War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
In the first days of his acquaintance with Speransky, Prince Andrey regarded him with passionate admiration, not unlike the feelings he had once entertained for Napoleon. The fact that he was the son of a village priest, which was reason enough for foolish people to treat him with vulgar contempt, as many did, sneering at his humble origins, gave Prince Andrey a particular sensitivity in marshalling his own feelings towards Speransky, which were unconsciously strengthened in the process.
On the first evening that Bolkonsky spent with him they talked of the commission set up for the revision of the legal code, and Speransky told him sarcastically that the commission had now been sitting for a hundred and fifty years, was costing millions and had done nothing, except for Rosenkampf, who had stuck little labels on corresponding paragraphs of the different legal codes.
'And that's all the state gets for its millions!' he said. 'We want the senate to have new judicial powers, but we have no laws. That's why it's a sin for men like you, Prince, not to offer yourself for service.'
Prince Andrey observed that legal training was necessary for work like this, and he had none.
'Nobody else has. So what would you have us do? This amounts to a circulus viciosus, and it must be broken.'
Within a week Prince Andrey was on the Army Regulations Committee, and amazed to find himself also chairman of a sub-committee on the Commission for Revision of the Legal Code. At Speransky's request he took the first part of the Civil Code under current review, and used both the Napoleonic Code and the Institutes of Justinian to help revise the section on Personal Rights.
CHAPTER 7
A couple of years before this, at the beginning of 1808, Pierre had returned to Petersburg from visiting his estates, and had assumed (without seeking it) a prominent position among the freemasons of the city. He organized dinners and funerals in the lodges, recruited new members, took an active part in bringing different lodges together and in the acquisition of authentic charters. He paid for the building of temples, and did what he could to top up the collection of alms, since most of the members were stingy and late with their payments. He stood virtually alone in maintaining the poorhouse built by their order in Petersburg.
Meanwhile his life went on as before, with the same kind of sudden passions and dissipation. He liked a good dinner and a lot to drink, and although he thought it was all immoral and degrading, he couldn't resist the temptations of the bachelor society in which he moved.
Although Pierre was thoroughly absorbed in his work and his life of pleasure, by the time a year had gone by he had begun to feel more and more as if the masonic ground on which he stood was giving way under his feet despite his best efforts to stand there ever more firmly. At the same time he felt that the more the ground gave way beneath his feet the more tightly he was trapped by it. When he had been working towards entry into the brotherhood he had felt like a man stepping confidently on to the flat surface of a bog. One foot down and in he went, so to convince himself he was still on firm ground he had stepped out with the other foot, sunk further in and got stuck in the mud. Now, despite himself, he was knee-deep in the bog and struggling.
Osip Bazdeyev was not in Petersburg. (He had recently withdrawn from all the activities of the Petersburg lodge and now stayed permanently in Moscow.) All his brother members in the lodge were people Pierre knew in everyday life, and it was difficult for him to see them as masonic brothers rather than Prince A or Ivan Vasilyevich B, most of them being, as he well knew from real-life encounters, weak and worthless personalities. For all their masonic aprons and secret signs he couldn't help seeing them in the uniforms and decorations they were working towards in ordinary life. Often after collecting the alms and counting no more than twenty or thirty roubles - and most of it only promised - from a dozen members, half of them as well off as he was, he thought of the masonic vow by which every brother undertook to give up all his worldly goods for his neighbour, and doubts stirred in his soul, though he tried not to dwell on them.
He divided all the brothers he knew into four categories. First, brothers who took no active part in the affairs of the lodges or humanity in general, but were obsessed with the secret mysteries of the order, questions about the threefold designation of God, or the three primordial elements - sulphur, mercury and salt - or the significance of the Square and all the figures on the Temple of Solomon. Pierre respected this category of masons, to which, by Pierre's reckoning, the elder brethren mainly belonged, including Osip Bazdeyev, though he didn't share their interests. His heart was not in the mystical side of freemasonry.
In the second category Pierre included himself and brothers like him who were seeking and wavering; they had not yet discovered in freemasonry a straight and clear path to follow, but still hoped to do so.
In the third category he included all the brothers (the majority of them) who saw nothing but external form and ceremonial in freemasonry, and who valued the disciplined execution of that external form without bothering too much about its content or meaning. Willarski and even the Grand Master of the lodge were two such people.
