'Ugh! how you have aged since I saw you last! you abuse the young and want to rear them on falsehoods, like nurses who tell children that the midwife brings the babies, and the difference between a boy and a girl is the cut of their clothes. You had better consider for hmv many centuries men have been telling godless lies, with a moral purpose, and morality has been none the better. Why not try speaking the truth? If the truth turns out to be bad, it will be a good precPdent. As to my bad influence on the young-I've long been resigned to that, remembering how all who have been of any use to the younger generation have invariably been accused of corrupting it, from Socrates to Voltaire, from Voltaire to Shelley and Belinsky. Besides, I am comforted by the fact that it is very difficult to corrupt our young Russians. Brought up on the estates of slave-owners by Nicholas's officials and officers, completing their studies in army barracks, government offices or the houses of the gentry, they are either incapable of being corrupted, or their corruption is already so complete that it would be hard to add to it by any bitter truth about Western Europe.'
'Truth! . . . But allow me to ask you whether your truth really is the truth? '
'I can't answer for that. You may be sure o f one thing, that I say conscientiously what I think. If I am mistahn, without being aware of it, what can I do? It is more your job to open my eyes.'
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'There's no convincing you-and you know why; it's because you are partly right; you are a good prosecutor, as you say yourself, and a bad accoucheur.'
'But you know I am not living in a maternity hospital, but in a clinic and an anatomy theatre.'
'And you are writing for nursery-schools. Children must be taught that they may not eat each other's porridge and pull each other's hair. But you regale them with the subtleties of your pathological anatomy, and keep on adding besides: Look here, how nasty the entrails of these old Europeans are! What is more, you use two standards of weight and two of measure. If you have taken up the scalpel, you should be uniform in your dissection.'
'What, am I cutting up the living too? How awful ! And children too! Do I seem to you to be a Herod?'
'You may joke as you like ; you won't put me off with that.
With great insight you diagnose the malady of modern man, but when you have made out all the symptoms of a chronic disease, you say that it is all due to the patient's being French or German. And our people at home actually imagine that they have youth and a future. Everything that is dear to us in the traditions, the civilisation and the history of the Western nations you cut open relentlessly and mercilessly, exposing frightful sores, and in that you are performing your task as a demonstrator. But you are sick of messing about for ever v..-ith corpses. And so, abandoning every ideal in the world, you are creating for yourself a new idol, not a golden calf but a woolly sheepskin, and you set to bowing down to it and glorifying it as "The Absolute Sheepskin, the Sheepskin of the Future, the Sheepskin of Communism, of Socialism! " You who have made for yourself a duty and a profession of scepticism, expect from a people, \vhich has done nothing so far, a new and original form of society in the future and every other blessing; and, in the excess of your fanatical ecstasy, you stop up your ears and squeeze your eyes shut that you may not see that your god is as crude and hideous as any Japanese idol, with its three-tiered belly and nose flattened onto its cheekbones and moustaclJPs like the King of Sardinia. VVhatever you are told, whatever facts are brought forward, you talk in "ardent ecstasy" of the freshness of spring, of beneficent tempests, of rainbows and sprouts full of promise!
It is no wonder that our young people, aftc>r drinking deep of your still fermenting brew of Slavophil socialism, are staggering, drunk and dizzy, till they break thc>ir necks or knock their noses against our real reality. Of course, it is as hard to sober them as
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it is to sober you-history, philology, statistics, incontestable facts, go for nothing with both of you.'
'But allow me; I, in my turn, shall tell you that you must keep within bounds. What are these indubitable facts?'
'There are scores of them.'
'Such as?'
'Such as the fact that we Russians belong both by race and language to the European family, genus europaeum, and consequently by the most immutable laws of physiology we are bound to follow the same path. I have never heard of a duck, belonging to the breed of ducks, breathing with gills . . . .'
'Only fancy, I haven't either.'
I pause at this agreeable moment of complete agreement with my opponent to turn to you again and submit to your judgment such censure of the honour and virtue of my epistles.
My whole sin lies in avoiding dogmatic statement and perhaps relying too much on my readers; this has led many into temptation and given my practical opponents a weapon against me--of various temper and not always of equal purity. I shall try to condense into a series of aphorisms the grounds of the theory on the basis of which I thought myself entitled to draw the conclusions, which I have passed on like apples I had picked without mentioning the ladder which I had put up to the tree, nor the shears with which I cut them off. But before I proceed to do this I want to show you by one example that my stern judges cannot be said to be on very firm ground. The learned friend who came to trouble the peace of my retreat takes it as you see for an indubitable fact, for an invariable physiological law, that if the Russians belong to the European family the same line of development awaits them as that followed by the Latin and Germanic peoples. But there is no such paragraph in the code of laws of physiology. It reminds me of the typically Muscovite invention of various institutions and regulations in which everyone believes, which everyone repeats, and which in fact have never existed. One friend of mine and of yours used to call them the laws of the English Club.
The general plan of development admits of endless unforeseen deviations, such as the trunk of the elephant and the hump of the camel. There are any number of variations on the same theme: dogs, wolves, foxes, harriers, borzois, water-spaniels and pugs. . . . A common origin by no means conditions an identical biography. Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, were brothers, but what different careers they had ! It is the same in
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all spiritual societies or communities. Every form of Christianity has similarities in the organisation of the family, of the Church and so on, but it cannot be said that the history of the English Protestants has been very similar to that of the Abyssinian Christians, or that the most Catholic Austrian army has much in common with the extremely Orthodox monks of Mount Athas.
That the duck does not breathe through gills is true; it is even truer that quartz does not fly like a humming-bird. You certainly know, however, though my learned friend does not, that there was a moment's hesitation in the duck's life when its aorta had not turned its stalk downwards, but branched out with pretensions to gills; but having a physiological tradition, the habit and possibility of development, the duck did not stop short at the inferior form of respiratory organ, but passed on to lungs.