University of Virginia Library

LESSON OF "THE KREUTZER
SONATA."

—

I have received, and still continue to receive,
numbers of letters from persons who are per-
fect strangers to me, asking me to state in plain
and simple language my own views on the sub-
ject handled in the story entitled "The Kreutzer
Sonata." With this request I shall now en-
deavor to comply.

My views on the question may be succinctly
stated as follows: Without entering into details,
it will be generally admitted that I am accurate
in saying that many people condone in young
men a course of conduct with regard to the
other sex which is incompatible with strict
morality, and that this dissoluteness is par-
doned generally. Both parents and the govern-
ment, in consequence of this view, may be said
to wink at profligacy, and even in the last re-

source to encourage its practice. I am of opin-
ion that this is not right.

It is not possible that the health of one class
should necessitate the ruin of another, and, in
consequence, it is our first duty to turn a deaf
ear to such an essential immoral doctrine, no
matter how strongly society may have estab-
lished or law protected it. Moreover, it needs
to be fully recognized that men are rightly to
be held responsible for the consequences of their
own acts, and that these are no longer to be
visited on the woman alone. It follows from
this that it is the duty of men who do not wish
to lead a life of infamy to practice such con-
tinence in respect to all woman as they would
were the female society in which they move
made up exclusively of their own mothers and
sisters.

A more rational mode of life should be adopt-
ed which would include abstinence from all al-
coholic drinks, from excess in eating and from
flesh meat, on the one hand, and recourse to
physical labor on the other. I am not speaking
of gymnastics, or of any of those occupations
which may be fitly described as playing at work;

I mean the genuine toil that fatigues. No one
need go far in search of proofs that this kind
of abstemious living is not merely possible, but
far less hurtful to health than excess. Hun-
dreds of instances are known to every one. This
is my first contention.

In the second place, I think that of late years,
through various reasons which I need not enter,
but among which the above-mentioned laxity of
opinion in society and the frequent idealization
of the subject in current literature and painting
may be mentioned, conjugal infidelity has be-
come more common and is considered less rep-
rehensible. I am of opinion that this is not
right. The origin of the evil is twofold. It is
due, in the first place, to a natural instinct, and,
in the second, to the elevation of this instinct to
a place to which it does not rightly belong. This
being so, the evil can only be remedied by ef-
fecting a change in the views now in vogue
about "falling in love" and all that this term
implies, by educating men and women at home
through family influence and example, and
abroad by means of healthy public opinion, to
practice that abstinence which morality and

Christianity alike enjoin. This is my second
contention.

In the third place I am of opinion that an-
other consequence of the false light in which
"falling in love," and what it leads to, are
viewed in our society, is that the birth of chil-
dren has lost its pristine significance, and that
modern marriages are conceived less and less
from the point of view of the family. I am of
opinion that this is not right. This is my third
contention.

In the fourth place, I am of opinion that the
children (who in our society are considered an
obstacle to enjoyment—an unlucky accident, as
it were) are educated not with a view to the
problem which they will be one day called on to
face and to solve, but solely with an eye to the
pleasure which they may be made to yield to
their parents. The consequence is, that the chil-
dren of human beings are brought up for all the
world like the young of animals, the chief care
of their parents being not to train them to such
work as is worthy of men and women, but to
increase their weight, or add a cubit to their
stature, to make them spruce, sleek, well-fed,

and comely. They rig them out in all manner
of fantastic costumes, wash them, over-feed
them, and refuse to make them work. If the
children of the lower orders differ in this last
respect from those of the well-to-do classes, the
difference is merely formal; they work from
sheer necessity, and not because their parents
recognize work as a duty. And in over-fed
children, as in over-fed animals, sensuality is
engendered unnaturally early.

Fashionable dress to-day, the course of read-
ing, plays, music, dances, luscious food, all the
elements of our modern life, in a word, from
the pictures on the little boxes of sweetmeats up
to the novel, the tale, and the poem, contribute
to fan this sensuality into a strong, consuming
flame, with the result that sexual vices and dis-
eases have come to be the normal conditions of
the period of tender youth, and often continue
into the riper age of full-blown manhood. And
I am of opinion that this is not right.

It is high time it ceased. The children of
human beings should not be brought up as if
they were animals; and we should set up as the
object and strive to maintain as the result of our

labors something better and nobler than a well-
dressed body. This is my fourth contention.

In the fifth place, I am of opinion that, owing
to the exaggerated and erroneous significance
attributed by our society to love and to the
idealized states that accompany and succeed it,
the best energies of our men and women are
drawn forth and exhausted during the most
promising period of life; those of the men in
the work of looking for, choosing, and winning
the most desirable objects of love, for which
purpose lying and fraud are held to be quite ex-
cusable; those of the women and girls in allur-
ing men and decoying them into
liaisons
or mar-
riage by the most questionable means conceiv-
able, as an instance of which the present fash-
ions in evening dress may be cited. I am of
opinion that this is not right.

The truth is, that the whole affair has been
exalted by poets and romancers to an undue
importance, and that love in its various develop-
ments is not a fitting object to consume the best
energies of men. People set it before them and
strive after it, because their view of life is as
vulgar and brutish as is that other conception

frequently met with in the lower stages of de-
velopment, which sees in luscious and abundant
food an end worthy of man's best efforts. Now,
this is not right and should not be done. And,
in order to avoid doing it, it is only needful to
realize the fact that whatever truly deserves to
be held up as a worthy object of man's striving
and working, whether it be the service of hu-
manity, of one's country, of science, of art, not
to speak of the service of God, is far above and
beyond the sphere of personal enjoyment.

Hence, it follows that not only to form a
liaison
,
but even to contract marriage, is, from a Chris-
tian point of view, not a progress, but a fall.

Love, and all the states that accompany and
follow it, however we may try in prose and
verse to prove the contrary, never do and never
can facilitate the attainment of an aim worthy
of men, but always make it more difficult. This
is my fifth contention.

How about the human race? If we admit
that celibacy is better and nobler than mar-
riage, evidently the human race will come to an
end. But, if the logical conclusion of the argu-
ment is that the human race will become ex-

tinct, the whole reasoning is wrong. To that I
reply that the argument is not mine; I did not
invent it. That it is incumbent on mankind so
to strive, and that celibacy is preferable to mar-
riage, are truths revealed by Christ 1,900 years
ago, set forth in our catechisms, and professed
by us as followers of Christ.

Chastity and celibacy, it is urged, cannot con-
stitute the ideal of humanity, because chastity
would annihilate the race which strove to realize
it, and humanity cannot set up as its ideal its
own annihilation. It may be pointed out in re-
ply that only that is a true ideal, which, being
unattainable, admits of infinite gradation in de-
grees of proximity. Such is the Christian ideal
of the founding of God's kingdom, the union of
all living creatures by the bonds of love. The
conception of its attainment is incompatible with
the conception of the movement of life. What
kind of life could subsist if all living creatures
were joined together by the bonds of love?

None. Our conception of life is inseparably
bound up with the conception of a continual
striving after an unattainable ideal.

But even if we suppose the Christian ideal of

perfect chastity realized, what then? We should
merely find ourselves face to face on the one
hand with the familiar teaching of religion, one
of whose dogmas is that the world will have an
end; and on the other of so-called science, which
informs us that the sun is gradually losing its
heat, the result of which will in time be the ex-
tinction of the human race.

Now there is not and cannot be such an insti-
tution as Christian marriage, just as there can-
not be such a thing as a Christian liturgy (Matt.
vi. 5-12; John iv. 21), nor Christian teachers,
nor church fathers (Matt. xxiii. 8-10), nor
Christian armies, Christian law courts, nor
Christian States. This is what was always
taught and believed by true Christians of the
first and following centuries. A Christian's
ideal is not marriage, but love for God and for
his neighbor. Consequently in the eyes of a
Christian relations in marriage not only do not
constitute a lawful, right, and happy state, as
our society and our churches maintain, but, on
the contrary, are always a fall.

Such a thing as Christian marriage never was
and never could be. Christ did not marry, nor

did he establish marriage; neither did his disci-
ples marry. But if Christian marriage cannot
exist, there is such a thing as a Christian view of
marriage. And this is how it may be formu-
lated: A Christian (and by this term I under-
stand not those who call themselves Christians
merely because they were baptized and still re-
ceive the sacrament once a year, but those whose
lives are shaped and regulated by the teachings
of Christ), I say, cannot view the marriage rela-
tion otherwise than as a deviation from the
doctrine of Christ,—as a sin. This is clearly
laid down in Matt. v. 28, and the ceremony
called Christian marriage does not alter its char-
acter one jot. A Christian will never, therefore,
desire marriage, but will always avoid it.

If the light of truth dawns upon a Christian
when he is already married, or if, being a Chris-
tian, from weakness he enters into marital rela-
tions with the ceremonies of the church, or
without them, he has no other alternative than
to abide with his wife (and the wife with her
husband, if it is she who is a Christian) and to
aspire together with her to free themselves of
their sin. This is the Christian view of mar-

riage; and there cannot be any other for a man
who honestly endeavors to shape his life in ac-
cordance with the teachings of Christ.

To very many persons the thoughts I have
uttered here and in "The Kreutzer Sonata"
will seem strange, vague, even contradictory.

They certainly do contradict, not each other,
but the whole tenor of our lives, and involun-
tarily a doubt arises, "on which side is truth,—
on the side of the thoughts which seem true
and well-founded, or on the side of the lives of
others and myself?" I, too, was weighed down
by that same doubt when writing "The Kreutzer
Sonata." I had not the faintest presentiment
that the train of thought I had started would
lead me whither it did. I was terrified by my
own conclusion, and I was at first disposed to
reject it, but it was impossible not to hearken
to the voice of my reason and my conscience.

And so, strange though they may appear to
many, opposed as they undoubtedly are to the
trend and tenor of our lives, and incompatible
though they may prove with what I have here-
tofore thought and uttered, I have no choice
but to accept them. "But man is weak," people

will object. "His task should be regulated by
his strength."

This is tantamount to saying, "My hand is
weak. I cannot draw a straight line,—that is, a
line which will be the shortest line between two
given points,—and so, in order to make it more
easy for myself, I, intending to draw a straight,
will choose for my model a crooked line."

The weaker my hand, the greater the need
that my model should be perfect.