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Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!

(Westminster Review, July 1855)

EVERY ONE who was so happy as to go mushrooming in his early days, remembers his delight when, after picking up and throwing away heaps of dubious fungi, dear to naturalists but abhorred of cooks, he pounces on an unmistakable mushroom, with its delicate fragrance and pink lining tempting him to devour it there and then, to the prejudice of the promised dish for breakfast. We speak in parables, after the fashion of the wise, amongst whom Reviewers are always to be reckoned. The plentiful dubious fungi are the ordinary quarter’s crop of novels, not all poisonous, but generally not appetizing, and certainly not nourishing; and the unmistakable mushroom is a new novel by Charles Kingsley. It seemed too long since we had any of that genuine description of external nature, not done after the poet’s or the novelist’s recipe, but flowing from spontaneous observation and enjoyment; any of that close, vigorous painting of outdoor life, which serves as myrrh and rich spices to embalm much perishable theorizing and offensive objurgation – too long since we had a taste of that exquisite lyrical inspiration to which we owe –

O, Mary! go and call the cattle home

Along the sands of Dee.1

After courses of ‘psychological’ novels (very excellent things in their way), where life seems made up of talking and journalizing, and men are judged almost entirely on ‘carpet consideration’,2 we are ready to welcome a stirring historical romance, by a writer who, poet and scholar and social reformer as he is, evidently knows the points of a horse and has followed the hounds, who betrays a fancy for pigs, and becomes dithyrambic on the virtues of tobacco. After a surfeit of Hebes and Psyches, or Madonnas and Magdalens, it is a refreshment to turn to Kiss’s Amazon.3 But this ruddy and, now and then, rather ferocious barbarism, which is singularly compounded in Mr Kingsley with the susceptibility of the poet and the warm sympathy of the philanthropist, while it gives his writings one of their principal charms, is also the source of their gravest fault. The battle and the chase seem necessary to his existence; and this Red Man’s nature, planted in a pleasant rectory among corn fields and pastures, takes, in default of better game, to riding down capitalists and Jesuits, and fighting with that Protean personage – ‘the devil’. If, however, Mother Nature has made Mr Kingsley very much of a poet and philanthropist, and a little of a savage, her dry-nurse Habit has made him superlatively a preacher: he drops into the homily as readily as if he had been ‘to the manner born’; and while by his artistic faculty he can transplant you into whatever scene he will, he can never trust to the impression that scene itself will make on you, but, true to his cloth, must always ‘improve the occasion’. In these two points – his fierce antagonism and his perpetual hortative tendency – lie, to our thinking, the grand mistakes which enfeeble the effect of all Mr Kingsley’s works, and are too likely to impede his production of what his high powers would otherwise promise – a fiction which might be numbered among our classics. Poet and artist in a rare degree, his passionate impetuosity and theological prepossessions inexorably forbid that he should ever be a philosopher; he sees, feels, and paints vividly, but he theorizes illogically and moralizes absurdly. If he would confine himself to his true sphere, he might be a teacher in the sense in which every great artist is a teacher – namely, by giving us his higher sensibility as a medium, a delicate acoustic or optical instrument, bringing home to our coarser senses what would otherwise be unperceived by us. But Mr Kingsley, unhappily, like so many other gifted men, has two steeds – his Pegasus and his hobby: the one he rides with a graceful abandon, to the admiration of all beholders; but no sooner does he get astride the other, than he becomes a feeble imitator of Carlyle’s manège, and attempts to put his wooden toy to all the wonderful paces of the great Scotchman’s fiery Tartar horse. This imitation is probably not a conscious one, but arises simply from the fact, that Mr Kingsley’s impetuosity and Boanerges’4 vein give him an affinity for Carlyle’s faults – his one-sided judgement of character and his undiscriminating fulminations against the men of the present as tried by some imaginary standard in the past. Carlyle’s great merits Mr Kingsley’s powers are not fitted to achieve; his genius lies in another direction. He has not that piercing insight which every now and then flashes to the depth of things, and alternating as it does with the most obstinate one-sidedness, makes Carlyle a wonderful paradox of wisdom and wilfulness; he has not that awful sense of the mystery of existence which continually checks and chastens the denunciations of the Teufelsdröckh;5 still less has he the rich humour, the keen satire, and the tremendous word-missiles, which Carlyle hurls about as Milton’s angels hurl the rocks. But Mr Kingsley can scold; he can select one character for unmixed eulogy and another for unmitigated vituperation; he can undertake to depict a past age and try to make out that it was the pattern of all heroisms now utterly extinct; he can sneer at actual doings which are only a new form of the sentiments he vaunts as the peculiar possession of his pet period; he can call his own opinion God, and the opposite opinion the Devil. Carlyle’s love of the concrete makes him prefer any proper name rather than an abstraction, and we are accustomed to smile at this in him, knowing it to be mere Carlylian rhetoric; but with Mr Kingsley, who has publicly made a vehement disclaimer of all heterodoxy,6 and wishes to be understood as believing ‘all the doctrines of the Catholic Church’, we must interpret such phraseology more literally. But enough of general remarks. Let us turn to the particular work before us, where we shall find all the writer’s merits and faults in full blow. We abstain on principle from telling the story of novels, which seems to us something like stealing geraniums from your friend’s flower-pot to stick in your own button-hole: you spoil the effect of his plant, and you secure only a questionable ornament for yourself. We shall therefore be careful to give the reader no hint of the domestic story around which Mr Kingsley has grouped the historical scenes and characters of Westward Ho!

