Old and New Masters

hological sauce." He afterwards apologized for the epigram, but he insisted

reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news. There are more murders and att

n the most respectable circles. He is beyond all his rivals the novelist of "scenes." His characters get drunk, or go mad with jealousy, or fall in epileptic fits,

uelty-the lust of destruction for destruction's sake-is the most conspicuous of the deadly sins in Dostoevsky's men and women. He may not be a "cruel author." Mr. J. Middleton Mu

almost Christ-like love, a love that is outside the body and has the nature of a melting and exquisite charity. He sometimes even portrays the two kinds of love in the same person. But they are never in balance; they ar

han the civil courts. His people are possessed with devils as the people in all but religious fiction have long ceased to be. "This

Dostoevsky's characters describe the execution of a criminal, the whipping of an ass, the torture of a child. He sows violent deeds, not with the hand, but with the sack. Even Prin

ose last two days that the other was wearing a silver watch on a yellow bead chain, which he seems not to have seen on him before. The man was not a thief; he was an honest man, in fact, and by a peasant's standard by no means poor. But he was so taken with that watch and so fascinated by it that at last he c

oo abnormal, too obviously tainted with madness. Yet to Dostoevsky such aberrations of conduct make a continuous and overw

ike a story from Suetonius or like Bluebeard. But there is no communicable passion in it such as we find in Agamemnon or Othello. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the despair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figure of the book is born

l characters and watches over them as a hen over her chickens. He invents vicious grotesques as Dickens invents comic grote

He used to dress up in a sheet as though it were a surplice, and sang

the old father and the eldest of his sons hati

with a crash on the floor. He kicked him two or three times with his heel in the face. The old man moaned shrilly. Ivan, though not so strong as

ve killed him

breathlessly. "If I haven't killed

nt. No melodramatist ever poured out incident upon the stage from such a horn of plenty. His people are

hree figures on the stage are represented in Dostoevsky as taking place before a howling, seething mob. "A dozen men have broken in," a maid announces

nds the following characters brought in by name: General Epanchin, Prince S., Adela?da Ivanovna, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, Yevgeny Pavlovitch Radomsky, Princess Byelokonsky, Aglaia, Prince Myshkin, Kolya Ivolgin, Ippolit, Varya, Ferdyshc

nal framework of his stories with the immense and sombre genius that broods over them that Mr. Murry is inclined to regard the incidents as a sort of wild spi

ay of life; it is more than a record of struggle, it is the struggle itself." Dostoevsky himself is a man of genius "lifted out of the liv

of voices calling without sound across the waste and frozen universe. And those voices take shape in certain unforgettable

ot so much men and women as disembodied spir

sired to be, but of a spirit which sought to know. They are the imaginations of a G

d, was he a novelist of horrors for horrors' sake. He could never have written

ctions 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 sure

ription 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 Chr

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

novels are the perfect image of the man. As to the man himself, the Vic

all, sharp eyes deeply set, sometimes dark and gloomy, sometimes gentle and mild. The forehead was large and lumpy, the temples were hollow as if hammered in. His drawn, twitching features seemed to press down on his sad-looking mouth.... Eyelids, lips, and every muscle of his face twitched nervously the whole time. When

that at once fascinates and repels. It is a figure that leads one to the edge of the abyss. One cannot live at all times with such an author