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Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake

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





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'oeil 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 paean 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 Caesars 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 [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] 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.
{21} 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 Elysee 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. {22} 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."



CHAPTER V--MADAME NOVIKOFF



The Cabinet Edition of "The Invasion of the Crimea" appeared in
1877, shortly after the Servian struggle for independence, which
aroused in England universal interest and sympathy. Kinglake had
heard from the lips of a valued lady friend the tragic death-tale
of her brother Nicholas Kireeff, who fell fighting as a volunteer
on the side of the gallant Servian against the Turk: and, much
moved by the recital, offered to honour the memory of the dead hero
in the Preface to his forthcoming edition. He kept his word; made
sympathetic reference to M. Kireeff in the opening of his Preface;
but passed in pursuance of his original design to a hostile
impeachment of Russia, its people, its church, its ruler. This was
an error of judgment and of feeling; and the lady, reading the
manuscript, indignantly desired him to burn the whole rather than
commit the outrage of associating her brother's name with an attack
on causes and personages dear to him as to herself. Kinglake
listened in silence, then tendered to her a crayon rouge, begging
her to efface all that pained her. She did so; and, diminished by
three-fourths of its matter, the Preface appears in Vol. I. of the
Cabinet Edition. The erasure was no slight sacrifice to an author
of Kinglake's literary sensitiveness, mutilating as it did the
integrity of a carefully schemed composition, and leaving visible
the scar. He sets forth the strongly sentimental and romantic side
of Russian temperament. Love of the Holy Shrines begat the war of
1853, racial ardour the war of 1876. The first was directed by a
single will, the second by national enthusiasm; yet the mind of
Nicholas was no less tossed by a breathless strife of opposing
desires and moods than was Russia at large by the struggle between
Panslavism and statesmanship. Kinglake paints vividly the imposing
figure of the young Kireeff, his stature, beauty, bravery, the
white robe he wore incarnadined by death-wounds, his body captured
by the hateful foes. He goes on to tell how myth rose like an
exhalation round his memory: how legends of "a giant piling up
hecatombs by a mighty slaughter" reverberated through mansion and
cottage, town and village, cathedral and church; until thousands of
volunteers rushed to arms that they might go where young Kireeff
had gone. Alexander's hand was forced, and the war began, which
but for England's intervention would have cleared Europe of the
Turk. We have the text, but not the sermon; the Preface ends
abruptly with an almost clumsy peroration.

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