Part 33 (1/2)
This is true not merely of places, but of people. When Svidrigailov seems to be most fantastic, then he becomes most real.
The demon Smerdyakov in _The Brothers Karamazov_ pines for solidity, corporal reality, call it what you will. In almost the very words quoted above from Dostoievsky himself the Demon makes his confession.
”'I am dreadfully fond of realism--realism, so to speak, carried to the fantastic. What most people call fantastic to me forms the very essence of the real, and therefore I love your earthly realism. Here with you everything is marked out, here are formulas and geometry, but with us all is a matter of indefinite equations. On earth I become superst.i.tious. I accept all your habits here: I have got to like going to the tradesmen's baths, and I like steaming in company with tradesmen and priests. My dream is to be incarnated, but finally, irrevocably, and therefore in some fat eighteen-stone tradesman's wife, and to believe in all that she believes.'”
As it is, he is in a state of metaphysical ennui--magnificently bored.
Eternity may after all be something by no means vast. Say a neglected village Turkish bathroom, with musty cobwebs in all its corners.
Dostoievsky is always trying to probe into the unknown: his Demon really tries to explain his point of view.
”'I swear by all that is holy I wished to join the choir and cry with them all ”Hosanna,” there already escaped, there already broke from my breast ...
”'I am very sentimental, you know, and artistically susceptible. But common-sense--my most unfortunate quality--kept me within due limits, and I let the moment pa.s.s. For what, I asked myself at the time, what would have resulted after my ”Hosanna”? That instant all would have come to a standstill in the world, and no events would have taken place. And so, simply from a sense of duty and my social position, I was forced to suppress in myself the good impulse and stick to villainy. Someone else takes all the honour of doing good to himself, and I am left only the bad for my share. I know, of course, there is a secret there, but they will not reveal it to me at any price, because, forsooth, if I found out the actual facts I should break out into a ”Hosanna” and instantly the indispensable minus quant.i.ty would vanish. Reason would begin to reign all over the earth, and with it, of course, there would be an end of everything. But as long as this does not happen, as long as the secret is kept, there exist for me two truths, one up yonder, Theris, which is quite unknown to me, and another which is mine. And it is still unknown which will be the purer of the two.'”
Samuel Butler in a note called _An Apology for the Devil_ says: ”It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. G.o.d has written all the books.” After reading _The Brothers Karamazov_ we may take leave to doubt Butler's aphorism. There are certainly occasions in Dostoievsky's books where the Devil has taken the pen out of the writer's hand and made a distinctly fine case for his side.
That he came nearer than most great thinkers to a solution of the mystery of life which is nearly Christian does not alter the fact that he faced the issue bravely and tried not to square his reason with his beliefs, but to evolve from his reason and experience a sound religion.
And what is that religion? Ivan, the embodiment of pure intellect, finds that he cannot accept the world as G.o.d has made it. That any innocent child should have to suffer makes any question of future recompense intolerable. It is not that he does not accept G.o.d, he most respectfully hands back his ticket. No reward, calculable or incalculable, can obliterate needless suffering.
Father Zossima, on the other hand, says to Alyosha: ”'Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will be happy on account of them, and you will bless life and cause others to bless it.'” That is the secret of Dostoievsky's greatness. Paradoxical as it may sound, out of the mud and filth, from a world full of the diseased and mad he extracts sweetness and light, good cheer and reasonableness.
In spite of the inferno in which he lived, stricken by poverty, crime and disease, he yet blessed life and caused others to bless it: he loved humanity: his charity was boundless, his good-nature omnipotent. ”Be no man's judge: humble love is a terrible power which effects more than violence. Only active love can bring out faith. Love men and be not afraid of their sins, love man in his sin: be cheerful as the children and as the birds.”
The Russian thought which shall renew humanity finds its ultimate and perfect expression in Dostoievsky. In spite of incoherence and an amazing formlessness, talk and description so unending that it takes us longer to read them than it actually took the characters to live through the events described ... in spite of a million petty artistic mistakes we are yet carried off our feet by him; there have, we feel, been greater artists but very few greater men. ”It is not before you I am kneeling,” says Raskolnikov to Sonia, ”but before all the suffering of mankind,” and this might be taken as the text of all his work.
”His friends were exaltations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind.”
IX
TOLSTOY (1828-1910)
Tolstoy was born in the estate of Yasnaya Polyana: after the death of his father in Moscow, where they went when he was nine, the novelist returned to his home and graduated at the University of Petrograd in 1848, and shortly afterwards entered the army, and was stationed in the Caucasus, where he began his literary career. He took part in the Crimean War and afterwards settled in Petrograd, where he grew more and more dissatisfied with existing conditions. In 1862 he married and returned once more to Yasnaya Polyana. Here he devoted himself to the education of the peasants and edited an educational paper: soon afterwards he a.s.sumed a negative att.i.tude to all progress and wrote many novels. Later he urged men to occupy themselves in manual labour, and in the year of his death left his home to put his theories more completely into practice, but died at a wayside railway station. Everything that Tolstoy wrote is autobiographical, so it is unnecessary to dwell further on the bare facts of his life. Like all Russians, he acts upon impulse; unlike Oblmov, he is first of all the man of action: he asks himself with unwearying persistence, ”What is the purpose of my life?” and his answer is: ”The purpose of my life is to understand, and as far as possible to do, the will of that Power which has sent me here, and which actuates my reason and conscience.” He seeks goodness rather by the head than the heart; he begins with the understanding. As a novelist he keeps closer to actual life than the others, because he has lived his incidents before he writes about them. He is first and foremost a seeker after G.o.d: he abjures literature and art through pride, and thinks that truth is to be found only in working like a peasant: he was unable himself to do this because his wife refused to allow him to. ”For ourselves we may do what we like, but for the sake of our children we may not,” was her contention.
No man ever more truly exemplified the meaning of Bacon's aphorism that ”he that is married hath given hostages to fortune.”
He had the pride of Lucifer or Lermontov's Demon, and yet he spent his life searching for the ideal humility of Dostoievsky's Myshkin, the pure fool, the divine idiot.
He starts by advocating non-resistance to evil, and ends by pa.s.sionately resisting it.
From the beginning we find in him a supreme love of himself, a man interested only in Russia, an amazing lack of sympathy with culture, an astonis.h.i.+ng want of taste (a lover of Dumas in his youth, he later on pins his faith to George Eliot and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_). He was quite ignorant of life owing to his wealth.
But by far the most outstanding characteristic of this genius is his perfect paganism: he is always seeking for the divine in the animal.
Like so many great Russians, he changed his whole life at one period of his existence.
In 1879 he explains this in a most illuminating pa.s.sage:
”Five years ago something very curious began to take place in me: I began to experience at first times of mental vacuity, of cessation of life, as if I did not know how I was to live or what I was to do. These suspensions of life always found expression in the same problem, 'Why am I here?' and then, 'What next?' I had lived and lived, and gone on and on till I had drawn near a precipice: I saw clearly that before me there lay nothing but destruction. With all my might I endeavoured to escape from this life. And suddenly I, a happy man, began to hide my boot-laces, that I might not hang myself between the wardrobes in my room when undressing alone at night; and ceased to take a gun with me out shooting, so as to avoid temptation by these two means of freeing myself of life.”