Love and Marriage

By
Ellen Key
Author of “The Century of the Child,” etc.
Translated from the Swedish by
Arthur G. Chater
With a Critical and Biographical Introduction by
Havelock Ellis
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press

Copyright, 1911
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Ninth Printing
The Knickerbocker Press. New York

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

In this treatise, the veteran Swedish reformer attacks problems the most vital to the welfare of the human race, problems which have throughout the centuries engaged the attention of leaders of thought.

The writers who have given attention to the complex subject of the relations of the sexes, of the obligations of the state in the control of these relations, and of the organisation of the family as the foundation of society, include such authors as Plato, Goethe, Richter, Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Fourier, Comte, Mrs. Browning, Mill, Ibsen, Westermarck, Charlotte Gilman, Havelock Ellis, and many others.

These problems are complex, and the difficulties presented by them most serious. No writer has ever yet presented solutions that could be accepted as finally satisfactory. Ellen Key writes with a profound antagonism to the philistinism and hypocrisy which have characterised much of the consideration given by the community to the subjects. She points out (as has, of course, been emphasised by many earlier writers) that the ignoring of an evil does not dispose of it, and that so far from preserving society from its influence, the burying of an evil merely tends to increase its corrupting and demoralising results.

Whether or not the reader be prepared to accept the conclusions and recommendations of the Swedish thinker, he must recognise that these conclusions represent the result of painstaking and scholarly thought and investigation. Daring and iconoclastic as they may be, the views of Ellen Key are presented with a calmness and philosophy of method that is absolutely free from any trace of sensationalism. The book, which is being distributed in half a dozen languages to a world’s public, must be accepted as a most important contribution to philosophic thought.

The introduction by Havelock Ellis, himself an authority on social problems, will help to make clear its purpose and character.

New York, January, 1911.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Ellen Key, whose most important book is here for the first time presented in English, is no stranger in the English-speaking world. Her Century of the Child has already found many appreciative readers in America as well as in England. Ellen Key is descended from a Scotch Highlander, Colonel M’Key (probably of the famous MacKay clan) who fought under Gustavus Adolphus, and she attaches no little significance to this ancestry. She has always interested herself in English matters, and is well acquainted with the life and literature of Great Britain; but she belongs first and foremost to Scandinavia.

She was born in 1849 in the Swedish province of Smaland, on a country estate of her father. He had played a distinguished part in the Swedish parliament as an avowed radical, but his wife was a representative of an old and noble family. Ellen, their eldest child, was marked from an early age by her love of nature and of natural things. This devotion to nature may be considered hereditary, for her great-grandfather was an ardent disciple of Rousseau, and a special admirer of Rousseau’s famous treatise on Education. He gave to his son the name of Émile, which was handed down to Ellen Key’s father. It was perhaps owing to the Rousseau tradition that the young girl was initiated from childhood in swimming, rowing, riding, and other exercises then usually reserved for boys. At the same time, she loved music and devoured books including Scott’s novels and Shakespeare’s plays. An early enthusiasm was for Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea; it may be said, indeed, that the ideal of natural, beautiful, and harmonious living for which that book stands has never left Ellen Key. She was educated for the most part at home by German, French, and Swedish teachers, but it may easily be believed that a girl of so much individuality of character, so impetuous and so independent, proved a difficult child to manage and was often misunderstood. One may divine as much from the sympathetic attitude towards children and the reverence for their healthy instincts, which are revealed in The Century of the Child. Fortunately young Ellen had a wise and discerning mother, to whom she owed much; with a fine intuition, this mother overlooked her daughter’s indifference to domestic vocations and left her free to follow her own instincts, at the same time exercising a judicious influence over her development. While still a young girl, the future author, inspired by Björnson and other Scandinavian writers, conceived the idea of devoting herself to the study of the condition of the people and wrote several novels on peasant life. A remark of her mother’s—that her daughter surely could not be meant to write novels, because the main questions for her were “the questions of her own soul”—opened her eyes to the truth that fiction could not be her vocation. But she was very far from knowing what her life’s work was to be, and her dreams were of love and motherhood, not of a career.

With Björnson she was throughout in friendly relationship. He had recognised her fine abilities before she even began to write, and she on her side was full of admiration for his genius, strength, and goodness. The other world-famous writer of Scandinavia Ellen Key learned to know through his work at the age of eighteen, when her mother presented to her Love’s Comedy, Brand, and Peer Gynt; this also was an influential event in her life. Among writers to whom she was later attracted were Elizabeth B. Browning, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and John Ruskin.

At the age of twenty-three, Ellen Key began those constant excursions to all the great centres of Europe, which may be said never since to have ceased, at first in the company of her father, whose secretary, confidant, and almost co-worker she had become, and she was thus gradually led to writing for journals. A love of art seems to have been a primary inspiration of these early journeys, for at this time Ellen Key was fascinated by the art of painting as she has always been by the greater art of living, and her wide knowledge of pictures has often happily illuminated her later writings. After 1880, however, when her father, as the result of an agricultural crisis, lost his property, she was compelled, at the age of thirty, to choose a career and for a time became a teacher in a girls’ school. She had always been attracted to teaching and many years earlier, at the instigation of Björnson, had studied the school system of Denmark. At a later period she gave courses of lectures in literature, history, and æsthetics. For twenty years she occupied the Chair of History of Civilisation in Sweden at the Popular University of Stockholm.

The early years of her career as a teacher seem to have been a period in Ellen Key’s life of much struggle, hardship, and mental depression due to personal sorrows. Amongst these were the deaths in rapid succession of several distinguished women with whom she was closely associated, Sophie Kowalevsky, Anna Charlotte Leffler, and (by suicide) Ernst Ahlgren. She had not yet reached full development nor found her true place in the world. Although her abilities, when she was still a girl of twenty, had been discerned by a distinguished Swedish woman’s rights advocate, Sophie Adlersparre, who encouraged her to write for her journal, she has always been shy and diffident, with none of the self-confident qualities, which an outsider might be tempted to attribute to her, of an imposing Corinne. She published no book till she had reached middle-age—most of her best books belong to the present century—and though she had so far overcome her timidity as to discuss literary and æsthetic questions before a public audience, she had yet scarcely touched openly on those dangerous and difficult questions which arouse fierce antagonisms. It required some assault on her most cherished convictions to arouse her latent courage. This occurred when an old Swedish law against heresy was revived in order to send to prison some young men who had freely argued the consequences, as they conceived them, of the Darwinian doctrine in religion and sexual morals. There is nothing so sacred to Ellen Key as the right to personal opinion and personal development; the sight of any injustice or oppression has always moved her profoundly, and on this occasion she sprang forward into the fray like a lioness in defence of her cubs. She is, in the opinion of Georg Brandes, “a born orator,” and she publicly brought her eloquence to the service of the cause she had at heart. Her discussion of the question was marked by moderation, skill, and learning, but her attitude on this occasion served to define publicly her real position. Thenceforward the conventionally respectable elements of Swedish society felt justified, according to the usual rule, in dealing out reckless and random abuse to the daring pioneer. She, on her side, retained her serenity, remaining a true woman, with much of the mother in her and something of the child, but before long her literary activities developed along her own native lines, and in full maturity she frankly approached the essential questions of life and the soul. A considerable series of volumes began rapidly to appear, often rather informal in method and personal in style, but freely following the author’s thought and feeling, full, not only of ardent enthusiasm but of fine intuition and mellow wisdom. In 1903 was begun the publication of her most extensive work, Lifslinjer (Lines of Life), of which work the first two volumes constitute the book here presented to the English reader. A few years later appeared The Century of the Child and in 1909 The Woman’s Movement, by many regarded as the best statement which has been made of that movement in its widest bearings. Ellen Key has also published a long series of essays on literary personalities—C. J. L. Almquist, the Brownings, Anna Charlotte Leffler, Ernst Ahlgren, etc.—who have appealed to her as illustrating some aspect of her own ideals. The latest of these is a lengthy study of Rahel Varnhagen.[1]

Ellen Key is a Scandinavian and may perhaps even be said to be a typical figure of the country whose foremost woman she is. Moreover, she loves her own land and is resolved to spend the rest of her life in a house she proposes to build in a beautiful part of the country, Alvastra, near Lake Wetter, close to the ruins of the first Swedish monastery, a spot already sacred through its associations with the great Swedish saint, Brigitta. But the prophet is a prophet everywhere except in his own country. It is easy to find estimable Swedes who are far from anxious to claim the honour which Ellen Key reflects on their land. It is in Germany that her fame has been made. To-day the Germans, and not least the German women, awaking from a long period of quiescence, are inaugurating a new phase of the woman movement. The first phase of that movement dates from the eighteenth century, and its ideals were chiefly moulded by a succession of distinguished English women who claimed for their sex the same human rights as for men: the same right to be educated, the same right to adopt the occupation they were fitted for, the same political rights. In the course of a century these claims, although not yet completely realised, have gradually been more and more generally conceded as reasonable.

At the same time, however, it began to be seen that these demands, important as they are, by no means cover the whole ground, while, taken separately, they were liable to lead in a false direction; they tended to masculinise women and they ignored the claims of the race. In their ardour for emancipation, women sometimes seemed anxious to be emancipated from their sex. Thus it was not enough to claim woman’s place as a human being—especially in an age when man was regarded as the human being par excellence—but it also became necessary to claim woman’s place in the world as a woman. That was not, as it might at first seem, a narrower but a wider claim. For on the merely human basis women were reduced to the level of competitive struggle with men, were allowed to bring no contribution of their own to the solution of common problems, and, worst of all, their supreme position in the world as mothers of the race was altogether ignored. So that the assertion of the essential rights of women as women meant at the same time the assertion of the rights of society and the race to the best that women have to give. It was certainly by no accident that the Germans, who once before led the evolution of Europe by their triumphant assertion of the fundamental human impulses and have since been pioneers in social organisation, should take the leading part in the inauguration of this new phase of the woman movement.

The publication of Ellen Key’s books corresponded in date with the recent tendency of the Germans to bring to bear on the questions of sex their characteristic Teutonic thoroughness and practicality. It is not surprising, therefore, that this Swedish woman, with her many-sided vision of the world, her daring yet serene statement of the secrets of human hearts, should be greeted as the natural leader of the movement on its most womanly side. Love, as Ellen Key regards it, is at the core of the woman question, and these opening volumes of Lifslinger are, above all, a contribution to the woman question, a modern and more mature version of that Vindication of the Rights of Woman which Mary Wollstonecraft had set forth a century earlier.

In England, and the same may be said of America, we are yet but at the beginning of this new phase of the woman movement. We have been mainly concerned with the rights of women to be like men; we are only now beginning to understand the rights of women to be unlike men, rights which, as Ellen Key understands them, include, although they go beyond, the rights embodied in the earlier claims. The dogmatic fanatics of every party, it is true, cannot endure Ellen Key; they cannot understand her, though she understands them, and even regards them with a certain sympathetic tolerance, as we should expect from a disciple of Montaigne and Shakespeare and Goethe. She is many-sided and is quite able to see and to accept both halves of a truth. In one of her earliest essays she showed how individualism and socialism, which some people suppose to be incompatible, are really woven together, and in the same way she now shows that eugenics and love—the social claims of the race and the individual claims of the heart —are not opposed but identical. Similarly, she declares that to build up, to help, to console is the greatest of women’s rights; but, she adds, they cannot adequately exercise that right unless they also possess the right of citizenship—so disconcerting the narrow partisan on each side. In matters of detail we may at many points reserve our opinion. Ellen Key is, above all,—like Olive Schreiner, to whom she is, in some respects, akin—the prophet of a movement which transcends merely isolated measures of reform. Her writings are the candid expression of her intimate self. In this book, especially, we feel that we are in the inspiring presence of a woman whose personality is one of the chief moral forces of our time.

London, September, 1910.

Love and Marriage

CHAPTER I
THE COURSE OF DEVELOPMENT OF SEXUAL MORALITY

All thoughtful persons perceive that the ideas of the morality of sexual relations upheld by the religions and laws of the Western nations are in our time undergoing a radical transformation.

Like all other such changes, this one is opposed by the distrust of the guardians of society, a distrust which is based upon the view that human beings lack the power of themselves directing their development on an upward course. According to these critics, this direction is the concern of transcendental reason, which expresses itself in the real and thus causes the real to become rational. Marriage as it exists is a historically produced reality, and therefore also rational. Historical continuity—as well as religious and ethical needs—must entail the permanence of the actual institution of marriage as an indispensable condition of the existence of society.

The reformers leave transcendental reason on one side. But they too acknowledge the connection between the real and the rational to this extent, that what has been real, has also been rational—so long as in certain given sociological and psychological conditions it has answered best the needs of humanity in some particular direction. They acknowledge the necessity of fixed laws and customs, since these alone intensify the feelings into sources of impulse, strong enough to be translated into action. They perceive that the conservative, tenacious emotions have the same importance for the soul as the skeleton for the body.

But the historical necessity, on the other hand, according to which it is alleged that mankind awaits and surrenders itself to a fate over which it has no control, is to these reformers an absurdity. The “historical necessity” in every age is the realised will of the strongest men, either in number or character, realised in the degree in which nature and history favour their exercise of power. The reformers know that the Western institution of marriage has arisen partly from the permanent, physico-psychological causes of the maintenance of the race, partly from historical causes which were transitory, although their effects in this domain, as in many others, still continue. They know that of all the fabrics of society marriage is the most complicated, the most delicate, and the most significant; they understand, therefore, that the majority must be seized with terror when the shrine of so many generations is threatened.

But they know also that all life is subject to transformation; that each transformation involves the death of once active realities, and the formation of new ones. They know that this dying-off and replacing never takes place uniformly; that laws and customs, which have become a drag upon the lives of those in a better position, are still of advantage to the majority, and therefore ought to continue in existence as long as they remain so. But they know at the same time that it is through the few in a better position—those whose needs and powers are most ennobled—that a higher standard of existence will finally become the portion also of the majority. The condition of all development is, not to be content with the present, but to have the courage to ask how everything can be made better and the good fortune to find a right answer to this question in thought or in action.

It is thus the dissatisfaction of the most cultured class with the existing contradictions between its sexual needs and the form of their legitimate gratification which is now giving rise to attacks on that institution of marriage which was still sufficient for their own grandparents, just as it is even now for a countless number of their contemporaries. These people know well enough that their dissatisfaction will not destroy marriage, so long as the psychological and social conditions which now maintain it continue to exist. But they know at the same time that their will is destined gradually to transform these psychological and social conditions. And they already see on the hemisphere of the soul signs and wonders which portend that the fulness of time is at hand.

The reformers do not believe that the inconsistencies and contradictions which are indissolubly connected with the natural conditions of the maintenance of the race can be got rid of by any legislation. And since they understand that complete freedom is an idea which only corresponds with perfected development, they are also aware that new forms frequently entail hitherto unknown limitations, as well as extensions, of liberty.

What they desire is such forms as, whether they limit or extend liberty of action, will promote a life-enhancing use of the sexual powers both for the individual and for the race. They have no hope that the new form will arrive in a state of perfection, any more than they expect that all mankind will be prepared for it. But they hope to foster the higher needs, to awaken the richer powers, which are destined finally to render the new form necessary also to the majority. This hope kindles their calculated efforts, which are directed by the certainty that personal love is life’s highest value, as well directly for the individual himself as indirectly for the new lives his love creates. And this certainty is spreading from day to day all over the world.

Unless one believes in a superhuman reason which directs evolution, one is bound to believe in a reason inherent in humanity, a motive power transcending that of each separate people, just as the power of the organism transcends that of the organ. This reason increases in proportion as the unity of mankind becomes established. Less and less are the individual nations able to preserve their own peculiarities from the influence of their neighbours. And this is now becoming especially plain with regard to sexual questions. While Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon ideas on sexual morality appear here and there in the literature of the Latin races, the Latin view of love has helped to shape the ideas which in Scandinavia go by the name of “the new immorality.”

Thus from one country to another fly the shuttles of gold and shuttles of steel, drawing the fine and many-coloured woof of contemporary consciousness through thread after thread of the strong warp, made up of the laws and customs of various nations. What follows is in part a drawing of the new pattern this weaving is fashioning, in part an insertion into this pattern of certain new motives.

Those who regard monogamy as the only standard of sexual morality and the only legitimate form of personal love, do not mean the ostensible monogamy now established by law but circumvented by custom. They mean real monogamy: one man for one woman during that man’s lifetime; one woman for one man during that woman’s lifetime, and beyond that complete abstinence. In the way of development, they acknowledge only one gradual realisation of this ideal; in the tendency of the present day to adopt several lines of development they see nothing but decadence.

Again, those who profess the faith of Life regard the ideals of mankind as an expression of man’s higher needs. Ideals which were once incentives to development thus become a drag upon it, whenever life’s needs demand new forms that are not recognised by the prevailing idealism. Only he who believes in supersensuous, God-inspired ideals will consider these fixed for all natures and all times. Evolution, on the other hand, shows us that the same ideals never have been and never can be accepted by all the beings we include in the single expression, the human race, but which in reality belong to almost as many separate races as the animal world. Evolutionists indeed rejoice that humanity cannot be equated under a single faith, a single code of custom, a single ideal, since in the diversity of life they see a great part of its worth. They think that this in itself is a sufficient reason for gradually granting to individuals of the same time and country that liberty which, from a historical point of view, is allowed to the same nation at different periods, and, from an ethnographical point of view, to different nations at the same period: namely, the liberty, within certain limits, of choosing its own form of sexual life. And they would be the more ready to do so, since the geographical, climatic, historical, and economic differences between individuals are just as great as those between nations and periods, and thus what is adequate to the needs and development of one cannot answer to those of the rest.

