Count von Bismarck (before the triumph of Sadowa had condoned for the
offences of the great despotic Minister), I had a visit, one night, from
a mysterious, seedy, snuffy old German. He came, he said, to develop a
grand plan for the extinction of the Junker or Feudal party. Why he came
to develop it to me I do not know, as it will presently be seen that I
could hardly render it any practical assistance. It was, like all grand
schemes, remarkably simple in its nature. Indeed, it was literally and
strictly Captain Bobadil's immortal plan; although my German visitor
indignantly repudiated the supposition that he had borrowed it, and
declared, I believe, with perfect truth, that he had never heard of
Captain Bobadil before. The plan was simply that a society should be
formed of young and devoted Germans who should occupy themselves in
challenging and killing off, one by one, the whole Junker party. My
friend made his calculations very calmly, and he did not foolishly or
arrogantly assume that the swordsmanship of his party must needs be
always superior to that of their adversaries. No; he counted that there
would be a certain number of victims among his Liberal heroes, and made,
indeed, a large allowance, left a broad margin for such losses. But
this, in no wise affected the success of his plan. The Liberals, were
many, the Junkers few. It would simply be a matter of time and
calculation. Numbers must tell in the end. A day must come when the last
Junker would fall to earth--and then Astrea would return. Now the man
who talked in this way was no lunatic. He had nothing about him, except
his plan, which denoted mental aberration. His scheme apart, he was as
steady and prosy an old German as you could meet under the lindens of
Berlin or on the Lutherplatz of Koenigsberg. He was, moreover, as
earnest, argumentative, and profoundly wearisome over his project as if
he were expounding to an admiring class of students the relations of the
Ego and Non-Ego. I need hardly add that one single beam, even the
faintest, of a sense of the ridiculous, never shone in upon him during
his long and eloquent exposition of the patriotic virtue, the
completeness and the mathematical certainty of his ingenious project.
Let me close my random reminiscences with one recollection of a sadder
nature. Some three or four years ago there came to London from Naples an
Italian of high education and character--a lawyer by profession; a
passionate devotee of Italian unity, and filled naturally with a hatred
of the expelled Bourbons. This gentleman had discovered in one of the
Neapolitan prisons a number of instruments of torture--rusty, hideous
old iron chairs, and racks, and screws, and "cages of silence," and such
other contrivances. He became the possessor of these, and he obtained
from the new government a certificate of the genuineness of his
treasure-trove--that is to say, a certificate that the things were
actually found in the place where the owner professed to have found
them. The Italian authorities, of course, could say nothing as to
whether they had or had not been used as instruments of torture in any
modern reign. They may have lain rusting there since hideous old days
when the Inquisition was a fashionable institution; they may have been
used--public opinion and Mr. Gladstone said things as horrible had been
done--in the blessed reign of good King Bomba. The Neapolitan lawyer
firmly believed that they had been so used; and he became inspired with
the idea that to take these instruments, first to London and then to the
United States, and exhibit them, and lecture on them, would arouse such
a tempest of righteous indignation among all peoples, free or enslaved,
as must sweep kingcraft and priestcraft off the earth. This idea became
a faith with him. He brought his treasure of rusty iron to London, and
proposed to take a great hall and begin the work of his mission. I
endeavored to dissuade him (he had brought some introductions to me). I
told him frankly that, just at that time, public opinion in London was
utterly indifferent to the Bourbons. The fervor of interest about the
Neapolitan Revolution had gone by; people were tired of Italy, and
wanted something new; the Polish insurrection was going on; the great
American Civil War was occupying public attention; London audiences
cared no more about the crimes of the Bourbons than about the crimes of
the Borgias. He was not to be dissuaded. He really believed at first
that he could induce some great English orator, Gladstone or Bright, to
deliver lectures on those instruments and the guilt of the system which
employed them. Then he became more moderate, and applied to this and
that professional lecturer--in vain. No one would have anything to do
with a project so obviously doomed to failure--he himself spoke no
English. At last he induced a lady who was somewhat ambitious of a
public career, to lecture for him; and he took a great hall for a series
of nights, and advertised largely, and went to great expense. I believe
he staked all he had in money or credit on the success of the
enterprise; and the making of money was not his object; he would have
cheerfully given all he had to create a flame of public indignation
against despotism. Need I say what a failure the enterprise was? The
London public never manifested the slightest interest in the exhibition.
