HE COMMENTS OF BAG SHOT 
 
 ; . A. SPENDER
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 n 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 y 
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT
 
 THE COMMENTS OF 
 BAGSHOT 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 J. A. SPENDER 
 
 LONDON 
 
 ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO. Ltd. 
 
 io Orange Street Leicester Square 
 
 1907
 
 CHISWICK PRESS : CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. 
 TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
 
 i 
 
 if 
 
 s 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 TAGE 
 
 Introductory Note .... . rx 
 
 Chapter I ...•••• T 
 
 Concerning Bagshot and his Diaries. — 
 Theories of Friendship. — Some Friends de- 
 scribed. — Bagshot's Religion.— The search for 
 a sequence. 
 
 Chapter II x 3 
 
 Bores and Boredom. — The Permanent and 
 the Political.— The "Eleventh-Hour Man" 
 and the Enemies of Youth. — Politics and 
 Democracy. 
 
 Chapter III 23 
 
 Immortality and Animal Instinct. — The 
 Eternal Life.— The Secret of Youth.— The 
 Poetry of the Future. — A Question about 
 Death. — The "most disagreeable fact in the 
 world." 
 
 Chapter IV 31 
 
 Shyness a Vice. — Concerning "false beards." 
 — The Dramatic Temperament and the Art- 
 istic. — The " Unexplored Interior." — In praise 
 of Man. — Wealth and Poverty. — A new form 
 of Endowment. 
 
 
 1
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chapter V 43 
 
 Ideals and Rights. — Zealots for Moderation. 
 — Maxims for War-time. — Pain and its Limits. 
 — Some personal experiences. — Modern 
 Surgery. 
 
 Chapter VI 54 
 
 A talk about Money. — The Needy and the 
 Greedy. — A "foolish kind of Paradox." — A 
 Utopian Form of Will. — A few Maxims. 
 
 Chapter VII 63 
 
 What happens "when we aren't there." — 
 The Diffusion of Consciousness. — Thought 
 and Fact. — About Persons. — A "Platitude 
 usually forgotten "—A division of Gifts. 
 
 Chapter VIII 73 
 
 Man the Parasite and Man the Monarch. — 
 Many views of the Great Adventure. — On 
 Life in general. — A deeply disgraceful Dream. 
 
 Chapter IX 83 
 
 A Bachelor on Women. — Woman's Advant- 
 age. — A change of parts. — Woman's Thrift.— 
 Her Morality.— Her Logic— The "restless 
 Analyst." — The Secret in the Common-place. 
 — The limits of Bagshot's knowledge. 
 
 Chapter X 
 
 Random Reflections. — Thrift and Laziness. 
 — Current Euphemisms. — A Providential Fact. 
 
 vi 
 
 95
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chapter XI 103 
 
 Gambling: an Escape from the Rational. — 
 " Systems " and the Unsystematic. — The In- 
 sincerity of politicians. — Homage to " im- 
 aginary fools." — Patriotic Antipathies and 
 International Pace-makers. — The " Deceitful- 
 ness of Diplomacy." — Compensating Qualities. 
 
 Chapter XII 113 
 
 Social Inequalities. — An argument for mes- 
 alliances. — Types of Men. — The opposite of 
 Education. — No Literature without specula- 
 tion. — The Mortifications of Bagshot. 
 
 Chapter XIII 124 
 
 Worldly Wisdom: the golden rules. — Sur- 
 face Values. — " Seek the Prizes of your call- 
 ing." — Some mixed maxims. — That " incon- 
 trollable conscience." — " As between Friends." 
 
 Chapter XIV 132 
 
 Literature and the Middle-aged. — A Test of 
 Genius. — The Utilitarian rebuked. — Literary 
 Changelings. — An Orchestrated Literature. — 
 A Blending of Men.— The Shelf of the Dis- 
 regarded. — Some Random Observations. — Two 
 kinds of Life. — Life's Great Irony. — The Last 
 Entry. 
 
 Vll
 
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 WHILE the chapters collected into 
 this volume were passing through the 
 "Westminster Gazette," many inquiries 
 reached me about the identity of Bagshot. 
 The answer to these questions would add 
 nothing to what is contained in the chapters 
 themselves. The merit of Bagshot, if any, as 
 a commentator lies in his point of view. His 
 calling, for instance, enables him to know 
 something of affairs, while it compels' him to 
 refrain from partisanship; and his attitude 
 towards life in general is roughly on the 
 same lines. His greatest advantage of all is 
 perhaps that, since he has passed from the 
 scene, it is useless to dispute with him. 
 
 There comes back to me a saying of his 
 own that "one man's paradox is another 
 man's platitude," and since he never aspires 
 
 ix
 
 x INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 to paradox, I know not to what deep borings 
 below platitude some of his observations 
 may seem to descend, if they encounter the 
 wrong reader or even the ri^ht reader in 
 
 the wrone mood. In such a case, let the 
 reader blame the editor. 
 
 J. A. S.
 
 THE 
 
 COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 SOMEWHAT to my surprise, when my A Word 
 friend Bagshot died about six months Bagshot 
 ago, I found myself named executor in his Di ar je! 
 will. He left me a legacy of ^ioo for my 
 pains, and, what I valued more, his small and 
 select library of about a thousand books, and 
 certain diaries and manuscript note-books 
 which were stacked together in the central 
 cupboard of his chief bookcase. The note- 
 books contained a variety of observations 
 about men and things, which he had appar- 
 ently been in the habit of jotting down at 
 odd moments; and when I came to look at 
 the books I found that there was scarcely 
 one of them which was not annotated on 
 the fly-leaf at the end with some query or 
 
 i b
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 comment which had occurred to him in read- 
 ing it. Some of these comments had at first 
 sight scarcely the remotest connection with 
 the book in which it was written; but, hav- 
 ing known him well, I was generally able, 
 on reflection, to discover a connecting-link. 
 Nothing, I am sure, was farther from his 
 thoughts than that any of these observations 
 would ever see the light. The note-books 
 are quite disconnected, and there is no ar- 
 rangement or plan about his jottings. He 
 set them down anyhow and on any subject 
 exactly as they came to him. He has often 
 told me that, though literature was, in a 
 sense, his main interest, he had no faculty of 
 consecutive writing, and I know from ex- 
 perience that it was pain and labour to him 
 to answer any but a formal letter. His 
 papers, nevertheless, have interested me so 
 much that I am tempted to make a few 
 selections from them and to offer them to 
 the public. 
 
 A few words in explanation about the man 
 himself. Bagshot is not his real name, but 
 the idea of publicity would have been so dis- 
 tasteful to him, that I have decided to veil 
 
 2
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 his identity. He died at the comparatively 
 early age of fifty-five, after more than thirty 
 years in the public service. He did well, but 
 not quite brilliantly, as a public servant, and 
 was in the last years head of a department 
 and earned a substantial salary. No one 
 heard of him outside his department, and, 
 having done his duty conscientiously, he con- 
 sidered that his private life was his own to 
 spend in the way most congenial to his own 
 tastes. He was a bachelor with about a 
 dozen real friends, and until he was forty-five 
 or thereabouts he lived in rooms not far 
 from Burlington House. After that he moved 
 out of London, and established himself near 
 St. Mary Cray, which, he used to say, was 
 the nearest piece of real country within 
 reach of a Government office. Here he had 
 his more intimate friends to stay with him, 
 and I remember nothing pleasanter than a 
 bachelor week-end at his house. He was a 
 good scholar, and had only just missed a fel- 
 lowship at Oxford, and though he disclaimed 
 every kind of expert knowledge, he had ex- 
 cellent taste, and I have known many a pro- 
 fessional critic ask his judgment on a work 
 
 3
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 of art. He was wholly unambitious, and ex- 
 tremely kind and charitable. He used to say 
 that the chief merit of the public service was 
 that it enabled you to live without the con- 
 stant sense of competition with rivals who 
 would deprive you of your daily bread if you 
 did not deprive them of theirs. I suspect 
 that the chief reason he remained a bachelor 
 was that he had to support a mother and two 
 sisters out of his official salary, for he would 
 have made an admirable husband and father, 
 and was capable of warm attachments. In 
 appearance he was more interesting than 
 handsome. I remember him as a tall man, 
 clean-shaven, with somewhat irregular fea- 
 tures, and piercing brown eyes. You could 
 not be long with him without noticing his 
 queer habit of raising his left eyebrow when 
 anything interested him. His attitude to- 
 wards life was — or so it seemed to his friends 
 — a half-humorous interrogative, but he was 
 essentially benevolent, and would insist with 
 much vehemence that men in the lump were 
 a great deal better than they were commonly 
 supposed to be. 
 
 I thought I knew him well, but there was 
 
 4
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 much in his papers that surprised me. He Theories 
 
 , t i about 
 
 seems to have meditated on a great many Friendship 
 subjects on which he never talked, at least to 
 me, though he was possibly less reticent to 
 others. Like most unmarried men, he had 
 careful theories about friendship, some of them, 
 I conjecture, founded on an estrangement 
 from an old friend which troubled him greatly 
 during the last years of his life. In one of 
 his note-books I find these entries under date 
 14th November, 1896: 
 
 There are very few friends with whom 
 you can be equally intimate on all subjects. 
 Discover the range of your intimacy with 
 each friend, and never go beyond it. 
 
 Nothing is so perilous to friendship as to 
 presume intimacy with a friend on a subject 
 on which he is a stranger to you. 
 
 Reserve is essential to an enduring 
 friendship. 
 
 The last sentence is repeated again and 
 again at later dates, as though he was per- 
 petually warning himself against a tendency 
 to transgress his own rule. I imagine he 
 meant that a man might be a friend to you 
 
 5
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 in politics, but a stranger to you in religion, 
 a friend to you in literature, but a stranger to 
 you in philosophy, and yet he by no means 
 intends to bar discussion between friends 
 on questions on which they may differ, for a 
 little later (ioth December of the same year) 
 he quotes with high approval Carlyle's de- 
 scription of himself and Sterling as " except 
 in opinion not disagreeing." But he is per- 
 sistent about " the subjects on which your 
 friend is a stranger to you," and I find the 
 expression slightly varied at a later date : 
 
 There are subjects on which an intimacy 
 is possible between strangers which would 
 be fatal to friendship. 
 
 • The wise penitent chooses a confessor 
 who is unknown to him. 
 
 I wish I knew the incident which gave rise 
 to these ejaculations, but, even as they stand, 
 they throw a new light on Bagshot and ex- 
 plain much that was puzzling to me in his 
 lifetime. 
 
 There is much more on the subject of 
 friends and friendship, to which I shall re- 
 turn another time. He had a pleasing habit 
 
 6
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 of summing up his friends in little aperfus 
 which I find scattered about his note-books. 
 Here are a few entries taken at random : 
 
 C. "has the courage which bears an in- 
 tolerable toothache with fortitude for fear 
 of going to the dentist." 
 
 Of L. he writes that " he has a tideless 
 nature beating against rocks." 
 
 Of Y. — that he is " like a frozen water- 
 fall. He comes clattering down to the 
 precipice and preserves all the forms of 
 animated and glittering motion, and then 
 hangs frosted over the edge." 
 
 G. (aged eighty-three) is "like an an- 
 cient olive, with a mere shell for its trunk, 
 yet indomitably throwing up new shoots 
 on top — green against the grey." 
 
 Of M. he says: " Cut him open and you 
 will find a clergyman inside." (This is put 
 in inverted commas as if he had read it 
 somewhere or someone else had said it, 
 but I cannot trace it to its source.) 
 
 Of another, M. (a well-known and dis- 
 tinguished man), he says: " He is gener- 
 ally supposed to be the least ambitious of 
 
 7
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 men, but he is consumed with an ambition 
 to surpass himself." 
 
 The conversation of D. is " like the 
 noise of a train in a tunnel" — one idea 
 deafening you with its echo. 
 
 S. is not a visionary, as his friends 
 say; he is merely hyperopic — i.e., consti- 
 tutionally incapable of focussing his vision 
 on any near object. His distant vision is 
 no better than other people's, usually a 
 little worse. 
 
 A. is like a bridge over a mountain 
 torrent. He joins two precipices, and the 
 stream of controversy passes beneath him. 
 
 C. is without the sense of co-operation. 
 He is nearly always right, but generally 
 fails, because he likes to keep his wisdom 
 to himself. It pleases him more to show 
 you how wrong you were than to have 
 had your help in doing the thing right. 
 A sagacious, unpopular, and infructuous 
 character. 
 
 Talking with D. is like glissading down 
 a snow slope — delightful while it lasts, but 
 you are soon at the bottom. If you aren't 
 careful, he'll take you over the precipice. 
 
 8
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 I quote these not to claim any special wisdom 
 or profundity for them, but rather to explain 
 the disposition of my friend by his observa- 
 tions on other people. 
 
 Bagshot loved theology, and plunged with Bagshot's 
 zest into ecclesiastical controversies, but I 
 never could discover what his religious 
 opinions were. As to the part which religion 
 should play in the world he was quite posi- 
 tive. I find him saying (19th April, 1897) : 
 
 An opposition is as necessary in daily 
 life as in a Parliamentary assembly. The 
 part which religion should play is that of 
 a permanent Opposition — an Opposition 
 which never hopes to become a Govern- 
 ment. 
 
 This role is fatally compromised when a 
 Church is established. 
 
 Established churches must be conserva- 
 tive, but a conservative religion is a con- 
 tradiction in terms. 
 
 The conversion of Constantine was the 
 greatest disaster to Christianity. It was 
 the beginning of its secular bondage. 
 
 Only stupid people sneer at the man 
 
 9
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 who says, " Credo quia impossibile." To 
 have faith in the impossible is precisely 
 the function of religion. 
 
 The State and religion may be in acute 
 conflict, and both maybe right, but though 
 the State may yield to religion, religion 
 should never yield to the State. 
 
 Religion cannot accept the protection of 
 the State without binding itself to uphold 
 the State and its law and policy. The 
 effect is automatic with an established 
 clergy, though they are mostly unaware 
 of it. 
 
 Religion dispenses with law nearly as 
 often as it enforces law. One of the finest 
 texts in the Gospels is the admonition 
 addressed to the disciple plucking corn on 
 the Sabbath day: " Blessed art thou, if 
 thou knowest what thou doest; but if not, 
 thou art accursed and a breaker of the 
 law." This occurs in only one manuscript 
 of the Gospels, and is declared to be an 
 interpolation. I am convinced that it is 
 o-enuine. 
 
 " But Jesus stooped down and with his 
 fineer wrote on the around." What did 
 
 IO
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 he write? (A great subject for a religious 
 poem.) 
 
 I should give a wrong impression of Bag- 
 shot if I said that he was intolerant about 
 anything, and some of his warmest friends 
 were among the Established clergy, but on 
 this subject of religion and the State he was 
 unyielding. Not that he took the Noncon- 
 formist view or had any prejudices against 
 the Anglican Church except as an establish- 
 ment. 
 
 On almost the last page of his latest diary 
 I find a passage which expresses a mood 
 that I was often aware of in him : 
 
 Have you ever stood outside a public 
 meeting and heard the applause and the 
 interruptions, but not the speaker? How 
 absurd and meaningless it sounds! There 
 are moments when one stands outside life 
 in just such a way. One hears the noises, 
 but has no clue to the meaning. 
 
 A month after this was written he was in The search 
 his grave, but I do not believe that he wrote q uen ce 
 it with any premonition of his end, which he 
 
 1 1
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 had no reason to expect. Rather it repre- 
 sents a mood which was frequent with him 
 throughout his life. Over and over again I 
 have heard him say " I have lost the clue to 
 things," or of a particular controversy that it 
 conveyed no meaning to him. His interest 
 in politics was keen when aroused, but there 
 were whole classes of subjects to which he 
 could not be persuaded to pay the faintest 
 attention, and others on which he would 
 blaze intermittentlyand quite briefly. Though 
 not at all a pedant, he was for ever trying to 
 discover some logic or sequence in things, 
 and he habitually talked of the unexpected 
 as if it were an offence against good manners. 
 " The gross impropriety of this event must 
 be obvious to you," he wrote about some 
 untoward happening — an earthquake or a 
 foreign complication, I have quite forgotten 
 what — which cut across his scheme of things. 
 But these traits I shall best illustrate when 
 I come to give further extracts from his own 
 comments. 
 
 12
 
 B 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 AGSHOT is gone, and I have already About Bores 
 explained that he left me no authority dom 
 
 to publish any of his writings. But to acquit 
 him of all blame in the matter let me beein 
 this chapter by quoting the first entry — dated 
 ist January, 1906 — in the very last of the 
 note-books that have come into my posses- 
 sion: 
 
 We all denounce bores, but, while we 
 do so, let us always remember that there 
 is nobody who isn't a bore to somebody. 
 The most certain mark of a bore is a com- 
 plete assurance that he is an exception to 
 this rule. 
 
 While I am denouncing A as a bore to 
 B, ten to one he is denouncing me as a bore 
 to C. 
 
 * Therefore let me be careful to confine 
 my moralizings to my note-books. 
 
 13
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 The last sentence is starred and endorsed 
 in the margin as "Good resolution for 1906." 
 In letting his moralizings escape from his 
 note-books, I feel it is due to his memory to 
 quote this passage. 
 
 Having thus discharged my conscience, let 
 me go on to quote a few more of Bagshot's 
 observations upon bores and boredom : 
 
 The worst attribute of the bore is 
 that he loves you. That adds remorse to 
 pain. 
 
 Bores are dreadfully intolerant of each 
 other. Never ask two to meet, or you will 
 have both on your hands. 
 
 The true bore is seldom stupid, and 
 often very clever; but a diet of pearls is 
 extremely boring to the swine. 
 
 Clever men forget that stupid ones can 
 be bored. None is so merciless as the 
 clever bore. 
 
 My friend B. is an epicure in bores. I 
 saw him the other night absorbed in the 
 conversation of W. (a notorious bore). 
 He took an exquisite pleasure in studying 
 the natural history of the bore as exempli- 
 
 14
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 fied in this extreme specimen. He begged 
 me afterwards to bring them together again 
 that he might have a further opportunity 
 of research. 
 
 Bores are generally called well-meaning, 
 for the essence of their infirmity is that 
 they are unconscious of it. Some few, 
 however, are malignant. These are deter- 
 mined to " talk to you for your good." That 
 is malice prepense. 
 
 It is a presumption against a man to 
 have the word too much in his mouth. The 
 easily bored are nearly always bores. It is 
 possible to be a bore about bores. 
 
 That last sentence warns me to shut down 
 these quotations, but I have let them run to 
 this length because they illustrate a certain 
 phase of Bagshot's character. I remember 
 well how vehemently he used to inveigh 
 against the " tyranny of clever men." He 
 was not without a suspicion of cleverness 
 himself, yet he had a rooted aversion to the 
 people commonly called " clever." Most of 
 them, he used to say, were fundamentally 
 stupid; and one man, reputed to be very 
 
 '5
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 clever, he described as having " a com- 
 placent, bornd intelligence with a fraudulent 
 top-dressing." In another entry he tells us 
 that one of the chief wants of the day is a 
 " league of ordinary mortals to put the clever 
 people in their proper place." 
 
 #4£- Jfe 4t? -V- 
 
 *?£• -Vv - "TV- 7F 
 
 The Perma- There is a touch of the Civil Service dis- 
 
 nent and the ... r i • i *.■ i 1 
 
 Political position in some 01 his observations, but he 
 had a clear eye for the characteristics of " the 
 Permanents" : 
 
 The ideal condition for the permanent 
 Civil servant is that in which he rules 
 the' country and the politician takes the 
 blame. 
 
 The ideal condition for the politician is 
 that in which he takes the praise and the 
 permanent does the work. 
 
 The fairest compromise is to give the 
 permanent the work and the politician the 
 blame. This conduces to the moral wel- 
 fare of both parties. 
 
 Rule for Civil servants : " Oh, take the 
 cash, and let the credit go." 
 
 16
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 This was written in 1884, but there is a 
 note added to it at a later date, January, 1906, 
 a very few months before his death. "After 
 further experience," he writes in this note, 
 " I am greatly struck with the loyalty of both 
 parties to this compact. Some few politicians, 
 
 such as and (two eminent names 
 
 which I omit), have grabbed the praise and 
 shirked the work, but hardly any have shirked 
 the blame. I scarcely know a case in which 
 a politician has thrown the blame on per- 
 manent servants even for the oross mistakes 
 of which he was wholly innocent. People 
 talk slightingly of politicians, but there is no 
 trade in which there is a higher standard of 
 loyalty." This was a frequent theme of his, 
 and I have often heard him regret that there 
 was no first-rate biography of a public man 
 written by a permanent servant who had been 
 closely in contact with him on the adminis- 
 trative side. 
 
 The note-books contain also sundry obser- 
 vations about promotions and appointments. 
 Some of them apply to special cases long for- 
 gotten, but others have a wider applica- 
 tion : 
 
 17 c
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 Promotion by merit is not at all the 
 same thing as promotion by ability. Clever 
 men mostly forget this. Nothing is so em- 
 barrassing as unsuitable ability. 
 
 The eleventh-hour man is absolutely es- 
 sential to the service. 
 
 It is the highest self-discipline to re- 
 ceive the eleventh-hour man without re- 
 sentment. 
 
 The 
 
 " Eleventh- 
 Hour Man" 
 and the 
 Enemies of 
 Youth 
 
 The " eleventh-hour man" is, I take it, an allu- 
 sion to the Parable of the Labourers in the 
 Vineyard. Bagshot himself, as I know, suffered 
 severely on one occasion from an eleventh- 
 hour man, and with all his philosophy it was, 
 I imagine, a severe act of self-discipline to 
 receive without resentment the brilliant new- 
 comer, hoisted over the heads of the labourers 
 who had borne the burden and heat of the 
 day. Till I stumbled on these passages in his 
 note-book I had never known him make 
 an allusion to this incident except to protest 
 that the appointment was admirable, and 
 most salutary to his Department. His ob- 
 jection to promotion by seniority was, indeed, 
 I think, carried to rather extreme lengths, 
 
 18
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 and he sometimes forgot the discouragement 
 of competent hard work which might have 
 followed from too perpetual incursions of the 
 eleventh-hour man. His idea, however, is 
 insisted upon again and again: 
 
 Exceptional ability must not be required 
 to graduate. 
 
 Hostility to youth is the worst vice of 
 the middle-aged. 
 
 It is silly to quarrel with the chamois 
 because he has not come by the mule- 
 path. 
 
 I hate to hear people saying, "He is 
 young, he must wait; he will get plenty of 
 chances." How do they know? Could 
 Keats have waited, or Shelley, or Byron, 
 or Burns ? 
 
 They said it of W., and pushed him 
 back. Three years later he died. 
 
 It is a cheap generosity which promises 
 the future in compensation for the present. 
 Give youth its present, and leave its future 
 to God. 
 
 The last three of these notes come together, 
 and they are tinged with a rather unusual 
 
 19
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 emotion. I imagine that he had been a warm 
 friend to W. 
 
 # 
 
 # 
 
 # 
 
 # 
 
 # 
 
 About Being a public servant, Bagshot was not 
 
 Politics and , , . .. . . i i i 
 
 Democracy m the ordinary sense a politician, nor had he 
 the party-political mind. But his instincts 
 were Liberal, even in some respects revolu- 
 tionary, and he had no patience with croakers. 
 Here is a characteristic entry from his 1890 
 note-book : 
 
 The weaknesses commonly attributed to 
 democracy by the pessimists are mostly 
 weaknesses inherent in collective action of 
 any kind — oligarchic, aristocratic, or demo- 
 cratic. They could be avoided only by 
 absolutism which is impossible in modern 
 States. 
 
 A few pages on I find this: 
 
 The most dangerous demagogues are 
 the clever Conservatives who despise the 
 the people. 
 
 In public affairs the cynic is more perni- 
 cious than the demagogue. 
 
 20
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 He returns to the attack on cleverness a 
 little later in the same note-book, and I sus- 
 pect that he was suffering much at this time 
 from a notoriously clever man who held high 
 office in those years: 
 
 Do not seek far-fetched explanations of 
 the stupidities of clever people. In public 
 affairs things are nearly always as silly as 
 they seem. 
 
 A motto for Cabinets: Twenty wise 
 men may easily add up into one fool. 
 
 Cleverness and stupidity are generally 
 in the same boat against wisdom. 
 
 I spoke in my last chapter of his constant 
 search for some logic or sequence in current 
 events. Here are one or two extracts which 
 illustrate this tendency: 
 
 History, we are told, is past politics, but 
 it is harder and more important to conceive 
 present politics as current history. 
 
 To see things sitb specie aetemitatis is 
 for angels and philosophers, but a poli- 
 tician may try to see them sub specie his- 
 toriae. 
 
 21
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 Conceive of your life as an unfinished 
 biography, and try to discover the next 
 chapter and the end. 
 
 That I gather from other entries in his 
 diaries was his habitual mood about his own 
 life. 
 
 22
 
 B 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 AGS HOT'S comments by no means all immortality 
 
 r , . . . r and Animal 
 
 ot them take the epigrammatic form ot instinct 
 
 some I have quoted. I find a longer passage, 
 for instance, written at the end of a forgotten 
 book on animal instinct: 
 
 The problem of immortality is for practi- 
 cal people the problem of memory. All the 
 metaphysical problems are combined in 
 the question, "Is there that which remem- 
 bers?" If we could conceive a man to 
 have irretrievably lost his memory, that 
 man would have lost his immortality. The 
 waters of Lethe are fatal to the eternal 
 life. The question " Does man survive?" 
 may, therefore, be re-stated as " Will man 
 remember?" 
 
 The instinct of the animal is its racial 
 immortality — the hoarded memory which 
 is the common property of the race, and 
 which gives each member of it his share of 
 
 23
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 its continuous existence. The bird which 
 builds its nest untaught, exactly according 
 to the pattern of its race, is not a bird but 
 the bird, the immortal bird of immemorial 
 age and unbroken memory. The animal is 
 so generalized that it repeats its self and 
 perpetuates its identity while the race lasts. 
 This self never dies, and it is the animal 
 soul. 
 
 So far as man becomes individualized, 
 he forfeits this racial immortality. The 
 hoarded memory dies down, as the in- 
 dividual emerges, and in the " progress 
 from homogeneity to heterogeneity " he 
 loses his racial soul. Does he, in com- 
 pensation, gain an individual soul ? So far 
 from merging man in the race, the theory 
 of evolution extricates him, individualizes 
 him, leaves him solitary and unique — a 
 being with his own memory, experience, 
 and characteristics for whose extinction the 
 survival of the race can offer no compensa- 
 tion to nature. If the whole purpose of 
 nature is the making of individuals, can we 
 believe that nature extinguishes them when 
 made? 
 
 24
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 I seem to see in the scheme of things an 
 ascent from the racial immortality to the 
 individual immortality — the individual 
 gradually emerging from the dim mass of 
 general life, losing, as he advances, more 
 and more of his connections with this gene- 
 ral life, but gaining by the same process his 
 individual immortal soul; becoming more 
 helpless as an animal, but more masteriul 
 as a man. Large numbers of the human 
 race seem as yet to be in the position in 
 which they have lost their privileges in the 
 animal world, and not gained their standing 
 in the human world. But the whole pro- 
 cess moves, I am persuaded, to the making 
 of the individual immortal — a being pos- 
 sessing in itself the same undying memory 
 and consciousness that are the collective 
 possession of the animal world. 
 
 Tudo-inof from his note-books, Baorshot The Eternal 
 
 J 8 S f Life 
 
 dwelt on this theme and wrestled with it 
 during many hours of his leisure. There is 
 another entry about the same date which is 
 worth quoting: 
 
 In all literature there are no words 
 
 25
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 which have affected me so profoundly 
 throughout my life as Aristotle's \(p o<rov 
 tviiyerou cIQocvocti^sh/. 1 They are untranslat- 
 able ; no modern language has any words 
 which convey the depth of their meaning. 
 Implied in them is the Christian concep- 
 tion of " the eternal life," but their value is 
 that they are pre-Christian, and independ- 
 ent of all mystic beliefs about another 
 world. The eternity of things is here as- 
 serted as the basis of the temporal. It is 
 the last word on the subject. Whatever 
 he believes about another world, a man 
 must live in this world as if he were im- 
 mortal. This alone lightens the burden of 
 his years and enables him to look steadily 
 at the future. 
 
 The Secret In the same vein is a note which Bagshot 
 has written in pencil on the fly-leaf at the end 
 of Morley's " Life of Gladstone" : 
 
 If you are feeling old and are oppressed 
 with the sense that your days are few and 
 the future is little to you, go to this book 
 and see where Gladstone was at your age, 
 
 1 So far as possible to live as an immortal. 
 26
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 and what he had in front of him. Yester- 
 day I was forty-nine, and all day long I 
 strueeled with the thought that the fiftieth 
 year was the beginning of the end. It com- 
 forted me amazingly to find that at this 
 age Mr. Gladstone had not yet got into 
 his second volume. 
 
 A few months later he seems to have taken 
 the book down again and to have added 
 another note: 
 
 It matters little, as a matter of fact, 
 whether death be near or far provided you 
 can keep this sense of the future. An in- 
 terest in public affairs is a preservative of 
 youth because it takes a man out of the 
 individual life into the general life and 
 projects his mind into a future not limited 
 by his own existence. He is bound as far 
 as possible to live the life of the immortal. 
 
 The same strain, slightly varied, is to be The Poetry 
 found in another reflection of about the same Future 
 date: 
 
 A great new building — not one of your 
 shoddy modern hotels, but something 
 
 27
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 noble and permanent — affects me with pre- 
 cisely the same sense of poetry as a great 
 old building. This morning I stood watch- 
 ing them at work on the new War Office, 
 and the thought came over me, What will 
 it witness which I shall not see ? Answers 
 to riddles innumerable, agonies of wars 
 undreamt of, hopes, fears, passions of 
 multitudes yet to be born. I see it im- 
 mensely historical with the history of the 
 future. 
 
 A Question Let me finish this graver kind of quotation 
 
 about Death , , «. . - - . 
 
 by one more passage dealing with the sub- 
 ject of death : 
 
 Why is it that in death the sense of 
 bereavement is felt by the living, but not 
 by the dying? Why should those who are 
 departing from life be supposed to feel the 
 separation less keenly than those who are 
 left behind? Most of those who have been 
 to the verge of death will tell you that 
 they felt no pang of the emotion which 
 they would have suffered if watching at 
 the deathbed of others whom they loved. 
 None of the poetry or literature of the 
 
 28
 
 world " 
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 subject imputes a sense of bereavement to 
 the departed. 
 
 Is this merely a result of the religious 
 teaching that it is far better to depart, or 
 is it some deep instinct which reassures 
 the dying? 
 
 ***** 
 
 Let me wind up this chapter by a few The "most 
 
 • -o u «.» * • disagreeable 
 
 passages in a lighter vein. hJagshot s transi- fact in the 
 tions are very abrupt, and I will not en- 
 deavour to soften them. This should please 
 the Food Reformers: 
 
 It is a pity that over-eating is not fol- 
 lowed by the same visibly scandalous con- 
 sequences as over-drinking. There would 
 be more thin people in the world and less 
 gluttony, but hardly anyone would be 
 sober at the end of a London dinner- 
 party. 
 
 It is ultimately the most disagreeable 
 fact in the world that living things live on 
 each other. In this respect man is divided 
 from the brutes by the cook. There may 
 be pleasures unrealized by man in the 
 sense of smell, but I am devoutly thankful 
 
 29
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 that the sight of a flock of sheep in a field 
 does not appeal to my appetite as it ap- 
 parently does to my dog's. Imagine a 
 pastoral landscape with cattle in it per- 
 vaded by an odour of roast beef. 
 
 The expression " dumb animal" is mean- 
 ingless. There are hardly any " dumb 
 animals," but the horse, to his great mis- 
 fortune, is one of them. Who would dare 
 whip a horse if he cried out like a dog ? 
 Imagine the uproar in London or Paris or 
 Naples! 
 
 The common saying that you should know 
 everything of something and something of 
 everything Bagshot paraphrases as follows: 
 
 It is necessary to fathom one's ignor- 
 ance on one subject in order to discover 
 how little one knows on other subjects.
 
 B 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 AGS HOT was generally counted a shy shyness a 
 man and his manners were somewhat 
 
 embarrassed. Yet, oddly enough, there was 
 hardly any imputation that he more disliked 
 than that of shyness. I ventured once to sug- 
 gest to him that he should try to overcome 
 this fault, and he was genuinely surprised 
 and not a little offended by the criticism. 
 For shyness, he said with some vehemence, 
 was either odious or silly— odious if, as in 
 nine cases out of ten, it arose from self-con- 
 sciousness or vanity; and silly if, as in the 
 tenth case, it arose from timidity. Nervous 
 a man might be on fit occasion — if, for in- 
 stance, he was going to an interview on which 
 his fate depended — but only fools were shy. 
 Then, turning on me with some acerbity, 
 he begged me to mention an occasion on 
 which he had misconducted himself in either 
 way. 
 
 3'
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 I entirely disclaimed the meaning he had 
 read into my friendly remonstrance, but I 
 pointed out that only the previous week in 
 my house, when a party of young people had 
 drawn us old ones into some improvised 
 charades, he had slunk aside looking the 
 picture of embarrassed wretchedness and 
 hidden himself downstairs in my study till 
 the cast was made up, To this he made the 
 astonishing answer that, if I had only given 
 him the false white beard and wig which I 
 had so thoughtfully provided for myself on 
 this occasion, he would have played my part 
 himself, and played it — he hinted — a good 
 deal better than I had played it. He said 
 this as if his meaning was completely self- 
 evident, and would have dismissed the sub- 
 ject but for my puzzled " What do you 
 mean ? " This set him off on to an excursion 
 About "false on "false beards," which, so far as I remem- 
 ber it, was to this effect: 
 
 Men are divided into two classes, those 
 who can and those who cannot throw off 
 their own personality. The former are 
 dramatic by nature, and have no sense of 
 
 1 ' 
 
 o- 
 
 \2
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 the absurdity of impersonating someone 
 else. The latter are always haunted by this 
 sense of absurdity. I belong to the latter 
 class, and I pity the actor who has to ap- 
 pear with his own face and in his ordinary 
 coat and trousers, pretending to be some- 
 one else in a modern play. To me the 
 situation only becomes tolerable when I 
 can disguise my face, and with a false 
 beard and wig I feel somehow that the 
 worst of it is mitigated. This is not shy- 
 ness, as you call it, but merely a natural 
 incapacity to take on another personality. 
 The same thinor runs through literature 
 and the arts. I have the greatest admira- 
 tion for the work of H. and S. (naming 
 two distinguished imaginative writers), but 
 if I had written their books (of which I 
 am quite incapable) I could not, for all 
 the applause and fame, have persuaded 
 myself to put my name to them. Such a 
 public impersonation of fictitious characters 
 would be fatal to my sense of myself. But 
 I can conceive myself writing anonymously 
 for newspapers without any sense of dis- 
 comfort. The "we" of journalism is the 
 
 d 
 
 JO
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 false beard and wig which saves you from 
 the constant intrusion of yourself before 
 the public, and enables you to live your 
 own life within the mask. That is a posi- 
 tive necessity to the non-dramatic kind 
 of man. 
 
 The Drama- I remember objecting that he was here con- 
 mentTndYhe fusing two things— the impersonations of the 
 Artistic actor and the emotional outpourings of such 
 
 a writer as S., who was deliberately attempt- 
 ing to express himself X.o> the public. Bagshot, 
 however, would not admit that the distinc- 
 tion held good. The relation of such a man 
 as S. to his public was essentially a dramatic 
 relation, and his constant appearances in his 
 own name led him to dramatize his own 
 character. He had a fancy picture of himself 
 as a man from whom certain postures were 
 expected, and he could not take up his pen 
 without putting this imaginary figure be- 
 tween the public and himself. He wrote 
 quite differently in his private letters, and 
 again he would write quite differently if he 
 wrote anonymously. Which of his assumed 
 characters was the real man it was impossible 
 
 34
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 to say, for the writing of imaginative litera- 
 ture had this curious effect of disintegrating 
 personality, and strongly individual men were 
 incapable of it. This was really what was 
 meant by the artistic temperament — an un- 
 stable personality moving in many worlds, 
 and not firmly anchored in any. 
 
 An entry which I find in one of his note- 
 books about this date is in keeping with this 
 discourse: 
 
 The misfortune of the " artistic tem- 
 perament " is that so many people have 
 the temperament and so few the art. We 
 should never excuse the temperament, un- 
 less we are sure of the art. 
 
 There are many other entries on this subject 
 to which I may return another time. A little 
 incident, however, comes back to me which 
 may be recorded in this place. I said to him 
 once that a certain notorious poetaster ex- 
 cused his excesses on the ground that Byron 
 had lived a shocking life. He replied curtly 
 that Admiral B. (a blameless and Church- 
 going acquaintance of us both) might as well 
 elope with the rector's wife, and justify the 
 
 35
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 proceeding by the plea that Nelson had 
 carried on with Lady Hamilton. 
 
 #-i£- 4f- -if. .y. 
 
 *7P "TT w TnF 
 
 The " Un- Bagshot seldom, if he could avoid it, spent 
 
 interior" a night in London; but I find this note dated 
 
 from an address in Gower Street, 10 p.m., 
 
 9th January, 1903: 
 
 To most people the vision of a great 
 city is that of streets, parks, river, bridges, 
 and endless bustling crowds in the open 
 under the sky. But the idea which most 
 weighs on me as I sit here alone is that of 
 a vast unexplored interior, with a million 
 forms of hidden life. If a path could be 
 driven through the heart of it, so that we 
 might walk under the roofs from the pro- 
 sperous West to the last of the mean 
 streets, we should begin to lift the curtain 
 on humanity. Would Dives venture to 
 return to his palace and fare sumptuously 
 every day if he were compelled to make 
 that pilgrimage once a week ? 
 
 The brain reels when it tries to realize 
 this life. Within a mile of me at this mo- 
 ment — the dinner-party, the death-bed, the 
 
 36'
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 woman in travail, children tucked away 
 in comfortable night-nurseries, children 
 swarming together in one verminous bed, 
 elegant loungers in drawing-rooms, roy- 
 sterers in public-houses, beautiful empty 
 rooms, squalid crowded tenements, end- 
 less human cells, with each its own separate 
 life shut off from all other life, a thousand 
 thousand romances, tragedies, histories, all 
 running at once, and with complete dis- 
 regard of each other. And then the emo- 
 tions, anxieties, pains, pleasures, griefs, 
 hopes, and fears falling on each man or 
 woman as if he or she were the one being 
 in the world! I get at once the sense of 
 the swarming of humanity and of its in- 
 tense separateness within its little com- 
 partments. The real city is the city 
 under the roof; all the rest is coming and 
 going. We say we know London. We 
 know at most the outside of a few score 
 of streets, and the inside of about six 
 houses — if so many. Beyond is impene- 
 trable mystery. 
 
 Side by side with this I may put another 
 
 37
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 in Praise of passage which comes a little later in the 
 
 Man . . 
 
 same note-book: 
 
 Year by year, as I grow older, I get 
 more impatient with the misanthropes. 
 Say what one will about the vices and 
 follies of man, how immense are his vir- 
 tues! Think steadily, if you can, of the 
 incredible things that he suffers — his hard 
 toil, his struggle for bread and home, the 
 smallness of his reward, his undeserved 
 calamities, the slaughter of his affections, 
 and through it all his indomitable spirit 
 and courage as he gathers himself from 
 the dust or the mire, and plants his feet 
 again on his rough and uncertain road. 
 The shallow rich talk much of the tur- 
 bulence of the poor and their tendency 
 to agitate. It is the patience of the 
 poor which most strikes those who know 
 them. 
 
 About 
 Wealth and 
 Poverty 
 
 The note-books abound in observations about 
 wealth and poverty, and Bagshot had a theory 
 that everyone should be taught the element- 
 ary facts about the distribution of wealth, so 
 that he might " place " himself correctly in 
 
 38
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 the material scale. Here is a characteristic 
 passage : 
 
 If I were a soul trembling on the thresh- 
 old of birth into this world, and my place 
 had to be assigned to me by an impartial 
 drawing of lots, the odds would be heavily 
 in favour of my being a Chinaman, or a 
 Hindu, or a negro. If I escaped that, and 
 were happy enough to draw an English 
 lot, the chances would still be nearly four 
 to one that I should be born into the 
 working-class. That I should come again 
 into such a home as I am now living in, a 
 home furnished with the modest comforts 
 and luxuries that an income of ,£1,200 a 
 year can provide, or get the start in life 
 that parents with such an income might 
 afford me, would be an incredible piece of 
 good fortune which I should have no right 
 whatever to expect. 
 
 An income of a thousand pounds a year 
 and upwards is, materially speaking, a rare 
 and privileged state of being which de- 
 humanizes those who attain to it or inherit 
 it. They are so far removed from the 
 
 39
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 common human lot that, except imagina- 
 tively, they have no experience or know- 
 ledge of it. 
 
 These fortunate few, nevertheless, habit- 
 ually talk as if they were the world, and 
 nearly all modern literature proceeds on 
 that assumption. That accounts for the 
 divorce in the Western world between life 
 and letters. All modern letters are "polite." 
 " Humane letters " have yet to be. 
 
 A new form Bagshot used to say that one of the advant- 
 
 of Endow- r , , i • • • 
 
 ment ages ol not being a practical politician was 
 
 that you were free to theorize without being 
 called a fool for your pains. So, for the mo- 
 ment, I may close with this quite unpractical 
 piece of theorizing which he has scribbled on 
 the fly-leaf of a recent book on Socialism : 
 
 The Socialists are quite right when they 
 wish to raise the minimum wage, but they 
 are wholly mistaken when they speak of 
 the equalizing of wealth as an important 
 object for society to pursue, except so far 
 as it is necessary for that purpose. ... I 
 look forward to a state of society in which 
 every man shall be able to earn sufficient 
 
 40
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 to provide air-space, decent food, and 
 clothine, as well as education and rational 
 enjoyment for himself and his family, and 
 in which no man shall be able to plead 
 economic conditions to avert the penalties 
 — compulsory labour, loss of rights, etc. — 
 with which he will then inexorably be 
 visited for failing to do these things. But 
 I do not at all look forward to any state of 
 society in which, above this level, there 
 shall not be all degrees of wealth and a 
 sufficient number of people living in the 
 style of the "magnificent man" in Aristotle. 
 The moderately well-to-do would gain no 
 more by levelling these more fortunate 
 beings than I should gain if Lord Roth- 
 schild became bankrupt to-morrow and 
 his property were scattered to the four 
 winds. 
 
 The real difficulty in a modern society 
 is to get the wealth into the hands of the 
 " magnificent men " — the men who have a 
 genius for spending at all corresponding 
 to the orenius which the modern rich man 
 has for acquiring. Not only is there no 
 connection between these two things, but 
 
 4i
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 there is an actual conflict between them. 
 The presumption is that a man with the 
 genius for acquiring will be a man without 
 the gift of spending. Half the world seems 
 to be born with the one and the remaining 
 half with the other gift. Rarely under 
 favouring stars is the man born who com- 
 bines the two. This is one of the most 
 glaring imperfections of nature, and this 
 it is which makes wealth gross and re- 
 pulsive in imperial Rome or modern 
 America. In my Utopia the State would 
 every year select a man who had a genius 
 for spending, but no money, and endow him 
 with the sum necessary for the " magni- 
 ficent life." It would thus have examples 
 of spending as a fine art, and the money 
 would be found by taxing those who abused 
 their wealth. 
 
 Underneath these reflections Bagshot has 
 written the names of half a dozen of his 
 friends whom he thinks would be eligible 
 for this Utopian endowment. These, how- 
 ever, I suppress. 
 
 42
 
 B 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 AGSHOT was not often obscure, but ideals and 
 he had a habit of packing a good deal 
 
 into a few sentences. Thus I find him trying 
 to condense the whole controversy about the 
 "riofhts of man" into a note which he has 
 written at the end of the late Professor 
 Ritchie's book on " Natural Rights " : 
 
 When the speculative man talks about 
 his " ideals," the practical man talks about 
 his " rights." Rights are ideals in terms 
 of action. Man first becomes formidable 
 in action when he conceives his ideals as 
 his rights. 
 
 I am familiar with that last sentence. He 
 used to repeat it with some pride, and declare 
 that it was the fundamental postulate of 
 human progress. Indeed, I can hear him 
 now enlarging on the theme of man setting 
 out on his long journey with an idea of 
 
 43
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 human society as good and just, pursuing 
 the vision till to the eye of faith it seemed 
 a concrete reality, and then passionately 
 claiming it as his right, his birthright. In 
 the same book and on the same page is 
 another note which treats the theme in a 
 minor key: 
 
 When men say that they have rights, 
 they generally mean that they are suffering 
 wrongs. 
 
 Bagshot was of equable temper in contro- 
 versy, but I have known him grow hot and 
 angry when some cynical young man fresh 
 from the schools was heard to declare that 
 human rights were a delusion. He told this 
 youth with some acerbity that a knowledge 
 of human nature was desirable in those who 
 set up to be philosophers. 
 Zealots for On the other hand, he was never weary of 
 
 o eration ms j stm g on t j ie distinction between the 
 
 idealist and the fanatic. Extremist politi- 
 cians, he held, were guilty of a gross con- 
 fusion of thought when they denounced men 
 of moderate opinions as necessarily oppor- 
 tunists or time-servers. A great many moder- 
 
 44
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 ate men, he used to say, were "visionaries 
 with an acute sense of the difficulty of legis- 
 lating for practical people." A great many 
 others were sfenuine zealots for a moderate 
 policy. Here is an entry of March, 1900: 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose that people 
 are only fanatical for extreme courses. A 
 passion for moderation is one of the com- 
 monest of English characteristics. A 
 bigoted attachment to the via media of 
 the Anglican Church was the redeeming 
 virtue of Charles I. If a martyr, he was a 
 martyr for a compromise. 
 
 He was clearly thinking much at this time Maxims for 
 about the South African war, which greatly 
 depressed his spirits. It is not necessary to 
 go back on his reflections at this period, but 
 one or two notes about war and public 
 opinion are worth reviving. This is dated 
 10th February, 1900: 
 
 There is only one possible change of 
 Government when a war is proceeding — 
 a change from a less warlike to a more 
 warlike Government, from Lord Aberdeen 
 
 45
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 to Lord Palmerston. The reverse process 
 is impossible, unless the country desires or 
 is compelled to make peace. The worse 
 the present Government conduct the Boer 
 war and the longer it lasts, the more likely 
 are they to remain in office. And yet I 
 imagine that they would greatly like to be 
 relieved. 
 
 I don't know whether the country is 
 more angry with the Boers, the pro- Boers, 
 or the Government. Of the three I think 
 I pity the Government most. 
 
 Soon after the taking of Pretoria, when the 
 Peace Party were crying out to stop the war, 
 comes this: 
 
 If you want to influence a country for 
 peace in time of war, you should be known 
 as a man of war in time of peace. Only 
 Bismarck could have "stopped the war" 
 after Koniggratz. 
 
 Beside these I may place two observations 
 written a few weeks before his death, in 
 March, 1906, at the time of the Akabah 
 incident, when everyone was in favour of 
 
 46
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 coercing the Sultan if he refused to give 
 way : 
 
 There is no peace-at-any-price party. 
 There are only various parties which dis- 
 approve of each other's wars. 
 
 All the peace parties I have known have 
 ardently desired to make war on the Sul- 
 tan of Turkey. Perhaps they are right, 
 but some of them seem to regard it as a 
 humanitarian picnic on a large scale — 
 which is almost certainly a mistake. 
 
 ^ -Jr t\" w tv 
 
 Bagshot was a very kind-hearted man, and Pain and its 
 he thought much on the subject of pain. 
 He comforted himself by believing that the 
 evil of pain was, on the whole, a good deal 
 exaggerated. I find this entry in January, 
 1899: 
 
 Nothincr cheers me more in the world 
 than to observe how much more abiding is 
 the memory of pleasure than of pain. I 
 have been talking to-day in a hospital 
 with men who, in the last few weeks, have 
 suffered every hideous form of mutilation 
 
 47
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 and torture — the survivors of an accident 
 which filled the public with horror. One 
 and all assure me that they suffered no- 
 thing at the time, and nearly all seem to 
 have forgotten what they suffered after- 
 wards, or, at most, to recall it with a cheer- 
 ful pride which has no element of pain in 
 it. One or two of them are maimed for 
 life, and therefore greatly to be pitied, but 
 the pain for which we chiefly pitied them 
 is apparently the least part of their mis- 
 fortune. 
 
 The thought of pain as something cap- 
 able of illimitable increase in proportion to 
 the tortures inflicted is, happily, an illusion. 
 Pain has its own limit — unconsciousness. 
 Whoever has fainted from pain has reached 
 his limit. He would suffer no more if he 
 were burnt at the stake. It is an illusion, 
 also, to suppose that the pains which are 
 horrible to describe are necessarily worse 
 than the commonplace pains we suffer with- 
 out sympathy. We should never think 
 lightly of pain, but we need not torture 
 ourselves by supposing that the wounded 
 on a battlefield or the victims of an accident 
 
 48
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 suffer an indefinite multiplication of the 
 pains we are familiar with. 1 
 
 A wise man will suffer almost any degree 
 of physical pain in preference to mental 
 anguish. It is one of the qualities of 
 physical pain that it kills thought. The 
 ascetic who flagellates himself does really 
 cure his spiritual agony. 
 
 Dr. N. (he writes a little later), came Some 
 
 , , •■ « .... personal 
 
 yesterday and made a large incision in my experiences 
 neck, and afterwards inserted an india- 
 rubber tube in the hole. I declined chloro- 
 form because, when a similar operation was 
 performed on me ten years ago, I suffered 
 nothing. This time I analysed my sensations 
 with some care. The sensation of being 
 cut by a skilful surgeon would not, I think, 
 be pain if one could keep one's imagination 
 out of it. If it is quickly done, you feel 
 nothing till it is over, and then what affects 
 you is not a hurt but the idea of the sharp 
 steel on your skin. That causes a shiver, 
 with a sense of the teeth being set on edge, 
 and, if you don't steady yourself, you go 
 
 B. adds as a note to this passage: "I have shown 
 this to a woman, and she disagrees with every word of it." 
 
 49 E
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 back and back on the sensation till you 
 erow sick and faint. If I had not known 
 what was happening, and let this prey on 
 my imagination, I do not think I should 
 have suffered anything from the wound. 
 
 A year later he was seriously ill of pneu- 
 monia, with various painful complications, 
 and I find another note about his sensations 
 a few weeks after his recovery : 
 
 I am told (he says) that my sufferings 
 were horrible to witness, and the nurse 
 dwells particularly on my struggles for 
 breath. Of those I was completely uncon- 
 scious, and I am not aware of having even 
 suffered discomfort in breathing. Other 
 things were temporarily painful, but the 
 memory of them has so far faded from my 
 mind that it is scarcely to be weighed 
 against the recollection of one sunny hour. 
 The idea of pain is constantly before us 
 because a few people out of a vast number 
 are always suffering accidents and diseases 
 which are described in newspapers or talked 
 about by their friends. This produces the 
 illusion that pain is a constant factor in 
 
 50
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 everybody's life. It is, on the contrary, but 
 a rare incident in the lives of the vast 
 majority. 
 
 A little later there comes this characteristic 
 sentence : 
 
 Just as the journalist conceives of men 
 and women as readers of newspapers, and 
 the banker conceives of them as possessors 
 of cheque-books, so the doctor conceives 
 of them as ''suffering humanity." Some 
 doctors are not even content with this. 
 They suppose most people to be suffering 
 from the particular disease in which they 
 happen to be specialists. My friend Sir 
 T. D., the eminent specialist in rheumatism, 
 told me the other day that " rheumatoid 
 arthritis " was " the scourge of the human 
 race." It is probable that not one in a 
 thousand suffers from that rare disease, and 
 if there were no specialists in appendicitis 
 it is probable that that affliction would be 
 as rare as it was before its discovery. It 
 is a solemn fact that the discovery of a 
 new disease immediately creates a demand 
 for it. 
 
