Page:Crime and Punishment - Garnett - Neilson - 1917.djvu/17

Rh loves a poor street-walker. The author's clairvoyance divines that even the sentiment of love was destined in him to be modified like every other, to be changed into a dull despair.

Sonia is a humble creature, who has sold herself to escape starvation, and is almost unconscious of her dishonor, enduring it as a malady she cannot prevent. She wears her ignominy as a cross, with pious resignation. She is attached to the only man who has not treated her with contempt; she sees that he is tortured by some secret, and tries to draw it from him. After a long struggle the avowal is made, but not in words. In a mute interview which is tragic in the extreme, Sonia reads the terrible truth in her friend's eyes. The poor girl is stunned for a moment, but recovers herself quickly. She knows the remedy; her stricken heart cries out:

"We must suffer, and suffer together; . . . we must pray and atone; . . . let us go to prison! . . ."

Thus are we led back to Dostoevsky's favorite idea, to the Russian's fundamental conception of Christianity: the efficacy of atonement, of suffering, and its being the only solution of all difficulties.

To express the singular relations between these two beings, that solemn pathetic bond, so foreign to every preconceived idea of love, we should make use of the word compassion in the sense in which Bossuet used it: the suffering with and through another being. When Raskolnikov falls at the feet of the girl who supports her parents by her shame, she, the despised of all, is terrified at his self-abasement, and begs him to rise. He then utters a phrase which expresses the combination of all the books we are studying: "It is not only before thee that I prostrate myself, but before all suffering humanity." Let us here observe that our author has never yet once succeeded in representing love in any form apart from these subtleties, or the simple natural attraction of two hearts toward each other. He portrays only extreme cases; either that mystic state of sympathy and self-sacrifice for a distressed fellow-creature, of utter devotion, apart from any selfish desire; or the mad, bestial cruelty of a perverted