NIETZSCHE
It is not the hour in which to say much about Nietzsche. The dissentient voices are silent. The crowd has stopped howling. But a worse thing is happening to him, the thing of all others he dreaded most;—he is becoming "accepted"—The preachers are quoting him and the theologians are explaining him.
What he would himself pray for now are Enemies—fierce irreconcilable Enemies—but our age cannot produce such. It can only produce sneering disparagement; or frightened conventional approbation.
What one would like to say, at this particular juncture, is thathere,or againthere,this deadly antagonist of God missed his aim. But who can say that? He aimed too surely. No, he did not miss his aim. He smote whom he went out to smite. But one thing he could not smite; he could neither smite it, or unmask it, or "transvalue" it. I mean the Earth itself—the great, shrewd, wise, all-enduring Mother of us all—who knows so much, and remains so silent!
And sometimes one feels, walking some country road, with the smell of upturned sods and heavy leaf-mould in one's nostrils, that even Lucifer himself is not as deep or strong or wise as is patient furrowed earth and her blundering children. A rough earth-hint, a Rabelaisian ditty, a gross amazing jest, a chuckle of deep Satyric humour;—and the monstrous "thickness" of Life, its friendly aplomb and nonchalance, its grotesque irreverence, its shy shrewd common-sense, its tough fibres, and portentous indifference to "distinction"; tumbles us over in the mud—for all our "aloofness"—and roars over us, like a romping bull-calf!
The antidote to Nietzsche is not to be found in the company of the Saints. He was too much of a Saint himself for that. It is to be found in the company of Shakespearean clodhoppers, and Rabelaisian topers, and Cervantian serving-wenches. In fact, it is to be found, as with the antidotes for other noble excesses, in burying your face in rough moist earth; and grubbing for pig-nuts under the beech-trees. A summer's day in the woods with Audrey will put "Fatality" into its place and remove "the Recurrence of all things" to a very modest remoteness. And this is not a relinquishing of the secret of life. This is not a giving up of the supreme quest. It is an opening of another door; a letting in of a different air; a reversion to a more primitive level of the mystery.
The way to reduce the tyranny of this proud spirit to its proper proportion is not to talk about "Love" or "Morality" or "Orthodoxy," or "the strength of the vulgar herd"—it is simply to call up in one's mind the motley procession of gross, simple, quaint,bulbous,irrepressible objects—human and otherwise—whose mere existence makes it as impossible for Nietzsche to deal with themassivenessof Life, as it is impossible for anyone else to deal with it.
No, we shall not free ourselves from his intellectual predominance by taking refuge with the Saints. We shall not do this because he himself was essentially a Saint. A Saint and a Martyr! Is it for me now to prove that?
It is realized, I suppose, what the history of his spiritual contest actually was? It was a deliberate self-inflicted Crucifixion of the Christ in him, as an offering to the Apollo in him. Nietzsche was—that cannot be denied—an Intellectual Sadist; and his Intellectual Sadism took the form—as it can (he has himself taught us so) take many curious forms—of deliberately outraging his own most sensitive nerves. This is really what broke his reason, in the end. By a process of spiritual vivisection—the suffering of which one dare not conceive—he took his natural "sanctity," and carved it, as a dish fit for the gods, until it assumed an Apollonian shape. We must visualize Nietzsche not only as the Philosopher with the Hammer; but as the Philosopher with the Chisel.
We must visualize him, with such a sculptor's tool, standing in the presence of the crucified figure of himself; and altering one by one, its natural lineaments! Nietzsche's own lacerated "intellectual nerves" were the vantage-ground of his spiritual vision. He could write "the Antichrist" because he had "killed." in his own nature, "the thing he loved" It was for this reason that he had such a supernatural insight into the Christian temperament. It was for this reason that he could pour vitriol upon its "little secrets"; and hunt it to its last retreats.
Let none think he did not understand the grandeur, and the terrible intoxicating appeal, of the thing he fought. He understood these only too well. What vibrating sympathy—as for a kindred spirit—may be read between the lines of his attack on Pascal—Pascal, the supreme type of the Christian Philosopher!
It must be further realized—for after all what are words and phrases?—that it was really nothing but the "Christian conscience" in him that forced him on so desperately to kick against the pricks. It was the "Christian conscience" in him—has he not himself analysed the voluptuous cruelty of that?—which drove him to seek something—if possible—nobler, austerer, gayer, more innocently wicked, than Christianity!
It was not in the interests of Truth that he fought it. True Christian, as he was, at heart, he never cared greatly for Truth as Truth. It was in the interest of a Higher Ideal, a more exacting, less human Ideal, that he crushed it down. The Christian spirit, in him set him upon strangling the Christian spirit—and all in the interest of a madness of nobility, itself perforated with Christian conscience!
