Aspects of the novel
"Hetty," she said gently, "do you know who it is that sits by your
side?"
"Yes," Hetty answered slowly, "it's Dinah." Then, after a pause, she
added, "But you can do nothing for me. You can't make 'em do anything.
They'll hang me o' Monday--it's Friday now."
"But, Hetty, there is some one else in this cell besides me, some one
close to you."
Hetty said, in a frightened whisper, "Who?"
"Some one who has been with you through all your hours of sin and
trouble--who has known every thought you have had--has seen where you
went, where you lay down and rose up again, and all the deeds you have
tried to hide in darkness. And on Monday, when I can't follow you, when
my arms can't reach you, when death has parted us, He who is
with you now and knows all, will be with you then. It makes no
difference--whether we live or die we are in the presence of God."
"Oh, Dinah, won't nobody do anything for me? _Will_ they hang me for
certain? ... I wouldn't mind if they'd let me live ... help me.... I
can't feel anything like you ... my heart is hard."
Dinah held the clinging hand, and all her soul went forth in her voice:
"... Come, mighty Saviour! let the dead hear Thy voice; let the eyes of
the blind be opened: let her see that God encompasses her; let her
tremble at nothing but the sin that cuts her off from Him. Melt the hard
heart; unseal the closed lips: make her cry with her whole soul,
'Father, I have sinned.'"
"Dinah," Hetty sobbed out, throwing her arms round Dinah's neck, "I will
speak ... I will tell ... I won't hide it any more. I did do it,
Dinah ... I buried in the wood ... the little baby ... and it cried ... I
heard it cry ... ever such a way off ... all night ... and I went back
because it cried."
She paused and then spoke hurriedly in a louder pleading tone.
"But I thought perhaps it wouldn't die--there might somebody find it. I
didn't kill it--I didn't kill it myself. I put it down there and covered
it up, and when I came back it was gone.... I don't know what I felt
until I found that the baby was gone. And when I put it there, I thought
I should like somebody to find it and save it from dying, but when I saw
it was gone, I was struck like a stone, with fear. I never thought o'
stirring, I felt so weak. I knew I couldn't run away, and everybody as
saw me 'ud know about the baby. My heart went like stone; I couldn't
wish or try for anything; it seemed like as if I should stay there for
ever, and nothing 'ud ever change. But they came and took me away."
Hetty was silent, but she shuddered again, as if there was still
something behind: and Dinah waited, for her heart was so full that tears
must come before words. At last Hetty burst out with a sob.
"Dinah, do you think God will take away that crying and the place in the
wood, now I've told everything?"
"Let us pray, poor sinner: let us fall on our knees again, and pray to
the God of all mercy."
I have not done justice to this scene, because I have had to cut it, and
it is on her massiveness that George Eliot depends--she has no nicety of
style. The scene is sincere, solid, pathetic, and penetrated with
Christianity. The god whom Dinah summons is a living force to the
authoress also: he is not brought in to work up the reader's feelings;
he is the natural accompaniment of human error and suffering.
Now contrast with it the following scene from _The Brothers Karamazov_
(Mitya is being accused of the murder of his father, of which he is
indeed spiritually though not technically guilty).
They proceeded to a final revision of the protocol. Mitya got up, moved
from his chair to the corner by the curtain, lay down on a large chest
covered by a rug, and instantly fell asleep.
He had a strange dream, utterly out of keeping with the place and the
time.
He was driving somewhere in the steppes, where he had been stationed
long ago, and a peasant was driving him in a cart with a pair of horses,
through snow and sleet. Not far off was a village; he could see the
black huts, and half the huts were burned down, there were only the
charred beams sticking up. And as they drove in, there were peasant
women drawn up along the road, a lot of women, a whole row, all thin and
wan, with their faces a sort of brownish colour, especially one at the
edge, a tall bony woman, who looked forty, but might have been only
twenty, with a long thin face. And in her arms was a little baby crying.
And her breasts seemed so dried up that there was not a drop of milk in
them. And the child cried and cried, and held out its little bare arms,
with its little fists blue from cold.
"Why are they crying? Why are they crying?" Mitya asked as they dashed
gaily by.
"It's the babe," answered the driver. "The babe weeping."
And Mitya was struck by his saying, in his peasant way, "the babe," and
he liked the peasant calling it "the babe." There seemed more pity in
it.
"But why is it weeping?" Mitya persisted stupidly. "Why are its little
arms bare? Why don't they wrap it up?"
"Why, they're poor people, burnt out. They've no bread. They're begging
because they've been burnt out."
"No, no," Mitya, as it were, still did not understand. "Tell me, why is
it those poor mothers stand there? Why are people poor? Why is the babe
poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don't they hug each other and kiss?
Why don't they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black
misery? Why don't they feed the babe?"
And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless,
yet he wanted to ask just that, and he had to ask it just in that way.
