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DURING THE FIRST PART of his stay in Petersburg, Prince Andrey found all the
habits of thought he had formed in his solitary life completely obscured by the
trifling cares which engrossed him in Petersburg.
In the evening on returning home he noted down in his memorandum-book four or
five unavoidable visits or appointments for fixed hours. The mechanism of life,
the arrangement of his day, so as to be in time everywhere, absorbed the greater
part of his vital energy. He did nothing, thought of nothing even, and had no
time to think, but only talked, and talked successfully, of what he had had time
to think about in the past in the country.
He sometimes noticed with dissatisfaction that it happened to him to repeat
the same remarks on the same day to different audiences. But he was so busy for
whole days together that he had no time to reflect that he was thinking of
nothing. Just as at their first meeting at Kotchubey's, Speransky had a long and
confidential talk with Prince Andrey on Wednesday at his own home, where he
received Bolkonsky alone and made a great impression on him.
Prince Andrey regarded the immense mass of men as contemptible and worthless
creatures, and he had such a longing to find in some other man the living
pattern of that perfection after which he strove himself, that he was ready to
believe that in Speransky he had found this ideal of a perfectly rational and
virtuous man. Had Speransky belonged to the same world as Prince Andrey, had he
been of the same breeding and moral traditions, Bolkonsky would soon have
detected the weak, human, unheroic sides of his character; but this logical turn
of mind was strange to him and inspired him with the more respect from his not
fully understanding it. Besides this, Speransky, either because he appreciated
Prince Andrey's abilities or because he thought it as well to secure his
adherence, showed off his calm, impartial sagacity before Prince Andrey, and
flattered him with that delicate flattery that goes hand in hand with conceit,
and consists in a tacit assumption that one's companion and oneself are the only
people capable of understanding all the folly of the rest of the world and the
sagacity and profundity of their own ideas.
In the course of their long conversation on Wednesday evening Speransky said
more than once: “Among us everything that is out of the common rut of
tradition is looked at,” … or with a smile: “But we want the wolves to be
well fed and the sheep to be unhurt.” … or: “They can't grasp that” … and
always with an expression that said. “We, you and I, we understand what
they are and who we are.”
This first long conversation with Speransky only strengthened the feeling
with which Prince Andrey had seen him for the first time. He saw in him a man of
vast intellect and sober, accurate judgment, who had attained power by energy
and persistence, and was using it for the good of Russia only. In Prince
Andrey's eyes Speransky was precisely the man—finding a rational explanation for
all the phenomena of life, recognising as of importance only what was rational
and capable of applying the standard of reason to everything—that he would have
liked to be himself. Everything took a form so simple, so clear in Speransky's
exposition of it that Prince Andrey could not help agreeing with him on every
subject. If he argued and raised objections it was simply with the express
object of being independent and not being entirely swayed by Speransky's ideas.
Everything was right, everything was as it should be, yet one thing disconcerted
Prince Andrey. That was the cold, mirror-like eye of Speransky, which seemed to
refuse all admittance to his soul, and his flabby, white hand, at which Prince
Andrey instinctively looked, as one usually does look at the hands of men who
have power. That mirror-like eye and that flabby hand vaguely irritated Prince
Andrey. He was disagreeably struck too by the excessive contempt for other
people that he observed in Speransky, and by the variety of the lines of
argument he employed in support of his views. He made use of every possible
weapon of thought, except analogy, and his transitions from one line of defence
to another seemed to Prince Andrey too violent. At one time he took his stand as
a practical man and found fault with idealists, then he took a satirical line
and jeered sarcastically at his opponents, then maintained a strictly logical
position, or flew off into the domain of metaphysics. (This last resource was
one he was particularly fond of using in argument.) He raised the question into
the loftiest region of metaphysics, passed to definitions of space, of time, and
of thought, and carrying off arguments to confute his opponent, descended again
to the plane of the original discussion. What impressed Prince Andrey as the
leading characteristic of Speransky's mind was his unhesitating, unmovable faith
in the power and authority of the reason. It was plain that Speransky's brain
could never admit the idea—so common with Prince Andrey—that one can never after
all express all one thinks. It had never occurred to him to doubt whether all he
thought and all he believed might not be meaningless nonsense. And that
peculiarity of Speransky's mind was what attracted Prince Andrey most.
During the first period of his acquaintance with Speransky, Prince Andrey had
a passionate and enthusiastic admiration for him, akin to what he had once felt
for Bonaparte. The very fact that Speransky was the son of a priest, which
enabled many foolish persons to regard him with vulgar contempt, as a member of
a despised class, made Prince Andrey peculiarly delicate in dealing with his own
feeling for Speransky and unconsciously strengthened it in him.
On that first evening that Bolkonsky spent with him, they talked of the
commission for the revision of the legal code; and Speransky described
ironically to Prince Andrey how the commission had been sitting for one hundred
and fifty years, had cost millions, and had done nothing, and how Rosenkampf had
pasted labels on all the various legislative codes.
“And that's all the state has got for the millions it has spent!” said he.
“We want to give new judicial powers to the Senate, and we have no laws. That's
why it is a sin for men like you, prince, not to be in the government.”
Prince Andrey observed that some education in jurisprudence was necessary for
such work, and that he had none.
“But no one has, so what would you have? It's a circulus viciosus,
which one must force some way out of.”
Within a week Prince Andrey was a member of the committee for the
reconstruction of the army regulations, and—a thing he would never have
expected—he was also chairman of a section of the commission for the revision of
the legal code. At Speransky's request he took the first part of the civil code
under revision; and with the help of the Napoleonic Code and the Code of
Justinian he worked at the revision of the section on Personal Rights.
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