"It is terrible to watch a man who has the Incomprehensible in his grasp, does not know what to do with it, and sits playing with a toy called God."

—Letter to his brother Michael.

In his Criticism and Fiction, Mr. Howells wrote: "It used to be one of the disadvantages of the practice of romance in America, which Hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that there were few shadows and inequalities in our broad level of prosperity; and it is one of the reflections suggested by Dosto?evsky\'s novel, The Crime and the Punishment, that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing—as false and as mistaken in its way as dealing in American fiction with certain nudities which the Latin peoples seem to find edifying."

Who cares nowadays for the hard-and-fast classifications of idealist, realist, romanticist, [Pg 53] psychologist, symbolist, and the rest of the phrases, which are only so much superfluous baggage for literary camp-followers. All great romancers are realists, and the converse may be true. You note it in Dumas and his gorgeous, clattering tales—improbable, but told in terms of the real. For my part, I often find them too real, with their lusty wenches and heroes smelling of the slaughter-house. Turn now to Flaubert, master of all the moderns; you may trace the romancer dear to the heart of Hugo, or the psychologist in Madame Bovary, the arch?ological novel in Salammb?, or cold, grey realism as in L\'Education Sentimentale, while his very style, with its sumptuous verbal echoes, its resonant, rhythmic periods—is not all this the beginning of that symbolism carried to such lengths by Verlaine and his followers? Shakespeare himself ranged from gross naturalism to the quiring of cherubim.

Walter Scott was a master realist if you forget his old-fashioned operatic scenery and costumes. It is to Jane Austen we must go for the realism admired of Mr. Howells, and justly. Her work is all of a piece. The Russians are realists, but with a difference; and that deviation forms the school. Taking Gogol as the norm of modern Russian fiction—Leo Wiener\'s admirable anthology surprises with its specimens of earlier men—we see the novel strained through the rich, mystic imagination of Dosto?evsky; [Pg 54] viewed through the more equable, artistic, and pessimistic temperament of Turgenieff, until it is seized by Leo Tolstoy and passionately transformed to serve his own didactic purposes. Realism? Yes, such as the world has never before seen, and yet at times as idealistic as Shelley. It is not surprising that Mr. John M. Robertson wrote, as far back as 1891: "In that strange country where brute power seems to be throttling all the highest life of the people ... there yet seems to be no cessation in the production of truthful literary art ... for justice of perception, soundness and purity of taste, and skill of workmanship, we in England, with all our freedom, can offer no parallel."

Perhaps "freedom" is the reason.

And what would this critic have said of the De Profundis of Maxim Gorky? Are there still darker depths to be explored? Little wonder Mr. Robertson calls Kipling\'s "the art of a great talent with a cheap culture and a flashy environment." Therefore, to talk of such distinctions as realism and romance is sheer waste of time. It is but a recrudescence of the old classic vs. romantic conflict. Stendhal has written that a classicist is a dead romanticist. It still holds good. But here in America, "the colourless shadow land of fiction," is there no tragedy in Gilead for souls not supine? Some years ago Mr. James Lane Allen, who cannot be accused of any hankerings after the flesh-pots of Zola, [Pg 55] made an energetic protest against what he denominated the "feminine principle" in our fiction. He did not mean the books written by women—in sooth, they are for the most part boiling over with the joy of life—but he meant the feminism of so much of our novel writing put forth by men.

The censor in Russia by his very stringency caused a great fictional literature to blossom, despite his forbidding blue pencil. In America the sentiment of the etiolated, the brainless, the prudish, the hypocrite is the censor. (Though something might be said now about the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction.) Not that Mr. Howells is strait-laced, prudish, narrow in his views—but he puts his foot down on the expression of the tragic, the unusual, the emotional. With him, charming artist, it is a matter of temperament. He admires with a latitude quite foreign to English-speaking critics such diverse genius as Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Galdos, Jane Austen, Emilia Pardo Bázan, Mathilde Serao—greater than any modern woman writer of fiction—Henry James, and George Moore. But he admires each on his or her native heath. That their particular methods might be given universal application he does not admit. And when he wrote the above about Dosto?evsky New York was not so full of Russians and Poles and people from southeastern Europe as it is now. Dosto?evsky, if he were alive, would find plenty of [Pg 56] material, tragedy and comedy alike, on our East Side.

The new translation of Dosto?evsky in English by Constance Garnett is significant. A few years ago Crime and Punishment was the only one of his works well known. The Possessed, that extraordinary study of souls obsessed by madness and crime, The Brothers Karamazov, The House of the Dead, and The Idiot are to-day in the hands of American readers who indorse what Nietzsche said of the Russian master: "This profound man ... has perceived that Siberian convicts, with whom he lived for a long time (capital criminals for whom there was no return to society), were persons carved out of the best, the hardest and the most valuable material to be found in the Russian dominions.... Dosto?evsky, the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn." George Moore once had dubbed the novelist, "Gaboriau with psychological sauce." Since then, Mr. Moore has contributed a charming introduction to Poor Folk, yet there is no denying the force and wit of his hasty epigram. Dosto?evsky is often melodramatic and violent; his "psychology" vague and tortuous.

