Very interesting is Ellen Key’s description of the numerous disillusions of love, which become still more perceptible in a coercive marriage. There is a whole series of “typical unhappy fates” in marriage, often with no blame properly attaching to either party, dependent merely upon incompatibility of temperament, but also upon faults of one or both parties to the marriage.
Frequently a man or a woman of a thoroughly sympathetic temperament lives with a woman or a man of such faultless excellence that the home seems filled with icicles. One day the husband or the wife runs away because the air has become so thin as to be irrespirable. The general sentiment is one of commiseration for the—superlatively excellent man or woman!
In the case of earnest, mature human beings, free divorce will not increase the number of dissolutions of marriage. On the contrary, the obligations imposed by a free relationship are greater than those of legal coercive marriage. The fear also that with the granting of free divorce every one will enter upon numerous free marriages one after another is groundless. It is precisely those who are united in free love to whom such a separation, when it does become necessary, is so profoundly painful, that life itself forbids the frequent repetition of such unhappiness.
Very beautiful, and based upon lofty ethical conceptions, are the writer’s views regarding the necessity for divorce precisely in view of the existence of children. She says:
“Men and women of earlier times went on patching up for ever and ever. The psychologically developed generation of to-day is more inclined to let the broken remain broken. For, except in those cases in which objective misfortunes, or a retarded evolution, gave rise to a rupture, patched-up marriage, like patched-up engagements, seldom prove durable. Often it was owing to profound instincts that the rupture became inevitable; reconciliations fortify these instincts, and sooner or later they once more find free vent.
“Thus it happens that even an exceptional nature is strained by the burden it has to bear, and the children are not then witnesses of their parents living together, but of their dying together.
“Neither religion nor law, neither society nor a family, can determine what it is that marriage is killing in a man, or what he finds it possible to rescue in that state—he himself alone knows the one and suspects the other. He alone can delineate the boundaries, can decide whether he is satisfied to regard his own existence as closed, and to remain contented in the life of his children; whether he is able so to endure the sorrows of a continued married life with such fortitude as to make it increase his own powers and those of his children.”
The conviction of the rights of love, and the consciousness of the rights of the children, are to-day unmistakably on the increase. There is no danger that the latter right, the right of the children, will suffer in comparison with the rights of love. It is, on the contrary, characteristic, that out of the very same feeling by which the freer configuration of the amatory life is demanded, there has also arisen a new programme of the rights of children. This same Ellen Key who proclaims the inalienable rights of free love, speaks also of the “century of the child,” and devotes to this subject an admirable book.
The most important point with regard to free divorce, in respect to the children, is that the father and the mother must not separate from one another in hatred, but in friendship, and that, in the interest of the children, they should continue to meet one another from time to time. Ellen Key here rightly condemns the conduct of the good friends and relatives who simply lay down the law that the separated pair must hate one another, and must in every relationship torment and cheat one another. It is precisely such “enmity” of the parents after divorce that is so full of bad consequences in respect of the children.
We also have to consider this point of view, that sometimes the new husband or the new wife has a better influence over the children than their own parents, and that in this way divorce may have brought the children greater happiness, may have been for them a true blessing.