The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization / Translated from the Sixth German Edition

by Iwan Bloch

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]

It is first the higher, refined spiritual civilization which brings with it a higher conception of marriage as the realization of the ideal, individual only-love. As Ludwig Stein justly remarks:

“It was not in our own time that marriage first began to degenerate to the level of an economic idea. The converse, indeed, is true; the economic background of marriage, as it so clearly manifests itself among savage races, first began to disappear in the course of the development of our own system of civilization, and therewith began also the liberation of mankind from the burden of metallic shackles.”[179]

At the same time, it cannot be denied that even at the present day the economic factor plays a very extensive part in the determination of marriage, although certainly not to the degree maintained by Buckle, who held that there was a fixed and definite relationship between the number of marriages and the price of corn.[180] Beyond question, economic considerations have a great influence upon the frequency of marriage. Many marriages, even to-day, are purely mercenary marriages; but still at the present time the qualities of intellect and emotion, quite apart from physical characteristics, have at least an equal share in the production of marriage. Only among the classes who feel it their duty to keep up a particular kind of appearance, among the upper-middle classes, the aristocracy, and among officers in the army, is the economic question the main determining influence in marriage. Well known, also, is the predominance of mercenary marriages among the Jews.

One may be an enemy of mammonism, and still see the necessity for an economic regulation of conjugal relations in view of the expected offspring, of the altered conditions of life, of the increase in the household, and of the necessity for safeguarding personal independence and free development. Such economic considerations can harmonize perfectly with the demand for personal sympathy, and with the most intimate physical and spiritual harmony between husband and wife.

Schmoller rightly places the most important advance of the modern family in this, that it becomes more and more transformed from a productive and business institute into an institute of moral life in common; that by the limitation of its economic purposes the nobler ideal must become more predominant, and the family become a richer soil for the cultivation of sympathetic sentiments.[181]

More especially among the upper classes of modern European and American society is there apparent an increasing disinclination to marriage, or, to employ a phrase of the moral statistician Drobisch, there is a decline in the intensity of the marriage impulse. Although the often burning money question no doubt plays its part, that part is, on the whole, much smaller than the part played by the ever-increasing difficulties of individual spiritual harmony, difficulties dependent on differences in age, character, education, views of life, and individual development during marriage. This disinclination to marry is nourished by certain tendencies of the time to be subsequently described, and by certain changes in the relations between the sexes.

To many also the idea of “conjugal rights,” as established by law, appears a horrible compulsion, an assignment to physical and spiritual prostitution. The modern consciousness of free personality, in fact, no longer harmonizes with that stoical conception of duty in marriage such as, for example, is described by B. Chateaubriand in his memoirs, although, of course, every one who enters on marriage ought to be aware that by doing so he assigns to the other party certain rights, the non-fulfilment of which actually destroys the character and the idea of marriage. Thus, the conduct of a schoolmistress of Berlin, who persistently refused physical surrender to her husband, on the ground that she had wished merely to contract an “ideal” marriage (of the same kind as the mystical “reformed marriage” of the American woman Alice Stockham), demands emphatic condemnation. But an abominable misuse of “conjugal rights” is unquestionably made by inconsiderate husbands, who demand from their wives unlimited, excessively frequent, gratification of their sexual desire, without any regard to the wife’s physical and spiritual condition at the time. That in this respect the idea of “conjugal rights” is greatly in need of revision has been convincingly proved by Dorothee Goebeler in an essay entitled “Conjugal Rights,” published in the Welt am Montag of August 6, 1906.

Too frequently, also, it happens that the husband simply transfers into his married life previous customs of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, and makes use in marriage of the experience he has gained in intercourse with prostitutes or with priestesses of the love of the moment; he treats his wife as an object of sensual lust, without paying any regard to her individuality and to her more delicate erotic needs.

This physical dissonance is not even the worst. Too often it is simply boredom which kills love in married life. Like Nora in “A Dolls’ House,” one waits for the “wonderful,” and the wonderful does not happen. Instead of this the years pass by; sexual passion, greatly influenced as it is by the spiritual environment, gradually disappears, and with it disappears also the last possibility of spiritual sympathy. Thus, the character of most marriages is solitude. They represent the tragedy of desolation, of the eternal self-seeking of husband and wife.

What disastrous consequences, finally, may result from the part played in marriage by disease, what tragic conflicts may here rise, can be studied in the great book “Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage and the Married State” (Rebman, 1906), an encyclopædic work edited by H. Senator and S. Kaminer, discussing in detail the relation between disorders of health and the married state.

The calamities of modern marriage are strikingly illuminated in the following psychologically interesting account given by the alienist Heinrich Laehr (“Concerning Insanity and Lunatic Asylums,” p. 44 et seq.; Halle, 1852):

“How, as a matter of fact, do marriages come about? In heaven certainly a very small number indeed, if by that phrase we understand marriages undertaken with the full understanding of the nature of the sacrifice involved, under the impulsion of an inner necessity, and based upon deep mutual inclination founded upon self-respect and respect for each other; in social circles, and not in heaven, on the other hand, the majority of marriages are made. The question upon which ultimately so many marriages depend is, what each will gain by it, whilst inner sensations and mutual liking are regarded as subordinate matters.... A man is fully informed about such matters in early years; a woman is full of dark perceptions, uncertain as to what she is to receive and what she is to give. She is naturally impelled by her sense of inward weakness to yield to anyone more powerful than herself, and, in the intoxication of sensual excitement, under conditions in which both, in order to please, tend to show the best side only to each other, she is far less able than man to weigh beforehand the significance of such a step. Later, indeed, when, in the trodden path of marriage, the current of love runs more slowly, her eyes are opened, naked reality takes the place of the pictures of imagination, which formerly caused self-deception, and what appeared to be love, but was not love, takes flight for ever. What has not been hidden under the name of love! It conceals the pretence of egoistic impulses, vanity it may be, the life of pleasure, avarice, indolence; and what a number of marriages are entered into on the part of the woman in order to escape from the oppression of repugnant domestic conditions, because the imagined future appears to them more pleasant in contrast with the actual present.

