Adventures in Criticism Part 9

Henry, the third son of the Rev. Charles Kingsley, was born in Northamptonshire on the 2nd of January, 1830, his brother Charles being then eleven years old. In 1836 his father became rector of St.

Luke's Church, Chelsea--the church of which such effective use is made in _The Hillyars and the Burtons_--and his boyhood was pa.s.sed in that famous old suburb. He was educated at King's College School and Worcester College, Oxford, where he became a famous oarsman, rowing bow of his College boat; also bow of a famous light-weight University "four," which swept everything before it in its time. He wound up his racing career by winning the Diamond Sculls at Henley. From 1853 to 1858 his life was pa.s.sed in Australia, whence after some variegated experiences he returned to Chelsea in 1858, bringing back nothing but good "copy," which he worked into _Geoffry Hamlyn_, his first romance.

_Ravenshoe_ was written in 1861; _Austin Elliot_ in 1863; _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ in 1865; _Silcote of Silcotes_ in 1867; _Mademoiselle Mathilde_ (admired by few, but a favorite of mine) in 1868. He was married in 1864, and settled at Wargrave-on-Thames. In 1869 he went north to edit the _Edinburgh Daily Review_, and made a mess of it; in 1870 he represented that journal as field-correspondent in the Franco-Prussian War, was present at Sedan, and claimed to have been the first Englishman to enter Metz. In 1872 he returned to London and wrote novels in which his powers appeared to deteriorate steadily.

He removed to Cuckfield, in Suss.e.x, and there died in May, 1876.

Hardly a man of letters followed him to the grave, or spoke, in print, a word in his praise.

And yet, by all accounts, he was a wholly amiable ne'er-do-well--a wonderful flyfisher, an extremely clever amateur artist, a lover of horses and dogs and children (surely, if we except a chapter of Victor Hugo's, the children in _Ravenshoe_ are the most delightful in fiction), and a joyous companion.

"To us children," writes Mr. Maurice Kingsley, "Uncle Henry's settling in Eversley was a great event.... At times he fairly bubbled over with humour; while his knowledge of slang--Burschen, Bargee, Parisian, Irish, c.o.c.kney, and English provincialisms--was awful and wonderful. Nothing was better than to get our uncle on his 'genteel behaviour,' which, of course, meant exactly the opposite, and brought forth inimitable stories, sc.r.a.ps of old songs and impromptu conversations, the choicest of which were between children, Irishwomen, or c.o.c.kneys. He was the only man, I believe, who ever knew by heart the famous _Irish Court Scenes_--naughtiest and most humorous of tales--unpublished, of course, but handed down from generation to generation of the faithful. Most delightful was an interview between his late Majesty George the Fourth and an itinerant showman, which ended up with, 'No, George the Fourth, you shall not have my Rumptifoozle!' What said animal was, or the authenticity of the story, he never would divulge."

I think it is to the conversational quality of their style--its ridiculous and good-humored impertinences and surprises--that his best books owe a great deal of their charm. The footnotes are a study in themselves, and range from the mineral strata of Australia to the best way of sliding down banisters. Of the three tales already republished in this pleasant edition, _Ravenshoe_ has always seemed to me the best in every respect; and in spite of its feeble plot and its impossible lay-figures--Erne, Sir George Hillyar, and the painfully inane Gerty--I should rank _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ above the more terrifically imagined and more neatly constructed _Geoffry Hamlyn_.

But this is an opinion on which I lay no stress.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] _The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn_. By Henry Kingsley. New Edition, with a Memoir by Clement Shorter. London: Ward, Lock & Bowden.

ALEXANDER WILLIAM KINGLAKE

January 10, 1891. His Life.

Alexander William Kinglake was born in 1812, the son of a country gentleman--Mr. W. Kinglake, of Wilton House, Taunton--and received a country gentleman's education at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge.

From college he went to Lincoln's Inn, and in 1837 was called to the Chancery Bar, where he practised with fair but not eminent success. In 1844 he published _Eothen_, and having startled the town, quietly resumed his legal work and seemed willing to forget the achievement.

Ten years later he accompanied his friend, Lord Raglan, to the Crimea.

