Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

In the ideas of the Church, the incapacity for marriage of one party freed the other from the duty of fidelity. In the more spiritual view of the future it will be equally evident that the same right exists to dissolve a marriage which has remained unconsummated in a spiritual sense; and there may be just as many possibilities of incapacity to fulfil the spiritual claims of marriage as there are men and women; therefore also just as many causes of divorce.

In the preceding pages only certain typical cases of unhappiness have been referred to. The many tragic exceptions are here left altogether on one side. So also are those causes of divorce which the preachers of monogamy call the “real misfortunes”: drunkenness, bodily cruelty, and the like; for with the customary realism of “idealism,” they admit these as valid reasons for divorce. It is significant that among the lower classes people still often think themselves bound to bear these misfortunes as a part of the miscalculations of marriage as unavoidable as those more complex sufferings which the champions of monogamy exhort people on a higher plane to endure. The pangs a soul suffers may, they think, be borne with God’s help, whereas unfortunately God is not in the habit of interfering when a man beats his wife; and the longer a soul has suffered, the more certain are they that it can continue to suffer.

Nor do they perceive that a relationship may have seemed good—perhaps even have been good,—until, after a lapse of years, a moment has arrived which has stripped the soul of one of them naked, sometimes in all its loftiness, more often in all its baseness. If the latter, then what was possible before becomes from that hour unthinkable.

That the soul may be confronted by such an alternative, of life or death, they will not admit. The soul, they say, is “a spirit,” an “invisible and imperishable entity.” That its conditions of life are just as variable and complex as those of the organism is, to a certain sort of “idealism,” meaningless. With God’s help, they say, everyone may save his soul. But such help is in this kind of peril as uncertain as it is in peril of the sea—and even in the latter case it is not “the votive tablets of the drowned, but only those of the saved, that one sees in the temple” (Nietzsche).

It is, however, especially when a man or woman is divorced in order to contract a fresh marriage that an outcry is raised over the weakness of the age in bearing suffering. Indeed, it is not even acknowledged that marriage may involve any suffering. Even those who have hitherto found a married couple extremely ill-suited, forget at once that they did so—should either of them “allow a third person to come between them.”

They forget not only their own former judgment but also the fact taught by experience, that when two married people are wholly one, there is no room for a third between the bark and the tree. In the contrary case, a third comes between them sooner or later. Sometimes it is the child, sometimes a life’s work, sometimes a new feeling—but something always comes, thanks to nature’s “abhorrence of a vacuum,” which is never more fatal than in marriage. Within the dimensions of the soul, as within those of space, no one can take the place of another, but can occupy only that space which another has left empty or not been able to retain.

In the latter case it is fair to admit the indirect share of literature in the inconsiderateness of those without an erotic conscience. The idea of justice in love has had to be extended. But during this removal of the boundaries, which literature is carrying out, a general insecurity has set in.

Poetry performs with the fullest freedom its duty of investigating the secrets of love, according to which souls and senses are attracted and repelled in answer to that law of elective affinity which our time is seeking more and more eagerly to discover, in order to be able to direct the erotic forces to a higher development. Literature is the foremost of these discoverers; and this in itself is enough to justify that complete freedom, without which, moreover, it cannot become what Georg Brandes has called love-poetry: the finest instrument for gauging the strength and warmth of the emotional life of a period.

That literature is often the power which gives rise to erotic agitation, is self-evident. And thus it always co-operates in some measure in the misfortunes which are caused by loves of the imagination or the intellect, misfortunes which are avoided by the firm and mature personality. The weak, on the other hand, are those who in their loves as in their beliefs adopt the course that another’s influence gives them.

Like lawn-tennis—which in certain circles makes or mars marriages—love is favoured by summer air and idleness. But at all seasons there are men and women for whom everyone is a ball that sets their fancy or their vanity in motion. No form of self-assertion is more justified than that of opposing one’s vigilance, one’s will, and one’s dignity to this use of one’s personality. What stimulates the game is not the power of the senses alone. No, this game is the sole inventive faculty of spiritual poverty, the mark of erotic ill-breeding. Only a refined person can rejoice at the stimulants to life in every field, the means of which he does not himself possess. As yet few people have attained a culture like that of the Athenian beggar, who thanked Alcibiades for giving him the jewels that Alcibiades indeed wore—but that the beggar was free to rejoice at. To attain in regard to human beings this sense of joy, free from all covetousness, is the flower of fine breeding.