... unmake him from a common manBut not complete him to an uncommon one....
... unmake him from a common manBut not complete him to an uncommon one....
... unmake him from a common manBut not complete him to an uncommon one....
... unmake him from a common man
But not complete him to an uncommon one....
It was no organic growth of the personality, but only a straining of self that love called forth.
But she who loved him will watch till her eyes are weary for what she has seen but once!
Those who have loved them deeply learn from these, in one way or another, inadequate persons the most dearly-bought truth in the knowledge of human nature, a truth that the heart acknowledges last of all: that even if we poured out our own blood in streams for any one—we could not thereby give him a drop of richer or more noble blood than is found in his own heart.
Many have learned this secret in that kind of marriage, where secure friendship and faithful comradeship abounded; just those feelings, in fact, which are recommended as the infallible remedy for love’s mistakes.
How often has not one of these married people active for and with the other, found outthat they never bring their mate into spiritual activity, that the soul of one has never reached the soul of the other? Outside observers think them suited like “hand in glove.” The image is significant, for a glove is empty and meaningless when it does not enclose a hand. But like hand to hand they are not suited! Therefore it not unfrequently occurs that some day one of them is seized by a passionate longing to meet with another hand, which shall be strongly and quietly grasped in his own and thus double its power; that the voice, which has continually spoken into empty space—whence a faithful echo has unfailingly answered—will finally be dumb from the longing to receive an answer from another voice, in words that were never heard before.
Not a few marriages include men who have had such fine thoughts, dreamed such fair dreams of woman, that they have desired to win her senses only through her soul and have disdained to offer her other than their best, the richest treasures of their personality. But perhaps such a man has a wife who understands only money-making and desires only the pleasures of love. If he offers all the glories of his soul, she does not even suspect when a mood is at its height; for her silence is never eloquent; she is incapable of waiting for another’s thought; has no patience with what is difficult of comprehension, and will always receive the unusual with dull misunderstanding or gay superiority.
The gulf perhaps began to open between them when one became aware of the other’s absence at a moment when he himself was most present; or when one felt that their bodies stood between their souls, the other that their souls stood between their bodies; or when one felt a restriction of liberty from the other’s superior spiritual or sensual force; or when one found that he could never show his innermost being without its putting the other out of humour. Thus two persons, each one innocent, may make each other profoundly solitary while sharing the same bed and board. Neither receives from the other what his innermost nature needs—and what one gives is only a constraint upon the other’s nature. Not a note in the soul of one is tuned to the same pitch as the other’s; not a movement in the blood of one is capable of enrapturing the other’s. Now it is unbearable dissimilarities, now unbearable similarities, that cause the trouble; each finds in the other “all the virtues he detests but none of the faults he loves.” With all this, perfect outward peace may prevail; nay, respect and devotion in a certain sense. That this is the fortune of innumerable marriages is overlooked in general, since married life usually continues—unless a third appears.
In the ideas of the Church, the incapacity for marriage of one party freed the other from the duty of fidelity. In the more spiritual view of the future it will be equally evident that the same right exists to dissolve a marriage which hasremained unconsummated in a spiritual sense; and there may be just as many possibilities of incapacity to fulfil the spiritual claims of marriage as there are men and women; therefore also just as many causes of divorce.
In the preceding pages only certain typical cases of unhappiness have been referred to. The many tragic exceptions are here left altogether on one side. So also are those causes of divorce which the preachers of monogamy call the “real misfortunes”: drunkenness, bodily cruelty, and the like; for with the customary realism of “idealism,” they admit these as valid reasons for divorce. It is significant that among the lower classes people still often think themselves bound to bear these misfortunes as a part of the miscalculations of marriage as unavoidable as those more complex sufferings which the champions of monogamy exhort people on a higher plane to endure. The pangs a soul suffers may, they think, be borne with God’s help, whereas unfortunately God is not in the habit of interfering when a man beats his wife; and the longer a soul has suffered, the more certain are they that it can continue to suffer.
Nor do they perceive that a relationship may have seemed good—perhaps even have been good,—until, after a lapse of years, a moment has arrived which has stripped the soul of one of them naked, sometimes in all its loftiness, more often inall its baseness. If the latter, then what was possible before becomes from that hour unthinkable.
That the soul may be confronted by such an alternative, of life or death, they will not admit. The soul, they say, is “a spirit,” an “invisible and imperishable entity.” That its conditions of life are just as variable and complex as those of the organism is, to a certain sort of “idealism,” meaningless. With God’s help, they say, everyone may save his soul. But such help is in this kind of peril as uncertain as it is in peril of the sea—and even in the latter case it is not “the votive tablets of the drowned, but only those of the saved, that one sees in the temple” (Nietzsche).
It is, however, especially when a man or woman is divorced in order to contract a fresh marriage that an outcry is raised over the weakness of the age in bearing suffering. Indeed, it is not even acknowledged that marriage may involve any suffering. Even those who have hitherto found a married couple extremely ill-suited, forget at once that they did so—should either of them “allow a third person to come between them.”
They forget not only their own former judgment but also the fact taught by experience, that when two married people are wholly one, there is no room for a third between the bark and the tree. In the contrary case, a third comes between them sooner or later. Sometimes it is thechild, sometimes a life’s work, sometimes a new feeling—but something always comes, thanks to nature’s “abhorrence of a vacuum,” which is never more fatal than in marriage. Within the dimensions of the soul, as within those of space, no one can take the place of another, but can occupy only that space which another has left empty or not been able to retain.
In the latter case it is fair to admit the indirect share of literature in the inconsiderateness of those without an erotic conscience. The idea of justice in love has had to be extended. But during this removal of the boundaries, which literature is carrying out, a general insecurity has set in.
Poetry performs with the fullest freedom its duty of investigating the secrets of love, according to which souls and senses are attracted and repelled in answer to that law of elective affinity which our time is seeking more and more eagerly to discover, in order to be able to direct the erotic forces to a higher development. Literature is the foremost of these discoverers; and this in itself is enough to justify that complete freedom, without which, moreover, it cannot become what Georg Brandes has called love-poetry: the finest instrument for gauging the strength and warmth of the emotional life of a period.
That literature is often the power which gives rise to erotic agitation, is self-evident. And thus it always co-operates in some measure in the misfortunes which are caused by loves of the imagination or the intellect, misfortunes which are avoided by the firm and mature personality. The weak, on the other hand, are those who in their loves as in their beliefs adopt the course that another’s influence gives them.
Like lawn-tennis—which in certain circles makes or mars marriages—love is favoured by summer air and idleness. But at all seasons there are men and women for whom everyone is a ball that sets their fancy or their vanity in motion. No form of self-assertion is more justified than that of opposing one’s vigilance, one’s will, and one’s dignity to this use of one’s personality. What stimulates the game is not the power of the senses alone. No, this game is the sole inventive faculty of spiritual poverty, the mark of erotic ill-breeding. Only a refined person can rejoice at the stimulants to life in every field, the means of which he does not himself possess. As yet few people have attained a culture like that of the Athenian beggar, who thanked Alcibiades for giving him the jewels that Alcibiades indeed wore—but that the beggar was free to rejoice at. To attain in regard to human beings this sense of joy, free from all covetousness, is the flower of fine breeding.
But the nervosity of the present day stimulates, on the contrary, erotic kleptomania. People steal one another, now from the same kind of hysteria which makes thieves of Parisian ladies in the fashionable stores; now from the same crudity which makes the child pluck every flower he sees;now from the same desire which urges the collector constantly to acquire new specimens.
When in regard to human beings the pleasure of the connoisseur rather than that of the collector has been attained, then the greatest of all joys—that of human beings in one another—will not be so often disturbed by erotic complications. To appeal to the liberty of the personality in frivolous concessions to eroticism is the same gross abuse of the idea as to use the name of this liberty in sailing a leaky yacht in a storm.
The liberty of the personality involves great risks to win great rewards; but it does not involve allowing one’s self to be driven into dangers, where for a trifle one stakes one’s own life and that of others. To drift into relations where one has not the hundredth part of the consent of one’s innermost ego, is not proving but wasting one’s personality; for every action which is less than ourselves, degrades our personality.
Again, it may be disastrous to perform acts greater and stronger than ourselves. He who ventures upon an exceptional course must—like the alpine climber—possess an abundance of strength and the sense of security which it lends; for otherwise, in both cases, the enterprise will be successful only if everything occurs according to the most favourable calculation. In an unforeseen misadventure the inadequate ones are those who are lost. Therefore, in one case as in the other, public opinion is unwittingly rightwhen it glorifies the daring that succeeds, but condemns that which fails.
Most people are not equal to the consequences of their resolutions. On the contrary, like unseated riders they are dragged by their actions through degraded circumstances that they had not counted upon. Thus many a pair of lovers who have broken earlier ties, have been only a warning example—since their action was destructive, not enhancing to life.
Ruin may be the climax of life; but inefficiency is always defeat; and of all the rashness of this life, the rash project of an exceptional lot is the saddest.
Few people who have passed their youth have courage or strength for such new experiences as imply a real enhancement of life. The majority ought rather to employ their personality in the task of worthily bearing and making the best of their lot—and, in spite of all that is asserted to the contrary, that is also what most people do and will continue to do.
