‘In times when all was plunged in darkness, exhortation alone was of course enough; the novelty of truth gave it peculiar force, but nowadays far more powerful means are necessary for us. Now a man guided by his senses needs to find in virtue a charm palpable to the senses. The passions cannot be uprooted; we must only attempt to direct them to a noble object, and so every one should be able to find satisfaction for his passions within the bounds of virtue, and our order should provide means to that end. As soon as we have a certain number of capable men in every state, each of them training again two others, and all keeping in close cooperation, then everything will be possible for our order, which has already done much in secret for the good of humanity.’
This speech did not merely make a great impression, it produced a thrill of excitement in the lodge. The majority of the brothers, seeing in this speech dangerous projects of ‘illuminism,’ to Pierre’s surprise received it
coldly. The Grand Master began to raise objections to it; Pierre began to expound his own views with greater and greater heat. It was long since there had been so stormy a meeting. The lodge split up into parties; one party opposed Pierre, accusing him of ‘illuminism’; the other supported him. Pierre was for the first time at this meeting impressed by the endless multiplicity of men’s minds, which leads to no truth being ever seen by two persons alike.
Even those among the members who seemed to be on his side interpreted him in their own way, with limitations and variations, to which he could not agree. What Pierre chiefly desired was always to transmit his thought to another exactly as he conceived it himself.
At the conclusion of the sitting, the Grand Master spoke with ill-will and irony to Bezuhov of his hasty temper; and observed that it was not love of virtue alone, but a passion for strife, that had guided him in the discussion.
Pierre made him no reply, but briefly inquired whether his proposal would be accepted. lie was told that it would not be; and without waiting for the usual formalities, he left the lodge and went home.
VIII
Again Pierre was overtaken by that despondency he so dreaded. For three days after the delivery of 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 who besought him to see her, wrote of her unhappiness on his account, and her desire to devote her whole life to him.
At the end of the letter she informed him that in a day or two she would arrive in Petersburg from abroad.
The letter was followed up by one of the freemasons whom Pierre respected least bursting in upon his solitude. Turning the conversation upon Pierre’s matrimonial affairs, he gave him, by way of brotherly counsel, his opinion that his severity to his wife was wrong, and that Pierre was departing from the first principles of freemasonry in not forgiving the penitent. At the same time his mother-in-law, Prince Vassily’s wife, sent to him, beseeching him to visit her, if only for a few minytes, to discuss a matter of great importance. Pierre saw there was a conspiracy against him, that they meant to reconcile him with his wife, and he did not even dislike this in the mood in which he then was. Nothing mattered to him; Pierre regarded nothing in life as a matter of great consequence, and under the influence of the despondency which had taken possession of him, he attached no significance either to his own freedom or to having his own way by punishing his wife.
‘No one is right, no one is to blame, and so she, too, is not to blame,’ he thought. If Pierre did not at once give his consent to being reunited to his wife, it was simply because in the despondent state into which he
had lapsed, he was incapable of taking any line of action. Had his wife come to him, he could not now have driven her away. Could it matter, beside the questions that were absorbing Pierre, whether he lived with his wife or not?
Without answering either his wife or his mother-in-law, Pierre at once set off late in the evening, and drove to Moscow to see Osip Alexyevitch.
This is what Pierre wrote in his diary.
