Somebody once said that he would have given anything in the world to have half an hour’s private interview with the late Lord Beaconsfield with a pistol, and to obtain from him under the threat of death an exact and complete account of his views and convictions. It would be interesting to perform a similar experiment on Count Witte; whatever the result of it might be, I doubt if there would be found a trace of the placid optimism which is sometimes attributed to him. Count Witte may be attacked for many things; he cannot be accused of a lack of clear-sightedness: not, that is, if he be judged by the utterances which he is known to have made before the outbreak of the war, or by those which he made publicly before entering office, and while the war was still going on. Mirabeau was, in the opinion of Horace Walpole, a ruffian; he was certainly distrusted by both parties, but we know now, though the fact escaped the notice of his contemporaries, that he gauged the forces at work and the probable trend of events with surprising accuracy. We now consider Mirabeau to have been something like a great man. Count Witte has perhaps inspired among all parties a greater distrust than that which was the lot of Mirabeau; but in times such as these clear-sightedness, self-confidence, and capacity for hard work are precious qualities indeed. Nobody denies the possession of these qualities to Count Witte. It is not, therefore, impossible that the future historian may place him in the same niche as Mirabeau in the Pantheon of the world. This, as Horace Walpole says, is speculation, not prophecy. And I revert, or rather arrive, at these conclusions, that a lull in events does not necessarily imply their final cessation; that so far in Russia revolutionary matters have succeeded one another, if anything, with greater rapidity than they did in France, and that what seems to be the unmistakable dawn of revolution to the historian may very well appear to be a false dawn to the contemporary observer; and that, whatever happens, nothing can ever shut the little window which Prince Mirsky opened.
CHAPTER XI
DOSTOIEVSKY’S ANNIVERSARY
St. Petersburg, February 24th.
They are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the death of Dostoievski, and this fact has brought back to my mind, with great vividness, a conversation I had with the officers of the battery at Jen-tzen-tung last September, and which I have already noted in my diary.
We were sitting in the ante-room of the small Chinese house which formed our quarters. This ante-room, which had paper windows and no doors, a floor of mud, and a table composed of boards laid upon two small tressels, formed our dining-room. We had just finished dinner, and were drinking tea out of pewter cups. Across the courtyard from the part of the dwelling where the Chinese herded together, we could hear the monotonous song of a Chinaman or a Mongol singing over and over to himself the same strophe, which rose by the intervals of a scale more subtle than ours and sank again to die away in the vibrations of one prolonged note, to the accompaniment of a single-stringed instrument.
The conversation had languished. Somebody was absorbed in a patience, we were talking of books and novels in a vague, desultory fashion, when suddenly Hliebnikov, a young Cossack officer, said: “Who is the greatest writer in the world?” Vague answers were made as to the comparative merits of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Molière, but Hliebnikov impatiently waived all this talk aside. Then turning to me he said: “He knows; there is one writer greater than all of them, and that is Dostoievski.”
“Dostoievski!” said the doctor. “Dostoievski’s work is like a clinical laboratory or a dissecting-room. There is no sore spot in the human soul into which he does not poke his dirty finger. His characters are either mad or abnormal. His books are those of a madman, and can only be appreciated by people who are half mad themselves.”
The young Cossack officer did not bother to discuss the question. He went out into the night in disgust. We continued the argument for a short time. “There is not a single character,” said the doctor, “in all Dostoievski’s books who is normal.” The doctor was a cultivated man, and seeing that we differed we agreed to differ, and we talked of other things, but I was left wondering why Hliebnikov was so convinced that Dostoievski was the greatest of all writers, and why he knew I should agree with him. I have been thinking this over ever since, and in a sense I do agree with Hliebnikov. I think that Dostoievski is the greatest writer that has ever lived, if by a great writer is meant a man whose work, message, or whatever you like to call it, can do the greatest good, can afford the greatest consolation to poor humanity. If we mean by the greatest writer the greatest artist, the most powerful magician, who can bid us soar like Shelley or Schubert into the seventh heaven of melody, or submerge us like Wagner beneath heavy seas until we drown with pleasure, or touch and set all the fibres of our associations and our æsthetic appreciation vibrating with incommunicable rapture by the magic of wonderful phrases like Virgil or Keats, or strike into our very heart with a divine sword like Sappho, Catullus, Heine, or Burns, or ravish us by the blend of pathos and nobility of purpose with faultless diction like Leopardi, Gray, and Racine, or bid us understand and feel the whole burden of mankind in a thin thread of notes like Beethoven or in a few simple words like Goethe, or evoke for us the whole pageant of life like Shakespeare to the sound of Renaissance flutes, or all Heaven and Hell like Dante, by “thoughts that breathe and words that burn”?
If we are thinking of all these miraculous achievements when we say a great writer or the greatest writer, then we must not name Dostoievski. Dostoievski is not of these; in his own province, that of the novelist, he is as a mere workman, a mere craftsman, one of the worst, inferior to any French or English ephemeral writer of the day you like to mention; but, on the other hand, if we mean by a great writer a man who has given to mankind an inestimable boon, a priceless gift, a consolation, a help to life, which nothing can equal or replace, then Dostoievski is a great writer, and perhaps the greatest writer that has ever lived. I mean that if the Holy Scriptures were destroyed and no trace were left of them in the world, the books where mankind, bereft of its Divine and inestimable treasure, would find the nearest approach to the supreme message of comfort would be the books of Dostoievski.
Dostoievski is not an artist; his stories and his books are put together and shaped anyhow. The surroundings and the circumstances in which he places his characters are fantastic and impossible to the verge of absurdity. The characters themselves are also often impossible and fantastic to the verge of absurdity; yet they are vivid in a way no other characters are vivid, and alive, not only so that we perceive and recognise their outward appearance, but so that we know the innermost corners of their souls. His characters, it is said, are abnormal. One of his principal figures is a murderer who kills an old woman from ambition to be like Napoleon, and put himself above the law; another is a victim to epileptic fits. But the fact should be borne in mind that absolutely normal people, like absolutely happy nations, have no history; that since the whole of humanity is suffering and groaning beneath the same burden of life, the people who in literature are the most important to mankind are not the most normal, but those who are made of the most complex machinery and of the most receptive wax, and who are thus able to receive and to record the deepest and most varied impressions. And in the same way as Job and David are more important to humanity than George I. or Louis-Philippe, so are Hamlet and Falstaff more important than Tom Jones and Mr. Bultitude. And the reason of this is not because Hamlet and Falstaff are abnormal—although compared with Tom Jones they are abnormal—but because they are human: more profoundly human, and more widely human. Hamlet has been read, played, and understood by succeeding generations in various countries and tongues, in innumerable different and contradictory fashions; but in each country, at each period, and in each tongue, he has been understood by his readers or his audience, according to their lights, because in him they have seen a reflection of themselves, because in themselves they have found an echo of Hamlet. The fact that audiences, actors, readers, and commentators have all interpreted Hamlet in utterly contradictory ways testifies not merely to the profound humanity of the character but to its multiplicity and manysidedness. Every human being recognises in himself something of Hamlet and something of Falstaff; but every human being does not necessarily recognise in himself something of Tom Jones or Mr. Bultitude. At least what in these characters resembles him is so like himself that he cannot notice the likeness; it consists in the broad elementary facts of being a human being; but when he hears Hamlet or Falstaff philosophising or making jokes on the riddle of life he is suddenly made conscious that he has gone through the same process himself in the same way.