Kenelm Chillingly: His Adventures and Opinions was published in 1873 and was the last of his works written in a very productive career which covered many different genres. ‘Kenelm’ is in that unusual mode, the quest tale. The clue to this characterisation of the novel is given in the choice of name for our hero. The family are foregathered to decide on a name for the child whose birth has edged out of the running for the title to the lands and the nobility of the Chillingly another remote cousin whose expectations seemed secure. This would be Chillingly Gordon and in the fullness of time Sir Gordon. It is that ‘Sir’ that is the problem. It requires something of a more noble ring than Sir Peter the daddy of the child. He has always felt overborne by the ordinariness of the name Peter even though the Chillinglys have done no more than survived and stuck to their lands from the time of the Heptarchy.
“All the disorders and revolutions that have occurred in England since the Heptarchy have left the Chillinglys the same race in the same place. Somehow or other the Norman Conquest did not despoil them; they held fiefs under Eudo Dapifer as peacefully as they had held them under King Harold; they took no part in the Crusades, nor the Wars of the Roses, nor the Civil Wars between Charles the First and the Parliament. As the dace sticks to the water and the water sticks by the dace, so the Chillinglys stuck to the land and the land stuck by the Chillinglys. Perhaps I am wrong to wish that the new Chillingly may be a little less like a dace.”
The dace by the way are the Three Fishes Argent on the Chillingly escutcheon. There you have the mock heroic tone of the novel, its wit.
Consultation of the family tree brings forth the suggestion from the parson Chillingly who has the family living:
“I have it! I have it!” cried the Parson. “Here is a descent from Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia Stanley. Sir Kenelm Digby! No finer specimen of muscular Christianity. He fought as well as he wrote; eccentric, it is true, but always a gentleman. Call the boy Kenelm!”
That’s one noble Kenelm a swashbuckling hero of the 16th.century the man who among other thing had the recipe for the cure of wounds by sympathetic magic. The aggravating sword must be treated by the application of a potion and thereby the wound itself was speedily healed. In the 19th.century there is another Kenelm Digby a well known author not mentioned in the book who wrote a treatise on chivalry as the guide to the code of the modern gentleman. This book was entitled The Broad-Stone of Honour published in 1823. It sold massively and any young sprig of the aristocracy such as Bulwer-Lytton would have read it or have it thrust upon him.
There then is the clef, as it were, to the progress of the hero Kenelm Chillingly. He will find his way in life by means of a quest. Will he find joy and love this knight of the Sorrowful Countenance? First he must be schooled in pugilism in order to subdue the bullying ways of Butt at school. This training stands to him as he will later have to protect and defend maidens in distress. Other forms of instruction in the best modern ways of cynicism and progress in the 19th.century will leave him a man without a true spiritual foundation and deficiency in joy. Mivers Chillingly, a remote cousin/uncle has just the plan. Mivers is the editor of a very successful literary magazine called ‘The Londoner’ and one of his contributors is Welby:
He is an elegant scholar, an effective writer, much courted by public men, a thorough gentleman, has a pleasant house, and receives the best society. Having been once taken in, he defies any one to take him in again. His experience was not bought too dearly. No more acute and accomplished man of the world. The three hundred a year or so that you would pay for Kenelm would suit him very well. His name is Welby, and he lives in Chester Square.”
What Welby teaches the young Kelelm is a refined gentlemanly sort of melioristic materialism but so far ahead of the general received enlightened opinion that when he goes to Cambridge he is bored by the stale opinions of his fellow students. He takes a good degree, wins prizes for latin verses and precipitated into the world is at a loss.
We now find him at 21 years of age a strapping lad about to set out on his journey in life. But where to?
It may here be said that Kenelm was not without great advantages of form and countenance. He was tall, and the youthful grace of his proportions concealed his physical strength, which was extraordinary rather from the iron texture than the bulk of his thews and sinews. His face, though it certainly lacked the roundness of youth, had a grave, sombre, haunting sort of beauty, not artistically regular, but picturesque, peculiar, with large dark expressive eyes, and a certain indescribable combination of sweetness and melancholy in his quiet smile.
The orotundity of expression is not mere fustian to clothe banal observation but a deliberate dignity due a story of quest. How shall he begin? In the best way, by happenstance. He encounter a wandering minstrel on the high road composing a verse as he ambles:
“Black Karl looked forth from his cottage door,
He looked on the forest green;
And down the path, with his dogs before,
Came the Ritter of Neirestein:
Singing, singing, lustily singing,
Down the path with his dogs before,
Came the Ritter of Neirestein.”
After his conversation with the minstrel Kenelm decides to walk away from home and ramble on the country roads for a while and discover whether there be anything to this thing called love which the singer of the Germanic ballad proposes as an aim in life. He must do it in disguise so as not to attract attention though his mien and manner are a key to his rank. The letter he writes to his father:
My dear father, I go in quest of adventure like Amadis of Gaul, like Don Quixote, like Gil Blas, like Roderick Random; like, in short, the only people seeking real life, the people who never existed except in books. I go on foot; I go alone. I have provided myself with a larger amount of money than I ought to spend, because every man must buy experience, and the first fees are heavy.
What follows is so charming, witty, ironic withal, that a mere itemisation would be bathetic. There are maidens to rescue, observations on the fatuity of the worldly, gentlemanly virtue that stays within the bourne of possibility, and a lady fair indeed a Fairy Queen. I do believe that it is one of those fabulous books called an undiscovered classic. Please read it.
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