CHAPTER VIIIFREE DIVORCE
Thedesire of the young to abolish prostitution by means of love’s freedom has already been adduced as one of the proofs of the higher development of sexual morality. Another such proof is the desire of the present day to abolish adultery by means of free divorce.
The preachers of monogamy are afraid that this desire will prepare the way for an open polygamy, instead of that which at present is at least secret. In the press and in the pulpit, in schoolrooms and lecture-rooms, modern literature is blamed for this “new immorality.”
And yet we all know that long before our time, married men and their sons in country houses were too often ready to seduce the wives and daughters of their dependents as well as the servants of the house. The wives and mothers of these gentlemen were frequently not ignorant of this—but they were praised for their wisdom when they pretended to suspect nothing. It was a matter of common knowledge that not a few married men and married women had mistresses and loverswithin their own social circle; and every one knew that in the towns many men, during or before marriage, had illegitimate families.
Serious preachers of morality doubtless reply that they no more condone this secret adultery than they would an open one; that they see in one and the other a manifestation of that power of sin which only religion can vanquish. We have the right then to ask, whether within their own ranks—among clergymen, missionaries, readers—no similar transgressions occur.
The honest ones answer Yes, but point out that this causes shame among their fellow-Christians, and that these believers themselves acknowledge that they have sinned. Such men of the world, who play the hypocrite to retain their respectability, do the same thing. But the great danger to society first comes in when free-thinkers with no qualms of conscience commit, and authors without moral indignation describe, the sin. This it is that degrades the ideal of morality.
Here we are at the very cross-roads of the old and the new morality.
The champions of the latter go on to ask whether all adulterers—children of this world as well as children of God—in their innermost consciousness really feel themselves to be sinners. The need which impelled them was perhaps so imperious that it justified them before their own conscience in choosing a lesser evil in preference to a greater, when—from one cause or another—they couldnot or ought not to satisfy the need in their marriage.
And if this be so, then the exponents of the new morality may have grounds for their opinion: that self-control cannot and must not be the only answer to all the problems of sexual life; that a solution must be found which shall by degrees prevent men from wasting, either in unchastity or in a celibacy disguised as marriage, the strength which belongs to the race. The solution can only be this, that we not only assert love’s freedom to unite without external tie, but also man’s right more freely than at present to loosen the tie, when real union is no longer possible.
When speaking of love’s selection, it was put forward that a growing insight into the value and conditions of the enhancement of the race might produce cases where a marriage could be openly broken without therefore being dissolved. But the true line of development will quite certainly be this: that divorce will be free, depending solely on the will of both parties or of one, maintained for a certain time; that public opinion as regards a dissolved marriage will take the broader view that it has already acquired in the question of a broken engagement, which at one time was thought just as humiliating as a divorce is now.
With ever-growing seriousness the new conception of morality is affirmed: that the race does not exist for the sake of monogamy, but monogamy for the sake of the race; that mankind is thereforemaster of monogamy, to preserve or to abolish it.
Even the advocates of free divorce know well enough that it will involve abuses. But at the same time they know that there is no better proof of man’s incredible indolence of mind than the uneasiness produced by the thought of possible abuses resulting from a new social form, while the ancient abuses are tolerated with the dullest tranquillity.
Whatever abuses free divorce may involve, they cannot often be worse than those which marriage has produced and still produces—marriage, which is degraded to the coarsest sexual habits, the most shameless traffic, the most agonising soul-murders, the most inhuman cruelties, and the grossest infringements of liberty that any department of modern life can show.
We may answer that abuses do not prove anything against the value of any particular social arrangement, so long as its right use serves well the purpose for which it was introduced.
The majority thinks that this is still the case with marriage. The minority, on the other hand, considers that its constraint now tends to defeat its original object, an enhanced sexual morality.
This minority thinks that, as soon as love is admitted as the moral ground of marriage, it will be a necessary consequence that he who has ceased to love should be allowed a moral as well as a legalright to withdraw from his marriage, if he chooses to avail himself of this right.
And this same minority is aware that love may cease, independently of a person’s will; that therefore no one can be held to the terms of a promise, the performance of which lies outside his powers.