He retired from the Bar in 1856, and entered Parliament next year as member for Bridgwater. Re-elected in 1868, he was unseated on pet.i.tion in 1869, and thenceforward gave himself up to the work of his life. He had consented, after Lord Raglan's death, to write a history of the Invasion of the Crimea. The two first volumes appeared in 1863; the last was published but two years before he succ.u.mbed, in the first days of 1891, to a slow incurable disease. In all, the task had occupied thirty years. Long before these years ran out, the world had learnt to regard the Crimean struggle in something like its true perspective; but over Kinglake's mind it continued to loom in all its original proportions. To adapt a phrase of M. Jules Lemaitre's, "_le monde a change en trente ans: lui ne bouge; il ne leve plus de dessus son papier a copie sa face congestionne_." And yet Kinglake was no cloistered scribe. Before his last illness he dined out frequently, and was placed by many among the first half-a-dozen talkers in London.

His conversation, though delicate and finished, brimmed full of interest in life and affairs: but let him enter his study, and its walls became a hedge. Without, the world was moving: within, it was always 1854, until by slow toiling it turned into 1855.

Style.

His style is hard, elaborate, polished to brilliance. Its difficult labor recalls Thucydides. In effect it charms at first by its accuracy and vividness: but with continuous perusal it begins to weigh upon the reader, who feels the strain, the unsparing effort that this glittering fabric must have cost the builder, and at length ceases to sympathize with the story and begins to sympathize with the author.

Kinglake started by disclaiming "composition." "My narrative," he says, in the famous preface to _Eothen_, "conveys not those impressions which _ought to have been_ produced upon any well-const.i.tuted mind, but those which were really and truly received, at the time of his rambles, by a headstrong and not very amiable traveller.... As I have felt, so I have written."

"_Eothen_."

For all this, page after page of _Eothen_ gives evidence of deliberate calculation of effect. That book is at once curiously like and curiously unlike Borrows' _Bible in Spain_. The two belong to the same period and, in a sense, to the same fashion. Each combines a tantalizing personal charm with a strong, almost fierce, coloring of circ.u.mstance. The central figure in each is unmistakably an Englishman, and quite as unmistakably a singular Englishman. Each bears witness to a fine eye for theatrical arrangement. But whereas Borrow stood for ever fortified by his wayward nature and atrocious English against the temptation of writing as he ought, Kinglake commenced author with a respect for "composition," ingrained perhaps by his Public School and University training. Borrow arrays his page by instinct, Kinglake by study. His irony (as in the interview with the Pasha) is almost too elaborate; his artistic judgment (as in the Plague chapter) almost too sure; the whole book almost too clever. The performance was wonderful; the promise a trifle dangerous.

The "Invasion."

"Composition" indeed proved the curse of the _Invasion of the Crimea_: for Kinglake was a slow writer, and composed with his eye on the page, the paragraph, the phrase, rather than on the whole work. Force and accuracy of expression are but parts of a good prose style; indeed are, strictly speaking, inseparable from perspective, balance, logical connection, rise and fall of emotion. It is but an indifferent landscape that contains no pedestrian levels: and his desire for the immediate success of each paragraph as it came helped Kinglake to miss the broad effect. He must always be vivid; and when the strain told, he exaggerated and sounded--as Matthew Arnold accused him of sounding--the note of provinciality. There were other causes. He was, as we have seen, an English country gentleman--_avant tout je suis gentilhomme anglais_, as the Duke of Wellington wrote to Louis XVIII.

His admiration of the respectable cla.s.s to which he belonged is revealed by a thousand touches in his narrative--we can find half a score in the description of Codrington's a.s.sault on the Great Redoubt in the battle of the Alma; nor, when some high heroic action is in progress, do we often miss an ill.u.s.tration, or at least a metaphor, from the hunting-field. Undoubtedly he had the distinction of his cla.s.s; but its narrowness was his as surely. Also the partisanship of the eight volumes grows into a weariness. The longevity of the English Bench is notorious; but it comes of hearing both sides of every question.

After all, he was a splendid artist. He tamed that beautiful and dangerous beast, the English sentence, with difficulty indeed, but having tamed, worked it to high achievements. The great occasion always found him capable, and his treatment of it is not of the sort to be forgotten: witness the picture of the Prince President cowering in an inner chamber during the bloodshed of the _Coup d'etat_, the short speech of Sir Colin Campbell to his Highlanders before the Great Redoubt (given in the exact manner of Thucydides), or the narrative of the Heavy Brigade's charge at Balaclava, culminating thus--

"The difference that there was in the temperaments of the two comrade regiments showed itself in the last moments of the onset.

