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Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake

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




The lady who inspired both the eulogy and the curtailment was
Madame Novikoff, more widely known perhaps as O. K., with whom
Kinglake maintained during the last twenty years of life an
intimate and mutual friendship. Madame Olga Novikoff, nee Kireeff,
is a Russian lady of aristocratic rank both by parentage and
marriage. In a lengthened sojourn at Vienna with her brother-in-
law, the Russian ambassador, she learned the current business of
diplomacy. An eager religious propagandist, she formed alliance
with the "Old Catholics" on the Continent, and with many among the
High Church English clergy; becoming, together with her brother
Alexander, a member of the Reunion Nationale, a society for the
union of Christendom. Her interest in education has led her to
devote extensive help to school and church building and endowment
on her son's estate. God-daughter to the Czar Nicholas, she is a
devoted Imperialist, nor less in sympathy, as were all her family,
with Russian patriotism: after the death of her brother in Servia
on July 6/18, 1876, she became a still more ardent Slavophile. The
three articles of her creed are, she says, those of her country,
Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationalism. Her political aspirations have
been guided, and guided right, by her tact and goodness of heart.
Her life's aim has been to bring about a cordial understanding
between England and her native land; there is little doubt that her
influence with leading Liberal politicians, and her vigorous
allocutions in the Press, had much to do with the enthusiasm
manifested by England for the liberation of the Danubian States.
Readers of the Princess Lieven's letters to Earl Grey will recall
the part played by that able ambassadress in keeping this country
neutral through the crisis of 1828-9; to her Madame Novikoff has
been likened, and probably with truth, by the Turkish Press both
English and Continental. She was accused in 1876 of playing on the
religious side of Mr. Gladstone's character to secure his interest
in the Danubians as members of the Greek Church, while with
unecclesiastical people she was said to be equally skilful on the
political side, converting at the same time Anglophobe Russia by
her letters in the "Moscow Gazette." Mr. Gladstone's leanings to
Montenegro were attributed angrily in the English "Standard" to
Madame Novikoff: "A serious statesman should know better than to
catch contagion from the petulant enthusiasm of a Russian Apostle."
The contagion was in any case caught, and to some purpose; letter
after letter had been sent by the lady to the great statesman, then
in temporary retirement, without reply, until the last of these, "a
bitter cry of a sister for a sacrificed brother," brought a feeling
answer from Mrs. Gladstone, saying that her husband was deeply
moved by the appeal, and was writing on the subject. In a few days
appeared his famous pamphlet, "Bulgarian Horrors and the Question
of the East."

Carlyle advised that Madame Novikoff's scattered papers should be
worked into a volume; they appeared under the title "Is Russia
Wrong?" with a preface by Froude, the moderate and ultra-prudent
tone of which infuriated Hayward and Kinglake, as not being
sufficiently appreciative. Hayward declared some woman had biassed
him; Kinglake was of opinion that by studying the etat of Queen
Elizabeth Froude had "gone and turned himself into an old maid."

Froude's Preface to her next work, "Russia and England, a Protest
and an Appeal," by O. K., 1880, was worded in a very different tone
and satisfied all her friends. The book was also reviewed with
highest praise by Gladstone in "The Nineteenth Century." Learning
that an assault upon it was contemplated in "The Quarterly,"
Kinglake offered to supply the editor, Dr. Smith, with materials
which might be so used as to neutralize a PERSONAL attack upon O.
K. Smith entreated him to compose the whole article himself. "I
could promise you," he writes, "that the authorship should be kept
a profound secret;" but this Kinglake seems to have thought
undesirable. The article appeared in April, 1880, under the title
of "The Slavonic Menace to Europe." It opens with a panegyric on
the authoress: "She has mastered our language with conspicuous
success; she expostulates as easily as she reproaches, and she
exhibits as much facility in barbing shafts of satire as in framing
specious excuses for daring acts of diplomacy." It insists on the
high esteem felt for her by both the Russian and Austrian
governments, telling with much humour an anecdote of Count Beust,
the Prime Minister of Austria during her residence in Vienna. The
Count, after meeting her at a dinner party at the Turkish Embassy,
composed a set of verses in her honour, and gave them to her, but
she forgot to mention them to her brother-in-law. The Prime
Minister, encountering the latter, asked his opinion of the verses;
and the ambassador was greatly amazed at knowing nothing of the
matter. {23} From amenities towards the authoress, the article
passes abruptly to hostile criticism of the book; declares it to be
proscribed in Russia as mischievous, and to have precipitated a
general war by keeping up English interest in Servian rebellion.
It sneers in doubtful taste at the lady's learning:


