Biographical Study of A.W. Kinglake Part 4

He cordially disliked "The Times" newspaper, alleging instances of the unfairness with which its columns had been used to spite and injure persons who had offended it, chuckling over Hayward's compact anathema,-"'The Times,' which as usual of late supplied its lack of argument and proof by a.s.sumption, misrepresentation, and personality."

He thought that its attacks upon himself had helped his popularity. "One of the main causes," he said in 1875, "of the interest which people here were good enough to take in my book was the fight between 'The Times' and me. In 1863 it raged, in 1867 it was renewed with great violence, and now I suppose the flame kindles once more, though probably with diminished strength. In 1863 the storm of opinion generally waxed fierce against me, but now, as I hear, 'The Times' is alone, journals of all politics being loud in my praise. But I never look at any comment on my volumes till long afterwards, and I never in my life wrote to a newspaper." Once, when Chenery, the editor, came to join the table at the Athenaeum where he and Mr. Cartwright were dining, Kinglake rose, and removed to another part of the room. "The Times" had inserted a statement that Madame Novikoff was ordered to leave England, and he thus publicly resented it. "So unlike me," he said, relating the story, "but somehow a savagery as of youth came over me in my ancient days; it was like being twenty years old again." It came out, however, that "our indiscreet friend Froude" had written something which justified the paragraph, and Kinglake sent his _amende_ to Chenery, with whom ordinarily he was on most friendly terms.

He disliked Irishmen "in the lump," saying that human nature is the same everywhere except in Ireland. Parnell he personally admired, though hating Home Rule; and stigmatized as gross hypocrisy the desertion of him by Liberals after the divorce trial. He was wont to speak irreverently of Lord Beaconsfield, whom he had known well at Lady Blessington's in early days. He would have found himself in accord with Huxley, who used to thank G.o.d, his friend Mr. Fiske tells us, that he had never bowed the knee either to Louis Napoleon or Benjamin Disraeli. He poured scorn on the Treaty of Berlin. Russia, he said, defeating the Turks in war, has defeated Beaconsfield in diplomacy. If Englishmen understood such things they would see that the Congress was a comedy; anyone who will satisfy himself as to what Russia was really anxious to obtain, and then look at the Salisbury-Schouvaloff treaty, will see that, thanks to Beaconsfield's imbecility, Schouvaloff obtained one of the most signal diplomatic triumphs that was ever won. {140} A sound _entente_ between Russia and England he thought both possible and desirable; but conceived it to be rendered difficult by the want of steadiness and capacity which, for international purposes, were the real faults of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury. He repeated with much amus.e.m.e.nt the current anecdote of Lord Beaconsfield's conquest of Mrs. Gladstone. Meeting her in society, he was said to have inquired with tenderness after Mr. Gladstone's health, and then after receiving the loving wife's report of her William, to have rejoined in his most dulcet tones, "Ah! take care of him, for he is very _very_ precious." He always attributed Dizzy's popularity to the feeling of Englishmen that he had "shown them sport," an instinct, he thought, supreme in all departments of the English mind.

Towards his old schoolfellow Gladstone he never felt quite cordially, believing, rightly or wrongly, that the great statesman nourished enmity towards himself. He called him, as has been said, "a good man in the worst sense of the term, conscientious with a diseased conscience." He watched with much amus.e.m.e.nt, as ill.u.s.trating the moral twist in Gladstone's temperament, the "Colliery explosion," as it was called, when Sir R. Collier, the Attorney-General, was appointed to a Puisne Judgeship, which he held only for a day or two, in order to qualify him for a seat on a new Court of Appeal; together with a very similar trick, by which Ewelme Rectory, tenable only by an Oxonian, was given to a Cambridge man. The responsibility was divided between Gladstone and Lord Hatherley the Chancellor, with the mutual idea apparently that each of the two became thereby individually innocent. But Sir F. Pollock, in his amusing "Reminiscences," recalls the amicable halving of a wicked word between the Abbess of Andouillet and the Novice Margarita in "Tristram Shandy." It answered in neither case. "'They do not understand us,'

cried Margarita. '_But the Devil does_,' said the Abbess of Andouillet."

