Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 094.djvu/412

402 a marvellous thing!" whensoever a third edition still wants the author's name in the title-page, and his pedigree in the preface.

Mr. Helps has done much to burnish up that rusted thing, the Essay, and to ensure for it a sale in days when it was supposed to be a dead-weight on the book-shelves. His originality and grace have proved that even the Essay, if a thing of beauty, is a joy for ever.

In assailing moral prejudices and social anomalies he is outspoken, but with no offensive or irritating candour. Like Brutus in the rostrum, he may challenge complaint on this score—may "pause for a reply," and find that "none hath he offended." Years since, one of his friends pronounced him a man who could say the most audacious things with the least offence. Objections have been raised to the defect of tangible remedies in his discussion of current evils—a kind of reproach that will ever, he says, be made, with much or little justice, against all men who endeavour to reform or improve anything—the reproach that they are not ready with definite propositions, but are, like the chorus in a Greek play, making general remarks about nature and human affairs, without suggesting any clear and decided course to be taken. What he "essays" to do, is not to prescribe a course of action, but a habit of thought which will modify all actions within its scope. Not that he is an abstract thinker, with a scornful disregard of the practical; on the contrary, he is an essayist "in the intervals of business." Avowedly, he writes not as a hermit or a clergyman, but as a man conversant with the world. His writings evidence a considerable and close experience of life. Without that love of originality and paradox which predominates in some minds of a like order, prompting them to an affectation of antagonism to the vulgar, in omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis, he freely uses his privilege of private judgment, and peers with his own eyes into the shady side of a question. As Sydney Smith, when a hubbub was raised about a dog biting a bishop, remarked that, for his part, he should like to hear the dog's version of the story,—so this essayist (to illustrate his temperament by one instance) whispers his private suspicion that "some of those Roman emperors" have been maligned a little. He is no superficial observer—no "one idea'd" man. He manufactures no Procustes' bed, on which to gauge universal human nature. He keeps no hack dogma, licensed to be let out to all characters, on all services, and in all weathers; no ethical hobby, which he rides to death without remorse. His antidotes to moral ills are not compounded in the quack medicine style, or puffed as the infallible panacea, exclusive in saving virtue, unconditional in specific effect. If his mind is subtle enough to see closely into a subject, it is also broad enough, and plastic enough, to escape the penalties of one-sidedness. Fond as he is of reverie on his favourite topics, he carefully sets reason on the watch, and compels reverie to a summary exit at the challenge of that trusty sentinel: in his dreamiest mood we never find him

His philosophy is of the Coleridgean type; in spirit and manner