of humanity, and a believer in God and man. He
seeks a monastery, but his spiritual father sends him out into the
world, to live and to suffer. He is to go through the furnace of the
world and experience many trials; for the microbe of lust that is in
his family is dormant in him also. The book was called the _History of
a Great Sinner_, and the sinner was to be Alyosha. But Dostoyevsky
died before this part of the subject is even approached.

He died in January 1881; the crowds of men and women of all sorts and
conditions of life that attended his funeral, and the extent and the
sincerity of the grief manifested, gave it an almost mythical
greatness. The people gave him a funeral such as few kings or heroes
have ever had. Without fear of controversy or contradiction one can
now say that Dostoyevsky's place in Russian literature is at the top,
equal and in the opinion of some superior to that of Tolstoy in
greatness. He is also one of the greatest writers the world has ever
produced, not because, like Tolstoy, he saw life steadily and saw it
whole, and painted it with the supreme and easy art of a Velasquez;
nor because, like Turgenev, he wove exquisite pictures into musical
words. Dostoyevsky was not an artist; his work is shapeless; his books
are like quarries where granite and dross, gold and ore are mingled.
He paid no attention to style, and yet so strong and vital is his
spoken word that when the Moscow Art Theatre put some scenes in _The
Brothers Karamazov_ and _Devils_ on the stage, they found they could
not alter one single syllable; and sometimes his words have a power
beyond that of words, a power that only music has. There are pages
where Dostoyevsky expresses the anguish of the soul in the same manner
as Wagner expressed the delirium of dying Tristram. I should indeed
put the matter the other way round, and say that in the last act of
Tristram, Wagner is as great as Dostoyevsky. But Dostoyevsky is great
because of the divine message he gives, not didactically, not by
sermons, but by the goodness that emanates, like a precious balm, from
the characters he creates; because more than any other books in the
world his books reflect not only the teaching and the charity, but the
accent and the divine aura of love that is in the Gospels.

"I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom,
conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that
addresses your spirit, just as if both had passed thr