And in the letters exchanged between Nietzsche and Georg Brandes, the latter writes of Dosto?evsky after his visit to Russia: "He is a great poet but a detestable fellow, altogether Christian in his emotions, and quite sadique at the same time. All his morality is what you [Pg 57] have christened \'Slave\'s\' morality.... Look at Dosto?evsky\'s face: half the face of a Russian peasant, half the physiognomy of a criminal, flat nose, little penetrating eyes, under lids trembling with nervousness, the forehead large and well-shaped, the expressive mouth telling of tortures without count, of unfathomable melancholy, of morbid desires, endless compassion, passionate envy. An epileptic genius whose very exterior speaks of the stream of mildness that fills his heart, of the wave of almost insane perspicuity that gets into his head, finally the ambition, the greatness of endeavour, and the envy that small-mindedness begets.... His heroes are not only poor and crave sympathy, but are half imbeciles, sensitive creatures, noble drabs, often victims of hallucinations, talented epileptics, enthusiastic seekers after martyrdom, the very types that we are compelled to suppose probable among the apostles and disciples of the early Christian era. Certainly no mind stands further removed from the Renaissance."

Of all Dosto?evsky\'s portraits after Sonia, the saintly prostitute, that of Nastasia Philipovna in The Idiot is the most lifelike and astounding. The career of this half-mad girl is sinister and tragic; she is half-sister in her temperamental traits to Paulina in the same master\'s admirable story The Gambler. Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov is another woman of the demoniac type to which Nastasia [Pg 58] belongs. Then there are high-spirited, hysterical girls such as Katarina in Karamazov, Aglaia Epanchin in The Idiot, or Liza in The Possessed (Besi). The border-land of puberty is a favourite theme with the Russian writer. And consider the splendidly fierce old women, mothers, aunts, grandmothers (Granny in The Gambler is a full-length portrait worthy of Hogarth) and befuddled old men—retired from service in state and army; Dosto?evsky is a masterly painter of drunkards, drabs, and neuropaths. Prince Mushkin (or Myshkin) the semi-idiot in The Idiot is depicted with surpassing charm. He is half cracked and an epileptic, but is one of the most lovable young men in fiction. Thinking of him, you recall what Nietzsche wrote of Christ: "One regrets that a Dosto?evsky did not live in the neighbourhood of this most interesting decadent, I mean some one who knew just how to perceive the thrilling charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childish." Here is a "moral landscape of the dark Russian soul," and an exemplification in the Prince Myshkin of The Idiot, who is evidently an attempt to portray a latter-day Christ.

Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, like Rogozhin in The Idiot, Stavrogin in The Possessed were supermen before Nietzsche, but all half mad. A famous alienist has declared that three-fourths of Dosto?evsky\'s characters are quite mad. This is an exaggeration, though [Pg 59] there are many about whom the aura of madness and melancholy hovers. Dosto?evsky himself was epileptic; poverty and epilepsy were his companions through a life crowded with unhappiness. (Born 1822, died 1881.) He was four years in Siberia, condemned though innocent as a member of the Pétrachevsky group. He tells us that the experience calmed his nerves. His recollections of his Dead House are harrowing, and make the literature of prison life, whether written by Hugo, Zola, Tolstoy, or others, like the literary exercise of an amateur. It is this sense of reality, of life growing like grass over one\'s head, that renders the novels of Dosto?evsky "human documents." Calling himself a "proletarian of letters" this tender-hearted man denied being a psychologist—which pre-eminently he was: "They call me a psychologist; it is not true. I am only a realist in the highest sense of the word, i. e., I depict all the soul\'s depths."

If he has shown us the soul of the madman, drunkard, libertine, the street-walker, he has also exposed the psychology of the gambler.

He knew. He was a desperate gambler and in Baden actually starved in company with his devoted wife. These experiences may be found depicted in The Gambler.

He has been called the "Bossuet of the détraqués," but I prefer that other and more appropriate title, the Dante of the North. His novels are infernos. How well Nietzsche studied him; they were fellow spirits in suffering. All [Pg 60] Dosto?evsky is in his phrase: "There are no ugly women"—put in the mouth of the senile, debauched Karamazov, a companion portrait to Balzac\'s Baron Hulot. His love for women has a pathological cast. His young girls discuss unpleasant matters. Even Frank Wedekind is anticipated in his Spring\'s Awakening by the Russian in The Brothers Karamazov: "How can Katarina have a baby if she isn\'t married?" cries one of the youngsters, a question which is the............