“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.”