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Title: A. W. Kinglake
       A Biographical and Literary Study


Author: W. Tuckwell



Release Date: February 21, 2013  [eBook #539]
[This file was first posted on March 23, 1996]

Language: English

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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A. W. KINGLAKE***


Transcribed from the 1902 Edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

                 [Picture: Kinglake in the late Fifties]





                              A. W. KINGLAKE
                            A BIOGRAPHICAL AND
                              LITERARY STUDY


                                    BY
                             REV. W. TUCKWELL

             AUTHOR OF “TONGUES IN TREES,” “WINCHESTER FIFTY
               YEARS AGO,” “REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD,” ETC.

                                * * * * *

                  ἁμέραι δ᾿ ἐπίλοιποι μάρτυρες σοφώτατρο

                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]

                                  LONDON

                          GEORGE BELL AND SONS,

                                   1902

                                * * * * *

               CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
                   TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

                                * * * * *




PREFACE


It is just eleven years since Kinglake passed away, and his life has not
yet been separately memorialized.  A few years more, and the personal
side of him would be irrecoverable, though by personality, no less than
by authorship, he made his contemporary mark.  When a tomb has been
closed for centuries, the effaced lineaments of its tenant can be
re-coloured only by the idealizing hand of genius, as Scott drew
Claverhouse, and Carlyle drew Cromwell.  But, to the biographer of the
lately dead, men have a right to say, as Saul said to the Witch of Endor,
“Call up Samuel!”  In your study of a life so recent as Kinglake’s, give
us, if you choose, some critical synopsis of his monumental writings,
some salvage from his ephemeral and scattered papers; trace so much of
his youthful training as shaped the development of his character; depict,
with wise restraint, his political and public life: but also, and above
all, re-clothe him “in his habit as he lived,” as friends and associates
knew him; recover his traits of voice and manner, his conversational wit
or wisdom, epigram or paradox, his explosions of sarcasm and his
eccentricities of reserve, his words of winningness and acts of kindness:
and, since one half of his life was social, introduce us to the
companions who shared his lighter hour and evoked his finer fancies; take
us to the Athenæum “Corner,” or to Holland House, and flash on us at
least a glimpse of the brilliant men and women who formed the setting to
his sparkle; “_dic in amicitiam coeant et foedera jungant_.”

This I have endeavoured to do, with such aid as I could command from his
few remaining contemporaries.  His letters to his family were destroyed
by his own desire; on those written to Madame Novikoff no such embargo
was laid, nor does she believe that it was intended.  I have used these
sparingly, and all extracts from them have been subjected to her
censorship.  If the result is not Attic in salt, it is at any rate Roman
in brevity.  I send it forth with John Bunyan’s homely aspiration:

    And may its buyer have no cause to say,
    His money is but lost or thrown away.




CONTENTS

CHAP.                                                PAGE
        I.  EARLY YEARS                                 1
       II.  “EOTHEN”                                   20
      III.  LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE            33
       IV.  “THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA”               56
        V.  MADAME NOVIKOFF                            90
       VI.  LATER DAYS, AND DEATH                     111
            INDEX                                     149

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

KINGLAKE IN THE LATE FIFTIES           _Frontispiece_
ELIOT WARBURTON                                    14
LORD RAGLAN                                        40
MADAME NOVIKOFF                                    92
KINGLAKE IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES                   128



CHAPTER I
EARLY YEARS


THE fourth decade of the deceased century dawned on a procession of
Oriental pilgrims, variously qualified or disqualified to hold the
gorgeous East in fee, who, with _bakshîsh_ in their purses, a theory in
their brains, an unfilled diary-book in their portmanteaus, sought out
the Holy Land, the Sinai peninsula, the valley of the Nile, sometimes
even Armenia and the Monte Santo, and returned home to emit their
illustrated and mapped octavos.  We have the type delineated admiringly
in Miss Yonge’s “Heartsease,” {1} bitterly in Miss Skene’s “Use and
Abuse,” facetiously in the Clarence Bulbul of “Our Street.”  “Hang it!
has not everybody written an Eastern book?  I should like to meet anybody
in society now who has not been up to the Second Cataract.  My Lord
Castleroyal has done one—an honest one; my Lord Youngent another—an
amusing one; my Lord Woolsey another—a pious one; there is the ‘Cutlet
and the Cabob’—a sentimental one; Timbuctoothen—a humorous one.”  Lord
Carlisle’s honesty, Lord Nugent’s fun, Lord Lindsay’s piety, failed to
float their books.  Miss Martineau, clear, frank, unemotional Curzon,
fuddling the Levantine monks with rosoglio that he might fleece them of
their treasured hereditary manuscripts, even Eliot Warburton’s power,
colouring, play of fancy, have yielded to the mobility of Time.  Two
alone out of the gallant company maintain their vogue to-day: Stanley’s
“Sinai and Palestine,” as a Fifth Gospel, an inspired Scripture
Gazetteer; and “Eothen,” as a literary gem of purest ray serene.

In 1898 a reprint of the first edition was given to the public, prefaced
by a brief eulogium of the book and a slight notice of the author.  It
brought to the writer of the “Introduction” not only kind and indulgent
criticism, but valuable corrections, fresh facts, clues to further
knowledge.  These last have been carefully followed out.  The unwary
statement that Kinglake never spoke after his first failure in the House
has been atoned by a careful study of all his speeches in and out of
Parliament.  His reviews in the “Quarterly” and elsewhere have been
noted; impressions of his manner and appearance at different periods of
his life have been recovered from coæval acquaintances; his friend
Hayward’s Letters, the numerous allusions in Lord Houghton’s Life, Mrs.
Crosse’s lively chapters in “Red Letter Days of my Life,” Lady Gregory’s
interesting recollections of the Athenæum Club in Blackwood of December,
1895, the somewhat slender notice in the “Dictionary of National
Biography,” have all been carefully digested.  From these, and, as will
be seen, from other sources, the present Memoir has been compiled; an
endeavour—_sera tamen_—to lay before the countless readers and admirers
of his books a fairly adequate appreciation, hitherto unattempted, of
their author.

I have to acknowledge the great kindness of Canon William Warburton, who
examined his brother Eliot’s diaries on my behalf, obtained information
from Dean Boyle and Sir M. Grant Duff, cleared up for me not a few
obscure allusions in the “Eothen” pages.  My highly valued friend, Mrs.
Hamilton Kinglake, of Taunton, his sister-in-law, last surviving relative
of his own generation, has helped me with facts which no one else could
have recalled.  To Mr. Estcott, his old acquaintance and Somersetshire
neighbour, I am indebted for recollections manifold and interesting; but
above all I tender thanks to Madame Novikoff, his intimate associate and
correspondent during the last twenty years of his life, who has
supplemented her brilliant sketch of him in “La Nouvelle Revue” of 1896
by oral and written information lavish in quantity and of paramount
biographical value.  Kinglake’s external life, his literary and political
career, his speeches, and the more fugitive productions of his pen, were
recoverable from public sources; but his personal and private side, as it
showed itself to the few close intimates who still survive, must have
remained to myself and others meagre, superficial, disappointing, without
Madame Novikoff’s unreserved and sympathetic confidence.

                                * * * * *

Alexander William Kinglake was descended from an old Scottish stock, the
Kinlochs, who migrated to England with King James, and whose name was
Anglicized into Kinglake.  Later on we find them settled on a
considerable estate of their own at Saltmoor, near Borobridge, whence
towards the close of the eighteenth century two brothers, moving
southward, made their home in Taunton—Robert as a physician, William as a
solicitor and banker.  Both were of high repute, both begat famous sons.
From Robert sprang the eminent Parliamentary lawyer, Serjeant John
Kinglake, at one time a contemporary with Cockburn and Crowder on the
Western Circuit, and William Chapman Kinglake, who while at Trinity,
Cambridge, won the Latin verse prize, “Salix Babylonica,” the English
verse prizes on “Byzantium” and the “Taking of Jerusalem,” in 1830 and
1832.  Of William’s sons the eldest was Alexander William, author of
“Eothen,” the youngest Hamilton, for many years one of the most
distinguished physicians in the West of England.  “Eothen,” as he came to
be called, was born at Taunton on the 5th August, 1809, at a house called
“The Lawn.”  His father, a sturdy Whig, died at the age of ninety through
injuries received in the hustings crowd of a contested election.  His
mother belonged to an old Somersetshire family, the Woodfordes of Castle
Cary.  She, too, lived to a great age; a slight, neat figure in dainty
dress, full of antique charm and grace.  As a girl she had known Lady
Hester Stanhope, who lived with her grandmother, Lady Chatham, at Burton
Pynsent, her own father, Dr. Thomas Woodforde, being Lady Chatham’s
medical attendant. {6}  The future prophetess of the Lebanon was then a
wild girl, scouring the countryside on bare-backed horses; she showed
great kindness to Mary Woodforde, afterwards Kinglake’s mother.  It was
as his mother’s son that she received him long afterwards at Djoun.  To
his mother Kinglake was passionately attached; owed to her, as he tells
us in “Eothen,” his home in the saddle and his love for Homer.  A
tradition is preserved in the family that on the day of her funeral, at a
churchyard five miles away, he was missed from the household group
reassembled in the mourning home; he was found to have ordered his horse,
and galloped back in the darkness to his mother’s grave.  Forty years
later he writes to Alexander Knox: “The death of a mother has an almost
magical power of recalling the home of one’s childhood, and the almost
separate world that rests upon affection.”  Of his two sisters, one was
well read and agreeably talkative, noted by Thackeray as the cleverest
woman he had ever met; the other, Mrs. Acton, was a delightful old
_esprit fort_, as I knew her in the sixties, “pagan, I regret to say,”
but not a little resembling her brother in the point and manner of her
wit.  The family moved in his infancy to an old-fashioned handsome
“Wilton House,” adjoining closely to the town, but standing amid spacious
park-like grounds, and inhabited in after years by Kinglake’s younger
brother Hamilton, who succeeded his uncle in the medical profession, and
passed away, amid deep and universal regret, in 1898.  Here during the
thirties Sydney Smith was a frequent and a welcome visitor; it was in
answer to old Mrs. Kinglake that he uttered his audacious _mot_ on being
asked if he would object, as a neighbouring clergyman had done, to bury a
Dissenter: “Not bury Dissenters?  I should like to be burying them all
day!”

Taunton was an innutrient foster-mother, _arida nutrix_, for such young
lions as the Kinglake brood.  Two hundred years before it had been a
prosperous and famous place, its woollen and kersey trades, with the
population they supported, ranking it as eighth in order among English
towns.  Its inhabitants were then a gallant race, republican in politics,
Puritan in creed.  Twice besieged by Goring and Lumford, it had twice
repelled the Royalists with loss.  It was the centre of Monmouth’s
rebellion and of Jeffrey’s vengeance; the suburb of Tangier, hard by its
ancient castle, still recalls the time when Colonel Kirke and his
regiment of “Lambs” were quartered in the town.  But long before the
advent of the Kinglakes its glory had departed; its manufactures had died
out, its society become Philistine and bourgeois—“little men who walk in
narrow ways”—while from pre-eminence in electoral venality among English
boroughs it was saved only by the near proximity of Bridgewater.  A noted
statesman who, at a later period, represented it in Parliament, used to
say that by only one family besides Dr. Hamilton Kinglake’s could he be
received with any sense of social or intellectual equality.

Not much, however, of Kinglake’s time was given to his native town: he
was early sent to the Grammar School at Ottery St. Mary’s, the
“Clavering” of “Pendennis,” whose Dr. Wapshot was George Coleridge,
brother of the poet.  He was wont in after life to speak of this time
with bitterness; a delicate child, he was starved on insufficient diet;
and an eloquent passage in “Eothen” depicts his intellectual fall from
the varied interests and expanding enthusiasm of liberal home teaching to
the regulation gerund-grinding and Procrustean discipline of school.
“The dismal change is ordained, and then—thin meagre Latin with small
shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper’s pall over all your
early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars
and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds and ends of
dead languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall, from
Roman story to a three-inch scrap of ‘Scriptores Romani,’—from Greek
poetry, down, down to the cold rations of ‘Poetæ Græci,’ cut up by
commentators, and served out by school-masters!”

At Eton—under Keate, as all readers of “Eothen” know—he was contemporary
with Gladstone, Sir F. Hanmer, Lords Canning and Dalhousie, Selwyn,
Shadwell.  He wrote in the “Etonian,” created and edited by Mackworth
Praed; and is mentioned in Praed’s poem on Surly Hall as

    “Kinglake, dear to poetry,
    And dear to all his friends.”

Dr. Gatty remembers his “determined pale face”; thinks that he made his
mark on the river rather than in the playing fields, being a good oar and
swimmer.  His great friend at school was Savile, the “Methley” of his
travels, who became successively Lord Pollington and Earl of Mexborough.
The Homeric lore which Methley exhibited in the Troad, is curiously
illustrated by an Eton story, that in a pugilistic encounter with
Hoseason, afterwards an Indian Cavalry officer, while the latter sate
between the rounds upon his second’s knee, Savile strutted about the
ring, spouting Homer.

Kinglake entered at Trinity, Cambridge, in 1828, among an exceptionally
brilliant set—Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, John Sterling, Trench, Spedding,
Spring Rice, Charles Buller, Maurice, Monckton Milnes, J. M. Kemble,
Brookfield, Thompson.  With none of them does he seem in his
undergraduate days to have been intimate.  Probably then, as afterwards,
he shrank from _camaraderie_, shared Byron’s distaste for “enthusymusy”;
naturally cynical and self-contained, was repelled by the spiritual
fervour, incessant logical collision, aggressive tilting at abuses of
those young “Apostles,” already

    “Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,
    Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father’s field,”

waxing ever daily, as Sterling exhorted, “in religion and radicalism.”
He saw life differently; more practically, if more selfishly; to one
rhapsodizing about the “plain living and high thinking” of Wordsworth’s
sonnet, he answered: “You know that you prefer dining with people who
have good glass and china and plenty of servants.”  For Tennyson’s poetry
he even then felt admiration; quotes, nay, misquotes, in “Eothen,” from
the little known “Timbuctoo”; {12a} and from “Locksley Hall”; and
supplied long afterwards an incident adopted by Tennyson in “Enoch
Arden,”

    “Once likewise in the ringing of his ears
    Though faintly, merrily—far and far away—
    He heard the pealing of his parish bells,” {12b}

from his own experience in the desert, when on a Sunday, amid
overpowering heat and stillness, he heard the Marlen bells of Taunton
peal for morning church. {13}

In whatever set he may have lived he made his mark at Cambridge.  Lord
Houghton remembered him as an orator at the Union; and speaking to
Cambridge undergraduates fifty years later, after enumerating the giants
of his student days, Macaulay, Praed, Buller, Sterling, Merivale, he goes
on to say: “there, too, were Kemble and Kinglake, the historian of our
earliest civilization and of our latest war; Kemble as interesting an
individual as ever was portrayed by the dramatic genius of his own race;
Kinglake, as bold a man-at-arms in literature as ever confronted public
opinion.”  We know, too, that not many years after leaving Cambridge he
received, and refused, a solicitation to stand as Liberal representative
of the University in Parliament.  He was, in fact, as far as any of his
contemporaries from acquiescing in social conventionalisms and shams.  To
the end of his life he chafed at such restraint: “when pressed to stay in
country houses,” he writes in 1872, “I have had the frankness to say that
I have not discipline enough.”  Repeatedly he speaks with loathing of the
“stale civilization,” the “utter respectability,” of European life; {14a}
longed with all his soul for the excitement and stir of soldiership, from
which his shortsightedness debarred him; {14b} rushed off again and again
into foreign travel; set out immediately on leaving Cambridge, in 1834,
for his first Eastern tour, “to fortify himself for the business of
life.”  Methley joined him at Hamburg, and they travelled by Berlin,
Dresden, Prague, Vienna, to Semlin, where his book begins.  Lord
Pollington’s health broke down, and he remained to winter at Corfu, while
Kinglake pursued his way alone, returning to England in October, 1835.
{14c}  On his return he read for the Chancery Bar along with his friend
Eliot Warburton, under Bryan Procter, a Commissioner of Lunacy, better
known by his poet-name, Barry Cornwall; his acquaintance with both
husband and wife ripening into life-long friendship.  Mrs. Procter is the
“Lady of Bitterness,” cited in the “Eothen” Preface.  As Anne Skepper,
before her marriage, she was much admired by Carlyle; “a brisk witty
prettyish clear eyed sharp tongued young lady”; and was the intimate,
among many, especially of Thackeray and Browning.  In epigrammatic power
she resembled Kinglake; but while his acrid sayings were emitted with
gentlest aspect and with softest speech; while, like Byron’s Lambro:

          “he was the mildest mannered man
    That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat,
    With such true breeding of a gentleman,
    You never could divine his real thought,”

her sarcasms rang out with a resonant clearness that enforced and
aggravated their severity.  That two persons so strongly resembling each
other in capacity for rival exhibition, or for mutual exasperation,
should have maintained so firm a friendship, often surprised their
acquaintance; she explained it by saying that she and Kinglake sharpened
one another like two knives; that, in the words of Petruchio,

    “Where two raging fires meet together,
    They do consume the thing that feeds their fury.”

[Picture: Eliot Warburton.  From a water-colour drawing in the possession
                           of Canon Warburton]

Crabb Robinson, stung by her in a tender place, his boastful iterative
monologues on Weimar and on Goethe, said that of all men Procter ought to
escape purgatory after death, having tasted its fulness here through
living so many years with Mrs. Procter; “the husbands of the talkative
have great reward hereafter,” said Rudyard Kipling’s Lama.  And I have
been told by those who knew the pair that there was truth as well as
irritation in the taunt.  “A graceful Preface to ‘Eothen,’” wrote to me a
now famous lady who as a girl had known Mrs. Procter well, “made friendly
company yesterday to a lonely meal, and brought back memories of Mr.
Kinglake’s kind spoiling of a raw young woman, and of the wit, the
egregious vanity, the coarseness, the kindness, of that hard old
worldling our Lady of Bitterness.”  In the presence of one man, Tennyson,
she laid aside her shrewishness: “talking with Alfred Tennyson lifts me
out of the earth earthy; a visit to Farringford is like a retreat to the
religious.”  A celebrity in London for fifty years, she died, witty and
vigorous to the last, in 1888.  “You and I and Mr. Kinglake,” she says to
Lord Houghton, “are all that are left of the goodly band that used to
come to St. John’s Wood; Eliot Warburton, Motley, Adelaide, Count de
Verg, Chorley, Sir Edwin Landseer, my husband.”  “I never could write a
book,” she tells him in another letter, “and one strong reason for not
doing so was the idea of some few seeing how poor it was.  Venables was
one of the few; I need not say that you were one, and Kinglake.”

Kinglake was called to the Chancery Bar, and practised apparently with no
great success.  He believed that his reputation as a writer stood in his
way.  When, in 1845, poor Hood’s friends were helping him by gratuitous
articles in his magazine, “Hood’s Own,” Kinglake wrote to Monckton Milnes
refusing to contribute.  He will send £10 to buy an article from some
competent writer, but will not himself write.  “It would be seriously
injurious to me if the author of ‘Eothen’ were _affichéd_ as contributing
to a magazine.  My frailty in publishing a book has, I fear, already hurt
me in my profession, and a small sin of this kind would bring on me still
deeper disgrace with the solicitors.”

Twice at least in these early years he travelled.  “Mr. Kinglake,” writes
Mrs. Procter in 1843, “is in Switzerland, reading Rousseau.”  And in the
following year we hear of him in Algeria, accompanying St. Arnaud in his
campaign against the Arabs.  The mingled interest and horror inspired in
him by this extra-ordinary man finds expression in his “Invasion of the
Crimea” (ii. 157).  A few, a very few survivors, still remember his
appearance and manners in the forties.  The eminent husband of a lady,
now passed away, who in her lifetime gave Sunday dinners at which
Kinglake was always present, speaks of him as _sensitive_, quiet in the
presence of noisy people, of Brookfield and the overpowering Bernal
Osborne; liking their company, but never saying anything worthy of
remembrance.  A popular old statesman, still active in the House of
Commons, recalls meeting him at Palmerston, Lord Harrington’s seat, where
was assembled a party in honour of Madame Guiccioli and her second
husband, the Marquis de Boissy, and tells me that he attached himself to
ladies, not to gentlemen, nor ever joined in general tattle.  Like many
other famous men, he passed through a period of shyness, which yielded to
women’s tactfulness only.  From the first they appreciated him; “if you
were as gentle as your friend Kinglake,” writes Mrs. Norton reproachfully
to Hayward in the sulks.  Another coæval of those days calls him
handsome—an epithet I should hardly apply to him later—slight, not tall,
sharp featured, with dark hair well tended, always modishly dressed after
the fashion of the thirties, the fashion of Bulwer’s exquisites, or of H.
K. Browne’s “Nicholas Nickleby” illustrations; leaving on all who saw him
an impression of great personal distinction, yet with an air of youthful
_abandon_ which never quite left him: “He was pale, small, and delicate
in appearance,” says Mrs. Simpson, Nassau Senior’s daughter, who knew him
to the end of his life; while Mrs. Andrew Crosse, his friend in the
Crimean decade, cites his finely chiselled features and intellectual
brow, “a complexion bloodless with the pallor not of ill-health, but of
an old Greek bust.”




CHAPTER II
“EOTHEN”


“EOTHEN” appeared in 1844.  Twice, Kinglake tells us, he had essayed the
story of his travels, twice abandoned it under a sense of strong
disinclination to write.  A third attempt was induced by an entreaty from
his friend Eliot Warburton, himself projecting an Eastern tour; and to
Warburton in a characteristic preface the narrative is addressed.  The
book, when finished, went the round of the London market without finding
a publisher.  It was offered to John Murray, who cited his refusal of it
as the great blunder of his professional life, consoling himself with the
thought that his father had equally lacked foresight thirty years before
in declining the “Rejected Addresses”; he secured the copyright later on.
It was published in the end by a personal friend, Ollivier, of Pall Mall,
Kinglake paying £50 to cover risk of loss; even worse terms than were
obtained by Warburton two years afterwards from Colburn, who owned in the
fifties to having cleared £6,000 by “The Crescent and the Cross.”  The
volume was an octavo of 418 pages; the curious folding-plate which forms
the frontispiece was drawn and coloured by the author, and was compared
by the critics to a tea-tray.  In front is Moostapha the Tatar; the two
foremost figures in the rear stand for accomplished Mysseri, whom
Kinglake was delighted to recognize long afterwards as a flourishing
hotel keeper in Constantinople, and Steel, the Yorkshire servant, in his
striped pantry jacket, “looking out for gentlemen’s seats.”  Behind are
“Methley,” Lord Pollington, in a broad-brimmed hat, and the booted leg of
Kinglake, who modestly hid his figure by a tree, but exposed his foot, of
which he was very proud.  Of the other characters, “Our Lady of
Bitterness” was Mrs. Procter, “Carrigaholt” was Henry Stuart Burton of
Carrigaholt, County Clare.  Here and there are allusions, obvious at the
time, now needing a scholiast, which have not in any of the reprints been
explained.  In their ride through the Balkans they talked of old Eton
days.  “We bullied Keate, and scoffed at Larrey Miller and Okes; we rode
along loudly laughing, and talked to the grave Servian forest as though
it were the Brocas clump.” {22}  Keate requires no interpreter; Okes was
an Eton tutor, afterwards Provost of King’s.  Larrey or Laurie Miller was
an old tailor in Keate’s Lane who used to sit on his open shop-board,
facing the street, a mark for the compliments of passing boys; as
frolicsome youngsters in the days of Addison and Steele, as High School
lads in the days of Walter Scott, were accustomed to “smoke the cobler.”
The Brocas was a meadow sacred to badger-baiting and cat-hunts.  The
badgers were kept by a certain Jemmy Flowers, who charged sixpence for
each “draw”; Puss was turned out of a bag and chased by dogs, her chance
being to reach and climb a group of trees near the river, known as the
“Brocas Clump.”  Of the quotations, “a Yorkshireman hippodamoio” (p. 35)
is, I am told, an _obiter dictum_ of Sir Francis Doyle.  “Striving to
attain,” etc. (p. 33), is taken not quite correctly from Tennyson’s
“Timbuctoo.”  Our crew were “a solemn company” (p. 57) is probably a
reminiscence of “we were a gallant company” in “The Siege of Corinth.”
For “‘the own armchair’ of our Lyrist’s ‘Sweet Lady Anne’” (p. 161) see
the poem, “My own armchair” in Barry Cornwall’s “English Lyrics.”  “Proud
Marie of Anjou” (p. 96) and “single-sin —” (p. 121), are unintelligible;
a friend once asked Kinglake to explain the former, but received for
answer, “Oh! that is a private thing.”  It may, however, have been a pet
name for little Marie de Viry, Procter’s niece, and the _chère amie_ of
his verse, whom Eothen must have met often at his friend’s house.  The
St. Simonians of p. 83 were the disciples of Comte de St. Simon, a
Parisian reformer in the latter part of the eighteenth century, who
endeavoured to establish a social republic based on capacity and labour.
Père Enfantin was his disciple.  The “mystic mother” was a female
Messiah, expected to become the parent of a new Saviour.  “Sir Robert
once said a good thing” (p. 93), refers possibly to Sir Robert Peel, not
famous for epigram, whose one good thing is said to have been bestowed
upon a friend before Croker’s portrait in the Academy.  “Wonderful
likeness,” said the friend, “it gives the very quiver of the mouth.”
“Yes,” said Sir Robert, “and the arrow coming out of it.”  Or it may mean
Sir Robert Inglis, Peel’s successor at Oxford, more noted for his genial
kindness and for the perpetual bouquet in his buttonhole at a date when
such ornaments were not worn, than for capacity to conceive and say good
things.  In some mischievous lines describing the Oxford election where
Inglis supplanted Peel, Macaulay wrote

    “And then said all the Doctors sitting in the Divinity School,
    Not this man, but Sir Robert’—now Sir Robert was a fool.”

But in the fifth and later editions Kinglake altered it to “Sir John.”

By a curious oversight in the first two editions (p. 41) _Jove_ was made
to gaze on Troy from Samothrace; it was rightly altered to Neptune in the
third; and “eagle eye of Jove” in the following sentence was replaced by
“dread Commoter of our globe.”  The phrase “a natural Chiffney-bit” (p.
109), I have found unintelligible to-day through lapse of time even to
professional equestrians and stable-keepers.  Samuel Chiffney, a famous
rider and trainer, was born in 1753, and won the Derby on Skyscraper in
1789.  He managed the Prince of Wales’s stud, was the subject of
discreditable insinuations, and was called before the Jockey Club.
Nothing was proved against him, but in consequence of the _fracas_ the
Prince severed his connection with the Club and sold his horses.
Chiffney invented a bit named after him; a curb with two snaffles, which
gave a stronger bearing on the sides of a horse’s mouth.  His rule in
racing was to keep a slack rein and to ride a waiting race, not calling
on his horse till near the end.  His son Samuel, who followed him,
observed the same plan; from its frequent success the term “Chiffney
rush” became proverbial.  In his ride through the desert (p. 169)
Kinglake speaks of his “native bells—the innocent bells of Marlen, that
never before sent forth their music beyond the Blaygon hills.”  Marlen
bells is the local name for the fine peal of St. Mary Magdalen, Taunton.
The Blaygon, more commonly called the Blagdon Hills, run parallel with
the Quantocks, and between them lies the fertile Vale of Taunton Deane.
“Damascus,” he says, on p. 245, “was safer than Oxford”; and adds a note
on Mr. Everett’s degree which requires correction.  It is true that an
attempt was made to _non-placet_ Mr. Everett’s honorary degree in the
Oxford Theatre in 1843 on the ground of his being a Unitarian; not true
that it succeeded.  It was a conspiracy by the young lions of the
Newmania, who had organized a formidable opposition to the degree, and
would have created a painful scene even if defeated.  But the Proctor of
that year, Jelf, happened to be the most-hated official of the century;
and the furious groans of undergraduate displeasure at his presence,
continuing unabated for three-quarters of an hour, compelled Wynter, the
Vice-Chancellor, to break up the Assembly, without recitation of the
prizes, but not without conferring the degrees in dumb show: unconscious
Mr. Everett smilingly took his place in red gown among the Doctors, the
Vice-Chancellor asserting afterwards, what was true in the letter though
not in the spirit, that he did not hear the _non-placets_.  So while
Everett was obnoxious to the Puseyites, Jelf was obnoxious to the
undergraduates; the cannonade of the angry youngsters drowned the odium
of the theological malcontents; in the words of Bombastes:

    “Another lion gave another roar,
    And the first lion thought the last a bore.”

The popularity of “Eothen” is a paradox: it fascinates by violating all
the rules which convention assigns to viatic narrative.  It traverses the
most affecting regions of the world, and describes no one of them: the
Troad—and we get only his childish raptures over Pope’s “Homer’s Iliad”;
Stamboul—and he recounts the murderous services rendered by the Golden
Horn to the Assassin whose _serail_, palace, council chamber, it washes;
Cairo—but the Plague shuts out all other thoughts; Jerusalem—but Pilgrims
have vulgarized the Holy Sepulchre into a Bartholomew Fair.  He gives us
everywhere, not history, antiquities, geography, description, statistics,
but only _Kinglake_, only his own sensations, thoughts, experiences.  We
are told not what the desert looks like, but what journeying in the
desert feels like.  From morn till eve you sit aloft upon your voyaging
camel; the risen sun, still lenient on your left, mounts vertical and
dominant; you shroud head and face in silk, your skin glows, shoulders
ache, Arabs moan, and still moves on the sighing camel with his
disjointed awkward dual swing, till the sun once more descending touches
you on the right, your veil is thrown aside, your tent is pitched, books,
maps, cloaks, toilet luxuries, litter your spread-out rugs, you feast on
scorching toast and “fragrant” {28} tea, sleep sound and long; then again
the tent is drawn, the comforts packed, civilization retires from the
spot she had for a single night annexed, and the Genius of the Desert
stalks in.

Herein, in these subjective chatty confidences, is part of the spell he
lays upon us: while we read we are _in_ the East: other books, as
Warburton says, tell us _about_ the East, this is the East itself.  And
yet in his company we are always _Englishmen_ in the East: behind
Servian, Egyptian, Syrian, desert realities, is a background of English
scenery, faint and unobtrusive yet persistent and horizoning.  In the
Danubian forest we talk of past school-days.  The Balkan plain suggests
an English park, its trees planted as if to shut out “some infernal
fellow creature in the shape of a new-made squire”; Jordan recalls the
Thames; the Galilean Lake, Windermere; the Via Dolorosa, Bond Street; the
fresh toast of the desert bivouac, an Eton breakfast; the hungry questing
jackals are the place-hunters of Bridgewater and Taunton; the Damascus
gardens, a neglected English manor from which the “family” has been long
abroad; in the fierce, dry desert air are heard the “Marlen” bells of
home, calling to morning prayer the prim congregation in far-off St.
Mary’s parish.  And a not less potent factor in the charm is the
magician’s self who wields it, shown through each passing environment of
the narrative; the shy, haughty, imperious Solitary, “a sort of Byron in
the desert,” of cultured mind and eloquent speech, headstrong and not
always amiable, hiding sentiment with cynicism, yet therefore
irresistible all the more when he condescends to endear himself by his
confidence.  He meets the Plague and its terrors like a gentleman, but
shows us, through the vicarious torments of the cowering Levantine that
it was courage and coolness, not insensibility, which bore him through
it.  A foe to marriage, compassionating Carrigaholt as doomed to travel
“Vetturini-wise,” pitying the Dead Sea goatherd for his ugly wife,
revelling in the meek surrender of the three young men whom he sees “led
to the altar” in Suez, he is still the frank, susceptible, gallant
bachelor, observantly and critically studious of female charms: of the
magnificent yet formidable Smyrniotes, eyes, brow, nostrils, throat,
sweetly turned lips, alarming in their latent capacity for fierceness,
pride, passion, power: of the Moslem women in Nablous, “so handsome that
they could not keep up their yashmaks:” of Cypriote witchery in hair,
shoulder-slope, tempestuous fold of robe.  He opines as he contemplates
the plain, clumsy Arab wives that the fine things we feel and say of
women apply only to the good-looking and the graceful: his memory wanders
off ever and again to the muslin sleeves and bodices and “sweet
chemisettes” in distant England.  In hands sensual and vulgar the
allusions might have been coarse, the dilatings unseemly; but the “taste
which is the feminine of genius,” the self-respecting gentleman-like
instinct, innocent at once and playful, keeps the voluptuary out of
sight, teaches, as Imogen taught Iachimo, “the wide difference ‘twixt
amorous and villainous.”  Add to all these elements of fascination the
unbroken luxuriance of style; the easy flow of casual epigram or
negligent simile;—Greek holy days not kept holy but “kept stupid”; the
mule who “forgot that his rider was a saint and remembered that he was a
tailor”; the pilgrims “transacting their salvation” at the Holy
Sepulchre; the frightened, wavering guard at Satalieh, not shrinking back
or running away, but “looking as if the pack were being shuffled,” each
man desirous to change places with his neighbour; the white man’s
unresisting hand “passed round like a claret jug” by the hospitable
Arabs; the travellers dripping from a Balkan storm compared to “men
turned back by the Humane Society as being incurably drowned.”  Sometimes
he breaks into a canter, as in the first experience of a Moslem city, the
rapturous escape from respectability and civilization; the apostrophe to
the Stamboul sea; the glimpse of the Mysian Olympus; the burial of the
poor dead Greek; the Janus view of Orient and Occident from the Lebanon
watershed; the pathetic terror of Bedouins and camels on entering a
walled city; until, once more in the saddle, and winding through the
Taurus defiles, he saddens us by a first discordant note, the note of
sorrow that the entrancing tale is at an end.

Old times return to me as I handle the familiar pages.  To the schoolboy
six and fifty years ago arrives from home a birthday gift, the bright
green volume, with its showy paintings of the impaled robbers and the
Jordan passage; its bulky Tatar, towering high above his scraggy steed,
impressed in shining gold upon its cover.  Read, borrowed, handed round,
it is devoured and discussed with fifth form critical presumption, the
adventurous audacity arresting, the literary charm not analyzed but felt,
the vivid personality of the old Etonian winged with public school
freemasonry.  Scarcely in the acquired insight of all the intervening
years could those who enjoyed it then more keenly appreciate it to-day.
Transcendent gift of genius! to gladden equally with selfsame words the
reluctant inexperience of boyhood and the fastidious judgment of
maturity.  Delightful self-accountant reverence of author-craft! which
wields full knowledge of a shaddock-tainted world, yet presents no
licence to the prurient lad, reveals no trail to the suspicious moralist.




CHAPTER III
LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE


KINGLAKE returned from Algiers in 1844 to find himself famous both in the
literary and social world; for his book had gone through three editions
and was the universal theme.  Lockhart opened to him the “Quarterly.”
“Who is Eothen?” wrote Macvey Napier, editor of the “Edinburgh,” to
Hayward: “I know he is a lawyer and highly respectable; but I should like
to know a little more of his personal history: he is very clever but very
peculiar.”  Thackeray, later on, expresses affectionate gratitude for his
presence at the “Lectures on English Humourists”:—“it goes to a man’s
heart to find amongst his friends such men as Kinglake and Venables,
Higgins, Rawlinson, Carlyle, Ashburton and Hallam, Milman, Macaulay,
Wilberforce, looking on kindly.”  He dines out in all directions, himself
giving dinners at Long’s Hotel.  “Did you ever meet Kinglake at my
rooms?” writes Monckton Milnes to MacCarthy: “he has had immense success.
I now rather wish I had written his book, _which I could have done—at
least nearly_.”  We are reminded of Charles Lamb—“here’s Wordsworth says
he could have written Hamlet, _if he had had a mind_.”  “A delightful
Voltairean volume,” Milnes elsewhere calls it.

“Eothen” was reviewed in the “Quarterly” by Eliot Warburton.  “Other
books,” he says, “contain facts and statistics about the East; this book
gives the East itself in vital actual reality.  Its style is
conversational; or the soliloquy rather of a man convincing and amusing
himself as he proceeds, without reverence for others’ faith, or lenity
towards others’ prejudices.  It is a real book, not a sham; it equals
Anastasius, rivals ‘Vathek;’ its terseness, vigour, bold imagery, recall
the grand style of Fuller and of South, to which the author adds a
spirit, freshness, delicacy, all his own.”  Kinglake, in turn, reviewed
“The Crescent and the Cross” in an article called “The French Lake.”
From a cordial notice of the book he passes to a history of French
ambition in the Levant.  It was Bonaparte’s fixed idea to become an
Oriental conqueror—a second Alexander: Egypt in his grasp, he would pass
on to India.  He sought alliance against the English with Tippoo Saib,
and spent whole days stretched upon maps of Asia.  He was baffled, first
at Aboukir, then at Acre; but the partition of Turkey at Tilsit showed
that he had not abandoned his design.  To have refrained from seizing
Egypt after his withdrawal was a political blunder on the part of
England.

By far the most charming of Kinglake’s articles was a paper on the
“Rights of Women,” in the “Quarterly Review” of December, 1844.  Grouping
together Monckton Milnes’s “Palm Leaves,” Mrs. Poole’s “Sketch of
Egyptian Harems,” Mrs. Ellis’s “Women and Wives of England,” he produced
a playful, lightly touched, yet sincerely constructed sketch of woman’s
characteristics, seductions, attainments; the extent and secret of her
fascination and her deeper influence; her defects, foibles,
misconceptions.  He was greatly vexed to learn that his criticism of
“Palm Leaves” was considered hostile, and begged Warburton to explain.
His praise, he said, had been looked upon as irony, his bantering taken
to express bitterness.  Warburton added his own conviction that the
notice was tributary to Milnes’s fame, and Milnes accepted the
explanation.  But the chief interest of this paper lies in the beautiful
passage which ends it.  “The world must go on its own way, for all that
we can say against it.  Beauty, though it beams over the organization of
a doll, will have its hour of empire; the most torpid heiress will easily
get herself married; but the wife whose sweet nature can kindle worthy
delights is she that brings to her hearth a joyous, hopeful, ardent
spirit, and that subtle power whose sources we can hardly trace, but
which yet so irradiates a home that all who come near are filled and
inspired by a deep sense of womanly presence.  We best learn the
unsuspected might of a being like this when we try the weight of that
sadness which hangs like lead upon the room, the gallery, the stairs,
where once her footstep sounded, and now is heard no more.  It is not
less the energy than the grace and gentleness of this character that
works the enchantment.  Books can instruct, and books can exalt and
purify; beauty of face and beauty of form will come with bright pictures
and statues, and for the government of a household hired menials will
suffice; but fondness and hate, daring hopes, lively fears, the lust of
glory and the scorn of base deeds, sweet charity, faithfulness, pride,
and, chief over all, the impetuous will, lending might and power to
feeling:—these are the rib of the man, and from these, deep veiled in the
mystery of her very loveliness, his true companion sprang.  A being thus
ardent will often go wrong in her strenuous course; will often alarm,
sometimes provoke; will now and then work mischief and even perhaps
grievous harm; but she will be our own Eve after all; the sweet-speaking
tempter whom heaven created to be the joy and the trouble of this
pleasing anxious existence; to shame us away from the hiding-places of a
slothful neutrality, and lead us abroad in the world, men militant here
on earth, enduring quiet, content with strife, and looking for peace
hereafter.” {37}  Beautiful words indeed! how came the author of a
tribute so caressingly appreciative, so eloquently sincere, to remain
himself outside the gates of Paradise? how could the pen which in the
Crimean chapter on the Holy Shrines traced so exquisitely the delicate
fancifulness of purest sexual love, perpetrate that elaborate sneer over
the bachelor obsequies of Carrigaholt—“the lowly grave, that is the end
of man’s romantic hopes, has closed over all his rich fancies and all his
high aspirations: he is utterly married.” {38a}

    “Gai, gai, mariez vous,
       Mettez vous dans la misère!
    Gai, gai, mariez vous,
       Mettez vous la corde au cou!” {38b}

There is generally a good reason for prolonged celibacy, a reason which
the bachelor as generally does not betray: Kinglake remained single, by
his own account, because he had observed that women always prefer other
men to their own husbands.  Yet, although unmarried, perhaps because
unmarried, he heartily admired many clever women; formed with them sedate
but genuine friendships, the _l’amour sans ailes_, sometimes called
“Platonic” by persons who have not read Plato; found in their illogical
clear-sightedness, in their ἀγχίνοια, to use the master’s own
untranslatable phrase, a titillating stimulus which he missed in men.  He
thought that the Church should ordain priestesses as well as priests, the
former to be the Egerias of men, as the latter are the Pontiffs of women.
And Lady Gregory tells us, that when attacked by gout, he wished for the
solace of a lady doctor, and wrote to one asking if gout were beyond her
scope.  She answered: “Dear Sir,—Gout is not beyond my scope, but men
are.”

In 1854 he accompanied Lord Raglan to the Crimea.  “I had heard,” writes
John Kenyon, “of Kinglake’s chivalrous goings on.  We were saying
yesterday that though he might write a book, he was among the last men to
go that he might write a book.  He is wild about matters military, if so
calm a man is ever wild.”  He had hoped to go in an official position as
non-combatant, but this was refused by the authorities.  His friend, Lord
Raglan, whose acquaintance he had made while hunting with the Duke of
Beaufort’s hounds, took him as his private guest.  Arrested for a time at
Malta by an attack of fever, he joined our army before hostilities began,
rode with Lord Raglan’s staff at the Alma fight, likening the novel
sensation to the excitement of fox-hunting; and accompanied the chief in
his visit of tenderness to the wounded when the fight was over.
Throughout the campaign the two were much together, as we shall notice
more fully later on.  There are often slight but unmistakable signs of
Kinglake’s presence as spectator and auditor of Lord Raglan’s deeds and
words; {40} his affection and reverence for the great general animate the
whole; in outward composure and latent strength the two men resembled
each other closely.  The book is, in fact, a history of Lord Raglan’s
share in the campaign; begun in 1856 at the request of Lady Raglan, the
narrative ends when the “Caradoc” with the general’s body on board steams
out of the bay, “Farewell” flying at her masthead, the Russian batteries,
with generous recognition, ceasing to fire till the ship was out of
sight.  “Lord Raglan is dead,” said Kinglake as vol. viii. was sent to
press, “and my work is finished.”

