(1865.) Readers can scarcely have forgotten the amusing “turn-up” between the Rev. Mr. Kingsley and the Rev. Dr. Newman, in which the latter got the former “into Chancery,” and punished him so pitilessly. While reading the “Apologia pro Vita Sua,” one naturally reflected now and then upon the opinions, as stated in the books, of Dr. Newman’s antagonist; and the fight grew more and more comically exquisite as one gradually learnt the thorough agreement at bottom of the two who were struggling so fiercely at top. When I speak of Mr. Kingsley’s books, I mean his novels and romances, all of which (except the one not yet completely published) I have duly read and enjoyed. As for certain collections of sermons, a dialogue for loose thinkers, a jeu d’esprit on the Pentateuch, together with various trifles by way of lectures on history and philosophy, I confess that none of these have I ever even attempted to peruse. To palliate this sin of omission I can only urge the high probability that a man of Mr. Kingsley’s character must find much more vigorous and ample expression in a free and easy novel than in any didactic or argumentative treatise, with its wearisome requirements of consecutiveness and cramping limitations of logic. I now ask the leaders of the National Reformer to accompany me in a general review of his romances, because I think that such a review will develop two or three facts seldom noticed in the critiques—whether friendly or adverse—that abound upon his writings. Especially, I think that it will be found that the popular phrases, “Muscular Christianity” and “Broad Church,” by no means sufficiently characterise his religious tendency; and that, with all the superficial unlikeness, almost amounting to perfect contrast between him and Dr. Newman, the opponents as religious men are fundamentally alike in this—that their respective creeds satisfy, or appear to satisfy, in the same manner the same peculiarly intense want in their several natures.
In every one of Mr. Kingsley’s romances there is a chief personage, more or less naturally good but decidedly godless at the beginning, god-fearing and saintly at the end. Some of the romances have each two or three of these convertites, the throes of whose regeneration are the principal “motives” of the most striking scenes, and may be thus fairly said to furnish the plot and passion of the book. My present object is not aesthetic, and I therefore need not argue the question whether narratives thus constructed can have any claim to rank as genuine works of art. With the melancholy Jaques in “As You Like It,” I believe:
Out of these Convertites
There is much matter to be heard and learned—
so will stay “to see no pastime, I,” but run through the stories of these conversions, touching only the most salient points.
Alton Locke, when adolescent, is a very poor tailor, a poet whose verses are far more vigorous than his character, a chartist, a sceptic. He madly falls in love with a Dean’s daughter, and through the patronage of the Dean himself, gets a volume of poems published. As the fiercest of the rhymes have been soothed out of this volume by the decorous Dean, Radical friends forward to young Locke a pair of plush-breeches—fitting testimonial to the flunkeyism conspicuous in the omissions. He is imprisoned for inciting a rustic mob to a Chartist outbreak, confounds the prison chaplain by sporting the latest novelties in heresy direct from Germany, shares when released in the delirium of the memorable tenth of April, finds that the lady of his love is to be married to his cousin, and consummates the long orgy of excitement with a desperate fever. The Dean had directed his attention to the study of natural history; hence the frenzy of the fever takes a zoological turn, and he undergoes therein marvellous transmigrations through a series of antediluvian monsters; awaking at last to sane consciousness (sane comparatively, he is never quite in his right senses, poor fellow) to find himself nursed by a young widow, the dean’s elder daughter, who soothes him with ladings from Tennyson. She has very recently lost her husband, who was merely a brilliant nobleman, and she herself a Convertite; in a few days the modest Alton is hinting at a declaration to her. She will not marry him, nor indeed any other man, but she sends him out to South America on a special poetical mission. On the voyage thither he dies, a believer, regenerate, leaving as legacy to his friends and the world at large a war-song of the Church (ferociously) Militant. What has converted him?—the plush breeches? the crash of the tenth of April? the loss of his first lady love? the reading of the “Lotus-eaters?” the delirious Fugue of Fossils? Some or all of these it must be supposed; for weak though he was, he surely could not have been seriously influenced by the comical caricatures of Socratic dialectics, which the Dean sometimes played with him in lieu of chess or backgammon.
