Visions and Revisions Part 12

its lost Atlantis. Well! It is for us to search it out; to take colour from its dim-lit under-world; to feed upon its wavering Sea-Lotus--and then, returning to the surface, to swim away, in search of other diving-grounds!

No Philosopher except Pater has dared to carry Esoteric Eclecticism quite as far as this. And, be it understood, he is no frivolous Dilettante. This draining the secret wine of the great embalmed Sarcophagi of Thought is his Life-Lure, his secret madness, his grand obsession. Walter Pater approaches a System of Metaphysical Thought as a somewhat furtive amorist might approach a sleeping Nymph. On light-stepping, crafty feet he approaches--and the hand with which he twitches the sleeve of the sleeper is as soft as the flutter of a moth's wing. "I do not like," he said once, "to be called a Hedonist. It gives such a queer impression to people who don't know Greek."

Ardent young people sometimes come to me, when in the wayfaring of my patient academic duties, I speak about Pater, and ask me point-blank to tell them what his "view-point"--so they are pleased to express it--"really and truly" was. Sweet reader, do you know the pain of these "really and truly" questions? I try to answer in some blundering manner like this. I try to explain how, for him, nothing in this world was certain or fixed; how everything "flowed away"; how all that we touch or taste or see, vanished, changed its nature, became something else, even as we vanish, as the years go on, and change our nature and become something else. I try to explain how, for him, we are ourselves but the meeting-places of strange forces, journeying at large and by chance through a shifting world; how we, too, these very meeting-places of such forces, waver and flicker and shift and are transformed, like dreams within dreams!

I try to explain how, this being so, and nothing being "written in the sky" it is our right to test every single experience that life can offer, short of those which would make things bitterer, harder, narrower, less easy, for "the other person."

And if my Innocents ask--as they do sometimes--Innocents are like that!--"Why must we consider the other person?" I answer--for no _reason,_ and under no threat or danger or categorical imperative; but simply because we have grown to be the sort of animal, the sort of queer fish, who _cannot_ do the things "that he would"! It is not, I try to indicate, a case of conscience; it is a matter of taste; and there are certain things, when it comes to that point, which an animal possessed of such taste _cannot do,_ even though he desire to do them. And one of these things is to hurt the other trapped creatures who happen to have been caught in the same "gin" as ourself.

With regard to Art and Literature, Pater has the same method as with regard to Philosophy. Everything in a world so fluid is obviously relative. It is ridiculous to dream that there is any absolute standard--even of beauty itself. Those high and immutable Principles of The Good and True are as much an illusion as any other human dream.

There are no such principles. Beauty is a Daughter of Life, and is forever changing as Life changes, and as we change who have to live. The lonely, tragic faith of certain great souls in that high, cold "Mathematic" of the Universe, the rhythm of whose ordered Harmony is the Music of the Spheres, is a Faith that may well inspire and solemnize us; it cannot persuade or convince us.

Beauty is not Mathematical; it is--if one may say so--physiological and psychological, and though that austere severity of pure line and pure color, the impersonal technique of art, has a seemingly pre-ordained power of appeal, in reality it is far less immutable than it appears, and has far more in it of the arbitrariness of life and growth and change than we sometimes would care to allow.

Walter Pater's magnetic spell is never more wonder-working than when he deals with the _materials_ which artists use. And most of all, with _words,_ that material which is so stained and corrupted and outraged--and yet which is the richest of all. But how tenderly he always speaks of materials! What a limitless reverence he has for the subtle reciprocity and correspondence between the human senses and what--so thrillingly, so dangerously, sometimes!--they apprehend. Wood and clay and marble and bronze and gold and silver; these--and the fabrics of cunning looms and deft, insatiable fingers--he handles with the reverence of a priest touching consecrated elements.

Not only the great main rivers of art's tradition, but the little streams and tributaries, he loves. Perhaps he loves some of these best of all, for the pathways to their exquisite margins are less trodden than the others, and one is more apt to find one's self alone there.

