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‘ ’ 
classical world was a “‘ going down to the mothers,’’ and 
the start of a great course which still. goes on. This 
sentence from one of his letters will suggest what is meant 
better than a long explanation. ‘‘ In five and twenty years 
my ruling idea has been what my friend Huxley has lately 
set forth as common to him and Comte; that the 
reconstruction of society on a scientific basis is not only 
possible, but the only political object much worth striving 
for!” 
Such then being the attitude of Kingsley to the old 
world and the new, we should expect to find him writing 
some poems out of an exuberant heart in the ‘‘ Gothic ”’ 
spirit. And so wedo. The very best of them is ‘‘ The Ode 
to the North-east Wind,’’ but not less delightful in its own 
kind is that jolly ballad, ‘‘ The Song of the little Baltung.”’ 
On the other hand we should expect to find him dealing 
with classical subjects also, but in a peculiar way. He 
might have objected to a phrase in the last paragraph, that 
Rome inherited Greek art, for he writes somewhere, ‘‘ The 
classical poets (Greek I mean—hang Latin Cockney 
Flunkeys).’’ But he writes this ungraciously, for the Latin 
poets treated their Greek inheritance very much as Kingsley 
himself did. They adapted it to another realm of thought 
and language. In ‘‘ The Heroes ”’ he told anew the stories 
of the Greek mythology for his children. In answer to a 
friend’s criticism he wrote, ‘‘ I feel what you say about not 
Greek and too Greek ; but I had laid my account with all 
that before I wrote. If I tell the story myself as you wish, 
I can’t give the children the Greek spirit—either morally 
or in manner ; therefore I have adopted a sort of simple 
ballad tone, and tried to make my prose as metrical as 
possible. The archaisms are all slips in the rough copy, 
and shall be amended, as shall all recondite allusions ; but. 
you must remember as to modernisms, that we Cambridge 
men are taught to translate Greek by its modern equivalent 
even to slang.”’ 
The reference to Cambridge is interesting. For better 
or worse it explains a good deal in Kingsley and his writings. 
But the main point of this letter is that Kingsley wished to 
convey the Greek spirit, and thought he could best do so 
by modifying the Greek form. And if so, his whole temper 
and training would lead him also to believe that spirit means 
life, and life means development, and therefore the spirit 
itself could not be in Eversley just what it had been in 
Athens. ‘Tio some devotees of the classics that might seem 
sacrilegious. To Kingsley—and his Cambridge training had 
something to do with his views—there would be no choice 
in the matter ; such development was a fact to be observed 
and to lay account with ; any other method would be 
artificial. 