"sit non doctissima conjux,
Sit nox cum somno, sit sine lite dies;"


denounces the Slavs as incapable of being welded into a nation,
urging that their independence must destroy Austria-Hungary, a
consummation desired by Madame Novikoff, with her feline contempt
for "poor dear Austria," but which all must unite to prevent if
they would avert a European war.

How could one clear harp, men asked themselves as they read, have
produced so diverse tones? The riddle is solved when we learn that
the first part only was from Kinglake's pen: having vindicated his
friend's ability and good faith, her right to speak and to be heard
attentively, he left the survey of her views, with which he
probably disagreed, to the originally assigned reviewer. The
article, Madame Novikoff tells us in the "Nouvelle Revue," was
received avec une stupefaction unanime. It formed the general talk
for many days, was attributed to Lord Salisbury, was supposed to
have been inspired by Prince Gortschakoff. The name standing
against it in Messrs. Murray's books, as they kindly inform me, is
that of a writer still alive, and better known now than then, but
they never heard that Kinglake had a hand in it; the editor would
seem to have kept his secret even from the publishers. Kinglake
sent the article in proof to the lady; hoped that the facts he had
imparted and the interpolations he had inserted would please her;
he could have made the attack on Russia more pointed had he written
it; she would think the leniency shows a fault on the right side;
he did not know the writer of this latter part. He begged her to
acquaint her friends in Moscow what an important and majestic organ
is "The Quarterly," how weighty therefore its laudation of herself.
She recalls his bringing her soon afterwards an article on her,
written, he said, in an adoring tone by Laveleye in the "Revue des
Deux Mondes," and directing her to a paper in "Fraser," by Miss
Pauline Irby, a passionate lover of the "Slav ragamuffins," and a
worshipper of Madame Novikoff. He quotes with delight Chenery's
approbation of her "Life of Skobeleff"; he spoke of you "with a
gleam of kindliness in his eyes which really and truly I had never
observed before." "The Times" quotes her as the "eloquent
authoress of 'Russia and England'"; "fancy that from your enemy!
you are getting even 'The Times' into your net." A later article
on O. K. contains some praise, but more abuse. Hayward is angry
with it; Kinglake thinks it more friendly than could have been
expected "to YOU, a friend of ME, their old open enemy: the sugar-
plums were meant for you, the sprinklings of soot for me."

Besides "Russia and England" Madame Novikoff is the author of
"Friends or Foes?--is Russia wrong?" and of a "Life of Skobeleff,"
the hero of Plevna and of Geok Tepe. From her natural endowments
and her long familiarity with Courts, she has acquired a capacity
for combining, controlling, entertaining social "circles" which
recalls les salons d'autrefois, the drawing-rooms of an Ancelot, a
Le Brun, a Recamier. Residing in several European capitals, she
surrounds herself in each with persons intellectually eminent; in
England, where she has long spent her winters, Gladstone, Carlyle
and Froude, Charles Villiers, Bernal Osborne, Sir Robert Morier,
Lord Houghton, and many more of the same high type, formed her
court and owned her influence.

