X. The Speech for the Defense. A Stick with Two Ends

Everything fell silent when the first words of the famous orator rang out. The whole hall fastened its eyes on him. He began extremely directly, simply, and with conviction, but without the slightest arrogance. Not the slightest attempt at eloquence, at pathetic notes, at little words ringing with feeling. This was a man who had begun to speak in an intimate circle of sympathetic people. His voice was beautiful, loud, and appealing, and even in this voice itself something sincere and simple-hearted seemed already to be heard. But it became clear to everyone at once that the orator might suddenly rise to the truly pathetic—and “strike at hearts with an unknown power.” He spoke, perhaps, less correctly than Ippolit Kirillovich, but without long sentences and even more precisely. One thing the ladies rather disliked: he kept somehow bending his back, especially at the beginning of the speech, not exactly bowing, but as if straining and flying toward his listeners, and he bent precisely as it were with half of his long back, as though in the middle of this long and thin back of his a sort of hinge had been fitted, so that it could bend almost at a right angle. At the beginning of the speech he spoke in a somehow scattered way, as if without a system, seizing on facts here and there, but in the end a whole emerged. His speech could be divided into two halves: the first half was criticism, a refutation of the prosecution, at times spiteful and sarcastic. But in the second half of the speech he seemed suddenly to change both his tone and even his method, and all at once rose to the pathetic, and the hall seemed to have been waiting for it and all trembled with rapture. He went straight to the case and began by saying that although his field was in Petersburg, this was not the first time he had visited the towns of Russia to defend the accused, but only those of whose innocence he was either convinced or had a presentiment beforehand. “The same thing happened to me in the present case too,” he explained. “Even from the first newspaper reports alone something had already flashed upon me that struck me extremely in the defendant’s favor. In a word, what interested me first of all was a certain juridical fact, which, though often repeated in judicial practice, never, it seems to me, appears in such fullness and with such characteristic peculiarities as in the present case. I ought to formulate this fact only in the finale of my speech, when I conclude my remarks, but I will nevertheless express my thought at the very beginning, for I have the weakness of going straight to the subject, without hiding my effects and without economizing on impressions. This is perhaps imprudent on my part, but at least it is sincere. This thought of mine, my formula, is as follows: an overwhelming sum of facts against the defendant, and at the same time not a single fact that will stand up to criticism if one examines it singly, by itself! Following the case further through rumors and the newspapers, I became more and more confirmed in my thought, and suddenly I received from the defendant’s relatives an invitation to defend him. I at once hastened here, and here I became finally convinced. It was precisely in order to break up this terrible sum of facts and to show how unproven and fantastic each accusing fact is taken separately that I undertook to defend this case.”

So the defense counsel began, and suddenly proclaimed:

“Gentlemen of the jury, I am a fresh man here. All the impressions fell upon me without prejudice. The defendant, violent and unbridled in character, did not offend me beforehand, as he did perhaps a hundred persons in this town, which is why many are prejudiced against him in advance. Of course, I too admit that the moral feeling of local society has been justly aroused: the defendant is violent and unruly. In local society, however, he was received; he was even made welcome in the family of the highly talented prosecutor. (Nota bene. At these words two or three titters were heard in the public, quickly suppressed, it is true, but noticed by everyone. It was known to all of us that the prosecutor admitted Mitya into his house against his will, solely because the prosecutor’s wife for some reason found him interesting—a lady highly virtuous and respectable, but fanciful and willful, and fond in certain cases, mainly in trifles, of opposing her spouse. Mitya, however, visited their house rather rarely.) Nevertheless I will venture to allow,” the defense counsel went on, “that even in so independent a mind and so just a character as my opponent’s, a certain mistaken prejudice against my unhappy client may have formed. Oh, it is so natural: the unhappy man has all too well deserved to be regarded even with prejudice. And an outraged moral, and still more an aesthetic, feeling is sometimes implacable. Of course, in the highly talented speech for the prosecution we all heard a strict analysis of the defendant’s character and actions, a strictly critical approach to the case, and above all such psychological depths were exhibited to explain to us the essence of the matter that the penetration into these depths could never have taken place with an attitude toward the defendant’s person that was in any way deliberately and maliciously prejudiced. But surely there are things that are even worse, even more ruinous in such cases, than the most malicious and premeditated attitude toward the case. Namely, if we are possessed, for example, by a certain, so to speak, artistic play, a need for artistic creation, so to speak, for the creation of a novel, especially given the wealth of psychological gifts with which God has endowed our faculties. While still in Petersburg, while only getting ready to come here, I was forewarned—and I knew myself without any forewarning—that I would meet here as my opponent a profound and most subtle psychologist, who had long since earned by this quality of his a certain special fame in our still young juridical world. But psychology, gentlemen, though it is a profound thing, is all the same like a stick with two ends (a titter in the public). Oh, you will of course forgive me my trivial comparison; I am no master at speaking too eloquently. But here, however, is an example—I take the first that comes to hand from the prosecutor’s speech. The defendant, at night, in the garden, running away, climbs over the fence and with a brass pestle strikes down the lackey who has seized him by the leg. Then at once he jumps back down into the garden and for a whole five minutes busies himself over the fallen man, trying to guess: has he killed him or not? And here the prosecutor will not for anything believe in the truth of the defendant’s testimony that he jumped down to old Grigory out of pity. ‘No,’ he says, ‘can there be such sensitivity at such a minute? This, he says, is unnatural, and he jumped down precisely in order to make sure whether the only witness of his villainy was alive or killed, and therefore he thereby testified that he had committed this villainy, since he could not have jumped down into the garden from any other cause, impulse, or feeling.’ There is psychology for you; but let us take this same psychology and apply it to the case, only from the other end, and it will come out no less plausible at all. The murderer jumps down out of caution, to make sure whether the witness is alive or not, and yet he has just left in the study of the father he killed, according to the testimony of the prosecutor himself, a colossal piece of evidence against himself in the form of a torn envelope on which it was written that there were three thousand in it. ‘Why, had he carried off this envelope with him, no one in the whole world would ever have known that there had been, had existed, an envelope, and money in it, and that, therefore, the money had been stolen by the defendant.’ That is the prosecutor’s own pronouncement. Well, so for the one thing, you see, there was not enough caution, the man lost his head, took fright, and ran away, leaving the evidence on the floor, but when two minutes later he struck and killed another man, then at once the most heartless and calculating sense of caution appears at our service. But so be it, so be it, let us say that is how it was: the subtlety of psychology, they say, lies precisely in this, that in such circumstances I am at one moment bloodthirsty and keen-sighted as a Caucasian eagle, and at the next minute blind and timid as a paltry mole. But if I am so bloodthirsty and cruelly calculating that, having killed, I jumped down only to see whether the witness against me was alive or not, then why, one would think, fuss over this new victim of mine for a whole five minutes, and perhaps acquire new witnesses besides? Why wet a handkerchief, wiping the blood from the head of the fallen man, so that this handkerchief would serve afterward as evidence against me? No, if we are so calculating and hardhearted, would it not have been better, having jumped down, simply to stun the fallen servant with that same pestle again and again on the head, so as to kill him for good and, having rooted out the witness, relieve one’s heart of all care? And finally, I jump down to check whether the witness against me is alive or not, and right there on the path I leave another witness, namely this very pestle, which I snatched from two women, who can both always recognize this pestle afterward as theirs and testify that it was I who snatched it from them. And it is not that I forgot it on the path, dropped it in absentmindedness, in confusion: no, we precisely flung our weapon away, because it was found some fifteen paces from the place where Grigory had been struck down. The question is, why did we do this? Why, precisely because we felt bitter at having killed a man, an old servant, and therefore in vexation, with a curse, we flung the pestle away as the weapon of murder, it could not have been otherwise, for why else throw it with such a swing? And if we could feel pain and pity at having killed a man, then of course it was because we had not killed our father: having killed his father, he would not have jumped down to another fallen man out of pity, then there would have been another feeling, it would have been no time for pity then, but for saving himself, and that is certainly so. On the contrary, I repeat, he would have smashed his skull for good, and not fussed over him for five minutes. There was room for pity and good feeling precisely because his conscience had been clear before that. Here, then, is another psychology. I have purposely resorted to psychology myself just now, gentlemen of the jury, in order to show clearly that one can deduce anything one likes from it. It all depends on whose hands it is in. Psychology lures even the most serious people into writing novels, and quite involuntarily. I am speaking of excessive psychology, gentlemen of the jury, of a certain abuse of it.”

Here again approving titters were heard in the public, and all at the prosecutor’s expense. I will not quote the whole of the defense counsel’s speech in detail; I will take only certain passages from it, certain of its most important points.