Dostoevsky
arts. I have in mind Alexander and Cæsar Borgia, Frederick II, King
of the Two Sicilies, Leonardo da Vinci, and Goethe--creators, men of
a superior race. For artists and for men of action the problem of the
_superman_ does not exist, or is at least readily solved. Their very
lives and activity provide an answer in themselves. The torturing
dread begins when the problem is left unsolved, or when the interval
between question and answer is protracted. The being who thinks and
invents and does not act brews his own poison draught. Hearken again to
William Blake: “_He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence_”--the
pestilence that proved mortal to Nietzsche.
“What can a man accomplish?” is the atheist’s characteristic query, and
Dostoevsky exquisitely realized the fact that to deny God is inevitably
to exalt man.
God a myth?... Then everything is lawful! We find this idea in _The
Possessed_ and it is repeated in _The Karamazovs_:
“If God exists, all is His will, and from His will I cannot escape.
If not; it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will.”[101] How
can a man assert his independence? Again begins that torturing dread.
Everything is possible. Is it? Everything? What can one man accomplish?
Whenever we see one of Dostoevsky’s characters ask himself this
question, we can be sure of witnessing ere long his utter downfall.
Take Raskolnikov, for instance, the first of them to formulate the idea
clearly, the very idea which Nietzsche transformed into his theory of
the _superman_. Raskolnikov is responsible for an article somewhat
subversive in tone, dividing, according to Porfiry’s version of it, all
men into _ordinary_ and _extraordinary_.
“Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress
the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary
men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in
any way, just because they are extraordinary.”--“That wasn’t quite
my conclusion,” began Raskolnikov, simply and modestly. “Yet I admit
that you have stated it almost correctly; perhaps, if you like,
perfectly so.” (It almost gave him pleasure to admit this.) “The only
difference is that I don’t contend that extraordinary people are
always bound to commit breaches of morals, as you call it. In fact,
I doubt whether such an argument could be published. I simply hinted
that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right ... that is, not an official
right but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep
certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical
fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole
of humanity).... Then, I remember, I maintain in my article that
all--well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon,
Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on--were all without exception criminals,
from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the
ancient one, handed down from their ancestors, and held sacred by
the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either, if that
bloodshed (often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defence of
ancient law) were of use to their cause. It’s remarkable, in fact, that
the majority, indeed, of those benefactors and leaders of humanity were
guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men, or
even a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some
new word, must from their very nature be criminals--more or less, of
course. Otherwise, it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut; and
to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their
very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to
it.”[102]
Observe, however, that in the face of this profession Raskolnikov
confesses his abiding faith in God--a testimony which differentiates
him from Dostoevsky’s other _supermen_.
“Do you believe in God? Excuse my curiosity!”
“I do,” repeated Raskolnikov, raising his eyes to Porfiry.
“And do you--believe in Lazarus’s rising from the dead?”
“I do! Why do you ask all this?”
“You believe it literally?”
“Literally.”[103]
“_One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression_”, says William Blake.
But the very fact that Raskolnikov puts himself the question, instead
of making action his answer, proves that he is no real _superman_. His
bankruptcy is complete. Not for one moment can he rid himself of the
conviction of his own mediocrity. He excites himself to commit a crime
in order to satisfy himself that he is a _superman_. “I divined then
... that power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and
pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to
dare! Then for the first time in my life an idea took shape in my mind
which no one had ever thought of before me, not one! I saw as clear as
daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad
world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying
to the devil. I wanted _to have the daring_ ... and I killed her. I
only wanted to have the daring.”[104]
Later, after the crime, he says: “Perhaps I should never have committed
a murder again. I wanted to find out something else; it was something
led me on. I wanted to find out then, and quickly, whether I was a
louse like everybody else or a man, whether I can step over barriers
or not, whether I dare to stoop to pick up or not, whether I am a
trembling creature or whether I have the right....”[105]
Moreover he is unwilling to accept the idea of his own failure. He
refuses to acknowledge he had not the right to dare.
“I couldn’t carry out even the first step, because I am contemptible,
that’s what’s the matter!... If I had succeeded I should have been
crowned with glory, but now I’m trapped.”[106]
After Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Kirillov, Ivan Karamazov and the _Raw
Youth_ will have their turn.
The utter inefficiency of every one of his intellectual heroes is
rooted in Dostoevsky’s belief that the man of active brain is wellnigh
incapable of action.
_Notes from Underground_, the little book he wrote shortly before _The
Eternal Husband_, marks for me the height of his career. It is the
keystone of his whole work, the clue to his thought. “_He who thinks,
acts not...._” ’Tis but a step then to the insinuation that action
presupposes a certain intellectual inferiority.
From first page to last, this little volume, _Notes from Underground_,
is a monologue pure and simple, and it really seems a trifle daring
to assert, as did our friend Valery Larbaud recently, that James
Joyce, the author of _Ulysses_, devised this form of narrative. Had he
forgotten Dostoevsky, Poe even, and Browning, of whom I cannot help
but think as I read these _Notes from Underground_ anew? Browning and
Dostoevsky seem to me to bring the monologue straightway to perfection,
in all the diversity and subtlety to which this literary form lends
itself.
Perhaps I shock the literary sense of some of my audience by coupling
these two names, but I can do no other, nor help being struck by the
profound resemblance, not merely in form, but in substance between
certain Browning monologues (I am thinking especially of _My Last
Duchess_, _Porphyria’s Lover_, and the two depositions of Pompilia’s
husband in the _Ring and the Book_) and that admirable little story in
Dostoevsky’s _Journal_, _Krotchkaya_, which means, I am told, _Faint
Heart_, the title it bears in the latest edition of the volume.
But to an even greater degree than the form and the manner of their
work, what urges my comparison of Browning and Dostoevsky is their
optimism--an optimism which has no affinity with Goethe’s, but brings
them both very close to Nietzsche and to William Blake, of whom I shall
have occasion to speak again.
Yes, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Browning, and Blake, are four stars of one
single constellation. For long Blake was completely unknown to me, then
recently I discovered him, and as an astronomer can sense the influence
of a star and determine its position before he has even glimpsed it,
I can say that Blake I had long anticipated. Is this equivalent to
saying his influence was considerable? No, indeed! I am not aware he
ever exerted any. Even in England, till late years, Blake remained
practically unknown, a pure and distant star whose rays are only now
reaching us.
The most significant of his works, _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_,
from which I shall quote passages now and again, will help us, I am
sure, to a better understanding of certain traits in Dostoevsky.
That sentence I quoted a moment ago from his _Proverbs of Hell_, as he
entitles some of his aphorisms, would be a fitting device to introduce
Dostoevsky’s _Notes from Underground_--or else this other saying of
Blake’s--“_Expect poison from standing water._”
“Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be
pre-eminently a characterless creature,” declares the hero (save the
mark!) of the _Underground_. The man of action according to Dostoevsky
must be mediocre in intellect, for the proud in mind are withheld
from action which they deem a compromise, a limitation to thought.
He who acts will be a Pyotr Stepanovitch, as in _The Possessed_, or
a Smerdiakov, for in _Crime and Punishment_ Dostoevsky had not yet
established the division between thought and action.
The mind does not act; it conditions action. In several of Dostoevsky’s
novels we come across an odd distribution of rôles, the uneasy
relationship and hidden connivance between a thinking being and
another acting under its influence, vicariously almost. Think of
Ivan Karamazov, Smerdiakov, Stavrogin, and Pyotr Stepanovitch, whom
Stavrogin called his “shadow.”
Strange, is it not, to find what I may term a first version of the
queer relationship between Ivan Karamazov the thinker and Smerdiakov
the lackey in _Crime and Punishment_, the first of his great novels?
Dostoevsky tells us of one Filka, a serf, Svidrigaïlov’s servant, who
hanged himself to escape, not blows, but his master’s mockery of him.
“Filka was a sort of hypochondriac, a sort of domestic philosopher.”
The other servants used to say “he read himself silly.”[107]
These lackeys, these shadows, these puppets that act in place of the
thinking beings, have one and all a love amounting to veritable
devotion for the diabolical superiority of intellect. Stavrogin’s
prestige in the eyes of Pyotr Stepanovitch is as exaggerated as that
intellectual’s scorn for his miserable inferior.
“‘Do you want the whole truth?’ said Pyotr Stepanovitch to Stavrogin.
‘You see the idea really did cross my mind--you hinted it yourself,
not seriously, but teasing me (for of course you would not hint it
seriously); but I couldn’t bring myself to it, and wouldn’t bring
myself to it for anything, not for a hundred roubles....’
“In the heat of his talk, he went close up to Stavrogin and took hold
of the revers of his coat (really, it may have been on purpose). With
a violent movement Stavrogin struck him on the arm: ‘Come, what is it?
... give over, you’ll break my arm.’”[108] (Ivan Karamazov’s conduct
towards Smerdiakov is marked by like brutality.)
“Nicolay Vsyevolodovitch, tell me, as before God, are you guilty or
not, and I’ll swear I’ll believe your word as though it were God’s, and
I’ll follow you to the end of the earth. Yes, I will, I’ll follow you
like a dog.... I am a buffoon, but I don’t want you, my better half, to
be one! Do you understand me?”[109]
The thinking being enjoys his domination of the other: yet this very
domination is a source of constant exasperation. For his creature’s
fumbling actions are served up as the caricature of his own thoughts.
Dostoevsky’s letters enlighten us concerning the elaboration of his