Page 1230 - the-brothers-karamazov

the unfortunate man has only too well deserved such preju-
dice. Outraged morality, and still more outraged taste, is
often relentless. We have, in the talented prosecutor’s speech,
heard a stern analysis of the prisoner’s character and con-
duct, and his severe critical attitude to the case was evident.
And, what’s more, he went into psychological subtleties into
which he could not have entered, if he had the least con-
scious and malicious prejudice against the prisoner. But
there are things which are even worse, even more fatal in
such cases, than the most malicious and consciously unfair
attitude. It is worse if we are carried away by the artistic
instinct, by the desire to create, so to speak, a romance, es-
pecially if God has endowed us with psychological insight.
Before I started on my way here, I was warned in Petersburg,
and was myself aware, that I should find here a talented op-
ponent whose psychological insight and subtlety had gained
him peculiar renown in legal circles of recent years. But
profound as psychology is, it’s a knife that cuts both ways.’
(Laughter among the public.) ‘You will, of course, forgive
me my comparison; I can’t boast of eloquence. But I will
take as an example any point in the prosecutor’s speech.
‘The prisoner, running away in the garden in the dark,
climbed over the fence, was seized by the servant, and
knocked him down with a brass pestle. Then he jumped
back into the garden and spent five minutes over the man,
trying to discover whether he had killed him or not. And
the prosecutor refuses to believe the prisoner’s statement
that he ran to old Grigory out of pity. ‘No,’ he says, ‘such
sensibility is impossible at such a moment, that’s unnatu-

1