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Bagehot in the chambers, first, of Mr. Charles Hall (afterwards Vice-Chancellor Sir Charles Hall), and then of his friend, Mr. Quain (afterwards the late Mr. Justice Quain), where he took a great liking for the art of special pleading, an art of which lawyers have now abandoned at least the technical and scientific use. Bagehot always professed to regret greatly the abolition of special pleas. 'The only thing I ever really knew,' he once wrote, 'was special pleading, and the moment I had learnt that, the law reformers botched and abolished it.' Nevertheless, though called to the bar in the autumn of 1852, he had already made up his mind not to pursue the law as his profession, but to join his father in his shipowning and banking business at Langport.

Before doing this, however, Bagehot spent some months in Paris, and happened to be living there at the time of the coup d'etat in December 1851. He adopted keenly at the time the side of the prince-president, and horrified some of his liberal friends in London by addressing seven letters on the subject of the coup d'etat to a little weekly paper, called the 'Inquirer.' These letters have since been republished in an appendix to the first volume of his 'Literary Studies,' which appeared after his death. They are letters of singular force and vivacity, though marked by more of that cynicism not uncommon in young men than any of his later writings. His great thesis was that 'stupidity' is the essential condition of political freedom, and that the French were a great deal too clever to be free. He held that the only security for people's doing their duty was 'that they should not know anything else to do,' and that the only guarantee for political stability was that they should be incapable of comprehending any other condition of political life than that to which they had been accustomed. It is easy to see that this notion, less paradoxically expressed, pervaded the essay on 'Physics and Politics' conceived and written some twenty years later.

In 1852 Bagehot plunged into business; but he had always spare energy for literature, and contributed first to the 'Prospective Review,' and from 1855 onwards to the 'National Review' (of which he was, throughout the existence of that quarterly, one of the editors), a series of essays which attracted very general attention by their brilliancy of style and lucidity of thought. Bagehot's great characteristic as a writer, whether on economic or literary subjects, was a very curious combination of dash and doubt, great vivacity in describing the superficial impressions produced on him by every subject-matter with which he was dealing, and great caution in yielding his mind to that superficial impression — one might almost say great distrust of it, if only because he was always disposed to believe in the illusiveness of a first impression. His face reflected both phases of his mind. He had heavy black hair, flashing black eyes, a florid complexion, a lissome figure, and the look of high animal spirits; but he had also something of good-natured mockery in his glance, and his face reflected that habitual reserve of judgment which has been called 'detachment' of mind — in other words, a power of holding himself aloof from the influence of his own first impressions till he had checked and criticised them. Perhaps the essays which would best represent his peculiar genius are those on the 'First Edinburgh Reviewers,' on 'Hartley Coleridge,' and on ' Bishop Butler.' In those essays you get a glimpse of Bagehot's ultimate creed, such as you hardly reach in any of his more elaborate works.

Of these more elaborate works, probably the most adequate to his own conception was that on the 'English Constitution,' in which he tries to get rid of all the formal theory of 'checks and balances,' and to show where the centre of power in the United Kingdom really is, and why the House of Commons is so much more powerful than other representative assemblies of the same class. His view was that the throne and the House of Lords are of the highest use, not in directly checking the House of Commons, but in affecting the wishes of the people as to what the commons should do and what they should not do. He regarded 'the dignified parts,' or, as he also calls them, 'the theatrical parts,' of the constitution, as useful chiefly to inspire in the people political confidence, to give a fuller significance to the sense of national unity, and to incline the people to look above themselves in education and social rank for the leaders by whom they would be guided. But the effective part of our constitution is, in Bagehot's view, the very close unity between the executive government and the legislature, produced by the machinery of the cabinet, which is at once responsible for every administrative act and for the legislation which enlarges, or contracts, or alters the scope of, both the administration and the legislature. He contrasts, at great length, the fusion of the administrative and legislative functions in the English cabinet with their formal and careful separation in the American constitution, and he maintains that the House of Commons gains enormously in efficiency by its power of dismissing and virtually nominating the cabinet; for that is the power,