No More Learning

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.


## p. 351 (#367) ############################################

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


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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.


## p. 364 (#380) ############################################

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. Such Elizabethan stumbling-blocks as the penal
laws are got out of the way without much trouble, and we are not
allowed time to criticise the antithesis between the man who does
right according to prescript and the man who does right by the
spirit of God that is in him. Amyas, whose heart never quailed,
whether before armada or before inquisition, deemed Parsons
and Campion fair game, and the massacre of Limerick a painful
necessity; and, if his editor is almost visited by a feeling of
compunction as to the whole quarrel with Ireland, he is able to
suppress this qualm by means of an honourable mention (in a
note) of the gallant conduct of Irish officers and soldiers in the
Crimean war. The whole story, however, is too good, and the end,
when Amyas, after throwing his sword, whose the vengeance was
not to be, into the waters, returns home blind, is too tragic, to
invite criticism of details. If not as notable a literary performance
as Hypatia, Westward Ho! , too, is a masterpiece after its kind,
and will live as such in the literature of English fiction.
In Two Years Ago (1857), Kingsley once more returned to
contemporary life, dealing with such of its moral difficulties and of
its material evils as more particularly came under his cognisance.
The main teaching of the book may, perhaps, be said to be that the
processes of Providence are to be read by him who runs in both
the happiness and the unhappiness of which the world around us
is full—in the beauty of nature, and in the power granted to
human action to set right much of the wrong wrought by human
sloth and self-indulgence, and that, consequently, man is called


## p. 365 (#381) ############################################

] XI
Two Years Ago
365
a
upon for faith and hope and the self-devotion of love, thus receiving
the one answer for which pure and honest spirits are, consciously
or unconsciously, in search. Had it not been for the force of some
of the character-drawing in this novel, especially for the figure of
the hero of the tale, Tom Thurnall, and for the vivid picturesqueness
of the writing, both in passages of pure description and in the
highly wrought episode of the storm, Two Years Ago would
probably not have excited much interest as a story. The main
plot, on the whole, is too transparent, and the advent of the cholera
has been too fully prepared to tell strongly when it actually breaks
out? . The Crimean war has no real bearing on the narrative,
though Tom's imprisonment forms the turning-point of his inner
life. The by-plot of Marie's (Cordifiamma's) love adventures has,
as Kingsley confessed, no organic connection with the story; and
the introduction, which dates two years after the action itself,
throws no new light upon it. Nor are the lesser characters as
interesting as is usual with Kingsley. The poet, Elsley Vavasour,
who seems to be intended as a contrast to the downright Tom, is
a mere caricature of what is most contemptible in a self-conscious
and effeminate man of the pen. The moraliser of the argument,
major Campbell, is not the less a shadowy figure because Kingsley
drew him from life, and because he shares with at least two other
characters in the story that passionate love for nature and the
study of nature without which, to its author, life was colourless.
Claude and Sabina are, as he told his critic George Brimley? , only
‘two dolls' with whom he had been playing, "setting them to say
and do all the pretty naïve things anyone else is too respectable
to be set about, till I know them as well as I know you. '
Kingsley's belief that the true task of the age was self-sacrifice
in the cause of suffering humanity-not talk but work, albeit not
to be brought home to the national conscience without a great
deal of talk—and his conviction that sanitary reform and what it
implied was the most pressing of its needs, were in harmony with
some of the noblest impulses of the era of Florence Nightingale
and her contemporaries. But, of the vehemence of his earlier
denunciations of existing social evils there is not much to be
found in Two Years Ago. He has a kindly eye for helpless
guardsmen, and even something more than this for well-meaning
1 So far back as 1849, Kingsley had preached at Eversley three remarkable sermons
on the cholera, which were published in the same year under the title Who causes
Pestilence ?
Memories and Letters, vol. II, p. 44.


