So it is with Dostoievski. Dostoievski’s characters are mostly abnormal, but it is in their very abnormality that we recognise their profound and poignant humanity and a thousand human traits that we ourselves share. And in showing us humanity at its acutest, at its intensest pitch of suffering, at the soul’s lowest depth of degradation, or highest summit of aspiration, he makes us feel his comprehension, pity, and love for everything that is in us, so that we feel that there is nothing which we could think or experience; no sensation, no hope, no ambition, no despair, no disappointment, no regret, no greatness, no meanness that he would not understand; no wound, no sore for which he would not have just the very balm and medicine which we need. Pity and love are the chief elements of the work of Dostoievski—pity such as King Lear felt on the heath; and just as the terrible circumstances in which King Lear raves and wanders make his pity all the greater and the more poignant in its pathos, so do the fantastic, nightmarish circumstances in which Dostoievski’s characters live make their humanness more poignant, their love more lovable, their pity more piteous. A great writer should see “life steadily and see life whole.” Dostoievski does not see the whole of life steadily, like Tolstoi, for instance, but he sees the soul of man whole, and perhaps he sees more deeply into it than any other writer has done. He shrinks from nothing. He sees the “soul of goodness in things evil”: not exclusively the evil, like Zola; nor does he evade the evil like many of our writers. He sees and pities it. And this is why his work is great. He writes about the saddest things that can happen; the most melancholy, the most hopeless, the most terrible things in the world; but his books do not leave us with a feeling of despair; on the contrary, his own “sweet reasonableness,” the pity and love with which they are filled are like balm. We are left with a belief in some great inscrutable goodness, and his books act upon us as once his conversation did on a fellow prisoner whom he met on the way to Siberia. The man was on the verge of suicide; but after Dostoievski had talked to him for an hour—we may be sure there was no sermonising in that talk—he felt able to go on, to live even with perpetual penal servitude before him. To some people, Dostoievski’s books act in just this way, and it is, therefore, not odd that they think him the greatest of all writers. CHAPTER XII THE POLITICAL PARTIES MOSCOW, _March 11th_.