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Gbe Victorian jExa device
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley
and
The Christian Social Movement
By
CHARLES WILLIAM STUBBS, D.D.
Dean of Ely
Author of "Village Politics", "Christ and Democracy",
"Christ and Economics", &c. &c.
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hope is the secret of social vision."— John Morley.
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Preface
The genesis of the Christian Social Movement
of the present century, and the filiation of its ideas,
of which the present memoir is intended to be a
brief record, were both democratic and Christian.
What I have written in the following pages, there-
fore, will be found to be complementary, on the one
hand, to the introductory volume of this series by
Mr. J. Holland Rose on The Rise of Democracy,
and, on the other, to the volume on The Anglican
Revival by Canon Overton. In the first volume
Mr. Rose gave a fairly full account of the rise of
the democratic movement in England, and a sketch
of those " Parliament men" and others who, sixty
years ago, succeeded in stirring up the English
artisans to that action which finally resulted in the
cession of most of their reasonable demands by the
State, and in the event has led to the beneficial
labour legislation of our own day. It has been my
endeavour in the present volume to supplement
Mr. Rose's sketch by a somewhat fuller account of
the Christian Socialists of 1848, and of their influ-
ence in turning the political and economic aspira-
tions of the Chartist workmen into the more
vi Charles Kingsley
peaceful paths of trade-unionism and industrial
co-operation. 1
Canon Overton in his book has given a succinct
account of the Anglican Revival, of that renewed
activity in the English Church which is associated
chiefly with the names of such typical men as
Keble, Pusey, and Newman. It has seemed to
me, however, that no history, however short, of the
religious movement of the Victorian era can be
complete which omits the name of Frederick Deni-
son Maurice, and gives no estimate of the remark-
able influence which that perhaps greatest, certainly
most typical, theologian of the nineteenth century
has exerted upon the later developments of Church
life and thought.
I have endeavoured, therefore, in my introductory
chapter to give an estimate of the position and
place of that great thinker, and to trace briefly the
filiation of those ideas, which are called socialistic,
and which, as a motive force to social service,
whether by the State or the individual, are now so
dominant among us, to their true source, in that
restatement of the great Christian doctrine of the
Incarnation as the exaltation of human nature, and
the consecration of all human relations, by which
Maurice has laid the English State, no less than
the English Church, under so deep a debt.
I have told the story of the movement in especial
connection with the life of Charles Kingsley for
1 A recent volume of this series, Provident Societies and Industrial
Welfare, by Mr. E. W. Brabrook, C.B., Registrar of Friendly Societies,
has dealt more in detail with the development of these societies.
Preface vii
two reasons. In the first place, because, although
Maurice was its real founder, no name is more
closely associated in the public mind with the move
ment than that of " Parson Lot", the pseudonym
under which Kingsley wrote " Cheap Clothes and
Nasty " and the earliest of the Christian Socialist
tracts. And, in the second place, because I am
desirous that these pages should not wholly fail to
pass on to a younger generation some of that
impulse to works of social service and civic reform
which I and my contemporaries thirty years ago at
Cambridge received from the chivalrous teaching
and fine character of Charles Kingsley. Facts are
always more stimulating when told in relation to a
personality.
But, of course, this Monograph makes no pre-
tence, even on a small scale, to describe the details
of Kingsley's life. The Letters and Memories of
Charles Kingsley ', edited by his wife, must always
remain the sufficient record of his life, as it is
undoubtedly one of the most inspiring of modern
biographies.
It only remains for me to acknowledge my in-
debtedness, in the compilation of these pages, to
that book, and my gratitude to Miss Kingsley for
her courtesy in allowing me to make quotations
from it. My sincere thanks are due to Messrs.
Macmillan & Co., Limited, for readily granting to
me similar permission in regard to the other works
of Charles Kingsley — the Poems, the Sermons, the
Prose Idylls, &c. — of which they hold the copy-
right, and also in regard to the Life of Frederick
viii Charles Kingsley.
Denison Maurice, by his son. To the articles in
the Economic Review, by the late Judge Hughes,
on " Frederick Maurice" and on " J. Vansittart
Neale"; and to the two articles in the same Review
by Mr. J. M. Ludlow on " The Christian Socialists
of 1848", I am also indebted. My special thanks
are due to Mr. Bowes of Cambridge for his kind
permission to use the copy of Politics for the People
which had belonged to its first publisher, Mr.
J. W. Parker, and which contained his MS. notes
of the names of the various writers of the Tracts.
Charles W. Stubbs.
The Deanery, Ely,
December, 1898.
Contents
CHAPTER I
Page
Introductory .-.//
CHAPTER II
A Poet, his Birth and Environment - - - - S°
CHAPTER III
The Country Parson a?id Village Problems - - - 4.8
CHAPTER IV
Lessons in Village Citizenship - - - - "73
CHAPTER V
" Politics for the People" 97
CHAPTER VI
The Christian Socialists ------ 129
CHAPTER VII
The Science and Duty of Health 159
CHAPTER VIII
Some Personal Characteristics ----- 180
INDEX 19?
Charles Kingsley.
Chapter I.
Introduction.
"Charles Kingsley could not help being a genius, and he
would have been one had he never heard of Mr. Maurice. But
his whole Theology is drawn from Mr. Maurice: his chief
mission was to be a popularizer of the principles set forth by
Mr. Maurice. ... I was staying with him at Eversley one
Sunday, and he said to me, with his characteristic stutter,
'N-now, J-j-john T-townsend' (a name under which I used
to write), ' I am g-going to t-take a s-sermon of M-maurice's
and t-turn it into 1-language understanded of the p-people'.
To do him justice, the sermon in question was so transformed
by his genius that no one but himself could have accused him
of plagiarism."
J. M. Ludlow.
Two thousand years ago, when the water-
wheel was first introduced into Europe from
the East, the Greek poet Antiparos, in some
verses which have come down to us, sang this
song of the Triumph of Labour : —
"O Labourers! who turn the millstone,
Spare your hands and sleep in peace.
12 Charles Kingsley.
In vain the shrill voice of the cock shall hail the day-
light : sleep on !
By order of Demeter, your labour shall be done for
you by the water nymphs.
Shining- and light, they shall leap upon the wheel as
it revolves;
They shall drag round the axle with its spokes, and
put in motion the great millstone which turns
round and round.
Live ye the happy life of your fathers, and enjoy with-
out irksome toil
The blessings which the goddess showers upon you."
Fifty years ago, when applied science, our
modern Demeter, was, by the application of
steam-power to machinery, revolutionizing the
manufacturing industries of England, and a
new epoch of social happiness, one would
have thought, was about to open for the
world of labour, an English poet might surely
be expected to sing the same song as that of
his Greek brother. But after two thousand
years the economic millennium was as far off
as ever. The triumph-song of labour could
not yet be sung.
"Weep, weep, weep and weep
For pauper, dolt and slave!
Hark ! from wasted moor and fen,
Feverous alley, stifling den,
Swells the wail of Saxon men —
Work ! or the grave !
Introduction. 13
Down, down, down and down
With idler, knave and tyrant !
Why for sluggards cark and moil?
He that will not live by toil
Has no right on English soil !
God's word's our warrant!"
So sang Charles Kingsley half a century ago.
Machinery, it was true, had multiplied riches
and created leisure. But who were those who
were to enjoy them?
Here is the great practical problem of
modern life.
How Charles Kingsley faced that problem;
how he and his friends challenged our modern
consecrated regime of individualism and com-
petition, refusing to accept as final the pessi-
mistic dogmas of an economic science which
forgot that in the last resort the problem was
not about wealth but about men; how they
endeavoured to formulate a social science in
which co-operation rather than competition
should be the true law of industrial relation-
ships, and did in fact succeed in laying the
foundation of what has proved the most hope-
ful industrial experiment of the century, — the
organization of the great co-operative move-
ment, which has already amassed a capital of
fourteen millions, and by its system of feder-
14 Charles Kingsley.
ated societies bids fair to absorb the greater
part of the retail trade of the country; — how
they fought the early battles of sanitary re-
form, and laid down those principles of the
science of public health, whose legal enforce-
ment now forms so large a part of the adminis-
trative work of municipalities and other local
authorities; and how, finally, because the
public remedy of social evils always runs up at
last into moral considerations, they endea-
voured, and not altogether in vain, to awaken
the conscience of both the English Church
and the English people to regard all these
great questions from the Christian point of
sight, — it will be my chief object in this mono-
graph to make plain.
In a former volume of this series, Canon
Overton has told with faithfulness and im-
partiality the story of the Anglican Revival,
and no one who reads that story can deny the
immense debt which the English people, no
less than the English Church, owes to that
remarkable movement. For it had brought
home to the hearts of the English people the
reality of a great spiritual society, extending
through all Christian ages, a storehouse of
Redemption for ever, open to all men, inviting
all men ; a Body, as the apostle calls it, a King-
Introduction. 15
dom, a Church, having a vitality of its own,
a life which is in Christ; having a corporeity of
its own, in and through and by which the life
works; having an administration of its own,
laws and rights and usages quickened by the
living spirit; possessed — in its " notes" of
succession and dogma and sacrament — of
continuity, visibility, authority; being in fact
God's accredited witness to mankind of His
purposes and His benefits.
But there is another aspect of the great
religious movement of our time which Canon
Overton could not notice in the brief space at
his disposal. To revive " the grandeur and
force of historical communion and church life"
in England, and " no less the true place of
beauty and art in worship", was undoubtedly
the work of the Oxford Movement. But
"the Oxford Movement" is hardly the full
equivalent of " the Anglican Revival". The
two terms are by no means convertible.
Newman and Pusey and Keble and Williams
and Marriott are names of great Christian
doctors of the English Church in the nine-
teenth century which must always stand out
prominently from the page of history; but
there is another name, not once mentioned
in Canon Overton's book, for which, never-
16 Charles Kingsley.
theless, the churchmen of a succeeding
generation are likely to demand a still more
prominent historical place than theirs — I
mean the name of Frederick Denison Maurice.
Certainly no estimate of the Anglican Revival
can be an exhaustive one which omits the influ-
ence of that great teacher's thought and work.
Indeed it is hardly too much to say that it
was the doctrine of Maurice, rather than
that of Pusey or Newman, which for forty
years — Maurice began his work in 1835; he
died in 1872 — " kept the whole of the forward
movement in the social and political life of
the English people in union with God and
identified with religion", a doctrine which,
idealized and transfigured in the two great
poets of the century, Tennyson and Browning,
dominant in the teaching of the Cambridge
schools of Lightfoot and Westcott and Hort,
assimilated, as it would seem almost uncon-
sciously, by the younger Oxford theologians
of the Lux Mundi school, has, during this
last decade of the century, turned so wisely
the current of our English Christianity to the
consideration of the great social problems
of the age, and is at this moment so pro-
foundly affecting, moulding, inspiring, trans-
figuring the social ideals of the present.
(H508)
Introduction. 17
Towards the close of the year 1835 — two
years only after the publication of the sermon
by John Keble on " National Apostasy",
which is usually given as the date of the
actual overt beginning of " the Oxford Move-
ment" — Maurice had written, at the desire
of Hugh James Rose, the distinguished Cam-
bridge pioneer of the Oxford movement, an
article in the Encyclopedia Metropolitana
on " Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy".
That article gradually expanded into a com-
plete history of philosophy, and practically
occupied him for the rest of his life, all his
other work, literary, theological, professorial,
for forty years, tending in fact to aid and
complete this one; The book is a remarkable
one, and has long taken its place as a
standard work of English literature. It is
full of dramatic interest, dramatic, that is, in
the sense that the author all through its pages
is always anxious to assert for each great
leader of the world's thought his own position,
not anxious to merge it in that of some other.
It is full too of divine philosophy, luminous
with the richest lights of meditative genius,
which no really thoughtful and spiritual mind
can read unmoved. But the book is also
remarkable for another reason. It contains
(M508) B
18 Charles Kingsley.
perhaps the earliest, certainly the earliest
authoritative, statement in our time, of that
special view of the doctrine of the Incar-
nation, which, in the last decades of the
century, has become the dominant thought
of the new Oxford school, who, under the
able and courageous leadership of Canon
Gore, " regard themselves as adjusting the
High Church theology of Dr. Pusey and his
generation to the newer knowledge of our
day", and are in reality but following the
lead given by Mr. Maurice more than sixty
years ago.
I do not mean, of course, to assert that
the doctrine of the Incarnation in its modern
restatement originated with Maurice. He
himself freely confessed his obligations to
Coleridge, to Erskine of Linlathen, to
Alexander Knox. And the history of the
heredity of the doctrine may easily be traced
backwards through the Cambridge Platonists
of the seventeenth century, — Dr. Cudworth,
John Smith, Benjamin Whichcot, to the Ox-
ford reformers of the fifteenth century, those
children of the revival of learning, — Colet,
Erasmus, and More, back to the great Greek
Christian fathers of the early church, — Cle-
ment of Alexandria, Origen, Hippolytus. The
Introduction. 19
doctrine was not indeed new. But Maurice
was the writer who first in our century set
it forth in the new form which the new age
needed. As Chaucer says, his was " the
newe corne which cometh year by year out
of the olde fields". Compare, for example,
the brilliant essay in Lux Mundi^ by Mr.
Illingworth, on " The Incarnation and De-
velopment", especially the passage towards
the close of that essay beginning with the
words — " The Incarnation opened heaven,
for it was the revelation of the Word; but it
also reconsecrated earth, for the Word was
made flesh and dwelt among men", — with
the chapter in Maurice's Moral and Meta~
physical Philosophy on ' ' Philo and the Alex-
andrian school", or the later chapters on the
neo-Platonists, and you will see how clearly,
sixty years ago, Maurice had grasped the
truth of the creative and administrative work
of the Pre-incarnate Word and the Incarnate
Christ, which our age needed, to give unity
and breadth and fulness to its theological
conceptions, and also no less to connect for
the Christian evolutionist both the revelations
of science and the developments of history, —
the study of which has influenced so deeply
the later phases of the Anglican Revival,
20 Charles Kingsley.
— with the operation of the same Divine
Word.
That doctrine I may briefly summarize
thus : —
The Christian creed announces to us not,
in the first place, a world-wide philosophy, or
even a universal religion, or a definite insti-
tution in "the Church", but it introduces us to
a supreme Person — Jesus Christ, our Lord.
In heaven as on earth, over things invisible
as over things visible, over things immaterial
as over things material, this Person is repre-
sented as supreme.
In the natural creation, in the universe, His
supremacy is that of the eternal reason, the
Pre-incarnate Word of God, the Logos of
Greek thought, by whose agency the world
of matter was created and is sustained, who is
at once the beginning and the end of material
things. ' ' All things have been created through
Him and unto Him."
And in the spiritual creation, in the Church,
this same Person is represented as the inspirer
and the illuminator of man in his intellectual
being, the light and the life of humanity,
the revealer to man of the Divine charac-
ter, "manifesting God with increasing clear-
ness at each successive stage in the great
Introduction. 21
scale of being", until, in the fulness of time,
He Himself "for us men and for our salva-
tion came down from heaven, and . . . was
incarnate . . . and was made man".
This was the doctrine which Maurice ac-
cepted as the true centre and basis of all
Christian philosophy. It is the master-note
of all his teaching, not least of his teaching
on the social problems of the age. For he saw
clearly that the doctrine of the Incarnation
means, in the first place, that God has a plan
for the world : it means that order and pro-
gress in human civilization is real: it means
that the policy of the cynic and social agnostic
is not only not true, but is a gross blasphemy
against God's purpose for humanity : it means
that God has for the world a great educational
plan by which both the perfection of the
individual and the perfection of the race are
to be accomplished : it means that in the
development of that plan each age of the
world* has its own special work to do: it
means that progress through order is not
only a vital fact of human existence, but
that it is its vital law: it means that there
is a Christian ideal for society, for no human
relationship can really be outside the Divine
kingdom: it means that there is a social
22 Charles Kingsley.
order which is the best, and that towards
this order the world is gradually moving : it
means, finally, that the Church of Christ is a
sovereign society, embracing in one compre-
hensive unity all realms of human thought
and action, because Christ in becoming incar-
nate did not desert the rest of His creation,
but is the quickening impulse of all that is
good in modern civilization, the nourisher of
new graces in the ever-widening circles of the
family, the society, the state, the Inspirer of
all true art, literature, morals, government, by
lifting them all into a higher atmosphere of
hopefulness than was ever possible until He
came, "the Head overall things to the Church,
... the fulness of Him that filleth all in all".
It is not difficult, I think, to see how this
doctrine, which Maurice rightly regarded as
the very root and ground of theology, led
him, in face of the great social distress of the
country and consequent democratic agitation,
culminating in the formidable Chartist demon-
stration of April 10, 1848, to consider how he
and his friends, who had been brought by
direct conference with the working-men of
England to know something at first hand of
their aspirations and hopes, both political and
social, could best help in turning these hopes
\
Introduction. 23
and aspirations, by the application of Chris-
tian principles, from revolutionary courses to
methods which might lead to stable and con-
servative, and therefore permanent progress.
This Mr. Maurice did by his organization of
the movement which came to be known by
vthe name of Christian Socialism, In subse-
quent chapters I shall have to tell in some
detail the history of this movement. Let me,
however, close this chapter with two quota-
tions from Mr. Maurice, which will make
plain the essential principles of his social
teaching.
And first as to the exact reason which
prompted the adoption of the term " Christian
Socialism" as adescription of the movement: —
" My dear friend," wrote Maurice to Mr. Ludlow
in the beginning of 1850, "I see it clearly. We
must not beat about the bush. What right have
we to address the English people? We must have
something special to tell them, or we ought not to
speak. ' Tracts on Christian Socialism' is, it seems
to me, the only title which will define our object,
and will commit us at once to the conflict we must
engage in sooner or later with the unsocial Christ-
ians and the unchristian Socialists. It is a great
thing not to leave people to poke out our object
and proclaim it with infinite triumph. * Why, you
are Socialists in disguise!' ' In disguise! not a bit
24 Charles Kingsley.
of it. There it is staring you in the face on the
title-page ! ' ' You want to thrust in ever so much
priestcraft under a good revolutionary name.'
' Well, did not we warn you of it? Did we not
profess that our intended something was quite
different from what your Owenish Lectures meant?'
This is the fair play which English people like,
and which will save us from a number of long pre-
faces, paraphrases, apologetical statements which
waste time when one wants to be getting to busi-
ness." 1
Again, in a letter to Dr. Jelf, the Principal
of King's College, he writes : —
" We did not adopt the word ' Christian ' merely
as a qualifying adjective. We believe that Chris-
tianity has the power of regenerating whatever it
comes in contact with, of making that morally
healthy and vigorous which apart from it must be
either mischievous or inefficient. We found from
what we know of the working-men in England that
the conviction was spreading more and more widely
among them that Law and Christianity were merely
the supports and agents of Capital. We wished to
show them both by words and deeds that Law and
Christianity are the only protectors of all classes
from the selfishness which is the destruction of all.
So far as we can do this we are helping to avert
those tremendous social convulsions which, as
recent experience proves, may be the effect of law-
1 Life of F. D. Maurice, vol. ii. pp. 34, 35.
Introduction. 25
less experiments to preserve property as well as of
violent conspiracies against it." 1
One further quotation I will give in con-
cluding* this chapter which seems to me to
throw a special light upon Mr. Maurice's
sociological method. That method, as I
have said, was a direct logical inference from
his theological creed. He could never en-
dure, therefore, any teaching which seemed
to imply that society ought not to be built up
on the selfish and competitive instincts of
mankind, for it was of the essence of his
Christian faith to believe that it was not,
God's order was founded on mutual love and
fellow-help. Selfishness and competition
were the direct results of man's disorder.
Human society he held to be a Divine crea-
tion. He could not therefore tolerate any
method or system which seemed to imply
that it was man's business to construct some
new and improved form of society, rather
than to assume that the existing form of
society, with its divinely created obligations,
was the best, if men could only pay reverent
homage to those obligations.
This principle comes out very clearly in the
characteristic letter which he wrote to protest
1 Life of F. D. Maurice, vol. ii. p. 92.
26 Charles Kingsley.
against what seemed a very harmless proposal,
to secure unity of action between the various
co-operative societies by the formation of a
central board. But the proposer of the
scheme had told Mr. Maurice that the organ-
ization of the central board was necessary to
curb the thoroughly mercenary, selfish, com-
petitive spirit of the individual associations.
This to Mr. Maurice implied a fatal desertion
of the root principle of Christian Socialism,
and he immediately wrote to Mr. Ludlow,
i i prophesying against this central board as
if it were the work of the Evil One ".
"This is the doctrine of a man whom you believe
and I believe to be one of the honestest and noblest
specimens of the English Socialist school. Now,
do I complain of him for believing in this power of
organization to make sets of men with an evil moral
purpose good and useful? Certainly not. It is
part of the creed which has grown with his growth
and strengthened with his strength. It must be the
hardest thing in the world for him to throw it off.
Nor do I believe that he does really hold these men
in whom he takes so earnest an interest to be the
mere devils he describes them as being! I believe
no such thing. I am certain he knows that there
are higher, truer impulses and desires with them,
and that these are leading them to co-operation and
brotherhood in spite of all the selfishness which is
Introduction. 27
drawing them asunder. But the more I entertain
this conviction the more solemnly am I bound not
to confirm him in what I ever have held and do
now hold to be a lie, the more am I bound to bear
witness for that truth which is at work in his mind,
and which must work itself out then if he is really
to help his brethren out of bondage into freedom.
If I join his i Central Board', I say, he teaches me
to say, ' my purpose is to turn a number of waver-
ing forces, each seeking the other's destruction, into
harmony, by certain scientific arrangements of mine
concerning production and consumption '. Now
what I have said, and so long as I have breath in
my body, hope to say, is this — 1 1 acknowledge in
these wavering creatures an element of peace and
harmony, the work of God's spirit. To that I
speak in each of them. I can speak to nothing
else. If the Son of Peace be there my peace will
rest upon them : if not, it will return to me again.
I have no hope of entering into terms of peace with
the devil. I have no notion that I can make him
my servant by a mere ingenious and extensive com-
bination. I believe the more skilful and large the
combination of such elements the worse and the
more deadly will be the result.' Talk as much as
you like about putting the hand to the plough and
drawing back; I never put my hand to this plough.
I have put my hand to another from which I should
draw back at once and for ever if I tolerated by any
word or act the maxim which Sully distinctly
avows, and upon which he rests the necessity of a
central board. Talk as much as you like about my
28 Charles Kingsley.
systemphobia. It is this which I mean by system,
it is this which I have hated in the church, the state,
the family, the heart, and which I see coming out
more fearfully every day — the organization of evil
powers for the sake of producing good effects ....
God's order seems to me more than ever the anta-
gonist of man's systems: Christian Socialism is in
my mind the assertion of God's order. Every
attempt, however feeble, to bring it forth I honour
and desire to assist. Every attempt to hide it under
a great machinery, call it organization of labour,
central board, or what you like, I must protest
against as hindering the gradual development of
what I regard as a divine purpose, as an attempt to
create a new constitution of society, when what we
want is that the old constitution should exhibit its
true functions and energies. ... To guide and to
govern is not my business ; I am ashamed to think
that you should, any of you, allow the notion in
your minds that it is. Sganarelle might be beaten
into a doctor, but Christopher Sly could only be
made a king when he was drunk. I am not quite
drunk, and I don't want to be a king, though I
am thankful to claim to be one of a family of kings
and priests, and am bound to assert the authority
of the true King, by whom, and not by central
boards, associations are prevented from breaking
into atoms. And in His name, and in assertion of
His rights, I will, with God's help, continue to
declare in your ears, and in the ears of the half
dozen who are awake on Sunday afternoons, that
no Privy Councils, National Councils, or Oecu-
Introduction. 29
menical Councils ever did lay, or ever can lay, a
foundation for men's souls and God's Church to
rest upon. That is what I said in my sermon. I
did affirm distinctly that Christ had used councils
and might use them when and how He pleased, as
He may, for aught I know, construct central boards
for the management of trade fraternities. But I do
say that neither the council nor the central board
can make the fraternity, or establish the law or
principle of it, and if we build churches upon the
decrees of councils, or associations upon decrees of
central boards, we build upon the sand, and that
when the rain comes our houses will fall, and that
great will be the fall of them." 1
1 Life of F. D. Maurice, vol. ii. pp. 4 2 ~45'
30 Charles Kingsley.
Chapter II.
A Poet, his Birth and Environment.
"And Nature, the old nurse, took
The child upon her knee,
Saying, here is a story-book
Thy Father has written for thee.
1 Come wander with me,' she said,
* Into regions as yet untrod,
And read what is still unread
In the manuscripts of God.'
And he wandered away and away
With Nature, the dear old nurse,
Who sang to him night and day
The rhymes of the universe.
And whenever the way seemed long,
Or his heart began to fail,
She would sing a more wonderful song,
Or tell a more wonderful tale."
— Longfellow.
" I believe God intended Kingsley to be,
above all, a poet. I believe that in some of
his poetry he rises higher than in all his prose,
ay, to the level of his greatest contemporaries.
I believe that since Shakespeare, there has
been no such Shakespearean promise as that
of The Saint's Tragedy." So wrote Mr. J. M.
Ludlow a year or two ago in the pages of the
Economic Review. And although, perhaps,
we must allow something for the glamour of
youthful memories in an old friend, there can
Birth and Environment. 31
be little doubt, I think, of the truth of the
first sentence. Charles Kingsley was essen-
tially and before all things a poet. A richer,
more sympathetic nature could hardly be con-
ceived. He had, moreover, the heredity of a
poet, and in early years he had the natural
environment calculated to stimulate a poetic
nature.
