MR. CHARLES KINGSLEY'S "AT LAST."*
THE reader who takes up Mr. Kingsley's book in the expectation, not unwarranted by the title, that he is about to enjoy another novel like Westward Ho! will find himself deceived ; but will scarcely hesitate to own, when he reaches the end of the second At Last : a Chriatinizs in the 1Vest Indies. By Charles Kiugeley. With Illustra- tions. In 2 vole. London: Macmillan and Co. 1871.
volume, that he has not been disappointed. Better than a novel, even when it comes from such a masterly hand as Mr. Kingsley's, is this fresh and vigorous description of life, the life of nature and of men, as it is seen under singularly favourable conditions by an observer who has eyes keenly appreciative of beauty, and that happy art, seemingly so easy, really so difficult of attainment, of giving to others clearly intelligible pictures of what he sees. Such word-pictures Mr. Kingsley paints better than almost any man, —not so gorgeous, if the comparison may be allowed, as Mr. Ruskin's, but, to our fancy at least, clearer and more
definite. In TVesnvard flo ! for instance, there are scenes— and here, it must be remembered, elaborated by study not of nature, but of books—which fix themselves indelibly iu the memory. There is the forest scene, for instance, when the jaguar seizes one of the deserters from Amyas's troop ; or the scene on the mountain road when the Englishmen surprise the Spaniards as they drive along their Indian slaves. Now, Mr. Kingsley has seen what he describes and writes while the memory is still fresh. How successful he is may be judged from the fact that fully one- half of these two volumes is made up of descriptions of scenery, a kind of writing with which, in most cases, one is easily satisfied, and yet that one reads with fresh and undiminished interest to the end.
Mr. Kingsley confines himself in the main to one island, Trini- dad. A short sketch of his voyage out, with the tale of what he saw, Gulf-weed and flying fish, among other things ; a highly picturesque chapter, entitled " Down the Islands," with flying glimpses of various islands among the Lesser Antilles, of which Antigua, St. Kitt's, and Guadaloupe are the best known ; a historical sketch of Trinidad from the day (July 31, 1499) when it was discovered by Columbus till its conquest by England in 1797 ; these occupy somewhat less than a half of the first volume, and the rest of his space Mr. Kingsley devotes, as he wisely devoted his time—it did not exceed in all the three months of absence which the law allows to a beneficed clergyman—to the beautiful island which he had elected to visit. We have no doubt that in every point of view he was right. What he has given us is ten times better than would have been the hasty sketches, necessarily confined to the chief towns and their immediate neigh- bourhoods, which would have been the result of hurried journey- ings from island to island, even had this been otherwise possible. Nor are we at all sorry that his choice fell on Trinidad. In Jamaica, which seems to have the first claim on the attention of the English traveller, there are cineres dolosi which Mr. Kingsley, who has a way of putting down his foot somewhat emphatically, might stir into flame. As it is, we feel ourselves in almost every case heartily in accord with our author, who, of course, as any reader who knows him will suppose, turns aside pretty frequently from his business of painting nature to deliver himself of shrewd, keen judgments about men and things.
