Page:Crime and Punishment - Garnett - Neilson - 1917.djvu/22

xiv 'The Idiot," the interest is not even in the happiness or unhappiness of the hero; for to Dostoevsky happiness and unhappiness seem to be external things, and he is not concerned even with this kind of failure or success. He has such a firm belief in the existence of the soul, and with it a faith so strong in the order of the universe, that he applies no final tests whatever to his life. Plot with most novelists is an effort to make life seem more conclusive than it really is; and that is one of the reasons why we like a firm plot in a novel. With its tests and judgments and results it produces an illusion of certainty agreeable to our weakness of faith. But Dostoevsky needs no illusion of certainty, and gives none. He had a faith independent of happiness and even of the state of his own soul. Life indeed had poured unhappiness upon him, so that he knew the worst of it from his own experience; yet we can tell from his books that he knew also a peace of thought compared with which all his own miseries were unreal to him. In that he differs from Tolstoy, who saw this peace of thought in the distance and could not reach it. Tolstoy therefore conceived of life as an inevitable discord between will and conviction, and tried to impose the impossible on mankind as he tried to impose it upon himself, judging them with the severity of his self-judgments. His books are full of his own pursuit of certainty and his own halffailure and half-success. He still makes happiness the test, even though he feels that the noblest of men cannot attain to it; for his own happiness was caused by the conflict in his mind between will and conviction. But in Dostoevsky this conflict had ceased. He was not happy, but he was not torn by the desire for happiness; nor did he test his own soul or the souls of others by their happiness or unhappiness. His faith in the soul was so great that he saw it independent of circumstance, and almost independent of its own manifestation in action. For in these manifestations there is always the alloy of circumstance, or the passions of the flesh, or of good or evil fortune; and he iried to see the soul free of this. He did not judge meri by their diversities which outward things seemed to impose on them. For him the soul itself was more real than all these