INTERPRETING EUROPE’S NIGHTMARE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3130, 14 August 1922, Page 2

INTERPRETING EUROPE’S NIGHTMARE.

Another “dark ages” may be preparing to descend upon Europe. So Thomas Hardy has lately been quoted as saying, but he does not develop the thought. A German writer, however, has said a similar thing with considerable detail. He looks forward to a “European downfall” and finds the character of this change prefigured in Dostoevsky’s novel, “The Brothers Karamazov.” If this turns out according to prediction, European and especially German youth, he declares, will discard the leadership of both Goethe and Nietzsche and turn to the Russian. These speculations of Herman Hesse are presented in the Dial (June) in a translation made by Stephen Hudson. He sets forth the ideal of Karamazov as “primeval, Asiatic, and occult,” and this ho affirms is “already beginning to consume the European soul.” His" meaning of “downfall” is only such in the sense that it is “a turning back to Asia, to the source,” and will necessarily lead, “like every death on earth, to" a new birth.” This Asiatic ideal is described as consisting in “the rejection of every strongly-held ethic and moral in favor of a comprehensive laissez-faire,” and Dostoevsky is shown to have exemplified the principle in. different aspects in each of the brothers Karamazov. Readers may turn to the novel for its realisation in these figures, but interest especially attaches to the way it will work out in Europe:— “It seems, then, that the ‘New Ideal’ by which the roots of the European spirit is being sapped, is an entirely amoral concept, a faculty to feel the Godlike, the significant, the fatalistic, in the wickedest and in the ugliest, and even to accord them veneration and worship. No less than that. The ironical exaggeration with which the magistrate in his speech seeks to hold these Karamazovs up to the scorn of the citizens, is not in reality an exaggeration. It is indeed a tame indictment. For in this speech the ‘Russian man’ is exhibited from the conserva-tive-bourgeois point of view. He had been till then a cock-shy. Dangerous, emotional, irresponsible, yet conscience haunted; soft, dreamy, cruel, yet fundamentally childish. As such one .still likes to regard the ‘Russian man’ to-day, although, I believe, he has for a long time been on the road to becoming the European man. And this is the downfall of Europe. “Let us look at this ‘Russian man’ a moment. He is far older than Dostoevsky. hut Dostoevsky lias finally shown him to the world in all his fearful significance. The ‘Russian man’ is Karamazov, he is Fyodor Pavlovitch, ho is Dmitri, he is Ivan, lie is Alyosha. These four, different as they may appear, belong inseparably together. Together they are Karamazov, together they are the ‘Russian man,’ together they are the' approaching, the proximate man of the European crisis. Next notice something very remarkable. Ivan in the course of the story turns from a civilised man into a Karamazov, from a European into a Russian, cut of a definitely-formed historical type into the unformed raw material of destiny. “There is a fairy-like dream-reality about the way in which Ivan slides out of his original psychology—out of his understanding, coolness, knowledge. There is mystical truth in this sliding of the apparently solid brother into the hysterical, into the Russian, into the Karamazov-like. It is just he, the doubter, who at the end holds speech with the devil! We will come to that later on. So the ‘Russian Man’ is drawn neither as the hysterical, the drunkard, the felon, the poet, the saint, but as one with them all, as possessing all these characteristics simultaneously. The ‘Russian man,’ Karamazov, is assassin and judge, ruffian and tenderest soul, the completes! egotist and the most self-sacrificing hero. We shall nob get a grasp of him from a European, from a hard and fastmoral. ethical, dogmatic standpoint. lr this man the outward and the inward, good- and evil, God and Satan are united.” The “Russian Man” has long existed far outside Russia, we are told. He rules half Europe; and “part of the dreaded explosion has indeed in these last years been audibly evident.” The Kaiser had a foreboding of the coming danger in his “vague fear of the Eastern hordes, which, through Japanese ambitions, might he enrolled against Europe.” He also sensed it when he said, “That nation will win the war which lias the strongest nerves,” a saying that lie thought flattering to the Germans. But his onetime subject interprets it differently: “Very likely he himself had excellent nerves: his hunting and troop-display comrades also. He knew, too, the old weary .story of effete and degenerate France and of virtuous, prolific Germany. and believed it. But for those with knowledge, still more for those with the intuition to sense to-morrow and the day after, that pronouncement was terrible. For they knew that the Germans bail in no way better nerves than the French, English, and Americans, at best better than the Russians. For to have bad. nerves is the colloquial term for hysteria and neurasthenia, for moral insanity and' for all those evils which one may regard in different ways, but which collectively signify the Karamazov-. With the exception of Austria, Germany stood infinitely more willingly and weakly open to the Karamazovs, to Dostoevsky, to Asia, than any other European people. Thus the Kaiser,, too, has indeed foretold the Downfall of ''Europe.” Those who cling definitely to the past, “who venerate time-honored cultural forms,” must sock to delay this Downfall, and will mourn it when the old order passes. But while the “Downfall” is the End. for some, it is Hie Beginning for others. Of them we read: — “These new people differ fundamentally from the earlier ones, the orderly, law-abiding, decent folk, in one vital respect, namely, that they live inwardly just as much ns outwardly, that they are constantly concerned with their own souls. The Karamazovs are prepared to commit any crime, but they commit them only exceptionally because, as a, rule, it suffices for them to have made their soul a confidant of its possibility. Here lies their'secret. Let us seek a formula For it. “Every formation of humanity, every culture, every civilisation, every order, is based upon an endowment of something over and above that which is allowed and that which is forbidden. Man, halfway between animal and a. higher consciousness, has always a great deal within him to repress, to hide, to deny, in order to he a decent 'human being and to he socially possible. Man is fud of animal, full of primeval being, full of the tremendous, scarcely tamed instincts of a beastly, cruel selfishness. All these dangerous instincts are there, always. But culture, superconsciousness, civilisation, have covered them over. Man does not show them, he has learnt from childhood to hide these instincts and to deny them. But every one of these instincts must come- sooner or later to the surface. Each instinct goes on living, not one is killed, not one is permanently and forever changed and ennobled. And each of these instincts is in itself good, is not worse than another. But for every period and culture there is a particular instinct which it regards with special aversion

or horror. Now when these instincts are again aroused, in the form of unextinguished and merely superficiailly, though carefully, restrained! naturefoirees, when these beasts again, begin roaring like, slaves whose spirit, long crushed by flogging and repression, is rekindled by insurgence, then the Kara* mazovs are upon us. When a culture, one of these attempts to domesticate man, gets tired and begins to decay, tben men become in greater measure remarkable. They 'become hysterical, develop strange lusts, become like young people in puberty or like women in childbirth. Longings for which man has no name, arise in the soul; longings which the old culture and morality must hold for wrong. But they announce themselves with so innocent a voice, that Good and Evil become interchangeable and' every law reek. "Such people arc the brothers Karaitiazov. Every law easily appears to them as a convention, every morality as philistine; they lightly adopt every license, every caprice. With ever so great a gladness they listen to the many voices in their own hearts. But these souls need not inevitably reap crime and turbulence from Chaos. As a new direction is given to the interrupted primeval current, so the seed is sown of a new order, of a now morality." And do these devolpments in the souls of imagined characters of fiction really signify the,. Downfall of Europe, asks this German, who provides himself with the answer:— "Certainly. They signify it as surely as the mind's eye perceives life and eternity in the grass-blade of spring, and death, and its inevitability in every falling leaf of autumn. It is possible that the whole Downfall of Europe will play itself out 'only' inwardly, 'only' in the souls of a generation, 'only' in changing the meaning of wornout symbols, in the disvaluation of spiritual values. Thus, the • ancient world, that first brilliant coining of European culture, did not go down under Nero. Its destruction was not due to Spartaeus nor to the Germanic tribes. But 'only' to a thought out of Asia, that simple, subtle thought that bad been there very long, but which took the form the teacher Christ rrnve to it."