Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/253

Rh think those Germans were up to a real Montagnard, who is the most horrible being to the eye I ever saw, - sallow, sincere, sour fanaticism, with grizzled moustaches, and a strong wish to shoot you rather than not. The Montagnards are a scarce commodity, the real race, - only three or four, if so many, to a barricade. The rest are mere shop-boys and gamins, who get knocked about by the Fraternité fanatics, if they put the stones wrong, or don't upset the cabs to an inch." "Till the Revolution came, I had no end of trouble to find conversation, but now they'll talk against everybody, and against the president like mad, - and they talk immensely well, and the language is like a razor, capital if you are skilful, but sure to cut you if you aren't. A fellow can talk German in crude forms, and I don't see it sounds any worse, but this stuff is horrid unless you get it quite right. A French lady made a striking remark to me:'' 'C'est une revolution qui a sauvé la France. Tous mes amis sont mis en prison.' ''She was immensely delighted that such a pleasing way of saving her country had been found."

Mr. Bagehot's stay in France, short as it was, confirmed him in his profound English reserve and also in his lively dread of that ready-made, neat-looking theory which, even to his mind, added so much to the attractiveness of French literature, while it squared so ill with the complexity of actual life. Yet his admiration for the effectiveness and perspicuity of French style was almost unlimited, though he regarded the French audacity of generalization as a grave warning, not as a seductive example. Perhaps his familiarity with it taught him that disposition to scoff at mere literature, and that deep belief in the educating power of all large mercantile life, which he was always expressing, sometimes with humorous exaggeration, sometimes with earnest conviction. "You see," he once wrote to a friend, "I have hunting, banking, ships, publishers, an article, and a Christmas to do, all at once, and it is my opinion they will all get muddled. A muddle will print, however, though it won't add up, - which is the real advantage of literature."

It is of course difficult to decide, as it is difficult to answer all hypothetical questions, whether Mr. Bagehot would have succeeded if he had ever got into Parliament, - as in 1866 he was within eight votes of doing for Bridgewater. It is certain enough that dozens of vastly inferior men have at various times succeeded in making a great Parliamentary and political reputation. But it does not follow that because he was a man of much higher and wider intellectual range than many of them, he would have succeeded too. As we have said, his mind was not a mind which got merged in his work and duties. It was a mind which he kept singularly detached from them, and this was one of the great obstacles to his popularity. He was a thorough Liberal so far as a steady belief in the educational advantages of popular institutions, and especially of wide and directly practical discussions, could make him a Liberal, but he had no sympathy with the "enthusiasms" of the Liberal party, and was, in a humorous way, almost proud of belonging to a county which, as he used to say, "would not subscribe a thousand pounds to be represented by an archangel." "I hate the Liberal enthusiast," he once wrote to a friend. "I feel inclined to say, 'Go home, sir, and take a dose of salts, and see if it won't clean it all out of you.' Nature did not mean me for a popular candidate." Clearly not; and even if he had got over that stage of the business, we are not sure that Mr. Bagehot did not a little too distinctly realize the wide chasm between his views and those of the popular party to which he must have belonged, to have exercised a perfectly natural and therefore a powerful influence over political opinion. He was a Liberal of the middle party, and always approved Liberal governments resting on the Liberal-Conservatives, and Conservative governments resting on the Conservative-Liberals, rather than governments of energy, enthusiasm, and action. Yet Mr. Bagehot was a Liberal from conviction, not from prepossession. His book on the British Constitution - much the ablest, indeed the only book on the real working of that constitution, and one which has been eagerly welcomed in Germany and France as quite a new light on the true meaning of the British political system - shows that intellectually he would have preferred a conservative republic to a constitutional monarchy, if it had but had the same magic hold on the British people. He did not like the many unreal fictions of constitutional monarchy, nor did he esteem highly the prepossessions in which national fidelity to a hereditary dynasty is rooted. Nevertheless, he steadily maintained that mankind being what it is, the position of a constitutional monarch, if used by a wise and patient sovereign, is one of the most powerful, and one conferring power of the most 