one understands _the depravity_ _of the spirit,_ as well as of the
flesh, and the amazing wantonness, whereby the human will does
not always seek its own realization and well-being, but quite as
often its own laceration and destruction.

Dostoievsky has, indeed, a demonic power of revelation in regard to
that twilight of the human brain, where lurk the phantoms of
unsatisfied desire, and where unspoken lusts stretch forth pitiable
hands. There are certain human experiences which the conventional
machinery of ordinary novel-writing lacks all language to express.
He expresses these, not in tedious analysis, but in the living cries,
and gasps, and gestures, and fumblings and silences of his characters
themselves. Who, like Dostoievsky, has shown the tragic association
of passionate love with passionate hate, which is so frequent a
human experience?

This monstrous _hate-love,_ caressing the bruises itself has made,
and shooting forth a forked viper-tongue of cruelty from between
the lips that kiss--has anyone but he held it fast, through all its
Protean changes? I suppose, when one really thinks of it, at the
bottom of every one of us lurk two _primary emotions_--vanity and
fear. It is in their knowledge of the aberrations of these, of the mad
contortions that these lead to, that the other writers seem so
especially simple-minded. Over and over again, in reading
Dostoievsky, one is positively seized by the throat with
astonishment at the man's insight into the labyrinthian retreats of our
secret pride--and of our secret fear. His characters, at certain
moments, seem actually to spit gall and wormwood, as they tug at
the quivering roots of one another's self-esteem. But this fermenting
venom, this seething scum, is only the expression of what goes on
below the surface every day, in every country.

Dostoievsky's Russians are cruelly voluble, but their volubility taps
the evil humour of the universal human disease. Their thoughts are
_our_ thoughts, their obsessions, _our_ obsessions. Let no one think,
in his vain security, that he has a right to say: "I have no part in this
morbidity. I am different from these poor madmen."

The curious nervous relief we experience as we read these books is
alone a sufficient vindication. They relieve us, as well as trouble us,
because in these pages we all confess what we have never confessed
to anyone. Our self-love is outraged, but outraged with that strange
accompaniment of thrillin