THE WORKS OF
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
GIFT OF
FREDERIC THOMAS BLANCHARD
FOR THE
ENGLISH READING ROOM
KINGSLEY'S PORTRAIT
"He is tall, slender, with blue eyes, brown
hair, and a hale, well-browned face, and some-
what loose-jointed withal. His wife is a real
Spanish beauty. How we did talk and go on
for three days! I guess he is tired. I'm sure
we were. He is a nervous, excitable being,
and talks with head, shoulders, arms and
hands, while his hesitance makes it the harder."
Harriet Bee c her Slowe
H
THE BIDEFORD EDITION
___W^
NOVELS, POEMS dr LETTERS
OF CHARLES ^KINGSLEY
LETTERS ftf
MEMORIES
VOLUME I
EDITED BY HIS WIFE
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK AND LONDON
THE CO-OPERATIVE
PUBLICATION SOCIETY
m
M
Copyright, 1899
By J. F. TAYLOR & COMPANY
Letters and Memori
Volume I.
IBetitcatetf
TO THE BELOVED MEMORY
OF
A RIGHTEOUS MAN
WHO LOVED GOD AND TRUTH ABOVE ALL THINGS.
A MAN OF UNTARNISHED HONOR
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.
Vol. i-i
CONTENTS
VOLUME I
CHAPTER I
1819-1838
PAGE
Birth and Parentage Inherited Tastes Removal from
Devonshire Clifton Barnack and its Ghost-Chamber
First Sermon and Poems Childish Character
Effect of Fen Scenery on his Mind Life at Clovelly
School Life at Clifton and Helston Chelsea King's
College, London i
CHAPTER II
1838-1842. AGED 19-23
Cambridge Visit to Oxfordshire A Turning Point ia
Life Undergraduate Days Decides to take Orders
Correspondence Takes his Degree ... 25
CHAPTER III
1842-1843. Aged 23-24
Leaves Cambridge Reads for Holy Orders Extracts
from Letters Ordained Deacon Curacy of Eversley
Parish Work Parting Words 45
CHAPTER IV
1842-1843. AGED 23-24
A Year of Sorrow Curate Life Letter from Cofonel W.
Brighter Prospects Promise of Preferment Cor-
respondence Renewed The Mystery of Life Impulse
Enthusiasm The Pendulum Wandering Min-
strels Leaves Eversley ...... 32
viii Contents
CHAPTER V
1844-1847. AGED 25-28
PACK
Marriage Curacy of Pimperne Rector of Eversley
Parish Work Personal Influence Canonry of Mid-
dleham Needs of the Church Birth of Two Chil-
dren The " Saint's Tragedy " Written ... 92
CHAPTER VI
1848. AGED 29
Publication of " Sainfs Tragedy " Chartist Riots Tenth
of April Work in London Politics for the People
Parson Lot Professorship at Queen's College Croy-
land Abbey Letters to his Child Advice to an
Author "Yeast" Illness The Higher View of
Marriage Devonshire 119
CHAPTER VII
1849. AGED 30
DVinter in Devonshire Illness Decides on Taking Pupils
Correspondence. On Romanism. Visit to London
Social Questions Fever at Eversley Renewed
Illness Returns to Devonshire Cholera in England
Sanitary Work Bermondsey Jacob's Island
Development of "Yeast" Influence on Young Men
Recollections by Mr. C. Kegan Paul ... 169
CHAPTER VIII
1850-1851. AGED 31-32
Resigns the Office of Clerk in Orders at Chelsea Pupil
Life at Eversley Publication of " Alton Locke " Let-
ters from Mr. Carlyle Writes for " Christian Social-
ist "_ Troubled State of the Country Burglaries
The Rectory Attacked Heavy Correspondence
Letters on the Romish Question 203
Contents ix
CHAPTER IX
1851. AGED 32
PAGB
Letters on University Reform Beginnings of " Hypatia "
Personal Traits Work and Recreation Teetotal-
ism Opening of the Great Exhibition Influence of
" Yeast " Lecture on Agriculture Occurrence in a
London Church Visit to Germany Letter from Mr.
John Martineau 230
CHAPTER X
1852. AGED 33
Correspondence Strike in the Iron Trade Letters on
Political Parties, on Prayer, on Metaphysical Questions
Parson Lot's Last Words Letters to Mr. Ludlow
Hexameters Poetry Frederika Bremer Sunday
Amusements To a Jew 273
CHAPTER XI
1853. AGED 34
The Rector in His Church " Hypatia " Letters from
Chevalier Bunsen Mr. Maurice's Theological Es-
says Correspondence with Thomas Cooper . . 309
CHAPTER XII
1854. AGED 35
Torquay Seaside Studies Sanitary Work Lectures in
Edinburgh Deutsche Theologie About Sisterhoods
Crimean War Settles in North Devon Writes
"Westward Ho!" 344
CHAPTER XIII
1855. AGED 36
Bideford Crimean War Death of his friend Charles
Blachford Mansfield " Westward Ho ! " Letters
from Mr. Henry Drummond and Rajah Brooke On
Bigots Drawing Class for Mechanics at Bideford
Leaves Devonshire Lecture to Ladies in London
-- On Being an Artist The " Heroes " Letter on
Fame .... 366
PREFACE
TN bringing out these volumes, thanks are due
and gratefully offered to all who have gener-
ously given their help to the work ; to the many
known and unknown Correspondents who have
treasured and lent the letters now first made
public ; to the publishers who have allowed
quotations to be made from Mr. Kingsley's pub-
lished works ; but above all, to the friends who
have so eloquently borne witness to his character
and genius. These written testimonies to their
father's worth are a rich inheritance to his
children, and God only knows the countless un-
written ones, of souls rescued from doubt, dark-
ness, error, and sin, of work done, the worth of
which can never be calculated upon earth, of seed
sown which has borne, and will still bear fruit for
years, perhaps for generations to come, when the
name of CHARLES KINGSLEY is forgotten, while
his unconscious influence will endure treasured up
in the eternal world, where nothing really good or
xviii Preface
great can be lost or pass away, to be revealed at
that Day when God's Book shall be opened and
the thoughts of all hearts be made known.
F. E. K.
BYFLEET, October, 1876.
CHAPTER I
1819-1838
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE INHERITED TALENTS REMOVAL
FROM DEVONSHIRE CLIFTON BARNACK AND ITS
GHOST-CHAMBER FIRST SERMON AND POEMS CHILD-
ISH CHARACTER EFFECT OF FEN SCENERY ON HIS MIND
LIFE AT CLOVELLY SCHOOL LIFE AT CLIFTON AND
HSLSTON CHELSEA KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON.
And Nature, the old Nurse, took
The child upon her knee,
Saying, " Here is a story book
Thy Father has written for thee.
" Come wander with me," she said,
" Into regions 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.
HARLES KINGSLEY, son of Charles
Kingsley, of Battramsley in the New Forest,
was born on the I2th of June, 1819, at Holne
Vicarage, under the brow of Dartmoor, Devon-
shire. His family claimed descent from the
2 Charles Kingsley
Kingsleys of Kingsley or Vale Royal, in Dela-
mere Forest, and from Rannulph de Kingsley,
whose name in an old family pedigree stands as
" Grantee of the Forest of Mara and Mondrem
from Randall Meschines, ante 1128." Charles's
father was educated at Harrow and Oxford, and
was a man of cultivation and refinement, a good
linguist, an artist, a keen sportsman and natural
historian. He had been brought up with fair ex-
pectations as a country gentleman, but having
been left an orphan early in life, and his fortune
squandered for him during his minority, he soon
spent what was left, and at the age of thirty was
obliged, for the first time, to think of a profession.
Being too old for the army, he decided on the
Church, sold his hunters and land, and, with a
young wife, went for a second time to college, and
read for Holy Orders at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
He was curate of Holne when his son was born.
Charles's mother, born in the West Indies, but
brought up in England, was a remarkable woman,
full of poetry and enthusiasm. Keenly alive to
the charms of scenery, and highly imaginative, she
believed that all impressions made on her own
mind before the birth of her child, by the roman-
tic surroundings of her Devonshire home, would
be transmitted to him ; and in this faith gave her-
self up to the enjoyment of the exquisite scenery
of Holne and Dartmoor, the Chase, the hills, the
lovely river Dart which flowed below the grounds
of the little parsonage, and of every sight and
sound which she hoped would be dear to her
child in after life. These hopes were realized,
and though her little son left Holne when he was
six weeks old, and never saw his birthplace till he
Inherited Talents 3
was a man of thirty, yet Devonshire scenes and
associations had always a mysterious charm for
him.
" I firmly believe," he said in after life, " in the mag-
netic effect of the place where one has been bred ; and
have continually the true ' heimweh ' home-sickness of
the Swiss and Highlanders. The thought of the West
Country will make me burst into tears at any moment.
Wherever I am it always hangs before my imagination as
home, and I feel myself a stranger and a sojourner in
a foreign land the moment I get east of Taunton Dean,
on the Mendips. It may be fancy, but it is most real,
and practical, as many fancies are."
Charles Kingsley was an instance of the truth of
Mr. Darwin's theory, " That genius which implies
a wonderfully complex combination of high facul-
ties tends to be inherited ; " for, from his father's
side, he inherited his love of art, his sporting
tastes, his fighting blood the men of his family
having been soldiers for generations, some of
them having led troops to battle at Naseby,
Minden, and elsewhere. And from the mother's
side came, not only his love of travel, science, and
literature, and the romance of his nature, but his
keen sense of humor, and a force and originality
which characterized the women of her family of a
still older generation. His maternal grandfather,
Nathan Lucas, of Farley Hall, who had estates in
the West Indies and Demerara, and was for many
years a judge in Barbadoes, was a man of science
and letters ; a great traveller, and the intimate
friend of Sir Joseph Banks and the distinguished
John Hunter. His stories of tropical scenes, and
reminiscences of the old war times, during which
4 Charles Kingsley
he had been on board his friend Lord Rodney's
ship, the " Formidable," in the great naval
engagement off St. Lucia, were the delight of
Charles's boyhood, and woke up in him that
longing to see the West Indies which was at last
accomplished.
" We are," he says himself, when writing to Mr. Gallon,
in 1865, on his book on Hereditary Talent, where the
Kingsleys as a family are referred to, " but the disjecta
membra of a most remarkable pair of parents. Our tal-
ent, such as it is, is altogether hereditary. My father
was a magnificent man in body and mind, and was said
to possess every talent except that of using his talents.
My mother, on the contrary, had a quite extraordinary
practical and administrative power; and she combines
with it, even at her advanced age (79)1 my father's
passion for knowledge, and the sentiment and fancy of
a young girl. ..."
But to return. His father, after leaving Holne,
went to Clifton in Nottinghamshire ; and, while
curate there, the Bishop of Peterborough, Dr.
Herbert Marsh, made him his Examining Chap-
lain and gave him the living of Barnack to hold
for six years. Barnack Rectory was a fine old
house, built in the fourteenth century, and con-
tained a celebrated haunted room called Button
Cap, which is still looked upon with mysterious
dread by the parishioners. On one occasion, when
ill of brain fever, little Charles was moved into this
room, and for years afterwards his imagination was
haunted by the weird sights and sounds associated
with that time in his memory. To this he at-
tributed his strong disbelief in the existence of
ghosts in later years, telling his own children he
First Composition 5
had heard too many ghosts in old Button Cap's
room at Barnack to have much respect for them.
He thus describes the room to Mrs. Francis
Pelham :
EVERSLEY, 1864. " Of Button Cap he lived in the
Great North Room at Barnack. I knew him well. He
used to walk across the room in flopping slippers, and
turn over the leaves of books to find the missing deed,
whereof he had defrauded the orphan and the widow.
He was an old Rector of Barnack. Everybody heard
him who chose. Nobody ever saw him ; but in spite of
that, he wore a flowered dressing-gown, and a cap with
a button on it. I never heard of any skeleton being
found ; and Button Cap's history had nothing to do with
murder, only with avarice and cheating. Sometimes he
turned cross and played Polter-geist, as the Germans say,
rolling the barrels in the cellar about with surprising
noise, which was undignified. So he was always
ashamed of himself, and put them all back in their
places before morning. I suppose he is gone now.
Ghosts hate mortally a certificated National School-
master, and (being a vain and peevish generation) as
soon as people give up believing in them, go away in a
huff or perhaps some one had been laying phosphoric
paste about, and he ate thereof and ran down to the
pond, and drank till he burst. He was rats ! "
Charles was a precocious child, and his poems
and sermons date from four years old. His de-
light was to make a little pulpit in his nursery,
from which, after arranging the chairs for an im-
aginary congregation, and putting on his pinafore
as a surplice, he would deliver addresses of a
rather severe tone of theology. His mother,
unknown to him, took them down at the time,
6 Charles Kingslcy
and the Bishop of Peterborough, to whom she
showed them, thought them so remarkable for
such a young child, that he predicted that the
boy would grow up to be no common man.
These are among the specimens his mother
kept. The sermon was written at four years
old, the poem at four years and eight months.
FIRST SERMON
"It is not right to fight. Honesty has no chance
against stealing. Christ has shown us true religion.
We must follow God, and not follow the devil, for if
we follow the devil we shall go into that everlasting fire,
and if we follow God, we shall go to Heaven. When
the tempter came to Christ in the Wilderness, and told
him to make the stones into bread, he said, Get thee
behind me, Satan. He has given us a sign and an ex-
ample how we should overcome the devil. It is written
in the Bible that we should love our neighbor, and not
covet his house, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor his wife, nor
anything that is his. It is to a certainty that we cannot
describe how thousands and ten thousands have been
wicked; and nobody can tell how the devil can be
chained in hell. Nor can we describe how many men
and women and children have been good. And if we
go to Heaven we shall find them all singing to God in
the highest. And if we go to hell, we shall find all the
wicked ones gnashing and wailing their teeth, as God
describes in the Bible. If humanity, honesty, and good
religion fade, we can to a certainty get them back, by
being good again. Religion is reading good books, doing
good actions, and not telling lies and speaking evil, and
not calling their brother Fool and Raca. And if we re-
bel against God, He will to a certainty cast us into hell.
Childish Character 7
And one day, when a great generation of people came to
Christ in the Wilderness, he said, Yea ye generation of
vipers ! "
SONG UPON LIFE
" Life is, and soon will pass ;
As life is gone, death will come
We we rise again
In Heaven we must abide.
Time passes quickly ;
He flies on wings as light as silk.
We must die.
It is not false that we must rise again ;
Death has its fatal sting,
It brings us to the grave.
Time and Death is and must be."
Charles was a delicate, nervous, and painfully
sensitive child he twice had brain fever, and was
subject to dangerous attacks of croup. He was
always remarkable for his thirst for knowledge and
love of physical science. A friend remembers him
now, as a little boy in the study at Barnack, re-
peating his Latin lesson to his father, with his eyes
fixed all the time on the fire in the grate. At last
he could stand it no longer ; there was a pause in
the Latin, and Charles cried out, " I do declare,
papa, there is pyrites in the coal."
At Barnack the boy's earliest sporting tastes and
love of natural history were developed; for his
father was one of the old-fashioned type of Eng-
lish clergymen, " where," it has been said, " the
country gentleman forms the basis of the charac-
ter which the minister of the Gospel completes,"
and while an excellent parish priest was a keen
sportsman ; so as soon as Charles was old enough,
he was mounted on his father's horse in front of
8 Charles Kingsley
the keeper on shooting-days to bring back the
game-bag a rich one in days when wild duck
and coot, bittern and bustard, ruffs and reeves
were plentiful in the Fen. Butterflies of species
now extinct, were not uncommon then, and used
to delight the eyes of the young naturalist. The
sunsets of the Great Fen, all the more striking
from the wide sweep of horizon, were never for-
gotten, and low flat scenery had always a charm
for him in after life from the memory of those
days. " They have a beauty of their own, those
great Fens ; a beauty as of the sea, of boundless
expanse and freedom. Overhead the arch of
Heaven spreads more ample than elsewhere, and
that vastness gives such cloudlands, such sunrises,
such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else within
these isles." (Preface to " Hereward.") Again,
in a lecture given to a Mechanics' Institute at Cam-
bridge on the Fens, in 1867, he says:
" The fancy may linger without blame, over the shin-
ing 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 Hunting-
don, what a grand place, even twenty years ago, was that
Holme and Whittlesea, which is now but a black un-
sightly 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 place, when
backed by Caistor Hanglands and Holme Wood and the
patches of the primeval forest ; while dark green alders,
and pale green reeds, stretched for miles round the
Life at Clovelly 9
broad lagoon, where the coot clanked, and the bittern
boomed, and the sedge-bird, not content with its own
sweet song, mocked the notes of all the birds around;
while high overhead hung motionless, 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 Cottes-
more; and overhead rushed and whirled the skein of
terrified wild-fowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croak-
ing, 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 wild 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, bit-
terns, avosets; the very snipe, one hears, disdains to
breed. Gone, too, not only from the Fens, but from
the whole world, is that most exquisite of butterflies
Lyccsna dispar the great copper; and many a curious
insect more." f'Prose Idylls."]
This picture, stamped on the boy's young mind,
inspired him in after years in writing the story of
Hereward the Wake.
In 1830 Mr. Kingsley gave up the living of Bar-
nack, which he had held for Bishop Marsh's son,
and went into Devonshire, where Sir James Hamlyn
Williams, of Clovelly Court, presented him to the
rectory of Clovelly.
Here a fresh life opened for Charles ; a new edu-
TO Charles Kingsley
cation began for him; a new world was revealed
to him. The contrast between the sturdy Fen
men and the sailors and fishermen at Clovelly
between the flat Eastern Counties, and the rocky
Devonshire coast with its rich vegetation, its new
fauna and flora, and blue sea with the long Atlan-
tic swell, filled him with delight and wonder. At
Clovelly he and his brothers had their boat and
their ponies, and Charles at once plunged into the
study of conchology. His parents, both people of
excitable natures and poetic feeling, shared in the
boy's enthusiasm. The new elements of their life
at Clovelly, the unique scenery, the impression-
able character of the people and their singular
beauty, the courage of the men and boys, and the
passionate sympathy of the women in the wild life
of their husbands and sons, threw a charm of ro-
mance over the parish work. The people sprang
to touch the more readily under the influence of
their new rector a man, who, physically their
equal, feared no danger, and could steer a boat,
hoist and lower a sail, "shoot" a herring net, and
haul a seine as one of themselves. Mr. Kingsley's
ministrations in church and in the cottages were
acceptable to dissenters as well as church people.
And when the herring fleet put to sea, whatever
the weather might be, he would start off "down
street," for the Quay, with his wife and boys, to
give a short parting service, at which "men who
worked," and "women who wept," would join in
singing the 121 st Psalm out of the old Prayer
Book, as those only can who have death and
danger staring them in the face; and who,
"though storms be sudden, and waters deep,"
can boldly say:
Life at Clovelly 1 1
"To Sion's hill I lift mine eyes.
From thence expecting aid,
From Sion's Hill and Sion's God
Who heaven and earth has made."
Such memories made this Psalm, in Tate and
Brady's rough versification, more dear and speak-
ing to Charles in after life, than any hymn "ancient
or modern" of more artistic form. Such memo-
ries still make the name of Kingsley a household
word in Clovelly.
A life so full of romantic and often tragic inci-
dents must needs leave its mark on Charles's mind.
One day especially would rise up often before
him in contrast to the still summer brightness
of Clovelly:
"when the old bay lay darkened with the gray columns
of the water-spouts, stalking across the waves before the
northern gale; and the tiny herring-boats fleeing from
their nets right for the breakers, hoping more mercy even
from those iron walls of rock than from the pitiless howl-
ing waste of spray behind them ; and that merry beach
beside the town covered with shrieking women and old
men, casting themselves on the pebbles in fruitless ago-
nies of prayer, as corpse after corpse swept up at the feet
of wife and child, till in one case alone, a single dawn
saw upwards of sixty widows and orphans weeping over
those who had gone out the night before in the fulness
of strength and courage. Hardly an old playmate of
mine but is drowned and gone. 1 . . ."
Such were the scenes which colored his boy-
hood, were reflected in his after life, and produced
the song of "Three Fishers," which was not a mere
creation of his imagination, but the literal tran-
1 "North Devon." ("Prose Idylls.")
12 Charles Kingsley
script of what he had seen again and again in Dev-
onshire. "Now that you have seen the dear old
Paradise," he said to his wife, after her first visit to
Clovelly in 1854, "you know what was the inspira-
tion of my life before I met you."
In 1831, Charles went to Clifton, to Mr. Knight's
preparatory school, who describes him as an
" affectionate boy, gentle and fond of quiet,"
glad to leave the boys' school-room and take
refuge wtih his tutor's daughters and their gov-
erness; capable of making remarkable translations
of Latin verse into English; a passionate lover of
natural history ; and only excited to vehement
anger when the housemaid swept away as rub-
bish some of the treasures collected in his walks
on the Downs. The Bristol Riots, which took'
place in the autumn of 1831, were the marked
event in his life at Clifton. He had been a timid
boy previous to this time, but the horror of the
scenes which he witnessed seemed to wake up a
new courage in him.
"It was in this very City of Bristol, twenty-seven years
ago," he says, when giving a lecture there in 1858, "that
I received my first lesson in what is now called ' social
science/ and yet, alas, ten years elapsed ere I could
even spell out that lesson, though it had been written
for me (as well as for all England) in letters of flame,
from one end of the country to the other. I was a
school-boy in Clifton up above. I had been hearing of
political disturbances, even of riots, of which I under-
stood nothing, and for which I cared nothing. But on
one memorable Sunday afternoon I saw an object which
was distinctly not political. It was an afternoon of sul-
len autumn rain. The fog hung thick over the docks
and lowlands. Glaring through that fog I saw a bright
Clifton and Helston 13
mass of flame almost like a half-risen sun. That, I
was told, was the gate of the new jail on fire that the
prisoners had been set free; that . But why
speak of what too many here recollect but too well?
The fog rolled slowly upward. Dark figures, even at
that great distance, were flitting to and fro across what
seemed the mouth of the pit. The flame increased
multiplied at one point after another; till, by ten
o'clock that night, one seemed to be looking down
upon Dante's Inferno, and to hear the multitudinous
moan and wail of the lost spirits surging to and fro amid
that sea of fire. Right behind Brandon Hill how can
I ever forget it ? rose the central mass of fire, till the
little mound seemed converted into a volcano, from the
peak of which the flame streamed up, not red alone, but
delicately, green and blue, pale rose and pearly white, while
crimson sparks leapt and fell again in the midst of that
rainbow, not of hope, but of despair; and dull explo-
sions down below mingled with the roar of the mob, and
the infernal hiss and crackle of the flame. Higher and
higher the fog was scorched and shrivelled upward by
the fierce heat below, glowing through and through with
red reflected glare, till it arched itself into one vast dome
of red-hot iron, fit roof for all the madness down below
and beneath it, miles away, I could see the lonely
tower of Dundry shining red the symbol of the old
faith, looking down in stately wonder and sorrow upon
the fearful birth-throes of a new age. ... It was
on the Tuesday or Wednesday after that I saw an-
other, and still more awful sight. Along the north side
of Queen Square, in front of ruins which had been
three days before noble buildings, lay a ghastly row, not
of corpses, but of corpse-fragments, and there was one
charred fragment with a scrap of old red petticoat ad-
hering to it, which I never forgot which, I trust in
God, I never shall forget. It is good for a man to be
14 Charles Kingsley
brought, once at least in his life, face to face with fact,
ultimate fact, however horrible it may be ; and have to
confess to himself, shuddering, what things are possible
upon God's earth, when man has forgotten that his only
welfare is in living after the likeness of God." (Mis-
cellanies: Great Cities and their Influence for Good
and Evil.)
From Clifton Charles went to Helston School.
His parents had thought of both Rugby and Eton
for him. Dr. Hawtry, head-master of Eton, who
had heard of the boy's talent, was anxious to have
him there, and Dr. Arnold was at that time at Rug-
by. But the strong Tory principles and evangel-
ical views of his parents (in the former, Charles at
that time sympathized) decided them against Rug-
by a decision which their son deeply regretted
for many reasons, when he grew up. It was his
own conviction that nothing but a public school
education would have overcome his constitutional
shyness, a shyness which he never lost, and which
was naturally increased by the hesitation in his
speech "That fearful curse of stammering," as
he calls it, " which has been my misery since my
childhood." This was a sore trial to him through
life ; and he often wished, he said, as he entered a
room or spoke in public or private, that the earth
would open and swallow him up there and then.
Helston School was then under the head-master-
ship of the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, son of Sam-
uel Taylor Coleridge. The Rev. Charles A. Johns,
who was then second master, and a first-rate bot-
anist, soon made himself Charles's companion, en-
couraging his young pupil in all his tastes, and
going long rambles with him on the neighboring
Clifton and Helston 15
moors and on the sea-coast, in search of wild
flowers and minerals. Here Charles formed the
dearest and most lasting friendship of his life, with
Richard Cowley Powles, afterwards Fellow and
Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford.
"It was at Helston, in January, 1833," says Mr.
Powles, "when we were each in our fourteenth year,
that Charles and I first became acquainted. I remem-
ber the long, low room, dimly lighted by a candle on a
table at the further end, where the brothers were sitting,
engaged at the moment of my entrance in a course of
(not uncharacteristic) experiments with gunpowder.
Almost from the time of our first introduction Charles
and I became friends, and subsequently we shared a
study. Looking back on those school-boy days, one can
trace without difficulty the elements of character that
made his maturer life remarkable. Of him more than
of most men who have become famous it may be said
' the boy was father of the man.' The vehement spirit,
the adventurous courage, the love of truth, the impa-
tience of injustice, the quick and tender sympathy, that
distinguished the man's entrance on public life, were all
in the boy, as any of those who knew him then and are
still living will remember; and there was, besides, the
same eagerness in the pursuit of physical knowledge,
the same keen observation of the world around him,
and the same thoughtful temper of tracing facts to
principles.
" For all his good qualities, Charles was not popular
as a school-boy. He knew too much, and his mind was
generally on a higher level than ours. Then, too,
though strong and active, Charles was not expert at
games. He never made ' a score ' at cricket. In mere
feats of agility and adventure he was among the fore-
most ; and on one of the very last times I ever saw him
1 6 Charles Kingsley
he was recalling an old exploit in which he had only two
competitors. Our play-ground was separated by a lane,
not very narrow, and very deep, from a field on the op-
posite side. To jump from the play-ground wall to the
wall opposite, and to jump back, was a considerable trial
of nerve and muscle. The walls, which were not quite
on a level, were rounded at the top, and a fall into the
deep lane must have involved broken bones. This
jump was one of Charles's favorite performances.
Again, I remember his climbing a tall tree to take an
egg from a hawk's nest. For three or four days he had
done this with impunity. There came an afternoon,
however, when the hawk was on her nest, and on the in-
truder's putting in his hand as usual the results were dis-
astrous. To most boys the surprise of the hawk's attack,
apart from the pain inflicted by her claws, would have
been fatal. They would have loosed their hold of the
tree, and tumbled down. But Charles did not flinch.
He came down as steadily as if nothing had happened,
though his wounded hand was streaming with blood. It
was wonderful how well he bore pain. On one occa-
sion, having a sore finger, he determined to cure it by
cautery. He heated the poker red-hot in the school-
room fire, and calmly applied it two or three tunes till he
was satisfied that his object was attained. His own en-
durance of pain did not, however, make him careless of
suffering in others. He was very tender-hearted often
more so than his school-fellows could understand ; and
what they did not understand they were apt to ridicule.
The moral quality that pre-eminently distinguished him
as a boy, was the generosity with which he forgave
offence. He was keenly sensitive to ridicule ; noth-
ing irritated him more ; and he had often excessive prov-
ocation from those who could not enter into his feelings,
or appreciate the workings of his mind. But with the
moment of offence the memory of it passed away. He
Clifton and Helston 17
had no place for vindictiveness in his heart. Again and
again I have seen him chafed to intensest exasperation
by boys with whom half an hour afterwards he has mixed
with the frankest good-humor. How keen his feelings
were none of his surviving school-fellows will forget, who
were with us at the time his brother Herbert died.
Herbert had had an attack of rheumatic fever, but was
supposed to be recovering, when one afternoon he
suddenly passed away. Charles was summoned from
the room where we were all sitting in ignorance of what
had just taken place. All at once a cry of anguish burst
upon us, such as, after more than forty years, I remem-
ber as if it were yesterday. There was no need to tell
the awe-struck listeners what had happened.
"Charles's chief taste was for physical science; for
botany and geology he had an absolute enthusiasm.
Whatever time he could spare he gave to these. 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 of Helston, dear to every geolo-
gist. For the study of language he had no great liking.
Later on, Greek and Latin interested him because of
their subject-matter ; but for classics, in the school- boy
sense of the term, he had no turn. He would work hard
at them by fits and starts on the eve of an examina-
tion, for instance ; but his industry was intermittent and
against the grain. His passion was for natural science,
and for art. With regard to the former I think his zeal
was led by a strong religious feeling a sense of the
nearness of God in His works. Thus he writes at six-
teen years of age to one of two friends, in whose inter-
course with each other he was much interested : ' Teach
her a love of nature. Stir her imagination, and excite
her awe and delight by your example. Point out to her
the sublime and terrible, the lovely and joyous, and let
VOL. i. 2
1 8 Charles Kingsley
her look on them both with the same over-ruling feeling,
with a reference to their Maker. Teach her to love God,
teach her to love Nature. God is love ; and the more we
love Him, the more we love all around us.' In the same
letter occurs a passage bearing on art. It shows that, so
far as he had then gone, the writer had definite views
and conceptions of his own on subjects of which boys of
his age I am speaking of forty years ago had hardly
begun to think at all. 'I love paintings. They and
poetry are identical the one is the figures, the other
the names of beauty and feeling of every kind. Of all
the painters Vandyke and Murillo are to my mind the
most exquisitely poetical. Rubens is magnificent, but
dreadful. His " Day of Judgement " is the most awful
picture I ever saw. It rapt me in awe and horror, and
I stood riveted for many minutes in astonishment.
What must the original at Dusseldorf be in which the
figures are as large as life !'..."
In recalling the school days of his pupil, the Rev.
Derwent Coleridge writes :
"... Charles was 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 distin-
guished. Though not a close student, he was an eager
reader and inquirer, sometimes in very out of the way
quarters. I once found him busily engaged with an old
copy of ( Porphyry and lamblichus,' which he had fer-
reted out of my library. Truly a remarkable boy, origi-
nal to the verge of eccentricity, and yet a thorough boy,
fond of sport, and up to any enterprise a genuine out-
of-doors English boy. His account of a walk or run
would often display considerable eloquence ; the impedi-
ment in his speech, rather adding to the effect. In
manner he was strikingly courteous, and thus, with his
Clifton and Helston 19
wide and ready sympathies, and bright intelligence, was
popular alike with all."
From Helston Charles writes to his mother:
" I am now quite settled and very happy. I read my
Bible every night, and try to profit by what I read, and I
am sure I do. I am more happy now than I have been
for a long time ; but I do not like to talk about it, but to
prove it by my conduct. I am keeping a journal of my
actions and thoughts, and I hope it will be useful to
me. . . ."
May 16, 1835. "I have just received your letter
about the plants, and I wish to tell you that you must
not send the new plant away without either finding me
some more, or keeping one piece. I entreat you, get me
a bit. It can hardly be an arum, and they ought to be
able to find out whether it is an orchis or not. Dry me
as much spurge as you can as much bird's-nest
orchis, and plenty of tway-blade, of which there are
quantities in the long walk all the Arabis to be found,
woodruff, Marsh marigold, and cockle. Give my love to
Emily, and ask her to dry me some Adoxa. The plant
in the moors is in flower now. Menyanthes trifoliata is
its name, and we have found it here long ago. I ques-
tion whether that is really ' Arabis stricta ; ' Hirsuta, it is
very likely to be. If it is ' stricta,' it is a most noble
prize. If you go to Bragela you will find a very large
red-stalked spurge, ' Euphorbia amygdaloides,' growing
by the path, before you enter the wood, as you come up
from the beach pray dry me some of this. I have
found Spergula subulata, Vicea angustifolia, Asplenium
lanceolatum ! ! ! Scilla verna, Arenaria verna, Tees-
dalia nudicaulis, Ornithopus perpusillus, Carex strigosa,
Carex yEden, and several others. I believe there are
only two other habitats for Asplenium lanceolatum known.
I am only sorry we are not going to Ireland, but I shall
make the most of my time at Plymouth, and on the
2o Charles Kingsley
South Downs, where I shall be certain to get excellent
plants. The orchids are unequalled on the South
Downs. . . ."
February 24, 1836. I write to tell you that I am quite
well and very happy. I have finished Psyche (a Prose
Poem) as you asked me. There is no botany yet, but have
been studying a little mineralogy and geology. Tell Papa
I have a very good specimen of hornblende rock from the
Lizard, and that I have found in great quantities a very
beautiful mineral, but whether it is schorl or aximite, I
cannot determine. Tell him the gradations of mica,
slate, and Grauwacke slate are very beautiful and perfect
here. ..."
His early poems, which were many, show the
same minute observation and intense love of
nature. They show too, Mr. Powles says, "the
pains he took to describe exactly what he saw,
instead of running off into the vague generalities
and commonplaces with which young versifiers
often think to take poetry by storm." But while
seemingly absorbed in external objects, the boy
lived in a world of his own. He refers to this
when at Cambridge.
"Once the love of nature constituted my whole hap-
piness ; in the ' shadowy recollections ' and vague emo-
tions which were called up by the inanimate creation, I
found a mine of mysterious wealth, in which I revelled
while I knew not its value. The vast and the sublime,
or the excitement of violent motion, affected me almost
to madness ; I have shed strange tears, I know not why,
at the sight of the most luscious and sunny prospects.
But 'there has passed away a glory from the earth.'
Though I feel the beauty more exquisitely than ever, I
do not feel the emotions it produced. I do not shun
society as when a boy, because man and his coarseness
Chelsea 2 1
and his folly seemed only to disarrange my world of
woods and hills, and stream and sea, peopled not with
actual existences, but with abstract emotions which were
neither seen nor heard, while their presence was
felt "
In 1836, Lord Cadogan gave his father the living
of Chelsea, and the free happy country life was ex-
changed for a London home. It was a bitter grief
to Charles to leave the West Country, with its rich
legendary lore, its botany and geology to lose
the intellectual atmosphere of Mr. Coleridge's
house and his valuable library, and, above all, the
beautiful natural surroundings of both Helston
and Clovelly. The change to a London rectory,
with its ceaseless parish work, the middle-class
society of Chelsea, the polemical conversation all
seemingly so narrow and conventional in its tone,
chafed the boy's spirit, and had anything but a
happy effect on his mind.
" I find a doleful difference," he writes to Mr. Powles,
"in the society here and at Helston, paradoxical as it
may appear. . . . We have nothing but clergymen (very
good and sensible men, but), talking of nothing but
parochial schools, and duties, and vestries, and curates,
&c., &c., &c. And as for women, there is not a woman
in all Chelsea, leaving out my own mother, to be com-
pared to Mrs. C., or ; and the girls here have got
their heads crammed full of schools, and district visiting,
and baby-linen, and penny clubs. Confound! ! ! and
going about among the most abominable scenes of filth,
wretchedness, and indecency, to visit the poor and read
the Bible to them. My own mother says the places they
go into are fit for no girl to see, and that they should
not know such things exist. ... I have got here two
or three good male acquaintances who kill the time ; one
22 Charles Kingsley
is sub-secretary to the Geological society. ... As you
may suppose all this clerical conversation (to which I
am obliged to listen) has had a slight effect in settling
my opinions on these subjects, and I begin to hate these
dapper young-ladies-preachers like the devil, for I am
sickened and enraged to see ' silly women blown about
with every wind,' falling in love with the preacher instead
of his sermon, and with his sermon instead of the Bible.
I could say volumes on this subject that should raise both
your contempt and indignation. I am sickened with its
day-by-day occurrence." l
Charles now became a day student at King's
College, London, where for two years he had what
he called hard grinding work, walking up there
every day from Chelsea, reading all the way, and
walking home late, to study all the evening. One
of his tutors there speaks of him as " gentle and
diffident to timidity."
"I have never," writes another, Archdeacon Brown,
" forgotten the happy intercourse which I had in former
days with him, when he attended my lectures at King's
College. I well remember his zeal, taste, and industry in
his classical studies, and that he always took a high place
in the examinations . . . and some time after he was
known to fame, his expressing to me his gratitude for
having introduced him to the study of the works of
Plato, which he said had a great influence on his mind
and habits of thought."
Charles's life at Chelsea was not a bright one.
His parents were absorbed in their parish work,
1 These early experiences made him most careful in after life,
when in a parish of his own, to confine all talk of parish business
to its own hours, and never, as he called it, to " talk shop " before
his children, or lower the tone of conversation by letting it de-
generate into mere parochial and clerical gossip.
Chelsea 23
and their religious views precluded all public
amusements for their children. So in his spare
hours, which were few and far between, he com-
forted himself for the lack of all variety by de-
vouring every book he could lay hands on; old
plays, old ballads, and many a strange volume
picked up at old book-stalls in his walks between
Chelsea and King's College. Percy's " Reliques,"
Southey, Shelley and Coleridge's poetry he knew
by heart. His love for Wordsworth developed
later ; but from first to last Sir Thomas Malory's
" Morte d'Arthur," and Spenser's " Faerie Queene,"
were among his most beloved books. Spenser was
more dear to him than even Shakespeare, and in
later life, when his brain needed rest and refresh-
ment, especially on Sunday evenings, he would
turn instinctively to Spenser. He was always a
good French scholar, and at sixteen he knew
enough German to make a translation of Krum-
macher's "John the Baptist" for the Religious
Tract Society. Of his first return to Clovelly, in
1838, he writes to his- mother:
"Though I have not written to you I have not for-
gotten you. . , . And to prove my remembrance of
you,- I am reading my Bible and my Paley, and my
mathematics steadily, and am learning poetry by heart.
And, moreover, I am keeping a journal full of thoughts
and meditations and prose poetry, for I am not alone
enough to indite verses as I have not had any walks
by myself. However, I hope that the fine weather (which
now appears to be returning) will draw out my poetical
thoughts again. I am exceedingly well here quite a
different being since I came. . . . The dear old place
looks quite natural, and yet somehow it is like a dream
when I think of the total revulsion that two days' journey
24 Charles Kingsley
has made in me, and how I seem like some spirit in the
metempsychosis which has suddenly passed back, out of
a new life, into one which it bore long ago, and has
recovered, in one moment, all its old ties, its old feelings,
its old friends and pleasures ! O that you were but here
to see, and to share the delight of your affectionate son,
"C. KINGSLEY."
CHAPTER II
1838-42
AGED 19-23
CAMBRIDGE VISIT TO OXFORDSHIRE A TURNING POINT
IN LIFE UNDERGRADUATE DAYS DECIDES TO TAKE
ORDERS CORRESPONDENCE TAKES HIS DEGREE.
As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood,
And ebb into a former life, or seem
To lapse far back in some confused dream
To states of mystical similitude ;
If one but speaks or hems or stirs his chair,
Ever the wonder waxeth more and more,
So that we say, " All this has been before ;
All this hath been, I know not when or where."
So, friend, when first I look'd upon your face,
Our thought gave answer each to each, so true
Opposed mirrors each reflecting each
That tho' I knew not in what time or place,
Methought that I had often met with you,
And either lived in either's heart and speech.
TENNYSON (Early Sonnets).
IN the autumn of 1838 Charles Kingsley left
King's College, London, and went up to
Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he soon
gained a scholarship, being first in his year in
the May Examinations, and thence in the joy of
his heart he writes home:
May 31, 1839. " You will be delighted to hear that
I am first in classics and mathematics also, at the exam-
inations, which has not happened in the College for sev-
eral years. I shall bring home prizes, and a very decent
26 Charles Kingsley
portion of honor the King's College men are all de-
lighted. I am going to stay up here a few days longer if
you will let me. Mr Wand has offered to help me with
my second year's subjects, so I shall read conic sections
and the spherical trigonometry very hard while I am here.
I know you and mama will be glad to hear of my success,
so you must pardon the wildness of my letter, for I am so
happy, I hardly know what to say. ' You know I am not
accustomed to be successful. I am going to-day to a
great fishing party at Sir Charles Wale's, at Shelford."
The prize-book he chose was a fine edition of
Plato.
He made many friends in the University who
took delight in his society, some for his wit and
humor, others for his sympathy on subjects of
art, and deeper matters. " He was very popular,"
writes an intimate friend, " amongst all classes of
his companions ; he mixed freely with all, the stu-
dious, the idle, the clever, and the reverse, a most
agreeable companion, full of inforrriation of all
kinds, and abounding in conversation. Whatever
he engaged in, he threw his whole energy into ;
he read hard at times, but enjoyed sports of all
kinds, fishing, shooting, riding, and cards." He was
soon in the Magdalene boat, which was in that year
high on the river. A letter from the Rev. E. Pit-
cairn Campbell, recalls their undergraduate life.
" We happened to be sitting together one night on the
top of one of those coaches which in our time were sub-
scribed for by a number of men, los. or 1 each, for
various expeditions into the Fens for instance, when
Whittlesea lay broadly under water Sir Colman Rash-
leigh, the Dykes of Cornwall, or other driving men taking
the management, wearing wonderful coats and hats, and
providing the horses. I remember the drive very well.
Cambridge 27
The moon was high, and the air was frosty, and we talked
about sport and natural history. At last we got upon
fishing, and I invited him to come to my rooms to view
some very superior tackle. He came at once, inviting
me to join him in some of his haunts up the Granta and
the Cam, where he had friends dwelling, and hospitable
houses open to him. I never shall forget our first ex-
pedition. I was to call him, and for this purpose I had
to climb over the wall of Magdalene College. This I did
at 2 A.M., and about 3 we were both climbing back into
the stonemason's yard, and off through Trumpington, in
pouring rain all the way, nine miles to Duxfbrd. We
reached about 6.30. The water was clouded by rain, and
I in courtesy to him yielded my heavier rod in order that
he might try the lower water with the minnow. He was,
however, scarcely out of sight, before I spied, under the
alders, some glorious trout rising to caterpillars dropping
from the bushes. ... In ten minutes I had three of
these fine fellows on the bank. . . . This performance
set me up in his opinion, and he took me with him to
Shelford, where I executed the feat to which he refers in
his Chalk Stream Studies (" Prose Idylls"). Oh! what
pleasant talk was his, so full of poetry and beauty ! and,
what I admired most, such boundless information. Be-
sides these expeditions we made others on horseback,
and at times we followed the great Professor Sedgwick in
his adventurous rides, which the livery stable-keepers called
jolly-gizing ! 1 The old professor was generally mounted
on a bony giant, whose trot kept most of us at a hand-gal-
lop. Gaunt and grim, the brave old Northern man seemed
to enjoy the fun as much as we did his was not a hunting
seat neither his hands nor his feet ever seemed exactly
in the right place. But when we surrounded him at the
trysting-place, even the silliest among us acknowledged
that his lectures were glorious. It is too true that our
1 Professor Sedgwick gave Geological Field Lectures on horses
back to a class in the neighborhood of Cambridge.
28 Charles Kingsley
method of reaching those trysting-places was not legiti-
mate, the greater number preferring the field to the road,
so that the unhappy owners of the hones found it neces-
sary to charge more for a day's joOy-gizing than they did
for a day's hunting. To crown oar sports, we have now
only to add the all-absorbing boating. . . .**
In the summer of 1839 his father took country
duty for two months at Ipsden, in Oxfordshire,
and settled with his family in the little parsonage
house. On the 6th of July, Charles (then an un-
dergraduate) and his future wife met for the first
time. " That was my real wedding day" he said,
some fifteen years afterwards.
He was then full of religious doubts; and his
fece, with its unsatisfied, hungering, and at times
defiant look, bore witness to the state of his mind.
It had a sad longing expression too, which seemed
to say that he had all his life been looking for a
sympathy he had never yet found a rest which
he never would attain in this world. His peculiar
character had not been understood at home,
and his heart had been half asleep. It woke up
now, never to sleep again. For the first time he
could speak with perfect freedom, and be met with
answering sympathy; and gradually as the new
friendship (which yet seemed old from the
first more of a recognition than an acquaintance)
deepened into intimacy, every doubt, every thought,
every failing, was laid bare. Counsel was asked
and given, all things in heaven and earth dis-
cussed; and as new hopes dawned, the look of
hard defiance gave way to a wonderful tender-
ness, and a " humility more irresistible even than
his eloquence," which were his characteristics,
with those who understood him, to his dying day-
Oxfordshire 29
The Oxford Tracts had lately appeared, and,
while discussing them from the merely human and
not the religious standpoint, he fiercely denounced
the ascetic view of the most sacred ties which he
foresaw would result from them : his keen eye de-
tecting in them principles which, as he expressed
years afterwards in his preface to " Hypatia,"
must, if once adopted, " sap the very foundation
of the two divine roots of the Church, the ideas of
family and national life."
He was just like his own Lancelot in " Yeast,"
in that summer of 1839 a bold thinker, a hard
rider, a " most chivalrous gentleman " sad, shy,
and serious habitually; in conversation at one
moment brilliant and impassioned the next re-
served and unapproachable by turns attracting
and repelling : but pouring forth to the one friend
whom he could trust, stores of thought and feeling
and information, which seemed boundless, on every
sort of unexpected subject. It was a feast for any
Imagination and intellect to hold communion with
Charles Kingsley even at the age of twenty. The
originality with which he treated every subject was
startling, and his genius lit up each object it ap-
proached, whether he spoke of " the delicious
shiver of those aspen leaves," on the nearest tree,
or of the deepest laws of humanity and the contro-
versies of the day. Of that intercourse truly
might these friends each say with Goethe " For
the first time, I may well say, I carried on a con-
versation ; for the first time, was the inmost sense of
my words returned to me, more rich, more full, more
comprehensive from another's mouth. What I had
been groping for, was rendered clear to me ; what
I had been thinking, I was taught to see. . . "
30 Charles Kingsley
Two months of such communion passed away
only too quickly, and though from this time for
the next four years and a half, the two friends met
but seldom, and corresponded at rare intervals, a
new life had dawned for both, which neither ab-
sence nor sorrow, nor adverse circumstances, their
own difference of religious opinions, or the oppo-
sition of their relations, could extinguish. Before
he left Oxfordshire, he was so far shaken in his
doubts, that he promised to read his Bible once
more to pray to open his heart to the Light,
if the Light would but come. All, however, was
dark for a time, and the conflict between faith and
unbelief, and between hopes and fears was so fierce
and bitter, that when he returned to Cambridge, he
became reckless, and nearly gave up all for lost :
he read little, went in for excitement of every kind
boating, hunting, driving, fencing, boxing, duck-
shooting in the Fens, anything to deaden the
remembrance of the happy past, which just then
promised no future. But through all, God kept
him in those dark days for a work he little dreamed
of. More than once he had nearly resolved, if his
earthly hopes were crushed, to leave Cambridge
and go out to the Far West to live as a wild prairie
hunter ; to this he refers when for the first time he
found himself on the prairies of America on May
11,1874.
"We are at Omaha !" he wrote home, "and opposite
to us is Council Bluffs ! ! Thirty years ago the palaver-
ing ground of trappers and Indians (now all gone), and
to that very spot, which I had known of from a boy, and
all about it, I meant to go as soon as I took my degree,
if, ... and throw myself into the wild life, to sink or
swim, escaping from a civilization which only tempted me
A Turning Point 31
and maddened me with the envy of a poor man ! Oh !
how good God has been to me. Oh ! how when I saw
those Bluffs yesterday morning I thanked God for you,
for everything, and stared at them till I cried. ..."
Many years later, when Rector of Eversley, he
says, in speaking of this period to a stranger who
made full confession to him about his own doubts
and difficulties, " Your experiences interested me
deeply, and confirm my own. An atheist I never
was; but in my early life I wandered through
many doubts and vain attempts to explain to my-
self the riddle of life and this world, till I found
that no explanation was so complete as the one
which one had learnt at one's mother's knee.
Complete nothing can be on this side of the
grave, of which St. Paul himself said, that he
only saw through a glass darkly; but complete
enough to give comfort to the weary hearts of my
poor laboring folk, and to mine also, which is
weary enough at times. . . ."
As time went on his theological difficulties about
the Trinity and other Christian doctrines increased.
He revolted from what seemed to him then, to use
his own words, the " bigotry, cruelty, and quibbling,"
of the Athanasian Creed, that very Creed which in
after years was his stronghold ; and he had little
faith in the clergy with whom he came in contact.
" From very insufficient and ambiguous grounds in the
Bible, they seem unjustifiably to have built up a huge
superstructure, whose details they have filled in accord-
ing to their own fancies, or alas ! too often according to
their own interest. ... Do not be angry. I know I
cannot shake you, and I think you will find nothing flip-
pant or bitter no vein of noisy and shallow blasphemy
32 Charles Kingsley
in my doubts. 1 feel solemn and sad on the subject. If
the philosophers of old were right, and if I am right in my
religion, alas ! for Christendom ! and if I am wrong, alas !
for myself ! It is a subject on which I cannot jest. ... I
will write soon and tell you some of my temptations. . . ."
December, 1840. "You cannot conceive the mo-
ments of self-abasement and self-shame I have. . . .
My own philosophy and the wisdom of the heathens of
old, hold out no other mode of retracing my steps than
the thorny road of tears and repentance which the Chris-
tian belief acknowledges. But you believe that you have
a sustaining Hand to guide you along that path, an In-
vincible Protector and an unerring Guide. I, alas ! have
no stay for my weary steps, but that same abused and
stupefied reason which has stumbled and wandered, and
betrayed me a thousand times ere now, and is every mo-
ment ready to faint and to give up the unequal struggle.
I am swimming against a mighty stream, and I feel every
moment I must drop my arms, and float in apathy over
the hurrying cataract, which I see and hear, but have not
spirit to avoid. Man does want something more than his
reason! Socrates confessed that he owed all to his
daemon, and that without his supernatural intimations,
right and wrong, the useful and the hurtful were envel-
oped in mist, and that he alone smoothed to him the
unapproachable heights which conducted to the beautiful
and the good. So he felt ; but I have no spiritual Guide.
I am told that before I can avail myself of the benevo-
lence of Him in whom you trust, I must believe in His
Godhead and His Omnipotence. I do not do this.
And it is a subject on which I cannot pray. . . ."
January, 1841. ". . . I have an instinctive, per-
haps a foolish fear, of anything like the use of religious
phraseology, because I am sure that if these expressions
were used by any one, placed as I now am, to me, I should
doubt the writer's sincerity. I find that if I allow myself
ever to use, even to my own heart, those vague and trite
A Turning Point 33
expressions, which are generally used as the watchwords
of religion, their familiarity makes me careless, or rather
dull to their sense, their specious glibness hurrying me on
in a mass of language, of whose precise import I have no
vital knowledge. This is their effect on me. We know
too well what it often is on others. Believe, then, every
word I write as the painful expression of new ideas and
feelings in a mind unprejudiced by conventionality in
language, or (I hope) in thought ... I ask this be-
cause I am afraid of the very suspicion of talking myself
into a fanciful conversion. I see people do this often,
and I see them fall back again. And this, perhaps, keeps
me in terror lest I should have merely mistaken the emo-
tions of a few passionate moments for the calm convic-
tions which are to guide me through eternity. . . .
Some day I must tell you of the dreamy days of boy-
hood, when I knew and worshipped nothing but the phys-
ical ; when my enjoyment was drawn not from the kind-
ness of those around, or from the consciousness of good,
or from the intercourse of mankind, but from the semi-
sensual delights of ar and eye, from sun and stars, wood
and wave, the beaitttful inanimate in all its forms. On
the unexpressed and incomprehensible emotions which
these raised, on strange dilatation and excitement, and
often strange tenderness and tears without object, was my
boyhood fed. Moral sense I had not so strongly as men
of great minds have. And above all, I felt no allegiance
to the dispensation of fear, either from man or more
than man. Present enjoyment, present profit, brought
always to me a recklessness of moral consequences, which
has been my bane. ... I should tell you next, how the
beauty of the animate and the human began to attract
me, and how after lonely wanderings and dreamings, and
contemplation of every work of art, and every specimen
of life which fed me with the elements of beauty, the
Ideal began to expand, dim but glorious, before my boy-
ish eyes. I would tell you how I paused on that height
34 Charles Kingsley
awhile, nor thought that beyond there lay another Ideal
the reflected image of God's mind ; but that was
reserved for a later period. Here I sought happiness
awhile, but was still unsatisfied.
" I have not much time for poetry, 1 as I am reading
steadily. How I envy, as a boy, a woman's life at the
corresponding age so free from mental control, as to
the subjects of thought and reading so subjected to it,
as to the manner and the tone. We, on the other hand,
are forced to drudge at the acquirement of confessedly
obsolete and useless knowledge, of worn-out philosophies,
and scientific theories long exploded and, at last, to
find every woman who has made even a moderate use of
her time, far beyond us in true philosophy. I wish I
were free from this university system, and free to follow
such a course of education as Socrates, and Bacon, and
More, and Milton have sketched out. . . ." 2
1 The only poems of this date were "Twin Stars," and
" Palinodia."
2 It is but fair to him to say that in after years his riper judg-
ment made him more just to his University and her course of
studies, and in the preface to his Alexandrian Lectures, he speaks
of what he owes to his Alma Mater. " In the hey-day of youth-
ful greediness and ambition, when the mind, dazzled by the vast-
ness and variety of the universe, must needs know everything, or
rather know about everything, at once and on the spot, too many
are apt, as I have been in past years, to complain of Cambridge
studies, as too dry and narrow : but as time teaches the student,
year by year, what is really required for an understanding of the
objects with which he meets, he begins to find that his university,
in as far as he has really received her teaching into himself, has
given him, in her criticism, her mathematics, above all in Plato,
something which all the popular knowledge, the lectures, and in-
stitutions of the day, and even good books themselves, cannot
give, a boon more precious than learning, namely, the art of learn-
ing. That, instead of casting into his lazy lap treasures which he
would not have known how to use, she has taught him to mine for
himself; and has, by her wise refusal to gratify his intellectual
greediness, excited his hunger, only that he may be the stronger to
Undergraduate Days 35
CAMBRIDGE: February, 1841. "I strive daily and
hourly to be calm. Every few minutes to stop myself
forcibly, and recall my mind to a sense of where I am
where I am going and whither I ought to be tending.
This is most painful discipline, but wholesome, and much
as I dread to look inward, I force myself to it con-
tinually. ... I am reading seven to eight hours a day.
I have refused hunting and driving. My trial of this new
mode of life has been short, but to have begun it is the
greatest difficulty. There is still much more to be done,
and there are more pure and unworldly motives of
improvement, but actions will pave the way for motives,
almost as much as motives do for actions. . . . You
cannot understand the excitement of animal exercise
from the mere act of cutting wood or playing cricket to
the manias of hunting or shooting or fishing. On these
things more or less most young men live. Every
moment which is taken from them for duty or for reading
is felt to be lost to be so much time sacrificed to hard
circumstance. And even those who have calmed from
age, or from the necessity of attention to a profession,
which has become custom, have the same feelings flowing
as an undercurrent in their minds ; and, if they had not,
they would neither think nor act like men. They might
be pure and good and kind, but they would need that
stern and determined activity, without which a man can-
not act in an extended sphere either for his own good, or
for that of his fellow-creatures. When I talk, then, of
excitement, I do not wish to destroy excitability, but to
hunt and till for his own subsistence ; and thus, the deeper he
drinks, in after years, at fountains wisely forbidden to him while
he was a Cambridge student, and sees his old companions grow-
ing up into sound-headed and sound-hearted practical men, liberal
and expansive, and yet with a firm standing ground for thought
and action, he learns to complain less and less of Cambridge
studies, and more and more of that conceit and haste of his own,
which kept him from reaping the full advantages of her training."
Alexandria and her Schools. Four lectures, delivered at
Edinburgh.
36 Charles Kingsley
direct it into the proper channel, and to bring it under
subjection. I have been reading Plato on this very sub-
ject, and you would be charmed with his ideas. ... Of
the existence of this quality there can be no doubt, and
you must remember the peculiar trial which this " (allud-
ing to the necessity for hard reading and giving up all
amusement for the time being) " proves, to a young man
whose superfluous excitement has to be broken in like
that of a dog or a horse for it is utterly animal. . . .
As for my degree, I can yet take high honors in the
University, and get my fellowship. ... I forgot to thank
you for the books. I am utterly delighted with them."
The books referred to were Carlyle's works,
and Coleridge's "Aids to Reflection." Carlyle's
" French Revolution," sent previously by the same
friend, had had a remarkable effect on his mind
before he decided upon taking holy orders, in
establishing and intensifying his belief in God's
righteous government of the world. The "Mis-
cellanies," and " Past and Present," placed him
under a still deeper debt to Mr. Carlyle, whom he
spoke of as " that old Hebrew prophet, who goes
to prince and beggar and says, ' If you do this or
that, you shall go to Hell' not the hell that
priests talk of, but a hell on this earth."
During the spring of this year he decided on
the Church as his profession instead of the law.
His name had been down at Lincoln's-inn : but a
great change had passed over him, and thus he
speaks of it:
" I repent no resolution which I have made because
my determination was not the sudden impulse of a
moment but the expansion into clear certainty of plans
which have been most strangely rising up before me for
To Take Orders 37
many months. Day after day there has been an involun-
tary still small voice directing me to the Church, as the
only rest for my troubled spirit in this world or the
next. ... I am under a heavy debt to God . . . how
can I better strive to pay it than by devoting myself to
the religion which I have scorned, and becoming a
preacher of purity and holiness a determined and dis-
interested upholder of the only true and perfect system,
the Church of Christ. The time passed lately in sor-
row . . . has produced a most powerful and vivid
change in my every thought, feeling, and intention. I
believe and I pray. Can I be what I was ? . . . Every-
thing I do, in my studies, in my plans, in my actions is
now and shall be done in reference first to God . . .
and neither fame or vanity, or excitement of any kind
shall (if prayers will avail, as I know they will,) turn me
away from the steady looking forward to this end. ..."
May, 1841. "My only reasons for working for a
degree are that I may enter the world with a certain
prestige which may get me a living sooner. . . . Several
of my intimate friends here, strange to say, are going into
the Church, so that our rooms, when we are not reading,
are full of clerical conversation. One of my friends goes
up for ordination next week. How I envy him his
change of life. I feel as if, once in the Church, I could
cling so much closer to God. I feel more and more
daily that a clergyman's life is the one for which both my
physique and morale were intended that the profession
will check and guide the faulty parts of my mind, while it
gives full room for my energy that energy which had
so nearly ruined me ; but will now be devoted utterly, I
hope, to the service of God. My views of theoretical
religion are getting more clear daily, as I feel more com-
pletely the necessity of faith. . . ."
June 12, 1841. "My birth-night I have been for
the last hour on the sea-shore, not dreaming, but think-
ing deeply and strongly, and forming determinations
38 Charles Kingsley
which are to affect my destiny through time and through
eternity. Before the sleeping earth and the sleepless sea
and stars I have devoted myself to God ; a vow never (if
He gives me the faith I pray for) to be recalled. . . ."
To his mother he writes from Cambridge :
June, 1841. "I have been reading the Edinburgh
Review (April, 1841), on No. 90 of the Tracts for the
Times, and I wish I could transcribe every word, and
send it to * * * * Whether wilful or self-deceived, these
men are Jesuits, taking the oath to the Articles with
moral reservations which allow them to explain them
away in senses utterly different from those of their
authors. All the worst doctrinal features of Popery Mr.
Newman professes to believe in. God bless you, dearest
mother. I feel very happy, and very much inclined to what
is good more so, perhaps, and more calmly so, than I
ever felt before. God grant that this may last. I saw Bate-
son to-day, and settled with him as to hours, &c. . . ."
"... I send you my Sunday evening letter, as a re-
fresher to my own mind as well as yours. I am now set-
tled to reading for the next five weeks. . . ."
October, 1841. "I am going to try what keeping
every chapel will do to my mind. I am sure it ought to
sober and quiet it. I now really feel the daily chapels a
refreshment, instead of an useless and antiquated restraint,
as I used to consider them. I spent Thursday at Shel-
ford. I had great fun. Tell papa I hooked a trout so
large that I was three-quarters of an hour playing him, and
that he grubbed the hook out of his mouth after all. Of
course he will say that I was a clumsy fellow, but this
brute would have puzzled the ghost of Izaak Walton.
"Do not, dearest mother, make yourself unhappy
about * * * * 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."
Correspondence 39
January, 1842. " My degree hangs over my thoughts
like a vast incubus keeping me down, and every moment
which is not devoted to my foolish studies, seems wasted.
Alas ! that it should be so ! but I can endure another
month, and then feel myself at last free. . . . Send down
to Holne and make all requisite inquiries, for I wish for
the ' Far West ' as soon as the leaves begin to show. My
lodgings in Devonshire ought not to cost much. It will
be like a second childhood, a fresh spring in my life, for
I felt very wintry till lately. I feel deeply what Manfred
says of 'an order
Of mortals on the earth, who do become
Old in their youth, and die ere middle age,
Some perishing of pleasure some of study
Some worn with toil some of mere weariness
And some of wither'd, or of broken hearts.'
" I feel that if I had not one hope, I were one of those
my heart is much older than my years I feel that
within, which makes me far more happy, or more miser-
able than those around me, but all of it belonging to a
much later age than mine I shall be an old man before
I am forty thank God for it ! ... My heart is very full,
I am rather lonely, but it is foolish to droop in my prison,
when liberty will so soon be here. God bless you and
* * * *, and if you rejoice that you have borne a man into
the world, remember that he is not one like common men
neither cleverer nor wiser, nor better than the multitude,
but utterly different from them in heart and mind legis-
late for him accordingly.
" Your own boy,
"C. KINGSLEY."
While at College his physical strength was great.
He walked one day from Cambridge to London,
fifty-two miles, starting early and arriving in Lon-
don at 9 P. M., with ease. For many years after-
wards, a walk of twenty to twenty-five miles a day
40 Charles Kingsley
was simply a refreshment to him ; and during ex-
amination time he says :
" I have walked ten miles down the Cam to-day and
back, pike fishing. My panacea for stupidity and ' over-
mentation ' is a day in a roaring Fen wind."
In February he went in for his examination, and
while it was going on writes to an Oxford friend
who was in danger of losing high honors from
overwork :
February 6, 1842. ". . . I am miserable when I
think that you are wearing out mind and body by the
over-exertion which I hear you are using for your degree.
Are you not disquieting yourself after a vain shadow?
, . . Remember that your talents are a loan from God,
which must not be abused by over-exercise, and that it is
H sin to do anything now, which shall make you hereafter
less able to exert yourself. If you are now led away by
the ambition of the moment to propter vitam Vivendi
ferdere causas can you justify yourself to your own
heart ? Remember that discipline is not education, only
the preparation for it, and that your university studies are
only useful so far as they strengthen your mind to learn,
Judge, and systematize for itself after you leave college."
February 13. ". . . As to your degree, leave it in
God's hands. . . . You have been, I fear, too much
tccustomed to consider university honors as the end
and aim of a man's life, instead of seeing in them a mere
trial for studies higher and severer, as well as more
beneficial for the science of unfolding the great mystery
of our being, the voOev KCU TTOI of our wonderful humanity,
for the inquiry into the duties and the capabilities of
mankind, and its application to their and our own per-
fection. A discipline which shall enable us hereafter to
make ourselves and all around us, wiser, better, and
happier. This is the object of, or, rather, the only good
Takes His Degree 41
to be derived from university education; and if your
studies have any other aim, they are useless and hurtful ;
useless, because they do not benefit the surrounding mass
of mankind, who expect from you not the mere announce-
ment of your having taken a first class, but the active and
practical influence of your wisdom and piety in guiding
them upwards, and smoothing the rugged road of life for
them ; hurtful, because they turn away your mind to their
arbitrary standard of excellence, from the great hope
God ; from the great question ' What are we, and why are
we born ? ' from the great object that we may be perfect
even as our Father in Heaven is perfect. . . . Do not
imagine that I speak without sympathy of your honor-
able ambition ; I wish to see it more worthily directed.
I have felt it myself; and circumstances, more than my
own reason, have weaned me from it. I have been toil-
ing almost as hard as you, and in fact much harder than
my health would allow, for the last six months. . . .
All through life, I fear, or at least, all through youth, age,
and perhaps till we shake off the earthly husk, we must
more or less use weapons of the earth, if we would keep
ourselves in the station in which alone we can improve
ourselves, and do good ; but these weapons should be
only used as the student uses bodily exercise, to put his
animal health into that soundness which shall enable
him completely to employ his mental vigor. . . . My
degree, I have got z. e., my mathematical one. I
came out to my great astonishment, and that of my tutor,
a tolerable second-class, with very little reading. The
classical examination comes on on Monday, and whether
I shall get my first-class or not, is the rub. If I do not,
I have not health to accuse like you, but previous idleness
in my second and first year. So / shall have some cause
to repine, if man has cause to repine at anything. I read
myself ill this week, and have been ordered to shut up every
book till the examination, and in fact the last three weeks
in which I had to make a rally from the violent exertion of
Vol. 13
42 Charles Kingsley
the mathematical tripos, have been spent in agonies of
pain with leeches on my head . . . just when I ought
to have been straining every nerve. I was very fretful, at
first, but I have now, thank God, conquered it, and for
the last forty-eight hours not thought of the examination.
I cannot be low, I may be high. ... I am going
after my degree to read divinity for five months (I shall
be ordained, I hope, in September,) at a place called
Holne, in Dartmoor, Devon. ... I am going there
to recover my health, not my spirits I defy the world
to break them. And you will want calm and relaxation
after your labors. . . . Come down to see me. . . .
Whether you will despise hard beds and dimity curtains,
morning baths and evening trout-fishing, mountain mut-
ton and Devonshire cream, I do not know, but you will
not despise the calm of a few weeks in which to com-
mune with God in His works, and to strengthen mind
and body together, before you again commence your
labors ; for remember always, toil is the condition of our
being. Our sentence is to labor from the cradle to the
grave. But there are Sabbaths allowed for the mind as
well as the body, when the intellect is stilled, and the
emotions alone perform their gentle and involuntary
functions, and to such a Sabbath I will lead you next
summer."
An incident which occured during the examina-
tion, and was much talked of at the time, is recalled
by Mr. Kewley, Rector of Baldock :
" On one morning but one question remained of a
paper on mechanics, ' Describe a common pump.' Of
the internal machinery of the pump Kingsley was un-
able to render a scientific account, but of the outside
his vivid imagination supplied a picture which his facile
pencil soon transferred to paper. Under the heading,
' Describe a Pump,' he drew a grand village pump in the
midst of a broad green, and opposite the porch of an
Takes His Degree 43
ancient church. By the side of the pump stood, in all
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 humor; while around the pump
itself was a huge chain, padlocked, and surrounded by a
notice, ' This pump locked during Divine service.' This,
Kingsley sent up to the 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."
Dr. Bateson, Master of St. John's, his tutor
much beloved, in speaking of Charles Kingsley's
career, says :
" I look back with much satisfaction, and shall always
reflect with pride on my engagement to serve him in the
capacity of classical private tutor. . . . It is too true, as
no one lamented more than himself, that from various
causes he made but an indifferent use of the opportuni-
ties which his residence in Cambridge afforded him, at
all events for the greater part of the time. In this respect
he differs little from many of the men of poetic genius
who have been undergraduates at our universities.
Whether it" is that our system of training and of fre-
quent examinations, has something in it which is repul-
sive and uncongenial, or that their fervid and impulsive
natures are unable to brook the restraints of our discipline,
certain it is that many youths of most brilliant promise,
who have lived to achieve great things in after years, have
left our colleges with but little cause to congratulate them-
selves on time well spent or talents well employed. My
own relations with Charles Kingsley in those early days
were always agreeable, although I was unable to induce
him to apply himself with any energy to his classical
44 Charles Kingsley
work, until quite the close of his undergraduate career.
Then indeed, he seemed an altered man. With wonder-
ful ability and surprising quickness during the last few
months he made rapid strides, and I can well remember
admiring his papers, more especially those of Latin prose
and verse, which he sent up for the classical tripos. They
exhibited excellence and power, due far more to native
talent than to industry or study, and raised him to a place
in the first class of the classical tripos. For after all his
degree was a good one, as senior optime in mathematics,
and a first class in classics ; but I must add that it was
nothing compared to what might have been attained by a
man of his powers. If he had worked as an undergradu-
ate with only a small portion of the industry and energy
which he exhibited after he left Cambridge, there was no
academic distinction that would not have been within his
reach."
CHAPTER III
1842-1843
AGED 23-24
LEAVES CAMBRIDGE READS FOR HOLY ORDERS EXTRACTS
FROM LETTERS ORDAINED DEACON CURACY OF EVERSLEY
PARISH WORK PARTING WORDS.
" Blessed is he who has found his work ; let him ask no other
blessedness. He has a work, a life purpose ; he has found it, and
will follow it ! "
CARLYLE.
"Nothing is sweeter than Love, nothing more courageous,
nothing higher, nothing wider, nothing more pleasant, nothing
fuller nor better in heaven and earth ; because love is born of
God, and cannot rest but in God, above all created things.
" He that loveth flieth, runneth, and rejoiceth ; he is free and
not bound. He giveth all for all, and hath all in all ; because he
resteth in One Highest above things, from whom all that is good
flows and proceeds. Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of
trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of
impossibility ; for it thinks all things lawful for itself and all
things possible. It is therefore able to undertake all things, and
it completes many things, and brings them to a conclusion, where
he who does not love faints and lies down. Love watcheth, and
sleeping, slumbereth not. Though weary, love is not tired;
though pressed, it is not straitened ; though alarmed, it is not
confounded : but as a lively flame, and burning torch, it forces its
way upwards, and securely passes through all."
THOMAS A KEMPIS. Book III., chap. 5.
HE left Cambridge in February, exhausted in
body and mind, having by six months' des-
perate reading done work which should have
spread over three years. While studying for Holy
Orders, he had the offer of two curacies.
46 Charles Kingsley
CHELSEA: April, 1842. ". . . I hope to be or-
dained in July to the Curacy of Eversley in Hampshire.
In the midst of lovely scenery rich but not exciting.
And you will be with me in your thoughts, in my village
visits, and my moorland walks, when I am drinking in
from man and nature, the good and the beautiful, while I
purge in my vocation the evil, and raise up the falling and
the faint. Can I not do it ? for have I not fainted and
fallen ? And do I not know too well the bitterness that
is from without, as well as the more dire one, from within ?
. . . My reading at present must be exclusively con-
fined to divinity not so yours. You may still range
freely among the meadows of the beautiful, while I am
mining in the deep mountains of the true. And so it
should be through life. The woman's part should be to
cultivate the affections and the imagination ; the man's
the intellect of their common soul. She must teach him
how to apply his knowledge to men's hearts. He must
teach her how to arrange that knowledge into practical
and theoretical forms. In this the woman has the nobler
task. But there is one more noble still to find out
from the notices of the universe, and the revelation of
God, and the uninspired truth which He has made His
creatures to declare even in heathen lands, to find out
from all these the pure mind of God, and the eternal laws
whereby He made us and governs us. This is true sci-
ence ; and this, as we discover it, will replace phantoms
by reality, and that darkling taper of ' common sense,' by
the glorious light of certainty. For this the man must
bring his philosophy, and the woman her exquisite sense
of the beautiful and the just, and all hearts and all lands
shall lie open before them, as they gradually know them
one by one ! That glorious word know it is God's at-
tribute, and includes in itself all others. Love truth
all are parts of that awful power of knowing, at a single
glance, from and to alt eternity, what a thing is in its es-
sence, its properties, and its relations to the whole uni-
Extracts from Letters 47
verse through all time ! I feel awe-struck whenever I see
that word used rightly, and I never, if I can remember
use it myself of myself. But to us, as to dying Schiller,
hereafter many things will become plain and clear. And
this is no dream of romance. It is what many have ap-
proximated to before us, with less intellectual, and no
greater spiritual advantages ; and strange to say, some of
them alont buried in cloisters seldom in studies
often some, worst of all, worn down by the hourly
misery of a wife who neither loved them nor felt for
them : but to those who, through love, have once caught
a glimpse of ' the great secret,' what may they not do by
it in years of love and thought ? For this heavenly knowl-
edge is not, as boyish enthusiasts fancy, the work of a
day or a year. Youth will pass before we shall have made
anything but a slight approximation to it, and having
handed down to our children the little wisdom we shall
have amassed while here, we shall commend them to
God, and enter eternity very little wiser in proportion to
the universal knowledge than we were when we left it at
our birth. But still if our plans are not for time, but for
eternity, our knowledge, and therefore our love to God,
to each other, to ourselves, to every thing, will progress
for ever.
"And this scheme is practical too for the attainment
of this heavenly wisdom requires neither ecstasy nor rev-
elation, but prayer, and watchfulness, and observation,
and deep and solemn thought. And two great rules for
its attainment are simple enough ' Never forget what
and where you are ; ' and, ' Grieve not the Holy Spirit.'
And it is not only compatible with our duties as priests of
the Eternal, but includes them as one of the means to its
attainment, for ' if a man will do God's will, he shall know
of the doctrine, whether it be of God.' They do not
speak without scriptural as well as theoretical foundation,
who think that we may hereafter be called upon to preach
God to other worlds beside our own ; and if this be so,
48 Charles Kingslcy
does not the acquirement of this knowledge become a
duty? Knowledge and love are reciprocal. He who
loves knows. He who knows loves. Saint John is the
example of the first, Saint Paul of the second."
In the interval between Cambridge and his cu-
racy he began to write the life of St. Elizabeth of
Hungary, his ideal saint; which he illustrated
with his own exquisite drawings in pen and ink,
not intending it for publication, but as a gift book
to his wife on his marriage-day, if that day should
ever come.
"When it is finished," he says, "I have another work
of the same kind to begin a life of St. Theresa as
a specimen of the dreamy mystic, in contrast with the
working ascetic, St. Elizabeth, and to contrast the celi-
bate saint with the married one. For this we must read
Tersteegen, Jacob Behmen, Madam Guyon, Alban Butler,
Fe'nelon, some of Origen and Clemens Alexandrinus, and
Coleridge's ' Aids,' &c., also some of Kant, and a Ger-
man history of mysticism. In order to understand
puritanism and evangelicalism, we must thoroughly un-
derstand asceticism and mysticism, which have to be
eradicated from them in preaching our ' Message.' "
In the Introduction to this MSS. life he says :
"... You know what first turned my attention to
the Oxford Tracts ; but you do not know that my own
heart strangely yearned towards them from the first ; that
if they had not struck at the root of wedded happiness, I
too had been ensnared ! . . . But when I read I soon saw
that the Oxford writings contained only half truths : that
if what they said was true, much more what they did not
say, was true also ! . . . that Popery was their climax
the full development of their theory the abyss to which
Extracts from Letters 49
they were hurrying, dallying on the brink, afraid to plunge
in, and be honest ! Then came the question, ' What is
this Popery ? ' Was it altogether a lie ? Did all Christen-
dom, with the Apostles' Creed in their mouths and hearts,
live a truthless and irrational life for 800 years? Does
God ever so desert His Church ? I must know, I said,
the truth of this. The soundness of the Reformers, the
Catholicity of the English Church, is only certain to him
who knows the unsoundness of Popery. What are these
Fathers too? If they were fallacies superinduced after
their day, how came they, and why, and when ? Do men
forsake the world for a lie ? Do they die in martyrdom,
or self-inflicted tortures altogether for a lie ? Do they go
on crusade for a lie's sake ? Is any great deed the off-
spring of a lie ? Strange questions ! and not to be
answered in a day ! Away with those shallow Encyclo-
paedists and Edinburgh Reviewers, with their cant about
excited imaginations and popular delusions, and such
sense-bound trash ! Being hollow themselves, they
fancy all things hollow ! Being sense-bound themselves,
they see the energizing Spirit nowhere ! Was there not
a spiritual truth, or half truth, or counterfeit of truth in
those days as in others, the parent of all religion, all man-
liness, all womanhood, all work? Many such thoughts
Maurice's writings raised in me, many such Thomas
Carlyle's, many more the observation, that men never
lost sight of Christian charity in their controversies, ex-
cept when they did not see that it was a something, right
or wrong, which should supply a spiritual want, which
their opponents were struggling after. From them I
learnt somewhat of true catholicity of the love which
delights to recognize God's Spirit, through every alloy of
age, and character, and circumstance !
*' But I would not go on hearsays Hell is paved with
them. To the Fathers I went from Clement of Rome
downwards I began to read them, and my task is not half
done. At the same time I began with Popish books;
50 Charles Kingsley
not with books written by Protestants against them, or by
them against Protestants ; but with books written for Pap-
ists, in the full heyday of Rome's unsuspecting prosperity,
before attack was feared, when monks said what they
thought, and did what their private judgment and the
Church might choose without misgiving or constraint
The acts and the biographies of saints, pictures of Pop-
ish life, were my study : their notions and their theories
(doctrines men call them), were only worth noticing, as
they were the springs of living action. My question was,
'What must we do, if Popery be right? what if it be
wrong? ' My heart told me more strongly at every page,
that the battle was for life or death to Love 1 Is human
love unholy inconsistent with the perfect worship of
the Creator? Is marriage less honorable than virginity?
