a w. kinglake - a biographical and literary study(A·W·金雷克传记研究)
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A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study
1
A W. Kinglake - A
Biographical and Literary
Study
by Rev. W. Tcikwell
A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study
2
PREFACE
IT is just eleven years since Kinglake passed away, and his life has
not yet been separately memorialized. A few years more, and the
personal side of him would be irrecoverable, though by personality, no
less than by authorship, he made his contemporary mark. When a tomb
has been closed for centuries, the effaced lineaments of its tenant can be
re-coloured only by the idealizing hand of genius, as Scott drew
Claverhouse, and Carlyle drew Cromwell. But, to the biographer of the
lately dead, men have a right to say, as Saul said to the Witch of Endor,
"Call up Samuel!" In your study of a life so recent as Kinglake's, give
us, if you choose, some critical synopsis of his monumental writings,
some salvage from his ephemeral and scattered papers; trace so much of
his youthful training as shaped the development of his character; depict,
with wise restraint, his political and public life: but also, and above all,
re-clothe him "in his habit as he lived," as friends and associates knew
him; recover his traits of voice and manner, his conversational wit or
wisdom, epigram or paradox, his explosions of sarcasm and his
eccentricities of reserve, his words of winningness and acts of kindness:
and, since one half of his life was social, introduce us to the companions
who shared his lighter hour and evoked his finer fancies; take us to the
Athenaeum "Corner," or to Holland House, and flash on us at least a
glimpse of the brilliant men and women who formed the setting to his
sparkle; "DIC IN AMICITIAM COEANT ET FOEDERA JUNGANT."
This I have endeavoured to do, with such aid as I could command
from his few remaining contemporaries. His letters to his family were
destroyed by his own desire; on those written to Madame Novikoff no
such embargo was laid, nor does she believe that it was intended. I
have used these sparingly, and all extracts from them have been
subjected to her censorship. If the result is not Attic in salt, it is at any
rate Roman in brevity. I send it forth with John Bunyan's homely
aspiration:
A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study
3
And may its buyer have no cause to say, His money is but lost or
thrown away.
A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study
4
CHAPTER I - EARLY YEARS
THE fourth decade of the deceased century dawned on a procession of
Oriental pilgrims, variously qualified or disqualified to hold the
gorgeous East in fee, who, with BAKSHISH in their purses, a theory in
their brains, an unfilled diary-book in their portmanteaus, sought out the
Holy Land, the Sinai peninsula, the valley of the Nile, sometimes even
Armenia and the Monte Santo, and returned home to emit their
illustrated and mapped octavos. We have the type delineated
admiringly in Miss Yonge's "Heartsease," (1) bitterly in Miss Skene's
"Use and Abuse," facetiously in the Clarence Bulbul of "Our Street."
"Hang it! has not everybody written an Eastern book? I should like to
meet anybody in society now who has not been up to the Second
Cataract. My Lord Castleroyal has done one - an honest one; my Lord
Youngent another - an amusing one; my Lord Woolsey another - a pious
one; there is the 'Cutlet and the Cabob' - a sentimental one;
Timbuctoothen - a humorous one." Lord Carlisle's honesty, Lord
Nugent's fun, Lord Lindsay's piety, failed to float their books. Miss
Martineau, clear, frank, unemotional Curzon, fuddling the Levantine
monks with rosoglio that he might fleece them of their treasured
hereditary manuscripts, even Eliot Warburton's power, colouring, play of
fancy, have yielded to the mobility of Time. Two alone out of the
gallant company maintain their vogue to-day: Stanley's "Sinai and
Palestine," as a Fifth Gospel, an inspired Scripture Gazetteer; and
"Eothen," as a literary gem of purest ray serene.
In 1898 a reprint of the first edition was given to the public, prefaced
by a brief eulogium of the book and a slight notice of the author. It
brought to the writer of the "Introduction" not only kind and indulgent
criticism, but valuable corrections, fresh facts, clues to further
knowledge. These last have been carefully followed out. The unwary
statement that Kinglake never spoke after his first failure in the House
has been atoned by a careful study of all his speeches in and out of
A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study
5
Parliament. His reviews in the "Quarterly" and elsewhere have been
noted; impressions of his manner and appearance at different periods of
his life have been recovered from coaeval acquaintances; his friend
Hayward's Letters, the numerous allusions in Lord Houghton's Life, Mrs.