## p. 366 (#382) ############################################

366
The Political and Social Novel [CH.
high-church curates ; and the general note of his social philosophy
is optimism. To Christianity, he steadfastly looks as to the crowning
grace of all, and, in a corner of his heart, there lurks the belief
that, in the crises as well as in the general conduct of life, a
gentleman is not a gentleman for nothing.
After Two Years Ago, Kingsley but once returned to the novel;
for the project which he entertained of writing a story on the
subject of the Pilgrimage of Grace was abandoned by him in 1858,
after part of the book had been written? . His last completed
novel, Hereward the Wake, was not published till 1866, with a
dedication to Thomas Wright, to whose researches the author
warmly acknowledged his indebtedness. It is one of the least read
of his historical romances, and there is no reference to it in his
biographical memorial. But it is a work of much vigour and
freshness, and hardly inferior to Westward Ho! in the picturesque
vividness of its setting; for the homeliness of much of the scenery
(the fens are not all sunsets) finds a compensation in the truthfulness
of the picture, familiar to Kingsley in his childhood and in his later
days? . Nor is the characterisation less forcible, to whatever extent
the reader may feel further removed from the followers of William
and Harold than from the lieges of queen Elizabeth. On the other
hand, the earlier of the two novels more successfully unites the
personal with the historical interest called forth by it, and less
encumbers itself by critical references to its sources. Thus, it comes
about that the earlier part of the book, which tells of Hereward's
strange adventures by flood and field as an outlaw before the
landing of William, is more attractive than the later, in which the
story becomes involved in that of the conquest itself and deals not
only with the climax of the hero's career, the defence of Ely, but,
also, with his rather inglorious exit. In Torfrida, the author of
Hereward draws a fine and impressive female character such as
is wanting in Westward Ho! and the figure of Martin, faithful to
her even more than to her wayward hero, is, likewise, admirable.
‘But as with Napoleon and Josephine, so it was with Hereward
and Torfrida. ' This analogy, like the less dignified remark that
‘if tobacco had been known then, Hereward would have smoked
all the way' to Crowland, fails to impair the historical veracity of
1 See Memories and Letters, vol. III, pp. 59–62. The effort could not but have
been interesting, since the heroes of the story, Robert and Christopher Aske, were
both good Romanists,' though, as Kingsley points out, they knew nothing of the
Jesuits.
? One of Kingsley's Prose Idylls (1873), treating of the fens, was a reproduction of
his article on the subject in Good Words, 1 May 1867.


## p. 367 (#383) ############################################

XI
a
]
Kingsley's Popularity 367
the romance; the danger of a professor of history indulging in
'imaginative literature lay in a different direction.
The causes of the great popularity of Kingsley's novels as a
whole, and of the attraction which they exercised upon a very large
and diversely composed body of readers, are not far to seek.
The
strength of his imagination could throw its brilliant light both
upon material taken from his own age and scenery with which
he was familiar, and upon past periods of history known to him
only from books, and lands and seas seen by him only with the
mind's eye, while his descriptive power enabled him to repro-
duce them not so much with abundance of detail as with graphic
distinctness of touch. These gifts made his fiction real to all who,
like himself, were interested in the world and its inhabitants, in
the life of nature with all its secrets and in human life with all
its longings. But he wrote, as he made no secret that he wrote,
for other ends than that of giving pleasure, or of stimulating
sympathy with the things with which he sympathised himself ; he
also meant, not only in those apaßáoels, as he calls them, which go
direct from author to reader, but by the whole current of his stories,
to enforce certain ideas and principles, or the meaning of certain
spiritual tendencies and movements of which those ideas formed
part. In the correspondence with George Brimley to which refer-
ence has already been made, he observes that, in the modern novel,
if it is to be a picture of actual life—and this was an end which,
with his hatred of unreality, he always kept in view—'you must
have people talk, as people do in real life, about all manner of
irrelevant things, but you must
take care that each man's speech shall show more of his character, and that
the general tone shall be such as never to make the reader forget the main
purpose of the book.
There could be no better description of the novel with a purpose
the Tendenzroman—which artistically conceals its moral, religious,
political, or social aims, and gives pleasure without losing sight
of its didactic object. It remains not the less a hybrid, even when
the artist's satisfaction in his work from time to time overpowers
the sense of his commission as a teacher. To Kingsley, this com-
mission, as he believed, came from the same authority as that
which he obeyed as a minister of religion and which he followed in
taking upon himself what he held to be part of his ministerial duty,
the task of social reform. All the manifold activities of his life-
his work as a parson, professor, writer, poet-he sought to fuse in
these works of fiction, together with his memories of the Berkshire
>
-