Those who trust only in compulsion to restrain a man’s desire to desert his wife, forget to what a degree spiritual influences have even now facilitated divorce, in spite of the coercive law. One seldom finds in our day a high-minded husband or wife who insists on retaining the other against his or her will, except when it is clear to one partner that divorce, if conceded, would result in the certain ruin of the other. As a rule it is now only thenarrow-minded or the low-minded who exercise the right of refusing divorce. If this right were abolished, this would not entail the abolition of the influences which even now keep married people together—although in most cases they might be free if they wished it.
Those who thoughtlessly separated, when greater facilities are given, would be the same class of people who now, in coercive marriage, secretly deceive one another.
To the serious, divorce will always be serious. Before a person of feeling and thought consciously hurts another who has loved or loves him, he himself has suffered terrible pain. Gratitude for a great devotion in a free connection has often proved more powerfully binding than the law could have been. Nay, to anyone tender of conscience the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones, since in the former case he has made a choice more decisive to his own and the other’s personality than if he had followed law and custom.
And even when no feelings of affection exercise their retentive power, many people prefer to remain as wreckage on the same shore, rather than be washed away towards a new and uncertain fate.
Human nature is credited with far too great simplicity and elasticity when it is taken for granted that one experiment in life would succeed another if divorce were free. In this case it is life itself, not the law, which fixes the insurmountable limits. To the deeper natures which have broken away from a life-connection, the pain of it has often been so great as permanently to deaden the colours of life.
In connection with the modern demand for exemption from motherhood we have already rejected the expedient of securing love’s freedom through the rearing of children by the State. At the same time the importance and value of the parental home was insisted upon as strongly as possible.
Here, on the other hand, is the place to point out the one-sidedness of the notion that nothing is more important than that the parents should remain together for the sake of the children—since everything must finally depend upon how the parents remain together and what they become through remaining together.
The more degrading cohabitation is to the personality of each parent the less valuable will be the influence for the children of the parental relation.
Only one who sees in marriage a system directly ordained by God, a form of realisation of the divine reason, can maintain the proposition that in such a system the good must outweigh human defects. Those who hold that the maintenance of marriage is always the sound and moral course, must take upon themselves the burden of provingthat the dull connubial habits of divided mates are a pure source for the origin of new beings; that their mutually conflicting influences are better able to further the welfare of the children than a tranquil bringing-up by one of them: that the happiness of one of them in a new union is more dangerous to the children than his unhappiness in the former one.
To those, on the other hand, who hold the faith of Life, the question of the children is always a fresh one in every fresh divorce. Here again we must rise to the conditional judgment, and leave behind the chess-board morality with its equal squares of right and wrong. The danger to the children arising from a divorce depends on all that has gone before and all that comes after. He who dissolves his marriage in the face of his inner consciousness of the harm that the children will thereby suffer, commits a sin which will infallibly be succeeded by the remorse that friends are sometimes eager to adduce as extenuating circumstances. He, on the other hand, who “sins” with an easy conscience, has made his choice with the welfare of the children in one scale of the balance. This calm of conscience is then not indifference, and, therefore, does not prevent the possibility of his suffering deeply through the consequences of the decision which he nevertheless does not regret. It may be that in most cases where there are children, the less painful course, even for him who is mostconvinced of his personal right, is to endeavour to the utmost to preserve a common life which allows the children to grow up under the joint protection of a father and mother, and for the sake of the children to give this life a worthy and kindly character.
In former times, people mended and patched things up endlessly. The psychologically developed generation of the present day is more disposed to allow what is broken to remain broken. For, except in the cases where the cause of rupture has been outward misunderstanding or belated development, patched-up marriages—like patched-up engagements—seldom prove lasting. It has often been profound instincts that caused the rupture; the reconciliation violated these instincts and sooner or later such violation revenges itself.
Thus, it happens, that even exceptional natures have a greater burden than they can bear, and then it is not the living together but the dying together of their parents that the children witness.
Neither religion nor the law, neither society nor the family, can decide what a marriage kills in a human being or what it may be the means of saving in him. Only he himself knows the one and feels the other. Only he himself can determine how far it may be possible for him to have so far finished with his own existence that he can completely pass into that of his children; to bear the pain of a continued married life so that it mayenhance the powers of himself and the children. A mother can do this oftener than a father, but in no case is there any standard that others can use to determine when an excess of suffering is present. More than this, there is strictly no suffering, but only suffering beings who in every case create the suffering anew according to their type of soul.
Only one thing is certain: that no one is more outside the question than the very one who causes the suffering. Thus nothing can be more unreasonable than to leave to the judgment of one of the parties the decision we have just mentioned. The knowledge of being able to refuse a divorce now involves want of consideration for the other’s moods of dejection, which would never occur if consideration were necessary to prevent separation. Such attentions are especially significant at the beginning of married life, when most young married people solve the small and great problems of accommodation with more or less difficulty. The birth of the first child, moreover, is often accompanied by abnormal states of feeling, which lead to hasty conclusions as to incompatibility and antipathy. The opponents of free divorce think that it is just during these years that precipitate divorces might take place. But they do not reflect that either partner in his sense of proprietorship now gives himself a loose rein in a way that would be unthinkable if such security did not exist. Thus the young certainly keeptogether, but not unfrequently destroy their finest chances of happiness. The need of mutual caution during these dissensions should have a much deeper influence in keeping a couple together than has at present the knowledge that they cannot be free. After the advent of children, the danger is small—except in the case of heartless natures—that a sufferer will too hastily think his powers of endurance are exhausted. The inter-dependence which children create between their parents when these together care for and love them, is sometimes indissoluble. In most cases it is so strong as to form the real tie, without which laws twice as strict as the present ones would have no power to keep together two unwilling beings.
When speaking of love’s selection, we pointed to the signs which indicate that the feeling for the race—the feeling which from time immemorial has linked together man and woman at a common hearth, has raised the altar near it and round them both the town wall—is approaching its renaissance. Consciousness of the children’s rights is indubitably on the increase, together with a knowledge of the rights of love. And against the assaults of this most turbulent and dangerous sea the race-feeling will continue to stand as a wall protecting society, though in a new form to give it new powers of resistance.
But the opponents of divorce think, on the contrary, that the sense of happiness through thechildren—especially in the case of the father—has now become so weak that most fathers would free themselves from all responsibility if they only could.
If this be so, society itself is to blame. It not only countenances sexual relations entirely independent of the mission of the race; it frees the man from responsibility for his illegitimate children and thus assigns to him a standpoint below that of the beasts. The instincts favourable to offspring, which in animals have remained undisturbed, cannot attain their full strength until man is completely answerable for every life he creates. As soon as society decrees that the fact of two persons becoming parents makes their union obligatory, the relationship itself will gradually intensify their feeling and the man will wish to possess and preserve the elements of joy for which he must always bear the burdens. Even if man’s fatherly feelings should be slow in awaking—and if a number of fathers of the present day should thus really avail themselves of free divorce to leave wife and child—there are still the mothers, who do not, as a rule, lightly leave their children, but who, on the contrary, now suffer the deepest misfortunes and renounce the greatest happiness so as to remain with them, and who—even if they tear themselves from them—are hardly ever able to release themselves. When the law gives to every mother the rights which now only the unmarried mother possesses,but imposes at the same time on every father the obligations which now only the married have—then it may be that the child will become a new and more valuable possession in the eyes of the man. If he only feels the influence he may obtain through his wife’s respect for his fatherly qualities; if his importance in the child’s existence comes to depend on personal force, not on legal might, then the quality of fatherhood may be in a high degree ennobled. And with this affection will grow, according to the immutable law, that the more man gives, the more he loves.
If matriarchy, in a new form, refined by the whole of development, should become the final phase—as in the opinion of many it has been the starting-point—of the family, then this would involve that paternal authority became conditional, depending on the value and warmth of the paternal feeling. At present many fathers are merely an accident in their children’s life, an accident which never even looks “like an idea.” And this is not only true of those fathers who, with the support of the law, withdraw themselves from all responsibility, but also of many others, especially of those who are driven by work or public business and who remain inwardly strangers to their children.
For the present, it may be regarded as certain that free divorce would, above all, afford this advantage, that a number of wives, who now keep broken-down husbands, could work for food fortheir children instead of for liquor for the children’s father; and that a number of mothers, who now are obliged for the sake of their children to suffer the deepest humiliation, would be able to free themselves; and in both cases the children would gain. On the other hand, the father who took advantage of free divorce to desert his family for frivolous reasons might, as a rule, be easily spared by that family.
In most cases, the children are even better off through a divorce, when the cause of it is differences of temperament and opinion between the parents. Each of them separately may be a person of merit. When they separate on the ground of dissension, both have a sense of something to atone for with the children. This prompts them to try to make amends, and thus the children receive—from each separately—far more than they did when the parents were united, when the children were witnesses to their conflicts and saw the worse side of the nature of each. The children are spared the pain of being the subject of their father’s and mother’s quarrels; of being compelled to take the part of one of them; of being torn between two diverse wills, between the jealous endeavours of each to win them exclusively. They, in part, avoid being brought up from two different, mutually-counteracting points of view, where one is trying to take away from the children the ideas that the other has given them.