 5'
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 The expression of " suffering humanity " 
 (he goes on), is a gross piece of senti- 
 mentalism if it is taken to imply that hu- 
 manity in the mass is generally suffering. 
 At any given moment the vast majority are 
 not suffering. 
 
 Modem Nevertheless, Baa-shot had a great respect 
 
 Surgery ' & & r 
 
 for doctors, and he was always advising 
 young men to enter " the most disinterested 
 of the professions." But he has occasional 
 flings at modern surgery: 
 
 One of the most audacious scientific non- 
 sequiturs is the assertion of the surgeons 
 that the appendix has no function in the 
 human body, because they are unable to 
 discover it. Its function will probably 
 now be discovered by the " method of dif- 
 ference." 
 
 The logical reader will have no difficulty in 
 divining the meaning of the last sentence. I 
 hope, for the sake of those who have under- 
 gone the operation, that the forecast is 
 untrue. 
 
 I am glad to be able to add that Bagshot 
 
 52
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 was not always quite so stoical himself as 
 some of these passages might suggest. On a 
 certain day in 1900 I find this entry: 
 
 I have never before been conscious of 
 my own shape, but this morning I woke 
 up with the sense of being outlined with a 
 running thread of rheumatism. It is a 
 horribly long way round. 
 
 With the exception of the passages quoted in 
 this chapter, I can find no allusion to his 
 health in any of Bagshot's diaries. 
 
 53
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 A talk T ET me for a moment suspend my selec- 
 
 Mcmey I d tion from Bagshot's note-books to re- 
 
 call a talk which has stamped itself on my 
 memory as revealing more of my friend than 
 he generally let us see. We were three in 
 number — B., myself, and a friend of his and 
 mine, whom I will call Slackford, an eminent 
 official well known in the public service for 
 his extreme competence and affected cynic- 
 ism. It was a June evening, and we had 
 gone down to dine with Bagshot at his house 
 in the country, and were sitting in the garden 
 after dinner, smoking his excellent cigars. 
 For a time everything was placid, then some- 
 thing or other set Slackford going about the 
 iniquities of the working man, whom he de- 
 clared to be idle and greedy. B. became 
 Socratic, and induced him, in particular, to 
 denounce a certain set of workmen to whom, 
 
 54
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 he said, a Government Department had just 
 made a base surrender. B. then observed 
 that the case had come before him, and he 
 had discovered that the men in question had 
 earned, on the average, rather less than 4.S. 
 for a day of nine hours. Slackford blustered 
 and declared it was quite as much as they 
 were worth, whereupon Bagshot made a 
 rough calculation of Slackford's wage, which 
 worked out at about £6 for a day of seven 
 hours. Granting a whole world of difference 
 between Slackford's value to the public and 
 the value of the aforesaid labourers, was a 
 man " greedy and idle," who wanted a very 
 little more than a thirtieth part of what Slack- 
 ford received (and what he was known to 
 complain of bitterly as a most inadequate 
 salary) ? 
 
 Slackford said with some justice that this The Needy 
 argtimentum ad hominem put him in a false Greedy 
 position, and immediately changed his tack 
 to a sweeping assertion that we were all 
 equally greedy together in these days, and 
 that there really was nothing worth having in 
 life except money and the things that money 
 bought. Small blame to them, then, if they 
 
 55
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 A " foolish 
 kind of 
 Paradox " 
 
 tried to get more, and small blame to us if 
 we tried to prevent them from getting more. 
 Slackford then launched outagainstthe "cant" 
 which was talked by preachers and writers 
 about money being an evil, when everybody 
 knew that nobody believed it, and all the 
 world spent the whole of its time in seeking 
 to get money and keep it. " Everyone," said 
 Slackford comprehensively, " was either 
 greedy or needy; those who weren't greedy 
 were needy, and those who weren't needy 
 were greedy. Most of us were both greedy 
 and needy." 
 
 Basrshot was not to be drawn, and at first 
 he returned a chaffing answer. But Slackford 
 persisted, and was presently denouncing Radi- 
 cals and Socialists, first for their dishonesty 
 and then for their foolish ignorance of human 
 nature. Then Bagshot's patience broke, and 
 he marched to the attack. His exact words 
 I cannot, of course, remember at this distance 
 of time, but the general tenor of the conver- 
 sation is vividly in my mind. " If," he said, 
 " I had to make the choice — which, merci- 
 fully, I have not — I would far rather live in 
 a country in which Socialism was a failure 
 
 56
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 than in a country in which materialism was a 
 success. To say that money is the only 
 thing that counts in this world is not only 
 not true, but a particularly foolish kind of 
 paradox." " A dull platitude, on the con- 
 trary," growled Slackford. " Let's test it, 
 then," said B. " By all means," replied the 
 other. " Well, then, is there any man who, 
 standing by the death-bed of a wife he loved, 
 would hesitate for one moment to take all he 
 had and throw it into the sea, if by so doing 
 he could bring her back?" "You put it too 
 high," said Slackford. " But you said the 
 'greatest thing in the world,'" was the re- 
 tort. " Take another case, if you will. Did 
 the rich young men who went to South 
 Africa show the white feather in order to be 
 sure of going home and enjoying their wealth ? 
 Notoriously not. Or would you, the cynic, 
 commit one paltry crime in order to save the 
 whole of your miserable salary?" One after 
 another came a torrent of typical cases, till 
 Slackford was protesting that he had been 
 misunderstood, while Bagshot, breathless but 
 triumphing, was declaiming upon the blessed 
 inaccessibility to the money motive of all that 
 
 57
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 really mattered in life. He got himself fin- 
 ally to the point of saying that the very im- 
 portance, on their own plane, of the things 
 that money could buy makes the refusal of 
 average decent people to get money at the 
 cost of self-respect a more shining virtue. 
 Slackford found courage to say that a vast 
 number of people had no such scruple, but 
 Bagshot, insisted that his " average decent 
 people" were an immense majority, 
 A Utopian Since Slackford still muttered, Bagshot 
 
 Will. took another illustration. " In my Utopia," 
 
 he said, " I would so order Nature that 
 people, in bequeathing their property, should 
 be able to bequeath also their characters, dis- 
 positions, and personal appearance, let us say 
 — to make it easy — at the best time of their 
 lives. I would make it a condition that the 
 legatee should not be allowed to accept the 
 one without at the same time accepting the 
 other, and that, in default of this acceptance, 
 the property should revert to the State." 
 " Now," he said, addressing himself to Slack- 
 ford, " supposing X " — naming a notorious 
 millionaire — " left you the whole of his mil- 
 lions on condition that you took his cruel 
 
 58
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 chin and snub nose and rascally disposition 
 and predisposition to gout, would you accept 
 
 them?" "I'm d d if I would," was the 
 
 emphatic reply; " which means," pursued 
 Bagshot quietly, " that you would not for all 
 his money change places with him. But let 
 us take a less acute case not involving present 
 company. Would my charming niece Molly, 
 who is sadly impecunious, and greatly desires 
 to marry a most deserving but wholly unen- 
 dowed young officer, take her Aunt Sarah's 
 thousand a year if she had also to assume 
 Sarah's honoured countenance and evangeli- 
 cal disposition ? We will take dear Sarah at 
 her best — say, aged thirty. I have a photo- 
 graph of her over there, and you can judge 
 for yourselves." Swiftly we judged, and de- 
 clared that Molly would go penniless all her 
 days, scrub floors, sweep crossings, and die at 
 the last in a workhouse rather than take up 
 that forbidding heritage. Bagshot pursued 
 the theme with a wealth of illustration. Was 
 there any painter, poet, musician, or man of 
 letters worth his salt who would exchange 
 his talents for the endowed Philistinism of 
 Mr. T. ? The initial concealed an extremely 
 
 59
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 undesirable personality, and Slackford and I 
 exclaimed together that the offer would 
 scarcely tempt even a starving journalist. 
 "Right, of course," said Bagshot; "and now 
 perhaps Slackford begins to see what I am 
 driving at. In my Utopia the State grows 
 enormously rich from repudiated estates, and 
 all social problems are solved without taxing 
 anybody, simply because, when it comes to 
 the point, almost everybody is quite con- 
 vinced that no money can possibly compen- 
 sate them for the loss of beauty, health, happi- 
 ness, good temper, and other things that 
 really count." I have never seen Bagshot 
 happier than when he had wrung the admis- 
 sion of this edifying platitude out of the cynic 
 Slackford. Slackford, in fact, gave it up. 
 " It must," he remarked, " be extremely 
 mortifying for the ghosts of those Utopian 
 aunts and uncles to watch the effect of their 
 dispositions, if that is permitted in the place 
 to which they go." "It is, of course, per- 
 mitted," said Bagshot; "and it makes an 
 excellent beginning of purgatory." 
 
 ***** 
 
 A f ew I find certain observations in the last note- 
 
 Maxims 
 
 60
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 book which, I think, belong to the same time 
 as this conversation. 
 
 Cynicism as often as not is a kind of 
 collective modesty. There are people who 
 think it as immodest to claim virtue for 
 humanity as to claim it for themselves. 
 This is what religious people call the sense 
 of sin. 
 
 To call themselves " miserable sinners" 
 is with many people a kind of religious 
 good manners, just as a man inscribes 
 himself " your humble servant." 
 
 In the idealist the sense of sin passes 
 into a passion for perfection. Instead of 
 " I am unworthy," he says, "this is un- 
 worthy of me." 
 
 Not a few clever men resemble those 
 plants which so impoverish the soil that no 
 other plants can live near them. Arthur 
 
 H has great talent himself, but he 
 
 kills talent in others. 
 
 There are a great many people who 
 would do excellently in the world if they 
 could from the beginning be marked hors 
 concours. They have a sense of perfection 
 
 61
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 which is blunted and marred by competi- 
 tion. 
 
 The fear of being beaten is the most in- 
 sidious form of moral cowardice. A great 
 many men will challenge their superiors, 
 but never face their equals. That is to 
 save their pride in case of defeat. For the 
 same reason the first-rate man actually 
 prefers to be handicapped when compet- 
 ing with his inferiors. 
 
 The non-Royal are said to be all one to 
 the King. For the same reason the gifted 
 and the ungifted seem alike to the man of 
 genius. Hence the common complaint of 
 the merely talented that the great choose 
 inferior men for their friends. 
 
 In literature the very good and the very 
 bad may alike be popular, but talent ap- 
 peals only to the cultivated. 
 
 Many excellent men fail because they 
 confuse the parts of conductor and first 
 fiddle. 
 
 Many minds are like low-grade ores. 
 There is gold in them, but it takes a vast 
 deal of labour to get it out. 
 
 62
 
 we 
 aren't there" 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 TO judge from the note-book before me, What 
 Bagshot was in a contemplative mood "^vhent 
 on the night of 3rd September, 1903. I 
 wonder (he writes) whether other people are 
 oppressed, as I am, by a sense of the things 
 which "happen when we are not there." 
 There are moments when our consciousness 
 is strained to the utmost in the effort to com- 
 prehend what we cannot see. To-night there 
 is a full south-west gale, and the wind howls 
 about my windows and chimneys. I think 
 of vast heaving masses of water in mid- 
 Atlantic under the moon — stupendous activi- 
 ties with no eye-witness. Metaphysicians 
 tell me that the thought is meaningless — 
 that there is no form or colour without an 
 eye to see, no noise of wind or wave without 
 an ear to hear. What, then, is there when I 
 am not there? Potentiality, says the meta- 
 physician, a kind of ghost of what might be 
 
 6*
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 there, if I were there. No matter; I cannot 
 help thinking of it as related to me, and I 
 try to realize all that is going on everywhere 
 — crashing of ice at the Poles ; tropical forests 
 under blazing sun in mid- Africa; beasts of 
 prey and their violent life in the jungle; 
 swarming- cities of Orientals in China and 
 India; solitary men on ranch and prairie; 
 crowds in the markets and Stock Exchanges; 
 armies of labouring men building, digging, 
 ploughing, mining; Parliaments, churches, 
 theatres, law-courts; endless forms of life 
 and death, at all hours of day and night 
 simultaneously. The brain whirls with it, 
 and for all my struggles I cannot rid myself 
 of the conviction that it is midnight every- 
 where, and that the whole world sits listen- 
 ing, as I do, to the sound of the wind with- 
 out. 
 
 We talk glibly of "realizing things," 
 but, as a matter of fact, we realize hardly 
 anything. It is an infinitesimal fragment of 
 the whole that is contained in our conscious- 
 ness. The rest is a confused mist round a 
 point of light, and the effort to enlarge the 
 field of vision throws the whole of it out of 
 
 64
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 focus. It is not the shortness of life that 
 oppresses me so much as this intense limita- 
 tion of the life of thought. I yearn not to 
 live longer, but to live more — to realize more 
 fully. 
 
 In thinking of the Deity, omnipotence is 
 nothing, omniscience everything. The mod- 
 ern conception of the universe substitutes 
 law for power, and forbids us to think of 
 power apart from law. But the omni-con- 
 sciousness of God is an overwhelming thought 
 to those who realize the intense poverty of the 
 human consciousness. 
 
 *J£. 4C> <U. 41. 
 
 •7V* w •Tr *A* 
 
 " The fool hath his eyes on the ends of the The Dif- 
 earth." But so has the modern man with the consci 
 modern newspaper. What subtle effect, I 
 wonder, has this daily diffusion of conscious- 
 ness through cable and telegraph upon the 
 mind of the race? This incessant hitching- 
 on and hitching-off leads to a kind of in- 
 tellectual short-windedness. The thinking 
 capacity of man remains constant, so far as 
 one can discover, while the demands upon it 
 multiply indefinitely. His mind is daily 
 
 65 F 
 
 ous- 
 ness
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 divided between a hundred imperfect images, 
 none of which can be even approximately- 
 realized. Mental culture reverses the pro- 
 cess of agriculture, and passes from the in- 
 tensive to the extensive, going to seed over 
 a wider and wider area, regardless of the 
 fertility or infertility of the soil. Hence the 
 sharp, shallow, inconsecutive modern intelli- 
 gence, which prefers the article to the book, 
 the paragraph to the article, and, eventually, 
 the headline to the paragraph. 
 
 The passion for fact is killing thought in 
 the rising generation. There is a conflict not 
 only between science and religion, but be- 
 tween science and thought. Nothing is so 
 fatal to thought as a little science — the popu- 
 lar science which teaches the "how "and the 
 " what " of things, and never the " why." 
 
 Thought I may, perhaps, add to this a note which 
 
 and Fact Bagshot wrote at a later date, at the end of 
 a scientific book on the origin of life : 
 
 Nearly all the scientific books about the 
 origin of life fail even to state the problem 
 
 66
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 coherently. We do not need to make 
 philosophers kings, and still less kings 
 philosophers. The great need for the 
 advancement of knowledge is that the 
 men of science should study philosophy, 
 and the men of philosophy study science. 
 The chasm between the two must be 
 bridged if either are to make progress. 
 The idea fostered by the universities, that 
 philosophy is an accomplishment for the 
 students of" humane letters" leaves science 
 without a foundation. 
 
 To Bacon, writing for his time, it seemed 
 a fundamental necessity to bring the world 
 back from the fantastic speculations of 
 schoolmen and alchemists to the solid 
 region of fact. For us, on the contrary, 
 the chief necessity is to make the thought 
 equal to the fact. Though Bacon con- 
 demned it, I can never read without a 
 thrill his description of the " inveniendi 
 modum simplicem et inartificiosum qui 
 hominibus maxime est familiaris" — the 
 simple and unartificial method of inquiry 
 which is most familiar to mankind. " Hie 
 autem non alius est, quam ut is, qui se ad 
 
 67
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 inveniendum aliquid comparat et accingit, 
 primo quae ab aliis circa ilia dicta sint in- 
 quirat et evolvat; deinde propriam medita- 
 tionem addat, atque per mentis multam 
 agitationem spiritum suum proprium solli- 
 citet et quasi invocet ut sibi oracula pan- 
 dat." * This image of man " invoking his 
 own spirit to open its oracles to him " is 
 surely one of the most beautiful in all litera- 
 ture, and I know of no words which ex- 
 press so much of the toil and turmoil of the 
 thinking mind. The excessively external 
 life which we lead in these times leaves us 
 without leisure to invoke the inner oracle. 
 
 #-y- .U. Jfc. Jg» 
 
 *7v* *7s* "A* -7v* 
 
 Let me pass from this to some more of the 
 observations about persons which are so 
 plentifully scattered throughout the note- 
 books : 
 
 1 Bacon, " Novum Organum," lib. i, 82. This is the 
 method whereby, when a man applies himself and braces 
 his faculties to an investigation of anything, he first asks 
 and ascertains what has been said about the subject by 
 others; then adds his own meditation, and with much 
 mental turmoil appeals to his own spirit and invokes it 
 to open its oracles to him. 
 
 68
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 Some persons have the good fortune to 
 combine dissimilar virtues, but still more 
 have the misfortune to possess defects 
 which, one would suppose, could not exist 
 together. 
 
 S., for instance, is both dull and violent, 
 and the conversation of Y. is at once bor- 
 ing and improper. 
 
 William (a cousin of his) has a genius 
 for the indirect. The front door may be 
 wide open, but he will fetch a ladder and 
 force an entrance by the first-floor window 
 even though he has to cut out the glass in 
 doing- it. 
 
 [Another entry, a year later, about the 
 same man may be compared with this: 
 
 William is in chronic rebellion against 
 other people's experience. He is like one 
 of those climbers who will go up a mountain 
 the wrong way, simply because other people 
 have gone up the right way before him.] 
 
