We have as yet said nothing about that which was Kingsley’s most characteristic and effective work—­his political fictions.  These were the pieces by which his fame was first achieved, and no doubt they are the works which gave him his chief influence on his generation.  But, for that very reason, they suffered most of all his writings as works of art. Yeast is a book very difficult to classify.  It is not exactly a novel, it is more than a Dialogue, it is too romantic for a sermon, it is too imaginative for a pamphlet, it is too full of action for a political and social treatise.  Incongruous as it is, it is interesting and effective, and contains some of Kingsley’s best work.  It has some of his most striking verses, some of his finest pictures of scenery, many of his most eloquent thoughts, all his solid ideas, the passion of his youth, and the first glow of his enthusiasm.  It was written before he was thirty, before he thought himself to be a philosopher, before he professed to be entrusted with a direct message from God.  Its title—­Yeast—­suggests that it is a ferment thrown into the compound mass of current political, social, and religious ideas, to make them work and issue in some new combination.  Kingsley himself was a kind of ferment.  His mind was itself destined to cause a violent chemical reaction in the torpid fluids into which it was projected.  His early and most amorphous work of Yeast did this with singular vigour, in a fresh and reckless way, with rare literary and poetic skill.

If I spoke my whole mind, I should count Yeast as Kingsley’s typical prose work.  It is full of anomalies, full of fallacies, raising difficulties it fails to solve, crying out upon maladies and sores for which it quite omits to offer a remedy.  But that is Kingsley all over.  He was a mass of over-excited nerves and ill-ordered ideas, much more poet than philosopher, more sympathetic than lucid, full of passionate indignation, recklessly self-confident, cynically disdainful of consistency, patience, good sense.  He had the Rousseau temperament, with its furious eloquence, its blind sympathies and antipathies, its splendid sophistries. Yeast was plainly the Christian reverse of the Carlyle image and superscription, as read in Sartor and Past and Present.  Kingsley was always profoundly influenced by Frederick D. Maurice, who was a kind of spiritual Carlyle, without the genius or the learning of the mighty Sartor, with a fine gift of sympathy instead of sarcasm, with a genuine neo-Christian devoutness in lieu of an old-Hebrew Goetheism.  Kingsley had some of Carlyle’s passion, of his eloquence, of his power to strike fire out of stones.  And so, just because Yeast was so disjointed as a composition, so desultory in thought, so splendidly defiant of all the conventions of literature and all the ten commandments of British society in 1849, I am inclined to rank it as Kingsley’s typical