Few propositions are so lacking in proof as that monogamy is the form of sexual life which is indispensable to the vitality and culture of nations. Neither history nor ethnography need be appealed to against an assertion which is sufficiently refuted by the fact that monogamy, according to our strict definition above, has never yet been a reality even among the Christian nations, except for a minority of individuals; that all the progress that is ascribed to Christian civilisation has taken place while monogamy was indeed the law but polygamy the custom. During the period which is rhetorically alluded to as that of “virtue and manliness,” the days of heathenism in the North, those laws and customs prevailed which now—after a thousand years’ further refinement of the emotional life under Christianity—are regarded as involving the dissolution of society! Our excellent forefathers, whose morals seem so greatly to have outshone our own, were all born in civil matrimony and brought up in homes where not infrequently the concubine lived by the same hearth as the wife, and where the latter was liable to be repudiated for reasons as trivial as those for which she might herself obtain divorce. Indeed, these ancestors were sometimes the offspring of a “free love” which found a home in the wilderness when the guardian had forbidden the lawful union of a loving couple. The introduction by the Catholic Church of an indissoluble marriage tie did not prevent the people from narrowly escaping ruin in the Middle Ages. No one, again, will give to eighteenth-century France the credit for monogamous morality. Nevertheless, France retained vitality enough to determine the history of Europe by her economical, intellectual, and military power. And, in spite of its erotic “immorality,” the heart of the French nation still possesses a great reserve of health and tenacity, together with excellent civic virtues and powers of work.

Those who are so fond of asserting that monogamy and indissoluble marriage determine the existence of nations, are either ignorant of the past history and present condition of the nations, or conceal their knowledge behind the prejudiced view that the white humanity of Europe is to be taken as the criterion for the morality as well as for the faith of the whole race.

On the other hand, what can be proved is this: that the vitality of a people depends first and foremost on the capacity and willingness of its women to bear and foster children fit to live, and on their husbands’ capacity and willingness to protect the national existence. In the next place, it depends on the whole people’s fondness for work and ability in the achievement of prosperity for itself and of value for mankind at large, and finally on the will of the individual to sacrifice his own ends when the common weal demands it. What can further be proved is that, if a people wastes its strength in sexual dissipation, this will often prevent its fulfilling the conditions we have mentioned as necessary to its progress, and will thus bring about its ruin.

But this does not involve any proof that a nation will be ruined if it alters the forms of sexual life according to a newly-acquired knowledge of the most reasonable sexual morality!

Monogamy was victorious from many causes, above all from experience of its advantages. It minimised the struggle of the men for the women and thus economised forces for other ends; it provided an incentive to work for offspring; it developed modesty and tenderness within the sexual relationship and thus raised the position of the woman and with it her importance in the bringing-up of the children; it provided them and her with a protection against the arbitrary will of the husband; through home life it fostered self-command and co-operation; the need of the two for each other led to mutual kindness. The authority of the husband was ennobled by the sense of responsibility and the joy of protection; the dependence of the wife by devotion and fidelity. This last was strengthened by fear of the husband’s proprietary jealousy, by his craving for the certainty that his property would be inherited by his own children; by religions, according to which the admixture of foreign blood in the race was a sin; by the hope of Christianity for a life together beyond the grave; and by their common children, the feeling of tenderness for whom grew deeper as development proceeded. And monogamy still continues to exercise this cultivating influence on the morals and on the soul. It might, therefore, seem that this admission of the value of even an imperfect monogamy rendered all further proof unnecessary for those who assert that the true development of sexual morality can only be secured through a gradually perfected monogamy. But they forget that monogamy, which was a custom long before the introduction of Christianity, became injurious as well as beneficial to true sexual morality, from the moment the Church prescribed it as the only form of this morality.

Then, by a common trick of thought, the conclusion was drawn that the mighty development of culture which had taken place under monogamy would have been impossible if this had not been the sole legitimate form of sexual relationship. And thus it was established as the indispensable condition of all higher culture!

The import of the moral controversies which now arise with increasing frequency is the examination of the relatively higher value for real sexual morality of marriage or love.

So long as man believed that he had been created perfect, had then fallen and continued in everlasting strife between the spirit and the flesh, no doubt could arise of the absolute value of the Christian ideal of morality. Even those who strove hardest to attain this ideal, even those vanquished in the strife, confessed themselves sinners in so far as the flesh triumphed over the spirit. It was evolutionism that first gave man courage to wonder whether he may not also be “sinning” when the spirit triumphs over the flesh; to ask himself whether perchance marriage did not exist for mankind, and not mankind for marriage; to assert the right of the present time to more universal experience with regard to the sexual customs most favourable to the development of the race. For “the idea of marriage” is to them nothing else than to further this development. But universal experience cannot be won so long as religion and law prescribe a single custom as certainly the right custom and all others are thus condemned and obstructed—as soon as they show themselves with serious frankness—while secret trespass against the monogamous ideal is countenanced. It cannot be denied that the sanctioning of this ideal has incited many to try to realise it; indeed, hypocrisy itself is an indirect tribute to its worth. But its fixity has now become a danger to continued evolution.

On the question of marriage, as in all other respects, Lutheranism is a compromise, a bridge between two logical views of the universe: the Catholic-Christian and the Individualistic Monist. And bridges are made to go over, not to stand upon.

None of our “immoral” authors has insisted more strongly than Luther and Olaus Petri on the power of the sexual life. Both regard modesty without marriage as unthinkable. Both see in marriage the means given by God to satisfy desire, just as food is the means given by God to satisfy hunger. But man has as little right to satisfy the former by unchastity as he has to still the latter by theft. There would be nothing to object to in this if unchastity had not been made synonymous with every form of sexual relation outside matrimony, while chastity became equivalent to every form of marriage.

Luther showed some knowledge of nature when he taught that, though it may be possible for human beings to repress their actions outside wedlock, they cannot repress their feelings and desires. On the other hand he knew nothing of that creation of culture, love, and therefore he failed to see that exactly the same sentence which he used to confute celibacy may also be employed to confute marriage, for the vow of fidelity no more entails real faithfulness than the vow of chastity is the cause of true purity. Real fidelity can only arise when love and marriage become equivalent terms. The substance of Luther’s controversy on marriage was not a higher conception of matrimony than that of the Catholic Church, it was merely the restoration of marriage to churchmen and monastic communities. We have to thank Luther for the Lutheran parsonage and with it for a great contribution to the poetry of country life, to popular culture, to the production of many great minds, and—indirectly—to the moulding of many passionate free-thinkers. The Lutheran doctrine of marriage, on the other hand, deserves no thanks, since—like Protestantism as a whole—it stopped short in an insoluble contradiction. Instead of upholding, in the spirit of the Catholic Church and of Christ, the indissolubility of marriage and demanding the suppression of sensuality when the peace of the soul required it, Luther, by his insistence on the strength of natural inclinations, was forced into concessions, which—quite in accordance with the teachings of the Bible—went so far as to approve of bigamy. To the gross apprehension of the Reformation period the choice of a personal love meant nothing. With marriage possible from a natural point of view alone, it might be contracted with any one; indeed, to the genuinely pious it seemed a higher thing to enter into matrimony without any earthly love, which interfered with the love of God. The Lutheran doctrine of marriage made God “indulgent” towards all the impurity that the sexual life shut up within the whited sepulchre of lawful wedlock. He has shut his eyes to all the wife-murders that the command of fecundity involved; to all the worthless children produced by ill-matched and impure marriages. He has “blessed” all unions entered into, even though from the lowest motives, under the most unnatural circumstances: between a sick person and a healthy one, an old and a young, a willing and an unwilling or two unwilling ones, coupled together by their families. To-day, countless women are still being sacrificed to this doctrine of marriage, or to its unconscious effects; their exhausted wombs are a poor soil for the new generation; their crushed souls a broken support for the growth of new wills. For one woman who defends herself with the resolution lent by horror, there are thousands who have conceived and still conceive children in loathing. For one wife who is met with the modest prayer of love, there are thousands who with a feeling of humiliation concede to their proprietors the right inculcated by the Lutheran doctrine of matrimony. But the signs of the times are visible even within the Lutheran Church. There are to be found younger men who maintain that love—not merely the formula about love in the marriage-service—must be present if the marriage is to be regarded as a moral one. And probably these neo-Lutheran prophets of love use their influence to prevent a number of repulsive marriages. But it does not occur either to them or to their congregation to treat with contempt a couple who have been married for the most despicable reasons. On the other hand, if two young and healthy people, united only by their love, should live together and fulfil the command of fruitfulness, then indeed this couple would be made to feel, through shameful treatment—if not by the young clergyman himself, then by his flock—that a sexual connection sanctioned by law is the only one that is respected, and that, therefore, it is not the seriousness of personal love in itself, but primarily society’s official stamp that makes it pass as a moral ground for the cohabitation of two human beings. And if a person who is unhappy in a loveless marriage frees himself and establishes a new home on “personal love, the moral ground of marriage,” then the churchmen hasten to substitute for “the moral ground of marriage” that of duty.

The doctrine that love is the moral ground of sexual relations is thus as yet only an unendorsed sequence of words. The attempt to realise it was for a long time a punishable crime in Lutheran countries, and will probably be still treated about the year 2000 as a culpable error.

Thus the marriage doctrine of Lutheranism—like that of Christianity in general—has ended, according to the moral ideas of the religion of Life, in immorality, since it no more protects the right of the race to the best conditions of life than it admits the right of the individual to realise his love according to the needs of his personal morality. The object of the Lutheran marriage was to unite man and woman, with or without love, as a means to securing their mutual morality, to make them breeders of children for society, and in addition to retain the husband as breadwinner. By relentlessly pursuing this object, the church has succeeded in damming up but not in purifying sensuality, in developing the sense of responsibility but not of love. It has thus merely rough-planed the material for a higher morality. This rough-planed material may still be the most suitable for general use, but more and more people will now require finer instruments.

The new conception of morality grows out of the hope of the gradual ascent of the race towards greater perfection. Those forms of sexual life which best serve this progress must therefore become the standards of the new morality. But as the nature of a relation can only be determined by its results, those who hold the faith of Life will apply a conditional judgment also in the case of sexual affairs. Only cohabitation can decide the morality of a particular case—in other words, its power to enhance the life of the individuals who are living together and that of the race. Thus sanction can never be granted in advance nor—with certain exceptions relating to children—can it be denied to any matrimonial relationship. Each fresh couple, whatever form they may choose for their cohabitation, must themselves prove its moral claim.

This is the new morality, which is now called immoral by the same type of souls as condemned Luther on his appearance as immoral,—a judgment which is repeated in the Catholic world, where to-day the same abuse is heaped upon “the unchaste monk” as is poured upon the adherents of “free love” within the Lutheran communities. The question for Luther’s present-day “liberal” followers, both in this matter and in that of faith, is whether they shall turn back or go forward; back to the firm ground of absolute authority, or over the bridge of free experiment into the untrodden country of an entirely personal faith; back to indissoluble marriage or over the bridge of coercion to the rights of love. The right course of a consistent thought admits of no third possibility.

The neo-Protestant doctrine of marriage is already much less logical than Luther’s. They agree with him in admitting the right of the sensual side of love, and with their contemporaries in granting to love its share in human life. But when they proceed to draw limits for both, they bring themselves into an untenable position.

They bring themselves into an untenable position not because they insist upon self-control within as well as outside of matrimony (all preparation for a final enhancement of life involves temporary checks upon life) but because the self-control they demand is so comprehensive that it will be in a high degree obstructive to life without the compensation of a final enhancement, for they limit the sexual part of love to the task of continuing the species, and the part of love in human life to a single relationship. Those couples who are unable or unwilling to take upon themselves the responsibility for a new life are thus condemned to celibacy in marriage. Those couples who have once founded their marriage on love must maintain the relationship even without love.

These demands are more ruthless to human nature than those opposed by Luther. Complete celibacy is easier than married celibacy. The needs of the soul are stronger than those of the senses. This ought not, however, to prevent the setting up of the strict demands if these were really conducive to a higher existence from the sexual point of view. But only one who disregards life’s reality (and the Christian is often such a one) can at the same time set up personal love as the ground of sexual morality and limit its rights within certain bounds of morality.

Personal love, as now developed by civilisation, has become so complicated, comprehensive, and involved that not only does it constitute in itself (independently of its mission to the race) a great asset in life, but it also raises or lowers the value of all else. It has acquired a new significance besides its original one: that of bearing the flame of life from generation to generation. No one calls him immoral who—disappointed in his love—abstains from continuing the race in his marriage; nor would the couple be called immoral who continue in a marriage made happy by love, although it has shown itself to be childless. But in both these cases, the parties concerned follow their subjective feelings at the cost of the race and treat their love as an end in itself. The right already granted to the individuals in these cases at the cost of the race will in future be extended more and more in proportion as the significance of love grows. On the other hand, the new morality will demand of love an ever greater voluntary limitation of its rights, during the times that a new life claims it, as well as voluntary or compulsory renunciation of the right to produce new lives, under conditions which would render them of less value.

The marriage doctrine of neo-Protestantism, like that of Tolstoy, rests finally on the ascetic distrust of the sexual life. Neither doctrine supposes that the sensual side can be ennobled otherwise than by being placed exclusively at the service of the race. It is this point of view which is finally decisive in all Christian conceptions of morality. Christianity is sustained by the knowledge that the object of man’s life on earth is his development as an eternal being. Therefore none of his expressions of life can be an end in itself, but must serve a higher purpose than the earthly life and happiness of the individual—or even than that of the race.

When the foundation of sexual morality was laid in an existence beyond this world, it lost its connection with the continuation of the race and thus was brought into contradiction with itself. This is the reason why Christianity, while it has indirectly done much for the spiritualisation of love, has yet never succeeded in combining the needs of the individual with those of the race, the cravings of the soul with those of the senses. That moral standard will alone be all-embracing which is determined by the belief that the meaning of life is its development through individuals towards higher and higher forms of life for the whole race. This standard will not regard any asceticism as moral which contemplates the freeing of the soul from the bonds of sensuality, as is the great aspiration of Eastern asceticism. It only recognises the claim of such self-discipline as brings about an ever-increasing unity between the soul and the will of the body. Such a self-discipline, indeed, renounces the nearer and lesser good for the more distant and greater. But it finds this good, in the domain of love as in everything else, in an increasingly soulful sensuousness, or in an increasingly sensuous soulfulness, not in the spirituality of asceticism, more and more freed from the senses. To the chapel of this spirituality a mountain path leads, which—however arduous every step may be—yet goes straight to the goal. The soulful-sensual existence again is a cell to which a labyrinth leads. Here each step is less difficult, but the whole journey involves infinitely greater dangers and excitement. It may be for this reason that as yet it only attracts the strongest—those who never renounce pleasure, since they find pleasure even in renunciation. For him who seeks the latter goal a single standard of morality will appear inapplicable—simply because human nature is manifold. Sexual abstinence in youth, for instance, may strengthen nine out of ten young men. The tenth it may change into a man of bestial impulses, who, although before marriage he has been chaste, may show, when married, a coarseness or depravity which drags down the wife to his level or opens an abyss between them. Purely sensual unions may in nine cases out of ten deteriorate both the man and the woman. In the tenth case such a connection may deepen into a feeling that determines the course of two lives, and the resulting marriage offers better prospects of happiness than that of many a young couple who have entered upon married life according to the rule which is regarded as the only one to give security of happiness. Thus it is possible in one case out of ten that the love for which a young man has kept himself pure until marriage really is personal love. In the other nine cases it is not so, but on the contrary the most impersonal of all love. Thus in nine cases out of ten, it is possible that such disappointments can be borne through a sense of duty, so that personality grows beneath them. In the tenth, again, persistence in the mistake will be the ruin of personality.

Those who make—and rightly—complete purity before marriage and personal love in the married state the standard of morality, ought, on account of innumerable similar experiences, to make up their minds to let every one decide for himself how this purity can best be attained, before as well as after marriage, and what personal love shall be held to imply. Either it must mean nothing for or against the sanctity of marriage; or, if it is to mean sanctity at the outset of married life, then it must also mean the same during its continuance. But only the individual himself knows how long his marriage remains sanctified by personal love or when it ceased to be so. No one can be burdened with the duty of remaining in an unhallowed relation, and neo-Protestantism must therefore either declare personal love to be the moral ground of marriage or unconditional fidelity to be the expression of moral personality.

The monist in these questions does not ask whether a sexual relationship is the first and only one, before he acknowledges its morality. He only wishes to know whether it was such that it did not exclude the personalities of the lovers; whether it was a union in which “neither the soul betrayed the senses nor the senses the soul.”

In these words George Sand gave the idea of the new chastity.

The claims of the new sexual morality show curious similarities and dissimilarities to those to which the age of chivalry gave rise in the same sphere. Thus the Courts of Love held the principle that marriage and love are mutually exclusive. On the other hand, the conception of personality has given rise to a desire for unity which makes it repulsive to many people to live in matrimony unless there is a longing of the soul and of the senses for one’s partner in marriage. The age of chivalry in its idea of love ignored the new generation whereas the hope of the present day is through love to perfect the race just as much as the lovers themselves.

