When he published 'Two Years Ago,' Kingsley had become reconciled to
the world. There is an apparent and decidedly unpleasant inconsistency
between the denouncer of social wrongs and the novelist who sings the
praises of squires, patrons, and guardsmen, with a placid conviction
that they sufficiently represent his ideal. The explanation is partly
that, as I have said, Kingsley never accepted the revolutionary
remedy for the grievances which he described. He was quite consistent
in regarding the old creed as expressing the true mode of cure. But
one must still ask whether the facts had changed. Was the world
regenerated between 1848 and 1855? Were English labourers all
properly fed, housed, and taught? Had the sanctity of domestic life
acquired a new charm in the interval, and was the old quarrel between
rich and poor definitely settled or in the way to settlement? That
appears to have been Kingsley's own view, if we may judge from the
prefaces to later editions of his book; and the great agency to which
he assigns the strange improvement was the outbreak of the Crimean
war. That crisis, it seems, had taught the higher classes a deeper
sense of their responsibility, and roused us from the dangerous
slumber of peace and growing wealth. Mr. Herbert Spencer has lately
expounded a very different theory as to the results of an increased
intensity of the military spirit. Without discussing so wide a
question, it may, I fancy, be pretty safely assumed that the future
historian will not take quite this view of recent affairs, and will
attribute any improvement that may have taken place to some deeper
cause than that assigned. When a whole social order is rotting, as the
author of 'Yeast' supposed ours to have been, it is not often cured by
a little splutter of fighting; nor does the belief in the efficacy of
such a remedy seem to fit in very well with a spiritual Christianity.
Perhaps we may further assume, therefore, that the change was rather
in the spectator than in the spectacle. If so, Kingsley was not the
first man to account for an alteration in his personal outlook by a
movement of the rest of the universe. His parish had been got into
better order; his combative instinct had grown weaker; and, like
other men who grow in years and domestic comfort, he had become more
content with things in general. Fathers of families are capable, we
know, of everything, and, amongst other things, of softening the
fervour of their early enthusiasms. There is nothing at all strange
in the process; but it must be taken to illustrate the fact that, if
Kingsley's sympathies were keen, his intellectual insight was not very
deep. A man who holds that a social disease is so easily suppressed,
has not measured very accurately the constitutional disorder which it
revealed.
'Two Years Ago,' the book in which this conclusion is plainly
announced, is in many respects a painful performance. It contains,
indeed, some admirable descriptions of scenery; but the sentiment
is poor and fretful. Tom Thurnall, intended to be an embodiment
of masculine vigour, has no real stuff in him. He is a bragging,
excitable, and at bottom sentimental person. All his swagger fails
to convince us that he is a true man. Put beside a really simple and
masculine nature like Dandie Dinmont, or even beside Kingsley's own
Amyas Leigh, one sees his hollowness. The whole story leads up to a
distribution of poetical justice in Kingsley's worst manner. He has a
lamentable weakness for taking upon himself the part of Providence.
'After all,' he once wrote in 'Yeast,' 'your "Rake's Progress" and
"Atheist's Deathbed" do no more good than noble George Cruikshank's
"Bottle" will, because everyone knows that they are the exception and
not the rule; that the atheist generally dies with a conscience as
comfortably callous as a rhinoceros-hide; and the rake, when age stops
his power of sinning, becomes generally rather more respectable than
his neighbours.' It is a pity that Kingsley could not remember this
true saying in later years. He seems to have grown too impatient to
leave room for the natural evolution of events. He gives the machinery
a jerk, and is fidgety because the wheels grind so slowly, though they
'grind exceeding small.'