The Scots Greys gave no utterance except to a low, eager, fierce moan of rapture--the moan of outbursting desire. The Inniskillings went in with a cheer. With a rolling prolongation of clangour which resulted from the bends of a line now deformed by its speed, the 'three hundred' crashed in upon the front of the column."

C.S.C. and J.K.S.

Dec. 5, 1891. Cambridge Baras.

What I am about to say will, no doubt, be set down to tribal malevolence; but I confess that if Cambridge men appeal to me less at one time than another it is when they begin to talk about their poets.

The grievance is an old one, of course--at least as old as Mr.

Birrell's "_Obiter Dicta_": but it has been revived by the little book of verse ("_Quo Musa Tendis_?") that I have just been reading. I laid it down and thought of Mr. Birrell's essay on Cambridge Poets, as he calls them: and then of another zealous gentleman, hailing from the same University, who arranged all the British bards in a tripos and brought out the Cambridge men at the top. This was a very characteristic performance: but Mr. Birrell's is hardly less so in these days when (to quote the epistolary parent) so much prominence is given to athleticism in our seats of learning. For he picks out a team of lightblue singers as though he meant to play an inter-University match, and challenges Oxford to "come on." He gives Milton a "blue,"

and says we oughtn't to play Sh.e.l.ley because Sh.e.l.ley isn't in residence.

Now to me this is as astonishing as if my butcher were to brag about Kirke White. My doctor might retort with Keats; and my scrivener--if I had one--might knock them both down with the name of Milton. It would be a pretty set-to; but I cannot see that it would affect the relative merits of mutton and laudanum and the obscure products of scrivenage.

Nor, conversely (as they say at Cambridge), is it certain, or even likely, that the difference between a butcher or a doctor is the difference between Kirke White and Keats. And this talk about "University" poets seems somewhat otiose unless it can be shown that Cambridge and Oxford directly encourage poesy, or aim to do so. I am aware that somebody wins the Newdigate every year at Oxford, and that the same thing happens annually at Cambridge with respect to the Chancellor's Prize. But--to hark back to the butcher and apothecary--verses are perennially made upon Mr. Lipton's Hams and Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer. Obviously some incentive is needed beyond a prize for stanzas on a given subject. I can understand Cambridge men when they a.s.sert that they produce more Wranglers than Oxford: that is a justifiable boast. But how does Cambridge encourage poets?

Calverley.

Oxford expelled Sh.e.l.ley: Cambridge whipped Milton.[A] _Facit indignatio versus_. If we press this misreading of Juvenal, Oxford erred only on the side of thoroughness. But that, notoriously, is Oxford's way. She expelled Landor, Calverley, and some others. My contention is that to expel a man is--however you look at it--better for his poesy than to make a don of him. Oxford says, "You are a poet; therefore this is no place for you. Go elsewhere; we set your aspiring soul at large." Cambridge says: "You are a poet. Let us employ you to fulfil other functions. Be a don." She made a don of Gray, of Calverley. Cambridge men are for ever casting Calverley in our teeth; whereas, in truth, he is specially to be quoted against them. As everybody knows, he was at both Universities, so over him we have a fair chance of comparing methods. As everybody knows, he went to Balliol first, and his ample cabin'd spirit led him to climb a wall, late at night. Something else caused him to be discovered, and Blaydes--he was called Blaydes then--was sent down.

n.o.body can say what splendid effect this might have had upon his poetry. But he changed his name and went to Cambridge. And Cambridge made a don of him. If anybody thinks this was an intelligent stroke, let him consider the result. Calverley wrote a small amount of verse that, merely as verse, is absolutely faultless. To compare great things with little, you might as well try to alter a line of Virgil's as one of Calverley's. Forget a single epithet and subst.i.tute another, and the result is certain disaster. He has the perfection of the phrase--and there it ends. I cannot remember a single line of Calverley's that contains a spark of human feeling. Mr. Birrell himself has observed that Calverley is just a bit inhuman. But the cause of it does not seem to have occurred to him. Nor does the biography explain it. If we are to believe the common report of all who knew Calverley, he was a man of simple mind and sincere, of quick and generous emotions. His biographers tell us also that he was one who seemed to have the world at his feet, one who had only to choose a calling to excel in it. Yet he never fulfilled his friends' high expectations. What was the reason of it all?

