Part 5

Dr. Brandes' epigrams sometimes sound as if he substituted wit for wisdom. But that is because the epigrams stick and are repeated. His method is to open with an epigram to catch the attention, to proceed with a line of sound argument, and at the end to finish superbly with a sentence that contains his conclusions and impales his opponent at the same time.

With Frank Harris, Dr. Brandes was no more gentle. By parallel quotation Harris was made to appear ridiculous. Brandes showed that whatever in his writings is sound has been said before. This was the end of the lecture:

Mr. Harris says that it is possible to admire Shakespeare, but that it is impossible to worship him. Ladies and gentlemen, I do the impossible.

Afterwards came a supper of the Scandinavian Society, at which the guest of honor made a speech that looked brilliant and was lively even as a piece of pantomime--but it was in Danish. Dr. Brandes was beaming and unaffectedly cordial with everybody. He smilingly interrupted one of the pompous addresses in his honor to correct a quotation from Goethe. He proposed a toast to the charming young lady who acted as his American manager, and said that the success of his tour was due entirely to her. Later a consul made a highly complimentary, but exceedingly tedious, speech. Dr. Brandes fidgeted until he could stand it no longer, then he quickly got up, took his champagne glass, ran over to the orator and slapped him on the shoulder, saying, "You are a very nice man." The rest was drowned in the toast.

A NEW LITERATURE

The other day an illustrator saw a hand-mirror in a publisher's office. He put the mirror against a book cover and held it at arm's length. "There," he said, "is the ideal jacket for a novel. Every woman likes to imagine herself the heroine of the book she is reading." But the publisher was wiser. "You are half right," he answered. "But she wants to be a Gibson heroine. To see her own face, without flattery, would startle her into disapproval of the book."

A recent symposium in _The Sun_ bore the impressive title, _The Sentimentalization of Woman in American Fiction_. All the authors were agreed that realism doesn't go because of the desire of the reader to be flattered. If she isn't, the novel is "unpleasant," "depressing." You may paint your villainess black, but, as your reader will take her for an enemy, you must see that she is properly punished. But if your heroine does anything unconventional, it must be of the kind that your reader enjoys by imagination, though she wouldn't have the courage to do it. Only you must not make the thrills so strong as to shock the reader into self-consciousness and self-disapproval. Georg Brandes said that our novels are written by old maids for old maids. If we would only put into our literature the same genius and daring that we put into our skyscrapers!

The thing none of the authors seemed to see is that it is futile to stop at blaming the readers. Of course the great public is comparatively stupid. It is everywhere, it always has been and always will be. What is a leader if he is not someone in advance of the others? And the essential act for a leader is to lead. He can't get a following until he does that. Only a coward stays behind and flatters the crowd because he is afraid they will not come after him. Perhaps they won't follow his particular route. But if he goes on fearlessly he has done the best that is in him, anyway. The chances are that if he has a sincere conviction and marches far enough in one direction they will at least struggle along after a while. They may even follow in hordes. What we need first is not a more intelligent public, but courageous writers.

Naturally the matter is not simple. Your artist has to be fed and clothed. If he is creating a new medium--as did Wagner--he even needs large resources to produce his art. The solution used to be the wealthy patron. The petty monarch maintained a musician or a painter to enhance the glory of his court. The noble supported a writer from personal pride. The monastery afforded a refuge for the unworldly creator. It would be difficult to find a great artist before the last century who did not have some such subsidy, unless he had means of his own.

Since then democracy has permeated the world. Fast presses, advertising, and royalties have been invented. Now the public is the writer's patron. Music is often subsidized, to be sure, and painters can still sell their canvases to the wealthy. But the earnings of the writer are in strict proportion to the number of copies of his books that can be sold.

There is a distinct advantage in this situation. The virtue of democracy is not the government of the majority, but the opportunity of the minority. The minority becomes, not a defensive close corporation, but a body of fighting visionaries. The emphasis is placed on growth. The eternal impulse of the minority to turn itself into a majority prevents a static age. The strongest lead, instead of the highly born.

So it must be with our writers. Difficulty insures heroes. We can discount at once the truckling commercial writers. But the others must be deeply sincere and strong in order to exist at all. There is little room for the dilletante. Let our young people who have something to say recognize the situation. They must dedicate themselves to a probable poverty. They must gird their loins and sharpen their weapons. They must be prepared to wait years, if need be, even for recognition. Every energy must be devoted to saying as well as may be the thing that is in them. And so, hoping nothing, fearing nothing, living simply, supporting themselves as best they may, but always doing the thing that is worth while for its own sake, they may produce a literature that has not been equalled since the world began.

