Born, at Balham Hill, Streatham, 10 July 1813. At Eton, 1829–32. Matric. Trin. Coll., Camb., 1832; B.A., 1835; M.A., 1839. Priv. Sec. to Chancellor of Exchequer, 1836 [?]–39; to Sec. for Ireland, 1839. Commissioner of French, Danish and Spanish Claims. Married Bissel Fuller. Clerk of Privy Council, June 1860 to March 1875. Hon. D.C.L., Oxford, 8 June 1864. C.B., June 1871; K.C.B., July 1872. Died, in London, 7 March 1875. Works: “Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd” (anon.), 1835; “Essays written in the intervals of Business” (anon.), 1841; “Catherine Douglas” (anon.), 1843; “King Henry II.” (anon.), 1843; “The Claims of Labour” (anon.), 1844; “Friends in Council,” ser. i. (2 pts.), 1847–49; ser. ii., 1859; “A Letter from one of the Special Constables in London” (anon.), 1848; “The Conquerors of the New World” (anon.), 1848; “Companions of my Solitude” (anon.), 1851; “A Letter on Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (anon.), 1852; “The Spanish Conquest in America” (4 vols.), 1855–61; “Oulita the Serf” (anon.), 1858; “Organization in Daily Life” (anon.), 1862; “Life of Las Casas,” 1868 [1867]; “Realmah” (anon.), 1868; “Life of Columbus” (with H. P. Thomas), 1869; “Life of Pizarro,” 1869; “Casimir Maremma” (anon.), 1870; “Brevia” (anon.), 1871; “Conversations on War” (anon.), 1871; “Life of Hernando Cortes,” 1871; “Life and Labours of Mr. Brassey,” 1872 (3rd edn. same year); “Thoughts upon Government,” 1872; “Some Talk about Animals” (anon.), 1873; “Ivan de Biron” (anon.), 1874; “Social Pressure” (anon.), 1875. He edited: the Prince Consort’s “Speeches,” 1862; the Queen’s “Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands,” 1868; the Queen’s “Mountain, Loch and Glen,” 1869; T. Brassey’s “Work and Wages,” 1872.

Personal

  I dined with Arthur Helps yesterday at Sir James Clark’s—very snug—only he and myself. He is a sleek man, with close-snipped hair; has a quiet, humorous way of talking, like his books.

  A thin, scholarly, cold sort of a man.

  Next to humanity the object of Sir Arthur’s greatest reverence was its most direct emanation—a book. His acquaintance with books was enormous. He read rapidly, for his power of attention was absolute; and he remembered what he read for that same reason. I am unable to say who were his favourite writers; for the writers he knew best he regarded as personal friends, and among personal friends there should be no favouritism. If I were called upon to say of what writer I have heard him speak the most often and with the greatest admiration, I think it would be one of the last my readers would be likely to name—Machiavelli. But then he had derived his opinion of him, not from the pages of Macaulay, but from the revelations of that great statesman concerning himself—to be found only in his writings and his life. Should a finished portrait of Sir Arthur Helps ever be achieved by a competent hand, it will present traits, moral and intellectual, too numerous and too beautiful to be truthfully attributable to more than a very few men of our own or any other time. One of these traits must not be omitted from the slightest sketch of him—the intensity and constancy of his personal attachments.

  He was an excellent host…. The admirable tact of the master of the house was always successful in putting people at ease with each other. He talked admirably, and had a marvellously retentive memory, but he never forgot the rule which he puts in the mouth of one of the “Friends in Council”—that “one ought always to be mindful of the first syllable of the word conversation, and talk with people, not to them.” As head of an Office which had to enter into relation with nearly every department of Government, he gained universal esteem. He treated his subordinates almost as part of his own family, and was perpetually extending his hospitality to them…. He was, I think, over-sensitive to adverse criticism, of which he had perhaps not enough to allow him to grow callous to it; and the least misprints in his own books or articles annoyed him exceedingly.

General

  “Casimir Maremma,” by the same author, is an Oriental story. The form of the conversations is not attractive; while the tales, though daringly novel in conception, are not always skilfully worked out. The language throughout is pure and elegant, and the true worth of the matter lies in its earnest and enlightened speculation…. Helps’s “History of Spanish Conquests in America” deals mainly with the slavery question and with the colonial policy of the Spaniards, and consequently does not trench on the ground so well occupied by Robertson and Prescott. The style of the work is chaste, the sentiment pure and elevated.

  I have been reading Helps’ “Conquest” on your recommendation. It is a curiously told story—as if it was being told with all the narrator’s little private ways of allusion or remark—but very interesting.

  It [“Oulita”] is a noble and beautiful work. It is strongly marked with the same characteristics which distinguish its author’s former writings. Its power and excellence are mainly in thoughtfulness, pathos, humour. There is a certain subtlety of thought,—a capacity gradually to surround the reader with an entire world and a complete life: we feel how heartily the writer has thrown himself into the state of things he describes, half believing the tale he tells, and using gently and tenderly the characters he draws. We have a most interesting story: we see before us beings of actual flesh and blood…. The language of the tragedy is such as might have been expected from its author. There is not a phrase, not a word from first to last, to which the most fastidious taste could take exception.

