He knows this imploring cry cannot proceed from the lips of the righteous man who has ever been sure of his course and confident he has acquitted his obligations to God and to himself alike, but from those of the unhappy creature “who has nowhere left to turn.”... “Do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn? No, that you don’t understand yet!”[112] Only through anguish and crime, after his expiation even, cut off from the society of his fellow-men, did Raskolnikov come face to face with the Gospel. There has no doubt been a measure of desultoriness in the ideas I have submitted to you to-day--but maybe responsibility for the confusion falls in part to Dostoevsky’s share as well. “_Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius._” At all events, Dostoevsky was convinced, as I too am convinced, that in the Gospel truths is no confusion--the one consideration of moment! VI I am overwhelmed by the number and importance of the things I have still left to say to you. You have grasped, have you not, what I meant in my introduction when I said that Dostoevsky was often an excuse for expressing my own ideas? I should crave your pardon did I think that thereby I had presented Dostoevsky’s in a false light. No, like the bees Montaigne tells of, I have but gathered from his works what I needed to make my own honey. However life-like a portrait, there is always much of the artist in it, as much of him almost as of the sitter. The most precious model is undoubtedly that which warrants the widest diversity of likeness and lends itself to the greatest number of portraits. I have attempted Dostoevsky’s likeness; I know I have not exhausted his semblance. Overwhelming, too, the number of touches I should like to add to my preceding papers. After each one I have felt there was something I had forgotten to tell you. At our last meeting, for example, I wanted to make plain the meaning of my two “proverbs”: “_Fine feelings are the stuff bad literature is made on_,” and “_The Fiend is party to every work of art._” What to me seems transparent may appear a paradox to you, and as such to call for elucidation. I loathe paradoxes and never seek effect in surprises, but had I nothing new to suggest I should not attempt these papers; and remember, a new idea wears invariably the guise of a paradox. To help you acknowledge the truth of what I am saying, I proposed to call your attention to two figures, St. Francis of Assisi and Fra Angelico. If it was vouchsafed the latter to be a great artist (the better to prove my contention I choose as my example the most shiningly pure figure in the whole history of art), it was because, in spite of his purity, his art permitted of demonic collaboration. There is no work of art to which the Demon is not a co-signatory. The true saint is not Fra Angelico, but Francis of Assisi. There are no artists amongst the saints, no saints amongst the artists.