'As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the
denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes
do; it was a fight about names--not about things; practically the
Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the
same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most
perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman....'
With this help the text and the thesis can be translated: 'All
experience does a gentleman good.' It is the kind of thing we should
like very much to believe; as an article of faith it was held with
passion and vehemence by Dostoevsky, though the connotation of the word
'gentleman' was for him very different from the connotation it had for
Butler. (Butler's gentleman, it should be said in passing, was very much
the ideal of a period, and not at all _quod semper, quod ubique_; a very
Victorian anti-Victorianism.) Dostoevsky worked his thesis out with a
ruthless devotion to realistic probability. He emptied the cornucopia of
misery upon his heroes and drove them to suicide one after another; and
then had the audacity to challenge the world to say that they were not
better, more human, and more lovable for the disaster in which they were
inevitably overwhelmed.
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