Nothing is more natural than that love’s longing for eternity should prompt lovers to vows of eternal fidelity; nothing is more true than that it is a satanic device of society to seize upon this promise and base thereon a legal institution (Carpenter). Nothing is more necessary than to abolish the legal claims that people have on one another, supported by promises of love and vows of fidelity.
The more people understand the laws of their own being, the more will the conscientious begin to hesitate about making promises which perhaps some day they will be forced by inner necessity to break. An increasing number of people find it impossible to contract marriage, or to ask it of the other party—or to continue in marriage or ask its continuance of the other—when their love has died or has awakened for another. A generation ago, an engaged person could refuse his or her betrothed’s petition for liberation with the answer that he or she had love enough for both. In corresponding circles at the present day, such a speech is unthinkable. But then a public engagement was still regarded as a binding tie and themarriage took place. After a long engagement it was a “point of honour” for the man not to let a woman run the risk of being unmarried, and she was satisfied if he only paid his debt of honour.
Such coarseness of feeling is fortunately becoming more and more rare, although it is far from disappearing. People see more and more that they have no more right to marry simply to fulfil a duty of fidelity than they have to steal in order to fulfil a duty of maintenance; that there is no more obligation to abide by a marriage which one feels to be one’s ruin than there is a duty to commit suicide for the sake of another.
The love of older times was above all afraid that the other party should not feel sufficiently bound. The finest erotic feeling of the present day shudders at the idea of becoming a bond; trembles at pity and recoils from the possibility of becoming a hindrance. This state of the soul knows of no other right than that of perfect candour. To place legal limits to each other’s liberty, so that neither shall cause pain to the other, is under these conditions meaningless; for each suffers just as much through a union maintained without full reciprocity.
Thus the question of divorce presents itself to modern souls, in cases where there are no children. And when there are children—as is of course the rule—they think that the mistakes of parents do not absolve them from the duty of co-operatingin the rearing of the children to whom they have given life.
But they maintain that this need not always be effected by means of continued cohabitation. On the other hand, this may often be necessary, and in such cases they subordinate their personal claims of happiness to those of the race. One who holds these opinions regards him who gives the same answer in every case—whether this answer be “freedom at any price” or “renunciation at any price”—simply as a moral automaton.
It is true that modern men and women are less able to bear unhappiness in marriage than were those of former times. This shows that connubial idealism makes greater demands than formerly.
The conscious will to live, of our time, revolts against the meaningless sufferings through which the people of bygone days, above all the women, allowed themselves to be degraded, benumbed, and embittered. A finer knowledge of self, a stronger consciousness of personality, now puts a limit to one’s own suffering, since the danger is understood of taking hurt in one’s soul. This determination of individualism makes it impossible for the modern woman to be fired by the ideal of Griselda—if for no other reason, because she feels how all-suffering meekness increases injustice. The “good old” marriages, sustained by the willing sacrifice of wives, are disappearing—that is happilytrue! But no one takes notice of the new good ones that are coming in their place. If those who now grudgingly reckon up divorces would also count all happy marriages, it would be seen that new formation has proceeded further than dissolution.
It must be evident that the question of divorce is the pursuance of the line of development of Protestantism. With the formation of a right and a left party, as usual in the treatment of a problem of culture, the Reformation succeeded only in asserting the right of the senses in human life. That it is the right of the soul in sexual life that is now most intimately affected by the question, people will not understand. Against the right of the individual they set up that of the child. If there is none, then a certain number of Christians are willing to admit that divorce is sometimes justified. Unhappy parents, on the other hand, must remain together for the sake of the children.
But the erotically noble person of the present day cannot, without the deepest sense of humiliation, belong to one he does not love, or by whom he knows he is not loved. Thus for one or both of the parties a marriage that is persisted in without the love of one or both causes profound suffering either through this humiliation or through lifelong celibacy.
This is the kernel of the question, which is avoided by all who, in their care for the children, forget that the parents must nevertheless be considered as an end in themselves. It is not asked that for the sake of the children they should commit other crimes; thus a woman who committed forgery to support her child would be disapproved of. But other women are judged leniently who “for the sake of their children” feel themselves prostituted year after year in their marriage.