                          [Picture: Lord Raglan]

Ten years were to elapse before the opening volumes should appear; and
meanwhile he entered parliament for the borough of Bridgewater, which had
rejected him in 1852.  His colleague was Colonel Charles J. Kemyss Tynte,
member of a family which local influence and lavish expenditure had
secured in the representation of the town for nearly forty years.
Catechized as to his political creed, he answered: “I call myself an
advanced Liberal; but I decline to go into parliament as the pledged
adherent of Lord Palmerston or any other Liberal.”  He adds, in response
to a further question: “I am believed to be the author of ‘Eothen.’”  He
broke down in his maiden speech; but recovered himself in a later effort,
and spoke, not unfrequently, on subjects then important, now forgotten;
on the outrage of the “Charles et George”; the capture of the Sardinian
“Cagliari” by the Neapolitans on the high seas; our attitude towards the
Paris Congress of 1857; while in 1858 he led the revolt against Lord
Palmerston’s proposal to amend the Conspiracy Laws in deference to Louis
Napoleon; in 1860 vigorously denounced the annexation of Savoy and Nice;
and in 1864 moved the amendment to Mr. Disraeli’s motion in the debate on
the Address, which was carried by 313 to 295.  His feeble voice and
unimpressive manner prevented him from becoming a power in the House; but
his speeches when read are full, fluent, and graceful; the late Sir
Robert Peel’s remarkable harangue against the French Emperor in the
course of an earlier debate was taken, as he is said to have owned,
mainly from a speech by Kinglake, delivered so indistinctly that the
reporters failed to catch it, but audible to Sir Robert who sate close
beside him.

With his constituents he was more at ease and more effective.  His seat
for Bridgewater was challenged at a general election by Henry Padwick, a
hanger-on to Disraeli and a well-known bookmaker on the turf, who, with
an Irish Colonel Westbrook, tried to cajole the electors and their wives
by extravagant compliments to the town, its neighbourhood, its denizens;
a place celebrated, as Captain Costigan said of Chatteris, “for its
antiquitee, its hospitalitee, the beautee of its women, the manly
fidelitee, generositee, and jovialitee of its men.”  Kinglake met them on
their own ground.  In his flowery speeches the romance of Sinai and
Palestine faded before the glories of the little Somersetshire town.
What was the Jordan by comparison with the Parrett?  Could Libanus or
Anti-Libanus vie with the Mendip and the Quantock Hills?  The view
surveyed by Monmouth from St. Mary’s Tower on the Eve of Sedgemoor
transcended all the panoramas which the Holy Land or Asia Minor could
present!  But his more serious orations were worthy of his higher fame.
In the panic of 1858, when the address of the French colonels to the
Emperor, beseeching to be led against England, had created serious alarm
on this side the Channel, he went down to Bridgewater to enlighten the
West of England.  “Why,” he asked, “do we fear invasion?  The population
of France is peaceful, the ‘turnip-soup Jacques Bonhomme’ is peaceful,
the soldiers of the line are peaceful.  Why are we anxious?  Because
there sits in his chamber at the Tuileries a solitary moody man.  He is
deeply interested in the science and the art of war; he told me once that
he was contemplating a history of all the great battles ever fought.  He
holds absolute control over vast resources both in men and money; he has
shown that he can attack successfully at a few weeks’ notice the greatest
European military power: gout or indigestion may at any moment convert
him into an enemy of ourselves.  Until France returns to parliamentary
government this danger is imminent and continual.  Our safety lies in our
fleet, and in that alone.  If for twenty-four hours only the Channel were
denuded of our ships in time of war with France, they would hurl upon our
shores a force we could not meet.  Such denudation must be made
impossible; our fleet so augmented and strengthened as to provide
impregnably at all times for home defence no less than for foreign
necessities.  Our danger, I repeat, lies in no hostility on the part of
the French army, in no ferocity on the part of the French people, in no
_present_ unfriendliness on the part of the French Emperor: it arises
from the fact that a revolutionary government exists in France, which has
armed one man, under the name of Emperor—Dictator rather, I should
say—with a power so colossal, that until such power is moderated, as all
power ought to be, no neighbour can be entirely safe.”  This speech was
reproduced in “The Times.”  Montalembert read it with admiration.  “Who,”
he asked Sir M. E. Grant Duff, “who is Mr. Kinglake?”  “He is the author
of ‘Eothen.’”  “And what is ‘Eothen?’  I never heard of it.”

He found great enjoyment in parliamentary life, but was in 1868 unseated
on petition for bribery on the part of his agents.  Blue-books are not
ordinarily light reading; but the Report of the Commissioners appointed
to inquire into the alleged corrupt practices at Bridgewater is not only
a model of terse and vigorous composition, but to persons with a sense of
humour, inclined to view human irregularities and inconsistencies in a
sportive rather than an indignant light, it is a sustained and diverting
comedy.  Of the constituency, both before and after the Reform Bill,
three-fourths, the Commissioners artlessly inform us, sought and received
bribes; of the remainder, all but a few individuals negotiated and gave
the bribes.  So in every election, both sides bribed avowedly; if a
luckless Purity Candidate appeared, he was promptly informed that “Mr.
Most” would win the seat: highest bribes decided each election, further
bribes averted petitions.  When once a desperate riot took place and the
ringleaders were tried at Quarter Sessions, the jury were bribed to
acquit, in the teeth of the Chairman’s summing up.  At last, in 1868, the
defeated candidate petitioned; blue-book literature was enriched by a
remarkable report, and the borough was disfranchised.  Of course Kinglake
had only himself to thank; if a gentleman chooses to sit for a venal
borough, and to intrust his interests to a questionable agent, he must,
in the words of Mrs. Gamp, “take the consequences of sech a sitiwation.”
The consequences to him were loss of his present seat, and permanent
exclusion from Parliament.

He was keenly mortified by his ostracism, speaking of himself ever after
as “a political corpse.”  Thenceforward he gave his whole energy to
literary work, to occasional reviews, mainly to his “Invasion of the
Crimea.”  In the “Edinburgh” I think he never wrote, cordially disliking
its then editor.  A fine notice in “Blackwood” of Madame de Lafayette’s
life was from his pen.  Surveying the Revolutionary Terror, he points out
that Robespierre’s opponents were in numbers overwhelmingly strong, but
lacked cohesion and leaders; while the Mountain, dominated by a single
will, was legally armed with power to kill, and went on killing.  The
Church played into Robespierre’s hands by enforcing Patience and
Resignation as the highest Christian virtues, confusing the idea of
submission to Heaven with the idea of submission to a scoundrel.  Had
Hampden been a Papist he would have paid ship-money.  He wrote also in
“The Owl,” a brilliant little magazine edited by his friend Laurence
Oliphant; a “Society Journal,” conducted by a set of clever well-to-do
young bachelors living in London, addressed like the “Pall Mall Gazette,”
in “Pendennis,” “to the higher circles of society, written by gentlemen
for gentlemen.”  When the expenses of production were paid, the balance
was spent on a whitebait dinner at Greenwich, and on offerings of flowers
and jewellery to the lady guests invited.  It came to an end, leaving no
successor equally brilliant, high-toned, wholesome; its collected numbers
figure sometimes at a formidable price in sales and catalogues. {47}

The first two volumes of his “Crimea” had appeared in 1863.  They were
awaited with eager expectation.  An elaborate history of the war had been
written by a Baron de Bazancourt, condemned as unfair and unreliable by
English statesmen, and severely handled in our reviews.  So the wish was
felt everywhere for some record less ephemeral, which should render the
tale historically, and counteract Bazancourt’s misstatements.  “I hear,”
wrote the Duke of Newcastle, “that Kinglake has undertaken the task.  He
has a noble opportunity of producing a text-book for future history, but
to accomplish this it must be _stoically_ impartial.”

The beauty of their style, the merciless portraiture of the Second
Empire, the unparalleled diorama of the Alma fight, combined to gain for
these first four-and-twenty chapters an immediate vogue as emphatic and
as widely spread as that which saluted the opening of Macaulay’s
“History.”  None of the later volumes, though highly prized as battle
narratives, quite came up to these.  The political and military
conclusions drawn provoked no small bitterness; his cousin, Mrs. Serjeant
Kinglake, used to say that she met sometimes with almost affronting
coldness in society at the time, under the impression that she was A. W.
Kinglake’s wife.  Russians were, perhaps unfairly, dissatisfied.
Todleben, who knew and loved Kinglake well, pronounced the book a
charming romance, not a history of the war.  Individuals were aggrieved
by its notice of themselves or of their regiments; statesmen chafed under
the scientific analysis of their characters, or at the publication of
official letters which they had intended but not required to be looked
upon as confidential, and which the recipients had in all innocence
communicated to the historian.  Palmerstonians, accepting with their
chief the Man of December, were furious at the exposure of his
basenesses.  Lucas in “The Times” pronounced the work perverse and
mischievous; the “Westminster Review” branded it as reactionary.  “The
Quarterly,” in an article ascribed to A. H. Layard, condemned its style
as laboured and artificial; as palling from the sustained pomp and
glitter of the language; as wearisome from the constant strain after
minute dissection; declaring it further to be “in every sense of the word
a mischievous book.”  “Blackwood,” less unfriendly, surrendered itself to
the beauty of the writing; “satire so studied, so polished, so
remorseless, and withal so diabolically entertaining, that we know not
where in modern literature to seek such another philippic.”

Reeve, editor of the “Edinburgh,” wished Lord Clarendon to attack the
book; he refused, but offered help, and the resulting article was due to
the collaboration of the pair.  It caused a prolonged coolness between
Reeve and Kinglake, who at last ended the quarrel by a characteristic
letter: “I observed yesterday that my malice, founded perhaps upon a
couple of words, and now of three years’ duration, had not engendered
corresponding anger in you; and if my impression was a right one, I trust
we may meet for the future on our old terms.”

On the other hand, the “Saturday Review,” then at the height of its
repute and influence, vindicated in a powerful article Kinglake’s truth
and fairness; and a pamphlet by Hayward, called “Mr. Kinglake and the
Quarterlies,” amused society by its furious onslaught upon the hostile
periodicals, laid bare their animus, and exposed their misstatements.
“If you rise in this tone,” he began, in words of Lord Ellenborough when
Attorney-General, “I can speak as loudly and emphatically: I shall
prosecute the case with all the liberality of a gentleman, but no tone or
manner shall put me down.”  And the dissentient voices were drowned in
the general chorus of admiration.  German eulogy was extravagant; French
Republicanism was overjoyed; Englishmen, at home and abroad, read eagerly
for the first time in close and vivid sequence events which, when spread
over thirty months of daily newspapers, few had the patience to follow,
none the qualifications to condense.  Macaulay tells us that soon after
the appearance of his own first volumes, a Mr. Crump from America offered
him five hundred dollars if he would introduce the name of Crump into his
history.  An English gentleman and lady, from one of our most distant
colonies, wrote to Kinglake a jointly signed pathetic letter, intreating
him to cite in his pages the name of their only son, who had fallen in
the Crimea.  He at once consented, and asked for particulars—manner,
time, place—of the young man’s death.  The parents replied that they need
not trouble him with details; these should be left to the historian’s
kind inventiveness: whatever he might please to say in embellishment of
their young hero’s end they would gratefully accept.

Unlike most authors, from Molière down to Dickens, he never read aloud to
friends any portion of the unpublished manuscript; never, except to
closest intimates, spoke of the book, or tolerated inquiry about it from
others.  When asked as to the progress of a volume he had in hand, he
used to say, “That is really a matter on which it is quite out of my
power even to inform myself”; and I remember how once at a well-selected
dinner-party in the country, whither he came in good spirits and inclined
to talk his best, a second-hand criticism on his book by a conceited
parson, the official and incongruous element in the group, stiffened him
into persistent silence.  All England laughed, when Blackwood’s “Memoirs”
saw the light, over his polite repulse of the kindly officious publisher,
who wished, after his fashion, to criticise and finger and suggest.  “I
am almost alarmed, as it were, at the notion of receiving suggestions.  I
feel that hints from you might be so valuable and so important, it might
be madness to ask you beforehand to abstain from giving me any; but I am
anxious for you to know what the dangers in the way of long delay might
be, the result of even a few slight and possibly most useful suggestions.
. . . You will perhaps (after what I have said) think it best not to set
my mind running in a new path, lest I should take to re-writing.”  Note,
by the way, the slovenliness of this epistle, as coming from so great a
master of style; that defect characterizes all his correspondence.  He
wrote for the Press “with all his singing robes about him”; his letters
were unrevised and brief.  Mrs. Simpson, in her pleasant “Memories,”
ascribes to him the _éloquence du billet_ in a supreme degree.  I must
confess that of more than five hundred letters from his pen which I have
seen only six cover more than a single sheet of note-paper, all are alike
careless and unstudied in style, though often in matter characteristic
and informing.  “I am not by nature,” he would say, “a letter-writer, and
habitually think of the uncertainty as to who may be the reader of
anything that I write.  It is my fate, as a writer of history, to have
before me letters never intended for my eyes, and this has aggravated my
foible, and makes me a wretched correspondent.  I should like very much
to write letters gracefully and easily, but I can’t, because it is
contrary to my nature.”  “I have got,” he writes so early as 1873, “to
shrink from the use of the pen; to ask me to write letters is like asking
a lame man to walk; it is not, as horse-dealers say, ‘the nature of the
beast.’  When others _talk_ to me charmingly, my answers are short,
faltering, incoherent sentences; so it is with my writing.”  “You,” he
says to another lady correspondent, “have the pleasant faculty of easy,
pleasant letter-writing, in which I am wholly deficient.”

In fact, the claims of his Crimean book, which compelled him latterly to
refuse all other literary work, gave little time for correspondence.  Its
successive revisions formed his daily task until illness struck him down.
Sacks of Crimean notes, labelled through some fantastic whim with female
Christian names—the Helen bag, the Adelaide bag, etc.—were ranged round
his room.  His working library was very small in bulk, his habit being to
cut out from any book the pages which would be serviceable, and to fling
the rest away.  So, we are told, the first Napoleon, binding volumes for
his travelling library, shore their margins to the quick, and removed all
prefaces, title-pages, and other superfluous leaves.  So, too, Edward
Fitzgerald used to tear out of his books all that in his judgment fell
below their authors’ highest standard, retaining for his own delectation
only the quintessential remnants.  Vols. III. and IV. appeared in 1868,
V. in 1875, VI. in 1880, VII. and VIII. in 1887; while a Cabinet Edition
of the whole in nine volumes was issued continuously from 1870 to 1887.
Our attempt to appreciate the book shall be reserved for another chapter.




CHAPTER IV
“THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA”


WAS the history of the Crimean War worth writing?  Not as a magnified
newspaper report,—that had been already done—but as a permanent work of
art from the pen of a great literary expert?  Very many of us, I think,
after the lapse of fifty years, feel compelled to say that it was not.
The struggle represented no great principles, begot no far-reaching
consequences.  It was not inspired by the “holy glee” with which in
Wordsworth’s sonnet Liberty fights against a tyrant, but by the faltering
boldness, the drifting, purposeless unresolve of statesmen who did not
desire it, and by the irrational violence of a Press which did not
understand it.  It was not a necessary war; its avowed object would have
been attained within a few weeks or months by bloodless European concert.
It was not a glorious war; crippled by an incompatible alliance and
governed by the Evil Genius who had initiated it for personal and sordid
ends, it brought discredit on baffled generals in the field, on Crown,
Cabinet, populace, at home.  It was not a fruitful war; the detailed
results purchased by its squandered life and treasure lapsed in swift
succession during twenty sequent years, until the last sheet of the
treaty which secured them was contemptuously torn up by Gortschakoff in
1870.  But a right sense of historical proportion is in no time the
heritage of the many, and is least of all attainable while the memory of
a campaign is fresh.  On Englishmen who welcomed home their army in 1855,
the strife from which shattered but victorious it had returned, loomed as
epoch-making and colossal, as claiming therefore permanent record from
some eloquent artist of attested descriptive power.  Soon the report
gained ground that the destined chronicler was Kinglake, and all men
hailed the selection; yet the sceptic who in looking back to-day decries
the greatness of the campaign may perhaps no less hesitate to approve the
fitness of its chosen annalist.  His fame was due to the perfection of a
single book; he ranked as a potentate in _style_.  But literary
perfection, whether in prose or poetry, is a fragile quality, an
_afflatus_ irregular, independent, unamenable to orders; the official
tributes of a Laureate we compliment at their best with the northern
farmer’s verdict on the pulpit performances of his parson:

    “An’ I niver knaw’d wot a meän’d but I thow’t a ’ad summut to saäy,
    And I thowt a said wot a owt to ’a said an’ I comed awaäy.”

Set to compile a biography from thirty years of “Moniteurs,” the author
of Waverley, like Lord Chesterfield’s diamond pencil, produced one
miracle of dulness; it might well be feared that Kinglake’s volatile pen,
when linked with forceful feeling and bound to rigid task-work, might
lose the charm of casual epigram, easy luxuriance, playful egotism,
vagrant allusion, which established “Eothen” as a classic.  On the other
hand, he had been for twenty years conversant with Eastern history,
geography, politics; was, more than most professional soldiers, an adept
in military science; had sate in the centre of the campaign as its
general’s guest and comrade; was intrusted, above all, by Lady Raglan
with the entire collection of her husband’s papers: her wish, implied
though not expressed, that they should be utilized for the vindication of
the great field-marshal’s fame, he accepted as a sacred charge; her
confidence not only governed his decision to become the historian of the
war, but imparted a personal character to the narrative.

In order, therefore, rightly to appreciate “The Invasion of the Crimea,”
we must look upon it as a great prose epic; its argument, machinery,
actors, episodes, subordinate to a predominant ever present hero.  In its
fine preamble Lord Raglan sits enthroned high above generals, armies,
spectators, conflicts; on the quality of his mind the fate of two great
hosts and the fame of two great nations hang.  He checks St. Arnaud’s
wild ambition; overrules the waverings of the Allies; against his own
judgment, but in dutiful obedience to home instruction carries out the
descent upon the Old Fort coast.  The successful achievement of the
perilous flank march is ascribed to the undivided command which, during
forty-eight hours, accident had conferred upon him.  From his presence in
council French and English come away convinced and strengthened; his calm
in action imparts itself to anxious generals and panic-stricken
aides-de-camp.  Through Alma fight, from the high knoll to which happy
audacity had carried him he rides the whirlwind and directs the storm.
In the terrible crisis which sees the Russians breaking over the crest of
Inkerman, in the ill-fated attack on the Great Redan where Lacy Yea is
killed, his apparent freedom from anxiety infects all around him and
achieves redemption from disaster. {60}  We see him in his moments of
vexation and discomfiture; dissembling pain and anger under the stress of
the French alliance, galled by Cathcart’s disobedience, by the loss of
the Light Brigade, by Lord Panmure’s insulting, querulous, unfounded
blame.  We read his last despatch, framed with wonted grace and
clearness; then—on the same day—we see the outworn frame break down, and
follow mournfully two days later the afflicting details of his death.  As
the generals and admirals of the allied forces stand round the dead
hero’s form, as the palled bier, draped in the flag of England, is
carried from headquarters to the port, as the “Caradoc,” steaming away
with her honoured freight, flies out her “Farewell” signal, the narrative
abruptly ends.  The months of the siege which still remained might be
left to other hands or lapse untold.  Troy had still to be taken when
Hector died; but with his funeral dirge the Iliad closed, the blind
bard’s task was over:

    “Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,
    And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.”

If the framework of the narrative is epic, its treatment is frequently
dramatic.  The “Usage of Europe” in the opening pages is not so much a
record as a personification of unwritten Law: the Great Eltchi tramps the
stage with a majesty sometimes bordering on fustian.  Dramatic is the
story of the sleeping Cabinet.  “It was evening—a summer evening”—one
thinks of a world-famous passage in the “De Corona”—when the Duke of
Newcastle carried to Richmond Lodge the fateful despatch committing
England to the war.  “Before the reading of the Paper had long continued,
all the members of the Cabinet except a small minority were overcome with
sleep”; the few who remained awake were in a quiet, assenting frame of
mind, and the despatch “received from the Cabinet the kind of approval
which is awarded to an unobjectionable Sermon.”  Not less dramatic is
Nolan’s death; the unearthly shriek of the slain corpse erect in saddle
with sword arm high in air, as the dead horseman rode still seated
through the 13th Light Dragoons; the “Minden Yell” of the 20th driving
down upon the Iäkoutsk battalion; the sustained and scathing satire on
the Nôtre Dame Te Deum for the Boulevard massacre.  A simple dialogue, a
commonplace necessary act, is staged sometimes for effect.  “Then Lord
Stratford apprised the Sultan that he had a private communication to make
to him.  The pale Sultan listened.” . . . “Whose was the mind which had
freshly come to bear upon this part of the fight?  Sir Colin Campbell was
sitting in his saddle, the veteran was watching his time.” . . . “The
Emperor Nicholas was alone in his accustomed writing-room.  He took no
counsel; he rang a bell.  Presently an officer of his staff stood before
him.  To him he gave his order for the occupation of the Principalities.”
This overpasses drama—it is melodrama.

To the personal element which pervades the volumes great part of their
charm is due.  The writer never obtrudes himself, but leaves his presence
to be discerned by the touches which attest an eye-witness.  Through his
observant nearness we watch the Chief’s demeanour and hear his words; see
him “turn scarlet with shame and anger” when the brutal Zouaves carry
outrage into the friendly Crimean village, witness his personal succour
of the wounded Russian after Inkerman, hear his arch acceptance of the
French courtesy, so careful always to yield the post of danger to the
English; his “Go quietly” to the excited aide-de-camp; {63} his
good-humoured reception of the scared and breathless messenger from
D’Aurelle’s brigade; the “five words” spoken to Airey commanding the long
delayed advance across the Alma; the “tranquil low voice” which gave the
order rescuing the staff from its unforeseen encounter with the Russian
rear.  He records Codrington’s leap on his grey Arab into the breast-work
of the Great Redoubt; Lacy Yea’s passionate energy in forcing his
clustered regiment to open out; Miller’s stentorian “Rally” in reforming
the Scots Greys after the Balaclava charge; Clarke losing his helmet in
the same charge, and creating amongst the Russians, as he plunged in
bareheaded amongst their ranks, the belief that he was sheltered by some
Satanic charm.  He notes on the Alma the singular pause of sound
maintained by both armies just before the cannonade began; the first
death—of an artilleryman riding before his gun—a new sight to nine-tenths
of those who witnessed it; {64} the weird scream of exploding shells as
they rent the air around.  He crossed the Alma close behind Lord Raglan,
cantering after him to the summit of a conspicuous hillock in the heart
of the enemy’s position, whence the mere sight of plumed English officers
scared the Russian generals, and, followed soon by guns and troops,
governed the issue of the fight.  The general’s manner was “the manner of
a man enlivened by the progress of a great undertaking without being
robbed of his leisure.  He spoke to me, I remember, about his horse.  He
seemed like a man who had a clue of his own and knew his way through the
battle.”  When the last gun was fired Kinglake followed the Chief back,
witnessed the wild burst of cheering accorded to him by the whole British
army, a manifestation, Lord Burghersh tells us, which greatly distressed
his modesty—and dined alone with him in his tent on the evening of the
eventful day.

