BOOKS.
THE LIFE OF CHARLES KINGSLEY.* [SECOND NOTICE.] THE critic of these volumes is tempted, by a suggestion as illusory as it is obvious, to lament in them the loss of a great literary opportunity. It is obvious that the biographer of so striking a representative of the third party in the Church might have set before his readers a well-centred picture of an important group, a picture of coarse not attempted here, and indeed rendered im- possible by a point of view too close to allow of a background. A moment's consideration shows us that the portrait here por- trayed by a loving hand, far from occupying the canvas, does but provide the best material for an artist who shall take his stand at the right point of view. We will venture on a few brief sugges- tions as to that part of the picture to which this record does not contribute, and will not shrink from pointing out those shadows, clear and transparent as they always were, which it could not possibly introduce.
The Broad Church was never a party, in the sense in which the High Church and the Low Church are parties. We could hardly find greater spiritual diversity than between some of those whom we must count among its members, and should be much per- plexed to point out any single view that was common to all. Still, we should consider it an unprofitable pedantry to refuse to use this designation for a body within the Church, which, dating its rise, perhaps, with Dr. Arnold, has embodied, on the whole, the liberal theological sympathies of the last forty years. The historian, whom we venture thus far to anticipate, may perhaps find some amends for the poverty of distinctive common principle which this description betrays in a wealth of resemblance which it cannot suggest. He may learn much and teach much by a retrospect which shall connect the nineteenth century with the first, and trace the various and pregnant analo- gies which connect the teaching of Arnold, of Coleridge, of most of those whom Kingsley honoured, and of Kingsley himself, with that school of which the best known representative is Philo the Jew. The appropriateness of such a retrospect is indeed forcibly suggested to the critic of the life of one who has done more than any writer to make the life of Alexandria vivid and real to the average English reader ; and though we cannot here justify, we will not conceal our belief that it is only with such a background that the party we speak of will assume any real dis- tinctness or unity, and find its true place in the history of thought. Whatever difficulty may be felt in including within the ranks of
• Charles Shepley: Ma Letters, sad Memories of Ms Ale. Edited by his Wife. London : Henry S. Sing and Co.
a party so difficult to describe and so easy to misinterpret this or that individual does sot apply, however, to Kingsley, for in a letter given here (11. 129), he speaks of " a synod of the Broad Church "' as a body which would include himself ; and a variety of qualities more obvious, and perhaps for the time more effective, than that= originalityof thought which he always disclaimed, certainly fitted him to be its prominent and characteristic specimen. He' embodies the strong secular tendencies more characteristic of the Broad Church than are any opinions, while his picturesque, many- sided character brought him conspicuously before the public eye, and made his teaching a channel of his faith to many and many a man of the world in every condition of life. We thus regard him as in one respect typically a Broad Churchman, for he was a link between the world and that party, the main, unquestionable characteristic of which is its sympathy with the world. He carried out most successfully that aim to which is owing whatever unity this school may be said to possess.
But an influence worked upon him which we cannot trace is any other important member of his party. There is no larger source of injustice than that which we commit to a man's creed in ignoring its element of protest. Half the controversies of the world would be ended, and little of their bitterness would remain, if men would but realise the suppressed alternative of what is chosen. The peril of failure here is brought vividly home- to us in trying to estimate Charles Kingsley's attitude towards Asceticism, for we confess that it seems to us repulsive from more than one point of view ; and if his heated declamation were the utterance of one still among us, it would seem to us impossible to speak of it without dwelling on its dangers. But the eloquent tongue is silent, and we are not, to confess the truth, anxious as to a possible successor in this par- ticular crusade. The mistake seems to us patent. So far as it is impossible to trace the genesis of this feeling in his mind without- expressing our own view, we must treat it as an unfortunate bias ; but we aim as much as possible at putting ourselves in his point of view, and the aim is the more necessary in proportion to the effort it costs.
