OF THE CRIMEA" WAS the history of the Crimean War worth writing? Not as a magnified newspaper report, - that had been already done - but as a permanent work of art from the pen of a great literary expert? Very many of us, I think, after the lapse of fifty years, feel compelled to say that it was not. The struggle represented no great principles, begot no far-reaching consequences. It was not inspired by the "holy glee" with which in Wordsworth's sonnet Liberty fights against a tyrant, but by the faltering boldness, the drifting, purposeless unresolve of statesmen who did not desire it, and by the irrational violence of a Press which did not understand it. It was not a necessary war; its avowed object would have been attained within a few weeks or months by bloodless European concert. It was not a glorious war; crippled by an incompatible alliance and governed by the Evil Genius who had initiated it for personal and sordid ends, it brought discredit on baffled generals in the field, on Crown, Cabinet, populace, at home. It was not a fruitful war; the detailed results purchased by its squandered life and treasure lapsed in swift succession during twenty sequent years, until the last sheet of the treaty which secured them was contemptuously torn up by Gortschakoff in 1870. 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; yet the sceptic who in looking back to-day decries the greatness of the campaign may perhaps no less hesitate to approve the fitness of its chosen annalist. His fame was due to the A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study perfection of a single book; he ranked as a potentate in STYLE. But literary perfection, whether in prose or poetry, is a fragile quality, an AFFLATUS irregular, independent, unamenable to orders; the official tributes of a Laureate we compliment at their best with the northern farmer's verdict on the pulpit performances of his parson: "An' I niver knaw'd wot a mean'd but I thow't a 'ad summut to saay, And I thowt a said wot a owt to 'a said an' I comed awaay." Set to compile a biography from thirty years of "Moniteurs," the author of Waverley, like Lord Chesterfield's diamond pencil, produced one miracle of dulness; it might well be feared that Kinglake's volatile pen, when linked with forceful feeling and bound to rigid task-work, might lose the charm of casual epigram, easy luxuriance, playful egotism, vagrant allusion, which established "Eothen" as a classic. On the other hand, he had been for twenty years conversant with Eastern history, geography, politics; was, more than most professional soldiers, an adept in military science; had sate in the centre of the campaign as its general's guest and comrade; was intrusted, above all, by Lady Raglan with the entire collection of her husband's papers: her wish, implied though not expressed, that they should be utilized for the vindication of the great field-marshal's fame, he accepted as a sacred charge; her confidence not only governed his decision to become the historian of the war, but imparted a personal character to the narrative. In order, therefore, rightly to appreciate "The Invasion of the Crimea," we must look upon it as a great prose epic; its argument, machinery, actors, episodes, subordinate to a predominant ever present hero. In its fine preamble Lord Raglan sits enthroned high above generals, armies, spectators, conflicts; on the quality of his mind the fate of two great hosts and the fame of two great nations hang. He checks St. Arnaud's wild ambition; overrules the waverings of the Allies; against his own judgment, but in dutiful obedience to home instruction carries out the descent upon the Old Fort coast. The successful achievement of the perilous flank march is ascribed to the undivided command which, during forty-eight hours, accident had conferred upon him. From his presence in council French and English come away convinced and A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study strengthened; his calm in action imparts itself to anxious generals and panic- stricken aides-de-camp. Through Alma fight, from the high knoll to which happy audacity had carried him he rides the whirlwind and directs the storm. In the terrible crisis which sees the Russians breaking over the crest of Inkerman, in the ill-fated attack on the Great Redan where Lacy Yea is killed, his apparent freedom from anxiety infects all around him and achieves redemption from disaster. (16) We see him in his moments of vexation and discomfiture; dissembling pain and anger under the stress of the French alliance, galled by Cathcart's disobedience, by the loss of the Light Brigade, by Lord Panmure's insulting, querulous, unfounded blame. We read his last despatch, framed with wonted grace and clearness; then - on the same day - we see the outworn frame break down, and follow mournfully two days later the afflicting details of his death. As the generals and admirals of the allied forces stand round the dead hero's form, as the palled bier, draped in the flag of England, is carried from headquarters to the port, as the "Caradoc," steaming away with her honoured freight, flies out her "Farewell" signal, the narrative abruptly ends. The months of the siege which still remained might be left to other hands or lapse untold. Troy had still to be taken when Hector died; but with his funeral dirge the Iliad closed, the blind bard's task was over: "Such honours Ilion to her hero paid, And peaceful slept the mighty Hector's shade." 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. "Before the reading of the Paper had long continued, all the members of the Cabinet except a small minority were overcome with sleep"; the few who remained awake were in a quiet, assenting frame of mind, and the despatch "received from the A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study Cabinet the kind of approval which is awarded to an unobjectionable Sermon." Not less dramatic is Nolan's death; the unearthly shriek of the slain corpse erect in saddle with sword arm high in air, as the dead horseman rode still seated through the 13th Light Dragoons; the "Minden Yell" of the 20th driving down upon the Iakoutsk battalion; the sustained and scathing satire on the Notre Dame Te Deum for the Boulevard massacre. A simple dialogue, a commonplace necessary act, is staged sometimes for effect. "Then Lord Stratford apprised the Sultan that he had a private communication to make to him. The pale Sultan listened." . . . "Whose was the mind which had freshly come to bear upon this part of the fight? Sir Colin Campbell was sitting in his saddle, the veteran was watching his time." . . . "The Emperor Nicholas was alone in his accustomed writing-room. He took no counsel; he rang a bell. Presently an officer of his staff stood before him. To him he gave his order for the occupation of the Principalities." This overpasses drama - it is melodrama. To the personal element which pervades the volumes great part of their charm is due. The writer never obtrudes himself, but leaves his presence to be discerned by the touches which attest an eye- witness. Through his observant nearness we watch the Chief's demeanour and hear his words; see him "turn scarlet with shame and anger" when the brutal Zouaves carry outrage into the friendly Crimean village, witness his personal succour of the wounded Russian after Inkerman, hear his arch acceptance of the French courtesy, so careful always to yield the post of danger to the English; his "Go quietly" to the excited aide-de- camp; (17) his good-humoured reception of the scared and breathless messenger from D'Aurelle's brigade; the "five words" spoken to Airey commanding the long delayed advance across the Alma; the "tranquil low voice" which gave the order rescuing the staff from its unforeseen encounter with the Russian rear. He records Codrington's leap on his grey Arab into the breast-work of the Great Redoubt; Lacy Yea's passionate energy in forcing his clustered regiment to open out; Miller's stentorian "Rally" in reforming the Scots Greys after the Balaclava charge; Clarke losing his helmet in the same charge, and creating A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study amongst the Russians, as he plunged in bareheaded amongst their ranks, the belief that he was sheltered by some Satanic charm. He notes on the Alma the singular pause of sound maintained by both armies just before the cannonade began; the first death - of an artilleryman riding before his gun - a new sight to nine- tenths of those who witnessed it; (18) the weird scream of exploding shells as they rent the air around. He crossed the Alma close behind Lord Raglan, cantering after him to the summit of a conspicuous hillock in the heart of the enemy's position, whence the mere sight of plumed English officers scared the Russian generals, and, followed soon by guns and troops, governed the issue of the fight. The general's manner was "the manner of a man enlivened by the progress of a great undertaking without being robbed of his leisure. He spoke to me, I remember, about his horse. He seemed like a man who had a clue of his own and knew his way through the battle." When the last gun was fired Kinglake followed the Chief back, witnessed the wild burst of cheering accorded to him by the whole British army, a manifestation, Lord Burghersh tells us, which greatly distressed his modesty - and dined alone with him in his tent on the evening of the eventful day. 