Page:Crime and Punishment - Garnett - Neilson - 1917.djvu/23

Rh diversities, and they only interested him for their power of revealing or obscuring it. Therefore his object in his novels is to reveal the soul, not to pass any judgments upon men, nor to tell us how they fare in this world; and this object makes his peculiar method. He does not try to show us souls free from their bodies or free from circumstance, for to do that would be contrary to his own experience and his own faith. Rather he shows them tormented and mistranslated, even to themselves, but in such a way that we see the reality beyond the torments and the mistranslations. His characters drift together and fall into long wayward conversations that have nothing to do with any events in the book. They quarrel about nothing; they have no sense of shame; they behave intolerably, so that we know that we should hate them in real life. But, as we read, we do not hate them, for we recognize ourselves—not indeed in their words and behavior, but in what they reveal through them. They have an extraordinary frankness which may be in the Russian character but which is also part of Dostoevsky's method, for the characters of other Russian novelists are not so frank as his. He makes them talk and act so as to reveal themselves, and for no other purpose whatever. And yet they always reveal themselves unconsciously, and their frankness, though surprising, is not incredible.

But we, accustomed to novels concerned with failure and success, with plots formed upon that concern, are bewildered by Dostoevsky's method; and even he is a little bewildered by it. He never quite learned how to tell his own kind of story a story in which all outward events are subordinate to the changes and manifestations of the soul. Even in "The Brothers Karamazov" there is a plot, made out of the murder of old Karamazov, which seems to be imposed upon the real interest of the book as the unintelligible plot of "Little Dorrit" is imposed upon the real interest of that masterpiece. And in "The Idiot" events are so causeless and have so little effect that we cannot remember them. The best plan is not to try to remember them, for they matter very little. The book is about the souls of men and women, and where the construction is