Was Nietzsche really Greek, compared with—Goethe, let us say? Not for a moment. It was in the desperation of his attempt to be so, that he seized upon Greek tragedy and made it dance to Christian cymbals! This is, let it be clearly understood, the hidden secret of his mania for Dionysus—Dionysus gave him his opportunity. In the worship of this god—also a wounded god, be it remarked;—he was able to satisfy his perverted craving for "ecstasy of laceration" under the shadow of another Name.
But after all—as Goethe says—"feeling is all in all; the name is sound and smoke." What he felt were Christian feelings, the feelings of a Mystic, a Visionary, a Flagellant. What matter by what name you call them? Christ? Dionysus? It is the secret creative passion of the human heart that sends them Both forth upon their warfaring.
Is any one simple enough to think that whatever Secret Cosmic Power melts into human ecstasy, it waits to be summoned by certain particular syllables? That this arbitrary strangling of the Christ in him never altogether ended, is proved by the words of those tragic messages he sent to Cosima Wagner from "the aristocratic city of Turin" when his tormented brain broke like a taut bow-string. Those messages resembled arrows of fire, shot into space; and on one was written the words "The Crucified" and on the other the word "Dionysus."
The grand and heart-breaking appeal of this lonely Victim of his own merciless scourge, does not depend, for its effect upon us, upon any of the particular "ideas" he announced. The idea of the "Eternal Recurrence of all things"—to take the most terrible—is clearly but another instance of his intellectual Sadism.
The worst thing that could happen to those innumerable Victims of Life, for whom he sought to kill his Pity, was that they should have to go through the same punishment again—not once or twice, but for an infinity of times—and it was just that that he, whose immense Pity for them took so long a killing, suddenly felt must be whathadto happen—had to happen for no other reason than that it wasintolerablethat it should happen. Again, we may note, it was not "Truth" he sought, but ecstasy, and, in this case, the ecstasy of "accepting" the very worst kind of issue he could possibly imagine.
The idea of the Superman, too, is an idea that could only have entered the brain of one, pushed on to think, at the spear-head of his own cruelty. It is a great and terrible idea, sublime and devastating, this idea of the human race yielding place toanother race,stronger, wiser, fairer, sterner, gayer, and more godlike! Especially noble and compelling is Nietzsche's constant insistence that the moment has come for men to take their Destiny out of the blind power of Evolution, and to guide it themselves, with a strong hand and a clear will, towards adefinite goal.
The fact that this driving force, of cruelty to himself and, through himself, to humanity, scourged him on to so formidable an illumination of our path, is a proof how unwise it is to suppress any grand perversion. Such motive-forces should be used, as Nietzsche used his, for purposes of intellectual insight—not simply trampled upon as "evil."
Whether our poor human race ever will surpass itself, as he demands, and rise to something psychologically different, "may admit a wide solution." It is not an unscientific idea. It is not an irreligious idea. It has all the dreams of the Prophets behind it. But—who can tell? It is quite as possible that the spirit of destruction in us will wantonly ruin this great Chance as that we shall seize upon it. Man has many other impulses besides the impulse of creation. Perhaps he will never be seduced into evendesiringsuch a goal, far less "willing" it over long spaces of time.
The curious "optimism" of Nietzsche, by means of which he sought to force himself into a mood of such Dionysian ecstasy as to be able not only to endure Fate, but to "love" it, is yet another example of the subterranean "conscience" of Christianity working in him. In the presence of such a mood, and, indeed, in the presence of nearly all his great dramatic Passions, it is Nietzsche, and not his humorous critic, who is "with Our Lord" in Gethsemane. One does not drink of the cup of Fate "lovingly"—without bloody sweat!
The interesting thing to observe about Nietzsche's ideas is that the wider they depart from what was essentially Christian in him, the less convincing they grow. One cannot help feeling he recognised this himself—and, infuriated by it, strode further and further into the Jungle.
For instance, one cannot suppose that the cult of "the Blonde Beast," and the cult of Caesar Borgia, were anything but mad reprisals, directed towards himself, in savage revenge; blind blows struck at random against the lofty and penetrating spirituality in which he had indulged when writing Zarathustra.
But there is a point here of some curious psychological interest, to which we are attracted by a certain treacherous red glow upon his words when he speaks of this sultry, crouching, spotted, tail-lashing mood. Why is it precisely this Borgian type, this Renaissance type, among the world's various Lust-Darlings that he chooses to select?
Why does he not oppose, to the Christian Ideal,its true opposite—the naive, artless, faun-like, pagan "child of Nature," who has never known "remorse"?
