Two Years Ago! TWO

What does it mean, this name set to a novel of to-day?

Nobody asked such a question when "Waverley" claimed the world's ear for a tale of "Sixty Years Since." Sixty years-two generations of human lifethese pleaded the author's excuse, at once, to the memories and the imaginations of all men. Everybody was willing, even anxious, to believe that things which happened when his father and his mother were but children must have been wonderful, racy, rich in interest and in instruction. Then, too, in the interval of those special sixty years, over which the first readers of "Waverley" were invited to travel backwards in search of pictures and emotions, how many amazing changes had been brought to pass! The long wars of the Stuarts had been forever stilledthe ancient monarchy of France had been shattered into pieces-the systems of the world, social, political, religious, economical, had been revolutionized, and that in the most tremendous manner. Men looked back over the last chaotic decade of the eighteenth century, to the age of Jacobin plots and divine right, with a curiosity of which we now can hardly appreciate the intensity.

But" Two Years Ago!" From what does this mere chink and cranny of time divide us? Two years ago, you, the reader, and we, the writer, of these pages were much the same creatures, were we not, that now we are-living much the same kind of lives, seeing much the same people, hoping the same hopes, fearing the same fears, wearied with the same weariness, or busy with the same business, as now? Two years ago the same men of little wisdom ruled the world, the same sinners plagued it, the same sufferers endured it. Why should any man tell us a story of two years ago?

Before you heed our answer to this question, oh, serious reader, think for a moment what manner of man he is whose work has provoked it!

When Charles Kingsley asks the world to hear him talk of things which

chanced two years ago, you may be sure that the things which chanced two years ago are as marvelous in his eyes, with a marvel of their own, as any things that ever happened on this earth at any time made memorable in the annals of men. For he is not a man to look up a title, as Proudhon looks up a theory, for the purpose of "firing it off like a pistol in the street," to attract the attention of the circulating libraries and the rest of mankind. If ever there lived a writer who wrote his life out into his books, Charles Kingsley is that 'writer, and the life which he leads is not a life of surprises, ecstasies, and sensations, but a life of sincere, and earnest, and resolute manliness-a life worth leading, in the first place, and, therefore, in the second place, worth writing out into books, for the help and behoof of all men and women, whom a manly life can reach, and touch, and bless, with strength, and faith, and peace. Not that Kingsley is one of those solemn Stylites (unhappily no more rare in modern Anglo-Saxondom than they were in ancient Egypt), who erect themselves, not "above themselves" (as wise Wordsworth and wiser Daniell before him said all men should), but above all their neighbors, upon the height of a "conscious mission." On the contrary, his writings teem with evidences of his extreme dislike, not to say horror, of all such assumptions and absurdities, and we dare say he would have heartily cheered the stout Pennsylvania farmer, of whom is related a celebrated and crushing reply to pretensions of this kind, put forth by the parson of the village in which he lived:

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Why will you preach to us every Sabbath about the damnation of infants?" asked the sturdy parishioner. "Because it is my duty to do so !” answered the pastor, impressively. "Oh! I dare say, and it's all very well to hold forth about it once in a while-but why every Sabbath?", "Because I am constrained to preach upon it continually!" "Constrained! Who constrains you?" "The Lord!-the Lord lays it upon me to cry aloud, and spare not, concerning this vital truth!" "The Lord lays it

the influences of iniquitous institutions, grow up to believe with Attila, the Scourge of God," or Mr. Toombs, the Senator from Georgia, or Paddy at Donnybrook Fair, that "war. is the natural state of man," so in civilized countries, and under the influence of institutions which foster equity by aiming to establish justice, men naturally come to be convinced, or, rather, possessed with a notion, that war is a thing so dreadfully abnormal and unredeemedly detestable, as to be put quite beyond the pale of political possibility. If this notion were radically sane, well and good! But it is not so. Odious as war is and dreadful, it is still a contingency upon which men and nations must count, however remotely, in calculating their career, just so long as honor and the capacity of indignation against wrong, and the determined love of right, survive to sway our human nature's purposes and destiny. And, on the other hand, just so long as selfinterest, too exclusively pursued, and self-indulgence pushed to luxury, shall retain the quality of corruption to vitiate prosperity and cultivation, just so long must peace have its dangers to be averted and its sins to be chastised in the way and manner which Providence shall see fit to choose. These dangers England had incurred; these sins, as her best sons most loudly protest, she had not escaped. Who has forgotten how grandly, even though a little fiercely, her laureate sang of peace and war, in the beginning of that great crisis of "two years ago," inspired with the passionate thought

