Just as the Swedes, in comparison with some other of the Germanic peoples, are behindhand in their view of l’amour passion, so are the Germanic races as a whole behindhand as compared with the foremost Latin peoples. The Gallic counterpart of the Lutheran doctrine of marriage is to be found in another monk, Luther’s contemporary, Rabelais, with his joyous project of a new kind of convent, where every monk should have his nun, with the power of separating after a year of probation; a plan which perhaps would not have been a much more roundabout way of educating mankind to love than was the Lutheran doctrine of marriage. Nothing is farther from the truth than that the Reformation increased respect for love and woman. It raised the esteem for the married state as compared with the unmarried, but it enhanced neither the position of woman in matrimony nor the importance of love in regard to marriage. Even in the Middle Ages, the Latin nations render a homage to woman which to-day is still almost incomprehensible to the man of a Germanic race. And if, on the one hand, this homage took the form of the cult of Venus, which is born in the Latin blood, on the other, it expressed through the cult of Mary its reverence for what is deepest in woman, motherhood. Even to-day, the Frenchwoman is esteemed not according to her age but according to her qualities. It is not only the mothers who worship their sons, but also the latter their mothers; and not only the mother, but besides her every admirable elderly woman receives attention in social life as in the family from men of all ages. The middle-class wife—though indeed at the cost of the children—co-operates in her husband’s calling with a seriousness unknown in the Germanic middle-class. In France as in Italy, family life has a kind of warm intimacy which the German does not understand; since the Latin temperament lacks that geniality which sheds its light over the frequently rough lines and harsh colours of the landscape of the Germanic soul. It is rather the coldness of his disposition than the strength of his soul that makes the German so much less erotic than the Southerner; it is more indifference to woman than respect for her that expresses itself in the distinction between the erotic customs of North and South. But when all this has been admitted for the sake of justice, we may fairly lay stress upon the influence of the Germanic spirit in the struggle to put an end to that cleavage between love and marriage which has prevailed among the Southern nations ever since the days of the Courts of Love. For the peculiarity of the Gallic spirit is to discriminate. This gives it the power of following out an idea to its uttermost conclusions, but at the same time renders it liable in actual life to split itself up among superficialities. The strength of the German, on the other hand, is his desire of unity. This makes him inconsistent as a thinker, since he must include everything, but against this it makes him strive after consistency in life. The same deep sense of personality which created Protestantism has in the Germanic world sought to make love as well as faith the affair of the individual and to make marriage one with love. Among the educated classes in the North, marriages of convenience or those arranged by the family are now things of the past, while in the Latin world they are still the rule, though with increasingly frequent exceptions. But in most cases it is still in free connections, before and during marriage, that the Frenchman engages his erotic feelings; and the French wife has abundantly shown the emptiness of the assertion that “a woman always loves the father of her child,” the most dangerous of the false doctrines which have led women into marriage and thence into adultery. In Shakespeare, on the other hand, we already find the wife and the mistress united in the same person, and it is always in English literature that we meet with the highest expression of the Germanic feeling for unity in love. Since the mediÆval minnesingers ceased to sing, the literature of Germany and Scandinavia, dominated by Lutheranism, bears witness chiefly of “the lust of the flesh.” Women are esteemed according as they fulfil their destiny as bearers of children and housewives. The abolition of the cloister and celibacy has, however, brought about the good result of the transmission of spiritual forces which formerly died with the individual. And it may well have been through some of those who formerly took refuge with their idealism in a cloister, that the longing for a great love has been left as an inheritance to sons and daughters.

In Germany, the leading poet of the “age of enlightenment,” Gottsched, asserts woman’s right to culture; in America, during the War of Independence, the women gave evidence of their sense of citizenship; and it was during a more recent struggle for liberty, that against slavery, that the woman’s question came to the front in that country.

In France, the eighteenth century, more than any other period of history, is “the century of woman.” The salons are the focussing point of all ideas; the most eminent men write for women, who become electric batteries from which the ideas of the time send out kindling sparks in all directions. Thus the women of France help to prepare the French Revolution. During the Revolution, Olympe de Gouges writes her “declaration of the rights of woman,” as a counterpart to that of the rights of man, and Condorcet speaks in support of woman’s claims. The same spirit of a new age confronts us in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), as also in Hippel’s Ueber die bÜrgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber, published the same year, and in the Swede Thorild’s contemporary treatise Om kvinnokÖnets naturliga hÖghet (“On the Natural Greatness of Women”). Each in its way was a remarkable sign of the time which already included the whole “emancipation” programme of equality of position: the same rights for woman as for man as regards education, labour, a share in legislation, and an equality of position under the law and in marriage.

Isolated instances of emancipated women were nothing new. In Greece, the type was common enough to be employed in comedy; in Rome, self-supporting women were to be found; during the Middle Ages not only Bridget but many another woman—in the quality of abbess or regent—exercised a great and often beneficial activity. The days of antiquity, of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance all possessed female scholars, physicians, and artists. But it is not until the century of the great Revolution that we find among women themselves as well as among certain men a persistent and conscious striving to elevate the education and to secure the rights of women.

And wherever this striving has been profound, it has been united with the desire to reform the position of woman in love and in marriage.

It is a very common but erroneous opinion that monogamy has given rise to love. Love appears already among animals, and with them, as in the world of men, has shown itself independent of monogamy.

The origin of the latter in human society was the relation of proprietorship, religious ideas, considerations of collective utility, but not perception of the importance of love’s selection. On the contrary, love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy, and it is therefore a profound mistake to suppose that the higher view of love has been formed solely through monogamy. The idea of love has been developed in as great a degree by attacks on marriage as in association with marriage itself.

While, in spite of the accumulation of evidence to the contrary, Christianity’s share in the origin of human love is constantly exaggerated, sufficient stress has not been laid upon its indirect influence on the development of sexual love. It is true that all over the world—from Iceland to Japan—songs and legends are to be found which give glorious evidence of the power of love in the heart of man in all ages. But the sexual emotion, nevertheless, held a subordinate position in the life of the human soul until Christianity granted to woman also a soul to save—in other words, a personality to cultivate. Christianity, moreover commended the womanly rather than the manly virtues, and although Christ himself ignored woman, love, and the family life, his ethics became thus in an indirect form a glorification of woman. The importance attached by Christianity to the value of the individual as a soul—in contradistinction to the insistence by paganism on his value as a citizen—was likewise one of the unseen contributary causes which during the Middle Ages made love a life-power.

In antiquity, marriage was a duty to society; friendship, on the other hand, was the free expression of sympathy. Not until man’s consciousness admitted a soul in woman, could personal love arise. But so mysterious are the influences through which the soul of mankind grows, that the youthful love of the ancients indirectly developed the need of sympathy also between grown men and women; and the suppression of the sexual instinct by Catholic asceticism indirectly furthered the introspective, soulful emotion of love which rises above sensuality.

The modern view of love as the most lofty state of the soul had already taken shape in the time of the Crusades sufficiently to bring into existence at this period the Courts of Love in the south of France. Woman, the knight, and the singer together intensify and refine love, in part by laying stress upon its incompatibility with marriage!

Students have shown how the refined expression of love in poetry corresponds with the forms of the sexual life of the upper classes, since monogamy became the law and a secret polygamy the custom. This dual division of the erotic feelings has on the one side brought about such fine and lofty, and on the other such coarse and debased manifestations that neither one nor the other has any counterpart among the nations—or classes within a nation—where this division is unknown, since there the freedom of sexual choice is undisputed.

And this is natural; for there the sexual life preserves its innocence of “paradise,” one of simple animality perturbed by no higher consciousness. This innocence can only be replaced on a higher plane after a long period of development. The way thither is by the cleavage which “the division of labour” involves even in regard to the development of the feelings.

The Middle Ages were thus only capable of dividing love from marriage. This is witnessed by the greatest singers of love and by the greatest love stories. Tristan and Isolde in the world of poetry, Abelard and HeloÏse in that of reality, are the highest types of the new age, even then dawning, which is finally to bring about the declaration of rights of human emotion as of human thought. These lovers, united in life and death, are the highest testimony of the Middle Ages to that free love which makes its own laws and abolishes all others; to that great love which is the sense of eternity of great souls, in opposition to the ephemeral inclination of small ones.

Scholasticism, ever extending introspective psychology; mysticism, ever refining the life of the soul devoted to God, unconsciously pour oil upon the red flame of love as upon the white flame of faith. The Vita Nuova of love breaks out in the fire of poetry, whose most aspiring flame was Dante. It lived on in the souls of the elect among Latin peoples. The Platonism of the Renaissance refined the mediÆval conception of love as the most excellent means of bringing to perfection the highest human qualities. And thus was established the right of lovers to independence of the customs of society.

It is significant that, at the mediÆval Courts of Love as at the courts of the Renaissance and in the contests of wit of the seventeenth century, women are granted not only the same right of sentiment as men but also the same liberty of using their spiritual gifts; for every intensifying of love is connected, openly or otherwise, with the augmentation of woman’s spiritual life and with man’s thus enhanced estimation of the value of her personality. Instead of being to him “the sex,” the means of enjoyment, woman becomes the mistress, when love has come to mean an exclusive desire for one woman, who is only to be won by devoted service. Whenever woman has taken the lead in erotic matters, man’s love has been ennobled. In Shakespeare, we find the whole of the preceding spiritual culture summed up. All his best women are chaste in the same degree as they are devoted, but they are also in the same degree spiritually rich and complete personalities. Therefore they are also leaders through their clear-sightedness and promptness in the moment of action. And although Shakespeare, like every other great poet, formed his women more of the material of dreams than of reality; although the foremost men of the Italian Renaissance probably had more often a Boccaccio’s than a Petrarch’s experience of love; although the age of baroque turned le Pays du tendre into a stiff garden surrounding decorative figures, nevertheless life itself, especially the life of the Latin peoples—as well as their best literature—can always show proud and beautiful examples of loving couples and sacrifices for love, even in that century whose male “philosophers” deprived woman of the lead, when love became “galanterie,” gay and ugly by turns.

At the time when Rousseau appeared, love was equally degraded through Latin-Epicurean immorality and through Germanic-Lutheran “morality.”

What he did for love was the same that he would have done for the lungs, if in one of the boudoirs of those days, stuffy with perfumes and wax candles, he had thrown open the windows to the summer night, with its scent of productive earth and blossoming plants, dark masses of foliage and the star-sown sky.

But Rousseau did not follow out the ideas that lay nearest to his own: that only love ought to constitute marriage; that only the development of the woman’s personality deepens love. Even Goethe, who after Rousseau carried the gleaming trail farther, by showing love as the mysterious fateful power of elective affinity, saw the happiness of love rather in the directness of woman’s nature than in its development. The French Revolution drew the consequences of Rousseau’s propositions also in the questions of love and woman; it made marriage civil and divorce free, but it did not give to woman the franchise; indeed, it did not even preserve the form of it which she had previously possessed. All the spirits influenced by Rousseau and the Revolution have since, in literature and in life, followed out love’s declaration of rights.

In the nineteenth century as in the Middle Ages, it was women, poets, and knights—the last under the name of social utopians—who took the lead in this. In Germany, it was first the romantic school, then “Young Germany,” which went foremost; in England, Shelley, Byron, Browning, and a number of other thinkers; in Norway, Camilla Collet and some great poets among the men. In France,—in the midst of the reaction which reintroduced indissoluble marriage,—Madame de StaËl attacks this in Delphine. In the country of literary salons, it is attempted to prevent woman’s genius from acting as a social force—and through Corinne and Coppet, Mme. de StaËl makes it a universal force. Her confidence that honour for a woman can signify only a means of winning love; her complaint that life denies to the woman of genius the fulfilment of her most beautiful dream, love in marriage, were the prologue to innumerable tragedies during woman’s century. After her, came the followers of St. Simon and the rest of the social revolutionaries, and above all another of Rousseau’s spiritual daughters, the woman in whose veins all the blood was mingled which the Revolution had poured out on the scaffold and on the battle-field: blood of the mob, blood of the bourgeois, noble blood, royal blood! The courage of her nation to follow truth to its utmost consequences, the fervent faith of her childhood, the wistfulness of her blood, her soul’s longing for eternity, the volcanic ardour and ashes of her experiences—all this George Sand hurls forth in her indictment of the marriage upheld by Church and State, which to her was “lawful ravishing” and “prostitution under vows.” Long before her time, the rights of love had been asserted in the case of exceptional natures. George Sand’s new courage was shown in demanding this right for all; in branding it upon the conscience of her time that, when two human beings wish to be together, no bond is needed to hold them together; that, when they do not wish it, to hold them together by force is a violation of their human rights and of their human dignity.

