than all, more clever than all! There isn’t one of these people who is fit to pick up the handkerchief you let fall, so why then do you humiliate yourself and place yourself below everybody! Why have you crushed yourself, why haven’t you any pride?”
She had begun her acquaintance with him by laughing at him and trying to cover him with ridicule. But in his presence those who come to scoff remain to pray. Such men really overcome the world.
He is not the only Idiot in fiction who is able to teach the wise, as every one knows who remembers his David Copperfield. How Betsy Trotwood would have loved Dostoevski’s hero! Dickens and Dostoevski were perhaps the biggest-hearted of all novelists, and their respect for children and harmless men is notable. The sacredness of mad folk is a holy tradition, not yet outworn.
The Eternal Husband is a story dealing, of course, with an abnormal character, in abnormal circumstances. It is a quite original variation on the triangle theme. It has genuine humour, and the conclusion leaves one in a muse. The Hobbledehoy, translated into French as Un Adolescent, is, on the whole, Dostoevski’s worst novel, which is curious enough, coming at a time when he was doing some of his best work. He wrote this while his mind was busy with a great masterpiece, The Karamazov Brothers, and in this book we get nothing but the lees. It is a novel of portentous length and utter vacuity. I have read many dull books, but it is hard to recall a novel where the steady, monotonous dulness of page after page is quite so oppressive. For it is not only dull; it is stupid.
Dostoevski’s last work, The Karamazov Brothers, was the result of ten years’ reflection, study, and labour, and he died without completing it. It is a very long novel as it stands; had he lived five years more, it would probably have been the longest novel on the face of the earth, for he seems to have regarded what he left as an introduction. Even as it is, it is too long, and could profitably be cut down one-third. It is incomplete, it is badly constructed, it is very badly written; but if I could have only one of his novels, I would take The Karamazov Brothers. For Dostoevski put into it all the sum of his wisdom, all the ripe fruit of his experience, all his religious aspiration, and in Alosha he created not only the greatest of all his characters, but his personal conception of what the ideal man should be. Alosha is the Idiot, minus idiocy and epilepsy.
The women in this book are not nearly so well drawn as the men. I cannot even tell them apart, so it would be a waste of labour to write further about them. But the four men who make up the Karamazov family, the father and the three sons, are one of the greatest family parties in the history of fiction. Then the idiotic and epileptic Smerdakov — for Dostoevski must have his idiot and his fits, and they make an effective combination — is an absolutely original character out of whose mouth come from time to time the words of truth and soberness. The old monk at the head of the chapter is marvellous; he would find a natural place in one of Ibsen’s early historical dramas, for he is a colossal pontifical figure, and has about him the ancient air of authority. If one really doubted the genius of Dostoevski, one would merely need to contemplate the men in this extraordinary story, and listen to their talk. Then if any one continued to doubt Dostoevski’s greatness as a novelist, he could no longer doubt his greatness as a man.
The criminal psychology of this novel and the scenes at the trial are more interesting than those in Crime and Punishment, for the prisoner is a much more interesting man than Raskolnikov, and by an exceedingly clever trick the reader is completely deceived. The discovery of the murder is as harsh a piece of realism as the most difficult realist could desire. The corpse lies on its back on the floor, its silk nightgown covered with blood. The faithful old servant, smitten down and bleeding copiously, is faintly crying for help. Close at hand is the epileptic, in the midst of a fearful convulsion. There are some dramatic moments!
But the story, as nearly always in Dostoevski, is a mere easel for the portraits. From the loins of the father — a man of tremendous force of character, all turned hellward, for he is a selfish, sensual beast — proceed three sons, men of powerful individualities, bound together by fraternal affection. Mitia is in many respects like his father, but it is wonderful how we love him in the closing scenes; Ivan is the sceptic, whose final conviction that he is morally responsible for his father’s murder shows his inability to escape from the domination of moral ideas; Alosha, the priestly third brother, has all the family force of character, but in him it finds its only outlet in love to God and love to man. He has a remarkably subtle mind, but he is as innocent, as harmless, as sincere, and as pure in heart as a little child. He invariably returns for injury, not pardon, but active kindness. No one can be offended in him for long, and his cheerful conversation and beautiful, upright life are a living witness to his religious faith, known and read of all men. Angry, sneering, and selfish folk come to regard him with an affection akin to holy awe. But he is not in the least a prig or a stuffed curiosity. He is essentially a reasonable, kindhearted man, who goes about doing good. Every one confides in him, all go to him for advice and solace. He is a multitudinous blessing, with masculine virility and shrewd insight, along with the sensitiveness and tenderness of a good woman. Seeing six boys attacking one, he attempts to rescue the solitary fighter, when to his surprise the gamin turns on him, insults him, strikes him with a stone, and bites him. Alosha, wrapping up his injured hand, after one involuntary scream of pain, looks affectionately at the young scoundrel, and quietly asks, “Tell me, what have I done to you?” The boy looks at him in amazement. Alosha continues: “I don’t know you, but of course I must have injured you in some way since you treat me so. Tell me exactly where I have been wrong.” The child bursts into tears, and what no violence of punishment has been able to accomplish, Alosha’s kindness has done in a few moments. Here is a boy who would gladly die for him.
The conversations in this book have often quite unexpected turns of humour, and are filled with oversubtle questions of casuistry and curious reasonings. From one point of view the novel is a huge, commonplace book, into which Dostoevski put all sorts of whimsies, queries, and vagaries. Smerdakov, the epileptic, is a thorn in the side of those who endeavour to instruct him, for he asks questions and raises unforeseen difficulties that perplex those who regard themselves as his superiors. No one but Dostoevski would ever have conceived of such a character, or have imagined such ideas.
If one reads Poor Folk, Crime and Punishment, Memoirs of the House of the Dead, The Idiot, and The Karamazov Brothers, one will have a complete idea of Dostoevski’s genius and of his faults as a writer, and will see clearly his attitude toward life. In his story called Devils one may learn something about his political opinions; but these are of slight interest; for a man’s opinions on politics are his views on something of temporary and transient importance, and like a railway time-table, they are subject to change without notice. But the ideas of a great man on Religion, Humanity, and Art take hold on something eternal, and sometimes borrow eternity from the object.
No doubt Dostoevski realised the sad inequalities of his work, and the great blunders due to haste in composition. He wrote side by side with Turgenev and Tolstoi, and could not escape the annual comparison in production. Indeed, he was always measuring himself with these two men, and they were never long out of his mind. Nor was his soul without bitterness when he reflected on their fortunate circumstances which enabled them to write, correct, and polish at leisure, and give to the public only the last refinement of their work. In the novel Downtrodden and Oppressed Natasha asks the young writer if he has finished his composition. On being told that it is all done, she says: “God be praised! But haven’t you hurried it too much? Haven’t you spoiled anything?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he replied; “when I have a work that demands a particular tension of the mind, I am in a state of extraordinary nervous excitement; images are clearer, my senses are more alert, and for the form, why, the style is plastic, and steadily becomes better in proportion as the tension becomes stronger.” She sighed, and added: “You are exhausting yourself and you will ruin your health. Just look at S. He spent two years in writing one short story; but how he has worked at it and chiselled it down! not the least thing to revise; no one can detect a blemish.” To this stricture the poor fellow rejoined, “Ah, but those fellows have their income assured, they are
