Immature Mind, fruit of recent study! Be quiet, urge not the pen into my hands: even without writing one may pass the fleeting days of life and gain honours, though one be not a poet. Many easy paths lead in our days to honours, and bold feet need not stumble upon them: the least acceptable is the one the nine barefooted sisters have laid out. Many a man has lost his strength thereon, without reaching a goal. You have to toil and moil there, and while you labour, people avoid you like the plague, rail at you, loathe you. He who bends over the table, fixing his eyes upon books, will gain no magnificent palaces, nor gardens adorned with marbles; will add no sheep to his paternal flock.
’Tis true, in our young monarch[127] a mighty hope has risen for the Muses, and the ignorant flee in shame from him. Apollo has found in him a strong defender of his glory, and has seen him honouring his suite and steadily intent upon increasing the dwellers on Parnassus.[128] The trouble is, many loudly praise in the Tsar what in the subject they haughtily condemn.
“Schisms and heresies are begot by science.[129] He lies most who knows most; who pores over books becomes an atheist.” Thus Crito grumbles, his rosary in his hands, and sighs, and with bitter tears the saintly soul bids us see how dangerous is the seed of learning that is cast among us: our children, who heretofore gently and meekly walked in the path of their forefathers, eagerly attending divine service and listening in fear to what they did not understand, now, to the horror of the Church, have begun to read the Bible; they discuss all, want to know the cause of all, and put little faith in the clerical profession; they have lost their good habits, have forgotten how to drink kvas, and will not be driven with a stick to partake of salt meat. They place no candles before the images, observe no feasts. They regard the worldly power misplaced in clerical hands, and whisper that worldly possessions ill become those who have renounced a worldly life.
Sylvan finds another fault with science: “Education,” he says, “brings famine in its track. We managed to get along before this without knowing Latin much better than we live now. We used to harvest more grain in our ignorance, but now that we have learned a foreign language, we lose our corn. What of it if my argument be weak and without sense and connection,—what matters that to a nobleman? Proof, order of words, is the affair of low-born men; for aristocrats it suffices boldly to assent, or contradict. Insane is he who examines the force and limitations of his soul; who toils whole days in his sweat, in order to learn the structure of the world and the change or cause of things: ’tis like making pease to stick to the wall. Will all that add one day to my life, or one penny to my coffers? Can I by means of it find out how much my clerk and superintendent steal a year or how to add water to my pond, or to increase the number of barrels in my still?
“Nor is he wise who, full of unrest, dims his eyes over a smoking fire, in order to learn the properties of ores. We have passed our A B C, and we can tell without all that the difference between gold, silver and copper. The science of herbs and diseases is idle talk. You have a headache, and the physician looks for signs of it in your hand! The blood is the cause of all, if we are to put faith in them. When we feel weak, it is because our blood flows too slowly; if it moves fast, there is a fever, he says boldly, though no one has ever seen the inside of a living body. And while he passes his time in such fables, the contents of our money-bags go into his. Of what use is it to calculate the course of the stars, and without rhyme or reason pass sleepless nights, gazing at one spot: for mere curiosity’s sake to lose your rest, trying to ascertain whether the sun moves, or we with the earth? We can read in the almanac, for every day in the year, the date of the month and the hour of sunrise. We can manage to divide the land in quarters without Euclid, and we know without algebra how many kopeks there are in a rouble.” Sylvan praises but one science to the skies,—the one that teaches how to increase his income and to save expenses. To labour in that from which your pocket does not swell at once, he deems a very dangerous occupation for a citizen.
Red-faced Lucas, belching thrice, speaks in a chanting voice: “Study kills the companionship of men. We have been created by God as social beings, and we have been given intelligence not for our own sakes alone. What good does it do anybody, if I shut myself up in my cabinet, and for my dead friends lose the living—when all my comradeship, all my good fellows, will be ink, pen, sand and paper? In merriment, in banquets we must pass our lives. Life is short, why should we curtail it further, worry over books, and harm our eyes? Is it not better to pass your days and nights over the winecup? Wine is a divine gift, there is much good in it: it befriends people, gives cause for conversation, makes glad, dispels heavy thoughts, eases misery, gives courage to the weak, mollifies the cruel, checks sullenness, and leads the lover more readily to his goal. When they will begin to make furrows in the sky, and the stars will shine through the surface of the earth; when swift rivers will run to their sources, and past ages will return; when at Lent the monk will eat nothing but dried sturgeon, then will I abandon my cup and take to books.”
Medor is worried because too much paper is used for letters and for printed books, and because he will soon be left without paper to curl his locks with. He would not change for Seneca a pound of good face-powder; in comparison with Egór,[130] Vergil is not worth two farthings to him, and he showers his praises on Rex,[131] not Cicero.
This is a part of the speeches that daily ring in my ears, and for this, O Mind, I advise you to be dumber than a dumpling. Where there is no profit, praise encourages to work, and without it the heart grows faint. But it is much worse, when instead of praises you earn insults! It is harder than for a tippler not to get his wine, or for a priest not to celebrate on Holy Week, or for a merchant to forego heady liquor.
I know, O Mind, that you will boldly answer me that it is not easy for an evil-minded man to praise virtue; that the dandy, miser, hypocrite, and the like, must perforce scorn science, and that their malevolent discourse concerns no men of culture.
Your judgment is excellent, correct; and thus it ought to be, but in our days the words of the ill-disposed control the wise. Besides, the sciences have other ill-wishers than those whom, for shortness’ sake, I merely mentioned or, to tell the truth, dared to mention. There are many more. The holy keepers of the keys of heaven and those to whom Themis has entrusted the golden scales little love, nearly all of them, the true adornment of the mind.