It is, however, none the less startling to our Western mind.

In Dostoievsky's books, madmen, idiots, drunkards, consumptives,
degenerates, visionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, nympholepts,
criminals and saints jostle one another in a sort of "Danse Macabre,"
but not one of them but has his moment of ecstasy. The very worst
of them, that little band of fantastic super-men of lust, whose
extravagant manias and excesses of remorse suggest attitudes and
gestures that would need an Aubrey Beardsley for illustration, have,
at moments, moods of divine sublimity. Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch
Stavrogin, in "the Possessed;" Svridigilaiof Dounia's would-be
seducer, in "Crime and Punishment," and Ivan, in "the Brothers
Karamazov," though all inspired by ten thousand demons, cannot be
called devoid of a certain mysterious spiritual greatness. Perhaps the
interesting thing about them is that their elaborate wickedness is
itself a _spiritual_ rather than a _sensual_ quality, or, to put it in
another way, there are abysmal depths of spiritual subtlety in their
most sensual obsession. The only entirely _base_ criminal I can
recall in Dostoievsky is Stavrogin's admirer, Peter Stepanovitch, and
he is transformed and transfigured at times by the sheer intensity of
his worship for his friend. It would be overpowering the reader with
names, themselves like ritualistic incantations, to enumerate all the
perverts and abnormalists whose various lapses and diseases become,
in these books, mediums of spiritual insight. Though dealing
continually with every form of tragedy and misery, Dostoievsky
cannot be called a Pessimist. He is so profoundly affected by the
spirit of the Evangelical "Beatitudes" that for him "poverty" and
"meekness" and "hungering and thirsting" and "weeping and
mourning" are always in the true sense "blessed"--that is to say, they
are the path of initiation, the sorrowful gates to the unspeakable joy.

The most beautiful characters he has drawn are, perhaps, Alyosha
Karamazov and Prince Myshkin; both of these being young men,
and both of them so Christ-like, that in reading about them one is
compelled to acknowledge that something in the temper of that
Figure, hitherto concealed from His followers, has been
communicated to this Russian. The naive, and yet ironical,
artlessness of their retorts to the aggressive Philistines who surround
them remind one over and over again of those Divine "bon-mots"
with which, to use Oscar W