Why we should read Part 33

This is true not merely of places, but of people. When Svidrigailov seems to be most fantastic, then he becomes most real.

The demon Smerdyakov in _The Brothers Karamazov_ pines for solidity, corporal reality, call it what you will. In almost the very words quoted above from Dostoievsky himself the Demon makes his confession.

"'I am dreadfully fond of realism--realism, so to speak, carried to the fantastic. What most people call fantastic to me forms the very essence of the real, and therefore I love your earthly realism. Here with you everything is marked out, here are formulas and geometry, but with us all is a matter of indefinite equations. On earth I become superst.i.tious. I accept all your habits here: I have got to like going to the tradesmen's baths, and I like steaming in company with tradesmen and priests. My dream is to be incarnated, but finally, irrevocably, and therefore in some fat eighteen-stone tradesman's wife, and to believe in all that she believes.'"

As it is, he is in a state of metaphysical ennui--magnificently bored.

Eternity may after all be something by no means vast. Say a neglected village Turkish bathroom, with musty cobwebs in all its corners.

Dostoievsky is always trying to probe into the unknown: his Demon really tries to explain his point of view.

"'I swear by all that is holy I wished to join the choir and cry with them all "Hosanna," there already escaped, there already broke from my breast ...

"'I am very sentimental, you know, and artistically susceptible. But common-sense--my most unfortunate quality--kept me within due limits, and I let the moment pa.s.s. For what, I asked myself at the time, what would have resulted after my "Hosanna"? That instant all would have come to a standstill in the world, and no events would have taken place. And so, simply from a sense of duty and my social position, I was forced to suppress in myself the good impulse and stick to villainy. Someone else takes all the honour of doing good to himself, and I am left only the bad for my share. I know, of course, there is a secret there, but they will not reveal it to me at any price, because, forsooth, if I found out the actual facts I should break out into a "Hosanna" and instantly the indispensable minus quant.i.ty would vanish. Reason would begin to reign all over the earth, and with it, of course, there would be an end of everything. But as long as this does not happen, as long as the secret is kept, there exist for me two truths, one up yonder, Theris, which is quite unknown to me, and another which is mine. And it is still unknown which will be the purer of the two.'"

Samuel Butler in a note called _An Apology for the Devil_ says: "It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. G.o.d has written all the books." After reading _The Brothers Karamazov_ we may take leave to doubt Butler's aphorism. There are certainly occasions in Dostoievsky's books where the Devil has taken the pen out of the writer's hand and made a distinctly fine case for his side.

That he came nearer than most great thinkers to a solution of the mystery of life which is nearly Christian does not alter the fact that he faced the issue bravely and tried not to square his reason with his beliefs, but to evolve from his reason and experience a sound religion.

And what is that religion? Ivan, the embodiment of pure intellect, finds that he cannot accept the world as G.o.d has made it. That any innocent child should have to suffer makes any question of future recompense intolerable. It is not that he does not accept G.o.d, he most respectfully hands back his ticket. No reward, calculable or incalculable, can obliterate needless suffering.

Father Zossima, on the other hand, says to Alyosha: "'Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will be happy on account of them, and you will bless life and cause others to bless it.'" That is the secret of Dostoievsky's greatness. Paradoxical as it may sound, out of the mud and filth, from a world full of the diseased and mad he extracts sweetness and light, good cheer and reasonableness.

In spite of the inferno in which he lived, stricken by poverty, crime and disease, he yet blessed life and caused others to bless it: he loved humanity: his charity was boundless, his good-nature omnipotent. "Be no man's judge: humble love is a terrible power which effects more than violence. Only active love can bring out faith. Love men and be not afraid of their sins, love man in his sin: be cheerful as the children and as the birds."

The Russian thought which shall renew humanity finds its ultimate and perfect expression in Dostoievsky. In spite of incoherence and an amazing formlessness, talk and description so unending that it takes us longer to read them than it actually took the characters to live through the events described ... in spite of a million petty artistic mistakes we are yet carried off our feet by him; there have, we feel, been greater artists but very few greater men. "It is not before you I am kneeling," says Raskolnikov to Sonia, "but before all the suffering of mankind," and this might be taken as the text of all his work.

"His friends were exaltations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind."

IX

TOLSTOY (1828-1910)

Tolstoy was born in the estate of Yasnaya Polyana: after the death of his father in Moscow, where they went when he was nine, the novelist returned to his home and graduated at the University of Petrograd in 1848, and shortly afterwards entered the army, and was stationed in the Caucasus, where he began his literary career. He took part in the Crimean War and afterwards settled in Petrograd, where he grew more and more dissatisfied with existing conditions. In 1862 he married and returned once more to Yasnaya Polyana. Here he devoted himself to the education of the peasants and edited an educational paper: soon afterwards he a.s.sumed a negative att.i.tude to all progress and wrote many novels. Later he urged men to occupy themselves in manual labour, and in the year of his death left his home to put his theories more completely into practice, but died at a wayside railway station. Everything that Tolstoy wrote is autobiographical, so it is unnecessary to dwell further on the bare facts of his life. Like all Russians, he acts upon impulse; unlike Oblmov, he is first of all the man of action: he asks himself with unwearying persistence, "What is the purpose of my life?" and his answer is: "The purpose of my life is to understand, and as far as possible to do, the will of that Power which has sent me here, and which actuates my reason and conscience." He seeks goodness rather by the head than the heart; he begins with the understanding. As a novelist he keeps closer to actual life than the others, because he has lived his incidents before he writes about them. He is first and foremost a seeker after G.o.d: he abjures literature and art through pride, and thinks that truth is to be found only in working like a peasant: he was unable himself to do this because his wife refused to allow him to. "For ourselves we may do what we like, but for the sake of our children we may not," was her contention.

