The relationship affording “protection” has also brought with it the idea that a woman could not show her love as openly as a man, except when he was proud and poor and she was rich. Only when the duty of support on the part of the man ceases, will woman be able to demand the same chastity and fidelity from him as he demands from her; she will then be able, quite as proudly and naturally as he, to show the flowering of her being—her love—instead of as now increasing her demand in the marriage market by artful dissimulation. As long as maintenance, within or outside of marriage, is the price for “possession” of the woman, the man will consider the woman as “his,” and the more submissive she is the more fully she satisfies his feeling of ownership. Now marriage has become only an affair of custom, a common death or comatose condition, because neither party needs trouble himself to keep the love of the other. Only when woman, through her work, can lead an existence worthy of a human being, when no woman will sell her love but every woman can freely give it, will man experience what perfect womanly devotion is. And when no man can “possess” love but must remain worthy of love in order to be loved then only will women, on their side, experience what tenderness and fine feeling masculine devotion can attain.
This, the purest and warmest erotic idealism, is the morality of the future. But the way to its realisation is not, as many women believe to-day, that mothers, even, should continue their work of earning a livelihood, but that way whose direction I have elsewhere pointed out.[[4]]
Here we have to do, however, only with the spiritual conditions which arise in the marriage of to-day, whether the wife has retained her work or has given it up.
Even the cultivated modern man, who brings to the human personality of his wife admiration and sympathy, seeks in her always that “womanliness” to which Goethe has given the classic expression: the finely reserved, quiet, strong, self-contained woman, reposing harmoniously in the fulness of her own nature, a maternally lovely being, wholly “natural,” a “beautiful soul,” observing, creative, but using these gifts only to create a home. These creative offices the modern man who loves desires to assure, when he wishes to “maintain” his wife, and begs her to abandon the outside commercial work in which he foresees a danger to the beautiful life together of which both dream. The woman who along with her new self-conscious individuality and her profound culture has guarded the “old” devotion, understands ordinarily this desire of the man. She chooses, in spite of her idealism, as he wishes, in cases where her work has not been very personal. If she has worked in the same field as the man, then she converts her gifts into comprehension of him, into personal interest for all his interests; and these marriages in which the wife has enjoyed the same education as the man, but later has devoted herself entirely to the home, are, as a rule, the happiest marriages of the present time. But in the proportion in which her work was creative, is the difficulty of the choice. In the case where the productive power has the strength of genius, the modern man will scarcely utter such a wish and in those circumstances the modern woman will not grant it. And because the woman of genius is generally a complete human being, with strong erotic as well as universal human demands, she chooses often compromise. She finds in love, in motherhood, new revelations; and in the mysterious depths of her nature, the productive element of the maternal function has an elevating influence upon her gift of creative power. Thus the energy temporarily diminished by motherhood is restored. And her uneasy conscience, because she must entrust to others much of the care and education of the children, is appeased by the consciousness that she has often given to mankind richer natures, and so more significant children, than more devoted mothers, and that her own nature, because of the double creative activity, has attained a ripeness and richness which make her personality more significant for husband and children than if she had given up her calling to please them. These thoughts cannot, however, prevent the daily conflict between her feelings of love and the impossibility, in times of strong spiritual production, of giving expression to it. The very proximity of the children consumes at such times too much nervous energy. And since all creation requires selfishness—in the sense of concentration upon one’s own needs in order to be able to work creatively and to sink oneself in the work—while all love’s solicitude requires active attention to the needs of the loved ones, the conflict must remain permanent and insoluble.
In this conviction, many women of genius choose the lesser conflict: marriage without children. Such a relationship occurs not infrequently in our time in this way: a man of feeling through the work of a woman is first moved by her being. The man is in that case often the younger or the less developed. At first, marriage brings both a rich happiness. But later comes a time when the power of the personality of the woman of genius becomes too strong for the man; when he feels himself exhausted by all the sensitiveness and impatience which charge the air about a creative personality with electricity. He has now had enough of the rich spiritual exchange and longs for a woman who is only fresh richness, sunny quiet, easy docility; the now vanished “ingénue” would be the type of woman who most of all could entrance him.
In another case, it is the wife who becomes wearied, when the man can no longer keep pace with her development nor afford her new inspiration. The erotic life of the woman as well as of the man of genius exhibits two phases: in one they are attracted by their opposite, in the other by a congeniality of souls; in one phase they have sought sentiment, intimacy, nature; in the other, soul, passion, culture. The order changes in different cases, but the phenomenon repeats itself. What both consciously or unconsciously desire of love is not another individuality to love but only a means of inspiration.
Yet one thing may be emphasised: the richer the nature of a woman is and the greater her talents, the more life-determining love will be for her; at one time making her existence desolate, at another time making it fruitful. For the woman of genius is less able than the man to renounce her own fate. This the man is capable of doing, in the midst of passion, without his work suffering thereby in vigour and strength; the woman on the contrary—even the genius—loses more easily her creative impulse in happiness, her creative power in unhappiness.
In this connection it may be recalled that many of the most gifted, most highly developed woman personalities of to-day have produced nothing, but have been what a Frenchman has called “les grandes inspiratrices.” These have not, indeed, like the “Ladies” of the Middle Ages, been worshipped at a distance by knights and poets; but they have had an influence similar to that of Beatrice, through the power of communication of their rich personality in a relationship which had now the character of an “amitié amoureuse,” now that of a love imbued with sympathy, which in some cases, infrequently however, led to marriage. I need only mention the name Richard Wagner for the forms of two such women to appear, one of whom, who was his wife, surpassed in personal greatness all independently creative women of her time. But there have always been less unusual women who had significance as propagandists of the ideas of a great man through their specifically feminine gifts of convincing, of diffusing ideas, of modifying views, etc. If the future, because of the wife’s zeal for production on her own part, should lose this element of culture, it would be deplorable.
One of the favourite arguments of the woman movement has been that two married people working in the same profession had the best opportunities for understanding each other and consequently also for being happy. And truly they can best talk shop with each other. But that is what the working man needs least of all in his home; there he seeks rather relaxation from his calling, or at least a quite disinterested, immediate sympathy with its annoyances or joys. When one of the married fellow-workmen needs exactly this sympathy, the other is perhaps busy or too tired to be capable of such lively interest as the other expects. Or one has experienced disappointments, the other joys, and then a real sympathy is still more difficult. To these crossings of mood is added also the unintentional, involuntary competition, which the similarity of vocation brings with it. The wife gains patients, the husband does not; his picture is praised, hers is pulled to pieces; she comes home from the theatre victorious, he after a defeat. During work, the criticism of one often disturbs the other; after the work, the criticism of the press disturbs the harmony of both. Love wishes to fuse them into one being, the outer world compels them always to feel themselves separate. In the beginning they think: “Nothing can come between us.” But if both do not possess a rare tenderness as well as rare fineness of soul, soon needles of ice fly through the air between them. Only when the wife, as is the case so often in France, puts her ability into her husband’s affairs does this common interest prevent rivalry.