If Lord Raglan was the Hector of the Crimean Iliad, its Agamemnon was
Lord Stratford: “king of men,” as Stanley called him in his funeral
sermon at Westminster; king of distrustful home Cabinets, nominally his
masters, of scheming European embassies, of insulting Russian opponents,
of presumptuous French generals, of false and fleeting Pashas (_Le
Sultan_, _c’est Lord Stratford_, said St. Arnaud), of all men, whatever
their degree, who entered his ambassadorial presence.  Ascendency was
native to the man; while yet in his teens we find Etonian and Cambridge
friends writing to him deferentially as to a critic and superior.  At
four and twenty he became Minister to a Court manageable only by
high-handed authority and menace.  He owned, and for the most part
controlled, a violent temper; it broke bounds sometimes, to our great
amusement as we read to-day, to the occasional discomfiture of _attachés_
or of dependents, {66} to the abject terror of Turkish Sublimities who
had outworn his patience.  But he knew when to be angry; he could
pulverize by fiery outbreaks the Reis Effendi and his master,
Abdu-l-Mejid; but as Plenipotentiary to the United States he could
“quench the terror of his beak, the lightning of his eye,” disarming by
his formal courtesy and winning by his obvious sincerity the suspicious
and irritable John Quincy Adams.  When Menschikoff once insulted him,
seeing that a quarrel at that moment would be fatal to his purpose, he
pretended to be deaf, and left the Russian in the belief that his rude
speech had not been heard.  Enthroned for the sixth time in
Constantinople, at the dangerous epoch of 1853, he could point to an
unequalled diplomatic record in the past; to the Treaty of Bucharest, to
reunion of the Helvetic Confederacy shattered by Napoleon’s fall, to the
Convention which ratified Greek independence, to the rescue from Austrian
malignity of the Hungarian refugees.

His conduct of the negotiations preceding the Crimean War is justly
called the cornerstone of his career: at this moment of his greatness
Kinglake encounters and describes him: through the brilliant chapters in
his opening volume, as more fully later on through Mr. Lane Poole’s
admirable biography, the Great Eltchi is known to English readers.  He
moves across the stage with a majesty sometimes bordering on what Iago
calls bombast circumstance; drums and trumpets herald his every entrance;
now pacing the shady gardens of the Bosphorus, now foiling, “in his grand
quiet way,” the Czar’s ferocious Christianity, or torturing his baffled
ambassador by scornful concession of the points which he formally
demanded but did not really want; or crushing with “thin, tight,
merciless lips and grand overhanging Canning brow” the presumptuous
French commander who had dared to enter his presence with a plot for
undermining England’s influence in the partnership of the campaign.  Was
he, we ask as we end the fascinating description, was he, what Bright and
the Peace Party proclaimed him to be, the cause of the Crimean War?  The
Czar’s personal dislike to him—a caprice which has never been explained
{68}—exasperated no doubt to the mind of Nicholas the repulse of
Menschikoff’s demands; but that the precipitation of the prince and his
master had put the Russian Court absolutely in the wrong is universally
admitted.  It has been urged against him that his recommendation of the
famous Vienna Note to the Porte was official merely, and allowed the
watchful Turks to assume his personal approbation of their refusal.  It
may be so; his biographer does not admit so much: but it is obvious that
the Turks were out of hand, and that no pressure from Lord Stratford
could have persuaded them to accept the Note.  Further, the “Russian
Analysis of the Note,” escaping shortly afterwards from the bag of
diplomatic secrecy, revealed to our Cabinet the necessity of those
amendments to the Note on which the Porte had insisted.  And lastly, the
passage of the Dardanelles by our fleet, which more than any overt act
made war inevitable, was ordered by the Government at home against Lord
Stratford’s counsel.  Between panic-stricken statesmen and vacillating
ambassadors, Lord Clarendon on one side, M. de la Cour on the other, the
Eltchi stands like Tennyson’s promontory of rock,

    “Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crowned.”

Napoleon at St. Helena attributed much of his success in the field to the
fact that he was not hampered by governments at home.  Every modern
commander, down certainly to the present moment, must have envied him.
Kinglake’s mordant pen depicts with felicity and compression the men of
Downing Street, who without military experience or definite political
aim, thwarted, criticised, over-ruled, tormented, their much-enduring
General.  We have Aberdeen, deficient in mental clearness and propelling
force, by his horror of war bringing war to pass; Gladstone, of too
subtle intellect and too lively conscience, “a good man in the worst
sense of the term”; Palmerston, above both in keenness of instinct and in
strength of will, meaning war from the first, and biding his time to
insure it; Newcastle, sanguine to the verge of rashness, loyally adherent
to Lord Raglan while governed by his own judgment, distrustful under
stress of popular clamour; Panmure, ungenerous, rough-tongued, violent,
churlish, yet not malevolent—“a rhinoceros rather than a tiger”—hurried
by subservience to the newspaper Press into injustice which he afterwards
recognized, yet did but sullenly repair.  We see finally that dominant
Press itself, personified in the all-powerful Delane, a potentate with
convictions at once flexible and vehement; forceful without spite and
merciless without malignity; writing no articles, but evoking, shaping,
revising all.  The French commanders were not hampered by the muzzled
Paris Press, which had long since ceased to utter any but dictated
sentiments; they suffered even more disastrously from the imperious
interference of the Tuileries.  Canrobert’s inaction, mutability, sudden
alarms, flagrant breaches of faith, were inexplicable until long
afterwards, when the fall of the Empire disclosed the secret
instructions—disloyal to his allies and ruinous to the campaign—by which
Louis Napoleon shackled his unhappy General.  In Canrobert’s successor,
Pelissier, he met his match.  For the first time a strong man headed the
French army.  Short of stature, bull-necked and massive in build, with
grey hair, long dark moustache, keen fiery eyes, his coarse rough speech
masking tested brain power and high intellectual culture, he brought new
life to the benumbed French army, new hope to Lord Raglan.  The duel
between the resolute general and the enraged Emperor is narrated with a
touch comedy.  All that Lord Raglan desired, all that the Emperor
forbade, Pelissier was stubbornly determined to accomplish; the siege
should be pressed at once, the city taken at any cost, the expedition to
Kertch resumed.  Once only, under torment of the Emperor’s reproaches and
the Minister at War’s remonstrances, his resolution and his nerve gave
way; eight days of failing judgment issued in the Karabelnaya defeat, the
severest repulse which the two armies had sustained; but the paralysis
passed away, he showed himself once more eager to act in concert with the
English general;—when the long-borne strain of disappointment and anxiety
sapped at last Lord Raglan’s vital forces, and the hard fierce Frenchman
stood for upwards of an hour beside his dead colleague’s bedside, “crying
like a child.”

The lieutenants of Lord Raglan in the Crimea have long since passed away,
but in artistic epical presentment they retain their place around him.
Airey, his right hand from the first disembarkation at Kalamita Bay,
strong-willed, decisive, ardent, thrusting away suspense and doubt,
untying every knot, is vindicated by his Chief against the Duke of
Newcastle’s wordy inculpation in the severest despatch perhaps ever
penned to his official superior by a soldier in the field.  Colin
Campbell, with glowing face, grey kindling eye, light, stubborn, crisping
hair, leads his Highland brigade tip the hill against the Vladimir
columns, till “with the sorrowful wail which bursts from the brave
Russian infantry when they have to suffer loss,” eight battalions of the
enemy fall back in retreat.  Lord Lucan, tall, lithe, slender, his face
glittering and panther-like in moments of strenuous action, wins our
hearts as he won Kinglake’s, in spite of the mis-aimed cleverness and
presumptuous self-confidence which always criticised and sometimes
disobeyed the orders of his Chief.  General Pennefather, “the grand old
boy,” his exulting radiant face flashing everywhere through the smoke,
his resonant innocuous oaths roaring cheerily down the line, sustains all
day the handful of our troops against the tenfold masses of the enemy.
Generous and eloquent are the notices of Korniloff and Todleben, the
great sailor and the great engineer, the soul and the brain of the
Sebastopol defence.  The first fell in the siege, the second lived to
write its history, to become a valued friend of Kinglake, to explore and
interpret in his company long afterwards the scenes of struggle; his book
and his personal guidance gave to the historian what would otherwise have
been unattainable, a clear knowledge of the conflict as viewed from
within the town.

The pitched battlefields of the campaign were three, Alma, Balaclava,
Inkerman.  The Alma chapter is the most graphic, for there the fight was
concentrated, offering to a spectator by Lord Raglan’s side a _coup
d’œil_ of the entire action.  The French were by bad generalship
virtually wiped out; for Bosquet crossed the river too far to the right,
Canrobert was afraid to move without artillery, Prince Napoleon and St.
Arnaud’s reserves were jammed together in the bottom of the valley.  We
see, as though on the spot, the advance, irregular and unsupported, of
Codrington’s brigade, their dash into the Great Redoubt and subsequent
disorderly retreat; the enemy checked by the two guns from Lord Raglan’s
knoll and by the steadiness of the Royal Fusiliers; the repulse of the
Scots Fusiliers and the peril which hung over the event; then the superb
advance of Guards and Highlanders up the hill, thin red line against
massive columns, which determined finally the action.

The interest of the Balaclava fight centres in the two historic cavalry
charges.  Here again, from his position on the hill above, Kinglake
witnessed both; the first, clear in smokeless air, the second lost in the
volleying clouds which filled the valley of death.  He saw the enormous
mass of Russian cavalry, 3,500 sabres, flooding like an avalanche down
the hill with a momentum which Scarlett’s tiny squadron could not for a
moment have resisted; their unexplained halt, the three hundred seizing
the opportunity to strike, digging individually into the Russian ranks,
the scarlet streaks visibly cleaving the dense grey columns.  Inwedged
and surrounded, in their passionate blood frenzy, with ceaseless play of
whirling sword, with impetus of human and equestrian weight and strength,
the red atoms hewed their way to the Russian rear, turned, worked back,
emerged, reformed; while the 4th and 5th Dragoons, the Royals, the 1st
Inniskillings, dashed upon the amazed column right, left, front, till the
close-locked mass headed slowly up the hill, ranks loosened, horsemen
turned and galloped off, a beaten straggling herd.  Eight minutes elapsed
from the time when Scarlett gave the word to charge, until the moment
when the Russians broke: we turn from the fifty describing pages,
breathless as though we had ridden in the melley; if the episode has no
historical parallel, the narrative is no less unique.  Our greatest
contemporary poet tried to celebrate it; his lines are tame and
unexciting beside Kinglake’s passionate pulsing rhapsody.  Its effect
upon the Russian mind was lasting; out of all their vast array hardly a
single squadron was ever after able to keep its ground against the
approach of English cavalry; while but for Cathcart’s obstinacy and
Lucan’s temper it would have issued in the immediate recapture of the
Causeway Heights.

The Charge of the Light Brigade, on the other hand, while it stirred the
imagination of the poet, shocked the military conscience of the
historian.  He saw in it with agony, as Lord Raglan saw, as the French
spectators saw, no act of heroic sacrifice, but a needless, fruitless
massacre.  “You have lost the Light Brigade,” was his commander’s
salutation to Lord Lucan. “_C’est magnifique_, _mais ce n’est pas la
guerre_,” was the oft-quoted reproof of Bosquet.  The “someone’s
blunder,” the sullen perversity in misconception which destroyed the
flower of our cavalry, has faded from men’s memories; the splendour of
the deed remains.  It is well to recover salvage from the irrevocable, to
voice and to prolong the deep human interest attaching to death
encountered at the call of duty; that is the poet’s task, and brilliantly
it has been discharged.  Its other side, the pæan of sorrow for a
self-destructive exploit, the dirge on lives wantonly thrown away, the
deep blame attaching to the untractableness which sent them to their
doom, was the task of the historian, and that too has been faithfully and
lastingly accomplished.

Inkerman was the most complicated of the battles; the chapters which
record it are correspondingly taxing to the reader.  More than once or
twice they must be scanned, with close study of their lucid maps, before
the intricate sequences are fairly and distinctively grasped; the sixth
book of Thucydides, a standing terror to young Greek students, is light
and easy reading compared with the bulky sixth volume of Kinglake.  The
hero of the day was Pennefather; he maintained on Mount Inkerman a combat
of pickets reinforced from time to time, while around him through nine
hours successive attacks of thousands were met by hundreds.  The
disparity of numbers was appalling.  At daybreak 40,000 Russian troops
advanced against 3,000 English and were repulsed.  Three hours later
19,000 fresh troops came on, passed through a gap in our lines, which
Cathcart’s disobedience, atoned for presently by his death, had left
unoccupied, and seized the heights behind us; they too were dispossessed,
but our numbers were dwindling and our strength diminishing.  The Home
Ridge, key of our position, was next invaded by 6,000 Russians; the 7th
St. Leger, linked with a few Zouaves and with 200 men of our 77th
Regiment, French and English for once joyously intermingled, hurled them
back.  It was the crisis of the fight; Canrobert’s interposition would
have determined it; but he sullenly refused to move.  Finally, led by two
or three daring young officers, 300 of our wearied troops charged the
Russian battery which had tormented us all day; their artillerymen,
already flinching under the galling fire of two 18-pounders, brought up
by Lord Raglan’s foresight early in the morning, hastily withdrew their
guns, and the battle was won.  It was a day of Homeric rushes; Burnaby,
with only twenty men to support him, rescuing the Grenadier Guards’
colours; the onset of the 20th with their “Minden Yell”; Colonel Daubeny
with two dozen followers cleaving the Russian trunk column at the
barrier; Waddy’s dash at the retreating artillery train, foiled only by
the presence and the readiness of Todleben.  One marvels in reading how
the English held their own; their victory against so tremendous odds is
ascribed by the historian to three conditions; the hampering of the enemy
by his crowded masses; the slaughter amongst his officers early in the
fight, which deprived their men of leadership; above all, the dense mist
which obscured from him the fewness of his opponents.  If Canrobert with
his fresh troops had followed in pursuit, the Russian’s retreat must have
been turned into a rout and his artillery captured; if on the following
day he had assaulted the Flagstaff Bastion, Sebastopol, Todleben owned,
must have fallen.  He would do neither; his hesitancy and apparent
feebleness have already been explained; but to it, and to the sinister
influence which held his hand, were due the subsequent miseries of the
Crimean winter.

But the epic muse exacted from Kinglake, as from Virgil long before, the
portrayal not only of generals and of battles, but of two great monarchs,
each in his own day conspicuously and absolutely prominent—the Czar
Nicholas and the Emperor Napoleon:

                “dicam horrida belia,
    Dicam acies, actosque animis in funera REGES.”

His handling of them is characteristic.  Few men living then could have
approached either without a certain awe, their “genius” rebuked,—like
Mark Antony’s, in the presence of Cæsars so imposing and so mighty;
Kinglake’s attitude towards both is the attitude of cold analysis.

In the opening of the fifties the Czar Nicholas was the most powerful man
then living in the world.  He ruled over sixty million subjects whose
loyalty bordered on worship: he had in arms a million soldiers, brave and
highly trained.  In the troubles of 1848 he had stood scornful and secure
amid the overthrow of surrounding thrones; and the entire impact of his
vast and well-organized Empire was subject to his single will; whatever
he chose to do he did.  Of stern and unrelenting nature, of active and
widely ranging capacity for business, of gigantic stature and commanding
presence, he inspired almost universal terror; and yet his friendliness
had when he pleased a glow and frankness irresistible in its charm.
Readers of Queen Victoria’s early life will recall the alarm she felt at
his sudden proposal to visit Windsor in 1844, the fascination which his
presence exercised on her when he became her guest.  He professed to
embody his standard of conduct in the English word “gentleman”; his ideal
of human grandeur was the character of the Duke of Wellington.  It was an
evil destiny that betrayed this high-minded man into crooked ways; that
made England sacrifice the stateliest among her ancient friends to an
ignoble and crime-stained adventurer; that poured out blood and treasure
for no public advantage and with no permanent result; that first
humiliated, then slew with broken heart the man who had been so great,
and who is still regarded by surviving Russians who knew his inner life
and had seen him in his gentle mood with passionate reverence and
affection.

Kinglake’s description of “Prince Louis Bonaparte,” of his character, his
accomplices, his policy, his crimes, is perhaps unequalled in historical
literature; I know not where else to look for a vivisection so scientific
and so merciless of a great potentate in the height of his power.  With
scrutiny polite, impartial, guarded, he lays bare the springs of a
conscienceless nature and the secrets of a crime-driven career; while for
the combination of precise simplicity with exhaustive synopsis, the
masquerading of moral indignation in the guise of mocking laughter, the
loathing of a gentleman for a scoundrel set to the measure not of
indignation but of contempt, we must go back to the refined insolence,
the ὕβρις πεπαιδευμένη, of Voltaire.  He had well known Prince Napoleon
in his London days, had been attracted by him as a curiosity—“a balloon
man who had twice fallen from the skies and yet was still alive”—had
divined the mental power veiled habitually by his blank, opaque, wooden
looks, had listened to his ambitious talk and gathered up the utterances
of his thoughtful, long-pondering mind, had quarrelled with him finally
and lastingly over rivalry in the good graces of a woman. {82}  He saw in
him a fourfold student; of the art of war, of the mind of the first
Napoleon, of the French people’s character, of the science by which law
may lend itself to stratagem and become a weapon of deceit.

The intellect of this strange being was subject to an uncertainty of
judgment, issuing in ambiguity of enterprise, and giving an impression of
well-kept secrecy, due often to the fact that divided by mental conflict
he had no secret to tell.  He understood truth, but under the pressure of
strong motive would invariably deceive.  He sometimes, out of curiosity,
would listen to the voice of conscience, and could imitate neatly on
occasion the scrupulous language of a man of honour; but the
consideration that one of two courses was honest, and the other not,
never entered into his motives for action.  He was bold in forming plots,
and skilful in conducting them; but in the hour of trial and under the
confront of physical danger he was paralysed by constitutional timidity.
His great aim in life was to be conspicuous—_digito monstrarier_—coupled
with a theatric mania which made scenic effects and surprises essential
to the eminence he craved.

Handling this key to his character, Kinglake pursues him into his
December treason, contrasts the consummate cleverness of his schemes with
the faltering cowardice which shrank, like Macbeth’s ambition, from “the
illness should attend them,” and which, but for the stronger nerve of
those behind him, would have caused his collapse, at Paris as at
Strasburg and Boulogne, in contact with the shock of action.  It is
difficult now to realize the commotion caused by this fourteenth chapter
of Kinglake’s book.  The Emperor was at the summit of his power, fresh
from Austrian conquest, viewed with alarm by England, whose rulers feared
his strength and were distrustful of his friendship.  Our Crown, our
government, our society, had condoned his usurpation; he had kissed the
Queen’s cheek, bent her ministers to his will, ridden through her capital
a triumphant and applauded guest.  And now men read not only a cynical
dissection of his character and disclosure of his early foibles, but the
hideous details of his deceit and treachery, the phases of cold-blooded
massacre and lawless deportation by which he emptied France of all who
hesitated to enrol themselves as his accomplices or his tools.  Forty
years have passed since the terrible indictment was put forth; down to
its minutest allegation it has been proved literally true; the arch
criminal has fallen from his estate to die in disgrace, disease, exile.
When we talk to-day with cultivated Frenchmen of that half-forgotten
epoch, and of the book which bared its horrors, we are met by their
response of ardent gratitude to the man who joined to passionate hatred
of iniquity surpassing capacity for denouncing it; their avowal that with
all its frequent exposure of their military shortcomings and depreciation
of their national character, no English chronicle of the century stands
higher in their esteem than the history of the war in the Crimea.

The close of the book is grim and tragic in the main, the stir of gallant
fights exchanged for the dreary course of siege, intrenchment, mine and
countermine.  We have the awful winter on the heights, the November
hurricane, the foiled bombardments, the cruel blunder of the Karabelnaya
assault, the bitter natural discontent at home, the weak subservience of
our government to misdirected clamour, the touching help-fraught advent
of the Lady Nurses: then, just as better prospects dawn, the Chief’s
collapse and death.  From the morrow of Inkerman to the end, through no
fault of his, the historian’s chariot wheels drag.  More and more one
sees how from the nature of the task, except for the flush of
contemporary interest then, except by military students now, it is not a
work to be popularly read; the exhausted interest of its subject swamps
the genius of its narrator.  Scattered through its more serious matter
are gems with the old “Eothen” sparkle, of periphrasis, aphorism,
felicitous phrase and pregnant epithet.  Such is the fine analogy between
the worship of holy shrines and the lover’s homage to the spot which his
mistress’s feet have trod; such France’s tolerance of the Elysée brethren
compared to the Arab laying his verminous burnous upon an ant-hill; the
apt quotation from the Psalms to illustrate the on-coming of the Guards;
the demeanour of horses in action; the course of a flying cannon-ball;
the two ponderous troopers at the Horse Guards; Tom Tower and his Croats
landing stores for our soldiers from the “Erminia.”  Or again, we have
the light clear touches of a single line; “the decisiveness and
consistency of despotism”—“the fractional and volatile interests in
trading adventure which go by the name of Shares”—“the unlabelled,
undocketed state of mind which shall enable a man to encounter the
Unknown”—“the qualifying words which correct the imprudences and derange
the grammatical structure of a Queen’s Speech”: but these are islets in
the sea of narrative, not, as in “Eothen,” woof-threads which cross the
warp.

