numbers of the Atlantic Monthly containing his articles, President Wilson writes: “As a matter of fact, I never saw him, but I long had an enlarged drawing of the only likeness I ever saw, hanging in my study,” and adds, “I have had, ever since my boyhood, a great enthusiasm for Mr. Bagehot’s writings and have derived so much inspiration from them”.

These writings speak for themselves. As regards the actual writing, there is scarcely a line which is difficult to understand. It would be true to add, I think, there is hardly a line that is not stimulating to the understanding. A striking point about all his work is that he not only has mastered his subjects exhaustively, but enjoys them keenly. ‘You feel that his sympathy and lively interest are always thoroughly aroused; hence he discourses on every topic that allures him in a familiar, humorous fashion all his own. No author was ever more keenly alive to the folly of pomposity, or of any pose in style. President Wilson, speaking of Bagehot’s writings, says: “They have all the freshness, the vivacity, the penetration of eager talk, and abound in those flashes of insight and discovery which make the speech of some gifted men seem like a series of inspirations. He does not always complete his subjects either, in writing, and their partial incompleteness makes them read the more as if they were a body of pointed remarks, and not a set treatise or essay.”

Again, after quoting Bagehot’s comparison between the English and American political arrangements, President Woodrow Wilson writes: “These are eminently business-like sentences. They are not consciously concerned with style; they do not seem to stop for the turning of a phrase; their only purpose seems to be plain elucidation, such as will bring the matter within the comprehension of everybody. And yet there is a stirring quality in them which operates upon the mind like wit. They are a tonic and full of stimulus. No man could have spoken them without a lively eye. I suppose their ‘secret of utility’ to be a very interesting one indeed—and nothing less than the secret of all Bagehot’s power. Young writers should seek it out and ponder it studiously. It is this: he is never writing ‘in the air’. He is always looking point blank and with steady eyes upon a definite object; he takes pains to see it, alive and natural, as it really is; he uses a phrase, as the masters of painting use a colour, not because it is beautiful,—he is not thinking of that,—but because it matches life, and is the veritable image of the thing of which he speaks. Moreover, he is not writing merely to succeed at that; he is writing, not to describe but to make alive. And so the secret comes to light. Style is an instrument, and is made imperishable only by embodiment in some great use. It is not of itself stuff to last; neither can it have real beauty except when working the substantial effects of thought or vision. Its highest triumph is to hit the meaning; and the pleasure you get from it is not unlike that which you will get from the perfect action of skill. The object is so well and so easily attained! A man’s vocabulary and outfit of phrase should be his thought’s perfect habit and manner of pose. Bagehot saw the world of his day, saw the world of days antique, and showed us what he saw in phrases which interpret like the tones of a perfect voice, in words which serve us like eyes.”

The English Constitution, Lombard Street, and Physics and Politics, the three complete works which have carried Walter Bagehot’s fame far and wide, in no wise suggest the whole range of his powers and sympathies. The early essays do so perhaps to a greater extent; but it is only by taking his writings as a whole that we can recognise fully his many-sided nature and versatile gifts, and also best run to ground what explains the special quality of his genius, the core of its excellence, the power which enabled him to tackle with equal ability the wide range of subjects on which he wrote, the power which has been referred to as Shakesperian in its quality. Whether it was political economy, religion, poetry, metaphysics, politics, or banking—all these various subjects, through his pen, become pungent with the same racy flavour, the same vitality and movement. The same thread can be discerned running through all he wrote, all he did, and all he was. If we seek farther and ask wherein lay the distinctive quality of this stimulating, vitalising power, we are confronted by his own words—“the sense of reality is necessary to excellence”. The force of his imagination was governed and illuminated by this sense of reality. All the facts of life, all his feelings and ideas were lit up with a keen apprehension of it, for though he was a voracious reader he studied Life through contact with Life, rather than from books. Ideas, he felt, must be taken in, first hand; they must be inspired by contact with living creatures, living interests, genuine sympathies, genuine feelings, not diluted with human thought, human theories, or human prejudices, as they are prone to be when conveyed through books. The world was borne in upon him as in reality it passed before his eyes—and an engrossingly interesting world it was to him. He was seldom so completely preoccupied by his own thoughts as to lose the chance of a picture of real life being imaged on his brain. Intuitively and subtly he grasped the ways of this queer world of ours, those ways with all their inconsistencies, their quirks, their surprises; the ways that utterly refuse to be compressed into any rigid theories of what is expected or not expected to be, under any given circumstances. His sense of reality carried him far into strange aspects of things. His own home life with his parents taught him what but few have the chance of learning: indeed he was an emanation of the unusual in many respects. His genius, no less than his power of deep feeling, turned these rare lessons to good account. Into infinitely higher regions than those conceived by ordinary minds, did these lessons carry him, but even these regions he confronted with the same sense of reality. With the same vivid force of conviction with which he could master a fundamental principle of banking or of the English Constitution, he could affirm that “Mysticism is true,” and apprehend the presence of that “Kindly light” which led John Newman, who exercised so strong an influence over him at one time, to seize the reality of the spiritual life. It is by reason of this complete view of reality, learned from looking with unprejudiced vision into the entire world of facts, that Walter Bagehot manages to convey his own ideas to his readers with so much force of conviction.

