![]() They are quite certain that they know what they want, and are not in dread of being nonplused when they get it. The real reformers, the John Browns, the Garrisons, are “ calm as clocks,” - and clocks that do not go striking twelve all round the dial, and then run down with a whir. The idealizing literary temperament is not dismayed when confronted with cases of wrong or suffering which immediate bravery and self-sacrifice may relieve, and so Kingsley’s private life was one of beautiful and heroic good works but we are forced to the belief that his connection with public reforms has been as sentimental us Victor Hugo’s, with vastly more vagueness. His letters upon the woman question are of almost Delphic width of purport, and his long letter to Mill, stating why he has abandoned the movement, is a wonder of prolix inconclusiveness. But it is possible that the memoir is not altogether to blame for this indistinctness as to his position on political and social questions. Perhaps it is from a lack of explicitness in the memoir that we do not quite know what were his actual feelings in regard to the Chartist movement and the Continental revolutions of 1848 about all that we are able to understand is that he feels deeply for people who are in trouble, and wants them to be very careful how they try to get out of it. ![]() He runs terribly to words, and sermonizes and exhorts at a rate hard to bear and he heats himself over matters that he himself perceives ought to be dealt with only in calm and soberness. ![]() He is always in this prodigious excitement about something, so that his letters become painful reading from their inconsequent storm and stress, their utter want of repose and of clearness. He was a man of feeling, of emotion, and when he turned to the practical world he wasted his fine substance against it with an eager, almost anguished intensity of sympathy and longing. It appears to us that this subordination of the greatest quality in Kingsley’s nature, the poetic quality, to other qualities common to commoner men is what gives that touch of something almost ludicrous in the feverish striving of his life. Longfellow in technical perfection, and memorable for many eloquent and splendidly descriptive passages. His Andromeda, too, must remain among the few fine English hexameter poems, deserving to rank with those of Mr. He was truly a poet of a real and noble sort, and several of his lyrics have the undying quality : the world will he deaf to many tremendous literary and psychic and social noises of the kind which Charles Kingsley himself was the man to be reverently stunned with, but it will not cease to hear the sweetness of such lyrics ns the Three Fishers, The Sands o’ Dee, Be good, sweet Maid, etc. Nevertheless we think Kingsley’s lasting fame will not he that of a divine, or a naturalist, or a Tendenz - romancer, however deeply lie* was himself stirred by questions of theology, science, and social reform, but that of a poet. There was really more of ferment than of inspiration in those books, but they were good stories and are not likely to be so much forgotten hereafter as they are now. Doubtless his will not be just such a place as the generation to which Yeast and Alton Locke and Hypatia came as revelations would have given him. Naturally, the work is uncritical, and so much is reserved, through a sensitive regard for what would have been Kingsley’s own wish in regard to a memoir, that the reader has not the full materials for making up his own judgment of a writer whom death has remanded to the temporary abeyance all authors must fail into before time settles their true place. ![]() THE life of Charles Kingsley, 1 which we think the American publishers have wisely reduced to one half the bulk of the English edition, is mainly presented in his own letters and the letters of his friends to him or about him, the thread of narrative with which the editor connects them being very slender.
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