Others of us can share in this glorious undertaking. Discerning critics must sift the true from the false. They must lay aside the twin snobberies of praising or blaming a work because of its popularity. They must fight eternally for the sincere. They must point out directions, they must prize meanings above methods. They must give a nucleus to the intelligent reading public and constantly augment it. They must bear sturdy witness to the fact that art is not an amusement for idle moments, but the consciousness of the race. They must show its relation to life as well as to living. They must be predisposed in favor of no work on account of its nationality, school or tendency. Just as Brandes enlarged the conception of literature by showing it as a world phenomenon, they must rid it of petty divisions in the realm of thought. No more should such a statement as "Galsworthy is a poet rather than a novelist" be allowed to pass as criticism. A novelist may be a poet or a philosopher or a psychologist or a historian or a sociologist. Any of these may combine the intrinsic abilities of any or all of the others. He is greater for doing so. The only test of his work is its effectiveness. A work of art is an organism, the highest product of nature, infinitely more real, more beautiful, more potent, than any flower. Only when we see it as such, and not as a collection of petals and stamens, or as a member of a species, shall we know it.

The whole problem of creating a literature, as of doing anything else, is one of direction and power. If we blame someone else for our deficiencies, if we stand aloof, if we bow to circumstances and are afraid to pay for what we want, we shall of course do nothing. And we shall not enjoy ourselves or the world much either. But if we fix on a goal that is worth a life, and set out for it with the joyous spirit of adventurers, risking everything, enduring everything, sleeping under the stars, staying hard and keen, we shall command the fates. What more could we ask of the world?

DOSTOEVSKY'S NOVELS

MAURICE LAZAR

_The Idiot_, _The Brothers Karamazov_, _Crime and Punishment_, etc., translated by Constance Garnett. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving (life) with one's inside, with one's stomach....

--Ivan Karamazov.

Chiefly concerned with the fester of civilization, literature, music, painting, all the modern forms of individual expression are elliptical in the sense that the old æsthetic values of emotional beauty seem to have become nullified, or else congealed, in the artist's direct application of his instrument to the repudiation of fixed social values or moralities; to the expansion of life-interests. We today want more than beauty of external form; we want the beauty of depth!

The true artist is such primarily because of his engrossing appetite for life, because (as Flaubert said) of the chaos in his soul. And although Flaubert kept on chiseling words around the lives of men and women totally devoid of inspirating individuality, his dictum has been nobly exemplified in the life and writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, that great-hearted epileptic Russian of whose psychological powers Nietzsche admittedly availed himself.

Tolstoy was reported to have said, in conversation with a writer for _Le Temps_, "A woman who has never suffered pain is a beast." He could have stretched the allegation to include the other sex, if only by way of illusion to that intense spiritual quality in modern Russian literature--a literature that has never been (notably) an off-shoot of, as much as a protest against, the retrogressive structures of its respective periods.

This spiritual, or psychical, concern with the individual's adjustment to the functioning of life has been revealed to highest degree in Dostoevsky's novels. It is also manifest in the analytical mould assumed by the creative arts of our time.

While Dostoevsky's personality is separably bound up with his work, profitable appreciation of the latter can be considerably amplified with knowledge of the important facts of his life and the conditions with which he struggled. I will record the more essential facts of his life as I have gathered them, and try to explain the causes that have made for the distinction in his work from that of all other writers.

He was born in a charity-hospital in Moscow, in 1821. His father was an army-surgeon, his mother a store-keeper's daughter. I like to think that he derived his expressive powers, or rather the nebulæ out of which they subsequently developed, from his mother, perhaps partly because of my theory that men of acute genius ultimately do transcend the difference of sex in the quality of their personalities as well as in that of their work.

Like most imaginative youths who come into contact with fine art, Dostoevsky was stimulated to literary expression by his study of classical and contemporaneous European literature. He had lived twenty-three years when he graduated from a St. Petersburg school of military engineering. His first novel, _Poor Folk_, was published three years later, and served to focus upon him the attention of the critics.

In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested, with members of a radical organization, on governmental charges of sedition. The terrible suffering he sustained while awaiting his execution (he was first confined in prison for eight months) have been set forth in striking passages of his novels, _The Idiot_ and _Letters from a Dead House_. The sentence of death was finally, and very unexpectedly, commuted to one of imprisonment in Siberia for four years. At the expiration of this period he served perforce as a private soldier in the Russian army for three more years. When he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg he was accompanied by his first wife, whom he had loved and married while in exile.

