"Free love" is moreover quite as senseless an expression as "legal love." Because no external command can call love into being or repress it; it is in this sense always free, yet as are all feelings, it is bound by certain psychological laws. If not, then it does not deserve the name of love. It is with love as with the human face: though the individual varieties are infinite, yet there are certain general characteristic features which make all these different faces human faces, all these different feelings human love. And in every time there is a type for both, which is recognized as nobler than the others.
This noblest type of love has been portrayed by a Danish writer,[A] who endeavored to show that a conception of life founded upon evolution need not lead to laxity in sexual relations. He shows how the erotic feeling, as all other feelings, has been developed from an incoherent, indeterminate and indefinite condition to one more coherent, determinate and differentiated, and so from a simple instinct for reproduction of the species has been finally transformed to an entirely personal, inner love. The highest type of this love is that which exists between a man and a woman of the same moral and intellectual level; which demands of necessity reciprocal love in order to be perfected, and can therefore be contented with no other kind of reciprocal love than a corresponding erotic love. This perfect love includes the yearning desire of both lovers to become entirely one being, to free each other and to develop each other to the greatest perfection. If love is perfected and consummated thus by the life together, then can it be given to only one and only once in a lifetime. This thought of the Danish writer is expressed with the concise brevity of the poet, by Bjornson, when he says of the sensation "feeling oneself doubled" in the beloved one: "That is love, all else is not love." This feeling which liberates, conserves and deepens the personality, which is the inspiration to noble deeds and works of genius, is the opposite of the ephemeral, merely sensual love, which enslaves, dissipates and lessens the personality.
[A] See Viggo Drewsen: "En Livsanskuelse grundet paa Elskow" ("A Conception of Life Founded upon Love") and "Forholdet mellem Maud og Kvinde belyst gjennem Udviklingshypothesen." ("The Relation between Man and Woman in the Light of the Hypothesis of Evolution.")
It is only the great love which has a higher right than all other feelings and which can establish its right in a life.
He who considers this love decisive for the morality of such an erotic union cannot believe that external ties are necessary to give ethical value to this union. Social considerations, prudence and feeling for others can indeed in certain cases make the legal bond desirable. But it can just as little give increased consecration to real love, as it can give any consecration whatever to a relation in which this content is lacking. And even if it would be too dogmatic to establish just the highest type of love as ethical norm for all relations between man and woman, since life proves that the highest love is still as rare as the highest beauty, yet it is on the contrary not premature to assert that this love, legally sanctioned or not, is moral, and that where it is lacking on either side, a moral ground is furnished for the dissolution of the relationship. The ever clearer consciousness that love can dispense with marriage yet marriage cannot dispense with love, is already partially recognized in modern society, by the facility of divorce. And it is only a question of time when the law which gives to one person the power to constrain the other to remain with him against his will, will be abrogated, so contrary is this possibility to that developed conception of the freedom of love—which is not at all the same as so-called "free love!"
It is not historically true that it was, as has been asserted, some certain conception of morality, some certain form of concluding or dissolving marriage which, in the last analysis, has been a decisive factor in the progress or decadence of peoples. Among the Jews as among the Greeks, among the Romans as among our Germanic forefathers, at the most flourishing period, there existed many laws and customs which were considered moral that the present time considers immoral. The decisive thing for the sound life of these peoples was, that that which they considered right had sovereign power to bind them: the faithfulness to the conception of duty more than the content of conception determines the moral soundness of a people. Society is in danger, not when the ideals are raised but when they are lost. But a very highly developed historical sense is necessary to see at the same time the connection and the difference between dissolution and reorganization. Moreover it is necessary to have the large view of the essentials of life which distinguishes the true poet, the view which Sophocles possessed when he let his Antigone follow the higher law of affection and commit a violation of the law which—according to the conception of that time—would lead to general license if it remained unpunished. The new ideal of marriage is now being formed in and through all the many literary and personal dissensions in which it constitutes the theme. Yes, it is formed also in the midst of all the conflicts of life for which marriage gives so much occasion. It is true there are now married people who separate because from the very beginning they considered fidelity impossible and so did not even strive for it. But many other divorces have far more complex, psychological reasons. When two people are married young, personal development takes often entirely opposite directions; if they have married in more mature years, then their individual differences, already strongly marked from the beginning, make the problem of common life together difficult of solution. The strongly developed sensibility of the modern individual to disposition, nuances, variations of humor, makes a lack of sympathy still more unendurable; a true sympathy a far greater source of joy. The whole multiplicity of psycho-physical influences and impressions which the members of a family exercise upon one another for pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and variance, harmony and discord, are now in all relationships, but above all in marriage, felt with greatest intensity. It is in those natures most individually developed, most refined, for whom the nuances of the married life, not its simple primal colors, signify happiness or unhappiness.
To this general delicacy of feeling there is added especially the heightened sensibility of woman to the discord between that which she expected in marriage and that which in reality it offered her, because the union often lacked the freedom, the understanding which her sympathetic feeling now craves. This lack of harmony is inevitable since the forms of marriage have not even approximately undergone the transformation which would correspond to the individual development of the two beings, of the woman especially, whom it unites. But while all these reasons, cursorily indicated here, contribute their part in the increased number of divorces, the life of finer feeling creates, on the other hand, an ever more intimate married life. There are married people who have pledged each other at marriage full freedom to dissolve the union when either of them so wished, and others who have never given legal form to their marriage yet realize fully and richly love in "sorrow and in joy," in sympathetic work together, in reciprocal, true devotion. There have been, on the other hand, champions of so-called "free love" who were themselves by nature such pronounced believers in only one marriage that their life was wrecked when the one to whom they had bound themselves applied to their own case their own theories. It is always the character which ultimately decides. Character can make the radical theorist a moral paragon and the pillar of society resting upon conservative ground a reed of passion; it can make the advocate of egoism sublimely devoted and the apostle of Christianity deeply egoistic in his love.
So many men, so many souls; so many souls, so many destinies. And to wish to apply to this whole, complex, manifold, incalculable erotic life, with its unfathomable depths, an immutable ethical standard, when judging the relationship between man and woman, and to make this standard decisive also for the ethical value of the personality in other respects—is quite as naive as the attempt of a child to draw up in his little bucket the wonderful depth of the vast storm-driven sea.
Love, as life, will fortunately remain an eternal mystery which no science will be able to penetrate and which reason cannot rule. Our only hope for the future is that man, endowed with a more delicate sense, will listen to the secrets of his own life. A more highly developed and differentiated soul life will give him a surer instinct or a keener power of analysis which will prevent him from confounding a passing sentiment of sympathy, need of tenderness or satisfaction of vanity with a love which decides existence. Now, on the contrary, many believe that a wave of admiration, of gratitude, or of pity is the whole sea; that the reflection of the fire of another is the holy fire itself!
No one can with certainty predict the final result of the profound revolution of the feeling and of the customs which is now taking place. But one thing appears certain: the danger to the future of mankind can scarcely be that the new ideal will result in general license. Rather it will lead to so individual, differentiated and refined love that erotic happiness will be increasingly difficult to find and the idealists of love will more frequently prefer celibacy to a compromise with their greater demands for sympathetic love.