SCHLEIERMACHER
Sound and sensible reflections, one and all, but neither exhaustive nor applicable to what are the real difficulties of the case. Schleiermacher warns against mistakes, but cannot remedy them, without infringing upon the sanctity of marriage, which he never calls in question. For what is to be done when the mistake has already been made? And what when it has been on one side only, when only the love of the one has grown cold, while that of the other still endures? And he does not give a word or a thought to the fact that marriage, as a social institution, does not exist for the sake of the lovers, that its original intention was to secure the father's property for the children, and that it has continued to exist because it seemed to society the only means of protecting the rising generation. Schleiermacher, the idealist, would fain discover a new moral foundation, and entirely overlooks the real, the practical difficulties. How characteristic of the nation to which the author belongs is all this pondering over feeling! An Italian once said to me: "What astonishes us most in the emotional life of the Teutonic nations is their conception and cult of love. With them love is positively a religion, something in which a good man is bound to believe. And this religion has its theology, and its philosophy, and what not. We simply love, and no more about it." I thought of this speech when reading Schleiermacher. How much ingenuity he exhibits in proving that men should not allow themselves to be disturbed by false theories when they love, and what a steadfast belief in the love which is to "complete and perfect the character," lies at the foundation of it all! It is instructive to compare with Schleiermacher's some utterances by great authors of other nations on the same subject; they throw what is peculiarly national in his into more marked relief.
George Sand, whose first novels are the expression of the same movement in France which Lucinde inaugurates in Germany, says, by the mouth of the principal characters in Jacques and Lucrezia Floriani: "Paul and Virginia were able to love each other steadily and undisturbedly; for they were children brought up by the same mother. Our surroundings have been too utterly unlike.... If two beings are to understand each other always, and to be united by an unchangeable love, their characters as children must have been formed by a similar education, they must have the same beliefs, the same turn of mind, even the same manners and habits. But we, the distressed offspring of a turbulent and corrupt society, which behaves to her disunited children like a stepmother, and is more cruel in her periods of savagery than actual savages are, how can we wonder, after such great outward divisions, at the perpetual divisions of hearts and the impossibility of inward harmony."
Obviously George Sand is considerably less persuaded than Schleiermacher of the probability or possibility of the individual's meeting with that "right one," love for whom perfects. Jacques says: "I am still persuaded that marriage is one of the most barbarous institutions of society. I doubt not that it will be abolished when the human race makes further progress towards justice and reason; a more human and not less sacred tie will take its place and will ensure the well-being of the children without fettering the freedom of the parents. But as yet men are too barbarous and women too cowardly to demand a nobler law than the iron one by which they are now ruled. Beings destitute of conscience and virtue need heavy chains. The improvements of which some generous spirits dream, cannot be realised in such an age as ours; these spirits forget that they are a hundred years in advance of their contemporaries, and that before they change the law, they must change mankind." Jacques says to his bride on their wedding day: "Society is about to dictate an oath to you. You are about to swear to be faithful and obedient to me, that is to say, never to love any one but me, and to obey me in all things. One of these vows is an absurdity, the other a disgrace."
The idea expressed by George Sand in all these books is, that to preserve the outward semblance of love, by caresses, &c., after it has ceased to exist, is what constitutes real immorality in love. Jacques says: "I have never forced my imagination to rekindle or reanimate a feeling in my soul which I no longer found there. I have never looked upon love as a duty, constancy as a rôle. When I have felt that love was extinguished in my soul I have said so, without being either ashamed or conscience-stricken." And Lucrezia Floriani says, still more emphatically: "Not one of all the passions to which I have yielded naively and blindly, seemed to me so guilty as the one which I was endeavouring, contrary to my feeling, to make lasting."
The French authoress looks upon unchangeable love for one and the same person as a possibility only, dependent upon certain conditions; and her idea of love is not, like Schleiermacher's, that it is the highest educational force, but that, as an irresistible natural force, a possessing passion, it is beautiful, the most beautiful thing in life. Institutions must adapt themselves to it, since it cannot change its nature to suit institutions. A disciple of Rousseau, she champions the cause of nature.
Let us now glance at one of the works of a contemporary English writer of the same tendencies, at Shelley's Queen Mab. In the notes he has appended to this poem we come upon a third variation of the opposition to prevailing opinions. Shelley says: "Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness. Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve.... A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of the right of private judgment should that law be considered which should make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in spite of the caprices, the inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity for improvement of the human mind. And by so much would the fetters of love be heavier and more unendurable than those of friendship, as love is more vehement and capricious, more dependent on those delicate peculiarities of imagination, and less capable of reduction to the ostensible merits of the object.... Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed.... The present system of constraint does no more, in the majority of instances, than make hypocrites or open enemies. Persons of delicacy and virtue, unhappily united to one whom they find it impossible to love, spend the loveliest season of their life in unproductive efforts to appear otherwise than they are, for the sake of the feelings of their partner or the welfare of their mutual offspring: those of less generosity and refinement openly avow their disappointment, and linger out the remnant of that union, which only death can dissolve, in a state of incurable bickering and hostility. The early education of their children takes its colour from the squabbles of the parents; they are nursed in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence, and falsehood.... The conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all temptations to the perverse: they indulge without restraint in acrimony, and all the little tyrannies of domestic life, when they know that their victim is without appeal.... Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its accompanying errors. Women, for no other crime than having followed the dictates of a natural appetite, are driven with fury from the comforts and sympathies of society. It is less venial than murder.... Has a woman obeyed the instincts of unerring nature (sic!), society declares war against her, pitiless and eternal war: she must be the tame slave, she must make no reprisals; theirs is the right of persecution, hers the duty of endurance. She lives a life of infamy: the loud and bitter laugh of scorn scares her from all return. She dies of long and lingering disease: yet she is in fault, she is the criminal, and society the pure and virtuous matron, who casts her as an abortion from her undefiled bosom!... Young men, excluded by the fanatical idea of chastity from the society of modest and accomplished women, associate with these vicious and miserable beings.... Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery, that some few may monopolise according to law. A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage. I conceive that from the abolition of marriage the fit and natural arrangement of sexual intercourse would result. I by no means assert that the intercourse would be promiscuous: on the contrary, it appears, from the relation of parent to child, that this union is generally of long duration, and marked above all others with generosity and self-devotion.... In fact, religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude: the genius of human happiness must tear every leaf from the accursed book of God ere man can read the inscription on his heart. How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image, should she look in the mirror of nature!"
Here again we have appeals to nature; but the standpoint is an entirely different one. Shelley, the enthusiastic atheist, attributes the principal miseries of social humanity to traditional religion. "Unerring" nature is the divinity he substitutes for the God of the Bible. He considers that man has the right to demand happiness, and, like a true Englishman, contends, without troubling much about the psychology of the matter, for the freedom of the individual from the compulsion of external law. Schleiermacher warns against what is foolish, because, once the foolish step is taken, it is binding; but he, the Protestant pastor, only indirectly incites to revolt. George Sand rebels against what is dishonourable. In the ethical creed of the French authoress honour plays the same part that wisdom does in Schleiermacher's; it is by the mouth of Jacques, her ideal of manly honour, that she protests in the name of the honour of humanity. Shelley stands forth as the champion of personal liberty; it is thraldom that he desires to abolish. The English apostle of liberty, soon to be an exile, unhesitatingly attacks the institutions of society. George Sand never directly attacked marriage. She actually says in the introduction to Mauprat: "It is husbands I have attacked, and if I am asked what I propose to substitute for them, I answer —marriage." But Shelley, who takes cognisance of all evils from the social and political standpoint, proposes to improve humanity by legislation, being persuaded that the state is bound to secure as much liberty of action as possible to the individual as citizen.
It is obvious that, of these three representatives of the same idea, Schleiermacher is the most profound thinker and the most reserved. In his estimation character is of the first importance, in George Sand's, the heart, and in Shelley's, happiness. These three great writers are the spokesmen of three great nations, and by comparing them we are better able to understand the character of the whole movement which begins at the beginning of the century, but which can neither settle into shape nor produce good and tranquillising results until the intellectual and social emancipation of woman has advanced so far that she is independent of social prejudices, knows her own needs, and is in a position to supply them.