Crosse's lively chapters in "Red Letter Days of my Life," Lady
Gregory's interesting recollections of the Athenaeum Club in Blackwood
of December, 1895, the somewhat slender notice in the "Dictionary of
National Biography," have all been carefully digested. From these, and,
as will be seen, from other sources, the present Memoir has been
compiled; an endeavour - SERA TAMEN - to lay before the countless
readers and admirers of his books a fairly adequate appreciation, hitherto
unattempted, of their author.
I have to acknowledge the great kindness of Canon William
Warburton, who examined his brother Eliot's diaries on my behalf,
obtained information from Dean Boyle and Sir M. Grant Duff, cleared
up for me not a few obscure allusions in the "Eothen" pages. My
highly valued friend, Mrs. Hamilton Kinglake, of Taunton, his sister-in-
law, last surviving relative of his own generation, has helped me with
facts which no one else could have recalled. To Mr. Estcott, his old
acquaintance and Somersetshire neighbour, I am indebted for
recollections manifold and interesting; but above all I tender thanks to
Madame Novikoff, his intimate associate and correspondent during the
last twenty years of his life, who has supplemented her brilliant sketch of
him in "La Nouvelle Revue" of 1896 by oral and written information
lavish in quantity and of paramount biographical value. Kinglake's
external life, his literary and political career, his speeches, and the more
fugitive productions of his pen, were recoverable from public sources;
but his personal and private side, as it showed itself to the few close
intimates who still survive, must have remained to myself and others
meagre, superficial, disappointing, without Madame Novikoff's
unreserved and sympathetic confidence.
Alexander William Kinglake was descended from an old Scottish
stock, the Kinlochs, who migrated to England with King James, and
whose name was Anglicized into Kinglake. Later on we find them
A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study
6
settled on a considerable estate of their own at Saltmoor, near
Borobridge, whence towards the close of the eighteenth century two
brothers, moving southward, made their home in Taunton - Robert as a
physician, William as a solicitor and banker. Both were of high repute,
both begat famous sons. From Robert sprang the eminent
Parliamentary lawyer, Serjeant John Kinglake, at one time a
contemporary with Cockburn and Crowder on the Western Circuit, and
William Chapman Kinglake, who while at Trinity, Cambridge, won the
Latin verse prize, "Salix Babylonica," the English verse prizes on
"Byzantium" and the "Taking of Jerusalem," in 1830 and 1832. Of
William's sons the eldest was Alexander William, author of "Eothen,"
the youngest Hamilton, for many years one of the most distinguished
physicians in the West of England. "Eothen," as he came to be called,
was born at Taunton on the 5th August, 1809, at a house called "The
Lawn." His father, a sturdy Whig, died at the age of ninety through
injuries received in the hustings crowd of a contested election. His
mother belonged to an old Somersetshire family, the Woodfordes of
Castle Cary. She, too, lived to a great age; a slight, neat figure in
dainty dress, full of antique charm and grace. As a girl she had known
Lady Hester Stanhope, who lived with her grandmother, Lady Chatham,
at Burton Pynsent, her own father, Dr. Thomas Woodforde, being Lady
Chatham's medical attendant. (2) The future prophetess of the Lebanon
was then a wild girl, scouring the countryside on bare-backed horses;
she showed great kindness to Mary Woodforde, afterwards Kinglake's
mother. It was as his mother's son that she received him long
afterwards at Djoun. To his mother Kinglake was passionately attached;
owed to her, as he tells us in "Eothen," his home in the saddle and his
love for Homer. A tradition is preserved in the family that on the day
of her funeral, at a churchyard five miles away, he was missed from the
household group reassembled in the mourning home; he was found to
have ordered his horse, and galloped back in the darkness to his mother's
grave. Forty years later he writes to Alexander Knox: "The death of a
mother has an almost magical power of recalling the home of one's
childhood, and the almost separate world that rests upon affection." Of
A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study
7
his two sisters, one was well read and agreeably talkative, noted by
Thackeray as the cleverest woman he had ever met; the other, Mrs.
