He was always wanting to have the orders for fire and blood in neat formal despatches, signed by me, and copied by clerks. However, I hope you are satisfied now, with the butcheries and the flames, and the -?
"_Miss O._ _Pour le moment_!"
She is absent during the sudden dissolution of Parliament in 1874.
"London woke yesterday morning and found that your friend Gladstone had made a _coup-d"etat_. He has dissolved Parliament at a moment when no human being expected it, and my impression is that he has made a good hit, and that the renovated Parliament will give him a great majority."
The impression was wildly wrong; and he found a cause for the Conservative majority in Gladstone"s tame foreign policy, and especially in the pusillanimity his government showed when insulted by Gortschakoff.
He always does justice to her influence with Gladstone; his great majority at the polls in 1880 is _her_ victory and _her_ triumph; but his Turkophobia is no less her creation: "England is stricken with incapacity because you have stirred up the seething caldron that boils under Gladstone"s skull, putting in diabolical charms and poisons of theology to overturn the structure of English polity:" she will be able, he thinks, to tell her government that Gladstone is doing his best to break up the British Empire.
He quotes with approbation the newspaper comparison of her to the Princess Lieven. She disparages the famous amba.s.sadress; he sets her right. Let her read the "Correspondence," by his friend Mr. Guy Le Strange, and she will see how large a part the Princess played in keeping England quiet during the war of 182829. She did not convert her austere admirer, Lord Grey, to approval of the Russian designs, nor overcome the uneasiness with which the Duke of Wellington regarded her intrigues; but the Foreign Minister, Lord Aberdeen, was apparently a fool in her hands; and, whoever had the merit, the neutrality of England continued. That was, he repeats more than once, a most critical time for Russia; it was an object almost of life and death to the Czar to keep England dawdling in a state of actual though not avowed neutrality. It is, he argued, a matter of fact, that precisely this result was attained, and "I shall be slow to believe that Madame de Lieven did not deserve a great share of the glory (as you would think it) of making England act weakly under such circ.u.mstances; more especially since we know that the Duke did not like the great lady, and may be supposed to have distinctly traced his painful embarra.s.sment to her power." So the letters go, interspersed with news, with criticisms of notable persons, with comments enlightening or cynical on pa.s.sing political events: with personal matters only now and then; as when he notes the loss of his two sisters; dwells with unwonted feeling on the death of his eldest nephew by consumption; condoles with her on her husband"s illness; gives council, wise or playful, as to the education of her son. "I am glad to hear that he is good at Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, for that shows his cleverness; glad also to hear that he is occasionally naughty, for that shows his force. I advise you to claim and exercise as much control as possible, because I am certain that a woman-especially so gifted a one as you-knows more, or rather feels more, about the right way of bringing up a boy than any mere man."
Unbrokenly the correspondence continues: the intimacy added charm, interest, fragrance to his life, brought out in him all that was genial, playful, humorous. He fights the admonitions of coming weakness; goes to Sidmouth with a sore throat, but takes his papers and his books. It is, he says, a deserted little sea-coast place. "Mrs. Grundy has a small house there, but she does not know me by sight. If Madame Novikoff were to come, the astonished little town, dazzled first by her, would find itself invaded by theologians, bishops, amba.s.sadors of deceased emperors, and an ex-Prime-Minister." But as time goes on he speaks more often of his suffering throat; of gout, increasing deafness, only half a voice: his last letter is written in July, 1890, to condole with his friend upon her husband"s death. In October his nurse takes the pen; Madame Novikoff comes back hurriedly from Scotland to find him in his last illness. "It is very nice," he told his nurse, "to see dear Madame Novikoff again, but I am going down hill fast, and cannot hope to be well enough to see much of her." This is in November, 1890; on New Year"s Eve came the inexorable, "Terminator of delights and Separator of friends."
CHAPTER VI LATER DAYS, AND DEATH
FOR twenty years Kinglake lived in Hyde Park Place, in bright cheerful rooms looking in one direction across the Park, but on another side into a churchyard. The churchyard, Lady Gregory tells us, gave him pause on first seeing the rooms. "I should not like to live here, I should be afraid of ghosts." "Oh no, sir, there is always a policeman round the corner." {111} "Pleaceman X." has not, perhaps, before been revered as the Shade-compelling son of Maia:
"Tu pias laetis animas reponis Sedibus, _virgaque levem coerces_ _Aurea turbam_."