“There are in the course of marriage so many periods of misunderstood depression, sadness, trouble; and mankind so readily forgets the golden rule, that these periods have to be got through by means of mutual aid, and that in married life husband and wife should do all that is possible to help one another onwards, and not to thrust one another back—so easily is this forgotten, that only too readily the mirth and gladness with which married life was begun vanish away. The intense pain which attacks us with violence, but only at long intervals, has a far less depressing influence on our organism than much less severe, but frequently repeated, emotional disturbances, especially such as arise out of the wretchedness of life. They give rise in us to irritability of the nervous system, by which sensitiveness is increased; and repeated misunderstandings in married life soon make both husband and wife feel that marriage is rather a burden than a joy.”

That women as well as men recognize the danger to love entailed by marriage is shown by Frieda von Bülow in “Einsame Frauen,” pp. 93, 94 (1897):

“During this period I have often considered the question of such continued life in common. Is it not inevitable that this unceasing, intimate association must always give rise to mutual hatred? Husband and wife learn to know one another through and through. The veil of white lies which plays so important a part in ordinary social intercourse is here impossible. The characters are seen naked in all their weakness, all their incapacity for love, all their vanity, all their egoism. In such circumstances, phrases intended to conceal appear simply untruths, and instead of producing illusion they repel. Just as in the first awakening of love, all the powers of the soul are directed towards the discovery of the excellences of the beloved one, so here the soul is for ever upon a voyage of discovery seeking for faults. In both cases alike, a sufficiency of that which one seeks is found.”

The poets also give us an insight into the depths of the eternal contradiction between love and marriage. Who does not know the saying of the idealistic and optimistic Schiller: “Mit dem Gürtel, mit dem Schleier reisst der schöne Wahn entzwei”—“With the girdle, with the veil (of marriage), the beautiful illusion is torn to pieces”? Consider, also, the horribly clear characterization of the pessimistic Byron (in “Don Juan,” canto iii., stanzas 5-8):

V.

“’Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign
Of human frailty, folly, also crime,
That love and marriage rarely can combine,
Although they both are born in the same clime.
Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine—
A sad, sour, sober beverage—by time
Is sharpen’d from its high, celestial flavour,
Down to a very homely household savour.

VI.

“There’s something of antipathy, as ’twere,
Between their present and their future state;
A kind of flattery that’s hardly fair
Is used until the truth arrives too late—
Yet what can people do, except despair?
The same things change their names at such a rate;
For instance—passion in a lover’s glorious,
But in a husband is pronounced uxorious.

VII.

“Men grow ashamed of being so very fond;
They sometimes also get a little tired
(But that, of course, is rare), and then despond;
The same things cannot always be admired,
Yet ’tis “so nominated in the bond,”
That both are tied till one shall have expired.
Sad thought! to lose the spouse that was adorning
Our days, and put one’s servants into mourning.

VIII.

“There’s doubtless something in domestic doings,
Which forms, in fact, true love’s antithesis;
Romances paint at full length people’s wooings,
But only give a bust of marriages;
For no one cares for matrimonial cooings,
There’s nothing wrong in a connubial kiss.
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?”

It is significant that those who most praise marriage are young people who do not know marriage from experience, but have failed to find true happiness in celibacy. We think of the words of Socrates, that it is a matter of indifference whether a man marries or does not marry, for in either case he will regret it.

Our own time is certainly characterized by hostility to marriage. It is the form of modern marriage which frightens most people; the compulsion which has actually been rendered more stringent by the new Civil Code of 1900. Modern individualism draws back from the undeniable loss of freedom which legal marriage entails. The shadow which, according to a saying of E. Dühring, indissoluble marriage has thrown upon love and upon the nobler aspects of the sexual life, is darker to-day than ever before.

Hence the growing disinclination to marry, which, significantly enough, is increasingly manifest upon the part of women; hence, above all, the extraordinary increase in divorce.

According to a statement in the Vossische Zeitung (No. 137, March 22, 1906), the number of divorces in Germany underwent a marked increase in the year 1904. In that year there were 10,882 divorces; in 1903, 9,932; in 1902, 9,074; thus in the year 1904 there was an increase of 590, or 9·6 per cent.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, a marked increase in the number of divorces was already discernible. For instance, in the years 1894-1899 the number rose from 7,502 to 9,433. It was at that time believed that the increase depended upon the fact that in most of the countries of the German Confederation the new Civil Code made divorce more difficult, and that for this reason as many people as possible were seeking divorce before the new Code came into action. It is true that the number of divorces diminished after the Civil Code passed into operation. In the year 1900 the divorces numbered 7,922, and in the year 1901, 7,892. Since then, however, there has once more been a marked increase, so that the figure for the year 1904 is 2,990 in excess of that for the year 1901, an increase of 38 per cent. This increase is principally to be referred to the fact that the so-called relative grounds for divorce, enumerated in § 1568 of the Civil Code,[182] appear to have justified a great number of demands for divorce. The marked extensibility of the sections of this paragraph leaves the judge very wide discretion in its application.

To what an extent the increase in the number of divorces influences the existing marriages is seen as soon as we compare the number of divorces with the number of marriages. It appears that in the years 1900 and 1901, for every 10,000 marriages, there were 8·1 divorces; in 1902, 9·3 divorces; in 1903, 10·1 divorces; and in 1904, 11·1 divorces. Thus in the year 1904, there were 3 more divorces per 10,000 marriages than in the year 1901.

I have already referred to the enormous importance of divorce in relation to the recognition on the part of the State of the temporary character of every marriage, whereby, in principle, free love, which is no more than a temporary marriage, receives a civil justification, and is legitimized. This fact stands out still more clearly when we recognize the legal possibility of repeated divorces on the part of one and the same person. Numerous actual examples of this can be given. Thus a well-known author was divorced no less than four times, and of his four wives one, on her side, had been divorced by other men. Two divorces on both sides are by no means rare. If we consider the matter openly and unemotionally, it must be admitted that this is nothing else than the much-opposed “free love,” the bugbear of all honest Philistines, a free love which has already received the official sanction of the State.

When four or five divorces are possible to the same individual by official decree, when, that is to say, this procedure has received civil sanction, the number may for theoretical purposes be multiplied at discretion.

He who knows human nature, he who knows that the consciousness of freedom in mature human beings—and only such should enter upon marriage—strengthens and confirms the consciousness of duty—such a one need not fear the introduction of free marriage. On the contrary, it may be assumed that divorces would be far less common than they are in the case of coercive marriage.

According to the Civil Code, divorces are obtainable on the ground of adultery, hazard to life, malicious abandonment, ill-treatment, mental disorder, legally punishable offences, dishonourable and immoral conduct, serious disregard of conjugal duties. As we saw, the last clause empowered the judge in difficult cases, by a humane, reasonable interpretation of the idea “disregard of conjugal duties,” to pronounce a divorce. It is obvious that in every divorce the interests of the children of the marriage (if any) must be especially safeguarded.

Marriage in France, to which hitherto the clauses of the Code Napoléon, analogous to those of our Civil Code, have been applicable, is said to have recently undergone reform, both in respect of moral and of legal rights. In Paris there has been constituted a standing “Committee of Marriage Reform,” composed of well-known authors, jurists, and women, among the number being Pierre Louys, Marcel Prevost, Judge Magnaud, Octave Mirbeau, Maeterlinck, Henri Bataille, Henri Coulon, and Poincaré.

In an address to the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate by the President of this Committee, Henri Coulon, in which he gives the reasons for desiring a change in the present marriage laws,[183] he says:

“It would be childish to disguise the fact that the institution of marriage has entered upon a critical phase; philosophers and novelists lay odds on the complete disappearance of the institution. In this, perhaps, they go too far. But it is none the less true that it is a matter of profound interest and importance to reform the institution of marriage. Granted this, how shall we begin?

“The entrance into marriage must be made as easy as possible; in this way the number of marriages which are based upon love will rapidly increase. Then, the married pair must have equal rights, equal duties, and equal responsibilities; in this way marriage will become more practical and less immoral than it is at present. Finally—and this is the most important of all—it is necessary to facilitate divorce. Divorce will then become the worthy separation of two thinking beings, and will no longer be the disgusting comedy that it is at the present day.

“For those determined to live apart, for those whose morals are loose, indissoluble marriage itself is no longer a bond. Absolute freedom is no hindrance to conjugal fidelity and constancy; on the contrary, freedom is the cause of constancy.

“Divorce is not happiness, but it is a help towards happiness. For two human beings who hate one another to continue to live together is a much greater evil than divorce. Certainly it would be preferable if husband and wife could continue to love one another as they did during the first days of their married life; that they should love their children and be honoured by them. But since humanity is not free from faults and vices, this does not always happen. Divorce, as we wish for it, makes marriage worthier and more profound. Such marriages will be better suited to the new social movements and to the modern spirit.

“The civil equality of the two sexes must be a fundamental principle of modern law. The French Civil Code already recognizes for both sexes equal rights in some respects; but the wife still loses a certain portion of her rights in the moment that she marries. She is in fact rendered incapable of business. The contrast between the incapacity for business of the married woman and the capacity for business of the unmarried is one of the characteristic traits of our legislation.

“Divorce, as it now exists, contradicts the indissolubility of the marriage bond demanded by the Church. Adultery should only be regarded as a ground for divorce, and should not exonerate the murderer who kills his adulterous wife or her accomplice.

“We demand the abolition of the punishment for adultery, because prosecutions of this character arise either from revengeful feelings or from litigiousness.”

Justice demands that with this facilitation of divorce, as advocated in the French scheme of marriage reform, there should be associated increased security for the care of the dependent wife and children after divorce. In this connexion, conjugal responsibility is merely a part of sexual responsibility in general. If two independent, free individuals have sexual relations one with the other, in or out of marriage, they thereby both undertake in respect of their own persons and of all possible offspring, the duty and the responsibility which are the outcome of a natural instinctive feeling, namely, “the sense of sexual responsibility.” This must dominate the entire sexual life of every human being, as a categorical imperative. In this is to be found the necessary ethical counterpoise to the activity of boundless sexual egoism.

For the love of the future and its social regulation, the three following conditions appear to me to be determinative; they form a part also of the French programme of marriage reform:

1. Equal rights, equal duties, equal responsibilities on the part of husband and wife.

2. Facilitation of divorce.

3. Individual freedom to be regarded as preferable to coercion. Freedom best promotes constancy in love.[184]

If these principles were strictly carried out in practical life, without doubt, and as a matter of absolute certainty, the number of divorces would not increase, but would diminish, and we should sooner witness the realization of the ideal of true marriage, as the lifelong union of two free personalities, fully conscious of their duties and their rights.

The high ethical and social significance of family life will ever continue, even under the freest love, by which, as I must again and again insist, I do not understand unrestricted and continually changing extra-conjugal sexual intercourse. Against this the gravest considerations must be urged. What “free love” is, is already apparent from the preceding exposition, but in the next chapter the subject will be more thoroughly discussed.

---

APPENDIX
ONE HUNDRED TYPICAL MARRIAGES AND SOME CHARACTERISTIC PICTURES OF THE MARRIED STATE, AFTER GROSS-HOFFINGER

In a long-forgotten, but very interesting, book by Dr. Anton J. Gross-Hoffinger, entitled “The Fate of Women, and Prostitution in Relation to the Principle of the Indissolubility of Catholic Marriage, and especially in Relation to the Laws of Austria and the Philosophy of our Time,”[185] we find a collection, equally interesting to psychologists and to students of human character, to the physician, the jurist, and the sociologist, of a hundred typical marriages, and also a more detailed description of the course of a few marriages. These sketches deserve to be preserved from oblivion, because they will serve equally well as an example of marriages of our time.

In the first place, the author discusses the principal difficulties of marriage. He then asks whether, in view of the smallness of the number of those comparatively happy persons who have found it possible to live a legal and at the same time a natural family life, the existing marriage laws, religious ideas, and social customs have attained their aim, whether they give rise, as a general rule, to happy and fruitful, honourable and blessed unions. The author hesitated long before presenting for the first time “to the Catholic world the picture of the actual state of marriages in that world, a picture based upon numerous experiences and observations.” He investigated one hundred marriages of persons belonging to the most diverse classes, without selection, as they came under his observation by chance; then, again, another hundred, and once again a third hundred. Always the results were equally sad; always the ratio between happy and unhappy marriages was the same. The result of his investigations was, he states:

“Although I have earnestly sought for happy marriages, my search has to this extent been vain, that I have never been able to satisfy myself that happy marriages are anything but extremely isolated exceptions to the general rule.”

In his view this is not the unhappy result of erroneous observation, but depends upon exact observation during a long series of years, and in conditions which brought him into intimate relationship with numbers of persons in all classes of society.

Thus, after a long, difficult, and careful investigation into a hundred marriages among persons of different classes, he obtained the following results, here briefly summarized:

Upper Classes.

• 1. The marriage not unhappy, wife suffering from disorder arousing suspicion of syphilis; conjugal fidelity of the husband prior to the occurrence of this illness doubtful. Children sickly.
• 2. Both parties to the marriage happy in advanced age, after the husband had lived freely.
• 3. Both parties happy in advanced age—childless.
• 4. Husband impotent, wife unhappy.
• 5. Husband an old man, wife unfaithful.
• 6. Husband and wife apparently happy—children scrofulous.
• 7. The husband removed from home by circumstances, wife unfaithful.
• 8. Both parties unhappy, the husband a libertine.
• 9. Both parties apparently content in advanced age.
• 10. Husband a dissolute old libertine, wife unhappy, but resigned—no children.
• 11. Condition precisely similar to No. 10.
• 12. A happy mésalliance.
• 13. The husband phlegmatically happy, wife dissolute, children ill, mother sickly.
• 14. Husband dissipated, wife resigned. Husband and wife have come to an understanding.
• 15. Husband a libertine, wife a Messalina. Both parties syphilitic. Children sickly.
• 16. Both parties unhealthy and miserable. Husband dissipated, coarse. Wife ill, in a decline.
• 17. Husband a coarse libertine, wife separated from him and unhappy.

Upper-Middle Classes.

• 18. Both parties unhappy. Husband impotent. Wife, who is elderly, a Messalina. Marriage childless and unceasingly stormy.
• 19. Both parties tolerably happy, owing to gentleness and good-heartedness. Husband a sensualist and unfaithful. Wife faithful, ailing.
• 20. Both parties unhappy. Incessant domestic warfare in the house.
• 21. Phlegmatic rich husband, poor suffering wife—marriage childless—happily, as it seems.
• 22. Both parties in very advanced age, apparently happy. Their past doubtful. Scrofulous children.
• 23. Childless marriage between a former high-class mistress and a dissolute man.
• 24. An apparently happy marriage between a still young husband and an elderly wife. The former compensates himself secretly.
• 25. Unhappy marriage. Both parties unsatisfied. Husband dissolute. Wife resigned.
• 26. Happy marriage.
• 27. Doubtfully happy marriage.
• 28. Extremely unhappy marriage. Husband a libertine, unprincipled; wife half insane; children syphilitic.
• 29. Unhappy marriage, the husband formerly somewhat fickle, the wife unforgiving.
• 30. Happy marriage. Both parties immoral, dissolute; the wife carries on secret prostitution with the knowledge of the husband, who on his side keeps several mistresses. They take matters philosophically!
• 31. The husband a libertine and seducer by profession, the wife separated from him.
• 32. Happy marriage. The husband inclined to gallantry, without being absolutely dissolute. Wife gentle, patient, fond of her husband, and faithful.
• 33. The husband ill as the result of dissipation, the wife frivolous. Indifferent marriage.
• 34. The husband made happy by means of his wife’s money, but neglects her; she is very ill, wasting away. Childless marriage.
• 35. Husband impotent. Wife, with knowledge of her husband, on intimate terms with a friend of the family. In its way a happy marriage.
• 36. Dissolute husband, dissolute wife, both shameless and free-thinking—in mutual indifference they seem fairly happy.
• 37. Husband old and sickly, a worn-out libertine. The wife on intimate terms with a friend of the house. Happy marriage!
• 38. Unhappy marriage. Husband phlegmatic, wife extremely passionate and voluptuous.
• 39. Unhappy marriage. A worthless speculator who led astray the wife of a wealthy man and then deserted her. Childless.
• 40. Husband debilitated by excesses; wife immoral. Happy marriage!
• 41. Husband debilitated by excesses; wife patient. Happy marriage!
• 42. A similar state of affairs.
• 43. Happy marriage. Both parties still very young, untried.
• 44. Happy marriage. Husband phlegmatic—wife faithful.
• 45. Husband debilitated by excesses, wife rich. At the moment, a happy marriage.

Professional and Trading Classes.

• 46. Happy marriage. The husband phlegmatic and seldom unfaithful; wife forbearing, good, and faithful.
• 47. Happy marriage. Both parties rich and young. Husband, without his wife’s knowledge, loves the joys of Venus.
• 48. Unhappy marriage. An enforced marriage of prudence. The husband lives with a concubine, wife separated from him.
• 49. Unhappy marriage. Poverty, jealousy, and childlessness.
• 50. Happy marriage, owing to the forbearance and consideration of the wife towards the sullen, irascible husband.
• 51. Unhappy marriage. Husband lives happily with a concubine, the wife unhappily with a false friend.
• 52. Unhappy marriage. Phlegmatic husband, immoral wife, continuous quarrelling.
• 53. Unhappy marriage. The husband henpecked, impotent. The wife masterful, quarrelsome, and ill-tempered.
• 54. Husband and wife have separated.
• 55. Happy marriage. The husband is good-humoured and deceived; the wife a sensual libertine; children sickly; wife incurably ill.
• 56. Happy marriage. The husband a worn-out debauchee, the wife a worn-out prostitute. Both incurably ill, for the same reason.
• 57. Happy marriage, happy from necessity and phlegm.
• 58. Happy marriage. The husband, a swindler, does everything possible for those dependent on him. The wife, formerly a prostitute, is happy in consequence of his care.
• 59. A happy, artistic marriage. Happy on account of mutual laxity and accommodation.
• 60. Similar circumstances.
• 61. Happy marriage. The husband conceals his diversions with success. Wife faithful and always gentle.
• 62. Unhappy marriage. Light conduct on both sides, with usual results.
• 63. Happy marriage. The conjugal fidelity of the husband not above suspicion.
• 64. Similar
• 65. circumstances.
• 66. Unhappy marriage. A marriage of prudence. The husband set himself up with his wife’s money, but spends it on light women; the wife revenges herself by boundless ill-temper.
• 67. Unhappy marriage. Marriage of prudence. The young husband settled in business on the money of his elderly wife; she nags, and he is drinking himself to death.
• 68. Marriage happy owing to avarice on both sides.
• 69. Marriage compulsorily happy owing to poverty on both sides.
• 70. Happy marriage! Husband a drunkard. Wife avaricious. Childless.
• 71. Husband and wife are separated; the husband abandoned his wife to poverty and prostitution.
• 72. Unhappy marriage. Husband impotent, wife lustful. Continued unhappiness.
• 73. Young married pair; wife mistress of a wealthy Jew, who supports the family.
• 74. Unhappy marriage. Husband dissolute, no longer cares for his wife; the latter incurably ill; children syphilitic.
• 75. Unhappy marriage. Both parties sickly and poor.
• 76. A marriage of speculation. Husband has sold his wife three times to different wealthy men; in this way he makes his living.
• 77. Immoral marriage. The husband lives by a swindling industry. The wife lives on a pension given by one whose mistress she formerly was—children brought up to prostitution.
• 78. Easy-going marriage. Husband formerly a domestic servant, now in business; wife formerly a prostitute who had saved money. Childless.
• 79. Happy marriage, between a fool and a clever woman.
• 80. Unhappy marriage. The husband dislikes his wife, is plagued to death by her; she brought the property into the house.
• 81. Dissipated husband, dissipated wife, separated from one another. The children scrofulous.
• 82. Impotent husband, licentious wife, sickly children; angry and stormy scenes.
• 83. Worn-out libertine, young wife; the parties are not unhappy, owing to affluence and freedom from cares.
• 84. Artistic marriage. Wife the mistress of a great man. The household goes on comfortably.

Lower Classes.

• 85. Dissolute husband. Formerly well-to-do, owing to his wife’s dowry, now reduced with her to beggary. Living by a trifling commission business. Wife sickly. Children dead.
• 86. Marriage happy, in consequence of great poverty.
• 87. A procurer’s family.
• 88. Happy marriage. Husband a thief, wife a prostitute.
• 89. The marriage unhappy in consequence of poverty.
• 90. Unhappy marriage. The husband a drinker, the wife working amid trouble and poverty.
• 91. Unhappy marriage. Poverty, misunderstanding, jealousy, and illness.
• 92. A family of servants. Wife and daughter at the disposal of the master.
• 93. Unhappy marriage. Frequent brawls. Mutual mistrust, hatred, and contempt.
• 94. Unhappy marriage. Upright husband deceived by his wife, and, in consequence of great poverty, is unable to control her.
• 95. Unhappy marriage. Husband has run away.
• 96. Immoral marriage. Husband, wife, and children live on the wages of unchastity.
• 97. Miserable marriages,
• 98. which ended in
• 99. the poor-house.
• 100. A happy pair, who had endured all the severe trials of life, had forgiven each other everything, and never abandoned one another, a virtuous marriage in the noblest sense.

Thus, among these hundred marriages there were:

Unhappy, about	48
Indifferent	36
Unquestionably happy	15
Virtuous	1
Virtuous and orthodox	—

Further, among these hundred marriages there were:

Intentionally immoral	14
Dissolute and libertine	51
Altogether above suspicion	?

Further:

Wives who were ill owing to the husband’s fault	30
Wives who were ill not owing to the husband’s fault	30
Wives who were unhappy, and had themselves to blame for it	12

Among these hundred marriages only one was happy owing to mutual faithfulness; all the other slightly happy marriages, if one may call them so, were so only because the wife did not disturb herself with regard to the question of her husband’s faithfulness.

From these statistics Gross-Hoffinger draws the following conclusions:

1. About one-half of all marriages are absolutely unhappy.

2. Much more than one-half of all marriages are obviously demoralized.

3. The morality of the remaining smaller moiety is preserved only by avoiding questions regarding the husband’s faithfulness.

4. Fifteen per cent. of all marriages live on the earnings of professional unchastity and procurement.

5. The number of orthodox marriages which are entirely above every suspicion of marital infidelity (assuming the existence of complete sexual potency) is in the eyes of every reasonable man, who understands the demands which Nature makes, and the violence of those demands, equivalent to nil. Hence the ecclesiastical purpose of marriage is generally, fundamentally, and completely evaded.

“No compulsion,” thus concludes the author, “is more unnatural than that of the Catholic (Protestant, Jewish, Greek Orthodox) religion, by which is prescribed a compulsory continuance of marriage, with its fantastic code and ridiculous conjugal duties and rights.

“First of all, this compulsion—this sacrament of marriage—marriage which is nothing, can be nothing, according to nature should be nothing, but a free union and a civil arrangement—results in the avoidance of marriage.

“Secondly, it results that in marriage the purposes of marriage are not and cannot be completely fulfilled.

“Thirdly, that marriage has ceased to be the natural marriage which it should be, and has become merely a business, a speculation, or a hospital for invalids.”

In illustration of this proposition, Gross-Hoffinger finally describes from life twenty-four marriages, some of which, being especially interesting, we will here record.

1.

Countess B., owing to unavoidable difficulties, was unable to contract a suitable marriage, and attained the age of thirty whilst still unmarried. The result of this was she gave herself to a servant, consequently became infected, and died of syphilis some months after she had, finally, married. Her husband was left with an unhappy memorial of this brief marriage.

2.

Count C., a man of high rank, lost his beloved wife through death. Circumstances made it impossible for him to marry again. He was afraid of acquiring venereal disorders, and therefore abstained from natural connexion. Through lack of natural sexual gratification his sexual impulse became perverse, and he took to the practice of Greek love.

3.

Prince D., young, impotent, concluded a marriage of convenience with a beautiful, very passionate lady, who, on account of her husband’s impotence, compensated herself with domestic servants, members of her retinue, and cavalry soldiers, and gave birth in these conditions to several children, which inherited the title of the putative father. In such circumstances the marriage has been very unhappy, but necessity compels the husband to bear his fate with patience.

4.

Count E., in other respects a man of fine character, made a marriage of convenience with a lady of good family, who, however, was not in a position to make him happy. From natural nobility of character, he was unwilling to distress his unhappy wife by entering openly into relations with a concubine, and therefore sought sexual gratification with prostitutes. He became infected, and transmitted the illness to his wife, who became seriously ill, and gave birth to diseased children. Although the poor sufferer is unaware of the origin of her troubles, and bears them with patience; although her husband takes all possible care of her, and does his best to bring about the restoration of her health; the marriage, owing to the uneasy conscience of the husband and the physical suffering of the wife, is obviously a very unhappy one.

5.

Baron F., a man of wide influence, in youth a libertine—frivolous, and of an emotional disposition, insusceptible to finer feelings, contracted successively four marriages of convenience, which in all cases terminated in the death of the wife. There is reason to believe that the unceasing libertinism and unscrupulous conduct of the husband had shortened the life of his wives—and this is all the more probable because all the Baron’s children are sickly and scrofulous.

6.

Count G., dissipated libertine, wasted his property in wild extravagance, and compelled his wife to live apart from him, whilst he spent enormous sums on professional singers and dancers and common prostitutes. Being ruined as completely financially as physically, he was despised by persons of all classes, persecuted by his creditors, and absolutely detested by his wife. Although his pleasures consist chiefly in reminiscences, he still devotes enormous sums to them, the money being obtained by a continued increase in his debts.

7.

Count H. has been married for many years, but lives on the most unpleasant terms with his wife, and devotes his spare time to the society of prostitutes. The scum of the street form his favourite associates; but his voluptuous adventures carry him also into family life, and no respectable middle-class wife or girl, however innocent, is safe from his advances, which are all the more incredible because he is quite an old man and completely impotent. He uses all possible means to make the woman of his choice compliant—presents, promises, threats.

8.

Dr. S., husband of an immoral wife, public official, libertine, philosopher, enjoying a small secured income. Lives with his wife on a footing which permits both parties unlimited freedom. The worthy couple devote their whole energies to earning money by their industry, in part by secret prostitution on the part of the wife, in part by direct and indirect procurement by the holding of piquant evening parties for youthful members of the aristocracy. The family has an extraordinary vogue. Persons of high position are engaged in confidential intercourse with them; young girls of the better classes gladly attend their soirées, since there they meet the élite of the young aristocracy, rich Jews, and officers. This interesting pair get through an almost incredible amount of money; they keep a magnificent carriage, they have a country house, a valuable collection of pictures, etc. It is only from their servants that both of them receive little respect, since the male portion of the household subserve the lustful desires of the wife, the female domestics those of the husband, and all must be initiated into the secrets of the household industry.

9.

Dr. U. was till recently an old bachelor, who had never wished to share his property with a wife and children, and found it much cheaper and more agreeable to impregnate servant-girls and other neglected characters than to keep a mistress, or to seek his pleasures in the street. Finally, becoming infirm at sixty-two years of age, and needing nursing, on account of an occasional gouty swelling of the leg, he discovered that it was not good for man to be alone. Having rank and wealth, it would have been easy for him to find a young and pretty girl who, under the title of wife, would have undertaken to play the part of sick nurse. But the old practitioner knew too well the value of what he had to offer to throw himself away on a poor girl. He considered that it would be reasonable to choose such a partner that he would not be obliged to divide his income, and to find some one to take care of him in his old age who would cost him nothing at all, but would rather provide for her own needs. He thought less, therefore, of youth than of property, less of beauty than of thrifty habits; and finally found an old maid, a woman with some property, who, on account of a somewhat unattractive exterior, had failed to obtain a husband. Now one can see the prudent husband, who is as faithful to his wife as the gout is faithful to him, walking from time to time in the street on the arm of his life companion, whose aspect is somewhat discontented. She still wears the same clothes which she wore before her marriage, and which have a sufficiently shabby appearance, but she endures her lot with patience, because she is now greeted as “gnädige Frau,” and people kiss her hand, as they did not do formerly.

10.

Count J., a man of unblemished character, lived for some time a happy married life. The increasing age of the wife, however, associated with the exceptional constitution of the Count, whose youth seemed remarkably enduring, led to scenes of jealousy, which embittered the life of both. We can hardly suppose that this jealousy is altogether unfounded; but surely it is a matter for regret that two human beings of distinctly noble character should by marriage be exposed to lifelong unhappiness.

11.

Herr von K., a young merchant in the wholesale trade, is married to the daughter of a man of position, and the wife by a rich dowry helped to found her husband’s fortunes; hence she enjoys the distinction over other wives that her husband pretends a great tenderness for her, and conceals his indiscretions with the greatest possible care. For this reason, she has always been devoted to him; she regards him as the example for all other husbands, as a true phenomenon in the midst of an utterly depraved world of immoral men. And as an actual fact, if one sees this man, how he lives in appearance only for his business, with what delicate modesty he avoids any conversation about loose women, if one hears him zealously preach against husbands who deceive their wives, how inconceivable it is to him that a man should find any pleasure in immoral women—one would be willing to swear that he is everything that his wife enthusiastically describes him to be. But some wags amongst his acquaintances, by taking incredible pains, discovered that this honourable merchant had no less than seven mistresses, two of whom belonged to the class of prostitutes, two to the class of grisettes; the remaining three had been decent middle-class women. To these last he presented himself under various names and in the most diverse forms—now as attaché to an embassy, now as an officer, now as a journeyman mechanic. To all these latter mistresses he had promised marriage, and by a succession of presents, oaths, and lies, he had in each case attained his end, and thereafter abandoned them without remorse to the consequences of the adventure, whilst he himself set out to seek in a fresh quarter of the town new sacrifices for the altar of his lusts. Since he never had anything to do with known prostitutes and procuresses, but by personal pains provided the materials for his pleasures, he succeeded both as a merchant and as a husband in preserving the reputation of a man free from illicit passion and deserving of all confidence.

12.

Major W., a distinguished officer, a man of honour in every respect, had in youth married a chambermaid, naturally, as one can imagine, from pure inclination. But the marriage remained barren, because the wife suffered from organic troubles; and soon her sexual powers were completely extinguished. Whilst the husband still remained virile, the wife was already an old woman, suffering from spasmodic and other affections, surrounded always by medicine-bottles and medical appliances, always ill-humoured and nagging, a true torment for the good-natured and amiable husband. The latter bears with Christian patience and inexhaustible love the ill-humour of his wife; but Nature is less pliable than his kind heart: his conjugal tenderness diminishes, and his ardent temperament seeks other outlets for the gratification of his natural sexual desires. The sick wife notices this coolness, and revenges herself by a refined cruelty. She knows that sulkiness on her part makes him ill and miserable; she therefore afflicts him with coldness of manner, and by jealousy and ill-temper she makes his life a hell. There occur horrible scenes of domestic brawling, which more than once have led the husband to attempt to end his troubles by suicide. He suffers in a threefold fashion: by the continued irritation of his healthy natural impulse, by the illnesses he contracts in gratifying that impulse, and by the sorrows of his really loved wife. He imposes upon himself a voluntary celibacy in order that he may not make her ill; but this sacrifice does not suffice, it does not make his wife gentler towards him. She demands from him, tacitly, all the ardency of the bridegroom; there is no rescue possible from this inferno. The husband surrenders himself to a quiet despair. He is faithful in his vocation; he lives only for the wife, who torments him continually. The neighbours see a very unedifying example of an extremely unhappy marriage, originally contracted as a pure love match, and none the less entailing martyrdom alike on husband and wife.

Note.—That in Vienna the conjugal conditions so graphically described in the above extracts are still much the same as formerly, and that marriage needs and marriage lies are there exceptionally painful is shown by the foundation in Vienna of a “Society for Marriage Reform,” which sent to the Assembly of German Jurists, meeting at Kiel in the beginning of September, 1906, the telegraphic request that they would undertake a revision of Austrian marriage law, since hitherto no cure had been found for unhappy marriage in Austria, no divorce was possible, and those who had obtained a judicial separation could, according to Canon Law, sue one another on account of adultery (cf. Neue Freie Presse, No. 15108, September 13, 1906). It is hardly credible, but, according to a report in the Berlin Aerzte-Correspondenz, 1907, No. 8, it is true, that the Medical Court of Honour for the town of Berlin and the province of Brandenburg, in the year of our Lord 1906, punished physicians on the ground of adultery!

---

[155] P. Näcke, one of the most trustworthy authorities on sexual anthropology, writes as follows: “That in ancient times, before monogamy, there was polygamy, or even a state resembling promiscuity, is very probable (Westermarck notwithstanding), and can, in fact, be assumed a priori” (“Einiges zur Frauenfrage und zur sexuellen Abstinenz”—“A Contribution to the Woman’s Question and to the Problem of Sexual Abstinence”), published in the Archiv f. Kriminalanthropologie, vol. xiv., p. 52 (Hans Gross, 1903). Cf. also Lohsing’s “Zustimmung zur Annahme einer ursprünglichen Promiscuität,” ibid., vol. xvi., p. 332.

The question of sexual promiscuity has recently been further considered by P. Näcke (“Earliest Beginnings of Human Society,” in Die Umschau of August 17, 1907). He believes that the state of pure promiscuity lasted a short time only, and gave place to certain nuclei of family structure, a kind of semi-promiscuity, which, prior to the complete development of the family union, lasted much longer than the state of pure promiscuity. Still, these earliest families were merely temporary, and only later became fixed and permanent. This assumption, however, does not affect the fact of a primordial pure promiscuity. Näcke himself also recognizes promiscuity as the natural state of primitive man.

[156] H. Schurtz, “Altersklassen und Männerbünde: eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft”—“Age Classes and Associations of Men: a Demonstration of the Fundamental Forms of Society,” p. 176 (Berlin, 1902).

[157] N. Melnikow, “The Buryats of the District of Irkutsk,” published in the Transactions of the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology, and Primeval History, p. 440 (1899).

[158] Marco Polo, translated by Yule, 2nd edition, vol. ii., pp. 38, 39 (London, 1875).

[159] Cf. my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 165-169.

[160] Cf., regarding group-marriage, the writings of Joseph Kehler, more particularly “Zur Urgeschichte der Ehe”—“The Primitive History of Marriage” (Stuttgart, 1897); “Rechtsphilosophie und Naturrecht”—“The Philosophy of Law and Natural Right,” published in Holtzendorff-Kohler’s “Encyklopädie der Rechtswissenschaft,” pp. 27-36 (Leipzig, 1902); “Die Gruppenehe”—“Group-Marriage,” in “Aus Kultur und Leben,” pp. 22-29 (Berlin, 1904); finally the chapter on “Group-Marriage” by Schurtz (op. cit.). [A quite modern instance of group-marriage was the Oneida community, “a league of two hundred persons to regard their children as ‘common.’” For an account of the Oneida experiment see Noyes, “A History of American Socialisms.”—Translator.]

[161] J. J. Bachofen, “Das Mutterrecht”—“Matriarchy” (Stuttgart, 1861).

[162] Ludwig Stein, “Die Anfänge der Kultur”—“The Beginnings of Civilization”—pp. 106, 107.

[163] Eduard von Mayer, “Die Lebensgesetze der Kultur”—“The Vital Laws of Civilization”—p. 210.

[164] G. F. W. Hegel, “Fundamental Outlines of the Philosophy of Law, or Natural Rights and Political Science in Outline,” edited by Eduard Gans, second edition, p. 218 (Berlin, 1840).

[165] That is to say, it is not sufficient to replace the father-right by the mother-right, as, for example, Ruth Bré demands (“The Children of the State, or the Mother-Right?” Leipzig, 1904).

[166] There is a most apposite remark in one of George Meredith’s novels. He imagines that an Oriental vizier (from a Mohammedan country) is visiting our “Christian” capital, and late one evening, after a dinner-party at a distinguished house, walks homeward by way of Piccadilly. He asks, and is told, who are the numerous ladies walking the streets at that late hour. “I perceive” said the vizier, “that monogamic society has a decent visage and a hideous rear.”—Translator.

[167] M. Nordau, “The Conventional Lies of our Civilization,” pp. 263-317 (Leipzig, 1884).

[168] Georg Hirth estimates the percentage of marriages of convenience as even higher—viz., 90 per cent. Cf. his “Ways to Love,” p. 607.

[169] Cf. my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 165-174; vol. ii., pp. 190, 191, 208, 209, 363, 364.

[170] Schopenhauer’s Collected Works, edited by E. Grisebach, vol. ii., p. 1337 (Leipzig, 1905).

[171] Ernest Stiedenroth, “Psychologie zur Erklärung der Seelenerscheinungen,” pp. 224, 225 (Berlin, 1825).

[172] Max Nordau, “Conventional Lies,” p. 305.

[173] Cf. in this connexion the feuilleton of the Vossische Zeitung, No. 286, June 17, 1904. Jean Paul, also, was an enthusiast in theory and practice for such double love. He called it “simultaneous love.” The idea of simultaneous love has also been employed in a recently published French novel, “A la Merci de l’Heure,” by Jean Tarbel (Paris, 1907). The heroine has need of two lovers—a celebrated literary professor for head and heart, and in addition, a young physician for the gratification of her sensual needs. Contrariwise, Knut Hamsun, in “Pan,” and Guy de Maupassant in “Notre Cœur,” describe the double love of a man for a woman of the world and for a child of Nature.

[174] Friederich Schleiermacher, “Philosophic and Other Writings,” vol. i., p. 473 (Berlin, 1846).

[175] Cf. Eduard von Hartmann, “Philosophie des Unbewussten,” p. 205. In a French collection—“L’Amour par les Grands Écrivains,” by Julien Lemer, p. 14 (Paris, 1861)—we find the saying, “Ordinairement, lorsqu’on se marie par amour, il vient ensuite de la haine; c’est que j’ai vu de mes yeux” (“Ordinarily, when one marries for love, hate takes its place. I have seen it with my own eyes”).

[176] B. Z. am Mittag, No. 210, September 7, 1906.

[177] “Annales d’Hygiène Publique,” 1900, p. 340.

[178] Elard H. Meyer, “Deutsche Volkskunde,” p. 166 (Strasburg, 1898).

[179] Ludwig Stein, “Der Sinn des Daseins”—“The Sense of Existence,” p. 235 (Tübingen and Leipzig, 1904).

[180] H. Th. Buckle, “History of Civilization in England.”

[181] G. Schmoller, “Elements of General Political Economy,” vol. i., p. 250 (Leipzig, 1901).

[182] § 1568 runs: “A husband or wife can sue for divorce when the wife or husband by serious disregard of the duties entailed by marriage, or by dishonourable or immoral conduct, has brought about so profound a disorder of the conjugal relationship that to the offended party the continuation of the marriage appears impossible. Gross ill-treatment is also to be regarded as a serious infringement of these duties.” It is clear that the emphasized passage is capable of manifold interpretations, and it thus compensates for the abolition of the earlier grounds for divorce based upon incompatibility of temper.

[183] Taken from the newspaper Le Jour, No. 337, July 6, 1906.

[184] Compare Browning’s lines, in “James Lee’s Wife”:

“How the light, light love, he has wings to fly
At suspicion of a bond.”—Translator.

[185] “Die Schicksale der Frauen und die Prostitution im Zusammenhange mit dem Prinzip der Unauflösbarkeit der katholischen Ehe und besonders der österreichischen Gesetzgebung und der Philosophie des Zeitalters” (Leipzig, 1847).

---

CHAPTER XI
FREE LOVE

“The transformation of coercive marriage into a free and equal marriage, one more closely approaching perfection, both naturally and morally, can only be effected in conjunction with social arrangements providing for the complete economic independence of woman, and giving security for her material means of subsistence. Unless this indispensable preliminary is fulfilled, the highest ideal of free morality will be debased to the level of a gross caricature.”—E. Dühring.

---