Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

But nature is no more infallible than she is perfect, no more reasonable than unreasonable, no more consistent than contrary in her purposes; since she is all these. She may be transformed—ennobled or debased—by culture, and therefore a natural declaration of rights implies only the right of man consciously to cultivate nature, so that in a certain direction she may fulfil her own purpose with a gradual approach to perfection; or, in other words, that the needs created by nature in and with human beings may by them be satisfied in a more beautiful and healthy way. But this culture of the erotic nature cannot find its moral criterion in any divine command or transcendental idea. It can only find it in the same mysterious longing for perfection, which in the course of evolution has raised instinct into passion, passion into love, and which is now striving to raise love itself to an even greater love.

There are some who think that love should therefore advance a claim to a glory of its own, which is incompatible with its “natural” mission, namely the perpetuation of the race.

Every one knows, however, that evolution brings about a more complicated, heterogeneous state than the original one; and in this respect love is the most conspicuous example. Love—as we have already shown—has now become a great spiritual power, a form of genius comparable with any other creative force in the domain of culture, and its production in that region is just as important as in the so-called natural field. Just as we now recognise the right of the artist to shape his work, or of the scientific man to carry out his investigations as it seems good to him, so must we allow to love the right to employ its creative force in its own way provided only that in one way or another it finally conduces to the general good.

From this point of view, then, we cannot extend the proposition that love is an end in itself so far as to say that it may remain unfruitful. It must give life; if not new living beings then new values; it must enrich the lovers themselves and through them mankind. Here as everywhere the truth which gives faith in life and creates morality is to be found included in the experience which creates happiness; and the most serious charge against certain forms of “free love” is that it is unhappy love; for there is no unhappy love but the unfruitful.

The capacity of mankind for forgetting is more wonderful than its capacity for learning. If this were not so, there would be no necessity to recall again and again that every band of apostles includes a Judas; nay, that the truth can only be accepted by disciples in the hands of its enemies. One is reminded by this that every reformation has its visionaries who arrest the blow when the reformers have put their axe to the root of the tree; and one is not surprised that with every spring flood not only the ice but the earth itself is washed away.

Mankind seems determined not to remember. They must therefore be reminded once more that the new morality’s band of combatants, ever more closely united and more rapidly increasing, are distinguished from their scattered followers and from their light advance-guard by the knowledge that love is subject to the same law as every other creative force; the law of dependence on the whole for its own enhancement to its highest possible value. Love, indeed, whose origin is the very instinct of the race, must be more deeply bound up with the race than any other emotion. And experience shows too that it cannot preserve and promote its vital force if it lacks any connection with, and does not stand in some relation, either of giving or receiving, to the race. It is therefore an indisputable necessity that every love entirely detached from the rest of humanity must die for want of nourishment.

But the band which attaches it to humanity may be woven of several materials; the gift to the race may express itself in various ways. In one case a great emotion may bring about a tragic fate, which opens the eyes of humanity to the red abysses it contains within itself. Another time it may create a great happiness, which sheds a radiance around the happy ones, illuminating all who come near them. In many cases love translates itself into intellectual achievements, or useful social work; in most it results in two more perfect human beings, and new creatures, still more perfect than themselves.

Those couples, on the other hand, who have shed no radiance either in their life or in their death; who have not taken one step on the golden ladder to a higher humanity, and who have only found in each other the lust of the beasts—without their readiness to sacrifice themselves for offspring —these are immoral, since their love has not served the ascending development of life. Whether this lifeless love has taken the form of a light and irregular or of a lifelong and lawful connection, it has in no respect enriched the life of the couple, much less therefore that of the race.

With the enhancement of life as love’s standard of morality, it is thus impossible, as we maintained at the beginning, to decide in advance whether either a free or a married love, an interrupted or a continued marriage, voluntary childlessness or parentage, is moral or immoral; for the result depends in each individual case on the will, the choice, which lies behind it, and only the development of events can decide the nature of this will and this choice.