LOVE’S FREEDOM
The most delicate test of a person’s sense of morality is his power of
interpreting ambiguous signs of the times in the ethical sphere; for
only the profoundly moral can discover the dividing line, sharp as the
edge of a sword, between new morality and old immorality.
In our time ethical obtuseness betrays itself first and foremost
by the condemnation of those young couples who freely unite their
destinies. The majority does not perceive the advance in morality which
this implies in comparison with the code of so many men, who without
responsibility—and without apparent risk—purchase the repose of their
senses.
Those young men who choose “free love” know that bought love may
destroy their finest instruments of mental activity; that it may result
in injury to the wife as well as in the danger either of degeneracy on
the part of the children, or of childishness, and may finally bring
about their own premature downfall.
But they also know that these results may not occur and that, on the
other hand, they may suffer spiritually by curbing their personality
and ruining their possibilities of single-hearted love. At the same
time they despise their fathers’ less dangerous, but for that reason
more unprincipled, expedient for sexual satisfaction, the seduction
of women of the people, women with whom they never had any thought of
community of life.
“Free love,” on the other hand, gives them an enhancement of life which
they consider that they gain without injuring anyone. It answers to
their idea of love’s chastity, an idea which is justly offended by the
incompleteness of the period of engagement with all its losses in the
freshness and frankness of emotion. When their soul has found another
soul, when the senses of both have met in a common longing, then they
consider that they have a right to the full unity of love, although
compelled to secrecy, since the conditions of society render early
marriage impossible. They are thus freed from a wasteful struggle,
which would neither give them peace nor inner purity and which would be
doubly hard for them, since they have attained the end—love—for the
sake of which self-control would have been imposed.
When in this connection we speak of youth, we can mean only the young
men and girls of the upper classes. For among the rest of society the
free union of love has long been the custom. Our working classes—as
those of many European countries—simply use the same freedom which the
custom of society allows to many extra-European peoples. Ethnographical
research shows that this is no new degraded habit, but, on the
contrary, a relic of primitive customs. Among certain extra-European
peoples—for example, one in north Burmah—this custom was accompanied
by definite guarantees for the possible children. Young people may
without hindrance unite freely, and separate if they do not find their
feeling deep enough for continued life together. In the contrary case,
they marry, and after marriage infidelity is as good as unknown. If the
girl becomes a mother, without a marriage following, the man is obliged
to secure the child through a sum paid to the girl’s father, who is
then answerable for it.
It is from similar sexual customs that the majority of our Swedish
people derive theirs—that people which in royal and academic speeches
has gained the character of being “the most law-abiding and loyal”
in the world. Failing a deeper love or a sense of responsibility,
these customs involve the abandonment of the woman, infanticide, and
sometimes the prostitution of the woman, when she has passed from one
man to another; finally the encumbrance of society with the children
of different fathers to whom she has given life, besides the neglect
of the children. And the custom leads—even in those cases where both
love and responsibility are present, but where the lovers are too
young—to the enfeebling of themselves and of the children, and to the
great mortality of the latter. Not only hard labour and scanty food,
but also a premature sexual life, contribute to hinder the full bodily
development of the lower classes and to hasten their growing old.
But by the side of these evil effects there are good ones. In most
cases, a young couple’s prospect of parentage leads their relatives to
make their marriage possible. When this cannot take place immediately,
the daughter and her child stay with the parents of one of them, or
she leaves the child with them, while she on her side, and the young
man on his, work for the future. Even when the man has not always
been disposed for marriage, their common life of work and the sense
of parentage soon show a uniting force. Such couples who have come
together in youth probably have better prospects for their life
together than an upper-class couple, worn out by a long engagement, in
which the bride has a full right to her orange-flowers—to say nothing
of the health contributed by the man of the people in comparison
with the majority of men of the upper class, who have bought their
injurious substitute for marriage while waiting for the promotion which
should make marriage possible. One thing at any rate is certain: that
matrimonial fidelity among the people is as great as freedom before
marriage is unlimited. That the free love of the peasant and working
class ends, as a rule, in marriage, often depends on the fact that
public opinion supports this as a point of morality. But—in those
cases where love itself does not bring about community of life—the
sense of parentage and the need of a helpmate are as decisive as
public opinion; for even among the erotically undeveloped the need of
cohabitation makes itself felt for other purposes than the instinct
of the race. It is the desire for such community of life—with its
sharing of pleasure and hardship, sorrow and attention—which makes it
really uniting. Where no such desire exists, the relationship becomes
immoral from the point of view of life-enhancement. If this standard
of morality be not adhered to, free love among the upper class—as
among the lower class—will, it is true, contribute to the abolition of
prostitution, but not to the exaltation of mankind through a greater
love, a higher morality.
