“So you’ve come to talk politics,” he said, “and I am not going to talk politics with you. I am going to talk literature with you--a far more interesting subject. No Russian knows anything about politics or really cares about politics; we are an artistic (I mean artistic, not æsthetic) nation; we have been forced to take notice of politics because our Government went just beyond the limit of incapacity and general idiocy that a nation can stand; but that does not make our political ideas any the more interesting. Whereas our ideas on literature are really interesting, because all the defects of our nature, owing to which we are such bad politicians, help to make us good judges of literature. We have neither the sublime and contented ignorance of the British, nor the Chinese Wall-like narrow-mindedness of the French, nor the complicated misapprehension of the Teutons; we are absolutely open-minded and catholic; we can understand and assimilate everything and anything; there is no hard bar in our nature; it is all plastic, pliant, and receptive. There is nothing we cannot appreciate; a Frenchman--even an extremely clever Frenchman like M. Bourget--cannot possibly appreciate either the humour or the style or the point of a Scotch writer of genius such as Stevenson or the works of Jacobs or a book like the _Diary of a Nobody_. We can; that’s the difference. That is why our politicians are so bad and our non-politicians so intelligent.” “That is all very well,” I answered, “but I have to write political letters to my newspaper and I want your views--people in England prefer politics to literature.” “I quite understand that,” answered Dimitri Nikolaievitch, “but for all that I refuse to talk politics to-day. I am going to talk to you about Byron, a subject which few Englishmen are interested in, I believe, and if what I say won’t do for a political letter send it to the literary page of your newspaper. In the _Morning Post_, which I take in in the hope of seeing my name mentioned now and then, I noticed that one of the most delightful of English writers, Mr. Andrew Lang, lately raised the question as to who was right about Byron, his detractors or the people who praised him. Now, it is an odd thing, which I have noticed, that people accept their likes and dislikes about most things with decent resignation. If they don’t like chicken or roast beef or Mozart’s music, or Rembrandt’s pictures, or Homer’s verse, they say so and pass on. Not so with Shakespeare and Byron. These two authors have the effect which a red rag has on a bull on the people who dislike them. If a man dislikes Shakespeare he feels it incumbent on himself to proclaim the fact on the housetops, as though it were a great discovery, oblivious of the fact that people and literature are like a Seidlitz powder, the man must have the complementary blue powder which when mixed with the white powder of the book produces a fizzing combustion in a glass of water.