His philosophy, though lacking in the deep and tragic imagination of
Nietzsche, has something of the Nietzschean intellectual fury. He
teaches a shameless and antinomian hedonism, narrower, less humane,
but more fervid and emotional, than that taught by Remy de Gourmont.

In "The Triumph of Death" we find a fierce smoldering voluptuousness,
expressed with a hard and brutal realism which recalls the frescoes on
the walls of ancient Pompeii. In "The Flame of Life" we have in superb
rhetoric the most colored and ardent description of Venice to be found
in all literature. Perhaps the finest passage he ever wrote is that
account of the speech of the Master of Life in the Doge's Palace with
its incomparable eulogy upon Veronese and its allusion to Pisanello's
head of Sigismondo Malatesta.



42. DOSTOIEVSKY. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. THE IDIOT. THE BROTHERS
KARAMAZOV. THE INSULTED AND INJURED. THE POSSESSED. _Translated by
Constance Garnett and published by Macmillan. Other translations in
Everyman's Library_.

Dostoievsky is the greatest and most racial of all Russian writers. He
is the subtlest psychologist in fiction. As an artist he has a dark
and sombre intensity and an imaginative vehemence only surpassed by
Shakespeare. As a philosopher he anticipates Nietzsche in the
direction of his insight, though in his conclusions he is
diametrically opposite. He teaches that out of weakness, abnormality,
perversity, foolishness, desperation, abandonment, and a morbid
pleasure in humiliation, it is possible to arrive at high and