Here he worked through the morning; the afternoon took him to the "Travellers," where his friends, Sir Henry Bunbury and Mr. Chenery, usually expected him; then at eight o"clock, if not, as Shylock says, bid forth, he went to dine at the Athenaeum. His dinner seat was in the left-hand corner of the coffee-room, where, in the thirties, Theodore Hook had been wont to sit, gathering near him so many listeners to his talk, that at Hook"s death in 1841 the receipts for the club dinners fell off to a large amount. Here, in the "Corner," as they called it, round Kinglake would be Hayward, Drummond Wolff, Ma.s.sey, Oliphant, Edward Twisleton, Strzelecki, Storks, Venables, Wyke, Bunbury, Gregory, American Ticknor, and a few more; Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, when in Scotland, sending hampers of pheasants to the company. "Hurried to the Athenaeum for dinner," says Ticknor in 1857, "and there found Kinglake and Sir Henry Rawlinson, to whom were soon added Hayward and Stirling. We pushed our tables together and had a jolly dinner. . . . To the Athenaeum; and having dined pleasantly with Merivale, Kinglake, and Stirling, I hurried off to the House." In later years, when his voice grew low and his hearing difficult, he preferred that the diners should resolve themselves into little groups, a.s.signing to himself a _tete-a-tete_, with whom at his ease he could unfold himself.
No man ever fought more gallantly the encroachments of old age-_on sut etre jeune jusque dans ses vieux jours_. At seventy-four years old, staying with a friend at Brighton, he insisted on riding over to Rottingdean, where Sir Frederick Pollock was staying. "I mastered," he said, in answer to remonstrances, "I mastered the peculiarities of the Brighton screw before you were born, and have never forgotten them."
Vaulting into his saddle he rode off, returning with a schoolboy"s delight at the brisk trot he had found practicable when once clear of the King"s Road. Long after his hearing had failed, his sight become grievously weakened, and his limbs not always trustworthy, he would never allow a cab to be summoned for him after dinner, always walking to his lodgings. But he had to give up by and by his daily canter in Rotten Row, and more reluctantly still his continental travel. Foreign railways were closed to him by the _Salle d"Attente_; he could not stand incarceration in the waiting-rooms.
The last time he crossed the Channel was at the close of the Franco-Prussian war, on a visit to his old friend M. Thiers, then President. It was a dinner to deputies of the Extreme Left, and Kinglake was the only Englishman; "so," he said, "among the servants there was a sort of reasoning process as to my ident.i.ty, ending in the conclusion, "_il doit etre Sir Dilke_."" Soon the inference was treated as a fact; and in due sequence came newspaper paragraphs declaring that the British Amba.s.sador had gravely remonstrated with the President for inviting Sir Charles Dilke to his table. Then followed articles defending the course taken by the President, and so for some time the ball was kept up. The remonstrance of the Amba.s.sador was a myth, Lord Lyons was a friend of Sir Charles; but the latter was suspect at the time both in England and France; in England for his speeches and motion on the Civil List; in France, because, with Frederic Harrison, he had helped to get some of the French Communists away from France; and the French Government was watching him with spies. In Sir Charles"s motion Kinglake took much interest, refusing to join in the cry against it as disloyal. Sir Charles, he said, spoke no word against the Queen; and only brought the matter before the House because challenged to repeat in Parliament the statements he had made in the country. As a matter of policy he thought it mistaken: "Move in such a matter openly, and party discipline compels your defeat; bring pressure to bear on a Cabinet, some of its members are on your side, and you may gain your point." Sir Charles"s speech was calmly argumentative, and to many minds convincing; it provoked a pa.s.sionate reply from Gladstone; and when Mr. Auberon Herbert following declared himself a Republican, a tumult arose such as in those pre-Milesian days had rarely been witnessed in the House. But the wisdom of Kinglake"s counsel is sustained by the fact that many years afterwards, as a result of more private discussion, Mr. Gladstone p.r.o.nounced his conversion to the two bases of the motion, publicity, and the giving of the State allowance to the head of the family rather than, person by person, to the children and grandchildren of the Sovereign.
Action pointing in this direction was taken in 1889 and 1901 on the advice of Tory ministers.
Amongst Frenchmen of the highest cla.s.s, intellectually and socially, he had many valued friends, keeping his name on the "Cosmopolitan" long after he had ceased to visit it, since "one never knows when the distinguished foreigner may come upon one, and of such the Cosmo is the London Paradise." But he used to say that in the other world a good Frenchman becomes an Englishman, a bad Englishman becomes a Frenchman.
