DOSTOEVSKY AND THE DOWNFALL OF EUROPE.*
Ma. HERMANN HESSE, whose two essays on Dostoevsky have now been translated by Mr. Stephen Hudson, is one of the most interesting of contemporary German critics ; and he is also the most extreme of those critics who accept Dostoevsky as above all a social prophet. Mr. Hesse is intelligent ; he is sufficiently a psychologist ; he has sensibility and imagination ; but one feels that though he has these qualities in sufficient force to interest one intensely, nevertheless he has them, in the presence of Dostoevsky, insufficiently under control. He shares, with so many other contemporary critics of Dosto- evsky, that special sort of critical drunkenness which the novels of Dostoevsky are peculiarly apt to inspire : a drunken- ness which, in its milder forms, one might designate simply as loss of aesthetic distance ; in severer cases, as hysteria. " Naturally," observes Mr. Hesse, " one can, if one likes, regard The Brothers Karamaxov, from a literary point of view, as a work of art. When the unconscious of the whole con- tinent and age has made of itself poetry in the nightmare of a single prophetic dreamer, when it has issued in his awful blood-curdling scream, one can, of course, consider the scream from the standpoint of a singing-teacher." There, certainly, is the hysterical note—it is in the " awful blood-curdling scream " (surely a phrase more remarkable for its emotional exaggerativeness than for its critical discretion) ; and it is even more seriously in " the whole continent and age." One has every sympathy with Mr. Hesse's suggestion that one cannot judge merely aesthetically a novel which, like The Brothers Karamazov, is so profoundly, so exceptionally and nakedly, of psychotic origin. One is prepared to go further still, and to suggest that the same thing applies to every work of art—the simplest lyric invites a psychological scrutiny just as close. One cannot treat some works of art aesthetically and others psychologically ; all works of art are psychotic in origin, all must be observed in the same way and under similar controls, and it becomes a little absurd to suggest that any one novel or poem is more or less exempt than another from aesthetic considerations, or sociological. Every poem or novel is to some extent a " blood-curdling scream " ; and it is certainly the duty of the critic to consider the scream as much from the standpoint of the singing-teacher as from that of the psychologist.
Mr. Hesse dispenses candidly with all aesthetic approach to his problem, and of that we do not necessarily complain. He admits, in The Brothers Karamazov, " exaggerated and tasteless things." " Such things," he explains, " come about when a man already stands beyond Art." One cannot be sure what, if anything, Mr. Hesse means by this. What is this state of " beyondness " in Art ? Dostoevsky himself observed repeatedly that he was a " poet," that he was, precisely, inadequate as an artist, and nearly always failed to develop his theme with the requisite harmony and power. lie was not, in any discoverable sense, " beyond Art "- more often Art was beyond him. What Mr. Hesse means, perhaps, is that he prefers, in literature, the more compulsively confessional and less ordered work to work less directly con- fessional and more deliberately or at any rate. successfully " shaped." He prefers Dostoevsky to Turgenev. With that preference there is no occasion to quarrel. What one does quarrel with is Mr. Hesse's assumption that Dostoevsky's feverishly confessional up-pourings from the unconscious represent a next step in Art, or consciousness, or civilization ; that the Karamazovs and Myshkin represent states of con- sciousness to which we all must come and through which we all must pass ; that Dostoevsky's confessional febrility, his complete subservience to his unconscious, renders him the chosen and deliberate prophet of " the whole continent and age" ; that " Art " is necessarily less psychotic, less involved in the unconscious, and therefore less true prophetically than " non-Art " ; and that in general the time for Art is past. In this series of large loose assumptions lies Mr. Hesse's thesis. Epileptic Dostoevsky—with his tortured sensibility ; his sick, mystical, bloodshot obsession with good and evil (a problem not so new as Mr. Hesse seems to think it is) ; his vehement, overcharged, fantastically beautiful caricatures of human • .le Sight of Chaos. By Hermann Hesse. Translated by Stephen Hudson. Zurich : Verlag Seidwyla.
beings struggling like inspired cripples to escape the moral net ; Dostoevsky, identified with the Karamazovs, who " have no character," who plunge downward from civilization and restraint into the unconscious, the mother of the all, and lose individuality in this awareness of the all and its indivis- ibility—this Dostoevsky is held up to us as a more or less conscious prophet of the downfall of Europe, the end of a moral order, the beginning of a chaos from which a new world is to come.
The thesis is strained—only Mr. Hesse's acuteness by the way, his many momentary brilliances, save it from becoming merely a hysterical muddle. Would Mr. Hesse have us believe, just because we admire Dostoevsky, or because he teaches us much, that all Europe, " the whole continent and age," is epileptic ? Would he have us believe that the Karamazovs, whose rebellion at civilization is the rebellion of the half-civilized, the barbarian, are European types, prophetic of the rebellion of the over-civilized ? In that parallel, which lies at the core of Mr. Hesse's thesis, one detects an error of the first magnitude. Of equal magnitude is the error in his assumption that the " work of Art " (" No, this is no time for artists, that time has bloomed itself away ") is less psychotic or compulsive than the mere " outpouring." It is simply that the compulsion is of a different sort. And the " work of Art " is just as likely as the " outpouring " to be prophetically characteristic of its era—and even, for that
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