In Dostoievsky's books, madmen, idiots, drunkards, consumptives, degenerates, visionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, nympholepts, criminals and saints jostle one another in a sort of "Danse Macabre," but not one of them but has his moment of ecstasy. The very worst of them, that little band of fantastic super-men of lust, whose extravagant manias and excesses of remorse suggest attitudes and gestures that would need an Aubrey Beardsley for illustration, have, at moments, moods of divine sublimity. Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin, in "the Possessed;" Svridigilaiof Dounia's would-be seducer, in "Crime and Punishment," and Ivan, in "the Brothers Karamazov," though all inspired by ten thousand demons, cannot be called devoid of a certain mysterious spiritual greatness. Perhaps the interesting thing about them is that their elaborate wickedness is itself a _spiritual_ rather than a _sensual_ quality, or, to put it in another way, there are abysmal depths of spiritual subtlety in their most sensual obsession. The only entirely _base_ criminal I can recall in Dostoievsky is Stavrogin's admirer, Peter Stepanovitch, and he is transformed and transfigured at times by the sheer intensity of his worship for his friend. It would be overpowering the reader with names, themselves like ritualistic incantations, to enumerate all the perverts and abnormalists whose various lapses and diseases become, in these books, mediums of spiritual insight. Though dealing continually with every form of tragedy and misery, Dostoievsky cannot be called a Pessimist. He is so profoundly affected by the spirit of the Evangelical "Beatitudes" that for him "poverty" and "meekness" and "hungering and thirsting" and "weeping and mourning" are always in the true sense "blessed"--that is to say, they are the path of initiation, the sorrowful gates to the unspeakable joy.