y's typical
prose work. It is full of anomalies, full of fallacies, raising
difficulties it fails to solve, crying out upon maladies and sores for
which it quite omits to offer a remedy. But that is Kingsley all over.
He was a mass of over-excited nerves and ill-ordered ideas, much more
poet than philosopher, more sympathetic than lucid, full of passionate
indignation, recklessly self-confident, cynically disdainful of
consistency, patience, good sense. He had the Rousseau temperament, with
its furious eloquence, its blind sympathies and antipathies, its splendid
sophistries. _Yeast_ was plainly the Christian reverse of the Carlyle
image and superscription, as read in _Sartor_ and _Past and Present_.
Kingsley was always profoundly influenced by Frederick D. Maurice, who
was a kind of spiritual Carlyle, without the genius or the learning of
the mighty _Sartor_, with a fine gift of sympathy instead of sarcasm,
with a genuine neo-Christian devoutness in lieu of an old-Hebrew
Goetheism. Kingsley had some of Carlyle's passion, of his eloquence, of
his power to strike fire out of stones. And so, just because _Yeast_ was
so disjointed as a composition, so desultory in thought, so splendidly
defiant of all the conventions of literature and all the ten commandments
of British society in 1849, I am inclined to rank it as Kingsley's
typical performance in prose. It is more a work of art than _Alton
Locke_, for it is much shorter, less akin to journalism, less spasmodic,
and more full of poetry. _Yeast_ deals with the country--which Kingsley
knew better and loved more than he did the town. It deals with real,
permanent, deep social evils, and it paints no fancy portrait of the
labourer, the squire, the poacher, or the village parson. Kingsley there
speaks of what he knew, and he describes that which he felt with the soul
of a poet. The hunting scenes in Yeast, the river vignettes, the village
revel, are exquisite pieces of painting. And the difficulties overcome
in the book are extreme. To fuse together a Platonic Dialogue and a
Carlyle latter-day pamphlet, and to mould this compound into a rural
romance in the style of _Silas Marner_, heightened with extracts from
University Pulpit sermons, with some ringing ballads, and political
diatribes in the vein of Cobbett's appeals to the People--this was to
show wonderful literary versatility and animation. And, after forty-five
years, _Yeast_ can be read and re-read still!