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CONTENTS OF No. XX.-APRIL 1860.

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THE NATIONAL REVIEW.

JANUARY 1860.

ART. I.-MR. KINGSLEY'S LITERARY EXCESSES. Miscellanies. By the Rev. Charles Kingsley. 2 vols. J. W. Parker.

THERE are two living English writers who, wide as the poles asunder in many points, have yet several marked characteristics in common, and whom we confess to regarding with very similar sentiments-Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Kingsley. Both are eminent; both are popular; both have exercised, and are still exercising, a very unquestionable influence over their contemporaries: unquestionable, that is, as to degree; questionable enough, unhappily, as to kind. Of both we have frequently had occasion to speak with respect and admiration. We read them much, and recur to them often; but seldom without mixed feelings, provocation, disappointment, and regret. We constantly lay them down outraged beyond endurance by their faults, and mentally forswearing them in future; we as constantly take them up again in spite of vow and protest, drawn back into the turbid vortex by the force of their resistless fascinations. In short, we feel and act towards them as men may do towards women whom they at once delight in, admire, and condemn; who perpetually offend their purer taste and grate against their finer sensibilities, but whose noble qualities and whose meretricious charms are so strangely vivid and so marvellously blended, that they can shake themselves free from neither. For Mr. Kingsley we have long ago expressed our hearty appreciation; but there is a time to appreciate, and a time to criticise. Standing as he now does at the zenith of

No. XIX. JANUARY 1860.

B

his popularity, it is the fit time to speak of his shortcomings with that frankness which is the truest respect.

The historian of Frederick the Great and the author of Hypatia have many points of resemblance, but always with a variation. They are cast in the same mould, but fashioned of different clays and animated by different spirits. Both are terribly in earnest; but Kingsley's is the earnestness of youthful vigour and a sanguine temper, Carlyle's is the profound cynicism of a bitter and a gloomy spirit. He is, if not the saddest, assuredly the most saddening of writers, the very Apostle of Despair. Both seem penetrated to the very core of their nature with the sharpest sense of the wrongs and sufferings of humanity; but the one is thereby driven to preach a crusade of vengeance on their authors, the other a crusade of rescue and deliverance for their victims. Mr. Kingsley's earnestness as a social philosopher and reformer develops itself mainly in the direction of action and of sympathy; Mr. Carlyle's exhales itself, for the most part, in a fierce contempt against folly and weakness, which is always unmeasured and usually unchristian. The earnestness of Carlyle, though savagely sincere, never condescends enough to detail or to knowledge to make him a practical reformer; that of Kingsley is so restless as to allow him no repose, and sends him rushing, tête baissée, at every visible evil or abuse. The one has stirred thousands to bitterest discontent with life and with the world, but scarcely erected a finger-post or supplied a motive; the other has roused numbers to buckle on their armour in a holy cause, but has often directed them astray, and has not always been careful either as to banner or to watchword.

Both are fearfully pugnacious; indeed, they are beyond comparison the two most combative writers of their age. Nature sent them into the world full of aggressive propensities; and strong principles, warm hearts, and expansive sympathies, have enlisted these propensities on the side of benevolence and virtue. Happier than many, they have been able to enlist their passions in the cause of right. But their success or good fortune in doing this has led them into the delusion common in such cases. They fancy that the cause consecrates the passion. They feel

"We have come forth upon the field of life

To war with Evil;"

and once satisfied that it is evil against which they are contending, they let themselves go, and give full swing to all the vehemence of their unregenerate natures. We comprehend the full charms of such a tilt. It must be delightful to array all the energies of the old Adam against the foes of the new. What unspeakable relief and joy for a Christian like Mr. Kingsley, whom God

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