A. W. Kinglake: A Biographical and Literary StudyTuckwell, William
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A. W. Kinglake: A Biographical and Literary Study
Tuckwell, William
Kinglake, Alexander William, 1809-1891
He had no knowledge of or liking for music. Present once by some
mischance at a _matinée __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 assume.” 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 association 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 coarse;
“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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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