You remember Abbé de Saint-Réal’s words?--and meaningless they might well appear did not Stendhal make use of them as a cover for his own æsthetic principles: “A novel is the mirror of one’s walks abroad.” In France and in England the novels that can be classed under this rubric are numerous indeed. What of Lesage, Voltaire, Fielding, Smollett? But nothing could be more remote from this category than a novel of Dostoevsky’s. Between his novels and those of the authors quoted above, aye, and Tolstoy’s too, and Stendhal’s, there is all the difference possible between a picture and a panorama. Dostoevsky composes a picture in which the most important consideration is the question of light. The light proceeds from but one source. In one of Stendhal’s novels, the light is constant, steady, and well-diffused. Every object is lit up in the same way, and is visible equally well from all angles; there are no shadow effects. But in Dostoevsky’s books, as in a Rembrandt portrait, the shadows are the essential. Dostoevsky groups his characters and happenings, plays a brilliant light upon them, illuminating one aspect only. Each of his characters has a deep setting of shadow, reposes on its own shadow almost. We notice in Dostoevsky a strange impulse to group, concentrate, centralize: to create between the varied elements of a novel as many cross-connections as possible. With him, events instead of pursuing their calm and measured course, as with Stendhal or Tolstoy, mingle and confuse in turmoil; the elements of the story--moral, psychological, and material--sink and rise again in a kind of whirlpool. With him there is no attempt to straighten or simplify lines; he is at his happiest in the complex; he fosters it. Feelings, thoughts, and passions are never presented in the pure state. He never isolates them. And now I come to make an observation on Dostoevsky’s manner of drawing his characters. But first of all let me read these very pertinent remarks of Jacques Rivière’s: “Once the idea of a character has taken shape in his mind, a novelist has to choose between two ways of materializing it. He can either insist on its complexity, or emphasize its cohesiveness; in this soul he is about to create, he can deliberately reproduce its absolute darkness, or for the reader he can dispel such darkness by his very description of it; he will either respect the soul’s hidden depths, or lay them open.” You see what Rivière’s theory is: the French school explores the unplumbed depths, whereas certain foreign novelists, Dostoevsky in particular, respect and cherish their gloom.