The first contact is indeed discouraging. Mme. Hoffmann, Dostoevsky’s German biographer, leads us to understand that the selection of letters issued by the Russian editors might have been better made; but she entirely fails to convince me that its keynote could have been different. As it stands, the volume is bulky, and the reader gasps in astonishment less at the number of the letters than at the vast formlessness of each one of them. Perhaps we have never yet had an example of a literary man’s letters so badly written, by that I mean written with so little regard for style. Ideas seem to come from his pen not in ordered sequence, but in a rich confusion, which, once it is brought under control, contributes powerfully to the complexity of his novels. The same man who is so uncompromising and so tenacious where his own work is concerned, correcting, destroying, modifying his stories, page by page, until each becomes “the expression of his very being,” writes his correspondence anyhow: never crossing a phrase out, but constantly catching himself up, hurrying on as fast as he can, and never able to bring his letter to a satisfactory close; and nothing helps us better to estimate the distance between a work and its creator. Inspiration? romantic and flattering convenience! The muse is not so readily wooed. And if ever Buffon’s modest saying--“_A patience that knows no weariness_”--were applicable, ’tis here. “What theory is this you’ve got hold of?” he writes to his brother, on the very threshold of his career.[6] “A picture ought to be painted at one sitting, you say? When did you acquire this conviction? Believe me, in all things, labour, yes, prolonged labour, is indispensable. A few lines of Pushkin’s verse, light and polished, truly seem the fruit of one effort, thanks to the hours Pushkin spent arranging and revising them. It needs more than a happy knack to produce mature work. We are told that Shakespeare’s work bears no trace of correction: that is exactly why we find in it so many imperfections and so much that is contrary to good taste. If he had spent more time over it, the result would have been better.” Such is the keynote of the whole correspondence. The best of his life and spirit Dostoevsky devotes to his work. None of his letters was written from pleasure. He constantly reverts to his “terrible, unmasterable, incredible distaste for letter-writing.”--“Letters,” he declares, “have neither rhyme nor reason: it is impossible to unburden oneself in them.” He goes even further: “I write to you at great length, and I see that of the very essence of my moral or spiritual life I have given you not a notion, and so it will remain as long as we continue to correspond; I _cannot_ write letters: I cannot write about myself and be just.”[7] Elsewhere he says that “in a letter it’s impossible to write anything. There’s the secret of my dislike to Madame de Sévigné: the woman wrote her