Kinglake first met her at Lady Holland's in 1870, and mutual liking
ripened rapidly into close friendship. During her residences in
England few days passed in which he did not present himself at her
drawing-room in Claridge's Hotel: when absent in Russia or on the
Continent, she received from him weekly letters, though he used to
complain that writing to a lady through the poste restante was like
trying to kiss a nun through a double grating. These letters, all
faithfully preserved, I have been privileged to see; they remind
me, in their mixture of personal with narrative charm, of Swift's
"Letters to Stella"; except that Swift's are often coarse and
sometimes prurient, while Kinglake's chivalrous admiration for his
friend, though veiled occasionally by graceful banter, is always
respectful and refined. They even imitate occasionally the "little
language" of the great satirist; if Swift was Presto, Kinglake is
"Poor dear me"; if Stella was M. D., Madame Novikoff is "My dear
Miss." This last endearment was due to an incident at a London
dinner table. A story told by Hayward, seasoned as usual with gros
sel, amused the more sophisticated English ladies present, but
covered her with blushes. Kinglake perceived it, and said to her
afterwards, "I thought you were a hardened married woman; I am glad
that you are not; I shall henceforth call you MISS." Sometimes he
rushes into verse. In answer to some pretended rebuff received
from her at Ryde he writes


"There was a young lady of Ryde, so awfully puffed up by pride,
She felt grander by far than the Son of the Czar,
And when he said, 'Dear, come and walk on the pier,
Oh please come and walk by my side;'
The answer he got, was 'Much better not,' from that awful young
lady of Ryde."


Oftenest, the letters are serious in their admiring compliments;
they speak of her superb organization of health and life and
strength and joyousness, the delightful sunshine of her presence,
her decision and strength of will, her great qualities and great
opportunities: "away from you the world seems a blank." He is
glad that his Great Eltchi has been made known to her; the old
statesman will be impressed, he feels sure, by her "intense life,
graciousness and grace, intellect carefully masked, musical faculty
in talk, with that heavenly power of coming to an end." He sends
playfully affectionate messages from other members of the
Gerontaion, as he calls it, the group of aged admirers who formed
her inner court; echoing their laments over the universality of her
patronage. "Hayward can pardon your having an ambassador or two at
your FEET, but to find the way to your HEART obstructed by a crowd
of astronomers, Russ-expansionists, metaphysicians, theologians,
translators, historians, poets;--this is more than he can endure.
The crowd reduces him, as Ampere said to Mme. Recamier, to the
qualified blessing of being only chez vous, from the delight of
being avec vous. He hails and notifies additions to the list of
her admirers; quotes enthusiastic praise of her from Stansfeld and
Charles Villiers, warm appreciation from Morier, Sir Robert Peel,
Violet Fane. He rallies her on her victims, jests at Froude's
lover-like galanterie--"Poor St. Anthony! how he hovered round the
flame";--at the devotion of that gay Lothario, Tyndall, whose
approaching marriage will, he thinks, clip his wings for
flirtation. "It seems that at the Royal Institution, or whatever
the place is called, young women look up to the Lecturers as
priests of Science, and go to them after the lecture in what
churchmen would call the vestry, and express charming little doubts
about electricity, and pretty gentle disquietudes about the solar
system: and then the Professors have to give explanations;--and
then, somehow, at the end of a few weeks, they find they have
provided themselves with chaperons for life." So he pursues the
list of devotees; her son will tell her that Caesar summarized his
conquests in this country by saying Veni, Vidi, Vici; but to her it
is given to say, Veni, Videbar, Vici.

