suddenly extinguished, how completely a thing of the past it seems to
have become! Only twenty-four years have passed since its collapse. Men
under forty can recall, as if it were yesterday, all its incidents and
its principal figures. People in the United States know that my friend
Henry Vincent is still only in his prime; he was one of its earliest and
foremost leaders. But it seems as old and dead as a peasant-war of the
Middle Ages. It was a strange jumble of politics and social complaints.
It was partly the blind, passionate protest of working men who knew that
they had no right to starve and suffer in a prosperous country, but who
hardly knew where the real grievance lay. It was partly the protest of
untaught and eager intelligence against the brutal apathy of government
which would do nothing for national education. Its political demands
were very modest. Some of them have since been quietly carried into law;
some of them have been quietly dismissed into the realm of anachronisms.
Chartism was indeed rather a wild cry, a passionate yearning of lonely
men for combination, than any definite political enterprise. One looks
back now with a positive wonder upon the savage stupidity of the ruling
classes which so nearly converted it into a rebellion. Of course it was
in some instances seized hold of by selfish and scheming politicians,
who played with it for their own purposes. Of course it had its evil
counsellors, its false friends, its cowards, and its traitors. But on
the whole there was a noble spirit of manly honesty pervading the
movement, which to my mind fills it with a romantic interest and ought
to secure for it an honorable memory. It found leaders in many cases
outside its own classes. There was, for example, "Tom Duncombe," a sort
of Alcibiades of English Radicalism; a brilliant talker in Parliament, a
gay man of fashion, steeped deep in reckless debt and sparkling
dissipation; hand and glove with the fast young noblemen of the West End
gambling houses, and the ardent Chartist working men of Shoreditch and
Clerkenwell. There was Feargus O'Connor--huge, boistering, fearless--a
burlesque Mirabeau with red hair; a splendid mob-speaker, who could
fight his way by sheer strength of muscle and fist through a hostile
crowd; vain of his half-mythical descent from Irish kings, even when he
delighted in being hail fellow well met with tailors and hod-carriers;
revelling in the fiercest struggles of politics and the wildest freaks
of prolonged debauchery. O'Connor tried to crowd half a dozen lives into
one, and the natural result was that he prematurely broke down. For a
long time before his death he was a mere lunatic. A strange fact was
that as his manners were always eccentric and boisterous, he had become
an actual madman for months before those around him were fully aware of
the change. In the House of Commons the freaks of the poor lunatic were
for a long time supposed to be only more marked eccentricities, or, as
some thought, insolent affectations of eccentricity. He would rise while
Lord Palmerston was addressing the House, walk up to the great minister,
and give him a tremendous slap on the back. One night he actually
assaulted a member of the House, and the Speaker ordered his arrest.
Feargus sauntered coolly out into the lobbies. The sergeant-at-arms was
bidden to go forth and arrest the offender. Lord Charles Russell
(brother of Earl Russell), then and now sergeant-at-arms, is a thin,
little, feeble man. I have been told by some who witnessed it that the
scene in the lobbies became highly amusing. Lord Charles went with
reluctant steps about his awful task. By this time everybody was
beginning to suspect that O'Connor was really a madman. Anyhow, he was a
giant, and at his sanest moments perfectly reckless. Now it is not a
pleasant task for a weak and little man to be sent to arrest even a sane
giant; but only think of laying hands on a giant who appears to be out
of his senses! The dignity of his office, however, had to be upheld, and
Lord Charles trotted quietly after his huge quarry. He cast imploring
looks at member after member, but it was none of their business to
interfere, and they had no inclination to volunteer. Some of them indeed
were deeply engrossed in speculations as to what would happen if Feargus
were suddenly to turn round. Would the sergeant-at-arms put his dignity
in his pocket and actually run? Or, if he stood his ground, what would
be the result? Happily, however, just as Feargus and his unwilling
pursuer reached Westminster Hall, the eager eye of Lord Charles Russell
descried a little knot of policemen; he hailed them; they came up, and
the sergeant-at-arms did his duty and the capture was effected. I can
well remember seeing O'Connor, somewhere about this time, sauntering
through Covent Garden market, with rolling, restless gait; his hair,
that once was fiery red, all snowy white; his eye gleaming with the
peculiar, quick, shallow, ever-changing glitter of madness. The poor
fellow rambled from fruit-stall to fruit-stall, talking all the while to
himself, sometimes taking up a fruit as if he meant to buy it, and then
putting it down with a vacant laugh and walking on. It was a pitiable
spectacle. His light of reason soon flickered out altogether, and death
came to his relief.
