No More Learning



## p. 338 (#354) ############################################

338
[CH.
Dickens
6
they pass. Shapes and scenes alike are of extraordinary number
and variety; they very seldom, as has been said above, merely
repeat each other, though there are some natural family likenesses
among them; they are grave or gay, tragic, comic or grotesque.
Sometimes, especially at the first, they are of somewhat too
familiar or 'stock' character; sometimes, especially at the last,
their rising, action and passing seem to be accompanied by more
effort, somewhere, than is compatible with the keeping of the
vision. But, on the whole, the spring never dries up; the
Great stream of people hurrying to and fro
never ceases or breaks. Astonishingly devoid of what may be
called subject-tautology as the books are, various as are ever
their themes, there is a relationship of continuity between them
which hardly exists anywhere else. There must be more than
one person living who has read Dickens through night after night
and week after week as if the wbole were one book—a thing
(experto crede) almost impossible to do with some novelists and
a terrible task with all but two or three. The reason why it is
possible easily in his case is that you do pot read merely for the
story-of which, sometimes, there is as little as the knife-grinder
had to tell, or for the characters, who rarely excite any passionate
interest—but for the Dickens quality of fantastic humour, which
may come at any time and is seldom absent long.
But, if this seem an exaggeration, something closely connected
with it and referred to briefly already is not : and that is the
unique re-readableness of Dickens. In this, he surpasses, for those
who can taste him at all, even Scott; and he surpasses, also, others
whom, in some cases, the same readers would put on a level with
him or above him in total literary rank. It may, possibly, be the
case that the very superiority of total effect, and the deeper draught
of character found in these latter, require the lapse of some time
in order to get the table of the mind ready for fresh impressions;
while Dickens's crowd of flitting figures and dissolving views
always finds a fresh appetite. If you like them at all you will like
them always.
How far this bears on the still vexed question of their `reality'
will, probably, be decided by foregone opinion. “How is it possible
that things not fully real should exercise such power? ' some may
ask, and others may answer, that it is precisely the fantastic
element—the contrast of real and unreal—which keeps the charm
effective. David Copperfield, in its characters, is, undoubtedly, the
nearest throughout to persons whom we have met and feel it quite
a
1


## p. 339 (#355) ############################################

x]
Summary
339
likely that we might meet. Pip, who, to some extent, is David's
younger brother, perhaps comes next. It would be hard to find
them many companions.
There are other points in Dickens of which some treatment
may be expected, but on which it does not seem necessary to say
much. Some peculiarities of his earlier style—especially his most
unlucky fondness for blank verse imbedded in the more impassioned
passages of his prose—have been more than enough rebuked. His
irony was seldom happy; first, because he had not the command
of himself which irony requires, and, secondly, because, in strict wit,
which irony requires still more, he was by no means so strong as
he was in humour. His irony, moreover, was almost wholly exerted
in the political-social passages where he was never at his best. His
politics and his sociology themselves are hot ashes at which there
is no need to burn discreet feet or fingers. Certainly he, perhaps
more than anyone else, started that curious topsy-turvyfied snob-
bishness—that'cult of the lower classes'-which has become a more
and more fashionable religion up to the present moment.
The more excellent way is to concentrate attention on those
purely literary qualities which have given to English literature
one of its greatest and most unique figures and contributions of
work. He has constantly been compared to Balzac, and the com-
parison has some solid foundations. But it must be a strange
taste which would take in exchange even the great Frenchman
for our English Dickens. Of the faults-ethical and aesthetic of
the national character he has plenty : prejudice, party spirit,
aptness to speak without sufficient information, lack of criticism,
insubordination to even reasonable rules in art and literature,
exaggeration, extravagance, doubtful taste. The French them-
selves, since their romantic transformation, have, at least, pretended
to like Dickens; but a criticism on him by Voltaire would be very
precious. On the other hand, he has many, if not quite all, of the
virtues on which we most pride, or, at least, used to pride, ourselves
-courage, independence, individuality, imaginative freshness and
activity, which does not disdain to approach the diviner kinds of
nonsense, humour, in some, if not all, of its quintessences, kindli-
ness, the sense of comfort and cheerfulness and home. And all
these good and bad things he put together for our literary use
with an unstinting fertility of device, a daemonic energy, an actual
power of artistic creation in certain kinds, to which there is,
perhaps, no parallel in our literature and certainly none in any
other.
22-2


## p. 340 (#356) ############################################

CHAPTER XI
THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL NOVEL
DISRAELI, CHARLES KINGSLEY, MRS GASKELL, 'GEORGE ELIOT'
Of the four eminent novelists whose names are placed at the
head of this chapter, the first three are representative rather of
a period than of any school, properly so called, of English prose
fiction; while the fourth, whose works, in a sense, complete the
cycle of imaginative literature here brought under review, stands,
in purpose and in method, as, to some extent, she does in point of
time, away from the rest. Yet, the novels of all of them, as well
as those of many authors of lesser note who were their contem-
poraries, had certain notable features in common which were more
or less new to English fiction, and which warrant a consideration,
side by side, of writers between whom, singly and severally, there
was a great and unmistakable diversity of genius.
With Disraeli and Kingsley, as, in a measure, with Bulwer
Lytton in certain of his works, and with one or two other writers
before them, the English historical novel, which had reached the
height of its glories in Scott, and, through him, had come to be
imitated in almost every other modern literature, changed into the
political (though both Disraeli and Kingsley, the one in passing
and the other with conspicuous success, also essayed the older
kind of fiction). At the same time, they, and the two women
writers whose names are here associated with theirs, were led to
give attention to a number of social questions of pressing political
significance. Simultaneously and, in part, as a natural result of
the expansion of the choice of themes, the new kind of novel, even
more distinctly than the historical novel before it, supplemented
and enlarged the range of subject on which earlier English fiction,
culminating in Richardson, had concentrated its efforts. The
treatment, in artistic form, of the experiences of individual men


## p. 341 (#357) ############################################

CH. XI] The Reaction against Romanticism
.
341
and women, and of the reaction of these experiences upon their
thoughts and feelings, had intimately connected English fiction
with the philosophy of Rousseau, and with its unparalleled influence
upon his generation. Now, the novelist went on to deal with the
life and doings, and the intellectual and moral condition, of whole
classes of men and women; till, at last, in the stories of George Eliot
above all, it became difficult to decide whether the interest of the
reader was more widely and effectively challenged by the leading
figures in front of the scene or by those which made up the
surroundings, constituted the atmosphere, or—to use a word for
which we have no satisfactory English equivalent-formed the
milieu of the action?
From the point of view of literary history, these changes, to
which the application of the comparative method would find it
easy to suggest analogies, connect themselves with the inevitable
reaction against the tendencies of the romantic school, which, for
some time, had been approaching superannuation. The rights of
individual fancy, taste, opinion and belief to go each its own way
and pursue each its own subjective course of development had
prevailed, with readers of novels, so far as to allow their heroes
and heroines the prerogative of an interest enhanced by the very
fact of their isolation. The effects of this and other cognate
characteristics of the romanticism which had long held the field
had begun to show themselves in imaginative literature at large
by an increased monotony, by occasional self-satire, by the weaken-
ing of poetic forms and by the predominance of lyric over dramatic
or epic treatment of literary themes.
Against all this, a reaction, in any case, must have arisen in
every branch of English literature, and, most of all, in that which,
more than any other, had come to supply the intellectual and
imaginative sentiment of the largest body of readers. But there
were forces at work in the life of the nation which were certain to
cooperate with this reaction, and to impart to it a force beyond
that of a literary movement pure and simple, which spends its
strength till superseded in its turn.
The literature of English fiction in the period with which these
chapters are chiefly concerned, and the beginning of which may be
dated from that of the fourth decade of the century, was, in the
first place, more and more intent upon dealing with things as they
actually were. This realism corresponded to the political and social
i See, as to what he calls the Milieuroman, Dibelius, W. , Englische Romankunst
(Berlin, 1910), vol. 11, p. 338.


