Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/519

 family is evolving, and so the older form is falling to pieces. The relations of the sexes are looking for new forms, and the old form is decomposing.

It is impossible to tell what the new form will be, though many things may be noticed. Maybe a greater number of men observing chastity; there may be temporary marriages, coming to an end after the birth of children, so that the conjugal pair separates after the birth of children and remains chaste; maybe the children will be brought up by society. It is impossible to foresee the new forms. But what is unquestionable is this, that the old form is decomposing, and that the existence of the old form is possible only with the submission of wife to husband, as it has always and everywhere been, and as happens there where the family is still preserved.

Yesterday I read Without Dogma. There is a very delicate description of love of woman,—tenderly, much more delicately done than with the French, where it is sensual, or with the English, where it is Pharisaical, or with the Germans, where it is inflated; and I thought I might write a novel of chaste love, for which the transition to sensuality is impossible, which forms the best defence against sensuality. Yes, is this not the only salvation from sensuality? Yes, yes, it is. It is for this that man was created as man and woman. Only with woman can one lose his chastity, and only with her can one keep it. It is good to make a note of it

Man, like any animal, submits to the law of the struggle and to the sexual instinct for the strengthening of the species; as a rational, loving, divine being, he submits to the reverse law, not that of the struggle with his rivals and enemies, but that of meekness, endurance of insults, and of love for them, and not that of the sexual instinct, but that of chastity.