Part 10
“‘... Only he didn’t know then whether he would end by embracing me or murdering me. Of course, it’s turned out that the best thing was to do both. A most natural solution’.”[94]
If I have lingered so long over this slender book, it is because it is more accessible than the rest of Dostoevsky’s novels, and helps us to win, beyond love and hate, to that wider region I spoke about not long since: a region where love is not, nor passion, so easily and so simply reached: the region Schopenhauer spoke of, the meeting-place of human brotherhood, where the limits of existence fade away, where the notion of the individual and of time is lost, the place wherein Dostoevsky sought--and found--the secret of happiness.
V
At our last meeting I spoke of the three strata or regions Dostoevsky seems to discern in the human personality: first, the province of intellectual speculation, then the domain of the passions, midway between the former and the third region, a vast realm remote from the play of passion.
It is plain that these three strata are not isolated or even strictly limited, but interpenetrate.
The intermediate region, the domain of passion, I have already discussed. Here, and on this plane, the play is staged, not merely the play Dostoevsky presents in each of his works, but the drama of entire mankind. We observed, too, what at first wore the air of a paradox: no matter how restless and powerful, the passions after all are of but slender importance, or at least do not stir the soul’s utmost depths. Events have no hold on the soul--they are simply outwith its province. To support my assertion, what instance could I more aptly adduce than war? Investigations have been carried out in regard to the terrible struggle through which we have but lately passed. Literary men were asked to estimate its real or apparent moment, its moral after-effects, its influence on literature. The answer is simple: to all intents and purposes its influence has been nil.
Consider for a moment the Napoleonic wars: endeavour to trace their repercussion in literature and determine in what way they have modified the soul of humanity. I admit there exist poems inspired by the imperial epic as there exist only all too many with the Great War for theme. But where is there a deeper note, a spiritual transformation? No exterior event, whatever its tragedy or magnitude, can effect such a change. On the other hand, the French Revolution is different, but here we are concerned with a disturbance that is more than physical, a traumatism, if I may use the word. This time the convulsion proceeds from the very soul of the nation. The influence of the French Revolution on the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau is enormous, although their works date from before the event for which they prepared the way. And we shall observe the same order of things in Dostoevsky’s novels: the idea is not consecutive to the event, but precedes it. In most cases passion has to serve as intermediary between thought and action.
At any rate, in Dostoevsky’s novels we shall see the intellectual element comes at times into touch with that deeper region, which is not the soul’s hell, but its heaven.
In Dostoevsky we find the mysterious inversion of values already noticed in William Blake, the great mystic amongst English poets. Hell, according to Dostoevsky, is the first region, the realm of mind and reason. Throughout his works, if our attention be at all alert, we shall become conscious of a depreciation of mental powers which is not so much systematic as involuntary and inspired by the spirit of the Gospel.
Dostoevsky never deliberately states, although he often insinuates, that the antithesis of love is less hate than the steady activity of the mind. In his eyes it is intellect which individualizes, which is the enemy of the Kingdom of Heaven, life eternal, and that bliss where time is not, reached only by renouncing the individual self and sinking deep in a solidarity that knows no distinctions.
This passage from Schopenhauer will prove illuminating: “He sees that the difference between him who inflicts suffering and him who must bear it is only the phenomenon; and does not concern the thing in itself, for this is the will living in both, which here deceived by the knowledge which is bound to its service, does not recognize itself, and seeking an increased happiness in _one_ of its phenomena, produces great suffering in _another_, and thus, in the presence of excitement, buries its teeth in its own flesh, not knowing that it always injures only itself, revealing in this form, through the medium of individuality, the conflict with itself, which it bears in its inner nature. The inflicter of suffering and the sufferer are one. The former errs in believing that he is not a partaker in the guilt. If the eyes of both were opened, the inflicter of suffering would see that he lives in all that suffers pain in the wide world, and which if endowed with reason, in vain asks why it was called into existence for such great suffering, its desert of which it does not understand, and the sufferer would see that all the wickedness which is, or ever was, committed in this world, proceeds from that will which constitutes _his_ nature also, appears also in _him_, and that through this phenomenon and its assertion he has taken upon himself all the sufferings which proceed from such a will, and bears them as his due, so long as he _is_ this will.”[95]
But this pessimism (which in Schopenhauer can at times virtually have the air of a disguise) yields place in Dostoevsky to a boundless optimism.