That married people are to be found who continue to live as friends, since the erotic needs of both are small; that others do not feel the humiliation of cohabitation without love; that the former as well as the latter are probably acting best for the children in keeping together a home for them—this does not prevent others under similar circumstances from suffering in such a way that life loses all its value. And these are they who end either in adultery or divorce.
Even if an enemy of divorce admits these difficulties, he replies, that the individual must still suffer for his erotic as for his other mistakes, since only so can people be taught not to commit mistakes.
But the true state of the case may be, that just as in old times murders increased in proportion to the number of executions people witnessed, so unhappy marriages may become more frequent, the more there are at present; for it is, above all, the whole spirit that prevails around us which determines our action. If the young are accustomed to see their elders content with false and ugly relations, they will learn to be so likewise. If theysee around them an aspiration towards ideal conditions in love—an idealism which is revealed now in a beautiful married life, now in the dissolution of one that is not beautiful—then their ideals will also be lofty. Those again, who have once made a mistake, will perhaps be more clear-sighted if they choose again.
But neither those who make mistakes nor those who witness them can be saved by the misfortunes of others from that great source of error, erotic illusion. And until erotic sympathy has become more refined, these mistakes are the most innocent of all. Every lover believes himself to be exempted from the sacrifice of illusion and no experience of the irretrievable erotic mistakes of others has ever opened the eyes of one blinded by love.
As it is recognised that society ought to make the lives of all as valuable as possible, this involves the claim that innocent mistakes should cause as little ruin as need be.
In marriage as in other fields, the modern principle must be put in force, that punishment should improve the faulty and prepare the way for a higher idea of justice. But this higher idea is that marriage should be contracted under gradually improving conditions, not that it should continue under gradually deteriorating influences.
Marriage under constraint forces people to continue their cohabitation and to bring children into the world in a revolt of the soul which must leave its mark in their children’s nature and thus influence their future destiny. But this is not a “well-deserved punishment” for a mistake: it is the profoundest violation of the sanctity of the personality and of the race.
Here as ever the only logical alternative is full individual liberty or unconditional surrender.
The Catholic Church maintains—and rightly from its own point of view—that, since even marriages entered into with the warmest love and under the most favourable conditions may turn out unhappily, it is impossible to base the morality of marriage on the emotion of love. Nothing that is founded upon emotion can be permanent. Nay, the richer, the more individually and universally developed a personality is, the less immutable will be the state of its soul. Thus even the highest need an inflexible law, an irremovable tie, to prevent their being at the mercy of winds and waves through their emotions, while inferior beings need them so as not to be driven out of their course by their desires. The concessions of Protestantism, therefore, lead to the dissolution of marriage, since when love is made the basis of marriage it is built upon sand.
Marriage, which the Church therefore made a sacrament and indissoluble, had already become the legal expression of the husband’s right of private ownership over his wife and children. The course of development has consisted in an unceasing transformation of this religio-economical view, and development cannot stop until thelast remnant of this conception has been destroyed.
Therefore the believers in Life refuse to admit either the half-admissions of Protestantism or the logical compulsion of Catholicism. They demand that the step from authority to freedom shall be taken outright, since they know that the external authority which simplifies life does not create the deeper morality. Compulsion fetters legal freedom of action, but thereby only makes secret crime a social institution.
And even if a husband or a wife has outwardly overcome a temptation, this will not prevent that individual when in the embrace of the lawful spouse from being filled with feeling for another. Have they then avoided adultery? Not according to their own finest consciousness—that consciousness which Goethe aroused in his great poem on elective affinities. Duties performed may as surely as those left undone produce incalculable and tragic results. They are foolish who think they can lead another soul across the bridge, fine as a hair and sharp as a knife-edge, by which every one goes his solitary way over the abyss to salvation: the way of the choice of personal conscience.
When custom and law deprive a human being of full freedom of choice in the matters of most profound personal concern—his belief, his work, and his love—then existence is robbed of greater values than those the compulsory fulfilment of duty can bring in.
In love, the idea of personality has now brought us to the view that “property is theft”; that only free gifts are of value; that the ideas of connubial “rights” and “duties” are to be exchanged for the great reconstructive thought, that fidelity can never be promised, but that indeed it may be won every day.
This will give the motive power for the attainment of ever higher forms of erotic organisation a power which the Buddha-like calm of indissoluble marriage has left unused.
It is sad that this truth—which was already clear to the noble minds of the Courts of Love—should still need proclaiming; for one of the reasons given in these Courts for love being impossible in marriage is this: that woman cannot expect from her husband the delicate conduct that a lover must show, since the latter only receives by favour what the husband takes as his right.
When divorce becomes free, the attention to each other’s emotions, the delicacy of conduct and the desire to captivate by being always new, which belong to the period of engagement, will be continued in married life. As in the early days of love, each will allow the other full freedom in all essential manifestations of life, but will exercise control over his own casual moods, whereas marriage now as a rule reverses this happy state of things.
The security of possession now puts to sleep theeagerness of acquisition; the compulsion to win anew will brace the energy in this as in every other connection.
A fidelity thus won will be the only sort that will be thought worth having in the future. A craving for happiness more sensitive than the present may one day marvel at the legally insured fidelity of our time, as at its inheritance of wealth. In both cases it will have been seen that only one’s exertion of force brings happiness and gives that felicity of victory before which hands stretched out to steal shrink back.
The believers in Life are everywhere distinguished by their determination to give to every relation the value of the unique, the stamp of the exceptional, that which has never been before and will never come again. Like the worshippers of Life of the Renaissance, those of our time have begun to recover the power of strong enjoyment and strong suffering which is always the sign of increasing spiritual unity, a new gathering of force through a new religious feeling.
To this view of life the permanence of happiness will be less important than its completeness while it lasts.
Spinoza, who described jealousy as no one else has done, has also uttered this deep saying of love: The greater the emotion we hope that the loved one will experience through us, and the more the loved one is moved by joy in his relation to us, the greater also will be our own happiness in love.
People of the present day have begun to distinguish the idea of this “greatest joy” from lifelong proprietorship; and therewith jealousy in its lower form has begun to disappear.
Jealousy like other shadows belongs to the rising and setting light and disappears like them in the full clearness of noonday. But its tone of feeling has become quite different since man has discovered that, if the sun stands still in the zenith for him, it is a miracle—not a right. The most highly developed people of the present day say “I am loved” or “I am not loved” with the same simplicity as they say the sun shines or does not shine. The difference is in both cases immeasurable, but in one case as in the other, necessity removes the feeling of humiliation. The grief which comes when a lover no longer feels that he brings joy to the beloved or when he sees another bring it, is natural and worthy of respect. It ceases to be so when it manifests itself in the will of an avaricious proprietor, the brutal instinct which often survives not only the feeling of the other but also its own.
But although the psychological differentiation in our time involves greater possibilities of finding some one who will satisfy some side of the erotic longing,—while it is more and more difficult to find one who wholly satisfies this ever more complex desire,—the danger of such division of self is counterbalanced by the growing wish for the longing to be wholly satisfied. Love by thusmaking ever greater demands becomes at the same time ever more faithful.
Those who dread the dissolution of society through the insistence upon the rights of love, do not reflect that its right to break up marriage is allowed to the feeling, which has not only the red glow of passion, but also the clearness through which two people have become conscious of each other as a revelation of the whole unsuspected richness of life. A revelation which included all the fulness of comprehension, all the serenity of confidence; where both have given with equal exactingness and generosity—not meagrely or hesitatingly, but so that each without reserve has rushed to meet the other—this is the only happiness that love’s noblemen will now experience. It will be more and more difficult even to experience it once—how much more so then to find it many times!
A great love is never like the erotic thunderstorms which move against the wind—that is to say, against the whole disposition of the personality in other things.
All valuable feelings—whether entertained for a person, a belief, a place, or a country—are conservative. The consciousness of this gives the preacher of liberty his boldness. He never perceives how liberty may be abused, since he knows what it costs to loosen a heart from what it has once embraced.
To a volatile nature, the happiness that a moresteadfast one experiences in love is as unfathomable as the bliss of the mystic becoming absorbed into the fulness of his divinity is to the polytheist.
Here, as everywhere, to the believer in Life, happiness is one with morality. Since happiness consists in the greatest emotions, its first condition is to intensify and enlarge all feelings, and above all that which leads to marriage.
But in addition, the whole standard of personality depends to a great extent upon whether we consider fidelity a life-value. He who desires fidelity centres his moods and his powers upon what is essential and protects them from the gusts of the accidental. Only this gives style and greatness to existence. The desire of fidelity is therefore one with a person’s feeling for his own integrity, his inward consistency, the attitude and dignity of his spiritual being.
When fidelity is preserved for these profound reasons, it will also be broken only for the same reasons. A fidelity, on the other hand, which rests upon conventional notions of duty, will be in the fire like a fire-escape of straw.
It is moreover forgotten, in all discussions of the dangers of free divorce, that under the influence of love the whole disposition of the soul is towards fidelity. Great love absorbs all associations of ideas and thus without conscious exertion intensifies and enlarges the personality. Fidelity will be a necessary condition of love, but a conditionwhose psychological continuance is not favoured by coercive marriage.
Fidelity towards one’s self—also in the new sense of the word—thus involves not only the ability in case of need to destroy the bridge between one’s self and one’s past. It also implies the building of better bridges to strengthen the connection between our personality and our present. It implies not only the capacity to have finished with a destiny; but also that of not having done too soon with a person. It may certainly involve the necessity of a new experiment in life. But still more certainly it involves the need of not allowing the incidental numbness of one’s feeling to seduce one to new “experiences.” This expression—in place of the old word “adventures”—implies, moreover, an intensification of feeling: where formerly only the excitement of “adventure” was looked for, a richer element of life is now sought. But it is often a fatal error to suppose that this is to be gained in new relations, when on the contrary it might have been won by an intensification of the former ones. By more attention to and respect for the other’s personality one may often discover more than one had expected; for some people are like certain landscapes or works of art: they do not begin to make an impression until one thinks one has done with them. But piety is required to await the revelations of soul as of a work. Piety implies contemplation, and this demands peace. But peace is difficult tofind in our time, whose misfortune is precisely disturbance and amusement.
That our time like every other has its particular epidemics in the erotic sphere, is certain, and disturbance is just the condition in which the most dangerous of these find a favourable soil. It is therefore a part of the erotic art of living that a married couple should now and then pass some time undisturbed in each other’s company—or separately and alone—in order thus to strengthen the health of their feelings. Here as in other things external precautions against infection are unimportant in comparison with care of the general health.
Only he who, after unceasing effort and patient self-examination, can say that he has used all his resources of goodness and understanding; put into his married life all his desire of happiness and all his vigilance; tried every possibility of enlarging the other’s nature, and yet has been unsuccessful,—only he can with an easy conscience give up his married life.
The life-tree of a human being is formed, no more than are the trees of the forest, according to a strict measure for the length of the branches or a pattern for the shape of the leaves. Like nature’s trees, its beauty depends upon the freedom of the boughs to take unexpected curves, upon the disposition of the leaves to exhibit an infinite diversity of shape. Only he who does not permit the tree to grow according to its own inner laws, but clips it according to those of gardening, can be sure of not preparing surprises for himself and others, when one branch unexpectedly shoots out and another equally unaccountably withers. No one can answer for the transformations to which life thus may subject his own nature; nor for the changes which the transformation of another’s nature may effect in his own feeling. He may possess the rarest disposition to fidelity, the most sincere desire to concentrate himself upon his love, to “let his personality grow around it, as about its core”—it nevertheless does not depend upon his will alone whether this core shall shrivel or be corrupted.
Therefore the desire of fidelity can not, must not, and ought not to imply more than the will to be true to the deepest needs of one’s own personality.
In other spheres than that of love, people admit this freely. Nobody considers it an unquestionable duty for a young man to find at once the view of life or the career in which he can continue for the rest of his life. What young people are rightly warned against is the wandering without method among different opinions or undertakings; for only that belief or that work which one seriously tries to live by and live for can really employ the powers of the personality and thus show its efficacy in enhancing them. But the most profound seriousness cannot prevent a continued development of the personality from one day compelling the man to abandon that belief or that work. It probably would not occur to a thoughtful clergyman to appeal to such a man’s promises at confirmation, or to a thoughtful father to bring forward his own choice of a career as an example to his son.