Between 'Alton Locke' and 'Two Years Ago' there luckily intervened
'Hypatia' and 'Westward Ho!' They are brilliant and almost solitary
exceptions to the general dreariness of the historical novel. To
criticise them either from the historical or the artistic point of
view would indeed be easy enough; but they have a vivacity which
defies criticism. I have no doubt that 'Hypatia' is fundamentally
and hopelessly inaccurate, and that a sound historian would shudder
at innumerable anachronisms and pick holes in every paragraph. I
don't believe that men like the Goths ever existed in this world,
and am prepared to give up the whole tribe of monks, pagans, Jews,
and fathers of the Church. If 'Westward Ho!' is (as I presume) less
inaccurate because dealing with less distant ages, it is still too
much of a party pamphlet to be taken for history. The Jesuits are
probably caricatures, and Miss Ayacanora is a bit of rather silly
melodrama. But it is difficult to say too much in favour of the
singular animation and movement of both books. There is a want of
repose, if you insist upon applying the highest canons of art; but
the brilliance of description, the energy and rapidity of the action,
simply disarm the reader. I rejoice in the Amal and Wulf and Raphael
Aben Ezra, as I love Ivanhoe, and Front de Bœuf, and Wamba the
Witless. The fight between 'English mastiffs and Spanish bloodhounds'
is as stirring as the skirmish of Drumclog in 'Old Mortality.'
'Hypatia,' according to Kingsley himself, was written with his heart's
blood. Like other phrases of his, that requires a little dilution.
But, at any rate, both books stand out for vividness, for a happy
audacity and quickness of perception, above all modern attempts in the
same direction.
The problems discussed in these historical novels and the solutions
suggested are of course substantially the same as in his earlier
books. The period of 'Hypatia' bears a striking analogy to the
present. In the heroes described in 'Westward Ho!' he supposed himself
to recognise the fullest realisation of the fundamental doctrines of
his own creed. Much might be said, were it worth saying, as to the
accuracy of these assumptions. Kingsley's method is in any case too
much tainted by the obvious tendency to see facts by the light of
preconceived theories. In the earlier writings he may be one-sided
and exaggerated; but his imagination is at least guided by reference
to actual observation. It seems as if in this later period he had
instinctively turned away to distant periods where men and events
might be more easily moulded into conformity with his prejudices.
However skilful a man may be in accommodating fact to fancy, he is
apt to find difficulties when he paints from the life around him. But
when nobody can contradict you except a few prosaic antiquaries, the
outside world becomes delightfully malleable. You do not find any
fragments of rigid material in the clay which shapes itself so easily
in your fingers. Kingsley has faith enough in his teaching to give a
genuine glow to these hybrid beings begotten half of fancy, half of
the external world. But we feel too plainly that the work will not
stand the test of close examination, either by the historian or the
literary critic. Such a nemesis naturally overtakes men who admit too
easily an appeal from fact to sentiment. They begin to lose the sense
of reality, and their artistic work shows signs of flimsiness as their
theories of arbitrary assumption. The great writer pierces to the true
life of a period because he recognises the necessity of conforming his
beliefs to realities. The inferior writer uses his knowledge only to
give colouring to his dreams, and his work tries to represent what
he would like to be the truth instead of showing genuine insight into
what is actually true.
Whatever else in Kingsley may have been affected or half-hearted,
his appreciation of nature remained true and healthy to the end.
If anything it became more intense as he seemed to grow weary of
abstract discussions, and turned for relief to natural scenes.
Nobody has ever shown a greater power of investing with a romantic
charm the descriptions of bird, beast, and insect. There are no more
delightful books than those which express the naturalist's delight in
country sights, from the days of Izaak Walton to White of Selborne,
or Waterton, or our most recent discovery, the Scotch naturalist
Edward. Amongst such writers, Kingsley is in the front rank; and his
taste is combined with a power of catching wider aspects of scenery,
such as few of our professional describers can rival. It would be
interesting to lay bare the secret of his power. He has done for
Devon and Cornwall, for the heaths and chalk-streams of the southern
counties, and even for the much-depreciated fens, what Scott did for
the Highlands. One secret is of course the terseness and directness of
his descriptions. He never lays himself out for a bit of deliberate
bombast, and deals always with first-hand impressions. The writing
is all alive. There is no dead matter of conventional phrases and
imitative ecstasies. And again, his descriptions are always dramatic.
