I recall reading long ago, in a German translation, _Die Familie Golowlef_, by Scheschedrin, a novel whose strength lay in its monotony. It conquered, it became grand, terrifying, by the same power by which the African desert grows grand, _monotony_, a level unenlivened by hill, tree. It is a masterpiece. I remembered it vividly for years. I have read them all, the novelists of Russia. They have saddened me. They have made me hopeless. They have made me, I trust, a little wiser. I am not big enough, to be sure, to face truth, their terrific revelations, I flee away to the glamour of the south, weakly I know, to songs born by shore of the blue Mediterranean, to light of a yellower sun, a land of white sculptured marble. In Russia the human soul has been stripped, left naked, to ride the blast. The reading of Dostoievsky all but made me ill. The blinding light of that tortured, violent, revealing brain! The terrors he found in hearts of men. The added terror of cold, filth, disease, hunger! The sure, unswerving seeing that made no compromises. Truth comes out of Russia. One must have suffered to face fact. Most people are brave because they ignore what they do not wish to see. People tell me they have never been the same, talked nor felt the same, after reading Dostoievsky. I, too, pagan that I am, have been sadder. I have glimpsed spaces of which I am afraid. I know now that the deserts of the mind are vast and terrifying. I have kept oftener, in pleasure, the _arrière pensée_. Before that, the Merrie England, gay France, (Italy), of Latin ancestors dwelled within me. I thought at least that peace might be, such peace as one finds amid the fairy fields, the flowers of England. If any one should ask me to name my greatest pleasures, the things that give me unvarying joy, I should say immediately one is French prose. Then I should feel false and a traitor to symphonic music, rare textiles (for which I have a veritable passion), and old weaving, ancient Chinese drawing, made in ink of India, (Sumiye), and the sea. But when I am ill, when I am sad, there are lines of French prose I repeat for sheer delight, with the dumb instinct of bringing joy back. Only once in a while down the ages can a man breathe such delight into words as Alphonse Daudet. The supremely great sentence can only be written through _the great forgetting_. One slight touch of the proud moment’s foolish consciousness destroys it.