Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

The prejudice originally fostered by Christianity, that sexual purity is in itself so great an asset in life that it outweighs the sacrifice of all others—this prejudice must be overcome. A person is estimable for sexual purity only to the extent to which it fits him to fulfil the purpose of life for himself and for the race: that of leading an ever higher life. His purity is too dearly won if it costs him, and through him the race, irreparable losses of vital joy, courage, and power.

And for the present—until many generations of marriage and bringing-up have arrived at a transformation of present-day human, and especially men’s, nature—the demand for purity will not admit of realisation without such losses; that is, if this demand takes the shape of the neo-Protestant formula, or, even more, that of Tolstoy.

Those ascetics who recommend only self-control as a remedy for the mastery of the sexual instinct, even when such control becomes merely obstructive to life, are like the physician who tried only to drive the fever out of his patient: it was nothing to him that the sick man died of the cure.

But these ascetics may have arrived at their fanaticism by two different paths. One group—which includes most of the female ascetics—hates Cupid because he has never shown to them any favour. The other group—embracing the majority of male ascetics—curse him because he never leaves them in peace. Meanwhile, those who put a tremendous emphasis on purity and those who rave about pleasure, meet on the common ground of distrust of love’s possibilities of development. Love to them means desire and nothing else; if the soul enters into it, it becomes friendship and that alone. They have never experienced a love which is creative in the fullest sense of the word. Sterility—of the soul or the body or both—is the mark of the only love these two groups are acquainted with. The slaves of eroticism are admirably characterised by Lord Chesterfield’s confession that he had made violent love to at least twenty women, all of whom personally were entirely indifferent to him. They know nothing of the soul’s desire for one single person, from among an unlimited selection; a desire which—when it is deeply rooted—is met by the desire of the other. They do not know that the elective affinity of sympathy causes the one to gather from the other’s eyes an all-mastering, liberating force. For they themselves experience in the violence of desire only prostration and humiliation of their higher being. An otherwise sensitive man may feel unnerved by eroticism to such a degree that now he will wish all women dead, to be thus freed from his thraldom; now he will desire, as Caligula did of the Romans, that they had but a single neck—but not to sever it. The hatred of these men for eroticism is that of the savage for the hideous gods on whom he believes himself dependent, and whom he knows to be making sport of his destiny. And nothing is more certain than that love, thus conceived, makes men degraded and ridiculous. Even he who in his innermost soul loves tragedy and hates farce, is made, under the attraction of this love, to halt between the two and to turn his life into a tragi-comedy; for in order to attain to the true tragic greatness a man must be prepared to surrender himself unconditionally to, and to suffer through what is greatest in, his nature, his innermost ego. But the tragic destiny is apt to pass a man by against his innermost will, and then arises the impure form of the tragic that we have just mentioned. Thus men and women, who have only sought fresh stimulants in eroticism, at last come across a person who does not understand love in that way, and who ends the game for ever. Or perchance they themselves are gripped by a great emotion, but their past destroys the hope of its now being granted to them to worship in any holy grove the divinity to whom hitherto they have only burned paper lanterns in the turmoil of a fair. In most cases the tragi-comedy takes the same form as with the drunkard: satisfaction becomes more and more impossible; the insatiable one is continually forced to fly to grosser means in order to quench his desire in some degree, to indulge with increasing frequency, but with diminishing festival gladness. He who has sunk to this kind of intoxication becomes by degrees as weak-willed, as heartless, as devoid of character and conscience as the dipsomaniac, and equally incapable of selection and appreciation within the sphere of his appetites. The most sublime woman’s love will at last leave him as insusceptible as is the drunkard to the liquid topaz of Rhenish wine, its bouquet and dewy freshness. “Love’s freedom” will finally mean to him nothing but freedom from responsibility, from consideration, from danger, and from expense. In comparison with this kind of “free love,” prostitution is doubtless more dangerous to health, but far less injurious to personality. Prostitution detracts from personality by a cleaving which excludes the soul; but it does not consume the personality in the same way as the “love” with which a man buys women who are not venal. If they expect him to redeem his bonds in true coin, they will be disappointed. Love may possess, according to his belief, no sterling value: he regards it as always a forged note with which nature obtains the co-operation of human beings—especially of women—to her ends.

This love knows no atmosphere but that of the alcoves where it has pursued its bought or stolen pleasure. It has never breathed the air of the wilds, the air which quivers with sunshine and shakes with storms; the air through which murmurs all life’s longing for renewal, all the wistful intuition of eternity born of a hunger for happiness, which raises generation above generation towards unknown goals; an air which immeasurably enhances and eternally absorbs vitality; the air of the wide expanses, where ferocity and madness are not yet extinct, where man and woman fight their eternal battles and suffer their eternal pains; pains whose source even Lucretius knew to be dualism.

But that only unity is capable of sealing up this source—that was known to none before our own time.

In literature it is sometimes from the alcoves, sometimes from these wilds that the complaint arises of the mastery of the sexual instinct.

In the works of not a few of the writers on morality one fails to find even a suspicion of these wildernesses of human life. These teachers betray their ignorance in a boundless narrow-mindedness, a narrow-mindedness which includes the most far-reaching questions of humanity among—gymnastic and bath apparatus! To their short-sighted view, immorality has revealed itself not only as venal but in the shape of “free love.” They do not suspect that free love as well as marriage includes many degrees of morality and immorality, rising above or sinking below the ethical zero, at which both the free love and the marriage of the majority are to be found.

Between the free or lawful love which becomes ugly, revengeful, or murderous and the love which may perhaps take its own life but never that of the loved one, the distance is therefore great. From the point of view of enhancement of life there will be nevertheless a great difference between the free—or lawful—love which is devoted, courageous, self-sacrificing, faithful, and that which leaves all the best human qualities unemployed. In the same way, the distance is great between the sterile erotic “adventures” of a paltry vanity, a sordid hunger for sensation, and the passion through which a human being attains to new creative power. The concession to the storm of passion is in one case the pennant, in the other the sail.

The artistic temperament often expresses itself in the demand for erotic renewal. But while some thus increase their strength and health, others grow ever poorer and uglier. Goethe was one of the former sort, George Sand likewise. Natures of this type contain a wonderful power of renewal. They can love several times without becoming erotically depreciated. Their souls, like the volcanic soils of the South, can bear three crops without being exhausted. But this is not the spiritual soil or climate of humanity at large. And even such Olympian gods and goddesses suspect that love may have some secret kept from them. Goethe, who prayed of fate that he might only be required to love once in another existence, may have known less of love than Dante, to whom was vouchsafed the marvellous vision described in the wonderful words