11 The Brothers Karamazov
‘With that remark I conclude my sketch of his character,
feeling it indelicate to continue further. Oh, I don’t want to
draw any further conclusions and croak like a raven over
the young man’s future. We’ve seen to-day in this court that
there are still good impulses in his young heart, that family
feeling has not been destroyed in him by lack of faith and
cynicism, which have come to him rather by inheritance
than by the exercise of independent thought.
‘Then the third son. Oh, he is a devout and modest youth,
who does not share his elder brother’s gloomy and destruc-
tive theory of life. He has sought to cling to the ‘ideas of
the people,’ or to what goes by that name in some circles
of our intellectual classes. He clung to the monastery, and
was within an ace of becoming a monk. He seems to me to
have betrayed unconsciously, and so early, that timid de-
spair which leads so many in our unhappy society, who
dread cynicism and its corrupting influences, and mistak-
enly attribute all the mischief to European enlightenment,
to return to their ‘native soil,’ as they say, to the bosom, so
to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children,
yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their de-
crepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the
horrors that terrify them.
‘For my part I wish the excellent and gifted young man
every success; I trust that youthful idealism and impulse to-
wards the ideas of the people may never degenerate, as often
happens, on the moral side into gloomy mysticism, and on
the political into blind chauvinism — two elements which
are even a greater menace to Russia than the premature de-