Hardly any period could furnish a happier subject for an historical fiction than the one Mr Kingsley has here chosen. It is unhackneyed , and it is unsurpassed in the grandeur of its moral elements, and the picturesqueness and romance of its manners and events. Mr Kingsley has not brought only genius but much labour to its illustration. He has fed his strong imagination with all accessible material, and given care not only to the grand figures and incidents but to small details. One sees that he knows and loves his Devonshire at first hand, and he has evidently lingered over the description of the forests and savannahs and rivers of the New World, until they have become as vividly present to him as if they were part of his own experience. We dare not pronounce on the merit of his naval descriptions, but to us, landlubbers as we are, they seem wonderfully real, and not to smack at all of technicalities learned by rote over the desk. He has given a careful and loving study to the history and literature of the period, and whatever misrepresentation there is in the book, is clearly not due to ignorance but to prepossession: if he misrepresents, it is not because he has omitted to examine, but because he has examined through peculiar spectacles. In the construction of a story Mr Kingsley has never been felicitous; and the feebleness of his dénouements have been matter of amazement, even to his admirers. In this respect, Westward Ho! though by no means criticism-proof, is rather an advance on his former works, especially in the winding-up. It is true, this winding-up reminds us a little of Jane Eyre, but we prefer a partially borrowed beauty to an original bathos, which was what Mr Kingsley achieved in the later chapters of Alton Locke and Yeast. Neither is humour his forte. His Jack Brimblecombe is too much like a piece of fun obbligato, after the manner of Walter Scott, who remains the unequalled model of historical romancists, however they may criticize him. Mr Kingsley’s necessity for strong loves and strong hatreds, and his determination to hold up certain persons as models, is an obstacle to his successful delineation of character, in which he might otherwise excel. As it is, we can no more believe in and love his men and women than we could believe in and love the pattern-boy at school, always cited as a rebuke to our aberrations. Amyas Leigh would be a real, lovable fellow enough if he were a little less exemplary, and if Mr Kingsley would not make him a text to preach from, as we suppose he is accustomed to do with Joshua, Gideon, and David.

Until he shakes off this parsonic habit he will not be able to create truly human characters, or to write a genuine historical romance. Where his prepossessions do not come into play, where he is not dealing with his model heroes, or where the drama turns on a single passion or motive, he can scarcely be rivalled in truthfulness and beauty of presentation; for in clothing passion with action and language, and in the conception of all that gives local colouring, he has his best gifts to aid him. Beautiful is that episode of Mr Oxenham’s love, told by Salvation Yeo! Very admirable, too, is the felicity with which Mr Kingsley has seized the style and spirit of the Elizabethan writers, and reproduced them in the poetry and supposed quotations scattered through his story. But above all other charms in his writings, at least to us, is his scene-painting. Who does not remember the scene by the wood in Alton Locke, or that of the hunt at the beginning of Yeast? And Westward Ho! is wealthy in still greater beauties of the same kind. Here is a perfect gem. After a description of the old house at Stow, the residence of Sir Richard Grenvile, we read –

