Three Masters Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 edition. Excerpt: ...when he enters Reading Gaol, the bath he must take is one in which the water has already served for the ablutions of ten of his fellow-convicts. Belonging to a privileged, a delicately nurtured class, his shudder at this enforced contact with the crowd is the shudder of the aristocrat compelled to rub shoulders with the canaille. Dostoeffsky, however, the new man who rises superior to class distinctions, feels delight instead of repulsion at having thus to mingle with the masses. For him, the dirty bathwater becomes a purgatorial fire for the cleansing of his soul from pride. When he helps a Tatar to wash, he thrills ecstatically, for in imagination he participates in the Christian mystery of the washing of feet. Wilde, for whom to be a gentleman is something more than to be a man, fears lest his fellow-prisoners may take him to be one of themselves, a fear which adds greatly to his torment: Dostoeffsky suffers only in so far as the thieves and murderers among whom he lives deny him their friendship for he feels every reserve on their part, every lack of brotherly affection, as a flaw in his own human kindness, as a personal insufficiency. Just as coal and diamonds are the products of one and the same element, so is this duplex destiny one and the same for these two men, and yet so different in its reactions on them both. Wilde's career is finished when he emerges from prison, Dostoeffsky's is merely begun 5 Wilde is consumed to a valueless ash in the same fires which steel Dostoeffsky to a brilliant hardness. Because he would defend himself from fate's blows, Wilde is chastised like an unruly thrall j but Dostoeffsky, who clasps his fate to his heart and loves it, triumphs over all its onslaughts. Dostoeffsky is so consummate in his...