The Civil War in America and Alexander Second’s freeing of the serfs
in Russia, which took place at the same time, were very different
in their effect upon the two countries. The Civil War, as the most
intelligent of the Transcendentalists, Thoreau and Hawthorne, foresaw,
was not likely to turn out into a victory of New England mysticism
over Southern rationalism and materialism. The desperate gallantry and
lost-cause chivalry with which the South flung itself into the struggle
and maintained it for the first two years, soon disabused everyone
but the politicians. The real balance of power lay with the northern
industrialists, busily making munitions and army equipment, and with
the population of the yet unformed border communities of Illinois,
Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas. After 1862 the victory, if victory was to
be won, would fall with its spoils, not to the abolitionists (the
most honest of whom, William Lloyd Garrison, was in favor of letting
the South go) nor to the small group of learned and cultivated New
Englanders, but to the steel magnates of Pennsylvania, the squatter
immigrants of the prairie, rapidly building Chicago, their true
capital, where the name of Emerson was unknown. The Civil War was the
first heavy defeat for American culture, and it is doubtful if America
has ever completely recovered from it. Coming as it did, before either
the North or the South had reached their fullest mental development,
and while the West was still mentally and physically undeveloped, it
only transferred power to the frontier and provided another episode in
the progressive decentralisation and deculturisation of America.
Far otherwise was it at the other end of the scale. Alexander’s action
in liberating the serfs, and his own liberal tendencies, sent a wave of
hope over everyone in Russia, and not least over the Slavophils. Their
programme was about to be accomplished. The next twenty years following
1860 is the richest and most remarkable period in Russian literature
until we reach the period that beginning about 1900, covers the present
day. During this time not only Tolstoy did his best work, which we have
already dealt with, but these years also covered the entire mature
achievement of another great Russian, who in his absolute uniqueness as
a spiritual force, surpasses even Tolstoy: Feodor Dostoevsky. One of
the few figures that we can remotely set beside him (and that we can do
so even remotely is a fact in itself of some significance) is that of
his American contemporary Herman Melville.
There can be little basis for comparison between the outward careers
of the son of the poor Russian doctor (with Volhynian, perhaps remote
Polish blood in his veins) who came to St. Petersburg at the age of
twenty-two to make a literary sensation with his first story, and who,
three years later, having taken part in meetings of a group of young
Socialists of markedly westernizing tendencies, was sent off to penal
servitude in Siberia, where he remained for ten years; and the life
of the scion of two of the proudest and most aristocratic of American
colonial families, who became stricken with poverty at twelve, ran away
to sea, tried school-teaching for three years, shipped aboard a whaler
at twenty-two, returned at twenty-four, married, poured out literary
work for about ten years, and relapsed again into the silence of
complete oblivion for over twenty years. When one adds the detail that
Dostoevsky’s period of imprisonment and exile in Siberia very nearly
corresponds to Melville’s sole period of creative work (1849-1859 in
Dostoevsky’s case, and 1847-1856 in Melville’s) one realises that
neither time nor space can be used as a basis of comparison. The
true comparison lies inward: in the unique spiritual torment, the
unsatisfied thirst for perfection that made Dostoevsky and Melville
what they were.
In the history of every great nation there comes a time when the need
of men to find what may be called the Golden Age becomes acute. This
search for the ideal, as it influences literature, is often attacked
by modern literary critics under the name of Romanticism. Nevertheless
nineteenth century Romanticism has very little in common with this
particular striving, which probably affected the Greeks just when they
touched high-water mark in the fifth century, certainly was present
with the Romans from Virgil onwards, and woke again with the first
stirrings of the Italian Renaissance. It seems as if man cannot create
his highest flights of beauty and imagination without the longing for
some marvellous Utopia to be finally achieved to lure him on. In the
case of the English race, the prospect and aspiration towards this
Golden Age in dream and in reality spanned the age of the Tudors, and
Shakespeare speaks its last farewell in “The Tempest’s” air-borne
music. To the Americans and the Russians the hope of a new birth,
arising from the ashes of the past, had existed as we have seen, from
the beginning; but their literature had been born prematurely old and
disillusioned in regard to what was the faith, not of the cultured few,
but the majority. Hawthorne had turned away from the life of his epoch
to brood on the shapes evoked for him by ancestral memories. Gogol had,
after a brief attempt to show the heroic past in its tragic splendor,
turned aside to acridly and bitterly satirize the present. But the
forces of Transcendentalism and Slavophilism had shown that however
evil the present might be, life and literary work would be impossible
in Russia and America, without hope and trust in the future. This
hope Tolstoy and Whitman tried to turn into hard, rational, everyday
reality. Melville and Dostoevsky on the other hand were not concerned
with what was practical reality--their aspirations were too great for
that--but with the vaster if more indefinite world of human hearts and
souls. They sought to go beyond the gospel of Transcendentalism and
Slavophilism into a search for the ultimate perfection of the human
type.
