MEMOIR BY THE EDITOR.⁠[1] (continued 2)

Bagehot made two or three efforts to get into Parliament, but after an illness which he had in 1868 he deliberately abandoned the attempt, and held, I believe rightly, that his political judgment was all the sounder, as well as his health the better, for a quieter life. Indeed, he used to say of himself that it would be very difficult for him to find a borough which would be willing to elect him its representative, because he was ‘between sizes in politics.’ Nevertheless in 1866 he was very nearly elected for Bridgewater, but was by no means pleased that he was so near success, for he stood to lose, not to win, in the hope that if he and his party were really quite pure, he might gain the seat on petition. He did his very best, indeed, to secure purity, though he failed. As a speaker, he did not often succeed. His voice had no great compass, and his manner was somewhat odd to ordinary hearers; but at Bridgewater he was completely at his ease, and his canvass and public speeches were decided successes. His examination, too, before the Commissioners sent down a year or two later to inquire into the corruption of Bridgewater was itself a great success. He not only entirely defeated the somewhat eagerly pressed efforts of one of the Commissioners, Mr. Anstey, to connect him with the bribery, but he drew a most amusing picture of the bribable electors whom he had seen only to shun. I will quote a little bit from the evidence he gave in reply to what Mr. Anstey probably regarded as home-thrusts:—

‘42,018. (Mr. Anstey.) Speaking from your experience of those streets, when you went down them canvassing, did any of the people say anything to you, or in your hearing, about money?—Yes, one I recollect standing at the door, who said, “I won’t vote for gentlefolks unless they do something for I. Gentlefolks do not come to I unless they want something of I, and I won’t do nothing for gentlefolks, unless they do something for me.” Of course, I immediately retired out of that house.

‘42,019. That man did not give you his promise?—I retired immediately; he stood in the doorway sideways, as these rustics do.

‘42,020. Were there many such instances?—One or two, I remember. One suggested that I might have a place. I immediately retired from him.

‘42,021. Did anybody of a better class than those voters, privately, of course, expostulate with you against your resolution to be pure?—No, nobody ever came to me at all.

‘42,022. But those about you, did any of them say anything of this kind: “Mr. Bagehot, you are quite wrong in putting purity of principles forward. It will not do if the other side bribes?”—I might have been told that I should be unsuccessful in the stream of conversation; many people may have told me that; that is how I gathered that if the other side was impure and we were pure, I should be beaten.

‘42,023. Can you remember the names of any who told you that?—No, I cannot, but I daresay I was told by as many as twenty people, and we went upon that entire consideration.’

To leave my subject without giving some idea of Bagehot’s racy conversation would be a sin. He inherited this gift, I believe, in great measure from his mother, to whose stimulating teaching in early life he probably owed also a great deal of his rapidity of thought. A lady who knew him well, says that one seldom asked him a question without his answer making you either think or laugh, or both think and laugh together. And this is the exact truth. His habitual phraseology was always vivid. He used to speak, for instance, of the minor people, the youths or admirers who collect round a considerable man, as his ‘fringe.’ It was he who invented the phrase ‘padding,’ to denote the secondary kind of article, not quite of the first merit, but with interest and value of its own, with which a judicious editor will fill up perhaps three-quarters of his review. If you asked him what he thought on a subject on which he did not happen to have read or thought at all, he would open his large eyes and say, ‘My mind is “to let” on that subject, pray tell me what to think;’ though you soon found that this might be easier attempted than done. He used to say banteringly to his mother, by way of putting her off at a time when she was anxious for him to marry, ‘A man’s mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.’ He told me once, at a time when the Spectator had perhaps been somewhat more eager or sanguine on political matters than he approved, that he always got his wife to ‘break’ it to him on the Saturday morning, as he found it too much for his nerves to encounter its views without preparation. Then his familiar antitheses not unfrequently reminded me of Dickens’s best touches in that line. He writes to a friend, ‘Tell —— that his policies went down in the Colombo, but were fished up again. They are dirty, but valid.’ I remember asking him if he had enjoyed a particular dinner which he had rather expected to enjoy, but he replied, ‘No, the sherry was bad; tasted as if L—— had dropped his h’s into it.’ His practical illustrations, too, were full of wit. In his address to the Bridgewater constituency, on the occasion when he was defeated by eight votes, he criticised most happily the sort of bribery which ultimately resulted in the disfranchisement of the place.