On two subjects, theology and politics, Madame Novikoff was, as we
have seen, passionately in earnest. Himself at once an amateur
casuist and a consistent Nothingarian, whose dictum was that
"Important if true" should be written over the doors of churches,
he followed her religious arguments much as Lord Steyne listened to
the contests between Father Mole and the Reverend Mr. Trail. He
expresses his surprise in all seriousness that the Pharisees, a
thoughtful and cultured set of men, who alone among the Jews
believed in a future state, should have been the very men to whom
our Saviour was habitually antagonistic. He refers more lightly
and frequently to "those charming talks of ours about our
Churches"; he thinks they both know how to effleurer the surface of
theology without getting drowned in it. Of existing Churches he
preferred the English, as "the most harmless going"; disliked the
Latin Church, especially when intriguing in the East, as
persecuting and as schismatic, and therefore as no Church at all.
Roman Catholics, he said, have a special horror of being called
"schismatic," and that is, of course, a good reason for so calling
them. He would not permit the use of the word "orthodox," because,
like a parson in the pulpit, it is always begging the question. He
refused historical reverence to the Athanasian Creed, and was
delighted when Stanley's review in "The Times" of Mr. Ffoulkes'
learned book showed it to have been written by order of Charles the
Great in 800 A.D. as what Thorold Rogers used to call "an election
squib." In the "Filioque" controversy, once dear to Liddon and to
Gladstone, now, I suppose, obsolete for the English mind, but which
relates to the chief dividing tenet of East from West, he showed an
interest humorous rather than reverent; took pains to acquaint
himself with the views held on it by Dollinger and the old
Catholics; noted with amusement the perplexity of London ladies as
to the meaning of the word when quoted in the much-read "Quarterly"
article, declaring their belief to be that it was a clergyman's
baby born out of wedlock.

Madame Novikoff's political influence, which he recognized to the
full, he treated in the same mocking spirit. She is at Berlin,
received by Bismarck; he hopes that though the great man may not
eradicate her Slavophile heresies, he may manifest the weakness of
embroiling nations on mere ethnological grounds. "Are even nearer
relationships so delightful? would you walk across the street for a
third or fourth cousin? then why for a millionth cousin?" Madame
Novikoff kindly sends to me an "Imaginary Conversation" between
herself and Gortschakoff, constructed by Kinglake during her stay
in St. Petersburg in 1879.

"G. Well--you really have done good service to your country and
your Czar by dividing and confusing these absurd English, and
getting us out of the scrape we were in in that--Balkan Peninsula.

"Miss O. Well, certainly I did my best; but I fear I have ruined
the political reputation of my English partizans, for in order to
make them 'beloved of the Slave,' I of course had to make them,
poor souls! go against their own country; and their country, stupid
as it is, has now I fear found them out.

"G. Tant pis pour eux! Entre nous, if I had been Gladstone, I
should have preferred the love of my own country to the love of
these--Slaves of yours. But, tell me, how did you get hold of
Gladstone?

"Miss O. Rien de plus simple! Four or five years ago I asked what
was his weak point, and was told that he had two, 'Effervescence,'
and 'Theology.' With that knowledge I found it all child's play to
manage him. I just sent him to Munich, and there boiled him up in
a weak decoction of 'Filioque,' then kept him ready for use, and
impatiently awaited the moment when our plans for getting up the
'Bulgarian atrocities' should be mature. I say 'impatiently,' for,
Heavens, how slow you all were! at least so it strikes a woman.
The arrangement of the 'atrocities' was begun by our people in
1871, and yet till 1876, though I had Gladstone ready in 1875,
nothing really was done! I assure you, Prince, it is a trying
thing to a woman to be kept waiting for promised atrocities such an
unconscionable time.

"G. That brother-in-law of yours was partly the cause of our
slowness. He was always wanting to have the orders for fire and
blood in neat formal despatches, signed by me, and copied by
clerks. However, I hope you are satisfied now, with the butcheries
and the flames, and the--?

"Miss O. Pour le moment!"

She is absent during the sudden dissolution of Parliament in 1874.
"London woke yesterday morning and found that your friend Gladstone
had made a coup-d'etat. He has dissolved Parliament at a moment
when no human being expected it, and my impression is that he has
made a good hit, and that the renovated Parliament will give him a
great majority." The impression was wildly wrong; and he found a
cause for the Conservative majority in Gladstone's tame foreign
policy, and especially in the pusillanimity his government showed
when insulted by Gortschakoff. He always does justice to her
influence with Gladstone; his great majority at the polls in 1880
is HER victory and HER triumph; but his Turkophobia is no less her
creation: "England is stricken with incapacity because you have
stirred up the seething caldron that boils under Gladstone's skull,
putting in diabolical charms and poisons of theology to overturn
the structure of English polity:" she will be able, he thinks, to
tell her government that Gladstone is doing his best to break up
the British Empire.

