At the same time the new movement of German women, however it may arise from or be supported by political or scientific movements, is fundamentally emotional in its character. If we think of it, every great movement of the Teutonic soul has been rooted in emotion. The German literary renaissance of the eighteenth century was emotional in its origin and received its chief stimulus from the contagion of the new irruption of sentiment in France. Even German science is often influenced, and not always to its advantage, by German sentiment. The Reformation is an example on a huge scale of the emotional force which underlies German movements. Luther, for good and for evil, is the most typical of Germans, and the Luther who made his mark in the world—the shrewd, coarse, superstitious peasant who blossomed into genius—was an avalanche of emotion, a great mass of natural human instincts irresistible in their impetuosity. When we bear in mind this general tendency to emotional expansiveness in the manifestations of the Teutonic soul we need feel no surprise that the present movement among German women should be, to a much greater extent than the corresponding movements in other countries, an emotional renaissance. It is not, first and last, a cry for political rights, but for emotional rights, and for the reasonable regulation of all those social functions which are founded on the emotions.[62]

This movement, although it may properly be said to be German, since its manifestations are mainly exhibited in the great German Empire, is yet essentially a Teutonic movement in the broader sense of the word. Germans of Austria, Germans of Switzerland, Dutch women, Scandinavians, have all been drawn into this movement. But it is in Germany proper that they all find the chief field of their activities.

If we attempt to define in a single sentence the specific object of this agitation we may best describe it as based on the demands of woman the mother, and as directed to the end of securing for her the right to control and regulate the personal and social relations which spring from her nature as mother or possible mother. Therein we see at once both the intimately emotional and practical nature of this new claim and its decisive unlikeness to the earlier woman movement. That was definitely a demand for emancipation; political enfranchisement was its goal; its perpetual assertion was that women must be allowed to do everything that men do. But the new Teutonic woman's movement, so far from making as its ideal the imitation of men, bases itself on that which most essentially marks the woman as unlike the man.

The basis of the movement is significantly indicated by the title, Mutterschutz—the protection of the mother—originally borne by "a Journal for the reform of sexual morals," established in 1905, edited by Dr. Helene Stoecker, of Berlin, and now called Die Neue Generation. All the questions that radiate outwards from the maternal function are here discussed: the ethics of love, prostitution ancient and modern, the position of illegitimate mothers and illegitimate children, sexual hygiene, the sexual instruction of the young, etc. It must not be supposed that these matters are dealt with from the standpoint of a vigilance society for combating vice. The demand throughout is for the regulation of life, for reform, but for reform quite as much in the direction of expansion as of restraint. On many matters of detail, indeed, there is no agreement among these writers, some of whom approach the problems from the social and practical side, some from the psychological and philosophic side, others from the medical, legal, or historical sides.

This journal was originally the organ of the association for the protection of mothers, more especially unmarried mothers, called the Bund fuer Mutterschutz. There are many agencies for dealing with illegitimate children, but the founders of this association started from the conviction that it is only through the mother that the child can be adequately cared for. As nearly a tenth of the children born in Germany are illegitimate, and the conditions of life into which such children are thrown are in the highest degree unfavourable, the question has its actuality.[63] It is the aim of the Bund fuer Mutterschutz to rehabilitate the unmarried mother, to secure for her the conditions of economic independence—whatever social class she may belong to—and ultimately to effect a change in the legal status of illegitimate mothers and children alike. The Bund, which is directed by a committee in which social, medical, and legal interests are alike represented, already possesses numerous branches, in addition to its head-quarters in Berlin, and is beginning to initiate practical measures on the lines of its programme, notably Homes for Mothers, of which it has established nearly a dozen in different parts of Germany.

In 1911 the first International Congress for the Protection of Mothers and for Sexual Reform was held at Dresden, in connection with the great Exhibition of Hygiene. As a result of this Congress, an International Union was constituted, representing Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden, and Holland, which may probably be taken to be the countries which have so far manifested greatest interest in the programme of sexual reform based on recognition of the supreme importance of motherhood. This movement may, therefore, be said to have overcome the initial difficulties, the antagonism, the misunderstanding, and the opprobrium, which every movement in the field of sexual reform inevitably encounters, and often succumbs to.

It would be a mistake to regard this Association as a merely philanthropic movement. It claims to be "An Association for the Reform of Sexual Ethics," and Die Neue Generation deals with social and ethical rather than with philanthropic questions. In these respects it reflects the present attitude of many thoughtful German women, though the older school of women's rights advocates still holds aloof. We may here, for instance, find a statement of the recent discussion concerning the right of the mother to destroy her offspring before birth. This has been boldly claimed for women by Countess Gisela von Streitberg, who advocates a return to the older moral view which prevailed not only in classic antiquity, but even, under certain conditions, in Christian practice, until Canon law, asserting that the embryo had from the first an independent life, pronounced abortion under all circumstances a crime. Countess von Streitberg takes the standpoint that as the chief risks and responsibilities must necessarily rest upon the woman, it is for her to decide whether she will permit the embryo she bears to develop. Dr. Marie Raschke, taking up the discussion from the legal side, is unable to agree that abortion should cease to be a punishable offence, though she advocates considerable modifications in the law on this matter. Dr. Siegfried Weinberg, summarizing this discussion, again from the legal standpoint, considers that there is considerable right on the Countess's side, because from the modern juridical standpoint a criminal enactment is only justified because it protects a right, and in law the embryo possesses no rights which can be injured. From the moral standpoint, also, it is argued, its destruction often becomes justifiable in the interests of the community.

This debatable question, while instructive as an example of the radical manner in which German women are now beginning to face moral questions, deals only with an isolated point which has hardly yet reached the sphere of practical politics.[64] It is more interesting to consider the general conceptions which underlie this movement, and we can hardly do this better than by studying the writings of Ellen Key, who is not only one of its recognized leaders, but may be said to present its aims and ideals in a broader and more convinced manner than any other writer.

Ellen Key's views are mainly contained in three books, Love and Marriage, The Century of the Child, and The Women's Movement, in which form they enjoy a large circulation, and are now becoming well known, through translations, in England and America. She carefully distinguishes her aims from what she regards as the American conception of progress in woman's movements, that is to say the tendency for women to seek to capture the activities which may be much more adequately fulfilled by the other sex, while at the same time neglecting the far weightier matters that concern their own sex. Man and woman are not natural enemies who need to waste their energies in fighting over their respective rights and privileges; in spiritual as in physical life they are only fruitful together. Women, indeed, need free scope for their activities—and the earlier aspirations of feminism are thus justified—but they need it, not to wrest away any tasks that men may be better fitted to perform, but to play their part in that field of creative life which is peculiarly their own. Ellen Key would say that the highest human unit is triune: father, mother, and child. Marriage, therefore, instead of being, as it is to-day, the last thing to be thought of in education, becomes the central point of life. In Ellen Key's conception, "those who love each other are man and wife," and by love she means not a temporary inclination, but "a synthesis of desire and friendship," just as the air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. It must be this for both sexes alike, and Ellen Key sees a real progress in what seems to her the modern tendency for men to realize that the soul has its erotic side, and for women to realize that the senses have. She has no special sympathy with the cry for purity in masculine candidates for marriage put forward by some women of the present day. She observes that many men who have painfully struggled to maintain this ideal meet with disillusion, for it is not the masculine lamb, but much more the spotted leopard, who fascinates women. The notion that women have higher moral instincts than men Ellen Key regards as absurd. The majority of Frenchwomen, she remarks, were against Dreyfus, and the majority of Englishwomen approved the South African war. The really fundamental difference between man and woman is that he can usually give his best as a creator, and she as a lover, that his value is according to his work and hers according to her love. And in love the demand for each sex alike must not be primarily for a mere anatomical purity, but for passion and for sincerity.

