Gavril Ardalionovitch was in a particularly excited state that evening, and in gay, almost triumphant spirits, so Myshkin fancied. He was joking, of course, with Lebedyev, egging him on; but soon he got hot himself.
“Not railways, no,” retorted Lebedyev, who was at the same time losing his temper and enjoying himself tremendously. “The railways alone won’t pollute the ‘springs of life,’ but the whole thing is accursed; the whole tendency of the last few centuries in its general, scientific and materialistic entirety, is perhaps really accursed.”
“Certainly accursed, or only perhaps? It’s important to know that, you know,” queried “Vfevgeny Pavlovitch.
“Accursed, accursed, most certainly accursed!” Lebedyev maintained with heat.
“Don’t be in a hurry, Lebedyev, you’re much milder in the morning,” put in Ptitsyn with a smile.
“But in the evening more open! In the evening more hearty and open!” Lebedyev turned to him warmly. “More open-hearted and definite, more honest and honourable; and although I am exposing my weak side to you, no matter. I challenge you all now, all you atheists. With what will you save the world, and where have you found a normal line of progress for it, you men of science, of industry, of cooperation, of labour-wage, and all the rest of it? With what? With credit? What’s credit? Where will credit take you?”
“Ach! you are inquisitive!” observed Yevgeny Pavlovitch.
“Well, my opinion is that anyone who is not interested in such questions is a fashionable ‘chenapan.’”
“But at least it leads to general solidarity and a balance of interests,” observed Ptitsyn.
“That’s all! That’s all! Without recognizing any moral basis except the satisfaction of individual egoism and material necessity! Universal peace, universal happiness, from necessity! Do I understand you right, my dear sir, may I venture to ask?”
“But the universal necessity of living, eating, and drinking, and a complete, scientific in fact, conviction that these necessities are not satisfied without association and solidarity of interests is, I believe, a sufficiently powerful idea to serve as a basis and ‘spring of life’ for future ages of humanity,” observed Ganya, who was excited in earnest.
“The necessity of eating and drinking, that is merely the instinct of self-preservation....”
“But isn’t that instinct of self-preservation a sufficient matter? Why, the instinct of self-preservation is the normal law of humanity....”
“Who told you that?” cried Yevgeny Pavlovitch suddenly. “It’s a law, that’s true; but it’s no more normal than the law of destruction, or even self-destruction. Is self-preservation the whole normal law of mankind?”
“A-ha!” cried Ippolit, turning quickly to Yevgeny Pavlovitch and scrutinising him with wild curiosity; but seeing that he was laughing, he too laughed, nudged Kolya who was standing beside him, and asked him again what o’clock it was, and even took hold of Kolya’s silver watch himself and looked eagerly at the hands. Then, as though forgetting everything, he stretched himself on the sofa, placed his arms behind his head, and stared at the ceiling; half a minute later, he sat down aqain at the table,
drawing himself up, and listening to the babble of Lebedyev, who was intensely excited.
“An artful and ironical idea, insidious as a larding-needle!” Lebedyev greedily caught up Yevgeny Pavlovitch’s paradox; “an idea expressed with the object of provoking opponents to battle — but a true idea! For you, a worldly scoffer and cavalry officer (though not without brains), are not yourself aware how true and profound your idea is. “Vfes, sir, the law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in humanity! The devil has equal dominion over humanity till the limit of time which we know not. You laugh? You don’t believe in the devil? Disbelief in the devil is a French idea, a frivolous idea. Do you know who the devil is? Do you know his name? Without even knowing his name, you laugh at the form of him, following Voltaire’s example, at his hoofs, at his tail, at his horns, which you have invented; for the evil spirit is a mighty menacing spirit, but he has not the hoofs and horns you’ve invented for him. But he’s not the point now.”
“How do you know that he’s not the point now?” cried Ippolit suddenly, and laughed as though in hysterics.
“A shrewd and insinuating thought!” Lebedyev approved. “But, again, that’s not the point. Our question is whether the ‘springs of life’ have not grown weaker with the increase of...”
“Railways?” cried Kolya.
“Not railway communication, young but impetuous youth, but all that tendency of which railways may serve, so to speak, as the artistic pictorial expression. They hurry with noise, clamour and haste, for the happiness of humanity, they tell us. ‘Mankind has grown too noisy and commercial; there is little spiritual peace,’ one secluded thinker has complained. ‘So be it; but the rumble of the waggons that bring bread to starving humanity is better, maybe, than spiritual peace,’ another thinker, who is always moving among his fellows, answers him triumphantly, and walks away from him conceitedly. But, vile as I am, I don’t believe in the waggons that bring bread to humanity. For the waggons that bring bread to humanity, without any moral basis for conduct, may coldly exclude a considerable part of humanity from enjoying what is brought; so it has been already....”
“The waggons can coldly exclude?” some one repeated.
“And so it has been already,” repeated Lebedyev, not deigning to notice the question. “We’ve already had Malthus, the friend of humanity. But the friend of humanity with shaky moral principles is the devourer of humanity, to say nothing of his conceit; for, wound the vanity of any one of these numerous friends of humanity, and he’s ready to set fire to the world out of petty revenge — like all the rest of us, though, in that, to be fair; like myself, vilest of all, for I might well be the first to bring the fuel and run away myself. But that’s not the point again!”
“What is it, then?”
“You’re boring us.”
“The points lie in what follows, in an anecdote of the past; for I absolutely must tell you a story of ancient times. In our times, and in our country, which I trust you love, gentlemen, as I do, for I am ready to shed the last drop of my blood for...”
“Get on, get on!”
“In our country, as well as in the rest of Europe, widespread and terrible famines visit humanity, as far as they can be reckoned, and as far as I can remember, not oftener now than four times a century, in other words, every twenty-five years. I won’t dispute the exact number, but they are comparatively rare.”
“Compared with what?”
“Compared with the twelfth century, or those near it, before or after. For then, as they write and as writers assert, widespread famines came usually every two years, or at least every three years, so that in such a position of affairs men even had recourse to cannibalism, though they kept it secret. One of these cannibals announced, without being forced to do so, as he was approaching old age, that in the course of his long and needy life he had killed and eaten by himself in dead secret sixty monks and a few infant laymen, a matter of six, but not more. That is extraordinarily few compared with the immense mass of ecclesiastics he had consumed. Grown-up laymen, it appeared, he had never approached with that object.”
“That can’t be true!” cried the president himself, the general, in an almost resentful voice. “I often reason and dispute with him, gentlemen, always about such thinqs; but usually he brinqs forward such absurd stories, that it makes your ears ache, without a shred of probability.”
“General, remember the siege of Kars! And let me tell you, gentlemen, that my story is the unvarnished truth. I will only observe that every reality, even though it has its unalterable laws, is almost always difficult to believe and improbable, and sometimes, indeed, the more real it is the more improbable it is.”
“But could he eat sixty monks?” they asked, laughing round him.
“He didn’t eat them all at once,
that’s evident. But if he consumed them in the course of fifteen or twenty years, it is perfectly comprehensible and natural....”
“Natural?”
“Yes, natural,” Lebedyev repeated, with pedantic persistence. “Besides, a Catholic monk is, from his very nature, easily led and inquisitive, and it wouldn’t be hard to lure him into the forest, or to some hidden place, and there to deal with him as aforesaid. But I don’t deny that the number of persons devoured seems excessive to the point of greediness.”
“It may be true, gentlemen,” observed Myshkin suddenly.
Till then he had listened in silence to the disputants and had taken no part in the conversation; he had often joined heartily in the general outbursts of laughter. He was evidently delighted that they were so gay and so noisy; even that they were drinking so much. He might perhaps not have uttered a word the whole evening, but suddenly he seemed moved to speak. He spoke with marked gravity, so that every one turned to him at once with interest.
“What I mean, gentlemen, is, that famines used to be frequent. I have heard of that, though I know little history. But I think they must have been. When I was among the Swiss mountains I was surprised at the ruins of feudal castles, built on the mountain slopes or precipitous rocks at least half a mile high (which means some miles of mountain path). You know what a castle is: a perfect mountain of stones. They must have meant an awful, incredible labour. And, of course, they were all built by the poor people, the vassals. Besides which, they had to pay all the taxes and support the priesthood. How could they provide for themselves and till the land? They must have been few in number at that time; they died off terribly from famine, and there may have been literally nothing to eat. I’ve sometimes wondered, indeed, how it was that the people didn’t become extinct altogether; how it was that nothing happened to them, and how they managed to endure it and survive. No doubt Lebedyev is right in saying that there were cannibals, and perhaps many of them; only I don’t understand why he brought monks into the story, and what he means by that.”
“Probably because in the twelfth century it was only the monks who were fit to eat, because they were the only people that were fat,” observed Gavril Ardalionovitch.
“A magnificent and true idea!” cried Lebedyev, “seeing he didn’t touch laymen — not one layman to sixty ecclesiastics; and that’s a frightful thought, an historical thought, a statistical thought indeed, and such facts make history for one who understands. For it follows with arithmetical exactitude that the ecclesiastics lived at least sixty times as happily and comfortably as all the rest of mankind at that period. And perhaps they were at least sixty times as fat. . .
“An exaggeration! An exaggeration, Lebedyev!” they all laughed.
“I agree that is an historical thought; but what are you leading up to?” Myshkin inquired again. (He spoke with such gravity and so absolutely without mocking or jeering at Lebedyev, at whom all the rest were laughing, that in contrast with the general tone his words could not help sounding comic. They were almost on the verge of laughing at him, but he did not notice it.)
“Don’t you see, prince, that he’s a madman?” said “Vfevgeny Pavlovitch, bending down to him. “I was told here just now that he’s mad on being a lawyer and making lawyers’ speeches, and wants to go in for an examination. I’m expecting a glorious burlesque.”
“I am leading up to vast issues,” Lebedyev was roaring meanwhile. “But let us first of all analyse the psychological and legal position of the criminal. We see that the criminal, or, as I might call him, my client, in spite of the impossibility of finding any other comestible, several times in the course of his interesting career, showed signs of a desire to repent and shun the clergy. We see this clearly from the facts. It will be remembered that he did at anv rate consume five or six infants — a number relatively insignificant, yet remarkable from another point of view. It is evident that, tormented by terrible pangs of conscience (for my client is a religious man and conscientious, as I shall prove later), and to minimise his sin as far as possible, he, by way of experiment, changed his diet from the clergy to the laity. That it was by way of experiment is beyond doubt again; for had it been simply for the sake of gastronomic variety, the number six would be too insignificant. Why only six? Why not thirty? (Half of one and half of the other.) But if it were only an experiment, arising simply from despair and the fear of sacrilege, and of offending the church, the number six becomes quite intelligible; for six attempts to appease the pangs of conscience are more than enough, as the attempts could not but be unsuccessful. And in the first place, in my opinion, an infant is too small — that is, insufficient, so that he would need three times or five times as many infant laymen for the same period of time as one ecclesiastic. So that the sin, though less on the one side, would be greater on the other — not in quality, but in quantity. In this reflection, gentlemen,
I am of course entering into the feelings of a criminal of the twelfth century. As for me, a man of the nineteenth century, I should have reasoned differently, I beg to inform you; so you need not grin at me, gentlemen, and it’s not at all the thing for you to do, general. In the second place, an infant, in my opinion, would be not sufficiently nutritious, and perhaps too sweet and mawkish; so that his appetite would be unsatisfied, while the pangs of conscience would remain. Now for the conclusion, the finale, gentlemen, in which lies the solution of one of the greatest questions of that age and of this! The criminal ends by going and giving information against himself to the clergy and gives himself up to the authorities. One wonders what tortures awaited him in that age — the wheel, the stake and the fire. Who was it urged him to go and inform against himself? Why not simply stop short at sixty and keep the secret till his dying breath? Why not simply relinquish the clergy and live in penitence as a hermit? Why not, indeed, enter a monastery himself? Here is the solution. There must have been something stronger than stake and fire, stronger even than the habit of twenty years! There must have been an idea stronger than any misery, famine, torture, plague, leprosy, and all that hell, which mankind could not have endured without that idea, which bound men together, guided their hearts, and fructified the ‘springs of life.’ Show me anything like such a force in our age of vices and railways. ... I should say of steamers and railways, but I say vices and railways, because I’m drunk but truthful. Show me any idea binding mankind together to-day with anything like the power it had in those centuries. And dare to tell me that the ‘springs of life’ have not been weakened and muddied beneath the ‘star,’ beneath the network in which men are enmeshed. And don’t try to frighten me with your prosperity, your wealth, the infrequency of famine, and the rapidity of the means of communication. There is more wealth, but there is less strength. There is no uniting idea; everything has grown softer, everything is limp, and everyone is limp! We’ve all, all of us grown limp. . . . But that’s enough. That’s not the point now. The point is, honoured prince, whether we shouldn’t see to getting the supper, that’s being prepared for your visitors.”
Lebedyev had roused several of his hearers to positive indignation. (It must be noted that corks were being drawn incessantly all the time.) But his unexpected reference to supper conciliated all his opponents at once. He called such a conclusion “a smart, lawyer-like wind-up.” Good-humoured laughter rang out again, the guests grew more festive, and they all got up from the table to stretch their legs and take a turn on the verandah. Only Keller was still displeased with Lebedyev’s speech, and was much excited.
“He attacks enlightenment and upholds the bigotry of the twelfth century. He’s attitudinizing; it’s not through simple-heartedness. How did he himself come by this house, allow me to ask?” he said aloud, appealing to each and all.
“I used to know a real interpreter of the Apocalypse,” the general was saying in another corner to another group of listeners, among them Ptitsyn, whom he had buttonholed— “the late Grigory Semyonovitch Burmistrov. He used to make your heart glow. First, he’d p
ut on his spectacles, and open a big old book in a black leather binding, and he’d a grey beard and two medals in recognition of his munificent charities. He used to beqin sternlvand severely. Generals would bow down before him, and ladies fell into swoons. But this fellow winds up with supper! It’s beyond anything.”
Ptitsyn listened to the general, smiled, and made towards his hat, as though meaning to go, but seemed to be undecided, or to have forgotten his intention. Ganya had left off drinking and pushed away his glass even before they got up from the table. A shade of gloom came over his face. When they rose from the table, he went up to Rogozhin and sat down beside him. They might have been supposed to be on the friendliest terms. Rogozhin, who had also at first been several times on the point of getting up and slipping away, sat now motionless with his head bowed. He too seemed to have forgotten his intention. He had not drunk a drop of wine all the evening, and was very thoughtful. From time to time he raised his eyes and gazed at every one. It might have been supposed that he was expecting something of great importance to him and had made up his mind to wait for it.
Myshkin had drunk no more than two or three glasses, and was only light-hearted. As he rose from the table, he caught the eye of Yevgeny Pavlovitch. He remembered the explanation they were to have, and smiled cordially. Yevgeny Pavlovitch nodded to him and indicated Ippolit, whom he was intently watching at the moment. Ippolit was asleep at full length on the sofa.
“Tell me, prince, why has this wretched boy forced himself upon you?” he asked suddenly, with such undisguised annoyance and even malice, that Myshkin was surprised. “I’ll bet he’s got some mischief in his mind!”
“I have noticed,” said Myshkin, “I have fancied, at any rate, that he is in your thoughts a great deal today, Yevgeny Pavlovitch, isn’t he?”
“And you may say too I’ve enough to think about in my own position, so that I’m surprised myself at not being able to get away from that detestable countenance all the evening.”
Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky Page 310
