Anna Karenina - Part 3

"Well, you're saying it yourself! What's wanted to prevent her

taking her child to the hen-roost to cure it of screaming fits is

just..." Sviazhsky said, smiling good-humoredly.

"Oh, no!" said Levin with annoyance; "that method of doctoring I

merely meant as a simile for doctoring the people with schools.

The people are poor and ignorant--that we see as surely as the

peasant woman sees the baby is ill because it screams. But in

what way this trouble of poverty and ignorance is to be cured by

schools is as incomprehensible as how the hen-roost affects the

screaming. What has to be cured is what makes him poor."

"Well, in that, at least, you're in agreement with Spencer, whom

you dislike so much. He says, too, that education may be the

consequence of greater prosperity and comfort, of more frequent

washing, as he says, but not of being able to read and write..."

"Well, then, I'm very glad--or the contrary, very sorry, that

I'm in agreement with Spencer; only I've known it a long while.

Schools can do no good; what will do good is an economic

organization in which the people will become richer, will have

more leisure--and then there will be schools."

"Still, all over Europe now schools are obligatory."

"And how far do you agree with Spencer yourself about it?" asked

Levin.

But there was a gleam of alarm in Sviazhsky's eyes, and he said

smiling: "No; that screaming story is positively capital! Did you really

hear it yourself?"

Levin saw that he was not to discover the connection between this

man's life and his thoughts. Obviously he did not care in the

least what his reasoning led him to; all he wanted was the

process of reasoning. And he did not like it when the process of

reasoning brought him into a blind alley. That was the only

thing he disliked, and avoided by changing the conversation to

something agreeable and amusing.

All the impressions of the day, beginning with the impression

made by the old peasant, which served, as it were, as the

fundamental basis of all the conceptions and ideas of the day,

threw Levin into violent excitement. This dear good Sviazhsky,

keeping a stock of ideas simply for social purposes, and

obviously having some other principles hidden from Levin, while

with the crowd, whose name is legion, he guided public opinion by

ideas he did not share; that irascible country gentleman,

perfectly correct in the conclusions that he had been worried

into by life, but wrong in his exasperation against a whole

class, and that the best class in Russia; his own dissatisfaction

with the work he had been doing, and the vague hope of finding a

remedy for all this--all was blended in a sense of inward

turmoil, and anticipation of some solution near at hand.