discount at once the truckling commercial writers. But the others must
be deeply sincere and strong in order to exist at all. There is little
room for the dilletante. Let our young people who have something to say
recognize the situation. They must dedicate themselves to a probable
poverty. They must gird their loins and sharpen their weapons. They must
be prepared to wait years, if need be, even for recognition. Every
energy must be devoted to saying as well as may be the thing that is in
them. And so, hoping nothing, fearing nothing, living simply, supporting
themselves as best they may, but always doing the thing that is worth
while for its own sake, they may produce a literature that has not been
equalled since the world began.
Others of us can share in this glorious undertaking. Discerning critics
must sift the true from the false. They must lay aside the twin
snobberies of praising or blaming a work because of its popularity. They
must fight eternally for the sincere. They must point out directions,
they must prize meanings above methods. They must give a nucleus to the
intelligent reading public and constantly augment it. They must bear
sturdy witness to the fact that art is not an amusement for idle
moments, but the consciousness of the race. They must show its relation
to life as well as to living. They must be predisposed in favor of no
work on account of its nationality, school or tendency. Just as Brandes
enlarged the conception of literature by showing it as a world
phenomenon, they must rid it of petty divisions in the realm of thought.
No more should such a statement as "Galsworthy is a poet rather than a
novelist" be allowed to pass as criticism. A novelist may be a poet or a
philosopher or a psychologist or a historian or a sociologist. Any of
these may combine the intrinsic abilities of any or all of the others.
He is greater for doing so. The only test of his work is its
effectiveness. A work of art is an organism, the highest product of
nature, infinitely more real, more beautiful, more potent, than any
flower. Only when we see it as such, and not as a collection of petals
and stamens, or as a member of a species, shall we know it.
The whole problem of creating a literature, as of doing anything else,
is one of direction and power. If we blame someone else for our
deficiencies, if we stand aloof, if we bow to circumstances and are
afraid to pay for what we want, we shall of course do nothing. And we
shall not enjoy ourselves or the world much either. But if we fix on a
goal that is worth a life, and set out for it with the joyous spirit of
adventurers, risking everything, enduring everything, sleeping under the
stars, staying hard and keen, we shall command the fates. What more
could we ask of the world?
DOSTOEVSKY'S NOVELS
MAURICE LAZAR
_The Idiot_, _The Brothers Karamazov_, _Crime and Punishment_, etc.,
translated by Constance Garnett. [The Macmillan Company, New
York.]
It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving (life) with
one's inside, with one's stomach....
--Ivan Karamazov.
Chiefly concerned with the fester of civilization, literature, music,
painting, all the modern forms of individual expression are elliptical
in the sense that the old æsthetic values of emotional beauty seem to
have become nullified, or else congealed, in the artist's direct
application of his instrument to the repudiation of fixed social values
or moralities; to the expansion of life-interests. We today want more
than beauty of external form; we want the beauty of depth!
The true artist is such primarily because of his engrossing appetite for
life, because (as Flaubert said) of the chaos in his soul. And although
Flaubert kept on chiseling words around the lives of men and women
totally devoid of inspirating individuality, his dictum has been nobly
exemplified in the life and writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, that
great-hearted epileptic Russian of whose psychological powers Nietzsche
admittedly availed himself.
Tolstoy was reported to have said, in conversation with a writer for _Le
Temps_, "A woman who has never suffered pain is a beast." He could have
stretched the allegation to include the other sex, if only by way of
illusion to that intense spiritual quality in modern Russian
literature--a literature that has never been (notably) an off-shoot of,
as much as a protest against, the retrogressive structures of its
respective periods.
This spiritual, or psychical, concern with the individual's adjustment
to the functioning of life has been revealed to highest degree in
Dostoevsky's novels. It is also manifest in the analytical mould assumed
by the creative arts of our time.
While Dostoevsky's personality is separably bound up with his work,
profitable appreciation of the latter can be considerably amplified with
knowledge of the important facts of his life and the conditions with
which he struggled. I will record the more essential facts of his life
as I have gathered them, and try to explain the causes that have made
for the distinction in his work from that of all other writers.