From this moment the battle was transferred from Olympus to the earth. And since then all “saviours of society” have sought to quench, and all “enemies of society” have striven to spread, its flames.

The love which a George Sand herself sought in vain on paths from which she returned with feet wounded, and sometimes soiled; the love a Rahel Varnhagen suffered from and lived on, a Camilla Collet implored, and an Elizabeth Browning realised—this is the love of which the woman of the new age is also dreaming.

George Sand—like the followers of St. Simon, and like the modern feminists—looked upon freedom in love as the central point in the woman’s question. Like George Sand, the feminism of the present day asserts the right of free thought against the creed of authority in every field; the solidarity of mankind and the cause of peace against the patriotism of militarism; social reform against the existing relations of society. The American-English-Scandinavian woman’s question—whose supreme confession of faith is still J. S. Mill’s book, published in 1854, on The Subjection of Women—has, on the other hand, overlooked to a great extent erotic, religious, and social emancipation, and asserted only woman’s rights as a citizen. Thus, especially in Scandinavia, the new gospel of love has had to encounter from the leaders of emancipation, now indifference, now resentment.

Ridicule and resentment from men have also fallen to the lot of the women’s demand for a new love. With arguments, for which Schopenhauer and Hartmann once provided the philosophical formulÆ, it has been shown that soulful love is an illusion of nature, and that the unity in love, which woman now claims of man, demands sacrifices which are opposed to his physiological and psychological nature.

Undisturbed by ridicule and resentment, however, the women of the new age have continued to preach the love of their dreams—which is also that of the dreams of poets.

For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality! Century after century, poetry sets forth the loftiness of love. But if anyone in everyday prose ventures to say that love may become an ever loftier emotion, then this is called extravagance; for it does not occur to the people of the present day to regard poetry as prophetic.

The new love is still the natural attraction of man and woman to each other for the continuance of the race. It is still the desire of the active human being to relieve through comradeship the hardships of another and of himself at the same time. But above this eternal nature of love, beyond this primeval cause of marriage, another longing has grown with increasing strength. This is not directed towards the continuance of the race. It has sprung from man’s sense of loneliness within his race, a loneliness which is ever greater in proportion as his soul is exceptional. It is the pining for that human soul which is to release our own from this torment of solitude; a torment which was formerly allayed by repose in God, but which now seeks its rest with an equal, with a soul that has itself lain wakeful with eyelids heated from the same longing; a soul empowered by love to the miracle of redeeming our soul—as itself by ours is redeemed—from the sense of being a stranger upon earth; a soul before whose warmth our own lets fall the covering that the world’s coldness has imposed upon it and shows its secrets and its glories without shame. Richard Dehmel has summed this up in two immortal lines:

The same feeling has possessed many a man before our time. One of them was EugÈne Delacroix, who speaks in his journal of the pain of only being able to show to each of his friends the aspect of himself which that friend understood, and of thus being obliged to become another for each of them, without ever feeling himself completely understood; a suffering for which he only knew one remedy, une Épouse qui est de votre force.

But what is new about it is that this sentiment has become diffused and has taken shape in the consciousness of the many; that it is beginning to set its stamp upon the whole spirit of the age.

Meanwhile, mankind continues to be guided by erotic impulses which lie deep below its conscious erotic needs. Man’s senses are spurred by a desire which thrusts aside that of the soul. The culture of the idea of love is far in advance of the instincts of love. And thus our time is brimful of love-conflicts.

To this must be added that the increased sensibility of modern man has rendered him more and more inclined to wear masks, protective disguises, artistically decorated armour. Protection is indispensable, since no one would be able to endure life if he were hourly seeing the ill-bound or still open wounds of others, or feeling his own touched by anyone. Existence would lose much of its excitement without secrets, suspected or unsuspected, in the destinies and souls of men. But at the same time this protection renders love’s struggle to penetrate appearances more and more difficult. Therefore a certain form of “flirtation” serves as the attempt of awakening love to tear off the mask, to outwit the protective disguise, a game of fence which aims at the joints of the tight-fitting armour.

But the attempts are often unsuccessful and life is more and more crowded with destinies that have miscarried, while more and more people wring their hands in solitude over what might have been! Man feels more deeply than ever before that life gave him a poor portion, when his love has been nothing but sinking in an embrace. An ever greater number know that love is absorption into that spirit, in which one’s own finds its foothold without losing its freedom; the nearness of that heart which stills the disquiet in our own; that attentive ear which catches what is unspoken and unspeakable; the clear sight of those eyes which see the realisation of our best possibilities; the touch of those hands which, dying, we would feel closed on our own.

When two souls have joys which the senses share, and when the senses have delights which the souls ennoble, then the result is neither desire nor friendship. Both have been absorbed in a new feeling, not to be compared with either taken by itself, just as the air is incomparable with its component elements. Nitrogen is not air, nor is oxygen; sensuousness is not love, nor is sympathy. In combination they are the air of life and love. If either of the component elements is in the wrong proportion to the other, then love—like air—becomes too heavy or too rarefied. But as the proportions between oxygen and nitrogen may within a wide limit vary without disadvantage, so also may the components of love. Affinity of soul is doubtless the most enduring element in love, but not therefore the only valuable one; the love that fills life with intoxication is separated from even the most lofty friendship by an ocean as deep as that which divides the India of legend from utilitarian America—a lifetime in which will not equal a single day in the other!

Great love arises only when desire of a being of the other sex coalesces with the longing for a soul of one’s own kind. It is like fire, the hotter it is, the purer; and differs from the ardour of desire as the white heat of a smelting-furnace differs from the ruddy, smoking flames of a torch carried along the streets.

The constantly increased importance of sympathy in the life of the soul finds expression, however, at the present time within the feminine world in an over-estimation of friendship, both between one woman and another and in relation to love. A passionate worship between persons of the same age—or of an elder by a younger member of the same sex—is among women as among men the customary and beautiful morning glow of love, which always pales after sunrise. An entirely personal, great friendship is, on the other hand, as rare as a great love, and equally rare among women as among men. Those who expect to find the complement of their being in friendship have therefore no greater prospect of attaining the essential in this sphere, and moreover they run the risk of missing it in the sphere of love, through shutting themselves off from or impoverishing themselves of love’s emotions. The women of older times also cultivated friendship. But they did not content themselves with it in the place of love. And if women were once seriously to do this, then winter would have come upon the world. The way of evolution is to demand of love all that friendship affords—and infinitely more! But the rich spiritual intercourse between female fellow-workers and fellow-students, as also between comrades of different sexes, is now preparing the third historical stage of development, that of individual sympathy. It is true that great love has been individually sympathetic in all ages. What is new is that an ever greater number of spirits are guided by the same need; that the possibility of great love has become apparent to many, not only to a chosen few. Just as we have been able to gauge the revival of love by the diminution of marriages of convenience, by the recognition of young people’s liberty of choice, and by the popular condemnation of marriages for money, so can we now measure the strength of the new revival by other, equally significant phenomena; those, namely, called “the new immorality.” It has been said with truth that love as it now is—the great psychological reality with which one has to reckon—in its present complicated, manifold, and refined condition, is the result of all the progress of human activity: of the victory of intelligence and sentiment over crude force, of the transformation in the relations between man and woman which new economic, religious, and ethical ideas have brought about; of the growing desire for inward and outward beauty, of the will to ennoble the race, and other causes. But among these we have not named the most important, that in which many now see a sign of degeneration, but which is really one of development, the cause on which rests the hope of the final abolition of erotic dualism: the conciliation of the excessive opposition of sex.

So long as man and woman are so divided in their erotic needs as is at present often the case, love will be the “everlasting conflict” described by those poets and thinkers who see only the immediate present, without faith in the development of love or mankind’s education in loving; for in the midst of the age of evolutionism men neither think nor feel according to its doctrines. To him, however, who does so feel, nothing is more certain than that “the everlasting conflict” will one day end in the conclusion of peace.

The sceptics just referred to smile ambiguously at the mention of friendship between women, as at that of the refinement and craving for sympathy in woman’s love. It is not until a mistress or a wife, misunderstood in the depths of her being, leaves him, that such a man discovers that the being he believed himself to be making entirely happy, has not even had her senses satisfied—since the soul received nothing from the senses and gave them nothing.

Those men—for the rest often men of fine culture—of whom this is true, are generally verging on middle age. Among men comparatively young, on the other hand, the erotic longing is often as refined and craves as much for sympathy, as with women, although it is still rare for the man to possess that balance between soul and senses which his equal in the other sex has attained. That women now venture to acknowledge that they possess erotic senses, while men are beginning to discover erotically that they have souls; that woman demands feelings in a man and he ideas in her—this is the great and happy sign of the times. Sensitive young men of the present day suffer perhaps as much as their sisters when loved only for their sex, not personally and on account of their personality. They for their part love just that womanly individuality for which they provide freedom of movement, instead of—as their own fathers did—trying to assimilate it to their own.

On the highest plane—as on the lowest—the similarities between man’s love and woman’s are already greater than the dissimilarities; and there may be more danger to love in the growing likeness between the sexes than in continued unlikeness. Man becomes a human being—and woman likewise—at the cost of his secondary sexual characters. There are already some who think that the close of psychical development will present the same phenomenon as the beginning of physical development, namely, that the embryo at a certain stage is neither male nor female but includes both possibilities!

The romanticists, F. Schlegel in particular, lay stress upon the distinction that, while the ancients put greatness of heart, nobility of mind, and strength of soul above the purely sexual qualities, the moderns have made woman one-sidedly feminine and man one-sidedly masculine, and assert that this extreme view on both sides must be got rid of in order to arrive at morality, beauty, and harmony in sexual relations; a view which was also that of Schleiermacher. And if we will see a deeper meaning in the tale of Aristophanes of the cloven human being, it will be the same that an apocryphal tradition ascribes to Jesus, in the saying that “the kingdom of God is at hand when the two again become one.” That Plato already emphasises the sufferings imposed on both halves of the being by the “cleavage,” is evidence of the commencement of development of love; for this development has progressed through the increasing opposition of the sexes, with the passion and the pain it has caused. Now at last the moment has arrived when the divided sections again converge towards a higher unity.

In reality, this desirable conciliation of sexual opposition is proceeding with such rapidity that there might be a fear of its becoming a danger to love in a near future, if the psychical opposition of sex were not always dependent finally on the physical, and if the modern man and woman were not becoming simultaneously more and more individualised.

And it is in this circumstance that the future possibilities of great love lie. Individualisation is already so powerful that a thoughtful person is ever more inclined to check himself when the abstract expressions “man” and “woman” escape his lips. For already men and women respectively differ among themselves almost as much as the two sexes from each other. And as a compensation for the enfeebling through conciliation of universal erotic attraction, we have the charm of individual contrasts. Love’s spiritual longing—to be resolved together with another soul into a higher harmony—will not be enfeebled, but, on the contrary, will be enhanced in proportion as this contrast is more personal.

A. Rodin—who like every great Frenchman understands great love—has glorified it in his statue of a pair of lovers, who have through each other become more perfect beings than either could have been alone. Rodin makes the man thoroughly masculine, the woman thoroughly feminine, while each line in their two figures shows primitive force ennobled into spiritual power, and love as the consummation of the human man and the human woman.

When life from time to time shows us this proud and beautiful vision, then we are in the presence of a happiness which is overpoweringly great. For as an economical housewife shuts out the sunlight, so life often lets fall the curtain of death when happiness shines; or indeed men kill their own happiness through instincts surviving from a lower stage.

Chief of these is that instinct which makes the force of primitive animality still erotically attractive even to the spiritually sensitive. Men and women with this power of elementary passion, intoxicate because they are themselves intoxicated, because, without being checked by any consideration or held back by the soul, they give themselves up wholly and hotly to the moment. It is as superficial a psychology to say that Don Juan’s reputation makes him irresistible as that conquest of Cleopatra is tempting because it is also conquest over CÆsar. No, the power of these natures lies in their undivided, unscrupulous will to use all the resources of their being to attain their end. And only that by which one’s whole being is held at the moment has the power of holding others. Thus the question is answered

Soulful people, especially women, have hitherto only loved partially. But when sensuousness—in alliance with the mission of the race—regains its ancient dignity, then the power of giving erotic rapture will not be the monopoly of him who is inhuman in his love. The wise virgins’ deadly sin against love is that they disdained to learn of the foolish ones the secret of fascination; that they would know none of the thousand things that bind a man’s senses or lay hold on his soul; that they regarded the power to please as equivalent to the will to betray. When all women who can love are also able to make goodness fascinating and completeness of personality intoxicating, then Imogen will conquer Cleopatra.