He quotes with approbation the newspaper comparison of her to the
Princess Lieven. She disparages the famous ambassadress; he sets
her right. Let her read the "Correspondence," by his friend Mr.
Guy Le Strange, and she will see how large a part the Princess
played in keeping England quiet during the war of 1828-29. She did
not convert her austere admirer, Lord Grey, to approval of the
Russian designs, nor overcome the uneasiness with which the Duke of
Wellington regarded her intrigues; but the Foreign Minister, Lord
Aberdeen, was apparently a fool in her hands; and, whoever had the
merit, the neutrality of England continued. That was, he repeats
more than once, a most critical time for Russia; it was an object
almost of life and death to the Czar to keep England dawdling in a
state of actual though not avowed neutrality. It is, he argued, a
matter of fact, that precisely this result was attained, and "I
shall be slow to believe that Madame de Lieven did not deserve a
great share of the glory (as you would think it) of making England
act weakly under such circumstances; more especially since we know
that the Duke did not like the great lady, and may be supposed to
have distinctly traced his painful embarrassment to her power." So
the letters go, interspersed with news, with criticisms of notable
persons, with comments enlightening or cynical on passing political
events: with personal matters only now and then; as when he notes
the loss of his two sisters; dwells with unwonted feeling on the
death of his eldest nephew by consumption; condoles with her on her
husband's illness; gives council, wise or playful, as to the
education of her son. "I am glad to hear that he is good at Greek,
Latin, and Mathematics, for that shows his cleverness; glad also to
hear that he is occasionally naughty, for that shows his force. I
advise you to claim and exercise as much control as possible,
because I am certain that a woman--especially so gifted a one as
you--knows more, or rather feels more, about the right way of
bringing up a boy than any mere man."

Unbrokenly the correspondence continues: the intimacy added charm,
interest, fragrance to his life, brought out in him all that was
genial, playful, humorous. He fights the admonitions of coming
weakness; goes to Sidmouth with a sore throat, but takes his papers
and his books. It is, he says, a deserted little sea-coast place.
"Mrs. Grundy has a small house there, but she does not know me by
sight. If Madame Novikoff were to come, the astonished little
town, dazzled first by her, would find itself invaded by
theologians, bishops, ambassadors of deceased emperors, and an ex-
Prime-Minister." But as time goes on he speaks more often of his
suffering throat; of gout, increasing deafness, only half a voice:
his last letter is written in July, 1890, to condole with his
friend upon her husband's death. In October his nurse takes the
pen; Madame Novikoff comes back hurriedly from Scotland to find him
in his last illness. "It is very nice," he told his nurse, "to see
dear Madame Novikoff again, but I am going down hill fast, and
cannot hope to be well enough to see much of her." This is in
November, 1890; on New Year's Eve came the inexorable, "Terminator
of delights and Separator of friends."



CHAPTER VI--LATER DAYS, AND DEATH



For twenty years Kinglake lived in Hyde Park Place, in bright
cheerful rooms looking in one direction across the Park, but on
another side into a churchyard. The churchyard, Lady Gregory tells
us, gave him pause on first seeing the rooms. "I should not like
to live here, I should be afraid of ghosts." "Oh no, sir, there is
always a policeman round the corner." {24} "Pleaceman X." has not,
perhaps, before been revered as the Shade-compelling son of Maia:


"Tu pias laetis animas reponis
Sedibus, virgaque levem coerces
Aurea turbam."


