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.