“If you were to give me three lives, it wouldn’t be enough for me,”[96] says one of his characters in _A Raw Youth_. In another passage of the same book:
“You so want to live and are so thirsting for life that I do believe three lives would not be enough for you.”[97]
I should like to investigate further this blissful state Dostoevsky depicts, or of which he gives us a glimpse, in each of his works, a state wherein we lose all sense of personal limitation and of the flight of time.
“At that moment,” said Prince Myshkin to Rogozhin, “I seem somehow to understand the extraordinary saying that there shall be no more time.”[98]
And compare this eloquent passage from _The Possessed_:
“‘Are you fond of children?’ asked Stavrogin.--‘I am,’ answered Kirillov, though rather indifferently.--‘Then you are fond of life?’--‘Yes, I’m fond of life. What of it?’--‘Though you’ve made up your mind to shoot yourself?’--‘What of it? Why connect it? Life’s one thing, and that’s another. Life exists, but death doesn’t at all.’--‘You’ve begun to believe in future eternal life?’--‘No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still and it will become eternal.’”[99]
I could multiply my quotations, but these doubtless will suffice.
I am struck, every time I read the Gospels, by the insistence with which the words, “_Et nunc_,” “_And now_,” are repeated over and over again. And certainly Dostoevsky too was struck by it. Everlasting bliss, the bliss promised by Jesus Christ, can be attained here and now, if only the human soul will forswear and deny itself. _Et nunc._...
Eternal life is not, or rather is more than, a thing of the future, and if we do not reach it in this world, there is little hope of our ever attaining to it. Listen to these admirable pages from Mark Rutherford’s _Autobiography_:
“As I got older, I became aware of the folly of this perpetual reaching after the future, and of drawing from to-morrow--and from to-morrow only--a reason for the joyfulness of to-day. I learned, when, alas! it was almost too late, to live in each moment as it passed over my head, believing that the sun as it is now rising is as good as it ever will be, and blinding myself as much as possible to what may follow. But when I was young I was the victim of that illusion, implanted for some purpose or other in us by Nature, which causes me on the brightest morning in June to think immediately of a brighter morning which is to come in July. I say nothing now for or against the doctrine of immortality. All I say is, that men have been happy without it, even under the pressure of disaster, and that to make immortality a sole spring of action here is an exaggeration of the folly which deludes us all through life with endless expectation, and leaves us at death without the thorough enjoyment of a single hour.”
Cheerfully would I cry: “What betides life eternal, without ever-present consciousness of that eternity even now? Eternal life can be present in us here below. We are partakers in it from the moment we are resigned to die to ourselves and accomplish the surrender which enables us to resurrect straightway into eternity!”
Neither behest nor ruling: simply the secret of the supreme felicity revealed by Jesus Christ in the Gospels. “_If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them_” (John xiii. 17). Not “_happy shall ye be_” but “_happy are ye_.” Here and now we can share in that perfect bliss.
What serenity! Time indeed ceases to exist: eternity lives, we inherit the Kingdom of God.
Yes, here is the mysterious essence of Dostoevsky’s philosophy and of Christian ethics too; the divine secret of happiness. The individual triumphs by renunciation of his individuality. He who lives his life, cherishing personality, shall lose it: but he who surrenders it shall gain the fullness of life eternal, not in the future, but in the present made one with eternity. Resurrection in the fullness of life, forgetful of all individual happiness.--Oh! perfect restoration!
Such glorification of feeling and inhibition of thought is nowhere better indicated than in the following passage from _The Possessed_ which complements the one I read a few moments since:
“‘You seem to be very happy, Kirillov,’ said Stavrogin.
“‘Yes, very happy,’ he answered, as though making the most ordinary reply.
“‘But you were distressed so lately, angry with Liputin?’
“‘H’m!... I’m not scolding now, I didn’t know then I was happy. Have you seen a leaf, a leaf from a tree?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘I saw one lately, a little green. It was decayed at the edges. It was blown by the wind. When I was ten years old I used to shut my eyes in the winter on purpose and fancy a green leaf, bright, with veins on it, and the sun shining. I used to open my eyes and not believe them, because it was very nice, and I used to shut them again.’
“‘What’s that? An allegory?’
“‘N-no.... Why? I’m not speaking of an allegory, but of a leaf, only a leaf. The leaf is good: everything’s good.’
“‘When did you find out you were so happy?’
“‘Last week, on Tuesday--no, Wednesday, for it was Wednesday by that time, in the night.’
“‘By what reasoning?’
