Part 2

To burn the ideal of a great love into the soul of youth in letters of fire--that is to give him a real moral strength. Thus there springs up in man the ineradicable, invincible instinct that an erotic relation can exist only as the expression of a reciprocal all comprehensive love. Thus will youth learn to consider the love-marriage as the central life relation, the center of life, and he will be inflamed with the desire to develop and to conserve body and soul for the entrance into this most holy thing in nature, wherein man and woman find their happiness in creating a new race for happiness. Thus will young men and women in increasing numbers understand that their own happiness, as well as that of the coming generation will be the greater the more completely they can give their personality to love. Boys and girls, young men and maidens, men and women by coeducation, by joint labor and comradeship will develop in one another that mutual understanding which will remove the enmity between the sexes, in which modern individualization--and the therewith increasing demands of the personality--has so far found its expression.

The usages of individual homes will be differentiated, instead of as now maintaining the same conventional forms for all families. After some generations so educated, under the influence of relationships thus arranged, we shall see marriages such as even now not a few are seen, in which not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity. Then will love be cherished as the most delicate, most precious thing in life; then will egoism and unselfishness attain a perfect harmony, because the husband and wife find happiness only in assuring the happiness of the other. That is the union which the Norwegian poet defines when he calls true marriage "a yearning quest after each other, an energetic cultivation, assertion of the personality, in order to be able to give one's personality; an ever increasing intimacy of understanding of each other; a union which the whole course of life will make more profound."

So prepared, the absolute human ideal will become perhaps a living reality; not as an isolated man, not as an isolated woman, but as a man and a woman who shall give to mankind a new religion--that of happiness.

* * * * *

Many indeed still doubt that marriage can become this highest form of existence in life, in which the surrender of the ego and the self-seeking of the ego reach a perfect harmony. It is asserted that this ideal condition can be attained perhaps by exceptional people, but never by ordinary people, and that the morality of the latter can be kept sound only by legal and social restraint.

My belief, however, is that, just as the Children of Israel followed the pillar of fire, so ordinary men follow at a distance exceptional men, and in this way mankind as a whole advances. Ordinary men are just now determined upon certain conceptions which at the end of the previous century were not conclusive even for exceptional people. The marriage of reason, for example, is already considered ignoble by many. The authority of the parents is very seldom in evidence either to coerce the children into a marriage without love or to restrain them from it. Even the superficial erotic emotion of our day is serious in comparison with the shallow and frivolous or vulgar and cruel gallantry of the eighteenth century. In the geological deposits of legislation and still more in those of literature we can study these risings of the levels of the erotic sentiments. So we are thereby convinced that the demands and conflicts of the exceptional men become gradually those of the ordinary men also, even though the ordinary men are always some generations behind the men who are stirred by new emotions, new conflicts, when the many have reached the problems which some decades before occupied only the few.

Certainly it may, under present imperfect conditions, often be a duty not to destroy the outward form of marriage for the sake of the children. But by no means can this duty be preached as universally binding. Only the individual himself can in each separate case determine the dissolution best, both for the children and for the married couple themselves, of a marriage which has fallen asunder within. When we consider the development in its entirety, the sooner people cease to sanction the present marriage the more fortunate it will be; for the sooner will the transformation be forced upon us by which marriage will maintain its permanence only from within. Only then will man be wholly able to have the experiences and to find the new, delicate means by which fidelity can be strengthened and happiness assured. But man will not seek this expedient so long as he can rely upon the power of legal right and social opinion to hold together that which love does not unify.

The ever increasing individualization of love indicates that mono-marriage will doubtless remain the form of erotic union between man and woman. But this rule will have, in the future, as in the past, many exceptions, since the feelings can change. The conflicts which will thus arise will bring suffering as a consequence, but not the bitterness nor the contention which the property sense in marriage now so often occasions. The deep consciousness that love belongs not to the sphere of duty but only to that of freedom will cause the one who has lost the love of the other to feel the same resignation before the inevitable, as if he were separated from the other by death.

And in cases where the individual is not capable of this resignation, then the law as well as custom shall make it impossible for the one to hold back the other against his will. Each of the twain shall be master of his own person and of his property, of his work and of his mode of life; the union shall in each especial case be arranged by the agreement of the individuals, and the law shall decide only the rights and duties of the husband and wife in regard to the children.

