The Critic as Statesman

by JACQUES BARZUN

1

THE title Physics and Politics has become so apt, since our deafening by the atom. that publishers would probably like to forget the man who first coined the caption for his own use seventy-five years ago. But they are not forgetting him, or at least his book; they are, on the contrary, bringing out two new editions of it. The work is a classic, as the reviewers are bound to say; yet it is seldom read, and Walter Bagehot, its author, has never become a familiar name. Not six months ago he was identified in a very reliable book catalogue as “banker and shipowner, joint editor of the National Review after 1855, and editor of the Economist from 1860 till his death.”This is of the order of “Shakespeare-Realtor at Stratford-on-Avon”; not quite, perhaps, for Bagehot was indeed notable as banker and editor. But he was so far greater as a political thinker and a literary critic that he deserves the title of genius in either kind.

It is good to have occasion to restate this conviction, though Bagehot’s hold on the public mind will probably not be strengthened by the reappearance in print of his Physics and Politics. For with this, as with all his books, one needs special orientation toward his thought and character to understand, not what he is saying,-since he is the clearest of prose writers,-but what he is driving at. I remember first reading Physics and Politics some twenty years ago and being at once entertained, outraged, and not enlightened. The impression I carried away was the one produced by his answer to the question he somewhere raises: “In what respects is a village of English colonists superior to a tribe of Australian natives who roam about them?” Indisputably, says Bagehot, the English are superior “in one, and that a main sense. . . . They can beat the Australians in war when they like; they can take from them anything they like, and kill any of them they choose.”

Bagehot goes on to speak of other superiorities, in comfort, culture, and practical knowledge, but that “one and main sense" of the white man’s eminence stuck in my throat and prevented for a time my swallowing anything else of Bagehot’s. I classed him as an unrepentant social Darwinist: was not the very book an inquiry into the law of progress by considering the light that Darwinism (physics) shed on human society (politics)? True, it was more concise and more perceptive than Darwin’s own attempt in The Descent of Man, but I could not reconcile myself to the apparent complacency of a critic who put the slum civilization of London or Manchester above Australian culture, however primitive. All my admiration of boomerangs rose against it.

Today we have lost a good deal of the post-Darwinian passion to find out who is superior to whom; we have lost it, that is, as a speculative interest, but we have hardly escaped as yet from the consequences of its earlier form. We have in fact just emerged from a struggle with powers whose first principle was belief in their own supremacy, and who were making it good by “taking what they liked and killing whom they chose.” So we may be readier than I was in the twenties to judge with fairness Bagehot’s chapter on

The Use of Conflict.”We can appreciate the exquisite accuracy of his remark that “the progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most showy, fact in human history.”

And when Bagehot proposes as a generality that “in every particular state of the world, those nations which are strongest tend to prevail over others; and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best,”we must concede that he is at least dealing candidly with an inescapable problem. In modern jargon, he is dealing with power politics, and if he heard us he would point out that the phrase says the same thing twice over: polities is for power; that is its connection with physics, whether physics be symbolized by the tiger or by uranium 235.

If this is the simple unpalatable point of Physics and Politics, what can we learn further from reading the rest of Bagehot-his English Constitution, his Lombard Street, and his essays on political, economic, and literary subjects? The answer is: we can learn something which seems to be very difficult to convey accurately through definition or example — the true character of political man. This character is, in its turn, important to discover, because on it depends the possibility of leading a life above “physics,” a life better than that of the jungle.

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THOUGH not himself a practicing statesman, Bagehot lived and worked in the very center of England’s politics, finance, and social struggle. As lucid in exposition as he was gifted in observation, he had besides that special temperament which marks off the potential ruler from the ordinary citizen. His strangeness therefore defines that temperament. Looking on such a scene as Bagehot saw, the ordinary citizen takes it for granted that a statesman is simply a man with a good head for details, who is given enlarged powers and responsibilities. The common man does not see, is not enabled to see, that these powers are as fluid as water, and these responsibilities as massive as mountains; and that consequently the ruler cannot act as if he were an honest motorman driving a streetcar. The workaday virtues, the black-andwhite morality of good and evil, the easy personifying of groups, classes, and nations as if they were single entities with one will and one mind — all this suddenly becomes childish and frivolous when applied to affairs of state. In that realm the practical and even the superior mind must undergo re-education, as if called upon to cipher in an utterly foreign system of numbers, or to survey a field of non-Euclidian dimensions.