  Though he is capable of strong conclusiveness, he approaches conclusions by a zig-zag, and tries by a parting kick any god of his own setting up. He concludes, but his conclusions are half-regrets; and his despotism (for he can be despotic) is almost a genial rage; as of a man who should say, “Come, something must be possible; let us go and make that something real after all this vacillation.” He says of the statesman—that is, Malverton says of him—that “he should doubt to the last, and then act like a man who has never doubted.” To this Ellesmere replies, “Cleverly put, but untrue, after the fashion of you maxim-mongers. He should not act like a man who has never doubted, but like a man who was in the habit of doubting till he had received sufficient information.” There is a good deal of Mr. Helps himself in that description; and it is not a bad sketch of the right temperament for a statesman.

  No two men have done more, I believe, to save this generation from two or even three extremes of fanaticism, than Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Helps…. It is this vein of wise charity, running through all which Mr. Helps has ever written, which makes his books so wholesome to the student of his fellow-men; especially wholesome, I should think, to ministers of religion.

  When Mr. Helps, twenty-five years ago, published “Friends in Council,” he founded a school of essayists who undertook to apply what—to use one of their favorite expressions—is called “thought” to all the minor affairs of life…. Of Mr. Helps’s school we confess we cannot with honesty say much good. Of Mr. Helps we gladly speak with considerable respect. He has, as an historian, produced works which place him high among historical writers of the second class. His earlier essays were graceful and intelligent, if not very profound or vigorous. There was a time when he wrote somewhat above the level of his readers, and strove rather to bring them up to him than to descend to their capacities. The candor, moreover, he claims he really possesses, and we suspect he might still as a critic produce works of considerable value. We greatly hope that he may cease to write vaguely on things in general, and produce once more works on history worthy of his considerable reputation. As an historian he has one great merit. He is one of the few men who still believe in moral force, since, in England at least, the limited number of persons who did not bow down and worship force when represented by Louis Napoleon, began to adore it when represented by Bismarck. From this passionate admiration for successful violence Mr. Helps is entirely free.

  His most popular books are “Friends in Council” and “Companions of my Solitude.” In these volumes are reported the conversations of a company of friends, who discuss questions of various kinds,—ethical, social, and literary. English literature contains nothing in the shape of colloquial essays that approaches these in merit. The individuality of the interlocutors is carefully preserved, and the reader acquires a personal interest in each hardly subordinate to the general effect of the wisdom which they interchange. The thought of these essays is effective not only by its intrinsic vigor and its wonderful affinity for the mind of average intelligence, but by the inimitable grace and almost insidious gentleness of its expression. No writer is more remote from dogmatism than Mr. Helps; but his opinions bear unmistakable marks of maturity and fixedness. His felicity of illustration is hardly surpassed, and the tender human sympathy which warms all his writings brings him very near to his readers. Mr. Helps is not a powerful original thinker; but he has the art of presenting the best thought in the most impressive and persuasive shape, in an almost unequaled degree, and of calling out or reanimating ideas which have been latent in the minds of his readers. There are no essays in the language, save perhaps those of Macaulay, that are at once so delightful and so instructive as Mr. Helps’s.

  I scarcely knew him except at Cambridge forty years ago: and could never relish his Writings, amiable and sensible as they are. I suppose they will help to swell that substratum of Intellectual Peat (Carlyle somewhere calls it) from [which] one or two living Trees stand out in a Century.

  Sir Arthur Helps’ books, if they possessed no other merit, would still be valuable to our hurry-skurry age by recalling to us the sense that there is—or used to be—such a thing as Leisure somewhere on the globe.

  In the most characteristic series of his works, of which “Friends in Council” is the centre, he is persistently occupied with a rationale of things which most think it a gain not to think about; how to do things that most do well or ill, and are done with; how to mitigate the surprises and avoid the regrets which meet us by the way, for which most think callousness the only remedy and the best. Throughout, the vein of his speculation is coloured by a view that if we would take up the little difficulties of life and deal with them, the great ones would melt away. He did not treat the weariness of detail and the reluctance to spend thought in articulating statements that border upon truisms as facts to be reckoned with, but as mistakes to be corrected, as, indeed, the sensitive eagerness of his mind, however it was disciplined into patience, always led him to see much more clearly that in life which is modifiable, than that which is fixed. But within its range, his perception was singularly clear and accurate, and there can be little doubt that it was heightened by his keen disinterested sensibility to all concrete discomfort. Perhaps his great talent for the concrete did something to keep his mind in the byways of thought and affairs; the highways of both are paved with abstractions.

  Helps’ literary career commenced at an early age with the publication in 1835 of “Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd.” He afterwards attempted history, fiction, drama, but his social essays alone achieved any lasting popularity…. His views are for the most part commonplace and are often expressed at tedious length.

  His position in the world of letters was something of a paradox: he never rose to the highest sphere, yet was a universal favourite of the public, respected and merited every respect; and while treating the loftiest subjects in a manner considered by a mass of readers both original and striking, he never really in any of his works rose above the region of the respectable commonplace.

  In different ways enough—for he was as quiet as the other was showy—Helps was the counterpart of Kinglake, as exhibiting a certain stage in the progress of English culture during the middle of the century—a stage in which the Briton was considerably more alive to foreign things than he had been, had enlarged his sphere in many ways, and was at least striving to be cosmopolitan, but had lost insular strength without acquiring Continental suppleness.

  He was an overrated writer in his time. He is perhaps underrated now.