I must not omit to mention, when speaking of the Chartist leaders, the
brave, disinterested, and highly-gifted Ernest Jones, who sacrificed
such bright worldly prospects for the cause of the People's Charter.
Long after the Charter and its agitation were dead, Jones emerged into
public life again, still comparatively a young man, and he seemed about
to enter on a career both brilliant and valuable. An immature and
unexpected death interposed.
However, I have wandered away from the subject of my paper. Charles
Kingsley came to know the principal working men among the Chartists,
and his impulsive nature was greatly influenced by their words and
their lives. Most of their leaders drawn from other classes, O'Connor
especially, he distrusted and disliked. But the rank and file of the
movement, the working men, the sufferers, the "proletaires" as they
would be called nowadays, attracted his kindly heart. Chartism had
fallen. It collapsed suddenly in 1848; died amid Homeric laughter of the
public. It fell mainly because it had come to occupy a false position
altogether. Partly by ignorance, partly by the selfish folly of some of
its leaders, and partly by the severity of the government measures, the
movement had been driven into a dilemma which it never originally
contemplated. It must either go into open rebellion or surrender. It was
jammed up like MacMahon at Sedan. Chartism had no real wish to rebel,
although of course the flame of the recent revolution in Paris had
glared over it and made it wild; and it had no means of carrying on a
revolt for a single day. So it could only surrender; and the surrender
took place under conditions which made it seem utterly ridiculous.
Kingsley was seized with the idea of crystallizing all this into a
romance. He had as a further stimulant and guide the work which Henry
Mayhew was then publishing, "London Labor and the London Poor," a serial
which by its painful and startling revelations was working a profound
impression on England. Mayhew's narratives were often inaccurate, for he
could not conduct the whole enterprise himself, and had sometimes to
call in the aid of careless and untrustworthy associates, who
occasionally found it easier to throw off a bit of sentimental or
sensational romance than to pursue a patient inquiry. But the general
effect of the publication was healthful and practical, and it became the
parent of nearly all the efforts that followed to lay bare and
ameliorate the condition of the London poor. There can be no doubt that
it had a great influence on the impressionable mind of Charles Kingsley.
He wrote "Alton Locke," and the book became a great success. The Tailor
and Poet was the hero of the hour. "Blackwood" at once christened Alton
Locke "Young Remnants;" but Young Remnants survived the joke. The novel
is full of nonsense and extravagance; and with all its sympathy for
tailors, it has a great deal of Kingsley's characteristic affection for
rank and birth. But it had a really great idea at its heart, and struck
out one or two new characters--especially that of the old Scotch
bookseller--and it made its mark. The peculiarity, however, to which I
wish now especially to direct attention is its utter absence of
practical thinking-power. Nowhere can you find any proof that the author
is able to think about anything. An idea strikes him; he seizes it, and,
to use Hawthorne's expression, "wields it like a flail." Then he throws
it down and takes up something else, to employ it in the same wild and
incoherent fashion. This is Kingsley all out, and always. He is not
content with developing his one only gift of any literary value--the
capacity to paint big, striking pictures with a strong glare or glow on
them. He firmly believes himself a profound philosopher and social
reformer, and he will insist on obtruding before the world on all
occasions his absolute incapacity for any manner of reasoning on any
subject whatsoever. Wild with intellectual egotism, and blind to all
teaching from without, Kingsley rushes at great and difficult subjects
head downwards like a bull. Thus he tackled Chartism, and society, and
competition, and political economy, and what not, in his "Alton Locke";
and thus he has gone on ever since and will to the end of his chapter,
always singling out for the display of his powers the very subjects
whereof he knows least, and is by the whole constitution of his
intellect and temperament least qualified to judge.
I am writing now rather about Kingsley himself than about his books,
with which the readers of "The Galaxy" are of course well acquainted. I
therefore pass over the many books he produced between "Alton Locke" and
"Westward Ho!"--and I dwell upon the latter only because it illustrates
the next great idea which got hold of the author after the little fever
about Chartism had passed away. I suppose "Westward Ho!" may be regarded
as the first appearance of the school of Muscular Christianity. Mr.
Kingsley started for our benefit the huge British hero who could do
anything in the way of fighting and walking, and propagated the
doctrines of the English Church. To read the Bible and to kill the
Spaniards was the whole duty of the ideal Briton of Elizabeth's time,
according to this authority. The notion was a success. In a moment our
literature became flooded with pious athletes who knocked their enemies
down with texts from the Scriptures and left-handers from the shoulder.