When in this way it shall come to pass that neither the husband nor wife shall have in outward sense, in external things, anything to gain or to lose by the consummation or dissolution of marriage, then only the erotic problem appears in all its seriousness.

Many mistakes, many caricatures, many tragic failures will naturally be the result of freedom. Great waves have great combers. A new principle cannot be put into effect without bringing with it new mistakes. But we may, however, be convinced that the laws of life--to which belongs the law that suffering follows the misuse of freedom--will finally be able to bring everything within its right limits. Nothing indeed has occasioned more suffering as an indirect consequence than Christianity, and although Jesus knew that, yet he did not hesitate to give to mankind this new creative force which destroyed in order to create. But it is above all His ideality which His present followers lack, the great ideality which dares to believe in the might of the spirit rather than that of the form.

It is, therefore, quite natural that these Christians, the upholders of society, oppose the new ideal of morality with vain apprehensions. They believe that a woman whose conscious aim is "Self-assertion in self-surrender" will forfeit the immediate, fresh originality in this surrender. They believe marriage must be destroyed when the support of its development is no longer bond and injunction, but is its own vital force. They believe morality will lose in the struggle if youth learns to consider the love between man and woman as the central condition of life. These, and a hundred similar apprehensions have all one and the same source.

This source is the Christian conception of life which has displaced the great, sound, strong conviction of antiquity of the holiness of nature. Mary was the "Virgin Mother;" Jesus, celibate. Paul regarded marriage as the lesser of two evils. Thus man first learned to regard the unmarried state as the higher and the married as the lower state. The result of the Christian conception of life then was that the sex relation was regarded in and for itself as unholy, human nature in and for itself as base and the earthly demand for happiness as the greatest egotism.

Therefore the Christian conception of life is now, since it has accomplished its great task of culture, the development of altruism--an obstacle to the unified conception out of which the happiness of mankind will finally develop.

No one who thinks or feels deeply dreams that this happiness can be easily achieved. The consistent belief of monism in human nature can only gradually leaven life. And until then suffering will be for the majority the first result of freedom. Even for the few, to whom the relationships have already given happiness, must this be incomplete in the measure in which they feel sympathy with all the suffering about them. But above all is happiness rare because the genius for happiness is still so rare, is indeed on the whole the rarest genius. To possess it means to approach life with the humility of a beggar, but to treat it with the proud generosity of a prince; to bring to its totality the deep understanding of a great poet and to each of its moments the abandonment and ingenuousness of a child; it means to be able to enjoy wholly each present, immediate, joy and yet to be able to give up the incidental joy for the enduring one.

Happiness lies so far from man; but he must begin by daring to will it. It is this courage which Christianity broke down when it directed the soul from the earth to eternity and gave to renunciation the highest place among ethical values. Through the _Revaluation of all Values_, which is now going on, happiness will receive this Place.

He who contends for the deepest of all ideas, Spinosa's idea, that "Joy is perfection," contends with certainty of victory, however solitary he may stand, however much of his heart's blood may be shed in the strife.

We live still in our inmost soul only by that for which we die. And all for which we have died will live when the time shall come in which all we ourselves have suffered signifies nothing for us, yet that for which we have suffered signifies everything for others.

THE WOMAN OF THE FUTURE

There are phrases which charm like a song, and one of these phrases is: "The Woman of the Future."

This sings for me in the verse of a poet and a seer, whose name now shines with the radiance of the morning star, although during his lifetime it was sullied with defamation as that of an atheist and destroyer of society--because the luminous path of his thoughts appeared to the prejudices of his contemporaries as a blinding flash of lightning. His poet's vision revealed to him a new time in which women would be

"... frank, beautiful and kind As the free heaven, which rains fresh light and dew On the wide earth From custom's evil taint exempt and pure; Speaking the wisdom once they could not think, Looking emotions once they feared to feel, And changed to all which once they dared not be Yet being now, made earth like heaven."

This beautiful profile of the woman of the future, which Shelley has traced, floats before me when I attempt here to draw her portrait in more precise outlines.

* * * * *

The storm and stress period of woman and the new social and psychological formations thereby entailed must, indeed, extend far into the twentieth century. This period of conflict will cease only when woman within and out of marriage shall have received legal equality with man. It will cease when such a transformation of society shall have come to pass that the present rivalry between the sexes shall be ended in a manner advantageous to both and when finally the work of earning a livelihood as well as care of the household shall have received such form that it will weigh less heavily than now upon the woman.

