第33章 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH(7)

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 Ambassador 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 moreintellectual 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 thathe and Kinglake, meetingalmost daily, lived in a cryptic world of jokes, confidences,colloquialisms, inexplicable to all but their two selves.

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 assumption, 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 God, 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.

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 amusement 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.