‘Well, there is your answer! Education will stop them from carrying their children to the roosts to cure them of fractiousness,’ said Sviyazhsky with a merry smile.
‘Oh, not at all!’ said Levin, crossly. ‘That treatment seems to me just a parallel to treating the peasants by means of schools. The people are poor and ignorant, this we know as surely as the woman knows that the child is fractious because it cries. But why schools should cure the ills of poverty and ignorance is just as incomprehensible as why hens on their perches should cure fractiousness. What needs to be cured is their poverty.’
‘Well, in this at least you agree with Spencer, whom you dislike so much; he too says that education may result from increased well-being and comfort — from frequent ablutions, as he expresses it — but not from the ability to read and reckon …’
‘Well, I am very glad, or rather very sorry, that I coincide with Spencer; but it is a thing I have long known. Schools are no remedy, but the remedy would be an economic organization under which the people would be better off and have more leisure. Then schools would come.’
‘Yet all over Europe education is now compulsory.’
‘And how do you agree with Spencer yourself in this matter?’
A frightened look flashed up in Sviyazhsky’s eyes and he said with a smile:
‘Yes, that cure for fractiousness is splendid! Did you really hear it yourself?’
Levin saw that he would not succeed in finding a connection between this man’s life and his thoughts. It was evidently all the same to him what conclusions his reasoning led to: he only needed the process itself, and he did not like it when the process of reasoning led him up a blind alley. That he disliked and evaded by turning the conversation to something pleasantly jocular.
All the impressions of that day, beginning with the impression of the peasant at the halfway-house which seemed to serve as a foundation for all the other impressions and ideas, agitated Levin greatly. There was this amiable Sviyazhsky, who kept his opinions only for social use, and evidently had some other bases of life which Levin could not discern, while with that crowd, whose name is legion, he directed public opinion by means of thoughts foreign to himself; and that embittered landowner with perfectly sound views he had wrung painfully from life, but wrong in his bitterness toward a whole class, and that the best class in Russia; and Levin’s own discontent with his own activity, and his vague hope of finding a remedy for all these things — all this merged into a feeling of restlessness and expectation of a speedy solution.
Left alone in the room assigned to him, and lying on a spring mattress which bounced unexpectedly whenever he moved a leg or an arm, it was long before Levin could sleep. Not one of the talks he had had with Sviyazhsky, though much that was clever had been said by the latter, interested him; but the landowner’s arguments required consideration. Levin involuntarily remembered all that the man had said, and corrected in imagination the answers he himself had given.
‘I ought to have said to him: “You say that our farming is not a success because the peasants hate all improvements and that these should be introduced by force; and if farming did not pay at all without these improvements, you would be right. But it succeeds where and only where (as in the case of the man at the halfway-house) the labourers act in conformity with their habits. Your and our common dissatisfaction with farming shows that we, and not the peasants, are at fault. We have long pushed on in our own way — the European way — without considering the nature of the labour force available. Let us consider the labourer not as an abstract labour force but as a Russian peasant with his own instincts, and let us arrange our farming accordingly. Imagine,” I ought to have said to him, “that your farming is conducted like that old man’s: that you have found means to interest the labourers in the results of their work, and have found improvements which they must recognize as such — then, without impoverishing the soil, you will get double and treble the crops you get now. Divide equally and give half the produce to labour, and the share left for you will be larger, and the labour force will receive more. And to do this we must lower the level of cultivation and give the peasants an interest in its success. How this can be done is a question of details, but it is certainly possible.” ’
This thought strongly excited Levin. He lay awake half the night considering the details necessary for carrying his thought into effect. He had not meant to leave next day, but now decided to go away early in the morning. Moreover there was the sister-in-law with the square-cut bodice, who occasioned in him a feeling akin to shame and repentance caused by the commission of a bad action. Above all he had to get away immediately to propose his new plan to the peasants before the winter corn was sown, so that the work might be done on the new conditions. He decided completely to reverse his former methods of farming.
Chapter 29
THE carrying out of Levin’s plans presented many difficulties, but he struggled with all his might to attain, if not all he desired, at any rate a possibility of believing without self-deception that the thing was worth doing. One of the chief difficulties was that the farming was actually going on and it was impossible to stop it all and start afresh; so that the machine had to be altered while it was working.
When, on the evening of his return, he informed the steward of his intentions, the steward with evident pleasure agreed with that part of the plan which showed that all that had been done up to then was foolish and unprofitable. He remarked that he had always said so but had not been listened to. But to Levin’s proposal that he, like the peasants, should participate as a shareholder would in the farming, the steward only put on a look of great depression and expressed no definite opinion, but at once began to speak of the necessity of carting the last sheaves of rye next day and of starting the second ploughing; so that Levin felt that it was not the time for his plans to be considered.
When speaking of the matter to the peasants and offering them land on the new conditions, Levin again met with the same difficulty; they too were so fully occupied with the labour of the day that they had no time to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the venture.
The naïve peasant, the cowman Ivan, quite understood Levin’s offer of letting him and his family have a share in the profits of the dairy farm, and quite sympathized with this undertaking: but when Levin impressed upon him the benefit that would accrue to him in the future, a look of anxiety and regret that he could not stop to listen to it all appeared on Ivan’s face, and he hurriedly remembered some task that could not be put off, seized a hayfork to remove the hay from the enclosure, fetched water, or cleared away the manure.
Another stumbling-block was the peasant’s invincible mistrust of the possibility of a landlord having any other aim than that of robbing them as much as possible. They were firmly convinced that his real aim (whatever he might say) would always be hidden in what he did not tell them. And they themselves, when they talked, said much, but never said what they really wanted. Besides all this (Levin felt that the splenetic landowner was right), the peasants put as the first and unalterable condition in any agreement, that they should not be obliged to use any new methods or new kinds of tools for their work. They agreed that an English plough ploughed better, that a scarifier worked quicker, but they found a thousand reasons why they could not use either the one or the other; and, though he was convinced that it would be necessary to lower his standards of farming, he disliked having to give up improvements the benefit of which was so clear. Yet in spite of all these difficulties he got his way, and by autumn the