Are the duties, the relations, the daily food of men, of
earth or heaven ? Is nature a holy type or a foul prison
to our spirits ? Is genius the reflex of God's mind, or the
self-will of man ? These were the heart questions ! And
in this book I try to solve them. If I succeed, then we
are safe ! If not, then our honest home is Popery
Popery and celibacy. . . . And why have I chosen this
biography in particular? Because it is a fair sample of
the heart of a Papist, and the work of a Popish saint and
heroine, in the days when Popery had a life, a meaning
for good and evil a fair sample, for though superior to
all other saints, as gold is to brass, yet she alone shows
what the system will effect, when applied to a healthy
mind. For her affections had free vent, and did not
ulcerate to the surface in brutal self-torture, or lazy
mysticism, or unthankful melancholy, or blasphemous
raptures. And because, too, she was no ' hot-bed
saint,' laid on a sick bed, or pent up in a cloister, but
abroad and at work, bearing such fruit as Popery can
bear, a specimen of what it can effect, when unassisted
by an artificial and unnatural mode of life.
" Look at her ! . . . Look at the trials, the victories of
Extracts from Letters 51
her heart. ... It is an easy task, for her heart is pure
and simple enough to see the life blood of God's Spirit
thrilling through the transparent arteries, yet spotted,
alas ! enough from without and from within to let us per-
ceive the evil, and see it overcome with good ! "
CHELSEA : May 7, 1842. " I have not begun Palm-
er's work on the church yet, and shall not till after my
ordination. I am afraid it is not catholic enough to suit
me. I hate party books. Men think wrongly when they
suppose that in order to combat error, they must not allow
their opponents to have the least right on their side ; no
opinion in the world hardly is utterly wrong. We must
be catholic spirits, and I do not think we shall be the
less sound for having been, in the dreary years that are
past, tossed about, attached to parties. When I see a
man change his opinions often, I say, ' This might be made
a catholic and valuable mind, if he were well grounded
in first principles.' But alas ! men build on the sand.
My great prayer is to be led into all truth. . . . You ask
me whether I like Tersteegen. The whole book seems
to me a beautiful fallacy ; his great fault the putting out of
sight the fact of man's free will and moral responsibility.
" What do you mean by a ' father-confessor ' ? Do
not, pray, use such words? I am sure that it is un-
womanly for woman, and unmanly for man to make any
man his/tf/xfor-confessor. All that another should know
of our hearts should be told in the almost involuntary
overflowing of love, not in the midst of blushes and
trembling to a man who dares to arrogate moral superi-
ority over us. I cannot understand the term. I can
believe in and think them happy who have a husband-
confessor, and a wife-confessor but a father-confessor is
a term I do not allow. ... I can feel veneration as
much as any one perhaps too much, but there is a
Christian as well as political liberty, which is quite con-
sistent with High-Church principles, which makes the
52 Charles Kingsley
clergy our teachers not the keepers of our consciences^
but of our creeds.
" I am liking more and more the experimental religion
of the Low Church School. I am astonished at the
depth and subtlety of knowledge of the human heart,
which many of them display. It is so refreshing after the
cold dogmatism of the High Church. Both are good in
their way. But / want, like such men as Leighton,
Jewell, and Taylor, to combine both the dogmatic and
the experimental. We must be catholic ; we must hold
the whole truth ; we must have no partial or favorite
views of Christianity, like the Dissenters and the Tracta-
rians. The more I look, the more I see how superior
the divines of the seventeenth century were to the present
generation, and how they have been belied by the Trac-
tarians. . . . These are my secret opinions mind, I
say opinions not convictions. What a man is convinced
is true, that God constrains him to tell out fearlessly;
but his opinions by which are properly meant sus-
picions of the truth of a fact which are derived from in-
sufficient grounds, these opinions I say, he is bound to
keep to himself (except to ask advice on them if they be-
long to points where harm may be done), lest having
reason to change them, he should find out hereafter that
he has been teaching a lie ! ..."
June, 1842. " . . . Amuse yourself get poetry and
read it I have a book called ' Tennyson's Poems,' the
most beautiful poetry of the last fifteen years. Shall I send it
you ? . . . What is our present dreariness and weariness to
what it would have been two thousand years ago ? We have
now the Rock of Ages to cling to. Then, there would
have been nothing but mist no certainty but that of our
own misery no hope but the stillness of death Oh
we are highly favored. When I watch the workings of
the ancient minds, weighed down with the sense of the
mystery of life, and giddy with the ceaseless whirl of
Ordained Deacon 53
matter and mind through infinite obscurity, then I feel
how safe we are ! Such a man as Lucretius, or Pyrrho,
seeing nothing but eternal change motion heaven
and earth one vast dreary all-devouring vortex, sucking in
to destruction all beauty and life and goodness, and re-
producing it with that horrid change-destroyed con-
sciousness. Such men as these, to whom the universe
seemed one everlasting fiend-dance, infinite in its dreari-
ness, eternal in its howlings ; hero-minds, bowed down
with the terror of helplessness, and the degradation of
ignorance ; phantom-builders, trying in vain to arrange
the everlasting chaos round them : these were the wise
of old. And we, by the alchemy of God's Spirit, can by
prayer systematize the chaos, and walk upon the rolling
mists of infinity, as on solid ground. All is safe for
through all time, changeless and unbroken, extends the
Rock of Ages ! And must we not thank and thank for
ever, and toil and toil for ever for Him ? . . . Tell me
if I am ever obscure in my expressions, and do not fancy
that if I am obscure I am therefore deep. If I were
really deep, all the world would understand, though they
might not appreciate. The perfectly popular style is the
perfectly scientific one. To me an obscurity is a reason
for suspecting a fallacy. ..."
In July he was ordained deacon by Bishop
Sumner.
FARNHAM : July 10. " God's mercies are new every
morning. Here I am waiting to be admitted in a few
hours to His holy ministry, and take refuge for ever in
His Temple ! . . . Yet it is an awful thing ! for we
promise, virtually at least, to renounce this day not only
the devil and the flesh, but the world ; to do nothing,
know nothing, which shall not tend to the furtherance of
God's Kingdom, or the assimilation of ourselves to the
Great Ideal, and to our proper place and rank in the
great system whose harmony we are to labor to restore.
54 Charles Kingsley
And can we restore harmony to the Church, unless we
have restored it to ourselves ? If our own souls are dis-
cords to the celestial key, the immutable symphonies
which revelation gives us to hear, can we restore the con-
cord of the perplexed vibrations round us? ... We
must be holy ! and to be holy we must believe rightly as
well as pray earnestly. We must bring to the well of
truth a spirit purified from all previous fancies, all medi-
cines of our own which may adulterate the water of life !
We must take of that and not of our own, and show it to
mankind. It is that glory in the beauty of truth, which
was my idol, even when I did not practise or even know
truth. But now that I know it, and can practise it, and
carry it out into the details of life ; now I am happy ; now
I am safe ! . . .
" We need not henceforward give up the beautiful for
the true, but make the true the test of the beautiful, and
the beautiful the object of the true, until to us God
appears in perfect beauty ! Thus every word and every
leaf which has beauty in it, will be as loved as ever, but
they will all be to us impresses of the Divine hand, re-
flexes of the Divine mind, lovely fragments of a once
harmonious world, whose ruins we are to store up in our
hearts, waiting till God restores the broken harmony, and
we shall comprehend in all its details the glorious system,
where Christ is all in all ! Thus we will love the beauti-
ful because it is part of God, though what part it is we
cannot see ; and love the true, because it shows us how
to find the beautiful ! But back ! back to the thought
that in a few hours my whole soul will be waiting silently
for the seals of admission to God's service, of which
honor I dare hardly think myself worthy, while I dare
not think that God would allow me to enter on them
unworthily. . . . Night and morning, for months, my
prayer has been : * O God, if I am not worthy ; if my
sin in leading souls from Thee is still unpardoned ; if I
am desiring to be a deacon not wholly for the sake of
Curacy of Eversley 55
serving Thee ; if it be necessary to show me my weak-
ness and the holiness of Thy office still more strongly, O
God, reject me ! ' and while I shuddered for your sake at
the idea of a repulse, I prayed to be repulsed if it were
necessary, and included that in the meaning of my petition
' Thy will be done.' After this what can I consider my
acceptance but as a proof that I have not sinned too
deeply for escape ! as an earnest that God has heard my
prayer and will bless my ministry, and enable me not
only to rise myself, but to lift others with me ! Oh ! my
soul, my body, my intellect, my very love, I dedicate you
all to God ! And not mine only . .. to be an example
and an instrument of holiness before the Lord for ever, to
dwell in His courts, to purge His temple, to feed His
sheep, to carry the lambs and bear them to that foster-
mother whose love never fails, whose eye never sleeps, the
Bride of God, the Church of Christ ! . . . I would have
written when I knew of my success yesterday, but there
was no town post. Direct to me next at Eversley ! . . ."
And now, at the age of twenty-three, he settled
down in Eversley ; little thinking that with a short
interval it would be his home for thirty-three years.
The parish of Eversley 1 (Aper's lea) was then
* " You are right in taking the name of Eversley," says Mr.
Isaac Taylor, author of " Words and Places," " as one of the few
remaining records of the former existence of the wild boar* in
England. In Anglo-Saxon, a wild boar is eofor. An Anglo-Saxon
to commonly answers to modern English e, and Anglo- Saxon /to
modern English v, and Anglo-Saxon o often to English e. All
these changes are seen in the word seven, which in Anglo-Saxon
was written seofon. Hence Anglo-Saxon eofor would take the
English form ever (genitive tvers). Ever and eofor are not derived
from Latin, aper, but are only cousin words derived from a common
Aryan parent. The last syllable of Eversley is the Anglo-Saxon
ledh, which means a bosky place a sort of open pasturage more
or less wooded, like the unenclosed glades in the New Forest."
Mr. Taylor was not aware that part of the parish of Eversley
was called Bramshill ; *'. e., Brawnshill, or the Hill of Wild Boars,
which sustains his theory. M. K.
56 Charles Kingsley
mostly common land, divided into three hamlets,
each standing on its own little green, surrounded
by the moorland with young forests of self-sown
fir trees cropping up in every direction. It was on
the borders of Old Windsor Forest ; and the old
men could remember the time when many a royal
deer used to stray into Eversley parish. The
population was very scattered " heth croppers "
from time immemorial and poachers by instinct
and heritage. Every man in those days could
snare his hare, and catch a good dinner of fish in
waters not then strictly preserved; and the old
women would tell of the handsome muffs and
tippets, made of pheasants' feathers, not got with
money, which they wore in their young days. To
use their rector's own words, after he had lived
among them for sixteen years:
" The clod of these parts is the descendant of many
generations of broom squires and deer stealers ; the in-
stinct of sport is strong within him still, though no more
of the Queen's deer are to be shot in the winter turnip
fields, or worse, caught by an apple-baited hook hung
from an orchard bough. He now limits his aspirations to
hares and pheasants, and too probably once in his life
' hits the keeper into the river,' and re-considers himself
for a while over a crank in Winchester jail. Well, he
has his faults, and I have mine. But he is a thorough
good fellow nevertheless. Civil, contented, industrious,
and often very handsome ; a far shrewder fellow too
owing to his dash of wild forest blood from gypsy, high-
wayman, and what not than his bullet-headed and
flaxen-polled cousin, the pure South Saxon of the chalk
downs. Dark-haired he is, ruddy, and tall of bone;
swaggering in his youth : but when he grows old a thor-
ough gentleman, reserved, stately, and courteous as a
prince. . . ." " Winter Garden Prose Idylls. "J
Curacy of Eversley * 57
Of the peculiar feature of the parish its fir
trees including the three fine specimens on the
rectory lawn, which were his joy and pride, he
says:
" Whether, as we hold traditionally here, the Scotch fir
was re-introduced by James I. when he built Bramshill
for Henry the prince, or whatever may have been the
date of their re-introduction, here they are, and no one
can turn them out. In countless thousands the winged
seeds float down the southwest gales from the older trees ;
and every seed which falls takes root in ground which,
however unable to bear broad-leaved trees, is ready by
long rest for the seeds of the needle-leaved ones. . . .
Truly beautiful grand indeed to me it is to see young
live Nature thus carrying on a great savage process in the
heart of this old and seemingly all-artificial English land ;
and reproducing here, as surely as in the Australian bush,
a native forest, careless of mankind. . . ." ["Winter
Garden Prose Idylls."]
July i /th was Charles Kingsley's first day of
public ministration in Eversley Church. " I was
not nervous," he says, " for I had prayed before
going into the desk that I might remember that I
was not speaking on my own authority, but on
God's, and the feeling that the responsibility (if I
may so speak) was on God and not on me quieted
the weak terror I have of offending people."
Before his coming, the church services had been
utterly neglected. It sometimes happened that
when the rector had a cold, or some trifling ail-
ment, he would send the clerk to the church door
at eleven, to tell the few who attended that there
would be no service. In consequence the ale-
houses were full on Sunday and the church empty,
58 Charles Kingsley
and it was up-hill work getting a congregation
together.
For the first six weeks of his curate life he lived
in the rectory house, and the following letter con-
tained a sketch of the lawn and glebe from the
drawing-room windows and a plan of the room.
EVERSLEY RECTORY : July 14, 1842. " Can you
understand my sketch ? I am no drawer of trees, but the
view is beautiful. The ground slopes upward from the
windows to a sunk fence and road, without banks or
hedges, and then rises in the furze hill in the drawing,
which hill is perfectly beautiful in light and shade, and
color. . . . Behind the acacia on the lawn you get the
first glimpse of the fir-forests and moors, of which five-
sixths of my parish consist. Those delicious self-sown
firs ! Every step I wander they whisper to me of you,
the delicious past melting into the more delicious future.
* What has been, shall be,' they say ! I went the other
day to Bramshill Park, the home of the seigneur de pays
here, Sir John Cope. And there I saw the very tree
where an ancestor of mine, Archbishop Abbott, in James
the First's time, shot the keeper by accident! I sat
under the tree, and it all seemed to me like a present
reality. I could fancy the noble old man, very different
then from his picture as it hangs in our dining-room at
Chelsea. I could fancy the deer sweeping by, and the
rattle of the cross-bow, and the white splinters sparkling
off the fated tree as the bolt glanced and turned and
then the death shriek, and the stagger, and the heavy fall
of the sturdy forester and the bow dropping from the
old man's hands, and the blood sinking to his heart in
one chilling rash, and his glorious features collapsing into
that look of changeless and rigid sorrow, which haunted
me in the portrait upon the wall in childhood. He never
smiled again ! And that solemn form always spoke to
me, though I did not then know what it meant It is
Parish Work 59
strange that that is almost the only portrait saved in the
wreck of our family. 1 As I sat under the tree, there
seemed to be a solemn and remorseful moan in the long
branches, mixed with the airy whisper of the lighter
leaves that told of present as well as past ! I am going to
dine at one to-day, and walk all the cool of the evening,
for my head is sadly worn of late, and I have been ser-
mon-writing all the morning. My books are not come
yet, and I cannot set to work in earnest perhaps it is
as well, for I want rest, though I shall not forget about
* making fatigue a plea for indolence.' I go to the school
every day, and teach as long as I can stand the heat and
smell. The few children are in a room ten feet square
and seven feet high. I am going after dinner to read to
an old woman of 8 7 ; so you see I have begun. This is
a plan of my room. It is a large, low, front room, with a
light paper and drab curtains, and a large bow window,
where I sit, poor me, solitary in one corner. . . ."
July 1 6. ". . . The great mysticism is the belief
which is becoming every day stronger with me that all
symmetrical natural objects, aye, and perhaps all forms,
colors, and scents which show organization or arrange-
ment, are 'types of some spiritual truth or existence, of a
grade between the symbolical type and the mystic type.
When I walk the fields I am oppressed every now and
then with an innate feeling, that everything I see has a
meaning, if I could but understand it. And this feeling
of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp,
amounts to indescribable awe sometimes 1 Everything
i This picture of Archbishop Abbott, by Vandyke, came into
the family through William Kingsley, born 1626, Gentleman of
the Privy Chamber to Charles II., son of William Kingsley, Arch-
deacon of Canterbury, and Damaris his wife, who was a niece to
Robertus Abbott, Archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop
was a great friend of Lord Zouche, then owner of Bramshill Park,
and while on a visit there accidentally killed the keeper with a
bolt from his cross-bow aimed at a stag. He was suspended for a
time in consequence.
60 Charles Kingsley
seems to be full of God's reflex, if we could but see it
Oh ! how 1 have prayed to have the mystery unfolded, at
least hereafter ! To see, if but for a moment, the whole
harmony of the great system ! To hear once the music
which the whole universe makes as it performs His
bidding ! Oh, that heaven ! The thought of the first
glance of Creation from, thence! when we know even as we
are known I and He, the glorious, the beautiful, the
incarnate Ideal shall be justified in all His doings, and in
all and through all and over all ! When I feel that sense
of the mystery that is around me, I feel a gush of
enthusiasm towards God, which seems its inseparable
effect! ... All day, glimpses from the other world
floating motes from that inner transcendental life, have
been flitting across me, just as they used in childhood,
when the seen and the unseen were one, an undistinguish-
able twin mystery ; the one not yet forgotten, the other
not yet learnt so perfectly as to dazzle, by its coarse glare,
the spirit-perceptions which the soul learnt to feel in
another world. . . . Have you not felt that your real soul
was imperceptible to your mental vision, except at a few
hallowed moments ? that in every-day life the mind, look-
ing at itself, only sees the brute intellect, grinding and
working; not the Divine particle, which is life and
immortality, and on which the Spirit of God most prob-
ably works, as being most cognate to Deity ? . . . More
and more do I see daily the tremendous truth that all our
vaunted intellect is nothing nothing but a noble
mechanism, and that the source of feeling is the soul.
This thought begins to explain to me the mysteries of
moral responsibility and moral culture. ..."
Aug., 1842. "To-day it is hotter than yesterday, if
possible, so I wandered out into the fields, and have been
passing the morning in a lonely woodland bath a little
stream that trickles off the moor with the hum of bees,
and the sleepy song of birds around me, and the feeling
of the density of life in myriads of insects and flowers
Parish Work 61
strong upon me, drinking in all the forms of beauty which
lie in the leaves and pebbles, and mossy nooks of damp
tree roots, and all the lowly intricacies of nature which no
one stoops to see ; and while eye and ear were possessed
with the feeling that all had a meaning all was a type
a language, which we should know in heaven, the in-
tellect was not dreaming asleep, but alternately investigating
my essay- subject, and then wandering away to you. And
over all, as the cool water trickled on, hovered the
delicious sense of childhood, and simplicity, and purity
and peace, which every temporary return to a state of
nature gives ! A woodland bath to me always brings
thoughts of Paradise. I know not whether they are fore-
tastes of the simple bliss that shall be in the renovated
earth, or whether they are back glimpses into the former
ages, when we wandered Do you remember f beside
the ocean of eternal love !
" ' Hence in a season of calm weather,
When inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that eternal sea
That brought us hither !
Can see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.'
" I read some of the sermons by authors of ' Tracts for
the Times,' which you gave me. There is the same
moaning piety hi them, and something darker. I was
frightened at a sermon of Newman's on ' Christian
Reverence,' in which he tries to show that Christ used
to ' deter ' people and repel them ! He illustrates it by
the case of the young ruler, and says that He was severe
on Nicodemus, and that < He made Himself strange and
spake roughly' to those who inquired. This is very dark
and dismal. I had thought that we were to ' come boldly
to the throne of grace.' But, no! we are to return,
under Christianity, to the terrors of the law. We are to
become ' again entangled with the yoke of bondage*
(mind that verse), by having to expiate our own sins by
62 Charles Kingsley
fasting, alms, and penance ! Is this the liberty with which
Christ has made us free ? I declare (I speak under God's
correction and with reverence) that if these doctrines be
Christianity, we should be happier here, and safer here-
after, as Jews or heathens ! . . . Can you not see what
my horror of Popery and Tractarianism arises from ? Do
you not see that if you once allow of good works having
any expiatory power, you do away with all real morality,
because you destroy its disinterestedness ! If a man does
good works to be saved from hell by them, what is he but
selfish ? We ought to do good works from gratitude to
Christ, and from admiration of His character. . . .
" Do you not see the noble standard of Christian
morality, and its infinite superiority to this? . . . Talk-
ing of the Tractators so you still like their tone I And
so do I. There is a solemn and gentleman-like, and
gentle earnestness which is most beautiful, and which I
wish I may ever attain. But you have just as much rea-
son for following them, or even reading them much on
that account, as the moth has for fluttering round the
candle because it is bright. The case is hackneyed but
the analogy is perfect.
" The Christian religion is all through anthropomorphic,
or suited to the intellect and feelings of finite man, and
proposing the worship of a God, not only manifested as
similar to us in intellect and feelings, but even incarnate in
a human body. . . . Now this religion appeals to the
intellect of mankind for its truth, as you will find in many
parts of Scripture a plain fact that it is comprehensible
by that intellect ; that is to say, all the anthropomorphic
part of it. All that part again which connects \hisparticu-
lar scheme, with God's infinite scheme of eternity and the
whole universe, is transcendental, and not to be under-
stood, and there we must not intrude. Such are the
doctrines of the Trinity, Incarnation, Free will, and
Predestination, and the operation of the Holy Spirit.
Parish Work 63
But for all parts of the religion which belong particularly
to the Christian scheme, there we are commanded to
search the Scriptures and satisfy ourselves as thoroughly
as we can. Do not then assume a ' voluntary humility,'
which we are cautioned against, and of which we know
that it produced in the early ages the heresy of worship-
ping angels, because men thought they were too vile and
ignorant to address God.
"... The body the temple of the Living God. . . .
There has always seemed to me something impious in the
neglect of personal health, strength, and beauty, which
the religious, and sometimes clergymen of this day affect.
It is very often a mere form of laziness. ... I could not
do half the little good I do do here, if it were not for that
strength and activity which some consider coarse and de-
grading. Do not be afraid of my overworking myself.
If I stop, I go down. I must work. . . . How merciful
God has been in turning all the strength and hardihood I
gained in snipe shooting and hunting, and rowing, and
jack-fishing in those magnificent fens to His work !
While I was following my own fancies, He was preparing
me for His work. ... Is it not an awful proof that mat-
ter is not necessarily evil, that we shall be clothed in
bodies even in our perfect state ? Think of that ! ... It
seems all so harmonious to me. It is all so full of God,
that I see no inconsistency in making my sermons while
I am cutting wood ; and no ' bizarrerie ' in talking one
moment to one man about the points of a horse, and the
next moment to another about the mercy of God to
sinners. I try to catch men by their leading ideas, and
so draw them off insensibly to my leading idea. And so
I find shall I tell you ? that God is really permitting me
to do His work I find that dissent is decreasing ; people
are coming to church who never went anywhere before j
that I am loved and respected or rather that God's
ministry, which has been here deservedly despised, alas 1
64 Charles Kingsley
is beginning to be respected; and above all, that the
young wild fellows who are considered as hopeless by
most men, because most men are what they call ' spoony
Methodists,' /, e., effeminate ascetics dare not gainsay,
but rather look up to a man who they see is their superior,
if he chose to exert his power, in physical as well as in-
tellectual skill. So I am trying to become (harmoniously
and consistently) all things to all men, and I thank God
for the versatile mind He has given me. . . ."
This was one secret of his influence in Eversley.
He could swing a flail with the threshers in the
barn, turn his swathe with the mowers in the
meadow, pitch hay with the hay-makers in the past-
ure. He knew, too, every fox earth on the moor,
the " reedy hover " of the pike, the still hole where
the chub lay, and had always a word in sympathy
for the huntsman or the old poacher. With the
farmer he could discuss the rotation of crops, and
with the laborer the science of hedging and ditch-
ing. And in giving sympathy he gained power. It
was this year, in a great crisis of his life, that Mr.
Maurice's " Kingdom of Christ " was put into his
hands a book to which he always said that he
owed more than to any he had ever read. To some
it may seem strange that Carlyle's works should
have laid the foundation to which Coleridge's and
Maurice's were the superstructure : but Chevalier
Bunsen, in a remarkable passage in his " Hyppoly-
tus" (vol. ii. p. 21-23), where he strikes the point
of contact between the three authors, explains their
influence on such minds as Charles Kingsley's.
Circumstances now caused a long break in this
correspondence ; and the faith and patience with
which he met the trial may be seen in these part-
Working and Waiting 65
ing words, intended for one eye only, but from
which the following extracts have been made, in
the hope they may be a help to those who have
the same thorny road to travel without such a
friend and guide.
EVERSLEY: August, 1842. ". . . Though there may
be clouds between us now, yet they are safe and dry, free
from storm and rains our parted state now is quiet
gray weather, under which all tender things will spring up
and grow, beneath the warm damp air, till they are ready
for the next burst of sunshine to hurry them into blossom
and fruit. Let us plant and rear all tender thoughts,
knowing surely that those who sow in tears shall reap in
joy. ... I can understand people's losing by trusting
too little to God, but I cannot understand any one's los-
ing by trusting too much to Him ! ... Do not," he had
said previously, " suppose that I augur ill from our dis-
appointment rather the contrary. I have always been
afraid of being too successful at first. I think sorrow at
the beginning augurs well for the happiness of a con-
nection that must last for ever." . . . "There are two
ways at looking at every occurrence a bright and a
dark side. Two modes of action Which is most
worthy of a rational being, a Christian and a friend? It
is absurd, as a rational being, to torture one's self un-
necessarily. It is inconsistent in a Christian to see God's
wrath, rather than His mercy in everything. . . . How to
avoid this morbidity of mind ? By prayer. ' Resist the
devil and he will flee from you.' By turning your mind
from the dark view. Never begin to look darkly at a
subject, without checking yourself and saying, * Is there
not a bright side to this? Has not God promised the
bright side to me? Is not my happiness in my own
power ? Do I not know that I am ruining my mind and
endangering the happiness of those I love by looking
at the wrong side ? ' Make this your habit. Every gift
VOL. i. 4
66 Charles Kingsley
of God is good, and given for our happiness ; and we sin
if we abuse it. To use our fancy to our own misery is to
abuse it and to sin the realm of the possible was given
to man to hope, and not to fear in. ... If, then, the
thought strikes you that we are punished for our sins
mourn for them, and not for the happiness which they
have prevented. Rather thank God that He has stopped
us in time, and remember His promises of restoring us if
we profit by his chastisement ... In cases of love to
God and working to His glory in the first and second in-
tention read Taylor's 'Holy Living.' But eschew his
Popish fallacy about duties as different from perfections.
Every step in love and to God, and devotion to Him is a
duty ! That doctrine was invented to allow mankind to
exist, while a few self-conceited shut themselves up in a
state of unnatural celibacy and morbid excitement, in
order to avoid their duty, instead of doing it. Avoid the
Fathers, after Origen (including him), on this account
their theories are not universal. . . .
"... You may think too much ! There is such a
thing as mystifying one's self ! Mystifying one's self is
thinking a dozen thoughts in order to get to a conclusion,
to which one might arrive by thinking one getting at
ideas by an unnecessarily subtle and circuitous path :
then, because one has been through many steps, one
fancies one has gone deep. This is one form of want of
simplicity. This is not being like a little child, any more
than analyzing one's own feelings. A child goes straight
to its point, and it hardly knows why. When you have
done a thing, leave it alone. You mystify yourself after
the idea, not before. Second thoughts may be best
before action they are folly after action, unless we find
we have sinned. The consistent Christian should have
no second thoughts, but do good by the first impulse.
How few attain to this. I do not object to subtlety of
thought : but it is dangerous for one who has no scientific
guide of logic, &c.
Working and Waiting 67
" Aim at depth. A thought is deep in proportion as
it is near God. You may be subtle, and only perceive a
trifling property of the subject, which others do not. To
be deep, you must see the subject in its relation to God
yourself and the universe ; and the more harmoni-
ous and simple it seems, the nearer God and the deeper
it is. All the deep things of God are bright for God
is light. The religion of terror is the most superficial of
all religions. God's arbitrary will, and almighty power,
may seem dark by themselves, though deep, as they do to
the Calvinists ; but that is because they do not involve
His moral character. Join them with the fact that He is
a God of mercy as well as justice ; remember that His
essence is love ; and the thunder-cloud will blaze with
dewy gold, fall of soft rain, and pure light !
" Again : remember that habit, more than reason, will
cure one both of mystifying subtlety and morbid fear ;
and remember that habits are a series of individual volun-
tary actions, continued till they become involuntary. One
would not wish to become good by habit, as the Aristotle-
loving Tractarians do ; but one must acquire tones of
mind by habit, in cases in which intellectual, not moral
obliquity, or constitutional ill-health is the cause of fail-
ure. Some minds are too ' subjective.' What I mean is,
that they may devote themselves too much to the subject
of self and mankind. Now man is not ' the noblest
study of man.' God is the noblest study of man. He is
the only study fit for a woman devoted to Him. And
Him you can study in three ways. ist. From His
dealings in History. This is the real Philosophy of His-
tory. Read Arnold's ' Lectures on Modern History.'
(Oh ! why did that noblest of men die ? God have
mercy upon England ! He takes the shining lights from
us, for our national sins!) And read as he tells us to
read, not to study man a la Rochefoucault, but God a la
David!
"zd. From His image as developed in Christ the
68 Charles Kingsley
Ideal, and in all good men great good men David,
Moses, St. Paul, Hooker, the four Oxford martyrs,
Luther, Taylor, Howard. Read about that glorious
Luther! and like him strive all your life to free men
from the bondage of custom and self, the two great
elements of the world that lieth in wickedness ! Read
Maurice for this purpose, and Carlyle.
"3d. From His works. Study nature not scien-
tifically that would take eternity, to do it so as to reap
much moral good from it. Superficial physical science is
the devil's spade, with which he loosens the roots of the
trees prepared for the burning. Do not study matter for
its own sake, but as the countenance of God. Try to
extract every line of beauty, every association, every
moral reflection, every inexpressible feeling from it.
Study the forms and colors of leaves and flowers, and
the growth and habits of plants ; not to classify them,
but to admire them and adore God. Study the sky.
Study water. Study trees. Study the sounds and scents
of nature. Study all these, as beautiful in themselves,
in order to re-combine the elements of beauty; next,
as allegories and examples from whence moral reflections
may be drawn ; next, as types of certain tones of feeling,
&c. ; but remain (yourself) in God-dependence, superior
to them. Learn what feelings they express, but do not
let them mould the tone of your mind ; else by allowing
a melancholy day to make you melancholy, you worship
the creature more than the Creator. No sight but has
some beauty and harmony. Read geology Buckland's
book, and you will rise up awe-struck and cling to God.
" Study the human figure, both as intrinsically beautiful
and as expressing mind. It only expresses the broad
natural childish emotions, which are just what you want
to return to. Study 'natural language' I mean the
' language of attitude.' It is an inexhaustible source of
knowledge and delight, and enables one human being to
understand another so perfectly. Draw, learn to draw
Working and Waiting 69
and paint figures. If you can command your hand in
drawing a tree, you can in drawing a face. Perfect your
coloring. ... It will keep your mind employed on
objective studies, and save all morbid introversion of
mind brooding over fallen man. It will increase your
perception of beauty, and thereby your own harmony of
soul and love to God. Practise music, I am going to
learn myself, merely to be able to look after my singers.
. . . Music is such a vent for the feelings. . . . Study
medicine. ... I am studying it. ... Make yourself
thoroughly acquainted with the wages, wants, and habits,
and prevalent diseases of the poor wherever you go. Let
your mind freely forth. Only turn it inwards at prayer
time, to recollect sins of which you were conscious at the
time, not to look for fresh ones. They are provided
against by prayer for pardon of unintentional sins. What
wisdom in our Church ! She knew that if she allowed sin
hunting, people would fancy, like some Dissenters, that
pretending everything they had done was sinful, was a sign
of holiness. Let your studies, then, be objective entirely.
Look forward to the future with hope. Build castles if you
will, but only bright ones, and not too many. Better to live
in the Past. We cannot help thanking God for that!
Blessed Past! Think of all God has done "for us. ... Be
happy. . . . Weep, but let them be tears of thankfulness.
" Do not be too solicitous to find deep meanings in
men's words. Most men do, and all men ought to mean
only what is evident at first sight in their books (unless
they be inspired or write for a private eye). This is the
great danger of such men as Novalis, that you never know
how much he means. Beware of subtlety again. The
quantity of sounding nonsense in the world is incredible !
If you wish to be like a little child, study what a little
child could understand nature ; and do what a little
child could do love. Use your senses much, and your
mind little. Feed on Nature, and do not try to under-
stand it. It will digest itself. It did so when you were
70 Charles Kingsley
a baby. Look round you much. Think little and read
less. Never give way to reveries. Have always some
employment in your hands. When you are doing nothing
at night, pray and praise ! . . .
" See how much a day can do ! I have since nine this
morning, cut wood for an hour ; spent an hour and more
in prayer and humiliation, and thereby established a
chastened but happy tone, which lasts till now ; written
six or seven pages of a difficult part of my essay ; taught
in the school ; thought over many things while walking ;
gone round two-thirds of the parish visiting and doctoring ;
and written all this. Such days are lives and happy
ones. One has no time to be miserable, and one is
ashamed to invent little sorrows for one's self while one
is trying to relieve such grief in others as would kill us,
if we gave way to fancies about them.
" Pray over every truth, for though the renewed heart
is not ' desperately wicked,' it is quite ' deceitful ' enough
to become so, if God be forgotten a moment ! . . .
Keep a commonplace book, and put into it, not only
facts and thoughts, but observations on form, and color,
and nature, and little sketches, even to the form of beau-
tiful leaves. They will all have their charm, all do their
work in consolidating your ideas. Put everything into it.
. . . Strive to put every idea into a tangible form, and
write it down. Distrust every idea which you cannot put
into words ; or rather distrust your own conception of it
not so with feelings. Try to put everything in its place
in the great system . . . seeing the realities of Heaven
and Earth."
In speaking of this time to a friend placed in
somewhat similar circumstances, he writes after his
marriage :
" I have already been through that ordeal of separation
which now seems to threaten you; but my experience
Working and Waiting 71
may be valuable to you God knows how valuable it
was to me ; and that I rank that period of misery as the
most priceless passage of my whole existence. It taught
me to know marriage for a state so spiritual, so paradisaic,
that, like the kingdom of heaven, it is only through much
tribulation, through the purifying fire of affliction, man
can be fitted to enter into it. That separation taught me
to look at marriage as a boon from God, to be gained from
Him alone by earnest prayer, by intense repentance, and
complete confession of youthful sins. It taught me to
know that providence was a reality, and prayer the highest
sacrament ; that to the Blessed Lord alone we must look
for the fulfilment of our desires ; that these desires, which
men call carnal, are truly most spiritual, most beloved by
Him, and that He Himself, when we are fit for our bliss,
will work what the world might call a miracle, if necessary,
to join us and those whom we love. All this I have experi-
enced I know, and therefore I speak. I know how after
long misery, during which filial trust in God, with many
inconsistencies and ' backslidings,' was my only support, I
gained by prayer the transcendental and super-rational con-
viction that we should again meet within a certain period.
I know how that period passed on and on, and how the
night grew ever darker and ever more hopeless, until
when I was on the point of black despair within a few
days of the expiration of the period which I had involun-
tarily, and as it were by inspiration, fixed from a quarter
where I least expected by means of those who had been
most utterly opposed to me, suddenly came a ray of light
an immediate re-union and from that moment a run
of blessings heaped one on the other, as if the merciful
God were turned prodigal in His undeserved love, and
here I am. Therefore, take heart, my friend, only
humble yourself utterly ; lie still and say, ' My Father,
Thy will be done.' And why shouldn't it be with you
as it has been with me ? "
CHAPTER IV
1842-1843
AGED 23-24
A YEAR OF SORROW CURATE LIFE LETTER FROM COLO-
NEL W. BRIGHTER PROSPECTS PROMISE OF PREFER-
MENT CORRESPONDENCE RENEWED THE MYSTERY OF
LIFE IMPULSE ENTHUSIASM THE PENDULUM WAN-
DERING MINSTRELS LEAVES EVERSLEY.
" And show
That life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipped in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd with the shocks of doom
To shape and use."
TENNYSON.
A YEAR passed by of silence and self-discipline,
hard reading and parish duties. That sor-
row was doing its work, his own words to his
parents will testify.
"... Christianity heightens as well as deepens the
human as well as the divine affections. I am happy, for
the less hope, the more faith. . . . God knows what is
best for us, and very lucky that He does, for I am sure
we do not. Continual resignation, at last I begin to find,
is the secret of continual strength. ' Daily dying? as
Behmen interprets it, is the path of daily living. ..."
His mother paid him a visit in the autumn of
this year, and thus describes his home :
Curate Life 73
EVERSLEY : 1842. " Here I am, in a humble cottage
in the comer of a sunny green, a little garden, whose
flower-beds are surrounded with tall and aged box, is
fenced in from the path with a low white paling. The
green is gay with dogs, and pigs, and geese, some running
frolic races, and others swimming in triumph in a glassy
pond, where they are safe from all intruders. Every
object around is either picturesque or happy, fulfilling in
their different natures the end of their creation. . . .
Surely it must have been the especial providence of God
that directed us to this place ! and the thought of this
brightens every trial. There is independence in every
good sense of the word, and yet no loneliness. The
family at the Brewery are devoted to Charles, and think
they cannot do enough for him. The dear old man says
he has been praying for years for such a time to come,
and that Eversley has not been so blessed for sixty years.
Need I say rejoice with me. Here I sit surrounded by
your books and little things which speak of you. ..."
During his first year of curate life he had little
society outside his parish except at Sandhurst,
where he had friends in the Senior department of
the Military College; and he writes to an old
Cambridge companion, Mr. Wood, to beg for a
visit in his solitude.
" PETER !
" Whether in the glaring saloons of Almack's, or
making love in the equestrian stateliness of the park, or
the luxurious recumbency of the ottoman, whether break-
fasting at one, or going to bed at three, thou art still
Peter, the beloved of my youth, the staff of my academic
days, the regret of my parochial retirement ! Peter ! I
am alone ! Around me are the everlasting hills, and the
everlasting bores of the country ! My parish is peculiar
for nothing but want of houses and abundance of peat
bogs; my parishioners remarkable only for aversion to
74 Charles Kingsley
education, and a predilection for fat bacon. I am wast-
ing my sweetness on the desert air I say my sweetness,
for I have given up smoking, and smell no more. Oh,
Peter, Peter, come down and see me ! Oh that I could
behold your head towering above the fir-trees that sur-
round my lonely dwelling. Take pity on me ! I am
' like a kitten in the washhouse copper with the lid on ! '
And, Peter, prevail on some of your friends here to give
me a day's trout-fishing, for my hand is getting out of
practice. But, Peter, I am, considering the oscillations
and perplex circumgurgitations of this piece-meal world,
an improved man. I am much more happy, much more
comfortable, reading, thinking, and doing my duty
much more than ever I did before in my life. Therefore
I am not discontented with my situation, or regretful that
I buried my first-class in a country curacy, like the girl
who shut herself up in a band-box on her wedding night
(vide Rogers's ' Italy '). And my lamentations are not
general (for I do not want an inundation of the froth and
tide-wash of Babylon the Great), but particular, being
solely excited by want of thee, oh, Peter, who art very
pleasant to me, and wouldst be more so if thou wouldst
come and eat my mutton, and drink my wine, and admire
my sermons, some Sunday at Eversley.
" Your faithful friend,
" BOANERGES ROAR-AT-THE-CLODS."
His friend responded to his call. " I paid him
a visit," he says, " at Eversley, where he lived in a
thatched cottage. So roughly was he lodged that
I recollect taking him some game, which was dried
to a cinder in the cooking and quite spoiled ; but
he was as happy as if he were in a palace. . . ."
Another friend, Colonel W., thus recalls their
intercourse :
"... My memory often runs back to the days at
Sandhurst, when I used to meet dear Kingsley continually
Brighter Prospects 75
in his little curate rooms, at the corner of the Green at
Eversley; when he told me of his attachment to one
whom he feared he should never be able to marry, and
that he supposed that he should live the rest of his life
reading old books, and knocking his head against the
ceiling of his room, like a caged bird. And well I re-
member a particular Sunday, when walking with him to
his church in the afternoon, having dined with him at
mid-day. It was a lovely afternoon in the autumn
passing through the corn in sheaf, the bells ringing, and
people, young and old, gathering together near the
church. He, looking down on the Rectory-house, said
to me ' How hard it is to go through life without wish-
ing for the goods of others ! Look at the Rectory ! Oh,
if I were there with a wife, how happy,' &c. God
seemed to hear the desire of His creature, for when the
next year's corn was in sheaf, you were with him at the
Rectory. And he has told me in after years that his life
with you was one of constantly increasing love. I called
at his cottage one morning, and I found him almost
beside himself, stamping his things into a portmanteau.
' What is the matter, dear Kingsley?' 'I am engaged.
I am going to see her now to-day! I was so glad,
and left him to his joy. I loved Kingsley as well as man
can love man. . . ."
In September, 1843, his prospects brightened;
for, through the kindness of Lord Sidney Osborne,
a relation of his future wife, Lord Portman prom-
ised him a small living, and in the mean time
recommended him for the curacy of Pimperne,
near Blandford, which, with a good house, would
soon be vacant. The correspondence, which had
dropped for a year, was now resumed.
HELSTON : September, 1843. " What a thought
it is that there is a God ! a Father, a King ! a Husband
76 Charles Kingsley
not of individuals, that is a Popish fancy, which the
Puritans have adopted but of the Church of col-
lective humanity. Let us be content to be members;
let us be, if we may, the feet, lowest, hardest worked,
trodden on, bleeding, brought into harshest contact with
the evil world ! Still we are members of Christ's
Church ! . . . How fearfully and wonderfully we are
made. I seem all spirit, and my every nerve is a musical
chord trembling in the wind ! . . . and yet I am sane,
and it is all real. I could find no vent for my feelings,
this afternoon, but by bursting out into the Te Deum, to
no known chant, but a strange involuntary melody which
told all. If I could but sing now ! I used to know only
melancholy songs. I wandered about moaning in one
eternal minor key. ... In heaven we shall sing involun-
tarily. All speech will be song ! . . . Pray night and
day, very quittly, like a little weary child, to the good
and loving God, for everything you want, in body as well
as soul the least thing as well as the greatest. Nothing
is too much to ask God for nothing too great for Him
to grant : Glory be to Thee, O Lord ! and try to thank
Him for everything. ... I sometimes feel that eternity
will be too short to praise God in, if it was only for mak-
ing us live at all ! ... What blessings we have had I
How we must work in return for them. Not under
the enslaving sense of paying off an infinite debt, but
with the delight of gratitude, glorying that we are God's
debtors. . . .
"... What an awful weapon prayer is ! Mark xi.
24 saved me from madness in my twelve months' sor-
rows ; and it is so simple, and so wide wide as eternity,
simple as light, true as God himself; and yet it is just the
last text of Scripture which is talked of, or preached on,
or used ! Verily, ' when the Son of Man cometh shall He
find faith on the earth? '
The Mystery of Life 77
"... You must love these Cornish men ! they are
the noblest men in England strong, simple-hearted,
united, working ' One and all/ is their motto. Glori-
ous West country ! I told some of them the other day
that if I ever married it should be a Cornish woman.
. . . You must not despise their accent, for it is the
remains of a purer and nobler dialect than our own, and
you will be surprised to hear me when I am merry, burst
out into pure unintelligible Devonshire ; when I am very
childish, my own country's language comes to me like a
dream of old days ! . . ."
EVERSLEY : October. " About the wind's moaning.
It is a great mystery. All nations have fancied that there
may be evil spirits in it. It used to terrify me as a child,
and make me inexpressibly melancholy as a youth. But
no bad weather now has a lowering effect on me but
rather a calming one. Of course some of this is to be
attributed to my familiarity with night in all its characters.
And the moaning of the wind now seems,to me the groan-
ing and the travailing of the whole creation, under the
purifying changes, bitter and destructive, yet salutary, of
storms and thunder clouds ! In the renewed earth there -
will be no winter, no storms ! Perpetual, calm day ; with,
perhaps, just change enough for incident if incident be
not a necessity for fallen nature only ! . . ."
"... That is no metaphor, when the Psalmist calls
on all things to praise God, from the monsters of the
deep to ' worms and feathered fowls ! ' They are all
witnesses of God, and every emotion of pleasure which
they feel is an act of praise to Him ! I dare not say an
unconscious act ! This is not imagination, for imagina-
tion deadens the feelings (so men say, but I do not un-
derstand that word imagination is so much misused),
but /, when I feel thus, seem to see all the universe at
one glance, instinct with The Spirit, and feel ready to
turn to the first beggar I meet, and say, ' Come, my
78 Charles Kingsley
brother, all this is thine, as well as mine ! Come, and 1
will show thee thy goodly heritage ! ' Oh, the yearning
when one sees a beautiful thing to make some one else
see it too ! Surely it is of Heaven ! . . . ' Every crea-
ture of God is good, if it be sanctified with prayer and
thanksgiving ! ' This, to me, is the master truth of Chris-
tianity ! I cannot make people see it, but it seems to me
that it was to redeem man and the earth that Christ was
made Man, and used the earth ! . . . Can there be a
more glorious truth for us to carry out? one which will
lead us more into all love and beauty and purity in
heaven and earth? one which must have God's light of
love shining on it at every step, if we are to see it through
the maze of our own hearts and the artificialities of the
world ? ... All the events of our life, all the workings
of our hearts seem strangely to point to this one idea.
As I walk the fields, the trees and flowers and birds, and
the motes of rack floating in the sky, seem to cry to me :
' Thou knowest us ! Thou knowest we have a meaning,
and sing a heaven's harmony by night and day ! Do us
justice! Spell our enigma, and go forth and tell thy
fellows that we are their brethren, that their spirit is our
spirit, their Saviour our Saviour, their God our God ! '
" And every man's and woman's eyes too, they cry to
me, they cry to me through dim and misty stragglings :
'Oh do us justice! we have human hearts within! we
are not walking statues ! we can love, we can worship,
we have God's spirit in us, but we cannot believe it our-
selves, or make others believe it ! Oh teach us ! and
teach others to yearn for love and peace ! Oh make us
One. All the world-generations have but One voice !
How can we become One ? at harmony with God and
God's universe ! Tell us this, and the dreary, dark mys-
tery of life, the bright sparkling mystery of life, the cloud-
checkered, sun-and-shower mystery of life is solved ! for
we shall have found one home and one brotherhood, and
happy faces will greet us wherever we move, and we
Impulse 79
shall see God! see Him everywhere, and be ready to
wait for the renewal, for the Kingdom of Christ per-
fected ! We came from Eden, all of us : show us how
we may return, hand in hand, husband and wife, parent
and child, gathered together from the earth and the sea,
from the past and the future, from one creed and another,
and take our journey into a far country, which is yet this
earth. A world-migration to the heavenly Canaan,
through the Red Sea of Death, back again to the
land which was given to our forefathers, and is ours
even now, could we but find it I "
" I want to talk to you about Impulse. That word, in
its common use, is one of my enemies. Its proper and
original meaning, if it has any, is the exciting effect of the
will (the spiritual part) on the flesh. And where a man
acts from impulse, it is because his flesh is at harmony
with, and obeys, his spirit. I know what impulse is, when
it has driven me, in putting out a fire, through blazing
rafters and under falling roofs, by an awful energy which
must be obeyed. Now there is nothing, in this, sinful in
itself. On the contrary, if the will which drives be a
spiritual and holy will, it is the highest state of harmony
and health, the rare moments of life, in which our life is
not manifold, but one body and soul and spirit work-
ing together ! Such impulses have led martyrs to the
stake. Such an impulse kept the two women-martyrs at
Coventry in the midst of the flames loose and unbound !
Such an impulse drove Luther on through years and
years, till he overthrew the Popedom ! Such impulses
are exactly what the world despises, and crushes as en-
thusiasm, because they are opposed to the cold, selfish work
of the brute intellect because they make men self-sacri-
ficing, because they awaken all that childish earnestness
and simplicity, and gushing tears, and passionate smiles,
which are witnesses and reproofs to the world of what she
has lost, and therefore is trying to fancy she can do without 1
80 Charles Kingsley
Yet the world will devour the most exciting works of fiction
thereby confessing that 'romance' and 'enthusiasm*
have a beauty, even to her but one which she hates to
see practised, because her deeds are evil, and her spiritual
will is dead, or dying ! The fault of impulse is, that one's
whole life is not impulse ! that we let worldly wisdom
close again over the glimpse of heaven-simplicity in us,
and so are inconsistent ! and so we acknowledge (even
the most religious), the world's ways to be our general
rule, and impulse our exception ; discord our practice,
harmony our exception ; and then the world, who is very
glad after all to get religion on her side, says and truly,
Oh ! these religieux do hold our principles as the great
principles, and themselves avoid and despise 'enthusiasm' !
" People smile at the ' enthusiasm of youth ' that
enthusiasm which they themselves secretly look back at
with a sigh, perhaps unconscious that it is partly their own
fault that they ever lost it. Is it not strange, that the
only persons who appear to me to carry to the grave with
them the joyousness, simplicity, and lovingness and trust
of children, are the most exalted Christians ? Think of St.
John, carried into the Church at Smyrna, at the age of
ninety-nine, and with his dying breath repeating the same
simple words, ' Little children, love one another.' "
"... As to self-improvement, the true Catholic mode
of learning is, to ' prove all things,' as far as we can without
sin or the danger of it, and ' hold fast that which is good.'
Let us never be afraid of trying anything, though copied
from people of different opinions to our own. And let
us never, never be afraid of changing our opinions
not our knowledge. If we should find fasting unsuc-
cessful, we will simply give it up and so on with all
practices and opinions not expressed in Scripture. That
is a form of pride which haunts the more powerful minds,
the unwillingness to go back from one's declared opinion :
but it is not found in great child-like geniuses. Fools
The Pendulum 81
may hold fast to their scanty stock through life, and we
must be very cautious in drawing them from it fot
where can they supply its place ? Therefore, there is no
more unloving, heartless man-murderer, than the man who
goes about trying, for the display of his own ' talents/ to
shake people in their belief, even when that belief is not
sound. Better believe in ghosts ' with no heads and jack-
boots on,' like my Eversley people, than believe in nothing
but self! Therefore Maurice's loving, Christian rule is,
'Never take away from a man even the shadow of a
spiritual truth, unless you can give him substance in
return.' . . . But those who discover much truth
ay, who make perhaps only one truth really their own,
a living integral law of their spirits must, in develop-
ing it, pass through many changes of opinion. They must
rise, and fall back, and rise higher again, and fall and
rise again, till they reach the level table-land of truth,
and can look down on men toiling and stumbling in the
misty valleys, where the rising sunlight has not yet found
its way. Or perhaps, their own minds will oscillate, like
a pendulum, between Dualism and Unitarianism, or High
Church and Low Church, until the oscillations become
gradually smaller, and subside into the Rest of Truth !
the peace which passes understanding 1 I fancy it is a
law, that the greater the mind, the stronger the heart, the
larger will the oscillations be, but the less they will be
visible to the world, because the wise man will not act
outwardly upon his opinions until they have become
knowledge, and his mind is in a state of rest. This
I think the true, the only doctrine of Reserve reserve
of our own fancies, not of immutable truth. And one
thing more I do see that as with the pendulum, those
oscillations are caused by the very force which at last
produces rest; God's Spirit, working on a man, draws
him down towards rest, and he, by the elastic legerete of
the flesh, swings past the proper point into the opposite
extreme, and has to be drawn back again down. And
82 Charles Kingsley
another thing I see that the pressure of the surround-
ing air, which helps the force of gravity in producing rest,
is a true emblem of the force of healthy ties and duties,
and the circumstances of God's universe those things
which stand round. . . . Let a man once break free
from them, and from God's Spirit by self-will or heart-
lessness, and he will oscillate, as the pendulum would,
for ever ! He will become like one of the ancient
philosophers like the gnostics, like the enthusiasts
(ascetic-mystics often) of every age. . . ."
EVERSLEY : October 27 th. "... As to ' Honor
all men,' you are quite right. Every man should be
honored as God's image, in the sense in which Novalis
says that we touch Heaven when we lay our hand on
a human body ! . . . The old Homeric Greeks I think
felt that, and acted up to it, more than any nation. The
Patriarchs too seem to have had the same feeling. . . .
I have been making a fool of myself for the last ten
minutes, according to the world's notion of folly, for there
have been some strolling fiddlers under the window, and
I have been listening and crying like a child. Some quick
music is so inexpressibly mournful. It seems just like
one's own feelings exultation and action, with the
remembrance of past sorrow wailing up, yet without
bitterness, tender in its shrillness, through the mingled
tide of present joy; and the notes seem thoughts
thoughts pure of words, and a spirit seems to call to me
in them and cry, ' Hast thou not felt all this ? ' And I
start when I find myself answering unconsciously, ' Yes,
yes, I know it all ! ' Surely we are a part of all we see
and hear ! And then the harmony thickens, and all dis-
tinct sound is pressed together and absorbed in a confused
paroxysm of delight, where still the female treble and the
male base are distinct for a moment, and then one again
absorbed into each other's being sweetened and
strengthened by each other's melody. . . . Why should
I not cry ? Those men have unconsciously told me my
Wandering Minstrels 83
own tale ! why should I not love them and pray for them ?
Are they not my benefactors ? Have they not given me
more than food and drink? Let us never despise the
wandering minstrel. He is an unconscious witness for
God's harmony a preacher of the world-music the
power of sweet sounds, which is a link between every age
and race the language which all can understand, though
few can speak. And who knows what tender thoughts
his own sweet music stirs within him, though he eat in
pot-houses, and sleep in barns ! Ay, thoughts too deep
for words are in those simple notes why should not we
feel them? . . ."
"... I have heard from Dr. W. this morning, and he
asks me to take possession of Pimperne on April 6th.
So that is settled. I am not, and will not (please God
to help me, as He has hitherto) be anxious about any-
thing. Why should we weary out the little life we have
left in us, when He has promised to care for us, and
make us renew our youth, and heap us with everything
that is good for us ! ... I look forward with quiet
certainty of hope, day and night ; believing, though I
can see but little day, that all this tangled web will resolve
itself into golden threads of twined, harmonious, life,
guiding both us, and those we love, together, through
this life to that resurrection of the flesh, when we shall
at last know the reality and the fulness of life and love.
Even so come, Lord Jesus !
"... I am full of plans for Pimperne, or wherever
else God may place us. We must have a regular rule of
life, not so as to become a law, but a custom. . . .
Family prayers before breakfast; 8.30 to 10, household
matters; 10 to i, studying divinity, or settle parish
accounts and business our doors open for poor parish
visitants ; between i and 5, go out in all weathers, to visit
sick and poor and to teach in the school ; in the evening
we will draw, and feed the intellect and the fancy. . . .
84 Charles Kingsley
" We must devote from 9 to 12 on Monday mornings
to casting up our weekly bills and accounts, and make a
rule never to mention them, if possible, at any other time \
and never to talk of household matters, unless urgent, but
between 9 and 10 in the morning ; nor of parish business
in the evening. I have seen the gbic and misery which
not following some such rule brings down ! We must
pray for a spirit of order and regularity and economy in
the least things. . . .
" This is a very homely letter, but not an outward one ;
for all the business I have talked of has a spiritual mean-
ing. If we can but keep alive a spiritual meaning in
every little action, we shall have no need to write poetry
our life will be a real poem. ... I have been think-
ing of how we are to order our establishment at Pimperne.
While we are in Somersetshire (next January, a season of
solemn and delightful preparation for our work) we will
hunt out all the texts in the Bible about masters and ser-
vants, to form rules upon them ; and our rules we will
alter and improve upon in time, as we find out more and
more of the true relation in which we ought to stand to
those whom God has placed under us. ... I feel more
and more that the new principle of considering a servant
as a trader, who sells you a certain amount of work for a
certain sum of money, is a devil's principle, and that we
must have none of it, but return as far as we can to the
patriarchal and feudal spirit towards them. . . . r
And religion, that is, truth, shall be the only thing in our
house. All things must be made to tend to it; and if
they cannot be made to tend to God's glory, the belief in,
and knowledge of the spiritual world, and the duties and
1 He carried out this principle in daily life, and at his death all
the servants in his house had lived with him from seventeen to
twenty-six years, and would have given their lives for their
master. It is only just to add that the mistress of the house was
as much beloved as the master, and that they remained with her
after his death as tried and valued friends of the family rather
than servants. (M. K.)
Leaves Eversley 85
ties of humanity, they must be turned out of door as part
of ' the world.' One thing we must keep up, if we intend
to be anything like witnesses for God, in perhaps the
most sensual generation since Alaric destroyed Rome, I
mean the continual open verbal reference of everything,
even to the breaking of a plate, to God and God's prov-
idence, as the Easterns do. The reason why God's name
is so seldom in people's mouths is not that they reverence
Him, as they say, too much to talk of Him (!!!), but
because they do not think of Him !
" About our Parish. No clergyman knows less about
the working of a parish than I do ; but one thing I do
know, that I have to preach Jesus Christ and Him cruci-
fied, and to be instant in that, in season and out of sea-
son and at all risks. . . . And therefore I pray daily for
the Spirit of love to guide us, and the Spirit of earnestness
to keep us at work. For our work must be done by pray-
ing for our people, by preaching to them, in church and out
of church (for all instruction is preaching vide Hooker)
by leading them to pray and worship in the liturgy,
and by setting them an example ; an example in every
look, word, and motion, in the paying of a bill, the
hiring of a servant, the reproving of a child.
" We will have no innovations in ceremony. But we
will not let public worship become ' dead bones.' We
will strive and pray, day and night, till we put life into it,
till our parish feels that God is the great Idea, and that
all things are in Him, and He in all things. The local
means, to which so much importance is attached now-a-
days, by those very sects who pretend to despise outward
instruments, I mean the schools, charities, &c., I know
nothing of, in Pimperne. But we must attend to them
(not alter them), and make them tools for our work, which
is to teach men that there is a God, and that nothing
done without Him is done at all, but a mere sham and
makeshift. We must attend the schools and superintend
the teaching, going round to the different classes, and not
86 Charles Kingsley
hearing them to the letter, but trying by a few seasonable
words to awaken them to the spirit ; this is the distinction
which is so neglected between the duty of the parson and
his wife, and that of the schoolmaster and mistress. . . .
The Church Catechism must be the main point of instruc-
tion. Of the Bible, the Proverbs and the Gospels, with
parts picked from the leading points of Old Testament
history are all they need know. They will soon learn the
rest, if they can master the real meaning and spirit of
Solomon and St. John. Few have done that, and there-
fore the Bible is a sealed book to the very people who
swear by it, ;'. e. t by some twenty texts in it which lay
down their favorite doctrines plainly enough to be
patched into a system, and those not understood skin
deep. Let us observe the Ember days, . . . praying
over the sins of the clergy, one's own especially, . . .
entreating God's mercy on the country, as children of a
land fast hurrying to ruin in her mad love of intellectual-
ity, mammonism, and false liberty ! . . . I see the
dawn of better knowledge. Puseyism is a struggle after
it. It has failed already failed, because unsound ; but
the answer which it found in ten thousand hearts shows
that men are yearning for better things than money, or
dogmas, and that God's Spirit has not left us. Maurice
is a struggle after it Thomas Carlyle is a struggle all
more or less sound, towards true Christianity, and there-
fore true national prosperity. But will they hear the
voices which warn them ? . . . Now I must bid good
night, and read my psalms and lessons and pray. ..."
"... I must write to you, for my heart is full. I
have been thinking over the great question How we
are to learn and what we are to learn ? Are we to follow
blindly in the steps of others ? No ! Have they not
thought and acted for 1800 years? and see what has
come of it ! How little is known how little is done
how little love there isl And yet must we not remember
Leaves Eversley 87
that this dissatisfaction at existing evil (the feeling of all
young and ardent minds), this struggle to escape from the
' circumstance ' of the evil world, has a carnal counterfeit
the love of novelty, and self-will, and self-conceit,
which may thrust us down into the abysses of misrule and
uncertainly; as it has done such men as Shelley, and
Byron, and others ; trying vainly every loophole, beating
against the prison bars of an imperfect system ; neither
degraded enough to make themselves a fool's paradise
within it, nor wise enough to escape from it through
Christ, ' the door into the sheepfold,' to return when they
will, and bring others with them into the serene empyrean
of spiritual truth truth which explains, and arranges, and
hallows, and subdues everything?
" We must forth, we must live above the world, if we
would wish to enjoy the pure humanity which it fetters.
And how? We cannot go without a guide, that were
self-conceited ; but what guide shall we take ? Oh, I am
sick of doctors and divines ! Books ! there is no end of
them ; mud, fire, acids, alkalies, every foreign ingredient
contaminating pure truth. Shall we listen to the voice of
God's spirit alone ? Yes ! but where ? Has He not
spoken to those very book-makers ? And hath not every
man his own gift? Each hero the appointed witness of
some peculiar truth? Then, must we plunge again into
that vast, muddy, blind, contradictory book-ocean ? No !
Is there not one immutable book? One pure written
wisdom ? The Bible, speaking of God's truth in words
meant for men. There may be other meanings in that
book besides the plain one. But this I will believe, that
whatever mysticism the mystic may find there, the simple
human being, the lover of his wife, the father of children,
the lover of God's earth, glorying in matter and humanity,
not for that which they are, but that which they ought to
be and will be, will find in the Bible the whole mystery
solved an answer to every riddle, a guide in every diffi-
culty. Let us read the Bible as we never read it before.
88 Charles Kingsley
Let us read every word, ponder every word ; first in its
plain human sense then, if in after years we can see any
safe law or rule by which we may find out its hidden
meaning (beside the mystic of a vague and lawless
imagination, which makes at last everything true to him
who thinks it so, and all uncertain, because all depends
upon accidental fancy, and private analogies) ; if we can
find a rule, let us use it, and search into the deep things
of God, not from men's theories, but from His own words.
I do see glimmers of a rule, I see that it is possible to find
a hidden meaning in Scripture a spiritual, catholic,
universal application of each word that all knowledge
lies in the Bible ; but my rule seems as yet simple,
logical, springing from universal reason, not from private
fancy. ... In the present day a struggle is coming.
A question must be tried Is intellectual Science, or the
Bible, truth; and All Truth? And if the Bible be the
great treasure-house of wisdom, does it speak in its ful-
ness to the mass, or to the few? Are the Fathers and
the Tractarians, or the Germans, or the modern Puritans
right, and wherein lies the difference between them ?
' ' Then comes again the hungry book-ocean, with its
million waves, crying, * Read ! Read ! Give up doing,
that you may think. Across me is the only path to the
isles of the blest, to the temple of wisdom, to the thres-
hold of God's throne ! ' And there we must answer
again, ' Not so ! ' Oh that we had wings as doves, then
would we flee away and be at rest at rest from the
noise of many waters and rise up on wings into the
empyrean of truth ; for it is through the air, not across
the sea, that Heaven lies, and Christ is not yet on earth,
but in Heaven ! . . . Ay, better to stay humbly on
earth among the duties and affections of humanity, in
contact with, and acting on, the material and visible, con-
tented to walk till wings are given us wherewith to fly.
Better far ! for while we labor, dressing and tilling the
garden which God has given us, even though sin have
Leaves Eversley 89
made us ashamed, and our bodies, and souls, and spirits
become defiled in our daily work, and require to be
washed in Christ His blood ; and though there are thorns
and briers in the garden, and our fairest flowers will
sometimes fade, and the thorns may enter into our flesh
and fester, and disease may not be extinct within us ;
better, even thus, to stay and work, saying ' Here at
least we are safe, for God hath appointed this place to
us ! ' And even though on earth, the heaven will be
above us in our labors, the heaven of eternal truth and
beauty, to which we may look up, and take comfort, and
draw light and guidance, and learn to walk in the light
And the breeze of God's Spirit shall fan our weary brows ;
and the cheering voices of our fellow laborers shall call
to us through dark thickets, and across broad lawns ; and
every bird, and bud, and herb will smile on us and say,
'You have not despised us, you have dwelt among us,
and been our friend. Therefore, when we are renewed,
we will rejoice with you ! ' Oh ! will it not be better
thus to wait for The Renewal, and learn to love a! 1 things,
all men not as spirits only, not with ' a love for poor
souls' as the cant saying is (that unappreciable, loveless
abstraction), but as men and women, of body, soul, and
spirit, each being made one, and therefore all to be
loved ? Is it not better thus to love intellect as well as
spirit, and matter as well as intellect, and dumb animals,
and trees, and rocks, and sun, and stars, that our joy and
glory may be fuller, more all-embracing, when they are
restored, and the moan which the earth makes day and
night to God, has ceased for ever? Better far, than to
make ourselves sham wings, and try to fly, and drop
fluttering down, disgusted with our proper element, yet
bound to it, poor selfish isolated mystics !
" This is healthy materialism, for there is a truth even
in materialism. The man has hold of a reality who says
< This earth is, after all, to me the great fact.' God is
the great fact, objectively, in the pure truth of things ;
.Vol. 15
90 Charles Kingsley
but He can only become the great fact to us, subjectively,
by our acting on the truth, that matter, and all its ties
so interwoven with our spirits and our spiritual ties that it
is impossible to separate them that this earth, I say, is
the next greatest fact to that of God's existence, the fact
by which we know Him. This is the path the Bible
takes. It does not lay down any description of pure
Deity. It is all about earth, and men, and women, and
marriage, and birth and death, food and raiment, trees
and animals ; and God, not as He is in Himself, but as
He has shown Himself in relation to the earth, and its
history, and the laws of humanity. And all attempts at
arriving at the contemplation of God as He is in Himself,
appear to me as yet to have ended in forgetfulness of the
Incarnation, and of the Lws of humanity, and lastly of
God Himself, because men, not content with the mixed
idea of God which the Bible gives, have turned from it to
contemplate a ' pure ' ( ?) imagination of their own in-
venting. All trying to substitute sight for faith. For
we do not and cannot yet know what God is. No man can
approach to Him ! What is my conclusion from all this ?
for I have not wandered, though I seem to have done so.
" That our safe plan will be, as young and foolish chil-
dren, first to learn the duties of daily life, the perfect
ideal of humanity, from the Bible, and prayer, and God's
earth ; and thus to learn and practise love. Then if we
are required to combat error verbally, we will make
cautious voyages on the book-ocean ; reading one book
at a time, and knowing it thoroughly; not adhering to
any party ; not caring of what creed our author is,
because we shall read not to learn creeds and doctrines,
but to learn men to find out what it was in their hearts
which made them take up those creeds and doctrines,
that we may understand the pathology of the human soul,
and be able to cure its diseases. This is the true spiritual
mode of reading, and I see enough for us for the next
year or two in three books Maurice, Kant, St. Augustine.
Leaves Eversley 91
I will know the heart of that St. Augustine how he
came to be at once so right and so wrong, so far-sighted
and so blind. And I must have better rules of pure
reasoning than I have at present, so Kant must be read.
. . . But I wish to read hardly anything but the Bible for
some time to come ; for till we have felt all the ties of
humanity, we shall be unfit to judge of much that we
must look at, both in God's work, and God's earth, and
men's fancies. . . ."
"Do you wish to help me? Pray for my successor,
that he may serve God and God's people here better
than I have done ; and may build, on the foundation that
I have laid, such stuff as may endure in the day of trial !
And oh ! pray that he may save me from blood-guiltiness,
by warning those whom I have neglected. . ."
His last sermon was on Romans xiii. 7, on the
duty of obeying ministers entreating his people
to look up to his successor, and to pray for the
success of his work in Eversley.
" Now why do I say this to you ? In order that when
I am gone, you may do better without me, than you have
done with me. I know that I have neglected many of
you very much that I have done my whole duty to
none of you. May God forgiv^ me for it. But I have
tried o teach you that you are all God's children. I
have tried to teach you what a noble Church yours is
what a mine of wisdom there is in the Church Services
Psalms and Lessons. I have told you the use and mean-
ing of the two sacraments, and entreated you to use them
aright. I have told you that faith without works, profes-
sion without practice, is dead ; and I have shown you
that to live with Christ in the next world, you must live
like Christ in this. . . ."
CHAPTER V
1844-1847
AGED 25-28
MARRIAGE CURACY OF PIMPERNE RECTOR OF EVERSLEY
PARISH WORK PERSONAL INFLUENCE CANONRY OF
MlDDLEHAM NEEDS OF THE CHURCH BlRTH OF TWO
CHILDREN THE SAINT'S TRAGEDY WRITTEN.
SCHILLER at JENA, a few months after his marriage.
". , . Life is quite a different thing by the side of a beloved
wife, than so forsaken and alone, even in summer. Beautiful
Nature ! I now for the first time fully enjoy it, live in it. The
world again clothes itself around me in poetic forms ; old feelings
are again awakening in my breast. What a life I am leading
here ! I look with a glad mind around me ; my heart finds a
perennial contentment without it ; my spirit so fine, so refreshing
a nourishment. My existence is settled in harmonious composure
not strained and impassioned, but peaceful and clear. I look
to my future destiny with a cheerful heart ; now when standing at
the wished-for goal, I wonder -vith myself, how it has all happened
so far beyond my expectations. Fate has conquered the difficulties
for me ; it has, I may say, forced me to the mark. From the
future I expect everything. . . ."
THOMAS -CARLYLE, Life of Schiller,
IN December, 1843, he left Eversley, as he then
thought, for ever, " this beloved place, hallowed
to me by my prayers, my tears, my hopes, my
first vows to God my paean of pardoned sin and
answered prayers, . . ." and in January, 1844,
was married to Fanny, daughter of Pascoe Grenfell
and Georgiana St. Leger his wife. He was to
have taken possession of the curacy of Pimperne
in the spring: but the living of Eversley falling
Curacy of Pirn perne 93
vacant at that time, a strong effort was made by
the parishioners to get the curate who had worked
among them so indefatigably appointed rectorv
While the matter was pending, he went down into
Dorsetshire for the Sunday duty. The following
are extracts from his daily letters to his wife :
SALISBURY : March 28, 1844. "I have been walking
round the cathedral oh ! such a cathedral ! Perfect
unity, in extreme multiplicity. The first thing which
strikes you in it (spiritually, I mean) is its severe and
studied calm, even to * primness ' nothing luscious,
very little or no variation. Then you begin to feel how
one it is ; how the high slated roof and the double lancet
windows, and the ranges of graduating lancet arches filling
every gable, and the continued repetition of the same
simple forms even in the buttresses and string courses,
and corbel tables, and the extreme harsh angular simpli-
city of the mouldings all are developments of one idea,
and the idea so well expressing the tone of its date, the
end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth
centuries, I suppose, when the ' revival ' of the age of St.
Francis, St. Dominic, and dear St. Elizabeth had formed
itself, from the many private fancies of its great minds,
into one clear dark system of stern, elegant, soul-crushing
asceticism. And then from the center of all this, that
glorious spire rises the work of a slightly later hand
too huge, I believe, for the rest of the cathedral, its
weight having split and crushed its supporters. Fit
emblem of the result of curbing systems. The moment
the tower escapes above the level of the roof, it bursts
into the wildest luxuriance, retaining the general char-
acter of the building below, but disguising it in a thousand
fantastic excrescences like the mind of man, crushed
by human systems, and then suddenly asserting its own
will in some burst of extravagance, yet unconsciously re-
taining the harsh and severe lineaments of the school in
94 Charles Kingsley
which it had been bred. And then its self-willed fancies
exhaust themselves, and it makes one final struggle up-
ward, in a vast simple pyramid like that spire ; emblem
of the return, the revulsion rather, to ' pure ' and naked
spirituality. And when even that has dwindled to a point,
it must end if it would have either safety, or perma-
nence, or shelter, or beauty as that spire ends, in the
Cross / Oh ! that cathedral is an emblem, unconscious
to its builders, of the whole history of Popery from the
twelfth century to the days when Luther preached once
more Christ crucified for us For ever above us, yet for
ever among us! It has one peculiar beauty. It rises
sheer out of a smooth and large grass field, not struggling
up among chimneys and party-walls, but with the grass
growing to the foot of the plinth. . . . The repose is so
wonderful. It awes you, too, without crushing you. You
can be cheerful under its shadow, but you could not do a
base thing. ... It is lucky I took down my tackle, for I
am promised a day's trout fishing to-morrow. . . ."
March 31. " . . . I spent a delightful day yesterday.
Conceive my pleasure at finding myself in Bemerton,
George Herbert's parish, and seeing his- house and
church, and fishing in the very meadows where he, and
Dr. Donne, and Izaac Walton, may have fished before
me. I killed several trout and a brace of grayling, about
three quarters of a pound each a fish quite new to me,
smelling just like cucumbers. The dazzling chalk-wolds
sleeping in the sun, the clear river rushing and boiling
down in one ever-sliding sheet of transparent silver, the
birds bursting into song, and mating and toying in every
hedge-row everything stirred with the gleam of God's
eyes, when ' He reneweth the face of the earth ! ' I had
many happy thoughts ; but I am very lonely. No time
for more, as I am going to prayers in the cathedral. . . ."
DURWESTON: April i. "The road from here to
Pimperne, over the downs, is about three miles of the
most beautiful turf and natural woodland, through Gran-
Curacy of Pimperne 95
borne Chase. I never was before on a chalk forest. It
is very peculiar, and most beautiful. I like it better than
Devon and Welsh Moorland it is more simple, and yet
not so severe more tender in its soft grays and greens,
yet quite as sublime in the vast unbroken curves and
sweeps of the open downs. I cannot express myself. I
should like to preach a sermon on chalk downs and
another on chalk streams. They are so purely beauti-
ful. . . . More and more I find that Carlyle's writings do
not lead to gloomy discontent that theirs is not a dark
but a bright view of life ; * in reality, more evil speaking
against the age and its inhabitants is thundered from the
pulpit daily, by both Evangelical and Tractarian, than
Carlyle has been guilty of in all his works ; but he finds
fault in tangible original language they speak evil of
every one except their own party, but in such conven-
tional language that no ear is shocked by the oft-repeated
formulae of ' original sin ' and ' unconverted hearts,' and
so on. Let us in all things take Dr. Johnson's golden
rule : ' First clear your mind of cant ! ' "
April 19. ". . . Oh! blissful future. Oh! dreary
present. Yet do not think I repine : this separation,
though dreary, is not barren. Nothing need be barren to
those who view all things in their real light, as links in the
great chain of progression both for themselves and for the
universe. To us all time should seem so full of life :
every moment the grave and the father of unnumbered
events and designs in heaven, and earth, and the mind of
our God Himself all things moving smoothly and
surely, in spite of apparent checks and disappointments,
towards the appointed end ! Oh, happy Eversley ! how
we shall read, and learn, and work there ; how we shall
find there that these few months of unrest have not been
1 Many years after this, Professor Shairp, speaking of his first
conversation with Mr. Kingsley, said he told him that, often when
he was tired or depressed, the book he would turn to was Car-
lyle's " French Revolution."
96 Charles Kingsley
thrown away, that in them we shall have learnt what
might have escaped us in the quiet routine of a parishy
and yet which are wanted there as weeds and water-
flowers show themselves in the rapid eddies, while they
are buried deep in the still reaches of the river. . . ."
April 21. "I have been reading Wordsworth's
' Excursion,' with many tears and prayers too. To me
he is not only poet, but preacher and prophet of God's
new and divine philosophy a man raised up as a light
in a dark time, and rewarded by an honored age, for
the simple faith in man and God with which he delivered
his message ; whose real nobility is independent of rank,
or conventionalities of language or manner, which is but
the fashion of this world and passes away. I am trying,
in my way, to do good ; but what is the use of talking to
hungry paupers about heaven ? ' Sir,' as my clerk said to
me yesterday, ' there is a weight upon their hearts, and
they care for no hope and no change, for they know they
can be no worse off than they are.' And so they have no
spirit to arise and go to their Father ! S. G. O. 1 is deep
in statistics and abuses. I will never believe that a man
has a real love for the good and beautiful, except he
attacks the evil and the disgusting the moment he sees it !
Therefore you must make up your mind to see me, with
God's help, a hunter out of abuses till the abuses cease
only till then. It is very easy to turn our eyes away from
ugly sights, and so consider ourselves refined. The re-
fined man to me is he who cannot rest in peace with a
coal mine, or a factory, or a Dorsetshire peasant's house
near him, in the state in which they are. . . ."
CHELSEA, May. "I shall return to you Monday, per-
haps rector of Eversley ! A bright future opens. Blessed
be God. ..."
"... All is settled at last. Sir John has given me
the living, and he wishes me to settle there as soon as
1 The Rev. Sidney Godolphin Osborn, who had married a sister
of Mrs. Kingsley. (M. K.)
Rector of Eversley 97
possible. God never fails those who put their trust in
Him. . . . Congratulations, as you may suppose, are
plentiful . . . and I had the pleasure of bringing the
news myself to Eversley. ... I took the whole duty at
St. George's Hospital yesterday morning, and preached a
charity sermon at St. Luke's in the afternoon, and at the
old church in the evening ; and am very tired, body and
mind. . . . My brain has been in such a whirl that I
have had no time for deep thoughts. I can understand,
by the events of the last few days, how the minds of men
of business, at the very moment they are wielding the
vastest commercial or physical power, may yet be de-
graded and superficial. One seems to do so much in
' business,' and yet with how little fruit ! we bustle, and
God works. That glorious, silent Providence such a
contrast to physical power, with its blast furnaces and
roaring steam-engines ! Farewell till to-morrow. . . ."
He and his wife now settled in the Rectory at
Eversley ; and life flowed on peacefully, notwith-
standing the anxieties of a sorely neglected parish,
and the expenses of an old house which had not
been repaired for more than a hundred years.
Owing to the circumstances under which the
living fell vacant, the incoming tenant got no
dilapidation-money, and had arrears of poor's
rates and the pay of his predecessor's curate to
meet. The house was damp and unwholesome,
surrounded with ponds, which overflowed with
every heavy rain, and flooded not only the gar-
den and stables, but all the rooms on the ground
floor, keeping up master and servants sometimes
all night bailing out the water in buckets for hours
together ; and drainage works had to be done be-
fore it was habitable. From these causes, and
from the charities falling almost entirely on the
98 Charles Kingsley
incumbent, the living, though a good one, was for
years unremunerative ; but the young rector,
happy in his home and his work, met all diffi-
culties bravely. New clubs for the poor, shoe
club, coal club, maternal society, a loan fund and
lending library, were established one after another.
An intelligent young parishioner, who was till lately
schoolmaster, was sent by the rector to the Win-
chester Training College ; an adult evening school
was held in the rectory all the winter months ; a
Sunday-school met there every Sunday morning
and afternoon ; and weekly cottage lectures were
established in the outlying districts for the old and
feeble. The fact of there being no school-house
had the good effect of drawing the people within
the humanizing influences of the rectory, which
was always open to them, and will be long associ-
ated in the minds of old and young at Eversley
with the kind and courteous sympathy and the
living teaching which they all got from their pas-
tor. At the beginning of his ministry there was
scarcely a grown-up man or woman among the
laboring class who could read or write for as
boys and girls they had all been glad to escape
early to field work from the one school a stifling
room, ten feet square, where cobbling shoes, teach-
ing, and caning went on together. As to religious
instruction, they had had none. The church was
nearly empty before he came as curate. The
farmers' sheep, when pasture was scarce, were
turned into the neglected churchyard. Holy
Communion was celebrated only three times a
year; the communicants were few; the alms
were collected in an old wooden saucer. A
Rector of Eversley 99
cracked kitchen basin inside the font held the
water for Holy Baptism. At the altar, which
was covered by a moth-eaten cloth, stood one
old broken chair ; and so averse were the church-
wardens to any change, that when the rector made
a proposal for monthly communions, it was only
accepted on his promising himself to supply the
wine for the extra celebrations. 1
The evil results of such years of neglect could
only be conquered by incessant labor, and his
whole energies were devoted to the parish. He
had to redeem it from barbarism: but it was a
gentle barbarism, for the people were a kindly
people, civil and grateful for notice, and not
demoralized by indiscriminate almsgiving. He
made a point of talking to the men and boys at
their field work, and was soon personally intimate
with every soul in the parish, from the mothers at
their wash-tubs to the babies in the cradle, for
whom he always had a loving word or look.
Nothing escaped his eye. That hunger for
knowledge on every subject which characterized
him through life, and made him eager to learn
from every laboring man what he could tell of his
own farm-work or the traditions of the place, had
put him when he was curate on an easy human
footing with the parishioners ; so that he soon got
the parish thoroughly in hand. It was by daily
house-to-house visiting in the week, still more
than his church services, that he acquired his in-
fluence. If a man or woman were suffering or
dying, he would go to them five and six times a
1 The church was renovated, repaired, and decorated about
eighteen years later ; and the churchyard was enlarged and planted
with shrubs. (M. K.)
ioo Charles Kingsley
day and night as well as day for his own
heart's sake as well as for their soul's sake.
Such visiting was very rare in those days. But,
then, to use his first curate's words, "What re-
spect he had for the poor ! I can think," he says,
" of no other word. It was not simply that he
cared for them exceedingly, and was kind, feeling,
sympathetic, that he would take any amount of
trouble for them, that those whom he employed
became simply devoted to him. It was far more
than this. There was in him a delicate, deep re-
spect for the poor a positive looking up to them,
for His dear sake who ' became poor; ' for the
good which he saw in them, for the still greater
good which he hoped to see and strove that he
might see in them. . . ."
At this time he seldom dined out ; never during
the winter months, when the adult school and the
cottage readings took up six evenings in the week ;
he was uneasy away from his work, and rarely left
the parish except for a few days at a time to take
his family to the sea-side. His chief relaxation
was a few hours' fishing in some stream close by.
He never took a gun in hand, because from the
poaching tastes of his people he felt it might bring
him into unpleasant collision with them, and for
this reason he did not wish to be made a magis-
trate lest he should have to sit in judgment on his
parishioners. He could not afford to hunt, nor
would he have done so on first settling in Eversley
for other reasons; though the temptation was
great, from the fact that for some years the fox-
hounds (now known as Mr. Garth's) were kept at
Bramshill, Sir John Cope being master. But often
has one who knew his every passing thought, and
Parish Work 101
watched him closely, seen the tears start in his
eyes as horses and hounds swept by the rectory.
When, in after years, he took a gallop now and
then to refresh himself, and to meet his friends in
the hunting field, where he was always welcome, it
was on some old horse which he had picked up
cheap for " parson's work." " Another old screw,
Mr. Kingsley," was said to him more than once by
middle-class men, who were well aware that he
knew a good horse when he saw it; and who per-
haps respected him all the more for his self-denial. 1
Sir John Cope's stablemen were a respectable
set of men, and most regular at church. The
rector had always a friendly word with the hunts-
man and whips ; and soon won their respect and
affection. Of this they early gave proof, for when
the first confirmation after his induction was given
out in church, and he invited all who wished to be
confirmed to come to the rectory for weekly in-
struction, the stud groom was among the first to
present himself, bringing a message from the
whips and stablemen to say they had all been
confirmed once, but if Mr. Kingsley wished it,
they would be happy to come again ! It had
been the custom in Eversley to let the catechu-
mens get over as they could to some distant
church, where four or five parishes assembled to
meet the bishop, with little or no preparation, and
in consequence the public-houses were unusually
full on the day of confirmation, which often ended
in a mere drunken holiday for boys and girls, who
1 He was not only a superb horseman : but could ride across
country equally well in the deep days and over the big banks and
blind ditches of South Berks and North Hants and over the
sweeping grass pastures of Beachmoor Vale a very rare qualifi-
cation, as hunting men know. (M. K.)
102 Charles Kingsley
had many miles to walk, and had neither superin-
tendence nor refreshment provided by the way.
But now matters were differently arranged. On
the six Sundays previous to the confirmation, the
catechism, creeds, and office of confirmation were
explained publicly; and during those six weeks
each candidate was taught separately as well as in
class. On the day itself the young people assem-
bled early for refreshment at the rectory, whence
they started in vans for Heckfield church. He
himself went with the boys, and his wife or some
trustworthy person with the girls, never losing
sight of them till they returned, the girls to their
homes, the boys and men to the rectory, where a
good dinner awaited them, and they spent the
evening in wandering over the glebe, or looking at
curiosities and picture-books indoors, ending with
a few earnest words from their rector. Thus the
solemn day was always associated with pleasant
thoughts and an innocent holiday, which made
them more inclined to come to him the week fol-
lowing to be prepared for Holy Communion.
The appearance and manner of the Eversley cate-
chumens the quiet dresses and neat caps pro-
vided for the girls were often remarked on. It
may seem a trifling matter to dwell on now when
such things are common in all parishes: but
thirty-two years ago Eversley set the example on
confirmation as well as on many other days.
His preaching from the first was remarkable.
The only fault which Bishop Sumner found with
the sermons he took up to him before his Priest's
Ordination, was that they were " too colloquial " :
but it was this very peculiarity which arrested and
attracted his hearers, and helped to fill an empty
Personal Influence 103
church. His original mind and common sense
alike revolted from the use of conventional and
unmeaning phraseology; and as to him all the
facts of life were sacred, he was equally unfettered
in the subject-matter of his sermons.
"The great difference," he said, in writing on this
point to his wife, " which strikes me between St. Augus-
tine and the divinity of our day, is his faith. I mean the
fulness and completeness of his belief, that every object
and circumstance has a spiritual import, a direct relation
to God's will and providence, and that in this import
alone should the Christian look at anything. A faith like
this, which explains all heaven and earth to a man, is in-
finitely above that half-faith of our present systems, which
makes religion a thing apart, explains by it only a few phe-
nomena of man's existence (whose number is limited by cus-
tom so closely, that thousands of subjects are considered
unfit for the pulpit) ; and leaves the rest of the universe a
terra incognita to the religious thinker, to be travelled only
by the Mammonite and the physical philosopher."
During the summer of 1844 he made the
acquaintance of the Rev. Frederick Denison
Maurice; soon to become his dear "Master."
He asked his advice on all his parish difficulties,
telling him that to his " works he was 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 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?"
His own happiness at this time deepened his
sympathies, and he writes to a friend then in great
anxiety :
104 Charles Kingsley
August 5, 1844. ". . . Still there is always some
way of escape to be found, if a man goes to the right
place to look for it. And if not of escape, still of com-
pensation. I speak that which I know, for twelve
months ago I was hopeless, separated from * * *, unable
to correspond even, burdened with difficulties, no hope of
a living . . . and yet through all filled with the most ex-
traordinary conviction that my deliverance was at hand
and coming I knew not whence or how at a certain
time ; at which certain time it did come, from a quarter
the most unexpected, and since then in spite of severe
trials within and without, blessing has been added to
blessing. A few months ago the rector of Eversley
absconded and resigned his living, to which I to my
utter astonishment was presented for life ! Of my own
comfort I will not talk. Of the path by which I attained
it I will. It was simply by not struggling, doing my work
vigorously (or trying to do it) where God had put me,
and believing firmly that His promises had a real, not a
mere metaphorical meaning, and that the x., xxvii.,
xxxiv., xxxvii., cvii., cxii., cxxiii., cxxvi. cxlvi. Psalms
and similar, are as practically true carnally true, if you
will, for us as they were for the Jews of old. I know
that I am right. I know that God is not only the God
of our spirits, but of our bodies of our married happi-
ness of our purses of our least amusements and
that the faithlessness of this day, and the Manichaeism of
this day, as of all ages, has been what prevents men from
accepting God's promises in their literal sense, with
simple childish faith, but drives them to spiritualize them
away /. <?. make them mere metaphors, which are after
all next door to lies. My dear friend, I may incur the
blame of intruding advice where unnecessary, but I do
not dare be silent. I have much more, much deeper
things to talk to you of. I see dimly, yet surely, in your
present discontent, the germ of much good of wider
views, perhaps of more satisfying tastes. Believe me, it is
Personal Influence 105
a true saying, and not a melancholy one, that through
much tribulation most men (not all, I believe) must enter
into the kingdom of God. Where God has made such a
mind and heart as yours, He will not let it stay on the
threshold of Christianity ; He will sicken you with all the
beauties of her outer courts ; He will lead you on, scourge
you, if it be necessary, into the very adyta, then up to the
highest holiest pinnacle of that church, from whence
alone we can see man's workings far below, and look
across the far ocean towards the happy isles, where dwell
the heroes of the earth, at the feet of their hero-king and
Saviour. If you would be among them ; if you would
not be a mere laissez-faire perpetuator of the decaying,
much less a restless reviver of the obsolete, you must walk
in the path which they have trodden. You must get at
the ' open secret ' ' Quid sumus et quare viduri gigni-
mur,' which so few, even among the highest religionists,
now know. You must get to see through the accidents,
the customs, the dilettantisms, fair and foul, which over-
crust humanity, and look at man and man's destiny, as
God constituted it You must leave self forget self
you must discipline self till she lays down, and ceases
clamoring for a vote in the Parliament of men. You
must throw off the proud system-seeking intellect which
haunts us all, and tries to round off heaven and earth with
a fresh theory every year. You must cast off the help of
man, and construct a religion for yourself from the Bible ;
or if you very wisely think this, as I do, a sheer impossi-
bility, you must use the help of all men, all schools, all
sects, all ages, all histories enter into all, sympathize
with all see God's Spirit working variously, yet surely
in all. And then you will begin to find what the peace
is, which passeth all understanding. You will be able to
float down the stream of time, contented to fulfil your
destiny, satisfied with the particular ripple on which God
has cast your lot, and sure that some day all riddles shall
be unfolded, all wrongs set right, and God justified, in
106 Charles Kingsley
every movement of this seeming chaos of life ! I say
this you must do because I do not think your mind
can find peace in doing less. The dose of opium
which will put the baby to sleep will only excite and
irritate the stronger passions of the man ! Therefore go
on to the perfection, which tribulation always indicates
as God's destiny for a man, who has not fallen impeni-
tently into habitual sin. . . . Let me hear from you,
and take the earliest opportunity of introducing you to
my dear wife."
Next year the news of his brother, Lieut. Kings-
ley's death from fever in Torres Straits, on board
H. M. S. "Royalist," reached England, and he
writes to his wife:
February 26, 1845. ". . . It is sad very sad
but what is to be said ? I saw him twice last night in two
different dreams strong and well and so much grown
and I kissed him and wept over him and woke to
the everlasting No ! As far as externals go, it has been
very sad. The sailors say commonly that there is but a
sheet of paper between Torres Straits and Hell. And
there he lay, and the wretched crew, in the little brig,
roasting and pining, day after day never heard of, or
hearing of living soul for a year and a half. The com-
mander died half the crew died and so they died
and died on till, in May, no officer was left but Gerald,
and on the 1 7th of September he died too, and so faded
away, and we shall never see him more for ever? God
that saved me knows. Then one Parkinson, the boat-
swain, had to promote himself to keep the pennant flying,
all the officers being dead, and in despair left his post
and so brought the brig home to Singapore, with great
difficulty, leaking, with her mast sprung her crew half
dead a doomed vessel. O God, Thou alone knowest
the long bitter withering baptism of fire, wherewith the
Canonry of Middleham 1 07
poor boy was baptized, day and night alone with his own
soul. And yet Thou wert right as ever perhaps
there was no way but that to bring him to look himself
in the face, and know that life was a reality, and not a
game 1 And who dare say that in those weary, weary
months of hope deferred, the heart eating at itself, did
not gnaw through the crust of vanities (not of so very
long growth either) and the living water which he did
drink in his childhood find vent and bubble up ! Why
not seeing that God is love ? . . .
" The plot is thickening with the poor Church of Eng-
land. All parties are in confused and angry murmur at
they know not what every one is frightened. . . ."
Early in 1845, Dean Wood, having two vacant
stalls at his disposal in the Collegiate Church of
Middleham, offered one to his son, and the other
to Charles Kingsley, his son's old college friend.
The canonries were honorary, and had neither duty
nor stipend connected with them, but being of
historic interest, the two friends gladly accepted
them, and went down together to be inducted. He
was charmed with Yorkshire, its people, and its
scenery, and writes from Middleham to his wife :
May 1 8, 1845. "At the station I met the Dean and
Peter, and went down with them. After a confused dog-
sleep night, the gray morning broke in on the country
beyond Derby of that peculiar furrowed cast which
marks the beds above the coal, like the scenery between
Bristol and Bath, only the hills not so high woods all
dewy green cattle sleeping in the rich meadows, every
little glen tenanted by its bright rivulet, choked and hid-
den by deep wooded banks. At Chesterfield they were
quarrying for coal from the side of the railway cutting.
Thence to York, and from York to Northallerton, a long
sweep of low, rolling country, with such a soil, such crops,
io8 Charles Kingsley
and such farming ! I never saw such fertility before
and this reaches to Middleham, where the scene changes,
high hills spring up, deep gorges empty themselves into
the plain, and Wensleydale lies spread out like a loving
mother, bearing in her bosom little bright villages, and
emerald pastures, until she turns the promontory of Pen-
hill, and wanders up towards the lakes, bearing with her
the Kendall mail, and two tortured horses, for which the
knacker's yard cries, indignant. The hospitalities here
seem perpetual."
May 22. "What a delight it would be to take you
up Coverdale just half a mile off at the back of the town.
You know those lovely river scenes of Creswick's ; they
are exact likenesses of little Cover in his deep-wooded glen
with his yellow rocks, and bright white stones, and brown
water clearer than crystal. As for fishing, I am a clod
never did I see or hear of such tackle as these men use
finer than our finest. Squire Topham considers my
tackle as only fit to hold cart-horses. This is quite a
racing town eighty horses standing here, jockeys and
grooms crowding the streets, and I hear they are the
most respectable and religious set, and many of them
regular communicants ! Little old Lye, the celebrated
jockey, was at church yesterday, and I never saw a
man attend to the service with more devotion. I quite
loved the little creature. The scenery is lovely. I saw
two views yesterday, whose xtent and magnificence sur-
passed everything I had fancied. To-day I go down the
Ure, to-morrow to see Richmond Castle, the next up the
Cover, and Saturday to Bolton Castle, famed for having
been Mary Queen of Scots' prison, and to ' Aysgack Force,'
a force, being in plain English, a waterfall. Leyburn
Scar, a magnificent terrace of rock, rising above the val-
ley through a ' talus ' of wood, I saw yesterday, and have
brought you a rare little flower therefrom. On it that evil
woman was taken, escaping from Bolton Castle, and
brought back again. I will bring you flowers from all
Needs of the Church 109
parts, and what souvenirs I can, of thoughts but there
has been so much bustle, and robing and unrobing and
so on, that I am quite tired and want a little rest of mind."
May 23. "I send you some flowers, gathered yester-
day from the ruins of Jervaulx Abbey, dismantled by con-
nivance of Henry VIII. The forget-me-not is from the
high altar, the saxifrage from the refectory. I have got a
few other flowers also, which I will bring home ; one rare
one among them, from Leyburn Scar. To-day I go up
the lovely Cover, to fish and dream of you. . . . Really
everyone's kindness here is extreme after the stiff South.
The mere meeting one is sufficient to cause an invitation
to stay ; parties of pleasure, gifts of flies and tackle (every-
one fishes and hunts), and dinners and teas and cigars
inexhaustible. I am deep in North country farming, too ;
such land ! The richest spot, it is said, in all England is
this beautiful oasis in the mountains. Happy souls, if
they knew their own happiness : but there are so many
feuds and old grudges, that it saddens one. Kiss baby
for me. . . ."
The state of parties in Church and State, espe-
cially the former, now lay heavy on his heart,
which echoed Dr. Arnold's words, "When I
think of the Church, I could sit down and pine
and die." (Life, Vol. II. p. 137), and this made
him anxious to join or start some periodical in
which the young men of the day could find a
vehicle for free expression of their opinions. On
all these subjects it was his comfort to pour out
his thoughts to his friend Mr. Powles, Fellow of
Exeter College, Oxford.
December 1 1, 1845. " About the ' Oxford and Cam-
bridge Review.' Froude seems to dread any fresh start,
. . . and I shall chew the cud and try to find out my
own way a little longer before I begin trying to lead others*
no Charles Kingsley
God help us all ! for such a distempered tangled juncture
must end in the cutting of the Gordian knot, by the higher
or lower powers ; and as the higher have fairly denied
their cutting ability and have given it up, perhaps the
lower may try their hands at it. I would, if I were hover-
ing between nine shillings a week and the workhouse, as
the sum of all attainabilities this side of Heaven. God
help us all ! I say again ; for there is no counsel to be
got anywhere from man, and as for God's book, men
have made it mean anything and nothing, with their
commenting and squabbling, and doctrine picking, till
one asks with Pilate, 'What is truth?' Well, at all
events, God knows, and Christ the King knows, and
so all must go right at last, but in the meantime?
" I am just now a sort of religious Shelley, an Ishmael
of catholicity, a John the Baptist, minus his spirit and
power alas ! bemoaning myself in the wilderness. Were
I to stop praying and remembering my own sins daily, I
could become a Democritus Junior, and sitting upon the
bench of contemplation, make the world my cockpit,
wherein main after main of cocklets the ' shell ' alas !
scarce ' off their heads ' come forth to slay and be
slain mutually, for no quarrel, except 'thou-cock art
not me-cock, therefore fight ! ' But I had as soon be
the devil as old Lucretius, to sit with him in the ' Sapientum
templa serena, despicere unde queas alias, atque cernere
Passim errantesS One must feel for one's fellows so
much better, two out of three of them than one's self,
though they will fill themselves with the east wind, and
be proportionably dyspeptic and sulky.
" Nobody trusts nobody. The clergy are split up into
innumerable parties, principally nomadic. Everyone
afraid to speak. Everyone unwilling to listen to his
neighbor; and in the meantime vast sums are spent,
and vast work undertaken, and yet nobody is content.
Everybody swears we are going backward. Everybody
swears it is not his fault, but the Evangelicals, or the
Needs of the Church in
Puseyites, or the Papists, or the ministry ; or everybody,
in short, who does not agree with him. Pardon this
jeremiad, but I am an owl in the desert, and it is too sad
to see a huge and busy body of clergy utterly unable to
gain the confidence or spiritual guidance of the nation,
and yet never honestly taking the blame each man upon
himself, and saying, ' I, not ye, have sinned.' . . . The
principles which the great kings and bishops of the Middle
Ages, and our reformers of the 1 6th century felt to be the
foundation of a Church and nation, are now set at nought
equally by those who pretend to worship the Middle Ages,
and those who swear by the reformers. And Popery and
Puritanism seem to be fighting their battle over again in
England, on the foul middle ground of mammonite infi-
delity. They are re-appearing in weaker and less sincere
forms ; but does that indicate the approach of their in-
dividual death, or our general decay? He who will tell
me this shall be my prophet; till then I must be my own.
. . . My game is gradually opening before me, and my
ideas getting developed, and 'fixed,' as the Germans
would say. But, alas ! as Hare has it, is not in one
sense ' every man a liar ' ? false to his own idea again
and again, even if, which is rare now-a-days, we have
one ? . . . What times we live in ! I sometimes long
for a St. Francis, with a third order of Minors, to lay
hold of one's will, soul, and body, and coax, threaten,
scourge one along some definite path of doctrine and
labor. The latter I have, thank God ; but for doctrines !
Verily, in England, doctrines, as Carlyle says of customs
in France in '93, are ' a world gone entirely to chaos, and
all things jumbling themselves mutually to try what will
swim ! ' which, alas ! often happens to be the lightest, and
not the worthiest. Yet still, as ever, God's voice is heard
through the roar, ' He that doeth my will shall know of
the doctrine whether it be of God.' Were it not for that
text I think I should sometimes sit down ' astonished,'
and pray to die and get it all cleared up. Oh, Salt
112 Charles Kingsley
Asphaltic lake of Polemics! Oh, teeming tropic sea
of Eros ! of love of man as man, of marriage, and
lessons which the hearth and home alone can teach
Heaven's glories, the face of Christ our Lord even
mirrored in their pure Eden depths ! and oh, foolish
heart of mine, which will try and try to think and under-
stand, instead of doing and loving ! I see more and
more, ' He that will be great, must be least.' He that
will be the miracle worker must first become like a little
child, the only miracle seer left in these materialist days !
But I am ranting. . . . God bless you and * * * *, and
admit you in His good time into the inner temple of the
Garden of Eden, which surely exists still on earth, for
those who have faith and purity enough to believe in
their own high honors."
EVERSLEY : December, 1846. " The lips of my soul
water but what is to be done ? Parsons in these parts
are like rural police one suffices for a tract ! ' qui
mitros fatigaret, agroj and I must stay at home for
Sunday. My house is full of bricklayers, carpenters,
my glebe of drainers (till they are frozen out), and were
I Geryon himself I could not come. Be sure that every-
thing which a man possesses, beyond a mere six-roomed
cottage, five acres of freehold, and good health, is vanity
and vexation of spirit thick clay wherewith we load
ourselves more wants more petty botherations ; less
books, less thought, and, alas, less prayer. That's the
sum of it I am seven times too rich, and therefore I 'm
as poor as Job, and entre nous glad to raise a little money
to repair my house. Had I been Will Barker there in
the drain, I should never have found out that it was cold,
and damp, and shabby, and what not. Man has un-
rivalled powers of self-adaptation ay, of adapting him-
self to wanting everything, just as easily as to wanting
nothing ; there 's the plague. I begin to think that, barring
community of wives, Plato's <f>vXaKes in the Republic are in
the only state fit for men of mind, yet discovered, except one
Needs of the Church 113
Sewell is not far out there. The <vAo/ces were the first
shot at that idea, monasticism the second. Shall we live to
see the foundations of a third attempt laid, in the form of
an author guild, or brotherhood of genius ? Ask Carlyle.
" But first, young men of this day must get faith. I am
more and more painfully awake to the fact that the curse
of our generation is that so few of us deeply believe any-
thing. Men dally with truth, and with lies. They deal
in innuendoes, impersonalities, conditionalities ; they have
no indicative mood no I, no thou, whereby alone have
any great souls conquered. Hence we are the worst of
letter-writers. If two men quarrel in print, they do not
speak to each other, they speak at each other ; they look
the other way, and kick like horses, or something worse.
That is the only good point in that anonymous stabber,
the 'Record,' that it attacks directly, and not by im-
plication. The Oxford party might take a lesson there ;
much more so that numerous youth, who, now that the
Tractarians are tired of playing at Popery, are keeping
dilettantism's altar alight by playing at Tractarianism
the shadow of a ghost the sham of a sham. Our
intellects are getting beyond milk and water; they are
becoming mere gas and bottled moonshine, from Iambus
Patrum and the land Plausible.
"My friend, we must pray to God to give us faith;
faith in something something that we can live for, and
would die for. Then we shall be ready and able to do
good in our generation. Our fixed ideas will be to us
Archimedes' fulcra in space, from whence, if need be, he
could move the world. Get hold of some one truth.
Let it blaze in your sky, like a Greenland sun, never set-
ting day or night. Give your soul up to it; see it in
everything, and everything in it, and the world will call
you a bigot and a fanatic, and then wonder a century
hence, how the bigot and fanatic continued to do so
much more than all the sensible folk round him, who
believed hi * * * and * * *."
Vol. 16
1 1 4 Charles Kingsley
December, 1846. " My whole heart is set, not on
retrogression, outward or inward, but on progression
not on going back in the least matter to any ideal age or
system, but on fairly taking the present as it is, not as I
should like it to be; and believing that Jesus Christ is
still working in all honest and well-meaning men see
what are the elements of spiritual good in the present age,
and try as an artist to embody them, not in old forms but
in new ones. . . . The new element is democracy, in
Church and State. Waiving the question of its evil or
its good, we cannot stop it. Let us Christianize it instead ;
and if you fear that you are therein doing evil that good
may come, oh ! consider, consider carefully, whether
democracy (I do not mean foul license, or pedantic con-
stitution-mongering, but the rights of man as man his
individual and direct responsibility to God and the State,
on the score of mere manhood and Christian grace) be
not the very pith and marrow of the New Testament
whether the noble structures of mediaeval hierarchy and
monarchy were not merely ' schoolmasters ' to bring
Europe to Christ ' tutors and governors ' till mankind
be of age, and fit for a theocracy in which men might
live by faith in an unseen, yet spiritually and sacramentally
present king, and have no king but Him ? I say consider
this, for I speak with fear and trembling not expecting
to be heard by those whom I most long should hear me
and yet perfectly content to wait Christ's time till the
age is ripe, be it to-morrow century through years of
dead monarchy, atheistic aristocrat jobbing, unrestored
Church lands, and ecclesiastical system which is powerless,
alas ! equally against Popery and dissent, and whatsoever
else the Blessed One shall choose to make our waiting and
probationary state. I am no revolutionist. Whatever
soul-sufficing truth men have, in God's name let them
keep it. ' The real struggle of the day will be, not
between Popery and Protestantism, but between Atheism
and Christ.' And here we are daubing walls with un-
Needs of the Church 115
tempered mortar quarrelling about how we shall patch
the superstructure, forgetting that the foundation is gone
Faith in anything. As in the days of Noah with the
Titans as in the days of Mahomet with the Christian
sects of the East they were eating, and drinking, and
quarrelling, no doubt, and behold the flood came and
swept them all away. And even such to me seems the
prospect of the English Church. . . ."
To his wife :
EVERSLEY : May, 1846. " . . . I got home at four
this morning after a delicious walk a poem in itself.
I never saw such a sight before as the mists on the heath
and valleys, and never knew what a real bird-chorus was.
I am lonely enough, but right glad I came, as there is
plenty to do. ... I shall start to-morrow morning, and
walk on to you at Shanklin. St. Elizabeth progresses,
and consolidates. ... I have had a great treat to-day ;
saw a swarm of bees hived, for the first time in my life.
I stood in the middle of the flying army, and saw the
whole to my great delight. Certainly man, even in the
lowest grade, is infinitely wonderful, and infinitely brave
give him habit and self-confidence. To see all those
little poisonous insects crawling over H., wrapt in the
one thought of their new-born sister-queen ! I hate to
think that it is vile self-interest much less mere brute
magnetism (called by the ignorant ' instinct '), which takes
with them the form of loyalty, prudence, order, self-sacri-
fice. How do we know that they have no souls ? ' The
beasts which perish?' Ay, but put against that 'the
spirit of the beast which goeth downward to the earth '
and whither then ? ' Man perisheth,' too, in scripture
language, yet not for ever. But I will not dream.
" I fancy you and baby playing in the morning. Bless
you my two treasures. ... I had a most interesting day
yesterday in London. Called on * * * and found him
undergoing all the horrors of a deep, and as I do think,
1 1 6 Charles Kingsley
healthy baptism of fire not only a conversion, but a
discovery that God and the devil are living realities, fight-
ing for his body and soul. This, in a man of vast thought
and feeling, who has been for years a confirmed
materialist, is hard work. He entreated me not to leave
him. . . . God help us all, and save our country not
so much from the fate of France, as from the fate of Rome
internal decay, and falling to pieces by its own weight ;
but I will say no more of this perhaps I think too much
about it. . . ."
1846 passed uneventfully in the routine of parish
work and domestic happiness. He never cared to
leave his quiet home, doubly enriched by the pres-
ence of a little daughter. A singing class was
started on Hullah's plan to improve the church
music, which had been hitherto in the hands of
three or four poor men, with a trombone and two
clarionets. This, and other adult classes, brought
his people on several nights 'in the week up to the
rectory, where the long unfurnished dining-room
served the purpose of schoolroom. In 1847 his
eldest son was born, and named after Mr. Maurice,
who, with Mr. Powles, stood sponsor to the boy. In
the summer he took his wife and two children for
six weeks to Milford, a little sea-side place near the
edge of the New Forest. It was his first real holi-
day since his marriage, which he earned by taking
the Sunday services of Pennington, near Lyming-
ton. Here he had the new luxury of a horse, and
explored the forest, dear to him from old associa-
tions with his father's youth 1 and manhood, day by
day, with deep delight. In the enjoyment of the
sea-shore with his beloved ones, with leisure to
1 See page i of this volume.
The Saint's Tragedy 117
watch his babies at play, and in solitary rides, his
heart's spring bubbled up into song once more,
and he wrote many ballads, among them, " The
Red King," the " Outlaw," " Oh, she tripp'd over
Ocknell plain." It was only either at some great
crisis of his life, or when his surroundings were, as
now, in perfect harmony, that he could write
poetry. Here, too, he laid up a store of impres-
sions for a New Forest Novel which was begun
many years later, but never completed.
This year his " Life of St. Elizabeth," which was
begun in prose in 1842, and had been gradually
growing under his hand, took the form of a drama.
He finished it in the summer : but being doubtful
as to whether it was worth printing, he decided
nothing till he had consulted the Dean of Windsor
and other friends on whose judgment and poetical
verdict he could rely. Their opinion was unani-
mous ; but the difficulty was to find a publisher who
would undertake the work of a young and unknown
author. He took the MSS. to London, from
whence he wrote to his wife :
" I breakfasted with Maurice this morning, and went
over a great deal of St. Elizabeth, and I cannot tell you
how thankful I am to God about it. He has quite changed
his mind about scene i. of act ii., Elizabeth's bower. He
read it to Powles, who is decidedly for keeping it in just
as it is, and thinks it ought to offend no one. He is very
desirous to show the MSS. to A. G. Scott, Mrs. H.,
Coleridge, Tennyson, and Van Artevelde Taylor. He
says that it ought to do great good with those who can
take it in, but for those who cannot, it ought to have a
preface ; and has more than hinted that he will help me
to one, by writing me something which, if I like, I can
prefix. What more would you have? . . . Coleridge's
1 1 8 Charles Kingsley
opinion of the poem is far higher than I expected. He
sent me to Pickering with a highly recommendatory note ;
which, however, joined with Maurice's preface, was not
sufficient to make him take the risk off my hands. I am
now going to Parker's, in the Strand. I am at once very
happy, very lonely, and very anxious. How absence in-
creases love ! It is positively good sometimes to be
parted, that one's affection may become conscious
of itself, and proud, and humble, and thankful
accordingly. ..."
". . . St. Elizabeth 1 is in the press," he writes joy-
fully a few days later to Mr. Powles, " having been taken
off my hands by the heroic magnanimity of Mr. J. Parker,
West Strand, who, though a burnt child, does not dread
the fire. No one else would have it. Maurice's preface
comes out with it, and is inestimable not only to I
myself, I, but to all men who shall have the luck to read
it, and the wit to understand it."
1 This was published under the name of " The Saint's Tragedy."
(M. K.)
CHAPTER VI
1848
AGED 29
PUBLICATION OF " SAINT'S TRAGEDY " PARISH WORK
CHARTIST RIOTS TENTH OF APRIL WORK IN LONDON
POLITICS FOR THE PEOPLE PARSON LOT A PROFES-
SORSHIP AT QUEEN'S COLLEGE CROYLAND ABBEY LET-
TERS TO HIS CHILD ADVICE TO AN AUTHOR "YEAST"
ILLNESS THE HIGHER VIEW OF MARRIAGE DEVON-
SHIRE.
" This is true liberty when freeborn men
Having to advise the public may speak free ;
Which he who can or will, deserves high praise ;
Who neither can, nor will, may hold his peace ;
What can be juster in a state like this ? "
EURIPIDES, Translation by MlLTOM.
THIS year, so marked in the history of
Europe, was one of the most important of
Charles Kingsley's life. " The Saint's Tragedy,"
which was published soon after Christmas, gave
him in one sense a new position, especially among
young men at the universities. It was eagerly
read at Oxford, and fiercely attacked by the high
church party, who were made still more bitter
against its author by the publication of " Yeast "
in the summer. He was surprised himself to find
the interest the drama had excited at Oxford ; and
while on a visit there he writes to his wife :
"... I may, I suppose, tell you that I am here under-
going the new process of being made a lion of, at least so
I2O Charles Kingsley
Powles tells me. They got up a meeting for me, and the
club was crowded with men merely to see poor me, so I
found out afterwards : very lucky that I did not know it
during the process of being trotted out. It is very funny
and new. I dine this afternoon with Coningtonj to-
morrow with Palgrave ; Monday with Stanley, and so on.
I like Conington very much ; he is a good, hearty piece of
nature ; and I like his review of the ' Saint's Tragedy,'
very much. Of course he did not go to the bottom on
the Love and Marriage question; but there he showed
his sense. . . ."
" Kingsley had not," says a friend in speaking of this
period, " I think, the least notion he would find himself
famous, but he was so among a not inconsiderable section
of young Oxford, even one month after the drama had
appeared. A large number of us were thoroughly dissat-
isfied with the high church teaching, which then was that
of the most earnest tutors in Oxford. There were, in-
deed, some noble exceptions, Jowett of Balliol, Powles
of Exeter, Congreve of Wadham, Stanley of University,
Clough of Oriel. But they were scattered, and their in-
fluence was over men here and there ; the high-churchmen
held the mass of intelligent young men, many of whom
revolted in spirit, yet had not found a leader. Here was
a book which showed that there was poetry also in the
strife against asceticism, whose manly preface was as
stirring as the verse it heralded. We look at its author
with the deepest interest ; it was a privilege to have been
in the room with him."
Though it excited no great interest in the liter-
ary world in England, it was read and appreciated
in Germany; and in the highest quarters in this
country the genius of the author was recognized.
Baron de Bunscn thus expresses his opinion in
strong, some may think extravagant, terms to Pro-
fessor Max Miiller, some years later:
The Saint's Tragedy 1 2 J
" As showing Kingsley' s dramatic power I do not hesi-
tate to call ' The Saint's Tragedy ' and ' Hypatia,' by far
the most important and perfect works. In these, I find
the justification of a hope that Kingsley might continue
Shakespeare's historical plays. I have 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 Wil-
liam of Orange. . . . The tragedy of 'St. Elizabeth'
shows that Kingsley can grapple, not only with the novel,
but with the more severe rules of dramatic art. And
' Hypatia' proves on the largest scale that he can discover
in the picture of the historical past, the truly human, the
deep, the permanent, and that he knows how to represent
it. How, with all this, he can hit the fresh tone of
popular life, and draw humorous characters and compli-
cations with Shakespearian energy is proved by all his
works. And why should he not undertake this great
task ? There is a time when the true poet, the prophet of
the present, must bid farewell to the questions of the day,
which seem so great because they are so near, but are, in
truth, but small and unpoetical. He must say to himself,
' Let the dead bury their dead : ' and the time has come
that Kingsley should do so."
The political events of 1848 which shook all
Europe to its very foundation, stirred his blood,
and seemed for the time to give him a super-
natural strength, which kept up till the autumn,
when he completely broke down.
" It is only by an effort," says Mr. Tom Hughes, in
his Preface to " Alton Locke," " that one can now realize
the strain to which the nation was subjected during that
winter and spring, and which, of course, tried every indi-
vidual man also, according to the depth and earnestness
1 2 2 Charles Kingsley
of his political and social convictions and sympathies.
The group of men who were working under Mr. Maurice
were no exceptions to the rule. The work of teaching
and visiting was not, indeed, neglected, but the larger
questions which were being so strenuously mooted the
points of the people's charter, the right of public meeting,
the attitude of the laboring class to the other classes,
absorbed more and more of their attention. Kingsley
was very deeply impressed with the gravity and danger of
the crisis more so, I think, than almost any of his
friends ; probably because, as a country parson, he was
more directly in contact with one class of the poor than
any of them. How deeply he felt for the agricultural
poor, how faithfully he reflected the passionate and rest-
less sadness of the time, may be read in the pages of
'Yeast,' which came out later in ' Eraser.' As the winter
months went on this sadness increased, and seriously
affected his health."
" So vividly did he realize the sufferings of the poor,"
to quote another friend, " so keenly did he feel what he
deemed the callousness and incompetence of the Govern-
ment and the mass of the upper classes to alleviate them,
that at times he seemed to look, with trembling, for the
coming of great and terrible social convulsions, of a ' day
of the Lord,' such as Isaiah looked for, as the inevitable
fate of a world grown evil, yet governed still by a right-
eous God. In later years this feeling gradually left him.
But it was no mere pulpit or poetic gust. It penetrated
(I think) occasionally even to the lesser matters of daily
life. Late one dark night he called me out to him into
the garden to listen to a distant sound, which he told me
was a fox's bark, bidding me remember it, for foxes
might soon cease to be in England, and I might never
hear one bark again."
It was while in this state of mind that he wrote
" The Day of the Lord." [Poems, p. 263.]
His parish work this year was if possible more
Parish Work 123
vigorous than ever. Every winter's evening was
occupied with either night-school at the rectory,
about thirty men attending; or little services in
the outlying cottages for the infirm and laboring
men after their day's work. During the spring
and summer a writing class was held for girls in
the empty coach-house ; a cottage school for in-
fants was opened on the common all preparing
the way for the national school that was built
some years later, and for which the teacher was in
training. The parish made a great step forward.
The number of communicants increased. The
Passion week daily services and sermons seemed
to borrow intenser fervor and interest from his
sympathy in the strange events of the great world
outside the small quiet parish, and though poorly
attended, still gathered together a few laboring
folk. He preached to his people on emigration,
on poaching, and on the political and social dis-
turbances of the day. He wrote his first article
for " Eraser's Magazine," " Why should we fear
the Romish Priests ? " following up his " Saint's
Tragedy," which had struck the key note of the
after work of his life ; and " Yeast " now was
seething in hi mind. In addition to parish and
literary work he accepted the professorship of
English Literature and Composition at Queen's
College, then in its infancy, of which Mr. Maurice
was President, and lectured once a week in Lon-
don. He was also proposed for the professorship
of Modern History at King's College. He was in
constant communication with Mr. Maurice and the
knot of remarkable men who gathered round him,
and made acquaintance with Bishop Stanley of
Norwich, and his distinguished son; with Thomas
124 Charles Kingsley
Carlyle, Archdeacon Hare, Thomas Hughes, Tom
Taylor, Arthur Helps, John Hullah, John Malcolm
Ludlow, and many others at work in the same
cause.
On the news of the Chartist rising and petition
reaching Eversley, he determined, having closed
his evening classes in the parish for the winter, to
go to London to see what was going on ; and on
the morning of the loth of April went up with his
friend Mr. John Parker ; publisher, who had been
spending the Sunday at Eversley. Mr. Parker,
like many owners of property in London, was
nervous and anxious about the results of the day,
telling Mrs. Kingsley, half in joke as he left the
door, that she might expect to hear of his shop
having been broken into, and himself thrown into
the Trafalgar Square fountains by the mob. On
arriving in town, they went to the Strand, then on
to Mr. Maurice's ; and in the afternoon Mr. Kings-
ley and Mr. Ludlow walked to Kennington Com-
mon, where pouring rain damped the spirits of the
crowds assembled. By midday post he wrote to
his wife.
". . . All is right as yet. Large crowds, but no one
expects any row, as the Chartists will not face Westminster
Bridge, but are gone round by London Bridge and Hoi-
born, and are going to send up only the legal number of
delegates to the House. The only fear is marauding in
the suburbs at night ; but do not fear for me, I shall be
safe at Chelsea at 5 . I met Colonel Herman, who says
there is no danger at all, and the two Mansfields, who are
gone as specials, to get hot, dusty, and tired nothing
else. I will write by the latest post. . . ."
April n, 8 A. M. "All as quiet as a mouse as yet.
The storm is blown over till to-morrow, but all are under
Chartist Riots 125
arms specials, police, and military. Maurice is in
great excitement. He has sent me to Ludlow, and we
are getting out placards for the walls, to speak a word for
God with. You must let me stay up to-night, for I am
helping in a glorious work ; and I go to breakfast with
Maurice now, and to spend the evening with Archdeacon
Hare, Scott, and himself. Send down to the cottage
lecture, and say I shall not have it till Saturday, and say
that the riots have kept me. I feel we may do something.
Pray for us that God may guide us, and open our mouths
to speak boldly."
EVENING. " The events of a week have been crowded
into a few hours. I was up till 4 this morning, writing
posting placards under Maurice's auspices, one of which
is to be got out to-morrow morning, the rest when we
can get money. Could you not beg a few sovereigns
somewhere, to help these poor wretches to the truest
alms? to words texts from the Psalms, any thing
which may keep one man from cutting his brother's throat
to-morrow or Friday? Pray, pray, help us. Maurice
has given me the highest proof of confidence. He has
taken me into counsel, and we are to have meetings for
prayer and study, when I come up to London, and we
are to bring out a new set of real ' Tracts for the Times,
addressed to the higher orders. Maurice is a la hauteur
des eirconstances determined to make a decisive move.
He says : ' If the Oxford tracts did wonders, why should
not we?' Pray for us. A glorious future is opening,
and both Maurice and Ludlow seem to have driven away
all my doubts and sorrows, and I see the blue .sky again
and my Father's face ! "
April 12. ". . . I really cannot go home this
afternoon. I have spent it with Archdeacon Hare, and
Parker, starting a new periodical a Penny ' People's
Friend,' in which Maurice, Hare, Ludlow, Mansfield,
and I, &c. are going to set to work, to supply the place
of the defunct 'Saturday Magazine.' I send you my
1 26 Charles Kingsley
first placard. Maurice is delighted with it. I cannot tell
you the interest which it has excited with every one who
has seen it. It brought the tears into old Parker's eyes,
who was once a working printer's boy. I have got already
2 los. towards bringing out more, and Maurice is sub-
scription-hunting for me. He took me to Jelf to-day,
the King's College principal, who received me very kindly,
and expressed himself very anxious to get me the profes-
sorship. I will be down at Winchfield to-morrow. Kiss
the babes for me. Parker begs to remark that he has
not been thrown into the Trafalgar fountain. . . ."
This was the Placard :
"WORKMEN OF ENGLAND!"
"You say that you are wronged. Many of you are
wronged ; and many besides yourselves know it. Almost
all men who have heads and hearts know it above all,
the working clergy know it. They go into your houses,
they see the shameful filth and darkness l in which you
are forced to live crowded together ; they see your chil-
dren growing up in ignorance and temptation, for want
of fit education ; they see intelligent and well-read men
among you, shut out from a Freemen's just right of voting ;
and they see too the noble patience and self-control with
which you have as yet borne these evils. They see it,
and God sees it.
"WORKMEN OF ENGLAND! You have more friends
than you think for. Friends who expect nothing from
you, but who love you, because you are their brothers,
and who fear God, and therefore dare not neglect you,
His children; men who are drudging and sacrificing
themselves to get you your rights ; men who know what
your rights are, better than you know yourselves, who are
trying to get for you something nobler than charters and
dozens of Acts of Parliament more useful than this
1 The Window tax was not then taken off.
Tenth of April 127
' fifty thousandth share in a Talker in the National Palaver,
at Westminster ' 1 can give you. You may disbelieve
them, insult them you cannot stop their working for
you, beseeching you, as you love yourselves, to turn back
from the precipice of riot, which ends in the gulf of uni-
versal distrust, stagnation, starvation. You think the
Charter would make you free would to God it would !
The Charter is not bad; if the men who use it are not
bad! But will the Charter make you free? Will it free
you from slavery to ten-pound bribes ? Slavery to beer
and gin? Slavery to every spouter who flatters your
self-conceit, and stirs up bitterness and headlong rage in
you? That, I guess, is real slavery; to be a slave to
one's own stomach, one's own pocket, one's own temper.
Will the Charter cure that? Friends, you want more
than Acts of Parliament can give.
" Englishmen ! Saxons ! Workers of the great, cool-
headed, strong-handed nation of England, the workshop
of the world, the leader of freedom for 700 years, men
say you have common-sense ! then do not humbug your-
selves into meaning 'license,' when you cry for 'liberty.'
Who would dare refuse you freedom? for the Almighty
God, and Jesus Christ, the poor Man, who died for poor
men, will bring it about for you, though all the Mammon-
ites of the earth were against you. A nobler day is
dawning for England, a day of freedom, science, industry !
But there will be no true freedom without virtue, no true
science without religion, no true industry without the fear
of God, and love to your fellow-citizens.
"Workers of England, be wise, and then you must be
free, for you will beyf/ to be free.
"A WORKING PARSON."
On the 1 5th, he returned to Eversley much ex-
hausted. He preached on the Chartist riots to his
own people the following Sunday ; and now work-
Carlyle.
128 Charles Kingsley
ing in his parish, writing for the "Politics,"
and preparing his lectures for Queen's College,
filled up every moment of time. The various
writers for the new periodical continually came
to Eversley to talk over their work with and con-
sult him.
Mr. Hughes, speaking of the distinct period of
Charles Kingsley's life extending from 1848 to
1856, says:
"... Look at them from what point we will, these
years must be allowed to cover an anxious and critical
time in modern English history ; but, above all, in the
history of the working classes. In the first of them the
Chartist agitation came to a head and burst, and was fol-
lowed by the great movement towards association, which,
developing in two directions and by two distinct methods
represented respectively by the amalgamated Trades
Unions and Co-operative Societies has in the interven-
ing years entirely changed the conditions of the labor
question in England, and the relations of the working to
the upper and middle classes. It is with this, the social
and industrial side of the history of those years, that we
are mainly concerned. . . . Our purpose is to give some
slight sketch of him ... in the character in which he
was first widely known, as the most out-spoken and
powerful of those who took the side of the laboring
classes, at a critical time the crisis in a word, when
they abandoned their old political weapons, for the more
potent one of union and association, which has since
carried them so far. To no one of all those by whom
his memory is tenderly cherished can this seem a super-
fluous task, for no writer was ever more misunderstood or
better abused at the time, and after the lapse of almost
a quarter of a century, the misunderstanding would seem
still to hold its ground. For through all the many notices
of him which appeared after his death, in January, 1875,
Work in London 129
there ran the same apologetic tone as to this part of his
life's work. While generally, and as a rule cordially,
recognizing his merits as an author and a man, the writers
seemed to agree in passing lightly over this ground.
When it was touched it was in a tone of apology,
sometimes tinged with sarcasm, as in the curt notice
in the ' Times ' 'He was understood to be the Par-
son Lot of those " Politics for the People " which made
no little noise in their time, and as Parson Lot he de-
clared in burning language that to his mind the fault in
the " People's Charter " was that it did not go nearly far
enough.' And so the writer turns away, as do most of
his brethren, leaving probably some such impression as
this on the minds of most of their readers ' Young men
of power and genius are apt to start with wild notions.
He was no exception. Parson Lot's sayings and doings
may well be pardoned for what Charles Kingsley said and
did in after years ; so let us drop a decent curtain over
them, and pass on.' Now as almost a generation has
passed since that signature used to appear at the foot of
some of the most noble and vigorous writing of our time,
readers of to-day are not unlikely to accept this view,
and so to find further confirmation and encouragement
in the example of Parson Lot for the mischievous and
cowardly distrust of anything like enthusiasm amongst
young men, already sadly too prevalent in England. If
it were only as a protest against this ' surtout point
de zt/e' spirit, against which it was one of Charles
Kingsley's chief tasks to fight with all his strength,
it is well that the facts should be set right. . . . My
first meeting with him was in the autumn of 1847. . . .
Mr. Maurice had undertaken the charge of a small dis-
trict in the parish in which he lived, and had set a number
of young men, chiefly students of the Inns of Court, who
had been attracted by his teaching, to work in it. Once
a week, on Monday evenings, they used to meet at his
house for tea, when their own work was reported upon
130 Charles Kingsley
and talked over. Suggestions were made and plans con-
sidered ; and afterwards a chapter of the Bible was read 1
and discussed. Friends and old pupils of Mr. Maurice's,
residing in the country, or in distant parts of London,
were in the habit of coming occasionally to these meet-
ings, amongst whom was Charles Kingsley. His poem,
'The Saint's Tragedy,' and the high regard and admira-
tion which Mr. Maurice had for him, made him a notable
figure in that small society, and his presence was always
eagerly looked for. What impressed me most about him
when we first met was his affectionate deference to Mr.
Maurice, and the vigor and incisiveness of everything he
said and did. He had the power of cutting out what he
meant in a few clear words, beyond any one I have ever
met. The next thing that struck one was the ease with
which he could turn from playfulness, or even broad
humor, to the deepest earnest. At first I think this
startled most persons, until they came to find out the real
deep nature of the man; and that his broadest humor
had its root in a faith which realized, with extraordinary
vividness, the fact that God's Spirit is actively abroad in
the world, and that Christ is in every man, and made him
hold fast, even in his saddest moments, and sad mo-
ments were not infrequent with him, the assurance that,
in spite of all appearances, the world was going right, and
would go right somehow, Not your way, or my way, but
God's way.' The contrast of his humility and audacity,
of his distrust in himself and confidence in himself, was
one of those puzzles which meet us daily in this world of
paradox. But both qualities gave him a peculiar power
for the work he had to do at that time, with which the
name of Parson Lot is associated. It was at one of these
gatherings, towards the end of 1847 or early in 1848,
when Kingsley found himself in a minority of one, that
he said jokingly, 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 Parson Lot was then and
Work in London 131
there suggested, and adopted by him, as a familiar nom
de plume. . . . The name was chiefly made famous by
his writings in ' Politics for the People/ the ' Christian
Socialist,' and the ' Journal of Association/ . . . by ' Alton
Locke/ and by tracts and pamphlets, of which the best
known [is] ' Cheap Clothes, and Nasty.' ... In order
to understand and judge the sayings and writings of
Parson Lot fairly, it is necessary to recall the condition of
the England of that day. Through the winter of 1847-8,
amidst wide-spread distress, the cloud of discontent, of
which Chartism was the most violent symptom, had been
growing darker and more menacing, while Ireland was
only held down by main force. The breaking out of the
revolution on the Continent in February increased the
danger. In March there were riots in London, Glasgow,
Edinburgh, Liverpool, and other large towns. ..." *
On the 6th of May the first number of " Politics
for the People " appeared. Its regular contribu-
tors were nearly all university men, clergymen of
the Church of England, London barristers, men of
science; among them Archdeacon Hare, Sir
Arthur Helps, Professor Conington, and a well
known London physician. A few letters from
working men were admitted. It was a remark-
able though short-lived publication; and those
whose opinions of the " Radicals, Socialists,
Chartists," who set it on foot, were formed by
the public press, without having read the book it-
self, would be surprised at the loyal, conservative,
serious tone of its contents, and the gravity, if not
severity, with which it attacked physical force
Chartism, monster meetings, and the demand for
universal suffrage by men who had neither educa-
1 Preface to " Alton Locke," and " Cheap Clothes, and Nasty,"
by Thomas Hughes, Q.C.
132 Charles Kingsley
tion nor moral self-government to qualify them for
a vote. Extracts are now given from his Letters to
Chartists, to avoid misconception as to " that burn-
ing languag^ of which the " Times " of January
25th, 1875, speaks, which Parson Lot used when
he said " that the People's Charter did not go far
enough" :
"Mv FRIENDS,
" If I give you credit for being sincere, you mast 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
i oth of April ; I have no patience with those who do.
Suppose there were but 250,000 honest names on that
sheet. Suppose the Charter itself were all stuff, yet
you have still a right to fair play, a patient hearing, an
honorable 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 Parliament. If any one 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
seems a harmless cry enough, but a poor, bald, constitu-
tion-mongering cry as I ever heard. That French cry of
' Organization of Labor ' is worth a dozen of it, and yet that
does not go to the bottom of the matter by many a mile.
" But I have a more serious complaint against Chartism
than this, and because I love you well, and, God is my
witness, would die to make you free, and am, even now,
pleading your cause with all my powers, I shall not be
Politics for the People 133
afraid to rebuke you boldly at first. Why do you your-
selves blacken Chartism in people's eyes ? Why do you
give a fair handle for all the hard things which are said of
you ? I mean this, and I speak honestly of what happened
to my own self. The other day, being in London, I said
to myself, ' I will see what the Chartists are saying and
doing just now ' ; and I set off to find a Chartist news-
paper, and found one in a shop where 'The People's
Charter,' and ' Lamartine's Address to the Irish Deputa-
tion,' and various Chartist books were sold. Now, as a
book, as well as a man, may be known by his companions,
I looked round the shop to see what was the general sort
of stock there, and, behold, there was hardly anything but
' Flash Songsters,' and the 'Swell's Guide,' and 'Tales of
Horror,' and dirty milksop French novels. I opened the
leading article of the paper, and there were fine words
enough, and some really noble and eloquent words, too,
which stirred my blood and brought the tears into my
eyes, about ' divine liberty,' and ' heaven-born fraternity/
and the ' cause of the poor being the cause of God ' ;
all which I knew well enough before, from a very different
' Reformer's Guide,' to which I hope to have the pleasure
of introducing you some day. ' Well,' I said to myself,
' the cause of God seems to have fallen into ugly company.
If poverty sends a man to strange bed-fellows, " divine
liberty " must be in a very poor way ; heaven-born brother-
hood has fraternized here with some very blackguard
brethen.' . . . No ! as I read on, I found that almost
the only books puffed in the advertising column of the
paper itself were the same French dirt which lay on the
counter : ' Voltaire's Tales,' ' Tom Paine/ and by way of
a finish, ' The Devil's Pulpit !'...' Well/ I thought :
* These are strange times ! I had thought the devil used
to befriend tyrants and oppressors, but he seems to have
profited by Burns' advice, to 'tak' a thought an' men'.'
I thought the struggling freeman's watchword was, ' God
sees my wrongs, He hath taken the matter into His own
134 Charles Kingsley
hands, the poor committeth himself unto Him, for He is
the helper of the friendless.' But now the devil seems
all at once to have turned philanthropist and patriot, and
to intend himself to fight the good cause, against which
he has been fighting ever since Adam's time. I don't
deny, my friends, it r much cheaper and pleasanter to be
reformed by the devil than by God ; for God will only
reform society on condition of our reforming every man
his own self while the devil is quite ready to help us to
mend the laws and the parliament, earth and heaven, with-
out ever starting such an impertinent and ' personal ' re-
quest, as that a man should mend himself. That liberty
of the subject he will always respect.
" But I must say honestly, whomsoever I may ofiend,
the more I have read of your convention speeches and
newspaper articles the more convinced 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 excite-
ment, 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 1 What brotherhood ought you to have
with the United Irishmen ' party, who pride themselves
on their hatred to your nation, and recommend schemes
of murder which a North American Indian, trained to
scalping from his youth, would account horrible ? When
they have learnt that ' Justice to Ireland' does not mean
hell broke loose there ; when they have repented and
amended of their madness, as God grant they may, then
you may treat them as brothers ; but till then, those who
bid them God-speed are partakers of their evil deeds. In
the name of liberty and brotherhood, in the name of the
Parson Lot 135
poor man's cause and the poor man's God, I protest
against this unnatural alliance ! 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, beastliness, 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.' Do God's work, and you will
share God's wages. 'Trust in the Lord, and be doing
good, dwell in the land, and, verily, thou shall be fed.
Commit thy way unto the Lord, and He shall bring it to
pass.' For the time is near, at last, my friends, even at
the doors, when those glorious old words shall be fulfilled :
' Thou, Lord, hast heard the desire of the poor : Thou
prepares! their heart, and Thine ear hearkeneth thereto ;
to help the fatherless and the poor unto their right, that
the man of the world be no more exalted against them ! '
" PARSON LOT."
In Letter II. he tells them that " the Bible demands for
the poor as much, and more, than they demand for them-
selves ; it expresses the deepest yearnings of the poor
man's heart far more nobly, more searchingly, more
daringly, more eloquently, than any modern orator has
done. I say, it gives a ray of hope say rather a certain
dawn of a glorious future, such as no universal suffrage,
free trade, communism, organization of labor, or any
other Morrison's-pill measure can give and yet of a
future, which will embrace all that is good in these, a
136 Charles Kingsley
future of conscience, of justice, of freedom, when idlers
and oppressors shall no more dare to plead parchments
and Acts of Parliament for their iniquities. I say the
Bible promises this, not in a few places only but through-
out: 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. Does that look like
the invention of tyrants and prelates? You may sneer;
but give me a fair hearing, and if I do not prove my
words, then call me the same hard name which I shall call
any man who, having read the Bible, denies that it is the
poor man's comfort, and the rich man's warning."
"I think," said Mr. Hughes, "I know every line which
was ever published under the signature, ' Parson Lot, ' and
I take it upon myself to say that there is in all that 'burn-
ing language' nothing more revolutionary than the ex-
tracts given from his letters to the Chartists. ... In the
early summer of 1848, some of those who felt with him
that the 'People's Charter' had not had fair play or
courteous treatment, and that those who signed it had
real wrongs to complain of, put themselves into communi-
cation with the leaders, and met and talked with them.
At last it seemed that the time was come for some more
public meeting, and one was called at the Cranbourn
Tavern, over which Mr. Maurice presided. After the
president's address, several very bitter speeches followed,
and a vehement attack was specially directed against the
church and the clergy. The meeting waxed warm, and
seemed likely to come to no good, when Kingsley rose,
folded his arms across his chest, threw his head back,
and began with the stammer which always came at first
when much moved but which fixed everyone's attention at
once 'I am a Church of England parson' a long
pause 'and a Chartist'; and then he went on to ex-
plain how far he thought them right in their claim for a
reform of Parliament; how deeply he sympathized with
Parson Lot 137
their sense of the injustice of the law as it affected them ;
how ready he was to help in all ways to get these things
set right ; and then to denounce their methods in very
much the same terms as I have already quoted from his
letters to the Chartists. Probably no one who was present
ever heard a speech which told more at the time. . . .
The fact is, that Charles Kingsley was born a fighting
man, and believed in bold attack. 'No human power
ever beat back a resolute forlorn hope,' he used to say;
f to be got rid of, they must be blown back with grape and
canister, because the attacking party have all the universe
behind them, the defence only that small part which is
shut up in their walls.' And he felt most strongly at this
time that hard fighting was needed. . . . The memo-
rials of his many controversies lie about in the periodi-
cals of that time, and any one who cares to hunt them up
will be well repaid, and struck with the vigor of the defence,
and still more with the complete change in public opinion
which has brought the England of to-day clean round to
the side of Parson Lot. 1 . . ."
Among his contributions to " Politics for the
People " were the first three of a projected series on
the National Gallery and the British Museum.
NO. I. NATIONAL GALLERY
" Picture-galleries should be the workman's paradise, a
garden of pleasure, to which he goes to refresh his eyes
and heart with beautiful shapes and sweet coloring, when
they are wearied with dull bricks and mortar, and the ugly
colorless things which fill the workshop and the factory.
For, believe me, there is many a road into our hearts
besides our ears and brains ; many a sight, and sound, and
scent, even, of which we have never thought at all, sinks
into our memory, and helps to shape our characters ; and
thus children brought up among beautiful sights and sweet
sounds will most likely show the fruits of their nursing, by
1 Preface to " Alton Locke," by T. Hughes, Q. C.
Vol. 17
138 Charles Kingsley
thoughtfulness, and affection, and nobleness of mind, even
by the expression of the countenance. The poet Words-
worth, talking of training up a beautiful country girl, says :
' The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her for her the willow bend ;
Nor shall she fail to see,
Even in the motions of the storm,
Grace which shall mould the maiden 's form.
By silent sympathy.
And she shall bend her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty, born of murmuring sound,
Shall pass into her face.''
" Those who live in towns should carefully remember
this, for their own sakes, for their wives' sakes, for their
children's sakes. Never lose an opportunity of seeing any-
thing beautiful. Beauty is God's handwriting a way-
side sacrament ; welcome it in every fair face, every fair
sky, every fair flower, and thank for it ffim, the fountain
of all loveliness, and drink it in, simply and earnestly, with
all your eyes ; it is a charmed draught, a cup of blessing.
" Therefore I said that picture-galleries should be the
townsman's paradise of refreshment. Of course, if he
can get the real air, the real trees, even for an hour, let
him take it in God's name ; but how many a man who
cannot spare time for a daily country walk, may well slip
into the National Gallery, or any other collection of pic-
tures, for ten minutes. That garden, at least, flowers as
gaily in winter as in summer. Those noble faces on the
wall are never disfigured by grief or passion. There, in
the space of a single room, the townsman may take his
country walk a walk beneath mountain peaks, blushing
sunsets, with broad woodlands spreading out below it j a
walk through green meadows, under cool mellow shades,
and overhanging rocks, by rushing brooks, where he
Parson Lot 139
watches and watches till he seems to hear the foam whis-
per, and to see the fishes leap ; and his hard-worn heart
wanders out free, beyond the grim city-world of stone and
iron, smoky chimneys, and roaring wheels, into the world
of beautiful things the world which shall be hereafter
ay, which shall be ! Believe it, toil-worn worker, in spite
of thy foul alley, thy crowded lodging, thy grimed cloth-
ing, thy ill-fed children, thy thin, pale wife believe it,
thou too, and thine, will some day have your share
of beauty. God made you love beautiful things only
because He intends hereafter to give you your fill of
them. That pictured face on the wall is lovely, but love-
lier still may the wife of thy bosom be when she meets
thee on the resurrection morn ! Those baby cherubs in
the old Italian painting how gracefully they flutter and
sport among the soft clouds, full of rich young life and
baby joy ! Yes, beautiful, indeed, but just such a one at
this very moment is that once pining, deformed child of
thine, over whose death-cradle thou wast weeping a
month ago ; now a child-angel, whom thou shalt meet
again never to part ! Those landscapes, too, painted by
loving, wise old Claude, two hundred years ago, are still
as fresh as ever. How still the meadows are ! how pure
and free that vault of deep blue sky ! No wonder that
thy worn heart, as thou lookest, sighs aloud, ' Oh that I
had wings as a dove, then would I flee away and be at
rest.' Ay, but gayer meadows and bluer skies await thee
in the world to come that fairy-land made real ' the
new heavens and the new earth,' which God has prepared
for the pure and the loving, the just and the brave, who
have conquered in this sore fight of life !
"These thoughts may seem all too far-fetched to
spring up in a man's head from merely looking at pic-
tures ; but it is not so in practice. See, now, such
thoughts have sprung up in my head ; how else did I
write them down here ? And why should not they, and
better ones, too, spring up in your heads, friends ? It is
140 Charles Kingsley
delightful to watch in a picture-gallery some street-boy
enjoying himself; how first wonder creeps over his rough
face, and then a sweeter, more earnest, awe-struck look,
till his countenance seems to grow handsomer and nobler
on the spot, and drink in and reflect unknowingly, the
beauty of the picture he is studying. See how some
laborer's face will light up before the painting which tells
him a noble story of by-gone days. And why? Be-
cause he feels as if he himself had a share in the story at
which he looks. They may be noble and glorious men
who are painted there ; but they are still men of like
passions with himself, and his man's heart understands
them and glories in them ; and he begins, and rightly, to
respect himself the more when he finds that he, too, has
a fellow feeling with noble men and noble deeds.
" I say, pictures raise blessed thoughts in me why
not in you, my brothers ? Your hearts are fresh, thought-
ful, kindly; you only want to have these pictures ex-
plained to you, that you may know why and how they are
beautiful, and what feelings they ought to stir in your
minds ; and therefore I wish, with your good will, to
explain, one by one, in future numbers, some of the best
pictures in the National Gallery, and the statues in the
British Museum. I shall begin by a portrait or two;
they are simpler than large pictures, and they speak of
real men and women who once lived on this earth of
ours generally of remarkable and noble men and
man should be always interesting to man. And as these
papers go on, if any one of you, in any part of England,
will be so kind as to mention well-known statues and pic-
tures of any sort which you wish explained, I, Parson
Lot, shall be most happy to tell you as much about them
as God shall give me wits to find out."
NO. II. NATIONAL GALLERY
" Any one who goes to the National Gallery in Trafal-
gar Square, and passes right through into the furthest
Parson Lot 141
room of all, cannot help seeing in the left-hand corner
two large and beautiful pictures the nearer of the two
labelled ' Titian/ representing Bacchus leaping from a
car drawn by leopards. The other, labelled 'Francia,'
representing the Holy Family seated on a sort of throne,
with several figures arranged below one of them a man
pierced with arrows. Between these two, low down,
<hangs a small picture, about two feet square, containing
only the portrait of an old man, in a white cap and robe,
and labelled on the picture itself, ' Joannes Bellinus?
Now this old man is a very ancient friend of mine, and
has comforted my heart, and preached me a sharp ser-
mon, too, many a time. I never enter that gallery with-
out having five minutes' converse with him ; and yet he
has been dead at least three hundred years, and, what is
more, I don't even know his name. I believe I might
have found out if I had taken the trouble to ask but
how much should I have been the wiser ? What more do
I know of a man by knowing his name ? It amuses me
much, in the world, when one asks, ' Who is that man ? '
to be answered, ' Oh ! don't you know ? that 's Mr.
Brown, who married Mrs. Smith's daughter ; ' and so on.
Bah ! Whether the man's name be Brown, or whether he
has as many names and titles as a Spanish grandee, what
does that tell me about the man 1 the spirit and char-
acter of the Man what the man will say when he is
asked what the man will do when he is stirred up to
action ? The man's name is part of his clothes ; his shell ;
his husk. Change his name and all his titles, you don't
change him -' A man 's a man for a' that,' as Burns says ;
and a goose a goose. Other men gave him his name ;
but his heart and his spirit his love and his hatred
his wisdom and his folly his power to do well and ill ;
those God and himself gave him. I must know those,
and then I know the man.
" Let us see what we can make out from the picture it-
self about the man whom it represents. In the first place,
142 Charles Kingsley
we may see by his dress that he was in his day the Doge
(or chief magistrate) of Venice the island city, the
queen of the seas. So we may guess that he had many a
stirring time of it, and many a delicate game to play
among those tyrannous and covetous old merchant-
princes who had elected him ; who were keeping up their
own power at the expense of every one's liberty, by spies
and nameless accusers, and secret councils, tortures, and
prisons, whose horrors no one ever returned to describe.
Nay, we may guess just the very men with whom he had
to deal the very battles he may have seen fought, for
the painter's name on the picture shows when he
lived.
" But all these are circumstances things which stand
round the man (as the word means), and not the whole man
himself not the character and heart of the man: that
we must get from the portrait ; and if the portrait is a
truly noble portrait we shall get it. If it is a merely vul-
gar or naturalist picture, like most that are painted now-
a-days, we shall get the man's dress and shape of his face,
but little or no expression : if it is Apathetic portrait, or
picture of passion, we shall get one particular temporary
expression of his face perhaps joy, sorrow, anger, dis-
gust but still one which may have passed any moment,
and left his face quite different ; but if the full expression
of the man's picture is of the noblest kind, an ideal or
high art picture, we shall get the whole spirit we shall
read his whole character there ; just all his strength and
weakness, his kindliness or his sternness, his thoughtful-
ness or his carelessness, written there once and for ever ;
what he would be, though all the world passed away ;
what his immortal and eternal soul will be, unless God or
the devil changed his heart, to all eternity.
" This is a deep matter. We shall get at it step by step,
by many examples. Let us see, now, whether this is an
ideal portrait ; in short, if it gives us a full idea of a com-
plete character, so that we should know him if any one
Parson Lot 143
talked to us of his character, even without telling us his
likeness.
"We may see at once that he ha: been very hand-
some ; but it is a peculiar sort of beauty. How delicate
and graceful all the lines in his face are ! he is a gentle-
man of God's own making, and not of the tailor';; making.
He is such a gentleman as I have seen among working-
men and nine-shilling-a-week laborers, often and often ;
his nobleness is in his heart it is God's gift, therefore it
shows in his noble-looking face. No matter whether he
were poor or rich ; all the rags in the world, all the finery
in the world, could not have made him look like a snob or
a swell. He was a thoughtful man, too ; no one with
such a forehead could have been a trifler : a kindly man,
too, and honest one that may have played merrily
enough with his grandchildren, and put his hand in his
purse for many a widow and orphan. Look what a
bright, clear, straightforward, gentle look he has, almost a
smile ; but he has gone through too many sad hours to
smile much : he is a man of many sorrows, like all true
and noble rulers ; and, like a high mountain-side, his face
bears the furrows of many storms. He has had a stern
life of it, what with tyrant noblemen, and wayward snobs,
and the cares of a great nation on his shoulders. He has
seen that in this world there is no rest for those who live
like true men : you may see it by the wrinkles in his
brow, and the sharp-cut furrows in his cheeks, and those
firm-set, determined lips. His eyes almost show the
marks of many noble tears, tears such as good men
shed over their nation's sins ; but that, too, is past now.
He has found out his path, and he will keep it ; and he
has no misgiving now about what God would have him
do, or about the reward which God has laid up for the
brave and just ; and that is what makes his forehead so
clear and bright, while his very teeth are clenched with
calm determination. And by the look of those high
cheek bones, and that large square jaw, he is a strong-
144 Charles Kingsley
willed man enough, and not one to be easily turned aside
from his purpose by any man alive, or by any woman
either, or by his own passions and tempers. One fault of
character, I think, he may perhaps have had much
trouble with I mean bitterness and contemptuousness.
His lips are very thin; he may have sneered many a
time, when he was younger, at the follies of the world
which that great, lofty, thoughtful brain and clear eye of
his told him were follies ; but he seems to have got past
that too. Such is the man's character : a noble, simple,
commanding old man, who has conquered many hard
things and, hardest of all, has conquered himself, and
now is waiting calmly for his everlasting rest God send
us all the same.
" Now consider the deep insight of old John Bellini,
who could see all this, and put it down there for us with
pencil and paint ; better far, more livingly and speakingly,
than I could describe it to you in a dozen letters.
" No doubt there was something in old John's own
character which made him especially able to paint such a
man ; for, as I have read, he was much such a man him-
self, and we always understand those best who are most
like ourselves ; and therefore you may tell pretty nearly a
painter's own character by seeing what sort of subjects he
paints, and what his style of painting is. And a noble,
simple, brave, godly man was old John Bellini, and never
lost his head, though princes were flattering him and
snobs following him with shouts and blessings for his
noble pictures of the Venetian victories, as if he had been
a man sent from God Himself; as indeed he was, as all
great painters are; for who but God makes beauty?
Who gives the loving heart, and the clear eye, and the
graceful taste to see beauty and to copy it, and to set
forth on canvas, or in stone, the noble deeds of patriots
dying for their country? To paint truly patriotic pictures
well, a man must have his heart in his work he must be
a true patriot himself, as John Bellini was (if I mistake
Parson Lot 145
not, he had fought for his country himself in more than
one shrewd fight). And what makes men patriots, or
artists, or anything noble at all, but the spirit of the living
God ? Those great pictures of Bellini's are no more ;
they were burnt a few years afterwards, with the magnifi-
cent national hall in which they hung ; but the spirit of
them is not passed away. Even now, Venice, Bellini's
beloved motherland, is rising, new-born, from long weary
years of Austrian slavery, and trying to be free and great
once more ; and young Italian hearts are lighting up with
the thoughts of her old fleets and her old victories, her
merchants and her statesmen, whom John Bellini drew.
Venice sinned, and fell ; and sorely has she paid for her
sins, through two hundred years of shame, and profligacy,
and slavery. And she has broken the oppressor's yoke,
by a strange and unexpected chance. The fall of Louis
Philippe has proved the salvation of Venice ; God send
her a new life ! May she learn by her ancient sins !
May she learn by her ancient glories!
" You will forgive me for forgetting my picture to talk
of such things? But we must return. Look back at
what I said about the old portrait the clear, calm, vic-
torious character of the old man's face, and see how all
the rest of the picture agrees with it, in a complete har-
mony, as all things in a first-rate picture should. The
dress, the scenery, the light and shade, the general ' tone '
of color should all agree with the character of the face
all help to bring our minds into that state in which we
may best feel and sympathize with the human beings
painted. Now here, because the face is calm and grand,
the color and the outlines are quiet and grand likewise.
How different these colors are from that glorious ' Holy
Family of Francia's, next to it on the right; or from
that equally glorious ' Bacchus and Ariadne ' of Titian's,
on the left ! Yet all three are right, each for its own
subject. Here you have no brilliant reds, no rich warm
browns ; no luscious greens. The white robe and cap
146 Charles Kingsley
give us the thought of purity and simplicity) the very
golden embroidery on them, which marks his rank, is
carefully kept back from being too gaudy. Everything is
sober here ; and the lines of the dress, how simple they
all are no rich curves, no fluttering drapery. They
would be quite stiff if it were not for that waving line of
round tassels in front, which break the extreme straight-
ness and heaviness of the splendid robe ; and all pointing
upwards towards that solemn, thin, calm face, with its high
white cap, rising like the peak of a snow-mountain against
the dark, deep, boundless blue sky beyond. That is a grand
thought of Bellini's ! You do not see the man's hands ;
he does not want them now, his work is done. You see
no landscape behind no buildings. All earth's ways and
sights are nothing to him now ; there is nothing but the old
man and the sky nothing between him and the heaven
now, and he knows it and is glad. A few months more,
and those way-worn features shall have crumbled to their
dust, and that strong, meek spirit shall be in the abyss of
eternity, before the God from whence it came.
"So says John Bellini, with art more cunning than
words. And if this paper shall make one of you look at
that little picture with fresh interest, and raise one strong
and solemn longing in you to die'the death of the right-
eous, and let your last end be like his who is painted
there then I shall rejoice in the only payment I expect,
or desire to get, for this my afternoon's writing.
"PARSON Lor."
The third article was on the British Museum,
and seems like an unconscious prophecy. 1 When
he wrote it many schemes were afloat in his own
mind, which he lived to see carried out in the
1 Mr. Kingsley, in common with Thomas Hughes, and many
others, later worked strenuously to have the British Museum, the
National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum in London
opened to the public on Sunday afternoons ; but the opposition
Parson Lot 147
great exhibitions of 1851 and 1860, in the various
local industrial exhibitions at Manchester and else-
where, and in the throwing open of our cathedrals
to the public. But he was before his age in these
as in many other matters.
"My friend, Will Willow-Wren, is bringing before our
readers the beauty and meaning of the living natural
world the great Green-book which holds 'the open
secret,' as Goethe calls it, seen by all, but read by, alas !
how few. And I feel as much as he, that nature is infin-
itely more wonderful than the highest art; and in the
commonest hedgeside leaf lies a mystery and beauty
greater than that of the greatest picture, the noblest statue
as infinitely greater as God's work is infinitely greater
than man's. But to those who have no leisure to study
nature in the green fields (and there are now-a-days too
many such, though the time may come when all will
have that blessing), to such I say, go to the British
Museum ; there at least, if you cannot go to nature's
wonders, some of nature's wonders are brought to you.