The aim of love, as understood by Ellen Key, is always marriage and the child, and as soon as the child comes into question society and the State are concerned. Before fruition, love is a matter for the lovers alone, and the espionage, ceremony, and routine now permitted or enjoined are both ridiculous and offensive. "The flower of love belongs to the lovers, and should remain their secret; it is the fruit of love which brings them into relation to society." The dominating importance of the child, the parent of the race to be, alone makes the immense social importance of sexual union. It is not marriage which sanctifies generation, but generation which sanctifies marriage. From the point of view of "the sanctity of generation" and the welfare of the race, Ellen Key looks forward to a time when it will be impossible for a man and woman to become parents when they are unlikely to produce a healthy child, though she is opposed to Neo-Malthusian methods, partly on aesthetic grounds and partly on the more dubious grounds of doubt as to their practical efficiency; it is from this point of view also that she favours sexual equality in matters of divorce, the legal assimilation of legitimate and illegitimate children, the recognition of unions outside marriage,—a recognition already legally established under certain circumstances in Sweden, in such a way as to confer the rights of legitimacy on the child,—and she is even prepared to advise women under some conditions to become mothers outside marriage, though only when there are obstacles to legal marriage, and as the outcome of deliberate will and resolution. In these and many similar proposals in detail, set forth in her earlier books, it is clear that Ellen Key has sometimes gone beyond the mandate of her central conviction, that love is the first condition for increasing the vitality alike of the race and of the individuality, and that the question of love, properly considered, is the question of creating the future man. As she herself has elsewhere quite truly pointed out, practice must precede, and precede by a very long time, the establishment of definite rules in matters of detail.

It will be noticed that a point with which Ellen Key and the leaders of the new German woman's movement specially concern themselves is the affectional needs of the "supernumerary" woman and the legitimation of her children. There is an excess of women over men, in Germany as in most other countries. That excess, it is said, is balanced by the large number of women who do not wish to marry. But that is too cheap a solution of the question. Many women may wish to remain unmarried, but no woman wishes to be forced to remain unmarried. Every woman, these advocates of the rights of women claim, has a right to motherhood, and in exercising the right under sound conditions she is benefiting society. But our marriage system, in the rigid form which it has long since assumed, has not now the elasticity necessary to answer these demands. It presents a solution which is often impossible, always difficult, and perhaps in a large proportion of cases undesirable. But for a woman who is shut out from marriage to grasp at the vital facts of love and motherhood which she perhaps regards, unreasonably or not, as the supreme things in the world, must often be under such conditions a disastrous step, while it is always accompanied by certain risks. Therefore, it is asked, why should there not be, as of old there was, a relationship established which while of less dignity than marriage, and less exclusive in its demands, should yet permit a woman to enter into an honourable, open, and legally recognized relationship with a man? Such a relationship a woman could proclaim to the whole world, if necessary, without reflecting any disesteem upon herself or her child, while it would give her a legal claim on her child's father. Such a relationship would be substantially the same as the ancient concubinate, which persisted even in Christendom up to the sixteenth century. Its establishment in Sweden has apparently been satisfactory, and it is now sought to extend it to other countries.[65]

It is interesting to compare, or to contrast, the movement of which Ellen Key has been a conspicuous champion with the futile movement initiated nearly a century ago by the school of Saint-Simon and Prosper Enfantin, in favour of "la femme libre."[66] That earlier movement had no doubt its bright and ideal side, but it was not supported by a sound and scientific view of life; it was rooted in sand and soon withered up. The kind of freedom which Ellen Key advocates is not a freedom to dispense with law and order, but rather a freedom to recognize and follow true law; it is the freedom which in morals as well as in politics is essential for the development of real responsibility.

People talk, Ellen Key remarks, as though reform in sexual morality meant the breaking up of a beautiful idyll, while the idyll is impossible as long as the only alternative offered to so many young men and women at the threshold of life is between becoming "the slave of duty or the slave of lust." In these matters we already possess licence, and the only sound reform lies in a kind of "freedom" which will correct that licence by obedience to the most fundamental natural instincts acting in harmony with the claims of the race, which claims, it must be added, cannot be out of harmony with the best traditions of the race. Ellen Key would agree with a great German, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who wrote more than a century ago that "a solicitude for the race conducts to the same results as the highest solicitude for the most beautiful development of the inner man." The modern revolt against fossilized laws is inevitable; it is already in progress, and we have to see to it that the laws written upon tables of stone in their inevitable decay only give place to the mightier laws written upon tables of flesh and blood. Life is far too rich and manifold, Ellen Key says again, to be confined in a single formula, even the best; if our ideal has its worth for ourselves, if we are prepared to live for it and to die for it, that is enough; we are not entitled to impose it on others. The conception of duty still remains, duty to love and duty to the race. "I believe in a new ethics," Ellen Key declares at the end of The Women's Movement, "which will be a synthesis growing out of the nature of man and the nature of woman, out of the demands of the individual and the demands of society, out of the pagan and the Christian points of view, out of the resolve to mould the future and out of piety towards the past."

No reader of Ellen Key's books can fail to be impressed by the remarkable harmony between her sexual ethics and the conception that underlies Sir Francis Galton's scientific eugenics. In setting forth the latest aspects of his view of eugenics before the Sociological Society, Galton asserted that the improvement of the race, in harmony with scientific knowledge, would come about by a new religious movement, and he gave reasons to show why such an expectation is not unreasonable; in the past men have obeyed the most difficult marriage rules in response to what they believed to be supernatural commands, and there is no ground for supposing that the real demands of the welfare of the race, founded on exact knowledge, will prove less effective in calling out an inspiring religious emotion. Writing probably at the same time, Ellen Key, in her essay entitled Love and Ethics, set forth precisely the same conception, though not from the scientific but from the emotional standpoint. From the outset she places the sexual question on a basis which brings it into line with Galton's eugenics. The problem used to be concerned, she remarks, with the insistence of society on a rigid marriage form, in conflict with the demand of the individual to gratify his desires in any manner that seemed good to him, while now it becomes a question of harmonizing the claims of the improvement of the race with the claims of the individual to happiness in love. She points out that on this aspect real harmony becomes more possible. Regard for the ennoblement of the race serves as a bridge from a chaos of conflicting tendencies to a truer conception of love, and "love must become on a higher plane what it was in primitive days—a religion." She compares the growth of the conception of the vital value of love to the modern growth of the conception of the value of health as against the medieval indifference to hygiene. It is inevitable that Ellen Key, approaching the question from the emotional side, should lay less stress than Galton on the importance of scientific investigation in heredity, and insist mainly on the value of sound instincts, unfettered by false and artificial constraints, and taught to realize that the physical and the psychic aspects of life are alike "divine."

It would obviously be premature to express either approval or disapproval of the conceptions of sexual morality which Ellen Key has developed with such fervour and insight. It scarcely seems probable that the methods of sexual union, put forward as an alternative to celibacy by some of the adherents of the new movement, are likely to become widely popular, even if legalized in an increasing number of countries. I have elsewhere given reasons to believe that the path of progress lies mainly in the direction of a reform of the present institution of marriage.[67] The need of such reform is pressing, and there are many signs that it is being recognized. We can scarcely doubt that the advocates of these alternative methods of sexual union will do good by stimulating the champions of marriage to increased activity in the reform of that institution. In such matters a certain amount of competition sometimes has a remarkably vivifying effect.

We may be sure that women, whose interests are so much at stake in this matter, and who tend to look at it in a practical rather than in a legal and theological spirit, will exert a powerful influence when they have acquired the ability to enforce that influence by the vote. This is significantly indicated by an inquiry held in England during 1910 by the Women's Co-operative Guild. A number of women who had held official positions in the Guild were asked (among other questions) whether or not they were in favour of divorce by mutual consent. Of 94 representative women conversant with affairs who were thus consulted, as many as 82 deliberately recorded their opinion in favour of divorce by mutual consent, and only 12 were against that highly important marriage reform.

