The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
with regard to the other sex which is incompatible with strict
morality, and that this dissoluteness is pardoned generally. Both
parents and the government, in consequence of this view, may be said to
wink at profligacy, and even in the last resource to encourage its
practice. I am of opinion that this is not right.
It is not possible that the health of one class should necessitate the
ruin of another, and, in consequence, it is our first duty to turn a
deaf ear to such an essential immoral doctrine, no matter how strongly
society may have established or law protected it. Moreover, it needs to
be fully recognized that men are rightly to be held responsible for the
consequences of their own acts, and that these are no longer to be
visited on the woman alone. It follows from this that it is the duty of
men who do not wish to lead a life of infamy to practice such
continence in respect to all woman as they would were the female
society in which they move made up exclusively of their own mothers and
sisters.
A more rational mode of life should be adopted which would include
abstinence from all alcoholic drinks, from excess in eating and from
flesh meat, on the one hand, and recourse to physical labor on the
other. I am not speaking of gymnastics, or of any of those occupations
which may be fitly described as playing at work; I mean the genuine
toil that fatigues. No one need go far in search of proofs that this
kind of abstemious living is not merely possible, but far less hurtful
to health than excess. Hundreds of instances are known to every one.
This is my first contention.
In the second place, I think that of late years, through various
reasons which I need not enter, but among which the above-mentioned
laxity of opinion in society and the frequent idealization of the
subject in current literature and painting may be mentioned, conjugal
infidelity has become more common and is considered less reprehensible.
I am of opinion that this is not right. The origin of the evil is
twofold. It is due, in the first place, to a natural instinct, and, in
the second, to the elevation of this instinct to a place to which it
does not rightly belong. This being so, the evil can only be remedied
by effecting a change in the views now in vogue about “falling in love”
and all that this term implies, by educating men and women at home
through family influence and example, and abroad by means of healthy
public opinion, to practice that abstinence which morality and
Christianity alike enjoin. This is my second contention.
In the third place I am of opinion that another consequence of the
false light in which “falling in love,” and what it leads to, are
viewed in our society, is that the birth of children has lost its
pristine significance, and that modern marriages are conceived less and
less from the point of view of the family. I am of opinion that this is
not right. This is my third contention.
In the fourth place, I am of opinion that the children (who in our
society are considered an obstacle to enjoyment—an unlucky accident, as
it were) are educated not with a view to the problem which they will be
one day called on to face and to solve, but solely with an eye to the
pleasure which they may be made to yield to their parents. The
consequence is, that the children of human beings are brought up for
all the world like the young of animals, the chief care of their
parents being not to train them to such work as is worthy of men and
women, but to increase their weight, or add a cubit to their stature,
to make them spruce, sleek, well-fed, and comely. They rig them out in
all manner of fantastic costumes, wash them, over-feed them, and refuse
to make them work. If the children of the lower orders differ in this
last respect from those of the well-to-do classes, the difference is
merely formal; they work from sheer necessity, and not because their
parents recognize work as a duty. And in over-fed children, as in
over-fed animals, sensuality is engendered unnaturally early.
Fashionable dress to-day, the course of reading, plays, music, dances,
luscious food, all the elements of our modern life, in a word, from the
pictures on the little boxes of sweetmeats up to the novel, the tale,
and the poem, contribute to fan this sensuality into a strong,
consuming flame, with the result that sexual vices and diseases have
come to be the normal conditions of the period of tender youth, and
often continue into the riper age of full-blown manhood. And I am of
opinion that this is not right.
It is high time it ceased. The children of human beings should not be
brought up as if they were animals; and we should set up as the object
and strive to maintain as the result of our labors something better and
nobler than a well-dressed body. This is my fourth contention.
In the fifth place, I am of opinion that, owing to the exaggerated and
erroneous significance attributed by our society to love and to the
idealized states that accompany and succeed it, the best energies of
our men and women are drawn forth and exhausted during the most
promising period of life; those of the men in the work of looking for,
choosing, and winning the most desirable objects of love, for which
purpose lying and fraud are held to be quite excusable; those of the
women and girls in alluring men and decoying them into liaisons or
marriage by the most questionable means conceivable, as an instance of
which the present fashions in evening dress may be cited. I am of
opinion that this is not right.
