ADDRESSES (continued 2)

You see what Rivière’s theory is: the French school explores the unplumbed depths, whereas certain foreign novelists, Dostoevsky in particular, respect and cherish their gloom.

“In any case,” Rivière continues, “it is these black gulfs that interest Dostoevsky most, and his whole effort is directed towards suggesting how utterly unreachable they are.... We, on the other hand, faced with a soul’s complexity and endeavouring to give a picture of it, instinctively seek to organize our material.” Serious enough! But there is more to come. “At need, we force things a trifle; we suppress a few small divergencies, and interpret certain obscure details in the sense most useful towards establishing a psychological unity. The ideal we strive towards is the complete closing up of every gulf.”⁠[72]

I am not so sure that we do not find some gulfs in Balzac, inexplicably abrupt; nor am I sure either that Dostoevsky’s are as unfathomed as at first would be imagined. Shall I give you an example of Balzac’s gulfs? I see one in La Recherche de l’Absolu. Balthazar Claès is seeking the philosopher’s stone: apparently he has completely forgotten the religious training of his childhood. He is absorbed by his quest. He neglects his wife, Josephine, whose religious mind is horror-stricken at her husband’s disbelief. One day she enters the laboratory without warning. The draught of the opening door causes an explosion, and Madame Claès falls fainting.... What is the cry that escapes Balthazar’s lips? One wherein suddenly reappears his childhood’s belief, long overlaid by the dross of his atheism. “Thank God you’re still alive! The Saints have preserved you from death!” Balzac does not press the incident any further, and no doubt nineteen out of every twenty readers will never even detect the fault. The abyss of which it gives a glimpse is left unexplained: maybe no explanation is possible. As a matter of fact, that was of no interest to Balzac. His one concern was to produce characters free of all inconsequences, wherein he was in perfect accord with French feeling; for what we French require most of all is logic.

I can say with respect not only to the Comédie Humaine, but also to the comedy of everyday life as we live it, that the dramatis personæ (for we French delineate ourselves as we see ourselves) are after a Balzacian ideal. The inconsequences of our nature, should such exist, seem to us awkward and ridiculous. We deny them. We try to ignore them, to palliate them. Each of us is conscious of our unity, our continuity even, and everything we repress and thrust beneath our consciousness, like the feeling that suddenly reasserts itself in Claès, we try to suppress completely, and failing this, we cease to hold it of any account. We consistently behave as the character we are—or fancy we are—ought to behave. The majority of our actions are dictated, not by the pleasure we take in doing them, but by the need of imitating ourselves and projecting our past into the future. We sacrifice truth (that is to say, sincerity) to purity and continuity of line.

And in face of all this, what does Dostoevsky offer? Characters that, without any thought for consistency, yield with facility to every contradiction and negation of which their peculiar constitution is capable. This seems to be Dostoevsky’s chief interest—inconsequence. Far from concealing it, he emphasizes and illuminates it without ceasing.

There is admittedly much that he fails to explain. I do not think there is much that could not be explained were we prepared to concede, as Dostoevsky invites us to do, that man is the dwelling place of conflicting feelings. Such cohabitation is often in Dostoevsky the more paradoxal that his characters’ feelings are forced to their extremest intensity and exaggerated to the point of absurdity.

I believe it right to press this point, for you may be thinking that this is an old story, just the conflict between passion and duty as we see it in Corneille. The problem is really different. The French hero, as Corneille depicts him, throws before himself the image of an ideal: there is not a little of himself in it, himself as he desires and strives to be, not as Nature made him, or as he would be if he yielded to his instincts. The inward struggle Corneille pictures is the fight between the ideal being to which the hero tries to conform, and the natural being, which he seeks to deny. In short, we are not so far removed in this instance from what Jules de Gaultier terms bovarysm—a name given, after Flaubert’s heroine, to the tendency of certain human beings towards complementing their real life by a purely imaginary existence, in which they cease to be what they are and become what they would like to be.

Every hero, every man who is not content merely to drift, but struggles towards some ideal and tries to achieve it, offers us an example of this bovarysm.

What we find in Dostoevsky’s works, the examples of dual existence submitted to us, how far different! They have no connection, or at least but little, with the frequently observed pathological states, where a second personality is grafted upon the original, the one alternating with the other and two groups of sensations and associations of ideas being formed, the one unknown to the other, so that ere long we have two distinct personalities sharing the one fleshly tenement. They change places, the one succeeding the other in turn, all the time ignorant of its neighbour. Think how admirably Stevenson illustrates this condition in his phantastic tale of the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

But in Dostoevsky the most disconcerting feature is the simultaneity of such phenomena, and the fact that each character never relinquishes consciousness of his dual personality with its inconsistencies.

It so happens that one of his heroes, in great stress of feeling, is uncertain whether it is love or hate that moves him, for these opposing emotions are mingled and confounded within him.

“And suddenly a strange surprising sensation of a sort of bitter hatred for Sonia passed through his (Raskolnikov’s) heart. As it were wondering and frightened of this sensation, he raised his head and looked intently at her; but he met her uneasy and painfully anxious eyes fixed on him: there was love in them; his hatred vanished like a phantom. It was not the real feeling—he has taken the one feeling for the other.”⁠[73]

Of this misinterpretation of feeling by the person concerned we should find examples in Marivaux, and in Racine as well.

At times one of these feelings exhausts itself by its very exaggeration. It seems as if the expression of the feeling disconcerts the character expressing it. With this we are not yet come to duality of feeling; but here is something more definite! Listen to Versilov, the Raw Youth’s father:

“If only I were a weak-willed nonentity and suffered from the consciousness of it! But you see that’s not so. I know I am exceedingly strong, and in what way do you suppose? Why, just in that spontaneous power of accommodating myself to anything whatever, so characteristic of all intelligent Russians of our generation. There’s no crushing me, no destroying me, no surprising me. I’ve as many lives as a cat. I can with perfect convenience experience two opposite feelings at one and the same time, and not, of course, through my own will.”⁠[74]

“I do not undertake to account for this co-existence of conflicting feelings,” deliberately says the narrator in The Possessed.

Versilov goes on to say: “I should like to say something nice to Sonia, and I keep trying to find the right word, though my heart is full of words which I don’t know how to utter; do you know I feel as if I were split in two?”—He looked round at us all with a terribly serious face and with perfectly genuine candour.—“Yes, I am really split in two mentally, and I’m horridly afraid of it. It’s just as though one’s second self were standing beside one; one is sensible and rational oneself, but the other self is impelled to do something perfectly senseless, and sometimes very funny; and suddenly you notice that you are longing to do that amusing thing, goodness knows why; that is, you want to, as it were, against your will; though you fight against it with all your might, you want to. I once knew a doctor who suddenly began whistling in church, at his father’s funeral. I really was afraid to come to the funeral to-day, because, for some reason, I was possessed by a firm conviction that I should begin to laugh or whistle in church, like that unfortunate doctor, who came to rather a bad end....”⁠[75]

Listen now to Stavrogin, the strange hero of The Possessed: “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.”⁠[76] As Baudelaire says, no man but is ever entreating God and the Devil at one and the same time.⁠[77]

With the help of some passages from William Blake, I shall try to throw some light on these apparent contradictions, and especially on Stavrogin’s strange declaration. But this attempt at explanation I shall hold over till later.

