To him it appeared (rightly or wrongly) to be hopelessly tainted by
the evil principle which he generally described as Manichæism. It
ordered him (or so he supposed) to look upon nature with horror or
suspicion, instead of regarding it as everywhere marked with the
indelible impress of the creative hand, and therefore calculated to
stimulate the highest emotions of reverence and awe; and, still more,
it set up a false and attenuated ethical standard, which condemned
all natural impulses as therefore bad, and placed the monkish above
the domestic virtues. It was clearly inevitable that a man who
regarded human love as the very centre and starting-point of all
the good influences of life, and the delight in nature as the very
test of a healthily-constituted mind, should look upon teaching thus
understood with absolute detestation. Possibly he caricatured it;
at any rate he spared no pains to attack it by every means open to
him, and especially by setting forth his own ideal of character. He
created the 'muscular Christian'—the man, that is, who, on the showing
of his antagonists, is an impossible combination of classical and
Christian types, and, on his own, implies the harmonious blending
of all aspects of the truth. He protested, fruitlessly enough,
against the nickname, because it seemed to imply that his version
of the character subordinated the highest to the lowest elements.
It suggested that he had used Christian phraseology to consecrate a
blind admiration for physical prowess and excess of animal vigour. His
indignation—expressed in an imprudently angry letter to one of his
critics—was intelligible enough. The imputation was cruel, because it
was at once false and plausible. It was false, for Kingsley's ideal
heroes—whether properly to be called Christians or not—are certainly
not mere animals. They have their faults, but they are not sensual
or cynical, though in some of their literary descendants the animal
side of their nature seems to have developed itself with suspicious
facility. Amyas Leigh would probably have hanged his Guy Livingstone
from a yard-arm before the voyage was over. To readers, however,
looking at Amyas from a different point of view, the likeness might
be deceptive; and in asserting the value of certain qualities too
much depreciated by his critics, he naturally seemed to give them an
excessive value.
A vague impression that Kingsley was somehow a potential defender of
the faith—that he had seen through the doubts and difficulties which
perplex other minds—counts for something in his popularity. It is
quite needless to dispel this pleasant vision, if anybody holds it;
but I shall venture to take it for granted that it would be useless to
look to him for any very profound statement of the grounds of belief.
Doubtless he was what is called a sincere believer; but one cannot
forget that all hagiologists are apt unconsciously to heighten the
halo of religious unction which surrounded their heroes when alive.
Kingsley did not carry so much of the pulpit frame of mind into
ordinary life as innocent readers might fancy. Nobody would have been
better pleased to follow jolly Bishop Corbet into his cellar and pitch
away cassock and bands with 'There goes the parson,' and 'There goes
the bishop.' He had not the dignified calm which stamps the caste of
bores and philosophers; and, indeed, the impetuosity of temperament
which disqualified him for such tasks is but too perceptible in his
artistic work. Its most obvious fault is a want of repose and harmony.
He can never be quiet for a moment. Every sentence must be emphatic
and intense. He seizes the first aspect of a subject; dashes out a
picture—sometimes of perfectly admirable vigour—in half-a-dozen lines;
but cannot dwell upon a particular strain of thought or tone down the
brilliant hues of fragmentary passages by the diffused atmosphere of
calm reflection. He could hardly sit quiet for a moment, as one of
his admirers tells us; and his strong-minded heroes, who ought to
be self-sustained and tranquil, are always in as great a fever as
himself. The result of this tendency is too plainly written upon his
life as upon his books. He was always, in a sanitary sense, living
upon his capital, and taking more out of his strength than his powers
justified. He knocked himself up completely by writing 'Yeast' before
he was thirty, and every subsequent work seems to have involved
an effort which told heavily upon his constitution. The natural
consequence of such a process is to be seen in the fact already
noticed that his literary productiveness rapidly declined; and that
in his later works we have the emphasis which has become habitual,
without the force which saved it from affectation. It must, however,
be said to his credit that he had the merit—a lamentably rare one—of
abandoning the attempt to rival his own earlier performances when the
vein no longer flowed spontaneously.