“‘I don’t remember. I was walking about the room ... never mind. I stopped my clock. It was thirty-seven minutes past two.’”[100]
But, you may well contend, if feeling is to overcome thought, and the soul know no state but this vague expectancy susceptible to every outside influence, what can result except complete anarchy? It has been said, and of late more frequently, that anarchy is the consummation of Dostoevsky’s doctrine. A discussion of his beliefs would lead us into a far country, for I can anticipate the storm of protest I should provoke if I dared affirm that Dostoevsky does not plunge us into anarchy, but simply and naturally leads us to the Gospels. On this point we must be clear. Christian doctrine as contained in the New Testament is usually seen by people of our nation through the medium of the Roman Catholic Church, as she has modified it, moreover, in harmony with her own needs. Now, Dostoevsky abhors all churches, the Church of Rome in
## particular. He claims it his right to accept Christ’s teaching directly
from the Scriptures, and from them alone, which is precisely what the Catholic cannot possibly concede.
In his letters we come across countless passages inveighing against the Roman Catholic Church, accusations so vehement and so categorical that I dare not repeat them to you here. But they confirm the general impression I gather at each fresh reading of Dostoevsky and help me to a better understanding of him. I know no author at once more Christian and less Catholic in spirit.
“But you have put your finger on the very crux of the question,” Roman Catholics will say, “and you have yourself explained it, many and many a time, seemingly with full understanding. The Gospels, the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, considered apart, lead but to anarchy, whence the need for St. Paul, for the Church, for Catholicism as a whole....” I shall not attempt to argue with them.
Dostoevsky leads us, we may take it, if not to anarchy, to a sort of Buddhism, or at least _quietism_, and we shall see that in the judgment of the orthodox, this is not his only heresy. He draws us far away from Rome--the Rome of the Encyclicals, I mean--far, too, from worldly codes of honour.
“But look here, Prince, are you a man of honour?” cries one of his characters to Prince Myshkin, the hero who best embodied his philosophy until the day when he wrote _The Karamazovs_ and presented to us these angelic creatures, Alyosha and Father Zossima. What then does Dostoevsky exalt as his ideal? The life contemplative? A life wherein man, renouncing reason and will, shall know love alone?
Perhaps Dostoevsky would find personal happiness in such an existence, but certainly not man’s higher destiny. As soon as Prince Myshkin, far from his native land, reaches the higher plane, he is urgently impelled to turn his steps homeward, and when young Alyosha confides to Father Zossima his secret aspirations towards ending his days in the monastery, his confessor says to him: “Go hence from this house, thou wilt be of greater use out in the world! Thy brothers have need of thee!”... “_I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from evil._”
I notice (and with this remark I come to treat of the demonic element in Dostoevsky’s works) that most translations of the Bible render Jesus’s words “_But deliver them from evil_,” which is not quite accurate. The translations I mean are Protestant versions. Protestantism is inclined to leave out of the reckoning angel and demon alike. By way of experiment I have often asked Protestants if they believed in the Devil, and invariably my question has been received with bewilderment. Then I realized that in most cases this was a question the Protestant had never put to himself. In the end he replied that he did, of course, believe in evil, and when I pressed him, he admitted that in evil he discerned only the absence of good, as in darkness the absence of light. Now, we are here far removed indeed from the Gospel texts which mention time and again a diabolic force, real, present, and defined. “_Deliver them from evil?_”... No! “_Deliver them from the Evil One._” This problem of the Devil occupies, I may say, an important place in Dostoevsky’s work. Some no doubt will see in him a Manichean. We are aware that the great heresiarch, Mani, recognized two principles controlling the universe--the Power of Good and the Power of Evil, equally active, independent, and indispensable, by which belief the Manichean doctrine is directly associated with the teaching of Zarathustra. We observed (and on this point I am bound to insist) how Dostoevsky assigns the Devil’s habitation, not to the baser elements in man, but to the very noblest--the realm of intellect, the seat of reason, although man’s entire being even can become the Archfiend’s dwelling-place and prey. The most cunning snares laid for us by the Evil One are, in Dostoevsky’s reckoning, intellectual temptations and problems. I do not think it will be going far astray from my subject if I consider first of all the problems expressing mankind’s torturing obsessions.... What is Man? Whence comes he and whither does he return? What was he before birth, what becomes of him after death? To what Truth can mankind attain?--or even more pertinently--What _is_ Truth?
