Therefore it is necessary to keep quite away from the danger. But surely danger is the dragon which guards every treasure on earth. And again, no matter what his precautions, a man will meet his fate sooner or later, and come into conflict with the dragon. Surely this is an axiom. Poushkin and Lermontov loved danger, and therefore sought women. They paid a heavy price, but while they lived they lived freely and lightly. If they had cared to peep in the book of destinies, they might have averted or avoided their sad end. But they preferred to trust their star--lucky or unlucky. Tolstoy was the first among us--we cannot speak of Gogol--who began to fear life. He was the first to start open moralising. In so far as public opinion and personal dignity demand it, he did go to meet his dangers: but not a step further. So he avoided women, art, and philosophy. Love _per se_, that is, love which does not lead to a family, like wisdom _per se_, which is wisdom that has no utilitarian motive, and like art for art's sake, seemed to him the worst of temptations, leading to the destruction of the soul. When he plunged too deep in thinking, he was seized with panic. "It seemed to me I was going mad, so I went away to the Bashkirs for koumiss." Such confessions are common in his works. And surely there is no other way with temptations, than to cut short, at once, before it is too late. Tolstoy preserved himself on account of his inborn instinct for departing betimes from a dangerous situation. Save for this cautious prompting he would probably have ended like Lermontov or Poushkin. True, he might have gone deeper into nature, and revealed us rare secrets, instead of preaching at us abstinence, humility, simplicity and so on. But such luck fell to the fate of Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky had very muddled relations with morality. He was too racked by disease and circumstance to get much profit out of the rules of morality. The hygiene of the soul, like that of the body, is beneficial only to healthy men. To the sick it is simply harmful. The more Dostoevsky engaged himself with high morality, the more inextricably entangled he became. He wanted to respect the personality in a woman, and only the personality, and so he came to the point where he could not look on any woman, however ugly, with indifference. The elder Karamazov and his affair with Elizabeth Smerdyascha (Stinking Lizzie)--in what other imagination could such a union have been contemplated? Dostoevsky, of course, reprimands Karamazov, and thanks to the standards of modern criticism, such a reprimand is accounted sufficient to exonerate our author. But there are other standards. If a writer sets out to tell you that no drab could be so loathsome that her ugliness would make you forget she was woman; and if for illustration of this novel idea we are told the history of Fiodov Karamazov with the deformed, repulsive idiot, Stinking Lizzie; then, in face of such "imaginative art" it is