Part 7
Despite the extraordinarily rich diversity of his _Comédie Humaine_, Dostoevsky’s characters group and arrange themselves always on one plane only, that of humility and pride. This system of grouping discomfits us; indeed, at first, it appears far from clear, for the very simple reason that we do not usually approach the problem of making a division at such an angle and that we distribute mankind in hierarchies. Let me explain my idea: in Dickens’s wonderful novels, for instance, I am often uneasy at the conventionality, childishness even, of his _hierarchy_, or to use Nietzsche’s phrase, _scale of values_. While reading him I have the impression that I am contemplating one of Fra Angelico’s _Last Judgements_ where you have the redeemed, the damned, and the indeterminate (not too numerous!) over whom angel and demon struggle. The balance that weighs them all, like in an Egyptian bas-relief, reckons only the positive or negative quality of their virtue. Heaven for the just: for the wicked, Hell. Herein Dickens is true to the opinion of his countrymen and of his time. It does happen that the evil prosper, while the just are sacrificed--to the great shame of this earthly existence and of society as we have organized it. All his novels endeavour to show us and make us realize the shining superiority of qualities of heart over qualities of head. I have selected Dickens as a type because of all the great novelists we know he uses this classification in its simplest form: which--if I may say in conclusion--is the secret of his popularity.
Now, after reading in close succession practically all Dostoevsky’s works, I have the impression that there exists in them, too, a similar classification: less apparent, no doubt, although almost as simple, and, in my estimation, much more significant. For it is not according to the positive or negative quality of their virtue that one can _hierarchize_ (forgive me this horrible word!) his characters: not according to their goodness of heart, but by their degree of pride.
Dostoevsky presents on one side the humble (some of these are humble to an abject degree, and seem to enjoy their abasement); on the other, the proud (some to the point of crime). The latter are usually the more intelligent. We shall see them, tormented by the demon of pride, ever striving after something higher still:
“There, I’ll bet anything--that you’ve been sitting side by side in the drawing-room all night wasting your precious time discussing something lofty and elevated,” says Stavrogin to the abominable Pyotr Stepanovitch in _The Possessed_.[58] Or again:
“In spite of the terror which I detected in her myself, Katerina Nikolaevna has always from the first cherished a certain reverence and admiration for the nobility of Andrey Petrovitch’s principles and the loftiness of his mind.... In his letter he gave her the most solemn and chivalrous promises that she should have nothing to fear--she responding with the same heroic feelings. There may have been a sort of chivalrous rivalry on both sides.”[59]
“There is nothing in it to fret your vanity,” said Elizabeth to Stavrogin: “The day before yesterday when I ‘insulted’ you before everyone and you answered me so chivalrously, I went home and guessed at once that you were running away from me because you were married, and not from contempt for me, which, as a fashionable young lady, I dreaded more than anything,” adding by way of conclusion, “Anyhow, it eases our vanity.”[60]
His women, even more so than his characters of the other sex, are ever moved and determined by considerations of pride. Look at Raskolnikov’s sister, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaïa Epantchin in _The Idiot_, Elizabeth Nikolaïevna in _The Possessed_, and Katerina Ivanovna in _The Karamazovs_!
But, by an inversion which I make bold to describe as inspired by the New Testament, the most abject characters are nearer the Kingdom of Heaven than the noblest. To such a degree is Dostoevsky’s work dominated by these profound truths. “_God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble._”--“_For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost._”
On the one hand, denial and surrender of the self; on the other, affirmation of the personality, the _will to power_, an exaggerated loftiness of sentiment. And take due note of this fact; in Dostoevsky’s novels, the _will to power_ leads inevitably to ruin.
M. Souday recently accused me of sacrificing, indeed, of immolating Balzac to Dostoevsky. Need I protest? My admiration of Dostoevsky is certainly fervent, but I do not think I am blinded by it. I readily agree that Balzac’s creations surpass the Russian novelist’s in their diversity, and that his _Comédie Humaine_ is the more varied. Dostoevsky certainly goes deeper and touches more important points than any other author, but we can admit that his characters are one and all cut from the same cloth. Pride and humility! these hidden reagents never change, although by graduating the doses of them, we obtain reactions that are infinitely rich and minutely varied in colour.
With Balzac (as invariably in Western society, in French especially, to which his novels hold a mirror) two factors are active which in Dostoevsky’s work practically do not exist: first, the intellect, second, the will. I do not pretend that in Balzac will-power always urges a man towards what is good, and that his strong-willed characters are never but virtuous. But at least consider how many of his characters attain to what is of good repute by effort of will and open up a glorious career by dint of perseverance, cleverness, and determination. Think of his David Séchards, his Bianchons, Joseph Brideaus, and Daniel d’Arthez--and there are twenty such I could name!
In all Dostoevsky we have not a single great man. “But what about that splendid Father Zossima in _The Karamazovs_?” you may say. Yes, he is certainly the noblest figure the Russian novelist had drawn; he far and away dominates the whole tragedy, and once we have entered into possession of the promised complete version of _The Karamazovs_, we shall understand still better his importance. At the same time we shall realize what in Dostoevsky’s eyes constitutes his real greatness. Father Zossima is not of the great as the world reckons them. He is a saint--no hero! And he has reached saintliness by surrender of will and abdication of intellect.
If I examine along with Balzac’s the resolute characters that Dostoevsky presents, I suddenly realize what terrible creatures they are, one and all. Look at Raskolnikov, heading the list; in his beginnings, a miserable worm--with ambitions, who would like to be a Napoleon, and only attains to being the murderer of an old broker-woman and of an innocent girl. Look at Stavrogin, Pyotr Stepanovitch, Ivan Karamazov, the hero of _A Raw Youth_ (the only one of Dostoevsky’s characters who, from his earliest days, at least since consciousness dawned, lived with a fixed determination, to wit, in this case, of becoming a Rothschild, and, by mockery as it were, in all the books of Dostoevsky nowhere is there a more pithless creature, at the mercy of his fellow-beings, individually and collectively). His heroes’ determination, every particle of cleverness and will-power they possess, seem but to hurry them onward to perdition, and if I seek to know what part mind plays in Dostoevsky’s novels, I realize that its power is demonic.
His most dangerous characters are the strongest intellectually, and not only do I maintain that the mind and the will of Dostoevsky’s characters are active solely for evil, but that, when urged and guided towards good, the virtue to which they attain is rotten with pride and leads to destruction. Dostoevsky’s heroes inherit the Kingdom of God only by the denial of mind and will and the surrender of personality.
We can without hesitation affirm that Balzac, too, is, to a certain degree, a Christian author. But only by confronting the two ethical points of view, the French author’s and the Russian’s, can we realize the chasm between the former’s Catholicism and the latter’s purely evangelical doctrine, and how widely the Catholic spirit can differ from the purely Christian. Or, to offend none, let me express myself thus: Balzac’s _Comédie Humaine_ sprang from the contact between the Gospels and the Latin mind: Dostoevsky’s from the contact between the Gospels and Buddhism, the Asiatic mind.
These are merely preliminary considerations which will help us at our next meeting to probe deeper into the souls of these strange creations.
III
What we have accomplished so far has been a mere clearing of the ground. Before attacking the problem of Dostoevsky’s philosophy, I should like to warn you against a grave misconception. During the last fifteen years of his life, Dostoevsky busied himself considerably with the editing of a review. The articles he wrote for this periodical have been collected in what is known as the _Journal of an Author_. In these articles Dostoevsky sets forth his ideas. It would seem the simplest and most natural thing in the world to make constant reference to this book; but I may as well admit at once that it is profoundly disappointing. In it we find an exposé of his social theories, which, however, never emerge from the nebulous state and are most awkwardly expressed. We find, too, political prophecies not one of which has come true. Dostoevsky tries to foretell the future state of Europe and goes far astray in practically every instance.
M. Souday, who recently devoted one of his literary reviews in the _Temps_ to Dostoevsky, takes a delight in pointing out his mistakes. In these articles of Dostoevsky’s he sees nothing more than journalism of the most everyday type, which fact I am prepared to concede. But I do protest when he goes on to say that these same articles are a wonderful revelation of Dostoevsky’s ideas. As a matter of fact, the problems Dostoevsky handles in his _Journal of an Author_ are not the problems that interest him most. Political questions are frankly less important in his estimation than social problems, these in turn far less important than moral and individual problems. The rarest and deepest truths we can expect from him are psychological, and I add that in this province the ideas he submits are most often left in the problematic state, in the form of a question. He is seeking not so much a solution as an exposition of these very questions which, by reason of their complexity, confusion, and interdependence, are as a rule left ill-defined. In a word, Dostoevsky is not, strictly speaking, a thinker but a novelist. His favourite theories, and all that is subtle and novel in them, must be sought in the speeches of his characters, and not always of his most important ones even. It often happens that his most valuable and daring ideas are attributed to subordinate characters. Dostoevsky is awkwardness itself when speaking in his own name. To his own case might well be applied the sentence he puts into Versilov’s mouth. “Explain?” he said. “No, it’s better not to; besides, I’ve a passion for talking without explanations. That’s really it. And there’s another strange thing; if it happens that I try to explain an idea I believe in, it almost always happens that I cease to believe what I have explained.”[61]
We can even say that it is exceptional for Dostoevsky not to turn against his own theory as soon as formulated. It seems as if for him it immediately breathed an odour of decay, like that which emanated from Father Zossima’s dead body--the body expected to work miracles--and made the deathwatch so painful for Alyosha Karamazov, his disciple.
It is evident that for a philosopher this feature would be something of a drawback. His ideas are practically never absolute, remaining relative always to the characters expressing them. I shall press the point even further and assert their relativity not merely to these characters, but to a specific moment in the lives of these characters. The ideas are, as it were, the product of a special and transitory state of his _dramatis personæ_, and relative they remain, subservient to and conditioned by the particular fact or action which determines them or by which they are determined. As soon as Dostoevsky begins to theorize, he disappoints us. Thus even in his article, _Of the Nature of Lying_,[62] despite his prodigious skill in exhibiting falsehood in all its forms and making us realize thereby what prompts the untruthful to their falsehoods (and how differently he proceeds from Corneille!), as soon as he begins to account for it all, as soon as he theorizes on the strength of his examples, he becomes stale and unprofitable.
This _Journal_ is proof that Dostoevsky’s genius is essentially as a novelist, for although in theoretical or critical articles he never rises above mediocrity, he becomes excellent as soon as a character appears on the scene. It is in this _Journal_ that we come across these admirable tales of _The Peasant Marey_[63] and _Krotchkaya_,[64] the latter outstandingly fine and powerful, in its way a novel that is really but one long monologue, like the _Notes from Underground_, written about the same period.
Better still, or rather, more significant, are the two instances in this _Journal_ when Dostoevsky allows us to watch the almost involuntary, almost subconscious activity of his mind engaged in the construction of a narrative.
After he tells us his delight in watching people walking in the streets and occasionally in following them, we see him suddenly attach himself to a chance passer-by:
“I notice a workman passing; he has no wife leaning on his arm, but he has a child with him, a little boy. Both are sad and lonely looking. The man is about thirty years of age: his face is worn and of an unhealthy tinge. He is wearing his Sunday best, a top-coat, rubbed at the seams and with buttons worn almost bare of cloth. The collar of the coat is very soiled, the trousers are cleaner, but look as if they had come straight from the broker’s. His top-hat is very shabby. I have the idea he is a printer. His expression is hard, gloomy, almost sullen. He holds the boy by the hand; the youngster lags behind a little. The child is two, or not much more, very pale and delicate looking, neatly dressed in a tunic, little boots with red uppers, and a hat tricked out with a peacock’s feather. He is weary. The father speaks to him, making fun maybe of his feeble little legs. The youngster makes no reply, and a few paces farther on, his father bends down, lifts him up in his arms and carries him. The child seems pleased, and throws his arms round his father’s neck. He catches sight of me, and from his perch stares down at me in astonishment and curiosity. I give him a little nod, but he frowns and clings closer still to his father’s neck. They must love each other dearly, these two!
“In the streets I love to watch the passers-by, gaze into their unknown features, guess their identity, imagine how they exist and what can be their interest in life. To-day I have eyes for none but this father and child. I imagine that the wife and mother had died not long since, that the father is busy working the whole week in the shop, while the child is left to the care of some elderly woman. They probably live in a basement where the father rents or even only shares a room, and to-day, being Sunday, the father is taking the boy to see some relative, the mother’s sister probably. I’m sure this aunt of whom they don’t see much must be married to a non-commissioned officer and live in the basement of the barracks, but in a separate apartment. She mourns her dead sister, but not for long. The widower does not show much grief either, during this visit anyway. He remains preoccupied, has little to say for himself, and replies only to personal questions. Soon he falls silent altogether. Then the samovar is brought in and they all take tea. The boy is left sitting on a bench in the corner, shy and frowning, and he finally drops off to sleep. The aunt and her husband take scant notice of him, except for passing him a cup of milk and a piece of bread. The husband, with not a word to say for himself at first, comes out suddenly with a coarse joke, savouring of the barrack-room, and makes fun of the youngster whom his father begins to scold. The child wants to leave at once, and the father fetches him home from Vyborg to Liteinyi.
“To-morrow the father will be back at his workshop, and the youngster left once more with the old woman.”[65]
In another passage of the same book,[66] we read an account of his meeting with a woman a hundred years old. As he passed along the street, he noticed her sitting on a bench. He spoke to her, then went on his way. But in the evening, after the day’s work was done, the old woman came back to his mind. He imagined her home-coming and what her family said to her. He describes her death: “I take a delight in inventing the end of the story. Of course I am a novelist and love a tale.”