To compare an idyll with an epic, it may be said, is like comparing a
cameo with a Grecian temple: be it so; but the temple falls in ruins, the
cameo is preserved in cabinets; and it is possible that a century hence
the Crimean history will be forgotten, while “Eothen” is read and
enjoyed.  The best judges at the time pronounced that as a lasting
monument of literary force the work was over refined: “Kinglake,” said
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, “tries to write better than he can write”;
quoting, perhaps unconsciously, the epigram of a French art critic a
hundred years before—_Il cherche toujours a faire mieux qu’il ne fait_.
{87}  He lavished on it far more pains than on “Eothen”: the proof sheets
were a black sea of erasures, intercalations, blots; the original chaotic
manuscript pages had to be disentangled by a calligraphic Taunton
bookseller before they could be sent to press.  This fastidiousness in
part gained its purpose; won temporary success; gave to his style the
glitter, rapidity, point, effectiveness, of a pungent editorial; went
home, stormed, convinced, vindicated, damaged, triumphed: but it missed
by excessive polish the reposeful, unlaboured, classic grace essential to
the highest art.  Over-scrupulous manipulation of words is liable to the
“defect of its qualities”; as with unskilful goldsmiths of whom old Latin
writers tell us, the file goes too deep, trimming away more of the first
fine minting than we can afford to lose.  Ruskin has explained to us how
the decadence of Gothic architecture commenced through care bestowed on
window tracery for itself instead of as an avenue or vehicle for the
admission of light.  Read “words” for tracery, “thought” for light, and
we see how inspiration avenges itself so soon as diction is made
paramount; artifice, which demands and misses watchful self-concealment,
passes into mannerism; we have lost the incalculable charm of
spontaneity.  Comparison of “Eothen” with the “Crimea” will I think
exemplify this truth.  The first, to use Matthew Arnold’s imagery, is
Attic, the last has declined to the Corinthian; it remains a great, an
amazingly great production; great in its pictorial force, its omnipresent
survey, verbal eloquence, firm grasp, marshalled delineation of
multitudinous and entangled matter; but it is not unique amongst martial
records as “Eothen” is unique amongst books of travel: it is through
“Eothen” that its author has soared into a classic, and bids fair to hold
his place.  And, apart from the merit of style, great campaigns lose
interest in a third, if not in a second generation; their historical
consequence effaced through lapse of years; their policy seen to have
been nugatory or mischievous; their chronicles, swallowed greedily at the
birth like Saturn’s progeny, returning to vex their parent; relegated
finally to an honourable exile in the library upper shelves, where they
hold a place eyed curiously, not invaded:

             “devoured
    As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
    As done. . . . To have done, is to hang
    Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail,
    In monumental mockery.”




CHAPTER V
MADAME NOVIKOFF


THE Cabinet Edition of “The Invasion of the Crimea” appeared in 1877,
shortly after the Servian struggle for independence, which aroused in
England universal interest and sympathy.  Kinglake had heard from the
lips of a valued lady friend the tragic death-tale of her brother
Nicholas Kiréeff, who fell fighting as a volunteer on the side of the
gallant Servian against the Turk: and, much moved by the recital, offered
to honour the memory of the dead hero in the Preface to his forthcoming
edition.  He kept his word; made sympathetic reference to M. Kiréeff in
the opening of his Preface; but passed in pursuance of his original
design to a hostile impeachment of Russia, its people, its church, its
ruler.  This was an error of judgment and of feeling; and the lady,
reading the manuscript, indignantly desired him to burn the whole rather
than commit the outrage of associating her brother’s name with an attack
on causes and personages dear to him as to herself.  Kinglake listened in
silence, then tendered to her a _crayon rouge_, begging her to efface all
that pained her.  She did so; and, diminished by three-fourths of its
matter, the Preface appears in Vol. I. of the Cabinet Edition.  The
erasure was no slight sacrifice to an author of Kinglake’s literary
sensitiveness, mutilating as it did the integrity of a carefully schemed
composition, and leaving visible the scar.  He sets forth the strongly
sentimental and romantic side of Russian temperament.  Love of the Holy
Shrines begat the war of 1853, racial ardour the war of 1876.  The first
was directed by a single will, the second by national enthusiasm; yet the
mind of Nicholas was no less tossed by a breathless strife of opposing
desires and moods than was Russia at large by the struggle between
Panslavism and statesmanship.  Kinglake paints vividly the imposing
figure of the young Kiréeff, his stature, beauty, bravery, the white robe
he wore incarnadined by death-wounds, his body captured by the hateful
foes.  He goes on to tell how myth rose like an exhalation round his
memory: how legends of “a giant piling up hecatombs by a mighty
slaughter” reverberated through mansion and cottage, town and village,
cathedral and church; until thousands of volunteers rushed to arms that
they might go where young Kiréeff had gone.  Alexander’s hand was forced,
and the war began, which but for England’s intervention would have
cleared Europe of the Turk.  We have the text, but not the sermon; the
Preface ends abruptly with an almost clumsy peroration.

                        [Picture: Madame Novikoff]

The lady who inspired both the eulogy and the curtailment was Madame
Novikoff, more widely known perhaps as O. K., with whom Kinglake
maintained during the last twenty years of life an intimate and mutual
friendship.  Madame Olga Novikoff, _née_ Kiréeff, is a Russian lady of
aristocratic rank both by parentage and marriage.  In a lengthened
sojourn at Vienna with her brother-in-law, the Russian ambassador, she
learned the current business of diplomacy.  An eager religious
propagandist, she formed alliance with the “Old Catholics” on the
Continent, and with many among the High Church English clergy; becoming,
together with her brother Alexander, a member of the _Réunion Nationale_,
a society for the union of Christendom.  Her interest in education has
led her to devote extensive help to school and church building and
endowment on her son’s estate.  God-daughter to the Czar Nicholas, she is
a devoted Imperialist, nor less in sympathy, as were all her family, with
Russian patriotism: after the death of her brother in Servia on July
6/18, 1876, she became a still more ardent Slavophile.  The three
articles of her creed are, she says, those of her country, Orthodoxy,
Autocracy, Nationalism.  Her political aspirations have been guided, and
guided right, by her tact and goodness of heart.  Her life’s aim has been
to bring about a cordial understanding between England and her native
land; there is little doubt that her influence with leading Liberal
politicians, and her vigorous allocutions in the Press, had much to do
with the enthusiasm manifested by England for the liberation of the
Danubian States.  Readers of the Princess Lieven’s letters to Earl Grey
will recall the part played by that able ambassadress in keeping this
country neutral through the crisis of 1828–9; to her Madame Novikoff has
been likened, and probably with truth, by the Turkish Press both English
and Continental.  She was accused in 1876 of playing on the religious
side of Mr. Gladstone’s character to secure his interest in the Danubians
as members of the Greek Church, while with unecclesiastical people she
was said to be equally skilful on the political side, converting at the
same time Anglophobe Russia by her letters in the “Moscow Gazette.”  Mr.
Gladstone’s leanings to Montenegro were attributed angrily in the English
“Standard” to Madame Novikoff: “A serious statesman should know better
than to catch contagion from the petulant enthusiasm of a Russian
Apostle.”  The contagion was in any case caught, and to some purpose;
letter after letter had been sent by the lady to the great statesman,
then in temporary retirement, without reply, until the last of these, “a
bitter cry of a sister for a sacrificed brother,” brought a feeling
answer from Mrs. Gladstone, saying that her husband was deeply moved by
the appeal, and was writing on the subject.  In a few days appeared his
famous pamphlet, “Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East.”

Carlyle advised that Madame Novikoff’s scattered papers should be worked
into a volume; they appeared under the title “Is Russia Wrong?” with a
preface by Froude, the moderate and ultra-prudent tone of which
infuriated Hayward and Kinglake, as not being sufficiently appreciative.
Hayward declared some woman had biassed him; Kinglake was of opinion that
by studying the _ètat_ of Queen Elizabeth Froude had “gone and turned
himself into an old maid.”

Froude’s Preface to her next work, “Russia and England, a Protest and an
Appeal,” by O. K., 1880, was worded in a very different tone and
satisfied all her friends.  The book was also reviewed with highest
praise by Gladstone in “The Nineteenth Century.”  Learning that an
assault upon it was contemplated in “The Quarterly,” Kinglake offered to
supply the editor, Dr. Smith, with materials which might be so used as to
neutralize a _personal_ attack upon O. K.  Smith entreated him to compose
the whole article himself.  “I could promise you,” he writes, “that the
authorship should be kept a profound secret;” but this Kinglake seems to
have thought undesirable.  The article appeared in April, 1880, under the
title of “The Slavonic Menace to Europe.”  It opens with a panegyric on
the authoress: “She has mastered our language with conspicuous success;
she expostulates as easily as she reproaches, and she exhibits as much
facility in barbing shafts of satire as in framing specious excuses for
daring acts of diplomacy.”  It insists on the high esteem felt for her by
both the Russian and Austrian governments, telling with much humour an
anecdote of Count Beust, the Prime Minister of Austria during her
residence in Vienna.  The Count, after meeting her at a dinner party at
the Turkish Embassy, composed a set of verses in her honour, and gave
them to her, but she forgot to mention them to her brother-in-law.  The
Prime Minister, encountering the latter, asked his opinion of the verses;
and the ambassador was greatly amazed at knowing nothing of the matter.
{96}  From amenities towards the authoress, the article passes abruptly
to hostile criticism of the book; declares it to be proscribed in Russia
as mischievous, and to have precipitated a general war by keeping up
English interest in Servian rebellion.  It sneers in doubtful taste at
the lady’s learning:

             “sit non doctissima conjux,
    Sit nox cum somno, sit sine lite dies;”

denounces the Slavs as incapable of being welded into a nation, urging
that their independence must destroy Austria-Hungary, a consummation
desired by Madame Novikoff, with her feline contempt for “poor dear
Austria,” but which all must unite to prevent if they would avert a
European war.

How could one clear harp, men asked themselves as they read, have
produced so diverse tones?  The riddle is solved when we learn that the
first part only was from Kinglake’s pen: having vindicated his friend’s
ability and good faith, her right to speak and to be heard attentively,
he left the survey of her views, with which he probably disagreed, to the
originally assigned reviewer.  The article, Madame Novikoff tells us in
the “Nouvelle Revue,” was received _avec une stupefaction unanime_.  It
formed the general talk for many days, was attributed to Lord Salisbury,
was supposed to have been inspired by Prince Gortschakoff.  The name
standing against it in Messrs. Murray’s books, as they kindly inform me,
is that of a writer still alive, and better known now than then, but they
never heard that Kinglake had a hand in it; the editor would seem to have
kept his secret even from the publishers.  Kinglake sent the article in
proof to the lady; hoped that the facts he had imparted and the
interpolations he had inserted would please her; he could have made the
attack on Russia more pointed had he written it; she would think the
leniency shows a fault on the right side; he did not know the writer of
this latter part.  He begged her to acquaint her friends in Moscow what
an important and majestic organ is “The Quarterly,” how weighty therefore
its laudation of herself.  She recalls his bringing her soon afterwards
an article on her, written, he said, in an adoring tone by Laveleye in
the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” and directing her to a paper in “Fraser,” by
Miss Pauline Irby, a passionate lover of the “Slav ragamuffins,” and a
worshipper of Madame Novikoff.  He quotes with delight Chenery’s
approbation of her “Life of Skobeleff”; he spoke of you “with a gleam of
kindliness in his eyes which really and truly I had never observed
before.”  “The Times” quotes her as the “eloquent authoress of ‘Russia
and England’”; “fancy that from your enemy! you are getting even ‘The
Times’ into your net.”  A later article on O. K. contains some praise,
but more abuse.  Hayward is angry with it; Kinglake thinks it more
friendly than could have been expected “to _you_, a friend of _me_, their
old open enemy: the sugar-plums were meant for you, the sprinklings of
soot for me.”

Besides “Russia and England” Madame Novikoff is the author of “Friends or
Foes?—is Russia wrong?” and of a “Life of Skobeleff,” the hero of Plevna
and of Geok Tepé.  From her natural endowments and her long familiarity
with Courts, she has acquired a capacity for combining, controlling,
entertaining social “circles” which recalls _les salons d’autrefois_, the
drawing-rooms of an Ancelot, a Le Brun, a Récamier.  Residing in several
European capitals, she surrounds herself in each with persons
intellectually eminent; in England, where she has long spent her winters,
Gladstone, Carlyle and Froude, Charles Villiers, Bernal Osborne, Sir
Robert Morier, Lord Houghton, and many more of the same high type, formed
her court and owned her influence.

Kinglake first met her at Lady Holland’s in 1870, and mutual liking
ripened rapidly into close friendship.  During her residences in England
few days passed in which he did not present himself at her drawing-room
in Claridge’s Hotel: when absent in Russia or on the Continent, she
received from him weekly letters, though he used to complain that writing
to a lady through the _poste restante_ was like trying to kiss a nun
through a double grating.  These letters, all faithfully preserved, I
have been privileged to see; they remind me, in their mixture of personal
with narrative charm, of Swift’s “Letters to Stella”; except that Swift’s
are often coarse and sometimes prurient, while Kinglake’s chivalrous
admiration for his friend, though veiled occasionally by graceful banter,
is always respectful and refined.  They even imitate occasionally the
“little language” of the great satirist; if Swift was Presto, Kinglake is
“Poor dear me”; if Stella was M. D., Madame Novikoff is “My dear Miss.”
This last endearment was due to an incident at a London dinner table.  A
story told by Hayward, seasoned as usual with _gros sel_, amused the more
sophisticated English ladies present, but covered her with blushes.
Kinglake perceived it, and said to her afterwards, “I thought you were a
hardened married woman; I am glad that you are not; I shall henceforth
call you _Miss_.”  Sometimes he rushes into verse.  In answer to some
pretended rebuff received from her at Ryde he writes

    “There was a young lady of Ryde, so awfully puffed up by pride,
       She felt grander by far than the Son of the Czar,
    And when he said, ‘Dear, come and walk on the pier,
       Oh please come and walk by my side;’
    The answer he got, was ‘Much better not,’ from that awful young lady
    of Ryde.”

Oftenest, the letters are serious in their admiring compliments; they
speak of her superb organization of health and life and strength and
joyousness, the delightful sunshine of her presence, her decision and
strength of will, her great qualities and great opportunities: “away from
you the world seems a blank.”  He is glad that his Great Eltchi has been
made known to her; the old statesman will be impressed, he feels sure, by
her “intense life, graciousness and grace, intellect carefully masked,
musical faculty in talk, with that heavenly power of coming to an end.”
He sends playfully affectionate messages from other members of the
_Gerontaion_, as he calls it, the group of aged admirers who formed her
inner court; echoing their laments over the universality of her
patronage.  “Hayward can pardon your having an ambassador or two at your
_feet_, but to find the way to your _heart_ obstructed by a crowd of
astronomers, Russ-expansionists, metaphysicians, theologians,
translators, historians, poets;—this is more than he can endure.  The
crowd reduces him, as Ampère said to Mme. Récamier, to the qualified
blessing of being only _chez vous_, from the delight of being _avec
vous_.”  He hails and notifies additions to the list of her admirers;
quotes enthusiastic praise of her from Stansfeld and Charles Villiers,
warm appreciation from Morier, Sir Robert Peel, Violet Fane.  He rallies
her on her victims, jests at Froude’s lover-like _galanterie_—“Poor St.
Anthony! how he hovered round the flame”;—at the devotion of that gay
Lothario, Tyndall, whose approaching marriage will, he thinks, clip his
wings for flirtation.  “It seems that at the Royal Institution, or
whatever the place is called, young women look up to the Lecturers as
priests of Science, and go to them after the lecture in what churchmen
would call the vestry, and express charming little doubts about
electricity, and pretty gentle disquietudes about the solar system: and
then the Professors have to give explanations;—and then, somehow, at the
end of a few weeks, they find they have provided themselves with
chaperons for life.”  So he pursues the list of devotees; her son will
tell her that Cæsar summarized his conquests in this country by saying
_Veni_, _Vidi_, _Vici_; but to her it is given to say, _Veni_, _Videbar_,
_Vici_.

On two subjects, theology and politics, Madame Novikoff was, as we have
seen, passionately in earnest.  Himself at once an amateur casuist and a
consistent Nothingarian, whose dictum was that “Important if true” should
be written over the doors of churches, he followed her religious
arguments much as Lord Steyne listened to the contests between Father
Mole and the Reverend Mr. Trail.  He expresses his surprise in all
seriousness that the Pharisees, a thoughtful and cultured set of men, who
alone among the Jews believed in a future state, should have been the
very men to whom our Saviour was habitually antagonistic.  He refers more
lightly and frequently to “those charming talks of ours about our
Churches”; he thinks they both know how to _effleurer_ the surface of
theology without getting drowned in it.  Of existing Churches he
preferred the English, as “the most harmless going”; disliked the Latin
Church, especially when intriguing in the East, as persecuting and as
schismatic, and therefore as no Church at all.  Roman Catholics, he said,
have a special horror of being called “schismatic,” and that is, of
course, a good reason for so calling them.  He would not permit the use
of the word “orthodox,” because, like a parson in the pulpit, it is
always begging the question.  He refused historical reverence to the
Athanasian Creed, and was delighted when Stanley’s review in “The Times”
of Mr. Ffoulkes’ learned book showed it to have been written by order of
Charles the Great in 800 A.D. as what Thorold Rogers used to call “an
election squib.”  In the “Filioque” controversy, once dear to Liddon and
to Gladstone, now, I suppose, obsolete for the English mind, but which
relates to the chief dividing tenet of East from West, he showed an
interest humorous rather than reverent; took pains to acquaint himself
with the views held on it by Döllinger and the old Catholics; noted with
amusement the perplexity of London ladies as to the meaning of the word
when quoted in the much-read “Quarterly” article, declaring their belief
to be that it was a clergyman’s baby born out of wedlock.

Madame Novikoff’s political influence, which he recognized to the full,
he treated in the same mocking spirit.  She is at Berlin, received by
Bismarck; he hopes that though the great man may not eradicate her
Slavophile heresies, he may manifest the weakness of embroiling nations
on mere ethnological grounds.  “Are even nearer relationships so
delightful? would you walk across the street for a third or fourth
cousin? then why for a millionth cousin?”  Madame Novikoff kindly sends
to me an “Imaginary Conversation” between herself and Gortschakoff,
constructed by Kinglake during her stay in St. Petersburg in 1879.

“_G._  Well—you really have done good service to your country and your
Czar by dividing and confusing these absurd English, and getting us out
of the scrape we were in in that—Balkan Peninsula.

“_Miss O._  Well, certainly I did my best; but I fear I have ruined the
political reputation of my English partizans, for in order to make them
‘beloved of the Slave,’ I of course had to make them, poor souls! go
against their own country; and their country, stupid as it is, has now I
fear found them out.

“_G._  _Tant pis pour eux_!  _Entre nous_, if I had been Gladstone, I
should have preferred the love of my own country to the love of
these—Slaves of yours.  But, tell me, how did you get hold of Gladstone?

“_Miss O._  _Rien de plus simple_!  Four or five years ago I asked what
was his weak point, and was told that he had two, ‘Effervescence,’ and
‘Theology.’  With that knowledge I found it all child’s play to manage
him.  I just sent him to Munich, and there boiled him up in a weak
decoction of ‘Filioque,’ then kept him ready for use, and impatiently
awaited the moment when our plans for getting up the ‘Bulgarian
atrocities’ should be mature.  I say ‘impatiently,’ for, Heavens, how
slow you all were! at least so it strikes a woman.  The arrangement of
the ‘atrocities’ was begun by our people in 1871, and yet till 1876,
though I had Gladstone ready in 1875, nothing really was done!  I assure
you, Prince, it is a trying thing to a woman to be kept waiting for
promised atrocities such an unconscionable time.

“_G._  That brother-in-law of yours was partly the cause of our slowness.
He was always wanting to have the orders for fire and blood in neat
formal despatches, signed by me, and copied by clerks.  However, I hope
you are satisfied now, with the butcheries and the flames, and the —?

“_Miss O._  _Pour le moment_!”

She is absent during the sudden dissolution of Parliament in 1874.
“London woke yesterday morning and found that your friend Gladstone had
made a _coup-d’état_.  He has dissolved Parliament at a moment when no
human being expected it, and my impression is that he has made a good
hit, and that the renovated Parliament will give him a great majority.”
The impression was wildly wrong; and he found a cause for the
Conservative majority in Gladstone’s tame foreign policy, and especially
in the pusillanimity his government showed when insulted by Gortschakoff.
He always does justice to her influence with Gladstone; his great
majority at the polls in 1880 is _her_ victory and _her_ triumph; but his
Turkophobia is no less her creation: “England is stricken with incapacity
because you have stirred up the seething caldron that boils under
Gladstone’s skull, putting in diabolical charms and poisons of theology
to overturn the structure of English polity:” she will be able, he
thinks, to tell her government that Gladstone is doing his best to break
up the British Empire.

He quotes with approbation the newspaper comparison of her to the
Princess Lieven.  She disparages the famous ambassadress; he sets her
right.  Let her read the “Correspondence,” by his friend Mr. Guy Le
Strange, and she will see how large a part the Princess played in keeping
England quiet during the war of 1828–29.  She did not convert her austere
admirer, Lord Grey, to approval of the Russian designs, nor overcome the
uneasiness with which the Duke of Wellington regarded her intrigues; but
the Foreign Minister, Lord Aberdeen, was apparently a fool in her hands;
and, whoever had the merit, the neutrality of England continued.  That
was, he repeats more than once, a most critical time for Russia; it was
an object almost of life and death to the Czar to keep England dawdling
in a state of actual though not avowed neutrality.  It is, he argued, a
matter of fact, that precisely this result was attained, and “I shall be
slow to believe that Madame de Lieven did not deserve a great share of
the glory (as you would think it) of making England act weakly under such
circumstances; more especially since we know that the Duke did not like
the great lady, and may be supposed to have distinctly traced his painful
embarrassment to her power.”  So the letters go, interspersed with news,
with criticisms of notable persons, with comments enlightening or cynical
on passing political events: with personal matters only now and then; as
when he notes the loss of his two sisters; dwells with unwonted feeling
on the death of his eldest nephew by consumption; condoles with her on
her husband’s illness; gives council, wise or playful, as to the
education of her son.  “I am glad to hear that he is good at Greek,
Latin, and Mathematics, for that shows his cleverness; glad also to hear
that he is occasionally naughty, for that shows his force.  I advise you
to claim and exercise as much control as possible, because I am certain
that a woman—especially so gifted a one as you—knows more, or rather
feels more, about the right way of bringing up a boy than any mere man.”

Unbrokenly the correspondence continues: the intimacy added charm,
interest, fragrance to his life, brought out in him all that was genial,
playful, humorous.  He fights the admonitions of coming weakness; goes to
Sidmouth with a sore throat, but takes his papers and his books.  It is,
he says, a deserted little sea-coast place.  “Mrs. Grundy has a small
house there, but she does not know me by sight.  If Madame Novikoff were
to come, the astonished little town, dazzled first by her, would find
itself invaded by theologians, bishops, ambassadors of deceased emperors,
and an ex-Prime-Minister.”  But as time goes on he speaks more often of
his suffering throat; of gout, increasing deafness, only half a voice:
his last letter is written in July, 1890, to condole with his friend upon
her husband’s death.  In October his nurse takes the pen; Madame Novikoff
comes back hurriedly from Scotland to find him in his last illness.  “It
is very nice,” he told his nurse, “to see dear Madame Novikoff again, but
I am going down hill fast, and cannot hope to be well enough to see much
of her.”  This is in November, 1890; on New Year’s Eve came the
inexorable, “Terminator of delights and Separator of friends.”




CHAPTER VI
LATER DAYS, AND DEATH


FOR twenty years Kinglake lived in Hyde Park Place, in bright cheerful
rooms looking in one direction across the Park, but on another side into
a churchyard.  The churchyard, Lady Gregory tells us, gave him pause on
first seeing the rooms.  “I should not like to live here, I should be
afraid of ghosts.”  “Oh no, sir, there is always a policeman round the
corner.” {111}  “Pleaceman X.” has not, perhaps, before been revered as
the Shade-compelling son of Maia:

    “Tu pias lætis animas reponis
    Sedibus, _virgaque levem coerces_
    _Aurea turbam_.”

Here he worked through the morning; the afternoon took him to the
“Travellers,” where his friends, Sir Henry Bunbury and Mr. Chenery,
usually expected him; then at eight o’clock, if not, as Shylock says, bid
forth, he went to dine at the Athenæum.  His dinner seat was in the
left-hand corner of the coffee-room, where, in the thirties, Theodore
Hook had been wont to sit, gathering near him so many listeners to his
talk, that at Hook’s death in 1841 the receipts for the club dinners fell
off to a large amount.  Here, in the “Corner,” as they called it, round
Kinglake would be Hayward, Drummond Wolff, Massey, Oliphant, Edward
Twisleton, Strzelecki, Storks, Venables, Wyke, Bunbury, Gregory, American
Ticknor, and a few more; Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, when in Scotland,
sending hampers of pheasants to the company.  “Hurried to the Athenæum
for dinner,” says Ticknor in 1857, “and there found Kinglake and Sir
Henry Rawlinson, to whom were soon added Hayward and Stirling.  We pushed
our tables together and had a jolly dinner. . . . To the Athenæum; and
having dined pleasantly with Merivale, Kinglake, and Stirling, I hurried
off to the House.”  In later years, when his voice grew low and his
hearing difficult, he preferred that the diners should resolve themselves
into little groups, assigning to himself a _tête-à-tête_, with whom at
his ease he could unfold himself.

No man ever fought more gallantly the encroachments of old age—_on sut
être jeune jusque dans ses vieux jours_.  At seventy-four years old,
staying with a friend at Brighton, he insisted on riding over to
Rottingdean, where Sir Frederick Pollock was staying.  “I mastered,” he
said, in answer to remonstrances, “I mastered the peculiarities of the
Brighton screw before you were born, and have never forgotten them.”
Vaulting into his saddle he rode off, returning with a schoolboy’s
delight at the brisk trot he had found practicable when once clear of the
King’s Road.  Long after his hearing had failed, his sight become
grievously weakened, and his limbs not always trustworthy, he would never
allow a cab to be summoned for him after dinner, always walking to his
lodgings.  But he had to give up by and by his daily canter in Rotten
Row, and more reluctantly still his continental travel.  Foreign railways
were closed to him by the _Salle d’Attente_; he could not stand
incarceration in the waiting-rooms.

The last time he crossed the Channel was at the close of the
Franco-Prussian war, on a visit to his old friend M. Thiers, then
President.  It was a dinner to deputies of the Extreme Left, and Kinglake
was the only Englishman; “so,” he said, “among the servants there was a
sort of reasoning process as to my identity, ending in the conclusion,
‘_il doit être Sir Dilke_.’”  Soon the inference was treated as a fact;
and in due sequence came newspaper paragraphs declaring that the British
Ambassador had gravely remonstrated with the President for inviting Sir
Charles Dilke to his table.  Then followed articles defending the course
taken by the President, and so for some time the ball was kept up.  The
remonstrance of the Ambassador was a myth, Lord Lyons was a friend of Sir
Charles; but the latter was suspect at the time both in England and
France; in England for his speeches and motion on the Civil List; in
France, because, with Frederic Harrison, he had helped to get some of the
French Communists away from France; and the French Government was
watching him with spies.  In Sir Charles’s motion Kinglake took much
interest, refusing to join in the cry against it as disloyal.  Sir
Charles, he said, spoke no word against the Queen; and only brought the
matter before the House because challenged to repeat in Parliament the
statements he had made in the country.  As a matter of policy he thought
it mistaken: “Move in such a matter openly, and party discipline compels
your defeat; bring pressure to bear on a Cabinet, some of its members are
on your side, and you may gain your point.”  Sir Charles’s speech was
calmly argumentative, and to many minds convincing; it provoked a
passionate reply from Gladstone; and when Mr. Auberon Herbert following
declared himself a Republican, a tumult arose such as in those
pre-Milesian days had rarely been witnessed in the House.  But the wisdom
of Kinglake’s counsel is sustained by the fact that many years
afterwards, as a result of more private discussion, Mr. Gladstone
pronounced his conversion to the two bases of the motion, publicity, and
the giving of the State allowance to the head of the family rather than,
person by person, to the children and grandchildren of the Sovereign.
Action pointing in this direction was taken in 1889 and 1901 on the
advice of Tory ministers.

Amongst Frenchmen of the highest class, intellectually and socially, he
had many valued friends, keeping his name on the “Cosmopolitan” long
after he had ceased to visit it, since “one never knows when the
distinguished foreigner may come upon one, and of such the Cosmo is the
London Paradise.”  But he used to say that in the other world a good
Frenchman becomes an Englishman, a bad Englishman becomes a Frenchman.
He saw in the typical Gaul a compound of the tiger and the monkey; noted
their want of individuality, their tendency to go in flocks, their
susceptibility to panic and to ferocity, to the terror that makes a man
kill people, and “the terror that makes him lie down and beg.”  We
remember, too, his dissection of St. Arnaud, as before all things a type
of his nation; “he impersonated with singular exactness the idea which
our forefathers had in their minds when they spoke of what they called ‘a
Frenchman;’ for although (by cowing the rich and by filling the poor with
envy), the great French Revolution had thrown a lasting gloom on the
national character, it left this one man untouched.  He was bold, gay,
reckless, vain; but beneath the mere glitter of the surface there was a
great capacity for administrative business, and a more than common
willingness to take away human life.”

“I relish,” Kinglake said in 1871, “the spectacle of Bismarck teaching
the A B C of Liberal politics to the hapless French.  His last _mot_,
they tell me, is this.  Speaking of the extent to which the French
Emperor had destroyed his own reputation and put an end to the worship of
the old Napoleon, he said: ‘He has killed himself and buried his uncle.’”
Again, in 1874, noting the _contre coup_ upon France resulting from the
Bismarck and Arnim despatches, he said: “What puzzles the poor dear
French is to see that truth and intrepid frankness consist with sound
policy and consummate wisdom.  How funny it would be, if the French some
day, as a novelty, or what they would call a _caprice_, were to try the
effect of truth; “though not naturally honest,” as Autolycus says, “were
to become so by chance.”

He thought M. Gallifet _dans sa logique_ in liking the Germans and hating
Bismarck; for the Germans, in having their own way, would break up into
as many fragments as the best Frenchman could desire, and Bismarck is the
real suppressor of France.  Throughout the Franco-Prussian war he sided
strongly with the Prussians, refusing to dine in houses where the
prevailing sympathy with France would make him unwelcome as its declared
opponent; but he felt “as a nightmare” the attack on prostrate Paris, “as
a blow” the capitulation of Metz; denouncing Gambetta and his colleagues
as meeting their disasters only with slanderous shrieks, “possessed by
the spirit of that awful Popish woman.”  Bismarck as a statesman he
consistently admired, and deplored his dismissal.  I see, he said, all
the peril implied by Bismarck’s exit, and the advent of his ambitious
young Emperor.  It is a transition from the known to the unknown, from
wisdom, perhaps, to folly.

His Crimean volumes continued to appear; in 1875, 1880, finally in 1887;
while the Cabinet Edition was published in 1887–8.  This last contained
three new Prefaces; in Vol. I. as we have seen, the memorial of Nicholas
Kiréeff; in Vol. II. the latter half of the original Preface to Vol. I.,
cancelled thence at Madame Novikoff’s request, though now carefully
modified so as to avoid anything which might irritate Russia at a moment
when troubles seemed to be clearing away.  In his Preface to Vol. VII. he
had three objects, to set right the position of Sir E. Hamley, who had
been neglected in the despatches; to demolish his friend Lord Bury, who
had “questioned my omniscience” in the “Edinburgh Review”; and to
exonerate England at large from absurd self-congratulations about the
“little Egypt affair,” the blame of such exaggeration resting with those
whom he called State Showmen.

Silent to acquaintances about the progress of his work, he was
communicative to his few intimates, though never reading aloud extracts
or allowing them to be seen.  In 1872 he would speak pathetically of his
“Crimean muddle,” perplexed, as he well might be, by the intricacies of
Inkerman.  Asked if he will not introduce a Te Deum on the fall of Louis
Napoleon, he answered that to write without the stimulus of combat would
be a task beyond his energy; “when I took the trouble to compose that
fourteenth chapter, the wretched Emperor and his gang were at the height
of their power in Europe and the world; but now!” He was insatiate as to
fresh facts: utilized his acquaintance with Todleben, whom he had first
met on his visit to England in 1864; sought out Prince Ourusoff at a
later time, and inserted particulars gleaned from him in Vol. IX.,
Chapter V.

In 1875 he told Madame Novikoff that his task was done so far as Inkerman
was concerned, and was proud to think that he had rescued from oblivion
the heroism of the Russian troops in what he calls the “Third Period” of
the great fight, ignored as it was by all Russian historians of the war.
He made fruitless inquiries after a paper said to have been left behind
him by Skobeleff, explaining that “India is a cherry to be eaten by
Russia, but in two bites”; it was contrary to the general’s recorded
utterances and probably apocryphal.  Russophobe as regarded Turkey, he
sneered at England’s sentimental support of nationalities as “Platonic”:
a capital epithet he called it, and envied the Frenchman who applied it
to us, declaring that it had turned all the women against us.  He was
moved by receiving Korniloff’s portrait with a kind message from the dead
hero’s family, seeing in the features a confirmation of the ideal which
he had formed in his own mind and had tried to convey to others.  Readers
of his book will recall the fine tribute to Korniloff’s powers, and the
description of his death, in Chapters VI. and XIII. of Vol. IV. (Cabinet
Edition).

Many of his comments on current events are preserved in the notes or in
the memories of his friends.  Sometimes these were characteristically
cynical.  He ridiculed the newspaper parade of national sympathy with the
Prince of Wales’s illness: “We are represented as all members of the
royal family, and all in family hysterics.”  Dizzy’s orientalization of
Queen Victoria into an Empress angered him, as it angered many more.  The
last Empress Regnant, he said, was Catherine II. and it seems to be
thought that by advising the Queen to take that great monarch’s title, we
shall exercise a wholesome influence on the morals of our women.  He
would quote Byron’s

             “Russia’s mighty Empress
    Behaved no better than a common sempstress;”

“there was an old-fashioned sacredness, which, however foolish
intrinsically, was still useful, in our title of ‘The Queen’; nor do we
see the policy of adding a _Suprême de Volaille_ to the bread and wine of
our Sacrament.”

He chuckled over the indignation of the _haute volée_, when on the visit
to England of President Grant’s daughter in 1872, Americans in London
sent out cards of invitation headed “To meet Miss Grant,” as at a profane
imitation of a practice hitherto confined to royalties; laughing not at
the legitimate American mimicry of European consequence, but at the silly
formalists in Society who fumed over the imagined presumption.  Consulted
by an invalid as to the charm of Ostend for a seaside residence, he
limited it to persons of gregarious habits; “the people are all driven
down to the beach like a flock of sheep in the morning, and in the
evening they are all driven back to their folds.”  He reported a feeble
drama written by his ancient idol, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe; “it is a
painful thing to see a man of his quality and of his age unduly detained
in the world; when the Emperor Nicholas died, the Eltchi lost his _raison
d’être_.”  He disparaged the wild fit of morality undergone by the “Pall
Mall Gazette” during the scandalous “Maiden Tribute” revelation,
pronouncing its protegées to be “clever little devils.”  He was greatly
startled by Gortschakoff’s famous circular, annulling the Black Sea
clause in the Treaty of Paris, and much relieved by Bismarck’s dexterous
interposition, which saved the susceptibility of Europe, and especially
of England, by yielding as a favour to the demand of Russia what no one
was in a position to refuse; but he maintained, and Lord Stratford agreed
with him, that Gortschakoff’s precipitate act was governed by
circumstances never revealed to mankind.  He learned, too, that it caused
the Chancellor to be _déconsideré_ in high Russian circles; he was called
“_un Narcisse qui se mire dans son encrier_.”  Kinglake used to say that
in conceding the right of the Sultan to exclude any war-flag from the
Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, Russia was treating Turkey as a bag-fox,
to be gently hunted occasionally, but not mangled or killed; and he felt
keenly the ridicule resting on the allies, who were compelled to
surrender the neutralization purchased at the cost of so much blood and
treasure.  He watched with much amusement the restoration of Turkish
self-confidence.  “Turkey believes that he is no longer a sick man, and
is turning all his doctors out of the house, to the immense astonishment
of the English doctor, so conscious of his own rectitude that he cannot
understand being sent off with the quacks.  You know in our beautiful
Liturgy we have a prayer for the Turks; it looks as if our supplications
had become successful.”  His interest in Turkey never flagged.  “I am in
a great fright,” he said in 1877, “about my dear Turks, because Russia
gives virtual command of the army before Plevna to Todleben, a really
great _homme de guerre_.”

Russophobia was at that time so strong in London that Madame Novikoff
hesitated to visit England, and he himself feared that she might find it
uncomfortable.  Her alarm, however, was ridiculed by Hayward, “most
faithful of the Russianisers, ready to do battle for Russia at any
moment, declaring her to be quite virtuous, with no fault but that of
being _incomprise_.”  But he groaned over the humiliation of England
under Russia’s bold stroke, noting frequently a decay of English
character which he ascribed to chronic causes.  The Englishman taken
separately, he said, seems much the same as he used to be; but there is a
softening of the aggregate brain which affects Englishmen when acting
together.  He hailed the great Liberal victory of 1880, and watched with
interest, as one behind the scenes, the negotiations which led to Lord
Hartington’s withdrawal and Mr. Gladstone’s resumption of power; for in
these his friend Hayward was an active go-between, removing by his tact
and frankness “hitches” which might otherwise have been disastrous.  He
thought W. E. Forster’s attack on Mr. Gladstone’s Irish policy in 1882
ill-managed for his own position, his famous speech not sufficiently
“clenching.”  Had he separated from his chief on broader grounds,
refusing complicity with a Minister who consented to parley with the
imprisoned Irishmen, he would, Kinglake thought, have occupied a highly
commanding position.  At present his difference from his colleagues was
one only of degree.

He was once beguiled, amongst friends very intimate, into telling a
dream.  He dreamed that he was attending an anatomical lecture—which, as
a fact, he had never done—and that his own body, from which he found
himself entirely separated, was the dissected subject on which the
lecturer discoursed.  The body lay on a table beside the lecturer, but he
himself, his entity, was at the other end of the room, on the furthest or
highest of a set of benches raised one above the other as at a theatre.
He imagined himself in a vague way to be disagreeing with the lecturer;
but the strongest impression on his mind was annoyance at being so badly
placed, so far from the professor and from his own body that he could not
see or hear without an effort.  The dream, he pointed out, showed this
curious fact, that without any conscious design or effort of the will a
man may conceive himself to be in perfect possession of his identity,
whilst separated from his own body by a distance of several feet.  “The
highest concept,” said Jowett, “which man forms of himself is as detached
from the body.”  (“Life,” ii. 241.)  The lecture-room which he imagined
was one of the lower school-rooms at Eton, with which he had been
familiar in early days.

After Hayward’s death in 1884, his own habits began to change.  He still
dined at the Athenæum “corner,” but increasing deafness began to make
society irksome, and, his solitary meal ended, he spent his evenings
reading in the Library.  By-and-by that too became impossible.  His voice
grew weak, throat and tongue were threatened with disease.  In 1888 he
went to Brighton with a nurse, returned to rooms on Richmond Hill, then
to Bayswater Terrace.  An operation was performed and he seemed to
recover, but relapsed.  Old friends tended him: Madame Novikoff, Mr.
Froude and Mr. Lecky, Madame de Quaire and Mrs. Brookfield, Lord
Mexborough his ancient fellow-traveller, Mrs. Craven, Sir William and
Lady Gregory, with a few more, cheered him by their visits so long as he
was able to bear them; and his brother and sister, Dr. and Mrs. Hamilton
Kinglake, were with him at the end.  Patient to the last, kind and gentle
to all about him, he passed away quietly on New Year’s Day, 1891:

             “being merry-hearted,
    Shook hands with flesh and blood, and so departed.”

His remains were cremated at Woking, after a special service at
Christchurch, Lancaster Gate, attended by Dr. and Mrs. Kinglake with
their son Captain Kinglake, the Duke of Bedford, Mr. and Mrs. Lecky, Mrs.
W. H. Brookfield and her son Charles.

                                * * * * *

No good portrait of him has been published.  That prefixed to Blackwood’s
“Eothen” of 1896 was furnished by Dr. Kinglake, who, however, looked upon
it as unsatisfactory.  The “Not an M.P.” of “Vanity Fair,” 1872, is a
grotesque caricature.  The photograph here reproduced (p. 128), by far
the best likeness extant, he gave to Madame Novikoff in 1870, receiving
hers in return, but pronouncing the transaction “an exchange between the
personified months of May and November.”  The face gives expression to
the shy aloofness which, amongst strangers, was characteristic of him
through life.  He had even a horror of hearing his name pealed out by
servants, and came early to parties that the proclamation might be
achieved before as few auditors as possible.  Visiting the newly married
husband of his friend Adelaide Kemble, and being the first guest to
arrive, he encountered in Mr. Sartoris a host as contentedly
undemonstrative as himself.  Bows passed, a seat by the fire was
indicated, he sat down, and the pair contemplated one another for ten
minutes in absolute silence, till the lady of the house came in, like the
prince in “The Sleeping Beauty,” though not by the same process, to break
the charm.  He gave up calling at a house where he was warmly
appreciated, because father, mother, daughter, bombarded him with
questions.  “I never came away without feeling sure that I had in some
way perjured myself.”

