Born, at Tauton, 5 Aug. 1809. Early education at Eton. Matric. Trin. Coll., Cam., 1828; B.A., 1832; M.A., 1836. Student of Lincoln’s Inn, 14 April 1832; called to Bar, 5 May 1837. Travelled in East, 1835. Contrib. to “Quarterly Rev.,” Dec. 1844 and March 1845. To Algiers, 1845; accompanied St. Arnaud’s forces. With English forces during Crimean War, 1854. M.P. for Bridgewater, 1857–69. Contrib. to “Blackwood’s Mag.,” Sept. 1872. Died, in London, 2 Jan. 1891. Works: “Eothen” (anon.), 1844; “Invasion of the Crimea,” vols. i., ii., 1863; vols. iii., iv., 1868; vol. v., 1875; vol. vi., 1880; vols. vii., viii., 1887.

Personal

  There is nothing marquant in his appearance or conversation. He is blond of beard and visage, fortyish in years, with a good eye and a pleasant voice, like most Englishmen. He has thus far made no great figure in Parliament.

  When I first knew him he lived in Hyde Park Place, in rooms overlooking a churchyard. When he had first looked at them he said to the landlady, “I should not like to live here—I should be afraid of ghosts.” “Oh no, sir,” she replied; “there is always a policeman round the corner.” I really believe he took the rooms on the spur of his delight at this truly British answer. Gout was the first malady to attack him, and to wean him from his daily club. He had a fancy to try a lady doctor, and wrote to one to ask if gout was beyond her scope. She replied, “Dear Sir,—Gout is not beyond my scope, but men are.” Then he called in Sir James Paget, because he had been very much struck with a portrait he had seen of him by Millais.

  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…. 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 Mérimée: terse epigram, felicitous apropos, whimsical presentment of the topic under discussion, emitted in a low tone, and without the slightest change of muscle.

Eothen, 1844

  “Eothen” is written in almost a conversational style, but it is such conversation as a Pythagorean might have used after his probation of long silence:—the production of one more accustomed to intercourse with his own mind than with that of others. He deals more in ideas than opinions, and seems to speak as it were in a soliloquy, amusing and convincing himself with vivid pictures and well-formed thought. There is apparent in almost every page a puzzling contrast between a vivacity of expression and practiced wit that would argue a man of the world—and the bold originality, and daring indifference to the prejudices of society, which are seldom misinterpreted as indications of secluded habits…. This is a real book—not a sham. It displays a varied and comprehensive power of mind, and a genuine mastery over the first and strongest of modern languages. The author has caught the character and humour of the Eastern mind as completely as Anastasius; while in his gorgeous descriptions and power of sarcasm he rivals Vathek. His terseness, vigour, and bold imagery remind us of the brave old style of Fuller and of South, to which he adds a spirit, freshness, and delicacy all his own.

  Do you know also “Eothen,” a work of genius?… Do you know Leigh Hunt’s exquisite essays called “The Indicator and Companion” &c., published by Moxon? I hold them at once in delight and reverence.

  Reading a brilliant book by a nameless man,—“Eothen, or Eastern Travel.” Full of careless, easy, masterly sketches, biting satire, and proud superiority to common report. It is an intellectual egotism which he acknowledges and glories in. He has remarkably freed himself from religious prepossessions, and writes as he feels, not as he ought to feel, at Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

  Dined with Kinglake, at the Athenæum, and talked to him about “Eothen.” He wrote half of it in three weeks at Vevey, and the rest long afterwards.

  The performance was wonderful; the promise a trifle dangerous.

  This charming little work, spontaneous as it appears to be, as if it had flowed smoothly off the pen at once without a pause, was in reality recast more than once by the painfully conscientious author, before it was finally given to the world in 1844, some years after the actual journey. Few books have been more thoroughly appreciated by the reading public. The ground was still comparatively new, and the tale which was told with so much freshness and charm was still one of excitement and occasional danger. “Eothen” is indeed a perfect gem of literary art, with its blending of a refined and scholarly style with an almost familiar lightness of narrative, and the overflowing, but always delicate humour with which it is enlivened.

