We see this still more clearly in another novel, whose purpose is to reduce Christianity to idiocy. Do not take this for hyperbole or epigram; it is merely the statement of Dostoievski’s thesis. The book is called “The Idiot,” and the hero is an incarnation of that mystical, psycho-neurotic Christianity which finds redemption through abasement deliberately sought. You see, it is so easy to suffer, and it is so hard to think! It is so easy to give yourself up to epileptic tremblings and terrors, and call it God! Also, it appears to be easy for literary critics to take mental disease at its own valuation.
In the whole field of art there is no spiritual tragedy greater than Dostoievski’s. This man made an attempt in the cause of liberty, and the Tsardom made him into a martyr; but he came back, not to be a soldier of enlightenment, but to crawl in the dust and lick the hand which had lashed him. He came back as a propagandist of reaction, proclaiming a Russia redeemed by monks. Well, he had his way, and the redeeming monk appeared—Gregori Rasputin by name!
Mind you, I do not quarrel with Dostoievski because he portrayed the lost and abandoned, the hopelessly sick and tortured souls he knew. I do not object because his characters are feverish and hysterical, because they stare and glare and moan and cry and leap and tremble, because their knees shake and their teeth chatter and they have nightmares filling whole chapters. I am willing to read these things; but I want to read them from the point of view of a scientist who can interpret them, or of an economist who can remedy them; I do not want to read them as an apotheosis of idiocy. I do not want them composed and idealized to prove the divine nature of epilepsy.
And when I hear perfectly sane and comfortable bourgeois critics in the United States exalting this pathologic mysticism, I want to throw a brick-bat at them. Here, for example, is Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale University, telling us that “of all the masters of fiction both in Russia and elsewhere, Dostoievski is the most truly spiritual.” At the beginning of his essay he says that this novelist “was brought up on the Bible and the Christian religion. The teachings of the New Testament were with him almost innate ideas. Thus, although his parents could not give him wealth, or ease, or comfort, or health, they gave him something better than all four put together.”
“I think,” says Mrs. Ogi, “that you had better take a chapter off and deal with that.”
Says her husband: “I have a title already chosen—”
CHAPTER LXXXV
THE CHRISTIAN BULL-DOG
Just what has a professor at Yale University to do with “the Christian religion”? What do “the teachings of the New Testament” really mean to him? How competent is he to judge about “masters of fiction” who are “truly spiritual”? How much sincerity is there in such literary criticism, emanating from the elm shadows of New Haven, Connecticut?
Picture a great ruling-class university, founded on “the Bible, rum and niggers”; that is to say, the African slave-trade, covered by a mantle of religiosity. The students at this university are young aristocrats, heirs-apparent of ruling-class families, who attend “prep” schools so exclusive, and with so long a waiting list that you have to make your application when you are born. In these schools they “make” certain exclusive fraternities, and when they come to Yale they “make” certain secret societies, whose spirit is symbolized by the “Skull and Bones.” Their other ideal in life is to win athletic contests, whose temper they embody in the “Bull-dog.”
The trustees of this pious university you will find listed according to their economic functions in “The Goose-Step.” Their favorite alumnus, the high god of the present Yale religion is a three-hundred-pound plutocrat by the name of William Howard Taft, who was made president of the United States some years ago for the purpose of allowing the land thieves to get away with the natural resources of Alaska. Having fulfilled that function for his class, and having, when he came up for re-election, succeeded in carrying the states of Vermont and Utah, he was made chief justice of the Supreme Court, to serve as a bulwark of the liberties of the American people: the liberty of the individual hunky and wop to negotiate independently with the Steel Trust; the liberty of railroad directors to compel their wage-slaves to toil when the wage-slaves want to rest; the liberty of little children of Georgia crackers and North Carolina clay-eaters to work all night in cotton mills. Having solemnly delivered such pronouncements in defense of liberty, this all-highest alumnus brings his three hundred pounds to the commencement ceremonies, and walks in solemn procession clad in scarlet and purple robes.