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