Dostoevsky—Pessimist?

The Possessed, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Shatov was an incorrigible idealist, with a keen satirical ability to destroy his own ideals. He had made a god out of Verhovensky, the leading figure in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Verhovensky was, he imagined, a god of selfish courage and supreme unconcern, the sort of man whom everybody followed involuntarily. Shatov knew that his hero had irreparably injured three women, one of them half-witted and defenseless. That did not bother the idealist at all; it was “in character.” But when Verhovensky lied about it to avoid condemnation, Shatov hit him a savage blow on the cheek and brooded for weeks over the disappointment. The disappointment was deepened by the fact that Verhovensky did not kill him for the blow.

There is something characteristically Russian about that. It goes far to explain Russian pessimism, and give the key to this very book. Your Russian wants above all things to be logical. He will fasten upon an idea and enshrine it in his holy of holies. He will relentlessly follow the dictates of his idea though it lead him to insanity. There is greatness in his attitude, also absurdity. Witness Tolstoy. And when he recognizes his own absurdity he becomes gloomy and savage; there is no escape from the vanity of the world, the spirit, and himself.

I can imagine the mood of Dostoevsky when this book germinated in his mind. He saw this trait in the people about him, he felt it in himself. The intellectuals, each with his little theory, were steadily working towards—nothing at all. The government with its elaborate systems for economic improvement and individual repression, the revolutionary with his scheming insincerity and chaotic program, were equally futile. The women with their pathetic loves, the frivolous with their mad pursuit of amusement, the great and the small, the sycophant and the rebel, were all bitter failures. Suddenly it occurred to him—they are all mad in an insane world, each in his way, one no more than another. I will vent my disgust with these vermin in a book; I will show what they really are. Like the madman who carefully traces out his meaningless labyrinth, I will with the most painstaking psychology unravel their minds, and in so doing I will find my release and my fiendish joy. The only thing lacking in this madhouse is complete self-consciousness. That I will furnish.—And so Dostoevsky logically and nobly followed his idea to its insane conclusion.

The fascinating result cannot be described in a paragraph. It is done, of course, with consummate ability. Beginning the book is like walking into a village of unknown people. They are real enough outwardly; you don’t know their nature or direction. Little by little you learn about them, and begin to take sides. Long habit makes you pick favorites. This man will be noble and successful; perhaps he is the hero. Suddenly you begin to suspect that something is wrong. All things are not working together for one end, as in well-regulated novels. Your favorites become jumbled up with the others. The author doesn’t give you a chance, because he never shows you a cross-section of a mind. He merely tells what the people do and say. You must draw your own conclusions as in ordinary life. When you get used to this, you see an occasional subtlety, a flash of sardonic laughter. Some of the people are not quite right in their minds. And at length the truth dawns; the sane people are even crazier than the others! This impression comes by sheer force of magic; how the author creates it is inexplicable. But once you have it, the fascination of following an idea obsesses you. And at the end it is impossible to find any meaning or direction in the world.

Of course, no such obsession can find a firm footing in the American temperament. After a while it seems Russian and incredible. If you can’t answer Dostoevsky logically, you will abandon logic. But he has stirred you up, and certain important conclusions rise to the surface.

One is that it would be impossible to be such a pessimist unless one looked for a good deal in the world, and looked for it rather sharply. Idealism and courage began this course of thought. Isn’t a big share of our optimism shallow? Shouldn’t we go a little deeper into things before being so sure they are right? Another is that no living individual is worth very much, after all. Our only salvation is in creating a nobler race. And for that any sacrifice of present individuals is supremely worth while.

It is as if some inspired member of a negro tribe in central Africa had suddenly awakened to the fact that his voodoo-worshipping friends were not acting rationally. From their status the burden of his chant might be horrible for its devilish revelations. But in our eyes he would be a seer and a prophet. Why should he have considered the feelings of the miserable savages? There is something more important than that!

George Soule.

The Salvation of the World À la Wells

Social Forces in England and America, by H. G. Wells. [Harper and Brothers, New York.]

Like many philosophers, Mr. Wells is concerned mainly with the need of a new human race. All profound reformers want that. The method of achieving this desirable result is, however, the rock of turning. It probably isn’t necessary to say that our present reformer is not one of those blind apostles of effortless immediacy. Such transmution was respectable when Botany Bay was a popular seaside resort for radical poets and philosophers. They of today realize something of the immensity of the developmental process. Their hopes are often so remote that they seem almost despair, but still time is trusted with a reliance on science for the urge toward human perfectibility. Of such the leader is H. G. Wells.

Clearly the conviction that civilization needs a new race is well founded. All ideals, all ideas, civilization, culture are and have always been the products of a pitiful minority. The tendency at present is toward making the desire of the majority supreme. The majority do not cleave toward ideals—not even toward establishing their own glory. Rousseau imagined that millions loved righteousness; Jefferson made such beliefs the basis of the country’s documents of incorporation. The idealists were manifestly mistaken. Men have never been drawn toward the ideals they have professed. Truth, justice, equality have never been valued when sex, property, or power were opposed. The virtues came in the early days from “Thus saith the Lord,” and they come today, if they come at all, from “Thus saith a Strong Man.”

Mr. Wells guesses that there are fifty thousand reading and thinking persons in England—keepers of the citadel. The fifty thousand are practically England. Perhaps his estimate is too low. John Brisben Walker says that in the United States the number of persons able to think independently about political and social matters has increased from a few score to about two hundred and fifty thousand within thirty years. The fact is, albeit, that the world has been fashioned always by this very small minority. Furthermore the present creation is not one in which there is reason for great pride.

The essay on the Great State is especially fine in this connection. Wells’s idea of the Normal Social Life and of the constant divergence of a minority is altogether clarifying for the watcher from any vantage, but it is in his discussion of the labor unrest that the reader in Colorado discovers the prophecies he most needs. For illustration this:

The ruling minority in Colorado has been confronted with this question during the coal strike. So far no response has been given save the impromptu utterances of a hideous rage and fright at the thought of awakening workers.

Wells answers his own questions. He replies as Colorado will sometime if Colorado is to persist. It is in this tone:

That is the truth which men hate most to hear. It is the doctrine which “Mother” Jones preaches and for which she has been imprisoned regardless of laws and constitutions.

But this reasonableness of Wells appeals as little to the left wing of the socialists as it does to conservatives. The I. W. W.’s have no patience with the detailed delays suggested and Wells is as irritated with the losses in civilization to which a violent revolution is likely to lead. He sets forth his feeling in a discussion of the American population, a curious phrase, necessary on account of his distaste for the word people. In speaking of the possibility of a national revolutionary movement as an arrest for the aristocratic tendency now so pronounced he says:

It is true almost. There are always enough of the Gracchi family present to supply the minimum number of weapons essential. To the truth of this the revolutionary movement in Mexico is a witness and Colorado itself could tell tales.

Social Forces, a too collegiate title, sums up satisfactorily Wells’s important opinions. The book isn’t really a whole: some of the essays are journalistic and some are old. It lacks nearly everywhere the fierceness of The Passionate Friends. In this book Wells is in his dinner coat, comfortable and well fed. He is respectable—horrible admission—but he is still prophetic.

In a sense, too, Social Forces is a warehouse. There one may find stored the rough materials which on occasion are hammered into the poignancies of Marriage or Tono-Bungay. As a vista into a masterhand’s workshop the book has its intense psychological interest, but most of all it is text for salvation of the world.

William L. Chenery.

A Novelist’s Review of a Novel

Vandover and the Brute, by Frank Norris. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.]

It would seem inevitable that had Frank Norris lived he would have rewritten Vandover and the Brute. In the book, as it was rescued from the packing box that had been through the San Francisco fire and sent to the publisher, there is much that would have been discarded by the later Norris. Perhaps he would have thrown it all away and written a new story with the same theme. He was a big man and he had the courage of bigness. He could throw fairly good work into the waste-paper basket. The decay of man in modern society, the slow growth in him of the brute that goes upon all fours—what a big, terrible theme! What a book the later Norris would have made of it!

In the introduction by Charles G. Norris quotation is made from the Frank Norris essay, The True Reward of the Novelist, in which this sentence stands out: “To make money is not the province of the novelist.” Also it is suggested that the book was written under the influence of Zola, and there is more than a hint of Zola’s formula that everything in life is material for literature in the way the job is done.

As it stands, Vandover wants cutting—cutting and something else. With that said and understood, we are glad that the book has been rescued and that it can stand upon our book shelves. American letters cannot know and understand too much of the spirit of Frank Norris, and just at this time when there is much talk of the new note and some little sincere effort toward a return to truth and honesty in the craft of writing, it is good to have this visit from the boy Norris. He was a brave lad, an American writing man who lived, worked, and died without once putting his foot upon the pasteboard road that leads to easy money. “The easy money is not for us,” he said and had the manhood to write and live with that warning in his mind. He had craft-love. With a few more writers working in his spirit we should hear less of the new note. Norris was the new note. He was of the undying brotherhood.

When Frank Norris wrote Vandover he was not the great artist he became, but he was the great man; and that’s why this book of his is worth publishing and reading. The greater writer would have possessed a faculty the boy who wrote this book had not acquired—the faculty of selection. He would have been less intent upon telling truly unimportant details and by elimination would have gained dramatic strength.

Read Vandover therefore not as an example of the work of Norris the artist but as the work of a true man. It will inspire you. Its very rawness will show you the artist in the making. It will make you understand why Frank Norris with Mark Twain will perhaps, among all American writers, reach the goal of immortality.

The Immigrant’s Pursuit of Happiness

They Who Knock at Our Gates, by Mary Antin. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]

Shaking the Declaration of Independence in the face of all those opposed to immigration in any form Mary Antin makes an impassioned appeal for practically unrestricted immigration. Her motive is no doubt praiseworthy, her enthusiasm and eloquence are admirable. She contrasts the nature of our present-day immigrants with those who landed in the Mayflower. The self-satisfied middle class attitude peeps through the question: “Is immigration good for us?”

And of course it is good. The immigrants do more than three-quarters of our bituminous coal mining. They make seven-tenths of our steel. They do four-fifths of our woolen, nine-tenths of our cotton-mill work, nearly all our clothing, nearly all our sugar, eighty-five per cent of all labor in the stock-yards. You cannot but come to the same conclusions as Mary Antin: “Open wide our gates and set him on his way to happiness.”

On his way to happiness? One thinks of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where immigrants are not exactly happy; or Paterson, New Jersey; or an incident of this kind from Marysville, California, related by Inez Haynes Gillmore in Harper’s Weekly for April 4: “An English lad, the possessor of a beautiful tenor voice, song leader of the hop pickers, was walking along carrying a bucket of water. A deputy sheriff shot him down.” One thinks of the Michigan copper mines. Alexander Irvine told us something about peonage in the South in his “Magyar.” The New York East Side with its 364,367[2] dark rooms and its “lung block with nearly four thousand people, some four hundred of whom are babies. In the past nine years alone this block has reported two hundred and sixty-five cases of tuberculosis.”[3] In Pittsburgh alone, according to The Literary Digest of January 16, 1909, five hundred laborers are killed and an unknown number injured every year in the steel industry. According to Dr. Peter Roberts about eighty per cent of those suffering from rickets in Chicago are Italians, Greeks, and Syrians. This disease is almost unknown in the southern countries. The following is taken from an article by Henry A. Atkinson in Harper’s Weekly:

“Open wide our gates and set him on his way to happiness” says Mary Antin.

Sixty thousand illiterate women were admitted in 1911 to this country. The president of The Woman’s National Industrial League says in this connection to the House Committee: “Syndicates exist in New York and Boston for the purpose of supplying fresh young girls from immigrants arriving in this country for houses of ill fame. Immigrants arriving in New York furnish twenty thousand victims annually.” Mr. Jacob Riis said very recently: “Scarce a Greek comes here, man or boy, who is not under contract. A hundred dollars a year is the price, so it is said by those who know, though the padrone’s cunning has put the legal proof beyond their reach.”

But these are statistics, and Mary Antin is horrified by statistics except when she can prove that “the average immigrant family of the new period is represented by an ascending curve. The descending curves are furnished by degenerate families of what was once prime American stock.” The “happiness” that those who knock at our gates run into once they land in our mines, factories, sweatshops, department stores, etc., might be traced further. The real question is this: Is immigration good for the immigrant? In view of the above facts there is but one answer so far as the illiterate and physically weak are concerned. Twisting of facts out of a desire to reach certain conclusions will only harm the immigrant and the inhabitants of this country.

Mary Antin would have been Mary Antin in Russia, Turkey, or Aphganistan. The weak and the illiterate are the ones who keep this question in the foreground. Probably the only exception is the Russian Jew. He has no country of his own and the New York East Side is a comparative improvement over the Czar’s empire.

William Saphier.

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[2] Fifth Report of Tenement House Department, 1909. Page 102.

[3] Ernest Poole:—A Handbook on the Prevention of Tuberculosis.

The Unique James Family

Notes of a Son and Brother, by Henry James. [Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.]

Whatever the deprecators of Henry James’s later manner may have to say about the difficulties of his involved style there are some situations, some plots, for which it is most happily suited. Was so haunting a ghost story ever written as that truly horrible one which involved two children—the name of which has unfortunately escaped me, for I should like to recommend it for nocturnal perusal. And in The Golden Bowl the gradual way you are led to perceive the wrong relationship between two of the characters, which, had it been offered bluntly, with no five degrees of approach and insinuation, would have lost half its mystery of guilt. As he himself says, in the Notes of a Son and Brother, “I like ambiguities, and detest great glares.”

Unfortunately, the style that is fitting to a slow unfolding of a psychological situation does not lend itself well to biography. The direct way is the only possible way there, if the reader is to keep an unflagging interest, and the direct way is simply not possible for Henry James. And one asks nothing more than to be told simply of the student days at Switzerland and Germany, and the life afterward at Newport, just as the Civil War was beginning or best of all throughout the story of a united family—the four boys, little sister, father, mother, and aunt, quite unlike, I imagine, any other family in the world. The quality of the genius of the brothers seems to have sprung from the association with a father as unlike as possible to the American father of today. He did not influence them, we are told, by any power of verbal persuasion to his own ideas. It was quite simply himself, his personality and character, the way he lived life, that took hold upon his sons’ imagination. Of course that is the only way anyone ever is influenced, but I think most parents do try the verbal persuasion as well. Henry James says of his father:

Speaking of the “detached” feeling they had after returning from Europe to settle in Newport, he says:

Very interesting are the occasional letters telling of Emerson and Carlyle. Especially so to me are the side lights on Carlyle, as chiming in somehow with the series of impressions I seem gradually to have accumulated about him as time goes on. Perhaps it really isn’t fair, as a large amount of those impressions I feel sure I owe to Froude, but I can’t help wondering what our times, with modern surgery and therapeutics, would have accomplished with Carlyle’s indigestion, and what resultant difference there would assuredly have been in his philosophy. To quote from a letter of the elder Henry James:

And again in a letter to Emerson:

An earlier letter has this delicious bit about Hawthorne:

And in the postscript of the same:

Which shows how much in earnest the Abolitionists really were—it was a tenet of faith with them. Sad and strange and illuminating to us of a later generation, who are now struggling for other abolitions of slavery, and still hoping for a new world.

I wish I could quote from the delightful letters of William James, but they must be read entire, with the author’s comments, to place them correctly. Pending a biography of the man, these letters will be to many readers the most interesting feature of the book. One of the most magnificent things about the book, however,—if I may use a large word for a large concept—is the spirit running through it of filial and fraternal love, never expressed in so many words, but apparent throughout, which makes, as I said before, the James family unique in the history of American letters.

De Morgan’s Latest

When Ghost Meets Ghost, by William De Morgan. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Whatever else I may say about De Morgan’s new book, I absolutely refuse to tell the number of its pages. Every other criticism begins or ends with this uninteresting fact, and usually adds that it makes no difference how long it is, since the writer’s charm pervades it all. But it does make a difference, and it is too trite to say we are so hurried and nervous and given over to frivolity nowadays that we are unable to read Dickens and Thackeray and Scott and De Morgan. There is a great deal more to read, and a great deal more to do and to think about, than ever there was in Thackeray’s day. And if we are going to spend our time reading countless pages (I very nearly told how many, after all!) we want to be sure it is more worth while than anything else we can be doing, or thinking, or reading.

However, one can’t say very well that he greatly admires a stork, or would if he had a short beak and short legs. De Morgan’s style is his own, and he will tell the story his own way, though we all have a quarrel with him for leaving the most interesting bits to a short “Pendrift” at the end. Did Given’s lover contemplate taking his East Indian poison when the newspapers announced that she was to marry an Austrian noble? Think of cutting that episode off in a few words, while an entire chapter is devoted to a “shortage of mud” for little Dave and Dolly, who were making a dyke in the street! But then, De Morgan doesn’t know how to stop when he begins to talk of children. How he loves them, and all other helpless creatures! He can’t speak even of kittens without a touch of tenderness:

It is bits like this that make Mr. De Morgan’s story so long, and it is bits like this that reconcile us to its length. I believe most readers won’t care greatly whether the two poor old sisters who have been separated so many years ever do meet again. There is no feeling of climax when they do—merely relief that the thing has finally been put across. It was beginning to look as if it never would happen; and though the reader himself, as I say, doesn’t greatly care, he can see that De Morgan does; he has apparently been doing his best to bring it about, but the cantankerous ones just wouldn’t let him.

On the other hand, who can help loving Given o’ the Towers—all sweetness, beauty, and light? Only—isn’t she really more of a twentieth-century heroine than a Victorian young lady, with her crisp decisiveness and air of being most ably able to look out for herself? Truly Victorian, however, are our “slow couple”—Miss Dickenson and Mr. Pellew. Miss Dickenson is thirty-six, and, by all Victorian standards, quite out of the running. De Morgan is extremely apologetic for allowing her to have a romance at this belated hour—her charms faded and gone. But we are betting quite heavily on Miss Dickenson’s chances for happiness with the Hon. Mr. Pellew. The two were “good gossips,” and would always have topics of interest in common.

The Pendrift at the end—quite the most fascinating part of the book—tells us of the daughter of this union Cicely, by this time sixteen years old.

“You know,” says the girl, Cis,—who is new and naturally knows things, and can tell her parents,—“you know there is never the slightest reason for apprehension as long as there is no delusion. Even then we have to discriminate carefully between fixed and permanent delusions and——”

“Shut up, Mouse!” says her father. “What’s that striking?”...

The young lady says, “Well, I got it all out of a book.”

One good reason for reading De Morgan is the fact that he is older than the majority of his readers. We read so much, we hear so much acclaimed that is written by children of twenty, whose experience of life must necessarily be got, like Cicely’s, “out of a book.” The saying of De Maupassant surely applies here—that the writer must sit down before an object until he has seen it in the way that he alone can see it. De Morgan has had the opportunity of seeing life, surely, and knowing what most of it amounts to. The result is a large tolerance and tenderness toward his fellow men.

M. H. P.

The Economics of Social Insurance

Social Insurance: With Special Reference to American Conditions, by I. M. Rubinow. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

The logic of events is rapidly forcing nation after nation into what has hitherto been damned with the epithet paternalism. America, perhaps, is the last important country in the world to face the problems raised by the march of events in this direction. Social insurance, a thing accomplished and a commonplace of government functioning in so many countries, recently adopted in England, is, in this country, still a novelty outside the university class room and the lecture halls of fanatical demagogues who wish to upset the foundations of our civil government and civilization—as the elder politicians express it when their attention is drawn to these sinister activities of thought.

The author of this book in fact was the first academic lecturer on the subject to give a university course in the various forms which social insurance has taken. These lectures he delivered before the New York School of Philanthropy, and they are reprinted here in an extended form.

After giving the philosophy of the matter, the underlying social necessity for insurance, the author takes up the various forms of the activity. Accident, disease, old age, and unemployment must all be provided against, and the state, the employer, and the laborer may share the burden among them, or the two latter may be relieved—as in various types of non-contributory insurance.

Of course the old school economist will ask why the latter two are not relieved, and why the employe or private citizen is not just encouraged to insure with a private corporation. The author’s answer is that, even if he were educated to the point of desiring to do that, he could not. A man insures his house because the feeling of security is worth the small premium he pays, even if that premium is larger than the actual risk involved would warrant—larger by a sum equal to the cost and profits of the business of the insurance company. But the poor man’s chances of loss of employment, accident, or sickness are so much greater in proportion to the capitalized value of his job that he could never afford to pay the premium necessary for a private company to take care of him; while his old age could not be insured without taking all of his earnings—and even then he might die before he reached it.

The situation then is that an admitted necessity cannot be obtained unless the state as a whole takes steps to attain it for all the members of the state. How other states have done this, how type after type of insurance has been evolved, and how these types may be adapted to American practice is the burden of the present work.

The author writes in a clear and non-technical manner, and makes no extravagant claims for what some people may regard as a social panacea; but he is confident that the full development of the idea of social insurance will relieve the worst aspects of poverty—the aspects in which poverty is not only a hardship, but a haunting spirit, sapping the vitality of its victims until they are rendered socially useless.

Llewellyn Jones.

Prose Poems of Ireland

Red Hanrahan, by William Butler Yeats. New edition. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

If you believe, with Chesterton, that “should the snap dragon open its little pollened mouth and sing ’twould be no more wonderful a thing” than that a solemn little blue egg should turn into a big happy red-breasted bird; if you are of “the young men that dream dreams” or of “the old men who have visions” the songs and the tales and the wanderings and the mysteries of “Red” Owen Hanrahan will thrill you with a sense of your real nearness to “something lovelier than Heaven.”

Such a group of tales of the people and by the people as Mr. Yeats has gathered together in Red Hanrahan can be nothing if not a personal matter. Frankly, I never saw a fairy, or a gnome, or a hobgoblin. I have never even had a vision worth writing a book about; but I am young yet, and if the gods continue to be kind.... In the meanwhile I shall grasp the first opportunity to read Red Hanrahan in a deep woods, at dusk—regardless of the optician’s orders.

H. B. S.