                [Picture: Kinglake in the early Seventies]

On his shyness waited swiftly ensuing boredom; if his neighbour at table
were garrulous or _banale_, his face at once betrayed conversational
prostration; a lady who often watched him used to say that his pulse
ought to be felt after the first course; and that if it showed languor he
should be moved to the side of some other partner.  “He had great charm,”
writes to me another old friend, “in a quiet winning way, but was ‘dark’
with rough and noisy people.”  So it came to pass that his manner was
threefold; icy and repellent with those who set his nerves on edge;
good-humoured, receptive, intermittently responsive in general and
congenial company; while, at ease with friends trusted and beloved, the
lines of the face became gracious, indulgent, affectionate, the _sourire
des yeux_ often inexpressibly winning and tender.  “Kinglake,” says Eliot
Warburton in his unpublished diary, “talked to us to-day about his
travels; pessimistic and cynical to the rest of the world, he is always
gentle and kind to us.”  To this dear friend he was ever faithful,
wearing to the day of his death an octagonal gold ring engraved “Eliot.
Jan: 1852.”  He would never play the _raconteur_ in general company, for
he had a great horror of repeating himself, and, latterly, of being
looked upon as a bore by younger men; but he loved to pour out
reminiscences of the past to an audience of one or two at most: “Let an
old man gather his recollections and glance at them under the right
angle, and his life is full of pantomime transformation scenes.”  The
chief characteristic of his wit was its unexpectedness; sometimes acrid,
sometimes humorous, his sayings came forth, like Topham Beauclerk’s in
Dr. Johnson’s day, like Talleyrand’s in our own, poignant without effort.
His calm, gentle voice, contrasted with his startling caustic utterance,
reminded people of Prosper Mérimée: terse epigram, felicitous _apropos_,
whimsical presentment of the topic under discussion, emitted in a low
tone, and without the slightest change of muscle:

    “All the charm of all the Muses
    Often flowering in a lonely word.” {130}

Questions he would suavely and often wittily parry or repel: to an
unhistorical lady asking if he remembered Madame Du Barry, he said, “my
memory is very imperfect as to the particulars of my life during the
reign of Lous XV. and the Regency; but I know a lady who has a teapot
which belonged, she says, to Madame Du Barry.”  Madame Novikoff, however,
records his discomfiture at the query of a certain Lady E—, who, when all
London was ringing with his first Crimean volumes, asked him if he were
not an admirer of Louis Napoleon.  “_Le pauvre Kinglake, décontenancé_,
_repondit tout bas intimidé comme un enfant qu’on met dates le coin_:
_Oui—non—pas précisément_.”

He had no knowledge of or liking for music.  Present once by some
mischance at a _matinée __musicale_, he was asked by the hostess what
kind of music he preferred.  His preference, he owned, was for the drum.
One thinks of the “Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” “_la trompette marine est un
instrument qui me plait, el qui est harmonieux_”; we are reminded, too,
of Dean Stanley, who, absolutely tone-deaf, and hurrying away whenever
music was performed, once from an adjoining room in his father’s house
heard Jenny Lind sing “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”  He went to her
shyly, and told her that she had given him an idea of what people mean by
music.  Once before, he said in all seriousness, the same feeling had
come over him, when before the palace at Vienna he had heard a tattoo
rendered by four hundred drummers.

                                * * * * *

Kinglake used to regret the disuse of duelling, as having impaired the
higher tone of good breeding current in his younger days, and even blamed
the Duke of Wellington for proscribing it in the army.  He had himself on
one occasion sent a cartel, and stood waiting for his adversary, like Sir
Richard Strachan at Walcheren, eight days on the French coast; but the
adversary never came.  Hayward once referred to him, as a counsellor, and
if necessary a second, a quarrel with Lord R—.  Lord R—’s friend called
on him, a Norfolk squire, “broad-faced and breathing port wine,” after
the fashion of uncle Phillips in “Pride and Prejudice,” who began in a
boisterous voice, “I am one of those, Mr. Kinglake, who believe R— to be
a gentleman.”  In his iciest tones and stoniest manner Kinglake answered:
“That, Sir, I am quite willing to assume.”  The effect, he used to say,
as he told and acted the scene, was magical; “I had frozen him sober, and
we settled everything without a fight.”  Of all his friends Hayward was
probably the closest; an association of discrepancies in character,
manner, temperament, not complementary, but opposed and hostile;
irreconcilable, one would say, but for the knowledge that in love and
friendship paradox reigns supreme.  Hayward was arrogant, overbearing,
loud, insistent, full of strange oaths and often unpardonably coarse;
“our dominant friend,” Kinglake called him; “odious” is the epithet I
have heard commonly bestowed upon him by less affectionate acquaintances.
Kinglake was reserved, shy, reticent, with the high breeding, grand
manner, quiet urbanity, _grata protervitas_, of a waning epoch;
restraint, concentration, tact of omission, dictating alike his silence
and his speech; his well-weighed words “crystallizing into epigrams as
they touched the air.” {133}  When Hayward’s last illness came upon him
in 1884, Kinglake nursed him tenderly; spending the morning in his
friend’s lodgings at 8, St. James’s Street, the house which Byron
occupied in his early London days; and bringing on the latest bulletin to
the club.  The patient rambled towards the end; “we ought to be getting
ready to catch the train that we may go to my sister’s at Lyme.” Kinglake
quieted his sick friend by an assurance that the servants, whom he would
not wish to hurry, were packing.  “On no account hurry the servants, but
still let us be off.”  The last thought which he articulated while dying
was, “I don’t exactly know what it is, but I feel it is something grand.”
“Hayward is dead,” Kinglake wrote to a common friend; “the devotion shown
to him by all sorts and conditions of men, and, what is better, of women,
was unbounded.  Gladstone found time to be with him, and to engage him in
a conversation of singular interest, of which he has made a memorandum.”

Another of Kinglake’s life-long familiars was Charles Skirrow, Taxing
Master in Chancery, with his accomplished wife, from whose memorable fish
dinners at Greenwich he was seldom absent, adapting himself no less
readily to their theatrical friends—the Bancrofts, Burnand, Toole,
Irving—than to the literary set with which he was more habitually at
home.  He was religiously loyal to his friends, speaking of them with
generous admiration, eagerly defending them when attacked.  He lauded
Butler Johnstone as the most gifted of the young men in the House of
Commons; would not allow Bernal Osborne to be called untrue; “he offends
people if you like, but he is never false or hollow.”  A clever
_sobriquet_ fathered on him, burlesquing the monosyllabic names of a
well-known diarist and official, he repelled indignantly.  “He is my
friend, and had I been guilty of the _jeu_, I should have broken two of
my commandments; that which forbids my joking at a friend’s expense, and
that which forbids my fashioning a play upon words.”  He entreated Madame
Novikoff to visit and cheer Charles Lever, dying at Trieste; deeply
lamented Sir H. Bulwer’s death: “I used to think his a beautiful
intellect, and he was wonderfully _simpatico_ to me.”  But he was shy of
condoling with bereaved mourners, believing words used on such occasions
to be utterly untrue.  He loved to include husband and wife in the same
meed of admiration, as in the case of Dean Stanley and Lady Augusta, or
of Sir Robert and Lady Emily Peel.  Peel, he said, has the _radiant_
quality not easy to describe; Lady Emily is always beauteous, bright,
attractive.  Lord Stanhope he praised as a historian, paying him the
equivocal compliment that his books were much better than his
conversation.  So, too, he qualified his admiration of Lady Ashburton,
dwelling on her beauty, silver voice, ready enthusiasm apt to disperse
itself by flying at too many objects.

He was wont to speak admiringly of Lord Acton, relating how, a Roman
Catholic, yet respecting enlightenment and devoted to books, he once set
up and edited a “Quarterly Review,” with a notion of reconciling the
Light and the Dark as well as he could; but the “Prince of Darkness, the
Pope,” interposed, and ordered him to stop the “Review.”  He was
compelled to obey; not, he told people, on any religious ground, but
because relations and others would have made his life a bore to him if he
had been contumacious against the Holy Father.

Kinglake was strongly attracted by W. E. Forster, a “rough diamond,”
spoken of at one time as a possible Prime Minister.  Beginning life, he
said, as a Quaker, with narrow opinions, his vigour of character and
brain-power shook them off.  Powerful, robust, and perfectly honest, yet
his honesty inflicted on him a doubleness of view which caused him to be
described as engaging his two hands in two different pursuits.  His
estimate of Sir R. Morier would have gladdened Jowett’s heart; he loved
him as a private friend; eulogized his public qualities; rejoiced over
his appointment as Ambassador at St. Petersburg, seeing in him a
diplomatist with not only a keen intellect and large views, but vibrating
with the warmth, animation, friendliness, that are charmingly
_un_-diplomatic.  Of Carlyle, his life-long, though not always congenial
intimate, he used to speak as having great graphic power, but being
essentially a humourist; a man who, with those he could trust, never
pretended to be in earnest, but used to roar with glorious laughter over
the fun of his own jeremiads; “so far from being a prophet he is a bad
Scotch joker, and knows himself to be a wind-bag.”  He blamed Froude’s
revelations of Carlyle in “The Reminiscences,” as injurious and
offensive.  Froude himself he often likened to Carlyle; the thoughts of
both, he said, ran in the same direction, but of the two, Froude was by
far the more intellectual man.

Staunch friend to the few, polite, though never effusive, to the many, he
also nourished strong antipathies.  The appearance in Madame Novikoff’s
rooms of a certain Scotch bishop invariably drove him out of them, “Peter
Paul, Bishop of Claridge’s,” he called him.  To Von Beust (the Austrian
Chancellor), who spoke English in a rapid half-intelligible falsetto, he
gave the name of _Mirliton_ (penny trumpet).  His allusions to Mirliton
and to the Bishop frequently mystified Madame Novikoff’s guests.  For he
loved to talk in cypher.  Canon Warburton, kindly searching on my behalf
his brother Eliot’s journals, tells me that he and Kinglake, meeting
almost daily, lived in a cryptic world of jokes, confidences,
colloquialisms, inexplicable to all but their two selves.

He cordially disliked “The Times” newspaper, alleging instances of the
unfairness with which its columns had been used to spite and injure
persons who had offended it, chuckling over Hayward’s compact
anathema,—“‘The Times,’ which as usual of late supplied its lack of
argument and proof by assumption, misrepresentation, and personality.”
He thought that its attacks upon himself had helped his popularity.  “One
of the main causes,” he said in 1875, “of the interest which people here
were good enough to take in my book was the fight between ‘The Times’ and
me.  In 1863 it raged, in 1867 it was renewed with great violence, and
now I suppose the flame kindles once more, though probably with
diminished strength.  In 1863 the storm of opinion generally waxed fierce
against me, but now, as I hear, ‘The Times’ is alone, journals of all
politics being loud in my praise.  But I never look at any comment on my
volumes till long afterwards, and I never in my life wrote to a
newspaper.”  Once, when Chenery, the editor, came to join the table at
the Athenæum where he and Mr. Cartwright were dining, Kinglake rose, and
removed to another part of the room.  “The Times” had inserted a
statement that Madame Novikoff was ordered to leave England, and he thus
publicly resented it.  “So unlike me,” he said, relating the story, “but
somehow a savagery as of youth came over me in my ancient days; it was
like being twenty years old again.”  It came out, however, that “our
indiscreet friend Froude” had written something which justified the
paragraph, and Kinglake sent his _amende_ to Chenery, with whom
ordinarily he was on most friendly terms.

He disliked Irishmen “in the lump,” saying that human nature is the same
everywhere except in Ireland.  Parnell he personally admired, though
hating Home Rule; and stigmatized as gross hypocrisy the desertion of him
by Liberals after the divorce trial.  He was wont to speak irreverently
of Lord Beaconsfield, whom he had known well at Lady Blessington’s in
early days.  He would have found himself in accord with Huxley, who used
to thank God, his friend Mr. Fiske tells us, that he had never bowed the
knee either to Louis Napoleon or Benjamin Disraeli.  He poured scorn on
the Treaty of Berlin.  Russia, he said, defeating the Turks in war, has
defeated Beaconsfield in diplomacy.  If Englishmen understood such things
they would see that the Congress was a comedy; anyone who will satisfy
himself as to what Russia was really anxious to obtain, and then look at
the Salisbury-Schouvaloff treaty, will see that, thanks to Beaconsfield’s
imbecility, Schouvaloff obtained one of the most signal diplomatic
triumphs that was ever won. {140}  A sound _entente_ between Russia and
England he thought both possible and desirable; but conceived it to be
rendered difficult by the want of steadiness and capacity which, for
international purposes, were the real faults of Lord Beaconsfield and
Lord Salisbury.  He repeated with much amusement the current anecdote of
Lord Beaconsfield’s conquest of Mrs. Gladstone.  Meeting her in society,
he was said to have inquired with tenderness after Mr. Gladstone’s
health, and then after receiving the loving wife’s report of her William,
to have rejoined in his most dulcet tones, “Ah! take care of him, for he
is very _very_ precious.”  He always attributed Dizzy’s popularity to the
feeling of Englishmen that he had “shown them sport,” an instinct, he
thought, supreme in all departments of the English mind.

Towards his old schoolfellow Gladstone he never felt quite cordially,
believing, rightly or wrongly, that the great statesman nourished enmity
towards himself.  He called him, as has been said, “a good man in the
worst sense of the term, conscientious with a diseased conscience.”  He
watched with much amusement, as illustrating the moral twist in
Gladstone’s temperament, the “Colliery explosion,” as it was called, when
Sir R. Collier, the Attorney-General, was appointed to a Puisne
Judgeship, which he held only for a day or two, in order to qualify him
for a seat on a new Court of Appeal; together with a very similar trick,
by which Ewelme Rectory, tenable only by an Oxonian, was given to a
Cambridge man.  The responsibility was divided between Gladstone and Lord
Hatherley the Chancellor, with the mutual idea apparently that each of
the two became thereby individually innocent.  But Sir F. Pollock, in his
amusing “Reminiscences,” recalls the amicable halving of a wicked word
between the Abbess of Andouillet and the Novice Margarita in “Tristram
Shandy.”  It answered in neither case.  “‘They do not understand us,’
cried Margarita.  ‘_But the Devil does_,’ said the Abbess of Andouillet.”
The Collier scandal narrowly escaped by two votes in the Lords,
twenty-seven in the Commons, a Parliamentary vote of censure, and gave
unquestionably a downward push to the Gladstone Administration.  Mr.
Gladstone, on the other hand, cordially admired Kinglake’s speeches,
saying that few of those he had heard in Parliament could bear so well as
his the test of publication.

To the great Prime Minister’s absolute fearlessness he did full justice,
as one of the finest features in his character; and loved to quote an
epigram by Lord Houghton, to whom Gladstone had complained in a moment of
weariness that he led the life of a dog.  “Yes,” said Houghton, “but of a
St. Bernard dog, ever busied in saving life.”  He loved to contrast the
twofold biographical paradox in the careers of the two famous rivals,
Gladstone and Disraeli; the dreaming Tory mystic, incarnation of Oxford
exclusiveness and Puseyite reserve, passing into the Radical iconoclast;
the Jew clerk in a city lawyer’s office, “bad specimen of an inferior
dandy,” coming to rule the proudest aristocracy and lead the most
fastidious assembly in the world.

He was not above broad farce when the fancy seized him.  At the time when
a certain kind of nonsense verse was popular, he, with Sir Noel Paton and
others, added not a few facetious sonnets to Edward Lear’s book, which
lay on Madame Novikoff’s table.  His authorship is betrayed by the
introduction of familiar Somersetshire names, Taunton, Wellington, Curry
Rivel, Creech, Trull, Wilton:

    “There was a young lady of Wilton,
       Who read all the poems of Milton:
    And, when she had done,
    She said, ‘What bad fun!’
       This prosaic young lady of Wilton.”

There were many more, but this will perhaps suffice; _ex ungue leonem_.
They were addressed to the “Fair Lady of Claridge’s,” Madame Novikoff’s
hotel when in London, and were signed “Peter Paul, Bishop of Claridge’s.”

    “There is a fair lady at Claridge’s,
    Whose smile is more charming to me,
    Than the rapture of ninety-nine marriages
       Could possibly, possibly, be;—”

is the final dedicatory stanza.  It is the gracious fooling of a
philosopher who understood his company.  “There are folks,” says Mr.
Counsellor Pleydell, “before whom a man should take care how he plays the
fool, because they have either too much malice or too little wit.”
Kinglake knew his associates, and was not ashamed _desipere in loco_, to
frolic in their presence.

                                * * * * *

One point there was on which he never touched himself or suffered others
to interrogate him, his conception of and attitude towards the Unseen.
He wore his religion as Sir William Gull wore the fur of his coat,
_inside_.  Outwardly he died as he had lived, a Stoic; that on the most
personal and sacred of all topics he should consult the Silences was in
keeping with his idiosyncrasy.  Another famous man, questioned as to his
religious creed, made answer that he believed what all wise men believe.
And what do all wise men believe?  “That all wise men keep to
themselves?”




INDEX


Abdu-l-Medjid, 66.

Aberdeen, Lord, 70.

Acton, Lord, 135.

Acton, Mrs., 7.

Adams, J. Quincy, 66.

Airey, General, 63, 72.

Alma, 39, 48, 59, 64, 73.

Ampère, M., 102.

Anastasius, 34.

Ancelot, Mme., 99.

Arnold, Matthew, 88.

Ashburton, Lady, 135.

Ashburton, Lord, 33.

Athanasian Creed, 104.

                                * * * * *

Bachaumont, M., 87.

Balaclava, 74–77.

Bazancourt, Baron de, 48.

Beaconsfield.  _See_ Disraeli.

Beauclerk, T., 129.

Beaufort, Duke of, 39.

Bedford, Duke of, 127.

Berlin Congress, 139, etc.

Beust, Count, 96, 137.

Bismarck, 105, 116–118, 140, 141.

Blackwood, 46, 49, 52, 127.

Blaygon Hills, 25.

Boissy, Marquis de, 18.

Bosquet, General, 74, 76.

Boyle, Dean, 3.

Bridgewater, 40, 43, 45.

Bright, John, 68.

Brocas Clump, 22.

Brookfield, Mrs., 11, 18, 126, 127.

Browning, R., 15.

Buller, Charles, 11.

Bulwer-Lytton, 19.

Bulwer, Sir H., 135.

Bunbury, Sir H., 111, 112.

Burghersh, Lord, 65.

Burnaby, Captain, 78.

Burton.  _See_ Carrigaholt.

Bury, Lord, 118.

Byron, 11, 15, 22, 29.

                                * * * * *

Cabinet, Sleeping, 61.

Cagliari, 41.

Campbell, Colin, 62, 72.

Cambridge, 10, 13.

Canning, Lady, 66.

Canning, Sir S.  _See_ Stratford.

Canrobert, 71, 78, 79.

“Caradoc,” 60.

Carlisle, Lord, 2.

Carlyle, 15, 33, 63, 136–137.

Carrigaholt, 21, 38.

Cartwright, Mr., 138.

Cathcart, General, 60, 76, 77.

Catherine II., 121.

Charles et George, 41.

Chatham, Lady, 6.

Chenery, Mr., 98, 111, 138–139.

Chesterfield, Lord, 58.

Chiffney, 24, 25.

Chorley, Mr., 17.

Clarendon, Lord, 50, 69.

Claridge’s Hotel, 100, 137, 146.

Clarke, Major, 64.

Codrington, General, 63, 74.

Coleridge, G., 9.

Collier, Sir R., 144.

“Corner,” the, 112, 126.

Cornwall, Barry.  _See_ Procter.

“Cosmo,” the, 115.

Cour, M. de la, 69.

Crosse, Mrs., 3, 19.

Crimea, 39, 48, 54, 57, etc.

Crump, 51.

Curzon, 2.

                                * * * * *

Daubeny, Col., 78.

D’Aurelle, 63.

Delane, 70.

Dilke, Sir Charles, 114.

Dilke, Lady, 87.

Disraeli, B., 41, 42, 121, 139, 140.

Dollinger, Dr., 104.

Doyle, Sir F., 22.

Dream, 125.

Du Barry, Mme., 130.

Duff, Sir M. E. Grant, 4, 44.

                                * * * * *

Ellenborough, Lord, 50.

Ellis, Mrs., 35.

Eothen, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20–32, 38, 41, 58,
85–88, 127.

Estcott, Mr., 4.

Etchingham Letters, 130.

Eton, 10, 21, 28.

Everett, Mr., 25–26.

                                * * * * *

Fane, Violet, 102.

Ffoulkes, Rev. E. S., 104.

“Filioque,” 104.

Fiske, Mr., 139.

Fitzgerald, E., 54.

Flowers, Jemmy, 22.

Forster, W. E., 124, 136.

Froude, J. A., 95, 99, 102, 126, 137.

                                * * * * *

Gallifet, M., 117.

Gambetta, 118.

Gatty, Dr., 10.

Gerontaion, 101.

Gladstone, W. E., 10, 70, 94, 95, 99, 107, 115, 124, 143–145.

Gladstone, Mrs., 143.

Gortschakoff, 57, 97, 105–108, 122.

Grant, Miss, 121.

Gregory, Sir W., 112, 126.

Gregory, Lady, 3, 38, 111, 126, 133.

Greville Memoirs, 60.

Grey, Earl, 93, 108.

Grundy, Mrs., 110.

Guiccioli, Mme., 18.

Gull, Sir W., 147.

                                * * * * *

Hallam, A., 11.

Hamley, Sir E., 118.

Hampden, J., 46.

Harrington, Lord, 18.

Harrison, F., 114.

Harrington, Lord, 124.

Hatherley, Lord, 144.

Hay, Mr., 66.

Hayward, Abraham, 3, 19, 33, 95, 100, 102, 112, 124, 126, 131–133.

Herbert, Auberon, 115.

Holland, Lady, 99.

Homer, 7, 10, 24, 27, 61.

Hood, Thomas, 17.

Hook, Theodore, 112.

Hoseason, 10.

Houghton, Lord, 3, 11, 13, 16, 17, 34–36, 99, 145.

Howard, Mrs., 82.

Huxley, Professor, 139.

                                * * * * *

Inglis, Sir R., 23–24.

Inkerman, 77–79.

Irby, Miss, 98.