The British Museum is my glory and joy ; because it is
almost the only place which is free to English citizens as
such where the poor and the rich may meet together,
and before those works of God's spirit, 'who is no
respecter of persons,' feel that ' the Lord is the maker of
them all.' In the British Museum and the National
Gallery alone the Englishman may say, 'Whatever my
coat or my purse, I am an Englishman, and therefore I
have a right here. I can glory in these noble halls, as if
they were my own house. . . .' "
After an appeal to deans and chapters and to
rich collectors, he goes on:
was so strong in certain quarters that their hopes were not
realized till 1896, when the South Kensington was opened,
followed by the National Gallery and British Museum.
(M. K.)
148 Charles Kingsley
" What a noble, and righteous, and truly brotherly plan
it would be, if all classes would join to form a free
National Gallery of Art and Science, which might com-
bine the advantages of the present Polytechnic, Society
of Arts, and British Institution, gratis. Manufacturers
and men of science might send thither specimens of their
new inventions. The rich might send, for a few months
in the year, ancient and modern pictures, and not only
pictures, but all sorts of curious works of art and nature,
which are now hidden in their drawing-rooms and libra-
ries. There might be free liberty to copy any object, on
the copyist's name and residence being registered. And
surely artists and men of science might be found, with
enough of the spirit of patriotism and love, to explain
gratuitously to all comers, whatever their rank or class,
the wonders of the Museum. I really believe that if once
the spirit of brotherhood got abroad among us ; if men
once saw that here was a vast means of educating, and
softening and uniting those who have no leisure for study,
and few means of enjoyment, except the gin-shop and
Cremorne Gardens ; if they could but once feel that here
was a project, equally blessed for rich and poor, the
money for it would be at once forthcoming from many a
rich man, who is longing to do good, if he could only be
shown the way ; and from many a poor journeyman, who
would gladly contribute his mite to a truly national
museum, founded on the principles of spiritual liberty,
equality, and fraternity. All that is wanted is the spirit
of self-sacrifice, patriotism, and brotherly love which
God alone can give which I believe He is giving more
and more in these very days.
" I never felt this more strongly than some six months
ago, as I was looking in at the windows of a splendid
curiosity shop in Oxford Street, at a case of humming-
birds. I was gloating over the beauty of those feathered-
jewels, and then wondering what was the meaning, what
was the use of it all ? why those exquisite little creatures
Parson Lot 149
should have been hidden for ages, in all their splendors
of ruby and emerald and gold, in the South American
forests, breeding and fluttering and dying, that some dozen
out of all those millions might be brought over here to
astonish the eyes of men. And as I asked myself, why
were all these boundless varieties, these treasures of un-
seen beauty, created? my brain grew dizzy between
pleasure and thought ; and, as always happens when one
is most innocently delighted, ' I turned to share the joy/
as Wordsworth says; and next to me stood a huge,
brawny coal-heaver, in his shovel hat, and white stockings
and high-lows, gazing at the humming-birds as earnestly
as myself. As I turned he turned, and I saw a bright
manly face, with a broad, soot-grimed forehead, from
under which a pair of keen flashing eyes gleamed won-
dering, smiling sympathy into mine. In that moment we
felt ourselves friends. If we had been Frenchmen, we
should, I suppose, have rushed into each other's arms
and ' fraternized ' upon the spot. As we were a pair of
dumb, awkward Englishmen, we only gazed a half-minute,
staring into each other's eyes, with a delightful feeling of
understanding each other, and then burst out both at
once with 'Isn't that beautiful?' 'Well, that is!'
And then both turned back again, to stare at our
humming-birds.
" I never felt more thoroughly than at that minute
(though, thank God, I had often felt it before) that all
men were brothers ; that fraternity and equality were not
mere political doctrines, but blessed God-ordained facts ;
that the party-walls of rank and fashion and money were
but a paper prison of our own making, which we might
break through any moment by a single hearty and kindly
feeling; that the one spirit of God was given without
respect of persons ; that the beautiful things were beautiful
alike to the coal-heaver and the parson ; and that before
the wondrous works of God and of God's inspired genius,
the rich and the poor might meet together, and feel that
150 Charles Kingsley
whatever the coat or the creed may be, ' A man 's a man
for a' that,' and one Lord the maker of them all.
" For believe me, my friends, rich and poor and I
beseech you to think deeply over this great truth that
men will never be joined in true brotherhood by mere
plans to give them a self-interest in common, as the
Socialists have tried to do. No : to feel for each other,
they must first feel with each other. To have their
sympathies in common, they must have not one object of
gain, but an object of admiration in common ; to know
that they are brothers, they must feel that they have one
Father ; and a way to feel that they have one common
Father, is to see each other wondering, side by side, at
his glorious works !
" PARSON LOT. "
He had a sore battle to fight at this time with
his own heart, and with those friends and relations,
religious and worldly, who each and all from their
own particular standpoint deprecated the line he
took, and urged him to withdraw from this sym-
pathy with the people, which must necessarily,
they thought, injure his prospects in life. " But,"
he writes to his wife :
"... I will not be a liar. I will speak in season
and out of season. I will not shun to declare the whole
counsel of God. I will not take counsel with flesh and
blood, and flatter myself into the dream that while every
man on earth, from Maurice back to Abel, who ever tried
to testify against the world, has been laughed at, mis-
understood, slandered, and that, bitterest of all, by the
very people he loved best, and understood best, I alone
am to escape. My path is clear, and I will follow in it.
He who died for me, and who gave me you, shall I not
trust Him through whatsoever new and strange paths he
may lead me? ..."
At Queen's College 151
" Many thanks for your kind letter," he writes to Mr.
Ludlow, who had announced to him his rejection at
King's College, "which gave me the first intimation of
my defeat. ... All I hope is," he adds, " that we
shall be bold ' draw the sword, and throw away the
scabbard.' I think I have counted the cost, and I have
more to lose in many ways than any one of us almost.
And therefore, lest I should turn coward, I want to put
myself whence there will be no retreat. That myth of
old Von Trong Hagen, dashing the boat in pieces by
which the Nibelungen crossed the Danube, is great and
true. Let the unreturning ferry-boat perish. Let us for-
ward. God leads us, though blind. Shall we be afraid
to follow ? I do not see my way ; I do not care to ; but
I know that He sees His way, and that I see Him, and I
cannot believe that in spite of all one's sins He will for-
get His gracious promises. ' They had an eye unto Him
and were lightened; they that put their trust in Him
shall not be ashamed.' No, Ludlow, out, out on the
wide weltering ocean of thought Let us be sure that
He will never leave us nor forsake us, however sorely
battered, however cowardly we may long to turn, till we
have showed His strength unto this generation, and His
power to all those who are yet for to come. What if we
are no better than I am ! His strength shall be made
perfect in our weakness, and He will have all the glory to
Himself as He ought. I will bring you up a Game-law
ballad or two, and will work the end of the week at a
National Gallery Article, and a Letter to the Chartists.
At present I am grinding for Queen's College. Pray, let
us try and see what sort of a definite tone we can influence
people towards taking at our meetings. We must be
more definite and practical ; we must let the people see
more what we do hold. We must thus gain their sym-
pathy, before we begin scolding. ..."
To THE SAME,y#/y, 1848. "I should have answered
yesterday your noble and kind letter, had not my after-
152 Charles Kingsley
noon been employed in forcing a cruel, lazy farmer to
shoot a miserable horse which was rotting alive in front of
my house, and superintending its death by aid of one of
my own bullets. What an awful wonderful thing a violent
death is, even in a dumb beast ! I would not have lost the
sight for a great deaL But now to business. You take a
strange way to frighten a man off from novel-writing, by
telling him that he may become the greatest novelist of
the age. If your good opinion of me was true, I should
have less fear for myself, for a man could not become
that in this wonderful era, without having ideas and long-
ings which would force him to become something far
better than a novelist ; but for myself, chaotic, piecemeal,
passionate, ' Idctumar ' as I am, I have fears as great as
your own. I know the miserable, peevish, lazy, con-
ceited, faithless, prayerless wretch I am, but I know this,
too, that One is guiding me, and driving me when I will
not be guided, who will make me, and has made me, go
His way and do His work, by fair means or by foul. He
set me on writing this ' novel' He has taught me things
about the heart of fast sporting men, and about the con-
dition of the poor, and our duty to them, which I have no
doubt He has taught many more, but He has not set any
one else to speak about them in the way in which I am
speaking. He has given me a certain artistic knack of
utterance (nothing but a knack), but He has done more.
He has made the ' Word of the Lord like fire within my
bones,' giving me no peace till I have spoken out I
know I may seem presumptuous to myself most of all,
because I know best the ' liar to my own idea ' which I
am. I know that He has made me a parish priest, and
that that is the duty which lies nearest me, and that I
may seem to be leaving my calling in novel-writing. But
has He not taught me all these very things by my parish-
priest life ? Did He, too, let me become a strong, daring,
sporting wild man-of-the-woods for nothing? Surely the edu-
cation which He has given me, so different from that which
At Queen's College 153
authors generally receive, points out to me a peculiar
calling to preach on these points, from my own experience,
as it did to good old Izaak Walton, as it has done in our
day to that truly noble man, Captain Marryat. Therefore
I must believe ' Se tu segui la tua stella ' with Dante, that
He who ordained my star will not lead me into tempta-
tion, but through it, as Maurice says. Without Him all
places and methods of life are equally dangerous with
Him, all equally safe. Pray for me, for in myself I am
weaker of purpose than a lost greyhound, lazier than a
dog in rainy weather.
But I feel intensely the weight of your advice to write
no more novels. Why should I ? I have no more to
say. When this is done I must set to and read. The
symbolism of nature and the meaning of history must be
my studies. Believe me I long for that day The pangs
of intellectual labor, the burden of spiritual pregnancy,
are not pleasant things. A man cannot write in the fear
of God without running again t the devil at every step.
He cannot sit down to speak the truth without disturbing
in his own soul a hornet swarm of lies. Your hack-writer
of no creed, your bigot Polyphemus, whose one eye just
helps him to see to eat men, they do not understand
this ; their pens run on joyful and light of heart. But no
more talk about myself. Will you tell Parker that I am
quite willing to have my name and anything else he
chooses appended to the reprint of the Politics. If it
will free his worthy father in pocket or reputation, it must
be done.
" Many, many thanks for charming letters ; especially
one about the river at night that I have seen. As a
companion, just see the Hungerford Suspension Bridge
in a fog ; standing on the steam-boat pier, the further
shore invisible, with two vast lines, the catenary and its
tangent line, stretching away as if self-supported, into in-
finite space ; a sort of Jacob's Ladder, one end on earth
154 Charles Kingsley
and one in heaven. It makes one feel very small : so for
that matter, do the lines of rail in looking along a vast
sweep of railway. There is an awful waiting look about
them : a silent forbidden desert to all the world, except
the one moment when their demon bridegrooms shall
rush roaring over them on the path which none but they
must go. Does this seem real ? It is because the
thought is so unspeakable. I wonder whether, in the
future ages, men will ever fall down and worship steam-
engines, as the Caribs did Columbus's ships. Why not ?
Men have worshipped stone men and women ; why not
line iron ? Fancy it ! "
In the summer he made an expedition with Mr.
Maurice to Croyland Abbey, near Peterborough,
which gave him many inspirations for his story of
" Hereward." " We spent there a priceless day,"
he says; "these days with Maurice have taught
me more than I can tell. Like all great things,
he grows upon one more and more." He wrote
several letters to his little daughter at this time,
full of poetry and natural history.
"Mv DARLING Miss ROSE,
" Your Daddy is going to write you a very long letter,
and you must ask your darling Mam to read it to you. I
will tell you what I have seen since I have been away.
Mr. Maurice and Daddy went to Cambridge, and saw all
the beautiful churches, and Daddy was so happy, and
thanked God so for giving him a darling Miss Rose and
Maurice and their blessed mother, and then we went in a
boat down the river to Ely, and the water was all full of
little fishes, that swam up and down under the boat ; and
Daddy went to Batesbite Loch into a house, and there
were such beautiful butterflies, that people catch in the
Fens. And then we went sailing down sailing down
for twenty miles down the most beautiful deep rivei
Croyland Abbey 155
till we came to Ely. And there was a church, such a
beautiful church, on the top of a hill, with so many
towers and steeples, and Mr. Maurice and Daddy went
to it, and heard all the people say their prayers, and they
prayed to God for Daddy and Mam, and Miss Rose, and
little brother, and all the people that are good, and Daddy
was so happy ; and then we went to Peterborough, where
Daddy used to go when he was a little boy, and there
was a very big tortoise there, and Daddy used to go and
see it eat strawberries. And at Peterborough, Daddy and
Mr. Maurice went to the Cathedral to hear the little boys
sing, and Daddy was so happy, and they prayed for Miss
Rose and Maurice and their dear mother. And then
Daddy took a dog-cart and drove Mr. Maurice to Croy-
land, and there was such a beautiful church, all tumbled
down. And Daddy and Mr. Maurice went up to the
top of the tower, and all underneath them there was quite
flat fen, so very flat and smooth, and beautiful fields of
wheat and beans, and oats and rape-seed, and such great
ditches, quite straight and flat, and great high banks, with
the roads on the top of the banks, for fear the water
should come and drown people. And Daddy and Mr.
Maurice stood on the top of the great high tower, and
Daddy said, ' When will the good people come and build
up this beautiful church that is tumbled down?' and
then Daddy cried. And Mr. Maurice said, ' Wait a little,
and the good God will come down out of heaven, and
send all the good people back again, and then the beauti-
ful church will be built up again, and everybody will be
so good, and nobody will be sick any more. . . . And,
Mr. Maurice said, ' if you will be very good, and not be
cross, or get into passions, you will see all the good
people come out of the sky and then everybody will
be so happy.' And Daddy was very glad to hear what
Mr. Maurice said.
" Now, I have got a very bad pen, like a stick, and I
cannot write any more. And I will write you a long
156 Charles Kingsley
letter to-morrow and tell you what a beautiful place I am
in, and all about the stork, and the owls, and the beauti-
ful birds and butterflies that are in Daddy's room. ... s
"Your dear DADDY."
DUXFORD. "I am writing in such a curious place.
A mill where they grind corn and bones, and such a
funny little room in it full of stuffed birds. And there is
a flamingo, such a funny red bird, with long legs and a
long neck, as big as Miss Rose, and sharks' jaws, and an
armadillo all over great scales, and now I will tell you
about the stork. He is called Peter, and here is a picture
of him. See what long legs he has, and a white body
and black wings, and he catches all the frogs and snails,
and eats them, and when he is cross, he opens his long
bill, and makes such a horrible clattering like a rattle.
And he comes to the window at tea time, to eat bread
and butter, and he is so greedy, and he gobbled down a
great pinch of snuff out of Daddy's box, and he was so
sick, and we all laughed at him, for being so foolish and
greedy. And do you know there are such curious frogs
here that people eat, and there were never any found in
England before Mr. Thurnall found them, and he sent
them to the British Museum and the wise men were so
pleased, and sent him leave to go to the British Museum
and see all the wonderful things whenever he liked. And
he has got such beautiful butterflies in boxes, and whole
cupboards full of birds' eggs, and a river full of beautiful
fish, and Daddy went fishing yesterday, and caught an
immense trout, very nearly four pounds' weight, and he
raged and ran about in the river so long, and Daddy was
quite tired before he could get him out. And to-day
Daddy is going back to Cambridge to get a letter from
his dear home. And do you know when Mr. Thurnall
saw me drawing the stork, he gave me a real live stork of my
own to bring home to Miss Rose, and we will put him in
the kitchen garden to run about what fun 1 And to-
Letters to his Child 157
morrow Daddy is going to see the beautiful pictures at
the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the next day he is going to
fish at Shelford, and the next day, perhaps, he is coming
home to his darlings at Eversley Rectory, for he does
not know what to do without them. . . . How happy
Miss Rose must be with her dear mother. She must
say, ' thank God for giving me such a darling mother ! '
Kiss her and Maurice for me, and now good-bye, and I
will bring you home the stork.
" Your own Daddy,
"CHARLES KINGSLEY."
He made acquaintance this year with Mr.
Thomas Cooper, the Chartist author, to whom
he writes :
EVERSLEY, June 19, 1848. "Ever since I read your
brilliant poem, ' The Purgatory of Suicides,' and its most
affecting preface, I have been possessed by a desire to
thrust myself, at all risks, into your acquaintance. The
risk which I felt keenly, was the fear that you might dis-
trust me, as a clergyman; having, I am afraid, no great
reason to love that body of men. Still, I thought, the
poetic spirit ought to be a bond of communion between
us. Shall God make us brother poets, as well as brother
men, and we refuse to fraternize? I thought also that
you, if you have a poet's heart, as well as the poet's
brain which you have manifested, ought to be more
able than other men to appreciate and sympathize with
my feelings towards 'the working classes.' You can
understand why I held back from shame a false
shame, perhaps, lest you should fancy me a hypocrite.
But my mind was made up, when I found an attack in
the ' Commonwealth,' on certain papers which I had
published in the 'Politics of the People,' under the
name of Parson Lot. Now I had hailed with cordial
pleasure the appearance of the ' Commonwealth/ and
sympathized thoroughly with it and here was this very
158 Charles Kingsley
'Commonwealth* attacking me on some of the very
points on which I most agreed with it. It seemed to
me intolerable to be so misunderstood. It had been
long intolerable to me, to be regarded as an object of
distrust and aversion by thousands of my countrymen,
my equals in privilege, and too often, alas 1 far my
superiors in worth, just because I was a clergyman, the
very office which ought to have testified above all others,
for liberty, equality, brotherhood, for time and eternity.
I felt myself bound, then, to write to you, to see if
among the nobler spirits of the working classes I could
not make one friend who would understand me. My
ancestors fought in Cromwell's army, and left all for the
sake of God and liberty, among the pilgrim fathers ; and
here were men accusing me of 'mediaeval tyranny.' I
would shed the last drop of my life blood for the social
and political emancipation of the people of England, as
God is my witness ; and here are the very men for whom
I would die, fancying me an 'aristocrat.' It is not
enough for me that they are mistaken in me. I want to
work with them. I want to realize my brotherhood with
them. I want some one like yourself, intimately ac-
quainted with the mind of the working classes, to give
me such an insight into their life and thoughts, as may
enable me to consecrate my powers effectually to their
service. For them I have lived for several years. I
come to you to ask you if you can tell me how to live
more completely for them. If you distrust and reject
my overtures, I shall not be astonished pained I shall
be and you must know as well as I, that there is no
bitterer pain than to be called a rogue because you are
honester than your neighbors, and a time-server, be-
cause you have intellect enough to see both sides of a
question. If you will allow me to call on you, you will
very much oblige me. I send you my poem as some-
thing of a ' sample.' At first sight it may seem to hanker
after feudalism and the middle age. I trust to you to
Advice to an Author 159
see a deeper and somewhat more democratic moral
in it. . . .'
To J. C, ESQ., 1848. "I have delayed answering your
letter because I did not wish to speak in a hurry on a sub-
ject so important to you. I cannot advise you to publish
the poems of yours which I have seen at least for some
years, and I will give you my reasons. With the ijtfos of
them I thoroughly agree ; it is in the Traces I see defects,
which will not suit the public just now. The time for
merely reflective poets is past : I do not mean for sub-
jective poetry that will always be interesting, but only
in so far as it embodies the subjective in objective forms
in short, in so far as it is dramatic, I do not mean in
dialogues and scenes, but in impersonation and repre-
sentation. Byron, Moore, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson
have succeeded in subjective poetry, just in so far as they
have embodied spiritual and intellectual truths in images
and examples drawn from the physical and pathetic (I use
these words in Aristotle's broad sense) phenomenon of
history, man, and the universe. This the last generation
of poets have done, and the world will be satisfied with
nothing less henceforward. Indeed, a man is a poet
just in so far as he does this as he sees and represents
the unseen in the seen. Now here you fail. You have
not images enough (I don't mean tropes), nor are those
you have original enough. . . . First, you write too easily ;
that same imp ' facility ' must not be let to ruin you, as it
helped to ruin Theodore Hook. You must never put two
words or lines where one will do ; the age is too busy and
hurried to stand it. Again, you want to see a great deal
more, and study more that is the only way to have
materials. Poets cannot create till they have learnt to
recombine. The study of man and nature ; the study
of poets and fiction writers of all schools is necessary.
And, believe me, you can never write like Byron, or any-
body else worth hearing, unless by reading and using
160 Charles Kingsley
poetry of a very different school from his. The early
dramatists, Shakespeare above all ; and not less the two
schools which made Shakespeare ; the Northern ballad
literature ; nay even, I find, the Norse myths. And on the
other hand, the Romance literature must be known, to
acquire that objective power of embodying thoughts,
without which poetry degenerates into the mere intel-
lectual reflective, and thence into the metrical-prose
didactic. Read, mark, and learn, and do not write. I
never wrote five hundred lines in my life before the
' Saint's Tragedy/ but from my childhood I had worked
at poetry from Southey's ' Thalaba,' Ariosto, Spenser, and
the ' Old Ballads,' through almost every school, classic
and modern, and I have not read half enough. I have
been studying all physical sciences which deal with
phenomena ; I have been watching nature in every mood ;
I have been poring over sculptures and paintings 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, and have
cut the Muse pro tempore. Again, you have an infinity
to learn about rhythm and metre, and about the
coloring and chiaroscuro of poetry; how to break up
your masses, and how to make masses ; high lights and
shadows ; major and minor keys of metre ; rich coloring
alternating with delicate. All these things have to be
learnt, if you wish to avoid monotony, to arrest the
interest, to gain the cardinal secret of giving ' continued
surprise in expectation,' and 'expectation in surprise.'
" Now don't be angry with me ; because I think you have
a poetic faculty, therefore I don't want you to publish, or
even write, till you have learnt enough really to enable you
to embody your thoughts. They are good and vigorous, and
profitable for this age ; but they are as yet too bare-backed
you must go clothes-hunting for the poor naked babbies."
To , ESQ. "The extreme importance which I
attach to the marriage question, and my great dissatisfac-
On Marriage 161
tion with my lame defence of the truth on the point,
compels me to inflict a long letter on you, hoping that it
may, if not convince, at least shake you in your present
view perhaps, by God's blessing, be one stepping-stone
for you towards that higher and spiritual view of marriage,
the path to which is very often earnest doubt, like yours,
of that vulgar and carnal conception of it which is com-
mon, in the sense-bound world.
** Man is a sexual animal. Sense tells us this, indepen-
dent of Scripture, and Scripture confirms it ' male and
female created he them ' ; and again, ' be fruitful and
multiply' were said of man in Paradise. The notion
that marriage was not instituted till after the Fall is a
private gloss, flatly contradicted by Gen. i. 28, and Adam's
speech, Gen. ii. 24 ; and, above all, the use of the word
* wife ' before the Fall proves it. I must protest, in the
name of all criticism and logic, against supposing that the
word wife has an utterly different meaning in the first
three chapters of Genesis to what it has in the rest of the
Bible and in the whole world to this day, especially when
those three chapters describe the institution of wives.
Admit such a mode of interpretation and Scripture may
be made (as among the Romish theologians) to mean
anything or nothing, at the reader's will. . . . Man is
not a mere animal he is the spirit-animal ; a spirit
manifesting itself in an animal form, as the heathens
themselves hold. Now the Law of the universe is, that
spirit shall rule and matter obey, and this law has two
poles ; ist, That spirit shall control, and matter be
controlled. 2nd, That spirit shall will, and matter
express that will For the true idea of rule is, where the
subject is not merely restrained by his king, but fulfils the
will of his king. In the earlier ages of Christianity the
first pole only was perceived; the gross sensuality of
the heathen world shut everything from the eyes of the
fathers but the fact that it was by his fleshly lusts that
man enacted most of his sins.
Vol. 18
1 6a Charles Kingsley
" It was, I think, a part of Christ's guidance that they
did see nothing else ; that their whole energies were
directed to preaching the great message, ' Ye are riot
beasts, but ;mmortal souls not the slaves of flesh and
matter, but the lords of your flesh, servants only of
God.' Till this message had been fully believed, no
art or chivalry was allowed to arise in the Church. It
was better that man should think marriage, eating, and
drinking, and humanity itself unclean, than make them
unclean by a mere animal return to the brutality from
which they had been raised. Thus Christ, in every age
of the Church, for the sake of enabling our piecemeal
and partial minds to bring out one particular truth, seems
to permit of our pushing it into error, by not binding it
with its correlative ; e.g., State Authority v. Ecclesiastical
Authority, and Free Will v. Predestination.
" In fulness of time God raised up Christian art,
chivalry, and woman worship as witnesses for the other
pole, ;>., that spirit had nobler relations to flesh and
matter, and a nobler duty to fulfil with regard to it. As
the flesh was not meant merely to be the slave of the
spirit, it was meant to be its symbol its outward
expression. In this day only can we reconcile the
contradiction by which both Scripture and common
sense talk of our bodies as at once not us, and yet us.
They are not we, but our earthly tabernacles, in as far as
they are aggregated gas and salts, &c. , while we are each
of us one and eternal. They are we, in as far as they
are infallibly, in every lineament and gesture, the expres-
sions of our inward and spiritual state. . . . ' In the
beginning God created them male and female.' This,
when taken with the context, can only be explained to
mean a woman for each man, and a man for each
woman. This binary law of man's being ; the want of a
complementum, a ' help meet,' without whom it is not
good for him to be, and joined to whom they two became
one being of a higher organization than either had alone
On Marriage 163
this binary or monogamic law has been gradually
developing itself in the history of man ; the heathen, when
purest, felt that his ideal. The Bible itself sets forth its
gradual rise from intermarriage with sisters, concubinage,
polygamy, up to our Lord's assertion of the original ideal
of marriage, the one husband and one wife. And St.
Paul, without forbidding polygamy, puts monogamy on
such a ground that the whole Church has instinctively felt
that as long as Ephesians v. stood in Scripture, polygamy
was a base and fearful fall for any Christian man. This
development of monogamy, as the only ideal of man, is
going on now ; one may see it in the increasing dislike to
second marriages, for the very opposite reason to the old
Romish dislike to them. Lovers of high and pure minds
now shrink from them, because marriage is so spiritual
and timeless so pure and mysterious an Eternal
union, which once solemnized with the loved one can be
transferred to no other which death cannot part.
God forbid, however, that any Church should break
gospel liberty by forbidding second marriages. They
are no more sin to those who have not entered into the
higher idea of marriage, than polygamy is sinful to the
heathen: but towards strict monogamy lies the path of
man's education in this age, and in the strict monogamy
to more divine, more Scriptural views of marriage than
the world has yet seen. . . .
" This brings me to your objection, that if this were
true it were a sin not to marry. To this I answer, that
were it false, it were a sin to marry, in all who knew
celibacy to be the higher state, because it is a sin to
choose a lower state, without having first striven to the
very uttermost for the higher. And it is a sin to disbe-
lieve that God's grace will be vouchsafed in answer to
prayer and earnest struggles to preserve that state, as I
think the biographies of pious monks and nuns fully
show. They by a vow, which they believed binding, had
made it sinful for them to marry, for whatsoever is not
164 Charles Kingsley
of faith is sin ; they, therefore, prayed for grace to avoid
that which in them would have been sin, and they ob-
tained it. Were I a Romanist, I should look on a con-
tinuance in the state of wedlock as a bitter degradation
to myself and my wife. But a better answer to your
objection is, that, as I said before, man is a spirit-animal,
and in communion with God's spirit has a right to believe
that his affections are under that spirit's guidance, and
that when he finds in himself such an affection to any
single woman as true married lovers describe theirs to
be, he is bound (duty to parents and country allowing)
to give himself up to his love in child-like simplicity and
self-abandonment, and, at the same time, with solemn
awe and self-humiliation at being thus readmitted into
the very garden of the Lord :
'The Eden, where the Spirit and the flesh
Are one again, and new-born souls walk free,
And name in mystic language all things new,
Naked and not ashamed.' 1
. . . With fear and trembling, ' putting his shoes from off
his feet,' for the place whereon he stands is holy ground,
even as the ineffable symbol of the highest of all unions
(Eph. v. 25-29) with fear and trembling, lest he for-
get the meaning of the glorious mystery. . . .
"Yet if a man marries without love, he sins not at
least God shall judge him and not I. But ' for the hard-
ness of our heart,' only I believe is a man allowed to
marry without love; and 'such shall have trouble in
the flesh,' says St. Paul. For remark all through
i Corinthians viL, he is talking of marriage on its low-
est ground . . . and here is the key to the whole chap-
ter. Who were the Corinthians? Tht city of harlots
for centuries sunk in the most brutal sensuality, even then
getting drunk at the Lord's table. This is ' the present
necessity ' their low and sensual state which would
i " Saint's Tragedy," Act II. Scene ix.
On Marriage 165
have never comprehended the magnificent idea of mar-
riage, which he unfolds to his beloved Ephesians, the
blameless Church to whom he speaks of nothing but the
deepest and most glorious truths. True, there is a bless-
ing pronounced on him who gives up wife for Christ's
sake and the Gospel's. . . . But in God's name let it be
for Christ's sake not for his own sake, that he may do
the more good, not merely that he may be the more good.
Is a man to be rewarded because for the sake of attaining
(as he thinks that he may attain) what he calls ' a higher
place in heaven,' he refuses to bring immortal beings,
made in God's image heirs of Christ's redemption into
the world, and to obey the primeval and as yet unrepealed
command ? Oh ! sir, whoever calls this devoutness, I
call it selfishness.
" But if a man, on the other hand, as men have done,
as I must believe St. Paul did, when I read Ephesians v.
and i Timothy iii. 2 says to himself, " I know marriage
is the highest, because the most symbolic of all human
states ; but it is not for me, I have . great work to do
a peculiar vocation, which lies in a quite opposite direc-
tion to the duties of citizen and husband, and must bear
that cross. God has refused to let me love woman ; and
even hereafter, if I shall love, I must turn away from the
fulfilment of that love in Time, trusting to my Heavenly
Father to give us some deeper and more ineffable union
with each other in those glories unknown, which He has
prepared for those who love Him : at all events, the work
which He has for me must be done. And, as a married
man, I cannot do my work, peculiar as it is.' I believe
that he who should so embrace celibacy, would deserve
all names of honor which men could heap on him, just
because the sacrifice is so great just because he gives
up a present and manifest honor and blessing his
rights as man made in God's image committing him-
self to God to repay him. But what has this to do with
mere selfish safety and easy saving of one's own soul ?
1 66 Charles Kingsley
"The highest state I define as that state through and in
which men can know most of God, and work most for
God : and this I assert to be the marriage state. He can
know most of God, because it is through those family ties,
and by those family names that God reveals Himself to
man, and reveals man's relations to Him. Fully to under-
stand the meaning of ' a Father in Heaven ' we must be
fathers ourselves ; to know how Christ loved the Church,
we must have wives to love, and love them ; else why has
God used those relations as symbols of the highest myste-
ries which we (on the Romish theory) are the more saintly
the less we experience of them ? And it is a historic fact,
that just the theologic ideas which a celibate priesthood
have been unable to realize in their teaching, are those of
the Father in Heaven the Husband in Heaven. Their
distortion of the last great truth requires a letter to itself,
I will only now add an entreaty that you will forgive me
if I have seemed too dogmatic. But God has showed
me these things hi an eventful and blissful marriage history,
and woe to me if I preach them not."
Some words of his written in 1872, in which he
defines a " noble fear " as one of the elements of
that lofty and spiritual love which ruled his own
daily life, may explain why he speaks above of
entering the married state with " solemn awe and
self-humiliation," and why he looked upon such
married love as the noblest education a man's
character could have :
" Can there be true love without wholesome fear? And
does not the old Elizabethan ' My dear dread ' express
the noblest voluntary relation in which two human souls
can stand to each other ? Perfect love casteth out fear.
Yes : but where is love perfect among imperfect beings,
save a mother's for her child? For all the rest, it is
through fear that love is made perfect ; fear which bridles
Devonshire 1 67
and guides the lover with awe even though misplaced
of the beloved one's perfections ; with dread never
misplaced of the beloved one's contempt. And there-
fore it is that souls who have the germ of nobleness
within, are drawn to souls more noble than themselves, just
because, needing guidance, they cling to one before whom
they dare not say, or do, or even think an ignoble thing.
And if these higher souls are as they usually are
not merely formidable, but tender likewise, and true, then
the influence which they may gain is unbounded both
to themselves, and to those that worship them. ..."
"Yeast" was now coming out monthly in
"Fraser's Magazine." It was written with his
heart's blood. No book ever took so much out of
him. After busy days in the parish he would sit
down and write it deep into the night. The
state of the laboring classes in country as well
as town absorbed him. Brain and nerves were
continually on the stretch, and the cry of his soul
was:
" How long, O Lord ! how long before Thou come again !
Still in cellar, and in garret, and on moorland dreary,
The orphans moan, and widows weep, and poor men toil
in vain."
One Sunday evening after his two services had
been got through with difficulty, he broke down
utterly, and his medical man, alarmed at his
weakness, ordered complete change. All literary
work, except an occasional review for "Fraser"
was stopped; but as during a month's rest at
Bournemouth he gained nothing, he had to pre-
pare for a longer absence in Devonshire, where he
spent the following winter and spring.
1 68 Charles Kingsley
TO HIS WIFE
EVERSLEY: October 27. ". . . Please God I shall
be back to-morrow (Bournemouth). I am quite worn
out with going round and seeing every one to-day. I
am trying to recollect and collect everything, but my
brains are half addled. Kiss the darlings for me. What
would life be without you ? What is it with you but a
brief pain to make us long for everlasting bliss. There
we shall be together for ever, without a sigh or a cross.
But how long first ! how long ! . . . "
TO J. CONINGTON, ESQ.
ILFRACOMBE : December 30. " . . . I am so dissatis-
fied with 'Yeast,' that I shall lay it by pro tern. 1 It was
finished, or rather cut short, to please Fraser, and now it
may lie and ferment for a few years. You are right in
your surmise that the finale is mythic and not typic.
You will see why (please God, for I am diffident of
myself,) when I finish it. But in the meantime I am
hardly up to much work. I have Mrs. Jamieson's book
to review, which will be hard work for my poor addle
brain, which feels, after an hour's reading, as if some one
had stirred it with a spoon. I have, however, tinkered
up something light and quaint by way of a review, and
shall get it done off in a day or two. So if you will keep
your trumpet for ' Ambarvalia,' I will celebrate the birth
of dough's ' Bothie ' with penny whistle and banjo. . . .
I am mending in health, from the joint action of idleness,
the climate of Paradise, and glorious cliff scenery, and
hope to have Maurice staying with me next week."
1 " Yeast " was finally published in book-form in 1851. (M. K.)
CHAPTER VII
1849
AGED 30
WINTER IN DEVONSHIRE ILLNESS DECIDES ON TAKING
PUPILS CORRESPONDENCE ON ROMANISM VISIT TO
LONDON SOCIAL QUESTIONS FEVER AT EVERSLEY
RENEWED ILLNESS RETURNS TO DEVONSHIRE CHOLERA
IN ENGLAND SANITARY WORK BERMONDSEY JACOB'S
ISLAND DEVELOPMENT OF " YEAST " INFLUENCE ON
YOUNG MEN RECOLLECTIONS BY MR. C. KEGAN PAUL.
Passion, or "sensation." I am not afraid of the word, still less
of the thing. You have heard many cries against sensation
lately ; but, I can tell you, it is not less sensation we want, but
more. The ennobling difference between one man and another
between one animal and another is precisely in this, that one
feels more than another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation
might not be easily got for us ; if we were earth-worms, liable at
every instant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too much
sensation might not be good for us. But being human creatures,
IT is good for us ; nay, we are only human in so far as we are
sensitive, and our honor is precisely in proportion to our passion.
RUSKIN, " Sesame and Lilies."
MR. MAURICE with other friends came to
visit him at Ilfracombe, and all went
away depressed at seeing the utter exhaustion,
mental and bodily, of one who had been the life
and soul of their band of workers in 1848.
" Not as of old, like Homeric Achilles, *v8 ycuW,
Joyous knight errant of God, thirsting for labor and strife,
No more on magical steed borne free through the regions of
ether,
170 Charles Kingsley
Fruit-bearing autumn is gone j let the sad, quiet winter hang
o'er me
Blossoms would fret me with beauty ; my heart has no tune
to be-praise them ;
Gray rock, bough, surge, cloud, waken no yearning within.
Sing not, thou skylark above ! . . .
Scream on, ye sea fowl ! my heart echoes your desolate cry.
Sweep the dry sand on, thou wild wind, to drift o'er the
shell and the sea-weed ;
Sea-weed and shell, like my dreams, swept down the pitiless
tide." i
For months he could do nothing but wander on
the seashore with his wife and babies collecting
shells and zoophytes, while dreaming over "The
Autobiography of a Cockney Poet," which in the
autumn was to develop into "Alton Locke."
Of this, he says to a friend :
u I have some hope, as it has revealed itself to me so
rapidly and methodically, that I feel it comes down from
above, and that only my folly can spoil it which I pray
against daily. . . . Tell Charles I have found to-day
another huge comatula, and bottled him with his legs, by
great dodging. I am always finding something fresh."
Illness had obliged him to resign his professor-
ship at Queen's College, where, besides two in-
troductory lectures n literature and composition,
he had jjiven P. course en Early English Litera-
ture. To Mr. Strettell who took his work there,
he writes :
" I left off befor the Conquest, my next lecture would
have been on Edward the Confessor the difference
between a good man and a good king like him and
1 Elegiacs. Poems, p. 275.
Decides on Taking Pupils 171
Louis XVI. The rotting of the Anglo-Saxon system.
. . . Go your own way ; what do girls want with a
' course of literature ' ? Your business and that of all
teachers is, not to cram them with things, but to teach
them how to read for themselves. A single half century
known thoroughly, as you are teaching, will give them
canons and inductive habits of thought, whereby to judge
all future centuries. We want to train not cupboards
full of 'information' (vile misnomer), but real informed
women. ... I read out some Caedmon no ^Elfric I
think some Beowulf but I should counsel you to let
that be (as I gave them the Athelstan Ballad, and some
of Alfred's, &c.), and just do what I intended. Give
them a lecture on the rise of our Norse forefathers give
them something from the Voluspa and Edda. Show
them the peculiar wild, mournful, gigantic objective
imagination of the men, and its marriage with the Saxon
subjectivity (as I fancy) to produce a ballad school.
Remember two things. The Norse are the great creators,
all through and all the ballads came from the North of
England and Lowlands of Scotland, i.e. from half Norse
blood. . . ."
The expenses of illness had now to be met, and
he consulted Mr. Maurice and Mr. A. J. Scott,
Principal of Owens College, Manchester, about
taking pupils.
"Will you excuse another word about pupils?" he
writes to Mr. Scott. . . . " I am not going to talk what
I can teach. But what I should try to teach, would be
principally physical science, history, English literature,
and modern languages. In my eyes the question is not
what to teach, but how to educate ; how to train not
scholars, but men; bold, energetic, methodic, liberal-
minded, magnanimous. If I can succeed in doing that,
I shall do what no salary can repay and what is not
172 Charles Kingsley
generally done, or expected to be done, by private
tutors. . . ."
"That is what is wanted," Mr. Scott remarked,
"and it is what Charles Kingsley will do." Mr.
Maurice wrote also to Professor Thompson, of
Trinity College, Cambridge, about pupils for him.
" I do not know," he says, " a man more fitted for the
work scarcely any one equally fitted. He is a good,
accurate, and enthusiastic scholar, full of knowledge of all
things about him, and delights in them, and more likely
to give a young man of the day a good direction in
divinity, meeting his difficulties and dealing honestly with
them, than any person I have fallen in with. His conver-
sation is full of interest even when he is ill ; when he is
well he is the freshest, freest hearted man in England.
. . . His home is altogether most pleasant. . . ."
But, notwithstanding the efforts of his friends,
so strong a prejudice had been created against
him by his writings, that no pupils were forth-
coming till the following year, when Mr. Richard
Martineau ventured to place his son with him.
His leave of absence was now extended ; grad-
ually the rest told upon him, and he cheerily
writes to his parents, who had provided for his
duty at Eversley :
" I now am better than I have been at all, I may say.
A tremendous gale of wind has acted on me exactly like
champagne and cathedral-organs in one, and restored my
(what you would call nervous) what I call magnetic tone."
ILFRACOMBE : April FooPs Day, 1849. " Many thanks
for all your great kindness ; I should be now like Batsy
Bannett, ' the mazed woman teu Morte that picketh
shalls,' if it had not been for all your care of my few sheep
Correspondence 173
in the wilderness. I am quite ashamed of amusing
myself here while you are toiling for me ; but being here,
I will not do things by halves, and am leading a truly
hoggish life viz. : 18 hours sleeping, 4 hours eating, 2
hours walking, o hours reading 24 ; which you will
allow is a change ( in my dietetics. Mansfield and I go
geologizing and shell-picking ; but ah ! ! ! ' ther baint no
shells ! Where be they gwan ? ' I went to Morte yes-
terday, and found, as indeed I do of all this country, that
my old childish recollection had painted it, not as usual,
larger and more striking than the actuality, but smaller.
I find that I was not, as a boy of ten, capable of taking in
the grandeur of the scenery here, and that I had brought
away only as much of it as I could hold. Every hill
(and this strikes me much), except perhaps little Cap-
stone, is much higher and grander than I thought. I feel
the change from North Hants very much the world
seems turned upside down. I get a strange swimming in
the wits now and then, at seeing farm-houses under my
feet, and cows feeding like so many flies against a wall.
It is the strange position of well-known objects, and not
the height, which upsets me. I find my climbing head
surer than ever, and can placidly look over the awful gulf
of Hillsborough as if it were a six-foot wall. We have had
some glorious climbs already, which have put new life
into me. In fact, were I to return to work to-morrow,
the journey would, so far, have cured me the very sight
of the hills round Barnstaple was enough. What a mys-
terious curse-blessing is this same ' Heimweh,' this intense
love of one's own country, which makes it seem pleasanter
to lie down here and die, than to live anywhere else on
earth. It is a righteous and a God-given feeling, and one
which, as Carlyle says, distinguishes man from the ape
that local attachment, root of all true patriotism, valor,
civilization woe to those who fancy it fine to turn cos-
mopolite, and by becoming ' citizens of the world,' lose
the very idea of citizenship for the sake of doing what a
174 Charles Kingsley
navigator's dog or a gipsy's donkey can do a great deal
better. Pray tell me how and where to find shells,, Morte
and even Barricane itself, was monopolized by countless
millions of mactra stultorum there was hardly another
shell. Crewkerne is very barren at Rillage Point the
beach is quite altered, all the sands q;one. And ' where,
oh where/ is the Venus Maidenhair gone ? I have hunted
every wet rock and ' shute ' from Rillage Point to the
near side of Hillsborough, at danger of my neck, and
cannot find a scrap, but plenty of Asplenium marinum,
which you could n't find. Pray inform me how to get
shells ; and pray don't ay that Yeast ' is written by me.
I shall be able to do better with it by remaining incog. I
have found the most wonderful beasts on the rocks you
can imagine. Comatula rosea, bred between the star-fish,
a coralline, and an encrinite, animal, vegetable, and
mineral, which start as stone-flowers, and then break off
their stalk, and go about with legs and arms, and the beauty
in shape and color is wonderful. I enclose a drawing."
The spring was spent at Lynmouth, and while
there he had the joy of introducing his wife's
sister and Mr. Froude l to his beloved Clovelly,
from whence he writes home :
" Only a few lines, for the post starts before breakfast.
We got here all safe. ... I cannot believe my eyes : the
same place, the pavement, the same dear old smells, the
dear old handsome loving faces again. It is as if I was a
little boy again, or the place had stood still while all the
world had been rushing and rumbling on past it ; and
then I suddenly recollect your face, and those two ducks
on the pier ; and it is no dream ; this is the dream, and I
am your husband ; what have I not to thank God for !
I have been thanking Him ; but where can I stop ! We
talk of sailing home again, as cheapest and pleasantest.
1 This sister of Mrs. Kingsley's was Mr. Froude's first wife*
(M. K.}
On Romanism 175
To-day I lionize C. over everything. Kiss the children
for me."
The following letter was written to a young
man going over to Rome. Several pages have
been lost, which will account for any want of
sequence.
CLIFTON: May ir, 18-9. "I have just heard from
Charles Mansfield, to my inexpressible grief, that you are
inclined to join the Roman Communion ; and at the risk
of being called impertinent, I cannot but write my whole
heart to you. What I say may be -n-apa TOV \6yov, after
all ; if so, pray write and let me know what your real
reasons are for such a step. I think, as one Christian
man writing to another, I may dare to entreat this of
you. For believe me I am no bigot. I shall not trouble
you with denunciations about the ' scarlet woman ' or the
* little horn.' I cannot but regard with awe, at least, if
not reverence, a form of faith which God thinks good
enough still for one half (though it be the more brutal,
profligate, and helpless half) of Europe. Believe me, I
can sympathize with you. I have been through it ; I
have longed for Rome, and boldly faced the consequences
of joining Rome ; and though I now have, thank God,
cast all wish of change behind me years ago, as a great
lying devil's temptation, yet I still long as ardently as
ever to see in the Church of England much which only
now exists, alas ! in the Church of Rome. Can I not
feel for you ? Do I not long for a visible, one, organized
Church ? Do I not shudder at the ghastly dulness of our
services ? Do I not pray that I may see the day when
the art and poetry of the nineteenth century shall be
again among us, turned to their only true destination
the worship of God ? Have I shed no bitter, bitter tears
of shame and indignation in cathedral aisles, and ruined
abbeys, and groaned aloud, ' Ichabod, Ichabod, the glory
is departed/ etc," [Here some pages are lost.]
176 Charles Kingsley
" Can you not commit the saving of your soul to Him
that made your soul ? I think it will be in good keeping,
unless you take it out of His hands, by running off where
He has not put you. Did you never read how ' He that
saveth his soul shall lose it.' .beware. Had you been
born an Italian Romanist I would have said to you,
Don't leave Rome ; stay where you are, and try to mend
the Church of your fathers ; if it casts you out, the sin
be on its own head ; and so I say to you. Do you want
to know God's will about you? What plainer signs of
it, than th* fact that He has made you, and educated
you as a Protestant Englishman. Here, believe it
believe the providentiam, 'Dei in rebus rcvelatam?
Here He intends you to work, and do the duty which
lies nearest. Hold what doctrines you will, but do not
take yourself out of communion with your countrymen,
to bind yourself to a system which is utterly foreign to
us and our thoughts, and only by casting off which have
we risen to be the most mighty, and (with all our sins),
perhaps the most righteous and pure of nations, a fact
which the Jesuits do nox deny. I assure you that they
tell their converts that the reason why Protestant Eng-
land is allowed to be so much more righteous than the
Romish nations is t try the faith of the elect ! ! You
will surely be above listening to such anile sophistry!
But still, you think, ' you may be holier there than here. 1
Ah, sir, 'ccelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare
currunt? Ultra-montanism will be a new system; but
not, I think, a new character. Certain outward acts, and
certain inward feelings, which are all very nice, and right,
and pleasant, will ' made easier for you there than
here : you will live so charming y by rule and measure /
not a moment in the day but will b allotted out for you,
with its appropriate acts of devotion. True, now you
are a man, standing face to .ace with God ; then you will
(believe one who knows) find yourself a machine, face to
face, not with God, but with a priest and a system, and
On Romanism 177
hosts of inferior deities, of which hereafter. Oh ! sir,
you, a free-born Englishman, brought up in that liberty
for which your forefathers died on scaffolds and in
battle-fields that liberty which begot a Shakespeare, a
Raleigh, a Bacon, Milton, Newton, Faraday, Brooke
will you barter away that inestimable gift because Italian
pedants, who know nothing of human nature but from
the books of prurient celibates, tell you that they have
got a surer ' dodge ' for saving your soul than those have,
among whom God's will, not your own, has begotten and
educated you ? But you ' will be able to rise to a greater
holiness there.' Holiness, sir? Devoutness, you mean.
The ' will of God ' is your holiness already, and you may
trust Him to perfect His will in you here for here He
has put you if by holiness you mean godliness and
manliness, justice and mercy, honesty and usefulness.
But if by holiness you mean ' saintliness,' I quite agree
that Rome is the place to get that, and a poor pitiful
thing it is when it is got not God's ideal of a man.
. . . And do not fancy that you will really get any spirit-
ual gain by going over. The very devotional system
which will educe and develop the souls o" people born
and bred up under it, and cast, constitutionally and by
hereditary associations, into its mould, will only prove a
dead leaden crushing weight on an Englishman, who has,
as you have, tasted from his boyhood the liberty of the
Spirit of God. You will wake, my dear brother, you
will wake, not altogether, but just enough to find your-
self not believing in Romish doctrines about saints and
virgins, absolutions and indulgences, but only believing
in believing them an awful and infinite difference, on
which I beseech you earnestly to meditate. You will
find yourself crushing the voice of conscience, common-
sense, and humanity I mean the voice of God within
you, in order to swallow down things at which your gorge
rises in disgust. You will find the Romish practice as
different from the Romish ideal as the English is from
178 Charles Kingsley
the English ideal, and you will find amid all your dis-
content and doubts, that the habits of religious excite-
ment, and of leaning on priests whom you will neither
revere nor trust for themselves, will have enchained you
like the habits of a drunkard or an opium-eater, so that
you must go back again and again for self-forgetfulness
to the spiritual laudanum-bottle, which gives now no
more pleasant dreams, but only painful heartache, and
miserable depression afterwards. You may answer
This may be all very fine, but if Rome be the only true
Church, thither I must go, loss or gain. Most true. But
take care how you get at this conviction that Rome is the
true Church ; if by a process of the logical understanding,
that is most unfair, for you will have to renounce the conclu-
sions of the understanding when you go to Rome. How
then can you let it lead you to a system which asserts in
limine that it has no right to lead you anywhere at all ?
"But I must defer this question, and also that of
Romish aesthetics, to another letter. I make no apology
for plain speaking ; these are times in which we must be
open with each other. And I was greatly attracted by
the little I saw of you. I know there is a sympathy
between us; and, having passed through these tempta-
tions in my own person, God would judge me if I
did not speak what He has revealed to me in bitter
struggles. One word more. Pray, answer this, and pray
wait. Never take so important a step without at least
six months' deliberate waiting, not till, but after your
mind is made up. Five-and-twenty years God has let
you remain a Protestant. Even if you were wrong in
being one, He will surely pardon your remaining one
six months longer, in a world wherein the roads of error
are so many and broad that a man may need to look hard
to find the narrow way."
Before resuming work again at Eversley, he
went to London, and took up the old thread by
Visit to London 179
attending a Chartist meeting and a workmen's
meeting on the Land Colonization question, and
from Chelsea he writes to his wife :
"... I could not write yesterday, being kept by a
poor boy who had fallen off a truck at Croydon and
smashed himself, whom I escorted to Guy's Hospital.
I breakfasted with Bunsen, such a divine-looking man,
and so kind. I have worlds to tell you. Met F. New-
man last night. I had a long and interesting talk with
Froude. . . .
June 10. " Went with Ludlow to Lincoln's-inn Chapel
on Sunday afternoon a noble sight. Maurice's head
looked like some great, awful Giorgione portrait in the
pulpit, but oh, so worn, and the face worked so at certain
passages of the sermon. It was very pleasant, so many
kind greetings there from old co-operative friends. To-
night for the meeting. They expect to muster between
one and two hundred. I am just going with my father
and mother to Deptford to put Mary T. (an Eversley
girl) on board an emigrant ship. . . . Long and most
interesting talk with Mons. C., a complete Red Repub-
lican and Fourrierist, who says nothing but Christianity
can save France or the world. London is perfectly hor-
rible. To you alone I look for help and advice God
and you, else I think at times I should cry myself to
death. . . . There is a great Tailor's meeting on Friday.
The women's shoe-makers are not set up yet. My Vil-
lage sermons are being lent from man to man, among
the South London Chartists, at such a pace that C. can't
get them back again, and the Manchester men stole his
copy of the ' Saint's Tragedy.' ... I have just been to
see Carlyle."
June 12. "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. No
one commented on what he said. He stunned us ! I
180 Charles Kingsley
will tell you all when I can collect myself. . . . This
morning I breakfasted with Dr. Guy, and went with him
Tailor hunting, very satisfactory as yet. . . . Yesterday
afternoon with Professor Owen at the College of Sur-
geons, where I saw unspeakable things. ... I am afraid
I must stay up till Thursday. I cannot get through my
work else. Kiss our babes for me. . . ."
He now settled at Eversley again, and threw
himself into the full tide of parish work with the
loving help of his first curate, the Rev. H. Percy
Smith, of Balliol. The summer of 1849 was
unhealthy; cholera was brooding over England,
and a bad low fever broke out at Eversley, which
gave him incessant work and anxiety. The
parishioners got frightened. It was difficult to
get nurses for the sick, so that he was with them
at all hours; and after sitting up a whole night
watching the case of a laborer's wife, the mother
of a large family, that he might himself give the
nourishment every half-hour on which the poor
woman's life depended, he once more broke down,
and London doctors advised a long sea voyage.
But he dreaded the long loneliness, and went to
Devonshire instead, hoping that a month's quiet
and idleness would restore him. From thence he
writes to his wife at Eversley:
APPLEDORE : August 10. " Here I am. ... A deli-
cious passage down, in which I fell in with a character,
a Cornish shipowner and fruit-vessel captain, who has
insisted on my drinking tea with him this evening, and on
my coming to see him in September, at Boscastle, near
Padstow, where he will give me sailing in his little yacht,
and take me to seal caves where they lie by dozens.
He is, of course, like all Cornish men, a great admirer of
In Devonshire 181
your father. 1 Strange, what a name your father seems to
have made for himself. The man is a thorough Cornish-
man : shrewd, witty, religious, well informed, a great
admirer of scenery ; talks about light, and shadow, and
coloring more like an artist than a brown-fisted merchant
skipper, with a mass of brain that might have made any-
thing had he taken to books. I feel myself already
much better. The rich, hot, balmy air, which comes in
now through the open window, off Braunton Burrows,
and the beautiful tide river, a mile wide, is like an
' Elixir of life ' to me. No night frosts here. It is as warm
as day. I expect a charming sail to-morrow, and to
catch mackerel on the way. The coast down here
looked more lovely than ever ; the green fern and purple
heather have enriched the coloring since the spring;
showers, succeeded by gleams of sun, give a wonderful
freshness and delicacy to all the tints. Dear old Lyn-
mouth and Ilfracombe, I loved them, because they seemed
so full of recollections of you and the children."
CLOVELLY. " Safe settled at Mrs. Whitefield's lodg-
ings. I am going out fishing to-day in the bay, if there
is wind ; if not, butterfly hunting. I was in and out of
all the houses last night, like a ferret in a rabbit burrow
all so kind. I feel unjustifiably well, and often ask
myself, What right have I to be here, while you are
working at home ? . . . My room is about 1 2 ft. square,
on the first floor, a jessamine and a fuchsia running up
the windows. In front, towers the wall of wood, oak, ash,
and larch, as tender and green as if it were May and
not August. I am near the top of the street, which lines
the bottom of this gorge of woods. On the left, I see
from my windows, piled below me, the tops of the nearest
houses, and the narrow paved cranny of a street, vanish-
ing downwards, stair below stair, and then above all, up
1 Pascoe Grenfell, Esq., M. P., President of the Royal Exchange,
and one of the Copper Kings of England.
(M. K.)
1 82 Charles Kingsley
in the sky it seems, from the great height at which I am,
the glorious blue bay, with its red and purple cliffs.
The Sand-Bar, and Braunton, the hills towards Ilfra-
combe, and Exmoor like a great black wall above all.
The bay is now curling and writhing in white horses
under a smoking south-wester, which promises a blessing,
as it will drive the mackerel off the Welsh shore, where
they now are in countless millions, into our bay ; and then
for fun and food for me and the poor fellows here, who
are at their wits' end, because some old noddles of doc-
tors have persuaded people that fish gives the cholera. . . .
Friday I had a charming sail with a poor fellow, who
thought zs. too much, and would work it out by offering
to give me a sail in his herring-boat, which is to come
off shortly. Saturday I hired a pony for is. 6d. and
went to Torridge just for the afternoon caught my
basket full, and among them one 2 Ibs. ! ! Never was such
a trout seen in Clovelly before.
" We had a charming trip yesterday to Lundy ; started
at six, and were five hours going over the wind being
very light ; but we went along very pleasantly to a con-
tinued succession of Wesleyan hymns, sung in parts most
sweetly (every one sings here, and sings in tune, and
well). We dined at the farm-house ; dinner costing me
is. Q*/. ; and then rambled over the island. I saw the
old Pirate Moresco's Castle on the cliff the awful
granite cliffs on the west, with their peaks and chasms
lined with sea fowl the coloring wonderful pink
gray granite, with bright yellow lichen spots, purple
heather, and fern of a peculiar dark glowing green.
You wanted no trees ; the beauty of their rich forms and
simple green was quite replaced by the gorgeous brilliance
of the hues. And beyond and around all, the illimitable
Atlantic not green but an intense sapphirine black-
blue, such as it never is inshore, and so clear, that every
rock and patch of sea-weed showed plain four hundred
In Devonshire 183
feet below us, through the purple veil of water. Then I
went back to the landing cove, where shoals of mackerel
were breaking up with a roar, like the voice of many
waters ; the cove like glass ; and one huge seal rolling his
black head and shoulders about in the deep water a
sight to remember for ever. Oh, that I had been a
painter for that day at least ! And coming away, as the
sun set behind the island, great flame-colored sheets of
rack flared up into the black sky from off the black line of
the island top, and when the sun set the hymns began
again, and we slipped on home, while every ripple off the
cutter's bow fell down, and ran along the surface in flakes
and sparkles of emerald fire ; and then the breeze died,
and we crawled under our own huge cliffs, through a
fiery sea, among the dusky herring-boats, for whom and
their nets we had to keep strict watch, and landed, still
through fire, at half-past two in the morning. We had to
land on the boulder stones, which average a yard high,
covered with slippery sea-weed at dead low water. How
we got up I don't know yet. The rocks seemed end-
less . . . but I did not tire myself too much to write a
line to you before I got to bed, and slept till 1 1 A.M. I
send you a little bit of dwarf centaury off the cliff above
the Seal Caves, as a token. What am I to do with eight
sketches of Hero and Leander, which I have been finish-
ing very carefully, and are the best things I ever did?
Shall I send them? This place is perfect continued
gray clouds night and day, just the same warmth. The
air like a hot scented air-bath. But it all seems a dream,
unreal as well as imperfect, without you. . . . Kiss the
darling children for me. How I long after them and
their prattle. I delight in all the little ones in the street
for their sake, and continually I start and fancy I hear
their voices outside. You do not know how I love them \
nor did I hardly till I came here. After all, absence
quickens love into consciousness."
TORRTDGE MOORS. "I have been fishing the Torridge
184 Charles Kingsley
to-day. Caught i dozen very bright sun, which was
against me. Tennyson was down here last year, and
walked in on Hawker, the West Country Poet, to collect
Arthur legends. I feel quite lonely, and long to be home.
And these moors are very desolate, from ignorance and
neglect only, for they might be made as fine land as the
carse of Berwick and the Lothians. When will men see
that God's laws are their interest? Talk of mankind
being ruled by self-interest ! Juggling fiend. It is its
own bane. None are so blind to their own interest as the
selfish. Witness the Torridge Moors. ..."
CLOVELLY : August 16. " L I tel 1 you that I am happy
outwardly, you must not suppose that I am not just as
lonely as you at heart. ... All lie pleasure of per-
fect rest, and I am in perfect rest, and in a new-old
and lovely place, does not take off the edge of my soli-
tude. Already I feel it how much rrore a month
hence ! . . . The weather has been too stormy for
trawling, but I have got a few nice shells. . . Last night
I gave a tea-party with cream and your cake, to my
landlady and Mr. and Mrs. Wimble, and we all agreed
we only wanted you and my mother : as it was we were
very merry, and finished with prayers. My landlady
is an extraordinary woman, a face and figure as of a
queen, but all thought, sensibility and excitement ; a
great * d&vote ' and a true Christian ; between grief and
religion she has learned a blessed lesson. Old Wim.
potters in, like an old gray-headed Newfoundland dog,
about three times a day to look after me. And I sit on
the window seat and watch the wonderful coloring of the
bay spread like a map below me, and just think of
nothing but home. To-day I am going out in one of
the large herring-boats ; there is plenty of wind, and the
herrings and mackerel are coming in. Tell Rose I will
write her a letter, and thank her very much for hers. Say
I am so pleased to hear she is a good girl. . .
" . . . Saturday I start I am quite in spirits at the
In Devonshire 185
notion of the moor. It will give me continual excite-
ment; it is quite new to me and I am well enough
now to walk in moderation. I am doing you a set more
drawings still better I hope. ' The Artist's Wife,'
seven or eight sketches of Claude Mellot and Sabina, two
of my most darling ideals, with a scrap of conversation
annexed to each, just embodying my dreams about mar-
ried love and its relation to art . . ."
CLOVELLY. " This place," he writes to his mother,
" seems more beautiful than of old. Contrary to one's
usual experience in visiting old scenes, the hills are
higher, the vegetation more luxuriant, the coloring richer
than I had fancied. I sail a great deal ; the difficulty is,
only to make the people take any money. I am kept in
fish, gratis, by half the town ; and at every door there are
daily inquiries, loving and hearty, after you and my
father. How these people love you both ! . . . Happy
and idle, I do not know how to get through the day,
strange to say ! It is too rough for trawling to-day, and
too wet for entomologizing. So I do nothing but smell
the woods, and chat with W. Many thanks for frighten-
ing me away from America. This is the place. The
wounded bird goes to the nest. ... I felt a new life, a
renewing my youth like the eagle's, the day after I got
here. The very smell of W.'s house is a fragrance
(spiritually not physically) from the fairy gardens of
childhood."
August 17. " I am doing nothing," he writes to Mr.
Ludlow, " but fish, sail, chat with old sailor and Wesleyan
cronies, and read, by way of a nice mixture, Rabelais,
Pierre Leroux [on Christianity and Democracy], and
Ruskin. The second is indeed a blessed dawn. The
third, a noble, manful, godly book, a blessed dawn too :
but I cannot talk about them ; I am as stupid as a por-
poise, and I lie in the window, and smoke and watch
the glorious cloud-phantasmagoria, infinite in color and
form, crawling across the vast bay and deep woods below,
Vol. 19
1 86 Charles Kingsley
and draw little sketches of figures, and do not even
dream, much less think. Blessed be God for the rest,
though I never before felt the loneliness of being without
the beloved being, whose every look and word and
motion are the keynotes of my life. People talk of love
ending at the altar. . . . Fools ! . . ."
TO HIS WIFE
" Here I am at Chagford in a beautiful old mullioned
and gabled ' perpendicular ' inn granite and syenite
everywhere my windows looking out on the old church-
yard, and beyond, a wilderness of lovely hills and woods
two miles from the moor fresh air and health every-
where. I went up into the moor yesterday, and killed a
dish of fish. Stay here for three days, and then move to
Holne. Then home ! home ! home ! How I thirst
for it."
September 4. " Starting out to fish down to Drew's
Teignton the old Druids' sacred place, to see Logan
stones and cromlechs. Yesterday was the most charming
solitary day I ever spent in my life scenery more
lovely than tongue can tell. It brought out of me the
following bit of poetry, with many happy tears :
" I cannot tell what you say, green leaves,
I cannot tell what you say ;
But I know that there is a spirit in you,
And a word in you this day.
" I cannot tell what ye say, rosy rocks,
I cannot tell what ye say;
But I know that there is a spirit in you,
And a word in you this day.
" I cannot tell what ye say, brown streams
I cannot tell what ye say;
But I know in you too, a spirit doth live,
And a word in you this day."
In Devonshire 187
The Word's Ansivtr
r ' Oh, rose is the color of love and youth,
And green is the color of faith and truth,
And brown of the fruitful clay.
The earth is fruitful, and faithful, and young,
And her bridal morn shall rise ere long,
And you shall know what the rocks and the streams,
And the laughing green-woods say ! "
Two BRIDGES. " Got on the Teign about three miles
up, and tracked it into the moor. About two miles in the
moor I found myself to my delight in the ruins of an old
British town, as yet, I fancy, unknown. The circular
town wall, circular gardens, circular granite huts, about
twenty feet in diameter, all traceable. All round was
peat-bog, indicating the site of ancient forests. For you
must know that of old, Dart Moor was a forest its
valleys filled with alder and hazel, its hillsides clothed
with birch, oak, and 'care,' mountain ash. But these,
like the Irish, were destroyed to drive out the Cymry,
and also dwindled of their own accord, having exhausted
the soil; and moreover, the scrub, furze, and heather
which succeeded them, having been periodically burnt
down for centuries, that grass for cattle may spring up.
So that the hills now are covered with coarse pasture, or
a peat soil, which wraps the hills round, and buries the
granite rocks, and softens all the outlines till the moor
looks like an enormous alternation of chalk downs and peat
bogs, only that the downs are strewn with huge granite
stones and capped with ' tors,' which cannot be described
only seen. I sketched two or three this afternoon
for you. Well, I got to Teign head through a boggy
glen. Out of the river banks, which were deep peat, I
got a piece of fossil birch bark for you. Then I climbed
a vast anticlinal ridge, and seeing a great tor close by, I
could not resist the temptation, and went up. Oh ! what
a scene ! a sea of mountains all round, and in the far east
wooded glens, fertile meadows, twenty miles off far
1 88 Charles Kingsley
far below ; and here and there through the rich country
some spur of granite hill peeped up, each with its tor, like
a huge ruined castle, on the top. Then, in the midst of
a bog, on the top of the hill, I came on two splendid
Druid circles, ' the gray wethers,' as I afterwards found
out, five and thirty yards in diameter stones about five
feet above the bog perhaps more still below it evi-
dently a sun temple in the heart of a great oak forest, now
gone. I traced the bog round for miles, and the place
was just one to be holy, being, I suppose, one of the loft-
iest woods in the moor. After that, all was down, down,
down, over the lawn and through deep gorges, to the
East Dart. At Port Bridge, I meant to sleep, but found
myself so lively that I walked on the four miles to this
place twenty miles about, of rough mountain, and got
in as fresh as a bird. The day was burning bright, so I
only killed a dozen or so of fish. Every valley has its beau-
tiful clear stream, with myriad fish among great granite
boulders. To-day I walked over, after breakfast, to
Cherry Brook, the best fishing on the moor the sharp
easterly wind made the fish lie like stones and down
Cherry Brook and up Dart home, and I only killed
seventeen. Then, after luncheon, I sallied to Wistmen's
(Wisemen's) wood the last remaining scrap of primeval
forest. But I shall write all night to tell you all I saw
and felt. I send you an oak leaf from the holy trees,
and a bit of moss from them as many mosses as leaves
poor old Britons ! The gray moss is from the ruins
of an old Cymry house near by a Druid may have
lived in it ! The whortle berry is from the top of a
wonderful rock three miles on, which I have sketched.
Oh, such a place ! I climbed to the top. I was alone
with God and the hills the Dart winding down a thou-
sand feet below I could only pray. And I felt impelled
to kneel on the top of the rock it seemed the only true
state to be in, in any place so primaeval so awful
which made one feel so indescribably little and puny.
In Devonshire 189
And I did pray and the Lord's Prayer too it seemed
the only thing to express one's heart in. But I will tell
you all at home ! ... It is an infinite relief and rest to me
to have seen even some little of the moor. I was always
from a child longing for it, and now, thank God, that is ful-
filled. To-morrow I walk to Holne l by Gator's Beam,
/.*., over the highest mountain on the South Moor, from
which all the South Devon streams rise. Sunday I spend
at Home, and Thursday home ! It seems sometimes a
day, sometimes a year since I saw you. I shall bring you
home several drawings and sketches, both of figures and
of the moor scenery. Kiss the darling babes for me."
TO HIS FATHER
EVERSLEY : September, 1849. "I had purposed to
have written to you from Home, but being panic-struck
at the increased ill-health of the parish, I hurried home
where I am. What I saw of Holne more than justified
your praises and drawings of it. Hazel Tor is to me the
finest thing I have seen except the Upper Wye, which
the whole place much resembles (I mean from Plinlim-
mon to Presteign). Of Benjay Tor I did not see as
much as I wished. But of that kind of scenery I had
seen much on the High Teign the preceding week, at
Gidleigh, Drew's Teignton, which quite astonished me
by its mingled lusciousness and grandeur. The distinc-
tive and specific glory of Holne was the descent into
cultivation down Holne Ridge, after four hours' awful
silence and desolation from Fox Tor Mire, along the
Titanic ridges of Gator's Beam, Aum Head, Peter in the
Mount, and over the black bog which varies the primaeval
forest, the first gleam of spires, and woods, and chequered
fields, first tinkle of the sheep bell, and creak of the plough,
and halloo of boys, and the murmur of the hidden Dart.
1 Mrs. Kingsley, senior, left Holne when Charles was a baby
six weeks old, so that this visit was the son's introduction to his
birthplace, except through sketches and descriptions. (M. K.)
190 Charles Kingsley
I could only pray and thank God for showing me such
a thing. The people, all whom I saw, were full of you,
and welcomed me as your son. Two fellows in the
public-house were glorying in two books which you gave
them the day you left. ... I shall be in London shortly,
and shall ' tell ' to you, usque ad nauseam. I am as well
as ever I was in my life in health and spirits : quite strong
and able to walk stoutly twenty miles and more a day
over me bogs and the rocks. I need not say I shall be
careful. Early to bed and to rise are now indeed a point
of conscience with me. ..."
And now he returned to fresh labors in his
parish. He added a Sunday evening service in
a cottage at some distance from the church, which
was crowded. "Alton Locke" was gradually
getting into shape. His reviews in "Eraser's
Magazine," principally on modern Poetry and
Novels, helped him to pay his curate. Cholera
was once more in England, and sanitary matters
absorbed him more and more. He preached three
striking sermons at Eversley, on Cholera, " Who
causes Pestilence?" (National Sermons.) He
worked in London and the country in the crusade
against dirt and bad drainage. The terrible reve-
lations of the state of the water supply in
London saddened and sickened him, and with
indefatigable industry he got up statistics from
Blue Books, Reports, and his own observations,
for an article in the "North British Review"
on the subject. An eminent London physician,
speaking of the opinion of the medical profession
regarding his work, says, "We all knew well your
noble husband's labors in the cause of the public
health, when it was too little thought of by
statesmen. He led the way."
Sanitary Work 191
" It was this sense," said Dean Stanley, " that he was a
thorough Englishman one of yourselves, working, toil-
ing, feeling with you and like you that endeared him to
you. Artisans and working men of London, you know how
he desired, with a passionate desire, that you should have
pure air, pure water, habitable dwellings, that you should
be able to share the courtesies, the refinements, the eleva-
tion of citizens, and of Englishmen ; and you may, therefore,
trust him the more when he told you from the pulpit, and
still tells you from the grave, that your homes and your
lives should be no less full of moral purity and light. ..."
TO HIS WIFE
CHELSEA : October 24, 1849. "I was yesterday with
George Walsh and Mansfield over the cholera districts
of Bermondsey ; and, oh, God ! what I saw ! people hav-
ing no water to drink hundreds of them but the
water of the common sewer which stagnated full of ...
dead fish, cats and dogs, under their windows. At the
time the cholera was raging, Walsh saw them throwing
untold horrors into the ditch, and then dipping out the
water and drinking it ! ! Oh, entreat Mr. Warre " (a
Member of Parliament) "to read the account of the
place in the ' Morning Chronicle ' of last week, and try
every nerve to get a model lodging-house there; why
should people spend money and time in making a play-
thing model parish of St. Barnabas, where there are three
rich to one poor, while whole square miles of other parts
of London are in the same state as two or three streets
only of Upper Chelsea ? And mind, these are not dirty,
debauched Irish, but honest hard-working artisans. It is
most pathetic, as Walsh says, it makes him literally cry
to see the poor souls' struggle for cleanliness, to see how
they scrub and polish their little scrap of pavement, and
then go through the house and see 'society* leaving at
the back poisons and filth such as would drive a lady
mad, I think, with disgust in twenty-four hours. Oh, that
1 92 Charles Kingsley
I had the tongue of St. James, to plead for those poor
fellows ! to tell what I saw myself, to stir up some rich
men to go and rescue them from the tyranny of the small
shopkeeping landlords, who get their rents out of the flesh
and blood of these men. Talk of the horrors of 'the
middle passage.' Oh, that one-tenth part of the money
which has been spent in increasing, by mistaken benevo-
lence, the cruelties of the slave-trade, had been spent in
buying up these nests of typhus, consumption, and chol-
era, and rebuilding them into habitations fit I do not
say for civilized Englishmen that would be too much,
but for hogs even ! I will say no more. Remember it
is not a question of alms. It is only to get some man to
take the trouble of making a profitable investment, and
getting six per cent, for his money. I will put him in
communication with those who know all the facts if he
will help us. Twenty pounds sent to us, just to start a
water-cart, and send it round at once at once for
the people are still in these horrors, would pay itself. I
can find men who will work the thing. Ludlow, Mans-
field, the Campbells, will go and serve out the water with
their own hands, rather than let it go on. Pray, pray,
stir people up, and God will reward you. Kiss my
darlings for me.
" P. S. Do not let them wait for committee meetings
and investigations ; while they will be maundering about
'vested interests,' and such like, the people are dying.
I start to-morrow for Oxford to see the bishop about
these Bermondsey horrors. Direct to me there. The
proper account of Bermondsey is in the ' Morning Chroni-
cle' of September 24, published a month ago, and yet
nothing done, or likely to be ! ! "
OXFORD. "... I saw the Bishop of Oxford yester-
day. Most satisfactory interview. I am more struck with
him than with any man, except Bunsen, I have seen for a
long time. Also Arch-deacon M disappointed, but
interested me. Had no notion that such specimens of
Sanitary Work 193
humanity were still to be found walking about this nine-
teenth century England. But he looks a good man.
How I long for your dear face and voice. ..."
EVERSLEY : November. " My friends," he writes to
Mr. Ludlow, " why tarry the wheels of your water carts,
why are your stand pipes truly stand still pipes ? Why
are you so confoundedly merciful and tender-hearted ? Do
you actually fancy that you can talk those landlords into
repentance ? Will men repent for being told ? are men
capable of repentance who will go on doing what they
have been doing? and is their interest changed by the
fact of your wanting them to lay on water? and do you
trust the water company? You see they are trying to
restrict, not to extend. You must go to the higher pow-
ers, ist. To the Chairman of Bermondsey Improvement
Commission. Now, what is this Commission ? By what
authority does it pretend to act ? If it is one of the New
Local Commissions under the Health of Towns Act it can
serve nuisance notices, and make people obey them.
Therefore the chairman is a twaddler, if he only talks of
wanting to do what he can do if he likes. Therefore find
out whether a majority of these Commissioners will serve
nuisance notices, &c. 2. On whom. Whom does the
ditch belong to? The Commissioners of Sewers or the
Landlords? Find out that and tell me, and try for in-
dicting the Commissioners of Sewers, whose names I saw
painted up. Next. Just tell me what you have found out
on these points, and I will write to Lord Carlisle and Lord
John Russell, as the Bishop of Oxford told me, and ask
for interviews. I write to Helps to-night. Lastly, have
the pamphlets been sent round ? People write that they
will help when they know either what is the matter or
how to mend it, but that no pamphlets have come to
them. When I know that, I will go to Farnham and see
the Bishop of Winchester. What has become of your
public meeting plan? /am ready. Or your placards?
2 am ready to write them. Now just give me an answer,
194 Charles Kingsley
dear boys. ... I like Mansfield's notion of a Sanitary
League. It will act like a wedge. Papers and preach-
ments are ' as a man beholding his natural face in a glass/
&c. Still, we '11 try them ; tell me my work, and I will do
it with God's help. ..."
December 30. "I am shamed and sickened by the
revelations in your article in ' Eraser's ' ; they were new to
me except about the tailors. . . . Put by my pamphlet
and write one yourself; you would do it seven times as
well. I send you up the rest of the MSS. ; but they are
not worthy of the cause. Perhaps you might make
something of them by doctoring; but I cannot speak
about association ; it is our only hope, but I know nothing
about it, or about anything else. If I had not had the com-
munion at church to-day, to tell me that Jesus does reign,
I should have blasphemed in my heart, I think, and said the
devil is king ! I come up Tuesday, and will see you at
your rooms. I have a wild longing to do something.
What God only knows. You say, * He that believeth
will not make haste ; ' but I think he that believeth must
make haste. But I will do anything that anybody likes.
I have no confidence in myself, or in anything but God.
I am not great enough for such times, alas ! . . ."
"... Such questions as these," he says (in an article
on the water supply of London) " involving not merely
profits, but health, sobriety, decency, life, are to be judged
of, not by the code, or in the language of the market, but
of the Bible. . . . Even the hard and soft water contro-
versy is not a mere matter of soap and tea expenditure,
but of humanity and morality. . . .
" We may choose to look at the masses in the gross, as
subjects for statistics and of course, where possible, of
profits. There is One above who knows every thirst and
ache, and sorrow, and temptation of each slattern, and
gin-drinker, and street boy. The day will come when
He will require an account of these neglects of ours not
in the gross. . . ."
