From the Dublin University Magazine. THE GENIUS OF THE REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY. THE Parsonage is awake to day; the breeze of the May morning is piping down the lea; the blackbird is whistling in the laurel; the bursting woods are alive with song; a thin frost is lying on the meadows; and in the East, now mounting all fresh and glorious from his bath in the southern seas, rises the great sun. But the parson is up already, and out among the airs and mysteries of the young dawn. He is not there to discover analogies for his own mental phenomena in nature, nor to expand in description, nor to see his own feelings in every thing; but he stands there bravely on his feet, to receive and to be strengthened, in the midst of the dewy lane, with the golden green of the risen buds about him; and beneath his feet the dust still compact with the damp of night, and from the mosses of the ashen stumps the violet and the primrose look on him approvingly, and above his head the big clouds are flying from the face of day in marshaled folds immense, and, in the kindling East, between the bars of dark purple and glancing gold, the dying sheen of phosphor. He is gaining strength for the coming work-and when the poor have been encouraged, and vice rebuked, and infidelity, it may be, charmed into faith by the word of truth spoken bravely-what matter if by the gentle river he whips the evening pool, or rides boldly across a twilight country, with an eye to see the hand of God in the sheen of every trout, or with a heart to feel his fatherhood and love in the thrill of the secret of great Nature? This is the Rev. Charles Kingsley, according to our fancy, for we know him not a man who has the boldness to declare his opinions freely, openly, without sham, and who has, perhaps, gained the widest popularity which an English writer of his class has ever enjoyed. With the works of this man we shall detain the notice of our readers, only premising that VOL. XLI.-NO. IV. our object will be, not to criticise, but to get at the principles on which Mr. Kingsley writes, and those reasons for which his books were written. As Mr. Kingsley's genius has developed itself chiefly in fiction, let us speak of it first in connection with his so-called novels. Great has been the change in novelwriting since "Evelina" took England by surprise. Little Burney, by the quickness of her genius, her geniality, her keen perception of the oddities and contrasts of life, and her clear judgment, did not let England altogether forget the vigor of Fielding, the grace of Richardson, the keenness of Smollett, and the wit of all three. She was the echo of these men; faint, fading, but still a sharer of their spirit. But it was the last echo which we have heard. Shortly after the sound of "Evelina" failed, fiction was dragged through the depths of degradation. While the immorality of Fielding and Smollett found readers everywhere for their wit, the increasing tone of outword morality forbade that coarse and licentious writing which had been so broadly indulged in. To minister, then, to a taste for fiction, which, by losing the real painting of Fielding, had added weakness to immorality-to minister, we say, to this, there appeared novels whose plots are marvels of folly and incapacity, maudlin and miserable in conception and expression, and even more pernicious in their influence on the minds of the people than the healthy painting, however immoral, of our old English novelists. The latter, at least, were true to real life and human nature. The former were dyed deep in the dullest and falsest falsehood. For some time this continued; but England was too innately true and brave and real in life to endure it long; and fiction would have perished, had not Mrs. Radcliffe made the first step. Mrs. Radcliffe was not a novelist of a high order, but. 31 Above all, we must thank Scott for having brought the novel home. His rare powers of invention enabled him to draw to the life characters which we shall love for ever, for we feel them akin closely to our common being. The long-winded and benevolent Antiquary, the acute and humorous Pleydell, the bluff breadth and hardheadness of the heartsome Dandie, and a hundred others, show us how wide a sympathy Walter Scott had with the heart of humanity. she was the instrument whereby English | in her peculiar line-that Scott declared fiction was first enabled to struggle out himself unequal to—but most characterispainfully from the mire and mephitic tically in the story of " Mid Lothian ;" and vapor in which it had slept the sleep of the quiet sorrow and unpretending love, apoplexy. As the thunder makes the the humble nobleness and the quaint prusensualist spring up terrified, so the tales dence, of Jeanie Deans, almost form a of Mrs. Radcliffe at least put the other happy comment on Miss Austin's title, side of human life before the abject crew." Sense and Sensibility." Murder, revenge, appalling scenery and scenes were, at least, strong contrasts to the effeminate wretchednesses of the former school. Dr. Moore, in "Zeluco," told to the world of England that there was such a thing as real jealousy. "Caleb Williams" was a powerful record of acute sensitiveness and delicacy of feeling coexisting with crime, and producing persecution and the agony of suspicion. The horrible reached its climax, we had almost said, in the "Monk," did not the romance of "Frankenstein" close the list with a story which was chaster in style and thought, and more imaginative in its terror. The extreme which these novelists went into had the effect not only of redeeming English