[43]. King of Poland and father-in-law of Louis XV.
After passing through these rooms, you came at last to a curtained door which led into the study. The heat in this room was terrific; and here The Chemist was always to be found, wearing a stained dressing-gown trimmed with squirrel-fur, sitting behind a rampart of books, and surrounded by bottles, retorts, crucibles, and other apparatus. A few years earlier, this room had been the scene of shocking vice and cruelty; now it smelt of chlorine and was ruled by the microscope; and in this very room I was born! When my father returned from foreign parts, he had not yet quarrelled with his brother, and spent some months under his roof. Here too my wife was born in the year 1817. After two years The Chemist sold the house, and I spent many evenings there, arguing about Pan-Slavism and losing my temper with Homyakóv,[[44]] though nothing could make him lose his. The chief rooms were altered then, but the outside steps, front hall, and staircase were unchanged; and the little study was left as before.
[44]. Alexyéi Homyakóv (1804-1860), poet, theologian, and a leader of the Slavophile party.
The Chemist’s household arrangements, simple at all times, were even simpler when his mother went to the country in summer and took the cook with her. At four in the afternoon, his valet brought a coffee-pot, made some strong broth in it, and placed it by the fire of the chemical furnace, where all sorts of poisons were brewing; then he fetched half a chicken and a loaf from an eating-house; and that was his master’s dinner. When it was eaten, the valet washed the coffee-pot and restored it to its proper functions. The man came again in the evening: he removed from the sofa a heap of books and a tiger-skin which The Chemist had inherited from his father; and when he had spread out a sheet and fetched pillows and a coverlet, the study, which had served as kitchen and drawing-room, was converted just as easily into a bedroom.
§5
At the very beginning of our acquaintance, The Chemist perceived that I was no mere idler; and he urged me to give up literature and politics—the former was mere trifling and the latter not only fruitless but dangerous—and take to natural science. He gave me Cuvier’s Essay on Geological Changes and Candolle’s Botanical Geography, and, seeing that I profited by the reading, he placed at my disposal his own excellent collections and preparations, and even offered to direct my studies himself. On his own ground he was very interesting—exceedingly learned, acute, and even amiable, within certain limits. As far as the monkeys, he was at your service: from the inorganic kingdom up to the orang-outang, nothing came amiss to him; but he did not willingly venture farther, and philosophy, in particular, he avoided as mere moonshine. He was no enemy to reform, nor Rip van Winkle: he simply disbelieved in human nature—he believed that selfishness is the one and only motive of our actions, and is limited only by stupidity in some cases and by ignorance in others.
His materialism shocked me. It was quite unlike the superficial and half-hearted scepticism of a previous generation. His views were deliberate, consistent, and definite—one thought of Lalande’s famous answer to Napoleon. “Kant accepts the hypothesis of a deity,” said Napoleon. “Sir,” answered the astronomer, “in the course of my studies I have never found it necessary to make use of that hypothesis.”
The Chemist’s scepticism did not refer merely to theology. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire he called a mystic, and Oken a mere lunatic. He felt for the works of natural philosophers the contempt my father had expressed for Karamzín—“They first invent spiritual forces and First Causes, and then they are surprised that they cannot prove them or understand them.” In fact, it was my father over again, but differently educated and belonging to a different generation.
His views on social questions were even more disquieting. He believed that men are no more responsible for their actions, good or bad, than beasts: it was all a matter of constitution and circumstances and depended mainly on the state of the nervous system, from which, as he said, people expect more than it is able to give. He disliked family life, spoke with horror of marriage, and confessed frankly that, at thirty years of age, he had never once been in love. This hard temperament had, however, one tender side which showed itself in his conduct towards his mother. Both had suffered much from his father, and common suffering had united them closely. It was touching to see how he did what he could to surround her solitary and sickly old age with security and attention.
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-fourths 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.