Free Ideas and the Novel by Mary McCarthy Page B

to excuse Julien’s selfishness. But the excuse is a weakness in the author, a tribute paid to convention. In the studied particulars of his daily conduct, Julien has shown that he is above that. When Mathilde de la Mole thinks of him to herself as “a man of genius,” it is the truculence of his manners, rather than his endowments, that has been the sure sign of election. Far from being a failing, selfishness is a duty imposed on him; as it is a proof of his superiority, he makes no attempt to hide it.
    Genius, it turns out, has requirements; it is not just a carte blanche entitling the holder to run up bills for gloves and cravats. Julien, in fact, is thrifty, like a peasant; he cares nothing for externals and by preference wears his ecclesiastical black. If the Marquis de la Mole prefers to see him in the evenings in a blue coat, he will have to pay for it. The requirements of genius, for Julien, are inward and take the form of a strict duty to the self. In the outer world, he is constantly testing and “proving” himself, but this is not done for the benefit of others. Certain acts must be performed if he is to be true to his Idea. It is at such moments of testing that he turns to his “rule of conduct,” the Mémorial. Yet the duty summoning him has nothing to do with conscience, and the acts he performs at its order have the character of rites. The gardener’s ladder, even though chained down, tells him that he must use it to mount a second time to Mathilde’s bedroom; that is the procedure enjoined on him here, as at Mme de Rênal’s. As the affair reaches the next prescribed stage, he is like a priest moving from the Epistle side to the Gospel side, or, more precisely, like someone compelling himself to walk on the cracks of the sidewalk or to step over them as the case may be. None of Julien’s acts is done from inclination. They are exercises in personal magic.
    Now exactly the same can be said of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, the last of a line of fictional heroes fathered by the great Napoleon. Raskolnikov does not want to kill the old pawnbroker, any more than Julien wants to seize the hand of Mme de Rênal. He forces himself to it, and not from mere desire for her money; by itself, that would be a vulgar motive, a motive anybody might have, given need and opportunity. He does it to test himself, to prove a thesis he has fully accepted in thought and embodied months before in an article: “that there are certain persons who...have a perfect right to commit breaches of morality and crimes and that the law is not for them.” You will recognize the doctrine even in Russian clothes: “Extraordinary Genius’s have a sort of Prerogative, which may dispense them from Laws.” By a peculiar twist, already visible in Julien, the “may dispense” has turned into an imperative: “must dispense.” The student Raskolnikov has the duty of killing the old pawnbroker if he is a superior individual. If he is not, there is no obligation.
    In his article he has given the hypothetical example of Newton. If Newton’s discoveries could only have been made known through the sacrifice of the lives of a hundred men, then “Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound to eliminate ...the hundred men for the sake of...the whole of humanity.” Evidently the cases are not identical. Raskolnikov has made no eminent scientific discovery whose publication would be facilitated by an axe-murder. He is aware of that, yet he is desperately poor, the landlady is dunning him, and he has convinced himself that, apart from personal motives, eliminating an old usuress who has done nothing but evil to her fellow-creatures would be a service to humanity. This benefaction will place him securely among the “extraordinary men” capable of saying a “new word,” and the act ought to be no more repugnant to him morally than crushing a louse.
    Alas, his being numbered among the extraordinary men has come