As yet the charming ones are not always good, the good not always charming, and the majority neither good nor charming. During this transition between an old and a new womanliness it is natural that she should be strongest who unites in herself

From observation of love’s realisation in marriage—as it is still realised in the majority of cases—young women have been more and more possessed by a disinclination to wed. They wish for the love of their dreams or none at all. A lower claim, a poorer gift of love has for them no value which can be compared with their free personal life. To the man who only seeks her lips but does not listen to the words from them, who longs for her embrace but smiles or frowns when she reveals the nature of her soul, such a woman has nothing to give. Her love is now filled with the whole nourishing force of her human nature, replete with the whole sap of her woman’s nature, and she desires that the sacrament she thus dispenses shall be received with devotion.

She will no longer be captured like a fortress or hunted like a quarry; nor will she like a placid lake await the stream that seeks its way to her embrace. A stream herself, she will go her own way to meet the other stream.

We live in a period of spiritual reformation of immense importance in the history of the world. Every human being who himself has soul is being more and more penetrated by the sense of the mysterious effects of elective affinities; of sympathetic and antipathetic influences; of subconscious powers, above all in the erotic sphere. Sensations of the erotically dÆmonic are not new. But they were formerly condemned to as great an extent as they are now recognised and indeed sometimes assisted. It is this exquisite sensitiveness, these vibrating nerves, these changing moods, this irritability of sensation that the woman—like the man—of the present day has acquired as her superiority, her gain through culture, her right of precedence before any other generation. But this new wealth involves innumerable new conflicts. The senses go their own way and are attracted where the soul is estranged, or repelled although the heart is filled with tenderness. Until the physiology and psychology of loathing are understood, we shall not have gone far towards the solution of the erotic problem. Every day—and night—these innumerable influences, conscious or unconscious, are at work transforming the feelings of married people and lovers. And although our time is becoming increasingly conscious of this, it does not yet understand either how to counteract the dangerous or encourage the favourable influence of the important trifles of married life.

Only the foremost of women with a genius for love have arrived at that degree of sensitiveness which makes it impossible for them to give or receive anything in love without the feeling which one of Charlotte BrontË’s women expresses in the words: You fit me into the finest fibre of my being.

Every developed modern woman wishes to be loved not en mÂle but en artiste. Only a man whom she feels to possess an artist’s joy in her, and who shows this joy in discreet and delicate contact with her soul as with her body, can retain the love of the modern woman. She will belong only to a man who longs for her always, even when he holds her in his arms. And when such a woman exclaims: “You desire me, but you cannot caress, you cannot listen ...” then that man is doomed.

Modern woman’s love differs from that of older times by, amongst other things, the insatiability of its demand for completeness and perfection in itself, and for corresponding completeness and perfection in the feeling of the man.

Our soul is doubtless often deeper, but occasionally also shallower, than our conscious existence and will. Therefore it may happen that the new love in all its force exists in a woman who is unconscious of her own erotic greatness, while, on the other hand, another, who desires it with all her will, perhaps may lack the depth of feeling, the instinctive sureness of choice.

The women of the present day learn everything and arrive at much, even at the finest ideas of love. But, full of insight as they are into the ars amandi, have modern women indeed learned how with all their soul, all their strength, and all their mind to love? Their mothers and grandmothers—on a much lower plane of conscious erotic idealism—knew of only one object: that of making their husbands happy. This then meant that the wife ought to submit to everything and ask for nothing; to serve her husband’s ends untiringly, even when she did not understand them, and to receive with gratitude any crumbs of his personality that might fall to her from the table to which his friends were bidden to feast. But what watchful tenderness, what dignified desire to please, what fair gladness could not the finest of these spiritually ignored women develop!

The new man lives in a dream of the new woman, and she, in a dream of the new man. But when they actually find one another it frequently results that two highly developed brains together analyse love, or that two worn-out nervous systems fight out a disintegrating battle over love. The whole thing usually ends in each of them seeking peace with some surviving incarnation of the old Adam and the eternal Eve. But not with a clear conscience; for they are continually aware that they were intended for the new experience, although their powers of loving were small while their ideas of love were great.

Not until the spring rain of the new ideas has fallen sufficiently to penetrate the roots and rise as sap in the tree of life, will a greater happiness grow from the new love, which is not to be blamed because men have dreamed it greater than they themselves are at present.

Individualism has made love deeper and at the same time increased its difficulties. It has called forth an enhanced consciousness of our own nature, our own moods; it has created new spiritual conditions and—as already pointed out—set in vibration innumerable formerly latent feelings of pleasure and aversion. But our personal irritable sensitiveness has not yet been developed to the point of a corresponding delicacy of feeling for the equally sensitive spiritual life of others. The capacity for giving and sacrificing has not grown at an equal pace with that of accepting and demanding. Of love’s double heart-beat—the finding one’s self, and the forgetting one’s self in another—the first is now considerably more advanced than the second. Not until those women who are absorbed in self-analysis combine their own personal store of life’s riches, their individual diversity, their unique spirituality with the sunny, healthy peace, the self-sacrificing devotion of older times, will their new development render them more powerful than the women who preceded them. It is a healthy sign that men and women exchange experiences and ideas on these subjects with a frankness that was never known before; that they are much less affected before marriage, as women indeed have ceased to be so after marriage. There was a heroic kind of affectation, of which Mrs. Carlyle was the typical example, but in itself it was borrowed from man’s ethical development. Nevertheless one would often wish that the young wives of the present day possessed more of the old-fashioned gift of conceding the desires of the beloved with a happy smile, instead of insisting on their own. The modern woman will not feign anything for the sake of occasional peace or understanding. And she is right—when anything of real importance in the domain of ideas or will is at stake; she is doubly right in holding that all the lies and ruses which married “happiness” enforced on the wives of an older time were degrading to both parties; that what was thus gained was no real gain. Nothing is more true than that the souls which are parted by a lack of perfect frankness never belonged to one another; that complete mutual confidence is the true sign of union. Nothing could be wiser than the modern woman’s desire to see life with her own eyes, not—as was the case with the women who went before her—only with those of a husband. But has she also retained the power of seeing everything with the thought of what the loved one’s eyes will find in it?

