"Eothen" appeared in 1844. Twice, Kinglake tells us, he had essayed the story of his travels, twice abandoned it under a sense of strong disinclination to write. A third attempt was induced by an entreaty from his friend Eliot Warburton, himself projecting an Eastern tour; and to Warburton in a characteristic preface the narrative is addressed. The book, when finished, went the round of the London market without finding a publisher. It was offered to John Murray, who cited his refusal of it as the great blunder of his professional life, consoling himself with the thought that his father had equally lacked foresight thirty years before in declining the "Rejected Addresses"; he secured the copyright later on. It was published in the end by a personal friend, Ollivier, of Pall Mall, Kinglake paying 50 pounds to cover risk of loss; even worse terms than were obtained by Warburton two years afterwards from Colburn, who owned in the fifties to having cleared 6,000 pounds by "The Crescent and the Cross." The volume was an octavo of 418 pages; the curious folding-plate which forms the frontispiece was drawn and coloured by the author, and was compared by the critics to a tea-tray. In front is Moostapha the Tatar; the two foremost figures in the rear stand for accomplished Mysseri, whom Kinglake was delighted to recognize long afterwards as a flourishing hotel keeper in Constantinople, and Steel, the Yorkshire servant, in his striped pantry jacket, "looking out for gentlemen's seats." Behind are "Methley," Lord Pollington, in a broad-brimmed hat, and the booted leg of Kinglake, who modestly hid his figure by a tree, but exposed his foot, of which he was very proud. Of the other characters, "Our Lady of Bitterness" was Mrs. Procter, "Carrigaholt" was Henry Stuart Burton of Carrigaholt, County Clare. Here and there are allusions, obvious at the time, now needing a scholiast, which have not in any of the reprints been explained. In their ride through the Balkans they talked of old Eton days. "We bullied Keate, and scoffed at Larrey Miller and Okes; we rode along loudly laughing, and talked to the grave Servian forest as though it were the Brocas clump." {9} Keate requires no interpreter; Okes was an Eton tutor, afterwards Provost of King's. Larrey or Laurie Miller was an old tailor in Keate's Lane who used to sit on his open shop-board, facing the street, a mark for the compliments of passing boys; as frolicsome youngsters in the days of Addison and Steele, as High School lads in the days of Walter Scott, were accustomed to "smoke the cobler." The Brocas was a meadow sacred to badger-baiting and cat-hunts. The badgers were kept by a certain Jemmy Flowers, who charged sixpence for each "draw"; Puss was turned out of a bag and chased by dogs, her chance being to reach and climb a group of trees near the river, known as the "Brocas Clump." Of the quotations, "a Yorkshireman hippodamoio" (p. 35) is, I am told, an obiter dictum of Sir Francis Doyle. "Striving to attain," etc. (p. 33), is taken not quite correctly from Tennyson's "Timbuctoo." Our crew were "a solemn company" (p. 57) is probably a reminiscence of "we were a gallant company" in "The Siege of Corinth." For "'the own armchair' of our Lyrist's 'Sweet Lady'" Anne'" (p. 161) see the poem, "My own armchair" in Barry Cornwall's "English Lyrics." "Proud Marie of Anjou" (p. 96) and "single-sin--" (p. 121), are unintelligible; a friend once asked Kinglake to explain the former, but received for answer, "Oh! that is a private thing." It may, however, have been a pet name for little Marie de Viry, Procter's niece, and the chere amie of his verse, whom Eothen must have met often at his friend's house. The St. Simonians of p. 83 were the disciples of Comte de St. Simon, a Parisian reformer in the latter part of the eighteenth century, who endeavoured to establish a social republic based on capacity and labour. Pere Enfantin was his disciple. The "mystic mother" was a female Messiah, expected to become the parent of a new Saviour. "Sir Robert once said a good thing" (p. 93), refers possibly to Sir Robert Peel, not famous for epigram, whose one good thing is said to have been bestowed upon a friend before Croker's portrait in the Academy. "Wonderful likeness," said the friend, "it gives the very quiver of the mouth." "Yes," said Sir Robert, "and the arrow coming out of it." Or it may mean Sir Robert Inglis, Peel's successor at Oxford, more noted for his genial kindness and for the perpetual bouquet in his buttonhole at a date when such ornaments were not worn, than for capacity to conceive and say good things. In some mischievous lines describing the Oxford election where Inglis supplanted Peel, Macaulay wrote
"And then said all the Doctors sitting in the Divinity School,
Not this man, but Sir Robert'--now Sir Robert was a fool."
But in the fifth and later editions Kinglake altered it to "Sir John."