Development of " Yeast " 195
To THOMAS COOPER.] December 6. ". . . I find
the good cause living and growing fast slowly enough,
God knows, for all the evils which have to be removed,
but wonderfully fast, considering the mountains of preju-
dice, selfishness, covetousness, and humbug, which it has
to dig through. On one point I am a little pained and
startled I mean Mr. Cobden's Freehold Land Society
speech. It seems to me that he openly avows the inten-
tion of setting up a number of small absentee proprietors,
resident in towns, and holding land in the country. Now
I would be just as glad to see a non-resident 40^. free-
holder in the pillory, as a non-resident ^"40,000 one.
And I honestly declare, that the worst cases of tyranny,
of neglect of property, and high rents taken for ' man-
styes,' which I see, are on these little freeholds of poor
landlords, who run up houses anyhow, to make the
ground pay. 'A poor man who oppresses the poor,'
says Solomon, 'is like a sweeping rain that leaveth no
food/ and I say, 'True ! ' It does seem to me that this
project would thus increase one of the very evils which
has pressed on the working man, and made his dwellings
unfit for human habitation ; and I fear, too, that the
greater part of these freeholds would become the prop-
erty, not of workmen, but small retail tradesmen a
class which, as you and I know, are a curse to the
workmen. Pray enlighten me on these points. I am
quite open to conviction if my fears are unfounded. . . ."
To J. M. L. "I want to talk to you about 'Yeast,'
and in doing so consolidate my own notions on it. It is not
going to die, but re-appear under a different name and
form, and in fresh scenes. Lancelot is to be ruined, go
up to London and turn artist. In 'Yeast,' as its name
implies, I have tried to show the feelings which are
working in the age, in a fragmentary and turbid state. In
the next part, ' The Artists,' I shall try to unravel the
tangled skein, by means of conversations on art, con-
196 Charles Kingsley
nected as they will be necessarily with the deepest
questions of science, anthropology, social life, and
Christianity. And looking at the art of a people as at
once the very truest symbol of its faith, and a vast means
for its further education, I think it a good path in
which to form the mind of my hero, the man of the
coming age. He, and his friend Mellot, and his cousin
Luke, who has just turned Romanist, will be typical of
the three great schools. Mellot of the mere classic
Pagan, and of the Fourierism which seems to me to be
its representative in the world of doctrines; Luke of
the Puginesque Manichsean, or exclusively spiritual
school; and Lancelot who tries historic painting, and
finding that there is nothing to paint about, falls back on
landscapes and animals, on the simple naturalism of our
Landseers and Creswkks, the only living school of art as
yet possible in England. He is raised above his mere
faith in nature by the simple Christianity of Tregarva, at
the same time that he is taught by him that true democ-
racy which considers the beautiful the heritage of the
poor as well as of the rich ; and Tregarva in his turn
becomes the type of English art-hating Puritanism, grad-
ually convinced of the divine mission of art, and of its
being the rightful child, not of Popery, but of Protestan-
tism alone. Thus I think Lancelot, having grafted on
his own naturalism, the Christianity of Tregarva, the
classicism of Mellot, and the spiritual symbolism of Luke,
ought to be in a state to become the mesothetic artist of
the future, and beat each of his tutors at their own wea-
pons, as the mesothet will always include a perfect each of
the poles connected with it. But where will Argemone
be all this time ? You have your fears that she will be
too like Lancelot : but I cannot help exhibiting in her the
same restlessness and dissatisfaction with the present as in
him, because I see it equally common now-a-days in both
sexes, and I take it as the painful, yet most hopeful sign
of the times. There will still be a true polarity (a merely
Development of " Yeast " 197
sexual one, being both ideals without any strongly marked
peculiarities) between her and her lover. She will retain
the virginal purity, the conscientious earnestness of
will, the strong conservative ecclesiastical prejudices,
which go to make the ideal Englishwoman. She will be
his comptementum, and consider on the ground of the
affections, the same questions which he is examining on
the ground of the intellect. She must be educating her
head through her heart, he his heart through his head.
She as heiress of Whitford must try all sorts of accredited
methods for its improvement, and find them all fail,
because unconnected with the great principles which
God is manifesting in this age ; and then when the lovers
are at last united, and Whitford becomes their work field,
he will supply her with social and anthropological princi-
ples on which to base her labors, and she will translate
his theories for him into objects of passionate enthusiasm
to be embodied in the charities of daily life. And so I
think the two may become an ideal pair of pioneers
toward the society of the future, the oroi^eta of which
will be given in a third and last volume, to be written
when ? This is a long preface. Whether I shall be able
to fulfil my designs remains to be proved. Perhaps I am
aiming at too much, perhaps I am meddling with matters
I don't understand. But if one needs must go when the
devil drives, how much more when One very different
from him impels one to speak at all costs ? And after
all, ' it shall be given you in that hour what ye shall
speak ; ' and I am in no hurry, five years will not be too
long to occupy in working out the plan, and I want, when
' Yeast,' and ' the Artists ' have appeared in ' Eraser's,' to
take them out, work them over, and enlarge them, and
then take my time over the last or positive volume.
So ends a long letter all about myself. When will you
come and see me ? . . ."
"Yeast," which as yet had only appeared in
the pages of "Fraser," made a deep impression at
198 Charles Kingsley
Oxford, and from this time young men gathered
more and more around him. Eversley Rectory
now became a centre to inquiring spirits, and re-
mained so to the end.
"... His personal power of appeal to young men,"
said a young London artist, who saw much of him during
the last years of his life, " was very great : though, as I
think, in a somewhat different direction to the one usually
imagined. It was of a far more tender, strict, and refin-
ing nature than I have found it was popularly supposed
to be. ... In the first half-hour of my knowing him,
I found him listening to me with as much attention and
kindness as he would have given to one of his own age
and attainments. I felt that whilst and whenever I was
with him he gave me his best. If I asked him anything
he would tell me the best he thought, knew, or felt.
Young men know how rare this is with men of Mr.
Kingsley's age and ability ; and none know better than
they how delightful also it is when it is met with. It
commanded my love and admiration more than I could
say. He always seemed content with the society he was
in ; because, I think, he loved and educated himself to
draw out the best of everyone, to touch on the stronger
and not on the weaker points ; and when I was with him
I always felt as much at home as if I were with one of
my own college friends. ..."
- Mr. C. Kegan Paul vividly recalls his first visit
to the Rectory in 1849:
" . = . The day after my arrival we dined at the
Rectory. . . . We went into the study afterwards while
Kingsley smoked his pipe, and the evening is one of
those that stand out in my memory with peculiar vivid-
ness. I had never then, I have seldom since, heard a
man talk so well. His conversational powers were very
remarkable. In the first place he had, as may be easily
Influence on Young Men 199
understood by the readers of his books, a rare command
of racy and correct English, while he was so many-sided
that he could take keen interest in almost any subject
which attracted those about him. He had read, and
read much, not only in matters which everyone ought to
know, but had gone deeply into many out-of-the-way
and unexpected studies. Old medicine, magic, the occult
properties of plants, folk-lore, mesmerism, nooks and
by-ways of history, old legends ; on all these he was at
home. On the habits and dispositions of animals he
would talk as though he were that king in the Arabian
Nights who understood the language of beasts, or at
least had lived among the gypsies who loved him so well.
The stammer, which in those days was so much more
marked than in later years, and which was a serious dis-
comfort to himself, was no drawback to the charm of his
conversation. Rather the hesitation before some bril-
liant flash of words served to lend point to and intensify
what he was saying ; and when, as he sometimes did, he
fell into a monologue, or recited a poem in his sonorous
voice, the stammer left him wholly. . . . When, however,
I use the word monologue, it must not be supposed that
he ever monopolized the talk. He had a courteous
deference for the opinions of the most insignificant
person in the circle, and was even too tolerant of a bore.
With all his vast powers of conversation, and ready to
talk on every or any subject, he was never superficial.
What he knew he knew well, and was always ready to
admit the fact when he did not know. . . .
" To those who, in the years of which we speak, were
constant guests at Eversley, that happy home can never
be forgotten. Kingsley was in the vigor of his manhood
and of his intellectual powers, was administering his parish
with enthusiasm, was writing, reading, fishing, walking,
preaching, talking, with a twenty-parson power, but was
at the same time wholly unlike the ordinary and conven-
tional parson. . . . His temperament was artistic and
2oo Charles Kingsley
impulsive. . . . His physical frame was powerful and
wiry, his complexion dark, his eye bright and piercing.
Yet he often said he did not think that his would be a
long life, and the event has sadly confirmed his anticipa-
tions. . . . The picturesque bow-windowed Rectory rises
to memory as it stood with all its doors and windows
open on certain hot summer days, the sloping bank with
its great fir-tree, the garden a gravel sweep before the
drawing-room and dining-rooms, a grass-plat before the
study, hedged off from the walk and the tall, active
figure of the Rector tramping up and down one or the
other. His energy made him seem everywhere, and to
pervade every part of house and garden. The MS. of
the book he was writing lay open on a rough standing
desk, which was merely a shelf projecting from the wall ;
his pupil, treated like his own son, was working in the
dining-room ; his guests perhaps lounging on the lawn,
or reading in the study. And he had time for all, going
from writing to lecturing on optics, or to a passage in
Virgil; from this to a vehement conversation with a
guest, or tender care for his wife, or a romp with his
children. He would work himself into a sort of white
heat over his book, till, too excited to write more, he
would calm himself down by a pipe, pacing his grass-plat
in thought and with long strides. He was a great
smoker, and tobacco was to him a needful sedative. He
always used a long and clean clay pipe, which lurked
in all sorts of unexpected places. But none was ever
smoked which was in any degree foul, and when there
was a vast accumulation of old pipes, they were sent
back again to the kiln to be rebaked, and returned fresh
and new. This gave him a striking simile, which, in
'Alton Locke,' he puts into the mouth of James Cross-
thwaite. ' Katie here believes in purgatory, where souls
are burnt clean again, like 'bacca pipes.' When luncheon
was over, and any arrears of the morning's work cleared
up, a walk with Kingsley was an occasion of constant
Influence on Young Men 201
pleasure. ... I remember standing on the top of a hill
with him when the autumn evening was fading, and one
of the sun's latest rays struck a patch on the moor, bring-
ing out a very peculiar mixture of red-brown colors.
What were the precise plants which composed that
patch? He hurriedly ran over the list of what he
thought they were, and then set off over hedge and ditch,
through bog and water-course, to verify the list he had
already made. During these afternoon walks he would
visit one or another of his very scattered hamlets or
single cottages on the heaths. . . . Nothing was ever
more real than Kingsley's parish visiting. He be-
lieved absolutely in the message he bore to the poor,
and the health his ministrations conveyed to their
souls, but he was at the same time a zealous sani-
tary reformer, and cared for their bodies also. I was
with him once when he visited a sick man suffering from
fever. The atmosphere of the little ground-floor bed-
room was horrible, but before the Rector said a word he
ran upstairs, and, to the great astonishment of the inhabi-
tants of the cottage, bored, with a large auger he had
brought with him, several holes above the bed's head for
ventilation. His reading in the sick room and his words
were wholly free from cant. The Psalms and the
Prophets, with judicious omissions, seemed to gain new
meaning as he read them, and his after-words were always
cheerful and hopeful. Sickness, in his eyes, seemed always
to sanctify and purify. He would say, with the utmost
modesty, that the patient endurance of the poor taught
him, day by day, lessons which he took back again as God's
message to the bed-side from which he had learnt them.
" One great element of success in his intercourse with
his parishioners was his abounding humor and fun.
What caused a hearty laugh was a real refreshment to
him, and he had the strongest belief that laughter and
humor were elements in the nature of God Himself.
This abounding humor has with some its dangers. Not
2^2 Charles Kingsley
so with Kingsley. No man loved a good story better
than he, but there was always in what he told or what he
suffered himself to hear, a good and pure moral under-
lying what might be coarse in expression. While he
would laugh with the keenest sense or amusement at
what might be simply broad, he had the most utter scorn
and loathing for all that could debase and degrade. And
he was the most reverent of men, though he would say
things which seemed daring because people were unac-
customed to hear sacred things named without a pious
snuffle. This great reverence led him to be even unjust
to some of the greatest humorists. I quoted Heine one
day at his table. ' vVlio was Heine T ' asked his little
daughter. ' A wicked man, my dear,' was the only
answer given *o her, and an implied rebuke to me.
" A day rises vividly to memory, when Kingsley re-
mained shut up in the study during the afternoon, the
door bolted, inaccessible to all interruption. The drowsy
hour had come on between the lights, when it was time
to dress for dinner, and talk, without the great inspirer of
it, was growing disjointed and fragmentary, when he came
in from the study, a paper, yet undried, in his hand, and
read us the ' Lay of the Last Buccaneer,' most spirited
of all his ballads. One who had been lying back in an
arm-chair, known for its seductive properties as 'sleepy
hollow,' roused up then, and could hardly sleep all night
for the inspiring music of the words read by one of the
very best readers I have ever heard. . . .
" Old and new friends came and went as he grew famous
not too strong a word for the feeling of those days
and the drawing-room evening conversations and readings,
the tobacco parliaments later into the night, included many
of the most remarkable persons of the day. ... I know
that those evening talks kept more than one who shared
in them from Rome, and weaned more than one from
vice, while others had doubts to faith removed which had
long paralyzed the energy of their lives. . . ."
CHAPTER VIII
1850-1851
AGED 31-32
RXSIGNS THE OFFICE OF CLERK IN ORDERS AT CHELSEA
PUPIL LIFE AT EVERSLEY PUBLICATION OF "ALTON
LOCKE" LETTERS FROM MR. CARLYLE WRITES FOR
'CHRISTIAN SOCIALIST" TROUBLED STATE OF THE
COUNTRY BURGLARIES THE RECTORY ATTACKED
HEAVY CORRESPONDENCE LETTERS ON THE ROMISH
QUESTION.
"A lynx-eyed fiery man, with the spirit of an old knight in
him ; more of a hero than any modern I have seen for a long
time. A singular veracity one finds in him ; not in his words
alone, which, however, I like much for their fine rough naivete ; but
in his actions, judgments, aims ; in all that he thinks, and does,
and says which indeed I have observed is the root of all great-
ness or real worth in human creatures, and properly the first (and
also the rarest) attribute of what we call GENIUS among men."
T. CARLYLE, on Sir Charles Napier.
THE year 1850 was spent at home, in better
health, with still fuller employment; for
in addition to parish and writing, he had the work
of teaching a private pupil, which was quite new
to him. Times were bad, rates were high, rate-
payers discontented, and all classes felt the pres-
sure. The Rector felt it also, but he met it by
giving the tenants back ten per cent, on their
tithe payments, and thus at once and for ever he
won their confidence. He had, since his mar-
riage, held the office of Clerk in Orders in his
father's parish of St. Luke's, Chelsea, which
204 Charles Kingsley
added considerably to his income, and in those
days was not considered incompatible with non-
residence; but though his deputy was well paid,
and he himself occasionally preached and lectured
in Chelsea, he had long regarded the post as a
sinecure, and decided to resign it. The loss of
income must however be met, and this could only
be done by his pen. It was a heavy struggle just
then, with rector's poor's rates at ^150 per
annum, and the parish charities mainly dependent
on him; but he set to work with indomitable
industry, and by a gallant effort finished "Alton
Locke." It was a busy winter, for the literary
work was not allowed to interfere with the pupil
work, or either with the parish ; he got up at five
every morning, and wrote till breakfast; after
breakfast he worked with his pupil and at his
sermons; the afternoons were devoted as usual
to cottage visiting; the evenings to adult school,
and superintending the fair copy of "Alton
Locke " made by his wife for the press. It was
the only book of which he ever had a fair copy
made. His habit was thoroughly to master his
subject, whether book or sermon, out in the open
air, either in his garden, on the moor, or by the
side of a lonely trout stream, and never to put pen
to paper till the ideas were clothed in words;
after which, except in the case of poetry, he sel-
dom altered a word. For many years he dictated
every composition to his wife, while he paced up
and down the room.
When " Alton Locke " was completed, the
difficulty was to find a publisher: Messrs. Parker,
who had, or thought they had, suffered in reputa-
tion for publishing "Yeast" in the pages of
Publication of " Alton Locke " 205
"Eraser," and "Politics for the People," refused
the book; and Mr. Carlyle kindly gave him an
introduction to Messrs. Chapman & Hall, who,
on his recommendation, undertook to bring it
out.
" I have written to Chapman, and you shall have his
answer on Sunday. . . . But without any answer, I be-
lieve I may already assure you of a respectful welcome, and
the new novel of a careful and hopeful examination from
the man of books. He is sworn to secrecy too. This is
all the needful to-day, in such an unspeakable hurry as
this present. And so, right glad myself to hear of a new
explosion, or salvo of red-hot shot against the Devil's
Dung-heap, from that particular battery. . . .
" Yours always truly,
"T. CARLYLE."
The book came out in August, and was noticed
in the leading journals with scorn and severity.
The best artisans, however, hailed it as a true
picture of their class and circumstances, and
thoughtful men and women of the higher orders
appreciated its value. Mr. Martineau distin-
guishes it as his "noblest and most characteristic
book at once his greatest poem, and his grand-
est sermon, though containing, as it may, more
faults, sweeping accusations, hasty conclusions,
than any of his writings."
" I am quite astonished," he says himself, some months
later in writing to a friend, " at the steady-going, respect-
able people who approve more or less of ' Alton Locke.' It
was but the other night, at the Speaker's, that sir *****
considered one of the safest Whig traditionists in England,
gave hi his adherence to the book in the kindest terms.
Both the Marshals have done the same so has Lord
206 Charles Kingsley
Ashburton. So have, strange to say, more than one ultra-
respectable High-Tory squire so goes the world. If
you do anything above party, the true-hearted ones of all
parties sympathize with you. And aH I want to do is, to
awaken the good men of all opinions to the necessity of
shaking hands and laying their heads together, and to
look for the day when the bad of all parties win get their
deserts, which they wflL very accurately, before Mr.
Cariyle's friends, 'The Powers' and The Destinies'
have done with them. . . ."
The following is Mr. Carlyle's verdict on
"Alton Locke":
CHELSEA: October 31*?, 1850. "It is now a great
many weeks that I have been your debtor for a book
which in various senses was very welcome to me. * Alton
Locke ' arrived in Annandak, by post, from my wife, early
in September, and was swiftly read by me. under the
bright sunshine, by the sound oT rushing brooks and
other rural accompaniments. I believe the book is still
doing duty in those parts ; for I had to leave it behind
me on loan, to satisfy the public demand. Forgive me,
that I have not, even by a word, thanked you for this
favor. Continual shifting and moving ever since, not
under the best omens, has hindered me from writing
almost on any subject or to any person.
"Apart from your treatment of my own poor self (on
which subject let me not venture to speak at all), I found
plenty to Bke, and be grateful for in the book: abundance,
nay exuberance of geuaous zeal ; headlong impetuosity of
questions ; snatches of excellent poetic description, occa-
sional sunbursts of nook insight ; everywhere a certain
wild intensity, which holds die reader fest as by a spefl :
they surely are good qualities,, and pregnant omens in a
man of your seniority in the regiment! At the same
time, I am bound to say, the book is drfinahlr as emit;
Letters from Carlyl 207
by no manner of means the best we expect of you if
you will resolutely temper your fire. But to make the
malt sweet, the fire should and must be slow : so says the
proverb, and now, as before, I include all duties for you
under that one I ' Saunders Mackaye,' my invaluable
countryman in this book, is nearly perfect ; indeed I
greatly wonder how you did contrive to manage him
his very dialect is as if a native had done it, and the
whole existence of the rugged old hero is a wonderfully
splendid and coherent piece 01 Scotch bravura. In both
of your women, too, I find some grand poetic features ;
but neither of them is worked out into the ' Daughter of
the Sun/ she might have been ; indeed, nothing is worked
out anywhere in comparison with ' Saunders ; ' and the
impression is of a fervid creation still left half chaotic.
That is my literary verdict, both the black of it and the
white.
" Of the grand social and moral questions we will say
nothing whatever at present: any time within the next
two centuries, it is like, there will be enough to say about
them ! On the whole, you will have to persist ; like a
cannon-ball that is shot, you will have to go to your
mark, whatever that be. I stipulate farther that you
come and see me when you are at Chelsea ; and that you
pay no attention at all to the foolish clamor of reviewers,
whether laudatory or condemnatory.
" Yours with true wishes,
"T. CARLYLE."
The writers for "Politics" about this time
brought out a series of tracts, "On Christian
Socialism." Among the most remarkable was
"Cheap Clothes, and Nasty, by Parson Lot," 1 ex-
posing the sweating and slop-selling system,
which was at the root of much of the distress in
London and the great towns. The Tailors' Asso-
1 Republished in the later editions of " Alton Locke."
208 Charles Kingsley
elation was already formed, and a shop opened in
Castle Street, to which the publication of "Cheap
Clothes " took many customers. The opening
sentences of this tract were :
" King Ryence, says the legend of King Arthur, wore a
paletot trimmed with king's beards. In the first French
Revolution (so Carlyle assures us) there were at Meudon
tanneries of human skins. Mammon, at once tyrant and
revolutionary, bllows both these noble examples in a more
respectable way, doubtless, for Mammon hates cruelty;
bodily pain is his devil the worst evil of which he, in
his effeminacy, can conceive. So he shrieks benevo-
lently 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, heathen-
dom, and despair ; and then chuckles, self-complacently,
over the smallness of his tailor's bills. Hypocrite I
straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! What is
flogging or hanging, King Ryence's paletot, or the tan-
neries of Meudon, to the slavery, starvation, waste of life,
year-long imprisonment in dungeons narrower and fouler
than those of the Inquisition, which goes on among
thousands of English clothes-makers at this day? . . .
The man is mad,' says Mammon. . . . Yes, Mammon J
mad as Paul before Festus; and for much the same
reason too. Much learning has made us mad. From
two articles in the Morning Chronicle, on the Condition
of the Working Tailors, we learnt too much to leave us
altogether masters of ourselves. . . ."
In August the rectory party had an addition,
a young Cambridge man, arriving for three
months to read for Holy Orders. It was a bold
step in those days for any man to take, to read
divinity with the author of " Yeast " and " Alton
Locke," but after twenty-six years' ministry in
A Troubled Country 209
the Church, he can look back upon it without
regret. With this pupil Mr. Kingsley read
Strauss's "Leben Jesu;" for he considered
Strauss then, as he did Comte eighteen years
later, the great false prophet of the day, who must
be faced and fought against by the clergy. The
circulation of Strauss's "Life of Christ," which
had been recently translated into English, and the
spread of infidel opinions among the working
classes, gave him grave anxiety. A new penny
periodical was projected to stem the torrent, and
he writes to Mr. Ludlow :
" If you will join me in a speculation to get the thing
started, I will run the chance of pecuniary loss, and
work myself to the bone to resuscitate ' Politics for the
People,' in a new form. . . .
" Lees and I are just going to begin Strauss, and I
will write some sort of answer to him, if God gives me
grace. ... Oh ! do not fancy that I am not perplexed
' cast down, yet not in despair.' No ; Christ reigns, as
Luther used to say, Christ reigns and therefore I will
not fear, ' though the mountains be removed (and I with
them) and cast into the midst of the sea.' . . ."
"... But there is something which weighs awfully on
my mind, the first number of Cooper's Journal, which
he sent me the other day. Here is a man of immense
influence, openly preaching Straussism to the workmen,
and in a fair, honest, manly way, which must tell. Who
will answer him? Who will answer Strauss? Who will
denounce Strauss as a vile aristocrat, robbing the poor
man of his Saviour of the ground of all democracy, all
freedom, all association of the Charter itself? Oh si
mihi centum, voces etferrea lingua. Think about that
talk to Maurice about that. To me it is awfully pressing.
If the priests of the Lord are wanting to the cause now ?
woe to us ! ... Don't fire at me about smoking. I
Vol. 110
210 Charles Kingsley
do it, because it does me good, and I could not (for I
have tried again and again) do without it. I smoke the
very cheapest tobacco. In the meantime I am keeping
no horse a most real self-sacrifice to me. But if I did,
I should have so much the less to give to the poor. God
knows all about that, John Ludlow, and about other
things too. ... As for the ubjects (for the periodical).
It seems to me that, to spread the paper, you must touch
the workman at all his points of interest. First and fore-
most at Association ; but also at political rights as
grounded both on the Christian idea of the Church and
on the historic facts of the Anglo-Saxon race; then
National Education, Sanitary and Dwelling-house Reform,
the Free Sale of Land, and corresponding Reform of the
Land- Laws, moral improvement of the Family relation,
public places of Recreation (on which point I am very
earnest) ; and I think a set of hints from History, and
sayings of great men, of which last I have been picking
up from Demosthenes, Plato, &c. . . .
"... Boyne-water day to-day ! ! ! glorious day and
what Psalms this morning ( i3th) ! Omen accipio lubens I "
"... Your letter makes me very sad. I cannot abide
the notion of Branch Churches or Free (Sect) Churches.
So help me God, unless my whole train of thought alters,
I will resist the temptation as coming from the devil.
Where I am, I am doing God's work, and when the
Church is ripe for more, the Head of the Church will put
the means in our way. You seem to fancy that we have
a ' Deus quidam Deceptor ' over us after all. If I did,
I 'd go and blow my dirty brains out, and be rid of the
whole thing at once, I would indeed. If God, when people
ask Him to teach and guide them, does not if, when
they confess themselves rogues and fools to Him, and
beg Him to make them honest and wise, He does not, but
darkens them and deludes them into bogs and pitfalls
is He a father ? You fall back on Judaism, friend.
Burglaries 2 1 1
"I shall write a Labor Conference Tract forthwith.
As for hot water with the tailors tell Cooper, no hot
water, no tea. ... I had rather work in harness. You
tell me what you want weekly, and you shall have it ; else
I shall have twenty irons in the fire at once, and none
of them hot. I tell you, you or some one must act
as my commanding officer in this. I have too much
autocracy already to be bothered with autocracy in this
too. Either I must be king of this paper, which I can't
and would n't be, or I must be an under-strapper, and
set the example of obedience."
During the autumn of 1850 the state of the
country was ominous. In his own parish there
Was still low fever, and a general depression pre-
vailed. Work was slack, and as winter ap-
proached gangs of housebreakers and men who
preferred begging and robbery to the workhouse,
wandered about Hampshire, Surrey, and Sussex.
No house was secure. Mr. Holiest, the rector of
Frimley, 1 was murdered in his own garden while
pursuing burglars; and the little rectory at
Eversley, which had never hitherto needed pro-
tection, and had scarcely a strong lock on its
doors, was armed with bolts and bars, fortunately
before it too was attempted by the same gang.
The Rector slept with loaded pistols by his bed-
side, and policemen from Winchester watched in
and about the quiet garden by night. The
future of England looked dark, and he writes to
Mr. Maurice:
" MY DEAREST MASTER, I hear you are come home.
If so, for God's sake come down and see me, if but for
a day. I have more doubts, perplexities, hopes, and
1 About eight miles from Eversley. (M. K.)
212 Charles Kingsley
fears to pour out to you than I could utter in a week,
and to the rest of our friends I cannot open. You com-
prehend me ; you are bigger than I. Come down and
tell me what to think and do, and let Fanny as well as
me, have the delight of seeing your face again. I would
come to you, but I have two pupils, and business besides,
and also don't know when and how to catch you. The
truth is, I feel we are all going on in the dark, toward
something wonderful and awful, but whether to a preci-
pice or a paradise, or neither, or both, I cannot tell. All
my old roots are tearing up one by one, and though I
keep a gallant ' front ' before the Charlotte Street people
(Council of Association), little they know of the struggles
within me, the laziness, the terror. Pray for me ; I could
lie down and cry at times. A poor fool of a fellow, and
yet feeling thrust upon all sorts of great and unspeakable
paths, instead of being left in peace to classify butterflies
and catch trout. If it were not for the Psalms and Pro-
phets, and the Gospels, I should turn tail, and flee shame-
fully, giving up the whole question, and all others, as agri
somnia"
" Jeremiah is my favorite book now. It has taught me
more than tongue can tell. But I am much disheartened,
and am minded to speak no more words in this name
(Parson Lot). Yet all these bullyings teach one, correct
one, warn one, show one that God is not leaving one to
go one's own way. 'Christ reigns,' quoth Luther."
To J. LEES, ESQ. : December 4. " . . . We have com-
menced night schools, and a weekly lecture on English
history, which I started last night with twenty hearers, on
the Saxon conquest, and I hope made the agricultural
eyes open once or twice, by showing that they did not
grow out of the earth originally, like beetles, but came
from somewhere else, and might probably have to go
somewhere else, and make room for their betters, if they
Heavy Correspondence 213
continued so like beetles, human manure-carriers, and
hole-grubbers, much longer. The weather has been try-
ing its hand at everything. Frantic gales, frantic frosts,
now frantic mists. I go to Bramshill cottage lecture to-
night, and expect to finish in a ditch but this rain has
made it soft lying, so that is of no consequence. The
Doctor is, as you may suppose, Wiseman-foolish ; so, for
that matter, are his betters. The dear ' Times ' is making
strong play on the papal aggressions ; and on the whole
the fool-crop seems as good this year as last. The
'Christian Socialist' sells about 1500, and is spreading;
but not having been yet cursed by any periodical, I fear
it is doing no good. Pray let us hear from you again.
You will see a letter of mine in last week's ' Spectator,'
' Evidence against the Universities.' Don't say who wrote
it : I have quite enough dogs barking at me already. . . .
I wish I was in bed, which, after all, is the only place of
rest on earth for a parson. ..."
His correspondence increased year by year, as
each fresh book touched and stirred fresh hearts.
Officers, both in the army and navy all stran-
gers would write; one to ask his opinion about
duelling; another to beg him to recommend or
write a rational form of family prayer for camp or
hut; another for suitable prayers to be used on
board ship in her Majesty's navy; others on more
delicate social points of conscience and conduct,
which the writers would confide to no other clergy-
man; and all to thank him for his books. The
sceptic dared tell him of his doubts; the profligate
of his fall ; young men brought up to go into Holy
Orders, but filled with misgivings about the Arti-
cles, the Creeds, and, more than all, the question
of endless punishment, would pour out all their
difficulties to him ; and many a noble spirit now
214 Charles Kingsley
working in the Church of England would never
have taken orders but for Charles Kingsley.
To this, Mr. Boyle, Vicar of Kidderminster,
alludes, in speaking of "some inestimable letters,
on orders," and the duties of clergymen, which
were lent and lost.
"Some years later," he adds, "I ventured to recall
myself to him in a time of great perplexity, as to inspira-
tion and the work of the ministry, and no casuist could
ever have entered into the doubts and difficulties of one
anxious to work and yet shrinking from unfaith, more
lovingly than he did. It has always been to me a very
deep regret that we met so seldom, for I felt what J. C.
Hare says somewhere of Arnold, that to talk with him
was like stepping out of the odors of an Italian Church
to the air and breath of a heathery moor. One sentence
in one letter is graven on my mind. 'You dislike the
tone of officiality of the clergy now. When you have
been eighteen years in orders you will detest it. But is
that a reason for skulking from the war which all men
should wage, but which Christ's servants can do better
than others ? It is a comfort often to feel there is one
iittle spot, the parish, to which one's thoughts and
prayers are for ever turning.' ..."
In the religious world the Anglican question
occupied one large section of the Church, and the
tide set Romewards. Clergymen wrote to ask
him to advise them how to save members of their
flock from Popery; mothers to beg him to try
and rescue their daughters from the influence of
Protestant confessors; while women hovering
between Rome and Anglicanism, between the
attractions of a nunnery and the monotonous
duties of family life, laid their difficulties before
the author of the " Saint's Tragedy ; " and he who
The Romish Question 215
shrank on principle from the office of father-
confessor had the work thrust upon him by num-
bers whom he dared not refuse to help, but whom
he never met face to face in this world.
The labor was severe to one who felt the re-
sponsibility of giving counsel, as intensely as he
did; and those only who saw the mass of letters
on his study table knew what the weight of such
a correspondence must be to a man of his powerful
sympathies, who had in addition sermons to pre-
pare, books to write, a parish to work, and a
pupil to teach. But his iron energy, coupled with
a deep conscientiousness, enabled him to get
through it. "One more thing done," he would
say, "thank God," as each letter was written,
each chapter of a book or page of a sermon dic-
tated to his wife; "and oh! how blessed it will
be when it is all over, to lie down together in that
dear churchyard. "
The following extracts from some letters to a
country rector, personally unknown to him, who
wrote to consult him about social politics and the
Romish question, are placed together, though
written at intervals:
EVERSLEY: January 13, 1851. "I will answer your
most interesting letter as shortly as I can, and, if possible,
in the same spirit of honesty as that in which you have
written to me. ist. I do not think the cry 'get on,'
to be anything but a devil's cry. The moral of my
book ['Alton Locke'] is, that the working man who
tries to get on, to desert his class and rise above it,
enters into a lie, and leaves God's path for his own
with consequences.
" and. I believe that a man might be, as a tailor or a
costermonger, every inch of him a saint and scholar, and
2 1 6 Charles Kingsley
a gentleman, for I have seen some few such already. I
believe hundreds of thousands more would be so, if their
businesses were put on a Christian footing, and them-
selves given by education, sanitary reforms, &c., the
means of developing their own latent capabilities. I
think the cry, ' rise in life,' has been excited by the very
increasing impossibility of being anything but brutes while
they struggle below. I know well r 'J that is doing in the
way of education, &c., but I do assert that the disease of
degradation has been for the last forty years increasing
faster than the remedy. And I believe, from experience,
that when you put workmen into human dwellings, and
give them a Christian education, so far from wishing dis-
contentedly to rise out of their class, or to level others to
it, exactly the opposite takes place. They become sen-
sible of the dignity of work, and they begin to see their
labor as a true calling in God's church, now that it is
cleared from the ace dentia which made it look in their
eyes, only a soulless drudgery in a devil's workshop of a
world.
" 3rd. From the advertisement of an ' English Repub-
lic ' you send, I can guess who will be the writers in it,
being behind the scenes. It will come to nought ; every-
thing of this kind is coming to nought now. The work-
men are tired of idols ; ready and yearning for the church
and gospel. . . . We live in a great crisis, and the Lord
requires great things of us. The fields are white to har-
vest. Pray ye, therefore, the Lord of the harvest to send
forth laborers.
"4th. As to the capacities of working men, I am
afraid that your excellent friend will find that he has only
the refuse of working intellects to form his induction on.
The devil has got the best long ago. By the neglect of
the Church, by her dealing (like the Popish church, and
all weak churches) only with women, children, and beg-
gars, the cream and pith of working intellect is almost
exclusively self-educated, and therefore, alas ! infidel. If
The Romish Question 217
he goes on as he is doing, lecturing on history, poetry,
science, and all things which the workmen crave for, and
can only get from such men as * * * and * * * mixed
up with Straussism and infidelity, he will find that he
will draw back to his Lord's fold, and to his lecture-
rooms, slowly, but surely, men whose powers would
astonish him, as they have astonished me.
" 5th. The workmen whose quarrels you mention, are
not Christians, or socialists either. They are of all creeds
and none. We are teaching them to become Christians
by teaching them gradually that true socialism, true lib-
erty, brotherhood, and true equality (not the carnal, dead
level equality of the communist, but the spiritual equality
of the Church idea, which gives every man an equal
chance of developing and using God's gifts, and rewards
every man according to his work, without respect of per-
sons) is only to be found in loyalty and obedience to
Christ. They do quarrel, but if you knew how they
used to quarrel before association, the improvement since
would astonish you. And the French associations do
not quarrel at all. . . .
"6th. May I, in reference to myself, and certain
attacks on me, say, with all humility, that I do not speak
from hearsay now, as has been asserted. . . . From my
cradle, as the son of an active clergyman, I have been
brought up in the most familiar intercourse with the poor
in town and country. My mother is a second Mrs. Fry,
in spirit and act. For fourteen years my father has been
the rector of a very large metropolitan parish and I
speak what I know, and testify that which I have seen.
With earnest prayer, in fear and trembling, I wrote my
book, and I trust in Him to whom I prayed, that He has
not left me to my own prejudices or idols, on any im-
portant point relating to the state of the possibilities of
the poor for whom He died. ..."
January 26, 1851. ". . . In * * *, and in all that
school, there is an element of foppery even in dress and
2i 8 Charles Kingsley
manner; a fastidious, maundering, die-away effeminacy,
which is mistaken for purity and refinement ; and I con-
fess myself unable to cope with it, so alluring is it to the
minds of an effeminate and luxurious aristocracy ; neither
educated in all that should teach them to distinguish
between bad and good taste, healthy and unhealthy phil-
osophy or devotion. I never attempted but once to
rescue a woman out of 's hands, and then I failed
utterly and completely. I could not pamper her fancies
as he could; for I could not bid her be more than a
woman, but only to be a woman. I could not promise
a safe and easy royal road to lily crowns, and palms of
virginity, and the especial coronet of saints. I have
nothing especial to offer anyone, except especial sorrow
and trouble, if they wish to try to do especial good. I
wish for no reward, no blessing, no name, no grace, but
what is equally the heritage of potboys and navvies, and
which they can realize and enjoy just as deeply as I can,
while they remain potboys and navvies, and right jolly
ones too. Now this whole school (though there is very
much noble and good in it, and they have re-called men's
minds I am sure they have mine to a great deal of
catholic and apostolic truth which we are now forgetting)
is an aristocratic movement in the fullest and most carnal
sense. . . ."
"... This road, then, as a fact, leads Homewards.
Now do you wish me to say to your friend what I think ?
Do you wish me to ask her the questions I must ask, or
speak no word to her? ... 'I want proof whether you
really believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God
the Holy Spirit. If you do not if you only believe in
believing in them, if you believe that they are present only
in some Church or system ; or ought to be present there,
and may be put back again there, by art and man's
device, by more rigid creeds, and formulae, more church-
goings, more mediaeval architecture, more outward cere-
monies, or more private prayers, &c., &c., and religious
The Romish Question 219
acts of the members : if you believe that God used to
guide the world, or one nation of it, in the Jews' time :
if you believe that God takes care of Episcopal churches,
and the devil has the rest of the world to himself: if
you believe that God takes care of souls, and not of
bodies also ; of Churches, and not of States also ; of
ecclesiastical events, and not of political and scientific
ones also ; of saints, and not of sinners also ; of spiritual
matters, and not of crops and trades and handicrafts
also then I cannot, cannot say that you believe in the
creeds or the sacraments, or those of whose Eternal
being, presence and power they witness. Madam,' I
would say, ' if you really believe the Lord's Prayer, and
the Creed, and the Sacraments, and the witness of the
Priesthood : if you really believe that you have a Father
in heaven, in any real sense of that king of words,
Father : if you believe that He who died on the Cross
for you, and for your children, and for the whole earth,
is really now King and Lord of the Universe, King and
Lord of England, and of your property, and of your body
and mind and spirit : if you really believe that the Holy
Spirit proceeds from Him as well as from His Father
and your Father, and that He and your Father are ONE :
why should you go to Rome ? Did God make Rome
and not England ? He has chosen to teach Rome one
way and England another. He has chosen to make you
an English woman, a member of the Church of England,
English in education, character, brain, feelings, duties:
you cannot unmake yourself. You are already a member
of that Spiritual One body, called the English nation :
you cannot make yourself anything else. A child can-
not choose its own mother : the fact of your being born
in a certain faith and certain circumstances, ought to be
to you a plain proof, if you believe in a Living Father at
all, that that faith and those circumstances are the ones
by which He means to teach you, in which you are to
work. You may answer, What if I find the faith is
22O Charles Kingsley
wrong? I answer, prove first that you know what the
faith is ! You must exhaust the meaning of the Church
of England, before you have any right to prefer any other
church to it. For there is always an A priori probability
that you are right where you are, because God has put
you where you are. But I am not going to rest the
question on probabilities. I only ask you to pause for
their sake, while you consider whether you know what
the Church of England is, what God's education of Eng-
land has been, and whether the one or the other are con-
sistent with each other. I say they are. I say that the
Church of England is wonderfully and mysteriously fitted
for the souls of a free Norse-Saxon race ; for men whose
ancestors fought by the side of Odin, over whom a de-
scendant of Odin now rules. And I say that the ele-
ment which you have partially introduced, and to drown
yourself in which you must go to Rome, is a foreign ele-
ment, unsuited to Englishmen, and to God's purposes
with England. How far it may be the best for the
Italian or Spanish spirit I cannot judge. I can only
believe that if they had been capable of anything higher,
God would have given them something higher. And if
you ask me, why I think we are capable of something
higher, I say, because the highest idea of man is to
know his Father, and look his Father in the face, in full
assurance of faith and love ; and that out of that springs
all manful energy, self-respect, all self-restraint, all that
the true Englishman has, and the Greek and Spaniard
have not. And I say this is what that inspired dema-
gogue, St. James, means when he speaks of " the perfect
law of liberty." I say that this Protestant faith, which
teaches every man to look God in the face for himself,
has contributed more than anything else to develop family
life, industry, freedom in England, Scotland, and Sweden ;
and that if anyone wishes to benefit the poor whom God
has committed to their charge, they must do anything
and everything rather than go to Rome to a creed
The Romish Question 221
which by substituting the Confessor for God, begins by
enslaving the landlord's soul, and will infallibly teach him
to enslave the souls of his tenants, make them more
incapable than they are now, of independence, self-
respect, self-restraint ; make association and co-operation
impossible to them, by substituting a Virgin Mary, who
is to nurse them like infants, for a Father in whom they
are men and brothers ; and end by bringing them down
to the level of the Irish or Neapolitan savage.'
" This I would say ; and then I would say, ' If you are
dissatisfied with the present state of the Church of Eng-
land, so am I. Stay in it, then, and try to mend it. But
let your emendations be consistent with the idea of the
part which is yet pure. To Romanize the Church is not
to reform it. To unprotestantize is not to reform it.
Therefore take care that the very parts in the Prayer
Book which you would alter, be not just the really Cath-
olic and Apostolic parts ; that you would give, without
intending it, exactly the same Sectarian and Manichsean
tone to its present true catholicity which the Puritan
party would, if they were allowed to tamper with the
Baptismal or Ordination Service.' This I would say, if
God gave me utterance and courage. . . .
"Make any use whatsoever which you chose of this
letter. Mind, my dear sir, that I have been here put-
ting the arguments themselves in strong relief. In
what words it might be right to embody them, would
depend upon the temper and peculiar trials and advan-
tages of the person herself."
February 5. " . . . I am convinced of one thing
more and more, by experience, that the whole question is
an anthropological one. ' Define a human being,' ought
to be the first query. It is thence that the point of
departure, perhaps unconsciously, takes place. Perhaps
I shall not bore you, if I speak a little on this point. I
do not speak from book, for I have no great faith in
222 Charles Kingsley
controversial books they never go to the hearts of the
doctrines or those who hold them. ' Measure for Meas-
ure ' taught me more than oceans of anti-men polemics
could have done, or pro-men either. But, to tell you
the truth in private, I have been through that terrible
question of 'Celibacy versus Marriage' once already in
my life. And from what I have felt about it in myself,
and seen others feel, I am convinced that it is the cardinal
point. If you leave that fortress untaken, your other
batteries are wasted. It is to religion, what the Malthu-
sian doctrine is to political economy the crux in limine,
your views of which must logically influence your views
of everything afterwards. .
"Now there are two great views of men. One as a
spirit embodied in flesh and blood, with certain relations,
namely, those of father, child, husband, wife, brother, as
necessary properties of his existence. No one denies
that the relations of father and child are necessary, seeing
that man is the son of man. About the necessity of
the others there is a question with some ; but not with the
class of whom I speak, viz., the many, Christian as well
as heathen, in all ages and countries. To them, practi-
cally, at least, all the relations are considered as standing
on the same basis, viz., the actual constitution which
God has given man, and the necessity of continuing his
race.
" Those of them who are spiritually enlightened, have
learnt to believe that these relations to man are the
symbols of relations to God. That God is our Father.
That Christ is the husband of the one collective and
corporate person, called the Church. That we are brothers
and sisters, in as far as we are children of the same
Heavenly Father. And, finally, that these human rela-
tions are given us to teach us their divine antitypes : and
therefore that it is only in proportion as we appreciate
and understand the types that we can understand the
antitypes. They deny that these relations are carnal, />.,
The Romish Question 223
animal, in essence. They say that they are peculiar
to the human race. That being human, they are spirit-
ual, because man fud man is not an animal, but a
spirit embodied in an animal. Therefore they more
or less clearly believe these relations to be everlasting;
because man is immortal, and therefore all which
pertains to his spirit (as these do) is immortal also.
How these relations are to be embodied practically in the
future state, they do not know : for they do not know
how they themselves are to be embodied. But seeing
that these relations are in this life the teachers of the
highest truths, and intimately and deeply connected with
their deepest and holiest feelings and acts, they believe
that they will in the next life teach them still more, be
still more connected with their inmost spirits, and there-
fore have a more perfect development and fulfilment,
and be the forms of a still more intimate union with the
beloved objects, whom they now feel and know to be
absolutely parts of themselves. This I hold to be the
Creed of the Bible, both of the Old Testament and the
New. And if any passages in the New Testament seem
to militate against it, I think that they only do so from
our reading our popular Manichseism or gnosticism into
them ; or from our not seeing that the Old Testament
doctrine of the absolute and everlasting humanity, and
therefore sanctity, of these relations is to be taken for
granted in the New Testament as an acknowledged sub-
stratum to all further teaching.
" The second class, who have been found in large
numbers, principally among the upper classes, both
among Christians and heathens at various eras of the
world, hold an entirely different anthropology. In their
eyes man is not a spirit necessarily embodied in, and
expressed by an animal ; but a spirit accidentally con-
nected with, and burdened by an animal. The animal
part of them only is supposed to be human, the spiritual,
angelic or diabolic, as the case may be. The relations
224 Charles Kingsley
of life are supposed to be properties only of the animal
part, or rather adjuncts of them. The ideal of man,
therefore, is to deny, not himself, but the animal part
which is not himself, and to strive after a non-human or
angelic state. And this angelic state is supposed, of
course, to be single and self-sustained, without relations,
except to God alone; a theory grounded first on the
belief of the Easterns and Alexandrians, and next, on the
supposed meaning of an expression of our Lord's in
Mark xii. 25. Now this may be a true anthropology,
but I object to it, in limine, that it denies its own ground.
If, as all will allow, we can only know our relations to
God through our relations to each other, the more we
abjure and despise those latter relations, the less we shall
know of the former, the less ground we shall have for
believing that they are our relations to God ; and therefore,
in practice, the less we shall believe that they are. It has
been said that to be alone only means to have nothing
between us and heaven. It may mean that, but it will
also mean to ignore God as our Father, men as our
brothers, Christ as the Bridegroom of the Church.
" That this is the case is evident from history ; and
history is a fair test. ' By their fruits ye shall know
them.' A fair test of doctrines, though not of individ-
uals. Every man is better and worse than his creed.
Even the most heretical are happily inconsistent (as I be-
lieve, because the light which lighteth every man, the
eternal idea of pure humanity, which is the image of the
Lord God, is too strong for them, and makes their acts
more right because more human than their theories).
But we may judge of the truth of a doctrine both from
its fruits in the general faith and practice of an age,
and from its manifestations in those stronger souls who
dare carry things consistently out wherever they may lead
them.
" Now this anthropology was held and carried out by
the Neo-Platonists, by Plotinus, Libanius, Hypatia, Isi-
The Romish Question 225
dore, Proclus, and others, and we know whither it led
them. To aristocratic exclusiveness ; to absolute hatred
of anything which looked like a gospel for the merely
human masses ; to the worship of the pure and absolute
intellect, and the confusion of it with the understanding ;
to the grossest polytheism, and image worship, as a
means of supplying that void which they themselves had
made, by trying to have nothing between themselves and
heaven ! To theurgy, and all such sorts of spasmodic
attempts at miracle-working, in order to give themselves,
when they had thrown away the evidence and teaching
which they thought gross and material, some sort of evi-
dence and teaching, any mere signs and wonders to assure
their exhausted faculties, tired of fluttering in the vacuum
of ' pure devotion/ that the whole was not a dream ; and
finally utter skepticism. I appeal to history whether my
account is not correct. And I appeal also to history
whether exactly the same phases, in exactly the same
order, but with far more fearful power, did not develop
themselves in the mediaeval Church, between the eleventh
and sixteenth century, ending in the lie of lies the
formulized and organized skepticism of Jesuitry. And I
do assert, that the cause of that development was the
same in both the peculiar anthropologic theory which
made an angel the ideal of a man, and therefore celi-
bacy his highest state. I only ask you to read carefully
the life of St. Francis of Assisi, in old Surius, and you
will, as I do, love, reverence, and all but adore the man ;
but you will see that all which made him unmanly,
superstitious, and everything which we abhor, sprang
evidently, and in his case (being a genius) consciously,
from his notion of what a man was, and what he ought to
be. And from these grounds I venture a prediction or
two. God knows I have seen enough of all this to see
somewhat at least where it leads. For several years of
my life it was the question which I felt I must either
conquer utterly or turn papist and monk. If I give you
226 Charles Kingsley
some little light, I can assure you I bought it dear. I,
too, have held, one by one, every doctrine of the extreme
High Church party, and faced their consequences.
" It does seem to me, then, that if that party persist in
their adoption of the Romish and Neo-Platonist anthro-
pology, they must, at least the most noble spirits of them,
follow it out to the same conclusions. There will be a
lessening sense of God as a Father or of that word
Father meaning anything real till we shall see, as we
do in Romish books of devotion, and in Romish practice,
the Fatherhood of God utterly forgotten, and the prayer
which declares it turned into a parrot-like charm as if
for the very purpose of not recollecting its blessed news.
And in proportion as their own feelings towards their
children become less sacred in their eyes, they will be
less inclined to impute such feelings in God towards
them ; they will not be able to conceive forgiveness, for-
bearance, tender patience and care on His part, and will
receive the spirit of bondage again unto fear. In pro-
portion as they think their relation to their own children
is not an absolute and eternal one, they will find a diffi-
culty in conceiving their relation to God to be so. They
will conceive it possible to lose the blessing even of the
name of God's children. They will resort to prayers and
terrors to recover a lost relationship to God, which, if
their own children employed towards them, they would
consider absurd in reason, and insulting to parental love.
Do I say they will? Alas ! may I not say they do so
already ?
" Then there will be an increasing confusion about our
Blessed Lord. They will, thanks be to His Spirit, and
the grace of the sacraments, which are never in vain, still
regard Him as the ideal of humanity. But they will only
see as much of that ideal as their sense of the term
humanity allows them. It will be, therefore, those pas-
sages of our Lord's life, those features of His temporary
stay on earth, which seem most angelic, or non-human,
The Romish Question 227
which will be most prized. In all in which He approaches
the Romish saint, they will apprehend and appreciate
Him. But they will not appreciate Him as the Word
who said to Adam and Eve, ' Increase and multiply and
replenish the earth;' as the tutelary God of the patri-
archs, with their rich animal life ; as the Lord of the
marrying, farming, fighting Jews, with their intense per-
ception of the sanctity of family, hereditary and national
ties, and the dependence of those on the very essence of
the Lord ; as the Lord of Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar,
the Lord of all the nations of the earth, who is the
example and the sanction, the ideal fulfiller, not merely
of the devotee, but of every phase of humanity. They
will less and less appreciate the gospel of ' Husbands
love your wives, as Christ also loved the Church, and
gave Himself for it.' Not that they will not hold the
doctrine of the Blessed One being the Bridegroom.
But having forgotten what a bridegroom means, they will
not shrink with horror from calling Him the ' Bridegroom
of each individual soul ' an unscriptural and illogical
doctrine (I will not use the words which I might about
it, for the sake of His name which it involves) common
to mystics, both Romish and Puritan, the last phase of
which may be seen in Frank Newman's Unitarian book,
' The soul, her sorrows and aspirations ! ' You are as
well aware as I, that the soul is talked of as a bride as
feminine by nature, whatever be the sex of its possessor.
This is indeed only another form of the desire to be an
angel. For if you analyze the common conception of an
angel, what is it, as the pictures consistently enough
represent it, but a woman, unsexed?
" But in the mean time, there will be revulsions from
the passionate, amatory language which mystics apply to
our Lord, as irreverent, if not worse. There will be
recollections that He is Lord and God. The distance
between His angelic, and therefore incomprehensible
humanity, and the poor, simple, struggling, earth-bound
228 Charles Kingsley
soul of the worshipper, already painful enough, will widen
more and more, till He becomes the tremendous Judge
of Michael Angelo's picture not a God-man, but a
God-angel terrible thought ' Who shall propitiate
Him the saintly, the spotless, the impassible ? He
would feel for us if He could comprehend us, for He
loved us to the death ; but how can He comprehend us,
poor mean creatures ? How dare we tell Him the mean-
nesses we hardly dare confess to ourselves ? Oh ! foi
some tender ear, into which we should not be ashamed
to pour our tale. One like us in all things of like
passions with ourselves. It must be a woman. We so
weak and woman-like we who call our souls " she," we
dare not tell man at least till he is unsexed by celi-
bacy ; for even the priest is cold, is uncertain, is sinful
like ourselves. Oh ! for a virgin mother, in whose face
we should never see anything but a pitying smile ! '
" ' Go to the blessed Virgin,' said a Romish priest, to
a lady whom I love well. ' She, you know, is a woman,
and can understand all a woman's feelings/ Ah !
thought I, if your head had once rested on a lover's
bosom, and your heart known the mighty stay of a man's
affection, you would have learnt to go now in your sore
need, not to the mother but to the Son not to the in-
dulgent virgin, but to the strong man, Christ Jesus stern
because loving who does not shrink from punishing,
and yet does it as a man would do it, ' mighty to save.'
"My dear sir, there is the course which that party
must run to Mariolatry ; and the noblest and tenderest
hearts of them will plunge most deeply, passionately, and
idolatrously into it. Not that they will find it sufficient.
They, too, will have to eke out the human mediation
which the soul of man requires, by saints, and their relics.
They, too, will find accesses of blank doubt! . . .
' Nothing between them and heaven.' True ; but
heaven will in that case look far, far off at times. There
must be ' signs,' ' evidences,' ' palpable proofs ' of some-
The Romish Question 229
thing invisible and spiritual. If their children, their
parents, their country are none perhaps images may
be, or still better, miracles, if one would but appear!
' The course of nature does not testify of God.' Then
something supernatural may. ' The laws of nature are
not the pure eternal children of the pure eternal Father.'
' Oh ! for something to break them to show that there
is something besides ourselves, and our own handiwork,
in the universe.' ' Oh ! for an ecstatica, a weeping
image, a bleeding picture ! ' . . . God help them and
us I . . ."
CHAPTER IX
1851
AGED 32
LETTERS ON UNIVERSITY REFORM BEGINNINGS OF " HVPATIA "
PERSONAL TENDENCIES WORK AND RECREATION
TEETOTALISM OPENING OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION
INFLUENCE OF " YEAST " LECTURE ON AGRICULTURE
OCCURRENCE IN A LONDON CHURCH VISIT TO GERMANY
LETTER FROM MR. JOHN MARTINEAU.
" He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
Envy and calumny and hate and pain
Can touch him not, and torture not again ;
He is secure ! and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain."
SHELLEY.
" We should be wary what persecution we raise against the
living labors of public men; how we spill the seasoned life of
man preserved and stored up in books ; since we see a kind of
homicide may be committed, sometimes a martyrdom."
MILTON.
THE year of the Great Exhibition, which be-
gan with distress and discontent in Eng-
land, and ended with a Revolution in Paris, was a
notable one in the life of Charles Kingsley. His
parochial work was only varied by the addition of
new plans of draining the parish at the points
where low fever had prevailed. He occasionally
attended the conferences of the promoters of
association. He crossed the Channel for the first
time. His friendship and correspondence with
On University Reform 231
Frederika Bremer, the Swedish novelist, and with
Miss .Mitford, date from this year. " Yeast, a
Problem," was reprinted and came out in a volume
anonymously. "Hypatia" was begun as a serial
in "Eraser's Magazine." "Santa Maura" and
several shorter poems were written. He contrib-
uted to the "Christian Socialist" eight papers on
"Bible Politics, or God justified to the People,"
four on the "Frimley Murder," three entitled
"The Long Game," a few ballads and sonnets,
and the story of "The Nun's Pool," which had
been rejected in 1848 by the publishers of "Poli-
tics. " He preached two sermons in London, one
of which made him notorious. He carried on a
correspondence in the "Spectator," on the state
of the Universities, urging the necessity of a
Commission, &c., &c. , which made him many
enemies and plunged him into a fresh sea of pri-
vate letters.
"As to the temper and tone of what I wrote," he
writes, to a fellow of Trinity, " whereon folks are fierce, I
have nothing to say, but that, if half my theory was true,
it would excuse my writing passionately. ... I expected
to be reviled. . . . Only I believe an old superstition,
that things are either right or wrong, and that right means
what God commands, and loves, and blesses ; and wrong
what He forbids and hates, and makes a curse and a
road of ruin to those who follow it; and therefore no
language is too strong to warn men from the road to ruin,
because you cannot tell into what fearful ' descensus
Averni ' it may lead them. I had a superstition that the
universities were going down that descent. ... I had
hoped that some here and there would listen to me. I
have no proof that none will not ; but still, if such men
as you think me wrong, I take it as a sign that I have
232 Charles Kingsley
tried to pick green fruit, that the time is not come, and
retire to chew the cud, and try again some day, when I
know more about the matter. As for hard words, they
neither make for me or against me. There never was
anyone who spoke out the truth yet on the earth,
who was not called a ' howling idiot ' for his pains at
first. . . . My conclusion is, being on all points a
' superstitious man,' that God does not choose me to
meddle in this matter, being not wise and good enough ;
that He has therefore allowed me to fall into a slight
mistake of fact, [as to the influence of Strauss's books at
Cambridge,] in order to cripple me, and that therefore I
must mind other work for the present ; whereof I have
plenty. . . ."
TO REV. F. D. MAURICE
EVERSLEY : January 16, 1851. "A thousand thanks
for all your advice and information, which encourages me
to say more. I don't know how far I shall be able to
write much for the ' Christian Socialist.' Don't fancy
that I am either lazy or afraid. But, if I do not use my
pen to the uttermost in earning my daily bread, I shall
not get through this year. I am paying off the loans
which I got to meet the expenses of repairing and fur-
nishing ; but, with an income reduced this year by more
than ^200, having given up, thank God, that sinecure
clerkship, and having had to return ten per cent, of my
tithes, owing to the agricultural distress, I have also this
year, for the first time, the opportunity, and therefore
the necessity, of supporting a good school. My available
income, therefore, is less than 400. I cannot reduce
my charities, and I am driven either to give up my
curate, or to write ; and either of these alternatives, with
the increased parish work, for I have got either lectures
or night school every night in the week, and three ser-
vices on Sunday, will demand my whole time. What to
do unless I get pupils I know not. Martineau leaves me
Beginnings of " Hypatia " 233
in June. My present notion is to write a historical
romance of the beginning of the fifth century, which has
been breeding in my head this two years. But how to
find time I know not. And if there is a storm brewing,
of course I shall have to help to fight the Philistines.
Would that I had wings as a dove, then would I flee
away and be at rest! I have written this selfish and
egotistical letter to ask for your counsel ; but I do not
forget that you have your own troubles. My idea in the
romance is to set forth Christianity as the only really
democratic creed, and philosophy, above all, spiritualism,
as the most exclusively aristocratic creed. Such has
been my opinion for a long time, and what I have been
reading lately confirms it more and more. Even Synesius,
' the philosophic ' bishop, is an aristocrat by the side of
Cyril. It seems to me that such a book might do good
just now, while the Scribes and Pharisees, Christian and
heathen, are saying, * This people, which knoweth not
the law, is accursed ! ' Of English subjects I can write
no more just now. I have exhausted both my stock and
my brain, and really require to rest it, by turning it to
some new field, in which there is richer and more pictur-
esque life, and the elements are less confused, or rather,
may be handled more in the mass than English ones
now. I have long wished to do something antique, and
get out my thoughts about the connection of the old
world and the new ; Schiller's ' Gods of Greece ' ex-
presses, I think, a tone of feeling very common, and
which finds its vent in modern Neo-Platonism Any-
thingarianism. But if you think I ought not, I will not.
I will obey your order."
The " Christian Socialist " movement had been
severely attacked in the " Edinburgh " and in the
" Quarterly Reviews ; " in both articles Commu-
nism and Socialism were spoken of as identical,
and the author of " Alton Locke " was pointed at
Vol. I 11
234 Charles Kingsley
as the chief offender. He writes to Mr. Brimley,
of Trinity :
"The article [in the 'Quarterly'] I have not seen,
and don't intend to. There is no use for a hot-tempered
and foul-mouthed man like myself praying not to be led
into temptation, and then reading, voluntarily, attacks on
himself from the firm of Wagg, Wenham, and Co. But
if you think I ought to answer the attack formally, pray
tell me so.
" Hypatia grows, little darling, and I am getting very
fond of her ; but the period is very dark, folks having
been given to lying then, as well as now, besides being
so blind as not to see the meaning of their own time (per-
haps, though, we don't of ours), and so put down, not
what we should like to know, but what they liked to
remember. Nevertheless there are materials for a grand
book. And if I fail in it, I may as well give up writing
perhaps the best thing for me ; though, thanks to abuse-
puffs, my books sell pretty steadily."
"Though" (says Mr. Hughes), "Charles Kingsley
faced his adversaries bravely, it must not be inferred that
he did not feel the attacks and misrepresentations very
keenly. 1 In many respects, though housed in a strong
and vigorous body, his spirit was an exceedingly tender
and sensitive one. I have often thought that at this time
his very sensitiveness drove him to say things more
broadly and incisively, because he was speaking as it
were somewhat against the grain, and knew that the line
he was taking would be misunderstood, and would dis-
please and alarm those with whom he had most sympathy.
For he was by nature and education an aristocrat in the
best sense of the word, believed that a landed aristocracy
was a blessing to the country, and that no country would
gain the highest liberty without such a class, holding its
1 See Margaret to Dolcino and Dolcino to Margaret in
Poems. (M. K.)
Personal Tendencies 235
own position firmly, but in sympathy with the people.
He liked their habits and ways, and keenly enjoyed their
society. Again, he was full of reverence for science and
scientific men, and specially for political economy and
economists, and desired eagerly to stand well with them.
And it was a most bitter trial to him to find himself not
only in sharp antagonism with traders and employers of
labor, which he looked for, but with these classes also.
On the other hand, many of the views and habits of
those with whom he found himself associated were very
distasteful to him. In a new social movement, such as
that of association as it took shape in 1849-50, there is
certain to be greav attraction for restless and eccentric
persons, and in point o' fact many such joined it. ...
1 As if we shall not be abused enough," he used to say,
'for what we must say and do, without being saddled
with mischievous nonsense of this kind.' To less sen-
sitive men the effect of eccentricity upon him was almost
comic. Many of the workmen, who always rise to the
top at first, who were most prominent in the Associa-
tions were almost as little to his mind windy inflated
kind of persons, with a lot of fine phrases in their mouths
which they did n't know the meaning of. But in spite of
all that was distasteful to him in some of its surroundings,
the co-operative movement (as it is now called) entirely
approved itself to his conscience and judgment, and
mastered him so that he was ready to risk whatever had
to be risked in fighting its battle. Often in those days,
seeing how loth Charles Kingsley was to take in hand
much of the work which Parson Lot had to do, and how
fearlessly and thoroughly he did it after all, one was
reminded of the old Jewish prophets, such as Amos the
herdsman of Tekoa, ' I was no prophet, neither was I
a prophet's son ; but I was an herdsman, and a gatherer
of sycamore fruit : and the Lord took me as I followed
the flock, and said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people
Israel.' "
236 Charles Kingsley
TO T. HUGHES, ESQ.
"... And if I had ,100,000, I'd have, and should
have staked and lost it all in 1848-50. I should, Tom,
for my heart was and is in it, and you '11 see it will beat
yet. Still, some somedever, it 's in the fates, that associ-
ation is the pure caseine, and must be eaten by the
human race if it would save its soul alive. ... I have
had a sorter kinder sample day. Up at five, to see a
dying man ; ought to have been up at two, but Ben King,
the rat-catcher, who came to call me, was taken ner-
vous ! ! ! and did n't make row enough ; was from 5.30 to
6.30 with the most dreadful case of agony insensible
to me, but not to his pain. Came home, got a wash and
a pipe, and again to him at eight. Found him insensible
to his own pain, with dilated pupils, dying of pressure
of the brain going any moment. Prayed the commen-
datory prayers over him, and started for the river with W.
Fished all the morning in a roaring N.E. gale, with the
dreadful agonized face between me and the river, ponder-
ing on The mystery. Killed eight on ' March brown,' a
' governor,' by drowning the flies, and taking 'em out
gently to see if aught was there, which is the only dodge
in a north-easter. 'Cause why? The water is warmer
than the air ergo, fishes don't like to put their noses
out o* doors, and feeds at home down stairs. It is the
only wrinkle, Tom. The captain fished a-top, and caught
but three all day. They were n't going to catch a cold
in their heads to please him or any man. Clouds burn
up at i P.M. I put on a minnow, and kill three more ;
I should have had lots, but for the image of the dirty
hickory stick, which would ' walk the waters like a thing
of life,' just ahead of my minnow. Mem. never fish with
the sun in your back ; it *s bad enough with a fly, but
with a minnow it's strychnine and prussic acid. My
eleven weighed together four and a-half pounds, three to
the pound ; not good, considering I had passed many a
Work and Recreation 237
two pound fish, I know. Corollary. Brass minnow don't
suit the water. Where is your wonderful minnow? Send
me one down, or else a horn one, which I believes in
desperate. One pounder I caught to-day on the ' March
brown,' womited his wittles, which was rude, but instruct-
ive ; and among worms was a gudgeon three inches long
and more. Blow minnows gudgeon is the thing.
Came off the water at three. Found my man alive, and,
thank God, quiet. Sat with him, and thought him going
once or twice. What a mystery that long, insensible
death struggle is ! ... Then had to go to Hartley Row
for an Archdeacon's Sunday-school meeting three
hours speechifying. Got back at 10.30, and sit writing to
you. So goes one's day. All manner of incongruous
things to do, and the very incongruity keeps one beany
and jolly. Your letter was delightful. I read part of it
to W., who says you are the best fellow on earth, to
which I agree. So no more from your sleepy and tired,
" C. KINGSLEY."
TO HIS WIFE
EVERSLEY RECTORY : Whit Monday. "A most suc-
cessful Club Day. Weather glorious roasting hot.
Preached them a sermon on the 2nd Lesson (i Cor. xii.),
the Church of the World. World as the selfish competi-
tive isolating form of society Church as the uniting
one. . . . Spoke of the Millennium and the realization of
the Kingdom of God showed the intimate connection
of the whole with Whitsuntide, and especially the Whit
Monday services, and was greeted after church by the
band striking up ' the good time coming.' I know noth-
ing which has pleased me so much for a long time. The
singing was excellent, and altogether all went charmingly.
We dine with them by request."
Whit Tuesday. " I have been planting vigorously.
This glorious heat makes me lively and happy in the
body in spite of myself; but if a chill whiff of a cloud
238 Charles Kingsley
comes, I feel all alone at once a crab without his shell,
a cock without his tail, a dog-fish with a nail through his
nose all are nothing in want and helplessness to my
feelings. Kiss the darlings for me. Thank God only
five days more alone, please God ! please God !
" Friday. Such a ducking ! such a storm ! I am glad
you were not at home for that only. We were up fishing
on the great lake at Bramshill : the morning soft, rich,
and lowering, with a low, falling glass. I have been pro-
phesying thunder for two or three days. Perch would
not bite. I went to see E. H. ; and read and prayed
with her. How one gets to love consumptive patients.
She seems in a most happy, holy state of mind. Then I
went on to L. G. ; sat a long time with her, and came
back to the lake day burning, or rather melting, the
country looking glorious. The day as hot without sun,
as it generally is with. There appeared a black storm
over Reading. I found J. had hooked a huge jack, which
broke everything in a moment, and went off with all his
spinning tackle. Then the storm began to work round in
that mysterious way storms will, and gather from every
quarter, and the wind which had been dead calm S. E.,
blew N. E., N., W., and lastly, as it is doing now, and always
does after these explosions, S. W. And then began such
a sight, and we on the island in the middle of the great
lake ! The lightning was close, and seemed to strike the
ground near Sandhurst again and again, and the crackle
and roar and spit and grumble over our heads was
awful. I have not been in such a storm for four years.
. . . We walked home after an hour's ducking. I am
not ashamed to say that I prayed a great deal during the
storm, for we were in a very dangerous place in an island
under high trees ; and it seemed dreadful never to see
you again. I count the hours till Monday. Tell the
chicks I found a real wild duck's nest on the island, full
of eggs, and have brought one home to hatch it under
a henJ We dined out last night, and after dinner went
The Great Exhibition 239
bird's nesting in the garden, and found plenty. Tell Rose
a bullfinch's, with eggs, and a chaffinch's, and an oxeye's,
and a thrush's, and a greenfinch's ; and then B. and I
climbed to the top of the highest fir-tree there, to hang
our hats on the top."
The opening of the Great Exhibition was a
matter of deep interest to him, not only for its
own sake, but for that of the great Prince who
was the prime mover in the undertaking. On
entering the building he was moved to tears; to
him it was like going into a sacred place, not a
mere show as so many felt it, and still less a
gigantic shop, in which wares were displayed for
the sake of selfish trade competition. The
science, the art, the noble ideas of universal
peace, universal brotherhood it was meant to
shadow forth and encourage, excited him intensely ;
while the feeling that the realization of these
great and noble ideas was as yet so far off, and
that these achievements of physical science were
mere forecastings of a great but distant future,
saddened him as profoundly. Four days after the
opening, in preaching at St. Margaret's, West-
minster, on Psalm Ixviii. 18: " When He ascended
up on high, He led captivity captive, and received
gifts for men, yea, even for His enemies, that the
Lord God might dwell among them," he startled
his hearers by contrasting the widespread unbe-
lief of the present day, in God as the Fount of
all science, all art, all the intelligence of the
nation, with the simple faith of our forefathers.
" If," he said, " a thousand years ago a congregation in
this place had been addressed upon the text I have chosen,
they would have had little difficulty in applying its mean-
240 Charles Kingsley
ing to themselves, and in mentioning at once the innu-
merable instances of those gifts which the King of men
had received for men, innumerable signs that the Lord
God was really dwelling among them. But among those
signs, I think, they would have mentioned several which
we are not now generally accustomed to consider in such
a light. They would have pointed not merely to the
building of churches, the founding of schools, the spread
of peace, the decay of slavery, but to the importation of
foreign literature, the extension of the arts of reading,
writing, painting, architecture, the improvement of agri-
culture, and the introduction of new and more successful
methods for the cure of diseases. 1 ... If these fore-
fathers of ours could rise from their graves this day they
would be inclined to see in our hospitals, in our railroads,
in the achievements of our physical science, confirmation
of that old superstition of theirs, proofs of the kingdom of
God, realizations of the gifts which Christ received for
men, vaster than any of which they had dreamed. . . .
And they would say sadly to us, ' Sons, you ought to be
so near to God. He seems to have given you so much,
and to have worked among you as He never worked for
any nation under heaven. How is it that you give the
glory to yourselves and not to Him.' . . . For do we give
the glory of our great scientific discoveries to God in any
real, honest, practical sense? . . . True, we keep up
something of the form and tradition of the old talk about
such things ; we join in prayer to God to bless our Great
Exhibition ; but we do not believe we do not believe,
my friends that it was God who taught men to con-
ceive, build, and arrange this great exhibition. And this,
in spite of words which were spoken by one whose office
it was to speak them as the representative of the highest
and most sacred personage in these realms words which
deserve to be written in letters of gold on the high places
1 The sermon was for the Westminster Hospital. (National
Sermons.)
Teetotalism 24 1
of this city, in which he spoke of this exhibition * as an
approach to a more complete fulfilment of the great and
sacred mission which man has to perform in the world/ *
and that ' man's reason being created in the image of God,
he has to discover the laws by which Almighty God gov-
erns this creation ; and by making those laws the standard
of his action, to conquer nature to his use, himself a di-
vine instrument ; ' when he spoke of ' thankfulness to
Almighty God for what He has already given ' as the first
feeling which that Exhibition ought to excite in us ; and
as the second, ' the deep conviction that these blessings
can only be realized in proportion to ' not, as some
would have it, the rivalry of selfish competition, but, ' in
proportion to the help which we are prepared to render
to each other; and, therefore, by peace, love, and ready
assistance, not only between individuals, but between all
nations of the earth.' . . ."
Among the topics discussed in the columns of
the " Christian Socialist " this year was teetotal-
ism ; and Mr. Kingsley wrote a remarkable letter,
which was not inserted, treating the movement on
its ascetic side. While "deeply sympathizing,"
he says, " with the horror of our English drunk-
enness that produced it, and honoring every tee-
totaler, as I honor every man who proves by his
actions that he possesses high principle, and man-
ful self-restraint;" yet he confesses his anxiety
lest Teetotalism should grow into an eleventh
commandment, and become a root of bitterness
and dissociation between men who ought to love,
respect, and work with each other, ending some
fifty years hence, in a great socialist split be-
tween water-drinkers and beer-drinkers, each
1 Speech of H. R. H. The Prince Consort, at the opening of the
Great Exhibition.
242 Charles Kingsley
party despising and reviling the other: and so
encouraging " that subtlest of sins, spiritual pride
and Pharisaism."
"The true remedies against drunkenness," he adds,
" are two. First, to agitate and battle for that about which
the working classes are so culpably and blindly lukewarm,
proper Sanitary Reform, which, by improving the at-
mosphere of their dwellings, will take away the morbid
craving of their stomachs for stimulants, and render tem-
perance easy and pleasant ; and, secondly, the establish-
ment of small associate home-breweries, in which a dozen
workmen's families, for a fixed capital of three or four
pounds, may brew themselves the best of malt-and-hop-
ale at a far lower price (thanks to free trade), than they
can buy the salt and grains of Paradise, and cocculus in-
dicus of the scoundrel publicans, and may free themselves
at once from all that wretched public-house tyranny, and
neglect of their families, to which those who represent
Association as too pure to consort with John Barleycorn,
wish in their tender mercies to deliver them over without
escape."
But while arguing against teetotalisra, and for
the right of the poor man to wholesome beer, he
was for ever urging oh landlords and magistrates
to refuse to grant fresh licenses, above all, to
withhold spirit licenses; and thus to make a stand
against the demoralizing drunkenness which
paralyzes the work of the clergy in town and
country. He saw no hope for the future unless
the number of public houses could be legally
restricted by the area of the parish and the amount
of population, to the lowest possible number. He
urged that these should be placed under the most
vigilant police superintendence; especially in
outlying districts, where they are nests of poach-
Influence of " Yeast " 243
ers and bad characters, and ruinous to the boys
and girls who frequent them, alas! from the
moment they leave school.
Early this year he republished "Yeast," with
the addition of an Epilogue. It was a bold
stroke, but he had counted the cost.
"Whatever obloquy," he said, " it may bring upon me,
I shall think that a light price to pay, if by it I shall have
helped, even in a single case, to tura the hearts of the
parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to
the parents, before the great and terrible day of the Lord
come as come it surely will, if we persist much longer
in substituting denunciation for sympathy, instruction for
education, and Pharisaism for the Good News of the
Kingdom of God."
In the month of May it was reviewed anony-
mously in the " Guardian " by a well-known Ox-
ford graduate, a strong partisan of the Anglican
party, who brought very grave charges against
the book and its writer of "heresy," of " en-
couraging profligacy, of despising doctrines con-
secrated by the faith of ages ... if they tend
to check the wildest speculations of the intellect,
or restrain the most entire indulgence of the
passions," &c. The review was so worded as to
leave a general impression on the reader's mind
that the book inculcated the vilest principles, and
most pernicious doctrines. Mr. Kingsley had
hitherto made it a rule not to answer newspaper
attacks, especially those of the religious press,
but these charges were beyond all precedent, and
he repudiated them indignantly in the following
letter:
244 Charles Kingsley
" SIR, Having lived for several years under the be-
lief that the Editor of the ' Guardian ' was a gentleman
and a Christian, I am bound to take for granted that you
have not yourself read the book called ' Yeast,' which you
have allowed to be reviewed in your columns. This an-
swer, therefore, is addressed, not to you, but to your
reviewer ; and I have a right to expect that you will, as
an act of common fairness, insert it.
" I most thoroughly agree with the reviewer that he has
not misunderstood me; on the contrary, he sees most
clearly the gist of the book, as is proved by his carefully
omitting any mention whatsoever of two questions con-
nected with a character whose existence is passed over in
silence, which form the very pith and moral of the whole
book. I know well enough why he has ignored them ;
because they were the very ones which excited his
wrath. But he 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 there-
fore 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 vou 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 inter-
rogation, occur in a scornful reductio ad absurdum of the
very doctrine which he wantonly imputes to me, an ap-
peal to common sense and logic against and not for the
b'e of the Genevan School. I have a right to use the
word ' wantonly,' for he cannot say that he has misunder-
stood me ; he has refused to allow me that plea, and I
refuse to allow it to him. Indeed, I cannot, for the pas-
Influence of " Yeast " 245
sage is as plain as daylight, no schoolboy could misun-
derstand it ; and every friend to whom I have shown his
version of it has received it with the same laughter and
indignation 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.'