Perhaps of all his essays, three might be selected as most characteristic of certain recurrent moods. That one on Denys L'Auxerrois, where the sweet, perilous legend of the exiled G.o.d--has he really been ever far from us, that treacherous Son of scorched white Flesh?--leads us so far, so strangely far. That one on Watteau, the Prince of Court Painters, where his pa.s.sion for things faded and withdrawn reaches its climax. For Pater, like Antoine, is one of those always ready to turn a little wearily from the pressure of their own too vivid days, and seek a wistful escape in some fantastic valley of dreams. Watteau's "happy valley" is, indeed, sadder than our most crowded hours--how should it not be, when it is no "valley" at all, but the melancholy cypress-alleys of Versailles?--but, though sadder, it is so fine; so fine and rare and gay!

And along the borders of it and under its clipped trees, by its fountains and ghostly lawns, still, still can one catch in the twilight the shimmer of the dancing feet of the Phantom-Pierrot, and the despair in his smile! For him, too--for Gilles the Mummer--as for Antoine Watteau and Walter Pater, the wistfulness of such places is not inconsistent with their levity. Soon the music must stop. Soon it must be only a garden, "only a garden of Lenotre, correct, ridiculous and charming." For the lips of the Despair of Pierrot cannot always touch the lips of the Mockery of Columbine; in the end, the Ultimate Futility must turn them both to stone!

And, finally, that Essay upon Leonardo, with the lines "we say to our friend" about Her who is "older than the rocks on which she sits."

What really makes Pater so great, so wise, so salutary a writer is his perpetual insistence on the criminal, mad foolishness of letting slip, in silly chatter and vapid preaching, the unreturning days of our youth! "Carry, O Youths and Maidens," he seems to say. "Carry with infinite devotion that vase of many odours which is your Life on Earth. Spill as little as may be of its unvalued wine; let no rain-drops or bryony-dew, or floating gossamer-seed, fall into it and spoil its taste. For it is all you have, and it cannot last long!"

He is a great writer, because from him we may learn the difficult and subtle art of drinking the cup of life _so as to taste every drop._

One could expatiate long upon his att.i.tude to Christianity--his final desire to be "ordained Priest"--his alternating pieties and incredulities. His deliberate clinging to what "experience" brought him, as the final test of "truth," made it quite easy for him to dip his arms deep into the Holy Well. He might not find the Graal; he might see nothing there but his own shadow! What matter? The Well itself was so cool and chaste and dark and cavern-like, that it was worth long summer days spent dreaming over it--dreaming over it in the cloistered garden, out of the dust and the folly and the grossness of the brutal World, that knows neither Apollo or Christ!

DOSTOIEVSKY

The first discovery of Dostoievsky is, for a spiritual adventurer, such a shock as is not likely to occur again. One is staggered, bewildered, insulted. It is like a hit in the face, at the end of a dark pa.s.sage; a hit in the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat.

Everything that has been _forbidden,_ by discretion, by caution, by self-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out of the darkness and seize upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses.

All that one has _felt,_ but has not dared to think; all that one has _thought,_ but has not dared to say; all the terrible whispers from the unspeakable margins; all the horrible wreckage and silt from the unsounded depths, float in upon us and overpower us.

There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them, cannot, _will_ not, say. There is so much that the normal self-preservative instincts in ourselves do not _want_ said. But this Russian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace?

What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Such revelations provoke and embarra.s.s? What matter? We _require_ embarra.s.sment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must have no closed c.h.i.n.ks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform its microcosmic reflections, even _down there,_ where it has to be driven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial even the great writers are; how lacking in the Mole's claws, in the Woodp.e.c.k.e.r's beak! They seem labouring beneath some pathetic vow, exacted by the Demons of our Fate, under terrible threats, only to reveal what will serve _their_ purpose! This applies as much to the Realists, with their traditional animal chemistry, as to the Idealists, with their traditional ethical dynamics. It applies, above all, to the interpreters of s.e.x, who, in their conventional grossness, as well as in their conventional discretion, bury such Ostrich heads in the sand!

