Bagehot
Page 12
Bagehot admitted that he was already a little distinguished in the monetary way. He had just filed 3,500 words of page-one copy for the Economist on the topic of the inadequacy of Britain’s gold reserve. Wilson had accorded this submission some of his highest praise; he said it was written in a “business style.”19 William Rathbone Greg, a family friend of the Wilsons, a manager of the Economist, and co-venturer, with Bagehot and others, in the National Review, praised the submission, too, after a fashion. “Better than any of your literary things, Bagehot,” said Greg, who had every reason to be jealous of Bagehot’s claim on the respect of his employer and the affections of the Wilson daughters. The recipient of Greg’s comment observed to Eliza that it was “paying a compliment and spoiling it rather.”
Bagehot did not deny that he was ambitious. He sought such reputation as accorded with his objective value—a wholesome kind of ambition. The wish to be appraised at more than one’s value was the undesirable kind. “I am afraid I covet ‘power’ influence over people’s wills, faculties and conduct,” he told her. “I think this is a very good thing too in many ways, but I do not quite approve the intensity with which I feel it.”20
By the end of November 1857, life was beginning to brighten in dull Edinburgh. The Wilsons had procured a piano, on which Sophie played Beethoven. In the evenings, a Wilson cousin came to read aloud from Zanoni, a popular occult novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Dr. Beveridge was “rubbing” Eliza for two hours a day now—a ten-year-old spinal injury was the bodily insult that had caused her head and eyes to ache, or so he determined. Stuff and nonsense, replied Bagehot.
Her intended lightheartedly blamed her for his inability to concentrate—he would sleep past his stop on the commuter train. He owed the Economist another article, and he had promised the Encyclopedia Britannica a note on the French Credit Mobilier, a subject he had written about for the Economist. The clock was also ticking on the deadline for an essay on the autumn financial crisis for the National Review, and the proofs of his soon-to-be-published collection of biographical studies were still uncorrected. “All the soft relaxing time that I used to give to literature insensibly goes to meditating on one face, and it requires such an effort to turn my mind away from it.”21
Her letters brought tears to his eyes; the “firm and stoical” front he showed to the world was fast breaking down. “Knowing you not only ‘gives a new significance to life,’ but has made a revolution in my whole being somehow. I must whisper these things to you: it is vain to try to write them.”22 Loving her, he became isolated from other people—“All the distracting world seems to be gone and we seem to be alone together in the sight of God.”23
Eliza had expected to be released by Christmas, but the doctor commanded more massage (her body was “fibrous”). As she could not come to London, Bagehot packed his bags for Edinburgh. Could he arrive by her birthday, Wednesday, December 16? How she hoped so: “If you could manage it, it would be delicious . . . We would have a real Sunday talk to begin with, and then you would cheer me with your jests and nonsense, the more nonsense the better as far as I am concerned, and I think you like to talk what you call ‘rubbish’ to me. Do you know, I feel quite joyous at the bare possibility of having you here.”24
“What nonsense it is about love being blind,” Bagehot wrote to her. “It sees so distinctly or does not one mind overhear the other? After I have gone away from you I have passed many aching moments trying to overhear what you must have thought of what I said to you.”25
•••
THE NEW YEAR BROUGHT Bagehot’s first publication between hard covers. Estimates of Some Englishmen and Scotchmen: A Series of Articles Reprinted by Permission Principally from the National Review incorporated his commentaries on Gibbon, Cowper, Shelley, “the First Edinburgh Reviewers,” Sir Robert Peel, Hartley Coleridge, and Bishop Butler.
The book-buying public had come to like these anthologies of essays from the top literary quarterlies. Two such journals mattered most, the Edinburgh Review (for Whigs) and the Quarterly Review (for Tories). The National Review, which Bagehot had helped to found in 1855, had no particular politics, and disrupted that intellectual duopoly by the strength of its ideas and the pleasures of its writing, Bagehot’s especially.