Some men are born with the intuition that this is so, that the common analogy between a good man, a good ruler, and a good nation is false. Bagehot, from the age of fifteen-the time of his earliest essay-had this perception. He was born political, like Alexander Hamilton, Dr. Johnson, Rousseau, Burke, Machiavelli, Lincoln, Hobbes, Tocqueville, or Bernard Shaw; and like them of course he has been called hard and cynical. He is quoted, and correctly as we have seen, on the side of power. When other words of his, equally characteristic, are quoted on the side of freedom, public instruction, and democratic diversity, he is put down (like Shaw) as a paradoxer

-or worse, as an inconsistent trifler; for again like Shaw, it is Bagehot’s misfortune to be witty.

In short, the difficulty of the political man in making himself understood is that he tries to bring together what the common man has decided must be kept asunder. The good man of commerce will accept a saint and understand his concentration; will shudder at a cynic and grasp the point of specialization; but how few can — particularly if contemporary with the events — fully share Bagehot’s feelings when he says: —

“Look back to the time . . . when the Socialists, not under speculative philosophers like Proudhon and Louis Blanc, but under practical rascals and energetic murderers like Sobrier and Caussidière, made their final stand; and when against them, on the other side, the National Guard (mostly solid shopkeepers, three-parts ruined by the events of February) fought, I will not say bravely or valiantly, but furiously, frantically, savagely, as one reads in old books that half starved burgesses in beleaguered towns have sometimes fought, for the food of their children; let any sceptic hear of the atrocities of the friends of order, and the atrocities of the advocates of disorder, and he will, I imagine, no longer be sceptical on two points: he will hope that if he ever have to fight it will not be with a fanatic Socialist, nor against a demi-bankrupt fighting for his shop; and he will admit that in a country subject to collisions ... no earthly blessing is in any degree comparable to a power which will stave off, long delay, or permanently prevent . . . such bloodshed.”

In this paragraph we can see at every turn what must be called the double vision-the cool awareness of everything at once—of the man destined for statecraft: that rascals and murderers can be practical and energetic; that defenders of property light for their children’s food, like the others—he will not say bravely, but savagely — whence atrocities on both sides and the need of a power to quell or neutralize this fury of waste. There is the root idea of government itself in this account, which contrasts so completely with our familiar moral views. For “we” are partisans first; we have “principles,” loyalties — to socialism or to shopkeeping — and we ascribe virtues accordingly. The socialists, or any progressive group you like, are heroes dying for freedom; the property owners are rational defenders of law and order; and the power that would stop civil war by an even greater show of force is tyranny incarnate.

The tragedy of man is that there is a sense in which these last statements are just as true as Bagehot’s. The political improvements we most venerate in the past were in actuality riotous, fanatical, and atrocious. But the political thinker or statesman cannot give in to this spectator’s view of history. He must act for a greater interest than improvement itself; he must perpetuate order, which he does by keeping the multitudinous aggressions of men in balance against one another. His task is paradoxical because through order he intends that moral force, which always does have the last word, shall not be a last word spoken from beyond the grave. This is why immediate morality is not his concern. Bagehot felt this so intimately that in his youth he performed what is perhaps the most symbolical act of statecraft on record.

Aged not quite twenty-six, handsome, spirited, with a very arresting intensity of eye, he was vacationing in Paris and also reporting, as correspondent for a Liberal and Unitarian paper, the coup d’état of Napoleon III. To the dismay of his friends and his editor, his seven long letters were an elaborate defense of the approaching dictatorship. He explained — and the paragraph I have quoted was part of the explanation — the necessity of order in France at whatever cost. But by a singular yet characteristic turn of mind, he was at the same time risking his life to help the Republicans build barricades against the usurper.

