pieces in the same way that the painter recognizes the apogee of his art in Giotto or Velasquez. Like Baudelaire in France and Nietzsche in Germany, whom he resembled morally and intellectually, Dostoievsky was an intellectual romantic in rebellion against life. His determination seemed to be to create an individual who should defy life, and when he had defied it to his heart's content "to hand God back his ticket", having no further need of it as the journey of existence was at an end. There is no place to go, nothing to do, everything worth trying has been tried and found valueless, and wherever he turns his gaze he sees the angel standing upon the sea and upon the earth avowing that there should be time no longer, so he puts a bullet in his temple if his name is Svidrigailov, or soaps a silken cord so that it will support his weight when one end is attached to a large nail and the other to his neck, if it is Stavrogin. His antinomian heroes from Raskolnikof to Karamazov are the prototypes of Baudelaire's Dandy and the brothers of Nietzsche's Superman. It is not with the passions of the body or of the senses that they contend but with those of the mind. Here and there one of them like Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin "could give lessons to the Marquis de Sade, and belonged to a secret society for practising beastly sensuality", but this was quite incidental and by no means a leading motive in his life. The fire that burns within them is abstraction and the fuel that replenishes it is thought-thought of whence and whither. By it the possessors are lashed to a conduct that surpasses that of hate, jealousy, lubricity or any of the baser passions as the light of an incandescent bulb surpasses a tallow candle. His heroes are all men of parts, either originally endowed with great intelligence or brought to a certain elevation of intellectuality by education. Their conduct, their actions, their misdeeds, their crimes are the direct result of their argumentation, not of concrete, but of abstract things and chiefly the nature and existence of God, the varieties of use that an individual may permit his intelligence, freewill, free determination, and of the impositions of dogma founded on faith and inspiration which seem contrary to reason and science. All of his heroes are more or less insane. Herein lies Dos toievsky's strength and his weakness in character creation. None of his heroes can be held fully responsible in a court of justice. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings the Lord ordained strength, but there is no writing to show that out of the mouths of the insane comes wisdom. Not that insanity is inimical to brilliant, even wise, utterance, but the pragmatic application of wisdom to life calls for sanity. Dostoievsky himself was abnormal. He was what the physician calls a neuropathic and psychopathic individual. In addition, he had genuine epilepsy, that is, epilepsy not dependent upon some accidental disease, such as infection, injury or new growth. He was of psychopathic temperament and at different times in his life displayed hallucination, obsession and hypochondria. That the reader may understand what is meant by the psychopathic temperament, I can do no better than to quote a description of it as displayed by one of his characters: An unstable balance of the psychic impulses, an overfacile tendency to emotion, an overswift interchange of mental phases, an abnormally violent reaction of the psychic mechanism. The feature most striking to the beholder in the character of such sufferers is its heterogeneous medley of moods and whims, of sympathies and antipathies; of ideas in turn joyous, stern, gloomy, depressed and philosophical; of aspirations at first charged with energy then dying away to nothing. Another feature peculiar to these sufferers is their self-love. They are the most naïve of egoists; they talk exclusively and persistently and absorbedly of themselves; they strive always to attract the general attention, to excite the general interest and to engage everyone in conversation concerning their personality, their ailments and even their vices. No one can read the Letters of Dostoievsky or the Journal of an Author without recognizing the self-portraiture. The facts of Dostoievsky's life that are important are that his father, surgeon to the Workhouse Hospital at Moscow, was a stern, suspicious, narrow-minded, gloomy, distrustful man who made a failure of life. "He has lived in the world fifty years and yet he has the same opinions of mankind that he had thirty years ago", wrote Feodor when seventeen years old. His mother was tender-minded, pious and domestic, and died early of tuberculosis. Although much has been written of his boyhood, there is nothing particularly interesting in it bearing on his career save that he was sensitive, introspective, unsociable, and early displayed a desire to be alone. The hero of the book Youth relates that in the lowest classes of the gymnasium he scorned all relations with those of his class who surpassed him in any way in the sciences, physical strength or in clever repartee. He did not hate such a person nor wish him harm. He simply turned away from him, that being his nature. These characteristics run like a red thread through the entire life of Dostoievsky. A tendency to day-dreaming was apparent in his earliest years, and he gives graphic accounts of hallucination in An Author's Diary. At the age of sixteen he was admitted to the School of Engineering and remained there six years. During the latter part of his student days he decided upon literature as a career. Before taking it up, however, he had a brief experience with life after he had obtained his commission as engineer, which showed him to be totally incapable of dealing with its everyday eventualities, particularly in relation to money, whose purpose he knew but whose value was ever to remain a secret. It was then