‘I can make allowance,’ he said, ‘for the poor voter; he is most likely ill-educated, certainly ill-off, and a little money is a nice treat to him. What he does is wrong, but it is intelligible. What I do not understand is the position of the rich, respectable, virtuous members of a party which countenances these things. They are like the man who stole stinking fish; they commit a crime, and they get no benefit.’

But perhaps the best illustration I can give of his more sardonic humour was his remark to a friend who had a church in the grounds near his house:—‘Ah, you’ve got the church in the grounds! I like that. It’s well the tenants shouldn’t be quite sure that the landlord’s power stops with this world.’ And his more humorous exaggerations were very happy. I remember his saying of a man who was excessively fastidious in rejecting under-done meat, that he once sent away a cinder ‘because it was red;’ and he confided gravely to an early friend that when he was in low spirits, it cheered him to go down to the bank, and dabble his hand in a heap of sovereigns. But his talk had finer qualities than any of these. One of his most intimate friends—both in early life, and later in Lincoln’s Inn—Mr. T. Smith Osler, writes to me of it thus:—

‘As an instrument for arriving at truth, I never knew anything like a talk with Bagehot. It had just the quality which the farmers desiderated in the claret, of which they complained that though it was very nice, it brought them “no forrader;” for Bagehot’s conversation did get you forward, and at a most amazing pace. Several ingredients went to this; the foremost was his power of getting to the heart of the subject, taking you miles beyond your starting point in a sentence, generally by dint of sinking to a deeper stratum. The next was his instantaneous appreciation of the bearing of everything you yourself said, making talk with him, as Roscoe once remarked, “like riding a horse with a perfect mouth.” But most unique of all was his power of keeping up animation without combat. I never knew a power of discussion, of co operative investigation of truth, to approach to it. It was all stimulus, and yet no contest.’

But I must have done; and, indeed, it is next to impossible to convey, even faintly, the impression of Bagehot’s vivid and pungent conversation to anyone who did not know him. It was full of youth, and yet had all the wisdom of a mature judgment in it. The last time we met, only five days before his death, I remarked on the vigour and youthfulness of his look, and told him he looked less like a contemporary of my own than one of a younger generation. In a pencil-note, the last I received from him, written from bed on the next day but one, he said, ‘I think you must have had the evil eye when you complimented me on my appearance. Ever since, I have been sickening, and am now in bed with a severe attack on the lungs.’ Indeed, well as he appeared to me, he had long had delicate health, and heart disease was the immediate cause of death. In spite of a heavy cold on his chest, he went down to his father’s for his Easter visit the day after I last saw him, and he passed away painlessly in sleep on the 24th March 1877, aged 51. It was at Herds Hill, the pretty place west of the river Parret, that flows past Langport, which his grandfather had made some fifty years before, that he breathed his last. He had been carried thither as an infant to be present when the foundation stone was laid of the home which he was never to inherit; and now very few of his name survive. Bagehot’s family is believed to be the only one remaining that has retained the old spelling of the name, as it appears in Doomsday Book, the modern form being Bagot. The Gloucestershire family of the same name, from whose stock they are supposed to have sprung, died out in the beginning of this century.

Not very many perhaps, outside Bagehot’s own inner circle, will carry about with them that hidden pain, that burden of emptiness, inseparable from an image which has hitherto been one full of the suggestions of life and power, when that life and power are no longer to be found; for he was intimately known only to the few. But those who do will hardly find again in this world a store of intellectual sympathy of so high a stamp, so wide in its range and so full of original and fresh suggestion, a judgment to lean on so real and so sincere, or a friend so frank and constant, with so vivid and tenacious a memory for the happy associations of a common past, and so generous in recognising the independent value of divergent convictions in the less pliant present.

R. H. H.

November 1, 1878.