Chapter XII

The Civil War in America and Alexander Second’s freeing of the serfs in Russia, which took place at the same time, were very different in their effect upon the two countries. The Civil War, as the most intelligent of the Transcendentalists, Thoreau and Hawthorne, foresaw, was not likely to turn out into a victory of New England mysticism over Southern rationalism and materialism. The desperate gallantry and lost-cause chivalry with which the South flung itself into the struggle and maintained it for the first two years, soon disabused everyone but the politicians. The real balance of power lay with the northern industrialists, busily making munitions and army equipment, and with the population of the yet unformed border communities of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas. After 1862 the victory, if victory was to be won, would fall with its spoils, not to the abolitionists (the most honest of whom, William Lloyd Garrison, was in favor of letting the South go) nor to the small group of learned and cultivated New Englanders, but to the steel magnates of Pennsylvania, the squatter immigrants of the prairie, rapidly building Chicago, their true capital, where the name of Emerson was unknown. The Civil War was the first heavy defeat for American culture, and it is doubtful if America has ever completely recovered from it. Coming as it did, before either the North or the South had reached their fullest mental development, and while the West was still mentally and physically undeveloped, it only transferred power to the frontier and provided another episode in the progressive decentralisation and deculturisation of America.

Far otherwise was it at the other end of the scale. Alexander’s action in liberating the serfs, and his own liberal tendencies, sent a wave of hope over everyone in Russia, and not least over the Slavophils. Their programme was about to be accomplished. The next twenty years following 1860 is the richest and most remarkable period in Russian literature until we reach the period that beginning about 1900, covers the present day. During this time not only Tolstoy did his best work, which we have already dealt with, but these years also covered the entire mature achievement of another great Russian, who in his absolute uniqueness as a spiritual force, surpasses even Tolstoy: Feodor Dostoevsky. One of the few figures that we can remotely set beside him (and that we can do so even remotely is a fact in itself of some significance) is that of his American contemporary Herman Melville.

There can be little basis for comparison between the outward careers of the son of the poor Russian doctor (with Volhynian, perhaps remote Polish blood in his veins) who came to St. Petersburg at the age of twenty-two to make a literary sensation with his first story, and who, three years later, having taken part in meetings of a group of young Socialists of markedly westernizing tendencies, was sent off to penal servitude in Siberia, where he remained for ten years; and the life of the scion of two of the proudest and most aristocratic of American colonial families, who became stricken with poverty at twelve, ran away to sea, tried school-teaching for three years, shipped aboard a whaler at twenty-two, returned at twenty-four, married, poured out literary work for about ten years, and relapsed again into the silence of complete oblivion for over twenty years. When one adds the detail that Dostoevsky’s period of imprisonment and exile in Siberia very nearly corresponds to Melville’s sole period of creative work (1849-1859 in Dostoevsky’s case, and 1847-1856 in Melville’s) one realises that neither time nor space can be used as a basis of comparison. The true comparison lies inward: in the unique spiritual torment, the unsatisfied thirst for perfection that made Dostoevsky and Melville what they were.

In the history of every great nation there comes a time when the need of men to find what may be called the Golden Age becomes acute. This search for the ideal, as it influences literature, is often attacked by modern literary critics under the name of Romanticism. Nevertheless nineteenth century Romanticism has very little in common with this particular striving, which probably affected the Greeks just when they touched high-water mark in the fifth century, certainly was present with the Romans from Virgil onwards, and woke again with the first stirrings of the Italian Renaissance. It seems as if man cannot create his highest flights of beauty and imagination without the longing for some marvellous Utopia to be finally achieved to lure him on. In the case of the English race, the prospect and aspiration towards this Golden Age in dream and in reality spanned the age of the Tudors, and Shakespeare speaks its last farewell in “The Tempest’s” air-borne music. To the Americans and the Russians the hope of a new birth, arising from the ashes of the past, had existed as we have seen, from the beginning; but their literature had been born prematurely old and disillusioned in regard to what was the faith, not of the cultured few, but the majority. Hawthorne had turned away from the life of his epoch to brood on the shapes evoked for him by ancestral memories. Gogol had, after a brief attempt to show the heroic past in its tragic splendor, turned aside to acridly and bitterly satirize the present. But the forces of Transcendentalism and Slavophilism had shown that however evil the present might be, life and literary work would be impossible in Russia and America, without hope and trust in the future. This hope Tolstoy and Whitman tried to turn into hard, rational, everyday reality. Melville and Dostoevsky on the other hand were not concerned with what was practical reality--their aspirations were too great for that--but with the vaster if more indefinite world of human hearts and souls. They sought to go beyond the gospel of Transcendentalism and Slavophilism into a search for the ultimate perfection of the human type.