This conscious self-contradiction, akin to the maturest political wisdom, has many meanings. It can signify for us the statesman’s conflict between his own ideal allegiance and what he deems the present public interest. It can also symbolize the permanent need for checks and balances — nothing must triumph absolutely lest absolutism result. It can finally typify Bagehot’s own conviction that dictatorship has only a crude and temporary use. When, fifteen years later, he reviewed the state of France in his essay, “ Caesareanism as it now Exists,” he did conclude to this effect. The Second Empire “is an admirable government for present and coarse purposes, but a detestable government for future and refined purposes . . . [because] it stops the teaching apparatus; it stops the effectual inculcation of important thought upon the mass of mankind . . .”and it will end by corrupting the nation.

3

THIS “teaching” and this important thought that Bagehot is worried about is not the formal instruction of the people, and even less the activities of professed intellectuals. It is the business of keeping “the mass of mankind” alive to their own changing needs, so that statesmanship can devise and bring about changes in established institutions. The nineteenth century had discovered, and was not allowed to forget, that the world does move, politically as well as cosmically. This fact confronts us with the second great paradox or contradiction that Bagehot explored and explained. The first was the moral paradox that the public good is not to be achieved by following the rules of private good. Now we face the psychological paradox that stability and change are equally necessary though diametrically opposed. But are men capable of being at once quiescent and active, habitridden and original?

Bagehot’s answer cannot be digested; it must be read in nearly everything he wrote on “such creatures as we are, in such a world as the present one.” Whether he discusses Shakespeare or Bishop Butler or the governors of the Bank of England, Bagehot is scrutinizing men and he always starts from their concrete diversity: “Men are formed, indeed, on no ideal type. Human nature has tendencies too various and circumstances too complex. All men’s characters have sides and aspects not to be comprehended in a single definition.” Training and the “cake of custom” solidify this flexibility: “Take the soft mind of the boy, and (strong and exceptional aptitudes excepted) you may make him merchant, barrister, butcher, baker, surgeon, or apothecary. But once make him an apothecary and he will never afterwards bake wholesome bread; make him a butcher, and he will kill too extensively even for a surgeon. . . .”Now just as acquired habit makes the professional man, it makes the sober citizen of a particular state. Upon this miracle rest the stability and the comfort of good government; gently drilled by habit, everybody knows what to do and, as we say, “behaves.”

This fact leads Bagehot to the enunciation of his unforgettable thesis that the true source of strength in the government of England is the stupidity of the population. Britain’s freedom has the same roots, though it flowers in the not quite so dense atmosphere of the people’s chosen representatives. There are in Parliament “the few invaluable members who sit and think,”but the "‘best’ English people keep their mind in a state of decorous dullness. . . . Take Sir Robert Peel — our last great statesman, the greatest Member of Parliament that ever lived, an absolutely perfect transactor of public business. Was there ever such a dull man ? Can anyone, without horror, foresee the reading of his memoirs?”

This stolid attention to business, however, makes for astonishing steadiness, and when combined with a free government, keeps the nation (as Tocqueville hoped for the United States) in “a rut of freedom.” One of these ruts is party organization, essential to majority rule. “If everybody does what he thinks right,” says Bagehot, “there will be 657 amendments to every motion, and none of them will be carried or the motion either.”The strictly irrelevant feelings of party interest must be aroused and used to push forward the real and complex enterprises of state. “There never was an election without a party. You cannot get a child into an asylum without a combination. At such places you see, ‘Vote for Orphan A’ upon a placard, and ‘Vote for Orphan B (Also an Idiot!!!)’ upon a banner, and the party of each is busy about its placard and banner.”

Abstractly put, Bagehot’s view of the psychological stuff of good government is that men in the mass are not, as is wrongly said, ruled by their imaginations, but rather “by the weakness of their imaginations. The nature of a constitution, the action of an assembly . . . are complex facts, difficult to know, and easy to mistake.” Government therefore needs symbols “to impose on the common people — not necessarily to impose on them what is untrue, yet less what is hurtful; but still to impose on their quiescent imaginations what would otherwise not be there.”

But do not be alarmed — or indignant. Plausible as this description is, it tells only half the story — else there would be no paradox. The other half consists in the second great need of government after stability: the need of change; which in turn requires Bagehot’s “teaching apparatus,” defined by him in the single word Agitation. The stupid, steady, sensible, unimaginative people must be stirred up, made to think and to alter their ways, though not suddenly or spastically, for then they might jump out of the rut of freedom altogether and their acquired wisdom be lost. “It is agitation, agitation alone, which teaches. . . . With our newspapers and our speeches — with our clamorous multitudes of indifferent tongues — we beat the ideas of the few into the minds of the many.”

Though he wrote seventy-five years ago, Bagehot saw the dangers of the short cut, variously represented by the dictator with a doctrine, the single party with a doctrine, the palace revolution with a doctrine: “Having ideas, they want to enforce them on mankind, to make them heard and admitted and obeyed before, in simple competition with other ideas, they would ever be so naturally. At this very moment, there are the most rigid Comtists teaching that we ought to be governed by a hierarchy-a combination of savants orthodox in science. Yet who can doubt that Comte would have been hanged by his own hierarchy. . . ?" For Comte substitute the name of any doctrinaire you prefer, and for his hypothetical hanging think of any purge, trial, or scapegoat sacrifice that comes to mind, and you have before you the dilemma of the twentieth century.

Bagehot’s own system, in so far as he has any, comes to rest on the ever more instructed consent of the governed. One might contrast this instructed consent with the dogmatic conceit that he so much reproved in the French. Against them he quotes their own saying that there is somebody wiser than Napoleon and Talleyrand, and that is Everybody. This “many-sided sense,” adds Bagehot, “finds no microcosm in any single individual.” Yet this common wisdom is made up, as mysteriously as the common will, of single individual convictions. “Very few people are good judges of a good constitution, but everybody’s eyes are excellent judges of good light; every man’s feet are profound in the theory of agreeable stones.”

This is egalitarian enough, but it implies that statesmanship, political theory, and even abstract ethics, though affecting the happiness of men, nearly always seem to them remote from their living concerns. Agitation may turn their eyes toward new matters to be settled, but the gap cannot be permanently closed because abstractions are not facts. “The selling of figs, the cobbling of shoes, the manufacturing of nails — these are the essence of life. And let whoso frameth a constitution for his country think on these things.”

Writing at the height of the Victorian epoch when, in his own words, “the middle classes were the despotic power in England and public opinion ruled,“the opinion of the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus,” — Bagehot could reasonably count on a certain acceleration of the teaching apparatus to keep pace with the steadily increasing demands on government. Teaching the new enfranchised masses after 1870 might in time make an isocratic (i.e. equalvoting) community workable with the aid of ”diffused intelligence.”Hence Bagehot remained, like Burke, a great respecter of Time — time for teaching, for change, for the solidifying of new habits and the preparation of new changes.

But to this eternal process, modern mechanics has imparted an alarming twist that neither Burke nor Bagehot could imagine. Mechanical advance has removed the old obstacle of Space and substituted for it the new obstacle of No Time. The old Roman Empire was unavoidably floppy at the edges: it took so long to cover the mileage from Rome. Now we can flash the photo of an absconding banker to the Antipodes, but this same power means that we are subject every few seconds to a political or economic spasm which may disrupt the maturest plan or paralyze the quickest political brain.

Even if we discount emergencies as nothing new, the living cells of our civilization keep growing and moving by themselves while we sleep. Nationalism, crime, technology, insect pests, and the output of books overtake us at a rate which would fire the imagination of a stone sphinx. The wise “stupidity" which feels that all reform should be like the Grecian urn, the “ foster-child of Silence and slow Time,”seems irrecoverable. In its place we have contracted the nervous twitching, the mental knee-jerk, which serves as a response to the barrage of stimuli without actually reaching as far as the mind. Accordingly we have begun again to ask for order, and strict rule, and fixed principles, backed up of course by “controls,” drill, regimentation, force. We reach this point only to face again Bagehot’s conclusion of 1865 about dictatorship in France: an admirable government for coarse purposes, a detestable one for the future and for any life worth living.

