As a thinker, Bagehot’s leading positions may be roughly summarized thus:  in history, that reasoning from the present to the past is generally wrong and frequently nonsense; in politics, that abstract systems are foolish, that a government which does not benefit its subjects has no rights against one that will, that the masses had much better let the upper ranks do the governing than meddle with it themselves, that all classes are too eager to act without thinking and ought not to attempt so much; in society, that democracy is an evil because it leaves no specially trained upper class to furnish models for refinement.  But there is vastly more besides this, and his value lies much more in the mental clarification afforded by his details than in the new principles of action afforded by his generalizations.  He leaves men saner, soberer, juster, with a clearer sense of perspective, of real issues, that more than makes up for a slight diminution of zeal.

As pure literature, the most individual trait in his writings sprang from his scorn of mere word-mongering divorced from actual life.  “A man ought to have the right of being a Philistine if he chooses,” he tells us:  “there is a sickly incompleteness in men too fine for the world and too nice to work their way through it.”  A great man of letters, no one has ever mocked his craft so persistently.  A great thinker, he never tired of humorously magnifying the active and belittling the intellectual temperament.  Of course it was only half-serious:  he admits the force and utility of colossal visionaries like Shelley, constructive scholars like Gibbon, ascetic artists like Milton, even light dreamers like Hartley Coleridge; indeed, intellectually he appreciates all intellectual force, and scorns feeble thought which has the effrontery to show itself, and those who are “cross with the agony of a new idea.”  But his heart goes out to the unscholarly Cavalier with his dash and his loyalty, to the county member who “hardly reads two books per existence,” and even to the rustic who sticks to his old ideas and whom “it takes seven weeks to comprehend an atom of a new one.”  A petty surface consistency must not be exacted from the miscellaneous utterances of a humorist:  all sorts of complementary half-truths are part of his service.  His own quite just conception of humor, as meaning merely full vision and balanced judgment, is his best defense:  “when a man has attained the deep conception that there is such a thing as nonsense,” he says, “you may be sure of him for ever after.”  At bottom he is thoroughly consistent:  holding that the masses should work in contented deference to their intellectual guides, but those guides should qualify themselves by practical experience of life, that poetry is not an amusement for lazy sybarites but the most elevating of spiritual influences, that religions cut the roots of their power by trying to avoid supernaturalism and cultivate intelligibility, and that the animal basis of human life is a screen expressly devised to shut off direct knowledge of God and make character possible.