This condition—in which every advantage gained becomes a gift and every gift a profit; in which are united a continual emotion and a calm peace—is even now that which dreamers await as that of the third kingdom.[2]
CHAPTER III
LOVE’S FREEDOM
The most delicate test of a person’s sense of morality is his power of interpreting ambiguous signs of the times in the ethical sphere; for only the profoundly moral can discover the dividing line, sharp as the edge of a sword, between new morality and old immorality.
In our time ethical obtuseness betrays itself first and foremost by the condemnation of those young couples who freely unite their destinies. The majority does not perceive the advance in morality which this implies in comparison with the code of so many men, who without responsibility—and without apparent risk—purchase the repose of their senses.
Those young men who choose “free love” know that bought love may destroy their finest instruments of mental activity; that it may result in injury to the wife as well as in the danger either of degeneracy on the part of the children, or of childishness, and may finally bring about their own premature downfall.
But they also know that these results may not occur and that, on the other hand, they may suffer spiritually by curbing their personality and ruining their possibilities of single-hearted love. At the same time they despise their fathers’ less dangerous, but for that reason more unprincipled, expedient for sexual satisfaction, the seduction of women of the people, women with whom they never had any thought of community of life.
“Free love,” on the other hand, gives them an enhancement of life which they consider that they gain without injuring anyone. It answers to their idea of love’s chastity, an idea which is justly offended by the incompleteness of the period of engagement with all its losses in the freshness and frankness of emotion. When their soul has found another soul, when the senses of both have met in a common longing, then they consider that they have a right to the full unity of love, although compelled to secrecy, since the conditions of society render early marriage impossible. They are thus freed from a wasteful struggle, which would neither give them peace nor inner purity and which would be doubly hard for them, since they have attained the end—love—for the sake of which self-control would have been imposed.
When in this connection we speak of youth, we can mean only the young men and girls of the upper classes. For among the rest of society the free union of love has long been the custom. Our working classes—as those of many European countries—simply use the same freedom which the custom of society allows to many extra-European peoples. Ethnographical research shows that this is no new degraded habit, but, on the contrary, a relic of primitive customs. Among certain extra-European peoples—for example, one in north Burmah—this custom was accompanied by definite guarantees for the possible children. Young people may without hindrance unite freely, and separate if they do not find their feeling deep enough for continued life together. In the contrary case, they marry, and after marriage infidelity is as good as unknown. If the girl becomes a mother, without a marriage following, the man is obliged to secure the child through a sum paid to the girl’s father, who is then answerable for it.