BOOKS.

KINGSLEY'S TWO YEARS AGO.* WE are glad to meet Mr. Kingsley once more on contemporary ground. Admirable in all the essentials of an historical novel as were " Hypatia" and "Westward Ho " we consider the peculiar and proper domain of the writer of fiction to lie among the contemporaries whose manners and characters he can be always studying, and who in reality are his models when he fancies he is painting the men and women of the past. The best historical novels must be conjectural restoration ; and the stress of the interest must generally be thrown into the unhistorical element, to give the book a chance of extensive popularity among the novelreading class. For this reason, we think a man of genius whose turn of mind is towards the past, had far better write history pure and simple. The work wants doing, sadly enough, as any one who has had to look into questions for himself only too well knows ; it offers scope to the highest genius, as in our times Carlyle has irrefragably shown. Mr. Kingsley could do the work as well, probably, as Mr. Fronde or Mr. Carlyle ; but so long as he writes novels in preference to history, we hope he will principally employ his talent in working that rich mine of contemporary life in which as author of " Yeast " and "Alton Locke" he won his earliest reputation, and established himself at once among the finest prose-writers of his age and country and among the clearest and strongest painters of some marked types of English society. It is surplusage to say now that a new book by Mr. Kingsley is vigorously written; that his characters are clearly conceived and strongly impressed ; that his dialogue is bright and characteristic ; his scenery-painting vivid in colour, true in drawing, and rich though not co in detail. But there is one characteristic of his novels—and stamped with peculiar emphasis upon Two Years Ago—to which it is worth while to direct attention, both for its importance and because it has seemly been noticed as it deserves. Four years ago, in reviewing Sir Bulwer Lytton's "My Novel," we remarked on the almost exclusive devotion of literary artists to those members of society who have no serious business to form their characters and occupy their time, or to such aspects of the busy classes as are disconnected with their business. In the first volume of the Cambridge Essays, Mr. Stephen took up the subject in his very able essay on the relation of novels to life, and discussed it at length and with ample illustration from both contemporary writers and those of a past age. Now we have to observe as the marked characteristic of Mr. Kingsley's novels—as that which gives them, quite apart from their talent, an especial value—that this limitation this elimination from pictures of society of the most important elements in society, is not chargeable upon his works. On the contrary, his characters are presented as acting and feeline.° and talking in the serious business of their lives, as modified and formed by this business, as interesting to the reader and important to the persons with whom they are associated in the novel by the spirit and energy with which they perform it. And this is particularly true of Two Years Ago ; the leading persons of which are men and women in the formation of whose character the main interest of the novel lies, and the discipline of life through which they grow is throughout intimately and inextricably connected with the common duties Of their callings. They are exhibited under the real influence of their circumstances. And Mr. Kingsley could scarcely do otherwise, as to him the circumstances of life are the Almighty's means of teaching human souls to seek for that Father in the unseen who is fully revealed in the Gospel of his Son ; and circumstances which in another way of looking at them are simply uninteresting, or utterly repulsive, having no relation at best to anything but the supply of man's material wants, become to him the alphabet of a divine language, the hieroglyphs of a gospel which sheds Heaven's light into Earth's darkest and dirtiest corners. A writer who holds in his heart and intellect this sort of clue through the muddling labyrinth of modern social life will not dare to ignore anything that really affects the characters of human beings, much less to misrepresent it for effect. And, believing, as he does, that man was not sent here to amuse himself, or simply to indulge in sentiment, however virtuous in its place the sentiment may be, he is little likely to fall into the common novelist's error of seeing interest only in what are called the romantic sides of life. Thus his novels, be they more or less clever as stories, arc dramas conscientiously studied from life, and sermons treating not of the abstract dogmas of theology, but of the human truths to which those dogmas are the correlatives, .preseating in the form most attractive to the feelings and the imagination a theory at once consoling and reasonable of God's government of human beings, not two thousand years ago, but in this England of the nineteenth century, amid exactly the same temptations the same discouragements, and the same sources of strength and comfort, that we recognize as surrounding, each of us, our own individual lives.

The interest of the story of Two Years Ago is far more derived from the characters who figure in its development, than they are made interesting by taking part in extraordinary incidents, or by being the subjects of unheard, of fortunes. And the characters themselves are not for the most part interesting because they are uncommon types, but, to our thinking, for just the opposite rea

• Two Years Ago. By the Reverend Charles Kingsley, F.S.A.,F.L.S., &e. Au thor of "Westward Ho !" &e. In three volumes. Published by Macmillan and Co., Cambridge. son, because the types are all around us, if we had as good eyes as Mr. Kingsleyhas. Certainly this is true of the two leading male characters, Tom Thurnall, 11i.R.C.S., who is the hero of the book, and Frank Headley, the High Church curate of the Cornish village of Aberalva, where the scene for a long time lies. Tom Thu.rnall's character at the commencement of the real story is thus sketched.

"Fifteen years of adventure had hardened into wrought metal a oharacter never very ductile. Tom was now, in his own way, an altogether accomplished man of the world ; who knew (at least in all companies and places where he was likely to find himself) exactly what to say, to do, to make, to seek, and to avoid. Shifty and thrifty as old Greek, or modern Scot, there were few things he could not invent, and perhaps nothing he could not endure. He had watched human nature under every disguise, from the pomp of the ambassador to the war-paint of the savage, and formed his own clear, hard, shallow, practical estimate thereof. Ile looked on it as his raw material, which he had to work up into subsistence and comfort for himself. He did not wish to live on men, but live by them he must; and for that purpose he must study them, and especially their weaknesses. He would not cheat them ; for there was in him an innate vein of honesty, so surly and explosive, at times, as to give him much trouble. The severest part of his selfeducation had been the repression of his dangerous inclination to call a sham a sham on the spot, and to answer fools according to their folly. That youthful rashness, however, was now well-nigh subdued, and Tom could Ratter and bully also, when it served his turn—as who cannot? Let him that is without sin among my readers cost the first stone. Self-conscious he was, therefore, in every word and action ; not from morbid vanity, hut a necessary consequence of his mode of life. Ho had to use men, and therefore to watch how he used them, to watch every word, gesture, tone of voice, and, in all times and places, do the fitting thing. It was hard work : but necessary for a man who stood alone and self-poised in the midst of the universe ; fashioning for himself everywhere, just as far as his arm could reach, some not intolerable condition ; depending on nothing but himself, and caring for little but himself, and the father whom, to do him justice, ho never forgot. If I wished to define Tom Thurnall by one epithet, I should call him specially an ungodly man—were it not that Scriptural epithets have, now-a-days, such altogether conventional and official meanings, that one fears to convey, in using them, some notion quite foreign to the truth. Tom was certainly not one of those ungodly whom David had to deal with of old, who robbed the widow and put the fatherless to death. His morality was as high as that of the average; his sense of honour far higher. He was generous and kindhearted. No one ever heard him tell a lie ; and he had a blunt honesty about him, half-real, because he liked to be honest, and yet half-affected too, because he found it pay in the long run, and because it threw off their guard the people whom he intended to make his tools. But of godliness in its true sense—of belief that any Being above cared for him, and was helping him in the daily business of life—that it was worth while asking that Being's advice, or that any advice would be given if asked for—of any practical notion of a Heavenly Father, or a Divine education, Tom was as ignorant—as thousands of respectable people who go to church every Sunday, and read good books, and believe firmly that the Pope is Antichrist. He ought to have learnt it, no doubt, for his father was a religious man : but he had not learnt it—any more than thousande learn it who have likewise religious parents. He had been taught, of course, the common doctrines and duties of religion ; but early remembrances had been rubbed out, as off a schoolboy's slate, by the mere current of new thoughts and objects, in his continual wanderings. Disappointments he had had, and dangers in plenty ; but only such as rouse a brave and cheerful spirit to bolder self-rehanee and invention ; not those deep sorrows of the heart which leave a man helpless in the lowest pit, craving for help from without, for there is none within, Ile had seen men of all creeds, and had found in all alike (so he hold) the many rogues and the few holiest men. All religions were, in his eyes, equally true and equally false. Superior morality was owing principally to the influences of race and climate ; and devotional experiences (to judge, at least, from American camp-meetings and Popish cities) the results of a diseased nervous system."

The novel is crowded with characters. Besides Thurnall and Headley, there is a poet, in whom the writer has depicted the faults and follies of a man who gives himself up to literary vanity as his ruling motive and to melodramatic sentimentalism as his instrument of effect. The miserable results of this kind of character on domestic happiness are drawn with great power and delicacy at the same time, in the scenes between the poet and his wife, a lady of rank who has fallen in love with him on her first entrance into London society, and run away with him. The family group of the St. Juats, to which the poet's wife belongs, includes a Major Campbell, on whom the writer has manifestly bestowed great pains, and has succeeded in clearly impressing tho intended stamp. But this is the ono character to which we should be inclined to take most exception, though he may truly represent an individual in actual life none the less. It is not, we think, vraisemblable, however vrai it may be, that such a man, altogether noble in nature, manly in character, a soldier of experience and reputation, a devotee of science, and a Christian at once childlike in faith and

profoundly. philosophic in intellect, should be utterly weary of his life, though continuing to perform every duty in the most thorough spirit,—merely because he is disappointed in a boyish attachment, on which he has allowed himself to brood till it 'becomes a fatal malady. The inhabitants of Aberalva supply most of the subordinate personages ; and Mr. Kingsley knows and loves the Cornish fishermen too well not to have made his readers see them in all their picturesque individuality of manners and characters. Captain Willis, the old man-of-war's-man, is a masterly sketch of a type in which the village patriarch and the old sailor are individualized by an almost feminine gentleness of manner and purity of feeling. Grace Harvey, i the schoolmistress of Aberalva, the heroine of the story.

Hers is a character which those whose experience is formed in the great world, of action and society would pronounce overdrawn and improbable. The religious history of all ages, however, abounds with evidences of such persons, whose nervous organization is so peculiar as to render them the subjects of experiences which it is easy for them and for those around them to attribute to supernatural influences. It depends entirely upon the circumstances in which such persons are educated whether they rise to the highest elevation of saintly loveliness, or sink to the lowest depths of imbecility and only half-conscious imposture— whether they become the truest and noblest women, or the shameless unsexed creatures that are the tools of Romanist priests, Methodist preachers, and mesmeric lecturers. Grace will interest persons who read works of fiction to enlarge and illustrate their experience of human nature; and she will also interest the ordinarynovel-reader, for she is young, beautiful, in love, and has terrible trials to go through. For the second of these assertions let the following extract bear witness. Even in describing that most difficult object a beautiful woman's face, Mr. Kingsley does not take refuge in mere general phrases; he paints to the eye and. to the mind.

"Her figure is tall, graceful,. and slight; the severity of its outlines suiting well with the severity of her dress, with the brown stuff gown, and plain grey whittle. Her neck is long, almost too long : but all defects are forgotten in the first look at her face. We can see it fully, for her bonnet lies beside her on the rock.

"The mask, though thin, is perfect. The brow, like that of a Greek statue looks lower than it really is for the hair springs from below the bend of the forehead. The brain is verilong, and sweeps backward and upward in grand curves, till it attains above the ears a great expanse and height. She should be a character more able to feel than to argue ; full of all a woman's veneration, devotion, love of children,—perhaps, too, of a woman's anxiety. "The nose is slightly aquiline; the sharp-cut nostrils indicate a reserve of compressed strength and passion; the mouth is delicate ; the lips, which are full and somewhat heavy, not from coarseness, but rather from languor, show somewhat of both the upper and the under teeth. Her eyes are bent on the pool at her feet ; so that we can see nothing of them but the large sleepy lids, fringed with lashes so long and dark that the eye looks as if it had been painted, in the Eastern fashion, with antimony ; the dark lashes, darkeyebrows, dark hair, crisped (as West-country hair so often is) to its very roots, increase the almost ghost-like paleness of the face, not sallow, not snow-white, but of a clear, bloodless, waxen hue. "And now she lifts her eyes,—dark eyes, of preternatural largeness ; brilliant, too, but not with the sparkle of the diamond ; brilliant as deep clear i wells are, n which the mellow moonlight sleeps fathom-deep, between black walls of rock; and round them, and round the wide-opened lids, and arching eyebrow, and slightly wrinkled forehead, hangs an air of melancholy thought, vogue doubt, almost of startled fear ; then that expression passes, and the whole face collapses into a languor of patient sadness, which seems to say—' I cannot solve the mystery. Let Him solve it as seems good to

Him.' "

Our old friends of "Yeast," Claude Mellot and his charming wife, come into the story, and delight us with wise genial talk of art and life. There is too an American gentleman named Stangrave, in love with an actress, who has slave blood in her veins, and who wishes, as the price of her hand, to enlist the rich Northern voluptuary in the cause of Abolition. There is much excellent sense hereupon concerning American polities and society: and it may be remarked generally, that Mr. Kingsley's novels are more than usually interesting because they touch with dramatic life the current topics of the day, and are the vehicles for the utterance of decided and generous convictions on all that is most stirring in contemporary polities and social improvement. Here for instance, is a capital exposition of the objections that may 'fairly be brought against even the greatest of the Prceraphaelite pictures. It is a fragment from a long conversation, at the Academy Exhibition, between Stangrave and Claude Mellot.

"'But did you ever see a modern portrait which more perfectly expressed character ; which more completely fulfilled the requirements which you laid down a few evenings since ? '

" Never • and that makes me all the more cross with the wilful mistake of it. He lied painted every wrinkle.' "'Why not, if they were there ? '

" ' Because he had painted a face not one-twentieth of the size of life. What right had he to cram into that small space all the marks which Nature had spread over a far larger one ? ' "'Why not, again, if ho diminished the marks in proportion ? '

"'Just what neither he nor any man could do, without making them so small as to be invisible save under a microscope ; and the result was, that he had caricatured every wrinkle, as his friend has in those horrible knuckles of Shem's wife. Besides, I deny utterly your assertion that one is bound to paint what is there. On that very fallacy are they all making shipwreck.' "'Not paint what is there? And you are the man who talks of art being highest when it copies nature.' ' Exactly. And therefore you must paint, not what is there, but what you see there. They forget that human beings are men with two eyes, and not daguerreotype lenses with one eye ; and so are contriving and striving to introduce into their pictures the very defect of the daguerreotype which the stereoscope is required to correct.'

"'I comprehend. They forget that the double vision of our two eyes gives a softness, and indistinctness, and roundness, to every outline.'

"'Exactly so • and therefore, while for distant landscapes, motionless, and already softened by atmosphere, the daguerreotype is invaluable, (I shall do nothing else this summer but work at it,) yet for taking portraits, in any true sense, it will be always useless, not only for the reason I just gave, but for another one which the Pranaphaelites have forgotten.' " Because all the features cannot be in focus at once ? '

" ' Oh no I am not speaking of that. Art, for aught I know, may overcome that ; 'for it is a mere defect in the instrument. What I mean is this : it tries to represent as still what never yet was still for the thousandth part of a second—that is, a human face ; and as seen by a spectator who is perfectly still, which no man ever yet was. My dear fellow, don't you see that what some painters call idealizing a portrait is, if it be wisely done, really painting for you the face which you see, and know, and love her evershifting features, with expression varying more rapidly than the gleam of the diamond on her finger • features which you, in your turn, are looking at with ever-shifting eyes; While, perhaps, if it is a face which you love and have lingered over, a dozen other expressions equally belonging to it are hanging in your memory, and blending themselves with the actual picture on your retina,—till every little angle is somewhat rounded, every little wrinkle somewhatsoftened, every little shade somewhat blended with the surrounding light, so that the sum total of what you see, and are intended by ilea-van to see, is somewhat far softer, lovelier—younger, perhaps, thank Heaven—than it would look if your head was screwed. down in a vice, to look with one eye at her head screwed down in a vice also,—though even that, thanks to the muscles of the eye, would not produce the required ugliness ; and the only possible method of fulfilling the Prieraphaelite ideal would be, to set a petrified Cyclops to paint his petrified brother.' " That Two Years Ago is a book full of interesting writing, and that thousands of persons will read. it from beginning to end. with avidity, we have no manner of doubt. It is by no means a faultless book from the purely dramatic point of view. Mr. 'Kingsley obtrudes his moral; it would impress more if it were left to the reader to gather it from the narrative,—that is, supposing the narrative really to contain the moral, which we think it does to a great extent. Then he is given to interrupt his narrative by profuse disquisition, and by minute description, running out into agricultural, geological, and botanical details,—all excellent things in their way, and excellently done, but they stop the business of the book. These are grave faults in art; but we have already indicated our opinion that few persons will wish them absent, certainly not those who seek in books, not so much an absorbing tale, as to become acquainted with a living author, and to watch the action of his mind upon the multifarious subjects of contemporary interest.