The lucky-unlucky individual whose path this formidable writer crosses, quickly begins, as he reads page by page, to cry out in startled wonder, in terrified protest. This rending Night Hawk reveals just what one hugged most closely of all--just what one did _not_ confess! Such a person, reading this desperate "clairvoyant,"

finds himself laughing and chuckling, under his breath, and _against his w.i.l.l.y_ over the little things there betrayed. It is not any more a case of enjoying with distant aesthetic amus.e.m.e.nt the general human spectacle. He himself is the one scratched and p.r.i.c.ked. He himself is the one so abominably tickled. That is why women--who have so mad a craving for the personal in everything--are especially caught by Dostoievsky. He knows them so fatally well. Those startling, contradictory feelings that make their capricious bosoms rise and fall, those feelings that they find so difficult themselves to understand, he drags them all into the light. The kind of delicate cruelty, that in others becomes something worse, refines itself in his magnetic genius into a cruelty of insight that knows no scruple. Nor is the reluctance of these gentle beings, so thrillingly betrayed, to yield their pa.s.sionate secrets, unaccompanied by pleasure. They suffer to feel themselves so exposed, but it is an exquisite suffering.

It may, indeed, be said that the strange throb of satisfaction with which we human beings feel ourselves _at the bottom,_ where we cannot fall lower, or be further unmasked, is never more frequent than when we read Dostoievsky. And that is largely because he alone understands _the depravity_ _of the spirit,_ as well as of the flesh, and the amazing wantonness, whereby the human will does not always seek its own realization and well-being, but quite as often its own laceration and destruction.

Dostoievsky has, indeed, a demonic power of revelation in regard to that twilight of the human brain, where lurk the phantoms of unsatisfied desire, and where unspoken l.u.s.ts stretch forth pitiable hands. There are certain human experiences which the conventional machinery of ordinary novel-writing lacks all language to express.

He expresses these, not in tedious a.n.a.lysis, but in the living cries, and gasps, and gestures, and fumblings and silences of his characters themselves. Who, like Dostoievsky, has shown the tragic a.s.sociation of pa.s.sionate love with pa.s.sionate hate, which is so frequent a human experience?

This monstrous _hate-love,_ caressing the bruises itself has made, and shooting forth a forked viper-tongue of cruelty from between the lips that kiss--has anyone but he held it fast, through all its Protean changes? I suppose, when one really thinks of it, at the bottom of every one of us lurk two _primary emotions_--vanity and fear. It is in their knowledge of the aberrations of these, of the mad contortions that these lead to, that the other writers seem so especially simple-minded. Over and over again, in reading Dostoievsky, one is positively seized by the throat with astonishment at the man's insight into the labyrinthian retreats of our secret pride--and of our secret fear. His characters, at certain moments, seem actually to spit gall and wormwood, as they tug at the quivering roots of one another's self-esteem. But this fermenting venom, this seething sc.u.m, is only the expression of what goes on below the surface every day, in every country.

Dostoievsky's Russians are cruelly voluble, but their volubility taps the evil humour of the universal human disease. Their thoughts are _our_ thoughts, their obsessions, _our_ obsessions. Let no one think, in his vain security, that he has a right to say: "I have no part in this morbidity. I am different from these poor madmen."

The curious nervous relief we experience as we read these books is alone a sufficient vindication. They relieve us, as well as trouble us, because in these pages we all confess what we have never confessed to anyone. Our self-love is outraged, but outraged with that strange accompaniment of thrilling pleasure that means an expiation paid, a burden lightened. Use the word "degenerate" if you will. But in this sense we are all "degenerates" for thus and not otherwise is woven the stuff whereof men are made.

Certainly the Russian soul has its peculiarities, and these peculiarities we feel in Dostoievsky as nowhere else. He, not Tolstoi or Turgenieff, is the typical Slav writer. But the chief peculiarity of the Russian soul is that it is not ashamed to express what all men feel. And this is why Dostoievsky is not only a Russian writer but a universal writer. From the French point of view he may seem wanting in lucidity and irony; from the English point of view he may seem antinomian and non-moral. But he has one advantage over both. He approaches the ultimate mystery as no Western writer, except, perhaps, Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever approached it.

He writes with human nerves upon parchment made of human tissue, and "abyssum evocat abyssum," from the darkness wherein he moves.

