With his constituents he was more at ease and more effective. His seat for Bridgewater was challenged at a general election by Henry Padwick, a hanger-on to Disraeli and a well-known bookmaker on the turf, who, with an Irish Colonel Westbrook, tried to cajole the electors and their wives by extravagant compliments to the town, its neighbourhood, its denizens; a place celebrated, as Captain Costigan said of Chatteris, “for its antiquitee, its hospitalitee, the beautee of its women, the manly fidelitee, generositee, and jovialitee of its men.” Kinglake met them on their own ground. In his flowery speeches the romance of Sinai and Palestine faded before the glories of the little Somersetshire town. What was the Jordan by comparison with the Parrett? Could Libanus or Anti-Libanus vie with the Mendip and the Quantock Hills? The view surveyed by Monmouth from St. Mary’s Tower on the Eve of Sedgemoor transcended all the panoramas which the Holy Land or Asia Minor could present! But his more serious orations were worthy of his higher fame. 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? Because there sits in his chamber at the Tuileries a solitary moody man. He is deeply interested in the science and the art of war; he told me once that he was contemplating a history of all the great battles ever fought. He holds absolute control over vast resources both in men and money; he has shown that he can attack successfully at a few weeks’ notice the greatest European military power: gout or indigestion may at any moment convert him into an enemy of ourselves. Until France returns to parliamentary government this danger is imminent and continual. Our safety lies in our fleet, and in that alone. If for twenty-four hours only the Channel were denuded of our ships in time of war with France, they would hurl upon our shores a force we could not meet. Such denudation must be made impossible; our fleet so augmented and strengthened as to provide impregnably at all times for home defence no less than for foreign necessities. Our danger, I repeat, lies in no hostility on the part of the French army, in no ferocity on the part of the French people, in no present unfriendliness on the part of the French Emperor: it arises from the fact that a revolutionary government exists in France, which has armed one man, under the name of Emperor—Dictator rather, I should say—with a power so colossal, that until such power is moderated, as all power ought to be, no neighbour can be entirely safe.” This speech was reproduced in “The Times.” Montalembert read it with admiration. “Who,” he asked Sir M. E. Grant Duff, “who is Mr. Kinglake?” “He is the author of ‘Eothen.’” “And what is ‘Eothen?’ I never heard of it.”
He found great enjoyment in parliamentary life, but was in 1868 unseated on petition for bribery on the part of his agents. Blue-books are not ordinarily light reading; but the Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the alleged corrupt practices at Bridgewater is not only a model of terse and vigorous composition, but to persons with a sense of humour, inclined to view human irregularities and inconsistencies in a sportive rather than an indignant light, it is a sustained and diverting comedy. Of the constituency, both before and after the Reform Bill, three-fourths, the Commissioners artlessly inform us, sought and received bribes; of the remainder, all but a few individuals negotiated and gave the bribes. So in every election, both sides bribed avowedly; if a luckless Purity Candidate appeared, he was promptly informed that “Mr. Most” would win the seat: highest bribes decided each election, further bribes averted petitions. When once a desperate riot took place and the ringleaders were tried at Quarter Sessions, the jury were bribed to acquit, in the teeth of the Chairman’s summing up. At last, in 1868, the defeated candidate petitioned; blue-book literature was enriched by a remarkable report, and the borough was disfranchised. Of course Kinglake had only himself to thank; if a gentleman chooses to sit for a venal borough, and to intrust his interests to a questionable agent, he must, in the words of Mrs. Gamp, “take the consequences of sech a sitiwation.” The consequences to him were loss of his present seat, and permanent exclusion from Parliament.