2
Feodor Michaelovitch Dostoevsky was born on October 30, 1821, at
Moscow. His father was an army doctor, who combined in his life the
vices of alcoholism and of avarice. The family was well-to-do, and
possessed estates in the country, together with a certain number of
serfs, but the elder Dostoevsky (who had many of the characteristics
of old Karamazov) not only denied his family support, but behaved in
such an insupportable manner towards his own peasants, that while on
a visit to one of his estates, he was smothered by the serfs with the
cushions of his own carriage. This tragic event haunted Dostoevsky
through all his later life. About the mother (who appears to have been
an ineffectual, harmless personage) we know little. Young Dostoevsky
was sent with his brother to St. Petersburg at twenty-one, to join
the Government Corps of Engineers, but soon abandoned this to take up
writing. Already he was afflicted with a mild form of epilepsy, which
was aggravated by his disorderly and riotous mode of existence. His
first novel, “Poor Folk,” created a mild sensation; the “literature
of pity,” the sentimental novel of the Dickens type was in the air,
and Dostoevsky’s work was of the sort to please the public taste. He
became acquainted with Belinsky and Nekrassov, the leading critic and
poet of the time, and was hailed as the true heir of Gogol’s tradition.
He soon became familiar with the advanced literary circles, which
were extremely radical in politics, and this led to his downfall. He
joined the political group of one Petrachevsky where the questions of
constitutional government on the English model, abolition of serfdom,
and freedom of the press were ardently debated. The whole group was
arrested, and after having the death-sentence passed on them, were
led into the prison yard to be executed, when a messenger came forward
announcing that this sentence had been commuted to imprisonment and
exile in Siberia. There Dostoevsky remained for ten years, till 1859.
It was not until after his return to Russia, and after his marriage
which took place in Siberia had proved a total failure, and after a
violent and lacerating love affair with a demoniacal and coldly proud
woman, that Dostoevsky found himself as a writer. The book in which
he found himself, though it has not the fame of the greater novels,
is in reality the key to his life and thought. It is called “Memories
from the Underground,” and was written in 1862. It was followed by
“Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” “The Gambler,” “The Possessed” (to
give it its English title; the Russian title is, properly speaking,
“Devils”), and “The Brothers Karamazov.” During these later years,
Dostoevsky’s life was not less harrowing than during the earlier. His
second marriage, with a young unspoilt girl who was devoted to him,
gave him some happiness, but his later years were harassed by constant
money troubles, and from 1867 to 1874 he had to live abroad, as a
penniless bankrupt. This state of affairs was further aggravated by a
mania for gambling which possessed him, and by his epileptic seizures,
now grown acute. His complete break with the Western liberals of
his youth, and his whole-hearted adoption of a mysticism resting on
Orthodoxy, alienated his early friends; and the Slavophils with whose
doctrines he now sympathised were repelled by his rudeness of manner,
his contempt for good society, and a sort of masked anarchism that
they perceived in him. Nevertheless, his “Brothers Karamazov,” which
appeared in the year before his death, made Dostoevsky popular, and his
Pushkin address, delivered a few months before the end, was a sort of
apotheosis. He died suddenly, as the result of an aggravated quarrel
with some relatives over money affairs, early in 1881.
Dostoevsky’s thought may be thus summarized: The human soul was to
him of incommunicable, unique value. And not only the human soul of
the higher ranks of society, but that of the lower, the “injured and
oppressed,” those who had been warped and embittered by the world and
by man. Dostoevsky knew well that he was such a warped individual, and
that nothing could heal him except some miracle of divine and earthly
harmony. This miracle could only be brought about by the production of
some superior human type, who would at once be “master of the world,”
a superman and yet one who sympathised and understood the lowest and
most degraded of men. But the trouble was that such types, the Father
Zossimas, the Alyosha Karamazovs, the Prince Myshkins, stood aloof from
the world and innocent of its temptations, they were ineffectual pure
fools, and in the world’s eyes, “Idiots.” On the other hand the world,
and Russia in particular (in whose destiny Dostoevsky forced himself
to believe with the anguished fervor of one who had been made to
suffer by it, and yet who had no other country) was likely to progress
in the exactly opposite direction and to produce the anti-Christian
“superman,” the serene monster, cold-bloodedly dabbling in ultimate
iniquity. Dostoevsky’s major work is a vast descent into the abyss
of human perversion, at the bottom of which stood hell, like a “cold
bathhouse filled with spiders.” If Tolstoy was as Adam before the fall,
Dostoevsky was Adam after.
Herman Melville, on the other hand, was born in the inner circle of
America’s colonial aristocracy. His father, a descendant of English
landowners and Revolutionary patriots, travelled abroad as a young man,
was highly cultivated for his time, but allowed the family fortune
to slip through his fingers. He died when Melville was only twelve
years old, leaving his family bankrupt. His mother, a cold, proud, and
essentially selfish descendant of the most notable of the colonial
Dutch settlers who had rallied to Washington’s side, did nothing
to mitigate the poverty of her family, and at the age of seventeen,
Melville shipped before the mast as a common seaman on a voyage to
Liverpool. This voyage, later described in “Redburn,” seems to have
opened Melville’s eyes to the cruelty and injustice of the world. He
returned after a painful experience as a penniless waif in England, to
America, and tried school teaching for a number of years. Meanwhile
he was writing, desultorily and badly. In 1840, when twenty-one years
of age, he again, in a fit of desperation, went to sea, this time on
a whale ship bound to the South Seas. How he deserted his ship at the
Marquesas, lived for a time with cannibals, returned to Tahiti, saw the
inside of a jail, and finally became a common seaman aboard an American
man-of-war which brought him back to his native country, is all fully
told in his first two books “Typee,” “Omoo,” and their later successor
“White Jacket.” The return to America in 1846 enabled Melville to
devote himself to literature, and his first book “Typee,” recounting
his adventures in the Marquesas, made a sensation in England and
America, being a “success of scandal” in the latter country on account
of certain passages not complimentary to the missionaries in the South
Seas. After writing its successor, “Omoo,” Melville married. The
marriage, with a woman of wealth and position, brought only further
disillusionment, as it is apparent that Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of
the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, had neither imagination nor tact
to sympathise with her husband’s work nor his sensitive temperament.
A family of children soon engrossed her, and Melville was forced to
struggle on alone in the effort to support not only his wife, but his
mother (who despised him heartily) and his wife’s sister as well. There
followed in rapid succession, “Mardi” (1848), “Redburn” (1848) and
“White Jacket” (1849) written to support his waning fortunes. In 1849,
he went to England, which had begun to take very favourable notice of
his work, and he might have become there a minor literary lion, but
family concerns, and perhaps also his own aloof independence of spirit,
soon recalled him. The first fruits of his return were “Moby Dick” and
“Pierre,” the two masterpieces of the mature Melville. A disastrous
fire at his publishers which destroyed the plates of his works, the
hostility of the reviewers to “Pierre,” Hawthorne’s defection from
friendship, the increasing lack of understanding of his own family, and
ill-health, all conspired to embitter him. After one or two further
attempts, and a second trip abroad on which he wrote the poem “Clarel,”
which could not even find a publisher, Melville retired from the field.
His last years were spent as collector of the customs of the port of
New York, where he died in 1891. His death passed absolutely unnoticed,
and it is only in the last decade that he has begun to emerge into the
fame that life denied him.