Nor does the new morality deny to the many, who have not even been capable of dreaming of personal love, the right to contract a marriage, which will at least contribute to their poor existence the interest of home and the joy of parentage. But it will be severe with those who, having had experience or intuition of love, have entered without it into a marriage which will certainly impoverish and perhaps ruin more lives than their own. Prudence may counsel leniency of judgment in the individual case, since the majority of human beings learn to know their hearts late in life, if at all. Once more, as a guiding principle of morality, the unity of marriage and love must be maintained. By his power of creating ideals, and the ever-increasing demand for happiness which results, man has deepened his instinct of spiritual needs, and the same power of idealisation is now ruthlessly withdrawing the outward supports of sexual morality and replacing them by the idea of unity. That the halt and the lame are thereby deprived of their crutches will be no stumbling-block to him who looks beyond the halt and the lame to the finer and healthier men of the future.

It is true that the idea of unity involves the right of every person to shape his sexual life in accordance with his individual needs, but only on condition that he does not prejudice unity or the rights of the beings to whom his love gives life. Love thus becomes more and more a private affair of the individual, while children are more and more the business of society, and from this it follows that the two lowest expressions of sexual division (dualism) sanctioned by society, namely, coercive marriage and prostitution, will by degrees become impossible, since after the triumph of the idea of unity they will no longer answer to the needs of humanity.

By coercive marriage is meant that under which not only are the morality of cohabitation and the rights of the children dependent on the form of cohabitation, but the possibility of divorce for one of the parties is also dependent on the other’s will. By prostitution is meant all trading with one’s sex, whether this traffic is carried on by women or by men, who from necessity or inclination sell themselves with or without marriage. Both these things occur under grosser and under milder forms. There is a scale of degrees for loveless marriage, as there is for loveless—“love.” The distance is great between, for instance, “La Dame aux Camélias” or Raskolnikoff’s “Sonja” on the one hand, and a prowler of the gutter on the other. So it is between a woman who contracts a marriage from the longing for motherhood and one who does it from love of luxury; between a man who seeks a partner in his work and one who only wants a wife to console his creditors. But whether one, with part of one’s person, buys one’s self free from hunger or from debts, loneliness or desire; however great in itself the value one gains may be, still the transaction remains, for buyer as well as for seller, a humiliation from the point of view of the sexual morality which sees things as a whole.

The development of the consciousness of erotic personality is at present hindered in an equal degree by the “morality” settled by society, and by the “immorality” regulated by society. Whether it is a question of maintaining the former or of excusing the latter, we are told that idealism must make way for “the needs of real life.” The same men who with reason are afraid of the dissolution of society if the right of the hungry to steal were preached in the name of “the needs of real life,” consider themselves wise when, in a far more important sphere than that of property, they proclaim the necessity of stealing, in the form of prostitution.

Real life has certainly its claims: in the one case, that all who are hungry for food should have work, at such a rate of pay that they can eat; in the other, that all who are of marriageable age should have the possibility of contracting marriage at the right time. But the changes that must take place before this can come to pass will fail to appear so long as society—under the assumption that prostitution is a necessary evil—superintends its results and thus gives itself the illusion that its dangers can be provided against. For thus society escapes the search for expedients which would better provide for the two fundamental needs—love and hunger—for the satisfaction of which prostitution at present provides the only means for many men and women.

But these changes will also fail to appear so long as society—under the assumption that marriage is a necessary good—retains this as the sole mark of morality in sexual relations.

For this state of things, those preachers of morality are to blame who persuade themselves that the only cure for the evil is a still stricter maintenance of the claims of monogamy. They are afraid of any mention of the wealth of varied experience, of the longing for happiness, or the joy of life. They proclaim nothing but the sense of duty, responsibility for one’s individual soul, and obligations to society. But this has been constantly preached from the dawn of Christianity, and yet the standard of sexual morality as a whole is no higher than it was. This gives food for reflection. The more so when this dread of love is carried as far as Tolstoy’s—or rather, the Oriental world’s—detestation of the senses; when marriage is regarded solely as a palliative for a hereditary disease, which ought rather to be stamped out so as to render the remedy unnecessary.

When psychical phenomena have been as much investigated as physical, love will also receive its cumatology—that is, its science of waves. We shall follow the curves of the emotions through the ages, their movement of rise and fall, the oppositions and side-influences by which they have been determined. Such a rising wave in our time is the growing detestation of young men for socially protected immorality, their longing for singleness in love. An opposing influence, again, is the disinclination of many young women for love. They are not content, like the neo-Protestant clergymen, with demanding that carnality shall be sanctified by marriage: they want to kill it. They do not merely hate—and with reason—desire apart from love: they depreciate love itself, even when it appears as the unity of soul and senses. According to them, marriage ought to be merely the highest form of sympathetic friendship, in conjunction with a sense of duty directed to the procreation and rearing of children. When marriage is freed from feelings of carnal pleasure as well as from claims of personal happiness, when it is the union of two friends in the duty and joy of living entirely for their children—then alone will it become “moral”!

On the other hand, love, treated as a synthesis of spiritual sympathy and the life of the race, as the vital force through which a human being’s existence is enhanced and beautified, is to them worthless; and the idea of a distinction between the nature of woman and of man is to them meaningless. They demand of both complete abstinence outside marriage, and within it they permit only certain few exceptions, which nature’s yet imperfect arrangements render necessary for the continuance of the race. With the advance of science, they hope that chemistry and biology will set humanity free from its degradation in love, just as Werner von Heidenstam expects his “food-powder” to bring freedom from degradation by hunger. Possibly they will both be right. But with these possibilities the people of the twentieth century have nothing to do. What we rather require at present is more love—and more food—not less.

It is therefore not likely that the line we have just touched upon will be that followed by the development of sexual morality, for even now an increasing proportion of mankind shows itself too exacting in erotic questions to allow of the realisation of the above-mentioned ideal of purity. No thought of the end will to their minds sanctify a means which when deprived of love appears to them ugly.

The children begotten under a sense of duty would moreover be deprived of a number of essential conditions of life; among others that of finding in their parents beings full of life and radiating happiness, which constitutes the chief spiritual nourishment of children—and it may be added that parents who “live entirely for their children” are seldom good company for them.

The programme of morality here alluded to is explicable from a justified hatred of socially protected immorality and a—partly—justified resentment against the love which leaves the child out of account. But its solution of love’s deepest conflict—that between the claims of the individual and those of the race—is prejudicial to the will of nature as well as to the conditions of civilisation. Independently of both factors, these zealots believe they can attain that white world of purity which attracts their minds, afflicted as they are by the impurity and misery with which sexual relations still load existence. They forget that above the snow-line only the poorest forms of life can flourish. But human development tends towards the production of an ever richer and stronger series of forms. Any attempt to separate morality from sensuousness will not accelerate development but only retard it, since the transplantation of sexual emotion to a soil other than that of the senses is an impossibility in our present earthly conditions.

The demand for purity which aims at non-sensuousness—or supersensuousness—may perhaps provide protection from minor dangers. In great ones it will be as futile as a hedge against a forest fire. No obstructing of appetites, but only their release in other directions, can really purify them. Passions can be curbed only by means of stronger passions. In the same appetite and the same passion in which the danger lies, in the instinct of love itself, we have the true starting-point for its ennobling. He to whom the destruction of this instinct is a passionate desire possesses in this passion itself a prospect of attaining his unnatural end. He, again, who does not wish to kill, but only to control the sexual instinct, will become, in his struggle against this desire—still immeasurably stimulated through heredity and social custom—a strong and proud conqueror only when he imagines and finally experiences unity in love. Assuredly also secondary expedients are to be found. Before all, that of acquiring the instinct of chastity from parents; of being strengthened and protected from childhood against the dangers of callousness as well as those of softness; of being instructed in a refined and gentle way of the great purpose and great dangers of sexual destiny; of receiving impressions through public opinion of the possibility of self-control and its importance to the happiness of the individual himself and of the race; of avoiding the abuse of means of enjoyment, especially of intoxicating liquors, which both directly and indirectly weaken the will-power in the case of sexual, as of all other kinds of, temptation. It is beyond question that noble sport, dancing, and games—and they are only noble when practised finely and worthily, with the mind as well as the body—are a means of replacing and controlling the sexual instinct. Equally certain is it that bodily and mental labour, whether undertaken independently or as a participation in some form of social endeavour, is important as occupying and consuming the sexual powers in a substituted form. All genuine artistic enjoyment is in the highest degree important for the ennobling of sexual life. But all this self-discipline, all these aids from the world of beauty and labour, all this cultivation of the body to strength and beauty, will be as lines without a centre so long as they do not all lead in the direction of love—love, which certain preachers of morality would leave altogether outside the question, as though even it were a danger and a temptation. No one would venture to deny that healthy habits of life and strict self-control may be elevating for the individual, even if love means nothing in his life. But life in its entirety gains nothing by the production of hardened or harassed ascetic types, which by exhausting bodily exercise, by reading that leaves the imagination arid, and by art that smothers nudity, have succeeded in lulling to sleep the sensuousness which, nevertheless, will perhaps some day awake. Life has as little joy of these harsh guardians of their “higher” nature as they themselves have of life. We have not gained much if we are to have a youth which attains sexual abstinence at the cost of other excellent qualities equally necessary to the race. A youth, with large blinkers, shunning the delights of the senses, the varied joy of life, the mobility of the fancy; a youth devoid of all spiritual adventure—such, with all its “purity,” would be a dead asset in life.

Those on the other hand who preserve but control the wealth of suggestion of the sexual life will be—even though their control has not always been complete—of infinitely greater service to existence.

The prejudice originally fostered by Christianity, that sexual purity is in itself so great an asset in life that it outweighs the sacrifice of all others—this prejudice must be overcome. A person is estimable for sexual purity only to the extent to which it fits him to fulfil the purpose of life for himself and for the race: that of leading an ever higher life. His purity is too dearly won if it costs him, and through him the race, irreparable losses of vital joy, courage, and power.

And for the present—until many generations of marriage and bringing-up have arrived at a transformation of present-day human, and especially men’s, nature—the demand for purity will not admit of realisation without such losses; that is, if this demand takes the shape of the neo-Protestant formula, or, even more, that of Tolstoy.

Those ascetics who recommend only self-control as a remedy for the mastery of the sexual instinct, even when such control becomes merely obstructive to life, are like the physician who tried only to drive the fever out of his patient: it was nothing to him that the sick man died of the cure.

But these ascetics may have arrived at their fanaticism by two different paths. One group—which includes most of the female ascetics—hates Cupid because he has never shown to them any favour. The other group—embracing the majority of male ascetics—curse him because he never leaves them in peace. Meanwhile, those who put a tremendous emphasis on purity and those who rave about pleasure, meet on the common ground of distrust of love’s possibilities of development. Love to them means desire and nothing else; if the soul enters into it, it becomes friendship and that alone. They have never experienced a love which is creative in the fullest sense of the word. Sterility—of the soul or the body or both—is the mark of the only love these two groups are acquainted with. The slaves of eroticism are admirably characterised by Lord Chesterfield’s confession that he had made violent love to at least twenty women, all of whom personally were entirely indifferent to him. They know nothing of the soul’s desire for one single person, from among an unlimited selection; a desire which—when it is deeply rooted—is met by the desire of the other. They do not know that the elective affinity of sympathy causes the one to gather from the other’s eyes an all-mastering, liberating force. For they themselves experience in the violence of desire only prostration and humiliation of their higher being. An otherwise sensitive man may feel unnerved by eroticism to such a degree that now he will wish all women dead, to be thus freed from his thraldom; now he will desire, as Caligula did of the Romans, that they had but a single neck—but not to sever it. The hatred of these men for eroticism is that of the savage for the hideous gods on whom he believes himself dependent, and whom he knows to be making sport of his destiny. And nothing is more certain than that love, thus conceived, makes men degraded and ridiculous. Even he who in his innermost soul loves tragedy and hates farce, is made, under the attraction of this love, to halt between the two and to turn his life into a tragi-comedy; for in order to attain to the true tragic greatness a man must be prepared to surrender himself unconditionally to, and to suffer through what is greatest in, his nature, his innermost ego. But the tragic destiny is apt to pass a man by against his innermost will, and then arises the impure form of the tragic that we have just mentioned. Thus men and women, who have only sought fresh stimulants in eroticism, at last come across a person who does not understand love in that way, and who ends the game for ever. Or perchance they themselves are gripped by a great emotion, but their past destroys the hope of its now being granted to them to worship in any holy grove the divinity to whom hitherto they have only burned paper lanterns in the turmoil of a fair. In most cases the tragi-comedy takes the same form as with the drunkard: satisfaction becomes more and more impossible; the insatiable one is continually forced to fly to grosser means in order to quench his desire in some degree, to indulge with increasing frequency, but with diminishing festival gladness. He who has sunk to this kind of intoxication becomes by degrees as weak-willed, as heartless, as devoid of character and conscience as the dipsomaniac, and equally incapable of selection and appreciation within the sphere of his appetites. The most sublime woman’s love will at last leave him as insusceptible as is the drunkard to the liquid topaz of Rhenish wine, its bouquet and dewy freshness. “Love’s freedom” will finally mean to him nothing but freedom from responsibility, from consideration, from danger, and from expense. In comparison with this kind of “free love,” prostitution is doubtless more dangerous to health, but far less injurious to personality. Prostitution detracts from personality by a cleaving which excludes the soul; but it does not consume the personality in the same way as the “love” with which a man buys women who are not venal. If they expect him to redeem his bonds in true coin, they will be disappointed. Love may possess, according to his belief, no sterling value: he regards it as always a forged note with which nature obtains the co-operation of human beings—especially of women—to her ends.

This love knows no atmosphere but that of the alcoves where it has pursued its bought or stolen pleasure. It has never breathed the air of the wilds, the air which quivers with sunshine and shakes with storms; the air through which murmurs all life’s longing for renewal, all the wistful intuition of eternity born of a hunger for happiness, which raises generation above generation towards unknown goals; an air which immeasurably enhances and eternally absorbs vitality; the air of the wide expanses, where ferocity and madness are not yet extinct, where man and woman fight their eternal battles and suffer their eternal pains; pains whose source even Lucretius knew to be dualism.

But that only unity is capable of sealing up this source—that was known to none before our own time.

In literature it is sometimes from the alcoves, sometimes from these wilds that the complaint arises of the mastery of the sexual instinct.

In the works of not a few of the writers on morality one fails to find even a suspicion of these wildernesses of human life. These teachers betray their ignorance in a boundless narrow-mindedness, a narrow-mindedness which includes the most far-reaching questions of humanity among—gymnastic and bath apparatus! To their short-sighted view, immorality has revealed itself not only as venal but in the shape of “free love.” They do not suspect that free love as well as marriage includes many degrees of morality and immorality, rising above or sinking below the ethical zero, at which both the free love and the marriage of the majority are to be found.

Between the free or lawful love which becomes ugly, revengeful, or murderous and the love which may perhaps take its own life but never that of the loved one, the distance is therefore great. From the point of view of enhancement of life there will be nevertheless a great difference between the free—or lawful—love which is devoted, courageous, self-sacrificing, faithful, and that which leaves all the best human qualities unemployed. In the same way, the distance is great between the sterile erotic “adventures” of a paltry vanity, a sordid hunger for sensation, and the passion through which a human being attains to new creative power. The concession to the storm of passion is in one case the pennant, in the other the sail.

The artistic temperament often expresses itself in the demand for erotic renewal. But while some thus increase their strength and health, others grow ever poorer and uglier. Goethe was one of the former sort, George Sand likewise. Natures of this type contain a wonderful power of renewal. They can love several times without becoming erotically depreciated. Their souls, like the volcanic soils of the South, can bear three crops without being exhausted. But this is not the spiritual soil or climate of humanity at large. And even such Olympian gods and goddesses suspect that love may have some secret kept from them. Goethe, who prayed of fate that he might only be required to love once in another existence, may have known less of love than Dante, to whom was vouchsafed the marvellous vision described in the wonderful words

Vede il cuor tuo ...

George Sand, who implored of the gods the flame of a great love, was never so thoroughly fired thereby as her sister poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who gave witness of her sympathy for her in the perfect lines which begin,

Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man ...

But great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life’s gracious gifts to its elect. There can be no other standard of morality for him who loves more than once than for him who loves once only: that of the enhancement of life. He who in a new love hears the singing of dried-up springs, feels the sap rising in dead boughs, the renewal of life’s creative forces; he who is prompted anew to magnanimity and truth, to gentleness and generosity, he who finds strength as well as intoxication in his new love, nourishment as well as a feast—that man has a right to the experience. Those on the other hand—and they are the majority—whom every new love makes poorer in the qualities common to humanity and in personal sense of power, weaker in will, less efficient in work, have, from the point of view of the religion of Life, no right to such self-deterioration. By its fruits love is known. Nothing is truer than that “there is no such thing as local demoralisation.” A person who in all his other doings is healthy and genuine; who continues strong and sound in his work, is in most cases moral also in sexual matters according to his conscience—even if this does not harmonise with the doctrine of monogamy. He, on the other hand, who shows himself a cheat or a wretch in his other dealings will probably be the same in the affairs of love, whether his morals are those of monogamy or polygamy; and it is therefore more unreasonable to judge of a man’s morality in other matters from his sexual code than it is to judge of his sexual morality from his ethical standpoint in other questions. Nor does the latter afford an infallible criterion, for these are people who reach the summit of their natures in a great love, but remain below it in the rest of their affairs. Others again never succeed in raising their erotic dealings to the level of the rest of their personality. But in regard to the accuracy of the result the latter standard is nevertheless as superior to the former as a chemist’s scales are to an old-fashioned steelyard. It may often be the case that a person’s other manifestations are in a certain sense greater or less than himself, but his love, on the other hand, will in a thousand cases to one be his inmost self. Great or mean, rich or poor, pure or impure as he is in that, so will one also find him in the other important relations of life. Of all summary characteristics of a person, therefore, none is more sure than this that, as a man has loved, so he is.

