There is an immeasurable area lying between that morbid mind which loves to depict the purlieus of life and that brave heart which reaches down deep into the filthy and the sickening for the sake of dragging somewhat of value up to the light. Dostoevski conceived that Russia could never energize her arm for saving service without a wide knowledge of what existed in every place of nameless horror. As a great natural pathologist, he understood the vagaries of the diseased and the defective; in Siberia he perforce mingled with the lowest criminals--the results he embodied in a score of novels, four or five of them great novels, for those to read who dare look in the face the life of the shadowy alleys, for those to avoid who prefer the light and airy high-paths. What is more, no pleasant bucolic pipe can rouse like a bugle-blast. Those who play the notes of beauty will exalt or pacify the soul, but those who would rouse the whole being must choose sturdy instruments and various. To shift the similitude, Russia needed no soothing unguents, her festering sores called for the heroic knife--first exact diagnosis, then the knife. And Dostoevski showed always the truth--the sordid, noisome, revolting, pitiful truth--and, as this serene prophet saw that she would, Russia herself is more and more bravely using the knife. Yet beauty and sweetness and upper air are in his stories, too, especially if one sees beneath the surface. * * * * * Russia’s greatest novelists are really three: Turgenev, the cosmopolitan, was an æsthete, an artist, a polished littérateur; Tolstoi, the mystic, was a brooding reformer, too self-centered to realize his humanitarian ideals, but a majestic figure in literature as in life; Dostoevski, the profoundly religious psychologist, was an unbalanced, fiery apostle, winging among the highest, stalking amidst the lowest, seeing visions not given to common men. Dostoevski’s novels are great not by reason of their art, but from their artlessness, which is to say their explosive sincerity, like the incoherent violence of one who feels things too powerful for orderly utterance. In this they reflect his life only in that they reproduce what the seismograph of his spirit recorded. Outwardly, he was quiet, detached, even morose, his epileptic seizures doubtless sending him into the companionship of his own life; but his soul shook with the volcanic terrors which he perforce beheld, from his cradle in the charity hospital, through the turbulent years of Siberia, Russia, and the continent, down to the day of his too early taking-off at the age of fifty-nine.