Chapter VI: Book IV: on "Aristocracies," "Captains of Industry," "The Landed," "The (4)

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 dénoûment 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 Brontë 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 passion 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 noble 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 Brontë'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 coarseness 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 Brontë 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 Brontë, 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-class 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 _naïveté_; 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 passion; and if it be bold in the little woman, it is redeemed by her noble 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 passionate 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, Shelley, 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 Brontë 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 surpassing 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 passing 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 passages 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 surpassed 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 illustrate 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 Dickens 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 massiveness 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 sunnès 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 God
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 God.

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 banalities of the drawing-room, is really (to use a hacknied and vulgarised phrase) a "haunting" piece of song; and though Ruskin may pronounce "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 passages, 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-title was--_New Foes with an Old Face_,--its preface elaborates the moral and spiritual ideas that it teaches, the very titles of the chapters bear biblical phrases and classical 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 passion 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 ashore 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 Dickens 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 Brontë'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 class. 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-gods tell their myths in noble 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 classify. 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 passion 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 God. Its title--_Yeast_--suggests that it is a ferment thrown into the compound mass 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 mass of over-excited nerves and ill-ordered ideas, much more poet than philosopher, more sympathetic than lucid, full of passionate 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_. Kingsley was always profoundly influenced by Frederick D. Maurice, who was a kind of spiritual Carlyle, without the genius or the learning of the mighty _Sartor_, with a fine gift of sympathy instead of sarcasm, with a genuine neo-Christian devoutness in lieu of an old-Hebrew Goetheism. Kingsley had some of Carlyle's passion, of his eloquence, of his power to strike fire out of stones. And so, just because _Yeast_ was so disjointed as a composition, so desultory in thought, so splendidly defiant of all the conventions of literature and all the ten commandments of British society in 1849, I am inclined to rank it as Kingsley's typical performance in prose. It is more a work of art than _Alton Locke_, for it is much shorter, less akin to journalism, less spasmodic, and more full of poetry. _Yeast_ deals with the country--which Kingsley knew better and loved more than he did the town. It deals with real, permanent, deep social evils, and it paints no fancy portrait of the labourer, the squire, the poacher, or the village parson. Kingsley there speaks of what he knew, and he describes that which he felt with the soul of a poet. The hunting scenes in Yeast, the river vignettes, the village revel, are exquisite pieces of painting. And the difficulties overcome in the book are extreme. To fuse together a Platonic Dialogue and a Carlyle latter-day pamphlet, and to mould this compound into a rural romance in the style of _Silas Marner_, heightened with extracts from University Pulpit sermons, with some ringing ballads, and political diatribes in the vein of Cobbett's appeals to the People--this was to show wonderful literary versatility and animation. And, after forty-five years, _Yeast_ can be read and re-read still!

_Alton Locke_ was no doubt more popular, more passionately in earnest, more definite and intelligible than _Yeast_; and if I fail to hold it quite as the equal of _Yeast_ in literary merit, it is because these very qualities necessarily impair it as a work of art. It was written, we well know, under violent excitement and by a terrible strain on the neuropathic organism of the poet-preacher. It is undoubtedly spasmodic, crude, and disorderly. A generation which has grown fastidious on the consummate finish of _Esmond_, _Romola_, and _Treasure Island_, is a little critical of the hasty outpourings of spirit which satisfied our fathers in the forties, after the manner of _Sybil_, the _Last of the Barons_, or _Barnaby Rudge_. The Tennysonian modulation of phrase had not yet been popularised in prose, and spasmodic soliloquies and melodramatic eloquence did not offend men so cruelly as they offend us now.

As Yeast was inspired by Sartor Resartus, so _Alton Locke_ was inspired by Carlyle's _French Revolution_. The effect of Carlyle upon Kingsley is plain enough throughout, down to the day when Carlyle led Kingsley to approve the judicial murder of negroes in Jamaica. Kingsley himself tells us, by the mouth of Alton Locke (chap. ix.), "I know no book, always excepting Milton, which at once so quickened and exalted my poetical view of man and his history, as that great prose poem, _the single epic of modern days_, Thomas Carlyle's _French Revolution_." Kingsley's three masters were--in poetry, Tennyson; in social philosophy, Carlyle; in things moral and spiritual, Frederick D. Maurice. He had far more of genius than had Maurice; he was a much more passionate reformer than Tennyson; he was far more genial and social than Carlyle. Not that he imitated any of the three. _Yeast_ is not at all copied from Sartor, either in form or in thought; nor is _Alton Locke_ in any sense imitated from the _French Revolution_. It is inspired by it; but _Yeast_ and _Alton Locke_ are entirely original, and were native outbursts from Kingsley's own fierce imagination and intense human sympathy.

