We
fight for Religion or fight against Religion. We fight for Morality or
fight against Morality. We are Traditionalists or Rebels,
Reactionaries or Revolutionaries. Only sometimes, in the fury of our
Faith and our Un-Faith, there come, blown across the world-margins,
whispers and hints of undreamed of secrets, of unformulated hopes.
Then it is that the faces of the people and things we know grow
strange and distant, or yield their place to faces we know not and
things "lighter than air." Then it is that the most real seems the most
dream-like, and the most impossible the most true, for the flowing of
the waters of Life have fallen into a new rhythm, and even the
children of Saturn may lift up their hearts!

It is too fatally easy, in these days, when machinery--that "Star
called Wormwood"--dominates the world, to fall into a state of hard
and flippant cynicism, or into a yet more hopeless and weary irony.
The unintelligent cheerfulness of the crowd so sickens one; the
disingenuous sophistry of its hired preachers fills one with such
blank depression that it seems sometimes as though the only mood
worthy of normal intelligence were the mood of callous indifference
and universal mockery.

All men are liars, and "the Ultimate Futility" grins horribly from its
mask. Well! It is precisely at these hours, at the hours when the little
pincers of the gods especially nip and squeeze, that it is good to turn
the pages of Fyodor Dostoievsky. He brings us his "Balm of Gilead"
between the hands of strange people, but it is a true "alabaster box of
precious ointment," and though the flowers it contains are snatched
from the House of the Dead, one knows at whose feet it was once
poured forth, and for whose sake it was broken!

The books that are the most valuable in this world are not the books
that pretend to solve life's mystery with a system. They are the
books which create a certain mood, a certain temper--the mood, in
fact, which is prepared for incredible surprises--the temper which no
surprise can overpower. These books of Dostoievsky must always
take their place in this great roll, because, though he arrives at no
conclusion and utters no oracle, the atmosphere he throws round us
is the atmosphere in which Life and Death are "equal;" the gestures
his people make, in their great darkness, are the gestures of _that
which goes upon its way,_ beyond Good and beyond Evil!

Dostoievsky is more than an artist. He is, perhaps--