A Writer's Notebook (50 page)

The Russian sets store on self-abasement because it comes easily to him; he can accept humiliation because to humiliate himself gives him a singular sensual gratification.

The poverty of types in Russian fiction is rather surprising. You meet the same people, under a variety of names, not only in the works of the same author but in the works of others. Alyosha and Stavrogin are the two prominent and marked types. They seem to haunt the imagination of Russian writers, and it may be supposed that they represent the two sides of Russian character, the two persons whom every Russian feels more or less in himself. And it may be that it is the presence in him of these two irreconcilable selves which makes the Russian so unbalanced and so contradictory.

It is humour which discerns the infinite diversity of human beings, and if Russian novels offer only a restricted variety of types it is perhaps because they are singularly lacking in humour. In Russian fiction you will look in vain for wit and repartee, badinage, the rapier thrust of sarcasm, the intellectual refreshment of the epigram, or the lighthearted jest. Its irony is coarse and obvious. When a Russian laughs he laughs at people and not with them; and so the objects of his humour
are the vapours of hysterical women, the outrageous clothes of the provincial, the antics of the inebriated. You cannot laugh with him for his laughter is a little ill-mannered. The humour of Dostoievsky is the humour of a bar loafer who ties a kettle to a dog's tail.

I can't think of a single Russian novel in which one of the characters goes to a picture gallery.

The message that Russia has given to the world seems to be the simple one that in love lies the secret of the universe. In opposition to it she places will, a rival but baneful force, and her novelists are never weary of showing to what catastrophe it may bring its bondsmen. They are fascinated by it, as women are fascinated by Don Juan, but it is with horror that they contemplate its satanic power; withal they look upon it with compassion and pursue it as Christ in
The Hound of Heaven
pursues the hurrying soul. They do not credit it with singleness of purpose. They believe that it is divided against itself and are sure that deep down in its essence lies a spark of that love which consumes their own breasts. They rejoice, as choirs of angels singing, when it abdicates its power and comes suppliant to their waiting bosoms, and if peradventure it refuses in the end to throw itself into their outstretched arms, like good Christians they consign it to outer darkness and to gnashing of teeth.

But in making this contrast between will and love Russia is merely placing one romantic figment of the imagination in face of another. They are both appearances, and if they have been thought to be something more it is presumably because they give us so intense a feeling of reality. But they begin and end in feeling. Love, so far as it is active, partakes of the nature of the will, and so cannot reasonably be set up against it as a rival
answer to the riddle of existence; but it is its passive side, its self-abnegation, its humility which have attracted the Russian temperament; it is there they find the answer they seek to the mystery which torments them. Obviously this has nothing to do with thought, it is a surrender of thought to emotion; when they say that in love is the secret of the universe they confess that they have given up the search for it. It is singular that the Russians who occupy themselves so much with questions of man's destiny and the meaning of the world should have so little talent for metaphysical discussion. They have produced no philosopher even of the second rank. They seem to have no capacity for accurate and profound thought. Intellectually they all suffer from the malady of Oblomovism. It is interesting to enquire why this Russian message has had so great a success in Europe. The supremacy of love has had a good press. All manner of writers have been taken with it, and consciously or otherwise it has influenced their attitude. It came at a happy time. The world was disappointed with science. France, where most intellectual movements have their origin for the western world, was humbled and weary. The naturalistic school had grown dry and mechanical; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had lost their novelty. There was a large class of educated persons interested in metaphysical questions, but with neither the education nor the patience to study metaphysical works; mysticism was in the air; and when they were told that love offered a solution of all their doubts they were more than willing to accept the statement. They thought they knew what it meant, for love is a word of many meanings and each one could give it that which was agreeable to his own experience; and the idea that this familiar feeling in some way rendered clear everything that had puzzled them gave them an emotion which they were quite ready to take for an explanation. It never occurred to them that they were trying to explain a leg of mutton in the terms of a top hat. With some the message agreed with a faith which they had never surrendered, with others it re-established one which they had given up with
their heads but not with their hearts. Nor must it be forgotten that love is a grateful theme for rhetoric.

I read a work on Dostoievsky by X. It might have been written at the menopause by the virgin daughter of a clergyman. There is no reason why one should not keep one's head about Dostoievsky. It is not necessary to read a novel with the ecstatic unction of a nun in contemplation of the Blessed Sacrament. To gush is not only tiresome to others, but unprofitable to oneself. And I think one pays a better compliment to the object of one's admiration when one considers him with sense than when one surrenders oneself to him like a drunkard to his glass of gin. I should have thought that if an author could enthral the minds of his readers he would be willing to let who would captivate their hearts. M. Arouet de Voltaire surely holds a more distinguished place among the dead than Mr. Moody or even Mr. Sankey.

I wish someone would analyse Dostoievsky's technique. I have an idea that, though his readers do not know it, the effect he has on them is largely due to his peculiar method. People speak sometimes as though he were negligible as a novelist, but this is not so, he is a very good novelist indeed, and he uses certain stratagems with great skill. A favourite one, which he employs constantly, is to bring together the chief persons in his story to discuss some action so outrageous that it is incomprehensible. He leads you along to an understanding of it with all the skill of Gaboriau unravelling a mystery of crime. These long conversations have a thrilling interest, and he heightens the thrill by an ingenious device: his characters are agitated quite out of proportion to the speeches they make; he describes them as trembling with excitement, green in the face or frightfully pallid, terror-stricken, so that a significance the reader cannot account for is given to the most ordinary words;
and presently the reader is so wrought up by these extravagant gestures that his own nerves are set on edge and he is prepared to receive a real shock when something happens which otherwise would hardly have stirred his blood. An unexpected person comes in, a piece of news is announced. Dostoievsky is too good a novelist to balk at the coincidence and his characters invariably find themselves at the necessary place at the dramatic moment. It is the method of Eugène Sue. That is not condemnation. All methods are good if you have talent. Racine found it possible to express all the variety of human passion within the iron convention of the Alexandrine, and Dostoievsky with the material of melodrama has created an enduring work of art. But he is a master hard to follow, and the amiable writers who fancy for themselves the role of an English Dostoievsky may find that they have succeeded only in becoming a shadow of Eugène Sue.