Of a family belonging originally to Cheshire,
but settled for many generations in Hamp-
shire, Charles Kingsley was born in 1819, at
Holne Vicarage, in Devonshire, " under the
brow of Dartmoor", thus inhaling, so to speak,
with his first breath, the daring spirit of the
men of Devon, whose deeds of adventure
and bravery he was afterwards to picture so
graphically for his countrymen in the pages
of Westward Ho! "I am", he was always
proud to say, "a West-countryman born
and bred." His father, at that time vicar of
Holne, was a man of cultivation and refine-
ment, a country gentleman, in fact, by birth
and habit, a clergyman by force of circum-
stance, but none the less a faithful parish
priest, a lover of art, a keen sportsman, a
good linguist, an ardent student of nature,
"a man", as his son said of him, "possessed
of every talent except that of using his
32 Charles Kingsley.
talents". His mother was a remarkable
woman. She was the daughter of Judge
Lucas of Barbados, a man both of action
and books. He was the friend of Lord
Rodney, and had taken part with him in the
great naval fight off S. Lucia in 1782. He
was the friend, too, of John Hunter and Sir
Joseph Banks, and in old age the tales which
he could tell of the old war-days on the
Spanish main, and his stories of the wonders
of tropical nature, became the delight of his
grandson's boyhood, and gave a colour pro-
bably to all his after-life. But it was from
his mother that Charles Kingsley no doubt
directly inherited his enthusiastic poetic na-
ture. It is said of her that, although in later
life of "a quite extraordinary practical and
administrative power", she was in earlier days
full of poetry and imaginative sentiment. In
faith that the impressions made on her own
mind before the birth of the child for whose
coming she longed, would be mysteriously
transmitted to him, Mrs. Kingsley luxuriated
in the romantic surroundings of her Devon-
shire home — the scenery of Holne and Dart-
moor, the chase, the hills, the combes, the
river — and gave herself up to every sight and
sound which she hoped would be dear to her
Birth and Environment. 33
child in after-life. Her hopes, we know, were
fully realized.
And if Charles Kingsley had a true poet's
mother, he had also in early life a true poet's
environment. When Charles was only five
years old, his father had moved from Devon-
shire to the living of Barnack, in Northamp-
tonshire. Here the next six years of his
boyhood were passed, amid all the weird,
mysterious beauty of the great Fenland. The
charm of it remained with him all through
his life. Forty years afterwards, lecturing at
Cambridge on the drainage of the Great Fen
which had turned a " waste howling wilder-
ness" into a " garden of the Lord", it is still
with a certain touch of pardonable sadness
that he recalls the picture as it had been in-
delibly stamped upon the impressionable
mind of his boyhood.
"The fancy may linger without blame (he said
in 1867) over the shining meres, the golden reed-
beds, the countless water-fowl, the strange and
gaudy insects, the wild nature, the mystery, the
majesty — for mystery and majesty there were — which
haunted the deep fens for many hundred years.
Little thinks the Scotsman, whirled down by the
Great Northern Railway from Peterborough to
Huntingdon, what a grand place, even twenty years
(M508) c
34 Charles Kingsley.
ago, was that Holme and Whittlesea, which is now
but a black, unsightly, steaming flat, from which
the meres and reed-beds of the old world are gone,
while the corn and roots of the new world have
not as yet taken their place. But grand enough it
was, that black, ugly waste, when backed by Cais-
tor highlands and Holme Wood and the patches
of the primeval forest : while dark-green alders and
pale-green reeds stretched for miles round the
broad lagoon, where the coot clanked and the bit-
tern boomed, and the sedge-bird, not content with
its own sweet song, mocked the notes of all the
birds around; while high overhead hung motion-
less hawk beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard,
kite beyond kite, as far as eye could see. Far off,
upon the silver mere, would rise a puff of smoke
from a punt invisible from its flatness and white
paint. Then down the wind came the boom of the
great stanchion gun : and after that sound another
sound, louder as it neared ; a cry as of all the bells
of Cambridge and all the hounds of Cottesmore;
and overhead rushed and whirled the skein of terri-
fied wild-fowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking
— filling the air with the hoarse rattle of their wings,
while clear above all sounded the wild whistle of the
curlew and the trumpet note of the great white swan.
They are all gone now. No longer do the ruffs
trample the sedge into a hard floor in their fighting
rings, while the sober reeves stand round, admiring
the tournament of their lovers, gay with ruffs and
tippets, no two of them alike. Gone are ruffs and
reeves, spoonbills, bitterns, avosets ; the very snipe,
Birth and Environment. 35
one hears, disdains to breed. Gone, too, not only
from the Fens, but from the whole world, is that
most exquisite of butterflies— Lyccena dispar— the
Great Copper, and many a curious insect more." 1
Such was the picture of the great Fenland
as it impressed itself upon his childish mind,
a land of weird and strange beauty, hidden in
rising mist, or suffused in the golden after-
glow of sunset, a picture which appears again
and again in the pages of his books, in the
prelude to Hereward the Wake, in the chapter
of The Hermits which is devoted to the
history of S. Guthlac, and above all in that
most poetic of all his prose idylls, the Cam-
bridge Lecture on the Fens, from which I
have quoted the above passage.
But if the impressions of nature which he
had gathered as a child from the scenery of
the East Anglian Fens were deep and lasting,
the impress of the rich and wild coast scenery
of North Devon and the West of England
would seem to have been even deeper. His
life there was that of a boy, not of a mere
child. And whether in his father's house at
Clovelly, or at school at Clifton or Helston,
the "west country" became to him that
dearest of all memories, the home of a happy
boyhood.
1 Prose Idylls, pp. 95, 96.
36 Charles Kingsley.
It was at Clovelly — to the rectory of which
his father had moved in 1830 — that Kingsley
first came into touch with all the vigorous life
and the manly qualities of a seafaring people.
Here he learnt to appreciate that spirit of
adventure and romance which characterized
the fisher -folk of the Devon and Cornish
coasts, and not less to respect that quiet
simplicity and godly piety which is nourished
in the hearts of men who win their daily bread
in the face of death and danger. Here, too,
most probably, he learnt that power of per-
sonal popularity, born of his own innate bon-
homie and unaffected nature, but cherished
also by the fact that in early life he lived
among the sons of toil on terms of natural
equality and simple human dignity, which
stood him in such good stead in later days
when dealing with the Chartist and demo-
cratic workmen. Of Charles Kingsley, in
this respect, we may say, as the poet Lowell
says of Agassiz :
" His magic was not far to seek;
He was so human ! Whether strong or weak
Far from his kind he neither sank nor soared,
But sate an equal guest at every board :
No beggar ever felt him condescend,
No prince presume : for still himself he bare
Birth and Environment. 37
At manhood's simple level, and where'er
He met a stranger, there he left a friend."
Certainly his six years' experience in this
seaboard parish coloured all his after-life. As
a companion picture to that of the Fen Country
we may quote this description of a scene on
the Devon coast from that same volume of
Prose Idylls : —
" A sudden turn of the clouds let in a wild gleam
of moonshine upon the white leaping heads of the
breakers, and on the pyramid of the Black Church
Rock, which stands in summer in such calm
grandeur gazing down on the smiling bay, with the
white sand of Braunton and the red cliffs of Port-
ledge shining through its two vast arches; and
against a slab of rock on the right, for years after
discoloured with her paint, lay the ship, rising
slowly on every surge to drop again with a piteous
crash as the wave fell back from the cliff and
dragged the roaring pebbles back with it under the
coming wall of foam. You have heard of ships at
the last moment crying aloud like living things in
agony? I heard it then as the stumps of her
masts rocked and reeled in her, and every plank
and joint strained and screamed with the dreadful
tension. . . , Ml
And again another Clovelly scene which
ends thus : —
1 Prose Idylls, p. 291.
38 Charles Kingsley.
" Hardly an old playmate of mine but is drowned
and gone.
Their graves are scattered far and wide,
By mount, by stream, and sea.
One poor little fellow's face starts out of the depths
of memory as fresh as ever, my especial pet and
birds'-nesting companion as a boy — a little, delicate,
precocious, large-brained child, who might have
written books some day if he had been a gentle-
man's son : but when his father's ship was wrecked
they found him, left alone of all the crew, just as he
had been lashed to the rigging by loving and dying
hands, but cold and stiff, the little soul beaten out
of him by the cruel waves before it had time to show
what growth there might have been in it." 1
In 1832 Charles Kingsley was sent to
the Helston Grammar School. Mr. Derwent
Coleridge, the then head-master, writes of
him as being at that time "a tall slight boy,
of keen visage, and of great bodily activity,
high-spirited, earnest, and energetic, giving
full promise of the intellectual powers and
moral qualities by which he was afterwards
distinguished. Though not a close student,
he was an eager leader and inquirer, some-
times in very out-of-the-way quarters." 2 And
his school-fellow and lifelong friend, Mr.
Powles, afterwards tutor of Exeter College,
1 Prose Idylls, p. 293. a Letters and Memories, vol. L p. 16.
Birth and Environment. 39
Oxford, tells us that the " vehement spirit,
the adventurous courage, the quick and tender
sympathy that distinguished the man'sentrance
on public life were all in the boy". Neverthe-
less he was not popular as a schoolboy. "He
knew too much, and his mind was generally
on a higher level than ours. He did not con-
sciously snub those who knew less, but a good
deal of unconscious snubbing went on, all the
more resented perhaps because it was uncon-
scious." 1 This judgment of Mr. Powles, writ-
ten many years afterwards, I confess, does
not read quite like an accurate transcript from
memory. It seems much more probable, and
much more in harmony, at anyrate with aver-
age schoolboy habit, to find the cause of un-
popularityin Kingsley's exceptional cultivation
of the study of natural history and, to the
schoolboy, eccentric behaviour in preferring
stupid walks in search of botanical specimens
to the school games and sports, in which
Kingsley, although strong and active, was
never an expert. " He liked nothing better
than to sally out, hammer in hand, and his
botanical tin slung round his neck, on some
long expedition in quest of new plants, and
to investigate the cliffs within a few miles ot
Helston." 1 His passion indeed for natural
1 Letters and Me?nories t vol. i. pp. 14, 15-
40 Charles Kingsley.
science, thus early in life, attests itself plainly
enough, comically so, in some of his boyish
letters and scraps of verse.
In 1836, when his father had moved up to
London, to the rectory of Chelsea, Kingsley
was entered as a day-student at King's Col-
lege, and after a two-years' course there, was
entered at Magdalen College, Cambridge,
where he soon gained a scholarship, and came
out first in the May examinations in both
classics and mathematics. His undergradu-
ate career from the academic point of view
was not brilliant. In that respect it differed
indeed little from that of many a distin-
guished Cambridge man — Macaulay, Thack-
eray, Tennyson — of whose future success in
life and literature the university class lists
give no indication. Possibly there is some-
thing instinctively repulsive in the competitive
system of the university to the man of poetic
genius or literary gift. His life at Cambridge
was undoubtedly one of " storm and stress ".
The period was one of much religious and
political excitement. The Chartist agitation
was in full force. Strange views, wild fancies
were fermenting in the minds of all, especially
of the young, with a force which Kingsley
not long afterwards aptly enough compared
Birth and Environment. 41
to " yeast". The Tractarian movement also
was stirring the mind of the university at
Cambridge little less than at Oxford. It was
little likely therefore that Kingsley should
escape the doubts and disturbances of belief
which are apt to beset such a mind as his,
perhaps every thinking masculine mind as it
emerges into manhood. Kingsley's letters,
at this time at anyrate, bear witness to the
bitterness of this mental struggle. His re-
ligious faith was wavering. His soul was
shaken to its depths by doubt and difficulty.
He could read little. He went in for excite-
ment of every kind — boating, hunting, driving,
fencing, boxing, duck-shooting in the fens —
anything to deaden thought. More than once
he had nearly resolved to leave Cambridge,
and go out to the Far West and live as a wild
prairie hunter. So little in those dark days
did he dream of the work which God had kept
for him to do.
In the summer of 1839 he had met the
lady who was to be his wife. She was the
youngest daughter of Mr. Pascoe Grenfell,
M.P. Three of her sisters were afterwards
married to men of high distinction; one to
Mr. Carr Glyn, afterwards Lord Wolverton,
one to the Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin
42 Charles Kingsley.
Osborne, the " S. G. O." of the Times, and
one to James Anthony Froude, the historian.
"On the 6th of July," says Mrs. Kingsley,
"Charles and his future wife met for the
first time." "That was my real wedding
day," he said some fifteen years afterwards.
No one can read Kingsley's letters, written
at this time, when the new friendship — "from
the first more of a recognition than an ac-
quaintance" — was ripening into intimacy, when
"counsel was asked and given, and all things
in heaven and earth discussed ", without feel-
ing how much he owed for the disciplining
of character, for the deepening of spiritual life,
for the broadening of intellectual life, to the
woman whom he loved. Happy indeed was
the man who found such a woman for a
friend, such a friend for a lover. Two months
of close intercourse passed away only too
quickly, and although from this time during
the next four years the friends met but
seldom, a new life had evidently dawned
for both, which neither absence nor sorrow,
difference of religious opinions, opposition
of friends, nor adverse circumstances could
extinguish. In a characteristic letter to his
mother, written in 1841, we can read plainly
enough how "the course of true love" was
Birth and Environment. 43
running: " Do not, dearest mother, make
yourself unhappy about Fanny and me. I
am young and strong . . . and she will be
strong too. Have no fears for us; we can
wait and endure and dare, and be happy
beyond the grave, if not on this side." 1 When
such was the spirit of their courtship, no
wonder that after thirty years of happy life
together the wife could sum up the story of
their love in the simple words she placed on
the white cross above his grave: "Amavi-
mus, Amamus, Amabimus ".
Her influence on Charles Kingsley's mind
is to be seen upon almost every page of his
writings, for amid their manly strength and
vigour there is a continual underflow of
tenderness and sweetness which tells its own
tale of a womanly inspiration. Miss Gren-
fell was a year older than her husband, and
at this time certainly she was more mature
in feeling, more disciplined in character, of
deeper culture, and more widely read. It
was she who first introduced him to the
works of Coleridge, Carlyle, and Frederick
Maurice, the three writers who did most to
mould the general bent of Kingsley's mind
during the earlier part of his career. His
1 Letters and Memories, vol. i. p. 56.
44 Charles Kingsley.
wife testifies that Carlyle's French Revolution
did much to " establish and intensify his
belief in God's righteous government of the
world ", and Carlyle's writings generally were
evidently a significant factor in Kingsley's
intellectual development. Wide as the poles
asunder in many things, Kingsley and
Carlyle had yet marked characteristics in
common. Both writers had, in fact, much
of the spirit of the old Crusaders about them.
They both thought of themselves as
" sent forth upon the field of life
To war with evil ",
and having once convinced themselves that
evil was the dragon against which they had
to tilt, they both rushed to the charge with
a vehemence which was certainly somewhat
unregenerate in character. Of Kingsley in
this en sabreur mood, a picturesque writer,
the late Mr. W. R. Greg, has not perhaps
very unjustly said : x
" He reminds us of nothing so much as of a
war-horse panting for the battle; his usual style is
marvellously like a neigh — a ( ha! ha! among the
trumpets' ; the dust of the combat is to him the
breath of life; and when once, in the plenitude
of grace and faith, fairly let loose upon his prey
1 Literary and Social Judg??ients t vol. i. p. 146.
Birth and Environment. 45
— human, moral, or material — all the Red Indian
within him comes to the surface, and he wields his
tomahawk with an unbaptized heartiness, slightly
heathenish, no doubt, but withal unspeakably re-
freshing".
But if in Carlyle's writings was laid the
groundwork of Kingsley's intellectual devel-
opment at this time, it was in Coleridge's
Aids to Reflection, and still more in Maurice's
Kingdom of Christ, that he found the specu-
lations and principles which had the most
abiding influence on his after-life and thought.
Coleridge's Aids to Reflection came to
him as a revelation of the new force of
spiritual insight. Coleridge was, in fact,
a great interpreter of spiritual philosophy.
He regarded Christianity not merely as a
means of salvation in any limited evangelical
sense, but as a perfect philosophy, giving
at once the true explanation of the facts of
our spiritual being, and the true remedy for
their disorder. His distinctive work was to
vindicate the rationality of religion by show-
ing on the one hand the essential divinity
of man, and, on the other, the rationality of
the higher life of man's spirit. And Kingsley
assimilated this doctrine. It is the germinal
principle of much of his own public teaching,
46 Charles Kingsley.
both in the realm of theology and of natural
science. It may be traced all through his
writings, but especially perhaps in his treat-
ment of such lectures as those on the Platonic
Schools of Alexandria, in such papers as that
on " Natural Theology", delivered at Sion
College in 1871, and subsequently published
as the preface to his Westminster Sermons.
It was, however, to Maurice's Kingdom of
Christ that Kingsley always said he "owed
more than to any other book he had ever
read ". This work had come to its second
edition in 1842. It is prefaced by a long
dedication to Kingsley's old Helston school-
master, Derwent Coleridge, in which Maurice
explains his own theological debt to the
system of Christian philosophy taught by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Miss Grenfell
sent the book to Kingsley a few months after
his leaving Cambridge. It evidently made
the deepest impression upon him, helping
to clear his views and to establish his faith.
In January, 1842, Kingsley took his degree
at Cambridge with some distinction. In
both classics and mathematics he took
honours. In classics he was ninth in the
first class. His position, however, in the
mathematical class-list — 39th senior optime
Birth and Environment. 47
— was evidently attained with some difficulty,
and was merely the qualification, at that
time required by the university, for candi-
dature in classical honours. His tutor Dr.
Bateson, afterwards Master of S. John's Col-
lege, says of him: " His degree was a good
one, but I must add that it was nothing com-
pared with what might have been attained by
a man of his powers. If he had worked as an
undergraduate with only a small portion of
the industry and the energy which he ex-
hibited after he left Cambridge, there was no
academic distinction that would not have been
within his reach." 1 That Kingsley had any
taste for pure mathematics we may well doubt,
not only on the evidence of his comparatively
low position in the mathematical class-list,
but also from the record of an incident in his
examination, which was much talked of at
the time, and has passed into the traditionary
schools' gossip of the university.
" * Describe the Common Pump', was a question
in the paper on Mechanics. Of the internal ma-
chinery of the pump Kingsley was unable to render
a scientific account, but of the outside his vivid im-
agination supplied a picture which his facile pencil
soon transferred to paper. Under the heading
' Describe a Pump' he drew a grand village pump
1 Letters and Memories, vol. i. p. 58.
48 Charles Kingsley.
in the midst of a broad green, and opposite the
porch of an ancient church. By the side of the
pump stood, in all the pomposity of his office, the
village beadle with uniform and baton. Around
were women and children of all ages, shapes, dress,
and sizes, each carrying a crock, a jug, a bucket,
or some vessel, large or small. These were drawn
with considerable power, and the whole was lighted
up with his deep vein of humour: while around the
pump itself was a huge chain, padlocked and sur-
rounded by a notice: ' This pump locked during
Divine Service'. This Kingsley sent up to his
examiner as his answer to the question. I know
not whether he got any marks for it : but it was so
clever that the moderator of the year had it framed
and hung up on the wall of his room." 1
Chapter III.
The Country Parson and Village
Problems.
" Parson do preach and tell me to pray,
And to think of our work, and not ask more pay;
And to follow plough-share, and never think
Of crazy cottage and ditch-stuff's stink —
That Doctor do say breeds ager and chills,
Or worse than that, the fever that kills —
And a' bids me pay my way like a man,
Whether I can't or whether I can ;
And as I han't beef, to be thankful for bread,
And bless the Lord it ain't turmuts instead ;
1 Letters and Memories^ vol. i. p. 62.
Village Problems. 49
And never envy the farmer's pig,
For all a' lies warm, and is fed so big,
While the missus and little uns grow that thin,
You may count their bones underneath the skin ;
I'm to call all I gets ' the chastening rod'
And look up to my betters and then thank God."
Punch.
In July, 1842, Charles Kingsley was or-
dained, and then at the age of twenty-three
settled down as curate of Eversley, little think-
ing that it was to be his home for thirty-three
years. He married in 1844, and shortly after
was appointed to the rectory of the parish.
Eversley had been anything but a model
village. In the days of the French war,
when smuggling was the most lucrative of
trades, the wild Eversley moors were one of
the regular smugglers' routes to London,
and the older men in their day had all either
smuggled or connived at smuggling — depots
of spirits, French silks and laces being hidden
away among the gorse and bracken. And
if the village in those days had not been a
model one, neither had been its squire. He
had been a boon companion of the Prince
Regent, a fox-hunter of the old school, a
strict game preserver, a five - bottle man.
Both the man and his establishment had been
a simple curse to the neighbourhood. Such
were the evil traditions of the place.
(M50S) D
50 Charles Kingsley.
Kingsley at once set to work, and soon
began to win his way with the people. Old
reprobate smugglers and poachers, who for
years had never darkened the doors of the
church, felt tempted to come and hear the
young parson, who could hit so straight and
so hard, who told them the plainest truths
in the plainest language. And having once
come they came again. Moreover it was
not only in the pulpit that the young parson
could hit hard. The young wild fellows in
the parish were not long in discovering that
the parson, if only he chose to exert his
power, was their superior in physical, as
well as in intellectual skill.
Here no doubt was one great secret of his
influence as a country parson, at least in such
a place as Eversley. It meant much in re-
velation of personal character, — and personal
character, after all, is the secret of influence,
whether for philosopher or peasant, — that the
rector could swing a flail with any thresher
in the barn, turn a swathe with any mower in
the meadow, or pitch hay with any labourer
in the field. The huntsman or the poacher
could feel the reality of the parson's sympathy,
when they found he knew as well as they did
the earth of every fox on the moor, or the
Village Problems. 51
" reedy hover" or the " still hole" of the
pike and chub in the river. The farmer
thought not the less, but the more, of the
rector's sermons because he knew he could
also talk sensibly of the rotation of crops and
the breed and feed of stock. There was no
lack, we may be sure, of earnestness and zeal
in the ordinary routine of parochial work in
a country village, — clubs, schools, mothers'
meetings, loan funds, lending library, night
classes, singing classes, village lectures, — but
there was also a complete and wholesome
absence of the stiff and starched clerical
officialism, which in his day, and perhaps
since, has so often marred the honest work of
many a good country clergyman who, as
Kingsley himself once said, allowed his
people too readily to find out " where the man
left off and the parson began".
Kingsley was indeed a true parish priest —
caring for his people's best welfare, sparing no
effort in their behalf, a most regular and con-
scientious visitor in their cottages, personally
intimate with every soul in his parish, from
the men and boys at their field work to the
women at their wash-tubs and the babies in
their cradles. " If a man or woman" — so his
wife records — "were suffering or dying, he
52 Charles Kingsley.
would go to them five and six times a day,
and night as well as day, for his own heart's
sake as well as for their soul's sake."
In his pulpit also the same spirit was visible.
When he went up for his priest's orders, Dr.
Sumner, the then Bishop of Winchester,
objected to the sermons which he showed
to him as being " too colloquial". " It was
this very peculiarity", says Mrs. Kingsley,
" which arrested and attracted his hearers,
and helped to fill a very empty church."
There were those even who thought that this
colloquialism almost verged on profanity,
and to whom the incessant recurrence of the
Holy name in Kingsley's writings was dis-
tasteful. " God's work", "God's world",
"God's feast", "God's heroes", "God's
bells", "good news of God" — were expres-
sions, they thought, which, just and fitting
enough when sparingly and solemnly used,
produce by their constant recurrence an al-
most profane effect on certain minds. But
such criticism is as foolish as it is unfair.
For it must ever be remembered that with
Kingsley such expressions were strictly the
result of his intensity of feeling, of his sincere
religious feeling that no work of God is too
small to be spoken of, and no work of the
Village Problems. 53
devil too homely to be denounced. Every
thought, every action, every circumstance
had for Kingsley a very real spiritual import.
He scouted indignantly, passionately, always,
that half- faith of some Christians which
could separate the things secular from the
things spiritual, and the things of everyday
life from the things of God, Life from Re-
ligion.
As an instance of this intensity of faith,
and of his directness of appeal to his village
congregation, take this extract from one of
the earliest of his village sermons 1 :
"Cunning, fair-spoken oppressor of the poor,
has not thy sin found thee out? Then be sure it
will. In the shame of thine own heart it will find
thee out; — in the curses of the poor it will find
thee out; — in a friendless, restless, hopeless death-
bed, thy covetousness and thy cruelty will glare
before thee in their true colours, and thy sin will
find thee out!
" Profligate woman, who art now casting away
thine honest name, thy self-respect, thy woman-
hood, thy baptism-vows, that thou mayest enjoy
the foul pleasures of sin for a season, has not thy
sin found thee out? Then be sure it will hereafter,
when thou hast become disgusted at thyself and
thine own infamy, — and youth and health and
1 Twenty-five Village Sermons, p. 70.
54 Charles Kingsley.
friends are gone, and a shameful and despised old
age creeps over thee, and death stalks nearer and
nearer, and God vanishes further and further off,
then thy sin will find thee out!
" Foolish, improvident young man, who art
wasting the noble strength of youth and manly
spirits which God has given thee in sin and folly,
throwing away thine honest earnings in cards and
drunkenness, instead of laying them by against
a time of need, has not thy sin found thee out?
Then be sure it will some day, when thou hast to
bring home thy bride to a cheerless unfurnished
house, and there to live from hand to mouth —
without money to provide for her sickness — with-
out money to give her the means of keeping things
neat and comfortable when she is well, — without
a farthing laid by against distress and illness and
old age: — then your sin will find you out: then
perhaps my text and my words may come across
you, as you sigh in vain in your comfortless home,
in your impoverished old age, for the money which
you wasted in youth ! My friends, my friends, for
your own sake consider and mend ere that day
come, as else it surely will.
" And lastly, you who, without running into any
especial sins as those which the world calls sins,
still live careless about religion, without loyalty to
Christ the Lord, without any honest attempt or
even wish to serve the God above you, or to rejoice
in remembering that you are his children, working
for Him and under Him, — be sure your sin will
find you out. When affliction, or sickness, or dis-
Village Problems. 55
appointment come, as come they will if God has
not cast you off; — when the dark day dawns, and
your fool's paradise of worldly prosperity is cut
away from under your feet, then you will find out
your folly; you will find you have insulted the only
friend who can bring you out of affliction — forgotten
the only knowledge which will enable you to be
wiser for affliction. Then, I say, the sin of your
godlessness will find you out; if you do not intend
to fall, soured and sickened merely by God's
chastisement, either into stupid despair or peevish
discontent, you will have to go back to God and
cry, * Father, I have sinned against heaven and
before Thee, and am no more worthy to be called
Thy son'.
"Go back at once before it be too late. Find
out your sins and mend them — before they find you
out and break your hearts."
It was during Kingsley's first year as rector
of Eversley, in July, 1844, that his admiration
for Maurice's published books induced him
to write to that great teacher, asking for his
advice, apologizing for intrusion. " But
where", he added, " shall the young priest
go for advice but to the elder prophet? To
your works I am indebted for the foundation
of any coherent view of the Word of God, the
meaning of the Church of England, and
the spiritual phenomena of the present and
56 Charles Kingsley.
past ages. And as through your thoughts
God's Spirit has given me catholicity, to
whom therefore can I better go for details on
any of these points?"
