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sense. Let him note the tact and skill with which the story is gradually prepared to receive the great thunderstroke of the judgment-day of "Two Years Ago"-how that stroke falls on the family of the Viscount, when the young lord is best prepared, by the disappointment of his first noble passion, for the solemn discipline of patriotic duty, and when Valencia has been melted, by her sister's misery and her lover's truth, into the mood of true womanhood-how Elsley, the wretched, self-tormented madman, who had so sedulously unfitted himself for the life of reality, vanishes away in the terrible light of the crisis, making the lesson of hope more solemn by a contrasted warning of despair-how Tom Thurnall rushes exultingly forth in the pride of his own strength, and pluck, and keen wits, to the conflict, there to gain, for the first time, the higher lessons of God's sovereignty and God's will-and how Grace Harvey, the sweet fanatic of Methodism, learns, in the anguish, and the humiliations, and the anxieties of a true passion in her own heart, such new teachings of the Father, whom she had ignorantly worshiped-how Frank Headley confirms, in the stern experience of the Crimea, the manly wisdom to which the trials of his afflicted parish and the unconquerable emotions of his own love-stricken nature had brought him. Upon the secondary characters, and the incidental figures, even, of the scene, the light of the author's central idea falls and glows. It kindles a deeper fire in the fervid eyes of the American Stangrave, when he takes up the cross of a noble and serious purpose, at the feet of the woman whom he loves with heart and soul, as a man should; it throws a soft, mild splendor upon the sweet old face and sightless eyes of the aged father, who waits so long for his far-away wandering son Tom; it touches into a healthy day the dimmed and blood-shot gaze of the Cornwall Squire Trebooze, and it lends one brief moment of beauty to the wan and haggard faces that flaunt in the gaslight of the thronged and steaming Strand.

It was the leading fault of "Alton Locke," that the fictitious element in that book, the ideal of the author, was not welded in naturally and simply with the real substance of the story. Characters drawn with unsurpassed truth,

and force, and ardor, were enveloped in an atmosphere essentially false in tone. No such fault can be found with "Two Years Ago." The atmosphere of "Alton Locke" was the breath of convictions by no means common to all thinking Englishmen; convictions, indeed, so far from being common, that half the critics in England at once cried out upon the book as possessed with a spirit of Socialism, which was as sensible and rational a cry as it would have been for them to exclaim against it on the score of its pervading Mahometanism, or Mormonism, or Paganism. That the sense of the condition of the working-classes, and, above all, of the working-classes exposed to quasi-intellectual influences, and the perception of the possibilities involved in their condition, which found expression in "Alton Locke," should ever have been mistaken by Englishmen of decent intelligence, and a competent acquaintance with the French grammar, for Socialism, was a blunder so outrageously ridiculous, an imbecility so simply ludicrous, that it could never have been perpetrated, had not the masses of educated Englishmen at that time been grossly ignorant of the state of England, and culpably unfamiliar with the needs of their country, and the duties of their own station. It was to be expected, therefore, that the author of "Alton Locke" should deal with his subject in an exaggerated and overwrought way. In Two Years Ago," on the contrary, Kingsley is speaking the experience of all England, and simply talking home to the hearts of the vast majority of his countrymen and countrywomen. While it was almost true, in a certain sense, of "Alton Locke," that it was worthless as a whole, and wonderful in details; that its episodes were hurried, crowded, and infelicitously placed, while they were yet so moving, so poignant with truth, and so superbly dithyrambic, that you would not willingly have spared one of them all, it is true more absolutely of "Two Years Ago," that the astonishing glow and wealth of its details are fully rivaled by the completeness and picturesque ensemble of the composition. There will, doubtless, be people found, who will complain of the multitude of interests and the complication of incidents presented to them in this book, as there are people who quarrel with the "Paradise" of Tintoretto on the

same ground; but the only answer to be made in the one case as in the other (and we are sorry there is no more consolatory reply to be found) must_be, that neither the "Paradise" nor "Two Years Ago" was composed excepting for those who have eyes to see and hearts to understand.

To such persons as these latter it will seem, we hope, a superfluous task for us to point out the relation which the American Stangrave and the great issue of our own politics bear to the theme of Kingsley's book. But partisan declamations and vulgar prejudices have done so much to cloud and confuse the natural faces of England and America in each other's sight, that it is really worth while for us to seize this opportunity of vindicating with a word the noble attempt of an Englishman of genius, and liberal faith and generous sympathies, to make matters plainer between us, though it is indeed a shame to any American if he needs Kingsley's word, or the word of any other man, to show him how truly we, too, as well as our British cousins, needed and need a profound spiritual awakening out of our dull devotion to material interests, and our preposterous notion that the world is driving on, hit or miss, right or wrong, to some certainty, at least, of bread and butter, and general gross content, fatness, and plenty.

