“I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honored and held sacred in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both.
“I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man, winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honored men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place;—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement—and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.’”
Alsop read these famous lines in a voice husky with emotion, and, at the end, paused a moment before speaking, to blow his nose vigorously. He was genuinely and deeply affected, and there was no doubt that his emotion and the way in which he read the passage had produced a profound effect on his audience. At the conclusion, after the vigorous salute into his handkerchief, and a moment’s silence, he looked around with a misty little smile and said quietly:
“Well, what do you think of that? Do you think that comes up to Mr. Dusty What’s-His-Name or not?”
There was an immediate chorus of acclamation. They all agreed vociferously that that passage not only “came up” to Mr. Dusty What’s-His-Name, but far surpassed anything he had ever accomplished.
In view of the fact that none of them knew anything about Mr. Dusty What’s-His-Name and were yet willing to pass judgment with such enthusiastic conviction, Monk felt his anger rising hot and quick, and broke in indignantly:
“That is not the same thing at all. The situation is altogether different.”
“Well, now,” said Jerry persuasively, “you must admit that fundamentally the situation is essentially the same. It’s the idea of love and sacrifice in both cases. Only it seems to me that Dickens’ treatment of the situation is the superior of the two. He says what Dostoevski is trying to say, but it seems to me he says it much better. He presents a more rounded pictuah, and lets you know that life is going to go on and be just as fine and sweet as it ever was in spite of everything. Now,” he said, quietly and persuasively again, “don’t you agree, Monk, that Dickens’ method is the best? You know you do, you scannel!” Here he chortled richly, shoulders and his great belly shaking with good-natured glee. “I know how you feel at the bottom of your heart. You’re just arguing to hear yourself talk.”
“Why not at all, Jerry,” Monk came back with hot earnestness, “I mean everything I say. And I don’t see any similarity at all between the two situations. What Sidney Carton says has no relation to what Alyosha is trying to say at the end of The Brothers Karamazov. One book is a skillful and exciting melodrama, which makes use of some of the events of the French Revolution. The other book is, in this sense, not a story at all. It is a great vision of life and of human destiny, as seen through the spirit of a great man. What Alyosha is saying is not that man dies for love, not that he sacrifices his life for romantic love, but that he lives for love, not romantic love, but love of life, love of mankind, and that through love his spirit and his memory survive, even when his physical self is dead. That’s not the same thing at all as the thing that Sidney Carton says. What you have on the one hand is a profound and simple utterance of a great spiritual truth, and what you have on the other is the rhetorical and sentimental ending to a romantic melodrama.”
“No suh!” Jerry Alsop now cried hotly, his face flushed with anger and excitement. “No suh!” he cried again, and shook his big head in angered denial. “If you call that sentimental, you just don’t know what you’re talking about! You’ve just gone and got yourself completely lost! You don’t even know what Dickens is trying to do!”
The upshot of it was that a cat-and-dog fight broke out at this point, a dozen angry, derisive voices clashing through the air trying to drown out the rebel, who only shouted louder as the opposition grew; and it continued until the contestants were out of breath and the entire campus was howling for quiet from a hundred windows.
It wound up with Alsop standing, pale but righteous, in the center of the room, finally restoring quiet, and saying:
“We’ve all tried to be your friends, we’ve tried to help you out. If you can’t take it the way it’s meant, you don’t need to bothah with us any more. We all saw the way that you were going—” he went on in a trembling tone; and Monk, stung by these final words into maddening and complete revolt, cried passionately: