676.
[112] _Op. cit._, pp. 671, 672.
[113] Menge, “The Influence of Constricting Clothing upon the
Abdominal Organs, and more Especially upon the Reproductive Organs of
Woman” (Leipzig, 1904).
[114] O. Rosenbach, “The Corset and Anæmia” (Stuttgart, 1895).
[115] G. Hirth, “Ways to Love,” p. 49.
[116] The modern fancy for slender, ethereal, Pre-Raphaelite feminine
figures is also to some extent allied with a negative accentuation of
the breasts. Heinrich Pudor with good reason declares that at the
present time perhaps the strongest sexual influence of woman is
dependent upon the fact that “the existence of the breasts is
concealed, and the appearance of the male sex is simulated.” _Cf._ his
article, “Clothing and Sex,” in _Die Gemeinschaft der Eigenen_, August
number, 1906, p. 22. Still, the sexual stimulating influence of this
concealment of the breasts appears to be of a transient character, and
confined to certain circles of the hyperæsthetic and the homosexual.
[117] Heinrich Pudor, “Nackt-Kultur,” vol. ii.; “Clothing and Sex;
Limbs and Pelvis,” pp. 7, 8 (Berlin-Steglitz, 1906).
[118] _Cf._ the passages relating to this in my work, “Contributions,”
etc., vol. i., pp. 152, 153.
[119] Schopenhauer, “Parerga and Paralipomena,” vol. v., p. 176.
[120] G. Simmel, “Philosophy of Fashion, p. 24” (Berlin, 1906).
[121] “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol.
i., pp. 158-162.
[122] Ovid, in his “Ars Amandi,” long ago advised men who wished to
please women to avoid feminine adornments, and to leave those to the
homosexual.
[123] J. Ryan, “Prostitution in London,” p. 382 (London, 1839).
[124] In Alfred de Musset’s erotic story, “Gamiani,” he describes how
a woman danced on a mat of catskin, which gave rise in her to very
voluptuous sensations.
[125] “Confessions of My Life,” Memoirs of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, p.
38 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1906).
[126] Here we may allude to a remark in the diary of the de Goncourts
that there is nothing to compare to the delicate voluptuous charm of
old cashmere as a dress-fabric for women (E. and J. de Goncourt,
“Diary,” 1851-1895).
[127] H. Pudor, “Nackt-Kultur,” vol. ii., pp. 4-6.
[128] Ernst Kapp, “Elements of a Philosophy of Technique,” pp. 269,
270 (Brunswick, 1877).
[129] W. Sombart, “Domestic Economy and Fashion” (Wiesbaden, 1902).
[130] G. Simmel, “The Psychology of Fashion,” published in _Die Zeit_,
October 12, 1895; “The Philosophy of Fashion” (Berlin, 1906).
[131] W. Fred, “The Psychology of Fashion” (Berlin, 1905).
[132] Simmel rightly points out that many women would feel very
uncomfortable if they had to appear in their private sitting-room, or
before a single strange man, in a dress so _décolleté_ as that in
which they readily appear, in society and following the fashion,
before thirty or a hundred.
[133] What serious dangers to health prudery may entail has recently
been shown by Karl Ries in a valuable essay, “Prudery as the Cause of
Bodily Disorders” (published in the Reports of the German Society for
the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1906, vol. iv., pp. 113-121).
CHAPTER VIII
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE--THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF LOVE
“_Above all, we must avoid the widely diffused error of regarding love
as a simple and single feeling. The exact opposite is the truth--love
consists of an entire group, and, indeed, of an extremely complex,
incessantly varying, group of feelings._”--H. T. FINCK.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER VIII
The individualization of love a product of recent times -- Finck’s
“romantic” love too narrow a conception -- Rôle of the idealization of
the senses -- First beginnings of individual love -- The Platonism of
the Greeks and of the Renascence -- Distinction between the plastic
and the romantic -- The love of the minnesinger -- The connexion
between the nature-sense and love -- The secret elements in love --
Love and gallantry -- The slavery of love -- The imaginative element
in love -- Predominance of tender feelings in the days of chivalry --
The development of the conventional in the relationships of love --
True and false gallantry -- Love as presented by Shakespeare --
Conventional life of pleasure in the days of Louis XIV. and XV. -- The
belief in woman (“Manon Lescaut”) -- Rousseau’s “Julie” and Goethe’s
“Werther” -- The nature-sense and sentimentality in love -- Difference
between “The New Héloïse” and “Werther” -- The first beginnings of
Weltschmerz -- Its physiological connexion with the vital feelings of
puberty -- The vital energy in the Weltschmerz of Goethe and Heine --
The modern Weltschmerz -- Nietzsche’s connexion with this matter --
The love of the romantic period -- A mirroring of the past -- Dreams
and emotions -- Moonshine reverie -- Conflict with conventional
Philistine morality -- Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” -- Apotheosis of
individual love -- Individual love in relation to genius -- Rôle of
the emotional in romantic love -- Love mysticism -- The modern
renascence of romanticism -- The Dionysiac element in modern romantic
love -- Difference between romantic and classical love -- Theodor
Mundt on this subject -- Goethe’s “Tasso” -- Gretchen and Helena in
“Faust” -- Heine’s “Ardinghello,” a combination of romantic and
classical love -- The prototype of “young Germany” -- Discussion of
all modern love problems in young German literature -- Gutzkow’s
overwhelming importance -- Among writers of the nineteenth century,
Gutzkow’s knowledge of women is the most profound -- His
characteristic girls and women -- Brings for the first time the
problem of love upon the stage -- The problem of personality in
Gutzkow’s writings -- The young German poetry of the flesh --
Self-analysis and reflection in love -- French precursors --
Replacement of the medieval “sin” by self-reflection -- Gutzkow’s
“Wally” and “Seraphine” -- The love of the emancipated woman --
Kierkegaard’s and Grillparzer’s diaries -- “Free love” and “free
marriage” in modern literature -- Influence of the Second Empire --
The satanic and artistic elements in love -- Pessimism. -- Grisebach’s
“New Tanhäuser” -- The affirmation of life in this work -- A glance at
the present day.
CHAPTER VIII
The individualization of love is principally a product of recent times.
A talented author, H. T. Finck, has dealt with this fact in a
comprehensive work in two volumes.[134] This individual love, containing
the spiritual elements of all the successive epochs of civilization, he
denotes by the term “romantic” love, whereas we ourselves generally
understand by that term a special variety of the more comprehensive
individual love.
Every one who is interested in the numerous “overtones” of individual
love will find in Finck’s book a rich, though not very well arranged,
supply of material.
Independently of Finck, I shall endeavour in this chapter to describe
very briefly the most =important= elements and the developmental phases
of modern love.
First, however, let us consider the “=idealization of the senses=,” this
expression being used by Georg Hirth to denote the capacity of the
senses for self-government; for independent feelings of pleasure and
pain; for the development of peculiar imaginations, ideas, and talents;
and for the utilization at will of other sensory areas and foci of
impulse--indeed, of the entire individual--for the purposes of purely
sensual self-command. The lower senses, among which Hirth also reckons
the sexual impulse, can only be idealized in consequence of the
centripetal spontaneous activity of the higher senses.[135]
This artistic idealization of the senses and impulses also plays an
important part in the process of the individualization and
spiritualization of love. The sexual impulse becomes “the source of rich
joys and imaginative tragedy” by means of the “veil of imagination,” the
“heaping up of emotions,” and the “helmet of reason” (Hirth). The libido
sexualis also takes part in the idealization of all the human senses and
impulses. This is the indispensable preliminary and foundation of the
transformation of the sexual impulse into love.
The first important enrichment of the sexual inclinations by means of a
higher spiritual, individual element, which continues to-day to form a
constituent of modern love, is, I consider, the =Platonism= of Greek
antiquity and of the Italian renascence. It is a metaphysic of love
resting upon the individual, æsthetic contemplation of the beloved
personality.[136] For that is the true sense of “Platonic love.” It
ennobles physical love to the heavenly Eros, which is nothing else than
the idea of =beauty= in the highest sense of the word. Kuno Fischer, in
his first published writing, “Diotima” (Pforzheim, 1849), has erected a
beautiful monument in honour of this Platonic love. And did not the
immortal Darwin restate the thought of Plato, when he described beauty
as the testimony of love? In Platonism, at any rate, is to be found the
first intimation of a =higher= individual significance of love. In
Dante’s Beatrice, in Petrarch’s Platonic lyrics, this idea is
reillumined after the long night of the middle ages, to shine forth
still more clearly at the time of the renascence in the new Platonism
and in the cult of the beautiful, thus attaining a much more powerful
individual colouring than it had among the Greeks.
In the sphere of love, as elsewhere, the plastic genius of the Greeks
manifested itself in the form of peaceful æsthetic contemplation;
romantic individualism, on the other hand, was foreign to the Greek
mind. The latter is a modern sentiment. Jean Paul, in his “Vorschule der
Aesthetik” (Hamburg, 1804, vol. i., p. 139), has aptly characterized the
difference between antique and modern sensibility in the words: “The
plastic sun (of the ancients) illuminates universally, like waking; the
romantic moon (of the moderns) gleams fitfully, like dreams.”
These first traces of =romantic-individual= love may be detected already
in Christian medievalism, among the troubadours and the minnesinger. The
heartfelt song, “Thou art mine, I am thine,” gives the clearest
expression to the individual, purely personal nature of the
love-relations between man and woman, and discloses also the “romantic”
sentiment, as in “Thou art locked within my heart; lost is the key: now
must thou stay there for ever,” and discloses the intimate association
peculiar to romanticism between the nature-sense and the feeling of
love. It is the beloved who first fills for us the joy of summer; her
love is like the rose. An enormous range is thus opened to the
subjectivity of this sentiment. The romanticism of the =secret= element
in love is first perceived at this time, and finds perception in the
words:
“No fire, no coal, can burn so hot
As secret love, of which no one knows anything.”[137]
The age of chivalry now arrives, the epoch of =minne=[138] (=love=) and
=gallantry=. What a new and remarkable change in the spiritual
physiognomy of love! This also has left deep traces in the love of
modern civilized man; this period represents an important stage in the
developmental history of individual eroticism.
In the middle ages the honour of the knight and the love of woman, “the
most beautiful radiance coming down to us from the life of this
wonderful period,” as Wienberg says, belong together. Since that time
man’s honour has been associated in a peculiar manner with woman’s love.
Boldly but aptly the far-sighted Herder has described the knightly minne
(love) as a reflex of the Gothic. The same immeasurability of the
imagination, the same indescribable sentiment, constructed the huge
cathedral, and disclosed the unrivalled worth and beauty of the
beloved--created minne and its outward expression, gallantry.
In deifying supplication, the knightly spirit elevated the beautiful sex
to the heavens, =raised woman far above man=, and placed man far beneath
woman. The knight sacrificed himself for the mistress of his heart,
subjected himself to her judgment before the _cours d’amour_ (courts of
love), and in the lists. He became the =slave= of love and of the
beloved woman; he wore her fetters, he obeyed her slightest nod, he
endured chastisement and pain for her sake. But was this all reality?
Was it not rather pure imagination? There was, indeed, as Johannes
Scherr says, a worm at the heart of all this romanticism. The ideal
deification of woman did not affect a corresponding elevation in her
true social position; minne was but too often a mere “pose,” and was
often associated with unbridled sexual licence in relation to women of
lower degrees.
The domination of the imaginative element characterized the aberrations
of minne, debasing itself for the honour of the beloved. The masochistic
element concealed in all love was here for the first time elevated into
a system. We shall return to this subject in the chapter on “Masochism.”
And yet there is another side to the matter, and by the spirit of
chivalry there was aroused a nobler view of woman’s nature.
“The cause and the secret of this dominance (of women) is this, that
woman, with her complete, noble womanliness, entered wholly and fully
into life; that she controlled a kingdom which was hers by right, the
world of feeling and emotion, but controlled this kingdom and no more.
As mistress of feeling, as guardian of feeling, she brought poetry
into life; and into art she brought that lofty impetus, the
above-described fanciful ideal or feminine tendency, which, when
observed and perceived, reacts on the emotional mood of the
observer.”[139]
To this time also belongs the development of the =conventional= in the
amatory relations of the sexes, which came to be governed by definite
rules; since that time, for example, it has been regarded as improper
and scandalous for an unmarried woman to remain for any considerable
time alone with a man, a view which has persisted to the present day.
The social intercourse of the sexes was based upon “=gallantry=” or
“courtesy,” upon a refined behaviour towards “ladies,” regulated by the
laws of beauty, propriety, and social tact. In the sequel there
developed out of this that exaggerated modern gallantry, characterized
by little real delicacy of feeling, because it exhibits an undertone of
contempt which makes woman feel only too clearly that she is the
representative of a “weaker,” inferior sex, and is in no way the
possessor of any proper individual, personal value. Intelligent, eminent
women have always protested against this modern gallantry. Mantegazza,
in his “Physiology of Woman,” p. 442 (Jena, 1893), ably describes the
hypocrisy underlying this evil form of gallantry.
The first intimation of modern individual love is to be found in
Shakespeare, to whom love was in general, indeed, only a “superhuman”
passion, something lying beyond good and evil, which seized hold of man
against his will; but none the less he embodies in his work the romantic
ideal life of his time in feminine characters possessing the fullest
individuality--as, for example, Ophelia, Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona,
Virginia, Imogen, and Cordelia, whilst in Cleopatra he has described the
daimonic-bacchantic traits of the love of woman. In Juliet, who sees in
“true love acted simple modesty,” we observe the passionate emotion of
the primordial natural impulse, and the first awakening of woman as a
personality.
False gallantry, in association with conventional propriety, both of
which were developed to the fullest degree at the Courts of Louis XIV.
and Louis XV., subordinated love to rules, and was very well compatible
with the most frivolous and epicurean sensual life. And this occurred at
the expense of deeply-felt natural sentiment, the place of which was
taken by mere flirtation and coquetry. Here, also, the contempt of woman
clearly shows itself. Especially in regard to this period, the opinion
has been maintained that the modern Frenchman has never suspected,
understood, recognized the divine in woman’s nature. Still, the general
truth of this assertion is belied by the amatory life of the celebrated
heroines of the salons, such as Du Deffand, Lespinasse, Du Chatelet,
Quinault, and above all of the celebrated Ninon de l’Enclos[140]; and
the Abbé Prévost, in his immortal “Manon Lescaut,” proved that even in
that period the indestructible belief in woman persisted, at least as an
ideal.
It was, in fact, in France that the higher individual love underwent a
new spiritual enrichment; Rousseau’s “Julie” appeared on the horizon of
Love’s heaven. And in the background was disclosed the German “Werther,”
a book strangely influenced by that of Rousseau. The =nature-sense= on
the one hand, =sentimentality= on the other, are the new elements in the
love of the period of Héloïse and Werther.
In Rousseau’s “New Héloïse,” passionate love and a complete
self-surrender were described without the artificiality, and also
without the coquetry and wantonness, of which the literature of the time
was full. =It was love in a grander style= than people were then
accustomed to see. For this reason, the book constituted a turning-point
in literature. That love is an earnest thing, that it can become “la
grande affaire de notre vie,” has perhaps never been more deeply and
thoroughly depicted than in the character of “Julie.” In maintaining the
essential purity of the love relationship, when the voice of Nature is
really expressed therein, Rousseau speaks of the principal theme of his
own life.
“Is not true love,” asks Julie, “the chastest of all bonds?... Is not
love in itself the purest as well as the most magnificent impulse of
our nature? Does it not despise low and crawling souls, in order to
inspire only grand and strong souls? And does it not ennoble all
feeling, does it not double our being and elevate us above ourselves?
In contrast to social inequalities, the love relationship points to a
higher law, before which all are equal.”[141]
The love of Rousseau is, in fact, not social; it is not a product of
civilization, but it is a creation of nature; it is one with nature. The
nature-sense and the love-sense are here most intimately associated. And
he observes both, nature and love, =with feeling=. The _sensibilité de
l’âme_ finds in nature and in love objects of the most glorious delight,
of the sweetest pain, of the most burning tears.
“Out of the perceptions of mingled pain and ecstasy which the vision
of nature, of beauty, or of a fine action, induced in him, he wove the
web of sensibility with which he enveloped the creatures of his
imagination. Incessantly thrust back into himself, his heart bleeding
from wounded friendship or from unrequited love, self-tormentingly
dissecting his own wishes and illusions, his own faculties and
impossibilities, he became one of the first heralds of the
Weltschmerz, of the woes of Werther and René, to which Byron and Heine
had only to add self-mockery.”[142]
The sentimentality of the eighteenth century took its rise in England,
as I have explained at some length in my pseudonymous work, “The Sexual
Life in England,” vol. ii., pp. 95-107 (Berlin, 1903). In that country
it found its most characteristic expression in the romances of
Richardson and Sterne, and in landscape-gardening; but it was by
Rousseau and Goethe that for the first time it was really brought into
contact with the realities of life.
For the history of Julie, the history of Werther--this was the history
of all happily or unhappily loving youths and maidens of that day; each
maiden had her Saint Preux, each youth his Lotte.
The profound influence exercised by Rousseau, especially on women, has
been described by H. Buffenoir in a very careful study.[143] The
significance which “Werther” had for the emotional life of the time has
been explained with the most cultivated understanding by Erich Schmidt
in a well-known monograph.[144]
He shows that the nature-sense and sentimentality are much more deeply
felt in Goethe’s “Werther” than in Rousseau’s “Nouvelle Héloïse.”
Goethe himself says in “Wahrheit und Dichtung,” speaking of this
poetical, rational, intimate, and loving absorption into nature:
“I endeavoured to separate myself inwardly from everything foreign to
me, to regard the outward world lovingly, and to allow all beings,
from the human onwards, to influence me, each in its kind, as deeply
as was possible. Thus arose a wonderful alliance with the individual
objects of nature, and an inward harmony, a harmony with the whole; so
that every change, whether of places and of regions, or of days and
seasons, or of any possible kind, moved me to my inmost soul. The
painter’s view became associated with that of the poet; the beautiful
country landscape through which the friendly river was wandering,
increased my inclination to solitude, and favoured my quiet attitude
of contemplation extending itself in every direction.”
Werther’s feeling for nature is intimately related to his love passion.
The two harmonize, and each exercises a reciprocal influence upon the
other. Nature is to Werther a second beloved. The youth of nature, the
spring of nature, are also the youth and the spring of his love.
In the peculiar association of love with the nature-sense and
sentimentality, which is so characteristic of the time of Julie and
Werther, are to be found the first beginnings of the “=Weltschmerz=,”
with its erotically significant “ecstasy of sorrow.” The following words
in Goethe’s “Stella” appear to me to bind Weltschmerz and eroticism in
an extremely distinct relationship. Stella says of men:
“They make us at once happy and miserable! They fill our heart with
feelings of bliss! What new, unknown feelings and hopes fill our
souls, when their stormful passion invades our nerves! How often has
everything in me trembled and throbbed, =when, in uncontrollable
tears, he has washed away the sorrows of a world on my breast=! I
begged him, for God’s sake, to spare himself!--to spare me!--in
vain!--=into my inmost marrow he fanned the flames which were
devouring himself=. And thus the girl, from head to foot, became all
heart, all sentiment.”
Here we find clearly described the erotic element in mental pain; and we
observe the remarkable =increase= of passion by means of sorrow, tears,
and a profound perception of the evil of the world. This Weltschmerz
fans the flames of eroticism, increases love, and ultimately gives rise
to a peculiar sense of power; it is, indeed, most frequently in the
first bloom of love, in the years of puberty, that its relations with
sexuality are most distinctly manifested. The celebrated alienist Mendel
has described this almost physiological Weltschmerz of the age of
puberty as “hypo-melancholia.” An indefinite, passionate longing, which
seeks relief in tears, a by no means negligible inclination to
suicide--of which Werther is the classical exemplar--characterizes this
condition, which is connected with the complete revolutionizing of the
spiritual and emotional life by means of the sexual. The Weltschmerz of
youth is a latent sexual sense of power.
How the nature-sense and love combine to constitute a perception of
Weltschmerz has been most beautifully expressed by Byron and Heine in
their poetry. With quite exceptional clearness, Heine also describes it
in a letter to Friedrich Merckel (written at Nordeney on August 7,
1826), in which he described a nightly recurring scene with a beautiful
woman on the seashore:
“The sea no longer appeared so romantic as before--and yet on its
strand I had lived through the =sweetest= and most mystically dear
experience of my life which could ever inspire a poet. The moon seemed
to wish to show me that in this world happiness yet remained for me.
We did not speak--it was only a long, profound glance, the moonlight
supplied the music--as we walked to and fro, I took her hand in mine,
I felt the secret pressure--my soul trembled and glowed--=afterwards I
wept=.”
How different were these tears from the floods of tears in Miller’s
“Siegwart,” and in other similar productions of the Werther epoch,
which, with their weakly sentimentality, their emotionally happy
“sensibility,” had nothing whatever in common with the much more natural
Weltschmerz of Goethe and Heine--more natural because based on a
physiological foundation.
In modern love also, the Weltschmerz continues to live. The only
difference is that by means of the pessimistic philosophy it has to some
extent obtained a logical foundation. And Nietzsche has shown us the
=force= which lies hidden in this ecstasy of sorrow. Precisely on
account of the pains of the world, he affirms joyfully life and love.
Anyone who wishes to write the history of Weltschmerz, from a
psychological point of view so profoundly interesting, must not overlook
Nietzsche as a most important turning-point in that history.
The passion inspired by genius, the excess of vital energy in the “Sturm
und Drang” epoch of German literature, was admirably consistent with
that genuine, primitive Weltschmerz. Rousseau’s more indeterminate
sensibility had, on the other hand, a more powerful influence upon the
mode of feeling of =romanticism=, and this movement appears more closely
related to him than to Goethe.
=Romantic love= combines the elements of feeling of the previous epochs
in an increased subjectivism. Not nature alone, but history also,
folk-tales, legends, poetry, and the wonderful secrets of the primeval
age--all these are reflected in romantic love, and awaken singular
dreams and emotions. The “mondbeglänzte Zaubernacht” (“moon-illumined
magic night”) is much more than a mere feeling of nature; it is the
recognition of a connexion with the past and with its secret, sweet,
half-forgotten stories. Fonqué’s “Undine” is the classical type of all
this. Romantic love delights in this wonder-mood of the heart; reality
becomes, as it were, a dream. The obscure, the problematical--these
attract the romanticist. It is for this reason that he loves the night
and the night-mood of nature, rather than the clear daylight. =Moonshine
reverie= is a characteristic trait of romantic love. Everything flows
away into the indeterminate, the cloudy, the boundless. This love knows
no limitation or narrowing, no fetters. It is the sworn enemy of the
conventional, narrow-hearted, philistine morality, and of all
limitations of personality. In Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” this most
celebrated monument of romantic love, the campaign against philistinism,
as the greatest enemy of a free, noble amatory life, is most
energetically carried on. It is utterly untrue to describe “Lucinde” as
a romance in which there is a cult of suggestive nudity--as the poetry
of the flesh. It certainly preaches the free natural conception and
perception of the nude and the sexual, and is a glorious protest against
the artificial and hypocritical separation of body and soul in love;
but, on the other side, it unlocks in love the entire kingdom of the
emotional and spiritual life, and discloses its significance for the
individual man as a free personality.
More than Rousseau’s “Julie” and Goethe’s “Werther” is Friedrich
Schlegel’s “Lucinde” the apotheosis of individual love. Romantic love is
the mirror of personality; it is changeable, filled with the highest
spiritual content, and, above all, like personality, is capable of
development. In a masterly manner Schlegel has represented the intimate
connexion between true love and all vital energy. The relations of love
to genius have never before been so admirably described.
“Here,” says Karl Gutzkow, “there is no question of artificiality; we
have to do rather with the yearning of a youth who loves, who sees the
one and only beloved in many different forms, in the metamorphoses of
his own ego, which yearns to reconcile egoism and love.”
Schleiermacher, in his “Confidential Letters regarding Lucinde,” Gutzkow
in his preface to the new edition of this work, and recently H.
Meyer-Benfey,[145] have supplied us with conclusions regarding the true
significance of “Lucinde,” conclusions in harmony with our own view.
We must allude here to a new element in romantic love, which since that
time has played an important part in modern eroticism. It is _l’art pour
l’art_ of love, the revelling in pure moods and emotions as the means of
enjoyment. The emotional frequently grows luxuriantly and chokes the
natural feeling of love. Jean Paul, for example,
“regards eroticism purely as a method of cultivation. Human beings are
not to be actually loved, but are to be used to strike sparks from, by
which one’s own inward life may be illuminated.... He is the exemplar
of that artist-love which, vampire-like, drinks the souls of those who
become its prey. This love sees in the hearts offered to it only the
stuff for pictures; and in their warm blood it finds only an
intoxicating, stimulating drink.”[146]
This unqualified search for personal emotional experiences in love,
without regard to the love-partner, is especially represented in Jean
Paul’s “Titan.”
Wackenroder, in his “Phantasien über die Kunst” (“Imaginative Studies
concerning Art”), has already warned us of the dangers of this purely
erotic-emotional love. Karl Joel has recently described very vividly how
the romanticists ultimately reduced all vital relationships to the
emotions of love.[147] This attempt must lead finally to mysticism, the
poetical representative of which is Novalis.
It is very interesting to find that all the diverse elements of romantic
love may also be detected in the latter-day renascence of romanticism.
In his admirable book on “Nietzsche and Romanticism,” Karl Joel has
clearly shown the existence of this romantic element in modern love,
and, above all, has insisted upon the intimate connexion which the
philosophy of Nietzsche has with the joy in battle and the vital energy
of the romanticists. Both are apostles of the Dionysiac, not of the
Apollinian.[148]
This also is the difference by which “romantic” love is distinguished
from “=classical=” love--a difference and a distinction which I find
indicated for the first time in Theodor Mundt’s romance “Madelon oder
die Romantiker in Paris” (Leipzig, 1832).
The relevant passage (pp. 9-12) runs as follows:
“I am therefore of opinion that there can be a romantic and a
classical poetry; there are also romantic and classical love; and it
is only by means of this twofold nature that it is possible to
discover and understand this contrast in poetry....
“This wild and yet so sweet disturbance of the heart, in which love
subsists, this rejoicing and revelry of the aroused imagination which,
originated by the charm of the beloved, lead to an intoxication with
all the sensual dreams of a delightful, ethereal happiness; and as in
the flower-bud in which a burning ray of sunshine has suddenly
awakened the impulse to bloom, give rise to the desire and longing of
sensual impulsion--all these tears and sighs of the lovers, pains and
joys, this love-happiness and love-misery at the same time, this
star-flaming night-side of passion, to which after a vagrant drunken
frenzy, an ice-cold, unwelcome morning follows--all this, my friend,
is romantic love....
“And shall I now describe also =classical= love?... Believe me, there
are faces which at the very first glance seem to us so trustworthy and
so near akin, they draw us to them, as if we had spent years with them
in sympathy, asking for love and receiving love. By the sight of this
girl’s face there was induced in me so suddenly a sense of peace, such
as never before in my life had I experienced; and this gentle feeling
which drew me towards her, I may call true love and true happiness. In
her loving eyes there glowed no seductive fire, no repellent pride
like that of our romantic Madelon; in the simple beautiful German
girl, all is clear and true; out of her gentle features speaks her
gentle soul; and all for which I have longed in passionate, aberrant
hours of my life--a definite, unalloyed happiness in existence--seemed
to me, as I saw her for the very first time, to shine on me out of her
blue true eyes. My friend, is not that classical love?”
It is the Apollinian-Platonic element of modern love which Theodor Mundt
here describes as “classical” love, and certainly he wrongly places it
before romantic love, which is the expression of modern subjectivism and
individualism. Such classical love found in Goethe’s “Tasso” its most
complete representation. Here love was conceived as “possession, which
should give =peace=”; the beloved being influences after the manner of
an already understood picture. As Kuno Fischer remarks, in the world of
Goethe’s “Tasso” the Platonic Eros is the fashion. Love is here the
pure, quiet contemplation of beauty in and with the beloved.
Gretchen and Helena in “Faust” embody very clearly the contrast
between romantic and classical love. We find these contrasts united
in Wilhelm Heinse’s celebrated “Ardinghello,” a romance which even
to us at the present day seems so modern. In this work we find the
Dionysiac-Faustian impulse of the loving individual, and the
Apollinian-artistic contemplation of the loved one, described with equal
mastery.
In regard to love, Heinse was the prototype of “=Young Germany=.” And we
are young Germany.
For all the problems of amatory life which to-day occupy our minds have
already been made topics of public discussion by the authors of young
Germany. In young German love-philosophy, the “Knights of the Spirit” as
well as the “Knights of the Flesh,” come to their full rights. Only the
ignorant can regard the so-called “emancipation of the flesh,” the
apotheosis of lascivious sensuality, as the sole characteristic of the
efforts and battles of our own time. No, he who wishes to understand
modern love, in all its =spiritual= manifestations and relationship, let
him read the writings of young Germany, especially the works of Laube,
Gutzkow, Mundt; and also those of Heine, who has a more intimate
relationship to young Germany than he has to romanticism.
More especially Gutzkow,[149] who appears to me the greatest and most
comprehensive spirit of the young German literature--indeed, of the more
recent German literature in general--overlooks no single riddle and
problem of modern eroticism. Of all the writers of the nineteenth
century, he has the profoundest knowledge of women. How stimulating are
his girl characters; how true, notwithstanding their manifoldness!
Wally, riding proudly upon a white palfrey, outwardly an image of
beauty, but, like so many modern emancipated women, inwardly tormented
by the demon of doubt; Seraphine the dreamer, uncertain about herself
and her love, of whom the poet himself later admitted that her character
was based on reality; Idaline,[150] full of majesty, the ideal “bride of
the waves,” a typical figure of conventional high life, who yet in
sudden revolution against this conventionalism gives her whole being to
a chance love, a love of the moment,[151] which alienates her from her
betrothed and later husband, and drives her to death; then, again, all
the brilliant feminine characters in the great romances, “Die Ritter vom
Geiste,” Melanie, Helene, Selma, Pauline, Olga--all are characters
bearing the stamp of reality in their spiritual and emotional life, so
various and yet so true, and, above all, in their manifold,
differentiated relationships to men, genuinely =modern= women.
Gutzkow was also the first to bring upon the stage the modern woman and
the problems of modern love, long before the French dramatists and
before Ibsen.
As Karl Frenzel pointed out as early as 1864, Gutzkow made the stage the
battlefield of modern ideas. The inward contrasts of love, the
psychological problem of the heart--he first ventured to deal with these
in the dramatic form.
“We all of us felt the wounds which ‘the world’ inflicted on Werner;
we all wandered from the quiet violet, Agathe, to the brilliant rose,
Sidonie; as in Ottfried, so in ourselves, the love of the heart
battled with the love of the spirit. Who would admit himself to be so
miserably poor as never to have revelled, lived, and suffered, in the
play of these feelings? What wife has not, at least in imagination,
hesitated for a moment, like Ella Rose, between the lover and the
husband? Such figures as these bear in themselves the essence of
truth, and do not lose their lofty value because, perhaps, their
garments are not draped with sufficient harmony. They touch us,
because we recognize in them our own flesh and blood; and they fulfil,
in so far as the form of the society drama allows, Shakespeare’s canon
of dramatic art--they hold the mirror up to nature.”
In his tragedies, “Werner,” “Ottfried,” “Ella Rose,” Gutzkow presents in
a masterly manner the inner life of the time; we see in them the pulsing
wing-beats of the souls, which in pain, as it must be in these days,
soar upwards in the effort to attain beauty and freedom.[152]
Of all the young German authors, Gutzkow has best grasped the problem of
problems in love--the problem of =personality=. In the painful question
asked of Helene d’Azimont, in “Die Ritter vom Geiste”--
“Is it, then, thy innermost need,
To be everything to others, =nothing to thyself=?
Nothing to woman’s highest glory, love,
Nothing, Helene, to the pang of renunciation?”
--this inalienable right to the safeguarding and development of the
individual personality, notwithstanding all the self-sacrifice of
passionate love, is most forcibly maintained. This is, indeed, the true
nucleus of all higher individual love between man and woman.
Gutzkow has been accused, by those who had in mind only the purely
symbolic nudity scene in “Wally,” of preaching the “emancipation of the
flesh”; the same accusation has been levelled against other young German
authors, such as Lambe (in “Jungen Europa”), Theodor Mundt (in the
“Madonna”), Wienbarg (in the “Aesthetische Feldzüge”), Heine (in the
“Neue Gedichte”). The charge is unjust. It is only the =poetry= of the
flesh which they wish to bring to its rights. Notwithstanding his
enthusiastic hymn of praise to Casanova, Theodor Mundt declares in his
“Madonna” that the separation of flesh and spirit is the “inexpiable
suicide of the human consciousness.”
Much more important, the true characteristic of all the authors of young
Germany, appear to me the parts which =self-analysis= and =reflection=
here for the first time play in love, visible beneath the influence of
the offshoots of French romanticism, in which, however, we also
encounter the same phenomenon, as in George Sand’s “Lelia,” in Alfred de
Musset’s “Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle,” in Balzac’s “Femme de
Trente Ans”--in which last romance we find the following passage:
“Love assumes the colouring of every century. Now, in the year 1822,
it is doctrinaire. Instead of, as formerly, proving it by deeds, it is
argued, it is discussed, it is brought upon the tribune in a speech.”
=Just as in the middle ages the idea of “sin” was the disturbing
principle of love, so for the modern civilized man, since the days of
young Germany, this cold self-reflection, this critical analysis of
one’s peculiar passionate perceptions and feelings, is the modern
disturbing principle.= This is the worm which gnaws unceasingly at the
root of our love, and destroys its most beautiful blossoms. Gutzkow’s
“Wally the Doubter” and “Seraphine” are the classical literary documents
for this destructive ascendancy of pure thought in love. Very noteworthy
is it that in both these romances it is =woman= who destroys life and
love by reflection, whilst from earliest days this danger has always
lain in the path of man. It is the fate of the modern woman, of
individual personalities, which is here depicted; this fate makes its
appearance from the moment when woman comes to take a share in the
spiritual life of man. The cold dialectic of Seraphine, who, as Gutzkow
makes one of her lovers say, reverses the natural order of man and
woman, is a necessary product of the love of woman ripening in the
direction of a free personality--happily, however, it is only a
=transient= phenomenon. The fully developed personality will return to
the primitiveness of feeling, and will no longer endure within herself
any kind of division or laceration. The corresponding phenomena in man
have been described by Kierkegaard and Grillparzer in their diaries,
which are classical documents of “reflection-love.”
The love of the present day contains within itself, and nourishes itself
upon, all the above-described spiritual elements of the past. More
especially at the present day is the question of the so-called =free
love= or =free marriage=, disregardant of the legally binding forms of
civil and ecclesiastical marriage, representative of all the heartfelt
needs of highly civilized mankind, hitherto held back, oppressed, and
fettered by the materialism of the time, and still more by its
conventionalism still active beneath its covering of outlived forms. The
problem of free love was first formulated in “Lucinde,” but found in the
young German literature, especially in the writings of Laube, Mundt, and
Dingelstedt, its theoretical foundation; and in the Bohemian life of the
Second Empire free love obtained its practical realization, although the
purely =idyllic= character of this Bohemian life, and its limitation to
the circle of the _dolce far niente_ students and artists, in truth
makes it differ widely from the most intensely personal free love,
=taking its part fully in the struggle for life=, as it presents itself
in the ideal form to modern humanity.
The Second French Empire, whose significance for the spiritual
tendencies of our time was a very great one, allowed two elements of
love, to which we have earlier alluded, to appear with marked
predominance--elements still influential at the present day: the
=satanic-diabolic= element of eroticism, which found its most incisive
expression in the works of Barbey d’Aurevilly (strongly influenced by
the writings of de Sade), of Baudelaire, and more particularly of the
great Félicien Rops; and the purely artistic element, as it appears in
the works of the authors just mentioned, but more especially in the
writings of Théophile Gautier. This “Young France” (to use the name of a
novel of Gautier’s) has influenced the amatory life and the amatory
theory of the present day almost as strongly as young Germany.
At the same time, in the sixties of the nineteenth century
Schopenhauer’s philosophy was dominant in Germany, and his metaphysic
of love, which considered the individual not at all, but the species as
all in all--this =pessimistic= conception of all love found its poetic
expression in Edward Grisebach’s “New Tanhäuser,” published in 1869.
Here, also, it would be a grave error to condemn these erotic poems of
the day, on account of their glowing sensuality, as mere glorifications
of carnal lust. The poet himself was the new Tanhäuser. He wished, as he
often told me, to find expression in these poems for the life-denying as
well as for the life-affirming forces. He sang the pleasure and the
pain, the hopes and the disappointments of modern love. For him love is
indeed the rose =with= the thorns. For this reason the motto of the poem
is a saying of Meister Eckart: “The voluptuousness of the creature is
intermingled with bitterness;” and this is the theme of the poets,
though expressed in numerous variations: “There is no pleasure without
regret.”
But for this reason Grisebach--and in this respect he resembles
Nietzsche--wished none the less joyfully to affirm this life, filled as
it is with pain, and in all its activity bringing with it regrets. In
this sense he is no exclusive pessimist, but an apostle of =activity=,
like the men of young Germany, in whose footsteps, and especially in
those of Heine, he follows. The beautiful saying of Laube, in his
“Liebesbriefen” (Leipzig, 1835, p. 29), “He who has never been shaken to
the depths by any profound sorrow is also ignorant of all deep
rejoicing, he knows no single verse of that enthusiasm which woos the
denied heaven, he experiences no sort of religion, he is capable of no
sacrifice, of no greatness,” is suited also to the “new Tanhäuser,”
which so powerfully influenced German youth during the seventies and
eighties of the nineteenth century.
He who wishes to understand how the various love-problems are
represented in the literature of the present, strongly influenced as it
is by the problem-poems of Ibsen, by Zola’s naturalism, and by the
French symbolism[153] dependent on him, will find it described later in
a special chapter devoted to love in the literature of to-day.
In the following chapter we have to consider one additional influence
which is especially apparent in the love and eroticism of the present
day, and possesses great importance for the individualization of love.
This is the artistic element in modern love.
[134] H. T. Finck, “Romantic Love and Personal Beauty.”
[135] _Cf._ G. Hirth, “Ways to Freedom,” pp. 468-472 (Munich, 1903).
[136] G. Saint-Yves (“La Littérature Amoureuse,” Paris, 1887, p. 25)
also sees in the æsthetic contemplation of the beloved person the
fundamental root of individual love. It has gradually developed out of
the ordinary æsthetic contemplation of nature. An interesting proof of
this connexion is the Song of Solomon, in which the æsthetic stimuli
of the beloved one are compared with every possible animate and
inanimate natural object.
[137] _Cf._ regarding the numerous variations of this ancient couplet,
the interesting account given by Arthur Kopp, “Old Proverbs and
Popular Rhymes for Loving Hearts,” published in the _Zeitschrift des
Vereins für Volkskunde_, Heft i., pp. 8, 9 (Berlin, 1902).
[138] _Minne_ is an old German word (now obsolete) for _love_, “the
love of fair women.” The _minnesinger_ were love-singers who sang
their own compositions to the accompaniment of the music of harp or
viol--in fact, they were lyric poets. The most flourishing years of
this art were from about 1170 to 1250; thus the minnesinger were
contemporary with and closely akin to the Provençal troubadours. But
the German development was essentially native, and the minnesinger’s
treatment of love was characterized by a more ideal note than was
usually attained by the troubadours. A good, though brief, account
(with a list of authorities) is given of the minnesinger in
“Chambers’s Encyclopædia.”--TRANSLATOR.
[139] Jacob Falke, “The Society of Knighthood in the Epoch of the Cult
of Women,” p. 49.
[140] In her letters (“Letters of Ninon de l’Enclos,” with ten
etchings by Karl Walser, Berlin, 1906), the deep spiritual
relationships of love found a classical representation.
[141] _Cf._ Harald Höffding, “Rousseau and his Philosophy,” pp. 86, 89
(Stuttgart, 1897).
[142] Emil Du Bois-Reymond, “Frederick II. and Jean Jacques Rousseau.”
[143] H. Buffenoir, “Jean Jacques Rousseau and Women” (Paris, 1891).
[144] Erich Schmidt, “Richardson, Rousseau, and Goethe” (Jena, 1875).
[145] H. Meyer-Benfey, “Lucinde,” published in
_Mutterschutz--Zeitschrift zur Reform der sexuellen Ethik_, 1906, No.
5, pp. 173-192. Edited by Dr. Helene Stöcker.
[146] Felix Poppenberg, “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’s Liebe und
Ehestand,” in “Bibelots,” p. 214 (Leipzig, 1904).
[147] Carl Joel, “Nietzsche und die Romantik,” pp. 13-16 (Jena and
Leipzig, 1905).
[148] _Cf._ also Helene Stöcker, “Nietzsche und die Romantik,” in
_Kölnische Zeitung_, No. 1127, October 29, 1905.
[149] At the present time but few of my living contemporaries share
this opinion of Gutzkow, which I myself base upon the careful reading
of all his works. I may quote, however, with satisfaction the prophecy
of the deceased dramatist Theodor Wehl. He writes of Gutzkow: “As a
literary phenomenon he will grow with time. After long, long years,
out of the literature of our time two characteristic heads will
emerge--one laughing, and one glancing round him earnestly and
sorrowfully: the head of Heinrich Heine, and the head of Karl Gutzkow”
(F. Wehl, “Zeit und Menschen,” “Tagebuch Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren
von 1863 bis 1884,” vol. i., p. 297 (Altona, 1889)).
[150] Karl Gutzkow, “Reminiscences of my Life,” p. 18 (Berlin, 1875).
[151] “The time of love is not age, it is not youth: the time of love
is the moment,” says Beate, one of Gutzkow’s characters, at the end of
the tragedy “Ein Weisser Blatt.”
[152] K. Frenzel, “Karl Gutzkow,” published in “Büsten und Bilder,”
pp. 177 and 178 (Hanover, 1864).
[153] Heinrich Stümcke refers to this connexion between naturalism and
symbolism in a very thoughtful essay (“Zwischen den Garben,” p. 156;
Leipzig, 1899).
CHAPTER IX
THE ARTISTIC ELEMENT IN MODERN LOVE
“_I am of opinion that love bears within itself, more than any other
moral relationship, the_ sense of the beautiful, _and when anywhere a
heavy heart begins to move its wings and to strive towards the ideal, it
is in the time when it loves. Without doubt an æsthetic perception
always accompanies the eye of the lover, and in a greater degree than it
ever accompanies the dispassionate eye._”--KUNO FISCHER.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER IX
Ennoblement and reform of the amatory life as a demand of our time --
The battle with the elemental forces of the sexual impulse and of
asceticism -- The artistic element in modern love -- Erotic
rhythmotropism -- Sexuality and æsthetics -- The awakening of æsthetic
sensibility at the time of puberty -- Importance of sensuality to
life and to the poietic impulse -- The example of Annette von
Droste-Hülshoff -- Sensuality of great poets and artists -- Views of
recent æsthetics regarding the relations between sexual love and
artistic perception -- Rôle of the erotic need for illusion in social
life -- Emerson, Konrad Lange, and William Scherer, on the æsthetic
eroticism of social life -- The liberating and vitalizing elements
therein -- Significance of modern individual beauty -- Misnamed
“nervous” beauty -- The English “Pre-Raphaelites” and the ideal of
beauty -- Masculine beauty -- Why women love ugly men -- Caroline
Schlegel, Goethe, Eduard von Hartmann, and Swedenborg, on this subject
-- The attractive force of the poietic and the spiritual in man.
CHAPTER IX
At the present day, notwithstanding all the adverse opinions and
jeremiads of infatuated apostles of morality, the epoch of our amatory
life through which we are passing is by no means one of decadence. On
the contrary, we are now actually engaged in its re-constitution,
reform, and ennoblement. All the tendencies of the time proceed towards
such a radical perfectionment of love, towards its free, individual
configuration, not by the unchaining of sensuality, but by its
idealization; and when we have once attained a natural view of
sensuality, it loses all its terrors. We fight at first against the
elemental force of the wild impulse, and against the elemental force of
life-denying asceticism. In this struggle the artistic element in modern
love plays a notable part. By this we do not signify “sugary”
æstheticism, nor yet the completely non-sensual Platonic Eros, but that
æsthetic tendency in human love, bringing about an intimate association
of the bodily and spiritual, which W. Bölsche denotes by the term
“rhythmotropism.” It is “an impulsive, forced reaction of the higher
animal brain to rhythmical beauty,” to which art also owes its origin.
This æsthetic natural impulse is of great importance to love, as Darwin
recognized many years ago. It was he who expressed the great thought
that beauty is love become perceptible.
The sexual is in no way hostile to æsthetic contemplation, as the
unhappy Weininger quite erroneously maintained in the confused chapter
“Erotism and Æsthetics” of his book. He curtly denies that sexuality has
any æsthetic value whatever, yet Plato himself deduced from the physical
Eros the highest æsthetic contemplation of a spiritual nature. In the
world of the senses he discovered the reflection of the Divine.
The well-known fact that with the awakening of the sexual life,
spiritual creative activity also awakens, and an artistic tendency
becomes kinetic, that at the time of puberty every youth is a poet,
confirms the suggested existence of this intimate relationship between
sexual and æsthetic perception.
“There appears to me to be no doubt,” says J. Volkelt in his
“Æsthetics” (vol. i., p. 523; Munich, 1905), “that in the youth or the
maiden the awakening of sexuality induces an individualization and
invigoration of artistic perception. Hand in hand with the first love
of youth, somewhere about the sixteenth or seventeenth year, the
sense of grace and beauty in the landscape, the appreciation of the
charm of poetry, painting, and music, are strengthened and refined to
such a degree, that in comparison with what is now felt, all earlier
experiences and enjoyments seem to be as nothing.”
Sensuality first gives life colour, brings out the nuances and the finer
tones of feeling, without which life would be tinted a uniform grey,
would be a monotonous waste, and lacking which the joy of existence and
creative activity would be annihilated, or, at least, would be reduced
to a minimum. Even the most ideal love must be nourished upon
sensuality, if it is to remain poietic and full of vitality. Of this
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff is an interesting example--a woman and poet
in whom in other respects sexual influences can have played only a very
modest part. But she lost on the instant all poetic capacity, all
artistic creative power, when her lover, Lewin Schücking, became engaged
to Louise von Gall. The mere idea of the =possibility= of physical
possession was to her a spur to poetic activity without its being
necessary for this possibility to be translated into reality. But when
the possibility was for ever removed, her muse at once became dumb.
An absolutely convincing proof of the intimate connexion between
sexuality and æsthetics is the fact that great artists and poets have,
in the majority of cases, possessed thoroughly sensual natures. The
previously described relationship between the sexual impulse and the
poietic impulse, comprised in the “function impulse” of Santlus, is
especially manifest in the case of artists. In these artistic natures
the perceptive æsthetic power is associated with an ardent sensuality,
which derives its most powerful impulse directly from the beautiful. We
agree with von Krafft-Ebing when he denies the possibility of genius,
art, and poetry except upon a sexual foundation. We do not believe in a
so-called purely æsthetic contemplation and perception without any
sexual admixture. Even Volkelt, who is inclined to sever art and the
sexual impulse each from the other, is unable to deny the genetic
connexion between the two. Oskar Bie makes the interesting observation
that “in æsthetic relationships the cord of the will does not become
thinner to the breaking point, but stronger, until it becomes blind
passion” (_Neue Deutsche Rundschau_, 1894, p. 479). Nietzsche and Guyau
have also declared themselves opposed to Schopenhauer’s theory regarding
the absence of a will-element in æsthetic perception. Nietzsche speaks
even of an “æsthetic of the sexual impulse.” Guyau bases his æsthetic
upon the love of life and upon sexual love (“Les Problèmes de
l’Esthétique Contemporaine,” Paris, 1897). Magnus Hirschfeld alludes in
his “Wesen der Liebe” (“The Nature of Love”), p. 48, to a work by G.
Santayana entitled “The Sense of Beauty,” in which the theory is
propounded that “for human beings the whole of nature is an object of
sexual perception, and it is chiefly in this way that the beauty of
nature is to be explained.” Finally, Gustav Naumann (“Sex and Art:
Prolegomena to Physiological Æsthetics,” Leipzig, 1899) says most
convincingly that the sexual is the =root= of all art, of all æsthetics.
But whatever view may be held regarding the relationship between
sexuality and art, it is a quite incontestable fact that our latter-day
life is characterized by a need “for erotic illusion” (to use the
expression of Konrad Lange), that the slighter degree of eroticism, as
it exhibits itself in social intercourse between the two sexes, is
principally of an artistic nature. I do not speak here merely of the
dance as the artistic transfiguration of the erotic phenomena of
courtship, or of dress and fashion and the whole _milieu_ as æsthetic
means of expression of the personality (as they were described in
earlier pages of this work), but I refer above all to =social
intercourse= as a whole, which to-day represents a free and facile
æsthetic element, in which modern love receives its most manifold
suggestions.
Emerson, in his essay on Love, has very beautifully described the
importance to our civilized life of these slight, imponderable
influences of an erotic-æsthetic nature; and Konrad Lange, in his “Wesen
der Kunst” (vol. ii., p. 23; Berlin, 1901), refers the pleasure of
social intercourse ultimately to the sexual impulse, even though therein
sensuality is mitigated by illusion and is elevated to a purer sphere.
Erotic enjoyment is modified into a “love-play,” sensuality is refined,
spiritualized, dematerialized. It is precisely this æsthetic eroticism
which at the present day becomes of increasing importance in the
emotional life of civilized humanity, in the life of those engaged in
the hard struggle for existence, to whom time and leisure are lacking
for the “great” love-passion. For such as these, these gentler
suggestions constitute the true charm of life, into the dreary monotony
of which they bring light and colour.
In his excellent “Remarks on Goethe’s Stella,” Wilhelm Scherer has
assigned its true value to this erotic æstheticism and æsthetic
eroticism of society and social intercourse. He speaks of a charm of
personal presence, which brings out all that is best in two human
beings. He speaks of an enthusiastic and complete surrender of the
spirit and the emotions, in which the souls seem to enter into
inseparable union--and yet only seem. For in reality this surrender
occurs for weeks, for days, for minutes, for moments, and to various
persons. These frequent, individual, purely spiritual contacts between
the two sexes have completely the character of æsthetic joy; they give
rise to a perception of =freedom=, of liberation from the power of the
senses. Who does not know the happy freedom of spirit which is aroused
by the glance of a beautiful girl, by the smile of a sympathetic face?
This æsthetic incitation by means of eroticism has, moreover, in it
something =vitalizing=, something which spurs on the will, because its
cause--eroticism itself--contains within it such an element of action
and vital energy. The modern love ideals of the sexes have a peculiar
impulsive force. Classical beauty taken by itself, and without the
individual, personal characteristic element, is valueless. And woman
herself also is no longer the patient Gretchen of yore. She must have
temperament, character, passion--she must be a personality.
More than by the beautiful are we allured by the characteristic, by the
developed personality, by the passionate, the subjective in woman--by
that which, in pursuance of a false connotation, is often now termed
“nervous” beauty. The pale Josepha of the days of Heine’s boyhood is an
example of this type.
In her “Buch der Frauen” (“Book of Women”) (Paris and Leipzig, 1895),
Laura Marholm has described in the figures of Marie Bashkirtzeff, Anna
Charlotte Loeffler, Eleonore Duse, George Egerton, Amalie Skram, and
Sonja Kowalewska, well-marked and characteristic types of modern woman
as a personality.
This attraction to the characteristic, to the personal, in the aspect of
woman conflicts to some extent with the preference arising under the
influence of the English “Pre-Raphaelites,” of Burne-Jones and Rossetti,
for straight lines, for slender, ethereal, unduly spiritual,
supersensual forms, which no longer express the free personality of the
mature, complete woman, but approximate rather to the infantile, asexual
habitus. In this case, however, we have to do with a mere transient
fashion, which cannot countervail the above characterized general
tendency towards the personal.
This personal, individual has in man even greater importance than actual
beauty. It is a distinctive fact that, throughout the history of
civilization, men have always had a clearer understanding of “masculine
beauty” than women. Women have preferred power, intelligence, energy of
will, and marked individuality. Caroline Schlegel, in a letter to Luise
Gotter, writes of Mirabeau: “Hideous he may have been--he says so
himself frequently in his letters--but Sophie loved him, =for what women
love in men is certainly not beauty=” (“Letters of Caroline Schlegel,”
vol. i., p. 93; edited by G. Waitz, Leipzig, 1871). This conception also
elucidates the words in the second part of Goethe’s “Faust”:
“Women, accustomed to man’s love,
Fastidious are they not,
But cognoscenti;
And equally with golden-haired swains
Shall we see black-bristly fauns,
As opportunity may serve,
Over their rounded limbs
Attain rights of possession.”
It explains, too, the opinion of Eduard von Hartmann (“Philosophie des
Unbewussten”--“Philosophy of the Unconscious,” p. 205; Berlin, 1874),
that the most powerful passions are not aroused by the most beautiful,
but, on the contrary, by the ugliest, individuals. The influence of
powerfully developed individuality is, in fact, notably greater than
that of physical beauty. The mystic Swedenborg long ago declared that in
man woman desired truth, spiritual significance, not beauty alone.[154]
Herein we see a suggestion of the fact that true beauty is ultimately
spiritual beauty, the expression of the force of will, of poietic
activity, and of free personality.
[154] “It is by no means rare,” says Lermontoff in “Ein Held unserer
Zeit” (“A Hero of our own Time”), “for women to love such men to
distraction, and to be unwilling to exchange their hideousness for the
beauty of an Endymion.”
CHAPTER X
THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP--MARRIAGE
“_The individualistic tendency, in the most decisive and characteristic
form peculiar to our system of civilization, is most happily represented
in the monogamic form of marriage; for here, on the woman’s side also,
the development of individuality is gently and imperceptibly
accomplished._”--LUDWIG STEIN.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER X
The disputed question of sexual promiscuity -- The fact of its
existence -- Westermarck’s defective criticism of the doctrine of
promiscuity -- Persistence of promiscuity until the present day --
Ethnological proofs of this fact -- The researches of Friedrich S.
Krauss -- Marriage an artificial product -- Group-marriage -- A form
of limited promiscuity -- Diffusion of group-marriage -- Connexion of
polygamy and group-marriage -- The loan and the exchange of wives --
Matriarchy and patriarchy -- Progress from lower to higher social
forms of sexual relationship -- Transition from matriarchy to
patriarchy -- Formation of the patriarchal family -- Marriage by
capture and marriage by purchase -- The bright side of patriarchy --
Patriarchal forms of marriage -- Polygamy and the patriarchal family
-- Levitical marriage -- Monogamic marriage -- Coexistence with
monogamic marriage of a facultative polygamy -- The conventional lie
of marriage -- Hegel’s definition of marriage -- Criticism of this
definition -- Combination of the matriarchal and the patriarchal forms
of the sexual relationship -- Revival of the idea of matriarchy --
Transformation of the ancient patriarchal form of marriage to freer
forms -- Introduction of civil marriage and divorce -- Chief grounds
for marriage reform -- Duplex sexual morality -- Its origin --
Criticism thereof -- Relationship between prostitution and the
conventional coercive marriage -- Necessity of, and justification for,
freer forms of marriage -- Lecky’s views on this subject -- Roman
concubinage, and the morganatic marriage -- Significance of the
sacramental character of marriage -- Sanction by the State of a freer
form of marriage (civil marriage, mixed marriage, divorce) --
Psychology of love in the marriage problem -- Inconstancy of human
love -- The eternity lie -- Transient character of youthful love --
Gutzkow, Kierkegaard, and Rétif de la Bretonne on this subject -- The
poetical character of the first stages of every love -- The sexual
need for variety as an anthropologico-biological phenomenon -- This
simply an explanatory principle, not an ideal -- Rarity of the “only”
love -- The psychologist Stiedenroth on this subject -- The
possibility of love felt simultaneously for several persons --
Explanation of this fact -- Examples -- Difficulty of complete harmony
between man and wife -- The ideal of the “one” love -- Schleiermacher
on the necessity for experiments in love -- The examples of Wilhelmine
Schröder-Devrient and Caroline Schelling -- The need for love
unaffected by disillusion -- Dangers of habituation -- The double rôle
of habituation in marriage -- Danger of intimate life in common -- The
common bedroom -- Unfavourable conditions with regard to the relative
ages of husband and wife -- Increase in premature marriages --
Connexion of this phenomenon with the premature awakening of sexuality
-- Too great a difference in age between husband and wife --
Consequent physiological disharmony -- Postponement of marriage in
consequence of civilization -- Diminution of marriages in various
European countries -- Economical factors -- Mercenary marriage a
vestige of earlier times -- Disappearance of the economic background
to marriage with the further advance of civilization -- Marriage and
the price of corn -- Part played by mercenary marriage in various
classes -- Importance of economic factors in marriage -- Summary of
the causes of the diminution of the “marriage impulse” -- “Conjugal
rights” -- Justification and misuse of these -- Boredom in married
life -- Marriage and disease -- Opinion of an alienist on the
calamities of marriage -- Statements of a wife -- Schiller and
Byron upon love and marriage -- A dictum of Socrates -- Growing
disinclination to the coercive character of the marriage bond -- Great
increase in the number of divorces in recent years -- § 1568 of the
Civil Code -- Legal possibility of several successive divorces on the
part of the same individual -- A kind of civil sanction of free love
-- Dependence of the consciousness of duty upon freedom -- Grounds for
divorce -- Marriage reform in France -- Composition and programme of
the French committee for marriage reform -- The idea of sexual
responsibility.
Appendix: Report of one hundred typical marriages, and twelve
characteristic more detailed pictures of married life, after
Gross-Hoffinger.
CHAPTER X
Since the subject first engaged my close attention, it has always seemed
to me incomprehensible that a dispute should ever have arisen among
anthropologists, ethnologists, and historians of civilization as to
whether, among the primitive forms of the sexual relationship, marriage
was the first, or whether it was preceded by a state of sexual
promiscuity.
Whoever knows the nature of the sexual impulse, whoever has arrived at a
clear understanding regarding the course of human evolution, and,
finally, whoever has studied the conditions that even now prevail, alike
among primitive peoples and among modern civilized races, in the matter
of sexual relations, can have no doubt whatever that =in the beginnings
of human development a state of sexual promiscuity did actually
prevail=.[155]
“The ideal goal,” says Heinrich Schurtz, “towards which, more or less
consciously, civilized humanity is undoubtedly advancing,
involuntarily also becomes the standard by which the past is judged,
and sentiment and mood take the place of a single-minded endeavour to
arrive at truth.”
Thus it has happened that the ideal of permanent marriage between a
single man and a single woman, which, in fact, as we shall proceed to
explain, must persist as =an ideal of civilization never to be lost=,
has been employed as a standard for the judgment of bygone conditions.
This error is one into which Westermarck more especially has fallen in
his “History of Human Marriage” (Jena, 1893)--a work of considerable
value from its richness in ethnological detail. Hence Westermarck’s
criticism of the doctrine of promiscuity, based as it is upon false
premises, “has ultimately remained barren,” as Heinrich Schurtz has
proved.[156] Westermarck, for example, simply ignores the fact that
within the group-marriage of sexual associates, within the totem,
promiscuity undoubtedly existed.
Since, as we shall see, among the tribes and races living in social
unions, sexual promiscuity can be proved to have existed side by side
with, and commonly in advance of, the development of marriage, it is
indubitable that primitive man, in whom the sexual impulse was still
purely instinctive, had simply no knowledge of “marriage” in the modern
sense of the term. Otherwise, indeed, the “mother-right” would not have
been necessary, for matriarchy was the typical expression of the
uncertainty of paternity which resulted from sexual promiscuity.
The great freedom of sexual intercourse in primitive times is denoted by
various investigators by many different terms; sometimes it is called
“promiscuity,” sometimes “free-love,” sometimes “group-marriage,”
“polyandry,” “polygamy,” “religious and sexual prostitution,” etc. The
classical works of Bachofen, Bastian, Giraud-Teulon, von Hellwald,
Kohler, Friedrich S. Krauss, Lubbock, MacLennan, Morgan, Friedrich
Müller, Post, H. Schurtz, Wilcken, and others, have proved beyond
question the existence of this primordial hetairism.
When modern critics at length find it convenient to admit the
overwhelming force of the enormous mass of evidence that has been
collected concerning this subject, they still exhibit a great dislike to
the conception and the term sexual “promiscuity,” whereby is understood
the boundless and indiscriminate intermingling of the sexes. They admit
the possibility of group-marriage, although this is merely a socially
limited form of promiscuity; they admit even the existence of polyandry
and polygamy, and of indiscriminate religious prostitution; but they
refuse to believe in the existence of genuine promiscuity.
And yet, if they only chose to make use of their eyes, they could
observe sexual promiscuity at the present day among the modern civilized
nations. In certain strata and classes of the population, such an
indiscriminate and unregulated sexual intercourse, in no way leading to
the formation of enduring relationships, can be observed to-day. Ask a
young man, even of the better classes, with how many women he has had
connexion during a single year--not one of these need have been a
prostitute--and, if he speaks the truth, you will be astounded at the
number of the “objects of lust”! This last expression is suitable
enough, because in most cases there is no individual relationship
between such casual partners. Ask certain girls also--maidservants, for
example, or girls engaged in the manufacture of ready-made clothing--and
you will obtain analogous information regarding the number of their
annual lovers. Phillip Frey (“Der Kampf der Geschlechter”--“The Battle
of the Sexes,” p. 51; Vienna, 1904) bases on similar grounds the
assumption of a primitive sexual promiscuity; he refers especially to
the condition of the seaports:
“Ports in which ocean-going vessels come to harbour are familiar with
the sexual impulse in its most completely animal form, and devoid of
every refinement and concealment. We find ourselves transported into
the depths of an urgent primitiveness and savagery, which gives the
lie to the advance in civilization, and this will enable us to form a
clearer idea of the bestial indifference in sexual matters that must
have obtained amongst the herds of primitive man. Intercourse between
man and woman promoted by the lust of the moment, dependent solely
upon reciprocal animal desire, the various male and female individuals
of the human herd differing too little each from the other to make it
worth while to strive for permanent rights of possession, the absence
of any ownership of land amongst those wandering to and fro through
the primeval forest, the common ownership of children by the herd or
tribe--that such was the primitive, ape-like condition of the human
race, one actually inferior to that of many other mammals, is a belief
amply justified by the polygamous and polyandrous instincts of _homo
sapiens_, recurring again and again in all the stages of
civilization.”
Fortunately, ethnology furnishes us with incontrovertible proofs of
genuine promiscuity.
Of the Nasomoni in Africa, Herodotus (iv. 172) reports:
“When a Nasomonian man takes his first wife, it is the custom that on
the =first= night the bride should be visited by each of the guests in
turn, and each one, as he leaves, gives her a present which he had
brought with him to the house.”
Diodorus Siculus makes a similar report regarding the inhabitants of the
Balearic Islands (v. 18). Have we not here an echo of primeval custom,
of sexual promiscuity prior to marriage?
Very interesting are the accounts recently given by Melnikow regarding
the free sexual relationships customary among the Siberian Buryats.
There before marriage unregulated sexual intercourse between men and
girls prevails. This is especially to be observed at festival seasons.
Such festivals occur usually late in the evening, and can rightly be
called “nights of love.” Near the villages bonfires are lighted, round
which the men and women dance monotonous dances termed “nadan.” From
time to time pairs separate from the thousands of dancers, and disappear
into the darkness; soon they return and resume their place in the dance,
to disappear again by and by into the obscurity; but they are not the
same couples that disappear each time, =for they continually change
partners=.[157]
Is this not promiscuity? In a mitigated form we can see the same among
ourselves. A case recently came under my notice in which two friends
made an exchange of their “intimates”; moreover, the “intimacy” in each
case had been of very brief duration. This, indeed, happened in the full
light of day; while among the Buryats the darkness concealed a
completely indiscriminate promiscuity.
Marco Polo reports as a remarkable custom of the inhabitants of Thibet,
that there a man would in no circumstances marry a girl who was a
virgin, for they say a wife is worth nothing if she has not had
intercourse with men. Girls were offered to the traveller, and he was
expected to reward the courtesy with a ring or some other trifle, which
the girl, when she wished to marry, would show as one of her
“love-tokens.” =The more such tokens she possessed, the more she was in
request as a wife.=[158]
From New Holland we receive similar reports.
Of especial importance, as proving the existence of sexual promiscuity,
are the investigations of the student of folk-lore, Friedrich S. Krauss,
regarding the sexual life of the Southern Slavs. Krauss has, indeed,
rendered most valuable aids to the scientific study and anthropological
foundation of the human sexual life; a place of honour among the
founders of “anthropologia sexualis” must be given to Krauss, and also
to Bastian, Post, Kohler, Mantegazza, and Ploss-Bartels.
Dr. Krauss first published his pioneer investigations in “Kryptadia,”
vols. vi. and vii. (Paris, 1899 and 1901); but later he founded an
annual for the record of researches into the folk-lore and ethnology of
the sexual life, entitled “Anthropophyteia: Jahrbuch für folkloristische
Erhebungen und Forschungen zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der
geschlechtlichen Moral”--“Anthropophyteia: Annual for Folk-lorist
Investigations and Researches in the History of the Evolution of Sexual
Morality.” This has been published now for four years, 1904-1907, Krauss
having the co-operation of anthropologists, ethnologists, folk-lorists,
and medical men, such as Thomas Achelis, Iwan Bloch, Franz Boas, Albert
Eulenburg, Anton Herrmann, Bernhard Obst, Giuseppe Pitré, Isak
Robinsohn, and Karl von dem Steinen. It constitutes a most important
addition to the hitherto very scanty works for the scientific study of
sexual problems. Later, I shall have occasion to refer again to this
important undertaking. Krauss, who, as he himself says, is insensitive
to the romantic appeal of folk-lore, but has an open mind for the
realities and possibilities of human history, has proved in this
publication the unquestionable existence of sexual promiscuity among the
Southern Slavs. As he himself declares, such an abundance of trustworthy
proofs, obtained by a professional folk-lorist, regarding the existence
of a form of sexual promiscuity within the narrow sphere of a single
geographical province of research, has not hitherto been available.
It is, moreover, perfectly clear that the human need for sexual variety,
which is an established anthropological phenomenon,[159] must in
primitive times have been much stronger and more unbridled, in
proportion as the whole of life had not hitherto risen above the needs
of purely physical requirements. Since even in our own time, in a state
of the most advanced civilization, after the development of a sexual
morality penetrating and influencing our entire social life, this
natural need for variety continues to manifest itself in almost
undiminished strength, we can hardly regard it as necessary to prove
that in primitive conditions sexual promiscuity was a more original,
and, indeed, a more =natural=, state than marriage.
For from the purely =anthropological= standpoint--only from this
standpoint, since with questions of morality, society, and civilization
we are not now concerned--permanent marriage appears a thoroughly
=artificial= institution, which even to-day fails to do justice to the
human need for sexual variety, since, indeed, vast numbers of men live
_de jure_ monogamously, but _de facto_ polygamously--a fact pointed out
by Schopenhauer. This criticism is, of course, based upon purely
physical sensual considerations; it does not touch marriage as an ideal
of civilization possessing a =spiritual and moral= content.
The other social forms of sexual intercourse, forms whose existence is
admitted even by the critics of promiscuity, are characterized by
frequent =changes= in sexual relationships. This is especially true of
the oldest form of marriage, the so-called “=group-marriage=.”[160]
Group-marriage is not a union in marriage of isolated individuals, but
such a union between two =tribal groups=, composed respectively of male
and female individuals, a union between the so-called =totems=.
The social instinct, the impulse towards companionship, upon which even
to-day the State and the family depend, united mankind at one time into
tribes of a peculiar kind, which felt themselves to constitute single
individuals, and believed themselves to be inspired by an animal spirit,
their protective spirit. Their union was known as the totem.
Group-marriage is =the marriage of one totem with another=--that is, the
men of one totem-group marry the women of another, and _vice versa_. But
=no individual man has any particular wife=. On the contrary, if, for
example, twenty men of the first totem espoused twenty women of the
second totem, then each one of the twenty men had an equivalent share of
each one of the twenty women, and _vice versa_. This was indeed an
advance over unrestricted sexual promiscuity, limited by no social
forms; but it afforded no possibility of any individual relationships of
love, it remained promiscuity within narrow bounds. Group-marriages
exist at the present day in Australia in a well-developed form among
certain tribes; whilst, as an occasional custom, in the form of an
exchange of wives among friends, guests, and relatives, it appears to be
almost universally diffused throughout Australia. Schurtz regards
Australian group-marriage as a kind of partial taming of the wild sexual
impulse.
Well known is the description of group-marriage in ancient Britain given
by Julius Cæsar: “The husbands possess their wives to the number of ten
or twelve in common, and more especially brothers with brothers, or
parents with children.” Here we have a special variety of
group-marriage.
According to Bernhöft, =polyandry= is also to be regarded as the
vestige of a primitive form of group-marriage, arising from a deficiency
of women in a totem, so that one woman was left as the representative of
the totem married to several husbands. Marshall has, in fact, amongst
the polyandrous Toda in Southern India, actually observed group-marriage
side by side with polyandry.
Among certain Indian tribes we find even at the present day indications
of group-marriage. For example, the husband will have a claim on the
sisters of his wife, or even on her cousins or her aunts, and gradually
he may marry them. In this case we see that =polygyny= has developed out
of the group-marriage.
The widely diffused practice of =wife-lending= and =wife-exchange= is
also connected with the conditions of group marriage. In Hawaii, in
Australia, among the Massai and the Herero in South Africa, we encounter
this custom, but more especially in Angola and at the mouth of the
Congo, also in North-Eastern Asia, and among many tribes of North
American Indians.
Schurtz points out that similar conditions may arise among European
proletariat in consequence of inadequate housing accommodation.
In this state of a somewhat limited promiscuity the only natural tie was
that between mother and child. The child belonged exclusively to the
mother, and therefore, in the wider sense, belonged to his mother’s
totem. As Bachofen proved in his celebrated work,[161] in primeval
times, and among many primitive tribes even at the present day, the
“=mother-right=” (matriarchy), founded upon purely sensual,
non-individual relations, was predominant; and only with the appearance
of freer, more spiritual, more individual relations between the sexes
(though this did not necessarily involve the development of monogamy)
was “mother-right” first superseded by “father-right” (patriarchy).
These recent ethnological researches have proved the untenability of
Westermarck’s criticism of the doctrine of promiscuity; it is no longer
possible to doubt the fact of a primitive sex-companionship, taking the
form of a more or less limited promiscuity of sexual intercourse. Ludwig
Stein also lays stress on this view.[162] The sexual relationships of
the primeval hordes were either quite unregulated, or regulated only to
a very small extent.
In this view of the matter there is nothing in any sense degrading to
the human race; on the contrary, in the development of individual,
enduring relationships between man and woman out of a condition of
primitive promiscuity, we see manifested a continuous progression from
lower to higher social forms of the sexual relationships, a gradual
improvement and ennoblement of these relationships, until the
development of monogamic marriage (which even to-day is merely an ideal
state, since the reality does not correspond to it, or the original pure
idea has been falsified and obscured).
The transition from matriarchy, resting on a purely natural basis, in
which women assumed a leading social position, and often also a leading
political position, to patriarchy, in which the spiritual and the
individual relationships were brought into the foreground, signified a
great step forward in the developmental history of marriage. Bachofen
was the first to recognize the profound importance in the history of
civilization and for the spiritual and social life of humanity of this
transition of the mother-right to the father-right, from matriarchy to
patriarchy. Schurtz found the following formula to express the change:
“Woman is the central point of the natural groups arising from sexual
intercourse and reproduction; man, on the other hand, is the creator
of free forms of society based upon the sympathy of like kinds.”
The development of the individual personal marriage is most intimately
dependent upon patriarchy. In this sense, but only in this sense, Eduard
von Mayer is right when he points to man as the true creator of the
family. For under the matriarchal system the “family” was incomplete: it
consisted only of mother and child. Only with the development of
patriarchy could the family become a complete whole. This patriarchal
family, which is also our modern family, is thus “the masculine form of
the human tendency to social aggregation.”[163]
The father-right consisted in the right of the father over the wife and
her children; it was a right of domination acquired by a severe
struggle. The =rape of women= and =marriage by capture= belong to the
beginnings of patriarchy; later, when woman, completely enslaved, had
fallen to the position of a mere chattel, =marriage by purchase= was
introduced. The debased position of women under the domination of the
primitive father-right can be best studied among the Greeks, where free
sexual relationships were possible only in connexion with hetairæ and
the love of boys. To the Greeks of classical antiquity the love of boys
was precisely that which to the modern civilized man hetero-sexual love
is, resting upon the most personal, most individual, most spiritual
contact and understanding.
Kohler has beautifully described the bright side of the complete and
unrestricted father-right:
“Now for the first time the man founds his home; he is the master of
the domestic herd, he is the priest of sacrifice at the domestic
altar; his ancestors are present in the spirit; he honours them; the
house is permeated by them. In his house nothing unclean shall exist;
he teaches the children propriety and dependence on the family; and
the wife, at the moment when, as a bride, she crosses the threshold of
her husband’s house, or is carried across it, gives up her household
gods; his home is now her home. Now, at the domestic hearth, the
virtues flourish--those virtues which become the preliminaries of
national greatness. In the bosom of his family the man gains power,
which fits him for the most important functions, whether in the life
of the State or in the life of science; and a township or an
agricultural community based upon such conditions constitutes the
necessary foundation upon which to erect the structure of ethical,
scientific, and political life. The wife passes into the background,
but in the house she develops new virtues; self-sacrifice to the
family, a domestic sense, joy in the home, amiability in narrower
circles, are the bright sides of her influence, for the wife knows how
to develop everywhere beautiful traits of character, so long as her
lot is not cast amidst rude or degenerating conditions.”
The most ancient form of marriage under the father-right was polygamy,
as, for example, we find it described in the Old Testament. Here we have
a typical picture of the patriarchal order of family. The head of the
house and of the family has a principal wife for the procreation of
legitimate issue, but, in addition, numerous concubines. Among the Jews,
the great stress laid upon father-right gave rise to the so-called
“=Leviratsehe=”--that is to say, a widowed wife was compelled to marry
the brother of her deceased husband, in order that the race of the dead
man should be continued. Out of this patriarchal polygamy there
gradually arose =monogamic= marriage, which down to the present
time--let us insist on the matter once for all--has remained an ideal,
never in reality attained, either by the Greeks or Romans or in the
modern civilized world. For the modern civilized marriage is mainly a
production of the father-right, and stands under the dominion of
“man-made” morality, which, beside monogamy, legally established and
assumed to be binding, tolerates “facultative polygamy”; hence =there is
here concealed an element of lying and hypocrisy which has rightly
brought into discredit the modern patriarchal marriage as a conventional
form among those who regard as the true ideal of marriage in the future
the enduring life in common of two free personalities endowed with equal
rights=.
Hegel, in his celebrated definition of marriage,[164] which he regards
as the embodiment of the reality of the species and as the spiritual
unity of the natural sexes brought about by self-conscious love, as
legal-moral love, has not done justice to the recognition and
development of the individuality of =both= parties. The “unity,” the
“one body and one soul,” corresponds indeed to the patriarchal
conception, according to which the woman is completely absorbed into the
man; it does not correspond, however, to the modern idea of individual
marriage, in which both man and woman are united as free personalities.
This, as we shall see later, is the meaning of the struggle for
“free-love,” which must not be confused, as, for example, it is confused
by Ludwig Stein (“Beginnings of Civilization,” p. 110), with the
free-love, the hetairism, of ancient times, or with the simple
extra-conjugal intercourse of the present day.
=Neither the mother-right alone, nor the father-right alone, is
competent to satisfy the ideals of modern civilized human beings, in
respect of the configuration of the social forms of the amatory life.=
This is only possible when both forms of right are united in a new form,
by equal rights given to both sexes.[165]
Hence, in association with the endeavour for the free individual
development of the feminine nature, we find also the tendency to
reintroduce into public life, into true valuation and honour, the
ancient conception of the mother-right.
“Slowly and gradually,” says Kohler, “has the reawakened idea of the
mother-right been gnawing with a sharp tooth, now in one way, now in
another, at the rigid fetters of this system, and has loosened
them.... =That in this manner woman will attain a worthier position is
certain.= But the unitary family-sense has long ceased among us to be
the powerful incentive to action that it is among the purely agnate
(patriarchal) peoples.... Our own conditions render it possible that
the institutions of civilization will continue to thrive, even though
the family tie is no longer tense and exclusive.”
The modern civilized man can quietly accustom himself to the idea that
the old patriarchal family under the dominion of the father-right will
gradually disappear; and that at the same time the patriarchal
conventional marriage of ancient times, still to all appearance so
firmly established, will be replaced by other, freer forms. The idea of
marriage, and its value as a form of social life, remains meanwhile
unaffected. It is possible to be a critic of the old, outlived form of
marriage, without therefore being exposed to the suspicion of wishing to
dispense with the idea of “marriage” altogether. The one-sided,
juristic, political, sacramental, and ecclesiastical conception of the
past does justice neither to the social nor to the individual
significance of marriage. He who, like Westermarck, regards monogamic
marriage as something primitively ordained, as if it were a biological
fact, and denies completely the =development= of that institution out of
lower forms, denies also the possibility of any extensive transformation
of the existing forms of marriage. The common mistake is, to place on
the one hand monogamy in its most ideal form, that of life-long
marriage, and on the other hand, the so-called “free love,”
understanding by free love completely unregulated extra-conjugal sexual
intercourse. It is not a matter for surprise that, in respect of both of
these extreme forms of sexual relationship, a pessimistic view should
easily gain ground. According to the point of view, one party will
insist on the intolerable character, in relation to the need for
individual freedom and as regards the development of personality, of a
lifelong marriage of duty; whilst the other party will lay stress upon
the equally great, if not greater, dangers of the unrestrained practice
of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse.
With regard to recent views on the marriage problem, the reader will do
well to consult the thoughtful pamphlet of Gabriele Reuter, “The Problem
of Marriage” (Berlin, 1907). The author points out that there is a
“deep-lying dissatisfaction with the existing marriage conditions, a
yearning and restless need for improvement.” In marriage, she holds, the
bodily and spiritual process of human development is completed in the
most concentrated manner. As a cause of the numerous unhappy marriages
of our time, she points to the divergencies, so widely manifest at the
present day, between modes of thought and views of life among members of
the same strata of society and among those of the same degree of
education, more especially in religious matters, and she refers also to
experiments made in respect of new modes of life, such as the woman’s
movement. According to Gabriele Reuter, the child will become the
regulator of all the changes in the married state which we have to
expect in the future. As “marriage,” she defines that earnest union
between man and woman which is formed for the purpose of a life in
common, and with the intention of procreating and bringing up children,
and she regards it as altogether beside the question whether that union
has been affected with or without civil or ecclesiastical sanction. In
contrast with this idea of “marriage,” there would be other fugitive or
more enduring unions, serving only for excitement and sensual enjoyment.
It is interesting to note that the author recommends to the modern woman
“good-humoured and motherly forbearance” in respect of marital
infidelity. For a woman’s own good and for that of her children, it is
more important that her husband should show her love, respect, and
friendship, than that he should preserve unconditional physical
faithfulness. But the author here ignores the possibility of venereal
infection as a result of occasional unfaithfulness, which very seriously
threatens the well-being of the wife and the children! Very wisely she
advises a facilitation of divorce. This would not make husband and wife
careless in their relations one to the other; on the contrary, it would
make both more careful and thoughtful in the avoidance of anything
causing pain to one another. The children should always remain with the
mother up to the age of fourteen years. A detailed and valuable account
of the problems of modern marriage will be found also in the work
“Regarding Married Happiness: the Experiences, Reflections, and Advice
of a Physician” (Wiesbaden, 1906).
Fortunately, by the legal introduction of =civil marriage= and of
=divorce= the necessity has now been recognized by the State of leaving
open for many persons a middle course--one which lies =between= lifelong
marriage (whose sacramental character is thus abandoned) and free
extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, =and yet maintains the tendency
towards the ideal of monogamic marriage=.
The principle of divorce forms the most important foundation at once for
a future reformation of marriage, and for a rational view, one doing
equal justice to the interests of society and those of the individual,
of the relations between man and wife. By the introduction of divorce,
the State itself has recognized the purely personal character of
conjugal relations, and has admitted that circumstances arise in which
the marriage ceases to fulfil its aims and becomes injurious to both
parties. =Thus the State has proclaimed the rights of the individual
personality in the married state.=
In the marriage problem, the so-called “=duplex sexual morality=” also
plays an important part--that is to say, the idea that man is by nature
inclined to polygamy, but woman to monogamy. Herein, indeed, the
thoroughly correct idea was dominant that the cohabitation of one woman
with several men--be it understood we refer to simultaneous
cohabitation--is harmful to the offspring. From this, however, the only
permissible inference is that for the purposes of the procreation of
children and of racial hygiene “monogamy” can be demanded of woman on
rationalistic grounds--that is to say, the intercourse of woman should
be restricted to a single man during such a time and for such a purpose.
But it is not legitimate from these considerations to deduce the
necessity of permanent “monandry” for woman.
I will consider this question somewhat more exactly, and in doing so
will refer to the interesting essay of Rudolph Eberstadt on “The
Economic Importance of Sanitary Conditions” in relation to marriage,
being the concluding chapter of “Health and Disease in Relation to
Marriage and the Married State,” by Senator and Kaminer (Rebman, 1906),
because here we find a very clear recognition of the confusion between
monogamy and monandry.
According to Eberstadt, there are above all two things characteristic of
modern civilized marriage--in the first place, the higher rank allotted
to the husband in the married state, and, in the second place, the
increased demand for prenuptial purity and for conjugal fidelity on the
part of the wife. The husband demands from his wife, in addition to his
own mastership in the married state, also sexual continence before
marriage and unconditional fidelity during marriage. But the husband
does not recognize that corresponding duties are imposed on himself.
This difference of judgment regarding extra-conjugal sexual intercourse
on the part of husband and wife respectively, depends entirely upon the
perfectly sound experience that =simultaneous= cohabitation on the part
of a woman with several men obscures paternity, and therewith the
foundations of the family, quite apart from a not uncommon physical
injury to the child. This =natural= difference between man and woman, in
respect of sexual intercourse and its consequences, will always endure.
A man can simultaneously cohabit with two women without thereby
interfering with the formation of a family; but a woman cannot with
similar impunity cohabit with two men. It is possible that the demand
for the virgin intactness of the wife at the time of marriage is based
upon the old experience that by sexual intercourse, and still more by
the first conception, certain far-reaching specific changes are induced
in the feminine organism, so that the first man impregnates the feminine
being for ever in his own sense, and even transmits his influence to
children of a second male progenitor. (_Cf._ in this connexion G.
Lomer, “Love and Psychosis,” p. 37.)
“It is not the brutality of man,” says Eberstadt, “which has imposed a
higher responsibility upon woman; Nature herself has done this. Nature
has endowed man and woman differently in respect of the consequences
of sexual intercourse. The fruit of intercourse is entrusted to the
woman alone. Now, one who has special responsibilities has also
special duties. Certain breaches of conjugal responsibility are more
sternly condemned when committed by the man; certain
others--especially such as concern care for the offspring--are more
severely judged in the wife. The relative positions in respect of
sexual intercourse are different in man and in woman, for reasons
which are physical and inalterable. Seduction, ill-treatment,
abandonment of a wife, and adultery, are punished in the husband by
law and custom. The wife, on the other hand, loses her honour =simply=
on account of promiscuous and unregulated intercourse, because Nature
herself forbids this intercourse if the material and spiritual tie
between mother, father, and child is to persist.”
In accordance with these considerations, Eberstadt holds fast to the
demand for “=monandry=” on the part of the wife; he rejects on principle
the idea of =sexual= equality between man and wife, and relegates the
progressive development of marriage exclusively to the =spiritual= and
=moral= provinces.
Although we recognize the general accuracy of this view, and admit that
it is based upon conditions imposed once for all by Nature herself,
still we are compelled to regard it as too narrow and one-sided, for it
completely overlooks the fact that this demand for monandric love on the
part of woman can be fulfilled in association with a freer moulding of
woman’s amatory life. We need merely think of the often happy marriages
of one woman to =several= men--_nota bene_ in temporal succession--in
which marriages perfectly healthy children have been born to different
fathers, in order to see that for the woman of the future a freer
moulding of the amatory life is also possible, though admittedly within
=narrower= limits than in the case of man. Just as the mastership of the
husband must give place to an equality of authority on the part of
husband and wife, considered as two free personalities, so also must the
“duplex morality” undergo a revision in the sense above indicated.
In passing, let us remark that all those who proscribe any kind of
extra-conjugal intercourse on the part of woman, and who love to brand
as an “outcast” any woman who indulges in it, should have their
attention directed for a moment to the tremendous fact of politically
tolerated, and even legalized, =prostitution=, which, like a haunting
shadow, accompanies the so-called conventional marriage--a shadow
growing ever =larger= the more strictly, exclusively, and narrowly the
idea of this “marriage” is conceived.[166]
The civilized ideal of marriage is the lifelong duration of the marriage
between two free, independent, mature personalities, who share fully
love and life, and by a common life-work further their own advantage and
the well-being of their children. =But this rarely attained ideal of
civilization in no way excludes other forms of marriage=, which have a
more transient and temporary character, without thereby doing any harm
either to the individual or to society.
More than forty years ago Lecky, the English historian of civilization,
an investigator whom no one can blame, in respect of the tendency of his
writings, for advancing lax ideas regarding sexual morality or for
advising libertinage, expressed himself admirably on this subject. In
his “History of European Morals” he wrote:
“In these considerations, we have ample grounds for maintaining that
the lifelong union of one man and of one woman should be the normal or
dominant type of intercourse between the sexes. We can prove that it
is on the whole most conducive to the happiness, and also to the moral
elevation, of all parties. But beyond this point it would, I conceive,
be impossible to advance, except by the assistance of a special
=revelation=! =It by no means follows that because this should be the
dominant type, it should be the only one, or that the interests of
society demand that all connexions should be forced into the same
die.= Connexions, which were confessedly only for a few years, have
always subsisted side by side with permanent marriages; and in periods
when public opinion, acquiescing in their propriety, inflicts no
excommunication on one or both of the parties, when these partners are
not living the demoralizing and degrading life which accompanies the
consciousness of guilt, and when proper provision is made for the
children who are born, it would be, I believe, impossible to prove, by
the light of simple and unassisted reason, that such connexions should
be invariably condemned. It is extremely important, both for the
happiness and for the moral well-being of men, that lifelong unions
should not be effected simply under the imperious prompting of a blind
appetite. There are always multitudes who, in the period of their
lives when their passions are most strong, are incapable of supporting
children in their own social rank, and who would therefore injure
society by marrying in it, but are nevertheless perfectly capable of
securing an honourable career for their illegitimate children in the
lower social sphere to which these would naturally belong (!). Under
the conditions I have mentioned these connexions are not injurious,
but beneficial, to the weaker partner; they soften the differences of
rank, they stimulate social habits, and they do not produce upon
character the degrading effect of promiscuous intercourse, or upon
society the injurious effects of imprudent marriages, one or other of
which will multiply in their absence. In the immense variety of
circumstances and characters, cases will always appear in which, on
utilitarian grounds, they might seem advisable.”
In ancient Rome these laxer unions were recognized by law as a form of
marriage, and this legal recognition protected them, notwithstanding the
unlimited freedom of divorce, from social contempt and stigmatization.
“Concubinage” was such a second kind of marriage, which was thoroughly
recognized and thoroughly honourable. The _amica convictrix_ or _uxor
gratuita_ was neither a legitimate wife nor simply a mistress; she had
rather the position of women in our own day who have contracted a
“morganatic” marriage, a “left-handed marriage.” The only difference was
that these ancient unions were more readily dissoluble.
It was the Christian dogma and the sacramental and lifelong character of
marriage which first caused the stamp of infamy to be impressed upon all
other varieties of sexual intercourse. The religious marriage was in its
very nature indissoluble; indeed, by forbidding mixed marriages
(marriages between Christian and pagan) individual freedom was entirely
prohibited.
In contrast with this ancient religious view, the State, by the
introduction of civil marriage, of mixed marriage (_vide supra_), and of
divorce, has been compelled to make continually greater concessions to
modern ideas, and =has already recognized in principle= that marriages
limited in duration harmonize exceedingly well with the demands of
civilization; that in general, as Lecky maintained, the recent changes
in economic conditions have a much greater influence upon marriage and
the forms of marriage than the ecclesiastical and mystical conception of
the institution.
Anyone who wishes to gain an insight into this very difficult problem of
modern marriage must first obtain clear views in respect of certain
peculiarities of individual human love, regarding the intimate connexion
of which with the whole process of mental evolution we have already
dealt in earlier chapters.
Max Nordau has written a celebrated chapter on “The Lie of
Marriage,”[167] and in the light of reality marriage is, in fact, often
such a lie as he describes, especially in view of the fact that not less
than 75 per cent. of modern marriages are so-called “marriages of
convenience,” and in no sense are properly love-marriages.[168]
But it is a well-known fact that these marriages of reason are often
more enduring than love-marriages. This depends upon the nature of human
love, which is by no means inalterable, =but changes in accordance with
the various developmental phases of the individual, needs new
incitements and new individual relationships=.
In No. 14,919 of the _Neue Freie Presse_ of Vienna, March 6, 1906, there
appeared among the advertisements a remarkable question, which was
probably directed by a betrayed or deceived lover to his beloved:
“Ewige Liebe--ewige Lüge?”
“Eternal Love--Eternal Lie?”
Love also, personal love, is transitory, like man himself, like the
isolated individual. It differs in the different ages of life; it
differs, too, according to its object for the time being. Eduard von
Hartmann calls love a thunderstorm, which does not discharge in a single
flash of lightning, but gradually discharges the electrical energy in
several successive flashes, and after the discharge “there comes the
cool wind, the heaven of consciousness clears once more, and we look
round astonished at the fertilizing rain falling on the ground, and at
the clouds fleeing towards the distant horizon.”
All those who are well acquainted with humanity, all poets and
psychologists, are in agreement respecting the fugitive character of
youthful love. For this reason, they advise against marriage concluded
during the passion of early youth. This poetry of love at first sight
is, according to Gutzkow, the eternal =game of chance= of our young
people, in which their health, their life, and their future go to wreck.
Another keen observer, Kierkegaard, in his “Diary of a Seducer,” says:
“Love has many mysteries, and this first love is also a mystery, if
not the greatest. Most men in their ardent passion are as if insane;
they become engaged or commit some other stupidity, and in a moment it
is all over, and they know once more what it has cost them, what they
have lost.”
And, finally, a third eminent writer on eroticism, Rétif de la Bretonne,
says:
“It is a folly of the same kind to trust the constancy of a young man
of twenty years of age. At this age it is less a woman that one loves
than women; one is intoxicated rather by sensual phenomena than by the
individual, however lovable that individual may be.”
But to youth love is almost always no more than a beautiful memory, a
vanishing paradise. There clings to it something imperishable, which
has, however, no binding force.
And just as to every man the love of youth appears ideal in character,
precisely because it is not subjected to the rude considerations of
reality, so also in every subsequent love it is almost always the =first
beginnings= only in which true beauty and deep perception are
experienced.
“A thousand years of tears and pains,” Goethe makes his Stella say,
“could not counterpoise the happiness of the first glance, the
trembling, the stammering, the approach and the withdrawal, the
self-forgetfulness, the first fugitive ardent kiss, and the first
gently breathing embrace.”
The eternal duration of such feelings is contradicted by an
anthropologico-biological phenomenon of human sexuality, which I have
described as “=the need for sexual variety=.”[169] Human love, as a
whole and in its individual manifestations, is dominated and influenced
by the need for change and variety. Schopenhauer drew attention to this
primordial and fundamental phenomenon of human love; he was wrong,
however, in limiting it to the male sex.[170] As I have already
insisted, this general human need for variety in sexual relationships is
to be regarded rather as a general =principle of explanation of admitted
facts=, than as a desirable ideal. On the contrary, in my opinion,
faithfulness, constancy, and durability in love, bring under control and
diminish this need for sexual variety, through the recognition of the
eminent =advances in civilization= by means of which the human amatory
life will be further developed and perfected in a higher sense. But the
facts of daily observation are not to be shuffled out of existence by
any kind of hypocrisy or prudery. They must be faced and dealt with.
First, it is an incontestable fact that the so-called “only” love is one
of the greatest rarities; that, on the contrary, in the life of the
majority of men and women a frequent repetition and renewal of
love-sentiments and love-relationships occurs. For the most part these
loves occur at successive intervals. Stiedenroth, in his admirable
“Psychology,” makes the following remarks regarding these successive
outbursts of passion and the transitory character of the feeling of
love:
“Since no two human beings are precisely alike, one will at one time
love passionately one only; in succession, however, several can be
loved, and the opinion that one person only can be loved in a lifetime
originates in rare dreams regarding the ideal, of which a quite false
representation is made. An object can indeed appear which transcends
the ideal hitherto conceived; but passion does not need a fully
developed ideal for its first foundation; it needs merely that which
in the theory of the feelings has been found to be a necessary
condition of love. That every love gladly thinks itself immortal, lies
in the nature of the case, for on account of the overwhelming
character of the sensations of love, it is impossible to understand
how they can ever come to an end. Experience, however, teaches us the
contrary, and insight enables us to recognize the reason.”[171]
Regarding the frequent occurrence of several love-passions on the part
of the same person, there can be two opinions; but is it possible that
anyone can =simultaneously= be in love with several individuals? I
answer this question with an unconditional “Yes,” and I agree fully with
Max Nordau when he explains that it is possible to love at the same time
several individuals with almost identical tenderness, and that it is not
necessarily lying when ardent passion for each of them is
expressed.[172]
It is precisely the extraordinarily manifold spiritual differentiation
of modern civilized humanity that gives rise to the possibility of such
a simultaneous love for two individuals. Our spiritual nature exhibits
the most varied colouring. It is difficult always to find the
corresponding complements in one single individual.
I ask those who are well acquainted with modern society if they have not
met men, and women also, who had advanced so far in the adaptation of
their love-needs to the anatomical analysis of their psychical life,
that for the romantic, realistical, æsthetic traits of their nature, for
the lyrical or dramatic moods of their heart, they demanded
correspondingly =different= lovers; and if these several lovers should
encounter each other, and be angry with one another, the one who loved
them both (or all) would be inclined to cry out in naive astonishment,
like the heroine in Gutzkow’s “Seraphine,” “Love one another! love one
another! You are all one, one--=in me=!”
In the romance “Leonide,” by Emerentius Scävola, the heroine is at the
same time the wife of two husbands. Reality also is familiar with double
love of this kind--for example, in the relationship of the Princess
Melanie Metternich to her husband, the celebrated statesman, and to her
previous bridegroom, Baron Hügel.[173] Especially frequent is the
gratification of higher ideal needs and of the simple natural impulse,
by means of two different persons. A man can love at the same time a
woman of genius and a simple child of Nature. In the novel “Double Love”
(1901), Elisar von Kupffer describes the simultaneous love of a learned
man for his extremely intelligent wife and for a buxom servant-girl. A
well-known example is also the double love of Wieland--the ideal love
for Sophie Laroche, the frankly sensual love for Christine Hagel. But
not only do differences of culture, of position, of character, play a
part in such multiple love; the simple difference also of bodily
appearance may lead to such simultaneous attractions; for example, a man
may love at the same time a brunette and a blonde, an elegant little
sylph and a distinguished presence. This is, however, on the whole, much
rarer than simultaneous attraction to two different spiritual varieties.
Such facts as these are not to be employed so much in advocacy of the
multiplication of love-relationships as for the illustration of the
enormous difficulty in obtaining complete harmony between human beings,
between one man and one woman. There remains always a balance of
yearning, which the other does not fulfil; always a balance of striving,
which the other is unable to understand. This cannot, however, affect in
the slightest degree the ideal of the =single love=; on the contrary, it
makes it stand out all the more brilliantly before our spiritual vision.
It is rare, like every ideal, and attainable only by few. This rarity of
=complete= love between a man and a woman is dwelt on also by Henry
Laube in his novel “Die Maske,” in which he describes love in all its
manifoldness and modern distraction.
Schleiermacher described very strikingly the necessity that exists for
the repetition and manifoldness of love-perceptions:
“Why,” says he, “should it be different with love from what it is in
every other matter? Is it possible that that which is the highest in
mankind should be brought at the first time, by the most elementary
activity, to a perfect conclusion in a single deed? Should we expect
it to be easier than the simple art of eating and drinking, which the
child first attempts, and attempts again and again, with unsuitable
objects and rude experimentation, and with results which, contrary to
his deserts, are not always unfortunate? In love, also, there is need
for =preliminary experiments=, leading to no permanent result, from
which, however, every one carries away something, =in order to make
the feeling more definite and the prospect of love greater and
grander=.”[174]
Georg Hirth also shows that true mastery of love only becomes possible
by means of repetition. There are ideal masculine and feminine Don Juan
natures, which are always searching for the genuine, eternal, only love;
as, for example, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, wandering perpetually
from man to man; or a similar figure, the titular heroine of the romance
“Faustine,” by the Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn. Many, most indeed, of such
never learn to know true love, because they never find the proper object
of love; and they die, as Rousseau, in his “Confessions,” says so
strikingly, without ever having loved, eternally torn by the need for
love, without ever having been able perfectly to satisfy that need.
Happy indeed are those like Karoline, who in Schelling found at length
the man whose powerful personality fully corresponded to her idea of
love.
The need for such a great and true love remains fixed, notwithstanding
all deceptions, bitternesses, and the sorrows of unsatisfied longing.
Love is, in fact, the human being himself; like the human being, love
has its development, its impulse towards higher things, towards that
which is better. No painful experience can completely annihilate love,
and the need for love. In a beautiful stanza a French poet of the
eighteenth century, the Chevalier de Bonnard, has described this
essential permanency of love:
“Hélas! pourquoi le souvenir
De ces erreurs de mon aurore
Me fait-il pousser un soupir!
Je dois peut-être aimer encore,
Ah! si j’aime encore, je sens bien
Que je serai toujours le même;
Le temps au cœur ne change rien:
Eh! n’est-ce pas ainsi qu’on aime?”
True love is the product of the ripest development; it is therefore
rare, and comes late. For this reason, as Nietzsche points out, the time
for marriage comes much earlier than the time for love. It is by means
of spiritual relationships that love first becomes enduring. Its
prolongation is almost always effected only by an enlargement and
variation of psychical relationships. Physical relationships alone soon
lose through habituation the stimulus of novelty; whence we explain the
fact that so many husbands, notwithstanding the physical beauty of their
wives, become unfaithful to them, often in favour of much uglier women,
of girls of the lower classes, or even of prostitutes. The de Goncourts
remark in their “Diary” that the beauty which in a _cocotte_ a man will
reward with 100,000 francs, will not in his own wife seem worth 10,000
francs--in the wife whom he has married, and who, with her dowry, has
brought him this magnificent beauty into the bargain. For this reason, a
priest, when a wife complained to him that her husband had begun to get
somewhat cold in his manner to her, gave the following by no means bad
advice: “My dear child, the most honourable wife must have in her just a
suspicion of the demi-mondaine.”
The greatest danger for love, a danger which therefore makes its
appearance above all in married life, is the danger of =habituation=.
This has a double effect. On the one hand, by the mere monotony of
eternal repetition, love may become blunted.
“It is worth remarking,” says Goethe, “that custom is capable of
completely replacing passionate love; it demands not so much a
charming, as a comfortable object; given that, it is invincible.”
In the second place, however, custom contradicts the already mentioned
need for variety, the eternal uniformity of daily companionship puts
love to sleep, damps its ardour, and even gives rise to a sense of
latent or open hatred between a married pair. This hatred is observed
most frequently in love-matches,[175] precisely because here the ideal
is all the more cruelly disturbed by the rude grasp of realities;
especially if the intimate life in common enfolds a human,
all-too-human, element, and tears away the last ideal veil. With justice
the common bedroom of a married couple has been called “the slaughter of
love.”
A further cause of unhappy marriages is to be found in unfavourable
age-relations of the married couple. The most serious is the premature
entrance upon marriage.
Before the introduction of the Civil Code, the age of nubility in the
German Empire was attained, in the male sex, with the completion of the
twentieth, in the female sex with the completion of the sixteenth year
of life. In Prussia a Minister of Justice could give permission to marry
at an even earlier age. According to the Civil Code, men could not marry
until they were of full age (twenty-one), and women, as before, not
until they were sixteen years of age. Women are able to obtain remission
from this restriction, but not men. In special cases, however, a man is
enabled to marry before the age of twenty-one years if the Court of
Wardship (_cf._ the English Court of Chancery) declares him to be of
full age, which the Court has power to do at any time after he is
eighteen years of age.
Whilst, before the year 1900, on the average, there were not as many as
300 men under twenty years who annually contracted marriage with the
permission of the Minister of Justice--already a matter for serious
consideration--since the introduction of the new Code, by which the
ordinary age of nubility for man is raised by one year, =the number of
persons prematurely contracting marriage has exhibited a notable
increase=. In the year 1900 there were 1,546, and in the year 1901
actually 1,848 young men married before the age of twenty-one years.
These very early marriages were distributed among all professions, and
almost all classes of the population.
This increase in premature marriages is, speaking generally, a symptom
indicative of the premature awakening of sexuality in our own time, a
phenomenon which we shall discuss more fully later. Such an occurrence
as the elopement of a girl aged fourteen with a boy aged fifteen, the
pair having already for some time been engaged in an intimate
love-relationship, and having finally come to the conclusion that they
could no longer live apart, is by no means a great rarity.[176] No
detailed argument is needed to show that persons completely wanting
mental and moral maturity are not suited for marriage, which can only be
regarded as offering some security for endurance and life happiness,
when it is the union of two fully-developed personalities. In this
respect it seems to me that the regulations of the Civil Code are not at
present sufficiently strict.
A second notable factor in the causation of unhappy marriages is an
excessive =difference between the ages= of husband and wife, and in this
respect it is quite an old experience, that a marked excess of age on
the part of the husband has a less unfavourable influence than a similar
excess on the part of the wife. This observation harmonizes with the
fact that men can preserve sexual potency up to the most advanced
age--even in a centenarian active spermatozoa have been found[177]--that
such old men can have complete sexual intercourse, and can procreate
children; whereas in women, at the age of forty-five to fifty years,
with the cessation of menstruation the procreative capacity is
extinguished, though not, indeed, the capacity for sexual intercourse
and for voluptuous sensation. Naturally, in this connexion we are not
alluding to quite abnormal cases, such as a premature impotence in the
husband, or other morbid conditions in either husband or wife. We are
considering merely the normal physical difference in age. Metchnikoff
lays great stress upon this physical disharmony between husband and
wife. He insists upon the fact that in the man sexual excitability
generally begins much earlier than in woman, and that at a time when the
woman stands at the acme of her needs the sexual activity in the man has
already begun to decline; but this is only the case when the husband was
notably older than the wife when the marriage was contracted. A
difference of five or ten years in this respect is a small matter; but a
difference of ten or twenty years may be of serious significance.
Generally speaking, in the case of marriages which are intended to be of
lifelong duration, the difference of age should never exceed ten years.
With increasing civilization, the average age at marriage has
continually advanced (in Western Europe the average age at marriage is
for men twenty-eight to thirty-one years, and for women twenty-three to
twenty-eight years), whilst the number of persons who do not marry until
late in life, and of those who do not marry at all, is continually
increasing. This is partly the result of spiritual differentiation and
of the ever-increasing difficulty in finding a suitable life-partner,
and partly it is the result of the increasing economic difficulty in
providing for the support of a household.
Schmoller has calculated that under normal conditions about 50 per
cent.--one-half, that is to say--of the population of the country must
be either married or widowed. In Europe, however, a much smaller
proportion is in this condition. Thus, taking only persons over fifty
years of age, in Hungary 3 per cent., in Germany 9 per cent., in
England 10 per cent., in Austria 13 per cent., in Switzerland 17 per
cent., were unmarried.
The number of married and widowed persons among those over fifty years
of age varies in the different countries between 56 per cent. (in
Belgium) and 76 per cent. (in Hungary). In England, in the years 1886 to
1890, the number was 60 per cent., in Germany 61 per cent., in the
United States 62 per cent., in France 64 per cent. If we enumerate the
married only, excluding the widowed, we find 8 or 10 per cent. fewer.
When we compare the number of married with the entire population, we
find, instead of the above-mentioned 50 per cent., no more than 37 to 39
per cent. And this percentage appears likely to undergo a continual
further decline. We must, at any rate, in the future reckon with this
fact, although, of course, isolated oscillations in the marriage
frequency may continue to occur. In these oscillations =economic= and
=domestic= factors play a great part.
It is, however, quite erroneous to regard our own time as one especially
characterized by “=mercenary marriages=,” one in which the union between
man and wife has become a simple affair of commerce. There are not
wanting reformers who attribute to mammonism all the blame for the
disordered love-life of the present day, and who describe very vividly
and dramatically Amor’s dance round the golden calf.
The facts of the history of civilization and folk-lore completely
contradict the view that this mammonistic character of marriage is a
product of our modern civilization. It is, on the contrary, a =vestige=
of early primitive civilization, in which economic factors always had a
far greater importance for marriage than spiritual sympathies. Thus,
Heinrich Schurtz proves that among the majority of savage races marriage
is rather an affair of business than of inclination. And where are money
marriages more frequent than they are among our sturdy German peasants,
with whom everything conventional has the freest possible play?[178]