  Once in my girlhood I, who seldom heard of books, and who grew up in a house without a Shakespeare, and in a province without a bookstall, caught the words of one friend to another, “What do you consider the most brilliant book of the last half-century?” And the answer that came was, “Eothen,” and a sequel to the answer was a present to me of the copy of the book itself, with the frontispiece of impaled skeletons, afterwards brought up as evidence in the Bulgarian atrocity controversy. I took it to my heart at once, and there it has ever since remained. “Thank you so much for recommending me ‘Eothen,’” a schoolboy friend wrote to me in after-days, “and please tell me of some more books like it.” But he has grown to manhood, and the books, “like ‘Eothen,’” have not yet appeared.

  The popularity of “Eothen” is a paradox: it fascinates by violating all the rules which convention assigns to viatic narrative. It traverses the most affecting regions of the world, and describes no one of them: the Troad—and we get only his childish raptures over Pope’s “Homer’s Iliad;” Stamboul—and he recounts the murderous services rendered by the Golden Horn to the Assassin whose serail, palace, council chamber, it washes; Cairo—but the Plague shuts out all other thoughts; Jerusalem—but Pilgrims have vulgarized the Holy Sepulchre into a Bartholomew Fair. He gives us everywhere, not history, antiquities, geography, description, statistics, but only Kinglake, only his own sensations, thoughts, experiences…. To compare an idyll with an epic, it may be said, is like comparing a cameo with a Grecian temple; 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.

Invasion of the Crimea, 1863–87

  It is going to be a wonderful book, and will sell enormously, at least I think so. There is a sort of chorus in the style, which carries one along in a way to which I hardly know a parallel. There was a sort of dreaminess about “Eothen” which was exactly suited to the subject; but here, with all the flow of the language, there is a precision that makes one pause to think and feel that one is reading history. The book will give rise to much interpellation and much controversy, but this could not be otherwise if the history was to be worth anything. The scene in the drowsy Cabinet at Richmond made me shake with laughter, and it bears the stamp of truth. The survivors will be in a great state of mind about it, and if they deny the statement, will not be believed.

  This history is the most remarkable book which has of late come before us; but it is also the book which most calls for exact and searching criticism. It has the freshness of an unwritten page of history, yet it awakens the remembrance of events which deeply stirred the heart of the nation. It records the greatest political transactions and the greatest military enterprise in which the men of our time have engaged. It exhibits the actors in these occurrences stripped of all disguise, for the author has not thought himself restrained by duty or discretion from dissecting to the quick the characters and motives of his own contemporaries. He has, therefore, thrown the passion of political life into this historical narrative, and he flavours it with the peremptory assertion, the biting sarcasm, the irritable sensitiveness, the lively retort of a man struggling to make a reputation in contentious debate. The result may be extremely flattering to Mr. Kinglake’s literary pretensions. He has rendered the uninviting narrative of dead diplomatic negotiations attractive to fascination, by a vivid delineation of individual character and by a nice analysis of the wheelwork of affairs; and he has contrived to throw a romantic glow over the patrons and the clients for whose exaltation this history has, we presume, been chiefly written.

  I am sure you are right in your estimate of Kinglake’s book. Such diatribes are no more history than the Balaclava charge was war. It was, however, his brief to make out the Crimean war a French intrigue, and he obeyed the old legal maxim in a different case—“Abuse the plaintiff’s attorney.”

