The desire of the young to abolish prostitution by means of love’s freedom has already been adduced as one of the proofs of the higher development of sexual morality. Another such proof is the desire of the present day to abolish adultery by means of free divorce.

The preachers of monogamy are afraid that this desire will prepare the way for an open polygamy, instead of that which at present is at least secret. In the press and in the pulpit, in schoolrooms and lecture-rooms, modern literature is blamed for this “new immorality.”

And yet we all know that long before our time, married men and their sons in country houses were too often ready to seduce the wives and daughters of their dependents as well as the servants of the house. The wives and mothers of these gentlemen were frequently not ignorant of this—but they were praised for their wisdom when they pretended to suspect nothing. It was a matter of common knowledge that not a few married men and married women had mistresses and lovers within their own social circle; and every one knew that in the towns many men, during or before marriage, had illegitimate families.

Serious preachers of morality doubtless reply that they no more condone this secret adultery than they would an open one; that they see in one and the other a manifestation of that power of sin which only religion can vanquish. We have the right then to ask, whether within their own ranks—among clergymen, missionaries, readers—no similar transgressions occur.

The honest ones answer Yes, but point out that this causes shame among their fellow-Christians, and that these believers themselves acknowledge that they have sinned. Such men of the world, who play the hypocrite to retain their respectability, do the same thing. But the great danger to society first comes in when free-thinkers with no qualms of conscience commit, and authors without moral indignation describe, the sin. This it is that degrades the ideal of morality.

Here we are at the very cross-roads of the old and the new morality.

The champions of the latter go on to ask whether all adulterers—children of this world as well as children of God—in their innermost consciousness really feel themselves to be sinners. The need which impelled them was perhaps so imperious that it justified them before their own conscience in choosing a lesser evil in preference to a greater, when—from one cause or another—they could not or ought not to satisfy the need in their marriage.

And if this be so, then the exponents of the new morality may have grounds for their opinion: that self-control cannot and must not be the only answer to all the problems of sexual life; that a solution must be found which shall by degrees prevent men from wasting, either in unchastity or in a celibacy disguised as marriage, the strength which belongs to the race. The solution can only be this, that we not only assert love’s freedom to unite without external tie, but also man’s right more freely than at present to loosen the tie, when real union is no longer possible.

When speaking of love’s selection, it was put forward that a growing insight into the value and conditions of the enhancement of the race might produce cases where a marriage could be openly broken without therefore being dissolved. But the true line of development will quite certainly be this: that divorce will be free, depending solely on the will of both parties or of one, maintained for a certain time; that public opinion as regards a dissolved marriage will take the broader view that it has already acquired in the question of a broken engagement, which at one time was thought just as humiliating as a divorce is now.

With ever-growing seriousness the new conception of morality is affirmed: that the race does not exist for the sake of monogamy, but monogamy for the sake of the race; that mankind is therefore master of monogamy, to preserve or to abolish it.

Even the advocates of free divorce know well enough that it will involve abuses. But at the same time they know that there is no better proof of man’s incredible indolence of mind than the uneasiness produced by the thought of possible abuses resulting from a new social form, while the ancient abuses are tolerated with the dullest tranquillity.

Whatever abuses free divorce may involve, they cannot often be worse than those which marriage has produced and still produces—marriage, which is degraded to the coarsest sexual habits, the most shameless traffic, the most agonising soul-murders, the most inhuman cruelties, and the grossest infringements of liberty that any department of modern life can show.

We may answer that abuses do not prove anything against the value of any particular social arrangement, so long as its right use serves well the purpose for which it was introduced.

The majority thinks that this is still the case with marriage. The minority, on the other hand, considers that its constraint now tends to defeat its original object, an enhanced sexual morality.

This minority thinks that, as soon as love is admitted as the moral ground of marriage, it will be a necessary consequence that he who has ceased to love should be allowed a moral as well as a legal right to withdraw from his marriage, if he chooses to avail himself of this right.

And this same minority is aware that love may cease, independently of a person’s will; that therefore no one can be held to the terms of a promise, the performance of which lies outside his powers.

Nothing is more natural than that love’s longing for eternity should prompt lovers to vows of eternal fidelity; nothing is more true than that it is a satanic device of society to seize upon this promise and base thereon a legal institution (Carpenter). Nothing is more necessary than to abolish the legal claims that people have on one another, supported by promises of love and vows of fidelity.

The more people understand the laws of their own being, the more will the conscientious begin to hesitate about making promises which perhaps some day they will be forced by inner necessity to break. An increasing number of people find it impossible to contract marriage, or to ask it of the other party—or to continue in marriage or ask its continuance of the other—when their love has died or has awakened for another. A generation ago, an engaged person could refuse his or her betrothed’s petition for liberation with the answer that he or she had love enough for both. In corresponding circles at the present day, such a speech is unthinkable. But then a public engagement was still regarded as a binding tie and the marriage took place. After a long engagement it was a “point of honour” for the man not to let a woman run the risk of being unmarried, and she was satisfied if he only paid his debt of honour.

Such coarseness of feeling is fortunately becoming more and more rare, although it is far from disappearing. People see more and more that they have no more right to marry simply to fulfil a duty of fidelity than they have to steal in order to fulfil a duty of maintenance; that there is no more obligation to abide by a marriage which one feels to be one’s ruin than there is a duty to commit suicide for the sake of another.

The love of older times was above all afraid that the other party should not feel sufficiently bound. The finest erotic feeling of the present day shudders at the idea of becoming a bond; trembles at pity and recoils from the possibility of becoming a hindrance. This state of the soul knows of no other right than that of perfect candour. To place legal limits to each other’s liberty, so that neither shall cause pain to the other, is under these conditions meaningless; for each suffers just as much through a union maintained without full reciprocity.

Thus the question of divorce presents itself to modern souls, in cases where there are no children. And when there are children—as is of course the rule—they think that the mistakes of parents do not absolve them from the duty of co-operating in the rearing of the children to whom they have given life.

But they maintain that this need not always be effected by means of continued cohabitation. On the other hand, this may often be necessary, and in such cases they subordinate their personal claims of happiness to those of the race. One who holds these opinions regards him who gives the same answer in every case—whether this answer be “freedom at any price” or “renunciation at any price”—simply as a moral automaton.

It is true that modern men and women are less able to bear unhappiness in marriage than were those of former times. This shows that connubial idealism makes greater demands than formerly.

The conscious will to live, of our time, revolts against the meaningless sufferings through which the people of bygone days, above all the women, allowed themselves to be degraded, benumbed, and embittered. A finer knowledge of self, a stronger consciousness of personality, now puts a limit to one’s own suffering, since the danger is understood of taking hurt in one’s soul. This determination of individualism makes it impossible for the modern woman to be fired by the ideal of Griselda—if for no other reason, because she feels how all-suffering meekness increases injustice. The “good old” marriages, sustained by the willing sacrifice of wives, are disappearing—that is happily true! But no one takes notice of the new good ones that are coming in their place. If those who now grudgingly reckon up divorces would also count all happy marriages, it would be seen that new formation has proceeded further than dissolution.

It must be evident that the question of divorce is the pursuance of the line of development of Protestantism. With the formation of a right and a left party, as usual in the treatment of a problem of culture, the Reformation succeeded only in asserting the right of the senses in human life. That it is the right of the soul in sexual life that is now most intimately affected by the question, people will not understand. Against the right of the individual they set up that of the child. If there is none, then a certain number of Christians are willing to admit that divorce is sometimes justified. Unhappy parents, on the other hand, must remain together for the sake of the children.

But the erotically noble person of the present day cannot, without the deepest sense of humiliation, belong to one he does not love, or by whom he knows he is not loved. Thus for one or both of the parties a marriage that is persisted in without the love of one or both causes profound suffering either through this humiliation or through lifelong celibacy.

This is the kernel of the question, which is avoided by all who, in their care for the children, forget that the parents must nevertheless be considered as an end in themselves. It is not asked that for the sake of the children they should commit other crimes; thus a woman who committed forgery to support her child would be disapproved of. But other women are judged leniently who “for the sake of their children” feel themselves prostituted year after year in their marriage.

That married people are to be found who continue to live as friends, since the erotic needs of both are small; that others do not feel the humiliation of cohabitation without love; that the former as well as the latter are probably acting best for the children in keeping together a home for them—this does not prevent others under similar circumstances from suffering in such a way that life loses all its value. And these are they who end either in adultery or divorce.

Even if an enemy of divorce admits these difficulties, he replies, that the individual must still suffer for his erotic as for his other mistakes, since only so can people be taught not to commit mistakes.

But the true state of the case may be, that just as in old times murders increased in proportion to the number of executions people witnessed, so unhappy marriages may become more frequent, the more there are at present; for it is, above all, the whole spirit that prevails around us which determines our action. If the young are accustomed to see their elders content with false and ugly relations, they will learn to be so likewise. If they see around them an aspiration towards ideal conditions in love—an idealism which is revealed now in a beautiful married life, now in the dissolution of one that is not beautiful—then their ideals will also be lofty. Those again, who have once made a mistake, will perhaps be more clear-sighted if they choose again.

