Classics in Short No.101: The Heroes

Fairy-tale, or folk-tale? Brian Alderson on Charles Kingsley’s story collection, The Heroes.

‘To my children, Rose, Maurce and Mary, a little present of THE HEROES’

The Water Babies

‘or a fairy tale for a land-baby’, having been the subject of our last Classic in Short it seems a neat idea to follow it with The Heroes, or Greek fairy tales for my children, disregarding the fact that, published in 1855, it preceded its companion volume by some eight years.

Charles Kingsley’s nomenclature

is arguable however. For neither of these books is strictly-speaking a fairy tale (which I would sooner call a folktale) nor do they share any uniform narrative characteristics. The Water-Babies is an inventive (over-inventive?) fantasy, while The Heroes is a reworking of history-as-mythology from sources that date back at least to the sixth century BC. Kingsley’s Argonauts perhaps the oldest and his Perseus and Theseus possibly a couple of centuries younger.

Whatever the sub-titles though,

the writer knew what he was doing with his storytelling, adopting different rhetorics according to the demands of his subjects. With The Heroes this is of particular interest since the book was not immediately prompted by his desire to pass on to his children his love of the stories of ‘these old Greeks’ than provoked by his obtaining the second of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s attempts to render classical myths ‘into very capital reading for children’. The quote comes from Hawthorne’s first production: A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls (1851), which Kingsley may or may not have seen. But he certainly saw the second, Tanglewood Tales (1853), which he found to be ‘distressingly vulgar’ and thus in need of some serious correction.

It’s easy to see the provocation.

The Wonder Book adopts the Bocacciesque manner of having its student narrator tell the stories to a group of fancifully-named children – Clover, Sweet Fern, Blue Eye etc – as they ramble to different parts of the Berkshires around Tanglewood. It’s a rather feeble framework which Hawthorne drops in the second book although throughout both he confesses to an uncaring attitude towards the classical aspects of the myths, converting (and much modifying them) into what he called ‘a Gothic or romantic guise’.

For Kingsley

that reduced the dignity conferred on the stories by their history. The three heroes he chose as his protagonists also figured in the dozen or so whom Eustace Bright introduced to Clover and co. but at far greater length, so that they could inhabit a defined atmosphere, and creating an authorial voice that carries with it a ballad-like formality. Thus, consider Perseus’s encounter with Hawthorne’s Three Gray Women (‘three very strange old ladies’) from whom he must learn the way to the Nymphs. To begin with, there is nothing heroic about the journey because he is attended throughout the whole Gorgon hunt by both Quicksilver (Hermes) and his sister (Pallas Athene), and when he descries the Women ‘he could not well make out what sort of figures they were; only he discovered that they had long grey hair…’

By way of contrast,

Kingsley’s Perseus takes flight from Hermes on winged sandals (denied at that stage to Hawthorne’s Perseus who must walk alongside Quicksilver). He doesn’t just wander along till he reaches the appointed place but flies through a whole rhapsody of Attic topography, flying ‘by Cythnus and by Ceos… till he came to the Unshapen Land and the place which has no name’ which is the sort of litany that later gave Tom’s flight across the Yorkshire moors a poetic grandeur.. And there ‘on the edge of everlasting night, where the air was

full of feathers and the soil was hard with ice…he found the Three Gray Sisters, by the shore of the freezing sea, nodding upon a white log of drift-wood, beneath the cold white winter moon…’

Absorbed by the adventures

he is recounting and their challenge to his imagination, Kingsley sustains the level and the poetic register of his diction throughout the book. This may not be authentic to any mythic source (whose nature is unknowable anyway) but makes for a persuasive distancing of myth from the everyday. I’m not sure that that is achieved by the most celebrated of modern interpretations – the Garfield/Blishen God Beneath the Sea – which replaces Kingsley’s essentially plain presentation with a self-conscious display of literary pyrotechnics. However, Kingsley could hardly measure up to Charles Keeping’s illustrations in that book in the matter of mythic imagery. The first edition of The Heroes was furnished with six plates done from drawings by the author. The frontispiece of Andromeda seems to stem from Kingsley’s apparent interest in bondage ceremonies (see the startling drawings in Susan Chitty’s The Beast and the Monk) but, as a draughtsman in line he cannot match the vision of his alter ego in prose and one regrets that Keeping was never given a crack at the text. What would he have made of Medea or the Minotaur?

The Heroes, Charles Kingsley, OUP Arc Manor, 978-1604505627, £6.99 pbk

I can authenticate that because, by a lucky chance, I was able to buy his own copy of it – but it is not furnished with any comments by its owner down the margins.