`More Disposed to Do Another Good'

Peter Matthiessen, the novelist/naturalist, gave a reading in Albany, N.Y., in the spring of 1990. During the question-and-answer period that followed, he was asked to pick his favorite work of fiction and without pause he named The Idiot. When pressed to explain his choice, Matthiessen said Dostoevsky’s novel is the only one he knew devoted to a person who was entirely good.

Internally, at least, I snorted. Like generations of adolescents, I had endured my Dostoevskian phase before I grew up and got a job, though Nabokov hastened the process with his deliciously snide contempt for “old Dusty.” Prince Myshkin is insufferable, but then, come to think of it, so is Matthiessen. Fictional representations of undiluted goodness are nearly always emetic, which is not the same as saying goodness as a human quality is emetic. In the best piece I’ve read online in a long time, Theodore Dalrymple puts it more elegantly:

“It is far easier to make evil interesting than good. Depictions of good people are inclined very soon to decline into mawkishness, and make their objects as dull as they are unbelievable. Too much good repels us; we long for the feet of clay to be revealed. As Oscar Wilde said, only a man with a heart of stone could read of the death of Little Nell without laughing.”

This is a momentary digression from “How to Hate the Non-Existent,” Dalrymple’s essay in the September edition of New English Review. As usual, he relates personal history to larger moral observations, and along the way takes swipes at the degeneracy and egotism of Michel Foucault and, writing “as a man without any religious belief,” at the virulent hatred of the anti-religious. It helps that Dalrymple has lived a life more interesting and varied than most. He spent years working as a physician in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World, and served as a psychiatrist in a prison in Birmingham, England, a Third World colony on the fringes of the First. Dalrymple’s witness to humanity at its best and worst, mediated by an attentive, compassionate, skeptical sensibility, give us a privileged seat at the eternal spectacle of good versus evil. His essay reminds me of a passage in the Life of Johnson, dated April 3, 1778, in which Boswell reports the conversation among Johnson, Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon:

“Burke: `From the experience which I have had, -- and I have had a great deal, -- I have learnt to think better of mankind.’ Johnson: `From my experience I have found them worse in commercial dealings, more disposed to cheat, than I had any notion of; but more disposed to do another good than I had conceived.’ Gibbon: `Less just and more beneficent.’ Johnson: `And really it is wonderful, considering how much attention is necessary for men to take care of themselves, and ward off immediate evils which press upon them, it is wonderful how much they do for others. As it is said of the greatest liar, that he tells more truth than falsehood; so it may be said of the worst man, that he does more good than evil.’”

Like Johnson, Dalrymple is not a misanthrope. Both welcome the good in men, more than mushy-headed latter-day hippies do, because it always comes as a comforting surprise. Dalrymple has been likened to George Orwell, but the author of Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier remained essentially a romantic, prone to the seductive allure of politics and its promise of human improvement. Dalrymple learned from Orwell but jettisoned the illusions. His understanding of our bottomless capacity for evil, and occasionally for good, is nuanced and unblinkered. Here’s how he concludes his essay:

“Perhaps one of the reasons that contemporary secularists do not simply reject religion but hate it is that they know that, while they can easily rise to the levels of hatred that religion has sometimes encouraged, they will always find it difficult to rise to the levels of love that it has sometimes encouraged.”