A. W. Kinglake | Page 8

the "Marlen" bells of home, calling to morning prayer the
prim congregation in far-off St. Mary's parish. And a not less potent
factor in the charm is the magician's self who wields it, shown through
each passing environment of the narrative; the shy, haughty, imperious
Solitary, "a sort of Byron in the desert," of cultured mind and eloquent
speech, headstrong and not always amiable, hiding sentiment with
cynicism, yet therefore irresistible all the more when he condescends to
endear himself by his confidence. He meets the Plague and its terrors
like a gentleman, but shows us, through the vicarious torments of the
cowering Levantine that it was courage and coolness, not insensibility,

which bore him through it. A foe to marriage, compassionating
Carrigaholt as doomed to travel "Vetturini-wise," pitying the Dead Sea
goatherd for his ugly wife, revelling in the meek surrender of the three
young men whom he sees "led to the altar" in Suez, he is still the frank,
susceptible, gallant bachelor, observantly and critically studious of
female charms: of the magnificent yet formidable Smyrniotes, eyes,
brow, nostrils, throat, sweetly turned lips, alarming in their latent
capacity for fierceness, pride, passion, power: of the Moslem women in
Nablous, "so handsome that they could not keep up their yashmaks:" of
Cypriote witchery in hair, shoulder-slope, tempestuous fold of robe. He
opines as he contemplates the plain, clumsy Arab wives that the fine
things we feel and say of women apply only to the good-looking and
the graceful: his memory wanders off ever and again to the muslin
sleeves and bodices and "sweet chemisettes" in distant England. In
hands sensual and vulgar the allusions might have been coarse, the
dilatings unseemly; but the "taste which is the feminine of genius," the
self-respecting gentleman-like instinct, innocent at once and playful,
keeps the voluptuary out of sight, teaches, as Imogen taught Iachimo,
"the wide difference 'twixt amorous and villainous." Add to all these
elements of fascination the unbroken luxuriance of style; the easy flow
of casual epigram or negligent simile;--Greek holy days not kept holy
but "kept stupid"; the mule who "forgot that his rider was a saint and
remembered that he was a tailor"; the pilgrims "transacting their
salvation" at the Holy Sepulchre; the frightened, wavering guard at
Satalieh, not shrinking back or running away, but "looking as if the
pack were being shuffled," each man desirous to change places with his
neighbour; the white man's unresisting hand "passed round like a claret
jug" by the hospitable Arabs; the travellers dripping from a Balkan
storm compared to "men turned back by the Humane Society as being
incurably drowned." Sometimes he breaks into a canter, as in the first
experience of a Moslem city, the rapturous escape from respectability
and civilization; the apostrophe to the Stamboul sea; the glimpse of the
Mysian Olympus; the burial of the poor dead Greek; the Janus view of
Orient and Occident from the Lebanon watershed; the pathetic terror of
Bedouins and camels on entering a walled city; until, once more in the
saddle, and winding through the Taurus defiles, he saddens us by a first
discordant note, the note of sorrow that the entrancing tale is at an end.

Old times return to me as I handle the familiar pages. To the schoolboy
six and fifty years ago arrives from home a birthday gift, the bright
green volume, with its showy paintings of the impaled robbers and the
Jordan passage; its bulky Tatar, towering high above his scraggy steed,
impressed in shining gold upon its cover. Read, borrowed, handed
round, it is devoured and discussed with fifth form critical presumption,
the adventurous audacity arresting, the literary charm not analyzed but
felt, the vivid personality of the old Etonian winged with public school
freemasonry. Scarcely in the acquired insight of all the intervening
years could those who enjoyed it then more keenly appreciate it to-day.
Transcendent gift of genius! to gladden equally with selfsame words
the reluctant inexperience of boyhood and the fastidious judgment of
maturity. Delightful self- accountant reverence of author-craft! which
wields full knowledge of a shaddock-tainted world, yet presents no
licence to the prurient lad, reveals no trail to the suspicious moralist.
CHAPTER III
--LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE

Kinglake returned from Algiers in 1844 to find himself famous both in
the literary and social world; for his book had gone through three
editions and was the universal theme. Lockhart opened to him the
"Quarterly." "Who is Eothen?" wrote Macvey Napier, editor of the
"Edinburgh," to Hayward: "I know he is a lawyer and highly
respectable; but I should like to know a little more of his personal
history: he is very clever but very peculiar." Thackeray, later on,
expresses affectionate gratitude for his presence at the "Lectures on
English Humourists":- "it goes to a man's