fiction from the dregs of Sterne, and the inanities of the circulating libraries, but also produced a reaction which has been of infinite service to novel writing. In the works of Mrs. Opie-Miss Austin -we can not but recognize the shrinking of the quiet English mind from all the melo-dramatic horrors of Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe simplicity-earnestness-quiet true love-stories remarkable for no startling incidents, but flowing gently to the end, with here and there a curve, and perhaps a dark pool beneath some shadowy rock, or a passionate little cataract. To this advance, Miss Edgeworth added the delineation of national character, much satire, and a very cold morality. There would seem to be some truth in the idea of Helvetius, that great men are the produce only of their predecessors, when we consider the genius of Scott. In him the horrible no longer expatiated on tempted monks or created demons, on ghostliness or ghastliness, but was turned into more legitimate channels; and the cellar of Front-de-boeuf, and the murder of Amy Robsart, not only excite our indignation and pity, but enable us to look on the movements which underlie the bare facts of the history of those times, not as lifeless learners, but as living and feeling with the actors and the actions. The influence of the quiet gentleness of Miss Austin's novels expanded itself not Not only this, but he took the simple materials which lay about him in the common doings and sayings of the nation he belonged to and loved, and showed that the Scotchman would write Scotch stories best, and the English, English. He told the world plainly, by what he wrote, that where the novelist's heart was, there was the home of his inspiration-and this principle can be applied to his other works. Of all men, Scott was the most imbued with the spirit of ancient chivalry. When he walked abroad, with his dependants and his mighty hound Maida at his heels, and visited the cottages of the simple Scotch around him, or trod the Highlands, there" was simmering" all the time in his heart "Rob Roy," or "Old Mortality," or "Guy Mannering." But when he returned home, and sat down among his shields, and spears, and faded banners, then the other chamber of his heart opened its doors, and Scott saw pass by the Saracenic chivalry, and among them the axe of Richard smiting fierce and fell; or he watched the lists at Ashby, and heard the solitary trumpet, or felt his blood tingling as he recognized the spear of Dunois, or heard the thundering avalanche of the Swiss break on the horsemen of the bold Burgundian Duke. He wrote what he felt. He did not make his novels, but created them from his own heart-alike at home among his Scottish hills, or in the glancing days of chivalry. We thank Sir Walter, then, for the impulse, an impulse which has not ceased, which has found expression in Lever, Lover, Carleton in Ireland, in many in Scotland, and which, more or less, has influenced all our | ters and difficulties which all tend to the English novelists. We thank him, too, ultimate rejoicement of the hero. None that he taught men to write on what of this, and so these novels of ours are their heart was in. So Maryatt wrote on very inartistic, yet still we question the sea-life which he knew and loved, and whether they are not more true. the hunter wrote on his hunting, and the warrior on his battle, the camp, and the bivouac. But here broke in on the life of fiction the age of materialism, and men rejected novels; but as poetry sprang from this triumphant, to reassert the spirit, so fiction reässerted the heart in works of deep human passion - at the head of which stands, as the representative of its class, the wondrous novel of "Jane Eyre." Alas! she whose heart throbbed so wildly and so deeply is no more. Charlotte Bronté is dead, and yet, why should we sorrow? Her long pilgrimage is over-her restless spirit is at peace. Calm at last-poor, passionate heart: "Where the wicked cease from troubling, And the weary are at rest." Sir Walter Scott himself is almost totally destitute of art in his works. They are in general graphic, loving, healthful, human delineations; each one more like a succession of anecdotes than a connected story; and we do believe that had Scott attempted what has been done now, he would have succeeded almost more than any novelist who has ever lived in influencing his time and future time for good. But in his books of fiction we find no trace of the time he lived in. His love for chivalry and the past deadened his mind to the movements of the age and the social problems and wrongs of the time. It is unfair, however, to demand what this decade requires from one who lived several years back in progress. We only mention it to show the vast difference between our present fictions and his. Ours are written to denounce wrong, to awake to good, to urge to progressive The materialistic tendency had another and religious excellence, to expose evils, reflex influence on novel writing. It has physical and intellectual; his to amuse his imparted a practical element to it. It has readers, and, as we said above, through a wedded usefulness to fiction, but in doing love of the people and history of that so it has destroyed art in the narration. Caledonia to which his heart "turned We shall see how this has happened after- with rapture," and through an antiquarward. The highest representatives we ian's and a poet's pleasure in the ringing have now of practical fiction are: Dickens, life of chivalry. Now when Dickens Thackeray, and Kingsley. Among these writes a book-we speak chiefly of his men, the