From this moment the battle was transferred from Olympus to the earth. And since then all “saviours of society” have sought to quench, and all “enemies of society” have striven to spread, its flames.
The love which a George Sand herself sought in vain on paths from which she returned with feet wounded, and sometimes soiled; the love a Rahel Varnhagen suffered from and lived on, a Camilla Collet implored, and an Elizabeth Browning realised—this is the love of which the woman of the new age is also dreaming.
George Sand—like the followers of St. Simon, and like the modern feminists—looked upon freedom in love as the central point in the woman’s question. Like George Sand, the feminism of the present day asserts the right of free thought against the creed of authority in every field; the solidarity of mankind and the cause of peace against the patriotism of militarism; social reform against the existing relations of society. The American-English-Scandinavian woman’s question—whose supreme confession of faith is still J. S. Mill’s book, published in 1854, on The Subjection of Women—has, on the other hand, overlooked to a great extent erotic, religious, and social emancipation, and asserted only woman’s rights as a citizen. Thus, especially in Scandinavia, the new gospel of love has had to encounter from the leaders of emancipation, now indifference, now resentment.
Ridicule and resentment from men have also fallen to the lot of the women’s demand for a new love. With arguments, for which Schopenhauer and Hartmann once provided the philosophical formulæ, it has been shown that soulful love is an illusion of nature, and that the unity in love, which woman now claims of man, demands sacrifices which are opposed to his physiological and psychological nature.
Undisturbed by ridicule and resentment, however, the women of the new age have continued to preach the love of their dreams—which is also that of the dreams of poets.
For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality! Century after century, poetry sets forth the loftiness of love. But if anyone in everyday prose ventures to say that love may become an ever loftier emotion, then this is called extravagance; for it does not occur to the people of the present day to regard poetry as prophetic.
The new love is still the natural attraction of man and woman to each other for the continuance of the race. It is still the desire of the active human being to relieve through comradeship the hardships of another and of himself at the same time. But above this eternal nature of love, beyond this primeval cause of marriage, another longing has grown with increasing strength. This is not directed towards the continuance of the race. It has sprung from man’s sense of loneliness within his race, a loneliness which is ever greater in proportion as his soul is exceptional. It is the pining for that human soul which is to release our own from this torment of solitude; a torment which was formerly allayed by repose in God, but which now seeks its rest with an equal, with a soul that has itself lain wakeful with eyelids heated from the same longing; a soul empowered by love to the miracle of redeeming our soul—as itself by ours is redeemed—from the sense of being a stranger upon earth; a soul before whose warmth our own lets fall the covering that the world’s coldness has imposed upon it and shows its secrets and its glories without shame. Richard Dehmel has summed this up in two immortal lines:
Liebe ist die Freiheit der Gestalt
Vom Wahn der Welt, vom Bann der eignen Seele.