Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/57

 transgressed. But the injury to man by incontinence (and intercourse outside the disengaged period is incontinence) may perhaps not be so great when moderation is observed (how disgusting even to pronounce this word in such a connection!), if a man knows but one woman; but what is moderation for the husband is terrible incontinence for the wife when with child or nursing her infant. I think that both backwardness of women and their hysterical temperament are chiefly attributable to this. It is from this that women should be emancipated, to become one with man, and the servant, not of the devil, but of God. It is a distant ideal, but a great one. And why should not man strive towards it? I picture to myself that marriage should be of this nature. A man and a woman unite under the irresistible pressure of being in love, a child is begotten, and the couple, avoiding all that may disturb the growth and feeding of the child, avoiding all fleshy temptations, and not, as at present, eliciting them, live as brother and sister. (At present it happens that the husband, previously depraved, transmits his habits to his wife, infects her with the same sensuality, and puts upon her the unbearable burden of being at one and the same time a mistress, and exhausted mother, and a sickly, irritable, hysterical individual. And the husband loves her as his mistress, ignores her as a mother, and hates her for the irritability and hysteria which he himself has produced and produces. It seems to me that this is the key to all the sufferings hidden in the majority of families.) And so I picture husband and wife living as brother and sister: She in peace bears her child, uninterruptedly feeds it, training it morally at the same time; and only in disengaged periods do they again allow themselves to be in love, which lasts weeks, and then again peace.