IV

At our last meeting we noticed the disquieting duality by which most of Dostoevsky’s characters are racked and driven, and which prompts Raskolnikov’s friend to say à propos of the hero of Crime and Punishment: “It really looks as if there were in him two opposite natures showing themselves in turn.”

And were these natures never visible but in turn, all would still be well, but we have seen how they often come to manifest themselves simultaneously. We have watched each of these contradictory impulses exhausted, depreciated, and inhibited by its own expression and manifestation, giving way to its opposite, and the hero is never nearer love than when he has just given exaggerated expression to his hatred, never nearer hatred than in the exaggeration of his love.

In all Dostoevsky’s creations, in his women characters especially, we detect an uneasy presentiment of their own instability. The dread of being unable to maintain for long the same mood or resolve drives them often to disconcertingly abrupt action. For instance, Lizaveta in The Possessed makes up her mind with great alacrity, because she knows from long experience that her resolutions never last more than a minute.

To-day I propose to study some of the results of this strange duality; but first of all let me ask whether this duality really exists, or whether Dostoevsky only imagines it? Does life provide him with any examples? Is it observed from Nature, or does he merely obligingly yield to his imaginative bent?

Nature, according to Oscar Wilde’s Intentions, copies the model set her by Art, and this apparent paradox he delights in illustrating by several specious insinuations, the gist of his argument being that Nature—“as you will not have failed to observe”—has taken to imitating Corot’s landscapes nowadays!

His meaning is undoubtedly that, accustomed to looking at Nature in a manner that is become conventional, we recognize only what Art has educated us to discern. When a painter essays to transmute and express in his work a personal vision, Nature’s new aspect seems at first brush paradoxal, insincere, freakish even. However, we speedily grow used to contemplating her with the bias given by this new method, and recognize only what the artist pointed out to us. Hence, to eyes unprejudiced, Nature would really seem to imitate Art.

What I have said about painting applies equally to novels and the intimate landscapes of psychology. We exist on given premises, and readily acquire the habit of seeing the world, not so much as it actually is, but as we have been told and persuaded it is. How many diseases were non-existent, so to speak, until diagnosed and described! How many strange, pathological, abnormal states we identify round us, aye, within us, once our eyes have been opened by reading Dostoevsky! Yes, I firmly believe he opens our eyes to certain phenomena;—I do not necessarily mean rare ones, but simply phenomena to which we had been so far blind.

Faced with the complexity almost every human being offers, the eye tends inevitably, spontaneously, unconsciously almost, to simplify to some extent.

Such is the French novelist’s instinctive effort. He singles out the chief elements in a character, tries to discern clear-cut lines in a figure and reproduce the contours unbroken. Whether Balzac or another, no matter: the desire, the need, even, for stylisation is all-important. None the less I believe it would be a gross mistake—one to which I fear many a foreigner is prone—to scorn and discredit the psychology of French literature on account of the sharp outlines it presents, the complete absence of indistinctness, and the lack of shading.

Remember that Nietzsche with rare perspicacity recognized and proclaimed the extraordinary superiority of our French psychologists, judging them—and to an even greater degree perhaps our moralists—Europe’s most eminent masters. True that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we had authors of unrivalled analytical powers: I have our moralists chiefly in mind. But I am not wholly satisfied that our present-day novelists are able to compete with them, for here in France we have an unfortunate habit of keeping to formulæ which soon become mechanical, and of resting content with them instead of pressing onwards.

I have already remarked elsewhere that La Rochefoucauld, while rendering splendid service to psychology, had in a measure arrested its development by reason of the very perfection of his Maxims. I must apologize for quoting myself, but I should find some difficulty in improving on these lines I wrote in 1910:

“When La Rochefoucauld bethought himself of reducing and ascribing every generous impulse of the human heart to the solicitations of personal vanity, I doubt whether it was not less a proof of rare insight than a check to further and more pertinent investigation. The formula, once found, was strictly adhered to, and for two hundred years people lived content with this interpretation. The most sceptical of psychologists passed as the most highly enlightened could he but detect in the noblest, most forgiving actions the hidden promptings of selfishness—losing sight thereby of all that is contradictory in the human soul. I do not make bold to criticize La Rochefoucauld’s impeachment of personal vanity, but I most definitely take exception to his limiting himself to this one consideration and believing that with amour propre the final word had been spoken. I blame still more his successors for carrying the question no further.”⁠[78]

Throughout French literature we find a horror of the formless, a certain impatience with what is not yet formed. This is how I account for the very small place taken by the child in French novels as compared with English or Russian. Scarcely a child is to be met with in our novels, and such authors as do introduce children—all too infrequently at that—are conventional, dull, and awkward.

In Dostoevsky’s works children are numerous, and it is worth noting that the majority of his characters—and of these the most important—are still young, hardly set. It seems to be the genesis of feelings that interests him chiefly, for he depicts them as indistinct, in their larval state, so to speak.

He has a predilection for baffling cases that challenge accepted psychology and ethics. It is plain that in the midst of everyday morality and psychology he himself does not feel at his ease. His temperament clashes painfully with certain rules accepted as established, which neither please nor satisfy him.

We find a similar uneasiness and lack of satisfaction in Rousseau. We know that Dostoevsky was an epileptic and that Rousseau went mad. I shall dwell later on the function of the morbid state in shaping their thought. Let us rest content to-day with recognizing in this abnormal physiological condition an invitation, as it were, to rebel against the psychology and the ethics of the common herd.

In man are many things unexplained, aye, unexplainable maybe, but once we admit the duality I discussed a moment ago, we cannot but admire the logic with which Dostoevsky pursues its consequences. In the first place, note that nearly all Dostoevsky’s characters are polygamists; I mean that by way of satisfying, doubtless, the complexity of their natures, they are almost all capable of several attachments simultaneously. Another consequence, and, if I may use the term, corollary to this argument, is the practical impossibility of producing jealousy. These creatures simply do not know what jealousy means!

Consider, first of all, the cases of multiple attachments he puts before us. Prince Myshkin is divided between Aglaïa Epantchin and Nastasya Filippovna. “I love her with my whole heart,” he says, referring to Nastasya.

“And at the same time you have declared your love for Aglaïa Ivanovna?”

“Oh, yes, yes.”

“How so? Then you must want to love both of them?”

“Oh, yes, yes.”

“Upon my word, Prince, think what you are saying.... Do you know what, the most likely thing is that you have never loved either of them! And how can you love two at once? That’s interesting!”⁠[79]

And each of the two heroines is likewise torn between two loves. Think too of Dmitri Karamazov between Grushenka and Natasya Ivanovna, and do not forget Versilov. Many another instance I could quote!

You may think one of their loves was of the flesh, the other of the spirit. Much too obvious a solution, I consider. Besides, on this score, Dostoevsky is never perfectly straightforward. He leads us on to numerous suppositions, then leaves us in the lurch. It was not until I was reading The Idiot for the fourth time that I became conscious of a fact now plain as daylight: all the whims and moods in Madame Epantchin’s attitude towards Prince Myshkin, all the hesitancy of Aglaïa, her daughter and the Prince’s betrothed, might well be due to the intuition these two women had (the mother in particular, of course) of some mystery in his character, and to their uncertainty whether he could prove an effectual husband. Dostoevsky lays stress several times on Prince Myshkin’s chastity, and doubtless this very chastity filled Madame Epantchin, his future mother-in-law, with uneasiness.

