The church and its services called for instant attention. The Holy Communion had been celebrated only three times a year; the other services were few and irregular; on Sundays the church was empty and the alehouse was full. The building was badly kept, the churchyard let out for grazing, the whole place destitute of reverence. What the service came to be under the new Rector we can read on the testimony of many visitors. The intensity of his devotion at all times, the inspiration which the great festivals of the Church particularly roused in him, changed all this rapidly. He did all he could to draw his parishioners to church; but he had no rigid Puritanical views about the Sabbath. A Staff-College officer, who frequently visited him on Sundays, tells us of 'the genial, happy, unreserved intercourse of those Sunday afternoons spent at the Rectory, and how the villagers were free to play their cricket—"Paason he do'ant objec'—not 'e—as loik as not, 'e'll come and look on".' All his life he supported the movement for opening museums to the public on Sundays, and this at a time when few of the clergy were bold enough to speak on his side. The Church was not his only organ for teaching. He started schools and informal classes. In winter he would sometimes give up his leisure to such work every evening of the week. The Rectory, for all its books and bottles, its fishing-rods and curious specimens, was not a mere refuge for his own work and his own hobbies, but a centre of light and warmth where all his parishioners might come and find a welcome. He was one of the first to start 'Penny Readings' in his parish, to lighten the monotony of winter evenings with music, poetry, stories, and lectures; and though his parish was so wide and scattered, he tried to rally support for a village reading-room, and kept it alive for some years.
His afternoons were regularly given to parish visiting, except when there were other definite calls upon his time. He soon came to know every man, woman, and child in his parish. His sympathies were so wide that he could make himself at home with every one, with none more so than the gipsies and poachers, who shared his intimate knowledge of the neighbouring heaths and of the practices, lawful and unlawful, by which they could be made to supply food. He would listen to their stories, sympathize with their troubles and speak frankly in return. There was no condescension. One of his pupils speaks of 'the simple, delicate, deep respect for the poor', which could be seen in his manner and his talk among the cottagers. He could be severe enough when severity was needed, as when he compelled a cruel farmer to kill 'a miserable horse which was rotting alive in front of his house'; and he could deal no less drastically with hypocrisy. When a professional beggar fell on his knees at the Rectory gate and pretended to pray, he was at once ejected by the Rector with every mark of indignation and contumely. But the weak and suffering always made a special appeal to him. Though it was easy to vex and exasperate him, he could always put away his own troubles in presence of his own children or of any who needed his help. He had that intense power of sympathy which enabled him to understand and reach the heart.
From a letter to his greatest friend, Tom Hughes, written in 1851, we get a glimpse of a day in his life—'a sorter kinder sample day'. He was up at five to see a dying man and stayed with him till eight. He then went out for air and exercise, fished all the morning and killed eight fish. He went back to his invalid at three. Later he spent three hours attending a meeting convoked by his Archdeacon about Sunday schools, and at 10.30 he was back in his study writing to his friends.
But though he himself calls this a 'sample day', it does no justice to one form of his activities. Most days in the year he would put away all thought of fishing, shut himself up in his study morning and evening, and devote himself to reading and writing. Great care was taken over his weekly sermons. Monday was, if possible, given to rest; but from Tuesday till Friday evening they took up the chief share of his thoughts. And then there were the books that he wrote, novels, pamphlets, history lectures, scientific essays, on which he largely depended to support his wife and family. Besides this he kept up an extensive correspondence with friends and acquaintances. Many wrote to consult him about political and religious questions; from many he was himself trying to draw information on the phenomena of the science which he was trying to study at the time. Among the latter were Geikie, Lyell, Wallace, and Darwin himself, giants among scientific men, to whom he wrote with genuine humility, even when his name was a household word throughout England. His books can sometimes be associated with visits to definite places which supplied him with material. It is not difficult to connect Westward Ho! with his winter at Bideford in 1854, and Two Years Ago with his Pen-y-gwryd fishing in 1856. Memories of Hereward the Wake go back to his early childhood in the Fens, of Alton Locke to his undergraduate days at Cambridge. But he had not the time for the laborious search after 'local colour' with which we are familiar to-day. The bulk of the work was done in his study at Eversley, executed rapidly, some of it too rapidly; but the subjects were those of which his mind was full, and the thoughts must have been pursued in many a quiet hour on the heathery commons or beside the streams of his own neighbourhood.
About his books, his own judgement agreed with that of his friends. 'What you say about my "Ergon" being poetry is quite true. I could not write Uncle Tom's Cabin and I can write poetry:... there is no denying it: I do feel a different being when I get into metre: I feel like an otter in the water instead of an otter ashore.' The value of his novels is in their spirit rather than in their artistic form or truth; but it is foolish to disparage their worth, since they have exercised so marked an influence on the characters and lives of so many Englishmen, especially our soldiers and sailors, inspiring them to higher courage and more unselfish virtue. Perhaps the best example of his prose is the Prose Idylls, sketches of fen-land, trout streams, and moors, which combine his gifts so happily, his observation of natural objects, and the poetic imagination with which he transfuses these objects and brings them near to the heart of man. There were very few men who could draw such joy from familiar English landscapes, and could communicate it to others. The cult of sport, of science, and of beauty has here become one and has found its true high priest. In poetry his more ambitious efforts were The Saint's Tragedy, a drama in blank verse on the story of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and Andromeda, a revival of the old Greek legend in the old hexameter measure. But what are most sure to live are his lyrics, 'Airlie Beacon', 'The Three Fishers', 'The Sands of Dee', with their simplicity and true note of song.
The combination of this poetic gift with a strong interest in science and a wide knowledge of it is most unusual; but there can be no mistaking the genuine feeling which Charles Kingsley had for the latter. It took one very practical form in his zeal for sanitation. In 1854 when the public, so irrational in its moments of excitement, was calling for a national fast-day on account of the spread of cholera, he heartily supported Lord Palmerston, who refused to grant it. He held it impious and wrong to attribute to a special visitation from God what was due to the blindness, laziness, and selfishness of our governing classes. His article in Fraser's Magazine entitled 'Who causes pestilence?' roused much criticism: it said things that comfortable people did not like to hear, and said them frankly; it was far in advance of the public opinion of that time, but its truth no one would dispute to-day. And what his pen did for the nation, his example did for the parish. He drained unwholesome pools in his own garden, and he persuaded his neighbours to do the same. He taught them daily lessons about the value of fresh air and clean water: no details were too dull and wearisome in the cause. To many people his novels, like those of Dickens and Charles Reade, are spoilt by the advocacy of social reforms. The novel with a purpose was characteristic of the early Victorian Age, and both in Alton Locke and in Two Years Ago he makes little disguise of the zeal with which he preaches sanitary reform. Of the more attractive sciences, which he pursued with equal intensity, there is little room to speak. Botany was his first love and it remained first to the end. Zoology at times ran it close, and his letters from seaside places are full of the names of marine creatures which he stored in tanks and examined with his microscope. A dull day on the coast was inconceivable to him. Geology, too, thrilled him with its wonders, and was the subject of many letters.
Side by side with his hobby of natural history went his love of sport: it was impossible for him to separate the one from the other. Fishing was his chief delight; he pursued it with equal keenness in the chalk streams of Hampshire, in the salmon rivers of Ireland, in the desolate tarns on the Welsh mountains. In the visitors' book of the inn at Pen-y-gwryd, Tom Hughes, Tom Taylor, and he left alternate quatrains of doggerel to celebrate their stay, written currente calamo, as the spirit prompted them. This is Charles Kingsley's first quatrain:
I came to Pen-y-gwryd in frantic hopes of slaying
Grilse, salmon, three-pound red-fleshed trout and what else there's no saying:
But bitter cold and lashing rain and black nor'-eastern skies, sir,
Drove me from fish to botany, a sadder man and wiser.
Each had his disappointment through the weather, which each expressed in verse; but it took more than bad weather to damp the spirits of three such ardent open-air enthusiasts. Hunting was another favourite sport, though he rarely indulged himself in this luxury, and only when he could do so without much expense. But whenever a friend gave him a mount, Kingsley was ready to follow the Berkshire hounds, and with his knowledge of the country he was able to hold his own with the best.
Let us try to imagine him then as he walked about the lanes and commons of Eversley in middle life, a spare upright figure, above the middle height, with alert step, informal but not slovenly in dress, with no white tie or special mark of his profession. His head was one to attract notice anywhere with the grand hawk-like nose, firm mouth, and flashing eye. The deep lines furrowed between the brows gave his face an almost stern expression which his cheery conversation soon belied. He might be carrying a fishing-rod or a bottle of medicine for a sick parishioner, or sometimes both: his faithful Dandie Dinmont would be in attendance and perhaps one of his children walking at his side. His walk would be swift and eager, with his eye wandering restlessly around to observe all that he passed: 'it seemed as if no bird or beast or insect, scarcely a cloud in the sky, passed by him unnoticed, unwelcomed.' So too with humanity—in breadth of sympathy he resembled 'the Shirra', who became known to every wayfarer between Teviot and Tweed. Gipsy boy, farm-hand, old grandmother, each would be sure of a greeting and a few words of talk when they met the Rector on his rounds. In society he might at times be too impetuous or insistent, when questions were stirred in which he was deeply interested. Tennyson tells us how he 'walked hard up and down the study for hours, smoking furiously and affirming that tobacco was the only thing that kept his nerves quiet'. Green compares him to a restless animal, and Stopford Brooke speaks of his quick-rushing walk, his keen face like a sword, and his body thinned out to a lath, and complains that he 'often screams when he ought to speak'. But this excitability was soothed by the country, and in his own parish he was at his best. He would never have been so beloved by his parishioners, if they had not found him willing to listen as well as to advise and to instruct.