“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.