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A BIOGRAPHY
249
I admit that I love this strange play, whieh, with
mathematical exactness, depicts the almighty power of love, and proves
that love, and love alone, is everything in life, and alone decides
growth or decay. In love alone lie development and strength,
and alone through love can duty be fulfilled.
No one could have better formulated than in the
above words the essence of the dramas which were the
" confession " of Sonya’s life. It only grieves me that
they were written too låte for her to feel the joy of
being so fully understood.
With her characteristic wish to explain scientifically
all the phenomena of life, Sönya had also invented a
whole theory to account for the idea of this double
drama. She wrote the outline of an unfinished
prologue, which, even now, and in spite of its
fragmentary form, will be read with interest, as is everything
which fell from her pen. She sent it to me
accompanied by the following lines:
Dear Carlotta: I cannot help it. I cannot make it any
better. But if you can link my stray thoughts together, it is
well. If you cannot, we must let the book appear without a
prologue. If any one attacks us we can explain later.
Your S6uya.
The prologue ran thus:
Every one, perhaps, has at one time or another given his
imagination play, and pictured how different his life would have
been had he acted differently at some decisive moment. In
every-day life one often realizes that he is the slave of outward
circumstance. The even tenor of the days binds one with a
thousand invisible links. Every one fills a given sphere in life.
Every one has certain definite duties whieh are fulfilled almost
automatically, without straining the energies to the utmost. It
matters little whether to-morrow one is a little better or a little
worse, a little stronger or a little weaker, or a little more or less
gifted, than to-day. One cannot divert the stream of his life
from the channel it has taken, without, at the same time,
presupposing the possession of qualities so unlike those which he
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