If, on the contrary, the result of this prolonged youth of the parents is that a father or mother changes the course of his or her life, then the children must suffer—until they can understand that perhaps in a deeper sense they do not suffer thereby. Sometimes the new partner has exercised a richer influence on the children than their own father or mother—as may also be the case with a step-father or step-mother. At present, however, this possibility is often destroyed by the common opinion just alluded to, which also decides that the children ought to hate, where, if left to themselves, they would perhaps have learned to love.
The selfish demand of grown-up children that the life of their parents shall in and with them have reached its climax and be personally concluded, is as cruel as it is unjustified, since there are souls which do not lose their blossom when the fruit appears, but are able at the same time to bear both fruit and new blossom. Children receive with life a right to the conditions which may make them fully fit for life; no less than this, but at the same time no more. What their parents may be willing to sacrifice of their own lives beyond this must be reckoned to their generosity, not their duty.
If great love may thus be admitted to possess a right superior to that of the children, the question obviously arises, how is this love to be distinguished from the accidental?
A mistake is already a hard thing in a marriage where there are children, for the obstacles that have to be surmounted in such a case are so serious that only great love can overcome them—that is, if the parents are such that they really mean anything at all to their children.
It is precisely by its genesis, in despite of all obstacles, that the predestined love often reveals its nature and thus becomes what is called “criminal.” Even if those who are possessed by this emotion allow duty to interpose oceans between them, they will, nevertheless, come together in every great moment of their lives until the last, convinced that
“his kiss was on her lips before she was born.”
When people have acquired more knowledge of the laws of psychology, they will discover, as Edward Carpenter has said, that there is also an astronomy in the world of emotion; that inter-dependence arises there also, in obedience to eternal laws; sympathies and antipathies which keep all the “heavenly bodies” at the right distance or proximity; that thus the path of love follows an equally irresistible necessity as the orbit of a star and is equally impossible to determine by any influences outside its own laws. And without doubt there will some day be discovered a telescope for this field also, which will at last reveal to the short-sighted the fixed stars, planets, nebulæ, and comets of erotic space, and will prove that its constellations are ordered by a higher law than that of “crude instinct.” But until we attain this astronomical certainty we must be content with the degree of knowledge that art criticism can give.
Great love, like a great artist, has its style. Whatever subject the latter may handle, whatever medium he may use, he gives to the canvas or the marble, the paper or the metal, the impress of his hand, and this reveals itself in the smallest thing he has created. So in every age and every country, every class and every time of life, great love is one and the same; its signs are unmistakable, though the fortune it leads to and the individuals on whom it sets its mark may in one case be more important than in another.
But this mighty emotion—which arouses one’s whole being through another’s and gives one’s whole being rest in another’s—this emotion seizes a man without asking whether he is bound or free. He who feels strongly and wholly enough need never wonder what it is he feels: it is the feeble emotion that is doubtful to itself. Nor does he who feels strongly enough ever ask himself whether he has a right to his feeling. He is so exalted by his love, that he knows he is thus exalting the life of mankind. It is the minor, partial passions that a person already bound feels with good reason to be “criminal.” For him, on the other hand, who would call his great emotion a sinful infatuation, a shameless egoism, a bestial instinct, one who loves thus has nothing but a smile of pity. He knows that he would commit a sin in killing his love, just as he would in murdering his child. He knows that his love has once more made him good as in his childhood’s prayers to God, and rich as one for whom the gates of paradise are opened anew.
Art is interpreting a universal experience when it always depicts Adam and Eve as young when they are driven out of Eden. One wonders that no artist has shown them—at a maturer age—outside the walls of paradise, tormented by the sense of now possessing wisdom enough to preserve the happiness for which in youth they only possessed the means.