It is probably unnecessary to discuss the opinions of other leaders in this movement, though there are several, such as Frau Grete Meisel-Hess, whose views deserve study. It will be sufficiently clear in what way this Teutonic movement differs from that Anglo-Saxon woman's rights' movement with which we have long been familiar. These German women fully recognize that women are entitled to the same human rights as men, and that until such rights are attained "feminism" still has a proper task to achieve. But women must use their strength in the sphere for which their own nature fits them. Even though millions of women are enabled to do the work which men could do better the gain for mankind is nil. To put women to do men's work is (Ellen Key has declared) as foolish as to set a Beethoven or a Wagner to do engine-driving.

It has probably excited surprise in the minds of some who have been impressed by the magnitude and vitality of this movement that it should have manifested itself in Germany rather than in England, which is the original home of movements for women's emancipation, or in America, where they have reached their fullest developments. This, however, ceases to be surprising when we realize the special qualities of the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic temperaments and the special conditions under which the two movements arose. The Anglo-Saxon movement was a special application to women of the general French movement for the logical assertion of abstract human rights. That special application was not ardently taken up in France itself, though first proclaimed by French pioneers,[68] partly perhaps because such one-sided applications make little appeal to the French mind, and mainly, no doubt, because women throughout the eighteenth century enjoyed such high social consideration and exerted so much influence that they were not impelled to rise in any rebellious protest. But when the seed was brought over to England, especially in the representative form of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, it fell in virgin soil which proved highly favourable to its development. This special application escaped the general condemnation which the Revolution had brought upon French ideas. Women in England were beginning to awaken to ideas,—as women in Germany are now,—and the more energetic and intelligent among them eagerly seized upon conceptions which furnished food for their activities. In large measure they have achieved their aims, and even woman's suffrage has been secured here and there, without producing any notable revolution in human affairs. The Anglo-Saxon conception of feminine progress—beneficial as it has undoubtedly been in many respects—makes little impression in Germany, partly because it fails to appeal to the emotional Teutonic temperament, and partly because the established type of German life and civilization offers very small scope for its development. When Miss Susan Anthony, the veteran pioneer of woman's movements in the United States, was presented to the German Empress she expressed a hope that the Emperor would soon confer the suffrage on German women; it is recorded that the Empress smiled, and probably most German women smiled with her. At the present time, however, there is an extraordinary amount of intellectual activity in Germany, a widespread and massive activity. For the first time, moreover, it has reached women, who are taking it up with characteristic Teutonic thoroughness. But they are not imitating the methods of their Anglo-Saxon sisters; they are going to work their own way. They are spending very little energy in waving the red flag before the fortresses of male monopoly. They are following an emotional influence which, strangely enough, it may seem to some, finds more support from the biological and medical side than the Anglo-Saxon movement has always been able to win. From the time of Aristophanes downwards, whenever they have demonstrated before the masculine citadels, women have always been roughly bidden to go home. And now, here in Germany, where of all countries that advice has been most freely and persistently given, women are adopting new tactics: they have gone home. "Yes, it is true," they say in effect, "the home is our sphere. Love and marriage, the bearing and the training of children—that is our world. And we intend to lay down the laws of our world."

FOOTNOTES:

[52] In 1787 Condorcet declared (Lettres d'un Bourgeois de New Haven, Lettre II) that women ought to have absolutely the same rights as men, and he repeated the same statement emphatically in 1790, in an article "Sur l'Admission des Femmes au Droit de Cite," published in the Journal de la Societe de 1789. It must be added that Condorcet was not a democrat, and neither to men nor to women would he grant the vote unless they were proprietors.

[53] Leopold Lacour has given a full and reliable account of Olympe de Gouges (who was born at Montauban in 1755) in his Trois Femmes de la Revolution, 1900.

[54] It is noteworthy that the Empire had even a depressing effect on the physical activities of women. The eighteenth-century woman in France, although she was not athletic in the modern sense, enjoyed a free life in the open air and was fond of physical exercises. During the Directoire this tendency became very pronounced; women wore the scantiest of garments, were out of doors in all weathers, cultivated healthy appetites, and enjoyed the best of health. But with the establishment of the Empire these wholesome fashions were discarded, and women cultivated new ideals of fragile refinement indoors. (This evolution has been traced by Dr. Lucien Nars, L'Hygiene, September, 1911.)

[55] Concerning the rise and progress of this movement in England much information is sympathetically and vivaciously set forth in W. Lyon Blease's Emancipation of English Women (1910), a book, however, which makes no claim to be judicial or impartial; the author regards "unregulated male egoism" as the source of the difficulties in the way of women's suffrage.

[56] Thus, in 1911 the National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage took an impartial poll of the women voters on the municipal register in several large constituencies, by sending a reply-paid postcard to ask whether or not they favoured the extension to women of the Parliamentary franchise. Only 5579 were in favour of it; 18,850 were against; 12,621 did not take the trouble to answer, and it was claimed, probably with reason, that a majority of these were not in favour of the vote.

[57] It must not be too hastily assumed. Unless we go back to ancient plots of the Guy Fawkes type (now only imitated by self-styled anarchists), the leaders of movements of political reform have rarely, if ever, organized outbursts of violence; such violence, when it occurred, has been the spontaneous and unpremeditated act of a mob.

[58] Revue de l'Ecole d'Anthropologie, February, 1909, p. 50.

[59] O. Schrader, Reallexicon, Art. "Keuschheit." He considers that Tacitus merely shows that German women were usually chaste after marriage. A few centuries later, Lea points out, Salvianus, while praising the barbarians generally for their chastity, makes an exception in the case of the Alemanni. (See also Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," pp. 382-4.)

[60] Thus Kaan, anticipating Krafft-Ebing, published a Psychopathia Sexualis, in 1844, and Casper, in 1852, was the first medical authority to point out that sexual inversion is sometimes due to a congenital psychic condition.

[61] Both Forel's and Bloch's books have become well known through translations in England and America. Dr. Bloch is also the author of an extremely erudite and thorough history of syphilis, which has gone far to demonstrate that this disease was introduced into Europe from America on the first discovery of the New World at the end of the fifteenth century.

[62] This attitude is plainly reflected even in many books written by men; I may mention, for instance, Frenssen's well-known novel Hilligenlei (Holyland).

[63] In most countries illegitimacy is decreasing; in Germany it is steadily increasing, alike in rural and urban districts. Illegitimate births are, however, more numerous in the cities than in the country. Of the constituent states of the German Empire, the illegitimate birth-rate is lowest in Prussia, highest in Saxony and Bavaria. In Munich 27 per cent of the births are illegitimate. (The facts are clearly brought out in an article by Dr. Arthur Gruenspan in the Berliner Tagblatt for January 6, 1911, reproduced in Die Neue Generation, July, 1911.) Thus, in Prussia, while the total births between 1903 and 1908, notwithstanding a great increase in the population, have only increased 2.6 per cent, the illegitimate births have increased as much as 11.1 per cent. The increase is marked in nearly all the German States. It is specially marked in Saxony; here the proportion of illegitimate births to the total number of births was, in 1903, 12.51 per cent, and in 1908 it had already risen to 14.40 per cent. In Berlin it is most marked; here it began in 1891, when there were nearly 47,000 legitimate births; by 1909, however, the legitimate births had fallen to 38,000, a decrease of 19.4 per cent. But illegitimate births rose during the same period from nearly 7000 to over 9000, an increase of 35 per cent. The proportion of illegitimate births to the total births is now over 20 per cent, so that to every four legitimate children there is rather more than one illegitimate child. It may be said that this is merely due to an increasing proportion of unmarried women. That, however, is not the case. The marriage-rate is on the whole rising, and the average age of women at marriage is becoming lower rather than higher. Gruenspan considers that this increase in illegitimacy is likely to continue, and he is inclined to attribute it less to economic than to social-psychological causes.

[64] I have discussed this point in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," chap. XII.

[65] It is remarkable that in early times in Spain the laws recognized concubinage (barragania) as almost equal to marriage, and as conferring equal rights on the child, even on the sons of the clergy, who could thus inherit from their fathers by right of the privileges accorded to the concubine or barragana. Barragania, however, was not real marriage, and in many regions it could be contracted by married men (R. Altamira, Historia de Espana y de la Civilazacion Espanola, Vol. I, pp. 644 et seq.).

