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