I read lately in an interview with M. Henry Bordeaux a sentence which surprised me somewhat: “Seek first to know yourself.” The literary creator who seeks himself runs a great risk--the risk of finding himself. From then onwards he writes coldly, deliberately, in keeping with the self he has found. He imitates himself. If he knows his path and his limitations, it is only to keep strictly to them. His great dread is no longer insincerity, but inconsistency. The true artist is never but half-conscious of himself when creating. He does not know exactly who he is. He learns to know himself only through his creation, in it, and after it. Dostoevsky never set out to find himself; he gave himself without stint in his works. He lost himself in each of the characters of his books, and, for this reason, it is in them that he can be found again. Presently we shall see how painfully awkward he is when speaking in his own name, how eloquent, on the other hand, when his own ideas are expressed by those whom he inspires. It is in endowing them with life that he finds himself. He lives in each of them, and the most obvious result of merging himself in their diversity is the masking of his own inconsistencies. I know no writer richer in contradictions and inconsistencies than Dostoevsky: Nietzsche would describe them as _antagonisms_. Had he been philosopher instead of novelist, he would certainly have attempted to bring his ideas into line, whereby we should have lost the most precious of them. The happenings in Dostoevsky’s life, however tragic, are but surface disturbances. The passions overwhelming him seem to shake him to the depths; but beyond, there remains an inner chamber, unreached by outside happenings or by passion. In this connection a few of his own words will seem a revelation, if read in conjunction with another passage: “Without some goal and some effort to reach it, no man can live. When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man often becomes a monster in his misery.”[31] But then he seems still in error where his real goal is concerned, for he adds immediately after: “The one object of the prisoners was freedom and to get out of prison.” These words were written in 1861. Such then was his idea of an aim in life. Of course he was suffering in that dread captivity! (He spent ten years in Siberia: four in prison, then six more in forced military service.) He was suffering; but once more a free man, he could realize that the real goal, the freedom he really longed for, was something deeper and had no connection with the throwing wide of prison gates. In 1874 he could write this extraordinary sentence, which I like to compare with what I read to you a moment ago: “No aim can possibly be worth a wrecked existence.”[32] So, according to Dostoevsky, we have each our reason for living, superior, hidden--hidden often from ourselves--certainly far different from the ostensible goal assigned by most of us to our existence.