The Sun.
London, England, 1851-11-07 00:00:00

LITERATURE

THE SAINT'S TRAGEDY. By Charles Kings-
ley, junior, Rector q/ Eversley. Second Edition.
John W. Parker.
Whenever the honours of a second edition are ac-
corded to any literary production within a moderate
period after its original appearance, we may rest as-
sured, in the majority of instances, that the intrinsic
merits of the effusion have justified its popularity.
There is no doubt, of course, that sometimes a work
of a somewhat indifferent character may be puffed
into a certain degree of notoriety, and that its author
may by the same means be invested with a mo•
mentary reputation. But so sure as we observe a
volume by a hitherto unknown writer rise to the dig-
nity of a reprint without any adventitious aids of the
kind particularized, so certain we may feel that it
possesses within it the germs of a "celebrity,"
germs requiring only time and opportunity for their
development. In "The Saint's Tragedy," by Charles
Kingsley, junior, Rector of Eversley, we recognise
a production precisely of the nature here intimated :
and we may take the fact of its having already
reached a second edition as proof positive of its in-
nate excellence as a dramatic composition. Fortu-
nately for those among his admirers who might feel
disposed to predict for him a brilliant career, as a
contributor to our national literature, he himself is,
apart from the book before us, fulfilling even now in
a very great measure their various and elevated anti-
cipations. His ingenious problem, entitled " Yeast,"
recently republished, with additions, from the pages
of Fraser'a Magazine, might of itself be adequate
evidence of this, supposing even that a very general
rumour did not also fix upon him the authorship of
" Alton Locke," that not least remarkable among
fictitious autobiographies. When it is remembered
that with the composition of the volume just men-
tioned, Mr. Kingsley combines, we believe, the assi-
duous discharge of his duties as an ecclesiastic, it
must be acknowledged that his faculties display as
much industry of application as luminous capacity
and vigour of intelligence. We speak thus of
the Rector of Eversley, solely from our know-
ledge of him through his literary effusions,
being otherwise strangers to him altogether; and
our tribute to what he has already achieved must
consequently be taken as one wholly and entirely dis-
pa'sionate. Admitting the powers displayed by Mr.
Kingsley, since the publication of his first perform-
ance—" The Saint's Tragedy," now lying before us in
the honourable guise of a cheap edition—we must,
nevertheless, avow that we regard that performance
as the one the most remarkable of its kind, and as the
work upon which he may the most securely rest his
reputation. According to the quaint and simple word-
ing of the title-page, this "Saint's Tragedy" is no
other than " the true story of Elizabeth of Hungary,
Landgravine of Thuringia, Saint of the Romish
Calendar." In the marvellous history of that most
extraordinary personage, the author has discovered,
with the subtle appreciation of a poet, much that is
in truth most tragic, blending with the record of her
deeds of benevolence and maceration an exquisite pathos
and a touching sublimity. Mr. Kingsley has, in doing
this, thrown his imagination back over a distance of six
hundred years, writing throughout in every instance
in the spirit not of the nineteenth but of the thirteenth
century. Aware at the very outset of the require-
ments of his position as the dramatic celebrant of Eli-
sabeth, he invokes the genius of that remote epoch in
the Proem, speaking in words touchingly melodious:and
persuasive. Appealing as Epimetheus, he sings—

" Wake again, Teutonic Father-ages,
Speak again, beloved primaeval creeds;
Flash ancestral spirit from your pages,
Wake the greedy age to noble deeds.

" Ye who built the churches where we worship,
Ye who framed the laws by which we move,
Fathers, long belied, and long forsaken,
Oh! forgive the children of your hive!"
Echoing the call as Prometheus, he exclaims—
" Speak! but ask us not to be as ye were!
All but God is changing day by day.
He who breathes on man the plastic spirit,
Bids us mould ourselves its rube of clay.

" Old decays but foster new creations;
Bones and ashes feed the golden aorn;
Fresh elixirs wander every moment,
Down the veins through which the live past feeds
its child, the live unborn.
Closing his invocation thus, Mr. Kingsley enters at
once upon the narrative of that wondrous history
which ended only in the canonization of Elizabeth, the
Landgravine of Thuringia, a saint, the marvels of
whose charities and self-sacrifices have caused her to
be regarded with a peculiar and reverential affection
by a large proportion of the toiling children of
Christendom. In recounting this memorable story
our author has scarcely failed in a single instance to
authenticate his otherwise bewildering statements by
a variety of most interesting notes, transcribed for the
most part from the fourth volume of Basnage's
" Canisius," a volume comprising the "Eight Books
concerning Saint Elizabeth, by Dietrich the Thurin-
gian." For these very curious and remarkable quo-
tations alone, the majority of scholars could not fail
to be thankful to Mr. Kingsley ; and for our own
part we must confess to having a grateful sense of the
boon afforded us by the insertion at page 179 of a
portion of that noble old ballad by Dietrich, in the
rhythm of which we do indeed recognise with our
author the throbbings of a " heart of flesh" under the
serge of the good old monk. Cordially, too, do we
sympathize in the evident indignation with which be
listens to the sneer of Basnage o❑ what he " unfairly"
designates a "carmen ineptum, foolish ballad," a ballad
on the contrary in which it is impossible not to per-
ceive a fine appreciation of the grand and the pathetic.
The five acts of this " Saint's Tragedy" are ap-
portioned in regard to time in graduated in-
tervals from A.D. 1220 to A.D. 1235, and
in regard to place, chiefly in Eisenach and
the Wartburg, changing, however, subsequently
to Bamberg and ultimately to Marpurg. The dra-
matis persona present to the mind an agreeable di-
versity of character, from the gentle Lewis to the
fanatical Conrad, from the gallant and cheery Count
of Varila to the luxurious and querulous Bishop of
Bamberg, from the faithful Isentrudis to the saintly
Elizabeth. Several of the scenes, such as the one
dedicated to the delineation of a peasant and a wood-
cutter (Act 2, scene 6) reveal in a ♦ivid manner the
completeness with which, as we have already inti-
mated, Mr. Kingsley has cast his ideas of men and
things in the mould of the middle ages. Snatches of
song scattered through the volume are some of them
fraught with exceeding beauty, and display on the
part of their writer an unusual aptitude for lyrical
compositions. His account of the sufferings of
Elizabeth will be found to be one abounding in evi-
dences of poetic ability of a high order ; but what we
value more than this in " The Saint's Tragedy," is
the fact of its affording a masterly analysis of one of
the most curious phases in the human character. As a
work yielding a very profound study to the psychologist
the book before us is in many ways most remarkable.
It accomplishes a task which was but hinted in the
well-known " St. Simon Stylites" of Alfred Tenny-
son. It recounts the battle towards a preternatural
godliness in the instance of the Landgravine of Thu-
ringia, in spite of the intense sensibility of a most
loving and susceptible temperament. As an expres-
sion of the passionate tenderness of her nature, we
need only transcribe her outbreak of emotion when
declaring her love for Lewis to Walter of Varilla :
.‘ Tell—tell him—God!
Have I grown mad, or a child within the moment?
The earth has lost her grey sad hue, and blazes
With her old life-light; hark! yon wind's a song--
Those clouds are angels' robes.—That fiery west
Is paved with smiling faces.—l am a woman,
And all things bid me love! my dignity
Is thus to cast my virgin pride away,
And find my strength in weakness.—Busy brain!"
It is this absorbing passion which Elizabeth
yields up on the altar of her devotion. Nay, it is the
fruit of this passion that she abandons with a rending
of the heartstrings on the occasion of her widowhood.
In the evoking of this dread tragedy of sacrifice upon
sacrifice, Mr. Kingsley squanders around him flowers
of poetry in profusion. Of these we shell indulge
ourselves by giving a few brilliant illustrations.
Already we have spoken of the beauty discoverable
here and there in the little snatches of songs. Here,
for example, is a lovely fragment of poesy from the
lips of Guts :
" Changeless march the stars above,
Changeless morn succeeds to even;
And the everlasting hills,
Changeless watch the changeless heaven.

"Can the sailor move the main?
Will the potter heed the clay?
Mortal! where the spirit drives,
Thither must the wheels obey.
" Neither ask, nor fret, nor strive:
Where thy path is, thou shalt go.
He who made the stream of time
Wafts thee down to weal or woe."
An exquisite song, answered comically enough by
the Fool, thus:—
" The same piece of clay makes a tile,
A pitcher, a taw or a brick:
Dan Horace knew life; you may cut out a saint,
Or a bench from the self-same stick.

•
" We fall on our legs in this world,
Blind kittens, tossed in neck and heels:
'Tis dame Circumstance licks Nature's cubs into shape,
She's the mill-head, if we are the wheels.
6, Then why puzzle and fret, plot and dream?
He that's wise will just follow his nose;
Contentedly fish, while be swims with the stream;
'Tis no business of his where it goes."
Better still than the song of Guta is the tong of
Elizabeth
Oh! that we two were Maying
Down the stream of the soft spring breeze;
Like childre❑ with violets playing
In the shade of tho whispering tug's.