But neither those who make mistakes nor those who witness them can be saved by the misfortunes of others from that great source of error, erotic illusion. And until erotic sympathy has become more refined, these mistakes are the most innocent of all. Every lover believes himself to be exempted from the sacrifice of illusion and no experience of the irretrievable erotic mistakes of others has ever opened the eyes of one blinded by love.

As it is recognised that society ought to make the lives of all as valuable as possible, this involves the claim that innocent mistakes should cause as little ruin as need be.

In marriage as in other fields, the modern principle must be put in force, that punishment should improve the faulty and prepare the way for a higher idea of justice. But this higher idea is that marriage should be contracted under gradually improving conditions, not that it should continue under gradually deteriorating influences.

Marriage under constraint forces people to continue their cohabitation and to bring children into the world in a revolt of the soul which must leave its mark in their children’s nature and thus influence their future destiny. But this is not a “well-deserved punishment” for a mistake: it is the profoundest violation of the sanctity of the personality and of the race.

Here as ever the only logical alternative is full individual liberty or unconditional surrender.

The Catholic Church maintains—and rightly from its own point of view—that, since even marriages entered into with the warmest love and under the most favourable conditions may turn out unhappily, it is impossible to base the morality of marriage on the emotion of love. Nothing that is founded upon emotion can be permanent. Nay, the richer, the more individually and universally developed a personality is, the less immutable will be the state of its soul. Thus even the highest need an inflexible law, an irremovable tie, to prevent their being at the mercy of winds and waves through their emotions, while inferior beings need them so as not to be driven out of their course by their desires. The concessions of Protestantism, therefore, lead to the dissolution of marriage, since when love is made the basis of marriage it is built upon sand.

Marriage, which the Church therefore made a sacrament and indissoluble, had already become the legal expression of the husband’s right of private ownership over his wife and children. The course of development has consisted in an unceasing transformation of this religio-economical view, and development cannot stop until the last remnant of this conception has been destroyed.

Therefore the believers in Life refuse to admit either the half-admissions of Protestantism or the logical compulsion of Catholicism. They demand that the step from authority to freedom shall be taken outright, since they know that the external authority which simplifies life does not create the deeper morality. Compulsion fetters legal freedom of action, but thereby only makes secret crime a social institution.

And even if a husband or a wife has outwardly overcome a temptation, this will not prevent that individual when in the embrace of the lawful spouse from being filled with feeling for another. Have they then avoided adultery? Not according to their own finest consciousness—that consciousness which Goethe aroused in his great poem on elective affinities. Duties performed may as surely as those left undone produce incalculable and tragic results. They are foolish who think they can lead another soul across the bridge, fine as a hair and sharp as a knife-edge, by which every one goes his solitary way over the abyss to salvation: the way of the choice of personal conscience.

When custom and law deprive a human being of full freedom of choice in the matters of most profound personal concern—his belief, his work, and his love—then existence is robbed of greater values than those the compulsory fulfilment of duty can bring in.

In love, the idea of personality has now brought us to the view that “property is theft”; that only free gifts are of value; that the ideas of connubial “rights” and “duties” are to be exchanged for the great reconstructive thought, that fidelity can never be promised, but that indeed it may be won every day.

This will give the motive power for the attainment of ever higher forms of erotic organisation a power which the Buddha-like calm of indissoluble marriage has left unused.

It is sad that this truth—which was already clear to the noble minds of the Courts of Love—should still need proclaiming; for one of the reasons given in these Courts for love being impossible in marriage is this: that woman cannot expect from her husband the delicate conduct that a lover must show, since the latter only receives by favour what the husband takes as his right.

When divorce becomes free, the attention to each other’s emotions, the delicacy of conduct and the desire to captivate by being always new, which belong to the period of engagement, will be continued in married life. As in the early days of love, each will allow the other full freedom in all essential manifestations of life, but will exercise control over his own casual moods, whereas marriage now as a rule reverses this happy state of things.

The security of possession now puts to sleep the eagerness of acquisition; the compulsion to win anew will brace the energy in this as in every other connection.

A fidelity thus won will be the only sort that will be thought worth having in the future. A craving for happiness more sensitive than the present may one day marvel at the legally insured fidelity of our time, as at its inheritance of wealth. In both cases it will have been seen that only one’s exertion of force brings happiness and gives that felicity of victory before which hands stretched out to steal shrink back.

The believers in Life are everywhere distinguished by their determination to give to every relation the value of the unique, the stamp of the exceptional, that which has never been before and will never come again. Like the worshippers of Life of the Renaissance, those of our time have begun to recover the power of strong enjoyment and strong suffering which is always the sign of increasing spiritual unity, a new gathering of force through a new religious feeling.

To this view of life the permanence of happiness will be less important than its completeness while it lasts.

Spinoza, who described jealousy as no one else has done, has also uttered this deep saying of love: The greater the emotion we hope that the loved one will experience through us, and the more the loved one is moved by joy in his relation to us, the greater also will be our own happiness in love.

People of the present day have begun to distinguish the idea of this “greatest joy” from lifelong proprietorship; and therewith jealousy in its lower form has begun to disappear.

Jealousy like other shadows belongs to the rising and setting light and disappears like them in the full clearness of noonday. But its tone of feeling has become quite different since man has discovered that, if the sun stands still in the zenith for him, it is a miracle—not a right. The most highly developed people of the present day say “I am loved” or “I am not loved” with the same simplicity as they say the sun shines or does not shine. The difference is in both cases immeasurable, but in one case as in the other, necessity removes the feeling of humiliation. The grief which comes when a lover no longer feels that he brings joy to the beloved or when he sees another bring it, is natural and worthy of respect. It ceases to be so when it manifests itself in the will of an avaricious proprietor, the brutal instinct which often survives not only the feeling of the other but also its own.

But although the psychological differentiation in our time involves greater possibilities of finding some one who will satisfy some side of the erotic longing,—while it is more and more difficult to find one who wholly satisfies this ever more complex desire,—the danger of such division of self is counterbalanced by the growing wish for the longing to be wholly satisfied. Love by thus making ever greater demands becomes at the same time ever more faithful.

Those who dread the dissolution of society through the insistence upon the rights of love, do not reflect that its right to break up marriage is allowed to the feeling, which has not only the red glow of passion, but also the clearness through which two people have become conscious of each other as a revelation of the whole unsuspected richness of life. A revelation which included all the fulness of comprehension, all the serenity of confidence; where both have given with equal exactingness and generosity—not meagrely or hesitatingly, but so that each without reserve has rushed to meet the other—this is the only happiness that love’s noblemen will now experience. It will be more and more difficult even to experience it once—how much more so then to find it many times!

A great love is never like the erotic thunderstorms which move against the wind—that is to say, against the whole disposition of the personality in other things.

All valuable feelings—whether entertained for a person, a belief, a place, or a country—are conservative. The consciousness of this gives the preacher of liberty his boldness. He never perceives how liberty may be abused, since he knows what it costs to loosen a heart from what it has once embraced.

To a volatile nature, the happiness that a more steadfast one experiences in love is as unfathomable as the bliss of the mystic becoming absorbed into the fulness of his divinity is to the polytheist.

Here, as everywhere, to the believer in Life, happiness is one with morality. Since happiness consists in the greatest emotions, its first condition is to intensify and enlarge all feelings, and above all that which leads to marriage.

But in addition, the whole standard of personality depends to a great extent upon whether we consider fidelity a life-value. He who desires fidelity centres his moods and his powers upon what is essential and protects them from the gusts of the accidental. Only this gives style and greatness to existence. The desire of fidelity is therefore one with a person’s feeling for his own integrity, his inward consistency, the attitude and dignity of his spiritual being.

When fidelity is preserved for these profound reasons, it will also be broken only for the same reasons. A fidelity, on the other hand, which rests upon conventional notions of duty, will be in the fire like a fire-escape of straw.

It is moreover forgotten, in all discussions of the dangers of free divorce, that under the influence of love the whole disposition of the soul is towards fidelity. Great love absorbs all associations of ideas and thus without conscious exertion intensifies and enlarges the personality. Fidelity will be a necessary condition of love, but a condition whose psychological continuance is not favoured by coercive marriage.

Fidelity towards one’s self—also in the new sense of the word—thus involves not only the ability in case of need to destroy the bridge between one’s self and one’s past. It also implies the building of better bridges to strengthen the connection between our personality and our present. It implies not only the capacity to have finished with a destiny; but also that of not having done too soon with a person. It may certainly involve the necessity of a new experiment in life. But still more certainly it involves the need of not allowing the incidental numbness of one’s feeling to seduce one to new “experiences.” This expression—in place of the old word “adventures”—implies, moreover, an intensification of feeling: where formerly only the excitement of “adventure” was looked for, a richer element of life is now sought. But it is often a fatal error to suppose that this is to be gained in new relations, when on the contrary it might have been won by an intensification of the former ones. By more attention to and respect for the other’s personality one may often discover more than one had expected; for some people are like certain landscapes or works of art: they do not begin to make an impression until one thinks one has done with them. But piety is required to await the revelations of soul as of a work. Piety implies contemplation, and this demands peace. But peace is difficult to find in our time, whose misfortune is precisely disturbance and amusement.