## p. 342 (#358) ############################################

342
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
changes which had given the nation, as a whole, wider and readier
opportunities of observing the different parts of its own organism
and, thus, of better understanding and appreciating the various
aspects and interests of its own life. In the course of the period
beginning with the death of George IV (1830), and the passing
of the Reform bill (1832), and, even more distinctly, from the
accession of queen Victoria (1837) onwards, society, whatever its
habits or desires, was no longer able to fence itself round, within
limits mainly determined by personal descent and connection with
landed property. There was a great movement upwards, as there
had been in the Tudor days; and, while the metropolis, with its
predominant commercial interest, was becoming, far more than it
had hitherto been, the real capital of the country, other large towns,
more especially in the manufacturing districts of the north, were
growing into what only one or two of them had been before, real
centres of popular life. Much to their own benefit, though, not
necessarily, in the same degree, to that of other classes, the court,
nobility and wealthier gentry were living under a new light of
publicity-a publicity increased by the twofold growth of locomo-
tive facilities and of the public press—and institutions which, for
many a generation, had been mainly appropriated to the use of the
privileged classes, the universities in especial, were more freely
opening their doors. The great professions, including that of the
church, were, at the same time, being popularised; and, though
the Reform bill had not brought to the popular chamber
a representative body of pure radicals of the type of Felix
Holt, it was becoming an assembly through whose proceedings
and their motive causes a good deal of daylight was allowed to
shine.
All this, unmistakably, facilitated the process by which the
English novel of the generation which entered into its prime in 1830,
or thereabouts, devoted itself very largely to a critical examination
of the various classes comprising the nation-however ingeniously
this criticism might be interwoven with the narrative of the
fictitious experiences of imaginary personages. As a matter of
course, it often turned into satire ; but its primary purpose was to
exhibit, or, at all events, to seem to exhibit, an actually existing
state of things, in lieu of the old romantic pictures either of the
present or of the (still more easily misrepresented) past.
In the second place, the condition of affairs in this country
during the years 1830 to 1850 (in which fell the greater part of
the new productivity of the English political and social novel) was


## p. 343 (#359) ############################################

XI]
Harriet Martineau
343
6
one of constant ferment, of great fears as well as of high hopes, of
terrible sufferings and of ardent efforts for better things. The
prophet of this period was Carlyle, who proclaimed the message of
an idealism no longer satisfied with the old aims and methods
of a political philosophy which, in fiction, too, had not been left
unrepresented. Here, it was taught with premeditated emphasis,
by a writer so successful in her work that the sage was himself
fain to declare her 'the only instance he knew of clear activity
being compatible with happiness. ' But Harriet Martineau, though,
besides her justly celebrated Illustrations of Political Economy
(1832—4) and Illustrations of Taxation (1834)—-confessed hybrids
of directly didactic purpose in innocently narrative form-she
published two novels of ordinary length and an effective series
of short tales for the young, collected under the title The
Playfellow (1841)', cannot properly be classed among English
novelists, and will be more fitly spoken of among historical and
political writers, in whose ranks an honourable place is her
due. Indeed, in that brief Autobiographical Memoir where
Harriet Martineau tells, with a frankness so frank as to have no
humour in it, the story of her own life up to the time when she
believed it to be drawing to its close, she states that
none of her novels or tales have, or ever had, in the eyes of good judges, or
her own, any character of permanence. The artistic aim and qualifications
were absent-she had no power of dramatic construction; nor the poetic
inspiration on the one hand, nor critical cultivation on the other, without
which no work of the imagination can be worthy to live 2.
Such candour disarms; and her further admission that, in some of
her political economy tales, perhaps her best achievement in
fiction, the plot which she was elsewhere unable to create was
furnished by the doctrine which she desired to enforce, may readily
be accepted as part of the disclaimer.
1 Of her two novels, Deerbrook (1839) and The Hour and the Man (1841), the
former offered her an opportunity of expressing an opinion on most subjects under
the sun; but the conversations contain much that is felicitous as well as true, and
the insight into character, chiefly from an educational point of view, is remarkable.
The Hour and the Man, which calls itself a historical romance,' consists of a judicious
selection of historical facts, skilfully adapted to the conception of the characters intro-
duced, and especially of that of the hero, Toussaint Louverture. The popularity of
The Playfellow tales—especially of the first of them, The Settlers at Home, still endures;
though Feats on the Fiord is not quite so good as its name, and The Peasant and the
Prince ("Louis XVII'), largely based on Mme de Campan's memoirs, is, in more
ways than one, too doctrinaire for maturer readers. The Crofton Boys successfully
insists on homeliness as an element in the life of both school and family.
2 Autobiographical Memoir in Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, with Memorials
by M. W. Chapman (3rd edn, 1877), vol. II, pp. 482 sqq.


## p. 344 (#360) ############################################

344
The Political and Social Novel [CH.
In the field of fiction, with which alone we are at present con-
cerned, no agency on behalf of the new idealism, and of the resolve
to set right by speedy action what was out of joint in the social
condition of the people, could approach in effectiveness that of
Dickens, who was able to touch chords of popular sentiment with
a masterhand that had no equal. Both these writers, and, with
them, a group of young men, partly clergy, partly barristers and
university scholars, who took pride in ranging themselves under
the moral and intellectual leadership of Frederick Denison Maurice,
pressed upon the nation the necessity of continuous effort on behalf
of the suffering and struggling working classes, as entitled to
a share in the blessings of human life as well as in the privileges
of citizenship, and thus became the leaders of a movement which
has been given the name of 'interventionism? ' Their endeavours
were most memorable while they were most needed, and while the
material sufferings of the working classes embittered their sense
of their political grievances. About 1846, a time of greater pros-
perity began to set in ; and, in 1848, chartism came to what seemed
a rather abrupt end; but the mid-Victorian age, and the tranquil
enjoyment during its course by the middle class of an assured
predominance in English political and social life, can hardly be
said to have begun much before 1851, the year of the festival of
peace—the first great international exhibition.
This period, then—from about 1830 to about 1850—is that to
which the great body of the literary work of the first three eminent
novelists discussed in this chapter belongs. With Dickens, as has
been already pointed out, their relations are more or less close,
while Thackeray holds aloof from ‘novels with a purpose,' be that
purpose conservative or socialista. For the eager productivity of
these writers and of those who shared in their endeavours, it would
not be easy to account, had they not been under the influence of
the spirit of the times in which they lived and had their being.
Instead of contenting itself with the new inheritance of political
rights into which it had entered, their age was ready to recognise
that a social regeneration must follow, and prepare the ground
for further political progress. The new reformers must be men
and women arguing not from theories but from facts, writers
whose sympathy with the people proceeded from a study of its
See, more especially, the important work of L. Cazamian, Le Roman. Social en
Angleterre (1830–1850) (Paris, 1904), in which he discusses the idealist and inter-
ventionist reaction against the individualism of the utilitarians and of the Manchester
school, as the adherents of earlier political economy are persistently called.
. See A Plan for a Prize Novel (cited by Cazamian).
9