The Broad Church is not a reaction from the High Church, in the sense that the High Church was a reaction from the Low Church. Indeed, it seems to us to owe its strength and its- weakness to the fact that it lacks alike the injustice and the impulse of reaction. It is a body sensitive rather to attraction. than repulsion, and hence characterised by the looseness of texture which is inseparable from the readiness constantly to assi- milate new material. Religion, modified by Science—words which sum up its ideal as little inaccurately as any short description—can- not possibly be an aggressive or a missionary creed. But Kingsley, though in some respects the typical man of his party, was unlike his party in this respect. in many ways nature seems to us to have intended him for a soldier, and this part of his charade]) was strongly engaged in all his preaching. And it is evident that in his youth the foe which impressed his imagination and kindled his energy was that party which is associated with the Oxford of the third and fourth decades of our century, and the great ex- ponent of which became subsequently, by a strange and yet natural fatality, Kingsley's most illustrious antagonist. The spirit in him which rebelled against the teaching of the Oxford School was that which we have already tried to describe in speaking of the Christian Socialist movement, the feeling he mistook for Democracy. The High Churchman, so far as he was consistent, said," The Church is the Ark, in which we are called on to take refuge from the waves of a troublesome world. God's appointed channel of Re- demption cannot have a mere preferential advantage over any alternative; if it is what we deem it, it must be the exclusive path to all that we mean by Salvation. To make the world only a lower stage for the exhibition of the same kind of providence that we find in this sacred enclosure is to take away the very object of the enclosure." Kingsley could never have listened with sufficient patience to this kind of argument to be able to answer, or even to understand it. But the antagonistic truth to which he held fast was that sense of the value of all that we gather up in the word Nature, which was the spring of so much of his power. He had not a logical mind, and he never troubled himself about the relation of one truth to another. If he had tried to set forth his view of the relation between that influence which the High Churchman thought the only Divine one to that broader influence which he himself traced to the same source, he might, we believe, have accurately expressed his meaning by an illustration that is none the worse for its triteness. The natural Order would stand to the Supernatural as the law of gravitation to that of chemical affinity, and the High-Church party take the place of a
chemist who should declaim against the absurdity of supposing that all matter was mutually attractive, whereas he could show you a thousand experiments to prove that this attractive influence was of the most rigidly selective character. He saw that there was no more absurdity in saying that an influence may be from one point of view impartial, and from another selective in the inward world, than there is in the outward world, where we are obliged to say it. And he guarded with a certain noble jealousy men's belief in what we will venture to call the impartial influence of God,— those influences which come to all alike, whether they believe in God or not. He stood within an inner circle, he knew the better thing, and he was indignant that those who knew it also should try to exalt their position at the expense of those who were with- out. This was what he meant by calling them an aristocratic party, and in this sense it is perfectly true. His protest in favour of the holiness of all natural impulse and law seems to us to have been stronger than was necessary, and to have betrayed some ignorance of the true dangers of the age ; but if the Oxford of 1834 had been the world, our only criticism would have been the wish that the protest should be made by one of a different tem- perament from Kingsley's.
How far the protest was necessary as things were, we will not inquire. The importance of the first High-Church movement —very different in character from that which represents it in our day—is, perhaps, now-a-days under-estimated ; on the other hand, it seems to us to have been exaggerated by Kingsley. We are somewhat surprised at the space it filled in his mind ; judging from his own account of his education, we should have formed a different anticipation as to his object of recoil. Probably the true explanation is that applicable to so many cases of alienation,—an extinct sympathy. There are some letters (L, 249-260) to a friend who had begged him to disentangle a lady apparently unknown to him, from some strong Romanising influence, which from a bio- graphical view are full of the deepest interest, and from them we learn that the temptations of the ascetic life had at some time presented themselves with real force to him. " For several years," he says (I., 258), " it was the question which I felt I must either conquer, or turn priest or monk I, too, have held, one by one, every doctrine of the extreme High-Church party, and faced their consequences." If it was so, we can only say it is another instance of the wisdom of that profound saying of Les- sing's, which we have had occasion to quote before, that superstition does not lose its influence when we cease to believe in it. For our own part, were we called upon to choose between the dangers of preaching marriage as Kingsley did, or celibacy as his Romanising opponent seems to have done, we should care very little which way the matter were settled. It is better to make a neutral thing a duty than a crime, no doubt, but there is just the same kind of evil in both mistakes. Kingsley seems to have come very near seeing this in one letter (I., 188), but his logic was always elastic enough to save him from any inconvenient inference, and his indifference as to the bearing of physical science on this question is one of the many proofs that this influence did not go very deep with him. He never seems to have looked at the question from any other point of view than that