Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/711

Rh ality so strangely limited and yet so inexplicably without boundaries. His belief in orthodoxy, his ardent nationalism, his fidelity to the Tzar, here once more so clearly discernible, must have been deeply inimical to many of the atheistical and cynical youth who received his words as if they were the only words of truth in all Russia, who marched blindly behind his banner, and wept at the very mention of his name. The old rigid concepts of right and wrong withered at his lightest touch, and he could create from some magical depth in himself a whole singular thickly peopled universe where were violated at every turn the sacred and accepted canons of art; and still our sympathy and attention instead of flagging remain more and more penetrated, all the safe little partitions of our habitual judgements shattered, as in a trance we expose ourselves to this new and passionately extreme world. Is it then to be wondered at that the other great obliterator of modern false values, Friederich Nietzsche himself, could write "He (Dostoevsky) belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal"?