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

A W. Kinglake - A

Biographical and Literary

Study

by Rev. W. Tcikwell

A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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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a w. kinglake - a biographical and literary study(A·W·金雷克传记研究)

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