Dostoevsky
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