Januarv lo. 1918 
LAND & WA.TER 
Etfe anil iteirers 
By J. C. Squire 
77 
Sir Arthur Helps 
PROBABLY. jno5t modern people, confuse Sir Arthur 
Helps with Smile's Self Help : and certainly both 
were edihing and neither could harm a fly. 1' or the 
benefit of such I may explain that Self-Help was a 
book, and Sir Arthur Helps was a man. He was a man with 
an ample forehead, an ample nose, and an ample beard : all ^ 
properties commoner in his dav than in ours. He was famous • 
for his Friends in Council and a"s editor of the Queen's Highland 
journal. He knew a great manv dignitaries ; he ended his 
Hfc as Clerk to the Privv Council ; and he died forty years 
ago. The Correspmidenc'e of Sir Arthur Helps (John Lane. 
I2S. 6d. net) has been published, therefore, after a very long 
inter\-al. But no ; it is not full of horrible revelations. 
* * * * * ' 
Xo age is entirely populated by persons of one tvp<% and 
it is as stupid to make generalisations about the Victorians 
as about "the Ehzabethans." The fact remains that you 
have onlj- to mention those two terms to be struck by a differ- 
ence of atmosphere. We feel at once that there is something 
about the majority of great Victorians which is not present 
in the majority of great Elizabethans. Dozens of eminent 
Victorians wrote letters, here printed, to Sir Arthur Helps. 
Their letters and his are not merely morally blameless : as 
a rule, they show real nobility of character, loftiness of aim, 
anxiety to be just, tolerant, sympathetic. But they almost 
all of "them Hrite as though trovn the pulpit; or as persons 
enjoymg a little relaxation out of the piilpit. There is sorne- 
thing of the wean,' Titan about them ; they don't complain, 
but the task ot maintaining the Cause of Nobility is a little 
wearing. Their genuine goodness one cannot but admire, 
but one could^ wish that they were sometimes a little less 
eager to make it absolutely clear that they mean well to the 
whole human race, and that they must not be misunderstood 
when they joke, and a little less self-consciously determined 
that their every utterance should be characteristic of them. 
There is a tinge of smugness and self-satisfaction about it 
all ; and this is all the more apparent in those of them, like 
Helps himself, who were not only incapable of realising the 
comic side of themseh'es, but who scarcely ever settn to have 
suspected their own limitations. 
***** 
Helps knew that he meant to be fair, philanthropic and 
progressive ; it never seems to have occurred to him, in spite 
of his habit of putting other people's points of view, that he 
may sometimes have been wrong or blind. " As all who 
knew him are awarCj" says his son, " he had a hatred of war. 
a dislike of competfl;i\'c examinations, and \v;as ever oppre.ssed 
by a sense of the evils of crowding unhealthy dwellings and 
insanitation in large cities." The mere hst is funny ; it is 
like saying that a man •believed in God and drank two whiskies 
a day. Helps realised that war and chattel-slavery were 
great evils ; but it was scarcely difficult to do that;. Faced 
with the brutalities and fhe slavery of contemporary in- 
dustrialism, he had no such general horror, but merely a few 
iiobbies. Mr. Chesterton has talked of the Victorian Com- 
jiromise ; this man was simply It. He would be the moderate 
man, advising employers to be kind, workmen not to ask for 
00 much, governors to be prudent, .mobs to be rcjasonable, 
•vePi-body to keep his temper, refrain from invective and 
:onsole himself for his afflictions— poverty included — by 
neditation and the cultivation of the arts, ("onfronted whh 
•conomir and social chaos, all he could suggest was that 
ompetitivc examinations were bad, and that foul drains were 
1 breeding-ground of sedition. He meant very wefl indeed 
when he axlvised tlie emjJoyer, faced with the Chartist, npt 
to abuse or assault him, j[)ut to reason with him. If he 
" begins with his ' liberty, equaht}-, and fraternity,' tell him 
that here there is neither time nor space for such things." 
')ne can imagine how blandness like that would work ! The 
mixture of this sort of thing with a mild human is what his 
Iriends called Helpsianism ; and he obviously relished the 
name. "This person, who is now writing," he. says, in a 
letter to the \'iceroy of India, " has, amongst~ his many 
other faults, a little love of teasing and making fun." Dear 
dear; how very naughty ! 
***** 
Still he was an amiable And benevolent soul, and tluy all 
Kked him. Many, perhaps most, of their letters acknowledge 
presentation copies of his books. He wrote, besides Friends 
in Council, a life of the Prince Consort, a history of the 
■Spanish Conquest of America, several novels (including one 
in favour of emigration -decidedly a no\cl witli a ijurposc — 
but he was quite capable of a romantic drama about com- 
j)etitive examinations), some plays, and numerous political 
l>ooks and pamphlets. He seems to have spread free copies 
about so freely that his publisher must almost always ha\-(.; 
been certain of a second edition. It is amusing to study, the 
replies of his friends. I like best of all Tennyson's, upon 
receiving a play in verse called Oulita : 
Mv Dk.'Mj Helps,— Thanks for Oulita. I have not yet read it 
but I have cut it open, which looks as if 1 meant to read it. 
That is a model. If one only acknowledges one's friends 
books in this way, one can express one's thanks and avoid 
the lies ; for no-one could expect a second letter containing 
additional remarks. Carlyle, on receiving The Spanish 
Conquest in America^ jvas less terse : 
Dkar Hui.ps, — Many kind thanks for this kind gift of your last 
\'olunie. It is very pretty reading, like its predecessors, 
when 1 dip into it. By and bye, if it please Heaven, I design 
to give that Work an E.xamination much worthier of its 
qualities than I could vet bestow on it — or anything that has 
appeared in its time ; wretched sinner, swallowed in the 
I'russian quagmires (fetid as the Stygian), and swimming for 
iife (too literally that !) as I have long been. 
Most of Carlyle's letters here are like that, in the familiar 
posing prose ; he might at least have got off the stilts when 
not writing for publication ; and in any other age but that his 
friends would have told him — the fastidious reader may 
be given a choice of terms — either to stow it or to cheese it. 
***** 
It may by now be evident that the present reviewer was a 
httlo bored" by this volume, is not drawn by the magnetic 
charms of Sir Arthur's works, and respects rather than loves 
Sir Arthtir himself. E\'ident or not it is true. But tire 
dullest book of memoirs is just worth reading, and this is one 
of them. There are few, if any, important or amusing 
additions to history. One would not expect such in the 
letter of one who-^when his circle was scandaUsed by the 
publication of Greville's Memoirs — wrote : 
I cannot help praising my.self. There will be no papers found 
after my death— no diaries — containing disagreeable stories 
about people and telhng alk that I have seen and heard of 
strange things. I resolved from the first that there should 
be an instance of a man who saw and heard much that was 
fleeply interesting, but private, and who could hold his tongue 
and restrain his pen, for ever. ... 
The spirit of this was akin to his 'preference for harmless 
generalities in discussion ; we do not go to Brer Rabbit for 
information. But, as always, there are entertaining scraps. 
We learn that the second Duke of Wellington thought that 
we were in honour bound to return Gibraltar to Spain. \\'e 
are told that when Dickens had his conversation with Queen 
Victoria (Helps appears to have been the tertium quid), the 
novelist told his sovereign what President Lincoln dreamt 
the night before his murder. Dickens, we know, shared 
some of the tastes of his own Fat Boy, but if this is the 
sort of small-talk that monarchs arc entertained with, it is 
no NN'onder that their heads lie uneasy. We find Lord Morley, 
at a lamentably early age, proudly stating that "like Buffon, 
I insist on shaving and fine Hnen before sitting down to com- 
position " ; which accounts for a good deal. We have a 
little light on " the old Germany of Beethoven, of Bach, 
Goethe, of Lcssing, of Ltfther and of Arminius " [vide Press) 
in Help's own description of his experiences at a Ratisbon 
song-festival in 1849 ; . 
'Jhe singing was excellent. . . . But there was also 
speechifying. Now I could make out some of it, and indeed t 
ought to have done so, for every tentli word (literally) was 
" Germany," or " Geriiiafi," or '' ]'atherland " ; the orator 
divided his subject into three or four sections, and at the end 
of each, he thus wound up, " If then you think with me thai 
Fatherland, etc." ... 
There are also a few anecdotes. A friend of Sheridaiv's met 
him and condoled with him on the death of his father. " 1 
am very much obliged to you," said the young man, " but 
von are" mistaken, 1 saw him myself this morning, and he sait! 
that he was alive, and well — Init really he is such a damne(! 
liar there's no kiKwing." Sidney Smith, describing a Scotch- 
man who in earlier days had been a humble kind of sculptor, 
said : " He used to do tombs and Scotch cherubs upon them 
with high-cheek bones." And when a Duke of Marlborough 
was in I.ondon he received a telegram informing him that one 
of the emus had laid an egg, and " in the absence of your 
Grace we have taken the largest goose to hatch it." Finally 
there is a long lettdr from F'roude, from South Africa, which, 
in its heartiness, naturalness and \-ividness, is like a breath 
of fresh air amid the worthy priggeries and senile pleasantries 
of this astonishingly dull collection. 
