Perhaps I shock the literary sense of some of my audience by coupling these two names, but I can do no other, nor help being struck by the profound resemblance, not merely in form, but in substance between certain Browning monologues (I am thinking especially of _My Last Duchess_, _Porphyria’s Lover_, and the two depositions of Pompilia’s husband in the _Ring and the Book_) and that admirable little story in Dostoevsky’s _Journal_, _Krotchkaya_, which means, I am told, _Faint Heart_, the title it bears in the latest edition of the volume. But to an even greater degree than the form and the manner of their work, what urges my comparison of Browning and Dostoevsky is their optimism--an optimism which has no affinity with Goethe’s, but brings them both very close to Nietzsche and to William Blake, of whom I shall have occasion to speak again. Yes, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Browning, and Blake, are four stars of one single constellation. For long Blake was completely unknown to me, then recently I discovered him, and as an astronomer can sense the influence of a star and determine its position before he has even glimpsed it, I can say that Blake I had long anticipated. Is this equivalent to saying his influence was considerable? No, indeed! I am not aware he ever exerted any. Even in England, till late years, Blake remained practically unknown, a pure and distant star whose rays are only now reaching us. The most significant of his works, _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, from which I shall quote passages now and again, will help us, I am sure, to a better understanding of certain traits in Dostoevsky. That sentence I quoted a moment ago from his _Proverbs of Hell_, as he entitles some of his aphorisms, would be a fitting device to introduce Dostoevsky’s _Notes from Underground_--or else this other saying of Blake’s--“_Expect poison from standing water._” “Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature,” declares the hero (save the mark!) of the _Underground_. The man of action according to Dostoevsky must be mediocre in intellect, for the proud in mind are withheld from action which they deem a compromise, a limitation to thought. He who acts will be a Pyotr Stepanovitch, as in _The Possessed_, or a Smerdiakov, for in _Crime and Punishment_ Dostoevsky had not yet established the division between thought and action. The mind does not act; it conditions action. In several of Dostoevsky’s novels we come across an odd distribution of rôles, the uneasy relationship and hidden connivance between a thinking being and another acting under its influence, vicariously almost. Think of Ivan Karamazov, Smerdiakov, Stavrogin, and Pyotr Stepanovitch, whom Stavrogin called his “shadow.”