Genius on Deadline
Grant, James
nomination, and it was during this year, when his reappointment was in doubt, and when he could be expected to be on his best behavior, that his andes seem to become order than ever. Poor Halleck...
...James Wilson, a self-made hat manufacturer who lost one fortune in 1837 and at length built another, founded the Economist in 1843 to support repeal of the Corn Laws, England's prohibitive duties on imported grain...
...Two years ago, the Graduate School at Columbia University announced a new program in financial writing, which it properly named for Bagehot...
...Genius, more to the point, has better things to do than try...
...When James Wilson, his father-in-law and founder of the Economist, died in 1860, Bagehot took over the magazine...
...He wanted change, knew there must be change if there was to be progress, knew the dangers of too much change...
...Pitt's wit," he writes in a review essay, "was the best [Wilberforce] had ever known...
...A redfaced, choleric man, he immediately began shouting about "the system," the docket cluttered up with misdemeanor charges like marijuana possession while the murderers and armed robbers were kept waiting for months...
...he had read for the law...
...When the company declined--PR, it explained, has become a more worldly affair in the twentieth century--the Economist and Norman St...
...He ran it in earnest and for profit, writing 4,000-6,000 words a week, expanding its statistical coverage, insisting that it be written for businessmen and not the approving (but stingy) literati...
...and when I came to reckon, the sum was more than my income tax...
...Even now, Bagehot's words won't sit still on the page...
...Some years ago, the Economist invited The Travelers to join it in bringing out a new edition...
...But the Liberal age has given way to the Age of Enormities...
...Thirty years later, Bagehot could write in an office memo that free trade "has long been established...
...He begins an article on Edward Gibbon: "A wit [almost certainly Bagehot himself] said of Gibbon's autobiography that he did not know the difference between himself and the Roman Empire...
...Bagehot, who lived in the high noon of freedom, proposed policy, not dogma...
...Yes, and Henry Aaron, it is said, could hit for power...
...In the speculative heat of a bull market, Bagehot feared, such a man might confuse his own interests with the paper's...
...and every attempt at a partial application of it lands us only into difficulties and troubles...
...John-Stevas are to be congratulated...
...Bagehot's genius is for all time...
...He regularly misspelled names and misquoted authorities, often improving on the standard text...
...And this: "There is some lurking quality, or want of quality, in the national character of the French nation which renders them but poorly adapted for the form of freedom and constitution which they have so often, with such zeal and so vainly, attempted to establish...
...The Economist and St...
...But what do we know of the poet from his poetry...
...He recoiled alike from the cravenness of arch-conservatism, the wrongheadedness of socialism, and the purity of laissez-faire...
...8 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977 leave a stamp of unity on the interpretive power of mankind...
...Second, it is forever linked with the English Constitution, an institution as mysterious and uninviting as the Electoral College...
...One suspects that Wilson's shade is something of an embarassment around the Economist nowadays...
...he had twice run for Parliament and twice been defeated...
...Friedrich von Hayek, whose economics Bagehot might have found congenial, can say: "A successful defense of freedom...must be dogmatic and make no concessions to expedience...
...His essays, in their genial range, are really conversation...
...introductory notes, through the first four volumes, on leading figures of the day...
...Russell Barrington, another Wilson daughter, recalls Bagehot in his courting days: tall and thin, with a dark eye, "narrow, square shoulders...
...The project began with four volumes of literary and fiistorical essays (including sketches of William Cowper, Hardey Coleridge, and Lord Macaulay), which appeared in 1968...
...Milton, "who was still by temperament and a schoolmaster by trade, selects a beautiful object, puts it straight before him and his readers, and accumulates upon it all the learned imagery of a thousand years...
...Bagehot had been a banker...
...Here is a great taxonomist of minds...
...Bagehot manfully took up double-entry bookkeeping...
...Gone was the flippancy of the Paris Letters but not their brilliance and verve...
...The magazine seems oddly sanguine in the face of impending national ruin...
...The specific gives rise to the general...
...Bagehot's moderation has plainly influenced succeeding editors at the Economist...
...I hate the Liberal enthusiasts," he said...
...The two journalistic rules most scrupulously observed by Bagehot were those set forth some years later by G.K...
...I think I know what he meant...
...Said Chesterton: "What is really the matter, with almost every paper, is that it is too much full of things suitable for the paper...
...Vols...
...A Liberal in a collectivist age speaks of doctrine-for it is only doctrine, he holds, that can save us...
...He feared the widening of the franchise and could speak, with his arch-enemy Disraeli, of the Weighing, not the counting, of votes...
...He was blessed more subtly...
...Bagehot wrote seven long "Letters" about the coup for the Inquirer, a Unitarian weekly...
...John-Stevas proceeded on their own, sparing no cost...
