BOOKS.

MR. KINGSLEY'S WATER-BABIES.*

Ma. KINGSLEY'S genius is so remarkable for its sympathy with the irrational forms of animal life, and the rational element in it is so often merged in a sort of noble but furious bark at what he dislikes, that we seldom read his tales without a feeling that the ideas with which be begins, often subtle and fine enough, are sure to tail off into something half animal before the conclusion. In this fairy story, begun with a clear purpose enough, the water-dog in Mr. Kingsley has prevailed more than usually early in the book, and before the end of it we have almost literally nothing left but the swishing of his wet tail, his floundering in the water, and the -deep bay of his liberal conservatism. , He has prefixed a kind of * The Water-Babies. A Fs, ai Tale tar a Land Baby. By the Ray. Charles Kingsley With two illastranons by J. Noel Paton, R.S.A. Macmillan.

warning to the critics which would appear to deprecate any remarks we may have to offer on this eccentric gambol of his

genius :— "Hence, unbelieving Sadducees,

And less believing Pharisees, With MI conventionalities ; And leave a country Muse at ease To play at leap-frog, if she please, With children and realities."

Well, we have no objection to Mr. Kingsley's freaks either with children or realities ; but we rather wish that when he is playing at leap-frog with children he would suit the dimensions of his realities to his small play-fellows, and not insist on their taking such tremendously high metaphysical backs, at times, which

are certainly quite beyond the little arms of his infantine friends. He dedicates the book to his youngest son, Grenville Arthur, with the motto-

" Come, read me my riddle, my good little man ; If you cannot read it, no grown-up folk can," and we are quite content to abide by Grenville Arthur's jedg- meta. If he understands the joke about the Gairfowl's objecting to marry his deceased wife's sister, about the whales "butting at each other with their ugly noses day and night from year's end to year's end," like "our American cousins,"— about the "abolition of the Have-his-carcase Act," and the " Indignation Meetings,"—or the Back-stairs way out of Hell, or the Hippopotamus major in the brain,—or a hundred others, we will pronounce Mr. Kingsley's tale a gool fairy tale for children, —for we do not deny that it had an idea ;—but if not, as we feel tolerably confident, why, then we arraign Mr. Kingsley of that half-animal impatience which cannot be satisfied with working out patiently a single distinct idea,—but must interpolate arrogant inarticulate barks at a hundred things which have no business at all in his tale, and tumble head over heels in scores of unfit places just because there and then his intellect feels inclined for

somerset of which neither men nor children will appreciate the fun.

The purpose of the tale,—and it was a fine one,—seems to have been to adapt Mr. Darwin's theory of the natural selection of species to the understanding of children, by giving it an in- dividual, moral, and religious, as well as a mere specific and scientific application. He took the watery world, principally because he knows it so well, and because the number of trans- formations which go on in it are so large, and so easily capable of semi-word significance, that it served best to illustrate his purpose. For ex,ample, the specific difference between salmon and trout Mr. Kingsley interprets as a difference between enterprise and industry on the one hand, and stupid greediness on the other,—as shown in this conversation between his water- baby and the salmon :—

not even mention them, if we can help it ; for I am sorry to say they are relations of ours who do us no credit. A groat many years " Why do you dislike the trout so ? ' asked Tom. My dear, we do ago they were just like us: but they were so lazy, and cowardly, and greedy, that instead of going down to the sea every year to see the world and grow strong and fat, they chose to stay and poke about in the little streams and eat worms and grubs; and they aro very properly punished for it ; for they have grown ugly and brown and spotted and small ; and are actually so degraded in their tastes, that they will eat our children.' "

The same general drift is intended to pervade the book, which contains numberless hints that wherever moral qualities, or the germs of moral qualities, begin, there, at least, is a turning point of natural development or degradation in the individual, and thence also in the species. Thus Mr. Kingeley hints that the specific difference between the Irish and Saxons may be originally rooted in moral, more than in physical distinctions, and might be ultimately traced to the- love of giving " a pleasant answer," if we take into account the long accumulations of generations of dispositions of the same sort. Again the Gairfowls are meant to be the types of races who die out through mere traditional pride, from refusing to avail themselves of the alliance of fresh blood, and determining to stand all alone on the precedents and etiquettes of ancestral usage. The same moral Darwinianism is the idea of the story of the idle Doasymilikes, and also, of course, of the water-baby's own history. Indeed, all the various physiolo- gical teansformations in the story are intended to illustrate some such notion as this. And the fairy whose watchwork-nature obliges her to punish everybody's mistakes by treating them exactly as they have treated others, " Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid," is meant, we suppose, to represent the invariable and unalter- able principle of God's universal Providence. She is, as we are • taught at the close, after all but another form of divine Love, which is the motive, if not the principal agency in effecting these transformations. Yet surely it is not quite true to represent men's actions as generally returned upon them in kind,—the bleeding doctors and over-cramming schoolmasters being by no means uniformly bled and over-crammed in their turn. However, the fairy is commissioned, we suppose, to show generally that individuals, and therefore races, suffer degradation in conse- quence of the accumulations of their errors and sins ;—in conse- quence of not keeping their eyes open to God's laws, and still more of not obeying them when they do know them.

Well, this conviction of Mr. King;ley's, and its many lively (if often fanciful) illustrations, was worth a fairy story, and none could be more spirited or vigorous than this up to the point when he gets his transformed chimney-sweep (who, coarse and ignorant, but wishing to be clean, was by the law of fairy consequences transformed into a water-baby) to the mouth of the salmon river. Even this portion has been improved con- siderably since its first publication, and made a more coherent fairy story by the earlier introduction of the fairy. The descrip- tion of the storm, which fills the stream and enables all the living things in it if desiring to reach the sea, to sweep down upon its swollen waters, is one of Mr. Kingsley's finest descriptive efforts. We have room but for a short passage :—

" But out of the water he dared not put his head ; for the rain came down by bucketsful, and the hail hammered like shot on the stream, and churned it into foam ; and soon the stream rose, and rushed down, higher and higher, and fouler and fouler, full of beetles, and sticks and straws, and worms, and addle-eggs and wood-lice, and leeches, and odds and ends, and omnium-gatherums, and this, that, and the other, enough to fill nine museums. Tom could hardly stand against the stream, and hid behind a rock. But the trout did not ; for out they rushed from among the stones and began gobbling the beetles and leeches in the most greedy and quarrelsome way, and swimming about with great worms hanging out of their mouths, tugging and kicking to get them away from each other. And now, by the flashes of the lightning, Tom saw a new sight—all the bottom of the stream alive with great eels, turning and twisting along, all down stream and away. They had been hiding for weeks past in the cracks of the rocks, and in burrows in the mud ; and Tom had hardly ever seen them, except now and then at night ; but now they were all out, and went hurrying past him so fiercely and wildly that he was quite frightened. And as they hurried past he could hear them say to each other, 'We must ran, we must run. What a jolly thunderstorm ! Down to the sea, down tothe sea!' And then the otter came by with all her brood, twining and sweeping along as fast as the eels themselves ; and she spied Tom as

she came by, and said Now is your time, eft, if you want to see the world. Come along, children, never mind those nasty eels ; we shall breakfast on salmon to-morrow. Down to the sea, down to the sea!'"

But no sooner does Mr. Kingsley get cut of the salmon stream, than his pen begins to flag, his power to spend itself in the most eecentric capers, and his proper theme to fade away at intervals from his imagination. He begins chaffing the scientific inen,—and his chaff is neither subtle to men nor intel- ligible to children. He barks right and left at everything he does not like, whether it has anything to do with his leading idea or not. Professor Owen is chaffed for insisting on the hippocampus minor as the specific distinction of man ; the cram-systems of education and examination are chaffed; the nescience of medical men is chaffed; universal progress and Mr. Lincoln are chaffed ; the orthodox fanatics who believe in hearsay, and don't want to be set right, are chaffed; the positive philosophy, collecting multifold experiences, but refusing to learn their meaning, is chaffed, and all in a way very few men will be able to laugh at, and no children at all (unless it be Grenville Arthur) to under- stand. What is the use of four whole pages of this sort of thing?

"Now the doctors had it all their own way ; and to work they went in earnest, and they gave the poor Professor divers and sundry medicines, as prescribed by the ancients and moderns, from Hippocrates to Feuchtersleben, as below, viz. :—Hellebore, to wit—hellebore of 2Eta ; hellebore of Galata ; hellebore of Sicily ; and all other hellebores, after the method of the helleborizing helleborists of the helleboric era. But that would not do. Bumpsterhausen's blue follicles would

not stir an inch out of his encephalo-digital region." "And if he had but been a convict lunatic, and had shot at the Queen, killed all his creditors to avoid paying them or indulged in any other little amiable eccentricity of that kind, they would have given him in addition—the healthiest situation in England, on Easthampstead Plain, free run of Windsor Forest, the Times every morning, a double-barrelled gun and pointers, and leave to shoot three Wellington College boys a week (not more) in case black game were scarce."

We may smile a grim smile at first, but it is impossible to smile when that sort of nonsense is prolonged beyond a certain point. And this kind of thing strays at large through the book, and is seldom very amusing. We may smile when we are first told that Professor Pttlimllnsprts, Professor of Necrobioneopalaeo- hydrochthonanthropopithekology would have called a water-baby by two long names, "of which the first would have said a little about Tom, and the second all about himself, for, of course, he would have called him Hydrotecnon Ptthmllnsprtsianum,' when the same species of fun goes on for a great many pagl, together, we feel as if we were hearing one of those insane extra- vaganzas at the minor theatres, which are meant apparently to cast a gloom over the very name of fun, and induce early idiocy in the actors. And this fault is repeated so systematically dining the latter part of the tale, that it quite sickens the reader, even though he may have what Miss Muloch painfully denominates "the child-heart." Indeed, the worst of it is, that when the child might possibly enjoy the caricature, the idea caricatured is quite beyond his grasp,—as, for example, in that ecstatic apostrophe to the Backstairs,—and when the man might, perhaps, enjoy the idea, the caricature is far too broad and its tone too screaming for his taste. For example, the follow- ing is said by the fairy to a water-baby to explain why she can- not let him know the back way out of the place of punishment, i.e., the way which saves you from the effect of evil without saving you from the cause. People would importune him as fol- lows, she says, to divulge the secret :—

"For thousands of years we have been paying, and petting, and obeying, and worshipping quacks who told us they had the key of the backstairs, and could smuggle us up them ; and in spite of all our dis- appointments, we will honour, and glorify, and adore, and beatify, and translate, and apotheotize you likewise, on the chance of your knowing something about the backstairs, that we may all go on pilgrimage to it ; and, even if we cannot get up it, lie at the foot of it, and cry= Oh! back- stairs, precious backstairs, invaluable backstairs, requisite backstairs, necessary backstairs, good-natured backstairs, cosmopolitan backstairs, comprehensive backstairs accommodating backstairs, well-bred back- stairs, comfortable backstairs, humane backstairs, reasonable backstairs, long-sought backstairs, coveted backstairs, aristocratic backstairs, respectable backstairs, gentlemanlike backstairs, ladylike backstairs, commercial backstairs, economical backstairs practical backstairs, logical backstairs, deductive backstairs, orthodox backstairs, probable backstairs, credible backstairs demonstrable backstairs, irrefragable backstairs, potent backstairs, all-but-omnipotent backstairs, Sm. Save us from the consequences of our own actions, and from the cruel fairy, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid!

This sort of thing might clearly be expanded by the Binomial Theorem to any number of terms you pleased.

Upon the whole, in spite of some passages of great beauty, a fine idea, and much knowledge to work with, Mr. Kingsley has, as he too often does, spoiled a good story by his undisciplined and ill-concentrated imagination, which induces him to interrupt one train of thought just to vent his disgust at a dozen follies or crimes which occur to him while he is at work. He is like a dog which constantly loses the scent by turning aside to worry cats, bark at ill-looking beggars, or simply to play with a bone with his four legs in the air. However noble the bay, or however graceful the frolics of such a creature, the fairy Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid will be obliged to reward him with a very mutilated and un- satisfactory fame,—unworthy both of Mr. Kingsley's real genius and of his noble aims.