All these heroes were of necessity "gentlemen." One of the principal
articles of the new gospel according to Kingsley was that truth, valor,
muscle, and theological fervor were only possessed in their fulness by
the scions of good old English county families. Other nations seldom had
such qualities at all; never had them to perfection; and even favored
Britain only saw them properly illustrated in country gentlemen of long
descent. Of course this sort of thing, which was for the moment a
sincere idea with Kingsley, became a mere affectation among his
followers and admirers. The fighting-parson pattern of hero was for a
while as great a bore as the rough and ugly hero after Jane Eyre's
"Rochester," or the colossal and corrupt guardsman whom "Guy
Livingstone" sent abroad on the world. Certainly Kingsley's hero was a
better style of man than Guy Livingstone's, for at the worst he was only
an egotistical savage, and not a profligate. But I think he did a good
deal of harm in his day. He helped to encourage and inflate that feeling
of national self-conceit which makes people such nuisances to their
neighbors, and he fostered that odious reverence for mere force and
power which Carlyle had already made fashionable. Kingsley himself
appears to have become "possessed" by his own idea as if by some
unmanageable spirit. It banished all his chartism and democracy and
liberalism, and the rest of it. Under its influence Kingsley
out-Carlyled Carlyle in the worship of strong despotisms and force of
any kind. He went out of his way to excuse slavery in the Southern
States. He became the fervent panegyrist of Governor Eyre of Jamaica.
When two sides were possible to any question of human politics, he was
sure to take the wrong one. Nothing for long years, I think, has been
more repulsive, and in its way more mischievous, than the cant about
"strength" which Kingsley did so much to diffuse and to glorify.
Meanwhile his irrepressible energy was always driving him into new
fields of work. It never allowed him time to think. The moment any sort
of idea struck him, he rushed at it and crushed it into the shape of a
book or an essay. He wrote historical novels, philosophical novels, and
theological novels. He wrote poetry--yards of poetry--volumes of poetry.
There really is a great deal of the spirit of poetry in him, and he has
done better things with the hexameter verse than better poets have done.
There was for a long time a fervid school of followers who swore by him,
and would have it that he was to be the great English poet of the
century. He published essays, tracts, lectures, and sermons without
number. He seems to have made up his mind to publish in book form
somehow everything that he had spoken or written anywhere. He inundated
the leading newspapers with letters on this, that, and the other
subject. He was appointed professor of modern history at the University
of Cambridge on the death of Sir James Stephen, and he launched at once
into a series of lectures, which were almost immediately published in
book form. Why he published them it was hard for even vanity itself to
explain, because with characteristic bluntness he began his course with
the acknowledgment that he really knew nothing in particular about the
subjects whereon he had undertaken to instruct the University and the
world. He made up in courage, however, for anything he may have lacked
in knowledge. He went bravely in for an onslaught on the positive theory
of history--on Comte, Mill, Buckle, Darwin, and everybody else. He made
it perfectly clear very soon that he did not know even what these
authors profess to teach. He flatly denied that there is any such thing
as an inexorable law in nature. He proved that even the supposed law of
gravitation is not by any means the rigid and universal sort of thing
that Newton and such-like persons have supposed. How, it may be asked,
did he prove this? In the following words: "If I choose to catch a
stone, I can hold it in my hands; it has not fallen to the ground, and
will not till I let it. So much for the inevitable action of the laws of
gravity." This way of dealing with the question may seem to many readers
nothing better than downright buffoonery. But Kingsley was as grave as a
church and as earnest as an owl. He fully believed that he was refuting
the pedants who believe in the inevitable action of the law of
gravitation, when he talked of holding a stone in his hand. That an
impulsive, illogical man should on the spur of the moment talk this kind
of nonsense, even from a professor's chair, is not perhaps wonderful;
but it does seem a little surprising that he should see it in print,
revise it, and publish it, without ever becoming aware of its absurdity.
In the same headlong spirit Mr. Kingsley rushed into his famous
controversy with Dr. John Henry Newman. I have already, when writing of
Dr. Newman, alluded to this controversy, which for a time excited the
greatest interest and indeed the greatest amusement in England. I only
refer to it now as an illustration of the surprising hotheadedness and
lack of thinking power which characterize the author of "Alton Locke."
Dr. Newman preached a sermon on "Wisdom and Innocence." Mr. Kingsley
went out of his way to discourse and comment on this sermon, and
publicly declared that its doctrine was an exhortation to disregard
truth. "Dr. Newman informs us that truth need not and on the whole ought
not to be a virtue for its own sake." Of course this was as grave a
charge as could possibly be made against a great religious teacher. It
was doubly odious and offensive to Dr. Newman because it was the revival
of an old and familiar charge against the church he had lately entered.
It was made by Kingsley in an oft-hand, careless sort of way, as if it
were something acknowledged and indisputable--as if some one were to
say, "Horace Greeley informs us that a protective tariff is often
useful," or "Henry Ward Beecher is in favor of early rising." Newman
wrote with a cold civility to ask in what passage of his writings any
such doctrine was to be found. Of course nothing of the kind was to be
found. If it were possible to conceive of any divine in our days holding
such a doctrine, we may be perfectly certain that he would never put it
into print. Newman was known to all the world as the purest and most
austere devotee of what he believed to be the truth. He had sacrificed
the most brilliant career in the Church of England for his convictions,
and, strange to say, had yet retained the admiration and the affection
of those whose religious fellowship he had renounced. Kingsley had but
one course in fairness and common sense open to him. He ought to have
frankly apologized. He ought to have owned that he had spoken without
thinking; that he had blurted out the words without observing the
gravity of the charge they contained; and that he was sorry for it. But
he did not do this. He published a letter, in which he said that Dr.
Newman having denied that his doctrine bore the meaning Mr. Kingsley had
put upon it, he (Kingsley) could only express his regret at having
mistaken him. This was nearly as bad as the first charge. It distinctly
conveyed the idea that but for Dr. Newman's subsequent explanation and
denial, certain words of his might fairly have been understood to bear
the odious meaning ascribed to them. Dr. Newman returned to the charge,
still with a chill urbanity which I cannot help thinking Kingsley
mistook for weakness or fear. He pointed out that he had never denied
anything; that there was nothing for him to deny; that Mr. Kingsley had
charged him with teaching a certain odious doctrine, and he therefore
asked Mr. Kingsley to point to the passage containing the doctrine, or
frankly own that there was no such passage in existence. Kingsley
thereupon took the worst, the most unfair, and as it proved the most
foolish course a man could possibly have pursued. He went to work to
fasten on Newman by a constructive argument, drawn from the general
tendency of his teaching, a belief in the doctrine of which he was
unable to find any specific statement. Then opened out that controversy,
which was quite an event in its time, and set everybody talking.
Newman's was an intellect which must be described as the peer of Stuart
Mill's or Herbert Spencer's. He was a perfect master of polemical
science. He could write, when he thought fit, with a vitriolic keenness
of sarcasm. When he had allowed Kingsley to entangle himself
sufficiently, Newman fairly opened fire, and the rest of the debate was
like a duel between some blundering, wrong-headed cudgel-player from a
village green, and some accomplished professor of the science of the
rapier from Paris or Vienna. Not the least amusing thing about the
controversy was the manner in which it put Kingsley into open antagonism
with his own teaching. He endeavored gratuitously and absurdly to
convict Dr. Newman of a disregard for the truth, because Newman believed
in the miracles of the saints. For, he argued, a man of Newman's
intellect could not believe in such things if he inquired into them. But
he did not inquire into them; he taught that they were not to be
questioned but accepted as orthodox. Thereby he showed that he preferred
orthodoxy to truth--"truth, the capital virtue, the virtue of virtues,
without which all others are rotten." Now, that sounds very well, and we
all agree in what Kingsley says of the truth. But Kingsley had not long
before been assailing Bishop Colenso for his infidelity. Kingsley
declared himself shocked at the publication of a work like Dr.
Colenso's, which claimed and exercised a license of inquiry that seemed
to him "anything but reverent." He distinctly laid it down that the
liberty of religious criticism must be "reverent," and "within the
limits of orthodoxy!" Now, I am not challenging Mr. Kingsley's doctrine
as to the limit of religious inquiry. That forms no part of my purpose.
But it is perfectly obvious that if to limit inquiry within the bounds
of orthodoxy shows a disregard for truth in John Henry Newman, the same
practice must be evidence of a similar disregard in Charles Kingsley. Of
course Kingsley never thought of this--never thought about the matter at
all. He disliked Colenso's teaching on the one hand and Newman's on the
other. He said the first thing that came into his mind against each in
turn, and never heeded the fact that the reproach he employed in the
former case was utterly inconsistent with that which he uttered in the
other. I do not believe, however, that the controversy did Kingsley any
harm. Nobody ever expected consistency or rational argument from him.
People were amused, and laughed, and perhaps wondered why Dr. Newman
should have taken any trouble in the matter at all. But Kingsley
remained in popular estimation just the same as before--blundering,
hot-headed, boisterous, but full of brilliant imagination, and
thoroughly sound at heart.
Thus Charles Kingsley is always at work. Lately he has been describing
some of the scenery of the West Indies, and proclaiming the virtues of
Australian potted meats. He has thrown his whole soul into the
Australian meat question. The papers have run over with letters from him
intended to prove to the world how good and cheap it is to eat the
mutton and beef brought in tin cans from Australia. I believe Mr.
