Shakespeare, Bagehot And The Nature Of Genius

Writers write. So here I am again trying to keep on top of my little demon who jumps up and down on my left shoulder (angels are on the right) and bellows into my lughole 'You're an underachiever Roberts.'

I'll tell you who wasn't an underachiever - that William Shakespeare. I'll tell you who else wasn't an underachiever - that Walter Bagehot. You've met them both before in these pages. Shakespeare you will have met in plenty of other places. Bagehot may be more of a stranger but he is the object of my scholarly attentions and I have been stuck in a rut of wordlessness for too many months now, hence this attempt at a break-out into the sunny uplands of academic productivity.

I don't think we need dwell on whether the Boy Shakespeare was a genius. Of course he bloody was. Certainly the Boy Bagehot thought so, though he used the g word only three times within the twenty thousand words he lavished on Shakespeare the Individual (1853, and thereby a piece of immediate post-juvenilia)- once to describe Goethe, once in the context of 'manifold genius' (the designation important for Bagehot's contemplation of genius) and finally in the contrasting context of a lesser style of genius that fails (unlike Shakespeare) to 'put out [its] proceeds properly in actual life'. In later work Bagehot who rather suffered from duomania (as recognised by his 1939 biographer William Irvine, 111, Walter Bagehot, Longmans) segregated genius into two types - 'symmetrical' and 'irregular'. Bagehot rather disdained the irregular, not least Dickens whom he placed in this caste. His distrust of Dickens' sentimentality gives us the clue as to the type of Bagehot's own genius - he was a regular sort of chap and a regular sort of genius. His was a studiously prosaic output. Might he even not have been a genius, but merely a talent? His biographers' opinions vary. Richard Holt Hutton and Mrs Russell Barrington were firmly in the genius camp and C.H. Sisson was equally firmly in the opposite school. In fact Sisson regarded Bagehot as a charlatan, albeit  a talented one. But let's leave it to rest with two further biographers, the aforementioned William Irvine (1939) and Norman St. John-Stevas (1965 in the preface to the first volume of his studiously edited Collected Works).

Irvine's is a cool-headed appraisal,

Among nineteenth-century thinkers Bagehot was perhaps not one of the greatest, yet he was certainly one of the most universal. As a writer and thinker he did not enjoy the luxury of pre-eminent genius, but he possessed a breadth and balance which such genius frequently lacks. He included within himself much of the past and therefore much of the future. In an age of various and widespread confusion he applied with cool common sense and keen penetration an ancient and profound [Aristotlean] philosophy to an immense variety of problems, both old and new.

St John-Stevas is far less circumspect,

Walter Bagehot (1826-77), banker, economist, political thinker and commentator, critic and man of letters was Victorian England's most versatile genius.

The versatility is the difficulty - does it disqualify a being from genius? Well I've been thinking about that and I think the answer is no but there has to be some product of lasting worth rather than a plethora of the merely meritorious. What of Bagehot bears re-reading? Quite a lot actually and I do not just mean the usual suspect, The English Constitution. I would even include Shakespeare the Individual in that category. For the constitutional theories that made Bagehot a genius inform his literary criticism and when your brain has been stewed by modern literary theory he makes a nicely refreshing and enthusiastic change.

So here goes: Shakespeare huge genius. Bagehot common or garden regular genius. You heard it here first.