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.”