The fourth category was also rich in numbers, especially among the recent recruits to the brotherhood. These were men who, as far as Pierre could tell, believed in nothing and wanted nothing, having entered the brotherhood just to make contact with the numerous lodge-members who were young and wealthy, high-ranking or well connected and therefore powerful men.
Pierre began to feel dissatisfied with what he was doing. Freemasonry, at least in the form he knew here, sometimes seemed to rest on nothing but external show. He had no thoughts of doubting freemasonry itself, but he suspected that Russian freemasonry had taken a wrong turning and deviated from its source. So it was that at the end of the year he went abroad to devote himself to the higher mysteries of the order.
It was in the summer of 1808 that Pierre returned to Petersburg. From an exchange of letters between our freemasons and others abroad it was known that Bezukhov had managed to gain the confidence of many people in high positions abroad, that many mysteries had been revealed to him, he had been raised to a higher grade and was bringing back with him much that was of great value to the cause of freemasonry in Russia. The Petersburg freemasons all drove round to see him, doing their best to ingratiate themselves, and all of them sensed that he was holding something back and getting something ready.
They convened a solemn meeting of the lodge of the second degree, at which Pierre promised to convey what he had brought for the Petersburg brothers from the highest leaders of the order abroad. All the places were taken. After the usual ceremonies Pierre rose and launched into his speech.
'Dear brothers,' he began, blushing and stammering as he clutched his written address, 'it is not enough to observe our mysteries in the seclusion of the lodge - we must act, er . . . we need to act . . . We are slumbering, and we need to act.'
Pierre took up a large note-book and began to read from it.
'For the dissemination of pure truth and to ensure the triumph of virtue,' he read, 'we must get rid of prejudice, diffuse principles in harmony with the spirit of the times, undertake the education of young people, bind ourselves with indissoluble bonds to the wisest of men, boldly yet prudently overcome superstition, faithlessness and folly, and turn our devoted followers into men linked by a common cause and possessing power and authority.
'For the attainment of this goal we must ensure that virtue prevails over vice, we must exert ourselves so that honest men can obtain everlasting reward even in this world. But in these great undertakings we are severely hindered by existing political institutions. What is to be done in this situation? Are we to encourage revolution, overthrow everything, turn violence against violence? . . . No, we are very far from that. Any reform based on violence is to be deprecated, because it does little towards correction of evil while men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.
'The whole plan of our order should be founded on the formation of strong cha
'When all was plunged in darkness, exhortation was, of course, sufficient in itself - the novelty of Truth gave her a special power - but in this day and age we need far more powerful methods. Nowadays a man guided by his senses needs to find virtue sensually attractive. Passion cannot be eradicated; all we can do is try to direct it towards a noble aim, so that everyone can satisfy his passions within the limits of virtue, and our order should provide the means to that end. As soon as we have a decent number of worthy men in every country, each of them educating two others, and all of them acting in concert, then nothing will be impossible for our order, which has already done so much in secret for the good of mankind.'
The speech not only made an impact, it produced uproar in the lodge. The majority of the brothers considered that the address smacked of Illuminism3 and gave it a cold reception, much to Pierre's surprise. The Grand Master began to raise objections. Pierre began to expound his own views with more and more passion. It was a long time since a meeting had turned out to be as stormy as this one. There were two factions, one ranged against Pierre, accusing him of Illuminism, the other on his side. For the first time in his life Pierre was struck by the endless variety of men's minds, which guarantees that no truth is ever seen the same way by any two persons.
Even those members who seemed to be on his side interpreted him each in his own way, with provisos and amendments which he found unacceptable since his most urgent need was to transmit ideas to other people exactly as he saw them in his own mind.
At the end of the session, the Grand Master, sardonic and vindictive, rebuked Bezukhov for speaking with too much passion, remarking that he had been guided during the discussion not so much by love of virtue as by a taste for conflict.
Pierre refused to respond, except to inquire tersely whether his proposal would be accepted. They said no, it would not, so he left the lodge without waiting for the usual formalities and went home.
CHAPTER 8
Once again Pierre was afflicted by the kind of depression he so much dreaded. For three days after making his speech at the lodge he lay on a sofa at home, seeing no one and going nowhere. At this time he received a letter from his wife begging for a meeting; she wrote of her unhappiness on his account, and her wish to devote her whole life to him. At the end of the letter she informed him that she would be arriving in Petersburg from abroad in the next few days.
Shortly after reading the letter Pierre found his solitude invaded by one of the freemasons whom he least respected, and this man soon got round to the subject of Pierre's marriage, expressing his opinion by way of brotherly counsel that Pierre's harsh attitude to his wife was wrong, an infringement of the basic principles of freemasonry because he was withholding forgiveness from a penitent.
At the same time his mother-in-law, Prince Vasily's wife, sent a message begging him to call on her, if only for a few minutes, to discuss something very important. Pierre could see them ganging up against him in a plot to reunite him with his wife, and, given the state he was in, he found this not unpleasant. Nothing mattered now; nothing in life was of much consequence, and under the weight of his depression he set no store by his own freedom or relentless pursuit of further punishment for his wife.
'Nobody's in the right, nobody's in the wrong, so she can't be in the wrong,' he thought. If Pierre failed to give immediate consent to a reconciliation with his wife this was only because in his present despondency he was incapable of taking any action. If his wife had walked in at that moment he couldn't have sent her away. Compared with the weight on Pierre's mind, did it really matter whether he lived with her or not?
Without sending an answer to his wife or his mother-in-law, Pierre set off that same evening and drove down to Moscow to see Osip Bazdeyev.
This is what he wrote in his diary.
Moscow, 17 November
Just back from seeing my benefactor and hasten to write down all that transpired between us. Osip lives in poverty and for the last three years he has been suffering from a painful bladder condition. Not a moan or a word of complaint has been heard from him. From morning till late at night, except when he takes his frugal meals, he goes on with his academic work. He received me graciously and had me sit down on the bed where he was lying. I gave him the sign of the Knights of the East and Jerusalem and he did the same to me, and then he asked me with a gentle smile what I had learnt and acquired in the lodges of Prussia and Scotland. I told him the whole story as best I could, and I set out the principles for action that I had proposed in our Petersburg lodge, and told him about the hostile reception and the break between me and the brothers. At first he thought things over for quite some time and said nothing, then he gave me his own view of the whole matter, which enabled me to see things in a new light - everything that has happened and my way forward in the future. I was taken aback when he asked whether I remembered the threefold aim of the order: (1) the preservation and study of the mystery; (2) self-purification and self-improvement for its assimilation; and (3) the improvement of the human race through constant striving towards such purification. Which, he asked, is the first and greatest of these three aims? Obviously, self-improvement and self-purification. This is the only aim that we can always strive towards under any circumstances. But at the same time this is the aim that calls for the greatest effort, and it follows that if we allow ourselves to be led astray by pride and lose sight of this aim we shall either strive towards a mystery we are not worthy to receive because of our impurity, or seek to reform the human race while setting an example of depravity and dissipation. Illuminism is a tarnished doctrine precisely because it has been seduced into social activity and has puffed itself up with pride. On this basis Osip condemned my speech and everything I have been doing. I agreed with him to the bottom of my heart. On the subject of my domestic affairs, he said to me, 'A mason's first duty, as I have told you, consists in self-perfection. But we often imagine that the best way to achieve this aim is to remove all the difficulties from our lives. Sir, it is the other way round,' he said. 'Only amidst the cares of this world can we achieve the three great aims of (1) self-knowledge, for a man can know himself only through comparison; (2) greater perfection, and this can be achieved only through struggle; and (3) the attainment of the greatest virtue - the love of death. Only the vicissitudes of life can show us all its vanity and promote our innate love of death, or rather rebirth into new life.' These words were particularly poignant coming from Osip, who never wearies of life in all his grievous physical pain. Yet he loves death, though he does not, for all the sublime purity of his inner self, feel properly prepared for it just yet. Then my benefactor explained to me the full meaning of the Great Square of Creation, and vouchsafed to me that the third and the seventh numbers are the basis of everything. He advised me not to withdraw from the society of the Petersburg brethren, to undertake only second-degree duties in the lodge and to do my best to distract the brothers from the seductions of pride and turn them towards the true path of self-knowledge and self-perfection. After this, for my own benefit, he advised me as a matter of first priority to watch myself carefully, and for this purpose he gave me a note-book