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The Mind Washes Its Hands in a Basin» Walter Bagehot's Literary Essays and Impure Criticism

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The Mind Washes Its Hands in a Basin» Walter Bagehot's Literary Essays and Impure Criticism English Literature ISSN 2420-823X Vol. 2 – Num. 2 – December 2015 «The mind washes its hands in a basin» Walter Bagehot’s Literary Essays and Impure Criticism Silvana Colella (Università degli Studi di Macerata, Italia) Abstract Bagehot’s literary essays provide fertile ground for the exploration of mid-Victorian negotiations with notions of aesthetic impurity. Bagehot looked at the increasing democratiza- tion of culture and the changing habits of readers with more excitement than apprehension. His critical perspective was predicated not on an elitist form of detachment from the unrefined philosophies of the commercial classes, but on a kind of respectful proximity to the practicali- ties that affected the life of what he called the «transacting and trading multitude». In order to bring literature to business, Bagehot brought business into literature. His stance lacks purity and solemnity: standards of value imported from the business sphere co-habit with more traditional notions of aesthetic excellence; a mixture of high-brow and middle-brow concerns inspires his assessments of literary works. As this article demonstrates, Bagehot’s criticism thrives on an impure and sometimes awkward combination of aesthetic and business values. Summary 1 Introduction. – 2 The Critic and the Broker. – 3 An Experiencing Nature. – 4 Conclusion. Keywords Criticism. Economics. Literary essays. Walter Bagehot. The soul ties its shoe; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous. (Walter Bagehot) 1 Introduction The list of possible candidates to the title of «the greatest Victorian», compiled by George M. Young in 1937, includes the eminent names of Karl Marx, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Charles Darwin, and John Ruskin (Young 1937, p. 1137). After briefly summing up their cre- dentials, Young awards the honour to none other than Walter Bagehot, «a man not too illustrious or too consummate to be companionable, but one, nevertheless, whose ideas took root and are still bearing» (p. 1138). The «robust and masculine sanity» of Victorian civilization, Young avers, finds its most eloquent expression in Bagehot’s style of essay writing (p. 1138). DOI 10.14277/2420-823X/EL-2-2-15-3 219 English Literature, 2, 2, 2015, pp. 219-236 ISSN 2420-823X Posterity has not endorsed Young’s idiosyncratic judgment. With the no- table exception of Lombard Street (1873) and The English Constitution (1867), still rated as classics by monetary economists and legal theorists respectively, Bagehot’s works have elicited scant attention. In his book- length study, The Case of Walter Bagehot (1972), C.H. Sisson revisits the essays of «the greatest Victorian» mainly to expose the alleged vulgarity of his thought: his «more refined ideas», Sisson argues, «are of an extraordi- nary vulgarity. He talks of the greatest artists as showing ‘an enthusiasm for reality’» (Sisson 1972, p. 42). Why this enthusiasm should be deemed symptomatic of vulgarity depends on Sisson’s pronounced distaste for Bagehot’s notion of reality, punctuated as it is by copious references to the world of money matters. These references appear all the more insidi- ous when they crop up in the literary essays, «putting at the centre of the intellectual stage what belongs to the periphery» (p. 41). Sisson repeatedly condemns the effrontery of the «mere man of affairs» (p. 41), the banker or the economist, who trespasses upon the preserves of specialists, criticizing Bagehot for his incapacity to appreciate a purely aesthetic experience. In Sisson’s understanding, the literary man and the banker, the critic and the economist, should not be trading partners in the intellectual arena. Yet for late Victorian and early twentieth-century readers, it was pre- cisely Bagehot’s effortless mingling of aesthetic, economic and political perspectives that qualified his impure prose as an accomplished intellec- tual achievement. Richard Holt Hutton praised Bagehot’s «excursive im- agination» which, he claimed, added «lucidity and caution» to his writing (Hutton 1891, vol. 1, p. xxvi). The American biographer, William Irvine, was even more explicit in his appreciation of the many-sided approach favoured in the literary essays: «Bagehot brought to the study of litera- ture almost every species of equipment but that of the literary historian […] the result is that his essays seem to have an added dimension. […] He writes with the ready confidence and easy adaptability of one who is ac- customed to assume many points of view, to be at home in a great variety of surroundings» (Irvine 1939, pp. 164-165). Bagehot’s economic writings have also been valued for their literary finish: Lombard Street, Forrest Morgan claimed, reads like a novel (Morgan 1891, vol. 1, p. xxi); «it is not necessary to understand it much» – John Maynard Keynes famously ob- served – «in order to enjoy it a good deal» (Keynes 1915, p. 371). The