Dostoievski is not an artist; his stories and his books are put together and shaped anyhow. The surroundings and the circumstances in which he places his characters are fantastic and impossible to the verge of absurdity. The characters themselves are also often impossible and fantastic to the verge of absurdity; yet they are vivid in a way no other characters are vivid, and alive, not only so that we perceive and recognise their outward appearance, but so that we know the innermost corners of their souls. His characters, it is said, are abnormal. One of his principal figures is a murderer who kills an old woman from ambition to be like Napoleon, and put himself above the law; another is a victim to epileptic fits. But the fact should be borne in mind that absolutely normal people, like absolutely happy nations, have no history; that since the whole of humanity is suffering and groaning beneath the same burden of life, the people who in literature are the most important to mankind are not the most normal, but those who are made of the most complex machinery and of the most receptive wax, and who are thus able to receive and to record the deepest and most varied impressions. And in the same way as Job and David are more important to humanity than George I. or Louis-Philippe, so are Hamlet and Falstaff more important than Tom Jones and Mr. Bultitude. And the reason of this is not because Hamlet and Falstaff are abnormal—although compared with Tom Jones they are abnormal—but because they are human: more profoundly human, and more widely human. Hamlet has been read, played, and understood by succeeding generations in various countries and tongues, in innumerable different and contradictory fashions; but in each country, at each period, and in each tongue, he has been understood by his readers or his audience, according to their lights, because in him they have seen a reflection of themselves, because in themselves they have found an echo of Hamlet. The fact that audiences, actors, readers, and commentators have all interpreted Hamlet in utterly contradictory ways testifies not merely to the profound humanity of the character but to its multiplicity and manysidedness. Every human being recognises in himself something of Hamlet and something of Falstaff; but every human being does not necessarily recognise in himself something of Tom Jones or Mr. Bultitude. At least what in these characters resembles him is so like himself that he cannot notice the likeness; it consists in the broad elementary facts of being a human being; but when he hears Hamlet or Falstaff philosophising or making jokes on the riddle of life he is suddenly made conscious that he has gone through the same process himself in the same way.