Part 8
Before attempting to trace some of Dostoevsky’s ideas in his books, I should like to speak of his method of working. Strakhov tells us that Dostoevsky worked almost exclusively at night: “About midnight, when everything was becoming still, there was Dostoevsky left alone with his samovar, and he used to go on working till five or six in the morning, sipping at intervals cold, mild-drawn tea. He rose about two or three in the afternoon, spent the rest of the day entertaining guests, walking, or visiting friends.” Dostoevsky was not always able to content himself with mild-drawn tea; during the last years of his life, he lost grip of himself, and drank, we are told, a great quantity of spirits. One day, so the story runs, Dostoevsky came out of his study, where he was busy writing _The Possessed_, in a state of remarkable mental exhilaration, obtained in some degree by artificial stimulus. It was Madame Dostoevsky’s “at home” day. Dostoevsky, wild-eyed, burst into the drawing-room where several ladies were sitting, one of whom, cordiality itself, hastened forward to him with a cup of tea. “Devil take you and your dish-water,” he shouted.
You remember Abbé de Saint-Réal’s words?--and meaningless they might well appear did not Stendhal make use of them as a cover for his own æsthetic principles: “A novel is the mirror of one’s walks abroad.” In France and in England the novels that can be classed under this rubric are numerous indeed. What of Lesage, Voltaire, Fielding, Smollett? But nothing could be more remote from this category than a novel of Dostoevsky’s. Between his novels and those of the authors quoted above, aye, and Tolstoy’s too, and Stendhal’s, there is all the difference possible between a picture and a panorama. Dostoevsky composes a picture in which the most important consideration is the question of light. The light proceeds from but one source. In one of Stendhal’s novels, the light is constant, steady, and well-diffused. Every object is lit up in the same way, and is visible equally well from all angles; there are no shadow effects. But in Dostoevsky’s books, as in a Rembrandt portrait, the shadows are the essential. Dostoevsky groups his characters and happenings, plays a brilliant light upon them, illuminating one aspect only. Each of his characters has a deep setting of shadow, reposes on its own shadow almost. We notice in Dostoevsky a strange impulse to group, concentrate, centralize: to create between the varied elements of a novel as many cross-connections as possible. With him, events instead of pursuing their calm and measured course, as with Stendhal or Tolstoy, mingle and confuse in turmoil; the elements of the story--moral, psychological, and material--sink and rise again in a kind of whirlpool. With him there is no attempt to straighten or simplify lines; he is at his happiest in the complex; he fosters it. Feelings, thoughts, and passions are never presented in the pure state. He never isolates them. And now I come to make an observation on Dostoevsky’s manner of drawing his characters. But first of all let me read these very pertinent remarks of Jacques Rivière’s: “Once the idea of a character has taken shape in his mind, a novelist has to choose between two ways of materializing it. He can either insist on its complexity, or emphasize its cohesiveness; in this soul he is about to create, he can deliberately reproduce its absolute darkness, or for the reader he can dispel such darkness by his very description of it; he will either respect the soul’s hidden depths, or lay them open.”
You see what Rivière’s theory is: the French school explores the unplumbed depths, whereas certain foreign novelists, Dostoevsky in
## particular, respect and cherish their gloom.
“In any case,” Rivière continues, “it is these black gulfs that interest Dostoevsky most, and his whole effort is directed towards suggesting how utterly unreachable they are.... We, on the other hand, faced with a soul’s complexity and endeavouring to give a picture of it, instinctively seek to organize our material.” Serious enough! But there is more to come. “At need, we force things a trifle; we suppress a few small divergencies, and interpret certain obscure details in the sense most useful towards establishing a psychological unity. The ideal we strive towards is the complete closing up of every gulf.”[72]
I am not so sure that we do not find some gulfs in Balzac, inexplicably abrupt; nor am I sure either that Dostoevsky’s are as unfathomed as at first would be imagined. Shall I give you an example of Balzac’s gulfs? I see one in _La Recherche de l’Absolu_. Balthazar Claès is seeking the philosopher’s stone: apparently he has completely forgotten the religious training of his childhood. He is absorbed by his quest. He neglects his wife, Josephine, whose religious mind is horror-stricken at her husband’s disbelief. One day she enters the laboratory without warning. The draught of the opening door causes an explosion, and Madame Claès falls fainting.... What is the cry that escapes Balthazar’s lips? One wherein suddenly reappears his childhood’s belief, long overlaid by the dross of his atheism. “Thank God you’re still alive! The Saints have preserved you from death!” Balzac does not press the incident any further, and no doubt nineteen out of every twenty readers will never even detect the fault. The abyss of which it gives a glimpse is left unexplained: maybe no explanation is possible. As a matter of fact, that was of no interest to Balzac. His one concern was to produce characters free of all inconsequences, wherein he was in perfect accord with French feeling; for what we French require most of all is logic.
I can say with respect not only to the _Comédie Humaine_, but also to the comedy of everyday life as we live it, that the _dramatis personæ_ (for we French delineate ourselves as we see ourselves) are after a Balzacian ideal. The inconsequences of our nature, should such exist, seem to us awkward and ridiculous. We deny them. We try to ignore them, to palliate them. Each of us is conscious of our unity, our continuity even, and everything we repress and thrust beneath our consciousness, like the feeling that suddenly reasserts itself in Claès, we try to suppress completely, and failing this, we cease to hold it of any account. We consistently behave as the character we are--or fancy we are--ought to behave. The majority of our actions are dictated, not by the pleasure we take in doing them, but by the need of imitating ourselves and projecting our past into the future. We sacrifice truth (that is to say, sincerity) to purity and continuity of line.
And in face of all this, what does Dostoevsky offer? Characters that, without any thought for consistency, yield with facility to every contradiction and negation of which their peculiar constitution is capable. This seems to be Dostoevsky’s chief interest--inconsequence. Far from concealing it, he emphasizes and illuminates it without ceasing.
There is admittedly much that he fails to explain. I do not think there is much that could not be explained were we prepared to concede, as Dostoevsky invites us to do, that man is the dwelling place of conflicting feelings. Such cohabitation is often in Dostoevsky the more paradoxal that his characters’ feelings are forced to their extremest intensity and exaggerated to the point of absurdity.
I believe it right to press this point, for you may be thinking that this is an old story, just the conflict between passion and duty as we see it in Corneille. The problem is really different. The French hero, as Corneille depicts him, throws before himself the image of an ideal: there is not a little of himself in it, himself as he desires and strives to be, not as Nature made him, or as he would be if he yielded to his instincts. The inward struggle Corneille pictures is the fight between the ideal being to which the hero tries to conform, and the natural being, which he seeks to deny. In short, we are not so far removed in this instance from what Jules de Gaultier terms _bovarysm_--a name given, after Flaubert’s heroine, to the tendency of certain human beings towards complementing their real life by a purely imaginary existence, in which they cease to be what they are and become what they would like to be.
Every hero, every man who is not content merely to drift, but struggles towards some ideal and tries to achieve it, offers us an example of this _bovarysm_.
What we find in Dostoevsky’s works, the examples of dual existence submitted to us, how far different! They have no connection, or at least but little, with the frequently observed pathological states, where a second personality is grafted upon the original, the one alternating with the other and two groups of sensations and associations of ideas being formed, the one unknown to the other, so that ere long we have two distinct personalities sharing the one fleshly tenement. They change places, the one succeeding the other in turn, all the time ignorant of its neighbour. Think how admirably Stevenson illustrates this condition in his phantastic tale of the _Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_.
But in Dostoevsky the most disconcerting feature is the simultaneity of such phenomena, and the fact that each character never relinquishes consciousness of his dual personality with its inconsistencies.
It so happens that one of his heroes, in great stress of feeling, is uncertain whether it is love or hate that moves him, for these opposing emotions are mingled and confounded within him.
“And suddenly a strange surprising sensation of a sort of bitter hatred for Sonia passed through his (Raskolnikov’s) heart. As it were wondering and frightened of this sensation, he raised his head and looked intently at her; but he met her uneasy and painfully anxious eyes fixed on him: there was love in them; his hatred vanished like a phantom. It was not the real feeling--he has taken the one feeling for the other.”[73]
Of this misinterpretation of feeling by the person concerned we should find examples in Marivaux, and in Racine as well.
At times one of these feelings exhausts itself by its very exaggeration. It seems as if the expression of the feeling disconcerts the character expressing it. With this we are not yet come to duality of feeling; but here is something more definite! Listen to Versilov, the _Raw Youth’s_ father:
“If only I were a weak-willed nonentity and suffered from the consciousness of it! But you see that’s not so. I know I am exceedingly strong, and in what way do you suppose? Why, just in that spontaneous power of accommodating myself to anything whatever, so characteristic of all intelligent Russians of our generation. There’s no crushing me, no destroying me, no surprising me. I’ve as many lives as a cat. I can with perfect convenience experience two opposite feelings at one and the same time, and not, of course, through my own will.”[74]
“I do not undertake to account for this co-existence of conflicting feelings,” deliberately says the narrator in _The Possessed_.
Versilov goes on to say: “I should like to say something nice to Sonia, and I keep trying to find the right word, though my heart is full of words which I don’t know how to utter; do you know I feel as if I were split in two?”--He looked round at us all with a terribly serious face and with perfectly genuine candour.--“Yes, I am really split in two mentally, and I’m horridly afraid of it. It’s just as though one’s second self were standing beside one; one is sensible and rational oneself, but the other self is impelled to do something perfectly senseless, and sometimes very funny; and suddenly you notice that you are longing to do that amusing thing, goodness knows why; that is, you want to, as it were, against your will; though you fight against it with all your might, you want to. I once knew a doctor who suddenly began whistling in church, at his father’s funeral. I really was afraid to come to the funeral to-day, because, for some reason, I was possessed by a firm conviction that I should begin to laugh or whistle in church, like that unfortunate doctor, who came to rather a bad end....”[75]
Listen now to Stavrogin, the strange hero of _The Possessed_: “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.”[76] As Baudelaire says, no man but is ever entreating God and the Devil at one and the same time.[77]
With the help of some passages from William Blake, I shall try to throw some light on these apparent contradictions, and especially on Stavrogin’s strange declaration. But this attempt at explanation I shall hold over till later.
IV
At our last meeting we noticed the disquieting duality by which most of Dostoevsky’s characters are racked and driven, and which prompts Raskolnikov’s friend to say à propos of the hero of _Crime and Punishment_: “It really looks as if there were in him two opposite natures showing themselves in turn.”
And were these natures never visible but in turn, all would still be well, but we have seen how they often come to manifest themselves simultaneously. We have watched each of these contradictory impulses exhausted, depreciated, and inhibited by its own expression and manifestation, giving way to its opposite, and the hero is never nearer love than when he has just given exaggerated expression to his hatred, never nearer hatred than in the exaggeration of his love.
In all Dostoevsky’s creations, in his women characters especially, we detect an uneasy presentiment of their own instability. The dread of being unable to maintain for long the same mood or resolve drives them often to disconcertingly abrupt action. For instance, Lizaveta in _The Possessed_ makes up her mind with great alacrity, because she knows from long experience that her resolutions never last more than a minute.
To-day I propose to study some of the results of this strange duality; but first of all let me ask whether this duality really exists, or whether Dostoevsky only imagines it? Does life provide him with any examples? Is it observed from Nature, or does he merely obligingly yield to his imaginative bent?
Nature, according to Oscar Wilde’s _Intentions_, copies the model set her by Art, and this apparent paradox he delights in illustrating by several specious insinuations, the gist of his argument being that Nature--“as you will not have failed to observe”--has taken to imitating Corot’s landscapes nowadays!
His meaning is undoubtedly that, accustomed to looking at Nature in a manner that is become conventional, we recognize only what Art has educated us to discern. When a painter essays to transmute and express in his work a personal vision, Nature’s new aspect seems at first brush paradoxal, insincere, freakish even. However, we speedily grow used to contemplating her with the bias given by this new method, and recognize only what the artist pointed out to us. Hence, to eyes unprejudiced, Nature would really seem to _imitate_ Art.
What I have said about painting applies equally to novels and the intimate landscapes of psychology. We exist on given premises, and readily acquire the habit of seeing the world, not so much as it actually is, but as we have been told and persuaded it is. How many diseases were non-existent, so to speak, until diagnosed and described! How many strange, pathological, abnormal states we identify round us, aye, within us, once our eyes have been opened by reading Dostoevsky! Yes, I firmly believe he opens our eyes to certain phenomena;--I do not necessarily mean rare ones, but simply phenomena to which we had been so far blind.
Faced with the complexity almost every human being offers, the eye tends inevitably, spontaneously, unconsciously almost, to simplify to some extent.
Such is the French novelist’s instinctive effort. He singles out the chief elements in a character, tries to discern clear-cut lines in a figure and reproduce the contours unbroken. Whether Balzac or another, no matter: the desire, the need, even, for _stylisation_ is all-important. None the less I believe it would be a gross mistake--one to which I fear many a foreigner is prone--to scorn and discredit the psychology of French literature on account of the sharp outlines it presents, the complete absence of indistinctness, and the lack of shading.
Remember that Nietzsche with rare perspicacity recognized and proclaimed the extraordinary superiority of our French psychologists, judging them--and to an even greater degree perhaps our moralists--Europe’s most eminent masters. True that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we had authors of unrivalled analytical powers: I have our moralists chiefly in mind. But I am not wholly satisfied that our present-day novelists are able to compete with them, for here in France we have an unfortunate habit of keeping to formulæ which soon become mechanical, and of resting content with them instead of pressing onwards.
I have already remarked elsewhere that La Rochefoucauld, while rendering splendid service to psychology, had in a measure arrested its development by reason of the very perfection of his _Maxims_. I must apologize for quoting myself, but I should find some difficulty in improving on these lines I wrote in 1910:
“When La Rochefoucauld bethought himself of reducing and ascribing every generous impulse of the human heart to the solicitations of personal vanity, I doubt whether it was not less a proof of rare insight than a check to further and more pertinent investigation. The formula, once found, was strictly adhered to, and for two hundred years people lived content with this interpretation. The most sceptical of psychologists passed as the most highly enlightened could he but detect in the noblest, most forgiving actions the hidden promptings of selfishness--losing sight thereby of all that is contradictory in the human soul. I do not make bold to criticize La Rochefoucauld’s impeachment of personal vanity, but I most definitely take exception to his limiting himself to this one consideration and believing that with _amour propre_ the final word had been spoken. I blame still more his successors for carrying the question no further.”[78]
Throughout French literature we find a horror of the formless, a certain impatience with what is not yet formed. This is how I account for the very small place taken by the child in French novels as compared with English or Russian. Scarcely a child is to be met with in our novels, and such authors as do introduce children--all too infrequently at that--are conventional, dull, and awkward.
In Dostoevsky’s works children are numerous, and it is worth noting that the majority of his characters--and of these the most important--are still young, hardly set. It seems to be the genesis of feelings that interests him chiefly, for he depicts them as indistinct, in their larval state, so to speak.
He has a predilection for baffling cases that challenge accepted psychology and ethics. It is plain that in the midst of everyday morality and psychology he himself does not feel at his ease. His temperament clashes painfully with certain rules accepted as established, which neither please nor satisfy him.
We find a similar uneasiness and lack of satisfaction in Rousseau. We know that Dostoevsky was an epileptic and that Rousseau went mad. I shall dwell later on the function of the morbid state in shaping their thought. Let us rest content to-day with recognizing in this abnormal physiological condition an invitation, as it were, to rebel against the psychology and the ethics of the common herd.
In man are many things unexplained, aye, unexplainable maybe, but once we admit the duality I discussed a moment ago, we cannot but admire the logic with which Dostoevsky pursues its consequences. In the first place, note that nearly all Dostoevsky’s characters are polygamists; I mean that by way of satisfying, doubtless, the complexity of their natures, they are almost all capable of several attachments simultaneously. Another consequence, and, if I may use the term, corollary to this argument, is the practical impossibility of producing jealousy. These creatures simply do not know what jealousy means!
Consider, first of all, the cases of multiple attachments he puts before us. Prince Myshkin is divided between Aglaïa Epantchin and Nastasya Filippovna. “I love her with my whole heart,” he says, referring to Nastasya.
“And at the same time you have declared your love for Aglaïa Ivanovna?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
“How so? Then you must want to love both of them?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
“Upon my word, Prince, think what you are saying.... Do you know what, the most likely thing is that you have never loved either of them! And how can you love two at once? That’s interesting!”[79]
And each of the two heroines is likewise torn between two loves. Think too of Dmitri Karamazov between Grushenka and Natasya Ivanovna, and do not forget Versilov. Many another instance I could quote!
You may think one of their loves was of the flesh, the other of the spirit. Much too obvious a solution, I consider. Besides, on this score, Dostoevsky is never perfectly straightforward. He leads us on to numerous suppositions, then leaves us in the lurch. It was not until I was reading _The Idiot_ for the fourth time that I became conscious of a fact now plain as daylight: all the whims and moods in Madame Epantchin’s attitude towards Prince Myshkin, all the hesitancy of Aglaïa, her daughter and the Prince’s betrothed, might well be due to the intuition these two women had (the mother in particular, of course) of some mystery in his character, and to their uncertainty whether he could prove an effectual husband. Dostoevsky lays stress several times on Prince Myshkin’s chastity, and doubtless this very chastity filled Madame Epantchin, his future mother-in-law, with uneasiness.
“There is no doubt that the mere fact he could come and see Aglaïa without hindrance, that he was allowed to talk to her, sit with her, walk with her, was the utmost bliss to him; and who knows, perhaps he would have been satisfied with that for the rest of his life. It was just this contentment that Lizaveta Prokofyevna (Madame Epantchin) secretly dreaded. She understood him; she dreaded many a thing in secret, which she could not have put into words herself.”[80]
And note what to me seems most important: in this instance, as indeed frequently, the less physical love is the stronger.
I have no wish to force Dostoevsky’s idea. I do not suggest that divided love and absence of jealousy open up the way to complaisant community of possession, at least not always, no, nor necessarily: they lead rather to renunciation. But, as I reminded you, Dostoevsky is not over frank on this subject....
The question of jealousy preoccupied Dostoevsky unceasingly. In one of his first books, _Another Man’s Wife_, we find this paradox: Othello must not be looked upon as a typical example of real jealousy. Perhaps it behoved us to see in this contention nothing more than an urgent desire to go against current opinion.
But later on Dostoevsky comes back to the point, and speaks again of Othello in _A Raw Youth_, one of this last books. “Versilov said once that Othello did not kill Desdemona and afterwards himself because he was jealous, but because he had been robbed of his ideal.”[81]
Is this really a paradox? I recently came across a similar assertion in Coleridge--the similarity is so marked that I wonder if Dostoevsky had not perchance been familiar with it.