BOOKS.

MADAME NOVIKOFF.*

MADAME NOVIKOFF, we learn, has always had an amiable aversion from writing about herself, and could not be pre- . veiled upon to write her reminiscences. This was Mr. Stead's .opportunity. He is ready to write about the whole world and lall that therein is, including himself. This book might be Toughly described as a narrative of the Balkan problem as it was reflected in the lives of Madame Novikoff, Gladstone, Kinglake, Froude, Freeman, Tyndall, and Mr. Stead. There are innumerable letters which have never been published 'before, and the majority of them are extraordinarily interest- ing. Some readers will not share our opinion—they are to be . envied—but we must say that to some extent our pleasure : has been spoiled by Mr. Stead's aggressive ineptitudes, his ; untidiness, discursiveness, and irrelevance. Nevertheless the :good material remains, and it is enough to make. the mouths * The M.P. for Russia Reminiscences and Correspondence of Madame Olga Movikoff. Edited by W. T. Stead, 2 Tole. London 3 Andrew Melrose, (82g. not. j

of all biographers water. Not more than two or three have had such interesting material at their disposal in our time.

Mr. Stead writes as though there had been a continuity in Pan-Sla.vistn, although he must know that Pan-Slavic:a as it was understood before the Treaty of Berlin, and in a dwindling degree until the Russo-Japanese War, no longer exists. The measured and prudent sympathy of Russian statesmen with the Slays of the Balkans to-day is a very different thing. In the first volume Mr. Stead uses arguments which are intel- ligible only on the ground that he is writing of the old regime in Turkey; but in the second volume he assumes the annexa- tion of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary. There is little excuse for such sloppiness, for the Turkish Revolution is a prime factor in all the questions with which he deals, from whatever point of view one looks at them. As other specimens of Mr. Stead's annoying ways we must mention his digression in order to bring in a spook story in connexion with the name of the late Russian Procurator of the Holy Synod, and his attribution to Lord Cromer of the blame for Gordon's death. This last statement is preposterous. Mr. Stead himself "ran" a very ill-advised Press campaign in which (if we are to accept his own estimate of his achievement) he worried the Government into sending Gordon to Khartoum. Lord Cromer had very good reasons, as the event proved, for resisting that plan. Yet Mr. Stead audaciously perseveres in appropriating what little glory there was in an episode he should be anxious to forget, and in saddling others with all the blame !

In the "seventies" and "eighties" of last century Madame Novikoff was a centre of London gossip. Every woman who conducts a salon must be exposed to gossip, but the gossip

which surrounded Madame Novikoff was very different from that which played like lightning round the head of Madame Recander or. of Madame do Steel. It was all political gossip. What was Madame Novikoff's mission in London P Her position was quite unofficial, yet she "knew everybody" and "went everywhere." Was she a Russian "agent," or, even worse, "a spy" ? If any one still entertains any fantastic suspicions of that sort, he may easily set them at rest by reading this book. Madame Novikoff yearned for (and we are glad to say that to-day she enjoys) an understanding between Russia and Britain. All her labours and, writings were directed towards the advancement of the Slavonic ideal, and towards an Anglo-Russian entente as the best means of realising it. Mr. Gladstone got to know her as intimately as he did simply because he heartily shared her political dreams. We dare say that Madame Novikoff now and again used the information she acquired in London in a quasi-diplomatic manner to guide the actions of Russia. She would have been less than human if she had not. But her aim was a good aim ; and now that Englishmen are almost unanimous in approving the Anglo-Russian Convention, no one will care to argue that Madame Novikoff was an agent in any undesirable sense. She made London better acquainted with Russian ideas, and it was Disraeli who called her the "Member of Parliament for Russia." It is an odd reflection, by the way, that so many Liberals should be opposed, most mistakenly as we think, to the effects of the pro-Russian policy for which Mr. Gladstone struggled so long.

Madame Novikoff met Gladstone and Disraeli on the same day, and she and Gladstone thereupon began a friendship which was marked by a manifold correspondence. As for ICinglalce's close friendship with her, it is familiar. from Canon Tuckwell's Life of Kinglake. Kinglake introduced her to Tyndall one day in Hyde Park, as Madame Novikoff relates in her own words :—

"I wanted particularly to know Kinglake's views upon Tyndall' beautiful Belfast address, which fascinated me greatly, though it certainly expressed anything but my religious creed. Still, I must confess, 1 was struck with its courageous outspokenness and artistic brilliancy. This address seemed to me the work of a poet, rather than that of a philosopher or theologian. Somehow it seemed to me thal,, however wrong was the author's theology, his nature had a loftiness and a generosity which I was accus- tomed to connect with the purest Christianity. I spoke perhaps too enthusiastically, but hero Kinglake interrupted me. Pray remember I am a heathen. I dislike churches, and had I my way,' added he, with a twinkle in his eye, would write on every church, chapel, and cathedral, only one line—"Important, if true." As for philosophy, with all its objective and subjective theories, with all its "categorical imperatives," I patronise it still less '—this time smiling outright. 'I admit categorical impera- tives only from a woman I like, But, look! here is the very man

you will be pleased to know, I am sure. Here is Tyndall himself, and he will explain everything you want to hear.' With these words he took the newcomer by the hand, and the acquaintance was made—an acquaintance which will never be forgotten."