...essays on Bagehot as historian and literary critic...
...Bagehot illuminates Gibbon by talking of the life around Gibbon, of the value of desultory reading, the fantasy of history, the timelesspropensity of stupid money to find its suitable reward,_ the English militia, the English middle class: "Everywhere there exists the comfortable mass: quiet, sagacious, shor~-sighted--such as the Jews whom Rabskakeh tempted by their wine and their fig tree, such as the English with their snug dining room and after-dinner nap, domestic happiness and Bullo coal...
...Writing plainly, sympathetically, "likening great things to small," he said to his reader: I am like you, let me help you understand...
...John-Stevas, Bagehot's biographer, has been compiling and publishing the great man's collected works...
...Bagehot, an occasional correspondent for a little-read weekly, was a man--on deadline--thinking...
...I & lI, t23.00...
...Death dissolves this association, and it becomes a problem for posterity what it was the contemporaries observed and reverenced...
...We know a great deal...
...Not precisely the news...
...By not sticking to the point, Bagehot both makes the point and goes beyond it...
...His prose has the gait of events...
...We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one aspect of the moon...
...The facts and faces, a hundred years old, are not a burden...
...He must have had a conserving political instinct, an "experiencing" nature, a worldly eye ("for he succeeded in the world...
...His views--" between sizes," Bagehot called them--were at peace with his time...
...vols...
...One day I went to see Judge Halleck, so startling were the reports about him in the papers...
...It was, on its face, the stuff of books and, indeed, much of it was to turn up later in The English Constitution: comment on national character, mysticism and the Church of Rome, the nature of free institutions, the uses of stupidity in maintaining them...
...Woodrow Wilson, a disciple of Bagehot, wrote of him: "...You know what you lack in Bagehot when you have read Burke...
...important commercial legislation is exceedingly rare, and nothing of general interest can ordinarily be written about it...
...He continued to write...
...You miss the deep eloquence which awakens purpose...
...The Economist edition of Bagehot's works is the third to be published since The Travelers Insurance Co., of Hartford, Connecticut, offered five volumes for sale in 1889...
...Then he darted off to his chambers and came back with a copy of Alice in rVonderland, copiously underlined, from which he began to read while nervous aides plucked at his robe...
...Mencken...
...not a dozen men in this republic could name the "important commercial legislation" of the past fortnight...
...Bagehot, heir to the intellectual climate that James Wilson helped foster, never grumbled...
...Yet Bagehot chose the trade of journalism...
...One imagines Bagehot in Paris, prowling the littered streets, watching (and helping) the Republicans throw up barricades, filing hastily written paragraphs on...what...
...on Bagehot's views on the Civil War, the Irish question, and Napoleon III...
...sensible, solid men, without stretching irritable reason, but with a placid, supine instinct, without originality and without folly...
...reading it, you can make out the furious scratching of a pen...
...If so, it is too bad...
...We read of types of men and types of authors...
...there is no consistent medium between perfect freedom and entire free agency of capital and labour, and that principle which would regulate wages, profits and the whole relations of life by legislation--between perfect independent self-reliance and regulated socialism--between Adam Smith and Robert Owen...
...Perhaps no other journalist has been so blessed...
...Yes, one mutters, Bagehot would have seen through The War to End All Wars...
...You are not in contact with systems of thought or with principles that dictate action, but only with perfect explanation...
...And it was likely to be," he adds: "humour gains much by constant suppression...
...no one is born in them), knew finance at first hand...
...But Wilson--give the man his due--made a telling point...
...1 1 O I Q . . . . Q O Q D O ~ m O Q O O O O O * O O O O Q J O O O O O O * I O Q O O Q l I I O O 6 Q . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O Q 6 1 O O 6 0 ~ O O 6 0 1 O O O O . . . . . . . . . I Q O Q O ~ Q O . . . . . . . . . . . . . I ~ * O I . . . . . OO . . . . OJ . . . . . J O O 0 . . . . . 0 * ~ 10 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977...
...The reader is to be envied...
...The reason why so few good books are written," Bagehot declared, "is that so few people who can write know anything...
...Chesterton and H.L...
...His illmouthed masses move women's souls-can you...
...Thus he foresakes power...
...The touch is sustained...
...Now it is very painful to me to think that they would shoot away my income tax...
...bore tomorrow...
...Bagehot had a novelist's eye for character and a politician's knowledge of what character does...
...Nor still the news of the week in review...
...Bagehot proceeds to deduce what Shakespeare must have been like: he must have been a hunter and sportsman (even as Bagehot was...
...Commissars and lunatics rule half the world...
...The writing is fresh and vivid...
...The prose gallops on...
...His words won't sit still on the page...
...Bagehot makes of facts, the grist of leading articles, something immutable...
