CHARLES KINGSLEY.
INTE do not know that Canon Kingsley is a loss to the nation, for premature as his death may be said to have been, be had probably done his best work, but there are few cultivated Englishmen who can have received the news without a keen regret. To all who could read him intelligently he had become a personal friend. Few men of his powers, which, though great and peculiar, were not of the first rank, have given their genera- tion so much pleasure, and still fewer have given it in such a thoroughly healthy and invigorating way. The note of his genius, indeed, was breeziness, the power of conveying to the reader a sense of rapid and joyous movement through a clear and strengthening atmosphere,—of flushing the cheek as air does, of quickening the pulses as a gallop does, of toning the nerves to pleasure till mere living is enjoyable, as skating always seems to envious lingerers on the bank to do. This effect of breeziness is the more remarkable, because it is not characteristic either of Mr. Kingsley's profession, to which he was devoted, or of the school in which his mental and spiritual character was formed. Sermons are seldom shower-baths. A Maurician may, and sometimes does, like Mr. Maurice, rise above the mephitic vapours of the earth ; • but he has not usually the force to scatter them to the winds, to blow them away by the gale of his move- ment, to make men feel through his thought not only better, but less loaded, healthier, and more alive. Mr. Hughes can do it little, or for some minds a great deal; but his writing has not for most readers the rush of Charles Kingsley's, or its life, or its quickening, exhilarating effect,. an effect not like that of cham- pagne, or even of exercise, but of residence in mountain or desert air. "Yeast," the very first book Canon Kingsley ever published, has this effect in its perfection, contains the best description he ever wrote, the famous hunting-scene, a description to which Mr. Trollope's many descriptions of the same scene are what the " 2Eneid " is to the " Iliad,"—and one of the most characteristic of his songs, "The merry brown hares came leaping ;" and it yields also the other effect which Mr. Kingsley always sought,— that of making men hate injustice and heartlessness and high- handed wrong. The same characteristics shine out in all the books of his better period,—in " Alton Locke," amidst its Tory- Socialist conceits ; in " Westward Ho !" with its half-pagan hero and glorification of buccaneers ; in "Two Years Ago," with its crowd of living and moving figures ; in " Hypatia," with its strange pictures of a rotting world, and its gloomy atmosphere heavy with the breath of the coming storm ; in all his essays, and in almost all—not quite all—his poetry, though the latter is more deeply tinged with the melancholy side of his mind, his sense of the hostility of fate as shown in the universality of death, and the comparative uselessness of effort. Throughout all, Charles Kingsley was the same,—tlie English poet-squire, able to sing, in melodious rhyme or equally melodious and more stirring prose, any thought which arose in him, whether of love, or strife, or doubting melancholy—read the love-scenes between Lancelot and Argemone in "Yeast," or the defeat of the Armada in " Westward Ho !" or " The Sands of Dee " among the smaller poems, and judge,—but loving best to tell of deeds of daring, of lives wild and sometimes lawless, of feats by flood and fell, and of the aspects of nature wherever she is found and in all her moods—in the tropics or in Devon—and in his intense en- joyment of these things communicating his own pleasure to all who will stand and hear. The instinctive prejudices, too, of the squire are there ; the over-reverence for merely physical qualities, the riotous, almost sensual enjoyment of all earthly
pleasure, provided it be allowable ; the love, rising to worship, of natural beauty—Kingsley gravely suggests that the tropical flowers may owe their glorious colouring to the pleasure the Almighty derives from gazing at them—the tolerance for all brave brutality—so that it be not displayed by Catholics, because then it is cruelty to be scourged out—and the immovable belief that England, let her be doing what she may, is doing the work of God. Never blind to the value of self-control, he values it first of all as an element of force ; preaching always purity, he pours on celibacy the vials of scorn other preachers have poured on vice; and abhorring cruelty to the obedient, he yet defended Governor Eyre, and his very heart goes out to Amyas and his buccaneers, as they rushfrom their ambuscade to massacre Spaniards wholesale for being so murderously cruel to their slaves. The virtues prevail, however, over the prejudices, and no man ever rose from Mr. Kingsley's books without feeling himself a stronger, more natural, more sympathetic human being, or without that hopeful trust in God and nature which, in spite of some doubts,—never, as we judge, deep, but still plain in " Two Years Ago,"—and of a deep and permanent sense of the sternness with which God works- " Yeast," " Westward Ho !" " Hypatia," and all his longer poems are in their essence tragedies—still ruled his thought, and tomes out in this little poem, which, though one of the feebler of ans songs, is, strange to say, perhaps the moat utterly characteristic of his philosophy :—
" Who will say the world is dying? Who will say our prime is past ?
Sparks from Heaven, within us lying, Flash, and will flash till the last.
Fools ! who fancy Christ mistaken ; Man a tool to buy and sell; Earth a failure, God-forsaken, Anteroom of Hell.
"Still the race of Hero-spirits Pass the lamp from hand to hand ; Age from age the Words inherits— Wife, and Child, and Fatherland.' Still the youthful bunter gathers Fiery joy from weld and wood ; He will dare as dared his fathers Give him cause as good.
While a slave bewails his fetters ; While an orphan pleads in vain ; While an infant lisps his letters, Heir of all the ages' gain; While a lip grows ripe for kissing; While a moan from man is wrung ; Know, by every want and blessing, That the world is young."
As artist, it is a little difficult to rank Mr. Kingsley. His best things are very good, but unless they were very short, he was apt either to leave them unfinished or to flag lamentably in the finish- ing. His shortest poems are his best, and one or two of them, especially the" Sands of Dee," may be sung for centuries to come. His shortest novel, " Yeast," is fullest of his genius. His shortest essays give the greatest impression of power. His sketchiest de- scriptions of character strike us as being most alive. We know of no people whose existence we doubt less than Colonel Bracebridge in " Yeast," or the bookseller in " Alton Locke "—the only humorous person, by the way, whom we remember in all Mr. Kingsley's works—or Jack Brimblecombe in " Westward Ho 1" or Lord Scontbush or Mark Armsworth in " Two Years Ago "; or Bishop Synesius in " Hypatia "; yet these are the veriest sketches, mere hints, as it were, of persons who might hereafter be described ; while those who are described, and as it were analysed —Lancelot Smith, Alton Locke, Amyas Leigh and his brother Frank, Tom Thurnall, and Grace Harvey, and Hypatia herself, are all blurred portraits, leaving a scarcely definite impression. Hypatia leaves none at all, except that of a woman who would be perfect if she did not happen to be a prig ; while the two characters on whom Mr. Kingsley be- stowed most pains—Raphael Ben Ezra and Tom Thurnall—are like wonderfully-drawn figures spoilt in putting on the colour. The cynical Jew, with his contemptuous tolerance and indif- ferentism, his man-of-the-world genius, coloured by specialty of race and position, who so fascinates readers in the first two volumes, becomes an average Rugby boy in the third ; while Tom Thurnall, the English Raphael Ben Ezra, the cynical, able, semi- pagan doctor, with his perennial elasticity and endless resources, is washed out at last into the sort of manly curate whom young ladies used to write novels about, to the curious and slightly- comic irritation of everybody not in holy orders. Cyril, the great propagandist Bishop of Alexandria, Mr. Kingsley did not under- stand, even with the sympathy of hate; and his failure to give life to the Saxon patriot and brigand Hereward was greater than Lord
Lytton's failure to depict Harold, the last of the Saxon Kings. The glow, however, and rush of his style, his thorough sympathy with his heroes, and his remarkable dramatic power—take, as an example, Major Campbell's curse on the ranting preacher in " Westward Ho !"—blind the reader to these defects, and leave him full power to enjoy Mr. Kingsley at his best, in his descriptions of country life and the scenery of nature. Whenever he appeared as naturalist—whenever, that is, he had knowledge to smelt under his genius — Mr. Kingsley rises at once into the poet, and can describe with a poet's insight scenes which he had never seen, and had only gathered from books into his mind. We know of nothing more wonderful in literature than the fact that the man who wrote " Westward Ho !" had never been in the tropics, never beheld nature in her maleficently-luxurious mood, the mood as of an Asiatic sovereign revelling in splendour and in death, which he yet so magnificently described. The man who wrote these two descriptions bad never then been out of Europe :—
" The night-mist began to steam and wreathe upon the foul, beer- coloured stream. The loathy floor of liquid mud lay bare beneath the mangrove forest. Upon the endless web of interarching roots great purple crabs were crawling up and down. They would have supped with pleasure upon Amyas's corpse ; perhaps they might sup on him after all ; for a heavy sickening graveyard smell made his heart sink within him, and his stomach heave ; and his weary body, and more weary soul, gave themselves up helplessly to the depressing influence of that doleful place. The black bank of dingy leathern leaves above his head, the endless labyrinth of stems and withes (for every bough had lowered its own living cord, to take fresh hold of the foul soil below) ; the web of roots, which stretched away inland till it was lost in the shades of evening—all seemed one horrid complicated trap for him and his; and even where, here and there, he passed the mouth of a lagoon, there was no opening, no relief—nothing but the dark ring of mangroves, and here and there an isolated group of large and small, parents and child- ren, breeding and spreading, as if in hideous haste to choke out air and sky. Wailing sadly, sad-coloured mangrove-hens ran off across the mud into the dreary dark. The hoarse night-raven, hid among the roots, startled the voyagers with a sudden shout, and then all was again silent as a grave. The loathly alligators, lounging in the slime, lifted their horny eyelids lazily, and leered upon him as he passed with stupid savageness. Lines of tall herons stood dimly in the growing gloom, like white fantastic ghosts watching the passage of the doomed boat."
• • • • • • • • • • •
"And as the sun rose higher and higher, a great stillness fell upon the forest. The jaguars and the monkeys had hidden themselves in the darkest depths of the woods. The birds' notes died out one by one : the very butterflies ceased their flitting over the tree-tops, and slept with outspread wings upon the glossy leaves, undistingaishable from the flowers around them. Now and then a colibri whirred downward toward the water, hummed for a moment around some pendent flower, and then the living gem was lost in the deep blackness 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 over- hanging bough ; or a thirsty monkey slid lazily down a liana to the surface of the stream, dipped up the water in his tiny band, and started chattering back, as his eyes met those of some foul alligator peering upward through the clear depths below. In shaded nooks beneath the boughs, the capybaras, rabbits as large as sheep, went paddling sleepily round and round, thrusting up their unwieldy heads among the blooms of the blue water-lilies.; while black and purple water-hens ran up and down upon the rafts of floating leaves. The shining snout of a fresh- water dolphin rose slowly to the surface ; a jet of spray whirred up; a rainbow hung upon it for a moment; and the black snout sank lazily again. Here and there, too, upon some shallow pebbly shore, scarlet flamingoes stood dreaming knee-deep on one leg; crested cranes pranced up and down, admiring their own finery; and ibises and egrets dipped their bills under water in search of prey : but before noon even those had slipped away, and there reigned a stillness which might be heard—such a stillness (to compare small things with great) as broods beneath the rich shadows of Amyas's own Devon woods, or among the lonely sweeps of Exmoor, when the heather is in flower—a stillness in which, as Humboldt says, ' If beyond the silence we listen for the faintest undertones, we detect a stifled, continuous hum of insects, which crowd the air close to the earth; a confused swarming murmur which hangs round every bush, in the cracked bark of trees, in the soil undermined by lizards, millepedes, and bees ; a voice proclaiming to us that all Nature breathes, that under a thousand different forms life swarms in the gaping and dusty earth, as much as in the bosom of the waters, and the air which breathes around."
We have said nothing of Mr. Kingsley personally, for we are not writing his biography ; and nothing of his theology, for that would require a separate study; and nothing of him as his- torian, for in that capacity he was to us unendurable ; but it would be wrong to forget that, poet by genius and novelist by habit, he was the most faithful of pastors, that the whole West country loved the Cheshire man who knew Devon so well, and that the poor of Eversley stood weeping by the grave, to which the Prince of Wales sent his representative.
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