The lecture-hall was empty. I believe the poor Neapolitan tried again
and again. The public would not come, or look, or listen. He spent his
money in vain; he got into debt in vain. His instruments of torture must
have inflicted on their owner agonies enough to have satisfied
Maniscalco or Carafa. At last he could bear it no longer. He wrote a few
short letters to some friends (I have still that which I received--a
melancholy memorial), simply thanking them for what efforts they had
made to assist him in his object, acknowledging that he had been over
sanguine, and intimating that he had now given up the enterprise.
Nothing more was said or hinted. A day or two after, he locked himself
up in his room. Somebody heard an explosion, but took no particular
notice. The lady who had endeavored to give voice to my poor friend's
scheme came, later in the day, to see him. The door was broken open--and
the poor Neapolitan lay dead, a pistol still in his hand, a pistol
bullet in his brain.
THE REVEREND CHARLES KINGSLEY.
I wonder how many of the rising generation in America or in England have
read "Alton Locke"? Many years have passed since I read or even saw it.
I do not care to read it any more, for I fear that it would not now
sustain the effect of the impression it once produced on me, and I do
not desire to destroy or even to weaken that impression. I know the book
is not a great work of art. I know that three-fourths of its value
consists in its blind and earnest feeling; that the story is heavily
constructed, that many of the details are extravagant exaggerations, and
that the author after all was not in the least a democrat or a believer
in human equality. I have not forgotten that even then, when he braved
respectable public opinion by taking a tailor for his hero, he took good
care that the tailor should have genteel relations. Still I retain the
impression which the book once produced, and I do not care to have it
disturbed. Therefore I do not read or criticise "Alton Locke" any more;
I remember it only as it struck me long ago--as a generous protest
against the brutal indifference, literary and political, which left the
London artisan so long to toil and suffer and sicken, to run into debt,
to drink and fight and pine and die, in the darkness. Is it
necessary--perhaps it is--to explain to some of my readers the story of
"Alton Locke"? It is the story of a young London tailor-boy who has
instincts and aspirations far above his class; who yearns to be a poet
and a patriot; who loves and struggles in vain; who is supposed to sum
up in his own weakly body all the best emotions, the vainest pinings,
the wildest wishes, the most righteous protests of his fellows; who
joins with the Chartist movement for lack of a better way to the great
end, and sees its failure, and himself utterly broken down goes out to
America to seek a new life there, and only beholds the shore of the
promised land to die. Here at least was a grand idea. Here was the
motive of a prose epic that ought to have been more thrilling to modern
ears than the song of Tasso. The effect of the work at the time was
strengthened by the fact that the author was a clergyman of the Church
of England, who was believed to be a man of aristocratic family and
connections. The book was undoubtedly a great success in its day. The
strong idea which was in the heart of it carried it along. The Rev.
Charles Kingsley became suddenly famous.