"2. So with the assertion, that the book 'regards the
Catholic doctrine of the Trinity as the same thing with
that of the Vedus Neo-Platonists,' &c. &c. ; or considers
' a certain amount of youthful profligacy as doing no real
and permanent harm to the character perhaps strength-
ening it for a useful and even a religious life ; and that
the existence of the passions is a proof that they are to
be gratified.' Sir, I shall not quote passages in disproof
of these calumnies, for if I did I should have to quote
half the book. I shall simply reply, with Father Valerian,
' Mentiris impudentissime?
" I shall enter into no further defence of the book ; I
have no doubt of there being many errors and defects in
it. I shall be most thankful to have them pointed out,
and to correct them most patiently. But one thing I
may say, to save trouble hereafter, that whosoever hence-
forth, 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 Apos-
tolic Church of England, as embodied in her Liturgy or
Articles, shall have no answer from me but Father
Valerian's Mentiris impudentissime.
11 1 am, Sir, your obedient and faithful servant,
" THE AUTHOR OF ' YEAST.' "
These misrepresentations, absurd as they may
seem now, as to the tendency of his teaching in
"Yeast," and at a later period in "Hypatia,"
assuming as they did a want of moral principle
in himself, and his encouragement of immorality
in others, touched Mr. Kingsley on his tenderest
246 Charles Kingsley
point. But when the first feeling and expression
of righteous indignation was over, he had a won-
derful power of putting his reviewers and their
hard words out of his mind, and going on his way
bearing no malice. " Life is too short and too
full of hard work," he would say, "to give one
time to hate and suspect people." The facts,
however, are recalled here to show those who
know what the results of his work have been, and
the different tone taken since towards him by the
religious press, what sore battles he had at one
time to fight, what bitter insults he had to stand,
while laboring day and night in the cause of purity
and godliness. The "Guardian" replied again,
reiterating its charges; the best answers to which
might be found in the many testimonies he re-
ceived to the moral influence of " Yeast " on those
whose hearts could not be touched by teachers of
a narrower school : and in the fact that more than
one " fast man " came down from London to open
his heart to its author. "To him," (to use his
own words of Mr. Maurice, ) " as to David in the
wilderness, gathered those who were spiritually
discontented, and spiritually in debt; and he was
a captain over them, because, like David, he
talked to them, not of his own genius, or his own
doctrines, but of the Living God, who had helped
their forefathers, and would help them like-
wise. ..."
" I have just finished ' Yeast/ " writes a stranger, " and,
fresh from the book, I cannot resist communicating to
you my heartfelt thanks for it. You will not care about
whether 7 thank you or not ; never mind, I shall relieve
myself by writing. ... I believe you have taken up the
right ground in standing firmly by the spirit of Christi-
Influence of "Yeast " 247
anity, and the divineness of Christ's mission, and showing
the people how they are their best friends and the truest
reformers. I have been as far as most people into the
Kingdom of the Everlasting No, and had nearly, in my
intellectual misery, taken up with blank Atheism ; and
should have done so, had not my heart rebelled against
my head, and flooding in upon me reflections of earlier,
purer, brighter days of Faith, bade me pause. For six
months I have been looking back to Christianity, my
heart impelling me towards it ; my head urging me into
farther cimmerias. I wanted some authoritative word to
confirm my heart, but could not meet with it. I read
orthodox books of argument, of persuasion, of narrative,
but I found they only increased my antagonism to Chris-
tianity. And I was very miserable as I believe all
earnest men must be when they find themselves God-
abandoned in times like these when, picking up your
' Christian Socialist,' I read your ' God justified to the
People,' and felt that here now was a man, not a mere empty
evangelical tub-thumper (as we of the North call Ranters),
but a bond, fide man with a man's intellect, a man of genius,
and a scholar, and yet who did not spit upon his Bible,
or class it with Goethe and Dante, but could have sym-
pathies with all the ferment of the age; be a Radical
Reformer without being a vague denier, a vaguer ' Spirit-
ualist,' or an utter Atheist. If this man, on further
acquaintance, prove what I suspect him to be, here is
the confirmation I desire. Impelled by this, and by the
accounts I gathered of you from Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle,
I devoured ' Yeast ; ' and ' Alton Locke,' I am now in the
middle of; ... and having, day and night, meditated
on what you have to say, I feel that the confirmation I
have got from you is sufficient. But I have another
better confirmation in my own heart. I feel as if I had
emerged from a mephitic cavern into the open day. In
the midst of worldly reverses, I feel a mental serenity I
never before knew ; can see life and my rdle in life, clear
248 Charles Kingsley
and definite for the first time, through all manner of inter-
vening entanglements. I know not by what right I make
you my father confessor, but I feel strangely drawn
towards you, and must send this to thank you and to
bless you for having helped in the light and the leaven to
a sad yeasty spirit hitherto."
A Wesleyan minister thus also gives his
testimony :
" I have read your book ' Yeast : a Problem ; ' and
cannot refrain from thanking you on my own behalf, and
on behalf of the millions of poor, for whom, with a warm
heart, a clear head, and a modest tongue, you have
pleaded. For years I have ardently longed to see the
cause of the needy advocated by one who knew their
real condition, as well as their undoubted rights. And,
for one, I thank you most heartily for your priceless
delineation of a skeptical mmd. fee/ing after the Almighty.
Alas ! there are few, yet, of my fellow working-men who
can follow you through the open door you set before
them, however ready they may be to lose themselves in
the first labyrinth of doubt which presents itself. ... I
hope I shall be able to induce some of my well-meaning,
but injudicious, brethren (I am a Wesleyan Local Preacher)
to look more attentively, and with more humility, at the
wounds they strive to heal. ..."
On the 28th of May, his controversy about
"Yeast" scarcely over, he had to deliver one
of a series of lectures on behalf of the Society
for Promoting Working Men's Associations, on
The Application of Associative Principles and
Methods to Agriculture. He gave it, as he
said, with the greatest diffidence; and its effect
on those who heard it is described by a London
barrister :
Lecture on Agriculture 249
" I was engaged till so late yesterday condensing your
husband's lecture for the t Christian Socialist,' that I was
not able to write to you as I intended. I can only say
that I feel what everybody else feels whom I have spoken
with on the subject, that no other man in England could
have done what he did j I say man emphatically, because
if I were to seek a word to express my opinion of it, I
would say it was the manliest thing I had ever heard.
Such a right bold honest way of turning from side to side,
looking everything straight in the face, and speaking out
all the good and all the ill that could be said of it, in the
plainest way, was surely never seen before ; and certainly
never was audience kept for nearly two hours and a half
so attentive, by the mere weight of the subject, and the
force with which it was wielded. ... I can call the
thing but by one name a triumph."
In the summer he was asked to help in a course
of sermons specially addressed to the working men
who came up to London to see the Great Exhibi-
tion. His subject was The message of the
Church to laboring men.
"Kingsley" (to quote Mr. T. Hughes) "took his
text from Luke iv. verses 18 to 21: 'The Spirit of the
Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me to
preach the gospel to the poor,' &c. What then was that
gospel ? Kingsley starts at once with ' I assert 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
those three great words ; that in as far as he so does, he
is a true priest, doing his Lord's work with his Lord's
blessing on him ; that in as 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
250 Charles Kingsley
ever.' Then he goes on to warn his hearers how there is
always a counterfeit in this world of the noblest message
and teaching. Thus there are two freedoms the false,
where a man is free to do what Ke likes ; the true, where
a man is free to do what he ought. Two equalities the
false, which reduces all intellects and all characters to a
dead level, and gives the same power to the bad as to the
good, to the wise as to the foolish, ending thus in practice
in the grossest inequality; the true, wherein each man
has equal power, to educate and use whatever faculties or
talents God has given him, be they less or more. This
is the divine equality which the church proclaims, and
nothing else proclaims as she does. Two brotherhoods
the false, where a man chooses who shall be his
brothers, and whom he will treat as such ; the true, in
which a man believes that all are his brothers, not by the
will of the flesh, or the will of man, but by the will of
God, whose children they all are alike. The Church has
three special possessions and treasures. The Bible,
which proclaims man's freedom, Baptism his equality, the
Lord's Supper his brotherhood. ..." (Preface to
" Alton Locke.")
The sermon was listened to with profound
attention by a large congregation. But at its
close, just as the preacher was about to give the
blessing, the incumbent rose in the reading-desk
and declared, that while he agreed with much that
had been said, 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, and to a man of Mr. Kingsley's vehe-
ment temperament it required a great effort to
make no reply. He only bowed his head, and
with deepened solemnity gave the blessing, came
down from the pulpit, and passing straight
In a London Church 251
through the crowd that thronged him with out-
stretched hands, and an eager "God bless you,
sir," on their lips, went into the vestry, where
his friends gathered round him to express their
sympathy, and to take possession of the sermon
that it might be printed at once.
He returned to Eversley exhausted and de-
pressed, and in the meantime the storm burst.
A leading morning paper began the attack, with
an article, full of inaccuracies, which made the
intended impression on those who were already
strongly prejudiced against the "Apostle of
Socialism." This was followed by a letter from
Bishop Blomfield, who, hearing of the disturb-
ance, wrote to Mr. Kingsley to express his dis-
pleasure, and to forbid him to preach in London.
Mr. Kingsley in answer most respectfully re-
quested the Bishop to suspend his judgment till
he had read the sermon. Meanwhile letters of
sympathy poured in from all quarters, from a few
of the clergy, from many of the laity, and from
numbers of working men. There was a meeting
of working men on Kennington Common, who
sent him an expression of their warm allegiance
and sympathy. A proposal was also made before
the Bishop's prohibition was withdrawn, to induce
Mr. Kingsley to start a free church independent
of episcopal rule, with the promise of a huge
following. It is needless to say he did not enter-
tain this proposal for a moment. Before the meet-
ing on Kennington Common, the secretary of the
John Street Lecture Hall, where the audience
was mostly composed of Chartists, free-thinkers,
and followers of Strauss, some of whom had heard
his sermon, wrote to offer Mr. Kingsley and his
252 Charles Kingsley
friends the use of their hall, which he declined
thus:
June 26, 1851. "I have conferred with my friends
on their willingness to give lectures in John Street, and
find it to be their unanimous opinion, that to do so,
would be interpreted by the public into an approval, more
or less, of other doctrines which are taught there, from
which I, of all men in England, differ most strongly, and
from which I hold myself bound most strongly to protest.
As a churchman, such a suspicion would be intolerable to
me, as it would be gratuitously incurred. Those who
wish to know my opinions will have plenty of opportuni-
ties elsewhere ; and I must therefore, in common with my
friends, distinctly, but most courteously, decline your
kind offer of the John Street lecture rooms."
In the meantime the sermon was printed and a
copy sent to the Bishop, who wrote at once to
ask Mr. Kingsley to come up and see him; and
after receiving him kindly, gave him full permis-
sion to preach in his diocese again.
He was now so much worn with the work and
the controversies of the last eight months, that
his parents, seeing the importance of his having
thorough change, persuaded him to leave his
parish in the care of a curate and go abroad with
them. It was the first time he had crossed the
water, and he enjoyed it, as thoroughly as he
could enjoy anything which took him from his
home. But even in new scenes his fiery spirit
could not rest ; and the cause of the church and
the people pressed heavily on him.
TO HIS WIFE
EMS: August i, 1851. "Actually at Ems at last
As for what I have seen and felt I cannot tell you. My
Visit to Germany 253
comfort is that you have seen it already, though, alas !
you have not seen that glass by Kaulbach at Coin, which
is most magnificent. Grand pictures in painted glass,
with far distances, which let the eye out of the building,
instead of confining and crushing it inwards, as painted
glass generally does. I cried like a child, at the head of
the Virgin in that great triptych of Koloffs, the Adora-
tion ; that head is the most wonderful female head I ever
saw yet from the hand of man. Then I had my first
sight of the Rhine and vineyards such a strange new
feeling and the Drachenfels, which is fine ; but I was
not overpowered as I was by Rolandseck and Nonnen-
werth, and that story ; it seemed quite awful to find one-
self in presence of it. Ehrenbreitstein disappointed me.
. . . But it is all beautiful beautiful. That vast rush-
ing silent river, those yellow vine slopes, and azure hills
behind, with the thunder clouds lowering over their heads
beautiful ; and the air ! I have felt new nerves, as
well as new eyes, ever since Cologne; the wonderful
freshness and transparency of the coloring, and the
bracing balminess of the atmosphere, make me under-
stand now at once why people prefer this to England ;
there is no denying it It is a more charming country,
and that is the best of reasons one has for thanking God
that one has not the means of escaping to it from work.
. . . How strange that my favorite Psalm about ' the hills
of the robbers' should have come the very day I went up
the Rhine. . . . The other day we walked over the hills and
caught unspeakable butterflies, and found conceive my
delight some twenty-five species of plants, new to me !
I cannot tell you the enjoyment of it. The scenery is cer-
tainly most lovely in every direction ; and it is so delight-
ful to think that you know it all ! That thought recurs to
me continually. Tell the darling children that I will
bring them each home something pretty, and that the
woods are full of great orange slugs, and great green
lizards, and great long snakes which bite nobody, and
254 Charles Kingsley
that I will bring them home some red and blue locusts
out of the vineyards. . . . Another dear letter, and with
such good news too ! (about the Needlewoman's and
other associations). I am so lifted up, and thankful for
it ! I am sure the cause is spreading ; and as the Psalms
for this morning say Those who fear God will be
turned to us ; let the proud lie as they will. . . .
" I have worlds to tell you. I have been to Bingen.
We walked down the right bank to St. Goar, and back
again. ... I scrambled up the face of the Lurlei to the
Nymph's own seat, and picked you a little bouquet. . . .
You told me I should be disappointed. It is past all
telling beautiful wonderful. Three things above all
Oberwesel the Sonneck Schloss, worth (as a beau
ideal of the robber's nest) all the other castles put to-
gether and the opening out of the Rhine at Bingen
into infinite unknown distances, and calm, and glory, and
wealth. I never shall, or hope I never shall, forget that
one thing as long as I live. As for new plants, I should
think I passed fifty new species in that one day. Keep-
ing them was no good, so I just picked specimens,
and looked at them till I knew them thoroughly, and
went on regretful. On Monday we start for the Eifel.
I have been writing a good deal of poetry; you shall
have it all when I get home ; and that getting home is
really too delicious to think of. Tell the dear children I
am getting lots of stories for them. The Eifel tramp will
set me up, with God's blessing, utterly. . . .
"... I take a knapsack and plaid, a change of gar-
ments, paper to write to you twice a week, my pipe,
fishing-tackle, German Testament, word-book, note-book,
and map of the Eifel. And so we start, and in a fort-
night appear at Bonn, with beards, I suppose, as shaving
is out of the question. I get better and better, and have
written lots more poetry. Here is a sonnet for you :
" The Baby sings not at its mother's breast."
Visit to Germany 255
The other poems which he sent home to his
wife were: "The Ugly Princess;" "Oh thou
hadst been a wife for Shakespeare's self ; " "Ask
if I love thee? oh, smiles cannot tell;" "The
world goes up and the world goes down;" and
"The Eagle."
MENDERSCHEID : August 7. "I write from the love-
liest place you can imagine, only how we got here I
know not ; having lost our way between some ' feld ' or
other to here. We found ourselves about 8 p. M. last
night at the top of a cliff 500 feet high, with a roaring
river at the bottom, and no path. So down the cliff-face
we had to come in the dark, or sleep in the forest to be
eaten by wild boars and wolves, of which latter, one was
seen on our route yesterday 'as high as the table.'
And down we came, knapsacks, fishing-rods, and all;
which process must not be repeated often if we intend to
revisit our native shores. I have seen such wonders I
don't know where to begin. Craters filled sometimes
with ghastly blue lakes, with shores of volcanic dust, and
sometimes, quaintly enough, by rye-fields and reapers.
The roads are mended with lava ; the whole country the
strangest jumble, alternations of Cambridgeshire ugliness
(only lifted up 1200 feet high) with all the beauties of
Devonshire. The bed of the Issbach, from the baths of
Bertrich, up which we came yesterday, was the most
ravishingly beautiful glen scenery I ever saw ; such rocks
such baths such mountains covered with huge
timber not mere scrub, like the Rhine forests. Such
strips of lawn here and there between the stream and the
wood. All this, of course, you get on a grander scale on
the Moselle, which was perfectly exquisite ; yet there is a
monotony in its luscious richness and softness, and I was
right glad to find myself on my legs at Alf. Weather
glorious. I have just had my first sight of the basalt
opposite the Kurhaus of all Kurhauses so lovely, one
256 Charles Kingsley
longs to kiss it. At two or three points one felt only
inclined to worship. Bertrich is just as beautiful as every-
thing else, too. Tell Rose I have got her some volcano-
dust from the crater of the Pulver-Maar. To-day we go
to a great Maar with cones of slag round it, and then a-
fishing for trout. I am exceedingly well and strong,
though we did dine yesterday off raw ham, and hock at
gd. a bottle. My knapsack and plaid weigh about two
stone, which is very heavy, but I go well enough under
it, having got a pair of elastic cross-straps, which divide
the weight over the breast -bone. . . ."
GEROLSTEIN: August to. "The most wonderful
place I ever was in in my life, and during the last three
days I have been stunned with wonders. Mountains
fallen in, and making great lakes in the midst of corn-
land; hills blown up with the wildest perpendicular
crags, and roasted into dust; craters with the lips so
perfect that the fire might have been blazing in them
twelve months ago ; heaps of slag and cinder 2,500 feet
above the sea, on which nothing will grow, so burnt are
they ; lava streams pouring down into the valley, meet-
ing with brooks, drying them up, and in the fight foaming
up into cliffs, and hurling huge masses of trachyte far
into the dells ; mysterious mineral springs boiling up,
full of carbonic acid, by the roadside all, as Beatrice
says, 'wonderful, wonderful, and yet again wonderful,
past all whooping ! ' When I shall get to Treves and
your letter I know not, for there is so much to see here
that I cannot tell when we move ; and the living is ridic-
ulously cheap, about zs. 6d. or 3*. a day for one person,
and we could not spend more if we would, for there is
nothing to spend on. This is the most memorable thing
I have ever seen, and when one adds, too, all the flowers,
and the castles, and the vales why, it will take me
three months to tell you all. Kiss my darlings, and tell
Rose I have got for her all sorts of curious lava-stones
from the volcanoes, and shall carry them 200 miles on
Visit to Germany 257
my back before she gets them. What fun we shall have
arranging and classifying them when I get home. God
be thanked that I ever came here to see so much."
BIRREBORN : August 13. "I write to you out of the
quaintest place, with a mineral spring which kills dogs
and birds, and a landlady who talks good French and
bad German, and a husband who is a dirty pothouse-
keeper, with a casting net over his arm ; and yet, speak-
ing of Kaulbach's stained glass at Cologne, gives it as
his opinion (in these very words), that 'they say that
Art (die Kunst) is decayed, but my opinion is, that it
widens and deepens every day.'( ! ! !) Really this Ger-
many is a wonderful country though its population are
not members of the Church of England and as noble,
simple, shrewd, kindly hearts in it, as man would wish to
see. I cannot tell you what moral good this whole
journey has done me. I am learning hourly so much,
that I do not know how much I have learnt. Exceed-
ingly well and strong; as lean as a lath, as any one
would be who carried two stone of baggage, daily in-
creasing in weight from the minerals and fossils I find,
on his back through broiling suns. We are both worse
than the 'hollow, pampered jades of Asia, that cannot
go but thirty miles a day,' for with our knapsacks we can
only make fifteen, and then a sight-seeing walk in the
evening. Yesterday we had indeed a day. We walked
from Hillesheim past the Dreiser Weiher a mountain
fallen into a crater, as is their habit here and on the
back among the volcanic dust-mountains we found such
minerals olivine, augite, and glassy feldspar. One could
have filled a cart as it was I could only fill a pair of
socks. Then we went from Daun up to the Schalcken
Maaren. Three crater lakes in one mountain, which,
being past all words beautiful and wonderful and awful, I
will say no more. Every night I dream of you and the
children, and everywhere I go I pick you flowers fur
denkmaler."
Vol. 112
258 Charles Kingsley
TREVES : August 17. " Here we are at Treves, hav-
ing been brought there under arrest, with a gensdarme
from the Mayor of Bittsburg, and liberated next morning
with much laughter and many curses from the police here.
However, we had the pleasure of spending a night in
prison, among fleas and felons, on the bare floor. It
appears the barbarians took our fishing-rods for 'todt-
instrumenten ' deadly weapons and our wide-awakes
for Italian hats, and got into their addle pates that we
were emissaries of Mazzini and Co. distributing political
tracts, for not a word of politics had we talked. Luckily
the police-inspector here was a gentleman, and his wife
and daughter ladies, and they did all they dare for us,
and so about ten next morning we were set free with
many apologies, and the gensdarme (who, after all, poor
fellow, was very civil) sent back to Bittsburg with a repri-
mand. We are the lions of Treves at present, for the
affair has made a considerable fuss. We leave this to-
morrow after having seen all the wonders and what
wonders there are to see ! I need not tell you all I have
felt here and at Fleissem. But at first the feeling that
one is standing over the skeleton of the giant iniquity
Old Rome is overpowering. And as I stood last night
in that amphitheatre, amid the wild beasts' dens, and
thought of the Christian martyrdoms and the Frank
prisoners, and all the hellish scenes of agony and cruelty
that place had witnessed, I seemed to hear the very voice
of the Archangel whom St. John heard in Patmos, crying,
' Babylon the Great is fallen ; ' no more like the sound
of a trumpet, but only in the still whisper of the night
breeze, and through the sleeping vineyards, and the great
still smile of God out of the broad blue heaven. Ah !
and you were not there to feel it with me! I am so
longing to be home ! . . . "
Before going abroad, he had parted with the
beloved pupil who was dear to him and his wife
as a son. Mr. John Martineau's graphic words
From John Martineau 259
and tender recollections give a true picture of
the home life at Eversley.
"I first knew him in January, 1850. I entered his
house as his pupil, and was for nearly a year and a half
his constant companion. He was then in his thirty-first
year, in the fulness of his strength ; I a raw receptive
school-boy of fifteen ; so that his mind and character left
their impression upon mine as a seal does upon wax.
He was then, above all things and before all things else,
a parish clergyman. His parish work was not indeed so
laborious and absorbing as it had been six years before,
when he was first made Rector. The efforts of these
six years had told, the seed was bearing fruit, and Evers-
ley would never again be as it had been. He had now a
curate to help him, and give him the leisure which he
needed for writing. Still, even so, with a large and strag-
gling though not very populous parish, with his share of
three services on Sunday and cottage lectures on two
week-day evenings in winter, there was much for him to
do, throwing himself into it, as he did, with all his inten-
sity and keen sense of responsibility. These were the
days when farm-laborers in Hampshire got from eight
to ten shillings a week, and bread was dear, or had not
long ceased to be so. The cholera of 1849 nac ^ J ust
swept through the country, and though it had not reached
Eversley, a severe kind of low fever had, and there had
been a season of much illness and many deaths, during
which he had, by his constant, anxious, tender care of
the sick poor, won their confidence more than ever
before. The poor will not go to the relieving officer if
they can get their needs supplied elsewhere ; and the
Eversley poor used to go for relief, and something more
than relief, to the Rectory. There were few mornings, at
that time, that did not bring some one in distress, some
feeble woman, or ailing child, or a summons to a sick-
bed. Up to that time he had allowed no man or woman
260 Charles Kingsley
in his parish to become an inmate of the work-house
through infirmity or old age, except in a few cases where
want had been the direct consequence of indolence or
crime. At times, too, other poor besides those of his
parish, might be seen at his door. Gypsies were attracted
to him from all the country round. He married and christ-
ened many of them, to whom such rites were things almost
unknown. I cannot give any description of his daily life,
his parish work, which will not sound commonplace. . . .
But there never was a man with whom life was less monot-
onous, with whom it was more full to overflowing, of vari-
ety, and freshness. Nothing could be so exquisitely
delightful as a walk with him about his parish. Earth,
air, and water, as well as farm-house and cottage, seemed
full of his familiar friends. By day and by night, in fair
weather and in storm, grateful for heat and cold, rain and
sunshine, light and soothing darkness, he drank in nature.
It seemed as if no bird, or beast, or insect, scarcely a
drifting cloud in the sky, passed by him unnoticed, un-
welcomed. He caught and noted every breath, every
sound, every sign. With every person he met he instinc-
tively struck some point of contact, found something to
appreciate often, it might be, some information to ask
for which left the other cheered, self-respecting, raised
for the moment above himself; and whatever the passing
word might be, it was given to high or low, gentle or
simple, with an appropriateness, a force, and a genial
courtesy, in the case of all women a deferential courtesy,
which threw its spell over all alike, a spell which few
could resist.
"So many-sided was he that he seemed to unite in
himself more types and varieties of mind and character,
types differing as widely as the poet from the man of
science, or the mystic from the soldier ; to be filled with
more thoughts, hopes, fears, interests, aspirations, tempta-
tions than could co-exist in any one man, all subdued or
clenched into union and harmony by the force of one
From John Martineau 261
iron will, which had learnt to rule after many a fierce and
bitter struggle. His senses were acute to an almost
painful degree. The sight of suffering, the foul scent of
a sick-room well used as he was to both would
haunt him for hours. For with all his man's strength
there was a deep vein of woman in him, a nervous sensi-
tiveness, an intensity of sympathy, which made him suffer
when others suffered ; a tender, delicate, soothing touch,
which gave him power to understand and reach the
heart ; to call out, sometimes almost at first sight (what
he of all men least sought), the inmost confidences of
men and women alike in all classes of life. And he had
sympathy with all moods from deepest grief to lightest
humor for no man had a keener, quicker perception
of the humorous side of anything a love and ready
word of praise for whatever was good or beautiful, from the
greatest to the least, from the heroism of the martyr to the
shape of a good horse, or the folds of a graceful dress.
And this wide-reaching, hearty appreciation made a word
of praise from him sweeter, to those who knew him well,
than volumes of commendation from all the world besides.
" His every thought and word was penetrated with the
belief, the full assurance, that the world the world of
the soldier or the sportsman, as well as the world of the
student or the theologian was God's world, and that
everything which He had made was good. * Humani
nihil a me alienum puto,' he said, taught by his wide
human sympathies, and encouraged by his faith in the
Incarnation. And so he rejected, as Pharisaic and
unchristian, most of what is generally implied in the use
of such words as ' carnal,' ' unconverted/ * worldly,' and
thereby embraced in his sympathy, and won to faith and
hope, many a struggling soul, many a bruised reed, whom
the narrow and exclusive ignorance of schools and
religionists had rejected.
" No human being but was sure of a patient, interested
hearer in him. I have seen him seat himself, hatless,
262 Charles Kingsley
beside a tramp on the grass outside his gate in his eager-
ness to catch exactly what he had to say, searching him,
as they sate, in his keen kindly way with question and
look. With as great a horror of pauperism and alms-
giving as any professed political economist, it was in
practice very hard to him to refuse anyone. The sight
of unmistakable misery, however caused, covered, to him,
the multitude of sins. I recollect his passing backwards
and forwards again and again the strong impulsive will
for once irresolute between the breakfast-room and a
miserable crying woman outside, and I cannot forget,
though twenty-five years have passed since, the unutter-
able look of pain and disgust with which, when he had
decided to refuse the request, he said, ' Look there ! '
as he pointed to his own well-furnished table. Nothing
roused him to anger so much as cant. Once a scoun-
drel, on being refused, and thinking that at a parsonage and
with a parson it would be a successful trick, fell on his
knees on the door-step, turned up the whites of his eyes
and began the disgusting counterfeit of a prayer. In an
instant the man found himself, to his astonishment, seized
by collar and wrist, and being swiftly thrust towards the
gate, with a firm grip and a shake that deprived him of
all inclination to resist, or, till he found himself safe
outside it, even to remonstrate. He had at that time
great physical strength and activity, and an impetuous,
restless, nervous energy, which I have never seen equalled.
All his strength, physical, mental, and moral, seemed to
find expression in his keen gray eyes, which gazed with
the look of an eagle, from under massive brows, divided
from each other by two deep perpendicular furrows
at that time, together with the two equally deep lines
from nostril to mouth, very marked features in his face.
One day, in a neighbor's yard, a large savage dog flew
out at him, straining at its chain. He walked up to it,
scolding it and by mere force of eye, voice, and gesture,
drove it into its kennel, close to which he stopped, keep-
From John Martineau 263
ing his eye on the cowed animal, as it growled and
moved uneasily from side to side. He had done the
same thing often before, and even pulled an infuriated
dog out of its kennel by its chain, after having driven
it in.
" By boyish habits and tastes a keen sportsman, the
only sport he ever enjoyed at this time was an occasional
day's trout or pike fishing, or throwing a fly for an hour
or two during his afternoon's walk over the little stream
that bounded his parish. Hunting he had none. And
in later years, when he did hunt occasionally, it was
generally a matter of two or three hours, on an old horse,
taken as a relaxation in the midst of work, not, as with
most other men, as a day's work in itself. Fond as he
was of horses, he never in his life had one worth fifty
pounds, so little self-indulgent was he.
"Though exercising intense self-control, he was very
restless and excitable. Constant movement was a relief
and almost a necessity to him. His study opened by a
door of its own upon the garden, and most of his sermons
and books were thought out and composed as he paced
up and down there, at all hours and in all weathers, his
hands behind his back, generally smoking a long clay
pipe ; for tobacco had, as he found by experience
having once tried a year's total abstinence from it
an especially soothing beneficial effect upon him. He
ate hurriedly, and it was an effort to him to sit still
through a meal. His coat frequently had a white line
across the back, made by his habit of leaning against the
whitened chimney-piece of the dining-room during break-
fast and dinner.
" Of society he had then very little, and it was rarely
and unwillingly that he passed an evening away from
home. He did not seek it, and it had not yet begun to
seek him. Indeed, at no time was general society a
congenial element to him ; and those who knew him only
thus, did not know him at his best. A few intimate
264 Charles Kingsley
friends, and now and then a stranger, seeking his advice
on some matter, would come for a night or a Sunday.
Amongst the former, and honored above all, was Mr.
Maurice. One of his visits happened at a time when we
had been startled by a burglary and murder at a parsonage
a few miles off, and had armejd ourselves and barricaded
the rambling old Rectory in case of an attack. In the
middle of the night an attempt was made to force open
the back door, which roused us all, and we rushed down-
stairs with pistols, guns, and blunderbuss, to expel the
thieves, who, however, had taken alarm and made off.
Mr. Maurice, the only unarmed and the coolest man
amongst us, was quietly going out alone, in the pitch
darkness, into the garden in pursuit of them, when Mr.
Kingsley fortunately came upon him and stopped him ;
and the two passed the rest of the night together talking
over the study fire till morning came.
" Many a one has cause to remember that Study, its
lattice window (in later years altered to a bay), its great
heavy door, studded with large projecting nails, opening
upon the garden ; its brick floor covered with matting ;
its shelves of heavy old folios, with a fishing-rod, or land-
ing-net, or insect-net leaning against them : on the table,
books, writing-materials, sermons, manuscript, proofs, let-
ters, reels, feathers, fishing-flies, clay-pipes, tobacco. On
the mat, perhaps the brown eyes set in thick yellow
hair, and gently-agitated tail, asking indulgence for the
intrusion a long-bodied, short-legged Dandie Dinmont
Scotch terrier, wisest, handsomest, most faithful, most
memorable of its race. When the rest of the household
went to bed, he would ask his guest in, ostensibly to
smoke. The swing-door would be flung open and slam
heavily after him, as it always did, for he would never
stop to catch and close it. And then in the quiet of
night, when no fresh face could come, no interruption
occur to distract him, he would give himself wholly to his
guest, taking up whatever topic the latter might suggest,
From John Martineau 265
whatever question he might ask, and pouring out from
the full stores of his knowledge, his quick, intuitive saga-
city, his ready sympathy. Then it was, far more than in
the excitement and distraction of many voices and many
faces, that he was himself, that the true man appeared ;
and it was at times such as these that he came to be
known and trusted and loved, as few men ever have
been, as no man has been whom I ever knew.
" He had to a wonderful degree the power of abstrac-
tion and concentration, which enabled him to arrange
and elaborate a whole sermon, or a chapter of a book,
while walking, riding, or even fly-fishing, without making
a note, so as to be able on his return to write or dictate
it in clear, terse language as fast as pen could move. He
would read a book and grasp its essential part thoroughly
in a time so short that it seemed impossible that his eyes
could have traversed its pages. Compared with other
men who have written or thought much, he worked for
few hours in the day, and without much system or regu-
larity ; but his application was so intense that the strain
upon his vital powers was very great. Nor when he
ceased could his brain rest. Except during sleep, and
even that was characteristic, so profound was it, repose
seemed impossible to him for body or mind. So that he
seemed to live three days, as it were, while other men
were living one, and already foresaw that there would be
for him no great length of years.
" Connected with this rapid living was a certain impa-
tience of trifles, an inaccuracy about details, a haste in
drawing conclusions, a forgetfulness of times and seasons,
and of words lightly spoken or written, and withal an
impulsive and almost reckless generosity, and fear of
giving pain, which sometimes placed him at an unfair
disadvantage, and put him formally in the wrong when
substantially he was in the right. It led him, too, to take
too hastily a favorable estimate of almost every one with
whom he came personally into contact, so that he was
266 Charles Kingsley
liable to suffer from misplaced confidence : while in the
petty matters of daily life it made him a bad guardian of
his own interests, and but for the wise and tender assist-
ance that was ever at his side would almost have over-
whelmed him with anxieties.
"In the pulpit, and even at his week-day cottage-
lectures, where, from the population of his parish being
so scattered, he had sometimes scarcely a dozen hearers,
he was at that time eloquent beyond any man I ever
heard. For he had the two essential constituents of
eloquence, a strong man's intensity and clearness of con-
viction, and a command of words, not easy or rapid, but
sure and unhesitating, an unfailing instinct for the one
word, the most concrete and pictorial, the strongest and
the simplest, which expressed his thought exactly. Many
have since then become familiar with his preaching, many
more with his published sermons, but few comparatively
can know what it was to hear him, Sunday after Sunday,
in his own church and among his own people, not preach
only, but read, or rather pray, the prayers of the Church-
service. So completely was he in harmony with these
prayers, so fully did they satisfy him, that with all his
exuberance of thought and imagination, it seemed as if
for him there was nothing to be asked for beyond what
they asked for. So that in his cottage-lectures, as in his
own household worship, where he was absolutely free to
use any words he chose, I scarcely ever heard him use a
word of prayer other than the words of the Prayer-book.
"In conversation he had a painful hesitation in his
speech, but in preaching, and in speaking with a set
purpose, he was wholly free from it. He used to say
that he could speak for God but not for himself, and
took the trial and to his keenly sensitive nature it was
no small one patiently and even thankfully, as having
by God's mercy saved him from many a temptation to
mere brilliancy and self-seeking. The successful effort
to overcome this difficulty increased instead of diminish-
From John Martineau 267
ing the impressiveness of his voice, for to it was partly
due the strange, rich, high-pitched, musical monotone in
which he prayed and preached, the echo of which, as it
filled his church, or came borne on the air through the
open window of a sick room, seems to travel over the
long past years and kindle his words afresh, as I read
them in the cold, dead page.
" And as it was an unspeakable blessing to Eversley to
have him for its Rector, so also it was an inestimable
benefit to him to have had so early in life a definite work
to do which gave to his generous, sympathetic impulses
abundant objects and responsibilities and a clear purpose
and direction. Conscious, too, as he could not but be,
of great powers, and impatient of dictation or control, the
repose and isolation of a country parish afforded him the
best and healthiest opportunities of development, and full
liberty of thought and speech, with sufficient leisure for
reading and study.
" Great as was his love of natural science, in so many
of its branches, his genius was essentially that of a poet.
Often a time of trouble and sadness and there was in
him a strong undercurrent of sadness at all times,
would result in the birth of a lyrical poem or song, on a
subject wholly unconnected with that which occupied
him, the production of which gave him evident relief, as
though in some mysterious way his mind was thereby
disburdened and set free for the reception of new
thoughts and impressions. In June, 1851, he preached
a powerful sermon to working men in a London church,
which was denounced by the incumbent. It was a pain-
ful scene, which narrowly escaped ending in a riot, and
he felt keenly not the insult to himself but the dis-
credit and scandal to the Church, the estrangement that
it would be likely to increase between the clergy and the
working men. He came home the day after, wearied
and worn out, obliged to stop to rest and refresh him-
self at a house in his parish during his afternoon's walk.
268 Charles Kingsley
That same evening he brought in a song that he had
written, the ' Three Fishers,' as though it were the out-
come of it all; and then he seemed able to put the mat-
ter aside, and the current' of his daily life flowed as
before. Not that he at this time or indeed at any
time wrote much verse. Considering that what the
world needed was not verse, however good, so much as
sound knowledge, sound reasoning, sound faith, and
above all, as the fruit and evidence of the last, sound
morality, he did not give free rein to his poetical faculty,
but sought to make it his servant, not his master, to use
it to illuminate and fix the eyes of men on the truths of
science, of social relationship, of theology, of morality.
The letters which he received in countless numbers, often
from utter strangers who knew nothing of him but from
his books, seeking counsel on the most delicate and
important matters of life, testify how great a gift it was,
how truly and tellingly it was used. In reading all his
writings, on whatever subject, it must not be forgotten
that he was a poet, that he could not help thinking,
feeling, and writing as a poet. Patience, industry he
had, even logical and inductive power of a certain in-
tuitive, intermittent kind, not sustained, indeed, or always
reliable, for his was not a logical mind, and surface incon-
sistencies ore not hard to find in his writings ; but as a
poet, even if he saw all sides, he could not express them
all at once. The very keenness of his sympathy, the
intensity with which he realized all that was passing
around him, made it impossible for him to maintain the
calm unruffled judgment of men of a less fiery tempera-
ment, or to abstract and devote himself to the pursuit of
any one branch of study without being constantly dis-
tracted from it, and urged in some new direction by the
joys and sorrows of the surging world around, to seek if
by any means he might find a medicine to heal its sick-
ness. Hence it may, perhaps, be that another genera-
tion will not fully realize the wide-spread influence, the
From John Martineau 269
great power, he exercised through his writings. For, in
a sense, it may be said that, as to some of them, not
their least merit is that in part they will not live, except
as the seed lives in the corn which grows, or water in the
plant which it has revived. For their power often lay
mainly in the direction of their aim at the special need of
the hour, the memory of which has passed, or will pass,
away. As his ' Master,' as he affectionately and humbly
called Mr. Maurice, was a theologian, and, in its original
sense, a ' Prophet,' so Mr. Kingsley, as Priest and Poet,
gloried in interpreting, expanding, applying him. 'I
think this will explain a good deal of Maurice,' was the
single remark I heard him make when he had completed
Yeast/
"In later years, as his experience widened, his judg-
ment ripened, his conclusions were more calmly formed.
But his genius was essentially of a kind that comes to
maturity early, when the imagination is still vivid, the
pulses of life beat fastest, and the sympathies and affec-
tions are most passionately intense. . . . With the great
outside world, with the world of politicians and the press,
and still more with the religious world, so called, as rep-
resented by the religious newspapers, he was in those
years at open war. Popular as he afterwards became, it
is difficult now to realize how great was the suspicion,
how bitter the attacks, especially from the religious news-
papers, which his books and sermons drew down upon
him. Not that he in general cared much for praise or
blame from the newspaper press, so venal and unprin-
cipled did he not without reason consider most of
it, Whig, Tory, Radical, and religious. At that time he
did not take in any daily paper.
" It was then about two years after the events of 1848,
and for him the one all-important and absorbing ques-
tion of politics was the condition, physical and mental,
of the working classes and the poor in town and country.
On that question he considered that all the leading
270 Charles Kingsley
parties of the legislature had alike shown themselves in-
different and incapable. This conviction, and a deep
sympathy with the suffering poor, had made him a
Radical. Nay, on at least one occasion, he publicly and
deliberately declared himself a Chartist a name which
then meant a great deal and for a clergyman to do
this was an act the boldness of which it is difficult to
appreciate now. . . .
" Looking back upon his daily life and conversation
at that time, I believe he was democratic in his opinions
rather than in his instincts, more by force of conviction
than by natural inclination. A doctrinaire, or a lover of
change for the sake of change, he never was ; and when
he advocated democratic measures, it was more as a
means to an end than because he altogether liked the
means. From the pulpit, and with his pen, he claimed
brotherhood with all men. No man in his daily inter-
course respected with more scrupulous courtesy the
rights, the dignity of the humblest. But he instinctively
disliked a * beggar on horseback.' Noblesse oblige, the
true principle of feudalism, is a precept which shines out
conspicuously in all his books, in all his teaching, at this
period of his life as at all others.
" In later years his convictions became more in accord
with this natural tendency of his mind, and he gradually
modified or abandoned his democratic opinions, thereby,
of course, drawing down upon himself the reproach of
inconsistency from those who considered that he had
deserted them. To me, looking back at what he was
when he wrote ' Yeast,' and ' Alton Locke/ the change
seems rather the natural development of his mind and
character under more or less altered circumstances, partly
because he saw the world about him really improving,
partly because by experience he found society and other
existing institutions more full of healthy life, more avail-
able as instruments of good, more willing to be taught,
than he had formerly thought. But, at that time, in his
From John Martineau 271
books and pamphlets, and often in his daily familiar
speech, he was pouring out the whole force of his eager,
passionate heart, in wrath and indignation, against star-
vation wages, stifling workshops, reeking alleys, careless
landlords, roofless and crowded cottages, hard and cant-
ing religion. His 'Poacher's Widow' is a piercing,
heart-rending cry to heaven for vengeance against the
oppressor. 'There is a righteous God,' is its burthen,
' and such things cannot, and shall not, remain to deface
the world which He has made. Laws, constitutions,
churches, are none of His if they tolerate such ; they are
accursed, and they must perish destroy what they
may in their fall. Nay, they will perish in their own
corruption.'
" One day, as he was reading with me, something led
him to tell me of the Bristol Riots of 1832. He was in
that year a schoolboy of thirteen, at Bristol, and had
slipped away, fascinated by the tumult and the horror,
into the midst of it He described rapidly pacing up
and down the room, and, with glowing, saddened face, as
though the sight were still before his eyes the brave,
patient soldiers sitting hour after hour motionless on their
horses, the blood streaming from wounds on their heads
and faces, waiting for the order which the miserable,
terrified mayor had not courage to give j the savage,
brutal, hideous mob of inhuman wretches plundering,
destroying, burning; casks of spirits broken open and
set flowing in the streets, the wretched creatures drinking
it on their knees from the gutter, till the flame from a
burning house caught the stream, ran down it with a hor-
rible rushing sound, and, hi one dreadful moment, the
prostrate drunkards had become a row of blackened
corpses. Lastly, he spoke of the shamelessness and the
impunity of the guilty ; the persecution and the suicide
of the innocent. ' That sight,' he said, suddenly turning
to me, ' made me a Radical.' ' Whose fault is it,' I ven-
tured to ask, 'that such things can be?' 'Mine,' he
272 Charles Kingsley
said, ' and yours.' I understood partly then, I have
understood better since, what his Radicalism was.
" From his home life I scarcely dare, even for a mo-
ment, try to lift the veil. I will only say that having had
the priceless blessing of admission to it, the daily sight of
him in the closest of his home relations has left me a
deeper debt of gratitude, and more precious memories,
created higher hopes and a higher ideal, than all other
manifestations combined of his character and intellect.
To his marriage so he never shrunk from affirming in
deep and humble thankfulness he owed the whole
tenor of his life, all that he had worth living for. It was
true. And his every word and look, and gesture of
chivalrous devotion for more than thirty years, seemed
to show that the sense of boundless gratitude had become
part of his nature, was never out of the undercurrent of
his thoughts. Little thinking that he was to be taken
first, and with the prospect of a long agony of loneliness
imminent from hour to hour, the last flash of genius from
his breaking heart was to gather into three simple, preg-
nant words, as a last offering to her, the whole story of
his life, of the Faith he preached and lived in, of his
marriage, blessed, and yet to be blessed. He was spared
that agony. Over his grave first are written his words :
1 Amavimus, amamus, amabimus? " l
1 We have loved we love we shall love.
CHAPTER X
1852
AGED 33
CORRESPONDENCE STRIKE IN THE IRON TRADE LETTERS
ON POLITICAL PARTIES, ON PRAYER, ON METAPHYSICAL
QUESTIONS PARSON LOT'S LAST WORDS LETTERS TO
MR. LUDLOW HEXAMETERS POETRY FREDERIKA
BREMER SUNDAY AMUSEMENTS To A JEW.
" I do not like to decline bearing my share of the odium, think-
ing that what many men call ' caution ' in such matters, is too
often merely a selfish fear of getting oneself into trouble or ill-
will. I am quite sure that I would never gratuitously court
odium or controversy, but I must beware also of too much dread-
ing it ; and the love of ease ... is likely to be a more growing
temptation than the love of notoriety or the pleasure of
argument."
DR. ARNOLD.
THE short holiday of the past year had so far
invigorated him that he worked without a
curate for a time. The literar; work was ham-
pered by the heavy correspondence, principally
with strangers, who lUtle knew what labor each
letter cost him, but to whom he said: "Never
apologize for writing. This is my business, and
I learn from the many such letters I have, far more
than I teach. I consider myself indebted most
deeply to any man who will honestly tell me the
workings of his own mind. How can a physician
learn pathology without studying cases ? " One
very valuable series of letters to the son of a
274 Charles Kingsley
clergyman, a young man of atheistical opinions,
who died a professed Christian, was by the wish
of their owner destroyed at his death, as referring
to a phase in his life which it would be painful to
his family to recall. Extracts will be made from
another series, to Thomas Cooper the Chartist,
which spread over this and several years. His
literary work consisted of " Hypatia," " Phaeton,"
and several magazine articles. In the summer
he amused himself by trying his hand at hexame-
ters, and began "Andromeda." His parish work
prevented his helping personally in the Co-
operative Movement in London ; but he was con-
sulted from time to time by the Council of
Promoters, and in the great lock-out of the Iron
Trade in January he wrote a letter which "will
show," as Mr. Hughes truly says, "how far
Kingsley was an encourager of violent measures
or views."
EVERSLEY. January 28, 1852. "You may have
been surprised, dear Tom, at my having taken no part in
this Amalgamated Iron Trades' matter. And I think
that I am bound to say why I have not, and how far I
wish my friends to interfere in it. I do think that we, the
Council of Promoters, shall not be wise in interfering be-
tween masters and mer , because i . I question whether
the points at issue between them can be fairly understood
by any persons not conversant with the practical details
of the trade. . . .
" 2. Nor do I think they have put their case as well as
they might. For instance, if it be true that they them-
selves have invented many, or most, of the improvements
in their tools and machinery, they have an argument in
favor of keeping out unskilled laborers, which is unan-
swerable, and yet what they have never used viz. :
Strike in the Iron Trade 275
1 Your masters make hundreds and thousands by these
improvements, while we have no remuneration for this
inventive talent of ours, but rather lose by it, because it
makes the introduction of unskilled labor more easy-
Therefore the only way in which we can get anything like
a payment for this inventive faculty of which we make
you a present over and above our skilled labor, for which
you bargained, is to demand that we, who invent the ma-
chines, if we cannot have a share in the profits of them,
shall at least have the exclusive privilege of using them,
instead of their being, as now, turned against us.' That,
1 think, is a fair argument ; but I have seen nothing oi it
from any speaker or writer.
"3. I think whatever battle is fought, must be fought
by the men themselves. The present dodge of the Man-
chester School is to cry out against us, as Greg did, ' These
Christian Socialists are a set of mediaeval parsons, who
want to hinder the independence and self-help of the
men, and bring them back to absolute feudal maxims ; '
and then, with the most absurd inconsistency, when we
get up a Co-operative workshop, to let the men work on
the very independence and self-help of which they talk so
fine, they turn round and raise just the opposite yell, and
cry, ' The men can't be independent of capitalists ; these
associations will fail because the men are helping them-
selves ' showing that what they mean is, that the men
shall be independent of every one but themselves inde-
pendent of legislators, parsons, advisers, gentlemen, noble-
men, and every one that tries to help them by moral
agents ; but the slaves of the capitalists, bound to them
by a servitude increasing instead of lightening with their
numbers. Now, the only way in which we can clear the
cause of this calumny, is to let the men fight their own
battle ; to prevent any one saying, ' These mer are the
tools of dreamers and fanatics,' which would be just as
ruinously blackening to them in the public eyes, as it
would be to let the cry get abroad, ' This is a Socialist
276 Charles Kingsley
movement destructive cf rights of property, Communism,
Louis Blanc, and the denl, etc.' You know the infernal
stuff which the devil gets up on such occasions, having
no scruples about calling himseli" hard names when it
suits his purpose, to blind and frighten respectable old
women. Moreover, these men are not poor distressed
needlewomen or slop-workers. They are the most intel-
ligent and best-educated workmen, receiving incomes
often higher than a gentleman's son whose education has
cost ;iooo ; and if they can't fight their own battles, no
men in England can, and the people are not ripe for as-
sociation, and we must hark back into the competitive
rot heap again. All, then, that we can do is, to give ad-
vice when asked, to see that they have, as far as we can
get at them, a clear stage and no favor, but not by public,
but by private influence.
" But we can help them in another way, by showing
them the way to associate. That is quite a distinct ques-
tion from their quarrel with their masters, and we shall
be very foolish if we give the press a handle for mixing up
the two. We have a right to say to masters, men, and
public, ' We know, and care nothing about the iron strike.
Here are a body of men coming to us, wishing to be
shown how to do that which is a right thing for them to
do, well or ill off, strike or no strike, namely, associate ;
and we will help and teach them to do that to the very
utmost of our power.'
" The Iron Workers' co-operative shops will be watched
with lynx eyes, calumniated shamelessly. Our business
will be to tell the truth about them, and fight manfully
with our pens for them. But we shall never be able to
get the ears of the respectabilities and the capitalists, if
we appear at this stage of the business. What we must
say is, ' If you are needy and enslaved, we will fight for
you from pity, whether you be associated or competitive.
But you are neither needy, nor, unless you choose,
enslaved ; and therefore we will only fight for you in
On Political Parties 277
proportion as you become associates. Do that, and see if
we can't stand hard knocks for your sake.' "
A few months later, having heard that a bill
for legalizing industrial association was about to
be introduced into the House of Commons, and
that a cabinet minister might undertake it, he
writes to Mr. Hughes:
" Let him be assured that he will by such a move do
more to carry out true conservatism, and to reconcile the
workmen with the real aristocracy, than any politician for
the last twenty years has done. The truth is, we are in a
critical situation, here in England. Not in one of danger
which is the vulgar, material notion of a crisis, but at
the crucial point, the point of departure of principles and
parties which will hereafter become great and powerful.
Old Whiggery is dead, old true blue Toryism of the Rob-
ert Inglis school is dead, too, and in my eyes a great
loss. But as live dogs are better than dead lions, let us
see what the live dogs are.
" i . The Peelites, who will ultimately, be sure, absorb
into themselves all the remains of Whiggery, and a very
large proportion of the Conservative party. In an effete
unbelieving age, like this, the Sadducee and the Herodian
will be the most captivating philosopher. A scientific lazi-
ness, lukewarmness, and compromise is a cheery theory
for the young men of the day, and they will take to it con
amore. I don't complain of Peel himself. He was a
great man, but his method of compromise, though useful
enough in particular cases when employed by a great man,
becomes a most dastardly ' schema mundi ' when taken up
by a school of little men. Therefore, the only help which
we can hope for from the Peelites is, that they will serve
as ballast and cooling pump to both parties ; but their
very trimming and moderation make them fearfully likely
to obtain power. It depends on the wisdom of the
present government, whether they do or not.
278 Charles Kingsley
" 2. Next you have the Manchester School, from
whom Heaven defend us. ... To pretend to be the
workmen's friends, by keeping down the price of bread,
when all they want thereby is to keep down wages and
increase profits, and in the mean time to widen the gulf
between the working man and all that is time-honored,
refined, and chivalrous in English society, that they may
make the men their divided slaves, that is perhaps half
unconsciously, for there are excellent men amongst them
the game of the Manchester School.
"... I have never swerved from my one idea of the last
seven years, that the real battle of the time is if England
is to be saved from anarchy and unbelief, and utter exhaus-
tion caused by the competitive enslavement of the masses
not Radical or Whig against Peelite or Tory (let the
dead bury their dead), but the Church, the gentleman, and
the workman, against the shop-keepers and the Manches-
ter School. The battle could not have been fought forty
years ago, because, on one side, the Church was an idle
phantasm, the gentleman too ignorant, the workman too
merely animal ; while, on the other, the Manchester cotton-
spinners were all Tories, and the shop-keepers were a
distinct class interest from theirs. But now these two
latter have united, and the sublime incarnation of shop-
keeping and labor-buying in the cheapest market shines
forth in the person of Nebuchadnezzar and Son, and both
cotton-spinners and shop-keepers say, ' This is the man ! '
and join in one common press to defend his system. Be
it so : now we know our true enemies, and soon the work-
ing men will know them also. But if the present Minis-
try will not see the possibility of a coalition between them
and the workmen, I see no alternative but just what we
have been straining every nerve to keep off a competi-
tive United States, a democracy before which the work
of ages will go down in a few years. A true democracy,
such as you and I should wish to see, is impossible with-
out a Church and a Queen, and, as I believe, without a
On Prayer 279
gentry. On the conduct of statesmen it will depend
whether we are gradually and harmoniously to develop
England on her ancient foundations, or whether we are to
have fresh paralytic governments succeeding each other
in doing nothing, while the workmen and the Manchester
School fight out the real questions of the day in ignorance
and fury, till * culbuU generate ' comes, and gentlemen of
ancient family betake themselves to Canada, to escape,
not the Amalgamated Engineers, but their ' masters/ and
the slop-working savages whom their masters' system has
created, and will by that time have multiplied tenfold."
TO LORD
April 25, 1852. "I am answering your letter, only
just received, I fear at a disadvantage ; for first, you seem
to fancy me an older man than I am. I am only two-and-
thirty; and shall not be surprised if you or any other
person consider me on further enquiry too young to
advise them.
" Next, I have not knowledge enough of you to give
such advice as would be best for you. I have no nostrum
for curing self-will and self-seeking ; I am aware of none.
It is a battle, I suspect a life-long battle, which each man
must fight for himself, and each in his own way, and
against his own private house-fiend, for in each man
the evil of self-seeking takes a different form. It must do
so, if you consider what it is. Self is not evil, because
self is you, whom God made, and each man's self is differ-
ent from his neighbor's. Now God does not make evil
things, therefore He has not made self evil or wrong;
but you, or self, are only wrong in proportion as you try
to be something in and for yourself, and not the child of
a father, the servant of a lord, the soldier of a general.
So it seems to me. The fault of each man who thinks
and studies as you seem to have done, in the confession
with which you have honored me, is the old fault of Luci*
28 o Charles Kingsley
fer. The planet is not contented with being a planet ; it
must be a sun ; and forthwith it falls from heaven. I
have no nostrum for keeping the planet in its orbit. It
must keep there itself and obey the law which was given
it, and do the work which it was set to do, and then all
will be well. Else it will surely find, by losing the very
brightness in which it gloried, that that brightness was
not its own but a given and reflected one, which is not
withdrawn from it as an arbitrary punishment for its self-
seeking, but is lost by it necessarily, and tpso facto, when
it deflects from the orbit in which alone the sun's rays
can strike 'ull on it. You will say, this is a pretty myth
or otherwise. . . . You have said boldly, in words which
pleased me much, though I differ from them, that I
ought not to ask you to try to cure self-seeking by idle
prayer, as if a man by taking thought could add one
cubit to his stature. I was pleased with the words ; be-
cause they show me that you have found that there is a
sort of prayer which is idle prayer, and that you had sooner
not pray at all than in that way. Now of idle prayer I
think there are two kinds : one of fetish prayer, when by
praying we seek to alter the will of God concerning us.
This is, and has been, and will be common enough and
idle enough. For if the will of Him concerning us be
good, why should we alter it ? If bad, what use praying
to such a Being at all? Prometheus does not pray to
Zeus, but curses and endures. Another, of praying to
oneself to change oneself; by which I mean the common
method of trying by prayer to excite oneself into a state,
a frame, an experience. This, too, is common enough
among Protestants and Papists, as well as among Unitari-
ans and Rationalists. Indeed, some folks tell us that the
great use of prayer is ' its reflex ' action on ourselves, and
inform us that we can thus by taking thought add certain
cubits to our stature. God knows the temptation to be-
lieve it is great. I feel it deeply. Nevertheless I am not
of that belief; nor, I think, are you. But if there were
On Prayer 281
a third kind of prayer, the kind which is set forth to us
in the Lord's Prayer as the only one worth anything, a
prayer, not that God's will concerning us or any one else
may be altered, but that it may be done ; that we may be
kept out of all evil and delivered from all temptation which
may prevent our doing it ; that we may have the aprov
oriovo-iov given to us in body, soul, spirit, and circum-
stance, which will just enable us to do it and no more ;
that the name of Him to whom we pray may be hallowed,
felt to be as noble and sacred as it is, and acted on ac-
cordingly. And if that name were the simple name of
Father, does it not seem that prayer of that kind the
prayer, not of a puling child but of a full-grown or grow-
ing son, to his father ; a prayer to be taught duty, to be
disciplined into obedience, to be given strength of will,
noble purpose, carelessness of self, delight in the will and
the purpose of his father would be the very sort of
prayer which supposing always, as I do from ten years'
experience, that Father to exist, and to hear, and to love,
and to have prepared good works for us to walk in, to
each man his own work, and his own education for that
work, does it not seem to you, I say, granting the hy-
pothesis, that that would be a sort of prayer which would
mightily help a man striving to get rid of his self-seeking,
and to recover his God-appointed place in the order of
the universe, and use, in that place, the attainments which
his Father has given him to be used ? It seems to me
that such a man might look up to God and feel himself
most strong when he was confessing his own weakness,
and then look down at himself and all his learning, and
see that he was most weak when he was priding himself
on his own strength, that such a man would be certain
of having his prayers for light, strength, unselfishness, an-
swered, because then, indeed, his will would be working
with God's will. He would be claiming to be a fellow-
worker with God ; to be a son going about his father's
business, in deep shame and sorrow, no doubt, for hav-
Vol. Iis
282 Charles Kingsley
ing stolen God's tools, to use for his own aggrandizement
for so long, but with no Papist (or rather Jesuit) notion
of making a sacrifice to God giving a present to Him
who has already given to us what we pretend to make a
merit of giving Him. And such a man, it seems to me,
would have no difficulty in finding out what God intended
him to do ; for if he really believed himself a son, under
a Father's education, he would believe everything which
happened to be a part of that education every oppor-
tunity of doing good, trivial as well as grand, a duty set
him by his Father to do. He would not be tempted to
rush forth fanatically from the place where God had put
him, to try some mighty act of self-sacrifice. If the thing
which lay nearest him was the draining of a bog, or the
giving employment to a pauper, or the reclaiming of a
poacher, he would stay where God had put him and try
to do it ; and believe that God had given him his nobil-
ity, or his learning, or his gentleman's culture, just that he
might be able the better to do that part of his father's
business there and then and no other. He would con-
sider over what he knew, what he could do, and would
determine to make all his studies, all his self-training bear
upon the peculiar situation in which God had put him ;
not fanatically reprobating, but still considering as of less
importance whatsoever did not bear on that situation.
In all things, in short, he would do the duty which lay
nearest him, believing that God had put it nearest him.
" And such a man, I believe, so praying and so work-
ing, keeping before him as his lode-star ' Our Father,
hallowed be Thy name ; Thy kingdom come ; Thy will
be done on earth, as it is in heaven ! ' and asking for his
daily bread for that purpose, and no other, would find,
unless I am much mistaken, selfishness and self-seeking
die out of him, and active benevolence grow up in him.
He would find trains of thought and subjects of inquiry
which he had pursued for his private pleasure, not to
mention past sorrows and falls, turned unexpectedly to
On Metaphysical Questions 283
practical use for others' good ; and so discover to his
delight that his Father had been educating him, while he
fancied that he was educating himself. And while he
was so working, and so praying, he would have neither
leisure nor need to torment himself about the motives of
his actions, but simply whatever his hand found to do,
would do it with all his might . . ."
TO THE SAME
June 15. " . . . Now, as to Time. I think, if you
would try time Socratically, by the same method as I
have tried space, you would find that the attribution of it
to God would involve analogical absurdities. I say this
out of mere laziness ; conscience tells me that I ought to
set it down and do it for you, having started the ques-
tion : but will you have patience with a man who has a
child nine days old?
" It shall be done as soon as I can. Nevertheless,
pray be vexed no more at taking up ?.ny time of mine.
Letters like these are a recreation after book-writing and
parish-visiting when I am at work ; and just now, when
the former is stopped by family circumstances, they are a
sacred duty. I have finished fifteen pages of Harriet
Martineau's book . . . after an afternoon's pike-fishing,
to which I took out of mere inability to sit quiet at home
without a wife downstairs. I liked to hear that you
were teaching a carpenter boat-building. Men ought to
know how to do such things ; and gentlemen and noble-
men ought to find an honor in teaching them. ... I
confess myself a Platonist ; and my aim is to draw men,
by showing them that the absolute 'God the Father/
whom no man hath seen, is beyond all possible intellec-
tual notions of ours to feel the necessity of believing in
a ' God the Son ' in whom that indefinable absolute will
and morality is manifested in space and time, under a
form not human till He took flesh, but still, as the
284 Charles Kingsley
Bible tells us from beginning to end, the archetype of
humanity. Moreover, I want to make men feel that the
merely intellectual cognition of either of the three persons
of the Trinity is ipso facto void ; because all intellectual
cognition on such points must start from the assumption
of self and of the universe as the fixed datum that the
former must lead to Pantheism, under which I class the
Neo-Platonism of Alexandria, and the Neo-Platonico-
Eclectism of Emerson, Fichte, and the whole of the
German, American, English, spiritualists (not excluding
Goethe himself, in his ultimate teaching), and that the
latter must lead, as with Atkinson, and Harriet Martineau,
to materialist atheism. When I say must lead, I mean
logically. Every one, thank God, is better than his creed
I mean his real heart's belief. Humanity and common
sense are too mighty even for H. Martineau and Atkin-
son ; but they will not be so for their disciples. Their
disciples will formulize, systematize, carry out perse-
cute ; and then find themselves ending, in a generation
or two, to the astonishment of their Atkinsonian and
Emersonian papas and mammas, in all manner of fetish-
worship ; out-popery-ing popery itself. Honestly believ-
ing this horoscope from all induction from history which
I can collect, I want as long as life, and as far as wisdom
is given to me, to put the anthropology of men of my own
generation on as sound a footing as I can, that their chil-
dren and grandchildren may have some fixed ideas concern-
ing God, and man, and the universe, to fall back on, and
fight from, when the evil day comes as come, unless the
tide turns, it surely will. And when a man of your posi-
tion writes to me about such matters, I feel no labor too
great which may help him even in the least to see and to
teach the good old way by which St. Paul and Augustine
struggled out of mists and quagmires, to which any in
these days are, after all, shallow and transparent. . . .
Read those confessions of St. Augustine, aud see if they
do not help you. . . . Pray read Maurice's ' History of
On Metaphysical Questions 285
Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy ; ' a little golden
book. It is a new world of thought and revelation in
the true sense. . . ."
TO , ESQ.*
" Sad as your letter was, it gave me much pleasure :
it is always a pleasure to see life springing out of death
health returning after disease, though, as doctors know,
the recovery from asphyxia or drowning is always as
painful as the temporary death itself was painless. . . .
Faith is born of doubt. ' It is not life but death where
nothing stirs.' I take all these struggles of yours as simply
so many signs that your Father in heaven is treating you
as a father, that He has not forsaken you, is not offended
with you, but is teaching you in the way best suited
to your own idiosyncrasy, the great lesson of lessons.
'Empty thyself, and God will fill thee.' I am not a man
of a mystical or romantic turn of mind ; but I do say
and know, both from reason and experience, that we
must be taught, even though it be by being allowed for a
while to make beasts of ourselves, that we are of our-
selves, and in ourselves, nothing better than as you see
in the savage a sort of magnified beast of prey, all the
more terrible for its wondrous faculties ; that neither in-
tellect nor strength of will can save us from degradation ;
that they may be just as powerful for evil as for good ;
and that what we want to make us true men, over and
above that which we bring into the world with us, is
some sort of God-given instinct, motive, and new prin-
ciple of life in us, which shall make us not only see the
right, and the true, and the noble, but love it, and give
up our wills and hearts to it, and find in the confession
of our own weakness a strength, in the subjection of our
1 A young man of nineteen, brought up as a Unitarian, to
whom he was personally a stranger, but who wrote to him laying
bare his whole heart, having woke up from a course of sin and
unbelief in black despair.
286 Charles Kingsley
own will a freedom, in the utter carelessness about self a
self-respect, such as we have never known before. Do
not do not fancy that any confession of yours to me
can lower you in my eyes. My dear young man, I went
through the same devil's sewer, with a thousand times the
teaching and advantages which you have had. Who am
I, of all men, to throw stones at you? But take your
sorrows, not to me, but to your Father in heaven. If
that name, Father, mean anything, it must mean that He
will not turn away from His wandering child, in a way in
which you would be ashamed to turn away from yours.
If there be pity, lasting affection, patience in man, they
must have come from Him. They, above all things,
must be His likeness. Believe that He possesses them
a million times more fully than any human being. St.
Paul knew well, at least, the state of mind in which you
are. He said that he had found a panacea for it ; and
his words, to judge from the way in which they have
taken root, and spread, and conquered, must have some
depth and life in them. Why not try them ? Just read
the first nine chapters of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans,
and write me your heart about them. But never mind
what anybody, Unitarian or Trinitarian, may say they
mean. Read them as you would a Greek play taking
for granted that they mean the simplest and most obvious
sense which can be put upon them. Let me hear more
I long for another letter. I need not say that I con-
sider your confidence an honor, and shall keep it
sacred."
"The Christian Socialist" came to an end this
year, and " Parson Lot " spoke his " last words " :
"... Let us say little and work the more. We
shall be the more respected, and the more feared too
for it. People will begin to believe that we really know
what we want, and really do intend to get it, and really
believe in its righteousness. And the spectacle of silent
Parson Lot's Last Words 287
working faith is one at once so rare and so noble, that
it tells more, even on opponents, than ten thousand
platform pyrotechnics. In the mean time it will be no
bad thing for us if we are beaten sometimes. Success
at first is dangerous, and defeat an excellent medicine
for testing people's honesty for setting them earnestly
to work to see what they want, and what are the best
methods of attaining it. Our sound thrashings as a
nation in the first French war were the making of our
armies ; and it is good for an idea, as well as for a man,
to ' bear the yoke in his youth.' The return match will
come off, and many, who are now our foes, will then be
our friends ; and in the mean time,
The proper impulse has been given,
Wait a little longer.'
"PARSON LOT."
"If you want an Epicedium," he writes to the
editor, " I send one. It is written in a hurry.
" So die, thou child of stormy dawn,
Thou winter flower, forlorn of nurse ;
Chilled early by the bigot's curse,
The pedant's frown, the worldling's yawn.
Fair death, to fall in teeming June,
When every seed which drops to earth
Takes root, and wins a second birth
From steaming shower and gleaming moon;
Fall warm, fall fast, thou mellow rain;
Thou rain of God, make fat the land ;
That roots, which parch in burning sand*
May bud to flower and fruit again,
To grace, perchance, a fairer morn
In mighty lands beyond the sea,
While honor falls to such as we
From hearts of heroes yet unborn,
288 Charles Kingsley
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 ?
"CHARLES KINGSLEY.
"June 9, 1852."
In the summer of 1852, Judge Erskine, with
his family, settled in Eversley to be a blessing
to the parish for fifteen years. He was friend
and counsellor to the rector in all matters, be-
sides relieving him of a heavy load of expense and
anxiety in the matter of the local charities. With
this fresh help he worked on cheerfully, and had
the heart to turn his thoughts to poetry once
more.
His youngest daughter was born in June, and
the day following he resumes his letters to Mr.
Ludlow, from which the following extracts are
made:
" Too tired, confused, and happy to work, I sit down
for a chat with you. i. About the last number of
'Hypatia.' I dare say you are right. I wanted, for
artistic purposes, to keep those two chapters cool and
calm till just the very end of each ; and it is very
difficult to be quiet without also being dull. But this,
you know, is only, after all, rough copy ; and such running
criticisms are of the very greatest help to me. About the
' Saga ' : I sent it to Max Miiller, who did not like it at
all, he said ; because, though he highly approved of the
form (and gave me a good deal of learned advice in re\
it was too rational and moral and rounded, he said, and
Letters to Mr. Ludlow 289
not irrational and vast, and dreamy, and hyperbolic
like a true saga.
" As for the monks : 'pon honor they are slow
fellows but then they were so horribly slow in reality.
And I can't see but that Pambo's palaver in my tale is
just what I find in Rosweyde's ' Vitse Patrum,' and
Athanases' ' Life of Anthony.' Almost every expression
of Pambo's is a crib from some one, word for word.
And his instances are historic ones. Moreover, you
must recollect that Arsenius was no mere monk, but
a finished gentleman and court intriguer taken ill with
superstition. ... As for the Sermons, 1 I am very glad
you like any of them. About what you don't like, I will
tell you honestly, I think that I have not said anything
too strong. People must be cured of their horrible
notions of God's arbitrary power His ' satisfaction '
in taking vengeance His inflicting a permanent arbi-
trary curse as a penalty His being the author ol
suffering or evil in any way. I have been driven to it
by this. It is easy enough in the case of a holy person
to use the stock phrase of its having ' pleased God to
afflict them,' because one sees that the affliction is of
use ; but you can't and dare n't say that God is pleased,
/. ., satisfied, or rejoiced to afflict poor wretched heathens
in St. Giles's, to whom, as far as we can see, the afflic-
tion is of no use, but the very reverse. . . .
" If, however, I found it in Scripture, I should believe
it : what I want is plain inductive proof from texts.
The ' it has pleased the Lord to bruise Him,' is just the
very opposite. The pith and marrow of the 53rd of
Isaiah being, that He of whom it speaks is afflicted, not
for the good of His own soul, but for others that He
is ennobled by being sacrificed. It seems to me, that
the only way to escape the dilemma really, is, to believe
that God is what He has revealed Himself to be 'A
1 National Sermons, First Series.
290 Charles Kingsley
Father.' If a child said, ' I was naughty, and it pleased
my father to whip me for it,' should we not feel that the
words were hollow and absurd? And if F. died to-
morrow, God forbid that I should say of my Father in
heaven, it pleased Him to take her from me. If the
Lord Jesus is the express image of His Father's glory,
then His Father cannot be like that. For could I dare
believe that it would not pain the Blessed Lord infinitely
more than it would pain me, if He was compelled by
my sins, or by any other necessity of His government
of this rebellious world, to inflict on me, not to mention
on the poor little children, that bitter agony? In the
face of such real thoughts, school terms vanish, and one
has to rest on realities ; on the belief in a human-hearted,
loving, sorrowing Lord, and of a Father whose image
He, in some inexplicable way, is or one would go
mad. And I have always found, in talking to my people
in private, that all second-hand talk out of books about
the benefits of affliction, was rain against a window-pane,
blinding the view but never entering. But I can
make a poor wretch believe 'the Lord Jesus is just
as sorry as you that you have compelled Him for a while
to deliver you over to Satan for the punishment of the
flesh, that your soul may be saved thereby.' Till you
can make them believe that God is not pleased, but
dfopleased to afflict them, I never found them any the
better for their affliction. They take either a mere
hypocritically fatalist view of their sorrow, or else
they are terrified and despairing, and fancy them-
selves under a curse, and God angry with them, and
are ready to cry, ' Let us curse God and die ! If God
be against me, what matter who is for me ? ' And so
with ***...
" I have been trying to tell him, as I do every one ' If
God be for you, what matter who is against you ? ' . . .
If I can make him feel that first, then, and then only, I
Letters to Mr. Ludlow 291
can go on to say, ' But He will not lift you out of it till
it has taught you the lesson which He intends you to
learn ; ' because then (instead of canting generalities,
which, God forgive me, I too often use, and feel ready
to vomit my own dirty soul out the next minute) I can
tell him what lesson God intends him to learn by
affliction, namely, the very lesson which I have been
trying to teach him, the very lesson which I preached
in the three sermons on the cholera that God is the
foe of all misery and affliction ; that He yearns to raise
us out of it, and to show us that in His presence is
the fulness of life and joy, and that nothing but our
own wilfulness and imperfection keep us in it for an
instant. I dare not say this of A. or B. I leave them
to impute sin to themselves : but I will impute to
myself, and not to God's will, the cause of every finger-
ache I have, because I know that I never had a sorrow
which I did not cause myself, or make necessary for
myself by some sin of my own ; and I will stand by the
service of the ' Visitation of the Sick,' which represents
the man's sins as the reason of the sickness, and his
recovery as God's will and desire. ' He doth not afflict
willingly or grieve the children of men,' is a plain
Scripture, and I will not explain it away to suit any
theory whatsoever about the origin of evil ; but believe
that the first chapter of Job, and the two accounts of
David's numbering the people, tell us all we can know
about it. Thus, so far from allowing that what I say of
God's absolute love of our happiness and hatred of our
misery is the half-truth, which must be limited by any-
thing else, I say it is the whole truth, the root truth,
which must limit all theories about the benefit of suf-
fering, or any other theories, and must be preached
absolutely, nakedly, unreservedly first, as the Lord Jesus
preached it, to be of any real benefit to men. I know
all this is incoherent ; but I don't pretend to have solved
292 Charles Kingsley
this or any other problem. If you prove to me seven
large self-contradictions l in my own harangue, it won't
matter. All you will do, will be to drive me to a
Socratic dialogue, which is the only way I can argue."
^ .......
..." Thank God that there is one more man in the
world who has found out the great metaphysicotheologic
law, that if a man sees me, he sees me, whether he
happens to know my name or not ! ! ! How has the
' religious world ' fallen into the notion that no one
believes in Christ, who does not call Him by the same
appellation as themselves? i. From the dogma-olatry
of the last two centuries (Popish and Protestant), Christ
has not seemed to them a Living Man, or God either,
but a black formula on white paper. 2. Because, as
old Fox and Naylor told them all, they had been be-
lieving in a dead Christ, not in the live one of the
'Revelations ' a historic Christ, absent since A. D. 33.
And it seems to me as if The Blessed One was just
saying no to that, saying (I speak with reverence,
but surely He wishes us to search out His dealings with
man) ' The knowledge of Me as a present King and
friend is far more important to you than knowledge of
the facts of my life eighteen hundred years ago, because
that last is only the cause, the root ; the former is the
effect, the fruit. I was born, crucified, rose, that I
might be what I AM.' Then, Christ seems (I speak
humbly) to be nowadays trying the Church, as He
did the disciples on the road to Emmaus, appearing in
disguise and anonymous. Cannot He do what he
likes? Is He bound by the Thirty-nine Articles, or
1 " I remember," said a friend, who complained of there being
a certain inconsistency about his theology, and asked him how
this was to go with that, " C. K.'s answering ' You logical
Scotchmen must construct consistent theories : I have intuitions
of individual truths : how they are to be reconciled I know not.' "
Letters to Mr. Ludlow 293
Robinson's * Christian System ' ? Then those who do
not know Him, but only facts about Him, will prove
their ignorance by denying His presence; those who
have Him in their hearts, who personally know and love
Him, will know Him without a label; whether in
***** *'s heart, or in any other verbal heresiarch's.
So far I seem to see. But there is more belonging to
this in my eyes the great theological revelation of the
day, first stated to me by Maurice in Peterborough
Cathedral, which I want to talk over with you."
" In three weeks' time, we shall be delighted to see
thee. My beloved roses will be just in glory, the fish
will be just in season ; thanks to the late spring. My
old hunter [a horse which a friend had lately lent him]
will be up from grass, and proud to carry you and me
per gig to see the best of men, John Paine, saint
and hop-grower, of Farnham, Surrey. Also we will talk
of all matters in heaven and earth. That is, unless I
am so deeply unthankful, as indeed I am, for all my
blessings that the Giver finds it necessary, against His
will, to send some bitter among my paradise of sweets.
. . . What you say about my ' ergon ' being poetry is
quite true. I could not write 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,'
and I can write poetry . . . there is no denying it : I
do feel a different being when I get into metre I
feel like an otter in the water, instead of an otter ashore.
He can run fast enough ashore, and keep the hounds
at a tearing gallop, as my legs found this spring in
Snowdonia, but when he takes water, then indeed he
becomes beautiful, full of divine grace and freedom,
and exuberance of power. Go and look at him in the
Zoological Gardens, and you '11 see what I mean.