In 1874 Tyndall wrote to Madame Novikoff

"You write to me sometimes as if I wore ungrateful for your kindnesa,—this is not the case ; my seeming neglect and delay arise wholly from my heavy work, and, though you will not believe »io, my bad brain. Had nature given me the capacity of resting that brain by sleep I might have really approached what you suppose me to be—I might have made my mark in the world. But as it is I am like a climber in the mountains who has to depend upon a broken leg."

If Madame Novikoff was naturally and deeply stirred by the Bulgarian atrocities, a new passion was imported into her detestation of the pro-Turkish policy of Britain by the death of her gallant brother Nicholas Kireeff, who was killed in the Turkish-Servian War of 1876 when leading a Servian brigade as a volunteer. Kinglake has described the death of this heroic man in the preface to the sixth edition of his Crimean book, working in an episode twenty years subsequent to the events with which the book is concerned with an ingenuity that attests his anxiety to pay a compliment to the family of Madame Novikoff. It appears that Madame Novikoff struck out a large part of the preface as Kinglake originally wrote it, as she disliked its unfavourable tone towards Russia. Madame Novikoff even entered into public disputation with Gladstone, for all their political alliance. She did not care to be opposed apparently on any point ; she imperfectly appre- ciated, so far as we can judge, the dialectical candour which is often the essence of strength in recommending a case to the favour of a democracy ; and she had pretensions to advise Ministers on matters on which her title to be beard was, to say the least, imperfect. Indeed, it was not easy for a democratic politician to swallow Madame Novikoff's con- victions whole. She was with British Liberals in their anti- Turk and pro-Slavonic policy, but she remained a believer in Russian autocracy, disbelieved in Constitutionalism (Froude was with her there, of course), condoned what we should call religious persecution, and bated Jews in the most approved " anti-Sernite" manner of the Continent.

There were moments when Gladstone was acutely alive to the base political uses which might be made of knowledge of the fact that he was in frequent communication with a Russian subject. There was the time, for example, when Disraeli was threatening Russia with war. Madame Novikoff was at fault, surely, in suggesting that Gladstone should register his letters to her. Gladstone answered ;—

" I wrote to you on the 22nd ult., and I am sorry to find that my rapid and rather changeful movements during a round of visits in the West have prevented my receiving with duo prompti- tude your several letters, to which I now reply. Do not wonder if I say I should not like even to register a letter to you, or allow it, by so slight an act, to be supposed that I wrote to you some- thing peculiar in its nature. This absurd construction would be put upon either my writing often or writing with any the slightest indication of secrecy. It is true that in this matter I have no secrets ; but I am compelled to be cautious of signs Which are among us misinterpreted by tho very class that have least excuse for the misinterpretation."

And again :— "I am acting in the Eastern Question against the Government, the Clubs, the London Press (in majority), the majority of both Houses, and five-sixths or nine-tenths of the Plutocracy of the country. These make up a great Power. Against them is, I believe, the true nation. For and with the true nation I am striving to Act. In so acting, I have, God knows, no strength to spare. It is my duty carefully to avoid whatever, even in a small degree, diminishes that strength. To write to you secretly, systematically, to furnish you with documents, or the like, would strengthen -prejudices against me, and thus injure a cause very dear to me.

Ho not be surprised, therefore, if, as I begged off from sending .you registered letters or in any way affectiug secrecy, so I ask to be excused from sending you documents with which I have no natural concern, and in sending which I should therefore seem to do the business of an agent."

Madame Novikoff had, and no doubt still has in an increased degree, a real liking for Great Britain. In one place she refers to her difficulties as a Russian subject in praising Englishmen in the face of all the bad opinions of them held by her friends In Russia. Her books—Friends or Foes? Is Russia Wrong ?

and Russia and England, to the lust of which Froude wrote the preface.—are obviously the plea of one who sincerely desired to bring the two countries together. We suspect that Madame Novikoff had a passionate instinct for "causes," however, and she seems to have taken up that of Ismail Pasha rather precipitately as the result of a casual suggestion at a dinner-party.

The reader must go to the book for the wealth of correspon- dence, but we quote here a characteristic letter from Froude on the Afghan War in 1879 :— " By the time that you arrive you will find this Afghan business at red heat. How amuse& you Russians must be at seeing our dear Government strangled in the webs of its own spinning. Nobody cares about the country. One party triumphs in the mistakes of the other ; and the massacres at Cabal, and the Zulu war, and the destruction of the Harvest by the bad weather, are all so many trump cards in the hands of the Liberals. May the Devil fly away with Liberals and Tories both, and may Fate or Providence, or whatever it is, send poor England a Ccesar or a Cromwell to lift us out of the mud in which we are rolling."

What we have written will suggest to the reader something of the fascination, the energy, and the complexity of this cultivated Russian lady. She had the power to draw men out. One might say of them that in their relations with her their characters became more than ever characteristic. We only wish that her wonderful archives bad fallen into the bands of a more discreet and becoming editor than Mr. Stead. On the main subject with which the book deals—the Slav problem—Britain has declared her sympathy clearly, and she had done so long before the situation was simplified for her by the overthrow of the old order in Turkey. Yet, unhappily for South-Eastern Europe, that problem in a slightly different form remains as real and as perilous as at the moment when Madame Novikoff arrived in London.