Eliza cut out the first review she saw, a lukewarm notice in the Statesman (“tolerable,” the critic allowed). The Examiner, while “heartily” recommending the book, was disapproving of Bagehot’s glibness, his attempts to achieve the “modern form of smartness that shall win the public ear, which in the essay on Shakespeare borders on impertinence.”26
There was no such holding back in the Morning Post, which extolled the author for his possession “of qualities that entitle him to a foremost place among the essayists of our own times.” Still less did the Economist stint. Hutton showered his best friend and journalistic stable-mate with superlatives: “There is true genius in these fascinating, and, perhaps, disrespectful estimates, and it is of a somewhat rare kind.” The National Review, Hutton judged, “is fortunate having secured in its early days the contributions of a writer so fresh and vivid a genius. His audacity would often provoke rebellion if it were not for the depth of his thought, and his thought would often seem abstruse and dull if it were not for the brilliancy of his humor.”
Bagehot brushed aside that tribute, well-earned though it was, as he did Hutton’s subsequent praise of his National Review essay on the Panic of 1857. But Bagehot’s literary work had also caught the eye of Matthew Arnold, the great critic, who praised it for “showing not talent only, but a concern for the simple truth which is rare in English literature as it is in English politics and English religion.” Bagehot was not so quick to deprecate Arnold’s opinion—he gave Eliza the letter in which Arnold had written it.
The book was a kind of love letter, Bagehot told her. “It never would have been put together, but from a floating idea that perhaps you might read it and perhaps you might like me better for it.”27
The two lovers, getting to know one another from afar, told each other about themselves. He related that he was “cheerful but not sanguine.” He could make the best of anything, “but I have a difficulty in expecting that the future will be very good.”28 He talked to himself. He needed his sleep, was prone to be late for breakfast, disliked the cold, would not live in suburbia nor sleep in four-poster beds. He was tone-deaf.29 He was afraid that she overrated his mind (though “I do not mind being thought too well of”).30
For her part, she was “decidedly sanguine” (too much so, her family thought); “I always expect things to turn out well.”31 She spoke German fluently (she had gone to school in Cologne for five years),32 French and Italian more than capably. Her nature was “very womanly”; she loved to lean “on a stronger nature, though I may appear to be somewhat independent on the surface.”33 Her taste in female beauty was “severe,” more so, even, than that of her appraising fiancé, and she would not accept his worshipful comments on her good looks (“though I have not the shadow of an objection to your thinking it, dear”).34 She had an ear for music (her father loved the way she sang “Annie Laurie”);35 parties bored her.36
She confronted him about his misogyny: “Are you not somewhat hyper-critical about women, dear? They must not be stupid; they must not talk and they must not be silent, and whatever else they are or are not, they must be pretty. I shall begin to fancy I must be a wonderful ‘juste milieu’ in everything to be right in your eyes, and I shall be getting vain in spite of myself.”37
Misogynist though he might have been, Bagehot condescended neither to his mother nor to his fiancée. He wrote to her during the crisis about the paradoxical nature of financial faith. “All banking rests on credit,” he said, “and credit is rather a superstition. At any rate it is adopted not from distinct evidence but from habit, usage and local custom, and when there is panic floating in the air no one ought to feel so comfortable as usual.”38
Suddenly, six weeks
later, it was as if the Panic of 1857 had not happened. “It is really a very ridiculous world,” he told her from London:
The last few times I have been here everybody was on their knees asking for money, now you have nearly to go on your knees to ask people to take it. Neither of these two extremes is very pleasant. Being besought is not unagreeable intrinsically, but when a man is very earnest for money, you begin to suspect he is “in difficulties” and ought not to have it, and in the other case it seems demeaning the majesty of money to ask—or beseech—human beings to take it. You look at a hard-eyed billbroker and think what is this man created for, if not to take money. Still the present state of things has the advantage that there is no tension of mind in managing your business while it lasts. You need not follow a man with your eyes when he takes away your money and think “Will he ever pay me?”—I own I like the sensation of safety.39
Few better observations of the cycles of bankerly feast and famine have ever been written. Historians of economic thought may make of it what they will that these passages are found not in Bagehot’s financial journalism but in his love letters.