"Alton Locke" was published more than twenty years ago. Then Charles
Kingsley was to most boys in Great Britain who read books at all a sort
of living embodiment of chivalry, liberty, and a revolt against the
established order of baseness and class-oppression in so many spheres of
our society. The author of "Alton Locke" about the same time delivered a
sermon in the country church where he officiated, so full of warm and
passionate protest against the wrongs done to the poor by existing
systems, that his spiritual chief, the rector or dean or some other
dignitary, arose in the church itself--morally and physically arose, as
Mrs. Gamp did--and denounced the preacher. Need it be said that the
report of so unusual and extraordinary a scene as this excited our
youthful enthusiasm into a perfect flame for the minister of the State
Church who had braved the public censure of his superior in the cause of
human right? For a long time Charles Kingsley was our chosen hero--I am
speaking now of young men with the youthful spirit of revolt in them,
with dreams of republics and ideas about the equality of man. If I were
to be asked to describe Charles Kingsley now, having regard to the
tendency of his writings and his public attitude, how should I speak of
him? First, as about the most perverse and wrong-headed supporter of
every political abuse, the most dogmatic champion of every wrong cause
in domestic and foreign politics, that even a State Church has for many
years produced. I hardly remember, in my practical observation of
politics, a great public question but Charles Kingsley was at the wrong
side of it. The vulgar glorification of mere strength and power, such a
disgraceful characteristic of modern public opinion, never had a
louder-tongued votary than he. The apostle of liberty and equality, as
he seemed to me in my early days, has of late only shown himself to my
mind as the champion of slave-systems of oppression and the iron reign
of mere force. Is this a paradox? Has the man undergone a wonderful
change of opinions? It is not a paradox, and I think Charles Kingsley
has not changed his views. Perhaps a short sketch of the man and his
work may reconcile these seeming antagonisms and make the reality
coherent and clear.
I was present at a meeting not long since where Mr. Kingsley was one of
the principal speakers. The meeting was held in London, the audience was
a peculiarly Cockney audience, and Charles Kingsley is personally little
known to the public of the metropolis. Therefore when he began to speak
there was quite a little thrill of wonder and something like incredulity
through the listening benches. Could that, people near me asked, really
be Charles Kingsley, the novelist, the poet, the scholar, the
aristocrat, the gentleman, the pulpit-orator, the "soldier-priest," the
apostle of muscular Christianity? Yes, that was indeed he. Rather tall,
very angular, surprisingly awkward, with thin, staggering legs, a
hatchet face adorned with scraggy gray whiskers, a faculty for falling
into the most ungainly attitudes, and making the most hideous
contortions of visage and frame; with a rough provincial accent and an
uncouth way of speaking, which would be set down for absurd caricature
on the boards of a comic theatre; such was the appearance which the
author of "Glaucus" and "Hypatia" presented to his startled audience.
Since Brougham's time nothing so ungainly, odd, and ludicrous had been
displayed upon an English platform. Needless to say, Charles Kingsley
has not the eloquence of Brougham. But he has a robust and energetic
plain-speaking which soon struck home to the heart of the meeting. He
conquered his audience. Those who at first could hardly keep from
laughing; those who, not knowing the speaker, wondered whether he was
not mad or in liquor; those who heartily disliked his general principles
and his public attitude, were alike won over, long before he had
finished, by his bluff and blunt earnestness and his transparent
sincerity. The subject was one which concerned the social suffering of
the poor. Mr. Kingsley approached it broadly and boldly, talking with a
grand disregard for logic and political economy, sometimes startling the
more squeamish of his audience by the Biblical frankness of his
descriptions and his language, but, I think, convincing every one that
he was sound at heart, and explaining unconsciously to many how it
happened that one endowed with sympathies so humane and liberal should
so often have distinguished himself as the champion of the stupidest
systems and the harshest oppressions. Anybody could see that the strong
impelling force of the speaker's character was an emotional one; that
sympathy and not reason, feeling rather than logic, instinct rather than
observation, would govern his utterances. There are men in whom, no
matter how robust and masculine their personal character, a
disproportionate amount of the feminine element seems to have somehow
found a place. These men will usually see things not as they really are,
but as they are reflected through some personal prejudice or emotion.
They will generally spring to conclusions, obey sudden impulses and
instincts, ignore evidence and be very "thorough" and sweeping in all
their judgments. When they are right they are--like the young lady in
the song--very, very good; but like her, too, when they happen to be
wrong they are "horrid." Of these men the author of "Alton Locke" is a
remarkable illustration. It seems odd to describe the expounder of the
creed of Muscular Christianity as one endowed with too much of the
feminine element. But for all his vigor of speech and his rough voice,
Mr. Charles Kingsley is as surely feminine in his way of reasoning, his
likes and dislikes, his impulses and his prejudices, as Harriet
Martineau is masculine in her intellect and George Sand in her emotions.