He saw in the typical Gaul a compound of the tiger and the monkey; noted their want of individuality, their tendency to go in flocks, their susceptibility to panic and to ferocity, to the terror that makes a man kill people, and "the terror that makes him lie down and beg." We remember, too, his dissection of St. Arnaud, as before all things a type of his nation; "he impersonated with singular exactness the idea which our forefathers had in their minds when they spoke of what they called "a Frenchman;" for although (by cowing the rich and by filling the poor with envy), the great French Revolution had thrown a lasting gloom on the national character, it left this one man untouched. He was bold, gay, reckless, vain; but beneath the mere glitter of the surface there was a great capacity for administrative business, and a more than common willingness to take away human life."
"I relish," Kinglake said in 1871, "the spectacle of Bismarck teaching the A B C of Liberal politics to the hapless French. His last _mot_, they tell me, is this. Speaking of the extent to which the French Emperor had destroyed his own reputation and put an end to the worship of the old Napoleon, he said: "He has killed himself and buried his uncle.""
Again, in 1874, noting the _contre coup_ upon France resulting from the Bismarck and Arnim despatches, he said: "What puzzles the poor dear French is to see that truth and intrepid frankness consist with sound policy and consummate wisdom. How funny it would be, if the French some day, as a novelty, or what they would call a _caprice_, were to try the effect of truth; "though not naturally honest," as Autolycus says, "were to become so by chance."
He thought M. Gallifet _dans sa logique_ in liking the Germans and hating Bismarck; for the Germans, in having their own way, would break up into as many fragments as the best Frenchman could desire, and Bismarck is the real suppressor of France. Throughout the Franco-Prussian war he sided strongly with the Prussians, refusing to dine in houses where the prevailing sympathy with France would make him unwelcome as its declared opponent; but he felt "as a nightmare" the attack on prostrate Paris, "as a blow" the capitulation of Metz; denouncing Gambetta and his colleagues as meeting their disasters only with slanderous shrieks, "possessed by the spirit of that awful Popish woman." Bismarck as a statesman he consistently admired, and deplored his dismissal. I see, he said, all the peril implied by Bismarck"s exit, and the advent of his ambitious young Emperor. It is a transition from the known to the unknown, from wisdom, perhaps, to folly.
His Crimean volumes continued to appear; in 1875, 1880, finally in 1887; while the Cabinet Edition was published in 18878. This last contained three new Prefaces; in Vol. I. as we have seen, the memorial of Nicholas Kireeff; in Vol. II. the latter half of the original Preface to Vol. I., cancelled thence at Madame Novikoff"s request, though now carefully modified so as to avoid anything which might irritate Russia at a moment when troubles seemed to be clearing away. In his Preface to Vol. VII. he had three objects, to set right the position of Sir E. Hamley, who had been neglected in the despatches; to demolish his friend Lord Bury, who had "questioned my omniscience" in the "Edinburgh Review"; and to exonerate England at large from absurd self-congratulations about the "little Egypt affair," the blame of such exaggeration resting with those whom he called State Showmen.
Silent to acquaintances about the progress of his work, he was communicative to his few intimates, though never reading aloud extracts or allowing them to be seen. In 1872 he would speak pathetically of his "Crimean muddle," perplexed, as he well might be, by the intricacies of Inkerman. Asked if he will not introduce a Te Deum on the fall of Louis Napoleon, he answered that to write without the stimulus of combat would be a task beyond his energy; "when I took the trouble to compose that fourteenth chapter, the wretched Emperor and his gang were at the height of their power in Europe and the world; but now!" He was insatiate as to fresh facts: utilized his acquaintance with Todleben, whom he had first met on his visit to England in 1864; sought out Prince Ourusoff at a later time, and inserted particulars gleaned from him in Vol. IX., Chapter V.
In 1875 he told Madame Novikoff that his task was done so far as Inkerman was concerned, and was proud to think that he had rescued from oblivion the heroism of the Russian troops in what he calls the "Third Period" of the great fight, ignored as it was by all Russian historians of the war.
