My pre-war plan of the biography comprised an introduction in which I proposed to discuss the commonly accepted idea of him. To throw light on the subject, I should have drawn a parallel between him and Rousseau--and no arbitrary one, I can assure you. Their natures reveal such deep-laid analogies that Rousseau’s _Confessions_ were able to exert an extraordinary influence on Dostoevsky. But in my opinion Rousseau, from the very beginning of his life, was poisoned, as it were, by Plutarch, through whom he fashioned for himself a somewhat rhetorical and pompous notion of a “great man.” He set up before himself the image of a fancied hero, and his life was one prolonged effort to be like it. He tried hard to _be_ what he wanted to _seem_. I allow that his painting of his own character may be sincere, but he is ever thinking of his pose, which pride alone dictates. “False greatness,” in the admirable words of La Bruyère, “is shy and inaccessible. Conscious of its foible, it hides away, or at least never shows an open face, letting be seen only as much as will make an impression and save it from being revealed for what it really is, something mean and small.” And if I do not go so far as to recognize Rousseau in this description, I _do_ think of Dostoevsky when a little farther on I read: “True greatness is free, gentle, familiar, unaffected; it can be touched and handled, and loses nothing when seen at close quarters. The better you are acquainted with it, the more you admire it. It bends out of goodness of heart to its inferiors, and returns to its own level without effort. Sometimes it lets itself go, neglecting and surrendering its natural advantages, but ever ready to recover them and put them to use.” With Dostoevsky there is this complete absence of pose or stage-management. He never considers himself a _superman_. He is most humbly human, and I do not think that pride of intellect could ever properly understand him. The word _humility_ comes up again and again in his letters and works. “Why should they deny me? I make no demands. I am but a humble petitioner.” (November 23, 1869.)--“I do not demand, I only seek in all humility.” (December 7, 1869.)--“I have made the humblest of requests.” (February 12, 1870.) “He often astonished me by a kind of humility,” says the _Raw Youth_ in speaking of his father, and in his effort to understand the possible relations between his father and mother, and the quality of their love, he recollects his father’s phrase, “She married me out of humility.”