business and pleasures, being under the law of a morality quite secular; his soul and its eternal affairs sitting apart in love quite spiritual. Who shall draw the line between the provinces, and know practically, hour by hour, where he stands? Living confusedly in both, a man is apt to acquire a sort of double consciousness, and fluctuate distractedly between Cæsar and God. He believes perhaps that the kingdoms of nature and of grace are destined always to remain side by side, neither absorbing the other till the day of doom. In that case, he will let other men create all the secular usages, the moralities of trade, the maxims of politics; standing aloof from them as not belonging to his realm; and falling in with them freely in his own case. They may be of questionable veracity and justice; but they belong to the devil's world, and are as good rules as can be expected from legislators sitting in the synagogue of Satan. Why should he decline to profit by them, now that they are there? When Eve has plucked the apple, it is too late for Adam not to taste the fruit. The pious broker comes on 'Change as into a foreign world, on which he is pushed by humiliating necessities, and in which he feels an interest derived from them alone: he has his citizenship elsewhere; he disdains naturalization; he is but a temporary settler; he wants no vote about the laws; but taking them as they are, cuts his crop and retires." Again, we ask, do not our readers recognize here great truths, of inexpressible practical import? Is not here an antagonism irreconcileable by the commonly received doctrines as to the relations of man and God? But is there not a view of these relations by which the antithesis of God's kingdom and man's world disappears? Happily for man there is. For in the words of the same writer, "We have said that men are tired of having their earthly and their heavenly relations set up in sharp opposition to each other, and are eager to live here in a consecrated world. This tendency has already found expression in two remarkable and apparently dissimilar phenomena: the partial success of the Anglican and Catholic reaction; and the vast influence on English society of the late Dr. Arnold's character. Both were virtual protests against that removal of God out of the common human life, that unreconciled condition of Law and Gospel, which had made the evangelical theology sickening and unreal. A path had to be opened for the re-introduction of a divine presence into the sphere of temporal things. Newman resorted to the supernatural channel of church miracle; Arnold to the natural course of human affairs, and the permanent sacredness of human obligation. Both restored to us a solemn mystery of immediate Incarnation; the one putting life, in order to its consecration, into contact with the sacraments; the other spreading a sacramental veneration over the whole of life." It is this ennobling belief in the sacramental sanctity of life which runs through and explains the works of Mr. Kingsley; and it is this, we are convinced, which has made of these works sources of hope, consolation, and belief to so many earnest and courageous spirits, calling passionately for a faith, but unable to accept the one preached to them from most pulpits. This belief pervades his sermons as much as it inspires his novels, and in no important particular will the latter be found to contradict the former. Had this not been so-had the artist in Mr. Kingsley been less inextricably intertwined with the preacher, we should have been inexcusable in devoting so much space to the great theological principle which for him elevates, harmonizes, and explains the mystery of life, and justifies God to man. There is another doctrine, however, complementary to this, -the belief in an actual, personal, ever-active principle of evil, exercising the free-will of man, and only to be vanquished by faith in God's parental relation to his creatures. There is nothing against which Mr. Kingsley protests more incessantly than the notion that evil is no tangible, independent thing, but some mysterious shadow of good. With him, to maintain no devil, is to believe in no God.* Having premised thus much with regard to the guiding belief of the theological school of which Mr. Kingsley is the bold and untiring teacher, we may pass to the consideration of his works in detail. We will begin with the "Saint's Tragedy," published in 1848. Taking for his heroine Elizabeth, the saintly Landgravine It is curious to find in Heinrich Heine, a recognition of the connection of these two beliefs, of which the one, to many minds, seems to exclude the other. Thus sings the poet of young Germany: Das Herz ist mir bedrückt, und sehnlich Die Welt war damals noch so wöhnlich. Und unten ist der Teufel todt. Or, if we may venture a translation, My heart is all weighed down with grieving, The world was once a place to live in, Now, somehow, all seems pushed uneven, Dead is the Lord God in his heaven, of Thuringia, Mr. Kingsley has constructed a drama, intended to exhibit, in the story of her life and death, the struggle between the family affections, and the pretensions of the Romish Church in the thirteenth century to quell those affections instead of sanctifying them. "In deducing fairly," says Mr. Kingsley in his preface, from the phenomena of her life the character of Elizabeth, she necessarily became a type of two great mental struggles of the Middle Age; first, of that between Scriptural or unconscious, and Popish or conscious, purity,-in a word, between innocence and prudery; next, of the struggle between healthy human affection and the Manichean contempt with which a celibate clergy would have all men regard the names of husband, wife, and parent. To exhibit this latter falsehood in its miserable consequences, when received into a heart of insight and determination sufficient to follow out all belief to its ultimate practice, is the main object of my poem." For this purpose it became necessary to typify, in the character of Conrad of Marpurg, Elizabeth's confessor and spiritual guide, "a noble nature warped and blinded by its unnatural exclusions from those family ties through which we first discern or describe God and our relations to Him, and forced to concentrate his whole faculties in the service, not so much of a God of Truth as of a Catholic system." In this character, Mr. Kingsley expresses a hope, "will be found some implicit apology for the failings of such truly great men as Dunstan, Becket, and Dominic, and many more, whom, if we hate, we shall never understand, while we shall be but too likely, in our own way, to copy them." In the stout knight and true liegeman of Elizabeth, Walter of Varila, Mr. Kingsley represents "the healthy animalism of the Teutonic mind, with its mixture of deep earnestness and hearty merriment." Walter's dislike of priestly sentimentalities, Mr. Kingsley maintains, "is no anachronism." "Even in his day," says Mr. Kingsley, a noble lay religion, founded on faith in the divine and universal symbolism of nature and humanity, was gradually arising, and venting itself, as I conceive, through many most unsuspected channels,-through chivalry, through the minnesingers, through the lay-inventors of pointed architecture, through the German school of painting, through the politics of the free towns, till it attained complete freedom in Luther and his associate reformers." But though Mr. Kingsley thus formally enunciates in his preface the ground-ideas of his leading personages, it must not be inferred that he has merely given us these notions in blank verse, and appended the name of the character to each speech, as is the wont of inferior artists when they are consciously embodying some tendency of a time or peculiar cast of mind. Elizabeth, and Conrad, and Walter are very human, and have dramatic life, as well as historical consistency and significance. In its manifestation of this power of vitalizing and symbolizing at once, the "Saint's Tragedy" deserves to be classed with Mr. Henry Taylor's "Philip Van Artevelde," while it is less obnoxious to the charge of speech-making or sermonizing, to which Mr. Taylor is rather prone. There is humour, movement, and variety in Mr. Kingsley's personages, from the Knight Walter down to the citizens and peasants, who represent the lower elements of medieval society in this play. And above all, there is hearty, manly sympathy with life and nature throughout, while ever and anon rises a strain of lyric music, at once sweet and significant. Take the third scene of the second Act, while Elizabeth is still distracted between her yearning for her young husband and her craving after the ascetic purity of the Christian life as it has been preached to her : A Chamber in the Castle. SCENE III. ELIZABETH-the Fool-ISENTRUDIS— GUTA singing. Far among the lonely hills, As I lay beside my sheep; Rest came down upon my soul, From the everlasting deep. Changeless march the stars above, Changeless morn succeeds to even; Changeless watch the changeless heaven. See the rivers, how they run, Can the sailor move the main? Neither ask, nor fret, nor strive Eliz. That's a sweet song, and yet it does not chime Guta. From a nun who was a shepherdess in her youth-sadly plagued she was by a cruel stepmother, till she fled to a convent and found rest to her soul. Fool. No doubt: nothing so pleasant as giving up one's own will in one's own way. But she might have learnt all that without taking cold on the hill-tops. Eliz. Where then, fool? Fool. At any market-cross where two or three rogues are together, who have neither grace to mend, nor courage to say, "I did it." Now you shall see the shepherdess's baby dressed in my cap and bells. When I was a greenhorn and young, And wanted to be and to do; I puzzled my brains about choosing my line, The same piece of clay makes a tile, A pitcher, a taw, or a brick : Dan Horace knew life; you may cut out a saint. The urchin who squalls in a gaol, By circumstance turns out a rogue; While the castle-born brat is a senator born, We fall on our legs in this world, Blind kittens, tossed in neck and heels: [Sings. 'Tis dame Circumstance licks Nature's cubs into shape, Then why puzzle and fret, plot and dream? He that's wise will just follow his nose; Contentedly fish while he swims with the stream; Eliz. Far too well sung for such a saucy song. So go. Fool. Ay, I'll go. Whip the dog out of church, and then rate him for being no Christian. Eliz. Guta, there is sense in that knave's ribaldry; [Exit FOOL. We must not thus baptize our idleness, And call it resignation: Which is love? I do not love that contemplative life : Leap forth from self, and spend my soul on others. Like the chill silence of an autumn sun: While action, like the roaring south-west wind, Guta. And yet what bliss, |