Among all the patriotic rubbish that has been heaped upon the book market since the outbreak of the European war, Mr. Powys’s pamphlet presents at least not dull reading. The brilliant lecturer unmasques the underlying motives of German statesmen who have accepted Machiavellian principles, “without acquiring Machiavellian subtlety.” He successfully attacks Münsterberg and other apologists for the Fatherland, who endeavor to present their country in the image of an innocent lamb dragged into the bloody struggle by greedy barbarians. Mr. Powys’ mission is a negative one, and there it ends. He falls flat as soon as he attempts to idealize and to glorify the Allies. His speculation that the present war is a struggle of ideas, of individualism versus state, of soul versus machine, is far fetched. The Reader Critic Mr. Powys on Dostoevsky (_A reader sends us these jottings from one of Mr. Powys’s lectures._) Shudders of life.... I have only one thing to do—to bring you into a strange mass of palpable darkness with something moving in it. Dostoevsky is really a great mass, a volume, not a cloud nor a pillar of fire nor a puff of smoke, but a vast, formless, shapeless mass of darkness, palpable and drawing you towards itself. Reading him is dangerous because of the inherent sense of fear likely to be accentuated in those who are a little mad and whose madness takes on the form of fear. We go on a visit to a mad house, to hospitals with Dostoevsky. But with him this whole world suddenly changes into a mad house. It is all haunting mad houses and hospitals filled with us maniacs of the particular fear we are subject to. (Life is all a running away—a distraction. We are running away when we are talking, when we are making love—then more than ever, perhaps.) In Dostoevsky we suddenly realize that these Russians are ourselves. If the religion, mysticism, liberalism, despotism they possess were only Russian there are excellent books written by travellers in Russia for us to read. But Dostoevsky is different. If I could but mesmerize you.... It is like reading the gospels in childhood, being overrun and overthrown by fate and then after one has lived meeting the words of the childhood situations and making associations.