When the thought has once become inherent in mankind that no one can be happy without the feeling that he is making others happy; that only the highest development of one’s own feeling is imperishable happiness; that all other happiness is charity, not justice—then there will be fewer torn asunder, even if there be no more happy ones.
But love is still such, men, women, and the people around them are still such, that one would rather wish a tied man or woman strength to endure marriage than to break it, at least if they have children who must share with them the unknown fortunes of their love. Before these, if ever, one feels the meaning of the Breton fisher’s song:
... la mer est grande et ma barque est petite ...
How often has not the little boat, fraught with life’s last riches, been lost on the wide sea?
But therefore it is that no one there seeks his pleasure, but only his life.
That our actions in the erotic sphere—as in every other—must call forth the criticism of others is just as unavoidable as that our figure should be reflected in a mirror as we pass. But public opinion is a convex mirror, a globe swollen by prejudice, which distorts the image. Only a clear and calm soul gives a true picture of another’s actions.
And to such a soul, it will not unfrequently be apparent that the “transgression” was right for one nature and not for the other. The latter will have felt that its innermost being would have been outraged if fidelity to the past had not been preserved to the uttermost—and will have chosen to allow its erotic powers to wither and to live only by the will of duty. Of this kind of self-immolation the same is true as of its bodily counterpart: sometimes they are great souls, sometimes great cowards. Nay, the same sacrifice may be sublime at one period of our lives and shameful at another.
Life never shows us “marriage,” but countless different marriages; never “love,” but countless lovers. He who sets up an ideal in these matters must, therefore, be content with possibly working for the future, but should not use his ideal as a criterion for the present. Nay, he ought not even to desire in the future the sole authority of his own ideal—since a descent from the diverse to the uniform would be a retrogressive development.
The effort of society to press into a single ideal form life’s infinite multitude of different cases under the same circumstances or of the same cases under different circumstances, the same influences on different personalities or the same personalities under different influences—this has been in the field of sexual morality as violent a proceeding as would be the establishment for all figures of Polycletus’s canon of beauty. The madness of the latter proceeding would be obvious. But violence to souls is not so obvious. Therefore it is always established by law.
Not until the diversity of souls becomes in our ideas a truth as real as the diversity of our bodies shall we perceive that of all dogmas monogamy has been that which has claimed most human sacrifices. It will one day be admitted that the auto-da-fés of marriage have been just as valueless to true morality as those of religion were to the true faith.