The answer is clear. He chooses the Borgian type—the type which isnotfree from "superstition," which is always wrestling with "superstition"—the type that sprinkles holy water upon its dagger—because such a type is the inevitableproductof the presence among us of the Christian Ideal. The Christian Ideal has made a certain complication of "wickedness" possible, which were impossible without it.
If Nietzsche had not been obsessed by Christianity he would have selected as his "Ideal Blond Beast" that perfectly naive, "unfallen" man, of imperturbable nerves, of classic nerves, such as Life abounded inbefore Christ came.He makes, indeed, a pathetic struggle to idealize this type, rather than the "conscience-stricken" Renaissance one. He lets his fingers stray more than once over the red-stained limbs of real sun-burnt "Pompeian" heathenism. He turns feverishly the wanton pages of Petronius to reach this unsullied, "imperial" Animal. But he cannot reach him. He never could reach him. The "consecrated" dagger of the Borgia gleams and scintillates between. Even, therefore, in the sort of "wickedness" he evokes, Nietzsche remains Christ-ridden and Christ-mastered. The matter is made still more certain when one steals up silently, so to speak, behind the passages where he speaks of Napoleon.
If a reader has the remotest psychological clairvoyance, he will be aware of a certain strain and tug, a certain mental jerk and contortion, whenever Napoleon is introduced.
Yes, he could engrave that fatal "N" over his mantlepiece at Weimar—to do so was the last solace of his wounded brain. But he was never really at ease with the great Emperor. Never did he—in pure, direct, classic recognition—greet him as "the Demonic Master of Destiny," with the Goethean salutation! Had Goethe and Napoleon, in their notorious encounter, wherein they recognized one another as "Men," been interrupted by the entrance of Nietzsche, do you suppose they would not have both stiffened and recoiled, recognizing their natural Enemy, the Cross-bearer, the Christ-obsessed one,"Il Santo"?
The difference between the two types can best be felt by recalling the way in which Napoleon and Goethe treated the Christ-Legend, compared with Nietzsche's desperate wrestling.
Napoleon uses "Religion" calmly and deliberately for his High Policy and Worldly Statecraft.
Goethe uses "Religion" calmly and deliberately for his aesthetic culture and his mystic symbolism. Neither of them are, for one moment, touched by it themselves.
They are born Pagans; and when this noble, tortured soul flings himself at their feet in feverish worship, one feels that, out of their Homeric Hades, they look wonderingly,unintelligently,at him.
One of the most laughable things in the world is the attempt some simple critics make to turn Nietzsche into an ordinary "Honest Infidel," a kind of poetic Bradlaugh-Ingersoll, offering to humanity the profound discovery that there is no God, and that when we die, we die! The absurdity is made complete when this naive, revivified "Pagan" is made to assure us—us, "the average sensual men"—that the path of wisdom lies, not in resisting, but in yielding totemptation;not in spiritual wrestling to "transform" ourselves, but in the brute courage "to be ourselves," and "live out our type"!
The good folk who play with such a childish illusion would do well to scan over again their "pagan" hero's branding and flaying of the philosopher Strauss. Strauss was precisely what they try to turn Nietzsche into—a rancorous, insensitive, bullying, materialistic Heathen, making sport of "the Cross" and drinking Laager Beer. Nietzsche loathed Laager Beer, and "the Cross"burntday and night in his tormented, Dionysian soul.
It occurs to me sometimes that if there had been no "German Reformation" and no overrunning of the world by vulgar evangelical Protestantism, it would be still possible to bring into the circle of the Church's development the lofty and desperate Passion of this "saintly" Antichrist. After all, why should we concede that those agitated, voluptuous, secret devices to get "saved," those super-subtle, subliminal tricks of the weak and the perverted to berevengedon the beautiful and the brave, which Nietzsche laments were ever "bound up" in the same cover as the "Old Testament." must remain forever the dominant "note" in the Faith of Christendom? While the Successor of Caesar, while the Pontifex Maximus of our "Spiritual Rome," still represents the Infallible Element in the world's nobler religious Taste, there is yet, perhaps, a remote chance that this vulgarizing of "the mountain summits" this degrading of our Planet's Passion-Play, may be cauterized and eliminated.
And yet it is not likely! Much more likely is it that the real "secret" of Jesus, together with the real "secret" of Nietzsche—and they do not differ in essence, for all his Borgias!—will remain the sweet and deadly "fatalities" they have always been—for the few, the few, the few who understand them!
