Charles Kingsley

When I was very young, a distinguished Review was still younger. I remember reading one of the earliest numbers, being then myself a boy of ten, and coming on a review of a novel. Never, as it seemed to me, or seems to my memory, was a poor novel more heavily handled: and yet I felt that the book must be a book to read on the very earliest opportunity. It was "Westward Ho!" the most famous, and perhaps the best novel, of Charles Kingsley. Often one has read it since, and it is an example of those large, rich, well-fed romances, at which you can cut and come again, as it were, laying it down, and taking it up on occasion, with the certainty of being excited, amused--and preached at.

Lately I have re-read "Westward Ho!" and some of Kingsley's other books, "Hypatia," "Hereward the Wake," and the poems, over again. The old pleasure in them is not gone indeed, but it is modified. One must be a boy to think Kingsley a humourist. At the age of twelve or ten you take the comic passages which he conscientiously provides, without being vexed or offended; you take them merely in the way of business. Better things are coming: struggles with the Inquisition, storms at sea, duels, the Armada, wanderings in the Lotus land of the tropical west; and for the sake of all this a boy puts up good-naturedly with Kingsley's humour. Perhaps he even grins over Amyas "burying alternately his face in the pasty and the pasty in his face," or he tries to feel diverted by the Elizabethan waggeries of Frank. But there is no fun in them--they are mechanical; they are worse than the humours of Scott's Sir Percy Shafto, which are not fine.

The same sense of everything not being quite so excellent as one remembered it haunts one in "Hereward the Wake, the Last of the English." Kingsley calls him "the Last of the English," but he is really the first of the literary Vikings. In the essay on the Sagas here I have tried to show, very imperfectly, what the Norsemen were actually like. They caught Kingsley's fancy, and his "Hereward," though born on English soil, is really Norse--not English. But Kingsley did not write about the Vikings, nor about his Elizabethan heroes in "Westward Ho!" in a perfectly simple, straightforward way. He was always thinking of our own times and referring to them. That is why even the rather ruffianly Hereward is so great an enemy of saints and monks. That is why, in "Hypatia" (which opens so well), we have those prodigiously dull, stupid, pedantic, and conceited reflections of Raphael Ben Ezra. That is why, in all Kingsley's novels, he is perpetually exciting himself in defence of marriage and the family life, as if any monkish ideas about the blessedness of bachelorhood were ever likely to drive the great Anglo-Saxon race into convents and monasteries. That is the very last thing we have to be afraid of; but Kingsley was afraid of it,