Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/253

Rh disturbs every human system of order. It was once said to the Idiot that it was lamentable he no longer told only the truth. So it was. Truth is everything. It is possible to say "Yes" to everything. But, to order the world, to achieve material results, to render possible Law, Society, Organization, Culture, and Morality, No must follow Yes. The world must be polarized, it must be divided against itself into Good and Evil. Establish every No, every prohibited thing, every wickedness upon a foundation sufficiently solid to make it accepted law and as soon as such law is enforced, as soon as it becomes the basis of a new mode of viewing things, a new order, it equally becomes absolute and sacred.

Highest Reality in the sense of human culture is the division of the World into Light and Dark, Good and Evil, Allowed and Forbidden. Highest Reality for Myshkin is the magical experience of the reversibility of all institutional forms, of the existence of a negative equivalent to all moral values. The Idiot finally considered, introduces the Mother-claim of the Unconscious, he is the blaster of Civilization. He does not break the Tables of the Law, he simply turns them round and shows that the contrary to them is written on the other side.

It is the secret of this terrifying book that this enemy of Order, this fearful destroyer does not appear as a malefactor but as a charming, shy creature full of childlike grace, full of warm-hearted, unselfish goodness. Dostoevsky drew upon the depths of his imagination when he made this man a diseased epileptic. All Dostoevsky's harbingers of a new and fearful and sinister future, all his forerunners of Chaos are enigmatic, burdened with pain and disease, Rogozhin, Nastasya, the four Karamazovs: all are represented as strange, exceptional beings, but in such a way that their eeriness and soul-sickness inspire that sort of awed veneration that the Asiatics feel for the insane. The remarkable and peculiar thing is not that an epileptic of genius between fifty and sixty years old had such fantasies and made an epic of them. The significant, the ominous consideration is that during three decades the youth of Europe has more and more been accepting these books as full of prophetic gravity. Another strange thing is that we look these criminals, hystericals, and idiots of Dostoevsky in the face in quite a different way from that in which we regard the criminals or fools in other novels, even in novels we have affection for. It is strange and un-