第310章

I am here to accuse him, but to defend him also.Yes, I, too, am human; I, too, can weigh the influence of home and childhood on the character.But the boy grows up and becomes an officer; for a duel and other reckless conduct he is exiled to one of the remote frontier towns of Russia.There he led a wild life as an officer.And, of course, he needed money, money before all things, and so after prolonged disputes he came to a settlement with his father, and the last six thousand was sent him.A letter is in existence in which he practically gives up his claim to the rest and settles his conflict with his father over the inheritance on the payment of this six thousand.

"Then came his meeting with a young girl of lofty character and brilliant education.Oh, I do not venture to repeat the details; you have only just heard them.Honour, self-sacrifice were shown there, and I will be silent.The figure of the young officer, frivolous and profligate, doing homage to true nobility and a lofty ideal, was shown in a very sympathetic light before us.But the other side of the medal was unexpectedly turned to us immediately after in this very court.

Again I will not venture to conjecture why it happened so, but there were causes.The same lady, bathed in tears of long-concealed indignation, alleged that he, he of all men, had despised her for her action, which, though incautious, reckless perhaps, was still dictated by lofty and generous motives.He, he, the girl's betrothed, looked at her with that smile of mockery, which was more insufferable from him than from anyone.And knowing that he had already deceived her (he had deceived her, believing that she was bound to endure everything from him, even treachery), she intentionally offered him three thousand roubles, and clearly, too clearly, let him understand that she was offering him money to deceive her.'Well, will you take it or not, are you so lost to shame?' was the dumb question in her scrutinising eyes.He looked at her, saw clearly what was in her mind (he's admitted here before you that he understood it all), appropriated that three thousand unconditionally, and squandered it in two days with the new object of his affections.

"What are we to believe then? The first legend of the young officer sacrificing his last farthing in a noble impulse of generosity and doing reverence to virtue, or this other revolting picture? As a rule, between two extremes one has to find the mean, but in the present case this is not true.The probability is that in the first case he was genuinely noble, and in the second as genuinely base.

And why? Because he was of the broad Karamazov character- that's just what I am leading up to- capable of combining the most incongruous contradictions, and capable of the greatest heights and of the greatest depths.Remember the brilliant remark made by a young observer who has seen the Karamazov family at close quarters- Mr.

Rakitin: 'The sense of their own degradation is as essential to those reckless, unbridled natures as the sense of their lofty generosity.' And that's true, they need continually this unnatural mixture.Two extremes at the same moment, or they are miserable and dissatisfied and their existence is incomplete.They are wide, wide as mother Russia; they include everything and put up with everything.

"By the way, gentlemen of the jury, we've just touched upon that three thousand roubles, and I will venture to anticipate things a little.Can you conceive that a man like that, on receiving that sum and in such a way, at the price of such shame, such disgrace, such utter degradation, could have been capable that very day of setting apart half that sum, that very day, and sewing it up in a little bag, and would have had the firmness of character to carry it about with him for a whole month afterwards, in spite of every temptation and his extreme need of it! Neither in drunken debauchery in taverns, nor when he was flying into the country, trying to get from God knows whom, the money so essential to him to remove the object of his affections from being tempted by his father, did he bring himself to touch that little bag! Why, if only to avoid abandoning his mistress to the rival of whom he was so jealous, he would have been certain to have opened that bag and to have stayed at home to keep watch over her, and to await the moment when she would say to him at last 'I am yours,' and to fly with her far from their fatal surroundings.

"But no, he did not touch his talisman, and what is the reason he gives for it? The chief reason, as I have just said, was that when she would say' I am yours, take me where you will,' he might have the wherewithal to take her.But that first reason, in the prisoner's own words, was of little weight beside the second.While I have that money on me, he said, I am a scoundrel, not a thief, for Ican always go to my insulted betrothed, and, laying down half the sum I have fraudulently appropriated, I can always say to her, 'You see, I've squandered half your money, and shown I am a weak and immoral man, and, if you like, a scoundrel' (I use the prisoner's own expressions), 'but though I am a scoundrel, I am not a thief, for if I had been a thief, I shouldn't have brought you back this half of the money, but should have taken it as I did the other half!' Amarvellous explanation! This frantic, but weak man, who could not resist the temptation of accepting the three thousand roubles at the price of such disgrace, this very man suddenly develops the most stoical firmness, and carries about a thousand roubles without daring to touch it.Does that fit in at all with the character we have analysed? No, and I venture to tell you how the real Dmitri Karamazov would have behaved in such circumstances, if he really had brought himself to put away the money.