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Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake

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




Amongst Frenchmen of the highest class, intellectually and
socially, he had many valued friends, keeping his name on the
"Cosmopolitan" long after he had ceased to visit it, since "one
never knows when the distinguished foreigner may come upon one, and
of such the Cosmo is the London Paradise." But he used to say that
in the other world a good Frenchman becomes an Englishman, a bad
Englishman becomes a Frenchman. He saw in the typical Gaul a
compound of the tiger and the monkey; noted their want of
individuality, their tendency to go in flocks, their susceptibility
to panic and to ferocity, to the terror that makes a man kill
people, and "the terror that makes him lie down and beg." We
remember, too, his dissection of St. Arnaud, as before all things a
type of his nation; "he impersonated with singular exactness the
idea which our forefathers had in their minds when they spoke of
what they called 'a Frenchman;' for although (by cowing the rich
and by filling the poor with envy), the great French Revolution had
thrown a lasting gloom on the national character, it left this one
man untouched. He was bold, gay, reckless, vain; but beneath the
mere glitter of the surface there was a great capacity for
administrative business, and a more than common willingness to take
away human life."

"I relish," Kinglake said in 1871, "the spectacle of Bismarck
teaching the A B C of Liberal politics to the hapless French. His
last mot, they tell me, is this. Speaking of the extent to which
the French Emperor had destroyed his own reputation and put an end
to the worship of the old Napoleon, he said: 'He has killed
himself and buried his uncle.'" Again, in 1874, noting the contre
coup upon France resulting from the Bismarck and Arnim despatches,
he said: "What puzzles the poor dear French is to see that truth
and intrepid frankness consist with sound policy and consummate
wisdom. How funny it would be, if the French some day, as a
novelty, or what they would call a caprice, were to try the effect
of truth; "though not naturally honest," as Autolycus says, "were
to become so by chance."

He thought M. Gallifet dans sa logique in liking the Germans and
hating Bismarck; for the Germans, in having their own way, would
break up into as many fragments as the best Frenchman could desire,
and Bismarck is the real suppressor of France. Throughout the
Franco-Prussian war he sided strongly with the Prussians, refusing
to dine in houses where the prevailing sympathy with France would
make him unwelcome as its declared opponent; but he felt "as a
nightmare" the attack on prostrate Paris, "as a blow" the
capitulation of Metz; denouncing Gambetta and his colleagues as
meeting their disasters only with slanderous shrieks, "possessed by
the spirit of that awful Popish woman." Bismarck as a statesman he
consistently admired, and deplored his dismissal. I see, he said,
all the peril implied by Bismarck's exit, and the advent of his
ambitious young Emperor. It is a transition from the known to the
unknown, from wisdom, perhaps, to folly.

His Crimean volumes continued to appear; in 1875, 1880, finally in
1887; while the Cabinet Edition was published in 1887-8. This last
contained three new Prefaces; in Vol. I. as we have seen, the
memorial of Nicholas Kireeff; in Vol. II. the latter half of the
original Preface to Vol. I., cancelled thence at Madame Novikoff's
request, though now carefully modified so as to avoid anything
which might irritate Russia at a moment when troubles seemed to be
clearing away. In his Preface to Vol. VII. he had three objects,
to set right the position of Sir E. Hamley, who had been neglected
in the despatches; to demolish his friend Lord Bury, who had
"questioned my omniscience" in the "Edinburgh Review"; and to
exonerate England at large from absurd self-congratulations about
the "little Egypt affair," the blame of such exaggeration resting
with those whom he called State Showmen.

Silent to acquaintances about the progress of his work, he was
communicative to his few intimates, though never reading aloud
extracts or allowing them to be seen. In 1872 he would speak
pathetically of his "Crimean muddle," perplexed, as he well might
be, by the intricacies of Inkerman. Asked if he will not introduce
a Te Deum on the fall of Louis Napoleon, he answered that to write
without the stimulus of combat would be a task beyond his energy;
"when I took the trouble to compose that fourteenth chapter, the
wretched Emperor and his gang were at the height of their power in
Europe and the world; but now!" He was insatiate as to fresh facts:
utilized his acquaintance with Todleben, whom he had first met on
his visit to England in 1864; sought out Prince Ourusoff at a later
time, and inserted particulars gleaned from him in Vol. IX.,
Chapter V.