that he first displayed inability to subscribe or to submit to ordinary social conventions; indeed, a determination to transgress them. From his earliest years the misfortunes of others hurt him and distressed him, and in later life the despised and the rejected, the poor and the oppressed always had his sympathy and his understanding. God and the people, that is the Russian people, were his passion. "The people have a lofty instinct for truth. They may be dirty, degraded, repellent, but without them and in disregard of them nothing useful can be effected." The intellectuals who held themselves aloof from the masses he could not abide, and atheists, and their propaganda socialism, were anathHe demanded of man who arrogated to himself a distinction above his fellow man, "who go to the people not to learn to know it, but condescendingly to instruct and patronize it," not only repentance but expiation by suffering. ema. His first important literary contribution was entitled Poor Folk. He was fortunate enough to be praised by his contemporaries and particularly by Bielinsky, an editor and great critic, who saw in the central idea of the story corroboration of his favorite theory, viz.: abnormal social conditions distort and dehumanize mankind to such an extent that they lose the human form and semblance. As the result of this publication, Dostoievsky made the acquaintance of the leading literary lights of St. Petersburg, many of whom praised him too immoderately for his own good, as he produced nothing worthy of his fame until many years after the event in his life which must be looked upon as the beginning of his real mental awakement: banishment and penal servitude in Siberia. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrines of the Frenchman, Charles Fourier, were having such acceptance in this country, where the North American Phalanx in New Jersey and the Brook Farm in Massachusetts were thriving, as to encourage the disciples of that sentimental but wholly mad socialist in other lands, particularly in Russia, that their hopes of seeing the world dotted with phalansteres might be fulfilled. Dostoievsky later stated most emphatically that he never believed in Fourierism, but nibbling at it nearly cost him his life. In fact, all that stood between him and death was the utterance of the word "Go", which it would seem the lips of the executioner had puckered to utter when the reprieve came. Dostoievsky was suspected of being a Revolutionary. One evening at the Petrashevsky Club he declaimed Pushkin's poem on Solitude: My friends, I see the people no longer oppressed, And a dawn breaking over us, glorious and bright, In discussion he suggested that the emancipation of the peasantry might have to come through a rising. Thus he became suspected. But it was not until he denounced the censorship and reflected on its severity and injustice that he was taken into custody. He and twenty-one others were sentenced to death. He spent four years in a Siberian prison and there became acquainted with misery, suffering and criminality that beggars description. What a number of national types and characters I became familiar with in the prison; I lived into their lives and so I believe I know them really well. Many tramps' and thieves' careers were laid bare to me, and above all the whole wretched existence of the common people. I learnt to know the Russian people as only a few know them. After four years he was, through the mediation of powerful friends, transferred for five years to military service in Siberia, chiefly at Semipalatinsk. In 1859 he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg, and in the twenty years that followed he published those books upon which his fame rests, namely, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Journal of an Author, and The Brothers Karamazov, and a tremendous amount of magazine, newspaper work and potboilers. In 1867 he was obliged to leave Russia to escape imprisonment for debt, and he remained abroad, chiefly in Switzerland, for four years. In his appeal to General Todleben to get transferred from the military to the civil service and to be permitted to employ himself in literature, he said: Perhaps you have heard something of my arrest, my trial and the supreme ratification of the sentence which was given in the case concerning me in the year 1849. I was guilty and am very conscious of it. I was convicted of the intention (but only the intention) of acting against the Government; I was lawfully and quite justly condemned; the hard and painful experiences of the ensuing years have sobered me and altered my views in many respects, but then while I was still blind I believed in all the theories and Utopias. For two years before my offense I had suffered from a strange moral disease-I had fallen into hypochondria. There was a time even when I lost my reason. I was exaggeratedly irritable, had a morbidly developed sensibility and the power of distorting the most ordinary events into things immeasurable. While Dostoievsky was in prison his physical health improved very strikingly, but despite this his epilepsy, which had previously manifested itself only in vague or minor attacks, became fully developed. Attempts have been made to prove that prison life and particularly its hardships and inhumanities were responsible in a measure for Dostoievsky's epilepsy, but such allegations are no more acceptable than that which attributes it to his father's alcoholism. His epilepsy was a part of his general make-up, a part of his constitution. It was an integral part of him and it became an integral part of his books. The phenomena of epilepsy may be said to be the epileptic personality and the attack with its warning, its manifestations and the after-effects. The disease is veiled in the same mystery to-day as it was when Hercules was alleged to have had it. Nothing is known of its causation or of its dependency, and all that can |