for it emerges,
gently enough, from the story; besides, we are not quite sure what it
is. We have no doubt, on the other hand, about the major thesis; it is
blazoned on the title page, with its sub-malicious quotation from St
Paul to the Romans. 'We know that all things work together for good to
them that love God.' The necessary gloss on this text is given in
Chapter LXVIII, where Ernest, after his arrest, is thus described:--

'He had nothing more to lose; money, friends, character, all were
gone for a very long time, if not for ever; but there was something
else also that had taken its flight along with these. I mean the
fear of that which man could do unto him. _Cantabit vacuus_. Who
could hurt him more than he had been hurt already? Let him but be
able to earn his bread, and he knew of nothing which he dared not
venture if it would make the world a happier place for those who
were young and lovable. Herein he found so much comfort that he
almost wished he had lost his reputation even more completely--for
he saw that it was like a man's life which may be found of them that
lose it and lost of them that would find it. He should not have had
the courage to give up all for Christ's sake, but now Christ had
mercifully taken all, and lo! it seemed as though all were found.

'As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the
denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes
do; it was a fight about names--not about things; practically the
Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the
same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most
perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman....'

With this help the text and the thesis can be translated: 'All
experience does a gentleman good.' It is the kind of thing we should
like very much to believe; as an article of faith it was held with
passion and vehemence by Dostoevsky, though the connotation of the word
'gentleman' was for him very different from the connotation it had for
Butler. (Butler's gentleman, it should be said in passing, was very much
the ideal of a period, and not at all _quod semper, quod ubique_; a very
Victorian anti-Victorianism.) Dostoevsky worked his thesis out with a
ruthless devotion to realistic probability. He emptied the cornucopia of
misery upon his heroes and drove them to suicide one after another; an