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; while yet in his teens we find Etonian and Cambridge friends writing to him deferentially as to a critic and superior. At four and twenty he became Minister to a Court manageable only by high-handed authority and menace. He owned, and for the most part controlled, a violent temper; it broke bounds sometimes, to our great amusement as we read to-day, to the occasional discomfiture of ATTACHES or of dependents, (19) to the abject terror of Turkish Sublimities who had outworn his patience. But he knew when A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study to be angry; he could pulverize by fiery outbreaks the Reis Effendi and his master, Abdu-l-Mejid; but as Plenipotentiary to the United States he could "quench the terror of his beak, the lightning of his eye," disarming by his formal courtesy and winning by his obvious sincerity the suspicious and irritable John Quincy Adams. When Menschikoff once insulted him, seeing that a quarrel at that moment would be fatal to his purpose, he pretended to be deaf, and left the Russian in the belief that his rude speech had not been heard. Enthroned for the sixth time in Constantinople, at the dangerous epoch of 1853, he could point to an unequalled diplomatic record in the past; to the Treaty of Bucharest, to reunion of the Helvetic Confederacy shattered by Napoleon's fall, to the Convention which ratified Greek independence, to the rescue from Austrian malignity of the Hungarian refugees. His conduct of the negotiations preceding the Crimean War is justly called the cornerstone of his career: at this moment of his greatness Kinglake encounters and describes him: through the brilliant chapters in his opening volume, as more fully later on through Mr. Lane Poole's admirable biography, the Great Eltchi is known to English readers. He moves across the stage with a majesty sometimes bordering on what Iago calls bombast circumstance; drums and trumpets herald his every entrance; now pacing the shady gardens of the Bosphorus, now foiling, "in his grand quiet way," the Czar's ferocious Christianity, or torturing his baffled ambassador by scornful concession of the points which he formally demanded but did not really want; or crushing with "thin, tight, merciless lips and grand overhanging Canning brow" the presumptuous French commander who had dared to enter his presence with a plot for undermining England's influence in the partnership of the campaign. Was he, we ask as we end the fascinating description, was he, what Bright and the Peace Party proclaimed him to be, the cause of the Crimean War? The Czar's personal dislike to him - a caprice which has never been explained (20) - exasperated no doubt to the mind of Nicholas the repulse of Menschikoff's demands; but that the precipitation of the prince and his master had put the Russian Court absolutely in the wrong is universally admitted. It has been urged A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study against him that his recommendation of the famous Vienna Note to the Porte was official merely, and allowed the watchful Turks to assume his personal approbation of their refusal. It may be so; his biographer does not admit so much: but it is obvious that the Turks were out of hand, and that no pressure from Lord Stratford could have persuaded them to accept the Note. 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." Napoleon at St. Helena attributed much of his success in the field to the fact that he was not hampered by governments at home. Every modern commander, down certainly to the present moment, must have envied him. Kinglake's mordant pen depicts with felicity and compression the men of Downing Street, who without military experience or definite political aim, thwarted, criticised, over- ruled, tormented, their much-enduring General. 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; Panmure, ungenerous, rough-tongued, violent, churlish, yet not malevolent - "a rhinoceros rather than a tiger" - hurried by subservience to the newspaper Press into injustice which he afterwards recognized, yet did but sullenly repair. We see finally that dominant Press itself, personified in the all-powerful Delane, a potentate with convictions at A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study once flexible and vehement; forceful without spite and merciless without malignity; writing no articles, but evoking, shaping, revising all. The French commanders were not hampered by the muzzled Paris Press, which had long since ceased to utter any but dictated sentiments; they suffered even more disastrously from the imperious interference of the Tuileries. Canrobert's inaction, mutability, sudden alarms, flagrant breaches of faith, were inexplicable until long afterwards, when the fall of the Empire disclosed the secret instructions - disloyal to his allies and ruinous to the campaign - by which Louis Napoleon shackled his unhappy General. In Canrobert's successor, Pelissier, he met his match. 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 siege should be pressed at once, the city taken at any cost, the expedition to Kertch resumed. Once only, under torment of the Emperor's reproaches and the Minister at War's remonstrances, his resolution and his nerve gave way; eight days of failing judgment issued in the Karabelnaya defeat, the severest repulse which the two armies had sustained; but the paralysis passed away, he showed himself once more eager to act in concert with the English general; - when the long-borne strain of disappointment and anxiety sapped at last Lord Raglan's vital forces, and the hard fierce Frenchman stood for upwards of an hour beside his dead colleague's bedside, "crying like a child." The lieutenants of Lord Raglan in the Crimea have long since passed away, but in artistic epical presentment they retain their place around him. Airey, his right hand from the first disembarkation at Kalamita Bay, strong-willed, decisive, ardent, thrusting away suspense and doubt, untying every knot, is vindicated by his Chief against the Duke of Newcastle's wordy inculpation in the severest despatch perhaps ever A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study penned to his official superior by a soldier in the field. Colin Campbell, with glowing face, grey kindling eye, light, stubborn, crisping hair, leads his Highland brigade tip the hill against the Vladimir columns, till "with the sorrowful wail which bursts from the brave Russian infantry when they have to suffer loss," eight battalions of the enemy fall back in retreat. Lord Lucan, tall, lithe, slender, his face glittering and panther- like in moments of strenuous action, wins our hearts as he won Kinglake's, in spite of the mis-aimed cleverness and presumptuous self- confidence which always criticised and sometimes disobeyed the orders of his Chief. General Pennefather, "the grand old boy," his exulting radiant face flashing everywhere through the smoke, his resonant innocuous oaths roaring cheerily down the line, sustains all day the handful of our troops against the tenfold masses of the enemy. 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. The Alma chapter is the most graphic, for there the fight was concentrated, offering to a spectator by Lord Raglan's side a COUP D'OEIL of the entire action. The French were by bad generalship virtually wiped out; for Bosquet crossed the river too far to the right, Canrobert was afraid to move without artillery, Prince Napoleon and St. Arnaud's reserves were jammed together in the bottom of the valley. We see, as though on the spot, the advance, irregular and unsupported, of Codrington's brigade, their dash into the Great Redoubt and subsequent disorderly retreat; the enemy checked by the two guns from Lord Raglan's knoll and by the steadiness of the Royal Fusiliers; the repulse of the Scots Fusiliers and the peril which hung over the event; then the superb advance of Guards and Highlanders up the hill, thin red line A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study against massive columns, which determined finally the action. The interest of the Balaclava fight centres in the two historic cavalry charges. Here again, from his position on the hill above, Kinglake witnessed both; the first, clear in smokeless air, the second lost in the volleying clouds which filled the valley of death. He saw the enormous mass of Russian cavalry, 3,500 sabres, flooding like an avalanche down the hill with a momentum which Scarlett's tiny squadron could not for a moment have resisted; their unexplained halt, the three hundred seizing the opportunity to strike, digging individually into the Russian ranks, the scarlet streaks visibly cleaving the dense grey columns. 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; while the 4th and 5th Dragoons, the Royals, the 1st Inniskillings, dashed upon the amazed column right, left, front, till the close-locked mass headed slowly up the hill, ranks loosened, horsemen turned and galloped off, a beaten straggling herd. Eight minutes elapsed from the time when Scarlett gave the word to charge, until the moment when the Russians broke: we turn from the fifty describing pages, breathless as though we had ridden in the melley; if the episode has no historical parallel, the narrative is no less unique. Our greatest contemporary poet tried to celebrate it; his lines are tame and unexciting beside Kinglake's passionate pulsing rhapsody. Its effect upon the Russian mind was lasting; out of all their vast array hardly a single squadron was ever after able to keep its ground against the approach of English cavalry; while but for Cathcart's obstinacy and Lucan's temper it would have issued in the immediate recapture of the Causeway Heights. The Charge of the Light Brigade, on the other hand, while it stirred the imagination of the poet, shocked the military conscience