Old and New Masters by Robert Lynd
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page 6 of 264 (02%)
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books seem to spring, not from more or less rational causes, but from
some seed of lunacy. He never paints Everyman; he always projects Dostoevsky, or a nightmare of Dostoevsky. That is why _Crime and Punishment_ belongs to a lower range of fiction than _Anna Karénina_ or _Fathers and Sons_. Raskolnikov's crime is the cold-blooded crime of a diseased mind. It interests us like a story from Suetonius or like _Bluebeard_. But there is no communicable passion in it such as we find in _Agamemnon_ or _Othello_. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the despair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figure of the book is born out of fantasy. He is a grotesque made alive by sheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related to the humanity we know in life and the humanity we know in literature as the sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God forgive me, for Christ's sake!" One does not grudge an artist an abnormal character or two. Dostoevsky, however, has created a whole flock of these abnormal characters and watches over them as a hen over her chickens. He invents vicious grotesques as Dickens invents comic grotesques. In _The Brothers Karamazov_ he reveals the malignance of Smerdyakov by telling us that he was one who, in his childhood, was very fond of hanging cats, and burying them with great ceremony. He used to dress up in a sheet as though it were a surplice, and sang, and waved some object over the dead cat as though it were a censer. As for the Karamazovs themselves, he portrays the old father and the |
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