A RUSSIAN REALISTIC NOVEL.*
THE appearance of a well-defined and original figure in fiction is an event of too rare occurrence to be passed over in silence ; therefore we wish to make known that such a figure is presented by the hero of the work before us, Prince Mnislikin, the idiot referred to in the title, who is a remarkable conception of character, and unlike any other that we remember having met with previously in the pages of a novel. In reading about him, one is reminded, by sheer force of contrast, of the words," When I became a man, I put away childish things ;" because that is emphatically and conspicuously what he does not do. He remains from first to last a very incarnation of childlike simplicity, guilelessness, and confidence in humanity, which seem unnatural and strangely out of place in a grown-up man. Though shrewd and anything but silly in some re- spects, he is nevertheless a downright fool in others, and commits acts of folly which would be a great deal more provoking than they are, if one's indignation were not tempered by genuine regard and admiration for what is beautiful in a never-failing kindliness, pity, and sympathy for his fellow-creatures, however objectionable they may be, and a wonderful capacity for the attribute which some- body (who is it I) has called "the love of the untamable." To such an extreme is hie pity carried, that it is not only akin to, but hardly distinguishable from, love ; and therefore, when the first emotion attracts him towards one woman, and the second towards another, the two influences are no evenly balanced that neither can be said to predominate, and he is as ready to marry the object of his love as that of his pity, although the latter is an innocent girl, and the former is—well—nothing of the kind. Excessively impressionable, and destitute of that sense of pro- portion which enables most people to keep their impressions in check, and to assign to them only so much importance as reason approves, his mental condition renders him no better fitted for the voyage of life, than is a vessel with ill-regulated ballast for going to sea. In calm waters all may go well, but not in rough ; for when tempests arise, the equilibrium of the mind will be capsized in the one case, as surely as that of the ship will in the other. And this illustration may not inaptly be applied to the career of the poor young fellow whose epileptic tendencies were well-nigh cured by residence for a few years in a quiet Swiss village under medical care, but who speedily collapsed into idiocy on returning to St. Petersburg and being exposed to the great world's storms, caused by the turbulent passions of selfish men and women living therein.
The Prince occupies so decidedly the principal and most interesting position in the book, that all its other characters are dwarfed by comparison, though some of them are anything but insignificant in themselves. The one who, next to him, arrests attention, is Nastasia, the woman be wants to make his wife out of pity, and who is a painful and curious study of a "foiled potentiality,"—to use Carlyle's term for anybody in whom originally existing, latent power for good has come to nothing. Firmly persuaded that she is the most hopeless, fallen
• The Idiot. By Fedor Dostoieffsky. London: Vizetelly and Co,
creature on earth, she has a morbid, perverse wish to be thought worse than she really is, which constantly prompts her "to do something disgraceful, in order that she might say to herself, ' There ! you've done a new act of shame,—you base creature ; " yet, demoralised as she is, her refusal to bring disgrace upon the man she loves by marrying him, shows a capability for self-sacrifice which is almost heroic ; and though contrary impulses may sway her temporarily, she nevertheless persists in this magnanimous refusal to the end, and then at last, mad and despairing, rushes upon a tragic- fate of which she has a prevision, but which seems to her the only alternative to the marriage. Another striking in- dividual, repulsive, grim, and forcibly drawn, is the boorish, brutal young millionaire, Rogojin; he resembles some half- tamed wild beset more than a civilised human being, and is a savage blackguard, whose only approach to a redeeming point (it does not arrive at actually being one) is an intense and overmastering love which has, at all events, the merit of strength and unswerving fidelity, notwithstanding the accompanying ferocity that surely foreshadows calamity to its object. Amongst the numerous minor characters, several are distinctly typical ; they are delineated with bold, strong, almost coarse strokes ; and in each case the type chosen for representation is a contemptible and disagreeable one. For instance, take General Ivolgin, the liar who, like one of Marryat's sea-captains, lies for no discover- able motive save a pure love of lying ; or Hippolyte, the vain, hateful, consumptive busybody, whose craving to make mischief and get himself talked about, is as strong on his death-bed as during life ; or, again, Gania, clever but commonplace, tor- mented with an immense longing to be original, combined with a profound consciousness of the lack of talent whereby that ambition is rendered futile ; a man who was always letting "I dare not wait upon I would," and of whom we are told :- "In his passionate desire to excel ho often felt willing to take some rash step; and yet, having resolved upon such a step, when the moment arrived Gania invariably proved too sensible to take it. He was ready, in the same way, to do a mean action in order to obtain some wished•for object and yet, when the moment came to do it, he found that he was too honest for it after all. (Not that he objected to arts of petty meanness—he was always ready for them)" As the work has no plot, and is composed chiefly of a series of scenes strung together on a slender thread of story, and introduced rather for the purpose of exhibiting seldom-seen phases of human nature, than in consequence of any internal necessities of the narrative, there is naturally a good deal of disjointedness and want of smoothness. Furthermore, in the effort to emphasise peculiarities and give due prominence to salient features, it seems likely that a touch of exaggeration may have here and there crept in ; and one or two of the incidents are quite sufficiently extraordinary to justify a doubt of their having been taken from real life, even though they are not absolutely impossible. Unusual, and widely different from each other as most of the scenes are, there is one serious fault common to all, and that is, that not a single pleasant one is to be found in the whole series. Perhaps that is only what might be expected in a novel which professes itself " realistic," since to apply this term to anything nowadays, is almost equivalent to saying that the thing so qualified deals entirely with what is ugly and dis- agreeable ; but that there should be any necessity for this is not altogether apparent when one remembers how much the world contains that is fair and beautiful, and yet every bit as real as its opposite. And, at all events, authors desirous of popularity should bear in mind that the so-called realism which consists in a display of deformities, more or less hideous, dragged forth and paraded for the public to gloat over if it chooses, is unquestionably unpleasant, whatever difference of opinion there may be amongst authorities as to the wholesomeness of the spectacle, or whether it is most conducive to edification or to the creation and development of vitiated tastes,—a matter probably depending greatly upon the manner in which the subject is treated. Although The Idiot is a work of decided talent, and has much that is striking and powerful, it is nevertheless rather tedious reading on the whole, owing, we think, partly to the slightness of the story, and partly to defects in the translation. What merits in the way of accuracy this may have, we do not know, not having read the original ; but at any rate, considered as a specimen of English composition, it is an indifferent per- formance, and we feel little doubt of the book's being a good deal better in the original than in the English version.
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