This sympathy with nature, and this power to invest it with feeling for the human drama of which it is the scene, lifts little Charlotte Bronte into the company of the poets. No one, however, can enter into all the art of her landscapes unless he knows those Yorkshire moors, the straggling upland villages, bare, cold, gray, uncanny, with low, unlovely stone buildings, and stern church towers and graveyards, varied with brawling brooks and wooded glens, and here and there a grim manor-house that had seen war. It is so often that the dwellers in the least picturesque and smiling countries are found to love their native country best and to invest it with the most enduring art. And the pilgrims to Haworth Parsonage have in times past been as ardent as those who flock to Grasmere or to Abbotsford.
_Jane Eyre_ is full of this "pathetic fallacy," or aspect of nature dyed in the human emotions of which it is the mute witness. The storm in the garden at night when Rochester first offers marriage to his little governess, and they return to the house drenched in rain and melted with joy, is a fine example of this power. From first to last, the correspondence between the local scene and the human drama is a distinctive mark in _Jane Eyre_.
If I were asked to choose that scene in the whole tale which impresses itself most on my memory, I should turn to the thirty-sixth chapter when Jane comes back to have a look at Thornfield Hall, peeps on the battlemented mansion which she had loved so well, and is struck dumb to find it burnt out to a mere skeleton--"I looked with timorous joy toward a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin." The suddenness of this shock, its unexpected and yet natural catastrophe, its mysterious imagery of the loves of Edward Rochester and Jane Eyre, and the intense sympathy which earth, wood, rookery, and ruin seem to feel for the girl"s eagerness, amazement, and horror, have always seemed to me to reach the highest note of art in romance. It is now forty-seven years since I first read that piece; and in all these years I have found no single scene in later fiction which is so vividly and indelibly burnt into the memory as is this. The whole of this chapter, and what follows it, is intensely real and true. And the very denoument of the tale itself--that inevitable bathos into which the romance so often dribbles out its last inglorious breath--has a manliness and sincerity of its own: "the sky is no longer a blank to him--the earth no longer a void."
The famous scene in the twenty-sixth chapter with the interrupted marriage, when Rochester drags the whole bridal party into the den of his maniacal wife, the wild struggle with the mad woman, the despair of Jane--all this is as powerful as anything whatever in English fiction.
It is even a masterpiece of ingenious construction and dramatic action.
It is difficult to form a cool estimate of a piece so intense, so vivid, and so artful in its mechanism. The whole incident is conceived with the most perfect reality; the plot is original, startling, and yet not wholly extravagant. But it must be confessed that the plot is not worked out in details in a faultless way. It is undoubtedly in substance "sensational," and has been called the parent of modern sensationalism. Edward Rochester acts as a Rochester might; but he too often talks like the "wicked baronet" of low melodrama. The execution is not always quite equal to the conception. The affiance of Jane and Edward Rochester, their attempted marriage, the wild temptation of Jane, her fierce rebuff of the tempter, his despair and remorse, her agony and flight--all are consummate in conception, marred here and there as they are in details by the blue fire and conventional imprecations of the stage.
The concluding chapters of the book, when Jane finally rejects St. John Rivers and goes back to Thornfield and to her "master," are all indeed excellent. St. John is not successful as a character; but he serves to produce the crisis and to be foil to Rochester. St. John, it is true, is not a real being: like Rochester, he is a type of man as he affects the brain and heart of a highly sensitive and imaginative girl.
Objectively speaking, as men living and acting in a practical world, St. John and Rochester are both in some degree caricatures of men; and, if the narrative were a cold story calmly composed by a certain Miss Bronte to amuse us, we could not avoid the sense of unreality in the men. But the intensity of the vision, the realism of every scene, the fierce yet self-governed pa.s.sion of Jane herself, pouring out, as in a secret diary, her agonies of love, of scorn, of pride, of abandonment,--all this produces an illusion on us: we are no longer reading a novel of society, but we are admitted to the wild musings of a girl"s soul; and, though she makes out her first lover to be a generous brute and her second lover to be a devout machine, we feel it quite natural that Jane, with her pride and her heart of fire and her romantic brain, should so in her diary describe them.