For if, on the one hand, the sexual customs of the lower class allow
more right than those of the upper class to the direct claims of
nature, on the other hand, the customs of the latter still provide the
same opportunities for the elevation into love of the instinct which,
from an historical and ethnographical point of view, has everywhere
been provided by self-control. Among those nations with which sexual
connections begin early, morals are, as a rule, loose, and where morals
are loose, the emotion of love has small importance. The control of
sensuality develops the deeper feelings of love. We need not go to
the nations of the past, or to existing extra-European peoples, but
only to the town and country labourers of our own and other European
lands, to see how the feelings become lax and feeble, the senses coarse
and greedy, when they have acquired the habit of satisfying physical
hunger before that of the soul has awakened. The miserable conditions
of dwelling among the lower classes are enough by themselves to rob
sexual life of its discretion; immature age or the tie of blood is
frequently no hindrance to unchastity, and its consequences—coarseness
and lack of responsibility towards one another as well as towards the
offspring—at times take hideous forms. The first condition therefore
for love’s freedom is that the freedom shall concern love, the most
universal sign of which is the desire of continued community of life.
As this sign is, as a rule, to be found among young people of the
educated class who now claim love’s freedom, they are thus far within
their rights, as also are the young people of the lower class when they
use the same freedom and as a result form many excellent connubial
unions. We could with every reason—and with more reason—draw the same
conclusions with regard to the upper class, if it were not the case
that among these love has become a so much more penetrating force.
While the majority of the working class—for even there a minority
with more refined erotic feelings is to be found,—in addition to the
satisfaction of its instincts, contents itself with a capable and
devoted comrade to bear its burden, the developed man or woman of
the present day has deeper erotic needs. It is the satisfaction of
these that is often missed by a youthful decision in life; for even
when youthful love is soulful—and nearly all youthful love can so be
described—it is nevertheless in most cases a longing for love rather
than love, a craving for experience rather than the new life itself.
And therefore the erotic feelings of early youth are founded upon the
illusions which make a Romeo lament the harshness of Rosalind a moment
before meeting Juliet, and a Titania to fondle Bottom’s ass’s ears.
Never in after life has the world such a marvellous glamour as when the
first dream of love has swathed all contours in its opalescent mists
of sunrise, but—never do we so easily go astray. It may happen that
the lifting of the mists will disclose the most beautiful landscape.
But there are more chances that the course one has steered in the fog
will end in one of many shipwrecks. Therefore the “’teens” should be
the age of the erotic prologue, not of the drama. For this reason also,
that no one can decide to what degree the transient may injure the
final relations of life; nor to what degree great love may be missed
or spoiled, when accidental love has anticipated its rights, even
though this happened in the full and frank belief that the accident was
destiny.
No part of the art of living is more important for youth than
developing in one’s self the knowledge of a predestined fellowship
which permits of waiting. People curse the hazards which separate
lovers. But it is less the hazards which separate than those which
unite at the wrong time, that ought to be cursed. First youth seldom
loses in love anything but what is unimportant; the reality shows
itself—when both are free—as what cannot be lost. Those who belong
to each other come together in the end; those whom chance parts, never
belonged to each other. A man may fail of happiness by finding out
too late what is real in himself or others; not by abstaining from
action before this discovery. Therefore youth should wait before making
decisive plunges into its own and others’ destinies, since great love
may resemble the Japanese divinity, to pray to whom more than once is a
crime, since it answers prayer only once.
But even when a young couple has the profoundest mutual sense of the
permanence of their feeling, it does not follow that their love ought
immediately to involve the rights and the accompanying responsibilities
of a later age. For young trees break or bend under too heavy a weight
of fruit, nor does the fruit attain its full value on trees that are
too young. Here nature herself is the opponent of youthful marriages.
Let us leave on one side the possibility of people being unwillingly
bound together through the consequences of an over-hasty union, and
deal only with the certainty that the young people in a profound
sense continue to belong to each other. They will nevertheless as
surely suffer through the possible or probable consequence of their
action, the child. Their consciousness of not being able to bear this
consequence will doubtless make them try to avoid it. But this is an
ugly beginning to a life of love. Many consider that it also involves
dangers. For those who have already given to the race their tribute
of new life, or who ought never thus to give, the choice must be free
between the two dangers. But for the opening of a life in common this
resource may be equally unsafe and unwholesome, since the racial
instinct as a whole is left unaccomplished. And thus love is robbed
of a part of its spiritual meaning, and sensuousness of its natural
restraint. But even if these consequences do not follow, “failure” may
yet be the most fortunate occurrence in these cases—and also the most
usual. How then does it appear in reality?
In most cases young people have entered into their free union because
they have seen no possibility of an open marriage. They are the less
able to support a child, as they themselves are supported by others,
in so far as they are not keeping themselves by running into debt or
by badly-paid labour. In the latter case, the child means a further
hindrance to life, the more so as it must involve for the woman
a diminution, perhaps a total loss, of her powers of work. It is
therefore the young people’s relatives who have to help. And, when
this is possible, the form it takes is that the lovers are obliged to
marry and receive the help that the parents can afford. In the case of
the poorer classes, this is comparatively slight, as the newly-married
pair frequently stay with the parents of one of them. But in the upper
classes, on the other hand, they prefer, with full reason, to form
their own home, and then there ensue the inevitable cares of child
and housekeeping, however simple the latter may be. But these will be
a hindrance to their studies, their freedom of movement, and general
development. They become cage-birds, at best fed by their parents;
bound by duties during the years which should have been wholly devoted
to their self-development.
Thus premature marriages, whether lawful or unlawful in form, may
arrest in their growth countless excellent forces, and ruin the full
possibilities of happiness in later years. It is true that the early
union will have stilled a powerful longing in the young people’s being.
But they soon find out that it has at the same time rendered difficult,
perhaps impossible, the satisfaction of their desire of knowledge,
the taste for research, the creative power, and freedom of action in
other, more or less important, directions; for example, in the love of
travel which is felt by all young people of spirit, and in the love of
pleasure in a wholesome sense. The young mother’s beauty probably never
attains the fulness designed by nature, and she is destined to grow
old before her time. And even when her children are not weaklings—as
is most frequently the case—they do not afford her the happiness they
might have brought if they had been longed for; if she had not had
to sacrifice to them her youthful joy, the fulness of her strength
and beauty, but, on the contrary, had felt this enhanced through
motherhood. Above all, the children do not receive the bringing-up
which the mother might give them at a somewhat maturer age.
Even if a pair of lovers are themselves willing to be subject to the
hindrances imposed in most cases by a premature union, this must be
their own affair; but for the child there must be loss.
In order that the child may enjoy the full possibility of favourable
conditions of life—in birth as well as in bringing-up—in northern
Europe the age of the woman at marriage should be at least twenty, that
of the man about twenty-five. This is the period of full maturity, and
until this age is reached youth itself gains by complete abstinence, in
order by its marriage at the proper age, in the words of Tacitus, to
“let the children witness to their parents’ strength.” In the opinion
of most younger men of science it is less and less probable that
acquired qualities are inherited. Others, again, who have defended or
still hold this view, have maintained with more or less force—as a
condition of the progress of the race—that procreation should not take
place until the activity and surroundings of the parents have acquired
a definite character. Acute psychologists who have given attention to
woman’s nature, consider that it does not attain its full spiritual
maturity before about the age of thirty, while she then still possesses
her youthfulness unimpaired; that until then her countenance does not
acquire its true completeness of expression; that her individuality,
intellectual powers, and passion are then for the first time fully
awake; that only these properties can inspire deep love, and that thus
woman gains everything by a later marriage, whereas the result of early
marriages, where the husband has to “educate” his wife, is frequently,
as a witty lady has remarked, that he is destined instead to educate a
wife for someone else.
Nor is it only narrow-viewed preachers of morality, but men of science
with the broadest outlook in these matters, who declare ever more
positively that abstinence until the age of maturity is in a high
degree favourable to the physico-psychical strength and elasticity of
both sexes, and that such favourable effect may sometimes extend beyond
this age.
To this direct gain must also be added the indirect one: that all
self-control for a greater and gladdening end—and what end can be
greater than this one?—gives to the will that force and to the
personality that joy in its strength which will later be all-important
in every other department of life.
Such an advancement of the age of marriage will probably not be opposed
by many women. Young girls have learned by the experience of others,
and now there is scarcely to be found a woman married before the age of
twenty who has not discovered that it was premature before she reaches
twenty-five. Moreover it is seldom the woman’s desire that hurries on a
secret union; for, in the absence of any admixture of Southern blood,
it is a long time, many years indeed in some cases, before the senses
of the Northern woman are consciously awakened.
But the young girl loves and wishes to satisfy the longing from which
she sees her lover suffer, the more so when she comes to know that
the demonstrations of affection which have satisfied her needs have
increased his suffering. And therefore she silences her own innermost
consciousness, which adjures her to wait.
This silencing of the inner voice not infrequently has for its result
that the two souls are never fully united, since the senses have stood
in their way; or in Nietzsche’s words: _Die Sinnlichkeit übereilt oft
das Wachsthum der Liebe so dass die Wurzeln schwach bleiben und leicht
auszureissen sind._ In every pure feeling of morality, a young woman
who thus surrenders herself in love stands immeasurably above the
engaged girl of good family who allows the man she says she loves to
toil alone during the best years of his young manhood, so as at last
to prepare for her the position which her own ideas of life, or those
of her family, demand. But higher than either stands the young woman
who has known how to preserve the freshness of love’s springtime. And
when women’s own claims of happiness have become more refined, when
their insight into nature is more profound, when they thus become fit
to take the lead in erotic development—which in Scandinavia during
the last generation has unfortunately been in man’s hands,—then they
will also understand this. They must prolong the happy time when love
is unspoken, unfettered by promises, full of expectation and intuition.
And they need not on this account give up the comradeship in sport,
in walks, and studies, which is wholesome in itself, cheerful and
preparatory to happiness, but which now leads to premature unions.
Women will come to understand when they ought to be on their guard, in
order that the sufferings of the period of waiting may be minimised.
They will shorten the secret engagement, and they will do away with the
public engagement, with the dangers both involve of attenuation of the
feelings, and with the latter’s profanation of love’s privacy.
If the youth of the North does not feel its soul in harmony with this
mood, its life will have lost its springtime—without receiving in
exchange a longer summer; for premature warmth has its revenge in life
as in nature. To experience fully the peculiar beauty of each season
of life is the attribute of a profounder comprehension of life’s
meaning—and this truth is not less true because a Juliet was only
fourteen. What Shakespeare has revealed in her is not the force of
early love, incomparable with any other power; rather does he show the
love, instantaneous, fatal, overcoming all obstacles, which—equally
powerful at every age—yet shows its force most unmistakably when
it drives two human beings to death just at the time when the yet
unlived life they have before them makes the thought of death most full
of horror. Only such an exception can anticipate in springtime the
flowering of summer. It is therefore not from the whole necessity of
their nature, but from attaching too much importance to one side of it,
that many young people now have the idea that love loses its fire and
its purity by waiting until the organism can bear its fruits. Nothing
is more certain than that the chastity of perfect love is conditioned
towards unity by the will of the soul and the senses. But this chaste
will may be found before or after the possibility of its realisation.
And love’s chastity may then show itself as well in waiting for
complete unity as in altogether renouncing the same.
It is true that a young man will not experience the intoxication of
love at twenty-five as he experienced it some years earlier. But if he
feels it for the first time at about twenty-five, then—according to
all the laws of physico-psychical sensations of pleasure—just at the
height of his sexual existence, and after years of self-control and
labour for happiness, he ought to be able to experience a richer vital
intoxication than he would have been capable of in the earlier years of
his youth.
It is incontestable that premature erotic claims are less the result of
the needs of the organism than of the influence of the imagination upon
it. Only a new healthiness and beauty in the method of treating erotic
questions will gradually refashion the now over-excited imagination,
calm erotic curiosity, and strengthen the sense of responsibility
towards self and towards the new generation, so that premature sexual
life may lose its attraction for the young.
All this however concerns only immature youth.
When, on the other hand, a pair of lovers have reached the age referred
to as that of full maturity, and their complete union can only further
their own life-enhancement and that of the race, then they commit a sin
against themselves and the race if they do not enter into union.
But not even in such a case is secret love desirable, in which
the woman goes in constant uneasiness for the possible child, and
yet—after the first period of happiness—in a growing desire not only
for it but for all the other conditions of life which might give sun
and fresh air to her feeling, confined, as it were, in forcing-house or
cellar.
In most cases it is only a question of time how soon this secret
happiness will languish, since the risk is almost entirely on the
woman’s side and the man is too much in the position of one who
receives. For human nature is such that this makes one hard; and love
is such that this makes one weak. If the man is not hardened thereby,
it is because he is extremely sensitive. And again, if he is so, then
the secret union, in which the woman gives most, becomes just as
humiliating to the man as a marriage in which the wife keeps him by her
fortune or her work. The woman, on her side, will be the more difficult
to please, will make higher claims upon the love which is to compensate
her for the home and for the child, the two interests through which she
would first have felt her powers developed in every direction, or, in
other words, would have gained complete happiness.
For a woman’s best qualities, even as a mistress, are inseparably bound
up with the motherhood in her nature.
There has been and is an infinity of talk about the degradation of
woman by her complete surrender without marriage; that the man thus
depreciates his loved one in his own eyes and himself in hers; that he
is selfish in proposing a union which injures the virtue and modesty of
love; that he “sacrifices” the woman to his desire; and so on without
end. All this talk is worthless, simply because a woman who loves feels
herself degraded neither in her own eyes nor in those of the man;
because she has no idea of a “sacrifice,” but of giving and receiving.
For she desires the completeness of love with a much profounder will
than man, since her erotic needs are stronger—although calmer—than
his. But she is frequently—and often for a long time—unconscious
that her profound desire to be made happy at any price through love
nevertheless refers at bottom to the child. The man sees only the
woman’s longing and his happy smile not unfrequently tells of an easy
victory. But he does not know—for a long time she does not know
herself—when her love becomes a sacrifice; when she begins to feel
her position as a degrading one. The man does not see what her smile
conceals; he does not understand her when she is silent, and perhaps
he does not listen when she speaks. He thus believes her to be still
satisfied, when she has begun to hunger for more.
Woman’s need of living and suffering for the race gives her love a
purer glow, a higher flame, a profounder will, a more tireless fidelity
than man’s. The unsatisfied longing for motherhood is released in an
ever warmer, ever more self-sacrificing affection for the loved one.
Man, on the other hand, who has less and less opportunity of giving,
thereby comes to love less and less. When the woman discovers this, she
begins to remember what she has given. And then strife, sin, sorrow,
and their wages—death—have entered into what was perhaps at the
beginning a genuine love; a love which might have had a full and fair
life, if it had had the unifying and purifying influence of a common
end, a great purpose.
When love possesses nothing of this kind, its power of motion is
directed against itself. The feelings of both parties then become the
object of a game like that of _parfiler_, which was the rage in the
eighteenth century, and which consisted in drawing the threads out of
worn-out cloth of gold. The feelings are torn up, ripped open, tied
together; tangled, disentangled, and wound up. But feelings are roots,
not threads—not even gold threads. It is in the great, wholesome
realities of life that the creative force of love, like that of art,
finds the productive earth for its growth. Torn out of this earth,
love, as surely as art, is like a tree blown down by a spring storm,
which may indeed put forth leaves this spring—though all its roots are
exposed to the air—but which will not live through the summer.
Clandestine love is in this respect like an upper-class marriage
without children and without common pursuits, although the
self-sacrificing, self-supporting, clandestine mistress stands far
above the kept wife, fashionable and full of pretension.
Thus it is not abstract ideas of duty, but real selfishness, which is
one with real morality, that will teach youth to understand the meaning
of Spinoza’s profound thought, made still more profound by the doctrine
of evolution: that “the sexual love which has its origin in what is
external and accidental, may easily be turned to hate, a kind of
madness that is nourished on discord; but that love, on the other hand,
is lasting, _which has its cause in freedom of soul and in the will to
bear and bring up children_.”
Through the religion of life and its countless influences, through
gradual, scarcely perceptible transformations, will love’s freedom more
and more come to mean freedom for enduring love.
The spirit of the age, working through the standards of literature
and public opinion, transforms with infallible certainty thoughts and
feelings in the direction in which the strongest lead them.
It now rests with the young to be these strong ones.
With the growing desire for a many-sided enhancement of life, parentage
will also become an ever more important condition of this enhancement.
Young people will be no more willing to depreciate by a premature
sexual life the value of those years which ought to be devoted to
furthering their individual growth, than they will be to diminish
their joy of parentage by putting a weak and unwelcome child into the
world. For they will wish to possess all happiness fully and frankly.
The expected child ought to give them beautiful dreams, not tormenting
uneasiness; it must be carried in rejoicing, not in unwilling, arms,
and must have received life from the fulness of happiness—not from a
mischance.
Here as everywhere, what is the most genuine and lasting happiness for
the individual is also for the moral enhancement the race.
When two lovers have this desire and have reached that maturity, when
the will has a right to realisation, and is in full agreement with the
health and beauty of themselves, of the new generation, and of society,
it is right that they should come together, even though it may not be
possible for their pure desire of common life and common work to take
the form of marriage.
For him who has ears to hear, these figures will speak: they show that
the average age of unlawful unions is the right age appointed by nature
for marriage. Thus the statistics of Sweden for 1900 show that 6340
“illegitimate” children were born of mothers between 20 and 25 years
old, while those born of mothers under 20 were 2028, and of mothers
between 25 and 30, 3857. Another eloquent fact is that, even before
the extension of compulsory military service, the highest figures of
emigration, for men as well as women, occur among the unmarried within
a year or two on either side of twenty.
By unlawful unions, the race is often defrauded of the children’s
fitness for life, which is ruined by the unfavourable conditions in
which the children are brought up; and by emigration the best blood of
the country is drained away. And even if the latter is occasioned by
a variety of causes, no thoughtful person could omit to reckon among
them the difficulty of marrying at the right time. Another equally
eloquent circumstance fully supported by statistical evidence is this:
that prostitution increases in direct proportion as the general social
conditions and the economical situation are unfavourable to marriage,
and that it decreases as marriage is facilitated. And the majority of
prostitutes—as of unmarried mothers—are of the right age for marriage.
The youth of the upper classes ought not, however, in their struggle
against actual conditions, to descend to the irresponsibility of the
lower classes. Educated young people must set an example to the rest,
not only by entering into their matrimonial alliances at the right
time, but also in a way that is unimpeachable as regards the claims
of the race and of society. The young have a perfect right—like
their contemporaries among the people—to assume the responsibility
of founding a home, which may be denied to them, before the child is
expected. But they have only a right to this kind of defiance if they
are willing, as soon as they are able, themselves to provide for the
new creatures who will one day replace them in the race. But above all
things, educated young people must also take part in the social reform
which—speaking broadly—will be the only solution of the marriage
question.
Instead of defending “free love,” which is a much-abused term capable
of many interpretations, we ought to strive for the freedom of love;
for while the former has come to imply freedom for any sort of love,
the latter must only mean freedom for a feeling which is worthy the
name of love.
This feeling, it may be hoped, will gradually win for itself the same
freedom in life as it already possesses in poetry. The flowering, as
well as the budding of love will then be a secret between the lovers,
and only its fruit will be a matter between them and society. As
always, poetry has pointed out the way to development. A great poet has
seldom sung of lawfully-wedded happiness, but often of free and secret
love; and in this respect too the time is coming when there will no
longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life.
Even the poet of Sakuntala calls that love the most beautiful which
gives itself freely in the “Gandoarva marriage,” sanctified only by the
fulness of emotion. But even then the danger was recognised of
... _unknown heart closing against unknown heart_.
Even then it was uneasiness about the fate of the child which coupled
responsibility to society with love’s freedom.
The new moral consciousness is thus an old thing. But it must
nevertheless be called new, since it is only beginning to be
wide-spread. It is becoming plain to more and more people that a man
or woman—whether married or free—does wrong to the nobility of self
by giving himself or herself to one who is at heart a stranger; it is
more and more becoming intuitively felt that it is the sense of home in
another soul which gives devotion its sanctity.
The suitor who—dressed for the occasion—went first to the father to
declare his feelings for the daughter is already such an old-fashioned
type that it is past ridicule. The brilliant wedding festival will
soon come to be regarded as ridiculous, then unbecoming, and finally
immoral. And—like other survivals of the time when marriage was the
affair of the family—it has already begun to disappear, in the same
degree as love has developed. Lovers are less and less inclined to
tolerate a spying upon their finest feelings; they are increasingly
anxious to rescue these from the prying fingers of society, of family,
and of friends. More and more is love venerated as part of nature’s
mysticism, whose course no outsider can determine, whose sensitive
manifestations and uncertain possibilities no one may disturb, a
mysticism within whose sphere a fixed timetable would be out of place.
How can Love, one of the great lords of life, take its freedom from the
hands of society any more than Death, the other, can do so? “Love and
Death, which meet like the two sides of a mountain-ridge, whose highest
points are ever where they come together” (G. Rodenbach); Love and
Death, which—one with the wings of the dawn, the other with those of
the night sky—overshadow the portals between earthly life and the two
great darknesses which enclose it—only these two powers are comparable
in majesty.
But while there is only one death, there are many sorts of love. Death
never plays. When all love becomes equally serious, it will also
possess death’s right to choose its own time.
In the springtime of love, parents can be of significance to their
children only when they feel reverence for the marvel which is
accomplished in their presence. But it seldom happens that parents have
previously been so sensitive that their children then treat them as
perfect friends. The period of youth is commonly full of strife, which
is brought about partly by the parents’ desire of remodelling their
children according to their own ideas—against which children are only
now venturing to defend themselves,—partly by the children’s desire to
assert their own ideals, which are always different from those of the
parents, for otherwise “the new generation would own no title to exist”
(G. Brandes). Parents might save for themselves and for their children
endless suffering, if they understood from the beginning that children
are significant exclusively as new personalities, with new gods and
new aims; with the right to protect their own nature, with the duty of
finding out new paths, without forfeiting the right of being respected
by their parents in the same degree as the latter on their side retain
the right of being venerated by their children—for the best of what
they are or have been, what they will or have willed. The only right
that parents ought never to renounce in dealing with their grown-up
children is that of giving to them the benefit of their own experience.
But in so doing they must remember what a poor loving heart forgets
easiest of all: that not even their own most bitter experience will be
able to save their children from making sad discoveries for themselves.
They will probably avoid their parents’ mistakes, but only to make
others of their own! The only real power a father or mother possesses
over the child’s fate—but indeed this is an immense one—is to fill
the home with his or her strong and beautiful personality; with love
and joy, with work and culture; and thus to make the atmosphere so rich
and so pure that the children may calmly delay their choice and have a
high standard to choose by.
But if parents see that in spite of this their children are tempted to
confuse accident with destiny, then they are called upon to show an
almost godlike wisdom in order to divert the danger. In most cases,
parents consciously or unconsciously play into the hands of the
accidental, while they raise obstacles against what is predestined.
Their warnings are not directed against what is silent and has nothing
to give; no, they advance mean and paltry reasons which the young
oppose with all that is best in their nature. Thus they silence their
own uneasy intuitions, which their parents might have induced them to
follow if they themselves had had a clearer perception of what was
essential.
Even in homes where there is most affection, the children, in their
stormy period of springtime, are as riddles which their parents often
try in vain to solve. A young soul never suffers so much as during
the solution of its own riddle. But only such a father or mother as
has succeeded in becoming renewed and rejuvenated through his or her
children will be able to help them in the solution. Otherwise the
result will only be that the parents on their side will bring stones to
the wall which the children on theirs are building ever higher.
Even parents who have not grown into crabbed working-machines; who
do not use their authority because they have the means of power, but
only because they possess spiritual superiority; who in their home let
their children have not only freedom for gladness but also the joy of
freedom, will nevertheless many a time fall short in the endeavour
to render their superiority serviceable to the children, or by their
broad-mindedness to liberate them from the one-sidedness of youth. And
in that case they must give up the struggle; for it will not improve
the difficulties of the present, but only destroy future chances of
understanding.
In the three greatest decisions to be taken in life—those of the
fundamental view of life, of one’s life work, and of love—each soul
must be its own counsel. In these matters, parents must restrict their
authority to saving their children from vital dangers; but they must
also be able to discover such dangers, and to differentiate profound
from superficial needs, the high-road from the by-road. If their
parents are not capable of this, then the children must perform their
duty to themselves and to life, by—sooner or later—going their own
way.
If, like a young couple in a similar case, the children can “smile and
be silent,” while showing their seriousness in their actions, then they
will probably be capable of educating their parents. In that case, it
will frequently be apparent that the heart of a father or mother was
stronger, their soul greater than either child or parents had believed
before the test was made. If, on the other hand, it should prove that
the faults and prejudices of the parents were the sole cause of the
conflict, then these faults and prejudices are not entitled to any more
respect because they are those of a father or mother.
But even if it should be the case that the parents have no souls
capable of profound feeling, but only hearts which can bleed—it is
nevertheless the duty of the child towards itself, and towards past
and future generations, to give to its own nature the highest possible
perfection through love. Parents are only a link in the infinite chain
of the race: it is the blood of hundreds of thousands that the parents
have transmitted to their children, who now in their turn are to pass
it on. Children have higher duties towards all these dead and unborn
beings than they have towards the single couple who became their father
and mother. It behooves the young to let all these dead ones live
again as fully as possible through the development of their own being
and in the blood of their children. A human being may owe a greater
debt of gratitude for his own nature to his grandmother’s heart or to
his grandfather’s imagination than to his own narrow-hearted mother
or unintelligent father. So far is it from being an invariable duty
to bring joy to the parents, that it may be one’s duty to bring them
sorrow—in order to bring joy to one’s successors. It is a good thing
to honour one’s father and mother; but the commandment which Moses
forgot is more important still: to honour one’s son and daughter even
before they are born.
When the sense of the dead and of the unborn becomes a conscious motive
of human action, through being a force in human emotion, then the claim
of the parents to decide their children’s life—as well as the claim
of the latter to decide that of their parents—will gradually fall to
pieces before the majesty of the past and of the future.
It results from the foregoing that any doctrine of morality is of
little worth which does not involve the need of providing the means of
marriage for healthy persons between the ages of twenty and thirty;
a possibility which was possessed without exception by the Germanic
ancestors whose example of abstinence is now appealed to.
So long as increasingly difficult examinations, the scale of pay in
government departments, the division of profits in business, and the
general rate of living, stand in the way of young people’s chances of
marriage, things will remain as they are, in spite of an increasing
minority of men who, for their own personality’s sake or for that of
their love, maintain abstinence until marriage or remain celibate.
The abolition of this sacrifice to the state of society and
civilisation is a matter of sufficient importance to the individual,
but of infinitely greater importance to society, whose forces are now
being wasted by the effects of immorality and checked by those of
morality: society, whose strength depends to such a great degree upon
young and healthy parents for the new generation.
Even under actual conditions, the chances of marriage for young people
might be increased by a judicious realisation of the “own home” idea
in country districts; by a shortening of the university course; by the
raising of salaries in the lower ratings (they appear at present to be
calculated upon the satisfaction of sexual needs through prostitution);
by the granting of pensions at an earlier age, so that the higher rates
of pay may be reached in middle age—when the burden of educating
children is heaviest;—and by increased exemption from taxation for men
and women who have to provide for a family.
In addition, a thorough change in social pretensions and habits of life
is necessary, above all in the large towns, where building societies
for the erection of small flats with common kitchen, offices for
providing domestic help, paid by the hour, and co-operative societies
for the cheaper supply of the necessaries of life, might considerably
assist young people in establishing their homes. It is, however, not
only this, but also communal employment that must be promoted, if
men of about twenty-five are to be ready to enter upon their various
occupations and—after thirty-five years in the service of the
State—to be entitled to their pensions, but at the same time under the
obligation to retire, except in the rare cases where special talent
renders a person indispensable in some leading position. The experience
a man has gained, and the strength that is left to him, would find full
employment in other social affairs or in personal interests.
It is not against immoral literature, but against the Treasury, the
Budget Committee and against private employers of labour that moral
reformers should draw up their resolutions. So long as a business man
is able to make two or three millions a year net profit while of those
employed in his office scarcely two or three are so paid that they can
think of marriage before the age of thirty; so long as the head of
a government department can reply, to the application of a class of
officials for an increase of salary in order to facilitate marriage,
by a gracious promise of more frequent leave to go to town; or an
employer refuse a female employee’s demand for a raise of salary with
a gallant reference to the ease with which— with her advantages of
appearance—she might increase her income; so long will the marriage
question remain unsolved.
All preaching of morality to youth which does not at the same time
condemn the state of society that favours immorality, but makes the
realisation of youthful love an impossibility, is more than stupidity,
it is a crime.
So long as the present low rates of pay and uncertain conditions of
employment continue, the blood of men will continue more and more to
be corrupted, and that of women to be impoverished, while waiting for
the marriage which might have given to society excellent children born
of healthy and happy parents. So long as societies thus fatuously
sacrifice their highest values will every other kind of social reform
be nothing but a work of Penelope, of which the night will undo what
the day has done.