In this series of papers I have been trying to note some of the more
definite literary forces which tended to mould English opinion during the
epoch of the present Queen. I can remember the issue of nearly all the
greater products of the Victorian writers, or at least the heyday of
their early fame. I do not speak of any living writer, and confine
myself to the writers of our country. Much less do I permit myself to
speak of those living lights of literature from whom we may yet receive
work even surpassing that of those who are gone. My aim has been not so
much to weigh each writer in the delicate balance of mere literary merit,
but rather, from the point of view of the historian of ideas and of
manners, to record the successive influences which, in the last fifty
years or so, have moulded or reflected English opinion through printed
books, be they of the dogmatic or of the imaginative order. In so doing,
I have to speak of writers whose vogue is passing away with the present
generation, or those of whom we must admit very grave defects and
feebleness. Some of them may be little cared for to-day; though they
have a place in the evolution of British society and thought.
Charles Kingsley has such a place--not by reason of any supreme work or
any very rare quality of his own, but by virtue of his versatility, his
_verve_, his fecundity, his irrepressible gift of breaking out in some
new line, his strong and reckless sympathy, and above all by real
literary brilliance. Where he failed to impress, to teach, to
inspire--almost even though he stirred men to anger or laughter--Charles
Kingsley for a generation continued to interest the public, to scatter
amongst them ideas or problems; he made many people think, and gave many
people delight. He woke them up in all sorts of ways, about all sorts of
things. He wrote lyrics, songs, dramas, romances, sermons, Platonic
dialogues, newspaper articles, children's fairy books, scientific
manuals, philosophical essays, lectures, extravaganzas, and theological
polemics. Hardly any of these were quite in the first rank, and some of
them were thin, flashy, and almost silly. But most of them had the
saving gift of getting home to the interests, ideas, and tastes of the
great public, and he made them think even when he was very wrong himself.
Such activity, such keenness, such command of literary resources, has to
be reckoned with in a man of warm feeling and generous impulses; and
thus, if Charles Kingsley is no longer with very many either prophet or
master, he was a literary influence of at least the second rank in his
own generation.
This would not be enough to make a permanent reputation if it stood
alone; but there were moments in which he bounded into the first rank.
It would hardly be safe to call Kingsley a poet of great pretension,
although there are passages in _The Saint's Tragedy_ and in the _Ballads_
of real power; but he has written songs which, as songs for the voice,
have hardly been surpassed by Tennyson himself. _The Sands of Dee_ and
_The Three Fishers_, if not poetry of quite perfect kind, have that
incommunicable and indescribable element of the _cantabile_ which fits
them to the wail of a sympathetic voice perhaps even better than any
songs of the most finished poetry. A true song must be simple, familiar,
musically suggestive of a single touching idea, and nothing more. And
this is just the mysterious quality of these songs and the source of
their immense popularity. Again, without pretending that Kingsley is a
great novelist, there are scenes, especially descriptive scenes, in
_Hypatia_, in _Westward Ho!_ which belong to the very highest order of
literary painting, and have hardly any superior in the romances of our
era. No romances, except Thackeray's, have the same glow of style in
such profusion and variety; and Thackeray himself was no such poet of
natural beauty as Charles Kingsley--a poet, be it remembered, who by
sheer force of imagination could realise for us landscapes and climates
of which he himself had no sort of experience. Even Scott himself has
hardly done this with so vivid a brush.
Kingsley was a striking example of that which is so characteristic of
recent English literature--its strong, practical, social, ethical, or
theological bent. It is in marked contrast with French literature. Our
writers are always using their literary gifts to preach, to teach, to
promulgate a new social or religious movement, to reform somebody or
something to illustrate a new doctrine. From first to last, Carlyle
regarded himself even more as preacher than as artist: so does his
follower, Mr. Ruskin. Macaulay seemed to write history in order to prove
the immeasurable superiority of the Whig to the Tory; and Froude and
Freeman write history to enforce their own moral. Disraeli's novels were
the programme of a party and the defence of a cause; and even Dickens and
Thackeray plant their knives deep into the social abuses of their time.
Charles Kingsley was not professed novelist, nor professed man of
letters. He was novelist, poet, essayist, and historian, almost by
accident, or with ulterior aims. Essentially, he was a moralist, a
preacher, a socialist, a reformer, and a theologian.
To begin with his poetry, and he himself began his literary career with
verses at the age of sixteen, he began to write poetry almost as a child,
and some of his earlier verses are his best. If Kingsley, with all his
literary gifts, was never quite in the first rank in anything, he came
nearest to being a poet of mark. Some of his ballads almost touch the
high-water mark of true ballad poetry, with its abrupt fierce blows of
tragedy and pathos, its simple touches of primitive rude speech, its
reserve of force, its unspoken mysteries. At any rate, Kingsley's best
ballads have no superior in the ballads of the Victorian era in lilt, in
massiveness of stroke, in strange unexpected turns. _The Weird Lady_ is
an astonishing piece for a lad of twenty-one--it begins with, "The
swevens came up round Harold the Earl, Like motes in the sunnès
beam"--and it ends with the stanza:
A white dove out of the coffin flew;
Earl Harold's mouth it kist;
He fell on his face, wherever he stood;
And the white dove carried his soul to God
Or ever the bearers wist.
That little piece is surely a bit of pure and rare ballad poetry.