Produced by Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from images made available by the HathiTrust
Digital Library.)
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
PAGE
INTRODUCTION BY HAVELOCK ELLIS vii
CHAPTER
I. THE COURSE OF DEVELOPMENT OF SEXUAL MORALITY 1
II. THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 57
III. LOVE’S FREEDOM 107
IV. LOVE’S SELECTION 140
V. THE RIGHT OF MOTHERHOOD 169
VI. EXEMPTION FROM MOTHERHOOD 200
VII. COLLECTIVE MOTHERLINESS 246
VIII. FREE DIVORCE 287
IX. A NEW MARRIAGE LAW 359
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.
[Illustration: Signature of Havelock Ellis]
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_.