Page:Crime and Punishment - Garnett - Neilson - 1917.djvu/24

xvi clumsy it is only because Dostoevsky is impatient to tell us what he has to tell.

Those who believe that the soul is only an illusion—and there are many who believe this without knowing it—will be surprised to find how much truth Dostoevsky has discovered through his error. Whether his faith was right or wrong, it certainly served him well as a novelist, and so did his experience. No modern writer has been so well acquainted with evil and misery as he was. Other novelists write about them as moving exceptions in life; he wrote about them, because in his experience they were the rule. Other novelists have a quarrel with life or with society, or with particular institutions; but he has no quarrel with anything. There is neither hatred in him, nor righteous indignation, nor despair. He had suffered from government as much as any man in the world, yet he never saw it as a hideous abstraction, and its crimes and errors were for him only the crimes and errors of men like himself.

We hate men when they seem no longer men to us, when we see nothing in them but tendencies which we abhor; and a novelist who expresses his hatred of tendencies in his characters deprives them of life and makes them uninteresting to all except those who share his hatred. Even Tolstoy makes some of his characters lifeless through hatred; but Dostoevsky hates no one, for behind every tendency he looks for the soul, and the tendency only interests him because of the soul that is concealed or betrayed by it. Thus his wicked people, and they abound, are never introduced into his books either to gratify his hatred of them or to make a plot with their wickedness. He is as much concerned with their souls as with the souls of his saints, Alyosha and Prince Myshkin. lago seems to be drawn from life, but only from external observation. We never feel that Shakespeare has been lago himself, or has deduced him from possibilities in himself. But Dostoevsky's worst characters are like Hamlet. He knows things about them that he could only know about himself, and they live through his sympathy, not merely through his observation. He makes no division of men into