In an age of many books, there must needs be some, highly worthy of
attention, with which the general reading-public will be but
imperfectly acquainted. Though probably known to many of our readers,
we think it likely that the writings of Mr Helps are yet unknown to
many others, who might profit by the study of them, and more or less
appreciate their excellence. Under this conviction, it is proposed to
notice them in the present pages; and we have little doubt of being
able to substantiate their claims to consideration. To readers who
require of a book something more than mere amusement, or a passing
satisfaction to their curiosity; who have any regard or relish for
independent thinking--for an enlarged observation of human life--for
the results of study and experience--for practical sense and wisdom,
and a general understanding and appreciation of the varied motives,
ways, and interests of men and of society--these volumes cannot fail
to prove delightful and profitable reading.
All Mr Helps's writings have been published anonymously; and it is
only within the last two years that he has become known, out of his
own circle, to be the author. His earliest publications were, _Essays
written in the Intervals of Business_, and _An Essay on the Duties of
the Employers to the Employed_, otherwise entitled _The Claims of
Labour_. He has also published a work in two volumes under the title
of _The Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen_; a historical
narrative of the principal events which led to negro slavery in the
West Indies and America. But the books from his pen with which we are
best acquainted, and which have obtained the largest measure of public
attention, are a series of essays intermixed with dialogues, called
_Friends in Council_, and a supplementary volume, somewhat different
in plan, which he calls _Companions of my Solitude_.[1] As the whole
of his characteristics as an essayist are displayed with a more
perfect effect in these two latter works than in the others, and as
they will afford us as much extract as we shall have space for, we
propose to confine our remarks to them exclusively. Matter enough, and
even more than enough, will be found in them for illustrating whatever
we may find to say respecting the author's powers and attainments.
The _Friends in Council_ purports to be edited by a clergyman named
Dunsford, who was so obliging and laborious as to set down the
conversations in which he, Ellesmere (the great lawyer), and Milverton
(the author), had engaged on various occasions, when the last read to
his companions a number of short essays which he was writing. We have
a page or two of introduction, informing us of this circumstance, and
of a few other particulars needful to be mentioned; and then, after a
little talk among the friends, an essay is read, followed by the
interlocutors' comments, and a discussion of its merits. These
conversations form a very agreeable portion of the work, and exhibit a
fine mastery of dialogue. They are exactly like the discourse of
intelligent and accomplished men, and therefore very much unlike the
ordinary run of book-reported talk. A few sentences may be not unfitly
quoted, by way of exhibiting their quality. We take the following, on
so common a matter as friendship; not because it is the best we might
select, but because it seems one of the passages which is most readily
extractable:--
'_Ellesmere._ I suppose all of us have, at one time or other, had a
huge longing after friendship. If one could get it, it would be much
safer than that other thing.
'_Milverton._ Well, I wonder whether love--for I imagine you mean
love--was ever so described before, "that other thing!"
'_Elles._ When the world was younger, perhaps there was more of this
friendship. David and Jonathan!--How does their friendship begin? I
know it is very beautiful; but I have forgotten the words. Dunsford
will tell us.
'_Dunsford._ "And Saul said to him, Whose son art thou, thou young
man? And David answered, I am the son of thy servant Jesse the
Bethlehemite. And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking
unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David,
and Jonathan loved him as his own soul."
'_Elles._ Now that men are more complex, they would require so much.
For instance, if I were to have a friend, he must be an
uncommunicative man: that limits me to about thirteen or fourteen
people in the world. It is only with a man of perfect reticence that
you can speak completely without reserve. We talk together far more
openly than most people; but there is a skilful fencing even in our
talk. We are not inclined to say the whole of what we think.
'_Mil._. What I should need in a friend would be a certain breadth of
nature: I have no sympathy with people who can disturb themselves
about small things; who crave the world's good opinion; are anxious to
prove themselves always in the right; can be immersed in personal talk
or devoted to self-advancement; who seem to have grown up entirely
from the _earth_, whereas even the plants draw most of their
sustenance from the air of heaven.
'_Elles._ That is a high flight. I am not prepared to say all that. I
do not object to a little earthiness. What I should fear in friendship
is the comment, and interference, and talebearing, I often see
connected with it.
'_Mil._ That does not particularly belong to friendship, but comes
under the general head of injudicious comment on the part of those who
live with us. Divines often remind us, that in forming our ideas of
the government of Providence, we should recollect that we see only a
fragment. The same observation, in its degree, is true too as regards
human conduct. We see a little bit here and there, and assume the
nature of the whole. Even a very silly man's actions are often more to
the purpose than his friend's comments upon them.
'_Elles._ True! Then I should not like to have a man for a friend who
would bind me down to be consistent, who would form a minute theory of
me which was not to be contradicted.
'_Mil._ If he loved you as his own soul, and his soul were knit with
yours--to use the words of Scripture--he would not demand this
consistency, because each man must know and feel his own immeasurable
vacillation and inconsistency; and if he had complete sympathy with
another, he would not be greatly surprised or vexed at that other's
inconsistencies.
'_Duns._ There always seems to me a want of tenderness in what are
called friendships in the present day. Now, for instance, I don't
understand a man ridiculing his friend. The joking of intimates often
appears to me coarse and harsh. You will laugh at this in me, and
think it rather effeminate, I am afraid.
'_Mil._ No; I do not. I think a great deal of jocose raillery may pass
between intimates without the requisite tenderness being infringed
upon. If any friend had been in a painful and ludicrous position (such
as when Cardinal Balue in full dress is run away with on horseback,
which Scott comments upon as one of a class of situations combining
"pain, peril, and absurdity"), I would not remind him of it. Why
should I bring back a disagreeable impression to his mind? Besides, it
would be more painful than ludicrous to me. I should enter into his
feelings rather than into those of the ordinary spectator.
'_Duns._ I am glad we are of the same mind in this.
'_Mil._ I have also a notion that, even in the common friendships of
the world, we should be very stanch defenders of our absent friends.
Supposing that our friend's character or conduct is justly attacked in
our hearing upon some point, we should be careful to let the light and
worth of the rest of his character in upon the company, so that they
should go away with something of the impression that we have of him;
instead of suffering them to dwell only upon this fault or foible that
was commented upon, which was as nothing against him in our
hearts--mere fringe to the character, which we were accustomed to, and
rather liked than otherwise, if the truth must be told.
'_Elles._ I declare we have made out amongst us an essay on
friendship, without the fuss of writing one. I always told you our
talk was better than your writing, Milverton. Now, we only want a
beginning and ending to this peripatetic essay. What would you say to
this as a beginning?--it is to be a stately, pompous plunge into the
subject, after the Milverton fashion:--"Friendship and the Phoenix,
taking into due account the fire-office of that name, have been found
upon the earth in not unsimilar abundance." I flatter myself that "not
unsimilar abundance" is eminently Milvertonian.
'_Mil._ Now observe, Dunsford, you were speaking sometime ago about
the joking of intimates being frequently unkind. This is just an
instance to the contrary. Ellesmere, who is not a bad fellow--at least
not so bad as he seems--knows that he can say anything he pleases
about my style of writing without much annoying me. I am not very
vulnerable on these points; but all the while there is a titillating
pleasure to him in being all but impertinent and vexatious to a
friend. And he enjoys that. So do I.'
This certainly reads like free and natural conversation, besides being
noteworthy for the suggestions it contains.
Mr Helps is strictly an original writer, in the sense of thinking for
himself; but at the same time, one of his excellences consists in an
adroit and novel use of commonplaces. There is, indeed, as much
originality in putting a new face upon old verities, as in producing
new ones from the mint of one's invention. As Emerson has remarked,
valuable originality does not consist in mere novelty or unlikeness to
other men, but in range and extent of grasp and insight. This is a
fact, too, which Mr Helps has noted. 'A suggestion,' says he, 'may be
ever so old; but it is not exhausted until it is acted upon, or
rejected on sufficient reason.' He has, therefore, no fastidious dread
of saying anything which has been said before, but readily welcomes
wise thoughts from all directions, often reproducing them with such
felicity of expression, as to give them new effect. Thus, in all the
elements of a profitable originality, he is rich and generous; and
from few books of modern times could so large a store of aphorisms,
fine sayings, and admirable observations be selected. We have marked a
great many more than can be incorporated in the present paper; but
some few may be, nevertheless, presented. Here, for instance, is a
fine remark on time--next to love, the most hackneyed subject in the
world:--'Men seldom feel as if they were bounded as to time: they
think they can afford to throw away a great deal of that commodity;
_thus shewing unconsciously in their trifling the sense that they have
of their immortality_.' On another familiar topic--human progress--he
writes thus:--'The progress of mankind is like the incoming of the
tide, which, from any given moment, is almost as much of a retreat as
an advance, but still the tide moves on.' Emerson has used the same
figure, but in a passage which ought not to be regarded as impairing
our author's originality.
On the vexed and perplexing question of _Evil_, Mr Helps has said many
acute and consolatory things, from among which we have culled the
following sentences:--'The man who is satisfied with any given state
of things that we are likely to see on earth, must have a creeping
imagination: on the other hand, he who is oppressed by the evils
around him so as to stand gaping at them in horror, has a feeble will
and a want of practical power, and allows his fancy to come in, like
too much wavering light upon his work, so that he does not see to go
on with it. A man of sagacity, while he apprehends a great deal of the
evil around him, resolves what part of it he will be blind to for the
present, in order to deal best with what he has in hand; and as to men
of any genius, they are not imprisoned or rendered partial even by
their own experience of evil, much less are their attacks upon it
paralysed by their full consciousness of its large presence.'
Here, in the next place, is an aphorism worth pondering and
remembrance:--'Vague injurious reports are no men's lies, but all
men's carelessness.' And by the side of it we may place a pleasant
sarcasm attributed to Ellesmere, and apparently intended as a reminder
for stump-orators: 'How exactly proportioned to a man's ignorance of
the subject is the noise he makes about it at a public meeting.' Not
altogether out of connection here may be this brief sentence:--'Next
to the folly of doing a bad thing, is that of fearing to undo it.' In
the following, we have a brief sufficient argument against the
indulgence of unavailing sorrow or anxiety:--'It has always appeared
to me, that there is so much to be done in this world, that all
self-inflicted suffering which cannot be turned to good account for
others, is a loss--a loss, if you may so express it, to the spiritual
world.' There is plain truth, too, in the next, though it is not
likely to be much remembered by those who are most in need of it:--'An
ill-tempered man often has everything his own way, and seems very
triumphant; but the demon he cherishes, tears him as well as awes
other people.' In another place, and from another point of view, he
indicates the admirable benefits of human, sympathy. 'Often,' says he,
'all that a man wants in order to accomplish something that is good
for him to do, is the encouragement of another man's sympathy. What
Bacon says the voice of the man is to the dog--the encouragement of a
higher nature--each man can in a lesser degree afford his neighbour;
for a man receives the suggestions of another mind with somewhat of
the respect and courtesy with which he would greet a higher nature.'
Speaking with reference to the pursuits of men of literary and
artistic genius, it is written: 'Almost any worldly state in which a
man can be placed is a hinderance to him, if he have other than mere
worldly things to do. Poverty, wealth, many duties, or many affairs,
distract and confuse him.' One sentence more is all that can be added
here; and if it seems to be suggested by an aphorism of Bacon, it is
equal to it in pith and penetration:--'Every _felicity_, as well as
wife and children, is a hostage to fortune.'
These sentences have been gathered chiefly from _Friends in Council_,
though a few of them are taken from _Companions of my Solitude_. The
two books are informed with the same spirit; and to a meditative
person, one could not recommend a choicer store of reading. Those,
however, to whom the works are as yet unknown, may wish to see some
longer and more connected extract. It is difficult to decide upon what
ought to be presented, where almost everything is exquisite; yet as a
choice must be made, we will take some sentences from an essay on
'Despair,' wherein the writer offers a few remedial suggestions
against the burden of remorse:--
'To have erred in one branch of our duties, does not unfit us for the
performance of all the rest, unless we suffer the dark spot to spread
over our whole nature, which may happen almost unobserved in the
torpor of despair. This kind of despair is chiefly grounded on a
foolish belief that individual words or actions constitute the whole
life of man; whereas they are often not fair representatives of
portions even of that life. The fragments of rock in a mountain stream
may tell much of its history, are, in fact, results of its doings, but
they are not the stream. They were brought down when it was turbid; it
may now be clear: they are as much the result of other circumstances
as of the action of the stream: their history is fitful: they give us
no sure intelligence of the future course of the stream, or of the
nature of its waters; and may scarcely shew more than that it has not
been always as it is. The actions of men are often but little better
indications of the men themselves....