He was born in a charity-hospital in Moscow, in 1821. His father was an
army-surgeon, his mother a store-keeper's daughter. I like to think that
he derived his expressive powers, or rather the nebulæ out of which they
subsequently developed, from his mother, perhaps partly because of my
theory that men of acute genius ultimately do transcend the difference
of sex in the quality of their personalities as well as in that of their
work.
Like most imaginative youths who come into contact with fine art,
Dostoevsky was stimulated to literary expression by his study of
classical and contemporaneous European literature. He had lived
twenty-three years when he graduated from a St. Petersburg school of
military engineering. His first novel, _Poor Folk_, was published three
years later, and served to focus upon him the attention of the critics.
In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested, with members of a radical organization,
on governmental charges of sedition. The terrible suffering he sustained
while awaiting his execution (he was first confined in prison for eight
months) have been set forth in striking passages of his novels, _The
Idiot_ and _Letters from a Dead House_. The sentence of death was
finally, and very unexpectedly, commuted to one of imprisonment in
Siberia for four years. At the expiration of this period he served
perforce as a private soldier in the Russian army for three more years.
When he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg he was accompanied by
his first wife, whom he had loved and married while in exile.
Dostoevsky's interminable suffering from epileptic seizures (it has been
suggested that these fits originated in a beating administered to him by
his father when Fyodor was a boy); his poverty, and the constant
accumulation of debt; the terrific haste with which he found it
necessary to write his most profound books--all have made it natural to
him, in dwelling upon any physiological aspect of his characters, to be
as unconvincing as the eremite attempting an analysis of conditions of
sex life.
In short, Dostoevsky's nervous disorders pervaded his "sensual sense" of
beauty--of beauty in all its manifestations. At the same time it must be
remarked that this negation of physical responsiveness surely
intensified the acuteness of his mental vision, which was otherwise
refined emotionally by the results of his imprisonment and life-long
hardships. And this also explains why Dostoevsky's novels are lacking so
singularly in the tingle of the physical contact of his characters; why
the suffering of his men and women move us so profoundly; why his
writings are so uneven, his dialogues of such elemental power, and his
purely descriptive passages so ordinary.
The elemental power in his dialogues is due chiefly to the vigor of
action accredited his characters. In his work is not to be found the
picturesque phrase, the adroitly-turned period, the illuminating
metaphor, the sequence of construction, the tone or shading offered by
the commingling of his objects. Dostoevsky has no style of form, his
outlines are amorphous. It is in his power of transcribing the living
voice, of recording in never-failing reflex emotionalism the lives and
deeds of his startling figures that he is supreme.
If you have read one of his books you know much of what he has to say.
His other works are repetitions, mainly. For Dostoevsky does not attempt
to paint character, and rarely does he stop to show the subtly-reacting
influence of environment upon his men and women. Always he is concerned
with the idea of the individual's personal adjustments to life. Each
book of his throbs with the discordant elements that clash over the
establishment of this idea; and always its conclusions are recognized.
That is why I regard Dostoevsky as an optimist. And his emphasis on
humanity's spiritual conception of life, no matter what the cost, grew
more and more pronounced in his later works.
His faith in human beings is expressed in one set theme, which can be
conveniently resolved into terms of comparison: on one hand the
individual's evasion of life's realities by the exercise of material
(and therefore fictitious) values; and on the other hand, the frank
acceptance of life's realities for the attainment of a proportionate
spiritual balance.
In _Crime and Punishment_, Dr. Raskolnikov is in doubt as to the
ultimate worth of this attainment, until he expiates his crime
in killing the old moneylender (I forget her name) not by
confessing,--Dostoevsky is too fine a realist for that,--but by
obtaining personal solace from the regenerating qualities of his
resignation. And it is characteristic of our writer's method that
Raskolnikov is assisted toward this state of resignation by his love,
Sonia, the prostitute, whose regard for the murderer is based upon the
confirmation evidenced in him of the faith that has been stimulated in
herself.
Similar in thesis, though expressed in terms of minor differences, is
Dostoevsky's last and unquestionably finest work, _The Brothers
Karamazov_. It is incomplete, actually one-third as long as he had
intended it to be. He died before he could finish the book. Nevertheless
it is compactly-formed material as the work now stands, and superior to
his other novels not because his outlines are more constrained, his
movement more co-ordinate, and the actual writing of a more intensive
quality, but because here he defines his own conception of spiritual
beauty in a distinctive fashion not to be found in his other books.
He offers us the history of a family,--and what a family! Each figure in
this domestic (?) group embodies conflicting phases of his great idea.
Fyodor Karamazov, the father, is a sensualist of the lowest type
imaginable. His three sons are Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha. There is also
another (illegitimate) son, Smerdyakov, an epileptic.
Dmitri Karamazov inherits his father's passion for wine, women, and
song, but the son's pursuit of this tame and conventional item is
tempered by frequent lapses, by periods of misgiving. The second son is
a materialist and a cynic. He changes his mind after a severe illness,
and his materialistic beliefs are all but supplanted by intense
spiritual curiosity. The third and youngest son is an idealist, lovable
and loving. Here again we have Dostoevsky's discordant elements conveyed
in terms of human characterizations. The plot of the story is as
formless as life itself, for it is with life, not with plots, that
Dostoevsky deals.
Dmitri's hatred of his father is intensified by the rivalry that exists
between the two in their common pursuit of Grushenka's affections.
Grushenka is a woman of the demi-monde. The author, I think, tried to
draw her in lines that would reveal a physical zest of life, as
evidenced, for example, in Tolstoy's _Anna Karenina_. His failure to
make Grushenka a convincing individual, as an individual, is typical,
for the reasons I have already advanced.
Development of the story shows how Dmitri's repeatedly avowed
determination to kill his father bears fruit. The elder Karamazov is
found dead one night, with his skull crushed. Dmitri is imprisoned. And
the rest of the book, which is devoted to Dmitri's trial, the moral
regeneration of Ivan, and the urge of life in Alyosha, approaches
psychological heights (or depths) that have not been surpassed to this
day. Small wonder that Nietzsche referred so affectionately to the
"giant spirit."
I have made reference to Dostoevsky's "optimism." A better word for it
is faith--faith of a new high order. He is the most cheerful,
sunlight-giving writer in Russian literature. "The essence of religious
feeling," says Prince Myshkin in _The Idiot_, "does not come under any
sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or
misdemeanors."
Prince Myshkin is the central figure of the novel; he is the "idiot,"
and everybody abuses him. He is insulted and beaten, and robbed and
deceived and loved. He is the most singular figure in literature--he is
Dostoevsky himself.
But he is not an idiot in any sense. He is so profoundly simple and
wise, and has such great faith in human beings, that he is mistaken by
the men and women of ordinary passions as a fool. While he can be
readily toyed with by women--a significant phase of the writer's own
attitude toward the sex--Prince Myshkin is regarded by them from a
common basis of understanding. For them he holds no quality of sex.
"Perhaps you don't know that, owing to my illness," he says (he too is
an epileptic), "I know nothing of women."
It is in _The Idiot_ that Dostoevsky's women are at least life-like. The
Epanchin sisters, especially the youngest, Aglaia, are not "types" in
the usual sense, but preconceived studies. The pages devoted to Aglaia's
love affair with Prince Myshkin are of the happiest in the book.
Besides the books I have already mentioned, the more important works are
_The Possessed_, in which national politics play a large part; _Poor
Folk_, the story of a poor clerk's love for a poor woman who eventually
turns from him; and _Letters from a Dead House_. This last is a book of
personal experiences, and reveals Dostoevsky's relations with the
criminals with whom he was imprisoned in Siberia. The mental temper of
men who disregard and break the common and social laws, is set forth
with the passionate curiosity that lies behind all his probings of the
human soul. I am strongly tempted to offer quotations; to show, in this
passage or that, how deeply Dostoevsky looked into the most extreme
boundaries of human sensibilities; but on the whole extracts from his
writings would do more harm than good. His work is so disconnected,
though not in any sense detached, that extracts could not serve here to
indicate the amazing clarity of his vision.
