The recently-published Memorials of the late Canon Kingsley do not constitute a biography of the normal type. In other words, the book does not profess to answer every question which the curiosity of readers might suggest; and, on the whole, one may be very glad that it does not. To many such questions the most appropriate answer is silence, not unmixed with contempt. To others, which may be taken as the expression of a legitimate interest in an eminent man, a reader of moderate intelligence may be trusted to find a sufficient answer in the ample materials placed before him. There is no great difficulty in seizing the main outlines of so strongly marked a character; and, on the whole, Kingsley well deserves the labour. Few writers of his generation gave clearer indications of power. Had he died at the age of five-and thirty (when 'Westward Ho!' was already completed), we should have speculated upon the great things which we had lost. The last twenty years of his life added little or nothing to his literary reputation. Perhaps, indeed, some of his performances—the lectures at Cambridge, and the unfortunate controversy with Newman—reflected a certain discredit upon his previous achievements. The explanation is not far to seek, when one has read the story of his life; but the fact makes it rather difficult to recall the feelings with which the rising generation of the years between 1848 and 1855 regarded the most vigorous champion of a school then in its highest vigour. The 'Saint's Tragedy,' 'Yeast,' 'Alton Locke,' 'Hypatia,' and 'Westward Ho!' did not exactly reveal one of the born leaders of mankind; but their freshness, geniality, and vigour seemed to indicate powers which might qualify their possessor to be an admirable interpreter between the original prophets and the inferior disciples. There was the buoyancy of spirit, the undoubting confidence that the riddle of the universe had at last been satisfactorily solved, and the power of seizing the picturesque and striking aspect of things and embodying abstract theories in vivid symbols which marks the second order of intellects—the men who spread but do not originate fruitful and transforming ideas. Thinkers of the highest rank may be equally self-confident: for it cannot be denied that unreasonable trust in one's own infallibility is a great condition of success in even the highest tasks; but the confidence of great minds is compatible with a deeper estimate of the difficulties before them. They may hold that evil will be extirpated, but they are aware that its roots strike down into the very heart of things. Kingsley's exuberant faith in his own message showed the high spirits of youth rather than a profound insight into the conditions of the great problems which he solved so fluently. At the time, however, this youthful zeal was contagious. If not an authority to obey, he was a fellow-worker in whom to trust heartily and rejoice unreservedly. Nobody, as Matthew Arnold says in a letter published in the Life, was more willing to admire or more free from petty jealousies. This quality gave a charm to his writings. There was always something generous in their tone; a desire to understand his antagonist's position, which was due to his own temperament as much as to the teaching of his leader, Maurice; and, in short, a warmth and heartiness which led one to overlook many defects, and rightly attracted the enthusiasm of men young enough to look up to him for guidance.

The earlier pages in Mrs. Kingsley's volumes give a vivid picture of this period of his life, or at least of one side of it. Something is said—as of course it is proper to say something—of the speculative doubts and difficulties through which he won his way to a more settled and happier frame of mind. But it is impossible to take this very seriously. Kingsley, as his letters prove, started in life, like other lads, with a ready-made theory of the universe. Like other lads, he was perfectly confident that it rested upon an unassailable basis and would solve all difficulties. He intended, it is true, to perfect himself in a few branches of study which he had hitherto neglected; he was to learn something about metaphysics, theology, ecclesiastical history, and other branches of knowledge; but it is quite plain that Kant and Augustine and other great teachers of mankind were to be called in, not to consult upon the basis of his philosophy, but to furnish him with a few tools for polishing certain corollaries and increasing his dialectical skill. His is quite ready to provide his correspondents immediately with a definitive philosophical system, and shows his usual versatility in applying at least some of the metaphysical phraseology caught from his intellectual idols. Many lads learn to modify the speculative apparatus with which they started in life. Absolute conversions, it is true, are almost unknown in philosophy. No one ever deserts from the empirical to the à priori school, or vice versâ; for a man's attitude in such matters depends upon intellectual tendencies which assert themselves in early youth as much as in riper years. But men of real power go through a process of development, which, though it leaves a certain homogeneity between their earlier and their later views, softens the crudeness and lessens the superficiality of the first guesses. No such process is traceable in Kingsley. His first theory is his last, except that in later years his interest in abstract speculation had obviously declined, and his declarations, if equally dogmatic in form, show less confidence than desire to be confident. He is glad to turn from speculations to facts, and thinks that his strength lies in the direction rather of the natural sciences than of speculative thought.

Probably he was quite right. It would, at any rate, be a mistake to regard any process of speculative development as determining his career. He was no real philosopher, though capable of providing philosophical dialogues quite good enough to figure in an historical novel. He was primarily a poet, or, at least, a man swayed by the imagination and emotions. He felt keenly, saw vividly, and accepted such abstract teachings as were most congenial to his modes of seeing and feeling. The true key to his mental development must therefore be sought in his emotional history, and not in the intellectual fermentation which determines the career of a true thinker. The story of his life in this aspect, though indicated rather than directly told, seems to be simple enough. Few people, it is probable, possess greater faculties of enjoyment than Kingsley. His delight in a fine landscape resembled the delight of an epicure in an exquisite vintage. It had the intensity and absorbing power of a sensual appetite. He enjoyed the sight of the Atlantic rollers relieved against a purple stretch of heather as the conventional alderman enjoys turtle-soup. He gave himself up to the pure emotion as a luxurious nature abandons itself to physical gratification. His was not the contemplative mood of the greater poets of nature, but an intense spasm of sympathy which rather excluded all further reflection. Such a temperament implies equal powers of appreciation for many other kinds of beauty, though his love of fine scenery has perhaps left the strongest mark upon his books. He was abnormally sensitive to those pleasures which are on the border-line between the sensuous and the intellectual. He speaks in an early letter of the 'dreamy days of boyhood,' when his 'enjoyment was drawn from the semi-sensual delights of ear and eye, from sun and stars, wood and wave, the beautiful inanimate in all its forms.' 'Present enjoyment,' he adds, 'present profit, brought always to me a recklessness of moral consequences which has been my bane.' The last expression must of course be taken for what it is worth—that is, for next to nothing: but he is no doubt right in attributing to himself a certain greediness of pleasures of the class described, which became more intellectual and comprehensive but hardly less intense in later years.

It is needless to point out what are the dangers to which a man is exposed by such a temperament. He describes himself (at the age of twenty-two) as saved from 'the darkling tempests of scepticism,' and from 'sensuality and dissipation;' saved, too, 'from a hunter's life on the prairies, from becoming a savage and perhaps worse.' The phrase savours of his habitual exaggeration, but it has a real meaning. Young men with a strong taste for pleasure are ruined often enough, though they do not go so far as 'the prairies' to effect that consummation. We can see with sufficient clearness that during his college life Kingsley went through serious struggles and came out victorious. Partly, no doubt, he owed that victory over himself to the fact that his tastes, however keen, were not coarse. He had a genuine vein of poetry; that is to say, of really noble feeling. His intense delight in the higher forms of beauty was a force which resisted any easy lapse into degradation. The æsthetic faculties may, as has been too clearly proved, fall into bondage to the lowest impulses of our nature. In the case of a man so open to generous and manly impulses, so appreciative of the charms which outward scenery reveals to healthy and tender minds and to them alone, the struggle against such a bondage must have been in any case prolonged and vigorous. But stronger men than Kingsley have yielded, and one may see in him the type of character which, under other conditions, produces the 'diabolical' or rather the animalistic school of art and literature. An external influence, we are left to infer, had a share in saving him from so lamentable a descent. Kingsley, in short, was rescued, as other men have been rescued, by the elevating influence of a noble passion. It is inevitable that this fact, tolerably obvious as it is, should be rather indicated than stated in the biography. But he was not slow to proclaim in all his writings, and we need not scruple to assume that his utterance was drawn from his own experience, that, of all good things that can befall a man in this world, the best is that he should fall in love with a good woman. It is not a new truth; indeed, most truths of that importance have an uncomfortable habit of revealing themselves to the intrusive persons who have insisted upon saying all our best things before us. Still, true as it is, many young men are apt to ignore it, or to consider it as repealed instead of limited by obvious prudential maxims. Kingsley, led to recognise it, and even to exaggerate its exclusive importance by his own history, insists upon it with an emphasis which may not only be traced through his writings, but which seems to have affected all his conceptions of life. It may almost be regarded as the true central point of his doctrine. The love of man for woman, when sanctified by religious feeling, is, according to him, the greatest of all forces that work for individual or social good. This belief, and the system of which it forms a part, gives the most characteristic colouring to all his work. It appears to be decided by general consent that a novel means the same thing as a love-story. Some writers, indeed, have been bold enough to maintain, and even to act upon the opinion, that this view exaggerates the part played by the passion in actual life; and that men have some interests in life which survive the pairing period. Kingsley's doctrine differs from that of the ordinary novelist in another way. Love may not be the ultimate end of a man's life; but it is, as Shakespeare puts it—

It is the guide to a noble life; and not only affords the discipline by which men obtain the mastery over themselves, but reveals to them the true theory of their relations to the universe. This doctrine, treated in a rather vacillating manner, supplies the theme for his earliest book, the 'Saint's Tragedy.' Lancelot in 'Yeast,' and even the poor tailor, Alton Locke, owe their best stimulus towards obtaining a satisfactory solution of the perplexed social problems of the time to their love for good women. Hypatia, the type of the feminine influence whose lofty instincts are misdirected by a decaying philosophy, and poor Pelagia, with no philosophy at all, excite the passions by which monks, pagans, and Goths are elevated or corrupted; and the excellent Victoria—a lady who comes too distinctly from a modern tract—shows the philosopher Raphael how to escape from a despairing cynicism. The Elizabethan heroes of 'Westward Ho!' take the side of good or evil according to their mode of understanding love for the heroines. In 'Two Years Ago,' the delicate curate, and the dandified American, and the sturdy Tom Thurnall, all manage to save their souls by the worship of a lofty feminine character, whilst poor Tom Briggs alias Vavasour is ruined by his failure to appreciate the rare excellence of his wife. The same thought inspires some of his most remarkable poems, as the truly beautiful 'Andromeda,' and the 'Martyrdom of Saint Maura,' considered by himself to be his best, though I fancy that few readers will share this judgment. Lancelot in 'Yeast' designs a great allegorical drawing called the 'Triumph of Woman,' which sets forth the hallowing influence of feminine charms upon every variety of human being. The picture is one of those which could hardly be put upon canvas; but it would be the proper frontispiece to Kingsley's works.

Such a doctrine, it may be said, is too specific and narrow to be considered as the animating principle of the various books in which it appears. This is doubtless true, and it must be taken rather as the most characteristic application of the teaching of which it is in a logical sense the corollary, though ostensible corollaries are often in fact first principles. When generalised or associated with congenial theories of wider application, it explains Kingsley's leading doctrines. Thus the love of good women is the great practical guide in life; and, in a broader sense, our affections are to guide our intellects. The love of nature, the rapture produced in a sensitive mind by the glorious beauties of the external world, is to teach us the true theory of the universe. The ultimate argument which convinces men like Tom Thurnall and Raphael Aben Ezra is that the love of which they have come to know the mysterious charm must reveal the true archetype of the world, previously hidden by the veil of sense. It wants no more to explain a problem which seems[1] to have puzzled Kingsley himself—why, namely, the mystics should supply the only religious teaching which had 'any real meaning for his heart.' A man who systematically sees the world through his affections is so far a mystic; though Kingsley's love of the concrete and incapacity for abstract metaphysics prevented him from using the true mystical language. Still simpler is the solution of another problem stated by his biographer. It is said to be 'strange' that Kingsley should have acknowledged the intellectual leadership at once of Coleridge and Maurice and of Carlyle. The superficial difference between the two first and the last of those writers is indeed obvious. But it requires no profound reasoner to detect the fundamental similarity. They all agree in seeing facts through the medium of the imagination, and substituting poetic intuition for the slow and chilling processes of scientific reasoning. They agree in rejecting the rigid framework of dogma and desiring to exalt the spirit above the dead letter. To Kingsley, as to his teachers, and to most imaginative minds, science seemed at one time to mean materialism in philosophy and cynicism in morals. Men of science subordinate the satisfaction of the emotions to the satisfaction of the intellect; they seek to analyse into their elements the concrete realities which alone interest the poet, and see mechanical laws where their opponents would recognise a living force. To Kingsley they appeared to be drying up the source of his most rapturous emotions, and reducing the beautiful world to a colourless museum of dead specimens. Instead of regulating they were suppressing the emotions. It is less remarkable that he should have opposed a doctrine thus interpreted, than that he should have gradually become less hostile to the scientific aspect of things. He accepted, instead of reviling, Darwin's teaching; and seems to have been convincing himself that, after all, science was not an enemy to the loftier sentiments. His keen eye for nature, his love of beast and bird and insect, made him sympathise with the observers, if not with the reasoners, and led him to recognise a poetic and a religious side in rightly interpreted science.

His antipathy to another kind of dogmatism is equally intelligible. To him it appeared (rightly or wrongly) to be hopelessly tainted by the evil principle which he generally described as Manichæism. It ordered him (or so he supposed) to look upon nature with horror or suspicion, instead of regarding it as everywhere marked with the indelible impress of the creative hand, and therefore calculated to stimulate the highest emotions of reverence and awe; and, still more, it set up a false and attenuated ethical standard, which condemned all natural impulses as therefore bad, and placed the monkish above the domestic virtues. It was clearly inevitable that a man who regarded human love as the very centre and starting-point of all the good influences of life, and the delight in nature as the very test of a healthily-constituted mind, should look upon teaching thus understood with absolute detestation. Possibly he caricatured it; at any rate he spared no pains to attack it by every means open to him, and especially by setting forth his own ideal of character. He created the 'muscular Christian'—the man, that is, who, on the showing of his antagonists, is an impossible combination of classical and Christian types, and, on his own, implies the harmonious blending of all aspects of the truth. He protested, fruitlessly enough, against the nickname, because it seemed to imply that his version of the character subordinated the highest to the lowest elements. It suggested that he had used Christian phraseology to consecrate a blind admiration for physical prowess and excess of animal vigour. His indignation—expressed in an imprudently angry letter to one of his critics—was intelligible enough. The imputation was cruel, because it was at once false and plausible. It was false, for Kingsley's ideal heroes—whether properly to be called Christians or not—are certainly not mere animals. They have their faults, but they are not sensual or cynical, though in some of their literary descendants the animal side of their nature seems to have developed itself with suspicious facility. Amyas Leigh would probably have hanged his Guy Livingstone from a yard-arm before the voyage was over. To readers, however, looking at Amyas from a different point of view, the likeness might be deceptive; and in asserting the value of certain qualities too much depreciated by his critics, he naturally seemed to give them an excessive value.

A vague impression that Kingsley was somehow a potential defender of the faith—that he had seen through the doubts and difficulties which perplex other minds—counts for something in his popularity. It is quite needless to dispel this pleasant vision, if anybody holds it; but I shall venture to take it for granted that it would be useless to look to him for any very profound statement of the grounds of belief. Doubtless he was what is called a sincere believer; but one cannot forget that all hagiologists are apt unconsciously to heighten the halo of religious unction which surrounded their heroes when alive. Kingsley did not carry so much of the pulpit frame of mind into ordinary life as innocent readers might fancy. Nobody would have been better pleased to follow jolly Bishop Corbet into his cellar and pitch away cassock and bands with 'There goes the parson,' and 'There goes the bishop.' He had not the dignified calm which stamps the caste of bores and philosophers; and, indeed, the impetuosity of temperament which disqualified him for such tasks is but too perceptible in his artistic work. Its most obvious fault is a want of repose and harmony. He can never be quiet for a moment. Every sentence must be emphatic and intense. He seizes the first aspect of a subject; dashes out a picture—sometimes of perfectly admirable vigour—in half-a-dozen lines; but cannot dwell upon a particular strain of thought or tone down the brilliant hues of fragmentary passages by the diffused atmosphere of calm reflection. He could hardly sit quiet for a moment, as one of his admirers tells us; and his strong-minded heroes, who ought to be self-sustained and tranquil, are always in as great a fever as himself. The result of this tendency is too plainly written upon his life as upon his books. He was always, in a sanitary sense, living upon his capital, and taking more out of his strength than his powers justified. He knocked himself up completely by writing 'Yeast' before he was thirty, and every subsequent work seems to have involved an effort which told heavily upon his constitution. The natural consequence of such a process is to be seen in the fact already noticed that his literary productiveness rapidly declined; and that in his later works we have the emphasis which has become habitual, without the force which saved it from affectation. It must, however, be said to his credit that he had the merit—a lamentably rare one—of abandoning the attempt to rival his own earlier performances when the vein no longer flowed spontaneously.

The strength and the weakness of such a temperament are illustrated by his poetry, of which some fragments will probably survive (and few, indeed, are the poets who survive by more than fragments), though we may doubt the truth of his own opinion that they would supply his most lasting claim upon posterity. He explains, however, very frankly why he can never be a great poet. He is wanting, he says,[2] in the great poetic faculty—the 'power of metaphor and analogue—the instinctive vision of connections between all things in heaven and earth.' His mind, in other words, was deficient in the direction of philosophic imagination. He could not, like Milton, converse habitually with

He was too restless and impetuous to be at ease on those heights from which alone the widest truths become perceptible and excite the emotions which are at once deepest and calmest. His songs represent jets and gushes of vivid but rather feverish emotion. A pathetic or heroic story, or the beauty of some natural scene, moves him deeply, and he utters his emotion in an energetic burst of vivid language. But he is too short-winged for a long flight, or for soaring into the loftiest regions of the intellectual atmosphere.

Every short lyric is the record, one must suppose, of some such mood of intense excitement. But it makes all the difference whether the excitement takes place in a mind already stored with thought, and ready to pierce instantaneously to the deepest meaning of a particular scene or incident, or in a mind incapable of sustained reflection, and accustomed to see things by brilliant flashes which reveal only their partial and superficial aspects. When, however, we do not blame Kingsley for not being somebody else, we must admit him to be excellent within his limits. The 'Andromeda' is in every way admirable. It is probably the most successful attempt in the language to grapple with the technical difficulties of English hexameters; and he also seems to find in the Pagan mythology a more appropriate symbol for his characteristic tone of sentiment, and an imagery which fits in better with his nature-worship than in regions more familiar to him. He can abandon himself unreservedly to his delight in the beautiful without bothering himself about the Manichees or showing the controversial theologian under the artistic dress. The shorter poems have generally a power of stamping themselves upon the memory, due, no doubt, to their straightforward, nervous style. They have the cardinal merit of vigour which belongs to all genuine utterance of real emotion, and are delightfully free from the flabby affectations of many modern rivals. The mark may not be the most elevated, but he goes at it as straight as he would ride at a fence. His 'North-Easter' does not blow from such ethereal regions as Shelley's 'Southwest Wind.' It verges upon the absurd, and is perhaps not quite free from that taint of vulgarity which vitiates all artistic reference to field-sports. But given that such a sentiment was worth expressing, the tones in which it is couched are as ringing and vigorous as could be wished. He can rise much higher when he is pathetic and indignant. It would not be easy to find a better war-cry for the denouncer of social wrongs than the ballad of the Poacher's Widow. And to pass over the two songs by which he is best known, such poems as 'Poor Lorraine'—first published in the biography—or the beautiful lines in the 'Saint's Tragedy,' beginning, 'Oh, that we two were maying!' are intense enough in their utterance to make us wonder why he fell short of the highest class of song-writing. Perhaps the defect is indicated by a certain desire to be picturesque, which prevents him from obtaining complete success in the simple expression of pathos. The poems have a taint of prettiness—and prettiness is a deadly vice in poetry. There is about them a faint flavour of drawing-room music. But, when we do not want to be hypercritical, we may be thankful for poetry which, if not of the highest class, has the rarest of merits at the present day—genuine fervour and originality.

The fullest expression of Kingsley's mind must be found in the works which appeared from 1848 to 1855. Those seven years, one may say, saw his literary rise, culmination, and decline. The 'Saint's Tragedy' represents the period of mental agitation. It will hardly live longer than many other modern attempts by men of equal genius to compose dramas not intended for the stage. The form in such cases is generally felt to be an encumbrance rather than a help, and one cannot help thinking in this instance that Kingsley might have done better if he had written a picturesque history instead of forcing his story into an uncongenial framework. Nobody is now likely to share Bunsen's belief that the author had proved himself capable of continuing Shakespeare's great series of historic dramas. But one is also rather surprised that a performance which, with all its crudities and awkwardness, showed such unmistakable symptoms of power, did not make a greater impression. Perhaps the most vital fault is the want of unity, not merely in plot but in the leading thought, which was the natural result of the mode of composition. He began it in 1842—that is, at the age of twenty-three—and it was not published till 1848. As this includes the period during which Kingsley passed through his acutest trouble, it is not wonderful that the book should show signs of confusion. It has, indeed, a purpose, and a very distinct one. It is the first exposition of that doctrine which, as I have said, Kingsley preached in season and out of season. He wishes to exhibit the beauty of his own ideal of feminine meekness as compared with the monastic and ascetic ideal. It cannot, I think, be denied that this central idea was capable of artistic treatment. A dramatist might surely find an impressive motive in the conflict set up in a mind of purity and elevation by the acceptance of a distorted code of morality. There is a genuine tragic element in this interpretation of poor Elizabeth's sufferings. Nature tells her that her domestic affections are holy and of divine origin; the priests tell her that they are to be crushed and mortified. She is gradually tortured to death by the distraction of attempting to obey the two voices, each of them appealing to the loftiest and most unselfish motives. The history is probably inaccurate, but the conception is not the less powerful. The execution remains unsatisfactory, chiefly for the obvious reason that Kingsley was not quite a Shakespeare nor even a Schiller, and that his work is therefore rather a series of vigorous sketches than an effective whole; but partly also because his own sentiment seems to be vacillating and indistinct. A thorough hater or a thorough adherent of the theories impugned would have made a work more artistically telling because more coherently conceived. Kingsley is really feeling his way to a theory, and therefore undecided in his artistic attitude. The whole becomes patchy and indistinct. He is feverishly excited rather than deeply moved, and inconsistent when he ought to be compassionate. Briefly, he wants firmness of hand and definiteness of purpose, though there is no want of very remarkable vigour.

The two novels, 'Yeast' and 'Alton Locke,' are far more effective; and indeed 'Alton Locke' may be fairly regarded as his best piece of work. It is not creditable to the discernment of the intelligent public that Kingsley should have been taken for a subversive revolutionist on the strength of these performances. The intelligent public indeed is much given to the grossest stupidity; and, as Kingsley more or less deceived himself, it is not wonderful that he should have been misunderstood. He announced himself at a public meeting to be a Chartist; and when a man voluntarily adopts a nickname, he must not be surprised if he is credited with all the qualities generally associated with it. In fact, however, he was not more of a genuine Radical than when in later years he declared that he would, if he could, 'restore the feudal system, the highest form of civilisation—in ideal, not in practice—which Europe has yet seen.'[3] There is much virtue in the phrase 'not in practice;' and perhaps Kingsley was no more of a genuine feudalist than he was of a genuine Chartist. In his earlier phase he was simply playing a part which has often enough been attempted by very honest men. Missionaries of a new faith see the advantage of sapping the old creed instead of attacking it in front. Adopting its language and such of its tenets as are congenial to their own, they can gradually introduce a friendly garrison into the hostile fort. The conscious adoption of such a method might have been called jesuitical by Kingsley, and in his mouth such an epithet would have been damnatory. But it was in all sincerity that he and his friends considered themselves to be the 'true demagogues'—to quote the title of the chapter in which the moral of 'Alton Locke' is embodied. They had not the slightest sympathy, indeed, with the tenets of the thoroughgoing Radical. Kingsley believed in the social as much as in the ecclesiastical hierarchy; and with an intensity which almost amounted to bigotry. He would no more put down the squires than the parson; and himself a most energetic parson, he certainly did not undervalue the social importance of the function discharged by his order. In 'Alton Locke' the bitterest satire is directed, not against self-indulgent nobles or pedantic prelates, but against the accepted leaders of the artisans. The 'true demagogue,' as is perfectly natural, holds the false demagogue in especial horror. Kingsley is the friend, not Cuffey. He hates the 'Manchester school' as the commonplace version of Radicalism and the analogue of the Materialist school in politics. From these, he says,[4] in 1852, 'heaven defend us; for of all narrow, conceited, hypocritical, and anarchic and atheistic schemes of the universe, the Manchester one is precisely the worst. I have no words to express my contempt for it.' Briefly, Kingsley's remedy for speculative error was not the rejection, but the more spiritual interpretation, of the old creed; and his remedy for bad squires and parsons was not disendowment and division of the land, but the raising up a better generation of parsons and squires.

There is a superficial resemblance between this theory and that of the Young England school, who, like Kingsley, would have restored the feudal system in a purified state. Some of his writing runs parallel to Lord Beaconsfield's exposition of that doctrine. The difference was, of course, vital. He hated mediæval revivalism as heartily as he hated the demagogues; and his prejudices against the whole order of ideas represented by the 'Tracts for the Times' were perhaps the strongest of his antipathies. He looked back to the sixteenth, not to the twelfth century; and his ideal parson was to be no ascetic, but a married man with a taste for field-sports, and fully sympathising with the common-sense of the laity. The Young England party seemed to him to desire the conversion of the modern labourer into a picturesque peasant, ready to receive doles at the castle-gate and bow before the priest with bland subservience. Kingsley wanted to make a man of him; to give him self-respect and independence, not in a sense which would imply the levelling all social superiorities, but in the sense of assigning to him an honourable position in the social organisation. He was no more to be petted or pauperised than to be set on a level with his social superiors, or set loose without guidance from his intellectual teachers.

Some such doctrines would be verbally accepted by most men; and I cannot here ask whether they really require the teaching with which Kingsley associated them. The demagogues and the obstructives were both, according to him, on a wrong tack; and he could point out the one true method of reuniting development with order. Whatever the value of his theories, the sentiment associated with them was substantially healthy, vigorous, and elevated. That part of his fictions in which it is embodied is probably his most valuable work. Nobody can read the descriptions of the agricultural labourers or of the London artisan in 'Yeast' and 'Alton Locke' without recognising both the strength of his sympathies and the vigour of his perceptive faculties. He was drawing from the life, and expressing his deepest emotions. 'What is the use of preaching to hungry paupers about heaven?' he asks. 'Sir, as my clerk said to me yesterday, there is a weight on their hearts, and they call for no change, for they know they can be no worse off than they are.' The phrase explains what was the curse which rested upon Kingsley's parishioners, and in what sense he had to 'redeem it from barbarism.' He did his work like a man. He was daily with his people 'in their cottages, and made a point of talking to the men and boys at their fieldwork till he was personally intimate with every soul, from the women at their washtubs to the babies in the cradle, for whom he had always a loving word and look.' Whatever we may think of his 'socialism' or 'democracy,' there was at least no want of depth or sincerity in his sympathy for the poor, and therefore there is no false ring in his description of their condition. He writes with his heart—not to serve any political purpose or to gain credit for a cheap display of charitable feeling.

No books can show more forcibly the dark side of English society of the time. The aspect in which Kingsley views the evil is characteristic. The root of all that is good in man lies in the purity and vigour of the domestic affections. A condition of things in which the stability and health of the family become impossible is one in which the very foundations of society are being sapped. Nobody could be more alive to the countless mischiefs implied in the statement that the poor man has nothing deserving the name of home. The verses given to Tregarva in 'Yeast' sum up his diagnosis of the social disease with admirable vigour. Many scenes in that rather chaotic story are equally vivid in their presentation of the facts. The description of the village feast is a bit of startlingly impressive realism. The poor sodden, hopeless, spiritless peasantry consoling themselves with strong drink and brutal songs, open to no impressions of beauty, with no sense of the romantic except in lawless passion, and too beaten down to have even a thought of rebellion except in the shape of agrarian outrage, are described with singular force. Poor Crawy, the poacher, scarcely elevated above the beasts, looking to the gaol and workhouse for his only refuge, so degraded that pity is almost lost in disgust, is the significant product of the general decay. The race is deteriorating. It has fallen vastly below the standard of the last generation. All the lads are 'smaller, clumsier, lower-brained, and weaker-jawed than their elders.' Such higher feeling as remains takes the form of the dog-like fidelity of Harry Verney, the gamekeeper. Kingsley never wrote a better scene than the death of the old man from a wound received in a poaching affray; when he suddenly springs upright in bed, holds out 'his withered paw with a kind of wild majesty,' and shouts 'There ain't such a head of hares on any manor in the country! And them's the last words of Harry Verney.'

'Alton Locke' is a more ambitious and coherent effort; and the descriptions of the London population, and of the futile attempt at a rising in the country, are in the same vigorous vein. Perhaps a more remarkable success is the old Scotchman, Mackaye, who seems to be the best of Kingsley's characters. He has some real humour, a quality in which Kingsley was for the most part curiously deficient; but one must expect that in this case he was drawing from an original. It is interesting to read Carlyle's criticism of this part of the book. 'Saunders Mackaye,' he says,[5] 'my invaluable countryman in this book, is nearly perfect; indeed, I greatly wonder how you did contrive to manage him. His very dialect is as if a native had done it, and the whole existence of the rugged old hero is a wonderfully splendid and coherent piece of Scotch bravura.' Perhaps an explanation of the wonder might be suggested to other people more easily than to Carlyle; but, at any rate, Mackaye is a very felicitous centre for the various groups who play their parts in the story; and not the less efficient as a chorus because he is chiefly critical and confines himself to shrewd demonstrations of the folly of everybody concerned.

Carlyle gives as his final verdict that his impression is of 'a fervid creation still left half chaotic.' In fact, with all the genuine force of 'Alton Locke'—and no living novelist has excelled the vividness of certain passages—there is an unsatisfactory side to the whole performance. It is marred by the feverishness which inspires most of his work. There is an attempt to crowd too much into the space, and the emphasis sometimes remains when the power is flagging. Greater reserve of power and more attention to unity of effect would have been required to make it a really great book. But the most unsatisfactory part is where the author forgets to be a novelist and becomes a preacher and a pamphleteer. The admirable heroine is forced to deliver what is to all purposes a commonplace tract of two or three chapters at the end of the story, when her thoughts, to be effective, should really have been embedded in the structure of the story. Anybody can preach a sermon when no contradiction is allowed; but the novelist ought to show the thought translated into action, and not given in a raw shape of downright comment. As it is, Lady Ellerton is a mere lay-figure who can talk very edifying phrases, but is really tacked on to the outside of the narrative. The moral should have been evolved by the natural course of events; for when it is presented in this point-blank fashion we begin to cavil, and wish that the Chartist or Mackaye might be allowed to show cause against the sentence pronounced. As they can't, we do it for ourselves.

The historical novels which followed indicate a remarkable change. When he published 'Two Years Ago,' Kingsley had become reconciled to the world. There is an apparent and decidedly unpleasant inconsistency between the denouncer of social wrongs and the novelist who sings the praises of squires, patrons, and guardsmen, with a placid conviction that they sufficiently represent his ideal. The explanation is partly that, as I have said, Kingsley never accepted the revolutionary remedy for the grievances which he described. He was quite consistent in regarding the old creed as expressing the true mode of cure. But one must still ask whether the facts had changed. Was the world regenerated between 1848 and 1855? Were English labourers all properly fed, housed, and taught? Had the sanctity of domestic life acquired a new charm in the interval, and was the old quarrel between rich and poor definitely settled or in the way to settlement? That appears to have been Kingsley's own view, if we may judge from the prefaces to later editions of his book; and the great agency to which he assigns the strange improvement was the outbreak of the Crimean war. That crisis, it seems, had taught the higher classes a deeper sense of their responsibility, and roused us from the dangerous slumber of peace and growing wealth. Mr. Herbert Spencer has lately expounded a very different theory as to the results of an increased intensity of the military spirit. Without discussing so wide a question, it may, I fancy, be pretty safely assumed that the future historian will not take quite this view of recent affairs, and will attribute any improvement that may have taken place to some deeper cause than that assigned. When a whole social order is rotting, as the author of 'Yeast' supposed ours to have been, it is not often cured by a little splutter of fighting; nor does the belief in the efficacy of such a remedy seem to fit in very well with a spiritual Christianity. Perhaps we may further assume, therefore, that the change was rather in the spectator than in the spectacle. If so, Kingsley was not the first man to account for an alteration in his personal outlook by a movement of the rest of the universe. His parish had been got into better order; his combative instinct had grown weaker; and, like other men who grow in years and domestic comfort, he had become more content with things in general. Fathers of families are capable, we know, of everything, and, amongst other things, of softening the fervour of their early enthusiasms. There is nothing at all strange in the process; but it must be taken to illustrate the fact that, if Kingsley's sympathies were keen, his intellectual insight was not very deep. A man who holds that a social disease is so easily suppressed, has not measured very accurately the constitutional disorder which it revealed.

'Two Years Ago,' the book in which this conclusion is plainly announced, is in many respects a painful performance. It contains, indeed, some admirable descriptions of scenery; but the sentiment is poor and fretful. Tom Thurnall, intended to be an embodiment of masculine vigour, has no real stuff in him. He is a bragging, excitable, and at bottom sentimental person. All his swagger fails to convince us that he is a true man. Put beside a really simple and masculine nature like Dandie Dinmont, or even beside Kingsley's own Amyas Leigh, one sees his hollowness. The whole story leads up to a distribution of poetical justice in Kingsley's worst manner. He has a lamentable weakness for taking upon himself the part of Providence. 'After all,' he once wrote in 'Yeast,' 'your "Rake's Progress" and "Atheist's Deathbed" do no more good than noble George Cruikshank's "Bottle" will, because everyone knows that they are the exception and not the rule; that the atheist generally dies with a conscience as comfortably callous as a rhinoceros-hide; and the rake, when age stops his power of sinning, becomes generally rather more respectable than his neighbours.' It is a pity that Kingsley could not remember this true saying in later years. He seems to have grown too impatient to leave room for the natural evolution of events. He gives the machinery a jerk, and is fidgety because the wheels grind so slowly, though they 'grind exceeding small.'

Between 'Alton Locke' and 'Two Years Ago' there luckily intervened 'Hypatia' and 'Westward Ho!' They are brilliant and almost solitary exceptions to the general dreariness of the historical novel. To criticise them either from the historical or the artistic point of view would indeed be easy enough; but they have a vivacity which defies criticism. I have no doubt that 'Hypatia' is fundamentally and hopelessly inaccurate, and that a sound historian would shudder at innumerable anachronisms and pick holes in every paragraph. I don't believe that men like the Goths ever existed in this world, and am prepared to give up the whole tribe of monks, pagans, Jews, and fathers of the Church. If 'Westward Ho!' is (as I presume) less inaccurate because dealing with less distant ages, it is still too much of a party pamphlet to be taken for history. The Jesuits are probably caricatures, and Miss Ayacanora is a bit of rather silly melodrama. But it is difficult to say too much in favour of the singular animation and movement of both books. There is a want of repose, if you insist upon applying the highest canons of art; but the brilliance of description, the energy and rapidity of the action, simply disarm the reader. I rejoice in the Amal and Wulf and Raphael Aben Ezra, as I love Ivanhoe, and Front de Bœuf, and Wamba the Witless. The fight between 'English mastiffs and Spanish bloodhounds' is as stirring as the skirmish of Drumclog in 'Old Mortality.' 'Hypatia,' according to Kingsley himself, was written with his heart's blood. Like other phrases of his, that requires a little dilution. But, at any rate, both books stand out for vividness, for a happy audacity and quickness of perception, above all modern attempts in the same direction.

The problems discussed in these historical novels and the solutions suggested are of course substantially the same as in his earlier books. The period of 'Hypatia' bears a striking analogy to the present. In the heroes described in 'Westward Ho!' he supposed himself to recognise the fullest realisation of the fundamental doctrines of his own creed. Much might be said, were it worth saying, as to the accuracy of these assumptions. Kingsley's method is in any case too much tainted by the obvious tendency to see facts by the light of preconceived theories. In the earlier writings he may be one-sided and exaggerated; but his imagination is at least guided by reference to actual observation. It seems as if in this later period he had instinctively turned away to distant periods where men and events might be more easily moulded into conformity with his prejudices. However skilful a man may be in accommodating fact to fancy, he is apt to find difficulties when he paints from the life around him. But when nobody can contradict you except a few prosaic antiquaries, the outside world becomes delightfully malleable. You do not find any fragments of rigid material in the clay which shapes itself so easily in your fingers. Kingsley has faith enough in his teaching to give a genuine glow to these hybrid beings begotten half of fancy, half of the external world. But we feel too plainly that the work will not stand the test of close examination, either by the historian or the literary critic. Such a nemesis naturally overtakes men who admit too easily an appeal from fact to sentiment. They begin to lose the sense of reality, and their artistic work shows signs of flimsiness as their theories of arbitrary assumption. The great writer pierces to the true life of a period because he recognises the necessity of conforming his beliefs to realities. The inferior writer uses his knowledge only to give colouring to his dreams, and his work tries to represent what he would like to be the truth instead of showing genuine insight into what is actually true.

Whatever else in Kingsley may have been affected or half-hearted, his appreciation of nature remained true and healthy to the end. If anything it became more intense as he seemed to grow weary of abstract discussions, and turned for relief to natural scenes. Nobody has ever shown a greater power of investing with a romantic charm the descriptions of bird, beast, and insect. There are no more delightful books than those which express the naturalist's delight in country sights, from the days of Izaak Walton to White of Selborne, or Waterton, or our most recent discovery, the Scotch naturalist Edward. Amongst such writers, Kingsley is in the front rank; and his taste is combined with a power of catching wider aspects of scenery, such as few of our professional describers can rival. It would be interesting to lay bare the secret of his power. He has done for Devon and Cornwall, for the heaths and chalk-streams of the southern counties, and even for the much-depreciated fens, what Scott did for the Highlands. One secret is of course the terseness and directness of his descriptions. He never lays himself out for a bit of deliberate bombast, and deals always with first-hand impressions. The writing is all alive. There is no dead matter of conventional phrases and imitative ecstasies. And again, his descriptions are always dramatic. There is a human being in the foreground with whom we sympathise. We do not lose ourselves in mystic meditations, or surrender ourselves to mere sensuous dreaming. We are in active, strenuous enjoyment; beguiling the trout of his favourite chalk-streams, sailing under the storm-beaten cliffs of Lundy, and drinking in the rich sea-breeze that sweeps over Dartmoor, or galloping with clenched teeth through the fir-woods of Eversley. One characteristic picture—to take one at random from a hundred—is the evening ride of Zeal-for-Truth Thoresby of Thoresby Rise in Deeping Fen as he rides slowly homeward after Naseby fight along one of the fen-droves. One could swear that one had been with him, as Kingsley no doubt was merely embodying the vivid recollection of some old Cambridge expedition into the Bedford Level, a scenery which has a singular and mysterious charm, though few besides Kingsley have succeeded in putting it on paper.

Some wonder has been wasted on Kingsley's descriptions of the tropical scenery which he had never seen. Even men of genius do not work miracles; and so far as I know they always blunder in such attempts. Johnson showed his usual sense in regard to a similar criticism upon the blind poet, Blacklock. If, he said, you found that a paralytic man had left his room, you would explain the wonder by supposing that he had been carried. Similarly, the explanation of Kingsley and of Blacklock is that they described not what they had seen, but what they had read. The description in 'Westward Ho!' may easily be traced to Humboldt and other sources where they are not explicable by a visit to Kew Gardens. A minute criticism would show that they are little more than catalogues of gorgeous plants and strange beasts, and show none of those vivid touches, so striking from their fidelity, which give animation to his descriptions of English scenery. In his pictures of Devonshire we can tell the time of the day and night and the state of the weather as clearly as if he were a meteorologist. In South America he leaves us to generalities. The true secret of his success is different. He describes vividly not the outward fact, but the inward enjoyment. One need not go to the tropics to imagine the charm of luxurious indolence. Perhaps we enjoy it the more because we have not really been exposed to its inconveniences. The dazzling of the eye by blazing sunlight and brilliant colours, the relief given by the cool deep streams under luxuriant foliage, the vague consciousness of wondrous forms of life lurking in the forest depths, can be realised without any special accuracy of portraiture. The contagion to which we are really exposed is that of the enthusiasm with which Kingsley had read his favourite books of travel. But of downright description there is little, and that little not very remarkable. If anybody doubts it, he may read the passage of river scenery which concludes with a quotation from Humboldt, and observe how vividly the fragment of actual observation stands out from the mere catalogue of curiosities; or, again, with any of Kingsley's own Devonshire scenes, where every touch shows loving familiarity with details and a consequent power of selecting just the most speaking incidents.

We may put two passages beside each other which will illustrate the difference. Describing, after Humboldt, the mid-day calm of the forest, he says, 'The birds' notes died out one by one; the very butterflies ceased their flitting over the treetops, and slept with outspread wings upon the glossy leaves, undistinguishable from the flowers around them. Now and then a colibri whirred downwards towards the water, hummed for a moment round some pendent flower, and then the living gem was lost in the deep darkness of the inner wood, among tree trunks as huge and dark as the pillars of some Hindoo shrine; or a parrot swung and screamed at them from an overhanging bough; or a thirsty monkey slid lazily down a liana to the surface of the stream, dipped up the water in his tiny hand, and started chattering back, as his eyes met those of some foul alligator peering upward through the clear depths below.' This and more is good enough, but there is nothing which would not suggest itself to a visitor to the British Museum or the Zoological Gardens. It is a catalogue, and rather too full a catalogue of curiosities, without one of those vivid touches which reveal actual observation. At the end of the same volume we have a real sketch from nature. Amyas and his friends walk to the cliffs of Lundy: 'As they approached, a raven, who sat upon the topmost stone, black against the bright blue sky, flapped lazily away, and sank down the abysses of the cliff, as if he had scented the corpses beneath the surge. Below them, from the gull-rock rose a thousand birds, and filled the air with sound, the choughs cackled, the hacklets wailed, the great black-backs laughed querulous defiance at the intruders, and a single falcon, with an angry bark, darted out from beneath their feet, and hung poised high aloft, watching the sea-fowl which swung slowly round and round below.' That gives the atmospheric effect, and what we may call the dramatic character. Every phrase suggests a picture, and the whole description, of which I have quoted a bit, has real unity of effect, instead of being a simple enumeration of details.

When one reads some passages inspired by this hearty and simple-minded love of nature, one is sometimes half tempted to wish that Kingsley could have put aside his preachings, social, theological, and philosophical, and have been content with a function for which he was so admirably adapted. The men who can feel and make others feel the charms of beautiful scenery and stimulate the love for natural history do us a service which, if not the highest, is perhaps the most unalloyed by any mixture of evil. Kingsley would have avoided many errors and the utterance of much unsatisfactory dogmatism if he could have limited himself to such a duty. But to do so he must have been a man of narrower sympathies, less generous temper, and less hearty hatred of all evil influences. We could hardly wish him to have been other than he was, though we may wish that he had developed under more favourable circumstances. The weaknesses which marred his work and led to the exhaustion of his faculties were to be regretted, but were not such as to diminish the affection deserved by so cordial a nature. He is more or less responsible for those offensive persons, the Viking and the muscular Christian. The Viking, I suppose, must have been partly a humbug like other products of graphic history, and too much has been made of his supposed share in our ancestry. Kingsley had a feminine tenderness and an impatient excitability indicative of a different ancestry. He admires the huge, full-blooded barbarians, but only belongs to them on one side. He is as near to his delicate as to his muscular heroes, to Francis as to Amyas Leigh, and to the morbid poet, Vavasour, as to the more vigorous Tom Thurnall. In these days, when the Viking or Berserker element seems to be dying out of our literature, even this qualified and external worship of masculine vigour is valuable. There is something hectic and spasmodic about it, though it implies a homage to more healthy ideals. Kingsley, at any rate, hated the namby-pamby, and he tried, with too obvious an effort, to be simple and unaffected. His aims were thoroughly noble, though marred by his want of reserve and of intellectual stamina. He was too timid or too impatient to work out consistent theories or acquire much depth of conviction. But with all his shortcomings he succeeded in giving forcible utterance to truths of vital importance, and brought vividly before our minds problems which most urgently press for a solution more satisfactory than he was able to reach.