LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 78, 1 April 1916, Page 16

LITERARY NOTES

Man is permitted much To scan and learn In Nature's frame; Till he well-nigh can tame Brute mischiefs, and can touch Invisible things, and turn All warring ills to purposes of good. —John Henry Newman,

"Dostoievsky was the psychologist of the abnormal," says Professor William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, in the Yale Review, "and Russian novelists of the twentieth century have run his methods into the ground, yes, into the mud. Sometimes I think he was not a realist at all, bu* rather a romanticist of the soul. Yet his paradoxes are superlatively impressive, and his lightning flashes reveal astounding secrets. He has an almost . uncanny spiritual force, by which he makes the vilest elements in humanity testify in some way to the kingdom, and the power, and the glory of our Father in Heaven."

"Wars in the past have tended to make the imaginative romantic. This one is more likely to make them realists."— Desmond MacCarthy.,

Mr. Edward Hutton, author of "Attila and the Huns," is at present in the Royal Naval Air Service, and on duty, at the Admiralty. To him the co-operation of the Italians is a source of real satisfaction. Move than twelve of Mr. Button's books deal with the history and topography of Italy.

"Happiness lies in breadth of heart. And breadth of heart is that inward freedom which has the power to understand, feel with, and, if need be, help, others." —John Galsworthy.

"Dostoievsky," writes the Argonaut, "is a giant figure in world literature by reason of his astounding power of psychological analysis. The keenness of hi 3 mental diagnosis grips the reader in an almost, sasesaa. •n»nncr t Hi* chatactwi

are not always, or even usually, pleasant, but they are characters. Harry Leon Wilson's comparison of Dostoievsky with Dickens, in which he points out that the English novelist dresses his characters up in costume and continually refers to extraneous points in order that you may recognise them, while the Russian draws his men and women in such unmistakable lines that this is unnecessary, is a discriminating criticism. In other words, in comparison with Dostoievsky's realistic, mentally active characters, the people of Dickens's novels are puppets, to be recognised by their physical characteristics and clothes."