From the house on three sides, the hill sloped steeply down, and the garden where Sir Richard and Amyas were walking gave a truly English prospect. At one turn they could catch, over the western walls, a glimpse of the blue ocean flecked with passing sails; and at the next, spread far below them, range on range of fertile park, stately avenue, yellow autumn woodland, and purple heather moors, lapping over and over each other up the valley to the old British earthwork, which stood black and furze-grown on its conical peak; and standing out against the sky on the highest bank of hill which closed the valley to the east, the lofty tower of Kilkhampton church, rich with the monuments and offerings of five centuries of Grenviles. A yellow eastern haze hung soft over park, and wood, and moor; the red cattle lowed to each other as they stood brushing away the flies in the rivulet far below; the colts in the horse-park close on their right whinnied as they played together, and their sires from the Queen’s park, on the opposite hill, answered them in fuller though fainter voices. A rutting stag made the still woodland rattle with his hoarse thunder, and rival far up the valley gave back a trumpet note of defiance, and was himself defied from heathery brows which quivered far away above, half seen through the veil of eastern mist. And close at home, upon the terrace before the house, amid romping spaniels and golden-haired children, sat Lady Grenvile herself, the beautiful Saint Leger of Annery, the central jewel of all that glorious place, and looked down at her noble children, and then up at her more noble husband, and round at that broad paradise of the west, till life seemed too full of happiness, and heaven of light.

It is pleasanter to linger over beauties such as these, than to point out faults; but unhappily, Mr Kingsley’s faults are likely to do harm in other ways than in subtracting from the lustre of his fame, and a faithful reviewer must lift up his voice against them, whether men ‘will hear, or whether they will forbear’.7 Who that has any knowledge of our history and literature – that has felt his heart beat high at the idea of great crises and great deeds – that has any true recognition of the greatest poetry, and some of the greatest thoughts enshrined in our language, is not ready to pay the tribute of enthusiastic reverence to the Elizabethan age? In his glowing picture of that age, Mr Kingsley would have carried with him all minds in which there is a spark of nobleness, if he could have freed himself from the spirit of the partisan, and been content to admit that in the Elizabethan age, as in every other, human beings, human parties, and human deeds are made up of the most subtly intermixed good and evil. The battle of Armageddon in which all the saints are to fight on one side, has never yet come. It is perfectly true that, at certain epochs, the relations and tendencies of ideas and events are so clearly made out to minds of any superiority, that the best and ablest men are for the most part ranged under one banner: there was a point at which it must have become disgraceful to a cultivated mind not to accept the Copernican system, and in these days we are unable to draw any favourable inference concerning the intellect or morals of a man who advocates capital punishment for sheep-stealing or forgery. But things have never come to this pass with regard to Catholicism and Protestantism; and even supposing they had, Mr Kingsley’s ethics seem to resemble too closely those of his bugbears the Dominicans, when he implies that it is a holy work for the ‘Ayes’ to hunt down the ‘Noes’ like so many beasts of prey. His view of history seems not essentially to differ from that we have all held in our childish days, when it seemed perfectly easy for us to divide mankind into the sheep and the goats, when we devoutly believed that our favourite heroes, Wallace and Bruce, and all who fought on their side, were ‘good’, while Edward and his soldiers were all ‘wicked’; that all the champions of the Reformation were of unexceptionable private character, and all the adherents of Popery consciously vicious and base. Doubtless the Elizabethan age bore its peculiar fruit of excellence, as every age has done which forms a nodus, a ganglion, in the historical development of humanity – as the age of Pericles produced the divinest sculptures, or the age of the Roman Republic the severe grandeur of Roman law and Roman patriotism, or as the core of the Middle Ages held the germ of chivalrous honour and reverential love. Doubtless the conquest of the Spanish Armada was virtually the triumph of light and freedom over darkness and bondage. What then? Is this a reason why Mr Kingsley should seem almost angry with us for not believing with the men of that day in the golden city of Manoa and the Gulf-stream, or scold by anticipation any one who shall dare to congratulate himself on being undeceived in these matters? Doubtless Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, and the rest,8 were brave, energetic men – men of great will and in some sort of great faculty; but like all other human agents, they ‘builded better than they knew’; and it would be as rational to suppose that the bee is an entomological Euclid, interested only in the solution of a problem, as to suppose that the motives of these mariners were as grand as the results of their work.