That our time like every other has its particular epidemics in the erotic sphere, is certain, and disturbance is just the condition in which the most dangerous of these find a favourable soil. It is therefore a part of the erotic art of living that a married couple should now and then pass some time undisturbed in each other’s company—or separately and alone—in order thus to strengthen the health of their feelings. Here as in other things external precautions against infection are unimportant in comparison with care of the general health.

Only he who, after unceasing effort and patient self-examination, can say that he has used all his resources of goodness and understanding; put into his married life all his desire of happiness and all his vigilance; tried every possibility of enlarging the other’s nature, and yet has been unsuccessful,—only he can with an easy conscience give up his married life.

The life-tree of a human being is formed, no more than are the trees of the forest, according to a strict measure for the length of the branches or a pattern for the shape of the leaves. Like nature’s trees, its beauty depends upon the freedom of the boughs to take unexpected curves, upon the disposition of the leaves to exhibit an infinite diversity of shape. Only he who does not permit the tree to grow according to its own inner laws, but clips it according to those of gardening, can be sure of not preparing surprises for himself and others, when one branch unexpectedly shoots out and another equally unaccountably withers. No one can answer for the transformations to which life thus may subject his own nature; nor for the changes which the transformation of another’s nature may effect in his own feeling. He may possess the rarest disposition to fidelity, the most sincere desire to concentrate himself upon his love, to “let his personality grow around it, as about its core”—it nevertheless does not depend upon his will alone whether this core shall shrivel or be corrupted.

Therefore the desire of fidelity can not, must not, and ought not to imply more than the will to be true to the deepest needs of one’s own personality.

In other spheres than that of love, people admit this freely. Nobody considers it an unquestionable duty for a young man to find at once the view of life or the career in which he can continue for the rest of his life. What young people are rightly warned against is the wandering without method among different opinions or undertakings; for only that belief or that work which one seriously tries to live by and live for can really employ the powers of the personality and thus show its efficacy in enhancing them. But the most profound seriousness cannot prevent a continued development of the personality from one day compelling the man to abandon that belief or that work. It probably would not occur to a thoughtful clergyman to appeal to such a man’s promises at confirmation, or to a thoughtful father to bring forward his own choice of a career as an example to his son.

Lifelong tenacity was demanded in those days when it was assumed that a single doctrine, a single set of circumstances, was entirely adequate for personal development for a whole lifetime. The crime of deviation was then logically punished by excommunication or by fines. But the profounder view which we have acquired in the matters of belief and occupation must also be extended to the third. We ought to perceive that unconditional fidelity to one person may be just as disastrous to the personality as unconditional continuance in a faith or an employment. Those who are now patching the sack-cloth of asceticism with a few shreds from the purple mantle of personality are spoiling both. Either state the claim of renunciation clearly, like the Catholic, or admit the whole claim of personality. But the whole problem is unfairly stated by those who make “personal love” the moral basis of marriage, but go on to speak of this love as though it were a question of light-heartedly taking partners for a game, where nothing is more usual than that each woman finds the right man and each man the right woman—and so everything is in order. If life were so easy, there would be reason for the pronouncements, which are now so profoundly coarse, that only the man or woman without character, the aimless personality, is incapable of vowing a lifelong love and keeping the promise; nay, that a true personality can “command itself to love its child’s father or mother.”

He who asserts that our true personality will always follow the duty laid down by society and constantly be able to fulfil the claims of fidelity, and that those who cannot do this are guided by a false subjectivity and not by their personality, makes the idea of personality equivalent to that of member of society, the whole equivalent to the part. The personality, the unique and peculiar value, is certainly connected through part of its nature with the standards of right upheld by society. Yet it never becomes equivalent to them.

The only thing therefore that a psychological thinker can demand is that love should not divide the personality in any phase of a human being’s development, but should always be its true expression.

But only one who is ignorant of the idea of personality can believe that the relation, into which a person at the age of twenty puts his whole feeling, must necessarily correspond to the needs of the same personality as it becomes at thirty or forty. Only one so ignorant can persuade himself that the destiny of our love will necessarily resemble our lofty theory of love, our pure desire of constancy. If even our own will has little to do with the love we feel, how much less then will it influence that which we receive or lose!

Thus the problem of fidelity is not solved merely by imposing the claim of constancy upon one’s self; for in the first place, in love there are two who must desire the same thing, and in the second, each of these two is manifold.

No human being is sole master of his fate when he has united it with another’s. The possibility of becoming a complete personality in and through love depends in half upon the pure and whole desire of the other to share in developing the common life.

