MADAME NOVIKOFF
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 Kiréeff, 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. Kiréeff 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 Kiréeff, his stature, beauty, bravery, the white robe
he wore incarnadined by death-wounds, his body captured by the 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 Kiréeff 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.
[Picture: Madame Novikoff]
The lady who inspired both the eulogy and the curtailment was Madame
Novikoff, more widely known perhaps as O. K., with whom Kinglake
maintained during the last twenty years of life an intimate and mutual
friendship. Madame Olga Novikoff, _née_ Kiréeff, is a Russian lady of
aristocratic rank both by parentage and marriage. In a lengthened
sojourn at Vienna with her brother-in-law, the Russian ambassador, she
learned the current business of diplomacy. An eager religious
propagandist, she formed alliance with the “Old Catholics” on the
Continent, and with many among the High Church English clergy; becoming,
together with her brother Alexander, a member of the _Réunion Nationale_,
a society for the union of Christendom. Her interest in education has
led her to devote extensive help to school and church building and
endowment on her son’s estate. God-daughter to the Czar Nicholas, she is
a devoted Imperialist, nor less in sympathy, as were all her family, with
Russian patriotism: after the death of her brother in Servia on July
6/18, 1876, she became a still more ardent Slavophile. The three
articles of her creed are, she says, those of her country, Orthodoxy,
Autocracy, Nationalism. Her political aspirations have been guided, and
guided right, by her tact and goodness of heart. Her life’s aim has been
to bring about a cordial understanding between England and her native
land; there is little doubt that her influence with leading Liberal
politicians, and her vigorous allocutions in the Press, had much to do
with the enthusiasm manifested by England for the liberation of the
Danubian States. Readers of the Princess Lieven’s letters to Earl Grey
will recall the part played by that able ambassadress in keeping this
country neutral through the crisis of 1828–9; to her Madame Novikoff has
been likened, and probably with truth, by the Turkish Press both English
and Continental. She was accused in 1876 of playing on the religious
side of Mr. Gladstone’s character to secure his interest in the Danubians
as members of the Greek Church, while with unecclesiastical people she
was said to be equally skilful on the political side, converting at the
same time Anglophobe Russia by her letters in the “Moscow Gazette.” Mr.
Gladstone’s leanings to Montenegro were attributed angrily in the English
“Standard” to Madame Novikoff: “A serious statesman should know better
than to catch contagion from the petulant enthusiasm of a Russian
Apostle.” The contagion was in any case caught, and to some purpose;
letter after letter had been sent by the lady to the great statesman,
then in temporary retirement, without reply, until the last of these, “a
bitter cry of a sister for a sacrificed brother,” brought a feeling
answer from Mrs. Gladstone, saying that her husband was deeply moved by
the appeal, and was writing on the subject. In a few days appeared his
famous pamphlet, “Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East.”
Carlyle advised that Madame Novikoff’s scattered papers should be worked
into a volume; they appeared under the title “Is Russia Wrong?” with a
preface by Froude, the moderate and ultra-prudent tone of which
infuriated Hayward and Kinglake, as not being sufficiently appreciative.
Hayward declared some woman had biassed him; Kinglake was of opinion that
by studying the _ètat_ of Queen Elizabeth Froude had “gone and turned
himself into an old maid.”