## p. 368 (#384) ############################################

368
[ch.
The Political and Social Novel
chalkstreams and the Devonshire coast,' and of the town alleys
where he 'preached his Gospel of godliness and cleanliness, while
smoking his pipe with soldiers and navvies? '
Apart from his novels and his solitary tragedy, Kingsley's con-
tributions to pure literature were by no means numerous.
He
wrote a considerable amount of miscellaneous verse2_some of
it so excellent as to make it intelligible that he should, at times,
have thought poetry the branch of composition for which his genius
preeminently qualified him. Of the larger poems, Andromeda
tells the familiar myth, with, perhaps, excessive elaboration, in not
unharmonious hexameters--a metre to the English form of which
he gave much consideration; the poet would not have been him-
self had he not made his poem a tribute to the sea and even to the
Silvery fish, wreathed shell, and the strange lithe things of the water.
His own favourite poem seems to have been St Maura, which had
satisfied Maurice. There are other legends, sagas and ballad-
romances of slighter pretensions ; but the best of all are the quite
short ballad-songs, some of them imbedded in his novels, which
reveal their depth of feeling in a few words, of which the cadence
persistently haunts the ear-such as The Sands of Dee, The
Three Fishers and maybe one or two more.
In 1860, Kingsley was appointed regius professor of modern
history in the university of Cambridge, an office which he held
during nine years. He was as deeply gratified by the circumstances
of his appointment as he was afterwards depressed by the respon-
sibilities of a chair to which, from first to last, he never failed to
devote the best of his powers. But they were not suited to many
sides of the work, and could not be made to suit them. That, with
many other things, he quickened, among his hearers, the interest
in historical studies is indisputable. The publications connected
with his tenure of the professorship are few. Besides the modest
inaugural discourse on the human interests of history, printed
(1860) under the title The Limits of Exact Science as applied to
History, he published, in 1864, a course of lectures entitled The
Roman and the Teuton. The subject, always particularly attrac-
tive to him, called for a close examination of evidence, in such
enquiries, for instance, as that into the character of later imperial
administration. The modest disclaimer 'I am not here to teach
history-no man can do that ; but to teach you to teach it will
See Max Müller's preface to the 1875 edition of The Roman and the Teuton.
? Collected in vol. xvi of the 19 vol. edition of his Life and Works.


## p. 369 (#385) ############################################

XI] Kingsley's Miscellaneous Writings 369
not prevent the conclusion that, as a historian, he was not equal
to his task, and this, not because of inaccuracies, partly disproved,
partly shown to be exaggerated, but, chiefly, by reason of his want
of insight into historic method. His historical essays published in
1873', of course, lay less open to this objection. In the last of these,
Kingsley was found ready to accept without hesitation the authority
of Froude; and it was a second review of the same History that
drew him into the controversy with Newman, which, inasmuch as
it gave rise to Apologia, belongs, rather, to an estimate of the works
of that writer. Kingsley's breakdown in the fray was due to his
original blunder of basing on evidence in part unfortunately chosen
and in part left vague the statement of a general conclusion on a
question not admitting of debate from two totally different points
of view. He was by nature neither dogmatical nor obstinate, as,
indeed, a candid examination of this controversy will itself suffice
to show. His lectures entitled The Ancien Régime, delivered at the
Royal Institution in 1867, have been left behind by later research.
During the last six years of Kingsley's life (1869–75), in which,
after resigning his Cambridge chair, he successively held canonries
at Chester and at Westminster (the latter from 1873), he was more
or less relieved from the necessity of work with his pen ; but it
was never idle. Nothing further, however, need be said here of
his sermons, of which there are many volumes, from the Village
Sermons of Eversley to those delivered in Westminster abbey :
most of them are distinguished not only by an incisive brevity, but,
also, by a skilful, as well as courageous, choice of social or ethical
topics, and all of them breathe a spirit of generous humanity? ,
as well as of true piety. Among the writings which testify to his
love of natural scenery and its associations, the Prose Idylls, vary-
ing in theme from the home counties to the fens and the Pyrenees,
are, perhaps, the most delightful ; and the same appreciative spirit
accompanied him across the sea on a three months' visit in 1869, to
the West Indies, recorded in At Last (1871)--a happily chosen title
-which tells the story of a life's longing satisfied. He paid another
visit to the new world, in the year before he died; but its literary
memorial deals with monuments and lessons of the old. To an
earlier year (1863) belongs The Water-Babies, a Fairy Tale for a
Land-Baby, written in a happy vein of humorous fancy, while
a
6
1 Plays and Puritans, Sir Walter Raleigh, review of Froude's History.
2 See, by way of example, the sermons on David, whom he once playfully declared
his favourite hero. '
3 Lectures delivered in America in 1874 (1875).
E. L. XIII.
24
CH, XI.