With Nietzsche a new problem arose, completely different from the rest, and far from being absorbed amongst these others, it pressed straight to the forefront. As a problem it, too, has its torturing uncertainty--an uncertainty that drove Nietzsche to madness. “What can mankind accomplish? What can one single man accomplish?” The question implies the terrible apprehension that man could have been other than he is, could have accomplished--could yet accomplish--greater things, whereas he is content to take his graceless ease at the first halting-place without thought of crowning his progress.
Was Nietzsche actually the first to formulate this question? I dare not affirm that he was, for I am confident he had already come across the problem amongst the Greeks and amongst the Italians of the Renaissance. But with the latter the question was answered immediately, and man turned eagerly to the domain of practical activity. The solution was sought and found unerringly in action and in the practice of the arts. I have in mind Alexander and Cæsar Borgia, Frederick II, King of the Two Sicilies, Leonardo da Vinci, and Goethe--creators, men of a superior race. For artists and for men of action the problem of the _superman_ does not exist, or is at least readily solved. Their very lives and activity provide an answer in themselves. The torturing dread begins when the problem is left unsolved, or when the interval between question and answer is protracted. The being who thinks and invents and does not act brews his own poison draught. Hearken again to William Blake: “_He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence_”--the pestilence that proved mortal to Nietzsche.
“What can a man accomplish?” is the atheist’s characteristic query, and Dostoevsky exquisitely realized the fact that to deny God is inevitably to exalt man.
God a myth?... Then everything is lawful! We find this idea in _The Possessed_ and it is repeated in _The Karamazovs_:
“If God exists, all is His will, and from His will I cannot escape. If not; it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will.”[101] How can a man assert his independence? Again begins that torturing dread. Everything is possible. Is it? Everything? What can one man accomplish?
Whenever we see one of Dostoevsky’s characters ask himself this question, we can be sure of witnessing ere long his utter downfall. Take Raskolnikov, for instance, the first of them to formulate the idea clearly, the very idea which Nietzsche transformed into his theory of the _superman_. Raskolnikov is responsible for an article somewhat subversive in tone, dividing, according to Porfiry’s version of it, all men into _ordinary_ and _extraordinary_.
“Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary.”--“That wasn’t quite my conclusion,” began Raskolnikov, simply and modestly. “Yet I admit that you have stated it almost correctly; perhaps, if you like, perfectly so.” (It almost gave him pleasure to admit this.) “The only difference is that I don’t contend that extraordinary people are always bound to commit breaches of morals, as you call it. In fact, I doubt whether such an argument could be published. I simply hinted that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right ... that is, not an official right but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity).... Then, I remember, I maintain in my article that all--well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on--were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors, and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either, if that bloodshed (often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defence of ancient law) were of use to their cause. It’s remarkable, in fact, that the majority, indeed, of those benefactors and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men, or even a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals--more or less, of course. Otherwise, it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it.”[102]
Observe, however, that in the face of this profession Raskolnikov confesses his abiding faith in God--a testimony which differentiates him from Dostoevsky’s other _supermen_.
“Do you believe in God? Excuse my curiosity!”
“I do,” repeated Raskolnikov, raising his eyes to Porfiry.
“And do you--believe in Lazarus’s rising from the dead?”
“I do! Why do you ask all this?”
“You believe it literally?”
“Literally.”[103]
“_One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression_”, says William Blake.
But the very fact that Raskolnikov puts himself the question, instead of making action his answer, proves that he is no real _superman_. His bankruptcy is complete. Not for one moment can he rid himself of the conviction of his own mediocrity. He excites himself to commit a crime in order to satisfy himself that he is a _superman_. “I divined then ... that power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! Then for the first time in my life an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever thought of before me, not one! I saw as clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil. I wanted _to have the daring_ ... and I killed her. I only wanted to have the daring.”[104]
Later, after the crime, he says: “Perhaps I should never have committed a murder again. I wanted to find out something else; it was something led me on. I wanted to find out then, and quickly, whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man, whether I can step over barriers or not, whether I dare to stoop to pick up or not, whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right....”[105]
Moreover he is unwilling to accept the idea of his own failure. He refuses to acknowledge he had not the right to dare.
“I couldn’t carry out even the first step, because I am contemptible, that’s what’s the matter!... If I had succeeded I should have been crowned with glory, but now I’m trapped.”[106]
After Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Kirillov, Ivan Karamazov and the _Raw Youth_ will have their turn.
The utter inefficiency of every one of his intellectual heroes is rooted in Dostoevsky’s belief that the man of active brain is wellnigh incapable of action.