May 1914

I write “these lines” just after arriving in Berlin. Not that I have anything to say about that. I merely mention the fact. It may explain my difficulties. The journey is really very dull. All those hundreds of miles over the Great Plain of Europe with never a hill except the ridge of Minden, very little water, nothing but endless flat fields sprinkled with trees, church spires, and red farm-houses. There is simply nothing to look at. If you put your head out of the window at Osnabrück, you may see some coal; and at Münster you may, if you choose, speculate as to which of the people on the platform are Anabaptists. That is not much during a twelve-hour run from Flushing.

A pleasant travelling companion is an alleviation on such occasions. The other occupant of my carriage had points about her. She was a young, cheerful, and rather obese Jewess going home with a plethora of scarves and wraps, several boxes, two lobsters (for her father), and a canary. At Goch she was incensed to find that she had to pay a heavy duty on the lobsters, so heavy that it would have paid her better to get the creatures in Berlin and have a drink on the balance. This story might make an illustration for one of Mr. Lloyd George’s homely speeches on Free Trade. But there was no duty on the canary. In his little cage, covered with a green curtain, the canary sat, non-dutiable but very phlegmatic. At frequent intervals his mistress lifted the green curtain, looked him in the eyes with a bewitching smile, and piped “Peep, Peep.” The bird never replied, though perhaps he looked his response. The lady then turned to me and said, “Is ’e not a nice bird? Is ’e not goot?” and common politeness—leaving gallantry out of the question—compelled me to reply always, “Yes, a beautiful little bird.” About twice an hour she retired to the dining-car and came back exuding smiles and sighs “I half joost ’ad a bifsteck. I dawn’t like steck.” How true it is that in life we have to be content with second-bests! But I did not discuss the matter.

In intervals of silence I finished Mrs. Russell Barrington’s Life of Walter Bagehot (Longmans, 12s. 6d. net). It is a strange thing—and unfortunate, since so much material has disappeared with the passage of time—that Bagehot should have had to wait nearly forty years for a biography. But now it has come it is an interesting one. The author being Bagehot’s sister-in-law (daughter of James Wilson, who founded the Economist), the work has rather a family air. Bagehot’s more obvious virtues are a little too much insisted upon, and excessive importance is attributed to irrelevant details. The long description of his ancestry and birthplace, for instance, might have been curtailed. But the Life is well written; it contains a great many interesting letters, and it gives a really living picture of one whom Lord Bryce has called “the most original mind of his generation.”

One would wish, however, for a supplement giving a fuller analysis of Bagehot’s literary work. Mrs. Barrington gives little more than a list of the titles of his essays. It is true that to most people Bagehot is still primarily the political and economic writer. There are few intelligent Englishmen to-day who have not been influenced by The English Constitution and, in a lesser degree, by Physics and Politics. His Economic Studies make the rudiments of political economy as simple and even as entertaining as a good fairy-tale, and those who have read Lombard Street speak of it as a masterpiece. But the most extraordinary thing about it is that this man, who knew all about currency, who was in the confidence of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and who invented Treasury Bills, was also one of the most illuminating and sympathetic literary critics that England has ever produced. Personally I find his literary essays inferior to those of no other English critic who was not himself a poet, and I think that in some respects, though not in all, they are better than Arnold’s.

Probably Bagehot’s celebrity as an economist militated for some years after his death against the popularity of his literary work. Many literary people, looking through the complete list of his works, and seeing Literary and Biographical Studies jostling shoulders with works on money, may very pardonably have assumed that these Studies, however able, must have been of a dry, hard character. They are very far from that; no English criticism is more human than his, less coldly intellectual; his temperament, naturally emotional and mystical, was most valuably reinforced by the balance, the tolerance, the sanity that were developed by his more mundane activities, but the temporal man in him never overcame the eternal. Such essays as those on Hartley Coleridge, on Shelley, on Dickens, on Cowper, on the Edinburgh Reviewers, are bound before long to be recognized as among the great classics of English criticism. Naturally he was not impeccable; posterity may think, for example, that he attached too much importance to his friend Clough. But he is usually completely convincing. Take the following passage from the comparison of Wordsworth and Jeffrey:

“A clear, precise, discriminating intellect shrinks at once from the symbolic, the unfounded, the indefinite. The misfortune is that mysticism is true. There certainly are kinds of truths, borne in as it were instinctively on the human intellect, most influential on the character and the heart, yet hardly capable of stringent statement, difficult to limit by an elaborate definition. Their course is shadowy; the mind seems rather to have seen than to see them, more to feel after than definitely apprehend them. They commonly involve an infinite element which, of course, cannot be stated precisely, or else a first principle—an original tendency of our intellectual constitution, which it is impossible not to feel, and yet which it is hard to extricate in terms and words. Of this latter kind is what has been called the religion of Nature, or more exactly, perhaps, the religion of the imagination. This is an interpretation of the world. Accordingly, to it the beauty of the universe has a meaning, its grandeur a soul, and its sublimity an expression. As we gaze on the faces of those whom we love; as we watch the light of life in the dawning of their eyes, and the play of their features, and the wildness of their animation; as we trace in changing lineaments a varying sign; as a charm and a thrill seem to run along the tone of a voice, to haunt the mind with a mere word; as a tone seems to roar in the ear; as a trembling fancy hears words that are unspoken; so in Nature the mystical sense finds a motion in the mountain, and a power in the waves, and a meaning in the long white line of the shore, and a thought in the blue of heaven, and a gushing soul in the buoyant light, an unbounded being in the vast void of air, and

“There is a philosophy in this which might be explained, if explaining were to our purpose. It might be advanced that there are original sources of expression in the essential grandeur and sublimity of Nature, of an analogous though fainter kind to those familiar, inexplicable signs by which we trace in the very face and outward lineaments of man the existence and working of the mind within. But be this as it may, it is certain that Mr. Wordsworth preached this kind of religion and that Lord Jeffrey did not believe a word of it.”

The visionary and the epigrammatist are near allied, and both the practical and the ideal in Bagehot are illustrated in his own phrase: “If you would vanquish Earth, you must invent Heaven.” Bagehot, as he appeared to ordinary people every day, is portrayed in another sentence. “He left many,” it is said, “with the idea that he was a good fellow, yet with no idea that he was a great man.” A great man can have no better epitaph.