of indignant protest against the advocacy of celibacy by the Romanising party in the Church. But it is the explanation of much that seems to us extravagant in his attitude to this party, that he was repelled from it by that secret sense of resemblance which makes a humble nature unjust. Of course, from a super- ficial point of view, and also in the depth of their being, Kingsley and the High Churchman of his youth were as unlike as two religious men could be. On the surface, he had a strong distaste for what he called " the fastidi- ous, maundering, die-away effeminacy " of this party, and in all fundamentals their views were the opposite of his. But there was a wide middle region where their tastes, perhaps in some degree even their opinions, were also his, and we think this was the region where he knew himself to be weak. In calling them an aristocratic party, he did not of course mean to assert anything about the social stratum in which they sought to move. He meant that they preached a gospel for the select, and set up an ideal for those who desired to live apart from the world. He had nothing. of this kind of aristocracy, but all that is fine and all that is weak of what we gather up in that word was in him. He never forgot, we think, that he was what he describes him- self,—"a gentleman of ancient family," remembering it gener- ally in the sense that noblesse oblige, but remembering it in every sense. He was repelled by anything eccentric or bizarre as by a discord, and the conventions of good-breeding, we suspect, were rated by him at the outside of their value. Nor was his religion. free from a certain trace of this kind of narrowness. He was in fact, though he knew it not, just as much preaching a Gospel to the few as Newman or Pusey. It was not the same type as theirs, but it was almost as exclusive a type, and there were some elements in common. He was brotherly, he was not tolerant ; full of broad human sympathy for the atheist, he has nothing- but denunciation for the Christian who tried to read the Bible by the light of an honest search for truth, and whose investigations did not supply any fountain of fervour. He had the true chivalric tenderness for the weak, and it is by lonely sick- beds and under poor low cottage roofs that the force of some of his words comes home most forcibly to the reader, but we cannot fancy him at home in the smug villa of respectability. It is very much the High-Church framework filled in with a different pattern.
That reverence for Nature, in all her aspects, of which his hatred to asceticism was one aspect, came out increasingly in the latter half of his life in another form far more useful to his fellows, perhaps not the less useful because it was associated with the like exaggeration, for it had to cope with selfishness and stupidity, which can be only borne down by a momentum hardly pos- sible to moderation. In calling his sanitary zeal exaggerated, we do not suppose that he exaggerated what enlightened efforts to. improve the health of the community can do, nor the importance of health itself for the happiness and usefulness of life. But it seems to us that here, as in the case of marriage, he brought in very doubtful recommendations to reinforce those which are quite strong enough to stand alone. He seems to have thought that to study the laws of health will enable us not only to bring up a healthy generation, but also to take different view of sickness and all its concomitant misery, when it is actually there. Nothing can be more shallow than such a view, it seems to us. It is utterly impossible to keep separate the evils which man is and is not responsible for, and we should gain nothing if it were possible, there would be no real alleviation of the perplexity of evil, for instance, if we could say pestilence was not the will of God, but earthquakes were. By all means let us do all we can to make this earth a wholesome habitation, and our fellows a vigorous, healthful race. But let us beware how we bind up our faith in God and our faith in any result of these efforts ; let us not add to the great burden of physical evil, the grievous pang that pierces the heart which has looked for a pledge of a righteous government that a. righteous governor does not will to grant. It may be that when the laws of health are understood and practised sickness will still be known, or that it will be succeeded by physical ills obviously beyond the reach of human power. Kingsley must have read the tremendous denun- ciation of Nature in the posthumous essays of one of whom we learn with satisfaction that he was his friend. He may have been led by it to doubt, perhaps, how far it was wise to encumber the truths he was certain of with the hypothesis that was there attacked, and as it seems to us, rent triumphantly to shreds.
We had hoped to balance our criticism with citations from these volumes exhibiting the endearing character which makes all cen- sure seem half unjust the moment it is written. Happily the task would be as superfluous as it would be agreeable ; the little traits in which is manifested so tender and generous a spirit must be imprinted on thousands of memories, and those to whom Christ- ianity represents the central truth of the world's history, and those to whom it represents an effete and perishing superstition, alike have learned to appreciate the character of one who, with all his faults, we would venture to point out as a specimen of its power. He was indeed richly endowed by nature. A generous, loving heart, burning with indignation at injustice, melting with pity for suffering, steadfast in loyalty to all bonds of affection and kindred he must have had, whatever his faith. That his fiery spirit never knew the smouldering flame of cherished resentment, that unjust, and, still more, half-just attack woke nothing bitter and rancorous within him ; that the wide circumference of his care was never chilled by the perfect satisfaction and repose he found at its focus,—this, we believe, was the result not of natural temperament, but of an invisible Presence, for whose fuller revela- tion his spirit always yearned, and in the clearer discernment of which it now rests satisfied.
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