Kingsley acknowledges that all his energy and eloquence have been
unequal to the task of persuading his servants to eat the excellent food
which he is himself willing to have at his table. He has also been
lecturing on temperance, and delivering a philippic against Darwin. He
has also written a paper condemning and deprecating the modern critical
spirit. There is one rule, he insists, "by which we should judge all
human opinions, endeavors, characters." That is, "Are they trying to
lessen the sum of human misery, of human ignorance? Are they trying,
however clumsily, to cure physical suffering, weakness, deformity,
disease, and to make human bodies what God would have them?... If so,
let us judge them no further. Let them pass out of the pale of our
criticism. Let their creed seem to us defective, their opinions
fantastic, their means irrational. God must judge of that, not we. They
are trying to do good; then they are children of the light." This is
not, perhaps, the spirit in which Kingsley himself criticised Newman or
Colenso. But if we judge him according to the principle which he
recommends, he would assuredly take high rank; for I never heard any one
question his sincerity and his honest purpose to do good. Of course he
is often terribly provoking. His feminine and almost hysterical
impulsiveness, and his antiquated, feudal devotion to rank, are
difficult to bear always without strong language. His utter absence of
sympathy with political emancipation is a lamentable weakness. His
self-conceit and egotism often make him a ludicrous object. Still, he
has an honest heart, and he tries to do the work of a man; and he is one
of those who would, if they could, make the English State Church still a
living, an active, and an all-pervading influence. As a preacher and a
pastor he often reminds me of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Of course he
is far below Mr. Beecher in all oratorical gifts as well as in political
enlightenment; but he has the same perfervid and illogical nature, the
same vigorous, self-sufficient temperament, the same tendency to "slop
over," the same generous energy in any cause that seems to him good.
It will be inferred that I do not rate Mr. Kingsley very highly as an
author. He can describe glowing scenery admirably, and he can vigorously
ring the changes on his one or two ideas--the muscular Englishman, the
glory of the Elizabethan discoverers, and so on. He is a scholar, and he
has written verses which sometimes one is on the point of mistaking for
poetry, so much of the poet's feelings have they about them. He can do a
great many things very cleverly. He belongs to a clever family. His
brother, Henry Kingsley, is a spirited and dashing novelist, whom the
critics sneer at a good deal, but whose books always command a large
circulation, and have made a distinctive mark. Perhaps if Charles
Kingsley had done less he might have done better. Human capacity is
limited. It is not given to mortal to be a great preacher, a great
philosopher, a great scholar, a great poet, a great historian, a great
novelist, an indefatigable country parson, and a successful man in
fashionable society. Mr. Kingsley seems never to have quite made up his
mind for which of these callings to go in especially, and being with all
his versatility not at all many-sided, but strictly one-sided, and
almost one-ideaed, the result of course has been that, touching success
at many points, he has absolutely mastered it at none. His place in
letters has been settled this long time. Since "Westward Ho!" at the
latest, he has never added half a cubit to his stature. The "Chartist
Parson" has, on the other hand, been growing more and more aristocratic,
illiberal, and even servile in politics. His discourse on the recovery
of the Prince of Wales was the very hyperbole of the most old-fashioned
loyalty--a discourse worthy of Filmer, and utterly out of place in the
present century. Muscular Christianity has shrunk and withered long
since. The professorship of modern history was a failure, and has been
given up. Darwin is flourishing, and I am not certain about the success
of Australian beef. All this acknowledged, however, it must still be
owned that, failing in this, that, and the other attempt, and never
probably achieving any real and enduring success, Charles Kingsley has
been an influence and a name of mark in the Victorian age. I cannot,
indeed, well imagine that age without him, although his presence is
sometimes only associated with it as that of Malvolio with the court of
the fair lady in "Twelfth Night." Men of far greater intellect have made
their presence less strongly felt, and imprinted their image much less
clearly on the minds of their contemporaries. He is an example of how
much may be done by energetic temper, fearless faith in self, an absence
of all sense of the ridiculous, a passionate sympathy, and a wealth of
half-poetic descriptive power. If ever we have a woman's parliament in
England, Charles Kingsley ought to be its chaplain; for I know of no
clever man whose mind and temper more aptly illustrate the illogical
impulsiveness, the rapid emotional changes, the generous, often
wrong-headed vehemence, the copious flow of fervid words, the vivid
freshness of description without analysis, and the various other
peculiarities which, justly or unjustly, the world has generally agreed
to regard as the special characteristics of woman.
MR. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.