Although in this way a follower of the religion of Life regards the Tolstoy code of sexual morality as profoundly immoral, he recognises that it has a purer as well as a less pure origin.

The former is the case with those who have suffered deeply from the passions which they now advise others to uproot for the sake of their peace; also with those who are in the early spring of their age, when life is still asleep and nature appears to wear the hues of autumn.

The latter is the case with those for whom life has been all autumn, since they were born withered; women and men who have been seized with a hatred of the conditions of procreation because they have been the victims of those vices and sufferings which still make of erotics the Divina Commedia of earthly life; but not as in that of Dante an architectonic arrangement of hell, heaven, and purgatory, giving them a definite sequence in space and time, but a drama wherein the three states break in upon one another like waves on the shore. But whether the haters of sexual life belong to the exhausted or to the excluded, to the sterile or to the immature, the withered or the poisoned, they may doubtless be entitled individually to more or less leniency; their doctrine of morality, however, must for the reasons we have given, be rejected as entirely worthless.

The same holds good of those who solve the sexual problem as though it were one with the claim of individual liberty, irrespective of any consideration for the race.

These latter are in the habit of comparing the right to satisfy sexual desire with the right to satisfy hunger. The former, on the other hand, reject this comparison as untenable, since, of course, a person can live healthily in lifelong sexual abstinence. Instead of it they compare the erotic passion with other passions, such as gambling and drunkenness, in which popular opinion recommends self-control and the will is capable of it.

Both regard the question in an equally superficial way. To compare the fundamental conditions of natural life, the motive forces of civilised life, love and hunger, with any other passion than each other, falsifies the whole statement of the problem. The instinct of love, as that of hunger, may to a certain extent be suppressed; in both cases an increase of strength in a certain direction may incidentally be gained. But both needs must be satisfied in the right way if the individual being and the human race are to live and fulfil the intention of life in a higher development. Fasting men in the question of love are of as little value to the enhancement of life as they are in other fields.

Christianity has so accustomed us to treat sexual purity as a question of the individual that, whether we regard it from the point of view of the enthusiast for chastity or from that of the enthusiast for liberty, we do not perceive that, while one satisfies hunger to prolong one’s own life, one produces children to prolong that of the race. This renders the ascetic talk about the innocuousness of abstinence as superficial as the alleged right to satisfy sexual desire with the same freedom as hunger.

If the individual remains without food, he himself loses his life; but if he remains without the right of procreation, the race loses the life he might have given to it. Again, if the individual dies of overeating, he is the only one who suffers; if the sexual instinct is abused through excess, it is the race that suffers.

The existing immorality involves an uninterrupted blood-poisoning of the organism of humanity. The existing order of society and morality starves this organism. It is not only with the melancholy their own inevitable fate inspires in them, but also with indignation against unnecessary suffering, that innumerable excellent men and women know that they are condemned to die without having given their blood, their souls, as an inheritance to a new generation of beings.

It is beyond all question that the instinct of the individual to continue his existence in the race must be controlled, if it is to be an enhancement, and not an obstruction, to life. But this, in the most literal sense, is the vital question for the individual and for the race: HOW and WHY and TO WHAT EXTENT this control is to be exercised.

Thus both the life of the individual and that of the race are enhanced when young people live in abstinence till they have reached full maturity. The development of the race gains when the lives less worthy to survive are not reproduced in offspring; but the life of the individual and of the race suffers when young people, mature and in every way fit, are not in a position to produce and rear offspring.

At a low stage of development, hunger as well as celibacy has been an ennobling force. Man has gradually learned to limit the quantity of his food while improving its quality and regulating the supply. He now knows that the value of food depends to a large extent on the enjoyment it provides and the gratification with which it is associated; that what is unappetising does not fulfil its purpose. He knows too that the organism cannot be nourished by a diet accurately calculated for every age or for every class of work, but that only a certain superfluity really gives the necessary satisfaction. Experience has shown that too great economy is as injurious as excess and that personal needs must within certain limits be the deciding criterion in a full and life-enhancing system of diet. Our understanding of this subject is now far in advance of the ability of the bulk of mankind to follow it. In the question of the racial instinct, on the other hand, we are still a long way from knowledge of the conditions of equilibrium, and we have much farther still to go before we actually arrive at that equilibrium between the starvation and excess in the satisfaction of this need which are at present characteristic of our Western communities.

It was natural that Luther should put an end to fasting as well as celibacy. Both were expressions of the Oriental longing to attain the ideal condition of freedom from desire; both had been necessary factors in the education of the Germanic peoples. But at the same time it was unfortunately inevitable that Luther’s work of liberation should be inconclusive; that he was incapable of adopting the belief of the ancients in the divinity of humanity, the rights of nature; that he continually sought the sanctification of human nature by means exterior to itself. Someone has said that the courage of Luther the monk in marrying a nun was worth more than all his doctrine. That is a true saying. Filippo Lippi certainly did the same. The world gained thereby some magnificent madonnas and—Filippino Lippi. But neither Fra Filippo nor any other vow-breaking monk brought about a revolution: that was the achievement of Luther alone, who asserted his divine and natural right to his action.

The problem of the present day is to follow up the consequences of this declaration of natural rights.

But nature is no more infallible than she is perfect, no more reasonable than unreasonable, no more consistent than contrary in her purposes; since she is all these. She may be transformed—ennobled or debased—by culture, and therefore a natural declaration of rights implies only the right of man consciously to cultivate nature, so that in a certain direction she may fulfil her own purpose with a gradual approach to perfection; or, in other words, that the needs created by nature in and with human beings may by them be satisfied in a more beautiful and healthy way. But this culture of the erotic nature cannot find its moral criterion in any divine command or transcendental idea. It can only find it in the same mysterious longing for perfection, which in the course of evolution has raised instinct into passion, passion into love, and which is now striving to raise love itself to an even greater love.

There are some who think that love should therefore advance a claim to a glory of its own, which is incompatible with its “natural” mission, namely the perpetuation of the race.

Every one knows, however, that evolution brings about a more complicated, heterogeneous state than the original one; and in this respect love is the most conspicuous example. Love—as we have already shown—has now become a great spiritual power, a form of genius comparable with any other creative force in the domain of culture, and its production in that region is just as important as in the so-called natural field. Just as we now recognise the right of the artist to shape his work, or of the scientific man to carry out his investigations as it seems good to him, so must we allow to love the right to employ its creative force in its own way provided only that in one way or another it finally conduces to the general good.

From this point of view, then, we cannot extend the proposition that love is an end in itself so far as to say that it may remain unfruitful. It must give life; if not new living beings then new values; it must enrich the lovers themselves and through them mankind. Here as everywhere the truth which gives faith in life and creates morality is to be found included in the experience which creates happiness; and the most serious charge against certain forms of “free love” is that it is unhappy love; for there is no unhappy love but the unfruitful.

The capacity of mankind for forgetting is more wonderful than its capacity for learning. If this were not so, there would be no necessity to recall again and again that every band of apostles includes a Judas; nay, that the truth can only be accepted by disciples in the hands of its enemies. One is reminded by this that every reformation has its visionaries who arrest the blow when the reformers have put their axe to the root of the tree; and one is not surprised that with every spring flood not only the ice but the earth itself is washed away.

Mankind seems determined not to remember. They must therefore be reminded once more that the new morality’s band of combatants, ever more closely united and more rapidly increasing, are distinguished from their scattered followers and from their light advance-guard by the knowledge that love is subject to the same law as every other creative force; the law of dependence on the whole for its own enhancement to its highest possible value. Love, indeed, whose origin is the very instinct of the race, must be more deeply bound up with the race than any other emotion. And experience shows too that it cannot preserve and promote its vital force if it lacks any connection with, and does not stand in some relation, either of giving or receiving, to the race. It is therefore an indisputable necessity that every love entirely detached from the rest of humanity must die for want of nourishment.

But the band which attaches it to humanity may be woven of several materials; the gift to the race may express itself in various ways. In one case a great emotion may bring about a tragic fate, which opens the eyes of humanity to the red abysses it contains within itself. Another time it may create a great happiness, which sheds a radiance around the happy ones, illuminating all who come near them. In many cases love translates itself into intellectual achievements, or useful social work; in most it results in two more perfect human beings, and new creatures, still more perfect than themselves.

Those couples, on the other hand, who have shed no radiance either in their life or in their death; who have not taken one step on the golden ladder to a higher humanity, and who have only found in each other the lust of the beasts—without their readiness to sacrifice themselves for offspring —these are immoral, since their love has not served the ascending development of life. Whether this lifeless love has taken the form of a light and irregular or of a lifelong and lawful connection, it has in no respect enriched the life of the couple, much less therefore that of the race.

With the enhancement of life as love’s standard of morality, it is thus impossible, as we maintained at the beginning, to decide in advance whether either a free or a married love, an interrupted or a continued marriage, voluntary childlessness or parentage, is moral or immoral; for the result depends in each individual case on the will, the choice, which lies behind it, and only the development of events can decide the nature of this will and this choice.

It is true enough that human beings are often weaker in execution than in resolve. But then they must content themselves with enlarging old ideas of morality, for such as they are not called to make new morals. And it is true that life occasionally lends an unexpected hand in the correction of a mistake; but as a rule the consequences are as the cause. A woman who for purely selfish reasons shuns motherhood will thus usually show herself to be a mistress without affection; a wife who breaks loose from a marriage before she has tried to extract from it its possibilities of happiness will probably throw away her chances in the same way in a new one. No relation can be better than the persons who compose it. This law is so inflexible that the administration of moral justice might confidently be left to time. This does not imply that love, more than any other expression of life, can be withdrawn from human arbitration, but it implies that such arbitration will be faulty when it is decided by the forms of a union instead of by its results. Here we are on the watershed between the old and the new morality. The course of the former is determined by doubts of, and that of the latter by belief in, the resources of the power in human nature. The doubts of the former lead to the obligation of the individual to submit himself to the claims of society; the belief of the latter leads to the liberty of the individual to choose his own duty to society. On account of the weakness of human nature, and of consequent care for the well-being of society, the conservatives claim that the individual must convince society in advance of his willingness to serve its ends in his love, by renouncing a part of his easily misused liberty. On account of the richness of human nature and the claims of development, the reformers demand for the individual the right of serving the community with his love according to his own choice, and of using the freedom of his love under his own responsibility.

He who does not allow his eye to be caught by the light straws that float and are lost upon the stream of time will soon become aware that the new morality is growing deeper and deeper with fresh tributaries.

Christian morality starts from the conception of human nature as complete in its constitution though not in its culture, and of a human being divided into body and soul. The soul is of divine origin, but fallen, and must be raised again by a process of culture determined by religion, the object of which is that mankind may attain the ideal provided by religion, that is, Christ.

There is another morality which rests—or which rested—upon the belief in the inborn divinity of human nature and the equality of all men; this belief ended in the efforts of the eighteenth century towards universal welfare, and in the expectation that liberty, equality, and fraternity could be realised even with the existing human material.

The new morality, on the other hand, adopts humanism in the form of evolutionism. It is determined by a monistic belief in the soul and body as two forms of the same existence; by the belief of evolutionism that man’s psycho-physical being is neither fallen nor perfect, but capable of perfection; that it is susceptible of modification for the very reason that it is not constitutively completed. Both utilitarian and Christian humanism saw “culture,” “progress,” and “development” in man’s improvement of material and non-material resources within and without himself. But evolutionism knows that all this has only been the preparation for a development which is to improve and ennoble the very material of mankind, hitherto, so to speak, only experimentally produced.

Our present “nature” means only what, at this stage of development, is psychologically and physiologically necessary that we may exist as people of a certain time, a certain race, a certain nation. Hairiness was once “nature,” as nakedness is now. Marriage by capture was once “natural,” as courtship is now. What new transformations the race is destined to undergo; what losses and gains, at present unsuspected, of organs and senses, faculties and properties of the soul, await it—this is the secret of the future. But the more mankind is convinced of its power of intervening in its own development, the more necessary does a conscious purpose become. We must understand what obstructions we will root out, what roads we will block up, and what sacrifices we will impose upon ourselves.

The new morality is in the stage of enquiry on many questions—such as labour, crime, and education—but above all on the sexual life. Even on this question it no longer accepts commandments from the mountains of Sinai or Galilee; here as everywhere else evolutionism can only regard continuous experience as revelation. Evolutionism does not reject the results of historical experience, nor the fruits of Christian-human civilisation—even if it were possible to “reject” what has become soul and blood in humanity. But it regards the course of historical civilisation that lies behind us as a battle-field of mutually conflicting ideas and purposes, with no more conscious plan than the warfare of savages. Not until humanity chooses its ends and its means—and makes its more immediate end the enhancement of all that is at present characteristic of humanity—not until it begins to measure all its other gains and losses by the degree in which they further or retard that enhancement, will it also adopt the right attitude towards its inheritance from former ages. Then it will reject what hinders and select what assists its struggle for the strengthening of its position as humanity and its elevation to super-humanity.

We stand on the verge of a stage of culture which will be that of the depths, not, as hitherto, of the surface alone; a stage which will not be merely a culture through mankind, but culture of mankind. For the first time, the great fashioners of culture will be able to work in marble, instead of, as hitherto, being forced to work in snow. The true relation between the rights of the individual and those of the race will become in the field of love as important as the relation between the rights of the individual and those of society in the field of labour. The conditions of labour raise or lower the value of the present as well as of the future generation. The same holds good—and in an even higher degree—of the conditions of love.

How the boundary will finally be defined—in the one case as in the other—we cannot know at present. It is true that there is here and there a glimmer of light which already shows the way; but until these gleams become more frequent, mankind can only grope and stumble along the path by which perhaps it will one day march in full daylight.

Many who regard sexual morality from the point of view of evolutionism have never enquired whether monogamy—and an increasingly perfect monogamy—is really the best means of human development. These evolutionists unite with the champions of Christian idealism in condemnation of “the immorality of the present day,” which declares itself in sexual matters in the form of free connections outside matrimony; of an increase of divorce among those married; of disinclination for parentage and of the claim of unmarried women to the right of motherhood. Other evolutionists think that all this is the earliest announcement of the awakening which will assign to love its full importance, not only for the perpetuation, but for the progress of the race. With the will of active, effective life they attack the current standard of morality and the rights of the family. The object of the conflict is not itself new; what is new is only the boldness, fostered, consciously or unconsciously, by the evolutionary idea, of thus asserting the rights of love against those of society, the code of the future against that of the past.

The new morality knows that in a wide sense civilisation will only attain lasting power over nature when it combines higher emotions of happiness with the ends in the pursuit of which harsh means may be demanded. That creed of life which makes the mission of the race co-operate with personal happiness in love, will also demand of the latter the sacrifices which the former renders necessary. But it must not augment these requirements by ascetic demands for purity which are meaningless for the racial mission. The followers of this creed will take love as the criterion of the individual’s sexual emotions and actions, above all because they believe that the happiness of the individual is the most important condition also for the enhancement of the race.

They desire to fill the earth with hungerers for happiness, since they know that only thus will earthly life attain its inmost purpose, that of forming—in an altogether new sense—creatures of eternity.

The word, which through Eros became flesh and dwells among us, is the profoundest of all: Joy is perfection.

If we accept this dictum of Spinoza as the highest revelation of life’s meaning, our eyes are at the same time opened to the harmony of existence. We perceive that the more perfect race will be in the fullest sense of the word created by love. But this will not take place until love has become a religion, the highest expression of the fear of life—not the fear of God;—when faith in life has scattered the superstition and unbelief which still disfigure love. When the eldest of the gods has no other god before him, then will the monsters who now fill the murky deeps over which the spirit of the god moves perish in the light of the new day of creation.

For the sake of clearness, it has been necessary to sum up here the main ideas of the following exposition. In some measure it will therefore be also necessary to return to them during the following treatment of the movements which have the deepest influence on sexual morality: the evolution of love, its freedom and its selection; the claims of a right to and an exemption from motherhood; of collective motherhood, of free divorce, and of a new marriage law.

CHAPTER II
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE

Just as the Swedes, in comparison with some other of the Germanic peoples, are behindhand in their view of l’amour passion, so are the Germanic races as a whole behindhand as compared with the foremost Latin peoples. The Gallic counterpart of the Lutheran doctrine of marriage is to be found in another monk, Luther’s contemporary, Rabelais, with his joyous project of a new kind of convent, where every monk should have his nun, with the power of separating after a year of probation; a plan which perhaps would not have been a much more roundabout way of educating mankind to love than was the Lutheran doctrine of marriage. Nothing is farther from the truth than that the Reformation increased respect for love and woman. It raised the esteem for the married state as compared with the unmarried, but it enhanced neither the position of woman in matrimony nor the importance of love in regard to marriage. Even in the Middle Ages, the Latin nations render a homage to woman which to-day is still almost incomprehensible to the man of a Germanic race. And if, on the one hand, this homage took the form of the cult of Venus, which is born in the Latin blood, on the other, it expressed through the cult of Mary its reverence for what is deepest in woman, motherhood. Even to-day, the Frenchwoman is esteemed not according to her age but according to her qualities. It is not only the mothers who worship their sons, but also the latter their mothers; and not only the mother, but besides her every admirable elderly woman receives attention in social life as in the family from men of all ages. The middle-class wife—though indeed at the cost of the children—co-operates in her husband’s calling with a seriousness unknown in the Germanic middle-class. In France as in Italy, family life has a kind of warm intimacy which the German does not understand; since the Latin temperament lacks that geniality which sheds its light over the frequently rough lines and harsh colours of the landscape of the Germanic soul. It is rather the coldness of his disposition than the strength of his soul that makes the German so much less erotic than the Southerner; it is more indifference to woman than respect for her that expresses itself in the distinction between the erotic customs of North and South. But when all this has been admitted for the sake of justice, we may fairly lay stress upon the influence of the Germanic spirit in the struggle to put an end to that cleavage between love and marriage which has prevailed among the Southern nations ever since the days of the Courts of Love. For the peculiarity of the Gallic spirit is to discriminate. This gives it the power of following out an idea to its uttermost conclusions, but at the same time renders it liable in actual life to split itself up among superficialities. The strength of the German, on the other hand, is his desire of unity. This makes him inconsistent as a thinker, since he must include everything, but against this it makes him strive after consistency in life. The same deep sense of personality which created Protestantism has in the Germanic world sought to make love as well as faith the affair of the individual and to make marriage one with love. Among the educated classes in the North, marriages of convenience or those arranged by the family are now things of the past, while in the Latin world they are still the rule, though with increasingly frequent exceptions. But in most cases it is still in free connections, before and during marriage, that the Frenchman engages his erotic feelings; and the French wife has abundantly shown the emptiness of the assertion that “a woman always loves the father of her child,” the most dangerous of the false doctrines which have led women into marriage and thence into adultery. In Shakespeare, on the other hand, we already find the wife and the mistress united in the same person, and it is always in English literature that we meet with the highest expression of the Germanic feeling for unity in love. Since the mediæval minnesingers ceased to sing, the literature of Germany and Scandinavia, dominated by Lutheranism, bears witness chiefly of “the lust of the flesh.” Women are esteemed according as they fulfil their destiny as bearers of children and housewives. The abolition of the cloister and celibacy has, however, brought about the good result of the transmission of spiritual forces which formerly died with the individual. And it may well have been through some of those who formerly took refuge with their idealism in a cloister, that the longing for a great love has been left as an inheritance to sons and daughters.

In Germany, the leading poet of the “age of enlightenment,” Gottsched, asserts woman’s right to culture; in America, during the War of Independence, the women gave evidence of their sense of citizenship; and it was during a more recent struggle for liberty, that against slavery, that the woman’s question came to the front in that country.

In France, the eighteenth century, more than any other period of history, is “the century of woman.” The salons are the focussing point of all ideas; the most eminent men write for women, who become electric batteries from which the ideas of the time send out kindling sparks in all directions. Thus the women of France help to prepare the French Revolution. During the Revolution, Olympe de Gouges writes her “declaration of the rights of woman,” as a counterpart to that of the rights of man, and Condorcet speaks in support of woman’s claims. The same spirit of a new age confronts us in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), as also in Hippel’s Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber, published the same year, and in the Swede Thorild’s contemporary treatise Om kvinnokönets naturliga höghet (“On the Natural Greatness of Women”). Each in its way was a remarkable sign of the time which already included the whole “emancipation” programme of equality of position: the same rights for woman as for man as regards education, labour, a share in legislation, and an equality of position under the law and in marriage.

Isolated instances of emancipated women were nothing new. In Greece, the type was common enough to be employed in comedy; in Rome, self-supporting women were to be found; during the Middle Ages not only Bridget but many another woman—in the quality of abbess or regent—exercised a great and often beneficial activity. The days of antiquity, of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance all possessed female scholars, physicians, and artists. But it is not until the century of the great Revolution that we find among women themselves as well as among certain men a persistent and conscious striving to elevate the education and to secure the rights of women.

And wherever this striving has been profound, it has been united with the desire to reform the position of woman in love and in marriage.

It is a very common but erroneous opinion that monogamy has given rise to love. Love appears already among animals, and with them, as in the world of men, has shown itself independent of monogamy.

The origin of the latter in human society was the relation of proprietorship, religious ideas, considerations of collective utility, but not perception of the importance of love’s selection. On the contrary, love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy, and it is therefore a profound mistake to suppose that the higher view of love has been formed solely through monogamy. The idea of love has been developed in as great a degree by attacks on marriage as in association with marriage itself.

While, in spite of the accumulation of evidence to the contrary, Christianity’s share in the origin of human love is constantly exaggerated, sufficient stress has not been laid upon its indirect influence on the development of sexual love. It is true that all over the world—from Iceland to Japan—songs and legends are to be found which give glorious evidence of the power of love in the heart of man in all ages. But the sexual emotion, nevertheless, held a subordinate position in the life of the human soul until Christianity granted to woman also a soul to save—in other words, a personality to cultivate. Christianity, moreover commended the womanly rather than the manly virtues, and although Christ himself ignored woman, love, and the family life, his ethics became thus in an indirect form a glorification of woman. The importance attached by Christianity to the value of the individual as a soul—in contradistinction to the insistence by paganism on his value as a citizen—was likewise one of the unseen contributary causes which during the Middle Ages made love a life-power.

In antiquity, marriage was a duty to society; friendship, on the other hand, was the free expression of sympathy. Not until man’s consciousness admitted a soul in woman, could personal love arise. But so mysterious are the influences through which the soul of mankind grows, that the youthful love of the ancients indirectly developed the need of sympathy also between grown men and women; and the suppression of the sexual instinct by Catholic asceticism indirectly furthered the introspective, soulful emotion of love which rises above sensuality.

The modern view of love as the most lofty state of the soul had already taken shape in the time of the Crusades sufficiently to bring into existence at this period the Courts of Love in the south of France. Woman, the knight, and the singer together intensify and refine love, in part by laying stress upon its incompatibility with marriage!

Students have shown how the refined expression of love in poetry corresponds with the forms of the sexual life of the upper classes, since monogamy became the law and a secret polygamy the custom. This dual division of the erotic feelings has on the one side brought about such fine and lofty, and on the other such coarse and debased manifestations that neither one nor the other has any counterpart among the nations—or classes within a nation—where this division is unknown, since there the freedom of sexual choice is undisputed.

And this is natural; for there the sexual life preserves its innocence of “paradise,” one of simple animality perturbed by no higher consciousness. This innocence can only be replaced on a higher plane after a long period of development. The way thither is by the cleavage which “the division of labour” involves even in regard to the development of the feelings.

The Middle Ages were thus only capable of dividing love from marriage. This is witnessed by the greatest singers of love and by the greatest love stories. Tristan and Isolde in the world of poetry, Abelard and Heloïse in that of reality, are the highest types of the new age, even then dawning, which is finally to bring about the declaration of rights of human emotion as of human thought. These lovers, united in life and death, are the highest testimony of the Middle Ages to that free love which makes its own laws and abolishes all others; to that great love which is the sense of eternity of great souls, in opposition to the ephemeral inclination of small ones.

Scholasticism, ever extending introspective psychology; mysticism, ever refining the life of the soul devoted to God, unconsciously pour oil upon the red flame of love as upon the white flame of faith. The Vita Nuova of love breaks out in the fire of poetry, whose most aspiring flame was Dante. It lived on in the souls of the elect among Latin peoples. The Platonism of the Renaissance refined the mediæval conception of love as the most excellent means of bringing to perfection the highest human qualities. And thus was established the right of lovers to independence of the customs of society.

It is significant that, at the mediæval Courts of Love as at the courts of the Renaissance and in the contests of wit of the seventeenth century, women are granted not only the same right of sentiment as men but also the same liberty of using their spiritual gifts; for every intensifying of love is connected, openly or otherwise, with the augmentation of woman’s spiritual life and with man’s thus enhanced estimation of the value of her personality. Instead of being to him “the sex,” the means of enjoyment, woman becomes the mistress, when love has come to mean an exclusive desire for one woman, who is only to be won by devoted service. Whenever woman has taken the lead in erotic matters, man’s love has been ennobled. In Shakespeare, we find the whole of the preceding spiritual culture summed up. All his best women are chaste in the same degree as they are devoted, but they are also in the same degree spiritually rich and complete personalities. Therefore they are also leaders through their clear-sightedness and promptness in the moment of action. And although Shakespeare, like every other great poet, formed his women more of the material of dreams than of reality; although the foremost men of the Italian Renaissance probably had more often a Boccaccio’s than a Petrarch’s experience of love; although the age of baroque turned le Pays du tendre into a stiff garden surrounding decorative figures, nevertheless life itself, especially the life of the Latin peoples—as well as their best literature—can always show proud and beautiful examples of loving couples and sacrifices for love, even in that century whose male “philosophers” deprived woman of the lead, when love became “galanterie,” gay and ugly by turns.

At the time when Rousseau appeared, love was equally degraded through Latin-Epicurean immorality and through Germanic-Lutheran “morality.”

What he did for love was the same that he would have done for the lungs, if in one of the boudoirs of those days, stuffy with perfumes and wax candles, he had thrown open the windows to the summer night, with its scent of productive earth and blossoming plants, dark masses of foliage and the star-sown sky.

But Rousseau did not follow out the ideas that lay nearest to his own: that only love ought to constitute marriage; that only the development of the woman’s personality deepens love. Even Goethe, who after Rousseau carried the gleaming trail farther, by showing love as the mysterious fateful power of elective affinity, saw the happiness of love rather in the directness of woman’s nature than in its development. The French Revolution drew the consequences of Rousseau’s propositions also in the questions of love and woman; it made marriage civil and divorce free, but it did not give to woman the franchise; indeed, it did not even preserve the form of it which she had previously possessed. All the spirits influenced by Rousseau and the Revolution have since, in literature and in life, followed out love’s declaration of rights.

In the nineteenth century as in the Middle Ages, it was women, poets, and knights—the last under the name of social utopians—who took the lead in this. In Germany, it was first the romantic school, then “Young Germany,” which went foremost; in England, Shelley, Byron, Browning, and a number of other thinkers; in Norway, Camilla Collet and some great poets among the men. In France,—in the midst of the reaction which reintroduced indissoluble marriage,—Madame de Staël attacks this in Delphine. In the country of literary salons, it is attempted to prevent woman’s genius from acting as a social force—and through Corinne and Coppet, Mme. de Staël makes it a universal force. Her confidence that honour for a woman can signify only a means of winning love; her complaint that life denies to the woman of genius the fulfilment of her most beautiful dream, love in marriage, were the prologue to innumerable tragedies during woman’s century. After her, came the followers of St. Simon and the rest of the social revolutionaries, and above all another of Rousseau’s spiritual daughters, the woman in whose veins all the blood was mingled which the Revolution had poured out on the scaffold and on the battle-field: blood of the mob, blood of the bourgeois, noble blood, royal blood! The courage of her nation to follow truth to its utmost consequences, the fervent faith of her childhood, the wistfulness of her blood, her soul’s longing for eternity, the volcanic ardour and ashes of her experiences—all this George Sand hurls forth in her indictment of the marriage upheld by Church and State, which to her was “lawful ravishing” and “prostitution under vows.” Long before her time, the rights of love had been asserted in the case of exceptional natures. George Sand’s new courage was shown in demanding this right for all; in branding it upon the conscience of her time that, when two human beings wish to be together, no bond is needed to hold them together; that, when they do not wish it, to hold them together by force is a violation of their human rights and of their human dignity.

From this moment the battle was transferred from Olympus to the earth. And since then all “saviours of society” have sought to quench, and all “enemies of society” have striven to spread, its flames.

The love which a George Sand herself sought in vain on paths from which she returned with feet wounded, and sometimes soiled; the love a Rahel Varnhagen suffered from and lived on, a Camilla Collet implored, and an Elizabeth Browning realised—this is the love of which the woman of the new age is also dreaming.

George Sand—like the followers of St. Simon, and like the modern feminists—looked upon freedom in love as the central point in the woman’s question. Like George Sand, the feminism of the present day asserts the right of free thought against the creed of authority in every field; the solidarity of mankind and the cause of peace against the patriotism of militarism; social reform against the existing relations of society. The American-English-Scandinavian woman’s question—whose supreme confession of faith is still J. S. Mill’s book, published in 1854, on The Subjection of Women—has, on the other hand, overlooked to a great extent erotic, religious, and social emancipation, and asserted only woman’s rights as a citizen. Thus, especially in Scandinavia, the new gospel of love has had to encounter from the leaders of emancipation, now indifference, now resentment.

Ridicule and resentment from men have also fallen to the lot of the women’s demand for a new love. With arguments, for which Schopenhauer and Hartmann once provided the philosophical formulæ, it has been shown that soulful love is an illusion of nature, and that the unity in love, which woman now claims of man, demands sacrifices which are opposed to his physiological and psychological nature.

Undisturbed by ridicule and resentment, however, the women of the new age have continued to preach the love of their dreams—which is also that of the dreams of poets.

For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality! Century after century, poetry sets forth the loftiness of love. But if anyone in everyday prose ventures to say that love may become an ever loftier emotion, then this is called extravagance; for it does not occur to the people of the present day to regard poetry as prophetic.

The new love is still the natural attraction of man and woman to each other for the continuance of the race. It is still the desire of the active human being to relieve through comradeship the hardships of another and of himself at the same time. But above this eternal nature of love, beyond this primeval cause of marriage, another longing has grown with increasing strength. This is not directed towards the continuance of the race. It has sprung from man’s sense of loneliness within his race, a loneliness which is ever greater in proportion as his soul is exceptional. It is the pining for that human soul which is to release our own from this torment of solitude; a torment which was formerly allayed by repose in God, but which now seeks its rest with an equal, with a soul that has itself lain wakeful with eyelids heated from the same longing; a soul empowered by love to the miracle of redeeming our soul—as itself by ours is redeemed—from the sense of being a stranger upon earth; a soul before whose warmth our own lets fall the covering that the world’s coldness has imposed upon it and shows its secrets and its glories without shame. Richard Dehmel has summed this up in two immortal lines:

Liebe ist die Freiheit der Gestalt

Vom Wahn der Welt, vom Bann der eignen Seele.

The same feeling has possessed many a man before our time. One of them was Eugène Delacroix, who speaks in his journal of the pain of only being able to show to each of his friends the aspect of himself which that friend understood, and of thus being obliged to become another for each of them, without ever feeling himself completely understood; a suffering for which he only knew one remedy, une épouse qui est de votre force.

But what is new about it is that this sentiment has become diffused and has taken shape in the consciousness of the many; that it is beginning to set its stamp upon the whole spirit of the age.

Meanwhile, mankind continues to be guided by erotic impulses which lie deep below its conscious erotic needs. Man’s senses are spurred by a desire which thrusts aside that of the soul. The culture of the idea of love is far in advance of the instincts of love. And thus our time is brimful of love-conflicts.

To this must be added that the increased sensibility of modern man has rendered him more and more inclined to wear masks, protective disguises, artistically decorated armour. Protection is indispensable, since no one would be able to endure life if he were hourly seeing the ill-bound or still open wounds of others, or feeling his own touched by anyone. Existence would lose much of its excitement without secrets, suspected or unsuspected, in the destinies and souls of men. But at the same time this protection renders love’s struggle to penetrate appearances more and more difficult. Therefore a certain form of “flirtation” serves as the attempt of awakening love to tear off the mask, to outwit the protective disguise, a game of fence which aims at the joints of the tight-fitting armour.

But the attempts are often unsuccessful and life is more and more crowded with destinies that have miscarried, while more and more people wring their hands in solitude over what might have been! Man feels more deeply than ever before that life gave him a poor portion, when his love has been nothing but sinking in an embrace. An ever greater number know that love is absorption into that spirit, in which one’s own finds its foothold without losing its freedom; the nearness of that heart which stills the disquiet in our own; that attentive ear which catches what is unspoken and unspeakable; the clear sight of those eyes which see the realisation of our best possibilities; the touch of those hands which, dying, we would feel closed on our own.

When two souls have joys which the senses share, and when the senses have delights which the souls ennoble, then the result is neither desire nor friendship. Both have been absorbed in a new feeling, not to be compared with either taken by itself, just as the air is incomparable with its component elements. Nitrogen is not air, nor is oxygen; sensuousness is not love, nor is sympathy. In combination they are the air of life and love. If either of the component elements is in the wrong proportion to the other, then love—like air—becomes too heavy or too rarefied. But as the proportions between oxygen and nitrogen may within a wide limit vary without disadvantage, so also may the components of love. Affinity of soul is doubtless the most enduring element in love, but not therefore the only valuable one; the love that fills life with intoxication is separated from even the most lofty friendship by an ocean as deep as that which divides the India of legend from utilitarian America—a lifetime in which will not equal a single day in the other!