It is this which is overlooked by the eloquent preachers of “constancy as the expression of the personality,” and this makes their words about the duty of lifelong love as meaningless as a harangue about the duty of lifelong health.

It is a beautiful sight when two married people enjoy the happiness of their love for the whole day of human life. It is also a beautiful sight when life sets like a clear sun upon the horizon, and does not lose itself like a weary river in the sand. But these are beautiful ideals not commands of duty.

Love, like health, can certainly be neglected or cared for, and by good care the average length of life both of human beings and of their loves may be raised.

But the final causes both of love’s birth and of its death are as mysterious as those of the origin and cessation of life. A person can therefore no more promise to love or not to love than he can promise to live long. What he can promise is to take good care of his life and of his love.

This may be done, as already pointed out, through the conscious will to be faithful, the firm resolve to make love a great experience.

But perhaps the majority as yet do little to preserve their happiness. In this case, life works for them, as God “gives to his servants, while they sleep.”

If ever the doctrine of the importance of the infinitely small has its application, it is in respect to the power the little things of everyday life have of uniting or dividing in marriage.

That hardships and memories, joys and sorrows shared bind people together even without the continuance of love; that in the deepest sense of the word they cannot be separated, since a great part of the one’s nature remains in the other’s—this in reality forms the binding tie, but not ideas of duty, whether clear or obscure, strict or free. If in one case a married life has so dried up the feelings of both that a gust of wind drives them apart like two withered leaves, in another it may have given the feelings such deep roots that, even if all the leaves that the springtime gave are torn away, even if life seems as empty and cold as naked boughs in winter—it is still lived in common.

It is thus a physiological and psychological fact that the man or woman who for the first time has communicated to the other the joys of the senses retains a power over her or him which is never really set aside. It is even said that long after a man’s death a woman sometimes bears children to another man which resemble the first. As such influences are more decided in the case of the woman, her fidelity has also for this reason become more of a natural necessity than man’s—although the same influence, if in a somewhat less degree, applies to him.

Even if no qualms of conscience for others’ sufferings are mingled with a new happiness—in many other senses the two, who in each other seek to forget the past of one of them, will perhaps for ever find a third between them.

Marriage, in a word, has such sure allies in man’s psycho-physical conditions of life that one need not be afraid of freedom of divorce becoming equivalent to polygamy. What this freedom would abolish is only lifelong slavery.

It is evident to every thoughtful person that a real sexual morality is almost impossible without early marriage; for simply to refer the young to abstinence as the true solution of the problem is, as we have already maintained, a crime against the young and against the race, a crime which makes the primitive force of nature, the fire of life, into a destructive element.

But the consequence of early marriages must be free divorce.

As soon as one approaches the outer side of the marriage problem, one is met by the experience which the four great Norwegian writers, Ibsen, Bjornson, Lie, and Kielland, some years ago jointly and publicly announced: that at present the majority do not marry for love. And R. L. Stevenson may have hit the mark, when he calls the marriages of the majority “a kind of friendship sanctioned by the police” and compares the “fancy” which decides them to that which sometimes takes one for a particular fruit in a dish that is being handed round.

But even if we one day come so far that early love-matches are the rule, we shall still be faced, as regards them, by the system which at present obtains among the upper classes: that marriage is binding upon the lovers before love is consummated. There is therefore a truth worthy of consideration in the words of the brothers Margueritte, in their contribution to the question of free divorce; that as the young girl has not experienced what she binds herself to at marriage, the majority of divorces begin on the wedding night.

Free divorce is therefore an unconditional demand of such young people who know that unforeseen transformations may take place in the sphere of the soul as in that of the senses, and who now frequently seek in the secret possession of love a security against a precipitancy which the legal bond of marriage may make irretrievable.

The young know, if any can know, that no form of love is more beautiful than that in which two young people find each other so early that they do not even know when their feeling was born, and accompany each other through all their fortunes, sometimes even to death—for now and then life vouchsafes this crowning fortune. Never do greater possibilities exist for the happiness both of the individuals and of the race than in a love which begins so early that the two can grow together in a common development; when they possess all the memories of youth as well as all the aims of the future in common; when the shadow of a third has never fallen across the path of either; when their children in turn dream of the great love they have seen radiating from their parents.

These happy ones—like the old couple in Bernard’s fine fresco in the mairie of the Louvre arrondissement in Paris—will one day look up to the stars of the winter twilight, united in a more intimate devotion than either the playtime of the spring morning or the midday toil could afford.

If this wonderful love were really the first and only one which fell to the lot of every young man and woman, and were it always possible for them to realise it at the right time—then there would neither be a problem of morality nor of divorce.

But the youth of the present day knows that this love is not the fortune of all. It has learned so much, from literature, from life, from its own soul, of the transformations of love, that one is tempted to wish for these young people the romantic belief of their fathers and mothers in a love which became extinct as easily as now. The difference is merely this, that whereas formerly they were content with a faded glow, we will have continual fire.

It is known now that, although youthful love may be the surest basis of marriage, it is more often the reverse. Here, if anywhere, is the scene of accidents. The one we have grown up with, the girl or youth we are thrown with just when the erotic life is waking; the one we were teased about; the one we hear is “in love” with us; the one we meet when the happiness of others fills the air with longing—these and other accidents, but not personal choice, often decide youthful love.

Then the imagination sets to work to transform the reality in accordance with the ideal we have formed for ourselves—and even this is often the result of accidental influence. It is therefore not surprising that most people, when after ten years or so they meet again the object of their first love, give a sigh of gratitude to the fate which made that love “unhappy.”

When it has not been so in the usual sense of the word, one of the parties may often be most to be pitied, and it is just those young people who unhesitatingly realise their love in the belief of its lifelong continuance, that in coercive marriage are made the victims of their own pure will, their healthy courage, their bright idealism.

For the younger, in the richest sense of the word, a person is, the more certainly does he possess the poet’s gift which transforms reality according to his dreams. The fine curve of a pair of lips renews the marvel of the legend: that every frog that jumps over them is changed into a rose. Even if a dim suspicion awakes, when every serious thought or intimate feeling is met by empty silence or equally empty loquacity, the imagination easily convinces the instinct that silence means “profundity of intelligence,” or speech “candour.” At every age, but especially at this, love is a great superstition. Secure as sleep-walkers in the presence of danger, its votaries fling themselves into a decision. And it is this simple rashness of innocence that the current conception of morality subjects to a lifelong punishment. The cautious ones, on the other hand, often find in time the great rewards—thanks to their own smaller value.

More things happen in a human life than marriage and finally death. Much may happen in a human soul between marriage and death. The current assumption that everything which separates a person from the partner in matrimony is evil and ought to be overcome; everything which binds him to her good and ought to be encouraged—this is part of the wisdom which reduces life to the simplest terms, which is cheap and therefore most in use; for a higher wisdom demands a higher price.

Nothing is commoner, especially for the woman whose first experience of love is in marriage, than that she is in love with love and not her husband. Sometimes woman is betrayed by her senses, but more often by the morning dew of sensibility, which youth and love spread over even the driest of men’s souls,—a dew which disappears with the morning. Another illusion, which in these days of intercommunication causes many mistakes in love, is the peculiarity of a foreign nationality, which has the effect of a personal originality—until it gradually betrays itself as only another kind of conformity than that one is used to.

In other cases again, the husband is all she sees in him. But a young woman herself often goes through, during the years from twenty to twenty-five, so complete a transformation of feelings and ways of thought, that after a few years of marriage she finds herself in the presence of a man who is a perfect stranger to her.

This period of illusions in first youth is answered by another towards the close of youth. If a woman has not before experienced love, this is the psychological moment at which almost every illusion is possible. Her now universal demands of love, the longing of her mature woman’s nature, have countless times made a noble creature cast these pearls—if not exactly as described in the biblical image—at least into an empty space where they have just as surely been unappreciated.

On man’s side, there are other or corresponding possibilities that early marriage may be founded on self-deception.

But even when love is real and well-founded, there yet arise, from the charm of contradictions already referred to, innumerable occasions of incurable discord.

Thus there are natures so simple that they become crippled, so uncomplex that they are foolish, so homogeneous as to be heavy. These are they who usually love once for all, with complete devotion. But, especially when they are women, Goethe’s words are often true of them: that a woman’s greatest misfortune is not to be charming when she loves. Only complete security gives these natures the calm of equilibrium, the courage of self-confidence, which calls forth the “smile of inward happiness” whereby they also become attractive. But these natures, who of all most deserve happiness, usually meet with some person of constantly changing moods, who reacts with extreme sensitiveness to every impression, but can never love deeply, and therefore is soon unable to bear that simplicity and seriousness in life and death which at first charmed by their contrast.

Such people are often poets or artists, who in love seek only constant stimulation. To them loving means “waking in the morning with new words on one’s lips,” and their erotic fortunes therefore show a rapidity of revolution comparable with that of the moons around Mars. Just as for certain natures, a connection originally frivolous may become permanent, held together by depth of feeling, so for this class of natures—on account of the superficiality of their feelings—no kind of connection is serious.

It is not unfrequently those who give the finest descriptions of their soulful moods and their exquisite feelings, who in their acts of love are narrowly selfish or relentlessly harsh. For it is the impressions of culture stored in their intelligence which determine their conscious utterances, but, on the other hand, it is their subconscious ego that decides their actions. And this ego is often centuries behind their cultured consciousness. He, on the other hand, who is reticent and curt of speech or dull and awkward in manners may at bottom possess a delicacy which he can show only in actions, the others only in words. But unfortunately in our time opportunities for speech are many and for action few—and so women pass over the latter for the former. How many a woman has not afterwards—before some act of the man of words—asked herself how it was possible for her ever to love that man! How many a one, before the actions of the silent, has not sighed, What a pity that I was never able to love him!

But in one case as in the other, through the law of contrasts, she was united to him and feels in this union the death or paralysis of the best possibilities of her being.

The most misleading of illusions are, however, those which are fostered by the actions love produces; for it is not these which determine the quality of a personality. While love is fighting for its happiness it may transform an ordinary person into something higher than himself, as also into something lower. When the tension is relieved, it is seen that in the former case—especially as regards men—love was able to

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 out that 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 has remained 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 in all 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 the child, 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 right when 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 the narrow-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 proving that 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 most convinced 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 may enhance 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 keep together, 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 the children—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 for their 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 take no 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 cannot in 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 each other. 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 has grown 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. Children receive 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

When people have acquired more knowledge of the laws of psychology, they will discover, as Edward Carpenter has said, that there is also an astronomy 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 seizes a 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 to mature. 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 George Eliot, 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 the Inferno wished 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 adultery feels 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 many great 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 people not 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 an amitiÉ 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 affords enjoyment 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 own limitations 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 the Epistle to the Corinthians on 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 has attained 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:

How often has not the little boat, fraught with life’s last riches, been lost on the wide sea?

But therefore it is that no one there seeks his pleasure, but only his life.

That our actions in the erotic sphere—as in every other—must call forth the criticism of others is just as unavoidable as that our figure should be reflected in a mirror as we pass. But public opinion is a convex mirror, a globe swollen by prejudice, which distorts the image. Only a clear and calm soul gives a true picture of another’s actions.

And to such a soul, it will not unfrequently be apparent that the “transgression” was right for one nature and not for the other. The latter will have felt that its innermost being would have been outraged if fidelity to the past had not been preserved to the uttermost—and will have chosen to allow its erotic powers to wither and to live only by the will of duty. Of this kind of self-immolation the same is true as of its bodily counterpart: sometimes they are great souls, sometimes great cowards. Nay, the same sacrifice may be sublime at one period of our lives and shameful at another.

Life never shows us “marriage,” but countless different marriages; never “love,” but countless lovers. He who sets up an ideal in these matters must, therefore, be content with possibly working for the future, but should not use his ideal as a criterion for the present. Nay, he ought not even to desire in the future the sole authority of his own ideal—since a descent from the diverse to the uniform would be a retrogressive development.

The effort of society to press into a single ideal form life’s infinite multitude of different cases under the same circumstances or of the same cases under different circumstances, the same influences on different personalities or the same personalities under different influences—this has been in the field of sexual morality as violent a proceeding as would be the establishment for all figures of Polycletus’s canon of beauty. The madness of the latter proceeding would be obvious. But violence to souls is not so obvious. Therefore it is always established by law.

Not until the diversity of souls becomes in our ideas a truth as real as the diversity of our bodies shall we perceive that of all dogmas monogamy has been that which has claimed most human sacrifices. It will one day be admitted that the auto-da-fÉs of marriage have been just as valueless to true morality as those of religion were to the true faith.

The Grand Inquisitors of the past probably resembled those of the present day in that, when confronted by a particular case within the circle of their own friends and relations, they found easily enough extenuating circumstances which they did not otherwise admit. But we must learn to see that every case is a separate case and that, therefore, sometimes a new rule—not only an exception to an old rule—becomes necessary. We cannot any longer maintain this double standard for known or unknown, for friends or enemies, for literature or life. It must be abolished by an earnest desire for genuine morality.

This double standard shows us, however, that even among the orthodox of monogamy the impossibility of carrying out a monogamous morality which shall apply to all is beginning to be perceived. But the effort, nevertheless, to attain in some degree the impossible now stands in the way of the possible, which is germinating here and there: the attainment of the morality of love.

Although the new life is already showing its strength—like spring flowers that push their way through last year’s carpet of dead foliage—the withered leaves must yet be cleared away.7 And only they who do not perceive the power of the new spring are afraid that the earth will not be able to dispense with its withered protection.