The first discovery of Dostoievsky is, for a spiritual adventurer, such
a shock as is not likely to occur again. One is staggered, bewildered,
insulted. It is like a hit in the face, at the end of a dark passage; a hit
in the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat.
Everything that has been _forbidden,_ by discretion, by caution, by
self-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out of
the darkness and seize upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses.
All that one has _felt,_ but has not dared to think; all that one has
_thought,_ but has not dared to say; all the terrible whispers from
the unspeakable margins; all the horrible wreckage and silt from the
unsounded depths, float in upon us and overpower us.
There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them,
cannot, _will_ not, say. There is so much that the normal
self-preservative instincts in ourselves do not _want_ said. But this
Russian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace?
What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Such
revelations provoke and embarrass? What matter? We _require_
embarrassment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must have
no closed chinks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform its
microcosmic reflections, even _down there,_ where it has to be
driven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial even the great
writers are; how lacking in the Mole's claws, in the Woodpecker's
beak! They seem labouring beneath some pathetic vow, exacted by
the Demons of our Fate, under terrible threats, only to reveal what
will serve _their_ purpose! This applies as much to the Realists,
with their traditional animal chemistry, as to the Idealists, with their
traditional ethical dynamics. It applies, above all, to the interpreters
of Sex, who, in their conventional grossness, as well as in their
conventional discretion, bury such Ostrich heads in the sand!
The lucky-unlucky individual whose path this formidable writer
crosses, quickly begins, as he reads page by page, to cry out in
startled wonder, in terrified protest. This rending Night Hawk
reveals just what one hugged most closely of all--just what one did
_not_ confess! Such a person, reading this desperate "clairvoyant,"
finds himself laughing and chuckling, under his breath, and _against
his willy_ over the little things there betrayed. It is not any more a
case of enjoying with distant aesthetic amusement the general
human spectacle. He himself is the one scratched and pricked. He
himself is the one so abominably tickled. That is why women--who
have so mad a craving for the personal in everything--are especially
caught by Dostoievsky. He knows them so fatally well. Those
startling, contradictory feelings that make their capricious bosoms
rise and fall, those feelings that they find so difficult themselves to
understand, he drags them all into the light. The kind of delicate
cruelty, that in others becomes something worse, refines itself in his
magnetic genius into a cruelty of insight that knows no scruple. Nor
is the reluctance of these gentle beings, so thrillingly betrayed, to
yield their passionate secrets, unaccompanied by pleasure. They
suffer to feel themselves so exposed, but it is an exquisite suffering.
It may, indeed, be said that the strange throb of satisfaction with
which we human beings feel ourselves _at the bottom,_ where we
cannot fall lower, or be further unmasked, is never more frequent
than when we read Dostoievsky. And that is largely because he
alone understands _the depravity_ _of the spirit,_ as well as of the
flesh, and the amazing wantonness, whereby the human will does
not always seek its own realization and well-being, but quite as
often its own laceration and destruction.
Dostoievsky has, indeed, a demonic power of revelation in regard to
that twilight of the human brain, where lurk the phantoms of
unsatisfied desire, and where unspoken lusts stretch forth pitiable
hands. There are certain human experiences which the conventional
machinery of ordinary novel-writing lacks all language to express.
He expresses these, not in tedious analysis, but in the living cries,
and gasps, and gestures, and fumblings and silences of his characters
themselves. Who, like Dostoievsky, has shown the tragic association
of passionate love with passionate hate, which is so frequent a
human experience?
This monstrous _hate-love,_ caressing the bruises itself has made,
and shooting forth a forked viper-tongue of cruelty from between
the lips that kiss--has anyone but he held it fast, through all its
Protean changes? I suppose, when one really thinks of it, at the
bottom of every one of us lurk two _primary emotions_--vanity and
fear. It is in their knowledge of the aberrations of these, of the mad
contortions that these lead to, that the other writers seem so
especially simple-minded. Over and over again, in reading
Dostoievsky, one is positively seized by the throat with
astonishment at the man's insight into the labyrinthian retreats of our
secret pride--and of our secret fear. His characters, at certain
moments, seem actually to spit gall and wormwood, as they tug at
the quivering roots of one another's self-esteem. But this fermenting
venom, this seething scum, is only the expression of what goes on
below the surface every day, in every country.
Dostoievsky's Russians are cruelly voluble, but their volubility taps
the evil humour of the universal human disease. Their thoughts are
_our_ thoughts, their obsessions, _our_ obsessions. Let no one think,
in his vain security, that he has a right to say: "I have no part in this
morbidity. I am different from these poor madmen."
The curious nervous relief we experience as we read these books is
alone a sufficient vindication. They relieve us, as well as trouble us,
because in these pages we all confess what we have never confessed
to anyone. Our self-love is outraged, but outraged with that strange
accompaniment of thrilling pleasure that means an expiation paid, a
burden lightened. Use the word "degenerate" if you will. But in this
sense we are all "degenerates" for thus and not otherwise is woven
the stuff whereof men are made.
Certainly the Russian soul has its peculiarities, and these
peculiarities we feel in Dostoievsky as nowhere else. He, not Tolstoi
or Turgenieff, is the typical Slav writer. But the chief peculiarity of
the Russian soul is that it is not ashamed to express what all men
feel. And this is why Dostoievsky is not only a Russian writer but a
universal writer. From the French point of view he may seem
wanting in lucidity and irony; from the English point of view he
may seem antinomian and non-moral. But he has one advantage
over both. He approaches the ultimate mystery as no Western writer,
except, perhaps, Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever approached it.
He writes with human nerves upon parchment made of human tissue,
and "abyssum evocat abyssum," from the darkness wherein he
moves.
Among other things, Dostoievsky's insight is proved by the
profound separation he indicates between "morality" and "religion."
To many of us it comes with something of a shock to find harlots
and murderers and robbers and drunkards and seducers and idiots
expressing genuine and passionate religious faith, and discussing
with desperate interest religious questions. But it is _our_
psychology that is shallow and inhuman, not his, and the presence of
real religious feeling in a nature obsessed with the maddest lusts is a
phenomenon of universal experience. It may, indeed, be said that
what is most characteristically Russian in his point of view--he has
told us so himself--is the substitution of what might be called
"sanctity" for what is usually termed "morality," as an ideal of life.
The "Christianity" of which Dostoievsky has the key is nothing if
not an ecstatic invasion of regions where ordinary moral laws, based
upon prudence and self-preservation, disappear, and give place to
something else. The secret of it, beyond repentance and remorse, lies
in the transforming power of "love;" lies, in fact, in "vision" purged
by pity and terror; but its precise nature is rather to be felt than
described.
It is in connection with this Christianity of his, a Christianity
completely different from what we are accustomed to, that we find
the explanation of his extraordinary interest in the "weak" as
opposed to the "strong." The association between Christianity and a
certain masterful, moral, self-assertive energy, such as we feel the
presence of in England and America, might well tend to make it
difficult for us to understand his meaning. It is precisely this sort of
thing that makes it difficult for us to understand Russia and the
Russian religion.
But as one reads Dostoievsky it is impossible to escape a suspicion
that we Western nations have as yet only touched the fringe of what
the Christian Faith is capable of, whether considered as a cosmic
secret or as a Nepenthe for human suffering.
He saw, with clairvoyant distinctness, how large a part of the
impetus of life's movement proceeds from the mad struggle, always
going on, between the strong and the weak. It was his emphasis
upon this struggle that helped Nietzsche to those withering
exposures of "the tyranny of the weak" which cleared the path for
his terrific transvaluations. It was Dostoievsky's demonic insight
into the pathological sub-soil of the Religion of Pity which helped
Nietzsche to forge his flashing counterblasts, but though their vision
of the "general situation" thus coincided, their conclusions were
diametrically different. For Nietzsche the hope of humanity is found
in the strong; for Dostoievsky it is found in the weak. Their only
ground of agreement is that they both refute the insolent claims of
mediocrity and normality.
One of the most arresting "truths" that emerge, like silvery fish, at
the end of the line of this Fisher in the abysses is the "truth" that any
kind of departure from the Normal may become a means of mystic
illumination. The same perversion or contortion of mind which may,
in one direction, lead to crime may, in another direction, lead to
extraordinary spiritual clairvoyance. And this applies to _all_
deviations from the normal type, and to all moods and inclinations
in normal persons under unusual excitement or strain. The theory is,
as a matter of fact, as old as the oldest races. In Egypt and India, as
well as in Rome and Athens, the gods were always regarded as in
some especial way manifesting their will, and revealing their secrets,
to those thus stricken. The view that wisdom is attained along the
path of normal health and rational sanity has always been a
"philosophical" and never a "religious" view. Dostoievsky's
dominant idea has, indeed, many affinities with the Pauline one, and
is certainly a quite justifiable derivation from the Evangelical
doctrine. It is, however, none the less startling to our Western mind.
In Dostoievsky's books, madmen, idiots, drunkards, consumptives,
degenerates, visionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, nympholepts,
criminals and saints jostle one another in a sort of "Danse Macabre,"
but not one of them but has his moment of ecstasy. The very worst
of them, that little band of fantastic super-men of lust, whose
extravagant manias and excesses of remorse suggest attitudes and
gestures that would need an Aubrey Beardsley for illustration, have,
at moments, moods of divine sublimity. Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch
Stavrogin, in "the Possessed;" Svridigilaiof Dounia's would-be
seducer, in "Crime and Punishment," and Ivan, in "the Brothers
Karamazov," though all inspired by ten thousand demons, cannot be
called devoid of a certain mysterious spiritual greatness. Perhaps the
interesting thing about them is that their elaborate wickedness is
itself a _spiritual_ rather than a _sensual_ quality, or, to put it in
another way, there are abysmal depths of spiritual subtlety in their
most sensual obsession. The only entirely _base_ criminal I can
recall in Dostoievsky is Stavrogin's admirer, Peter Stepanovitch, and
he is transformed and transfigured at times by the sheer intensity of
his worship for his friend. It would be overpowering the reader with
names, themselves like ritualistic incantations, to enumerate all the
perverts and abnormalists whose various lapses and diseases become,
in these books, mediums of spiritual insight. Though dealing
continually with every form of tragedy and misery, Dostoievsky
cannot be called a Pessimist. He is so profoundly affected by the
spirit of the Evangelical "Beatitudes" that for him "poverty" and
"meekness" and "hungering and thirsting" and "weeping and
mourning" are always in the true sense "blessed"--that is to say, they
are the path of initiation, the sorrowful gates to the unspeakable joy.
The most beautiful characters he has drawn are, perhaps, Alyosha
Karamazov and Prince Myshkin; both of these being young men,
and both of them so Christ-like, that in reading about them one is
compelled to acknowledge that something in the temper of that
Figure, hitherto concealed from His followers, has been
communicated to this Russian. The naive, and yet ironical,
artlessness of their retorts to the aggressive Philistines who surround
them remind one over and over again of those Divine "bon-mots"
with which, to use Oscar Wilde's allusion, the Redeemer bewildered
His assailants. Stephan Trophinovitch reading the Miracle of the
Swine with his female Colporteur; Raskolnikoff reading the Miracle
of the Raising of Lazarus with his prostitute Sonia, are scenes that
might strike an English mind as mere melodramatic sentiment, but
those who have entered into the Dostoievsky secret know how much
more than that there is in them, and how deep into the mystery of
things and the irony of things they go. One is continually coming
upon passages in Dostoievsky the strange and ambiguous nature of
which leads one's thought far enough from Evangelical simplicities;
passages that are, indeed, at once so beautiful and so sinister that
they make one think of certain demonic sayings of Goethe or
Spinoza; and yet even these passages do no more than throw new
and formidable light upon the "old situations," the old "cross-roads."
Dostoievsky is not content with indicating how weakness and
disease and suffering can become organs of vision; he goes very
far--further than anyone--in his recognition of the secret and perverted
cruelty that drives certain persons on to lacerate themselves with all
manner of spiritual flagellation.
He understands, better than anyone else, how absurd the
philosophical utilitarians are with their axiom that everyone
pursueshis own happiness. He exposes over and over again, with
nerve-rending subtlety, how intoxicating to the human spirit is the mad
lust of self-immolation, of self-destruction. It is really from him that
Nietzsche learnt that wanton Dionysic talisman which opens the
door to such singular spiritual orgies.
Nothing is more characteristic of Dostoievsky's method than his
perpetual insistence upon the mania which certain curious human
types display for "making fools of themselves." The more sacred
aspects of this deliberate self-humiliation require no comment. It is
obviously good for our spirit's salvation to be made Fools in Christ.
What one has to observe further, under his guidance, is the strange
passion that certain derelicts in the human vortex have for being
trampled upon and flouted. These queer people--but there are more
of them than one would suppose--derive an almost sensual pleasure
from being abominably treated. They positively lick the dust before
their persecutors. They run to "kiss the rod." It is this type of person
who, like the hero in that story in "L'Esprit Souterrain," deliberately
rushes into embarrassing situations; into situations and among
people where he will look a fool--in order to avenge himself upon
the spectators of his "folly" by going deeper and deeper into it.
If Dostoievsky astounds us by his insight into the abnormalities of
"normal" men, he is still more startling when he deals with women.
There are certain scenes--the scene between Aglaia and Nastasya in
"The Idiot;" the scene between Sonia and the mother and sister of
Raskolnikoff in "Crime and Punishment;" the scene in "The
Possessed" where Liza leaves Stavrogin on the morning after the fire;
and the scene where the woman, loved by the mad Karamazov
brothers, tears her nerves and theirs to pieces, in outrageous
obliquity--which brand themselves upon the mind as reaching the
uttermost limit of devasting vision.
In reviewing the final impression left upon one by the reading of
Dostoievsky one must confess to many curious reactions. He
certainly has the power of making all other novelists seem dull in
comparison; dull--or artistic and rhetorical. Perhaps the most marked
effect he has is to leave one with the feeling of a universe _with
many doors;_ with many doors, and not a few terrifyingly dark
passages; but a universe the opposite of "closed" or "explained."
Though not a single one of his books ends "happily," the final
impression is the reverse of hopeless. His very mania for tragedy,
his Dionysic embracing of it, precludes any premature despair.
Perhaps a profound deepening of one's sense of the mysterious
_perversity_ of all human fate is the thing that lingers, a perversity
which is itself a kind of redemption, for it implies arbitrariness and
waywardness, and these things mean power and pleasure, even in
the midst of suffering.
He is the best possible antidote for the peculiar and paralysing
fatalism of our time, a fatalism which makes so much of
"environment" and so little of "character," and which tends to endow
mere worldly and material success with a sort of divine prerogative.
A generation that allows itself to be even _interested_ in such types
as the "strong," efficient craftsmen of modern industry and finance
is a generation that can well afford a few moral shocks at the hands
of Dostoievsky's "degenerates." The world he reveals is, after all, in
spite of the Russian names, the world of ordinary human obliquity.
The thing for which we have to thank him is that it is made so rich
and deep, so full of fathomless pits and unending vistas.
Every great writer brings his own gift, and if others satisfy our
craving for destruction and beauty, and yet others our longing for
simplification and rational form, the suggestions he brings of
mystery and passion, of secret despairs and occult ecstasies, of
strange renunciations and stranger triumphs, are such as must
quicken our sense of the whole weird game. Looking back over
these astonishing books, it is curious to note the impression left of
Dostoievsky's feeling for "Nature." No writer one has met with has
less of that tendency to "describe scenery," which is so tedious an
aspect of most modern work. And yet Russian scenery, and Russian
weather, too, seem somehow, without our being aware of it, to have
got installed in our brains. Dostoievsky does it incidentally, by
innumerable little side-touches and passing allusions, but the general
effect remains in one's mind with extraordinary intimacy. The great
Russian cities in Summer and Winter, their bridges, rivers, squares,
and crowded tenements; the quaint Provincial towns and wayside
villages; the desolate outskirts of half-deserted suburbs; and, beyond
them all, the feeling of the vast, melancholy plains, crossed by
lonely roads; such things, associated in detail after detail with the
passions or sorrows of the persons involved, recur as inveterately to
the memory as the scenes and weather of our own personal
adventures. It is not the self-conscious _art_ of a Loti or a
D'Annunzio; it is that much more penetrating and imaginative
_suggestiveness_ which arrests us by its vague beauty and terror in
Lear or Macbeth. This subtle inter-penetration between humanity
and the familiar Stage of its "exits and entrances" is only one portion
of the weight of "cosmic" destiny--one can use no other
word--which bears so heavily upon us as we read these books. In other
writers one feels that when one has gone "full circle" with the
principal characters, and has noted the "descriptive setting" all has
been done. Here, as in Aeschylus and Euripides, as in Shakespeare
and Goethe, one is left with an intimation of the clash of forces
beyond and below humanity, beyond and below nature. One stands
at the brink of things unspoken and unspeakable. One "sees the
children sport upon the shore, and hears the mighty waters rolling
evermore."
In ordinary life we are led, and rightly led--what else can we do?--this
way and that by personal feeling and taste and experience. We
fight for Religion or fight against Religion. We fight for Morality or
fight against Morality. We are Traditionalists or Rebels,
Reactionaries or Revolutionaries. Only sometimes, in the fury of our
Faith and our Un-Faith, there come, blown across the world-margins,
whispers and hints of undreamed of secrets, of unformulated hopes.
Then it is that the faces of the people and things we know grow
strange and distant, or yield their place to faces we know not and
things "lighter than air." Then it is that the most real seems the most
dream-like, and the most impossible the most true, for the flowing of
the waters of Life have fallen into a new rhythm, and even the
children of Saturn may lift up their hearts!
It is too fatally easy, in these days, when machinery--that "Star
called Wormwood"--dominates the world, to fall into a state of hard
and flippant cynicism, or into a yet more hopeless and weary irony.
The unintelligent cheerfulness of the crowd so sickens one; the
disingenuous sophistry of its hired preachers fills one with such
blank depression that it seems sometimes as though the only mood
worthy of normal intelligence were the mood of callous indifference
and universal mockery.
All men are liars, and "the Ultimate Futility" grins horribly from its
mask. Well! It is precisely at these hours, at the hours when the little
pincers of the gods especially nip and squeeze, that it is good to turn
the pages of Fyodor Dostoievsky. He brings us his "Balm of Gilead"
between the hands of strange people, but it is a true "alabaster box of
precious ointment," and though the flowers it contains are snatched
from the House of the Dead, one knows at whose feet it was once
poured forth, and for whose sake it was broken!
The books that are the most valuable in this world are not the books
that pretend to solve life's mystery with a system. They are the
books which create a certain mood, a certain temper--the mood, in
fact, which is prepared for incredible surprises--the temper which no
surprise can overpower. These books of Dostoievsky must always
take their place in this great roll, because, though he arrives at no
conclusion and utters no oracle, the atmosphere he throws round us
is the atmosphere in which Life and Death are "equal;" the gestures
his people make, in their great darkness, are the gestures of _that
which goes upon its way,_ beyond Good and beyond Evil!
Dostoievsky is more than an artist. He is, perhaps--who can tell?--the
founder of a new religion. And yet the religion he "founds" is a
religion which has been about us for more years than human history
can count. He, more than anyone, makes palpable and near--too
palpable--O Christ! The terror of it!--that shadowy, monstrous
weight of oppressive darkness, through which we signal to each
other from our separate Hells. _It_ sways and wavers, it gathers and
re-gathers, it thickens and deepens, it lifts and sinks, and we know
all the while that it is the Thing we ourselves have made, and the
intolerable whispers whereof it is full are the children of our own
thoughts, of our lusts, of our fears, of our terrible creative dreams.
Dostoievsky's books seem, as one handles them, to flow
mysteriously together into one book, and this book is the book of the
Last Judgment. The great obscure Land he leads us over, so full of
desolate marshes, and forlorn spaces, and hemlock-roots, and
drowned tree-trunks, and Golgothas of broken shards and
unutterable refuse, is the Land of those visions which are our inmost
selves, and for which we are _answerable_ and none else.
Across this Land we wander, feeling for some fingers, cold and dead
as our own, to share that terror with, and, it may be, finding none,
for as we have groped forward we have been pitiless in the darkness,
and, half-dead ourselves, have trodden the dead down, and the dead
are those who cannot forgive; for murdered "love" has no heart
wherewith it should forgive:--_Will the Christ never come?_