Among other things, Dostoievsky's insight is proved by the profound separation he indicates between "morality" and "religion."

To many of us it comes with something of a shock to find harlots and murderers and robbers and drunkards and seducers and idiots expressing genuine and pa.s.sionate religious faith, and discussing with desperate interest religious questions. But it is _our_ psychology that is shallow and inhuman, not his, and the presence of real religious feeling in a nature obsessed with the maddest l.u.s.ts is a phenomenon of universal experience. It may, indeed, be said that what is most characteristically Russian in his point of view--he has told us so himself--is the subst.i.tution of what might be called "sanct.i.ty" for what is usually termed "morality," as an ideal of life.

The "Christianity" of which Dostoievsky has the key is nothing if not an ecstatic invasion of regions where ordinary moral laws, based upon prudence and self-preservation, disappear, and give place to something else. The secret of it, beyond repentance and remorse, lies in the transforming power of "love;" lies, in fact, in "vision" purged by pity and terror; but its precise nature is rather to be felt than described.

It is in connection with this Christianity of his, a Christianity completely different from what we are accustomed to, that we find the explanation of his extraordinary interest in the "weak" as opposed to the "strong." The a.s.sociation between Christianity and a certain masterful, moral, self-a.s.sertive energy, such as we feel the presence of in England and America, might well tend to make it difficult for us to understand his meaning. It is precisely this sort of thing that makes it difficult for us to understand Russia and the Russian religion.

But as one reads Dostoievsky it is impossible to escape a suspicion that we Western nations have as yet only touched the fringe of what the Christian Faith is capable of, whether considered as a cosmic secret or as a Nepenthe for human suffering.

He saw, with clairvoyant distinctness, how large a part of the impetus of life's movement proceeds from the mad struggle, always going on, between the strong and the weak. It was his emphasis upon this struggle that helped Nietzsche to those withering exposures of "the tyranny of the weak" which cleared the path for his terrific transvaluations. It was Dostoievsky's demonic insight into the pathological sub-soil of the Religion of Pity which helped Nietzsche to forge his flashing counterblasts, but though their vision of the "general situation" thus coincided, their conclusions were diametrically different. For Nietzsche the hope of humanity is found in the strong; for Dostoievsky it is found in the weak. Their only ground of agreement is that they both refute the insolent claims of mediocrity and normality.

One of the most arresting "truths" that emerge, like silvery fish, at the end of the line of this Fisher in the abysses is the "truth" that any kind of departure from the Normal may become a means of mystic illumination. The same perversion or contortion of mind which may, in one direction, lead to crime may, in another direction, lead to extraordinary spiritual clairvoyance. And this applies to _all_ deviations from the normal type, and to all moods and inclinations in normal persons under unusual excitement or strain. The theory is, as a matter of fact, as old as the oldest races. In Egypt and India, as well as in Rome and Athens, the G.o.ds were always regarded as in some especial way manifesting their will, and revealing their secrets, to those thus stricken. The view that wisdom is attained along the path of normal health and rational sanity has always been a "philosophical" and never a "religious" view. Dostoievsky's dominant idea has, indeed, many affinities with the Pauline one, and is certainly a quite justifiable derivation from the Evangelical doctrine. It is, however, none the less startling to our Western mind.

In Dostoievsky's books, madmen, idiots, drunkards, consumptives, degenerates, visionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, nympholepts, criminals and saints jostle one another in a sort of "Danse Macabre,"

