Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

From the point of view of the religion of Life this impotence is regrettable, just as much as secret adultery. Doubtless both may possess the beauty of a great love-tragedy. Probably no one who has read the Inferno wished Francesca strength to reject the love of Paolo. And so strangely does a soul find the way home to itself, that there are cases where a person in adultery feels himself purified from the defilement of marriage—since he thus for the first time experiences the unity of soul and senses which was his dream of love from the beginning.

But even in these exceptional cases—so much the more, therefore, in others—the secret transgression, which the older morality found comparatively innocuous, is from the point of view of the new morality greater than the open rupture. For the personality is humiliated by the duplicity and the weakness whereby one avoids the responsibility of the consequences of one’s actions. And this, moreover, decreases the life-value of love to the race. New experiments in life, which are made openly, which enhance the strength of the individual through conflict and earnestness, may possess an importance for the personality itself and for society which secret transgressions in most cases lack.

A poet or an artist, for example, has a wife, as to whose insufficiency for him all are agreed—so long as he still has her. Suddenly he finds the space, that was empty and waste, filled by a new creation; the air becomes alive with songs and visions. He not only feels his slumbering powers awake, he knows that great love has called up in him powers he had never suspected; he sees that now he will be able to accomplish what he could never have done before. He follows the life-will of his love, and he does right. Marriages kept inviolable have doubtless produced many great advantages to culture. But it is not to them that art and poetry owe their greatest debt of gratitude. Without “unhappy” or “criminal” love, the world’s creations of beauty would at this moment be not only infinitely fewer, but, above all, infinitely poorer. Nay, after such an exclusion the whole spiritual world might appear as some mediæval church, decorated from floor to roof with frescoes, appeared after the whitewashing of the Reformation.

But in a choice such as we have just mentioned, public opinion is always certain that the sufferings of the wife, unimportant as she is to the community, are the great thing, while those of the man, important to the community, may be disregarded.

He, however, who experiences the new spring which flowers in song, in tones, in colours, raises the life of generation after generation, centuries after the one person or the few who suffered through him have long ceased to suffer.

Who would have gained what the race would have lost through his self-sacrifice? Not the wife, if she had a heart, and not only a pride, which could suffer.

Not only from the point of view of universal, but from that of individual life-enhancement, we ought not to give all our sympathy to the one who is called “heart-broken.” Why is the heart that is broken considered so much more valuable than the one or the two which must cause the pain lest they themselves perish? And why will people not see that he who is looked upon as “broken-hearted” sometimes finds a new and richer happiness? But, above all, why is it constantly forgotten that one who suffers through sorrow often becomes greater than he could ever have been in the secure possession of his “property”?

There are other ways of living on a great emotion than that of being in the usual sense made happy by it.

This must, however, be remembered above all by him who, already tied, is seized by a new feeling. If all three parties are high-minded enough, it has sometimes happened that the feeling has been transformed into an amitié amoureuse, which has made all of them richer and none of them unhappy—even if it has made none of them completely happy.

But even under other circumstances people ought to remember, that one does not always own what one has—and sometimes possesses most surely what one has never owned.