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diff --git a/539-0.txt b/539-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..813805f --- /dev/null +++ b/539-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,4213 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, A. W. Kinglake, by W. Tuckwell + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +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 + +Character set encoding: UTF-8 + + +***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. + + + +RECENT PUBLICATIONS BY MESSRS. BELL. + + + _Just published_. + + +THE LIFE OF NAPOLEON I. + + +Including new materials from the British Official Records, by JOHN +HOLLAND ROSE, M.A., late Scholar of Christ’s College, Cambridge, author +of “The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era,” and “A Century of Continental +History.” With many maps and plans and numerous illustrations from +contemporary paintings, rare prints and engravings, medals, etc.; also a +facsimile from a letter of Napoleon. In two volumes, large post 8vo, +handsomely bound, 18_s._ net. + + +MEMOIRS AND CORRESPONDENCE OF COVENTRY PATMORE. + + +Compiled and Edited by BASIL CHAMPNEYS. With numerous Photogravure +Portraits and other Illustrations in Collotype, etc. Two vols., demy +8vo, 32_s._ net. + +—A CHEAPER EDITION of the above work, with two Portraits. Two vols., +demy 8vo, 15_s._ + + +THE WORKS OF C. S. CALVERLEY. + + +With a Memoir by SIR WALTER J. SENDALL, G.C.M.G., Governor of British +Guiana, and Portrait. Complete in one volume. _Second Impression_, +crown 8vo, 6_s._ net. + + LIBRARY EDITION. + +With binding designed by GLEESON WHITE. In four vols., crown 8vo, 5_s._ +each. + +Vol. I. Literary Remains. With a Memoir by SIR WALTER J. SENDALL, +K.C.M.G., and Portrait. + +Vol. II. Verses and Fly-Leaves. + +Vol. III. Translations into English and Latin. + +Vol. IV. Theocritus Translated into English Verse. + + +HANDBOOKS TO THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS. + + +Crown 8vo, 3_s._ 6_d._ net each. + +ETON. + +By A. CLUTTON-BROCK. With 46 Illustrations. + +CHARTERHOUSE. + +By A. H. TOD, M.A., Assistant Master at Charterhouse. With 58 +Illustrations. + +RUGBY. + +By H. C. BRADBY, B.A., Assistant Master at Rugby School. With 44 +Illustrations. + +WINCHESTER. + +By R. TOWNSEND WARNER, New College, Oxford, late Scholar of Winchester +College. With 46 Illustrations. + +HARROW. + +By J. FISCHER WILLIAMS, M.A., late Fellow of New College, Oxford. With +48 Illustrations. + +WESTMINSTER. + +By REGINALD AIRY, B.A., Trinity College, Cambridge. With 47 +Illustrations. + + * * * * * + + LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS, + + 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. + + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A. W. KINGLAKE*** + + +******* This file should be named 539-0.txt or 539-0.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/5/3/539 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, +set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to +copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to +protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. 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