This letter led to a correspondence and a
friendship which was only dissolved by death.
To Maurice, ' ' My dear — my dearest Master ! "
was Kingsley's habitual mode of address.
There was no exaggeration in this. Maurice
was the prophet, Kingsley the disciple, in
some respects also the interpreter, able to
popularize by his more poetic and glowing
sympathies the profounder message of his
friend. In this connection, as illustrative of
the peculiar personal charm which Maurice
exercised, not only over Kingsley, but over
all who came within the range of his influ-
ence, these characteristic words of Kingsley
are interesting:
" The most beautiful human soul, whom God has
ever in His great mercy allowed me most unworthy
to meet with on this earth ; the man who of all men
I have seen approached nearest to my conception
of S. John, the Apostle of Love. Well do I remem-
ber, when we were looking together at Leonardo da
Vinci's fresco of the Last Supper, his complaining
almost with indignation of the girlish and senti-
mental face which the painter, like too many Italians,
^
Village Problems. 57
had given to S. John. I asked why? And Maurice
answered, ' Why? Was not S. John the Apostle of
Love? Then, in such a world of hate and misery as
this, do you not think he had more furrows in his
cheeks than all the other apostles?' And I looked
upon the furrows in that most delicate and yet most
noble face, and knew that he spoke truth — of S.
John and of himself likewise ; and understood better
from that moment what was meant by bearing the
sorrows and carrying the infirmities of men." 1
This attitude of discipleship towards Mau-
rice continued to the end. In the next chapter
we shall have to deal with the intimate rela-
tionship of the two men in connection with
the Christian Socialist movement. Meanwhile
it was under Maurice's immediate patronage
that Kingsley's first book was published.
This was The Saint y s Tragedy, a poetic drama \S
dealing with the thirteenth -century story of
S. Elisabeth of Hungary. Ever since his
first going down into Devonshire, after taking
his degree, Kingsley had been working at this
story in one form or another. It was pub-
lished in 1848, with an introduction by Mr.
Maurice. It made little impression at the
time on the general literary world, though w
it was eagerly read at Oxford, fiercely at-
1 Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, vol. ii. p. 554.
58 Charles Kingsley.
tacked by the High Church party, and some-
what extravagantly praised by Baron Bun-
sen.
This latter writer was so impressed by its
dramatic power that in a letter to Mr. Max
Mliller he expressed the hope that Kingsley
might undertake the task of continuing the
series of Shakespearean historical plays. " I
have", he said, "for several years made no
secret of it, that Kingsley seems to me the
genius of our country called to place by the
side of that sublime dramatic series, from
King John to Henry VIII., another series
from Edward VI. to the landing of William
of Orange. This is the only historical devel-
opment of Europe which unites in itself all
vital elements, and which we might look upon
without overpowering pain. The tragedy of
1 Saint Elisabeth' shows that Kingsley can
grapple, not only with the novel, but with the
more severe rules of dramatic art." 1
I am afraid the poet himself had a truer
appreciation of the limitations of his own
power.
"I never wrote", he says in one of his
letters, "five hundred lines in my life before
The Saint } s Tragedy, . . . and I have not read
1 Letters and Memories t vol. i p. 151.
Village Problems. 59
half enough. I have been studying all physi-
cal sciences which deal with phenomena. I
have been watching nature in every mood; I
have been poring over sculptures and paint-
ings since I was a little boy, and all I can say
is, I do not know half enough to be a poet in
the nineteenth century." 1
Anyhow The Saint 's Tragedy never became
popular in the ordinary sense of the word.
The story is too repugnant to popular feeling.
The language in which it is written was, as
his mentor, Mr. Maurice, says in the preface
to the drama, "a little too bold for the taste
and temper of the age". And the social pro-
blems with which its author endeavoured to
grapple in his poem were so powerfully pressed
upon his own spirit that they left him with
none of the calmness or serenity of mind which
seem necessary for the production of a truth-
ful or consistent work of imagination such as
a great Shakespearean tragedy. Indeed, the
drama is mainly interesting because of its
unconscious revelation of the hopes and
dreams and ideals of a young and ardent soul
yearning for truth and love. Reading it by
the light of his biography, one cannot avoid
the conviction that in following its various
1 Letters and Memories, vol. i. p. 186.
60 Charles Kingsley.
scenes we are watching the mental struggles
and aspirations of its author, that Walter and
Conrad and the heretic preacher were very-
real personages to the curate of Eversley, and
that in some way — dim, unacknowledged,
idealized — he has associated his future wife
with the sweet picture of the "dear Elisa-
beth". Indeed there is even a suspicion, in
one scene in the second act when the individ-
ualistic abbot discourses of "that self-interest
of each which produces in the aggregate the
happy equilibrium of all", that we are hearing
echoes, not from the thirteenth century, but
from some Ruridecanal Chapter in the nine-
teenth, where during a heated discussion on
"charity organization" some young Christian
Socialist vicar had used wild words about
"simpering clerical philanthropists aping the
artless cant of an aristocracy who made them,
use them, and despise them". Certainly the
master-note of his heroine's character in deal-
ing with the social problems of her day is the
master-note of his.
"Be earnest, earnest, earnest; mad if thou wilt:
Do what thou dost as if the stakes were heaven,
And that thy last deed ere the judgment day.
When all's done, nothing's done. There's rest above —
Below let work be death, if work be love."
Village Problems. 61
Of the man himself as he was at this time,
earnest of purpose, keen of sympathy, im-
petuously generous, nobly self- sacrificing",
quixotic, chivalrous, stern to all forms of
wrong* and oppression, stern, above all, to
himself, gentle and tender and pitiful to
weakness as one who lived always in the
presence of God, there is no more vivid
picture than that painted for us in the letter 1
by Mr. John Martineau, an old pupil in the
Eversley rectory, during the most strenuous
of the years in which Kingsley was work-
ing at the problems of village and town
life.
It was in the autumn of 1848 that Kingsley's
first, and in some respects his ablest, novel
came out in the pages of Frasers Magazine,
Yeast, a story of village life and labour
problems, is a powerful representation of the
seething state of rural society in the middle
of the nineteenth century, and as such will
probably always continue to be a favourite
with young students of social philosophy;
but it can never be popular with the mere
novel reader, for, notwithstanding its many
brilliant descriptive passages, — the fox-hunt-
ing scene in an early chapter is one of the
1 See p. 297 of vol. i. of the Letters and Memories,
v/
62 Charles Kingsley.
most vivid pictures in this line in all literature,
and the love scenes between Lancelot and
Argemone are in their tenderness and truth,
to say the least, worthy of "the poet-squire"
who was their author, — and notwithstanding
the powerfully- drawn character of the real
hero of the book, the Cornish gamekeeper
Tregarva, the novel, after all, as a novel must
be judged not to be a great work of art by
a consummate artist, but a political pamphlet,
written at white heat, and with uncompromis-
ing earnestness, by a great spiritual teacher,
by a very real, though perhaps minor, prophet.
It was obviously never Kingsley's ambition,
then or afterwards, to be a great novelist.
He wished to be considered always as a
teacher, or as nothing; as a Christian priest,
to quote his own words, "as a man, to whom
are superadded his Christianity and his
priesthood ". But then the Christian priest
was also a genius and a poet, and so his keen
sympathy for suffering humanity, his ap-
preciation of the wrongs of the village poor,
which his experience as a hard-working
country parson forced on him, give a vivid
intensity to words of bitterness and truth
which his countrymfen did not easily forget,
or in some cases forgive.
Village Problems. 63
In a preface to the fourth edition of Yeast,
written twelve years after its first publication
in Frasers Magazine, Kingsley speaks of the
improved tone and temper which, during the
interval, has grown up in the agricultural dis-
tricts with regard to all the details of village
reform. There is greater self-help and inde-
pendence among the labouring men as the
result of " the twelve years more of the New
Poor Law". The country gentry are learning
more and more their responsibilities as leaders
of agricultural progress. The younger gener-
ation of farmers are adding to the " strong
sense of justice and the vast good nature " of
their fathers a steadily increasing knowledge
of what is required of them both as " manu-
facturers of food and employers of human
labour ".
"The country clergy, again, are steadily im-
proving. Would (however) that we clergymen
could learn (some of us are learning already) that
influence over our people is not to be gained by
perpetual interference in their private affairs, too
often inquisitorial, irritating, and degrading to both
parties, but by showing ourselves their personal
friends, of like passions with them. Let a priest
do that. Let us make our people feel that we
speak to them, and feel to them, as men to men,
and then the more cottages we enter the better. If
64 Charles Kingsley.
we go into our neighbours' houses only as judges,
inquisitors, or at best gossips, we are best — as too
many are — at home in our studies. Would, too,
that we would recollect this — that our duty is,
among other things, to preach the Gospel; and
consider firstly whether what we commonly preach
be any Gospel or good news at all, and not rather
the worst possible news ; and secondly, whether we
preach at all ; whether our sermons are not utterly
unintelligible (being delivered in an unknown
tongue), and also of a dulness not to be surpassed ;
and whether, therefore, it might not be worth our
while to spend a little time in studying the English
tongue, and the art of touching human hearts and
minds."
Nor does Kingsley fail to see that some-
thing of this generally improved tone in vil-
lage administration is due to a change in the
political ideas of the country, to the triumph
of liberal principles for which the Whig party
had been fighting for the last forty years.
" England had become Whig; and the death of
the Whig party is the best proof of its victory. It
has ceased to exist, because it has done its work;
because its principles are accepted by its ancient
enemies; because the political economy and the
physical science, which grew up under its patron-
age, are leavening the thoughts and acts of Angli-
can and of Evangelical alike, and supplying them
with methods for carrying out their own schemes.
Village Problems. 65
Lord Shaftesbury's truly noble speech on Sanitary
Reform at Liverpool is a striking proof of the ex-
tent to which the Evangelical leaders have given in
their adherence to those scientific laws, the original
preachers of which have been called by his Lord-
ship's party heretics and infidels, materialists and
rationalists. Be it so. Provided truth be preached,
what matter who preaches it? Provided the leaven
of sound inductive science leaven the whole lump,
what matter who sets it working? Better, perhaps,
because more likely to produce practical success,
that these noble truths should be instilled into the
minds of the educated classes by men who share
somewhat in their prejudices and superstitions, and
doled out to them in such measure as will not terrify
or disgust them. The child will take its medicine
from the nurse's hand trustfully enough, when it
would scream itself into convulsions at the sight
of the doctor, and so do itself more harm than the
medicine would do it good. The doctor meanwhile
(unless he be one of Hesiod's ' fools, who know not
how much more half is than the whole ') is content
enough to see any part of his prescription got down,
by any hands whatsoever."
The characteristic chivalry of Kingsley
comes out in the last paragraph of this pre-
face. Yeast, like all the books he has written,
was written to tell the English labouring man,
the English workman, of his national birth-
right.
(M508) b
66 Charles Kingsley.
44 But it is not this book, or any man's book, or
any man at all, who can tell Esau the whole truth
about himself, his powers, his duty, and his God.
Woman must do it, and not man. His mother, his
sister, the maid whom he may love; and failing all
these (as they often will fail him, in the wild wan-
dering life which he must live), those human angels
of whom it is written — ' The barren hath many
more children than she who has an husband \
And such will not be wanting. As long as Eng-
land can produce at once two such women as Flor-
ence Nightingale and Catherine Marsh, there is
good hope that Esau will not be defrauded of his
birthright; and that by the time that Jacob comes
crouching to him, to defend him against the ene-
mies who are near at hand, Esau, instead of borrow-
ing Jacob's religion, may be able to teach Jacob his ;
and the two brothers face together the superstition
and anarchy of Europe, in the strength of a lofty and
enlightened Christianity, which shall be thoroughly
human, and therefore thoroughly divine."
There is little plot in Yeast. It has for
hero, a devout and dashing fox-hunter, "an
unlicked bear with sorrows before him ",
carrying a copy of Francis de Sales' Devout
Life in his pocket when he rides to hounds;
for heroine, "the very model from which
Raphael might have conceived his glorious
Catharine ", a squire's daughter, a graceful
ascetic, a ritualistic devotee, feeling herself
uwvr
Village Problems. 67
the destined instrument of the hero's conver-
sion ; for chorus, a crowd of country gentle-
men, parsons, sportsmen, landlords, farmers,
labourers, poachers; and for leader of the
chorus, the gamekeeper, "a stately, thought-
ful-looking Cornishman, some six feet three in
height, with thews and sinews in proportion",
a village reformer, agitator, socialist, poet.
Such are the dramatis persons of this very
fragmentary story. The essence of the book
is concentrated in the fierce lyric on the game-
laws, written by the gamekeeper Tregarva,
and called "The Bad Squire".
" There's blood on your new foreign shrubs, squire,
There's blood on your pointer's feet,
There's blood on the game you sell, squire,
And there's blood on the game you eat.
You have sold the labouring man, squire,
Body and soul to shame,
To pay for your seat in the House, squire,
And to pay for the feed of your game.
You made him a poacher yourself, squire,
When you'd give neither work nor meat,
And your barley-fed hares robbed the garden
At our starving children's feet;
When, packed in one reeking chamber,
Man, maid, mother, and little ones lay:
68 Charles Kingsley.
While the rain pattered in on the rotting bride-bed,
And the walls let in the day.
Our daughters with base-born babies
Have wandered away in their shame;
If your misses had slept, squire, where they did,
Your misses might do the same.
Can your lady patch hearts that are breaking,
With handfuls of coals and rice,
Or by dealing out flannel and sheeting
A little below cost price?"
•
Here we have, by implication, most of the
burning questions of rural politics — the reform
of the game-laws, the housing of the rural
poor, the question of insanitary cottages,
village morality, indiscriminate and un-
thoughtful charity. And Tregarva can speak
as forcibly in plain prose as in poetry. "Day
labourer born, day labourer live, from hand to
mouth, scraping and grinding to get not meal
and beer even, but bread and potatoes; and
then, at the end of it all, for a worthy reward,
half a crown a week of parish pay — or the
workhouse. That's a lively hopeful prospect
for a Christian man."
" ' What makes me maddest of all, sir,' he ex-
claims, 'is to see that everybody sees these evils
except just the men who can cure them — the squires
Village Problems. 69
and the parsons. . . . The parsons are afraid
of the landlords. They must see these things, for
they are not blind ; and they try to plaster them up
out of their own pockets. . . . And as for the
charitable great people, sir, when they see poor
folk sick or hungry before their eyes, they pull out
their purses fast enough, God bless them ! — for they
would not like to be so themselves. But the op-
pression that goes on all the year round; and the
want that goes on all the year round; and the filth,
and the lying, and the swearing, and the profligacy
that goes on all the year round; and the sickening
weight of debt, and the miserable grinding anxiety
from rent-day to rent-day, and Saturday night to
Saturday night, that crushes a man's soul down,
and drives every thought out of his head but how
he is to fill his stomach, and warm his back, and
keep a house over his head, till he daren't for his
life take his thoughts one moment off the meat that
perisheth — oh, sir, they never feel this, and there-
fore they never dream that there are thousands who
feel this, and feel nothing else.'"
The author of Yeast himself, however, had
no heroic remedies to offer for all these sad 1
problems. He believed in the working of
reformatory tendencies in men, gradually
bringing about practical results in the work
of the "individual or the state. It was his
business to guide these tendencies and aims
70 Charles Kingsley.
by stating forcibly the data of the problem.
" In homely English", he said, "I have
given my readers Yeast; if they be what I
take them for, they will be able to bake with
it themselves."
There were few critics of the book, how-
ever, at that time who were able to accept
Kingsley's own view of its purport and aim. <y
It was too repugnant to all the customs and
prejudices of the time. Its author was rather
regarded as a mischievous firebrand whom it
behoved all right-minded and loyal English-
men manfully to withstand. One anonymous
critic in the pages of the Guardian published
a violent attack upon the teaching of Yeast
as subversive of the very principles of
Christianity, as mere heathenism, pagan
morality, and rationalistic infidelity. In
proof of this he did not hesitate to garble
sentences, to misquote, to twist, to contort.
The attack was so grossly insulting, so
obviously unfair, that Kingsley found it
necessary to reply. He did so in words
which are worth quoting, not only because
of their force and directness, but because
they contain a confession of his faith and his
loyalty to the Church, which throws a light
on all his subsequent teaching and writing.
Village Problems. 71
"The reviewer", he said, in a letter to the editor
of the Guardian, " makes certain allegations against
me which I found it somewhat difficult to answer,
from their very preposterousness, till in Pascal's
Fifteenth Provincial Letter I fell on an argument
which a certain Capuchin Father, Valerian, found
successful against the Jesuits, and which seems to
suit the reviewer exactly. I shall therefore proceed
to apply it to the two accusations which concern me
most nearly as a Churchman.
"(i.) He asserts that I say that 'it is common
sense and logic to make ourselves children of God
by believing that we are so when we are not'. Sir,
you and your readers will hardly believe me when
I tell you that this is the exact and formal opposite
to what I say, that the words which he misquotes,
by leaving out the context and the note of interroga-
tion, occur in a scornful reductio ad absurdum of the
very doctrine which he wantonly imputes to me, an
appeal to common sense and logic against and not
for the lie of the Genevan school. I have a right
to use the word ' wantonly ', for he cannot say that
he has misunderstood me : he has refused to allow
me that plea, and I refuse to allow it to him. In-
deed, I cannot, for the passage is as plain as day-
light, no schoolboy could misunderstand it: and
every friend to whom I have shewn his version of
it has received it with the same laughter and in-
dignation with which I did, and felt with me, that
the only answer to be given to such dishonesty was
that of Father Valerian, * Mentiris impudentissime '
(Thou liest most unblushingly).
72 Charles Kingsley.
" (ii.) So with the assertion that the book regards
the Catholic Doctrine of the Trinity as the same
thing with that of the Vedas, Neoplatonists, etc.,
etc., or considers a certain amount of youthful
profligacy as doing no real and permanent harm to
the character — perhaps strengthening it — for a use-
ful and even religious life; and that the existence
of the passions is a proof that they are to be grati-
fied! Sir, I shall not quote passages in proof of
these calumnies, for if I did, I should have to quote
half the book. I shall simply reply, with Father
Valerian, * Mentiris impudentissime \
". . . But one thing I may say, to save
trouble hereafter, that whosoever henceforth, either
explicitly or by insinuation, says that I do not hold
and believe ex animo, and in the simple and literal
sense, all the doctrines of the Catholic and Apostolic
Church of England, as embodied in her Liturgy and
in her Articles, shall have no answer from me but
Father Valerian's i Mentiris impudentissime'." 1
More direct, outspoken confession of faith
it is impossible for anyone, whether clergy-
man or layman, to make. And to that con-
fession Kingsley adhered throughout his life.
1 Letters and Memories, vol. i. p. 283.
Lessons in Village Citizenship. 73
Chapter IV.
Lessons in Village Citizenship.
"The church bells were ringing, the devil sat singing
On the stump of a rotting old tree;
' Oh faith it grows cold, and the creeds they grow old,
And the world is nigh ready for me '.
The bells went on ringing, a spirit came singing,
And smiled as he crumbled the tree;
* Yon wood does but perish new seedlings to cherish,
And the world is too live yet for thee'."
[Eversley, 1848.]
To a rural re-former looking back upon the
social and economic history of the English
village during the fifty years which have
elapsed since the publication of Yeast, it is
plain that considerable progress has been
made. But very much yet remains to be
done, and to be done in directions which for
the most part Charles Kingsley very definitely
foresaw.
Broadly speaking, the problems in rural
administration which still face the village
reformer may be classed under three heads.
I. How to increase village prosperity by improved
methods of livelihood.
II. How to improve the housing of the rural
poor, and the sanitary equipment of the village.
74 Charles Kingsley.
III. How to inspire through the whole system
of rural administration worthier ideals of village
citizenship.
Possibly this last problem ought to be con-
sidered first. But at anyrate we may say this.
It is quite idle for the potential village reformer
to consider the solution of any one of these
problems until he has first also satisfactorily to
his own mind answered these three questions: —
I. Does the English state consider that produc-
tion of food for the people is the primary charge
on the land, and with that object in view does she
desire to retain a rural population of workers on the
soil?
II. Does the English Church consider that
national character is of far greater importance than
national wealth, and from that point of view is she
prepared to welcome the revival of an English yeo-
man class as one of the surest means of building up
a sturdy, wholesome, religious national character?
III. What is the legitimate civic ideal of the
English peasant of the future to be?
Until we have settled these questions satis-'
factorily it is evidently idle to go further.
What, for example, is the use of all these
various and conflicting schemes of the Tech-
nical Training Committees of the County
Councils up and down the country, if we
Lessons in Village Citizenship. 75
have not first made up our minds as to the
special object of all our training"? The peasant
proprietor, or the small farmer of the future
— if we decide that the creation of such a class
is to be our national aim — will need a very
different training from that of the wage-earn-
ing farm-hand of the present : for small farm-
ing, remember, is a lost art in England.
I. That Kingsley saw vividly enough one
aspect of this question is plain from a letter
which is quoted on page 360 of vol. ii. of his
Letters and Memories : —
"I have as a practical agriculturist interested
myself much for twenty-five years (this letter was
written in 187 1) in the small farm question, and I
think your friend may depend on what I tell him.
... He must remember that the French and Ger-
man peasants who own or rent little farms have
long hereditary skill in agriculture, which the Eng-
lish artisan has not. He must remember also that
the crops which they raise per acre are miserably
small compared to those on a large English farm, —
I speak from the sight of my own eyes, — and that an
immediate result of breaking up the present farms
into little allotments would be to diminish the food- ^
producing powers of this realm at least one-half.
" For a single fact, the small farmer could never
fat a single bullock; and English beef would dis-
appear from the market, its place being taken (as
76 Charles Kingsley.
in France and Germany) by veal — the calves being
killed to save the expense of rearing.
" He must also remember — what I assure him —
that the foreign peasant in the north lives far worse >/
than a good English labourer. Meat he never
tastes or white bread. Black rye bread and pottage
is his staple food, and his wife, from early field
work, becomes a haggard old woman at twenty-
five. God forbid that I should ever see in England
such wives and mothers as are common on the Con-
tinent. . . . As it is, were I a land-owner, I should
certainly try this experiment. I should let some four
to five acre lots to the very ablest labourers at the
usual low farmer's rent, on the condition that they
would spade and fork, not plough, and give them
all fair play. But if a town artisan came to ask me
for a similar bit of land, I would say: Come in, my
good fellow, and eat and drink with me, and go
your way back to your own trade. For if you settled
down on this bit of land, you would be either in the
workhouse or the grave in twelve months, and the
land a wilderness. And if he were a sensible man
I would make him see that I was right."
" Back to the Land!" a cry which was so
popular a few years ago with the Radical
land reformers of the town clubs, would evi-
dently have met with little sympathy from
Charles Kingsley; and rightly so. And yet
no man was more keen to see such a develop-
ment of agricultural science and rural industry
Lessons in Village Citizenship. 77
as should make possible a large increase in
the numbers of the labouring population sub-
sisting on the land. But he knew the con-
ditions of the problem. He knew that a
revolution in the direction of the continental
system of peasant properties was no true need
of England, for that system, to say no more,
does not make for civilization or progress. In
a lecture delivered in London shortly after the
publication of Yeast, on "The Application of
Associative Principles and Methods to Agri-
culture ", he spoke of the two great needs of
rural society as being (1) the application of
scientific methods to agriculture and village
industries, and (2) the adoption of a system
of co-operative distribution. After an interval
of fifty years they still remain so.
Of more scientific methods of distribution
some little has been learnt even in rural
districts. The co-operative village store is
steadily and surely spreading throughout Eng-
land. And the rural labourers who for the
most part manage these stores are gradually
learning in the committee work of store man-
agement, and by contact at their annual meet-
ings with the business men of their own class,
who are the managing directors of the Co
operative Wholesale Societies in London and
78 Charles Kingsley.
Manchester, something of the future pos-
sibilities of the principle of co-operation, both
in developing village industries, and also in
putting the village producers into touch with
the town markets. Even the farmer in some
parts of England is slowly awakening to the
value of the co-operative principle in the
organization of dairy and cheese factories, and
to the necessity for the adoption of newer
methods if he is to compete successfully for
the custom of the English townsmen with the
rapidly- increasing number of foreign and
colonial producers of farm produce.
But especially the revivification of village
life in England flags for want of specific
knowledge and training both in the sciences of
life and the arts of livelihood.
Of all the countless parliamentary blue-
books which the many Royal Commissions
on the Condition of the English Rural Poor
have produced, I think perhaps the most
valuable of the century is the report published
two years ago by the Recess Committee, of
which Mr. Horace Plunkett was the chair-
man, dealing with the question of a proposed
Department of Agriculture and Industries for
Ireland. It consists of reports and corre-
spondence from delegates sent out by the
Lessons in Village Citizenship. 79
committee to investigate various industries on
the Continent, and to report how far conti-
nental methods might be utilized for the pros-
perity of Ireland. But for the most part the
very remarkable continental experience which
is tabulated in that report is just as applicable
to England as to Ireland, and the final de-
duction from that experience is just this, that
rural prosperity is within the reach of every
English village that will equip itself for the
industrial conflict. It will be sufficient to
quote only one paragraph from that report : —
" Dr. Steinbeis found his country (Wurtemberg)
steeped in poverty when he first entered the public
service in 1840. Half a century later, Sir Henry
Barron, the British Minister at Stuttgart, writes as
follows: — ' England now buys from Wurtemberg
large quantities of manufactured articles, such as
blankets, carpets, flannels, hosiery, linens, tissues,
instruments, types, drugs, chemicals, paper, ivory
goods, wood carving, toys, furniture, hats, pianos,
gunpowder, clocks, and stays'. ... It is to be noted
especially that these industries are carried on by an
agricultural population, who forty years ago were
devoid of all mechanical knowledge, and also in
taking to these industries have by no means aban-
doned agriculture, but on the contrary have found
their agriculture prosper through the growth of a
manufacturing population in their villages. Mr.
80 Charles Kingsley.
Tylor describes the prosperity of Wiirtemberg in
these words: ' Thirty years ago Wiirtemberg was
in a deplorable condition. Since then Dr. Steinbeis,
by means of technical schools, local and central
exhibitions, by training industrial teachers, by
transplanting trades from other countries, has con-
verted a population without mechanical knowledge
into one carrying on most of the small trades prac-
tised in Europe. This has helped the agricultural
interest much, it has provided a manufacturing
population close to the farmer.' Again, the Director
of the Royal Bank of Stuttgart writes: — ' To-day
there is not a pauper in the kingdom of Wiirtem-
berg '. In the midst of the depression of trade and
industry which affected all Europe in 1886 the
British Minister reported: — 'the prosperity of the
nation and well-being of the masses have suffered
no interruption ... no real depression exists
here'."
Had England listened to Charles Kingsley
in 1850, as Wiirtemberg listened to Dr. Von
Steinbeis, possibly the English villager of
to-day might have been as free from poverty
as his Bavarian brother.
II. Again, take another administrative pro-
blem of village government — the housing of
the rural poor and the improvement of village
sanitation — to which Charles Kingsley called
attention, not only in the vivid pages of Yeast,
Lessons in Village Citizenship. 81
but in the many lectures and addresses which
followed, in "The Massacre of the Innocents",
his speech at the inauguration of the Ladies'
Sanitary Association ; in his address on " The
Air Mothers ", in which he advocated the
teaching of the rudiments of the science of
health in our public schools and colleges; in
his "Sermons on the Cholera", in which he
declared that outbreak to be "the expression
of God's judgment, God's opinion, God's
handwriting on the wall against us for our
sins of filth and laziness, foul air, foul food,
foul drains, foul bedrooms"; in the notable
address on " Human Soot" on behalf of the
Liverpool Ragged Schools; and in all the
"crusade against dirt, degradation, disease,
and death " which during the next twenty
years he regarded as "a sacred duty".
Certainly if the health conditions of the
cottage homes of England to-day are better
than they were fifty years ago, it is very
largely owing to the work and teaching of
Charles Kingsley, and the little band of
sanitary reformers, his personal friends — Dr.
Southwood Smith, Mr. Edwin Chadwick, Sir
John Simon, Sir Arthur Helps, — who won for
England the Public Health Act of 1848, and*
the various amending acts which from time to
(M508) F
82 Charles Kingsley.
time followed it, down to the very year ot
Kingsley's death, when in 1875 the Act of
Consolidation was passed, which made sani-
tary questions an imperial subject, and thus
finally gained from the State the acknowledg-
ment that the preservation of the health and
life of the people was a public duty.
Yet progress in sanitary reform has been
very slow. Eight years after Kingsley's
death I remember in my examination before
the Royal Commission on the Housing of the
Poor, laying before the Commissioners certain
vital statistics with regard to village homes
in the midland counties, which led me, as a
country parson striving to do my work as far
as possible in the spirit which I had learnt
from Kingsley, to ask these questions: —
" How is it possible under such physical
conditions for a country parson to expect
from his parishioners any approach to that
' pure religion breathing household laws '
which it is yet his duty to inculcate? How,
with mere huts for homes, can the distinctively
home virtues — parental love, filial obedience,
household thrift, cleanliness, modesty, chas-
tity, self-respect, purity and simplicity of
heart — find any room for growth? Can he
honestly ascribe the meagre growth of these
Lessons in Village Citizenship. 83
virtues among his people solely to failure of
individual will, or must he not rather trace it
to circumstances of life, and sleep so degrad-
ing* as to leave no moral room for their
growth? What provision can there be under
such conditions of home life, not only for the
three essentials of physical life — pure air,
pure water, pure food, — but also for the three
essentials of spiritual life, 'admiration, hope,
and love'?". I wrote those words in 1883.
And still, after the elapse of fifteen years more,
the conditions are very little improved. It
would be possible to quote many pieces of
evidence in proof of this. Let me be satisfied
with quoting two. The first is the evidence
of a vicar in my own county of Cambridge,
a county councillor and the chairman of a
parish council.
" I was two years in getting a block of houses
condemned, although they had no back-door, con-
sequently no through ventilation, no window in
bedroom, consequently again no ventilation or
light, and the floor of the living-room inches below
the outside surface, and no drainage. A poor old
woman, since dead, pointed out to^ the sanitary
medical and the inspector her ingenious contrivance
for conducting the soaked-in water under the fire-
place, and how she ' deeved ', as she expressed it,
the water out with a scoop into a pail, and showed
84 Charles Kingsley.
the sacks on the floor saturated with stagnant water.
There is still one bedroom at least without window,
and possibly more. The thatch is rotting, and the
rain comes freely in, though this is being remedied
a little now, by the rotten thatch, stinking as it is,
being covered up by a thin layer of new straw in
patches. A couple of open ditches run from one
end of the village to the other, generally 3 feet deep
of the filthiest liquid imaginable.
One house at least has the closet about 3 feet from
the back-door, and had at least 200 gallons of five-
year-old night-soil in an uncemented hole, whose
surface was a foot at least above the living-room
floor. . . . Most of the cottages are provided
with non-fitting doors. Many without through
ventilation and back-doors. Thirteen with one bed-
room ; 44 with two, including several places under
stairs. Not much overcrowding — children die off
and prevent it. . . . I have been ten years at it,
and the only result is a little new thatch here and
there and the condemnation of seven houses. It
seems hopeless. My efforts have left me solitary,
and I am almost constrained to cease efforts at
fighting the wind." " I enclose a piece of sacking
taken to-day from a cottage hearth, and describe its
sanitary condition. Tenant, a widow and invalid
son, both with chronic colds. Living-room, through
broken drain at back, soaked with water all along
one side to a height of 2 ft. 9^ in. Water flows
to hearth on which enclosure was laid. Hearthrug
completely wet. Fireplace falling out, no cooking
arrangements whatever. Bedroom on floor too
Lessons in Village Citizenship. 85
damp to sleep in. Loft over used as bedroom.
Floor actually 3 in. away from wall that should
support it. Tenants dare not walk on that side.
Light hole : All the light that can get in is through
a hole 10 sq. in. in superficial area, and does
not open.
Outside conditions: A drain leading from the
parson's w.c. cesspool past the village pump (catch-
ing through an untrapped grid on which the vil-
lagers' pails stand while being filled) is broken in
just opposite this house, and the contents flow on
the ground within 10 feet of the front door and
unused bedroom of this house. A heap of reeking
manure, some five or six tons, stands within the
same distance of front door and window. No back
door, only the front door gives ingress and egress
to the house. Owner, a magistrate and D.L. Rent
has been paid. Tenant in receipt of parish relief,
1 j. per week and half stone bread — all she, a widow,
has to live upon. Invalid son has not worked for
years, has heart disease; 2s. 6d. per week from
club, is. from union."
And the second piece of evidence is this. It
is taken from the official summary of Mr.
Little, the Special Agricultural Commissioner,
printed in the lately published Report of the
Royal Commission on Labour: —
" There is abundant evidence", he says, " to show
that a large proportion of the cottages inhabited by
labourers are below a proper standard of what is
86 Charles Kingsley.
required for decency and comfort, while a consider-
able number of them are vile and deplorably
wretched dwellings. . . . It is impossible to
read these reports without experiencing a painful
feeling that too frequently and too commonly the
agricultural labourer lives under conditions which
are physically and morally unwholesome and offen-
sive ; the accommodation provided in respect of the
number, size, and comfort of the rooms, the sanitary
condition and the water supply, is lamentably
deficient generally, and requires amendment. The
action of the local sanitary authority, though vigor-
ous in some districts, is in many places ineffective,
and it is everywhere impeded, and sometimes
arrested, by the knowledge that the owners of
insanitary dwellings have not the means to remedy
the defects, and that the consequences of closing
such dwellings would be to make the present in-
habitants homeless."
When we come to ask ourselves how we
shall set about remedying this state of things,
so discreditable to our civilization, we are
forced to acknowledge that it is not entirely
the law which is to blame. The Public
Health Act of 1875, the Housing of the
Working Classes Act of 1890, and the Parish
Councils Act of 1894 ought to be quite
sufficient to grapple with most of the evils.
It is the motive force, in an enlightened
Lessons in Village Citizenship. 87
public opinion in the various localities, to set
these Acts in motion which is too often
absent.
How shall this more sensitive public con-
science be created?
I think a study of Charles Kingsley's life
and teaching would teach us to answer that
question in some such way as this.
Christ came to give us life, and to give it
more abundantly. Here, then, is an obvious
duty laid upon the Church, which claims to be
His interpreter of life to the people.
It is for her to exhibit the practical religion
of citizenship by creating and fostering such
a public opinion as shall overcome the supine-
ness, the ignorance, the apathy, the sluggish
indifference of too many of the existing sani-
tary authorities. And when, for example, she
hears, as she will hear, for it is the common
burden of all the squires, that "good cottages
cannot be built to pay", that, as Lord Salis-
bury stated not so long ago, only two-thirds of
the cost of cottage building can be considered
a commercial investment, and that the remain-
ing third must be regarded as a charity and a
benevolence on the part of the landlord, then
I venture to say that it will be the Church's
duty to take up its burden of prophecy and
88 Charles Kingsley.
declare that if a landlord finds it commercially
profitable to provide, as part of the necessary
working plant of his estate, healthy stables
and cow-sheds for the proper housing of his
farmer's cattle, but commercially unprofitable
to provide healthy cottages for the labourers
who are necessary to the work of the farm,
then we have reached a social state in which
the worth and the value of a beast is more
considered than the worth and the value of
a man, and it is idle to talk any more of either
citizenship or practical religion, for the time
has evidently come for revolution! Thus
speaketh the Lord of Hosts, saying: Is it a
time for you, O ye who dwell in your ceiled
houses that the houses of God's poor should
lie waste? Consider your ways. Go up to the
mountain, and bring wood and build houses
for My poor, and I will take pleasure in them,
and I will be glorified, saith the Lord. . . .
Woe unto him that buildeth for himself a wide
house and large chambers and cutteth him
out windows, and ceileth it with cedar and
painteth it with vermilion, but forgetteth to
judge the cause of the poor and needy. Shall
I not visit for these things? saith the Lord:
shall not My soul be avenged on such a nation
as this?
Lessons in Village Citizenship. 89
III. Lastly, in view of the experience of
rural administration during the last fifty
years, there is a further lesson to be learnt
from Charles Kingsley's example and teach-
ing, if we would see the growth in our villages
of a worthier ideal of village citizenship.
And it is a lesson, in the first instance at
anyrate, for the country parson. When from
the village pulpit he is performing the Church's
prophetic function of interpreter of Life, he
must so learn to speak to his people that they
shall come to feel it a point of honour and
of Christian obligation to build up, as far as
their influence extends, the life of the civic
brotherhood to which they belong, the cor-
porate life of the village, in justice, righteous-
ness, and the fear of God.
Charles Kingsley made such teaching effec-
tive, because at the heart of every sermon he
preached on national patriotism or civic duty
was to be found this principle which he
had learnt, as so many of his followers have
learnt since, from the teaching of Frederick
Maurice : —
Jesus Christ by His incarnation exalted
human nature, consecrated all human rela-
tions, claimed supremacy over all realms of
human thought and action, founded an ideal
9d Charles Kingsley.
spiritual kingdom to be a storehouse of re-
demption, social no less than personal, for ever.
For every loyal Christian, therefore, using
the daily prayer of his Lord, " Thy kingdom
come ... on earth", Christ must be acknow-
ledged as the supreme King of all village
government, and Christ's law recognized al-
ways as the ultimate authority in the realm of
village ethics, village politics, village econo-
mics. For, after all, it is this doctrine of
our faith which will best create in the citizen
that true sense of individual responsibility,
strengthening him to resist the tyranny of a
majority, habituating him to live for an unseen
and distant end, which is so necessary to
counter-work that impatience for quick re-
sults and legislative short-cuts which must
ever remain one of the great dangers of a
democratic electorate.
Again, the parson's teaching of civic duty
should be saturated with the emotion of
patriotism. If, in the litany of the Church,
the village priest expects his people to join
with him in any real sense in the suffrage : "O
God, we have heard with our ears, and our
fathers have declared unto us the noble works
that Thou didst in their days and in the old
time before them", he must surely instruct his
Lessons in Village Citizenship. 91
people in those " noble works"; he must not
be ashamed to take his text occasionally from
the national Bible, from the books that tell of
England's divine genesis and exodus, from
her records of judges and heroes, her chron-
icles of kings and poets and prophets; he
must strive to bring home to the hearts of the
people the sense of the sacredness of national
life, and the greatness and continuity of our
country's story, as part of the design of God.
Practical citizenship will not be less practical,
but more so, if it can appeal reasonably to the
ideal emotion of patriotism.
"They must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake : the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held."
But the capable citizen will not be formed
only by imbibing principles, however ideal,
from the pulpit teaching of his parson. He
must be trained in the practical school of
village politics.
In old days that school was, for the village,
the parish vestry, or it ought to have been so.
To-day it is the Parish Council. There in the
active business of responsible public life, if
they are to be learnt at all, must be learnt
those primary lessons in public justice and
self-government, in public discussion and
92 Charles Kingsley.
civic duty, which are necessary to the char-
acter of a capable citizen. How does the
country parson, then, regard the work of the
new parish councils?
In the majority of cases, I trust, up and
down the country, in the experience of the
last three or four years, the village parson
has loyally accepted the new Act, and has set
himself to help his people, his labouring par-
ishioners especially, to take their due part in
the nation's work, and to forward all wise
measures for the well-being of the village
community. But it is to be feared that there
are also far too many instances in which the
parson, especially if he himself is not an
elected member, or has not been invited to
the chairmanship of the council, affects either
a supreme indifference to the whole business
of village government, or stands aloof watch-
ing with complacent amusement the ineffec-
tive bungling which of course is apt to char-
acterize the first effort of untrained political
tyros. "The English agricultural labourer",
he says, by way of justification of his attitude,
"is not yet fit for self-government. If he
would only believe it, he is a thousand times
better off under the benevolent paternal des-
potism of the squire and parson."
Lessons in Village Citizenship. 93
But the parson, surely, of all men, ought
to know that the end of government, even of
village government, is not to exhibit a model
community, in the sense of a perfectly smooth-
working political machine, but to develop
human beings, to train character, to make
men — men with souls, for whom Christ died.
And — it is as old as Aristotle — "the harper is
not made otherwise than by harping, nor the
just man otherwise than by doing just deeds".
Citizenship is only a larger art. And if you
would teach men to do their duties to the
State, the only finally effective plan is to give
them duties to do. Men can only become fit
to have votes by first using them. Personal
responsibility in citizenship requires at least
for its development that modicum of oppor-
tunity which the parish franchise supplies.
One thinks one knows how Kingsley would
have welcomed such a measure of rural reform
as the new Parish Councils Act, not indeed
as likely to bring what our American friends
call "millennium by express", but as giving
opportunity for the free play of the best demo-
cratic forces of the time, and leading on, one
would hope, to the gradual revivification of
village life in England.
And the country parson who, in Kingsley's
94 Charles Kingsley.
spirit, would wish to be a true village leader,
and whose religion teaches him that the veriest
day-drudge in his village has a worth in the
eye of God which is seldom adequately mea-
sured by human standards, will not hesitate
to begin with the elementary political right of
the parish franchise. Recognizing, as he must
do, as an educated man, the dangers in a de-
mocratic state of society of subdivided power,
— and subdivided power means of course sub-
divided responsibility, — and knowing the fatal
paralysis of individual character which all too
swiftly follows the blight of indifference, he
will never suffer, if he can help it, even that
fraction of subdivided power, the simple duty
of the vote, to be lightly regarded by any of
his parishioners. At the time of a parish
election, therefore, or of a parliamentary elec-
tion, although it should be no part of the
public duty of the parson to give his par-
ishioners advice as to how they shall cast
their votes, it should undoubtedly be a part of
the public duty of the parson to give them
advice as to the spirit in which they should
cast their votes. It should be his duty, his
distinct duty, to remind his people that the
vote is given to them by the State on the
understanding that they will exercise it, not
Lessons in Village Citizenship. 95
to serve any private interest of their own, but
entirely for what they honestly consider to be
for the public good. He should point out to
them, therefore, that to neglect to record
their vote when the right time comes, or to
give their votes carelessly and without serious
thought, much less to sell them for money or
favour, would be an act of treason to their
country; nay, that it would be more, that it
would be an act of treason to Christ Himself,
for not to act according to conscience in such
matters would be practically to deny Christ's
claim to be King of Men, the Ruler over
every department of life and action, in con-
trast with the domination of capital, class,
party, or sect. Better, he ought to say to
them, better that you should support the
wrong cause conscientiously than the right
cause insincerely. Better be a true man on
the wrong side than a false man on the right.
The Quaker poet of Democracy was not wrong
when he said :
" No jest is this,
One vote amiss
May blast the hope of freedom's year.
O take me where
Are hearts of prayer,
And foreheads bowed in reverent fear;
96 Charles Kingsley.
Not lightly fall
Beyond recall
The written scrolls a breath can float:
The crowning fact,
The kingliest act
Of freedom, is the free man's vote."
" Politics for the People." 97
Chapter V.
"Politics for the People."
The Day of the Lord is at hand, at hand :
Its storms roll up the sky :
The nations sleep starving on heaps of gold ;
All dreamers toss and sigh ;
The night is darkest before the morn ;
When the pain is sorest the child is born,
And the Day of the Lord at hand.
. * . •**••
Who would sit down and sigh for a lost age of gold,
While the Lord of all ages is here?
True hearts will leap up at the trumpet of God,
And those who can suffer can dare.
Each old age of gold was an iron age too,
And the meekest of saints may find stern work to do,
In the day of the Lord at hand.
(Torridge, 1849.)
On the 10th of April, 1848, a revolution
was threatened in England. One hundred
thousand armed men were to meet on Kenning-
ton Common, and from thence to march to
Westminster, there to compel, by physical
force, if necessary, the acceptance of the
People's Charter by the Houses of Parliament.
The revolution had been carefully prepared,
as it was supposed, by ten years of steady
agitation. At the close of 1837 — a year of
bad harvest and of serious commercial crisis —
a public meeting had been convened by the
(M508) a
98 Charles Kingsley.
London Working-men's Association, at which
a drastic reform of parliament had been de-
manded. A petition was drafted and signed
by some 3000 people. In its final shape it
was published on May 8, 1838, as the People's
Charter. It contained "six points": or, practi-
cally, five, for IV. in its form of equal electoral
districts had been dropped. They were these :
I. Universal suffrage.
II. Abolition of property qualification for
members of Parliament.
III. Annual Parliaments.
IV. Equal representation.
V. Payment of M.P.'s.
VI. Vote by ballot at elections.
These "six points" were almost identically
the same as the demands formulated sixty
years previously by Charles James Fox in his
Whig programme. To-day, fifty years later,
a full century of political agitation being more
than complete, and five out of the "six
points" — the vote by ballot alone excepted —
being still unwon, the propositions of the
People's Charter seem no more unreasonable,
not to say dangerous or revolutionary, than
the items of the latest of Radical programmes.
Such, however, was not the feeling in the
spring of 1848. The Revolution in France,
" Politics for the People." 99
the predial disturbances in Ireland, the un-
doubtedly wide-spread distress among" the
working population in the manufacturing
districts of the north, which had already led
during the winter to riots in Glasgow, Edin-
burgh, and Liverpool, gave point to the fears
of those who were responsible for civil order.
The Government filled London with troops,
put the Duke of Wellington in command,
barricaded the bridges and Downing Street,
garrisoned the Bank of England, closed the
Horse Guards. The troops, however, were
wisely kept out of sight. The impression
created by the ready enrolment of more than
150,000 London householders as " special
constables", combined with the bombastic
boast of French and Irish assistance on the
part of the Physical-force Chartists, naturally
persuaded the sensible English workman of
the wisdom of staying indoors. On Ken-
nington Common the expected 100,000
men rapidly dwindled to a rabble of reckless
partisans and foolish zealots, who were left
with thieves and roughs and hobbledehoys
"to cheer for the revolution". The Chartist
leader, Feargus O'Connor, an irresponsible
Irish rhetorician, acted with the irresolute
weakness common to his class in face of
ioo Charles Kingsley.
superior force. Torrents of rain completed
the fiasco. And the day which had dawned
with all the possibilities of a great national
tragedy, closed in burlesque and " inextin-
guishable laughter''. Charles Kingsley has
thus described the final scene in one of the
last chapters of Alton Locke: —
"The sun had risen on the tenth of April.
What would be done before the sun had set?"
(asks the Chartist hero of that book). " What would
be done? Just what we had the might to do; and,
therefore, according to the formula on which we
were about to act, that mights are rights, just what
we had a right to do — nothing. Futility, absurdity,
vanity and vexation of spirit. . . . It is a day
to be forgotten — and forgiven. . . . Every one
of Mackaye's predictions came true. We had
arrayed against us, by our own folly, the very
physical force to which we had appealed. The
dread of general plunder and outrage by the
savages of London, the national hatred of that
French and Irish interference of which we had
boasted, armed against us thousands of special
constables who had in the abstract little or no
objection to our political opinions. The practical
common-sense of England, whatever discontent it
might feel with the existing system, refused to let
it be hurled rudely down on the mere chance of
building up on its ruins something as yet untried
and even undefined. Above all, the people would
" Politics for the People." 101
not rise. Whatever sympathy they had with us,
they did not care to show it. And then futility
after futility exposed itself. The meeting, which
was to have been counted by hundreds of thousands,
numbered hardly its tens of thousands; and of
them a frightful proportion were of those very
rascal classes against whom we ourselves had
offered to be sworn in as special constables.
O'Connor's courage failed him after all. He con-
trived to be called away at the critical moment by
some problematical superintendent of police. Poor
Cuffy, the honestest, if not the wisest, speaker there,
leapt off the wagon, exclaiming that we were all
' humbugged and betrayed ' ; and the meeting broke
up pitiably piecemeal, drenched and cowed, body
and soul, by pouring rain on its way home — for
the very heavens mercifully helped to quench our
folly — while the monster-petition crawled ludi-
crously away in a hack cab, to be dragged to the
floor of the House of Commons amid roars of
laughter. . . ."
This description, written a year or so after
the Chartist failure, shows that Kingsley was
not inappreciative of the futilities and absurdi-
ties of the agitation. But that he was pro-
foundly moved at the time cannot be denied.
Nor was this unnatural. For if there was
much in the conduct of the agitation that
was foolish and fanatic, there were also some
102 Charles Kingsley.
claims that were not unfounded, and there
were also wrongs real enough and grievous
enough to draw the sympathy of any right-
hearted Englishman. We have only to read
such books as the Autobiography of a
Chartist, by Thomas Cooper, or the Corn-
law Rhymes of the Sheffield poet, Ebenezer
Elliot, to learn how bitter were the sufferings
of large numbers of the working people of
England, or why it was that the bread tax
had come to be identified in the minds of the
very best of the artisans with a system of
economic legislation which was distinctly
preferential to the interests of a single class.
Anyhow it was a profound and passionate
sympathy with what he knew of these real
sufferings of the poor that caused Charles
Kingsley to act and write as he did. Had
he written or done otherwise he would not
have been Charles Kingsley.
Mr. Ludlow has told us how on that ioth
of April he first met Kingsley. 1 He had come
from Eversley to see if anything could be
done to prevent a collision between the
Chartists and the troops. Almost his first
words to Ludlow were: " The poor fellows
mean well, however misguided; it would be
horrible if there were blood shed. I am
1 Economic Review , Oct. 1893.
" Politics for the People." 103
going to Kennington Common to see what
man can do. Will you go with me?"
The two men did not reach Kennington,
for at Waterloo Bridge they heard the news
that O'Connor had told the people to go
home, and that all danger for the moment
was over. They turned their steps accord-
ingly to the house of Mr. Maurice in Blooms-
bury to tell him the good news. There
during the following week, in consultation
with the little group of remarkable men who
had gathered round Mr. Maurice — Arch-
deacon Hare, Scott, Ludlow, Charles Mans-
field, J. W. Parker, Thomas Hughes, — the
lines were laid of that peaceful agitation for
the organization of labour, on the principle of
association rather than of competition, which
came to be known by the name of the
Christian Socialist Movement, and which
undoubtedly in the latter half of the century
has done so much, not only to promote a
more brotherly spirit between rich and poor
— " the two nations into which", according to
the well-known phrase in Disraeli's Sybil,
" England was divided" — and to create a
desire, at least on the part of the more cultured
classes, to seek for a more Christian, and
therefore more reasonable, solution of the
104 Charles Kingsley.
social and labour problem, but also to foster
the growth of the great industrial co-opera-
tive societies, whose success promises so
much for the industrial future of the country,
and points in all probability to the direction
in which lies the ultimate solution of the
problem of Labour and Capital.
The force and fire of Kingsley soon made
him the popular hero of the movement,
though Maurice remained from first to last
its directing spirit. " If the Oxford tracts
did wonders", said Maurice, "why should
not we?" He proposed, therefore, a new
set of real " Tracts for the Times". Accord-
ingly the first issue of Politics for the People
was published by Mr. J. W. Parker on May
6th, 1848. In the "prospectus" of its first
page, Mr. Maurice defined plainly the
principles upon which he and his friends
proposed to "consider the questions of the
relation of the capitalist to the labourer, of
what a government can or cannot do, to find
work or pay for the poor".
"To speak of these questions calmly is a duty;
to speak of them coldly is a sin; for they cannot
be separated from the condition of men who are
suffering intensely. If we do not sympathize
with their miseries we are not fit to discuss the
" Politics for the People." 105
remedies which they propose themselves, or which
others have proposed for them. That sympathy
we desire to cultivate in ourselves and in our
countrymen. It will be strongest when it is least
maudlin. The poor man wishes to be treated as a
brother, not to be praised as an angel. Those who
flatter him do not love him.
" Politics have been separated from household
ties and affections, from art and science and litera-
ture. While they belong to parties, they have no
connection with what is human and universal;
when they become politics for the people, they
are found to take in a very large field: whatever
concerns man as a social being must be included
in them.
" Politics have been separated from Christianity:
religious men have supposed that their only busi-
ness was with the world to come; political men
have declared that the present world is governed
on entirely different principles from that. So long
as politics are regarded as the conflicts between
Whig and Tory and Radical; so long as Chris-
tianity is regarded as the means of securing selfish
rewards, they will never be united.
" But politics for the people cannot be sepa-
rated from religion. They must either start from
Atheism, or from the acknowledgment that a living
and righteous God is ruling in human society not
less than in the natural world. . . . The world is
governed by God; this is the rich man's warning;
this is the poor man's comfort ; this is the real hope
in the consideration of all questions, let them be as
106 Charles Kingsley.
hard of solution as they may; this is the pledge that
Liberty, Fraternity, Unity, under some conditions
or other, are intended for every people under
heaven."