•••
ELIZA, AT LAST FREE of the clutches of Dr. Beveridge, returned to London in February 1858 to buy “the then de rigueur dressing case” and to order her trousseau.40 The next stop was Claverton, where she was reunited with her fiancé and her sisters. Fully integrated into the family, Bagehot amused the Wilsons by reading aloud from poetry or the National Review and by competing in zestful games of cup-and-ball, a monocle stuck in his eye. He loved to play cards, too, especially with the one Wilson sister who actually cared—as did he—about winning and losing.
In the weeks leading up to the wedding, set for April 21, Bagehot wrote an essay on Sir Walter Scott and the Waverley novels, conducted his banking business in Langport and Bristol, and went searching for a house for Eliza and himself. Bella Vista, the final selection was called, which the new Walter Bagehots presently rechristened “The Arches.” Set on a hill near Clevedon, a seaside resort and Bristol bedroom community, the house commanded a view that was everything its original name implied. Bagehot had loved visiting the town during his Bristol College days,41 and the air, he exulted to Eliza, was “eager.” They would pay an annual rent on the order of £120. Mitigating that cost was the fact that, in the country, a gentleman could “wear very cheap clothes.”42
They were married not at the cathedral, or by the archbishop as Eliza had jokingly demanded, but in the old church at Claverton. The great day dawned warm and sunny. There was dancing on the lawn to the strains of a Hanoverian band and, of course, there were speeches. Neither of the bridegroom’s parents was present—she could not stand the excitement, and he remained home to watch over her—so Bagehot took time from his honeymoon to describe the enchanting event. “A Mr. Moffat (MP for Ashburton),” he wrote home, “proposed our health in a copious and eloquent manner, and spoke of the ‘hundred of thousands’ who had read my writings, whom I myself should wish to see particularly.”
He signed the letter, and so did Eliza:
I am your affectionate daughter,
Eliza Bagehot
This is the first time I ever signed my new name.
* In which two metals, usually silver and gold, jointly serve as the standard of value. French law assigned a fixed exchange rate between silver and gold in the shape of a ratio of 15.5:1. When Wilson and Bagehot were discussing the phenomenon, the French were busily exporting silver to India and, with those proceeds, importing gold. Wikipedia contributors, “Bimetallism,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=820858049 (accessed February 8, 2018).
CHAPTER 7
A DEATH IN INDIA
Post-panic finance was quiescent, just as Lord Overstone’s theory of the economic seasons predicted it would be. English politics were livelier. In 1858, the Conservative government of Lord Derby began to prepare a new parliamentary reform bill, the first since 1832. Bagehot responded to the Tory initiative with his own proposals for constitutional renovation, and “Parliamentary Reform,” the resulting 43,000-word opus, appeared in the January 1859 issue of the National Review.
The 1832 Reform Act had established a uniform test of eligibility for voting: to exercise the franchise, a man had to be living in a house for which the annual rent was at least £10. Bagehot was all for a property qualification, but he proposed that the minimum be established locally rather than nationally, and that, perhaps, other kinds of property—debentures, shares, savings bank accounts—be considered as equivalents to land and rent in determining who might cast a ballot. He urged, too, some reapportionment of parliamentary seats to secure a stronger voice in the nation’s political councils for the fast-growing, industrial North.1
His essay, soon expanded and published as a two-shilling pamphlet, proceeded from an optimistic view of the age. Free trade, an improved poor law, municipal reform, a more enlightened colonial policy, and the abolition of forced tithing to the Church of England were among the signs of progress. All had followed the expansion of the franchise with the Reform Act of 1832. The authors of that profound legislation had succeeded in transferring “the predominant influence in the state from certain special classes to the general aggregate of fairly instructed men.” Not that you could prove the point with statistics, Bagehot allowed: “We must trust to our eyes and ears, to the vague but conclusive evidence of events.”2
Among some of the free traders who had stood shoulder to shoulder with Wilson since the Corn Law struggles of the 1840s—John Bright was one—there was a strain of almost pure democracy. Bagehot was immune to it. The schoolboy who had characterized his classmates as “the mob” and the adult who—in this very essay—condemned the vulgarity of the U.S. Congress (“Men of refinement shrink from the House of Representatives as from a parish vestry”)3 had no sympathy for universal suffrage. Still and all, for society’s own good, the “lower orders,” too, must be heard:
. . . in every free country it is of the utmost importance,—and, in the long-run, a pressing necessity,—that all opinions extensively entertained, all sentiments widely diffused, should be stated publicly before the nation.
We may place the real decision of questions, the actual adoption of policies, in the ordinary and fair intelligence of the community, or in the legislature which represents it. But we must also take care to bring before that fair intelligence and that legislature the sentiments, the interests, the opinions, the prejudices, the wants of all classes of the nation; we must be sure that no decision is come to in ignorance of real facts and intimate wants.4
Publication of “Parliamentary Reform” made a sensation. Bagehot’s admirers showered the essay with praise, some of which they conveyed to Wilson with the request that he pass it along to his new son-in-law. Wilson went a step further: he invited a dozen of these appreciative and prominent readers—“public animals,” Bagehot called the members of the star-studded guest list—to toast the author at dinner.
William E. Gladstone, William Makepeace Thackeray, Lord Grey, Lord Granville, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and Robert Lowe were among the eminences who gathered around Wilson’s table at 12 Upper Belgrave Street on April 1, 1859.5 Lowe, an Oxford classicist turned Liberal member of Parliament, had bypassed Wilson to praise Bagehot directly. The essay, wrote Lowe in a letter, “is beyond compare the best I have seen on the subject, and is indeed written with the insight of a statesman and the moderation of a philosopher.”6
Emilie Barrington, Eliza’s little sister, would often watch her brother-in-law pull a “very tiny” notebook from his waistcoat and jot down fleeting thoughts. One such entry said this: “Living really in the political world is the greatest possible gain in a political country; knowing at first hand what others know at second hand only.”7 On April 4, three days after the Wilson-hosted dinner to honor the author of “Parliamentary Reform,” the Walter Bagehots attended a party at the Gladstones’ home.8 The in
side world of politics had a new member.
ELIZA HAD EXPRESSED THE hope that her fiancé would make a name for himself “on Money,” and Bagehot presently tackled the subject head-on. The outpouring of gold from the mines in California and Australia prompted concern about a new inflation: as a superabundant harvest would tend to reduce the price of food, so, the argument went, would the recent gold strikes in California and Australia likely depress the value of money. Michel Chevalier, a French economist, free-trader, and friend of Wilson’s, took that tack in a new book entitled On the Probable Fall in the Value of Gold. He projected depreciation in gold coin of as much as 50 percent.
Bagehot, with a courtly bow to his father-in-law’s friend, chose the other side of the argument. He reminded readers of the Economist that nobody knew the size of the existing stock of gold, and, absent this critical information, there was no telling what effect the addition of new bullion—between 1851 and 1857, it was surely immense—might produce. There was, in fact, persuasive evidence that the channels of commerce had swallowed the new gold without any noticeable disturbance to the level of prices. For inferential proof, Bagehot cited the ratio of the prices of gold to silver during the decade of the bullion bonanza: it had hardly wavered. It would surely have moved in silver’s favor if gold had, in fact, become depreciated through a glut in new supply.§
Wilson challenged Bagehot’s reasoning, especially on the technical point of whether the growth in quasi-money credit instruments like bank checks, convertible into gold on demand, ought to be weighed in reckoning the import of the new mine supply. Chevalier’s concerns about the future stability of the monetary standard were ones that Wilson shared. It was a fond and friendly difference of opinion: “I wish I had you here to talk over this interesting point,” Wilson wrote to his son-in-law. “But go on with the articles. When shall we see you?” He sent his love to Eliza.