And he felt that a passion of pity, such as he had never known before,
was rising in his heart, that he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do
something for them all, so that the babe should weep no more, so that
the dark-faced dried-up mother should not weep, that no one should shed
tears again from that moment, and he wanted to do it at once, at once,
regardless of all obstacles, with all the recklessness of the
Karamazovs.... And his heart glowed, and he struggled forward towards
the light, and he longed to live, to go on and on, towards the new
beckoning light, and to hasten, hasten, now, at once!
"What! Where?" he exclaimed, opening his eyes, and sitting up on the
chest, as though he had revived from a swoon, smiling brightly. Nikolay
Parfenovitch was standing over him, suggesting that he should hear the
protocol read aloud and sign it. Mitya guessed that he had been asleep
an hour or more, but he did not hear Nikolay Parfenovitch. He was
suddenly struck by the fact that there was a pillow under his head,
which hadn't been there when he leant back exhausted, on the chest.
"Who put that pillow under my head? Who was so kind?" he cried, with a
sort of ecstatic gratitude, and tears in his voice, as though some great
kindness had been shown him.
He never found out who this kind man was, perhaps one of the peasant
witnesses, or Nikolay Parfenovitch's little secretary had
compassionately thought to put a pillow under his head, but his whole
soul was quivering with tears. He went to the table and said he would
sign whatever they liked.
"I've had a good dream, gentlemen," he said in a strange voice, with a
new light, as of joy, in his face.
Now what is the difference in these passages--a difference that throbs
in every phrase? It is that the first writer is a preacher, and the
second a prophet. George Eliot talks about God, but never alters her
focus; God and the tables and chairs are all in the same plane, and in
consequence we have not for a moment the feeling that the whole universe
needs pity and love--they are only needed in Hetty's cell. In Dostoevsky
the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves;
infinity attends them; though yet they remain individuals they expand to
embrace it and summon it to embrace them; one can apply to them the
saying of St. Catherine of Siena that God is in the soul and the soul is
in God as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea. Every
sentence he writes implies this extension, and the implication is the
dominant aspect of his work. He is a great novelist in the ordinary
sense--that is to say his characters have relation to ordinary life and
also live in their own surroundings, there are incidents which keep us
excited, and so on; he has also the greatness of a prophet, to which our
ordinary standards are inapplicable.
That is the gulf between Hetty and Mitya, though they inhabit the same
moral and mythological worlds. Hetty, taken by herself, is quite
adequate. She is a poor girl, brought to confess her crime, and so to a
better frame of mind. But Mitya, taken by himself, is not adequate. He
only becomes real through what he implies, his mind is not in a frame at
all. Taken by himself he seems distorted out of drawing, intermittent;
we begin explaining him away and saying he was disproportionately
grateful for the pillow because he was overwrought--very like a Russian
in fact. We cannot understand him until we see that he extends, and that
the part of him on which Dostoevsky focused did not lie on that wooden
chest or even in dreamland but in a region where it could be joined by
the rest of humanity. Mitya is--all of us. So is Alyosha, so is
Smerdyakov. He is the prophetic vision, and the novelist's creation
also. He does not become all of us here: he is Mitya here as Hetty is
Hetty. The extension, the melting, the unity through love and pity occur
in a region which can only be implied and to which fiction is perhaps
the wrong approach. The world of the Karamazovs and Myshkin and
Raskolnikov, the world of Moby Dick which we shall enter shortly, it is
not a veil, it is not an allegory. It is the ordinary world of fiction,
but it reaches back. And that tiny humorous figure of Lady Bertram whom
we considered some time ago--Lady Bertram sitting on her sofa with
pug--may assist us in these deeper matters. Lady Bertram, we decided,
was a flat character, capable of extending into a round when the action
required it. Mitya is a round character, but he is capable of extension.
He does not conceal anything (mysticism), he does not mean anything
(symbolism), he is merely Dmitri Karamazov, but to be merely a person in
Dostoevsky is to join up with all the other people far back.
Consequently the tremendous current suddenly flows--for me in those
closing words: "I've had a good dream, gentlemen." Have I had that good
dream too? No, Dostoevsky's characters ask us to share something deeper
than their experiences. They convey to us a sensation that is partly
physical--the sensation of sinking into a translucent globe and seeing
our experience floating far above us on its surface, tiny, remote, yet
ours. We have not ceased to be people, we have given nothing up, but
"the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea."
There we touch the limit of our subject. We are not concerned with the
prophet's message, or rather (since matter and manner cannot be wholly
separated) we are concerned with it as little as possible. What matters
is the accent of his voice, his song. Hetty might have a good dream in
prison, and it would be true of her, satisfyingly true, but it would
stop short. Dinah would say she was glad, Hetty would recount her dream,
which, unlike Mitya's, would be logically connected with the crisis, and
George Eliot would say something sound and sympathetic about good dreams
generally, and their inexplicably helpful effect on the tortured breast.
Just the same and absolutely different are the two scenes, the two
books, the two writers.
Now another point appears. Regarded merely as a novelist the prophet has
certain uncanny advantages, so that it is sometimes worth letting him
into a drawing-room even on the furniture's account. Perhaps he will