This is not the place for us to enter upon a political declamation against this party or that, and, if it were, we should have no such declamation to enter upon. For, neither by one party, nor by another, nor by one section nor by another, have we in America been blinded and bewildered so as to make the sublime and enduring interests of liberty, and reasonable progress, and Christian civilization subordinate to the fleeting interests of trade and enterprise, and to thrust the sovereign beneath the throne which he should fill. The canker of our national character has been the canker of the age the frightful egotism which destroys the individual only to spread over the community to which he belongs, and eats out at once the happiness of private homes and the righteousness of the public weal. And, just in proportion to the opportunities of egotism afforded by a state of things in which the chances of individual success are greatly multiplied while the necessity of individual success

is not diminished, has been the development of modern egotism in America. In no country under heaven have the doctrines of laissez faire been pushed to such an extreme as among ourselves. This is so true, that it may almost be said that the only passion and the only purpose, sufficiently organized and sufficiently developed in America to deserve the name of a national passion and a national purpose, have been the passion and the purpose of Slavery Extension. The Free States have left Liberty to take care of itself. The Slave States have taken care of Slavery, and that with all their might. The American citizen of the Free States, not absorbed in his own business and family purposes, has been really at a loss, for years, in which direction to look for a great national object worthy the devotion of a man. Unless he was willing to be a traitor to the principles of the Revolution-the immortalities of Law and Liberty-he could not throw himself into a political career in which his sagacity and his instincts must soon teach him that he had only a subordinate part to play, so long as he refused to acquiesce in the growing tendencies of the ruling powers in the Union toward the extension and establishment of slavery. He could not give himself heartily to the party of the abolitionists, because he could not help seeing that their aims were narrow and their spirit intolerant and bitter. What, then, was he to do? And what has he done?

Let the gradual decline of statesmanlike ability, the gradual abdication of high political thinking at the North, and the gradual victories of the extreme Southern party, give the melancholy answer!

Do we suppose that all this while our history has been acted in a corner? that nobody has cared enough about us, or watched us closely enough, to see how things were going in these United States? On the contrary! we have been shouting aloud to the whole world that we were the altogether most interesting people on earth, and the worthiest to be studied. When Europe shook with revolution, we called upon all the trembling aristocracies and all the struggling democracies of men to cross the Atlantic and learn how men should be governed, and what men could mke of themselves. We have

clamored for admiration; and to demand admiration is to challenge criticism. Above all, does such a demand challenge criticism from those who really desire to love us, and to admire us, and to get some help and good from us. The liberals of Europe cannot but be passionately interested in us. If we go right, their going right is thereby more solidly assured. If we go wrong, the whole work to be done for mankind is made a hundredfold harder. And so

the liberals of Europe have watched us very closely-those of them most closely, who, loving us best, and loving best the liberty of which we make our boast, are most anxious to be sure that they are not deceived in their estimate of us, and are weaving no ropes of sand in the ties they seek to attach us by. The criticism of these men is not lightly passed; their doubts of us, if doubts they have, are little less than agonizing.

Here is the explanation, and in that explanation the justification, of Kingsley's introduction into his story of "Two Years Ago" of the American episode of Stangrave and the slave girl whom he loves-for Marie Cordifiamma is an escaped slave, the daughter of a quadroon mother and of a white father.

He has remembered that two years ago the crisis of the great trial came upon America in the shape of that Repeal of the Missouri Compromise which was the worst act of flagrant outrage upon the sanctities of freedom then perpetrated by the Slave Power; and he has done well, therefore, to bring his young American-his cultivated, elegant, selfseeking, worldly Northerner-into contact then with the realities of passion both private and public, and the solemnities of the highest duty, that so, from the stormy text of "Two Years Ago," he might read a lesson for us who are his kindred, by our English blood and our free laws, beyond the seas. Of the temper in which he has done this, the book itself will be the sufficient argument, to all who read it with clear and righteous eyes; but we are not sorry to have in our possession, and to be able here to use a private note from himself, in fuller explanation of the feeling which moved all England to take an interest so warm and so intelligent in the result of our last presidential election, as it impelled himself to touch upon the question of the American character and its relations to public life at home and abroad, in the

portraiture of Stangrave. No words of ours could do such justice to the single ness, and sincerity, and good-sense of this impulse, as his own. And here they are:

DEAR ―:

I have spoken, en passant, in "Two Years Ago," not only my mind, but the mind, I believe, of the whole English people, on the present crisis in America. My conviction is, that there is not a man in England who is worth listening to, from the highest to the lowest, who was not in favor of Frémont. The feeling for him was the most unanimous which I have ever witnessed in this country. Of course, the result of any future election, like the result of this last, is no concern of ours. We respect the deliberate conclusion of a great nation, and treat her government with all the honor due to her. We are no fanatics; we are ready to accept a less evil instead of a positive good. But, let no man fancy that slavery is regarded in England as anything but an evil; that any Englishman, who would be listened to patiently across a dinner-table, believes that slavery can be anything but a misery and a curse to the slaveholders.

Now there is, in England, a very strong feeling-I may say, affection-for the slaveholders, as being, for the most part, gentlemen of the best English blood; and, therefore, the longing of England is, not to see them crushed, but delivered. We look upon them as men hampered in a fearful snare-not spread by themselves, or by their fathers either-and we desire to see them freed, that they may become worthy of themselves, of their nation, and of their English parentage.

But, let neither them, nor any man, deceivo himself with the notion that "the peculiar institution" is looked on in England with any. thing but simple abhorrence.

Mind, we are no abolitionist fanatics. We shall be happy to see slavery pass into the same quiet euthanasia, through which it has vanished from our own colonies. It is a very ancient evil, and, therefore, to be buried, when it dies, peaceably, if not honorably, as polygamy got buried fifteen hundred years ago, throughout Christendom. But we do regard it as no less unworthy of civilized Christian men in the nineteenth century, than polygamy itself is; and we do hope to see, at least, a cordon sanitaire drawn round it, which shall prevent its spreading, and leave it to die as quietly as it can.

Any man, who will draw that cordon sani. taire-who will open the eyes of the slaveholders to see that in that limitation of their own principle lies their only hope of safety from the horrors of a servile war, or the worse horrors of unbridled patrician despotism-any man who will show them that in extending slavery, they are fighting, not only against the conscience of the nineteenth century, and God, who has inspired that conscience, bat against the whole tendency of the emigrants from the old world, which must be ultimately in favor of free soil principles; any man who will devise a method of terminating slavery after a certain period, without convulsing the South by interfering with vested rights-a method by which we English have abolished,

of late years, our worst abuses without bloodsbed, almost without quarrel-that man, my dear will be the saviour of his country;

he will be greater even than your great Washington, because a domestic sin is always more difficult to face than a foreign wrong; he will be welcomed and trusted, I must believe, by all who are truly noble, both in South and North; and here in England he will be looked on as a hero, who has saved from ruin-for I must use the word—a daughter of whom England is at heart more proud than of her Pacific Colonies or her Indian Empire-the noblest daughter which a mother country ever brought into the world. May God send you that man!

When I say this, I believe I speak the thoughts of all ranks of Englishmen. Remove but wisely and well that one fault of slavery, which makes the real and only bar of disunion between us; and see whether a grudge remains on this side the Atlantic, at the triumphs and glories of the United States. C. K.

simple reality-Two Years Ago" is
so admirably abundant in attractions,
that many a man will never think of its
meaning till long after he has filled
himself with the power of its pictures
and its poetry.
The men and women,

through whom Kingsley utters his les-
son, are not mere types and names, but
most fresh, and quick, and positive
creations. It is long since we have
fallen in with a book so crowded with
characters-each of whom, however
quickly he may come and go, leaves
with you a memory of himself, as of a
person whom you met, you know not
where, but never can confound, thence-
forth and forever, with any other image
in your mind.

The old naturalist, Dr. Thurnall, with his wise, sweet, patient heart, and that light within which blindness cannot quench; the banker, Armsworth, just a shade conventional, perhaps, but racy and real, too, vociferous, dogmatic, just, and generous; the mean, dismal village apothecary, Hale, with his shattered, dowdy, opium-eating, vulgar wife, and his petulant, luxurious, gossiping, un easy daughter; the magnificent Cornish seamen, equally ready to duck a ranter, snub a parson, and leap into the boiling

So much for the motive of the American episode. Of the skill with which it is handled, we cannot speak quite so highly; for, although the character of Stangrave is admirably sketched and treated, and although his relations to the main actors of the story are plausibly enough described, the conception of Marie's career is a trifle too vivid and melo-dramatic to consist with the tone of the rest of the work. As a type, she is wonderfully well drawn-pit of the waters to save a sailor or a the idiosyncrasies of the mixed blood being seized with an insight quite amazing, and painted with a minuteness and reality worthy of Balzac. Whatever may be thought of the probability of Marie's theatrical history, every man at all familiar with the character and temperament of the mixed races will recognize the hand of a master in Marie's intercourse with her lover, and with Sabina Mellot. You need not look for the pink-purple of the fingernails after listening to the confession which the poor, proud, passionate girl pours out to her sweet and sagacious friend while the small white hand of the artist's wife plays with her glossy black curls.

We have dwelt mainly on the conception of this new novel, because we hold it best that whoever wishes to enter upon and enjoy so rich a realm should not wander into it as into a fool's paradise. Nor can we think that all our preaching will seem superfluous, even to those who read the book with understanding hearts. For, just as a novel-as a story of human lives, and thoughts, and troubles, and happiness, made interesting by its VOL. IX.-33

ship; the west-country squireen, Trebooze, and his domestic angel in "a housemaid's shape;" the glorious old Major Campbell, with his buried passion in his heart, and its immortal beauty in his soul; these are all living and real personages, and personages so various in origin, station, and character, that the fidelity and force with which they are drawn argue in the author an experience as extensive as his faculty of observation is refined and vigorous. That a man should know his fellow-men, of all sorts and kinds, so well as Kingsley proves himself to know them, is a splendid testimony to the warmth of his heart, as well as to the strength of his intellect, for no man can understand the motives and the ways of human creatures who does not sympathize with human creatures truly, in all their sorrows, joys, and sins.

How much criticism of the style and literary execution of this novel has been implied in what we have said we must leave our readers to estimate for themselves, when the subsiding glow of their interest in the thing done shall leave them at leisure to speculate on the way

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of its doing. But we suppose that a critic's duty must be discharged in the forms, if he does not wish to leave himself open to those charges of obscurity or uncertainty which are the easy resorts of indolence or indifference; and we must say our say, as briefly, therefore, as we may, upon these heads. Briefly, then, “Two Years Ago" seems to us to be as much the best of Charles Kingsley's books, in point of style and execution, as it is in respect of dramatic life and systematic purpose. He has achieved in it the difficult problem of treating a theme at once largely and closely. Every touch is as clear and positive as the whole result is comprehensive and solemn. His old, warm sympathy with the moods of nature as well as with the minds of men-his racy, genial humor-his poetic perception of beauty in sound and sight-his worship of woman, in nowise blind or sentimental, but clear, and manly, and passionate, all have been with him in this work, and the glow, and strength, and grace of them are in his language, and the music of them is in the rhythm of his periods and his sentences. The tendency to poetic modulation in prose composition, which is as conspicuous in his writings as it is in those of all men who feel deeply while they think strong ly, was never more conspicuous than in Two Years Ago." The opening sentences of the book pass easily into a kind of Scandinavian chant, and this without the least affectation of such an effect, for nothing could be more natural than the disposition of the words.

The same thing is true of many another passage, which we have no space to quote and no disposition to descant upon without quoting. The amateur of word-painting, who has accustomed himself to look to the author of "Yeast," and "Amyas Leigh," and "Hypatia," for magnificent pictures of human passion and of natural beauty, will not be disappointed of his pleasure in "Two Years Ago.' The account of the wreck of the Hesperus, in the opening of the book, is one of the finest descriptions ever written of a storm off shore, and the tempest of thunder and rain, through which the mad poet Elsley is hunted over the mountains of Wales, will never be rivaled on canvas till the

spirits of Salvator and of Turner shall be mingled in one mortal man.

The love-scenes of this novel are certainly not less wonderful than its graphic landscapes, and its painting of masculine strength or weakness. The interview in which Frank Headley first moves the heart of Valencia St. Just, and that in which he wins her hand, would suffice, of themselves, to prove Kingsley a closer and keener student of the heart of woman than any English novelist of the day. We must pass into the company of the poets to find any rival for him in his knowledge of the wayward, subtle, delicious, and noble attributes of womanhood, or in his mastery over the springs of feeling and of action in the womanly nature. If any man can remove the reproach which has rested, and justly rested, upon English fiction, of extreme poverty in all that relates to the treatment and development of female character, the author of the "Saint's Tragedy" should be that man; and we look to see him achieve the work. But we will no longer detain the reader from a book so much better worth the reading than any novel which has been published in a long time. Leave here our critic pages, good friend, and make haste to take up the poetic pages which have provoked them.

And then join with us in our thankfulness. that even in these days, reputed unheroic, God has witnesses on earth to plead for manhood and for womanhood, with words of cunning and with souls of fire; that the magic of passion, and the grace of tenderness, and the power of will, and the beauty of wisdom, are not denied even to an age of stocks and steamengines, railway manias, and California fevers; but, that to them who will open their eyes to see, and open their hearts to understand, life, rich, glorious, beautiful life, is still to be wooed and still to be won in the noble love of noble women, in the true service of righteousness, in honesty and courage, and devotion and simplicity, and heroic belief; and do honor with us to all men who, like Charles Kingsley, have come to know these things, and, knowing them, have the gift from Heaven to speak them wisely and witchingly to the world!

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