In attempting to give such extracts as may justify our praise the difficulty is to select. But here are some passages out of what is one of the most striking chapters, "The High Woods." First, we have " The Cacao Plantation," which is in the out- skirts of the primeval forest :—
" Imagine an orchard of nut-trees, with very large long leaves. Each tree is trained to a single stem. Among them, especially near the path, grow plants of the common hothouse Datura, its long white flowers perfuming all the air. They have been planted as landmarks, to prevent the young Cacao-trees being out over when the weeds are cleared. Among them, too, at some twenty yards apart, are the stems of a tree looking much like an ash, save that it is inclined to throw out broad spurs, like a Ceiba. You look up, and see that they are Bola immortelles, fifty or sixty feet high, one blaze of vermilion against the blue sky. Those who have stood under a Lombardy poplar in early spring, and looked up at its buds and twigs, showing like pink coral against the blue sky, and have felt the beauty of the eight, can imagine faintly—but only faintly—the beauty of those ' Madres de Cacao,' Cacao-mothers, as they call them here, because their shade is supposed to shelter the Cacao-trees, while the dew collected by their leaves keeps the ground below always damp. I turned my dazzled eyes down again, and looked into the delicious darkness under the bushes. The ground was brown with fallen leaves, or green with ferns; and here and there a slant ray of sunlight pierced through the shade, and flashed on the brown leaves, and on a grey atom, and on a or i msoonjee; and a jewel whsiehmyhnenyge on the stem—and there, again, on a bright orange n became accustomed to the darkness, I saw that the stems and larger boughs far away into the wood were dotted with pods, crimson, or yellow, or green, of the size and shape of a small hand closed with the fingers straight out. They were the Cacao-pods, full of what are called at home coco-nibs. And there lay a heap of them, looking like a heap of gay flowers ; and by them sat their brown owner, pinking them to pieces and laying the seeds to dry on a cloth."
On one point we must contradict Mr. Kingsley. He says that few educated people in England know that the cocoa-nuts and the cocoa are the products of different trees. The writer of this review put the question to a class of thirteen young boys, and found that seven of them knew. But here are.the " high woods" themselves:— " My first feeling on entering the high woods was helplessness, con- fusion, awe, all but terror. One is afraid at first to venture in fifty yards. Without a compass or the landmark of some opening to or from which he can look, a man must be lost in the first ten minutes, such a sameness is there in the infinite variety. That sameness and variety make it impossible to give any general sketch of a forest. Once inside, you cannot see the wood for the trees.' You can only wander on as far as you dare, letting each object impress itself on your mind as it may, and carrying away a confused recollection of innumerable per- pendicular lines, all straining upwards, in fierce competition, towards the light-food far above ; and next of a groan cloud, or rather mist, which hovers round your head, and rises, thickening and thickening to an unknown height. Tho upward linos are of every possible thickness, and of almost every possible hue ; what leayee they bear, being for the most part on the tips of the twigs, give a scattered, mist-like appearance to the under-foliage. For the first moment, therefore, the forest seems more open than an English wood. But try to walk through it, and ton steps undeceive you. Around your knees are probably Matnures, with creeping stems and fan-shaped leaves, something like those of a young coco-nut palm. You try to brush through them, and are caught up instantly by a string or wire belonging to some other plant. You look up and round : and then you find that tho air is full of wires—that you are hung up in a network of fine branches belonging to half-a-dozen different sorts of young trees, and intertwined with as many different species of slender creepers. You thought at your that glance among the tree-stems that you were looking through open air; you find that you are looking through a labyrinth of wire-rigging, and must use the cut- lass right and left at every five steps Look hero at a fresh wonder. Away in front of us a smooth grey pillar glistens on high. You can see neither the top nor the bottom of it. But its colour, and its perfectly cylindrical shape, tell you what it is—a glorious Palmists; one of those queens of the forest which you saw standing in the fields ; with its capital buried in the green cloud and its base buried in that bank of green-velvet plumes, which you must skirt carefully round, for they are a prickly dwarf palm, called hero Black Roseau. Close to it rises another pillar, as straight and smooth, but one-fourth of the diameter—a giant's walking-cane. Its head, too, is in the green cloud. But near are two or three younger Ones only forty or fifty feet high, and you see their deli- cate feather heads, and are told that they are Manacques ; the slender nymphs which attend upon the forest queen, as beautiful, though not as grand, as she. The land slopes down fast new. You are tramping through stiff mud, and those Rowans are a sign of water. There is a stream or gully near : and now for the first time you can sea clear sun- shine through the stems ; and see, too, something of the bank of foliage on the other side of the brook. You catch sight, It may be, of the hoed of a tree aloft, blazing with golden trumpet-flowers, which is a Pout ; and of another lower one covered with hear-frost, perhaps a Croton; and of another, a giant covered with purple tassels. That is an Angelim. Another giant overtops oven him. His dark glossy leaves toss off sheets of silver light as they flicker in the breeze ; for it blows hard aloft out- side while you are in stifling calm. That is a Babas. And what is that on high ?—twenty or thirty square yards of rich crimson a hundred feet above the ground. The flowers may belong to the tree itself. It may be a Mountain-mangrove, which I have never seen in flower ; but take the glasses and decide. No. The flowers belong to a liens. The ' wonder- ful' Prince of Wales's feather has taken possession of the hood of a huge Mombin, and tiled it all over with crimson combs which crawl out to the ends of the branches, and dangle twenty or thirty foot down, wav- ing and-leaping in the breeze. And over all blazes the cloudless blue."
