With the help of some passages from William Blake, I shall try to throw some light on these apparent contradictions, and especially on Stavrogin’s strange declaration. But this attempt at explanation I shall hold over till later. IV At our last meeting we noticed the disquieting duality by which most of Dostoevsky’s characters are racked and driven, and which prompts Raskolnikov’s friend to say à propos of the hero of _Crime and Punishment_: “It really looks as if there were in him two opposite natures showing themselves in turn.” And were these natures never visible but in turn, all would still be well, but we have seen how they often come to manifest themselves simultaneously. We have watched each of these contradictory impulses exhausted, depreciated, and inhibited by its own expression and manifestation, giving way to its opposite, and the hero is never nearer love than when he has just given exaggerated expression to his hatred, never nearer hatred than in the exaggeration of his love. In all Dostoevsky’s creations, in his women characters especially, we detect an uneasy presentiment of their own instability. The dread of being unable to maintain for long the same mood or resolve drives them often to disconcertingly abrupt action. For instance, Lizaveta in _The Possessed_ makes up her mind with great alacrity, because she knows from long experience that her resolutions never last more than a minute. To-day I propose to study some of the results of this strange duality; but first of all let me ask whether this duality really exists, or whether Dostoevsky only imagines it? Does life provide him with any examples? Is it observed from Nature, or does he merely obligingly yield to his imaginative bent? Nature, according to Oscar Wilde’s _Intentions_, copies the model set her by Art, and this apparent paradox he delights in illustrating by several specious insinuations, the gist of his argument being that Nature--“as you will not have failed to observe”--has taken to imitating Corot’s landscapes nowadays! His meaning is undoubtedly that, accustomed to looking at Nature in a manner that is become conventional, we recognize only what Art has educated us to discern. When a painter essays to transmute and express in his work a personal vision, Nature’s new aspect seems at first brush paradoxal, insincere, freakish even. However, we speedily grow used to contemplating her with the bias given by this new method, and recognize only what the artist pointed out to us. Hence, to eyes unprejudiced, Nature would really seem to _imitate_ Art.