“There is no doubt that the mere fact he could come and see Aglaïa without hindrance, that he was allowed to talk to her, sit with her, walk with her, was the utmost bliss to him; and who knows, perhaps he would have been satisfied with that for the rest of his life. It was just this contentment that Lizaveta Prokofyevna (Madame Epantchin) secretly dreaded. She understood him; she dreaded many a thing in secret, which she could not have put into words herself.”⁠[80]

And note what to me seems most important: in this instance, as indeed frequently, the less physical love is the stronger.

I have no wish to force Dostoevsky’s idea. I do not suggest that divided love and absence of jealousy open up the way to complaisant community of possession, at least not always, no, nor necessarily: they lead rather to renunciation. But, as I reminded you, Dostoevsky is not over frank on this subject....

The question of jealousy preoccupied Dostoevsky unceasingly. In one of his first books, Another Man’s Wife, we find this paradox: Othello must not be looked upon as a typical example of real jealousy. Perhaps it behoved us to see in this contention nothing more than an urgent desire to go against current opinion.

But later on Dostoevsky comes back to the point, and speaks again of Othello in A Raw Youth, one of this last books. “Versilov said once that Othello did not kill Desdemona and afterwards himself because he was jealous, but because he had been robbed of his ideal.”⁠[81]

Is this really a paradox? I recently came across a similar assertion in Coleridge—the similarity is so marked that I wonder if Dostoevsky had not perchance been familiar with it.

“Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago.... Othello had no life but in Desdemona: the belief that she, his angel, had fallen from the heaven of her native innocence, wrought a civil war in his heart.... But yet the pity of it, Iago. Oh, Iago, the pity of it!”

Constitutionally incapable of jealousy, then, Dostoevsky’s heroes? Perhaps I am going a little too far, or, at least, it would be seemly to modify my statement slightly. It may be said that of jealousy these creatures know only the suffering it brings, a suffering which is not complicated by any feeling of hatred for their rivals: this point is of primary importance. If hatred there be, as in the Eternal Husband, which case we shall examine presently, the hatred is counterbalanced and restrained by a strange, imperious affection for the rival. But most frequently there is no suspicion of hatred, nor even suffering. And now we are venturing on a precipitous path where we have every chance of overtaking Jean-Jacques Rousseau, equably tolerating the favours shown by Madame de Warens to his rival, Claude Anet, or, his thoughts full of Madame d’Houdetot, writing in his Confessions:

“Anyway, no matter how ardent the passion I had conceived for her, I found it as sweet to be the confidant as to be the object of her affections, and never for a moment did I consider her lover as my rival, I always held him my friend. (He refers to Saint-Lambert.) People will say this is not love: maybe not, perhaps it is more than love.”

Similarly, in The Possessed, we are told that Stavrogin, far from feeling jealous, developed a great friendship for his rival.

At this point I propose a short detour to help us probe the question more deeply and grasp Dostoevsky’s conception. When I recently re-read most of his novels, I was fascinated by Dostoevsky’s manner of passing from one book to another. Undoubtedly it was natural that after The House of the Dead he should write Raskolnikov’s story in Crime and Punishment, the story of the crime that sent the latter to Siberia. More absorbing still to watch how the last pages of this novel lead up to The Idiot. You remember we left Raskolnikov in Siberia so completely regenerated in mind that he said the happenings of his past life had lost all importance for him: his crimes, his repentance, his martyrdom, even, seemed to him like the life-history of a stranger.

“He was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of feeling.”⁠[82] This is the frame of mind in which we find Prince Myshkin at the beginning of The Idiot, a frame of mind which could be, and in Dostoevsky’s eyes doubtless was, the Christian state par excellence. I shall revert to this point.

Dostoevsky seems to establish in the human soul—or simply recognizes as already existing—a kind of stratification. I can distinguish in the characters of his novels three strata or regions. First the intellectual, remote from the soul and whence proceed the worst temptations. Therein dwells, according to Dostoevsky, the treacherous demonic element. For the moment I am concerned only with the second region, the region of passion, ravaged and desolated by storms; but tragic though the happenings be that these storms determine, the very soul of Dostoevsky’s characters is scarcely affected. There is a region deeper still, where passion exists not. This is the region that resurrection (and I grant the word the full significance bestowed on it by Tolstoy), re-birth, in Christ’s words, enables us to reach as Raskolnikov reached it. In this region Myshkin lives and moves.

The transition from The Idiot to the Eternal Husband is more interesting still. You surely remember that at the close of The Idiot we leave Prince Myshkin at the bedside of Nastasya Filippovna whom her lover Rogozhin, the prince’s rival, has just murdered. There stand the rivals, face to face, close to each other. Will they kill each other? No, indeed! They weep together, and spend a wakeful night stretched out side by side at the foot of Nastasya’s bed.

“Every time the delirious man (Rogozhin) broke into screaming or babble, he hastened to pass his trembling hand softly over his hair and cheeks, as though caressing and soothing him.”⁠[83]

Almost the theme of The Eternal Husband! The Idiot dates from 1868, The Eternal Husband from 1870. Some men of letters—and as clever a critic as Marcel Schwob was amongst them—consider the latter novel Dostoevsky’s masterpiece. His masterpiece! Perhaps that is excessive. But, at any rate, it is a masterpiece, and it is interesting to hear what Dostoevsky himself had to say about the book.

“I have a story,” he wrote to his friend Strakhov on March 18, 1869, “not a very long one. I had already thought of writing it three or four years ago, the year my brother died, encouraged by some words of Apollon Gregoriev who, praising my Notes from Underground, said to me, ‘Just write something in this style.’ But it will be something quite different, as far as form goes: the foundation, however, will still be the same. My everlasting theme.... I can write the story very quickly, because there is not a word or line of it but what is clear to me. It is already written in my head, although nothing is down on paper so far.”⁠[84]

And in a letter dated October 27, 1869, he continues:

“Two-thirds of the story are almost completely written and recopied. I’ve done my best to cut it down, but that was impossible. It is not a question, though, of quantity, but of quality. Of its quality I cannot speak, for I have no notion myself: others will decide that point.”⁠[85]

And here is what the others have to say:

“Your short story,” writes Strakhov, “is making a very lively impression here, and will, in my opinion, have an unchallenged success. It is one of the best worked-out of your novels, and by reason of its subject, one of the most interesting you have ever written. I am speaking of Trusotsky: the majority will have difficulty in understanding this character, but the book is being read and will be read eagerly.”

Notes from Underground appeared a short time before this volume. I believe that with these Notes we reach the height of Dostoevsky’s career. I consider this book (and I am not alone in my belief) as the keystone of his entire works. But with it we return to the intellectual region, so I shall not speak further of it to-day. Let us linger with The Eternal Husband in the realm of passion. In this short tale there are but two characters, the husband and the lover. Concentration could be carried no further. The whole book responds to an ideal we should nowadays call classical: the action itself, or at least the initial fact that provokes the drama, had already taken place, like in one of Ibsen’s plays.

Velchaninov is come to that time of life when the past begins to look different to his eyes:

“Now that he was verging on the forties, the brightness and good humour were almost extinguished. These eyes, which were already surrounded by tiny wrinkles, had begun to betray the cynicism of a worn-out man of doubtful morals, a duplicity, an ever-increasing irony, and another shade of feeling, which was new: a shade of sadness and of pain—a sort of absent-minded sadness as though about nothing in particular, and yet acute. This sadness was specially marked when he was alone.”⁠[86]

What is happening with Velchaninov? What does happen at this age, at this turning point in life? So far, we have had the joy out of life; but suddenly we realize that our actions, the happenings we have brought about, once separated from us and launched out into the world, like a skiff on the sea, continue a separate existence often unknown to us. George Eliot speaks admirably of this in Adam Bede. Yes, the events in his own past no longer appear to Velchaninov in quite the same light, because he suddenly realizes his responsibility. At this period he meets one whom he knew in bygone days, the husband of a woman who had been his mistress. This husband appears in rather whimsical fashion. It is impossible to decide whether he is avoiding Velchaninov or pursuing him. He seems to spring up without warning from between the very paving stones in the street. He wanders around mysteriously, haunting the vicinity of Velchaninov’s house, unrecognized at first.

I shall not attempt to recount the gist of the book, nor how after a late night visit from Pavel Pavlovitch Trusotsky, the husband, Velchaninov decides to call upon him. Their standpoints, obscure at first, become clearer:

“‘Tell me, Pavel Pavlovitch, you are not alone here, then? Whose little girl is that I found with you just now?’

“Pavel Pavlovitch was positively amazed and raised his eyebrows, but he looked frankly and pleasantly at Velchaninov.

“‘Whose little girl? Why, it’s Liza!’ he said, with an affable smile.

“‘What Liza?’ muttered Velchaninov, with a sort of inward tremor. The shock was too sudden. When he came in and saw Liza, just before, he was surprised, but had absolutely no presentiment of the truth, and thought nothing particular about her.

“‘Yes, our Liza, our daughter Liza!’ Pavel Pavlovitch smiled.

“‘Your daughter? Do you mean that you and Natalya Vassilyevna had children?’ Velchaninov asked timidly and mistrustfully in a very low voice.

“‘Why, of course! But there, upon my word, how should you have heard of it? What am I thinking about! It was after you went away God blessed us with her!’

“Pavel Pavlovitch positively jumped up from his chair, in some agitation, though it seemed agreeable too.

“‘I heard nothing about it,’ said Velchaninov, and he turned pale.

“‘To be sure, to be sure, from whom could you have heard it?’ said Pavel Pavlovitch, in a voice weak with emotion, ‘My poor wife and I had lost all hope, as no doubt you remember, and suddenly God sent us this blessing, and what it meant to me He only knows! Just a year after you went away, I believe. No, not a year, not nearly a year. Wait a bit—why, you left us, if my memory does not deceive me, in October or November, I believe.’

“‘I left T—— at the beginning of September, the twelfth of September, I remember it very well.’

“‘In September, was it? H’m! what was I thinking about?’ cried Pavel Pavlovitch, much surprised. ‘Well, if that’s so, let me see, you went away on the twelfth of September, and Liza was born on the eighth of May, so—September—October—November—December—January—February—March—April—a little over eight months! And if you only knew how my poor wife ...’

“‘Show me—call her,’ Velchaninov faltered in a breaking voice.”⁠[87]

And thus Velchaninov learns that his passing whim, by which he had set so little store, has left its mark. At once the question presents itself—does the husband know? Almost to the very end of the book the reader is left in doubt. Dostoevsky keeps us undecided, and this very indecision tortures Velchaninov. He does not know where he is. Or rather, it seems to us early in the day that Pavel Pavlovitch knows, but feigns ignorance, precisely in order to torture the lover by the indecision he skilfully maintains in his mind.

Here is one way of considering this strange book. The Eternal Husband depicts the struggle between genuine and sincere feeling on one hand, and conventional feeling, accepted and current psychology on the other.

“There is but one way out—a duel,” cries Velchaninov. But you realize what a base issue that is, bringing satisfaction to no existing feeling, and simply pandering to an artificial conception of honour, one I touched on lately, a Western conception, for which we have no use here. We soon realize that, in his heart of hearts, Pavel Pavlovitch hugs his very jealousy. Yes, he positively loves and welcomes his suffering. This eagerness to suffer played already an important part in Notes from Underground.

In France, where the Russians are concerned, there has been much talk, in imitation of De Vogüé, of a religion of suffering. We French love to hear a formula, and to use one! It is one easy way of naturalizing an author and assigning him to his place in the show-case. Our mind likes precise data to hold fast by; and once satisfied, what need for thought or personal contact?—Nietzsche? Oh, yes! “The superman. Be ruthless. Live dangerously.”—Tolstoy? “Non-resistance to evil.”—Ibsen? “Northern mists.”—Darwin? “Man is descended from the monkey. The struggle for life.”—D’Annunzio? “The religion of beauty.” Woe betide the authors whose ideas refuse to be reduced to a formula! The bulk of the reading public simply cannot tolerate them (and Barrès realized this when to his merchandise he affixed the label: La Terre et Les Morts).

Yes, in France we tend to deceive ourselves with words, and believe that everything possible has been achieved and that it is time to apply the closure and pass on, once the formula has been found. In the same way we believed victory already in our grasp, thanks to Joffre and his “wearing down the enemy,” or to Russia and her “steam-roller advance.”

A religion of suffering ... let us eliminate at once the possibility of misinterpretation. It is not a question, or rather not solely a question, of vicarious suffering, the world-wide suffering before which Raskolnikov humbles himself to lie at Sonia the prostitute’s feet, or Father Zossima at Dmitri Karamazov the predestined parricide’s, but a theory of personal suffering.

Throughout the whole book, Velchaninov keeps asking himself whether Trusotsky is jealous or not, whether he knows all or nothing. The question is absurd: of course Trusotsky knows! Of course he is jealous, but with the jealousy he fosters and cherishes within himself. It is the torment of jealousy that Trusotsky desires and enjoys, just as we saw the attachment of the hero of the Underground to his toothache.

Of the hideous torment of the jealous husband we learn practically nothing. Dostoevsky reveals it only indirectly, by virtue of the cruel suffering Trusotsky inflicts on the creatures round about him, especially on the little girl whom he adores in spite of all. The child’s anguish helps us to measure the intensity of the father’s own suffering. Pavel Pavelovitch tortures the child, whom he loves passionately; he can no more hate her than he can hate his wife’s lover:

“‘Do you know what Liza has been to me?’—he suddenly recalled the drunkard’s exclamation and felt that that exclamation was sincere, not a pose, and that there was love in it. How could that monster be so cruel to a child whom he loved so much? Is it credible? But every time he made haste to dismiss that question, and, as it were, brush it aside; there was something awful in that question, something he could not bear and could not solve.”⁠[88]

We may rest assured that the keenest of his suffering is due to his inability to become jealous: of jealousy he has only the suffering, and he cannot hate the man who was preferred to himself. The very sufferings he inflicts on his rival, those he would fain inflict upon him, the torments he inflicts on his little daughter, are a kind of mystic counterpart that he sets to the horror and the anguish in whose depths he is struggling. None the less, he dreams of revenge: not that he has any precise desire to avenge himself, but he tells himself that he must seek revenge, as perhaps the sole means of freeing himself from such awful torments.

“Habit is everything, even in love,” says Vauvenargues,⁠[89] and you remember La Rochefoucauld’s maxim? “How many men would never have known love if they had never heard of love?” Are we not justified in asking: How many would never be jealous, if they did not hear jealousy spoken about, and had not persuaded themselves that it was imperative to be jealous?

Yes, convention is the great breeder of falsehood. How many are forced to play their life long a part strangely foreign to themselves? And how difficult it is to discern in ourselves a feeling not previously described, labelled, and present before us as a model! Man finds it easier to imitate everything than to invent anything. How many are content to live their lives warped by untruth, and find, none the less, in the very falsity of convention more comfort and less need for effort than in straightforward affirmation of their personal feelings! Such affirmation would require of them an effort of invention utterly beyond them.

“‘I’ll tell you a killing little anecdote, Alexey Ivanovitch,’ said Trusotsky. ‘I thought of it this morning in the carriage. I wanted to tell you of it then. You said just now “hangs on people’s necks.” You remember perhaps Semyon Petrovitch Livstov, he used to come and see us when you were in T——: well, his younger brother, who was also a young Petersburg swell, was in attendance on the Governor at V——, and he too was distinguished for various qualities. He had a quarrel with Gobulenko, a colonel, and considered himself insulted, but he swallowed the affront and concealed it, and meanwhile Gobulenko cut him out with the lady of his heart and made her an offer. And what do you think? This Livtsov formed a genuine friendship with Gobulenko, he quite made it up with him, and, what’s more, insisted on being his best man: he held the wedding crown and when they came out from under it, he went up to kiss and congratulate Gobulenko. And in the presence of the Governor and all the honourable company, with his swallow-tail coat, and his hair in curl, he sticks the bridegroom in the stomach with a knife—so that he rolled over! His own best man! What a disgrace! And, what’s more, when he’d stabbed him like that, he rushed about crying: “Alas, what have I done! Oh, what is it that I’ve done!” with floods of tears, trembling all over, flinging himself on people’s necks, even ladies. “Ah, what have I done!” he kept saying, “what have I done now!” He—he—he! he was killing. Though one feels sorry for Gobulenko, perhaps, but after all, he recovered.’

“‘I don’t see why you told me this story,’ observed Velchaninov, frowning sternly.

“‘Why, all because he stuck the knife in him, you know,’ Pavel Pavlovitch tittered....”⁠[90]

And in similar fashion, Pavel Pavlovitch’s real spontaneous feeling expresses itself, when he is unexpectedly obliged to nurse Velchaninov, down with a liver complaint.

“The sick man fell asleep suddenly, a minute after lying down. The unnatural strain upon him that day, in the shattered state of his health, had brought on a sudden crisis, and he was as weak as a child. But the pain asserted itself again and weariness; and an hour later he woke up and painfully got up from the sofa. The storm had subsided, the room was full of tobacco smoke, on the table stood an empty bottle, and Pavel Pavlovitch was asleep on another sofa. He was lying on his back, with his head on the sofa cushion, fully dressed and with his boots on. His lorgnette had slipped out of his pocket, and was hanging down almost to the floor.”⁠[91]

Strange how Dostoevsky, when leading us through the strangest by-paths of psychology, ever must needs add the most precise and infinitesimal of realistic details, in order to make more secure an edifice which otherwise would appear the extreme expression of phantasy and imagination.

Velchaninov is in great pain, and immediately Trusotsky applies every possible means of alleviating it.

“But Pavel Pavlovitch, goodness knows why, seemed beside himself as though it were a question of saving his own son. Without heeding Velchaninov’s protests, he insisted on the necessity of compresses and also of two or three cups of weak tea to be drunk on the spot, ‘and not simply hot, but boiling.’ He ran to Mavra, without waiting for permission, with her laid a fire in the kitchen, which always stood empty, and blew up the samovar; at the same time he succeeded in getting the sick man to bed, took off his clothes, wrapped him up in a quilt, and within twenty minutes had prepared tea and compresses.

“‘This is a hot plate, scalding hot!’ he said, almost ecstatically, applying the heated plate, wrapped up in a napkin, on Velchaninov’s aching chest. ‘There are no other compresses, and plates, I swear on my honour, will be even better; they were laid on Pyotr Kuzmitch, I saw it with my own eyes, and did it with my own hands. One may die of it, you know. Drink your tea, swallow it; never mind about scalding yourself! Life is too precious for one to be squeamish.’

“He quite flustered Mavra, who was half asleep; the plates were changed every two or three minutes. After the third plate, and the second cup of tea, swallowed at a gulp, Velchaninov felt a sudden relief.

“‘If once they’ve shifted the pain, thank God, it’s a good sign!’ said Pavel Pavlovitch, and he ran joyfully to fetch a fresh plate and a fresh cup of tea.

“‘If only we can ease the pain, if only we can keep it under!’ he kept repeating.

“Half an hour later the pain was much less, but the sick man was so exhausted that, in spite of Pavel Pavlovitch’s entreaties, he refused to put up with ‘just one more nice little plate.’ He was so weak that everything was dark before his eyes.

“‘Sleep, sleep!’ he repeated in a faint voice.

“‘To be sure,’ Pavel Pavlovitch assented.

“‘You’ll stay the night—what time is it?’

“‘It’s nearly two o’clock, it’s quarter to.’

“‘You’ll stay the night?’

“‘I will, I will.’

“A minute later the sick man called Pavel Pavlovitch again. ‘You, you,’ he muttered, when the latter had run up and was bending over him: ‘You are much better than I am! I understand it all—all.... Thank you.’

“‘Sleep, sleep,’ whispered Pavel Pavlovitch, and he hastened on tiptoe to his sofa.

“As he fell asleep, the invalid heard Pavel Pavlovitch noiselessly making a bed for himself, and taking off his clothes. Finally, putting out the candle, and almost holding his breath for fear of waking the patient, he stretched himself on his sofa.”⁠[92]

And yet, a quarter of an hour later, Velchaninov catches Trusotsky, who believes him sound asleep, bending over him with intent to murder him.

“Pavel Pavlovitch wanted to kill him, but didn’t know he wanted to kill him! ‘It’s senseless, but that’s the truth,’ thought Velchaninov.”⁠[93]

And yet he is not satisfied!

“‘And can it be that it was all true?’ he exclaimed again, suddenly raising his head from the pillow and opening his eyes. ‘All that madman told me yesterday about his love for me, when his chin quivered and he thumped himself on the breast with his fist?’

“‘It was the absolute truth,’ he decided, still pondering and analysing. ‘That quasimodo from T—— was quite sufficiently stupid and noble to fall in love with the lover of his wife, about whom he noticed nothing suspicious in twenty years! He had been thinking of me with respect, cherishing my memory and brooding over my “utterances” for nine years. Good Heavens! And I had no notion of it! He could not have been lying yesterday. But did he love me yesterday when he declared his feeling and said, “Let us settle our account!” Yes, it was from hatred that he loved me; that’s the strongest of all loves....

“‘... Only he didn’t know then whether he would end by embracing me or murdering me. Of course, it’s turned out that the best thing was to do both. A most natural solution’.”⁠[94]

If I have lingered so long over this slender book, it is because it is more accessible than the rest of Dostoevsky’s novels, and helps us to win, beyond love and hate, to that wider region I spoke about not long since: a region where love is not, nor passion, so easily and so simply reached: the region Schopenhauer spoke of, the meeting-place of human brotherhood, where the limits of existence fade away, where the notion of the individual and of time is lost, the place wherein Dostoevsky sought—and found—the secret of happiness.

V

At our last meeting I spoke of the three strata or regions Dostoevsky seems to discern in the human personality: first, the province of intellectual speculation, then the domain of the passions, midway between the former and the third region, a vast realm remote from the play of passion.

It is plain that these three strata are not isolated or even strictly limited, but interpenetrate.

The intermediate region, the domain of passion, I have already discussed. Here, and on this plane, the play is staged, not merely the play Dostoevsky presents in each of his works, but the drama of entire mankind. We observed, too, what at first wore the air of a paradox: no matter how restless and powerful, the passions after all are of but slender importance, or at least do not stir the soul’s utmost depths. Events have no hold on the soul—they are simply outwith its province. To support my assertion, what instance could I more aptly adduce than war? Investigations have been carried out in regard to the terrible struggle through which we have but lately passed. Literary men were asked to estimate its real or apparent moment, its moral after-effects, its influence on literature. The answer is simple: to all intents and purposes its influence has been nil.

Consider for a moment the Napoleonic wars: endeavour to trace their repercussion in literature and determine in what way they have modified the soul of humanity. I admit there exist poems inspired by the imperial epic as there exist only all too many with the Great War for theme. But where is there a deeper note, a spiritual transformation? No exterior event, whatever its tragedy or magnitude, can effect such a change. On the other hand, the French Revolution is different, but here we are concerned with a disturbance that is more than physical, a traumatism, if I may use the word. This time the convulsion proceeds from the very soul of the nation. The influence of the French Revolution on the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau is enormous, although their works date from before the event for which they prepared the way. And we shall observe the same order of things in Dostoevsky’s novels: the idea is not consecutive to the event, but precedes it. In most cases passion has to serve as intermediary between thought and action.

At any rate, in Dostoevsky’s novels we shall see the intellectual element comes at times into touch with that deeper region, which is not the soul’s hell, but its heaven.

In Dostoevsky we find the mysterious inversion of values already noticed in William Blake, the great mystic amongst English poets. Hell, according to Dostoevsky, is the first region, the realm of mind and reason. Throughout his works, if our attention be at all alert, we shall become conscious of a depreciation of mental powers which is not so much systematic as involuntary and inspired by the spirit of the Gospel.

Dostoevsky never deliberately states, although he often insinuates, that the antithesis of love is less hate than the steady activity of the mind. In his eyes it is intellect which individualizes, which is the enemy of the Kingdom of Heaven, life eternal, and that bliss where time is not, reached only by renouncing the individual self and sinking deep in a solidarity that knows no distinctions.

This passage from Schopenhauer will prove illuminating: “He sees that the difference between him who inflicts suffering and him who must bear it is only the phenomenon; and does not concern the thing in itself, for this is the will living in both, which here deceived by the knowledge which is bound to its service, does not recognize itself, and seeking an increased happiness in one of its phenomena, produces great suffering in another, and thus, in the presence of excitement, buries its teeth in its own flesh, not knowing that it always injures only itself, revealing in this form, through the medium of individuality, the conflict with itself, which it bears in its inner nature. The inflicter of suffering and the sufferer are one. The former errs in believing that he is not a partaker in the guilt. If the eyes of both were opened, the inflicter of suffering would see that he lives in all that suffers pain in the wide world, and which if endowed with reason, in vain asks why it was called into existence for such great suffering, its desert of which it does not understand, and the sufferer would see that all the wickedness which is, or ever was, committed in this world, proceeds from that will which constitutes his nature also, appears also in him, and that through this phenomenon and its assertion he has taken upon himself all the sufferings which proceed from such a will, and bears them as his due, so long as he is this will.”⁠[95]

But this pessimism (which in Schopenhauer can at times virtually have the air of a disguise) yields place in Dostoevsky to a boundless optimism.

“If you were to give me three lives, it wouldn’t be enough for me,”⁠[96] says one of his characters in A Raw Youth. In another passage of the same book:

“You so want to live and are so thirsting for life that I do believe three lives would not be enough for you.”⁠[97]

I should like to investigate further this blissful state Dostoevsky depicts, or of which he gives us a glimpse, in each of his works, a state wherein we lose all sense of personal limitation and of the flight of time.

“At that moment,” said Prince Myshkin to Rogozhin, “I seem somehow to understand the extraordinary saying that there shall be no more time.”⁠[98]

And compare this eloquent passage from The Possessed:

“‘Are you fond of children?’ asked Stavrogin.—‘I am,’ answered Kirillov, though rather indifferently.—‘Then you are fond of life?’—‘Yes, I’m fond of life. What of it?’—‘Though you’ve made up your mind to shoot yourself?’—‘What of it? Why connect it? Life’s one thing, and that’s another. Life exists, but death doesn’t at all.’—‘You’ve begun to believe in future eternal life?’—‘No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still and it will become eternal.’”⁠[99]

I could multiply my quotations, but these doubtless will suffice.

I am struck, every time I read the Gospels, by the insistence with which the words, “Et nunc,” “And now,” are repeated over and over again. And certainly Dostoevsky too was struck by it. Everlasting bliss, the bliss promised by Jesus Christ, can be attained here and now, if only the human soul will forswear and deny itself. Et nunc....

Eternal life is not, or rather is more than, a thing of the future, and if we do not reach it in this world, there is little hope of our ever attaining to it. Listen to these admirable pages from Mark Rutherford’s Autobiography:

“As I got older, I became aware of the folly of this perpetual reaching after the future, and of drawing from to-morrow—and from to-morrow only—a reason for the joyfulness of to-day. I learned, when, alas! it was almost too late, to live in each moment as it passed over my head, believing that the sun as it is now rising is as good as it ever will be, and blinding myself as much as possible to what may follow. But when I was young I was the victim of that illusion, implanted for some purpose or other in us by Nature, which causes me on the brightest morning in June to think immediately of a brighter morning which is to come in July. I say nothing now for or against the doctrine of immortality. All I say is, that men have been happy without it, even under the pressure of disaster, and that to make immortality a sole spring of action here is an exaggeration of the folly which deludes us all through life with endless expectation, and leaves us at death without the thorough enjoyment of a single hour.”

Cheerfully would I cry: “What betides life eternal, without ever-present consciousness of that eternity even now? Eternal life can be present in us here below. We are partakers in it from the moment we are resigned to die to ourselves and accomplish the surrender which enables us to resurrect straightway into eternity!”

Neither behest nor ruling: simply the secret of the supreme felicity revealed by Jesus Christ in the Gospels. “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them” (John xiii. 17). Not “happy shall ye be” but “happy are ye.” Here and now we can share in that perfect bliss.

What serenity! Time indeed ceases to exist: eternity lives, we inherit the Kingdom of God.

Yes, here is the mysterious essence of Dostoevsky’s philosophy and of Christian ethics too; the divine secret of happiness. The individual triumphs by renunciation of his individuality. He who lives his life, cherishing personality, shall lose it: but he who surrenders it shall gain the fullness of life eternal, not in the future, but in the present made one with eternity. Resurrection in the fullness of life, forgetful of all individual happiness.—Oh! perfect restoration!

Such glorification of feeling and inhibition of thought is nowhere better indicated than in the following passage from The Possessed which complements the one I read a few moments since:

“‘You seem to be very happy, Kirillov,’ said Stavrogin.

“‘Yes, very happy,’ he answered, as though making the most ordinary reply.

“‘But you were distressed so lately, angry with Liputin?’

“‘H’m!... I’m not scolding now, I didn’t know then I was happy. Have you seen a leaf, a leaf from a tree?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘I saw one lately, a little green. It was decayed at the edges. It was blown by the wind. When I was ten years old I used to shut my eyes in the winter on purpose and fancy a green leaf, bright, with veins on it, and the sun shining. I used to open my eyes and not believe them, because it was very nice, and I used to shut them again.’

“‘What’s that? An allegory?’

“‘N-no.... Why? I’m not speaking of an allegory, but of a leaf, only a leaf. The leaf is good: everything’s good.’

“‘When did you find out you were so happy?’

“‘Last week, on Tuesday—no, Wednesday, for it was Wednesday by that time, in the night.’

“‘By what reasoning?’

“‘I don’t remember. I was walking about the room ... never mind. I stopped my clock. It was thirty-seven minutes past two.’”⁠[100]

But, you may well contend, if feeling is to overcome thought, and the soul know no state but this vague expectancy susceptible to every outside influence, what can result except complete anarchy? It has been said, and of late more frequently, that anarchy is the consummation of Dostoevsky’s doctrine. A discussion of his beliefs would lead us into a far country, for I can anticipate the storm of protest I should provoke if I dared affirm that Dostoevsky does not plunge us into anarchy, but simply and naturally leads us to the Gospels. On this point we must be clear. Christian doctrine as contained in the New Testament is usually seen by people of our nation through the medium of the Roman Catholic Church, as she has modified it, moreover, in harmony with her own needs. Now, Dostoevsky abhors all churches, the Church of Rome in particular. He claims it his right to accept Christ’s teaching directly from the Scriptures, and from them alone, which is precisely what the Catholic cannot possibly concede.

In his letters we come across countless passages inveighing against the Roman Catholic Church, accusations so vehement and so categorical that I dare not repeat them to you here. But they confirm the general impression I gather at each fresh reading of Dostoevsky and help me to a better understanding of him. I know no author at once more Christian and less Catholic in spirit.

“But you have put your finger on the very crux of the question,” Roman Catholics will say, “and you have yourself explained it, many and many a time, seemingly with full understanding. The Gospels, the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, considered apart, lead but to anarchy, whence the need for St. Paul, for the Church, for Catholicism as a whole....” I shall not attempt to argue with them.

Dostoevsky leads us, we may take it, if not to anarchy, to a sort of Buddhism, or at least quietism, and we shall see that in the judgment of the orthodox, this is not his only heresy. He draws us far away from Rome—the Rome of the Encyclicals, I mean—far, too, from worldly codes of honour.

“But look here, Prince, are you a man of honour?” cries one of his 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.

Overwhelming, too, the number of touches I should like to add to my preceding papers. After each one I have felt there was something I had forgotten to tell you. At our last meeting, for example, I wanted to make plain the meaning of my two “proverbs”: “Fine feelings are the stuff bad literature is made on,” and “The Fiend is party to every work of art.” What to me seems transparent may appear a paradox to you, and as such to call for elucidation. I loathe paradoxes and never seek effect in surprises, but had I nothing new to suggest I should not attempt these papers; and remember, a new idea wears invariably the guise of a paradox. To help you acknowledge the truth of what I am saying, I proposed to call your attention to two figures, St. Francis of Assisi and Fra Angelico. If it was vouchsafed the latter to be a great artist (the better to prove my contention I choose as my example the most shiningly pure figure in the whole history of art), it was because, in spite of his purity, his art permitted of demonic collaboration. There is no work of art to which the Demon is not a co-signatory. The true saint is not Fra Angelico, but Francis of Assisi. There are no artists amongst the saints, no saints amongst the artists.

Creative art may be likened to the box of sweet spices which Mary Magdalene brake not. I have already quoted that strange dictum of Blake’s: “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.”

There are three threads in the loom on which every work of art is woven, the three lusts pointed out by the apostle: “... the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.”

Remember Lacordaire’s remark when congratulated upon an admirable sermon he had just delivered: “The Devil has forestalled you.” The Devil would not have told him his sermon was fine, indeed, he would have been there to speak, had he not been party to it.

After citing lines from Schiller’s Hymn to Joy, Dmitri Karamazov exclaims: “And the awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”⁠[113]

No artist, I am sure, has given the demonic so large a share in his work as Dostoevsky, unless Blake himself, who concluded his admirable little book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with these words:

“This Angel who is now become a Devil is my particular friend. We often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well.”

After leaving you, I realized that in quoting the strangest of William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, I had omitted to read to you the entire passage from The Possessed which had called forth these very quotations. May I atone for my omission? In this one page from The Possessed you will marvel at the fusion—not to say confusion—of the divers elements I sought to point out in my previous papers: optimism first and foremost, the wild love of life we come across again and again in Dostoevsky’s works, love of life and all the world, Blake’s vast delectable world wherein dwells the tiger as well as the lamb.

“Are you fond of children?”

“I am,” answered Kirillov, though rather indifferently.

“Then you’re fond of life?”

“Yes, I’m fond of life! What of it?”

“Though you’ve made up your mind to shoot yourself?”

“What of it? Why connect it? Life’s one thing, and that’s another. Life exists, but death doesn’t at all....”⁠[114]

We saw too Dmitri Karamazov ready to take his life in a fit of optimism, beside himself with enthusiasm.

“You seem to be very happy, Kirillov?”

“Yes, very happy,” he answered, as though making the ordinary reply.

“But you were distressed so lately, angry with Liputin?”

“H’m!... I’m not scolding now. I did not know then that I was happy.”⁠[115]

Do not draw a mistaken conclusion from this seeming ferocity which is frequent in Dostoevsky. It is an integral part of his quietism, as of Blake’s. You remember my saying that Dostoevsky’s Christianity had closer affinities with Asia than with Rome? Yet his acceptance of the doctrine of energy, a doctrine positively glorified by Blake, is rather of the West than of the East.

But for Blake and Dostoevsky both, the truth of New Testament teaching is too radiantly clear for them to deny this ferocity as but a transitory phase, the short-lived consequence of a passing blindness.

And to reveal to you only the vision of his cruelty would be an act of treachery towards Blake. I wish I could counter my quotations from his terrible Proverbs of Hell by reading one of the loveliest of his Songs of Innocence—alas! its aëry form eludes translation—the poem where he foretells the time when the lion in his strength will lie down with the lamb and watch over the fold.

But let us continue with our reading from The Possessed.

“They’re bad because they don’t know they’re good; when they find out they won’t outrage a little girl. They’ll find out that they’re good and they’ll all become good, every one of them,” declares Kirillov.⁠[116]

And so the conversation continues until we stumble across the singular conception of the man-God.

“Here you’ve found it out! So you’ve become good then?”

“I am good.”

“That I agree with, though,” muttered Stavrogin, frowning.

“He who teaches that all are good will end the world.”

“He who taught it was crucified.”

“He will come, and his name will be the man-God.”

“The God-man?”

“The man-God! That’s the difference.”⁠[117]

The notion of a man-God succeeding the God-man brings us round again to Nietzsche. À propos of the superman theory, I should like to contribute one emendation in protest against an opinion which is only too current and too easily accepted. Nietzsche’s superman (observe, pray, wherein he differs from the superman of Raskolnikov’s or Kirillov’s vision), though ruthlessness is his motto, is ruthless not to others but to himself. The humanity he aspires to outstrip is his own. In short: to one and the same problem Nietzsche and Dostoevsky propose different, radically opposed solutions. Nietzsche advocates the affirmation of the personality—for him it is the one possible aim in life: Dostoevsky postulates its surrender. Nietzsche presupposes the heights of achievement where Dostoevsky prophesies utter ruin.

At the darkest hour of the War, I read in the letters of a Red Cross orderly (his modesty forbids me to name him), living in the midst of agonizing sufferings and hearing but the voice of despair, “Ah, if only they could make a sacrifice of their sufferings!”—a thought so luminous that all commentary were a matter for reproach. I shall only compare it with this sentence from The Possessed:

“Every earthly woe and every earthly tear is a joy for us. And when you water the earth with your tears a foot deep, you will rejoice at everything at once, and your sorrow will be no more, such is the prophecy.”⁠[118] Are not we very near to Pascal’s “sweet and perfect resignation” and his cry of “Joy! Joy! Tears of joy!”?

Is not this state of bliss depicted by Dostoevsky the very one exalted by the Gospel, a state into which we are born anew, the joy whose fulfilment is possible only through renunciation of self, for it is love of self which prevents us from leaping into Eternity, from entering into the Kingdom of God and communing in the mystery of life universal?

The first consequence of such regeneration is that man becomes as a little child. “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” In the words of La Bruyère, “Little children have neither past nor future, for they live in the present,” which man has lost the power to do.

“At that moment,” said Prince Myshkin to Rogozhin—“at that moment I seem somehow to understand the extraordinary saying that there shall be no more time.”⁠[119]

This direct participation is, as I have earlier indicated, taught by the Gospel, unwearying in its insistence upon these words, “Et nunc” ... “And now.” The perfect joy Christ means is not of the future, but of the immediate present.

“You’ve begun to believe in future eternal life?”

“No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still and it will become eternal.”⁠[120]

And towards the end of The Possessed Dostoevsky reverts once more to Kirillov’s uncanny rapture. Let us read the passage in question. It will help us to appreciate Dostoevsky’s idea, and prepare the way for one of the most essential truths I have left to discuss.

“There are seconds—they come five or six at a time—when you suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained. It’s something not earthly—I don’t mean in the sense that it’s heavenly—but in that sense that man cannot endure it in his earthly aspect. He must be physically changed or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable; it’s as though you apprehend all nature and suddenly say, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ God, when He created the world, said at the end of each day of creation, ‘Yes, it’s right, it’s good.’ It—it’s not being deeply moved, but simply joy. You don’t forgive anything, because there is no more need of forgiveness. It’s not that you love—oh, there’s something in it higher than love—what’s most awful is that it’s terribly clear and such joy. If it lasted more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds I live through a lifetime, and I’d give my whole life for them, because they are worth it. To endure ten seconds one must be physically changed. I think man ought to give up having children—what’s the use of children, what’s the use of evolution when the goal has been attained? In the Gospel it is written that there will be no child-bearing in the resurrection, but that man will be like the angels of the Lord....”⁠[121]

“‘Kirillov, does this often happen?’

“‘Once in three days, or once a week.’

“‘Don’t you have fits, perhaps?’

“‘No.’

“‘Well, you will. Be careful, Kirillov. I’ve heard that’s just how fits begin. An epileptic described exactly that sensation before a fit, word for word as you’ve done. He mentioned five seconds too, and said that more could not be endured. Remember Mahomet’s pitcher from which no drop of water was spilt while he circled Paradise on his horse. That was a case of five seconds too; that’s too much like your eternal harmony, and Mahomet was an epileptic. Be careful, Kirillov, it’s epilepsy.’

“‘It won’t have time.’ Kirillov smiled gently.”⁠[122]

In The Idiot we hear Prince Myshkin connect this condition of euphoria, familiar to him too, with the epileptic attacks to which he is subject.

So there we have Prince Myshkin an epileptic, Kirillov an epileptic, Smerdiakov an epileptic. There is an epileptic in each of Dostoevsky’s great works. We know Dostoevsky himself was thus afflicted, and his persistence in making epilepsy intervene as a factor in his novels sufficiently indicates the rôle he assigned this disease in moulding his ethical conceptions and directing the course of his thought.

If we seek far enough, we shall invariably find the genesis of every serious moral reform in some physiological enigma, some non-satisfaction of the flesh, irritation, or anomaly. Forgive me for quoting myself again, but if I am to express my idea as explicitly as before, I must use the same phraseology as on that previous occasion.

“It is natural that every important moral change, or, as Nietzsche would say, transmutation of values, should be due to some physiological disturbance. With physical well-being, mental activity is in abeyance, and as long as conditions continue to be satisfactory, no change can possibly be contemplated. By conditions I mean spiritual circumstance, for where the external and material are implicated, the reformer’s motive is utterly different: the one readjustment involved is chemical, the other mechanical. There lies at the root of every reform a distemper. The reformer is a sick man by reason of some ill-adjustment in his spiritual balance. Densities, ratios, and moral values present themselves to him in different perspectives, so he exerts himself to establish a fresh accord. He aims at a new co-ordination. His work is nothing but an attempt to reorganize, in the light of his logic and reasoning, the elements of confusion he senses within himself, for the unsystematic he cannot tolerate. Of course I do not suggest that lack of balance is the necessary condition for the making of a reformer, but I do contend that every reformer starts out with a lack of balance.”⁠[123]

So far as I know, it would be impossible to find, amongst the reformers who have held up to humanity a new measure of values, one single instance where we could fail to discern what Dr. Binet-Sanglé is pleased to qualify a hereditary taint.⁠[124]

Mahomet was an epileptic. Epileptics, too, the Prophets of Israel, and Luther, and Dostoevsky. Socrates had his demon, Saint Paul his mysterious “thorn in the flesh,” Pascal his abyss, Nietzsche and Rousseau their mania.