Sir Robert Giffen, who acted as his assistant editor to the Economist, meeting him as a rule only in that capacity, but becoming intimate with him thereby, wrote in his contribution to the Encyclopædia Britannica: “Bagehot was altogether a remarkable personality. It is impossible to give a full idea of the brightness and life of Bagehot’s conversation, although the conversational style of his writing may help those who did not know him personally to understand it. With winged words he would transfix a fallacy or stamp a true idea so that it could not be forgotten. He was certainly greater than his books, and always full of ideas.” In a letter to my sister, written six months after Walter Bagehot’s death, Lord Morley, referring to Mr. Hutton’s article in the Fortnightly Review, ^{Endnote 009} writes: “The article has recalled to my mind some of my conversations with him (Walter Bagehot), and in musing over them I feel strongly the impossibility of conveying to those who did not know him, the originality, force, acuteness, and, above all, the quaint and whimsical humour, of that striking genius. I am only glad to think that I have never failed to recognise and to enjoy his qualities as they deserve from my earliest literary days when I read the Estimates—a volume, by the way, which I hope you will reprint.”

If this personality impressed his friends who, like Lord Morley and Sir Robert Giffen, met him outside the home life, with how much more force did it stamp itself on those who shared that life. With Mr. Hutton we have “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. To those who heard of Bagehot only as an original political economist and a lucid political thinker, a curiously false image of him must be suggested.” ^{Endnote 010} To us that false image seems to be the only one that is reflected by many who quote him or speak of him in these quite later days. But how could the present generation, not having known him, conjure up the image of an entity so unique? How could it picture the singular power he had of making everyday matters in everyday life take an exciting, amusing aspect, while at the same time the grave, fundamental view of questions which underlie those everyday aspects, was never felt to be wholly off the scene, and was always to the fore when it was wanted? The idea generally formed of a sound, prudent person, and Walter Bagehot was eminently sound and prudent, is of one whose prudence takes a cautious and somewhat unimaginative direction. But, as Mr. Hutton says, in Walter Bagehot “the imaginative qualities were even more remarkable than the judgment, and were indeed at the root of all that was strongest in the judgment”. The uncommon and unexpected combination of qualities in his nature defies, I fear, any attempt to convey easily to this generation what those who knew him personally felt to be his most marked distinction. The light was distributed so far, yet was so vivid when focussed.

It is notable that Sir Robert Giffen, his intercourse with Walter Bagehot having been restricted mostly to the discussion of economic questions, should have conceived so true an impression of the ever-growing, expanding nature of his interests and inquiries. He wrote: “Mentally Bagehot was at his best when he died, and he looked forward to many years of happy toil, both in finishing the Economic Studies and other work beyond. So far from becoming absorbed in economic science as he grew older, though his later writings happened to be almost all economic, Bagehot to the last gave me the impression of only passing through one mental stage, which being passed through he would again leave political economy behind. To his historical and descriptive account of English political economy he was likely enough to have added a history of political ideas, or at any rate some other work of general philosophy, which had necessarily more attraction for him than the ordinary topics of political economy.” ^{Endnote 011}

I believe that before the end Walter Bagehot was rather reverting to earlier grooves of thought, and that, had he lived, he would have included in his future writings a class of subjects and impressions which characterised many of his earlier essays, in the days before his life had become somewhat choked with business. He was getting impatient, I think, of having to devote his best energies to matters from which religion, poetry, and art were excluded. His connection with the Metaphysical Society to which Manning, Ward, and Tennyson belonged, re-awakened trains of thought and speculation more in harmony with the trend of his feelings in those early days when Shelley and Keats were first delicious to him, and when Wordsworth and John Henry Newman were his daily food.

