a measure true. Dostoevsky was no realist. Nor, on the
other hand, was he a novelist of horrors for horrors' sake. He could
never have written _Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar_ like Poe for the
sake of the aesthetic thrill.

None the less he remains a novelist who dramatized his spiritual
experiences through the medium of actions performed by human beings.
Clearly he believed that human beings--though not ordinary human
beings--were capable of performing the actions he narrates with such
energy. Mr. Murry will have it that the actions in the novels take place
in a "timeless" world, largely because Dostoevsky has the habit of
crowding an impossible rout of incidents into a single day. But surely
the Greeks took the same license with events. This habit of packing into
a few hours actions enough to fill a lifetime seems to me in Dostoevsky
to be a novelist's device rather than the result of a spiritual escape
into timelessness.

To say this is not to deny the spiritual content of Dostoevsky's
work--the anguish of the imprisoned soul as it battles with doubt and
denial and despair. There is in Dostoevsky a suggestion of Caliban
trying to discover some better god than Setebos. At the same time one
would be going a great deal too far in accepting the description of
himself as "a child of unbelief." The ultimate attitude of Dostoevsky is
as Christian as the Apostle Peter's, "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine
unbelief!" When Dostoevsky writes, "If any one could prove to me that
Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ,
I shall prefer to stay with Christ and not with the truth," Mr. Murry
interprets this as a denial of Christ. It is surely a kind of faith,
though a despairing kind. And beyond the dark night of suffering, and
dissipating the night, Dostoevsky still sees the light of Christian
compassion. His work is all earthquake and eclipse and dead stars apart
from this.

He does not, Mr. Murry urges, believe, as has often been said, that men
are purified by suffering. It seems to me that Dostoevsky believes that
men are purified, if not by their own sufferings, at least by the
sufferings of others. Or even by the compassion of others, like Prince
Myshkin in _The Idiot_. But the truth is, it is by no means easy to
systematize the creed of a creature at war with life, as Dostoevsky
was--a man tortured by the eternal conflict of the devilish and the
divine in his own breast.

His work, like his