4

WE CAN leave the moral to the sagacity of the reader and, as a more fitting conclusion, follow Bagehot into his last stronghold as a person, critic, and philosopher at large. Not that he abandons his statesmanlike character even in these recesses. His double vision continues to perform its office and it brings us, as we might expect, a very special brand of irony. The ordinary irony states a thing and means its opposite. Bagehot’s kind intends both the thing and its opposite, relishing the simultaneity.

Bagehot himself, I imagine, would have enjoyed the discovery I recently made, that the only copy of his love letters owned by the Columbia University library is in the School of Business reading room. The fact would have struck him as showing men’s careful carelessness and as administering a rebuke to him for daring to seem so volatile. He would similarly have found it natural that the first collected edition of his works should have been made by the president of an American insurance company and issued to the policyholders for their good.

Whatever they thought of the five solid volumes, those so happily insured must at least have agreed with Bagehot’s explanation why so few good books are written. It is that “so few people that can write know anything ... an author has always lived in a room, has read books . . . but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears.”Bagehot used his, unquestionably, and was inclined to praise Shakespeare most of all for his “experiencing mind.” just as he deplored the incapacity of Gibbon’s prose to deal with the lower reaches of truth: “He cannot mention Asia Minor.”

Yet even these critical distinctions must be “read double,”as comments that imply something about Bagehot himself and establish his range, from low to high and from the commonplace use of eyes and ears to the subtler turns of mind’s eye and ear. “Don’t think,”he handsomely adds, “that I wish to be hard on [journalists]. I am not going to require of hackwriters to write only on what they understand — if that were law, what a life for the sub-editor!”

For his own pleasure he usually saw to it that he understood, since what he treasured most in life was the very thing he pointed to as an admirable lack in his compatriots: they have “no notion of the play of mind; no conception that the charm of society depends upon it. They think cleverness an antic, and have a constant though needless horror of being thought to have any of it.”In Bagehot’s play of mind, clearly, words take a leading part, precisely because they can accumulate meanings, give off wave after wave of combined and conflicting connotations, as a vibrating string does harmonics. So good prose is a sensation and some writers “believe that their words are good to eat, as well as to read; they [enjoy] rolling them about the mouth like sugarplums and gradually smoothing off any knots or excrescences.”

Yet mind does not bring pleasure alone, any more than imagination feeds the heart with agreeable fancies. On the contrary, the developed imagination recreates reality, which is often disagreeable; and the rational mind discovers that the essence of things is the opposite of rationality. “People who have thought know that inquiring is suffering.” Fornotice the double-edged adverb addressed to the hasty rationalist-"unfortunately, mysticism is true.” The process of truth-seeking itself is not all bliss: “Deduction is a game, but induction is a grieyance”; which may be an added reason why the fruits of thinking should be set forth lightly and the body of truth form a gay science.

Bagehot had an inkling, moreover, that democracy, for all its dependence on enlightenment, might increasingly discredit mind. “People are so deafened with the loud reiteration of half-truths that they have neither curiosity nor energy for elaborate investigation. The very word ‘elaborate’ is become a reproach.”He comforted himself with the fact that great communities have scarcely ever been ruled by their highest thought, and that perhaps there might exist in future what he called “deferential nations”

-nations that would acknowledge an educated minority as its surrogates in elections. With this suggestion, we are once again in politics, Fabian and Shavian politics, in a world that has by anticipation mastered “physics” for worthy purposes.

In such a world as the present, Bagehot, though occasionally lapsing into gloom, did his best to reduce the din of half-truths by presenting us with his double ones. This, long before Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw, was his chosen function, and it remains his glory and perpetual challenge. He almost always graced it with high-spirited humor, conscious that to be great is to be difficult and misunderstood. He speaks and shocks us, then adds: “As St. Athanasius aptly observes, ‘for the sake of the women who may be led astray, I will this very instant explain my sentiments.’”