The indispensable prerequisites to the reform of love and marriage are, according to Carpenter, the following (op. cit., p. 100):
(1) The furtherance of the freedom and self-dependence of women. (2) The provision of some rational teaching, of heart and of head, for both sexes during the period of youth. (3) The recognition in marriage itself of a freer, more companionable, and less pettily exclusive relationship. (4) The abrogation or modification of the present odious law which binds people together for life, without scruple, and in the most artificial and ill-assorted unions.
Carpenter accepts Letourneau’s view, that, in a more or less distant future, the institution of marriage will undergo transformation into monogamic unions, freely entered on, and when necessary freely dissolved, by simple mutual consent, as is already done in several European countries—in Canton Geneva, in Belgium, in Roumania, as regards divorce; and in Italy as regards separation. State and society should take part in the matter only so far as the safety of the children demands, concerning whom more extensive duties should be expected from the parents. Carpenter also points out, as was shown seventy years ago by Gutzkow, that, as regards the development of the children, it is better, in unhappy marriages, that their parents should separate than that the children should grow up amid the miseries of such marriages.
“Love”—thus Carpenter concludes his dissertation on marriage in the future—“is doubtless the last and most difficult lesson that humanity has to learn; in a sense, it underlies all the others. Perhaps the time has come for the modern nations when, ceasing to be children, they may even try to learn it” (op. cit., p. 113).
A greater vogue even than Carpenter’s book had was obtained by the essays of the Swedish writer Ellen Key, “Love and Marriage,” which in 1894 appeared in a German translation,[203] and had an unusual success in the book-market. It is without exception the most interesting and pregnant work on the sexual question which has ever appeared. Written from the heart, and inspired by the observations of a free and lofty spirit, it avoids none of the numerous difficulties and by-paths in this department of thought; and the reproach of libertinism which has been cast at the author must be emphatically rejected. Ellen Key is the most outspoken realist of all the writers on the subject of free love. She takes her arguments from actual life; she associates her ideas of reform always with the real; she writes as an earnest evolutionist. Thus, in her book, her first aim is to establish “the course of the evolution of sexual morality” and the “evolution of love.”
Ellen Key starts from the fact that no one has ever offered any proof that monogamy is that form of the sexual life which is indispensable to the vital force and civilization of the nations. Even among the Christian nations it has never yet really existed, and its legalization as the only permissible form of sexual morality has hitherto been rather harmful than helpful to general morality.
The writer then develops the idea, no less beautiful than true, that the genuine character of love can be proved only by the lovers actually living together for a considerable time; only thus is it possible to demonstrate that it is moral for them to live together, and that their union will have an elevating influence on themselves and their generation. Consequently, of no conjugal relationship can we beforehand affirm or deny its success. Every new pair, whatever form they may have chosen for their common life, must first of all prove for themselves that they are morally justified in living together.
Ellen Key then proceeds to maintain a view, which I myself also regard as an integral constituent of the programme of the love of the future, and one which I have advanced in earlier writings: that love is not merely, as Schopenhauer thought, an affair of the species, but is, at least in equal degree, the concern of the loving individuals. This is the result and the meaning of civilization, which, as I have proved in earlier chapters, exhibits a progressive individualization and an increasing spiritual enrichment of love (the “spiritualized sensuality” of Ellen Key), and thus gives to love a thoroughly independent importance for each individual.
“In view of the manner in which civilization has now developed personal love, this latter has become so composite, so comprehensive and far-reaching, that not only in and by itself—independently of the species—does it constitute a great life-value, but it also increases or diminishes all other values. In addition to its primitive importance, it has gained a new significance: to carry the flame of life from sex to sex. No one names that person immoral who, deceived in his love, abstains in his married life from procreating the species; that husband and wife also we shall not call immoral, who continue their married life rendered happy by love, although their marriage has proved childless. But in both cases these human beings follow their subjective feelings at the expense of the future generations, and treat their love as an independent aim. The right already recognized in these individual cases, as belonging to the individual at the expense of the species, will continue to undergo enlargement in proportion as the importance of love continues to increase. On the other hand, the new morality will demand from love an ever-increasing voluntary limitation of rights at those times when the growth of a new life renders it necessary. It will also demand a voluntary or enforced renunciation of the right to procreate new life under conditions which would make this new life deficient in value.”
Ellen Key terms this new, modern love “erotic monism,” because it comprehends the entire unitary personality, including the spiritual being, not merely the body. George Sand gave the first definition of this love as being of such a kind that “neither had the soul betrayed the senses, nor had the senses betrayed the soul.”