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A R
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REV I EW
arrive at it in analysis, seems intolerable to people without analytical
training. The Greek drama, while retaining the crime, introduces the
indispensable toning-down in a masterly fashion by projecting the
motive of the hero into the real as a compulsion of destiny external to
himself. The hero commits the fatal deed unintentionally and ap–
parently uninfluenced by the woman;
th~
connection is, however,
preserved by making the winning of the Queen-mother dependent on
a repetition of the deed on the Sphinx, the monster which symbolises
the father. After the guilt is revealed to consciousness, the hero makes
no attempt to exculpate himself by appealing to the expedient of the
compulsion of destiny. The guilt is recognized and punished as a con–
scious crime, which is bound to appear unjust, but which psycho–
logically is perfectlv right. The presentation in the English play is
more indirect: there the hero does not commit the crime himself; it
is committed by another, for whom it is not parricide. The revolting
motive of sexual rivalry for the woman does not, therefore, need to
be disguised. Also, we see the Oedipus complex of the hero, as it were,
in a reflected light, by learning the effect on him of the mother's crime.
He has to avenge the crime, but proves in a very remarkable way
incapable of doing so. We know that it is his relll.qrse that cripple§
JEm; in a way quite consistent with neurotic processes, the remorse
is displaced upon the perception of his inadequacy for fulfilling his
task. There are signs that the hero feels this guilt as a super-individual
one. He despises others no less than himself: "Use every man after his
desert, and who should 'scape whipping?"
The Russian novel goes a step farther in
this
direction. Here
also the murder is committed by another, but that other is one who
stands to the murdered man in the same filial relation as the hero,
Dmitri, another, in whom the motive of sexual rivalry is openly ad–
mitted, and to whom Dostoevski has most remarkably attributed his
own disease, alleged epilepsy, as if he were trying to confess that the
epileptic, the neurotic, in him was a parricide. Then follows in the
speech for the defence the famous mockery of psychology, which is
a double-edged weapon. A magnificent disguise, which has only to be
turned round to discover the deepest meaning of Dostoevski's concep–
tion. It is not psychology which deserves mockery, but the procedure
of judicial examination. It is a matter of indifference who actually
committed the crime; psychology is interested only in discovering
who desired it, and who welcomed it when it was done, and for that
)
reason, all the brothers are equally guil!y, even the sharply-contrasted
figure of Aliosha, the impulsive sensual man, the sceptical cynic and
the epileptic criminal. In
The Brothers Karamazov
we find one very