Upon the answer to these questions of conscience will depend the success of the new woman in guiding the development of love in the direction of her will. For only by herself loving better will she gradually humanise man’s passion and liberate it from the blind force of the blood, which makes of the capercailzie’s play or the rivalry of stags a spectacle beautiful in its animality, but, on the other hand, renders man’s love bestial. Those who think that the healthy strength of nature will be thereby enfeebled are as foolish as those who try to prove that the artistic instinct in the woodcock’s note is healthier and stronger than that which created Beethoven’s symphonies.

But it is not sufficient that woman should take the lead and appoint the goal. She must herself be developed for the task, and that not only in the direction just mentioned. Her soul is as yet no sure guide to her senses, nor her senses to her soul. So much the less can she then be a guide to man’s soul or senses, which moreover she frequently fails to understand and therefore unhesitatingly condemns—for the sins to which she herself has not unfrequently seduced him!

The new woman demands purity of man. But has she any suspicion as to how her treatment, on the one hand, of the awkward and uncertain youth, on the other, of the experienced and confident “lady-killer” type, acts upon the former, who is perhaps striving after erotic purity in the hope of being rewarded by the happy smile of a woman, but who sees that woman treat him with haughty commiseration while, on the other hand, she regards the leopard’s spots of his rival with admiration? One may ask whether all young women who now express their detestation of the impurity in man’s sexual habits are themselves guided only by a soft and noble joy in giving pleasure. Do they never permit themselves the most despicable of hypocrisies, that of love?

So long as “pure” women take pleasure in the cruel sport of the cat; so long as with the facile changes of mood of the serpentine dancer they evade the responsibilities of their flirtations; so long as they delight in provoking jealousy as a homage to themselves, so long will they be helping to brew the hell-broth around which men will celebrate the witches’ sabbath in the company of the bat-winged bevies of the night.

There are more men led astray by “pure” than by “impure” women.

And not even those women who are pure in the true sense of the word are free from blame in this. Woman—for whom love is a life-and-death matter in a much deeper sense than for man—experiences on the approach of love those tremblings that follow a sunrise for which one has lain awake and waited. Her physico-psychical timidity takes on by turns the expressions, incomprehensible to the man who loves, of dumb avoidance, of abrupt change, of empty girlish giggling, of sullen misunderstanding. And all that is contradictory—not that which is mysterious—in woman stirs the unrest in a man’s blood.

The modern woman’s great distress has been the discovery of the dissimilarity between her own erotic nature and that of man; or rather, she has refused and still refuses to make this discovery and thinks that only the custom of society—with its wholesome severity towards her, its reckless leniency towards him—has brought about the difference which exists and which she would abolish. But while one group proposes to do so by demanding feminine chastity of the man, the other would claim masculine freedom for the woman.

The book world is now full of works on purity, written by men as well as women, of literary tone and otherwise. Now it is the story of a woman who breaks with the man she loves when he confesses his past; now that of a woman who forces her lover to marry another because the latter has borne him a child; and so on to infinity. Finally there is one who takes her life from grief over her husband’s past, which she thinks will ruin their future. Literature is the roll of the drum which announces the approach of the troop—that army of strong women who are to educate men to chastity by denying them their love.

But will it really be the Amazons who will play the leading part in the struggle against man’s erotic dualism? Will not perhaps wisdom be found also in this case in the hope of being able to conquer the evil with the good, not the evil with the worse, by allowing a man awakened by love to the desire of unity to turn again to disunion?

Would not woman accomplish more in the renovation of morals if she stayed with the man she loves, so as with her whole being to let him learn how a woman can suffer and be made happy through a man? The means of salvation for men suffering under erotic dualism may well be an increase of tenderly chaste, delicately feeling, and kindly wise wives. Even such a mother, sister, or friend is a strength to a man. But only the wife who remains a mistress can be sure of victory.

It is true that she cannot efface her husband’s past. But she can create together with him a new and stronger generation. The man who knows what his beloved has suffered through his past; who has seen the wings of her courage lose something of their power, her confidence something of its smile, her joy something of its playfulness—he will in time teach his sons that a man may certainly become once more strong and healthy through happiness in love, but that he cannot win so beautiful and sure a happiness as self-control can prepare; such queenly pride as his victory might have given the loved one, he will never see in her. But if woman is to help man’s struggle for purity, she must for her share take another view of what has been degrading to man’s nature and what has not.

A woman who marries a widower has to go through a pain which will be deep in proportion as her love is personal. She will then wish to be not only her husband’s last, but also his first love; she suffers from all the memories they have not in common. She would fain have sat by his cradle and received his first smile; she longs to have played with him as a sister, to have shared as a friend his troubles and his joys. She envies all who have been able to see him at those stages of his life and in those spiritual conditions that she has not seen. Above all she envies the woman who first saw him made happy by the love she gave him.

But all these sufferings do not bring her to regard the beloved as morally sunken, because before her he has been the husband of another woman. And the same must hold good of earlier relations of love. The man may have developed, through a former marriage or free connection, his powers of giving a personal love, or he may, in the same way, have lost them. If no baseness is connected with these earlier experiences, if he has not degraded himself to voluntary division of his erotic nature—and bought love is always such a degradation—or to contemptible duplicity; if he has not treated any woman as a means, but received and given personality, then he does not enter “impure” into his marriage, even if he has not evidence of abstinence.

At present it is unfortunately often the case that men enter into marriage with deep stains from earlier connections, and it is this circumstance that gives the demand for purity its general applicability.

