Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

The marriage doctrine of neo-Protestantism, like that of Tolstoy, rests finally on the ascetic distrust of the sexual life. Neither doctrine supposes that the sensual side can be ennobled otherwise than by being placed exclusively at the service of the race. It is this point of view which is finally decisive in all Christian conceptions of morality. Christianity is sustained by the knowledge that the object of man’s life on earth is his development as an eternal being. Therefore none of his expressions of life can be an end in itself, but must serve a higher purpose than the earthly life and happiness of the individual—or even than that of the race.

When the foundation of sexual morality was laid in an existence beyond this world, it lost its connection with the continuation of the race and thus was brought into contradiction with itself. This is the reason why Christianity, while it has indirectly done much for the spiritualisation of love, has yet never succeeded in combining the needs of the individual with those of the race, the cravings of the soul with those of the senses. That moral standard will alone be all-embracing which is determined by the belief that the meaning of life is its development through individuals towards higher and higher forms of life for the whole race. This standard will not regard any asceticism as moral which contemplates the freeing of the soul from the bonds of sensuality, as is the great aspiration of Eastern asceticism. It only recognises the claim of such self-discipline as brings about an ever-increasing unity between the soul and the will of the body. Such a self-discipline, indeed, renounces the nearer and lesser good for the more distant and greater. But it finds this good, in the domain of love as in everything else, in an increasingly soulful sensuousness, or in an increasingly sensuous soulfulness, not in the spirituality of asceticism, more and more freed from the senses. To the chapel of this spirituality a mountain path leads, which—however arduous every step may be—yet goes straight to the goal. The soulful-sensual existence again is a cell to which a labyrinth leads. Here each step is less difficult, but the whole journey involves infinitely greater dangers and excitement. It may be for this reason that as yet it only attracts the strongest—those who never renounce pleasure, since they find pleasure even in renunciation. For him who seeks the latter goal a single standard of morality will appear inapplicable—simply because human nature is manifold. Sexual abstinence in youth, for instance, may strengthen nine out of ten young men. The tenth it may change into a man of bestial impulses, who, although before marriage he has been chaste, may show, when married, a coarseness or depravity which drags down the wife to his level or opens an abyss between them. Purely sensual unions may in nine cases out of ten deteriorate both the man and the woman. In the tenth case such a connection may deepen into a feeling that determines the course of two lives, and the resulting marriage offers better prospects of happiness than that of many a young couple who have entered upon married life according to the rule which is regarded as the only one to give security of happiness. Thus it is possible in one case out of ten that the love for which a young man has kept himself pure until marriage really is personal love. In the other nine cases it is not so, but on the contrary the most impersonal of all love. Thus in nine cases out of ten, it is possible that such disappointments can be borne through a sense of duty, so that personality grows beneath them. In the tenth, again, persistence in the mistake will be the ruin of personality.

Those who make—and rightly—complete purity before marriage and personal love in the married state the standard of morality, ought, on account of innumerable similar experiences, to make up their minds to let every one decide for himself how this purity can best be attained, before as well as after marriage, and what personal love shall be held to imply. Either it must mean nothing for or against the sanctity of marriage; or, if it is to mean sanctity at the outset of married life, then it must also mean the same during its continuance. But only the individual himself knows how long his marriage remains sanctified by personal love or when it ceased to be so. No one can be burdened with the duty of remaining in an unhallowed relation, and neo-Protestantism must therefore either declare personal love to be the moral ground of marriage or unconditional fidelity to be the expression of moral personality.

The monist in these questions does not ask whether a sexual relationship is the first and only one, before he acknowledges its morality. He only wishes to know whether it was such that it did not exclude the personalities of the lovers; whether it was a union in which “neither the soul betrayed the senses nor the senses the soul.”

In these words George Sand gave the idea of the new chastity.

The claims of the new sexual morality show curious similarities and dissimilarities to those to which the age of chivalry gave rise in the same sphere. Thus the Courts of Love held the principle that marriage and love are mutually exclusive. On the other hand, the conception of personality has given rise to a desire for unity which makes it repulsive to many people to live in matrimony unless there is a longing of the soul and of the senses for one’s partner in marriage. The age of chivalry in its idea of love ignored the new generation whereas the hope of the present day is through love to perfect the race just as much as the lovers themselves.

Nor does the new morality deny to the many, who have not even been capable of dreaming of personal love, the right to contract a marriage, which will at least contribute to their poor existence the interest of home and the joy of parentage. But it will be severe with those who, having had experience or intuition of love, have entered without it into a marriage which will certainly impoverish and perhaps ruin more lives than their own. Prudence may counsel leniency of judgment in the individual case, since the majority of human beings learn to know their hearts late in life, if at all. Once more, as a guiding principle of morality, the unity of marriage and love must be maintained. By his power of creating ideals, and the ever-increasing demand for happiness which results, man has deepened his instinct of spiritual needs, and the same power of idealisation is now ruthlessly withdrawing the outward supports of sexual morality and replacing them by the idea of unity. That the halt and the lame are thereby deprived of their crutches will be no stumbling-block to him who looks beyond the halt and the lame to the finer and healthier men of the future.

It is true that the idea of unity involves the right of every person to shape his sexual life in accordance with his individual needs, but only on condition that he does not prejudice unity or the rights of the beings to whom his love gives life. Love thus becomes more and more a private affair of the individual, while children are more and more the business of society, and from this it follows that the two lowest expressions of sexual division (dualism) sanctioned by society, namely, coercive marriage and prostitution, will by degrees become impossible, since after the triumph of the idea of unity they will no longer answer to the needs of humanity.

By coercive marriage is meant that under which not only are the morality of cohabitation and the rights of the children dependent on the form of cohabitation, but the possibility of divorce for one of the parties is also dependent on the other’s will. By prostitution is meant all trading with one’s sex, whether this traffic is carried on by women or by men, who from necessity or inclination sell themselves with or without marriage. Both these things occur under grosser and under milder forms. There is a scale of degrees for loveless marriage, as there is for loveless—“love.” The distance is great between, for instance, “La Dame aux Camélias” or Raskolnikoff’s “Sonja” on the one hand, and a prowler of the gutter on the other. So it is between a woman who contracts a marriage from the longing for motherhood and one who does it from love of luxury; between a man who seeks a partner in his work and one who only wants a wife to console his creditors. But whether one, with part of one’s person, buys one’s self free from hunger or from debts, loneliness or desire; however great in itself the value one gains may be, still the transaction remains, for buyer as well as for seller, a humiliation from the point of view of the sexual morality which sees things as a whole.

The development of the consciousness of erotic personality is at present hindered in an equal degree by the “morality” settled by society, and by the “immorality” regulated by society. Whether it is a question of maintaining the former or of excusing the latter, we are told that idealism must make way for “the needs of real life.” The same men who with reason are afraid of the dissolution of society if the right of the hungry to steal were preached in the name of “the needs of real life,” consider themselves wise when, in a far more important sphere than that of property, they proclaim the necessity of stealing, in the form of prostitution.