wrote the book “without any access to town records, much more to State papers, chiefly by the light of my dear old Hakluyt,” and adds that he always tried “to be as accurate as possible.” In a letter to Tom Hughes before the book appeared he wrote: “I suppose you are right as to Amyas and his mother. I will see to it. The letter in Purchas is to me unknown, but your conception agrees with a picture my father says he has seen of Captain John 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 stemp in plenty too.”

Perhaps the most strenuous objection to Westward Ho! comes from Catholics of the Roman Communion, who hold that Kingsley’s pictures of Jesuits are nothing better than malicious caricatures. This objection was brought home to the writer of this note very forcibly a few years ago when the book was prescribed for the English Division of the B.A. Examination in a South Indian University. Such strong opposition was encountered on the part of the numerous ROman Catholic affiliated colleges that the syllabus had to be changed by the Senate and another book substituted in place of this party pamphlet. It ought not to be forgotten, however, that Kingsley bears the worthiest testimony to that band of English Catholic gentry who so nobly stood for England in the Armada cristis, and it is the Spanish-American Jesuits and inquisitors whom the necessity of his story forces him to depict by way of contrast to the great figure of Salvation Yeo. One could wish that his skill could have obviated “the somewhat jarring sense of a partial representation in this respect”; but, after all, Kingsley held the conviction that the cause of Yeo was the cause of freedom, of England and of God. It was because his heroes held this conviction (Drake was full of it) that the great victory was won, and it was because Kingsley held it that his story is so animated, energetic and rapid in action.

But, whatever its merits and demerits as history, Westward Ho! has one great charm, that it shares with all Kingsley’s writing—the beauty and brilliancy of its natural description. “When one recalls,” says Mr. Frederic Harrison, “all that Kingsley has done in the landscape of romance—Alexandria and the desert of the Nile, West Indian jungles and rivers, Bideford Bay, his own heaths in Yeast, the fever-dens of London in Alton Locke—one is almost inclined to rank him in this single fift of description as first of all the novelists since Scott. Compared with the brilliancy and variety of Kingsley’s pictures of country, Bulwer’s and Discraeli’s are conventional; even those of Dickens are but local; Thackeray and Trollope have no interest in landscape at all; George Eliot’s keen interest is not so spontaneous as Kingsley’s, and Charlotte Brontë’s wonderful gift is strictly limited to the narrow field of her own experience. But Kingsley, as a landscape painter, can image to us other continents and many zones, and he carries us to distant climates with astonishing force of reality.”

And yet there is a world of difference between his descriptions of the things at home that he had seen and those in torried regions that he had never seen. This has been pointed out once for all by Sir Leslie Stephen, who draws a telling contrast between the description of the midday calm of the tropical forest in Chapter xxiii. with that of the crag above the Devil’s-limekiln on the cliffs of Lundy (p. 625). The one is full of generalities, it is one of Humboldt’s catalogues enthused.

But the other is the real thing, “every touch shows loving familiarity with details, and a consequent power of selecting just the most speaking incidents.” We have “the atmospheric effect, and what we may call the dramatic character. Every phrase suggests a picture, and the whole description has real unity of effect, instead of being a simple enumeration of details.” It is passages like this that show Kingsley at his best and admit him to the goodly fellowship of Izzaak Walton and Gilbert White and Richard Jefferies. “Nobody has ever shown a greater power of investing with a romantic charm the descriptions of bird, beast and insect, and this taste is combined with a power of catching wider aspects of scenery. One secret of his power is the terseness and directness of his descriptions. He never lays himself out for a bit of deliberate bombast, and deals always with first-hand impressions. The writing is all alive. There is no dead matter of conventional phrases and imitative ecstasies. And, again, his descriptions are always dramatic. There is a human being in the foreground with whom we sympathize, we do not lose ourselves in mystic meditations, or surrender out-selves to mere sensuous dreaming. We are in active strenuous


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