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. And, though it is hard to say 'Yes' to his
challenge, it is harder still to say 'No.'

In the case of Ernest Pontifex, however, we do not care to respond to
the challenge at all. The experiment is faked and proves nothing. It is
mere humbug to declare that a man has been thrown into the waters of
life to sink or swim, when there is an anxious but cool-headed friend on
the bank with a £70,000 life-belt to throw after him the moment his head
goes under. That is neither danger nor experience. Even if Ernest
Pontifex knew nothing of the future awaiting him (as we are assured he
did not) it makes no difference. _We_ know he cannot sink; he is a lay
figure with a pneumatic body. Whether he became a lay figure for Butler
also we cannot say; we can merely register the fact that the book breaks
down after Ernest's misadventure with Miss Maitland, a deplorably
unsubstantial episode to be the crisis of a piece of writing so firm in
texture and solid in values as the preceding chapters. Ernest as a man
has an intense non-existence.

After all, as far as the positive side of _The Way of all Flesh_' is