Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/498

 egoism it makes me sad to think that I have passed all my life in a beastly way and that I no longer can mend my life, particularly sad, because people will say: "It is all very well for you, a decaying old man, to say this, but you did not live accordingly. When we get old, we shall be speaking in the same manner." This is where the chief punishment for sins lies: you feel that you are an unworthy instrument for the transmission of God's will, an instrument that is spoiled and soiled. But there is the consolation that others will be such. May God help you and the others.

I have been thinking, among other things, for the epilogue: Marriage was formerly the acquisition of a wife for the purpose of possessing her. Again, the relation to woman was established by war, by captivity. Man arranged for himself the possibility of his lust, without thinking of woman,—the harem. Monogamy changed the number of wives, but not the relation to her. The true relation is quite the opposite. A man can always have a woman and can always contain himself; but a woman (especially one who has known a man) can with much greater difficulty contain herself when she may have intercourse, which happens with her once in two years. And so, if there is any one who can ask for gratification, it is by no means the man, but the woman. The woman may demand this, because for her it is not a Genuss, as for man, but, on the contrary, because she gives herself up with pain, and expects pain,—pain, and suffering, and cares. It seems that marriage ought to be formulated like this: Man and woman come together, loving one another spiritually, and both promise one another that if they shall have children, they will have them of one another. But the demand for sexual intercourse ought to come from her, and not from him.