The simplest formula for the new conception of morality, which is
beginning to be opposed to moral dogma still esteemed by all society,
but especially by women, might be summed up in these words:
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral
without love.
The customary objection to this tenet is that those who propose it
forget all other ethical duties and legitimate feelings in order to make
the sex relationship the center of existence, and love the sole decisive
point of view in questions concerning this relationship. But if we
except the struggle for existence--which indeed must be called not a
relationship of life but a condition of life--what then can be more
central for man, than a condition decreed by the laws of earthly
life--the cause of his own origin? Can one imagine a moment which
penetrates more deeply his whole being?
That many men live content without the happiness of love, that others
after they attain it seek a new end for their activity, proves nothing
against the truth of the experience that for men in general the erotic
relation between man and woman becomes the deepest life determining
factor, whether negatively, because they are deprived of this relation
or because they formed it unhappily; or positively, because they have
found therein the fullness of life.
The depreciation for mankind of the significance of the sex relation and
of the significance of love in the sex relation brings into it all the
immorality still imposed by conventionalism as morality.
We no longer consider, as in our mother's youth, ignorance of the side
of life which concerns the propagation of the race the essential
condition of womanly purity. But the conventional idea of purity still
maintains that the untouched condition of the senses belongs to this
conception. And it would be right, if the distinction were made between
purity and chastity. Purity is the new-fallen snow which can be melted
or sullied; chastity is steel tempered in the fire by white heat. For
chastity is only developed together with complete love; this not only
excludes equally all partition among several but also makes a separation
between the demands of the heart and the senses impossible. The essence
of chastity is, according to George Sand's profound words: "to be able
never to betray the soul with the senses nor the senses with the soul"
("de ne pouvoir jamais tromper ni l'ame avec les sens ni les sens avec
l'ame"). And as absolute consecration is its distinctive mark, so is it
also its demand. This alone is the chastity which must characterize the
family life and form in the future the basis of foundation for the
happiness of the people.
Literature was, therefore, wholly justified when in the name of nature
it attacked the hyperidealistic subtlety which raised the love of the
heart to the highest rank and made that of the senses the lowest; and
when it desired that the woman should not only know what complete love
was but that she should also when she loved desire that completeness.
Because from time to time powerful voices were raised, like George
Sand's or Almquist's, calling without consideration not only that
marriage immoral which was consummated without mutual love but also that
marriage immoral which was continued without mutual love--a purer
consciousness has awakened in questions regarding the conditions of the
genesis of the unborn race and elevated the conditions of the personal
dignity of man and woman. So eventually it will come to pass that no
finely sensitive woman will become a mother except through mutual love;
that this motherhood sanctioned legally or not so sanctioned shall be
considered the only true motherhood, and every other motherhood untrue.
Thus will mankind awaken to such a feeling of the "Sanctity of the
generation," and to such an understanding of the conditions of the
health, strength and beauty of the race, that every marriage which has
its source in worldly or merely sensual motives, or in reasons of
prudence or in a feeling of duty shall be considered as Almquist calls
it: "A criminal counterfeiting of the highest values of life." And the
same criminal counterfeit obtains in every married life which is
continued under the compulsion, the distaste or the resignation of one
of the two. Man will be penetrated with the consciousness that the whole
ethical conception which now in and with marriage gives to a husband or
a wife rights over the personality of the other, is a crude survival of
the lower periods of culture; that everything which is exchanged between
husband and wife in their life together, can only be the free gift of
love, can never be demanded by one or the other as a right. Man will
understand that when one can no longer continue the life in love then
this life must cease; that all vows binding forever the life of feeling
are a violence of one's personality, since one cannot be held
accountable for the transformation of one's feeling. Even though this
new moral ideal should in the beginning dissolve many untrue marriages
and thus cause much suffering, yet all this suffering is necessary. It
belongs to the attainment of the new erotic ethics which will uplift man
and woman in that sphere where now the spirit of slavery and of
obtuseness under a holy name degrade them; where social convention
sanctions prostitution alongside monogamy, and vouchsafes to the seducer
but not to the seduced, social esteem, calling the unmarried woman
ruined who in love has become a mother, but the married woman
respectable who without love gives children to the man who has bought
her!
The erotic-ethical consciousness of mankind cannot be uplifted until the
new idea of morality with all its consequences is clearly established.
This ideal has two types of adversary. One is the adherent of the
conventional morality; the other the supporter of the transitory union
to which the name of "free love" is erroneously applied.
Those of the first type demand quite the same morality for the man as
for the woman. They assert that celibacy for either sex brings with it
serious difficulties. They maintain that the social feeling of duty, not
mutual love, must be the ground of conjugal fidelity. They call "pure
love" love untouched by all that which they call "sensuality."
These same moral dogmas in recent years have manifested themselves in
the effort to quench all fire, whiten all burning red coals, and drape
all nudity in literature and art. The supporters of this dogma
certainly understand--since, to begin at the beginning they have surely
glanced into the Bible and Homer--that the undertaking would be too vast
were it to extend to classic literature. But all the more ardently they
have directed their zeal against modern literature and art. And if they
do not encounter energetic opposition the fig leaf will soon among us
also attest the fall of taste and of the soul.
"Free love" has also its fanatics who are guilty of quite as crass
excess. They have no conception of soulful and true devotion, which they
consider an absurdity or a conventionality under which human nature
cannot bow without hypocrisy. For since experience shows that lifelong
love is frequently an illusion, so, they say, one must not begin by
expecting it! The so-called Bohemians have shown as great monomania in
their rotation around this one point, the right of the senses, as have
the zealots of traditional morality in their rotation around their
point, the suppression of the senses. The extreme result of both would
be retrogression to a lower degree of culture; in one case to the
asceticism of the Middle Ages, in the other to the promiscuity of the
savage. Both forget the reality of life. On the one side they ignore
this reality in their absolute demands without consideration of
temperament or circumstances; in their assertion of the unqualified
moral superiority of woman and in depreciation of the significance of
love for the full harmony of man and woman. On the other side they
ignore this reality when they try to make woman as unrestrained morally
as man has hitherto been; when they forget all the suffering of the new
generation born and reared in such an unrestrained existence; when they
learn nothing of the nature of woman from the many younger and older
women who live solitary and yet sound and useful lives in the deep
conviction that, since they have not found the great, mutual love, which
decides existence, any union with a man would be degrading and unhappy.
Development has, because of multifarious influences made entirety and
continuity in love a greater life necessity for the woman of culture in
general than for the man of the same intellectual level. A man,
therefore, ordinarily dissolves an erotic relation without bitterness
when he has ceased to love, while a woman, even after her love has
ceased, often suffers because the relationship has not endured a
lifetime.
It is this ever increasing peremptory demand for erotic completeness of
the woman of developed individuality of the present time, which causes
her always to wish to more fervently cherish the personality of the man
as entirely as it is her happiness and her pride to be able to give her
own. It is this demand for entirety which, among Germanic peoples, at
least, makes woman neither desirous nor psychologically fitted for the
so-called "free love." This is evidently to be concluded from the
vicissitudes of those who have tried it.
"Free love" is moreover quite as senseless an expression as "legal
love." Because no external command can call love into being or repress
it; it is in this sense always free, yet as are all feelings, it is
bound by certain psychological laws. If not, then it does not deserve
the name of love. It is with love as with the human face: though the
individual varieties are infinite, yet there are certain general
characteristic features which make all these different faces human
faces, all these different feelings human love. And in every time there
is a type for both, which is recognized as nobler than the others.
This noblest type of love has been portrayed by a Danish writer,[A] who
endeavored to show that a conception of life founded upon evolution need
not lead to laxity in sexual relations. He shows how the erotic feeling,
as all other feelings, has been developed from an incoherent,
indeterminate and indefinite condition to one more coherent, determinate
and differentiated, and so from a simple instinct for reproduction of
the species has been finally transformed to an entirely personal, inner
love. The highest type of this love is that which exists between a man
and a woman of the same moral and intellectual level; which demands of
necessity reciprocal love in order to be perfected, and can therefore be
contented with no other kind of reciprocal love than a corresponding
erotic love. This perfect love includes the yearning desire of both
lovers to become entirely one being, to free each other and to develop
each other to the greatest perfection. If love is perfected and
consummated thus by the life together, then can it be given to only one
and only once in a lifetime. This thought of the Danish writer is
expressed with the concise brevity of the poet, by Bjornson, when he
says of the sensation "feeling oneself doubled" in the beloved one:
"_That_ is love, all else is not love." This feeling which liberates,
conserves and deepens the personality, which is the inspiration to noble
deeds and works of genius, is the opposite of the ephemeral, merely
sensual love, which enslaves, dissipates and lessens the personality.
[A] See Viggo Drewsen: "En Livsanskuelse grundet paa Elskow" ("A
Conception of Life Founded upon Love") and "Forholdet mellem
Maud og Kvinde belyst gjennem Udviklingshypothesen." ("The
Relation between Man and Woman in the Light of the Hypothesis
of Evolution.")
It is only the great love which has a higher right than all other
feelings and which can establish its right in a life.
He who considers this love decisive for the morality of such an erotic
union cannot believe that external ties are necessary to give ethical
value to this union. Social considerations, prudence and feeling for
others can indeed in certain cases make the legal bond desirable. But it
can just as little give increased consecration to real love, as it can
give any consecration whatever to a relation in which this content is
lacking. And even if it would be too dogmatic to establish just the
highest type of love as ethical norm for all relations between man and
woman, since life proves that the highest love is still as rare as the
highest beauty, yet it is on the contrary not premature to assert that
this love, legally sanctioned or not, is moral, and that where it is
lacking on either side, a moral ground is furnished for the dissolution
of the relationship. The ever clearer consciousness that love can
dispense with marriage yet marriage cannot dispense with love, is
already partially recognized in modern society, by the facility of
divorce. And it is only a question of time when the law which gives to
one person the power to constrain the other to remain with him against
his will, will be abrogated, so contrary is this possibility to that
developed conception of the freedom of love--which is not at all the
same as so-called "free love!"
It is not historically true that it was, as has been asserted, some
certain conception of morality, some certain form of concluding or
dissolving marriage which, in the last analysis, has been a decisive
factor in the progress or decadence of peoples. Among the Jews as among
the Greeks, among the Romans as among our Germanic forefathers, at the
most flourishing period, there existed many laws and customs which were
considered moral that the present time considers immoral. The decisive
thing for the sound life of these peoples was, that that which they
considered right had sovereign power to bind them: the faithfulness to
the conception of duty more than the content of conception determines
the moral soundness of a people. Society is in danger, not when the
ideals are raised but when they are lost. But a very highly developed
historical sense is necessary to see at the same time the connection and
the difference between dissolution and reorganization. Moreover it is
necessary to have the large view of the essentials of life which
distinguishes the true poet, the view which Sophocles possessed when he
let his Antigone follow the higher law of affection and commit a
violation of the law which--according to the conception of that
time--would lead to general license if it remained unpunished. The new
ideal of marriage is now being formed in and through all the many
literary and personal dissensions in which it constitutes the theme.
Yes, it is formed also in the midst of all the conflicts of life for
which marriage gives so much occasion. It is true there are now married
people who separate because from the very beginning they considered
fidelity impossible and so did not even strive for it. But many other
divorces have far more complex, psychological reasons. When two people
are married young, personal development takes often entirely opposite
directions; if they have married in more mature years, then their
individual differences, already strongly marked from the beginning, make
the problem of common life together difficult of solution. The strongly
developed sensibility of the modern individual to disposition, nuances,
variations of humor, makes a lack of sympathy still more unendurable; a
true sympathy a far greater source of joy. The whole multiplicity of
psycho-physical influences and impressions which the members of a family
exercise upon one another for pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and
variance, harmony and discord, are now in all relationships, but above
all in marriage, felt with greatest intensity. It is in those natures
most individually developed, most refined, for whom the nuances of the
married life, not its simple primal colors, signify happiness or
unhappiness.
To this general delicacy of feeling there is added especially the
heightened sensibility of woman to the discord between that which she
expected in marriage and that which in reality it offered her, because
the union often lacked the freedom, the understanding which her
sympathetic feeling now craves. This lack of harmony is inevitable since
the forms of marriage have not even approximately undergone the
transformation which would correspond to the individual development of
the two beings, of the woman especially, whom it unites. But while all
these reasons, cursorily indicated here, contribute their part in the
increased number of divorces, the life of finer feeling creates, on the
other hand, an ever more intimate married life. There are married people
who have pledged each other at marriage full freedom to dissolve the
union when either of them so wished, and others who have never given
legal form to their marriage yet realize fully and richly love in
"sorrow and in joy," in sympathetic work together, in reciprocal, true
devotion. There have been, on the other hand, champions of so-called
"free love" who were themselves by nature such pronounced believers in
only one marriage that their life was wrecked when the one to whom they
had bound themselves applied to their own case their own theories. It is
always the character which ultimately decides. Character can make the
radical theorist a moral paragon and the pillar of society resting upon
conservative ground a reed of passion; it can make the advocate of
egoism sublimely devoted and the apostle of Christianity deeply egoistic
in his love.
So many men, so many souls; so many souls, so many destinies. And to
wish to apply to this whole, complex, manifold, incalculable erotic
life, with its unfathomable depths, an immutable ethical standard, when
judging the relationship between man and woman, and to make this
standard decisive also for the ethical value of the personality in other
respects--is quite as naive as the attempt of a child to draw up in his
little bucket the wonderful depth of the vast storm-driven sea.
Love, as life, will fortunately remain an eternal mystery which no
science will be able to penetrate and which reason cannot rule. Our only
hope for the future is that man, endowed with a more delicate sense,
will listen to the secrets of his own life. A more highly developed and
differentiated soul life will give him a surer instinct or a keener
power of analysis which will prevent him from confounding a passing
sentiment of sympathy, need of tenderness or satisfaction of vanity with
a love which decides existence. Now, on the contrary, many believe that
a wave of admiration, of gratitude, or of pity is the whole sea; that
the reflection of the fire of another is the holy fire itself!
No one can with certainty predict the final result of the profound
revolution of the feeling and of the customs which is now taking place.
But one thing appears certain: the danger to the future of mankind can
scarcely be that the new ideal will result in general license. Rather it
will lead to so individual, differentiated and refined love that erotic
happiness will be increasingly difficult to find and the idealists of
love will more frequently prefer celibacy to a compromise with their
greater demands for sympathetic love.
The occasional experience, often only the dream of such a love, sensible
to the finest shades of the soul, to the most delicate vibrations of the
senses--of a love which is an all comprehensive tenderness, an all
embracing intimacy--has already raised the erotic demands and the erotic
existence of thousands of men and women to a sphere of more infinite
longing, more fervid chastity than that of their contemporaries. It is
this experience or this dream which has already begun to assume form in
the art and literature of the present time. It is true the extreme
discord between the peculiar character of man and of woman has long been
the favorite theme, especially in modern literature. But among the wild,
discordant tones a new leitmotiv resounds which will swell and rise and
fill the void with a harmony, still but faintly divined.
One of the conditions that this harmony become as perfect as possible
is that woman in life as in literature shall begin to be more honest and
man more eager to listen when she reveals to him something of her own
nature. Men have desired and justly that women should learn from their
confessions in regard to the conflict between man and woman. But woman
because of the conventional conception of womanly purity has been
intimidated from conceding to man a deep insight into her erotic life
experiences.
Only when women begin to tell the truth about themselves will literature
universally illuminate the still unknown depths of woman's erotic
temperament. To the present time it has been almost exclusively men
poets who have made revelations about women. The nearer these poets have
approached life, the more surely have they seen the highest expression
of the eternal feminine as the great women poets also saw it: in erotic
love and in mother love. And it was the completeness of her consecration
which was in their eyes a woman's supreme chastity.
It is the great poets who have taught and have continued to teach youth
to revere the "all powerful Eros."
This is the only "morality" which has a future. Only by conforming to
this shall we gradually succeed in preventing the erotic feeling from
appearing sometimes as a brutal instinct or marriage from being founded
upon a fleeting attraction.
An ideal of negative purity--even incarnated in the person of
Jesus--cannot inflame youth and therefore cannot in the long run protect
him. That alone which has the power not only to restrain but also to
transform the brutal instinct is a conception of the existence of a
higher feeling which belongs to the same sphere of life as the instinct
itself.
To burn the ideal of a great love into the soul of youth in letters of
fire--that is to give him a real moral strength. Thus there springs up
in man the ineradicable, invincible instinct that an erotic relation can
exist only as the expression of a reciprocal all comprehensive love.
Thus will youth learn to consider the love-marriage as the central life
relation, the center of life, and he will be inflamed with the desire to
develop and to conserve body and soul for the entrance into this most
holy thing in nature, wherein man and woman find their happiness in
creating a new race for happiness. Thus will young men and women in
increasing numbers understand that their own happiness, as well as that
of the coming generation will be the greater the more completely they
can give their personality to love. Boys and girls, young men and
maidens, men and women by coeducation, by joint labor and comradeship
will develop in one another that mutual understanding which will remove
the enmity between the sexes, in which modern individualization--and the
therewith increasing demands of the personality--has so far found its
expression.
The usages of individual homes will be differentiated, instead of as now
maintaining the same conventional forms for all families. After some
generations so educated, under the influence of relationships thus
arranged, we shall see marriages such as even now not a few are seen,
in which not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that
assures fidelity. Then will love be cherished as the most delicate, most
precious thing in life; then will egoism and unselfishness attain a
perfect harmony, because the husband and wife find happiness only in
assuring the happiness of the other. That is the union which the
Norwegian poet defines when he calls true marriage "a yearning quest
after each other, an energetic cultivation, assertion of the
personality, in order to be able to give one's personality; an ever
increasing intimacy of understanding of each other; a union which the
whole course of life will make more profound."
So prepared, the absolute human ideal will become perhaps a living
reality; not as an isolated man, not as an isolated woman, but as a man
and a woman who shall give to mankind a new religion--that of happiness.
* * * * *
Many indeed still doubt that marriage can become this highest form of
existence in life, in which the surrender of the ego and the
self-seeking of the ego reach a perfect harmony. It is asserted that
this ideal condition can be attained perhaps by exceptional people, but
never by ordinary people, and that the morality of the latter can be
kept sound only by legal and social restraint.
My belief, however, is that, just as the Children of Israel followed the
pillar of fire, so ordinary men follow at a distance exceptional men,
and in this way mankind as a whole advances. Ordinary men are just now
determined upon certain conceptions which at the end of the previous
century were not conclusive even for exceptional people. The marriage of
reason, for example, is already considered ignoble by many. The
authority of the parents is very seldom in evidence either to coerce the
children into a marriage without love or to restrain them from it. Even
the superficial erotic emotion of our day is serious in comparison with
the shallow and frivolous or vulgar and cruel gallantry of the
eighteenth century. In the geological deposits of legislation and still
more in those of literature we can study these risings of the levels of
the erotic sentiments. So we are thereby convinced that the demands and
conflicts of the exceptional men become gradually those of the ordinary
men also, even though the ordinary men are always some generations
behind the men who are stirred by new emotions, new conflicts, when the
many have reached the problems which some decades before occupied only
the few.
Certainly it may, under present imperfect conditions, often be a duty
not to destroy the outward form of marriage for the sake of the
children. But by no means can this duty be preached as universally
binding. Only the individual himself can in each separate case determine
the dissolution best, both for the children and for the married couple
themselves, of a marriage which has fallen asunder within. When we
consider the development in its entirety, the sooner people cease to
sanction the present marriage the more fortunate it will be; for the
sooner will the transformation be forced upon us by which marriage will
maintain its permanence only from within. Only then will man be wholly
able to have the experiences and to find the new, delicate means by
which fidelity can be strengthened and happiness assured. But man will
not seek this expedient so long as he can rely upon the power of legal
right and social opinion to hold together that which love does not
unify.
The ever increasing individualization of love indicates that
mono-marriage will doubtless remain the form of erotic union between man
and woman. But this rule will have, in the future, as in the past, many
exceptions, since the feelings can change. The conflicts which will thus
arise will bring suffering as a consequence, but not the bitterness nor
the contention which the property sense in marriage now so often
occasions. The deep consciousness that love belongs not to the sphere of
duty but only to that of freedom will cause the one who has lost the
love of the other to feel the same resignation before the inevitable,
as if he were separated from the other by death.
And in cases where the individual is not capable of this resignation,
then the law as well as custom shall make it impossible for the one to
hold back the other against his will. Each of the twain shall be master
of his own person and of his property, of his work and of his mode of
life; the union shall in each especial case be arranged by the agreement
of the individuals, and the law shall decide only the rights and duties
of the husband and wife in regard to the children.
When in this way it shall come to pass that neither the husband nor wife
shall have in outward sense, in external things, anything to gain or to
lose by the consummation or dissolution of marriage, then only the
erotic problem appears in all its seriousness.
Many mistakes, many caricatures, many tragic failures will naturally be
the result of freedom. Great waves have great combers. A new principle
cannot be put into effect without bringing with it new mistakes. But we
may, however, be convinced that the laws of life--to which belongs the
law that suffering follows the misuse of freedom--will finally be able
to bring everything within its right limits. Nothing indeed has
occasioned more suffering as an indirect consequence than Christianity,
and although Jesus knew that, yet he did not hesitate to give to mankind
this new creative force which destroyed in order to create. But it is
above all His ideality which His present followers lack, the great
ideality which dares to believe in the might of the spirit rather than
that of the form.
It is, therefore, quite natural that these Christians, the upholders of
society, oppose the new ideal of morality with vain apprehensions. They
believe that a woman whose conscious aim is "Self-assertion in
self-surrender" will forfeit the immediate, fresh originality in this
surrender. They believe marriage must be destroyed when the support of
its development is no longer bond and injunction, but is its own vital
force. They believe morality will lose in the struggle if youth learns
to consider the love between man and woman as the central condition of
life. These, and a hundred similar apprehensions have all one and the
same source.
This source is the Christian conception of life which has displaced the
great, sound, strong conviction of antiquity of the holiness of nature.
Mary was the "Virgin Mother;" Jesus, celibate. Paul regarded marriage as
the lesser of two evils. Thus man first learned to regard the unmarried
state as the higher and the married as the lower state. The result of
the Christian conception of life then was that the sex relation was
regarded in and for itself as unholy, human nature in and for itself as
base and the earthly demand for happiness as the greatest egotism.
Therefore the Christian conception of life is now, since it has
accomplished its great task of culture, the development of altruism--an
obstacle to the unified conception out of which the happiness of mankind
will finally develop.
No one who thinks or feels deeply dreams that this happiness can be
easily achieved. The consistent belief of monism in human nature can
only gradually leaven life. And until then suffering will be for the
majority the first result of freedom. Even for the few, to whom the
relationships have already given happiness, must this be incomplete in
the measure in which they feel sympathy with all the suffering about
them. But above all is happiness rare because the genius for happiness
is still so rare, is indeed on the whole the rarest genius. To possess
it means to approach life with the humility of a beggar, but to treat it
with the proud generosity of a prince; to bring to its totality the deep
understanding of a great poet and to each of its moments the abandonment
and ingenuousness of a child; it means to be able to enjoy wholly each
present, immediate, joy and yet to be able to give up the incidental joy
for the enduring one.
Happiness lies so far from man; but he must begin by daring to will it.
It is this courage which Christianity broke down when it directed the
soul from the earth to eternity and gave to renunciation the highest
place among ethical values. Through the _Revaluation of all Values_,
which is now going on, happiness will receive this Place.
He who contends for the deepest of all ideas, Spinosa's idea, that "Joy
is perfection," contends with certainty of victory, however solitary he
may stand, however much of his heart's blood may be shed in the strife.
We live still in our inmost soul only by that for which we die. And all
for which we have died will live when the time shall come in which all
we ourselves have suffered signifies nothing for us, yet that for which
we have suffered signifies everything for others.