Mr. George Moore once summed up _Crime and Punishment_ as "Gaboriau with
psychological sauce." He afterwards apologized for the epigram, but he
insisted that all the same there is a certain amount of truth in it. And
so there is.
Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the
last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost
always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like
the men and women one reads about in the police news. There are more
murders and attempted murders in his books than in those of any other
great novelist. His people more nearly resemble madmen and wild beasts
than normal human beings.
He releases them from most of the ordinary inhibitions. He is fascinated
by the loss of self-control--by the disturbance and excitement which
this produces, often in the most respectable circles. He is beyond all
his rivals the novelist of "scenes." His characters get drunk, or go mad
with jealousy, or fall in epileptic fits, or rave hysterically. If
Dostoevsky had had less vision he would have been Strindberg. If his
vision had been aesthetic and sensual, he might have been D'Annunzio.
Like them, he is a novelist of torture. Turgenev found in his work
something Sadistic, because of the intensity with which he dwells on
cruelty and pain. Certainly the lust of cruelty--the lust of destruction
for destruction's sake--is the most conspicuous of the deadly sins in
Dostoevsky's men and women. He may not be a "cruel author." Mr. J.
Middleton Murry, in his very able "critical study," _Dostoevsky_, denies
the charge indignantly. But it is the sensational drama of a cruel world
that most persistently haunts his imagination.
Love itself is with him, as with Strindberg and D'Annunzio, for the most
part only a sort of rearrangement of hatred. Or, rather, both hatred and
love are volcanic outbursts of the same passion. He does also portray an
almost Christ-like love, a love that is outside the body and has the
nature of a melting and exquisite charity. He sometimes even portrays
the two kinds of love in the same person. But they are never in balance;
they are always in demoniacal conflict. Their ups and downs are like the
ups and downs in a fight between cat and dog. Even the lust is never, or
hardly ever, the lust of a more or less sane man. It is always lust with
a knife.
Dostoevsky could not have described the sin of Nekhludov in
_Resurrection_. His passions are such as come before the criminal rather
than the civil courts. His people are possessed with devils as the
people in all but religious fiction have long ceased to be. "This is a
madhouse," cries some one in _The Idiot_. The cry is, I fancy, repeated
in others of Dostoevsky's novels. His world is an inferno.
One result of this is a multiplicity of action. There was never so much
talk in any other novels, and there was never so much action. Even the
talk is of actions more than of ideas. Dostoevsky's characters describe
the execution of a criminal, the whipping of an ass, the torture of a
child. He sows violent deeds, not with the hand, but with the sack. Even
Prince Myshkin, the Christ-like sufferer in _The Idiot_, narrates
atrocities, though he perpetrates none. Here, for example, is a
characteristic Dostoevsky story put in the Prince's mouth:
In the evening I stopped for the night at a provincial hotel, and a
murder had been committed there the night before.... Two peasants,
middle-aged men, friends who had known each other for a long time
and were not drunk, had had tea and were meaning to go to bed in
the same room. But one had noticed during those last two days that
the other was wearing a silver watch on a yellow bead chain, which
he seems not to have seen on him before. The man was not a thief;
he was an honest man, in fact, and by a peasant's standard by no
means poor. But he was so taken with that watch and so fascinated
by it that at last he could not restrain himself. He took a knife,
and when his friend had turned away, he approached him cautiously
from behind, took aim, turned his eyes heavenwards, crossed
himself, and praying fervently "God forgive me, for Christ's sake!"
he cut his friend's throat at one stroke like a sheep and took his
watch.
One would not accept that incident from any Western author. One would
not even accept it from Tolstoi or Turgenev. It is too abnormal, too
obviously tainted with madness. Yet to Dostoevsky such aberrations of
conduct make a continuous and overwhelming appeal. The crimes in his
books seem to spring, not from more or less rational causes, but from
some seed of lunacy.
He never paints Everyman; he always projects Dostoevsky, or a nightmare
of Dostoevsky. That is why _Crime and Punishment_ belongs to a lower
range of fiction than _Anna Karénina_ or _Fathers and Sons_.
Raskolnikov's crime is the cold-blooded crime of a diseased mind. It
interests us like a story from Suetonius or like _Bluebeard_. But there
is no communicable passion in it such as we find in _Agamemnon_ or
_Othello_. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the
despair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figure
of the book is born out of fantasy. He is a grotesque made alive by
sheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related to
the humanity we know in life and the humanity we know in literature as
the sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God forgive me,
for Christ's sake!"
One does not grudge an artist an abnormal character or two. Dostoevsky,
however, has created a whole flock of these abnormal characters and
watches over them as a hen over her chickens. He invents vicious
grotesques as Dickens invents comic grotesques. In _The Brothers
Karamazov_ he reveals the malignance of Smerdyakov by telling us that he
was one who, in his childhood,
was very fond of hanging cats, and burying them with great
ceremony. He used to dress up in a sheet as though it were a
surplice, and sang, and waved some object over the dead cat as
though it were a censer.
As for the Karamazovs themselves, he portrays the old father and the
eldest of his sons hating each other and fighting like brutal maniacs:
Dmitri threw up both hands and suddenly clutched the old man by the
two tufts of hair that remained on his temples, tugged at them, and
flung him with a crash on the floor. He kicked him two or three
times with his heel in the face. The old man moaned shrilly. Ivan,
though not so strong as Dmitri, threw his arms round him, and with
all his might pulled him away. Alyosha helped him with his slender
strength, holding Dmitri in front.
"Madman! You've killed him!" cried Ivan.
"Serve him right!" shouted Dmitri, breathlessly. "If I haven't
killed him, I'll come again and kill him."
It is easy to see why Dostoevsky has become a popular author. Incident
follows breathlessly upon incident. No melodramatist ever poured out
incident upon the stage from such a horn of plenty. His people are
energetic and untamed, like cowboys or runaway horses. They might be
described as runaway human beings.
And Dostoevsky knows how to crowd his stage as only the inveterate
melodramatists know. Scenes that in an ordinary novel would take place
with two or three figures on the stage are represented in Dostoevsky as
taking place before a howling, seething mob. "A dozen men have broken
in," a maid announces in one place in _The Idiot_, "and they are all
drunk." "Show them all in at once," she is bidden. Dostoevsky is always
ready to show them all in at once.
It is one of the triumphs of his genius that, however many persons he
introduces, he never allows them to be confused into a hopeless chaos.
His story finds its way unimpeded through the mob. On two opposite pages
of _The Idiot_ one finds the following characters brought in by name:
General Epanchin, Prince S., Adelaïda Ivanovna, Lizaveta Prokofyevna,
Yevgeny Pavlovitch Radomsky, Princess Byelokonsky, Aglaia, Prince
Myshkin, Kolya Ivolgin, Ippolit, Varya, Ferdyshchenko, Nastasya
Filippovna, Nina Alexandrovna, Ganya, Ptitsyn, and General Ivolgin. And
yet practically all of them remain separate and created beings. That is
characteristic at once of Dostoevsky's mastery and his monstrous
profusion.
But the secret of Dostoevsky's appeal is something more than the
multitude and thrill of his incidents and characters. So incongruous,
indeed, is the sensational framework of his stories with the immense and
sombre genius that broods over them that Mr. Murry is inclined to regard
the incidents as a sort of wild spiritual algebra rather than as events
occurring on the plane of reality. "Dostoevsky," he declares, "is not a
novelist. What he is is more difficult to define."
Mr. Murry boldly faces the difficulty and attempts the definition. To
him Dostoevsky's work is "the record of a great mind seeking for a way
of life; it is more than a record of struggle, it is the struggle
itself." Dostoevsky himself is a man of genius "lifted out of the living
world," and unable to descend to it again. Mr. Murry confesses that at
times, as he reads him, he is "seized by a supersensual terror."
For an awful moment I seem to see things with the eye of eternity,
and have a vision of suns grown cold, and hear the echo of voices
calling without sound across the waste and frozen universe. And
those voices take shape in certain unforgettable fragments of
dialogue that have been spoken by one spirit to another in some
ugly, mean tavern, set in surrounding darkness.
Dostoevsky's people, it is suggested, "are not so much men and women as
disembodied spirits who have for the moment put on mortality."
They have no physical being. Ultimately they are the creations, not
of a man who desired to be, but of a spirit which sought to know.
They are the imaginations of a God-tormented mind. ... Because they
are possessed they are no longer men and women.
This is all in a measure true. Dostoevsky was no realist. Nor, on the
other hand, was he a novelist of horrors for horrors' sake. He could
never have written _Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar_ like Poe for the
sake of the aesthetic thrill.
None the less he remains a novelist who dramatized his spiritual
experiences through the medium of actions performed by human beings.
Clearly he believed that human beings--though not ordinary human
beings--were capable of performing the actions he narrates with such
energy. Mr. Murry will have it that the actions in the novels take place
in a "timeless" world, largely because Dostoevsky has the habit of
crowding an impossible rout of incidents into a single day. But surely
the Greeks took the same license with events. This habit of packing into
a few hours actions enough to fill a lifetime seems to me in Dostoevsky
to be a novelist's device rather than the result of a spiritual escape
into timelessness.
To say this is not to deny the spiritual content of Dostoevsky's
work--the anguish of the imprisoned soul as it battles with doubt and
denial and despair. There is in Dostoevsky a suggestion of Caliban
trying to discover some better god than Setebos. At the same time one
would be going a great deal too far in accepting the description of
himself as "a child of unbelief." The ultimate attitude of Dostoevsky is
as Christian as the Apostle Peter's, "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine
unbelief!" When Dostoevsky writes, "If any one could prove to me that
Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ,
I shall prefer to stay with Christ and not with the truth," Mr. Murry
interprets this as a denial of Christ. It is surely a kind of faith,
though a despairing kind. And beyond the dark night of suffering, and
dissipating the night, Dostoevsky still sees the light of Christian
compassion. His work is all earthquake and eclipse and dead stars apart
from this.
He does not, Mr. Murry urges, believe, as has often been said, that men
are purified by suffering. It seems to me that Dostoevsky believes that
men are purified, if not by their own sufferings, at least by the
sufferings of others. Or even by the compassion of others, like Prince
Myshkin in _The Idiot_. But the truth is, it is by no means easy to
systematize the creed of a creature at war with life, as Dostoevsky
was--a man tortured by the eternal conflict of the devilish and the
divine in his own breast.
His work, like his face, bears the mark of this terrible conflict. The
novels are the perfect image of the man. As to the man himself, the
Vicomte de Vogüé described him as he saw him in the last years of his
life:--
Short, lean, neurotic, worn and bowed down with sixty years of
misfortune, faded rather than aged, with a look of an invalid of
uncertain age, with a long beard and hair still fair, and for all
that still breathing forth the "cat-life." ... The face was that of
a Russian peasant; a real Moscow mujik, with a flat nose, small,
sharp eyes deeply set, sometimes dark and gloomy, sometimes gentle
and mild. The forehead was large and lumpy, the temples were hollow
as if hammered in. His drawn, twitching features seemed to press
down on his sad-looking mouth.... Eyelids, lips, and every muscle
of his face twitched nervously the whole time. When he became
excited on a certain point, one could have sworn that one had seen
him before seated on a bench in a police-court awaiting trial, or
among vagabonds who passed their time begging before the prison
doors. At all other times he carried that look of sad and gentle
meekness seen on the images of old Slavonic saints.
That is the portrait of the man one sees behind Dostoevsky's novels--a
portrait one might almost have inferred from the novels. It is a figure
that at once fascinates and repels. It is a figure that leads one to the
edge of the abyss. One cannot live at all times with such an author. But
his books will endure as the confession of the most terrible spiritual
and imaginative experiences that modern literature has given us.