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Feodor Michaelovitch Dostoevsky was born on October 30, 1821, at Moscow. His father was an army doctor, who combined in his life the vices of alcoholism and of avarice. The family was well-to-do, and possessed estates in the country, together with a certain number of serfs, but the elder Dostoevsky (who had many of the characteristics of old Karamazov) not only denied his family support, but behaved in such an insupportable manner towards his own peasants, that while on a visit to one of his estates, he was smothered by the serfs with the cushions of his own carriage. This tragic event haunted Dostoevsky through all his later life. About the mother (who appears to have been an ineffectual, harmless personage) we know little. Young Dostoevsky was sent with his brother to St. Petersburg at twenty-one, to join the Government Corps of Engineers, but soon abandoned this to take up writing. Already he was afflicted with a mild form of epilepsy, which was aggravated by his disorderly and riotous mode of existence. His first novel, “Poor Folk,” created a mild sensation; the “literature of pity,” the sentimental novel of the Dickens type was in the air, and Dostoevsky’s work was of the sort to please the public taste. He became acquainted with Belinsky and Nekrassov, the leading critic and poet of the time, and was hailed as the true heir of Gogol’s tradition. He soon became familiar with the advanced literary circles, which were extremely radical in politics, and this led to his downfall. He joined the political group of one Petrachevsky where the questions of constitutional government on the English model, abolition of serfdom, and freedom of the press were ardently debated. The whole group was arrested, and after having the death-sentence passed on them, were led into the prison yard to be executed, when a messenger came forward announcing that this sentence had been commuted to imprisonment and exile in Siberia. There Dostoevsky remained for ten years, till 1859.

It was not until after his return to Russia, and after his marriage which took place in Siberia had proved a total failure, and after a violent and lacerating love affair with a demoniacal and coldly proud woman, that Dostoevsky found himself as a writer. The book in which he found himself, though it has not the fame of the greater novels, is in reality the key to his life and thought. It is called “Memories from the Underground,” and was written in 1862. It was followed by “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” “The Gambler,” “The Possessed” (to give it its English title; the Russian title is, properly speaking, “Devils”), and “The Brothers Karamazov.” During these later years, Dostoevsky’s life was not less harrowing than during the earlier. His second marriage, with a young unspoilt girl who was devoted to him, gave him some happiness, but his later years were harassed by constant money troubles, and from 1867 to 1874 he had to live abroad, as a penniless bankrupt. This state of affairs was further aggravated by a mania for gambling which possessed him, and by his epileptic seizures, now grown acute. His complete break with the Western liberals of his youth, and his whole-hearted adoption of a mysticism resting on Orthodoxy, alienated his early friends; and the Slavophils with whose doctrines he now sympathised were repelled by his rudeness of manner, his contempt for good society, and a sort of masked anarchism that they perceived in him. Nevertheless, his “Brothers Karamazov,” which appeared in the year before his death, made Dostoevsky popular, and his Pushkin address, delivered a few months before the end, was a sort of apotheosis. He died suddenly, as the result of an aggravated quarrel with some relatives over money affairs, early in 1881.

Dostoevsky’s thought may be thus summarized: The human soul was to him of incommunicable, unique value. And not only the human soul of the higher ranks of society, but that of the lower, the “injured and oppressed,” those who had been warped and embittered by the world and by man. Dostoevsky knew well that he was such a warped individual, and that nothing could heal him except some miracle of divine and earthly harmony. This miracle could only be brought about by the production of some superior human type, who would at once be “master of the world,” a superman and yet one who sympathised and understood the lowest and most degraded of men. But the trouble was that such types, the Father Zossimas, the Alyosha Karamazovs, the Prince Myshkins, stood aloof from the world and innocent of its temptations, they were ineffectual pure fools, and in the world’s eyes, “Idiots.” On the other hand the world, and Russia in particular (in whose destiny Dostoevsky forced himself to believe with the anguished fervor of one who had been made to suffer by it, and yet who had no other country) was likely to progress in the exactly opposite direction and to produce the anti-Christian “superman,” the serene monster, cold-bloodedly dabbling in ultimate iniquity. Dostoevsky’s major work is a vast descent into the abyss of human perversion, at the bottom of which stood hell, like a “cold bathhouse filled with spiders.” If Tolstoy was as Adam before the fall, Dostoevsky was Adam after.

Herman Melville, on the other hand, was born in the inner circle of America’s colonial aristocracy. His father, a descendant of English landowners and Revolutionary patriots, travelled abroad as a young man, was highly cultivated for his time, but allowed the family fortune to slip through his fingers. He died when Melville was only twelve years old, leaving his family bankrupt. His mother, a cold, proud, and essentially selfish descendant of the most notable of the colonial Dutch settlers who had rallied to Washington’s side, did nothing to mitigate the poverty of her family, and at the age of seventeen, Melville shipped before the mast as a common seaman on a voyage to Liverpool. This voyage, later described in “Redburn,” seems to have opened Melville’s eyes to the cruelty and injustice of the world. He returned after a painful experience as a penniless waif in England, to America, and tried school teaching for a number of years. Meanwhile he was writing, desultorily and badly. In 1840, when twenty-one years of age, he again, in a fit of desperation, went to sea, this time on a whale ship bound to the South Seas. How he deserted his ship at the Marquesas, lived for a time with cannibals, returned to Tahiti, saw the inside of a jail, and finally became a common seaman aboard an American man-of-war which brought him back to his native country, is all fully told in his first two books “Typee,” “Omoo,” and their later successor “White Jacket.” The return to America in 1846 enabled Melville to devote himself to literature, and his first book “Typee,” recounting his adventures in the Marquesas, made a sensation in England and America, being a “success of scandal” in the latter country on account of certain passages not complimentary to the missionaries in the South Seas. After writing its successor, “Omoo,” Melville married. The marriage, with a woman of wealth and position, brought only further disillusionment, as it is apparent that Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, had neither imagination nor tact to sympathise with her husband’s work nor his sensitive temperament. A family of children soon engrossed her, and Melville was forced to struggle on alone in the effort to support not only his wife, but his mother (who despised him heartily) and his wife’s sister as well. There followed in rapid succession, “Mardi” (1848), “Redburn” (1848) and “White Jacket” (1849) written to support his waning fortunes. In 1849, he went to England, which had begun to take very favourable notice of his work, and he might have become there a minor literary lion, but family concerns, and perhaps also his own aloof independence of spirit, soon recalled him. The first fruits of his return were “Moby Dick” and “Pierre,” the two masterpieces of the mature Melville. A disastrous fire at his publishers which destroyed the plates of his works, the hostility of the reviewers to “Pierre,” Hawthorne’s defection from friendship, the increasing lack of understanding of his own family, and ill-health, all conspired to embitter him. After one or two further attempts, and a second trip abroad on which he wrote the poem “Clarel,” which could not even find a publisher, Melville retired from the field. His last years were spent as collector of the customs of the port of New York, where he died in 1891. His death passed absolutely unnoticed, and it is only in the last decade that he has begun to emerge into the fame that life denied him.