He made fruitless inquiries after a paper said to have been left behind him by Skobeleff, explaining that "India is a cherry to be eaten by Russia, but in two bites"; it was contrary to the general"s recorded utterances and probably apocryphal. Russophobe as regarded Turkey, he sneered at England"s sentimental support of nationalities as "Platonic": a capital epithet he called it, and envied the Frenchman who applied it to us, declaring that it had turned all the women against us. He was moved by receiving Korniloff"s portrait with a kind message from the dead hero"s family, seeing in the features a confirmation of the ideal which he had formed in his own mind and had tried to convey to others. Readers of his book will recall the fine tribute to Korniloff"s powers, and the description of his death, in Chapters VI. and XIII. of Vol. IV. (Cabinet Edition).
Many of his comments on current events are preserved in the notes or in the memories of his friends. Sometimes these were characteristically cynical. He ridiculed the newspaper parade of national sympathy with the Prince of Wales"s illness: "We are represented as all members of the royal family, and all in family hysterics." Dizzy"s orientalization of Queen Victoria into an Empress angered him, as it angered many more. The last Empress Regnant, he said, was Catherine II. and it seems to be thought that by advising the Queen to take that great monarch"s t.i.tle, we shall exercise a wholesome influence on the morals of our women. He would quote Byron"s
"Russia"s mighty Empress Behaved no better than a common sempstress;"
"there was an old-fashioned sacredness, which, however foolish intrinsically, was still useful, in our t.i.tle of "The Queen"; nor do we see the policy of adding a _Supreme de Volaille_ to the bread and wine of our Sacrament."
He chuckled over the indignation of the _haute volee_, when on the visit to England of President Grant"s daughter in 1872, Americans in London sent out cards of invitation headed "To meet Miss Grant," as at a profane imitation of a practice hitherto confined to royalties; laughing not at the legitimate American mimicry of European consequence, but at the silly formalists in Society who fumed over the imagined presumption. Consulted by an invalid as to the charm of Ostend for a seaside residence, he limited it to persons of gregarious habits; "the people are all driven down to the beach like a flock of sheep in the morning, and in the evening they are all driven back to their folds." He reported a feeble drama written by his ancient idol, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe; "it is a painful thing to see a man of his quality and of his age unduly detained in the world; when the Emperor Nicholas died, the Eltchi lost his _raison d"etre_." He disparaged the wild fit of morality undergone by the "Pall Mall Gazette" during the scandalous "Maiden Tribute" revelation, p.r.o.nouncing its protegees to be "clever little devils." He was greatly startled by Gortschakoff"s famous circular, annulling the Black Sea clause in the Treaty of Paris, and much relieved by Bismarck"s dexterous interposition, which saved the susceptibility of Europe, and especially of England, by yielding as a favour to the demand of Russia what no one was in a position to refuse; but he maintained, and Lord Stratford agreed with him, that Gortschakoff"s precipitate act was governed by circ.u.mstances never revealed to mankind. He learned, too, that it caused the Chancellor to be _deconsidere_ in high Russian circles; he was called "_un Narcisse qui se mire dans son encrier_." Kinglake used to say that in conceding the right of the Sultan to exclude any war-flag from the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, Russia was treating Turkey as a bag-fox, to be gently hunted occasionally, but not mangled or killed; and he felt keenly the ridicule resting on the allies, who were compelled to surrender the neutralization purchased at the cost of so much blood and treasure. He watched with much amus.e.m.e.nt the restoration of Turkish self-confidence. "Turkey believes that he is no longer a sick man, and is turning all his doctors out of the house, to the immense astonishment of the English doctor, so conscious of his own rect.i.tude that he cannot understand being sent off with the quacks. You know in our beautiful Liturgy we have a prayer for the Turks; it looks as if our supplications had become successful." His interest in Turkey never flagged. "I am in a great fright," he said in 1877, "about my dear Turks, because Russia gives virtual command of the army before Plevna to Todleben, a really great _homme de guerre_."
Russophobia was at that time so strong in London that Madame Novikoff hesitated to visit England, and he himself feared that she might find it uncomfortable. Her alarm, however, was ridiculed by Hayward, "most faithful of the Russianisers, ready to do battle for Russia at any moment, declaring her to be quite virtuous, with no fault but that of being _incomprise_." But he groaned over the humiliation of England under Russia"s bold stroke, noting frequently a decay of English character which he ascribed to chronic causes. The Englishman taken separately, he said, seems much the same as he used to be; but there is a softening of the aggregate brain which affects Englishmen when acting together. He hailed the great Liberal victory of 1880, and watched with interest, as one behind the scenes, the negotiations which led to Lord Hartington"s withdrawal and Mr. Gladstone"s resumption of power; for in these his friend Hayward was an active go-between, removing by his tact and frankness "hitches" which might otherwise have been disastrous. He thought W. E. Forster"s attack on Mr. Gladstone"s Irish policy in 1882 ill-managed for his own position, his famous speech not sufficiently "clenching." Had he separated from his chief on broader grounds, refusing complicity with a Minister who consented to parley with the imprisoned Irishmen, he would, Kinglake thought, have occupied a highly commanding position. At present his difference from his colleagues was one only of degree.
He was once beguiled, amongst friends very intimate, into telling a dream. He dreamed that he was attending an anatomical lecture-which, as a fact, he had never done-and that his own body, from which he found himself entirely separated, was the dissected subject on which the lecturer discoursed. The body lay on a table beside the lecturer, but he himself, his ent.i.ty, was at the other end of the room, on the furthest or highest of a set of benches raised one above the other as at a theatre.
He imagined himself in a vague way to be disagreeing with the lecturer; but the strongest impression on his mind was annoyance at being so badly placed, so far from the professor and from his own body that he could not see or hear without an effort. The dream, he pointed out, showed this curious fact, that without any conscious design or effort of the will a man may conceive himself to be in perfect possession of his ident.i.ty, whilst separated from his own body by a distance of several feet. "The highest concept," said Jowett, "which man forms of himself is as detached from the body." ("Life," ii. 241.) The lecture-room which he imagined was one of the lower school-rooms at Eton, with which he had been familiar in early days.
After Hayward"s death in 1884, his own habits began to change. He still dined at the Athenaeum "corner," but increasing deafness began to make society irksome, and, his solitary meal ended, he spent his evenings reading in the Library. By-and-by that too became impossible. His voice grew weak, throat and tongue were threatened with disease. In 1888 he went to Brighton with a nurse, returned to rooms on Richmond Hill, then to Bayswater Terrace. An operation was performed and he seemed to recover, but relapsed. Old friends tended him: Madame Novikoff, Mr.
Froude and Mr. Lecky, Madame de Quaire and Mrs. Brookfield, Lord Mexborough his ancient fellow-traveller, Mrs. Craven, Sir William and Lady Gregory, with a few more, cheered him by their visits so long as he was able to bear them; and his brother and sister, Dr. and Mrs. Hamilton Kinglake, were with him at the end. Patient to the last, kind and gentle to all about him, he pa.s.sed away quietly on New Year"s Day, 1891:
"being merry-hearted, Shook hands with flesh and blood, and so departed."
His remains were cremated at Woking, after a special service at Christchurch, Lancaster Gate, attended by Dr. and Mrs. Kinglake with their son Captain Kinglake, the Duke of Bedford, Mr. and Mrs. Lecky, Mrs.
W. H. Brookfield and her son Charles.
No good portrait of him has been published. That prefixed to Blackwood"s "Eothen" of 1896 was furnished by Dr. Kinglake, who, however, looked upon it as unsatisfactory. The "Not an M.P." of "Vanity Fair," 1872, is a grotesque caricature. The photograph here reproduced (p. 128), by far the best likeness extant, he gave to Madame Novikoff in 1870, receiving hers in return, but p.r.o.nouncing the transaction "an exchange between the personified months of May and November." The face gives expression to the shy aloofness which, amongst strangers, was characteristic of him through life. He had even a horror of hearing his name pealed out by servants, and came early to parties that the proclamation might be achieved before as few auditors as possible. Visiting the newly married husband of his friend Adelaide Kemble, and being the first guest to arrive, he encountered in Mr. Sartoris a host as contentedly undemonstrative as himself. Bows pa.s.sed, a seat by the fire was indicated, he sat down, and the pair contemplated one another for ten minutes in absolute silence, till the lady of the house came in, like the prince in "The Sleeping Beauty," though not by the same process, to break the charm. He gave up calling at a house where he was warmly appreciated, because father, mother, daughter, bombarded him with questions. "I never came away without feeling sure that I had in some way perjured myself."
[Picture: Kinglake in the early Seventies]
On his shyness waited swiftly ensuing boredom; if his neighbour at table were garrulous or _ba.n.a.le_, 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 pa.s.s 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. "Kinglake," says Eliot Warburton in his unpublished diary, "talked to us to-day about his travels; pessimistic and cynical to the rest of the world, he is always gentle and kind to us." To this dear friend he was ever faithful, wearing to the day of his death an octagonal gold ring engraved "Eliot.
