You will, of course, be wrong in any such contempt, because these novelists show a bewildering variety of types and a deep intuition of the major movements of the soul. Dickens teems with irrational creatures, with unconventional levels of life. But you can scarcely contradict me when I say that neither Dickens nor his readers ever forgot that these human patterns were queer. His appeal lies exactly in the joyful irrelevance with which we take all these lapses from the norm, in the pitiful tears which we can shed for human beings done so obviously as they should not be done by. In reading these familiar novelists we never lose our moral landmarks. No matter how great the deviations a character shows, we are always conscious--or could be conscious if we liked--of the exact amount of that deviation. The charm of that nineteenth-century fiction, as in the work of belated Victorians like Mr. Chesterton, lies in that duality between the sane and the insane, the virtuous and the villainous, the sober and the mischievous, the responsible and the irresponsible. There is no falsification in this. These novelists were writing for an epoch that really had stable “character,” standards, morals, that consistently saw the world in a duality of body and spirit. They were a reflection of a class that really had reticences, altruisms, and religious codes. Dostoevsky appeals to us to-day because we are trying to close up that dualism. And our appreciation of him and the other modern Russians is a mark of how far we have actually gone. It is still common to call this fiction unhealthy, morbid, unwholesome. All that is meant by this is that the sudden shock of a democratic, unified, intensely the mind that thinks in the old dual terms as to be almost revolting. What becomes more and more apparent to the readers of Dostoevsky, however, is his superb modern healthiness. He is healthy because he has no sense of any dividing line between the normal and the abnormal, or even between the sane and the insane. I call this healthy because it is so particularly salutary for our American imagination to be jolted out of its stiltedness and preconceived notions of human psychology. I admit that the shock is somewhat rough and rude. “The Idiot”, which I have read only once, remains in my mind as a stream of fairly incomprehensible people and unintelligible emotional changes. Yet I feel that when I read it again I shall understand it. For Dostoevsky has a strange, intimate power which breaks in your neat walls and shows you how much more subtle and inconsequent your flowing life is than even your introspection had thought. But for all his subtlety he is the reverse of anything morbidly introspective. In his work you get the full warm unity of emotional life without losing any of the detail of the understanding analysis of the soul.