Read Ebook: Daily Thoughts: selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife by Kingsley Charles Kingsley Frances Eliza Grenfell Editor

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Prague, then, was the city where they set up my cradle, over which, as over all cradles, so much was unprophesied. But my mother, who at my birth was already a widow, soon moved to Br?nn, and what I remember of childhood is events that took place in the Moravian capital.

There I see myself standing by the window--five years old--and looking down into the "great square," where a noisy throng is in wild commotion. A new word strikes upon my ear,--Revolution. Every one is looking out; every one is repeating the new word and is greatly excited. What my sensations were I no longer remember, but at any rate I too was excited, else the picture and the word would not have impressed themselves on my mind. But there is no more to it. The picture does not arouse any comprehension; the word has no meaning. Thus appears my first experience of a historical event.

But my memory reaches farther back, and shows me a scene which I was concerned in at the age of three, and which stirred me far more powerfully than the political overturnings of the year 1848.

I am about three years old. It is a beautiful afternoon, and my mother and my guardian are planning to take me with them to a picnic in the Schreibwald. The Schreibwald, a favorite place for excursions from Br?nn, shines among my memories of childhood as the sum of all natural beauty, festive joy, woodland shade, mountain-climbing, social meals,--in a word, as the acme of that combination of delights known as a picnic. At that date, on the memorable afternoon, all these experiences were doubtless not yet part of my consciousness; perhaps it was the very first time I was to be taken to the Schreibwald; but to me the name was forever afterwards associated with the following event.

They dressed me in a white cashmere frock trimmed with narrow red braid. A superb thing--d?collet?; I can still see before me the pattern of the braiding, I could draw it on paper. How the onlookers would marvel when they espied that! I felt myself beautiful in it, positively beautiful. And then my guardian, looking out of the window , remarked that it was clouding up, it would probably rain. There followed a short session of the cabinet,--the general, my mother, and the chambermaid Babette,--and the decision was announced: the beautiful new frock might suffer harm.

But consequently the next picture in this indelible picture gallery shows me the brilliantly clad, beautiful, and energetic creature laid on a large table, her face against the table-top, her red-embroidered frock lifted by the obliging hand of the tall army man who stood by; and from the maternal hand, slap, slap, the first whipping, with its burden of despair and dishonor, came down on the object.

Yes, despair: that there could be such great woe in the world, and the world not go to pieces under it, was most likely incomprehensible to me. At last the wild sobbing subsided; I was stood in a corner and had to beg for pardon--the victim of such grievous outrage, beg for pardon into the bargain! But I did; unhappy I was, deeply unhappy, but subdued. To-day I do not know why this occurrence made such a deep impression on my soul; was it injured vanity on account of the ravishing frock, or injured honor on account of the disciplinary procedure? Probably both.

Still another picture is fixed in my memory. Oh, I must have been a very vain and pleasure-loving little ninny! My mother comes into the nursery; she is wearing a beautiful gown, such as I have never yet seen on her, and jewelry on her bare neck: mamma is going to the ball, and they explain to me that this is a festivity where all are dressed so beautifully as that and dance in rooms that are all lighted up. I want to be taken with her, to go to the ball too. "Yes, my little roly-poly is going to the ball too." "To the Feather Ball she is going." With that the beautiful mamma kisses me and goes. "So," says Babette, "now we will get ready for the Feather Ball." And she begins to undress me, which I permit in joyful anticipation. But when, instead of being dressed in my best, I am put to bed and learn that this is the Feather Ball, I break out in wild sobbing, deceived, trifled with, humiliated.

I must delay a moment over the portrait of my guardian. It cast a friendly radiance over all my childhood and early youth. Friedrich, Landgrave of F?rstenberg, had been the comrade and friend of my deceased father, and he faithfully fulfilled till his death the duties which he had undertaken as guardian and protector and watchful friend to the fatherless child. I simply worshiped him; I regarded him as a being of a higher race, to whom I owed and gladly rendered unconditional obedience, honor, and love. He was an elderly gentleman, past fifty, when I came into the world; and, such being the way of children in judging age, he seemed to me ever so old, but ever so dear. So smiling, so jolly, so lordly, so indescribably kind. That confectionery that he used to bring with him! those rich Christmas presents that he gave me! that care for my education, my health, my future!