## p. 345 (#361) ############################################

2
XI]
Benjamin Disraeli
345
actual condition, and who refused to remain deaf to the unanswer-
able grievances, and blind to the unendurable lives, of town and
country. Before relief came, in the latter part of this period,
it had seemed as if a revolution more like the first than the
second French revolution must break out in England, and as if
'the two nations’ at home would be ranged in warfare, the one
against the other. Such, deep and serious, was the nature of the
problems faced by the 'young England' of Disraeli, by the disciples
of Maurice, from whose earnest ranks Charles Kingsley stood
forth in bright literary panoply, and by tender-hearted women
whose hearts went out, like Mrs Gaskell's, to their neighbours in
the great industrial towns, while to George Eliot's critical but
sympathetic intelligence these questions were familiar traditions.
The genius of none of these writers, was absorbed by their social
or political interests; and of each of them this chapter will speak
as distinguished by what was individually the writer's own. But
the influence of their times was upon them all-times in which,
amidst great political storm and stress, the spirit of England stood
high and her soul renewed itself in the struggle onward.
A quite unique place in the history of English fiction will be
universally allowed to be held by Benjamin Disraeli, once called
the younger—in recognition of his learned father, who is still
remembered as one of the lesser lights of critical antiquarianism-
and afterwards the wonder of the world under his title the earl of
Beaconsfield. W. F. Monypenny, in a Life of very high merit which
he has not lived to complete with his own hand', justly observes
that ‘novels may not be read for biography, but biography may be
used to elucidate novels,' and it is only from this point of view
that, in the following rapid survey of Disraeli's principal writings,
reference will be made to the events of his life, the most striking
of which form part, for better or for worse, of our national history.
Nothing that Disraeli ever did, said or wrote was done, said or
written without self-consciousness ; everything worked together
in the scheme of his life, between the private and public aspects
of which it is often difficult to draw a line, and which stands freely
self-revealed in his books as it does in the extraordinary story of
his career. He became a writer when very young; his earliest
book, though not the first production of his pen”, appeared in
1 Monypenny, William Flavelle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield,
vols. I and 11, 1804_46; 1910–12. Continued by Buckle, G. E. , vol. III, to 1855. In
this volume, the analysis of Tancred is by Monypenny.
See bibliography.


## p. 346 (#362) ############################################

346
[ch.
The Political and Social Novel
>
1826, when he was in his twenty-first or twenty-second year, and
was afterwards reckoned by himself among ‘books written by boys. '
The earliest literary training which he received was that which,
like Vivian Grey, he sought for himself in his father's library,
hence, the wide, though superficial, knowledge of books which he
had not time to supplement in later life, his resolute adherence to
the literary heroes of his youth (Byron and Bolingbroke above all)
and, also, the ineradicable imperfection of his spelling of French,
the only language except his own with which he attained to any
degree of familiarity. Oxford and Cambridge remained unknown
to him, and he made bold, at times, to treat them in his books with
a touch of more or less friendly scorn.
During much of the earlier part of his life, he was burdened by
debt; and the pressure of such a burden is nowhere more forcibly
depicted than in a passage of Henrietta Temple, though, at times,
his buoyant nature may have led him, like Fadredeen in Tancred,
to believe in indebtedness as a stimulant of genius. Partly because
of these difficulties, against which he gallantly struggled, he was
not a great traveller, though, like Contarini Fleming, he made the
grand tour; and among his most notable literary achievements are
the pictures in the same novel, and in Tancred, which, like those
in Eothen, appreciatively reproduce the humours as well as the
splendours of the near east.
Disraeli's literary masterpieces have an irrefutable claim to be
included in a chapter on the political and social novel of his age ;
but it would be an error to suppose politics to have been, from the
first, the main element of his fiction any more than it was the chief
interest of his early personal career. Vivian Grey (1826), written
from an experience developed by a vivid imagination out of
conversations to which the youthful author had listened at John
Murray's dinners, contains no serious political thought, for the
New Union' has no purpose beyond that of faction; and, when
Disraeli wrote Contarini Fleming (1832), his dream, as Monypenny
points out, was to acquire fame through literature, just as the hero
of this romance purposed to 'devote himself to the amelioration
of his kind' by authorship. There can be no doubt that, as, indeed,
the author himself indicates, the conception of his novel owed
something to Wilhelm Meister ; but, except in the imitation of
the character of Philine, only in a very general way. Disraeli's
6
1 As to Byron, see, especially, Venetia, and Sidonia's expatiation, in Coningsby, on
the text Genius when young is divine. ' Bolingbroke was, of course, Disraeli's political
ideal as well as one of his literary exemplars.


## p. 347 (#363) ############################################

XI]
Benjamin Disraeli
347
next novel, The Young Duke (1830), although containing some
pungent political criticisms, deals almost exclusively with the
world of fashion ; and, if it professes to supply the reader with
something very different from the ordinary type of fashionable
novel as defined in the course of the story', certainly keeps what-
ever may be its special purpose well in reserve. Alroy (1833) and
The Rise of Iskander (1835) are historical, or quasi-historical,
romances of a more or less conventional type. Henrietta Temple,
which rightly calls itself 'a Love Story,' and Venetia (both 1837),
with its topsy-turveydom of literary portraiture and reminiscences,
have nothing to do with political or social problems; nor was it
before Coningsby, or The New Generation (1844) and Sybil, or The
Two Nations (1845) that the author deliberately sought to concen-
trate the attention of his readers on the treatment of such matters.
He declares that, in the frenzied period of the Reform bill, thirteen
or fourteen years before the publication of these cognate if not
twin novels, he took occasion 'to intimate and then to develope to
the first assembly of his countrymen that he ever had the honour to
address the convictions which he expounds in these works? ' Two
or three years after that historic date-in 1835–he had, in the
Vindication of the English Constitution which he addressed to
the sympathetic ear of lord Lyndhurst, enunciated, with extra-
ordinary gusto, his views on the three estates of the realm, on
the difference between governing for a people and governing for
à party, on the enormities of the whigs and on the enduring
significance for the national welfare of the church and the
house of lords. This animated essay was followed by Letters of
Runnymede, which, after appearing in The Times, were published
in 1836 with a brief congenial diatribe The Spirit of Whiggism,
but which their author never acknowledged. Modelled, in form,
upon the letters of Junius, they outdid their predecessors in
scurrilous violence, but lacked that calm assumption of self-evident
superiority which gave to the earlier diatribes so much of their
authoritative tone. They were dedicated, as a whole, to Peel, whom
the time had not yet come for attacking, but were individually, for
the most part, addressed to the whig leaders, for whom no method
of abuse seemed out of place?
1. Take a pair of pistols and a pack of cards, a cookery book and a set of new
quadrilles, mix them up with half an intrigue and a whole marriage, and divide them
into three equal portions. '
2 See L'envoi to Sybil.
3 To the same period belong a number of contributions to The Times, The Morning
Post (June 1834), the short-lived Press and Fraser's Magazine, all of which were