His books arouse a feeling of wonder that there can be so many things in
our own individual emotions with which we never before came into
contact. He moves us so profoundly because he tears his men and women
out of their morally-bound lives and makes them confront stupendous
questions--the questions of life. He plies detail upon detail of human
misery until one feels that the whole world is reeling from him--then
grows aware of the sweet white glow of Dostoevsky's faith, and feels
that life can hold no terrors--that he is above the petty miseries of
human strife! That is why I say Dostoevsky's optimism is of the new high
order.
Dostoevsky purges one's mind. He makes you conscious of the beauty of a
soul.
BOOK DISCUSSION
AN UNREELING REALIST
_The Titan_, by Theodore Dreiser [John Lane Company, New York]
Theodore Dreiser possesses none of the standard qualifications for the
art of fiction writing. He is not imaginative but inventive; he is not
clever but clear; he is not excited but calm. Whatever the flaws in his
considerable body of work no fair-minded reader may say that it is made
to catch popular applause. Its tremendous distinction is sincerity.
Another characteristic which his novels exhibit is resolute purpose.
Dreiser is aiming at something, and in _The Titan_, the second book in
an unfinished trilogy, he takes a long if wobbly step toward it.
Previously to the publishing of this volume he had not even hinted at
what he intended to work out. One thing was certain: he was not a
trifler; he was not trying to write best sellers; literary success was
not in his mind. He had set out seriously and indefatigably to write,
not so much what he felt and thought, as what he saw. Some day he would
try to get at the realities that lay back of their representations. He
would probably undertake to reveal the soul of the American nation. He
would pass through the growth stages of a nation, and achieve some kind
of spiritual national life. In the last two pages of _The Titan_ this
guess at his purpose receives appreciable encouragement. Moreover, it is
made evident for the first time, in these concluding paragraphs, that
Dreiser's prosaic realism springs not only from a vague, deep idealism
but a large, hidden spirituality. For at the core of him Dreiser is a
profoundly religious person.
Neither his style nor his stuff is far above the dead level of
mediocrity; in fact, Dreiser's rhetoric is often inexcusably
atrocious--intentionally crude, one is tempted to assert. Obviously he
is not interested in style; he is conscious of something bigger than
that revealing itself in a huge, ugly, unfinished moving picture--a net
result symbolical of a young, raw, riotous, unsynthesized national life.
One is therefore tempted to say that Dreiser, more than any other
author, is the personification of America. He represents the composite
personality of Uncle Sam.
After reading _The Financier_ and running far into the interminable
pages of _The Titan_ I felt that in the absence of cameras, kodaks,
Baedekers, and historians Dreiser would be worth while. His endless
reels of pictorial facts did not impress me as possessing sufficient
animation successfully to compete with these odd rivals, but I admired
his consistent sincerity and simplicity and felt that something
important was promised by the mere unfinishedness of his pictures. I was
sure that he did not write as one inspired, and certainly not as one
fired. And after finishing _The Titan_ I felt that here was a work
having the aspects of a seriously performed duty, exacted by fidelity to
some personal theory of industrial change. I could not imagine the
author happy as an artist is happy in his creative work; he was too
conscious of service to a cause. But in the last paragraph I discovered
a big, personal note which introduced an attitude that extends beyond
the borders of materialism. It presented another Dreiser--an author who
was much more than a cinematograph, snapping superficial impressions of
a vast panorama. Two years ago I should not have attributed the
following words to Theodore Dreiser:
In a mulch of darkness is bedded the roots of endless
sorrows--and of endless joys. Canst thou fix thine eye on the
morning? Be glad. And if in the ultimate it blind thee, be glad
also! Thou hast lived.
After laboring through arid deserts of description, this memorable
passage, fraught with recognition, satisfaction, challenge, hope, and
promise, stands out as an oasis.
_The Titan_, by virtue of its bold, graphic strokes, loses its identity
as a tree, with sharply defined individual characters, and represents
the forest. It is more like a jungle, and the jungle is our national
life, into which the morning sun inevitably will shine.
--DeWitt C. Wing.
THE REVOLT OF THE "ONCE BORN"
_Challenge_, by Louis Untermeyer. [The Century Company, New York]
There has recently appeared a volume of verse by Louis Untermeyer which
is an excellent example of the determinedly young and eupeptic
philosophy so prevalent today--the philosophy of revolt. The book is
named _Challenge_ and as challenge it must be considered. To be sure it
is rhymed, but the fact seems quite incidental. To rhyme a polemic does
not make it poetry, and one feels sure that Mr. Untermeyer is more proud
of the spiritual attitude than of the artistry.
The book is a revolt, but a careful perusal of its pages fails to reveal
against what it revolts. At first glance one might think it socialistic,
but it is not clearly enough visualized for that. Socialism has at least
found the enemy. Mr. Untermeyer manfully girds on his armor and sets
forth to war, shouting his challenge lustily the while. And why, after
all, be particular about having an actual enemy? Life, with a capital L,
can do duty for that, or "the scornful and untroubled skies," or the
"cold complacency of earth." The revolt is the point, and Mr. Untermeyer
drives it home with all the phrases of frozen impetuosity to be
discovered in a very useful vocabulary. "Athletic courage," "eager
night," "Life's lusty banner," "impetuous winds," "raging mirth," etc.,
are scattered carefully through the pages. But unfortunately,
virility--with all due respect to the reviewer who mentioned these poems
in the June number of The Little Review--has a way of oozing out of such
phrases, leaving them empty of everything save a painful determination
to be manly at all costs.
But though Mr. Untermeyer is not quite clear on some subjects he is very
clear on others. Several things seem to have struck him with peculiar
force--that city streets are dirty, for instance; that strife is tonic
for young blood; and that it is difficult for the human soul to conceive
of complete annihilation. These things he proclaims passionately and
challenges the world to disprove them. A little couplet from Kipling's
_Jungle Book_ suggests itself rather maliciously as the probable
attitude of the world towards this outbreak:
"There is none like to me!" says the Cub in the pride of his
earliest kill;
But the Jungle is large and the Cub he is small. Let him think and be
still.
Seriously, however, Mr. Untermeyer's attitude is what William James
calls the attitude of the "once born." One feels that he thinks in one
dimension, that he does not see around his subject, nor hear the
overtones which surround every happening for a man of deep intellect.
The revolt is Walt Whitman's magnificent revolt, which is overpowering
in a giant, cropping out in a man of very ordinary stature, where it
sits a little ridiculously.
As philosophy much of this, printed on a neat little card, would do
splendidly to hang in a business office for the encouragement of the
employees. As poetry it is negligible. Mr. Untermeyer lacks entirely the
one gift which could redeem it--the gift of poignancy. This lack is
particularly striking in the middle section, called _Interludes_, in
which he pauses for a little from revolt. These are love songs and
lyrics, a field in which anything not perfect is no longer acceptable.
And Mr. Untermeyer's are not perfect. His sense of rhythm is extremely
primitive and his lyrics are full of words. Only now and then, when he
forgets for a moment how manly he is, does he say anything simply enough
to strike home. These lines, for instance, from _Irony_ stick:
There is no kind of death to kill
the sands that lie so meek and still ...
But man is great and strong and wise--
And so he dies.
But in the main it is unfortunate that Mr. Untermeyer, who writes so
much and so readably on the subject of poetry, should put out so
pretentious and undeveloped a volume as this is. It is inevitable that
it should affect his standing as a critic, and there seems little doubt
that his work in that field is really valuable to the cause of poetry in
America today.
--Eunice Tietjens.
TWO BIOGRAPHIES: VERLAINE AND TOLSTOY
_Paul Verlaine_, by Wilfred Thorley; _Tolstoy: His Life and
Writings_, by Edward Garnett. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]
When autumn is in your heart--not that of the golden delirium of exotic
agony, but bleak weeping autumn of crucifixion and dead leaves--what
dirge, what note haunts you in accompaniment to your grief? Maddening
darts from Tchaikowsky's _Pathétique_, or _Weltschmerz_-moans from
Beethoven's _Marchia Funebre_, or an unuttered accord known only to your
soul? Or, if you are a brother of mine, do your lips soundlessly mutter
this?