With men of
European reputation, with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was
otherwise. My first introduction to English imaginative literature was
"Nicholas Nickleby." It is extraordinary how well Mrs. Nickleby could
chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the sinister Ralph rage in that
language. As to the Crummles family and the family of the learned
Squeers it seemed as natural to them as their native speech. It was, I
have no doubt, an excellent translation. This must have been in the year
'70. But I really believe that I am wrong. That book was not my first
introduction to English literature. My first acquaintance was (or were)
the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," and that in the very MS. of my father's
translation. It was during our exile in Russia, and it must have been
less than a year after my mother's death, because I remember myself
in the black blouse with a white border of my heavy mourning. We were
living together, quite alone, in a small house on the outskirts of the
town of T----. That afternoon, instead of going out to play in the large
yard which we shared with our landlord, I had lingered in the room in
which my father generally wrote. What emboldened me to clamber into
his chair I am sure I don't know, but a couple of hours afterward he
discovered me kneeling in it with my elbows on the table and my head
held in both hands over the MS. of loose pages. I was greatly confused,
expecting to get into trouble. He stood in the doorway looking at me
with some surprise, but the only thing he said after a moment of silence
was:

"Read the page aloud."

Luckily the page lying before me was not overblotted with erasures
and corrections, and my father's handwriting was otherwise extremely
legible. When I got to the end he nodded, and I flew out-of-doors,
thinking myself lucky to have escaped reproof for that piece of
impulsive audacity. I have tried to discover since the reason for this
mildness, and I imagine that all unknown to myself I had earned, in
my father's mind, the right to some latitude in my relations with his
writing-table. It was only a month before--or perhaps it was only a week
before--that I had read to him aloud from beginning to end, and to his
perfect satisfaction, as he lay on his bed, not being very well at the
time, the proofs of his translation of Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the
Sea." Such was my title to consideration, I believe, and also my first
introduction to the sea in literature.