Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Just as the Swedes, in comparison with some other of the Germanic peoples, are behindhand in their view of l’amour passion, so are the Germanic races as a whole behindhand as compared with the foremost Latin peoples. The Gallic counterpart of the Lutheran doctrine of marriage is to be found in another monk, Luther’s contemporary, Rabelais, with his joyous project of a new kind of convent, where every monk should have his nun, with the power of separating after a year of probation; a plan which perhaps would not have been a much more roundabout way of educating mankind to love than was the Lutheran doctrine of marriage. Nothing is farther from the truth than that the Reformation increased respect for love and woman. It raised the esteem for the married state as compared with the unmarried, but it enhanced neither the position of woman in matrimony nor the importance of love in regard to marriage. Even in the Middle Ages, the Latin nations render a homage to woman which to-day is still almost incomprehensible to the man of a Germanic race. And if, on the one hand, this homage took the form of the cult of Venus, which is born in the Latin blood, on the other, it expressed through the cult of Mary its reverence for what is deepest in woman, motherhood. Even to-day, the Frenchwoman is esteemed not according to her age but according to her qualities. It is not only the mothers who worship their sons, but also the latter their mothers; and not only the mother, but besides her every admirable elderly woman receives attention in social life as in the family from men of all ages. The middle-class wife—though indeed at the cost of the children—co-operates in her husband’s calling with a seriousness unknown in the Germanic middle-class. In France as in Italy, family life has a kind of warm intimacy which the German does not understand; since the Latin temperament lacks that geniality which sheds its light over the frequently rough lines and harsh colours of the landscape of the Germanic soul. It is rather the coldness of his disposition than the strength of his soul that makes the German so much less erotic than the Southerner; it is more indifference to woman than respect for her that expresses itself in the distinction between the erotic customs of North and South. But when all this has been admitted for the sake of justice, we may fairly lay stress upon the influence of the Germanic spirit in the struggle to put an end to that cleavage between love and marriage which has prevailed among the Southern nations ever since the days of the Courts of Love. For the peculiarity of the Gallic spirit is to discriminate. This gives it the power of following out an idea to its uttermost conclusions, but at the same time renders it liable in actual life to split itself up among superficialities. The strength of the German, on the other hand, is his desire of unity. This makes him inconsistent as a thinker, since he must include everything, but against this it makes him strive after consistency in life. The same deep sense of personality which created Protestantism has in the Germanic world sought to make love as well as faith the affair of the individual and to make marriage one with love. Among the educated classes in the North, marriages of convenience or those arranged by the family are now things of the past, while in the Latin world they are still the rule, though with increasingly frequent exceptions. But in most cases it is still in free connections, before and during marriage, that the Frenchman engages his erotic feelings; and the French wife has abundantly shown the emptiness of the assertion that “a woman always loves the father of her child,” the most dangerous of the false doctrines which have led women into marriage and thence into adultery. In Shakespeare, on the other hand, we already find the wife and the mistress united in the same person, and it is always in English literature that we meet with the highest expression of the Germanic feeling for unity in love. Since the mediæval minnesingers ceased to sing, the literature of Germany and Scandinavia, dominated by Lutheranism, bears witness chiefly of “the lust of the flesh.” Women are esteemed according as they fulfil their destiny as bearers of children and housewives. The abolition of the cloister and celibacy has, however, brought about the good result of the transmission of spiritual forces which formerly died with the individual. And it may well have been through some of those who formerly took refuge with their idealism in a cloister, that the longing for a great love has been left as an inheritance to sons and daughters.

In Germany, the leading poet of the “age of enlightenment,” Gottsched, asserts woman’s right to culture; in America, during the War of Independence, the women gave evidence of their sense of citizenship; and it was during a more recent struggle for liberty, that against slavery, that the woman’s question came to the front in that country.

In France, the eighteenth century, more than any other period of history, is “the century of woman.” The salons are the focussing point of all ideas; the most eminent men write for women, who become electric batteries from which the ideas of the time send out kindling sparks in all directions. Thus the women of France help to prepare the French Revolution. During the Revolution, Olympe de Gouges writes her “declaration of the rights of woman,” as a counterpart to that of the rights of man, and Condorcet speaks in support of woman’s claims. The same spirit of a new age confronts us in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), as also in Hippel’s Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber, published the same year, and in the Swede Thorild’s contemporary treatise Om kvinnokönets naturliga höghet (“On the Natural Greatness of Women”). Each in its way was a remarkable sign of the time which already included the whole “emancipation” programme of equality of position: the same rights for woman as for man as regards education, labour, a share in legislation, and an equality of position under the law and in marriage.

Isolated instances of emancipated women were nothing new. In Greece, the type was common enough to be employed in comedy; in Rome, self-supporting women were to be found; during the Middle Ages not only Bridget but many another woman—in the quality of abbess or regent—exercised a great and often beneficial activity. The days of antiquity, of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance all possessed female scholars, physicians, and artists. But it is not until the century of the great Revolution that we find among women themselves as well as among certain men a persistent and conscious striving to elevate the education and to secure the rights of women.

And wherever this striving has been profound, it has been united with the desire to reform the position of woman in love and in marriage.

It is a very common but erroneous opinion that monogamy has given rise to love. Love appears already among animals, and with them, as in the world of men, has shown itself independent of monogamy.

The origin of the latter in human society was the relation of proprietorship, religious ideas, considerations of collective utility, but not perception of the importance of love’s selection. On the contrary, love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy, and it is therefore a profound mistake to suppose that the higher view of love has been formed solely through monogamy. The idea of love has been developed in as great a degree by attacks on marriage as in association with marriage itself.

While, in spite of the accumulation of evidence to the contrary, Christianity’s share in the origin of human love is constantly exaggerated, sufficient stress has not been laid upon its indirect influence on the development of sexual love. It is true that all over the world—from Iceland to Japan—songs and legends are to be found which give glorious evidence of the power of love in the heart of man in all ages. But the sexual emotion, nevertheless, held a subordinate position in the life of the human soul until Christianity granted to woman also a soul to save—in other words, a personality to cultivate. Christianity, moreover commended the womanly rather than the manly virtues, and although Christ himself ignored woman, love, and the family life, his ethics became thus in an indirect form a glorification of woman. The importance attached by Christianity to the value of the individual as a soul—in contradistinction to the insistence by paganism on his value as a citizen—was likewise one of the unseen contributary causes which during the Middle Ages made love a life-power.

In antiquity, marriage was a duty to society; friendship, on the other hand, was the free expression of sympathy. Not until man’s consciousness admitted a soul in woman, could personal love arise. But so mysterious are the influences through which the soul of mankind grows, that the youthful love of the ancients indirectly developed the need of sympathy also between grown men and women; and the suppression of the sexual instinct by Catholic asceticism indirectly furthered the introspective, soulful emotion of love which rises above sensuality.

The modern view of love as the most lofty state of the soul had already taken shape in the time of the Crusades sufficiently to bring into existence at this period the Courts of Love in the south of France. Woman, the knight, and the singer together intensify and refine love, in part by laying stress upon its incompatibility with marriage!