In 1875 he told Madame Novikoff that his task was done so far as
Inkerman was concerned, and was proud to think that he had rescued
from oblivion the heroism of the Russian troops in what he calls
the "Third Period" of the great fight, ignored as it was by all
Russian historians of the war. He made fruitless inquiries after a
paper said to have been left behind him by Skobeleff, explaining
that "India is a cherry to be eaten by Russia, but in two bites";
it was contrary to the general's recorded utterances and probably
apocryphal. Russophobe as regarded Turkey, he sneered at England's
sentimental support of nationalities as "Platonic": a capital
epithet he called it, and envied the Frenchman who applied it to
us, declaring that it had turned all the women against us. He was
moved by receiving Korniloff's portrait with a kind message from
the dead hero's family, seeing in the features a confirmation of
the ideal which he had formed in his own mind and had tried to
convey to others. Readers of his book will recall the fine tribute
to Korniloff's powers, and the description of his death, in
Chapters VI. and XIII. of Vol. IV. (Cabinet Edition).

Many of his comments on current events are preserved in the notes
or in the memories of his friends. Sometimes these were
characteristically cynical. He ridiculed the newspaper parade of
national sympathy with the Prince of Wales's illness: "We are
represented as all members of the royal family, and all in family
hysterics." Dizzy's orientalization of Queen Victoria into an
Empress angered him, as it angered many more. The last Empress
Regnant, he said, was Catherine II. and it seems to be thought that
by advising the Queen to take that great monarch's title, we shall
exercise a wholesome influence on the morals of our women. He
would quote Byron's


"Russia's mighty Empress
Behaved no better than a common sempstress;"


"there was an old-fashioned sacredness, which, however foolish
intrinsically, was still useful, in our title of 'The Queen'; nor
do we see the policy of adding a Supreme de Volaille to the bread
and wine of our Sacrament."

He chuckled over the indignation of the haute volee, when on the
visit to England of President Grant's daughter in 1872, Americans
in London sent out cards of invitation headed "To meet Miss Grant,"
as at a profane imitation of a practice hitherto confined to
royalties; laughing not at the legitimate American mimicry of
European consequence, but at the silly formalists in Society who
fumed over the imagined presumption. Consulted by an invalid as to
the charm of Ostend for a seaside residence, he limited it to
persons of gregarious habits; "the people are all driven down to
the beach like a flock of sheep in the morning, and in the evening
they are all driven back to their folds." He reported a feeble
drama written by his ancient idol, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe; "it
is a painful thing to see a man of his quality and of his age
unduly detained in the world; when the Emperor Nicholas died, the
Eltchi lost his raison d'etre." He disparaged the wild fit of
morality undergone by the "Pall Mall Gazette" during the scandalous
"Maiden Tribute" revelation, pronouncing its protegees to be
"clever little devils." He was greatly startled by Gortschakoff's
famous circular, annulling the Black Sea clause in the Treaty of
Paris, and much relieved by Bismarck's dexterous interposition,
which saved the susceptibility of Europe, and especially of
England, by yielding as a favour to the demand of Russia what no
one was in a position to refuse; but he maintained, and Lord
Stratford agreed with him, that Gortschakoff's precipitate act was
governed by circumstances never revealed to mankind. He learned,
too, that it caused the Chancellor to be deconsidere in high
Russian circles; he was called "un Narcisse qui se mire dans son
encrier." Kinglake used to say that in conceding the right of the
Sultan to exclude any war-flag from the Bosphorus and the
Dardanelles, Russia was treating Turkey as a bag-fox, to be gently
hunted occasionally, but not mangled or killed; and he felt keenly
the ridicule resting on the allies, who were compelled to surrender
the neutralization purchased at the cost of so much blood and
treasure. He watched with much amusement the restoration of
Turkish self-confidence. "Turkey believes that he is no longer a
sick man, and is turning all his doctors out of the house, to the
immense astonishment of the English doctor, so conscious of his own
rectitude that he cannot understand being sent off with the quacks.
You know in our beautiful Liturgy we have a prayer for the Turks;
it looks as if our supplications had become successful." His
interest in Turkey never flagged. "I am in a great fright," he
said in 1877, "about my dear Turks, because Russia gives virtual
command of the army before Plevna to Todleben, a really great homme
de guerre."

