A. W. Kinglake | Page 4

cynical and self- contained, was repelled by the spiritual fervour, incessant logical collision, aggressive tilting at abuses of those young "Apostles," already
"Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield, Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field,"
waxing ever daily, as Sterling exhorted, "in religion and radicalism." He saw life differently; more practically, if more selfishly; to one rhapsodizing about the "plain living and high thinking" of Wordsworth's sonnet, he answered: "You know that you prefer dining with people who have good glass and china and plenty of servants." For Tennyson's poetry he even then felt admiration; quotes, nay, misquotes, in "Eothen," from the little known "Timbuctoo"; {3} and from "Locksley Hall"; and supplied long afterwards an incident adopted by Tennyson in "Enoch Arden,"
"Once likewise in the ringing of his ears Though faintly, merrily--far and far away - He heard the pealing of his parish bells," {4}
from his own experience in the desert, when on a Sunday, amid overpowering heat and stillness, he heard the Marlen bells of Taunton peal for morning church. {5}
In whatever set he may have lived he made his mark at Cambridge. Lord Houghton remembered him as an orator at the Union; and speaking to Cambridge undergraduates fifty years later, after enumerating the giants of his student days, Macaulay, Praed, Buller, Sterling, Merivale, he goes on to say: "there, too, were Kemble and Kinglake, the historian of our earliest civilization and of our latest war; Kemble as interesting an individual as ever was portrayed by the dramatic genius of his own race; Kinglake, as bold a man-at-arms in literature as ever confronted public opinion." We know, too, that not many years after leaving Cambridge he received, and refused, a solicitation to stand as Liberal representative of the University in Parliament. He was, in fact, as far as any of his contemporaries from acquiescing in social conventionalisms and shams. To the end of his life he chafed at such restraint: "when pressed to stay in country houses," he writes in 1872, "I have had the frankness to say that I have not discipline enough." Repeatedly he speaks with loathing of the "stale civilization," the "utter respectability," of European life; {6} longed with all his soul for the excitement and stir of soldiership, from which his shortsightedness debarred him; {7} rushed off again and again into foreign travel; set out immediately on leaving Cambridge, in 1834, for his first Eastern tour, "to fortify himself for the business of life." Methley joined him at Hamburg, and they travelled by Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, to Semlin, where his book begins. Lord Pollington's health broke down, and he remained to winter at Corfu, while Kinglake pursued his way alone, returning to England in October, 1835. {8} On his return he read for the Chancery Bar along with his friend Eliot Warburton, under Bryan Procter, a Commissioner of Lunacy, better known by his poet-name, Barry Cornwall; his acquaintance with both husband and wife ripening into life-long friendship. Mrs. Procter is the "Lady of Bitterness," cited in the "Eothen" Preface. As Anne Skepper, before her marriage, she was much admired by Carlyle; "a brisk witty prettyish clear eyed sharp tongued young lady"; and was the intimate, among many, especially of Thackeray and Browning. In epigrammatic power she resembled Kinglake; but while his acrid sayings were emitted with gentlest aspect and with softest speech; while, like Byron's Lambro:
"he was the mildest mannered man That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat, With such true breeding of a gentleman, You never could divine his real thought,"
her sarcasms rang out with a resonant clearness that enforced and aggravated their severity. That two persons so strongly resembling each other in capacity for rival exhibition, or for mutual exasperation, should have maintained so firm a friendship, often surprised their acquaintance; she explained it by saying that she and Kinglake sharpened one another like two knives; that, in the words of Petruchio,
"Where two raging fires meet together, They do consume the thing that feeds their fury."
Crabb Robinson, stung by her in a tender place, his boastful iterative monologues on Weimar and on Goethe, said that of all men Procter ought to escape purgatory after death, having tasted its fulness here through living so many years with Mrs. Procter; "the husbands of the talkative have great reward hereafter," said Rudyard Kipling's Lama. And I have been told by those who knew the pair that there was truth as well as irritation in the taunt. "A graceful Preface to 'Eothen,'" wrote to me a now famous lady who as a girl had known Mrs. Procter well, "made friendly company yesterday to a lonely meal, and brought back memories of Mr. Kinglake's kind spoiling of a raw young woman, and of the wit, the egregious vanity, the