Acton, was a delightful old ESPRIT FORT, as I knew her in the sixties,
"pagan, I regret to say," but not a little resembling her brother in the
point and manner of her wit. The family moved in his infancy to an
old-fashioned handsome "Wilton House," adjoining closely to the town,
but standing amid spacious park-like grounds, and inhabited in after
years by Kinglake's younger brother Hamilton, who succeeded his uncle
in the medical profession, and passed away, amid deep and universal
regret, in 1898. Here during the thirties Sydney Smith was a frequent
and a welcome visitor; it was in answer to old Mrs. Kinglake that he
uttered his audacious MOT on being asked if he would object, as a
neighbouring clergyman had done, to bury a Dissenter: "Not bury
Dissenters? I should like to be burying them all day!"
Taunton was an innutrient foster-mother, ARIDA NUTRIX, for such
young lions as the Kinglake brood. Two hundred years before it had
been a prosperous and famous place, its woollen and kersey trades, with
the population they supported, ranking it as eighth in order among
English towns. Its inhabitants were then a gallant race, republican in
politics, Puritan in creed. Twice besieged by Goring and Lumford, it
had twice repelled the Royalists with loss. It was the centre of
Monmouth's rebellion and of Jeffrey's vengeance; the suburb of Tangier,
hard by its ancient castle, still recalls the time when Colonel Kirke and
his regiment of "Lambs" were quartered in the town. But long before
the advent of the Kinglakes its glory had departed; its manufactures had
died out, its society become Philistine and bourgeois - "little men who
walk in narrow ways" - while from pre-eminence in electoral venality
among English boroughs it was saved only by the near proximity of
Bridgewater. A noted statesman who, at a later period, represented it in
Parliament, used to say that by only one family besides Dr. Hamilton
Kinglake's could he be received with any sense of social or intellectual
equality.
Not much, however, of Kinglake's time was given to his native town:
he was early sent to the Grammar School at Ottery St. Mary's, the
A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study
8
"Clavering" of "Pendennis," whose Dr. Wapshot was George Coleridge,
brother of the poet. He was wont in after life to speak of this time with
bitterness; a delicate child, he was starved on insufficient diet; and an
eloquent passage in "Eothen" depicts his intellectual fall from the varied
interests and expanding enthusiasm of liberal home teaching to the
regulation gerund- grinding and Procrustean discipline of school. "The
dismal change is ordained, and then - thin meagre Latin with small
shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your
early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel
grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds and
ends of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down you
fall, from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of 'Scriptores Romani,' -
from Greek poetry, down, down to the cold rations of 'Poetae Graeci,'
cut up by commentators, and served out by school- masters!"
At Eton - under Keate, as all readers of "Eothen" know - he was
contemporary with Gladstone, Sir F. Hanmer, Lords Canning and
Dalhousie, Selwyn, Shadwell. He wrote in the "Etonian," created and
edited by Mackworth Praed; and is mentioned in Praed's poem on Surly
Hall as
"Kinglake, dear to poetry, And dear to all his friends."
Dr. Gatty remembers his "determined pale face"; thinks that he made
his mark on the river rather than in the playing fields, being a good oar
and swimmer. His great friend at school was Savile, the "Methley" of
his travels, who became successively Lord Pollington and Earl of
Mexborough. The Homeric lore which Methley exhibited in the Troad,
is curiously illustrated by an Eton story, that in a pugilistic encounter
with Hoseason, afterwards an Indian Cavalry officer, while the latter sate
between the rounds upon his second's knee, Savile strutted about the ring,
spouting Homer.
Kinglake entered at Trinity, Cambridge, in 1828, among an
exceptionally brilliant set - Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, John Sterling,
Trench, Spedding, Spring Rice, Charles Buller, Maurice, Monckton
Milnes, J. M. Kemble, Brookfield, Thompson. With none of them does
he seem in his undergraduate days to have been intimate. Probably then,
A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study
9
as afterwards, he shrank from CAMARADERIE, shared Byron's distaste
for "enthusymusy"; naturally cynical and self- contained, was repelled by
the spiritual fervour, incessant logical collision, aggressive tilting at
abuses of those young "Apostles," already
"Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would
yield, Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field,"
waxing ever daily, as Sterling exhorted, "in religion and
radicalism." He saw life differently; more practically, if more selfishly;
to one rhapsodizing about the "plain living and high thinking" of
Wordsworth's sonnet, he answered: "You know that you prefer dining
with people who have good glass and china and plenty of servants."