The good that Tennyson looked for, and more good, too, Kingsley has found. His heart beat with the heart of his country, pulse for pulse, through all the weary, terrible months of the war; and, when the war was done, his first thought was to put the lesson it had taught him into words. This work is no light work, when it is a Christian poet and a Christian patriot who is to do it. That rush of victory at the Alma -that gallop with death at Balaklava— that mêlée of heroes at Inkermann-and that long agony of the trenches, did not pass before Charles Kingsley as a pageant kindling up in his soul a poor rapture of song. For in all the horror and in all the glory of those days, in the anguish and in the exultation of England, he saw the moving hand of Heaven, and he found, in this mighty spectacle of a nation's strife, and shame, and sorrow, what he would find in the simplest story of a human heart, a very solemn dealing of God with men, and a new reading out to him and to his of truths as old as Christianity, and yet as fresh to every living man as his own temptations are, his own hopes and desolations, his own affections, wretchednesses, and sins.

Therefore it is that Kingsley has given to his new novel this name"Two Years Ago"-which seems to refer us to the events of a passing age; and yet really points us to thoughts and emotions which transcend all timewhich seems to confine our interest to one race and land, and yet involves us in principles whereof the application is wide as the creeds of men. And as in criticising, so in reading his book, this must be borne steadily in mind, if we would do justice either to the author or ourselves. Not that it is impossible to learn the lesson of "Two Years Ago" without being distinctly conscious that the author meant to teach it us. For that lesson was so thoroughly mastered by himself, and had entered so absolutely into his own mind and heart, that it pervades the book like an atmosphere, and, while it is nowhere positively obtruded, cannot fail to write itself out in the quickened breathing and heightened color of every brave and

generous man or woman who simply follows the poet's guidance, never heeding how like are his "singing robes" to the garments of the altar.

But it will be impossible for any one to estimate aright, or adequately to recognize, the power displayed in this extraordinary book, without grasping firmly and fully the central and dominant idea of its construction. That idea once seized, much that might have seemed, when looked at from beneath, mere superfluous episode, will be seen to spring most really from the necessary life of the composition.

"Two Years Ago," for instance, is a novel without a hero or a heroine. Four men come and go through its pages, making love to, and variously complicating the lives of as many women; and yet no one of these men or these women monopolizes so large a share of the reader's attention and interest as to throw the others quite into a secondary position. Now, a novel without a hero or heroine is a very unusual novel; and as everybody revolts at first from what is unusual, many people, no doubt, will think this a sad fault in the book. It is, on the contrary, one of its highest merits, for the generative idea of the work requires that our special interest in the fortunes of this or that person should be subordinated to our perceptions of the wonderful manner in which reality-reality of passion, of purpose, and of effort-vindicates by its absence, as well as by its presence, the ways of God, and bears witness of Him to men. This is the upshot of the book; the sum of the whole matter-for this Kingsley holds to be the lesson of" Two Years Ago." It is to him what the lesson of all history is to Carlyle. He sees

alike in the dismal disasters which incompetency and presumption brought upon England's gallant army, and in the heroism of England's soldier sons, and in the saintly devotion of her daughters-alike in all the good and in all the ill of that eventful season, simply a new and tremendous proclamation of God's wrath against shams, and blunders, and vanity, and of His everlasting presence with simplicity, sincerity, faith, and

Two years ago, the outbreak of the great European war found in England, and occupying towards each other the various relations of ordinary English life, such as English life has been during the feverish twenty years of steam-history, certain persons more or less interesting, either from their character or their position. Some of these persons belonged to what are called the better classes of English society, and were certainly no worse, if they were not much better than the average members of their order. Of these were Lord Scoutbush, a young peer and guardsman, a "good-hearted, whole-souled fellow," in the St. James's street acceptation of these terms; generous, wellbred, honorable, frivolous as much by habit as by constitution, flighty, inadequate, certainly not very happy, nor, indeed, very positively estimable, and yet really willing and even anxious to be a brighter, and better, and more useful man, if by any means he could compass such ends; and of these, too, were Lord Scoutbush's sisters, Valencia and Lucia St. Just-Valencia, a sweet, lovely, and lovable, half-spoilt woman of the world, a fiery heart and a pas sionate soul, hidden in a character wayward capricious, undefined, a creature to be pitied at once and adored, wept over, and worshiped, a being hard enough to seize and hold, but if once seized and held, a most true and gracious woman-Lucia, a wife wedded in the flush of a young romantic passion, and clinging, after the sweet romance of life had been cruelly worn away from her heart and her home, with a kind of hushed and desperate tenderness to the idol she had made for herself; a quiet martyr to that mystery of utter self-surrender which men so glibly call the "devotion of women," and count upon as calmly, as if it were the simplest thing in nature, not worth, indeed, so much as the pains of looking for its sacred meaning.

