Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Love, like every other emotion, has its ebb and flow. Thus, even in the greatest souls, it is not always at the same height. But the greater the soul that the wave of erotic emotion inundates, the more surely does this wave quiver at its highest with the longing of eternity. The child is the only true answer to this longing.

This does not mean that lovers in the moments of rapture divide their consciousness between the present and the future, between their own bliss and the possible child. The life of the soul does not work so awkwardly as this. But the conscious conditions of the soul are determined by emotions—reduced for the moment to unconsciousness; and motives, which are forgotten in the hour of fulfilment, have not therefore been less decisive. The athlete in the moment of victory does not remember the training which preceded his race, but it was nevertheless that which decided the fate of that moment. The artist in the hour of creation does not remember the toil of his student years, but that nevertheless determines the perfection of his creation. The will to ennoble the race need not be conscious in a pair of lovers, who in each other forget time and existence, but without the emotions, which, consciously or unconsciously, have been influenced by that will, they would not be united in an ecstasy of the soul and the senses.

Young men are becoming increasingly conscious that the thought of the child influenced them in their choice of love; women are increasingly aware that never was their longing for a child stronger than in the embrace of the man to whom they have been attracted by a great love. More and more often do mothers search the features and souls of their children for evidence of their love. More and more often does one hear the unmarried woman confess the hungry longing for motherhood, which a few decades ago she concealed as a shame.

Every awakened soul perceives that the consciousness of the time comprehends the mission of the race with a new intensity, although centuries must pass before it can be proved what influence love’s free selection has had upon the production of beings above the present standard of humanity.

Even from believers in the religion of life warnings are still heard against the love which is a matter of personal choice, which excludes all else, and which dissolves all former ties. Evolutionists thus admit that this emotion certainly produces in the individual the highest possible development of force, the fullest richness of life, and that this indirectly and in many ways is to the good of the whole. But at the same time they assert that love itself often consumes these enhanced powers; that it ought therefore only to occupy a brief period of human life and should not be allowed any decisive importance in shaping the course of life, since this would be to the detriment of the new generation. Their special objection to love is, that just as monastic life and the celibacy of the clergy during the Middle Ages and down to the present day have deprived the race of excellent qualities—since the most gifted often choose the calm of the cloister or the call of the priesthood—so now many of the best men and women are kept from marriage by the dream or by the loss of a great love’s happiness.

Finally, from the point of view of evolutionary ethics, not only the desire of great love, excluding all else, but monogamy itself has been attacked. This purely scientific line of thought has at present no conscious part in the utterances of what is called the “new immorality,” all the less as the scientific reasoning lays stress upon the point that if mankind is to abandon monogamy, which has possessed such enormous advantages, then this must be done with a conscious purpose, to further the development of the whole race, not the passions of individuals.

But if this evolutionistic reasoning be conceded, then it will result in a transformation of society’s view of love’s freedom of choice, both in the direction of extension and of limitation. Much of what is now called the “new immorality” may then appear as the unconscious self-protection of the race against a degeneration forced upon it by the customs and arrangements of society.

Against the future claims of evolutionism, however, the conviction asserts itself that personal love, the great creation of culture, will not disappear; and thereby the danger of polygamy is removed. It must therefore continue to be love’s selection which will occasion the ethical “adulteries” just alluded to, but it will be a love determined by the point of view of the ennobling of the race. At present the claims of evolution in this respect have scarcely begun to be perceived, still less have they succeeded in exercising a transforming influence on moral opinion, which will perhaps one day apply in this connection Plato’s saying: that what is useful is fit, and what is hurtful is shameful. Where good reasons exist for not outwardly dissolving the marriage, the right may perhaps be admitted which even now a man or woman has here and there appropriated: that of becoming a father by another woman, or a mother by another man, since they themselves have a passionate longing for a child and are eminently suited for parentage, but have been deprived of its joys because the wife or husband has been wanting in these possibilities.

Even now people begin to perceive the psychological justification of the oft-repeated experience that a man—sometimes also a woman—can at the same time and in a different way love more than one, since the great love, the love which is one and indivisible and pervades their whole being for ever, has not been given to them. Even now such conflicts are solved in a new way—there are examples of it known throughout Europe—not as Luther solved it for Philip of Hesse, who kept the wife that had just borne him a ninth child, while secretly wedding a new one, but as Goethe first intended to bring about the solution in Stella: that the wife, without any open rupture, should step aside; that the devotion, the tenderness of memories, which united her and her husband, should still render possible their meeting now and then as friends, in a common care for their children, although the husband had contracted a new matrimonial relation to another woman.

From the children’s point of view such a solution may come to be looked upon in the future as more desirable—and more worthy of respect—than it seems now.