By a curious oversight in the first two editions (p. 41) Jove was made to gaze on Troy from Samothrace; it was rightly altered to Neptune in the third; and "eagle eye of Jove" in the following sentence was replaced by "dread Commoter of our globe." The phrase "a natural Chiffney-bit" (p. 109), I have found unintelligible to- day through lapse of time even to professional equestrians and stable-keepers. Samuel Chiffney, a famous rider and trainer, was born in 1753, and won the Derby on Skyscraper in 1789. He managed the Prince of Wales's stud, was the subject of discreditable insinuations, and was called before the Jockey Club. Nothing was proved against him, but in consequence of the fracas the Prince severed his connection with the Club and sold his horses. Chiffney invented a bit named after him; a curb with two snaffles, which gave a stronger bearing on the sides of a horse's mouth. His rule in racing was to keep a slack rein and to ride a waiting race, not calling on his horse till near the end. His son Samuel, who followed him, observed the same plan; from its frequent success the term "Chiffney rush" became proverbial. In his ride through the desert (p. 169) Kinglake speaks of his "native bells-the innocent bells of Marlen, that never before sent forth their music beyond the Blaygon hills." Marlen bells is the local name for the fine peal of St. Mary Magdalen, Taunton. The Blaygon, more commonly called the Blagdon Hills, run parallel with the Quantocks, and between them lies the fertile Vale of Taunton Deane. "Damascus," he says, on p. 245, "was safer than Oxford"; and adds a note on Mr. Everett's degree which requires correction. It is true that an attempt was made to non-placet Mr. Everett's honorary degree in the Oxford Theatre in 1843 on the ground of his being a Unitarian; not true that it succeeded. It was a conspiracy by the young lions of the Newmania, who had organized a formidable opposition to the degree, and would have created a painful scene even if defeated. But the Proctor of that year, Jelf, happened to be the most-hated official of the century; and the furious groans of undergraduate displeasure at his presence, continuing unabated for three-quarters of an hour, compelled Wynter, the Vice-Chancellor, to break up the Assembly, without recitation of the prizes, but not without conferring the degrees in dumb show: unconscious Mr. Everett smilingly took his place in red gown among the Doctors, the Vice- Chancellor asserting afterwards, what was true in the letter though not in the spirit, that he did not hear the non-placets. So while Everett was obnoxious to the Puseyites, Jelf was obnoxious to the undergraduates; the cannonade of the angry youngsters drowned the odium of the theological malcontents; in the words of Bombastes:
"Another lion gave another roar,
And the first lion thought the last a bore."
The popularity of "Eothen" is a paradox: it fascinates by violating all the rules which convention assigns to viatic narrative. It traverses the most affecting regions of the world, and describes no one of them: the Troad--and we get only his childish raptures over Pope's "Homer's Iliad"; Stamboul--and he recounts the murderous services rendered by the Golden Horn to the Assassin whose serail, palace, council chamber, it washes; Cairo-but the Plague shuts out all other thoughts; Jerusalem--but Pilgrims have vulgarized the Holy Sepulchre into a Bartholomew Fair. He gives us everywhere, not history, antiquities, geography, description, statistics, but only Kinglake, only his own sensations, thoughts, experiences. We are told not what the desert looks like, but what journeying in the desert feels like. From morn till eve you sit aloft upon your voyaging camel; the risen sun, still lenient on your left, mounts vertical and dominant; you shroud head and face in silk, your skin glows, shoulders ache, Arabs moan, and still moves on the sighing camel with his disjointed awkward dual swing, till the sun once more descending touches you on the right, your veil is thrown aside, your tent is pitched, books, maps, cloaks, toilet luxuries, litter your spread- out rugs, you feast on scorching toast and "fragrant" {10} tea, sleep sound and long; then again the tent is drawn, the comforts packed, civilization retires from the spot she had for a single night annexed, and the Genius of the Desert stalks in.
Herein, in these subjective chatty confidences, is part of the spell he lays upon us: while we read we are IN the East: other books, as Warburton says, tell us ABOUT the East, this is the East itself. And yet in his company we are always ENGLISHMEN in the East: behind Servian, Egyptian, Syrian, desert realities, is a background of English scenery, faint and unobtrusive yet persistent and horizoning. In the Danubian forest we talk of past school- days. The Balkan plain suggests an English park, its trees planted as if to shut out "some infernal fellow creature in the shape of a new-made squire"; Jordan recalls the Thames; the Galilean Lake, Windermere; the Via Dolorosa, Bond Street; the fresh toast of the desert bivouac, an Eton breakfast; the hungry questing jackals are the place-hunters of Bridgewater and Taunton; the Damascus gardens, a neglected English manor from which the "family" has been long abroad; in the fierce, dry desert air are heard 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 gentlemanlike 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.