The Collier scandal narrowly escaped by two votes in the Lords, twenty-seven in the Commons, a Parliamentary vote of censure, and gave unquestionably a downward push to the Gladstone Administration. Mr.

Gladstone, on the other hand, cordially admired Kinglake's speeches, saying that few of those he had heard in Parliament could bear so well as his the test of publication.

To the great Prime Minister's absolute fearlessness he did full justice, as one of the finest features in his character; and loved to quote an epigram by Lord Houghton, to whom Gladstone had complained in a moment of weariness that he led the life of a dog. "Yes," said Houghton, "but of a St. Bernard dog, ever busied in saving life." He loved to contrast the twofold biographical paradox in the careers of the two famous rivals, Gladstone and Disraeli; the dreaming Tory mystic, incarnation of Oxford exclusiveness and Puseyite reserve, pa.s.sing into the Radical iconoclast; the Jew clerk in a city lawyer's office, "bad specimen of an inferior dandy," coming to rule the proudest aristocracy and lead the most fastidious a.s.sembly in the world.

He was not above broad farce when the fancy seized him. At the time when a certain kind of nonsense verse was popular, he, with Sir Noel Paton and others, added not a few facetious sonnets to Edward Lear's book, which lay on Madame Novikoff's table. His authorship is betrayed by the introduction of familiar Somersetshire names, Taunton, Wellington, Curry Rivel, Creech, Trull, Wilton:

"There was a young lady of Wilton, Who read all the poems of Milton: And, when she had done, She said, 'What bad fun!'

This prosaic young lady of Wilton."

There were many more, but this will perhaps suffice; _ex ungue leonem_.

They were addressed to the "Fair Lady of Claridge's," Madame Novikoff's hotel when in London, and were signed "Peter Paul, Bishop of Claridge's."

"There is a fair lady at Claridge's, Whose smile is more charming to me, Than the rapture of ninety-nine marriages Could possibly, possibly, be;-"

is the final dedicatory stanza. It is the gracious fooling of a philosopher who understood his company. "There are folks," says Mr.

Counsellor Pleydell, "before whom a man should take care how he plays the fool, because they have either too much malice or too little wit."

Kinglake knew his a.s.sociates, and was not ashamed _desipere in loco_, to frolic in their presence.

One point there was on which he never touched himself or suffered others to interrogate him, his conception of and att.i.tude towards the Unseen.

He wore his religion as Sir William Gull wore the fur of his coat, _inside_. Outwardly he died as he had lived, a Stoic; that on the most personal and sacred of all topics he should consult the Silences was in keeping with his idiosyncrasy. Another famous man, questioned as to his religious creed, made answer that he believed what all wise men believe.

And what do all wise men believe? "That all wise men keep to themselves?"

INDEX

Abdu-l-Medjid, 66.

Aberdeen, Lord, 70.

Acton, Lord, 135.

Acton, Mrs., 7.

Adams, J. Quincy, 66.

Airey, General, 63, 72.

Alma, 39, 48, 59, 64, 73.

Ampere, M., 102.

Anastasius, 34.

Ancelot, Mme., 99.

Arnold, Matthew, 88.

Ashburton, Lady, 135.

Ashburton, Lord, 33.

Athanasian Creed, 104.

Bachaumont, M., 87.

Balaclava, 7477.

Bazancourt, Baron de, 48.

Beaconsfield. _See_ Disraeli.

Beauclerk, T., 129.

Beaufort, Duke of, 39.

Bedford, Duke of, 127.

Berlin Congress, 139, etc.

Beust, Count, 96, 137.

Bismarck, 105, 116118, 140, 141.

Blackwood, 46, 49, 52, 127.

Blaygon Hills, 25.

Boissy, Marquis de, 18.

Bosquet, General, 74, 76.

Boyle, Dean, 3.

Bridgewater, 40, 43, 45.