## p. 348 (#364) ############################################

348
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
In Disraeli's two great political novels, and, in a measure, in
their companion romance, Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847),
he fully developed the revised tory creed. Equally removed from
the 'stupid' and stagnant toryism of the Liverpool era, and from
the colourless conservatism proposed by the party without prin-
ciples which followed Peel after the passing of the Reform bill,
the new generation represented by the young England party
makes open war upon political radicalism and utilitarian philosophy,
upon the coldblooded whigs who have allied themselves with these
tendencies, upon the middle classes, the merchants and the manu-
facturers who profit from their ascendancy, upon the cruelty
of the new poor law (against which, in parliament, Disraeli had
voted with a small minority) and upon the unimaginative and un-
aesthetic impoverishment of the life of the peasantry! . Contempt
is poured upon the existing system of government, which a 'heroic'
effort must be made to overthrow, instead of continuing to depend
on 'a crown robbed of its prerogative, a church extended to a
Commission, and an aristocracy that does not lead? '; and the
heart must thus be taken out of chartism, the fondly trusted
gospel of the second of the 'two nations' into which the English
people is divided. In Sybil, we seem to be nearing the thought
that, in the emancipation of the people, the idealism of the church
of Rome will lend powerful aid, and, in the earlier part of Tancred,
we are treated to an excursus on the English church and its
defects, which might seem to tend in the same direction? But
the defects of that church, we learn, lie not only in the mediocrity
of its bishops, but, primarily, in its deficiency in oriental knowledge,
and, thus, with a note that Tancred began to doubt'whether faith
is sufficient without race,' we pass into another sphere of Disraeli's
unacknowledged and some of which have only recently been discovered to be his.
A selection from these articles, which illustrate their author's genius for invective-
some of them in a way which, perhaps, he might prefer not to be too closely remem-
bered—has been reprinted with the Runnymede Letters by Hutcheon, W. , under the
title Whigs and Whiggism, covering the period from the passing of the first Reform
bill to the year 1841.
1 Cf. Cazamian, L. , Le Roman Social en Angleterre (1904), pp. 334 ff.
2 Coningsby.
3 The Roman church had an irresistible attraction for Disraeli, though the anti-
papal agitation of 1850 caused him to abandon the 'tractarian' tendencies of his
young England' days. His admiration for the Roman system may be traced in a
phase of the experiences of Contarini Fleming, in the influence exercised upon the
young duke by Mary Dacre, and, passim, in Henrietta Temple, as well as in Sybil.
In Lothair and Endymion, the admiration is not extinct, but has passed into an
ironical stage. The movement for protestantising Ireland is mentioned with scorn in
Tancred.
6


## p. 349 (#365) ############################################

XI]
Benjamin Disraeli
349
political and historical philosophy, which concerns itself with the
question of race. Here, we are scarcely any longer in the region
of practical politics, but, rather, in that of semi-occult influences
such as are best demonstrated by the esoteric knowledge and
prophetical certainty of Sidonia, or illustrated by the traditional
tale Alroy. The inner meaning of Tancred may be veiled, but its
courage, as a declaration of faith in the destinies of the Jewish
race, must be described as magnificent. Disraeli's last two novels
-Lothair (1870) and Endymion (1880)—are, of course, full of
political passages and invaluable to the historical and political
student as containing the obiter dicta of a statesman to whom the
world of contemporary politics was as familiar as the boards of the
stage are to its veteran protagonists. But these books have no
longer any political purpose; the writer looks on the contentions
of ultramontanism and Mazzinianism from the outside, and the
very motto of Endymionbetrays the unimpassioned spirit of the
observer for whom political life no longer has any secrets.
Among those secrets is the mysterious action of personal
character, on the paramount importance of which Disraeli (who
never shrank from repeating himself) again and again descants.
He possessed a wonderful insight into the motives that actuate
men not only in their public doings, but in the shaping of their
lives, or in the leaving of them to be shaped by circumstances as
the agents of Providence. Thus, when he worked with special
care and elaborated his presentiments, he could place on his
canvas figures typically true and yet highly original, such as
Monmouth in Coningsby, the selfish aristocrat of whom Carabas, in
Vivian Grey, is merely a first sketch and Montfort, in Endymion,
a more delicate part-copy, the omniscient Sidonia, Rigby, the
embodiment of official meanness, and the radiant Mr Phoebus.
All these have in them features of actual individuals well known
to fame? ; but they are, at the same time, types worthy to stand
by the side of the best remembered in English fiction ; and the
same may be asserted of a few others who are types only, such
as the immortal Tadpole and Taper. In many of the characters
which crowd his pages, Disraeli was content to introduce con-
temporaries under a more or less thin disguise, without, on the
one hand, working them out with fullness or, on the other, aiming
at photographic exactitude. It is not of much importance whether
1 Quidquid agunt homines.
3 In Sidonia, these features are, of course, purely external; and the author goes
out of his way to make Sidonia appear at the ball of baroness S. de R-d.


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350
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
Disraeli hit upon this device unassisted, or whether he borrowed
it from a popular novelist of a rather earlier day, who had personal
experience of political life, Robert Plumer Ward'. In Disraeli's
novels, the real personages introduced are all recognisable by
those acquainted with the social history of the age, even if they
cannot attest the likeness on the strength of personal intercourse
or even of a deprecatory vidi tantum.
Such are, among a
multitude of others, the delightful Mirabel in Henrietta Temple ;
the almost equally delightful St Aldegonde in Lothair, who re-
appears as Waldershare in Endymion ; besides Coningsby himself,
lord Henry Sidney, Sir Charles Buckhurst, Eustace Lyle in
Coningsby; Vavasour in Tancred; Monsignore Catesby and
the cardinal, and, at the other pole, Mirandola, in Lothair; and
prince, afterwards king, Florestan in Endymion. As a rule, all
these are touched with equal humour and a kindliness, or, at
least, gentleness, in accordance with the obvious demands of good
taste; but there are a few notable exceptions. The character of
Rigby in Coningsby has already been mentioned ; and it remains,
so far as we are aware, unknown why Disraeli should have
displayed so vitriolic a hatred of Croker as is displayed in this
portrait-unmistakable, at all events, in the account of him as
a man of letters, the author of slashing articles, full of detail
constantly incorrect. Here and there, in his political novels, Disraeli
gives piquancy to his array of dramatis personae by introducing
among them actual personages, such as lord (John) Russell, who
intervenes in the action of Sybil and whose character is not
unfairly drawn in Coningsby. But no such treatment is accorded
to Sir Robert Peel, whom Disraeli hated with a bitterness that
can only be accounted for by the fact that the great minister, on
one occasion, had behaved to him with undeserved generosity.
In return, he is assailed in Coningsby (though, in the same work,
a recognition is accorded to his courage), insulted in The Young
Duke and held up to scorn in Tancred. Disraeli's spite against
Goldwin Smith, in the character of the Oxford professor in
A perusal of Ward's Tremaine ; or the Man of Refinement (1825) can hardly fail to
suggest to readers of Disraeli's best known novels some similarity in style and treat-
ment—more especially in the way of introducing characters and recalling, in an easy
fashion, as if treating of familiar circumstances, their antecedents and surroundings.
But the resemblance does not go deep; and the story of a tired man of pleasure and
fashion, led gradually by the influences of friendship and love, but, also, by sustained
argument in moral theology and philosophy, to a nobler view of life and its duties, takes
the reader out of Disraeli's sphere of thought and experience. Very ample and very
polite, the style of Tremaine is, at the same time, easy and attractive, and the success
of the book is not surprising.


