“He was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of feeling.”[82] This is the frame of mind in which we find Prince Myshkin at the beginning of _The Idiot_, a frame of mind which could be, and in Dostoevsky’s eyes doubtless was, the Christian state _par excellence_. I shall revert to this point. Dostoevsky seems to establish in the human soul--or simply recognizes as already existing--a kind of stratification. I can distinguish in the characters of his novels three strata or regions. First the intellectual, remote from the soul and whence proceed the worst temptations. Therein dwells, according to Dostoevsky, the treacherous demonic element. For the moment I am concerned only with the second region, the region of passion, ravaged and desolated by storms; but tragic though the happenings be that these storms determine, the very soul of Dostoevsky’s characters is scarcely affected. There is a region deeper still, where passion exists not. This is the region that resurrection (and I grant the word the full significance bestowed on it by Tolstoy), re-birth, in Christ’s words, enables us to reach as Raskolnikov reached it. In this region Myshkin lives and moves. The transition from _The Idiot_ to the _Eternal Husband_ is more interesting still. You surely remember that at the close of _The Idiot_ we leave Prince Myshkin at the bedside of Nastasya Filippovna whom her lover Rogozhin, the prince’s rival, has just murdered. There stand the rivals, face to face, close to each other. Will they kill each other? No, indeed! They weep together, and spend a wakeful night stretched out side by side at the foot of Nastasya’s bed. “Every time the delirious man (Rogozhin) broke into screaming or babble, he hastened to pass his trembling hand softly over his hair and cheeks, as though caressing and soothing him.”[83] Almost the theme of _The Eternal Husband_! _The Idiot_ dates from 1868, _The Eternal Husband_ from 1870. Some men of letters--and as clever a critic as Marcel Schwob was amongst them--consider the latter novel Dostoevsky’s masterpiece. His masterpiece! Perhaps that is excessive. But, at any rate, it is _a masterpiece_, and it is interesting to hear what Dostoevsky himself had to say about the book. “I have a story,” he wrote to his friend Strakhov on March 18, 1869, “not a very long one. I had already thought of writing it three or four years ago, the year my brother died, encouraged by some words of Apollon Gregoriev who, praising my _Notes from Underground_, said to me, ‘Just write something in this style.’ But it will be something quite different, as far as form goes: the foundation, however, will still be the same. My everlasting theme.... I can write the story very quickly, because there is not a word or line of it but what is clear to me. It is already written in my head, although nothing is down on paper so far.”[84] And in a letter dated October 27, 1869, he continues: