The Public School product is a fine specimen of a man: he is strictly honest in all his dealings, he will never turn his back on a "pal," he is capable of handling men with sympathy, he can adapt himself at short shrift to almost any circumstance: if only he could be prevailed upon not to despise learning and beauty no other type of man could touch him. I have lately been trying to understand more of foreign countries through their fiction, particularly Russia. Years ago I read and loved Tolstoi's "Resurrection"; last week I tried to get through "Anna Karenin" and failed. I can't explain quite why, unless it is that Dostoievsky has supplanted him in my estimation. I never read any one in the least like Dostoievsky. I think "The Brothers Karamazov" is the greatest novel I ever read. No man rises from it with exactly the same outlook on life which he had when he sat down to it. Dostoievsky seemed in that book to be on the point of discovering all that hurt and puzzled us about the world: every now and then we seem to get a glimpse millions of years ahead into a timeless, limitless space where truth and beauty at last prevail, and misery and suffering are no more. Everything that he writes seems to turn on this word "suffering." Light, not salvation, comes to man through his capacity to suffer. The characters in "The Brothers Karamazov" are not human beings at all: they are disembodied spirits with an amazing power of self-analysis: this gloomy introspectiveness is the chief feature of all Russian writing. They seem to know so much more than we do about the actions of the human heart: their sympathy with humanity is deeper than ours: we are too apt to dismiss from our thoughts what we do not immediately understand--the more complex a man's character the more we shun him, but the Russian seeks to disintegrate it and account for his contradictory traits: how Iago must appeal to the Russian mind. They appear to be a nation of Hamlets. Those that are not are Lucifers. I am not pleased with the German mind. There is, in their plays at any rate, an awful playing with fire. Nietzsche paralyses me--this will to power would be frightful if it were ever given full play. The present effect of their refined system of education seems to drive the flower of their youth to suicide. English stupidity is better than German kultur if that is what love of learning leads to. There must be some middle way. It is a relief to turn to American fiction. All the world seems to be passing through a stage of transition much as it did in the days of the Romantic Revival. Then all Europe was bothered about the Brotherhood of Man and the Return to Nature; nowadays we are casting off all the conventions of our fathers and pressing towards the rights of the individual to be a law unto himself.