[66] "La femme libre," in quest of whom the young Saint-Simonians preached a crusade, must be a woman of reflection and intellect who, having meditated on the fate of her "sisters," knowing the wants of women, and having sounded those feminine capacities which man has never completely penetrated, shall give forth the confession of her sex, without restriction or reserve, in such a manner as to furnish the indispensable elements for formulating the rights and duties of woman. Saint Simon had asked Madame de Stael to undertake this role, but she failed to respond. When George Sand published her first novels, one Gueroult was commissioned to ascertain if the author of Lelia would undertake this important service. He found a badly dressed woman who was using her talents to gain a living, but was by no means anxious to become the high priestess of a new religion. Even after his disappointment Enfantin looked eagerly forward to the publication of George Sand's Histoire de ma Vie, hoping that at last the great revelation was coming, and he was again disillusioned. But before this Emile Barrault had arisen and declared that in the East, in the solitude of the harem, "la femme libre" would be found in the person of some odalisque. The "mission of the mother" was formed, and with Barrault at the head it set out for Constantinople. All were dressed in white as an indication of the vow of chastity they had taken before leaving Paris, and on the road they begged in the name of the Mother. They arrived at Constantinople and preached the faith of Saint-Simon to the Turks in French. But "la femme libre" seemed as far off as ever, and they resolved to go to Rotourma in Oceana, there to establish the religion of Saint-Simon and a perfect Government which might serve as a model to the States of Europe. First, however, they felt it a duty to make certain that the Mother was not hiding somewhere in Russia, and they went therefore to Odessa, but the Governor, who was wanting in sympathy, speedily turned them out, and having realized that Rotourma was some distance off, the mission broke up, most of the members going to Egypt to rejoin Enfantin, whom the Arabs, struck by his beauty, had called Abu-l-dhunieh, the Father of the World. (This account of the movement is based on that given by Maxime du Camp, in his Souvenirs Litteraires)

[67] Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," chap. X.

[68] It is worth noting that a Frenchwoman has been called "the mother of modern feminism." Marie de Gournay, who died in 1645 at the age of eighty, is best known as the adopted daughter of Montaigne, for whom she cherished an enthusiastic reverence, becoming the first editor of his essays. Her short essay, Egalite des Hommes et des Femmes, was written in 1622. See e.g. M. Schiff, La Fille d'Alliance de Montaigne.



IV

THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN IN RELATION TO ROMANTIC LOVE

The Absence of Romantic Love in Classic Civilization—Marriage as a Duty—The Rise of Romantic Love in the Roman Empire—The Influence of Christianity—The Attitude of Chivalry—The Troubadours—The Courts of Love—The Influence of the Renaissance—Conventional Chivalry and Modern Civilization—The Woman Movement—The Modern Woman's Equality of Rights and Responsibilities excludes Chivalry—New Forms of Romantic Love still remain possible—Love as the Inspiration of Social Hygiene.

What will be the ultimate effect of the woman's movement, now slowly but surely taking place among us, upon romantic love? That is really a serious question, and it is much more complex than many of those who are prepared to answer it off-hand may be willing to admit.

It must be remembered that romantic love has not been a constant accompaniment of human relationships, even in civilization. It is true that various peoples very low down in the scale possess romantic love-songs, often, it appears, written by the women. But the classic civilizations of Greece and Rome in their most robust and brilliant periods knew little or nothing of romantic love in connection with normal sexual relationships culminating in marriage. Classic antiquity reveals a high degree of conjugal devotion, and of domestic affection, at all events in Rome, but the right of the woman to follow the inspirations of her own heart, and the idealization and worship of the woman by the man, were not only scarcely known but, so far as they were known, reprehended or condemned. Ovid, in the opinion of some, represents a new movement in Rome. We are apt to regard Ovid as, in erotic matters, the representative of a set of immoral Roman voluptuaries. That view probably requires considerable modification. Ovid was not indeed a champion of morality, but there is no good reason to suppose that, before he appeared, the rather stern Roman mind had yet conceived those refinements and courtesies which he set forth in such charming detail. If we take a wide survey of his work, we may perhaps regard Ovid as the pioneer of a chivalrous attitude towards women and of a romantic conception of love not only new in Rome but of significance for Europe generally. Ovid was a powerful factor in the Renaissance movement, and not least in England, where his influence on Shakespeare and some others of the Elizabethans cannot easily be overrated.[69]

For the ordinary classic mind, Greek or Roman, marriage was intended for the end of building up the family, and the family was consecrated to the State. The fulfilment of so exalted a function involved a certain austere dignity which excluded wayward inclination or passionate emotion. These might indeed occur between a man and a woman outside marriage, but putting aside the very limited phenomena of Athenian hetairism, they were too shameful to be idealized. Some trace of this classic attitude may be said to persist even to-day among the so-called Latin nations, notably in the French tradition (now dying out) of treating marriage as a relationship to be arranged, not by the two parties themselves, but by their parents and guardians; Montaigne, attached as he was to maxims of Roman antiquity, was not very alien from the ordinary French attitude of his time when he declared that, since we do not marry so much for our own sakes as for the sake of posterity and the race, marriage is too sacred a process to be mixed with amorous extravagance.[70] There is something to be said for that point of view which is nowadays too often forgotten, but it certainly fails to cover the whole of the ground.

It is not only in the West that a contemptuous attitude towards the romantic and erotic side of life has prevailed at some of the most vigorous moments of civilization. It is also found in the East. In Japan, for instance, even at the present day, romantic love, as a reputable element of ordinary life, is unknown or disapproved; its existence is not recognized in the schools, and the European novels that celebrate it are scarcely understood.[71]

The development of modern romantic love in connection with marriage seems to be found in the late Greek world under the Roman Empire.[72] That is commonly called a period of decadence. In a certain limited sense it was. Greece had become subjugated to Rome. Rome herself had lost her military spirit and was losing her political power. But the fighting instinct, and even the ruling spirit, are not synonymous with civilization. The "decline and fall" of empires by no means necessarily involves the decay of civilization. It is now generally realized that the later Roman Empire was not, as was once thought, an age of social and moral degeneration.[73] The State indeed was dissolving, but the individual was evolving. The age which produced a Plutarch—for fifteen hundred years one of the great inspiring forces of the world—was the reverse of a corrupt age. The life of the home and the life of the soul were alike developing. The home was becoming more complex, more intimate, more elevated. The soul was being turned in on itself to discover new and joyous secrets: the secret of the love of Nature, the secret of mystic religion, and, not least, the secret of romantic love. When Christianity finally conquered the Roman world its task very largely lay in taking over and developing those three secrets already discovered by Paganism.

It was inevitable, however, that in developing these new forms of the emotional life, the ascetic bent of Christianity should make itself felt. It was not possible for Christianity to cast its halo around the natural sexual life, but it was possible to refine and exalt that life, to lift it into a spiritual sphere. Neither woman the sweetheart nor woman the mother were in ordinary life glorified by the Church; they were only tolerated. But on a higher than natural plane they were surrounded by a halo and raised to the highest pedestal of reverence and even worship. The Virgin was exalted, Bride and Bridegroom became terms of mystical import, and the Holy Mother received the adoring love of all Christendom. Even in the actual relations of men and women, quite early in the history of Christianity, we sometimes find men and women cultivating relationships which excluded that earthly union the Church looked down on, but yet involved the most tender and intimate physical affection. Many charming stories of such relationships are found in the lives of the saints, and sometimes they existed even within the marriage bond.[74] Christianity led to the use of ideas and terms borrowed from earthly love in a different and symbolic sense. But the undesigned result was that a new force and beauty were added to those ideas and terms, however applied, and also that many emotions were thus cultivated which became capable of re-inforcing earthly human love. In this way it happened that, though Christianity rejected the ideal of romantic love in its natural associations, it indirectly prepared the way for a loftier and deeper realization of that love.