When I have done ' Hypatia ' I will write no more
novels. I will write poetry not as a profession but
I will keep myself for it, and I do think I shall do
294 Charles Kingsley
something that will live. I feel my strong faculty is that
sense of form, which, till I took to poetry, always came
out in drawing, but poetry is the true sphere, combining
painting and music and history all in one."
"... I wonder what makes me so chatty this morn-
ing mere idleness, I do believe; never mind. I
can't settle again for a few days, and I can't work hard,
because I can't play hard, on account of this mighty
rain ; and unless I get frantic exercise of body, my mind
won't work. I should like to have a ' Nicer" to slay
every afternoon; wouldn't I write eight hours a day
then ! As it is, my only nicor to-day has been a rabbit
about as long as this sheet of paper, which I, my man,
and my dog valiantly captured half-an-hour ago in the
middle of the flower-beds ! ' But slew him not ; awe
kept our souls from that,' as Andromache remarks in a
certain novel.
' Therefore we took him by the silver ears,
And made for him a hutch with iron hoops,
And put him in the tool-house ; and around
The children of the baby-nursing dame,
The imps who haunt the garden, danced and yelled."
" What do you think of that for a parody ? F. re-
mains very, very well, and so does the infant."
" I send you more Andromeda. . . . You will see at
once the difference in style between this opening and
the latter part right or wrong, it was instinctive. I
felt myself on old mythic, idolatrous ground, and went
slowly and artificially, feeling it unreal, and wishing to
make readers feel it such. Then when I get into real
human Greek life, I can burst out and rollick along in
the joy of existence. ... .
" You know that Andromeda myth is a very deep one.
It happened at Joppa, and she must have been a
Letters to Mr. Ludlow 295
Canaanite ; and I cannot help fancying that it is some
remnant of old human sacrifices to the dark powers of
nature, which died out throughout Greece before the
higher, sunnier faith in human gods ; and that I shall
thus bring out, or bring in, enough to make it felt with-
out hurting the classicality, by contrasting her tone about
the gods with that of Perseus, whom she is ready to
worship as a being of a higher race, with his golden hair
and blue eyes. Oh, my dear man, the beauty of that
whole myth is unfathomable ; I love it, and revel in it more
and more the longer I look at it. If I have made one
drawing of Perseus and Andromeda I have made fifty,
and burnt them all in disgust. If I conceive a thought
(objective, that is, of course), I almost always begin by
drawing it again and again, and then the incompleteness
of the pencil (for paint I can't) drives me to words
to give it color and chiaroscuro. 1 . . .
"When you come to me I have a poem (Santa
Maura) to show you. I can hardly bear to read it
myself; but it is the deepest and clearest thing I have
yet done. I send a scrap more rough copy. Perseus
rushing on the Ore
' As when an osprey, aloft, dark eyebrowed, royally crested . . .
Stunning with terrible heel the life of the brain in the hind
head.'
Mind the ' terrible heel' That is right, a hawk strikes
with his heel, and after grips with his whole foot. A
fish or duck killed by a hawk is always scored up the
neck and hind head ; sometimes ripped up right along
the back. If you '11 consider ; striking his prey at im-
The first edition of " The Heroes " a Christian book of Greek
fairy tales for his children, published in 1855, was illustrated by
himself, and contains an exquisite sketch of Perseus and Androm-
eda. (M. K.)
296 Charles Kingsley
mense speed from behind, he could n't drive his front
claws in. The dark eyebrowed is Homer's ' melano~
phrus,' and is the thing which struck me as most magnifi-
cent in a large osprey which I came upon ten yards
from me in the Issthal. For the same reason, doubt
not, ' the wind rattling in his pinions.' A falcon does
not, as the herd think, rush silently down head foremost,
but drives himself noisily down heels foremost by a
succession of preternatural flaps, the philosophy of which
I could never make out. A gull does the same, though
he strikes with his beak when he wants to force himself
under water ; anything atop he takes as an owl does,
by sliding down or not quite for an owl's silent fall
is more mysterious still. He catches with his beak, and
then takes the mouse out of his mouth with his hand,
like a Christian. But there 's enough natural history
for the nonce. There 's a hawk ' stooping ' (sketch
enclosed). . . .
"I don't agree with you about not polishing too
much. 1 If you are a verse maker, you will, of course,
1 Speaking once of the finish and perfection of Tennyson's
poetry, he says : " And how are such effects produced but by
labor? Labor severe, self -restraining, patient; labor without
which the diamond itself is dark. The Venus or the Apollo
might possess the most exact proportion of limb, the most perfect
grace of attitude, yet who would have called them beautiful while
the surface of the marble was still rough and knotty? It is not
the size, but the finish of the picture which proves the painter's
art, proves that he has worked, to use Mr. Ruskin's phrase, by
the light of ' The Lamps of Sacrifice and of Obedience.' ... If
metre and melody be worth anything at all, let them be polished
to perfection : let an author ' keep his piece nine years,' or ninety
and nine, till he has made it as musical as he can. . . . The
thought must be struck off in the passion of the moment ; the
sword-blade must go red-hot to the anvil, and be forged in a few
seconds ; true : but after the forging, long and weary polishing
and grinding must follow, before your sword-blade will cut. And
melody is what makes poetry cut, what gives it its life, its power,
its magic influence, on the hearts of men. It must ring in their
ears ; it must have music in itself ; it must appeal to the senses,
Hexameters 297
rub off the edges and the silvering ; but if you are a
poet, and have an idea and one key-note running
through the whole, which you can't for the life define to
yourself, but which is there out of the abysses, defining
you, then every polishing is a bringing the thing
nearer to that idea, and there is no more reason in not
polishing than there is for walking about with a hole or
a spot on your trousers, a thing which drives me mad.
If I have a spot on my clothes, I am conscious of
nothing else the whole day long, and just as conscious
of it in the heart of Bramshill Common, as if I were
going down Piccadilly. . . . Dear man, did you ever
ride a lame horse, and wish that the earth would open,
and swallow you, though there was n't a soul within
miles ? Or did you ever sit and look at a handsome or
well-made man, and thank God from your heart for hav-
ing allowed you such a privilege and lesson ? Oh, there
was a butcher's nephew playing cricket in Bramshill
last week, whom I would have walked ten miles to
see, in spite of the hideous English dress. One looked
forward with delight to what he would be ' in the
resurrection. . . .'
"... I want to aim at the clearest and sharpest
objectivity, and even in the speeches of Perseus and
Andromeda, the subjective element must come out in
sententiousness, not in sentiment. I shall read up the
CEdipus Coloneus, and the Antigone, before I do them,
to catch the sententiosity. But I never had dreamed
of daring to write hexameters. 1 I should write them
merely by ear, as I firmly believe Homer wrote his, and
as well as to the feelings, the imagination, the intellect: then, when
it seizes at once on the whole man, on body, soul, and spirit, will
it ' swell in the heart, and kindle in the eyes, and constrain him,
he knows not why, to believe and to obey.' "
1 In " Westward Ho ! " is introduced a supposed conversa-
tion between Sir Walter Raleigh and the poet Edmund Spenseii
on the subject of Hexameter verse. (M. K.)
298 Charles Kingsley
make a word scan two different ways, as he does, when-
ever I chose, minding always to make accent and metre
coincide. As for hexameters being foreign to our lan-
guage, if you will mind the caesura, and split your sense
at that as often as convenient, you can talk prose in
hexameters just as easily as in blank verse. Look (it is
Coleridge's hint) at the great quantity of the Bible and
Prayer-book which is actually unconscious hexameter
already. ... I enclose my last :
" I and my gardener George, and my little whelp Maurice
and Dandy,
Went out this afternoon fishing ; a better night nobody could
wish,
Wind blowing fresh from the west, and a jolly long roll on
the water,
After a burning day and the last batch of May-flies just
rising
Well, I fished two or three shallows and never a fish would
look at me.
Then I fished two or three pools, and with no more success,
I assure you.
'I'll tell you what, G.,' said I, 'some rascal's been " stud-
dling " the water ;
Look at the tail of that weed there, all turned up and tangled
Tim Goddard 's
Been up the stream before us, or else Bonny Over, and sold us !'
' Well, sir,' says he, ' I '11 be sworn, some chap 's gone up here
with a shove-net !
Pack up our traps and go home, is the word ! ' and by jingo
we did it.
As I sit here, word for word, that was mine and G.'s
conversation."
"... I wish you would show this Prologue to
Maurice. It is as deep a thing though not very
smooth as I have said yet, and I mean what I say.
' Linger no more, my beloved, by abbey and cell and
cathedral ;
Mourn not for holy ones mourning of old them who knew
not the Father,
Poetry 299
Weeping with fast and scourge, when the bridegroom was
taken from them.
Drop back awhile through the years, to the warm rich youth
of the nations,
Childlike in virtue and faith, though childlike in passion and
pleasure,
Childlike still, and still near to their God, while the day-spring
of Eden
Lingered in rose-red rays on the peaks of Ionian mountains.
Down to the mothers, as Faust went, I go, to the roots of
our manhood.
Mothers of us in our cradles ; of us once more in our glory.
Newborn, 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.
Down to the mothers I go yet with thee still ! be with
me, thou purest!
Lead me, thy hand in my hand; and the dayspring of God
go before us.'
"P. S. What I have said of ballads is this: that
they must be objective, dealing with facts and not feel-
ings or with feelings as manifested in actions. The
union of the objective ballad or epic (for they only
differ in size) with the subjective ode, elegiac and satire,
makes the drama. The present age writes subjective
ballads, and fails of course.
" Your best specimens are ' Johnnie of Breadislee ; '
' Sir Patrick Spens : ' Lady Maistry, perfectly awful
* She carried the peats in her apron lap
To burn herself withal.'
One or two Danish ballads : Tennyson's ' Sir Galahad ; '
Wee Croodledoo;' 'Auld Robin Gray]' Lord Wit
300 Charles Kingsley
loughby in Percy's ' Reliques ; ' ' Hosier's Ghost ; *
'When in Porto-bello lying,' a noble speech; 'Would
you hear a Spanish Lady ? ' Campbell's ' Hohenlinden ; '
Uhland's ' Drei Burschen ; ' Goethe's ' Beggarman and
Erl-King.' But the Germans have hundreds."
To T. HUGHES, ESQ. ". . . I had just done my
work, and dinner was coming on the table yesterday
just four o'clock when the bow-wows appeared on
the top of the Mount, trying my patch of gorse ; so I
jumped up, left the cook shrieking, and off. He was n't
there, but I knew where he was, for I keep a pretty
good register of foxes (ain't they my parishioners, and
parts of my flock ?) ; and, as the poor fellows had had a
blank day, they were very thankful to find themselves in
five minutes going like mad. We had an hour and a
half of it scent breast-high as the dew began to rise
(bleak north-easter always good weather), and if we
had not crossed a second fox, should have killed him in
the open ; as it was, we lost him after sunset, after the
fiercest grind I have had this nine years, and I went
back to my dinner. The old horse behaved beautifully ;
he is not fast, but in the enclosed woodlands he can live
up to any one, and earned great honor by leaping in
and out of the Loddon ; only four more doing it, and
one receiving a mucker. I feel three years younger to-
day. . . . The whip tells me there were three in the
river together, rolling over horse and man ! What a
sight to have lost even by being a-head. . . . Have you
seen the story of the run, when Mr. Woodburne's hounds
found at Blackholme, at the bottom of Windermere, and
ended beyond Helvellyn, more than fifty miles of moun-
tain. After Applethwaite Crag (where the field lost
them) they had a ring on High Street (2700 feet) of an
hour unseen by mortal eye ; and after that were seen by
shepherds in Batterdale, Brotker Water, top of Fairfield
Frederika Bremer 301
(2900) Dunnaird Gap; and then over the top of Hel-
vellyn (3050) ; and then to ground on Birkside Screes
I cannot find it on the maps. But what a poetic
thing ! Helvellyn was deep in frost and snow. Oh,
that I could write a ballad thereanent. The thing has
taken possession of me ; but I can't find words. There
was never such a run since we were born ; and think of
hounds doing the last thirty miles alone / "
One of his many correspondents at this time
was Frederika Bremer, the Swedish novelist,
who, in the previous autumn, had paid a visit to
Eversley Rectory. She had come to England to
see the Great Exhibition, but she expressed one
still stronger desire, which was to see Charles
Kingsley, whose writings had struck a deep chord
in her heart. It would be needless to say that he
thought her one of the most highly cultivated
women he had ever conversed with, and her sweet
gentleness and womanliness attracted him still
more than her intellect. After she left Eversley,
she sent him a copy of Esaia Tegner's " Frithiof 's
Saga," with this inscription: "To the Viking of
the New Age, Charles Kingsley, this story of the
Vikings of the Old, from a daughter of the Vik-
ings, his friend and admirer, Frederika Bremer;"
and writes :
"My YOUNG FRIEND, Will you allow me to call
you in writing, in plain words, what I have called and
do call you in my mind and heart? You must think
then it is a baptismal of the spirit, and you must un-
derstand it. I have received your books. They shall
go with me over the sea to my fatherland, and there in
my silent home, I shall 'read them, live in them, enjoy
them deeply, intensely. I know it, know it all the bettex
302 Charles Kingsley
since I have been with you. I have had a dream some-
times of a young brother like that one that was snatched
away from me in his youth ; like him, but more ardent,
a young mind that I could like, love, sympathize with,
quarrel with, live with, influence, be influenced by, fol-
low, through the thorny path, through tropical islands,
through storm and sunshine, higher and higher ascend-
ing in the metamorphosis of existence. I had that
dream, that vision again, when I saw you, that made
me so sad at parting. But let that pass. With much
we must part. Much must pass. More will remain. The
communion of related souls will remain to be revived
again and again. I shall hear from you, and I will write
to you. Meantime my soul will hover about you with the
wings of blessing thoughts. I send a copy of my last
book, the ' Midnight Sun.' As you are fond of Natural
History, the sketch of the people and provinces of Swe-
den in the introduction may interest you ; this much be-
longs to the natural history of a country. The voyage
up to the mountains of the midnight sun, the scenery
there is perfectly true to nature ; I have seen and lived
it through myself. Frithiof 's Saga I take peculiar pleas-
ure in asking you to accept, as a true follower of Scan-
dinavian mind and life, and as the story of a spirit to
whom your own is nearly related. The universal, the
tropical mind seems more embodied in man in the rigid
zones of the north, than in those of tropical nature. It is
strange, but it seems to me to be so, the old Viking's
greatness was that he wanted to conquer the whole
world and make it his own. The mission of the spiritual
Viking seems to me the higher one to conquer the world
to God. So is yours. God speed you ! and He will !
God bless you and yours, your lovely wife first among
those, and lastly me as one of yours in sisterly love."
A proposal was made this year to open the
Crystal Palace on Sundays a step towards stem-
Sunday Amusements 303
ming the tide of Sunday drunkenness, and he
wrote to Mr. George Grove, who had asked him
to help :
October 28. "I am in sad perplexity about your
letter. I have been talking it over with Maurice. He
says he shall take the matter in hand in his Lincoln's Inn
sermons, and that it is a more fit thing for a London
than for a country parson, being altogether against my
meddling. ... I use freely a pamphlet, by the Rev.
Baldwin Brown, 1 which I think the wisest speech, save
Maurice's, which I have seen on the matter. . . .
The Church of England knows nothing of that definition
of the Sabbath as a fast, which the Puritans borrowed
from the Pharisees and Rabbins of the most fallen and
hideous period of Judaism, and which the Lord de-
nounced again and again as contrary to, and destructive
of, the very idea and meaning of the Sabbath. The
Church of England calls Sunday a feast-day, and not a
fast ; and it is neither contrary to her ritual letter, nor
to her spirit, to invite on that day every Englishman to
refresh himself with the sight of the wonders of God's
earth, or with the wonders of men's art, which she con-
siders as the results of God's teaching and inspiration.
" The letter, moreover, as well as the spirit of the
Bible, is directly in favor of the arguments brought
forward by the Crystal Palace Company's advocates.
The Sabbath, it declares, was made for man. And
man, it declares to be, not a mere ' soul to be saved '
(an expression nowhere used in Scripture, in its mod-
ern sense of a spirit, to be get safely through to some
future state of bliss), but as consisting of body, soul, and
spirit meaning by soul what we call intellect and feel-
ings. And therefore any institution, which, like the
Crystal Palace, tends to give healthy and innocent rest
l Author of " The Higher Life," " The Home Life," and " The
Doctrine of Annihilation in the Light of the Gospel of Love."
304 Charles Kingsley
and refreshment to body, mind, and tastes, is in accord-
ance, a lower sphere certainly, but still directly in ac-
cordance with the letter of the Sabbatical institution, as
a day of rest made for man as man. . . ."
In 1856 he writes on this topic to Mr.
Maurice :
" I have read through your pamphlet forthwith, and
with very great delight. I agree with every word. I
feel with you that the only ground on which Sunday
amusements can be really defended, is as a carrying out
of the divineness of the Sabbath, and not as a relaxation
of it, ... I do not see how to lay down the ground
of the Sabbath better than you have done, so I do not
see how to dogmatize about practical applications any far-
ther than the hints you have given. I have often fancied
I should like to see the great useless naves and aisles of
our cathedrals turned into museums and winter gardens,
where people might take their Sunday walks, and yet at-
tend service; but such a plan could only grow up of
itself, round a different service than ours, or at least
round a service interpreted and commented on by
very different preaching; and till the Tartarus and
Elysium superstition, which lies as really at the bot-
tom of this question as at the bottom of all, is settled,
I see no hope for that. . . . You have made me
see more than I ever did, the dignity of work and rest,
and their analogy with God's so justifying all that
Parker, Emerson, or Carlyle have said about it, by put-
ting it on a ground which they deny. Yet if the prob-
lem of human existence be to escape the impending
torture cut bono 1 Who need care for rest, or work
either, save to keep the body alive till the soul is
saved ? Till that doctrine vanishes, no one will feel any
real analogy between his life and God's life, and will be
as selfish and covetous in his work, and as epicurean in
his rest, as men are now. It was their ignorance of this
Sunday Amusements 305
superstition, I suppose, which enabled the old Jews to
keep their Sabbath (as they seem to have done from
the few hints we have) as a day of ' rejoicing before the
Lord,' in attempts more or less successful to consecrate
to Him the simple enjoyments of life in feasting, sing-
ing, and dancing. * In the midst go the damsels playing
with the timbrels.' But this would be absurd here, and
therefore I suppose it is, that the all-wise Book keeps
the practical details so in the background, leaving each
future nation to actualize the Sabbath according to its
own genius. I think what you have said on that quite
admirable. Nevertheless, we (after we are dead and
alive for evermore) shall see that conception carried
out on earth.
" ' In mighty lands beyond the sea,
While honor falls to such as thee,
From hearts of heroes yet unborn.'
"Men drink, and women too, remember," he says
elsewhere, "not merely to supply exhaustion; not
merely to drive away care ; but often simply to drive
away dulness. . . . The publican knows too well where
thousands of the lower classes, simply for want of any
other place to be in, save their own sordid dwellings,
spend as much as they are permitted of the Sabbath
day. . . . Let us put down 'Sunday drinking, by all
means. And let us see in the name of Him who
said He had made the Sabbath for man, and not man
for the Sabbath if we cannot do something to pre-
vent the townsman's Sabbath being, not a day of rest,
but a day of mere idleness ; the day of most temptation,
because of most dulness in the whole seven."
("Health and Education," p. 64.)
"Have you any objection" (he asks the Dean of
Westminster, before preaching in the Abbey for the
Vol. 114
306 Charles Kingslcy
Temperance Society in 1873) "to my speaking in
favor of opening the British Museum and National
Gallery to the public on Sunday afternoons? ... I
have held very strong and deliberate opinions on this
matter for many years ; and think that the opening of
these institutions would stop not only a good deal of
Sunday and therefore of Monday drunkenness but
would, if advocated by the clergy, enable the Church
to take the wind out of the sails of the well-meaning but
ignorant Sunday league, and prove herself what she
can prove herself in other matters if she has courage,
the most liberal religious body in these isles. ..."
TO ADOLPH SAPHIR, ESQ.
(Then a student in Edinburgh)
November i, 1852. "If I am surprised at your
writing to me, it is the surprise of delight at finding that
my writings have been of use to any man, and above all
to a Jew. For your nation I have a very deep love,
first because so many intimate friends of mine and
in one case a near connection are Jews, and next,
because I believe as firmly as any modern interpreter
of prophecy, that you are still ' The Nation? and that
you have a glorious, as I think a culminating, part to
play in the history of the race. Moreover, I owe all I
have ever said or thought about Christianity as the idea
which is to redeem and leaven all human life, ' secular '
as well as ' religious,' to the study of the Old Testament,
without which the New is to me unintelligible ; and I
cannot love the Hebrew books without loving the men
who wrote them. My reason and heart revolt at that
magical theory of inspiration which we have borrowed
from the Latin Rabbis (the very men whom we call
fools on every other subject), which sinks the person-
ality of the inspired writer, and makes him a mere
To a Jew 307
puppet and mouthpiece; and therefore I love your
David, and Jeremiah, and Isaiah, as men of like pas-
sions with myself men who struggled, and doubted,
and suffered, that I might learn from them ; and loving
them, how can I but love their children, and yearn over
them with unspeakable pity?
" You seem to be about to become a Christian minis-
ter. In that capacity your double education, both as a
German and as a Hebrew, ought to enable you to do
for us what we sadly need having done, almost as much
as those Jews among whom your brother so heroically
labored I mean to teach us the real meaning of the
Old Testament and its absolute unity with the New.
For this we want not mere * Hebrew scholars,' but
Hebrew spirits Hebrew men ; and this must be done,
and done soon, if we are to retain our Old Testament,
and therefore our New. For if we once lose our faith
in the Old Testament, our faith in the New will soon
dwindle to the impersonal ' spiritualism ' of Frank
Newman, and the German philosophasters. Now the
founder of German unbelief in the Old Testament was
a Jew. Benedict Spinoza wrote a little book which con-
vulsed the spiritual world, and will go on convulsing it
for centuries, unless a Jew undoes what a Jew has done.
Spinoza beat down the whole method of rabbinical in-
terpretation the whole theory of rabbinical inspira-
tion ; but he had nothing, as I believe, to put in their
place. The true method of interpretation the true
theory of inspiration is yet sadly to seek. At least such
a method and such a theory as shall coincide with his-
tory and with science. It is my belief that the Christian
Jew is the man who can give us the key to both who
can interpret the New and the Old Testaments both,
because he alone can place himself in the position of
the men who wrote them, as far as national sympathies,
sorrows, and hopes are concerned not to mention the
308 Charles Kingsley
amount of merely antiquarian light which he can throw
on dark passages for us, if he chooses to read as a Jew
and not as a Rabbinist.
" I would therefore intreat you, and every other con-
verted Jew, not to sink your nationality, because you
have become a member of the Universal Church, but to
believe with the old converts of Jerusalem, that you are
a true Jew because you are a Christian ; that as a Jew
you have your special office in the perfecting of the
faith and practice of the church, which no Englishman
or other Gentile can perform for you : neither to Ger-
manize or Scotticize, but try to see all heaven and earth
with the eyes of Abraham, David, and St. Paul."
CHAPTER XI
1853
AGED 34
THE RECTOR IN HIS CHURCH " HYPATIA" LETTERS FROM
CHEVALIER BUNSEN MR. MAURICE'S THEOLOGICAL ES-
SAYS CORRESPONDENCE WITH THOMAS COOPER.
* My heart and hope is with thee Thou wilt be
A latter Luther, and a soldier priest,
To scare church-harpies from the Master's feet ;
Our dusted velvets have much need of thee :
Thou art no Sabbath-drawler of old saws,
Distill'd from some worm-canker'd homily ;
But spurr'd at heart with fieriest energy,
To embattail and to wall about thy cause
With iron-worded proof, hating to hark
The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone,
Half God's good Sabbath, while the worn-out clerk
Brow-beats his desk below. Thou from a throne,
Mounted in heaven wilt shoot into the dark
Arrows of lightning. I will stand and mark."
TENNYSON (Early Sonnets).
THE books which entailed so many letters,
now also attracted strangers to Eversley
Church on Sunday. Officers from Sandhurst
would constantly walk over, and occasionally a
stray clergyman would be seen in the free sit-
tings. " Twenty-five Village Sermons " had been
published in 1849, and had been reviewed in the
"Times," and "Sermons on National Subjects,"
perhaps the most remarkable of all his volumes of
sermons, had just been brought out. His preach-
310 Charles Kingsley
ing was becoming a great power. It was the
speech of a live man to living beings.
"Yes, my friends," he would say, "these are real
thoughts. They are what come into people's minds
every day ; and I am here to talk to you about what
is really going on in your soul and mine ; not to repeat
to you doctrines at second hand out of a book, and say,
'There, that is what you have to believe and do, and
if you do not, you will go to hell ; ' but to speak to you
as men of like passions with myself; as sinning, sorrow-
ing, doubting, struggling human beings; to talk to you
of what is in my own heart, and will be in your hearts
too, some day, if it has not been already. . . ."
After he gave out his text, the poor men in the
free sittings under the pulpit would turn towards
him, and settle themselves into an attitude of
fixed attention. In preaching he would try to
keep still and calm, and free from all gesticula-
tion ; but as he went on, he had to grip and clasp
the cushion on which his sermon rested, in order
to restrain the intensity of his own emotion ; and
when, in spite of himself, his hands would escape,
they would be lifted up, the fingers of the right
hand working with a peculiar hovering movement,
of which he was quite unconscious; his eyes
seemed on fire, his whole frame worked and
vibrated. It was riveting to see as well as hear
him, as his eagle glance penetrated every corner
of the church, and whether there were few or
many there, it was enough for him that those who
were present were human beings standing between
two worlds, and that it was his terrible responsi-
bility as well as high privilege, to deliver a mes-
sage to each and all. The great festivals of the
The Rector in his Church 311
Church seemed to inspire him, and his words
would rise into melody. At Christmas, Easter,
Whitsuntide, and on the Holy Trinity especially,
his sermon became a song of triumph; during
Advent, a note of solemn warning. On Good
Friday, and through the Passion week evening
services, it would be a low and mournful chant,
uttered in a deep, plaintive, and at moments al-
most agonized tone, which hushed his congrega-
tion into a silence that might be felt. These
Passion services were given at an hour to suit the
laboring men on their way home from work, when
a few would drop into church, to whom he
preached a fifteen minutes' sermon, which a Lon-
don congregation would have gone miles to hear.
His hearers, sometimes only fifteen to twenty
besides his own family, will never forget the
dimly-lighted church in the spring evening's
twilight, with its little sprinkling of worshippers,
and the silence as of death and the grave, when
with a look which he never seemed to have at any
other season, he followed Christ through the
events of the Holy Week, from the First Com-
munion to the foot of the Cross. And when "the
worst was over," with what a gasp of relief was
Easter Even, with its rest and quietness, reached,
and with significant words about that Intermediate
state, in which he so deeply believed, he would
lead our thoughts from the peaceful sepulchre in
the garden to the mysterious gate of Paradise.
His Good Friday sermons were flashes of inspi-
ration. He thus closes one, perhaps the finest
he ever preached [National Sermons, ist Series],
in 1848, when his heart was full of the People's
cause :
^12 Charles Kingsley
" Oh ! sad hearts and suffering ! Anxious and weary
ones ! Look to the Cross this day ! There hung your
King. The King of sorrowing souls, and more the King
of Sorrow. Ay, pain and grief, tyranny and desertion,
death and hell. He has faced them one and all, and
tried their strength, and taught them His, and con-
quered them right royally ! And since He hung upon
that torturing cross, sorrow is divine, godlike, as joy
itself. All that man's fallen nature dreads and despises,
God honored on the cross, and took unto Himself, and
blest and consecrated for ever. And now, blessed are
the poor, if they are poor in heart as well as purse, and
theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are the hun-
gry, if they hunger for righteousness as well as food : for
Jesus hungered, and they shall be filled. Blessed are
those who mourn, if they mourn not only for their
afflictions, but for their sins, and the sins of those they
see around them : for on this day, Jesus mourned for
our sins : on this day He was made sin for us who
knew no sin; and they shall be comforted. Blessed
are those who are ashamed of themselves and humble
themselves before God this day ; for on this day Jesus
humbled Himself for us, and they shall be exalted.
Blessed are the forsaken and despised. Did not all
men forsake Jesus this day, in His hour of need ? And
why not thee, too, thou poor deserted one ? Shall the
disciple be above his master? No, every one that is
perfect, must be like his master. The deeper, the bit-
terer your loneliness, the more you are like Him who
cried upon the cross, ' My God, my God, why hast
Thou forsaken me?' ... All things are blessed now,
but sin ; for all things, excepting sin, are redeemed by
the life and death of the Son of God. Blessed are
wisdom and courage, joy and health, and beauty, love
and marriage, childhood and manhood, corn and wine,
fruits and flowers, for Christ redeemed them by His life.
The Rector in his Church 313
And blessed, too, are tears and shame, blessed are
weakness and ugliness, blessed are agony and sickness,
blessed the sad remembrance of our sins, and a broken
heart, and a repentant spirit. Blessed is death, and
blessed the unknown realms, where souls await the
resurrection day, for Christ redeemed them by His
death. Blessed are all things, weak as well as strong.
Blessed are all days, dark as well as bright, for all are
His, and He is ours ; and all are ours, and we are His,
for ever. Therefore sigh on, ye sad ones, and rejoice
in your own sadness ; ache on, ye suffering ones, and
rejoice in your own sorrows. Rejoice that you are
made free of the holy brotherhood of mourners, that
you may claim your place too, if you will, among the
noble army of martyrs. Rejoice that you are counted
worthy of a fellowship in the sufferings of the Son of
God. Rejoice and trust on, for after sorrow shall come
joy. Trust on; for in man's weakness God's strength
shall be made perfect. Trust on, for death is the gate of
life. Endure on to the end, and possess your souls in
patience for a little while, and that perhaps a very little
while. Death comes swiftly, and more swiftly still, per-
haps, the day of the Lord. The deeper the sorrow, the
nearer the salvation.
The night is darkest before the dawn ;
When the pain is sorest, the child is born,
And the day of the Lord at hand ! "
On Easter day he would burst forth into a song
of praise once more, for the Blessed Resurrection
not only of Christ the Lord, but of man, and of
the dear earth he loved so well spring after
winter, birth after death. Every gnat that danced
in the sunshine on the blessed Easter morn,
every blade of grass in the old churchyard spoke
of hope and joy and a living God. And the
314 Charles Kingsley
flowers in the church, and the graves decked
with bright wreaths would add to his gladness,
as he paced up and down the narrow gravel path
before service. Many a testimony has come to
the blessing of those village sermons. " Twenty-
five Village Sermons," said a clergyman working
in a great city parish, " like a plank to a drown-
ing man kept me from sinking in the ' blackness
of darkness ' which surrounds the unbeliever.
Leaning upon these, while carried about by every
wind of doctrine I drifted hither and thither, at
last, thanks be to God, I found standing ground."
In a preface written for the Village Sermons in
1849, but subsequently suppressed for fear of mis-
conception, he explained why he had adopted the
peculiar method of preaching, both in matter and
style, which offended some, while it arrested
many:
" At the solicitation of several friends," he says, " I put
these sermons into print, with extreme diffidence as to
their value a diffidence much increased by the high
standard which I have most unsuccessfully proposed to
myself. These sermons refer chiefly to those subjects
which are less commonly than others expounded in the
pulpit, and must therefore be in no wise taken as a com-
plete confession of faith. The great doctrines of the
Gospel will be found rather implicit and diffused through
them, and underlying them everywhere as their primary
ground, than formally and articulately stated in them.
" (i) To such a method of teaching I have been
more or less compelled by circumstances. I have found
that, in my own parish at least, the minds of working
men have been inundated by a dogmatic technology
which is, by their own confession, utterly beyond the
comprehension of the great majority, while repeated use
The Rector in his Church 315
has made the ears of too many of the rest callous to the
thread of vague meaning which they may have once
attached to it. The same objections I found to hold
good also against a peculiar phraseology, which, though
it calls itself scriptural, is yet utterly deficient in the
lively and dramatic terseness of the Bible, being for the
most part a mere patchwork I had almost said parody
of the archaisms, not of the Scriptures themselves,
but of our English translation of them. I have therefore
boldly thrown off as much as possible conventional forms
and technicalities of speech, and I believe that all who
do the same will be rewarded by the delight with which
youths and men of the laboring classes will welcome
the Gospel in the intelligible form of their own mother-
tongue.
" (2) I must also say that I cannot see without
astonishment men who profess unbounded reverence
for Scripture, utterly and intentionally avoiding every
method of teaching which Scripture employs. In the
sermons of the Prophets, of our Lord, of the Apostles,
all is indicative, personal, pointed, concrete ; with most
sermon writers of this day, all is studiously hypothetic,
impersonal, rounded, and abstract. Scripture deals hi
dialogue and apostrophe ; in allusions to time and place
and detail, and almost invariably makes passing events
the ground from which to evolve eternal and spiritual
lessons ; most modern sermons, on the contrary, avoid
carefully all which can connect their subject with the
events of the day, with the peculiar circumstances or
actual every-day life and business of their hearers. The
honest old ' You ' and ' I,' for instance, are ousted by a
certain dreamy book-compiled abstraction ' The Chris-
tian,' or else for ' My brethren,' a phrase whose anti-
quated form alone, if we will consider, proves the
unreality of our own use of it. If we believe that our
hearers are our brothers, let us call them so. It is a
316 Charles Kingsley
poor trick to soften down the rebuke which that word con-
veys to ourselves, by watering it down into a vapid ' breth-
ren.' These sermons have been written in the belief,
that true reverence for Scripture will copy its manner, as
well as its matter, and that as every teacher in Scripture
expresses God's truth in the language and style peculiar
to his own time, we shall best follow the leading of God's
Spirit, by expressing His truth in the style and language
peculiar neither to the first, nor to the sixteenth, but to
the nineteenth century.
" (3) We have, I think, again much injured the use-
fulness of our preaching, by a squeamish regard for that
miserable fiction, ' the dignity of the pulpit,' by a horror
of our words and thoughts which are homely and ' collo-
quial,' and anything less than sesquipedalian. How
much of this may have proceeded from honest bad taste,
how much from a subtle temptation to excuse ourselves
for our ignorance of the speech and thought of the very
peasants to whom we are commissioned to minister, God
alone can judge ; but this pedantry must be thoroughly
and at once amended, if we do not wish to be called, as
I believe, to most fearful and speedy account for our
remiss use of that tremendous power the undisturbed
possession of the pulpits of England.
" (4) I must now, even at the risk of being misunder-
stood, say boldly that I believe our preaching has been
of late years sadly chilled and tongue-tied by a certain
rigid idolatry of formulae, and a consequent scrupulous
terror of mere verbal and accidental heterodoxy : while
most seem quite unconscious that it is easy to preach
sermons, in whose words the most scrupulous theologian
could detect no flaw, the total outcome of which may
nevertheless be utterly heretical Manichsean, for in-
stance, or Apollinarian errors which are at this very
day fearfully rife, among nominally orthodox preachers
of every shade of opinion.
The Rector in his Church 317
" I may have erred in the opposite direction ; but I
have been less solicitous about the outward and treach-
erous orthodoxy of the understanding than about the far
deeper orthodoxy of the spirit ; not so much to prove
my correctness to my hearers as to excite correct
notions in them. My hearers were ploughmen, not
schoolmen my grammar is that of the farm, not of
the university. If therefore any expressions be discov-
ered in my sermons, which, when separated from their
context, and from the gist of the whole discourse (as is
the manner of critics), do not exactly fit into any of the
current systems of doctrine, I answer with all humility
that I do not care. I am perfectly assured of the
orthodox result of the whole, and equally perfectly
assured that any one who wishes really to touch the
souls of men, must apply to oratory Augustine's glorious
maxim, ' Ama etfac quicquid vis? and say boldly,
" ' Crede et die quicquid vis.' "
His sermons owed much to the time he gave
himself for preparation. The Sunday services,
while they exhausted him physically, yet seemed
to have the effect of winding his spirit up to
higher flights. And often late on Sunday even-
ing he would talk over with his wife the subject
and text for the next week. He seldom put off
his sermon till Saturday. On Monday, he would,
if possible, take a rest, but on Tuesday it was
sketched, and the first half carefully thought out
before it was dictated or written : then put by for
a day or two, that it might simmer in his brain,
and be finished on Friday. But none who read
them now can tell what it was to hear them, and
to see him, and the look of inspiration on his
face, as he preached. While to those his nearest
3i 8 Charles Kingsley
and dearest, who looked forward with an ever-fresh
intensity of interest to the Eversley Church ser-
vices week after week, year after year, each ser-
mon came with double emphasis from the fact
that his week-day life was no contradiction, but
a noble carrying out of his Sunday teaching.
"The Eversley Sunday," said his friend and curate,
Mr. Harrison, " was very characteristic of Mr. Kingsley.
It was not to him far above the level of every other day,
but then his every other day was far above the ordinarily
accepted level. One thing was specially observable
about it, the absence of all artificial solemnity of man-
ner, and .exceptional restraints of speech and conduct.
Whatever the day might be he was emphatically always
the same. He would chat with his people in the church-
yard before service as freely and as humorously as he
would have done in field or cottage. The same vivid
untiring interest in nature which has made his rambles
by the chalk streams of England, and through the high
woods of Trinidad, a source of perpetual enjoyment to
his readers, would flash out from him the very moment
he left church, if anything unusual or beautiful attracted
his attention. Yet during service his manner was always
impressive ; and at times, as during the celebration of
the Holy Communion until the recent judgment he
always consecrated in the eastward position it rose
into a reverence that was most striking and remarkable.
It was not the reverence of a school. It was evidently
the impulse of the moment, and being so, was not pre-
cise and systematic. Indeed, his individuality came out
involuntarily at unexpected moments, in a way that
occasionally was startling to those who did not know
him, and amusing to those who did. One Sunday
morning, for instance, in passing from the altar to the
pulpit he disappeared, and we discovered that he was
The Rector in his Church 3 1 9
searching for something on the ground, which when
found was carried to the vestry. Subsequently it came
out that he was assisting a lame butterfly, which by ita
beauty had attracted his attention, and which was in
great danger of being trodden on. There was nothing
incongruous, nothing of the nature of an effort to him,
in turning from the gravest thoughts and duties to the
simplest acts of kindness, and observation of everything
around him. 'He prayeth best who loveth best all
creatures great and small.'
" Many a heart will cherish through life dear mem-
ories of the Eversley sermons. It was well that Chester
and Westminster should grow familiar with the tones of
his voice before they were silenced forever. It was well
that men and women, among whom his name had been
a household word, should be able, Sunday after Sunday,
to come in crowds to listen to his burning words, in a
place befitting his genius, and his message to them. But
to my mind he was never heard to greater advantage
than in his own village pulpit. I have sometimes been
so moved by what he then said, that I could scarcely
restrain myself from calling out, as he poured forth words
now exquisitely sad and tender, now grand and heroic ;
with an insight into character, a knowledge of the world,
and a sustained eloquence which, each in its own way,
was matchless."
" I never did," said the Bishop of Truro, " and I be-
lieve I never shall, see anything that spoke so loud for
the Church of England as never to be put away, as did
the morning service in Eversley Church, whether he read
or whether he preached. ..."
This year, begun at Eversley and ended at Tor-
quay, was one of much anxiety and incessant
labor. Unable to get a pupil, he was therefore
unable to keep a curate. The Sunday services,
320 Charles Kingsley
night schools, and cottage lectures were done
single-handed ; and if he seemed to withdraw from
his old associates in the cause of co-operation,
and of the working men in London, it was not
from want of interest, but of time and strength.
He went only once up to Town, to lecture for the
Needlewomen's Association. Constant sickness
in the parish and serious illness in his own house-
hold gave him great anxiety; while the proceed-
ings of the King's College Council against Mr.
Maurice, on the ground of his views on eternal
punishment, depressed him deeply. But the
year had its lights as well as shadows; he had the
comfort of seeing the first good national school
built and opened in his parish; friends, new and
old, came and went Mr. Maurice frequently
Bishop McDougall of Labuan, and Mr. Alfred
Tennyson. His intimacy with Bishop Wilber-
force, Chevalier Bunsen, and Miss Mitford deep-
ened ; he made the personal acquaintance of Mr.
Robert Browning and his wife, and of several of
his hitherto unknown correspondents.
"Hypatia," perhaps his highest work of art,
this year came out as a whole. It cost him more
labor than any of his books, and a friend, who
was with him during the summer in which part of
it was written, says :
" I was struck not only with his power of work, but
with the extraordinary pains he took to be accurate in
detail. We spent one whole day in searching the four
folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was there,
and which was found there at last. The hard reading he
had undergone for that book alone would furnish an ao-
swer to some who thought him superficial."
Chevalier Bunsen 321
M Hypatia M has been translated into German,
into Dutch, and into Modern Greek. In one sec-
tion of the English Church it made him bitter
enemies, more bitter, perhaps, than were ftbmt
up by either "Yeast " or the " Saint's Tragedy."
It certainly lost him his D.C.L. degree at Ox-
ford in 1863. And wiry? but because, as Dean
Stanley remarked, of
fllS mOCu enthusiasm*
'Hypatia,' has farti*l with an everlasting brand the
name of the Alexandrian Cjril and his followers, for their
~ ' " ". _ : : 1 .". '. . ."."- 1 -". - " : ~. . ~.'. '. T'~ . . ~~ - ~. ~. '. ~. ~. '
low QiiniianUy and a tpuiiom orthodoxy. Read," the
Dean adds, ** if you would learn some of the most im-
pressive V****** of RvipBiJit ti jl history, read and
iinranfljr digest those pages, perhaps the most puwcifiil
he ever wrote which dose that wonderful story
.'.'.._ . : '. ' \ ". . ; :."..". 1 " . " t _ 7 I 1 ". ! . "
as they passed, one after another, 'each to m> own
place.'"
" I want," wrote Chevalier T*"*****, " to wish you joy
for the wonderinl picture of the iuwaul and uulvjud fife
of Hypataa's age, and of the creatkn of such -lim!!M'iyiy
as hers and Raphael's, and the other protagonists. . . .
Ton bare succeeded in qfr'v"tg a) poetically and philo-
sophically, one of the most rntaregrmg ajxi erentM epochs
: : - - : :.:..._: -. : : . -..--.:....:.::.-. ..::
jULtM.Aive febie ; yon resuscitate the real liislav of the
time and its l^"g character* so pn*^pHy that we
forget that fn*tt^Mt B cmifened upon us in every
page. . . .
u You have performed a great and failing work, but it
is a bold ndfrta^""g- Ton fire over the heads of me
pabJic, A*. 9*9 foani n, zs Nestor ssys, the prgmies of
the circulating Hbraiy. Besides yon have (pardon me)
322 Charles Kingsley
wronged your own child most cruelly. Are you aware
that many people object to reading or allowing it to be
read, because, the author says in the preface, it is not
written for those of pure mind? 1 My daughters ex-
claimed when they read that in the preface, after having
read to their mamma the whole in numbers to general
edification, as they do Bible and Shakespeare every day.
I should wish you to have said that, in describing and
picturing an age like that, there must here and there be
nudities as in nature and as in the Bible. Nudities there
are because there is truth. For God's sake, let that
preface not come before Germany without some modi-
fied expression. Impure must be the minds who can
be offended or hurt by your picture ! What offends and
hurts is the modern Lilsternheit, that veiling over inde-
cency, exciting imagination to draw off the veil in order
to see not God's naked nature, but corrupted man's in-
decency. Forgive that I take the child's part against
the father. But, indeed, that expression is not the right,
and unjust to yourself, and besides highly detrimental to
the book. . . .
1 The passage referred to is the opening paragraph of the
preface where the author says, " A picture e life in the fifth cen-
tury must needs contain much which will be painful to any reader,
and which the young and innocent will do well to leave altogether
unread. It has to represent a very hideous, though a very great,
age ; one of those critical and cardinal eras in the history of the
human race, in which virtues and vices manifest themselves side
by side even, at times, in the same person with the most
startling openness and power. One who writes of such an era
labors under a troublesome disadvantage. He dare not tell how
evil people were ; he will not be believed if he tell how good they
were. In the present case that disadvantage is doubled ; for
while the sins of the Church, however heinous, were still such as
admit of being expressed in words, the sins of the heathen world
against which she fought, were utterly indescribable ; and the
Christian apologist is thus compelled, for the sake of decency, to
state the Church's case far more weakly than the facts deserve."
Preface to " Hypatia."
Theological Essays 323
M The times before us are brimful of destruction,
therefore of regeneration. The Nemesis is coming, as
Ate. Ever yours faithfully,
" BUNSEN."
TO MRS. GASKELL
July 25, 1853. "I am sure that you will excuse my
writing to you thus abruptly when you read the cause of
my writing. I am told, to my great astonishment, that
you have heard painful speeches on account of ' Ruth ; '
what was told me raised all my indignation and disgust.
Now I have read only a little (though, of course, I know
the story) of the book ; for the same reason that I can-
not read ' Uncle Tom's Cabin,' or Othello,' or < The
Bride of Lammermoor.' It is coo painfully good, as I
found before I had read Lalf a volume. But this I can
tell you, that among all my larg acquaintance I never
heard, or have heard, but one unanimous opinion of the
beauty and righteousness of the book, and that, above
all, from real ladies, and really good women. If you
could have heard the things which I heard spoken of it
this evening by a thorough High Church fine lady of the
world, and by her daughter, too, a- pure and pious a
soul as one need see, you would have no more doubt
than I have, that whatsoever the ' snobs ' and the bigots
may think, English people, in general, have but one
opinion of ' Ruth,' and that is, one of utter satisfaction.
I doubt not you have had this said to you already often.
Believe me, you may have it said to you as often as you
will by the purest and most refined of English women.
May God bless you, and help you to write many more
such books as you have already written, is the fervent
wish of your very faithful servant.
"C. KINGSLEY."
Mr. Maurice's volume of "Theological Essays"
appeared this year containing one on Eternal Life
324 Charles Kmgsley
and Death, which was the cause of his dismissal
from King's College. The subject had occupied
Mr. Kingsley's own mind for years ; and the per-
secution of his friend and teacher roused all his
chivalry. "The book seemed to him," he said,
"to mark a new era in English Ecclesiastical
History." He at once took counsel with friends
at Oxford and Cambridge, before getting up a
protest against the proceedings of the council of
King's College.
" ' The Time and Eternity Question,' " he says, in
writing to a friend, " is coming before the public just
now in a way which may seriously affect our friend
Maurice, unless all who love him make good fight.
Maurice's essays, as you say, will constitute an epoch.
If the Church of England rejects them, her doom is
fixed. She will rot and die, as the Alexandrian did
before her. If she accepts them not as ' a code com-
plete,' but as hints towards a new method of thought,
she may save herself still. . . ."
"... Well, dearest master," he writes to Mr.
Maurice, " I shall not condole with you. You are
above that : but only remind you of this day's Psalms,
30th, which have been to me, strangely enough, the
Psalms for the day in all great crises of my life. . . .
You know what I feei for you. But your cause is mine.
We swim in the same boat, and stand or fall henceforth
together. I am the mouse helping the lion with this
difference, that the mouse was 0/-side the net when
she gnawed it, while I am inside. For if you are con-
demned for these ' opinions ' I shall and must therefore
avow them. ... I was utterly astonished at finding in
page after page things which I had thought, and hardly
dared to confess to myself, much less to preach. How-
ever, you have said them now ; and I, gaining courage,
Thomas Cooper 325
have begun to speak more and more boldly, thanks to
your blessed example, in a set of sermons on the
Catechism, accompanying your angel's trump on my
private penny-whistle. ... I was struck the other day
by the pleasure which a sermon of mine gave not only
to my clods, but to the best of my high church gentry,
in which sermon I had just copied word for word your
Essay on Eternal Life and Death of course stating the
thing more coarsely, and therefore more dangerously than
your wisdom would have let you do. ... I am too un-
happy about you to say much. I always expected it ;
but yet, when it comes one cannot face it a bit the better.
Nevertheless, it is but a passing storm of dust."
The following are extracts given without regard
to dates, from letters to Mr. Thomas Cooper,
Chartist, author of the "Purgatory of Suicides."
When Mr. Kingsley first knew Thomas Cooper,
he was lecturing on Strauss, to working men ; but
after a long struggle his doubts were solved. He
is now, at the age of 70, a preacher of Christianity. 1
February 15, 1850. " Many thanks for your paper.
On Theological points I will say nothing. We must
have a good long stand-up fight some day, when we
have wind and time. In the mean time, I will just say,
that I believe as devoutly as you, Goethe, or Strauss,
that God never does if one dare use the word, never
can break the Laws of Nature, which are His Laws,
manifestations of the eternal ideas of His Spirit and
Word but that Christ's Miracles seem to me the
highest realizations of those very laws. How ? you
will ask to which I answer, you must let me tell
1 Thomas Cooper's autobiography, published by Hodder and
Stoughton in 1872, is a book well worth reading for its own sake
and for the pictures of working-class life and thought, which it
reveals.
326 Charles Kingsley
you by and by. Your thinkings from Carlyle are well
chosen. There is much in Carlyle's ' Chartism ' and
the ' French Revolution,' and also in a paper called
' Characteristics,' among the miscellanies, which is ' good
doctrine and profitable for this age.' I cannot say what
/ personally owe to that man's writings.
" But you are right, a thousand times right, in saying
that the [co-operative] movement is a more important
move than any Parliamentary one. It is to get room
and power for such works, and not merely for any
abstract notions of political right that I fight for the
suffrage. I am hard at work harder, the doctors say,
than is wise. But 'the days are evil, and we must
redeem the time,' Our one chance for all the Eterni-
ties, to do a little work in for God and the people, for
whom, as I believe, He gave His well-beloved Son.
That is the spring of my work, Thomas Cooper ; it will
be yours ; consciously or unconsciously it is now, for
aught I know, if you be the man I take you for. . . ."
EVERSLEY: November 2, 1853. ". . . Your friend
is a very noble fellow. 1 As for converting either you or
1 This refers to a letter in which Thomas Cooper says, " My
friend, a noble young fellow, says, you are trying to convert him
to orthodoxy, and expresses great admiration for you. I wish
you success with him, and I had almost said I wish you could
next succeed with me ; but I think I am likely to stick where I
have stuck for some years never lessening, but I think increas-
ing, in my love for the truly divine Jesus but retaining the
Strauss view of the Gospel." " Ah I that grim Strauss," he says
in a later letter, " how he makes the iron agony go through my
bones and marrow, when I am yearning to get hold of Christ !
But you understand me ? Can you help me ? I wish I could be
near you, so as to have a long talk with you often. I wish you
could show me that Strauss's preface is illogical, and that it is
grounded on a.fe titio principii. I wish you could bring me into
a full and hearty reception of this doctrine of the Incarnation. I
wish you could lift off the dead weight from my head and heart,
that blasting, brutifying thought, that the grave must be my
cod all.'"
Thomas Cooper 327
him. what I want to do, is to make people believe in
the Incarnation, as the one solution of all one's doubts
and fears for all heaven and earth ; wherefore I should
say boldly, that, even if Strauss were right, the thing
must either have happened somewhere else, or will
happen somewhere some day, so utterly does both my
reason and conscience, and, as I think, judging from
history, the reason and conscience of the many in all
ages and climes, demand an Incarnation. As for
Strauss, I have read a great deal of him, and his pref-
ace carefully. Of the latter, I must say that it is
utterly illogical, founded on a gross petitio principii ; as
for the mass of the book, I would undertake, by the
same fallacious process, to disprove the existence of
Strauss himself, or any other phenomenon in heaven or
earth. But all this is a long story. As long as you do
see in Jesus the perfect ideal of man, you are in the
right path, you are going toward the light, whether or
not you may yet be allowed to see certain consequences
which, as I believe, logically follow from the fact of His
being the ideal. Poor ****'s denial (for so I am told)
of Jesus being the ideal of a good man, is a more serious
evil far. And yet Jesus Himself said, that, if any one
spoke a word against the Son of Man (/. e. against Him
as the perfect man) it should be forgiven him ; but the
man who could not be forgiven either in this world or
that to come, was the man who spoke against the Holy
Spirit, ;. f. who had lost his moral sense and did not
know what was righteous when he saw it a sin into
which we parsons are as likely to fall as any men, much
more likely than the publicans and sinners. As long
as your friend or any other man loves the good and
does it, and hates the evil and flees from it, my Catholic
creeds tell me that the Spirit of Jesus, ' the Word,' is
teaching that man ; and gives me hope that either here
or hereafter, if he be faithful over a few things, he shall
328 Charles Kingsley
be taught much. You see, this is quite a different view
from either the Dissenters or Evangelicals, or even the
High-Church parsons. But it is the view of those old
' Fathers ' whom they think they honor, and whom they
will find one day, in spite of many errors and supersti-
tions, to be far more liberal, humane, and philosophical
than our modern religionists. . .-."
TORQUAY: 1854. "I am now very busy at two
things. Working at the sea-animals of Toxbay for Mr.
Gosse, the naturalist, and thundering in behalf of sani-
tary reform. Those who fancy me a ' sentimentalist '
and a ' fanatic ' little know how thoroughly my own bent
is for physical science ; how I have been trained in it
from earliest boyhood; how I am happier now in
classifying a new polype, or solving a geognostic prob-
lem of strata, or any other bit of hard Baconian induc-
tion, than in writing all the novels in the world ; or how,
again, my theological creed has grown slowly and natu-
rally out of my physical one, till I have seen, and do
believe more and more utterly, that the peculiar doc-
trines of Christianity (as they are in the Bible, not as
some preachers represent them from the pulpit) coin-
cide with the loftiest and severest science. This blessed
belief did not come to me at once, and therefore I com-
plain of no man who arrives at it slowly, either from the
scientific or religious side ; nor have I yet spoken out
all that is in me, much less all that I see coming ; but I
feel that I am on a right path, and please God, I will
hold it to the end. I see by the by that you have
given out two ' Orations against taking away human life.'
I should be curious to hear what a man like you says on
the point, for I am sure you are free from any effemi-
nate sentimentalism, and by your countenance, would
make a terrible and good fighter, in a good cause. It
is a painful and difficult subject. After much thought, I
have come to the conclusion that you cannot take away
Thomas Cooper 329
human life. That animal life is all you take away;
and that very often the best thing you can do for a poor
creature is to put him out of this world, saying, 'You
are evidently unable to get on here. We render you
back into God's hanfls that He may judge you, and set
you to work again somewhere else, giving you a fresh
chance as you have spoilt this one.' But I speak really
in doubt and awe. . . . When I have read your
opinions I will tell you why I think the judicial taking
away animal life to be the strongest assertion of the
dignity and divineness of human life ; x and the taking
away life hi wars the strongest assertion of the dignity
and divineness of national life."
1855. **** sen t me some time ago a letter of
yours, in which you express dissatisfaction with the ' soft
indulgence ' which I and Maurice attribute to God. . . .
" My belief is, that God will punish (and has punished
already somewhat) every wrong thing I ever did, unless
I repent that is, change my behavior therein ; and
that His lightest blow is hard enough to break bone and
marrow. But as for saying of any human being whom I
ever saw on earth that there is no hope for them ; that
even if, under the bitter smart of just punishment, they
opened their eyes to their folly, and altered their minds,
even then God would not forgive them ; as for saying
that, I will not for all the world, and the rulers thereof.
I never saw a man in whom there was not some good,
and I believe that God sees that good far more clearly,
and loves it far more deeply, than I can, because He
Himself put it there, and, therefore, it is reasonable to
believe that He will educate and strengthen that good,
and chastise and scourge the holder of it till he obeys it,
and loves it, and gives up himself to it ; and that the
said holder will find such chastisement terrible enough,
1 See Sermon on Capital Punishment, preached in 1870, by
Rev. C. Kingsley. (All Saints' Day and other Sermons.)
Vol. 115
330 Charles Kingsley
if he is unruly and stubborn, I doubt not, and so much
the better for him. Beyond this I cannot say ; but I
like your revulsion into stern puritan vengeance it is
a lunge too far the opposite way, like Carlyle's; but
anything better than the belief 'that our Lord Jesus
Christ was sent into the world to enable any man to be
infinitely rewarded without doing anything worth re-
warding anything, oh ! God of mercy as well as jus-
tice, than a creed which strengthens the heart of the
wicked, by promising him life, and makes * * * * * * *
believe (as I doubt not he does believe) that though
a man is damned here his soul is saved hereafter.
Write to me. Your letters do me good."
1856. "You have an awful and glorious work
before you, 1 and you do seem to be going about it in
the right spirit namely, in a spirit of self-humiliation.
Don't be downhearted if outward humiliation, failure,
insult, apparent loss of influence, come out of it at first.
If God be indeed our Father in any real sense, then,
whom He loveth, He chasteneth, even as a father the
son in whom he delighteth. And ' Till thou art emptied
of thyself, God cannot fill thee,' though it be a saw of
the old mystics, is true and practical common sense.
God bless you and prosper you. . . .
"... Your letter this morning delighted me, for /
see that you see. If you are an old hand at the Socratic
method, you will be saved much trouble. I can quite
understand young fellows kicking at it. Plato always
takes care to let us see how all but the really earnest
kicked at it, and flounced off in a rage, having their own
notions torn to rags, and scattered, but nothing new put
in the place thereof. It seems to me (I speak really
humbly here) that the danger of the Socratic method,
which issued, two or three generations after, in making
1 Thomas Cooper had now re-commenced lecturing at th Hall
of Science on Sunday evenings, simply teaching theism, for he
had not advanced farther yet in positive conviction.
Thomas Cooper 331
his so-called pupils the academics mere destroying
skeptics, priding themselves on picking holes in every-
thing positive, is this to use it without Socrates' great
Idea, which he expressed by 'all knowledge being
memory,' which the later Platonists, both Greek and
Jew, e. g., Philo and St. John, and after them the good
among the Roman Stoics and our early Quakers, and
German mystics, expressed by saying that God, or
Christ, or the Word, was more or less in every man,
the Light which lightened him. Letting alone formal
phraseology, what I mean, and what Socrates meant,
was this, to confound people's notions and theories,
only to bring them to look their own reason in the face,
and to tell them boldly : you know these things at heart
already, if you will only look at what you know, and
clear from your own spirit the mists which your mere
brain and ' organization ' has wrapt round them. Men
may be at first more angry than ever at this ; they will
think you accuse them of hypocrisy when you tell them
' you know that I am right, and you wrong ; ' but it will
do them good at last. It will bring them to the one
great truth, that they too have a Teacher, a Guide, an
Inspirer, a Father : that you are not asserting for your-
self any new position, which they have not attained,
but have at last found out the position which has been
all along equally true of them and you, that you are all
God's children, and that your Father's Love is going out
to seek and to save them and you, by the only possible
method, viz., teaching them that He is their Father.
"I am very anxious to hear your definition of a
person. I have not been able yet to get one, or a
proof of personal existence which does not spring from
d priori subjective consciousness, and which is, in fact,
Fichte's. ' I am I.' I know it. Take away my ' or-
ganization,' cast my body to the crows or the devil,
logically or physically, strip me of all which makes me
332 Charles Kingsley
palpable to you and to the universe, still I have the
unconquerable knowledge that ' I am I,' and must and
shall be so for ever. How I get this idea I know not :
but it is the most precious of all convictions, as it is the
first; and I can only suppose it is a revelation from
God, whose image it is in me, and the first proof of my
being His child. My spirit is a person ; and the child
of the Absolute Person, the Absolute Spirit. And so is
yours, and yours, and yours. In saying that, I go on
* Analogy,' which is Butler's word for fair Baconian
Induction. I find that I am absolutely I, an individual
and indissoluble person; therefore I am bound to
believe at first sight that you, and you, and you arc
such also. . . . This is all I seem to know about it
as yet.
" But how utterly right you are in beginning to teach
the real meaning of words, which people now (parsons
as well as atheists) use in the loosest way. Take even
'organization,' paltry word as it is, and make them
analyze it, and try if they can give any definition of it
(drawn from its real etymology) which does not imply a
person distinct from the organs, or tools, and organizing
or arranging those tools with a mental view to a result.
I should advise you to stick stoutly by old Paley. He
is right at root, and I should advise you, too, to make
your boast of Baconian Induction being on your side,
and not on theirs; for 'many a man talks of Robin
Hood who never shot in his bow,' and the ' Reasoner '
party, while they prate about the triumphs of science,
never, it seems to me, employ intentionally in a single
sentence the very inductive method whereby that sci-
ence has triumphed. ... Be of good cheer. WHEN
the wicked man turneth from his wickedness (then,
there and then), he shall save his soul alive as you
seem to be consciously doing, and all his sin and his
iniquity shall not be mentioned unto him. What your
Thomas Cooper 333
measure ' of guilt (if there can be a measure of the
incommensurable spiritual) I know not. But this I
know, that as long as you keep the sense of guilt alive
in your own mind, you will remain justified in God's
mind; as long as you set your sins before your face,
He will set them behind his back. Do you ask how I
know that ? I will not quote ' texts,' though there are
dozens. I will not quote my own spiritual experience,
though I could honestly: I will only say, that such a
moral law is implied in the very idea of ' Our Father
in heaven.' . . ."
". . . You must come and see me, and talk over
many things. That is what I want. An evening's
smoke and chat in my den, and a morning's walk on our
heather moors, would bring our hearts miles nearer each
other, and our heads too. As for the political move,
I can give you no advice save, say little, and do less. I
am ready for all extensions of the franchise, if we have
a government system of education therewith : till then I
am merely stupidly acquiescent. More poor and igno-
rant voters ? Very well more bribees ; more bribers j
more pettifogging attorneys in parliament ; more local
interests preferred to national ones; more substitution
of the delegate system for the representative one. . . ."
June 14, 1856. " It is, I know it, a low aim (I don't
mean morally) for a man who has had the aspirations
which you have ; but may not our Heavenly Father just
be bringing you through this seemingly degrading work, 1
to give you what I should think you never had, what it
cost me bitter sorrow to learn, the power of working in
harness, and so actually drawing something, and being
1 Thomas Cooper had been given copying work at the Board of
Health ; and his hearers at the Hall of Science, already made bit-
ter by his deserting the atheist camp, made the fact of his doing
government work and taking government pay a fresh ground ol
opposition to his teaching.
334 Charles Kingsley
of real use. Be sure, if you can once learn that
lesson, in addition to the rest you have learnt, you
will rise to something worthy of you yet. ... It has
seemed to me, in watching you and your books, and
your life, that just what you wanted was self-control. I
don't mean that you could not starve, die piece-meal,
for what you thought right ; for you are a brave man,
and if you had not been, you would not have been alive
now. But it did seem to me, that what you wanted was the
quiet, stern cheerfulness, which sees that things are wrong,
and sets to to right them, but does it trying to make the
best of them all the while, and to see the bright side ; and
even if, as often happens, there be no bright side to see,
still ' possesses his soul in patience,' and sits whistling
and working till ' the pit be digged for the ungodly.'
"Don't be angry with me and turn round and say,
' You, sir, who never knew what it was to want a meal in
your life, who belong to the successful class who have,
what do you mean by preaching these cold platitudes to
me ? ' For, Thomas Cooper, I have known what it was
to want things more precious to you, as well as to me,
than a full stomach ; and I learnt or rather I am
learning a little to wait for them till God sees good.
And the man who wrote ' Alton Locke ' must know a
little of what a man like you could feel to a man like me,
if the devil entered into him. And yet I tell you,
Thomas Cooper, that there was a period in my life
and one not of months, but for years, in which I would
have gladly exchanged your circumstantia, yea, your-
self, as it is now, for my circumstantia, and myself, as
they were then. And yet I had the best of parents and
a home, if not luxurious, still as good as any man's need
be. You are a far happier man, now, I firmly believe,
than I was for years of my life. The dark cloud has passed
with me now. Be but brave and patient, and (I will
swear now), by God, sir ! it will pass with you."
Thomas Cooper 335
June, 1856. "You are in the right way yet. I can
put you in no more right way. Your sense of sin is not
fanaticism ; it is, I suppose, simple consciousness of fact.
As for helping you to Christ, I do not believe I can one
inch. I see no hope but in prayer, in going to Him
yourself, and saying : ' Lord, if Thou art there, if Thou
art at all, if this all be not a lie, fulfil Thy reputed
promises, and give me peace and the sense of forgive-
ness, and the feeling that, bad as I may be, Thou lovest
me still, seeing all, understanding all, and therefore
making allowances for all ! ' I have had to do that in
past days ; to challenge Him through outer darkness
and the silence of night, till I almost expected that He
would vindicate His own honor by appearing visibly as
He did to St. Paul and St. John ; but He answered in the
still small voice only ; yet that was enough.
" Read the book by all means ; but the book will not
reveal Him. He is not in the book ; He is in the Heaven
which is as near you and me as the air we breathe, and
out of that He must reveal Himself; neither priests
nor books can conjure Him up, Cooper. Your Wesleyan
teachers taught you, perhaps, to look for Him in the
book, as Papists would have in the bread ; and when you
found He was not in the book, you thought Him no-
where ; but He is bringing you out of your first mistaken
idolatry, ay, through it, and through all wild wanderings
since, to know Him Himself, and speak face to face
with Him as a man speaks with his friend. Have
patience with Him. Has He not had patience with
you? And therefore have patience with all men and
things ; and then you will rise again in His good time the
stouter for your long battle. . . .
". . . For yourself, my dear friend, the secret of life
for you and for me, is to lay our purposes and characters
continually before Him who made them, and cry, ' Do
Thou purge me, and so alone I shall be clean. Them
336 Charles Kingsley
requires! truth in the inward parts. Thou wilt make
me to understand wisdom secretly.' What more rational
belief? For surely if there be any God, and He made
us at first, He who makes can also mend His own work
if it get out of gear. What more miraculous in the
doctrines of regeneration and renewal, than in the mere
fact of creation at all ?
" I am glad to hear you are regularly at work at the
Board. It will lead to something better, doubt not;
and if it be dry drudgery, after all, some of the greatest
men who have ever lived (perhaps almost all) have had
their dull collar-work of this kind, which after all was
useful in keeping mind and temper in order. I have a
good deal of it, and find it most blessed and useful."
April 3, 1857. "Go on and prosper. 1 Let me
entreat you, in broaching Christianity, to consider
carefully the one great Missionary sermon on record,
viz., St. Paul's at Athens. There the Atonement, in its
sense of a death to avert God's anger, is never men-
tioned. Christ's Kingship is his theme ; the Resurrec-
tion, not the death, the great fact. Oh, begin by
insisting, as I have done in the end of ' Hypatia,' on the
Incarnation as morally necessary, to prove the goodness
of the Supreme Being. Insist on its being the Incarna-
tion of Him who had been in the world all along. . . .
Do bear in mind that you have to tell them of The
Father Their Father of Christ, as manifesting that
Father ; and all will go well. On the question of future
punishment, I should have a good deal to say to you. I
believe that it is the crux to most hearts."
May 9, 1857. "About endless torment. . . . You
may say, i. Historically, that, a. The doctrine occurs
nowhere in the Old Testament, or any hint of it.
1 T. Cooper had written to say that he had now begun the
" grand contest." " God has been so good to me that I must
confess Christ, and we shall have greater rage now that I have
come to Christianity."
Thomas Cooper 337
The expression, in the end of Isaiah, about the fire
unquenched, and the worm not dying, is plainly of the
dead corpses of men upon the physical earth, in the
valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, where the offal of Jerusa-
lem was burned perpetually. Enlarge on this, as it is the
passage which our Lord quotes, and by it the meaning
of His words must be primarily determined. b. The
doctrine of endless torment was, as a historical fact,
brought back from Babylon by the Rabbis. It was a
very ancient primary doctrine of the Magi, an appendage
of their fire-kingdom of Ahriman, and may be found in
the old Zends, long prior to Christianity. c. St. Paul
accepts nothing of it as far as we can tell, never making
the least allusion to the doctrine. d. The Apocalypse
simply repeats the imagery of Isaiah, and of our Lord ;
but asserts, distinctly, the non-endlessness of torture,
declaring that in the consummation, not only death,
but Hell, shall be cast into the Lake of Fire. e. The
Christian Church has never really held it exclusively,
till now. It remained quite an open question till the
age of Justinian, 530, and significantly enough, as soon
as 200 years before that, endless torment for the heathen
became a popular theory, purgatory sprang up synchro-
nously by the side of it, as a relief for the conscience
and reason of the Church. f. Since the Reformation,
it has been an open question in the English Church, and
the philosophical Platonists, of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, always considered it as such. g. The
Church of England, by the deliberate expunging of the
42nd Article which affirmed endless punishment, has
declared it authoritatively to be open. h. It is so,
in fact. Neither Mr. Maurice, I, or any others, who
have denied it, can be dispossessed or proceeded against
legally in any way whatsoever. Exegeticalty, you may
say, I think, That the meanings of the word alu>v and
have little or nothing to do with it, even if auav
338 Charles Kingsley
be derived from dei always, which I greatly doubt. The
word never is used in Scripture anywhere else, in the
sense of endlessness (vulgarly called eternity). It
always meant, both in Scripture and out, a period of
time. Else, how could it have a plural how could you
talk of the seons, and aeons of aeons, as the Scripture
does ? Nay, more, how talk of ovros 6 alwv, which the
translators, with laudable inconsistency, have translated
' this world/ /'. e., this present state of things, ' Age,'
' dispensation,' or epoch aioivtos, therefore, means, and
must mean, belonging to an epoch, or the epoch, auovtos
KoXatris is the punishment allotted to that epoch. Always
bear in mind, what Maurice insists on, and what is so
plain to honest readers, that our Lord and the Apostles
always speak of being in the end of an age or aeon, not
as ushering in a new one. Come to judge and punish
the old world, and to create a new one out of its
ruins, or rather as the S. S. better expresses it, to burn up
the chaff and keep the wheat, *. e., all the elements of
food as seed for the new world.
" I think you may say, that our Lord took the popu-
lar doctrine because He found it, and tried to correct and
purify it, and put it on a really moral ground. You may
quote the parable of Dives and Lazarus (which was the
emancipation from the Tartarus theory) as the one
instance in which our Lord professedly opens the
secrets of the next world, that He there represents
Dives as still Abraham's child, under no despair, not cut
off from Abraham's sympathy, and under a direct
moral training, of which you see the fruit. He is
gradually weaned from the selfish desire of indulgence
for himself, to love and care for his brethren, a divine
step forward in his life, which of itself proves him not
to be lost. The impossibility of Lazarus getting to him,
or vice versd, expresses plainly the great truth, that each
being where he ought to be at that time, interchange of
Thomas Cooper 339
place (i. e., of spiritual state) is impossible. But it says
nothing against Dives rising out of his torment, when he
has learnt the lesson of it, and going where he ought to
go. The common interpretation is merely arguing in
a circle, assuming that there are but two states of the
dead, ' Heaven ' and * Hell,' and then trying at once to
interpret the parable by the assumption, and to prove
the assumption from the parable. Next, you may say
that the English * damnation,' like the Greek /caraKpio-is,
is perhaps Kpib-is simple, simply means condemnation,
and is (thank God) retained in that sense in various of
our formularies, where I always read it, e. g., ' eateth to
himself damnation,' with sincere pleasure, as protests
in favor of the true and rational meaning of the word,
against the modern and narrower meaning.
" You may say that Fire and Worms, whether physi-
cal or spiritual, must in all logical fairness be supposed to
do what fire and worms do do, viz., destroy decayed and
dead matter, and set free its elements to enter into new
organisms ; that, as they are beneficent and purifying
agents in this life, they must be supposed such in the
future life, and that the conception of fire as an engine
of torture, is an unnatural use of that agent, and not to
be attributed to God without blasphemy, unless you
suppose that the suffering (like all which He inflicts) is
intended to teach man something which he cannot learn
elsewhere.
" You may say that the catch, ' All sin deserves infi-
nite punishment, because it is against an Infinite Being,'
is a worthless amphiboly, using the word infinite in two
utterly different senses, and being a mere play on sound.
That it is directly contradicted by Scripture, especially
by our Lord's own words, which declare that every man
(not merely the wicked) shall receive the due reward of
his deeds, that he who, &c., shall be beaten with few
stripes, and so forth. That the words ' He shall not go
34 Charles Kingsley
out till he has paid the uttermost farthing,' evidently
imply (unless spoken in cruel mockery) that he may go
out then. . . .
" Finally, you may call on them to rejoice that there
is a fire of God the Father whose name is Love, burning
for ever unquenchably, to destroy out of every man's
heart and out of the hearts of all nations, and off the
physical and moral world, all which offends and makes
a lie. That into that fire the Lord will surely cast all
shams, lies, hypocrisies, tyrannies, pedantries, false doc-
trines, yea, and the men who love them too well to give
them up, that the smoke of their Bao-avr/*ds (. /., the
torture which makes men confess the truth, for that is
the real meaning of it; Boo-awrftos means the touch-
stone by which gold was tested) may ascend perpetu-
ally, for a warning and a beacon to all nations, as the
smoke of the torment of French aristocracies, and Bour-
bon dynasties, is ascending up to Heaven and has been
^ver since 1 793. Oh, Cooper is it not good news
that that fire is unquenchable ; that that worm will not
die. . . . The parti pritre tried to kill the worm which
was gnawing at their hearts, making them dimly aware
that they were wrong, and liars, and that God and His
universe were against them, and that they and their
system were rotting and must die. They cannot kill
God's worm, Thomas Cooper. You cannot look in the
face of many a working continental priest without seeing
that the worm is at his heart. You cannot watch their
conduct without seeing that it is at the heart of their
system. God grant that we here in England we
parsons (dissenting and church) may take warning by
them. The fire may be kindled for us. The worm
may seize our hearts. God grant that in that day we
may have courage to let the fire and the worm do their
work to say to Christ, These too are Thine, and out
of Thine infinite love they have come. Thou requirest
Thomas Cooper 341
truth in the inward parts, and I will thank Thee for
any means, however bitter, which Thou usest to make
me true. I want to be an honest man, and a right
man ! And, oh joy, Thou wantest me to be so also.
Oh joy, that though I long cowardly to quench Thy fire,
I cannot do it. Purge us, therefore, O Lord, though
it be with fire. Burn up the chaff of vanity and self-
indulgence, of hasty prejudices, second-hand dogmas,
husks which do not feed my soul, with which I cannot
be content, of which I feel ashamed daily and if
there be any grains of wheat in me, any word or thought
or power of action which may be of use as seed for my
nation after me, gather it, O Lord, into Thy garner.
" Yes, Thomas Cooper. Because I believe hi a God
of Absolute and Unbounded Love, therefore I believe in
a Loving Anger of His, which will and must devour and
destroy all which is decayed, monstrous, abortive in His
universe, till all enemies shall be put under His feet, to
be pardoned surely, if they confess themselves in the
wrong, and open their eyes to the truth. And God
shall be All in All. Those last are wide words. It is
he who limits them, not I who accept them in their
fulness, who denies the verbal inspiration of Scripture.
" P. S. When you talk to them on the Trinity, don't
be afraid of saying two things.
" They will say ' Three in On: ' is contrary to sense
and experience. Answer, that is your ignorance. Every
comparative anatomist will tell you the exact contrary ;
that among the most common, though the most puzzling
phenomena is multiplicity in unity divided life in the
same individual of every extraordinary variety of case.
That distinction of persons with unity of individuality
(what the old schoolmen properly called substance) is to
be met with in some thousand species of animals, e. g.,
all the compound polypes, and that the soundest physi-
ologists, like Huxley, are compelled to talk of these
342 Charles Kingsley
animals in metaphysic terms just as paradoxical as, and
almost identical with, those of the theologian. Ask
them then, whether, granting one primordial Being who
has conceived and made all other beings, it is absurd to
suppose in Him some law of multiplicity in unity, anal-
ogous to that on which He has constructed so many
millions of His creatures. . . .
"I have said my say on the Trinity in the end of
'Yeast,' and in the end of 'Hypatia.' . . ."
" But my heart demands the Trinity, as much as my
reason. I want to be sure that God cares for us, that
God is our Father, that God has interfered, stooped,
sacrificed Himself for us. I do not merely want to love
Christ a Christ, some creation or emanation of God's
whose will and character, for aught I know, may be
different from God's. I want to love and honor the
absolute, abysmal God Himself, and none other will
satisfy me and in the doctrine of Christ being co-
equal and co-eternal, sent by, sacrificed by, His Father,
that He might do His Father's will, I find it and no
puzzling texts, like those you quote, shall rob me of that
rest for my heart, that Christ is the exact counterpart of
Him in whom we live, and move, and have our being.
The texts are few, only two after all ; on them I wait
for light, as I do on many more : meanwhile, I say
boldly, if the doctrine be not in the Bible, it ought to
be, for the whole spiritual nature of man cries out for
it. Have you read Maurice's essay on the Trinity in
his theological essays ? addressed to Unitarians ? If not,
you must read it. About the word Trinity, I feel much
as you do. It seems unfortunate that the name of
God should be one which expresses a mere numerical
abstraction, and not a moral property. It has, I think,
helped to make men forget that God is a spirit
that is, a moral being, and that moral spiritual, and that
Thomas Cooper 343
morality (in the absolute) is God, as St. John saith God
is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God,
and God in him words which, were they not happily
in the Bible, would be now called rank and rampant
Pantheism. But, Cooper, I have that faith in Christ's
right government of the human race, that I have good
hope that He is keeping the word Trinity, only because
it has not yet done its work; when it has, He will
inspire men with some better one."