Besides, Dostoevsky never invents by chance. In one of the articles in this same _Journal_, à propos of the Kornilov trial, he reconstitutes and rebuilds the story in his own way, and after the process of the law has thrown light on every aspect of the crime, he writes: “I divined almost everything,” and adds: “Chance enabled me to go and see Madame Kornilova. I was astonished to see that my suppositions were almost identical with the true facts. I had, I admit, made a few errors of detail: for instance, Kornilov, though from the country, wore the townsman’s dress, etc.,” and Dostoevsky concludes: “All in all, my errors have been slight; the basis of my suppositions remains accurate.”[67]
With such gifts as an observer, such powers as a narrator and reconstructor of actual events, and an added degree of sensitiveness, you can make a Gogol or a Dickens. Perhaps you remember the beginning of the _Old Curiosity Shop_ where Dickens, too, is busy following up the passers-by, and after he has left them, goes on to imagine their lives? But such gifts, remarkable as they are, do not wholly account for a Balzac, a Thomas Hardy, a Dostoevsky. They would certainly not suffice to make Nietzsche write: “Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn; he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.”[68]
Long ago I copied from Nietzsche a page I should like to read to you. When he wrote it, had Nietzsche not in view what constitutes the essential value of the great Russian novelist, what opposes him diametrically to many of our modern novelists, to the Goncourts, for example, whom Nietzsche seems to indicate in these lines? “_A Moral for Psychologists._--Do not go in for any notebook psychology! Never observe for the sake of observing! Such things lead to a false point of view, to a squint, to something forced and exaggerated! To experience things on purpose--this is not a bit of good. In the midst of an experience a man should not turn his eyes upon himself; in such cases any eye becomes the ‘evil eye.’ A born psychologist instinctively avoids seeing for the sake of seeing. And the same holds good of the born painter. Such a man never works ‘from Nature’--he leaves it to his instinct, to his _camera obscura_ to sift and to define the ‘fact,’ ‘nature,’ the ‘experience.’ The general idea, the conclusion, the result is the only thing that reaches his consciousness. He knows nothing of that wilful process of deducing from particular cases. What is the result when a man sets about the matter differently?--When, for instance, after the manner of Parisian novelists, he goes in for notebook psychology on a large and small scale? Such a man is constantly spying on reality, and every evening he bears home a handful of fresh curios.... But look at the result!”[69]
Dostoevsky never observes for observation’s sake. His work is not the result of observations of the real; or at least, not of that alone. Nor is it the fruit of a preconceived idea, and that is why it is never mere theorizing, but remains steeped in reality. It is the fruit of intercourse between fact and idea, a blending, in the proper English sense of the word, of the one with the other, so perfect that it can never be said that one element outweighs the other. Hence the most realistic scenes in his novels are the most pregnant with psychological and moral import. To be precise, each work of Dostoevsky’s is produced by the crossing of fact and idea. “The germ of the novel has been in me for the last three years,” he wrote in 1870,[70] referring to _The Brothers Karamazov_, not written until nine years later. In another letter he says: “The chief problem dealt with throughout this particular work is the very one which has, my whole life long, tormented my conscious or subconscious being: the question of the existence of God.”[71]
But the idea is present only cloudily in his mind until it comes into contact with some fact from real life (in this instance, a criminal court case, a _cause célèbre_) which will make it fructify. Then--and not till then--can we speak of the work as conceived. “I am writing with a purpose,” he says in the same letter, speaking of _The Possessed_ which reached fruition about the same period as _The Karamazovs_, another novel with a purpose. Nothing less gratuitous, in the modern acceptation of the term, than Dostoevsky’s work. Each of his novels is in its way a demonstration, I might even say a speech for the defence, or better still, a sermon. And if I dared find in this wonderful artist any grounds for reproach, I might suggest that he sought to _prove_ only too well.
Let there be no disagreement on this score: Dostoevsky never tries to influence our opinion unduly. He seeks to bring light into dark places, to make plain certain hidden truths, which to him appear already dazzlingly clear and of paramount importance, the most important, no doubt, to which the mind of man can attain: not truths of an abstract nature, beyond human grasp, but truths secret and intimately personal. On the other hand, what saves his work from the disfigurements inseparable from all writing with a purpose, is the fact that these truths are ever subordinated to fact, and his ideas infused with reality. Towards these realities of human experience, his attitude is ever humble and obedient; he never applies pressure nor turns a happening to his own advantage. It would seem that even to his very thought he applied the Gospel precept: “_For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for My sake, the same shall save it._”