Moreover, once an idea has possessed Dostoievsky he seldom lets it drop but continues to examine it from all sides, at the risk of a certain monotony. Thus Raskolnikov’s All-is-permitted theory peeps through at intervals in The Possessed; it is Stavrogin who expounds it in his atrocious practice but also in words. As a “prince,” he has given the “No barriers” concept an aesthetic twist, almost a cool-headed twirl. “Is it true,” Shatov asks him, seemingly much worried, “that you declared you saw no distinction in beauty between some brutal obscene action and any great exploit, even the sacrifice of life for the good of humanity?” Stavrogin does not reply.
It is curious to turn from all this dark questioning to the homely English novel of the same time. George Eliot was a great moral writer, but no character in her novels, however thoughtful, would be asking a question like that of another character. It is not that she would have shrunk from such a phrase as “for the good of humanity”; she thought a great deal about our suffering race and clearly felt that it was her duty to devote her professional life to serving it. Besides she had an interest in theories of socialism and was perfectly familiar with abstract thought. With her competence in French and German, she must have read many of the same books that Dostoievsky read. But the kind of questions her characters put to themselves and to each other, though sometimes lofty, never question basic principles such as the notion of betterment or the inviolability of the moral law. Unlike the great novels of the Continent, the English novel is seldom searching, at any rate not on the plane of articulated thought.
I doubt, for instance, that it could ever have occurred to George Eliot to wonder about the validity of mental activity in itself. She could not have pictured ideas as baleful or at best equivocal forces. About the worst ideas can do, in her view, is to encourage a tendency toward headstrongness in a heroine. We see this in Middlemarch with Dorothea Brooke, whose determination to be the helpmeet of Mr. Casaubon springs from a fixed longing of her brain. “It would be like marrying Pascal,” she says to herself. “I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by.” But it is all a mistake, as with Emma’s obstinate plans for Harriet in Jane Austen’s novel: Mr. Casaubon is no Pascal; his “Key to All Mythologies,” to which Dorothea plans to devote her young energies, is a figment of his fussy, elderly brain, an “idea” he once had for a multi-volume work which is simply gathering dust in his head. In a sense, this, like Emma, is an education novel: Dorothea has finally grown up when she learns to stop asking her husband about the progress he is making on his master work.
Among George Eliot’s novels, the best place to look for an examination of ideas and their influence might be Felix Holt, the Radical. On the surface, this short novel has quite a lot in common with the novels I have been speaking of, especially Crime and Punishment and The Red and the Black. The hero is a Radical of independent mind. He comes from the lower middle class, is poor, indifferent to his dress, often proudly contemptuous in his manner, and ambitious, not for himself but for humanity or, more accurately, for the small part of it he knows. He wants them all and particularly Esther Lyon to be better than they are. He is angered by her reading-matter—Byron and Chateaubriand—by her ladylike ways and taste for fine gloves, all of which are proofs of shallowness. He is a reformer in the public sphere, too, who earnestly desires to improve the lot of working men and believes that the first step must be to win them from the slavery of drink through night and Sunday classes; without education, the working man cannot advance his cause. When we meet Felix, on the eve of a parliamentary election, he is deeply troubled by corrupt electoral practices: above all, the habit of treating in public houses. In short, he is a man of the Left with a number of stubborn ideas that unfit him for practical politics.