The issue of the Politics ran through seven-
teen weekly numbers, and came to an end
in July, 1848. In the final number Mr.
Maurice frankly confessed that so far as the
practical side of the movement was concerned
the writers had executed their task very
imperfectly. "The great subject of Social-
ism," he said, "or, in other words, the
question, What is the order and constitution
of social life? What principles lie beneath
all that is merely visible and conventional?
we have treated in hints and fragments,
rather than formally and directly. Apart
from blunders of execution, this has, perhaps,
been our greatest mistake. We have not
fairly entered upon the subject which we
hoped would have been most prominent in
our pages, the relation between the capitalist
and the labourer."
But if the publication was incomplete in
scope and short-lived in duration, it was re-
markable not only for the number of dis-
tinguished names among its contributors, or
rather of names of men who afterwards became
" Politics for the People." 107
distinguished, but also for its frank discussion
of the first principles of social evolution, and
for its vigorous denial of the Chartist notion
that the greatest and deepest of social evils
are those which are caused by legislation, or
can be removed by it. The articles are all
either unsigned or signed by a nom de plume.
In the copy, however, which, through the
courtesy of Mr. Bowes of Cambridge, I have
been allowed to use, the names of the writers
have been inserted in the handwriting of Mr.
J. W. Parker, the publisher.
It will be interesting here, I think, seeing
that Politics for the People^ though as a
title often quoted, is little known as to its
subject-matter, to record the names of these
early pioneers of the Christian Social move-
ment in England, and to quote perhaps some
characteristic words of those who in the
middle of the century " did so much", ac-
cording to the testimony of one of the fore-
most social students and reformers in Europe,
Professor Brentano, u to bring the Social
Evolution of England into a peaceful way ".
Among the names of the contributors, in
addition to Maurice and J. M. Ludlow, who
were the " working editors" of the paper,
are the following: — Archbishop Whateley,
108 Charles Kingsley.
Archbishop Trench, Bishop Thirlwall of S.
David's, Dean Stanley, Professor Conning-
ton, Dr. Guy, Charles Mansfield, James
Spedding, Daniel Macmillan, A. J. Scott,
Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, Sir Edward
Strachey, Sir Arthur Helps, and Charles
Kingsley.
Mrs. Kingsley in the Memories speaks of
"Old and New: a Parable" as the only poem
which Kingsley wrote for the Politics, but in
my copy I find that Mr. Parker has initialed
("C. K.") three other pieces, two of which, if
not strictly "poetic", are at least sufficiently
rhythmical and to the point to be worthy of
quotation.
OLD SAWS NEW SET.— No. I.
A Greek Fable to an English Moral.
I met John Clod the other day quite out of sorts and
pensive,
And grumbling at the government as idle and expensive,
" With taxing food and clothes and light, they've almost
broke our backs ;
And when shall we poor chaps get back our money's
worth, I ax?
I seed upon the paper what a lot we have to pay :
They promises us all reform, but they cart no dirt away.
This government does nothing, sir, I've 'most a mind to
riot."
" Politics for the People." 109
" So had the frogs, friend John," quoth I, " but they got
little by it."
" How's that, then?" " Why, these frogs had lived for
many a hundred year,
Like jolly old republicans, without distress or fear;
When having grown more civilized, the sapient croakers
found,
That all they wanted was a king, just like the nations
round.
So for a king they prayed— Jove heard— and kindly
tossed a Log
Down out of heaven among them all, and flattened many
a frog.
The great unsquashed croaked loyal awe, and swore on
bended knees,
To carry out with fire and sword whate'er their king
might please :
But his majesty pleased nothing — no ! he wouldn't even
swear.
To find their dear-bought whistle dumb, was more than
frogs could bear.
'A King!' they squalled again. Jove laughed, 'They
can't let well alone ;
Why, lazy rulers leave at least each man to mind his
own;
Well, then, here's something practical,— this govern-
ment shall work.'
And Iris post from Belgium fetched a patriarchal Stork.
The Stork surveyed his subjects with a true Malthusian
air —
1 Ah ! over population ! There's the mischief, I declare !
The bog will get quite pauperized!' he stretched two
yard-long bills,
no Charles Kingsley.
And sucked down luckless frog on frog, and as he
gulped his pills,
' Your individual suffering, my brothers, may be great,
But then, like starving artisans, your suffering feeds the
State.'
In vain they shrieked to Jove; * It's now too late, my
friends, to talk;
You've had your choice — you cut King Log, you cannot
cut King Stork.'"
Moral,
New brooms sweep clean — but then new boots are apt
to prove too tight ;
Each party tries its nostrums — if they could but hit the
right !
Things might be better, babies know — but then things
might be worse.
Reforms are God's own blessings — Revolutions oft his
curse.
No. II.
England for the English.
Our demagogues, as wise old Aristophanes may shew,
Are playing just the game they played just two thousand
years ago.
"They work", says he, "like seamen when they go to
fish for eels ;
They stir the mud, and foul the ponds, and so they fill
their creels.
For fools, like eels, pop up their heads, whene'er they
scent a riot;
And orators in shoals would starve, if once the State
grew quiet."
"Politics for the People." in
Moral.
Let workmen plead the workmen's cause, and trust no
flatterer's cant,
Hold fast by English fortitude — you'll ne'er need Irish
rant.
There is certainly nothing very inflam-
matory in poetry such as this. Such merit
as it may have savours rather of that robust
common sense and homely humour in which
the proverbial philosophy of England has
always been apt to express itself. Nor in
the more academic lines of Professor Con-
ington does the grave severity and serious-
ness of his muse seem to rebuke unduly the
gentle satire of his theme : —
NOTHING POSSIBLE HERE BUT PARLIA-
MENTARY ELOQUENCE.
Words, words, words, words ! O dreamy day,
A day of leaves and not of fruit,
When Truth is smothered in display,
When none will act and all dispute !
O tongue, tongue, tongue ! awhile be mute,
And let the hand for once have way !
O endless clash of mind on mind !
Still raising thickest clouds of dust
The eyes of simple folk to blind !
O all ye interests, which must
Be ever, evermore discussed,
Ere aught is done to help mankind !
ii2 Charles Kingsley.
Oh, Reason once serene and earnest,
Why ieavest thou thy proper uses,
And from the lips of pedants learnest
Most philosophical excuses
For all too palpable abuses,
Now, when the people's needs are sternest!
O words ! O words ! ye are most strong,
For ye can rear a thickset fence
To bar the view of right and wrong
From common men's intelligence,
With sophistry and vain pretence,
And tangled brushwood of the tongue.
O words ! O words ! yet are ye weak,
For Truth's indomitable force
Shall through your firmest barriers break,
With strength as of a mighty horse ;
And those who act shall take their course
O'er the fallen wreck of those who speak.
Altogether, I am not sure that the most
revolutionary counsel in the whole of the
Politics does not come from the pen of an
archbishop. At anyrate it may be worth
quoting as a practical suggestion for the per-
plexed politician of to-day. Dr. Whateley
writes a spirited " Dialogue between John
Bullman and Patrick Kelly on the subject of
Repeal ", and, more Hibernico, puts all the
wisdom into the mouth of the Irishman and
all the foolishness into that of the English-
" Politics for the People." 113
man. The Irishman closes the discussion
thus wisely : —
"I recommend that Parliament should sit for
three weeks or a month every session in Dublin to
transact Irish affairs, and that the sovereign should
reside a portion of every year, or at least of every
two years, in Ireland. ... If the measure tended,
as I am convinced that it would, to tranquillize the
country, it would be well worth much more than in
fact it would cost. ... I must confess that I know
of no way of at once converting Ireland into a ter-
restial Paradise. A partial remedy of evils for the
present, and a gradual and slow, though steady,
improvement in future, is the utmost I could hope
from the wisest measures. On the other hand,
Repeal would do its work at once. It would
speedily cure all the evils complained of, by sub-
stituting others ten times greater. But I hope the
people of England will not act like a foolish patient
who turns with disgust from a prudent and honest
physician for not administering violent doses, to a
rash or roguish quack, who promises an immediate
or complete cure, and brings him to an untimely
grave."
I am afraid the story of the last twenty
years proves the archbishop to have been as
wise in political foresight as he was evidently
wanting in skill to "cast" appropriately his
dramatic personages. The pen of S. G. O.
is both more skilful and more vivid. "Sam
(M508, v tt
H4 Charles Kingsley.
Gorze's Country Letters " remind one of the
trenchant power and picturesque style which
at a later time made S. G. O.'s letters to the
Times so weighty a factor in the formation of
public opinion on questions of rural politics.
" <I know very well ', says John Gristfed to Sam
Gorze, ' that much wants mending before we poor
working-folk get what we ought to do, and that is,
kind treatment from those who get hard work out
of us. But, Mr. Gorze, I tell you what I think, that
all the charters in the world won't make a bad
master good, a hard landlord kind. . . . Let us
have power to earn good wages wherever we can
get work; let us have decent dwellings wherever
we are forced to live : give us power to worship our
God on the day he appoints ; let us have a chance
of rearing our young ones in their duty to Him in
Heaven, and to the rulers on earth ; and no Char-
tists will ever drive us to disturb the country by
asking for changes which would pull the rich down
and make the poor still poorer.
" ' Oppress us, defraud us, breed us up on wages
that starve the flesh, in dwellings that starve the
soul; treat us as beings of a different order from
the rich, not merely of a different degree, and we
may be early led to mischief, for discontent will
soon breed it. Treat us fairly and kindly, and you
may take my word for it, Mr. Gorze, the Queen will
never have warmer well-wishers than we of the
smock-frock."'
"Politics for the People." 115
But, after all, the most characteristic "note"
of the Politics, both literary and social, was
that struck by the articles which bore the sig-
nature of "Parson Lot". It had been at a
gathering at Mr. Maurice's house of some of
the leading contributors to the Politics that
Kingsley, finding himself in some discussion
in a minority of one, said jokingly that he
felt much as Lot must have felt in the Cities
of the Plain, when he seemed as one that
mocked to his sons-in-law. The name " Par-
son Lot " was then and there suggested and
adopted by him as a familiar nom de plume.
He used it constantly during the succeeding
years in Politics for the People, The Christian
Socialist, and The Jotirnal of Association, and
the numerous tracts and pamphlets published
from time to time during the next eight years,
of which perhaps "Cheap Clothes and Nasty"
is the best known.
Of the articles in the Politics three papers
on "The National Gallery", full of vivid
description and poetic appreciation of art,
are printed in full by Mrs. Kingsley in the
Memories. But of the "Three Letters to
Chartists " by Parson Lot in the same pub-
lication, it may be well to quote some pas-
sages, if only to show how unreasonable and
n6 Charles Kingsley.
unfounded was the prejudice against him at
the time as a dangerous firebrand and revolu-
tionary, and how, equally with the other writers
already cited, the only revolution which Kings-
ley desired to see was a moral and religious
revolution, not a political or a social one. For
example, there is a sentence in the first letter
which, separated from its context, gave rise
to much misrepresentation. " My only quar-
rel", said Parson Lot, "with the Charter is
that it does not go far enough." Taken by
itself we can see that such a sentence might
be so quoted as to give rise to a very false
impression. But read the whole letter, and
its tone is at once seen to be most honest and
manly, earnest and grave, and as little re-
volutionary as anything possibly can be which
is also sincere.
From Letter I. it is only necessary to quote
one or two paragraphs. Letters II. and III.
may be given almost in full.
Letter I.
(t My friends, — If I give you credit for being sin-
cere you must give me credit for being so too. I
am a radical reformer. I am not one of those who
laugh at your petition of the ioth of April; I have
no patience with those who do. Suppose there
"Politics for the People." 117
were but 250,000 honest names on that sheet — sup-
pose the Charter itself were all stuff — yet you have
still a right to fair play, a patient hearing, an
honourable and courteous answer, whichever way
it may be. But my only quarrel with the Charter
is that it does not go far enough in reform. I want
to see you free ; but I do not see how what you ask
for will give you what you want. I think you have
fallen into just the same mistake as the rich of whom
you complain — the very mistake which has been
our curse and our nightmare — I mean the mistake
of fancying that legislative reform is social reform,
or that men's hearts can be changed by act of par-
liament. If anyone will tell me of a country where
a charter made the rogues honest, or the idle indus-
trious, I shall alter my opinion of the Charter, but
not till then. It disappointed me bitterly when I
read it. It seemed a harmless cry enough, but a
poor, bald, constitution-mongering cry as I ever
heard. That French cry of * Organization of La-
bour ' is worth a thousand of it, and yet that does
not go to the bottom of the matter by many a mile.
" But I must say honestly, whomsoever I may
offend, the more I have read of your convention
speeches and newspaper articles, the more con-
vinced I am that too many of you are trying to do
God's work with the devil's tools. What is the use
of brilliant language about peace and the majesty
of order, and universal love, though it may all be
printed in letters a foot long, when it runs in the
same team with ferocity, railing, mad one-eyed
n8 Charles Kingsley.
excitement, talking itself into a passion like a street
woman? Do you fancy that after a whole column
spent in stirring men up to fury, a few twaddling
copy-book headings about 'the sacred duty of order '
will lay the storm again? What spirit is there but
the devil's spirit, in bloodthirsty threats of revenge,
" I denounce the weapons which you have been
deluded into employing to gain you your rights,
and the indecency and profligacy which you are
letting be mixed up with them ! Will you strengthen
and justify your enemies? Will you disgust and
cripple your friends? Will you go out of your way
to do wrong? When you can be free by fair means,
will you try foul? When you might keep the name
of Liberty as spotless as the heaven from whence she
comes, will you defile her with blasphemy, beast-
liness, and blood? When the cause of the poor is
the cause of Almighty God, will you take it out of
His hands to entrust it to the devil? These are
bitter questions, but as you answer them so will
you prosper. ' Be fit to be free, and God himself
will set you free.'"
Letter II.
" If I was severe on some of you in my last letter,
believe me, it is not because I do not feel for you.
There are great allowances to be made for most of
you. If you have followed a very different Re-
former's Guide from mine, it is mainly the fault of
us parsons: we have never told you that the true
"Politics for the People." 119
Reformer's Guide, the true poor man's book, the
true 'God's voice against Tyrants, Idlers, and Hum-
bugs ', was the Bible. Ay, you may sneer, but so it
is; it is our fault, our great fault, that you should
sneer — sneer at the very news which ought to be
your glory and strength. It is our fault. We have
used the Bible as if it were a mere special con-
stable's handbook — an opium dose for keeping
beasts of burden patient while they were being
overloaded — a mere book to keep the poor in order.
We have told you that the powers that be were
ordained of God, without telling you who ordained
the impotencies and imbecilities that be, alas! some-
times. We have told you that the Bible preached
to you patience, while we have not told you that it
promised you freedom. We have told you that the
Bible preached the rights of property and the duties
of labour, when (God knows) for once that it does
that, it preaches ten times over the duties of property
and the rights of labour. We have found plenty of
texts to rebuke the sins of the poor, and very few
to rebuke the sins of the rich. You say that we
have not preached to you: really I think we have
preached to you a great deal more than your fair
share. For, for one wholesome rating that we have
given the rich, we have given you a thousand. I
have been as bad as anyone, but I am sick of it.
" Now, I tell you, my friends, there are two sides
to the Bible ; that instead of being a book to keep
the poor in order, it is a book, from beginning to
end, written to keep the rich in order. I do not
wonder at your saying (as, alas! many of you are
120 Charles Kingsley.
saying) that the Bible is the invention of kings and
prelates, to pretend God's sanction for superstition
and tyranny; but I say that that Bible demands
for the poor as much and more, than they demand
for themselves; that it is full of the most awful
warnings and restrictions to the rich; that it ex-
presses the deepest yearnings of the poor man's
heart far more nobly, more searchingly, more dar-
ingly, more eloquently, than any modern orator has
done. I say that it gives a ray of hope — say rather
a certain dawn of a glorious future, such as no
universal suffrage, free-trade, communism, organiz-
ation of labour, or any other Morrison's-pill-measure
can give — and yet of a future which will embrace
all that is good in these things — a future of science,
of justice, of freedom, when idlers and oppressors
shall no more dare to plead parchments and acts of
parliament for their iniquities, when the laws shall
be God's laws, and God shall take the matter into
His own hands, when ' He shall keep the simple
folk by their rights, defend the children of the poor,
and punish the wrong-doer'. I say the Bible pro-
mises this, not in a few places only, but throughout*,
it is the thought which runs through the whole
Bible. * Justice from God to those whom men
oppress — glory from God to those whom men
despise.'"
"Politics for the People." 121
Letter III.
" What are the things you demand most earnestly?
Is not one of them that no man shall enjoy wages
without doing work?
"The Bible says at once, that 'he that will not
work, neither shall he eat* \ and as the Bible speaks
to rich as well as poor, so is that speech meant for
the idle rich as well as for the idle poor.
' ' Do you not say that the cause of the poor is
the cause of God?
"And are not those noble old Hebrew Psalms
full of the same thought from beginning to end?
How ' the poor commits himself to God, for He is
the helper of the friendless'! How, 'when they
are diminished or brought low through oppression,
through any plague or trouble, though He suffer
them to be evil intreated by tyrants, yet helpeth He
the poor out of misery, and maketh His households
like a flock of sheep'! How 'the poor shall not
always be forgotten — the patient abiding of the
meek shall not perish for ever'! Only, my friends,
let it be the patient abiding of the meek, not the
frantic boasts of the bloodthirsty.
"You say that the poor man has his rights as
well as the rich. So says the Bible; it says more
— it says that God inspires the poor with the desire
of liberty: that he helps them to their right. 'Lord,
thou hast heard the desire of the poor. Thou pre-
parest their heart, and thine ear hearkeneth thereto:
to help the fatherless and poor unto their right, that
122 Charles Kingsley.
the man of the world be no more exalted against
them.' Oh you who raise righteous cries against
capital overriding labour, against worldly politicians
who make the poor their stepping-stones to wealth
and office ! God grant that that glorious text may
give you the same hope and comfort as it has given
me in many a black and bitter hour!
" You cry, and I cry, * A fair day's wages for a fair
day's work'. And is not the doctrine of the whole
Bible that even in that last most awful judgment —
i Every man shall be judged according to his works'?
And are there not written in the Bible these awful
words — 'Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl, for
your miseries that shall come upon you. Your gold
and silver is cankered; and the rust of them {i.e. the
accumulation of unemployed capital) shall be a wit-
ness against you.' . . . My friends, these are but a
few drops from the inexhaustible well of The Poor
Man's Book. ... I intreat you, I adjure you, to
trust the Bible, to trust my samples from it, and to
read it honestly for yourselves, and see if it be not
the true Radical Reformer's Guide — God's everlast-
ing witness against oppression and cruelty and
idleness."
I may close this chapter by adding to these
extracts from the Politics two characteristic
passages from Alton Locke. That novel,
which has been well said to be Kingsley's
" greatest poem and grandest sermon", was
" Politics for the People." 123
published in the summer of 1850. There is
some truth perhaps in Carlyle's blunt criti-
cism of the book, for it is more of a political
pamphlet than a carefully constructed work
of art. "Your book", Carlyle wrote to him,
"is definable as crude \ to make the malt
sweet the fire should and must be slow; the
impression is of a fervid creation, still left
half chaotic." And Kingsley, I am sure,
would not have been careful to answer the
criticism, for he was quite well aware, and not
in the least ashamed of the fact, that it was at
least with the objects of a political pamphlet-
eer that he had conceived the book. But
one tribute to the artistic power of the novel
Carlyle did give, in which he has rightly been
followed by all the critics. "But Saunders
Mackaye", he added, "is nearly perfect; I
greatly wonder how you did contrive to man-
age him."
We may still wonder, for Mrs. Kingsley in
the Memories does not tell us how her
husband, or where, or when, previous to
1849, could have picked up this "rugged old
hero ", whose personification is indeed, as
Carlyle put it, "a wonderfully splendid and
coherent piece of Scotch bravura ". Let my
first quotation, then, be one which introduces
124 Charles Kingsley.
this shrewd, excellent, pure -hearted old
Scotchman. Alton Locke, the young tailor-
poet, had commenced his essays by a descrip-
tion of the South Sea Islands, and Mackaye
tells him to choose his subject from the poetry
that lies around him.
"'What the deevil! is there no harlotry and
idolatry here in England, that ye maun gang
speerin' after it in the Cannibal Islands? Are ye
gaun to be like they puir aristocratic bodies that
wad suner hear an Italian dog howl than an English
nightingale sing?
"< Coral Islands? Pacific? What do ye ken
about Pacifies? Are ye a Cockney or a Cannibal
Islander? Dinna stand there, ye gowk, as fusion-
less as a docken, but tell me that. Where do ye
live?'
"'What do you mean, Mr. Mackaye?' asked I
with a doleful and disappointed visage.
"'Mean — why, if God had meant ye to write
about Pacifies, He'd ha' put ye there— and because
he means ye to write about London town, He's put
ye there — and gien ye an unco sharp taste of the
ways o't; and I'll gie ye another. Come along
wi' me.' And he seized me by the arm, and hardly
giving me time to put on my hat, marched me out
into the streets, and away through Clare Market to
St. Giles'.
"It was a foul, chilly, foggy Saturday night.
From the butchers' and greengrocers' shops the gas
" Politics for the People." 125
lights flared and flickered, wild and ghastly, over
haggard groups of slip-shod dirty women bargain-
ing for scraps of stale meat and frost-bitten vege-
tables, wrangling about short weight and bad
quality. Fish stalls and fruit stalls lined the edge
of the greasy pavement, sending up odours as foul
as the language of the sellers and buyers. Blood
and sewer water crawled from under doors and out
of spouts, and reeked down the gutters among offal,
animal and vegetable, in every state of putrefaction.
Foul vapours rose from cow-sheds and slaughter-
houses, and the doorways of undrained alleys,
where the inhabitants carried the filth out on their
shoes from the back yard into the court, and from
the court into the main street ; while above, hanging
like cliffs over the streets — those narrow brawling
torrents of filth and poverty and sin — the houses
with their teeming load of life were piled up into
the dingy choking night. A ghastly, deafening,
sickening sight it was. Go, scented Belgravian!
and see what London is! and then go to the
Library which God has given thee — one often fears
in vain — and see what science says this London
might be !
" He stopped suddenly before the entrance of a
miserable alley.
" ' Look! — there's not a soul down that yard but's
either beggar, drunkard, thief, or worse. Write
about that! Say how ye saw the mouth o' hell,
and the twa pillars thereof at the entry — the pawn-
broker's shop o' one side, and the gin palace at the
other — twa monstrous deevils, eating up men,
126 Charles Kingsley.
women and bairns, body and soul. Are na they a
mair damnable man-devouring idol than ony red-hot
statue o' Moloch, or wicker-Gogmagog, wherein
auld Britons burnt their prisoners? Look at thae
bare-footed, bare-backed hizzies, wi' their arms
roun' the men's necks, and their mouths full of
vitriol and beastly words! Look at that Irish-
woman pouring the gin down the babbie's throat!
Look at that raff o' a boy gaun out o' the pawn-
shop, where he has been pledging the handkerchief
he stole the morning, into the gin shop to buy beer
poisoned wi' grains o' paradise, and cocculus indicus,
and saut, and a' damnable, maddening, thirst-breed-
ing, lust-breeding drugs! Look at that girl that
went in wi' a shawl to her back, and cam' out wi'out
ane! Drunkards frae the breast! — harlots frae the
cradle ! — damned before they are born ! John Calvin
had an inkling o' the truth there, I'm a'most driven
to think, wi' his reprobation deevils' doctrines.'
"'Well — but — Mr. Mackaye — I know nothing
about these poor creatures.'
11 'Then ye ought. What do ye ken aboot the
Pacific? Which is maist to your business? — thae
bare-backed hizzies that play the harlot o' the other
side o' the warld, or these — these thousands o' bare-
backed hizzies that play the harlot o' your ain side —
made out o' your ain flesh and blood? You a poet?
True poetry, like true charity, my laddie, begins
at hame. If ye'll be a poet at a', ye maun be a
Cockney poet, and while the Cockneys be what
they be, ye maun write, like Jeremiah of old, o'
lamentation and mournin' and wae, for the sins o'
" Politics for the People." 127
your people. Gin ye want to learn the spirit o' a
people's poet, down wi' your Bible, and read thae
auld Hebrew prophets : gin ye would learn the style,
read your Burns frae morning to night: and gin
ye'd learn the matter, just gang after your nose, and
keep your eyes open, and ye'll no miss it.'
" ' But all this is so — so unpoetical.'
"'Hech! Is there no the heeven above them
there, and the hell beneath them, and God frowning
and the Deevil grinning. No poetry there! Is no
the verra idea of the classic tragedy defined to be,
man conquered by circumstance? Canna ye see it
there? And the very idea of the modern tragedy,
man conquering circumstance? — and I'll show ye
that too — in mony a garret where no eye but the
gude God's enters, to see the patience and the forti-
tude, and the self-sacrifice, and the luve stronger
than death, that's shining in thae dark places o' the
earth. Come wi' me, and see.' "
Let me close the chapter with one more
extract. It is the rhapsody, in the style of
Lamennais' Paroles (Fun Croyant, which
Kingsley puts into the mouth of his heroine.
She is speaking* of Christ as the great Social
Emancipator, who alone can renovate human
society.
"She spoke of Him as the great Reformer and
yet as the true Conservative : the inspirer of all new
truths, revealing in the Bible to every age abysses
128 Charles Kingsley.
of new wisdom as the times require: and yet the
indicator of all which is ancient and eternal — the
justifier of his own dealings with man from the
beginning. She spoke of Him as the true dema-
gogue — the Champion of the poor; and yet as the
true king, above and below all earthly rank; on
whose will alone all real superiority of man to man,
all time-justified and time-honoured usages of the
family, the society, the nation stand, and shall
stand for ever. . . . Look at the great societies
of our own day, which, however imperfectly, still
lovingly and earnestly do their measure of God's
work at home and abroad; and say, when was
there ever real union, co-operation, philanthropy,
equality, brotherhood among men, save in loyalty
to Him — Jesus who died upon the Cross.'*
"The Christian Socialists." 129
Chapter VI.
"The Christian Socialists."
" Who in the light of fuller day
Of loving science, holier laws,
Bless us, faint heralds of their cause,
Dim beacons of their glorious way.
Failure? While tide-floods rise and boil
Round cape and isle, in port and cove,
Resistless, star-led from above :
What though our tiny wave recoil?"
During the summer of 1849 a series of
meetings, held at the house of Mr. Maurice,
which had been planned by the friends men-
tioned in the last chapter, in conference with
several of the Chartist leaders, culminated in
a meeting, at which it was determined to take
some practical step towards combating the
fearful evils, in the slop system of the tailoring
trade and in other depressed industries, con-
cerning which a deep impression had been
made on the public mind by the revelations of
certain articles by Mr. Mahew in the pages of
the Morning Chronicle, This meeting was ad-
dressed by Mr. Maurice in a striking speech,
in which he protested against the evils of un-
restricted competition, and asserted that the
old faith of Christendom must be once more
(M608) 1
130 Charles Kingsley.
proclaimed as the only power which could re-
generate society, and make Socialism morally
healthy and vigorous by rescuing it from its
existing anti-Christian and revolutionary advo-
cates. No record of Mr. Maurice's speech
seems to exist, but the following trenchant
words, which he wrote shortly afterwards,
might well have formed its substance: — 1
" Competition is put forth as the law of the uni-
verse. That is a lie. The time is come for us to
declare that it is a lie. I see no way but associating
for work instead of for strikes. I do not say or
think we feel that the relation of the employer and
the employed is not a true relation. I do not deter-
mine that wages may not be a righteous mode of
expressing that relation. But at present it is clear
that this relation is destroyed, that the payment of
wages is nothing but a deception. We may restore
the old state of things : we may bring in a new one.
God will decide that. His voice has gone forth
clearly bidding us come forward to fight against
the present state of things ; to call men to repentance
first of all : but then also, as it seems to me, to give
them an opportunity of showing their repentance
and bringing forth fruits worthy of it. . . . Given
a moral state, and it seems to me the . . . revela-
tions are rather in favour of the conclusion that the
old position of master and worker might be a healthy
one. But it is no old condition we are contending
with, but an accursed new one, the product of a
1 Life of Frederick Maurice, vol. ii. p. 32.
"The Christian Socialists." 131
hateful devilish theory which must be fought with
to the death."
Of this speech Kingsley, writing to his wife,
says enthusiastically: " Last night will never
be forgotten by many many men. Maurice
was — I cannot describe it. Chartists told me
this morning that many were affected even to
tears. The man was inspired, gigantic. He
stunned us. I will tell you all when I can
collect myself." 1
The enthusiasm called forth by this meet-
ing, at any rate, resulted in the institution of
the first Co-operative Association of Tailors.
It was in the interests of this institution that
Kingsley wrote his famous tract " Cheap
Clothes and Nasty ". This pamphlet was
denounced at the time, by many good, well-
meaning men even, as a foul attack on the
rights and claims of education and society, of
law and order. It was nothing of the kind.
It was in reality an indictment of the com-
petitive system and a plea for co-operation,
or of some system in which the principle of
association should take the place of competi-
tion, founded on the recital of a number of
instances of the terrible effects, economic and
moral, of the slop system, taken from the
evidence of the commissioner of the Morning
1 Economic Review, April, 1891.
132 Charles Kingsley.
Chronicle. It was the first paragraph of the
tract probably which most " wrung the
withers" of the orthodox " Quarterly Re-
viewer " of the day.
"King Ryence, says the Legend of Prince
Arthur, wore a paletot trimmed with kings' beards.
In the first French Revolution (so Carlyle assures
us) there arose at Meudon tanneries of human
skins. Mammon, at once tyrant and revolutionary,
follows both these noble examples — in a more
respectable way, doubtless, for Mammon hates
cruelty; bodily pain is his devil — the worst evil
which he, in his effeminacy, can conceive. So he
shrieks benevolently when a drunken soldier is
flogged; but he trims his paletots, and adorns his
legs with the flesh of men and the skins of women,
with degradation, pestilence, heathendom, and
despair, and then chuckles self-complacently over
the smallness of his tailor's bills. Hypocrite! —
straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel ! What
is flogging or hanging, King Ryence's paletot,
or the tanneries of Meudon, to the slavery, starva-
tion, waste of life, year -long imprisonment in
dungeons narrower and fouler than those of the
Inquisition, which goes on among thousands of
free English clothes-makers at this day?
"'The man is mad', says Mammon, smiling
supercilious pity. Yes, Mammon, mad as Paul
before Festus, and for much the same reason too.
Much learning has made us mad. From two
"The Christian Socialists." 133
articles of the Morning Chronicle of Friday, 14th
December, and Tuesday, 18th December, on the
condition of the working tailors, we learnt too
much to leave us altogether masters of ourselves.
But there is method in our madness; we can give
reasons for it — satisfactory to ourselves, perhaps
also to Him who made us, and you and all tailors
likewise. Will you, freshly bedizened, you and
your footmen, from Nebuchadnezzar & Co.'s
1 Emporium of Fashion', hear a little about how
your finery is made? You are always calling out
for facts, and have a firm belief in salvation by
statistics. Listen to a few."
This is strong and passionate language, no
doubt. And reading it in cold blood fifty
years afterwards we might perhaps have been
tempted even to say that Kingsley was rash
and intemperate to write as he did. But in
memory of the revelations of the Royal Com-
mission of only a few years ago on the exist-
ing sweating system, still rampant in East
London and many of our great towns, with
the knowledge of the facts so carefully and
laboriously collected for us by Mr. Charles
Booth in his monumental work on Life and
Labour in London, can we read such a passage
in cold blood? Ought we to do so? I think
not. We can well afford at any rate to pardon
Charles Kingsley, if his warm heart and out-
134 Charles Kingsley.
raged sense of pity suffered neither taste nor
expediency nor reticence to silence his bitter
earnest words for truth and righteousness and
humanity. And for ourselves, let us at any
rate determine that our passion of philan-
thropy shall become really an effective force
in action. For there is much yet to be done.
It is true that since Kingsley's time the men
in the tailoring and allied trades have learnt
to protect themselves by the organization of
their unions and trade societies. But the
women workers are almost as defenceless as
they were fifty years ago. The administra-
tion of the Factory Acts in relation to work-
shop female labour is still very inefficient.
In many cases the inspection is a mere farce.
What, for example, can one inspector do in
a large town like Liverpool to see that the
regulations of the Act are properly enforced?
As a matter of fact the time regulations are
daily set at nought, not only in the sweating
dens, but in many of the workrooms of the
tradesmen of the city. In most of our large
towns, in fact, the organization of women's
labour is becoming a vital question. For
nothing is more clear, as the result of the
exhaustive inquiries of Mr. Charles Booth,
than that it is hopeless to cope with the still
"The Christian Socialists." 135
deplorable evils of the sweating system in the
present disorganized condition of women's
labour. The women, moreover, need much
preliminary training before they can grasp
the idea of combination. The members of
the different trades need to be gathered to-
gether in social clubs, where they may learn
to know and trust one another, and gradually
build up those social virtues of self-reliance,
discipline, loyalty, and trustfulness upon which
the subsequent stability of the trade society
will largely rest. In this preliminary work
there is much work still to be done by those
who have learnt the lesson of the Christian
Socialists of fifty years ago, and by others,
and not least perhaps — Charles Kingsley
would remind us — by those ladies of leisure,
for whom at present too often the terrible
truth is, that in the skirts of their clothing is
found the blood of the souls of God's people
— " Women who carelessly wear fine clothes
without having inquired into the possible
cost in a sister's shame or death . . . and
who forget that some cheap things are too dear
for human use ".
There is a passage, which I may quote
here, from Alton Locke, in which Kingsley,
by his imaginative genius, may perhaps help
136 Charles Kingsley.
us to realize facts, which neither his own
tract, " Cheap Clothes and Nasty", nor the
revelations of the late Royal Commission on
the Sweating System, may have quite brought
home to us so vividly: —
" There was no bed in the room, — no table. It
was bare of furniture, comfortless, and freezing
cold ; but with the exception of the plaster dropping
from the roof, and the broken windows patched with
rags and paper, there was a scrupulous neatness
about the whole which contrasted strangely with
the filth and slovenliness outside. On a broken
chair by the chimney sat a miserable old woman,
fancying that she was warming her hands over
embers that had long been cold, and muttering to
herself with palsied lips about the guardians and
the workhouse; while upon a few rags upon the
floor lay a girl, ugly, marked with small -pox,
hollow-eyed, emaciated, — her only bed-clothes the
skirt of a large handsome new riding-habit, at
which two other girls, lean and tawdry, were stitch-
ing busily as they sat right and left of her on the
floor. The old woman took no notice of us as we
entered ; but one of the girls looked up, and, with
a pleased gesture of recognition, put her fingers on
her lips, and whispered — * Ellen's asleep '.
" 'I am not asleep, dears,' answered a faint un-
earthly voice; 'I was only praying. Is that Mr.
Mackaye?'
" ' Aye, my lasses, but ha' ye gotten no fire the
nicht?'
"The Christian Socialists." 137
11 * No,' said one of them bitterly — i we've earned
no fire to-night, by fair trade or foul either.'
" I saw Mackaye slip something into the hand of
one of the girls and whisper, 'A half-hundredweight
of coals;' to which she replied with an eager look of
gratitude I can never forget, and hurried out. Then
the sufferer, as if taking advantage of her absence,
began to speak quickly and hurriedly.
" 'Oh, Mr. Mackaye, — dear, kind Mr. Mackaye,
— do speak to her; and do speak to poor Lizzy
here! I'm not afraid to say it before her because
she is more gentle-like, and hasn't learnt to say bad
words yet ; but do speak to them, and tell them not
to go the bad way like all the rest. Tell them it'll
never prosper. I know it's want that drives them
to it, as it drives all of us, — but tell them it's best to
starve and die honest girls, than to go about with
the shame and the curse of God on their hearts for
the sake of keeping this vile, poor, miserable body
together for a few short years more in this world of
sorrow. . . . For Lizzy here, I did hope she had
repented of it, after all my talking to her; but since
I've been so bad, and the girls have had to keep me
most of the time, she's gone out o' nights just as
bad as ever.'
" Lizzy had hid her face in her hands the greater
part of this speech. Now she looked up passionately,
— almost fiercely : —
"' Repent! — I have repented, — I repent of it
every hour : I hate myself and I hate all the world
because of it; but I must — I must: I cannot see her
starve, and I cannot starve myself. When she
138 Charles Kingsley.
first fell sick she kept on as long as she could, doing
what she could; and then between us we only
earned three shillings a-week. . . . And now Ellen
can't work at all ; and there's four of us with the old
lady to keep off two's work that couldn't keep them-
selves alone.'
" At this moment the other girl entered with the
coals. i We have been telling Mr. Mackaye every-
thing,' said poor Lizzy.
"'A pleasant story, isn't it? Oh, if that fine
lady, as we're making this riding-habit for, would
just spare half the money that goes in dressing her
up to ride in the Park to send us out to the colonies,
wouldn't I be an honest girl there, and maybe an
honest man's wife ! Oh, my God, wouldn't I slave
my fingers to the bone for him ! Wouldn't I mend
my life there! It 'ud be like getting into heaven
out of hell. But now we must — we must, I tell
you.'
"And she sat down and began stitching franti-
cally at the riding-habit, from which the other girl
had hardly lifted her eyes or hands for a moment
during our visit."
It was because Maurice and Kingsley also
felt the necessity of much preliminary work
in the training of men, if the co-operative
societies which they hoped to see everywhere
established were to be a success, that in
1850 they followed up the establishment of
the Association of Tailors in Castle Street by
"The Christian Socialists." 139
the organization of the Society for the Pro-
motion of Working-men's Associations, and
by the publication of the Tracts on Christian
Socialism, setting forth the principles upon
which the movement was to be based.
The fundamental principle of the Society
was stated to be "the practical application of
Christianity to the purposes of trade and in-
dustry ". In Tract V. its objects are set forth
in the following statement which accompanied
the Society's Constitution, and also Model
Rules for Associations : —
"It is now our business to show by what ma-
chinery the objects of Christian Socialism can, as
we believe, be compassed; how working-men can
release themselves, and can be helped by others
to release themselves, from the thraldom of in-
dividual labour under the competitive system; or
at least how far they can at present, by honest
fellowship, mitigate its evils. In offering this
machinery to others, we are bound to protest
against that idolatry of social mechanism, which
imagines society as a mere assemblage of wheels
and springs, and not as a partnership of living
men, which takes account of the form alone, and
not of the spirit which animates it; but we have
also to protest with scarcely less of earnestness
against that idolatry of individual will, which scorns
all regular means of action — looks for all social
140 Charles Kingsley.
improvements to the mere genius of some mighty
leader, in whose way it would almost place obstacles,
like hurdles for him to leap over, rather than
smooth the way for the feebler crowd; or against
that faith which sees God only in the works of
nature, and not in the works of men; which may
delight in tracing the harmonies of the solar sys-
tem, yet sees nothing but human devices and intel-
lectual snares in the harmonies of social organi-
zation; which acknowledges as divine the instinc-
tive laws of a community of bees and of emmets,
but turns away from the laws of a fellowship of
men as if they had nothing to do with the will,
with the wisdom, with the love of the Great Law-
giver."
In a similar spirit in a later number of the
Christian Socialist Kingsley wrote : —
" I believe political economy to be all but the
highest and most spiritual of sciences; the science
of organizing politics and of making men good
citizens; of realizing outwardly the ideas of the
kingdom of God. But I will say nothing about
it now; I will simply ask, ' If you allow us to use
moral means to hop-pickers, why not to their
masters? If to the outward accidents and symp-
toms of the system, why not to the symptom itself?"
To the objection, 'you must not interfere
between employer and employed ', he replies :
" These are not moral questions; they are ma-
"The Christian Socialists." 141
terial facts, affecting material interests; and a
political economy which cannot alter these facts
is not worthy the name of a science; it does not
even show us how to regulate those very material
interests which it claims as its exclusive sphere. . . .
I believe that political economy can and will learn
how to cure these evils, and that in accordance
with the formulae inductively discovered by such
men as Bentham, Ricardo, Mill, and Chalmers.
. . . * Nature is conquered in obeying her' ought
to be held as true in political economy as in
chemistry ; and the man who tells us that we ought
to investigate nature, simply to sit still patiently
under her, and let her freeze, and ruin and starve
and stink us to death, is a goose, whether he calls
himself a chemist or a political economist."
The Society for Promoting Working-men's
Associations brought together men of very
various gifts and attainments, all giving of
their best to make the movement a success.
Among them, in addition to those we have
already mentioned, it is right here to record
the names of Dr. Walsh, afterwards one
of the most active members of the Council
of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association;
Augustus Vansittart, Fellow of Trinity, Cam-
bridge, who became the first treasurer of the
Association, and his cousin, E. Vansittart
Neale; Cuthbert Ellison, a friend of the East
142 Charles Kingsley.
End Needlewomen's Society, and a friend
also of Thackeray, and " the original", it is
said, " of Arthur Pendennis"; Charles Sully,
the first secretary, bookbinder by trade, in
early days a Physical - force Chartist, — he
had fought twice behind the barricades in
Paris Revolutions, — but had effectually learnt
the lesson that force is no remedy, for
Tract V. in Christian Socialism, quoted
above, is substantially his; and Lloyd Jones,
a master tailor in Oxford Street, an old
disciple of Mr. Owen, one of his Socialist
lecturers, who afterwards became a most
accomplished journalist, the ablest and hon-
estest of Trades-union advocates, the life-
long friend of co-operation, and indeed of
all good movements for the benefit of the
industrial classes.
Of all these, however, Mr. E. Vansittart
Neale was the man to whom the movement
was eventually most indebted. 1 He was
indeed, as Professor Brentano has said, "a
hero and a saint", whose practical life has
done more for the reconciliation of the classes
and the masses than volumes written by others.
Up to the time of his joining the Council of
Promoters, the action of the Association had
been cautious and tentative. It had been
1 Economic Review, Jan. and April, 1893.
"The Christian Socialists." 143
the means of starting some small productive
societies in London, of tailors, shoemakers,
and bakers, and much correspondence was
pouring in upon them from the co-operative
societies of the north of England asking for
advice as to rules, and for legal opinions as
to joint funds and property. Vansittart Neale
had no sooner joined the Council than he
began, as Judge Hughes has said, to " force
the running". He was a man of large
means and of larger generosity. He at once
founded the first London Co-operative Stores
in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, and also
advanced the capital to start two Working
Builders' Associations. He then established
a " Central Co-operative Agency" for the
use of all associations. This, as far as the
then state of the law would allow, was an
anticipation of the great English and Scottish
Wholesale Societies. Its main object was
to organize and stimulate consumption, by
providing a central society through which
the stores could obtain all their supplies on
the best wholesale terms. The movement
now rapidly developed, and with its develop-
ment the need for further legal protection
began to be felt. Fortunately in 1851 a
committee of the House of Commons had
144 Charles Kingsley.
been appointed to inquire into the subject
of the investment for the savings of the
middle and working classes. By the efforts
chiefly of Mr. Ludlow and Mr. Neale, some
of the members of the Council of Promoters
were called, among other witnesses, before it.
The result was that an overwhelming case
was made out for giving " these humble
men", as the chairman of the Parliamentary
Committee called them, the necessary facili-
ties for carrying on their business. In the
session of 1852 the first Industrial and Provi-
dent Societies Act was passed, under which
the co-operative stores and associations
obtained a legal status as trading bodies.
The Act has been rightly called the " Magna
Carta" of the labouring class. It certainly
formed an epoch in the history of co-operation.
The passing of the Industrial and Provident
Societies Act in 1852 was immediately fol-
lowed by a great outburst of Co-operation
in the northern counties, which practically
removed the centre of the movement from
London and abolished the raison detre of the
Council of Promoters. The second general
conference or congress of Co-operators was
held at Manchester on August 15th, 1853,
and the three principles which Maurice had
"The Christian Socialists." 145
laid down for the original association were
unanimously adopted. They were these : —
I. That human society is a body consisting of
many members, not a collection of war-
ring atoms.
II. That true workmen must be fellow-workers
and not rivals.
III. That a principle of justice, not of selfishness,
must govern exchanges.
These principles remain as part of the con-
stitution of the General Co-operative Union
to-day. But, alas for poor human nature!
if the principles of Maurice and Kingsley
and the early Christian Socialists are still
there in print, they have too often been for-
gotten in practice by the later Co-operators.
In 1864 the Co-operative Wholesale Society
was founded at Manchester, and prospered
mightily. In four years two hundred societies
had become members. It was doing business
of about half a million a year, and was rapidly
becoming the official and recognized repre-
sentative organ of Co-operation in England.
In 1897 this society had a turn-over of
,£11,920,143, and an accumulated capital of
,£2,472,321.
But the very success of the movement has
(M508) K
146 Charles Kingsley.
brought with it elements of danger. No one
can have watched the later development of
Industrial Co-operation without experiencing
some fear lest it might degenerate into a vast
system of mere joint-stock shopkeeping, con-
ducted on selfish principles, with no dominant
moral purpose pervading it, no longer striv-
ing earnestly for the amelioration of social
and industrial conditions, but in the field of
commercial distribution aiming chiefly at
large dividends, and in the case of productive
undertakings showing no tendency to share
profits with its work-people.
No one was more conscious of this danger
than Mr. Vansittart Neale. During the
whole of the forty years — he died in 1893 —
of his close connection with the movement,
and especially during the later years in which
he had taken upon himself the whole secre-
tarial duties of the Co-operative Union, devot-
ing himself and his fortune absolutely to its
business, he had kept up one long struggle
against this evil spirit of competition and
greed, which he felt to be in direct contra-
diction to the principles which had been
accepted as fundamental by the union, and
which had been in letter confirmed again and
again by the Co-operative Congress. " None
"The Christian Socialists." 147
but the happiest old man in England," says
Judge Hughes of him, " one who could do
altogether without sight and live upon the
evidence of things not seen — could have
gone on so long bearing, forbearing, and
hoping; but even he at last began to have
his doubts." A few months before his death
he attended the Rochdale Congress of 1893.
The vicar of Rochdale, Archdeacon Wilson,
preached the usual " Congress sermon", on
the text, "Can Satan cast out Satan?" and
in it appealed to the co-operators not to
neglect the high ideals of their founders.
" If you let selfishness of aim", he said, " creep
over the movement, as the writer in last week's
Co-operative News who says, ' I want a good big
dividend first, then it will be time to squander our
profits on education '—if the time ever comes when
that spirit represents your aim, you may write
1 Ichabod ' over your doors in Toad Lane. Nothing
but magnanimity and sympathy will build up what
shall endure. It is the eternal law of God, and man
kicks against it in vain."
On the very next day a Rochdale man, the
chairman of the Wholesale Society, the chief
opponent of sharing profits with labour and
advocate of production by the wholesale
societies and all profits to the consumer, was
148 Charles Kingsley.
selected to preside at the congress and give
the inaugural address. In his first words
he accepted the challenge of Archdeacon
Wilson, dwelt strongly on the charm of
" dividend hunting", and added: —
" I know I shall say things that people will say
' No! No!' to this morning; but I intend to say
them nevertheless, because it is time that namby-
pambyism was crushed at these Congresses. I
should not have made these remarks but for a
sermon I heard last night from my own spiritual
adviser. He is a capital adviser in spiritual mat-
ters, but not altogether reliable on co-operative
affairs."
Is, then, "the high ideal" of the Christian
Socialists after all a failure? Does the victory
really lie with the giant Goliath of Competition
and his robust swagger — "a good big divi-
dend first, and no profits to the workman"?
Certainly the prospect at first sight does
not seem very hopeful. When one reflects as
to what the average of mankind is to-day,
to what our species, self-regarding by its very
essence, is at best; to what our actual society,
after nineteen centuries of Christianity, is at
this latest hour of its development, with its
egoism intensified by the ethics of the market;
when one considers the average moral tone of
"The Christian Socialists." 149
commercial society, its real working code of
morality, its low theory of life, its false valu-
ation of the things good and evil in life, its
lost ideal of heroism, its relaxed standard of
honour, its forgotten notions of duty; above
all, when we bring ourselves to confess hon-
estly that religious belief, the last reserve
force against the pressure of self-interest, has,
in relation to business life, with so many of
us, practically broken down, it is indeed diffi-
cult to take an optimistic view of the future of
industrial society.
And yet, on the other hand, we cannot
deny, we must indeed acknowledge with
thankful recognition, that there is also much
to make us hopeful. When we compare the
state of public opinion on economic morals
at the time of the inception of the Christian
Socialist movement with the state of public
opinion now, we are at least conscious of a
marked increase of solicitude about all the
problems of industrial and social life, and of
sympathy with the struggles, sufferings, re-
sponsibilities, and anxieties which those pro-
blems involve. And beyond, too, this quick-
ened sense of responsibility for the conditions
under which the poorer members of the
community live, there has also been a new
150 Charles Kingsley.
departure in economic thought, relaxing the
dread of interference with natural laws, which
at one time was so keenly felt by both econo-
mic teachers and the world at large. Above
all, there has come an absolutely changed
attitude on the part of the Church of England
herself in regard to all these social problems,
a recognition in the first place that the Church
of Christ has a social mission, has a duty laid
upon her, of harmonizing, in the light of the
Incarnation, all the facts of human life —
social, political, industrial, and as a conse-
quence of that, an acknowledgment that many
of the ideas which are stirring in the world
outside, in minds nowise Church-like to begin
with, are the very same ideas which are to be
found at the heart of the Christian religion.
This change of attitude on the part of the
Church towards social problems has un-
doubtedly in the last forty years been very
great; but it would not be difficult to trace
back the causes of change to the teaching of
the Christian Socialists of 1848. It may be
sufficient here and now to record three facts
which sufficiently mark the gradual steps of
the movement.
In the year 1876 a little band of Anglican
clergy, directly tracing their inspiration to the
"The Christian Socialists." 151
teaching of Charles Kingsley — one of their
number at least had been a pupil of both
Maurice and Kingsley at Cambridge — organ-
ized a small society whose chief aim was to
bring the doctrine, discipline, and worship of
the Church of England more into harmony
with what they thought to be the special social
needs of English democracy. They called
their society " The Guild of S. Matthew".
They set before their members three objects :
I. To get rid, by every possible means, of the
existing prejudices, especially on the part
of " secularists ", against the Church, her
sacraments and doctrines: and to endea-
vour to " justify God to the people".
II. To promote the study of social and political
questions in the light of the Incarnation.
III. To promote frequent and reverent worship
in the Holy Communion, and a better
observance of the teaching of the Church
of England, as set forth in the Book of
Common Prayer.
The following extract from an early report
of the Guild will sufficiently indicate the char-
acter of its work and the similarity of its ideal
to that of the early Christian Socialists : —
" Believing, as we do, that the great fact of the
Incarnation is the foundation of Christian teaching
152 Charles Kingsley.
and practice, we cannot see how or why the Chris-
tian Church should not consider every question
bearing upon the welfare, secular and spiritual,
of man. We feel the absolute need of preaching
in season and out of season ' the Gospel of the
Kingdom ', the fact that the Church is a real living
society on this earth, working for the greatest good
of the greatest number, and embodying in her
sacraments and in her creeds the strongest asser-
tions of true ' liberty, equality, and fraternity ' ever
given to the world, doing this, too, on far higher
grounds than can possibly be taken by any ' secu-
lar' creed or society. Does the secularist talk of
fraternity? We tell him there is no merely theo-
retical basis of true fraternity so grand or sure as
the fact of the Fatherhood of God. Of equality?
Nowhere is it embodied so grandly as in Holy
Baptism and in the Holy Communion; nowhere
have its principles been carried out to their logical
conclusions so thoroughly as in the Communistic
Church of Jerusalem. Of liberty? The priests
and bishops of the English Church have constantly
led the people to victory over kings and pope alike.
Of the rights of labour? Bible history, as apart
from Bible biography, begins with a ' strike ' (Ex.
v. 45), and some of the bitterest denunciations of
the prophets both of the Old and of the New Testa-
ments are launched against those i who keep back
by fraud the hire of the labourers who have reaped
their fields '. Of patriotism? The English Church
welded the incoherent Saxon kingdoms into one
nation. The representative government of later
"The Christian Socialists." 153
times was modelled after the earlier councils of the
Church. Of the wider bond of the brotherhood of
nations? St. Paul preached it for the first time in
Europe, in the teeth of the exclusive Greeks at
Athens. The Hebrew prophets — nay, more, our
Lord Himself — reiterated it in equally exclusive
Judaea. The Catholic Church is the only true
international."
