_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_.