Essays on Russian Novelists | Page 4

as wide in
interest as the world itself. There is a refreshing breadth of vision in the
Russian character, which is often as healthful to a foreigner as the wind
that sweeps across the vast prairies. This largeness of character partly
accounts for the impression of Vastness that their books produce on
Occidental eyes. I do not refer at all to the length of the book--for a
book may be very long, and yet produce an impression of pettiness, like
many English novels. No, it is something that exhales from the pages,
whether they be few or many. As illustrations of this quality of vastness,
one has only to recall two Russian novels--one the longest, and the
other very nearly the shortest, in the whole range of Slavonic fiction. I
refer to "War and Peace," by Tolstoi, and to "Taras Bulba," by Gogol.
Both of these extraordinary works give us chiefly an impression of
Immensity--we feel the boundless steppes, the illimitable wastes of

snow, and the long winter night. It is particularly interesting to compare
Taras Bulba with the trilogy of the Polish genius, Sienkiewicz. The
former is tiny in size, the latter a leviathan; but the effect produced is
the same. It is what we feel in reading Homer, whose influence, by the
way, is as powerful in "Taras Bulba" as it is in "With Fire and Sword."
The Cosmopolitanism of the Russian character is a striking feature.
Indeed, the educated Russian is perhaps the most complete
Cosmopolitan in the world. This is partly owing to the uncanny facility
with which he acquires foreign languages, and to the admirable custom
in Russia of giving children in more or less wealthy families, French,
German, and English governesses. John Stuart Mill studied Greek at
the age of three, which is the proper time to begin the study of any
language that one intends to master. Russian children think and dream
in foreign words, but it is seldom that a Russian shows any pride in his
linguistic accomplishments, or that he takes it otherwise than as a
matter of course. Stevenson, writing from Mentone to his mother, 7
January 1874, said: "We have two little Russian girls, with the
youngest of whom, a little polyglot button of a three-year-old, I had the
most laughable little scene at lunch to-day. . . . She said something in
Italian which made everybody laugh very much . . .; after some
examination, she announced emphatically to the whole table, in
German, that I was a machen.. . . This hasty conclusion as to my sex
she was led afterwards to revise . . . but her new opinion . . . was
announced in a language quite unknown to me, and probably Russian.
To complete the scroll of her accomplishments, . . . she said good-bye
to me in very commendable English." Three days later, he added, "The
little Russian kid is only two and a half; she speaks six languages."
Nothing excites the envy of an American travelling in Europe more
sharply than to hear Russian men and women speaking European
languages fluently and idiomatically. When we learn to speak a foreign
tongue, we are always acutely conscious of the transition from English
to German, or from German to French, and our hearers are still more so.
We speak French as though it HURT, just as the average tenor sings. I
remember at a polyglot Parisian table, a Russian girl who spoke seven
languages with perfect ease; and she was not in the least a
blue-stocking.
Now every one knows that one of the indirect advantages that result

from the acquisition of a strange tongue is the immediate gain in the
extent of view. It is as though a near-sighted man had suddenly put on
glasses. It is something to be able to read French; but if one has learned
to speak French, the reading of a French book becomes infinitely more
vivid. With a French play in the hand, one can see clearly the
expressions on the faces of the personages, as one follows the printed
dialogue with the eye. Here is where a Russian understands the
American or the French point of view, much better than an American or
a Frenchman understands the Russian's. Indeed, the man from Paris is
nothing like so cosmopolitan as the man from Petersburg. One reason is,
that he is too well satisfied with Paris. The late M. Brunetiere told me
that he could neither read or speak English, and, what is still more
remarkable, he said that he had never been in England! That a critic of
his power and reputation, interested as he was in English literature,
should never have had sufficient intellectual curiosity to cross the
English Channel, struck me as nothing short of amazing.
The