We had marked several passages as specimens of the small success which attends Mr Kingsley in his favourite exercise of deducing a moral, but our want of space obliges us to renounce the idea of quoting them, with the exception of one, which, we think, will in some degree justify our low estimate of Mr Kingsley’s gifts as a philosophizer. Here is the passage –

Humboldt9 has somewhere a curious passage; in which, looking on some wretched group of Indians, squatting stupidly round their fires, besmeared with grease and paint, and devouring ants and clay, he somewhat naïvely remarks, that were it not for science, which teaches us that such is the crude material of humanity, and this the state from which we have all risen, he should have been tempted rather to look upon those hapless beings as the last degraded remnants of some fallen and dying race. One wishes that the great traveller had been bold enough to yield to that temptation, which his own reason and common sense presented to him as the real explanation of the sad sight, instead of following the dogmas of a so-called science, which has not a fact whereon to base its wild notion, and must ignore a thousand facts in asserting it. His own good sense, it seems, coincided instinctively with the Bible doctrine, that man in a state of nature is a fallen being, doomed to death – a view which may be a sad one, but still one more honourable to poor humanity than the theory, that we all began as some sort of two-handed apes. It is surely more hopeful to believe that those poor Otomacs or Guahibas were not what they ought to be, than to believe that they were. It is certainly more complimentary to them, to think that they had been somewhat nobler and more prudent in centuries gone by, than that they were such blockheads as to have dragged on, the son after the father, for all the thousands of years which have elapsed since man was made, without having had wit enough to discover any better food than ants and clay.

Our voyagers, however, like those of their time, troubled their heads with no such questions. Taking the Bible story as they found it, they agreed with Humboldt’s reason, and not with his science; or, to speak correctly, agreed with Humboldt’s self, and not with the shallow anthropologic theories which happened to be in vogue fifty years ago; and their new hosts were in their eyes immortal souls like themselves, ‘captived by the devil at his will’, lost there in the pathless forests, likely to be lost hereafter.

Note the accuracy of Mr Kingsley’s reasoning. Humboldt observes that, but for scientific data leading to an opposite conclusion, he could have imagined that a certain group of Indians were the remnants of a race which had sunk from a state of well-being to one of almost helpless barbarism. Hereupon, Mr Kingsley is sorry that Humboldt did not reject ‘the dogmas of a so-called science’, and rest in this conception which ‘coincided with the Bible doctrine’; and he urges as one of his reasons for this regret, that it would be complimentary to the Otomacs and Guahibas to suppose that in centuries gone by, they had been nobler and more prudent. Now, so far as we are acquainted with the third chapter of Genesis, and with the copious exegeses of that chapter from Saint Paul downwards, the ‘Bible doctrine’ is not that man multiplied on the earth and formed communities and nations – amongst the rest, noble and prudent societies of Otomacs and Guahibas – in a state of innocence, and that then came the Fall. We have always understood that for the Fall ‘we may thank Adam’, and that consequently the very first Otomac or Guahiba was already ‘captived by the devil’, and ‘likely to be lost hereafter’. Hence, what the question of the Otomacs and Guahibas having been nobler and more prudent in centuries gone by, can have to do with the doctrine of the Fall, we are at a loss to perceive. We will do no more than point to Mr Kingsley’s cool arrogance in asserting that a man like Humboldt, the patriarch of scientific investigators, is ‘misled by the dogmas of a so-called science, which has not a fact whereon to base its wild notions’. Indeed it is rather saddening to dwell on the occasional absurdities into which anomalous opinions can betray a man of real genius; and after all, the last word we have to say of Westward Ho! is to thank Mr Kingsley for the great and beautiful things we have found in it, as our dominant feeling towards his works in general is that of high admiration.