Lifelong tenacity was demanded in those days when it was assumed that a single doctrine, a single set of circumstances, was entirely adequate for personal development for a whole lifetime. The crime of deviation was then logically punished by excommunication or by fines. But the profounder view which we have acquired in the matters of belief and occupation must also be extended to the third. We ought to perceive that unconditional fidelity to one person may be just as disastrous to the personality as unconditional continuance in a faith or an employment. Those who are now patching the sack-cloth of asceticism with a few shreds from the purple mantle of personality are spoiling both. Either state the claim of renunciation clearly, like the Catholic, or admit the whole claim of personality. But the whole problem is unfairly stated by those who make “personal love” the moral basis of marriage, but go on to speak of this love as though it were a question of light-heartedly taking partners for a game, where nothing is more usual than that each woman finds the right man and each man the right woman—and so everything is in order. If life were so easy, there would be reason for the pronouncements, which are now so profoundly coarse, that only the man or woman without character, the aimless personality, is incapable of vowing a lifelong love and keeping the promise; nay, that a true personality can “command itself to love its child’s father or mother.”
He who asserts that our true personality will always follow the duty laid down by society and constantly be able to fulfil the claims of fidelity, and that those who cannot do this are guided by a false subjectivity and not by their personality, makes the idea of personality equivalent to that of member of society, the whole equivalent to the part. The personality, the unique and peculiar value, is certainly connected through part of its nature with the standards of right upheld by society. Yet it never becomes equivalent to them.
The only thing therefore that a psychological thinker can demand is that love should not divide the personality in any phase of a human being’s development, but should always be its true expression.
But only one who is ignorant of the idea of personality can believe that the relation, into which a person at the age of twenty puts his whole feeling, must necessarily correspond to the needs of the same personality as it becomes at thirty or forty. Only one so ignorant can persuade himself that the destiny of our love will necessarily resemble our lofty theory of love, our pure desire of constancy. If even our own will has little to do with the lovewe feel, how much less then will it influence that which we receive or lose!
Thus the problem of fidelity is not solved merely by imposing the claim of constancy upon one’s self; for in the first place, in love there are two who must desire the same thing, and in the second, each of these two is manifold.
No human being is sole master of his fate when he has united it with another’s. The possibility of becoming a complete personality in and through love depends in half upon the pure and whole desire of the other to share in developing the common life.
It is this which is overlooked by the eloquent preachers of “constancy as the expression of the personality,” and this makes their words about the duty of lifelong love as meaningless as a harangue about the duty of lifelong health.
It is a beautiful sight when two married people enjoy the happiness of their love for the whole day of human life. It is also a beautiful sight when life sets like a clear sun upon the horizon, and does not lose itself like a weary river in the sand. But these are beautiful ideals not commands of duty.
Love, like health, can certainly be neglected or cared for, and by good care the average length of life both of human beings and of their loves may be raised.
But the final causes both of love’s birth and of its death are as mysterious as those of the origin andcessation of life. A person can therefore no more promise to love or not to love than he can promise to live long. What he can promise is to take good care of his life and of his love.
This may be done, as already pointed out, through the conscious will to be faithful, the firm resolve to make love a great experience.
But perhaps the majority as yet do little to preserve their happiness. In this case, life works for them, as God “gives to his servants, while they sleep.”
If ever the doctrine of the importance of the infinitely small has its application, it is in respect to the power the little things of everyday life have of uniting or dividing in marriage.
That hardships and memories, joys and sorrows shared bind people together even without the continuance of love; that in the deepest sense of the word they cannot be separated, since a great part of the one’s nature remains in the other’s—this in reality forms the binding tie, but not ideas of duty, whether clear or obscure, strict or free. If in one case a married life has so dried up the feelings of both that a gust of wind drives them apart like two withered leaves, in another it may have given the feelings such deep roots that, even if all the leaves that the springtime gave are torn away, even if life seems as empty and cold as naked boughs in winter—it is still lived in common.
It is thus a physiological and psychological fact that the man or woman who for the first time has communicated to the other the joys of the senses retains a power over her or him which is never really set aside. It is even said that long after a man’s death a woman sometimes bears children to another man which resemble the first. As such influences are more decided in the case of the woman, her fidelity has also for this reason become more of a natural necessity than man’s—although the same influence, if in a somewhat less degree, applies to him.
Even if no qualms of conscience for others’ sufferings are mingled with a new happiness—in many other senses the two, who in each other seek to forget the past of one of them, will perhaps for ever find a third between them.
Marriage, in a word, has such sure allies in man’s psycho-physical conditions of life that one need not be afraid of freedom of divorce becoming equivalent to polygamy. What this freedom would abolish is only lifelong slavery.
It is evident to every thoughtful person that a real sexual morality is almost impossible without early marriage; for simply to refer the young to abstinence as the true solution of the problem is, as we have already maintained, a crime against the young and against the race, a crime which makes the primitive force of nature, the fire of life, into a destructive element.
But the consequence of early marriages must be free divorce.
As soon as one approaches the outer side of the marriage problem, one is met by the experience which the four great Norwegian writers, Ibsen, Bjōrnson, Lie, and Kielland, some years ago jointly and publicly announced: that at present the majority do not marry for love. And R. L. Stevenson may have hit the mark, when he calls the marriages of the majority “a kind of friendship sanctioned by the police” and compares the “fancy” which decides them to that which sometimes takes one for a particular fruit in a dish that is being handed round.
But even if we one day come so far that early love-matches are the rule, we shall still be faced, as regards them, by the system which at present obtains among the upper classes: that marriage is binding upon the lovers before love is consummated. There is therefore a truth worthy of consideration in the words of the brothers Margueritte, in their contribution to the question of free divorce; that as the young girl has not experienced what she binds herself to at marriage, the majority of divorces begin on the wedding night.
Free divorce is therefore an unconditional demand of such young people who know that unforeseen transformations may take place in the sphere of the soul as in that of the senses, and who now frequently seek in the secret possession of love asecurity against a precipitancy which the legal bond of marriage may make irretrievable.
The young know, if any can know, that no form of love is more beautiful than that in which two young people find each other so early that they do not even know when their feeling was born, and accompany each other through all their fortunes, sometimes even to death—for now and then life vouchsafes this crowning fortune. Never do greater possibilities exist for the happiness both of the individuals and of the race than in a love which begins so early that the two can grow together in a common development; when they possess all the memories of youth as well as all the aims of the future in common; when the shadow of a third has never fallen across the path of either; when their children in turn dream of the great love they have seen radiating from their parents.
These happy ones—like the old couple in Bernard’s fine fresco in themairieof the Louvrearrondissementin Paris—will one day look up to the stars of the winter twilight, united in a more intimate devotion than either the playtime of the spring morning or the midday toil could afford.
If this wonderful love were really the first and only one which fell to the lot of every young man and woman, and were it always possible for them to realise it at the right time—then there would neither be a problem of morality nor of divorce.
But the youth of the present day knows that this love is not the fortune of all. It has learned somuch, from literature, from life, from its own soul, of the transformations of love, that one is tempted to wish for these young people the romantic belief of their fathers and mothers in a love which became extinct as easily as now. The difference is merely this, that whereas formerly they were content with a faded glow, we will have continual fire.
It is known now that, although youthful love may be the surest basis of marriage, it is more often the reverse. Here, if anywhere, is the scene of accidents. The one we have grown up with, the girl or youth we are thrown with just when the erotic life is waking; the one we were teased about; the one we hear is “in love” with us; the one we meet when the happiness of others fills the air with longing—these and other accidents, but not personal choice, often decide youthful love.
Then the imagination sets to work to transform the reality in accordance with the ideal we have formed for ourselves—and even this is often the result of accidental influence. It is therefore not surprising that most people, when after ten years or so they meet again the object of their first love, give a sigh of gratitude to the fate which made that love “unhappy.”
When it has not been so in the usual sense of the word, one of the parties may often be most to be pitied, and it is just those young people who unhesitatingly realise their love in the belief of its lifelong continuance, that in coercive marriageare made the victims of their own pure will, their healthy courage, their bright idealism.
