of the former as never to be wholly destitute of the latter. Its appeal is that of taste and learning to a circle comparatively limited.

Mr. Kingsley, on the other hand, addresses a larger auditory in another tone. His vehement and daring nature has marked out a course for itself. He is thought to have been even too oblivious, at times, of the smooth-shaven proprieties of the starched and white-neckclothed nicety of ecclesiastical conventionalism. In fact, he would seem, at one time, to have taken the Carlyle fever, and to have had it very badly indeed. But the sickness did not with him, as with poor Sterling, develop into a life-long disorder. Mr. Kingsley got over his Carlyleperiod as other strong minds have survived their Werter and Byron periods-their era of affectation and sentimentality-that time of life wherein, as of old,

Young gentlemen would be as sad as night,
Only for wantonness.'-

So Mr. Kingsley recovered, and now exhibits a mental constitution whose vitals the disease has left untouched. In all he has written, the freshness and vigour of an independent and powerful mind are apparent. Even where we think him wrong, we cannot but respect his motive, and honour his conscientiousness and courage. The excellences of his style are his own, its faults those of the school in which he appears first to have studied. There is observable in many parts of his writings a strain and violence hardly compatible with the highest order of power-a certain self-conscious and spasmodic effort which cannot dare to be calm and natural, which fears repose as though it were dulness and death inevitable. He loves abrupt transitions, dashes, intervening chains of dots, and has used, but too freely, stage property of this sort, for the purpose of effect. But his sins in this respect are venial, compared with those of Mr. Carlyle. Already he is outgrowing such faults; and Hypatia, while thoroughly characteristic of the author of Yeast, and Alton Locke, manifests a patient, thoughtful comprehensiveness, to which neither of those very clever books can lay claim. The vices to which, under such influence, Mr. Kingsley was most exposed those of exaggeration and one-sidedness, he appears now to have almost completely escaped. It may not be flattering to Mr. Carlyle, but we believe it to be true, that by far the larger proportion of the best minds, whose early youth his writings have powerfully influenced, will look back on the period of such subjection as the most miserably morbid season of their life. On awaking from such delirium to the sane and healthful realities of manful toil, they will discover the hollow

CHARACTERISTICS OF MR. KINGSLEY'S STYLE.

129

ness of that sneering, scowling, wailing, declamatory, egotistical, and bombastic misanthropy, which, in the eye of their unripe judgment, wore the air of a philosophy so profound.

It is but justice to Mr. Kingsley to bear in mind what, so circumstanced, he refrains from doing, as well as what he does. He does not imagine that, to speak to the universal heart, he has only to 'thou' the reader, to apostrophize him as 'brother,' or loudly to cry, 'O man! He does not believe that a shortwinded Emersonian sentence is great of necessity with oracular majesty. He does not regard it as indicative of vast superiority, to call his fellow-labourers in the historic field, or his fellowmen, anywhere, dry-as-dusts, pudding-heads, imbeciles, choughs, beetles, apes, and ostriches. He does not reckon a certain vituperative volubility among the supernatural privileges of the inspired priesthood of letters. He does not believe that either originality or depth can be secured by the virtue inherent in capital letters. He does not serve up pages liberally besprinkled with Silencies, Eternities, and Abysses, as a condiment attractive to the jaded appetite, which loathes everything natural. He does not fill with the commonest verity some monstrous and unwieldy sentence, till it seems a discovery of appalling import, while the whole may be compared to a giant in a midsummer pageant, 'marching,' as saith an old writer, 'as though it were alive, and 'armed at all points, but within stuffed full of browne paper and 'tow, which the shrewd boyes, under peeping, do guilefully dis'cover, and turne to a greate derision.'

The strength so conspicuous in Mr. Kingsley's writings is power of that kind which results from the consecration of great gifts to a great purpose. His convictions are strong, his aim is worthy. He is not one of the many clever men of our time whose acuteness and whose talents are rendered almost futile by a lack of earnest conviction. Now Mr. Kingsley does believe strongly; as Austin Caxton would say he never forgets 'the saffron-bag.' What he believes he must speak, and what he says he must make men hear. He is not to be precluded by his profession from the use of any legitimate means which shall secure attention to his message. If men will not hear his truth in essays, sermons, and big books, they shall receive it in the drama, the tale, and the historical romance. In addition to this intensity and concentrativeness, this faculty of gathering up in a present purpose all the energy he possesses, Mr. Kingsley is endowed, in no small measure, with that gift of language which communicates to other minds the creations and the feelings that people his own. There are only certain words which will do this. The faculty which detects and rightly places them

makes a man a painter with the pen. Such terms and epithets are the vincula between the unseen world of an author's mind and the actual world constituted by his public. They are the magic formulæ, the runes and spell-words by which marvels are wrought in the poet's 'heaven of invention.' In his slightest touches Mr. Kingsley displays the artist. He discerns at a glance those features of an object which must be brought out to realize the whole to the eye.

This power of selection as to what shall be described, and this choice of what is perhaps the one only epithet in the language which could vividly and accurately indicate it, is the secret of that life and force which distinguish his delineations. Thus there is so much chilly verisimilitude about his description of the hunting-field on a foggy morning, with which 'Yeast' opens, as to make a susceptible reader quite damp and uncomfortable. It is like Constable's picture of rain, which made Fuseli open his umbrella. In like manner, to read of those Goths in sunny, dusty, broiling Alexandria, singing of northern snows, is verily like the refreshment of an ice in the dog-days. And so throughout, those who will give themselves up fairly to the enjoyment of Mr. Kingsley's pages may be carried within an hour to the remotest extremes of climate, physical or moral; they may travel from Hyperborean frosts to burning Abyssinia-from the mental territory of the ice-bound sceptic to the dangerous heats of brain-sick fanaticism.

