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hands. They are radicals in everything, in faith and
infidelity, in love and hate, in submission and rebellion.
Finally, there is one more fundamental trait of the
Russians, one which seems most vigorously to combat
the idea of originality: the inclination to imitation, the
power of echoing, of reflecting after the Russian spirit,
the capacity to accommodate themselves to the strange
and to adapt the strange to themselves. It is first and
foremost a capacity to understand and then a disposition
to appropriate.
It has been claimed that the Germans possess a
similar quality of seizing upon everything foreign, and by
translation or penetrating comprehension making it their
own. They have this quality in the highest degree.
But it is of a different kind with them. Herder’s highly
endowed, but ponderous and slow people understand
ponderously and slowly national intellects: they grasped
Greece, Calderon, and Shakespeare before any of the other
European nations; but they are not able, on that account,
to become so thoroughly imbued with the genius of the
foreign race as to reproduce it and act in its spirit. The
French, who did not appreciate the Greeks, came far
nearer to them in their works than the Germans, who
did comprehend them. The Russians, above all others,
have the talent of grasping the manner of thought and
range of ideas of other races, of imitating them and of
dealing with them as their own intellectual property.
The cultivated Russian understands and always has
understood the living, the new, the newest in foreign
countries, and does not wait till it becomes cheap because
it is old, or has gained currency by the approbation of
the stranger’s countrymen. The Russian catches the
new thought on the wing. Their culture makes a
modern race, with the keenest scent for everything modern.
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