Jan: 1852." He would never play the _raconteur_ in general company, for he had a great horror of repeating himself, and, latterly, of being looked upon as a bore by younger men; but he loved to pour out reminiscences of the past to an audience of one or two at most: "Let an old man gather his recollections and glance at them under the right angle, and his life is full of pantomime transformation scenes." 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 Merimee: terse epigram, felicitous _apropos_, whimsical presentment of the topic under discussion, emitted in a low tone, and without the slightest change of muscle:
"All the charm of all the Muses Often flowering in a lonely word." {130}
Questions he would suavely and often wittily parry or repel: to an unhistorical lady asking if he remembered Madame Du Barry, he said, "my memory is very imperfect as to the particulars of my life during the reign of Lous XV. and the Regency; but I know a lady who has a teapot which belonged, she says, to Madame Du Barry." Madame Novikoff, however, records his discomfiture at the query of a certain Lady E-, who, when all London was ringing with his first Crimean volumes, asked him if he were not an admirer of Louis Napoleon. "_Le pauvre Kinglake, decontenance_, _repondit tout bas intimide comme un enfant qu"on met dates le coin_: _Oui-non-pas precis.e.m.e.nt_."
He had no knowledge of or liking for music. Present once by some mischance at a _matinee __musicale_, he was asked by the hostess what kind of music he preferred. His preference, he owned, was for the drum.
One thinks of the "Bourgeois Gentilhomme," "_la trompette marine est un instrument qui me plait, el qui est harmonieux_"; we are reminded, too, of Dean Stanley, who, absolutely tone-deaf, and hurrying away whenever music was performed, once from an adjoining room in his father"s house heard Jenny Lind sing "I know that my Redeemer liveth." He went to her shyly, and told her that she had given him an idea of what people mean by music. Once before, he said in all seriousness, the same feeling had come over him, when before the palace at Vienna he had heard a tattoo rendered by four hundred drummers.
Kinglake used to regret the disuse of duelling, as having impaired the higher tone of good breeding current in his younger days, and even blamed the Duke of Wellington for proscribing it in the army. He had himself on one occasion sent a cartel, and stood waiting for his adversary, like Sir Richard Strachan at Walcheren, eight days on the French coast; but the adversary never came. Hayward once referred to him, as a counsellor, and if necessary a second, a quarrel with Lord R-. Lord R-"s friend called on him, a Norfolk squire, "broad-faced and breathing port wine," after the fashion of uncle Phillips in "Pride and Prejudice," who began in a boisterous voice, "I am one of those, Mr. Kinglake, who believe R- to be a gentleman." In his iciest tones and stoniest manner Kinglake answered: "That, Sir, I am quite willing to a.s.sume." The effect, he used to say, as he told and acted the scene, was magical; "I had frozen him sober, and we settled everything without a fight." Of all his friends Hayward was probably the closest; an a.s.sociation of discrepancies in character, manner, temperament, not complementary, but opposed and hostile; irreconcilable, one would say, but for the knowledge that in love and friendship paradox reigns supreme. Hayward was arrogant, overbearing, loud, insistent, full of strange oaths and often unpardonably coa.r.s.e; "our dominant friend," Kinglake called him; "odious" is the epithet I have heard commonly bestowed upon him by less affectionate acquaintances.
Kinglake was reserved, shy, reticent, with the high breeding, grand manner, quiet urbanity, _grata protervitas_, of a waning epoch; restraint, concentration, tact of omission, dictating alike his silence and his speech; his well-weighed words "crystallizing into epigrams as they touched the air." {133} When Hayward"s last illness came upon him in 1884, Kinglake nursed him tenderly; spending the morning in his friend"s lodgings at 8, St. James"s Street, the house which Byron occupied in his early London days; and bringing on the latest bulletin to the club. The patient rambled towards the end; "we ought to be getting ready to catch the train that we may go to my sister"s at Lyme." Kinglake quieted his sick friend by an a.s.surance that the servants, whom he would not wish to hurry, were packing. "On no account hurry the servants, but still let us be off." The last thought which he articulated while dying was, "I don"t exactly know what it is, but I feel it is something grand."
