of your astonishing clumsiness!  The scene with the old monk at the beginning of “The Brothers Karamazov” is in the very grandest heroical manner.  There is nothing in either English or French prose literature to hold a candle to it.  And really I do not exaggerate!  There is probably nothing in Russian literature to match it, outside Dostoievsky.  It ranks, in my mind, with the scene towards the beginning of “Crime and Punishment,” when in the inn the drunken father relates his daughter’s “shame.”  These pages are unique.  They reach the highest and most terrible pathos that the novelist’s art has ever reached.  And if an author’s reputation among people of taste depended solely on his success with single scenes Dostoievsky would outrank all other novelists, if not all poets.  But it does not.  Dostoievsky’s works—­all of them—­have grave faults.  They have especially the grave fault of imperfection, that fault which Tourgeniev and Flaubert avoided.  They are tremendously unlevel, badly constructed both in large outline and in detail.  The fact is that the difficulties under which he worked were too much for the artist in him.  Mr. Baring admits these faults, but he does not sufficiently dwell on them.  He glances at them and leaves them, with the result that the final impression given by his essay is apt to be a false one.  Nobody, perhaps, ever understood and sympathized with human nature as Dostoievsky did.  Indubitably nobody ever with the help of God and good luck ever swooped so high into tragic grandeur.  But the man had fearful falls.  He could not trust his wings.  He is an adorable, a magnificent, and a profoundly sad figure in letters.  He is anything you like.  But he could not compass the calm and exquisite soft beauty of “On the Eve” or “A House of Gentlefolk."...

JOHN GALSWORTHY

[14 July ’10]

Mr. John Galsworthy, whose volume of sketches, “A Motley,” is now in process of being reviewed, is just finishing another novel, which will no doubt be published in the autumn.  That novels have to be finished is the great disadvantage of the novelist’s career—­otherwise, as every one knows, a bed of roses, a velvet cushion, a hammock under a ripe pear-tree.  To begin a novel is delightful.  To finish it is the devil.  Not because, on parting with his characters, the novelist’s heart is torn by the grief which Thackeray described so characteristically. (The novelist who has put his back into a novel will be ready to kick the whole crowd of his characters down the front-door steps.) But because the strain of keeping a long book at the proper emotional level through page after page and chapter after chapter is simply appalling, and as the end approaches becomes almost intolerable.  I have just finished a novel myself; my nineteenth, I think.  So I know the rudiments of the experience.  For those in peril on the sea, and for novelists finishing novels, prayers ought to be offered up.