_Alton Locke_ was no doubt more popular, more passionately in earnest,
more definite and intelligible than _Yeast_; and if I fail to hold it
quite as the equal of _Yeast_ in literary merit, it is because these very
qualities necessarily impair it as a work of art. It was written, we
well know, under violent excitement and by a terrible strain on the
neuropathic organism of the poet-preacher. It is undoubtedly spasmodic,
crude, and disorderly. A generation which has grown fastidious on the
consummate finish of _Esmond_, _Romola_, and _Treasure Island_, is a
little critical of the hasty outpourings of spirit which satisfied our
fathers in the forties, after the manner of _Sybil_, the _Last of the
Barons_, or _Barnaby Rudge_. The Tennysonian modulation of phrase had
not yet been popularised in prose, and spasmodic soliloquies and
melodramatic eloquence did not offend men so cruelly as they offend us
now.

As Yeast was inspired by Sartor Resartus, so _Alton Locke_ was inspired
by Carlyle's _French Revolution_. The effect of Carlyle upon Kingsley is
plain enough throughout, down to the day when Carlyle led Kingsley to
approve the judicial murder of negroes in Jamaica. Kingsley himself
tells us, by the mouth of Alton Locke (chap. ix.), "I know no book,
always excepting Milton, which at once so quickened and exalted my
poetical view of man and his history, as that great prose poem, _the
single epic of modern days_, Thomas Carlyle's _French Revolution_."
Kingsley's three masters were--in poetry, Tennyson; in social philosophy,
Carlyle; in things moral and spiritual, Frederick D. Maurice. He had far
more of genius than had Maurice; he was a much more passionate reformer
than Tennyson; he was far more genial and social than Carlyle. Not that
he imitated any of the three. _Yeast_ is not at all copied from Sartor,
either in form or in thought; nor is _Alton Locke_ in any sense imitated
from the _French Revolution_. It is inspired by it; but _Yeast_ and
_Alton Locke_ are entirely original, and were native outbursts from
Kingsley's own fierce imagination and intense human sympathy.

And in many ways they were amongst the most powerful influences over the
thought of the young of the last generation. In the early fifties we
were not so fastidious in the matter of style and composition as we have
now become. Furious eloquence and somewhat melodramatic incongruities
did not shock us so much, if we found them to come from a r