CHAPTER XXXIII
Looking backwards over the long road which lies behind us, and which has conducted us past all the heights and deeps of the human amatory and sexual life, we may now endeavour to give a brief answer to the difficult question, What is the future of human love? Are we able to recognize the existence of progress towards better things? Are there any indications of a new, nobler, happier configuration of the sexual life? The answer is a confident and joyful “Yes!”
Never before throughout the history of mankind has love evoked so earnest and so profound an interest as to-day; never has it been considered from so eminently social a standpoint as now. As I remarked at the first public meeting of the Association for the Protection of Motherhood, the idea of a reform, ennoblement, and more natural configuration of the sexual life harmonizes perfectly with the general tendency of our time, which has in view a resanation of all the relationships of life. It is continually more clearly and widely recognized that in the human sexual life, as in all other departments of human activity, modifications may be effected by means of conscious endeavour in the direction of a progressive evolution; that the relationship between man and woman, alike in its individual and in its social aspects, is influenced by the changes and advances of human evolution; and that this relationship cannot be artificially confined by main force within limits which may have been suitable to it one hundred or two hundred years ago.
Our love is of this earth, afflicted with all earthly defects and sorrows. Notwithstanding this, we affirm it joyfully, in the confident hope that it can be saved from all hostile and destructive influences, and that it can be elevated above the transient and the casual, and manifest itself in its finest form as intimate, individual love. In the sphinx of the individual, the greatest riddle of all unquestionably lies in the alarming and elemental qualities of the sexual impulse. But the way to liberation is obvious and open. Let us fight courageously with all the hostile forces described in this book, which poison the amatory life of our time; let us destroy all the germs of degeneration, and let us imprint upon our sexual conscience three words—health, purity, responsibility.
One thing more. Why does love at the present day so often threaten to perish amid the general fragmentation of life? Why do the leading spirits and the greatest artists in love complain of the fragile character of all love? Because love is isolated, because it is not associated with the work of life, with the battle for freedom which every man has to fight; because love is not conceived as a union between the lovers for the common conquest of existence, as a partnership for the purposes of inward spiritual growth. Far too often the man of the future is opposed to the woman of the past, or the woman of the future to the man of the past; each is to the other a sexual being, and nothing beyond. And yet individual love is only possible when, passing beyond the aims of mere sexual gratification, and beyond the purposes of reproduction, it subserves the general objects of life, and assists in the performance of all the tasks of the civilization of our time. The most wonderful dreams of the heart cannot suffice to take the place of the positive work which life demands from love. Without free activity there is no love! That is the great saying of a great thinker. And I add to this saying, that without free activity there is no right to love. Such a right is possessed only by the personality, the poetic, striving, willing human being, be it man or be it woman. How often the man seeks love from the woman and cannot find it, and yet might have found it so easily!
“... doch wenn ich suchend drücke
Die Fänge meines Geistes in ihr Hirn,
Dünkt mich, dass hinter dieser hohen Stirn
Ein Etwas liegt, das einst gefehlt dem Glücke.”
[“But when searchingly I press
The talons of my spirit into her brain,
It seems to me that behind this lofty forehead
Something lies which has just missed happiness.”]
In this beautiful verse of Ada Christen’s the secret of all love reveals itself. We must not seek that which is lower in the other sex, in the beloved person; we must seek the highest, her spiritual essence, her will, her developmental possibilities. Before the eyes of the modern human being, the individual love of two free personalities appears as an ideal, as is poetically expressed by Dingelstedt in the words:
“Und Liebe blüht nur in dem Doppel-Leben
Verwandter Seelen, die nach oben streben.”
[“And Love blossoms only in the duplex-life
Of two allied souls, which together strive upwards.”]