The accident that cut short his career is not wholly to blame, I think. At any rate, it will not explain away the exception I have taken to his verse. Had that been destined to exhibit the humanity which we seek, some promise of it would surely be discoverable; for he was a full-grown man at the time of that unhappy tumble on the ice.

But there is none. It is all sheer wit, impish as a fairy changeling's, and always barren of feeling. Mr. Birrell has not supplied the explanatory epithet, so I will try to do so. It is "donnish." Cambridge, fondly imagining that she was showing right appreciation of Calverley thereby, gave him a Fellowship. Mr. Walter Besant, another gentleman from Calverley's college, complained, the other day, that literary distinction was never marked with a peerage.

It is the same sort of error. And now Cambridge, having made Calverley a don, claims him as a Cambridge poet; and the claim is just, if the epithet be intended to mark the limitations imposed by that University on his achievement.

"J.K.S."

Of "J.K.S.," whose second volume, _Quo Musa Tendis?_ (Macmillan & Bowles), has just come from the press, it is fashionable to say that he follows after Calverley, at some distance. To be sure, he himself has encouraged this belief by coming from Cambridge and writing about Cambridge, and invoking C.S.C. on the first page of his earlier volume, _Lapsus Calami_. But, except that J.K.S. does his talent some violence by constraining it to imitate Calverley's form, the two men have little in common. The younger has a very different wit. He is more than academical. He thinks and feels upon subjects that were far outside Calverley's scope. Among the dozen themes with which he deals under the general heading of _Paullo Majora Canamus_, there is not one which would have interested his "master" in the least. Calverley appears to have invited his soul after this fashion--"Come, let us go into the King's Parade and view the undergraduate as he walks about having no knowledge of good or evil. Let us make a jest of the books he admires and the schools for which he is reading." And together they manage it excellently. They talk Cambridge "shop" in terms of the wittiest scholarship. But of the very existence of a world of grown-up men and women they seem to have no inkling, or, at least, no care.

The problems of J.K.S. are very much more grown-up. You have only to read _Paint and Ink_ (a humorous, yet quite serious, address to a painter upon the scope of his art) or _After the Golden Wedding_ (wherein are given the soliloquies of the man and the woman who have been married for fifty years) to a.s.sure yourself that if J.K.S. be not Calverley's equal, it is only because his mind is vexed with problems bigger than ever presented themselves to the Cambridge don. To C.S.C., Browning was a writer of whose eccentricities of style delicious sport might be made. J.K.S. has parodied Browning too; but he has also perpended Browning, and been moulded by him. There are many stanzas in this small volume that, had Browning not lived, had never been written. Take this, from a writer to a painter:--

"So I do dare claim to be kin with you, And I hold you higher than if your task Were doing no more than you say you do: We shall live, if at all, we shall stand or fall, As men before whom the world doffs its mask And who answer the questions our fellows ask."

Many such lines prove our writer's emanc.i.p.ation from servitude to the Calverley fetish, a fetish that, I am convinced, has done harm to many young men of parts. It is pretty, in youth, to play with style as a puppy plays with a bone, to cut teeth upon it. But words are, after all, a poor thing without matter. J.K.S.'s emanc.i.p.ation has come somewhat late; but he has depths in him which he has not sounded yet, and it is quite likely that when he sounds them he may astonish the world rather considerably. Now, if we may interpret the last poem in his book, he is turning towards prose. "I go," he says--

"I go to fly at higher game: At prose as good as I can make it; And though it brings nor gold nor fame, I will not, while I live, forsake it."

It is no disparagement to his verse to rejoice over this resolve of his. For a young man who begins with epic may end with good epic; but a young man who begins with imitating Calverley will turn in time to prose if he means to write in earnest. And J.K.S. may do well or ill, but that he is to be watched has been evident since the days when he edited the _Reflector_.[B]

FOOTNOTES:

[A] I am bound to admit that the only authority for this is a note written into the text of Aubrey's _Lives_.

[B] The reader will refer to the date at the head of this paper:--