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XI]
Benjamin Disraeli
351
Lothair, was, perhaps, provoked, and certainly requited; but it
is really too inept to have deserved notice. Could his equally
violent, if not equally pointless, caricature of Thackeray, as
St Barbe in Endymion, have been merely the result of annoyance
at the happy parody of himself as a prize novelist in Scaramouch?
Hardly less captivating than the likenesses of prominent
contemporaries introduced by Disraeli into his novels are the
apophthegms which he puts into their mouths or delivers on his
own account. His earliest work, Vivian Grey, is full of these;
but, as they come to us in more mellowed form from the lips of
Sidonia, they seem laden with wisdom. Where epigrams cannot
conveniently be coined, mere phrases have to do their duty, and
no audacity is too great to fill them with sound. The author of
Vivian Grey was able to produce an equivalent of diplomatic
phraseology, as it were, from his inner consciousness; and, like
the master of diplomatic speech in the period of European
congresses, he could always find a formula, even when his purpose
was mainly negative.
It may, perhaps, be added that the names of Disraeli's per-
sonages are generally chosen with great felicity. In this respect,
he has few equals except Thackeray, who, however, occasionally
condescends, as Dickens avowedly seeks, to raise laughter by his
inventive power in this respect. It is not often that Disraeli
unbends so far. Not that he was wanting in the imitative
humour which could reproduce, with lifelike correctness, the talk
between two young sporting dukes at Doncaster, the vaunts of
G. 0. A. Head at Manchester and even the rodomontade of
Chaffing Jack, the keeper of a music-hall in a small manufacturing
town, who, indeed, has in him something of the volubility of
Alfred Jingle.
Though he loved hyperbole, and though it would
be easy to cite passages, even in his later works, which must be
called grandiloquent, and others which are wholly artificial, even
in the inversion of their sentences, yet, the favourite form of
Disraeli's humour was irony, in which, both as a writer and as a
speaker, he excelled all his contemporaries. The earliest mani-
festations of this gift will be found in the short stories or sketches,
beginning with Popanilla (1827), and including Ixion in Heaven
(1833), pure burlesque, though almost Lucianic in its urbanity,
and The Infernal Marriage (1834), a little lengthy, but containing
some good political banter. The gift was carefully cultivated,
and is abundantly exhibited in all Disraeli's later works. Sarcasms
like the old ideal, to do nothing and get something' are as
6


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352
[ch.
The Political and Social Novel
6
plentiful with him as leaves in Vallombrosa, and whole episodes
-such as the diplomacy of the prime minister of the Amsarey in
Tancred and the Roman plot for the conversion of Lothair-are
conceived in this vein, with equal delicacy and malice.
'Thought and passion,' Disraeli writes in Henrietta Temple,
are required in a fine novel, besides the descriptive accessories.
The intense energy of his nature, the strength of his will and the
consistency of his purpose did duty for the primary ingredients.
When their flow might have seemed to slacken, imagination, wit
and extraordinary quickness of insight did the rest. His power
of construction was considerable; Coningsby and Sybil in different
ways, are interesting as stories, and the turn of the narrative
in Lothair (by the appearance of Mr Phoebus) is very deftly con-
trived. On the other hand, not only Vivian Grey, but Tancred,
lacks an ending, and Endymion (it must be confessed) a hero.
Yet, with all their combined effectiveness and particular brilliancy,
his literary gifts were limited in their range; notwithstanding
his extraordinary power of writing dialogue, he had no essentially
dramatic gifts, while the feebleness of his lyrics is manifest
in both Henrietta Temple and Venetia, though, in the latter
novel, they are introduced as the productions of a second Byron.
His blank verse was not much superior, though it found its way
into some of his prose. The merits of his style are confined to
his prose, though estimates have differed as to the work or works
in which it attained to its highest excellence. He himself thought
that Contarini Fleming was the perfection of English prose, and
his biographer considers that this novel shows him at his best as a
prose-writer. But, to us, the afflatus of the latter part of his
favourite Tancred appears stronger, and its effect more stimulating.
The vividness, subtle humour and attractive lightness of his general
prose style seem to have reached their height in Coningsby or,
perhaps, in Sybil, where his historical and other excursuses begin
to have a value of their own, something like that of the openings
of Fielding or the digressions of Thackeray; but none of his
earlier works exhibits the exquisite finish of style which, in his
latter days, he knew how to impart to Lothair and to Endymion.
In the former of these, at all events, his genius for depicting the
conflict of great ideas had not deserted him.
Of Disraeli's contributions to literature outside the field of
prose fiction, very little needs to be said here. He took himself
very seriously in writing The Revolutionary Epick (1834), of
which he states himself to have conceived the idea on the plains


## p. 353 (#369) ############################################

xi]
Benjamin Disraeli
353
of Troy; but the fragment of a blank verse poem which remains
consists partly of commonplace rhetoric, partly of a faint reflec-
tion of the influence of Childe Harold, with a troublesome inter-
ference of the allegorical element. Count Alarcos, a Tragedy
(1839), though not without telling points, has neither reality of
passion nor strength of style. Quite at the beginning of his
career, Disraeli incurred and escaped the chance of settling down
into journalism; but he withdrew from the Murray-Lockhart
scheme of The Representative, and had no share in the production
of that short-lived journal (1825). So late as 1853, he returned to
journalism, as the founder and guiding spirit of a weekly journal
called The Press, for which he wrote the opening leader Coalition,
and which he did not sell till 1866. To his published political
writings proper, no further reference is needed; but it may be
well to note that, in his 'political biography' of lord George
Bentinck, Disraeli essayed a kind of writing of which there are not
many examples in English literature, namely, the life of a states-
man designed, primarily, to illustrate the nature and value of the
political principles by which it was animated, and only secondarily
the character and qualities of the man himself. How far he was
successful in fulfilling the former purpose must largely depend on
political opinion and sentiment; but, of the purpose itself, even
without the guidance of a recent editor of the book, no doubt can
remain ; and the work is almost as much an attack upon Peel as
a panegyric upon the protectionist leader. The personal touches,
so far as the hero of the story is concerned, are effectively intro-
duced, though the elegiac note at the close, with its three Greek
quotations, is strained. On the other hand, a scene or two in the
narrative-Peel in a reverie, and the same statesman in the hour
of final defeat—as well as some incidental touches-O'Connell in
decay, and the duke explaining the motives of his policy to the
press-are worthy of the author at his best. His own self he
more or less effaces, tactfully, in the biography of his friend, but
he finds room for a chapter on the Jewish question, in which both
were at one.
The life of Charles Kingsley is outspanned at both ends by
that of lord Beaconsfield; it was, in its outward circumstances,
as simple and modest as the career of his senior was world-
embracing in its notoriety. But, in the writings which have
secured to the one and to the other a place in every history
of English literature, they dealt, each after his own fashion and
23
E. L. XIII.
CH. XI.


## p. 354 (#370) ############################################

354
[ch.
The Political and Social Novel
in his own spirit, with many of the same social problems of the
age of transition which, in this and other European lands, set in
with the fourth decade of the nineteenth century. Though, in
heart as well as by profession ever since he had grown into manhood,
a country parson, and yet, also, an author whose full-fledged
imagination felt at home alike in the oases of the eastern desert
and amidst the waters of the western main, Kingsley, if any
man, was always the same in his life and in his writings, and the
latter can never be dissociated from the experiences and con-
ditions of the former. For what was most vital in his books was
inspired by the ideas and purposes which determined the essential
course of his life, and took immediate shape under the impulses
which created them. Kingsley, in the words of one of the
most just as well as most affectionate of his critics-Max
Müller-always did his best at the time and for the time. '
He disliked being called a muscular Christian; but he would not
(at least in his own day) have repudiated the title of a militant
apostle. Deliberation was not less foreign to his nature than were
afterthoughts ; and, though he was not given to inner self-
contradictions, even self-consistency he held of small account as
compared with the duty of declaring that which was in him. He
was, it may confidently be added, wholly devoid of either literary or
other personal ambition, properly so called, and was quite conscious
of his powers as forming part of himself. But what he had in
view was the end. In the same letter in which, when, on the
very threshold of his career as a writer, he acknowledged
the weight of his wife's advice that he should write no more
novels, and allowed that, as a matter of fact, he had no more to
say, he declared that, while God had bestowed on him
a certain artistic knack of utterance (nothing but a knack), He had done
more; He had made the Word of the Lord like fire in his bones' giving
him no peace till he had spoken out.
It is partly because of these characteristics and partly notwith-
standing them, that his life and works appear fused together
like the bronze in the statues of those Greek heroes—a Perseus
or a Theseus—in whom he loved to trace the congenial features of
Christian chivalry.
Charles Kingsley, who described his own talent as 'altogether
hereditary,' owed many enduring impressions to the scenes and
i See Charles Kingsley, his Letters and the Memories of his Lije, edited by his wife
(here cited as Letters and Memories, the 4 vol. edition, 1901—2), vol. I, pp. 188—9.