The strength and the weakness of such a temperament are illustrated by
his poetry, of which some fragments will probably survive (and few,
indeed, are the poets who survive by more than fragments), though we
may doubt the truth of his own opinion that they would supply his most
lasting claim upon posterity. He explains, however, very frankly why
he can never be a great poet. He is wanting, he says,[2] in the great
poetic faculty—the 'power of metaphor and analogue—the instinctive
vision of connections between all things in heaven and earth.' His
mind, in other words, was deficient in the direction of philosophic
imagination. He could not, like Milton, converse habitually with
Him that yon soars on golden wing,
Guiding the fiery-wheeled throne,
The cherub Contemplation.
He was too restless and impetuous to be at ease on those heights
from which alone the widest truths become perceptible and excite the
emotions which are at once deepest and calmest. His songs represent
jets and gushes of vivid but rather feverish emotion. A pathetic or
heroic story, or the beauty of some natural scene, moves him deeply,
and he utters his emotion in an energetic burst of vivid language.
But he is too short-winged for a long flight, or for soaring into the
loftiest regions of the intellectual atmosphere.
Every short lyric is the record, one must suppose, of some such
mood of intense excitement. But it makes all the difference whether
the excitement takes place in a mind already stored with thought,
and ready to pierce instantaneously to the deepest meaning of a
particular scene or incident, or in a mind incapable of sustained
reflection, and accustomed to see things by brilliant flashes which
reveal only their partial and superficial aspects. When, however, we
do not blame Kingsley for not being somebody else, we must admit him
to be excellent within his limits. The 'Andromeda' is in every way
admirable. It is probably the most successful attempt in the language
to grapple with the technical difficulties of English hexameters;
and he also seems to find in the Pagan mythology a more appropriate
symbol for his characteristic tone of sentiment, and an imagery which
fits in better with his nature-worship than in regions more familiar
to him. He can abandon himself unreservedly to his delight in the
beautiful without bothering himself about the Manichees or showing the
controversial theologian under the artistic dress. The shorter poems
have generally a power of stamping themselves upon the memory, due, no
doubt, to their straightforward, nervous style. They have the cardinal
merit of vigour which belongs to all genuine utterance of real
emotion, and are delightfully free from the flabby affectations of
many modern rivals. The mark may not be the most elevated, but he goes
at it as straight as he would ride at a fence. His 'North-Easter' does
not blow from such ethereal regions as Shelley's 'Southwest Wind.' It
verges upon the absurd, and is perhaps not quite free from that taint
of vulgarity which vitiates all artistic reference to field-sports.
But given that such a sentiment was worth expressing, the tones in
which it is couched are as ringing and vigorous as could be wished. He
can rise much higher when he is pathetic and indignant. It would not
be easy to find a better war-cry for the denouncer of social wrongs
than the ballad of the Poacher's Widow. And to pass over the two
songs by which he is best known, such poems as 'Poor Lorraine'—first
published in the biography—or the beautiful lines in the 'Saint's
Tragedy,' beginning, 'Oh, that we two were maying!' are intense enough
in their utterance to make us wonder why he fell short of the highest
class of song-writing. Perhaps the defect is indicated by a certain
desire to be picturesque, which prevents him from obtaining complete
success in the simple expression of pathos. The poems have a taint of
prettiness—and prettiness is a deadly vice in poetry. There is about
them a faint flavour of drawing-room music. But, when we do not want
to be hypercritical, we may be thankful for poetry which, if not of
the highest class, has the rarest of merits at the present day—genuine
fervour and originality.
