its."

What really makes Pater so great, so wise, so salutary a writer is his
perpetual insistence on the criminal, mad foolishness of letting slip,
in silly chatter and vapid preaching, the unreturning days of our
youth! "Carry, O Youths and Maidens," he seems to say. "Carry
with infinite devotion that vase of many odours which is your Life
on Earth. Spill as little as may be of its unvalued wine; let no
rain-drops or bryony-dew, or floating gossamer-seed, fall into it and spoil
its taste. For it is all you have, and it cannot last long!"

He is a great writer, because from him we may learn the difficult
and subtle art of drinking the cup of life _so as to taste every drop._

One could expatiate long upon his attitude to Christianity--his final
desire to be "ordained Priest"--his alternating pieties and
incredulities. His deliberate clinging to what "experience" brought
him, as the final test of "truth," made it quite easy for him to dip his
arms deep into the Holy Well. He might not find the Graal; he might
see nothing there but his own shadow! What matter? The Well itself
was so cool and chaste and dark and cavern-like, that it was worth
long summer days spent dreaming over it--dreaming over it in the
cloistered garden, out of the dust and the folly and the grossness of
the brutal World, that knows neither Apollo or Christ!

DOSTOIEVSKY

The first discovery of Dostoievsky is, for a spiritual adventurer, such
a shock as is not likely to occur again. One is staggered, bewildered,
insulted. It is like a hit in the face, at the end of a dark passage; a hit
in the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat.
Everything that has been _forbidden,_ by discretion, by caution, by
self-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out of
the darkness and seize upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses.

All that one has _felt,_ but has not dared to think; all that one has
_thought,_ but has not dared to say; all the terrible whispers from
the unspeakable margins; all the horrible wreckage and silt from the
unsounded depths, float in upon us and overpower us.

There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them,
cannot, _will_ not, say. There is so much that the normal
self-preservative instincts in ourselves do not _want_ said. But this
Russian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace?
What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Such
revel