p>Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 711, August 11, 1877
CHARLES KINGSLEY AT HOME
All who had the pleasure of knowing the Rev. Charles Kingsley, author of Hypatia, Westward Ho, and Alton Locke, will acknowledge that however great he was as a parish clergyman, poet, novelist, naturalist, sportsman, he was greater still at home. And how was this greatness shewn? By his self-denying efforts to give joy to his wife and children, and chivalrously to take away from them whatever was painful. No man ever excelled him in the quality of being 'thoroughly domesticated.' In actual life we fear this is a rare attainment, for it is nothing less than the flower that indicates perfectly developed manhood or womanhood. This flower beautified and sweetened Canon Kingsley's life. He was a hero to those who had greater opportunities of knowing him than have most valets. Whatever unheroic cynics may say of the disenchanting power of intimacy, there was an exception in his case. How much such an example should teach us all! Not one in ten thousand can hope to become the many-sided man Kingsley was, but none of us need despair of making that little corner of the world called 'home' brighter and happier, as he made Eversley Rectory. We can all make our homes sweet if, when company-clothes are doffed, we clothe the most ordinary and commonplace duties of home-life with good temper and cheerfulness.
Because the Rectory-house was on low ground, the rector of Eversley, who considered violation of the divine laws of health a sort of acted blasphemy, built his children an outdoor nursery on the 'Mount,' where they kept books, toys, and tea-things, spending long happy days on the highest and loveliest point of moorland in the glebe; and there he would join them when his parish work was done, bringing them some fresh treasure picked up in his walk, a choice wild-flower or fern or rare beetle, sometimes a lizard or a field-mouse; ever waking up their sense of wonder, calling out their powers of observation, and teaching them lessons out of God's great green book, without their knowing they were learning. Out-of-doors and indoors, the Sundays were the happiest days of the week to the children, though to their father the hardest. When his day's work was done, there was always the Sunday walk, in which each bird and plant and brook was pointed out to the children, as preaching sermons to Eyes, such as were not even dreamt of by people of the No-eyes species. Indoors the Sunday picture-books were brought out, and each child chose its subject for the father to draw, either some Bible story, or bird or beast or flower. In all ways he fostered in his children a love of animals. They were taught to handle without disgust toads, frogs, beetles, as works from the hand of a living God. His guests were surprised one morning at breakfast when his little girl ran up to the open window of the dining-room holding a long repulsive-looking worm in her hand: 'O daddy, look at this delightful worm!'
Kingsley had a horror of corporal punishment, not merely because it tends to produce antagonism between parent and child, but because he considered more than half the lying of children to be the result of fear of punishment. 'Do not train a child,' he said, 'as men train a horse, by letting anger and punishment be the first announcement of his having sinned. If you do, you induce two bad habits: first, the boy regards his parent with a kind of blind dread, as a being who may be offended by actions which to him are innocent, and whose wrath he expects to fall upon him at any moment in his most pure and unselfish happiness. Next, and worst still, the boy learns not to fear sin, but the punishment of it, and thus he learns to lie.' He was careful too not to confuse his children by a multiplicity of small rules. 'It is difficult enough to keep the Ten Commandments,' he would say, 'without making an eleventh in every direction.' He had no 'moods' with his family, for he cultivated, by strict self-discipline in the midst of worries and pressing business, a disengaged temper, that always enabled him to enter into other people's interests, and especially into children's playfulness. 'I wonder,' he would say, 'if there is so much laughing in any other home in England as in ours.' He became a light-hearted boy in the presence of his children, or when exerting himself to cheer up his aged mother who lived with him. When nursery griefs and broken toys were taken to his study, he was never too busy to mend the toy and dry the tears. He held with Jean Paul Richter, that children have their 'days and hours of rain,' which parents should not take much notice of, either for anxiety or sermons, but should lightly pass over, except when they are symptoms of coming illness. And his knowledge of physiology enabled him to detect such symptoms. He recognised the fact, that weariness at lessons and sudden fits of obstinacy are not hastily to be treated as moral delinquencies, springing as they so often do from physical causes, which are best counteracted by cessation from work and change of scene.
How blessed is the son who can speak of his father as Charles Kingsley's eldest son does. '"Perfect love casteth out fear," was the motto,' he says, 'on which my father based his theory of bringing up children. From this and from the interest he took in their pursuits, their pleasures, trials, and even the petty details of their everyday life, there sprang up a friendship between father and children, that increased in intensity and depth with years. To speak for myself, he was the best friend – the only true friend I ever had. At once he was the most fatherly and the most unfatherly of fathers – fatherly in that he was our intimate friend and our self-constituted adviser; unfatherly in that our feeling for him lacked that fear and restraint that make boys call their father "the governor." Ours was the only household I ever saw in which there was no favouritism. It seemed as if in each of our different characters he took an equal pride, while he fully recognised their different traits of good or evil; for instead of having one code of social, moral, and physical laws laid down for one and all of us, each child became a separate study for him; and its little "diseases au moral," as he called them, were treated differently according to each different temperament… Perhaps the brightest picture of the past that I look back to now is the drawing-room at Eversley in the evenings, when we were all at home and by ourselves. There he sat, with one hand in mother's, forgetting his own hard work in leading our fun and frolic, with a kindly smile on his lips, and a loving light in that bright gray eye, that made us feel that, in the broadest sense of the word, he was our father.'
Of this son, when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, his father (then Professor of History) writes: 'Ah! what a blessing to be able to help him at last by teaching him something one's-self.' And to a learned 'F.G.S.' he says very seriously: 'My eldest son is just going off to try his manhood in Colorado, United States. You will understand, therefore, that it is somewhat important to me just now whether the world be ruled by a just and wise God or by 0. It is also important to me with regard to my own boy's future, whether what is said to have happened to-morrow (Good Friday) be true or false.' In this way Kingsley educated his heart and became truly wise. For no matter how extensive may be our stock of information, we cannot be called wise unless heart become to head a helpmate.
And how well he used his matrimony – a state that should be to all the means of highest culture, or 'grace.' Sympathising with a husband's anxiety, he once wrote to a friend: 'I believe one never understands the blessed mystery of marriage till one has nursed a sick wife, nor understands either what treasures women are.' He believed in the eternity of marriage. 'So well and really married on earth' did he think himself, that in one of his letters he writes: 'If I do not love my wife body and soul as well there as I do here, then there is neither resurrection of my body nor of my soul, but of some other, and I shall not be I.' And again in another letter: 'If immortality is to include in my case identity of person, I shall feel to her for ever what I feel now. That feeling may be developed in ways which I do not expect; it may have provided for it forms of expression very different from any which are among the holiest sacraments of life… Will not one of the properties of the spiritual body be, that it will be able to express that which the natural body only tries to express?'
Kingsley and his future wife met for the first time when he was only twenty years of age in Oxfordshire, where he was spending his college vacation. 'That was my real wedding-day,' he used always to say. The Cambridge undergraduate was at the time going through the crisis in a young man's life that may be called without irreverence 'moral measles.' He was then full of religious doubts; and his face, with its unsatisfied hungering look, bore witness to the state of his mind. He told her his doubts, and she told him her faith; and the positive, being stronger than the negative, so prevailed that he was no longer faithless but believing. Hitherto
