The puritan is a case of arrested development. Most of us do grow beyond him and find subtler ways of satisfying our desire for power. And we do it because we never can quite take that step from self-abasement to self-regard. We never can quite become proud of our humility. Renunciation remains an actual going without, sacrifice a real thwarting. If we value an experience and deliberately surrender it, we are too naïve to pretend that there are compensations. There is a loss. We are left with a vacuum. There _is_ only depression and loss of control. Our self-regard is not quite elemental enough to get stimulation from wielding virtue over others. I never feel so degraded as when I have renounced. I had rather beat my head rhythmically and endlessly against an unyielding wall. For the pagan often breaks miraculously through the wall. But the puritan at his best can only strut outside. Most of us, therefore, after we have had our puritan fling, sown our puritan wild oats as it were, grow up into devout and progressing pagans, cultivating the warmth of the sun, the deliciousness of love-experience, the high moods of art. The puritans remain around us, a danger and a threat. But they have value to us in keeping us acutely self-conscious of our faith. They whet our ardor. Perhaps no one can be really a good appreciating pagan who has not once been a bad puritan. THE IMMANENCE OF DOSTOEVSKY It is impossible not to think of Dostoevsky as a living author when his books come regularly, as they are coming, to the American public every few months. Our grandfathers sixty years ago are said to have lived their imaginative lives in anticipation of the next instalment of Dickens or Thackeray. I can feel somewhat of the same excitement in this Dostoevsky stream, though I cannot pretend that the great Russian will ever become a popular American classic. Yet in the progress from Dickens to Dostoevsky there is a symbol of the widening and deepening of the American imagination. We are adrift on a far wider sea than our forefathers. We are far more adventurous in personal relations, far more aware of the bewildering variousness of human nature. If you have once warmed to Dostoevsky, you can never go back to the older classic fiction on which we were brought up. The lack of _nuance_, the hideous normality of its people begin to depress you. When once you have a sense of the illusion of “character,” when once you have felt the sinister, irrational turn of human thoughts, and the subtle interplay of impression and desire, and the crude impingement of circumstance, you find yourself--unless you keep conscious watch--feeling a shade of contempt for the Scott and Balzac and Dickens and Thackeray and Trollope who were the authoritative showmen of life for our middle-class relatives. You relegate such fiction to the level of “movie” art, with its clean, pigeon-holed categories of the emotions, and its “registering” of a few simple moods.