was very fond of hanging cats, and burying them with great ceremony.  He used to dress up in a sheet as though it were a surplice, and sang, and waved some object over the dead cat as though it were a censer.

As for the Karamazovs themselves, he portrays the old father and the eldest of his sons hating each other and fighting like brutal maniacs: 

Dmitri threw up both hands and suddenly clutched the old man by the two tufts of hair that remained on his temples, tugged at them, and flung him with a crash on the floor.  He kicked him two or three times with his heel in the face.  The old man moaned shrilly.  Ivan, though not so strong as Dmitri, threw his arms round him, and with all his might pulled him away.  Alyosha helped him with his slender strength, holding Dmitri in front.

     “Madman!  You’ve killed him!” cried Ivan.

     “Serve him right!” shouted Dmitri, breathlessly.  “If I haven’t
     killed him, I’ll come again and kill him.”

It is easy to see why Dostoevsky has become a popular author.  Incident follows breathlessly upon incident.  No melodramatist ever poured out incident upon the stage from such a horn of plenty.  His people are energetic and untamed, like cowboys or runaway horses.  They might be described as runaway human beings.

And Dostoevsky knows how to crowd his stage as only the inveterate melodramatists know.  Scenes that in an ordinary novel would take place with two or three figures on the stage are represented in Dostoevsky as taking place before a howling, seething mob.  “A dozen men have broken in,” a maid announces in one place in The Idiot, “and they are all drunk.”  “Show them all in at once,” she is bidden.  Dostoevsky is always ready to show them all in at once.

It is one of the triumphs of his genius that, however many persons he introduces, he never allows them to be confused into a hopeless chaos.  His story finds its way unimpeded through the mob.  On two opposite pages of The Idiot one finds the following characters brought in by name:  General Epanchin, Prince S., Adelaida Ivanovna, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, Yevgeny Pavlovitch Radomsky, Princess Byelokonsky, Aglaia, Prince Myshkin, Kolya Ivolgin, Ippolit, Varya, Ferdyshchenko, Nastasya Filippovna, Nina Alexandrovna, Ganya, Ptitsyn, and General Ivolgin.  And yet practically all of them remain separate and created beings.  That is characteristic at once of Dostoevsky’s mastery and his monstrous profusion.

But the secret of Dostoevsky’s appeal is something more than the multitude and thrill of his incidents and characters.  So incongruous, indeed, is the sensational framework of his stories with the immense and sombre genius that broods over them that Mr. Murry is inclined to regard the incidents as a sort of wild spiritual algebra rather than as events occurring on the plane of reality.  “Dostoevsky,” he declares, “is not a novelist.  What he is is more difficult to define.”