Much good work was done by the Guild in
the large towns, chiefly in combating the
errors of " secularism" as to the function of
the Church, and answering in lectures and in
public discussion the objections to Christianity
brought by the followers of Mr. Bradlaugh.
A few years later, however, the work of the
Guild was taken up and extended by the
Christian Social Union, a society which, tak-
ing its origin at Oxford, has, during the last
few years, under the presidency of the Bishop
of Durham, multiplied its branches through-
out the country, and now numbers a very
large number of the younger clergy in its
ranks. The following is the simple form of
this society's constitution : —
" This Union consists of Members of the Church
who have the following objects at heart: —
" I. To claim for the Christian law the ultimate
authority to rule social practice.
154 Charles Kingsley.
"II. To study in common how to apply the moral
truths and principles of Christianity to the
social and economic difficulties of the
present time.
"III. To present Christ in practical life as the
Living Master and King, the enemy of
wrong and selfishness, the power of right-
eousness and love."
Lastly, no more remarkable sign of the
change that has come over the Church of
England since the time of Charles Kingsley,
on the subject of Christian Socialism, can well
be cited than the report on the office of the
Church in respect to industrial problems,
which was issued last year by the conference
of more than two hundred Anglican bishops
assembled at Lambeth.
"The primary duty of the Church, as such, and
within her, of the clergy, is that of ministry to men
in the things of character, conscience, and faith.
In doing this she also does her greatest social duty.
Character in the citizen is the first social need ; char-
acter with its securities in a candid, enlightened,
and vigorous conscience, and a strong faith in
goodness and in God. The Church owes this duty
to all classes alike. Nothing must be allowed to
distract her from it, or needlessly to impede or
prejudice her in its discharge, and this requires
of the clergy, as spiritual officers, the exercise of
"The Christian Socialists." 155
great discretion in any attempt to bring within
their sphere work of a more distinctively social
kind.
"But while this cannot be too strongly said, it
is not the whole truth. Character is influenced at
every point by social conditions, and active con-
science, in an industrial society, will look for moral
guidance on industrial matters.
"Economic science does not claim to give this,
its task being to inform, but not to determine the
conscience and the judgment. But we believe that
Christ our Master does give such guidance by His
examples and teachings, and by the present work-
ings of His Spirit; and therefore, under Him,
Christian authority must in a measure do the same,
the authority, that is, of the whole Christian body,
and of an enlightened Christian opinion. This is
part of the duty of a Christian society, as witness-
ing for Christ, and representing Him in this present
world, occupied with His work of setting up the
kingdom of God, under and amidst the natural
conditions of human life. In this work the clergy,
whose special duty it is to ponder the bearings
of Christian principles, have their part; but the
Christian laity, who deal directly with the social
and economic facts, can do even more."
The bishops then go on to submit that
Christian social duty will operate in two
directions :
"(1) The recognition, inculcation, and application
156 Charles Kingsley.
of certain Christian principles. They offer the
following as examples : —
" (a) The Principle of Brotherhood. This prin-
ciple of brotherhood, or fellowship in Christ, pro-
claiming, as it does, that men are members one of
another, should act in all the relations of life as a
constant counterpoise to the instinct of competition.
"(b) The Principle of Labour, that every man is
bound to service — the service of God and man.
Labour and service are to be understood in their
widest and most inclusive sense : but in some sense
they are obligatory on all. The wilfully idle man,
and the man who lives only for himself, are out of
place in a Christian community. Work, accord-
ingly, is not to be looked upon as an irksome
necessity for some, but as the honourable task and
privilege of all.
"(c) The Principle of Justice. God is no respecter
of persons. Inequalities indeed of every kind are
interwoven with the whole providential order of
human life, and are recognized emphatically in our
Lord's own words. But the social order cannot
ignore the interests of any of its parts, and must,
moreover, be tested by the degree in which it secures
for each freedom for happy, useful, and untram-
melled life, and distributes, as widely and equitably
as may be, social advantages and opportunities.
" (d) The Principle of Public Responsibility. A
Christian community, as a whole, is morally re-
sponsible for the character of its own economic and
social order, and for deciding to what extent matters
affecting that order are to be left to individual
"The Christian Socialists." 157
initiative and to the unregulated play of economic
forces. Factory and sanitary legislation, the institu-
tion of a government labour department, and the
influence of government, or of public opinion and
the press, or of eminent citizens, in helping to avoid
or reconcile industrial conflicts, are instances in
point.
"(2) Christian -opinion should be awake to re-
pudiate and condemn either open breaches of social
justice and duty, or maxims and principles of an
unchristian character. It ought to condemn the
belief that economic conditions are to be left to the
action of material causes and mechanical laws uncon-
trolled by any moral responsibility. It can pro-
nounce certain conditions of labour to be intolerable.
It can insist that the employer's personal responsi-
bility, as such, is not lost by his membership in a
commercial or industrial company. It can press
upon retail purchasers the obligation to consider,
not only the cheapness of the goods supplied to
them, but also the probable conditions of their pro-
duction. It can speak plainly of evils which attach
to the economic system under which we live, such
as certain forms of luxurious extravagance, the
wide-spread pursuit of money by financial gam-
bling, the dishonesties of trade into which men are
driven by feverish competition, and the violences
and reprisals of industrial warfare."
• •••••••
In conclusion, the bishops " record their
conviction that conspicuous, sustained, and
158 Charles Kingsley.
wide-spread effort in this direction, more par-
ticularly on the part of Christian laymen, is
required at the present time, as one special
sign and form of the witness of the Church to
the all-sufficiency of her Divine and Incarnate
Lord, and to the transforming, enlightening,
and quickening power of His Spirit upon
human character and life ".
Certainly such words as these seem to
run back behind the traditions with which
the Anglican episcopate have usually been
thought to have become encrusted in days
of English aristocracy or of mediaeval feu-
dalism, and to remind us of the more manly
strength and vigour and directness of appeal
or rebuke which characterized the represen-
tative and fraternal episcopate of the early
Church.
The Science and Duty of Health. 159
Chapter VII.
The Science and Duty of Health.
" Down to the mothers, as Faust went, I go, to the roots of our man-
hood,
Mothers of us in our cradles ; of us once more in our glory.
New-born body and soul, in the great pure world which shall be
In the renewing of all things, when man shall return to his Eden,
Conquering evil, and death, and shame, and the slander of conscience —
Free in the sunshine of Godhead — and fearlessly smile on his Father."
(Eversley, 1852.)
There is one little-known name among the
band of Charles Kingsley's Christian Socialist
friends of which some record ought to be
made here, for it is the name not only of a
man of most brilliant and original genius, a
scientific thinker of singular freshness and
power, but of one who exercised upon Charles
Kingsley a very potent influence, at first
during years of youthful friendship as an
example of unconquerable faith in truth and
goodness, and afterwards as a noble and inspir-
ing memory. What Arthur Hallam was to
Lord Tennyson, such to a very great extent
seems to have been Charles Blachford Mans-
field to Kingsley. They were undergraduates
together at Cambridge, and close friends after-
160 Charles Kingsley.
wards for seventeen years until Mansfield's
death — a death which was also a martyrdom
in the cause of science. In the sketch of his
life which Kingsley prefixed to a volume of
letters by Mansfield on Paraguay, Brazil, and
the Plate, there is a description of Mansfield
in the Cambridge days which is worth quoting,
for it helps also to complete our picture of
Kingsley himself: —
"The next thing which drew me to him was his
intellect, not merely that he talked of the highest
things, but he did it in such a wonderful way. He
cared for nothing but truth. He could argue by
the hour, but never for arguing sake. None can for-
get the brilliance of his conversation, the eloquence
with which he could assert, the fancy with which
he could illustrate, the earnestness with which he
could enforce, the sweetness with which he could
differ, the generosity with which he could yield.
Perhaps the secret of that fascination, which even
at Cambridge, and still more in after-life, he quite
unconsciously exercised over all who really knew
him (and often, too, over those who but saw him for
a passing minute or heard him in a passing sen-
tence, yet went away saying that they had never
met his like) was that virtue of earnestness. When
I first met him at Cambridge he was very full of
Combe's works and of Volney's Ruins of Empires.
He was what would be called a materialist, and
used to argue stoutly on it with me, who chose to
The Science and Duty of Health. 161
be something of a dualist or gnostic. I forget my
particular form of folly. But I felt all through that
his materialism was more spiritual than other men's
spiritualism, because he had such an intense sense
of the truly spiritual, of right and wrong. He was
just waiting for the kingdom of God. . . . When
the truth was shown to him he leapt up to embrace
it. There was the most intense faith in him from
the first that right was right, and wrong wrong;
that right must conquer ; that there was a kingdom
of God eternal in the heavens, an ideal righteous
polity, to which the world ought to be, and some
day would be, conformed. That was his central
idea; I don't say that he saw it clearly from the
first ; I don't say that he did not lose sight of it at
times, but I know that he saw it, for he was the first
human being that taught it to me. Added to this
unconquerable faith in good was an unconquerable
faith in truth. He first taught me not to be afraid
of truth. If a thing is so you can't be the worse
for knowing that it is so, was his motto, and well
he carried it out."
Mansfield became one of the most promis-
ing chemists in England, one for whose future
renown no hope could be too high pitched.
He was the discoverer of the coal-tar pro-
ducts, a discovery which has to a great extent
revolutionized the art of dyeing. His un-
finished work on Aerial Navigation is said
by competent authorities to lay down the
(M508) L
162 Charles Kingsley.
lines on which that great achievement of the
future will have to be worked out. His lec-
tures at the Royal Institution on benzole, and
on the chemical elements, were characterized
not only by most patient observation, but by
a most vivid and original scientific imagina-
tion. It was generally expected that he would
have been Faraday's successor.
But this was not to be. At the zenith of
his genius God called him to Himself, and he
gave away his life quite simply, as Kingsley
relates, to save others. By the mistake of a
lad who assisted him in his chemical experi-
ments, a still of naphtha boiled over and caught
fire. He might easily have escaped; but he
feared an explosion which might destroy the
premises. He lifted the burning still in his
arms to carry it out, but the door was shut;
he tried to hurl it through the window, but it
dropped from his hand, half flayed with liquid
fire. He scrambled out, rolled in the snow,
and so extinguished the flames. After which
he had still to walk a mile to a cab, leaning
upon a woman's arm. He was taken to the
Middlesex Hospital, where he was most care-
fully tended, and where relatives and friends
took turns to watch him. Nothing, however,
could save him, and to use Kingsley's words
The Science and Duty of Health. 163
— " after nine days of agony he died like a
Christian man ,fl
It was Kingsley that brought Charles Mans-
field into the Christian Socialist movement.
In all their undertakings Mr. Ludlow has
testified he was one of their most regular,
most trustworthy, though most unobtrusive
of workers. In Politics for the People, under
the pseudonym of "Will Willow-wren", he
wrote two articles entitled "Politics of the
Fields", unfinished vignettes, alas! of bird-life
and natural things, and the lessons to be
learnt from them, articles intended to be
complementary to those of " Parson Lot" on
the " National Gallery ".
" For there is a universal and a national gallery "
—so Mansfield wrote— " other than that in the formal
pile behind the fountains of Trafalgar Square; and
into this we can take frequent looks with much
comfort to our eyes and not little profit to our souls.
Perhaps you will allow one who has spent a good
many whole hours among these pictures to jot
down a few notions concerning them for the bene-
fit of his brethren among the farms and meadows,
and for those of our town cousins who come down
among us occasionally, to bless Him who made the
hills, the woods, and the railways.
" These pictures of ours are all the work of God,
though they are not more this than are those in
1 Economic Review, January, 1894.
164 Charles Kingsley.
London His handwriting on the wall. For if God
did not paint upon the canvas, neither did the
human artists, but the paint-brushes or the devil.
Our gallery here has, however, this advantage, that
the devil, though he has dabbled a good deal in oil
colours, has never yet tried his hand at creation.
The devil may have sneaked up the staircases in
Trafalgar Square (if so, no doubt Parson Lot will
find him out) ; but here our criticism need not be
on its guard. Our country collection is all of
genuine handiworks, with the divine autograph
legible upon every one — of none can it be said that
they are second-hand from heaven.
"It is in the woods, in the streams, and on the
sea-cliff side that they are hung ; and the sky is the
window that lights them. Beauty is there in all
its elements. The gallery is universal, but a part
of it is national to us — English in its scenery, Eng-
lish in its life. Though the artist of all the speci-
mens is one and the same, there is no mannerism
there, yet a method and a reason breathes through
all. The chamber that is painted for Englishmen
has characters which mark its style, but do not
separate it as distinct from the others, which all own
the same author, and appeal each to a sympathy
deep in the hearts of those who will spare their eyes
to read them . . . We cannot yet thoroughly in-
terpret them all, but the endeavour to understand
a few of them may be less useless than a headful
of phenomena; and if the seeds sown in humility
grow not up into a plant fruitful in science, the
branches of thought decaying may at least become
The Science and Duty of Health. 165
a soil on which future roots may be crowned with a
foliage of wisdom."
How fresh and delightful too is this writing
on " Friendship with the Birds", graphic and
original of phrase, melodious and gay and
fantastic, and yet as full of keen observation
as Kingsley's own Charm of Birds ! —
"Why are we inclined to friendship with the
birds? This wise : man was made by God a good
spirit; such that the true, the open, the unconceal-
ing, is grateful music to his sense ; and the nation
of birds is exactly that one, of all the neighbour
races, that emphatically expresses the idea of can-
dour, unreserved and unashamed. They are the
living sacraments of truth. Their lives are for the
most part passed in open day; their motions as they
sweep across the clouds, or gambol in the gutter,
are equally among things outward and visible.
" Not that the other types of being — the hairy and
the scaly — are symbols of evil or even of attributes
less divine than those of which the feathery forms
are the expression. Gravity and wisdom and sor-
row, perhaps, are there, and many deep good things
not clearly seen; for the open secret of nature is
closer there than where the voices of the birds de-
clare it.
" But they are more than truth; joy, too, is here
developed in life. Their every note, their every
motion, is joy; not the innocent, careless mirth of
simple innocence, which lambs or young lions
166 Charles Kingsley.
frolic into parables, but the deep heartfelt joyousness
of conscious integrity. It is to be read in the
attitudes of all, from the sea-gull screaming round
the headland, to the little wren who makes the
snow-wreathed thatch ring with his thrilling melody.
" There is scarcely such a thing as a melancholy
bird. It is a sentimentalism entirely visionary and
confutable, which some metre-and-rhyme writers
have sanctified in verse, which speaks of sad birds
and melancholy songs. For instance, the com-
plaints of the nightingale ! Who can listen to the
gushing strains of that little half-ounce of choral
ecstasy, and call it melancholy? It is utter incom-
municable merriment; you would say it was tumul-
tuous, if it did not last all night and all day long
too; the little throat will burst before it can tell
you all its joy — how he has sailed thousands of
miles over desert Africa, over boisterous Biscay,
and troubled France — to meet his own love under
that oak tree, with whose leaves he will build her
a couch when he has sung enough ; and how there
on the very actual day appointed, she had met him.
This is what you can hear in that 'jug, jug, jug,
tirhading", as some German bird-eager has printed
it, and no milksop whining about nothing at all.
The poet who first called that bird plaintive, was
one of the old pagan school, who vowed that no
man could write decent verses who had not been
swilling wine — sour Falernian; and the man who
repeats it now, either does so from sheer faith in
the inspiration of his ancestor, or from the stupid
influences of copious beer.
The Science and Duty of Health. 167
" There are, however, some few birds that do
seem exceptions; not, however, to prove the rule
(for creation's types have not any such impossible
way of demonstrating truth), but to remind us that
we have not read all the book at the first glance,
but that mysteries are there yet unrevealed. There is
a gladness about a homeless cuckoo : is there a tale
there of a magnet (sic) that has lost its keeper — of an
isolated heart, victim to its own approach to femi-
nine perfection — of an only one now among the
foundlings? And it will try to sing: is it a merry
song of former days, that fails now at the second
note, and a few weeks later at the first, and then is
choked altogether, when the gay little finches dart
at it, as if in spite against a bird of prey? There is
no rapacity there, but quiet endurance. And a
little later it is gone — gone to a far distant sunny
land, where it will be gay again no doubt, and per-
haps may remember that tune of which we long so
much to hear the end.
"The owls and night-jars speak not of overflowing
mirth, but they are not to be excepted as sad. Theirs
is a quiet contentment, which sits at home and
meditates, when it can be of no use abroad, and
then at evening, when its duty calls it forth, is up
and doing. But there is no doubt that our quiet
friends, the owls and their similars, are less expres-
sive of the beau-ideal of bird-life than most others
of their nation ; but they are birds, and therefore to
be loved and to be listened to, for we may learn of
them.
" Let us not forget that a bird — a dove — was the
168 Charles Kingsley.
bearer of good tidings to the old weather-vexed
faith-steered navigator, Noah; and that, later still,
a deeper mystery is represented to us under the
same form."
It was from his friend Mansfield that Kings-
ley seems to have gained much of his early
enthusiasm for the cause of sanitary reform.
In the early days of the Chartist movement,
Mansfield, in conjunction with Mr. J. M.
Ludlow, had drawn up the programme of a
National Health League, whose objects were
stated to be the " uniting of all classes of
society in the promotion of the Public Health,
and the removal of all causes of disease which
unnecessarily abridge man's right to live ".
The League was intended to be worked by
means of local and district committees, whose
duty it should be "(i.) to collect and diffuse
information; (ii.) to further the due execution,
and, when necessary, the amendment, of the
law; and (iii.) to stimulate and assist all
public bodies and private persons in the per-
formance of their respective duties in refer-
ence to the Public Health". The idea of the
society was a good one, but Mr. Maurice
thought the programme at that particular
juncture to be premature. It was accord-
ingly dropped, to be revived, however, later
The Science and Duty of Health. 169
in " The Ladies' National Sanitary Associa-
tion ", which has done such good work in
later years in the promotion of truer ideas as
to the duty of public health.
Meanwhile Kingsley, at the time of the
outbreak of cholera in 1849 had preached
three sermons which had attracted much
attention by their outspoken denunciation of
the popular notion that the cholera was a
special visitation of God sent as a national
punishment, and demanding the proclama-
tion of a national fast and confession of sins.
Upon the recurrence of the cholera five
years afterwards, Kingsley republished these
sermons, with a preface, entitled "Who
causes Pestilence?" from which it may still
be useful — for the foolish sneer as to " the
Gospel of Drains taking the place of the
Gospel of Salvation, in the Broad Church
scheme of doctrine", is even yet not quite
obsolete — to quote the ground upon which
Kingsley was accustomed to base his strong
opinion that the promotion of the science of
health was a distinct obligation of the Chris-
tian Church.
"As a clergyman," he says, "I feel bound to
express my gratitude to Lord Palmerston for having
refused to allow a national fast-day on the occasion
170 Charles Kingsley.
of the present reappearance of pestilence, and so
having prevented fresh scandal to Christianity,
fresh excuses for the selfishness, laziness, and
ignorance which produce pestilence, fresh turning
men's minds away from the real causes of this
present judgment, to fanciful and superstitious
ones.
"It was to be hoped, that after the late dis-
coveries of sanitary science, the clergy of all de-
nominations would have felt it a sacred duty to go
forth on a crusade against filth, and so save the
lives of thousands, not merely during the presence
of cholera, but every year.
" We cannot plead ignorance as an excuse. The
facts of sanitary science are at once so notorious,
and so easy of comprehension, that ignorance in an
educated man must be either wilful and deliberate,
or the consequence of a stupidity which ought to
unfit any man from any office or responsibility. This
may be the case with some; but the majority of
preachers and ministers seem to care little about
sanitary reform for one of three reasons : —
"(1) Some fancy that the business of a clergy-
man is exclusively what they choose to call
' spiritual ', and that sanitary reform, being what
they choose to call a ' secular ' question, is beyond
their province.
" But I can say, proudly and joyfully, as a
clergyman of the Church of England, that this
notion is dying out daily under the influence of
those creeds which tell that the Son of God has
The Science and Duty of Health. 171
redeemed all mankind, body, soul, and spirit, and
therefore teaches clergymen to look on the physical
and intellectual improvement of every human being
as a duty no less sacred than his spiritual welfare.
Nevertheless there is still too much of this lazy and
selfish Manicheism left among us ; and on the too
probable reappearance of cholera in the spring,
Britain will reap the bitter fruits of it.
"(2) Some again dislike the notion of its being
possible to abolish pestilence by sanitary reform,
because it seems to interfere with their own reli-
gious theories and doctrines. Of them there is
nothing to be said but that that man is to be pitied
who can shut his eyes to facts, and deny the evi-
dence of his own senses and reason, for the sake of
preserving his own dark and superstitious calum-
nies against the God of order, justice, and love.
"(3) Some again — and perhaps the larger class
— do in their hearts believe the truths of sanitary
science ; but they are afraid, especially if they get
their subsistence on the voluntary principle, of
arguing them too plainly and boldly, lest they
should attack the vested interests, and thereby
excite the displeasure of wealthy and influential
members of their congregations.
" Let all these three classes of ministers, of what-
ever denomination they may be, . . . consider
the enormous power which they might have em-
ployed, which they can still employ — each man in
his pulpit, his congregation, his parish — to deliver
those from death whom the covetousness and the
172 Charles Kingsley.
neglect of man have appointed to die; and then let
them solemnly ask themselves whether, unless they
bestir themselves very differently from what they
have yet done, their brothers' blood will not cry
against them from the ground? . . . As surely
as there is a merciful God who answers prayer, He
has answered the prayers of those two first cholera
Fasts in the best way in which rational beings could
wish a Heavenly Father to answer prayer, namely,
by showing us how to extirpate the evil against
which we prayed. And if the Bible be true, then
as long as ministers are careless about doing that,
the only answer they can expect to fasts or prayers
is that ancient one : —
"'When ye come to appear before Me, who hath
required this at your hands, to tread My courts?
Bring no more vain oblations ; your Sabbaths and
your calling of assemblies I cannot away with; it
is iniquity even your solemn meeting. . . . Your
hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you
clean, put away the evil of your doings from before
My eyes: cease to do evil; learn to do well: seek
justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless,
plead for the widow.'
" This, it seems to me, if the Bible be indeed an
inspired Book, setting forth God's dealing with
man, is the only answer which we can expect to
any national prayers, till we have, by sanitary
reform, done what God has taught and commanded
us to do." 1
In one of the most eloquent speeches that
1 Letters and Memories, vol. ii. pp. 83-85.
The Science and Duty of Health. 173
Kingsley ever made — that on " The Massacre
of the Innocents" at the first meeting of the
Ladies' Sanitary Association — he placed his
appeal for the recognition of the duties of
public health on even nobler ground.
" l If it seemed to them', he said to his audience,
'as I confess it does to me, that the most precious
thing in the world is a human being, that the lowest
and poorest and most degraded of human beings
is better than all the dumb animals in the world;
that there is an infinite, priceless capability in that
creature, degraded as it may be — a capability of
virtue, and of social and industrial use, which, if it
is taken in time, may be developed up to a pitch,
of which at first sight the child gives no hint what-
soever; if they believed again that of all races upon
earth now, probably the English race is the finest,
and that it gives not the slightest sign yet of
exhaustion; that it seems to be on the whole a
young race, and to have very great capabilities in
it which have not yet been developed, and, above
all, the most marvellous capability of adapting
itself to every sort of climate, and every form of life
that any nation, except the old Roman, ever had
in the world; if they considered with me that it
is worth the while of political economists and social
philosophers to look at the map and see that about
four-fifths of the globe cannot be said as yet to be
in anywise inhabited or cultivated, or in the state
in which man could make it by any fair supply of
174 Charles Kingsley.
population and industry and human intellect, then
perhaps they may think with me that it is a duty —
one of the noblest of duties — to help the increase
of the English race as much as possible, and to
see that every child that is born into this great
nation of England be developed to the highest
pitch to which we can develop him, in physical
strength and in beauty, as well as in intellect and
in virtue.
• • • • • ■ •
" There are people who talk of the ill-health of
themselves and their children as 'afflictions' and
1 misfortunes'; and if they be pious people they
talk of 'the will of God' and 'of the visitation of
God'. I do not like to trench upon those matters,
but when I read in my Book and in your Book
that i it is not the will of your Father in Heaven
that one of these little ones should perish', it has
come to my mind sometimes with very great strength
that that may have a physical application as well
as a spiritual one, and that the Father in heaven,
who does not wish the child's soul to die, may
possibly have created that child's body for the
purpose of its not dying except in a good old age.
Not only in the lower class, but in the middle class,
when one sees an unhealthy family, then in three
cases out of four, if one takes time, trouble, and
care enough, one can, with the help of the doctor
who has been attending them, run the evil home
to a very different cause than the will of God ; and
that is, to a stupid neglect, a stupid ignorance,
or, what is just as bad, a stupid indulgence.
The Science and Duty of Health. 175
"Oh it is a distressing thing to see children die!
God gives the most precious and beautiful thing
that earth can have, and we just take it and cast
it away ; we cast our pearls upon the dunghill and
leave them. A dying child is to me one of the
most dreadful sights in the world. A dying man,
a man dying on the field of battle, that is a small
sight: he has taken his chance; he has had his
excitement; he has had his glory, if that will be
any consolation to him; if he is a wise man, he
has the feeling that he is doing his duty by his
country, or by his king, or by his queen. It
does not horrify me or shock me to see a man dying
in a good old age, even though it be painful at the
last, as it too often is. But it does shock me, it
does make me feel that the world is indeed out
of joint, to see a child die. I believe it to be a
priceless boon to the child to have lived a week
or a day; but oh, what has God given to this thank-
less earth, and what has the earth thrown away,
in nine cases out of ten, from its own neglect and
carelessness? What that boy might have been,
what he might have done as an Englishman, if he
could have lived and grown up healthy and strong !
"Ah, would to God that some man had the
pictorial eloquence to put before the mothers of
England the mass of preventible suffering, the
mass of preventible agony of mind and body which
exists in England year after year! And would
that some man had the logical eloquence to make
176 Charles Kingsley.
them understand that it is in their power, in the
power of the mothers and wives of the higher class,
I will not say to stop it all — God only knows that —
but to stop, as I believe, three-fourths of it.