Great love arises only when desire of a being of the other sex coalesces with the longing for a soul of one’s own kind. It is like fire, the hotter it is, the purer; and differs from the ardour of desire as the white heat of a smelting-furnace differs from the ruddy, smoking flames of a torch carried along the streets.

The constantly increased importance of sympathy in the life of the soul finds expression, however, at the present time within the feminine world in an over-estimation of friendship, both between one woman and another and in relation to love. A passionate worship between persons of the same age—or of an elder by a younger member of the same sex—is among women as among men the customary and beautiful morning glow of love, which always pales after sunrise. An entirely personal, great friendship is, on the other hand, as rare as a great love, and equally rare among women as among men. Those who expect to find the complement of their being in friendship have therefore no greater prospect of attaining the essential in this sphere, and moreover they run the risk of missing it in the sphere of love, through shutting themselves off from or impoverishing themselves of love’s emotions. The women of older times also cultivated friendship. But they did not content themselves with it in the place of love. And if women were once seriously to do this, then winter would have come upon the world. The way of evolution is to demand of love all that friendship affords—and infinitely more! But the rich spiritual intercourse between female fellow-workers and fellow-students, as also between comrades of different sexes, is now preparing the third historical stage of development, that of individual sympathy. It is true that great love has been individually sympathetic in all ages. What is new is that an ever greater number of spirits are guided by the same need; that the possibility of great love has become apparent to many, not only to a chosen few. Just as we have been able to gauge the revival of love by the diminution of marriages of convenience, by the recognition of young people’s liberty of choice, and by the popular condemnation of marriages for money, so can we now measure the strength of the new revival by other, equally significant phenomena; those, namely, called “the new immorality.” It has been said with truth that love as it now is—the great psychological reality with which one has to reckon—in its present complicated, manifold, and refined condition, is the result of all the progress of human activity: of the victory of intelligence and sentiment over crude force, of the transformation in the relations between man and woman which new economic, religious, and ethical ideas have brought about; of the growing desire for inward and outward beauty, of the will to ennoble the race, and other causes. But among these we have not named the most important, that in which many now see a sign of degeneration, but which is really one of development, the cause on which rests the hope of the final abolition of erotic dualism: the conciliation of the excessive opposition of sex.

So long as man and woman are so divided in their erotic needs as is at present often the case, love will be the “everlasting conflict” described by those poets and thinkers who see only the immediate present, without faith in the development of love or mankind’s education in loving; for in the midst of the age of evolutionism men neither think nor feel according to its doctrines. To him, however, who does so feel, nothing is more certain than that “the everlasting conflict” will one day end in the conclusion of peace.

The sceptics just referred to smile ambiguously at the mention of friendship between women, as at that of the refinement and craving for sympathy in woman’s love. It is not until a mistress or a wife, misunderstood in the depths of her being, leaves him, that such a man discovers that the being he believed himself to be making entirely happy, has not even had her senses satisfied—since the soul received nothing from the senses and gave them nothing.

Those men—for the rest often men of fine culture—of whom this is true, are generally verging on middle age. Among men comparatively young, on the other hand, the erotic longing is often as refined and craves as much for sympathy, as with women, although it is still rare for the man to possess that balance between soul and senses which his equal in the other sex has attained. That women now venture to acknowledge that they possess erotic senses, while men are beginning to discover erotically that they have souls; that woman demands feelings in a man and he ideas in her—this is the great and happy sign of the times. Sensitive young men of the present day suffer perhaps as much as their sisters when loved only for their sex, not personally and on account of their personality. They for their part love just that womanly individuality for which they provide freedom of movement, instead of—as their own fathers did—trying to assimilate it to their own.

On the highest plane—as on the lowest—the similarities between man’s love and woman’s are already greater than the dissimilarities; and there may be more danger to love in the growing likeness between the sexes than in continued unlikeness. Man becomes a human being—and woman likewise—at the cost of his secondary sexual characters. There are already some who think that the close of psychical development will present the same phenomenon as the beginning of physical development, namely, that the embryo at a certain stage is neither male nor female but includes both possibilities!

The romanticists, F. Schlegel in particular, lay stress upon the distinction that, while the ancients put greatness of heart, nobility of mind, and strength of soul above the purely sexual qualities, the moderns have made woman one-sidedly feminine and man one-sidedly masculine, and assert that this extreme view on both sides must be got rid of in order to arrive at morality, beauty, and harmony in sexual relations; a view which was also that of Schleiermacher. And if we will see a deeper meaning in the tale of Aristophanes of the cloven human being, it will be the same that an apocryphal tradition ascribes to Jesus, in the saying that “the kingdom of God is at hand when the two again become one.” That Plato already emphasises the sufferings imposed on both halves of the being by the “cleavage,” is evidence of the commencement of development of love; for this development has progressed through the increasing opposition of the sexes, with the passion and the pain it has caused. Now at last the moment has arrived when the divided sections again converge towards a higher unity.

In reality, this desirable conciliation of sexual opposition is proceeding with such rapidity that there might be a fear of its becoming a danger to love in a near future, if the psychical opposition of sex were not always dependent finally on the physical, and if the modern man and woman were not becoming simultaneously more and more individualised.

And it is in this circumstance that the future possibilities of great love lie. Individualisation is already so powerful that a thoughtful person is ever more inclined to check himself when the abstract expressions “man” and “woman” escape his lips. For already men and women respectively differ among themselves almost as much as the two sexes from each other. And as a compensation for the enfeebling through conciliation of universal erotic attraction, we have the charm of individual contrasts. Love’s spiritual longing—to be resolved together with another soul into a higher harmony—will not be enfeebled, but, on the contrary, will be enhanced in proportion as this contrast is more personal.

A. Rodin—who like every great Frenchman understands great love—has glorified it in his statue of a pair of lovers, who have through each other become more perfect beings than either could have been alone. Rodin makes the man thoroughly masculine, the woman thoroughly feminine, while each line in their two figures shows primitive force ennobled into spiritual power, and love as the consummation of the human man and the human woman.

When life from time to time shows us this proud and beautiful vision, then we are in the presence of a happiness which is overpoweringly great. For as an economical housewife shuts out the sunlight, so life often lets fall the curtain of death when happiness shines; or indeed men kill their own happiness through instincts surviving from a lower stage.

Chief of these is that instinct which makes the force of primitive animality still erotically attractive even to the spiritually sensitive. Men and women with this power of elementary passion, intoxicate because they are themselves intoxicated, because, without being checked by any consideration or held back by the soul, they give themselves up wholly and hotly to the moment. It is as superficial a psychology to say that Don Juan’s reputation makes him irresistible as that conquest of Cleopatra is tempting because it is also conquest over Cæsar. No, the power of these natures lies in their undivided, unscrupulous will to use all the resources of their being to attain their end. And only that by which one’s whole being is held at the moment has the power of holding others. Thus the question is answered

Comment fais-tu les grands amours,

Petite ligne de la bouche?

Soulful people, especially women, have hitherto only loved partially. But when sensuousness—in alliance with the mission of the race—regains its ancient dignity, then the power of giving erotic rapture will not be the monopoly of him who is inhuman in his love. The wise virgins’ deadly sin against love is that they disdained to learn of the foolish ones the secret of fascination; that they would know none of the thousand things that bind a man’s senses or lay hold on his soul; that they regarded the power to please as equivalent to the will to betray. When all women who can love are also able to make goodness fascinating and completeness of personality intoxicating, then Imogen will conquer Cleopatra.

As yet the charming ones are not always good, the good not always charming, and the majority neither good nor charming. During this transition between an old and a new womanliness it is natural that she should be strongest who unites in herself

Ève, Joconde, et Delila.

From observation of love’s realisation in marriage—as it is still realised in the majority of cases—young women have been more and more possessed by a disinclination to wed. They wish for the love of their dreams or none at all. A lower claim, a poorer gift of love has for them no value which can be compared with their free personal life. To the man who only seeks her lips but does not listen to the words from them, who longs for her embrace but smiles or frowns when she reveals the nature of her soul, such a woman has nothing to give. Her love is now filled with the whole nourishing force of her human nature, replete with the whole sap of her woman’s nature, and she desires that the sacrament she thus dispenses shall be received with devotion.

She will no longer be captured like a fortress or hunted like a quarry; nor will she like a placid lake await the stream that seeks its way to her embrace. A stream herself, she will go her own way to meet the other stream.

We live in a period of spiritual reformation of immense importance in the history of the world. Every human being who himself has soul is being more and more penetrated by the sense of the mysterious effects of elective affinities; of sympathetic and antipathetic influences; of subconscious powers, above all in the erotic sphere. Sensations of the erotically dæmonic are not new. But they were formerly condemned to as great an extent as they are now recognised and indeed sometimes assisted. It is this exquisite sensitiveness, these vibrating nerves, these changing moods, this irritability of sensation that the woman—like the man—of the present day has acquired as her superiority, her gain through culture, her right of precedence before any other generation. But this new wealth involves innumerable new conflicts. The senses go their own way and are attracted where the soul is estranged, or repelled although the heart is filled with tenderness. Until the physiology and psychology of loathing are understood, we shall not have gone far towards the solution of the erotic problem. Every day—and night—these innumerable influences, conscious or unconscious, are at work transforming the feelings of married people and lovers. And although our time is becoming increasingly conscious of this, it does not yet understand either how to counteract the dangerous or encourage the favourable influence of the important trifles of married life.

Only the foremost of women with a genius for love have arrived at that degree of sensitiveness which makes it impossible for them to give or receive anything in love without the feeling which one of Charlotte Brontë’s women expresses in the words: You fit me into the finest fibre of my being.

Every developed modern woman wishes to be loved not en mâle but en artiste. Only a man whom she feels to possess an artist’s joy in her, and who shows this joy in discreet and delicate contact with her soul as with her body, can retain the love of the modern woman. She will belong only to a man who longs for her always, even when he holds her in his arms. And when such a woman exclaims: “You desire me, but you cannot caress, you cannot listen ...” then that man is doomed.

Modern woman’s love differs from that of older times by, amongst other things, the insatiability of its demand for completeness and perfection in itself, and for corresponding completeness and perfection in the feeling of the man.

Our soul is doubtless often deeper, but occasionally also shallower, than our conscious existence and will. Therefore it may happen that the new love in all its force exists in a woman who is unconscious of her own erotic greatness, while, on the other hand, another, who desires it with all her will, perhaps may lack the depth of feeling, the instinctive sureness of choice.

The women of the present day learn everything and arrive at much, even at the finest ideas of love. But, full of insight as they are into the ars amandi, have modern women indeed learned how with all their soul, all their strength, and all their mind to love? Their mothers and grandmothers—on a much lower plane of conscious erotic idealism—knew of only one object: that of making their husbands happy. This then meant that the wife ought to submit to everything and ask for nothing; to serve her husband’s ends untiringly, even when she did not understand them, and to receive with gratitude any crumbs of his personality that might fall to her from the table to which his friends were bidden to feast. But what watchful tenderness, what dignified desire to please, what fair gladness could not the finest of these spiritually ignored women develop!

The new man lives in a dream of the new woman, and she, in a dream of the new man. But when they actually find one another it frequently results that two highly developed brains together analyse love, or that two worn-out nervous systems fight out a disintegrating battle over love. The whole thing usually ends in each of them seeking peace with some surviving incarnation of the old Adam and the eternal Eve. But not with a clear conscience; for they are continually aware that they were intended for the new experience, although their powers of loving were small while their ideas of love were great.

Not until the spring rain of the new ideas has fallen sufficiently to penetrate the roots and rise as sap in the tree of life, will a greater happiness grow from the new love, which is not to be blamed because men have dreamed it greater than they themselves are at present.

Individualism has made love deeper and at the same time increased its difficulties. It has called forth an enhanced consciousness of our own nature, our own moods; it has created new spiritual conditions and—as already pointed out—set in vibration innumerable formerly latent feelings of pleasure and aversion. But our personal irritable sensitiveness has not yet been developed to the point of a corresponding delicacy of feeling for the equally sensitive spiritual life of others. The capacity for giving and sacrificing has not grown at an equal pace with that of accepting and demanding. Of love’s double heart-beat—the finding one’s self, and the forgetting one’s self in another—the first is now considerably more advanced than the second. Not until those women who are absorbed in self-analysis combine their own personal store of life’s riches, their individual diversity, their unique spirituality with the sunny, healthy peace, the self-sacrificing devotion of older times, will their new development render them more powerful than the women who preceded them. It is a healthy sign that men and women exchange experiences and ideas on these subjects with a frankness that was never known before; that they are much less affected before marriage, as women indeed have ceased to be so after marriage. There was a heroic kind of affectation, of which Mrs. Carlyle was the typical example, but in itself it was borrowed from man’s ethical development. Nevertheless one would often wish that the young wives of the present day possessed more of the old-fashioned gift of conceding the desires of the beloved with a happy smile, instead of insisting on their own. The modern woman will not feign anything for the sake of occasional peace or understanding. And she is right—when anything of real importance in the domain of ideas or will is at stake; she is doubly right in holding that all the lies and ruses which married “happiness” enforced on the wives of an older time were degrading to both parties; that what was thus gained was no real gain. Nothing is more true than that the souls which are parted by a lack of perfect frankness never belonged to one another; that complete mutual confidence is the true sign of union. Nothing could be wiser than the modern woman’s desire to see life with her own eyes, not—as was the case with the women who went before her—only with those of a husband. But has she also retained the power of seeing everything with the thought of what the loved one’s eyes will find in it?

Upon the answer to these questions of conscience will depend the success of the new woman in guiding the development of love in the direction of her will. For only by herself loving better will she gradually humanise man’s passion and liberate it from the blind force of the blood, which makes of the capercailzie’s play or the rivalry of stags a spectacle beautiful in its animality, but, on the other hand, renders man’s love bestial. Those who think that the healthy strength of nature will be thereby enfeebled are as foolish as those who try to prove that the artistic instinct in the woodcock’s note is healthier and stronger than that which created Beethoven’s symphonies.

But it is not sufficient that woman should take the lead and appoint the goal. She must herself be developed for the task, and that not only in the direction just mentioned. Her soul is as yet no sure guide to her senses, nor her senses to her soul. So much the less can she then be a guide to man’s soul or senses, which moreover she frequently fails to understand and therefore unhesitatingly condemns—for the sins to which she herself has not unfrequently seduced him!

The new woman demands purity of man. But has she any suspicion as to how her treatment, on the one hand, of the awkward and uncertain youth, on the other, of the experienced and confident “lady-killer” type, acts upon the former, who is perhaps striving after erotic purity in the hope of being rewarded by the happy smile of a woman, but who sees that woman treat him with haughty commiseration while, on the other hand, she regards the leopard’s spots of his rival with admiration? One may ask whether all young women who now express their detestation of the impurity in man’s sexual habits are themselves guided only by a soft and noble joy in giving pleasure. Do they never permit themselves the most despicable of hypocrisies, that of love?

So long as “pure” women take pleasure in the cruel sport of the cat; so long as with the facile changes of mood of the serpentine dancer they evade the responsibilities of their flirtations; so long as they delight in provoking jealousy as a homage to themselves, so long will they be helping to brew the hell-broth around which men will celebrate the witches’ sabbath in the company of the bat-winged bevies of the night.

There are more men led astray by “pure” than by “impure” women.

And not even those women who are pure in the true sense of the word are free from blame in this. Woman—for whom love is a life-and-death matter in a much deeper sense than for man—experiences on the approach of love those tremblings that follow a sunrise for which one has lain awake and waited. Her physico-psychical timidity takes on by turns the expressions, incomprehensible to the man who loves, of dumb avoidance, of abrupt change, of empty girlish giggling, of sullen misunderstanding. And all that is contradictory—not that which is mysterious—in woman stirs the unrest in a man’s blood.

The modern woman’s great distress has been the discovery of the dissimilarity between her own erotic nature and that of man; or rather, she has refused and still refuses to make this discovery and thinks that only the custom of society—with its wholesome severity towards her, its reckless leniency towards him—has brought about the difference which exists and which she would abolish. But while one group proposes to do so by demanding feminine chastity of the man, the other would claim masculine freedom for the woman.

The book world is now full of works on purity, written by men as well as women, of literary tone and otherwise. Now it is the story of a woman who breaks with the man she loves when he confesses his past; now that of a woman who forces her lover to marry another because the latter has borne him a child; and so on to infinity. Finally there is one who takes her life from grief over her husband’s past, which she thinks will ruin their future. Literature is the roll of the drum which announces the approach of the troop—that army of strong women who are to educate men to chastity by denying them their love.

But will it really be the Amazons who will play the leading part in the struggle against man’s erotic dualism? Will not perhaps wisdom be found also in this case in the hope of being able to conquer the evil with the good, not the evil with the worse, by allowing a man awakened by love to the desire of unity to turn again to disunion?

Would not woman accomplish more in the renovation of morals if she stayed with the man she loves, so as with her whole being to let him learn how a woman can suffer and be made happy through a man? The means of salvation for men suffering under erotic dualism may well be an increase of tenderly chaste, delicately feeling, and kindly wise wives. Even such a mother, sister, or friend is a strength to a man. But only the wife who remains a mistress can be sure of victory.

It is true that she cannot efface her husband’s past. But she can create together with him a new and stronger generation. The man who knows what his beloved has suffered through his past; who has seen the wings of her courage lose something of their power, her confidence something of its smile, her joy something of its playfulness—he will in time teach his sons that a man may certainly become once more strong and healthy through happiness in love, but that he cannot win so beautiful and sure a happiness as self-control can prepare; such queenly pride as his victory might have given the loved one, he will never see in her. But if woman is to help man’s struggle for purity, she must for her share take another view of what has been degrading to man’s nature and what has not.

A woman who marries a widower has to go through a pain which will be deep in proportion as her love is personal. She will then wish to be not only her husband’s last, but also his first love; she suffers from all the memories they have not in common. She would fain have sat by his cradle and received his first smile; she longs to have played with him as a sister, to have shared as a friend his troubles and his joys. She envies all who have been able to see him at those stages of his life and in those spiritual conditions that she has not seen. Above all she envies the woman who first saw him made happy by the love she gave him.

But all these sufferings do not bring her to regard the beloved as morally sunken, because before her he has been the husband of another woman. And the same must hold good of earlier relations of love. The man may have developed, through a former marriage or free connection, his powers of giving a personal love, or he may, in the same way, have lost them. If no baseness is connected with these earlier experiences, if he has not degraded himself to voluntary division of his erotic nature—and bought love is always such a degradation—or to contemptible duplicity; if he has not treated any woman as a means, but received and given personality, then he does not enter “impure” into his marriage, even if he has not evidence of abstinence.

At present it is unfortunately often the case that men enter into marriage with deep stains from earlier connections, and it is this circumstance that gives the demand for purity its general applicability.

During each new phase of the development of love women, probably earlier and certainly more consciously than men, have connected the demand for unity with the idea of love. The sense of unity is quite another and a far later phenomenon than monogamy. The enforced fidelity in monogamy, the voluntary fidelity in love, gave rise in woman first to control of desire, then to the weakening of desire through control. Thus by degrees erotic unity became with many women an organic condition, or, as is significantly said, a physical necessity. Not with all, not even with the majority, but still sufficiently frequently to enable us to call the unity of soul and senses in love—as also a lifelong fidelity in a single love—the provision of nature for innumerable women, while with men both are still exceptions so rarely to be met with that they are often called unnatural. But he who concludes from this that one has only to demand the same of men for the effect to be the same, is attributing the same effect to two different causes. For the erotic conditions of man and woman are and will remain different causes. The purity which a man is capable of attaining must always, therefore, to a certain degree be different from a woman’s, but not on that account of less worth. He will certainly remain more polygamous than she, but this does not involve a division of himself in the satisfaction of his erotic needs. Love possesses, nay, besets, dominates, and determines woman’s whole being in an entirely different way from man’s. He is more strongly possessed at rapidly passing moments, by the erotic emotion, but at the same time he liberates himself more quickly and completely. On the other hand, in the degree in which a woman is womanly, is she completely determined by love. This gives a unity, completeness, and equilibrium to her sensuousness which man lacks. When he is warm, he often believes woman is cool; when he sees her warm, he thinks that she is so in the same way as himself. Women are undoubtedly to be found, shifting, like men, between sudden ardour and abrupt chill, and these women are ever the most exciting erotically. With the majority of women, however, love is, for the reasons already given, a constant warmth, a never-quenched fervour. But this makes the woman suffer through the man, who in the intervals of his passion is so much more tranquil than she, so little capable of her unremitting tenderness. Therefore she seldom finds herself occupying his thoughts and feelings so completely as he occupies hers.

A woman has aptly said that “it is precisely woman’s greater sensuousness that makes her less sensuous than man: on account of motherhood—and all that it implies—she is sensuous, so to speak, from head to foot and chronically, while man is so only acutely and locally.” If one transfers one’s thoughts from erotics to motherhood, the truth of this will at once be clear: the feeling of motherhood is the most thoroughly sensuous and therefore the most thoroughly soulful of emotions; the same transport of the senses in which the mother exclaims that she could “eat” her child, expresses itself in the affection which would prompt her to die for it. But the author just quoted goes on to consider that even with men the erotic emotions could be transposed or released in many ways besides the one which to most of them still represents the whole expression of “love.” What Rousseau revealed to his unbelieving contemporaries will perhaps one day become true in a psycho-physical sense: that a look may fill a lover with voluptuousness; that the great emotions are the chief conditions of love’s happiness; that the lightest touch of the loved one’s hand gives greater bliss than the possession of the most beautiful women without love—feelings which all great lovers in all times have confirmed, and as to which even the most contrary natures give the same testimony. The peasant’s love, which knows nothing of caresses, comes lower in the scale of happiness than that of the cultivated person, who finds in love all the refined delights of the senses; and this again is far below the happiness of those who even in the encounter of two ideas or two moods can experience all the transport of love.

The conviction that sensuousness can only be controlled through being spiritualised is what directs those women who are now hoping to convert men, not to the duty of monogamy, but to the joy of unity.

Before woman’s will could thus become conscious, her long struggle for liberation had to take place. Marriage had to cease to be a trade among the upper classes, as prostitution still is among the hungry lower classes. Love must have become free at least in the sense that a woman had no choice but charity from her family or forced sale to her husband; her personality must have attained consideration, not only for her value as a woman and dignity as a human being, but also individually. Not until—by her own labour and activity—she no longer exclusively depended on a man’s courtship for both her livelihood and her life’s destiny, did woman’s salvation come to be, not “that the man wills” (Nietzsche), but that she herself can exercise her will. Language already reflects the change of custom. We seldom hear it asked nowadays of a woman: Why has she not married? but it is all the more frequently enquired: What has her love-story been, since she has never married?

Here also the line of development is a zigzag. Women sometimes act as though their whole liberation was of no avail. But in spite of much that is contradictory, the evolution of love—above all through the new woman’s claims of love—is to him who stands high enough to have a full view of the situation, the most certain of realities.

Evidence of this evolution can be found in life as well as in literature, where it now takes every kind of form, from experiences translated into genuine poetry down to the productions which tempt one to think that these people have only loved to get “copy” for a book. The feminine fiction of the present day reminds one of a relief on a sacrificial altar in the Roman Forum, where the ox, the sheep, and the pig proceed in file to meet the knife. Hecatombs of these animals—in the likeness of husbands or lovers—are now sacrificed to Eros by the new woman. It may not be very long before the vow of fidelity is exchanged for an oath of silence and the marriage contract contains a provision that in case of a rupture love-letters are not to be used as literature.

No doubt it will ever remain true that a living book on love is never written with other ink than blood. But such books are not those which resemble a trial in which the prosecutor, witness, judge, and executioner are united in one person.

But whether powerful or weak, discreet or audacious, noble or ignoble—the new woman’s books are always instructive to those who seek to follow the course of love’s evolution.

The great danger to this evolution is that women never take sufficient account of sensuousness, nor men of spirituality. And it is especially woman who now one-sidedly applies her own erotic nature—with its warm penetration, its completeness that frees it from temptation—as the ethical and erotic standard for that of man with its sudden heat, its dangerous incompleteness.

It is without doubt a feminine exaggeration to say that a “pure” woman only feels the force of her sex’s need when she loves. But the enormous difference between her and man is that she cannot obey this need without loving. It is doubtless true that besides her love a woman may have a calling in life. But the profound distinction between her and man is at present this: that he more often gives of his best as a creator than as a lover—while for her the reverse is nearly always the case. And while thus man is appraised by himself and others according to his work, woman in her heart values herself—and wishes to be valued—according to her love. Not until this is fully appreciated and working for happiness does she feel her own worth. It is no doubt true that woman also wishes to be made happy by man through her senses. But while this longing in her not unfrequently awakes long after she already loves a man so that she could give her life for him, with man the desire to possess a woman often awakes before he even loves her enough to give his little finger for her. That with women love usually proceeds from the soul to the senses and sometimes does not reach so far; that with man it usually proceeds from the senses to the soul and sometimes never completes the journey—this is for both the most painful of the existing distinctions between man and woman. It is quite certain that both man and woman are humbled by their great love, and that the knowledge of having awakened reciprocal love turns even the freethinker into a believer in miracles. But man often conceals his humility behind a security which wounds the woman; she, on the other hand, hides hers in an uncertainty which wounds the man. And from this difference of instinct arises a new kind of complication, when man also has begun to desire an unspoken understanding on the part of woman; when he becomes convinced of her love only when she has guessed this and loved his reticence itself. But against this conscious and refined will of the modern man stands his hereditary instinct of a conqueror. And no woman is more sure of all the older as well as all the newer sufferings of love than she who really acts according to the words of her lover: that he will accept love only from a woman who herself has the courage to declare it to him. For, on the other side, the primitive desire of being captured survives in woman. And therefore also her strongest instincts come into conflict with her newly acquired courage in action.

For all these reasons it is difficult for a person of the present day to believe himself loved or to know that he is loved.

And it is this which will preserve to love its excitement, even when the animal habits—with pursuit on one side and flight on the other—have gradually ceased. Conflict and the intoxication of victory will always form a part of the vital stimulation and pleasurable emotion of love,—but they will be removed to a higher plane. Man’s forward rush to win a woman who perhaps would not otherwise have remarked him; woman’s turning aside to egg the man on, or else to defend in some measure the independent decision of her feelings, will be transformed by the desire of each to wait until the other has chosen. The erotic tension will then be released in the contest for the most refined expressions of sympathy, the most convincing assurances of comprehension, the most rapidly vibrating sensitiveness to the other’s moods, the fullest communication of confidence. Victory will mean a constantly deeper penetration into the other’s nature, an ever richer fulness and joy in the communication of one’s own; a constantly growing faith as regards what is mysterious, and a like gratitude for what is revealed. The stimulation will be renewed daily in moods the transitions of which are as imperceptible as those of the evening sky from the reddest gold to the purest white; in the border lines of sympathy and antipathy, now fine as a straw, now broad as a river. It will be renewed through the test of innumerable uniting and repellent emotions, as rapidly and irrevocably decisive as the fall of a star in space, or of a silver piece in the river.

And this tension of married life will not be relaxed as now by the puffed-up arrogance of proprietorship on the part of the man or by dull complaisance on that of the woman. Since all sense of happiness is connected with the exertion of force to attain an end and with the equilibrium that results from its attainment, it has been the misfortune of love that courtship has absorbed all the tension, and married life the subsequent equilibrium. Only the sense of impending loss—through life or through death—has, as a rule, evoked a new spiritual tension. This, for reasons mentioned above, has especially concerned the husband. Wives have often suffered long from the self-satisfied comfort of the daily life of marriage before they have resigned the peace of consummation, the equilibrium without movement, which was their dream of happiness.

But now women will no longer resign, nor allow themselves to be cheated of life. More and more their demand for a new love becomes one with the demand for a new marriage, the chief value of which will not, as now, consist in “security and calm.”

Woman knows—and man still more—that it is in periods of calm, when all vital stimulation is wanting, that the temptation comes to seek it in new relations. But at the same time they are beginning to see that when one and the same feeling affords an unceasing excitement—through the desire of constantly attaining higher conditions of that feeling—then such temptation becomes of necessity less and less dangerous, simply because the human soul can only with great difficulty transfer the spiritual wealth it has accumulated in one place. Love in its impersonal form is movable capital, easily realised. In its personal form, on the other hand, it is fixed property, which increases in value the more one sinks in it, and which, owing to its very nature, is difficult to disperse.

Whenever a woman has captivated a man with a lifelong fascination, the secret has been that he has never exhausted her; that she “has not been one, but a thousand” (G. Heiberg); not a more or less beautiful variation on the eternal theme of the female sex, but a music in which he has found the wealth of inexhaustibility, the enticement of impenetrability, while she has given him an incomparable happiness of the senses. The more the modern woman acquires courage for a love as rich in the senses as in the soul, the more complicated and self-inclosed her personality becomes, the more will she obtain that power which is now only the fortunate advantage of the exceptional.

Man tells woman that her new way of love is opposed not only to man’s nature but to the welfare of the new generation.

She answers that great love doubtless betrays a childish lack of understanding in all departments of worldly wisdom, but that in its own sphere—with all its riddles and problems—it is godlike wisdom, the gift of divining, the power of working miracles; that the only thing needful in order that love may re-create the race is that it shall become an even greater vital force, through mankind investing it with more and more of its spiritual power.

Even at the present day couples are to be found who are inspired by great love. They show an insatiable desire for all the riches of life, so as to have the means of being regally lavish towards each other. Neither defrauds the other of so much as a dewdrop. The fervour they give one another, the freedom they possess through one another, make the space that surrounds them warm and ample. Love is constantly giving them new impulses, new powers and new employment for their powers, whether these are directed inwards to home life or outwards to that of society. And thus the happiness, which for themselves is the source of life, becomes also a tributary stream by which the happiness of all is raised. The power of great love to enhance a person’s value for mankind can only be compared with the glow of religious faith or the creative joy of genius, but surpasses both in universal life-enhancing properties. Sorrow may sometimes make a person more tender towards the sufferings of others, more actively benevolent than happiness with its concentration upon self. But sorrow never led the soul to those heights and depths, to those inspirations and revelations of universal life, to that kneeling gratitude before the mystery of life, to which the piety of great love leads it.

Like faith, this piety sanctifies all things. It gives significance to attention bestowed on one’s self, since

... If I am dear to some one else

Then must I be to myself more dear.

It combines the most trifling things of life into an intelligent whole. He who is loved and loves in this way bears the same stamp as the Christian mystic, who grows ever clearer and yet more rich in mystery; ever fuller of life and yet calmer; ever more introspective and yet more radiant.

There are some who think that this state is visionary and unnatural.

But the truth—for everyone who has beheld it—is that le vrai amour est simple comme un bas relief antique. Such a relief, which before all others corresponds to the image, is to be found in the Naples museum. It shows a man and a woman, standing still on either side of a tree. An artist of antiquity may have already foreseen all the significance that a son of our time interpreted, when he placed a youth and a maiden beneath the tree of life with a cloven apple in their hands: they divided the apple of life and ate it together....

For a couple who share it thus, everyday life will scintillate with little delights as a wheat-field at midsummer with cornflowers; and the high days will be white with joy as a spring garden with fruit blossoms. A couple who live thus will be able to play so that beyond their sport will always be the calm of tenderness; to smile so that behind their smiles will always lie an easily-aroused seriousness. Unless death interrupts them they will thus build up their life together as the Gothic cathedrals were built: buttress upon buttress, arch above arch, ornament within ornament, until finally the gilding of the topmost spire catches the last rays of the sunset.

Thus great love already gives to two human beings what only completed development can give to mankind as a whole: unity between senses and soul, desire and duty, self-assertion and self-devotion, between the individual and the race, the present moment and the future.

This condition—in which every advantage gained becomes a gift and every gift a profit; in which are united a continual emotion and a calm peace—is even now that which dreamers await as that of the third kingdom.[2]

CHAPTER III
LOVE’S FREEDOM

The most delicate test of a person’s sense of morality is his power of interpreting ambiguous signs of the times in the ethical sphere; for only the profoundly moral can discover the dividing line, sharp as the edge of a sword, between new morality and old immorality.

In our time ethical obtuseness betrays itself first and foremost by the condemnation of those young couples who freely unite their destinies. The majority does not perceive the advance in morality which this implies in comparison with the code of so many men, who without responsibility—and without apparent risk—purchase the repose of their senses.

Those young men who choose “free love” know that bought love may destroy their finest instruments of mental activity; that it may result in injury to the wife as well as in the danger either of degeneracy on the part of the children, or of childishness, and may finally bring about their own premature downfall.

But they also know that these results may not occur and that, on the other hand, they may suffer spiritually by curbing their personality and ruining their possibilities of single-hearted love. At the same time they despise their fathers’ less dangerous, but for that reason more unprincipled, expedient for sexual satisfaction, the seduction of women of the people, women with whom they never had any thought of community of life.

“Free love,” on the other hand, gives them an enhancement of life which they consider that they gain without injuring anyone. It answers to their idea of love’s chastity, an idea which is justly offended by the incompleteness of the period of engagement with all its losses in the freshness and frankness of emotion. When their soul has found another soul, when the senses of both have met in a common longing, then they consider that they have a right to the full unity of love, although compelled to secrecy, since the conditions of society render early marriage impossible. They are thus freed from a wasteful struggle, which would neither give them peace nor inner purity and which would be doubly hard for them, since they have attained the end—love—for the sake of which self-control would have been imposed.

When in this connection we speak of youth, we can mean only the young men and girls of the upper classes. For among the rest of society the free union of love has long been the custom. Our working classes—as those of many European countries—simply use the same freedom which the custom of society allows to many extra-European peoples. Ethnographical research shows that this is no new degraded habit, but, on the contrary, a relic of primitive customs. Among certain extra-European peoples—for example, one in north Burmah—this custom was accompanied by definite guarantees for the possible children. Young people may without hindrance unite freely, and separate if they do not find their feeling deep enough for continued life together. In the contrary case, they marry, and after marriage infidelity is as good as unknown. If the girl becomes a mother, without a marriage following, the man is obliged to secure the child through a sum paid to the girl’s father, who is then answerable for it.

It is from similar sexual customs that the majority of our Swedish people derive theirs—that people which in royal and academic speeches has gained the character of being “the most law-abiding and loyal” in the world. Failing a deeper love or a sense of responsibility, these customs involve the abandonment of the woman, infanticide, and sometimes the prostitution of the woman, when she has passed from one man to another; finally the encumbrance of society with the children of different fathers to whom she has given life, besides the neglect of the children. And the custom leads—even in those cases where both love and responsibility are present, but where the lovers are too young—to the enfeebling of themselves and of the children, and to the great mortality of the latter. Not only hard labour and scanty food, but also a premature sexual life, contribute to hinder the full bodily development of the lower classes and to hasten their growing old.

But by the side of these evil effects there are good ones. In most cases, a young couple’s prospect of parentage leads their relatives to make their marriage possible. When this cannot take place immediately, the daughter and her child stay with the parents of one of them, or she leaves the child with them, while she on her side, and the young man on his, work for the future. Even when the man has not always been disposed for marriage, their common life of work and the sense of parentage soon show a uniting force. Such couples who have come together in youth probably have better prospects for their life together than an upper-class couple, worn out by a long engagement, in which the bride has a full right to her orange-flowers—to say nothing of the health contributed by the man of the people in comparison with the majority of men of the upper class, who have bought their injurious substitute for marriage while waiting for the promotion which should make marriage possible. One thing at any rate is certain: that matrimonial fidelity among the people is as great as freedom before marriage is unlimited. That the free love of the peasant and working class ends, as a rule, in marriage, often depends on the fact that public opinion supports this as a point of morality. But—in those cases where love itself does not bring about community of life—the sense of parentage and the need of a helpmate are as decisive as public opinion; for even among the erotically undeveloped the need of cohabitation makes itself felt for other purposes than the instinct of the race. It is the desire for such community of life—with its sharing of pleasure and hardship, sorrow and attention—which makes it really uniting. Where no such desire exists, the relationship becomes immoral from the point of view of life-enhancement. If this standard of morality be not adhered to, free love among the upper class—as among the lower class—will, it is true, contribute to the abolition of prostitution, but not to the exaltation of mankind through a greater love, a higher morality.

For if, on the one hand, the sexual customs of the lower class allow more right than those of the upper class to the direct claims of nature, on the other hand, the customs of the latter still provide the same opportunities for the elevation into love of the instinct which, from an historical and ethnographical point of view, has everywhere been provided by self-control. Among those nations with which sexual connections begin early, morals are, as a rule, loose, and where morals are loose, the emotion of love has small importance. The control of sensuality develops the deeper feelings of love. We need not go to the nations of the past, or to existing extra-European peoples, but only to the town and country labourers of our own and other European lands, to see how the feelings become lax and feeble, the senses coarse and greedy, when they have acquired the habit of satisfying physical hunger before that of the soul has awakened. The miserable conditions of dwelling among the lower classes are enough by themselves to rob sexual life of its discretion; immature age or the tie of blood is frequently no hindrance to unchastity, and its consequences—coarseness and lack of responsibility towards one another as well as towards the offspring—at times take hideous forms. The first condition therefore for love’s freedom is that the freedom shall concern love, the most universal sign of which is the desire of continued community of life. As this sign is, as a rule, to be found among young people of the educated class who now claim love’s freedom, they are thus far within their rights, as also are the young people of the lower class when they use the same freedom and as a result form many excellent connubial unions. We could with every reason—and with more reason—draw the same conclusions with regard to the upper class, if it were not the case that among these love has become a so much more penetrating force. While the majority of the working class—for even there a minority with more refined erotic feelings is to be found,—in addition to the satisfaction of its instincts, contents itself with a capable and devoted comrade to bear its burden, the developed man or woman of the present day has deeper erotic needs. It is the satisfaction of these that is often missed by a youthful decision in life; for even when youthful love is soulful—and nearly all youthful love can so be described—it is nevertheless in most cases a longing for love rather than love, a craving for experience rather than the new life itself. And therefore the erotic feelings of early youth are founded upon the illusions which make a Romeo lament the harshness of Rosalind a moment before meeting Juliet, and a Titania to fondle Bottom’s ass’s ears. Never in after life has the world such a marvellous glamour as when the first dream of love has swathed all contours in its opalescent mists of sunrise, but—never do we so easily go astray. It may happen that the lifting of the mists will disclose the most beautiful landscape. But there are more chances that the course one has steered in the fog will end in one of many shipwrecks. Therefore the “’teens” should be the age of the erotic prologue, not of the drama. For this reason also, that no one can decide to what degree the transient may injure the final relations of life; nor to what degree great love may be missed or spoiled, when accidental love has anticipated its rights, even though this happened in the full and frank belief that the accident was destiny.

No part of the art of living is more important for youth than developing in one’s self the knowledge of a predestined fellowship which permits of waiting. People curse the hazards which separate lovers. But it is less the hazards which separate than those which unite at the wrong time, that ought to be cursed. First youth seldom loses in love anything but what is unimportant; the reality shows itself—when both are free—as what cannot be lost. Those who belong to each other come together in the end; those whom chance parts, never belonged to each other. A man may fail of happiness by finding out too late what is real in himself or others; not by abstaining from action before this discovery. Therefore youth should wait before making decisive plunges into its own and others’ destinies, since great love may resemble the Japanese divinity, to pray to whom more than once is a crime, since it answers prayer only once.

But even when a young couple has the profoundest mutual sense of the permanence of their feeling, it does not follow that their love ought immediately to involve the rights and the accompanying responsibilities of a later age. For young trees break or bend under too heavy a weight of fruit, nor does the fruit attain its full value on trees that are too young. Here nature herself is the opponent of youthful marriages. Let us leave on one side the possibility of people being unwillingly bound together through the consequences of an over-hasty union, and deal only with the certainty that the young people in a profound sense continue to belong to each other. They will nevertheless as surely suffer through the possible or probable consequence of their action, the child. Their consciousness of not being able to bear this consequence will doubtless make them try to avoid it. But this is an ugly beginning to a life of love. Many consider that it also involves dangers. For those who have already given to the race their tribute of new life, or who ought never thus to give, the choice must be free between the two dangers. But for the opening of a life in common this resource may be equally unsafe and unwholesome, since the racial instinct as a whole is left unaccomplished. And thus love is robbed of a part of its spiritual meaning, and sensuousness of its natural restraint. But even if these consequences do not follow, “failure” may yet be the most fortunate occurrence in these cases—and also the most usual. How then does it appear in reality?

In most cases young people have entered into their free union because they have seen no possibility of an open marriage. They are the less able to support a child, as they themselves are supported by others, in so far as they are not keeping themselves by running into debt or by badly-paid labour. In the latter case, the child means a further hindrance to life, the more so as it must involve for the woman a diminution, perhaps a total loss, of her powers of work. It is therefore the young people’s relatives who have to help. And, when this is possible, the form it takes is that the lovers are obliged to marry and receive the help that the parents can afford. In the case of the poorer classes, this is comparatively slight, as the newly-married pair frequently stay with the parents of one of them. But in the upper classes, on the other hand, they prefer, with full reason, to form their own home, and then there ensue the inevitable cares of child and housekeeping, however simple the latter may be. But these will be a hindrance to their studies, their freedom of movement, and general development. They become cage-birds, at best fed by their parents; bound by duties during the years which should have been wholly devoted to their self-development.

Thus premature marriages, whether lawful or unlawful in form, may arrest in their growth countless excellent forces, and ruin the full possibilities of happiness in later years. It is true that the early union will have stilled a powerful longing in the young people’s being. But they soon find out that it has at the same time rendered difficult, perhaps impossible, the satisfaction of their desire of knowledge, the taste for research, the creative power, and freedom of action in other, more or less important, directions; for example, in the love of travel which is felt by all young people of spirit, and in the love of pleasure in a wholesome sense. The young mother’s beauty probably never attains the fulness designed by nature, and she is destined to grow old before her time. And even when her children are not weaklings—as is most frequently the case—they do not afford her the happiness they might have brought if they had been longed for; if she had not had to sacrifice to them her youthful joy, the fulness of her strength and beauty, but, on the contrary, had felt this enhanced through motherhood. Above all, the children do not receive the bringing-up which the mother might give them at a somewhat maturer age.

Even if a pair of lovers are themselves willing to be subject to the hindrances imposed in most cases by a premature union, this must be their own affair; but for the child there must be loss.

In order that the child may enjoy the full possibility of favourable conditions of life—in birth as well as in bringing-up—in northern Europe the age of the woman at marriage should be at least twenty, that of the man about twenty-five. This is the period of full maturity, and until this age is reached youth itself gains by complete abstinence, in order by its marriage at the proper age, in the words of Tacitus, to “let the children witness to their parents’ strength.” In the opinion of most younger men of science it is less and less probable that acquired qualities are inherited. Others, again, who have defended or still hold this view, have maintained with more or less force—as a condition of the progress of the race—that procreation should not take place until the activity and surroundings of the parents have acquired a definite character. Acute psychologists who have given attention to woman’s nature, consider that it does not attain its full spiritual maturity before about the age of thirty, while she then still possesses her youthfulness unimpaired; that until then her countenance does not acquire its true completeness of expression; that her individuality, intellectual powers, and passion are then for the first time fully awake; that only these properties can inspire deep love, and that thus woman gains everything by a later marriage, whereas the result of early marriages, where the husband has to “educate” his wife, is frequently, as a witty lady has remarked, that he is destined instead to educate a wife for someone else.

Nor is it only narrow-viewed preachers of morality, but men of science with the broadest outlook in these matters, who declare ever more positively that abstinence until the age of maturity is in a high degree favourable to the physico-psychical strength and elasticity of both sexes, and that such favourable effect may sometimes extend beyond this age.

To this direct gain must also be added the indirect one: that all self-control for a greater and gladdening end—and what end can be greater than this one?—gives to the will that force and to the personality that joy in its strength which will later be all-important in every other department of life.

Such an advancement of the age of marriage will probably not be opposed by many women. Young girls have learned by the experience of others, and now there is scarcely to be found a woman married before the age of twenty who has not discovered that it was premature before she reaches twenty-five. Moreover it is seldom the woman’s desire that hurries on a secret union; for, in the absence of any admixture of Southern blood, it is a long time, many years indeed in some cases, before the senses of the Northern woman are consciously awakened.

But the young girl loves and wishes to satisfy the longing from which she sees her lover suffer, the more so when she comes to know that the demonstrations of affection which have satisfied her needs have increased his suffering. And therefore she silences her own innermost consciousness, which adjures her to wait.

This silencing of the inner voice not infrequently has for its result that the two souls are never fully united, since the senses have stood in their way; or in Nietzsche’s words: Die Sinnlichkeit übereilt oft das Wachsthum der Liebe so dass die Wurzeln schwach bleiben und leicht auszureissen sind. In every pure feeling of morality, a young woman who thus surrenders herself in love stands immeasurably above the engaged girl of good family who allows the man she says she loves to toil alone during the best years of his young manhood, so as at last to prepare for her the position which her own ideas of life, or those of her family, demand. But higher than either stands the young woman who has known how to preserve the freshness of love’s springtime. And when women’s own claims of happiness have become more refined, when their insight into nature is more profound, when they thus become fit to take the lead in erotic development—which in Scandinavia during the last generation has unfortunately been in man’s hands,—then they will also understand this. They must prolong the happy time when love is unspoken, unfettered by promises, full of expectation and intuition. And they need not on this account give up the comradeship in sport, in walks, and studies, which is wholesome in itself, cheerful and preparatory to happiness, but which now leads to premature unions. Women will come to understand when they ought to be on their guard, in order that the sufferings of the period of waiting may be minimised. They will shorten the secret engagement, and they will do away with the public engagement, with the dangers both involve of attenuation of the feelings, and with the latter’s profanation of love’s privacy.

If the youth of the North does not feel its soul in harmony with this mood, its life will have lost its springtime—without receiving in exchange a longer summer; for premature warmth has its revenge in life as in nature. To experience fully the peculiar beauty of each season of life is the attribute of a profounder comprehension of life’s meaning—and this truth is not less true because a Juliet was only fourteen. What Shakespeare has revealed in her is not the force of early love, incomparable with any other power; rather does he show the love, instantaneous, fatal, overcoming all obstacles, which—equally powerful at every age—yet shows its force most unmistakably when it drives two human beings to death just at the time when the yet unlived life they have before them makes the thought of death most full of horror. Only such an exception can anticipate in springtime the flowering of summer. It is therefore not from the whole necessity of their nature, but from attaching too much importance to one side of it, that many young people now have the idea that love loses its fire and its purity by waiting until the organism can bear its fruits. Nothing is more certain than that the chastity of perfect love is conditioned towards unity by the will of the soul and the senses. But this chaste will may be found before or after the possibility of its realisation. And love’s chastity may then show itself as well in waiting for complete unity as in altogether renouncing the same.

It is true that a young man will not experience the intoxication of love at twenty-five as he experienced it some years earlier. But if he feels it for the first time at about twenty-five, then—according to all the laws of physico-psychical sensations of pleasure—just at the height of his sexual existence, and after years of self-control and labour for happiness, he ought to be able to experience a richer vital intoxication than he would have been capable of in the earlier years of his youth.

It is incontestable that premature erotic claims are less the result of the needs of the organism than of the influence of the imagination upon it. Only a new healthiness and beauty in the method of treating erotic questions will gradually refashion the now over-excited imagination, calm erotic curiosity, and strengthen the sense of responsibility towards self and towards the new generation, so that premature sexual life may lose its attraction for the young.

All this however concerns only immature youth.

When, on the other hand, a pair of lovers have reached the age referred to as that of full maturity, and their complete union can only further their own life-enhancement and that of the race, then they commit a sin against themselves and the race if they do not enter into union.

But not even in such a case is secret love desirable, in which the woman goes in constant uneasiness for the possible child, and yet—after the first period of happiness—in a growing desire not only for it but for all the other conditions of life which might give sun and fresh air to her feeling, confined, as it were, in forcing-house or cellar.

In most cases it is only a question of time how soon this secret happiness will languish, since the risk is almost entirely on the woman’s side and the man is too much in the position of one who receives. For human nature is such that this makes one hard; and love is such that this makes one weak. If the man is not hardened thereby, it is because he is extremely sensitive. And again, if he is so, then the secret union, in which the woman gives most, becomes just as humiliating to the man as a marriage in which the wife keeps him by her fortune or her work. The woman, on her side, will be the more difficult to please, will make higher claims upon the love which is to compensate her for the home and for the child, the two interests through which she would first have felt her powers developed in every direction, or, in other words, would have gained complete happiness.

For a woman’s best qualities, even as a mistress, are inseparably bound up with the motherhood in her nature.

There has been and is an infinity of talk about the degradation of woman by her complete surrender without marriage; that the man thus depreciates his loved one in his own eyes and himself in hers; that he is selfish in proposing a union which injures the virtue and modesty of love; that he “sacrifices” the woman to his desire; and so on without end. All this talk is worthless, simply because a woman who loves feels herself degraded neither in her own eyes nor in those of the man; because she has no idea of a “sacrifice,” but of giving and receiving. For she desires the completeness of love with a much profounder will than man, since her erotic needs are stronger—although calmer—than his. But she is frequently—and often for a long time—unconscious that her profound desire to be made happy at any price through love nevertheless refers at bottom to the child. The man sees only the woman’s longing and his happy smile not unfrequently tells of an easy victory. But he does not know—for a long time she does not know herself—when her love becomes a sacrifice; when she begins to feel her position as a degrading one. The man does not see what her smile conceals; he does not understand her when she is silent, and perhaps he does not listen when she speaks. He thus believes her to be still satisfied, when she has begun to hunger for more.

Woman’s need of living and suffering for the race gives her love a purer glow, a higher flame, a profounder will, a more tireless fidelity than man’s. The unsatisfied longing for motherhood is released in an ever warmer, ever more self-sacrificing affection for the loved one. Man, on the other hand, who has less and less opportunity of giving, thereby comes to love less and less. When the woman discovers this, she begins to remember what she has given. And then strife, sin, sorrow, and their wages—death—have entered into what was perhaps at the beginning a genuine love; a love which might have had a full and fair life, if it had had the unifying and purifying influence of a common end, a great purpose.

When love possesses nothing of this kind, its power of motion is directed against itself. The feelings of both parties then become the object of a game like that of parfiler, which was the rage in the eighteenth century, and which consisted in drawing the threads out of worn-out cloth of gold. The feelings are torn up, ripped open, tied together; tangled, disentangled, and wound up. But feelings are roots, not threads—not even gold threads. It is in the great, wholesome realities of life that the creative force of love, like that of art, finds the productive earth for its growth. Torn out of this earth, love, as surely as art, is like a tree blown down by a spring storm, which may indeed put forth leaves this spring—though all its roots are exposed to the air—but which will not live through the summer.

Clandestine love is in this respect like an upper-class marriage without children and without common pursuits, although the self-sacrificing, self-supporting, clandestine mistress stands far above the kept wife, fashionable and full of pretension.

Thus it is not abstract ideas of duty, but real selfishness, which is one with real morality, that will teach youth to understand the meaning of Spinoza’s profound thought, made still more profound by the doctrine of evolution: that “the sexual love which has its origin in what is external and accidental, may easily be turned to hate, a kind of madness that is nourished on discord; but that love, on the other hand, is lasting, which has its cause in freedom of soul and in the will to bear and bring up children.”