The fullest expression of Kingsley's mind must be found in the works
which appeared from 1848 to 1855. Those seven years, one may say, saw
his literary rise, culmination, and decline. The 'Saint's Tragedy'
represents the period of mental agitation. It will hardly live longer
than many other modern attempts by men of equal genius to compose
dramas not intended for the stage. The form in such cases is generally
felt to be an encumbrance rather than a help, and one cannot help
thinking in this instance that Kingsley might have done better if he
had written a picturesque history instead of forcing his story into an
uncongenial framework. Nobody is now likely to share Bunsen's belief
that the author had proved himself capable of continuing Shakespeare's
great series of historic dramas. But one is also rather surprised
that a performance which, with all its crudities and awkwardness,
showed such unmistakable symptoms of power, did not make a greater
impression. Perhaps the most vital fault is the want of unity, not
merely in plot but in the leading thought, which was the natural
result of the mode of composition. He began it in 1842—that is, at
the age of twenty-three—and it was not published till 1848. As this
includes the period during which Kingsley passed through his acutest
trouble, it is not wonderful that the book should show signs of
confusion. It has, indeed, a purpose, and a very distinct one. It is
the first exposition of that doctrine which, as I have said, Kingsley
preached in season and out of season. He wishes to exhibit the beauty
of his own ideal of feminine meekness as compared with the monastic
and ascetic ideal. It cannot, I think, be denied that this central
idea was capable of artistic treatment. A dramatist might surely
find an impressive motive in the conflict set up in a mind of purity
and elevation by the acceptance of a distorted code of morality.
There is a genuine tragic element in this interpretation of poor
Elizabeth's sufferings. Nature tells her that her domestic affections
are holy and of divine origin; the priests tell her that they are
to be crushed and mortified. She is gradually tortured to death by
the distraction of attempting to obey the two voices, each of them
appealing to the loftiest and most unselfish motives. The history is
probably inaccurate, but the conception is not the less powerful. The
execution remains unsatisfactory, chiefly for the obvious reason that
Kingsley was not quite a Shakespeare nor even a Schiller, and that
his work is therefore rather a series of vigorous sketches than an
effective whole; but partly also because his own sentiment seems to be
vacillating and indistinct. A thorough hater or a thorough adherent of
the theories impugned would have made a work more artistically telling
because more coherently conceived. Kingsley is really feeling his way
to a theory, and therefore undecided in his artistic attitude. The
whole becomes patchy and indistinct. He is feverishly excited rather
than deeply moved, and inconsistent when he ought to be compassionate.
Briefly, he wants firmness of hand and definiteness of purpose, though
there is no want of very remarkable vigour.
The two novels, 'Yeast' and 'Alton Locke,' are far more effective; and
indeed 'Alton Locke' may be fairly regarded as his best piece of work.
It is not creditable to the discernment of the intelligent public
that Kingsley should have been taken for a subversive revolutionist
on the strength of these performances. The intelligent public indeed
is much given to the grossest stupidity; and, as Kingsley more or
less deceived himself, it is not wonderful that he should have
been misunderstood. He announced himself at a public meeting to be
a Chartist; and when a man voluntarily adopts a nickname, he must
not be surprised if he is credited with all the qualities generally
associated with it. In fact, however, he was not more of a genuine
Radical than when in later years he declared that he would, if he
could, 'restore the feudal system, the highest form of civilisation—in
ideal, not in practice—which Europe has yet seen.'[3] There is much
virtue in the phrase 'not in practice;' and perhaps Kingsley was no
more of a genuine feudalist than he was of a genuine Chartist. In his
earlier phase he was simply playing a part which has often enough
been attempted by very honest men. Missionaries of a new faith see
the advantage of sapping the old creed instead of attacking it in
front. Adopting its language and such of its tenets as are congenial
to their own, they can gradually introduce a friendly garrison into
the hostile fort. The conscious adoption of such a method might have
been called jesuitical by Kingsley, and in his mouth such an epithet
would have been damnatory. But it was in all sincerity that he and his
friends considered themselves to be the 'true demagogues'—to quote the
title of the chapter in which the moral of 'Alton Locke' is embodied.
