CHAPTER XI

DOSTOIEVSKY’S ANNIVERSARY

ST. PETERSBURG, _February 24th_.

They are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the death of Dostoievski, and this fact has brought back to my mind, with great vividness, a conversation I had with the officers of the battery at Jen-tzen-tung last September, and which I have already noted in my diary.

We were sitting in the ante-room of the small Chinese house which formed our quarters. This ante-room, which had paper windows and no doors, a floor of mud, and a table composed of boards laid upon two small tressels, formed our dining-room. We had just finished dinner, and were drinking tea out of pewter cups. Across the courtyard from the part of the dwelling where the Chinese herded together, we could hear the monotonous song of a Chinaman or a Mongol singing over and over to himself the same strophe, which rose by the intervals of a scale more subtle than ours and sank again to die away in the vibrations of one prolonged note, to the accompaniment of a single-stringed instrument.

The conversation had languished. Somebody was absorbed in a patience, we were talking of books and novels in a vague, desultory fashion, when suddenly Hliebnikov, a young Cossack officer, said: “Who is the greatest writer in the world?” Vague answers were made as to the comparative merits of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Molière, but Hliebnikov impatiently waived all this talk aside. Then turning to me he said: “He knows; there is one writer greater than all of them, and that is Dostoievski.”

“Dostoievski!” said the doctor. “Dostoievski’s work is like a clinical laboratory or a dissecting-room. There is no sore spot in the human soul into which he does not poke his dirty finger. His characters are either mad or abnormal. His books are those of a madman, and can only be appreciated by people who are half mad themselves.”

The young Cossack officer did not bother to discuss the question. He went out into the night in disgust. We continued the argument for a short time. “There is not a single character,” said the doctor, “in all Dostoievski’s books who is normal.” The doctor was a cultivated man, and seeing that we differed we agreed to differ, and we talked of other things, but I was left wondering why Hliebnikov was so convinced that Dostoievski was the greatest of all writers, and why he knew I should agree with him. I have been thinking this over ever since, and in a sense I do agree with Hliebnikov. I think that Dostoievski is the greatest writer that has ever lived, if by a great writer is meant a man whose work, message, or whatever you like to call it, can do the greatest good, can afford the greatest consolation to poor humanity. If we mean by the greatest writer the greatest artist, the most powerful magician, who can bid us soar like Shelley or Schubert into the seventh heaven of melody, or submerge us like Wagner beneath heavy seas until we drown with pleasure, or touch and set all the fibres of our associations and our æsthetic appreciation vibrating with incommunicable rapture by the magic of wonderful phrases like Virgil or Keats, or strike into our very heart with a divine sword like Sappho, Catullus, Heine, or Burns, or ravish us by the blend of pathos and nobility of purpose with faultless diction like Leopardi, Gray, and Racine, or bid us understand and feel the whole burden of mankind in a thin thread of notes like Beethoven or in a few simple words like Goethe, or evoke for us the whole pageant of life like Shakespeare to the sound of Renaissance flutes, or all Heaven and Hell like Dante, by “thoughts that breathe and words that burn”?

If we are thinking of all these miraculous achievements when we say a great writer or the greatest writer, then we must not name Dostoievski. Dostoievski is not of these; in his own province, that of the novelist, he is as a mere workman, a mere craftsman, one of the worst, inferior to any French or English ephemeral writer of the day you like to mention; but, on the other hand, if we mean by a great writer a man who has given to mankind an inestimable boon, a priceless gift, a consolation, a help to life, which nothing can equal or replace, then Dostoievski is a great writer, and perhaps the greatest writer that has ever lived. I mean that if the Holy Scriptures were destroyed and no trace were left of them in the world, the books where mankind, bereft of its Divine and inestimable treasure, would find the nearest approach to the supreme message of comfort would be the books of Dostoievski.

Dostoievski is not an artist; his stories and his books are put together and shaped anyhow. The surroundings and the circumstances in which he places his characters are fantastic and impossible to the verge of absurdity. The characters themselves are also often impossible and fantastic to the verge of absurdity; yet they are vivid in a way no other characters are vivid, and alive, not only so that we perceive and recognise their outward appearance, but so that we know the innermost corners of their souls. His characters, it is said, are abnormal. One of his principal figures is a murderer who kills an old woman from ambition to be like Napoleon, and put himself above the law; another is a victim to epileptic fits. But the fact should be borne in mind that absolutely normal people, like absolutely happy nations, have no history; that since the whole of humanity is suffering and groaning beneath the same burden of life, the people who in literature are the most important to mankind are not the most normal, but those who are made of the most complex machinery and of the most receptive wax, and who are thus able to receive and to record the deepest and most varied impressions. And in the same way as Job and David are more important to humanity than George I. or Louis-Philippe, so are Hamlet and Falstaff more important than Tom Jones and Mr. Bultitude. And the reason of this is not because Hamlet and Falstaff are abnormal—although compared with Tom Jones they are abnormal—but because they are human: more profoundly human, and more widely human. Hamlet has been read, played, and understood by succeeding generations in various countries and tongues, in innumerable different and contradictory fashions; but in each country, at each period, and in each tongue, he has been understood by his readers or his audience, according to their lights, because in him they have seen a reflection of themselves, because in themselves they have found an echo of Hamlet. The fact that audiences, actors, readers, and commentators have all interpreted Hamlet in utterly contradictory ways testifies not merely to the profound humanity of the character but to its multiplicity and manysidedness. Every human being recognises in himself something of Hamlet and something of Falstaff; but every human being does not necessarily recognise in himself something of Tom Jones or Mr. Bultitude. At least what in these characters resembles him is so like himself that he cannot notice the likeness; it consists in the broad elementary facts of being a human being; but when he hears Hamlet or Falstaff philosophising or making jokes on the riddle of life he is suddenly made conscious that he has gone through the same process himself in the same way.

So it is with Dostoievski. Dostoievski’s characters are mostly abnormal, but it is in their very abnormality that we recognise their profound and poignant humanity and a thousand human traits that we ourselves share. And in showing us humanity at its acutest, at its intensest pitch of suffering, at the soul’s lowest depth of degradation, or highest summit of aspiration, he makes us feel his comprehension, pity, and love for everything that is in us, so that we feel that there is nothing which we could think or experience; no sensation, no hope, no ambition, no despair, no disappointment, no regret, no greatness, no meanness that he would not understand; no wound, no sore for which he would not have just the very balm and medicine which we need. Pity and love are the chief elements of the work of Dostoievski—pity such as King Lear felt on the heath; and just as the terrible circumstances in which King Lear raves and wanders make his pity all the greater and the more poignant in its pathos, so do the fantastic, nightmarish circumstances in which Dostoievski’s characters live make their humanness more poignant, their love more lovable, their pity more piteous.

A great writer should see “life steadily and see life whole.” Dostoievski does not see the whole of life steadily, like Tolstoi, for instance, but he sees the soul of man whole, and perhaps he sees more deeply into it than any other writer has done. He shrinks from nothing. He sees the “soul of goodness in things evil”: not exclusively the evil, like Zola; nor does he evade the evil like many of our writers. He sees and pities it. And this is why his work is great. He writes about the saddest things that can happen; the most melancholy, the most hopeless, the most terrible things in the world; but his books do not leave us with a feeling of despair; on the contrary, his own “sweet reasonableness,” the pity and love with which they are filled are like balm. We are left with a belief in some great inscrutable goodness, and his books act upon us as once his conversation did on a fellow prisoner whom he met on the way to Siberia. The man was on the verge of suicide; but after Dostoievski had talked to him for an hour—we may be sure there was no sermonising in that talk—he felt able to go on, to live even with perpetual penal servitude before him. To some people, Dostoievski’s books act in just this way, and it is, therefore, not odd that they think him the greatest of all writers.

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