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“Well, you’re saying it yourself! What’s wanted to prevent her
taking her child to the hen-roost to cure it of screaming fits is just...”
Sviazhsky said, smiling good-humoredly.
“Oh, no!” said Levin with annoyance; “that method of doctoring I
merely meant as a simile for doctoring the people with schools. The
people are poor and ignorant—that we see as surely as the peasant
woman sees the baby is ill because it screams. But in what way this
trouble of poverty and ignorance is to be cured by schools is as incom-
prehensible as how the hen-roost affects the screaming. What has to
be cured is what makes him poor.”
“Well, in that, at least, you’re in agreement with Spencer, whom you
dislike so much. He says, too, that education may be the consequence
of greater prosperity and comfort, of more frequent washing, as he says,
but not of being able to read and write...”
“Well, then, I’m very glad—or the contrary, very sorry, that I’m in
agreement with Spencer; only I’ve known it a long while. Schools can
do no good; what will do good is an economic organization in which the
people will become richer, will have more leisure—and then there will
be schools.”
“Still, all over Europe now schools are obligatory.”
“And how far do you agree with Spencer yourself about it?” asked
Levin.
But there was a gleam of alarm in Sviazhsky’s eyes, and he said
smiling:
“No; that screaming story is positively capital! Did you really hear
it yourself?”
Levin saw that he was not to discover the connection between this
man’s life and his thoughts. Obviously he did not care in the least what
his reasoning led him to; all he wanted was the process of reasoning.
And he did not like it when the process of reasoning brought him into
a blind alley. That was the only thing he disliked, and avoided by
changing the conversation to something agreeable and amusing.
All the impressions of the day, beginning with the impression made
by the old peasant, which served, as it were, as the fundamental basis
of all the conceptions and ideas of the day, threw Levin into violent
excitement. This dear good Sviazhsky, keeping a stock of ideas simply
for social purposes, and obviously having some other principles hidden
from Levin, while with the crowd, whose name is legion, he guided
public opinion by ideas he did not share; that irascible country gentle-
man, perfectly correct in the conclusions that he had been worried into
by life, but wrong in his exasperation against a whole class, and that
the best class in Russia; his own dissatisfaction with the work he had
been doing, and the vague hope of finding a remedy for all this—all
was blended in a sense of inward turmoil, and anticipation of some
solution near at hand.
Left alone in the room assigned him, lying on a spring mattress that
yielded unexpectedly at every movement of his arm or his leg, Levin
did not fall asleep for a long while. Not one conversation with Sviazhsky,
though he had said a great deal that was clever, had interested Levin;
but the conclusions of the irascible landowner required consideration.
Levin could not help recalling every word he had said, and in imagina-
tion amending his own replies.
“Yes, I ought to have said to him: You say that our husbandry does
not answer because the peasant hates improvements, and that they
must be forced on him by authority. If no system of husbandry an-
swered at all without these improvements, you would be quite right.
But the only system that does answer is where laborer is working in
accordance with his habits, just as on the old peasant’s land half-way