Robert Lynd

Old and New Masters Robert Lynd

Mr. George Moore once summed up Crime and Punishment as "Gaboriau with psychologicalsauce." He afterwards apologized for the epigram, but he insisted that all the same there isa certain amount of truth in it. And so there is. Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be agreat mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stagecrowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the policenews. There are more murders and attempted murders in his books than in those of anyother great novelist. His people more nearly resemble madmen and wild beasts thannormal human beings. He releases them from most of the ordinary inhibitions. He is fascinated by the loss of selfcontrol-by the disturbance and excitement which this produces, often in the mostrespectable circles. He is beyond all his rivals the novelist of "scenes." His characters getdrunk, or go mad with jealousy, or fall in epileptic fits, or rave hysterically. If Dostoevskyhad had less vision he would have been Strindberg. If his vision had been aesthetic andsensual, he might have been D'Annunzio. Like them, he is a novelist of torture. Turgenev found in his work something Sadistic, because of the intensity with which he dwells on cruelty and pain. Certainly the lust ofcruelty-the lust of destruction for destruction's sake-is the most conspicuous of thedeadly sins in Dostoevsky's men and women. He may not be a "cruel author." Mr. J. Middleton Murry, in his very able "critical study," Dostoevsky, denies the chargeindignantly. But it is the sensational drama of a cruel world that most persistently hauntshis imagination