YEAST: A PROBLEM.
The Rev. Mr. Kingsley, author of Alton Locke, has collected into a book the series of vehement and yeasty papers which have appeared from his pen in Fraser's Magazine under the above title, and a new impulse is thus given in England to the discussion of the Problem of Society. The declared object of the work—which is of the class of philosophical novels—is to exhibit the miseries of the poor; the conventionalisms, hypocrisies, and feebleness of the rich; the religious doubts of the strong, and the miserable delusions and superstitions of the weak; the mammon-worship of the middling and upper classes, and the angry humility of the masses. The story is very slight, but sufficient for the effective presentation of the author's opinions. The best characters are an Irish parson, a fox-hunting squire and his commonplace worldly wife, and a thoughtless and reckless but not unkind man of the world. Here is a sketch of a commonplace old English vicar, such as has been familiar in the pages of novels and essays time out of mind:
"He told me, hearing me quote Schiller, to beware of the Germans, for they were all Pantheists at heart. I asked him whether he included Lange and Bunsen, and it appeared that he had never read a German book in his life. He then flew furiously at Mr. Carlyle, and I found that all he knew of him was from a certain review in the Quarterly. He called Boëhmen a theosophic Atheist. I should have burst out at that, had I not read the very words in a High Church review, the day before, and hoped that he was not aware of the impudent falsehood which he was retailing. Whenever I feebly interposed an objection to any thing he said (for, after all he talked on), he told me to hear the Catholic Church. I asked him which Catholic Church? He said the English. I asked him whether it was to be the Church of the sixth century, or the thirteenth, or the seventeenth, or the eighteenth? He told me the one and eternal Church, which belonged as much to the nineteenth century as to the first. I begged to know whether, then, I was to hear the Church according to Simeon, or according to Newman, or according to St. Paul; for they seemed to me a little at variance? He told me, austerely enough, that the mind of the Church was embodied in her Liturgy and Articles. To which I answered, that the mind of the episcopal clergy might, perhaps, be; but, then, how happened it that they were always quarreling and calling hard names about the sense of those very documents? And so I left him, assuring him that living in the nineteenth century, I wanted to hear the Church of the nineteenth century, and no other; and should be most happy to listen to her, as soon as she had made up her mind what to say."
English travellers in America give very minute accounts of the bad grammar and questionable pronunciation they sometimes hear among our common people: with what advantage they might go into the rural neighborhoods of their own country for exhibitions in this line is shown by the following description of a scene in a booth, which one of the characters of Mr. Kingsley enters at night:
"Sadder and sadder, Lancelot tried to listen to the conversation of the men around him. To his astonishment he hardly understood a word of it. It was half articulate, nasal, guttural, made up almost entirely of vowels, like the speech of savages. He had never before been struck with the significant contrast between the sharp, clearly-defined articulation, the vivid and varied tones of the gentleman, or even of the London street-boy, when compared with the coarse, half-formed growls, as of a company of seals, which he heard round him. That single fact struck him perhaps more deeply than any; it connected itself with many of physiological fancies; it was the parent of many thoughts and plans of his after-life. Here and there he could distinguish a half sentence. An old shrunken man opposite him was drawing figures in the spilt beer with his pipestem, and discoursing of the glorious times before the great war, 'when there was more food than there were mouths, and more work than there hands.' 'Poor human nature,' thought Lancelot, as he tried to follow one of those unintelligible discussions about the relative prices of the loaf and the bushel of flour, which ended, as usual, in more swearing and more quarreling, and more beer to make it up: 'poor human nature! always looking back, as the German sage says, to some fancied golden age, never looking forward to the real one which is coming."
The descriptive powers of the author are illustrated in many fine passages, of which this delineation of an English day in March will serve as a specimen:
"A silent, dim, distanceless, steaming, rotting day in March. The last brown oak-leaf, which had stood out the winter's frost, spun and quivered plump down, and then lay, as if ashamed to have broken for a moment the ghastly stillness, like an awkward guest at a great dumb dinner-party. A cold suck of wind just proved its existence, by toothaches on the north side of all faces. The spiders, having been weather-be-witched the night before, had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and brier with gossamer-cradles, and never a fly to be caught in them; like Manchester cotton-spinners madly glutting the markets in the teeth of 'no demand.' The steam crawled out of the dank turf, and reeked off the flanks and nostrils of the shivering horses, and clung with clammy paws to frosted hats and dripping boughs. A soulless, skyless, catarrhal day, as if that bustling dowager, old mother Earth—what with match-making in spring, and fêtes champetres in summer, and dinner-giving in autumn—was fairly worn out, and put to bed with the influenza, under wet blankets and the cold-water cure."
"Yeast," says the Spectator, "may be looked at as a series of sketches, loosely strung together, descriptive of palpable social evils in the mass, and of metaphysical broodings among the more thoughtful youth; a struggle which perhaps is always taking place, and which is no further distinctive of the present age than the form that is given by our intellectual and religious activity. The origin of evil, its presence in the world, what man was made for, what he struggles for, what becomes of him, have been questions that excited the speculative of all ages, taking various channels according to the circumstances of the time. Considered from this point of view, as a life-like picture of the heavings of the mass, and the mental fermentation going on among individuals—of the yeast of society—the book displays great ability, and challenges careful attention. It is powerful, earnest, feeling, and eloquent; the production of a man acquainted with society, who has looked closely upon its various classes, and has the power of reading the signs of the times. He has a truthful vigor of description, a rhetorical rather than a dramatic power; or he sacrifices the latter to his habit of expressing his opinions in dialogue, where the author talks rather than the dramatis personæ. There is a genial warmth of feeling in the book, and wide human sympathies, but with a tendency to extremes in statement and opinion—a disposition to deepen the shadows of English life; for go where the author would, pictures quite as bad or worse may be drawn of the condition of mankind, from the 'noble savage,' the beau ideal of Rousseau, to the educated 'Prussian,' who was within a little while the model man of a certain school of philosophers."