'There is frequently much selfishness about remorse. Put what has been
done at the worst. Let a man see his own evil word or deed in full
light, and own it to be black as hell itself. He is still here. He
cannot be isolated. There still remain for him cares and duties; and
therefore hopes. Let him not in imagination link all creation to his
fate. Let him yet live in the welfare of others, and, if it may be so,
work out his own in this way; if not, be content with theirs. The
saddest cause of remorseful despair is when a man does something
expressly contrary to his character--when an honourable man, for
instance, slides into some dishonourable action; or a tender-hearted
man falls into cruelty from carelessness; or, as often happens, a
sensitive nature continues to give the greatest pain to others' from
temper, feeling all the time perhaps more deeply than the persons
aggrieved. All these cases may be summed up in the words, "That which
I would not, that I do"--the saddest of all human confessions, made
by one of the greatest men. However, the evil cannot be mended by
despair. Hope and humility are the only supports under this burden.'
As our space presses, the passages we give must necessarily be short.
The beauty of the few sentences following will not be disputed. They
are taken from a 'Chapter of Consolations' in _Companions of my
Solitude_, and will serve to exhibit our author's style under one of
its more animated aspects:--
'Lastly, there is to be said of all suffering--that it is experience.
I have forgotten in whose life it is to be found, but there is some
man who went out of his way to provide himself with every form of
human misery which he could get at. I do not myself see any occasion
for any man's going out of the way to provide misfortune for himself.
Like an eminent physician, he might stay at home, and find almost
every form of human misery knocking at his door. But still I
understand what this chivalrous inquirer meant, who sought to taste
all suffering for the sake of the experience it would give him.
'There is this admirable commonplace, too, which, from long habit of
being introduced in such discourses, wishes to come in before I
conclude--namely, that infelicities of various kinds belong to the
state here below. Who are we that we should not take our share? See
the slight amount of personal happiness requisite to go on with. In
noisome dungeons, subject to studied tortures, in abject and shifty
poverty, after consummate shame, upon tremendous change of fortune, in
the profoundest desolation of mind and soul, in forced companionship
with all that is unlovely and uncongenial--men, persevering nobly,
live on, and live through all. The mind, like water, passes through
all states, till it shall be united to what it is ever seeking. The
very loneliness of man here is the greatest proof, to my mind, of a
God.'
One of the things that strikes us most in these essays, is the
author's wise moderation of statement, his habit of looking at all
phases of a question, and of saying something appropriate on each. We
believe he makes Ellesmere observe somewhere, that moral essays
commonly require another essay from the opposite point of view to
temper and qualify their meaning. This requirement has been closely
kept in mind. There is no undue vehemence, no straining of favourite
points, no clap-trap rhetoric or elaborate phrase-makings; but
everything is clear, judicious, well considered, and conscientiously
set forth. The man does not write for the sake of writing, but because
his soul is full of thoughts, and his remembrances charged with the
wholesome lessons of experience. The thoughts generally are less
remarkable for their depth than for their _breadth_--a free and
unembarrassed all-sidedness, which is, perhaps, one of the most
difficult of all attainments in the way of writing. There is a mild
meditative wisdom in his utterances which can have been derived only
through a large acquaintance with life and society; with the manifold
diversities of motive and aspiration by which men are actuated; with
everything, in short, that interests, degrades, or elevates humanity.
Only from an extensive quarry of experience could this strong and
graceful pillar of wit, sagacity, and judgment, have been built up.
From this, too, has been acquired that broad liberality of opinion
which must be welcome to every candid mind--the enlarged tolerance,
and generous appreciation of all degrees of difference in men's ways
of thinking and of acting, which is one of the most pleasing and most
distinctive characteristics of these writings. Often, in reading, we
are inclined to say, here is one of the best-balanced souls in
England--a finely-gifted and highly-cultivated man, to whom the pains
and difficulties, the joys, the sorrows, the ambitions, and
shortcomings of his race, are all familiar; who has felt them all,
seen the good and evil of them all, and, with a calm deliberation, can
testify at last, that the great Power of the Universe has so
constrained and ordered the uncertainties and perils of our lot, as
not only to reconcile all its apparent contradictions with the ends of
moral discipline and benefit, but to make even the darkness of
calamity flash rays of brightness and of hope. Thus, along with an
enlarged knowledge of men and things, he gives us the wisest counsel
about our conduct and proceedings in the world, and also the most
encouraging conclusions with regard to our final destiny and
prospects.