In Physics and Politics, when referring “to the loose conception of morals” which existed in primitive man, Bagehot writes ten years before his death: “In the best cases it existed much as the vague feeling of beauty now exists in minds sensitive but untaught; a still, small voice of uncertain meaning; an unknown something modifying everything else, and higher than anything else, yet in form so indistinct that when you looked for it, it was gone”. More and more did Walter towards the end desire that the still, small voice should become clearer and more often heard, that the something of form so indistinct should become more distinct.

From father and mother alike he inherited a fervent sense of the reality of the spiritual life, and an equally fervent love for the beauty of nature and, so far as opportunity allowed, an appreciation of the best art. “We are souls in the disguise of animals,” he writes in the Essay, “The Ignorance of Man”. From the days when Walter was a very small boy, the three enjoyed together the delights of their West of England scenery. Lynmouth was most often chosen for the seaside holidays because of its great beauty, and together they became intimate with every rock and cranny in the place, appropriating in fancy special spots as their very own. Herd’s Hill, their home, was worshipped by Walter as a boy. Countless letters exist—written by him from Bristol College and from University College, London, and from his parents to him, showing the romantic love they all felt for this Herd’s Hill. His father writes to him in 1843, Walter being then seventeen: “I do not know what you will say when you hear that some unsparing hand has commenced the work of destruction at Wick (one of the many beautiful views seen from the lawns at Herd’s Hill) and is cutting down the trees we have so long valued as one of our greatest ornaments. We shall be able to bear it I dare say; and I live in hope of finding many beauties beyond them. At all events we must have a beautiful home, while a virtuous and happy one.”

A month or two before his death, Walter and I (we were staying with him and my sister in their London house, 8 Queen’s Gate Place) made a compact. I was to administer experiences of an artistic—he, an experience of an intellectual kind. He had not liked any music he had hitherto heard. He had even felt music to be irritating. From babyhood it had been associated in his mind with anything but fertilising influences, having been chiefly allied to a pathetic feature in the family life. But when he was fifty-one he said to me: “You must take me to hear Joachim; I think I might understand Joachim”. A few days before he took his last journey to Herd’s Hill, he said: “You must take me to see Watts—I should like to see the outside of the person who does these things”. Deplorable indeed was it that this visit never came off. Watts, with his quick eye and apt discernment, would not only have wished to paint what in Walter was pictorially noticeable, but would have discovered something of him as he was below the surface—and we might have possessed a portrait which would have suggested that something. In return for the Joachim and Watts’s visits, Walter was to have taken me one Sunday to see George Eliot. I had been asked by Watts to meet her in his studio, but I had not dared on that occasion to propose a visit to her, though I had been inspired by my friend Mrs. Nassau Senior, with a wish to do so. Walter Bagehot was in the habit of attending George Eliot’s gatherings on Sunday afternoons at The Priory, St. John’s Wood. Bagehot recognised the value of William Morris’s art, and my sister and he had their London house furnished and decorated by his firm. It was written of him two years after his death: ^{Endnote 012} “Few men of our own time have combined in so eminent a degree the useful and the beautiful. The value of such a mind is not to be measured by the amount of adulation poured upon it by the press. Thinking men recognise a gap which no other writer fills.”

Life had been a tremendous rush ever since he had married. He spent much of it in the train, between Clevedon and Bristol, London and Langport. Towards the end it quieted down somewhat, and he then felt the want of some echo of these things which had been nurtured in the early days, developed into the expanded form in which they were then revealing themselves to his matured taste. His nature was always annexing—and annexing what was best. To quote a saying of W. R. Greg’s, he was “a spring and not a cistern,”—not as Pitt, who “never...

Table of contents

• PREFACE.
• CHAPTER I.: INTRODUCTORY.
• CHAPTER II.: LANGPORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS.
• CHAPTER III.: HOME AND FAMILY.
• CHAPTER IV.: EARLY EDUCATION.
• CHAPTER V.: UNIVERSITY COLLEGE.
• CHAPTER VI.: AN INTERREGNUM.
• CHAPTER VII.: PARIS.
• CHAPTER VIII.: AUTHOR AND BANKER.
• CHAPTER IX.: ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE.
• CHAPTER X.: “THE ARCHES” AND LONDON.
• CHAPTER XI.: INDIA.
• CHAPTER XII.: “THE ECONOMIST”
• CHAPTER XIII.: “THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION.”
• CHAPTER XIV.: “PHYSICS AND POLITICS.”
• CHAPTER XV.: “LOMBARD STREET.”
• CHAPTER XVI.: “ECONOMIC STUDIES.”
• CHAPTER XVII.: TRIBUTES FROM CONTEMPORARIES.
• Endnotes: