CHAPTER VIII

FREE DIVORCE

The desire of the young to abolish prostitution by means of love’s

freedom has already been adduced as one of the proofs of the higher

development of sexual morality. Another such proof is the desire of the

present day to abolish adultery by means of free divorce.

The preachers of monogamy are afraid that this desire will prepare

the way for an open polygamy, instead of that which at present is

at least secret. In the press and in the pulpit, in schoolrooms and

lecture-rooms, modern literature is blamed for this “new immorality.”

And yet we all know that long before our time, married men and their

sons in country houses were too often ready to seduce the wives and

daughters of their dependents as well as the servants of the house.

The wives and mothers of these gentlemen were frequently not ignorant

of this—but they were praised for their wisdom when they pretended to

suspect nothing. It was a matter of common knowledge that not a few

married men and married women had mistresses and lovers within their

own social circle; and every one knew that in the towns many men,

during or before marriage, had illegitimate families.

Serious preachers of morality doubtless reply that they no more condone

this secret adultery than they would an open one; that they see in

one and the other a manifestation of that power of sin which only

religion can vanquish. We have the right then to ask, whether within

their own ranks—among clergymen, missionaries, readers—no similar

transgressions occur.

The honest ones answer Yes, but point out that this causes shame

among their fellow-Christians, and that these believers themselves

acknowledge that they have sinned. Such men of the world, who play

the hypocrite to retain their respectability, do the same thing. But

the great danger to society first comes in when free-thinkers with no

qualms of conscience commit, and authors without moral indignation

describe, the sin. This it is that degrades the ideal of morality.

Here we are at the very cross-roads of the old and the new morality.

The champions of the latter go on to ask whether all

adulterers—children of this world as well as children of God—in their

innermost consciousness really feel themselves to be sinners. The need

which impelled them was perhaps so imperious that it justified them

before their own conscience in choosing a lesser evil in preference to

a greater, when—from one cause or another—they could not or ought

not to satisfy the need in their marriage.

And if this be so, then the exponents of the new morality may have

grounds for their opinion: that self-control cannot and must not be the

only answer to all the problems of sexual life; that a solution must

be found which shall by degrees prevent men from wasting, either in

unchastity or in a celibacy disguised as marriage, the strength which

belongs to the race. The solution can only be this, that we not only

assert love’s freedom to unite without external tie, but also man’s

right more freely than at present to loosen the tie, when real union is

no longer possible.

When speaking of love’s selection, it was put forward that a growing

insight into the value and conditions of the enhancement of the race

might produce cases where a marriage could be openly broken without

therefore being dissolved. But the true line of development will quite

certainly be this: that divorce will be free, depending solely on

the will of both parties or of one, maintained for a certain time;

that public opinion as regards a dissolved marriage will take the

broader view that it has already acquired in the question of a broken

engagement, which at one time was thought just as humiliating as a

divorce is now.

With ever-growing seriousness the new conception of morality is

affirmed: that the race does not exist for the sake of monogamy, but

monogamy for the sake of the race; that mankind is therefore master of

monogamy, to preserve or to abolish it.

Even the advocates of free divorce know well enough that it will

involve abuses. But at the same time they know that there is no better

proof of man’s incredible indolence of mind than the uneasiness

produced by the thought of possible abuses resulting from a new

social form, while the ancient abuses are tolerated with the dullest

tranquillity.

Whatever abuses free divorce may involve, they cannot often be worse

than those which marriage has produced and still produces—marriage,

which is degraded to the coarsest sexual habits, the most shameless

traffic, the most agonising soul-murders, the most inhuman cruelties,

and the grossest infringements of liberty that any department of modern

life can show.

We may answer that abuses do not prove anything against the value of

any particular social arrangement, so long as its right use serves well

the purpose for which it was introduced.

The majority thinks that this is still the case with marriage. The

minority, on the other hand, considers that its constraint now tends to

defeat its original object, an enhanced sexual morality.

This minority thinks that, as soon as love is admitted as the moral

ground of marriage, it will be a necessary consequence that he who has

ceased to love should be allowed a moral as well as a legal right to

withdraw from his marriage, if he chooses to avail himself of this

right.

And this same minority is aware that love may cease, independently of

a person’s will; that therefore no one can be held to the terms of a

promise, the performance of which lies outside his powers.

Nothing is more natural than that love’s longing for eternity should

prompt lovers to vows of eternal fidelity; nothing is more true than

that it is a satanic device of society to seize upon this promise and

base thereon a legal institution (Carpenter). Nothing is more necessary

than to abolish the legal claims that people have on one another,

supported by promises of love and vows of fidelity.

The more people understand the laws of their own being, the more will

the conscientious begin to hesitate about making promises which perhaps

some day they will be forced by inner necessity to break. An increasing

number of people find it impossible to contract marriage, or to ask it

of the other party—or to continue in marriage or ask its continuance

of the other—when their love has died or has awakened for another. A

generation ago, an engaged person could refuse his or her betrothed’s

petition for liberation with the answer that he or she had love enough

for both. In corresponding circles at the present day, such a speech

is unthinkable. But then a public engagement was still regarded as a

binding tie and the marriage took place. After a long engagement it

was a “point of honour” for the man not to let a woman run the risk

of being unmarried, and she was satisfied if he only paid his debt of

honour.

Such coarseness of feeling is fortunately becoming more and more rare,

although it is far from disappearing. People see more and more that

they have no more right to marry simply to fulfil a duty of fidelity

than they have to steal in order to fulfil a duty of maintenance; that

there is no more obligation to abide by a marriage which one feels to

be one’s ruin than there is a duty to commit suicide for the sake of

another.

The love of older times was above all afraid that the other party

should not feel sufficiently bound. The finest erotic feeling of the

present day shudders at the idea of becoming a bond; trembles at pity

and recoils from the possibility of becoming a hindrance. This state of

the soul knows of no other right than that of perfect candour. To place

legal limits to each other’s liberty, so that neither shall cause pain

to the other, is under these conditions meaningless; for each suffers

just as much through a union maintained without full reciprocity.

Thus the question of divorce presents itself to modern souls, in cases

where there are no children. And when there are children—as is of

course the rule—they think that the mistakes of parents do not absolve

them from the duty of co-operating in the rearing of the children to

whom they have given life.

But they maintain that this need not always be effected by means of

continued cohabitation. On the other hand, this may often be necessary,

and in such cases they subordinate their personal claims of happiness

to those of the race. One who holds these opinions regards him who

gives the same answer in every case—whether this answer be “freedom at

any price” or “renunciation at any price”—simply as a moral automaton.

It is true that modern men and women are less able to bear unhappiness

in marriage than were those of former times. This shows that connubial

idealism makes greater demands than formerly.

The conscious will to live, of our time, revolts against the

meaningless sufferings through which the people of bygone days, above

all the women, allowed themselves to be degraded, benumbed, and

embittered. A finer knowledge of self, a stronger consciousness of

personality, now puts a limit to one’s own suffering, since the danger

is understood of taking hurt in one’s soul. This determination of

individualism makes it impossible for the modern woman to be fired by

the ideal of Griselda—if for no other reason, because she feels how

all-suffering meekness increases injustice. The “good old” marriages,

sustained by the willing sacrifice of wives, are disappearing—that is

happily true! But no one takes notice of the new good ones that are

coming in their place. If those who now grudgingly reckon up divorces

would also count all happy marriages, it would be seen that new

formation has proceeded further than dissolution.

It must be evident that the question of divorce is the pursuance of the

line of development of Protestantism. With the formation of a right

and a left party, as usual in the treatment of a problem of culture,

the Reformation succeeded only in asserting the right of the senses in

human life. That it is the right of the soul in sexual life that is now

most intimately affected by the question, people will not understand.

Against the right of the individual they set up that of the child. If

there is none, then a certain number of Christians are willing to admit

that divorce is sometimes justified. Unhappy parents, on the other

hand, must remain together for the sake of the children.

But the erotically noble person of the present day cannot, without the

deepest sense of humiliation, belong to one he does not love, or by

whom he knows he is not loved. Thus for one or both of the parties a

marriage that is persisted in without the love of one or both causes

profound suffering either through this humiliation or through lifelong

celibacy.

This is the kernel of the question, which is avoided by all who, in

their care for the children, forget that the parents must nevertheless

be considered as an end in themselves. It is not asked that for the

sake of the children they should commit other crimes; thus a woman who

committed forgery to support her child would be disapproved of. But

other women are judged leniently who “for the sake of their children”

feel themselves prostituted year after year in their marriage.

That married people are to be found who continue to live as friends,

since the erotic needs of both are small; that others do not feel the

humiliation of cohabitation without love; that the former as well

as the latter are probably acting best for the children in keeping

together a home for them—this does not prevent others under similar

circumstances from suffering in such a way that life loses all its

value. And these are they who end either in adultery or divorce.

Even if an enemy of divorce admits these difficulties, he replies,

that the individual must still suffer for his erotic as for his other

mistakes, since only so can people be taught not to commit mistakes.

But the true state of the case may be, that just as in old times

murders increased in proportion to the number of executions people

witnessed, so unhappy marriages may become more frequent, the more

there are at present; for it is, above all, the whole spirit that

prevails around us which determines our action. If the young are

accustomed to see their elders content with false and ugly relations,

they will learn to be so likewise. If they see around them an

aspiration towards ideal conditions in love—an idealism which is

revealed now in a beautiful married life, now in the dissolution of

one that is not beautiful—then their ideals will also be lofty. Those

again, who have once made a mistake, will perhaps be more clear-sighted

if they choose again.

But neither those who make mistakes nor those who witness them can be

saved by the misfortunes of others from that great source of error,

erotic illusion. And until erotic sympathy has become more refined,

these mistakes are the most innocent of all. Every lover believes

himself to be exempted from the sacrifice of illusion and no experience

of the irretrievable erotic mistakes of others has ever opened the eyes

of one blinded by love.

As it is recognised that society ought to make the lives of all as

valuable as possible, this involves the claim that innocent mistakes

should cause as little ruin as need be.

In marriage as in other fields, the modern principle must be put in

force, that punishment should improve the faulty and prepare the way

for a higher idea of justice. But this higher idea is that marriage

should be contracted under gradually improving conditions, not that it

should continue under gradually deteriorating influences.

Marriage under constraint forces people to continue their cohabitation

and to bring children into the world in a revolt of the soul which

must leave its mark in their children’s nature and thus influence

their future destiny. But this is not a “well-deserved punishment”

for a mistake: it is the profoundest violation of the sanctity of the

personality and of the race.

Here as ever the only logical alternative is full individual liberty or

unconditional surrender.

The Catholic Church maintains—and rightly from its own point of

view—that, since even marriages entered into with the warmest love

and under the most favourable conditions may turn out unhappily, it is

impossible to base the morality of marriage on the emotion of love.

Nothing that is founded upon emotion can be permanent. Nay, the richer,

the more individually and universally developed a personality is, the

less immutable will be the state of its soul. Thus even the highest

need an inflexible law, an irremovable tie, to prevent their being at

the mercy of winds and waves through their emotions, while inferior

beings need them so as not to be driven out of their course by their

desires. The concessions of Protestantism, therefore, lead to the

dissolution of marriage, since when love is made the basis of marriage

it is built upon sand.

Marriage, which the Church therefore made a sacrament and indissoluble,

had already become the legal expression of the husband’s right of

private ownership over his wife and children. The course of development

has consisted in an unceasing transformation of this religio-economical

view, and development cannot stop until the last remnant of this

conception has been destroyed.

Therefore the believers in Life refuse to admit either the

half-admissions of Protestantism or the logical compulsion of

Catholicism. They demand that the step from authority to freedom shall

be taken outright, since they know that the external authority which

simplifies life does not create the deeper morality. Compulsion fetters

legal freedom of action, but thereby only makes secret crime a social

institution.

And even if a husband or a wife has outwardly overcome a temptation,

this will not prevent that individual when in the embrace of the lawful

spouse from being filled with feeling for another. Have they then

avoided adultery? Not according to their own finest consciousness—that

consciousness which Goethe aroused in his great poem on elective

affinities. Duties performed may as surely as those left undone produce

incalculable and tragic results. They are foolish who think they can

lead another soul across the bridge, fine as a hair and sharp as a

knife-edge, by which every one goes his solitary way over the abyss to

salvation: the way of the choice of personal conscience.

When custom and law deprive a human being of full freedom of choice in

the matters of most profound personal concern—his belief, his work,

and his love—then existence is robbed of greater values than those the

compulsory fulfilment of duty can bring in.

In love, the idea of personality has now brought us to the view that

“property is theft”; that only free gifts are of value; that the ideas

of connubial “rights” and “duties” are to be exchanged for the great

reconstructive thought, that fidelity can never be promised, but that

indeed it may be won every day.

This will give the motive power for the attainment of ever higher

forms of erotic organisation a power which the Buddha-like calm of

indissoluble marriage has left unused.

It is sad that this truth—which was already clear to the noble minds

of the Courts of Love—should still need proclaiming; for one of the

reasons given in these Courts for love being impossible in marriage is

this: that woman cannot expect from her husband the delicate conduct

that a lover must show, since the latter only receives by favour what

the husband takes as his right.

When divorce becomes free, the attention to each other’s emotions, the

delicacy of conduct and the desire to captivate by being always new,

which belong to the period of engagement, will be continued in married

life. As in the early days of love, each will allow the other full

freedom in all essential manifestations of life, but will exercise

control over his own casual moods, whereas marriage now as a rule

reverses this happy state of things.

The security of possession now puts to sleep the eagerness of

acquisition; the compulsion to win anew will brace the energy in this

as in every other connection.

A fidelity thus won will be the only sort that will be thought worth

having in the future. A craving for happiness more sensitive than the

present may one day marvel at the legally insured fidelity of our

time, as at its inheritance of wealth. In both cases it will have been

seen that only one’s exertion of force brings happiness and gives that

felicity of victory before which hands stretched out to steal shrink

back.

The believers in Life are everywhere distinguished by their

determination to give to every relation the value of the unique, the

stamp of the exceptional, that which has never been before and will

never come again. Like the worshippers of Life of the Renaissance,

those of our time have begun to recover the power of strong enjoyment

and strong suffering which is always the sign of increasing spiritual

unity, a new gathering of force through a new religious feeling.

To this view of life the permanence of happiness will be less important

than its completeness while it lasts.

Spinoza, who described jealousy as no one else has done, has also

uttered this deep saying of love: The greater the emotion we hope that

the loved one will experience through us, and the more the loved one is

moved by joy in his relation to us, the greater also will be our own

happiness in love.

People of the present day have begun to distinguish the idea of this

“greatest joy” from lifelong proprietorship; and therewith jealousy in

its lower form has begun to disappear.

Jealousy like other shadows belongs to the rising and setting light and

disappears like them in the full clearness of noonday. But its tone

of feeling has become quite different since man has discovered that,

if the sun stands still in the zenith for him, it is a miracle—not a

right. The most highly developed people of the present day say “I am

loved” or “I am not loved” with the same simplicity as they say the sun

shines or does not shine. The difference is in both cases immeasurable,

but in one case as in the other, necessity removes the feeling of

humiliation. The grief which comes when a lover no longer feels that he

brings joy to the beloved or when he sees another bring it, is natural

and worthy of respect. It ceases to be so when it manifests itself in

the will of an avaricious proprietor, the brutal instinct which often

survives not only the feeling of the other but also its own.

But although the psychological differentiation in our time involves

greater possibilities of finding some one who will satisfy some side of

the erotic longing,—while it is more and more difficult to find one

who wholly satisfies this ever more complex desire,—the danger of such

division of self is counterbalanced by the growing wish for the longing

to be wholly satisfied. Love by thus making ever greater demands

becomes at the same time ever more faithful.

Those who dread the dissolution of society through the insistence upon

the rights of love, do not reflect that its right to break up marriage

is allowed to the feeling, which has not only the red glow of passion,

but also the clearness through which two people have become conscious

of each other as a revelation of the whole unsuspected richness of

life. A revelation which included all the fulness of comprehension,

all the serenity of confidence; where both have given with equal

exactingness and generosity—not meagrely or hesitatingly, but so that

each without reserve has rushed to meet the other—this is the only

happiness that love’s noblemen will now experience. It will be more and

more difficult even to experience it once—how much more so then to

find it many times!

A great love is never like the erotic thunderstorms which move against

the wind—that is to say, against the whole disposition of the

personality in other things.

All valuable feelings—whether entertained for a person, a belief, a

place, or a country—are conservative. The consciousness of this gives

the preacher of liberty his boldness. He never perceives how liberty

may be abused, since he knows what it costs to loosen a heart from what

it has once embraced.

To a volatile nature, the happiness that a more steadfast one

experiences in love is as unfathomable as the bliss of the mystic

becoming absorbed into the fulness of his divinity is to the polytheist.

Here, as everywhere, to the believer in Life, happiness is one with

morality. Since happiness consists in the greatest emotions, its first

condition is to intensify and enlarge all feelings, and above all that

which leads to marriage.

But in addition, the whole standard of personality depends to a great

extent upon whether we consider fidelity a life-value. He who desires

fidelity centres his moods and his powers upon what is essential and

protects them from the gusts of the accidental. Only this gives style

and greatness to existence. The desire of fidelity is therefore one

with a person’s feeling for his own integrity, his inward consistency,

the attitude and dignity of his spiritual being.

When fidelity is preserved for these profound reasons, it will also be

broken only for the same reasons. A fidelity, on the other hand, which

rests upon conventional notions of duty, will be in the fire like a

fire-escape of straw.

It is moreover forgotten, in all discussions of the dangers of free

divorce, that under the influence of love the whole disposition of

the soul is towards fidelity. Great love absorbs all associations of

ideas and thus without conscious exertion intensifies and enlarges the

personality. Fidelity will be a necessary condition of love, but a

condition whose psychological continuance is not favoured by coercive

marriage.

Fidelity towards one’s self—also in the new sense of the word—thus

involves not only the ability in case of need to destroy the bridge

between one’s self and one’s past. It also implies the building of

better bridges to strengthen the connection between our personality

and our present. It implies not only the capacity to have finished

with a destiny; but also that of not having done too soon with a

person. It may certainly involve the necessity of a new experiment

in life. But still more certainly it involves the need of not

allowing the incidental numbness of one’s feeling to seduce one

to new “experiences.” This expression—in place of the old word

“adventures”—implies, moreover, an intensification of feeling: where

formerly only the excitement of “adventure” was looked for, a richer

element of life is now sought. But it is often a fatal error to suppose

that this is to be gained in new relations, when on the contrary it

might have been won by an intensification of the former ones. By more

attention to and respect for the other’s personality one may often

discover more than one had expected; for some people are like certain

landscapes or works of art: they do not begin to make an impression

until one thinks one has done with them. But piety is required to await

the revelations of soul as of a work. Piety implies contemplation, and

this demands peace. But peace is difficult to find in our time, whose

misfortune is precisely disturbance and amusement.

That our time like every other has its particular epidemics in the

erotic sphere, is certain, and disturbance is just the condition

in which the most dangerous of these find a favourable soil. It is

therefore a part of the erotic art of living that a married couple

should now and then pass some time undisturbed in each other’s

company—or separately and alone—in order thus to strengthen the

health of their feelings. Here as in other things external precautions

against infection are unimportant in comparison with care of the

general health.

Only he who, after unceasing effort and patient self-examination, can

say that he has used all his resources of goodness and understanding;

put into his married life all his desire of happiness and all his

vigilance; tried every possibility of enlarging the other’s nature, and

yet has been unsuccessful,—only he can with an easy conscience give up

his married life.

The life-tree of a human being is formed, no more than are the trees

of the forest, according to a strict measure for the length of the

branches or a pattern for the shape of the leaves. Like nature’s

trees, its beauty depends upon the freedom of the boughs to take

unexpected curves, upon the disposition of the leaves to exhibit an

infinite diversity of shape. Only he who does not permit the tree to

grow according to its own inner laws, but clips it according to those

of gardening, can be sure of not preparing surprises for himself and

others, when one branch unexpectedly shoots out and another equally

unaccountably withers. No one can answer for the transformations to

which life thus may subject his own nature; nor for the changes which

the transformation of another’s nature may effect in his own feeling.

He may possess the rarest disposition to fidelity, the most sincere

desire to concentrate himself upon his love, to “let his personality

grow around it, as about its core”—it nevertheless does not depend

upon his will alone whether this core shall shrivel or be corrupted.

Therefore the desire of fidelity can not, must not, and ought not to

imply more than the will to be true to the deepest needs of one’s own

personality.

In other spheres than that of love, people admit this freely. Nobody

considers it an unquestionable duty for a young man to find at once

the view of life or the career in which he can continue for the rest

of his life. What young people are rightly warned against is the

wandering without method among different opinions or undertakings; for

only that belief or that work which one seriously tries to live by

and live for can really employ the powers of the personality and thus

show its efficacy in enhancing them. But the most profound seriousness

cannot prevent a continued development of the personality from one day

compelling the man to abandon that belief or that work. It probably

would not occur to a thoughtful clergyman to appeal to such a man’s

promises at confirmation, or to a thoughtful father to bring forward

his own choice of a career as an example to his son.

Lifelong tenacity was demanded in those days when it was assumed

that a single doctrine, a single set of circumstances, was entirely

adequate for personal development for a whole lifetime. The crime

of deviation was then logically punished by excommunication or by

fines. But the profounder view which we have acquired in the matters

of belief and occupation must also be extended to the third. We ought

to perceive that unconditional fidelity to one person may be just

as disastrous to the personality as unconditional continuance in a

faith or an employment. Those who are now patching the sack-cloth of

asceticism with a few shreds from the purple mantle of personality are

spoiling both. Either state the claim of renunciation clearly, like

the Catholic, or admit the whole claim of personality. But the whole

problem is unfairly stated by those who make “personal love” the moral

basis of marriage, but go on to speak of this love as though it were a

question of light-heartedly taking partners for a game, where nothing

is more usual than that each woman finds the right man and each man the

right woman—and so everything is in order. If life were so easy, there

would be reason for the pronouncements, which are now so profoundly

coarse, that only the man or woman without character, the aimless

personality, is incapable of vowing a lifelong love and keeping the

promise; nay, that a true personality can “command itself to love its

child’s father or mother.”

He who asserts that our true personality will always follow the

duty laid down by society and constantly be able to fulfil the

claims of fidelity, and that those who cannot do this are guided by

a false subjectivity and not by their personality, makes the idea

of personality equivalent to that of member of society, the whole

equivalent to the part. The personality, the unique and peculiar value,

is certainly connected through part of its nature with the standards of

right upheld by society. Yet it never becomes equivalent to them.

The only thing therefore that a psychological thinker can demand is

that love should not divide the personality in any phase of a human

being’s development, but should always be its true expression.

But only one who is ignorant of the idea of personality can believe

that the relation, into which a person at the age of twenty puts his

whole feeling, must necessarily correspond to the needs of the same

personality as it becomes at thirty or forty. Only one so ignorant can

persuade himself that the destiny of our love will necessarily resemble

our lofty theory of love, our pure desire of constancy. If even our own

will has little to do with the love we feel, how much less then will

it influence that which we receive or lose!

Thus the problem of fidelity is not solved merely by imposing the claim

of constancy upon one’s self; for in the first place, in love there are

two who must desire the same thing, and in the second, each of these

two is manifold.

No human being is sole master of his fate when he has united it with

another’s. The possibility of becoming a complete personality in and

through love depends in half upon the pure and whole desire of the

other to share in developing the common life.

It is this which is overlooked by the eloquent preachers of “constancy

as the expression of the personality,” and this makes their words about

the duty of lifelong love as meaningless as a harangue about the duty

of lifelong health.

It is a beautiful sight when two married people enjoy the happiness

of their love for the whole day of human life. It is also a beautiful

sight when life sets like a clear sun upon the horizon, and does not

lose itself like a weary river in the sand. But these are beautiful

ideals not commands of duty.

Love, like health, can certainly be neglected or cared for, and by good

care the average length of life both of human beings and of their loves

may be raised.

But the final causes both of love’s birth and of its death are as

mysterious as those of the origin and cessation of life. A person can

therefore no more promise to love or not to love than he can promise to

live long. What he can promise is to take good care of his life and of

his love.

This may be done, as already pointed out, through the conscious will to

be faithful, the firm resolve to make love a great experience.

But perhaps the majority as yet do little to preserve their happiness.

In this case, life works for them, as God “gives to his servants, while

they sleep.”

If ever the doctrine of the importance of the infinitely small has

its application, it is in respect to the power the little things of

everyday life have of uniting or dividing in marriage.

That hardships and memories, joys and sorrows shared bind people

together even without the continuance of love; that in the deepest

sense of the word they cannot be separated, since a great part of the

one’s nature remains in the other’s—this in reality forms the binding

tie, but not ideas of duty, whether clear or obscure, strict or free.

If in one case a married life has so dried up the feelings of both that

a gust of wind drives them apart like two withered leaves, in another

it may have given the feelings such deep roots that, even if all the

leaves that the springtime gave are torn away, even if life seems as

empty and cold as naked boughs in winter—it is still lived in common.

It is thus a physiological and psychological fact that the man or woman

who for the first time has communicated to the other the joys of the

senses retains a power over her or him which is never really set aside.

It is even said that long after a man’s death a woman sometimes bears

children to another man which resemble the first. As such influences

are more decided in the case of the woman, her fidelity has also for

this reason become more of a natural necessity than man’s—although the

same influence, if in a somewhat less degree, applies to him.

Even if no qualms of conscience for others’ sufferings are mingled with

a new happiness—in many other senses the two, who in each other seek

to forget the past of one of them, will perhaps for ever find a third

between them.

Marriage, in a word, has such sure allies in man’s psycho-physical

conditions of life that one need not be afraid of freedom of divorce

becoming equivalent to polygamy. What this freedom would abolish is

only lifelong slavery.

It is evident to every thoughtful person that a real sexual morality

is almost impossible without early marriage; for simply to refer the

young to abstinence as the true solution of the problem is, as we have

already maintained, a crime against the young and against the race, a

crime which makes the primitive force of nature, the fire of life, into

a destructive element.

But the consequence of early marriages must be free divorce.

As soon as one approaches the outer side of the marriage problem, one

is met by the experience which the four great Norwegian writers, Ibsen,

Bjōrnson, Lie, and Kielland, some years ago jointly and publicly

announced: that at present the majority do not marry for love. And R.

L. Stevenson may have hit the mark, when he calls the marriages of the

majority “a kind of friendship sanctioned by the police” and compares

the “fancy” which decides them to that which sometimes takes one for a

particular fruit in a dish that is being handed round.

But even if we one day come so far that early love-matches are the

rule, we shall still be faced, as regards them, by the system which

at present obtains among the upper classes: that marriage is binding

upon the lovers before love is consummated. There is therefore a truth

worthy of consideration in the words of the brothers Margueritte, in

their contribution to the question of free divorce; that as the young

girl has not experienced what she binds herself to at marriage, the

majority of divorces begin on the wedding night.

Free divorce is therefore an unconditional demand of such young people

who know that unforeseen transformations may take place in the sphere

of the soul as in that of the senses, and who now frequently seek in

the secret possession of love a security against a precipitancy which

the legal bond of marriage may make irretrievable.

The young know, if any can know, that no form of love is more beautiful

than that in which two young people find each other so early that they

do not even know when their feeling was born, and accompany each other

through all their fortunes, sometimes even to death—for now and then

life vouchsafes this crowning fortune. Never do greater possibilities

exist for the happiness both of the individuals and of the race than in

a love which begins so early that the two can grow together in a common

development; when they possess all the memories of youth as well as all

the aims of the future in common; when the shadow of a third has never

fallen across the path of either; when their children in turn dream of

the great love they have seen radiating from their parents.

These happy ones—like the old couple in Bernard’s fine fresco in the

_mairie_ of the Louvre _arrondissement_ in Paris—will one day look up

to the stars of the winter twilight, united in a more intimate devotion

than either the playtime of the spring morning or the midday toil could

afford.

If this wonderful love were really the first and only one which fell

to the lot of every young man and woman, and were it always possible

for them to realise it at the right time—then there would neither be a

problem of morality nor of divorce.

But the youth of the present day knows that this love is not the

fortune of all. It has learned so much, from literature, from life,

from its own soul, of the transformations of love, that one is tempted

to wish for these young people the romantic belief of their fathers and

mothers in a love which became extinct as easily as now. The difference

is merely this, that whereas formerly they were content with a faded

glow, we will have continual fire.

It is known now that, although youthful love may be the surest basis of

marriage, it is more often the reverse. Here, if anywhere, is the scene

of accidents. The one we have grown up with, the girl or youth we are

thrown with just when the erotic life is waking; the one we were teased

about; the one we hear is “in love” with us; the one we meet when

the happiness of others fills the air with longing—these and other

accidents, but not personal choice, often decide youthful love.

Then the imagination sets to work to transform the reality in

accordance with the ideal we have formed for ourselves—and even this

is often the result of accidental influence. It is therefore not

surprising that most people, when after ten years or so they meet again

the object of their first love, give a sigh of gratitude to the fate

which made that love “unhappy.”

When it has not been so in the usual sense of the word, one of the

parties may often be most to be pitied, and it is just those young

people who unhesitatingly realise their love in the belief of its

lifelong continuance, that in coercive marriage are made the victims

of their own pure will, their healthy courage, their bright idealism.

For the younger, in the richest sense of the word, a person is, the

more certainly does he possess the poet’s gift which transforms reality

according to his dreams. The fine curve of a pair of lips renews the

marvel of the legend: that every frog that jumps over them is changed

into a rose. Even if a dim suspicion awakes, when every serious

thought or intimate feeling is met by empty silence or equally empty

loquacity, the imagination easily convinces the instinct that silence

means “profundity of intelligence,” or speech “candour.” At every

age, but especially at this, love is a great superstition. Secure as

sleep-walkers in the presence of danger, its votaries fling themselves

into a decision. And it is this simple rashness of innocence that the

current conception of morality subjects to a lifelong punishment.

The cautious ones, on the other hand, often find in time the great

rewards—thanks to their own smaller value.

More things happen in a human life than marriage and finally death.

Much may happen in a human soul between marriage and death. The current

assumption that everything which separates a person from the partner

in matrimony is evil and ought to be overcome; everything which binds

him to her good and ought to be encouraged—this is part of the wisdom

which reduces life to the simplest terms, which is cheap and therefore

most in use; for a higher wisdom demands a higher price.

Nothing is commoner, especially for the woman whose first experience

of love is in marriage, than that she is in love with love and not her

husband. Sometimes woman is betrayed by her senses, but more often by

the morning dew of sensibility, which youth and love spread over even

the driest of men’s souls,—a dew which disappears with the morning.

Another illusion, which in these days of intercommunication causes many

mistakes in love, is the peculiarity of a foreign nationality, which

has the effect of a personal originality—until it gradually betrays

itself as only another kind of conformity than that one is used to.

In other cases again, the husband is all she sees in him. But a young

woman herself often goes through, during the years from twenty to

twenty-five, so complete a transformation of feelings and ways of

thought, that after a few years of marriage she finds herself in the

presence of a man who is a perfect stranger to her.

This period of illusions in first youth is answered by another towards

the close of youth. If a woman has not before experienced love,

this is the psychological moment at which almost every illusion is

possible. Her now universal demands of love, the longing of her mature

woman’s nature, have countless times made a noble creature cast these

pearls—if not exactly as described in the biblical image—at least

into an empty space where they have just as surely been unappreciated.

On man’s side, there are other or corresponding possibilities that

early marriage may be founded on self-deception.

But even when love is real and well-founded, there yet arise, from the

charm of contradictions already referred to, innumerable occasions of

incurable discord.

Thus there are natures so simple that they become crippled, so

uncomplex that they are foolish, so homogeneous as to be heavy. These

are they who usually love once for all, with complete devotion. But,

especially when they are women, Goethe’s words are often true of

them: that a woman’s greatest misfortune is not to be charming when

she loves. Only complete security gives these natures the calm of

equilibrium, the courage of self-confidence, which calls forth the

“smile of inward happiness” whereby they also become attractive. But

these natures, who of all most deserve happiness, usually meet with

some person of constantly changing moods, who reacts with extreme

sensitiveness to every impression, but can never love deeply, and

therefore is soon unable to bear that simplicity and seriousness in

life and death which at first charmed by their contrast.

Such people are often poets or artists, who in love seek only constant

stimulation. To them loving means “waking in the morning with new words

on one’s lips,” and their erotic fortunes therefore show a rapidity

of revolution comparable with that of the moons around Mars. Just as

for certain natures, a connection originally frivolous may become

permanent, held together by depth of feeling, so for this class of

natures—on account of the superficiality of their feelings—no kind of

connection is serious.

It is not unfrequently those who give the finest descriptions of their

soulful moods and their exquisite feelings, who in their acts of love

are narrowly selfish or relentlessly harsh. For it is the impressions

of culture stored in their intelligence which determine their conscious

utterances, but, on the other hand, it is their subconscious ego that

decides their actions. And this ego is often centuries behind their

cultured consciousness. He, on the other hand, who is reticent and

curt of speech or dull and awkward in manners may at bottom possess a

delicacy which he can show only in actions, the others only in words.

But unfortunately in our time opportunities for speech are many and for

action few—and so women pass over the latter for the former. How many

a woman has not afterwards—before some act of the man of words—asked

herself how it was possible for her ever to love that man! How many a

one, before the actions of the silent, has not sighed, What a pity that

I was never able to love him!

But in one case as in the other, through the law of contrasts, she was

united to him and feels in this union the death or paralysis of the

best possibilities of her being.

The most misleading of illusions are, however, those which are

fostered by the actions love produces; for it is not these which

determine the quality of a personality. While love is fighting for

its happiness it may transform an ordinary person into something

higher than himself, as also into something lower. When the tension is

relieved, it is seen that in the former case—especially as regards

men—love was able to

... unmake him from a common man

But not complete him to an uncommon one....

It was no organic growth of the personality, but only a straining of

self that love called forth.

But she who loved him will watch till her eyes are weary for what she

has seen but once!

Those who have loved them deeply learn from these, in one way or

another, inadequate persons the most dearly-bought truth in the

knowledge of human nature, a truth that the heart acknowledges last

of all: that even if we poured out our own blood in streams for any

one—we could not thereby give him a drop of richer or more noble blood

than is found in his own heart.

Many have learned this secret in that kind of marriage, where secure

friendship and faithful comradeship abounded; just those feelings,

in fact, which are recommended as the infallible remedy for love’s

mistakes.

How often has not one of these married people active for and with the

other, found out that they never bring their mate into spiritual

activity, that the soul of one has never reached the soul of the other?

Outside observers think them suited like “hand in glove.” The image

is significant, for a glove is empty and meaningless when it does not

enclose a hand. But like hand to hand they are not suited! Therefore

it not unfrequently occurs that some day one of them is seized by a

passionate longing to meet with another hand, which shall be strongly

and quietly grasped in his own and thus double its power; that the

voice, which has continually spoken into empty space—whence a faithful

echo has unfailingly answered—will finally be dumb from the longing to

receive an answer from another voice, in words that were never heard

before.

Not a few marriages include men who have had such fine thoughts,

dreamed such fair dreams of woman, that they have desired to win her

senses only through her soul and have disdained to offer her other

than their best, the richest treasures of their personality. But

perhaps such a man has a wife who understands only money-making and

desires only the pleasures of love. If he offers all the glories of his

soul, she does not even suspect when a mood is at its height; for her

silence is never eloquent; she is incapable of waiting for another’s

thought; has no patience with what is difficult of comprehension, and

will always receive the unusual with dull misunderstanding or gay

superiority.

The gulf perhaps began to open between them when one became aware of

the other’s absence at a moment when he himself was most present;

or when one felt that their bodies stood between their souls, the

other that their souls stood between their bodies; or when one felt a

restriction of liberty from the other’s superior spiritual or sensual

force; or when one found that he could never show his innermost being

without its putting the other out of humour. Thus two persons, each one

innocent, may make each other profoundly solitary while sharing the

same bed and board. Neither receives from the other what his innermost

nature needs—and what one gives is only a constraint upon the other’s

nature. Not a note in the soul of one is tuned to the same pitch as the

other’s; not a movement in the blood of one is capable of enrapturing

the other’s. Now it is unbearable dissimilarities, now unbearable

similarities, that cause the trouble; each finds in the other “all the

virtues he detests but none of the faults he loves.” With all this,

perfect outward peace may prevail; nay, respect and devotion in a

certain sense. That this is the fortune of innumerable marriages is

overlooked in general, since married life usually continues—unless a

third appears.

In the ideas of the Church, the incapacity for marriage of one party

freed the other from the duty of fidelity. In the more spiritual view

of the future it will be equally evident that the same right exists to

dissolve a marriage which has remained unconsummated in a spiritual

sense; and there may be just as many possibilities of incapacity to

fulfil the spiritual claims of marriage as there are men and women;

therefore also just as many causes of divorce.

In the preceding pages only certain typical cases of unhappiness have

been referred to. The many tragic exceptions are here left altogether

on one side. So also are those causes of divorce which the preachers

of monogamy call the “real misfortunes”: drunkenness, bodily cruelty,

and the like; for with the customary realism of “idealism,” they admit

these as valid reasons for divorce. It is significant that among the

lower classes people still often think themselves bound to bear these

misfortunes as a part of the miscalculations of marriage as unavoidable

as those more complex sufferings which the champions of monogamy exhort

people on a higher plane to endure. The pangs a soul suffers may, they

think, be borne with God’s help, whereas unfortunately God is not in

the habit of interfering when a man beats his wife; and the longer a

soul has suffered, the more certain are they that it can continue to

suffer.

Nor do they perceive that a relationship may have seemed good—perhaps

even have been good,—until, after a lapse of years, a moment has

arrived which has stripped the soul of one of them naked, sometimes in

all its loftiness, more often in all its baseness. If the latter, then

what was possible before becomes from that hour unthinkable.

That the soul may be confronted by such an alternative, of life or

death, they will not admit. The soul, they say, is “a spirit,” an

“invisible and imperishable entity.” That its conditions of life are

just as variable and complex as those of the organism is, to a certain

sort of “idealism,” meaningless. With God’s help, they say, everyone

may save his soul. But such help is in this kind of peril as uncertain

as it is in peril of the sea—and even in the latter case it is not

“the votive tablets of the drowned, but only those of the saved, that

one sees in the temple” (Nietzsche).

It is, however, especially when a man or woman is divorced in order to

contract a fresh marriage that an outcry is raised over the weakness of

the age in bearing suffering. Indeed, it is not even acknowledged that

marriage may involve any suffering. Even those who have hitherto found

a married couple extremely ill-suited, forget at once that they did

so—should either of them “allow a third person to come between them.”

They forget not only their own former judgment but also the fact taught

by experience, that when two married people are wholly one, there is no

room for a third between the bark and the tree. In the contrary case, a

third comes between them sooner or later. Sometimes it is the child,

sometimes a life’s work, sometimes a new feeling—but something always

comes, thanks to nature’s “abhorrence of a vacuum,” which is never more

fatal than in marriage. Within the dimensions of the soul, as within

those of space, no one can take the place of another, but can occupy

only that space which another has left empty or not been able to retain.

In the latter case it is fair to admit the indirect share of literature

in the inconsiderateness of those without an erotic conscience. The

idea of justice in love has had to be extended. But during this

removal of the boundaries, which literature is carrying out, a general

insecurity has set in.

Poetry performs with the fullest freedom its duty of investigating the

secrets of love, according to which souls and senses are attracted and

repelled in answer to that law of elective affinity which our time

is seeking more and more eagerly to discover, in order to be able to

direct the erotic forces to a higher development. Literature is the

foremost of these discoverers; and this in itself is enough to justify

that complete freedom, without which, moreover, it cannot become what

Georg Brandes has called love-poetry: the finest instrument for gauging

the strength and warmth of the emotional life of a period.

That literature is often the power which gives rise to erotic

agitation, is self-evident. And thus it always co-operates in

some measure in the misfortunes which are caused by loves of the

imagination or the intellect, misfortunes which are avoided by the

firm and mature personality. The weak, on the other hand, are those

who in their loves as in their beliefs adopt the course that another’s

influence gives them.

Like lawn-tennis—which in certain circles makes or mars

marriages—love is favoured by summer air and idleness. But at all

seasons there are men and women for whom everyone is a ball that sets

their fancy or their vanity in motion. No form of self-assertion is

more justified than that of opposing one’s vigilance, one’s will,

and one’s dignity to this use of one’s personality. What stimulates

the game is not the power of the senses alone. No, this game is the

sole inventive faculty of spiritual poverty, the mark of erotic

ill-breeding. Only a refined person can rejoice at the stimulants to

life in every field, the means of which he does not himself possess.

As yet few people have attained a culture like that of the Athenian

beggar, who thanked Alcibiades for giving him the jewels that

Alcibiades indeed wore—but that the beggar was free to rejoice at.

To attain in regard to human beings this sense of joy, free from all

covetousness, is the flower of fine breeding.

But the nervosity of the present day stimulates, on the contrary,

erotic kleptomania. People steal one another, now from the same kind

of hysteria which makes thieves of Parisian ladies in the fashionable

stores; now from the same crudity which makes the child pluck every

flower he sees; now from the same desire which urges the collector

constantly to acquire new specimens.

When in regard to human beings the pleasure of the connoisseur rather

than that of the collector has been attained, then the greatest of

all joys—that of human beings in one another—will not be so often

disturbed by erotic complications. To appeal to the liberty of the

personality in frivolous concessions to eroticism is the same gross

abuse of the idea as to use the name of this liberty in sailing a leaky

yacht in a storm.

The liberty of the personality involves great risks to win great

rewards; but it does not involve allowing one’s self to be driven into

dangers, where for a trifle one stakes one’s own life and that of

others. To drift into relations where one has not the hundredth part of

the consent of one’s innermost ego, is not proving but wasting one’s

personality; for every action which is less than ourselves, degrades

our personality.

Again, it may be disastrous to perform acts greater and stronger than

ourselves. He who ventures upon an exceptional course must—like the

alpine climber—possess an abundance of strength and the sense of

security which it lends; for otherwise, in both cases, the enterprise

will be successful only if everything occurs according to the most

favourable calculation. In an unforeseen misadventure the inadequate

ones are those who are lost. Therefore, in one case as in the other,

public opinion is unwittingly right when it glorifies the daring that

succeeds, but condemns that which fails.

Most people are not equal to the consequences of their resolutions. On

the contrary, like unseated riders they are dragged by their actions

through degraded circumstances that they had not counted upon. Thus

many a pair of lovers who have broken earlier ties, have been only a

warning example—since their action was destructive, not enhancing to

life.

Ruin may be the climax of life; but inefficiency is always defeat; and

of all the rashness of this life, the rash project of an exceptional

lot is the saddest.

Few people who have passed their youth have courage or strength for

such new experiences as imply a real enhancement of life. The majority

ought rather to employ their personality in the task of worthily

bearing and making the best of their lot—and, in spite of all that is

asserted to the contrary, that is also what most people do and will

continue to do.

Those who trust only in compulsion to restrain a man’s desire to desert

his wife, forget to what a degree spiritual influences have even now

facilitated divorce, in spite of the coercive law. One seldom finds

in our day a high-minded husband or wife who insists on retaining the

other against his or her will, except when it is clear to one partner

that divorce, if conceded, would result in the certain ruin of the

other. As a rule it is now only the narrow-minded or the low-minded

who exercise the right of refusing divorce. If this right were

abolished, this would not entail the abolition of the influences which

even now keep married people together—although in most cases they

might be free if they wished it.

Those who thoughtlessly separated, when greater facilities are given,

would be the same class of people who now, in coercive marriage,

secretly deceive one another.

To the serious, divorce will always be serious. Before a person of

feeling and thought consciously hurts another who has loved or loves

him, he himself has suffered terrible pain. Gratitude for a great

devotion in a free connection has often proved more powerfully binding

than the law could have been. Nay, to anyone tender of conscience the

ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones,

since in the former case he has made a choice more decisive to his own

and the other’s personality than if he had followed law and custom.

And even when no feelings of affection exercise their retentive power,

many people prefer to remain as wreckage on the same shore, rather than

be washed away towards a new and uncertain fate.

Human nature is credited with far too great simplicity and elasticity

when it is taken for granted that one experiment in life would succeed

another if divorce were free. In this case it is life itself, not the

law, which fixes the insurmountable limits. To the deeper natures

which have broken away from a life-connection, the pain of it has often

been so great as permanently to deaden the colours of life.

In connection with the modern demand for exemption from motherhood we

have already rejected the expedient of securing love’s freedom through

the rearing of children by the State. At the same time the importance

and value of the parental home was insisted upon as strongly as

possible.

Here, on the other hand, is the place to point out the one-sidedness

of the notion that nothing is more important than that the parents

should remain together for the sake of the children—since everything

must finally depend upon how the parents remain together and what they

become through remaining together.

The more degrading cohabitation is to the personality of each parent

the less valuable will be the influence for the children of the

parental relation.

Only one who sees in marriage a system directly ordained by God, a

form of realisation of the divine reason, can maintain the proposition

that in such a system the good must outweigh human defects. Those who

hold that the maintenance of marriage is always the sound and moral

course, must take upon themselves the burden of proving that the dull

connubial habits of divided mates are a pure source for the origin of

new beings; that their mutually conflicting influences are better able

to further the welfare of the children than a tranquil bringing-up by

one of them: that the happiness of one of them in a new union is more

dangerous to the children than his unhappiness in the former one.

To those, on the other hand, who hold the faith of Life, the question

of the children is always a fresh one in every fresh divorce. Here

again we must rise to the conditional judgment, and leave behind the

chess-board morality with its equal squares of right and wrong. The

danger to the children arising from a divorce depends on all that has

gone before and all that comes after. He who dissolves his marriage in

the face of his inner consciousness of the harm that the children will

thereby suffer, commits a sin which will infallibly be succeeded by

the remorse that friends are sometimes eager to adduce as extenuating

circumstances. He, on the other hand, who “sins” with an easy

conscience, has made his choice with the welfare of the children in one

scale of the balance. This calm of conscience is then not indifference,

and, therefore, does not prevent the possibility of his suffering

deeply through the consequences of the decision which he nevertheless

does not regret. It may be that in most cases where there are children,

the less painful course, even for him who is most convinced of his

personal right, is to endeavour to the utmost to preserve a common life

which allows the children to grow up under the joint protection of a

father and mother, and for the sake of the children to give this life a

worthy and kindly character.

In former times, people mended and patched things up endlessly. The

psychologically developed generation of the present day is more

disposed to allow what is broken to remain broken. For, except in the

cases where the cause of rupture has been outward misunderstanding

or belated development, patched-up marriages—like patched-up

engagements—seldom prove lasting. It has often been profound instincts

that caused the rupture; the reconciliation violated these instincts

and sooner or later such violation revenges itself.

Thus, it happens, that even exceptional natures have a greater burden

than they can bear, and then it is not the living together but the

dying together of their parents that the children witness.

Neither religion nor the law, neither society nor the family, can

decide what a marriage kills in a human being or what it may be the

means of saving in him. Only he himself knows the one and feels the

other. Only he himself can determine how far it may be possible for him

to have so far finished with his own existence that he can completely

pass into that of his children; to bear the pain of a continued married

life so that it may enhance the powers of himself and the children. A

mother can do this oftener than a father, but in no case is there any

standard that others can use to determine when an excess of suffering

is present. More than this, there is strictly no suffering, but only

suffering beings who in every case create the suffering anew according

to their type of soul.

Only one thing is certain: that no one is more outside the question

than the very one who causes the suffering. Thus nothing can be more

unreasonable than to leave to the judgment of one of the parties the

decision we have just mentioned. The knowledge of being able to refuse

a divorce now involves want of consideration for the other’s moods of

dejection, which would never occur if consideration were necessary to

prevent separation. Such attentions are especially significant at the

beginning of married life, when most young married people solve the

small and great problems of accommodation with more or less difficulty.

The birth of the first child, moreover, is often accompanied by

abnormal states of feeling, which lead to hasty conclusions as to

incompatibility and antipathy. The opponents of free divorce think that

it is just during these years that precipitate divorces might take

place. But they do not reflect that either partner in his sense of

proprietorship now gives himself a loose rein in a way that would be

unthinkable if such security did not exist. Thus the young certainly

keep together, but not unfrequently destroy their finest chances of

happiness. The need of mutual caution during these dissensions should

have a much deeper influence in keeping a couple together than has

at present the knowledge that they cannot be free. After the advent

of children, the danger is small—except in the case of heartless

natures—that a sufferer will too hastily think his powers of endurance

are exhausted. The inter-dependence which children create between their

parents when these together care for and love them, is sometimes

indissoluble. In most cases it is so strong as to form the real tie,

without which laws twice as strict as the present ones would have no

power to keep together two unwilling beings.

When speaking of love’s selection, we pointed to the signs which

indicate that the feeling for the race—the feeling which from time

immemorial has linked together man and woman at a common hearth,

has raised the altar near it and round them both the town wall—is

approaching its renaissance. Consciousness of the children’s rights is

indubitably on the increase, together with a knowledge of the rights of

love. And against the assaults of this most turbulent and dangerous sea

the race-feeling will continue to stand as a wall protecting society,

though in a new form to give it new powers of resistance.

But the opponents of divorce think, on the contrary, that the sense

of happiness through the children—especially in the case of the

father—has now become so weak that most fathers would free themselves

from all responsibility if they only could.

If this be so, society itself is to blame. It not only countenances

sexual relations entirely independent of the mission of the race;

it frees the man from responsibility for his illegitimate children

and thus assigns to him a standpoint below that of the beasts. The

instincts favourable to offspring, which in animals have remained

undisturbed, cannot attain their full strength until man is completely

answerable for every life he creates. As soon as society decrees that

the fact of two persons becoming parents makes their union obligatory,

the relationship itself will gradually intensify their feeling and the

man will wish to possess and preserve the elements of joy for which he

must always bear the burdens. Even if man’s fatherly feelings should

be slow in awaking—and if a number of fathers of the present day

should thus really avail themselves of free divorce to leave wife and

child—there are still the mothers, who do not, as a rule, lightly

leave their children, but who, on the contrary, now suffer the deepest

misfortunes and renounce the greatest happiness so as to remain with

them, and who—even if they tear themselves from them—are hardly ever

able to release themselves. When the law gives to every mother the

rights which now only the unmarried mother possesses, but imposes

at the same time on every father the obligations which now only the

married have—then it may be that the child will become a new and

more valuable possession in the eyes of the man. If he only feels the

influence he may obtain through his wife’s respect for his fatherly

qualities; if his importance in the child’s existence comes to depend

on personal force, not on legal might, then the quality of fatherhood

may be in a high degree ennobled. And with this affection will grow,

according to the immutable law, that the more man gives, the more he

loves.

If matriarchy, in a new form, refined by the whole of development,

should become the final phase—as in the opinion of many it has been

the starting-point—of the family, then this would involve that

paternal authority became conditional, depending on the value and

warmth of the paternal feeling. At present many fathers are merely an

accident in their children’s life, an accident which never even looks

“like an idea.” And this is not only true of those fathers who, with

the support of the law, withdraw themselves from all responsibility,

but also of many others, especially of those who are driven by work or

public business and who remain inwardly strangers to their children.

For the present, it may be regarded as certain that free divorce

would, above all, afford this advantage, that a number of wives, who

now keep broken-down husbands, could work for food for their children

instead of for liquor for the children’s father; and that a number of

mothers, who now are obliged for the sake of their children to suffer

the deepest humiliation, would be able to free themselves; and in both

cases the children would gain. On the other hand, the father who took

advantage of free divorce to desert his family for frivolous reasons

might, as a rule, be easily spared by that family.

In most cases, the children are even better off through a divorce, when

the cause of it is differences of temperament and opinion between the

parents. Each of them separately may be a person of merit. When they

separate on the ground of dissension, both have a sense of something to

atone for with the children. This prompts them to try to make amends,

and thus the children receive—from each separately—far more than they

did when the parents were united, when the children were witnesses

to their conflicts and saw the worse side of the nature of each. The

children are spared the pain of being the subject of their father’s and

mother’s quarrels; of being compelled to take the part of one of them;

of being torn between two diverse wills, between the jealous endeavours

of each to win them exclusively. They, in part, avoid being brought up

from two different, mutually-counteracting points of view, where one

is trying to take away from the children the ideas that the other has

given them.

But of all this the opponents of divorce take no account. The main

thing is that the parents shall keep together, however chill or dark

with thunder may be the air in which the children grow up.

This point of view misses the reality as much as that of those who

call for divorce as soon as love is over. Keeping together may, in

certain cases, give the children a happier and richer childhood than

the state of things after a divorce. It has been maintained with reason

that discord between the parents is sometimes compensated for by the

value of the manly nature of the one and the womanly nature of the

other, which—even if they do not co-operate—still work well side by

side; and that children who, through dissensions at home, have early

been forced to think and choose for themselves, often become stronger

characters than those who have grown up in happy homes.

While, on the one hand, we hear children whose parents have separated

complain that they did not have the patience to remain together, on

the other we hear those who have grown up in unhappy homes regret the

continuance of their parents’ married life. If this had been dissolved,

the children might have had at least one good home, perhaps two,

whereas now they have none.

But, of course, each one can know only what he has suffered from a

series of events, not what he might have suffered if circumstances had

been different; and thus the children’s opinion cannot in either case

be regarded as decisive, when laying down the principle.

The experience, therefore, which we have, of the position of children

whom death has deprived of their father is more important. While the

widower, as a rule, marries again, if his children are small, the

widow, in most cases, remains unmarried. And it may be regarded as

certain that statistics of able men would give a remarkable result in

respect of the sons of widows.

A divorce often puts the child in a corresponding position of

tenderness and responsibility towards his mother. But while society

bows to the “stern necessity” of a single battle making more children

fatherless than the divorces of a generation—and calmly relies on the

mothers’ ability by themselves to make good citizens of their sons—it

shrinks from the same stern necessity when it is a question of saving a

living person from lifelong unhappiness.

The children’s chief danger in a divorce is that they are often divided

between father and mother and thus lose in part the companionship of

brothers and sisters which is so eminently productive of happiness.

Next to this, the greatest misfortune is not that the father and mother

no longer live under the same roof, but that they are no longer able to

meet. This misfortune could often be avoided, if friends and relations

would refrain from the pleasure of deciding how the divorced couple

ought to hate and variously torment each other. If people saw the

merit of two human beings—who were able to separate as friends and

to meet again as such—being also capable of this; if the presence of

either parent with the children never led to their being influenced to

the detriment of the absent one—then children, even after a divorce,

would not feel the want of their essential relation to both their

parents. Now, on the other hand, divided as they often are between two

mutually hostile parents, separated thus from each other and—lacking

common memories and other ties to bind them—gradually becoming

strangers to each other when they meet, the children lose so much by

a divorce, that parents in most cases can gain nothing which makes up

for the losses of the children and thus prefer to bear the burdens of

living together rather than lay those of divorce upon the children.

In the question of divorce also, the great fundamental idea of

protestantism must be applied in the recognition of the individual’s

full freedom of choice, since no case can be decided generally, and

since here also the right and wrong can only be discovered through the

searching of each individual conscience.

A child has often—in moments of great crisis—blocked the way which

led from the door of the home. But the home within that door did not

for that reason become brighter or warmer for the child.

In the preceding, the position of the children in divorce has been

considered from the point of view of discord between the parents. If,

on the other hand, the divorce is brought about by a new feeling on

the part of one of them, then this father or mother must be prepared

one day—when the children can understand them—to justify the step by

showing them how the new love has made him or her a richer and greater

personality. The children have a full right not to be sacrificed to the

degradation of their parents. In every case, the children are the most

incorruptible judges of their parents.

But the fact that a person has already brought children into the world

does not give to these children an unconditional right to demand that a

father or mother shall sacrifice the love that may advance themselves,

and through them the race, to which they may thus give more excellent

children or more excellent works than they have been able to produce

hitherto. Many a woman has borne children to her husband without having

seen her child; many a man has given the community his industry but

never his work—until great love accomplished their innermost longing

and the child or the work that was thus created became the only one

indispensable to the race.

The claim of society that a father or mother, radiant with

possibilities of happiness, shall sacrifice these for the sake of the

children, will be reduced when the sense of the value of life has

grown and the duty of parents to live for their children is more often

interpreted to mean that they must continue to be fully alive, with

powers of renewal. On the other hand, this very rejuvenation of parents

at the present day may often result in their living so rich a life

together with their children that they will need no other renewal than

that which is most productive of happiness to all parties; namely, to

enjoy their “second springtime” in the children’s first.

If, on the contrary, the result of this prolonged youth of the parents

is that a father or mother changes the course of his or her life, then

the children must suffer—until they can understand that perhaps in a

deeper sense they do not suffer thereby. Sometimes the new partner has

exercised a richer influence on the children than their own father or

mother—as may also be the case with a step-father or step-mother. At

present, however, this possibility is often destroyed by the common

opinion just alluded to, which also decides that the children ought to

hate, where, if left to themselves, they would perhaps have learned to

love.

The selfish demand of grown-up children that the life of their parents

shall in and with them have reached its climax and be personally

concluded, is as cruel as it is unjustified, since there are souls

which do not lose their blossom when the fruit appears, but are able

at the same time to bear both fruit and new blossom. Children receive

with life a right to the conditions which may make them fully fit for

life; no less than this, but at the same time no more. What their

parents may be willing to sacrifice of their own lives beyond this must

be reckoned to their generosity, not their duty.

If great love may thus be admitted to possess a right superior to that

of the children, the question obviously arises, how is this love to be

distinguished from the accidental?

A mistake is already a hard thing in a marriage where there are

children, for the obstacles that have to be surmounted in such a case

are so serious that only great love can overcome them—that is, if

the parents are such that they really mean anything at all to their

children.

It is precisely by its genesis, in despite of all obstacles, that the

predestined love often reveals its nature and thus becomes what is

called “criminal.” Even if those who are possessed by this emotion

allow duty to interpose oceans between them, they will, nevertheless,

come together in every great moment of their lives until the last,

convinced that

“his kiss was on her lips before she was born.”

When people have acquired more knowledge of the laws of psychology,

they will discover, as Edward Carpenter has said, that there is also

an astronomy in the world of emotion; that inter-dependence arises

there also, in obedience to eternal laws; sympathies and antipathies

which keep all the “heavenly bodies” at the right distance or

proximity; that thus the path of love follows an equally irresistible

necessity as the orbit of a star and is equally impossible to determine

by any influences outside its own laws. And without doubt there will

some day be discovered a telescope for this field also, which will at

last reveal to the short-sighted the fixed stars, planets, nebulæ, and

comets of erotic space, and will prove that its constellations are

ordered by a higher law than that of “crude instinct.” But until we

attain this astronomical certainty we must be content with the degree

of knowledge that art criticism can give.

Great love, like a great artist, has its style. Whatever subject the

latter may handle, whatever medium he may use, he gives to the canvas

or the marble, the paper or the metal, the impress of his hand, and

this reveals itself in the smallest thing he has created. So in every

age and every country, every class and every time of life, great love

is one and the same; its signs are unmistakable, though the fortune it

leads to and the individuals on whom it sets its mark may in one case

be more important than in another.

But this mighty emotion—which arouses one’s whole being through

another’s and gives one’s whole being rest in another’s—this emotion

seizes a man without asking whether he is bound or free. He who feels

strongly and wholly enough need never wonder what it is he feels: it is

the feeble emotion that is doubtful to itself. Nor does he who feels

strongly enough ever ask himself whether he has a right to his feeling.

He is so exalted by his love, that he knows he is thus exalting the

life of mankind. It is the minor, partial passions that a person

already bound feels with good reason to be “criminal.” For him, on the

other hand, who would call his great emotion a sinful infatuation, a

shameless egoism, a bestial instinct, one who loves thus has nothing

but a smile of pity. He knows that he would commit a sin in killing his

love, just as he would in murdering his child. He knows that his love

has once more made him good as in his childhood’s prayers to God, and

rich as one for whom the gates of paradise are opened anew.

Art is interpreting a universal experience when it always depicts Adam

and Eve as young when they are driven out of Eden. One wonders that no

artist has shown them—at a maturer age—outside the walls of paradise,

tormented by the sense of now possessing wisdom enough to preserve the

happiness for which in youth they only possessed the means.

For there not unfrequently arrives a time in human life when

enlightenment enters before coldness has set in; when the blossoms

are still rich although the fruits have already begun to mature. It

is then that great happiness is often seen for an instant and then

disappears. Sometimes she is never seen, for she comes softly and—like

a playmate—lays a hand over one’s eyes, asking: Who am I? One guesses

wrongly and happiness is gone before one can bid her stay. To her

favourites only does she come with her hands full and open. To the

majority the words of the dying Hebbel are true: _We human beings lack

either the cup or the wine_.

Love’s deepest tragedy is that a number of people have first to learn

through their mistakes before their souls and senses are ready for the

great love which of two beings makes one more perfect.

In poetry as in life it is sometimes the first love, sometimes the

last, that is extolled as the strongest. Neither need be, and either

may be, this. The strongest love is that which—at whatever age it

comes—most takes up all the forces of personality.

It also sometimes happens that not until a person ought to have done

with love, is he really ready for it. The fewer are then the chances

of finding the love he wishes to give and receive. And fewer still the

chances that he can give himself up to them, with the concurrence of

his whole being.

For it is one thing to have the right to one’s great emotion; another

to have the right or the possibility of one’s full happiness.

Love may be never so free in its social aspect; no freedom of

morals or of divorce can release the sons of men from the inevitable

sufferings of their own nature, nor from the inevitable conflicts of

their connection with the past. These sufferings and conflicts have

been made so deep by life itself that there is indeed no necessity for

the law to make them deeper.

The most usual form of the conflict is that a person is bound by or

broken by casual love—whether wedded or free—when the predestined

intervenes in his existence.

That so many more unhappy marriages continue than are dissolved may

be due less to a sense of duty than to the fact that only a few are

capable of great emotions. Peer Gynt’s symbol—the bulb—illustrates

the erotic nature of the majority. It flowers as readily in sand as

in water, in the open as in a pot. But should an acorn be planted in

a pot, it is inevitable—on account of the vital conditions of the

oak—that it should one day burst its prison or die.

And in such a case, it is unfortunate when a Christian ethical view

stands in the way of serious and genuine chances of so renewing life

that it may be more valuable to the community as well as to the

individual himself. People who are equipped with rich possibilities

still allow themselves to be decided by unconditional consideration for

others’ feelings, which, taken from Christianity, have been grafted

even on evolutionism, and which, especially through George Eliot, have

obtained their great but one-sided expression.

That the race not only needs people willing to lose their lives in

order to gain them, but also people with courage to sacrifice others

in order to win their own—this is a truth which nevertheless must

be indissolubly bound up with an evolutionist view of life, to which

the will to preserve and enhance one’s own existence is a duty as

undeniable as that of preserving and enhancing the lives of others

by self-sacrifice. To have the courage of one’s happiness, to be

able to bear the pain inseparable from a rupture without pangs of

conscience, is only in the power of those who act from their innermost

necessity. That pairs of lovers outside the law now so often commit

suicide together is no proof of the overmastering power of love; it

rather proves the powerlessness of their emotion to dare and win the

right of direct and immediate living and thus increasing the riches of

life. For it is only to a love that is throughout a will to live that

circumstances become as wax in the artist’s hand.

From the point of view of the religion of Life this impotence is

regrettable, just as much as secret adultery. Doubtless both may

possess the beauty of a great love-tragedy. Probably no one who has

read the _Inferno_ wished Francesca strength to reject the love of

Paolo. And so strangely does a soul find the way home to itself, that

there are cases where a person in adultery feels himself purified

from the defilement of marriage—since he thus for the first time

experiences the unity of soul and senses which was his dream of love

from the beginning.

But even in these exceptional cases—so much the more, therefore,

in others—the secret transgression, which the older morality found

comparatively innocuous, is from the point of view of the new morality

greater than the open rupture. For the personality is humiliated by the

duplicity and the weakness whereby one avoids the responsibility of

the consequences of one’s actions. And this, moreover, decreases the

life-value of love to the race. New experiments in life, which are made

openly, which enhance the strength of the individual through conflict

and earnestness, may possess an importance for the personality itself

and for society which secret transgressions in most cases lack.

A poet or an artist, for example, has a wife, as to whose insufficiency

for him all are agreed—so long as he still has her. Suddenly he finds

the space, that was empty and waste, filled by a new creation; the air

becomes alive with songs and visions. He not only feels his slumbering

powers awake, he knows that great love has called up in him powers he

had never suspected; he sees that now he will be able to accomplish

what he could never have done before. He follows the life-will of his

love, and he does right. Marriages kept inviolable have doubtless

produced many great advantages to culture. But it is not to them that

art and poetry owe their greatest debt of gratitude. Without “unhappy”

or “criminal” love, the world’s creations of beauty would at this

moment be not only infinitely fewer, but, above all, infinitely poorer.

Nay, after such an exclusion the whole spiritual world might appear

as some mediæval church, decorated from floor to roof with frescoes,

appeared after the whitewashing of the Reformation.

But in a choice such as we have just mentioned, public opinion is

always certain that the sufferings of the wife, unimportant as she

is to the community, are the great thing, while those of the man,

important to the community, may be disregarded.

He, however, who experiences the new spring which flowers in song, in

tones, in colours, raises the life of generation after generation,

centuries after the one person or the few who suffered through him have

long ceased to suffer.

Who would have gained what the race would have lost through his

self-sacrifice? Not the wife, if she had a heart, and not only a pride,

which could suffer.

Not only from the point of view of universal, but from that of

individual life-enhancement, we ought not to give all our sympathy to

the one who is called “heart-broken.” Why is the heart that is broken

considered so much more valuable than the one or the two which must

cause the pain lest they themselves perish? And why will people not

see that he who is looked upon as “broken-hearted” sometimes finds

a new and richer happiness? But, above all, why is it constantly

forgotten that one who suffers through sorrow often becomes greater

than he could ever have been in the secure possession of his “property”?

There are other ways of living on a great emotion than that of being in

the usual sense made happy by it.

This must, however, be remembered above all by him who, already tied,

is seized by a new feeling. If all three parties are high-minded

enough, it has sometimes happened that the feeling has been transformed

into an _amitié amoureuse_, which has made all of them richer and none

of them unhappy—even if it has made none of them completely happy.

But even under other circumstances people ought to remember, that one

does not always own what one has—and sometimes possesses most surely

what one has never owned.

The sanctity and loftiness of one’s own feeling is the indestructible

part of happiness in love. No longer to be able to love is the greatest

sorrow. But a person no more becomes less worthy of love because his

own love is dead, than he becomes so through leaving love unrequited.

Therefore, he alone can feel himself really ruined who has been nothing

but the means of another’s pleasure or sport, development or work;

a means that is cast off when it no longer affords enjoyment or

profit. The person who is thus betrayed in love, either because love

never existed or because its past existence is denied; who sees the

personality he loved unveiled as another than he believed himself to

be loving—this person must exert his whole soul to save it from being

narrowed, embittered, and destroyed. All other great blows of fate may

be borne in such a way that a man grows by them: but to lose faith in

a human being is the greatest pain of all, since it is also the most

unfruitful; since it in no respect enlarges the soul or enhances the

existence.

But even from this suffering the soul may finally raise itself through

the consciousness that it has too great a value of its own to allow

itself to be destroyed by the baseness or pettiness of another.

Only he who has fought out the battle alone in all the horrors of

the desert night knows what the sunrise is. Years later it may fall

to the lot of such a man, who at one blow has lost everything—the

sanctity of his memories, the meaning of his experiences, the faith

of his love—himself to see the truth of the great, calm thinker’s

exhortation: that one ought neither to laugh nor weep at, exalt nor

curse a human being’s actions, but only to try to understand them

(Spinoza). And then there begins for him a great and difficult work,

which perhaps will last as long as life lasts, the work of looking

into the depths of this other soul; of again reviewing the past in the

perspective of distance; of perceiving his own limitations as well as

those of the other, and thus beginning to understand. This is the only

forgiveness there is.

But thus a person once dead and buried in the midst of life may finally

see the grass grow green and the sun shine over his grave.

If this can become true—and it has become true for many people whom

others regarded as broken-hearted—how much more then is it not true

to him who has once been really rich and has never been robbed of his

greatest treasure, the glory of his own love?

A woman, for example, who for years of her life has possessed complete

happiness and through this has become a mother—will she be robbed of

it all, if this happiness comes to an end?

There is still the happiness of others to serve, the sufferings of

others to alleviate, the great ends of humanity to further. To many a

one who has never even had a happiness of his own this must still be

sufficient consolation. But we judge of happiness as of wealth. That

innumerable human beings daily perish from want makes little impression

on us. But if one of our friends falls from riches into poverty, this

seems to us dreadful. We forget that he may perhaps, through poverty,

attain a development that riches never won for him; that he who is

robbed by fortune may make a new position for himself.

Life has countless possibilities as well as countless contradictions.

It is full of secret remedial powers as well as of hidden causes of

death. And, finally, it is, therefore, very uncertain whether it is

not the two who come together that are “torn asunder”—while the one

abandoned remains whole.

For loving is a healing medicine even for the wounds love gives. Only

one thing a loving person cannot bear, to see the dear ones suffer. To

take one’s self silently away in order to spare them pain is within

the power of great love. And this does not mean a tame resignation

watering the red stream of the blood. It means that love has become

so great that it takes seriously the great words so lightly uttered

in happiness, that torments caused by the beloved were dearer than

joys given by others. When love has become the power in which a person

lives and moves and has his being, the words of the _Epistle to the

Corinthians_ on love are fulfilled in a more beautiful way than Paul

dreamed of. Great love does not only love for the sake of loving; it

attains the incredible: to love the loved one more than one’s own

feeling. If it were a question of thus providing for the other a more

perfect happiness, this love would be able to quench its own flame and

with it the fulness of pain and of joy that life had gained from this

feeling. Women sometimes make such a sacrifice. Here and there a man

has been capable of it. But he who has attained to this height of

emotion lives so wonderful a life that the happiness the united couple

create for each other must be extraordinarily great if these two rich

ones are not in reality to be the poorer.

When the thought has once become inherent in mankind that no one can

be happy without the feeling that he is making others happy; that only

the highest development of one’s own feeling is imperishable happiness;

that all other happiness is charity, not justice—then there will be

fewer torn asunder, even if there be no more happy ones.

But love is still such, men, women, and the people around them are

still such, that one would rather wish a tied man or woman strength to

endure marriage than to break it, at least if they have children who

must share with them the unknown fortunes of their love. Before these,

if ever, one feels the meaning of the Breton fisher’s song:

... la mer est grande et ma barque est petite ...

How often has not the little boat, fraught with life’s last riches,

been lost on the wide sea?

But therefore it is that no one there seeks his pleasure, but only his

life.

That our actions in the erotic sphere—as in every other—must call

forth the criticism of others is just as unavoidable as that our

figure should be reflected in a mirror as we pass. But public opinion

is a convex mirror, a globe swollen by prejudice, which distorts the

image. Only a clear and calm soul gives a true picture of another’s

actions.

And to such a soul, it will not unfrequently be apparent that the

“transgression” was right for one nature and not for the other. The

latter will have felt that its innermost being would have been outraged

if fidelity to the past had not been preserved to the uttermost—and

will have chosen to allow its erotic powers to wither and to live only

by the will of duty. Of this kind of self-immolation the same is true

as of its bodily counterpart: sometimes they are great souls, sometimes

great cowards. Nay, the same sacrifice may be sublime at one period of

our lives and shameful at another.

Life never shows us “marriage,” but countless different marriages;

never “love,” but countless lovers. He who sets up an ideal in these

matters must, therefore, be content with possibly working for the

future, but should not use his ideal as a criterion for the present.

Nay, he ought not even to desire in the future the sole authority of

his own ideal—since a descent from the diverse to the uniform would be

a retrogressive development.

The effort of society to press into a single ideal form life’s infinite

multitude of different cases under the same circumstances or of the

same cases under different circumstances, the same influences on

different personalities or the same personalities under different

influences—this has been in the field of sexual morality as violent

a proceeding as would be the establishment for all figures of

Polycletus’s canon of beauty. The madness of the latter proceeding

would be obvious. But violence to souls is not so obvious. Therefore it

is always established by law.

Not until the diversity of souls becomes in our ideas a truth as real

as the diversity of our bodies shall we perceive that of all dogmas

monogamy has been that which has claimed most human sacrifices. It will

one day be admitted that the _auto-da-fés_ of marriage have been just

as valueless to true morality as those of religion were to the true

faith.

The Grand Inquisitors of the past probably resembled those of the

present day in that, when confronted by a particular case within the

circle of their own friends and relations, they found easily enough

extenuating circumstances which they did not otherwise admit. But

we must learn to see that every case is a separate case and that,

therefore, sometimes a new rule—not only an exception to an old

rule—becomes necessary. We cannot any longer maintain this double

standard for known or unknown, for friends or enemies, for literature

or life. It must be abolished by an earnest desire for genuine

morality.

This double standard shows us, however, that even among the orthodox

of monogamy the impossibility of carrying out a monogamous morality

which shall apply to all is beginning to be perceived. But the effort,

nevertheless, to attain in some degree the impossible now stands in

the way of the possible, which is germinating here and there: the

attainment of the morality of love.

Although the new life is already showing its strength—like spring

flowers that push their way through last year’s carpet of dead

foliage—the withered leaves must yet be cleared away.[7] And only they

who do not perceive the power of the new spring are afraid that the

earth will not be able to dispense with its withered protection.