Melville’s work began as a continuation of the adventure story as practised by Cooper. “Typee” and “Omoo” are largely what they purport to be; a sublimation of actual experience of a white man amongst strange countries and savage peoples with a considerable dash of idyllic and exotic colouring. But Melville’s attitude towards the savages of the South Seas (to which he came, be it noted, after the disillusionment and shattering of early romantic hopes recounted in “Redburn”) was very different from the skilled idealisation of the remote practised by Cooper. He was the first man to ask himself and others the question, “If this savage life is so much more rational and sensible than Christianity, why pretend to be Christian?”--a question to which to this day there has remained no answer. Thus he early became profoundly suspicious of the virtues of his own countrymen, while at the same time (like Dostoevsky) he knew himself innately bound to his own country by unbreakable ties. He thus affirms the sole achievement that Christianity really has to its credit, the conquest of the world by democracy, while at the same time his eyes are open to all the evil done daily in the world in the name of democracy. This profound division of self, this inner warping grew up early in him, and the struggle was but intensified by his boyish adoration of his selfish, purse-proud, and beautiful mother, which turned to disgust after his father’s death. Thus he interjected into the sea-story elements which had nothing whatever to do with realistic experience; elements derived from his profound knowledge of the ways of humanity, intensified by his own loneliness and aloofness from mankind. Very early he seems to have traversed the waste of German metaphysics, and to have become a transcendentalist, if not before Emerson, at least coeval with Hawthorne. Each of the major novels, “Redburn,” “White Jacket,” “Moby Dick,” “Mardi,” is less the description of an actual voyage than a terrible allegoric record of spiritual defeat and despair. Even “Redburn,” the one most based perhaps on actual experience, is haunted by the figure of Jackson, a vision of pure unadulterated evil; and the two last are desperate flights of imagination away from the world. In all his best work, except “Pierre,” Melville makes us walk a ship’s deck, which should be the breeding ground of the most mystic whole-hearted democracy on earth, and in every line and passage he shows us how this fair scene, seen from within man’s soul, is only hell.

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It is customary among literary critics to devote attention to Melville’s remarkable style, and to stress the point that Dostoevsky’s major novels are nothing but glorified detective stories. It is true that Melville possessed a style that in its measured eloquence was the equal and sometimes the superior of his models, De Quincey and Sir Thomas Browne, and that--at its best--makes the style of Hawthorne shrivel into insignificance. It is true also that all of Dostoevsky’s great works centre about a commonplace murder, and that he uses the most elementary devices of suspense and horror to heighten our interest about this murder. But the significant thing is that neither Melville’s long purple passages, surcharged with descriptive power, by which he makes you see every detail of his scenes in an unearthly light, nor Dostoevsky’s interminable hysteric conversations, in which each of his characters tries in turn to lay bare the inmost criminal secret of his or her soul, are anything more than skilful devices to set out the heart of the subject, which is in both cases the complete, candid, and terribly disillusioned revelation of the workings of the naked and helplessly-entangled human soul. Both carried pure character-creation to a point beyond that which any other writer has attempted, except perhaps Shakespeare in “Hamlet”; and both, like Shakespeare in “Hamlet,” were obsessed by their characters, and obsessed above all by the “mystery of iniquity,” the infinite perversion and moral deformity of humankind.

It is possible to show how this is so only by a direct comparison of the masterpiece of both men. “The Brothers Karamazov” is outwardly, at least, the story of the murder of a wealthy landowner by his sons. But a moment’s examination of the character of old Karamazov, the landowner in question, will convince us that no such man as old Karamazov could possibly exist in actual flesh. He transcends all human limitations. He is not only a coarse wine-bibber, and an avaricious miser with his money, like Dostoevsky’s own father, but an unbridled sensualist, a cynic, a sentimentalist, and a buffoon--none of which Dostoevsky’s father ever was. He is, in short, an encyclopædia of all Russian vices, is in fact, a symbol of that Old Russia which Dostoevsky saw had to be put to death. And as such, he triumphs in life and death over his sons. The oldest, Ivan, who is also the noblest, sees his faith in God and man destroyed by the monstrous conduct of his father, and goes insane; the second, Dmitri, follows a crooked path of sensuality and sentimentality, but is redeemed by some traits of generosity for which he has to suffer; the youngest of all, Alyosha, fancies that he has gained redemption and become “a new man” by entering a monastery, but in the end has to admit that he too is in essence “Karamazov.” The actual murder is consummated by Smerdyakov, the unacknowledged offspring of Karamazov himself and a gutter-drab; he hangs himself, and Dmitri has to suffer the penalty. The end of the book leaves Dostoevsky questioning alike human and divine justice; there is no solution, except perhaps in suffering, and the shout of “Hurrah for Karamazov!” with which the story closes, may conceal an even deadlier irony.