## p. 370 (#386) ############################################

370
The Political and Social Novel [ch.
the didactic element introduces itself without insistence, as it
should in a story meant for children and not for the grown-up
people in the back seats.
Kingsley's life and literary career reflect and represent a
restless age. He belonged to a band of courageous and clear-
sighted men who, with Maurice at their head, tried to understand
their countrymen and to lead them to a better time. Kingsley
was gifted, like few of them, with a strong imagination and the
power of direct and striking, as well as fervent and sympathetic,
expression; and, thus, he, more than any one of his companions,
imparted to the most popular literary form of his times that
quality of earnestness which associated it indelibly with the great
social endeavours of the age.
Of Maurice's followers in the efforts for social reforms which
marked the middle years of the century, Thomas Hughes was the
only writer besides Kingsley who gained for himself an enduring
name in the literature of fiction. And this, virtually, by a single
work, Tom Brown's School Days; for its continuation from no
point of view equalled it in merit, and most of the author's other
works were biographical. Hughes, like Kingsley, made no secret
of the didactic purpose of his extraordinarily successful story,
which was first published, anonymously, in 1857. 'He wrote,' he
said, 'to get the chance of preaching, and not for any other
object'; and the keynote of the story was the defence of earnestness
in schoolboys as a brighter renewal of what, in former days, used
to be called seriousness. The value of this quality, as the master
quality of a boy's character and life, and of those of the man into
whom he is growing, is set forth not only in the experience of the
commonplace hero (for this commonplaceness is indispensable in
an exemplar), but, also, in the personality of the man in whom he
recognises his ideal. Rarely, if ever, has a great school been so
identified with a great man as Arnold has become identified with
Rugby; and, since Hughes's tale contributed to this result not less
unmistakably than Stanley’s Life, the one has as good a title to his
statue by the playing-fields as the other has to his in the chapel
of the school. Though there are passages in the book which
may be fitter for men than for boys, that charge can, certainly,
not be brought home to it as a whole; and its close (written
by the author in circumstances of deep personal distress) gives
solemnity as well as unity to the story, though it begins with
scenes of admirable humour and is, what few school histories


