January 10, 1891. His Life.
Alexander William Kinglake was born in 1812, the son of a country
gentleman--Mr. W. Kinglake, of Wilton House, Taunton--and received a
country gentleman's education at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge.
From college he went to Lincoln's Inn, and in 1837 was called to the
Chancery Bar, where he practised with fair but not eminent success. In
1844 he published _Eothen_, and having startled the town, quietly
resumed his legal work and seemed willing to forget the achievement.
Ten years later he accompanied his friend, Lord Raglan, to the Crimea.
He retired from the Bar in 1856, and entered Parliament next year as
member for Bridgwater. Re-elected in 1868, he was unseated on petition
in 1869, and thenceforward gave himself up to the work of his life. He
had consented, after Lord Raglan's death, to write a history of the
Invasion of the Crimea. The two first volumes appeared in 1863; the
last was published but two years before he succumbed, in the first
days of 1891, to a slow incurable disease. In all, the task had
occupied thirty years. Long before these years ran out, the world had
learnt to regard the Crimean struggle in something like its true
perspective; but over Kinglake's mind it continued to loom in all its
original proportions. To adapt a phrase of M. Jules Lemaître's, "_le
monde a changé en trente ans: lui ne bouge; il ne lève plus de dessus
son papier à copie sa face congestionné_." And yet Kinglake was no
cloistered scribe. Before his last illness he dined out frequently,
and was placed by many among the first half-a-dozen talkers in London.
His conversation, though delicate and finished, brimmed full of
interest in life and affairs: but let him enter his study, and its
walls became a hedge. Without, the world was moving: within, it was
always 1854, until by slow toiling it turned into 1855.
Style.
His style is hard, elaborate, polished to brilliance. Its difficult
labor recalls Thucydides. In effect it charms at first by its accuracy
and vividness: but with continuous perusal it begins to weigh upon
the reader, who feels the strain, the unsparing effort that this
glittering fabric must have cost the builder, and at length ceases to
sympathize with the story and begins to sympathize with the author.
Kinglake started by disclaiming "composition." "My narrative," he
says, in the famous preface to _Eothen_, "conveys not those
impressions which _ought to have been_ produced upon any
well-constituted mind, but those which were really and truly received,
at the time of his rambles, by a headstrong and not very amiable
traveller.... As I have felt, so I have written."
"_Eothen_."
For all this, page after page of _Eothen_ gives evidence of deliberate
calculation of effect. That book is at once curiously like and
curiously unlike Borrows' _Bible in Spain_. The two belong to the same
period and, in a sense, to the same fashion. Each combines a
tantalizing personal charm with a strong, almost fierce, coloring of
circumstance. The central figure in each is unmistakably an
Englishman, and quite as unmistakably a singular Englishman. Each
bears witness to a fine eye for theatrical arrangement. But whereas
Borrow stood for ever fortified by his wayward nature and atrocious
English against the temptation of writing as he ought, Kinglake
commenced author with a respect for "composition," ingrained perhaps
by his Public School and University training. Borrow arrays his page
by instinct, Kinglake by study. His irony (as in the interview with
the Pasha) is almost too elaborate; his artistic judgment (as in the
Plague chapter) almost too sure; the whole book almost too clever. The
performance was wonderful; the promise a trifle dangerous.