most recent publication that engages with the works of the Victorian polymath, Prochaska’s The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot (2013), pays tribute in its very shape to the hybrid style of intellectual discourse for which Bagehot has been alternatively commended and attacked. The book is a collage of un- marked extracts from Bagehot’s writings framed as a faux autobiography; it is a literary experiment in «historical reconstruction» (Prochaska 2013, p. ix) that blurs the boundaries between memoir, biography and fiction. In the hybrid shape of Prochaska-Bagehot’s memoir one can detect a rever- 220 Colella. «The mind washes its hands in a basin» ISSN 2420-823X English Literature, 2, 2, 2015, pp. 219-236 beration of the taste for the impure that marks the dialogic prose of the Victorian critic, political analyst and economist – a prose often considered «difficult to categorize» (Kimball 2002, p. 52). Though largely unread today, Bagehot’s literary essays provide fertile ground for the exploration of mid-Victorian negotiations with notions of aesthetic impurity.1 There is no systematic theory of literature at work in these essays. The attempt to formulate a theory of the «literesque», in the 1864 article on Wordsworth, Browning and Tennyson, has failed to convince even the most admiring of his critics.2 It is not Bagehot’s con- ceptualization of literary purity (or its opposite), but the cultivation of an impure critical stance in his literary essays that is worthy of closer scru- tiny. Biographical explanations have been adduced to account for Bage- hot’s peculiar critical angle. He wrote the majority of his literary essays while training and working as a banker, immersed in double-entry book- keeping during the day but devoted to literature in the evenings. Written in the intervals of business, Bagehot’s literary essays – so the argument goes – bear the impress of his occupation: he speaks like a banker with a keen eye for the practical details of mercantile life.3 There is some truth in this explanation, but the line of thinking I would like to pursue places Bagehot more squarely in the context of Victorian print culture as an organic intellectual who did not shy away from the task of orienting the cultural tastes of the middle classes and of the business community in particular. Unlike Matthew Arnold, Bagehot was relatively unperturbed by the Philistinism of his contemporaries: «I think a man ought to be able to be a ‘Philistine’ if he chooses», he writes in the essay on Crabb Robinson, «there is a sickly incompleteness about people too fine for the world, and too nice to work their way in it» (St John-Stevas 1968, vol. 4, p. 487). Bagehot looked at the increasing democratization of culture and the changing habits of readers with more excitement than apprehension. Accordingly, his critical perspective was predicated not on an elitist form of detachment from the unrefined, materialistic or even vulgar philosophies of the commercial classes, but on a kind of empathic and respectful proxim- ity to the practicalities that affected the life of the «transacting and trad- ing multitude».4 In order to bring literature to business, Bagehot brought 1 It is safe to assume that, unlike Lombard Street, the literary essays are not widely known today – hence my choice to include extended quotations from Bagehot’s texts. 2 Irvine, for instance, speaks of the «narrowness of [Bagehot’s] formula» (Irvine 1939, p. 97) when discussing his distinction between «pure», «ornate» and «grotesque» poetry. See St John-Stevas (1965, vol. 2, pp. 318-366). 3 See Irvine (1939) and Buchan (1959, p. 76). 4 This definition of the industrious middle classes appears in Bagehot’s 1856 essay «The Character of Sir Robert Peel»: «In his later career, the second Sir Robert Peel was the states- man who most completely and thoroughly expressed the sentiments of this new dynasty; – in- Colella. «The mind washes its hands in a basin» 221 English Literature, 2, 2, 2015, pp. 219-236 ISSN 2420-823X business into literature. His stance lacks purity and solemnity: standards of value imported from the business sphere co-habit with more traditional notions of aesthetic excellence; a mixture of high-brow and middle-brow concerns inspires his assessments of literary works; genius is less a ques- tion of originality than of «sagacity», a quintessentially mercantile virtue. In other words, Bagehot’s criticism thrives on an impure and sometimes awkward combination of aesthetic and business values, as I argue in this essay. Whether or not this contamination produces valuable and enduring insights, it certainly suggests a willingness to explore the contact zones be- tween high and low, élite and popular taste, the purity of art and the impurity of life which sits uneasily with the Arnoldian paradigm of disinterestedness.5 2 The Critic and the Broker In a letter written when he was familiarizing himself with the solemn art of double-entry bookkeeping, Bagehot reports: «I have hunting, banking, shipping, publishers, an article, and a Christmas to do, all at once, and it is my opinion they will all get muddled.
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