  The first two volumes of Mr. Kinglake’s “Invasion of the Crimea” were certainly among the most successful and renowned English books of our time. Their style was one of the most renowned things about them, and yet how conspicuous a fault in Mr. Kinglake’s style is this over-charge of which I have been speaking. Mr. James Gordon Bennett, of the “New York Herald” says, I believe, that the highest achievement of the human intellect is what he calls “a good editorial.” This is not quite so; but, if it were so, on what a height would these two volumes by Mr. Kinglake stand! I have already spoken of the Attic and the Asiatic styles; besides these, there is the Corinthian style. That is the style for “a good editorial,” and Mr. Kinglake has really reached perfection in it. It has not the warm glow, blithe movement, and soft pliancy of life, as the Attic style has; it has not the over-heavy richness and encumbered gait of the Asiatic style; it has glitter without warmth, rapidity without ease, effectiveness without charm. Its characteristic is, that it has no soul; all it exists for, is to get its ends, to make its points, to damage its adversaries, to be admired, to triumph. A style so bent on effect at the expense of soul, simplicity, and delicacy; a style so little studious of the charm of the great models; so far from classic truth and grace, must surely be said to have the note of provinciality. Yet Mr. Kinglake’s talent is a really eminent one, and so in harmony with our intellectual habits and tendencies, that, to the great bulk of English people, the faults of his style seem its merits; all the more needful that criticism should not be dazzled by them.

  Mr. Kinglake’s still unfinished history of the Crimean War is full of brilliant description and of keen, penetrating thought. It shows many gleams of the poetic, and it has some of the brightest and bitterest satirical passages in the literature of our time. The chapters in which Mr. Kinglake goes out of his way to describe the career, the character, and the companions of the Emperor Napoleon III. cut like corrosive acid. Mr. Kinglake found his mind filled with detestation of Louis Napoleon and his companies. He invented for himself the theory that the Crimean War arose only out of Louis Napoleon’s peculiar position, and his anxiety to become recognized among the great sovereigns of Europe. The invention of this theory gave him an excuse for lavishing so much labor of love and hate on chapters which must always remain a masterpiece of remorseless satire. They hardly pretend to be always just in their estimate of men, but no one rates them according to their justice or their injustice. They are read for their style, and nothing more. Perhaps it would not be altogether unjust to say much the same of the history as far as it has gone. It is brilliant; it is powerful; it is full of thrilling passages; but it remains after all the historical romance rather than history. Moreover, it is a good deal too long.

  A work that has taken rank as one of the most important military histories in the English language. It is still incomplete, the last volume yet published bringing the history down only to the Battle of Inkermann; but enough has been published to establish its reputation. The author’s style differs from that of Napier—perhaps the only other great military historian with whom he may properly be compared—in being less graceful, but more vigorous. While his descriptive powers are scarcely inferior, his political acumen is far greater, and his research into the complicated relations of the different nations at war far more subtle and successful. The presentation of the cause of the war, occupying more than three hundred pages of the first volume, is perhaps the most brilliant part of the history. The grasp and insight with which the author traced the impulses that finally led to the conflict are worthy of great admiration.

  The literary gifts of Kinglake, the historian of the Crimean war, would have amply sufficed to hand his book down to posterity. Unfortunately, the most brilliant parts are the least relevant, and the necessary is everywhere encumbered with the superfluous.

  The two first volumes appeared in 1863; the last was published but two years before he succumbed, in the first days of 1891, to a slow incurable disease. In all, the task had occupied thirty years. Long before these years ran out, the world had learnt to regard the Crimean struggle in something like its true perspective; but over Kinglake’s mind it continued to loom in all its original proportions. To adapt a phrase of M. Jules Lemaître’s, “le monde a changé en trente ans: lui ne bouge; il ne lève plus de dessus son papier à copie sa face congestionnée.” And yet Kinglake was no cloistered scribe. Before his last illness he dined out frequently, and was placed by many among the first half-a-dozen talkers in London. His conversation, though delicate and finished, brimmed full of interest in life and affairs: but let him enter his study, and its walls became a hedge. Without, the world was moving: within, it was always 1854, until by slow toiling it turned into 1855. His style is hard, elaborate, polished to brilliance. Its difficult labour recalls Thucydides. In effect it charms at first by its accuracy and vividness; but with continuous perusal it begins to weigh upon the reader, who feels the strain, the unsparing effort that this glittering fabric must have cost the builder, and at length ceases to sympathise with the story and begins to sympathise with the author.

  The literary ability in any case is remarkable; the spirit of the writing is never quenched by the masses of diplomatic and military information; the occasional portraits of remarkable men are admirably incisive; the style is invariably polished to the last degree, and the narrative is as lucid as it is animated.

  That this history shows no small literary faculties no competent judge can deny. The art of wordpainting—a dubious and dangerous art—is pushed to almost its furthest limits; the writer has a wonderful gift of combining the minutest and most numerous details into an orderly and intelligible whole; and the quality which the French untranslatably call diable du corps, or, as we more pedantically say, “dæmonic energy,” is present everywhere. But the book is monstrously out of proportion,—a single battle has something like an entire volume, and the events of some two years occupy eight,—and, clear as the individual pictures are, the panorama is of such endless length that the minds’s eye retains no proper notion of it. In the second place, the style, though brilliant, is hard and brassy, full of points that are more suitable to the platform or the newspaper than to the historic page,—not so much polished as varnished, and after a short time intolerably fatiguing. In the third,—and this is the gravest fault of all,—the author’s private or patriotic likes or dislikes pervade the whole performance and reduce too much of it to a tissue of extravagant advocacy or depreciation, made more disgusting by the repetition of catch phrases and pet labels somewhat after the manner of Dickens.

  We imagine there has been no such work about battles and fighting written by any layman.

  “The Invasion of the Crimea” is open to several serious objections. It is far too long, and the style is florid, diffuse and highly mannered. Moreover, Kinglake is a most prejudiced historian. There is no mean in his judgment; he either can see no faults, or he can see nothing else. Raglan and St. Arnaud are examples of the two extremes. But frequently the historian supplies the corrective to his own judgment. If the battle of the Alma was won as Kinglake says it was, then it was won not by generalship but by hard fighting plus a lucky blunder on the part of the general. On the other hand, Kinglake sustains the interest with great skill, especially in the battle volumes. Long as are the accounts of the Alma and of Balaclava, they are perfectly clear, and the impression left is indelible.

  In Kinglake, great merits as an historian are marred by serious blemishes. In the thoroughness with which he surveys everything within the field of his inquiry he falls no whit behind Professor Gardiner himself. Moreover, in all the qualities of life, motion, the play of changing colour, and the vivid dramatic realism of the pictures with which he fills the imagination, he is not unworthy even of Mr. Froude. But, on the other hand, not even Froude himself can outdo him in the spirit of the partisan. The special pleader stands revealed in every page of the history. Never was there a writer of stronger prejudices; never one that showed a more bitter animus towards the objects of his aversion. Thus the whole book is coloured by the writer’s excessive dislike to Napoleon III.

  His “infirmities” as a writer, to which he makes almost touching allusion, are better characterized as extreme conscientiousness and honest endeavour to do full justice to his subject. Not only his own writing of the work, but the actual production of the book, were made more difficult by his extraordinary conscientious nature. Thus we find him objecting to the usual method of making stereotype plates from which to print. The word stereotype, it seems, had alarmed him with an irrevocable sound fatal to all alterations or corrections in which he largely indulged. He says in opposition to the stereotyping, “I am so constituted that it would be painful to me not to be able to satisfy the minds of one of my heroes who might write to me in anguish to explain that he is ‘Captain Snook’ and not ‘Captain Cook,’” The foregoing conveys so much more than is expressed of the qualities which distinguish Kinglake, that it explains to a great extent why writing his History was such a lengthy process.

  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; while for the combination of precise simplicity with exhaustive synopsis, the masquerading of moral indignation in the guise of mocking laughter, the loathing of a gentleman for a scoundrel set to the measure not of indignation but of contempt, we must go back to the refined insolence, the ὕβρις πεηαιδευμένη, of Voltaire.