William Tuckwell

“ Todleben, who knew and loved Kinglake well, pronounced the book a charming romance, not a history of the war. Individuals were aggrieved by its notice of themselves or of their regiments; statesmen chafed under the scientific analysis of their characters, or at the publication of official letters which they had intended but not required to be looked upon as confidential, and which the recipients had in all innocence communicated to the historian. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 eminent husband of a lady, now passed away, who in her lifetime gave Sunday dinners at which Kinglake was always present, speaks of him as sensitive, quiet in the presence of noisy people, of Brookfield and the overpowering Bernal Osborne; liking their company, but never saying anything worthy of remembrance. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ A being thus ardent will often go wrong in her strenuous course; will often alarm, sometimes provoke; will now and then work mischief and even perhaps grievous harm; but she will be our own Eve after all; the sweet-speaking tempter whom heaven created to be the joy and the trouble of this pleasing anxious existence; to shame us away from the hiding-places of a slothful neutrality, and lead us abroad in the world, men militant here on earth, enduring quiet, content with strife, and looking for peace hereafter. ”

“ Herein, in these subjective chatty confidences, is part of the spell he lays upon us: while we read we are in the East: other books, as Warburton says, tell us about the East, this is the East itself. And yet in his company we are always Englishmen in the East: behind Servian, Egyptian, Syrian, desert realities, is a background of English scenery, faint and unobtrusive yet persistent and horizoning. In the Danubian forest we talk of past school-days. The Balkan plain suggests an English park, its trees planted as if to shut out “some infernal fellow creature in the shape of a new-made squire” ”

“ We best learn the unsuspected might of a being like this when we try the weight of that sadness which hangs like lead upon the room, the gallery, the stairs, where once her footstep sounded, and now is heard no more. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But a right sense of historical proportion is in no time the heritage of the many, and is least of all attainable while the memory of a campaign is fresh. On Englishmen who welcomed home their army in 1855, the strife from which shattered but victorious it had returned, loomed as epoch-making and colossal, as claiming therefore permanent record from some eloquent artist of attested descriptive power. Soon the report gained ground that the destined chronicler was Kinglake, and all men hailed the selection ”

“ 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 ”

“ Kinglake said in 1871, “the spectacle of Bismarck teaching the A B C of Liberal politics to the hapless French. His p. 117last 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. ”

“ In the presence of one man, Tennyson, she laid aside her shrewishness: “talking with Alfred Tennyson lifts me out of the earth earthy; a visit to Farringford is like a retreat to the religious.” A celebrity in London for fifty years, she died, witty and vigorous to the last, in 1888. “You and I and Mr. Kinglake,” she says to Lord Houghton, p. 17“are all that are left of the goodly band that used to come to St. John’s Wood; Eliot Warburton, Motley, Adelaide, Count de Verg, Chorley, Sir Edwin Landseer, my husband.” ”

“ 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 bakshîsh 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. ”

“ It is the gracious fooling of a philosopher who understood his company. “There are folks,” says Mr. Counsellor Pleydell, “before whom a man should take care how he plays the fool, because they have either too much malice or too little wit.” Kinglake knew his associates, and was not ashamed desipere in loco, to frolic in their presence. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ In the panic of 1858, when the address of the French colonels to the Emperor, beseeching to be led against England, had created serious alarm on this side the Channel, he went down to Bridgewater to enlighten the West of England. “Why,” he asked, “do we fear invasion? The population of France is peaceful, the ‘turnip-soup Jacques Bonhomme’ is peaceful, the soldiers of the line are peaceful. Why are we anxious? ”

“ 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. ”

“ If the framework of the narrative is epic, its treatment is frequently dramatic. The “Usage of Europe” in the opening pages is not so much a record as a personification of unwritten Law: the Great Eltchi tramps the stage with a majesty sometimes bordering on fustian. Dramatic is the story of the sleeping Cabinet. “It was evening—a summer evening”—one thinks of a world-famous passage in the “De Corona”—when the Duke of Newcastle carried to Richmond Lodge the fateful despatch committing England to the war. ”

“ Further, the “Russian Analysis of the Note,” escaping shortly afterwards from the bag of diplomatic secrecy, revealed to our Cabinet the necessity of those amendments to the Note on which the Porte had insisted. And lastly, the passage of the Dardanelles by our fleet, which more than any overt act made war inevitable, was ordered by the Government at home against Lord Stratford’s counsel. Between panic-stricken statesmen and vacillating ambassadors, Lord Clarendon on one side, M. de la Cour on the other, the Eltchi stands like Tennyson’s promontory of rock,
“Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crowned.” ”

“ To the great Prime Minister’s absolute fearlessness he did full justice, as one of the finest features in his character; and loved to quote an epigram by Lord Houghton, to whom Gladstone had complained in a moment of weariness that he led the life of a dog. “Yes,” said Houghton, “but of a St. Bernard dog, ever busied in saving life.” He loved to contrast the twofold biographical paradox in the careers of the two famous rivals, Gladstone and Disraeli; the dreaming Tory mystic, incarnation p. 146of Oxford exclusiveness and Puseyite reserve, passing into the Radical iconoclast ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ If Lord Raglan was the Hector of the Crimean Iliad, its Agamemnon was Lord Stratford: “king of men,” as Stanley called him in his funeral sermon at Westminster; king of distrustful home Cabinets, nominally his masters, of scheming European embassies, of insulting Russian opponents, of presumptuous French generals, of false and fleeting Pashas (Le Sultan, c’est Lord Stratford, said St. Arnaud) , of all men, whatever their degree, who entered his ambassadorial presence. Ascendency was native to the man ”

“ To compare an idyll with an epic, it may be said, is like comparing a cameo with a Grecian p. 87temple: 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” ”

“ He gives us everywhere, not history, antiquities, geography, description, statistics, but only Kinglake, only his own sensations, thoughts, experiences. We are told not what the desert looks like, but what journeying in the desert feels like. From morn till eve you sit aloft upon your voyaging camel; the risen sun, still lenient on your left, mounts vertical and dominant ”

“ 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, p. 86of periphrasis, aphorism, felicitous phrase and pregnant epithet. ”