 B.'s distrust of logic leads him not to re- 
 frain from syllogizing, which would be 
 rational, but to put a negative; into the 
 conclusion — which is absurd. 
 
 69
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 Denys has a nature warmed from within 
 on which the snow will not lie. 
 
 Lewis's life is an incessant tobogganing, 
 which means that he spends two-thirds of 
 his time in getting his bob-sled up-hill. 
 
 S. has the misfortune to be out of scale 
 with his surroundings. He has too much 
 talent for the circle in which he moves and 
 not enough to be at home in the circle of 
 the really talented. M., again, is always 
 shocking the pious people with whom she 
 lives, but is ineffably shocked when she 
 finds herself in the company of the real 
 worldlings. 
 
 H. asked Dr. F. what would reduce his 
 corpulence. " Three months' hard worry," 
 was the reply. H. is conscientiously seek- 
 ing a subject to worry about, but has com- 
 pletely failed thus far. A course of H., 
 however, is extremely thinning to his 
 friends. 
 
 \ "Platitude After a series of these observations Bag- 
 
 jsually for- , . . ... 
 
 gotten " shot seems to have been struck with remorse, 
 
 for he adds a " platitude usually forgotten " : 
 
 The most difficult thino- in the world to 
 
 70
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 realize is that other people talk about us 
 with exactly the same freedom that we 
 talk about them. We are so encased in 
 self-flattery that there is scarcely one of us 
 who is not genuinely surprised and indig- 
 nant if accidentally on one occasion we 
 discover this to be true. Let us assure 
 ourselves that this is habittially our fate at 
 the hands of our best friends, and, before 
 we take offence, let us ask ourselves 
 whether they have not exactly the same 
 ground of offence against us. 
 
 The idea that you must say nothing be- 
 hind a man's back which you would not 
 say to his face is absurd. A great many 
 things which are quite inoffensive when 
 said behind one's back would be grossly 
 impertinent if said to one's face. I am 
 quite entitled to say to my friends that I 
 don't admire Mrs. Hawksbee's type of 
 beauty, but I should be grossly impertinent 
 if I said it to her face. If I am a journalist 
 I may without offence write things about 
 Mr. Balfour and Sir Henry Campbell-Ban- 
 nerman which I could not without gross 
 rudeness say in their presence. Our friends 
 
 7'
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 are to us, and we are to our friends, what 
 the newspapers are to the public man. 
 Society would be indescribably artificial 
 and insipid without the liberty of fair com- 
 ment on matters of personal importance. 
 Let us cheerfully yield ourselves as a topic 
 of conversation to our friends, if they are 
 kind enough to think us interesting; but 
 let us have no mercy on the mischief- 
 makers who turn the innocent into the 
 malicious by the act of repeating it. 
 
 Bagshot's sister insisted on taking him to 
 a ball one night in 1894, when his niece 
 Molly, came out. According to an entry in 
 his diary, he was not in bed till four the next 
 morning. I am sure he made himself very 
 agreeable, but he celebrates the occasion with 
 this comment: 
 
 "The gods," says Hesiod, "have be- 
 stowed fortitude on some men, and on 
 others a disposition for dancing." I was 
 sorely in need of both qualities last night. 
 
 72
 
 I 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 HAVE been reading (writes Bagshot in Man the 
 his diary of ioth March, 1906) several Man the 
 
 books and articles this week on man's place 
 in the universe. One — a book on astronomy 
 — suggests that the meanest pebble on the 
 seashore may be a whole universe in itself, 
 with a multitude of planetary systems in its 
 interior, all whirling about their solar centres 
 and reproducing the pageant of night and 
 morninof and summer and winter on millions 
 of atom-planets, divided from each other and 
 their suns and other stars by spaces relatively 
 as great as those which divide the heavenly 
 bodies in our universe. All this the writer 
 deduces from the supposition that matter is 
 " discrete " and subject to radio-activity. And 
 then he goes on to suggest that there may 
 be an Intelligence to which our universe is 
 but a pebble on the shore of the infinite and 
 our globe but one among a million million 
 
 73 
 
 Monarch
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 atoms whirling round their radio-active centres 
 within the pebble. This is a humbling 
 thought, and it reduces us from our com- 
 paratively respectable place as inhabitants of 
 one of the meaner planets to that of incon- 
 ceivably microscopic parasites on the surface 
 of an atom. 
 
 From this I turned to an article by Dr. 
 A. R. Wallace in the " Fortnightly Review," 
 and I learnt that the universe is one and 
 limited, that our solar system is the centre 
 of it, that our earth holds the primacy of the 
 solar system, that alone of all stars and 
 planets it is inhabited, and that man holding 
 the lordship of its inhabitants is, therefore, 
 the crown and climax of creation. 
 
 These, apparently, are the two voices of 
 science about man at this moment. Which 
 of them am I to choose ? 
 
 In my perplexity I turn to a metaphysician, 
 and he tells me that whether I am the parasite 
 on the atom, or the crown and centre of the 
 universe, is, from his point of view, not of 
 the slightest importance, and that both the 
 astronomer and Dr. Wallace are fussirio- 
 themselves about nothing. Mind, says the 
 
 74
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 metaphysician, is the only reality, and mind 
 is not to be weighed in any of these material 
 scales. So far as I partake of mind, I create 
 the universe and possess it, which is much 
 better than being a microscopic atom, as on 
 any other supposition I must be, whether at 
 the centre, the circumference, or drifting 
 about in between. This puffs me up, and I 
 feel like Heine when he fed on the fixed 
 stars and drank up the milky way. 
 
 After this course of reading I went last Many views 
 
 „ , iii t ^ • °f tne Great 
 
 Sunday to church and sat under an eminent Adventure 
 preacher, who took all these hypotheses and 
 hurled them at me one after another, with- 
 out, apparently, the slightest sense of their 
 incongruity. I was a speck in infinity, a worm 
 and no man, a miserable sinner, yet the centre 
 of creation, the constant object of Divine 
 solicitude, the being for whose salvation 
 everything was ordained before the founda- 
 tions of the world were laid. The preacher 
 was apparently as convinced that the earth 
 was the Lord's chosen planet as the Jews 
 were that Palestine was His chosen country, 
 and to that extent he agreed with Dr. Wal- 
 lace, but he would grant me no pride in my 
 
 75
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 position on the elect world, but insisted re- 
 peatedly on my unworthiness to occupy this 
 place, and the pain and sorrow which I 
 caused to a Creator who, he seemed to say, 
 had been grievously disappointed by the 
 result of His own act in placing me there. 
 So though I held my central position I 
 had no right to it, and for some inscrutable 
 reason had been promoted to a place in 
 nature for which I was equally unsuited and 
 unworthy. 
 
 The curious thing is that I seriously be- 
 lieve all these things in turn. I feel myself 
 of no importance and of all importance, an 
 outcast and an angel, the master of circum- 
 stances and the sport of circumstances, the 
 most perishable of things and the most en- 
 during of things — each of these things in 
 turn, on different days of the week, and dif- 
 ferent hours of the same day. There are 
 days when, so far from lacking faith, all the 
 terrestrial faiths put together seem to make 
 too little demand on my capacity for be- 
 lieving, and there are days when I seem to 
 be equally without past or future or anchorage 
 to the present. 
 
 76
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 I have questioned all sorts of religious 
 people, and I gather that their emotions are 
 essentially the same as mine, though they use 
 phrases about them which do not come easily 
 to my lips. And this is good for them and 
 for me. Any religion would be a calamity 
 which quenched this sense of the great human 
 adventure in the unknown. There is no cer- 
 tainty which could be other than dull, hard, 
 and materialistic, compared with the infinite 
 hopes and possibilities of this spiritual quest. 
 
 rt O Mi%£Ttx,<TTO<; fiiog ov fiiooTog oivQpUTru, and I Will 
 
 not for any theory, theological or scientific, 
 resign my rights in the inquiry. 
 
 # # * # # 
 
 Let me pass from this philosophizing to On Life in 
 
 r ^ , ) i. i it general 
 
 some of Bagshot s lighter comments on lite 
 in general. Here is a note about snobbery: 
 
 Snobbery is imperfectly defined as 
 " meanly admiring mean things." It is 
 just as often a quite respectable form of 
 egoism — a desire to show in what esteem 
 you are held by people of esteem. The 
 disappointed and those who are insecure 
 
 77
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 of their position are quite as prone to it as 
 the vulgar. 
 
 It is no sin to cultivate the society of 
 your betters. The important thing is whom 
 you consider to be your betters. 
 
 Boastfulness, like snobbery, is a vice of 
 the unsuccessful. The boaster speaks for 
 himself because he cannot trust other people 
 to speak for him. 
 
 Let me give next an observation about 
 diplomacy which I have often heard from his 
 own lips: 
 
 A diplomatist should never seek to be 
 thought diplomatic. Here, if anywhere, 
 ars est celare artem. A really discreet man 
 avoids the appearance of discretion. 
 
 To speak freely what you may speak 
 and to be silent about what you may not 
 speak is the way to be trusted. A fool 
 blabs the forbidden, and makes a mystery 
 of the permissible. 
 
 Here is another note on a kindred subject, 
 which may properly be given here: 
 
 In proportion as society has gained free- 
 
 73
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 dom of speech in law and theory, it has 
 curtailed its freedom in life and practice. 
 We greatly need some modern substitute 
 for the fool at the Court or the slave in 
 the chariot — privileged truth-tellers, who 
 will say to the great what, with all our 
 liberty of speech, none of us dare say, for 
 fear of shocking propriety or encountering 
 the law of libel. A public scavenger, enjoy- 
 ing immunity from prosecution, would serve 
 a purpose in the modern world. 
 
 In the year 1884 one of his relatives asked 
 Baeshot to be ofodfather to her child. There 
 followed quite a long and acrimonious cor- 
 respondence about the child's name, which he 
 so much disliked that he actually would not 
 appear at the church, and the ceremony had 
 to go forward with a proxy in his place. This 
 entry — about the same date —must, I think, 
 refer to that incident : 
 
 Silly name makes silly child. Parents 
 should consider the effect which a foolish 
 name will have upon the child's character 
 and other people's opinion about the child. 
 Every child should have the right of 
 
 79
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 changing its name when it comes to years 
 of discretion. Many children, I fancy, 
 would exercise this right. 
 
 ^T* *T* *T*» *T* *T» 
 
 A deeply Dreams are generally rather a bore, but an 
 
 disgraceful 
 
 Dream entry of Bagshot's, on 20th March, 1903, is, 
 
 I think, sufficiently out of the common to 
 justify me in reproducing it here: 
 
 There must, I think (he writes), be some 
 mocking spirit imprisoned in all of us which 
 escapes in our dreams and rejoices to place 
 us in ridiculous and humiliating positions. 
 How else explain the extraordinary puck- 
 ishness of many of our dreams? There is 
 one dream which has visited me twice or 
 three times, and which is to me what the 
 no-clothes dream is to other people. I find 
 myself standing on the platform of a large 
 lecture-hall, something like the Royal In- 
 stitution, with a distinguished company to 
 support me on the platform, and a crowded 
 audience of the most intellectual in front 
 of me. Then I become conscious that all 
 these people are awaiting a lecture from 
 
 80
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 me on a Spanish poet of the eighteenth 
 century. I have no manuscript and no 
 notes; I have made no preparation; and I 
 know nothing about the poet — not even 
 his name. There is breathless silence, and 
 I am expected to begin. I strain my eyes 
 to the far end of the hall, where hangs a 
 bill announcing the subject of my lecture, 
 and with a tremendous effort I just manage 
 to read the name of the poet. The situa- 
 tion is horrible; for though I have read 
 the name I don't know how to pronounce 
 it, and I have never before heard of the man. 
 My tongue sticks to my throat, and I break 
 out into a clammy perspiration but the 
 audience beams and looks expectant. 
 
 And then a sad and deeply disgraceful 
 thing happens. How do I act? I should 
 like my friends to answer the question by 
 saying, " Of course he made a clean breast 
 of it, and begged pardon of the audience 
 and swallowed the mortification like a 
 man." The unhappy truth — or at least the 
 dream-truth — is that I suddenly recovered 
 ni)' composure, and, casting shame and 
 scruple to the winds, proceeded to invent 
 
 8l G
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 the poet from his cradle onwards. I gave 
 him a birth-place, supplied him with anec- 
 dotes and incidents for his childhood and 
 youth, enlarged upon his style and themes 
 — all the time refreshing my memory about 
 his name by furtive glances at the poster 
 at the back of the hall — and finally brought 
 the thing to a climax by reciting my own 
 translations of his imaginary poems, and 
 brought the house down with such applause 
 that I woke up with a start. Then, for ten 
 minutes, I lay panting with the effort, but 
 secretly consoling myself that the mocking 
 spirit had turned the joke against the 
 audience. On calm reflection, however, I 
 am wondering whether the incident does 
 not reveal something dark and unscrupu- 
 lous in my sub-conscious self, which will 
 one day come to the surface and involve 
 me in a scandal. Is it a common experi- 
 ence, I wonder, with others as with me, to 
 lose all moral sense in their dreams? If so, 
 what does it mean? 
 
 82
 
 B 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 AGSHOT, like all bachelors, loved to a Bachelor 
 
 i . , , . on Women 
 
 moralize about women, and, on the 
 
 principle that the outsider sees most, of the 
 game, he claimed that the unmarried have 
 the best right to be heard on this subject. 
 His observations, however, though numerous, 
 are, as usual, scattered and inconsecutive ; 
 and if I attempt to gather them up into one 
 chapter, I must put in the reminder that they 
 were not so written, and that Bagshot himself 
 would have been the last to claim that they 
 were a new or methodical treatment of this 
 ancient theme. 
 
 In no respect (he writes in March, 1890) 
 has man taken greater advantage of his 
 position than in labelling as feminine a 
 large number of the less attractive weak- 
 nesses which are common to humanity and 
 
 83
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 both sexes. In apportioning these weak- 
 nesses man selects for himself what he 
 imagines to be the defects of his qualities 
 and gives the rest to women. 
 I like this stanza of Lafontaine: 
 
 Rien ne pese tant qu'un secret: 
 
 Le porter loin est difficile aux dames; 
 
 Et je sais meme sur ce fait 
 
 Bon nombre d'hommes qui sont femmes. 
 
 The sexes are much more alike in funda- 
 mentals than is generally acknowledged, 
 and when we say that this or that quality 
 is feminine we have always to add that 
 there are bon nombre d'hommes qui sont 
 femmes. 
 Woman's The great advantage which women have 
 
 in the world is that most women under- 
 stand men a vast deal better than any man 
 understands women. Since knowledge is 
 power, woman has a control over man 
 which man never has over her. To man 
 she is always, in the last resort, untamable 
 and unintelligible, whereas to her man is a 
 simple, if massive, creature, whose subtle- 
 ties, when occasionally he is subtle, are 
 
 84 ' 
 
 Advantage
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 much more intelligible to her than to other 
 men. There is no complexity of the male 
 character which the woman does not under- 
 stand, and there is scarcely any complica- 
 tion of the feminine character which the 
 man can really unravel. This accounts for 
 the good humour with which the vast 
 majority of women accept the crude me- 
 chanical power which man exercises by his 
 laws and political devices. 
 
 But, unfortunately for both parties, there A change 
 are women with men's minds and men with 
 women's minds, and you never can tell from 
 the appearance of either when this inner 
 discord is at work. I have known delicate 
 fair feminine women with a masculine mind 
 within, and I have known robust brawny 
 masculine men with the mind of a woman 
 within. The woman with the man's mind 
 must be perpetually in revolt, whereas the 
 man with the woman's mind enjoys the 
 privileges of both sexes. The first finds 
 the woman's place an odious subserviency 
 from which there is no escape; the second 
 has the advantage of the male ascendency, 
 and, if he does not choose to use it, he may 
 
 85
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 flatter himself that he is exercising a 
 merciful forbearance. 
 
 ■Sfr "5^ »Jc >£ *l* 
 
 There is an Italian proverb which says 
 that woman is to money as the sun is to 
 ice. According to my observation, a woman 
 is more naturally disposed to thrift than a 
 man, whenever she is answerable to others 
 for her expenditure. Women who are reck- 
 less in spending their own money are 
 scrupulously frugal in spending their hus- 
 band's money. Give a woman the sense of 
 responsibility, and she is more conscientious 
 than any man. 
 
 A woman will spend half the morning in 
 saving fourpence on her household bills and 
 then make up time by taking a half-crown 
 cab to keep an appointment. Whereat the 
 man laughs consumedly. 
 
 This, however, is exactly what man does 
 himself. 
 
 The man who worries an office t osave a 
 pound in business will spend ten pounds 
 without a thought on a dinner at the 
 Savoy. Business is business, says the man; 
 
 86
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 the weekly bills are the weekly bills, says 
 the woman. It is the same habit in both. 
 I know a woman who telegraphed to her 
 husband to buy threepennyworth of cream 
 on his way home from business to save her 
 books from exceeding £6 a week. He 
 paid for the cream and the telegram. It 
 was an admirable instinct on her part. 
 Similarly, I have known a Government De- 
 partment spend £$ of another Department's 
 money to save twopence of its own. 
 
 Woman's morality (writes Bagshot a Her 
 
 c i i \ • • r • • Morality 
 
 lew months later) is not interior or superior 
 to man's morality so much as different from 
 it. Women are much more truthful than 
 men when they are convinced of the im- 
 portance of truth, just as they are much 
 more uncompromising than men when they 
 are convinced of the importance of an 
 ideal. When they are not convinced they 
 have little or none of the everyday morality 
 which carries men through the ordinary 
 affairs of life, though they may conform to 
 it from fear of the consequences. 
 
 87
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 Nearly all white lies are the inventions 
 of women, and nearly all great falsities the 
 inventions of men. Men say that women 
 have no sense of honour, which is true in 
 the sense that they do not conceive them- 
 selves as bound by obligations to those 
 who are not in intimate relations with them. 
 With them loyalty to persons always takes 
 precedence of loyalty to institutions or to 
 the public interest. A woman is hardly ever 
 convinced if you tell her that the public 
 interest prevents you from perpetrating a 
 job for the benefit of her husband or son. 
 She is sure that you nourish a secret spite 
 against them. 
 
 *-tt> Oi. -4t -4i- 
 
 "Jr- *n i -7v- w 
 
 A woman's conclusions are often the 
 same as a man's conclusions, but her rea- 
 sons are nearly always different from a 
 man's reasons; hence the extreme difficulty 
 of arguments between women and men. 
 A woman is not content that you should 
 agree with her conclusions; she requires 
 your assent to her reasons as well. 
 
 The demand of women for political in- 
 
 88
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 fluence is difficult to concede, not because 
 women are unfit for political influence, nor 
 because they are inferior to men; but be- 
 cause the mind of man and the mind of 
 woman run on parallel lines which cannot 
 be made to meet. All good polities pre- 
 sume a unity in difference among those 
 who are entrusted with power. 
 
 In my Utopia there is a man's legisla- 
 ture and a woman's legislature, and there 
 are many important branches of legislation 
 in which the man's legislature is obliged 
 to defer to the woman's. This is found to 
 work excellently. 
 
 3£ 3fe % 4c 3fe 
 
 All the world is agreed about a pretty 
 face, but there is always a minority against 
 a beautiful face. 
 
 Women are indefatigable in their analysis The "rest- 
 of conduct. A man accepts a white ray of i yst » 
 light for what it is; a woman passes it 
 through a prism and resolves it into its 
 component rays. If I pass Mrs. A. in the 
 street without saluting her, she conjectures 
 
 89
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 a dozen painful motives to account for my 
 absent-mindedness. If she passes me, I 
 conclude that she is shortsighted or absent- 
 minded. 
 
 Women see through a brick wall to what 
 isn't on the other side. Nothing causes 
 them so much misery as their habit of 
 supplying complicated explanations and in- 
 vidious motives to simple and innocent pro- 
 ceedings. I never meet my sister Alice but 
 what she tells me that some friend of hers 
 was inexplicably cold to her when they 
 last met, and before I can tell her that she 
 was probably mistaken about this, her 
 "unerring instinct," as she calls it, has 
 woven together a dozen meaningless trifles 
 into a consecutive and plausible but highly 
 improbable story of her friend's motives 
 and intentions. 
 
 A good and loyal woman will resent a 
 slight upon her husband long after he has 
 forgotten and forgiven it. I am very good 
 friends with S., whom I once thought it 
 necessary to criticise in an official report; 
 but his wife will never again ask me to her 
 house, and she thinks that her husband has 
 
 90
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 shown a mean and compromising spirit in 
 forgiving me so easily. 
 
 The maxim of Pericles that you should 
 treat your enemies as though they might 
 again become your friends seems mean and 
 craven to most women. Never enlist a 
 woman s sympathy with you in a quarrel 
 with another person unless yoti are qiiite 
 stire that you will never make it up, for, 
 if you do, you will fall heavily in her 
 esteem. 
 
 When their feelings are really engaged, 
 women are much less worldly minded than 
 men. Opportunism and compromise on the 
 things that they really care about are un- 
 pardonable offences in their eyes. Most of 
 the great sacrifices for principle are inspired 
 by women. 
 
 ***** 
 
 If I say to my niece Molly that two and The Secret 
 two make four she consents, but is uncon- Common- 
 vinced. But if I show her this little for- place 
 mula: 
 
 she is at once all alive with interest, and 
 
 9i
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 sits down to work it out, and proclaims in 
 triumph that it is so. From a hard and dull 
 statement of fact it has become a problem 
 and an intrigue, and here she is in her ele- 
 ment. 
 
 That is the way of womenkind in all re- 
 lations of life. 
 
 The obvious bores them and at the bot- 
 tom of their hearts they do not believe in 
 it, though a long habit of conforming to 
 male conventions requires them to consent 
 for the avoidance of friction. Nearly all 
 women are convinced in their hearts that 
 things are other than they seem. 
 
 It is this sense of a secret lurking in the 
 commonplace which renders them more 
 liable than men to superstition. 
 
 Reason covers probably two-thirds of 
 life. Most men imagine that it covers the 
 whole of life; most women are convinced 
 that it covers less than half of life. Women's 
 mistrust of male logic is quite as well 
 founded as men's mistrust of women's in- 
 tuitions. 
 
 Genius arises when the imagination of 
 the woman is added to the intellect of the 
 
 92
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 man. The man of genius is supreme over 
 woman in the feminine qualities. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Talking to Lady C. the other night I 
 quoted Kant's injunction to "act so that 
 your action may be universal." She replied 
 at once that the philosopher was a fool. 
 Was there any woman, she wanted to 
 know, who would not be insulted if a man 
 behaved to her in " a universal manner " ? 
 
 Women hate rules and love exceptions. 
 There is no woman who does not believe 
 herself an exception to a rule. Most men 
 know that they are not, and wish that they 
 were. 
 
 ***** 
 
 There is much more in the same vein The limits 
 
 , i i n i > of Basrshot's 
 
 scattered up and down rJagshot s many note- knowledge 
 books, but I have given enough to show his 
 general state of mind — a state of mind which, 
 as the reader will see, varied according to his 
 moods, and may easily be convicted of incon- 
 sistency. Let me add just one note, written 
 when he was thirty years of age, which shows 
 a sad lucidity of soul: 
 
 93
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 One marries a girl and lives with a 
 woman. I think I know something about 
 girls, but I am sure I know nothing about 
 women. 
 
 Bagshot never married. 
 
 94
 
 T 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 H I S is a chapter of random observations, Random 
 
 . , r . iiii Reflections 
 
 gathered from three note-books, dated 
 
 1895, 1900, and 1903 respectively. The sub- 
 jects are conduct, religion, and things in 
 general. Here, to begin with, is a character- 
 istic reflection on the life of the bee: 
 
 It is curious that in moralizing about the 
 bee, Maeterlinck should have omitted one 
 feature which lends itself above all others 
 to a parable. The bee builds her cell and 
 gathers honey to fill it, but, all unconsciously, 
 she is the agent of another service, bearing 
 the pollen from flower to flower. So we, 
 while we go about our own business, are 
 unconsciously the ministers of others, fer- 
 tilizing them if we are fortunate, blighting 
 them if we are not. And this service of 
 ours is effectual and happy, precisely in 
 
 95
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 proportion as we are unconscious of it. 
 Virtue oroes out of it when we become 
 philanthropists, and carry the pollen with 
 the air of benefactors. 
 
 A man knows what he does, but not what 
 he is. It is because being is so much more 
 than doing that the consciousness of doing 
 is so much less than the innocence of being. 
 
 A page or two later comes this thought, 
 suggested by a flower : 
 
 Whence does the flower draw its scent? 
 I have had a narcissus bulb growing in a 
 pot in my room. I have watched it send 
 up its shoot and come into bud, and yet 
 not till the moment when the bud opens 
 and it breaks into flower have I ever dis- 
 covered the faintest trace of the comino- 
 scent. Then in a second it comes from no- 
 where, and fills my room with its fragrance. 
 A human being will suddenly perform this 
 miracle for us like a flower. 
 
 As a note to this Bagshot has added a quota- 
 tion from Thoreau : " I do not value chiefly 
 a man's uprightness and benevolence, which 
 
 96
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 are, as it were, his stem and leaves. I want 
 the flower and fruit of a man that some frag- 
 rance be wafted over from him to me and 
 some ripeness flavour our intercourse." 
 
 I have often heard Bagshot say that the Thrift and 
 combination of thrift and laziness produced 
 the most useless kind of man. Here is the 
 same thought expressed the other way round : 
 
 Just as it is necessary to create wants in 
 the savage man before he can be induced 
 to work regularly, so it is a necessity for 
 many civilized men to live habitually beyond 
 their incomes as a condition of using their 
 powers. I constantly hear his relations 
 lamenting R.'s extravagance; but for my 
 part I rejoice at it, since R., with all his 
 gifts, is precisely the kind of man who would 
 be lazy if not extravagant. 
 
 11 Lazy and extravagant," are two epithets 
 commonly combined, but when a poor man 
 is extravagant he is generally also in- 
 dustrious. 
 
 The principle of the counter-irritant is 
 universal in life (he writes in November, 
 1900); and it is the function of the minor 
 
 97 H
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 anxieties to cure the greater. Hence it is 
 that our lots are more equal than they seem. 
 He who has most fears most, and the chief 
 human malady is fear. 
 
 A few pages later he writes : 
 
 He who need not worry about his wealth 
 will almost certainly worry about his health. 
 Cast out the fear of poverty and you let in 
 the fear of death. 
 
 Current Now and again his customary optimism 
 
 isms seems to have deserted him. Thus I read on 
 
 i st December, 1900: 
 
 The Greeks named the hemlock supo/>|3t'a, 
 the good food. So we speak of " death the 
 healer," " death the comforter," " death the 
 good angel," in a pathetic effort to propitiate 
 the power we dread. Our attitude towards 
 pain and death is a constant euphemism — 
 a kind of whistling in the dark. 
 
 That leads him on to sundry observations 
 about the attitude of religious people towards 
 pain, death, and evil. They are rather dis- 
 
 98
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 jointed, but I put them together as they are 
 written : 
 
 Religion would gain greatly if the clergy 
 would make a more sparing use of the 
 blessing-in-disguise argument. No one 
 really believes that pain, privation, and 
 bereavement, are other than evil things. 
 Not to believe this is to take the mainspring 
 out of human action. It is rational to say 
 that character may win good out of evil, 
 but only a colossal egoist will be persuaded 
 that the death or suffering of another is a 
 dispensation of Providence for the welfare 
 of his soul. 
 
 The problem of evil is not in the least 
 helped by saying that good and evil are 
 correlative terms, that evil is " less eood," 
 or that the idea of good is impossible with- 
 out the idea of evil. That merely restates 
 the question in a more perplexing form. 
 Why should existence be so conditioned 
 that good is impossible or unthinkable 
 without evil ? 
 
 The moral currency is debased by the 
 Puritanism which calls good things evil, as 
 
 99
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 well as by the cynicism which calls evil 
 things good. The child who is brought up 
 to believe that the theatre is sinful will end 
 by believing that debauchery is venial. 
 
 If the modern world abandons the re- 
 ligious idea of sin it will have to recover 
 the Greek idea of virtue as a fine art. It 
 is a pity that the two cannot be combined. 
 The next nation which leads mankind to a 
 higher level of conduct will be one which 
 adds conscience to instinctive orood taste. 
 
 The misfortune, meanwhile, is that the 
 nations which excel in manners pay for it 
 by disparaging morals. 
 
 ^T* '^* *T* *T* VJfc 
 
 A Provi- In China lack of patriotism and corrup- 
 
 dential Fact . , , . , , • , 
 
 tion in government go hand in hand with 
 the highest standard of honesty in private 
 transactions. In Japan the highest stand- 
 ard of patriotism and public honour is 
 maintained by individuals who are untrust- 
 worthy in private business. If the Chinese 
 could learn the public virtues of the Japan- 
 ese, and the Japanese the private virtues 
 of the Chinese, the Yellow races would be 
 irresistible. 
 
 ioo
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 Here is a hard saying, which Bagshot has 
 underlined as if trying to impress it on him- 
 self: 
 
 The just man bears most easily what he 
 knows to be his own fault. 
 
 These, again, are characteristic: 
 
 Mem. for humanitarians. — Sympathy 
 like strength, must be harboured. He who 
 pities the whole world will relieve no one. 
 
 At what period of the world's history 
 should one wish to live? Young ladies 
 reply the age of Elizabeth or the age of 
 Pericles. I rather think we have lived a 
 thousand years too soon. 
 
 Moderation, coolness, caution, are quite 
 compatible with a highly nervous tempera- 
 ment. Some well-balanced minds are like 
 "sleeping tops," which keep their equili- 
 brium by being perpetually in motion. 
 
 It is as important for a country to have 
 great unrepresentative men as to have great 
 representative men. Socrates, St. Francis, 
 Dante, Wiclif, Giordano Bruno, Newman, 
 
 101
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 were all unrepresentative men. The 
 Founder of Christianity was, humanly 
 speaking, the supreme unrepresentative 
 man. 
 
 It is only the landlubber who makes a 
 boast of the fact that he is never sick at 
 sea. The homo sanus ought to be sick at 
 sea if he is accustomed to live on dry land. 
 
 Despotic governments need not be 
 afraid of education. In so far as they 
 educate their subjects, they undermine 
 their power of physical resistance; and, 
 though agitation is increased, the chance of 
 rebellion is diminished. What a despot 
 has to fear is a few intellectuals let loose 
 among a fighting people. 
 
 "He jests at scars that never felt a 
 wound." It is true courage to come out of 
 hospital and to go back into battle. 
 
 102
 
 B 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 AGS HOT appears to have visited Gambling— 
 Monte Carlo in the winter of the year f rom t h e 
 
 1902, and I find sundry observations in his Ratlonal 
 note-books which may be traced to this visit. 
 " Gambling and superstition," he writes, "go 
 hand in hand, and both result from the inex- 
 pugnable human instinct to escape from the 
 rational. In this place everything that is ab- 
 surd is greedily believed. You acquire luck 
 by touching a dwarf, by picking up a pin, by 
 wearing charms, by not seeing the moon 
 through glass, by seeing two magpies or 
 three parrots. You are in a world where two 
 and two have ceased to make four and may 
 make a hundred or nothing. That is ob- 
 viously the charm of it to men and women in 
 revolt against the horrid routine of cause and 
 effect. There is F. — temperate, frugal, busi- 
 ness-like, and sternly rational for fifty weeks 
 in the year, yet for the remaining fortnight 
 
 103
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 recklessly staking forty-pound notes on the 
 spin of the roulette ball or the fall of the 
 cards! It is his reaction against the deadly 
 sanity of Lombard Street. All men are said 
 to crave a nerve poison — alcohol, tobacco, or 
 drugs — and nearly all men seem at one time 
 or another to need a brain-poison — some nar- 
 cotic of the reasoning faculty — which it is 
 the function of this place to supply. 
 "Systems" But then the reasoning faculty has a habit 
 
 and the Un- r , r . .. . . 
 
 systematic ol reasserting itself while the narcotic is at 
 work. If the gambler would only accept this 
 irrational world on its own terms, little harm 
 would come to him. But he must proceed to 
 supply it with a logic which belongs to the 
 sane world, and herein lies his disaster. F., 
 who is in all other respects a rational man, 
 seriously believes while he is in this place 
 that one spin of the roulette ball influences 
 another spin of the roulette ball, and one deal 
 of the cards another deal of the cards. Both 
 beliefs are manifestly absurd, and if he ap- 
 plied them to his banking business he would 
 be ruined in a fortnight. Yet on these ab- 
 surdities he builds what he calls a " system," 
 and "invests" a thousand pounds. It is the 
 
 104
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 nature of the place to be system-proof. You 
 cannot have a system of the unsystematic. 
 Yet its supreme cunning lies in its constant 
 invitation to you to apply reason to its ab- 
 surdities, and in proportion as it succeeds it 
 increases your losses and its own gains. 
 
 The gambler is vain and inordinately san- 
 guine. If he wins, it is his own cleverness; if 
 he loses, it is his " accursed luck." What he 
 wins he spends, regardless of what he lost 
 yesterday or what he may lose to-morrow. 
 Above all things, never give moral advice to 
 a gambler, for it is part of the perversity of 
 this place that it will instantly rise up and 
 defeat your best maxims. You tell him to 
 come away; he defies you and stays, and at 
 the next coup wins heavily. Or he comes 
 away, and misses a coup that would have 
 brought him fortune, and bears you an eternal 
 grudge. There is no point in the game at 
 which you can say that prudence will be 
 rewarded or recklessness punished. Moral- 
 ize, if you will, about gambling in general; 
 but never stake your moral maxims on 
 a particular coup (a good rule for life in 
 general). 
 
 105
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 The last entry in this note-book will be 
 understood by philosophers who have been 
 to Monte Carlo: 
 
 The lights of the Casino shut out the stars. 
 
 ***** 
 The "in- Let me pass to a few more of Bagshot's 
 
 sincerity" of . ■,.. j i_i* ir • t-u 
 
 politicians sayings on politics and public anairs. 1 he 
 root difficulty of politics was, in his view, to 
 keep thought on a high plane, while sub- 
 mitting to the limitations in action which are 
 a necessary condition of public life. What a 
 politician dared do for forty millions of people 
 must often be the second-best, but his thought, 
 which was his own, should always be best. 
 However, let Bagshot speak for himself: 
 
 The suspicion of insincerity which clings 
 to politics arises largely from the fact that 
 politicians will not make confession of the 
 conditions under which they work, and 
 which, if openly confessed, are no shame 
 to them. A politician need never apologize 
 for opportunism in action, but he should 
 always be ashamed of compromise in 
 thought. 
 
 1 06
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 Politics progress most where men are 
 moderate in their action and uncompro- 
 mising in their ideals. 
 
