He never tried to make converts to his views, except on chemistry : they came out casually or were elicited by my questions.
He was even unwilling to answer the objections I urged from an idealistic point of view ; his answers were brief, and he smiled as he spoke, showing the kind of considerateness that an old mastiff will show to a lapdog whom he allows to snap at him and only pushes gently from him with his paw. But I resented this more than anything else and returned unwearied to the attack, though I never gained a single inch of ground. In later years I often called to mind what The Chemist had said, just as I recalled my father's utterances ; and, of course, he was right in three-quarters of the points in dispute. But, all the same, I was right too. There are truths which, like political rights, cannot be conveyed from one man to another before a certain age.
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6
It was The Chemist's influence that made me choose the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Perhaps I should have done better to take up medicine ; but it did me no great harm to acquire a partial knowledge of differential and integral equations, and then to lose it absolutely.
Without a knowledge of natural science, there is no salvation for the modem man. This wholesome food, this strict training of the mind by facts, this proximity to the life that surrounds ours, and this acknowledgement of its independence - without these there lurks somewhere in the soul a monastic cell, and this contains a germ of mysticism which may cover like a dark cloud the whole intellect.
Before I had gone through College, The Chemist had moved to Petersburg, and I did not meet him again till my return from exile. A few months after my marriage I paid a half-secret visit of a few days to my father, who was L.ving near Moscow. He was still displeased at my marriage, and the purpose of my journey was to make peace between us once for all. I broke my journey at the village of Perkhushkovo, the place where we had so often stayed in my youth. The Chemist was expecting me there; he even had dinner ready for me, and two bottles of champagne.
Four or five years had made no change in him, except that he looked a little older. Before dinner he said to me quite seriously :
'Please tell me frankly. how marriage and domestic life strike you. Do you find it to your taste, or only passable ?' I laughed, and he went on : 'I am astonished at your boldness ; no man in a normal condition could ever decide on so awful a step. More than one good match has been suggested to me ; but when I think that a woman would do as she liked in my room, arranging everything in what she thinks order, forbidding me to smoke possibly, making a noise and talking nonsense, I feel such terror of the prospect that I prefer to die in solitude.'
'Shall I stop the night here or go on to my father's ? ' I asked him after dinner.
'There is room enough in the house,' he answered, 'but for your own sake I advise you to go on ; you will get there by ten o'clock. Of course you know he's still angry with you. Well, old people's nerves are generally less active at night, before they get
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to sleep, and you will probably get a much better reception tonight than tomorrow morning ; by then his spurs will be sharp for the fray.'
'Ha ! ha l ha ! ' I laughed, 'there is my old instructor in physiology and materialism ! You remind me of those blissful days, when I used to come to you, like Wagner in Faust, to bore you with my idealism and to suf.Ier, with some impatience, the cold water you threw on it.'
He laughed too and replied, 'You have lived long enough, since then, to find out that all human actions depend merely on the nerves and chemical combination.'
Later, we somehow drifted apart; probably we were both to blame. Nevertheless, he wrote me a letter in 1846. I had published the first part of Who Is At Fault? � and was beginning to be the fashion. He wrote that he was sorry to see me wasting my powers on trivial objects. 'I made it. up with you because of your letters on the study of Nature, in which you made me understand (as far as it is intelligible to the mind of man) the German philosophy. But why, instead of going on with serious work, do you write fairy tales ? ' I sent him a few friendly words in reply, and there our relations ended.
If these lines happen to fall under The Chemist's eyes, I beg that he will read them before going to bed, when the nerves are less active ; and I am convinced that he will be able then to pardon this friendly gossip, and all the more because I cherish a real regard for him.
7
And so, at last, the doors of my prison were opened, and I was free. The solitude of my smallish room and the quiet half-secret interviews with my one friend, Ogarev, were now exchanged for a noisy family of six hundred members. In a fortnight, I was more at home there than I had ever been, from the day I was born, in my father's house.
But even here my father's house pursued me, in the shape of a footman whom my father sent with me to the University, especially when I walked there. I spent a whole term in trying to dodge this escort, and was formally excused from it at last. I say 'formally', because my valet Peter, who was entrusted with this duty, s. A noveL
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very soon realised, first, that I disliked being escorted, and secondly, that he himself would be much better off in various places of amusement than in the entrance-hall of my lectureroom, where he had no occupation except to exchange gossip and pinches of snuff with the two porters. What was the motive of this precaution ? Was it possible that Peter, who had been liable all his life to drinking-bouts that lasted for days, could keep me straight ? I don't suppose my father believed that; but, for his own peace of mind, he took measures - ineffective, indeed, but still measures - much in the way that freethinkers keep Lent This is a characteristic feature of the old system of education in Russia. Till I was seven, I was not allowed to come downstairs alone - the flight was rather steep ; and Vera Artamonovna went on bathing me till I was eleven. It was of a piece with this system that I should have a servant walking behind me to College, and should not be allowed, before I was twenty-one, to be out later than half-past ten. I was never really free and independent till I was banished ; but for that incident, the system would probably have gone on till I was twenty-five or thirty-five.
8
Like most energetic boys who had been brought up alone, I rushed into the arms of my companions with such frank eagerness, made proselytes with such sublime confidence, and was myself so fond of everyone, that I could not but kindle a corresponding warmth in my hearers, who were mostly of the same age as myself. I was then seventeen.