And yet it is a simple book. There are very few writings so direct and simple, so easy to read and to understand. The terrifying lusts and passions and distorted rages make the mind quiver, but they never mystify. The harrowing morbidities pierce the intelligence like hot lances, but they never blunt or deprave the moral senses. The fierce pathos so exquisitely written, the blood-soaked restraints, the consumptive dying in his iron fetters too weak to support the weight of the little cross on his chest, the wild, inhuman humanness—they sizzle away the nerve cuticles and burn the emotions with a strange fire. It is the peculiar paradox of reaction. I visited once a Home for Crippled Children and came away happier and cleaner. There the little misshapen bodies and the unconscious holiness of their suffering suddenly revealed to me things I had scoffingly overlooked in the popular words of accepted divines. And it is the same way with the company that writhes through the pages of Dostoevsky’s book. A more material illustration of this paradox is the very rhapsodics I have indulged in to convey what I have read. There are no rhapsodies in the book. There is no “dramatic action” at all in the book. It is the most inactive book I ever have read, barring not certain memoirs and diaries. Nothing happens in the book, yet from its start a demoralized pageant marches thunderingly across the pages, and somehow, by a psychological process it would take Dostoevsky again to reveal, lifts the spirit to heights as lofty as its itinerary is low. As for the style of its writing, there are no secrets in the art for the great Russian. And here he chooses the grim, gripping reiteration, the tragic calm and human poesy of simple words to build up his staggering effects. What will Americans think of the book providing it becomes popular?—and it may. (The idolatrous regard born in this country for Russian art instances the possibilities of American hysteria directed in the proper channels.) The great majority of them, however—particularly those with whom I have mentioned my horror of spending ten years—will feel it incumbent upon them to be outraged, none more so than the criminal fraternity. It is perhaps stretching a point to say that even so were the highly and lowly estimable backbones of an earlier period of less comparative moribund piety outraged by the Sermon on the Mount. But there is a promising likelihood that their ectypes will never read the volume and will thus be saved or lost or whatever you will. And those who see the light from this Sermon in the Depths can effect an exclusiveness which will merit them the flattering curses and derisions of their fellow men for many sweet years to come.