Dostoevsky is a cerebralist. His specialty is imaginative reactions. All the lusts that have stretched their wailing arms, all the hopes, all the goblins.... In sex as in everything else people are not what they are doing; they are in that vortex of what they imagine themselves. Dostoevsky understands all that. Those frank-spoken people who think they know sex are puritans on the other side. They have no imagination. We can overestimate what Dostoevsky has from Russia and not attribute what he is to himself. Other Russians are Russians—Turgeniev, Tolstoy, Andreyev, Chekhov, Gorky—but they are not as big as he is; perhaps they are more of the broader stamp. ... Constance Garnett’s translations are masterpieces. The French are too artistic to translate Dostoevsky.... No one can approach Dostoevsky in creating a saint. Russia as the spiritual bringer-back of the world to Christianity—this runs through his works. He is _the_ Christian. His books are full of translations from Scripture. He understands the underlying psychology of the gospels. Nietzsche said that putting the gospels with the art of the Old Testament was a crime in the name of Art. The Old Testament is undoubtedly finer art, but the New is psychology—masterly. VERS LIBRE AND COMMON SENSE _Clinton Masseck, St. Louis_: _Vers Libre_ has no inconsiderable tradition in English verse, as Mr. Arthur Ficke has recently pointed out in THE LITTLE REVIEW. Its progress in French poetry, particularly among modern writers, is familiar to all students. And if we were inclined to forget or to forgive Whitman (meaning in politer terms to accept him and his followers), the recent verse of the Imagiste group and such writers as Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. Max Bodenheim in our own midst would be likely to force our attention to this interesting form—if I may employ this word in no paradoxical sense. But _vers libre_ is of the moment—new, if you will, in its present appeal. Its modern themes, its unique figures of speech, its wide practice, both in this country and in England, mark it as a new movement, or at least a new recrudescence. Anything new invites attack; anything new in literature perhaps warrants attack. If it can stand the test, by just such a token, it is worth consideration. But there are those to whom the new is always a thing to be attacked—because it is new, because it is inexplicable according to their own canons of emotion and intellect. Francis Jeffrey, with his famous caption on Wordsworth, “This will never do,” has his echo, futile and otherwise, in every generation of critics. And so we have Mr. Llewellyn Jones, in the January issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW, sending up his protest against _vers libre_ in general and Mr. Bodenheim in particular.