For the final impression one carries away, after reading Nietzsche, is the impression of "distinction," of remoteness from "vulgar brutality," from "sensual baseness," from the clumsy compromises of the world. It may not last, this Zarathustrian mood. It lasts with some of us an hour; with some of us a day—with a few of us a handful of years! But while it lasts, it is a rare and high experience. As from an ice-bound promontory stretching out over the abysmal gulfs, we dare to look Creation and Annihilation, for once, full in the face.
Liberated from our own lusts, or using them, contemptuously and indifferently, as engines of vision, we see the life and death of worlds, the slow, long-drawn, moon-lit wave of Universe-drowning Nothingness.
We see the races of men, falling, rising, stumbling, advancing and receding—and we see thenew race—in the hours of the "Great Noon-tide"—fulfilling its Prophet's hope—and we seethe end of that also!And seeing all this, because the air of our watch-tower is so ice-cold and keen, we neither tremble or blench. The world is deep, and deep is pain, and deeper than pain is joy. We have seen Creation, and have exulted in it. We have seen Destruction, and have exulted in it. We have watched the long, quivering Shadow of Life shudder across our glacial promontory, and we have watched that drowning tide receive it. It is enough. It is well. We have had our Vision. We know now what gives to the gods "that look" their faces wear.
It now only remains for us to return to the familiar human Stage; to the "Gala-Night, within the lonesome latter years," and be gay, and "hard," and "superficial"!
That ice-bound Promontory into the Truth of Things has only known one Explorer whose "Eloi, Eloi Lama Sabachthani" was not the death-cry of his Pity. And that Explorer—did we only dream of his Return?
THOMAS HARDY
With a name suggestive of the purest English origin, Mr. Hardy has become identified with that portion of England where the various race-deposits in our national "strata" are most dear and defined. In Wessex, the traditions of Saxon and Celt, Norman and Dane, Roman and Iberian, have grown side by side into the soil, and all the villages and towns, all the hills and streams, of this country have preserved the rumour of what they have seen.
In Celtic legend the country of the West Saxons is marvellously rich. Camelot and the Island of Avalon greet one another across the Somersetshire vale. And Dorsetshire, Hardy's immediate home, adds the Roman traditions of Casterbridge to tragic memories of King Lear. Tribe by tribe, race by race, as they come and go, leaving their monuments and their names behind, Mr. Hardy broods over them, noting their survivals, their lingering footprints, their long decline.
In his well-loved Dorchester we find him pondering, like one of his own spirits of Pity and Irony, while the moonlight shines on the haunted amphitheatre where the Romans held their games. He devotes much care to noting all those little "omens by the way" that make a journey along the great highways of Wessex so full of imaginative suggestion.
It is the history of the human race itself that holds him with a mesmeric spell, as century after century it unrolls its acts and scenes, under the indifferent stars. The continuity of life! The long, piteous "ascent of man," from those queer fossils in the Portland Quarries—to what we see today, so palpable, so real! And yet for all his tragic pity, Mr. Hardy is a sly and whimsical chronicler. He does not allow one point of the little jest the gods play on us—the little long-drawn-out jest—to lose its sting. With something of a goblin-like alertness he skips here and there, watching those strange scene shifters at their work. The dual stops of Mr. Hardy's country pipe are cut from the same reed. With the one he challenges the Immortals on behalf of humanity; with the other he plays such a shrewd Priapian tune that all the Satyrs dance.
I sometimes think that only those born and bred in the country can do justice to this great writer. That dual pipe of his is bewildering to city people. They over emphasize the "magnanimity" of his art, or they over emphasize its "miching-mallecho." They do not catch the secret of that mingled strain. The same type of cultured "foreigner" is puzzled by Mr. Hardy's self-possession. He ought to commit himself more completely, or he ought not to have committed himself at all! There is something that looks to them—so they are tempted to express it—like the cloven hoof of a most Satyrish cunning, about his attitude to certain things. That little caustic by-play, for instance, with which he girds at the established order, never denouncing it wholesale like Shelley, or accepting it wholesale like Wordsworth—and always with a tang, a dash of gall and wormwood, an impish malice.
The truth is, there are two spirits in Mr. Hardy, one infinitely sorrowful and tender, the other whimsical, elfish and malign.
The first spirit rises up in stern Promethean revolt against the decrees of Fate. The second spirit deliberately allies itself in wanton, bitter glee, with the humorous provocation of humanity, by the cruel Powers of the Air. The psychology of all this is not hard to unravel. The same abnormal sensitiveness that makes him pity the victims of destiny makes him also not unaware of what may be sweet to the palate of the gods in such "merry jests." These two tendencies seem to have grown upon him as years went on and to have become more and more pronounced. Often, with artists, the reverse thing happens. Every human being has his own secretive reaction, his own furtive recoil, from the queer trap we are all in,—his little private method of retaliation. But many writers are most unscrupulously themselves when they are young. The changes and chances of this mortal life mellow them into a more neutral tint. Their revenge upon life grows less personal and more objective as they get older. They become balanced and resigned. They attain "the wisdom of Sophocles."