St. John Rivers, if we take him coolly outside of Jane"s portrait gallery, is little more than a puppet. We never seem to get nearer to his own mind and heart, and his conduct and language are hardly compatible with the n.o.ble attributes with which he is said to be adorned. A man of such refined culture, of such high intelligence, of such social distinction and experience, of such angelic character, does not treat women with studied insolence and diabolical cynicism. That a girl, half maddened by disappointed love, should romantically come to erect his image into that of a sort of diabolic angel, is natural enough, and her conduct when she leaves Moor House is right and true, though we cannot say as much for Rivers" words. But the impression of the whole scene is right.
In the same way, Edward Rochester, if we take him simply as a cultured and travelled country gentleman, who was a magnate and great _parti_ in his county, is barely within the range of possibility. As St. John Rivers is a walking contradictory of a diabolic saint, so Edward Rochester is a violent specimen of the heroic ruffian. In Emily Bronte"s gruesome phantasmagoria of _Wuthering Heights_ there is a ruffian named Heathcliff; and, whatever be his brutalities and imprecations, we always feel in reading it that _Wuthering Heights_ is merely a grisly dream, not a novel at all. Edward Rochester has something of the Heathcliff too. But Rochester is a man of the best English society, courted by wealth and rank, a man of cultivated tastes, of wide experience and refined habits, and lastly of most generous and heroic impulses--and yet such a man swears at his people like a horse-dealer, teases and bullies his little governess, treats his adopted child like a dog, almost kicks his brother-in-law in his rages, plays shocking tricks with his governess at night, offers her marriage, and attempts to commit bigamy in his own parish with his living wife still under the same roof! That a man of Rochester"s resource, experience, and forethought, should keep his maniac wife in his own ancestral home where he is entertaining the county families and courting a neighbouring peer"s sister, and that, after the maniac had often attempted murder and arson--all this is beyond the range of probabilities. And yet the story could not go on without it. And so, Edward Rochester, man of the world as he is, risks his life, his home, and everything and every one dear to him in order that his little governess, Jane Eyre, should have the materials for inditing a thrilling autobiography. It cannot be denied that this is the very essence of "sensationalism," which means a succession of thrilling surprises constructed out of situations that are practically impossible.
Nor, alas! can we deny that there are ugly bits of real coa.r.s.eness in _Jane Eyre_. It is true that most of them are the effects of that portentous ignorance of the world and of civilised society which the solitary dreamer of Haworth Parsonage had no means of removing. The fine ladies, the lords and soldiers in the drawing-room at Thornfield are described with inimitable life, but they are described as they appeared to the lady"s-maids, not to each other or to the world.
Charlotte Bronte perhaps did not know that an elegant girl of rank does not in a friend"s house address her host"s footman before his guests in these words--"Cease that chatter, blockhead! and do my bidding." Nor does a gentleman speak to his governess of the same lady whom he is thought to be about to marry in these terms--"She is a rare one, is she not, Jane? A strapper--a real strapper, Jane: big, brown, and buxom."
But all these things are rather the result of pure ignorance.
Charlotte Bronte, when she wrote her first book, had hardly ever seen any Englishmen but a few curates, the villagers, and her degraded brother, with rare glimpses of lower middle-cla.s.s homes. But Jane Eyre"s own doings and sayings are hardly the effect of mere ignorance.
Her nocturnal adventures with her "master" are given with delightful _navete_; her consenting to hear out her "master"s" story of his foreign amours is not pleasant. Her two avowals to Edward Rochester--one before he had declared his love for her, and the other on her return to him--are certainly somewhat frank. Jane Eyre in truth does all but propose marriage twice to Edward Rochester; and she is the first to avow her love, even when she believed he was about to marry another woman. It is indeed wrung from her; it is human nature; it is a splendid encounter of pa.s.sion; and if it be bold in the little woman, it is redeemed by her n.o.ble defiance of his tainted suit, and her desperate flight from her married lover.
But Jane Eyre"s ignorances and simplicities, the improbabilities of her men, the violence of the plot, the weird romance about her own life, are all made acceptable to us by being shown to us only through the secret visions of a pa.s.sionate and romantic girl. As the autobiography of a brave and original woman, who bares to us her whole heart without reserve and without fear, _Jane Eyre_ stands forth as a great book of the nineteenth century. It stands just in the middle of the century, when men were still under the spell of Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and yet it is not wholly alien to the methods of our latest realists.
It is true that a purely subjective work in prose romance, an autobiographic revelation of a sensitive heart, is not the highest and certainly not the widest art. Scott and Thackeray--even Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth--paint the world, or part of the world, as it is, crowded with men and women of various characters. Charlotte Bronte painted not the world, hardly a corner of the world, but the very soul of one proud and loving girl. That is enough: we need ask no more. It was done with consummate power. We feel that we know her life, from ill-used childhood to her proud matronhood; we know her home, her school, her professional duties, her loves and hates, her agonies and her joys, with that intense familiarity and certainty of vision with which our own personal memories are graven on our brain. With all its faults, its narrowness of range, its occasional extravagances, _Jane Eyre_ will long be remembered as one of the most creative influences of the Victorian literature, one of the most poetic pieces of English romance, and among the most vivid masterpieces in the rare order of literary "Confessions."
VIII
CHARLES KINGSLEY
In this series of papers I have been trying to note some of the more definite literary forces which tended to mould English opinion during the epoch of the present Queen. I can remember the issue of nearly all the greater products of the Victorian writers, or at least the heyday of their early fame. I do not speak of any living writer, and confine myself to the writers of our country. Much less do I permit myself to speak of those living lights of literature from whom we may yet receive work even surpa.s.sing that of those who are gone. My aim has been not so much to weigh each writer in the delicate balance of mere literary merit, but rather, from the point of view of the historian of ideas and of manners, to record the successive influences which, in the last fifty years or so, have moulded or reflected English opinion through printed books, be they of the dogmatic or of the imaginative order. In so doing, I have to speak of writers whose vogue is pa.s.sing away with the present generation, or those of whom we must admit very grave defects and feebleness. Some of them may be little cared for to-day; though they have a place in the evolution of British society and thought.
Charles Kingsley has such a place--not by reason of any supreme work or any very rare quality of his own, but by virtue of his versatility, his _verve_, his fecundity, his irrepressible gift of breaking out in some new line, his strong and reckless sympathy, and above all by real literary brilliance. Where he failed to impress, to teach, to inspire--almost even though he stirred men to anger or laughter--Charles Kingsley for a generation continued to interest the public, to scatter amongst them ideas or problems; he made many people think, and gave many people delight. He woke them up in all sorts of ways, about all sorts of things. He wrote lyrics, songs, dramas, romances, sermons, Platonic dialogues, newspaper articles, children"s fairy books, scientific manuals, philosophical essays, lectures, extravaganzas, and theological polemics. Hardly any of these were quite in the first rank, and some of them were thin, flashy, and almost silly. But most of them had the saving gift of getting home to the interests, ideas, and tastes of the great public, and he made them think even when he was very wrong himself.
Such activity, such keenness, such command of literary resources, has to be reckoned with in a man of warm feeling and generous impulses; and thus, if Charles Kingsley is no longer with very many either prophet or master, he was a literary influence of at least the second rank in his own generation.
This would not be enough to make a permanent reputation if it stood alone; but there were moments in which he bounded into the first rank.
It would hardly be safe to call Kingsley a poet of great pretension, although there are pa.s.sages in _The Saint"s Tragedy_ and in the _Ballads_ of real power; but he has written songs which, as songs for the voice, have hardly been surpa.s.sed by Tennyson himself. _The Sands of Dee_ and _The Three Fishers_, if not poetry of quite perfect kind, have that incommunicable and indescribable element of the _cantabile_ which fits them to the wail of a sympathetic voice perhaps even better than any songs of the most finished poetry. A true song must be simple, familiar, musically suggestive of a single touching idea, and nothing more. And this is just the mysterious quality of these songs and the source of their immense popularity. Again, without pretending that Kingsley is a great novelist, there are scenes, especially descriptive scenes, in _Hypatia_, in _Westward Ho!_ which belong to the very highest order of literary painting, and have hardly any superior in the romances of our era. No romances, except Thackeray"s, have the same glow of style in such profusion and variety; and Thackeray himself was no such poet of natural beauty as Charles Kingsley--a poet, be it remembered, who by sheer force of imagination could realise for us landscapes and climates of which he himself had no sort of experience. Even Scott himself has hardly done this with so vivid a brush.
Kingsley was a striking example of that which is so characteristic of recent English literature--its strong, practical, social, ethical, or theological bent. It is in marked contrast with French literature. Our writers are always using their literary gifts to preach, to teach, to promulgate a new social or religious movement, to reform somebody or something to ill.u.s.trate a new doctrine. From first to last, Carlyle regarded himself even more as preacher than as artist: so does his follower, Mr. Ruskin. Macaulay seemed to write history in order to prove the immeasurable superiority of the Whig to the Tory; and Froude and Freeman write history to enforce their own moral. Disraeli"s novels were the programme of a party and the defence of a cause; and even d.i.c.kens and Thackeray plant their knives deep into the social abuses of their time.
Charles Kingsley was not professed novelist, nor professed man of letters. He was novelist, poet, essayist, and historian, almost by accident, or with ulterior aims. Essentially, he was a moralist, a preacher, a socialist, a reformer, and a theologian.
To begin with his poetry, and he himself began his literary career with verses at the age of sixteen, he began to write poetry almost as a child, and some of his earlier verses are his best. If Kingsley, with all his literary gifts, was never quite in the first rank in anything, he came nearest to being a poet of mark. Some of his ballads almost touch the high-water mark of true ballad poetry, with its abrupt fierce blows of tragedy and pathos, its simple touches of primitive rude speech, its reserve of force, its unspoken mysteries. At any rate, Kingsley"s best ballads have no superior in the ballads of the Victorian era in lilt, in ma.s.siveness of stroke, in strange unexpected turns. _The Weird Lady_ is an astonishing piece for a lad of twenty-one--it begins with, "The swevens came up round Harold the Earl, Like motes in the sunnes beam"--and it ends with the stanza:
A white dove out of the coffin flew; Earl Harold"s mouth it kist; He fell on his face, wherever he stood; And the white dove carried his soul to G.o.d Or ever the bearers wist.
That little piece is surely a bit of pure and rare ballad poetry.
A _New Forest Ballad_ is also good, it ends thus--
They dug three graves in Lyndhurst yard; They dug them side by side; Two yeomen lie there, and a maiden fair, A widow and never a bride.
So too is the _Outlaw_, whose last request is this:--
And when I"m taen and hangit, mither, a brittling o" my deer, Ye"ll no leave your bairn to the corbie craws, to dangle in the air; But ye"ll send up my twa douce brethren, and ye"ll steal me fra the tree, And bury me up on the brown, brown muirs, where I aye loved to be.
The famous ballad in _Yeast_ might have been a great success if Kingsley would have limited it to five stanzas instead of twenty. What a ring there is in the opening lines--
The merry brown hares came leaping Over the crest of the hill--
If he could only have been satisfied with the first five stanzas what a ballad it would have been!--If only he had closed it with the verse--
She thought of the dark plantation And the hares, and her husband"s blood, And the voice of her indignation Rose up to the throne of G.o.d.
That was enough for a ballad, but not for a political novel. The other fifteen stanzas were required for his story; they may be vigorous rhetoric, impressive moralising, but they are too argumentative and too rhetorical to be ballad poetry. It is curious how much of Kingsley"s work, both poetry and prose, is inspired by his love of sport and his indignation at game laws!
His songs, spoiled as they are to our ears by poor music and too often maudlin voices, are as good songs and as fitted for singing as any in our time. _The Sands of Dee_, hacknied and vulgarised as it is by the ba.n.a.lities of the drawing-room, is really (to use a hacknied and vulgarised phrase) a "haunting" piece of song; and though Ruskin may p.r.o.nounce "the cruel crawling foam" to be a false use of the pathetic fallacy, the song, for what it professes to be, is certainly a thing to live. I have always felt more kindly toward the East wind since Kingsley"s _Welcome, wild North-Easter_!; and his Church Hymns such as--_Who will say the world is dying?_ and _The Day of the Lord is at hand, at hand!_--are far above the level even of the better modern hymns.
We have not yet touched upon Kingsley"s longest and most ambitious poem--_The Saint"s Tragedy_. With all its merits and beauties it is a mistake. It was avowedly a controversial diatribe against the celibacy and priestcraft of Romanism, and was originally designed to be in prose.
That is not a safe basis for a dramatic poem, and the poem suffers from the fact that it is in great part a theological pamphlet. It would have made a most interesting historical novel as a mediaeval pendant to _Hypatia_; but it is not a great lyrical drama. As we have had no great lyrical drama at all since _Manfred_ and _The Cenci_, that is not much in its dispraise. There are powerful pa.s.sages, much poetic grace in the piece; but the four thousand lines of this elaborate polemical poem rather weary us, and a perfervid appeal to the Protestantism and uxoriousness of Britons should have been cast into other moulds.
The long poem of _Andromeda_ almost succeeds in that impossible feat--the revival of the hexameter in English. It may be a hard saying to the countrymen of Longfellow, but the truth is that the hexameter is a metrical monster in our English speech. The paucity of easy dactyls and the absence of all true spondees in English words, the preponderance of consonants over vowels, the want of inflected forms, and other peculiarities in our language--make the hexameter incapable of transplantation; and this magnificent metre loses with us all its majesty, its ease, its beauty. The very line can hardly be printed on an ordinary page, for the immense number of letters in each English verse causes an unsightly doubling of the lines, chokes the voice, and wearies the ear. In the hexameter line of Homer there are usually about thirty letters, of which only twelve are consonants; in the English hexameter there are often sixty letters, of which nearly forty are consonants. And the Homeric hexameter will have six words where the English hexameter has twelve or fourteen.[1] Yet having set himself this utterly hopeless and thankless task, to write English hexameter, Kingsley produced some five hundred lines of _Andromeda_, which in rhythm, ease, rapidity, and metrical correctness are quite amongst the best in the language. It is very rare to meet with any English hexameter which in rhythm, stress, and prosody is perfectly accurate. _Andromeda_ contains many such lines, as for example:
Violet, asphodel, ivy, and vine-leaves, roses and lilies-- Nereid, siren, and triton, and dolphin, and arrowy fishes.
These lines are true hexameters, chiefly because they consist of Latin and Greek words; and they have little more than forty letters, of which barely more than half are consonants. They would be almost pure hexameters, if in lieu of the long a[a-macron]nd, we could put e[e-breve]t, or _te_ [tau epsilon]. And there are only three Saxon words in the two lines. But hexameters consisting of purely English words, especially of Anglo-Saxon words, halt and stammer like a schoolboy"s exercise. The attempt of Kingsley in _Andromeda_ is most ingenious and most instructive.
I have dwelt so much upon Kingsley"s poetry because, though he was hardly a "minor poet,"--an order which now boasts sixty members--he wrote a few short pieces which came wonderfully near being a great success. And again, it is the imaginative element in all his work, the creative fire and the vivid life which he threw into his prose as much as his verse, into his controversies as much as into his fictions, that gave them their popularity and their savour. Nearly every one of Kingsley"s imaginative works was polemical, full of controversy, theological, political, social, and racial; and this alone prevented them from being great works.
Interesting works they are; full of vigour, beauty, and ardent conception; and it is wonderful that so much art and fancy could be thrown into what is in substance polemical pamphleteering.
Of them all _Hypatia_ is the best known and the best conceived.
_Hypatia_ was written in 1853 in the prime of his manhood and was on the face of it a controversial work. Its sub-t.i.tle was--_New Foes with an Old Face_,--its preface elaborates the moral and spiritual ideas that it teaches, the very t.i.tles of the chapters bear biblical phrases and cla.s.sical moralising as their style. I should be sorry to guarantee the accuracy of the local colouring and the detail of its elaborate history; but the life, realism, and pictorial brilliancy of the scenes give it a power which is rare indeed in an historical novel. It has not the great and full knowledge of _Romola_, much less the consummate style and setting of _Esmond_; but it has a vividness, a rapidity, a definiteness which completely enthral the imagination and stamp its scenes on the memory. It is that rare thing, an historical romance which does not drag. It is not one of those romances of which we fail to understand the incidents, and often forget what it is that the personages are struggling so fiercely to obtain. No one who has read _Hypatia_ in early life will fail to remember its chief scenes or its leading characters, if he lives to old age. After forty years this romance has been cast into a drama and placed upon the London stage, and it is frequently the subject of some vigorous pictures.
In any estimate of _Hypatia_ as a romance, it is right to consider the curious tangle of difficulties which Kingsley crowded into his task. It was to be a realistic historical novel dated in an age of which the public knew nothing, set in a country of which the author had no experience, but which many of us know under wholly altered conditions.
It was to carry on controversies as to the older and the later types of Christianity, as to Polytheism, Judaism, and Monotheism; it was to confute Romanism, Scepticism, and German metaphysics; it was to denounce celibacy and monasticism, to glorify muscular Christianity, to give glowing pictures of Greek sensuousness and Roman rascality, and finally to secure the apotheosis of Scandinavian heroism. And in spite of these incongruous and incompatible aims, the story still remains a vivid and fascinating tale. That makes it a real _tour de force_. It is true that it has many of the faults of Bulwer, a certain staginess, melodramatic soliloquies, careless incongruities, crude sensationalism--but withal, it has some of the merits of Bulwer at his best, in _The Last Days of Pompeii_, _Riensi_, _The Last of the Barons_,--the play of human pa.s.sion and adventure, intensity of reproduction however inaccurate in detail; it has "go," intelligibility, memorability. The characters interest us, the scenes amuse us, the pictures are not forgotten. The stately beauty of Hypatia, the seductive fascination of Pelagia, the childlike nature of Philammon, the subtle cynicism of Raphael Aben-Ezra, the mighty audacity of the Goths, the fanaticism of Cyril, and the strange clash of three elements of civilisation,--Graeco-Roman, Christian, Teutonic--give us definite impressions, leave a permanent imprint on our thoughts. There are extravagances, theatricalities, impossibilities enough. The Gothic princes comport themselves like British seamen ash.o.r.e in Suez or Bombay; Raphael talks like young Lancelot Smith in _Yeast_; Hypatia is a Greek Argemone; and Bishop Synesius is merely an African fifth-century Charles Kingsley, what Sydney Smith called a "squarson," or compound of squire and parson. Still, after all--bating grandiloquences and incongruities and "errors excepted," _Hypatia_ lives, moves, and speaks to us; and, in the matter of vitality and interest, is amongst the very few successes in historical romance in the whole Victorian literature.
_West-ward Ho!_ shares with _Hypatia_ the merit of being a successful historical romance. It is free from many of the faults of _Hypatia_, it is more mature, more carefully written. It is not laden with the difficulties of _Hypatia_; it is only in part an historical romance at all; the English scenery is placed in a country which Kingsley knew perfectly and from boyhood; and the only controversy involved was the interminable debate about Jesuit mendacity and Romanist priestcraft. So that, if _Westward Ho!_ does not present us with the weaknesses and the dilemmas of _Hypatia_, on the other hand it is not so brilliant or so rich with interest. But it has real and lasting qualities. The Devon coast scenery which Kingsley knew and loved, the West Indian and tropical scenery, which he loved but did not know, are both painted with wonderful force of imaginative colour. When one recalls all that Kingsley has done in the landscape of romance,--Alexandria and the desert of the Nile, West Indian jungles and rivers, Bideford Bay, his own heaths in _Yeast_, the fever-dens of London in _Alton Locke_,--one is almost inclined to rank him in this single gift of description as first of all the novelists since Scott. Compared with the brilliancy and variety of Kingsley"s pictures of country, Bulwer"s and Disraeli"s are conventional; even those of d.i.c.kens are but local; Thackeray and Trollope have no interest in landscape at all; George Eliot"s keen interest is not so spontaneous as Kingsley"s, and Charlotte Bronte"s wonderful gift is strictly limited to the narrow field of her own experience. But Kingsley, as a landscape painter, can image to us other continents and many zones, and he carries us to distant climates with astonishing force of reality.
_Two Years Ago_ has some vigorous scenes, but it has neither the merits nor the defects of Kingsley in historical romance. Its scene is too near for his fine imagination to work poetically, and it is too much of a sermon and pamphlet to be worth a second, or a third reading; and as to _Hereward the Wake_, I must confess to not having been able to complete even a first reading, and that after sundry trials. Of Kingsley"s remaining fanciful pieces it is enough to say that _The Heroes_ still remains, after forty years, the child"s introduction to Greek mythology, and is still the best book of its cla.s.s. When we compare it with another attempt by a romancer of genius, and set it beside the sticky dulness of _The Tanglewood Tales_, it looks like a group of real Tanagra figurines placed beside a painted plaster cast. Kingsley"s _Heroes_, in spite of the inevitable sermon addressed in the preface to all good boys and girls, has the real simplicity of Greek art, and the demi-G.o.ds tell their myths in n.o.ble and pure English. _The Water Babies_ is an immortal bit of fun, which will be read in the next century with _Gulliver_ and _The Ring and the Rose_, long after we have all forgotten the nonsensical whims about science and the conventional pulpit moralising which Kingsley scattered broadcast into everything he said or wrote.
We have as yet said nothing about that which was Kingsley"s most characteristic and effective work--his political fictions. These were the pieces by which his fame was first achieved, and no doubt they are the works which gave him his chief influence on his generation. But, for that very reason, they suffered most of all his writings as works of art.
_Yeast_ is a book very difficult to cla.s.sify. It is not exactly a novel, it is more than a _Dialogue_, it is too romantic for a sermon, it is too imaginative for a pamphlet, it is too full of action for a political and social treatise. Incongruous as it is, it is interesting and effective, and contains some of Kingsley"s best work. It has some of his most striking verses, some of his finest pictures of scenery, many of his most eloquent thoughts, all his solid ideas, the pa.s.sion of his youth, and the first glow of his enthusiasm. It was written before he was thirty, before he thought himself to be a philosopher, before he professed to be entrusted with a direct message from G.o.d. Its t.i.tle--_Yeast_--suggests that it is a ferment thrown into the compound ma.s.s of current political, social, and religious ideas, to make them work and issue in some new combination. Kingsley himself was a kind of ferment. His mind was itself destined to cause a violent chemical reaction in the torpid fluids into which it was projected. His early and most amorphous work of _Yeast_ did this with singular vigour, in a fresh and reckless way, with rare literary and poetic skill.
If I spoke my whole mind, I should count _Yeast_ as Kingsley"s typical prose work. It is full of anomalies, full of fallacies, raising difficulties it fails to solve, crying out upon maladies and sores for which it quite omits to offer a remedy. But that is Kingsley all over.
He was a ma.s.s of over-excited nerves and ill-ordered ideas, much more poet than philosopher, more sympathetic than lucid, full of pa.s.sionate indignation, recklessly self-confident, cynically disdainful of consistency, patience, good sense. He had the Rousseau temperament, with its furious eloquence, its blind sympathies and antipathies, its splendid sophistries. _Yeast_ was plainly the Christian reverse of the Carlyle image and superscription, as read in _Sartor_ and _Past and Present_.