Next comes Yeast, whose great Convertite is Lancelot Smith. He is introduced to us as fresh from Cambridge, a stalwart gallant fellow of great abilities, rather debauched, but discontented with his debauchery, and utterly without fixed creed. An accident confines him long to the house of the Squire whom he is visiting. During his convalescence he becomes a lover of one of the Squire’s daughters—a young lady whose vernacular name is Argemone, and who is herself rapidly growing a perfect saint. He also becomes the friend of a gamekeeper who reads Carlyle, writes poetry, and has experienced special religious illumination. Lancelot then loses all his fortune by the failure of his uncle’s bank, and loses his sweetheart by the sulphuretted-hydrogen fever; turns street-porter for the nonce to earn a bit of bread, and finally goes off one knows not whither; an excellent fervid Christian, after playing through several bewildering pages a wild burlesque of the Platonic dialogue with a personage so mysterious that I prefer not to attempt a description of him. What has converted Lancelot? The loss of his money and the death of his sweetheart seem to have been the main influences. For although he was stunned with calamity, I will not deem him so stupefied as to think that he was made a believer by the unintelligible dialogue.
Then follows Hypatia. And here I may remark that I am unable to concur in what seems the general opinion—namely, that Mr. Kingsley intended his heroine to represent the character of the Hypatia of history. Although living in the same city at the same period, both lecturing on philosophy, and both ultimately murdered by Christian mobs; it appears to me that, as women, the two Hypatias differed so much from each other that no one having heard them talk for five minutes could have the slightest doubt as to which was which. History and Mr. Kingsley have each composed an acrostic on this lovely name, and with the same bouts rimes; but the body (and the spirit) of the one poem is extremely unlike the body (and the spirit) of the other. Mr. Kingsley proffers us an ancient cup and a flask, Greek-lettered “Wine of Cyprus”; we commence to drink solemnly and devoutly, but—O most miserable mockery! it is indubitable brandy and water. Well may he call this an old foe with a new face! The Kingsley Hypatia is not altogether, but is very nearly a Convertite; so nearly that he would certainly have made her altogether one, had not the bouts rime’s been too well known for alteration. Her best pupil (of whom more anon) abandons her, she begins to love a beautiful young Greek monk, and yet (that philosophy may have the help of worldly power in its mortal duel with Christianity) consents to marry the Prefect of Alexandria, whom she very justly despises. While miserable with the consciousness of how low she is stooping to conquer, she is fascinated or mesmerised by an old Jewish hag, and crouches in a sort of fetish worship to what she thinks a statue of Apollo, said statue being represented by the handsome monk. In the agony of shame which follows her discovery of this cheat she performs a short parody of the Socratic dialogue in concert with the pupil who had left her and who has returned a Christian, and at last, when going to the lecture hall (where murder shall prevent her from ever lecturing more) she confesses to a certain longing for Christianity. Why? She was wretched, humiliated, defeated, weary; she had staked all on the red, and had lost—what more natural than a yearning to try the black? And this character is published and generally received for the Hypatia of history!
But the great Convertite of this romance is the pupil already mentioned, the renegade Jew, Raphael Ben Ezra. In the prime of life, wealthy, the favorite comrade of the Prefect, superlatively gifted with that subtle Hebrew clearness, which, swayed by a strong will and intense self-love, can scarcely be distinguished from genius, we find him in the opening chapters already as used up as the old King Solomon of Ecclesiastes, having exhausted all excitements of wine, women, and philosophy, all voluptuousness, physical and intellectual. Desperate with ennui, he abandons Hypatia, casts away his wealth (how many Jews do the same!), barters clothes with a beggar, and sets out to wander the world with an amiable British bull-bitch (afterwards the happy mother of nine sweet infants) for his sole guide, philosopher and friend. The chapter wherein his Pyrrhonism disported itself “on the floor of the bottomless” seems to have been, in great measure, borrowed from the talk of one Babbalanja in Herman Melville’s “Mardi;” perhaps, however, both were borrowed direct from Jean Paul’s gigantic grotesque, “Titan.” Becoming involved in the meshes of the great war in Africa—that revolt of Heraclian against Honorius which Gibbon treats with such contemptuous brevity in his thirty-first chapter—he is nearly killed himself, saves an old officer from death and soon falls in love with this officer’s daughter. He reads about this time certain epistles, and infers therefrom that Saul of Tarsus was one of the finest gentlemen that ever lived. Also, while the guest of good Bishop Synesius, he hears Saint Augustine preach, and engages with him in long discussions, fortunately unreported. Returning to Alexandria, he almost converts Hypatia, sees her murdered, sharpens his tongue on Cyril the primate, and leaves again to marry his saintly sweetheart, and end his lire as quite a model Christian. What has converted him? His love for the young Christian? the gentlemanly character of Paul’s Epistles? the bull-bitch with her ninefold litter, like Shakespere’s nightmare? the murder of Hypatia by the Christians, who rent, and tore and shred her living body to fragments? Or was it mere satiety and weariness of thinking—the weariness which leads so ............