Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/56

 attraction as its root) is extolled as though it were the highest and most poetic aim of human endeavour (as all our art and poetry bears witness), young people devote the best part of their lives—the men to spying out, pursuing, and obtaining (whether in marriage or free union), those best suited to attract them; the women and girls to enticing and entrapping men into free unions or marriages.

In this way the best powers of many people run to waste in activity not merely unproductive but injurious. Most of our insensate luxury results from this, as well as most of the idleness of the men and the shamelessness of the women who are not above following fashions admittedly borrowed from depraved women, and exposing parts of the body that excite sensuality.

And this, I think, is wrong.

It is wrong because, however it may be idealized, to obtain connection—in marriage or without marriage—with the object of one's love is an aim as unworthy of a man as is that of securing tasty and abundant food, which seems to many people the highest good.

The conclusion to be drawn from this is that we must cease to consider sex-love as something specially elevated, and must understand that no aim that we count worthy of a man—whether it be the service of humanity, fatherland, science or art (not to speak of the service of God)—can be attained by means of connection with the object of one's love (either with or without a marriage rite). On the contrary, falling in love and connection (however men may seek to prove the contrary in prose and verse) never facilitate, but always impede, the attainment of any aim worthy of man.

That is the fifth point.

That is the substance of what I wanted to say, and thought I had said, by my story; and it seemed to me that one might discuss the question of how to remedy the evils indicated, but that it was impossible not to agree with the considerations advanced. It seemed impossible not to agree: first, because these considerations quite coincide with what we know of the progress of