He died unmarried. His life was so methodically ordered, it ran its course so free from cares and passions, between service and sociality, that the wish to change it never arose in him. In Vienna he occupied handsome bachelor quarters in the Inner City; in Moravia he had a domain where he often spent a few weeks of the summer to see what his factors were doing; but he preferred, instead of living in his own lonely castle, to spend the summer months as a guest at the homes of his old mother and his various sisters. He never took journeys. At the Austrian boundarymonuments the world came to an end for him. Devotion, both churchly and military, had an essential place, I will not say among the virtues of his character, but among the virtues of his station in life. He was never absent at any Sunday mass, any feast of the church, or any parade. He had an enthusiasm for Field Marshal Radetzky, whom he had known well personally. The glory of the Austrian army was in his eyes one of the most admirable constituents of the universe. Society was to him the only class of human beings whose lives and fates interested him; and he always attended all the great functions given at the houses of the Schwarzenbergs, the Pallavacinis, etc. In the Adelskasino he had his regular rubbers of whist with sundry friends of his own rank. He was fond of card-playing in general--not gambling games, for he was in the highest degree steady, but innocent games such as piquet, omber, tarteln. This last he used to play with my mother at his twice-a-week morning visit to our house, and I was allowed to sit by to mark the points of the game with my little pencil. The various marriages in society interested him greatly; he had a troop of nephews and nieces who made more or less successful matches. He himself, though the male line was to become extinct with him, did not think of marrying. The reason was that he cherished an affection for a lady who, while she was the widow of an aristocrat, was not by birth capable of being presented at court, so a marriage with her appeared to be simply out of the question. He would not cause such a vexation to his family--and at bottom it would have been a vexation to him too; for everything that was out of the rut, outside of tradition, outside of "correctness," went against his grain.

This figure stands before my memory as a type of the old-fashioned Austrian: a type of which there are doubtless some specimens still, but which, as is the fate of all types, is dying out. Our country is now made up of Slavs, Germans, Croats, Italians, and a few more nationalities, but the collective name "Austrian" cannot again become a proudly patriotic conception until--if ever--all the different races, with individual autonomy, form a federative state as do the Germans, French, and Italians in Switzerland. A friend of mine--a middle-class man, but one who is made very welcome at court--was lately telling me of an interview that he had with the Emperor not long ago. In the course of a political conversation the Emperor asked him to what party he belonged: "To the one which has only a single adherent, that is myself." "And what party is that?" "The Austrian, your Majesty." "Well, how about me? don't you count me?" rejoined Franz Joseph, smiling.

--To come back to the past and my dear Fritzerl. It is a good thing that he did not live to see the events of 1866. The defeats in Bohemia, the severance of Venetia,--it would have cut him to the heart. And he would have found it simply incomprehensible, as it were a calamity violating all the laws of nature, and especially all divine ordinance. In that conception of the world which characterizes the type that I refer to, an essential point is the belief that Austria is the center of the world, and that any disaster which befalls it--especially any disaster in war--means an unnatural neglect of duty on the part of Providence. Unless such defeats be meant as punishment, as merited chastisement for the spread of unbelief, the dissolution of morals, t that there is something more than intellect, and that is--purity and virtue.

The Heroic Life. February 19.

Provided we attain at last to the truly heroic and divine life, which is the life of virtue, it will matter little to us by what wild and weary ways, or through what painful and humiliating processes, we have arrived thither. If God has loved us, if God will receive us, then let us submit loyally and humbly to His law--"whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth."

The Wages of Sin. February 20.

It is sometimes said, "The greater the sinner the greater the saint." I do not believe it. I do not see it. It stands to reason--if a man loses his way and finds it again, he is so much the less forward on his way, surely, by all the time he has spent in getting back into the way.

And if any of you fancy you can sin without being punished, remember that the prodigal son is punished most severely. He does not get off freely the moment he chooses to repent, as false preachers will tell you. Even after he does repent and resolves to go back to his father's house he has a long journey home in poverty and misery, footsore, hungry, and all but despairing. But when he does get home; when he shows he has learnt the bitter lesson; when all he dares to ask is, "Make me as one of thy hired servants,"--he is received as freely as the rest.

Silent Depths. February 21.

Our mightiest feelings are always those which remain most unspoken. The most intense lovers and the greatest poets have generally, I think, written very little personal love-poetry, while they have shown in fictitious characters a knowledge of the passion too painfully intimate to be spoken of in the first person.

True Justification. February 22.

God grant us to be among those who wish to be really justified by faith, by being made just persons by faith,--who cannot satisfy either their conscience or their reason by fancying that God looks on them as right when they know themselves to be wrong; and who cannot help trusting that union with Christ must be something real and substantial, and not merely a metaphor and a flower of rhetoric.

A Present Hell. February 23.

