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Page 6
'_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.'
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