There can be no doubt that the emotional training and refining of the fleshly instincts by Christianity was the chief cause of the rise of that conception of romantic love which we associate with the institution of chivalry. Exalted and sanctified by contact with the central dogmas of religion, the emotion of love was brought down from this spiritual atmosphere by the knightly lover, with something of its ethereal halo still clinging to it, and directed towards an earthly mistress. The most extravagant phase of romantic love which has ever been seen was then brought about, and in many cases, certainly, it was a real erotomania which passed beyond the bounds of sanity.[75] In its extreme forms, however, this romantic love was a rare, localized, and short-lived manifestation. The dominant attitude of the chivalrous age towards women, as Leon Gautier has shown in his monumental work on chivalry, was one of indifference, or even contempt. The knight's thoughts were more of war than of women, and he cherished his horse more than his mistress.[76]

But women, above all in France, reacted against this attitude, and with splendid success. Their husbands treated them with indifference or left them at home while they sought adventure in the world. The neglected wives proceeded to lay down the laws of society, and took upon themselves the part of rulers in the domain of morals. In the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth centuries, says Meray in a charming book on life in the days of the Courts of Love, we find women "with infinite skill and an adorable refinement seizing the moral direction of French society." They did so, he remarks, in a spirit so Utopian, so ideally poetic, that historians have hesitated to take them seriously. The laws of the Courts of Love[77] may sometimes seem to us immoral and licentious, but in reality they served to restrain the worst immoralities and licences of the time. They banished violence, they allowed no venality, and they inculcated moderation in passion. The task of the Courts of Love was facilitated by the relative degree of peace which then reigned, especially by the fact that the Normans, holding both coasts of the Channel, formed a link between France and England. When the murderous activities of French kings and English kings destroyed that link, the Courts of Love were swept away in the general disorder and the progress of civilization indefinitely retarded.[78] Yet in some degree the ideals which had been thus embodied still persisted. As the Goncourts pointed out in their invaluable book, La Femme au Dix-huitieme Siecle (Chap. v), from the days of chivalry even on into the eighteenth century, when on the surface at all events it apparently disappeared, an exalted ideal of love continued to be cherished in France. This conception remained associated, throughout, with the great social influence and authority which had been enjoyed by women in France even from medieval times. That influence had become pronounced during the seventeenth century, and at that time Sir Thomas Smith in his Commonwealth of England, writing of the high position of women in England, remarked that they possessed "almost as much liberty as in France."

There were at least two forms of medieval romantic love. The first arose in Provence and northern Italy during the twelfth century, and spread to Germany as Minnedienst. In this form the young knights directed their respectful and adoring devotion to a high-born married woman who chose one of them as her own cavalier, to do her service and reverence, the two vowing devotion to each other until death. It was a part of this amorous code that there could not be love between husband and wife, and it was counted a mark of low breeding for a husband to challenge his wife's right to her young knight's services, though sometimes we are told the husband risked this reproach, occasionally with tragic results. This mode of love, after being eloquently sung and practised by the troubadours—usually, it appears, younger sons of noble houses—died out in the place of its origin, but it had been introduced into Spain, and the Spaniards reintroduced it into Italy when they acquired the kingdom of Naples; in Italy it was conventionalized into the firmly rooted institution of the cavaliere servente. From the standpoint of a strict morality, the institution was obviously open to question. But we can scarcely fail to see that at its origin it possessed, even if unconsciously, a quasi-religious warrant in the worship of the Holy Mother, and we have to recognize that, notwithstanding its questionable shape, it was really an effort to attain a purer and more ideal relationship than was possible in a rough and warlike age which placed the wife in subordination to her husband. A tender devotion that inspired poetry, an unalloyed respect that approached reverence, vows that were based on equal freedom and independence on both sides—these were possibilities which the men and women of that age felt to be incompatible with marriage as they knew it.

The second form of medieval romantic love was more ethereal than the first, and much more definitely and consciously based on a religious attitude. It was really the worship of the Virgin transferred to a young earthly maiden, yet retaining the purity and ideality of religious worship. To so high a degree is this the case that it is sometimes difficult to be sure whether we are concerned with a real maiden of flesh and blood or only a poetic symbol of womanhood. This doubt has been raised, notably by Bartoli, concerning Dante's Beatrice, the supreme type of this ethereal love, which arose in the thirteenth century, and was chiefly cultivated in Florence. The poets of this movement were themselves aware of the religious character of their devotion to the donna angelicata to whom they even apply, as they would to the Queen of Heaven, the appellation Stella Maris. That there was an element of flesh and blood in these figures is believed by Remy de Gourmont, but when we gaze at them, he remarks, we see at first, "in place of a body only two eyes with angel's wings behind them, on the background of an azure sky sown with golden stars"; the lover is on his knees and his love has become a prayer.[79] This phase of romantic love was brief, and perhaps mostly the possession of the poets, but it represented a really important moment in the evolution of modern romantic love. It was a step towards the realization of the genuinely human charm of young womanhood in real human relationships, of which we already have a foretaste in the delicious early French story of Aucassin and Nicolette.

The re-discovery of classic literature, the movements of Humanism and the Renaissance, swept away what was left of the almost religious idealization of the young virgin. The ethereal maiden, thin, pale, anaemic, disappeared alike from literature and from art, and was no longer an ideal in actual life. She gave place to a new woman, conscious of her own fully developed womanhood and all its needs, radiantly beautiful and finely shaped in every limb. She lacked the spirituality of her predecessors, but she had gained in intellect. She appears first in the pages of Boccaccio. After a long interval Titian immortalized her rich and mature beauty; she is Flora, she is Ariadne, she is alike the Earthly Love and the Heavenly Love. Every curve of her body was adoringly and minutely described by Niphus and Firenzuola.[80] She was, moreover, the courtesan whose imperial charm and adroitness enabled her to trample under foot the medieval conception of lust as sin, even in the courts of popes. At the great academic centre of Bologna, finally, she chastely taught learning and science.[81] The people of the Italian Renaissance placed women on the same level as men, and to call a woman a virago implied unalloyed praise.[82]

The very mixed conditions of what we have been accustomed to consider the modern world then began for women. They were no longer cloistered—whether in convents or the home—but neither were they any longer worshipped. They began to be treated as human beings, and when men idealized them in figures of romantic charm or pathos—figures like Shakespeare's Rosalind or Marivaux's Sylvia or Richardson's Clarissa—this humanity was henceforth the common ground out of which the vision arose. But, one notes, in nearly all the great poets and novelists up to the middle of the last century, it was usually in the weakness of humanity that the artist sought the charm and pathos of his feminine figures. From Shakespeare's Ophelia to Thackeray's Amelia this is the rule, more emphatically expressed in the literature of England than of any other country. There had been no actual emancipation of women; though now they had entered the world of men, they were not yet, socially and legally, of that world. Even the medieval traditions still lived on in subtly conventionalized forms. The "chivalrous" attitude towards women was, as the word itself suggests, a medieval survival. It belonged to a period of barbarism when brutal force ruled and when the man who magnanimously placed his force at the disposition of a woman was really doing her a service and granting her a privilege. But civilization means the building up of an orderly society in which individual rights are respected, and force no longer dominates. So that as civilization advances the occasions on which women require the aid of masculine force become ever fewer and more unimportant. The conventionalized chivalry of men then tends to become an offer of services which it would be better for women to do for themselves and a bestowal of privileges to which they are nowise entitled.[83] Moreover, this same chivalry is, under these conditions, apt to take on a character which is the reverse of its face value. It becomes the assertion of a power over women instead of a power on their behalf; and it carries with it a tinge of contempt in place of respect. Theoretically, a thousand chivalrous swords should leap from their scabbards to succour the distressed woman. In practice this may only mean that the thousand owners of these metaphorical weapons are on the alert to take advantage of the distressed woman.

