SOPHIA IVANOVNA, as I afterwards came to know her, was one of those
rare, young-old women who are born for family life, but to whom that
happiness has been denied by fate. Consequently all that store of their
love which should have been poured out upon a husband and children
becomes pent up in their hearts, until they suddenly decide to let it
overflow upon a few chosen individuals. Yet so inexhaustible is that
store of old maids’ love that, despite the number of individuals so
selected, there still remains an abundant surplus of affection which
they lavish upon all by whom they are surrounded--upon all, good or bad,
whom they may chance to meet in their daily life.
Of love there are three kinds--love of beauty, the love which denies
itself, and practical love.
Of the desire of a young man for a young woman, as well as of the
reverse instance, I am not now speaking, for of such tendresses I am
wary, seeing that I have been too unhappy in my life to have been able
ever to see in such affection a single spark of truth, but rather a
lying pretence in which sensuality, connubial relations, money, and
the wish to bind hands or to unloose them have rendered feeling such a
complex affair as to defy analysis. Rather am I speaking of that love
for a human being which, according to the spiritual strength of its
possessor, concentrates itself either upon a single individual, upon
a few, or upon many--of love for a mother, a father, a brother,
little children, a friend, a compatriot--of love, in short, for one’s
neighbour.
Love of beauty consists in a love of the sense of beauty and of its
expression. People who thus love conceive the object of their affection
to be desirable only in so far as it arouses in them that pleasurable
sensation of which the consciousness and the expression soothes the
senses. They change the object of their love frequently, since their
principal aim consists in ensuring that the voluptuous feeling of their
adoration shall be constantly titillated. To preserve in themselves
this sensuous condition, they talk unceasingly, and in the most elegant
terms, on the subject of the love which they feel, not only for its
immediate object, but also for objects upon which it does not touch at
all. This country of ours contains many such individuals--individuals
of that well-known class who, cultivating “the beautiful,” not only
discourse of their cult to all and sundry, but speak of it pre-eminently
in FRENCH. It may seem a strange and ridiculous thing to say, but I am
convinced that among us we have had in the past, and still have, a
large section of society--notably women--whose love for their friends,
husbands, or children would expire to-morrow if they were debarred from
dilating upon it in the tongue of France!
Love of the second kind--renunciatory love--consists in a yearning
to undergo self-sacrifice for the object beloved, regardless of any
consideration whether such self-sacrifice will benefit or injure the
object in question. “There is no evil which I would not endure to show
both the world and him or her whom I adore my devotion.” There we have
the formula of this kind of love. People who thus love never look
for reciprocity of affection, since it is a finer thing to sacrifice
yourself for one who does not comprehend you. Also, they are always
painfully eager to exaggerate the merits of their sacrifice; usually
constant in their love, for the reason that they would find it hard to
forego the kudos of the deprivations which they endure for the object
beloved; always ready to die, to prove to him or to her the entirety of
their devotion; but sparing of such small daily proofs of their love
as call for no special effort of self-immolation. They do not much care
whether you eat well, sleep well, keep your spirits up, or enjoy good
health, nor do they ever do anything to obtain for you those blessings
if they have it in their power; but, should you be confronting a bullet,
or have fallen into the water, or stand in danger of being burnt, or
have had your heart broken in a love affair--well, for all these
things they are prepared if the occasion should arise. Moreover, people
addicted to love of such a self-sacrificing order are invariably
proud of their love, exacting, jealous, distrustful, and--strange to
tell--anxious that the object of their adoration should incur perils (so
that they may save it from calamity, and console it thereafter) and even
be vicious (so that they may purge it of its vice).