There is a human being in the foreground with whom we sympathise. We
do not lose ourselves in mystic meditations, or surrender ourselves
to mere sensuous dreaming. We are in active, strenuous enjoyment;
beguiling the trout of his favourite chalk-streams, sailing under the
storm-beaten cliffs of Lundy, and drinking in the rich sea-breeze
that sweeps over Dartmoor, or galloping with clenched teeth through
the fir-woods of Eversley. One characteristic picture—to take one at
random from a hundred—is the evening ride of Zeal-for-Truth Thoresby
of Thoresby Rise in Deeping Fen as he rides slowly homeward after
Naseby fight along one of the fen-droves. One could swear that one
had been with him, as Kingsley no doubt was merely embodying the
vivid recollection of some old Cambridge expedition into the Bedford
Level, a scenery which has a singular and mysterious charm, though few
besides Kingsley have succeeded in putting it on paper.
Some wonder has been wasted on Kingsley's descriptions of the tropical
scenery which he had never seen. Even men of genius do not work
miracles; and so far as I know they always blunder in such attempts.
Johnson showed his usual sense in regard to a similar criticism upon
the blind poet, Blacklock. If, he said, you found that a paralytic
man had left his room, you would explain the wonder by supposing that
he had been carried. Similarly, the explanation of Kingsley and of
Blacklock is that they described not what they had seen, but what they
had read. The description in 'Westward Ho!' may easily be traced to
Humboldt and other sources where they are not explicable by a visit to
Kew Gardens. A minute criticism would show that they are little more
than catalogues of gorgeous plants and strange beasts, and show none
of those vivid touches, so striking from their fidelity, which give
animation to his descriptions of English scenery. In his pictures of
Devonshire we can tell the time of the day and night and the state
of the weather as clearly as if he were a meteorologist. In South
America he leaves us to generalities. The true secret of his success
is different. He describes vividly not the outward fact, but the
inward enjoyment. One need not go to the tropics to imagine the charm
of luxurious indolence. Perhaps we enjoy it the more because we have
not really been exposed to its inconveniences. The dazzling of the eye
by blazing sunlight and brilliant colours, the relief given by the
cool deep streams under luxuriant foliage, the vague consciousness of
wondrous forms of life lurking in the forest depths, can be realised
without any special accuracy of portraiture. The contagion to which we
are really exposed is that of the enthusiasm with which Kingsley had
read his favourite books of travel. But of downright description there
is little, and that little not very remarkable. If anybody doubts
it, he may read the passage of river scenery which concludes with
a quotation from Humboldt, and observe how vividly the fragment of
actual observation stands out from the mere catalogue of curiosities;
or, again, with any of Kingsley's own Devonshire scenes, where every
touch shows loving familiarity with details and a consequent power of
selecting just the most speaking incidents.
We may put two passages beside each other which will illustrate the
difference. Describing, after Humboldt, the mid-day calm of the
forest, he says, 'The birds' notes died out one by one; the very
butterflies ceased their flitting over the treetops, and slept with
outspread wings upon the glossy leaves, undistinguishable from the
flowers around them. Now and then a colibri whirred downwards towards
the water, hummed for a moment round some pendent flower, and then
the living gem was lost in the deep darkness of the inner wood, among
tree trunks as huge and dark as the pillars of some Hindoo shrine; or
a parrot swung and screamed at them from an overhanging bough; or a
thirsty monkey slid lazily down a liana to the surface of the stream,
dipped up the water in his tiny hand, and started chattering back,
as his eyes met those of some foul alligator peering upward through
the clear depths below.' This and more is good enough, but there is
nothing which would not suggest itself to a visitor to the British
Museum or the Zoological Gardens. It is a catalogue, and rather too
full a catalogue of curiosities, without one of those vivid touches
which reveal actual observation. At the end of the same volume we have
a real sketch from nature. Amyas and his friends walk to the cliffs of
Lundy: 'As they approached, a raven, who sat upon the topmost stone,
black against the bright blue sky, flapped lazily away, and sank down
the abysses of the cliff, as if he had scented the corpses beneath
the surge. Below them, from the gull-rock rose a thousand birds, and
filled the air with sound, the choughs cackled, the hacklets wailed,
the great black-backs laughed querulous defiance at the intruders, and
a single falcon, with an angry bark, darted out from beneath their
feet, and hung poised high aloft, watching the sea-fowl which swung
slowly round and round below.' That gives the atmospheric effect,
and what we may call the dramatic character. Every phrase suggests a
picture, and the whole description, of which I have quoted a bit, has
real unity of effect, instead of being a simple enumeration of details.
When one reads some passages inspired by this hearty and simple-minded
love of nature, one is sometimes half tempted to wish that Kingsley
could have put aside his preachings, social, theological, and
philosophical, and have been content with a function for which he
was so admirably adapted. The men who can feel and make others feel
the charms of beautiful scenery and stimulate the love for natural
history do us a service which, if not the highest, is perhaps the
most unalloyed by any mixture of evil. Kingsley would have avoided
many errors and the utterance of much unsatisfactory dogmatism if he
could have limited himself to such a duty. But to do so he must have
been a man of narrower sympathies, less generous temper, and less
hearty hatred of all evil influences. We could hardly wish him to have
been other than he was, though we may wish that he had developed under
more favourable circumstances. The weaknesses which marred his work
and led to the exhaustion of his faculties were to be regretted, but
were not such as to diminish the affection deserved by so cordial a
nature. He is more or less responsible for those offensive persons,
the Viking and the muscular Christian. The Viking, I suppose, must
have been partly a humbug like other products of graphic history, and
too much has been made of his supposed share in our ancestry. Kingsley
had a feminine tenderness and an impatient excitability indicative of
a different ancestry. He admires the huge, full-blooded barbarians,
but only belongs to them on one side. He is as near to his delicate
as to his muscular heroes, to Francis as to Amyas Leigh, and to the
morbid poet, Vavasour, as to the more vigorous Tom Thurnall. In these
days, when the Viking or Berserker element seems to be dying out of
our literature, even this qualified and external worship of masculine
vigour is valuable. There is something hectic and spasmodic about it,
though it implies a homage to more healthy ideals. Kingsley, at any
rate, hated the namby-pamby, and he tried, with too obvious an effort,
to be simple and unaffected. His aims were thoroughly noble, though
marred by his want of reserve and of intellectual stamina. He was too
timid or too impatient to work out consistent theories or acquire much
depth of conviction. But with all his shortcomings he succeeded in
giving forcible utterance to truths of vital importance, and brought
vividly before our minds problems which most urgently press for a
solution more satisfactory than he was able to reach.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Life_, vol. i. p. 420.
[2] _Life_, vol. ii. p. 55.
[3] _Life_, vol. ii. p. 357.
[4] _Life_, vol. i. p. 314.
[5] _Life_, vol. i. p. 244.
_GODWIN AND SHELLEY_
The poetic and the metaphysical temperaments are generally held to
be in some sense incompatible. Poets, indeed, have often shown the
highest speculative acuteness, and philosophy often implies a really
poetical imagination. But the necessary conditions of successful
achievement in the two cases are so different that the combination of
the two kinds of excellence in one man must be of excessive rarity.
No man can be great as a philosopher who is incapable of brooding
intensely and perseveringly over an abstract problem, absolutely
unmoved by the emotion which is always seeking to bias his judgment;
whilst a poet is great in virtue of the keenness of his sensibility
to the emotional aspect of every decision of the intellect. For the
one purpose, it is essential to keep the passions apart from the
intellect: for the other, to transfuse intellect with passion. A few
of our metaphysicians have ventured into poetical utterance. Berkeley
wrote a really fine copy of verses, and Hobbes struck out one famous
couplet—
And like a star upon her bosom lay
His beautiful and shining golden head—
in a translation of Homer, otherwise not easily readable. Scott
proposed to publish the whole poetical works of David Hume, consisting
of a remarkable quatrain composed in an inn at Carlisle.[6]
Here chicks in eggs for breakfast sprawl,
Here godless boys God's glories squall,
Here Scotchmen's heads do guard the wall,
But Corby's walks atone for all.
The only exception to this rule in our literature seems to be
Coleridge. Coleridge undoubtedly exercised a vast influence upon
the speculation of his countrymen, whilst his poems possess merits
of the rarest order. It is more worthy of remark that his poetry is
most successful where it is most independent of his philosophy. In
'Christabel,' the 'Ancient Mariner,' or 'Kubla Khan,' we can only
discover the philosopher by the evidence of a mind richly stored with
associations, and by the tendency to discover a mystical significance
in natural objects. Some people would urge that his philosophy would
have been improved if it had been equally free from poetical elements.
In any case, Coleridge is an example of a combination of diverse
excellence not easily to be paralleled. Another poet was supposed by
some of his admirers to have similar claims upon our respect. Shelley
seems to have thought himself as well fitted for abstract speculation
as for poetry; and his widow declared that, had he lived longer,
he might have 'presented to the world a complete theory of mind; a
theory to which Berkeley, Coleridge, and Kant would have contributed;
but more simple, unimpugnable, and entire than the systems of those
writers.' The phrase is by itself enough to prove Mrs. Shelley's
incompetence to form any opinion as to her husband's qualifications
for this stupendous task. It is not by forming a patchwork of
Berkeley, Kant, and Coleridge that a 'complete theory of mind' is
likely to be evolved; nor does it appear that Shelley really knew much
about either of the latter writers; certainly, he has not given the
smallest proof of a power of original speculation in such matters.
And yet, though it would be absurd to treat Shelley seriously as an
originator of philosophic thought or even as a moderately profound
student of philosophy, there is no doubt that his poetry contains
a philosophical element which deserves consideration, if only to
facilitate the comprehension of his poetry.
Enough has been written by the competent and the incompetent, the
prosaic and the poetical, the hyperbolical panegyrists and the calm
analytical critics, of Shelley considered primarily as a poet. Nobody,
as it seems to me, is entitled to add anything who has not himself a
very unusual share, if not of Shelley's own peculiar genius, at least
of receptivity for its products; and after all that has been written
by the ablest writers, one can learn more of Shelley by getting, say,
the 'Adonais' or the 'Ode to the Skylark' by heart than by studying
volumes of talk about his works. At any rate, I feel no vocation to
add to the mass of imperfectly appreciative disquisition. Recent
discussions, however, seem to show both that some interest is still
taken in the other aspect of Shelley's writings, and that an obvious
remark or two still remains to be made. People are in doubt whether to
classify Shelley as atheist, pantheist, or theist; they dispute as to
whether his writings represent the destructive spirit which undermines
all that is good amongst men, or, on the contrary, are the fullest
expression yet reached by any human being of the divinest element
of religion. Were it not that some parallel phenomena might be very
easily suggested, it would be surprising that the meaning of a writer,
who had extraordinary powers of expressing himself clearly and an
almost morbid hatred of anything like reticence, should be seriously
doubtful. The explanation of the wonder is not, I think, very far to
seek. For one thing, people have not yet made up their minds as to
the true bearing of some opinions which Shelley undoubtedly held. The
question whether they were of good or evil import is mixed up with
the question as to whether they were true or false. Upon that problem
I shall not touch; but a few pages may be occupied by an attempt to
indicate what, as a matter of fact, Shelley actually held, or rather
what was his general attitude as to certain important questions. One
result will probably be that it matters very little what he held so
far as his influence upon our own conclusions is concerned. For, to
say nothing of Shelley's incapacity to deal satisfactorily with the
great controversies of his own time, our point of view has so much
shifted that we can consider his opinions almost as calmly as those of
the Eleatics or the Pythagoreans. They are matters of history which
need affect nobody at the present day.