This letter was continued in April, and a fortnight after this cry of despair, we read, under the date April 14: “Of all my reserves of strength and energy, there is nothing left save a vague uneasiness of soul, a state bordering on despair. Bitterness and indecision--a mood foreign to me. And then I’m utterly alone. I’ve lost the friend of a lifetime. Yet I always have the feeling that I am going to begin to live! Ridiculous, isn’t it? The cat and its nine lives?”[46] He adds these words: “I write to you at great length, and I see that of the very essence of my moral or spiritual life I have given you not a notion,” which passage I should like to set side by side with an extraordinary paragraph I find in _Crime and Punishment_. In this novel Dostoevsky tells us the story of Raskolnikov, who commits a crime and is sent to Siberia. In the last pages he speaks of the strange feeling that takes possession of his hero’s being, the feeling that at last he is going to live. “And what were all, all the agonies of the past! Everything, even his crime, sentence, and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an external, strange fact, with which he had no concern. But he could not think for long together of anything that evening, and he could not have analysed consciously, he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of theory.”[47] These sentences I have read to you in justification of my opening remarks. The great external events of Dostoevsky’s life, tragic though they were, are less important than this one small fact which it is now time to consider. During his years in Siberia, Dostoevsky made the acquaintance of a woman who put the New Testament into his hand--this, by the way, being the only officially sanctioned reading matter in gaol. This reading and meditating the Gospels was of vital importance to Dostoevsky. All his subsequently written works are steeped in the teaching of the Gospels, and we shall be obliged again and again to revert to the truths he discovered in reading them. I find it highly interesting to observe and compare in two natures akin in so many respects, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the very different reactions to contact with the Gospels. With Nietzsche the reaction, immediate and marked, was, we may as well admit, jealousy. It does not seem to me possible to understand Nietzsche’s works without taking account of this feeling. Nietzsche was jealous of Jesus Christ, jealous to the point of madness. In writing his _Zarathustra_, Nietzsche is ever harassed by his desire to write a counterpart to the Gospels. He even adopts at times the form of the Beatitudes the better to make mockery of them. He wrote the _Anti-Christ_, and in his last work, _Ecce Homo_, he poses as the adversary triumphant of Him he sought to oust.