The opposite of this has been the history of Mr. Hardy's progression. He began with quite harmless rustic realism, fanciful and quaint. Then came his masterpieces wherein the power and grandeur of a great artist's inspiration fused everything into harmony. At the last, in his third period, we have the exaggeration of all that is most personal in his emotion intensified to the extreme limit.
It is absurd to turn away from these books, books like Jude the Obscure and the Well-Beloved. If Mr. Hardy had not had such sardonic emotions, such desire to "hit back" at the great "opposeless wills," and such Goblin-like glee at the tricks they play us, he would never have been able to write "Tess." Against the ways of God to this sweet girl he raises a hand of terrible revolt, but it is with more than human "pity" that he lays her down on the Altar of Sacrifice.
But, after all, it is in the supreme passages of pure imaginative grandeur that Mr. Hardy is greatest. Here he is "with Shakespeare" and we forget both Titan and Goblin. How hard it is exactly to put into words what this "imaginative grandeur" consists of! It is, at any rate, an intensification of our general consciousness of the Life-Drama as a whole, but this, under a poetic, rather than a scientific, light, and yet with the scientific facts,—they also not without their dramatic significance—indicated and allowed for. It is a clarifying of our mental vision and a heightening of our sensual apprehension. It is a certain withdrawing from the mere personal pull of our own fate into a more rarified air, where the tragic beauty of life falls into perspective, and, beholding the world in a clear mirror, we escape for a moment from "the will to live."
At such times it is as though, "taken up upon a high mountain, we see, without desire and without despair, the kingdoms of the world and the glories of them." Then it is that we feel the very wind of the earth's revolution, and the circling hours touch us with a palpable hand.
And the turmoil of the world grown so distant, it is then that we feel at once the greatness of humanity and the littleness of what it strives for. We are seized with a shuddering tenderness for Man. This bewildered animal—wrestling in darkness with he knows not what.
And gazing long and long into this mirror, the poignancy of what we behold is strangely softened. After all, it is something, whatever becomes of us, to have been conscious of all this. It is something to have outwatched Arcturus, and felt "the sweet influences" of the Pleiades. Congruous with such a mood is the manner in which, while Mr. Hardy opposes himself to Christianity, he cannot forget it. He cannot "cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart." It troubles and vexes him. It haunts him. And his work both gains and suffers. He flings gibe after gibe at "God," but across his anger falls the shadow of the Cross. How should it not be so? "All may be permitted," but one must not add a feather's weight to the wheel that breaks our "little ones."
It is this that separates Mr. Hardy's work from so much modern fiction that is clever and "philosophical" but does not satisfy one's imagination. All things with Mr. Hardy—even the facts of geology and chemistry—are treated with that imaginative clairvoyance that gives them their place in the human comedy. And is not Christianity itself one of these facts? How amazing that such a thing should have appeared at all upon the earth! When one reads Meredith, with his brilliant intellectual cleverness, one finds Christianity "taken for granted," and dismissed as hardly relevant to modern topics.
But Mr. Hardy is too pagan, in the true sense, too fascinated by the poetry of life and the essential ritual of life, to dismiss any great religion in this way. The thing is always with him, just as the Gothic Tower of St. Peter's Church in Casterbridge is always with him. He may burst into impish fury with its doctrines, but, like one of those queer demons who peep out from such consecrated places, yet never leave them, his imagination requires that atmosphere. For the same reason, in spite of his intellectual realization of the mechanical processes of Fate, their engine-like dumbness and blindness, he is always being driven topersonifythese ultimate powers; to personify them, orit,as something that takes infernal satisfaction in fooling its luckless creations; in provoking them and scourging them to madness.
Mr. Hardy's ultimate thought is that the universe is blind and unconscious; that it knows not what it does. But, standing among the graves of those Wessex churchyards, or watching the twisted threads of perverse destiny that plague those hapless hearts under a thousand village roofs, it is impossible for him not to long to "strike back" at this damned System of Things that alone is responsible. And how can one "strike back" unless one converts unconscious machinery into a wanton Providence? Where Mr. Hardy is so incomparably greater than Meredith and all his modern followers is that in these Wessex novels there is none of that intolerable "ethical discussion" which obscures "the old essential candours" of the human situation.
The reaction of men and women upon one another, in the presence of the solemn and the mocking elements; this will outlast all social readjustments and all ethical reforms.
