Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/504

 relations, the alertness, so that there may be no conflicts. That is a terrible habit. With no one are there such close and many-sided relations as with a husband or wife, and for this reason we always forget to think of them, to be conscious of them, just as we cease being conscious of our body. And that is where the trouble is.

For a conjugal pair to be happy, as they write about happiness in novels, and as every human heart wishes for it, it is necessary that there should be concord. But in order that there should be concord, it is necessary for husband and wife to look in the same way upon the world and the meaning of life (this is particularly necessary in relation to children). But that husband and wife should understand life alike, should stand on the same level of comprehension, will happen as rarely as that one leaf of a tree should precisely cover another. And since this does not exist, the only possibility of concord, and so of happiness, consists in this, that one of the two should submit his or her comprehension to the other.

Here lies the chief difficulty: the spouse with the superior comprehension cannot, in spite of his or her best desire, surrender it to the inferior comprehension. It is possible for the attainment of concord not to sleep, not to eat, to make beds for flowers, etc., but it is impossible to do that which you consider wrong, sinful, not only irrational, but directly opposed to reason, and bad. In spite of all the consciousness that the happiness of both depends on concord, that this concord is necessary for happiness and for the correct education of the children, a wife cannot contribute to her husband's intoxication or gambling, and the husband cannot contribute to his wife's balls and to teaching his children dancing and fencing and religion according to Filarét's Catechism.

For the observance of concord and not only of happiness, but also of the true good, which coincides with love