 Thoughtwhich is individual should never 
 be dragged down to the level of action, 
 which is collective. 
 
 Where there are no extreme parties the 
 average of opinion will be low. 
 
 The merit of the English two-party sys- 
 tem is that it simplifies politics by squeez- 
 ing a great variety of opinions into the 
 same moulds ; its weakness, that it tends to 
 impose on thought the discipline which is 
 necessary for action. 
 
 Freedom of thought means division of 
 opinion. A party which is not divided 
 in Opposition will seldom have ideas on 
 which it is worth while to unite when in 
 power. 
 
 It is often necessary to tolerate evil in 
 public affairs, but it is always disastrous to 
 pretend that it is good. 
 
 The extremist who refuses an instal- 
 ment for fear it may prejudice his demand 
 for the whole betrays a rooted mistrust of 
 his own cause. 
 
 ro;
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 Homage to 
 " imaginary 
 fools " 
 
 Patriotic 
 Antipathies 
 and Inter- 
 national 
 Pace-makers 
 
 The worst spectacle in politics is that of 
 everybody doing what everybody dis- 
 approves, in the hope of pleasing somebody 
 else who doesn't exist. This fictitious being 
 is commonly called " the man in the street." 
 
 All the world is constantly engaged in 
 doing homage to imaginary fools. 
 
 Civilization is in its infancy. Its entire 
 history is comprised within 10,000 years. 
 Astronomers tell us that the world will 
 probably be habitable for at least fifteen 
 million years. If so, man has not yet run 
 the 1500th part of his career. 
 
 Next come 
 affairs : 
 
 a few notes on International 
 
 If you hear a man described as anti- 
 German, you may be certain, in nine cases 
 out of ten, that three years ago he was 
 anti-French. The fundamental thing is 
 the anti-temperament. It is a pure accident 
 what nation may at any given moment be- 
 come the subject of a patriotic antipathy. 
 
 The truth is that every active nation 
 needs a pace-maker, and when there is no 
 rival at hand to fill the part, it instantly 
 
 108
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 invents one. France, Russia, Germany, 
 and the United States, have each success- 
 ively fulfilled this purpose to Great Britain 
 in the last twelve years, and Great Britain 
 herself regularly discharges the same duty 
 to other nations. The function of the 
 " anti's " is to discover the pace-maker. It 
 is, therefore, idle to expect a state of inter- 
 national relations in which every nation will 
 be on equally good terms with every other. 
 
 If there were no international rivalries 
 it would be necessary to invent them, and 
 the collective intelligence which constitutes 
 national feeling will not for many genera- 
 tions to come reach the point at which the 
 rival is distinguished from the enemy. That 
 is still an exceptional effort of the individual 
 mind. 
 
 The great difficulty of international rela- The " De 
 
 , , .,, , , r ceitfulnes 
 
 tions is that they are still on the plane ot f Diplo- 
 natural selection and subject to the play of macy 
 forces which are quite unmoral; whereas 
 internal politics are (dimly) informed by 
 morality. Man, however, is so invincibly 
 moral in his reasoning processes that he is 
 constantly under the necessity of explaining 
 
 109
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 his instinctive combativeness by motives, 
 reasons, causes, pretexts, which are quite 
 irrelevant to it. Hence the inevitable deceit- 
 fulness of diplomacy, which is for ever en- 
 gaged in concealing the barbarian under a 
 frock coat. 
 
 Hypocrisy is imperfectly defined as the 
 homage which vice pays to virtue. It is 
 also the prediction of a morality to come. 
 Man rises to the height of his own hypo- 
 crisies. International morality will some 
 day be what diplomacy pretends it to be. 
 
 In so far as the Liberal is justly suspected 
 of indifference or hostility to Empire, it is 
 because he is always trying to apply the 
 moral law to the physical world. That is 
 his special function, but it is often prema- 
 ture. 
 
 A government is always in a sad plight 
 with a war to which it has reluctantly con- 
 sented. By a confusion of thought it carries 
 its reluctance on into the conduct of military 
 operations, and compounds with its con- 
 science by sparing the enemy. This is 
 absurd. There is no middle course between 
 keeping the peace and making war with all 
 
 1 10
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 your might. History abounds in instances 
 of the disasters which follow from neglect- 
 ing this elementary rule. 
 
 Here are a few observations taken at ran- Compensat- 
 
 . r t r ing Qualities 
 
 dom from a diary lor 1901 : 
 
 A disagreeable disposition is, in certain 
 circumstances, a high testimonial of ability. 
 My friend C, for instance, is of so dis- 
 agreeable a disposition that no one can 
 possibly have desired to retain his services, 
 unless they were indispensable. I know 
 nothing about him in his official capacity, 
 but the unanimous aversion to him in all 
 other capacities is proof positive that he is 
 a most competent man. 
 
 There is an almost pathetically charitable 
 inclination to assume that physical defici- 
 encies must be compensated for by moral 
 excellences. A plain woman starts with a 
 presumption in favour of her goodness, 
 which a beautiful woman will scarcely ac- 
 quire by years of good conduct. The worst 
 of it is that the presumption is mostly 
 groundless. 
 
 The same idea applies more or less to 
 
 1 1 1
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 intellectual qualities. " Be good, sweet 
 child, and let who will be clever." Herein 
 Kingsley expresses the fundamental British 
 idea that there is a hidden opposition be- 
 tween goodness and cleverness. Next to 
 that of being a humorist, there is no reputa- 
 tion which a British public man had better 
 avoid more carefully than that of being 
 clever. There is room for orenius and for 
 solid worth, but the path of talent is a 
 razor's edge. 
 
 I heard a certain man described the other 
 day as " one who had never used a bad 
 argument in a good cause." I don't know 
 this man, but I hate him. Tanto buon die 
 val niente. 
 
 I 12
 
 L 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 ET me put together in this chapter a Social in- 
 equalities 
 
 few of Bagshot's reflections on social 
 classes and social inequalities. Under date 
 ioth January, 1886, I find a closely written 
 note in his smallest handwriting on the fly- 
 leaf of an American book entitled, " What 
 Social Classes Owe to Each Other." 
 
 It is, of course, quite true (he writes) 
 that men are not born equal, but they are 
 not born unequal in the manner which 
 those who remind us of the fact appear 
 generally to assume. Natural inequalities 
 form no basis for class distinctions as they 
 are at present, though in an ideal society 
 they might very well form the basis of a 
 kind of life-peerage hierarchy. As things 
 are, the established families are constantly 
 engaged in protecting their unfit members 
 from the competition of the fitter in other 
 
 113 1
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 classes, with the inevitable result that the 
 sum-total of their capacity declines. If 
 natural endowments are the test, the ad- 
 vantage tends more and more to be with 
 the middle and artisan class. That fact 
 would quickly be revealed if we really had 
 the educational ladder from the elementary 
 schools to the Universities. It is not in- 
 marrying so much as the artificial pro- 
 tection of inferior types which threatens 
 an aristocracy in modern times. 
 
 It is probably a dim instinct of what is 
 for its own good that makes an aristocracy 
 warlike, even in modern times. The aristo- 
 cracy of feudal times was exposed to a 
 rigorous process of natural selection on 
 the battlefield, which kept it physically 
 vigorous and mentally self-respecting. The 
 aristocracy in these days has found no role 
 in peace to take the place of the part which 
 it formerly took in war. When it ceased 
 to be a fighting class it was doomed as a 
 governing class, and when it ceases to be 
 a governing class it becomes plutocracy 
 with a past. If the world is ever driven to 
 Socialism, it will not be from any predatory 
 
 114
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 instinct, but from sheer inability to dis- 
 cover the role of the rich in the modern 
 economy. 
 
 A few years later I find a series of short An argu- 
 
 ment for 
 
 comments on the same theme : mesalliances 
 
 I hear people constantly deploring the 
 fertility of the poor, and the comparative 
 infertility of the well-to-do. They assume 
 that Society is being replenished from the 
 " worst stock." Is there any foundation for 
 this belief? The so-called " worst stock " 
 provides admirable settlers for new coun- 
 tries. House them well, feed them well, 
 educate them well, and they yield the same 
 proportion of intelligent and influential 
 characters. The ideal marriage is that of 
 intellect and character, of culture and sim- 
 plicity, and in my Utopia the Athenian 
 would wed the Boeotian. The world would 
 gain greatly by the intermarriage of tin-. 
 intellectual and the working classes. A 
 mesalliance is biologically good. 
 
 # # ;•: # * 
 
 Clear your mind of the superficial symp- 
 
 "5
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 toms — dropping of aspirates, wearing of 
 corduroy or broadcloth — and you will see 
 an astonishing resemblance in the types of 
 men. My gardener is an Academic man 
 who never went to College; my secretary 
 an agricultural labourer with a University 
 education. My nephews (two notable ath- 
 letes) are natural backwoodsmen with a 
 thwarted instinct for physical toil which 
 finds its vent in rowing and Rugby foot- 
 ball. The great majority in all classes are 
 by nature manual labourers, and the upper- 
 class labourer is in chronic revolt against 
 the circumstances which compel him to 
 affect an interest in things intellectual. 
 
 #=i£r •£'- ?3&- -Hf 
 
 Tt" TV* TT •W* 
 
 Types of I went yesterday through the men's 
 
 Men 
 
 wards of a great London hospital. Illness 
 searches out and discriminates the types. 
 Pass down this ward where thirty men lie 
 in bed, shoulders and heads above the 
 counterpane, showing features sharpened 
 and refined by the wasting of sickness. 
 They strike on you as abstractions of char- 
 acter, purged of dross and accident, "all 
 that they might have been, all that they 
 
 116
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 could not be," the thwarted heart and core 
 of them. There to the right of me, with 
 splendid brow and profile and dreamy blue 
 eyes, lies the speculative man, poet, philo- 
 sopher, higher mathematician, mystic — 
 take your choice — all these potentially, and 
 fine gentleman above all, with such mild 
 dignity of patience and courage in his clear 
 glance that he is surely saint as well. I 
 ask the nurse for his name and calling, 
 and the answer comes short and sharp, 
 " Smith, stevedore, of Bermondsey, re- 
 covering from operation for cancer." Two 
 beds down lies Raphael's Pope Julian, 
 beetle-browed, sunk -eyed, full -bearded, 
 holding his head at precisely the charac- 
 teristic angle, and with just the authoritative 
 Pontifical air (Collins, grain-porter, East 
 India Dock); and opposite him again a 
 manifest Cardinal of the same period, full- 
 jowled, square-chinned, worldly, ecclesi- 
 astical (Webb, potman, Rotherhithe). Next 
 bed but two a distinguished man of the 
 world, slightly cynical, and ruse, but with 
 the perfect self-possession that comes of 
 long mingling with good society (Sothern, 
 
 117
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 bookstall-clerk, District Railway) ; then an 
 unmistakable prize-fighter, square-jawed, 
 heavy-chested, with enormously developed 
 muscles (Wilson, solicitor's copyist) ; and 
 next to him an oppressively intellectual 
 man, whose enormous forehead squeezes 
 down on nose, mouth, and chin, and 
 threatens to extinguish them (Rawson, 
 casual labourer). There at length is a 
 carpenter true to himself, but next to him 
 again an unmistakable King's Counsel, 
 who turns out to be a shop-walker; and 
 in the last bed of all an inglorious Milton — 
 shrivelled and reduced, but Milton still — 
 who proves to be a picker-up of waste- 
 paper. Here among a score of the poor 
 and very poor were all the physical types 
 which till now I had supposed to be the 
 special marks of the refined and well-to-do 
 and intellectually distinguished. 
 
 *^u •at- «m- si' 
 
 •7V* -A* TV" *7V* 
 
 The opposite Following on this line of thought are sun- 
 
 of Education . , . , , 
 
 dry observations about education. 
 
 We sadly need a word (says Bagshot), 
 which shall express the opposite of the 
 
 118
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 word " education," a word to denote that 
 turning-in of the mind upon itself, closing 
 of doors upon speculation, hardening of 
 mental tissues, which is the special vice of 
 the so-called educated. The cases in which 
 learning kills culture and science extin- 
 guishes philosophy are around us every- 
 where. There is also a kind of educa- 
 tion which expels nature and leaves a 
 vacuum. 
 
 Three notes in the same vein may be inserted 
 here: 
 
 Second-rate minds are apt to be con- 
 firmed in their inferiority by education. 
 This is why a liberal education so often 
 results in illiberal opinions. 
 
 The best mind feeds all day, like the 
 flower, from sun and air. The inferior mind 
 needs constant meals to keep it going. 
 
 A large number of scholars are men of 
 science gone astray, and many editions of 
 classical authors are but chemical analyses 
 of their component parts, from which the 
 
 119
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 element of literature is excluded. It is for 
 this reason, among others, that a classical 
 education so often fails to impart a literary 
 sense. 
 
 # # # # # 
 
 At the close of a German book on Education, 
 which is heavily interlined with notes of dis- 
 sent, I find a very singular outburst on Bag- 
 shot's part: 
 
 My heart (he writes) goes out to the un- 
 happy German youths who have fallen 
 under the yoke of this horrible pedant. It 
 enraees me to think of him and a hundred 
 like him let loose on a country to turn its 
 schools and universities into gigantic tool- 
 factories for the making of human imple- 
 ments. To-morrow I will start for Ger- 
 many and tell this man to his face that 
 education has no purpose but to make men 
 philosophers. He will not understand my 
 meaning, and he will laugh in my face, but 
 happily there are some people in Germany 
 who do understand, and by-and-by they 
 will rise up and slay these pedants and 
 save their country. 
 
 1 20
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 Side by side with this I may place these No Litera- 
 
 f . ture without 
 
 stray notes from a diary of the same speculation 
 year: 
 
 There is no literature without specula- 
 tion. When a subject can be exhausted it 
 has ceased to be literature and become 
 material for a Blue-book. 
 
 If science enlarges the bounds of know- 
 ledge, it also enormously expands our con- 
 ception of the unknown. The modern 
 positive and scientific world has a sense of 
 mystery which was altogether lacking in 
 the ancient and mediaeval world, and 
 which is akin to the mysticism of the East. 
 The scientific age is that which has the 
 measure of its own ignorance. 
 
 What curious instinct is it which has led 
 the Christian world to describe the " aees 
 of faith " as the " dark ages " ? Last Sun- 
 day I heard a preacher exhort his congre- 
 gation to return to the Christianity of the 
 " first six centuries," and within five min- 
 utes he was speaking of a large part of this 
 period as the " dark ages." 
 
 12 I
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 The " dark ages " were apparently more 
 convinced than any of the completeness of 
 their illumination. 
 
 ***** 
 
 The Morti- Let me wind up this section with a more 
 
 fications of i i t-» i i 
 
 Bagshot personal record. Bagshot appears to have 
 been seriously annoyed on 26th October, 
 1900. The cause of the trouble is unknown 
 to me, but his diary contains this entry: 
 
 I am told that the junior clerks in my 
 department regard me as a demigod, raised 
 high above law and discipline. Yet this 
 morning I received a letter from my political 
 chief which makes me feel like a fifth-form 
 boy under the lash of a school-master. My 
 chief, I gather, has received a letter from 
 the Prime Minister which makes him feel 
 like an usher who has been reprimanded 
 by a Head master; and the Prime Minister 
 probably has received a letter from the 
 Sovereign which makes him feel like a foot- 
 man who has been scolded by his mistress. 
 Now I shall go home and scold my cook, 
 who will quite certainly scold the kitchen- 
 maid. Such is the link which binds the 
 
 122
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 highest and humblest; but the kitchen- 
 maid, I hope, will feel less mortified than 
 I do. 
 
 To be where no one has the risfht to 
 blame is the vain hope of middle-aged 
 vanity. My colleague, Pulsford, left the 
 public service to gain this freedom, and 
 then married a widow with two daughters, 
 whose censure is reoular and oral. 
 
 I read in the Life of Archbishop Ben- 
 son that he never could face the governors 
 of the school of which he was Head master 
 without an inward conviction that he was 
 going to be summarily dismissed. That is 
 a touch of nature which has given me much 
 comfort. The prospect of an interview with 
 my official superiors always fills me with the 
 same unfounded sense of calamity to come. 
 
 The entry winds up with an injunction 
 which I have often heard from his own lips, 
 and which I have known him describe as 
 "one of the three golden rules of worldly 
 wisdom " : 
 
 " Never display a uound — except to a 
 
 physician." 
 
 123
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 Worldly " N my last chapter I said that Bagshot 
 
 Wisdom- 
 
 I 
 
 the golden ■*■ described a certain maxim as one of 
 " the three golden rules of worldly wisdom." 
 This has naturally set me searching among 
 his papers to find the other two. Clearly 
 Bagshot had three in his own mind, but, 
 oddly enough, whenever he records them on 
 paper, he makes them four or even five. 
 Here, for instance, is a fragment on the sub- 
 ject, dated ioth June, 1894, which I will copy 
 down exactly as it is written : 
 
 Be rich among the poor rather than poor 
 among the rich. 
 
 Take all but the most important things 
 at their surface value. 
 
 Seek the prizes of your own calling and 
 be resolutely hors concours to all others. 
 
 Never display a wound — except to a 
 physician. 
 
 124
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 Thus (he adds), you will avoid vain 
 striving for the trivial or the impossible, 
 and, if you suffer hurt, be spared the mor- 
 tification of thinking that others are wit- 
 nesses of your discomfiture. Let your phy- 
 sician be a trusty friend who will not break 
 your confidence. Let him see you without 
 your clothes on, but never disrobe to an 
 acquaintance. 
 