And in many ways they were amongst the most powerful influences over the thought of the young of the last generation. In the early fifties we were not so fastidious in the matter of style and composition as we have now become. Furious eloquence and somewhat melodramatic incongruities did not shock us so much, if we found them to come from a really glowing imagination and from genuine inspiration, albeit somewhat unpruned and ill-ordered. Now Kingsley "let himself go," in the way of Byron, Disraeli, Bulwer, and Dickens, who not seldom poured out their conceptions in what we now hold to be spasmodic form. It is possible that the genteeler taste of our age may prevent the young of to-day from caring for _Alton Locke_. But I can assure them that five-and-forty years ago that book had a great effect and came home to the heart of many. And the effect was permanent and creative. We may see to-day in England widespread results of that potent social movement which was called Christian Socialism, a movement of which Kingsley was neither the founder nor the chief leader, but of which his early books were the main popular exponents, and to which they gave a definiteness and a key which the movement itself sadly lacked.

I was not of an age to take part in that movement, but in after years at the Working Men's College, which grew out of it, I gained a personal knowledge of what was one of the most striking movements of our time. Nowadays, when leading statesmen assure us "we are all Socialists now," when the demands of the old "Chartists" are Liberal common form, when trades-unionism, co-operation, and state-aided benefits are largely supported by politicians, churchmen, journals, and writers, it is difficult for us now to conceive the bitter opposition which assailed the small band of reformers who, five-and-forty years ago, spoke up for these reforms. Of that small band, who stood alone amongst the literary, academic, and ecclesiastical class, Charles Kingsley was the most outspoken, the most eloquent, and assuredly the most effective. I do not say the wisest, the most consistent, or the most staunch; nor need we here discuss the strength or the weakness of the Christian Socialist reform. When we remember how widely this vague initiative has spread and developed, when we read again _Alton Locke_ and _Yeast_, and note how much has been practically done in forty years to redress or mitigate the abuses against which these books uttered the first burning protest, we may form some estimate of all that the present generation of Englishmen owes to Charles Kingsley and his friends.

I have dwelt last and most seriously upon Kingsley's earliest books, because they were in many respects his most powerful, his typical works. As he grew in years, he did not develop. He improved for a time in literary form, but his excitable nerve-system, his impulsive imagination, drove him into tasks for which he had no gift, and where he floated hither and thither without sure guide. From the time of his official success, that is, for the last fifteen years of his life, he produced nothing worthy of himself, and much that was manifest book-making--the mere outpouring of the professional preacher and story-teller. Of his historical and philosophical work I shall not speak at all. His shallow Cambridge Inaugural Lecture, given by him as Professor of History, was torn to pieces in the _Westminster Review_ (vol. xix. p. 305, April 1861), it is said, by a brother Professor of History. Much less need we speak of his miserable duel with Cardinal Newman, wherein he was so shamefully worsted. For fifteen years he poured out lectures, sermons, tales, travels, poems, dialogues, children's books, and historical, philosophical, theological, social, scientific, and sanitary essays--but the Charles Kingsley of _Yeast_, of _Alton Locke_, of _Hypatia_, of _Westward Ho!_ of the Ballads and Poems, we never knew again. He burnt out his fiery spirit at last, at the age of fifty-five, in a series of restless enterprises, and a vehement outpouring of miscellaneous eloquence.

Charles Kingsley was a man of genius, half poet, half controversialist. The two elements did not blend altogether well. His poetic passion carried away his reason and often confused his logic. His argumentative vehemence too often marred his fine imagination. Thus his _Saint's Tragedy_ is partly a satire on Romanism, and his ballad in _Yeast_ is mainly a radical pamphlet. Hardly one of his books is without a controversial preface, controversial titles, chapters, or passages on questions of theology, churches, races, politics, or society. Indeed, excepting some of his poems, and some of his popular or children's books (but not even all of these), all his works are of a controversial kind. Whatever he did he did with heart, and this was at once his merit and his weakness. Before all things, he was a preacher, a priest of the English Church, a Christian minister. He was, indeed, a liberal priest, sometimes even too free and easy. He brings in the sacred name perhaps more often than any other writer, and he does so not always in a devout way. He seemed at last to use the word "God" as if it were an expletive or mere intensive like a Greek _ge_ [gamma epsilon], meaning "very much" or "very good," as where he so oddly calls the North-East wind "the wind of God." And he betrays a most unclerical interest in physical torture and physical voluptuousness (_Hypatia_, _The Saint's Tragedy_, _Saint Maura_, _Westward Ho!_), though it is true that his real nature is both eminently manly and pure.

As we have done all through these estimates of great writers, we have to take the great writer at his best and forget his worst. It is a melancholy reflection that we so often find a man of genius working himself out to an unworthy close, it is too often feared, in the thirst of success and even the attraction of gain. But at his best Charles Kingsley left some fine and abiding influences behind him, and achieved some brilliant things. Would that we always had men of his dauntless spirit, of his restless energy, of his burning sympathy, of his keen imagination! He reminds us somewhat of his own Bishop Synesius, as described in _Hypatia_ (chap. xxi.), who "was one of those many-sided, volatile, restless men, who taste joy and sorrow, if not deeply or permanently, yet abundantly and passionately"--"He lived . . . in a whirlwind of good deeds, meddling and toiling for the mere pleasure of action; and as soon as there was nothing to be done, which, till lately, had happened seldom enough with him, paid the penalty for past excitement in fits of melancholy. A man of magniloquent and flowery style, not without a vein of self-conceit; yet withal of overflowing kindliness, racy humour, and unflinching courage, both physical and moral; with a very clear practical faculty, and a very muddy speculative one"--and so on. Charles Kingsley must have been thinking of his own tastes when he drew the portrait of the "squire-bishop." But he did more than the Bishop of Cyrene, and was himself a compound of squire-parson-poet. And in all three characters he showed some of the best sides of each.

[1] Amongst other difficulties it may be observed that such words as "and," "is," "are," "the," "who," "his," "its," "have," "been"--words without which few English sentences can be constructed--do not form the short syllables of a true dactyl.

IX

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

Some of our younger friends who read the name which heads this essay may incline to think that it ought to be very short indeed, nay, be limited to a single remark; and, like the famous chapter on the snakes in Iceland, it should simply run--that Anthony Trollope has no place at all in Victorian literature. We did not think so in England in the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies, in the heyday of Victorian romance; and I do not think we ought to pass that judgment now in this last quinquennium of our century. I shall have to put our friend Anthony in a very moderate and prosaic rank; I shall not conceal my sense of his modest claims and conspicuous faults, of his prolixity, his limited sphere, his commonplace. But in view of the enormous popularity he once enjoyed, of the space he filled for a whole generation, I cannot altogether omit him from these studies of the Victorian writers.

I have, too, a personal reason for including him in the series. I knew him well, knew his subjects, and his stage. I have seen him at work at the "Megatherium Club," chatted with him at the "Universe," dined with him at George Eliot's, and even met him in the hunting-field. I was familiar with the political personages and crises which he describes; and much of the local colouring in which his romances were framed was for years the local colouring that I daily saw around me. Most of the famous writers of whom I have been speaking in this series (with the exception of Charlotte Brontë) I have often seen and heard speak in public and in private, but I cannot be said to have known them as friends. But Anthony Trollope I knew well. I knew the world in which he lived, I saw the scenes, the characters, the life he paints, day by day in the same clubs, in the same rooms, and under the same conditions as he saw them. To re-read some of his best stories, as I have just done, is to me like looking through a photographic album of my acquaintances, companions, and familiar reminiscences of some thirty years ago. I can hear the loud voice, the honest laugh, see the keen eyes of our old friend as I turn to the admirable vignette portrait in his posthumous _Autobiography_, and I can almost hear him tell the anecdotes recounted in that pleasant book.

Does the present generation know that frank and amusing book--one of the most brisk and manly autobiographies in our language? Of course it is garrulous, egoistical, self-complacent in a way. When a famous writer, at the close of a long career of varied activity, takes up his pen to tell us how he has lived, and how his books were written, and what he has loved, seen, suffered, and striven for--it is his business to be garrulous; we want him to talk about himself, and to give us such peeps into his own heart and brain as he chooses to unlock. That is what an "autobiography" means. And never did man do this in a more hearty, manly, good-tempered spirit, with more good sense, with more modest _bonhomie_, with a more genial egoism. He has been an enormous worker; he is proud of his industry. He has fought his way under cruel hardships to wealth and fame: and he is well satisfied with his success. He has had millions of readers; he has been well paid; he has had good friends; he has enjoyed life. He is happy in telling us how he did it. He does not overrate himself. He believes some of his work is good: at least it is honest, pure, sound work which has pleased millions of readers. Much of his work he knows to be poor stuff, and he says so at once. He makes no pretence to genius; he does not claim to be a hero; he has no rare qualities--or none but industry and courage--and he has met with no peculiar sufferings and no cruel and undeserved rebuffs. He has his own ideas about literary work--you may think them commonplace, mechanical, mercenary ideas--but that is a true picture of Anthony Trollope; of his strong, manly, pure mind, of his clear head, of his average moral sense: a good fellow, a warm friend, a brave soul, a genial companion.

With all his artless self-complacency in his own success, Trollope took a very modest estimate of his own powers. I remember a characteristic discussion about their modes of writing between Trollope and George Eliot at a little dinner party in her house.[1] "Why!" said Anthony, "I sit down every morning at 5.30 with my watch on my desk, and for three hours I regularly produce 250 words every quarter of an hour." George Eliot positively quivered with horror at the thought--she who could write only when she felt in the vein, who wrote, re-wrote, and destroyed her manuscript two or three times, and as often as not sat at her table without writing at all. "There are days and days together," she groaned out, "when I cannot write a line." "Yes!" said Trollope, "with imaginative work like yours that is quite natural; but with my mechanical stuff it's a sheer matter of industry. It's not the head that does it--it's the cobbler's wax on the seat and the sticking to my chair!" In his _Autobiography_ he has elaborately explained this process--how he wrote day by day, including Sundays, whatever his duties, his amusements, or the place; measuring out every page, counting the words, and exacting the given quantity hour by hour. He wrote continuously 2500 words in each day, and at times more than 25,000 words in a week. He wrote whilst engaged in severe professional drudgery, whilst hunting thrice a week, and in the whirl of London society. He wrote in railway trains, on a sea voyage, and in a town club room. Whether he was on a journey, or pressed with office reports, or visiting friends, he wrote just the same. _Dr. Thorne_ was written whilst he was very sea-sick in a gale at sea, or was negotiating a treaty with Nubar Pasha; and the day after finishing _Dr. Thorne_ he began _The Bertrams_. It is one of the most amazing, and one of the most comical, records of literary activity we have. No one can suppose that work of a very high class can be so produced at all. Nor does Trollope pretend that it is of a high class. He says it is honest work, the best he could do.

He takes a strange pleasure in recounting these feats of literary productiveness. He poses as the champion of the age in quantity and rapidity. This lightning novelist could produce a volume in two or three weeks; and thus he could easily turn out three novels of three volumes each in a year. He gives us an exact list of sixty works produced in about thirty-five years, and a total of about 70,000 pounds as the earnings of some twenty-four years. He insists that he never neglected his Post-Office work, but was an invaluable and energetic public servant; he insists that, much as he enjoyed his literary profits, he was never misled by the desire of money; and he insists that he could have done no better work if he had written much less, or if he had given more time to each book. In all this he does not convince us. He certainly showed transcendent force of will, of nerve, and of endurance. "It's dogged as does it!" says Giles Hoggett to Mr. Crawley, in _The Last Chronicle of Barset_; and if "dogged" could make a great novelist, Anthony Trollope was pre-eminently "dogged." But a great novelist needs other gifts. And to tell us that he would not have done better work if his whole life had been given to his work, if every book, every chapter of every book, were the fruit of ample meditation and repeated revision, if he had never written with any thought of profit, never written but what he could not contain hidden within him--this is to tell us palpable nonsense.

Trollope's sixty works no doubt exceed the product of any Englishman of our age; but they fall short of the product of Dumas, George Sand, and Scribe. And, though but a small part of the sixty works can be called good, the inferior work is not discreditable: it is free from affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash. It never sinks into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even Dickens, could indite in their worst moods. Trollope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in a manly tone, and if he becomes dull, he is neither ridiculous nor odious. He is very often dull: or rather utterly commonplace. It is the fashion with the present generation to assert that he is never anything but commonplace; but this is the judgment of a perverted taste. His besetting danger is certainly the commonplace. It is true that he is almost never dramatic, or powerful, or original. His plots are of obvious and simple construction; his characters are neither new, nor subtle, nor powerful; and his field is strictly limited to special aspects of the higher English society in town and country. But in his very best work, he has risen above commonplace and has painted certain types of English men and women with much grace and consummate truth.