Russophobia was at that time so strong in London that Madame
Novikoff hesitated to visit England, and he himself feared that she
might find it uncomfortable. Her alarm, however, was ridiculed by
Hayward, "most faithful of the Russianisers, ready to do battle for
Russia at any moment, declaring her to be quite virtuous, with no
fault but that of being incomprise." But he groaned over the
humiliation of England under Russia's bold stroke, noting
frequently a decay of English character which he ascribed to
chronic causes. The Englishman taken separately, he said, seems
much the same as he used to be; but there is a softening of the
aggregate brain which affects Englishmen when acting together. He
hailed the great Liberal victory of 1880, and watched with
interest, as one behind the scenes, the negotiations which led to
Lord Hartington's withdrawal and Mr. Gladstone's resumption of
power; for in these his friend Hayward was an active go-between,
removing by his tact and frankness "hitches" which might otherwise
have been disastrous. He thought W. E. Forster's attack on Mr.
Gladstone's Irish policy in 1882 ill-managed for his own position,
his famous speech not sufficiently "clenching." Had he separated
from his chief on broader grounds, refusing complicity with a
Minister who consented to parley with the imprisoned Irishmen, he
would, Kinglake thought, have occupied a highly commanding
position. At present his difference from his colleagues was one
only of degree.

He was once beguiled, amongst friends very intimate, into telling a
dream. He dreamed that he was attending an anatomical lecture--
which, as a fact, he had never done--and that his own body, from
which he found himself entirely separated, was the dissected
subject on which the lecturer discoursed. The body lay on a table
beside the lecturer, but he himself, his entity, was at the other
end of the room, on the furthest or highest of a set of benches
raised one above the other as at a theatre. He imagined himself in
a vague way to be disagreeing with the lecturer; but the strongest
impression on his mind was annoyance at being so badly placed, so
far from the professor and from his own body that he could not see
or hear without an effort. The dream, he pointed out, showed this
curious fact, that without any conscious design or effort of the
will a man may conceive himself to be in perfect possession of his
identity, whilst separated from his own body by a distance of
several feet. "The highest concept," said Jowett, "which man forms
of himself is as detached from the body." ("Life," ii. 241.) The
lecture-room which he imagined was one of the lower school-rooms at
Eton, with which he had been familiar in early days.

After Hayward's death in 1884, his own habits began to change. He
still dined at the Athenaeum "corner," but increasing deafness
began to make society irksome, and, his solitary meal ended, he
spent his evenings reading in the Library. By-and-by that too
became impossible. His voice grew weak, throat and tongue were
threatened with disease. In 1888 he went to Brighton with a nurse,
returned to rooms on Richmond Hill, then to Bayswater Terrace. An
operation was performed and he seemed to recover, but relapsed.
Old friends tended him: Madame Novikoff, Mr. Froude and Mr. Lecky,
Madame de Quaire and Mrs. Brookfield, Lord Mexborough his ancient
fellow-traveller, Mrs. Craven, Sir William and Lady Gregory, with a
few more, cheered him by their visits so long as he was able to
bear them; and his brother and sister, Dr. and Mrs. Hamilton
Kinglake, were with him at the end. Patient to the last, kind and
gentle to all about him, he passed away quietly on New Year's Day,
1891:


"being merry-hearted,
Shook hands with flesh and blood, and so departed."


His remains were cremated at Woking, after a special service at
Christchurch, Lancaster Gate, attended by Dr. and Mrs. Kinglake
with their son Captain Kinglake, the Duke of Bedford, Mr. and Mrs.
Lecky, Mrs. W. H. Brookfield and her son Charles.


No good portrait of him has been published. That prefixed to
Blackwood's "Eothen" of 1896 was furnished by Dr. Kinglake, who,
however, looked upon it as unsatisfactory. The "Not an M.P." of
"Vanity Fair," 1872, is a grotesque caricature. The photograph
here reproduced (p. 128), by far the best likeness extant, he gave
to Madame Novikoff in 1870, receiving hers in return, but
pronouncing the transaction "an exchange between the personified
months of May and November." The face gives expression to the shy
aloofness which, amongst strangers, was characteristic of him
through life. He had even a horror of hearing his name pealed out
by servants, and came early to parties that the proclamation might
be achieved before as few auditors as possible. Visiting the newly
married husband of his friend Adelaide Kemble, and being the first
guest to arrive, he encountered in Mr. Sartoris a host as
contentedly undemonstrative as himself. Bows passed, a seat by the
fire was indicated, he sat down, and the pair contemplated one
another for ten minutes in absolute silence, till the lady of the
house came in, like the prince in "The Sleeping Beauty," though not
by the same process, to break the charm. He gave up calling at a
house where he was warmly appreciated, because father, mother,
daughter, bombarded him with questions. "I never came away without
feeling sure that I had in some way perjured myself."