Mr. Charles Kingsley is a man of ancient English family, very proud of
his descent, and full of the conviction so ostentatiously paraded by
many Englishmen, that good blood carries with it a warrant for bravery,
justice, and truth. The Kingsleys are a Cheshire family; I believe they
date from before the Conquest--it does not much matter. I shall not
apply to them John Bright's epigram about families which came over with
William the Conqueror and never did anything else; for the Kingsleys
seem to have been always an active race. They took an energetic part in
the civil war during Charles the First's time, and stood by the
Parliament. I am told that the family have still in their possession a
commission to raise a troop of horse, given to a Kingsley and signed by
Oliver Cromwell. One of the family emigrated to the New World with the
Pilgrim Fathers, and I believe the Kingsley line still flourishes there
like a bay-tree. Irrepressible energy, so far as I know, seems to have
always been a characteristic of the household. Charles Kingsley was born
near Dartmouth, in Devonshire; every one who has read his books must
know how he revels in descriptions of the lovely scenery of Devon. He
was for a while a pupil of the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, son of the poet,
and he finally studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Mr. Kingsley was
originally intended for the legal profession, but he changed his mind
and went into the church. He was first curate and soon after rector of
the Hampshire parish of Eversley, the name of which has since been so
constantly kept in association with his own. I may mention that Mr.
Kingsley married one of a trio of sisters--the Misses Grenfell--a second
of whom was afterwards married to Mr. Froude, and is since dead, while
the third became the wife of one of the foremost English journalists.
Passing away from these merely personal facts, barely worth a brief
note, we shall find that Kingsley's real existence, if I may use such a
phrase, began and developed under the guidance of a remarkable man and
under the inspiration of a strange movement. The man to whose leadership
and teaching Mr. Kingsley owed so much was the Rev. Frederick Denison
Maurice, who died in the first week of last April.
It would not be easy to explain to an American reader the meaning and
the extent of the influence which this eminent man exercised over a
large field of English society. The life of Mr. Maurice contains nothing
worthy of note as to facts and dates; but its spirit infused new soul
and sense into a whole generation. He was not a great speaker or a great
thinker; he was not a bold reformer; he had not a very subtle intellect;
I doubt whether his writings will be much read in coming time. He was
simply a great character, a grand influence. He sent a new life into the
languid and decaying frame of the State Church of England. He quickened
it with a fresh sense of duty. His hope and purpose were to bring that
church into affectionate and living brotherhood with modern thought,
work, and society. An early friend and companion of John Sterling (the
two friends married two sisters), Maurice had all the sweetness and
purity of Carlyle's hero, with a far greater intellectual strength. Mr.
Maurice set himself to make the English Church a practical influence in
modern thought and society. He did not believe in a religion sitting
apart on the cold Olympian heights of dogmatic theology, and looking
down with dignified disdain upon the common life and the vulgar toils of
humanity. He held that a church, if it is good for anything, ought to be
able to meet fair and square the challenge of the skeptic and the
infidel, and that it ought to concern itself about all that concerns men
and women. One of the fruits of his long and valuable labor is the
Workingmen's College in Red Lion Square, London, an institution of which
he became the principal and to which he devoted much of his time and
attention. Only a few weeks before his death he presided at one of the
public meetings of this his favorite institution. He was the parent of
the scheme of "Christian socialism," which sprang into existence more
than twenty years ago and is bearing fruit still--a scheme to set on
foot cooeperative associations among working men on sound and progressive
principles; to help the working men by advances of capital, in order
that they might thus be enabled to help themselves. One of Mr. Maurice's
earliest and most ardent pupils was Charles Kingsley; another was Thomas
Hughes. In helping Mr. Maurice to carry out these schemes Kingsley was
brought into frequent intercourse with some of the London Chartists, and
especially with the working tailors, who have nearly all a strong
radical tendency. Kingsley's impulsive sympathies took fire, and flamed
out with the novel "Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet."