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.”
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.