But the very fact that Raskolnikov puts himself the question, instead of making action his answer, proves that he is no real _superman_. His bankruptcy is complete. Not for one moment can he rid himself of the conviction of his own mediocrity. He excites himself to commit a crime in order to satisfy himself that he is a _superman_. “I divined then ... that power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! Then for the first time in my life an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever thought of before me, not one! I saw as clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil. I wanted _to have the daring_ ... and I killed her. I only wanted to have the daring.”[104] Later, after the crime, he says: “Perhaps I should never have committed a murder again. I wanted to find out something else; it was something led me on. I wanted to find out then, and quickly, whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man, whether I can step over barriers or not, whether I dare to stoop to pick up or not, whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right....”[105] Moreover he is unwilling to accept the idea of his own failure. He refuses to acknowledge he had not the right to dare. “I couldn’t carry out even the first step, because I am contemptible, that’s what’s the matter!... If I had succeeded I should have been crowned with glory, but now I’m trapped.”[106] After Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Kirillov, Ivan Karamazov and the _Raw Youth_ will have their turn. The utter inefficiency of every one of his intellectual heroes is rooted in Dostoevsky’s belief that the man of active brain is wellnigh incapable of action. _Notes from Underground_, the little book he wrote shortly before _The Eternal Husband_, marks for me the height of his career. It is the keystone of his whole work, the clue to his thought. “_He who thinks, acts not...._” ’Tis but a step then to the insinuation that action presupposes a certain intellectual inferiority. From first page to last, this little volume, _Notes from Underground_, is a monologue pure and simple, and it really seems a trifle daring to assert, as did our friend Valery Larbaud recently, that James Joyce, the author of _Ulysses_, devised this form of narrative. Had he forgotten Dostoevsky, Poe even, and Browning, of whom I cannot help but think as I read these _Notes from Underground_ anew? Browning and Dostoevsky seem to me to bring the monologue straightway to perfection, in all the diversity and subtlety to which this literary form lends itself.