A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake

R >> Rev. W. Tuckwell >> Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake



Transcribed from the 1902 Edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




A. W. KINGLAKE--A BIOGRAPHICAL AND LITERARY STUDY




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 Athenaeum
"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.



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 bakshish 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 coaeval 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 Athenaeum 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. {2} 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
'Poetae Graeci,' 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"; {3} 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," {4}


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. {5}

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; {6} longed with all his
soul for the excitement and stir of soldiership, from which his
shortsightedness debarred him; {7} 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. {8} 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."


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
pounds 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 affiched 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 coaeval 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."



CHAPTER II--"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 pounds 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
pounds 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." {9} 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 chere
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. Pere 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

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.