Literary and General Lectures and Essays

by Charles Kingsley

*****

by which

Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither:
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sporting on the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

And those old dreams of our ancestors in the childhood of England, they are fantastic enough, no doubt, and unreal, but yet they are most true and most practical, if we but use them as parables and symbols of human feeling and everlasting truth. What, after all, is any event of earth, palpable as it may seem, but, like them, a shadow and a ghostly dream, till it has touched our hearts, till we have found out and obeyed its spiritual lesson? Be sure that one really pure legend or ballad may bring God’s truth and heaven’s beauty more directly home to the young spirit than whole volumes of dry abstract didactic morality. Outward things, beauty, action, nature, are the great problems for the young. God has put them in a visible world, that by what they see they may learn to know the unseen; and we must begin to feed their minds with that literature which deals most with visible things, with passion manifested in action, which we shall find in the early writing of our Middle Ages; for then the collective mind of our nation was passing through its natural stages of childhood and budding youth, as every nation and every single individual must at some time or other do; a true “young England,” always significant and precious to the young. I said there was a literary art before Shakespeare—an art more simple, more childlike, more girlish as it were, and therefore all the more adapted for young minds. But also an art most vigorous and pure in point of style: thoroughly fitted to give its readers the first elements of taste, which must lie at the root of even the most complex æsthetics. I know no higher specimens of poetic style, considering the subject, and the belief of the time about them, than may be found in many of our old ballads. How many poets are there in England now, who could have written “The Twa Bairns,” or “Sir Patrick Spens?” How many such histories as old William of Malmesbury, in spite of all his foolish monk miracles? As few now as there were then; and as for lying legends—they had their superstitions, and we have ours; and the next generation will stare at our strange doings as much as we stare at our forefathers. For our forefathers they were; we owe them filial reverence, thoughtful attention, and more—we must know them ere we can know ourselves. The only key to the present is the past.

But I must go farther still, and after premising that the English classics, so called, of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries will of course form the bulk of the lectures, I must plead for some instruction in the works of recent and living authors. I cannot see why we are to teach the young about the past and not about the present. After all, they have to live now, and at no other time; in this same nineteenth century lies their work: it may be unfortunate, but we cannot help it. I do not see why we should wish to help it. I know no century which the world has yet seen so well worth living in. Let us thank God that we are here now, and joyfully try to understand where we are, and what our work is here. As for all superstitions about “the good old times,” and fancies that they belonged to God, while this age belongs only to man, blind chance, and the Evil One, let us cast them from us as the suggestions of an evil lying spirit, as the natural parents of laziness, pedantry, popery, and unbelief. And therefore let us not fear to tell our children the meaning of this present day, and of all its different voices. Let us not be content to say to them, as we have been doing: “We will see you well instructed in the past, but you must make out the present for yourselves.” Why, if the past is worth explaining, far more is the present—the pressing, noisy, complex present, where our work-field lies, the most intricate of all states of society, and of all schools of literature yet known, and therefore the very one requiring most explanation.

How rich in strange and touching utterances have been the last fifty years of English literature. Do you think that God has been teaching us nothing in them? Will He not make our children listen to that teaching, whether we like or not? And suppose our most modern writers had added nothing to the stock of national knowledge, which I most fervently deny, yet are they not actually influencing the minds of the young? and can we prevent their doing so either directly or indirectly? If we do not find them right teaching about their own day, will they not be sure to find self-chosen teachers about it themselves, who will be almost certainly the first who may come to hand, and therefore as likely as not to be bad teachers? And do we not see every day that it is just the most tender, the most enthusiastic, the most precious spirits, who are most likely to be misled, because their honest disgust at the follies of the day has most utterly outgrown their critical training? And that lazy wholesale disapprobation of living writers, so common and convenient, what does it do but injure all reverence for parents and teachers, when the young find out that the poet, who, as they were told, was a bungler and a charlatan, somehow continues to touch the purest and noblest nerves of their souls, and that the author who was said to be dangerous and unchristian, somehow makes them more dutiful, more earnest, more industrious, more loving to the poor? I speak of actual cases. Would to God they were not daily ones!

Is it not then the wiser, because the more simple and trustful method, both to God and our children, to say: “You shall read living authors, and we will teach you how to read them; you, like every child that is born into the world, must eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; we will see that you have your senses exercised to discern between that good and that evil. You shall have the writers for whom you long, as far as consists with common prudence and morality, and more, you shall be taught them: all we ask of you is to be patient and humble; believe us, you will never really appreciate these writers, you will not even rationally enjoy their beauties, unless you submit to a course of intellectual training like that through which most of them have passed, and through which certainly this nation which produced them has passed, in the successive stages of its growth.”

The best method, I think, of working out these principles would be to devote a few lectures in the last term of every complete course, to the examination of some select works of recent writers, chosen under the sanction of the Educational Committee. But I must plead for whole works. “Extracts” and “Select Beauties” are about as practical as the worthy in the old story, who, wishing to sell his house, brought one of the bricks to market as a specimen. It is equally unfair on the author and on the pupil; for it is impossible to show the merits or demerits of a work of art, even to explain the truth or falsehood of any particular passage, except by viewing the book as an organic whole. And as for the fear of raising a desire to read more of an author than may be proper—when a work has once been pointed out as really hurtful, the rest must be left to the best safeguard which I have yet discovered, in man or woman—the pupil’s own honour.

Such a knowledge of English literature would tend no less, I think, to the spread of healthy historic views among us. The literature of every nation is its autobiography. Even in its most complex and artistic forms, it is still a wonderfully artless and unconscious record of its doubts and its faith, its sorrows and its triumphs, at each era of its existence. Wonderfully artless and correct—because all utterances which were not faithful to their time, which did not touch some sympathetic chord in their heart’s souls, are pretty sure to have been swept out into wholesome oblivion, and only the most genuine and earnest left behind for posterity. The history of England indeed is the literature of England—but one very different from any school history or other now in vogue. You will find it neither a mere list of acts of parliament and record-office, like some; nor yet an antiquarian gallery of costumes and armour, like others; nor a mere war-gazette and report of killed and wounded from time to time; least of all not a “Debrett’s Peerage,” and catalogue of kings and queens (whose names are given, while their souls are ignored), but a true spiritual history of England—a picture of the spirits of our old forefathers, who worked, and fought, and sorrowed, and died for us; on whose accumulated labours we now here stand. That I call a history—not of one class of offices or events, but of the living human souls of English men and English women. And therefore one most adapted to the mind of woman; one which will call into fullest exercise her blessed faculty of sympathy, that pure and tender heart of flesh, which teaches her always to find her highest interest in mankind, simply as mankind; to see the Divine most completely in the human; to prefer the incarnate to the disembodied, the personal to the abstract, the pathetic to the intellectual; to see, and truly, in the most common tale of village love or sorrow, a mystery deeper and more divine than lies in all the theories of politicians or the fixed ideas of the sage.

Such a course of history would quicken women’s inborn personal interest in the actors of this life-drama, and be quickened by it in return, as indeed it ought: for it is thus that God intended woman to look instinctively at the world. Would to God that she would teach us men to look at it thus likewise! Would to God that she would in these days claim and fulfil to the uttermost her vocation as the priestess of charity!—that woman’s heart would help to deliver man from bondage to his own tyrannous and all-too-exclusive brain—from our idolatry of mere dead laws and printed books—from our daily sin of looking at men, not as our struggling and suffering brothers, but as mere symbols of certain formulæ), incarnations of sets of opinions, wheels in some iron liberty-grinding or Christianity-spinning machine, which we miscall society, or civilisation, or, worst misnomer of all, the Church!