Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography by Charles Kingsley (best short novels txt) 📗

have nothing to sing about those glorious fellows, except 'God save the Queen and them.' I tell you the whole thing stuns me, so I cannot sit down to make fiddle rhyme with diddle about it—or blundered with hundred like Alfred Tennyson. He is no Tyrtæus, though he has a glimpse of what Tyrtæus ought to be. But I have not even that; and am going rabbit shooting to-morrow instead. But every man has his calling, and my novel is mine, because I am fit for nothing better. The book" ('Westward Ho!') "will be out the middle or end of January, if the printers choose. It is a sanguinary book, but perhaps containing doctrine profitable for these times. My only pain is that I have been forced to sketch poor Paddy as a very worthless fellow then, while just now he is turning out a hero. I have made the deliberate amende honorable in a note."

Then, referring to some criticism of mine on 'Westward Ho!'—"I suppose you are right as to Amyas and his mother; I will see to it. You are probably right too about John Hawkins. The letter in Purchas is to me unknown, but your conception agrees with a picture my father says he has seen of Captain John (he thinks at Lord Anglesey's, at Beaudesert) as a prim, hard, terrier-faced, little fellow, with a sharp chin, and a dogged Puritan eye. So perhaps I am wrong: but I don't think that very important, for there must have been sea-dogs of my stamp in plenty too." Then, referring to the Crimean war—"I don't say that the two cases are parallel. I don't ask England to hate Russia as she was bound to hate Spain, as God's enemy; but I do think that a little Tudor pluck and Tudor democracy (paradoxical as the word may seem, and inconsistently as it was carried out then) is just what we want now."

"Tummas! Have you read the story of Abou Zennab, his horse, in Stanley's 'Sinai,' p. 67? What a myth! What a poem old Wordsworth would have writ thereon! If I didn't cry like a babby over it. What a brick of a horse he must have been, and what a brick of an old head-splitter Abou Zennab must have been, to have his commandments keeped unto this day concerning of his horse; and no one to know who he was, nor when, nor how, nor nothing. I wonder if anybody'll keep our commandments after we be gone, much less say, 'Eat, eat, O horse of Abou Kingsley!'"

By this time the success of "Westward Ho!" and "Hypatia" had placed him in the first rank of English writers. His fame as an author, and his character as a man, had gained him a position which might well have turned any man's head. There were those amongst his intimate friends who feared that it might be so with him, and who were faithful enough to tell him so. And I cannot conclude this sketch better than by giving his answer to that one of them with whom he had been most closely associated in the time when, as Parson Lot, every man's hand had been against him—

"MY DEAR LUDLOW,

"And for this fame, &c.,

"I know a little of her worth.

"And I will tell you what I know,

"That, in the first place, she is a fact, and as such, it is not wise to ignore her, but at least to walk once round her, and see her back as well as her front.

"The case to me seems to be this. A man feels in himself the love of praise. Every man does who is not a brute. It is a universal human faculty; Carlyle nicknames it the sixth sense. Who made it? God or the devil? Is it flesh or spirit? a difficult question; because tamed animals grow to possess it in a high degree; and our metaphysician does not yet allow them spirit. But, whichever it be, it cannot be for bad: only bad when misdirected, and not controlled by reason, the faculty which judges between good and evil. Else why has God put His love of praise into the heart of every child which is born into the world, and entwined it into the holiest filial and family affections, as the earliest mainspring of good actions? Has God appointed that every child shall be fed first with a necessary lie, and afterwards come to the knowledge of your supposed truth, that the praise of God alone is to be sought? Or are we to believe that the child is intended to be taught as delicately and gradually as possible the painful fact, that the praise of all men is not equally worth having, and to use his critical faculty to discern the praise of good men from the praise of bad, to seek the former and despise the latter? I should say that the last was the more reasonable. And this I will say, that if you bring up any child to care nothing for the praise of its parents, its elders, its pastors, and masters, you may make a fanatic of it, or a shameless cynic: but you will neither make it a man, an Englishman, or a Christian.

