And the year of his death, writing to Mlle. N----, he says: “I am conscious that, as a writer, I have many defects, because I am the first to be dissatisfied with my own efforts. You can just picture the times when I cross-examine myself, to find that I have literally not expressed the twentieth part of what was in my mind, and could, perhaps, have been expressed! My salvation lies in the sure hope that one day God may grant me such strength and inspiration that I shall find perfect self-expression and be able to make plain all that I carry in my heart and imagination.”[16] How remote from Balzac with his self-assurance and rich imperfection! Can even Flaubert have known what it is to make such demands upon oneself, to struggle so hard and toil in such mad frenzies? I think not. His exigencies are more purely literary, and if his uncompromising uprightness as a writer and the tale of his prodigious labours are prominently displayed in his letters, it is simply because he becomes attached to this very labour, and without exactly vaunting it, he is at least uncommonly proud of it. Besides, he suppressed all else, holding life so “loathsome a thing, that the only way to bear it is to avoid it,” and compared himself to the “Amazons who cut off their breasts, the better to bend the bow.” Dostoevsky suppressed nothing; he had a wife and children, whom he adored, and life he did not scorn. After his release from prison, he wrote: “At least, I have lived; I have suffered, but I have lived!” His sacrifices for love of his art are the nobler and the more tragic because less arrogant, less conscious, less deliberate. He frequently quotes Terence, refusing to concede that anything human should be foreign to himself either. “Man has not the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order. Homo sum, et nihil humanum....” He does not despise his suffering, but assumes the burden in all its fullness. Losing wife and brother within the space of a few months, he writes: “And then I was suddenly left alone, and I knew fear! It has become terrible. My life broken in two! On one hand, the past, with all that I had to live for, on the other, the unknown, with not one loving heart to comfort me in my loss. There was literally no reason why I should go on living. Forge new links, start a fresh existence? The very thought revolted me! I realized then for the first time that I could not replace my lost ones, they were all I held dear, and new loves could not, ought not to exist.”[17] But a fortnight later, this is what he wrote: “Of all my reserves of strength and energy, there is nothing left save a vague uneasiness of soul, a state bordering on despair. Bitterness and indecision--a mood foreign to me. And then I’m utterly alone. Yet I always have the feeling that I am going to begin to live! Ridiculous, isn’t it? The cat and its nine