"Ay," he muttered, "sing awa', . . . wi' pretty fancies and gran' words, and gang to hell for it."

"To hell, Mr. Mackaye?"

"Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie--a warse ane than any fiend's kitchen or subterranean Smithfield that ye'll hear o' in the pulpits--the hell on earth o' being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a useless peacock, wasting God's gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures--and kenning it--and not being able to get oot o' it for the chains of vanity and self-indulgence."

Time and Eternity. February 24.

Christ's Life. February 25.

What was Christ's life? Not one of deep speculations, quiet thoughts, and bright visions, but a life of fighting against evil; earnest, awful prayers and struggles within, continued labour of body and mind without; insult, and danger, and confusion, and violent exertion, and bitter sorrow. This was Christ's life. This was St. Peter's, and St. James's, and St. John's life afterwards.

The Higher Education. February 26.

In teaching women we must try to make our deepest lessons bear on the great purpose of unfolding Woman's own calling in all ages--her especial calling in this one. We must incite them to realise the chivalrous belief of our old forefathers among their Saxon forests, that something Divine dwelt in the counsels of woman: but, on the other hand, we must continually remind them that they will attain that divine instinct, not by renouncing their sex, but by fulfilling it; by becoming true women, and not bad imitations of men; by educating their heads for the sake of their hearts, not their hearts for the sake of their heads; by claiming woman's divine vocation as the priestess of purity, of beauty, and of love.

God's Kingdom. February 27.

Philamon had gone forth to see the world, and he had seen it; and he had learnt that God's kingdom was not a kingdom of fanatics yelling for a doctrine, but of willing, loving, obedient hearts.

Sowing and Reaping. February 28.

So it is, that by every crime, folly, even neglect of theirs, men drive a thorn into their own flesh, which will trouble them for years to come, it may be to their dying day--

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all--

as those who neglect their fellow-creatures will discover, by the most patent, undeniable proofs, in that last great day, when the rich and poor shall meet together, and then, at last, discover too that the Lord is the Maker of them all.

The Church Catechism. February 29.

Did it ever strike you that the simple, noble, old Church Catechism, without one word about rewards and punishments, heaven or hell, begins to talk to the child, like a true English Catechism as it is, about that glorious old English key-word Duty? It calls on the child to confess its own duty, and teaches it that its duty is something most human, simple, everyday--commonplace, if you will call it so. And I rejoice in the thought that the Church Catechism teaches that the child's duty is commonplace. I rejoice that in what it says about our duty to God and our neighbour, it says not one word about counsels of perfection, or those frames and feelings which depend, believe me, principally on the state of people's bodily health, on the constitution of their nerves, and the temper of their brain; but that it requires nothing except what a little child can do as well as a grown person, a labouring man as well as a divine, a plain farmer as well as the most refined, devout, imaginative lady.

SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.

FEBRUARY 2. The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, COMMONLY CALLED The Purification of the Virgin Mary.

Little children may think of Christ as a child now and always. For to them He is always the Babe of Bethlehem. Let them not say to themselves, "Christ is grown up long ago." He is, and yet He is not. His life is eternal in the heavens, above all change of time and space. . . . Such is the sacred heart of Jesus--all things to all. To the strong He can be strongest, to the weak weakest of all. With the aged and dying He goes down for ever to the grave; and yet with you children Christ lies for ever on His mother's bosom, and looks up for ever into His mother's face, full of young life and happiness and innocence, the Everlasting Christ- child, in whom you must believe, whom you must love, to whom you must offer up your childish prayers.

FEBRUARY 24. St. Matthias, Apostle and Martyr.

Ash Wednesday.

There is a repentance too deep for words--too deep for all confessionals, penances, and emotions or acts of contrition; the repentance, not of the excitable, theatric Southern, unstable as water even in his most violent remorse, but of the still, deep-hearted Northern, whose pride breaks slowly and silently, but breaks once for all; who tells to God what he will never tell to man, and having told it, is a new creature from that day forth for ever.

The True Fast.

March.

Early in the Springtime, on raw and windy mornings, Beneath the freezing house-eaves, I heard the starlings sing-- Ah! dreary March month, is this then a time for building wearily? Sad, sad, to think that the year is but begun!

Late in the Autumn, on still and cloudless evenings, Among the golden reed-beds I heard the starlings sing-- Ah! that sweet March month, when we and our mates were courting merrily; Sad, sad, to think that the year is all but done.

Knowledge and Love. March 1.

Knowledge and Love are reciprocal. He who loves knows. He who knows loves. Saint John is the example of the first; Saint Paul of the second.

A Charm of Birds. March 2.

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