"But 'our Lord's words stand, about not seeking the honour which comes from men, but the honour which comes from God only!' True, they do stand, and our Lord's fact stands also, the fact that He has created every child to be educated by an honour which comes from his parents and elders. Both are true. Here, as in most spiritual things, you have an antinomia, an apparent contradiction, which nothing but the Gospel solves. And it does solve it; and your one-sided view of the text resolves itself into just the same fallacy as the old ascetic one. 'We must love God alone, therefore we must love no created thing.' To which St. John answers pertinently 'He who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?' If you love your brethren, you love Christ in them. If you love their praise, you love the praise of Christ in them. For consider this, you cannot deny that, if one loves any person, one desires that person's esteem. But we are bound to love all men, and that is our highest state. Therefore, in our highest state, we shall desire all men's esteem. Paradoxical, but true. If we believe in Christmas-day; if we believe in Whitsunday, we shall believe that Christ is in all men, that God's spirit is abroad in the earth, and therefore the dispraise, misunderstanding, and calumny of men will be exquisitely painful to us, and ought to be so; and, on the other hand, the esteem of men, and renown among men for doing good deeds will be inexpressibly precious to us. They will be signs and warrants to us that God is pleased with us, that we are sharing in that 'honour and glory' which Paul promises again and again, with no such scruples as yours, to those who lead heroic lives. We shall not neglect the voice of God within us; but we shall remember that there is also a voice of God without us, which we must listen to; and that in a Christian land, vox populi, patiently and discriminately listened to, is sure to be found not far off from the vox Dei.

"Now, let me seriously urge this last fact on you. Of course, in listening to the voice of the man outside there is a danger, as there is in the use of any faculty. You may employ it, according to Divine reason and grace, for ennobling and righteous purposes; or you may degrade it to carnal and selfish ones; so you may degrade the love of praise into vanity, into longing for the honour which comes from men, by pandering to their passions and opinions, by using your powers as they would too often like to use theirs, for mere self-aggrandisement, by saying in your heart—quam pulchrum digito monstrari el diceri hic est. That is the man who wrote the fine poem, who painted the fine picture, and so forth, till, by giving way to this, a man may give way to forms of vanity as base as the red Indian who sticks a fox's tail on, and dances about boasting of his brute cunning. I know all about that, as well as any poor son of Adam ever did. But I know, too, that to desire the esteem of as many rational men as possible; in a word, to desire an honourable, and true renown for having done good in my generation, has nothing to do with that; and the more I fear and struggle against the former, the more I see the exceeding beauty and divineness, and everlasting glory of the latter as an entrance into the communion of saints.

"Of course, all this depends on whether we do believe that Christ is in every man, and that God's spirit is abroad in the earth. Of course, again, it will be very difficult to know who speaks by God's spirit, and who sees by Christ's light in him; but surely the wiser, the humbler path, is to give men credit for as much wisdom and rightness as possible, and to believe that when one is found fault with, one is probably in the wrong. For myself, on Looking back, I see clearly with shame and sorrow, that the obloquy which I have brought often on myself and on the good cause, has been almost all of it my own fault—that I have given the devil and bad men a handle, not by caring what people would say, but by not caring—by fancying that I was a very grand fellow, who was going to speak what I knew to be true, in spite of all fools (and really did and do intend so to do), while all the while I was deceiving myself, and unaware of a canker at the heart the very opposite to the one against which you warn me. I mean the proud, self-willed, self-conceited spirit which made no allowance for other men's weakness or ignorance; nor again, for their superior experience and wisdom on points which I had never considered—which took a pride in shocking and startling, and defying, and hitting as hard as I could, and fancied, blasphemously, as I think, that the word of God had come to me only, and went out from me only. God forgive me for these sins, as well as for my sins in the opposite direction; but for these sins especially, because I see them to be darker and more dangerous than the others.

"For there has been gradually revealed to me (what my many readings in the lives of fanatics and ascetics ought to have taught me long before), that there is a terrible gulf ahead of that not caring what men say. Of course it is a feeling on which the spirit must fall back in hours of need, and cry, 'Thou, God, knowest mine integrity. I have believed, and therefore I will speak; thou art true, though all men be liars!' But I am convinced that that is a frame in which no man can live, or is meant to live; that it is only to be resorted to in fear and trembling, after deepest self-examination, and self-purification, and earnest prayer. For otherwise, Ludlow, a man gets to forget that voice of God without him, in his determination to listen to nothing but the voice of God within him, and so he falls into two dangers. He forgets that there is a voice of God without him. He loses trust in, and charity to, and reverence for his fellow-men; he learns to despise, deny, and quench the Spirit, and to despise prophesyings, and so becomes gradually cynical, sectarian, fanatical.

"And then comes a second and worse danger. Crushed into self, and his own conscience and schema mundi, he loses the opportunity of correcting his impression of the voice of God within, by the testimony of the voice of God without; and so he begins to mistake more and more the voice of that very flesh of his, which he fancies he has conquered, for the voice of God, and to become, without knowing it, an autotheist. And out of that springs eclecticism, absence of tenderness for men, for want of sympathy with men; as he makes his own conscience his standard for God, so he makes his own character the standard for men; and so he becomes narrow, hard, and if he be a man of strong will and feelings, often very inhuman and cruel. This