ding vistas.

Every great writer brings his own gift, and if others satisfy our
craving for destruction and beauty, and yet others our longing for
simplification and rational form, the suggestions he brings of
mystery and passion, of secret despairs and occult ecstasies, of
strange renunciations and stranger triumphs, are such as must
quicken our sense of the whole weird game. Looking back over
these astonishing books, it is curious to note the impression left of
Dostoievsky's feeling for "Nature." No writer one has met with has
less of that tendency to "describe scenery," which is so tedious an
aspect of most modern work. And yet Russian scenery, and Russian
weather, too, seem somehow, without our being aware of it, to have
got installed in our brains. Dostoievsky does it incidentally, by
innumerable little side-touches and passing allusions, but the general
effect remains in one's mind with extraordinary intimacy. The great
Russian cities in Summer and Winter, their bridges, rivers, squares,
and crowded tenements; the quaint Provincial towns and wayside
villages; the desolate outskirts of half-deserted suburbs; and, beyond
them all, the feeling of the vast, melancholy plains, crossed by
lonely roads; such things, associated in detail after detail with the
passions or sorrows of the persons involved, recur as inveterately to
the memory as the scenes and weather of our own personal
adventures. It is not the self-conscious _art_ of a Loti or a
D'Annunzio; it is that much more penetrating and imaginative
_suggestiveness_ which arrests us by its vague beauty and terror in
Lear or Macbeth. This subtle inter-penetration between humanity
and the familiar Stage of its "exits and entrances" is only one portion
of the weight of "cosmic" destiny--one can use no other
word--which bears so heavily upon us as we read these books. In other
writers one feels that when one has gone "full circle" with the
principal characters, and has noted the "descriptive setting" all has
been done. Here, as in Aeschylus and Euripides, as in Shakespeare
and Goethe, one is left with an intimation of the clash of forces
beyond and below humanity, beyond and below nature. One stands
at the brink of things unspoken and unspeakable. One "sees the
children sport upon the shore, and hears the mighty waters rolling
evermore."

In ordinary life we are led, and rightly led--what else can we do?--this
way and that by personal feeling and taste and experience.