THE GREATER PORTION OF these natures may be brought into one type, applicable to all – representing an excess of impulse – ochainie, a state of mind for which I try in vain to find an equivalent in French. Dostoyevsky analyses it thus:

It is the sensations experienced by a man who, standing at the top of a high tower, looks down into the depths below and is thrilled with ecstasy at the thought of plunging down head-foremost. The sooner the better – he says to himself – and all is over! Often it is the most dull-witted, and most ordinary people who think thus…. Man finds a pleasure in horrifying others…. He allows his soul to fall into a state of frantic despair, and he looks upon the consequent chastisement as a solution, as something that will make a ‘decision’ for him.

In a novel we shall presently refer to, The Idiot , our author relates a case illustrating that kind of mental aberration based on fact, so he assures us: —

“Two peasants, of middle age, friends of long standing, both sober, arrived at an inn. They ordered tea and a single room, in which they passed the night.

“One of them had, for the last two days, observed that his friend was wearing a silver watch hanging by a string of glass beads, which he had not before noticed. This man was no thief, he was honest, and, for a peasant, quite well off. But the watch had such an attraction for him, that it made him furiously desirous of becoming its possessor. He seized a knife and, as soon as his friend’s back was turned, he crept up to him like a wolf, selected the spot, lifted his eyes to heaven, signed the cross, and devoutly murmured this prayer: ‘Lord, forgive me, for Christ’s sake.’ He cut his friend’s throat, as if he were a sheep, and took the watch.”

Frequently during his periods of madness we come across strong doses of asceticism. See, for instance, the episode of that “Old Saint,” a convict of exemplary behaviour, who throws a stone at the Commandant, solely for the purpose of “suffering affliction” under the strokes of the flogging that naturally followed. It made such an impression on Dostoyevsky that he brings the incident into his Crime and Punishment. There, he makes use of it for the hundredth time to illustrate the “mystic sense” in which the Russian mind looks on suffering in itself as a propitiatory virtue. “And if this affliction comes ‘by authority,’ all the better!”