Froude’s Preface to her next work, “Russia and England, a Protest and an
Appeal,” by O. K., 1880, was worded in a very different tone and
satisfied all her friends. The book was also reviewed with highest
praise by Gladstone in “The Nineteenth Century.” Learning that an
assault upon it was contemplated in “The Quarterly,” Kinglake offered to
supply the editor, Dr. Smith, with materials which might be so used as to
neutralize a _personal_ attack upon O. K. Smith entreated him to compose
the whole article himself. “I could promise you,” he writes, “that the
authorship should be kept a profound secret;” but this Kinglake seems to
have thought undesirable. The article appeared in April, 1880, under the
title of “The Slavonic Menace to Europe.” It opens with a panegyric on
the authoress: “She has mastered our language with conspicuous success;
she expostulates as easily as she reproaches, and she exhibits as much
facility in barbing shafts of satire as in framing specious excuses for
daring acts of diplomacy.” It insists on the high esteem felt for her by
both the Russian and Austrian governments, telling with much humour an
anecdote of Count Beust, the Prime Minister of Austria during her
residence in Vienna. The Count, after meeting her at a dinner party at
the Turkish Embassy, composed a set of verses in her honour, and gave
them to her, but she forgot to mention them to her brother-in-law. The
Prime Minister, encountering the latter, asked his opinion of the verses;
and the ambassador was greatly amazed at knowing nothing of the matter.
{96} From amenities towards the authoress, the article passes abruptly
to hostile criticism of the book; declares it to be proscribed in Russia
as mischievous, and to have precipitated a general war by keeping up
English interest in Servian rebellion. It sneers in doubtful taste at
the lady’s learning:
“sit non doctissima conjux,
Sit nox cum somno, sit sine lite dies;”
denounces the Slavs as incapable of being welded into a nation, urging
that their independence must destroy Austria-Hungary, a consummation
desired by Madame Novikoff, with her feline contempt for “poor dear
Austria,” but which all must unite to prevent if they would avert a
European war.
How could one clear harp, men asked themselves as they read, have
produced so diverse tones? The riddle is solved when we learn that the
first part only was from Kinglake’s pen: having vindicated his friend’s
ability and good faith, her right to speak and to be heard attentively,
he left the survey of her views, with which he probably disagreed, to the
originally assigned reviewer. The article, Madame Novikoff tells us in
the “Nouvelle Revue,” was received _avec une stupefaction unanime_. It
formed the general talk for many days, was attributed to Lord Salisbury,
was supposed to have been inspired by Prince Gortschakoff. The name
standing against it in Messrs. Murray’s books, as they kindly inform me,
is that of a writer still alive, and better known now than then, but they
never heard that Kinglake had a hand in it; the editor would seem to have
kept his secret even from the publishers. Kinglake sent the article in
proof to the lady; hoped that the facts he had imparted and the
interpolations he had inserted would please her; he could have made the
attack on Russia more pointed had he written it; she would think the
leniency shows a fault on the right side; he did not know the writer of
this latter part. He begged her to acquaint her friends in Moscow what
an important and majestic organ is “The Quarterly,” how weighty therefore
its laudation of herself. She recalls his bringing her soon afterwards
an article on her, written, he said, in an adoring tone by Laveleye in
the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” and directing her to a paper in “Fraser,” by
Miss Pauline Irby, a passionate lover of the “Slav ragamuffins,” and a
worshipper of Madame Novikoff. He quotes with delight Chenery’s
approbation of her “Life of Skobeleff”; he spoke of you “with a gleam of
kindliness in his eyes which really and truly I had never observed
before.” “The Times” quotes her as the “eloquent authoress of ‘Russia
and England’”; “fancy that from your enemy! you are getting even ‘The
Times’ into your net.” A later article on O. K. contains some praise,
but more abuse. Hayward is angry with it; Kinglake thinks it more
friendly than could have been expected “to _you_, a friend of _me_, their
old open enemy: the sugar-plums were meant for you, the sprinklings of
soot for me.”
Besides “Russia and England” Madame Novikoff is the author of “Friends or
Foes?—is Russia wrong?” and of a “Life of Skobeleff,” the hero of Plevna
and of Geok Tepé. From her natural endowments and her long familiarity
with Courts, she has acquired a capacity for combining, controlling,
entertaining social “circles” which recalls _les salons d’autrefois_, the
drawing-rooms of an Ancelot, a Le Brun, a Récamier. Residing in several
European capitals, she surrounds herself in each with persons
intellectually eminent; in England, where she has long spent her winters,
Gladstone, Carlyle and Froude, Charles Villiers, Bernal Osborne, Sir
Robert Morier, Lord Houghton, and many more of the same high type, formed
her court and owned her influence.
Kinglake first met her at Lady Holland’s in 1870, and mutual liking
ripened rapidly into close friendship. During her residences in England
few days passed in which he did not present himself at her drawing-room
in Claridge’s Hotel: when absent in Russia or on the Continent, she
received from him weekly letters, though he used to complain that writing
to a lady through the _poste restante_ was like trying to kiss a nun
through a double grating. These letters, all faithfully preserved, I
have been privileged to see; they remind me, in their mixture of personal
with narrative charm, of Swift’s “Letters to Stella”; except that Swift’s
are often coarse and sometimes prurient, while Kinglake’s chivalrous
admiration for his friend, though veiled occasionally by graceful banter,
is always respectful and refined. They even imitate occasionally the
“little language” of the great satirist; if Swift was Presto, Kinglake is
“Poor dear me”; if Stella was M. D., Madame Novikoff is “My dear Miss.”
This last endearment was due to an incident at a London dinner table. A
story told by Hayward, seasoned as usual with _gros sel_, amused the more
sophisticated English ladies present, but covered her with blushes.
Kinglake perceived it, and said to her afterwards, “I thought you were a
hardened married woman; I am glad that you are not; I shall henceforth
call you _Miss_.” Sometimes he rushes into verse. In answer to some
pretended rebuff received from her at Ryde he writes
“There was a young lady of Ryde, so awfully puffed up by pride,
She felt grander by far than the Son of the Czar,
And when he said, ‘Dear, come and walk on the pier,
Oh please come and walk by my side;’
The answer he got, was ‘Much better not,’ from that awful young lady
of Ryde.”
Oftenest, the letters are serious in their admiring compliments; they
speak of her superb organization of health and life and strength and
joyousness, the delightful sunshine of her presence, her decision and
strength of will, her great qualities and great opportunities: “away from
you the world seems a blank.” He is glad that his Great Eltchi has been
made known to her; the old statesman will be impressed, he feels sure, by
her “intense life, graciousness and grace, intellect carefully masked,
musical faculty in talk, with that heavenly power of coming to an end.”
He sends playfully affectionate messages from other members of the
_Gerontaion_, as he calls it, the group of aged admirers who formed her
inner court; echoing their laments over the universality of her
patronage. “Hayward can pardon your having an ambassador or two at your
_feet_, but to find the way to your _heart_ obstructed by a crowd of
astronomers, Russ-expansionists, metaphysicians, theologians,
translators, historians, poets;—this is more than he can endure. The
crowd reduces him, as Ampère said to Mme. Récamier, to the qualified
blessing of being only _chez vous_, from the delight of being _avec
vous_.” He hails and notifies additions to the list of her admirers;
quotes enthusiastic praise of her from Stansfeld and Charles Villiers,
warm appreciation from Morier, Sir Robert Peel, Violet Fane. He rallies
her on her victims, jests at Froude’s lover-like _galanterie_—“Poor St.
Anthony! how he hovered round the flame”;—at the devotion of that gay
Lothario, Tyndall, whose approaching marriage will, he thinks, clip his
wings for flirtation. “It seems that at the Royal Institution, or
whatever the place is called, young women look up to the Lecturers as
priests of Science, and go to them after the lecture in what churchmen
would call the vestry, and express charming little doubts about
electricity, and pretty gentle disquietudes about the solar system: and
then the Professors have to give explanations;—and then, somehow, at the
end of a few weeks, they find they have provided themselves with
chaperons for life.” So he pursues the list of devotees; her son will
tell her that Cæsar summarized his conquests in this country by saying
_Veni_, _Vidi_, _Vici_; but to her it is given to say, _Veni_, _Videbar_,
_Vici_.
On two subjects, theology and politics, Madame Novikoff was, as we have
seen, passionately in earnest. Himself at once an amateur casuist and a
consistent Nothingarian, whose dictum was that “Important if true” should
be written over the doors of churches, he followed her religious
arguments much as Lord Steyne listened to the contests between Father
Mole and the Reverend Mr. Trail. He expresses his surprise in all
seriousness that the Pharisees, a thoughtful and cultured set of men, who
alone among the Jews believed in a future state, should have been the
very men to whom our Saviour was habitually antagonistic. He refers more
lightly and frequently to “those charming talks of ours about our
Churches”; he thinks they both know how to _effleurer_ the surface of
theology without getting drowned in it. Of existing Churches he
preferred the English, as “the most harmless going”; disliked the Latin
Church, especially when intriguing in the East, as persecuting and as
schismatic, and therefore as no Church at all. Roman Catholics, he said,
have a special horror of being called “schismatic,” and that is, of
course, a good reason for so calling them. He would not permit the use
of the word “orthodox,” because, like a parson in the pulpit, it is
always begging the question. He refused historical reverence to the
Athanasian Creed, and was delighted when Stanley’s review in “The Times”
of Mr. Ffoulkes’ learned book showed it to have been written by order of
Charles the Great in 800 A.D. as what Thorold Rogers used to call “an
election squib.” In the “Filioque” controversy, once dear to Liddon and
to Gladstone, now, I suppose, obsolete for the English mind, but which
relates to the chief dividing tenet of East from West, he showed an
interest humorous rather than reverent; took pains to acquaint himself
with the views held on it by Döllinger and the old Catholics; noted with
amusement the perplexity of London ladies as to the meaning of the word
when quoted in the much-read “Quarterly” article, declaring their belief
to be that it was a clergyman’s baby born out of wedlock.
Madame Novikoff’s political influence, which he recognized to the full,
he treated in the same mocking spirit. She is at Berlin, received by
Bismarck; he hopes that though the great man may not eradicate her
Slavophile heresies, he may manifest the weakness of embroiling nations
on mere ethnological grounds. “Are even nearer relationships so
delightful? would you walk across the street for a third or fourth
cousin? then why for a millionth cousin?” Madame Novikoff kindly sends
to me an “Imaginary Conversation” between herself and Gortschakoff,
constructed by Kinglake during her stay in St. Petersburg in 1879.
“_G._ Well—you really have done good service to your country and your
Czar by dividing and confusing these absurd English, and getting us out
of the scrape we were in in that—Balkan Peninsula.
“_Miss O._ Well, certainly I did my best; but I fear I have ruined the
political reputation of my English partizans, for in order to make them
‘beloved of the Slave,’ I of course had to make them, poor souls! go
against their own country; and their country, stupid as it is, has now I
fear found them out.
“_G._ _Tant pis pour eux_! _Entre nous_, if I had been Gladstone, I
should have preferred the love of my own country to the love of
these—Slaves of yours. But, tell me, how did you get hold of Gladstone?
“_Miss O._ _Rien de plus simple_! Four or five years ago I asked what
was his weak point, and was told that he had two, ‘Effervescence,’ and
‘Theology.’ With that knowledge I found it all child’s play to manage
him. I just sent him to Munich, and there boiled him up in a weak
decoction of ‘Filioque,’ then kept him ready for use, and impatiently
awaited the moment when our plans for getting up the ‘Bulgarian
atrocities’ should be mature. I say ‘impatiently,’ for, Heavens, how
slow you all were! at least so it strikes a woman. The arrangement of
the ‘atrocities’ was begun by our people in 1871, and yet till 1876,
though I had Gladstone ready in 1875, nothing really was done! I assure
you, Prince, it is a trying thing to a woman to be kept waiting for
promised atrocities such an unconscionable time.
“_G._ That brother-in-law of yours was partly the cause of our slowness.
He was always wanting to have the orders for fire and blood in neat
formal despatches, signed by me, and copied by clerks. However, I hope
you are satisfied now, with the butcheries and the flames, and the —?
“_Miss O._ _Pour le moment_!”
She is absent during the sudden dissolution of Parliament in 1874.
“London woke yesterday morning and found that your friend Gladstone had
made a _coup-d’état_. He has dissolved Parliament at a moment when no
human being expected it, and my impression is that he has made a good
hit, and that the renovated Parliament will give him a great majority.”
The impression was wildly wrong; and he found a cause for the
Conservative majority in Gladstone’s tame foreign policy, and especially
in the pusillanimity his government showed when insulted by Gortschakoff.
He always does justice to her influence with Gladstone; his great
majority at the polls in 1880 is _her_ victory and _her_ triumph; but his
Turkophobia is no less her creation: “England is stricken with incapacity
because you have stirred up the seething caldron that boils under
Gladstone’s skull, putting in diabolical charms and poisons of theology
to overturn the structure of English polity:” she will be able, he
thinks, to tell her government that Gladstone is doing his best to break
up the British Empire.
He quotes with approbation the newspaper comparison of her to the
Princess Lieven. She disparages the famous ambassadress; he sets her
right. Let her read the “Correspondence,” by his friend Mr. Guy Le
Strange, and she will see how large a part the Princess played in keeping
England quiet during the war of 1828–29. She did not convert her austere
admirer, Lord Grey, to approval of the Russian designs, nor overcome the
uneasiness with which the Duke of Wellington regarded her intrigues; but
the Foreign Minister, Lord Aberdeen, was apparently a fool in her hands;
and, whoever had the merit, the neutrality of England continued. That
was, he repeats more than once, a most critical time for Russia; it was
an object almost of life and death to the Czar to keep England dawdling
in a state of actual though not avowed neutrality. It is, he argued, a
matter of fact, that precisely this result was attained, and “I shall be
slow to believe that Madame de Lieven did not deserve a great share of
the glory (as you would think it) of making England act weakly under such
circumstances; more especially since we know that the Duke did not like
the great lady, and may be supposed to have distinctly traced his painful
embarrassment to her power.” So the letters go, interspersed with news,
with criticisms of notable persons, with comments enlightening or cynical
on passing political events: with personal matters only now and then; as
when he notes the loss of his two sisters; dwells with unwonted feeling
on the death of his eldest nephew by consumption; condoles with her on
her husband’s illness; gives council, wise or playful, as to the
education of her son. “I am glad to hear that he is good at Greek,
Latin, and Mathematics, for that shows his cleverness; glad also to hear
that he is occasionally naughty, for that shows his force. I advise you
to claim and exercise as much control as possible, because I am certain
that a woman—especially so gifted a one as you—knows more, or rather
feels more, about the right way of bringing up a boy than any mere man.”
Unbrokenly the correspondence continues: the intimacy added charm,
interest, fragrance to his life, brought out in him all that was genial,
playful, humorous. He fights the admonitions of coming weakness; goes to
Sidmouth with a sore throat, but takes his papers and his books. It is,
he says, a deserted little sea-coast place. “Mrs. Grundy has a small
house there, but she does not know me by sight. If Madame Novikoff were
to come, the astonished little town, dazzled first by her, would find
itself invaded by theologians, bishops, ambassadors of deceased emperors,
and an ex-Prime-Minister.” But as time goes on he speaks more often of
his suffering throat; of gout, increasing deafness, only half a voice:
his last letter is written in July, 1890, to condole with his friend upon
her husband’s death. In October his nurse takes the pen; Madame Novikoff
comes back hurriedly from Scotland to find him in his last illness. “It
is very nice,” he told his nurse, “to see dear Madame Novikoff again, but
I am going down hill fast, and cannot hope to be well enough to see much
of her.” This is in November, 1890; on New Year’s Eve came the
inexorable, “Terminator of delights and Separator of friends.”