Literary and General Lectures and EssaysKingsley, Charles
History
Literary and General Lectures and Essays
Kingsley, Charles
English literature -- History and criticism
It is amusing, by-the-bye, to see how the world changes its codes of
respectability, and how, what is anathema in one generation, becomes
trite orthodoxy in the next. The political sins in the work were,
that "my brother had attacked the corn-laws with some severity; and I
have attempted to level a battery against that sort of servile homage
which the poor pay to the rich!"
There is no use pursuing the story much farther. They again save a
little money, and need it; for the estate on which they have lived
from childhood changing hands, they are, with their aged father,
expelled from the dear old dog-kennel to find house-room where they
can. Why not?--"it was not in the bond." The house did not belong
to them; nothing of it, at least, which could be specified in any
known lease. True, there may have been associations: but what
associations can men be expected to cultivate on fourteenpence a-day?
So they must forth, with their two aged parents, and build with their
own hands a new house elsewhere, having saved some thirty pounds from
the sale of their writings. The house, as we understand, stands to
this day--hereafter to become a sort of artisan's caaba and pilgrim's
station, only second to Burns's grave. That, at least, it will
become, whenever the meaning of the words "worth" and "worship" shall
become rightly understood among us.
For what are these men, if they are not heroes and saints? Not of
the Popish sort, abject and effeminate, but of the true, human,
evangelic sort, masculine and grand--like the figures in Raffaelle's
Cartoons compared with those of Fra Bartolomeo. Not from
superstition, not from selfish prudence, but from devotion to their
aged parents, and the righteous dread of dependence, they die
voluntary celibates, although their writings show that they, too,
could have loved as nobly as they did all other things. The extreme
of endurance, self-restraint, of "conquest of the flesh," outward as
well as inward, is the life-long lot of these men; and they go
through it. They have their share of injustice, tyranny,
disappointment; one by one each bright boy's dream of success and
renown is scourged out of their minds, and sternly and lovingly their
Father in heaven teaches them the lesson of all lessons. By what
hours of misery and blank despair that faith was purchased, we can
only guess; the simple strong men give us the result, but never dream
of sitting down and analysing the process for the world's amusement
or their own glorification. We question, indeed, whether they could
have told us; whether the mere fact of a man's being able to dissect
himself, in public or in private, is not proof-patent that he is no
man, but only a shell of a man, with works inside, which can of
course be exhibited and taken to pieces--a rather more difficult
matter with flesh and blood. If we believe that God is educating,
the when, the where, and the how are not only unimportant, but,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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