On his shyness waited swiftly ensuing boredom; if his neighbour at
table were garrulous or banale, his face at once betrayed
conversational prostration; a lady who often watched him used to
say that his pulse ought to be felt after the first course; and
that if it showed languor he should be moved to the side of some
other partner. "He had great charm," writes to me another old
friend, "in a quiet winning way, but was 'dark' with rough and
noisy people." So it came to pass that his manner was threefold;
icy and repellent with those who set his nerves on edge; good-
humoured, receptive, intermittently responsive in general and
congenial company; while, at ease with friends trusted and beloved,
the lines of the face became gracious, indulgent, affectionate, the
sourire des yeux often inexpressibly winning and tender.
"Kinglake," says Eliot Warburton in his unpublished diary, "talked
to us to-day about his travels; pessimistic and cynical to the rest
of the world, he is always gentle and kind to us." To this dear
friend he was ever faithful, wearing to the day of his death an
octagonal gold ring engraved "Eliot. Jan: 1852." He would never
play the raconteur in general company, for he had a great horror of
repeating himself, and, latterly, of being looked upon as a bore by
younger men; but he loved to pour out reminiscences of the past to
an audience of one or two at most: "Let an old man gather his
recollections and glance at them under the right angle, and his
life is full of pantomime transformation scenes." The chief
characteristic of his wit was its unexpectedness; sometimes acrid,
sometimes humorous, his sayings came forth, like Topham Beauclerk's
in Dr. Johnson's day, like Talleyrand's in our own, poignant
without effort. His calm, gentle voice, contrasted with his
startling caustic utterance, reminded people of Prosper Merimee:
terse epigram, felicitous apropos, whimsical presentment of the
topic under discussion, emitted in a low tone, and without the
slightest change of muscle:


"All the charm of all the Muses
Often flowering in a lonely word." {25}


Questions he would suavely and often wittily parry or repel: to an
unhistorical lady asking if he remembered Madame Du Barry, he said,
"my memory is very imperfect as to the particulars of my life
during the reign of Lous XV. and the Regency; but I know a lady who
has a teapot which belonged, she says, to Madame Du Barry." Madame
Novikoff, however, records his discomfiture at the query of a
certain Lady E-, who, when all London was ringing with his first
Crimean volumes, asked him if he were not an admirer of Louis
Napoleon. "Le pauvre Kinglake, decontenance, repondit tout bas
intimide comme un enfant qu'on met dates le coin: Oui--non--pas
precisement."

He had no knowledge of or liking for music. Present once by some
mischance at a matinee musicale, he was asked by the hostess what
kind of music he preferred. His preference, he owned, was for the
drum. One thinks of the "Bourgeois Gentilhomme," "la trompette
marine est un instrument qui me plait, el qui est harmonieux"; we
are reminded, too, of Dean Stanley, who, absolutely tone-deaf, and
hurrying away whenever music was performed, once from an adjoining
room in his father's house heard Jenny Lind sing "I know that my
Redeemer liveth." He went to her shyly, and told her that she had
given him an idea of what people mean by music. Once before, he
said in all seriousness, the same feeling had come over him, when
before the palace at Vienna he had heard a tattoo rendered by four
hundred drummers.


Kinglake used to regret the disuse of duelling, as having impaired
the higher tone of good breeding current in his younger days, and
even blamed the Duke of Wellington for proscribing it in the army.
He had himself on one occasion sent a cartel, and stood waiting for
his adversary, like Sir Richard Strachan at Walcheren, eight days
on the French coast; but the adversary never came. Hayward once
referred to him, as a counsellor, and if necessary a second, a
quarrel with Lord R-. Lord R-'s friend called on him, a Norfolk
squire, "broad-faced and breathing port wine," after the fashion of
uncle Phillips in "Pride and Prejudice," who began in a boisterous
voice, "I am one of those, Mr. Kinglake, who believe R- to be a
gentleman." In his iciest tones and stoniest manner Kinglake
answered: "That, Sir, I am quite willing to assume." The effect,
he used to say, as he told and acted the scene, was magical; "I had
frozen him sober, and we settled everything without a fight." Of
all his friends Hayward was probably the closest; an association of
discrepancies in character, manner, temperament, not complementary,
but opposed and hostile; irreconcilable, one would say, but for the
knowledge that in love and friendship paradox reigns supreme.
Hayward was arrogant, overbearing, loud, insistent, full of strange
oaths and often unpardonably coarse; "our dominant friend,"
Kinglake called him; "odious" is the epithet I have heard commonly
bestowed upon him by less affectionate acquaintances. Kinglake was
reserved, shy, reticent, with the high breeding, grand manner,
quiet urbanity, grata protervitas, of a waning epoch; restraint,
concentration, tact of omission, dictating alike his silence and
his speech; his well-weighed words "crystallizing into epigrams as
they touched the air." {26} When Hayward's last illness came upon
him in 1884, Kinglake nursed him tenderly; spending the morning in
his friend's lodgings at 8, St. James's Street, the house which
Byron occupied in his early London days; and bringing on the latest
bulletin to the club. The patient rambled towards the end; "we
ought to be getting ready to catch the train that we may go to my
sister's at Lyme." Kinglake quieted his sick friend by an assurance
that the servants, whom he would not wish to hurry, were packing.
"On no account hurry the servants, but still let us be off." The
last thought which he articulated while dying was, "I don't exactly
know what it is, but I feel it is something grand." "Hayward is
dead," Kinglake wrote to a common friend; "the devotion shown to
him by all sorts and conditions of men, and, what is better, of
women, was unbounded. Gladstone found time to be with him, and to
engage him in a conversation of singular interest, of which he has
made a memorandum."