During each new phase of the development of love women, probably earlier and certainly more consciously than men, have connected the demand for unity with the idea of love. The sense of unity is quite another and a far later phenomenon than monogamy. The enforced fidelity in monogamy, the voluntary fidelity in love, gave rise in woman first to control of desire, then to the weakening of desire through control. Thus by degrees erotic unity became with many women an organic condition, or, as is significantly said, a physical necessity. Not with all, not even with the majority, but still sufficiently frequently to enable us to call the unity of soul and senses in love—as also a lifelong fidelity in a single love—the provision of nature for innumerable women, while with men both are still exceptions so rarely to be met with that they are often called unnatural. But he who concludes from this that one has only to demand the same of men for the effect to be the same, is attributing the same effect to two different causes. For the erotic conditions of man and woman are and will remain different causes. The purity which a man is capable of attaining must always, therefore, to a certain degree be different from a woman’s, but not on that account of less worth. He will certainly remain more polygamous than she, but this does not involve a division of himself in the satisfaction of his erotic needs. Love possesses, nay, besets, dominates, and determines woman’s whole being in an entirely different way from man’s. He is more strongly possessed at rapidly passing moments, by the erotic emotion, but at the same time he liberates himself more quickly and completely. On the other hand, in the degree in which a woman is womanly, is she completely determined by love. This gives a unity, completeness, and equilibrium to her sensuousness which man lacks. When he is warm, he often believes woman is cool; when he sees her warm, he thinks that she is so in the same way as himself. Women are undoubtedly to be found, shifting, like men, between sudden ardour and abrupt chill, and these women are ever the most exciting erotically. With the majority of women, however, love is, for the reasons already given, a constant warmth, a never-quenched fervour. But this makes the woman suffer through the man, who in the intervals of his passion is so much more tranquil than she, so little capable of her unremitting tenderness. Therefore she seldom finds herself occupying his thoughts and feelings so completely as he occupies hers.

A woman has aptly said that “it is precisely woman’s greater sensuousness that makes her less sensuous than man: on account of motherhood—and all that it implies—she is sensuous, so to speak, from head to foot and chronically, while man is so only acutely and locally.” If one transfers one’s thoughts from erotics to motherhood, the truth of this will at once be clear: the feeling of motherhood is the most thoroughly sensuous and therefore the most thoroughly soulful of emotions; the same transport of the senses in which the mother exclaims that she could “eat” her child, expresses itself in the affection which would prompt her to die for it. But the author just quoted goes on to consider that even with men the erotic emotions could be transposed or released in many ways besides the one which to most of them still represents the whole expression of “love.” What Rousseau revealed to his unbelieving contemporaries will perhaps one day become true in a psycho-physical sense: that a look may fill a lover with voluptuousness; that the great emotions are the chief conditions of love’s happiness; that the lightest touch of the loved one’s hand gives greater bliss than the possession of the most beautiful women without love—feelings which all great lovers in all times have confirmed, and as to which even the most contrary natures give the same testimony. The peasant’s love, which knows nothing of caresses, comes lower in the scale of happiness than that of the cultivated person, who finds in love all the refined delights of the senses; and this again is far below the happiness of those who even in the encounter of two ideas or two moods can experience all the transport of love.

The conviction that sensuousness can only be controlled through being spiritualised is what directs those women who are now hoping to convert men, not to the duty of monogamy, but to the joy of unity.

Before woman’s will could thus become conscious, her long struggle for liberation had to take place. Marriage had to cease to be a trade among the upper classes, as prostitution still is among the hungry lower classes. Love must have become free at least in the sense that a woman had no choice but charity from her family or forced sale to her husband; her personality must have attained consideration, not only for her value as a woman and dignity as a human being, but also individually. Not until—by her own labour and activity—she no longer exclusively depended on a man’s courtship for both her livelihood and her life’s destiny, did woman’s salvation come to be, not “that the man wills” (Nietzsche), but that she herself can exercise her will. Language already reflects the change of custom. We seldom hear it asked nowadays of a woman: Why has she not married? but it is all the more frequently enquired: What has her love-story been, since she has never married?

Here also the line of development is a zigzag. Women sometimes act as though their whole liberation was of no avail. But in spite of much that is contradictory, the evolution of love—above all through the new woman’s claims of love—is to him who stands high enough to have a full view of the situation, the most certain of realities.

Evidence of this evolution can be found in life as well as in literature, where it now takes every kind of form, from experiences translated into genuine poetry down to the productions which tempt one to think that these people have only loved to get “copy” for a book. The feminine fiction of the present day reminds one of a relief on a sacrificial altar in the Roman Forum, where the ox, the sheep, and the pig proceed in file to meet the knife. Hecatombs of these animals—in the likeness of husbands or lovers—are now sacrificed to Eros by the new woman. It may not be very long before the vow of fidelity is exchanged for an oath of silence and the marriage contract contains a provision that in case of a rupture love-letters are not to be used as literature.

No doubt it will ever remain true that a living book on love is never written with other ink than blood. But such books are not those which resemble a trial in which the prosecutor, witness, judge, and executioner are united in one person.

But whether powerful or weak, discreet or audacious, noble or ignoble—the new woman’s books are always instructive to those who seek to follow the course of love’s evolution.

The great danger to this evolution is that women never take sufficient account of sensuousness, nor men of spirituality. And it is especially woman who now one-sidedly applies her own erotic nature—with its warm penetration, its completeness that frees it from temptation—as the ethical and erotic standard for that of man with its sudden heat, its dangerous incompleteness.

It is without doubt a feminine exaggeration to say that a “pure” woman only feels the force of her sex’s need when she loves. But the enormous difference between her and man is that she cannot obey this need without loving. It is doubtless true that besides her love a woman may have a calling in life. But the profound distinction between her and man is at present this: that he more often gives of his best as a creator than as a lover—while for her the reverse is nearly always the case. And while thus man is appraised by himself and others according to his work, woman in her heart values herself—and wishes to be valued—according to her love. Not until this is fully appreciated and working for happiness does she feel her own worth. It is no doubt true that woman also wishes to be made happy by man through her senses. But while this longing in her not unfrequently awakes long after she already loves a man so that she could give her life for him, with man the desire to possess a woman often awakes before he even loves her enough to give his little finger for her. That with women love usually proceeds from the soul to the senses and sometimes does not reach so far; that with man it usually proceeds from the senses to the soul and sometimes never completes the journey—this is for both the most painful of the existing distinctions between man and woman. It is quite certain that both man and woman are humbled by their great love, and that the knowledge of having awakened reciprocal love turns even the freethinker into a believer in miracles. But man often conceals his humility behind a security which wounds the woman; she, on the other hand, hides hers in an uncertainty which wounds the man. And from this difference of instinct arises a new kind of complication, when man also has begun to desire an unspoken understanding on the part of woman; when he becomes convinced of her love only when she has guessed this and loved his reticence itself. But against this conscious and refined will of the modern man stands his hereditary instinct of a conqueror. And no woman is more sure of all the older as well as all the newer sufferings of love than she who really acts according to the words of her lover: that he will accept love only from a woman who herself has the courage to declare it to him. For, on the other side, the primitive desire of being captured survives in woman. And therefore also her strongest instincts come into conflict with her newly acquired courage in action.

