24 January: Boreham on Charles Kingsley

Satin and Sackcloth
Like Nanki-poo, the wandering minstrel in "The Mikado," Charles Kingsley, the anniversary of whose birthday recurs tomorrow, is a thing of shreds and patches. It may justly be claimed that the patches are purple patches; but it must be confessed that the shreds are tattered shreds. The brilliance of the one, only throws into a more painful relief, the raggedness of the other. Novelist, poet, economist, reformer, preacher, philosopher, historian, professor, Kingsley touched the soul of England at an infinite number of points. His fervent and passionate spirit welcomed any avenue by which he might give expression to the thoughts that surged so furiously within him. His message burned within his bones and ached for articulation. His critics pillory this intensity as his worst fault. "Kingsley never speaks," Stopford Brooke complains, "he screams! If he tells you that it is five o'clock, he says it in such a way that you imagine that it is the crack of doom!" He could not help it. He was built that way. That was the man.

He was only 56 when he died, yet it would have been better for his reputation if he had passed away 20 years earlier. He reached high water mark with "Westward Ho. "If he had died then at the age of 36, we should, as Sir Leslie Stephen has said, have speculated wistfully on the brilliant things that might have been. In his "Victorian Age in Literature" G. K. Chesterton says that "Westward Ho" is a lie, but he hastens to add that it is a thundering good lie. Nothing worse could be said of Kingsley and nothing better. He himself would have appreciated both the criticism and the compliment.

Telling A Tale For The Tale's Own Sake
Unhappily Kingsley's purple patches and tattered shreds were inartistically distributed. In "Hypatia" and in "Westward Ho" we have the purple patches in such gorgeous profusion that they almost become a purple robe, the occasional shreds being scarcely perceptible. In "Alton Locke" and in "Yeast," on the other hand, the shreds become the rule and the patches the exception. These two novels are virtually problem novels, the former dealing with industrial and the latter with agricultural questions. They suffer the doom that invariably overtakes romances of that piebald character: the gravity of the problem obscures and destroys the charm of the plot. For those who simply desire to enjoy themselves, Kingsley is at his best in his children's books. "The Heroes" comes as near to perfection as any author is ever likely to get in this world, and "The Water Babies" has taken its place as the liveliest and most fascinating fairy tale ever told. It is a thousand pities that Kingsley did not abide perpetually in this congenially felicitous mood. But self-control was an impossible task. Even in the solitude of his study his intense fervour swept him off his feet and communicated itself to his pages.

He was, one of his friends tells us, a tall, spare man, sinewy rather than powerful, of swarthy complexion, dark hair and bright piercing eye. He was of gentle and affectionate disposition, but of a restless and excitable temperament. His hot temper, usually under inflexible restraint, revealed itself in a flashing scorn and a fiery indignation whenever anything ignoble or impure broke upon his horizon. His study opened by a door on to a lawn, and the lawn became a necessary adjunct to the study. For his excitement, as he bent over his manuscript, often became so vehement that, to calm his nerves and recapture his literary poise, he would snatch his long clay pipe from the mantelpiece and stride out on to the grass. Sometimes, it must be confessed, the soft green lawn and the long clay pipe scamped or neglected their soothing ministry. They allowed their effervescent master to return to his desk before his agitation had subsided, and, while we are glad to feel the exhilarating vibrations of his boyish enthusiasm, we are now and again shocked by his fierce and polemical outbursts.

Skilful Painting Of Unseen Landscapes
With an audacity that takes your breath away, Kingsley undertakes to set graphically before you the dramas of a remote antiquity and the landscapes of the most unfamiliar latitudes. He splashes on a 10-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair. Yet his touch is always sure. Whether the scene is laid in a drowsy little fisher village or amid the bustle of an Oriental market place, or among the Indian settlements of the far West, or in the academies of ancient Greece, or in an Egyptian desert, or on the high seas, he is always equal to the occasion. Even in describing, in the most minute detail, the luxurious vegetation of the valley of the Amazon—a realm he had never actually invaded—he is as accurate as he is realistic. His horizons are infinite, yet every object outlined satisfies the eye and captivates the fancy.

Little of his work will ultimately be regarded as classical. He knew how to tell a thoroughly good tale and to hold the rapt attention of his hearers until the climax had been reached. He is still read, yet nobody ever reads him without wishing at times that he had left his philosophising and sermonising to somebody else and had given unbridled rein to that instinct for romance which, in his golden moments, marked him as a novelist of real genius and inspiration. When he died, a resting-place in Westminster Abbey was immediately offered but the family, knowing his wishes, decided that he should sleep in the pretty little churchyard at Eversley, beside the villagers among whom practically all his days had been spent. Mrs. Kingsley used to delight in the swarms of little children who during their holidays visited the tomb, and—as she added with pardonable pride—the gipsies never passed the gate without turning in to stand for a moment bareheaded beside the grave. In one of the choicest nooks in the Abbey, quite close to the Unknown Warrior's Tomb, a beautiful monument, surmounted by a bust from the chisel of Thomas Woolner, has been placed. Thus, Kingsley's memory is perpetuated both in the village God's-acre with which he was so familiar and in the imposing pantheon of the nation's illustrious dead.

F W Boreham

Image: Charles Kingsley