But of all this the opponents of divorce takeno account. The main thing is that the parents shall keep together, however chill or dark with thunder may be the air in which the children grow up.
This point of view misses the reality as much as that of those who call for divorce as soon as love is over. Keeping together may, in certain cases, give the children a happier and richer childhood than the state of things after a divorce. It has been maintained with reason that discord between the parents is sometimes compensated for by the value of the manly nature of the one and the womanly nature of the other, which—even if they do not co-operate—still work well side by side; and that children who, through dissensions at home, have early been forced to think and choose for themselves, often become stronger characters than those who have grown up in happy homes.
While, on the one hand, we hear children whose parents have separated complain that they did not have the patience to remain together, on the other we hear those who have grown up in unhappy homes regret the continuance of their parents’ married life. If this had been dissolved, the children might have had at least one good home, perhaps two, whereas now they have none.
But, of course, each one can know only what he has suffered from a series of events, not what he might have suffered if circumstances had been different; and thus the children’s opinion cannotin either case be regarded as decisive, when laying down the principle.
The experience, therefore, which we have, of the position of children whom death has deprived of their father is more important. While the widower, as a rule, marries again, if his children are small, the widow, in most cases, remains unmarried. And it may be regarded as certain that statistics of able men would give a remarkable result in respect of the sons of widows.
A divorce often puts the child in a corresponding position of tenderness and responsibility towards his mother. But while society bows to the “stern necessity” of a single battle making more children fatherless than the divorces of a generation—and calmly relies on the mothers’ ability by themselves to make good citizens of their sons—it shrinks from the same stern necessity when it is a question of saving a living person from lifelong unhappiness.
The children’s chief danger in a divorce is that they are often divided between father and mother and thus lose in part the companionship of brothers and sisters which is so eminently productive of happiness. Next to this, the greatest misfortune is not that the father and mother no longer live under the same roof, but that they are no longer able to meet. This misfortune could often be avoided, if friends and relations would refrain from the pleasure of deciding how the divorced couple ought to hate and variously torment eachother. If people saw the merit of two human beings—who were able to separate as friends and to meet again as such—being also capable of this; if the presence of either parent with the children never led to their being influenced to the detriment of the absent one—then children, even after a divorce, would not feel the want of their essential relation to both their parents. Now, on the other hand, divided as they often are between two mutually hostile parents, separated thus from each other and—lacking common memories and other ties to bind them—gradually becoming strangers to each other when they meet, the children lose so much by a divorce, that parents in most cases can gain nothing which makes up for the losses of the children and thus prefer to bear the burdens of living together rather than lay those of divorce upon the children.
In the question of divorce also, the great fundamental idea of protestantism must be applied in the recognition of the individual’s full freedom of choice, since no case can be decided generally, and since here also the right and wrong can only be discovered through the searching of each individual conscience.
A child has often—in moments of great crisis—blocked the way which led from the door of the home. But the home within that door did not for that reason become brighter or warmer for the child.
In the preceding, the position of the children in divorce has been considered from the point of view of discord between the parents. If, on the other hand, the divorce is brought about by a new feeling on the part of one of them, then this father or mother must be prepared one day—when the children can understand them—to justify the step by showing them how the new love has made him or her a richer and greater personality. The children have a full right not to be sacrificed to the degradation of their parents. In every case, the children are the most incorruptible judges of their parents.
But the fact that a person has already brought children into the world does not give to these children an unconditional right to demand that a father or mother shall sacrifice the love that may advance themselves, and through them the race, to which they may thus give more excellent children or more excellent works than they have been able to produce hitherto. Many a woman has borne children to her husband without having seen her child; many a man has given the community his industry but never his work—until great love accomplished their innermost longing and the child or the work that was thus created became the only one indispensable to the race.
The claim of society that a father or mother, radiant with possibilities of happiness, shall sacrifice these for the sake of the children, will be reduced when the sense of the value of life hasgrown and the duty of parents to live for their children is more often interpreted to mean that they must continue to be fully alive, with powers of renewal. On the other hand, this very rejuvenation of parents at the present day may often result in their living so rich a life together with their children that they will need no other renewal than that which is most productive of happiness to all parties; namely, to enjoy their “second springtime” in the children’s first.
If, on the contrary, the result of this prolonged youth of the parents is that a father or mother changes the course of his or her life, then the children must suffer—until they can understand that perhaps in a deeper sense they do not suffer thereby. Sometimes the new partner has exercised a richer influence on the children than their own father or mother—as may also be the case with a step-father or step-mother. At present, however, this possibility is often destroyed by the common opinion just alluded to, which also decides that the children ought to hate, where, if left to themselves, they would perhaps have learned to love.
The selfish demand of grown-up children that the life of their parents shall in and with them have reached its climax and be personally concluded, is as cruel as it is unjustified, since there are souls which do not lose their blossom when the fruit appears, but are able at the same time to bear both fruit and new blossom. Childrenreceive with life a right to the conditions which may make them fully fit for life; no less than this, but at the same time no more. What their parents may be willing to sacrifice of their own lives beyond this must be reckoned to their generosity, not their duty.
If great love may thus be admitted to possess a right superior to that of the children, the question obviously arises, how is this love to be distinguished from the accidental?
A mistake is already a hard thing in a marriage where there are children, for the obstacles that have to be surmounted in such a case are so serious that only great love can overcome them—that is, if the parents are such that they really mean anything at all to their children.
It is precisely by its genesis, in despite of all obstacles, that the predestined love often reveals its nature and thus becomes what is called “criminal.” Even if those who are possessed by this emotion allow duty to interpose oceans between them, they will, nevertheless, come together in every great moment of their lives until the last, convinced that
“his kiss was on her lips before she was born.”
“his kiss was on her lips before she was born.”
“his kiss was on her lips before she was born.”
“his kiss was on her lips before she was born.”
When people have acquired more knowledge of the laws of psychology, they will discover, as Edward Carpenter has said, that there is also anastronomy in the world of emotion; that inter-dependence arises there also, in obedience to eternal laws; sympathies and antipathies which keep all the “heavenly bodies” at the right distance or proximity; that thus the path of love follows an equally irresistible necessity as the orbit of a star and is equally impossible to determine by any influences outside its own laws. And without doubt there will some day be discovered a telescope for this field also, which will at last reveal to the short-sighted the fixed stars, planets, nebulæ, and comets of erotic space, and will prove that its constellations are ordered by a higher law than that of “crude instinct.” But until we attain this astronomical certainty we must be content with the degree of knowledge that art criticism can give.
Great love, like a great artist, has its style. Whatever subject the latter may handle, whatever medium he may use, he gives to the canvas or the marble, the paper or the metal, the impress of his hand, and this reveals itself in the smallest thing he has created. So in every age and every country, every class and every time of life, great love is one and the same; its signs are unmistakable, though the fortune it leads to and the individuals on whom it sets its mark may in one case be more important than in another.
But this mighty emotion—which arouses one’s whole being through another’s and gives one’s whole being rest in another’s—this emotion seizesa man without asking whether he is bound or free. He who feels strongly and wholly enough need never wonder what it is he feels: it is the feeble emotion that is doubtful to itself. Nor does he who feels strongly enough ever ask himself whether he has a right to his feeling. He is so exalted by his love, that he knows he is thus exalting the life of mankind. It is the minor, partial passions that a person already bound feels with good reason to be “criminal.” For him, on the other hand, who would call his great emotion a sinful infatuation, a shameless egoism, a bestial instinct, one who loves thus has nothing but a smile of pity. He knows that he would commit a sin in killing his love, just as he would in murdering his child. He knows that his love has once more made him good as in his childhood’s prayers to God, and rich as one for whom the gates of paradise are opened anew.
Art is interpreting a universal experience when it always depicts Adam and Eve as young when they are driven out of Eden. One wonders that no artist has shown them—at a maturer age—outside the walls of paradise, tormented by the sense of now possessing wisdom enough to preserve the happiness for which in youth they only possessed the means.
For there not unfrequently arrives a time in human life when enlightenment enters before coldness has set in; when the blossoms are still rich although the fruits have already begun tomature. It is then that great happiness is often seen for an instant and then disappears. Sometimes she is never seen, for she comes softly and—like a playmate—lays a hand over one’s eyes, asking: Who am I? One guesses wrongly and happiness is gone before one can bid her stay. To her favourites only does she come with her hands full and open. To the majority the words of the dying Hebbel are true:We human beings lack either the cup or the wine.
Love’s deepest tragedy is that a number of people have first to learn through their mistakes before their souls and senses are ready for the great love which of two beings makes one more perfect.
In poetry as in life it is sometimes the first love, sometimes the last, that is extolled as the strongest. Neither need be, and either may be, this. The strongest love is that which—at whatever age it comes—most takes up all the forces of personality.
It also sometimes happens that not until a person ought to have done with love, is he really ready for it. The fewer are then the chances of finding the love he wishes to give and receive. And fewer still the chances that he can give himself up to them, with the concurrence of his whole being.
