第30章 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH(4)

He was once beguiled, amongst friends very intimate, into telling a dream. He dreamed that he was attending an anatomical lecture - which, as a fact, he had never done - and that his own body, from which he found himself entirely separated, was the dissected subject on which the lecturer discoursed. The body lay on a table beside the lecturer, but he himself, his entity, was at the other end of the room, on the furthest or highest of a set of benches raised one above the other as at a theatre. He imagined himself in a vague way to be disagreeing with the lecturer; but the strongest impression on his mind was annoyance at being so badly placed, so far from the professor and from his own body that he could not see or hear without an effort. The dream, he pointed out, showed this curious fact, that without any conscious design or effort of the will a man may conceive himself to be in perfect possession of his identity, whilst separated from his own body by a distance of several feet. "The highest concept," said Jowett, "which man forms of himself is as detached from the body." ("Life," ii. 241.) The lecture-room which he imagined was one of the lower school-rooms at Eton, with which he had been familiar in early days.

After Hayward's death in 1884, his own habits began to change.Hestill dined at the Athenaeum "corner," but increasing deafness began to make society irksome, and, his solitary meal ended, he spent his evenings reading in the Library. By-and-by that too became impossible. His voice grew weak, throat and tongue were threatened with disease. In 1888 he went to Brighton with a nurse, returned to rooms on Richmond Hill, then to Bayswater Terrace. An operation was performed and he seemed to recover, but relapsed. Old friends tended him: Madame Novikoff, Mr. Froude and Mr. Lecky, Madame de Quaire and Mrs. Brookfield, Lord Mexborough his ancient fellow-traveller, Mrs. Craven, Sir William and Lady Gregory, with a few more, cheered him by their visits so long as he was able to bear them; and his brother and sister, Dr. and Mrs. Hamilton Kinglake, were with him at the end. Patient to the last, kind and gentle to all about him, he passed away quietly on New Year's Day, 1891:

"being merry-hearted, Shook hands with flesh and blood, and so departed."His remains were cremated at Woking, after a special service at Christchurch, Lancaster Gate, attended by Dr. and Mrs. Kinglake with their son Captain Kinglake, the Duke of Bedford, Mr. and Mrs. Lecky, Mrs. W. H. Brookfield and her son Charles.

No good portrait of him has been published. That prefixed to Blackwood's "Eothen" of 1896 was furnished by Dr. Kinglake, who, however, looked upon it as unsatisfactory. The "Not an M.P." of "Vanity Fair," 1872, is a grotesque caricature. The photograph here reproduced (p. 128), by far the best likeness extant, he gave to Madame Novikoff in 1870, receiving hers in return, but pronouncing the transaction "an exchange between the personified months of May and November." The face gives expression to the shy aloofness which, amongst strangers, was characteristic of him through life.He had even a horror of hearing his name pealed out by servants, and came early to parties that the proclamation might be achieved before as few auditors as possible. Visiting the newly married husband of his friend Adelaide Kemble, and being the first guest to arrive, he encountered in Mr. Sartoris a host ascontentedly undemonstrative as himself.Bowspassed, a seat by the fire was indicated, he sat down, and the pair contemplated one another for ten minutes in absolute silence, till the lady of the house came in, like the prince in "The Sleeping Beauty," though not by the same process, to break the charm. He gave up calling at a house where he was warmly appreciated, because father, mother, daughter, bombarded him with questions. "I never came away without feeling sure that I had in some way perjured myself."On his shyness waited swiftly ensuing boredom; if his neighbour at table were garrulous or BANALE, his face at once betrayed conversational prostration; a lady who often watched him used to say that his pulse ought to be felt after the first course; and that if it showed languor he should be moved to the side of some other partner. "He had great charm," writes to me another old friend, "in a quiet winning way, but was 'dark' with rough and noisy people." So it came to pass that his manner was threefold; icy and repellent with those who set his nerves on edge; good- humoured, receptive, intermittently responsive in general and congenial company; while, at ease with friends trusted and beloved, the lines of the face became gracious, indulgent, affectionate, the SOURIRE DES YEUX often inexpressibly winning and tender. "Kinglake," says Eliot Warburton in his unpublished diary, "talked to us to-day about his travels; pessimistic and cynical to the rest of the world, he is always gentle and kind to us." To this dear friend he was ever faithful, wearing to the day of his death an octagonal gold ring engraved "Eliot. Jan: 1852." He would never play the RACONTEUR in general company, for he had a great horror of repeating himself, and, latterly, of being looked upon as a bore by younger men; but he loved to pour out reminiscences of the past to an audience of one or two at most: "Let an old man gather his recollections and glance at them under the right angle, and his life is full of pantomime transformation scenes." The chief characteristic of his wit was its unexpectedness; sometimes acrid, sometimes humorous, his sayings came forth, like Topham Beauclerk's in Dr. Johnson's day, like Talleyrand's in our own, poignant without effort. His calm, gentle voice, contrasted with his startling caustic utterance, reminded people of Prosper Merimee: terse epigram,felicitous APROPOS, whimsical presentment of the topic under discussion, emitted in a low tone, and without the slightest change of muscle: