“And it’s true, remember, where he said the other nations won’t wait.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the English Parliament just last week one member stood up, to do with the nihilists, and asked the Ministry if it wasn’t time to intervene in a barbarous nation, in order to educate us. It was him Ippolit meant, I know it was him. He talked about it last week.”
“There’s many a slip.”
“What slip? Why many?”
“We’ll close Kronstadt and not give them any bread. [345]Where will they get it?”
“And America? It’s America now.”
“Rubbish.”
But the bell rang, all rushed to their places. Fetyukovich mounted the rostrum.
Chapter 10: The Defense Attorney’s Speech. A Stick with Two Ends
All became hushed as the first words of the famous orator resounded. The whole room fixed their eyes on him. He began with extreme directness, simplicity, and conviction, but without the slightest presumption. Not the slightest attempt at eloquence, at notes of pathos, at words ringing with emotion. This was a man speaking within an intimate circle of sympathizers. His voice was beautiful, loud, and attractive, and even in this voice itself one seemed to hear something genuine and guileless. But everyone realized at once that the orator could suddenly rise to true pathos—and “strike the heart with an unutterable power.’” [346]He spoke perhaps less correctly than Ippolit Kirillovich, but without long phrases, and even more precisely. There was one thing the ladies did not quite like: he somehow kept bending forward, especially at the beginning of his speech, not really bowing, but as if he were rushing or flying at his listeners, and this he did by bending precisely, as it were, with half of his long back, as if a hinge were located midway down that long and narrow back ‘ that enabled it to bend almost at a right angle. He spoke somehow scatteredly at the beginning, as if without any system, snatching up facts at random, but in the end it all fell together. His speech could be divided into two halves: the first half was a critique, a refutation of the charges, at times malicious and sarcastic. But in the second half of the speech he seemed to change his tone and even his method, and all at once rose into pathos, and the courtroom seemed to be waiting for it and all began trembling with rapture. He went straight to work, and began by saying that although his practice was in Petersburg, this was not the first time he had visited the towns of Russia to defend a case, though he did so only when he was convinced of the defendant’s innocence or anticipated it beforehand. “The same thing happened to me in the present case,” he explained. “Even in the initial newspaper reports alone, I caught a glimpse of something that struck me greatly in favor of the defendant. In a word, I was interested first of all in a certain juridical fact, which appears often enough in legal practice, though never, it seems to me, so fully or with such characteristic peculiarities as in the present case. This fact I ought to formulate only in the finale of my speech, when I have finished my statement; however, I shall express my thought at the very beginning as well, for I have a weakness for going straight to the point, not storing up effects or sparing impressions. This may be improvident on my part, yet it is sincere. This thought of mine—my formula—is as follows: the overwhelming totality of the facts is against the defendant, and at the same time there is not one fact that will stand up to criticism, if it is considered separately, on its own! Following along through rumors and the newspapers, I was becoming more and more firmly set in my thought, when suddenly I received an invitation from the defendant’s relatives to come and defend him. I hastened here at once, and here became finally convinced. It was in order to demolish this terrible totality of facts and show how undemonstrable and fantastic each separate accusing fact is, that I undertook the defense of this case.”
Thus the defense attorney began, and suddenly he raised his voice: “Gentlemen of the jury, I am a newcomer here. All impressions fell upon me without preconceived ideas. The defendant, a man of stormy and unbridled character, had not offended me to begin with, as he had perhaps a hundred persons in this town, which is why many are prejudiced against him beforehand. Of course, I also admit that the moral sense of local society has been justly aroused: the defendant is stormy and unbridled. Nonetheless he was received in local society; even in the family of the highly talented prosecutor he was warmly welcomed.” ( Nota bene:At these words two or three chuckles came from the public, quickly suppressed, but noticed by all. We all knew that the prosecutor had admitted Mitya to his house against his will, solely because for some reason he interested the prosecutor’s wife—a highly virtuous and respectable, but fantastic and self-willed, lady, who in certain cases, for the most part trifling, loved to oppose her husband. Mitya, by the way, had visited their home rather infrequently.) “Nevertheless, I make so bold as to assume,” the defense attorney went on, “that even in such an independent mind and just character as my opponent’s, a somewhat erroneous prejudice against my unfortunate client might have formed. Oh, it’s quite naturaclass="underline" the unfortunate man deserved all too well to be treated with prejudice. And an offended moral and, even more so, aesthetic sense is sometimes implacable. Of course, in the highly talented speech for the prosecution, we have all heard a strict analysis of the defendant’s character and actions, a strictly critical attitude towards the case; and, above all, such psychological depths were demonstrated to explain the essence of the matter, that a penetration to those depths could by no means have taken place were there even the slightest amount of deliberate and malicious prejudice with regard to the person of the defendant. But there are things that are even worse, even more ruinous in such cases than the most malicious and preconceived attitude towards the matter. Namely, if we are, for example, possessed by a certain, so to speak, artistic game, by the need for artistic production, so to speak, the creation of a novel, especially seeing the wealth of psychological gifts with which God has endowed our abilities. While still in Petersburg, still only preparing to come here, I was warned—and I myself knew without any warning—that I would meet here as my opponent a profound and most subtle psychologist, who has long deserved special renown for this quality in our still young legal world. But psychology, gentlemen, though a profound thing, is still like a stick with two ends.” (A chuckle from the public.) “Oh, you will of course forgive the triviality of my comparison; I am not a master of eloquent speaking. Here, however, is an example—I take the first I happen upon in the prosecutor’s speech. The defendant, at night, in the garden, climbs the fence as he is fleeing, and strikes down with a brass pestle the servant who has seized him by the leg. Then he at once jumps back down into the garden and for a whole five minutes fusses over the fallen man, trying to see whether he has killed him or not. Now, not for anything will the prosecutor believe in the truthfulness of the defendant’s testimony that he jumped down to the old man Grigory out of pity. ‘No,’ he says, ‘how could there be such sensitivity at such a moment; this is unnatural; he jumped down precisely in order to make sure that the only witness to his evil deed was dead, and thereby testified that he had committed this evil deed, since he could not have jumped down into the garden for any other reason, inclination, or feeling.’ There you have psychology; but let us take the same psychology and apply it to this case, only from the other end, and the result will be no less plausible. The murderer jumps down as a precaution, to make sure if the witness is alive or not, and yet, according to the words of the prosecutor himself, he had just left in the study of his father, whom he had murdered, a colossal piece of evidence against himself in the form of a torn envelope on which it was written that it contained three thousand roubles. ‘Were he to have taken this envelope with him, no one in the whole world would have learned that the envelope existed, or the money inside it, and that the defendant had therefore robbed the money.’ These are the prosecutor’s own words. Well, so you see, on the one hand the man was not cautious enough, he lost his head, got frightened, and ran away leaving evidence on the floor, but when two minutes later he strikes and kills another man, then all at once the most heartless and calculating sense of caution comes to our service. But so, let it be so: it is, shall we say, the subtlety of psychology that under certain circumstances I instantly become bloodthirsty and sharp-eyed as a Caucasian eagle, and the next moment as blind and timid as a worthless mole. But if I am so bloodthirsty and cruelly calculating that, having killed, I jump down only to see if the witness against me is alive or not, do you think I would fuss over this new victim of mine for a whole five minutes, allowing, perhaps, for new witnesses? Why soak the handkerchief, wiping blood from the fallen man’s head, so that this handkerchief can later serve as evidence against me? No, if we really are so calculating and hard-hearted, would it not be better, having jumped down, simply to whack the fallen servant on the head again and again with the same pestle, so as to kill him finally, and, having eradicated the witness, to put all worry out of our mind? And, lastly, I jump down in order to see whether the witness against me is alive or dead, and right there on the path I leave another witness—namely, this very pestle that I took from the two women, both of whom can later recognize the pestle as theirs and testify that I took it from their house. And it’s not that I forgot it on the path, dropped it in distraction, in confusion: no, we precisely threw our weapon away, because it was found about fifteen paces from the spot where Grigory was struck down. The question is, why did we do that? But we did it precisely because we felt bitter at having killed a man, an old servant, and therefore in vexation, with a curse, we threw the pestle away as a murderous weapon, it could not be otherwise, or why throw it with such force? And if we could feel pain and pity at having killed a man, it is of course because we did not kill our father: if he had killed his father, he would not have jumped down to another fallen man out of pity, in that case there would be a different feeling, in that case we would not be bothered with pity but would think about self-salvation, that is certainly so. On the contrary, I repeat, we would have smashed his skull finally, and not fussed over him for five minutes. There was room for pity and kind feeling precisely because our conscience was clear to begin with. Here, then, is a different psychology. I myself, gentlemen of the jury, have resorted to psychology now, in order to demonstrate that one can draw whatever conclusions one likes from it. It all depends on whose hands it is in. Psychology prompts novels even from the most serious people, and quite unintentionally. I am speaking of excessive psychology, gentlemen of the jury, of a certain abuse of it.”