For it is one thing to have the right to one’s great emotion; another to have the right or the possibility of one’s full happiness.
Love may be never so free in its social aspect;no freedom of morals or of divorce can release the sons of men from the inevitable sufferings of their own nature, nor from the inevitable conflicts of their connection with the past. These sufferings and conflicts have been made so deep by life itself that there is indeed no necessity for the law to make them deeper.
The most usual form of the conflict is that a person is bound by or broken by casual love—whether wedded or free—when the predestined intervenes in his existence.
That so many more unhappy marriages continue than are dissolved may be due less to a sense of duty than to the fact that only a few are capable of great emotions. Peer Gynt’s symbol—the bulb—illustrates the erotic nature of the majority. It flowers as readily in sand as in water, in the open as in a pot. But should an acorn be planted in a pot, it is inevitable—on account of the vital conditions of the oak—that it should one day burst its prison or die.
And in such a case, it is unfortunate when a Christian ethical view stands in the way of serious and genuine chances of so renewing life that it may be more valuable to the community as well as to the individual himself. People who are equipped with rich possibilities still allow themselves to be decided by unconditional consideration for others’ feelings, which, taken from Christianity, have been grafted even on evolutionism, and which, especially through GeorgeEliot, have obtained their great but one-sided expression.
That the race not only needs people willing to lose their lives in order to gain them, but also people with courage to sacrifice others in order to win their own—this is a truth which nevertheless must be indissolubly bound up with an evolutionist view of life, to which the will to preserve and enhance one’s own existence is a duty as undeniable as that of preserving and enhancing the lives of others by self-sacrifice. To have the courage of one’s happiness, to be able to bear the pain inseparable from a rupture without pangs of conscience, is only in the power of those who act from their innermost necessity. That pairs of lovers outside the law now so often commit suicide together is no proof of the overmastering power of love; it rather proves the powerlessness of their emotion to dare and win the right of direct and immediate living and thus increasing the riches of life. For it is only to a love that is throughout a will to live that circumstances become as wax in the artist’s hand.
From the point of view of the religion of Life this impotence is regrettable, just as much as secret adultery. Doubtless both may possess the beauty of a great love-tragedy. Probably no one who has read theInfernowished Francesca strength to reject the love of Paolo. And so strangely does a soul find the way home to itself, that there are cases where a person in adulteryfeels himself purified from the defilement of marriage—since he thus for the first time experiences the unity of soul and senses which was his dream of love from the beginning.
But even in these exceptional cases—so much the more, therefore, in others—the secret transgression, which the older morality found comparatively innocuous, is from the point of view of the new morality greater than the open rupture. For the personality is humiliated by the duplicity and the weakness whereby one avoids the responsibility of the consequences of one’s actions. And this, moreover, decreases the life-value of love to the race. New experiments in life, which are made openly, which enhance the strength of the individual through conflict and earnestness, may possess an importance for the personality itself and for society which secret transgressions in most cases lack.
A poet or an artist, for example, has a wife, as to whose insufficiency for him all are agreed—so long as he still has her. Suddenly he finds the space, that was empty and waste, filled by a new creation; the air becomes alive with songs and visions. He not only feels his slumbering powers awake, he knows that great love has called up in him powers he had never suspected; he sees that now he will be able to accomplish what he could never have done before. He follows the life-will of his love, and he does right. Marriages kept inviolable have doubtless produced manygreat advantages to culture. But it is not to them that art and poetry owe their greatest debt of gratitude. Without “unhappy” or “criminal” love, the world’s creations of beauty would at this moment be not only infinitely fewer, but, above all, infinitely poorer. Nay, after such an exclusion the whole spiritual world might appear as some mediæval church, decorated from floor to roof with frescoes, appeared after the whitewashing of the Reformation.
But in a choice such as we have just mentioned, public opinion is always certain that the sufferings of the wife, unimportant as she is to the community, are the great thing, while those of the man, important to the community, may be disregarded.
He, however, who experiences the new spring which flowers in song, in tones, in colours, raises the life of generation after generation, centuries after the one person or the few who suffered through him have long ceased to suffer.
Who would have gained what the race would have lost through his self-sacrifice? Not the wife, if she had a heart, and not only a pride, which could suffer.
Not only from the point of view of universal, but from that of individual life-enhancement, we ought not to give all our sympathy to the one who is called “heart-broken.” Why is the heart that is broken considered so much more valuable than the one or the two which must cause the pain lest they themselves perish? And why will peoplenot see that he who is looked upon as “broken-hearted” sometimes finds a new and richer happiness? But, above all, why is it constantly forgotten that one who suffers through sorrow often becomes greater than he could ever have been in the secure possession of his “property”?