## p. 355 (#371) ############################################

At an
XI]
Charles Kingsley
355
associations of his boyhood, his father's livings on the edge of the
fens and in north Devon, his mother's West Indian descent, and
his schooldays at Helston under Derwent Coleridge. He afterwards
entered King's college, London, of which, in his manhood, through
the intervention of Frederick Denison Maurice, he had nearly
become a professor. Thence, he passed to Magdalene college,
Cambridge, and, after taking a good degree, into the active service
of the church, to which, as an undergraduate, he had resolved on
devoting his life. He became curate at Eversley on the borders
of Windsor forest, and, after a very brief interval, was, in 1844,
appointed rector of the parish—an office which became an integral
part of his life and which he held till its close.
Yet, it was not likely that either his care for his parish, or his
happy home life, should confine his interests within the circle of
the chalkstreams and firtrees of his Hampshire home.
early date, he was led to enquire into the condition of the working
masses and into the problems suggested by it, above all to
those called upon by their profession to minister to the poor.
The writings of Carlyle, which, in this period, were reaching
the height of their power, were among the earliest of these
influences; but it should be noted that Kingsley strongly
deprecated being considered in any wise in theology as a follower
of Carlyle. ' In 1844, Kingsley made the acquaintance of
Maurice, who soon became “the Master' to him and to a band
of fellow-teachers and workers. When the year 1848 drew near,
from which, in England, also, much was expected and much
feared, Kingsley had come to be frequently in London, and, in
this and the following year, he held a professorship of English
literature in Queen's college, Harley street. More or less under
Maurice's guidance, he and the friends with whom he was
more especially associated-John Malcolm Ludlow and Thomas
Hughes above all-were preparing to play their part in the move-
ment for social reform into whose broader and deeper channel
they hoped that the angry chartism of the day might be
merged.
That, after he had plunged into the struggle, his name speedily
became prominent among those engaged in it, was, in no small
measure, due to the reputation which, in this fateful year, he had
rapidly acquired by his earliest published literary work. When he
declared that, previously to this, he had not written five hundred
lines in his life, he, of course, meant in verse, though, even in that
form, he can hardly but have perpetrated, in blank or rime, other
23-2


## p. 356 (#372) ############################################

356
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
a
juvenilia besides Hypotheses Hypochondriacae'. His lyric gift
awoke early; but its best remembered fruits belong to a date rather
later than his one dramatic work. The Saint's Tragedy (1848)
had been designed neither as a drama nor for the public eye-
still less, of course, for the stage, from which he had an inherited
aversion, and which he found it difficult to judge equitably? .
The work, which was to have been followed by a biographical
essay on St Teresa, had been begun in 1842, and it was not until
five years later that it took shape as a drama. Kingsley's own
introduction to this dramatic poem shows it to have been written
with the definite purpose of liberating his soul on the subject
of the medieval conception of saintship—or religion in its loftiest
phase-as a condition of mind and soul detached from human
affections even of the strongest and the purest kind.
As a
drama, The Saints Tragedy cannot be said to be powerful,
although the character of the heroine is both deeply conceived
and consistently elaborated through an action of which the
interest grows more and more intense as it proceeds. The
blank verse of the play, on the whole, is adequate, but, in one
or two lyrical passages with which the dialogue is interspersed,
the mixed metre is not very happily managed; while the prose
strives too perceptibly after colour.
It was, as has been said, in the year of the publication of
The Saint's Tragedy and that in which there appeared in Fraser's
Magazine, as first of the large number of contributions made
by Kingsley to periodical literature, a papers not wholly alien
in thought to his dramatic poem, that he and his fellows first
bethought themselves of making a sustained attempt to meet the
chief trouble of their times. During the decade which preceded
the transmission to the house of commons, on 10 April 1848, of
'the people's charter,' that document had become, as it has been
well put“, “the banner of the working classes round which millions
gathered'; and, on the securing of its 'points' of political reform,
the mass of English workmen had resolved to concentrate for
the present their efforts towards ameliorating their social con-
dition and obtaining their desired share in the government of
the country. At the same time, while primarily directed to the
i For this, see Letters and Memories, vol. 1, pp. 31 ff. Psyche, a Rhapsody, which
follows, is in prose.
See his essay Plays and Puritans.
3 Why should we fear the Romish Priests ?
• By Kaufmann, M. , in Charles Kingsley, Christian Socialist and Social Reformer
(1892).
>


## p. 357 (#373) ############################################

] XI
Charles Kingsley
357
gain of the charter, the general movement named from it stood
in close relation to those projects of social change which, of
late years, had, in a great part of Europe, come to occupy the
minds of working men and those in sympathy with their claims.
These projects had been urged with increasing persistency since
the Reform bill and the French July revolution seemed to have
established the ascendancy of the middle classes in England
and in France. Thus, the avowed object of the Working Men's
association, founded in London in 1836, was to bring about, by
means of the equality of political rights which the charter would
secure, a full enquiry into the social grievances of the working
classes. Both country and town were concerned in these grievances:
the decline of agriculture and the approaching extinction of
small landholders, the troubles of the towns, more especially those
in manufacturing districts, and of London, the lowering of wages
owing to immigration from the country and from distressed
Ireland, the sudden developments of machinery, the sufferings
of those employed in sweated trades, the pressure of excessive
hours of work in factories upon men, women and children and
the insanitary conditions of their daily life, while left unprotected
against the inroads of infectious disease.
These were some of the causes of a movement which deeply
stirred all men and women of the age with thoughts and feelings
to spare for concerns outside their own doors and apart from
their immediate cares and interests, and which led not a few
of them to believe that England was on the eve of a social crisis
incalculable in its results. And it was to meet, so far as in him
lay, the demands facing him, that Kingsley and his friends went
forth-stimulated, no doubt, to quick action by such words and
wishes as those of F. D. Maurice, who hailed in him another
Thalaba, with a commission to slay magicians and put the Eblis
band which possesses our land to rout. He and his associates
proposed, in the first instance, to obtain the goodwill of the
working classes, whom their efforts were, above all, to bring to
believe in the brotherly sympathy and aid offered to them. Their
social grievances were not to be gainsaid or the sufferings to
which they were subject minimised ; and, again, the risk was to
be cheerfully run, on their behalf, of being decried as identified
with their cause-chartists with the rest of them. On the other
hand, working men were not to be encouraged in the delusion
that political concessions would, of themselves, assure social
reforms-or, in other words, that the points of the charter' went