but not one of them but has his moment of ecstasy. The very worst of them, that little band of fantastic super-men of l.u.s.t, whose extravagant manias and excesses of remorse suggest att.i.tudes and gestures that would need an Aubrey Beardsley for ill.u.s.tration, have, at moments, moods of divine sublimity. Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin, in "the Possessed;" Svridigilaiof Dounia's would-be seducer, in "Crime and Punishment," and Ivan, in "the Brothers Karamazov," though all inspired by ten thousand demons, cannot be called devoid of a certain mysterious spiritual greatness. Perhaps the interesting thing about them is that their elaborate wickedness is itself a _spiritual_ rather than a _sensual_ quality, or, to put it in another way, there are abysmal depths of spiritual subtlety in their most sensual obsession. The only entirely _base_ criminal I can recall in Dostoievsky is Stavrogin's admirer, Peter Stepanovitch, and he is transformed and transfigured at times by the sheer intensity of his worship for his friend. It would be overpowering the reader with names, themselves like ritualistic incantations, to enumerate all the perverts and abnormalists whose various lapses and diseases become, in these books, mediums of spiritual insight. Though dealing continually with every form of tragedy and misery, Dostoievsky cannot be called a Pessimist. He is so profoundly affected by the spirit of the Evangelical "Beat.i.tudes" that for him "poverty" and "meekness" and "hungering and thirsting" and "weeping and mourning" are always in the true sense "blessed"--that is to say, they are the path of initiation, the sorrowful gates to the unspeakable joy.

The most beautiful characters he has drawn are, perhaps, Alyosha Karamazov and Prince Myshkin; both of these being young men, and both of them so Christ-like, that in reading about them one is compelled to acknowledge that something in the temper of that Figure, hitherto concealed from His followers, has been communicated to this Russian. The naive, and yet ironical, artlessness of their retorts to the aggressive Philistines who surround them remind one over and over again of those Divine "bon-mots"

with which, to use Oscar Wilde's allusion, the Redeemer bewildered His a.s.sailants. Stephan Trophinovitch reading the Miracle of the Swine with his female Colporteur; Raskolnikoff reading the Miracle of the Raising of Lazarus with his prost.i.tute Sonia, are scenes that might strike an English mind as mere melodramatic sentiment, but those who have entered into the Dostoievsky secret know how much more than that there is in them, and how deep into the mystery of things and the irony of things they go. One is continually coming upon pa.s.sages in Dostoievsky the strange and ambiguous nature of which leads one's thought far enough from Evangelical simplicities; pa.s.sages that are, indeed, at once so beautiful and so sinister that they make one think of certain demonic sayings of Goethe or Spinoza; and yet even these pa.s.sages do no more than throw new and formidable light upon the "old situations," the old "cross-roads."

Dostoievsky is not content with indicating how weakness and disease and suffering can become organs of vision; he goes very far--further than anyone--in his recognition of the secret and perverted cruelty that drives certain persons on to lacerate themselves with all manner of spiritual flagellation.

He understands, better than anyone else, how absurd the philosophical utilitarians are with their axiom that everyone pursueshis own happiness. He exposes over and over again, with nerve-rending subtlety, how intoxicating to the human spirit is the mad l.u.s.t of self-immolation, of self-destruction. It is really from him that Nietzsche learnt that wanton Dionysic talisman which opens the door to such singular spiritual orgies.

Nothing is more characteristic of Dostoievsky's method than his perpetual insistence upon the mania which certain curious human types display for "making fools of themselves." The more sacred aspects of this deliberate self-humiliation require no comment. It is obviously good for our spirit's salvation to be made Fools in Christ.

What one has to observe further, under his guidance, is the strange pa.s.sion that certain derelicts in the human vortex have for being trampled upon and flouted. These queer people--but there are more of them than one would suppose--derive an almost sensual pleasure from being abominably treated. They positively lick the dust before their persecutors. They run to "kiss the rod." It is this type of person who, like the hero in that story in "L'Esprit Souterrain," deliberately rushes into embarra.s.sing situations; into situations and among people where he will look a fool--in order to avenge himself upon the spectators of his "folly" by going deeper and deeper into it.

If Dostoievsky astounds us by his insight into the abnormalities of "normal" men, he is still more startling when he deals with women.

There are certain scenes--the scene between Aglaia and Nastasya in "The Idiot;" the scene between Sonia and the mother and sister of Raskolnikoff in "Crime and Punishment;" the scene in "The Possessed" where Liza leaves Stavrogin on the morning after the fire; and the scene where the woman, loved by the mad Karamazov brothers, tears her nerves and theirs to pieces, in outrageous obliquity--which brand themselves upon the mind as reaching the uttermost limit of devasting vision.

