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!
VI
I am overwhelmed by the number and importance of the things I have
still left to say to you. You have grasped, have you not, what I meant
in my introduction when I said that Dostoevsky was often an excuse
for expressing my own ideas? I should crave your pardon did I think
that thereby I had presented Dostoevsky’s in a false light. No, like
the bees Montaigne tells of, I have but gathered from his works what
I needed to make my own honey. However life-like a portrait, there
is always much of the artist in it, as much of him almost as of the
sitter. The most precious model is undoubtedly that which warrants the
widest diversity of likeness and lends itself to the greatest number of
portraits. I have attempted Dostoevsky’s likeness; I know I have not
exhausted his semblance.