For all these reasons it is difficult for a person of the present day to believe himself loved or to know that he is loved.

And it is this which will preserve to love its excitement, even when the animal habits—with pursuit on one side and flight on the other—have gradually ceased. Conflict and the intoxication of victory will always form a part of the vital stimulation and pleasurable emotion of love,—but they will be removed to a higher plane. Man’s forward rush to win a woman who perhaps would not otherwise have remarked him; woman’s turning aside to egg the man on, or else to defend in some measure the independent decision of her feelings, will be transformed by the desire of each to wait until the other has chosen. The erotic tension will then be released in the contest for the most refined expressions of sympathy, the most convincing assurances of comprehension, the most rapidly vibrating sensitiveness to the other’s moods, the fullest communication of confidence. Victory will mean a constantly deeper penetration into the other’s nature, an ever richer fulness and joy in the communication of one’s own; a constantly growing faith as regards what is mysterious, and a like gratitude for what is revealed. The stimulation will be renewed daily in moods the transitions of which are as imperceptible as those of the evening sky from the reddest gold to the purest white; in the border lines of sympathy and antipathy, now fine as a straw, now broad as a river. It will be renewed through the test of innumerable uniting and repellent emotions, as rapidly and irrevocably decisive as the fall of a star in space, or of a silver piece in the river.

And this tension of married life will not be relaxed as now by the puffed-up arrogance of proprietorship on the part of the man or by dull complaisance on that of the woman. Since all sense of happiness is connected with the exertion of force to attain an end and with the equilibrium that results from its attainment, it has been the misfortune of love that courtship has absorbed all the tension, and married life the subsequent equilibrium. Only the sense of impending loss—through life or through death—has, as a rule, evoked a new spiritual tension. This, for reasons mentioned above, has especially concerned the husband. Wives have often suffered long from the self-satisfied comfort of the daily life of marriage before they have resigned the peace of consummation, the equilibrium without movement, which was their dream of happiness.

But now women will no longer resign, nor allow themselves to be cheated of life. More and more their demand for a new love becomes one with the demand for a new marriage, the chief value of which will not, as now, consist in “security and calm.”

Woman knows—and man still more—that it is in periods of calm, when all vital stimulation is wanting, that the temptation comes to seek it in new relations. But at the same time they are beginning to see that when one and the same feeling affords an unceasing excitement—through the desire of constantly attaining higher conditions of that feeling—then such temptation becomes of necessity less and less dangerous, simply because the human soul can only with great difficulty transfer the spiritual wealth it has accumulated in one place. Love in its impersonal form is movable capital, easily realised. In its personal form, on the other hand, it is fixed property, which increases in value the more one sinks in it, and which, owing to its very nature, is difficult to disperse.

Whenever a woman has captivated a man with a lifelong fascination, the secret has been that he has never exhausted her; that she “has not been one, but a thousand” (G. Heiberg); not a more or less beautiful variation on the eternal theme of the female sex, but a music in which he has found the wealth of inexhaustibility, the enticement of impenetrability, while she has given him an incomparable happiness of the senses. The more the modern woman acquires courage for a love as rich in the senses as in the soul, the more complicated and self-inclosed her personality becomes, the more will she obtain that power which is now only the fortunate advantage of the exceptional.

Man tells woman that her new way of love is opposed not only to man’s nature but to the welfare of the new generation.

She answers that great love doubtless betrays a childish lack of understanding in all departments of worldly wisdom, but that in its own sphere—with all its riddles and problems—it is godlike wisdom, the gift of divining, the power of working miracles; that the only thing needful in order that love may re-create the race is that it shall become an even greater vital force, through mankind investing it with more and more of its spiritual power.

Even at the present day couples are to be found who are inspired by great love. They show an insatiable desire for all the riches of life, so as to have the means of being regally lavish towards each other. Neither defrauds the other of so much as a dewdrop. The fervour they give one another, the freedom they possess through one another, make the space that surrounds them warm and ample. Love is constantly giving them new impulses, new powers and new employment for their powers, whether these are directed inwards to home life or outwards to that of society. And thus the happiness, which for themselves is the source of life, becomes also a tributary stream by which the happiness of all is raised. The power of great love to enhance a person’s value for mankind can only be compared with the glow of religious faith or the creative joy of genius, but surpasses both in universal life-enhancing properties. Sorrow may sometimes make a person more tender towards the sufferings of others, more actively benevolent than happiness with its concentration upon self. But sorrow never led the soul to those heights and depths, to those inspirations and revelations of universal life, to that kneeling gratitude before the mystery of life, to which the piety of great love leads it.

Like faith, this piety sanctifies all things. It gives significance to attention bestowed on one’s self, since

It combines the most trifling things of life into an intelligent whole. He who is loved and loves in this way bears the same stamp as the Christian mystic, who grows ever clearer and yet more rich in mystery; ever fuller of life and yet calmer; ever more introspective and yet more radiant.

There are some who think that this state is visionary and unnatural.

But the truth—for everyone who has beheld it—is that le vrai amour est simple comme un bas relief antique. Such a relief, which before all others corresponds to the image, is to be found in the Naples museum. It shows a man and a woman, standing still on either side of a tree. An artist of antiquity may have already foreseen all the significance that a son of our time interpreted, when he placed a youth and a maiden beneath the tree of life with a cloven apple in their hands: they divided the apple of life and ate it together....

For a couple who share it thus, everyday life will scintillate with little delights as a wheat-field at midsummer with cornflowers; and the high days will be white with joy as a spring garden with fruit blossoms. A couple who live thus will be able to play so that beyond their sport will always be the calm of tenderness; to smile so that behind their smiles will always lie an easily-aroused seriousness. Unless death interrupts them they will thus build up their life together as the Gothic cathedrals were built: buttress upon buttress, arch above arch, ornament within ornament, until finally the gilding of the topmost spire catches the last rays of the sunset.

Thus great love already gives to two human beings what only completed development can give to mankind as a whole: unity between senses and soul, desire and duty, self-assertion and self-devotion, between the individual and the race, the present moment and the future.

This condition—in which every advantage gained becomes a gift and every gift a profit; in which are united a continual emotion and a calm peace—is even now that which dreamers await as that of the third kingdom.2