James Lane Allen, who cannot be accused of any hankerings after the
flesh-pots of Zola, made an energetic protest against what he
denominated the "feminine principle" in our fiction. He did not mean
the books written by women--in sooth, they are for the most part
boiling over with the joy of life--but he meant the feminism of so
much of our novel writing put forth by men.

The censor in Russia by his very stringency caused a great fictional
literature to blossom, despite his forbidding blue pencil. In America
the sentiment of the etiolated, the brainless, the prudish, the
hypocrite is the censor. (Though something might be said now about the
pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction.) Not that Mr.
Howells is strait-laced, prudish, narrow in his views--but he puts his
foot down on the expression of the tragic, the unusual, the emotional.
With him, charming artist, it is a matter of temperament. He admires
with a latitude quite foreign to English-speaking critics such diverse
genius as Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Galdos, Jane Austen, Emilia
Pardo Bazan, Mathilde Serao--greater than any modern woman writer of
fiction--Henry James, and George Moore. But he admires each on his or
her native heath. That their particular methods might be given
universal application he does not admit. And when he wrote the above
about Dostoievsky New York was not so full of Russians and Poles and
people from southeastern Europe as it is now. Dostoievsky, if he were
alive, would find plenty of material, tragedy and comedy alike, on
our East Side.

The new translation of Dostoievsky in English by Constance Garnett is
significant. A few years ago Crime and Punishment was the only one of
his works well known. The Possessed, that extraordinary study of souls
obsessed by madness and crime, The Brothers Karamazov, The House of
the Dead, and The Idiot are to-day in the hands of American readers
who indorse what Nietzsche said of the Russian master: "This profound
man ... has perceived that Siberian convicts, with whom he lived for a
long time (capital criminals for whom there was no return to society),
were persons carved out of the best, the hardest and the most valuable
material to be found in the Russian dominions.... Dostoievsky, the
only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn." George Moore
once had dubbed the novelist, "Gaboriau with psychological sauce."
Since then, Mr. Moore has contributed a charming introduction to Poor