for novel, you must acknowledge--I say it
regretfully--that Charles carries the heavier guns. If you ask me
whether I prefer _Westward Ho!_ or _Ravenshoe_, I answer without
difficulty that I find _Ravenshoe_ almost wholly delightful, and
_Westward Ho!_ as detestable in some parts as it is admirable in
others; that I have read _Ravenshoe_ again and again merely for
pleasure, and that I can never read a dozen pages of _Westward Ho!_
without wishing to put the book in the fire. But if you ask me which I
consider the greater novel, I answer with equal readiness that
_Westward Ho!_ is not only the greater, but much the greater. It is a
truth too seldom recognized that in literary criticism, as in
politics, one may detest a man's work while admitting his greatness.
Even in his episodes it seems to me that Charles stands high above
Henry. Sam Buckley's gallop on Widderin in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ is (I
imagine) Henry Kingsley's finest achievement in vehement narrative:
but if it can be compared for one moment with Amyas Leigh's quest of
the Great Galleon then I am no judge of narrative. The one point--and
it is an important one--in which Henry beats Charles as an artist is
his sustained vivacity. Charles soars far higher at times; but Charles
is often profoundly dull. Now, in all Henry's books I have not found a
single dull page. He may be trivial, inconsequent, irrelevant, absurd;
but he never wearies. It is a great merit: but it is not enough in
itself to place a novelist even in the second rank. In a short sketch
of Henry Kingsley, contributed by his nephew, Mr. Maurice Kingsley, to
Messrs. Scribner's paper, _The Bookbuyer_, I find that the younger
brother was considered at home "undoubtedly the novelist of the
family; the elder being more of the poet, historian, and prophet."
(Prophet!) "My father only wrote one novel pure and simple--viz. _Two
Years Ago_--his other works being either historical novels or 'signs
of the times.'" Now why an "historical novel" should not be a "novel
pure and simple," and what kind of literary achievement a "sign of the
times" may be, I leave the reader to guess. The whole passage seems to
suggest a certain confusion in the Kingsley family with regard to the
fundamental divisions of literature. And it seems clear that the
Kingsley family considered novel-writing "pure and simple"--in so far
as they differentiated this from other kinds of novel-writing--to be
something not entirely respectable.

The