His first step was to call together the more intelligent and influential of his serfs, and to explain to them his project; but his efforts at explanation were eminently unsuccessful.  Even with regard to ordinary current affairs he could not express himself in that simple, homely language with which alone the peasants are familiar, and when he spoke on abstract subjects he naturally became quite unintelligible to his uneducated audience.  The serfs listened attentively, but understood nothing.  He might as well have spoken to them, as he often did in another kind of society, about the comparative excellence of Italian and German music.  At a second attempt he had rather more success.  The peasants came to understand that what he wished was to break up the Mir, or rural Commune, and to put them all on obrok—­that is to say, make them pay a yearly sum instead of giving him a certain amount of agricultural labour.  Much to his astonishment, his scheme did not meet with any sympathy.  As to being put on obrok, the serfs did not much object, though they preferred to remain as they were; but his proposal to break up the Mir astonished and bewildered them.  They regarded it as a sea-captain might regard the proposal of a scientific wiseacre to knock a hole in the ship’s bottom in order to make her sail faster.  Though they did not say much, he was intelligent enough to see that they would offer a strenuous passive resistance, and as he did not wish to act tyrannically, he let the matter drop.  Thus a second benevolent scheme was shipwrecked.  Many other schemes had a similar fate, and Victor Alexandr’itch began to perceive that it was very difficult to do good in this world, especially when the persons to be benefited were Russian peasants.

In reality the fault lay less with the serfs than with their master.  Victor Alexandr’itch was by no means a stupid man.  On the contrary, he had more than average talents.  Few men were more capable of grasping a new idea and forming a scheme for its realisation, and few men could play more dexterously with abstract principles.  What he wanted was the power of dealing with concrete facts.  The principles which he had acquired from University lectures and desultory reading were far too vague and abstract for practical use.  He had studied abstract science without gaining any technical knowledge of details, and consequently when he stood face to face with real life he was like a student who, having studied mechanics in text-books, is suddenly placed in a workshop and ordered to construct a machine.  Only there was one difference:  Victor Alexandr’itch was not ordered to do anything.  Voluntarily, without any apparent necessity, he set himself to work with tools which he could not handle.  It was this that chiefly puzzled the peasants.  Why should he trouble himself with these new schemes, when he might live comfortably as he was?  In some of his projects they could detect a desire to increase the revenue, but in others they could discover no such motive.  In these latter they attributed his conduct to pure caprice, and put it into the same category as those mad pranks in which proprietors of jovial humour sometimes indulged.