Here, also, we find the expression of the firm conviction that in the freedom of love is to be found an assured guarantee for its durability!
Later, also, the English Pre-Raphaelites, especially John Ruskin, advocated free love, and maintained that the sacredness of these natural bonds lay in their very essence. It is love which first makes marriage legal, not marriage which legalizes love (cf. Charlotte Broicher, “John Ruskin and his Work,” vol. i., pp. 104-106; Leipzig, 1902).
In Germany, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, a lively discussion of the problems of love and marriage ensued upon the publication of Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” and Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften”—“Elective Affinities” (1809).
Goethe, in his very rich amatory life, especially in his relationship to Charlotte von Stein and to Christiane Vulpius, with the latter of whom he lived for eighteen years in a free “marriage of conscience,”[192] and whose son, August, the offspring of this union, he adopted long before the marriage was legitimized, realized the ideal of free love more than once. Although in his book “Wahlverwandtschaften” (“Elective Affinities”) he at length gave the victory to the moral conception of monogamic marriage, and propounded it as an illuminating ideal for civilization (which “ideal standpoint” we ourselves, as we have shown in the previous chapters, fully share), yet in this novel he has represented conjugal struggles, from which it appears how profoundly he was impressed by the importance of a transformation of amatory life in the direction of freedom. It is especially by the mouth of the Count in this work that he gives utterance to such ideas. The latter records the advice of one of his friends that every marriage should be contracted for the term of five years only.
“This number,” he said, “is a beautiful, sacred, odd number, and such a period of time would be sufficient for the married pair to learn to know one another, for them to bring a few children into the world, to separate, and, what would be most beautiful of all, to come together again.”
Often he would exclaim:
“How happily would the first portion of the time pass! Two or three years at least would pass very happily. Then very likely one member of the pair would wish that the union should be prolonged; and this desire would increase the more nearly the terminus of the marriage approached. An indifferent, even an unsatisfied, member of such a union would be pleased by such a demeanour on the part of the other. One is apt to forget how in good society the passing of time is unnoticed; one finds with agreeable surprise, when the allotted time has passed away, that it has been tacitly prolonged. It is precisely this voluntary, tacit prolongation of sexual relationship, freely undertaken by both parties without any extraneous compulsion, to which Goethe ascribes a profound moral significance.”
I should like to draw the attention of students of Goethe to the fact that this recommendation of a temporary marriage for the term of five years, with tacit prolongation of the term, is a very ancient Japanese custom, or, at any rate, was so thirty years ago.
Wernich, who for several years was Professor of Medicine at the Imperial University of Japan, remarks:
“Marriages were concluded for a term only: in the case of persons of standing for five years; among the lower classes for a shorter term. It was very rare, however, only in cases in which the marriage was manifestly unhappy, for a separation to take place when the term expired. If there were healthy living children such a separation hardly ever occurred—most of these temporary marriages were, in fact, extremely happy, and the same is true of Jewish marriages, in which divorce is easily effected by a very simple ceremonial, closely resembling that of the Japanese.”[193]