That iron age--which some have thought
Of mettle rather overwrought--
Is now all overcast."

And finally, "The Saint's Tragedy" (1848) of Charles Kingsley affords a
case in which mediaeval biography is made the pretext for an assault upon
mediaeval ideas. It is a _tendenz_ drama in five acts, founded upon the
"Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary," as narrated by her contemporary,
Dietrich the Thuringian. Its militant Protestantism is such as might be
predicted from Kingsley's well-known resentment of the Romanist attitude
towards marriage and celibacy; from his regard for freedom of thought;
and from that distrust and contempt of Popish priestcraft which involved
him in his controversy with Newman. "The Middle Age," says the
Introduction, "was, in the gross, a coarse, barbarous, and profligate
age. . . . It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness of the time
which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time the
Apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of the mediaeval
saints. . . . So rough and common a life-picture of the Middle Age will,
I am afraid, whether faithful or not, be far from acceptable to those who
take their notions of that period principally from such exquisite dreams
as the fictions of Fouque, and of certain moderns whose graceful
minds . . . are, on account of their very sweetness and simplicity,
singularly unfitted to convey any true likeness of the coarse and stormy
Middle Age. . . . But really, time enough has been lost in ignorant
abuse of that period, and time enough also, lately, in blind adoration of
it. When shall we learn to see it as it was?"

Polemic in its purpose and anti-Catholic in temper, "The Saint's Tragedy"
then seeks to dispel the glamour which romance had thrown over mediaeval
life. Kingsley's Middle Age is not the holy Middle Age of the German
"throne-and-altar" men; nor yet the picturesque Middle Age of Walter
Scott. It is the cruel, ignorant, fanatical Middle Age of "The Amber
Witch" and "The Succube." But Kingsley was too much of a poet not to
feel those "last enchantments" which whispered to Arnold from Oxford
towers, maugre his "strong sense of the irrationality of that period."
The saintly, as well as the human side, of Elizabeth's character is
portrayed with sympathy, though poetically the best thing in the drama
are the songs of the Crusaders.

Kingsley, in effect, was always good at a ballad. His finest work in
this kind is modern,