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ROMANTIC LOVE
Count Tolstoi, whose works are deserving of attention for their insight into human nature, thus discourses on the evils of Romantic love.
“I wish,” said Count Tolstoi to a correspondent “to write a novel, a romance, exposing the conventional illusion of romantic love. I have already written it, but it must be turned upside down and rewritten. It is too much of a treatise as it stands, and there is not enough of action in it.
My object is to fill the reader with horror at the result of taking romantic love au sérieux. The end to which the whole story will lead up will be the murder of a wife by her husband. It will exhibit the depravation of married life by the substitution of romantic love, a fever born of carnal passion for Christian love, which is born of identity of sentiment, similarity of ideal, of friendship of the soul. Upon that love, Christian love, the love of brother and sister, if the carnal love can be grafted it is well, but the former, not the latter, is the first condition of happy married life.
Herein the peasants teach us a lesson. They regard what we regard as romantic love as a disease, temporary and painful, and dangerous. With them no marriage is made under its influence. Anything is better than that. The Herrstatten, who marry by the drawing of lots, are wiser than we. Our system is the worst possible, and the whole of our building ceremonial, and the honeymoon, the fasting, and the incitement to carnality are directly calculated to result in the depravation of matrimony.
Not in one case out of a hundred does romantic love result in a lifelong happy union. The young people whose lives lie in different orbits are drawn together by this evanescent passion. They marry. For a month they are happy—perhaps even for a year, or two years. Then they hate each other for the rest of their lives, spending their time in paying homage to the respectabilities by concealing the truth from their neighbours. It must be so.
If Anna Karenina had married Leven she must have abandoned him likewise. Romantic love is like opium or hashish. But it passes. It is not overpowering and delightful. But it passes. It is not human nature to wish to renew the experience. For this novelty is indispensable. So the wife betrays her husband, and the husband, is false to his wife, and the world becomes one wide brothel.
I wish to open the eyes of all to the real nature and the tragic consequences of this substitution of romantic for Christian love. I see it clearly; oh! so clearly; and when you which no one else seems to see a thing which no one else forms and you see a thing which no one else forms and you feel you must gather all your forces, and devote yourself to setting forth the truth as you see it. This depravation of marriage is all because Christianity has been a word and not a thing. It will however, be a reality again soon.”
[Source: Civil & Military Gazette (Lahore) – Friday 21 December 1888]