While the sun shines and the moon draws the tides, men and women will ache from jealousy, and the lover will not be the beloved! Long after a quite new set of "interesting modern ideas" have replaced the present, children will break the hearts of their parents, and parents will break the hearts of their children. Mr. Hardy is indignant enough over the ridiculous conventions of Society, but he knows that, at the bottom, what we suffer from is "the dust out of which we are made;" the eternal illusion and disillusion which must drive us on and "take us off" until the planet's last hour.
Mr. Hardy's style, at its best, has an imaginative suggestiveness which approaches, though it may not quite reach, the indescribable touch of the Shakespearean tragedies. There is also a quality in it peculiar to himself—threatening and silencing; a thunderous suppression, a formidable reserve, an iron tenacity. Sometimes, again, one is reminded of the ancient Roman poets, and not unfrequently, too, of the rhythmic incantations of Sir Thomas Browne, that majestic and perverted Latinist.
The description, for instance, of Egdon Heath, at the beginning of the Return of the Native, has a dusky architectural grandeur that is like the Portico of an Egyptian Temple. The same thing may be noted of that sudden apparition of Stonehenge, as Tess and Angel stumble upon it in their flight through the darkness.
One thinks of the words of William Blake: "He who does not love Form more than Colour is a coward." For it is, above all, Form that appeals to Mr. Hardy. The iron plough of his implacable style drives pitilessly through the soft flesh of the earth until it reaches the architectural sub-structure. Whoever tries to visualize any scene out of the Wessex Novels will be forced to see the figures of the persons concerned "silhouetted" against a formidable skyline. One sees them, these poor impassioned ones, moving in tragic procession along the edge of the world, and, when the procession is over, darkness re-establishes itself. The quality that makes Mr. Hardy's manner such a refuge from the levities and gravities of the "reforming writers" is a quality that springs from the soil. The soil has a gift of "proportion" like nothing else. Things fall into due perspective on Egdon Heath, and among the water-meadows of Blackmoor life is felt as the tribes of men have felt it since the beginning.
The modern tendency is to mock at sexual passion and grow grave over social and artistic problems. Mr. Hardy eliminates social and artistic problems and "takes nothing seriously"—not even "God"—except the love and the hate of men and women, and the natural elements that are their accomplices. It is for this lack in them, this uneasy levity over the one thing that really counts, that it is so hard to read many humorous and arresting modern writers, except in railway trains and cafes. They have thought it clever to dispossess the passion of our poor heart of its essential poetry. They have not understood that man would sooner suffer the bitterness of death than be deprived of hisrightto suffer the bitterness of love.
It must be, I suppose, that these flippant triflers are so optimistic about their reforms and their ethical ideals and their sanitary projects that to them such things as how the sun rises over Shaston and sinks over Budmouth; such things as what Eustacia felt when she walked, "talking to herself," across the blasted heath; such things as the mood of Henchard when he cursed the day of his birth, are mere accidents and irrelevancies, by no means germane to the matter.
Well, perhaps they are wise to be so hopeful. But for the rest of us, for whom the world does not seem likely to "improve" so fast, it is an unspeakable relief that there should be at least one writer left interested in the things that interested Sophocles and Shakespeare, and possessed of a style that does not, remembering the work of such hands, put our generation altogether to shame.
WALTER PATER
What are the qualities that make this shy and furtive Recluse, this Wanderer in the shadow, the greatest of critics? Imagination, in the first place, and then that rare, unusual, divine gift of limitless Reverence for the Human Senses. Imagination has a two-fold power. It visualizes and it creates. With clairvoyant ubiquity it floats and flows into the most recondite recesses, the most reluctant sanctuaries, of other men's souls. With clear-cut, architectural volition it builds up its own Byzantium, out of the quarried debris of all the centuries.
One loves to think of Pater leaving that Olney country, where he "hated" to hear anything more about "the Poet Cowper," and nursing his weird boy-fancies in the security of the Canterbury cloisters. The most passionate and dedicated spirit he—to sulk, and dream, and hide, and love, and "watch the others playing," in that quiet retreat—since the great soul of Christopher Marlowe flamed up there into consciousness!
And then Oxford. And it is meet and right, at such a point as this, to lay our offering, modest, secret, shy—a shadow, a nothing—at the feet of this gracious Alma Mater; "who needs not June for Beauty's heightening!" One revolts against her sometimes. The charm is too exclusive, too withdrawn. And something—what shall I say?—of ironic, supercilious disillusion makes her forehead weary, and her eyelids heavy. But after all, to what exquisite children, like rare, exotic flowers, she has the power to give birth! But did you know, you for whom the syllables "Oxford" are an Incantation, that to the yet more subtle, yet more withdrawn, and yet more elaborate soul of Walter Pater, Oxford Herself appeared, as time went on, a little vulgar and silly?
Indeed, he fled from her, and took refuge-sometimes with his sisters, for, like Charles Lamb, Pater was "Conventual" in his taste—and sometimes with the "original" of Marius the Epicurean. But what matter where he fled—he who always followed the "shady side" of the road? He has not only managed to escape, himself, with all his "Boxes of Alabaster," into the sanctuary of the Ivory Tower, that even Oxford cannot reach, but he has carried us thither with him.
And there, from the opal-clouded windows of that high place, he shows us still the secret kingdoms of art and philosophy and life, and the remotest glories of them. We see them all—from those windows—a little lovelier, a little rarer, a little more "selective," than, perchance, they really are. But what matter? What does one expect when one looks through opal-clouded windows? And, after all, those are the kinds of windows from which it is best to look at the dazzling limbs of the immortal gods!
Not but what, sometimes, he permits us to throw those "magic casements" wide open. And then, in how lucid an air, in how clean and fresh a morning of reality, those pure forms and godlike figures stand out, their naked feet in the cold, clear dew!
For one must note two things about Walter Pater. He is able to throw the glimmering mantle of his own elaboratesophistry of the sensesover comparatively fleeting, unarresting objects. And he is able to compel us to follow, line by line, curve by curve, contour by contour, the very palpable body and presence of the Beauty that passeth not away.
In plainer words, he is a great and exact scholar—laborious, patient, indefatigable, reserved; and, at the same time, a Protean Wizard, breathing forbidden life into the Tyrian-stained writhings of many an enchanted Lamia! At a thousand points he is the only modern literary figure who draws us towards him with the old Leonardian, Goethean spell. For, like Goethe and Da Vinci, he is never far from those eternal "Partings of the Ways." which alone make life interesting.
He is, for instance, more profoundly drenched, dyed, and endued in "Christian Mythology" than any mortal writer, short of the Saints themselves. He is more native to the pure Hellenic air than any since Walter Savage Landor. And he is more subtle, in his understanding of "German Philosophy" as opposed to "Celtic Romance," than all—outside the most inner circles—since Hegel—or Heine! The greedy, capricious "Uranian Babyishness" of his pupil Oscar, with its peevish clutching at all soft and provocative and glimmering things, is mere child's play, compared with the deep, dark Vampirism with which this furtive Hermit drains the scarlet blood of the Vestals of every Sanctuary.
How little the conventional critics have understood this master of their own craft! What hopeless people have "rushed in" to interpret this super-subtle Interpreter! Mr. Gosse has, however, done one thing for us. Somewhere, somehow, he once drew a picture of Walter Pater "gambolling," in the moonlight, on the velvet lawn of his own secluded Oxford garden, like a satin-pawed Wombat! I always think of that picture. It is a pleasanter one than that of Mark Pattison, running round his Gooseberry bushes, after great screaming girls. But they are both touching sketches, and, no doubt, very indicative of Life beneath the shadow of the Bodleian.
Why have the professional philosophers—ever since that Master of Baliol who used to spend his time boring holes in the Ship that carried him—"fought shy" of Pater's Philosophy? For a sufficient reason! Because, like Protagoras the Sophist, and like Aristippus the Cyrenean, he has undermined Metaphysic,by means of Metaphysic.
For Walter Pater—is that clearly understood?—was an adept, long before Nietzsche's campaign began, at showing the human desire, the human craving, the human ferocity, the human spite, hidden behind the mask of "Pure Reason."
He treats every great System of Metaphysic as a great work of Art—with a very human, often a too human, artizan behind it—a work of Art which we have a perfect right to appropriate, to enjoy, to look at the world through, and thento pass on!
Every Philosophy has its "secret," according to Pater, its "formula," 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 noreason,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, whocannotdo 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 tastecannot 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 thematerialswhich artists use. And most of all, withwords,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 god—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 passion 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 lifeso as to taste every drop.
One could expatiate long upon his attitude 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 passage; a hit in the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat. Everything that has beenforbidden,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 hasfelt,but has not dared to think; all that one hasthought,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,willnot, say. There is so much that the normal self-preservative instincts in ourselves do notwantsaid. 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 embarrass? What matter? Werequireembarrassment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must have no closed chinks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform its microcosmic reflections, evendown 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 Woodpecker's beak! They seem labouring beneath some pathetic vow, exacted by the Demons of our Fate, under terrible threats, only to reveal what will servetheirpurpose! 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 Sex, 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 didnotconfess! Such a person, reading this desperate "clairvoyant," finds himself laughing and chuckling, under his breath, andagainst his willyover the little things there betrayed. It is not any more a case of enjoying with distant aesthetic amusement the general human spectacle. He himself is the one scratched and pricked. 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 passionate 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 ourselvesat 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 understandsthe depravityof 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 lusts 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 analysis, but in the living cries, and gasps, and gestures, and fumblings and silences of his characters themselves. Who, like Dostoievsky, has shown the tragic association of passionate love with passionate hate, which is so frequent a human experience?