## p. 371 (#387) ############################################

XI]
Mrs Gaskell
371
succeed in being, a true picture of school life and of boys'
nature.
The present seems the most appropriate place for speaking
of the chief contributions to British fiction of Elizabeth Cleghorn
Gaskell, a writer of rare charm and, though no one knew better
than herself the limits prescribed to her creations, possessed of
true powers of both pathos and humour. For, although she pre-
ferred to exercise those powers chiefly in tracing the interplay
of personal affections and passions, the influence of character
upon character, the genial impulses of the soul and the shy sorrows
of the heart, and the all-healing love which rises above self, they
were, it is certain, first set in motion when her mind was brought to
bear upon the social problems and troubles around her. In these,
her loving nature was drawn, by personal affliction of its own,
to take a sympathetic interest; and Mary Barton, written to
beguile a mother's grief for the loss of her infant son, her first
book and that by which her literary reputation was at once
established, may justly claim to rank among the most notable of
the social novels of the age.
Mrs Gaskell was described by one of the most faithful and
gifted of her and her daughters' friends ? as
like the best things in her books; full of gracious and tender sympathies, of
thoughtful kindness, of pleasant humour, of quick appreciation, of utmost
simplicity and truthfulness, and uniting with peculiar delicacy and refinement
a strength of principle and purpose and straightforwardness in action such
as few women possess.
But her life was led in conditions of great tranquillity and almost
unbroken happiness, and, after her death, the remembrance of her
was preserved by the perfect love of those whom she had left
behind her and to whom her wishes were law. She desired that
no set biography of her should be attempted ; and it is thus from
her writings only that later generations are likely to gather much
beyond the outward facts of her existence. Those who knew her or
hers may indulge the belief that in those writings are to be found
more than one experience that came very near home to her, trans-
muted into kindly lessons of resignation and of charity to all men”.
Mrs Gaskell was born on 29 September 1810, in what is now
&
· Eliot Norton, in a letter to J. Russell Lowell, written in 1857. See his Letters of
Charles Eliot Norton (2 vols. 1913), vol. 1, pp. 171—2.
• A remembrance of the loss of her boy, already noticed, is traceable in Mary Barton,
Lizzie Leigh, Ruth, Cranford, Mr Harrison's Confessions, Cousin Phillis and, doubtless,
in other of her stories.
24_2


## p. 372 (#388) ############################################

372
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
known as 93 Cheyne walk and was then called Lindsay row,
Chelsea. Her father, member of a Berwick-on-Tweed family in
which ran a strong love of the sea,' was a man of original ability,
in turn unitarian minister and (after an interval of schoolmastering
and farming) keeper of the treasury records; her maternal
grandfather was a descendant of the wellknown Lancashire and
Cheshire family of Holland, who farmed his own land at Sandle
bridge in the latter county. William Stevenson may be fairly set
down as the original of minister Holman in Cousin Phillis, and
the intimate and enduring connection of the Cheshire Hollands
with Knutsford suggested an infinitude of personal and local
reminiscences of that town and its vicinity under the aliases of
Cranford, Duncombe (in Mr Harrison's Confessions) and Hol-
lingford (in Wives and Daughters). At Knutsford (which thus
became part of herself), most of Elizabeth Stevenson's girlhood
was spent; the rest was divided between London, Newcastle-on-
Tyne (where she resided in the house of a unitarian minister,
William Turner, who is said to have suggested some features in
the beautiful character of Thurston Benson in Ruth) and at
Edinburgh, (as humorously recorded in the introduction to Round
the Sofa). In 1832, she married William Gaskell, then and to the
end of his life, minister of the Cross street unitarian chapel in
Manchester and an accomplished scholar, with whom all the rest
of her life flowed on in perfect unison. The circle of friends of
which she now became part and of which, in time, her house,
84 Plymouth grove, was to be looked upon as a chosen centre,
was one of social as well as intellectual distinction; yet it was as
a 'greater Manchester,' in more than the local sense of the phrase,
that she learnt to love the place, till, even on her holidays in Wales,
and, afterwards, on the Neckar, in Italy and in her favourite France,
she could look back, like Mary Barton on the railway to Liverpool,
'towards the factory-chimneys, and the cloud of smoke which
hovers over the place, with a feeling akin to Heimweh. ' And it is
not too much to say that what, from the first, helped to bind her
to the city which, for more than fourscore years, was to be her
home and that of her daughters, was the care for the poor of
which she and they never lost sight. Several years before she
began Mary Barton, she and her husband printed the first (and,
as it proved, the only) one of a projected series of versified Sketches
1 His mother, Mrs Gaskell's paternal grandmother, was cousin, once removed, of
the author of The Seasons.
2 In Blackwood's Magazine for January 1837 (vol. XLI, no. 255).