In reviewing the final impression left upon one by the reading of Dostoievsky one must confess to many curious reactions. He certainly has the power of making all other novelists seem dull in comparison; dull--or artistic and rhetorical. Perhaps the most marked effect he has is to leave one with the feeling of a universe _with many doors;_ with many doors, and not a few terrifyingly dark pa.s.sages; but a universe the opposite of "closed" or "explained."

Though not a single one of his books ends "happily," the final impression is the reverse of hopeless. His very mania for tragedy, his Dionysic embracing of it, precludes any premature despair.

Perhaps a profound deepening of one's sense of the mysterious _perversity_ of all human fate is the thing that lingers, a perversity which is itself a kind of redemption, for it implies arbitrariness and waywardness, and these things mean power and pleasure, even in the midst of suffering.

He is the best possible antidote for the peculiar and paralysing fatalism of our time, a fatalism which makes so much of "environment" and so little of "character," and which tends to endow mere worldly and material success with a sort of divine prerogative.

A generation that allows itself to be even _interested_ in such types as the "strong," efficient craftsmen of modern industry and finance is a generation that can well afford a few moral shocks at the hands of Dostoievsky's "degenerates." The world he reveals is, after all, in spite of the Russian names, the world of ordinary human obliquity.

The thing for which we have to thank him is that it is made so rich and deep, so full of fathomless pits and unending vistas.

Every great writer brings his own gift, and if others satisfy our craving for destruction and beauty, and yet others our longing for simplification and rational form, the suggestions he brings of mystery and pa.s.sion, of secret despairs and occult ecstasies, of strange renunciations and stranger triumphs, are such as must quicken our sense of the whole weird game. Looking back over these astonishing books, it is curious to note the impression left of Dostoievsky's feeling for "Nature." No writer one has met with has less of that tendency to "describe scenery," which is so tedious an aspect of most modern work. And yet Russian scenery, and Russian weather, too, seem somehow, without our being aware of it, to have got installed in our brains. Dostoievsky does it incidentally, by innumerable little side-touches and pa.s.sing allusions, but the general effect remains in one's mind with extraordinary intimacy. The great Russian cities in Summer and Winter, their bridges, rivers, squares, and crowded tenements; the quaint Provincial towns and wayside villages; the desolate outskirts of half-deserted suburbs; and, beyond them all, the feeling of the vast, melancholy plains, crossed by lonely roads; such things, a.s.sociated in detail after detail with the pa.s.sions or sorrows of the persons involved, recur as inveterately to the memory as the scenes and weather of our own personal adventures. It is not the self-conscious _art_ of a Loti or a D'Annunzio; it is that much more penetrating and imaginative _suggestiveness_ which arrests us by its vague beauty and terror in Lear or Macbeth. This subtle inter-penetration between humanity and the familiar Stage of its "exits and entrances" is only one portion of the weight of "cosmic" destiny--one can use no other word--which bears so heavily upon us as we read these books. In other writers one feels that when one has gone "full circle" with the princ.i.p.al characters, and has noted the "descriptive setting" all has been done. Here, as in Aeschylus and Euripides, as in Shakespeare and Goethe, one is left with an intimation of the clash of forces beyond and below humanity, beyond and below nature. One stands at the brink of things unspoken and unspeakable. One "sees the children sport upon the sh.o.r.e, and hears the mighty waters rolling evermore."

In ordinary life we are led, and rightly led--what else can we do?--this way and that by personal feeling and taste and experience. We fight for Religion or fight against Religion. We fight for Morality or fight against Morality. We are Traditionalists or Rebels, Reactionaries or Revolutionaries. Only sometimes, in the fury of our Faith and our Un-Faith, there come, blown across the world-margins, whispers and hints of undreamed of secrets, of unformulated hopes.

Then it is that the faces of the people and things we know grow strange and distant, or yield their place to faces we know not and things "lighter than air." Then it is that the most real seems the most dream-like, and the most impossible the most true, for the flowing of the waters of Life have fallen into a new rhythm, and even the children of Saturn may lift up their hearts!

It is too fatally easy, in these days, when machinery--that "Star called Wormwood"--dominates the world, to fall into a state of hard and flippant cynicism, or into a yet more hopeless and weary irony.