For the younger, in the richest sense of the word, a person is, the more certainly does he possess the poet’s gift which transforms reality according to his dreams. The fine curve of a pair of lips renews the marvel of the legend: that every frog that jumps over them is changed into a rose. Even if a dim suspicion awakes, when every serious thought or intimate feeling is met by empty silence or equally empty loquacity, the imagination easily convinces the instinct that silence means “profundity of intelligence,” or speech “candour.” At every age, but especially at this, love is a great superstition. Secure as sleep-walkers in the presence of danger, its votaries fling themselves into a decision. And it is this simple rashness of innocence that the current conception of morality subjects to a lifelong punishment. The cautious ones, on the other hand, often find in time the great rewards—thanks to their own smaller value.
More things happen in a human life than marriage and finally death. Much may happen in a human soul between marriage and death. The current assumption that everything which separates a person from the partner in matrimony is evil and ought to be overcome; everything which binds him to her good and ought to be encouraged—this is part of the wisdom which reduces life to the simplest terms, which is cheap and therefore most in use; for a higher wisdom demands a higher price.
Nothing is commoner, especially for the woman whose first experience of love is in marriage, than that she is in love with love and not her husband. Sometimes woman is betrayed by her senses, but more often by the morning dew of sensibility, which youth and love spread over even the driest of men’s souls,—a dew which disappears with the morning. Another illusion, which in these days of intercommunication causes many mistakes in love, is the peculiarity of a foreign nationality, which has the effect of a personal originality—until it gradually betrays itself as only another kind of conformity than that one is used to.
In other cases again, the husband is all she sees in him. But a young woman herself often goes through, during the years from twenty to twenty-five, so complete a transformation of feelings and ways of thought, that after a few years of marriage she finds herself in the presence of a man who is a perfect stranger to her.
This period of illusions in first youth is answered by another towards the close of youth. If a woman has not before experienced love, this is the psychological moment at which almost every illusion is possible. Her now universal demands of love, the longing of her mature woman’s nature, have countless times made a noble creature cast these pearls—if not exactly as described in the biblical image—at least into an empty space where they have just as surely been unappreciated.
On man’s side, there are other or correspondingpossibilities that early marriage may be founded on self-deception.
But even when love is real and well-founded, there yet arise, from the charm of contradictions already referred to, innumerable occasions of incurable discord.
Thus there are natures so simple that they become crippled, so uncomplex that they are foolish, so homogeneous as to be heavy. These are they who usually love once for all, with complete devotion. But, especially when they are women, Goethe’s words are often true of them: that a woman’s greatest misfortune is not to be charming when she loves. Only complete security gives these natures the calm of equilibrium, the courage of self-confidence, which calls forth the “smile of inward happiness” whereby they also become attractive. But these natures, who of all most deserve happiness, usually meet with some person of constantly changing moods, who reacts with extreme sensitiveness to every impression, but can never love deeply, and therefore is soon unable to bear that simplicity and seriousness in life and death which at first charmed by their contrast.
Such people are often poets or artists, who in love seek only constant stimulation. To them loving means “waking in the morning with new words on one’s lips,” and their erotic fortunes therefore show a rapidity of revolution comparable with that of the moons around Mars. Just as forcertain natures, a connection originally frivolous may become permanent, held together by depth of feeling, so for this class of natures—on account of the superficiality of their feelings—no kind of connection is serious.
It is not unfrequently those who give the finest descriptions of their soulful moods and their exquisite feelings, who in their acts of love are narrowly selfish or relentlessly harsh. For it is the impressions of culture stored in their intelligence which determine their conscious utterances, but, on the other hand, it is their subconscious ego that decides their actions. And this ego is often centuries behind their cultured consciousness. He, on the other hand, who is reticent and curt of speech or dull and awkward in manners may at bottom possess a delicacy which he can show only in actions, the others only in words. But unfortunately in our time opportunities for speech are many and for action few—and so women pass over the latter for the former. How many a woman has not afterwards—before some act of the man of words—asked herself how it was possible for her ever to love that man! How many a one, before the actions of the silent, has not sighed, What a pity that I was never able to love him!
But in one case as in the other, through the law of contrasts, she was united to him and feels in this union the death or paralysis of the best possibilities of her being.
The most misleading of illusions are, however,those which are fostered by the actions love produces; for it is not these which determine the quality of a personality. While love is fighting for its happiness it may transform an ordinary person into something higher than himself, as also into something lower. When the tension is relieved, it is seen that in the former case—especially as regards men—love was able to