Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Students have shown how the refined expression of love in poetry corresponds with the forms of the sexual life of the upper classes, since monogamy became the law and a secret polygamy the custom. This dual division of the erotic feelings has on the one side brought about such fine and lofty, and on the other such coarse and debased manifestations that neither one nor the other has any counterpart among the nations—or classes within a nation—where this division is unknown, since there the freedom of sexual choice is undisputed.

And this is natural; for there the sexual life preserves its innocence of “paradise,” one of simple animality perturbed by no higher consciousness. This innocence can only be replaced on a higher plane after a long period of development. The way thither is by the cleavage which “the division of labour” involves even in regard to the development of the feelings.

The Middle Ages were thus only capable of dividing love from marriage. This is witnessed by the greatest singers of love and by the greatest love stories. Tristan and Isolde in the world of poetry, Abelard and Heloïse in that of reality, are the highest types of the new age, even then dawning, which is finally to bring about the declaration of rights of human emotion as of human thought. These lovers, united in life and death, are the highest testimony of the Middle Ages to that free love which makes its own laws and abolishes all others; to that great love which is the sense of eternity of great souls, in opposition to the ephemeral inclination of small ones.

Scholasticism, ever extending introspective psychology; mysticism, ever refining the life of the soul devoted to God, unconsciously pour oil upon the red flame of love as upon the white flame of faith. The Vita Nuova of love breaks out in the fire of poetry, whose most aspiring flame was Dante. It lived on in the souls of the elect among Latin peoples. The Platonism of the Renaissance refined the mediæval conception of love as the most excellent means of bringing to perfection the highest human qualities. And thus was established the right of lovers to independence of the customs of society.

It is significant that, at the mediæval Courts of Love as at the courts of the Renaissance and in the contests of wit of the seventeenth century, women are granted not only the same right of sentiment as men but also the same liberty of using their spiritual gifts; for every intensifying of love is connected, openly or otherwise, with the augmentation of woman’s spiritual life and with man’s thus enhanced estimation of the value of her personality. Instead of being to him “the sex,” the means of enjoyment, woman becomes the mistress, when love has come to mean an exclusive desire for one woman, who is only to be won by devoted service. Whenever woman has taken the lead in erotic matters, man’s love has been ennobled. In Shakespeare, we find the whole of the preceding spiritual culture summed up. All his best women are chaste in the same degree as they are devoted, but they are also in the same degree spiritually rich and complete personalities. Therefore they are also leaders through their clear-sightedness and promptness in the moment of action. And although Shakespeare, like every other great poet, formed his women more of the material of dreams than of reality; although the foremost men of the Italian Renaissance probably had more often a Boccaccio’s than a Petrarch’s experience of love; although the age of baroque turned le Pays du tendre into a stiff garden surrounding decorative figures, nevertheless life itself, especially the life of the Latin peoples—as well as their best literature—can always show proud and beautiful examples of loving couples and sacrifices for love, even in that century whose male “philosophers” deprived woman of the lead, when love became “galanterie,” gay and ugly by turns.

At the time when Rousseau appeared, love was equally degraded through Latin-Epicurean immorality and through Germanic-Lutheran “morality.”

What he did for love was the same that he would have done for the lungs, if in one of the boudoirs of those days, stuffy with perfumes and wax candles, he had thrown open the windows to the summer night, with its scent of productive earth and blossoming plants, dark masses of foliage and the star-sown sky.

But Rousseau did not follow out the ideas that lay nearest to his own: that only love ought to constitute marriage; that only the development of the woman’s personality deepens love. Even Goethe, who after Rousseau carried the gleaming trail farther, by showing love as the mysterious fateful power of elective affinity, saw the happiness of love rather in the directness of woman’s nature than in its development. The French Revolution drew the consequences of Rousseau’s propositions also in the questions of love and woman; it made marriage civil and divorce free, but it did not give to woman the franchise; indeed, it did not even preserve the form of it which she had previously possessed. All the spirits influenced by Rousseau and the Revolution have since, in literature and in life, followed out love’s declaration of rights.

In the nineteenth century as in the Middle Ages, it was women, poets, and knights—the last under the name of social utopians—who took the lead in this. In Germany, it was first the romantic school, then “Young Germany,” which went foremost; in England, Shelley, Byron, Browning, and a number of other thinkers; in Norway, Camilla Collet and some great poets among the men. In France,—in the midst of the reaction which reintroduced indissoluble marriage,—Madame de Staël attacks this in Delphine. In the country of literary salons, it is attempted to prevent woman’s genius from acting as a social force—and through Corinne and Coppet, Mme. de Staël makes it a universal force. Her confidence that honour for a woman can signify only a means of winning love; her complaint that life denies to the woman of genius the fulfilment of her most beautiful dream, love in marriage, were the prologue to innumerable tragedies during woman’s century. After her, came the followers of St. Simon and the rest of the social revolutionaries, and above all another of Rousseau’s spiritual daughters, the woman in whose veins all the blood was mingled which the Revolution had poured out on the scaffold and on the battle-field: blood of the mob, blood of the bourgeois, noble blood, royal blood! The courage of her nation to follow truth to its utmost consequences, the fervent faith of her childhood, the wistfulness of her blood, her soul’s longing for eternity, the volcanic ardour and ashes of her experiences—all this George Sand hurls forth in her indictment of the marriage upheld by Church and State, which to her was “lawful ravishing” and “prostitution under vows.” Long before her time, the rights of love had been asserted in the case of exceptional natures. George Sand’s new courage was shown in demanding this right for all; in branding it upon the conscience of her time that, when two human beings wish to be together, no bond is needed to hold them together; that, when they do not wish it, to hold them together by force is a violation of their human rights and of their human dignity.