## p. 373 (#389) ############################################

>
XI]
Mary Barton
373
among the Poor, 'rather' as she confidentially put it to her friend
Mrs Howitt, in the manner of Crabbe, but in a more seeing-beauty
spirit. ' The influence of Crabbe, tempered in the fashion which
this passage indicates, is, as will be seen, traceable in some of her
published writings.
Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life, was written in
1845–71, when there was still great distress in the manufacturing
districts, and when the abolition of the corn laws was only be-
ginning to exercise its remedial effects; and it was published in
1848, when the political and social fabric of this country stood
unshaken, though not unmoved, by the convulsions of the continent.
When, or just before, Mrs Gaskell was beginning her story,
Disraeli had published Coningsby and was preparing to follow
it by Sybil; but Mrs Gaskell was unacquainted with either of
these works, though she might have given them at least as
friendly a reception as was accorded to the later of them by her
contemporary George Eliot? . It is, however, clear that Mrs
Gaskell's story was concerned with a rather earlier period of
British social history—the years 1842—3; and this was recog-
nised by the most powerful, though not by the most violent,
among its critics: The troubles of these years really dated from
the series of bad harvests which had begun so far back as 1837,
and which had led, in 1838, to the great chartist meeting on Kersal
moor, Manchester, and, in the following year, amidst continued
distress, to the rejection, by a large parliamentary majority, of
a monster chartist petition, agreed upon by a national convention
of working men’s delegates. It cannot be said that (though, as
John Barton and other less prejudiced observers noted, royal
drawing-rooms and other social functions were not suspended)
these occurrences made no impression even in London ; but, at
Manchester and elsewhere in the manufacturing districts, there
ensued much agitation and violence, and, when, in 1840 and 1841, the
distress among the working classes continued and, in the following
year, reached its height, a great part of Lancashire fell into a
condition approaching to riot, though the queen's speech stated
1 The conjecture that the short and powerful story Lizzie Leigh, of which the
first portion appeared on 30 March 1850, in the first number of Household Words, was
written, in part at least, before Mary Barton, is plausible, but unproved. Probably,
the reproduction in it, with a different relation, of the Esther episode was unconscious.
George Eliot's Life, by Cross, J. W. , vol. I, p. 104.
3 Greg, W. R. , speaks of such periods as 1842'; The Manchester Guardian of
28 February 1849 refers to this morbid sensibility to the condition of factory
operatives, which has become so fashionable of late among the gentry and landed
aristocracy. '
.
6


## p. 374 (#390) ############################################

374
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
that the sufferings and privations of the manufacturing districts
had been borne 'with exemplary patience and fortitude. ' After
another petition—this time bearing more than three million sig-
natures—had been rejected by a sweeping majority of the house
of commons, a wild riot broke out at Manchester, and a general
strike was for a few days enforced.
It was the impression of these events, and of the efforts which
followed to allay the almost unprecedented sufferings, as well as
the perilous excitement, of the working classes, especially in the
manufacturing districts, which was upon Mrs Gaskell when she
wrote her tale of Manchester life. For it should not be over-
looked that, if the preceding years had brought with them sore
suffering and savage wrath, 1842 and the years immediately
following, at all events, were full, not only of charitable effort, but
of legislative endeavour to find remedies for the existing condition
of things; that, in a word, the conscience of the country was
awake, and the system by which things (including wages) were left
to right themselves had been definitely put on its defence. This
is the point of view from which the authoress of Mary Barton
addressed herself to the problem of the early forties, which she
did not so much as profess to understand in all its economical
bearings; and this is what the eminent political and economical
thinker who was the sternest critic of the book failed to see when
he tried to shift the chief blame for the patent evils of the situation
from the masters to the workmen, and, more especially, to the
ex-workmen who form the acting staff of trades' unions and
delegations! ' Mrs Gaskell's panacea—the bringing-about of a
good understanding (in every sense of the term) between masters
and men-had only begun to be put into operation in the period
with which Mary Barton deals; and even to these beginnings she
pays a tribute, though not in a particularly decisive form? .
Still, it is obvious enough that, in Mary Barton, there is no
very manifest intention of holding a careful balance between the
two sides, and that, as was inevitable, the sympathies of the
2
6
i Greg, W. R. , Mistaken Aims and Attainable Ideals of the Working Classes (1876),
reprinted from The Edinburgh Review, April 1849. See, also, Essays in Political
and Social Science, vol. I, 1853.