Was the history of the Crimean War worth writing? Not as a
magnified newspaper report,--that had been already done--but as a
permanent work of art from the pen of a great literary expert?
Very many of us, I think, after the lapse of fifty years, feel
compelled to say that it was not. The struggle represented no
great principles, begot no far-reaching consequences. It was not
inspired by the "holy glee" with which in Wordsworth's sonnet
Liberty fights against a tyrant, but by the faltering boldness, the
drifting, purposeless unresolve of statesmen who did not desire it,
and by the irrational violence of a Press which did not understand
it. It was not a necessary war; its avowed object would have been
attained within a few weeks or months by bloodless European
concert. It was not a glorious war; crippled by an incompatible
alliance and governed by the Evil Genius who had initiated it for
personal and sordid ends, it brought discredit on baffled generals
in the field, on Crown, Cabinet, populace, at home. It was not a
fruitful war; the detailed results purchased by its squandered life
and treasure lapsed in swift succession during twenty sequent
years, until the last sheet of the treaty which secured them was
contemptuously torn up by Gortschakoff in 1870. But a right sense
of historical proportion is in no time the heritage of the many,
and is least of all attainable while the memory of a campaign is
fresh. On Englishmen who welcomed home their army in 1855, the
strife from which shattered but victorious it had returned, loomed
as epoch-making and colossal, as claiming therefore permanent
record from some eloquent artist of attested descriptive power.
Soon the report gained ground that the destined chronicler was
Kinglake, and all men hailed the selection; yet the sceptic who in
looking back to-day decries the greatness of the campaign may
perhaps no less hesitate to approve the fitness of its chosen