This monstroushate-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 twoprimary 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 scum, 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 areourthoughts, their obsessions,ourobsessions. 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 passionate religious faith, and discussing with desperate interest religious questions. But it isourpsychology that is shallow and inhuman, not his, and the presence of real religious feeling in a nature obsessed with the maddest lusts 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 substitution of what might be called "sanctity" 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 association between Christianity and a certain masterful, moral, self-assertive 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 toalldeviations 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 gods 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 lust, whose extravagant manias and excesses of remorse suggest attitudes and gestures that would need an Aubrey Beardsley for illustration, 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 aspiritualrather than asensualquality, or, to put it in another way, there are abysmal depths of spiritual subtlety in their most sensual obsession. The only entirelybasecriminal 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 "Beatitudes" 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 assailants. Stephan Trophinovitch reading the Miracle of the Swine with his female Colporteur; Raskolnikoff reading the Miracle of the Raising of Lazarus with his prostitute 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 passages in Dostoievsky the strange and ambiguous nature of which leads one's thought far enough from Evangelical simplicities; passages 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 passages 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 pursues his own happiness. He exposes over and over again, with nerve-rending subtlety, how intoxicating to the human spirit is the mad lust 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 passion 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 embarrassing 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 universewith many doors;with many doors, and not a few terrifyingly dark passages; 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 mysteriousperversityof 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 eveninterestedin 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 passion, 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 passing 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, associated in detail after detail with the passions 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-consciousartof a Loti or a D'Annunzio; it is that much more penetrating and imaginativesuggestivenesswhich 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 principal 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 shore, 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. The unintelligent cheerfulness of the crowd so sickens one; the disingenuous sophistry of its hired preachers fills one with such blank depression that it seems sometimes as though the only mood worthy of normal intelligence were the mood of callous indifference and universal mockery.
All men are liars, and "the Ultimate Futility" grins horribly from its mask. Well! It is precisely at these hours, at the hours when the little pincers of the gods especially nip and squeeze, that it is good to turn the pages of Fyodor Dostoievsky. He brings us his "Balm of Gilead" between the hands of strange people, but it is a true "alabaster box of precious ointment," and though the flowers it contains are snatched from the House of the Dead, one knows at whose feet it was once poured forth, and for whose sake it was broken!
The books that are the most valuable in this world are not the books that pretend to solve life's mystery with a system. They are the books which create a certain mood, a certain temper—the mood, in fact, which is prepared for incredible surprises—the temper which no surprise can overpower. These books of Dostoievsky must always take their place in this great roll, because, though he arrives at no conclusion and utters no oracle, the atmosphere he throws round us is the atmosphere in which Life and Death are "equal;" the gestures his people make, in their great darkness, are the gestures ofthat which goes upon its way,beyond Good and beyond Evil!
Dostoievsky is more than an artist. He is, perhaps—who can tell?—the founder of a new religion. And yet the religion he "founds" is a religion which has been about us for more years than human history can count. He, more than anyone, makes palpable and near—too palpable—O Christ! The terror of it!—that shadowy, monstrous weight of oppressive darkness, through which we signal to each other from our separate Hells.Itsways and wavers, it gathers and re-gathers, it thickens and deepens, it lifts and sinks, and we know all the while that it is the Thing we ourselves have made, and the intolerable whispers whereof it is full are the children of our own thoughts, of our lusts, of our fears, of our terrible creative dreams.
Dostoievsky's books seem, as one handles them, to flow mysteriously together into one book, and this book is the book of the Last Judgment. The great obscure Land he leads us over, so full of desolate marshes, and forlorn spaces, and hemlock-roots, and drowned tree-trunks, and Golgothas of broken shards and unutterable refuse, is the Land of those visions which are our inmost selves, and for which we areanswerableand none else.
Across this Land we wander, feeling for some fingers, cold and dead as our own, to share that terror with, and, it may be, finding none, for as we have groped forward we have been pitiless in the darkness, and, half-dead ourselves, have trodden the dead down, and the dead are those who cannot forgive; for murdered "love" has no heart wherewith it should forgive:—Will the Christ never come?