MR. KINGL AKE'S NEW VOLUME.*

Tux sixth and penultimate volume of Mr. Kinglake's Invasion of the Crimea is disappointing. Masked no longer by the moving accidents of glorious war, the radical faults of his method of writing history become distressingly apparent. He ignores or disregards the laws of historical composition so thoroughly, that at least one-half of his present volume con- sists of matter which would be far better away ; and, to borrow the expression which he applies to a reprehensible habit of the " shrewd, reflective Lord Melbourne," it is almost impossible for the (male) reader to avoid " accentuating thought with a ' damn," as he wades through the mass of unnecessary and irrelevant details with which this book is clogged. Of history proper, there is little indeed in it, beyond a succinct account of the famous hurricane of November 14th, and an elaborate description, in lengthened dullness long drawn out, of the sufferings of the troops before and after that event. That our description of this description is not unfair, will be clear to any reader who will mark—to take no other examples of Mr. Kinglake's voluble iteration,—the almost incredible number of times that he repeats the not very novel proposition that scurvy is produced by a certain kind of diet, and that the troops of England and France suffered much from that " accusing " disease. The mismanagement of England's re- sources at the commencement of a war is a tale so trite, that it does not call for the amount of verbiage which Mr. Kinglake has lavished on it,—unless, indeed, he could suggest a definite remedy ; but this, we submit, he has failed to do. He draws a comparison between the war administration of France and the war administration of England, in favour of the former. But it does not appear that our allies were better sup- plied than ourselves at the commencement of the war, and they certainly were in a much worse plight than we were when it ended. With the full command of the sea and practically un- limited resources, the problem of supplying a small army with everything it could need was a problem which England was bound to solve with ease. That such a problem was put before her in a shape which made it for a time so difficult to solve, was not due, as Mr. Kinglake would have us believe, to a rivalry between the State and the Court, and the consequences thereof, but chiefly to the deficiencies of Lord Raglan. In saying this, and in the further remarks that we have to make on this matter, we must disclaim all wish, even the faintest, of derogating from the fair fame of the man who was, so unfortunately for himself and for his country, entrusted with the com- mand of our troops in the Crimea. But it is the obvious duty of a critic to state what he thinks to be the truth,—and we have long believed that the cardinal error of Mr. Kinglake's history is the gallant and chivalrous, but as we hold, utterly erroneous notion, which he entertains of Lord Raglan's capa- city as a general. And although we may seem for a moment to be travelling out of the record in taking a backward glance, in this place, at Mr. Kinglake's previous volumes, we think that we are justified in doing so. For this volume contains some striking instances of the way in which Lord Raglan deceived himself as to the exigencies of his position, and these instances • The Invasion of the Crimea. Vol. VI. By A. W. Bloglake, M.A. London : Blackwood and Sons.

have light thrown upon them by what seem to us to be his: earlier errors. And by far the longest chapter in the book,- " The Demeanour of England," owes much of its length and' nearly all its relevancy to the opportunity which Mr. Kinglake finds in it of defending Lord Raglan against attacks which were as unjust as they were ungenerous. No doubt whatever can exist as to the industry and self-devotion with which Lord Raglan, after Inkerman and the fatal storm, set himself to remedy the irremediable. He shut the stable-door with promptitude when the steed was stolen. But the fix into which he got, or to use Mr. Kinglake's phrase, the duress into which he went of his own accord, justifies us, we believe, in holding that his appointment was a mistake, and that he was, in homely language, "the wrong man in the wrong place."

We must perforce support this view with so much brevity,

that we may fail to make it clear; but, if we are not mistaken, there is abundant matter in Mr. Kinglake's-

work to give us the clearest warrant for saying what we have to say. Few readers of his account of Balaklava can have for- gotten the memorable contrast which he drew between the-

" man from the banks of the Sutlej and the man from the banks of the Serpentine," and in his present volume he dwells- with just contempt upon England's silly practice of foregoing

the aid of her India officers and administrators in European war. But Lord Raglan was taken from the desk at which he had toiled for forty years, to conduct an enterprise which ought to have been entrusted to a soldier of some recent experience in the field,—whether that soldier was a youthful genius like Wolfe, or a matured warrior like Sir Colin Campbell. More- over, Lord Raglan's experiences of war under Wellington were not of the kind to warrant any strong belief in his capacity as a general. They were not of the kind enjoyed even by Picton or Crawfurd, and it is not surprising to find that he was " sky- larking" at the Alma when he ought to have been directing the movements of his troops ; that he marred, if he did' not lose, the fruits of that ill-managed battle, by not following up his defeated foes ; and that he allowed his wish to storm Sebastopol to be overruled by " Science," as Mr. King- lake puts it, " and the French." But having made this last and most fatal blunder, he ought at once—and it is needless to say that his master would have done so—he ought at once to have made his communications with Balaklava secure. Bat for this, and all other shortcomings, of the English General, Mr; Kinglake has one defence, and one only,—he was afraid, for- sooth, of offending the susceptibilities of the French, and en- dangering the Alliance. That Lord Raglan really was affected with this feeling to a morbid degree may be inferred from a passage that we are about to quote, but that Mr. Kinglake, above all men, should approve and endorse it is curious. In the most explicit terms, he has expressed his opinion that the English Alliance was the one thing necessary to the then ruler of France, and quite as explicitly that that potentate was singularly and peculiarly alive to the fact. If Lord Raglan,.

therefore, without any of the soldierly bluntness which a Picton or a Crawfurd might have used, had in his courteous way com- municated to St. Arnaud his intention of pursuing the defeated Russians at the Alma, there cannot be the shadow of a doubt that St. Arnaud would have acquiesced. And if Lord Raglan,

with a similar exercise of firmness and courtesy, bad insisted, on trying storming before investing Sebastopol, Canrobert un- questionably would have also acquiesced. On neither occasion, we may be certain, would he have been met with a " Vous ne le pouvez pas," or even a "non possumus." Yet that he thought differently himself is clear from the comment which he made when the first answer was actually given to him, on another occasion, by the French Marshal :— " Our cruelly over-tasked army had long been bitterly needing a little remission of labour ; and we saw the kind of resistance which the English commander encountered, when pressing the. French to relieve his harassed soldiery from a portion of their toil. In his grievous extremity, Lord Raglan one day declared that, unless he could have his troops relieved from some portion of their toil, he might be forced to withdraw from the front ; but the Frenclr General answered, ' My lord, you cannot do that !' And in narrating this rejoinder of Canrobert's, Lord Raglan adds,—` He was right. L could not do so without compromising the Alliance, and, in all pro- bability, the safety of the army."

As a matter of fact, he could not do so, as Mr. Kinglake has himself pointed out, " without calling down utter ruin upon the French, thus deserted, as it were, in the battle-field, and also upon the seceders themselves." We were mistaken, however,. in saying that this exaggerated fear of compromising the: Alliance was the sole excuse which Air. Kinglake makes for Lord Raglan. As regards the third and most fatal of his errors, he says :—" The zeal of the Duke of Newcastle drove him to send out the fated word, to send out the fated man, and

to send out the fated gift, which, unhappily, were fitted to change what might otherwise have proved a swift conquest into a painful, lengthened siege." "The word," he adds, in a foot-note, " was siege (` lay siege to Sebastopol ') ; the man was Burgoyne ; the gift was the siege-train."

We may leave the " man " and the " gift " alone, but Mr. Kinglake must be hard-pressed indeed for an argument, if he can use such a nonsensical one as his appeal to the " word " presumes. Again, Lord Raglan's despatches in his hour of need were far from being so plain-spoken and vigorous as they should have been. " When for duty's sake charging himself to impart mournful truths, he certainly did not break out into much lamentation; and, on the contrary, after showing, if he could, any circumstances of a more hopeful sort than those with which he had dealt, he liked to add a short sentence, which, although, of course, kept, and kept strictly ,within the limits of truth, was still so buoyantly worded that, when coming under the eyes of an ardent and hopeful reader, it might tend to chase away gloom occasioned by ugly tidings." He paid dearly for this, when in the end it brought upon him the reproaches of Newcastle, the

rebukes of Panmure, and the thunder of the then omnipotent Times. Mr. Kinglake is successful, as we have said, in showing that mach of this reprobation was as unmerited as it was un-

generous ; but although Lord Raglan appears to have never lost popularity in the army which he commanded, he never re- covered it in England.

On the whole, Mr. Kinglake finds it impossible to blame any

men or set of men in particular for the temporary but terrible break-down which aggravated the " winter troubles " of our army after Inkerman. In our opinion, he blames Lord Raglan too little, and the Times too much. The Aberdeen Ministry, too, get off with fewer stripes than they deserve ; and that this opinion is shared by Mr. Kinglake himself may be inferred from the following on dit, which he mentions with evident

approval :—

" In reference to Tower's vast energies and his inveterate habit of taking thought for the morrow, it was said of him that if he had been a member of the Government at the time of the war, be would have destroyed all repose at Whitehall, and tormented his colleagues to death, but that still at that cost—a cost cheerfully borne by our people—he would have saved the army from want."

Of the literary merits of this volume we have little space to speak. We fancy that the style is slightly deteriorated, and at all events that the trick of repeating words and phrases in the same sentence, a trick which Mr. Kinglake once used so effectually, but never too sparsely, has now become a disagree- able and inveterate mannerism. The sketches of Mr. Delane and Mr. Roebuck are drawn with all the old force and fire. " At none non erat his locus," and they are better suited for obituary notices of these remarkable men, than for the place and space which they occupy in this history. A whole host of exceptions also might be taken to the mixture of fact and fancies which constitute what is called " A Retrospective Inquiry." But what will probably annoy and vex the reader more than anything else, is the persistent way in which the author fails to show the first of all the qualifications of an historian, a knowledge of what to omit. It is really—to mention only two examples of this, and to mention them in the way which they deserve—it is really "quite too awfully " ridiculous to be told in two separate foot- notes that Lord Raglan's " outer coat was one thoughtfully sent him from Vienna by Lady Westmoreland," and in another that "the daughter of one of the Generals present on duty (at the Chelsea Court of Inquiry) was then in the reign,' the early reign,' of her beauty." We ought not to omit to say that in a very noble passage Mr. Kinglake has paid a magnificent tribute to the magnificent behaviour of the English soldiers in their hour of extreme need, but we must conclude as we began, by pronouncing this book a disappointing one ; and if we may twist Holofernes' words a little away from the meaning he meant them to bear, we should say of the author that, in this volume at all events, " he draweth out the thread of his ver- bosity finer than the staple of his argument."