But later on Dostoevsky comes back to the point, and speaks again of Othello in _A Raw Youth_, one of this last books. “Versilov said once that Othello did not kill Desdemona and afterwards himself because he was jealous, but because he had been robbed of his ideal.”[81] Is this really a paradox? I recently came across a similar assertion in Coleridge--the similarity is so marked that I wonder if Dostoevsky had not perchance been familiar with it. “Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago.... Othello had no life but in Desdemona: the belief that she, his angel, had fallen from the heaven of her native innocence, wrought a civil war in his heart.... But yet the pity of it, Iago. Oh, Iago, the pity of it!” Constitutionally incapable of jealousy, then, Dostoevsky’s heroes? Perhaps I am going a little too far, or, at least, it would be seemly to modify my statement slightly. It may be said that of jealousy these creatures know only the suffering it brings, a suffering which is not complicated by any feeling of hatred for their rivals: this point is of primary importance. If hatred there be, as in the _Eternal Husband_, which case we shall examine presently, the hatred is counterbalanced and restrained by a strange, imperious affection for the rival. But most frequently there is no suspicion of hatred, nor even suffering. And now we are venturing on a precipitous path where we have every chance of overtaking Jean-Jacques Rousseau, equably tolerating the favours shown by Madame de Warens to his rival, Claude Anet, or, his thoughts full of Madame d’Houdetot, writing in his _Confessions_: “Anyway, no matter how ardent the passion I had conceived for her, I found it as sweet to be the confidant as to be the object of her affections, and never for a moment did I consider her lover as my rival, I always held him my friend. (He refers to Saint-Lambert.) People will say this is not love: maybe not, perhaps it is more than love.” Similarly, in _The Possessed_, we are told that Stavrogin, far from feeling jealous, developed a great friendship for his rival. At this point I propose a short detour to help us probe the question more deeply and grasp Dostoevsky’s conception. When I recently re-read most of his novels, I was fascinated by Dostoevsky’s manner of passing from one book to another. Undoubtedly it was natural that after _The House of the Dead_ he should write Raskolnikov’s story in _Crime and Punishment_, the story of the crime that sent the latter to Siberia. More absorbing still to watch how the last pages of this novel lead up to _The Idiot_. You remember we left Raskolnikov in Siberia so completely regenerated in mind that he said the happenings of his past life had lost all importance for him: his crimes, his repentance, his martyrdom, even, seemed to him like the life-history of a stranger.