novel proper does not exist at all. later works-it is not primarily to make No one can read their books, and suppose us weep over the tragedy of Ada and for a moment that the fate of the hero Richard, or to rejoice in the happiness of and heroine at the end is the main object Dame Durden, but to expose the evils of of the story. This is the practical ele- chancery, and to exalt the detective force! ment of fiction-opposition to evil, and It is the same in almost all his works. exaltation of good, as no abstract unreal When Thackeray writes the "Newcomes," things, but living, real, what we may see though he is artistic at times, the main with our own eyes and hear with our own point of the story is not to marry Clive ears, and which the design of the work and Ethel, and to bring them to this is to urge us either to support or over- through much difficulty and intrigue; but throw. On this account, the characters it is to lay bare and shivering the falseare often seemingly left to shift for them- hood of society, and to bring it to the selves, and the hero, from this forgetful- light, that its deeds may be reproved. ness, gets into a state of Gordian difficulty, Indeed we know not any novel which so knotted up so closely, and so unconcious- fully, as the "Newcomes," leaves on the ly to the novelist, that, "nisi Deus inter- mind of the reader the idea that God is sit," nothing can help him. But there is directing all things in the story, and not none of the artistic progression, none of the novelist-and this we think to be the the restraint on the introduction of per- highest truth of the novel. Now art, as sonages who do not advance the denoue- generally understood, pre-suppose the ment, none of the intertwined links of mind of the writer directing, planning, action, nor of the mutual play of charac-ordaining, as it were, the Providence of the book. The question is-is it not the highest art, an art not understood before, to make the reader feel that the novel is the mirror of the world, with all its mystery and difficulty, and not a perfectly comprehensible and artistic story? This is to us the great charm of "The Newcomes." In his former books, Mr. Thackeray seemed to us too bitter, and sometimes too flippant; but this is said to be true painting of the world. Why, so were Dryden's plays, so are "Larochefoucault's Maxims;" and yet there are few who will say that they represent the whole of humanity. It is only one side, and that the darkest; so we were glad when we read Mr. Thackeray's last novel, to find that he had advanced, and hopeless, wicked, frivolous, hard-hearted as his pictures must be, yet in the East there is now a gleam of sunshine which makes a luster in the very darkest spot. He sees the mysteries of good which are hidden in our humanity. But in proportion to Mr. Thackeray's advance is Mr. Dickens' retrogression. Men may extol the delicate etching, the pre-Raphaelitism of character; but his studies of life, in his two latter works especially, appear to us not realities, but caricatures. As the diseased predominance of one idea is madness, so the unnatural representation of peculiarities of action or speech, to the unconscious exclusion of all the rest of the man, is caricature. If but one of Mr. Dickens' heroes snaps his fingers, he is very seldom seen to do any thing else. If at one period of his life an unoffending person happens to resemble a steam-tug, for ever afterward he is always puffing, or whistling, or bearing down, or mooring, or towing something out of sight. He is lost to us as a man, and becomes a human steamboat. The chief conception we have of Carker is his teeth-the chief idea of Uriah Heep is the word 'umble and a fishy hand. Now we say this is not true to human nature. Thought is mutable as a cloud, and the body responds to every change of those many wandering imaginations. We can not feel that many of Mr. Dickens' characters are flesh and blood as we are. They are not the representatives of a class, but the embodiment of a peculiarity, and for these peculiarities he has the same appetite as the French have for the horrible and strange. Still, all honor to Mr. Dickens for the wondrous beauty and tenderness of his true characters, and all honor to him for his manly declarations against huge and crying wrongs. This latter object, we said already, was that also of our other novelists, and chiefly of Mr. Kingsley. Of all men Kingsley has, in his novels, least pretension to art. "Yeast," "Hypatia," "Westward Ho!" "Two Years Ago," are not written as novels, but as writings to and against the age. With Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton we have little to do. He is not one of this protesting class. He is still the artistic novelist. But the false metaphysics, and the falser views of morality and life, which disfigured his former novels, all those who admired, but did not love his genius, have forgiven and forgotten in the loving admiration with which they regard his two last works. That the same man should have written "Ernest Maltravers," and "The Caxtons," is a phenomenon almost unequaled in literature. Yet, artistic, well worked out as these last two novels are, they share more or less in the protesting idea we have spoken of. For the first is an assertion of the nobility of true honor, and the restoring power of healthy life; and the second, a vindication, clear and beautiful, of the position and influence of woman, to exalt and to console-most wanted now, when the domestic and social relations of the two sexes are so miserably misunderstood, neglected, ig nored, and, we fear, so nationally corrupted. Thus the novelist does not now write a mere story of the affections and passions of humanity, with interleaved descriptions, in which accessories the hero and heroine stand, the figures to which all the rest refer; but he either holds up his glass to the Present, that it may see its reflection there, and so amend its own evil and increase its good, or collects the distant rays of the Past into a focus on the Present, that he may consume the wrong, or kindle into higher life the right. For the same evil and good come round again; yet there is a progress-for we see the evil in a more hideous light, and we are slowly gaining a deeper knowledge of the old truths-our course is not onward in a straight line, but upward, in a spiral curve-higher and higher, yet still on the ancient foundation, and at every step a wider and clearer view. We have thus reached the Kingsley point of our delineation, and that point is more or less the point of our own time. and this clearness, Mr. Kingsley has not To balance by some defect this beauty been given repose of style. We must go forth with him, To enter, then, on this land of Buelah. | as ever I saw them, till I thought my sight was Mr. Kingsley has published at various come again. But soon I knew it was not sotimes a number of works with great rafor I saw more than man could see, right over pidity. Two volumes of sermons, five the ocean, as I live, and away to the Spanish main. Then I saw the cliffs beneath me, and fictions, so called, whose titles are "Yeast," the Gull Rock, and the Shutter, and the Ledge, "Hypatia," "Alton Locke," "Westward and I saw them, William Cary, and the weeds beHo!" and "Two Years Ago." "A Drama neath the merry blue sea. And I saw the grand of the Middle Ages, or The Saint's Tra- old galleon, Will-she has righted with the gedy," a large pamphlet called "Phaethon, sweeping of the tide. She lies in fifteen faor Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers," thoms, at the edge of the rocks upon the sand, a Dialogue on the Difference between Ob- and her men are all lying round her, asleep until the judgment day." jective and Subjective Truth," "Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore," "Greek Hero Tales," and "Four Lectures on Alexandria and her Schools," which are, we regret to say, not known well in Ireland. The first thing which strikes us on reading this list is, the marvelous versatility of Mr. Kingsley's genius. Poetry, theology, metaphysics, fiction, natural philosophy, are all written and discussed with a picturesqueness of words, and a close and crystalline clearness. The style is peculiarly Mr. Kingsley's own-no epicene incongruities leap up as we turn the page -no old familiar face looks at us from the lattice of a sentence-no sentiment irritates our memory by a clipped and spoiled resemblance, the archetype of which we can not recollect. We feel that Mr. Kingsley must have written every line straight from the impulse of the heart, and that none else could have possibly indited a single word. There is also such a light freshness and healthy animalism in the style, that we can never conceive any of these works being written in the house, but sitting by the river, or on the side of some breezy hill, with the wind ruffling his manuscript, and the bubbling of the river in his ears. The structure of the sentences is seldom faulty, except in some of the dialogues, where the truthfulness of the reality of conversation of the broken and short expressions would have made Addison's hair to stand on end, and shortened the sober existence of Blair. The rhythm of his most masterly descriptions is at times so perfect that it is like reading music. What can be more sweet and clear than the following chant of these words: THE SPEECH OF BLIND AMYAS LEIGH. "When you left me there upon the rocks, lads, I looked away and out to sea, to get one last snuff of the merry sea breeze which will never sail me again. And as I looked, I tell you truth, I could see the water and the sky as plain "Away, away, his style and we, Upon the pinions of the wind," and never draw bridle till the close of the book, where we pull up so thoroughly exhausted, that it is said, on credible authority, that even physical weariness ensues from the continued excitement. "Westward Ho!" for example, is like the magnificent joy of the trumpet-song in Samson, which, always grand and beautiful, delights though it should continue the whole night, but leaves us exhausted at the close. There is not sufficient provision made for the passive enjoyment of our contemplative nature. We would give much for the repose of one quiet sentence. So when travelers have passed the thrilling day among alps succeeding alps, and in deep gorges heard no soothing sound, but only the war of the cataract, or the crash of the avalanche, and only seen the gentian and the fern, the lowliness of nature, among the foam and echoes of those high mountain solitudesit is pleasant and most grateful to lie in some greenlit meadow, beneath a hawthorn hedge, with no mightiness and noise to oppress the heart, and be refreshed and consoled with the humbleness of beauty. So tears would more often start to the eyes from excitement than from the tenderness of Mr. Kingsley's style. In painting Turner was a true artist. No one can look over a volume of his studies without being impressed by the succession of calm and storm, with the feelings of terror the one when we have been made to tremand repose, without being refreshed by ble by the other. It was nature herself that taught Turner this deep lesson. For the foundations of the everlasting moun |