Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Our soul is doubtless often deeper, but occasionally also shallower, than our conscious existence and will. Therefore it may happen that the new love in all its force exists in a woman who is unconscious of her own erotic greatness, while, on the other hand, another, who desires it with all her will, perhaps may lack the depth of feeling, the instinctive sureness of choice.

The women of the present day learn everything and arrive at much, even at the finest ideas of love. But, full of insight as they are into the ars amandi, have modern women indeed learned how with all their soul, all their strength, and all their mind to love? Their mothers and grandmothers—on a much lower plane of conscious erotic idealism—knew of only one object: that of making their husbands happy. This then meant that the wife ought to submit to everything and ask for nothing; to serve her husband’s ends untiringly, even when she did not understand them, and to receive with gratitude any crumbs of his personality that might fall to her from the table to which his friends were bidden to feast. But what watchful tenderness, what dignified desire to please, what fair gladness could not the finest of these spiritually ignored women develop!

The new man lives in a dream of the new woman, and she, in a dream of the new man. But when they actually find one another it frequently results that two highly developed brains together analyse love, or that two worn-out nervous systems fight out a disintegrating battle over love. The whole thing usually ends in each of them seeking peace with some surviving incarnation of the old Adam and the eternal Eve. But not with a clear conscience; for they are continually aware that they were intended for the new experience, although their powers of loving were small while their ideas of love were great.

Not until the spring rain of the new ideas has fallen sufficiently to penetrate the roots and rise as sap in the tree of life, will a greater happiness grow from the new love, which is not to be blamed because men have dreamed it greater than they themselves are at present.

Individualism has made love deeper and at the same time increased its difficulties. It has called forth an enhanced consciousness of our own nature, our own moods; it has created new spiritual conditions and—as already pointed out—set in vibration innumerable formerly latent feelings of pleasure and aversion. But our personal irritable sensitiveness has not yet been developed to the point of a corresponding delicacy of feeling for the equally sensitive spiritual life of others. The capacity for giving and sacrificing has not grown at an equal pace with that of accepting and demanding. Of love’s double heart-beat—the finding one’s self, and the forgetting one’s self in another—the first is now considerably more advanced than the second. Not until those women who are absorbed in self-analysis combine their own personal store of life’s riches, their individual diversity, their unique spirituality with the sunny, healthy peace, the self-sacrificing devotion of older times, will their new development render them more powerful than the women who preceded them. It is a healthy sign that men and women exchange experiences and ideas on these subjects with a frankness that was never known before; that they are much less affected before marriage, as women indeed have ceased to be so after marriage. There was a heroic kind of affectation, of which Mrs. Carlyle was the typical example, but in itself it was borrowed from man’s ethical development. Nevertheless one would often wish that the young wives of the present day possessed more of the old-fashioned gift of conceding the desires of the beloved with a happy smile, instead of insisting on their own. The modern woman will not feign anything for the sake of occasional peace or understanding. And she is right—when anything of real importance in the domain of ideas or will is at stake; she is doubly right in holding that all the lies and ruses which married “happiness” enforced on the wives of an older time were degrading to both parties; that what was thus gained was no real gain. Nothing is more true than that the souls which are parted by a lack of perfect frankness never belonged to one another; that complete mutual confidence is the true sign of union. Nothing could be wiser than the modern woman’s desire to see life with her own eyes, not—as was the case with the women who went before her—only with those of a husband. But has she also retained the power of seeing everything with the thought of what the loved one’s eyes will find in it?

Upon the answer to these questions of conscience will depend the success of the new woman in guiding the development of love in the direction of her will. For only by herself loving better will she gradually humanise man’s passion and liberate it from the blind force of the blood, which makes of the capercailzie’s play or the rivalry of stags a spectacle beautiful in its animality, but, on the other hand, renders man’s love bestial. Those who think that the healthy strength of nature will be thereby enfeebled are as foolish as those who try to prove that the artistic instinct in the woodcock’s note is healthier and stronger than that which created Beethoven’s symphonies.

But it is not sufficient that woman should take the lead and appoint the goal. She must herself be developed for the task, and that not only in the direction just mentioned. Her soul is as yet no sure guide to her senses, nor her senses to her soul. So much the less can she then be a guide to man’s soul or senses, which moreover she frequently fails to understand and therefore unhesitatingly condemns—for the sins to which she herself has not unfrequently seduced him!

The new woman demands purity of man. But has she any suspicion as to how her treatment, on the one hand, of the awkward and uncertain youth, on the other, of the experienced and confident “lady-killer” type, acts upon the former, who is perhaps striving after erotic purity in the hope of being rewarded by the happy smile of a woman, but who sees that woman treat him with haughty commiseration while, on the other hand, she regards the leopard’s spots of his rival with admiration? One may ask whether all young women who now express their detestation of the impurity in man’s sexual habits are themselves guided only by a soft and noble joy in giving pleasure. Do they never permit themselves the most despicable of hypocrisies, that of love?

So long as “pure” women take pleasure in the cruel sport of the cat; so long as with the facile changes of mood of the serpentine dancer they evade the responsibilities of their flirtations; so long as they delight in provoking jealousy as a homage to themselves, so long will they be helping to brew the hell-broth around which men will celebrate the witches’ sabbath in the company of the bat-winged bevies of the night.

There are more men led astray by “pure” than by “impure” women.