Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Instead of defending “free love,” which is a much-abused term capable of many interpretations, we ought to strive for the freedom of love; for while the former has come to imply freedom for any sort of love, the latter must only mean freedom for a feeling which is worthy the name of love.

This feeling, it may be hoped, will gradually win for itself the same freedom in life as it already possesses in poetry. The flowering, as well as the budding of love will then be a secret between the lovers, and only its fruit will be a matter between them and society. As always, poetry has pointed out the way to development. A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully-wedded happiness, but often of free and secret love; and in this respect too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. Even the poet of Sakuntala calls that love the most beautiful which gives itself freely in the “Gandoarva marriage,” sanctified only by the fulness of emotion. But even then the danger was recognised of

... unknown heart closing against unknown heart.

Even then it was uneasiness about the fate of the child which coupled responsibility to society with love’s freedom.

The new moral consciousness is thus an old thing. But it must nevertheless be called new, since it is only beginning to be wide-spread. It is becoming plain to more and more people that a man or woman—whether married or free—does wrong to the nobility of self by giving himself or herself to one who is at heart a stranger; it is more and more becoming intuitively felt that it is the sense of home in another soul which gives devotion its sanctity.

The suitor who—dressed for the occasion—went first to the father to declare his feelings for the daughter is already such an old-fashioned type that it is past ridicule. The brilliant wedding festival will soon come to be regarded as ridiculous, then unbecoming, and finally immoral. And—like other survivals of the time when marriage was the affair of the family—it has already begun to disappear, in the same degree as love has developed. Lovers are less and less inclined to tolerate a spying upon their finest feelings; they are increasingly anxious to rescue these from the prying fingers of society, of family, and of friends. More and more is love venerated as part of nature’s mysticism, whose course no outsider can determine, whose sensitive manifestations and uncertain possibilities no one may disturb, a mysticism within whose sphere a fixed timetable would be out of place.

How can Love, one of the great lords of life, take its freedom from the hands of society any more than Death, the other, can do so? “Love and Death, which meet like the two sides of a mountain-ridge, whose highest points are ever where they come together” (G. Rodenbach); Love and Death, which—one with the wings of the dawn, the other with those of the night sky—overshadow the portals between earthly life and the two great darknesses which enclose it—only these two powers are comparable in majesty.

But while there is only one death, there are many sorts of love. Death never plays. When all love becomes equally serious, it will also possess death’s right to choose its own time.

In the springtime of love, parents can be of significance to their children only when they feel reverence for the marvel which is accomplished in their presence. But it seldom happens that parents have previously been so sensitive that their children then treat them as perfect friends. The period of youth is commonly full of strife, which is brought about partly by the parents’ desire of remodelling their children according to their own ideas—against which children are only now venturing to defend themselves,—partly by the children’s desire to assert their own ideals, which are always different from those of the parents, for otherwise “the new generation would own no title to exist” (G. Brandes). Parents might save for themselves and for their children endless suffering, if they understood from the beginning that children are significant exclusively as new personalities, with new gods and new aims; with the right to protect their own nature, with the duty of finding out new paths, without forfeiting the right of being respected by their parents in the same degree as the latter on their side retain the right of being venerated by their children—for the best of what they are or have been, what they will or have willed. The only right that parents ought never to renounce in dealing with their grown-up children is that of giving to them the benefit of their own experience. But in so doing they must remember what a poor loving heart forgets easiest of all: that not even their own most bitter experience will be able to save their children from making sad discoveries for themselves. They will probably avoid their parents’ mistakes, but only to make others of their own! The only real power a father or mother possesses over the child’s fate—but indeed this is an immense one—is to fill the home with his or her strong and beautiful personality; with love and joy, with work and culture; and thus to make the atmosphere so rich and so pure that the children may calmly delay their choice and have a high standard to choose by.

But if parents see that in spite of this their children are tempted to confuse accident with destiny, then they are called upon to show an almost godlike wisdom in order to divert the danger. In most cases, parents consciously or unconsciously play into the hands of the accidental, while they raise obstacles against what is predestined. Their warnings are not directed against what is silent and has nothing to give; no, they advance mean and paltry reasons which the young oppose with all that is best in their nature. Thus they silence their own uneasy intuitions, which their parents might have induced them to follow if they themselves had had a clearer perception of what was essential.