Dostoevsky
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