## p. 358 (#374) ############################################

358
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
far enough and struck at the root of the matter. Support and
advice of this sort was to be given by word and pen, in tracts
and contributions to journals written for perusal by the workers,
or in their interest, and by the spoken word on platforms, in
lecture-halls and in the pulpit—which last, on one occasion, was
used by Kingsley, with the consequence of his being temporarily
interdicted from preaching in London .
It was on the very morrow of the coup manqué of 10 April
1848, when the storm had blown over, though, as it seemed, only
for the moment, that Kingsley is found entering heart and soul
into the scheme set on foot by Maurice, to bring out a new series
of Tracts for the Times, addressed to the higher orders, but on
behalf of the working classes— if the Oxford tracts did wonders,'
Maurice asked, 'why should not we? ' The design (as well as
that of converting the then existing Oxford and Cambridge
Review into an organ of the opinions of Kingsley and his friends,
including James Anthony Froude? ) was, however, exchanged for the
scheme, more directly to the purpose, of Politics for the People,
a series of tracts, addressed to the working classes themselves.
To the Workmen of England, Kingsley spoke his first word in
a placard signed 'A Working Parson,' posted all over London
on 12 April, urging them to aim at 'something nobler than the
Charter and dozens of Acts of Parliament'--'to be wise, and then
you must be free, for you will be fit to be free. ' To Politics for
the People, of which the first number appeared on 16 May, he
contributed a series of papers under the pseudonym Parson Lot
(a name adopted by him in humorous commemoration of a gather-
ing of friends and fellow-workers in which he had found himself in
a minority of ones). They were partly admonitions, friendly but
outspoken, to trust to a better guidance than that of political
animosity, partly endeavours to direct attention to the great
opportunities for action open to those who would set their shoulders
to the wheel, or exposures of the abuses that needed and admitted
of reform. About the same time, he wrote papers for The
Christian Socialist“, and The Journal of Association, and for
i See the account of the incident in Letters and Memories, vol. II, pp. 29–32.
? As to the beginnings of the lifelong intimacy between Kingsley and Froude, see
Paul, Herbert, Life of Froude (1905), chap. III.
3 See Hughes, T. , prefatory memoir in his edition of Alton Locke (2 vols. 1881),
where is also reprinted the tract Cheap Clothes, and Nasty (1851). Several of
Parson Lot's papers are reprinted in Letters and Memories, vol. 1, pp. 171 ff.
• It was in The Christian Socialist that the story of The Nun's Pool, which had
been refused admission to Politics for the People and which seems to have fascinated
Kingsley, was, after some hesitation, inserted. See Kaufmann, op. cit. p. 147.


## p. 359 (#375) ############################################

6
XI]
Yeast
359
a penny People's Friend-all of which periodicals owed their
origin to this season of eager effort. He also produced a number
of tracts and pamphlets, of which Cheap Clothes, and Nasty, one
of a series on Christian socialism, with its fierce attack on the
ruthless application of the principle of competition, brought down
upon him the ire of W. R. Greg in The Edinburgh Review ;
while The Friends of Order was, rather, a defence of himself
and his fellows as combatants on the side of society against
anarchy. In general, amidst all the vehemence of controversy,
the ‘foul-mouthed, ill-tempered man,' as he half-ironically called
himself, not only repeatedly exhibited the virtue of self-control,
which was part of his manliness, but, also, asserted the right of
individual judgment, which was dear to his love of freedom.
Neither the teetotal movement, nor, in the long run, the
agitation for the rights of women, could reckon him among its
champions. On the other hand, certain lines or branches of
social reform were advocated by him from first to last with un-
abating vigour—and, among them, he always conceded to sanitary
reform the place to which the virtue which it has in view is pro-
verbially entitled.
To Kingsley's sermons at this period of his life we need not
specially return. But, unlike most of his fellow-workers, Kingsley
possessed, besides the gifts of an orator and a moralist, the strong
imaginative faculty which made him a poet. This faculty, like
most of his other gifts, he kept under restraint; and, while he
rarely cared to use it without a definite purpose-moral or practical,
or, more frequently, both-neither pleasure nor profit induced
him to wear it out. This showed itself even with regard to the
form of imaginative composition which he now came to essay.
The first of his novels to be planned and begun was Yeast,
a Problem; so that, though Alton Locke was published a year
sooner as a whole, Yeast has an undoubted right of precedence.
Both works sprang—not, indeed, in full panoply, for the one was
hardly more than half-finished, and the other bears many marks of
haste-from a brain overwrought by the interests and labours
which it had shared; both were contributions to the solution of
England's pressing social problems, in country and in town, by
a writer to whom they came directly home, and who, while able to
sympathise with those oppressed whether by material or by spiritual
difficulties, could not, in either case, accept any answers irrecon-
cilable with the religious convictions which formed the anchorage
of his own mind.
a


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360
[ch.
The Political and Social Novel
Yeast began to appear in Fraser's Magazine in the fateful
year of revolutions, 1848 ; but the proprietors of that journal,
though generous friends both to Kingsley and to his ideas, took
fright, and, while they induced him to cut this novel short, declined
to publish its successor. Moreover, Kingsley had overstrained his
powers of work, and had been obliged to take refuge in his beloved
north Devon in the midst of the production of Yeast. It did not
appear as a book till 1851, without the new conclusion which he
seems, at one time, to have intended to supply in a second part,
called 'The Artists’and not absolutely alien in conception, perhaps,
to the second part of Faust! . As it stands, the story, if judged
by literary canons, must be allowed to exhibit some glaring
defects. One of these is the weakness of its plot, which not only,
as in a novel of the twentieth century, leaves everything unsettled
at the end, but really hinges on the pusillanimous laches of a quite
secondary personage. Yeast is far less successful than Alton
Locke in adjusting the intermixture of narrative and declamation,
and does not even scorn a boisterous transition such as: 'Perhaps,
reader, you are getting tired of all this. . . . So we will have a bit of
action again. ' The opening 'bit of action,' however—the run with
the hounds—is so superlatively fresh and free that the reader may
be excused for desiring more of the same kind. Yet, the centre
of gravity of the book lies in the dialogues between Launcelot and
the personages who exercise a varied influence upon his manly
and noble, but roving and ungoverned, nature—the man of the
world, Bracebridge, Launcelot's proud love, Argemone, and, above
all, the philosophically observant keeper, Tregarva ; and it is
through the last named that Launcelot is brought to take cognis-
ance of the question of the relation of classes in England and to
seek to understand the real wants of the labouring poor. The
treatment of this theme naturally suggests a comparison, from this
point of view, of Yeast with Disraeli’s Coningsby (published only
four years before Kingsley's story was begun) and its successors
by the same hand. Although written from totally diverse stand-
points, the earlier having an unconcealed party purpose to which
the later was altogether a stranger, they came to much the same
conclusion, well formulated by Leslie Stephen, as the acceptance of
the same ideal of society: the few for the many, not the many for
1
i Kingsley was a great reader of Goethe, without entering very profoundly into the
spirit of his genius.
? The similarity between the characters of Sidonia and Barnakill is too obvious to have
escaped notice, though Kingsley had not read Disraeli's book when he wrote his own.


## p. 361 (#377) ############################################

xi]
Alton Locke
361
the few. Kingsley's utilitarian millionaire is not a caricature, nor
is his great remedy of sanitary reform a mere item in a party
programme. Contrariwise, his high-church curate on the way to
Rome stands almost alone among his types of clergymen in its
blank ugliness. The background of the degenerate weakness of
the rustic labouring class, its desperate acquiescence in its miserable
lot and its dogged blindness to the necessity of self-help (“Why
save the farmers' rates ? ') is painted with genuine power. As for
Launcelot, the process by which he has to work out his own
salvation ends, so far as the story goes, in a half-mystical, half-
ironical prognostic of the destiny of its chief personages; but for
Tregarva there remains a process of purification by faith as well
as by love.
Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, was published in 1850, in the
midst of great social unrest, and a strong strain upon its author due
to his exertions towards meeting some of the causes of this wide-
spread popular perturbation. Carlyle, to whose goodwill there lay
a strong appeal in the convinced impetuosity of the book, relieved,
in the character of Saunders Mackaye, by a humour which his
brother Scot pronounced 'nearly perfect,' nevertheless judged it
'definable as crude,' and averred that the impression made by it
upon him was that of ‘a fervid creation still left half chaotic'; yet,
though Alton Locke ends in dreamland as Yeast dissolved itself
into a Utopia, it has attracted two generations of readers as a true
picture of the travails of a fellow-man. The hero is a poet as well
as a tailor, but a poet who, instead of wandering about like
Contarini Fleming (or, for that matter, Elsley Vavasour) in search
of themes and experiences worthy of his powers, finds them in
daily life and common things—a democratic poet, if you will, who
suffers severely when, after recognising that he has genius but has
been left without its rights, he swerves from the straight line
prescribed to him by his task in life. The direct bearing of the
attack upon the abuses of a typical town trade, from a picture of
whose conditions the narrative starts, was attested by its effects,
more especially in the partial adoption of the system of association
-on behalf of which, as Kingsley emphasised in 1854, working
men themselves failed to take sufficient trouble. The story,
throughout, exhibits a direct reference to facts: the dependence
of working men on the charter, the dubious ways of demagogy in
the matter of journalism and at meetings and so forth. On the
other hand, the picture of Cambridge--even of Cambridge as it
might strike a working-tailor on a casual visit-seemed, to the


## p. 362 (#378) ############################################

362 The Political and Social Novel [CH.
novelist, at a subsequent date, to call for revision. Apart from
those touches in Saunders Mackaye which came home to Carlyle,
there is little humour in the book; for this, the writer was too
fully absorbed in his theme and incensed by the grimness and
cruelty of some of its aspects. Conceived, as it was, in a white
heat, it was met, on both sides, with an unmitigated condemnation,
showing that its earnestness of purpose was wholly misunderstood;
and it remains, of all its author's books, that which shares with
Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton the credit of having come straight
from the heart of a witness of the conflict who could not, when
the fire blazed, remain a bystander.
When, in 1851, Kingsley began the publication, once more in
Fraser's Magazine, of Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face,
which did not appear in book form till 1853, he may be said to
have written, with full consciousness of his literary powers, the
only novel from his hand which, he believed, might endure. In
his case, this consciousness came at a time when the ardour of
youth still urged him on from venture to venture. Thus, when he
turned from the social to the historical novel, the transition was
made with extraordinary self-confidence by means of a work
dealing, as its sub-title indicates, with spiritual and intellectual
questions which had stirred bygone ages as they were stirring his
own, and intended to convey lessons to the living with the aid of
the experience of the past. The period in the history of the world
chosen by him to show how wisdom without faith is as salt which
has lost its savour was one to which he was long attracted by the
greatness of the issues determined in it—the period of the downfall
of the western empire, of which Africa was claimed as part, and
the transformation of the western world by Teutonic immigra-
tion. The only course of his Cambridge professorial lectures
published by him deals with the main aspects of this general
theme, and, in a short series of lectures which he delivered at
Edinburgh in the year of the publication of Hypatia, he sought to
trace the history of civilisation, thought and religion at Alexandria,
the chief theatre of the action of his novell. Its special end is to
depict the antagonism between an aggressive church and a decrepit
empire, and, at the same time, to draw the lessons to be found in
the struggles of a school of philosophy devoid of regenerative
power. One of the new foes with an old face who reappear here is
1 The lectures on Alexandria and her Schools (1854) reach down to the conquering
advent of Mohammedanism, for whose founder and early leaders sympathy is expressed.
The preface rushes patriotically into the eastern question of the day.


## p. 363 (#379) ############################################

xi]
Hypatia
363
scepticism—an attitude of mind which Kingsley treated briefly,
but with considerable skill as well as effect, in an essay, centring
in a 'Platonic' dialogue, published about this time (1852), under
the title Phaethon, or Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers. It is
one of the freshest and brightest of Kingsley's lesser productions,
and imbeds in the familiar surroundings of English country life
and scenery a perfectly lucid and self-consistent argument against
the complacent scepticism of a class of thinkers who were after-
wards to form part of the large army of agnostics. In the novel,
even the man of the world Raphael, saturated with intellectual
experience, who forms a contrast to Philammon, the simple monk
of the Laura, is led by the grace of divine love to a better mind.
The learning brought to bear upon the course of the narrative
of which Hypatia, historical in the outline of the portrait, is the
central figure, is ample enough to warrant the high praise bestowed
upon ‘Kingsley's masterpiece' by Bunsen', who had himself drunk
deeply from the sources of the narrative. For the rest, Hypatia
was, as Yeast had been before it, denounced as 'immoral'; but, in
the present case, the charge was, manifestly, the invention of
sheer perversity. The book has its flaws: the noble self-reliance
-
of Hypatia is belied by her blind submission to Orestes; and
Bunsen was probably right in complaining of the Goths being
presented too exclusively ‘in the drunken mood in which they
appear as lawless and blood-sucking barbarians, and chronic
berserkers. ' But the brilliancy and glow of the whole picture, as
it changes from quay and market to lecture-hall and amphitheatre,
till, at last, it subsides into the solitude of the remote temple
whence it took its start, is almost as notable as is the lifelike truth
of the characters, taken from nearly every class and sect of the
seething world-city.
The winter of the Crimean campaign (1854—5) and the following
spring were spent by Kingsley, who was profoundly moved by the
events of the war, in Devonshire; and the twofold influences of
time and place, as well as the leisure imposed upon him by his
wife's illness, account for the main result of his literary activity?
In 1855 was published the most successful of all his novels,
Westward Ho! or the Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas
Leigh, Knight of Burrough, in the County of Devon, in the
1 Memoir of Baron Bunsen by his Widow (1868), vol. II, p. 309.
» Besides this, he found full opportunity for his natural history studies. Glaucus,
the Wonders of the Sea Shore, which appeared in 1855, was developed out of an article
in The North British Review.


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364 The Political and Social Novel [CH.
reign of Her Most Glorious Majesty Queen Elizabeth, with a
characteristic double dedication to rajah Brooke and the bishop
of New Zealand (George Augustus Selwyn). The book breathes
the spirit of martial heroism and naval enterprise typified by the
Elizabethan age and the county of Devon ; but it is also animated
by a, more or less, aggressive patriotism, of which Kingsley found
no difficulty in ‘rendering the supposed autobiographical expression
‘into modern English. ' The novelist had a special gift of opening
his stories in a vivid and stimulating way; but, in the present
instance, there follows a second opening, where Amyas, whom, in
the first pages, we met, as a boy, vainly intent upon sailing with
the luckless John Oxenham, reappears on his return from a voyage
round the world with Drake. And so we are launched into the
story, which is carried through with inexhaustible verve, but, also,
with something beyond mere vigour and high spirits. The book is
written by an Englishman for Englishmen—and by a protestant
for protestants.