CHAPTER XII
1854
AGED 35
TORQUAY SEASIDE STUDIES SANITARY WORK LECTURES
IN EDINBURGH DEUTSCHE THEOLOGIE ABOUT SISTER-
HOODS CRIMEAN WAR SETTLES IN NORTH DEVON
WRITES " WESTWARD Ho 1 "
" Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water snakes ;
They moved In tracks of shining white,
And when they rear'd the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Oh happy living things ! no tongue
Their beauty might declare :
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I bless'd them unaware."
COLERIDGE'S " Ancient Mariner."
" Happy truly is the naturalist. He has no time for melancholy
dreams. The earth becomes to him transparent ; everywhere he
sees significance, harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect end-
lessly interlinked, which draw him out of the narrow sphere of
self . . . into a pure and wholesome region of joy and wonder."
C. K.
THE winter and spring of 1854 were passed
at Torquay, his Bishop having given him
leave of absence on account of his wife's health.
The place had its own peculiar charm for him,
not only from its rich fauna and flora, but from
its historical associations. Torbay gave him his
first inspiration for " Westward Ho ! "
Torquay 345
We cannot gaze on its blue ring of water," he said,
" and the great limestone bluffs which bound it to the
north and south without a glow passing through our
hearts, as we remember the terrible and glorious pageant
which passed by it in the bright days of July, 1588,
when the Spanish Armada ventured slowly past Berry
Head, with Elizabeth's gallant pack of Devon captains
(for the London fleet had not yet joined), following fast
in its wake, and dashing into the midst of the vast line,
undismayed by size and numbers, while their kin and
friends stood watching and praying on the cliffs, specta-
tors of Britain's Salamis. The white line of houses, too,
on the other side of the bay, is Brixham, famed as the
landing-place of William of Orange ; and the stone on
the pier-head, which marks his first footprints on British
ground, is sacred in the eyes of all true English Whigs ;
and close by stands the castle of the settler of New-
foundland, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh's half-brother,
most learned of all Elizabeth's admirals in life, most
pious and heroic in death. ..."
This was the first rest he had enjoyed for many
years, and the temporary cessation from sermon
writing and parish work, and the quiet peaceful
Sundays with his wife and children were most
welcome. For at this time, and for some years to
come, the clergy of all parties in the Church stood
aloof from him as a suspected person; and the
attacks of the religious press, perhaps happily for
him, had so alarmed the clergy of Torquay, High
Church and Evangelical, that all pulpit doors
were closed against the author of "Alton Locke,"
"Yeast," and "Hypatia." Once only he was
asked to preach in the parish church for a charity,
and once at St. John's, in a Lenten week-day
service, when he surprised the congregation, a
346 Charles Kingsley
High Church one, by his reverent and orthodox
views on the Holy Eucharist. Settled at Liver-
mead, the father and children spent bright hours
together daily on the shore, of which he speaks :
" Wanderings among rock and pool, mixed up with
holiest passages of friendship and of love, and the inter-
communion of equal minds and sympathetic hearts,
and of the laugh of children drinking in health from
every breeze and instruction in every step, running
ever and anon with proud delight to add their little
treasure to their father's stock ; and of happy evenings
spent over the microscope and the vase, in examining,
arranging, preserving, and noting down in the diary the
wonders and the labors of the happy busy day."
This seaside life led to a voluminous corre-
spondence, each letter illustrated by his own
beautiful sketches, and to an article in the
"North British Review," on "The Wonders of
the Shore," which was afterwards developed into
"Glaucus," and contained not only studies in
natural history, but some of his deepest thoughts
on theology as connected with the transmutation
theory, and the lately published "Vestiges of
Creation." A daily journal of natural history
was kept, and hampers of sea beasts, live shells,
and growing seaweed sent off to Mr. Gosse, in
London. After each low tide, some fresh treas-
ure was discovered, and drawings and a minute
description made. In a cave, near Goodrington,
he found washed ashore, after a succession of
southeasterly gales, a rare zoophyte, Montagu's
Chirodata (Synapta digitatd), which had not been
seen for years; Cardium Tuberculatum, the red-
legged cockle, a shell quite new to him, lay on the
Seaside Studies 347
sands in countless numbers. In the well-stocked
vivarium at home he could study the ways of the
lovely little Eolis papillosa, the bright lemon-
colored Doris, the Cucumaria Hyndmanii, with
their wondrous gills and feathers to common
eyes mere sea-slugs, and varieties of Serpulae,
with their fairy fringes only visible at happy
moments to those who have the patience to watch
and wait for the sight; while the more minute
forms of the exquisite Campanularia Syringa and
Volubilis, the various Sertularii, and that "pale
pink flower of stone," the Carophyllia Smithii,
with numberless others, were examined under the
microscope. The manners and customs too of
the soldier crab were not only a source of inex-
haustible merriment, but led him to some of the
deep strange speculations so reverently hinted at
in the pages of " Glaucus ; " while the habits of
the spider crab suggested lessons of sanitary
science. At Torquay, he fulfilled before his
children's eyes his own ideal of the
"... perfect naturalist, one who should combine in
himself the very essence of true chivalry, namely, self-
devotion, whose moral character, like the true knight of
old, must be gentle and courteous, brave and enterpris-
ing and withal patient and undaunted in investigation,
knowing (as Lord Bacon would have put it), that the
kingdom of nature, like the kingdom of heaven, must
be taken by violence, and that only to those who knock
earnestly and long, does the Great Mother open the
doors of her sanctuary, . . . always reverent, yet never
superstitious, wondering at the commonest, yet not sur-
prised by the most strange ; free from the idols of size
and sensuous loveliness, . . . holding every phenome-
non worth the noting down ; believing that every pebble
348 Charles Kingsley
holds a treasure, every bud a revelation ; making it a
point of conscience to pass over nothing through laziness
or hastiness, lest the vision once offered and despised
should be withdrawn, and looking at every object as if
he were never to behold it more. ..."
Before leaving Torquay he made a rough list of
about sixty species of Mollusks, Annelids, Crus-
tacea, and Polypes found on the shore, nearly all
new to him, and revealing a new world of won-
ders to his wife and children. The attitude of
his mind during those rare hours of rest and lib-
erty at Torquay, is well described by Dean
Stanley :
" Such was the wakefulness, such the devouring curi-
osity, of him whose life and conversation, as he walked
amongst ordinary men, was often as of a waker among
drowsy sleepers, as a watchful sentinel in advance of the
slumbering host. . . . Perhaps even more than to the
glories and the wonders of man, he was far beyond what
falls to the lot of most, alive and awake in every pore to
the beauty, the marvels of nature. That contrast in the
old story of ' eyes and no eyes,' was the contrast be-
tween him and common men. That eagle eye seemed
to discern every shade and form of animal and vegetable
life. That listening ear, like that of the hero in the
fairy tale, seemed almost to catch the growing of the
grass and the opening of the shell. Nature to him was
a companion speaking with a thousand voices. And
Nature was to him also the voice of God, the face of
the Eternal and Invisible, as it can only be to those
who study and love and know it. For his was no idle
dreamer's pleasure ; it was a wakefulness not only to
the force and beauty of the outward world, but to the
causes of its mysterious operations, to the explanations
Sanitary Matters 349
given by its patient students and explorers." (Funeral
Sermon, 1875.)
But these pursuits, however enchanting, did
not engross him to the forgetfulness of the great
social questions of the day. Early in the year
we find him busy about sanitary matters, and, in
a preface to his Three Cholera Sermons, which
he now republished as a tract, entitled, "Who
Causes Pestilence ? " urging the clergy to turn
their minds to the subject.
"These sermons," he says, "were preached during
the last appearance of the cholera in Great Britain.
Since then, both Scripture, reason, and medical experi-
ence have corroborated the views which were put forth
in them ; and as a clergyman, I feel bound to express
my gratitude to Lord Palmerston for having refused to
allow a National Fast- day on the occasion of the present
re-appearance of pestilence, and so having prevented
fresh scandal to Christianity, fresh excuses for the sel-
fishness, laziness, and ignorance which produce pesti-
lence, fresh turning men's minds away from the real
causes of this present judgment, to fanciful and super-
stitious ones. It was to be hoped, that after the late
discoveries of sanitary science, the clergy of all denom-
inations would have felt it a sacred duty to go forth on
a crusade against filth, and so to save the lives of
thousands, not merely during the presence of cholera,
but every year. . . .
" Some fancy that the business of clergymen is exclu-
sively what they choose to call ' spiritual,' and that
sanitary reform, being what they choose to call a ' secu-
lar ' question, is beyond their province. This unscrip-
tural distinction still lingers in the minds of a few, both
lay and clerical, especially of those who attach a super-
stitious importance to the mere act of almsgiving as
350 Charles Kingsley
something which will increase their chance of future
happiness, while they seem, in many cases, to make that
duty an excuse for leaving their tenants and parishioners
to live the life of swine ; ' paying tithe of mint, anise,
and cummin, and neglecting the weightier matters of
the law, justice, mercy, and truth." . . . 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 men that the Son of
God has 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. . . .
Some, again, dislike the notion of its being possible to
abolish pestilence by sanitary reform, because it seems
to interfere with their own religious theories and doc-
trines. . . . But that man is to be pitied who can shut
his eyes to facts, and deny the evidence of his own
senses and reason, for the sake of preserving his own
dark and superstitious calumnies against the God of
order, justice, and love.
" 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 urging them too plainly
and boldly, lest they should attack the vested interests,
and thereby excite the displeasure of wealthy and in-
fluential members of their congregations . . . and put
aside sanitary reform, lest it should compel them to say
something which might be ' personal ' and ' offensive '
to those of their respectable hearers whose incomes are
derived from the filth, disease, and brutality of the
lower classes. Let all these three classes of ministers,
of whatever denomination they may be let them but
read a little, a very little, on the subject . . . and see
the actual practical results which have been obtained by
Sanitary Matters 351
sanitary reform, and the providing of fit dwellings for
the lower classes, not merely in extirpating disease, but
in extirpating drunkenness, ferocity, and those coarser
vices of which too many preachers speak as if they were
the only sins worth rebuking. Let them consider the
enormous power which they can still employ each
man in his pulpit, his congregation, his parish to de-
liver those from death whom the covetousness and neg-
lect of man have appointed to die ; and then let them
solemnly ask themselves whether, unless they bestir
themselves very differently from what they yet have
done, their brother's 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 offerings; your . . .
Sabbaths and your calling of assemblies I cannot away
with ; it is iniquity, even your solemn meeting. Your
appointed feasts My soul hateth ; they are a trouble to
me ; I am weary to bear them. And when you spread
forth your hands, I will hide Mine eyes from you ; yea,
when you make many prayers, I will not hear : 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.' "
In February he went to Edinburgh to deliver
four lectures on the "Schools of Alexandria," at
352 Charles Kingsley
the Philosophical Institute. It was his first visit
to Scotland, where he was warmly welcomed. On
his return he remained alone at Eversley during
a change of curates, working the parish, getting
up an anti-cholera fund, writing a sanitary pam-
phlet, and preparing statistics for a sanitary de-
putation, of which % he was a member, to Lord
Palmerston.
In the spring he went up again to London to
give evidence before the House of Commons on
sanitary matters, and on the insufficient pay
of parish medical officers. The experience of
eleven years had convinced him that the pay of
the parish doctor was insufficient; and he was
glad to give evidence on the subject, and to point
out the fact that under the present salaries no
medical man could afford, or be expected, to give
two of the most important but most expensive
medicines quinine and cod-liver oil to their
poor patients. The following are extracts from
his daily letters to his wife :
EDINBURGH: February. ". . . Edinburgh itself de-
serves all the praises which have been lavished upon it.
The esplanade where I sit now is certainly the finest in
Great Britain. The public buildings very splendid, and
so are the spires and churches, all of gray stone. The
Castle in the center of the city, and Arthur's Seat, with
its basalt crags, 800 feet high, ready to topple into the
town. This afternoon I walked with F. Russell to the
Corstorphine Hills, and got a noble view of the city,
which there looked very like Oxford, with a huge
Windsor Castle in the middle of it, and the Firth of
Forth, with its islands and the Fifeshire Hills. Most
beautiful, God knows, it was. The people very kindly.
Russell put me in rather better heart about my lectures,
.Lectures in Edinburgh 353
over which I have felt more nervous than I have ever
done in my life, and would give anything to run right
away home. ..."
"... Lecture went off well. I was dreadfully ner-
vous, and actually cried with fear up in my own room
beforehand ; but after praying I recovered myself, and
got through it very well, being much cheered and
clapped. ... All the notabilities came, and were intro-
duced to me ; and I had some pleasant talk with Sir
John Maxwell. Mr. Erskine, of Linlathen, is a charm-
ing old man. ..."
"... My second lecture went off better than the
first, in spite of the delicate points on which it touched.
Nothing can exceed the cordiality of people. ... I
drove with Mrs. B. round the Queen's drive to Arthur's
Seat. It is perfectly magnificent a great wild volcano
peak hanging over the city, with Holyrood at the foot.
Just starting for Linlathen. ..."
LINLATHEN : Feb. 20. " This place is very pleasant,
and Mr. Erkskine delightful. He gave us a long exposi-
tion last night, about the indwelling Word, and I am
delighted to find that his views and mine seem to agree
thoroughly ; but I long so painfully for you and the chil-
dren too, that I have no pleasure or peace in anything,
and am counting the days till I get back. Tell Rose
and Maurice I have got a strange sponge for each of
them, which I picked up upon the shore of the Firth
ofTay."
WARRBTON : Feb. 22. " Lecture last night went off
well. Smith, the translator of * Fichte/ came up to me
and begged me to publish them. People seem surprised
at my power of condensing. To me they seem dread-
fully trashy. God knows. Erskine and others think they
will do much good, but will infuriate the Free Kirk."
February 26. " It is at last over, and I start for
England to-morrow. The last lecture was more crowded
Vol. 116
354 Charles Kingsley
than ever. . . . Altogether it has been (if you had but
been with me, and alas ! that poisons everything) one
of the most pleasant and successful episodes in my life.
I have been heaped with kindness. I have got my say
said without giving offence, and made friendships which
I hope will last for life. I cannot be thankful enough
to God for having sent me here, and carried me through.
Sir John Maxwell, a perfect fine gentleman of the old
school, who was twenty-five years in Parliament, approves
highly of ' Alton Locke ' and ' Yeast ' ; as also does his
wife, Lady Matilda, who told me I had a glorious career
before me, and bade God speed me in it. ... "
February 27. "The Guards march to-morrow!
How it makes one's blood boil ! We send 10,000
picked men to Malta, en route for Constantinople, and
the French 60,000. ..."
EVERSLEY. " The working men in London, includ-
ing many of the old Chartists of 1848, are going to pre-
sent a grand address to Maurice in St. Martin's Hall, at
which, I believe, I am to be a chairman. Kiss the babes
for me, and tell them I long to be with them on Tor
sands. ..."
" Did I ever tell you of my delightful chat with Bunsen ?
I have promised him to write a couple of pages preface
to Miss Winkworth's translation of the ' Deutsche Theo-
logia.' Oh ! how you will revel in that book ! . . . "
"... I have a very heavy evening's work before
going to Lord Palmerston. Helps is coming out as a
hero. What a thought that we may by one great and
wise effort save from ten to twenty thousand lives in
London alone ! . . . I am quite content to stay here
and do my duty (till the curate comes), though I long
more than ever I did in my life for you and for those
dear dear children. . . . To-day has been lovely
bright sun crocuses in full bloom. The dear old
treacherous place looking as if it were really healthy.
Lectures in Edinburgh 355
Nothing sanitary done in the parish. ... I work on
and on ... but am very sad. How can I help being
sad in this place ? It is like a grave, empty of you and
the children. ' Deutsche Theologia ' is doing me much
good. Curious it is, that that, much as I differ from its
view of man, is the only kind of religious reading which
I love, or which has even any real meaning for my heart.
. . . God knows best whether or not I ought to be here
just now. Still I can't help beating against the wires a
little. ..."
" I had an opportunity of telling Lord Palmerston a
great deal which I trust may save many lives. Remem-
ber, it is now a question of blood-guiltiness that is all.
But I am not going to London any more about sanitary
matters. The utter inability of the Health of Towns
Act to cleanse this or any other neighboring parish,
made me consider what I have done as a parochial
duty. ..."
"... The Reform Bill is shelved : excellent as it is,
it does not much matter at this minute. Two days after
our deputation, that bane of London, the Sewers Com-
mission, awoke in the morning, and behold they were all
dead men ! Lord Palmerston having abolished them
by one sentence the night before, and I have not heard
that anyone has gone into mourning. The Board of
Health are now triumphant and omnipotent. God
grant that they may use their victory well, and not spoil
it by pedantry and idealism ! Baines brings in three
clauses, which will re-form the whole poor-law, and strike
at the root of cottage destruction. God knows it is base
of one to sit here fretting about little private evils, while
the country is doing so well and the ministers so nobly.
The ' Times ' has taken up the cause of soldiers' wives
and families ; and a great cause it is. I feel that after
all England's heart is sound : and if it be, what matter
whether I am at Eversley or Torquay ? And yet I long
356 Charles Kingsley
to be there. ... I have got Hawley's secretary dining
here with a lot of blue-books, he and I being about a
joint pamphlet, ' The Cholera versus the Present Slavery
of Union Medical Officers.' "
While at Torquay he wrote at Baron Bunsen's
request an invaluable preface to the translation
of the "Deutsche Theologia," in which he plainly
states where he does and does not agree with its
theology, and says that, in order to see its clear
meaning, the reader
". . . must forget all popular modern dogmas and
systems, all popular philosophies, and be true to the
letter of his Bible, and to the instincts which the indwel-
ling Word of God was wont to awaken in his heart, while
he was yet a little unsophisticated child : and he will find
germs of wider and deeper wisdom than its good author
ever dreamed of; and that those great spiritual laws
which he only applies, and that often inconsistently, to
an ascetic and passively contemplative life, will hold just
as good in the family, in the market, in the senate, in
the study, ay, in the battle-field itself, and teach him to
lead in whatsoever station of life he may be placed,
a truly manlike, because a truly Christlike and Godlike
life. ..."
" To those who really hunger and thirst after right-
eousness, and who therefore long to know what righteous-
ness is, that they may copy it : To those who long to be
freed, not merely from the punishment of sin after they
die, but from sin itself while they live on earth ; and
who, therefore, wish to know what sin is that they may
avoid it : To those who wish to be really justified by
faith, by being made just persons by faith ; and who
cannot satisfy either their consciences or reasons by
fancying that God looks on them as right when they
know themselves to be wrong, or that the God of Truth
" Deutsche Theologia " 357
will stoop to fictions (mis-called forensic) which would
be considered false and unjust in any human court of
law : To those who cannot help trusting that union with
Christ must be something real and substantial, and not
merely a metaphor and a flower of rhetoric : To those,
lastly, who cannot help seeing that the doctrine of Christ
in every man, as the indwelling Word of God, the Light
who lights everyone who comes into the world, is no
peculiar tenet of the Quakers, but one which runs
through the whole of the Old and New Testaments,
and without which they would both be unintelligible,
just as the same doctrine runs through the whole of the
early Church for the first two centuries, and is the only
explanation of them : To all these this nobie little book
will recommend itself. . . . Not that I agree," he says,
" with all its contents. It is for its noble views of right-
eousness and of sin that I honor it. ... "
In June, on his wife's account, he took a house
at Bideford for a year, where he wrote " West-
ward Ho ! " The anxieties and expenses of illness
were very heavy just now, but he always met
them by a brave heart, and by cheering words to
her who grieved over the labor they entailed on
him, and the absence from Eversley.
" I cannot help looking forward," he writes, " to our
twelve months at Northdown (Bideford) as a blessed
time. . . . We never have really wanted yet; all we
have had to do has been best of all trainings to
live by faith, and to exert ourselves. Oh ! let us be
content. We do not know what is good for us, and
God does. . . ."
"And these very money difficulties against which
you rebel. Has it not been fulfilled in them, ' As thy
day so shall thy strength be ? ' Have we ever been in
358 Charles Kingsley
any debt by our own sin? Have we ever really wanted
anything we needed ? Have we not had friends, credit,
windfalls in all things, with the temptation, a way to
escape? Have they not been God's sending? God's
way of preventing the cup of bliss being over-sweet (and
I thank Him heartily it has not been) ; and, consider,
have they not been blessed lessons? But do not think
that I am content to endure them any more than the
race horse, because he loves running, is content to stop
in the middle of the course. To pay them, I have
thought, I have written, I have won for us a name which,
please God, may last among the names of English
writers. Would you give up the books I have written
that we might never have been in difficulties ? So out
of evil God brings good; or rather, out of necessity
He brings strength and, believe me, the highest
spiritual training is contained in the most paltry physical
accidents; and the meanest actual want may be the
means of calling into actual life the possible but sleep-
ing embryo of the very noblest faculties. This is a
great mystery : but we are animals, in time and space ;
and by time and space and our animal natures are we
educated. Therefore let us be only patient, patient;
and let God our Father teach His own lesson, His own
way. Let us try to learn it well, and learn it quickly ;
but do not let us fancy that He will ring the school-bell,
and send us to play before our lesson is learnt.
" Therefore ' rejoice in your youth, ere the days come
when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them. 1 But
make to yourself no ghosts. And remember he who
says, ' I will be happy some day,' never will be happy at all.
If we cannot be happy now with ten times the blessings
which nine-tenths of God's creatures have, we shall never
be happy though we lived a thousand years. Let us lay this
solemnly to heart, and take no thought for the morrow."
To a lady who consulted him about Sisterhoods :
About Sisterhoods 359
BIDEFORD: July 24, 1854. "MADAM, Though I
make a rule of never answering any letter from a lady
whom I have not the honor of knowing, yet I dare not
refuse to answer yours. First, because you, as it were,
challenge me on the ground of my books : and next,
because you tell me that if I cannot satisfy you, you will
do that, to prevent which, above all things, my books
are written, namely, flee from the world, instead of
staying in it and trying to mend it.
" Be sure that I can sympathize with you most deeply
in your dissatisfaction with all things as they are. That
feeling grows on me, as I trust in God (strange to say)
it may grow on you, day by day. I, too, have had my
dreams of New Societies, brotherhoods, and so forth,
which were to regenerate the world. I, too, have had
my admirations for Old Societies and brotherhoods like
those of Loyola and Wesley, which intended to do the
same thing. But I have discovered, Madam, that we
can never really see how much evil there is around us,
till we see how much good there is around us, just as it
is light which makes us, by contrast, most aware of
darkness. And I have discovered also, that the world
is already regenerated by the Lord Jesus Christ, and
that all efforts of our own to regenerate it are denials of
Him and of the perfect regeneration which He ac-
complished when He sat down on the right hand of
God having all power given to Him in heaven and in
earth, that He might rule the earth in righteousness for
ever. And I have discovered also, that all societies and
brotherhoods which may form, and which ever have been
formed, are denials of the One Catholic Church of faith-
ful and righteous men (whether Protestant or Roman
Catholic, matters not to me) which He has established on
earth, and said that hell shall not prevail against
it. And when I look back upon history, as I have
done pretty carefully, i find that all such attempts
360 Charles Kingsley
have been total failures, just because, with the purest
and best intentions, they were doing this, and thereby
interfering with the Lord Jesus Christ's way of govern-
ing the world, and trying to introduce some new nostrum
and panacea of their own, narrow and paltry, compared
with His great ways in the deep.
"Therefore, though Fox (to take your own example)
was a most holy man, Quakerism in general, as a means
of regenerating the world, has been a disastrous failure.
And so (I speak from years of intimate experience) has
good John Wesley's Methodist attempt. Both were
trying to lay a new foundation for human society, and
forgetting that one which was already laid, which is Christ,
who surely has not been managing the earth altogether
wrongly, Madam, for 1800 years, or even before that?
" So, again, with that truly holy and angelic man,
St. Vincent de Paul has he succeeded ? What has
become of education, and of the poor, in the very land
where he labored ? . . . The moment the personal
influence of his virtue was withdrawn, down tumbled all
that he had done. He (may God bless him all the
same) had no panacea for the world's ills. He was not
a husband or a father how could he teach men to be
good husbands and fathers ? You point to what he and
his did. I know what they did in South America, and
beautiful it was ; but, alas ! I know, too, that they could
give no life to their converts ; they could not regenerate
society among the savages of Paraguay ; and the moment
the Jesuit's gentle despotism was withdrawn, down fell
the reductions again into savagery, having lost even the
one savage virtue of courage. The Jesuits were shut
out, by their vows, from political and family life. How
could they teach their pupils the virtues which belong
to those states ? But all Europe knows what the Jesuits
did in a country where they had every chance ; where
for a century they were the real rulers, in court and
About Sisterhoods 361
camp, as well as in schools and cloisters, I mean in
France. They tried their very best (and tried, I am
bound to believe, earnestly and with good intent) to
regenerate France. And they caused the Revolution.
Madam, the horrors of 1793 were the natural fruit of
the teaching of the very men who not only would have
died sooner than bring about these horrors, but died too
many of them, alas ! by them. And how was this ?
By trying to set up a system of society and morals of
their own, they uprooted in the French every element
of faith in, and reverence for, the daily duties and
relations of human life, without knowing it without
meaning it. May God keep you from the same snare,
of fancying, as all ' Orders,' Societies, and Sects do, that
they invent a better system of society than the old one,
wherein God created man in His own image, viz., of
father, and son, husband and wife, brother and sister,
master and servant, king and subject. Madam, these
are more divine and godlike words than all the brother-
hoods, ' Societies of Friends,' ' Associations of the
Sacred Heart,' or whatsoever bonds good and loving
men and women have from time to time invented to
keep themselves in that sacred unity from which they
felt they were falling. I can well believe that you feel
it difficult to keep in it now. God knows that I do :
but never will I (and I trust you never will) yield to
that temptation which the devil put before our Lord,
' Cast thyself down from hence, for it is written He shall
give His angels charge over Thee,' &c. Madam, when-
ever we leave the station where God has placed us, be
it for never So seemingly self-sacrificing and chivalrous
and saintly an end, we are tempting the Lord our God ;
we are yielding most utterly to that very self-will which
we are pretending to abjure. As long as you have a
parent, a sister, a servant, to whom you can do good in
those simple every-day relations and duties of life,
362 Charles Kingsley.
which are most divine, because they are most human,
so long will the entering a cloister be tempting the
Lord your God. And so long, Madam, will it be the
doing all in your power to counteract every word which
I have ever written. My object has been and is, and I
trust in God ever will be, to make people see that they
need not, as St. Paul says, go up into heaven, or go
down to the deep, to find Christ, because He, the Word
whom we preach, is very near them, in their hearts and
on their lips, if they would but believe it ; and ready,
not to set them afloat on new untried oceans of schemes
and projects, but ready to inspire them to do their duty
humbly and simply where He has put them and
believe me, Madam, the only way to regenerate the
world is to do the duty which lies nearest us, and not to
hunt after grand, far-fetched ones for ourselves. If each
drop of rain chose where it should fall, God's showers
would not fall, as they do now, on the evil and on the
good alike. I know from the experience of my own
heart how galling this doctrine is how, like Naaman,
one goes away in a rage, because the Prophet has not
bid us do some great thing, but only to go and wash in
the nearest brook, and be clean. But, Madam, be
sure that he who is not faithful in a little will never be
fit to be ruler over much. He who cannot rule his own
household will never (as St. Paul says) rule the Church
of God ; and he who cannot keep his temper, or be self-
sacrificing, cheerful, tender, attentive at home, will never
be of any real and permanent use to God's poor abroad.
" Wherefore, Madam, if, as you say, you feel what St.
Francis de Sales calls ' a dryness of soul ' about good
works and charity, consider well within yourself, whether
the simple reason, and (no shame on you !) be not only
because God does not wish you just yet to labor among
the poor; because He has not yet finished educating
you for that good work, and therefore will not let you
Crimean War 363
handle tools before you know how to use them. Begin
with small things, Madam you cannot enter the pres-
ence of another human being without finding there more
to do than you or I, or any soul, will ever learn to do
perfectly before we die. Let us be content to do little,
if God sets us at little tasks. It is but pride and self-
will which says, 'give me something huge to fight,
and I should enjoy that but why make me sweep the
dust ? ' Finally, Madam, be sure of one thing, that the
Lord Jesus Christ is King of this earth, and all therein ;
and that if you will do faithfully what He has set you to
already, and thereby using the order of a Deaconess
well, gain to yourself a good foundation in your soul's
training, he will give you more to do in His good time,
and of His good kind.
" If you are inclined to answer this letter, let me ask
you not to answer it for at least three months to come.
It may be good for you to have read it over a second time.
" I am, Madam, your obedient servant,
"C. KTNGSLEY."
To REV. F. MAURICE : Oct. 19. " We think of noth-
ing but the war. . . . But all will go well, please God ;
and ' the ancient spirit is not dead,' as the heights of
the Alma prove. As to your people's college, it is a
noble plan. I wish I could help in it ; but I am shut
up like any Jeremiah here, living on the newspapers
and my own Elizabethan books. The novel is more
than half done, and a most ruthless, bloodthirsty book
it is (just what the times want, I think). I am afraid
I have a little of the wolf-vein in me, in spite of fifteen
centuries of civilization; and so, I sometimes suspect,
have you, and if you had not you would not be as
tender and loving as you are. Sooner one caress from
a mastiff than twenty from a spaniel. I wish you were
here, I want to ask you a thousand things. I am some-
364 Charles Kingsley
times very sad; always very puzzled. . . . This war
would have made me half mad, if I had let it. It
seemed so dreadful to hear of those Alma heights being
taken and not be there ; but God knows best, and I
suppose I am not fit for such brave work ; but only like
Camille Desmoulins, ' une pauvre creature, ne'e pourfaire
des vers.' But I can fight with my pen still (I don't
mean in controversy I am sick of that . . . but in
writing books which will make others fight) . This one
is to be called ' Westward Ho ! ' . . . The writing of it
has done me much good. I have been living in those
Elizabethan books, among such grand, beautiful, silent
men, that I am learning to be sure of what I all along
suspected, that I am a poor, queasy, hysterical, half-
baked sort of a fellow, and so am inclined to sing small,
and am by no means hopeful about my book, which
seems to me only half as good as I could have written,
and only one-hundredth as good as ought to be written
on the matter ; but at least God bless you."
Dec. 31. "I see my way through politics, as through
everything else, less and less, and believe more and
more that the present ministry see as far as anyone else,
and are doing their best. Who ever saw far in a storm ?
which, by the very nature of it, clouds and narrows the
whole horizon with boundless ugly possibilities."
To T. HUGHES, ESQ. BIDEFORD : December 18,
1854. ". . . As to the war, I am getting more of
a Government man every day. As for a ballad oh !
my dear lad, there is no use fiddling while Rome is
burning. I have nothing to sing about those glorious
fellows, except ' God save the Queen and them.' I
tell you the whole thing stuns me, so I cannot sit down to
make fiddle rhyme with diddle about it or blundered
with hundred, like Alfred Tennyson. . . . Every man has
his calling, and my novel is mine, because I am fit for noth-
"Westward Ho!" 365
ing better. The book (' Westward Ho ! ') will be out
the middle or end of January. It is a sanguinary book,
but perhaps containing doctrine profitable for these times.
" Tummas ! Have you read the story of Abou Zennab,
his horse, in Stanley's 'Sinai,' p. 67? What a myth!
What a poem old Wordsworth would have writ thereon !
If I did n't cry like a baby over it. What a brick of a
horse he must have been, and what a brick of an old
head-splitter Abou Zennab must have been, to have his
commandments keeped unto this day concerning of his
horse ; and no one to know who he was, nor when, nor
how, nor nothing. I wonder if anybody '11 keep our
commandments after we be gone, much less say, ' Eat,
eat, oh horse of Abou Kingsley ! ' "
To J. SIMON, ESQ., M.D. December 28. "I have
just read, with intense pleasure, your City Cholera Re-
port, in the columns of the 'Times.' Verily the days
are coming (they have not been of late years) when, as
the Prophet says, 'a man shall be more precious than
fine gold ; ' when the lives and manhood of the citizens
will be found more valuable to a nation, after all, than
the wealth of a few, or even than the mere brute physi-
cal employment of vast numbers. And if we are to fur-
nish many more levies of men who will equal the heroes
of Inkerman, we must open our eyes, and first keep
them alive when they are infants, and next, give them
such an atmosphere to grow up in, that they shall
become men and not rickety monkeys : and your labors
are helping towards this good end. It is a sad thing
that ' food for powder ' requires to be of the best qual-
ity; but so it is, and unless the physical deterioration
of the lower classes is stopt by bold sanatory reform,
such as you have been working out, we shall soon have
rifles, but no men to shoulder them ; at least to use the
butts of them when required."
CHAPTER XIII
AGED 36
BIDEFORD CRIMEAN WAR DEATH OF HIS FRIEND CHARLES
BLACHFORD MANSFIELD " WESTWARD Ho I " LETTERS
FROM MR. HENRY DRUMMOND AND RAJAH BROOKE
ON BIGOTS DRAWING CLASS FOR MECHANICS AT BIDE-
FORD LEAVES DEVONSHIRE LECTURE TO LADIES IN
LONDON ON BEING AN ARTIST THE "HEROES"
LETTER ON FAME.
" Then in such hour of need
Of your fainting, dispirited race,
Ye, like angels, appear,
Radiant with ardor divine.
Beacon, of hope, ye appear I
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van ; at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.
Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the out-worn,
Praise, re-inspire the brave.
Order, courage, return.
Eyes re-kindling and prayers
Follow your steps as ye go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march
On to the bound of the waste,
On to the city of God."
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Crimean winter, bitter alike to the brave
_ men before Sebastopol and to the hearts
of all Englishmen and women at home, weighed
heavily on Charles Kingsley, to whom the war
Crimean War 367
was like a dreadful nightmare, which haunted him
day and night. " I can think of nothing but the
war," he said; and on the receipt of a letter from
a friend telling him of the numbers of tracts sent
out to the soldiers which they never read, but
looked upon as so much waste paper, and urging
him to write something which would go home to
them in their misery, he sat down, wrote off, and
despatched the same day to London a tract known
probably to few in England " Brave Words to
Brave Soldiers and Sailors. " * Several thousand
copies were sent out and distributed in the
Crimea, and the stirring words touched many a
noble soul. It was published anonymously to
avoid the prejudice which was attached to the
name of its author in all sections of the religious
world and press at that period.
To T. HUGHES, ESQ. BIDEFORD : 1855. " You may
have fancied me a bit of a renegade and a hanger-back
of late.
4 Still in our ashes live their wonted fires.'
And if I have held back from the Social Movement, it
has been because I have seen that the world was not
going to be set right in any such rose-pink way, excel-
lent as it is, and that there are heavy arrears of destruc-
tion to be made up, before construction can even begin ;
and I wanted to see what those arrears were. And I do
see a little. At least I see that the old phoenix must
burn, before the new one can rise out of its ashes.
Next, as to our army. I quite agree with you about that
if it existed to agree about. But the remnant that
comes home, like gold tried in the fire, may be the seed
1 Now reprinted in " True Words," a volume for Soldiers' and
Sailors' Libraries.
368 Charles Kingsley
of such an army as the world never saw. Perhaps we
may help it to germinate. But please don't compare the
dear fellows to Cromwell's Ironsides. There is a great
deal of 'personal' religion in the army, no doubt: and
personal religion may help men to endure, and complete
the bull-dog form of courage: but the soldier wants
more. He wants a faith that he is fighting on God's
side ; he wants military and corporate and national re-
ligion, and that is what I fear he has yet to get, and
what I tried to give in my tract. That is what Crom-
well's Ironsides had, and by it they conquered. That is
what the Elizabethans had up to the Armada, and by it
they conquered."
On the death of Captain Hedley Vicars, who
was killed in a sortie, he writes to Miss Marsh:
BIDEFORD: May 9, 1855. ". . . These things are
most bitter, and the only comfort which I can see in
them is, that they are bringing us all face to face with
the realities of human life, as it has been in all ages, and
giving us sterner and yet more loving, more human, and
more divine thoughts about ourselves, and our business
here, and the fate of those who are gone, and awakening
us out of the luxurious, frivolous, unreal dream (full
nevertheless of harsh judgments, and dealings forth of
damnation), in which we have been living so long to
trust in a Living Father who is really and practically
governing this world and all worlds, and who willeth that
none should perish and therefore has not forgotten, or
suddenly begun to hate or torment, one single poor soul
which is past out of this life into some other, on that
accursed Crimean soil. All are in our Father's hands ;
and as David says, Though they go down into hell, He
is there. Oh ! blessed thought more blessed to me at
this moment (who think more of the many than of the
few) than the other thought, that though they ascend
Charles Blachford Mansfield 369
into heaven with your poor lost hero, He is there
also. . . ."
During this winter a personal sorrow came, and
God took from him, for a time, one who had been
his beloved friend for seventeen years, Charles
Blachford Mansfield l the Will Willow-wren of
"Politics for the People," and one of the Council
of Promoters of Association. No record of
Charles Kingsley would be complete unless it in-
cluded a sketch of one who was so entwined with
the memory of his Cambridge days, with the rec-
tory life at Eversley, and with the winter of
1848-9 in Devonshire. He died, at Middlesex
Hospital, a martyr to Science.
" I knew Charles Mansfield first when he was at Clare
Hall in 1838-9, sometime in my freshman's winter. He
was born in the year 1819, at a Hampshire parsonage,
and in due time went to school at Winchester, in the
old days of that iron rule among masters, and that brutal
tyranny among the boys themselves, which are now fast
disappearing before the example and influence of the
great Arnold. Crushed at the outset, he gave little evi-
dence of talent beyond his extraordinary fondness for
mechanical science. But the regime of Winchester told
on his mind in after life for good and for evil ; first, by
arousing in him a stern horror of injustice (and in that
alone he was stern), and next, by arousing in him a
doubt of all precedents, a chafing against all constituted
authority, of which he was not cured till after long and
sad experience. What first drew me to him was the
combination of body and mind. He was so wonderfully
graceful, active, and daring. He was more like an ante-
1 Author of a ' Treatise on Benzole," a " Theory of Salts,"
" Aerial Navigation," and " Letters from Paraguay."
370 Charles Kingsley
lope than a man. ... I believe him to have been physi-
cally incapable of fear. . . . 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 would
argue by the hour, but never for arguing's sake. None
can forget the brilliance of his conversation, the elo-
quence 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 he quite unconsciously
exercised over all who really knew him, was the virtue
of earnestness. . . . He was just waiting for the king-
dom of God. . . . When the truth was shown to him,
he leapt up and embraced it. There was the most in-
tense 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. . . . 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 it is so,' was his motto, and well
he carried it out. This was connected, it seems to me,
with his intense conscientiousness. Of his conscientious-
ness I could write pages. ... All knight-errant honor
which I ever heard of, that man might have, perhaps
has, actually outdone. From the time of his leaving
Cambridge he devoted himself to science. . . . The
history of his next ten years is fantastic enough, were it
written, to form material for any romance. Long periods
of voluntary penury, when (though a man of fair worldly
fortune) he would subsist on the scantiest fare a few
dates and some brown bread, or a few lentils at the
Charles Blachford Mansfield 371
cost of a few pence a day, bestowing his savings on the
poor ; bitter private sorrows, which were schooling his
heart and temper into a tone more purely angelic than I
have ever seen in man ; magnificent projects, worked
out as far as they would go, not wildly and superficially,
but on the most deliberate and accurate grounds of
science, then thrown away in disappointment, for some
fresh noble dream ; an intense interest in the social and
political condition of the poor, which sprang up in him,
to his great moral benefit, during the last five years of his
life. . . . He left a trail of light wherever he went. . . .
" He would flash down over the glebe at Eversley,
with his knapsack at his back, like a shining star ap-
pearing with peace on earth and good-will to men, and
bringing an involuntary smile into the faces of everyone
who met him the compelled reflection of his own
smile. His voice was like the singing of a bird in its
wonderful cheerfulness, tenderness, and gaiety.
" At last, when he was six-and-thirty years of age, his
victory in the battle of life seemed complete. His
enormous and increasing labor seemed rather to have
quickened and steadied than tired his brain. The
clouds which had beset his path had all but cleared,
and left sunshine and hope for the future. . . . He was
already recognized as one of the most promising young
chemists in England, for whose future fame no hope
could be too high-pitched ; and a patent for a chemical
discovery which he had obtained, seemed, after years
of delay and disappointment, to promise him what he
of all men coveted least, renown and wealth. One day
he was at work on some experiments connected with
his patent. By a mistake of the lad who assisted him,
the apparatus got out of order, the naphtha boiled over
and was already on fire. To save the premises from the
effect of an explosion, Mr. Mansfield caught up the still
in his arms, and attempted to carry it out ; the door was
37 2 Charles Kingsley
fast ; he tried to hurl it through the window, but too late.
The still dropped from his hands, half flayed with liquid
fire. He scrambled out, rolled in the snow, and so ex-
tinguished the flame. Fearfully burnt and bruised, he
was taken to Middlesex Hospital, where, after nine days
of agony, he died like a Christian man.
" Oh, fairest of souls ! Happy are those who knew
thee in this life ! Happier those who will know thee in
the life to come ! C. K."
They are together now ! Two true and perfect
knights of God, perchance on some fresh noble
quest !
" Westward Ho ! " came out this winter. It
was dedicated to Rajah Brooke and Bishop Sel-
wyn, two of his heroes, and, in course of time,
produced the following letters from Mr. Henry
Drummond, of Albury, and from the Rajah.
ALBEMARLE STREET, May 13, 1855.
" DEAR SIR, I have just seen your noble dedication
of ' Westward Ho ! ' to Sir J. Brooke, and have taken
the liberty to desire a copy of the shameful trial to
which he has been subjected to be sent you, as I am
sure it will gratify you. I heard from him last week : he
is quite well, and all his work prospering. A remark-
able thing is about to take place in Sarawak. The
people rinding themselves dealt with in a manner so
superior to that in which they are dealt with by their
own rulers, have considered that the religion of their
present governor must be the true religion, and accord-
ingly are about to apply en masse to become members
of Brooke's religion. In my opinion the only means
which should be used towards heathen is the manifesta-
tion of mercy, justice, and truth. The poor bishop's
trouble will begin after he has got his converts.
Rajah Brooke 373
" Begging pardon for this intrusion from a stranger,
" I am, Sir, with great admiration of your writings,
" Your obedient Servant,
" HENRY DRUMMOND."
" MY DEAR SIR, I have long delayed to thank you
in person for a very welcome dedication to ' Westward
Ho ! ' but business, with many cares, prevented me. I
cannot, however, now that I hear of your kind interest
in my cause, and the exertions you are making to ad-
vance it, forbear from assuring you of my sense of your
good opinion, and the good it does me mentally. My
life is pretty well at its dregs, and I shall be glad indeed
to pass the few remaining months or years in quiet and
free from the anxieties which must beset the post I have
occupied, but which of late years have been increased
tenfold, owing to the course or rather no course pur-
sued by the Government. It is a sad but true expe-
rience, that everything has succeeded with the natives,
and everything has failed with the English in Borneo.
I am anxious to retire, for Sarawak should not be ruled
by a failing man, and I would not cling to power when
unable to discharge its duties. In due time I would
fain hand over my staff to my successor if permitted ;
but if forced to return to Sarawak, to bear its anxieties
and share its trials, I shall know it is a duty though a
trying one, and shall not begrudge the exertion for the
short time I can make it. Let me thank you, then, for
your kindness, and let me have the satisfaction of know-
ing you before I leave this country. . . .
" Believe me, my dear Sir,
" Yours very sincerely,
"J. BROOKE."
For years past Mr. Kingsley had bitterly re-
sented the attacks made upon Rajah Brooke by
the press during his government of Borneo, and
374 Charles Kingsley
had expressed his own views on the subject to Mr.
Ludlow.
" I have an old ' crow to pick with you ' about my
hero, Rajah Brooke ; and my spirit is stirred within me
this morning by seeing that the press are keeping up the
attack on him for the Borneo business. I say at once
that I think he was utterly right and righteous. If I had
been in his place I would have done the same. If it is
to do again, I trust he will have courage to do it again.
But, thank God, just because it is done it will not have
to be done again. The truest benevolence is occasional
severity. It is expedient that one man die for the
people. One tribe exterminated, if need be, to save a
whole continent. ' Sacrifice of human life ? ' Prove
that it is human life. It is beast-life. These Dyaks
have put on the image of the beast, and they must take
the consequence. ' Value of life ? ' Oh, Ludlow, read
history ; look at the world, and see whether God values
mere physical existence. Look at the millions who fall
in war ; the mere fact that savage races, though they
breed like rabbits, never increase in number ; and then,
beware lest you reproach your Maker. Christ died for
them? Yes, and He died for the whole creation as
well the whole world, Ludlow for the sheep you eat,
the million animalcules which the whale swallows at every
gape. They shall all be hereafter delivered into the
glorious liberty of the children of God ; but, as yet, just
consider the mere fact of beasts of prey, the countless
destruction which has been going on for ages and ages,
long before Adam's fall, and then consider. Physical
death is no evil. It may be a blessing to the survivors.
Else, why pestilence, famine, Cromwell and Perrot in
Ireland, Charlemagne hanging 4000 Saxons over the
Weser Bridge ; did not God bless those terrible right-
eous judgments? Do you believe in the Old Testa-
ment ? Surely, then, say, what does that destruction of
Rajah Brooke 375
the Canaanites mean? If //was right, Rajah Brooke
was right. If he be wrong, then Moses, Joshua, David,
were wrong. No ! I say. Because Christ's kingdom is
a kingdom of peace ; because the meek alone shall inherit
the earth, therefore, you Malays and Dyaks of Sarawak,
you also are enemies to peace. ' Your feet swift to shed
blood, the poison of asps under your lips ; ' you who have
been warned, reasoned with ; who have seen, in the case
of the surrounding nations, the strength and happiness
which peace gives, and will not repent, but remain still
murderers and beasts of prey You are the enemies of
Christ, the Prince of Peace ; you are beasts, all the more
dangerous, because you have a semi-human cunning. I
will, like David, ' hate you with a perfect hatred, even
as though you were my enemies.' I will blast you out
with grape and rockets, ' I will beat you as small as the
dust before the wind.' You, ' the strange children that
dissemble with me, shall fail,' and be exterminated, and
be afraid out of your infernal river- forts, as the old
Canaanites were out of their hill-castles. I say, honor
to a man, who, amid all the floods of sentimental cow-
ard cant, which by some sudden revulsion may, and I
fear will, become coward cruelty, dares act manfully on
the broad sense of right, as Rajah Brooke is doing.
Oh, Ludlow, Ludlow, recollect how before the '89 men
were maundering about universal peace and philan-
thropy, too loving to hate God's enemies, too indulgent
to punish sin. Recollect how Robespierre began by
refusing, on conscientious principles, to assist at the
punishment of death ! Just read, read the last three
chapters of the Revelations, and then say, whether these
same organs of destructiveness and combativeness, which
we now-a-days, in our Manichaeism, consider as the
devil's creation, may not be part of the image of God,
and Christ the Son of God, to be used in His service
and to His glory, just as much as our benevolence or
376 Charles Kingsley
-our veneration. Consider and the Lord give thec
grace to judge what I say. I may be wrong. But He
will teach us both ; and show this to Maurice, and ask
him if I am altogether a fiend therein. . . .
" I have been seeing lately an intimate friend of
Rajah Brooke, and hearing things which make me love
the man more and more. I think the preserving
that great line of coast * om horrible outrage, by
destroying the pirate fleet, was loving his neighbor
as himself. . . .'*
TO A WESLEYAN MINISTER
April, 1855. "Most truly pleasant it is to me to
find that my words have gone home to the heart of any
man, and much more to that of one employed hi preaching
Christ's Gospel. Churchman as I am, I can bid any
man God-speed who really wishes to preach * deliver-
ance to captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, and
an acceptable year of the Lord.' Do you do so ? and
is the year of the Lord which you preach acceptable, or
awful, horrible, a slander to Him who hateth nothing
that He hath made, who hath made all men, and all
things, save sin, and desires to deliver men from sin,
and therefore will assuredly, unless evil be stronger than
good, and God's creation a failure, see His desire ful-
filled ? I only ask you this question first that by your
answer to it we may know how deep our sympathy ex-
tends. And now I thank you heartily for the manner
of your letter, and God heartily for the matter of it.
Write to me again. I am not a man of many compli-
ments, and you need not be to me a man of many
excuses ; for who am I, and who are you, if we both
are in earnest, but mortal souls too weak to dispense
with any help, any love which can lighten for us the
burden of life's stormy and dark road ? "
On Bigots 377
TO , ESQ.
BIDEFORD, May, 1855. "I was pained enough at
the receipt of your letter this morning ; but I can only
entreat you not to despair where there is no need to do
so. And as for the ' sin against the Holy Ghost,' let
neither man nor devil torment you with that old worn-
out lie, and slander of God's eternal love and long-
suffering. In the first place, all sins whatsoever are sins
against the Holy Spirit, whether conscious or uncon-
scious ; but who is mad enough to say that therefor*
they are without forgiveness ? But the passage which
seems to torment you, and has tormented many, has
(if you will read it carefully) a special meaning on the
very face of it. Our Lord says, when the Pharisees
said that He cast out devils by Beelzebub, that they
were committing an utterly unpardonable sin blas-
pheming {i.e. speaking evil of) the Holy Spirit; that
is, they were attributing good and god-like deeds, be-
cause merciful and beneficent deeds, to an evil princi-
ple, instead of recognizing in them the sure mark of a
Divine principle. In plain English, they were bigots.
This was their sin. And it is one which one often
enough sees (shuddering) committed, or something
fearfully like it, now-a-days in our religious wars and
hatred ; but what has that to do with these struggles
between your flesh and God's spirit, while your own
spirit (as every line of your letter shows) is arrayed on
the side of God's spirit against your flesh, and will
therefore most assuredly conquer in the end? Besides,
see why this sin of the Pharisees is unpardonable. Be-
cause they cannot repent of it. If they could repent
they would be forgiven ipso facto. To that primary
eternal moral law God has sworn again and again in the
Bible, and nothing whatsoever can countervail it. But
the bigot (I mean, of course, the complete one) cannot
Vol. 117
378 Charles Kingsley
repent, simply because he thinks himself right, even
though he make out God wrong ; himself true, though
God be a liar ; and his insane self-satisfaction forms an
eternal bar to any metanoia, or change of mind. More-
over, to repent is to turn from sin, to God ; and how
can he, who says he has no sin, and who has forgotten
where God is, and what God is, that He is mercy and
love, and His Spirit the spirit whose mercy is over all
His works ? Thus the bigot's moral sense is gone and
dead, or rather inverted, and he says to himself, more
or less, ' Evil be thou my good.' And such a state of
mind must breed fresh sins, misery and ruin to all time
and eternity, as long as it lasts. That is the meaning of
the matter ; but what in heaven or earth has it to do
with you, and your sins, though they be red as blood?
The other passages in Hebrews about ' impossible to
renew them to repentance,' should not trouble you
cither. Neither vi. 4, and sqq., nor xii. 16-17. They
are both distinct warnings addressed to the Jews of that
day, that if they did fall back from the Christian de-
velopment of their national covenant and life, into their
old Jewish superstition and brutal worldliness, they
would perish with their nation; that a great historic
crisis, a one last opportunity for the Jewish nation, was
at hand, and if they lost that, the destruction was hope-
less. As the event proved, the city and religion being
destroyed by Titus, and the Jews remaining spiritually
dead to this day.
" Remark, too, that Esau, the very man who ' found
no place for repentance,' was not damned ; but blessed
in his own way, and in the way which was best for him,
as a lower-natured man, and given the ' fatness of
the earth, and the dew of heaven,' and a warrior-
kingdom !
" So much for the plain fact of texts which the devil
and his best emissaries, bigots who make a God in their
Drawing Class for Mechanics 379
own image, dark, cruel, and capricious, use to torment
poor souls, and frighten them from arising and going to
their Father, and saying, 'Father, I hate myself; but
Thou lovest me. I do not understand myself; but
Thou dost, and wilt be merciful to the work of Thin
own hands. I cannot guide and help myself, but Thou
canst, and wilt, too, because Thou art my Father, and
nothing can part me from Thy love, or from the love
of Thy Son, my King, as often as I come and claim my
share in Thee, just because I have nothing, and can
bring Thee nothing, but lie at Thy gate as a beggar
full of sores, desiring to be fed with the crumbs from
Thy table. And if I would feed and nurse in such a
case, not my own child merely, but the Russian who
might shoot him in battle, how much more wilt Thou,
whose name is Love, and whose glory is the likeness of
Thy Son Jesus Christ, who said, " Come to me, ALL ye
that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you
rest." ' If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts
to your children, how much more shall your Heavenly
Father give His Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?"
Having no parish work at Bideford, except dur-
ing an outburst of cholera, when he took a district
for house-to-house visitation ; and occasional duty
at Northam, Hartland, and Abbotsham; he lec-
tured on the Fine Arts, and got up a drawing-
class for young men, which one of the members,
Mr. Plucknett, of Warwick, thus recalls :
" I was a youth in Bideford at the time Mr. Kingsley
came to reside there, when seeing the young men of
the town hanging about wasting their leisure hours in
worse than wasting, his heart yearned to do them good.
He at first endeavored to establish a Government School
of Art this, however, failed. He then offered to teach
380 Charles Kingsley
a class drawing gratuitously. A few of us held a
meeting, and hired a room in the house of the Poet
Postman, Edward Capern, who, although a married man,
much older than the rest of us, was a most hard-working
pupil. I look back upon those evenings at Bideford as
the pleasantest part of my life, and, with God's blessing,
I attribute my success in life to the valuable instruction
I received from Mr. Kingsley : his patience, persever-
ance, and kindness won all our hearts, and not one of
his class but would have given his life for the master.
He used to bring fresh flowers from his conservatory for
us to copy as we became sufficiently advanced to do so j
and still further on he gave us lectures on anatomy, illus-
trating the subject with chalk drawings on a large black-
board. His knowledge of geometry, perspective, and
free-hand drawing, was wonderful; and the rapid and
beautiful manner in which he drew excited both our admi-
ration and our ambition. I have reason to believe that
most of the class received lasting benefit, and have turned
out well. Personally, I may say, with truth, I have cause
to bless the name of Mr. Kingsley as long as I live ; for
I left home with little more than the knowledge of my
business, and the knowledge of drawing learned in the
class. After many years of hard work I am now at the
head of a good business, which I am proud to say is well
known for the production of art furniture, &c. . . .
" Though dead, he yet influences for good thousands
of hearts and minds, and he is now reaping the reward
of his noble efforts while on earth to add to the sum of
human happiness, and thus leave the world better than
he found it. ..."
The mention of the " blackboard " will remind
many of his masterly sketches, in public lectures
and at his own school, where he liked always to
have a blackboard, with a piece of chalk, to illus-
Leaves Devonshire 381
trate his teaching by figures, which spoke some-
times as eloquently as his words. His sense of
form was marvellous, and, when at home, he was
never so thoroughly at ease as with a pen or pen-
cil in his hand. In conversation with his chil-
dren or guests his pencil was out in a moment to
illustrate every subject, whether it was natural
history, geological strata, geography, maps, or the
varieties of race. And even when writing his
sermons his mind seemed to find relief in sketch-
ing on the blotting paper before him, or on the
blank spaces in the sermon book, characteristic
heads, and types of face, among the different
schools of thought from the mediaeval monk to the
modern fanatic. He was always "thinking in
figures," to use his own words. "A single pro-
file, even a mere mathematical figure, would in
his hands become the illustration of a spiritual
truth " (" Yeast "). At Bristol, when he was presi-
dent of the educational section at the Social
Science congress, as he sat listening to the
various speakers, pen in hand, apparently making
notes, he covered the paper with sketches sug-
gested by the audience before him or by his
own fancy; and when the room was cleared,
unknown to him, people would return, and beg to
carry off every scrap of paper he had used, as
mementos.
In the end of May he left Devonshire and went
up to London, before settling at Eversley. He
there gave a lecture at the Working Men's Col-
lege, and one of r. series to ladies interested in the
cause of the laboring classes on "The work of
ladies in the country parish," from which a few
extracts are given :
382 Charles Kingsley
"... I keep to my own key-note, I say, Visit
whom, when, and where you will ; but let your visits be
those of women to women. Consider to whom you go
to poor souls whose life, compared with yours, is one
long malaise of body, and soul, and spirit and do as
you would be done by ; instead of reproving and fault-
finding, encourage. In God's name, encourage. They
scramble through life's rocks, bogs, and thorn brakes,
clumsily enough, and have many a fall, poor things !
But why, in the name of a God of love and justice, is
the lady, rolling along the smooth turnpike road in her
comfortable carriage, to be calling out all day long to the
poor soul who drags on beside her, over hedge and ditch,
moss and moor, barefooted and weary hearted, with half
a dozen children at her back ' You ought not to have
fallen here ; and it was very cowardly to lie down there ;
and it was your duty as a mother to have helped that
child through the puddle; while as for sleeping under
that bush, it is most imprudent and inadmissible?'
Why not encourage her, praise her, cheer her on her
weary way by loving words, and keep your reproofs for
yourself even your advice? for she does get on her
way after all, where you could not travel a step forward ;
and she knows what she is about perhaps better than
you do, and what she has to endure, and what God
thinks of her life-journey. The heart knoweth its own
bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not with its joy.
But do not you be a stranger to her. Be a sister to her.
I do not ask you to take her up in your carriage. You
cannot ; perhaps it is good for her that you cannot. . . .
All I ask is, do to the poor soul as you would have her do
to you in her place. Do not interrupt and vex her (for she
is busy enough already) with remedies which she does
not understand, for troubles which you do not under-
stand. But speak comfortably to her, and say, * I can-
not feel with you, but I do feel for you : I should enjoy
Lecture to Ladies 383
helping you but I do not know how tell me. Tell
me where the yoke galls ; tell me why that forehead is
grown old before its time : I may be able to ease the
burden, and put fresh light into the eyes ; and if not,
still tell me, simply because I am a woman, and know
the relief of pouring out my own soul into loving ears,
even though in the depths of despair.' Yes, paradoxi-
cal as it may seem, I am convinced that the only way to
help these poor women humanely and really, is to begin
by confessing to them that you do not know how to help
them; to humble yourself to them, and to ask their
counsel for the good of themselves and of their neigh-
bors, instead of coming proudly to them, with nostrums,
ready compounded, a; if a doctor should be so confi-
dent in his own knowledge of books and medicine as to
give physic before asking the patient's symptoms.
" I entreat you to bear hi mind (for without this all
visiting of the poor will be utterly void and useless) that
you must regulate your conduct to them and in their
houses, even to the most minute particulars, by the very
same rules which apply to persons of your own class. . . .
Piety, earnestness, affectionateness, eloquence all may
be nullified and stultified by simply keeping a poor
woman standing in her own cottage while you sit, or
entering her house, even at her own request, while she
is at meals. She may decline to sit ; she may beg you
to come in : all the more reason for refusing utterly to
obey her, because it shows that that very inward gulf
between you and her still exists in her mind, which it is
the object of your visit to bridge over. If you know her
to be in trouble, touch on that trouble as you would with
a lady. Woman's heart is alike in all ranks, and the
deepest sorrow is the one of which she speaks the last
and least. We should not like anyone no, not an angel
from heaven, to come into our houses without knocking
384 Charles Kingsley
at the door, to say, ' I hear you are very ill off I will
lend you a hundred pounds. I think you are very care-
less of money, I will take your accounts into my own
hands.' And still less again, ' Your son is a very bad,
profligate, disgraceful fellow, who is not fit to be men-
tioned; I intend to take him out of your hands and
reform him myself.' . . .
" Approach, then, these poor women as sisters learn
lovingly and patiently (aye, and reverently, for there is
that in every human being which deserves reverence,
and must be reverenced if we wish to understand it) ;
learn, I say, to understand their troubles, and by that
time they will have learnt to understand your remedies.
For you have remedies. I do not undervalue your posi-
tion. No man on earth is less inclined to undervalue
the real power of wealth, rank, accomplishments,
manners even physical beauty. All are talents from
God, and I give God thanks when I see them possessed
by any human being ; for I know that they too can be
used in His service, and brought to bear on the true
emancipation of woman her emancipation not from
man (as some foolish persons fancy), but from the devil,
' the slanderer and divider,' who divides her from man,
and makes her life a life-long tragedy, a vie apart, a
vie incomprise a life made up half of ill-usage, half of
unnecessary self-willed martyrdom, instead of being, as
God intended half of the human universe, a helpmeet
for man, and the one bright spot which makes this
world endurable. Towards making her that, and so
realizing the primeval mission by every cottage hearth,
each of you can do something ; for each of you have
some talent, power, knowledge, attraction between soul
and soul, which the cottager's wife has not, and by
which you may draw her to you, by human bonds and
the cords of love; but she must be drawn by them
Lecture to Ladies 385
alone, or your work is nothing, and though you give the
treasures of Ind, they are valueless equally to her and to
Christ; for they are not given in His name, which is
that boundless tenderness, consideration, patience, self-
sacrifice, by which even the cup of cold water is a
precious offering as God grant your labor may be ! "
" Again, there is one thing in school work which I
wish to press on you. And that is, that you should not
confine your work to the girls ; but bestow it as freely
on those who need it more, and who (paradoxical as it
may be) will respond to it more deeply and freely the
boys. I am not going to enter into the reason why. I
only intreat you to believe me, that by helping to
educate the boys, or even by taking a class, as I have seen
done with admirable effect, of grown-up lads, you may
influence for ever, not only the happiness of your pupils,
but of the girls whom they will hereafter marry. It will
be a boon to your own sex, as well as to ours, to teach
them courtesy, self-restraint, reverence for physical
weakness, admiration of tenderness and gentleness, and
it is one which only a lady can bestow. Only by being
accustomed in youth to converse with ladies will the boy
learn to treat hereafter his sweetheart or his wife like a
gentleman. There is a latent chivalry, doubt it not, in
the heart of every untutored clod ; if it dies out in him,
as it too often does, it were better for him, I often think,
that he had never been born ; but the only talisman
which will keep it alive, much more develop it into its
fulness, is friendly and revering intercourse with women
of higher rank than himself, between whom and him there
is a great and yet blessed guh" fixed. ..." (Practical
Lectures to Ladies.)
"Tell these lads and men," he wrote to one who con-
sulted him about ragged-school work, " that they have a
Father in heaven show that you believe it, by your
386 Charles Kingsley
looks, your manner, and common geniality, and brotherly
kindness, and general hopefulness of tone ; and let them
draw their own conclusions. God their Father will take
good care that the good seed shall grow."
To HIS WIFE: July 16. ". . . After all, the prob-
lem of life is not a difficult one, for it solves itself so
very soon at best by death. Do what is right the
best way you can, and wait to the end to know. Only
we priests confuse it with our formulae, and bind heavy
burdens. How many have I bound in my time, God
forgive me ! But for that, too, I shall receive my pun-
ishment, which is to me the most comforting of thoughts.
'T is life, whereof our nerves are scant,
Oh life, not death for which we pant,
More life, and fuller, that I want.'
You are right that longing to get rid of walls and
roofs and aU the chrysalis case of humanity is the earnest
of a higher, richer state of existence. That instinct
which the very child has to get rid of clothes, and cuddle
to esh what is it but the longing for fuller union with
those it loves? But see again (I always take the bright
side), If in spite of wars and fevers, and accidents,
and the strokes of chance, this world be as rich and fair
and green as we have found it, what must the coming
world be like ? Let us comfort ourselves as St. Paul did
(in infinitely worse times), that the sufferings of this
present time are not worthy to be compared with the
glory that shall be revealed. It is not fair either to St.
Paul or to God to quote the one text about the crea-
tion groaning and travailing, without the other, which
says, that it will not groan or travail long. Would the
mother who has groaned and travailed and brought forth
children would she give up those children for the sake
of not having had the pain? No. Then believe that
On Being an Artist 387
the world and every human being in it who has really
groaned and travailed, will not give up its past pangs for
the sake of its then present perfection, but will look back
on this life, as you do on past pain, with glory and joy.
Oh ! let the Bible tell its own tale, and be faithful to its
plain words, honestly and carefully understood, and all
will be well. I come to-morrow, . . . and I shall see
my darling children."
To REV. F. D. MAURICE. EVERSLEY: Augusts.
" Many, many thanks, my dear Master, for your letter.
You need never fear lecturing me, as long as I want it
as much as I do now. Your fears for me are most just,
and if you knew half as much c f me as I do of myself,
you would have hundreds rf fears more. ... A period
of collapse has come to me. . . . Only do not fear that
ultimately I shall be content with being ' an artist.' I
despise and loathe the notion from the bottom of my
heart. I have felt its temptation ; but I will, by God's
help, fight against that. Indeed, if I write another
novel, one of my principal characters is to be a man
who wants to be an * artist,' like old Goethe (of whom I
think less, if not worse, the longer I live), and finds that
he becomes, * artist ' or none, a very confused fellow,
going rapidly to hell. No. I am going to settle quietly
here again, and write my sermons, and books for my
children, and leave fame to take care of itself, and thank
God every day of my life for this paralytic os hyoides
of mine, which has kept me low, and makes me refrain
my tongue and my soul too, whenever I try to be witty
or eloquent, under the penalty of stuttering dumbness.
The mere fact of my stammering (if you knew behind
the scenes of my character and life) would be proof
enough that I have a Father in Heaven.
" No ; my ^temptation] lies in a somewhat different
direction from what you fancy. ... Of course I am
388 Charles Kingslcy
ready to worship Nature all day long, and in the merest
anacreontic Tommy- Moore style too, to lie among the
roses and sing . . . that is more to my taste than any
gnostic or Vestiges-of-Creation nature-worship, or even
than the scientific bug-hunting which I recommend to
idlers who can't or won't go and die like men or dogs
before Sebastopol. I am losing a zest for work. Every-
thing seems to me not worth working at, except the
simple business of telling poor people, ' Don't fret, God
cares for you, and Christ understands you.' -. . . I can-
not escape that wretched fear of a national catastrophe.
... I live in dark, nameless dissatisfaction and dread,
which has certainly not diminished during the last few
months. . . . My dear Master, terrible and sad thoughts
haunt me thoughts which I long to put away, which I
do and will put away in simple silent home-work. Per-
haps I may so concentrate my power as to be able to do
the Lord's work thoroughly when the Day comes ; and if
not why it will be done upon me, if not by me ; for
done it will be. But, meanwhile, comfort yourself on one
point that I am humbled; . . . and have had a
peep or two down through the sea of glass (thanks for
ever for that most true interpretation), and seen the
nether fire within half an inch of my feet. . . . Tell me
what is wrong in that Raleigh Article, 1 and I will correct
it. I tried to be honest, and read up all the authorities :
but my failure is a fresh proof that I am even as an ass
that eateth thistles. Yet the four-legged ass digests his
thistles ; which is more, I am sure, than I do.
" Yours ever loving, C. K."
They were now at Eversley; but as winter ap-
proached, the damp obliged him to leave the
rectory again ; though not his people, to his and
their great joy ; and settle at Farley Court, Swal-
1 Life and Times of Raleigh, Miscellanies.
"The Heroes" 389
lowfield, a high and dry spot adjoining his parish.
In the intervals of parish work and lectures at
many diocesan institutes, he brought out a volume
of " Sermons for the Times, " 1 and wrote " The
Heroes," a Christmas book of Greek fairy tales,
dedicated to his children, Rose, Maurice, and
Mary, to whom he says :
"I love these old Hellenes heartily, and should be
very ungrateful if I did not, considering all they have
taught me. They seem to me like brothers, though
they have all been dead and gone many hundred years,
so I wish to be the first to introduce you to them, and
to say, * Come hither, children, at this blessed Christmas
time, when all God's creatures should rejoice together,
and bless Him who redeemed them. Come and see
old friends of mine, whom I knew long ere you were
born. They are come to visit us at Christmas, out of
the world where all live to God ; and to tell you some
of their old fairy tales which they loved when they
were young, like you.' . . . Next to the old romances
which were written in the Christian middle age, there
are no fairy tales like these old Greek ones for beauty,
wisdom, and truth, and for making children love noble
deeds, and trust in God to help them through. . . ."
To J. M. LUDLOW, ESQ. FARLEY COURT : Dec. "
I feel what you say about not Greek and too Greek;
but I had laid my account with all that before I wrote.
If I tell the story myself as you wish, I can't give the
children the Greek spirit either morally or in manner,
therefore I have adopted a sort of simple ballad tone, and
tried to make my prose as metrical as possible. . . .
1 Of these sermons a stranger wrote to him from Cambridge to
tell him the blessing they had been to many, and how the sermon
on " Salvation " had saved one man from suicide.
39 Charles Kingslcy
You must remember as to modernisms, that we Cam-
bridge men are taught to translate Greek by its modern
equivalent even to slang. My own belief is, that by tak-
ing the form I have, I shall best do what I want, trans-
late the children back into a new old world, and make
them, as long as they are reading, forget the present,
which is the true method of a musement, while the
half metrical form will fix it in their minds, and give
them something to think over. I don't agree with you
at all, nor does F., about omitting allusions which the
children can't understand. She agrees with me that
that is just what they like."
To J. M. L., ESQ. "And for this Fame, &c. I
know a little of her worth. And I will tell you what I
know. That, in the first place, she is a fact; and as
such, it is not wise to ignore her, but at least to walk
once round her, and see her back as well as her front.
"The case to me seems to be this. A man feels in
himself the love of praise. Every man does who is not
a brute. It is a universal human faculty ; Carlyle nick-
names it the sixth sense. Who made it? God or the
devil ? Is it flesh or spirit ? A difficult question ; be-
cause tamed animals grow to possess it in a high degree ;
and our metaphysic does not yet allow them spirit.
But, whichever it be, it cannot be for bad : only bad
when misdirected, and not controlled by reason, the
faculty which judges between good and evil. Else why
has God put His love of praise into the heart of every
child which is born into the world, and entwined it into
the holiest filial and family affections, as the earliest
mainspring of good actions ? Has God appointed that
every child shall be fed first with a necessary lie, and
afterwards come to the knowledge of your supposed
truth, that the praise of God alone is to be sought ? Or
are we to believe that the child is intended to be taught
On Fame 391
as delicately and gradually as possible the painful fact,
that the praise of all men is not equally worth having,
and to use his critical faculty to discern the praise of
good men from the praise of bad, to seek the former
and despise the latter? I should say that the last was
the more reasonable. And this I will say, that if you
bring up any child to care nothing for the praise of its
parents, its elders, its pastors, and masters, you may
make a fanatic of it, or a shameless cynic : but you will
neither make it a man, an Englishman, nor a Christian.
" But Our Lord's words stand, about ' not seeking the
honor which comes from men, but the honor which
comes from God only ! ' True, they do stand, and our
Lord's fact stands also, the fact that He has created
every child to be educated by an honor which comes
from his parents and elders. Both are true. Here, as in
most spiritual things, you have an antinomia, an appar-
ent contradiction, which nothing but the Gospel solves.
And it does solve it ; and your one-sided view of the
text resolves itself into just the same fallacy as the old
ascetic one ' We must love God alone, therefore we
must love no created thing.' To which St. John
answers pertinently, 'He who loveth not his brother
whom he hath seen how can he love God whom he hath
not seen?' If you love your brethren, you love Christ
in them. If you love their praise, you love the praise
of Christ in them. For consider this, you cannot deny
that if one loves any person, one desires that person's
esteem. But we are bound to love all men, and that is
our highest state. Therefore, in our highest state, we
shall desire all men's esteem. Paradoxical, but true.
If we believe in Christmas-day, if we believe in Whit-
sunday, we shall believe that Christ is in all men, that
God's spirit is abroad in the earth, and therefore the
dispraise, misunderstanding, and calumny of men will
be exquisitely painful to us, and ought to be so ; and,
392 Charles Kingsley
on the other hand, the esteem of men, and renown
among men for doing good deeds, will be inexpressibly
precious to us. They will be signs and warrants to us
that God is pleased with us, that we are sharing in that
'honor and glory' which Paul promises again and
again, to those who lead heroic lives. We shall not
neglect the voice of God within us ; but we shall remem-
ber that there is also a voice of God without us, which
we must listen to; and that in a Christian land, vox
poputi, patiently and discriminately listened to, is sure
to be found not far off from the vox Dei. Of course,
in listening to the voice of the many outside, there is
a danger, as there is in the use of any faculty. You
may employ it, according to Divine reason and grace,
for ennobling and righteous purposes ; or you may de-
grade it to carnal and selfish ones ; so you may degrade
the love of praise into vanity, into longing for the
honor which comes from men, by pandering to their
passions and opinions, by using your powers as they
would too often like to use theirs, for mere self-aggran-
dizement, by saying in your heart quam pulchrum digito
monstrari et dicere hie est 'That is the man who
wrote the fine poem, who painted the fine picture,' and
so forth, till, by giving way to this, a man may give way
to forms of vanity as base as the red Indian who sticks
a fox's tail on, and dances about boasting of his brute
cunning. I know all about that, as well as any poor son
of Adam ever did. But I know, too, that to desire the
esteem of as many rational men as possible ; in a word,
to desire an honorable and true renown for having
done good in my generation, has nothing to do with
that; and the more I fear and struggle against the
former, the more I see the exceeding beauty and divine-
ness, and everlasting glory of the latter as an entrance
into the communion of saints.
" Of course, all this depends on whether we do believe
On Fame 393
that Christ is in every man, and that God's spirit is
abroad in the earth. Of course, again, it will be very
difficult to know who speaks by God's spirit, and who
sees by Christ's light in him ; but surely the wiser, the
humbler path, is to give men credit for as much wisdom
and Tightness as possible, and to believe that when one
is found fault with, one is probably in the wrong. For
myself, on looking back, I see clearly with shame and
sorrow, that the obloquy which I have brought often on
myself and on the good cause, has been almost all of it
my own fault. . . .
" There has been gradually revealed to me (what my
many readings in the lives of fanatics and ascetics ought
to have taught me long before), that there is a terrible
gulf ahead of that not caring what men say. Of course
it is a feeling on which the spirit must fall back in hours
of need, and cry, 'Thou God knowest mine integrity.
I have believed, and therefore I will speak ; Thou art
true, though all men be liars ! ' But I am convinced
that that is a frame in which no man can live, or is
meant to live ; that it is only to be resorted to in fear
and trembling, after deepest self-examination, and self-
purification, and earnest prayer. For otherwise, a man
gets to forget that voice of God without him, in his
determination to listen to nothing but the voice of God
within him, and so he falls into two dangers. He for-
gets that there is a voice of God without him. He loses
trust in, and charity to, and reverence for his fellow-
men ; he learns to despise, deny, and quench the Spirit
. . . and so becomes gradually cynical, sectarian,
fanatical.
"And then comes a second and worse danger.
Crushed into self, and his own conscience and schema
mundi, he loses the opportunity of correcting his im-
pression of the voice of God within, by the testimony of
the voice of God without; and so he begins to mistake
394 Charles Kingsley
more and more the voice of that very flesh of his, which
he fancies he has conquered, for the voice of God, and
to become, without knowing it, an autotheist. And out
of that springs eclecticism, absence of tenderness for
men, for want of sympathy with men ; as he makes his
own conscience his standard for God, so he makes his
own character the standard for men; and so he be-
comes narrow, hard, and if he be a man of strong will
and feelings, often very inhuman and cruel. This is the
history of thousands of Jeromes, Lauds, Puritans who
scourged Quakers, Quakers who cursed Puritans ; Non-
jurors who, though they would die rather than offend
their own conscience in owning William, would plot
with James to murder William, or devastate England
with Irish Rapparees and Auvergne dragoons. This, in
fact, is the spiritual diagnosis of those many pious per-
secutors, who, though neither hypocrites nor black-
guards themselves, have used both as instruments of
their fanaticism.
" Against this I have to guard myself, you little know
how much, and to guard my children still more, brought
up, as they will be, under a father, who, deeply discon-
tented with the present generation, cannot but express
that discontent at times. To make my children banau-
soi insolent and scoffing radicals believing in nobody
and nothing but themselves, would be perfectly easy in
me if I were to make the watchword of my house,
' Never mind what people say.' On the contrary, I shall
teach them that there are plenty of good people in the
world, that public opinion has pretty surely an under-
current of the water of life, below all its froth and gar-
bage, and that in a Christian country like this, where,
with all faults, a man (sooner or later) has fair play and
a fair hearing, the esteem of good men, and the blessings
of the poor, will be a pretty sure sign that they have the
blessing of God also ; and I shall tell them, when they
On Fame 395
grow older, that ere they feel called on to become mar-
tyrs, in defending the light within them against all the
world, they must first have taken care most patiently,
and with all self-distrust and humility, to make full use
of the light which is around them, and has been here
for ages before them, and would be here still, though
they had never been born or thought of. The antinomy
between this and their own conscience may be painful
enough to them some day. To what thinking man is it
not a life-long battle ? . . ."
END OF VOL. I
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