Thus the romantic emotions based on medieval ideals gradually lost their worth. They were not in relation to the altered facts of life; they had become an empty convention which could be turned to very unromantic uses. The movement for the emancipation of women was not consciously or directly a movement of revolt against an antiquated chivalry. It was rather a part of the development of civilization which rendered chivalry antique. Medieval romantic love implied in women a weakness in the soil of which only a spiritual force could flourish. The betterment of social conditions, the subordination of violence to order, the growing respect for individual rights, took away the reasons for consecrating weakness in women, and created an ever larger field in which women could freely seek to rival men, because it is a field in which knowledge and skill are of far more importance than muscular strength. The emancipation of women has simply been the later and more conscious phase of the process by which women have entered into this field and sought their share of its rights and its responsibilities.

The woman movement of modern times, properly understood, has thus been the effort of women to adapt themselves to the conditions of an orderly and peaceful civilization. Education, under the changed conditions, can effect what before needed force of arms; responsibility is now demanded where before only tutelage was possible. A civilized society in which women are ignorant and irresponsible is an anachronism, and, however great the wrench with the past might be, it was necessary that women should be adjusted to the changing times. The ideal of the weak, ignorant, inexperienced woman—the cross between an angel and an idiot, as I have elsewhere described her[84]—no longer fulfilled any useful purpose. Civilized society furnishes the conditions under which all adult persons are socially equal and all are free to give to society the best they are capable of.

It was inevitable, but unfortunate, that this movement should have sometimes tended to take the form of an attempt on the part of women to secure, not merely equality with men, but actual imitation of men. These women said that since men had attained mastery in life, captured all the best things, and adopted the most successful methods of living, it was necessary for women to copy them at every point. That was a specious plea which even had in it a certain element of truth. But the fact remained that women and men are different, that the difference is based in fundamental natural functions, and that to place one sex in exactly the same position as the other sex is to deform its outlines and to hamper its activities.

From the present point of view we are only concerned with the influence of the woman's movement on love. On the traditional conception of romantic love inherited from medieval days there can be no doubt that this influence has been highly dissolvent. Medieval romantic love, in its original form, had been part of a conception of womanhood made up of opposites, and all the opposites balanced each other. The medieval man laid his homage at the feet of the great lady in the castle hall, but he himself lorded it over the wife who drudged in his own home. On his knees he gazed up in devotion at the ethereal virgin, but when she ceased to be a virgin, he asserted himself by cursing her as a demon sent from hell to seduce and torment him. All this was possible because the woman was outside the orbit of the man's life, never on the same plane, necessarily higher or lower. It became difficult if woman was man's equal, absurdly impossible if she was of identical nature with him.

The medieval romantic tradition has come down to us so laden with beauty and mystery that we are apt to think, as we see it melt away, that human achievements are being permanently depreciated. That illusion occurs in every age of transition. It was notably so in the eighteenth century, which represented a highly important stage in the emancipation of women. To some that century seems to have been given up to empty gallantry and facile pleasure. Yet it was not only the age in which women for the first time succeeded in openly attaining their supreme social influence,[85] it was an age of romantic love, and the noble or poignant love-stories which have reached us from the records of that period surpass those of any other age.

If we believe with Goethe that the religion of the future consists in a triple reverence—the reverence for what is above us, the reverence for what is below us, and the reverence for our equals[86]—we need not grieve overmuch if one form of this reverence, the first, and that which Goethe regarded as the earliest and crudest, has lost its exclusive claim. Reverence is essential to all romantic love. To bring down the Madonna and the Virgin from their pedestals to share with men the common responsibilities and duties of life is not to divest them of the claim to reverence. It is merely the sign of a change in the form of that reverence, a change which heralds a new romantic love.

It would be premature to attempt to define the exact outline of the new forms of romantic love, or the precise lineaments of the beings who will most ardently evoke that love. In literature, indeed, the ideals of life cast their shadow before, and we may surely trace a change in the erotic ideals mirrored in literature. The woman whom Dickens idealized in David Copperfield is unlike indeed to the series of women of a new type introduced by George Meredith, and the modern heroine generally exhibits more of the robust, open-eyed and spontaneous qualities of that later type than the blind and clinging nature of the amiable simpletons of the older type. That the changed conditions of civilization should produce new types of womanhood and of love is not surprising, if we realize that, even within the ancient chivalrous forms it was possible to produce similar robust types when the qualities of a race were favourable to them. Spain furnishes a notable illustration. Spanish literature from Cervantes and Tirso to Valera and Blasco Ibanez reflects a type of woman who stands on the same ground as man and is his equal and often his superior on that ground, alike in vigour of body and of spirit, acquiring all that she cares to of virility, while losing nothing feminine that is of worth.[87] In more than one respect the ideal woman of Spain is the ideal woman our civilization now renders necessary. The women of the future, Grete Meisel-Hess declares in her femininely clever and frank discussion of present-day conditions, Die Sexuelle Krise, will be full, strong, elementary natures, devoid alike of the impulse to destroy or the aptitude to be destroyed. She considers, moreover, that so far from romantic love being a thing of the past, "love as a form of worship is reserved for the future."[88] In the past it has only been found among a few rare souls; in the future world, fostered by the finer selection of a conscious eugenics, and a new reverence and care for motherhood, we may reasonably hope for a truly efficient humanity, the bearers and conservers of the highest human emotions. It is in this sense, indeed, that the voices of the greatest and most typical leaders of the woman's movement of emancipation to-day are heard. Ellen Key, in her Love and Marriage, seeks to conciliate the cultivation of a free and sacred sexual relationship with the worship of the child, as the embodiment of the future race, while Olive Schreiner proclaims in her Woman and Labour that the woman of the future will walk side by side with man in a higher and deeper relationship than has ever been possible before because it will involve a new community in activity and insight.

Nor is it alone from the feminine side that these forecasts are made. Certainly for the most part love has been cultivated more by women than by men. Primacy in the genius of intellect belongs incontestably to men, but in the genius of love it has doubtless oftener been achieved by women. They have usually understood better than men that in this matter, as Goethe insisted, it is the lover and not the beloved who reaps the chief fruits of love. "It is better to love, even violently," wrote the forsaken Portuguese nun, in her immortal Letters, "than merely to be loved." He who loses his life here saves it, for it is only in so far as he becomes a crucified god that Love wins the sacrifice of human hearts. Of late years, by an inevitable reaction, women have sometimes forgotten this eternal verity. The women of the twentieth century in their anxiety for self-possession and their rightful eagerness to gain positions they feel they have been too long excluded from, have perhaps yet failed to realize that the women of the eighteenth century, who exerted a sway over life that the women of no age before or since have possessed, were, above all women, great and heroic lovers, and that those two fundamental facts cannot be cut asunder. But this failure, temporary as it is doubtless destined to be, will work for good if it is the point of departure for a revival among men of the art of love.

Men indeed have here fallen behind women. The old saying, so tediously often quoted, concerning love as a "thing apart" in the lives of men would scarcely have occurred to a medieval poet of Provence or Florence. It is not enough for women to proclaim a new avatar of love if men are not ready and eager to learn its art and to practise its discipline. In a profoundly suggestive fragment on love, left incomplete at his death by the distinguished sociologist Tarde,[89] he suggests that when masculine energy dies down in the fields of political ambition and commercial gain, as it already has in the field of warfare, the energy liberated by greater social organization and cohesion may find scope once more in love. For too long a period love, like war and politics and commerce, has been chiefly monopolized by the predatory type of man, in this field symbolized by the figure of Don Juan. In the future, Tarde suggests, the Don Juan type of lover may fall into disrepute, giving place to the Virgilian type, for whom love is not a thing apart but a form of life embodying its best and highest activities.

