Companions of My Solitude
By , Author of “Friends in Council,” etc. Boston : Roberts Brothers.
WE could not give so many good, tangible reasons, perhaps, for not liking Mr. Helps’s essays as might be urged why we should like them by some one who does ; and yet we are very certain of not finding them satisfactory. They have a quaintness without humor, a prejudiced and narrowminded benevolence, an elaborate and fatiguing ease. The author is apt to be very subtle about some interest purely factitious and quite unworthy consideration, and then for compensation to treat with one-sided petulance and impatience some most serious and important problem. He is a humane thinker to no particular purpose ; his sympathies embrace misfortunes upon the understanding that the conditions producing the misfortunes are not to be essentially changed. He is a conservative who would like to see the world improved, but not particularly advanced ; but at the same time he has some very startlingly radical sentiments in abeyance. In the literary management of his book he concerns himself so much with getting into a proper and impressively careless attitude to say something, that you are usually quite worn out before he says anything. When he refers to an expression of one of his characters as humorous or sarcastic, in which his reader is able to discern only a cold and colorless flippancy, it is touching, though pathos is not Mr. Helps’s strong point ; in fact, he seems to have only a vague faiblesse, and no forte at all. Yet, as we must say again, one might found a contrary opinion upon his book, if one had a mind to discover only its good things. Here, for example, is a passage which might persuade us that Mr. Helps had made a shrewder study than any one else of German character, for the German people are now realizing upon the French battle-fields the terribleness he guessed to be in them, when one day he stepped into a Protestant church in Germany: “They sang psalms such as I fancy Luther would have approved of; and I thought it would be a serious thing for a hostile army to meet a body of men who had been thus singing.” Or he might almost make us believe that he had acquainted himself intimately with things in this country, so cursed by the brutality of people in small authority, when he wrote beseeching those wretched little despots to bethink themselves that “ it is a great privilege to have an opportunity many times in a day, in the course of their business, to do a real kindness which is not to be paid for. Graciousness of demeanor is a large part of the duty of any official person who comes in contact with the world. Where a man’s business is, there is the ground for his religion to manifest itself.”
The companions of Mr. Helps’s solitude are his reveries upon all manner of subjects, and he talks on with a looseness at times which it is no great violence to call maundering. He laments for a long time the existence of prostitution, which he sees clearly enough comes from the aristocratic constitution of society in some degree ; and then of the folly that tends to ruin he says : “ For women are the real aristocrats ; and it is one of their greatest merits. Men’s intellects, even some of the brightest, may occasionally be deceived by theories about equality and the like, but women, who look at reality more, are rarely led away by nonsense of this kind. ” If you feel like answering that this admirably disastrous aristocratic sentiment of women is an effect of their false education and narrow life, a relic of their ancient slavery, in fact, rather than a finer instinct, spare yourself the pains ; Mr. Helps is going to tell us very shortly that “there is a cultivation in women quite independent of literary culture, rank, and other advantages. They are more on a level with each other than men.”
We do not recollect to have read anything upon the social evil quite so aimless and inconclusive as the speculations in Mr. Helps’s book, though we recognize a certain nervous and distracted good-will in the essay that at any rate does honor to his heart. There may be more reason for the existence of this and the other essays than we have allowed, but we should be at a loss how to express it. There seems tobe no occasion for uniting the sentiment of Tupper to the logic of Ruskin, and presenting the result in the form of reveries and dialogues ; and yet there may be.