of the "Ancient Mariner" as a poem of
religious experience; but apart from its brilliant play with natural
magic, its human charm actually depends upon this well-founded
picture of the loneliness of guilt and of the escape through loving
union with one's kind. And {70} the poet deliberately gives to this
picture the form and the sense of a religious process of salvation.

If you turn from the dreamy product of Coleridge's youthful fancy to
the opposite pole of modern literature, you find an instance of almost
the same motives at the basis of that most impressive romance of the
Russian Dostoieffsky: "Crime and Punishment." Dostoieffsky had himself
lived long in what he called "The House of the Dead," in Siberia,
before he learned how to write this masterpiece. He had been forced to
sojourn amongst the guilty of the most various grades. He had come to
universalise their experiences and to struggle himself with one form
of the problem of salvation. Those who, like Dante, have looked upon
hell, sometimes have, indeed, wonders to tell us. Dostoieffsky
condenses the whole problem of salvation from guilt in this picture of
an individual. Raskolnikow, the hero, after his thoughtfully conceived
crime, and after his laborious effort at self-justification, finds
himself the prey of a simply overwhelming sense that he walks alone
amongst men, and that, in the crowded streets of the city, he is as
one dead amongst spectres. There is nowhere, I think, a more
persuasive picture of the loneliness of great guilt. Raskolnikow could
not be more the victim of supernatural forces if he were Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner. Like the Ancient Mariner, Raskolnikow in the end
finds the way to salvation through love--the love which the martyred
Sonia teaches him--herself, {71} as our Russian most persuasively
pictures her, at once outcast and saint. The author uses religious
conceptions which are both ancient and, in his use of them,
unconventional. But the central one of these is the familiar
conception that salvation involves a reconciliation both with the
social and with the divine order, a reconciliation through love and
suffering--an escape from the wilderness of lonely guilt to the realm
where men can understand one another.

In such elemental ways the process of salvation can be made to appear
as essentially a social process, just because its opposite, perdition,
seems to mean banishment from amongst men.

Another group of cases presents t