For Tennyson's poetry he even then felt admiration; quotes, nay,
misquotes, in "Eothen," from the little known "Timbuctoo"; (3) and from
"Locksley Hall"; and supplied long afterwards an incident adopted by
Tennyson in "Enoch Arden,"
"Once likewise in the ringing of his ears Though faintly, merrily - far
and far away - He heard the pealing of his parish bells," (4)
from his own experience in the desert, when on a Sunday, amid
overpowering heat and stillness, he heard the Marlen bells of Taunton
peal for morning church. (5)
In whatever set he may have lived he made his mark at Cambridge.
Lord Houghton remembered him as an orator at the Union; and speaking
to Cambridge undergraduates fifty years later, after enumerating the
giants of his student days, Macaulay, Praed, Buller, Sterling, Merivale,
he goes on to say: "there, too, were Kemble and Kinglake, the historian
of our earliest civilization and of our latest war; Kemble as interesting an
individual as ever was portrayed by the dramatic genius of his own race;
Kinglake, as bold a man-at-arms in literature as ever confronted public
opinion." We know, too, that not many years after leaving Cambridge
he received, and refused, a solicitation to stand as Liberal representative
of the University in Parliament. He was, in fact, as far as any of his
contemporaries from acquiescing in social conventionalisms and shams.
To the end of his life he chafed at such restraint: "when pressed to stay in
country houses," he writes in 1872, "I have had the frankness to say that
A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study
10
I have not discipline enough." Repeatedly he speaks with loathing of
the "stale civilization," the "utter respectability," of European life; (6)
longed with all his soul for the excitement and stir of soldiership, from
which his shortsightedness debarred him; (7) rushed off again and again
into foreign travel; set out immediately on leaving Cambridge, in 1834,
for his first Eastern tour, "to fortify himself for the business of life."
Methley joined him at Hamburg, and they travelled by Berlin, Dresden,
Prague, Vienna, to Semlin, where his book begins. Lord Pollington's
health broke down, and he remained to winter at Corfu, while Kinglake
pursued his way alone, returning to England in October, 1835. (8) On
his return he read for the Chancery Bar along with his friend Eliot
Warburton, under Bryan Procter, a Commissioner of Lunacy, better
known by his poet-name, Barry Cornwall; his acquaintance with both
husband and wife ripening into lifelong friendship. Mrs. Procter is the
"Lady of Bitterness," cited in the "Eothen" Preface. As Anne Skepper,
before her marriage, she was much admired by Carlyle; "a brisk witty
prettyish clear eyed sharp tongued young lady"; and was the intimate,
among many, especially of Thackeray and Browning. In epigrammatic
power she resembled Kinglake; but while his acrid sayings were emitted
with gentlest aspect and with softest speech; while, like Byron's Lambro:
"he was the mildest mannered man That ever scuttled ship or cut a
throat, With such true breeding of a gentleman, You never could divine his
real thought,"
her sarcasms rang out with a resonant clearness that enforced and
aggravated their severity. That two persons so strongly resembling
each other in capacity for rival exhibition, or for mutual exasperation,
should have maintained so firm a friendship, often surprised their
acquaintance; she explained it by saying that she and Kinglake
sharpened one another like two knives; that, in the words of Petruchio,
"Where two raging fires meet together, They do consume the thing
that feeds their fury."
Crabb Robinson, stung by her in a tender place, his boastful
iterative monologues on Weimar and on Goethe, said that of all men
Procter ought to escape purgatory after death, having tasted its fulness
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AW.Kinglake-ABiographicalandLiteraryStudy1AW.Kinglake-ABiographicalandLiteraryStudybyRev.W.TcikwellAW.Kinglake-ABiographicalandLiteraryStudy2PREFACEITisjustelevenyearssinceKinglakepassedaway,andhislifehasnotyetbeenseparatelymemorialized.Afewyearsmore,andthepersonalsideofhimwouldbeirrecoverable,thoug...
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