When we come upon utterances of this kind we are tempted to think that they represent merely the poetic dreams of individuals, standing too far ahead of their fellows to possess any significance for men and women in general. But it is probable that Ovid, and certain that Dante, set forth erotic conceptions that were unintelligible to most of their contemporaries, yet they have been immensely influential over the ideas and emotions of men in later ages. The poets and prophets of one generation are engaged in moulding ideals which will be realized in the lives of a subsequent generation; in expressing their own most intimate emotions, as it has been truly said, they become the leaders in a long file of men and women. Whatever may yet be uncertain and undefined, we may assuredly believe that the emotion of love is far too deeply rooted in the depth of man's organism and woman's organism ever to be torn out or ever to be thrust into a subordinate place. And we may also believe that there is no measurable limit to its power of putting forth ever new and miraculous flowers. It is recorded that once, in James Hinton's presence, the conversation turned on music, and it was suggested that, owing to the limited number of musical combinations and the unlimited number of musical compositions, a time would come when all music would only be a repetition of exhausted harmonies. Hinton remarked that then would come a man so inspired by a new spirit that his feeling would be, not that all music has been written, but that no music has yet been written. It was a memorable saying. In every field that is the perpetual proclamation of genius: Behold! I create all things new. And in this field of love we can conceive of no age in which to the inspired seer it will not be possible to feel: There has yet been no love!

FOOTNOTES:

[69] See especially Sidney Lee, "Ovid and Shakespeare's Sonnets," Quarterly Review, April, 1909.

[70] Montaigne, Essais, Book III, chap. V.

[71] See e.g. Mrs. Fraser, World's Work and Play, December, 1906.

[72] A more modern feeling for love and marriage begins to emerge, however, at a much earlier period, with Menander and the New Comedy. E.F.M. Benecke, in his interesting little book on Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry, believes that the romantic idea (that is to say, the idea that a woman is a worthy object for a man's love, and that such love may well be the chief, if not the only, aim of a man's life) had originally been propounded by Antimachus at the end of the fifth century B.C. Antimachus, said to have been the friend of Plato, had been united to a woman of Lydia (where women, we know, occupied a very high position) and her death inspired him to write a long poem, Lyde, "the first love poem ever addressed by a Greek to his wife after death." Only a few lines of this poem survive. But Antimachus seems to have greatly influenced Philetas (whom Croiset calls "the first of the Alexandrians") and Asclepiades of Samos, tender and exquisite poets whom also we only know by a few fragments. Benecke's arguments, therefore, however probable, cannot be satisfactorily substantiated.

[73] As I have elsewhere pointed out (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," chap. IX), most modern authorities—Friedlaender, Dill, Donaldson, etc.—consider that there was no real moral decline in the later Roman Empire; we must not accept the pictures presented by satirists, pagan or Christian, as of general application.

[74] I have discussed this phase of early Christianity in the sixth volume of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, "Sex in Relation to Society," chap. V.

[75] Ulrich von Lichtenstein, in the thirteenth century, is the typical example of this chivalrous erotomania. His account of his own adventures has been questioned, but Reinhold Becker (Wahrheit und Dichtung in Ulrich von Lichtenstein's Frauendienst, 1888) considers that, though much exaggerated, it is in substance true.

[76] Leon Gautier, La Chevalerie, pp. 236-8, 348-50.

[77] The chief source of information on these Courts is Andre le Chapelain's De Arte Amatoria. Boccaccio made use of this work, though without mentioning the author's name, in his own Dialogo d' Amore.

[78] A. Meray, La Vie au Temps des Cours d'Amour, 1876.

[79] Remy de Gourmont, Dante, Beatrice et la Poesie Amoureuse, 1907, p. 32.

[80] Niphus (born about 1473), a physician and philosopher of the Papal Court, wrote in his De Pulchro, sometimes considered the first modern treatise on aesthetics, a minute description of Joan of Aragon, whose portrait, traditionally ascribed to Raphael, is in the Louvre. The famous work of Firenzuola (born 1493) entitled Dialogo delle Bellezze delle Donne, was published in 1548. It has been translated into English by Clara Bell under the title On the Beauty of Women.

[81] See, for example, Edith Coulson James, Bologna: Its History, Antiquities and Art, 1911.

[82] See, for an interesting account of the position of women in the Italian Renaissance, Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance, Part V, ch. VI.

[83] I may quote the following remarks from a communication I have received from a University man: "I am prepared to show women, and to expect from them, precisely the same amount of consideration as I show to or expect from other men, but I rather resent being expected to make a preferential difference. For example, in a crowded tram I see no more adequate reason for giving up my seat to a young and healthy girl than for expecting her to give up hers to me; I would do so cheerfully for an old person of either sex on the ground that I am probably better fit to stand the fatigue of 'strap-hanging,' and because I recognize that some respect is due to age; but if persons get into over-full vehicles they should not expect first-comers to turn out of their seats merely because they happen to be men." This writer acknowledges, indeed, that he is not very sensitive to the erotic attraction of women, but it is probable that the changing status of women will render the attitude he expresses more and more common among men.

[84] Ante, p. 58.

[85] "Women then were queens," as Taine writes (L'Ancien Regime, Vol. I, p. 219), and he gives references to illustrate the point.

[86] Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Book II, ch. I.

[87] Havelock Ellis, The Soul of Spain, chap. III, "The Women of Spain."

[88] Grete Meisel-Hess, Die Sexuelle Krise, 1909, pp. 148, 168.

[89] "La Morale Sexuelle," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, January, 1907.



V

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A FALLING BIRTH-RATE

The Fall of the Birth-rate in Europe generally—In England—In Germany—In the United States—In Canada—In Australasia—"Crude" Birth-rate and "Corrected" Birth-rate—The Connection between High Birth-rate and High Death-rate—"Natural Increase" measured by Excess of Births over Deaths—The Measure of National Well-being—The Example of Russia—Japan—China—The Necessity of viewing the Question from a wide Standpoint—The Prevalence of Neo-Malthusian Methods—Influence of the Roman Catholic Church—Other Influences lowering the Birth-rate—Influence of Postponement of Marriage—Relation of the Birth-rate to Commercial and Industrial Activity—Illustrated by Russia, Hungary, and Australia—The Relation of Prosperity to Fertility—The Social Capillarity Theory—Divergence of the Birth-rate and the Marriage-rate—Marriage-rate and the Movement of Prices—Prosperity and Civilization—Fertility among Savages—The lesser Fertility of Urban Populations—Effect of Urbanization on Physical Development—Why Prosperity fails permanently to increase Fertility—Prosperity creates Restraints on Fertility—The Process of Civilization involves Decreased Fertility—In this Respect it is a Continuation of Zoological Evolution—Large Families as a Stigma of Degeneration—The Decreased Fertility of Civilization a General Historical Fact—The Ideals of Civilization to-day—The East and the West.

I

One of the most interesting phenomena of the early part of the nineteenth century was the immense expansion of the people of the so-called "Anglo-Saxon" race.[90] This expansion coincided with that development of industrial and commercial activity which made the English people, who had previously impressed foreigners as somewhat lazy and drunken, into "a nation of shopkeepers." It also coincided with the end of the supremacy of France in Europe; France had succeeded to Spain as the leading power in Europe, and had on the whole maintained a supremacy which Napoleon brought to a climax, and, in doing so, crushed. The growing prosperity of England represented an entirely new wave of influence, mainly economic in character, but not less forceful than that of Spain and of France had been; and this prosperity was reflected in the growth of the nation. The greater part of the Victorian period was marked by this expansion of population, which reached its highest point in the early years of the second half of that period. While the population of England was thus increasing with ever greater rapidity at home, at the same time the English-speaking peoples overspread the whole of North America, and colonized the fertile fringe of Australia. It was, on a still larger scale, a phenomenon similar to that which had occurred three hundred years earlier, when Spain covered the world and founded an empire upon which, as Spaniards proudly boasted, the sun never set.

