In the essay on the Sagas
here I have tried to show, very imperfectly, what the Norsemen were
actually like. They caught Kingsley's fancy, and his "Hereward,"
though born on English soil, is really Norse--not English. But
Kingsley did not write about the Vikings, nor about his Elizabethan
heroes in "Westward Ho!" in a perfectly simple, straightforward way.
He was always thinking of our own times and referring to them. That
is why even the rather ruffianly Hereward is so great an enemy of
saints and monks. That is why, in "Hypatia" (which opens so well),
we have those prodigiously dull, stupid, pedantic, and conceited
reflections of Raphael Ben Ezra. That is why, in all Kingsley's
novels, he is perpetually exciting himself in defence of marriage
and the family life, as if any monkish ideas about the blessedness
of bachelorhood were ever likely to drive the great Anglo-Saxon race
into convents and monasteries. That is the very last thing we have
to be afraid of; but Kingsley was afraid of it, and was eternally
attacking everything Popish and monkish.
Boys and young people, then, can read "Westward Ho!" and "Hypatia,"
and "Hereward the Wake," with far more pleasure than their elders.
They hurry on with the adventures, and do not stop to ask what the
moralisings mean. They forgive the humour of Kingsley because it is
well meant. They get, in short, the real good of this really great
and noble and manly and blundering genius.
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