They had not the slightest sympathy, indeed, with the tenets of the
thoroughgoing Radical. Kingsley believed in the social as much as
in the ecclesiastical hierarchy; and with an intensity which almost
amounted to bigotry. He would no more put down the squires than the
parson; and himself a most energetic parson, he certainly did not
undervalue the social importance of the function discharged by his
order. In 'Alton Locke' the bitterest satire is directed, not against
self-indulgent nobles or pedantic prelates, but against the accepted
leaders of the artisans. The 'true demagogue,' as is perfectly
natural, holds the false demagogue in especial horror. Kingsley is
the friend, not Cuffey. He hates the 'Manchester school' as the
commonplace version of Radicalism and the analogue of the Materialist
school in politics. From these, he says,[4] in 1852, 'heaven defend
us; for of all narrow, conceited, hypocritical, and anarchic and
atheistic schemes of the universe, the Manchester one is precisely
the worst. I have no words to express my contempt for it.' Briefly,
Kingsley's remedy for speculative error was not the rejection, but the
more spiritual interpretation, of the old creed; and his remedy for
bad squires and parsons was not disendowment and division of the land,
but the raising up a better generation of parsons and squires.
There is a superficial resemblance between this theory and that of
the Young England school, who, like Kingsley, would have restored the
feudal system in a purified state. Some of his writing runs parallel
to Lord Beaconsfield's exposition of that doctrine. The difference
was, of course, vital. He hated mediæval revivalism as heartily as
he hated the demagogues; and his prejudices against the whole order
of ideas represented by the 'Tracts for the Times' were perhaps the
strongest of his antipathies. He looked back to the sixteenth, not to
the twelfth century; and his ideal parson was to be no ascetic, but
a married man with a taste for field-sports, and fully sympathising
with the common-sense of the laity. The Young England party seemed to
him to desire the conversion of the modern labourer into a picturesque
peasant, ready to receive doles at the castle-gate and bow before the
priest with bland subservience. Kingsley wanted to make a man of him;
to give him self-respect and independence, not in a sense which would
imply the levelling all social superiorities, but in the sense of
assigning to him an honourable position in the social organisation.
He was no more to be petted or pauperised than to be set on a level
with his social superiors, or set loose without guidance from his
intellectual teachers.
Some such doctrines would be verbally accepted by most men; and I
cannot here ask whether they really require the teaching with which
Kingsley associated them. The demagogues and the obstructives were
both, according to him, on a wrong tack; and he could point out
the one true method of reuniting development with order. Whatever
the value of his theories, the sentiment associated with them was
substantially healthy, vigorous, and elevated. That part of his
fictions in which it is embodied is probably his most valuable work.
Nobody can read the descriptions of the agricultural labourers or of
the London artisan in 'Yeast' and 'Alton Locke' without recognising
both the strength of his sympathies and the vigour of his perceptive
faculties. He was drawing from the life, and expressing his deepest
emotions. 'What is the use of preaching to hungry paupers about
heaven?' he asks. 'Sir, as my clerk said to me yesterday, there is a
weight on their hearts, and they call for no change, for they know
they can be no worse off than they are.' The phrase explains what
was the curse which rested upon Kingsley's parishioners, and in what
sense he had to 'redeem it from barbarism.' He did his work like a
man. He was daily with his people 'in their cottages, and made a
point of talking to the men and boys at their fieldwork till he was
personally intimate with every soul, from the women at their washtubs
to the babies in the cradle, for whom he had always a loving word and
look.' Whatever we may think of his 'socialism' or 'democracy,' there
was at least no want of depth or sincerity in his sympathy for the
poor, and therefore there is no false ring in his description of their
condition. He writes with his heart—not to serve any political purpose
or to gain credit for a cheap display of charitable feeling.
No books can show more forcibly the dark side of English society
of the time. The aspect in which Kingsley views the evil is
characteristic. The root of all that is good in man lies in the purity
and vigour of the domestic affections. A condition of things in which
the stability and health of the family become impossible is one in
which the very foundations of society are being sapped. Nobody could
be more alive to the countless mischiefs implied in the statement that
the poor man has nothing deserving the name of home. The verses given
to Tregarva in 'Yeast' sum up his diagnosis of the social disease
with admirable vigour. Many scenes in that rather chaotic story are
equally vivid in their presentation of the facts. The description of
the village feast is a bit of startlingly impressive realism. The
poor sodden, hopeless, spiritless peasantry consoling themselves with
strong drink and brutal songs, open to no impressions of beauty, with
no sense of the romantic except in lawless passion, and too beaten
down to have even a thought of rebellion except in the shape of
agrarian outrage, are described with singular force. Poor Crawy, the
poacher, scarcely elevated above the beasts, looking to the gaol and
workhouse for his only refuge, so degraded that pity is almost lost
in disgust, is the significant product of the general decay. The race
is deteriorating. It has fallen vastly below the standard of the last
generation. All the lads are 'smaller, clumsier, lower-brained, and
weaker-jawed than their elders.' Such higher feeling as remains takes
the form of the dog-like fidelity of Harry Verney, the gamekeeper.
Kingsley never wrote a better scene than the death of the old man
from a wound received in a poaching affray; when he suddenly springs
upright in bed, holds out 'his withered paw with a kind of wild
majesty,' and shouts 'There ain't such a head of hares on any manor in
the country! And them's the last words of Harry Verney.'
'Alton Locke' is a more ambitious and coherent effort; and the
descriptions of the London population, and of the futile attempt at a
rising in the country, are in the same vigorous vein. Perhaps a more
remarkable success is the old Scotchman, Mackaye, who seems to be the
best of Kingsley's characters. He has some real humour, a quality in
which Kingsley was for the most part curiously deficient; but one
must expect that in this case he was drawing from an original. It is
interesting to read Carlyle's criticism of this part of the book.
'Saunders Mackaye,' he says,[5] 'my invaluable countryman in this
book, is nearly perfect; indeed, I greatly wonder how you did contrive
to manage him. His very dialect is as if a native had done it, and
the whole existence of the rugged old hero is a wonderfully splendid
and coherent piece of Scotch bravura.' Perhaps an explanation of the
wonder might be suggested to other people more easily than to Carlyle;
but, at any rate, Mackaye is a very felicitous centre for the various
groups who play their parts in the story; and not the less efficient
as a chorus because he is chiefly critical and confines himself to
shrewd demonstrations of the folly of everybody concerned.
Carlyle gives as his final verdict that his impression is of 'a fervid
creation still left half chaotic.' In fact, with all the genuine force
of 'Alton Locke'—and no living novelist has excelled the vividness
of certain passages—there is an unsatisfactory side to the whole
performance. It is marred by the feverishness which inspires most of
his work. There is an attempt to crowd too much into the space, and
the emphasis sometimes remains when the power is flagging. Greater
reserve of power and more attention to unity of effect would have been
required to make it a really great book. But the most unsatisfactory
part is where the author forgets to be a novelist and becomes a
preacher and a pamphleteer. The admirable heroine is forced to deliver
what is to all purposes a commonplace tract of two or three chapters
at the end of the story, when her thoughts, to be effective, should
really have been embedded in the structure of the story. Anybody can
preach a sermon when no contradiction is allowed; but the novelist
ought to show the thought translated into action, and not given in
a raw shape of downright comment. As it is, Lady Ellerton is a mere
lay-figure who can talk very edifying phrases, but is really tacked on
to the outside of the narrative. The moral should have been evolved
by the natural course of events; for when it is presented in this
point-blank fashion we begin to cavil, and wish that the Chartist
or Mackaye might be allowed to show cause against the sentence
pronounced. As they can't, we do it for ourselves.