第22章 MADAME NOVIKOFF(1)

THE Cabinet Edition of "The Invasion of the Crimea" appeared in 1877, shortly after the Servian struggle for independence, which aroused in England universal interest and sympathy. Kinglake had heard from the lips of a valued lady friend the tragic death-tale of her brother Nicholas Kireeff, who fell fighting as a volunteer on the side of the gallant Servian against the Turk: and, much moved by the recital, offered to honour the memory of the dead hero in the Preface to his forthcoming edition. He kept his word; made sympathetic reference to M. Kireeff in the opening of his Preface; but passed in pursuance of his original design to a hostile impeachment of Russia, its people, its church, its ruler. This was an error of judgment and of feeling; and the lady, reading the manuscript, indignantly desired him to burn the whole rather than commit the outrage of associating her brother's name with an attack on causes and personages dear to him as to herself. Kinglake listened in silence, then tendered to her a CRAYON ROUGE, begging her to efface all that pained her. She did so; and, diminished by three-fourths of its matter, the Preface appears in Vol. I. of the Cabinet Edition. The erasure was no slight sacrifice to an author of Kinglake's literary sensitiveness, mutilating as it did the integrity of a carefully schemed composition, and leaving visible the scar. He sets forth the strongly sentimental and romantic side of Russian temperament. Love of the Holy Shrines begat the war of 1853, racial ardour the war of 1876. The first was directed by a single will, the second by national enthusiasm; yet the mind of Nicholas was no less tossed by a breathless strife of opposing desires and moods than was Russia at large by the struggle between Panslavism and statesmanship. Kinglake paints vividly the imposing figure of the young Kireeff, his stature, beauty, bravery, the white robe he wore incarnadined by death-wounds, his body captured bythe hateful foes. He goes on to tell how myth rose like an exhalation round his memory: how legends of "a giant piling up hecatombs by a mighty slaughter" reverberated through mansion and cottage, town and village, cathedral and church; until thousands of volunteers rushed to arms that they might go where young Kireeff had gone. Alexander's hand was forced, and the war began, which but for England's intervention would have cleared Europe of the Turk. We have the text, but not the sermon; the Preface ends abruptly with an almost clumsy peroration.