Part 11

_Notes from Underground_, the little book he wrote shortly before _The Eternal Husband_, marks for me the height of his career. It is the keystone of his whole work, the clue to his thought. “_He who thinks, acts not...._” ’Tis but a step then to the insinuation that action presupposes a certain intellectual inferiority.

From first page to last, this little volume, _Notes from Underground_, is a monologue pure and simple, and it really seems a trifle daring to assert, as did our friend Valery Larbaud recently, that James Joyce, the author of _Ulysses_, devised this form of narrative. Had he forgotten Dostoevsky, Poe even, and Browning, of whom I cannot help but think as I read these _Notes from Underground_ anew? Browning and Dostoevsky seem to me to bring the monologue straightway to perfection, in all the diversity and subtlety to which this literary form lends itself.

Perhaps I shock the literary sense of some of my audience by coupling these two names, but I can do no other, nor help being struck by the profound resemblance, not merely in form, but in substance between certain Browning monologues (I am thinking especially of _My Last Duchess_, _Porphyria’s Lover_, and the two depositions of Pompilia’s husband in the _Ring and the Book_) and that admirable little story in Dostoevsky’s _Journal_, _Krotchkaya_, which means, I am told, _Faint Heart_, the title it bears in the latest edition of the volume.

But to an even greater degree than the form and the manner of their work, what urges my comparison of Browning and Dostoevsky is their optimism--an optimism which has no affinity with Goethe’s, but brings them both very close to Nietzsche and to William Blake, of whom I shall have occasion to speak again.

Yes, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Browning, and Blake, are four stars of one single constellation. For long Blake was completely unknown to me, then recently I discovered him, and as an astronomer can sense the influence of a star and determine its position before he has even glimpsed it, I can say that Blake I had long anticipated. Is this equivalent to saying his influence was considerable? No, indeed! I am not aware he ever exerted any. Even in England, till late years, Blake remained practically unknown, a pure and distant star whose rays are only now reaching us.

The most significant of his works, _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, from which I shall quote passages now and again, will help us, I am sure, to a better understanding of certain traits in Dostoevsky.

That sentence I quoted a moment ago from his _Proverbs of Hell_, as he entitles some of his aphorisms, would be a fitting device to introduce Dostoevsky’s _Notes from Underground_--or else this other saying of Blake’s--“_Expect poison from standing water._”

“Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature,” declares the hero (save the mark!) of the _Underground_. The man of action according to Dostoevsky must be mediocre in intellect, for the proud in mind are withheld from action which they deem a compromise, a limitation to thought. He who acts will be a Pyotr Stepanovitch, as in _The Possessed_, or a Smerdiakov, for in _Crime and Punishment_ Dostoevsky had not yet established the division between thought and action.

The mind does not act; it conditions action. In several of Dostoevsky’s novels we come across an odd distribution of rôles, the uneasy relationship and hidden connivance between a thinking being and another acting under its influence, vicariously almost. Think of Ivan Karamazov, Smerdiakov, Stavrogin, and Pyotr Stepanovitch, whom Stavrogin called his “shadow.”

Strange, is it not, to find what I may term a first version of the queer relationship between Ivan Karamazov the thinker and Smerdiakov the lackey in _Crime and Punishment_, the first of his great novels? Dostoevsky tells us of one Filka, a serf, Svidrigaïlov’s servant, who hanged himself to escape, not blows, but his master’s mockery of him. “Filka was a sort of hypochondriac, a sort of domestic philosopher.” The other servants used to say “he read himself silly.”[107]

These lackeys, these shadows, these puppets that act in place of the thinking beings, have one and all a love amounting to veritable devotion for the diabolical superiority of intellect. Stavrogin’s prestige in the eyes of Pyotr Stepanovitch is as exaggerated as that intellectual’s scorn for his miserable inferior.

“‘Do you want the whole truth?’ said Pyotr Stepanovitch to Stavrogin. ‘You see the idea really did cross my mind--you hinted it yourself, not seriously, but teasing me (for of course you would not hint it seriously); but I couldn’t bring myself to it, and wouldn’t bring myself to it for anything, not for a hundred roubles....’

“In the heat of his talk, he went close up to Stavrogin and took hold of the revers of his coat (really, it may have been on purpose). With a violent movement Stavrogin struck him on the arm: ‘Come, what is it? ... give over, you’ll break my arm.’”[108] (Ivan Karamazov’s conduct towards Smerdiakov is marked by like brutality.)

“Nicolay Vsyevolodovitch, tell me, as before God, are you guilty or not, and I’ll swear I’ll believe your word as though it were God’s, and I’ll follow you to the end of the earth. Yes, I will, I’ll follow you like a dog.... I am a buffoon, but I don’t want you, my better half, to be one! Do you understand me?”[109]

The thinking being enjoys his domination of the other: yet this very domination is a source of constant exasperation. For his creature’s fumbling actions are served up as the caricature of his own thoughts.

Dostoevsky’s letters enlighten us concerning the elaboration of his novels, _The Possessed_ in particular. Personally, I judge this work to be most extraordinarily powerful and wonderful. In it we are vouchsafed to witness a rare literary phenomenon. The book Dostoevsky planned to write was very different from that we actually have. While he was putting it into shape a new character, of which at first he had scarcely dreamed, asserted itself, gradually took front rank, and ousted the intended hero!

“None of my works has given me so much trouble as this one,” he wrote from Dresden to his friend Strakhov in October, 1870. “At the beginning, that is, at the end of last year, I thought the novel _made_ and artificial, and rather scorned it. But later I was overtaken by real enthusiasm. I fell in love with my work of a sudden and made a big effort to get all that I had written into good trim. Then in the summer came a transformation, up started a new, vital character, who insisted on being the hero of the book, the original hero (a most interesting figure, but not worthy to be called a hero) fell into the background. The new one so inspired me that I once more began to go over the whole book afresh.”[110]

The new character, to which all his attention is now devoted, is Stavrogin, the strangest perhaps and the most terrifying of Dostoevsky’s creations. Stavrogin reads his own riddle towards the end of the book. It is seldom that a character of Dostoevsky’s fails to give, sooner or later, the key, as it were, to his nature, often in most unexpected fashion, by some words he lets slip all of a sudden. Listen, for instance, to Stavrogin’s account of himself:

“I have no ties in Russia--everything is as alien to me there as everywhere. It’s true that I dislike living there more than anywhere, but I can’t hate anything even there! I’ve tried my strength everywhere. You advised me to do this, ‘that I might learn to know myself.’ As long as I was experimenting for myself and for others, it seemed infinite, as it has all my life. Before your eyes I endured a blow from your brother; I acknowledged my marriage in public. But to what to apply my strength, that is what I’ve never seen, and do not see now in spite of all your praises in Switzerland, which I believed in. I am still capable, as I always was, of desiring to do something good, and of feeling pleasure from it; at the same time I desire evil, and feel pleasure from that too.”[111]

At our last meeting we shall come back to the first item in this declaration--a very important one in Dostoevsky’s estimation. Stavrogin had no ties in his native land. To-day let us consider only this double-headed hydra of desire that is gnawing Stavrogin. Man ever entreats, says Baudelaire, God and the Devil at one and the same time.

At the bottom, what Stavrogin worships is energy. William Blake will give us the key to this baffling character: “_Energy is the only Life--Energy is Eternal Delight._” Aye, hearken further to his proverbs: “_The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom_,” or “_If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise_.”--“_You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough._” Blake’s glorification of energy expresses itself in divers forms. “_The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man._”

We further read: “_The cistern contains: the fountain overflows_,” and “_The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction_.” And the formula which introduces his _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ seems to have been appropriated all unconsciously by Dostoevsky: “_Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence._” “_These two classes of men are always upon earth, and they should be enemies: whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence._”

Allow me to add to Blake’s proverbs two of my own invention: “_Fine feelings are the stuff that bad literature is made on_,” and “_The Fiend is a party to every work of art_.” Yes, of a truth, every work of art is a _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, and William Blake tells us: “_The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it._”

Dostoevsky was tormented his life long by his horror of evil and by his sense of its inevitability. By evil I mean suffering also. I think of him when I read the parable of the man which sowed good seed in his field, but while men slept his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.... And the servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay: lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let them both grow together until the harvest.

Two years ago, in neutral territory, I met Walther Rathenau. He spent two days with me, I remember, and I questioned him on the events of the time, seeking in particular his opinion of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. His answer was that naturally he suffered at the horrible abominations practised by the revolutionaries. “But, believe me,” he added, “a nation learns to know itself, as a man his own soul, only by passing through the depths of suffering and the abyss of sin.... And America has not yet gained a soul because she refuses to accept sin and suffering.”

Now you know my grounds for saying, when we saw Father Zossima kneel before Dmitri and Raskolnikov before Sonia, that they were humbling themselves, not merely before suffering, but before sin.

Let us make no mistake as regards what was in Dostoevsky’s mind. I repeat that even though he clearly formulates the problem of the _superman_ which insidiously reappears in each of his works, we witness the glorious vindication of none but Gospel truths. Dostoevsky perceives and imagines salvation only in the individual’s renunciation of self; but, on the other hand, he gives us to understand that man is never nearer God than in his extremity of anguish. Then and not till then does he cry: “_Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life._”

He knows this imploring cry cannot proceed from the lips of the righteous man who has ever been sure of his course and confident he has acquitted his obligations to God and to himself alike, but from those of the unhappy creature “who has nowhere left to turn.”... “Do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn? No, that you don’t understand yet!”[112] Only through anguish and crime, after his expiation even, cut off from the society of his fellow-men, did Raskolnikov come face to face with the Gospel.

There has no doubt been a measure of desultoriness in the ideas I have submitted to you to-day--but maybe responsibility for the confusion falls in part to Dostoevsky’s share as well. “_Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius._”

At all events, Dostoevsky was convinced, as I too am convinced, that in the Gospel truths is no confusion--the one consideration of moment!

VI

I am overwhelmed by the number and importance of the things I have still left to say to you. You have grasped, have you not, what I meant in my introduction when I said that Dostoevsky was often an excuse for expressing my own ideas? I should crave your pardon did I think that thereby I had presented Dostoevsky’s in a false light. No, like the bees Montaigne tells of, I have but gathered from his works what I needed to make my own honey. However life-like a portrait, there is always much of the artist in it, as much of him almost as of the sitter. The most precious model is undoubtedly that which warrants the widest diversity of likeness and lends itself to the greatest number of portraits. I have attempted Dostoevsky’s likeness; I know I have not exhausted his semblance.

Overwhelming, too, the number of touches I should like to add to my preceding papers. After each one I have felt there was something I had forgotten to tell you. At our last meeting, for example, I wanted to make plain the meaning of my two “proverbs”: “_Fine feelings are the stuff bad literature is made on_,” and “_The Fiend is party to every work of art._” What to me seems transparent may appear a paradox to you, and as such to call for elucidation. I loathe paradoxes and never seek effect in surprises, but had I nothing new to suggest I should not attempt these papers; and remember, a new idea wears invariably the guise of a paradox. To help you acknowledge the truth of what I am saying, I proposed to call your attention to two figures, St. Francis of Assisi and Fra Angelico. If it was vouchsafed the latter to be a great artist (the better to prove my contention I choose as my example the most shiningly pure figure in the whole history of art), it was because, in spite of his purity, his art permitted of demonic collaboration. There is no work of art to which the Demon is not a co-signatory. The true saint is not Fra Angelico, but Francis of Assisi. There are no artists amongst the saints, no saints amongst the artists.

Creative art may be likened to the box of sweet spices which Mary Magdalene brake not. I have already quoted that strange dictum of Blake’s: “_The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it._”

There are three threads in the loom on which every work of art is woven, the three lusts pointed out by the apostle: “... _the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life_.”

Remember Lacordaire’s remark when congratulated upon an admirable sermon he had just delivered: “The Devil has forestalled you.” The Devil would not have told him his sermon was fine, indeed, he would have been there to speak, had he not been party to it.

After citing lines from Schiller’s _Hymn to Joy_, Dmitri Karamazov exclaims: “And the awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”[113]

No artist, I am sure, has given the demonic so large a share in his work as Dostoevsky, unless Blake himself, who concluded his admirable little book, _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, with these words:

“_This Angel who is now become a Devil is my particular friend. We often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well._”

After leaving you, I realized that in quoting the strangest of William Blake’s _Proverbs of Hell_, I had omitted to read to you the entire passage from _The Possessed_ which had called forth these very quotations. May I atone for my omission? In this one page from _The Possessed_ you will marvel at the fusion--not to say confusion--of the divers elements I sought to point out in my previous papers: optimism first and foremost, the wild love of life we come across again and again in Dostoevsky’s works, love of life and all the world, Blake’s vast delectable world wherein dwells the tiger as well as the lamb.

“Are you fond of children?”

“I am,” answered Kirillov, though rather indifferently.

“Then you’re 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....”[114]

We saw too Dmitri Karamazov ready to take his life in a fit of optimism, beside himself with enthusiasm.

“You seem to be very happy, Kirillov?”

“Yes, very happy,” he answered, as though making the ordinary reply.

“But you were distressed so lately, angry with Liputin?”

“H’m!... I’m not scolding now. I did not know then that I was happy.”[115]

Do not draw a mistaken conclusion from this seeming ferocity which is frequent in Dostoevsky. It is an integral part of his quietism, as of Blake’s. You remember my saying that Dostoevsky’s Christianity had closer affinities with Asia than with Rome? Yet his acceptance of the doctrine of energy, a doctrine positively glorified by Blake, is rather of the West than of the East.

But for Blake and Dostoevsky both, the truth of New Testament teaching is too radiantly clear for them to deny this ferocity as but a transitory phase, the short-lived consequence of a passing blindness.

And to reveal to you only the vision of his cruelty would be an act of treachery towards Blake. I wish I could counter my quotations from his terrible _Proverbs of Hell_ by reading one of the loveliest of his _Songs of Innocence_--alas! its aëry form eludes translation--the poem where he foretells the time when the lion in his strength will lie down with the lamb and watch over the fold.

But let us continue with our reading from _The Possessed_.

“They’re bad because they don’t know they’re good; when they find out they won’t outrage a little girl. They’ll find out that they’re good and they’ll all become good, every one of them,” declares Kirillov.[116]

And so the conversation continues until we stumble across the singular conception of the man-God.

“Here you’ve found it out! So you’ve become good then?”

“I am good.”

“That I agree with, though,” muttered Stavrogin, frowning.

“He who teaches that all are good will end the world.”

“He who taught it was crucified.”

“He will come, and his name will be the man-God.”

“The God-man?”

“The man-God! That’s the difference.”[117]

The notion of a man-God succeeding the God-man brings us round again to Nietzsche. À propos of the _superman_ theory, I should like to contribute one emendation in protest against an opinion which is only too current and too easily accepted. Nietzsche’s _superman_ (observe, pray, wherein he differs from the _superman_ of Raskolnikov’s or Kirillov’s vision), though _ruthlessness_ is his motto, is ruthless not to others but to himself. The humanity he aspires to outstrip is his own. In short: to one and the same problem Nietzsche and Dostoevsky propose different, radically opposed solutions. Nietzsche advocates the affirmation of the personality--for him it is the one possible aim in life: Dostoevsky postulates its surrender. Nietzsche presupposes the heights of achievement where Dostoevsky prophesies utter ruin.

At the darkest hour of the War, I read in the letters of a Red Cross orderly (his modesty forbids me to name him), living in the midst of agonizing sufferings and hearing but the voice of despair, “Ah, if only they could make a sacrifice of their sufferings!”--a thought so luminous that all commentary were a matter for reproach. I shall only compare it with this sentence from _The Possessed_:

“Every earthly woe and every earthly tear is a joy for us. And when you water the earth with your tears a foot deep, you will rejoice at everything at once, and your sorrow will be no more, such is the prophecy.”[118] Are not we very near to Pascal’s “_sweet and perfect resignation_” and his cry of “_Joy! Joy! Tears of joy!_”?

Is not this state of bliss depicted by Dostoevsky the very one exalted by the Gospel, a state into which we are born anew, the joy whose fulfilment is possible only through renunciation of self, for it is love of self which prevents us from leaping into Eternity, from entering into the Kingdom of God and communing in the mystery of life universal?

The first consequence of such regeneration is that man becomes as a little child. “_Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven._” In the words of La Bruyère, “_Little children have neither past nor future, for they live in the present_,” which man has lost the power to do.

“At that moment,” said Prince Myshkin to Rogozhin--“at that moment I seem somehow to understand the extraordinary saying that _there shall be no more time_.”[119]

This direct participation is, as I have earlier indicated, taught by the Gospel, unwearying in its insistence upon these words, “_Et nunc_” ... “_And now_.” The perfect joy Christ means is not of the future, but of the immediate present.

“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.”[120]

And towards the end of _The Possessed_ Dostoevsky reverts once more to Kirillov’s uncanny rapture. Let us read the passage in question. It will help us to appreciate Dostoevsky’s idea, and prepare the way for one of the most essential truths I have left to discuss.