And when I'm taen and hangit, mither,
a brittling o' my deer,
Ye'll no leave your bairn to the corbie craws,
to dangle in the air;
But ye'll send up my twa douce brethren,
and ye'll steal me fra the tree,
And bury me up on the brown, brown muirs,
where I aye loved to be.
The famous ballad in _Yeast_ might have been a great success if Kingsley
would have limited it to five stanzas instead of twenty. What a ring
there is in the opening lines--
The merry brown hares came leaping
Over the crest of the hill--
If he could only have been satisfied with the first five stanzas what a
ballad it would have been!--If only he had closed it with the verse--
She thought of the dark plantation
And the hares, and her husband's blood,
And the voice of her indignation
Rose up to the throne of God.
That was enough for a ballad, but not for a political novel. The other
fifteen stanzas were required for his story; they may be vigorous
rhetoric, impressive moralising, but they are too argumentative and too
rhetorical to be ballad poetry. It is curious how much of Kingsley's
work, both poetry and prose, is inspired by his love of sport and his
indignation at game laws!
His songs, spoiled as they are to our ears by poor music and too often
maudlin voices, are as good songs and as fitted for singing as any in our
time. _The Sands of Dee_, hacknied and vulgarised as it is by the
banalities of the drawing-room, is really (to use a hacknied and
vulgarised phrase) a "haunting" piece of song; and though Ruskin may
pronounce "the cruel crawling foam" to be a false use of the pathetic
fallacy, the song, for what it professes to be, is certainly a thing to
live. I have always felt more kindly toward the East wind since
Kingsley's _Welcome, wild North-Easter_!; and his Church Hymns such
as--_Who will say the world is dying?_ and _The Day of the Lord is at
hand, at hand!_--are far above the level even of the better modern hymns.
We have not yet touched upon Kingsley's longest and most ambitious
poem--_The Saint's Tragedy_. With all its merits and beauties it is a
mistake. It was avowedly a controversial diatribe against the celibacy
and priestcraft of Romanism, and was originally designed to be in prose.
That is not a safe basis for a dramatic poem, and the poem suffers from
the fact that it is in great part a theological pamphlet. It would have
made a most interesting historical novel as a mediaeval pendant to
_Hypatia_; but it is not a great lyrical drama. As we have had no great
lyrical drama at all since _Manfred_ and _The Cenci_, that is not much in
its dispraise. There are powerful passages, much poetic grace in the
piece; but the four thousand lines of this elaborate polemical poem
rather weary us, and a perfervid appeal to the Protestantism and
uxoriousness of Britons should have been cast into other moulds.
The long poem of _Andromeda_ almost succeeds in that impossible feat--the
revival of the hexameter in English. It may be a hard saying to the
countrymen of Longfellow, but the truth is that the hexameter is a
metrical monster in our English speech. The paucity of easy dactyls and
the absence of all true spondees in English words, the preponderance of
consonants over vowels, the want of inflected forms, and other
peculiarities in our language--make the hexameter incapable of
transplantation; and this magnificent metre loses with us all its
majesty, its ease, its beauty. The very line can hardly be printed on an
ordinary page, for the immense number of letters in each English verse
causes an unsightly doubling of the lines, chokes the voice, and wearies
the ear. In the hexameter line of Homer there are usually about thirty
letters, of which only twelve are consonants; in the English hexameter
there are often sixty letters, of which nearly forty are consonants. And
the Homeric hexameter will have six words where the English hexameter has
twelve or fourteen.[1] Yet having set himself this utterly hopeless and
thankless task, to write English hexameter, Kingsley produced some five
hundred lines of _Andromeda_, which in rhythm, ease, rapidity, and
metrical correctness are quite amongst the best in the language. It is
very rare to meet with any English hexameter which in rhythm, stress, and
prosody is perfectly accurate. _Andromeda_ contains many such lines, as
for example:
Violet, asphodel, ivy, and vine-leaves, roses and lilies--
Nereid, siren, and triton, and dolphin, and arrowy fishes.
These lines are true hexameters, chiefly because they consist of Latin
and Greek words; and they have little more than forty letters, of which
barely more than half are consonants. They would be almost pure
hexameters, if in lieu of the long a[a-macron]nd, we could put
e[e-breve]t, or _te_ [tau epsilon]. And there are only three Saxon words
in the two lines. But hexameters consisting of purely English words,
especially of Anglo-Saxon words, halt and stammer like a schoolboy's
exercise. The attempt of Kingsley in _Andromeda_ is most ingenious and
most instructive.
I have dwelt so much upon Kingsley's poetry because, though he was hardly
a "minor poet,"--an order which now boasts sixty members--he wrote a few
short pieces which came wonderfully near being a great success. And
again, it is the imaginative element in all his work, the creative fire
and the vivid life which he threw into his prose as much as his verse,
into his controversies as much as into his fictions, that gave them their
popularity and their savour. Nearly every one of Kingsley's imaginative
works was polemical, full of controversy, theological, political, social,
and racial; and this alone prevented them from being great works.
Interesting works they are; full of vigour, beauty, and ardent
conception; and it is wonderful that so much art and fancy could be
thrown into what is in substance polemical pamphleteering.
Of them all _Hypatia_ is the best known and the best conceived.
_Hypatia_ was written in 1853 in the prime of his manhood and was on the
face of it a controversial work. Its sub-title was--_New Foes with an
Old Face_,--its preface elaborates the moral and spiritual ideas that it
teaches, the very titles of the chapters bear biblical phrases and
classical moralising as their style. I should be sorry to guarantee the
accuracy of the local colouring and the detail of its elaborate history;
but the life, realism, and pictorial brilliancy of the scenes give it a
power which is rare indeed in an historical novel. It has not the great
and full knowledge of _Romola_, much less the consummate style and
setting of _Esmond_; but it has a vividness, a rapidity, a definiteness
which completely enthral the imagination and stamp its scenes on the
memory. It is that rare thing, an historical romance which does not
drag. It is not one of those romances of which we fail to understand the
incidents, and often forget what it is that the personages are struggling
so fiercely to obtain. No one who has read _Hypatia_ in early life will
fail to remember its chief scenes or its leading characters, if he lives
to old age. After forty years this romance has been cast into a drama
and placed upon the London stage, and it is frequently the subject of
some vigorous pictures.
In any estimate of _Hypatia_ as a romance, it is right to consider the
curious tangle of difficulties which Kingsley crowded into his task. It
was to be a realistic historical novel dated in an age of which the
public knew nothing, set in a country of which the author had no
experience, but which many of us know under wholly altered conditions.
It was to carry on controversies as to the older and the later types of
Christianity, as to Polytheism, Judaism, and Monotheism; it was to
confute Romanism, Scepticism, and German metaphysics; it was to denounce
celibacy and monasticism, to glorify muscular Christianity, to give
glowing pictures of Greek sensuousness and Roman rascality, and finally
to secure the apotheosis of Scandinavian heroism. And in spite of these
incongruous and incompatible aims, the story still remains a vivid and
fascinating tale. That makes it a real _tour de force_. It is true that
it has many of the faults of Bulwer, a certain staginess, melodramatic
soliloquies, careless incongruities, crude sensationalism--but withal, it
has some of the merits of Bulwer at his best, in _The Last Days of
Pompeii_, _Riensi_, _The Last of the Barons_,--the play of human passion
and adventure, intensity of reproduction however inaccurate in detail; it
has "go," intelligibility, memorability. The characters interest us, the
scenes amuse us, the pictures are not forgotten. The stately beauty of
Hypatia, the seductive fascination of Pelagia, the childlike nature of
Philammon, the subtle cynicism of Raphael Aben-Ezra, the mighty audacity
of the Goths, the fanaticism of Cyril, and the strange clash of three
elements of civilisation,--Graeco-Roman, Christian, Teutonic--give us
definite impressions, leave a permanent imprint on our thoughts. There
are extravagances, theatricalities, impossibilities enough. The Gothic
princes comport themselves like British seamen ashore in Suez or Bombay;
Raphael talks like young Lancelot Smith in _Yeast_; Hypatia is a Greek
Argemone; and Bishop Synesius is merely an African fifth-century Charles
Kingsley, what Sydney Smith called a "squarson," or compound of squire
and parson. Still, after all--bating grandiloquences and incongruities
and "errors excepted," _Hypatia_ lives, moves, and speaks to us; and, in
the matter of vitality and interest, is amongst the very few successes in
historical romance in the whole Victorian literature.
