V
At our last meeting I spoke of the three strata or regions Dostoevsky seems to discern in the human personality: first, the province of intellectual speculation, then the domain of the passions, midway between the former and the third region, a vast realm remote from the play of passion.
It is plain that these three strata are not isolated or even strictly limited, but interpenetrate.
The intermediate region, the domain of passion, I have already discussed. Here, and on this plane, the play is staged, not merely the play Dostoevsky presents in each of his works, but the drama of entire mankind. We observed, too, what at first wore the air of a paradox: no matter how restless and powerful, the passions after all are of but slender importance, or at least do not stir the soul’s utmost depths. Events have no hold on the soul—they are simply outwith its province. To support my assertion, what instance could I more aptly adduce than war? Investigations have been carried out in regard to the terrible struggle through which we have but lately passed. Literary men were asked to estimate its real or apparent moment, its moral after-effects, its influence on literature. The answer is simple: to all intents and purposes its influence has been nil.
Consider for a moment the Napoleonic wars: endeavour to trace their repercussion in literature and determine in what way they have modified the soul of humanity. I admit there exist poems inspired by the imperial epic as there exist only all too many with the Great War for theme. But where is there a deeper note, a spiritual transformation? No exterior event, whatever its tragedy or magnitude, can effect such a change. On the other hand, the French Revolution is different, but here we are concerned with a disturbance that is more than physical, a traumatism, if I may use the word. This time the convulsion proceeds from the very soul of the nation. The influence of the French Revolution on the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau is enormous, although their works date from before the event for which they prepared the way. And we shall observe the same order of things in Dostoevsky’s novels: the idea is not consecutive to the event, but precedes it. In most cases passion has to serve as intermediary between thought and action.
At any rate, in Dostoevsky’s novels we shall see the intellectual element comes at times into touch with that deeper region, which is not the soul’s hell, but its heaven.
In Dostoevsky we find the mysterious inversion of values already noticed in William Blake, the great mystic amongst English poets. Hell, according to Dostoevsky, is the first region, the realm of mind and reason. Throughout his works, if our attention be at all alert, we shall become conscious of a depreciation of mental powers which is not so much systematic as involuntary and inspired by the spirit of the Gospel.
Dostoevsky never deliberately states, although he often insinuates, that the antithesis of love is less hate than the steady activity of the mind. In his eyes it is intellect which individualizes, which is the enemy of the Kingdom of Heaven, life eternal, and that bliss where time is not, reached only by renouncing the individual self and sinking deep in a solidarity that knows no distinctions.
This passage from Schopenhauer will prove illuminating: “He sees that the difference between him who inflicts suffering and him who must bear it is only the phenomenon; and does not concern the thing in itself, for this is the will living in both, which here deceived by the knowledge which is bound to its service, does not recognize itself, and seeking an increased happiness in one of its phenomena, produces great suffering in another, and thus, in the presence of excitement, buries its teeth in its own flesh, not knowing that it always injures only itself, revealing in this form, through the medium of individuality, the conflict with itself, which it bears in its inner nature. The inflicter of suffering and the sufferer are one. The former errs in believing that he is not a partaker in the guilt. If the eyes of both were opened, the inflicter of suffering would see that he lives in all that suffers pain in the wide world, and which if endowed with reason, in vain asks why it was called into existence for such great suffering, its desert of which it does not understand, and the sufferer would see that all the wickedness which is, or ever was, committed in this world, proceeds from that will which constitutes his nature also, appears also in him, and that through this phenomenon and its assertion he has taken upon himself all the sufferings which proceed from such a will, and bears them as his due, so long as he is this will.”[95]
But this pessimism (which in Schopenhauer can at times virtually have the air of a disguise) yields place in Dostoevsky to a boundless optimism.
“If you were to give me three lives, it wouldn’t be enough for me,”[96] says one of his characters in A Raw Youth. In another passage of the same book:
“You so want to live and are so thirsting for life that I do believe three lives would not be enough for you.”[97]
I should like to investigate further this blissful state Dostoevsky depicts, or of which he gives us a glimpse, in each of his works, a state wherein we lose all sense of personal limitation and of the flight of time.