Dostoevsky's interminable suffering from epileptic seizures (it has been suggested that these fits originated in a beating administered to him by his father when Fyodor was a boy); his poverty, and the constant accumulation of debt; the terrific haste with which he found it necessary to write his most profound books--all have made it natural to him, in dwelling upon any physiological aspect of his characters, to be as unconvincing as the eremite attempting an analysis of conditions of sex life.

In short, Dostoevsky's nervous disorders pervaded his "sensual sense" of beauty--of beauty in all its manifestations. At the same time it must be remarked that this negation of physical responsiveness surely intensified the acuteness of his mental vision, which was otherwise refined emotionally by the results of his imprisonment and life-long hardships. And this also explains why Dostoevsky's novels are lacking so singularly in the tingle of the physical contact of his characters; why the suffering of his men and women move us so profoundly; why his writings are so uneven, his dialogues of such elemental power, and his purely descriptive passages so ordinary.

The elemental power in his dialogues is due chiefly to the vigor of action accredited his characters. In his work is not to be found the picturesque phrase, the adroitly-turned period, the illuminating metaphor, the sequence of construction, the tone or shading offered by the commingling of his objects. Dostoevsky has no style of form, his outlines are amorphous. It is in his power of transcribing the living voice, of recording in never-failing reflex emotionalism the lives and deeds of his startling figures that he is supreme.

If you have read one of his books you know much of what he has to say. His other works are repetitions, mainly. For Dostoevsky does not attempt to paint character, and rarely does he stop to show the subtly-reacting influence of environment upon his men and women. Always he is concerned with the idea of the individual's personal adjustments to life. Each book of his throbs with the discordant elements that clash over the establishment of this idea; and always its conclusions are recognized. That is why I regard Dostoevsky as an optimist. And his emphasis on humanity's spiritual conception of life, no matter what the cost, grew more and more pronounced in his later works.

His faith in human beings is expressed in one set theme, which can be conveniently resolved into terms of comparison: on one hand the individual's evasion of life's realities by the exercise of material (and therefore fictitious) values; and on the other hand, the frank acceptance of life's realities for the attainment of a proportionate spiritual balance.

In _Crime and Punishment_, Dr. Raskolnikov is in doubt as to the ultimate worth of this attainment, until he expiates his crime in killing the old moneylender (I forget her name) not by confessing,--Dostoevsky is too fine a realist for that,--but by obtaining personal solace from the regenerating qualities of his resignation. And it is characteristic of our writer's method that Raskolnikov is assisted toward this state of resignation by his love, Sonia, the prostitute, whose regard for the murderer is based upon the confirmation evidenced in him of the faith that has been stimulated in herself.

Similar in thesis, though expressed in terms of minor differences, is Dostoevsky's last and unquestionably finest work, _The Brothers Karamazov_. It is incomplete, actually one-third as long as he had intended it to be. He died before he could finish the book. Nevertheless it is compactly-formed material as the work now stands, and superior to his other novels not because his outlines are more constrained, his movement more co-ordinate, and the actual writing of a more intensive quality, but because here he defines his own conception of spiritual beauty in a distinctive fashion not to be found in his other books.

He offers us the history of a family,--and what a family! Each figure in this domestic (?) group embodies conflicting phases of his great idea. Fyodor Karamazov, the father, is a sensualist of the lowest type imaginable. His three sons are Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha. There is also another (illegitimate) son, Smerdyakov, an epileptic.

Dmitri Karamazov inherits his father's passion for wine, women, and song, but the son's pursuit of this tame and conventional item is tempered by frequent lapses, by periods of misgiving. The second son is a materialist and a cynic. He changes his mind after a severe illness, and his materialistic beliefs are all but supplanted by intense spiritual curiosity. The third and youngest son is an idealist, lovable and loving. Here again we have Dostoevsky's discordant elements conveyed in terms of human characterizations. The plot of the story is as formless as life itself, for it is with life, not with plots, that Dostoevsky deals.

Dmitri's hatred of his father is intensified by the rivalry that exists between the two in their common pursuit of Grushenka's affections. Grushenka is a woman of the demi-monde. The author, I think, tried to draw her in lines that would reveal a physical zest of life, as evidenced, for example, in Tolstoy's _Anna Karenina_. His failure to make Grushenka a convincing individual, as an individual, is typical, for the reasons I have already advanced.