                                * * * * *

Jelf, W. E., 26.

Johnstone, Butler, 134.

Jowett, B., 125, 136.

                                * * * * *

Karabelnaya, 72, 85.

Keate, Dr., 10, 21, 22.

Kemble, Adelaide, 128.

Kemble, J. M., 11, 13.

Kenyon, J., 39.

Kinglake, A. W., parentage and birth, 5; school at Ottery, 9; Eton, 10;
Cambridge, 11–13; tour in the East, 14; called to the Bar, 17; further
travel, 18; shyness in society, 18; manners and appearance, 19; “Eothen”
published, 20; its popularity, 26–32; writes in “Quarterly Review,” 33;
accompanies Lord Raglan to the Crimea, 39; enters Parliament for
Bridgewater, 40; first failure in the House, and subsequent speeches, 41,
etc.; unseated for bribery, 45; publishes the first two volumes of
“Invasion of the Crimea,” 48; further volumes, 55; the book discussed,
56–86; and compared with “Eothen,” 86–89; his first acquaintance with
Madame Novikoff, his tribute to her brother, M. Kiréeff, 91; her history,
character, literary work, 92–95, 99; Kinglake’s review of her book
“Russia and England,” 95–98; his letters to her when abroad, 100, etc.;
his later years, friends, daily habits, 111; the Athenæum “Corner,” 112;
his comment on Sir Charles Dilke’s Civil List motion, 114; on the French
character, 116; on Gortschakoff’s circular, 122; his singular dream, 125;
increasing deafness, 126; sickness and death, 127; his traits of manner,
temperament, speech, as reported by surviving friends, 127, etc.;
attendance on Hayward’s last hours, 133; antipathies and likings, 137,
etc.; opinion of Gladstone and Disraeli, 139, etc.; reserve as to his own
religious feelings, 147.

Kinglake, Captain, 127.

Kinglake, Dr. Hamilton, 5, 6, 7, 9, 126–127.

Kinglake, Mr. Robert, 5, 6.

Kinglake, Mr. William, 5, 6.

Kinglake, Mrs. Hamilton, 4, 126–127.

Kinglake, Mrs. William (the elder), 6, 8.

Kinglake, Mr. Serjeant, 5, 6.

Kinglake, Mrs. Serjeant, 48.

Kinglake, Rev. W. C., 5, 6.

Kiréeff, Alexander, 92, 96.

Kiréeff, Nicholas, 90.

Knox, Alexander, 7.

Korniloff, 73, 120.

                                * * * * *

Lafayette, Mme. de, 46.

“Lama, The,” 16.

Lamb, Charles, 34.

Landseer, Edwin, 17.

Lane-Poole, Mr., 66, 67.

Laveleye, M., 98.

Layard, A. H., 49.

Lear, Edward, 146.

Le Brun, Mme., 99.

Lecky, Mr., 126.

Lever, Charles, 134.

Lewis, Sir G. Cornewall, 87.

Liddon, Canon, 104.

Lieven, Princess, 93, 108.

Lind, Jenny, 13.

Lockhart, J. G., 33.

Lucas, Mr., 49.

Lucan, Lord, 72, 76.

Lyons, Lord, 114.

                                * * * * *

Macaulay, 13, 33, 48, 51.

MacCarthy, 34.

Marie of Anjou, 23.

Marlen Bells, 13, 25.

Martineau, Miss, 2.

Massey, Mr., 112.

Maurice, F. D., 11.

Menschikoff, Prince, 67–68.

Mérimée, Prosper, 129.

Methley, 10, 14, 21.

Mexborough, Lord, 10, 126.

Miller, Captain, 64.

Miller, Larrey, 21–22.

Milman, Dean, 33.

“Minden Yell,” 62, 78.

Mirliton, 137.

Monckton Milnes.  _See_ Houghton.

Montalembert, M. de, 44.

Morier, Sir Robert, 99, 102, 136.

“Most, Mr.,” 45.

Motley, Mr., 17.

Murray, John, 20.

Murray, Messrs., 97.

                                * * * * *

Napier, Macvey, 33.

Napoleon I., 34–35, 54, 69, 82, 117.

Napoleon, Louis, 41, 43, 71, 81, etc., 117, 119, 130.

Napoleon, Prince, 74.

Newcastle, Duke of, 48, 61, 70, 72.

Nicholas, Czar, 62, 68, 79–81, 93, 122.

Nolan, Captain, 62.

Norton, Mrs., 19.

“Nouvelle Revue,” 4, 97.

Novikoff, Mme., 4, 90–110, 118–119, 126–127, 130, 134, 137–138, 146.

Nugent, Lord, 2.

Nurses, The Lady, 85.

                                * * * * *

Okes, Dr., 21–22.

Oliphant, L., 46, 112.

Ollivier, Mr., 20.

Osborne, Bernal, 18, 99, 134.

Ostend, 122.

Ottery St. Mary, 9.

Ourusoff, Prince, 119.

“Owl, The,” 46–47.

                                * * * * *

Padwick, Henry, 42.

“Pall Mall Gazette,” 122.

Palmerston, Lord, 41, 70.

Panmure, Lord, 60, 70.

Parnell, C. S., 139.

Paton, Sir N., 146.

Peel, Lady E., 135.

Peel, Sir R. (senior), 23.

Peel, Sir R. (junior), 41, 102, 135.

Pelissier, Marshal, 71–72.

Pennefather, General, 73, 77.

Pere Enfantin, 23.

Pharisees, the, 103.

Platonic, 38, 120.

Pleydell, Counsellor, 146.

Poitier, M., 38.

Pollington, Lord, 10, 14, 21.

Pollock, Sir F., 113, 145.

Poole, Mrs., 35.

Portraits, 127.

Praed, Mackworth, 10.

Prince Consort, 60.

Procter, Adelaide, 17.

Procter, B. W., 15, 16, 23.

Procter, Mrs., 15, 16, 17, 21.

                                * * * * *

Quaire, Mme. de, 126.

                                * * * * *

Raglan, Lord, 39, 40, 59, etc.

Raglan, Lady, 40, 58.

Rawlinson, Sir H., 33, 112.

Récamier, Mme., 99.

Reeve, H., 50.

Robespierre, 46.

Robinson, Crabb, 16.

Rogers, Thorold, 104.

Ruskin, J., 88.

                                * * * * *

Salisbury, Lord, 97, 143.

Salvation Army, 14.

Sartoris, Mr., 128.

Savile, Mr., 10.

Scarlett, General, 74–75.

Schwetschke, G., 140.

Schouvaloff, Count, 140.

Sidmouth, 110.

Simpson, Mrs., 19, 53, 82.

Skene, Miss, 1.

Skepper, Anne, 15.

Skirrow, Ch., 134.

Skobeleff, General, 98, 99, 120.

Smith, Dr. Wm., 95.

Smith, Sydney, 7, 8.

Spedding, J., 11.

Spring Rice, Hon. S., 11.

St. Arnaud, 18, 65, 116.

St. Simon, 23.

Stanhope, Lady H., 6.

Stanhope, Lord, 135.

Stanley, Dean, 2, 65, 104, 131, 135.

Stanley, Lady A., 135.

Stansfeld, Rt. Hon. J., 102.

Sterling, J., 11.

Steyne, Lord, 103.

Stirling, Sir W., 112.

Storks, Mr., 112.

Stratford de Redcliffe, Lord, 61, 62, 65, etc., 101, 122.

Strachan, Sir R., 131.

Strzelecki, Count, 112.

Swift, Dean, 100.

                                * * * * *

Talleyrand, 129.

Tangier, 8.

Taunton, 4, 5, 8, 9, 13.

Tennyson, 11, 12, 16, 22, 58, 69.

Thackeray, 11, 7, 15, 33.

Thiers, M., 113.

Thompson, Dr., 11.

Ticknor, G., 112.

“Timbuctoo,” 12.

“Times, The,” 49, 98, 99, 137, 138.

Todleben, 49, 73, 78–79, 119, 123.

Tower, Tom, 86.

Trench, R. C., 11.

Trevelyan, Sir G., 47.

“Tristram Shandy,” 145.

Twisleton, E., 112.

Tyndall, Professor, 102.

Tynte, Colonel, 40.

                                * * * * *

“Vanity Fair,” 127.

Vathek, 34.

Venables, G., 17, 33, 112.

Verg, Count de, 17.

Victoria, Queen, 80, 84, 121.

Villiers, Charles, 99.

Voltaire, 84.

                                * * * * *

Waddy, Colonel, 78.

Wales, Prince of (Regent), 24–25.

Wales, Prince of (late), 120.

Warburton, Canon, 3, 137.

Warburton, Eliot, 2, 14, 17, 20, 21, 34–35, 129, 137.

Waverley, 58.

Wellington, Duke of, 80, 108, 131.

Westbrook, Colonel, 42.

Wilberforce, Samuel, 33.

Wolff, Drummond, 112.

Woodforde, Dr., 6.

Woodforde, Mary, 6.

Wordsworth, W., 11, 34, 56.

Wordsworth, Charles, 12.

Wynter, Dr., 26.

                                * * * * *

Yea, Lacy, 60, 63.

Yonge, Miss, 1.

                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]

               CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
                   TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

                                * * * * *




ADVERTISEMENTS


            _On Hand-made Paper_, _small_ 8_vo_, 4_s._ _net_.



EOTHEN


                         BY ALEXANDER W. KINGLAKE

                     REPRINTED FROM THE FIRST EDITION

                           WITH AN INTRODUCTION

                         BY THE REV. W. TUCKWELL

                _The original Illustrations_, _and a Map_.

“The Text is an accurate reprint of the first edition of 1844, and
Kinglake’s subsequent alterations are omitted and his omissions restored.
Even the singularly erratic and illogical punctuation is rigidly
preserved.  Thus in the words of the editor, the Rev. W. Tuckwell, ‘we
are brought nearer to the author, whom we love, by the intermediate
transference into book form of his creations, fresh from his devising and
correcting pen, and reflecting his joy in their production.’”—_Athenæum_.

“The present one appeals to a different class of reader from those who
like the modern _format_ with fresh illustrations, inasmuch as it is an
exact reprint, with title-page, of the first edition, preserving ‘the
eccentric punctuation of an ungrammatical Etonian in pre-local
examination days,’ and the original form of a good many passages which
were afterwards omitted or altered.  The value of the reprint is much
enhanced by an excellent introduction from the pen of the Rev. W.
Tuckwell, who remembers the sensation ‘Eothen’ caused at Oxford—even
among the scouts—on its first appearance.”—_Literature_.

“Alone of the famous books on Oriental sightseeing, it is again and again
reproduced, and ‘is devoured _senibus puerisque_ with unflagging
freshness of enjoyment.’”—_Speaker_.

                      LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS,
                       YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN.



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                       YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN.

                                * * * * *




FOOTNOTES


{1}  When “Heartsease” first appeared, Percy Fotheringham was believed to
be a portrait; but the accomplished authoress in a letter written not
long before her death told me that the character was wholly imaginary.

{6}  Pedigrees are perplexing unless tabulated; so here is Kinglake’s
genealogical tree.

Kinglakes of Saltmoor had sons ROBERT KINGLAKE and WILLIAM KINGLAKE.

ROBERT KINGLAKE had sons SERJEANT JOHN KINGLAKE and Rev. W. C. KINGLAKE.

Woodfordes of Castle Cary had a daughter MARY WOODFORDE.

WILLIAM KINGLAKE married MARY WOODFORDE and had sons A. W. KINGLAKE
(“Eothen”) and Dr. HAMILTON KINGLAKE.

{12a}  “Eothen,” p. 33.  Reading “Timbuctoo” to-day one is amazed it
should have gained the prize.  Two short passages adumbrate the coming
Tennyson, the rest is mystic nonsense.  “What do you think of Tennyson’s
prize poem?” writes Charles Wordsworth to his brother Christopher.  “Had
it been sent up at Oxford, the author would have had a better chance of
spending a few months at a lunatic asylum than of obtaining the Prize.”
A current Cambridge story at the time explained the selection.  There
were three examiners, the Vice-Chancellor, a man of arbitrary temper,
with whom his juniors hesitated to disagree; a classical professor
unversed in English Literature; a mathematical professor indifferent to
all literature.  The letter _g_ was to signify approval, the letter _b_
to brand it with rejection.  Tennyson’s manuscript came from the
Vice-Chancellor scored all over with _g_’s.  The classical professor
failed to see its merit, but bowed to the Vice-Chancellor, and added his
_g_.  The mathematical professor could not admire, but since both his
colleagues ordained it, good it must be, and his _g_ made the award
unanimous.  The three met soon after, and the Vice-Chancellor, in his
blatant way, attacked the other two for admiring a trashy poem.  “Why,”
they remonstrated, “you covered it with _g_’s yourself.”  “_G_’s,” said
he, “they were _q_’s for queries; I could not understand a line of it.”

{12b}  “Enoch Arden,” p. 34.

{13}  “Eothen,” p. 169.  Reprint by Bell and Sons, 1898.

{14a}  “Eothen,” p. 17.

{14b}  His deferential regard for army rank was like that of Johnson for
bishops.  Great was his indignation when the “grotesque Salvation Army,”
as he called it, adopted military nomenclature.  “I would let those
ragamuffins call themselves saints, angels, prophets, cherubim, Olympian
gods and goddesses if they like; but their pretension in taking the rank
of officers in the army is to me beyond measure repulsive.”

{14c}  “Eothen,” p. 190 in first edition.  It was struck out in the
fourth edition.

{22}  “Eothen,” p. 18.  Reprint by Bell and Sons, 1898.

{28}  He is very fond of this word; it occurs eleven times.

{37}  “Quarterly Review,” December, 1844.

{38a}  “Eothen,” p. 46.

{38b}  Poitier’s “Vaudeville.”

{40}  One characteristic anecdote he omits.  Two French officers were
attached to our headquarters; and the staff were partly embarrassed and
partly amused by Lord Raglan’s inveterate habit, due to old Peninsular
associations, of calling the enemy “the French” in the presence of our
foreign guests.

{47}  Some of us can recall the lines in which Sir G. Trevelyan
commemorated “The Owl’s” nocturnal flights:

    “When at sunset, chill and dark,
    Sunset thins the swarming park,
    Bearing home his social gleaning—
    Jests and riddles fraught with meaning,
    Scandals, anecdotes, reports,—
    Seeks The Owl a maze of courts
    Which, with aspect towards the west,
       Fringe the street of Sainted James,
    Where a warm, secluded nest
       As his sole domain he claims;
    From his wing a feather draws,
       Shapes for use a dainty nib,
       Pens his parody or squib;
    Combs his down and trims his claws,
    And repairs where windows bright
    Flood the sleepless Square with light.”

{60} Greville, vii. 223, quotes from a letter written after Inkerman to
the Prince Consort by Colonel Steele, saying “that he had no idea how
great a mind Raglan really had, but that he now saw it, for in the midst
of distresses and difficulties of every kind in which the army was
involved, he was perfectly serene and undisturbed.”

{63}  “Go quietly” might have been his motto: even on horseback he seemed
never to be in a hurry.  Airey used to come in from their rides round the
outposts shuddering with cold, and complaining that the Chief would never
move his horse out of a walk.  “I daresay,” said Carlyle, “Lord Raglan
will rise quite quietly at the last trump, and remain entirely composed
during the whole day, and show the most perfect civility to both
parties.”

{64}  The first death! out of how many he nowhere reckons: he shrinks
from estimates of carnage, and we thank him for it.  But an accomplished
naturalist tells me that the vulture, a bird unknown in the Crimea before
hostilities began, swarmed there after the Alma fight, and remained till
the war was over, disappearing meanwhile from the whole North African
littoral.

{66}  “D—n your eyes!” he said once, in a moment of irritation, to his
_attaché_, Mr. Hay.  “D—n your Excellency’s eyes!” was the answer,
delivered with deep respect but with sufficient emphasis.  Dismissed on
the spot, the candid _attaché_ went in great anger to pack up, but was
followed after a time by Lady Canning, habitual peacemaker in the
household, who besought him if not to apologize at least to bid his Chief
good-bye.  After much persuasion he consented.  “Hardly had he entered
the room when Sir Stratford had him by the hand.  ‘My dear Hay, this will
never do; what a devil of a temper you have!’  The two were firmer
friends than ever after this” (LANE POOLE’S _Life of Lord Stratford_,
chapter xiii.).

{68}  The story of an old quarrel between Sir Stratford Canning and the
then Grand Duke Nicholas at St. Petersburg in 1825 is disproved by
Canning’s own statement.  The two met once only in their lives, at a
purely formal reception at Paris in 1814.

{82}  _La Femme_ was a “Miss” or “Mrs.” Howard.  She followed Louis
Napoleon to France in 1848, and lived openly with him as his mistress.
In the once famous “Letters of an Englishman” we are told how shortly
after the December massacre the _élite_ of English visitors in Paris were
not ashamed to dine at her house in the President’s company: and in 1860,
Mrs. Simpson, in France with her father, Nassau Senior, found her,
decorated with the title of Madame de Beauregard, inhabiting La Celle,
near Versailles, once the abode of Madame de Pompadour, “with the
national flag flying over it, to the great scandal of the neighbourhood.”

{87}  Bachaumont’s criticism of Latour.  Lady Dilke’s “French Painters,”
p. 165.

{96}  Here is one of the stanzas:

    “L’Autriche—dit-on—et la Russie
    Se brouillent pour la Turquie.
    Dès aujourd’hui il n’en est plus question.
    En invitant une femme charmante,
    Le Turc—et je l’en complimente—
    Est devenu pour nous un trait d’union.”

{111}  “Blackwood’s Magazine,” December, 1895, p. 802.

{130}  I inserted this quotation before reading the “Etchingham Letters.”
Sir Richard would wish me to erase it as hackneyed; but it applies to
Kinglake’s talk as accurately as to Virgil’s writing, and I refuse to be
defrauded of it.

{133}  This delightful phrase is Lady Gregory’s.  One would wish, like
Lord Houghton, though suppressing his presumptuous rider, to have been
its author.

{140}  Of course Kinglake was not alone in this opinion.  It was voiced
in a delightful _jeu d’esprit_, now forgotten, which it is worth while to
reproduce:

                            “THE BERLIN CONGRESS.

    “The following Latin poem, from the pen of the well-known German
    poet, Gustave Schwetschke, was distributed by Prince Bismarck’s
    special request amongst the Plenipotentiaries immediately after the
    last sitting on Saturday:

    “‘GAUDEAMUS CONGRESSIBILE.

    “‘Gaudeamus igitur
       Socii congressus,
    Post dolores bellicosos,
    Post labores gloriosos,
       Nobis fit decessus.

    “‘Ubi sunt, qui ante nos
       Quondam consedere,
    Viennenses, Parisienses
    Tot per annos, tot per menses?
       Frustra decidere.

    “‘Mundus heu! vult decipi,
       Sed non decipiatur,
    Non plus ultra inter gentes
    Litigantes et frementes
       Manus conferatur.

    ‘Vivat Pax! et comitent
       Dii nunc congressum,
    Ceu Deus ex machinâ
    Ipsa venit Cypria
       Roborans successum.

    “‘Pereat discordia!
       Vincat semper litem
    Proxenetae probitas, {141}
    Fides, spes, et charitas,
       Gaudeamus item!

                                                                   “G. S.”

                                * * * * *

                             “THE OTHER VERSION.

                       (From the “Pall Mall Gazette.”)

    “A correspondent informs us that the version given in ‘The Standard’
    of yesterday of the congratulatory ode (‘Gaudeamus igitur,’ etc.)
    addressed to the Congress by ‘the well-known German poet Gustave
    Schwetschke,’ and ‘distributed by Prince Bismarck’s request among the
    Plenipotentiaries,’ is incorrect.  The true version, we are assured,
    is as follows:

    “‘Rideamus igitur,
       Socii Congressus;
    Post dolores bellicosos,
    Post labores bumptiosos,
       Fit mirandus messus.

    “Ubi sunt qui apud nos
       Causas litigâre,
    Moldo-Wallachæ frementes,
    Græculi esurientes?
       Heu! absquatulâre.

    “‘Ubi sunt provinciæ
       Quas est laus pacâsse?
    Totæ, totæ, sunt partitæ:
    Has tulerunt Muscovitæ,
       Illas Count Andrassy.

    “‘Et quid est quod Angliæ
       Dedit hic Congressus?
    Jus pro aliis pugnandi,
    Mortuum vivificandi—
       Splendidi successus!

    “‘Vult Joannes decipi
       Et bamboosulatur.
    Io Beacche!  Quæ majestas!
    Ostreæ reportans testas
       Domum gloriatur!’”

    “This version, which from internal evidence will be seen to be the
    true one, may be roughly Englished thus:

    “Let us have our hearty laugh,
       Greatest of Congresses!
    After days and weeks pugnacious,
    After labours ostentatious,
       See how big the mess is!

    “‘Where are those who at our bar
       Their demands have stated:
    Robbed Roumanians rampaging,
    Greeklings with earth-hunger raging?
       Where?  Absquatulated!

    “‘Where the lands we’ve pacified,
       With their rebel masses?
    All are gone; yes, all up-gobbled:
    These the Muscovite has nobbled,
       Those are Count Andrassy’s.

    “‘And what does England carry off
       To add to her possessions?
    The right to wage another’s strife,
    The right to raise the dead to life—
       Glorious concessions!

    “‘Well, let John Bull bamboozled be
       If he’s so fond of sells!
    Io Beacche!  Hark the cheering!
    See him home in triumph bearing
       _Both_ {143} the oyster shells!’”

{141} “Der ehrlich Miikler.”

{143} Peace and Honour.




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