He was keenly mortified by his ostracism, speaking of himself ever after as “a political corpse.” Thenceforward he gave his whole energy to literary work, to occasional reviews, mainly to his “Invasion of the Crimea.” In the “Edinburgh” I think he never wrote, cordially disliking its then editor. A fine notice in “Blackwood” of Madame de Lafayette’s life was from his pen. Surveying the Revolutionary Terror, he points out that Robespierre’s opponents were in numbers overwhelmingly strong, but lacked cohesion and leaders; while the Mountain, dominated by a single will, was legally armed with power to kill, and went on killing. The Church played into Robespierre’s hands by enforcing Patience and Resignation as the highest Christian virtues, confusing the idea of submission to Heaven with the idea of submission to a scoundrel. Had Hampden been a Papist he would have paid ship-money. He wrote also in “The Owl,” a brilliant little magazine edited by his friend Laurence Oliphant; a “Society Journal,” conducted by a set of clever well-to-do young bachelors living in London, addressed like the “Pall Mall Gazette,” in “Pendennis,” “to the higher circles of society, written by gentlemen for gentlemen.” When the expenses of production were paid, the balance was spent on a whitebait dinner at Greenwich, and on offerings of flowers and jewellery to the lady guests invited. It came to an end, leaving no successor equally brilliant, high-toned, wholesome; its collected numbers figure sometimes at a formidable price in sales and catalogues. [47]
The first two volumes of his “Crimea” had appeared in 1863. They were awaited with eager expectation. An elaborate history of the war had been written by a Baron de Bazancourt, condemned as unfair and unreliable by English statesmen, and severely handled in our reviews. So the wish was felt everywhere for some record less ephemeral, which should render the tale historically, and counteract Bazancourt’s misstatements. “I hear,” wrote the Duke of Newcastle, “that Kinglake has undertaken the task. He has a noble opportunity of producing a text-book for future history, but to accomplish this it must be stoically impartial.”
The beauty of their style, the merciless portraiture of the Second Empire, the unparalleled diorama of the Alma fight, combined to gain for these first four-and-twenty chapters an immediate vogue as emphatic and as widely spread as that which saluted the opening of Macaulay’s “History.” None of the later volumes, though highly prized as battle narratives, quite came up to these. The political and military conclusions drawn provoked no small bitterness; his cousin, Mrs. Serjeant Kinglake, used to say that she met sometimes with almost affronting coldness in society at the time, under the impression that she was A. W. Kinglake’s wife. Russians were, perhaps unfairly, dissatisfied. 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. Palmerstonians, accepting with their chief the Man of December, were furious at the exposure of his basenesses. Lucas in “The Times” pronounced the work perverse and mischievous; the “Westminster Review” branded it as reactionary. “The Quarterly,” in an article ascribed to A. H. Layard, condemned its style as laboured and artificial; as palling from the sustained pomp and glitter of the language; as wearisome from the constant strain after minute dissection; declaring it further to be “in every sense of the word a mischievous book.” “Blackwood,” less unfriendly, surrendered itself to the beauty of the writing; “satire so studied, so polished, so remorseless, and withal so diabolically entertaining, that we know not where in modern literature to seek such another philippic.”
Reeve, editor of the “Edinburgh,” wished Lord Clarendon to attack the book; he refused, but offered help, and the resulting article was due to the collaboration of the pair. It caused a prolonged coolness between Reeve and Kinglake, who at last ended the quarrel by a characteristic letter: “I observed yesterday that my malice, founded perhaps upon a couple of words, and now of three years’ duration, had not engendered corresponding anger in you; and if my impression was a right one, I trust we may meet for the future on our old terms.”
On the other hand, the “Saturday Review,” then at the height of its repute and influence, vindicated in a powerful article Kinglake’s truth and fairness; and a pamphlet by Hayward, called “Mr. Kinglake and the Quarterlies,” amused society by its furious onslaught upon the hostile periodicals, laid bare their animus, and exposed their misstatements. “If you rise in this tone,” he began, in words of Lord Ellenborough when Attorney-General, “I can speak as loudly and emphatically: I shall prosecute the case with all the liberality of a gentleman, but no tone or manner shall put me down.” And the dissentient voices were drowned in the general chorus of admiration. German eulogy was extravagant; French Republicanism was overjoyed; Englishmen, at home and abroad, read eagerly for the first time in close and vivid sequence events which, when spread over thirty months of daily newspapers, few had the patience to follow, none the qualifications to condense. Macaulay tells us that soon after the appearance of his own first volumes, a Mr. Crump from America offered him five hundred dollars if he would introduce the name of Crump into his history. An English gentleman and lady, from one of our most distant colonies, wrote to Kinglake a jointly signed pathetic letter, intreating him to cite in his pages the name of their only son, who had fallen in the Crimea. He at once consented, and asked for particulars—manner, time, place—of the young man’s death. The parents replied that they need not trouble him with details; these should be left to the historian’s kind inventiveness: whatever he might please to say in embellishment of their young hero’s end they would gratefully accept.
Unlike most authors, from Molière down to Dickens, he never read aloud to friends any portion of the unpublished manuscript; never, except to closest intimates, spoke of the book, or tolerated inquiry about it from others. When asked as to the progress of a volume he had in hand, he used to say, “That is really a matter on which it is quite out of my power even to inform myself”; and I remember how once at a well-selected dinner-party in the country, whither he came in good spirits and inclined to talk his best, a second-hand criticism on his book by a conceited parson, the official and incongruous element in the group, stiffened him into persistent silence. All England laughed, when Blackwood’s “Memoirs” saw the light, over his polite repulse of the kindly officious publisher, who wished, after his fashion, to criticise and finger and suggest. “I am almost alarmed, as it were, at the notion of receiving suggestions. I feel that hints from you might be so valuable and so important, it might be madness to ask you beforehand to abstain from giving me any; but I am anxious for you to know what the dangers in the way of long delay might be, the result of even a few slight and possibly most useful suggestions. . . . You will perhaps (after what I have said) think it best not to set my mind running in a new path, lest I should take to re-writing.” Note, by the way, the slovenliness of this epistle, as coming from so great a master of style; that defect characterizes all his correspondence. He wrote for the Press “with all his singing robes about him”; his letters were unrevised and brief. Mrs. Simpson, in her pleasant “Memories,” ascribes to him the éloquence du billet in a supreme degree. I must confess that of more than five hundred letters from his pen which I have seen only six cover more than a single sheet of note-paper, all are alike careless and unstudied in style, though often in matter characteristic and informing. “I am not by nature,” he would say, “a letter-writer, and habitually think of the uncertainty as to who may be the reader of anything that I write. It is my fate, as a writer of history, to have before me letters never intended for my eyes, and this has aggravated my foible, and makes me a wretched correspondent. I should like very much to write letters gracefully and easily, but I can’t, because it is contrary to my nature.” “I have got,” he writes so early as 1873, “to shrink from the use of the pen; to ask me to write letters is like asking a lame man to walk; it is not, as horse-dealers say, ‘the nature of the beast.’ When others talk to me charmingly, my answers are short, faltering, incoherent sentences; so it is with my writing.” “You,” he says to another lady correspondent, “have the pleasant faculty of easy, pleasant letter-writing, in which I am wholly deficient.”
In fact, the claims of his Crimean book, which compelled him latterly to refuse all other literary work, gave little time for correspondence. Its successive revisions formed his daily task until illness struck him down. Sacks of Crimean notes, labelled through some fantastic whim with female Christian names—the Helen bag, the Adelaide bag, etc.—were ranged round his room. His working library was very small in bulk, his habit being to cut out from any book the pages which would be serviceable, and to fling the rest away. So, we are told, the first Napoleon, binding volumes for his travelling library, shore their margins to the quick, and removed all prefaces, title-pages, and other superfluous leaves. So, too, Edward Fitzgerald used to tear out of his books all that in his judgment fell below their authors’ highest standard, retaining for his own delectation only the quintessential remnants. Vols. III. and IV. appeared in 1868, V. in 1875, VI. in 1880, VII. and VIII. in 1887; while a Cabinet Edition of the whole in nine volumes was issued continuously from 1870 to 1887. Our attempt to appreciate the book shall be reserved for another chapter.