Toward the end of the twentieth century only could the type of the nineteenth century woman have reached its culmination and a new type of woman begin to appear.

My ideal picture of the woman of the future, and when one paints an ideal one does not need to limit one's imagination, is that she will be a being of profound contrasts which have attained harmony. She will appear as a great multiplicity and a complete unity; a rich plenitude and a perfect simplicity; a thoroughly educated creature of culture and an original spontaneous nature; a strongly marked human individuality and a complete manifestation of most profound womanliness. This woman will understand the spirit of a scientific work, of an exact search after truth, of free, independent thought, of artistic creation. She will comprehend the necessity of the laws of nature and of the progress of evolution; she will possess the feeling of solidarity and regard for the interests of society. Because she will know more and think more clearly than the woman of the present, she will be more just; because she will be stronger, she will be better; because she will be wiser, she will be also more gentle. She will be able to see things in the ensemble and in their connection with each other; she will lose thereby certain prejudices which are still called virtues. Nevertheless she will remain the one who forms customs. But she will not seek her support in social convention; she will find it in the laws of her own being. She will have the courage to think her own thoughts and to investigate the new thoughts of her time. She will dare to experience and to acknowledge feelings which she now suppresses or conceals. Her full liberty of action and the complete development of her personality will render possible intrepid efforts for life, an energetic striving after an existence which shall conform to her own ego. And such an existence she will be able also to find with surer instinct than now. She will understand how to work with more intensity, to rest with more intensity and with more intensity to delight in all immediate, simple sources of joy than the woman of the present is able to do. Thus in the new woman the feeling of life will be enhanced, her experience will be more profound; her soul life, her demands for beauty, her senses will be more developed and refined. She will be more sensitive, more delicately vibratory; she will therefore be able to be more profoundly happy and also to suffer more keenly than the woman of our time.

Thus the woman of the twentieth century will give new value to the life of society and to art, to science and to literature. But her greatest cultural significance remains, however, by means of the enigmatic, the instinctive, the intuitive and the impulsive in her own being to protect mankind from the dangers of excessive culture. In face of knowledge she will maintain the rights of the unknowable; in face of logic, feeling; in face of reality, possibilities; and in face of analysis, intuition. Woman will above all further the growth of the soul, man that of the intelligence; she will extend the sphere of intuition, he that of reason; she will realize tenderness, he justice; she will triumph by audacity, he by courage.

The woman of the future will not only have learned much, she will also have forgotten much--especially the feminine as well as anti-feminine follies of the present time.

With her whole being she will desire the happiness of love. She will be chaste, not because she is cold, but because she is passionate. She will be reserved, not because she is bloodless but because she is full blooded. She will be soulful and therefore she will be sensuous; she will be proud and therefore she will be true. She will demand a great love, because she herself can give a still greater. The erotic problem, because of her refined idealism, will be extremely complicated and often almost insoluble. Therefore the happiness which she will give and experience will be richer, more profound and enduring than anything which up to the present time has been called happiness. Many traits which belong to the wife and mother of today will probably be lacking in the woman of the future. She will remain always the beloved, the sweetheart, and only so will she become a mother. She will devote her finest and strongest forces to the difficult and beautiful art of being at the same time the beloved and the mother; her religious cult will be to create the supreme happiness of life. Because she will know and value the psychical and physical conditions of health and beauty she will choose the father of her children with clearer vision and deeper feeling of responsibility than at present; she will bear and rear sound and beautiful beings and she herself will possess greater attraction and longer youth than the woman of the present. She will charm all her life, because she will always beautify existence. But she will please only because, at every age, she will be wholly herself; and her imperishable youth, her most perfect beauty, she will reveal solely to him whom she loves. She will know that the charm of the soul is the most profound; and out of the plenitude of her being she will create the eternal renewal of this charm, always unexpected and in infinitely nuanced expressions of her personal grace. By her mere presence she will remove the constraint of form and custom and will create varying expressions, elevated by her own nobility, for the family life, the public life and for society. She will probably speak less than the woman of the present time, but her silence and her smile will be more eloquent. She will give herself always directly and always with moderation, different and always constant, spontaneous and always exquisite. Her being will pour forth, brimming free and fresh, like the surge of the mountain torrent, but like this, dominated by a certain inner rhythm. However far she allows herself to go--in ecstasy of joy, in passion of tenderness, in delirium of happiness or in the frenzy of grief--yet she will never lose herself. She will be a multiplicity of women and yet always one, whether she plays and smiles or suffers and smiles; whether she beams with health or bleeds with mortal wounds; whether she be imbued with and radiate repose or nervous intensity, joy or tears, sun or night, coolness or ardor.