But, apart from this descriptive faculty, there is another attribute to which Mr. Kingsley owes no small proportion of his deserved success: this quality is sympathy. Without this insight of the heart an acute and comprehensive mind may accomplish not a little as a philosopher, but, as an artist, must be powerless. It is much to be able to entertain two ideas at the same time at least, such capacity would seem to be more rare among us than could be wished, judging from the desperate haste with which we see men daily rushing from extreme to extreme, and stultifying themselves by arguing from abuse against use. But higher yet is his endowment who possesses a heart in some measure open to all mankind-who can enter into the hopes and fears, the sorrows and the temptation of minds the most opposite. We admire the calmness which can so deliberately estimate the strength and the weakness of either side in the battle between truth and error. We pay our tribute of praise to the graphic skill which realizes, with equal truth, the religious stillness of the desert, and the tumultuous horror of the amphitheatre-which exhibits, with such ease and clearness, almost as it were in passing, that strange compound, yclept

SYMPATHY THE SECRET OF POWER.

131

Alexandrian philosophy, and can compress into a sentence the system of Lucretius, till we seem to see the forlorn world as he saw it an aimless and everlasting gravitation of innumerable atoms. But most of all do we love that true-hearted kindliness, the tenderness of the strong, which gently and reverently lifts the veil from the dark and mournful sanctuary of hearts that have found no God-that tremble bewildered between their devotion and their doubt that seek, but seek amiss, or that are seen in one place denying the use of search, and, in another, discovering a deity only to be crushed with terror. It is from the heart alone that any writer could have limned those changing features of the soul that we behold working, now in aspiration, and now in despair, in the history of Hypatia, of Aben Ezra, and Pelagia. The same sympathizing spirit can detect traits of nature not wholly alien yet from the fellow-feeling of fellowsinners, in Cyril, in Eudæmon, in Miriam,-in the scheming prelate, in the frivolous and selfish sciolist, in the fierce and abandoned procuress. Even in the case of Peter the Reader, cowardly, mean, and bloodthirsty as the man is, a retrospective word or two shows us that he too had his affections once, was not thus evil always, and had been open to the touch of pity. Thus the geologist may point to the watermarks on the fragment of hardened rock, revealing a primæval history, and recalling the time when it was a bright and yielding sand, traversed by the silver ripples of some pool, or frith, that shone and murmured amid the solitudes of the unpeopled world.

Hypatia exhibits, as a work of art, a manifest advance on the former productions of Mr. Kingsley. The same power in the delineation of character, the same passion and pathos, intermingled now with humour and now with sarcasm, which characterized his earlier writings, are equally manifest in the present story, with a result more satisfactory, a truer unity of design, more judgment, and apparently more careful thought in the management of incident and dialogue. As a whole, the work is more successful in a province confessedly more difficult.

Mr. Kingsley never gives such scope to his indignation as when speaking of that worst thing-the corruption of the best. His severest lash is reserved for the smiling malignity and the sleek villanies of Pharisees and zealots. He is at home in detecting and holding up to abhorrence the secret Atheism that lurks in the heart of all intolerance, the iniquity of that unbelief which sins in the name of holiness and attempts the work of God with the tools of the devil. He is the sworn enemy of all those pretences under which men would part off the religious from the civil world, and override the sanctions of morality for the pro

K2

motion of an ecclesiastical interest. But, unlike many loudvoiced denouncers of 'wind-bags,' 'red-tape-isms,' and 'shams,' he tells us what he loves, quite as plainly as what he hates, what he believes as clearly as what he disbelieves. He does not with incessant bark assail every effort philanthropy actually makes, and after snapping at the legs of every messenger of mercy, withdraw into his tub-the cynic prophet of negation. He has something positive to announce and to commend. He does not see in the mass of mankind a flat and dreary deluge of common-placean aggregate of transitory waves lifted up into a momentary being, raised for a transitory glance at sun and moon, and then subsiding into unfathomable night. He believes in a gospel which the poor hear gladly. Through all the gathered clouds of error, amidst the countless misbegotten phantoms of darkness that blot her glory, he beholds in history the Church of Christthe Jerusalem which is from above, and is happy in the sight of the gleaming gold and sapphire, darting ever and anon a ray through the vapours from the mouth of the pit. While bringing out in unsparing relief the ill-omened features of that corruption which, in the fifth century, had already maimed and defiled the church, he does not fail to indicate aright the secret of her real power. One great lesson is plainly taught by his book. Christianity-in spite of its doctrinal disputes, so subtile and so envenomed, on questions utterly insoluble, -in spite of those wrangling, persecuting factions, whose inveterate hatred embroiled East and West, Roman and Barbarian, Greek and Goth, throughout the length and breadth of the tottering empire, in spite of the trumpery of miracle-mongering, ecstasies, and exorcisms, of the fanaticism and the stupor, the fury and the filth, of oriental monasticism-Christianity had, in his view, nevertheless, an answer for the deepest cravings of man's heart, which philosophic culture could not in its dreams surmise, and was busy with a benevolence, and glorious with a self-devotion, that attested daily a celestial origin-a divine commission.

Hypatia is no one-sided apology for Christianity; it is a faithful representation of the thinkings and doings of men called Christians at Alexandria, in their conflict with the vanishing theories and the too substantial evils of the dying giant heathendom. The intellectual opposition they encountered was comparatively feeble-the moral, gigantic. Pagan philosophy had made, now and then, an effort to stay, with the arms of rhetoric and dialectics, the vices of the time. But the weapons belonged to one element, and the adversaries aimed at to another. The immorality which peopled the atmosphere of old Hellas mocked