A. W. Kinglake: A Biographical and Literary Study

William Tuckwell

A. W. Kinglake: A Biographical and Literary Study

EAN 8596547238386

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [email protected]

Table of Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER I EARLY YEARS

CHAPTER II EOTHEN

CHAPTER III LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE

CHAPTER IV THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA

CHAPTER V MADAME NOVIKOFF

CHAPTER VI LATER DAYS, AND DEATH

INDEX

ADVERTISEMENTS

EOTHEN

RECENT PUBLICATIONS BY MESSRS. BELL.

PREFACE

Table of Contents

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 Athenæum 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:

And may its buyer have no cause to say,

His money is but lost or thrown away.

CHAPTER I

EARLY YEARS

Table of Contents

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. 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 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 coæval 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 Athenæum 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 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. [6] 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 his two sisters, one was well read and agreeably talkative, noted by Thackeray as the cleverest woman he had ever