When now, a century later, we survey the situation, not only has industrial and commercial activity ceased to be a special attribute of the Anglo-Saxons—since the Germans have here shown themselves to possess qualities of the highest order, and other countries are rapidly rivalling them—but within the limits of the English-speaking world itself the English have found formidable rivals in the Americans. Underlying, however, even these great changes there is a still more fundamental fact to be considered, a fact which affects all branches of the race; and that is, that the Anglo-Saxons have passed their great epoch of expansion and that their birth-rate is rapidly falling to a normal level, that is to say, to the average level of the world in general. Disregarding the extremely important point of the death-rate in its bearing on the birth-rate, England is seen to possess a medium birth-rate among European countries, not among the countries with a high birth-rate, like Russia, Roumania, or Bulgaria, nor among those with a low birth-rate, like Sweden, Belgium, and France. It was in this last country that the movement of decline in the European birth-rate began, and though the rate of decline has in France now become very gradual the long period through which it has extended has placed France in the lowest place, so far as Europe is concerned. In 1908 out of a total of over 11,000,000 French families, in nearly 2,000,000 there were no children, and in nearly 3,000,000 there was only one child.[91] The general decline in the European birth-rate, during the years 1901-1905, was only slight in Switzerland, Ireland and Spain, while it was large not only in France, but in Italy, Servia, England and Wales, and especially in Hungary (while, outside Europe, it was largest of all in South Australia). Since 1905 there has been a further general decline throughout Europe, only excepting Ireland, Bulgaria, and Roumania. In Prussia in 1881-1885 the birth-rate was 37.4; in 1909 it was only 31.8; while in the German Empire as a whole it is throughout lower than in Prussia, though somewhat higher than in England. In Austria and Spain alone of European countries during the twenty years between 1881 and 1901 was there any tendency for the fertility of wives to increase. In all other countries there was a decrease, greatest in Belgium, next greatest in France, then in England.[92]

If we consider the question, not on the basis of the crude birth-rate, but of the "corrected" birth-rate, with more exact reference to the child-producing elements in the population, as is done by Newsholme and Stevenson,[93] we find that the greatest decline has taken place in New South Wales, then in Victoria, Belgium, and Saxony, followed by New Zealand. But France, the German Empire generally, England, and Denmark all show a considerable fall; while Sweden and Norway show a fall, which, especially in Norway, is slight. Norway illustrates the difference between the "crude" and the "corrected" birth-rate; the crude birth-rate is lower than that of Saxony, but the corrected birth-rate is higher. Ireland, again, has a very low crude birth-rate, but the population of child-bearing age has a high birth-rate, considerably higher than that of England.

Thus while forty years ago it was usual for both the English and the Germans to contemplate, perhaps with some complacency, the spectacle of the falling birth-rate in France as compared with the high birth-rate in England and Germany, we are now seen to be all marching along the same road. In 1876 the English birth-rate reached its maximum of 36.3 per thousand; while in France the birth-rate now appears almost to have reached its lowest level. Germany, like England, now also has a falling birth-rate, though it will take some time to sink to the English level. The birth-rate for Germany generally is still much higher than for England generally, but urbanization in Germany seems to have a greater influence than in England in lowering the birth-rate, and for many years past the birth-rate of Berlin has been lower than that of London. The birth-rate in Germany has long been steadily falling, and the increase in the population of Germany is due to a concomitant steady fall in the death-rate, a fall to which there are inevitable natural limits.[94] Moreover, as Flux has shown,[95] urbanization is going on at a greater speed in Germany than in England, and practically the entire natural increase of the German population for a quarter of a century has drifted into the towns. But the death-rate of the young in German towns is far higher than in English towns, and the first five years of life in Germany produce as much mortality as the first twenty-five years in England.[96] So that a thousand children born in England add far more to the population than a thousand children born in Germany. The average number of children per family in German towns is less than in English towns of the same size. These results, reached by Flux, suggest that in a few years' time the rate of increase in the German population will be lower than it is at present in England. In England, since 1876, the decline has been so rapid as to be equal to 20 per cent within a generation, and in some of the large towns to 40 per cent. Against this there has, indeed, to be set the general tendency during recent years for the death-rate to fall also. But this saving of life has until lately been effected mainly at the higher ages; there has been but little saving of the lives of infants, upon whom the death-rate falls most heavily. Accompanying this falling off in the number of children produced there has often been, as we might expect, a fall in the marriage-rate; but this has been less regular, and of late the marriage-rate has sometimes been high when the birth-rate was low.[97] There has, however, been a steady postponement of the average age at which marriage takes place. On the whole, the main fact that emerges is, that nowadays in England we marry less and have fewer children.

This is now a familiar fact, and perhaps it should not excite very great surprise. England is an old and fairly stable country, and it may be said that it would be unreasonable to expect its population to retain indefinitely a high degree of fertility. Whether this is so or not, there is the further consideration to be borne in mind that, during nearly the whole of the Victorian period, emigration of the most vigorous stocks took place to a very marked extent. It is not difficult to see the influence of such emigration in connection with the greatly diminished population of Ireland, as compared with Scotland; and we may reasonably infer that it has had its part in the decreased fertility of the United Kingdom generally.

But we encounter the remarkable fact that this decreased fertility of the Anglo-Saxon populations is not confined to the United Kingdom. It is even more pronounced in those very lands to which so many thousand shiploads of our best people have been taken. In the United States the question has attracted much attention, and there is little disagreement among careful observers as to the main facts of the situation. The question is, indeed, somewhat difficult for two reasons: the registration of births is not generally compulsory in the United States, and, even when general facts are ascertained, it is still necessary to distinguish between the different classes of the population. Our conclusions must therefore be based, not on the course of a general birth-rate, but on the most reliable calculations, based on the census returns and on the average size of the family at different periods, and among different classes of the population. A bulletin of the Census Bureau of the United States since 1860 was prepared a few years ago by Walter F. Wilcox, of Cornell University. It determines from the data in the census office the proportion of children to the number of women of child-bearing age in the country at different periods, and shows that there has been, on the whole, a fall from the beginning to the end of the last century. Children under ten years of age constituted one-third of the population at the beginning of the century, and at the end less than one-fourth of the total population. Between 1850 and 1860 the proportion of children to women between fifteen and forty-nine years of age increased, but since 1860 it has constantly decreased. In 1860 the number of children under five years of age to one thousand women between fifteen and forty-nine years of age was 634; in 1900 it was only 474. The proportion of children to potential mothers in 1900 was only three-fourths as large as in 1860. In the north and west of the United States the decline has been regular, while in the south the change has been less regular and the decline less marked. A comparison is made between the proportion of children in the foreign-born population and in the American. The former was 710 to the latter's 462. In the coloured population the proportion of children is greater than in the corresponding white population.

There can be no doubt whatever that, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, there has been a steady decrease in the size of the American family. Franklin, in the eighteenth century, estimated that the average number of children to a married couple was eight; genealogical records show that, while in the seventeenth century it was nearly seven, it was over six at the end of the eighteenth century. Since then, as Engelmann and others have shown, there has been a steady decrease in the size of the family; in the earlier years of the nineteenth century there were between four and five children to each marriage, while by the end of the century the number of children had fallen to between four and but little over one. Engelmann finds that there is but a very trifling difference in this respect between the upper and the lower social classes; the average for the labouring classes at St. Louis he finds to be about two, and for the higher classes a little less. It is among the foreign-born population, and among those of foreign parents, that the larger families are found; thus Kuczynski, by analysing the census, finds that in Massachusetts the average number of children to each married woman among the American-born of all social classes is 2.7, while among the foreign-born of all social classes it is 4.5. Moreover, sterility is much more frequent among American women than among foreign women in America. Among various groups in Boston, St. Louis, and elsewhere it varies between 20 and 23 per cent, and in some smaller groups is even considerably higher, while among the foreign-born it is only 13 per cent. The net result is that the general natality of the United States at the present day is about equal to that of France, but that, when we analyse the facts, the fertility of the old native-born American population of mainly Anglo-Saxon origin is found to be lower than that of France. This element, therefore, is rapidly dwindling away in the United States. The general level of the birth-rate is maintained by the foreign immigrants, who in many States (as in New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota) constitute the majority of the population, and altogether number considerably over ten millions. Among these immigrants the Anglo-Saxon element is now very small. