Part 1 (2/2)
But the secret of Dostoevsky's appeal is something more than the mult.i.tude and thrill of his incidents and characters. So incongruous, indeed, is the sensational framework of his stories with the immense and sombre genius that broods over them that Mr. Murry is inclined to regard the incidents as a sort of wild spiritual algebra rather than as events occurring on the plane of reality. ”Dostoevsky,” he declares, ”is not a novelist. What he is is more difficult to define.”
Mr. Murry boldly faces the difficulty and attempts the definition. To him Dostoevsky's work is ”the record of a great mind seeking for a way of life; it is more than a record of struggle, it is the struggle itself.” Dostoevsky himself is a man of genius ”lifted out of the living world,” and unable to descend to it again. Mr. Murry confesses that at times, as he reads him, he is ”seized by a supersensual terror.”
For an awful moment I seem to see things with the eye of eternity, and have a vision of suns grown cold, and hear the echo of voices calling without sound across the waste and frozen universe. And those voices take shape in certain unforgettable fragments of dialogue that have been spoken by one spirit to another in some ugly, mean tavern, set in surrounding darkness.
Dostoevsky's people, it is suggested, ”are not so much men and women as disembodied spirits who have for the moment put on mortality.”
They have no physical being. Ultimately they are the creations, not of a man who desired to be, but of a spirit which sought to know.
They are the imaginations of a G.o.d-tormented mind. ... Because they are possessed they are no longer men and women.
This is all in a measure true. Dostoevsky was no realist. Nor, on the other hand, was he a novelist of horrors for horrors' sake. He could never have written _Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar_ like Poe for the sake of the aesthetic thrill.
None the less he remains a novelist who dramatized his spiritual experiences through the medium of actions performed by human beings.
Clearly he believed that human beings--though not ordinary human beings--were capable of performing the actions he narrates with such energy. Mr. Murry will have it that the actions in the novels take place in a ”timeless” world, largely because Dostoevsky has the habit of crowding an impossible rout of incidents into a single day. But surely the Greeks took the same license with events. This habit of packing into a few hours actions enough to fill a lifetime seems to me in Dostoevsky to be a novelist's device rather than the result of a spiritual escape into timelessness.
To say this is not to deny the spiritual content of Dostoevsky's work--the anguish of the imprisoned soul as it battles with doubt and denial and despair. There is in Dostoevsky a suggestion of Caliban trying to discover some better G.o.d than Setebos. At the same time one would be going a great deal too far in accepting the description of himself as ”a child of unbelief.” The ultimate att.i.tude of Dostoevsky is as Christian as the Apostle Peter's, ”Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief!” When Dostoevsky writes, ”If any one could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I shall prefer to stay with Christ and not with the truth,” Mr. Murry interprets this as a denial of Christ. It is surely a kind of faith, though a despairing kind. And beyond the dark night of suffering, and dissipating the night, Dostoevsky still sees the light of Christian compa.s.sion. His work is all earthquake and eclipse and dead stars apart from this.
He does not, Mr. Murry urges, believe, as has often been said, that men are purified by suffering. It seems to me that Dostoevsky believes that men are purified, if not by their own sufferings, at least by the sufferings of others. Or even by the compa.s.sion of others, like Prince Myshkin in _The Idiot_. But the truth is, it is by no means easy to systematize the creed of a creature at war with life, as Dostoevsky was--a man tortured by the eternal conflict of the devilish and the divine in his own breast.
His work, like his face, bears the mark of this terrible conflict. The novels are the perfect image of the man. As to the man himself, the Vicomte de Vogue described him as he saw him in the last years of his life:--
Short, lean, neurotic, worn and bowed down with sixty years of misfortune, faded rather than aged, with a look of an invalid of uncertain age, with a long beard and hair still fair, and for all that still breathing forth the ”cat-life.” ... The face was that of a Russian peasant; a real Moscow mujik, with a flat nose, small, sharp eyes deeply set, sometimes dark and gloomy, sometimes gentle and mild. The forehead was large and lumpy, the temples were hollow as if hammered in. His drawn, twitching features seemed to press down on his sad-looking mouth.... Eyelids, lips, and every muscle of his face twitched nervously the whole time. When he became excited on a certain point, one could have sworn that one had seen him before seated on a bench in a police-court awaiting trial, or among vagabonds who pa.s.sed their time begging before the prison doors. At all other times he carried that look of sad and gentle meekness seen on the images of old Slavonic saints.
That is the portrait of the man one sees behind Dostoevsky's novels--a portrait one might almost have inferred from the novels. It is a figure that at once fascinates and repels. It is a figure that leads one to the edge of the abyss. One cannot live at all times with such an author. But his books will endure as the confession of the most terrible spiritual and imaginative experiences that modern literature has given us.
II
JANE AUSTEN: NATURAL HISTORIAN
Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study man (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside.
Nor is Jane Austen entirely a realist in her treatment even of these.
She idealizes them to the point of making most of them good-looking, and she hates poverty to such a degree that she seldom can endure to write about anybody who is poor. She is not happy in the company of a character who has not at least a thousand pounds. ”People get so horridly poor and economical in this part of the world,” she writes on one occasion, ”that I have no patience with them. Kent is the only place for happiness; everybody is rich there.” Her novels do not introduce us to the most exalted levels of the aristocracy. They provide us, however, with a natural history of county people and of people who are just below the level of county people and live in the eager hope of being taken notice of by them. There is more caste sn.o.bbishness, I think, in Jane Austen's novels than in any other fiction of equal genius. She, far more than Thackeray, is the novelist of sn.o.bs.
How far Jane Austen herself shared the social prejudices of her characters it is not easy to say. Unquestionably, she satirized them. At the same time, she imputes the sense of superior rank not only to her b.u.t.ts, but to her heroes and heroines, as no other novelist has ever done. Emma Woodhouse lamented the deficiency of this sense in Frank Churchill. ”His indifference to a confusion of rank,” she thought, ”bordered too much on inelegance of mind.” Mr. Darcy, again, even when he melts so far as to become an avowed lover, neither forgets his social position, nor omits to talk about it. ”His sense of her inferiority, of its being a degradation ... was dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.” On discovering, to his amazement, that Elizabeth is offended rather than overwhelmed by his condescension, he defends himself warmly.
”Disguise of every sort,” he declares, ”is my abhorrence. Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?”
It is perfectly true that Darcy and Emma Woodhouse are the b.u.t.ts of Miss Austen as well as being among her heroes and heroines. She mocks them--Darcy especially--no less than she admires. She loves to let her wit play about the egoism of social caste. She is quite merciless in deriding, it when it becomes overbearing, as in Lady Catherine de Bourgh, or when it produces flunkeyish reactions, as in Mr. Collins. But I fancy she liked a modest measure of it. Most people do. Jane Austen, in writing so much about the sense of family and position, chose as her theme one of the most widespread pa.s.sions of civilized human nature.
She was herself a clergyman's daughter. She was the seventh of a family of eight, born in the parsonage at Steventon, in Hamps.h.i.+re. Her life seems to have been far from exciting. Her father, like the clergy in her novels, was a man of leisure--of so much leisure, as Mr. Cornish reminds us, that he was able to read out Cowper to his family in the mornings.
Jane was brought up to be a young lady of leisure. She learned French and Italian and sewing: she was ”especially great in satin-st.i.tch.” She excelled at the game of spillikins.
She must have begun to write at an early age. In later life, she urges an ambitious niece, aged twelve, to give up writing till she is sixteen, adding that ”she had herself often wished she had read more and written less in the corresponding years of her life.” She was only twenty when she began to write _First Impressions_, the perfect book which was not published till seventeen years later with the t.i.tle altered to _Pride and Prejudice_. She wrote secretly for many years. Her family knew of it, but the world did not--not even the servants or the visitors to the house. She used to hide the little sheets of paper on which she was writing when any one approached. She had not, apparently, a room to herself, and must have written under constant threat of interruption.
<script>