 Then follows a note upon " surface Surface 
 
 , ,, Values 
 
 values : 
 
 B. asked you to dinner the other night 
 and you enjoyed yourself. You think he 
 called you a bore after you had gone? 
 Very likely he did, but you enjoyed your- 
 self. What more do you want? It was 
 amiable of B. to have been so agreeable 
 to you, if he thinks you a bore. 
 
 The Mauleverers asked you to their best 
 house-party and you had three very good 
 days. "Why did they do it?" you keep 
 asking yourself. You are sure that Mrs. 
 Mauleverer dislikes you and wants to get 
 something out of you. Perhaps she does, 
 but you had three very good days, and it 
 
 125
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 is extremely doubtful if Mrs. Mauleverer 
 will get anything in return. 
 
 You went to " The Gaiety Girl " last 
 night, and you grumbled all the time be- 
 cause it wasn't Shakespeare set to Bee- 
 thoven. To-morrow you are going to a 
 dance — you in your ridiculous forties — and 
 you will yawn and feel aggrieved because 
 it isn't a political dinner-party. You want 
 to go and you want to complain because it 
 isn't something else. There is no help for 
 you. 
 
 You can't enjoy a holiday because you 
 have to go back to work next week, nor a 
 rose because it will fade to-morrow, nor 
 your robust middle-age because you are 
 going to be old and decrepit some day. 
 The ground j s CO vered with flowers and 
 you sigh and say the grave is underneath. 
 There is no help for you. 
 
 There are about six people in the world 
 whose motives matter to you. Study these, 
 if you will and can, but in regard to all 
 others consider only if what they do is 
 agreeable, helpful, or convenient to you, 
 or if what you can do is agreeable, helpful, 
 
 126
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 or convenient to them. What they think 
 is of no consequence to you and you will 
 never discover it. 
 
 The other maxims explain themselves, but "Seek the 
 I find Bagshot returning again to the idea of youTown 
 pursuing your own prizes and being " reso- callm s" 
 lutely hors concours to all others." It is the 
 advice which he gives oftenest in his letters 
 to friends and colleagues. 
 
 Choose your own world and live in it. 
 Don't, if you are a public servant, expect 
 the applause and notoriety of a public man; 
 don't, if you are a professional man, expect 
 the prizes of what is called " Society " ; 
 don't, if you are an artist, expect to shine 
 as an author. There can be no greater 
 folly than to play another man's game on 
 his terms — amateur against professional. 
 In life the champions do not "concede 
 points " to their inferiors. We all start from 
 scratch in each race. 
 
 Let me add here a few other notes and Some mixed 
 
 . , r ,. rr . maxims 
 
 maxims gathered from different times: 
 
 i 27
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 The world admires the worldling only 
 when it is sure that there are some things 
 in which he is not worldly. 
 
 The world forgives the cynic because it 
 believes him to be a poseui\ It has no 
 mercy on the real thing. 
 
 It is a great part of worldly wisdom to 
 recognize other kinds of cleverness than 
 your own. One of the greatest mistakes 
 you can make is to think a man stupid be- 
 cause he isn't clever in your way. 
 
 " Charity believeth all things" — but so 
 unfortunately do envy and malice. 
 
 If you want to prosper in the worldly 
 sense you had better do the wrong thing 
 in the right way than the right thing in the 
 wrong way. 
 
 It was long a belief of rich men that poor 
 men had no right to the gout. In the same 
 way the smart greatly resent the assumption 
 of their follies by the dowdy. 
 
 Not only does the world answer the fool 
 according to his folly, but it suspects the 
 suspicious, is hard to the harsh, and thinks 
 ill of those who think meanly of it. The 
 world is as penetrating as a child in dis- 
 
 128
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 covering and punishing those who dislike 
 it. 
 
 " Better is an ass that carrieth me than 
 a horse that layeth me on the ground." It 
 is the greatest folly to seek a position to 
 which your abilities are unequal. 
 
 That society is most to be pitied which 
 lives perpetually in a condition of mutual 
 disrespect. Never seek a friendship with 
 those whom you do not respect. 
 
 Conform to your kind in everything that 
 is immaterial. It is almost as silly to make 
 it a point of conscience not to wear a coat 
 with gold lace on it, when custom requires 
 it, as it is miserable to desire a gold coat 
 for its own sake. 
 
 This last idea is carried on in two entries 
 of the year 1889: 
 
 Mr. Gladstone dropped an admirable That "in- 
 
 _, -11 1 controllable 
 
 phrase last night. " 1 he right hon. gentle- conscience' 
 man, with that incontrollable conscience of 
 his." . . . Surely the mot jtistc and of widest 
 application. How one hates it, that con- 
 science out of control, ranging at large over 
 the trivial, breaking butterflies on wheels, 
 
 129 K
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 pouncing on mole-hills and discovering 
 them to be mountains of right and wrong! 
 An incontrollable conscience fails almost 
 invariably to discover a real case of right 
 and wrong. 
 
 The prig is he who renders unto God 
 the things that are Caesar's. 
 
 It was part of Bagshot's philosophy that in 
 the long run the simple people got the better 
 of the clever people: 
 
 Bismarck boasted that he deceived the 
 whole world by telling the truth. It is thus 
 that the simple defeat the clever, but with- 
 out intending- it. 
 
 Simplicity is one of the few virtues which 
 cannot be counterfeited. It is often the last 
 touch which great ability needs to make it 
 genius. 
 
 Surely one of the most charming tributes 
 to a friend is Martial's to Fabullinus: 
 
 Tarn saepe nostrum decipi Fabullinum 
 miraris, Aule? semper homo bonus tiro est. 
 
 [You wonder, Aulus, that our friend 
 Fabullinus is so often deceived? A good 
 man is always a novice?^ 
 
 1 30
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 Next let me put in a few more observations "As between 
 about friendship: Friends " 
 
 Aristotle was right when he said that the 
 test of friendship was to share a friend. 
 
 He is no true friend who thinks that he 
 puts a friend under an obligation by doing 
 him a service. 
 
 Persistently doing what you don't want 
 to do under the idea that you are sacrificing 
 yourself for others may so embitter your 
 character as to make you intolerable to 
 others. 
 
 There are some services which you can- 
 not do to a friend without sacrificing his 
 friendship. I once had the opportunity of 
 extricating a distinguished man from a 
 position which was extremely mortifying to 
 his pride. He was inordinately grateful, 
 but he never forgave me for having known 
 of his catastrophe, and I saw him no more. 
 
 If you have to explain to a friend why 
 he has given you offence, you may be sure, 
 in nine cases out of ten, that you are wrong 
 in taking offence. 
 
 The sympathy of your friends will be in 
 
 131
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 inverse ratio to the number of your griev- 
 ances. 
 
 You may have one grievance, but two 
 are dangerous, and three make you absurd. 
 If three people do you an injury, it is ad- 
 visable to forgive two of them. 
 
 132
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 BAGS HOT'S comments touch lightly Literature 
 upon literature in many directions, and Middle-aged 
 he was apparently a wide but rather capri- 
 cious reader. His answer with the commenta- 
 tors on classics, ancient or modern, I have 
 already noted, and again and again he de- 
 nounces the rubbish-heaps of irrelevancies 
 which they have accumulated about the 
 text. 
 
 I am making discovery for the first time 
 (he writes in 1900) of a great deal of litera- 
 ture which I supposed myself to know in- 
 timately as a boy. Greek plays which I 
 had by heart when I was at school, and 
 still to a considerable extent retain in my 
 memory, large parts of Virgil, Lucretius, 
 Juvenal, Lucian, and in modern literature 
 Dante, Shakespeare, and Bacon, have sud- 
 denly possessed me as human documents. 
 
 133
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 For years I have known the words, and 
 have repeated them mechanically, but now 
 the meaning comes flooding in upon me, 
 and I am struck with my own stupidity in 
 having missed so much of it for so many 
 years. This rediscovery of the familiar 
 and enrichment of it with one's own ex- 
 perience is one of the joys of middle-age, 
 and I give myself great airs about it to the 
 scholarly youths, shaking my head mysteri- 
 ously and telling them that they will only 
 begin to understand when they have lived 
 my tale of years. 
 
 A Test of Somewhere he has read a saying of Victor 
 
 Hugo's that "genius is the achievement of 
 the impossible," and he marks it with high 
 approval : 
 
 This (he says) and nothing else is what 
 we ordinary people mean when we use the 
 word. Our measure of genius is what we 
 can by no effort of imagination conceive 
 ourselves as doing. If I lived for two hun- 
 dred years and devoted myself to the 
 writing of poetry, I can conceive myself 
 writing a considerable part of what ap- 
 
 134
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 pears in most anthologies. A mistake, no 
 doubt, on my part, but still I can conceive 
 it. But I cannot by any flight of imagina- 
 tion conceive myself writing the Ode to 
 a Nightingale, or the Solitary Reaper, 
 or Lycidas, or the invocation in " The 
 Ring and the Book." 1 The first appeal to 
 me as exquisite but attainable accomplish- 
 ments, the second as miracles, and the 
 miraculous alone is orenius. 
 
 On the margin of an extremely utilitarian The Utiiita- 
 book which questioned the value of literary 
 studies, Bagshot has written Leonardo's 
 observation about his own aphorisms: " I 
 know that many will say this work is use- 
 less. . . . Often when I see one of these take 
 this work in his hand, I wonder whether, like 
 a monkey, he will not smell it and ask me if 
 it is something to eat." At the end of an 
 ultra-refined and exceedingly "precious" little 
 volume he has written: — 
 
 Taste, like humour, is an intermittent 
 
 quality. Most of us have moods in which 
 
 we are very vulgar. It is a common trick 
 
 Book I, 1 391-14 i'i. 
 
 '35
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 to disguise a vulgar thought in an absurd 
 frippery of language. 
 
 Another literary theme on which he dwells 
 is the diabolical perversity of the pen. He 
 quotes Mr. Sludge, the medium: 
 
 Tables do tip 
 In the oddest way of themselves, and pens, good Lord, 
 Who knows if you drive them or they drive you? 
 
 Literary I am persuaded (he goes on) that half 
 
 the literature in the world was written by 
 men who intended to write something en- 
 tirely different when they took pen in 
 hand. I am perpetually haunted by the 
 things that refuse to be said. To-day 
 I have spent an hour trying to say a com- 
 paratively simple thing in a letter to H., 
 and I have said a dozen other things, and 
 entirely failed to say that particular thing. 
 The moment I think I am going to over- 
 take it, it flies off at a tangent and utterly 
 eludes me, or something else crosses the 
 scent, and I am away after that, before I 
 have time to think where I am going. Or 
 else I have a perfectly clear image in my 
 mind for which I can find no words that 
 
 136
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 even approximately express its form and 
 shape. I start out to describe it, and I 
 describe something which may be quite 
 definite and intelligible, but something 
 which is entirely different from my thought. 
 Much writing is in this way a changeling 
 which the pen has foisted between the 
 author and his thought. This is, I suppose, 
 the reason why writers can seldom bear 
 to read over what they have just written. 
 They put it away for a week, and, having 
 forgotten their thought, complacently ac- 
 cept the changeling in its stead. 
 
 Thoughts are chords, and words are An Orches- 
 
 , .... . trated Lite- 
 
 Single notes — for which reason music so rature 
 
 often expresses thought more profoundly 
 than speech. Perhaps in another world 
 there will be a kind of orchestrated litera- 
 ture combining the two — a speech of many 
 parts all blending into one immensely en- 
 riched meaning. Dante's magical descrip- 
 tion of Beatrice's speech — per le sorrise 
 parolctle brevi x — has to my ear the effect 
 of a chord by its blending of the voice and 
 the smile in one infinitely caressing phra 
 ' Paradiso I, 95. 
 137
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 A page later comes this : 
 
 A Blending Perhaps, too, in this other world there 
 
 will be some way of blending men so as to 
 make orood the deficiencies of individuals. 
 I could name twenty men who, if judici- 
 ously combined, would make ten men of 
 genius. There is H., who is profound in 
 thought, but incoherent in words; mingle 
 him with A., who is all words, but has no 
 ideas, and you would have one first-class 
 man of letters. There is Y., who is im- 
 mense in energy, but confused in purpose; 
 mingle him with N., who has the vision of 
 a seer, but is incapable of action, and you 
 would have one statesman of the first class. 
 Or take W., with his beautiful draughts- 
 manship, and mix him with B., who revels in 
 formless colour, and you will have an artist 
 of the first rank. The rarity in nature is the 
 last gift which makes the others service- 
 able and coherent. The great man does not 
 so much tower above his fellows as add this 
 final touch to the gifts which they possess. 
 
 I pass over much, and come to the last 
 journal of all. I can hardly do better than 
 
 133
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 transcribe the last three pages exactly as they The Shelf of 
 
 j nm. • i. • i_ the Disre- 
 
 stand. 1 here is no obvious connection be- gar d e d 
 tween the entries, yet they seem to work to 
 a sort of undesigned conclusion : 
 
 There are two shelves in my library 
 wholly reserved for old books that are 
 quite dead. Nothing goes there that any- 
 one has heard of, and I test them occasion- 
 ally by bringing an eminent bibliophile to 
 inspect them. If there is any one of them 
 that he knows or has heard of, it is straight- 
 way banished. For this is the home of the 
 disregarded, and it is pleasant to think that 
 the ghosts of their authors may sometimes 
 visit them, and take comfort when they see 
 me finger them, and browse on their faded 
 pages, as I often do. For there is a certain 
 charm in their artless inferiority, and, better 
 than the masters, they help me to realize 
 the common thoughts of average folk who 
 have otherwise left no records. ( )nc of the 
 falsities of history and literature is that the 
 average- life is transmitted to us through 
 the distorting medium inius, and this 
 
 might be corrected, ii we • ould unearth the 
 
 [39
 
 tions. 
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 average people and let them speak for 
 themselves. A society for the study of for- 
 gotten books would have more to say for 
 itself than many other learned bodies. 
 
 Some How seldom one meets a clever man 
 
 Random , <• , . 
 
 Observa- wno has enough conscience not to beat a 
 
 stupid one by a bad argument. 
 
 Of a certain politician : X. so enjoys the 
 luxury of differing from other people that, 
 though a Conservative in politics, he prefers 
 to call himself a Liberal and differ from the 
 Liberal Party than to call himself a Con- 
 servative and agree with the Conservative 
 Party. 
 
 The whole of metaphysics lurks in the 
 tenses of an ordinary verb. If you know 
 the meaning of "am," "will," "shall," and 
 " was," you have fathomed the secrets of 
 existence. 
 
 Luther began by extolling reason as 
 " something divine," and ended by calling 
 it " that ugly devil's bride " ; Cromwell be- 
 gan by extolling liberty, and ended by 
 "taking away that bauble." 
 
 140
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 I talked yesterday to a man who has Two kinds 
 won his way up from the working-class to 
 a distinguished position among- public men, 
 and I asked him — putting wealth and am- 
 bition aside — which was, day by day, the 
 more pleasurable existence. He answered, 
 to my surprise, that the workman's life was, 
 beyond all comparison, the more pleasur- 
 able — that he had never had the same 
 pleasure as in the evening's rest after a 
 day at the foundry, or as on a Sunday after 
 a week's hard toil. No work was so exhil- 
 arating, no leisure so rich and peaceful. 
 Compare with this the depression of the 
 brain-worker, the absence of any sharp 
 boundary between his work and his leisure, 
 the constant slopping over of the one into 
 the other, the restlessness of intellectual 
 fatigue, and the pitiful shifts to which the 
 intellectual man was reduced in his effort 
 to supply the physical element which was 
 lacking in his artificial life. Life lor life, 
 no natural healthy man would hesitate for 
 a moment to choose the hand-working in 
 preference to the brain-working life. " I 
 hope it is true," adds Bagshot, "but only 
 
 ' 1'
 
 Irony 
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 those who have tried both have the right 
 to say it. The intellectuel who says it 
 exposes himself to the suspicion of doing 
 so, in order, as Bacon put it, ' to abate the 
 edge of envy.' " 
 Life's Great Life's great irony is that achievement 
 
 defeats itself in the moment of its victory. 
 Tantae molts erat Romanam condere gentem. 
 The poet has scarcely finished before the 
 historian takes up the tale of the Decline 
 and Fall. Our Paradise may be lost and 
 regained, but never held and enjoyed. We 
 develop our brains and pay by the decay 
 of our bodies ; we refine our tastes and pay 
 by the decay of our morals; we become 
 humane and find that we have lost our en- 
 durance, we enjoy the blessings of peace 
 and find that our bones are full of water. 
 There is stupendous energy of building 
 up, stupendous energy of tearing down, 
 but no moment of repose for the atom or 
 the planet or the human spirit. The city 
 of the soul whirls and vibrates like a 
 machine-shop fitted with dynamos. Yet, 
 somewhere in the heart of it all, the indi- 
 vidual can make his own peace on his own 
 
 142
 
 THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 
 
 terms and defy the whole universe to dis- 
 turb it. It still matters nothing to me that 
 the earth and the solar system are whirling 
 through space at the rate of sixty miles a 
 second from no one knows where to no 
 one knows whither, if I may sit in my gar- 
 den and listen to the bees on a summer 
 afternoon. 
 
 *r* *jv *is iv *F* 
 
 The last entry of all is another aphorism The Last 
 from Leonardo : n ry 
 
 Thou, O God, sellest all good things at 
 the price of labour. 
 
 .vii K II I ■ : PRIN ill. I.v < li,\ri l. v. in i i INGHAM AN: 
 rOOKl COURT, UIANCKKY LAN I .
 
 
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