of the historian. He saw in it with agony, as Lord Raglan saw, as the French spectators saw, no act of heroic sacrifice, but a needless, fruitless massacre. "You have lost the Light Brigade," was his commander's salutation to Lord Lucan. "C'EST MAGNIFIQUE, MAIS CE N'EST A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study PAS LA GUERRE," was the oft-quoted reproof of Bosquet. The "someone's blunder," the sullen perversity in misconception which destroyed the flower of our cavalry, has faded from men's memories; the splendour of the deed remains. It is well to recover salvage from the irrevocable, to voice and to prolong the deep human interest attaching to death encountered at the call of duty; that is the poet's task, and brilliantly it has been discharged. Its other side, the paean of sorrow for a self- destructive exploit, the dirge on lives wantonly thrown away, the deep blame attaching to the untractableness which sent them to their doom, was the task of the historian, and that too has been faithfully and lastingly accomplished. Inkerman was the most complicated of the battles; the chapters which record it are correspondingly taxing to the reader. More than once or twice they must be scanned, with close study of their lucid maps, before the intricate sequences are fairly and distinctively grasped; the sixth book of Thucydides, a standing terror to young Greek students, is light and easy reading compared with the bulky sixth volume of Kinglake. The hero of the day was Pennefather; he maintained on Mount Inkerman a combat of pickets reinforced from time to time, while around him through nine hours successive attacks of thousands were met by hundreds. The disparity of numbers was appalling. At daybreak 40,000 Russian troops advanced against 3,000 English and were repulsed. Three hours later 19,000 fresh troops came on, passed through a gap in our lines, which Cathcart's disobedience, atoned for presently by his death, had left unoccupied, and seized the heights behind us; they too were dispossessed, but our numbers were dwindling and our strength diminishing. The Home Ridge, key of our position, was next invaded by 6,000 Russians; the 7th St. Leger, linked with a few Zouaves and with 200 men of our 77th Regiment, French and English for once joyously intermingled, hurled them back. It was the crisis of the fight; Canrobert's interposition would have determined it; but he sullenly refused to move. Finally, led by two or three daring young officers, 300 of our wearied troops charged the Russian battery which had tormented us all day; their artillerymen, already flinching A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study under the galling fire of two 18- pounders, brought up by Lord Raglan's foresight early in the morning, hastily withdrew their guns, and the battle was won. It was a day of Homeric rushes; Burnaby, with only twenty men to support him, rescuing the Grenadier Guards' colours; the onset of the 20th with their "Minden Yell"; Colonel Daubeny with two dozen followers cleaving the Russian trunk column at the barrier; Waddy's dash at the retreating artillery train, foiled only by the presence and the readiness of Todleben. One marvels in reading how the English held their own; their victory against so tremendous odds is ascribed by the historian to three conditions; the hampering of the enemy by his crowded masses; the slaughter amongst his officers early in the fight, which deprived their men of leadership; above all, the dense mist which obscured from him the fewness of his opponents. If Canrobert with his fresh troops had followed in pursuit, the Russian's retreat must have been turned into a rout and his artillery captured; if on the following day he had assaulted the Flagstaff Bastion, Sebastopol, Todleben owned, must have fallen. He would do neither; his hesitancy and apparent feebleness have already been explained; but to it, and to the sinister influence which held his hand, were due the subsequent miseries of the Crimean winter. But the epic muse exacted from Kinglake, as from Virgil long before, the portrayal not only of generals and of battles, but of two great monarchs, each in his own day conspicuously and absolutely prominent - the Czar Nicholas and the Emperor Napoleon: "dicam horrida belia, Dicam acies, actosque animis in funera REGES." His handling of them is characteristic. Few men living then could have approached either without a certain awe, their "genius" rebuked, - like Mark Antony's, in the presence of Caesars so imposing and so mighty; Kinglake's attitude towards both is the attitude of cold analysis. In the opening of the fifties the Czar Nicholas was the most powerful man then living in the world. He ruled over sixty million subjects whose loyalty bordered on worship: he had in arms a million soldiers, brave and highly trained. In the troubles of 1848 he had stood scornful A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study and secure amid the overthrow of surrounding thrones; and the entire impact of his vast and well- organized Empire was subject to his single will; whatever he chose to do he did. Of stern and unrelenting nature, of active and widely ranging capacity for business, of gigantic stature and commanding presence, he inspired almost universal terror; and yet his friendliness had when he pleased a glow and frankness irresistible in its charm. Readers of Queen Victoria's early life will recall the alarm she felt at his sudden proposal to visit Windsor in 1844, the fascination which his presence exercised on her when he became her guest. He professed to embody his standard of conduct in the English word "gentleman"; his ideal of human grandeur was the character of the Duke of Wellington. It was an evil destiny that betrayed this high-minded man into crooked ways; that made England sacrifice the stateliest among her ancient friends to an ignoble and crime-stained adventurer; that poured out blood and treasure for no public advantage and with no permanent result; that first humiliated, then slew with broken heart the man who had been so great, and who is still regarded by surviving Russians who knew his inner life and had seen him in his gentle mood with passionate reverence and affection. 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 [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of Voltaire. He had well known Prince Napoleon in his London days, had been attracted by him as a curiosity - "a balloon man who had twice fallen from the skies and yet was still alive" - had divined the mental power veiled habitually by his blank, opaque, wooden looks, had listened to his ambitious talk and A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study gathered up the utterances of his thoughtful, long-pondering mind, had quarrelled with him finally and lastingly over rivalry in the good graces of a woman. (21) He saw in him a fourfold student; of the art of war, of the mind of the first Napoleon, of the French people's character, of the science by which law may lend itself to stratagem and become a weapon of deceit. The intellect of this strange being was subject to an uncertainty of judgment, issuing in ambiguity of enterprise, and giving an impression of well-kept secrecy, due often to the fact that divided by mental conflict he had no secret to tell. He understood truth, but under the pressure of strong motive would invariably deceive. He sometimes, out of curiosity, would listen to the voice of conscience, and could imitate neatly on occasion the scrupulous language of a man of honour; but the consideration that one of two courses was honest, and the other not, never entered into his motives for action. He was bold in forming plots, and skilful in conducting them; but in the hour of trial and under the confront of physical danger he was paralysed by constitutional timidity. His great aim in life was to be conspicuous - DIGITO MONSTRARIER - coupled with a theatric mania which made scenic effects and surprises essential to the eminence he craved. Handling this key to his character, Kinglake pursues him into his December treason, contrasts the consummate cleverness of his schemes with the faltering cowardice which shrank, like Macbeth's ambition, from "the illness should attend them," and which, but for the stronger nerve of those behind him, would have caused his collapse, at Paris as at Strasburg and Boulogne, in contact with the shock of action. It is difficult now to realize the commotion caused by this fourteenth chapter of Kinglake's book. The Emperor was at the summit of his power, fresh from Austrian conquest, viewed with alarm by England, whose rulers feared his strength and were distrustful of his friendship. Our Crown, our government, our society, had condoned his usurpation; he had kissed the Queen's cheek, bent her ministers to his will, ridden through her capital a triumphant and applauded guest. And now men read not only a cynical dissection of his character and disclosure of his A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study early foibles, but the hideous details of his deceit and treachery, the phases of cold-blooded massacre and lawless deportation by which he emptied France of all who hesitated to enrol themselves as his accomplices or his tools. Forty years have passed since the terrible indictment was put forth; down to its minutest allegation it has been proved literally true; the arch criminal has fallen from his estate to die in disgrace, disease, exile. When we talk today with cultivated Frenchmen of that half-forgotten epoch, and of the book which bared its horrors, we are met by their response of ardent gratitude to the man who joined to passionate hatred of iniquity surpassing capacity for denouncing it; their avowal that with all its frequent exposure of their military shortcomings and depreciation of their national character, no English chronicle of the century stands higher in their esteem than the history of the war in the Crimea. The close of the book is grim and tragic in the main, the stir of gallant fights exchanged for the dreary course of siege, intrenchment, mine and countermine. We have the awful winter on the heights, the November hurricane, the foiled bombardments, the cruel blunder of the Karabelnaya assault, the bitter natural discontent at home, the weak subservience of our government to misdirected clamour, the touching help-fraught advent of the Lady Nurses: then, just as better prospects dawn, the Chief's collapse and death. 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, of periphrasis, aphorism, felicitous phrase and pregnant epithet. Such is the fine analogy between the worship of holy shrines and the lover's homage to the spot which his mistress's feet have trod; such France's tolerance of the Elysee brethren compared to the Arab laying his verminous burnous upon an ant-hill; the apt quotation from the Psalms to illustrate the on-coming of the Guards; the demeanour of horses in action; the course of a flying cannon-ball; A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study the two ponderous troopers at the Horse Guards; Tom Tower and his Croats landing stores for our soldiers from the "Erminia." Or again, we have the light clear touches of a single line; "the decisiveness and consistency of despotism" - "the fractional and volatile interests in trading adventure which go by the name of Shares" - "the unlabelled, undocketed state of mind which shall enable a man to encounter the Unknown" - "the qualifying words which correct the imprudences and derange the grammatical structure of a Queen's Speech": but these are islets in the sea of narrative, not, as in "Eothen," woof-threads which cross the warp. 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. 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"; quoting, perhaps unconsciously, the epigram of a French art critic a hundred years before - IL CHERCHE TOUJOURS A FAIRE MIEUX QU'IL NE FAIT. (22) He lavished on it far more pains than on "Eothen": the proof sheets were a black sea of erasures, intercalations, blots; the original chaotic manuscript pages had to be disentangled by a calligraphic Taunton bookseller before they could be sent to press. This fastidiousness in part gained its purpose; won temporary success; gave to his style the glitter, rapidity, point, effectiveness, of a pungent editorial; went home, stormed, convinced, vindicated, damaged, triumphed: but it missed by excessive polish the reposeful, unlaboured, classic grace essential to the highest art. Over-scrupulous manipulation of words is liable to the "defect of its qualities"; as with unskilful goldsmiths of whom old Latin writers tell us, the file goes too deep, trimming away more of the first fine minting than we can afford to lose. Ruskin has explained to us how the decadence of Gothic architecture commenced through care bestowed on window tracery for itself instead of as an avenue or vehicle for the admission of light. Read "words" for A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study tracery, "thought" for light, and we see how inspiration avenges itself so soon as diction is made paramount; artifice, which demands and misses watchful self-concealment, passes into mannerism; we have lost the incalculable charm of spontaneity. Comparison of "Eothen" with the "Crimea" will I think exemplify this truth. The first, to use Matthew Arnold's imagery, is Attic, the last has declined to the Corinthian; it remains a great, an amazingly great production; great in its pictorial force, its omnipresent survey, verbal eloquence, firm grasp, marshalled delineation of multitudinous and entangled matter; but it is not unique amongst martial records as "Eothen" is unique amongst books of travel: it is through "Eothen" that its author has soared into a classic, and bids fair to hold his place. And, apart from the merit of style, great campaigns lose interest in a third, if not in a second generation; their historical consequence effaced through lapse of years; their policy seen to have been nugatory or mischievous; their chronicles, swallowed greedily at the birth like Saturn's progeny, returning to vex their parent; relegated finally to an honourable exile in the library upper shelves, where they hold a place eyed curiously, not invaded: "devoured As fast as they are made, forgot as soon As done. . . . To have done, is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail, In monumental mockery." A W. Kinglake - A Biographical and Literary Study