The woman of the future exists already in man's dreams of women, and woman fashions herself according to the dreams of man. The modern man's ideal of woman is not the masculine woman, but the revelation of the "eternal feminine" developed in all directions. This new type of woman has already gleamed forth here and there, not only in our time but in centuries passed. In the Middle Ages she wrote the letters of Heloise; in the Renaissance, Leonardo painted her as Mona Lisa; and in the eighteenth century she held the salon of Mlle. Lespinasse. In our century she wrote the love sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; she appeared upon the stage as Eleonora Duse--and as in a precious stone her being is crystallized by the poet's words with which Rahel's personality was epitomized: "calm yet emotionally vivid."[B]

[B] Footnote from French translation:--The reference here is to Rahel de Varnhagen. The citation is taken from the "Hyperion" of Holderlin, a German poet of whom mention is made apropos of Nietzsche, upon whom he had great influence.

THE CONVENTIONAL WOMAN

Conventionality is the tacit agreement to set appearance before reality, form before content, subordination before principal. Its field in certain measure is "vogue" changing according to the idea of beauty of each new season. In deeper sense, however, a part of the sphere of conventionality coincides always with that of law and custom, and with the conception of the amount of self-control and self-sacrifice which every individual must impose upon himself for the common life with others. The further the evolution of humanity advances, the fewer are the fields to which the power of society over the thought, belief, mode of life and manner of work of the individual is restricted. More and more prevalent becomes the conviction that all those forms of expression of the individual which do not interfere with the rights of others must be free. A great part of the work of culture of each new generation has consisted and still consists in clearing away great masses of conceptions of right dried up into conventionalism, dead rubbish which prevents the new germs from sprouting. In every period strong voices are heard which desire freedom from the prevailing customs, and right of choice for the individual conscience and temperament. In this ever-continuous struggle it is important to distinguish what are really still living conceptions of right from factitious conceptions, which form only a conventional obstacle to a more beautiful freedom, a deeper truth, a greater originality, a richer life content.

Yet it is not only old conventionalism which needs to be rooted out. In every faction, in every social circle are soon formed lifeless collections of prejudices, paltry motives, dependent customs. It is always the women among whom conventionalism reaches its acme. For conservatism, that deep significant instinct of woman, becomes also often a prop of conventionality. Women are as yet seldom sufficiently developed personally to distinguish, in that which they wish to cherish, the appearance from the reality, the form from the content; or if they do distinguish, they have as yet rarely the courage to choose the content and reality if the majority have declared for form and appearance!

In the literature of the last ten years and in part also among women there prevails, however, a strong opposition to conventionality. This opposition has been directed especially against the archaic ideal of woman, according to which renunciation is still considered the highest attribute of woman; and against the antiquated conception of morality which regarded love without marriage as immoral, but any marriage, even without love, as moral.

The women who adopted the new ideal--which a Norwegian poet strikingly defined as "Self-assertion in self-surrender." "Affirmation of self in giving of self"--encounter now on the part of the modern woman's-rights advocates the same kind of conventional objection as in the fifties and sixties was directed against the then new ideal of the earlier woman movement.

The older emancipation movement advanced along the first line in the effort to establish the right of woman as a human being; that is, to give to woman the same rights as to man. The present movement purposes to assert the right of woman as an individuality; the absolute right to believe, to feel, to think and to act in her own way, if it does not interfere with the rights of others. Since the first end was a general one, the movement could in great part be made effective by collective work in attaining that end; the exposition of the independence of the individuality of woman, on the contrary, must be the personal concern of each single individual. This those women do not understand who still are working ever for the first end--the rights of woman as a human being. They do not understand that every woman must receive, not merely her universal rights, as a member of the body politic, but also her entire individual rights as the possessor of a definite personality. The right to establish an ego independent of, and perhaps entirely at variance with, theories and ideals is at heart the point of struggle between the one or the other individual woman and the women representatives of the earlier era of the woman question.