In speaking of one of the sights which Trinidad has to show, a thing commonly reckoned among the " wonders of the world," Mr. Kingsley makes some remarks which strike us as being -very much to the point, and as turning the tables on certain materialist
theorizers with considerable effect :-
" If any average educated person were asked—Which seemed to him more wonderful, that a hon's egg should always produce a chicken, or that it should now and then produce a sparrow or a duckling?—can it be doubted what answer ho would give? or that it would be the wrong answer? What answer, again, would he make to the question—Which is more wonderful, that dwarfs and giants—i.e., people under four feet six or over six feet six—should be exceedingly rare ?—or that the human race is not of all possible heights from three inches to thirty feet? Can it be doubted that in this case, as in the last, the wrong answer would be given ? He would defend himself, probably, if he had a smattering of science, by saying that experience teaches us that Nature works by ' invariable laws ;' by which he would mean, usually unbroken customs ; and that he has, therefore, a right to be astonished if they are broken. But he would bo wrong. The just cause of astonishment is, that the laws aro, on the whole, invariable ; that the One tram are so seldom broken ; that sun and moon, plants and animals, grains of dust and vesicles of vapour, are not perpetually committing Pomo vagary or other, and mak- ing as groat fools of themselves as human beings are wont to do. Hap- pily for the existence of the universe, they do not. But how, and still more why, things in general behave se respectably and loyally, is it won- der which is either utterly inexplicable, or explicable, I hold, only on the old theory that they obey Some One—whom we obey to a very limited extent indeed. Not that this latter theory gets rid of the perpetual and omnipresent element of wondrousness. If matter alone exists, it is a won- der and a mystery how it obeys itself, If A Spirit exists, it is a wonder and a mystery how He makes matter obey Him. All that the scientific man can do is, to confess the presence of mystery all day long ; and to live in that wholesome and calm attitude of wonder which we call awe and reverence ; that so he may be delivered from the unwholesome and passionate fits of wonder which we call astonishment, the child of ignor- ance and fefir, and the parent of rashness and superstition. So will he keep his mind in the attitude most fit for seizing new facts, whenever they are presented to him. So he will be able, when he doubts of a now
fact, to examine himself whether he doubts it on just grounds whether his doubt may not proceed from mere self-conceit, because the fact does not suit his preconceived theories ; whether it may not proceed from an even lower passion, which he shares (being human) with the most uneducated; namely, from dread of the two groat bogies, Novelty and Size"
We have left ourselves small space to notice many matters in these volumes to which we would gladly have directed our readers' attention. One thing we are especially glad to observe, the emphatic approval which our author gives to the way in which Trinidad manages the matter of the " Coolies." It is highly satisfactory to know, for the question practically in- volves the prosperity of all English communities in the tropics, that the difficult affair of "the immigration of labour" can be managed honestly and justly, can be made to serve the best in- terests both of the race which imports and of that which is imported. If the practices which have been denounced in Demerara and in Queensland were the rule, there would be no alternative to putting down the whole business with a strong hand, and, as a not very distant consequence, leaving the islands to the negro. Happily Trinidad seems to have solved the pro- blem. Other matters, among which is especially noticeable a very interesting account of " Obeah," .the great N egro superstition, we shall recommend our readers to search out for themselves in these fascinating volumes.
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