Here he worked through the morning; the afternoon took him to the
"Travellers," where his friends, Sir Henry Bunbury and Mr. Chenery,
usually expected him; then at eight o'clock, if not, as Shylock
says, bid forth, he went to dine at the Athenaeum. His dinner seat
was in the left-hand corner of the coffee-room, where, in the
thirties, Theodore Hook had been wont to sit, gathering near him so
many listeners to his talk, that at Hook's death in 1841 the
receipts for the club dinners fell off to a large amount. Here, in
the "Corner," as they called it, round Kinglake would be Hayward,
Drummond Wolff, Massey, Oliphant, Edward Twisleton, Strzelecki,
Storks, Venables, Wyke, Bunbury, Gregory, American Ticknor, and a
few more; Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, when in Scotland, sending
hampers of pheasants to the company. "Hurried to the Athenaeum for
dinner," says Ticknor in 1857, "and there found Kinglake and Sir
Henry Rawlinson, to whom were soon added Hayward and Stirling. We
pushed our tables together and had a jolly dinner. . . . To the
Athenaeum; and having dined pleasantly with Merivale, Kinglake, and
Stirling, I hurried off to the House." In later years, when his
voice grew low and his hearing difficult, he preferred that the
diners should resolve themselves into little groups, assigning to
himself a tete-a-tete, with whom at his ease he could unfold
himself.

No man ever fought more gallantly the encroachments of old age--on
sut etre jeune jusque dans ses vieux jours. At seventy-four years
old, staying with a friend at Brighton, he insisted on riding over
to Rottingdean, where Sir Frederick Pollock was staying. "I
mastered," he said, in answer to remonstrances, "I mastered the
peculiarities of the Brighton screw before you were born, and have
never forgotten them." Vaulting into his saddle he rode off,
returning with a schoolboy's delight at the brisk trot he had found
practicable when once clear of the King's Road. Long after his
hearing had failed, his sight become grievously weakened, and his
limbs not always trustworthy, he would never allow a cab to be
summoned for him after dinner, always walking to his lodgings. But
he had to give up by and by his daily canter in Rotten Row, and
more reluctantly still his continental travel. Foreign railways
were closed to him by the Salle d'Attente; he could not stand
incarceration in the waiting-rooms.

The last time he crossed the Channel was at the close of the
Franco-Prussian war, on a visit to his old friend M. Thiers, then
President. It was a dinner to deputies of the Extreme Left, and
Kinglake was the only Englishman; "so," he said, "among the
servants there was a sort of reasoning process as to my identity,
ending in the conclusion, 'il doit etre Sir Dilke.'" Soon the
inference was treated as a fact; and in due sequence came newspaper
paragraphs declaring that the British Ambassador had gravely
remonstrated with the President for inviting Sir Charles Dilke to
his table. Then followed articles defending the course taken by
the President, and so for some time the ball was kept up. The
remonstrance of the Ambassador was a myth, Lord Lyons was a friend
of Sir Charles; but the latter was suspect at the time both in
England and France; in England for his speeches and motion on the
Civil List; in France, because, with Frederic Harrison, he had
helped to get some of the French Communists away from France; and
the French Government was watching him with spies. In Sir
Charles's motion Kinglake took much interest, refusing to join in
the cry against it as disloyal. Sir Charles, he said, spoke no
word against the Queen; and only brought the matter before the
House because challenged to repeat in Parliament the statements he
had made in the country. As a matter of policy he thought it
mistaken: "Move in such a matter openly, and party discipline
compels your defeat; bring pressure to bear on a Cabinet, some of
its members are on your side, and you may gain your point." Sir
Charles's speech was calmly argumentative, and to many minds
convincing; it provoked a passionate reply from Gladstone; and when
Mr. Auberon Herbert following declared himself a Republican, a
tumult arose such as in those pre-Milesian days had rarely been
witnessed in the House. But the wisdom of Kinglake's counsel is
sustained by the fact that many years afterwards, as a result of
more private discussion, Mr. Gladstone pronounced his conversion to
the two bases of the motion, publicity, and the giving of the State
allowance to the head of the family rather than, person by person,
to the children and grandchildren of the Sovereign. Action
pointing in this direction was taken in 1889 and 1901 on the advice
of Tory ministers.

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