Not quite of the same rank and breeding with this noble family were the persons most intimately connected with its fates. Elsley Vavasour, Lucia's domestic Juggernaut, though the world knew him two years ago only as poet, gentleman, and husband of a viscount's sister, had begun life, and, in fact, makes the acquaintance of Kingsley's readers in the opening chapter of the book, as John Briggs-bottle-boy and

apprentice to the leading medical practitioner of Whitbury town. He had a soul above pestles and mortars, however, and so had run away from his benefactor and best friend, and from all his family, in a fit of rage against his fellow-apprentice, after nearly poisoning the most respectable old banker in the town, by giving him a frightful dose, mixed for quite another person. Genius he had, this John Briggs, of a certain kind, and a genial nature, alternately fierce and feeble, as such natures are wont to be; a brain less accessible to inspiration than addicted to selfintoxication; a spirit delighting in adulations and aspirations more than in achievements and affection. He was, in short, what not a few blazing lights of these latter days have been-a curious and pathetic creature, combining in one altogether lamentable entity, the soul of a Brahmin with the mind of a Sadducee, and the senses of a Sybarite. Not much like Elsley Vavasour, is Frank Headley, the curate of Aberalva, and the true, devoted lover of Valencia St. Just. Two years ago, the cholera in his parish, and war in his land, and love in his own manly soul, found him a perplexed, bewildered, but, altogether, right-hearted, noble, and high-spirited man, trying to be a priest of God according to what he fancied his commission from the church to be, rather than according to his authentic capacity, and the consecration of God in his own simple manhood; trying to govern and guide other men, while he was striving to put down and put out of sight all in his own nature that drew him most closely and sympathizingly to them, and so, very naturally, coming to grief" all the while.

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Tom Thurnall, again, led a very different kind of life from Headley. From his youth up, a mortal full of resources, spirit, passions, and perceptions-a quick-handed, quick-sighted, quick-thoughted Ulysses of a man, Tom Thurnall had come home to England two years ago, from an Odyssey of years, laden with Australian gold enough to cheer his poor old father's lonely fireside forever; and having lost the same in a shipwreck on his native coast, had forthwith set to work to make up his fortunes again in the village whereof the Viscount Scoutbush was chief lord and man of rank. There he stumbled on Mr. Vavasour, in whom

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he recognized his old fellow-apprentice, John Briggs, and on Frank Headley, whose clerical ways amused him as much as his stout, true nature attracted; and there Tom Thurnall set to work to acquire influence and pounds sterling, much after the manner and in the spirit of the old Viking, who professed to believe neither in Christ, nor Mahomet, nor Odin, but in his own good sword, and the keel of his own sea-dragon! Tom is not left, as will easily be supposed, without a romance. He loves, in his Berserking way, the beautiful, fanatical young schoolmistress Aberalva, Grace Harvey, who had saved his life from the shipwreck, and given her heart to the man whom she had snatched from the abyss. And he has a vague connection, never cleared up wholly, till the story has considerably advanced, with a strange, tropical creature, the Signora Cordifiamma, who is the wonder and delight of London, and to whom Lord Scoutbush pays hopeless, fruitless, piteous court. Her Scoutbush sees most frequently at the house of his friend Claude Mellot, the painter, and Sabina, his wife-two very charming, gay, affectionate, brilliant, happy souls, who live in the most delectable possible humming-bird's nest of a home

bright with pictures, and sweet with flowers-an ideal artist's paradise; so fair, you wonder that even Scoutbush's stammering suit should not prosper within its enchanted bounds. Or, rather, you might so wonder, were it not for the presence there of an accomplished, stately, and handsome American, who kneels nearer to the luxurious beauty, and wields a stronger word, and a clearer, it is plain, than the poor little warm-hearted peer.

Such are the leading personages upon whose fates and characters the storm of "Two Years Ago" comes down, to develope and decide them forever. How it comes to pass that an American is brought within the scope of this history, we shall presently show. We must now ask the reader to go to the perusal or reperusal of the book itself, with this conception of it in his mind, and then to tell us whether we are not right in pronouncing "Two Years Ago" to be not only the most powerfullywritten and the most exuberant in life of all the books which Kingsley has given to the world, but the most coherent also, and complete in an artistic