The truth is, that the whole affair has been exalted by poets and
romancers to an undue importance, and that love in its various
developments is not a fitting object to consume the best energies of
men. People set it before them and strive after it, because their view
of life is as vulgar and brutish as is that other conception frequently
met with in the lower stages of development, which sees in luscious and
abundant food an end worthy of man’s best efforts. Now, this is not
right and should not be done. And, in order to avoid doing it, it is
only needful to realize the fact that whatever truly deserves to be
held up as a worthy object of man’s striving and working, whether it be
the service of humanity, of one’s country, of science, of art, not to
speak of the service of God, is far above and beyond the sphere of
personal enjoyment. Hence, it follows that not only to form a liaison,
but even to contract marriage, is, from a Christian point of view, not
a progress, but a fall. Love, and all the states that accompany and
follow it, however we may try in prose and verse to prove the contrary,
never do and never can facilitate the attainment of an aim worthy of
men, but always make it more difficult. This is my fifth contention.
How about the human race? If we admit that celibacy is better and
nobler than marriage, evidently the human race will come to an end.
But, if the logical conclusion of the argument is that the human race
will become extinct, the whole reasoning is wrong.
To that I reply that the argument is not mine; I did not invent it.
That it is incumbent on mankind so to strive, and that celibacy is
preferable to marriage, are truths revealed by Christ 1,900 years ago,
set forth in our catechisms, and professed by us as followers of
Christ.
Chastity and celibacy, it is urged, cannot constitute the ideal of
humanity, because chastity would annihilate the race which strove to
realize it, and humanity cannot set up as its ideal its own
annihilation. It may be pointed out in reply that only that is a true
ideal, which, being unattainable, admits of infinite gradation in
degrees of proximity. Such is the Christian ideal of the founding of
God’s kingdom, the union of all living creatures by the bonds of love.
The conception of its attainment is incompatible with the conception of
the movement of life. What kind of life could subsist if all living
creatures were joined together by the bonds of love? None. Our
conception of life is inseparably bound up with the conception of a
continual striving after an unattainable ideal.
But even if we suppose the Christian ideal of perfect chastity
realized, what then? We should merely find ourselves face to face on
the one hand with the familiar teaching of religion, one of whose
dogmas is that the world will have an end; and on the other of
so-called science, which informs us that the sun is gradually losing
its heat, the result of which will in time be the extinction of the
human race.
Now there is not and cannot be such an institution as Christian
marriage, just as there cannot be such a thing as a Christian liturgy
(Matt. vi. 5-12; John iv. 21), nor Christian teachers, nor church
fathers (Matt. xxiii. 8-10), nor Christian armies, Christian law
courts, nor Christian States. This is what was always taught and
believed by true Christians of the first and following centuries. A
Christian’s ideal is not marriage, but love for God and for his
neighbor. Consequently in the eyes of a Christian relations in marriage
not only do not constitute a lawful, right, and happy state, as our
society and our churches maintain, but, on the contrary, are always a
fall.
Such a thing as Christian marriage never was and never could be. Christ
did not marry, nor did he establish marriage; neither did his disciples
marry. But if Christian marriage cannot exist, there is such a thing as
a Christian view of marriage. And this is how it may be formulated: A
Christian (and by this term I understand not those who call themselves
Christians merely because they were baptized and still receive the
sacrament once a year, but those whose lives are shaped and regulated
by the teachings of Christ), I say, cannot view the marriage relation
otherwise than as a deviation from the doctrine of Christ,—as a sin.
This is clearly laid down in Matt. v. 28, and the ceremony called
Christian marriage does not alter its character one jot. A Christian
will never, therefore, desire marriage, but will always avoid it.
If the light of truth dawns upon a Christian when he is already
married, or if, being a Christian, from weakness he enters into marital
relations with the ceremonies of the church, or without them, he has no
other alternative than to abide with his wife (and the wife with her
husband, if it is she who is a Christian) and to aspire together with
her to free themselves of their sin. This is the Christian view of
marriage; and there cannot be any other for a man who honestly
endeavors to shape his life in accordance with the teachings of Christ.
To very many persons the thoughts I have uttered here and in “The
Kreutzer Sonata” will seem strange, vague, even contradictory. They
certainly do contradict, not each other, but the whole tenor of our
lives, and involuntarily a doubt arises, “on which side is truth,—on
the side of the thoughts which seem true and well-founded, or on the
side of the lives of others and myself?” I, too, was weighed down by
that same doubt when writing “The Kreutzer Sonata.” I had not the
faintest presentiment that the train of thought I had started would
lead me whither it did. I was terrified by my own conclusion, and I was
at first disposed to reject it, but it was impossible not to hearken to
the voice of my reason and my conscience. And so, strange though they
may appear to many, opposed as they undoubtedly are to the trend and
tenor of our lives, and incompatible though they may prove with what I
have heretofore thought and uttered, I have no choice but to accept
them. “But man is weak,” people will object. “His task should be
regulated by his strength.”
This is tantamount to saying, “My hand is weak. I cannot draw a
straight line,—that is, a line which will be the shortest line between