Suppose, now, that you are living in the country with a wife who loves
you in this self-sacrificing manner. You may be healthy and contented,
and have occupations which interest you, while, on the other hand,
your wife may be too weak to superintend the household work (which,
in consequence, will be left to the servants), or to look after the
children (who, in consequence, will be left to the nurses), or to put
her heart into any work whatsoever: and all because she loves nobody and
nothing but yourself. She may be patently ill, yet she will say not a
word to you about it, for fear of distressing you. She may be patently
ennuyee, yet for your sake she will be prepared to be so for the rest
of her life. She may be patently depressed because you stick so
persistently to your occupations (whether sport, books, farming, state
service, or anything else) and see clearly that they are doing you harm;
yet, for all that, she will keep silence, and suffer it to be so. Yet,
should you but fall sick--and, despite her own ailments and your prayers
that she will not distress herself in vain, your loving wife will remain
sitting inseparably by your bedside. Every moment you will feel her
sympathetic gaze resting upon you and, as it were, saying: “There! I
told you so, but it is all one to me, and I shall not leave you.” In the
morning you maybe a little better, and move into another room. The room,
however, will be insufficiently warmed or set in order; the soup which
alone you feel you could eat will not have been cooked; nor will any
medicine have been sent for. Yet, though worn out with night watching,
your loving wife will continue to regard you with an expression of
sympathy, to walk about on tiptoe, and to whisper unaccustomed and
obscure orders to the servants. You may wish to be read to--and your
loving wife will tell you with a sigh that she feels sure you will be
unable to hear her reading, and only grow angry at her awkwardness in
doing it; wherefore you had better not be read to at all. You may wish
to walk about the room--and she will tell you that it would be far
better for you not to do so. You may wish to talk with some friends who
have called--and she will tell you that talking is not good for you. At
nightfall the fever may come upon you again, and you may wish to be
left alone whereupon your loving wife, though wasted, pale, and full of
yawns, will go on sitting in a chair opposite you, as dusk falls, until
her very slightest movement, her very slightest sound, rouses you to
feelings of anger and impatience. You may have a servant who has lived
with you for twenty years, and to whom you are attached, and who would
tend you well and to your satisfaction during the night, for the reason
that he has been asleep all day and is, moreover, paid a salary for
his services; yet your wife will not suffer him to wait upon you. No;
everything she must do herself with her weak, unaccustomed fingers (of
which you follow the movements with suppressed irritation as those pale
members do their best to uncork a medicine bottle, to snuff a candle, to
pour out physic, or to touch you in a squeamish sort of way). If you are
an impatient, hasty sort of man, and beg of her to leave the room, you
will hear by the vexed, distressed sounds which come from her that
she is humbly sobbing and weeping behind the door, and whispering
foolishness of some kind to the servant. Finally if you do not die,
your loving wife--who has not slept during the whole three weeks of your
illness (a fact of which she will constantly remind you)--will fall ill
in her turn, waste away, suffer much, and become even more incapable of
any useful pursuit than she was before; while by the time that you
have regained your normal state of health she will express to you
her self-sacrificing affection only by shedding around you a kind of
benignant dullness which involuntarily communicates itself both to
yourself and to every one else in your vicinity.
The third kind of love--practical love--consists of a yearning to
satisfy every need, every desire, every caprice, nay, every vice, of the
being beloved. People who love thus always love their life long, since,
the more they love, the more they get to know the object beloved,
and the easier they find the task of loving it--that is to say, of
satisfying its desires. Their love seldom finds expression in words, but
if it does so, it expresses itself neither with assurance nor beauty,
but rather in a shamefaced, awkward manner, since people of this kind
invariably have misgivings that they are loving unworthily. People of
this kind love even the faults of their adored one, for the reason that
those faults afford them the power of constantly satisfying new
desires. They look for their affection to be returned, and even
deceive themselves into believing that it is returned, and are happy
accordingly: yet in the reverse case they will still continue to
desire happiness for their beloved one, and try by every means in their
power--whether moral or material, great or small--to provide it.
Such practical love it was--love for her nephew, for her niece, for
her sister, for Lubov Sergievna, and even for myself, because I loved
Dimitri--that shone in the eyes, as well as in the every word and
movement, of Sophia Ivanovna.
Only long afterwards did I learn to value her at her true worth. Yet
even now the question occurred to me: “What has made Dimitri--who
throughout has tried to understand love differently to other young
fellows, and has always had before his eyes the gentle, loving Sophia
Ivanovna--suddenly fall so deeply in love with the incomprehensible
Lubov Sergievna, and declare that in his aunt he can only find good
QUALITIES? Verily it is a true saying that ‘a prophet hath no honour in
his own country.’ One of two things: either every man has in him more
of bad than of good, or every man is more receptive to bad than to good.
Lubov Sergievna he has not known for long, whereas his aunt’s love he
has known since the day of his birth.”