“At that moment,” said Prince Myshkin to Rogozhin, “I seem somehow to understand the extraordinary saying that there shall be no more time.”[98]
And compare this eloquent passage from The Possessed:
“‘Are you fond of children?’ asked Stavrogin.—‘I am,’ answered Kirillov, though rather indifferently.—‘Then you are 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.’—‘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.’”[99]
I could multiply my quotations, but these doubtless will suffice.
I am struck, every time I read the Gospels, by the insistence with which the words, “Et nunc,” “And now,” are repeated over and over again. And certainly Dostoevsky too was struck by it. Everlasting bliss, the bliss promised by Jesus Christ, can be attained here and now, if only the human soul will forswear and deny itself. Et nunc....
Eternal life is not, or rather is more than, a thing of the future, and if we do not reach it in this world, there is little hope of our ever attaining to it. Listen to these admirable pages from Mark Rutherford’s Autobiography:
“As I got older, I became aware of the folly of this perpetual reaching after the future, and of drawing from to-morrow—and from to-morrow only—a reason for the joyfulness of to-day. I learned, when, alas! it was almost too late, to live in each moment as it passed over my head, believing that the sun as it is now rising is as good as it ever will be, and blinding myself as much as possible to what may follow. But when I was young I was the victim of that illusion, implanted for some purpose or other in us by Nature, which causes me on the brightest morning in June to think immediately of a brighter morning which is to come in July. I say nothing now for or against the doctrine of immortality. All I say is, that men have been happy without it, even under the pressure of disaster, and that to make immortality a sole spring of action here is an exaggeration of the folly which deludes us all through life with endless expectation, and leaves us at death without the thorough enjoyment of a single hour.”
Cheerfully would I cry: “What betides life eternal, without ever-present consciousness of that eternity even now? Eternal life can be present in us here below. We are partakers in it from the moment we are resigned to die to ourselves and accomplish the surrender which enables us to resurrect straightway into eternity!”
Neither behest nor ruling: simply the secret of the supreme felicity revealed by Jesus Christ in the Gospels. “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them” (John xiii. 17). Not “happy shall ye be” but “happy are ye.” Here and now we can share in that perfect bliss.
What serenity! Time indeed ceases to exist: eternity lives, we inherit the Kingdom of God.
Yes, here is the mysterious essence of Dostoevsky’s philosophy and of Christian ethics too; the divine secret of happiness. The individual triumphs by renunciation of his individuality. He who lives his life, cherishing personality, shall lose it: but he who surrenders it shall gain the fullness of life eternal, not in the future, but in the present made one with eternity. Resurrection in the fullness of life, forgetful of all individual happiness.—Oh! perfect restoration!
Such glorification of feeling and inhibition of thought is nowhere better indicated than in the following passage from The Possessed which complements the one I read a few moments since:
“‘You seem to be very happy, Kirillov,’ said Stavrogin.
“‘Yes, very happy,’ he answered, as though making the most ordinary reply.
“‘But you were distressed so lately, angry with Liputin?’
“‘H’m!... I’m not scolding now, I didn’t know then I was happy. Have you seen a leaf, a leaf from a tree?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘I saw one lately, a little green. It was decayed at the edges. It was blown by the wind. When I was ten years old I used to shut my eyes in the winter on purpose and fancy a green leaf, bright, with veins on it, and the sun shining. I used to open my eyes and not believe them, because it was very nice, and I used to shut them again.’
“‘What’s that? An allegory?’
“‘N-no.... Why? I’m not speaking of an allegory, but of a leaf, only a leaf. The leaf is good: everything’s good.’
“‘When did you find out you were so happy?’
“‘Last week, on Tuesday—no, Wednesday, for it was Wednesday by that time, in the night.’
“‘By what reasoning?’
“‘I don’t remember. I was walking about the room ... never mind. I stopped my clock. It was thirty-seven minutes past two.’”[100]
But, you may well contend, if feeling is to overcome thought, and the soul know no state but this vague expectancy susceptible to every outside influence, what can result except complete anarchy? It has been said, and of late more frequently, that anarchy is the consummation of Dostoevsky’s doctrine. A discussion of his beliefs would lead us into a far country, for I can anticipate the storm of protest I should provoke if I dared affirm that Dostoevsky does not plunge us into anarchy, but simply and naturally leads us to the Gospels. On this point we must be clear. Christian doctrine as contained in the New Testament is usually seen by people of our nation through the medium of the Roman Catholic Church, as she has modified it, moreover, in harmony with her own needs. Now, Dostoevsky abhors all churches, the Church of Rome in particular. He claims it his right to accept Christ’s teaching directly from the Scriptures, and from them alone, which is precisely what the Catholic cannot possibly concede.
In his letters we come across countless passages inveighing against the Roman Catholic Church, accusations so vehement and so categorical that I dare not repeat them to you here. But they confirm the general impression I gather at each fresh reading of Dostoevsky and help me to a better understanding of him. I know no author at once more Christian and less Catholic in spirit.
“But you have put your finger on the very crux of the question,” Roman Catholics will say, “and you have yourself explained it, many and many a time, seemingly with full understanding. The Gospels, the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, considered apart, lead but to anarchy, whence the need for St. Paul, for the Church, for Catholicism as a whole....” I shall not attempt to argue with them.
Dostoevsky leads us, we may take it, if not to anarchy, to a sort of Buddhism, or at least quietism, and we shall see that in the judgment of the orthodox, this is not his only heresy. He draws us far away from Rome—the Rome of the Encyclicals, I mean—far, too, from worldly codes of honour.
“But look here, Prince, are you a man of honour?” cries one of his characters to Prince Myshkin, the hero who best embodied his philosophy until the day when he wrote The Karamazovs and presented to us these angelic creatures, Alyosha and Father Zossima. What then does Dostoevsky exalt as his ideal? The life contemplative? A life wherein man, renouncing reason and will, shall know love alone?
Perhaps Dostoevsky would find personal happiness in such an existence, but certainly not man’s higher destiny. As soon as Prince Myshkin, far from his native land, reaches the higher plane, he is urgently impelled to turn his steps homeward, and when young Alyosha confides to Father Zossima his secret aspirations towards ending his days in the monastery, his confessor says to him: “Go hence from this house, thou wilt be of greater use out in the world! Thy brothers have need of thee!”... “I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from evil.”
I notice (and with this remark I come to treat of the demonic element in Dostoevsky’s works) that most translations of the Bible render Jesus’s words “But deliver them from evil,” which is not quite accurate. The translations I mean are Protestant versions. Protestantism is inclined to leave out of the reckoning angel and demon alike. By way of experiment I have often asked Protestants if they believed in the Devil, and invariably my question has been received with bewilderment. Then I realized that in most cases this was a question the Protestant had never put to himself. In the end he replied that he did, of course, believe in evil, and when I pressed him, he admitted that in evil he discerned only the absence of good, as in darkness the absence of light. Now, we are here far removed indeed from the Gospel texts which mention time and again a diabolic force, real, present, and defined. “Deliver them from evil?”... No! “Deliver them from the Evil One.” This problem of the Devil occupies, I may say, an important place in Dostoevsky’s work. Some no doubt will see in him a Manichean. We are aware that the great heresiarch, Mani, recognized two principles controlling the universe—the Power of Good and the Power of Evil, equally active, independent, and indispensable, by which belief the Manichean doctrine is directly associated with the teaching of Zarathustra. We observed (and on this point I am bound to insist) how Dostoevsky assigns the Devil’s habitation, not to the baser elements in man, but to the very noblest—the realm of intellect, the seat of reason, although man’s entire being even can become the Archfiend’s dwelling-place and prey. The most cunning snares laid for us by the Evil One are, in Dostoevsky’s reckoning, intellectual temptations and problems. I do not think it will be going far astray from my subject if I consider first of all the problems expressing mankind’s torturing obsessions.... What is Man? Whence comes he and whither does he return? What was he before birth, what becomes of him after death? To what Truth can mankind attain?—or even more pertinently—What is Truth?
With Nietzsche a new problem arose, completely different from the rest, and far from being absorbed amongst these others, it pressed straight to the forefront. As a problem it, too, has its torturing uncertainty—an uncertainty that drove Nietzsche to madness. “What can mankind accomplish? What can one single man accomplish?” The question implies the terrible apprehension that man could have been other than he is, could have accomplished—could yet accomplish—greater things, whereas he is content to take his graceless ease at the first halting-place without thought of crowning his progress.
Was Nietzsche actually the first to formulate this question? I dare not affirm that he was, for I am confident he had already come across the problem amongst the Greeks and amongst the Italians of the Renaissance. But with the latter the question was answered immediately, and man turned eagerly to the domain of practical activity. The solution was sought and found unerringly in action and in the practice of the arts. I have in mind Alexander and Cæsar Borgia, Frederick II, King of the Two Sicilies, Leonardo da Vinci, and Goethe—creators, men of a superior race. For artists and for men of action the problem of the superman does not exist, or is at least readily solved. Their very lives and activity provide an answer in themselves. The torturing dread begins when the problem is left unsolved, or when the interval between question and answer is protracted. The being who thinks and invents and does not act brews his own poison draught. Hearken again to William Blake: “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”—the pestilence that proved mortal to Nietzsche.
“What can a man accomplish?” is the atheist’s characteristic query, and Dostoevsky exquisitely realized the fact that to deny God is inevitably to exalt man.
God a myth?... Then everything is lawful! We find this idea in The Possessed and it is repeated in The Karamazovs:
“If God exists, all is His will, and from His will I cannot escape. If not; it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will.”[101] How can a man assert his independence? Again begins that torturing dread. Everything is possible. Is it? Everything? What can one man accomplish?
Whenever we see one of Dostoevsky’s characters ask himself this question, we can be sure of witnessing ere long his utter downfall. Take Raskolnikov, for instance, the first of them to formulate the idea clearly, the very idea which Nietzsche transformed into his theory of the superman. Raskolnikov is responsible for an article somewhat subversive in tone, dividing, according to Porfiry’s version of it, all men into ordinary and extraordinary.
“Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary.”—“That wasn’t quite my conclusion,” began Raskolnikov, simply and modestly. “Yet I admit that you have stated it almost correctly; perhaps, if you like, perfectly so.” (It almost gave him pleasure to admit this.) “The only difference is that I don’t contend that extraordinary people are always bound to commit breaches of morals, as you call it. In fact, I doubt whether such an argument could be published. I simply hinted that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right ... that is, not an official right but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity).... Then, I remember, I maintain in my article that all—well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on—were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors, and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either, if that bloodshed (often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defence of ancient law) were of use to their cause. It’s remarkable, in fact, that the majority, indeed, of those benefactors and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men, or even a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals—more or less, of course. Otherwise, it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it.”[102]
Observe, however, that in the face of this profession Raskolnikov confesses his abiding faith in God—a testimony which differentiates him from Dostoevsky’s other supermen.
“Do you believe in God? Excuse my curiosity!”
“I do,” repeated Raskolnikov, raising his eyes to Porfiry.
“And do you—believe in Lazarus’s rising from the dead?”
“I do! Why do you ask all this?”
“You believe it literally?”
“Literally.”[103]
“One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression”, says William Blake.
But the very fact that Raskolnikov puts himself the question, instead of making action his answer, proves that he is no real superman. His bankruptcy is complete. Not for one moment can he rid himself of the conviction of his own mediocrity. He excites himself to commit a crime in order to satisfy himself that he is a superman. “I divined then ... that power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! Then for the first time in my life an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever thought of before me, not one! I saw as clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil. I wanted to have the daring ... and I killed her. I only wanted to have the daring.”[104]
Later, after the crime, he says: “Perhaps I should never have committed a murder again. I wanted to find out something else; it was something led me on. I wanted to find out then, and quickly, whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man, whether I can step over barriers or not, whether I dare to stoop to pick up or not, whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right....”[105]
Moreover he is unwilling to accept the idea of his own failure. He refuses to acknowledge he had not the right to dare.
“I couldn’t carry out even the first step, because I am contemptible, that’s what’s the matter!... If I had succeeded I should have been crowned with glory, but now I’m trapped.”[106]
After Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Kirillov, Ivan Karamazov and the Raw Youth will have their turn.
The utter inefficiency of every one of his intellectual heroes is rooted in Dostoevsky’s belief that the man of active brain is wellnigh incapable of action.
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!