A VICTORIAN CONTROVERSIALIST

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29222, 4 June 1960, Page 3

A VICTORIAN CONTROVERSIALIST

The Dust of Combat. A Life of Charles Kingsley. By R. B. Martin. Faber. 300 pp. Index. Most people, when they hear the name of Charles Kingsley mentioned, think of “Westward g 0!” and of “The Water Babies,” his two successes; or of Newman’s 'Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” the sign e f his most resounding defeat, few nowadays turn over the pages of “Hypatia” or “Hereward the Wake,” although these works remain in print as standard clashes. His “Village Sermons” and 'Good News of God” have been brought out in cheap editions by Messrs Macmillan during this century; but they make old-fashioned reading now and indeed seem curiously lacking in originality. Yet Kingsley himself made a remarkable impression on his contemporaries. Not that he was ambitious. When he died, he was still vicar of Eversley and had but recently exchanged his canonsy at Chester for a stall at Westminster. Nevertheless he was what was called “a national figure.” and he remains a representative one. At his best, he carried along with him many of a younger generation than his own towards the task of far-reaching social reform. His position is perhaps that of Alton Locke, the hero of the novel of that name. “If by a Chartist you mean one who fancies that a change in mere political circumstance will bring about a millennium, I am no longer one. That dream is gone—with others. But if to be a Chartist is to love my brothers with every faculty of my soul—to wish to live and die struggling for their rights, endeavouring to make them, not electors merely, I but fit to- be electors, senators,! kings, and priests to God and to His Christ —if that be the Chartism of the future, then am I sevenfold a Chartist, and ready to confess it before men, though I were thrust forth from every door in England.”

It would seem to follow that some form of socialistic, welfare Statb should be planned, “but it was clear that socialism needed to be entirely Christianised, or . it might become an alternative to Christianity and shake the Church to its foundations.” No doubt the amusing bias here is unconscious; but Charles Kingsley was deeply concerned at the state of what used to be called “the deserving poor." He knew a great deal about conditions in the larger cities, and besides his own parish of Eversley in the forties the agricultural labourers were in a desperate plight. What Kingsley thought can be studied in the pages of his first novel, “Yeast,” “Yeast itself,” he said, is an honest sample of the questions which, good or bad. are fermenting in the minds of the young of this day, and are rapidly leavening

tiem” ll^^8 *h e r^s * n ® generaIn a sermon preached in Lonm J une, 1851, Kingsley said, All systems of society which tavour the accumulation of capital m a few hands— which oust the masses from the soil which their forefathers possessed of old—(which reduce them to the level of serfs and day-labourers, living on wages and on alms—which crush them down with debt, or in anywise degrade or enslave them or deny them a permanent stake in the Commonwealth, are contrary to the kingdom of God which Jesus proclaimed.” Although after 1852 he had little more to do with the Christian Socialist movement, he always cherished the principles he had so frequently and forcefullv

uttered. He was in a special sense the mouthpiece of the movement.

“Westward Ho!” is like other books of its kind. In its sectarian bitterness almost a polemical tract, it survives, so far as it does survive, as an adventure story for boys. Kingsley writes in a prejudiced way. For example, Raleigh in Ireland has condemned 700 Spaniards to death. “It was done. Right or wrong it was done. The shrieks and curses had died away, and the Fort del Oro was a red shambles, which the soldiers were trying to cover from the sight of heaven and earth by dragging the bodies into the ditch, and covering them with ruins of the rampart, while the Irish fled trembling into the deepest recesses of the forest. It was done; and it never needed to be done again. The hint was severe, but it was sufficient. Many years passed before a Spaniard set foot again in Ireland.” It is instructive to note that Kingsley shakes his head over the cruelty practised by the Spaniards. The English give a “severe hint”; the Spaniards, however, commit atrocities.

Individual Roman Catholics, too, may be personally attractive, or as brave as Don Guzman; but “it is taken for granted that their religion makes them into seducers and traitors.”

All of which naturally lead up ito the famous controversy with J John Henry Newman. As a critic, Kingsley believed in speaking his ' mind. His procedure as a controversialist was peculiar. He once wrote, “I shall be quite silent on any charges which you may bring against me. My business is attack, 'not defence. If .1 cannot make ' myself understood the first time |of speaking, I am not likely to ■do it by any subsequent word- ! splitting explanations.” No doubt lan excellent idea, provided the critic is impeccable. Kingsley, I however, was in error when he wrote in Macmillan’s Magazine, “Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage.” The writer of “The Dust of Combat” agrees that Kingsley acted foolishly in speaking, as he did; but he considers that Newman took advantage of the situation in an equivocal way. Not all readers will agree; for after all Newman was attacked in the first place and had the right to defend himself. Of course, it did not cost him any great effort to demolish his adversary, who is soon forgotten as the great cardinal becomes increasingly absorbed in the drama of his conversion to the Church of Rome and his new life in that communion.

Interest in Kingsley in all respects has been growing in recent I years. He touched English life at many points, as studies by Guy ’ Kendall, Margaret Thorp, and I Dame Una Pone - plainly show. Mr Martin has had the advantage of reading a vast amount of material concerning his subject in the Parrish collection of his own university, Princeton. “Dust of Combat” gives a scholarly account of one of the most brilliant of erratic figures of the nineteenth century.