nd 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.

In accordance with my habit of re-reading books which have uncommonly
interested me on first perusal, I have recently read again "A Man of
Property."