Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Vede il cuor tuo ...

George Sand, who implored of the gods the flame of a great love, was never so thoroughly fired thereby as her sister poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who gave witness of her sympathy for her in the perfect lines which begin,

Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man ...

But great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life’s gracious gifts to its elect. There can be no other standard of morality for him who loves more than once than for him who loves once only: that of the enhancement of life. He who in a new love hears the singing of dried-up springs, feels the sap rising in dead boughs, the renewal of life’s creative forces; he who is prompted anew to magnanimity and truth, to gentleness and generosity, he who finds strength as well as intoxication in his new love, nourishment as well as a feast—that man has a right to the experience. Those on the other hand—and they are the majority—whom every new love makes poorer in the qualities common to humanity and in personal sense of power, weaker in will, less efficient in work, have, from the point of view of the religion of Life, no right to such self-deterioration. By its fruits love is known. Nothing is truer than that “there is no such thing as local demoralisation.” A person who in all his other doings is healthy and genuine; who continues strong and sound in his work, is in most cases moral also in sexual matters according to his conscience—even if this does not harmonise with the doctrine of monogamy. He, on the other hand, who shows himself a cheat or a wretch in his other dealings will probably be the same in the affairs of love, whether his morals are those of monogamy or polygamy; and it is therefore more unreasonable to judge of a man’s morality in other matters from his sexual code than it is to judge of his sexual morality from his ethical standpoint in other questions. Nor does the latter afford an infallible criterion, for these are people who reach the summit of their natures in a great love, but remain below it in the rest of their affairs. Others again never succeed in raising their erotic dealings to the level of the rest of their personality. But in regard to the accuracy of the result the latter standard is nevertheless as superior to the former as a chemist’s scales are to an old-fashioned steelyard. It may often be the case that a person’s other manifestations are in a certain sense greater or less than himself, but his love, on the other hand, will in a thousand cases to one be his inmost self. Great or mean, rich or poor, pure or impure as he is in that, so will one also find him in the other important relations of life. Of all summary characteristics of a person, therefore, none is more sure than this that, as a man has loved, so he is.

Although in this way a follower of the religion of Life regards the Tolstoy code of sexual morality as profoundly immoral, he recognises that it has a purer as well as a less pure origin.

The former is the case with those who have suffered deeply from the passions which they now advise others to uproot for the sake of their peace; also with those who are in the early spring of their age, when life is still asleep and nature appears to wear the hues of autumn.

The latter is the case with those for whom life has been all autumn, since they were born withered; women and men who have been seized with a hatred of the conditions of procreation because they have been the victims of those vices and sufferings which still make of erotics the Divina Commedia of earthly life; but not as in that of Dante an architectonic arrangement of hell, heaven, and purgatory, giving them a definite sequence in space and time, but a drama wherein the three states break in upon one another like waves on the shore. But whether the haters of sexual life belong to the exhausted or to the excluded, to the sterile or to the immature, the withered or the poisoned, they may doubtless be entitled individually to more or less leniency; their doctrine of morality, however, must for the reasons we have given, be rejected as entirely worthless.

The same holds good of those who solve the sexual problem as though it were one with the claim of individual liberty, irrespective of any consideration for the race.

These latter are in the habit of comparing the right to satisfy sexual desire with the right to satisfy hunger. The former, on the other hand, reject this comparison as untenable, since, of course, a person can live healthily in lifelong sexual abstinence. Instead of it they compare the erotic passion with other passions, such as gambling and drunkenness, in which popular opinion recommends self-control and the will is capable of it.