Home Life of Great Authors

by Hattie Tyng Griswold

"We are but the disjecta membra of a most remarkable pair of parents. Our talent, such as it is, is altogether hereditary. My father was a magnificent man in body and mind, and was said to possess every talent except that of using his talents. My mother, on the contrary, had a quite extraordinary practical and administrative power; and she combines with it, even at her advanced age (seventy-nine), my father's passion for knowledge, and the sentiment and fancy of a young girl."

The product of the union of such characters could hardly be otherwise than unique; and we see in Charles Kingsley a man of powerful nature,—strong, aggressive, administrative,—but at the same time deeply poetical, and tender almost to weakness. We find in him a union of the intensest sympathy with the weak and helpless, and a comprehension of the flaws and defects which make up their character, which seems at times merciless and almost heartless. We find in him remarkable combative power, united to a desire to use that power purely and simply for the defence and protection of those who are unable to protect and help themselves. We find a man who can deal heaviest blows, who loves the excitement of a battle, and never shuns an occasion for a fight in behalf of humanity, but who was so sensitive to an unfair thrust from an opponent that his life was permanently embittered by the injustice and malignity of literary and political critics of the opposing party. In short, he united a royal aggressiveness shaped and guided entirely by his Christian principles, and a tenderness and sensitiveness such as are rarely found in so strong and fearless a man.

In childhood he is described as strong and active, but not expert at any games; while he bore pain wonderfully well, and excelled in all feats that required nerve and daring. He was well prepared when he went to Cambridge, and obtained a scholarship at Magdalen the first year. He disliked the prescribed course intensely, and sometimes neglected his work and gave himself up to wild sport in the fens, which then presented much of the bleak picturesqueness which he has immortalized in his prose idyls. He was very popular, but not very sociable, and lived then, as afterwards, a most strenuous life. On July 6, 1839, while visiting in Oxfordshire, he met his future wife, Fanny, the daughter of Pascoe Grenfell and Georgiana St. Leger his wife. Circumstances seemed to give the lover very little hope, and in intervals of recklessness Kingsley often dreamed and talked of going to America and joining the wild hunters on the prairies. Had he done so, what bits of strong and striking description should we not have had! Few writers have the photographic accuracy of Kingsley, united to so vivid an imagination; consequently his pictures are all of striking quality. Look at this characteristic bit, when Amyas and his friends walk to the cliffs of Lundy:—

"As they approached, a raven, who sat upon the topmost stone, black against the bright blue sky, flapped lazily away, and sunk down the abysses of the cliff, as if he had scented the corpses beneath the surge. Below them from the gull-rock rose a thousand birds, and filled the air with sound; the choughs cackled, the hacklets wailed, the great black-backs laughed querulous defiance at the intruders, and a single falcon with an angry bark darted out beneath their feet, and hung poised high aloft, watching the sea-fowl which swung slowly round and round below."

In all his books we have these glowing pictures of the natural world, intense, graven in as it were with a burin, and colored with tropical magnificence.

Soon after taking orders Charles Kingsley was given the living of Eversley, which he retained to the end of his life. His work there was full of hardship; but he was young and strong, and had a superabundant energy which no toil daunted. Eversley was a democratic parish of "heth croppers," and there were few gentry within its borders. These peasants were hereditary poachers on Windsor Forest and other preserves in the neighborhood, and possessed one and all with a spirit of almost lawless independence. But it was one of Kingsley's most amiable characteristics through life to be able to make friends of uncultivated people without any painful effort of condescension. He visited these poor people of his parish constantly, until he knew every person intimately, and could speak to each with a knowledge of his inmost needs; and their needs, in most cases, were of a very earthly and commonplace kind.

"What is the use," he would say, "of my talking to a lot of hungry paupers about heaven? Sir, as my clerk said to me yesterday, there is a weight on their hearts, and they care for no hope and no change, for they know they can be no worse off than they are." But he did better for them than to preach far-away sermons above their comprehension. "If a man or woman were suffering or dying, he would go to them five or six times a day,—and night as well as day,—for his own heart's sake as well as for their soul's sake." And he won the respect of these people for the Church which they had long neglected, and which had ceased to stand for anything to them, until, "when he announced the first confirmation, and invited all who wished to take advantage of it to come to the rectory on a certain evening for instruction, the stud groom from Sir John Cope's, a respectable man of five-and-thirty, was among the first to come, bringing a message from the whips and stablemen to say that they had all been confirmed once, but if Mr. Kingsley wished it they would all be happy to come again." This was at a time when England was in a really dangerous state of tumult and discontent, and when the Church, through the heartlessness and folly of its leaders, had lost almost all hold upon the people. Is there not in it a hint to the unsuccessful preachers of our time?

In a few years he had raised the whole parish of Eversley to a higher level, and had set his mark upon every individual soul in his keeping. And after he had been appointed to the canonry of Westminster, and was called to preach to immense congregations there, he felt the burden of these new souls, as he had felt that of his more humble charge. He felt that he was personally called to speak some vital word to every soul within his hearing, and the strain upon him was great, as he realized how difficult a thing this was to do in these later days. He expressed his sense of this responsibility in his characteristic way. "Whenever," he said, "I walk along the choir to the pulpit I wish myself dead; and whenever I walk back I wish myself more dead." But though his sense of failure was great, it is certain that those noble sermons in the grand abbey left their ineffaceable mark upon some of that multitude of young men who crowded the north and south transepts of the abbey, and stood there for two hours through a long musical service, that they might hear Kingsley when he spoke; for he spoke with characteristic power and eloquence, moving all by his earnestness and evident sincerity. "If you want to be stirred to the very depths of your heart," said one of the minor canons to Canon Farrar, "come to the abbey and hear Canon Kingsley." And when he preached, as he often did, to classes of college boys, even the youngest, they always found something pertinent to their own cases in what he said.

He had married in the early days of Eversley the one woman he ever loved, and the marriage was one of peculiar happiness, so that his home life was always of the brightest. A family of beautiful children sprung up around him, and in his peculiar fondness for pets he always had dogs about him that were scarcely less dear than his children. He mourned the death of one after another of his favorites, until, when the last one died, he said he would have no more,—the pang of parting with them was too keen.

The influence of his books as they came along one after another—"Yeast," "Alton Locke," "Hypatia," "Westward Ho," "Two Years Ago"—was of a stimulating, even of an exciting, nature, particularly that of the earlier ones. Like nearly all men of genius, when young he was a radical, and upon the publication of his first books the conservatives all took up arms against him. In review after review, all learning, all sincerity, all merit was denied him. He bore up under a storm of obloquy and misrepresentation. This simply because he had shown some of the sufferings of the poor,—given some vivid pictures of life in England as it was in those days, before the repeal of the Corn Laws had mitigated a little the sufferings of the dependent masses; and had expressed some human sympathy with all this fruitless pain, and a manly indignation at some forms of atrocious wrong. But there was nothing in his teaching of the people which should have given offence to the veriest conservative. The main burden of it was that "workingmen must emancipate themselves from the tyranny of their own vices before they could be emancipated from the tyranny of bad social arrangements; that they must cultivate the higher elements of a common humanity in themselves before they could obtain their share in the heritage of national civilization. He discouraged every approach to illegality or violence, and during the riots of that exciting time worked as hard as the Duke of Wellington to keep the peace." But the Philistines of that day looked upon it as crime in a beneficed clergyman to enter into friendly intercourse for any purpose whatever with revolutionists, as they called the agitators, who were engaged in what seem to us now to have been great reforms. They denounced him for a Chartist, a name which he proudly owned, although he never went the lengths of the real leaders in that movement; and owning, as his enemies did, all the powerful papers and reviews, they systematically belittled his work and prejudiced the minds of many people against him to his dying day.