MR. HELPS ON WAR AND GENERAL CULTURE.* THE conversations, which
in the first series of Friends in Council served as a sort of explanatory interlude to relieve and qualify the more substantial essays, have gradually encroached upon the terri- tory of their allies, and now claim absolute supremacy. This new method admits of much greater freedom of handling, but it is ex- posed to some dangers. In his essays Mr. Helps felt it necessary to reason out his thoughts, and to observe a certain rule of con- sistency. No doubt if he went too far he could correct the excess in the ensuing dialogue, and this was at once a useful check and a safe test of opinion. Now, however, that a sentiment is no sooner uttered by one of the speakers than another expresses his dissent, there is not the same means of judging which aide has the beat of the argument. We must say, with all respect for Mr. Helps, that the conversation is apt to degenerate into a wordy scuffle. The object of the writer is probably to represent all shades of opinion, and to give them a fair hearing. But by introducing contradictory views and leaving his readers to choose between them according to their own tastes, rather than any settled principle, he is sure to cause some confusion. Again the temptation of making his conversations lively, and bringing out by dramatic touches the characteristics with which so many former books have familiarized himself and his admirers, leads Mr. Helps into constant interrup- tions. It is true that many of these are amusing, but they too often seem to be made to order. Sir John Ellesmere, for instance, has a tradition to keep up, and feels that he would lose his charac- ter if he did not indulge in asides and impertinences. Some of these are too laboured, especially the affectation of talking of a fugue in E sharp, which is mild for a sarcasm and over-elaborate for a blunder. The effect of such sayings is to make us painfully conscious that, after all, we may have too much even of Sir John Ellesmere. Yet Mr. Helps must feel that none of the newer characters can replace him. The secretary who writes down these conversations, and who, to be consistent with the account he gives of himself as "comparatively an ignorant and ill-read young man," cannot find one of the most familiar pass- ages in Bacon, Sir Arthur Godolphin, Mr. Creamer, and Mr. Mauleverer, are all somewhat indistinct and colourless. Mr. Helps turns occasionally from the engrossing subject of the war to let us see that Mr. Mauleverer cares for cookery, and that Mr. Cranmer has been Secretary of tho Treasury, but we believe all the questions started in this book would have been discussed equally well without their assistance. It also seems to us that the substitution of a monologue for an essay is not an improvement, and the reading of a few detached passages from an author does not replace critical analysis. These are our main objections to the form of Mr. Helps's present work ; we may, perhaps, find it more difficult to make good any complaints against the substance.
Mr. Helps's views about war are not brought forward here for the first time, but they are more likely to be accepted now than they were in 1859. The wanton butchery of a war undertaken for dynastic ambition on the one side, and continued for territorial aggrandizement on the other, cannot fail to be generally revolting; while whatever may have been the arriere pensies in the Italian war, the expulsion of the Austrians was a noble design and merited all our sympathies. At that time, however, if we remem- ber rightly, Mr. Helps was dwelling exclusively on the evils which were caused by the war, and was forgetting those which it cured. Until it is proved to be possible to ex- clude war altogether, until some other remedy is dis- covered for national injustice and oppression, such an indis- criminate crusade against all wars detracts from the authority with which an unnecessary war can be censured. Had England intervened with effect in 1859 by persuading the Emperor of Austria to yield, she might have spoken with much greater weight * Conversations on War and General Culture. By the Author of "friends in Council." London : Smith and Elder. 1871.
to France in 1870. But when it appeared as if all her remon- strances were dictated by the same wish for quiet without regard to the merits of the point at issue, she could hardly expect to retain her influence. We may apply the same rule to Mr. Helps, although for the sake of his present book, we should be glad to let it stand on its own merits. When we think how the late war originated and what were the terms imposed by the conquerors of Sedan, we can enter fully into Mr. Helps's denunciations and appreciate his description of the horrors of a battle. The comparison he makes of the numbersof killed and wounded to the stars which are visible on a cloudless night, and the account of the space that would be occupied by arranging in a row the bodies of those
placed entirely hors de combat, may seem fanciful, but they enable us to realize the misery which last year brought upon two great
nations. There is true pathos, too, in the picture of a battle- field when the fight is over, and of the sufferings of the fatally wounded as they lie "slowly stiffening into death." We quote two of Mr. Helps's descriptions :-
"Is he a lover ? He thinks of her. It is not always of their sorrow- ful parting that be thinks ; for that strangely errant and ungovernable thing, memory, carries him back, perhaps, to some fond hour, hitherto forgotten,—as when, one summer day, she threw wild flowers in his face -while they were walking by the river-side, and was shy, and would not come as near to him as he wished ; but never looked more beautiful. There is a strange complacency in his mind at the thought that he will be so much mourned over by her. If this bleeding would but stop, be would scribble something to her, at least write her name. But it is so cold, and he must sleep for a few minutes. He will write
her name when be awakes. But he never does awake
Is he a husband, and a father ? His are the bitterest feelings There is no consolation here—at least, no earthly consolation. What a -world this is, in which he leaves those dear ones, is but too clearly manifest to him from the way in which he has been made to depart from it. It would be a temptation worthy of the Arch-Tempter him- self, standing by that dying soldier, to try what portion of his soul's welfare he would imperil, so that he might be permitted to behold his wife and children once again, if only in this dying hour. He listens for aid to come: to him life is still inexpressibly dear. He hears the galloping of horses ; but his trained hearing knows that this is only the quick pursuit of friends or foes, and not the approach of any aid for him. The cold wind makes its strident noise amidst the reeds ; he watches them bend before it ; and it is, perhaps, the last thing that he sees or thinks about."
It may be doubted whether such passages will produce any practical effect, and whether the keenest perception of the horrors of war will ever deter kings, statesmen, or nations from engaging in it. The man who wept at thinking how few of his great army would be alive in a given time was the sole cause of their destruction. We have advanced in feeling since the days of Xerxes ; we have had numberless paintings and descriptions of battle-fields ; Goethe's "Campaign in France" and Erckmann-Chatrian's novels are well known to the two
contending parties in the late war, yet the carnage was more horrible than ever. Mr. Helps does not appear to us to suggest any remedy, unless by coupling war and general culture he implies that the one is an antidote to the other. He inveighs, indeed, against the ignorance of the French as being the cause of
their defeats, but the war was not made by the French alone. It is rather comic to read in one sentence that the study of music promotes reverence, and thus promotes humility, and then to read five lines further down that "the culture of music amongst the Germans has been of immense service as regards the general cul- ture of the Teutonic mind." But this is the legitimate consequence of the theory which runs through the present conversations, and Mr. Helps may think that a passage which has escaped Sir John Ellesmere is safe from the critics. With such praise of the Germans, not only for the knowledge which they possess, but for the civilizing influence which it has not always produced upon them, Mr. Helps is surely rather incon- sistent in opposing our adoption of a general military train- ing. If that does not interfere with the production of learned men in Germany, we need hardly assume that it will be fatal to science and literature in England. "Would you like," asks Mr. Helps, "to have had some of the best years of Faraday's life directed to military training?—or of Wheatstone's, or Sir James Simpson's, or Dickens's, or Thackeray's, or scores more whom I could mention ? Perhaps they would have done nothing at all
if you had diverted their minds at a critical period of their lives from those pursuits which were especially suited to those minds." In a "perhaps," as in an "if," there is great virtue. But why
should not science and literature be just as compatible with mili- tary training as with the work of a bookbinder's apprentice and a Parliamentary reporter ? Mr. Helps seems to remember this, for he virtually abandons his particular instances. We do not care to answer them by others, but it may be worth while ybserving that Dr. Waagen attributed his knowledge of art to the hours he spent as sentry in the galleries of the Louvre during the. occupation of Paris by the Allies. The real question, however, is the general one, and that needs a more systematic treatment than. it can receive in a review or in a conversation.
If we have dealt more with Mr. Helps's theories than with the broad tendency of his work, our excuse must be that we were led_ away by his method. His dialogues are so pleasant that we could. not help joining in them, and indeed we have known Milvertom and Ellesmere long enough to claim such an acquaintance. Now, before we shut up the book, we must quote a description of a journey with Lord Palmerston which will be new to most readers, and which gives Mr. Helps one of those opportunities, that he uses so well, of linking his imaginary characters with real life, and making real life the more distinct from the contrast :—
"I have often made long railway journeys with him—we two alone in a compartment. For about the first fifty miles he would work at his official boxes. Then—for he was the most courteous and kind of men- -he would have a little talk with me about affairs in general, thinking it right to be companionable. And then, out of his capacious great-coat pockets, he would bring some scientific paper—the last thing published by the Astronomical Society, or the latest discovery in optics ; and he would be absorbed in this paper until the end of the journey. The only things that occasionally took the place of his scientific studies were. worksrelating to the grammar of foreign languages. -He knew more about Italian and modern Greek than almost any other man. Now, I have always put him down in my mind as a man of real culture. Of course it would have been a grand thing for him if he bad been better' educated scientifically speaking, and had known more, of pure mathe- matics ; but then, I suppose, we should have lost him as a politician, for the bent of his mind was scientific."
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