Another of Kinglake's life-long familiars was Charles Skirrow,
Taxing Master in Chancery, with his accomplished wife, from whose
memorable fish dinners at Greenwich he was seldom absent, adapting
himself no less readily to their theatrical friends--the Bancrofts,
Burnand, Toole, Irving--than to the literary set with which he was
more habitually at home. He was religiously loyal to his friends,
speaking of them with generous admiration, eagerly defending them
when attacked. He lauded Butler Johnstone as the most gifted of
the young men in the House of Commons; would not allow Bernal
Osborne to be called untrue; "he offends people if you like, but he
is never false or hollow." A clever sobriquet fathered on him,
burlesquing the monosyllabic names of a well-known diarist and
official, he repelled indignantly. "He is my friend, and had I
been guilty of the jeu, I should have broken two of my
commandments; that which forbids my joking at a friend's expense,
and that which forbids my fashioning a play upon words." He
entreated Madame Novikoff to visit and cheer Charles Lever, dying
at Trieste; deeply lamented Sir H. Bulwer's death: "I used to
think his a beautiful intellect, and he was wonderfully simpatico
to me." But he was shy of condoling with bereaved mourners,
believing words used on such occasions to be utterly untrue. He
loved to include husband and wife in the same meed of admiration,
as in the case of Dean Stanley and Lady Augusta, or of Sir Robert
and Lady Emily Peel. Peel, he said, has the RADIANT quality not
easy to describe; Lady Emily is always beauteous, bright,
attractive. Lord Stanhope he praised as a historian, paying him
the equivocal compliment that his books were much better than his
conversation. So, too, he qualified his admiration of Lady
Ashburton, dwelling on her beauty, silver voice, ready enthusiasm
apt to disperse itself by flying at too many objects.

He was wont to speak admiringly of Lord Acton, relating how, a
Roman Catholic, yet respecting enlightenment and devoted to books,
he once set up and edited a "Quarterly Review," with a notion of
reconciling the Light and the Dark as well as he could; but the
"Prince of Darkness, the Pope," interposed, and ordered him to stop
the "Review." He was compelled to obey; not, he told people, on
any religious ground, but because relations and others would have
made his life a bore to him if he had been contumacious against the
Holy Father.

Kinglake was strongly attracted by W. E. Forster, a "rough
diamond," spoken of at one time as a possible Prime Minister.
Beginning life, he said, as a Quaker, with narrow opinions, his
vigour of character and brain-power shook them off. Powerful,
robust, and perfectly honest, yet his honesty inflicted on him a
doubleness of view which caused him to be described as engaging his
two hands in two different pursuits. His estimate of Sir R. Morier
would have gladdened Jowett's heart; he loved him as a private
friend; eulogized his public qualities; rejoiced over his
appointment as Ambassador at St. Petersburg, seeing in him a
diplomatist with not only a keen intellect and large views, but
vibrating with the warmth, animation, friendliness, that are
charmingly un-diplomatic. Of Carlyle, his life-long, though not
always congenial intimate, he used to speak as having great graphic
power, but being essentially a humourist; a man who, with those he
could trust, never pretended to be in earnest, but used to roar
with glorious laughter over the fun of his own jeremiads; "so far
from being a prophet he is a bad Scotch joker, and knows himself to
be a wind-bag." He blamed Froude's revelations of Carlyle in "The
Reminiscences," as injurious and offensive. Froude himself he
often likened to Carlyle; the thoughts of both, he said, ran in the
same direction, but of the two, Froude was by far the more
intellectual man.

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