"It is in the power, I believe, of any woman in
this room to save three or four lives, human lives,
during the next six months. It is in your power,
ladies, and it is so easy. You might save several
lives apiece if you choose, without, I believe, inter-
fering with your daily business, or with your daily
pleasure, or, if you choose, with your daily frivoli-
ties, in any way whatsoever. Let me ask, then,
those who are, and who have not yet laid these
things to heart: . . . Will you learn — I say it
openly — from the noble chairman (Lord Shaftes-
bury) how easy it is to be earnest in life ; how every-
one of you, amid all the artificial complications of
English society in the nineteenth century, can find
a work to do, and a noble work to do, chivalrous
work to do — just as chivalrous as if you lived in
any old fairy land, such as Spenser talked of in his
Faery Queen, how you can be as true a knight-
errant, or lady-errant, in the present century, as if
you had lived far away in the dark ages of violence
and rapine? Will you, I ask, learn this? Will
you learn to be in earnest, and use the position and
the station and the talent that God has given you
to save alive those who should live? And will you
remember that it is not the will of your Father that
is in heaven that one little one that plays in the
kennel outside should perish, either in body or in
soul?" 1
1 Letters and Memories, vol. ii. pp. 81-86.
The Science and Duty of Health. 177
More and more as the years went on
Kingsley gave himself to this crusade for
the promotion of sanitary science, devoting
to it time, influence, and thought. The
volume published in 1874, under the title of
Health and Education, consisting of such
well-known lectures as that on " The Science
of Health", "The Two Breaths", and
" Nausicaa in London", sum up his teaching
on the subject. They are all written with
the same leading idea, which is also the key-
note of almost everything that he has written.
It is this. To do our duty in this world towards
God and towards man, consistently, steadily,
and not hysterically, needs the fullest develop-
ment possible of all the faculties which God
has given us. The mind in an unhealthy
body is itself of necessity unhealthy. Care
must therefore be taken to exercise the body
and to keep it in health. To violate the
known laws of health therefore was, with
Kingsley, to commit physical sin. Sanitary
law ought to be obeyed by the free-will and
enlightened judgment of the people, but,
failing that, must be enforced by legislation.
In all Kingsley's lectures and addresses
during the later years of his life he had thus
ever before him a twofold object. First, to
(M608) M
178 Charles Kingsley.
educate the individual and the public con-
science in the duties of health; and secondly,
to press unceasingly upon the Government
the necessity of amending and perfecting
sanitary legislation in the interests of the
public health.
In regard to this second object, an immense
progress has been made in the last twenty
years. At the present time the Public Health
Acts of the country furnish us with almost
all that is needed, and sanitary science, the
science of preventive medicine, occupies a
foremost place in the attention of all thought-
ful statesmen. But with regard to Kingsley's
first object, that of instructing and stimulating
both the individual and public conscience
in the science and duties of health, much
remains to be done.
And it is just here, as Charles Kingsley
was never tired of proclaiming, that the
Church of Christ has so great an opportunity.
If it will but recognize that opportunity,
and the duty which that opportunity imposes,
it will be the means of affording invaluable
aid to the nation. When one remembers,
on the one hand, that immense army of
human beings annually stricken down in this
country by preventible disease — in plain
The Science and Duty of Health. 179
words, slain either by culpable carelessness
or by ignorance scarcely, if at all, less culpable :
and when one remembers, on the other hand,
the immense engine of influence that might
be brought to bear by the pulpits of this land,
it does indeed seem lamentable that there
should be any hesitation on the part of the
Christian Church to embark in the great
work, not only of denouncing that careless-
ness, but also of instructing that ignorance.
To any man who believes, as Charles
Kingsley did most firmly, that the body of
man is not only the shrine which contains
the soul, but a shrine which, under certain
conditions, fashions and modifies the soul
itself, there can surely appear no task more
noble, no aim more worthy of the energies
of any church or Christian community than
that of removing those conditions of igno-
rance and squalor and disease which are the
chief obstacles at present in the way of man's
attainment to that fulness and perfection of
stature which is the true height of his destiny.
180 Charles Kingsley.
Chapter VIII.
Some Personal Characteristics.
"A RIGHTEOUS MAN
Who loved God and Truth above all things,
A man of untarnished honour —
Loyal and chivalrous— gentle and strong —
Modest and humble — tender and true —
Pitiful to the weak — yearning after the erring —
Stern to all forms of wrong and oppression,
Yet most stern towards himself —
Who being angry yet sinned not.
Whose highest virtues were known only
To his wife, his children, his servants, and the poor.
Who lived in the presence of God here,
And passing through the grave and gate of death
Now liveth unto God for evermore."
Such are the words which Mrs. Kingsley
has inscribed on the first page of the book of
Memories of her husband's life. They are
high and noble words. But the book in
which they are written proves them to be as
true as they are noble. It is the record of a
life which must always go to the heart of the
generous-minded of every age. But, espe-
cially for the young, one would fain hope,
Charles Kingsley's Memories will always re-
main a book of inspiration to lofty ideals of
character and life. One thinks it must be so.
For there is always a charm about any per-
Some Personal Characteristics. 181
sonality in which the elements of romance
and chivalry are marked features of character.
And this was essentially so with Kingsley.
I remember once, when I was an under-
graduate at Cambridge, attending the course
of lectures which Kingsley as Professor of
History was then delivering on " The Nor-
mans in England ", being much struck with
certain words of Her Majesty the Queen,
which he quoted in his lecture, but which,
with characteristic modesty and loyalty, he
quoted as words which "the highest lady in
this land had once said to a certain pro-
fessor:"
" It grieves me, sir," said Queen Victoria,
" to see that the young men of the present day
are losing the spirit of romance and chivalry.
They try to be old men of the world before
they are even young men of the world. They
are too prone to laugh at anything earnest."
I hope the Queen's estimate of the youth of
England was not entirely true even of the
last generation. It is certainly not true of
the present. And if it is not so, I do not
think it is too much to say that the influence
and teaching of Charles Kingsley has been a
very large factor in the result. For his writ-
ings have been rich in many sources of teach-
182 Charles Kingsley.
ing and help to our age. There have been
many writers, no doubt, of higher literary rank,
but few who by their works have given their
generation so much pleasure, and still fewer
who have given it in such a thoroughly healthy
and invigorating way. And certainly no in-
telligent reader ever rose from a perusal of
Kingsley's books without feeling himself a
stronger, more natural, more sympathetic
human being, or without an increased sense
of that faith in God and nature which was
always at the centre of Kingsley's thought.
His two earliest novels, Yeast and Alton
Locke, stirred up, it is true, much vehement
and bitter hostility to their author, but this in
a great measure he lived down, and the novels
which followed — Hypatia, with its noble
sketch of the Neoplatonist virgin and martyr
on the background of the strange seething
life of Alexandria; Westzvard Ho, with its
half-pagan hero and glorification of the Eliza-
bethan sailors who fought the Armada; Two
Years Ago, with its crowd of living and mov-
ing figures, and the fine manly character of
Tom Thurnall ; Hereward the Wake, with its
picturesque descriptions of the weird Fen-
lands — kindled such personal love and enthu-
siasm for their author, as made the name of
Some Personal Characteristics. 183
Kingsley, for those readers at least of a gener-
ation ago, the very synonym for goodness and
chivalry and all knightly service. To these
the age of chivalry had certainly not gone
by. For here in the author of these stirring
books — felt by those who could read him
intelligently as a personal friend — was " the
very gentle, perfect knight,
. . . sent forth upon the field of life
To war with evil".
But Kingsley, romantic knight-errant as he
was, was also emphatically a man of his own
time. "With Kingsley," says Max Miiller,
"his life and his work were one. All he
wrote was meant for the day he wrote it. He
did his best at the time, and for the time."
The vices he warred against, the science of
which he was the popular exponent, were all
things of the present. Whatever illustrations
he might adopt from history it was to the
present that he applied them. Whether he
was writing of the old days of " Roman and
Teuton", or of the courtly and foul "harloto-
cracy" of France in the eighteenth century;
or of the old struggle between pagan philo-
sophy and the early Christian Church, as in
Hypatia, or between tyranny and freedom,
184 Charles Kingsley.
superstition and religion, as in Westward Ho,
the present was as much before him as when
he wrote of cleanliness and whitewash in Two
Years Ago, or of the abominations of tight-
lacing and high heels and "the nasty mass
of false hair " in the Nausicaa hi London.
But it was also perhaps because Kingsley
wrote essentially of the present and for the
present, that his writing did sometimes become
careless and extravagant in style, abounding
in passages of wild, unchastened eloquence,
sometimes even of almost aimless declama-
tion, in which some things were apt to get said
which both Christian feeling and scholarly
taste must alike condemn. Yet in this very
inartistic abandon of style there is always a
strange magnetic power in his writing which
defies analysis, a glow and a rush and a
poetic intensity which blinds the reader to its
defects. The note of his genius, it has been
well said, is "breeziness"; the power of moral
bracing, the faculty of conveying by his words
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 merely to be alive
seems enjoyable, of making men feel through
Some Personal Characteristics. 185
his thought not only better, but less loaded,
healthier, more alive. The famous hunting
scene in Yeast is perhaps one of the most
characteristic instances of this quality. I
have even heard it said that not a few officers
returning from foreign service took the first
opportunity of going to Eversley to see with
their own eyes and hear with their own ears
the parson who could paint such a picture of
the hunting-field as that described in the
opening chapter of that volume. It is this
same quality which makes the familiar letters
written to his friend Judge Hughes such
wholesome pleasant reading. They may be
found on the closing pages of the first volume
of the Memories. Their hearty humour and
homely slang seem to bring the man before
us even more vividly than any of his more
studied writings. And yet I think it is well
to warn those who did not know Kingsley
personally that they should be on their guard
against a misreading of Kingsley's character,
into which these letters, taken in connection
with much of what the late Mr. Judge
Hughes wrote of his friend, might otherwise
lead them. Charles Kingsley was as little
like his friend's hero " Tom Brown at Ox-
ford" as possible. As one of his nearest
186 Charles Kingsley.
relatives writes to me — " He was the least
rowdy, the most courteous and dignified of
men. . . . He died, alas, when I was
still quite a young girl; but he remains to
me the most perfect example of self-control
and unselfishness in daily intercourse, the
most admirable example of a courtly gentle-
man in manner and bearing that I have ever
known. These things with him were so
simple and instinctive as to be almost
pathetic in a person of such great natural
gifts."
No one who ever was in Kingsley's pres-
ence for half an hour could doubt the truth
of that characterization. But the most gra-
cious courtliness of general bearing was in
no way inconsistent — why should it be? —
with the merriest abandon, the most boyish
high spirits, on occasion. There is no better
evidence of this than in these holiday letters 1
to "Tom Hughes", especially, perhaps, in
the galloping rhythm of this jeu d? esprit, one
of the most genuinely humorous of all Kings-
ley's verses : —
" Come away with me, Tom,
Term and talk are done;
My poor lads are reaping,
Busy every one.
1 Letters and Memories, vol. i. p. 492.
Some Personal Characteristics. 187
Curates mind the parish,
Sweepers mind the court;
We'll away to Snowdon
For our ten days' sport :
Fish the August evening
Till the eve is past,
Whoop like boys, at pounders
Fairly played and grassed.
When they cease to dimple,
Lunge and swerve and leap,
Then up over Siabod
Choose our nest and sleep.
Up a thousand feet, Tom,
Round the lion's head,
Find soft stones to leeward
And make up our bed.
Eat our bread and bacon,
Smoke the pipe of peace,
And, ere we be drowsy,
Give our boots a grease.
Homer's heroes did so,
Why not such as we?
What are sheets and servants?
Superfluity?
Pray for wives and children
Safe in slumber curled,
Then to chat till midnight
O'er this babbling world —
Of the Workman's College,
Of the price of grain,
Of the tree of knowledge,
Of the chance of rain ;
If Sir A. goes Romeward,
If Miss B. sings true,
1 88 Charles Kingsley.
If the fleet comes homeward,
If the mare will do, —
Anything and everything — •
Up there in the sky
Angels understand us,
And no saints are by.
Down and bathe at day-dawn,
Tramp from lake to lake;
Washing brain and heart clean
Every step we take.
Though we earn our bread, Tom,
By the dirty pen,
What we can we will be,
Honest Englishmen.
Do the work that's nearest
Though it's dull at whiles,
Helping, when we meet them,
Lame dogs over stiles ;
See in every hedgerow
Marks of angels' feet,
Epics in each pebble
Underneath our feet:
Once a year like schoolboys
Robin-Hooding go,
Leaving fops and fogies
A thousand feet below."
It is easy of course to criticise the racy
colloquialism of such verses as these as slip-
shod and inartistic, and indeed of Kingsley's
more serious poetry it is sometimes possible
to say that it is wanting in that reticent self-
Some Personal Characteristics. 189
control, in that serenity and stateliness, in
that perfect poetic accent, in fact, which
characterises the great masters. And yet,
after all, is it any great disparagement of such
a man as Kingsley to say that all his poetry
is of the nature of improvisation , had at least
only such inspiration as that of the old ballad
writers, who thought only of what they said, and
not at all of how they said it? His shortest
poems are thus always the best, and one or
two of them, such as The Sands of Dee and
The Three Fishers, may be sung for centuries
to come; and certainly the world will not
readily forget the four beautiful songs from
The Water Babies, the sweet idyllic grace
of the lyrics The Tide River and The Summer
Sea, or the tender pathos and cheery optimism
of When all the World was Young, Lad, and
/ once had a Sweet Little Doll, dears. His
Last Buccaneer too is, of its kind, only just not
perfection. With what a fine ballad-like swing
do these lines carry one along with them . —
" Oh sweet it was in Aves to hear the landward breeze
A-swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees,
With a negro lass to fan you, while you listened to the
roar
Of the breakers on the reef outside, that never touched
the shore.
190 Charles Kingsley.
And now I'm old and going — I'm sure I can't tell where;
One comfort is, the world's so hard, I can't be worse
off there :
If I might but be a sea-dove, I'd fly across the main,
To the pleasant Isle of Aves, to look at it once again."
Kingsley at any rate had one advantage
over most of the minor poets of our gener-
ation. He never wrote poetry but when he
could not help it.
Mr, Ludlow gives us a touching illustra-
tion of this characteristic of his friend when
he tells us that The Three Fishers — a little
masterpiece which has obviously influenced
the creation of a greater poem yet, Tennyson's
Crossing the Bar — was forced out of him by
Mr. Drew's insolence towards him in S.
John's Church.
That incident may well be quoted for
another reason. It furnishes a noble illustra-
tion of the self-control which he was able to
exercise over his fiery and vehement spirit,
and of how little even under unjust accusation
there was in him of bitterness or rancour or
resentment.
At the time of the first great Exhibition
Kingsley had been asked, through Mr.
Maurice, to take part in a series of sermons
which were being preached to working-men
Some Personal Characteristics. 191
in S. John's Church, Fitzroy Square. The
incumbent, Mr. Drew, had assured Mr.
Maurice that " he had been reading Kings-
ley's works with the greatest interest, and
desired to secure him as one of his lecturers".
Under these circumstances Kingsley con-
sented, and took as his subject, "The Mes-
sage of the Church to Labouring Men ". It
was such a sermon as any reader of his books
might have expected him to preach.
"'I assert,' he said, 'that the business for which
God sends a Christian priest in a Christian nation
is to preach freedom, equality, and brotherhood in
the fullest, deepest, widest meaning of these three
great words : that in as far as he does, he is a true
priest, doing his Lord's work with his Lord's bless-
ing upon him : that in so far as he does not, he is
no priest at all, but a traitor to God and man;' and
again, ' I say that these words express the very
pith and marrow of a priest's business : I say that
they preach freedom, equality, and brotherhood to
rich and poor for ever and ever.'"
He then went on to warn his hearers how
there is always a counterfeit in this world of
the noblest message and teaching, and con-
cluded by showing how the Church of Christ
has three special possessions and treasures:
the Bible, which contains man's freedom;
192 Charles Kingsley.
Baptism, his equality; the Lord's Supper, his
brotherhood. The sermon was listened to
with profound attention by a large congrega-
tion, in which were many working-men. But
at its close, just as Mr. Kingsley was about
to give the blessing, the incumbent of the
church rose in the reading-desk and declared
that while he agreed with much that had been
said by the preacher, it was his painful duty
to add that he believed much to be dangerous
and much untrue. The excitement of the
congregation was intense: the working-men
could with difficulty be kept quiet. Kingsley,
however, merely bowed his head, gave the
blessing with deepened solemnity, came down
from the pulpit, and silently passed through
the crowd that thronged around him, with
outstretched hands and an eager " God bless
you, sir," on their lips. " Those", said Mr.
Maurice, who was present, "who observed
the solemnity of Mr. Kingsley's manner while
he was delivering his sermon, still more when
he was praying with the congregation and
blessing them, will believe that the thought
of having unwittingly made himself a stum-
bling-block to his fellow-men, was infinitely
more bitter to him than any mere personal
insult which he was called upon to endure."
Some Personal Characteristics. 193
The sequel is, I think, very touching-. 1 He
returned late that night to Eversley, and in-
stead of going to bed, paced backwards and
forwards in front of the rectory. His wife
knew he must be composing, and the next
morning he recited to her the lines :
"Three fishers went sailing- away to the west,
Away to the west as the sun went down ;
Each thought on the woman who loved him the best,
And the children stood watching them out of the
town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And there's little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbour bar be moaning."
As I began this chapter, so let me end it,
with a personal reminiscence.
It is just thirty-four years ago now since I
saw and heard Charles Kingsley for the first
time. It was on the first Sunday of my under-
graduate residence at Cambridge. He was
preaching in the University pulpit the first of
a course of sermons on " David". I shall
never forget that afternoon. I can still see
the galleries of S. Mary's crowded with the
throng of undergraduates; — surely the most
moving, the most inspiring congregation that
preacher could well have. After the long
interval of more than thirty years I can still
(M508) 1 E conom ic Review, October, 1893. N
194 Charles Kingsley.
hear the intonation of his voice as he began.
u We have heard much of late about Muscular
Christianity. A clever expression, spoken in
jest by I know not whom, has been bandied
about the world, and supposed by many to
represent some new ideal of the Christian
character. For myself I do not know what
it means. It may mean one of two things.
If it mean the first, it is a term somewhat
unnecessary, if not somewhat irreverent. If
it mean the second, it means something untrue
and immoral."
It is the lesson which Kingsley drew from
the second consideration that remains in my
memory; I pray God in my heart. If I
thought that by anything I have written in
this book I could pass on to a younger gener-
ation that lesson with half the force that it
fell on my ears all those years ago I shall be
amply satisfied. The fulness of organized
social life, for which Charles Kingsley and
the Christian Socialists laboured forty years
ago, and from whose labours we in these
days are still receiving so much of our present
social stimulus and inspiration, we must never
forget, can only gain elements of richness and
variety from the free play of individuality.
Character, after all, is the greatest of social
Some Personal Characteristics. 195
and industrial forces. And character for the
Christian, as these last words of Kingsley may
remind us, means self-control through com-
munion with the Spirit of Christ : —
"< Believe it, young men, believe it/ he cried,
' better would it be for any one of you to be the
stupidest and the ugliest of mortals, to be the most
diseased and abject of cripples, the most silly, ner-
vous, incapable person who ever was a laughing-
stock for the boys upon the streets, if only you lived
according to your powers the life of the Spirit of
God. . . . Therefore settle it in your minds, young
men, that the first and the last of all virtues and
graces which God can give is self-control, as
necessary for the saint and the sage, lest they
become fanatics and pedants, as for the young man
in the heyday of youth and health ; but as neces-
sary for the young man as for the saint and the
sage, lest while they become only fanatics and
pedants he become a profligate and cumberer of
the ground. Remember this, remember it now in
the glorious days of youth, which will never return,
but in which you are sowing seed of which you will
reap the fruit until your dying day. . . . And when
the hour of temptation comes, go back, go back if
you would escape, to what you were all taught at
your mother's knee concerning the grace of God;
for that alone will keep you safe, or angel or arch-
angel, or any created being, safe, in this life and in
all lives to come. 1
> >>
Index,
Agassiz, Professor, 36.
Air Mothers, The, 81.
Alton Locke, 123, 124, 127, 135—
138.
Anglican Revival, 14, 15.
Antiparos, II.
Booth, Charles, 133, 134.
Breaths, The Two, 177.
Brentano, Professor, 142.
Browning, Robert, 16.
Bunsen, Baron, 58.
Cambridge Platonists, 18.
Carlyle, Thomas, on Alton Locke,
123.
Chad wick, Mr. Edwin, 81.
Charter, The People's, 97, 98.
Chartist Demonstration, 22, 99-
102.
Chartists, Three Letters to, 115-
122.
Chaucer, 19.
Cheap Clothes and Nasty, 1 15, 132,
133-
Cholera, Sermons on, 81.
Christ, the Great Social Emanci-
pator, 128.
Christian Socialism, 23, origin of
name, 24, 25. Christian Social
Union, 153, 154.
Civic Duty, 89, 90-95.
Clement of Alexandria, 18.
Clifton, 36.
Clovelly, 36, 37.
Coleridge, Rev. Derwent, 38.
Coleridge, S. T., 18, 43, 45.
Colet, Dean, 18.
Competition and Co-operation, 130,
148.
Conington, Professor John, 108,
in.
Cooper, Thomas, 102.
Co-operative Union and Congress,
146.
Co-operative Wholesale Society,
145-
Cottage Homes, 81-88.
Cudworth, Dr., 18.
Day of the Lord, The, 97.
Duty of Health, 1 59-179.
Ellison, Cuthbert, 142.
Erasmus, 18.
Erskine, T., of Linlathen, 18.
Eversley, 49.
Factory Acts, 134.
Fenland Scenery, 33, 34.
Fens, Lecture on, 35.
Froude, James A., 42.
Gore, Rev. Charles, 18.
i g8
Charles Kingsley.
Greg, W. R., 44.
Guardian, The, 70, 74.
Guild of S. Matthew, 151, 152.
Guthlac, S., 35-
Hare, Archdeacon, 103, 108.
Health, Public, 86, 159-179.
Health and Education, 177.
Health League, National, 168.
Helps, Sir Arthur, 81.
Hereward the Wake, 35, 152.
Hermits, The, 35.
Hippolytus, 18.
Hort, Professor, 16.
Hughes, Judge, 185-188.
Hu?nan Soot, 81.
Hypatia, 182.
Illingworth, Rev. J. R., on the
Incarnation, 19.
Incarnation, Doctrine of, and its
Social Aspect, 18-29, 89.
Industrial and Provident Societies
Acts, 144.
Jelf, Dr., 24.
Jones, Mr. Lloyd, 142.
Journal of Association, 115.
Keble, Mr., 15, 17.
Kingsley, Charles, birth and en-
vironment, 30-73; a poet, 30;
at Cambridge, 40; his wife, 41;
influence of Coleridge, 45; mar-
riage, 49; as parish priest, 49-
55, friendship with Mr. Maurice,
55-57; Yeast, 61-72; Village
Problems and Citizenship, 73-
96; Letter on Land Questions,
75> 76; Chartist Demonstration,
99-102 ; meets J. M. Ludlow,
102; T. Hughes, 185-188; per-
sonal characteristics, 180-195;
Sands of Dee, 189; The Three
Fishers, 1 90; Sermons on* David '
at Cambridge, 193.
Kin ox, Rev. Alexander, 18.
Ladies' Sanitary Association, 81,
169, 173.
Lambeth Encyclical on Co-opera-
tion, 154-158.
Lightfoot, Bishop, 16.
Lowell, J. R., 36.
Lucas, Judge, Kingsley's grand-
father, 32.
Ludlow, Mr. J. M., II, 23, 26,
30, 102, 168.
Lux Mundi, 16, 19.
Mackaye, Sandy, 123-127.
Mansfield, Charles, 103, 159-169.
Marriott, Rev. C, 15.
Martineau, Mr. John, 61.
Massacre of the Innocents, 81, 173-
176.
Maurice, Rev. F. D., 11, 16-29;
his Moral and Metaphysical Phi-
losophy, 17, 19; and Christian
Socialism, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28;
Kingdom of Christ, 46; Politics
for the People, 104, 105-114.
More, Sir Thomas, 18.
Mliller, Mr. Max, 58.
National Health League, 168.
Nausicaa in London, 177, 184.
Neale, Mr. E. Vansittart, 142,
143-149.
Neo-Platonists, 19.
Newman, Cardinal, 15, 16.
O'Connor, Feargus, 99, 103.
Old Saws New Set, 108 - 1 1 1 .
Index.
199
Origen, 18.
Osborne, Lord Sydney G., 42,
108, 114.
Overton, Canon, 15.
Oxford Movement, 15, 17.
Oxford Reformers, 18.
Parish Councils, 91.
Parker, Mr. J. W., 103, 104.
Parson Lot, origin of name, 1 15.
Philo and the Alexandrian Schools,
19, 46.
Politics for the People, 97-116.
Powles, Mr., 39.
Prose Idylls, 37.
Pusey, Dr., 15, 16, 18.
Queen, Her Majesty the, on Chi-
valry and Romance, 181.
Recess Committee, Report on Ag-
riculture and Village Industries,
78-81.
Rose, Rev. Hugh J., 17.
Saint's Tragedy, 30, 57, 58, 59,
60.
Science of Health, 159-179.
Scott, Mr. A. J., 103, 108.
"S. G.O.", 42, 108, 114.
Simon, Sir John, 81.
Smith, Dr. South wood, 81.
Smith, Rev. John, 18.
Squire, The Bad, 67, 68.
Stanley, Dean, 103.
Strachey, Sir Edward, 108.
Sully, Charles, 142.
Sweating System, 133-135.
Tennyson, Lord, 16, 190.
The Three Fishers, 190.
Thirlwall, Bishop, 108.
Tom Brown's Schooldays, 184.
Trench, Archbishop, 108.
Two Years Ago, 182, 184.
Vansittart, Mr. Augustus, 141.
Village Citizenship, 73-96.
Walsh, Dr., 141.
Westcott, Bishop, 16.
Westminster Sermons, 46.
Westward Ho! 31, 182.
Whateley, Archbishop, 107, 113.
Whichcot, Dr. Benjamin, 18.
Williams, Isaac, 15.
Wilson, Archdeacon, on Co-opera-
tion, 147.
Women's Trades-unions, 134-135.
Working Men's Association, 139,
141.
Yeast, 61-72, 182.
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