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 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 meän’d but I thow’t a ’ad summut to saäy,
And I thowt a said wot a owt to ’a said an’ I comed awaäy.”
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 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. [60] 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 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 Iäkoutsk battalion; the sustained and scathing satire on the Nôtre 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; [63] 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 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; [64] 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 attachés or of dependents, [66] to the abject terror of Turkish Sublimities who had outworn his patience. But he knew when 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 [68]—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 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.”