...It is ever so reasonable, chiding leftwing Labourites, to be sure, counseling a bit less government here and there, but never seeing as Wilson saw (and as Herbert Spencer, Wilson's editorial assistant saw) the manifest danger of socialism...
...From countless causes the age of great cities requires a strong government...
...Said Mencken: "In journalism, it is far better to be wrong than timorous...
...Zealots embarassed Bagehot...
...The Economist's influence, however, exceeded its 30 pages, its circulation of roughly 3,000, and its income...
...systems worried him...
...An editor, if he could bear it, might cut one sentence in three without losing the drift...
...During a recess he came out of the courtroom into the reception room where I was sitting...
...DIQQ0DDD0OD6QtOi0DIQQQ6Dm000lgQmIIOD000DDDDDDI0D0IQIQOBBBj00DDI0~0Do0Q0D09DDD~i0000QoI00QIPQOD060BQ QQ000BQQDDPBDDD0mQ000ig0QO0DQ0DDmiDQQ00Q0U0DDPB0Q, James Grant Genius on Deadline Banker, editor, essayist, Walter Bagehot joined the world with the world of letters...
...In a lecture on "Literature" to the Langport Literary and Scientific Institution, Bagehot advised his audience to read the Times every day, news and advertisements, if they would know what the world was really about...
...Yet there is nothing mummified about these sturdy, blue volumes...
...he knew about markets and money...
...Finally he allowed himself to be dragged back into court, handing me the classic as he left...
...It was, in short, the perfect new journalism, except that beneath it all was something enduring...
...They sold 1,000 sets...
...He could comment on yesterday's news and yet still say something startling...
...When Reform triumphed, however, his cry was "Educate...
...Wilson's pluck is especially for our own...
...Not so in the reading...
...The air and atmosphere, so to speak, which are around a man," he wrote at 29, "have a delicate and expressive power, and " The Collected FP'orks of F~ralter Bdgebot, in twelve volumes (eight now complete), The Economist, publisher...
...A letter to Bagehot from Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary in 1870, ended with the telling postscript: "May I ask you in anything you say, which always comes with so much weight from the high character of your paper and great ability of the articles, not to write anything which will give thoughtful Germans to believe that they have just cause of complaint with us...
...Both callings serve the needs of the hour: news and running water wait for no one...
...The English state," he declared without irony, "is but another name for the English people...
...Even as his age was reasonable, he was a reasonable man...
...Wilson railed at history...
...A concluding four volumes, three of economics, one of letters and miscellany, are expected late this year...
...Nor were they then to Bagehot...
...He got too close to the story," is the city desk's plaint: the reporter learned too much and thereby confused the reader...
...The conservative backlash to the French Revolution amused him: " I f you proposed to alter anything, of importance or not of importance...the same answer was ready,--'You see what the French have come to...
...the Inquirer's readers held none...
...indices by subject and epigram...
...Genius is as rare in journalism as it is in plumbing...
...They made alterations: if we make alterations, who knows what we may end up in the same way?' " Wilson was right: Bagehot, by temperament a man of the left-center, could not have written Reflections on t/Je Revolution in France...
...Bagehot took little notice of Proudhon ("property is theft") and none, surprisingly, of Karl Marx, whose Das Kapital, Volume I, appeared in 1867, the very year that T/Je EnglistJ Constitution was published as a book...
...He held his fingers quite straight from the knuckles and would often stroke his mouth or rub his forehead when he was thinking or talking...
...One recalls Tom Wicker in Dallas, leaping a fence without breaking stride, running half a mile with typewriter and briefcase to the press room of the Dallas air terminal, there to write 106 accurate paragraphs on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy...
...III& IV, $23.00...
...First, his name appears to be unpronounceable (in truth, it is simply BADGE-e0...
...I have been told that it was the only financial journal in Europe which had not a shop [i.e., "bucket shop," a shady brokerage operation I behind it, and this is the reason why its manThe Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977 9 agement must never be left to a salaried Editor...
...Someone in the boardroom had read Bagehot, had been smitten, and had decided that the policy holders would be served by a complete collection priced at cost: $1 a book, $5 the set...
...Bagebot began at the beginning...
...It is the opaqueness often imparted by great knowledge...
...It explains the problems we have here better than anything...
...Few in England held much brief for the Church or its alliance with Napoleon...
...Thus the career of Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) is unique in the annals of the working press...
...Read it yourself," he said...
...A good deal of what he said made sense...
...It was all very cynical and paradoxical--epigram rivaled epigram in praising a dull national temper...
...Bagehot possessed both the journalist's facility and the journalist's spleen...
...we may be certain that no one deplored it more than the readers of the Inquirer...
...Banking was then a leisured occupation...
...Bagehot, 26 years old, unknown, himself a Liberal, contrived to eulogize the Church and to defend the coup--ignoring the Prince's perjury and making rather light of the teeming gaols...