Melville’s work began as a continuation of the adventure story as
practised by Cooper. “Typee” and “Omoo” are largely what they purport
to be; a sublimation of actual experience of a white man amongst
strange countries and savage peoples with a considerable dash of
idyllic and exotic colouring. But Melville’s attitude towards the
savages of the South Seas (to which he came, be it noted, after the
disillusionment and shattering of early romantic hopes recounted in
“Redburn”) was very different from the skilled idealisation of the
remote practised by Cooper. He was the first man to ask himself and
others the question, “If this savage life is so much more rational and
sensible than Christianity, why pretend to be Christian?”--a question
to which to this day there has remained no answer. Thus he early became
profoundly suspicious of the virtues of his own countrymen, while at
the same time (like Dostoevsky) he knew himself innately bound to his
own country by unbreakable ties. He thus affirms the sole achievement
that Christianity really has to its credit, the conquest of the world
by democracy, while at the same time his eyes are open to all the
evil done daily in the world in the name of democracy. This profound
division of self, this inner warping grew up early in him, and the
struggle was but intensified by his boyish adoration of his selfish,
purse-proud, and beautiful mother, which turned to disgust after his
father’s death. Thus he interjected into the sea-story elements which
had nothing whatever to do with realistic experience; elements derived
from his profound knowledge of the ways of humanity, intensified by
his own loneliness and aloofness from mankind. Very early he seems
to have traversed the waste of German metaphysics, and to have
become a transcendentalist, if not before Emerson, at least coeval
with Hawthorne. Each of the major novels, “Redburn,” “White Jacket,”
“Moby Dick,” “Mardi,” is less the description of an actual voyage
than a terrible allegoric record of spiritual defeat and despair.
Even “Redburn,” the one most based perhaps on actual experience, is
haunted by the figure of Jackson, a vision of pure unadulterated evil;
and the two last are desperate flights of imagination away from the
world. In all his best work, except “Pierre,” Melville makes us walk
a ship’s deck, which should be the breeding ground of the most mystic
whole-hearted democracy on earth, and in every line and passage he
shows us how this fair scene, seen from within man’s soul, is only hell.
3
It is customary among literary critics to devote attention to
Melville’s remarkable style, and to stress the point that Dostoevsky’s
major novels are nothing but glorified detective stories. It is true
that Melville possessed a style that in its measured eloquence was the
equal and sometimes the superior of his models, De Quincey and Sir
Thomas Browne, and that--at its best--makes the style of Hawthorne
shrivel into insignificance. It is true also that all of Dostoevsky’s
great works centre about a commonplace murder, and that he uses the
most elementary devices of suspense and horror to heighten our interest
about this murder. But the significant thing is that neither Melville’s
long purple passages, surcharged with descriptive power, by which he
makes you see every detail of his scenes in an unearthly light, nor
Dostoevsky’s interminable hysteric conversations, in which each of
his characters tries in turn to lay bare the inmost criminal secret
of his or her soul, are anything more than skilful devices to set out
the heart of the subject, which is in both cases the complete, candid,
and terribly disillusioned revelation of the workings of the naked and
helplessly-entangled human soul. Both carried pure character-creation
to a point beyond that which any other writer has attempted, except
perhaps Shakespeare in “Hamlet”; and both, like Shakespeare in
“Hamlet,” were obsessed by their characters, and obsessed above all by
the “mystery of iniquity,” the infinite perversion and moral deformity
of humankind.
It is possible to show how this is so only by a direct comparison of
the masterpiece of both men. “The Brothers Karamazov” is outwardly, at
least, the story of the murder of a wealthy landowner by his sons. But
a moment’s examination of the character of old Karamazov, the landowner
in question, will convince us that no such man as old Karamazov could
possibly exist in actual flesh. He transcends all human limitations.
He is not only a coarse wine-bibber, and an avaricious miser with his
money, like Dostoevsky’s own father, but an unbridled sensualist, a
cynic, a sentimentalist, and a buffoon--none of which Dostoevsky’s
father ever was. He is, in short, an encyclopædia of all Russian vices,
is in fact, a symbol of that Old Russia which Dostoevsky saw had to
be put to death. And as such, he triumphs in life and death over his
sons. The oldest, Ivan, who is also the noblest, sees his faith in
God and man destroyed by the monstrous conduct of his father, and
goes insane; the second, Dmitri, follows a crooked path of sensuality
and sentimentality, but is redeemed by some traits of generosity for
which he has to suffer; the youngest of all, Alyosha, fancies that he
has gained redemption and become “a new man” by entering a monastery,
but in the end has to admit that he too is in essence “Karamazov.”
The actual murder is consummated by Smerdyakov, the unacknowledged
offspring of Karamazov himself and a gutter-drab; he hangs himself, and
Dmitri has to suffer the penalty. The end of the book leaves Dostoevsky
questioning alike human and divine justice; there is no solution,
except perhaps in suffering, and the shout of “Hurrah for Karamazov!”
with which the story closes, may conceal an even deadlier irony.
Melville’s “Moby Dick” is very different as regards setting, but its
import is even more clear. Here we have what purports to be the story
of a whaling-cruise. But in fact the story from beginning to end is
pure allegory, thinly disguised with masses of irrelevant detail about
whales and whaling. Moby Dick, the White Whale, whose killing is the
special aim of the ship’s cruise, is nothing but a symbol: a symbol of
the unearthly, unconquerable, superhuman--and after all is said and
done, strangely beautiful--power of evil. He exists in every sea of the
world, but it is precisely in the “Pacific,” in the heart of a noonday
calm, that he is found. He has been sighted before, but never without
disaster; has been hunted by others, but has always escaped. Captain
Ahab, master of the ship that is now seeking him, has been disabled by
him, in a previous encounter, having lost one leg. This Captain Ahab is
Melville’s symbol of the human will in its highest and most courageous
aspect; the human will that, not having been able to conquer evil by
fair means, in direct battle, now strives to do so by unhallowed ones.
By a stroke of superb genius, Melville makes him master even of the
souls of simple savages; his three chief harpooners are respectively a
South Sea Islander, a Negro, and an American Indian. His control over
his three mates, all of whom represent some shade of manly courage, is
also practically absolute. Moby Dick is duly hunted, and destroys the
ship and Ahab alike in a scene whose magnificence of prose and mounting
terror alike have no parallel in anything written by man. The only
person who has foreseen the inevitable tragedy is an idiot boy, to whom
no one pays attention; the only one who survives it is the outcast,
Ishmael, who tells the story.
Here, too, the parallel with Shakespeare is inevitable. As Dostoevsky
recalls “Hamlet,” and in part “Othello,” so Melville recalls the
Shakespeare of “Macbeth” and “King Lear.” If we can suppose a Lear
endowed with superhuman force, who instead of wandering out upon
the heath and raving, feeds his insanity with the steady thought of
revenge, and at last sets out, backed by others, to accomplish it,
we get in this Lear a complete picture of Ahab. He is undaunted, so
long as his ship lasts, ready to match weapons with God Himself. Only
when his ship goes down before the battering onrush of the superhuman
power behind Moby Dick does Ahab momentarily give way; and then but to
recover and hurl another unavailing harpoon at his antagonist. Ship
and captain alike go down in the struggle, and the last thing seen is
a topmast pennon floating above the waters, with a sky-hawk entangled
in its folds: “And so the bird of heaven with his whole captive form
enfolded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship which, like
Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of
heaven along with her, and helmeted herself in it.” “Then all collapsed
and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand
years ago.” To the problem of evil Melville has no more an answer,
then, than Dostoevsky. He can but suggest that if evil conquers, it
is so much the worse for God who lets evil conquer; a solution to
which Dostoevsky might have answered in the words of Kirillov in
“The Possessed,” that God in that case was dead, and man must become
God. That Melville adds his favourite tag “all is vanity,” to this
conclusion would seem to Dostoevsky an impertinence. “We have to live
nevertheless,” he might have retorted; a fact poor Melville often
neglected to take into account.
Before Melville arrived at this conclusion, that the world was more
evil than good, he too had striven to portray the ideal human type of
his dreams. Jack Chase in “White Jacket” (who is significantly made an
Englishman) is the apotheosis of Melville’s type; the bluff, hearty,
pleasant Anglo-Saxon blend of Pagan and Puritan. Perhaps it was his own
wavering between England and America (where the bluff, hearty, pleasant
type is but too frequently in practice a hypocrite and a bully to boot)
that made Melville select for his life’s loyalty, this sort of being,
and not continue his search into the deeper waters of the human soul;
certainly it was his own reticent prudery in sexual matters--a prudery
not shared by the great Russian with whom his name is here linked--that
made him hesitate before what must have been the final statement of his
problem. What that statement might have been, “Pierre” exists to show;
Melville in the end meant to portray evil as seductive but ruinous, and
good as purely negative and helpless. The public would have none of
this, and Melville decided to keep silent about the dangerous secret
of his own philosophy. That he did not continue to write was America’s
second great disaster in the field of culture; following on the Civil
War, it was a double fatality scarcely paralleled elsewhere, and
certainly not in Russia. But in his transformation of the realistic
adventure story into the “allegory of Good and Evil” Melville perhaps
pointed the way to American authors as yet unborn.