There are other ways of living on a great emotion than that of being in the usual sense made happy by it.
This must, however, be remembered above all by him who, already tied, is seized by a new feeling. If all three parties are high-minded enough, it has sometimes happened that the feeling has been transformed into anamitié amoureuse, which has made all of them richer and none of them unhappy—even if it has made none of them completely happy.
But even under other circumstances people ought to remember, that one does not always own what one has—and sometimes possesses most surely what one has never owned.
The sanctity and loftiness of one’s own feeling is the indestructible part of happiness in love. No longer to be able to love is the greatest sorrow. But a person no more becomes less worthy of love because his own love is dead, than he becomes so through leaving love unrequited.
Therefore, he alone can feel himself really ruined who has been nothing but the means of another’s pleasure or sport, development or work; a means that is cast off when it no longer affordsenjoyment or profit. The person who is thus betrayed in love, either because love never existed or because its past existence is denied; who sees the personality he loved unveiled as another than he believed himself to be loving—this person must exert his whole soul to save it from being narrowed, embittered, and destroyed. All other great blows of fate may be borne in such a way that a man grows by them: but to lose faith in a human being is the greatest pain of all, since it is also the most unfruitful; since it in no respect enlarges the soul or enhances the existence.
But even from this suffering the soul may finally raise itself through the consciousness that it has too great a value of its own to allow itself to be destroyed by the baseness or pettiness of another. Only he who has fought out the battle alone in all the horrors of the desert night knows what the sunrise is. Years later it may fall to the lot of such a man, who at one blow has lost everything—the sanctity of his memories, the meaning of his experiences, the faith of his love—himself to see the truth of the great, calm thinker’s exhortation: that one ought neither to laugh nor weep at, exalt nor curse a human being’s actions, but only to try to understand them (Spinoza). And then there begins for him a great and difficult work, which perhaps will last as long as life lasts, the work of looking into the depths of this other soul; of again reviewing the past in the perspective of distance; of perceiving his ownlimitations as well as those of the other, and thus beginning to understand. This is the only forgiveness there is.
But thus a person once dead and buried in the midst of life may finally see the grass grow green and the sun shine over his grave.
If this can become true—and it has become true for many people whom others regarded as broken-hearted—how much more then is it not true to him who has once been really rich and has never been robbed of his greatest treasure, the glory of his own love?
A woman, for example, who for years of her life has possessed complete happiness and through this has become a mother—will she be robbed of it all, if this happiness comes to an end?
There is still the happiness of others to serve, the sufferings of others to alleviate, the great ends of humanity to further. To many a one who has never even had a happiness of his own this must still be sufficient consolation. But we judge of happiness as of wealth. That innumerable human beings daily perish from want makes little impression on us. But if one of our friends falls from riches into poverty, this seems to us dreadful. We forget that he may perhaps, through poverty, attain a development that riches never won for him; that he who is robbed by fortune may make a new position for himself.
Life has countless possibilities as well as countless contradictions. It is full of secret remedial powers as well as of hidden causes of death. And, finally, it is, therefore, very uncertain whether it is not the two who come together that are “torn asunder”—while the one abandoned remains whole.
For loving is a healing medicine even for the wounds love gives. Only one thing a loving person cannot bear, to see the dear ones suffer. To take one’s self silently away in order to spare them pain is within the power of great love. And this does not mean a tame resignation watering the red stream of the blood. It means that love has become so great that it takes seriously the great words so lightly uttered in happiness, that torments caused by the beloved were dearer than joys given by others. When love has become the power in which a person lives and moves and has his being, the words of theEpistle to the Corinthianson love are fulfilled in a more beautiful way than Paul dreamed of. Great love does not only love for the sake of loving; it attains the incredible: to love the loved one more than one’s own feeling. If it were a question of thus providing for the other a more perfect happiness, this love would be able to quench its own flame and with it the fulness of pain and of joy that life had gained from this feeling. Women sometimes make such a sacrifice. Here and there a man has been capable of it. But he who hasattained to this height of emotion lives so wonderful a life that the happiness the united couple create for each other must be extraordinarily great if these two rich ones are not in reality to be the poorer.
When the thought has once become inherent in mankind that no one can be happy without the feeling that he is making others happy; that only the highest development of one’s own feeling is imperishable happiness; that all other happiness is charity, not justice—then there will be fewer torn asunder, even if there be no more happy ones.
But love is still such, men, women, and the people around them are still such, that one would rather wish a tied man or woman strength to endure marriage than to break it, at least if they have children who must share with them the unknown fortunes of their love. Before these, if ever, one feels the meaning of the Breton fisher’s song: