Charles Kingsley - Page 2

and was eternally attacking everything Popish and monkish.

Boys and young people, then, can read "Westward Ho!" and "Hypatia," and "Hereward the Wake," with far more pleasure than their elders. They hurry on with the adventures, and do not stop to ask what the moralisings mean. They forgive the humour of Kingsley because it is well meant. They get, in short, the real good of this really great and noble and manly and blundering genius. They take pleasure in his love of strong men, gallant fights, desperate encounters with human foes, with raging seas, with pestilence, or in haunted forests. For in all that is good of his talent--in his courage, his frank speech, his love of sport, his clear eyes, his devotion to field and wood, river, moor, sea, and storms--Kingsley is a boy. He has the brave, rather hasty, and not over well-informed enthusiasm of sixteen, for persons and for causes. He saw an opponent (it might be Father Newman): his heart lusted for a fight; he called his opponent names, he threw his cap into the ring, he took his coat off, he fought, he got a terrible scientific drubbing. It was like a sixth-form boy matching himself against the champion. And then he bore no malice. He took his defeat bravely. Nay, are we not left with a confused feeling that he was not far in the wrong, though he had so much the worse of the fight?

Such was Kingsley: a man with a boy's heart; a hater of cruelty and injustice, and also with a brave, indomitable belief that his own country and his own cause were generally in the right, whatever the quarrel. He loved England like a mistress, and hated her enemies, Spain and the Pope, though even in them he saw the good. He is for ever scolding the Spanish for their cruelties to the Indians, but he defends our doings to the Irish, which (at that time) were neither more nor less oppressive than the Spanish performances in America. "Go it, our side!" you always hear this good Kingsley crying; and one's heart goes out to him for it, in an age when everybody often proves his own country to be in the wrong.

Simple, brave, resolute, manly, a little given to "robustiousness," Kingsley transfigured all these qualities by possessing the soul and the heart of a poet. He was not a very great poet, indeed, but a true poet--one of the very small band who are cut off, by a gulf that can never be passed, from mere writers of verse, however clever, educated, melodious, ingenious, amiable, and refined. He had the real spark of fire, the true note; though the spark might seldom break into flame, and the note was not always clear. Never let us confuse true poets with writers of verse, still less with writers of "poetic prose." Kingsley wrote a great deal of that- perhaps too much: his descriptions of scenes are not always as good as in Hereward's ride round the Fens, or when the tall, Spanish galleon staggers from the revenge of man to the