Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

For there not unfrequently arrives a time in human life when enlightenment enters before coldness has set in; when the blossoms are still rich although the fruits have already begun to mature. It is then that great happiness is often seen for an instant and then disappears. Sometimes she is never seen, for she comes softly and—like a playmate—lays a hand over one’s eyes, asking: Who am I? One guesses wrongly and happiness is gone before one can bid her stay. To her favourites only does she come with her hands full and open. To the majority the words of the dying Hebbel are true: We human beings lack either the cup or the wine.

Love’s deepest tragedy is that a number of people have first to learn through their mistakes before their souls and senses are ready for the great love which of two beings makes one more perfect.

In poetry as in life it is sometimes the first love, sometimes the last, that is extolled as the strongest. Neither need be, and either may be, this. The strongest love is that which—at whatever age it comes—most takes up all the forces of personality.

It also sometimes happens that not until a person ought to have done with love, is he really ready for it. The fewer are then the chances of finding the love he wishes to give and receive. And fewer still the chances that he can give himself up to them, with the concurrence of his whole being.

For it is one thing to have the right to one’s great emotion; another to have the right or the possibility of one’s full happiness.

Love may be never so free in its social aspect; no freedom of morals or of divorce can release the sons of men from the inevitable sufferings of their own nature, nor from the inevitable conflicts of their connection with the past. These sufferings and conflicts have been made so deep by life itself that there is indeed no necessity for the law to make them deeper.

The most usual form of the conflict is that a person is bound by or broken by casual love—whether wedded or free—when the predestined intervenes in his existence.

That so many more unhappy marriages continue than are dissolved may be due less to a sense of duty than to the fact that only a few are capable of great emotions. Peer Gynt’s symbol—the bulb—illustrates the erotic nature of the majority. It flowers as readily in sand as in water, in the open as in a pot. But should an acorn be planted in a pot, it is inevitable—on account of the vital conditions of the oak—that it should one day burst its prison or die.

And in such a case, it is unfortunate when a Christian ethical view stands in the way of serious and genuine chances of so renewing life that it may be more valuable to the community as well as to the individual himself. People who are equipped with rich possibilities still allow themselves to be decided by unconditional consideration for others’ feelings, which, taken from Christianity, have been grafted even on evolutionism, and which, especially through George Eliot, have obtained their great but one-sided expression.

That the race not only needs people willing to lose their lives in order to gain them, but also people with courage to sacrifice others in order to win their own—this is a truth which nevertheless must be indissolubly bound up with an evolutionist view of life, to which the will to preserve and enhance one’s own existence is a duty as undeniable as that of preserving and enhancing the lives of others by self-sacrifice. To have the courage of one’s happiness, to be able to bear the pain inseparable from a rupture without pangs of conscience, is only in the power of those who act from their innermost necessity. That pairs of lovers outside the law now so often commit suicide together is no proof of the overmastering power of love; it rather proves the powerlessness of their emotion to dare and win the right of direct and immediate living and thus increasing the riches of life. For it is only to a love that is throughout a will to live that circumstances become as wax in the artist’s hand.