one

may believe his assurances, some games of patience demand a great

power of combination and concentration. Nevertheless while he sets out the
cards he amuses himself by talking continually. Katy follows his cards
carefully, helping him more by mimicry than words. In the whole evening she
drinks no more than two small glasses of wine, I drink only a quarter of a
glass, the remainder of the bottle falls to Mikhail Fiodorovich, who can drink
any amount without ever getting drunk.
During patience we solve all kinds of questions, mostly of the lofty order,
and our dearest love, science, comes off second best.
"Science, thank God, has had her day," says Mikhail Fiodorovich very
slowly. "She has had her swan-song. Ye-es. Mankind has begun to feel the
desire to replace her by something else. She was grown from the soil of
prejudice, fed by prejudices, and is now the same quintessence of prejudices as
were her bygone grandmothers: alchemy, metaphysics and philosophy. As
between European scholars and the Chinese who have no sciences at all the
difference is merely trifling, a matter only of externals. The Chinese had no
scientific knowledge, but what have they lost by that?"
"Flies haven't any scientific knowledge either," I say; "but what does that
prove?"
"It's no use getting angry, Nicolai Stiepanich. I say this only between
ourselves. I'm more cautious than you think. I shan't proclaim it from the
housetops, God forbid! The masses still keep alive a prejudice that science and
art are superior to agriculture and commerce, superior to crafts. Our
persuasion makes a living from this prejudice. It's not for you and me to
destroy it. God forbid!"
During patience the younger generation also comes in for it.
"Our public is degenerate nowadays," Mikhail Fiodorovich sighs. "I don't
speak of ideals and such things, I only ask that they should be able to work
and think decently. 'Sadly I look at the men of our time'—it's quite true in this
connection."
"Yes, they're frightfully degenerate," Katy agrees. "Tell me, had you one
single eminent person under you during the last five or ten years?"
"I don't know how it is with the other professors,—but somehow I don't
recollect that it ever happened to me."
"In my lifetime I've seen a great many of your students and young
scholars, a great many actors.... What happened? I never once had the luck to
meet, not a hero or a man of talent, but an ordinarily interesting person.
Everything's dull and incapable, swollen and pretentious...."
 All these conversations about degeneracy give me always the impression
that I have unwittingly overheard an unpleasant conversation about my
daughter. I feel offended because the indictments are made wholesale and are
based upon such ancient hackneyed commonplaces and such penny-dreadful
notions as degeneracy, lack of ideals, or comparisons with the glorious past.
Any indictment, even if it's made in a company of ladies, should be formulated
with all possible precision; otherwise it isn't an indictment, but an empty
calumny, unworthy of decent people.
I am an old man, and have served for the last thirty years; but I don't see
any sign either of degeneracy or the lack of ideals. I don't find it any worse
now than before. My porter, Nicolas, whose experience in this case has its
value, says that students nowadays are neither better nor worse than their
predecessors.
If I were asked what was the thing I did not like about my present pupils, I
wouldn't say offhand or answer at length, but with a certain precision. I know
their defects and there's no need for me to take refuge in a mist of
commonplaces. I don't like the way they smoke, and drink spirits, and marry
late; or the way they are careless and indifferent to the point of allowing
students to go hungry in their midst, and not paying their debts into "The
Students' Aid Society." They are ignorant of modern languages and express
themselves incorrectly in Russian. Only yesterday my colleague, the hygienist,
complained to me that he had to lecture twice as often because of their
incompetent knowledge of physics and their complete ignorance of
meteorology. They are readily influenced by the most modern writers, and
some of those not the best, but they are absolutely indifferent to classics like
Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Pascal; and their worldly
unpracticality shows itself mostly in their inability to distinguish between
great and small. They solve all difficult questions which have a more or less
social character (emigration, for instance) by getting up subscriptions, but not
by the method of scientific investigation and experiment, though this is at their
full disposal, and, above all, corresponds to their vocation. They readily
become house-doctors, assistant house-doctors, clinical assistants, or
consulting doctors, and they are prepared to keep these positions until they are
forty, though independence, a sense of freedom, and personal initiative are
quite as necessary in science, as, for instance, in art or commerce. I have
pupils and listeners, but I have no helpers or successors. Therefore I love them
and am concerned for them, but I'm not proud of them ... and so on.
However great the number of such defects may be, it's only in a cowardly
and timid person that they give rise to pessimism and distraction. All of them
are by nature accidental and transitory, and are completely dependent on the
conditions of life. Ten years will be enough for them to disappear or give place