No man ever more truly exemplified the meaning of Bacon's aphorism that "he that is married hath given hostages to fortune."

He had the pride of Lucifer or Lermontov's Demon, and yet he spent his life searching for the ideal humility of Dostoievsky's Myshkin, the pure fool, the divine idiot.

He starts by advocating non-resistance to evil, and ends by pa.s.sionately resisting it.

From the beginning we find in him a supreme love of himself, a man interested only in Russia, an amazing lack of sympathy with culture, an astonishing want of taste (a lover of Dumas in his youth, he later on pins his faith to George Eliot and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_). He was quite ignorant of life owing to his wealth.

But by far the most outstanding characteristic of this genius is his perfect paganism: he is always seeking for the divine in the animal.

Like so many great Russians, he changed his whole life at one period of his existence.

In 1879 he explains this in a most illuminating pa.s.sage:

"Five years ago something very curious began to take place in me: I began to experience at first times of mental vacuity, of cessation of life, as if I did not know how I was to live or what I was to do. These suspensions of life always found expression in the same problem, 'Why am I here?' and then, 'What next?' I had lived and lived, and gone on and on till I had drawn near a precipice: I saw clearly that before me there lay nothing but destruction. With all my might I endeavoured to escape from this life. And suddenly I, a happy man, began to hide my boot-laces, that I might not hang myself between the wardrobes in my room when undressing alone at night; and ceased to take a gun with me out shooting, so as to avoid temptation by these two means of freeing myself of life."

He was saved from this mood by becoming friendly with the labouring cla.s.ses.

"I lived in this way, that is to say, in communion with the people, for two years; and a change took place in me. What befell me was that the life of our cla.s.s--the wealthy and cultured--not only became repulsive to me, but lost all significance. All our actions, our judgments, science and art itself, appeared to me in a new light. I realised that it was all self-indulgence, that it was useless to look for any meaning in it. I hated myself and acknowledged the truth. Now it had all become clear to me."

Here as always he unfolds to us all that he knows about himself.

At one moment self-conscious, good and weak, he controls himself, repents, and cultivates loathing of himself and his vices; at another, unconscious, wicked and violent, he fancies himself a great man, who has discovered for the welfare of all mankind new truths, and with a proud consciousness of his own merit looks down on other mortals. In other words, he is imbued in one mood with self-love, in another with self-hate. It is always self.

Then come those twenty happy years immediately after his marriage, years of complete isolation and happiness, in which he learnt to live according to "the one truth, that you must live in such a way as may be best for you and your family."

In the words of Ecclesiastes: "He undertook great things: he built himself houses, and planted vineyards, he made gardens and groves, and placed in them all manner of fruit trees, he made himself cisterns for the watering of the groves, he got himself men-servants and maid-servants ... and he became great and rich, and wisdom dwelt with him."

And yet there lies the dread of death lurking always in the dim background. Brave enough when confronted with actual danger, he was yet terrified at the thought of pa.s.sing into nothingness. The truth as he came now to see it consisted in casting out the desire of lands and money; so he determined to leave his home, his wife, his children, his lands, to give away his six hundred thousand kopecks and become a beggar.

"I shall look," he says, "for my friends among the peasants. No woman can stand to me in the place of a friend. Why do we deceive our wives by pretending to consider them our best friends? For it certainly is not true. Woman is, in all respects, morally man's inferior."

"Nowadays," writes his biographer, "Leo behaves to his wife with a touch of exactingness, reproachfulness, and even displeasure, accusing her of preventing him from giving away his property, and going on bringing up the children in the old way. His wife, for her part, thinks herself in the right, and complains of such conduct on her husband's side. In her there has involuntarily sprung up a hatred and loathing of his teaching and its consequences. Between them there has even grown up a tone of mutual contradiction, the voicing of their complaints against one another. Giving away one's property to strangers and leaving one's children on the world, when no one else is disposed to do the same, she not only looks on as out of the question, but thinks it her duty as a mother to prevent."

"'Should I not have gone with him,' she cries, 'if I had not had young children? But he has forgotten everything in his doctrines.'"

Then comes the final decision.

"Leo's wife, in order to preserve the property for her children, was prepared to ask the authorities to appoint a committee to manage the property. Not wishing to oppose his wife by force, he began to a.s.sume towards his property an att.i.tude of ignoring its existence; renounced his income, proceeded to shut his eyes to what became of it, and ceased to make use of it, except in so far as to go on living under the roof of the house at Yasnaya Polyana."

His wife continues to look after his wants and turns a blind eye to his doctrines; she is always ready to help him. Even if he seems ungrateful and says that his wife is no friend of his, she finds comfort in the realisation that he cannot get along without her for a day, and that she has made him what he is. Life becomes one golden holiday: there is an air of infectious jollity pervading the household. He finds sheer animal delight in his physical vigour, and yet ... and yet.... Is he not thinking of himself (as usual) when he writes:

"One refined life, led in moderation and within the bounds of decency, of what is commonly called a virtuous household, one family life, absorbing as many working days as would suffice to maintain thousands of the poor that live in misery hard by, does more to corrupt people than thousands of wild orgies by coa.r.s.e tradesmen, officers or artisans given to drunkenness or debauchery, who smash mirrors and crockery for sheer fun."

It was at this time that he found out that his books were becoming a source of commercial prosperity to him. At first he refused to listen when there was talk of money in connection with his books, but the Countess, to secure the future of her children, stood firm.

Tolstoy was, as is well known, remarkable for the few friendships which he formed. The notable exception is, of course, Turgenev, who wrote of him: "His chief fault consists in the absence of spiritual freedom. He is an egotist to the marrow of his bones." Despite his constant a.s.severation that he always confesses everything, this is the one trait he dare not divulge, even to himself.

Dostoievsky calls him "an ordinary Moscow fop of the upper cla.s.s," "an empty and chaotic soul," _faineantise_ ... but he was more, much more than this. As Merejkvski says, he came very near to solving the supreme mystery, to lifting the veil in the Holy of Holies.... In the end despairingly he has to cry: "I am a fallen fledgling lying on my back and crying in the high gra.s.s." He finds nothing, no faith, no G.o.d, for all his seeking. His path lay in pursuing his ideal through things terrestrial, in carrying on those moments when he rolled in self-admiration in his tub as a naked child, when he felt the fresh touch of the cherry-tree boughs, like a child's kiss, against his face.

In all literature there is no writer equal to Tolstoy in depicting the human body. He is accurate, simple and as short as possible, selecting only the few small unnoticed facial or personal features, and producing them gradually he distributes them over the whole course of the story.

The wife of Prince Andre in _Peace and War_ is for ever recurring to our memory owing to the fact that we are constantly reminded of her short downy upper lip. Prince Andre's sister, too, is always fixed in our minds owing to her trick of flushing in patches and walking heavily.

There are countless instances of this. There is the long thin neck of Verestchagin, the swollen neck of Prince Andre, the rotundity of Platon Karataev, the little white hand of Napoleon. All these details are impressed upon us with unwearying insistence until we come to realise that this is Tolstoy's peculiar method of unfolding before us the psychology of his characters. He has the gift of insight into the body of his _dramatis personae_. Think for a moment of Anna Karenina. Trait is added to trait, feature to feature ... she has red lips, flashing grey eyes, and most noticeable of all, her hands are made to express her more even than her face. In them lies the whole charm of her person, the union of strength with delicacy.

We learn that she always held herself exceptionally erect, that she has a quick, decisive gait, when she dances she has a distinguishing grace, sureness and lightness of movement. Tolstoy emphasises again and again the roundness of her arms, the unruliness of her curls; the traits are so harmonised that they naturally and involuntarily unite, in the fancy of the reader, into one living, personal whole. We feel how easy and pleasant it is to the author to describe living bodies and their movements, not only of people, but also of animals. Even the Tartar footmen who wait on Levine are said to be broad-hipped, an unnecessary touch which shows us how much this sort of bodily accentuation can be carried to excess.

For there is no doubt that Tolstoy relies on gestures where another writer would have had recourse to words. He uses this convertible connection between the external and the internal with inimitable art and exquisite effect. It is the silent smile of Natasha which decides the fate of Pierre far more effectively than any words.

So peculiar is this gift that it has been said that the nervous susceptibility of people becomes different after reading Tolstoy's works. He notices what has escaped everyone else, and uses his discovery with a subtlety of effect that is startling. Thus it is to him that we are indebted for the simple but none the less surprising fact that a man's smile is reflected not only in his face, but also in the sound of his voice.

Thus Platon Karataev says something to Pierre "in a voice changed by a smile." Tolstoy was the first to notice that horse-hoofs have the queer effect of giving, as it were, a "transparent sound." As we should expect from so "animal-loving" a man, Tolstoy sounds every note in sensation.

He is equally able to fathom the sensation of her bared body to a young girl, before going to her first ball, and the feelings of an old woman worn out with child-bearing, and those of a nursing mother who has not yet severed the mysterious connection of her body with that of her child. Even the sensations of animals are familiar to him. Not the least of his gifts to us is that he gave us new bodily sensations. He is the greatest portrayer of the physico-spiritual region in the natural man: that side of the spirit which most nearly approximates to the flesh. He is a man of the senses, half-pagan, a fraction Christian: in the region of pure thought, where Dostoievsky walked at ease, superbly master, he is totally at a loss. But within the limits of the animal in man he is the supreme artist of the world.