_West-ward Ho!_ shares with _Hypatia_ the merit of being a successful
historical romance. It is free from many of the faults of _Hypatia_, it
is more mature, more carefully written. It is not laden with the
difficulties of _Hypatia_; it is only in part an historical romance at
all; the English scenery is placed in a country which Kingsley knew
perfectly and from boyhood; and the only controversy involved was the
interminable debate about Jesuit mendacity and Romanist priestcraft. So
that, if _Westward Ho!_ does not present us with the weaknesses and the
dilemmas of _Hypatia_, on the other hand it is not so brilliant or so
rich with interest. But it has real and lasting qualities. The Devon
coast scenery which Kingsley knew and loved, the West Indian and tropical
scenery, which he loved but did not know, are both painted with wonderful
force of imaginative colour. When one recalls all that Kingsley has done
in the landscape of romance,--Alexandria and the desert of the Nile, West
Indian jungles and rivers, Bideford Bay, his own heaths in _Yeast_, the
fever-dens of London in _Alton Locke_,--one is almost inclined to rank
him in this single gift of description as first of all the novelists
since Scott. Compared with the brilliancy and variety of Kingsley's
pictures of country, Bulwer's and Disraeli's are conventional; even those
of Dickens are but local; Thackeray and Trollope have no interest in
landscape at all; George Eliot's keen interest is not so spontaneous as
Kingsley's, and Charlotte Brontë's wonderful gift is strictly limited to
the narrow field of her own experience. But Kingsley, as a landscape
painter, can image to us other continents and many zones, and he carries
us to distant climates with astonishing force of reality.
_Two Years Ago_ has some vigorous scenes, but it has neither the merits
nor the defects of Kingsley in historical romance. Its scene is too near
for his fine imagination to work poetically, and it is too much of a
sermon and pamphlet to be worth a second, or a third reading; and as to
_Hereward the Wake_, I must confess to not having been able to complete
even a first reading, and that after sundry trials. Of Kingsley's
remaining fanciful pieces it is enough to say that _The Heroes_ still
remains, after forty years, the child's introduction to Greek mythology,
and is still the best book of its class. When we compare it with another
attempt by a romancer of genius, and set it beside the sticky dulness of
_The Tanglewood Tales_, it looks like a group of real Tanagra figurines
placed beside a painted plaster cast. Kingsley's _Heroes_, in spite of
the inevitable sermon addressed in the preface to all good boys and
girls, has the real simplicity of Greek art, and the demi-gods tell their
myths in noble and pure English. _The Water Babies_ is an immortal bit
of fun, which will be read in the next century with _Gulliver_ and _The
Ring and the Rose_, long after we have all forgotten the nonsensical
whims about science and the conventional pulpit moralising which Kingsley
scattered broadcast into everything he said or wrote.
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 performance in prose. It is more a work of art than _Alton
Locke_, for it is much shorter, less akin to journalism, less spasmodic,
and more full of poetry. _Yeast_ deals with the country--which Kingsley
knew better and loved more than he did the town. It deals with real,
permanent, deep social evils, and it paints no fancy portrait of the
labourer, the squire, the poacher, or the village parson. Kingsley there
speaks of what he knew, and he describes that which he felt with the soul
of a poet. The hunting scenes in Yeast, the river vignettes, the village
revel, are exquisite pieces of painting. And the difficulties overcome
in the book are extreme. To fuse together a Platonic Dialogue and a
Carlyle latter-day pamphlet, and to mould this compound into a rural
romance in the style of _Silas Marner_, heightened with extracts from
University Pulpit sermons, with some ringing ballads, and political
diatribes in the vein of Cobbett's appeals to the People--this was to
show wonderful literary versatility and animation. And, after forty-five
years, _Yeast_ can be read and re-read still!
_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 really glowing
imagination and from genuine inspiration, albeit somewhat unpruned and
ill-ordered. Now Kingsley "let himself go," in the way of Byron,
Disraeli, Bulwer, and Dickens, who not seldom poured out their
conceptions in what we now hold to be spasmodic form. It is possible
that the genteeler taste of our age may prevent the young of to-day from
caring for _Alton Locke_. But I can assure them that five-and-forty
years ago that book had a great effect and came home to the heart of
many. And the effect was permanent and creative. We may see to-day in
England widespread results of that potent social movement which was
called Christian Socialism, a movement of which Kingsley was neither the
founder nor the chief leader, but of which his early books were the main
popular exponents, and to which they gave a definiteness and a key which
the movement itself sadly lacked.
I was not of an age to take part in that movement, but in after years at
the Working Men's College, which grew out of it, I gained a personal
knowledge of what was one of the most striking movements of our time.
Nowadays, when leading statesmen assure us "we are all Socialists now,"
when the demands of the old "Chartists" are Liberal common form, when
trades-unionism, co-operation, and state-aided benefits are largely
supported by politicians, churchmen, journals, and writers, it is
difficult for us now to conceive the bitter opposition which assailed the
small band of reformers who, five-and-forty years ago, spoke up for these
reforms. Of that small band, who stood alone amongst the literary,
academic, and ecclesiastical class, Charles Kingsley was the most
outspoken, the most eloquent, and assuredly the most effective. I do not
say the wisest, the most consistent, or the most staunch; nor need we
here discuss the strength or the weakness of the Christian Socialist
reform. When we remember how widely this vague initiative has spread and
developed, when we read again _Alton Locke_ and _Yeast_, and note how
much has been practically done in forty years to redress or mitigate the
abuses against which these books uttered the first burning protest, we
may form some estimate of all that the present generation of Englishmen
owes to Charles Kingsley and his friends.
I have dwelt last and most seriously upon Kingsley's earliest books,
because they were in many respects his most powerful, his typical works.
As he grew in years, he did not develop. He improved for a time in
literary form, but his excitable nerve-system, his impulsive imagination,
drove him into tasks for which he had no gift, and where he floated
hither and thither without sure guide. From the time of his official
success, that is, for the last fifteen years of his life, he produced
nothing worthy of himself, and much that was manifest book-making--the
mere outpouring of the professional preacher and story-teller. Of his
historical and philosophical work I shall not speak at all. His shallow
Cambridge Inaugural Lecture, given by him as Professor of History, was
torn to pieces in the _Westminster Review_ (vol. xix. p. 305, April
1861), it is said, by a brother Professor of History. Much less need we
speak of his miserable duel with Cardinal Newman, wherein he was so
shamefully worsted. For fifteen years he poured out lectures, sermons,
tales, travels, poems, dialogues, children's books, and historical,
philosophical, theological, social, scientific, and sanitary essays--but
the Charles Kingsley of _Yeast_, of _Alton Locke_, of _Hypatia_, of
_Westward Ho!_ of the Ballads and Poems, we never knew again. He burnt
out his fiery spirit at last, at the age of fifty-five, in a series of
restless enterprises, and a vehement outpouring of miscellaneous
eloquence.
Charles Kingsley was a man of genius, half poet, half controversialist.
The two elements did not blend altogether well. His poetic passion
carried away his reason and often confused his logic. His argumentative
vehemence too often marred his fine imagination. Thus his _Saint's
Tragedy_ is partly a satire on Romanism, and his ballad in _Yeast_ is
mainly a radical pamphlet. Hardly one of his books is without a
controversial preface, controversial titles, chapters, or passages on
questions of theology, churches, races, politics, or society. Indeed,
excepting some of his poems, and some of his popular or children's books
(but not even all of these), all his works are of a controversial kind.
Whatever he did he did with heart, and this was at once his merit and his
weakness. Before all things, he was a preacher, a priest of the English
Church, a Christian minister. He was, indeed, a liberal priest,
sometimes even too free and easy. He brings in the sacred name perhaps
more often than any other writer, and he does so not always in a devout
way. He seemed at last to use the word "God" as if it were an expletive
or mere intensive like a Greek _ge_ [gamma epsilon], meaning "very much"
or "very good," as where he so oddly calls the North-East wind "the wind
of God." And he betrays a most unclerical interest in physical torture
and physical voluptuousness (_Hypatia_, _The Saint's Tragedy_, _Saint
Maura_, _Westward Ho!_), though it is true that his real nature is both
eminently manly and pure.
As we have done all through these estimates of great writers, we have to
take the great writer at his best and forget his worst. It is a
melancholy reflection that we so often find a man of genius working
himself out to an unworthy close, it is too often feared, in the thirst
of success and even the attraction of gain. But at his best Charles
Kingsley left some fine and abiding influences behind him, and achieved
some brilliant things. Would that we always had men of his dauntless
spirit, of his restless energy, of his burning sympathy, of his keen
imagination! He reminds us somewhat of his own Bishop Synesius, as
described in _Hypatia_ (chap. xxi.), who "was one of those many-sided,
volatile, restless men, who taste joy and sorrow, if not deeply or
permanently, yet abundantly and passionately"--"He lived . . . in a
whirlwind of good deeds, meddling and toiling for the mere pleasure of
action; and as soon as there was nothing to be done, which, till lately,
had happened seldom enough with him, paid the penalty for past excitement
in fits of melancholy. A man of magniloquent and flowery style, not
without a vein of self-conceit; yet withal of overflowing kindliness,
racy humour, and unflinching courage, both physical and moral; with a
very clear practical faculty, and a very muddy speculative one"--and so
on. Charles Kingsley must have been thinking of his own tastes when he
drew the portrait of the "squire-bishop." But he did more than the
Bishop of Cyrene, and was himself a compound of squire-parson-poet. And
in all three characters he showed some of the best sides of each.
[1] Amongst other difficulties it may be observed that such words as
"and," "is," "are," "the," "who," "his," "its," "have," "been"--words
without which few English sentences can be constructed--do not form the
short syllables of a true dactyl.