Melville’s “Moby Dick” is very different as regards setting, but its import is even more clear. Here we have what purports to be the story of a whaling-cruise. But in fact the story from beginning to end is pure allegory, thinly disguised with masses of irrelevant detail about whales and whaling. Moby Dick, the White Whale, whose killing is the special aim of the ship’s cruise, is nothing but a symbol: a symbol of the unearthly, unconquerable, superhuman--and after all is said and done, strangely beautiful--power of evil. He exists in every sea of the world, but it is precisely in the “Pacific,” in the heart of a noonday calm, that he is found. He has been sighted before, but never without disaster; has been hunted by others, but has always escaped. Captain Ahab, master of the ship that is now seeking him, has been disabled by him, in a previous encounter, having lost one leg. This Captain Ahab is Melville’s symbol of the human will in its highest and most courageous aspect; the human will that, not having been able to conquer evil by fair means, in direct battle, now strives to do so by unhallowed ones. By a stroke of superb genius, Melville makes him master even of the souls of simple savages; his three chief harpooners are respectively a South Sea Islander, a Negro, and an American Indian. His control over his three mates, all of whom represent some shade of manly courage, is also practically absolute. Moby Dick is duly hunted, and destroys the ship and Ahab alike in a scene whose magnificence of prose and mounting terror alike have no parallel in anything written by man. The only person who has foreseen the inevitable tragedy is an idiot boy, to whom no one pays attention; the only one who survives it is the outcast, Ishmael, who tells the story.

Here, too, the parallel with Shakespeare is inevitable. As Dostoevsky recalls “Hamlet,” and in part “Othello,” so Melville recalls the Shakespeare of “Macbeth” and “King Lear.” If we can suppose a Lear endowed with superhuman force, who instead of wandering out upon the heath and raving, feeds his insanity with the steady thought of revenge, and at last sets out, backed by others, to accomplish it, we get in this Lear a complete picture of Ahab. He is undaunted, so long as his ship lasts, ready to match weapons with God Himself. Only when his ship goes down before the battering onrush of the superhuman power behind Moby Dick does Ahab momentarily give way; and then but to recover and hurl another unavailing harpoon at his antagonist. Ship and captain alike go down in the struggle, and the last thing seen is a topmast pennon floating above the waters, with a sky-hawk entangled in its folds: “And so the bird of heaven with his whole captive form enfolded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself in it.” “Then all collapsed and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” To the problem of evil Melville has no more an answer, then, than Dostoevsky. He can but suggest that if evil conquers, it is so much the worse for God who lets evil conquer; a solution to which Dostoevsky might have answered in the words of Kirillov in “The Possessed,” that God in that case was dead, and man must become God. That Melville adds his favourite tag “all is vanity,” to this conclusion would seem to Dostoevsky an impertinence. “We have to live nevertheless,” he might have retorted; a fact poor Melville often neglected to take into account.

Before Melville arrived at this conclusion, that the world was more evil than good, he too had striven to portray the ideal human type of his dreams. Jack Chase in “White Jacket” (who is significantly made an Englishman) is the apotheosis of Melville’s type; the bluff, hearty, pleasant Anglo-Saxon blend of Pagan and Puritan. Perhaps it was his own wavering between England and America (where the bluff, hearty, pleasant type is but too frequently in practice a hypocrite and a bully to boot) that made Melville select for his life’s loyalty, this sort of being, and not continue his search into the deeper waters of the human soul; certainly it was his own reticent prudery in sexual matters--a prudery not shared by the great Russian with whom his name is here linked--that made him hesitate before what must have been the final statement of his problem. What that statement might have been, “Pierre” exists to show; Melville in the end meant to portray evil as seductive but ruinous, and good as purely negative and helpless. The public would have none of this, and Melville decided to keep silent about the dangerous secret of his own philosophy. That he did not continue to write was America’s second great disaster in the field of culture; following on the Civil War, it was a double fatality scarcely paralleled elsewhere, and certainly not in Russia. But in his transformation of the realistic adventure story into the “allegory of Good and Evil” Melville perhaps pointed the way to American authors as yet unborn.