...Having made friends with James Wilson in 1857, he married his daughter Eliza and within four years was directing the Economist...
...For Bagehot, alike banker, essayist, and advisor to governments, was indeed a genius...
...There is nothing so boring to a man in power as doctrine, especially losing doctrine, that which would challenge facts (to quote Bagehot) "of the first magnitude...
...It surely doesn't get them out...
...The French, he owned, were simply too clever, too mercurial, to govern themselves...
...the law was a tiring one...
...Bagehot begins the essay with a commonplace: it is said that the greatesy of English poets "is but a name...
...As a weekly commentator, Bagehot escaped the fate which a past editor of Barton's vividly described as "coming in on the freight...
...Bagehot, who was born in the family bank (a few people die in banks...
...I feel inclined to say, 'Go home, Sir, and take a dose of salts, and see if it won't clear it out of you.' " Bagehot was no friend of the mass of men...
...In outline, it seems only clever guesswork, a scholarly list...
...The effect is winning;, we are charmed, not dragooned...
...He would pace a room while talking, and, as the ideas framed themselves in words, he would throw back his head as some animals do when sniffing the air...
...The stalls in London were full of papers that would puff a stock for a price...
...in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us...
...Bagehot, a man of his time, acceded to it...
...A Liberal man in a Liberal age, Bagehot wielded immense influence...
...Consider, he bids us, Milton and Shakespeare as they describe a scene...
...The New York Times, in reporting the news, could say no more of the Economist's greatest editor than that he "was widely considered to have been one of the more distinguished economic journalists...
...we see in Shakespeare both the English character and the character of Bagehot...
...His particular good fortune was the coup d'&at of Louis Napoleon in December 1851 and the killing, rioting, mass arrests, declaration of universal suffrage, muzzling of the press, and dissolution of the Assembly which attended it...
...Journalism is properly mortal, doomed by its own immediacy: inform today, James Grant is an associate editor of Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly...
...He loved the clamor of the world...
...Bagehot is an extensive writer--he reasons on paper...
...Bagehot, as someone said, has endured two misfortunes...
...A convinced freetrader and hard-money man, he nevertheless supported the Factory Acts and endorsed--though not without some caveats-the income tax...
...Sensing these truths, Bagehot began his career in the now-prescribed manner-chancing upon the scene of calamity and sending home reports of it...
...Nor could he have written what James Wilson wrote in the Economist in 1844: "a principle is either right or it is wrong...
...Not the Economist, whose honesty, Bagehot said in 1873, was its greatest asset...
...The poorest priest in the remote region of the Basses Alpes has more power over men's souls than human cultivation," he wrote...
...Bagehot was occasionally wrong--he was consistently wrong on the American Civil War, in which he long favored the South--but never stale...
...Bagehot's tenure at the Economist coincided with the gathering power of British industry and a new demand for honest financial reporting and informed political commentary...
...But which of these sentences would you klll?---"Behind every man's external life, which he leads in company, there is another which he leads alone, and which he carries with him apart...
...Poor Halleck seems ultimately to have been duped by the fiberated philosophy of his own "lifestyle...
...The press cries out for copy, stupidly, daily, for no better reason than habit...
...He knew about men...
...In journalism there is something worse than utter ignorance...
...He wrote of the budget for war: "An engineer told me they had shot away powder worth a certain sum of pounds sterling in a few trials of this new gun at Shoeburyness...
...There are essays on Bagehot's life and his political genius...
...With the publication of "Shakespeare--The Individual" in 1853, his 28th year, Bagehot had reached his full powers...
...He returned to England in 1852, faced with a choice of the law-he was soon to be called to the bar--or the family bank...
...The editorship returned to Bagehot, who had an outside income, only a modest salary--400 pounds sterling annually, space rates for his articles, and half the profits above 2,000 pounds a year...
...The project has an improbable, ghoulish air about it...
...Shakespeare glances at it and says something of his own...
...V-VIII, $63.75...
...A brilliant student, he knew mathematics, languages, economics, and history (Jacques Barzun, included in this edition, calls him a great user of history...
...The English Constitution (politics), Lombard Street (finance), and Physics and Polities (sociology, but of the very best cut) stand as the still-read testi3nony to Bagehot's versatility, his genius to join the world with the world of letters...
...Four more of political studies followed in 1974...
...Genius--eccentric, painstaking--may sell papers...
...Everyone in England deplored the coup...
...vols...
...We all come down to dinner, but each has a room to himself...
...For nearly a decade now, the Economist, together with Norman St...
...Walter Bagehot, who advised Gladstone, helped found the National Review, and invented the treasury bill, was in print neither pedant nor expert...
Vol. 10 • February 1977 • No. 5
