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Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake

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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. {15}

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 Moliere 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
eloquence 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.



CHAPTER IV--"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 mean'd but I thow't a 'ad summut to saay,
And I thowt a said wot a owt to 'a said an' I comed awaay."


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. {16} 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 Iakoutsk battalion; the sustained and
scathing satire on the Notre 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; {17} 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; {18} 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 attaches or of dependents, {19} 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 {20}--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."

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