The puritan gets his sense of power not in the harmless way of the artist or the philosopher or the lover or the scientist, but in a crude assault on that most vulnerable part of other people’s souls, their moral sense. He is far more dangerous to those he converts than to those he intimidates. For he first scares them into abandoning the rich and sensuous and expressive impulses in life, and then teaches them to be proud of having done so. We all have the potentiality of the puritan within us. I remember suffering agonies at the age of ten because my aunt used to bring me candy that had been wickedly purchased on the Sabbath day. I forget whether I ate it or not, but that fact is irrelevant. What counted was the guilt with which the whole universe seemed to be stained. I need no other evidence of the irrational nature of morality than this fact that children can be such dogged little puritans, can be at the age of ten so sternly and intuitively righteous.
The puritan is a case of arrested development. Most of us do grow beyond him and find subtler ways of satisfying our desire for power. And we do it because we never can quite take that step from self-abasement to self-regard. We never can quite become proud of our humility. Renunciation remains an actual going without, sacrifice a real thwarting. If we value an experience and deliberately surrender it, we are too naïve to pretend that there are compensations. There is a loss. We are left with a vacuum. There is only depression and loss of control. Our self-regard is not quite elemental enough to get stimulation from wielding virtue over others. I never feel so degraded as when I have renounced. I had rather beat my head rhythmically and endlessly against an unyielding wall. For the pagan often breaks miraculously through the wall. But the puritan at his best can only strut outside.
Most of us, therefore, after we have had our puritan fling, sown our puritan wild oats as it were, grow up into devout and progressing pagans, cultivating the warmth of the sun, the deliciousness of love-experience, the high moods of art. The puritans remain around us, a danger and a threat. But they have value to us in keeping us acutely self-conscious of our faith. They whet our ardor. Perhaps no one can be really a good appreciating pagan who has not once been a bad puritan.
THE IMMANENCE OF DOSTOEVSKY
It is impossible not to think of Dostoevsky as a living author when his books come regularly, as they are coming, to the American public every few months. Our grandfathers sixty years ago are said to have lived their imaginative lives in anticipation of the next instalment of Dickens or Thackeray. I can feel somewhat of the same excitement in this Dostoevsky stream, though I cannot pretend that the great Russian will ever become a popular American classic. Yet in the progress from Dickens to Dostoevsky there is a symbol of the widening and deepening of the American imagination. We are adrift on a far wider sea than our forefathers. We are far more adventurous in personal relations, far more aware of the bewildering variousness of human nature. If you have once warmed to Dostoevsky, you can never go back to the older classic fiction on which we were brought up. The lack of nuance, the hideous normality of its people begin to depress you. When once you have a sense of the illusion of “character,” when once you have felt the sinister, irrational turn of human thoughts, and the subtle interplay of impression and desire, and the crude impingement of circumstance, you find yourself—unless you keep conscious watch—feeling a shade of contempt for the Scott and Balzac and Dickens and Thackeray and Trollope who were the authoritative showmen of life for our middle-class relatives. You relegate such fiction to the level of “movie” art, with its clean, pigeon-holed categories of the emotions, and its “registering” of a few simple moods.
You will, of course, be wrong in any such contempt, because these novelists show a bewildering variety of types and a deep intuition of the major movements of the soul. Dickens teems with irrational creatures, with unconventional levels of life. But you can scarcely contradict me when I say that neither Dickens nor his readers ever forgot that these human patterns were queer. His appeal lies exactly in the joyful irrelevance with which we take all these lapses from the norm, in the pitiful tears which we can shed for human beings done so obviously as they should not be done by. In reading these familiar novelists we never lose our moral landmarks. No matter how great the deviations a character shows, we are always conscious—or could be conscious if we liked—of the exact amount of that deviation. The charm of that nineteenth-century fiction, as in the work of belated Victorians like Mr. Chesterton, lies in that duality between the sane and the insane, the virtuous and the villainous, the sober and the mischievous, the responsible and the irresponsible. There is no falsification in this. These novelists were writing for an epoch that really had stable “character,” standards, morals, that consistently saw the world in a duality of body and spirit. They were a reflection of a class that really had reticences, altruisms, and religious codes.
Dostoevsky appeals to us to-day because we are trying to close up that dualism. And our appreciation of him and the other modern Russians is a mark of how far we have actually gone. It is still common to call this fiction unhealthy, morbid, unwholesome. All that is meant by this is that the sudden shock of a democratic, unified, intensely the mind that thinks in the old dual terms as to be almost revolting. What becomes more and more apparent to the readers of Dostoevsky, however, is his superb modern healthiness. He is healthy because he has no sense of any dividing line between the normal and the abnormal, or even between the sane and the insane. I call this healthy because it is so particularly salutary for our American imagination to be jolted out of its stiltedness and preconceived notions of human psychology. I admit that the shock is somewhat rough and rude. “The Idiot”, which I have read only once, remains in my mind as a stream of fairly incomprehensible people and unintelligible emotional changes. Yet I feel that when I read it again I shall understand it. For Dostoevsky has a strange, intimate power which breaks in your neat walls and shows you how much more subtle and inconsequent your flowing life is than even your introspection had thought. But for all his subtlety he is the reverse of anything morbidly introspective. In his work you get the full warm unity of emotional life without losing any of the detail of the understanding analysis of the soul.
This astounding mergence Dostoevsky actually seems to achieve. That is what gives him the intimate power which distinguishes every story of his from anything else you have ever read. Again he contrasts with the classical novelists. For they are quite palpably outside their subjects. You are never unaware of the author as telling the story. He has always the air of the showman, unrolling his drama before your eyes. His characters may be infinitely warm and human, but the writer himself is somehow not in them. “Wuthering Heights” is the only English story I think of that has something of the fierce, absorbed intensity of Dostoevsky. In the great Russian you lose all sense of the showman. The writer is himself the story; he is inextricably in it. In narratives like “The Double” or “A Gentle Spirit” immanence could go no further. The story seems to tell itself. Its strange, breathless intimacy of mood follows faithfully every turn and quirk of thought and feeling. Its tempo is just of that inner life we know, with its ceaseless boring into the anxious future and its trails of the unresolved past. These stories follow just that fluctuating line of our conscious life with its depressions and satisfactions, its striving always for a sense of control, its uneasiness. In Dostoevsky’s novels it is not only the author that is immanent. The reader also is absorbed. After reading “Crime and Punishment” you are yourself the murderer. For days the odor of guilt follows you around. The extravaganza of “The Double” pursues you like a vivid dream of your own.
Such stories, however fantastic the problems of the soul, get deeply into us. We cannot ignore them, we cannot take them irresponsibly. We cannot read them for amusement, or even in detachment, as we can our classics. We forget our categories, our standards, our notions of human nature. All we feel is that we are tracing the current of life itself. Dostoevsky is so much in his stories that we get no sense of his attitude toward his characters or of his criticism of life. Yet the after-impression is one of rich kindness, born of suffering and imperfection, and of a truly religious reverence for all living experience. Man as a being with his feet in the mud and his gaze turned toward the stars, yet always indissolubly one in feet and eyes and heart and brain! If we are strong enough to hear him, this is the decisive force we need on our American creative outlook.