ABSTRACT
The warmth with which a defending counsel expounds his client’s case may be inspired solely by sincere affection for his client and disinterested esteem for his virtues. But as a rule partisanship, whether in the courts or within the covers of a biography, draws most of its vigour from self-love in one or other of its innumerable forms, and tends therefore to obscure what it purposes to clarify. Three recently published studies, of Frederick the Great, of Heine, and of Dostoevsky, may serve to illustrate this point. Dr. Gooch treats Frederick with the respectful consideration which academic historians offer indiscriminately to all great providers of raw material for their work. After Dostoevsky’s death, Strakhov wrote to Tolstoi, communicating an incident in Dostoevsky’s life which may have been invented by Strakhov to connect Dostoevsky as a man with the form of sexual perversion he dwells on with such imaginative intensity in his account of Svidrigailov’s last night and in Stavroguin’s Confession.
