Chapter 24

LOVE

SOPHIA IVANOVNA, as I afterwards came to know her, was one of
those rare, young-old women who are born for family life, but to
whom that happiness has been denied by fate. Consequently all
that store of their love which should have been
poured out upon a husband and children becomes pent up in their
hearts, until they suddenly decide to let it overflow upon a few
chosen individuals. Yet so inexhaustible is that store of old
maids' love that, despite the number of individuals so selected,
there still remains an abundant surplus of affection which they
lavish upon all by whom they are surrounded--upon all, good or
bad, whom they may chance to meet in their daily life.

Of love there are three kinds--love of beauty, the love which
denies itself, and practical love.

Of the desire of a young man for a young woman, as well as of the
reverse instance, I am not now speaking, for of such tendresses I
am wary, seeing that I have been too unhappy in my life to have
been able ever to see in such affection a single spark of truth,
but rather a lying pretence in which sensuality, connubial
relations, money, and the wish to bind hands or to unloose them
have rendered feeling such a complex affair as to defy analysis.
Rather am I speaking of that love for a human being which,
according to the spiritual strength of its possessor,
concentrates itself either upon a single individual, upon a few,
or upon many--of love for a mother, a father, a brother, little
children, a friend, a compatriot--of love, in short, for one's
neighbour.

Love of beauty consists in a love of the sense of beauty and of
its expression. People who thus love conceive the object of their
affection to be desirable only in so far as it arouses in them
that pleasurable sensation of which the consciousness and the
expression soothes the senses. They change the object of their
love frequently, since their principal aim consists in ensuring
that the voluptuous feeling of their adoration shall be
constantly titillated. To preserve in themselves this sensuous
condition, they talk unceasingly, and in the most elegant terms,
on the subject of the love which they feel, not only for its
immediate object, but also for objects upon which it does not
touch at all. This country of ours contains many such
individuals--individuals of that well-known class who,
cultivating "the beautiful," not only discourse of their cult to
all and sundry, but speak of it pre-eminently in FRENCH. It may
seem a strange and ridiculous thing to say, but I am convinced
that among us we have had in the past, and still have, a large
section of society--notably women--whose love for their friends,
husbands, or children would expire to-morrow if they were
debarred from dilating upon it in the tongue of France!

Love of the second kind--renunciatory love--consists in a
yearning to undergo self-sacrifice for the object beloved,
regardless of any consideration whether such self-sacrifice will
benefit or injure the object in question. "There is no evil which
I would not endure to show both the world and him or her whom I
adore my devotion." There we have the formula of this kind of
love. People who thus love never look for reciprocity of
affection, since it is a finer thing to sacrifice yourself for
one who does not comprehend you. Also, they are always painfully
eager to exaggerate the merits of their sacrifice; usually
constant in their love, for the reason that they would find it
hard to forego the kudos of the deprivations which they endure
for the object beloved; always ready to die, to prove to him or
to her the entirety of their devotion; but sparing of such small
daily proofs of their love as call for no special effort of self-
immolation. They do not much care whether you eat well, sleep
well, keep your spirits up, or enjoy good health, nor do they
ever do anything to obtain for you those blessings if they have
it in their power; but, should you be confronting a bullet, or
have fallen into the water, or stand in danger of being burnt, or
have had your heart broken in a love affair--well, for all these
things they are prepared if the occasion should arise. Moreover,
people addicted to love of such a self-sacrificing order are
invariably proud of their love, exacting, jealous, distrustful,
and--strange to tell--anxious that the object of their adoration
should incur perils (so that they may save it from calamity, and
console it thereafter) and even be vicious (so that they may
purge it of its vice).

Suppose, now, that you are living in the country with a wife who
loves you in this self-sacrificing manner. You may be healthy and
contented, and have occupations which interest you, while, on the
other hand, your wife may be too weak to superintend the
household work (which, in consequence, will be left to the
servants), or to look after the children (who, in consequence,
will be left to the nurses), or to put her heart into any work
whatsoever: and all because she loves nobody and nothing but
yourself. She may be patently ill, yet she will say not a word to
you about it, for fear of distressing you. She may be patently
ennuyee, yet for your sake she will be prepared to be so for the
rest of her life. She may be patently depressed because you stick
so persistently to your occupations (whether sport, books,
farming, state service, or anything else) and see clearly that
they are doing you harm; yet, for all that, she will keep
silence, and suffer it to be so. Yet, should you but fall sick--
and, despite her own ailments and your prayers that she will not
distress herself in vain, your loving wife will remain sitting
inseparably by your bedside. Every moment you will feel her
sympathetic gaze resting upon you and, as it were, saying:
"There! I told you so, but it is all one to me, and I shall not
leave you." In the morning you maybe a little better, and move
into another room. The room, however, will be insufficiently
warmed or set in order; the soup which alone you feel you could
eat will not have been cooked; nor will any medicine have been
sent for. Yet, though worn out with night watching, your loving
wife will continue to regard you with an expression of sympathy,
to walk about on tiptoe, and to whisper unaccustomed and obscure
orders to the servants. You may wish to be read to--and your
loving wife will tell you with a sigh that she feels sure you
will be unable to hear her reading, and only grow angry at her
awkwardness in doing it; wherefore you had better not be read to
at all. You may wish to walk about the room--and she will tell you
that it would be far better for you not to do so. You may wish to
talk with some friends who have called--and she will tell you that
talking is not good for you. At nightfall the fever may come upon
you again, and you may wish to be left alone whereupon your
loving wife, though wasted, pale, and full of yawns, will go on
sitting in a chair opposite you, as dusk falls, until her very
slightest movement, her very slightest sound, rouses you to
feelings of anger and impatience. You may have a servant who has
lived with you for twenty years, and to whom you are attached,
and who would tend you well and to your satisfaction during the
night, for the reason that he has been asleep all day and is,
moreover, paid a salary for his services; yet your wife will not
suffer him to wait upon you. No; everything she must do herself
with her weak, unaccustomed fingers (of which you follow the
movements with suppressed irritation as those pale members do
their best to uncork a medicine bottle, to snuff a candle, to
pour out physic, or to touch you in a squeamish sort of way). If
you are an impatient, hasty sort of man, and beg of her to leave
the room, you will hear by the vexed, distressed sounds which
come from her that she is humbly sobbing and weeping behind the
door, and whispering foolishness of some kind to the servant.
Finally if you do not die, your loving wife--who has not slept
during the whole three weeks of your illness (a fact of which she
will constantly remind you)--will fall ill in her turn, waste
away, suffer much, and become even more incapable of any useful
pursuit than she was before; while by the time that you have
regained your normal state of health she will express to you her
self-sacrificing affection only by shedding around you
a kind of benignant dullness which involuntarily communicates
itself both to yourself and to every one else in your vicinity.

The third kind of love--practical love--consists of a yearning to
satisfy every need, every desire, every caprice, nay, every vice,
of the being beloved. People who love thus always love their life
long, since, the more they love, the more they get to know the
object beloved, and the easier they find the task of loving it--
that is to say, of satisfying its desires. Their love seldom
finds expression in words, but if it does so, it expresses itself
neither with assurance nor beauty, but rather in a shamefaced,
awkward manner, since people of this kind invariably have
misgivings that they are loving unworthily. People of this kind
love even the faults of their adored one, for the reason that
those faults afford them the power of constantly satisfying new
desires. They look for their affection to be returned, and even
deceive themselves into believing that it is returned, and are
happy accordingly: yet in the reverse case they will still
continue to desire happiness for their beloved one, and try by
every means in their power--whether moral or material, great or
small--to provide it.

Such practical love it was--love for her nephew, for her niece,
for her sister, for Lubov Sergievna, and even for myself, because
I loved Dimitri--that shone in the eyes, as well as in the every
word and movement, of Sophia Ivanovna.

Only long afterwards did I learn to value her at her true worth.
Yet even now the question occurred to me: "What has made Dimitri--
who throughout has tried to understand love differently to other
young fellows, and has always had before his eyes the gentle,
loving Sophia Ivanovna--suddenly fall so deeply in love with the
incomprehensible Lubov Sergievna, and declare that in his aunt he
can only find good QUALITIES? Verily it is a true saying that 'a
prophet hath no honour in his own country.' One of two things:
either every man has in him more of bad than of good, or every
man is more receptive to bad than to good. Lubov Sergievna he has
not known for long, whereas his aunt's love he has known since
the day of his birth."