with dislike and distrust. Meeting him for the first time in 1844, he thought him clever, but 'too vain and full of self-esteem 'to talk freely lest he should lose ground'; in 1858 he described him as a shifty and unsafe tactician,' and as a 'hateful 'leader,' and nine years later he was still uncertain of his honesty. Even to the end, although he became the most loyal and devoted of his colleagues, Cranbrook had too much blunt and uncompromising directness in his own composition to be won over to ungrudging admiration; and as late as 1878, when almost entirely under the spell of his influence, he could occasionally throw off his obsession and criticise him in the old spirit. Talking of a speech of Beaconsfield's in the House of Lords, he remarks: 'I could not understand his Indian policy at all. I wish I had seen him and put words into his 'mouth, for I am afraid he had no very definite conception of 'his own meaning.' But though a blunt, rather commonplace and not over-subtle man like Lord Cranbrook could not be expected ever to understand the great magician under whose sway he fell, the matter-of-fact observations in his diary give a more human and intelligible picture of Disraeli than most of those hitherto published; and his final verdict on him after his death shows that he came to appreciate a side of him hidden to the popular view:

'He was a sure friend,' Lord Cranbrook wrote in 1881, not a bitter enemy, as many supposed, and could forget and forgive private wrongs. . . He was not the impassive Sphinx drawn by some: and sitting by him I have noted feelings to which outsiders deemed him impervious. . . . Where there was time he was always ready for discussion and not ashamed to give way if convinced.'

This verdict is borne out by Lord Aberdare, who wrote during Disraeli's last illness, 'We are all sorry, for everybody ' likes him, although we vary in our degrees of respect.'

But, besides the personal feelings of Lord Cranbrook and others, it is interesting to trace in his memoirs the rapidity with which Disraeli, advocate of the democracy against the oligarchy, himself lapsed into autocracy in his party dealings. His autocratic methods, surprising in a man who had attained the leadership of his party before he had won their confidence, no doubt help to account for his ultimate success in securing an unstinted measure of confidence also. Thus in 1858 a whip he sent out peremptorily requiring the constant attendance of the under-secretaries in the House was regarded as so great an affront that Hardy threatened to resign; sixteen. years later his cabinet ministers received similar notices

without a murmur. With the possible exception of Peel, no Prime Minister since the younger Pitt had so subservient a cabinet or such uncontrolled power as Disraeli in his last ministry. By that time he had become able to cast off his suppleness and opportunism, and had trained the Conservatives to look to him alone for the word of command; even a man of Salisbury's strong individuality paled into insignificance before him in the eyes not only of the party but of the country. As an instance of his absolutism in the cabinet, it appears that he appointed under-secretaries without a word to the ministers to whom they were to be subordinate. At 'last,' says Hardy, then Secretary for War and the Prime Minister's right-hand man in the Commons, Disraeli has given me an Under-Secretary and surprised me by his name. '-Lord Pembroke.' An even more remarkable exercise of authority without consultation with the principal members of the ministry is alluded to by Cranbrook in his diary for January 5, 1876: I see with surprise Lord Lytton named 'for Governor-General vice Northbrook. I had no idea his 'claims were so high.' No doubt Disraeli encouraged among his followers a belief in his own omniscience similar to that with which Chatham, with more justice, was credited. Cranbrook, speaking of a conversation with his chief before the elections of 1880, concludes: he was cheerful about our prospects, but had his doubt about the counties, which surprised me. He often has means of judging which others have 'not.' He certainly, however, did not always judge his countrymen accurately, or he would hardly have dismissed the Midlothian campaign so cavalierly as in the following laconic note dated from Hughenden, December 10, 1879: 'It certainly is a relief that this drenching rhetoric has at 'length ceased-but I have never read a word of it—“ Satis "eloquentiæ, sapientiæ parum.”—Yrs. B.'

Perhaps it was only a natural consequence of Disraeli's autocratic methods that his last cabinet appears to have been singularly feeble as an executive body. Derby and Carnarvon were from the first a source of weakness, for, though often disapproving of their chief's actions, they had no influence in the cabinet and expressed their disapproval chiefly by sulking. Carnarvon's form of recalcitrancy is happily expressed by Cranbrook in the phrase, he could not make up his mind to 'a policy of action which was the inevitable result of pro'fessions in which he had concurred,' while Derby would give vent to his obstinate moods at cabinet meetings by leaving his usual seat next to the Prime Minister and retiring to the

other end of the table in sulky silence. He nearly bit his 'finger off' on one occasion, and from what Beaconsfield told me afterwards must be very difficult to conduct business ' with '; which is not surprising when his view of cabinet meetings was that he did not see the use of calling together twelve Foreign Secretaries, none of whom, including himself, 'knew their business.' This feebleness is illustrated by Cranbrook's comments on the decision to bring troops to Malta in 1877. Apparently Beaconsfield pressed the scheme on an unwilling cabinet, and in his airy way had thought so little about the details that the Secretary for War on considering it with his military advisers found it both useless and impracticable as proposed. Later, when Beaconsfield himself was becoming worn out and losing his personal grip of affairs, when Indian and foreign difficulties were falling thick upon the country, and proud proconsuls were taking the imperialist bit between their teeth and running far beyond the control of their imperialist masters, the cabinet's feebleness and helplessness is expressed in one of its own members' despairing cry: I fear that we play but a sorry part, unready for 'everything.'

In spite of the bankruptcy of his administration in 1880, Beaconsfield might well claim to have accomplished most of what he originally set out to do. At an early age he made up his mind that the Conservative party must be raised from the slough of inertness and prejudice to which it had sunk after the great war, and he almost alone made it the power it became during the last quarter of the nineteenth century; he had also seen the need of stirring the popular imagination and of making his party rest on a broad basis of democracy, and he stimulated in millions an intense pride in our imperial traditions and responsibilities, formerly only the possession of a few idealists. As years and responsibility came upon him he lost that cynical opportunism and that zeal for selfadvertisement which impaired his usefulness when, to use a slang phrase exactly fitted to him, he was still on the 'make.' It is the fashion sometimes to decry service in the House of Commons as tending to insincerity and debasing; such complaints have been heard from some quarters for at least two hundred years. But as long as our public life can win for itself men of the stamp of Northbrook, as long as it can fit into the system men of Parnell's or Disraeli's explosive genius and mould them quite as much as it is moulded by them, England can still believe with truth that her service brings out the best in a not unworthy race.

ART. IX.-LYOF NIKOLAYEVITCH TOLSTOY.

1. Russkaya Krititcheskaya Literatoura o proizvedeniyakh. L. N. Tolstovo. Moscow: Velinsky. 7 vols.

2. Graf L. N. Tolstoy, Vospominaniya. By S. P. ARBUZOVA.

6. Graf L. Tolstoy v literatura i iskusstve. By U. BITOVT. Petersburg. 1903.

7. Lyof Nikolayevitch Tolstoy. Biografiya. By P. BIRUKOF. Moscow.

1906.

8. The Life of Tolstoy. By AYLMER MAUDE. London. 2 vols. 1908 and 1910.

9. Tolstoi et les Doukhobors. Par J. W. BIENSTOCK. Paris. 1902.

10. Graf Leo Tolstoi. Von ANNA SEURON. Berlin. 1895. And works by LEO TOLSTOY.

in August of 1828, and outliving the delicacy of his constitution until the winter of 1910, the figure of the great writer, known to this country as Leo Tolstoy, occupies a more considerable portion of the Russian century than has been achieved by any of his predecessors or contemporaries. However, in Russia, we may compare the influences of the pen and the sword, the pen has proved by far the more dangerous weapon to its wielders. The nation's warriors have worn their honours to a ripe age, but her thinkers, her poets, the men who have expressed her, almost invariably, ended in an early and often lamentable grave. Rykéyef, hanged as a conspirator; Gogol, a suicide at forty-three; Puskhin, at thirty-eight killed in a duel; Lérmontof, thrice exiled, dead at thirty; Shevtchenko, robbed by torture and imprisonment of life at forty-seven; Vénévitinof, dead of insult and outrage at twenty-two; Koltzof, broken-hearted at twentythree; Bélinsky, starved at thirty-eight; Chernishévski, sent to the mines at thirty-five; Hertzen, imprisoned, exiled, and banished; Dostoyevsky broken in mind and body by ten years of Siberia-a long, melancholy catalogue, which

leaves unenumerated but two names of importance-Tolstoy and Turgénef, and, of these, Turgénef owed his immunity to the distance which he lived, both in mind and body, from his country's affairs. Tolstoy, at once the most and the least Russian of them all, alone succeeded in living in his country and speaking the truth to it for the full term of his natural life.

In a survey of that life, the causes which made possible his peaceful continuance in the land he loved, illuminated and reproved will become apparent, and we may hope also to dispel the common illusion, for which, indeed, he was in some sort responsible, that he was a man whose moral purpose underwent, at the critical hour of his life, an abrupt and unaccountable change of direction. So much is the exact contrary the case, that the continuity of his moral impulse stands out as the most significant feature of his life. It is true that in his youth he paid but little heed to its admonitions, but he never succeeded in eluding its chastening, and it would be difficult to imagine anyone who was more gloomily dogged by the shadow of his offences.

Tolstoy's life divides naturally into three parts, with 1862, the year of his marriage, and 1878, the year of his illumination, as the decisive dates. These years mark equally well-defined stages in his literary and moral progress, so far as the two can be considered apart. Within the first period of thirty-four years fall those shorter, uncertain, experimental efforts, from Childhood' to the Cossacks,' which, masterly as some of them may be, bear evidence of a too great insistence on a personal standpoint which he was considerably to outgrow. In the next sixteen years were written his two longest and most famous works, 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karénina,' and, what perhaps cost him more labour than either, the children's school primers, by which so much of his mind and time was occupied.

The thirty-two years from 1878 to the end of his life, though they include novels, plays, essays, and innumerable tales, saw nothing produced without a directly didactic intention, and thus supply a third distinct era; and no one unacquainted with Tolstoy's life and work in each of these three periods can form a just opinion as to the continuity of his moral purpose.

His mother died when he was but two years old, his father and grandmother when he was nine. Thence until the end of his life, Yásnaya Polyána was his home, and it was from roots set so irremovably into the soil that his work acquired its intensely Russian quality, and that his revelation drew the sap