Development of the story shows how Dmitri's repeatedly avowed determination to kill his father bears fruit. The elder Karamazov is found dead one night, with his skull crushed. Dmitri is imprisoned. And the rest of the book, which is devoted to Dmitri's trial, the moral regeneration of Ivan, and the urge of life in Alyosha, approaches psychological heights (or depths) that have not been surpassed to this day. Small wonder that Nietzsche referred so affectionately to the "giant spirit."

I have made reference to Dostoevsky's "optimism." A better word for it is faith--faith of a new high order. He is the most cheerful, sunlight-giving writer in Russian literature. "The essence of religious feeling," says Prince Myshkin in _The Idiot_, "does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors."

Prince Myshkin is the central figure of the novel; he is the "idiot," and everybody abuses him. He is insulted and beaten, and robbed and deceived and loved. He is the most singular figure in literature--he is Dostoevsky himself.

But he is not an idiot in any sense. He is so profoundly simple and wise, and has such great faith in human beings, that he is mistaken by the men and women of ordinary passions as a fool. While he can be readily toyed with by women--a significant phase of the writer's own attitude toward the sex--Prince Myshkin is regarded by them from a common basis of understanding. For them he holds no quality of sex. "Perhaps you don't know that, owing to my illness," he says (he too is an epileptic), "I know nothing of women."

It is in _The Idiot_ that Dostoevsky's women are at least life-like. The Epanchin sisters, especially the youngest, Aglaia, are not "types" in the usual sense, but preconceived studies. The pages devoted to Aglaia's love affair with Prince Myshkin are of the happiest in the book.

Besides the books I have already mentioned, the more important works are _The Possessed_, in which national politics play a large part; _Poor Folk_, the story of a poor clerk's love for a poor woman who eventually turns from him; and _Letters from a Dead House_. This last is a book of personal experiences, and reveals Dostoevsky's relations with the criminals with whom he was imprisoned in Siberia. The mental temper of men who disregard and break the common and social laws, is set forth with the passionate curiosity that lies behind all his probings of the human soul. I am strongly tempted to offer quotations; to show, in this passage or that, how deeply Dostoevsky looked into the most extreme boundaries of human sensibilities; but on the whole extracts from his writings would do more harm than good. His work is so disconnected, though not in any sense detached, that extracts could not serve here to indicate the amazing clarity of his vision.

His books arouse a feeling of wonder that there can be so many things in our own individual emotions with which we never before came into contact. He moves us so profoundly because he tears his men and women out of their morally-bound lives and makes them confront stupendous questions--the questions of life. He plies detail upon detail of human misery until one feels that the whole world is reeling from him--then grows aware of the sweet white glow of Dostoevsky's faith, and feels that life can hold no terrors--that he is above the petty miseries of human strife! That is why I say Dostoevsky's optimism is of the new high order.

Dostoevsky purges one's mind. He makes you conscious of the beauty of a soul.

BOOK DISCUSSION

AN UNREELING REALIST

_The Titan_, by Theodore Dreiser [John Lane Company, New York]

Theodore Dreiser possesses none of the standard qualifications for the art of fiction writing. He is not imaginative but inventive; he is not clever but clear; he is not excited but calm. Whatever the flaws in his considerable body of work no fair-minded reader may say that it is made to catch popular applause. Its tremendous distinction is sincerity. Another characteristic which his novels exhibit is resolute purpose. Dreiser is aiming at something, and in _The Titan_, the second book in an unfinished trilogy, he takes a long if wobbly step toward it. Previously to the publishing of this volume he had not even hinted at what he intended to work out. One thing was certain: he was not a trifler; he was not trying to write best sellers; literary success was not in his mind. He had set out seriously and indefatigably to write, not so much what he felt and thought, as what he saw. Some day he would try to get at the realities that lay back of their representations. He would probably undertake to reveal the soul of the American nation. He would pass through the growth stages of a nation, and achieve some kind of spiritual national life. In the last two pages of _The Titan_ this guess at his purpose receives appreciable encouragement. Moreover, it is made evident for the first time, in these concluding paragraphs, that Dreiser's prosaic realism springs not only from a vague, deep idealism but a large, hidden spirituality. For at the core of him Dreiser is a profoundly religious person.

Neither his style nor his stuff is far above the dead level of mediocrity; in fact, Dreiser's rhetoric is often inexcusably atrocious--intentionally crude, one is tempted to assert. Obviously he is not interested in style; he is conscious of something bigger than that revealing itself in a huge, ugly, unfinished moving picture--a net result symbolical of a young, raw, riotous, unsynthesized national life. One is therefore tempted to say that Dreiser, more than any other author, is the personification of America. He represents the composite personality of Uncle Sam.