"Hayward is dead," Kinglake wrote to a common friend; "the devotion shown to him by all sorts and conditions of men, and, what is better, of women, was unbounded. Gladstone found time to be with him, and to engage him in a conversation of singular interest, of which he has made a memorandum."
Another of Kinglake"s life-long familiars was Charles Skirrow, Taxing Master in Chancery, with his accomplished wife, from whose memorable fish dinners at Greenwich he was seldom absent, adapting himself no less readily to their theatrical friends-the Bancrofts, Burnand, Toole, Irving-than to the literary set with which he was more habitually at home. He was religiously loyal to his friends, speaking of them with generous admiration, eagerly defending them when attacked. He lauded Butler Johnstone as the most gifted of the young men in the House of Commons; would not allow Bernal Osborne to be called untrue; "he offends people if you like, but he is never false or hollow." A clever _sobriquet_ fathered on him, burlesquing the monosyllabic names of a well-known diarist and official, he repelled indignantly. "He is my friend, and had I been guilty of the _jeu_, I should have broken two of my commandments; that which forbids my joking at a friend"s expense, and that which forbids my fashioning a play upon words." He entreated Madame Novikoff to visit and cheer Charles Lever, dying at Trieste; deeply lamented Sir H. Bulwer"s death: "I used to think his a beautiful intellect, and he was wonderfully _simpatico_ to me." But he was shy of condoling with bereaved mourners, believing words used on such occasions to be utterly untrue. He loved to include husband and wife in the same meed of admiration, as in the case of Dean Stanley and Lady Augusta, or of Sir Robert and Lady Emily Peel. Peel, he said, has the _radiant_ quality not easy to describe; Lady Emily is always beauteous, bright, attractive. Lord Stanhope he praised as a historian, paying him the equivocal compliment that his books were much better than his conversation. So, too, he qualified his admiration of Lady Ashburton, dwelling on her beauty, silver voice, ready enthusiasm apt to disperse itself by flying at too many objects.
He was wont to speak admiringly of Lord Acton, relating how, a Roman Catholic, yet respecting enlightenment and devoted to books, he once set up and edited a "Quarterly Review," with a notion of reconciling the Light and the Dark as well as he could; but the "Prince of Darkness, the Pope," interposed, and ordered him to stop the "Review." He was compelled to obey; not, he told people, on any religious ground, but because relations and others would have made his life a bore to him if he had been contumacious against the Holy Father.
Kinglake was strongly attracted by W. E. Forster, a "rough diamond,"
spoken of at one time as a possible Prime Minister. Beginning life, he said, as a Quaker, with narrow opinions, his vigour of character and brain-power shook them off. Powerful, robust, and perfectly honest, yet his honesty inflicted on him a doubleness of view which caused him to be described as engaging his two hands in two different pursuits. His estimate of Sir R. Morier would have gladdened Jowett"s heart; he loved him as a private friend; eulogized his public qualities; rejoiced over his appointment as Amba.s.sador at St. Petersburg, seeing in him a diplomatist with not only a keen intellect and large views, but vibrating with the warmth, animation, friendliness, that are charmingly _un_-diplomatic. Of Carlyle, his life-long, though not always congenial intimate, he used to speak as having great graphic power, but being essentially a humourist; a man who, with those he could trust, never pretended to be in earnest, but used to roar with glorious laughter over the fun of his own jeremiads; "so far from being a prophet he is a bad Scotch joker, and knows himself to be a wind-bag." He blamed Froude"s revelations of Carlyle in "The Reminiscences," as injurious and offensive. Froude himself he often likened to Carlyle; the thoughts of both, he said, ran in the same direction, but of the two, Froude was by far the more intellectual man.
Staunch friend to the few, polite, though never effusive, to the many, he also nourished strong antipathies. The appearance in Madame Novikoff"s rooms of a certain Scotch bishop invariably drove him out of them, "Peter Paul, Bishop of Claridge"s," he called him. To Von Beust (the Austrian Chancellor), who spoke English in a rapid half-intelligible falsetto, he gave the name of _Mirliton_ (penny trumpet). His allusions to Mirliton and to the Bishop frequently mystified Madame Novikoff"s guests. For he loved to talk in cypher. Canon Warburton, kindly searching on my behalf his brother Eliot"s journals, tells me that he and Kinglake, meeting almost daily, lived in a cryptic world of jokes, confidences, colloquialisms, inexplicable to all but their two selves.