ations provoke and embarrass? What matter? We _require_
embarrassment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must have
no closed chinks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform its
microcosmic reflections, even _down there,_ where it has to be
driven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial even the great
writers are; how lacking in the Mole's claws, in the Woodpecker's
beak! They seem labouring beneath some pathetic vow, exacted by
the Demons of our Fate, under terrible threats, only to reveal what
will serve _their_ purpose! This applies as much to the Realists,
with their traditional animal chemistry, as to the Idealists, with their
traditional ethical dynamics. It applies, above all, to the interpreters
of Sex, who, in their conventional grossness, as well as in their
conventional discretion, bury such Ostrich heads in the sand!

The lucky-unlucky individual whose path this formidable writer
crosses, quickly begins, as he reads page by page, to cry out in
startled wonder, in terrified protest. This rending Night Hawk
reveals just what one hugged most closely of all--just what one did
_not_ confess! Such a person, reading this desperate "clairvoyant,"
finds himself laughing and chuckling, under his breath, and _against
his willy_ over the little things there betrayed. It is not any more a
case of enjoying with distant aesthetic amusement the general
human spectacle. He himself is the one scratched and pricked. He
himself is the one so abominably tickled. That is why women--who
have so mad a craving for the personal in everything--are especially
caught by Dostoievsky. He knows them so fatally well. Those
startling, contradictory feelings that make their capricious bosoms
rise and fall, those feelings that they find so difficult themselves to
understand, he drags them all into the light. The kind of delicate
cruelty, that in others becomes something worse, refines itself in his
magnetic genius into a cruelty of insight that knows no scruple. Nor
is the reluctance of these gentle beings, so thrillingly betrayed, to
yield their passionate secrets, unaccompanied by pleasure. They
suffer to feel themselves so exposed, but it is an exquisite suffering.
It may, indeed, be said that the strange throb of satisfaction with
which we human beings feel ourselves _at the bottom,_ where we
cannot fall lower, or be further unmasked, is never more frequent
than when we read Dostoievsky. And that is largely because he
al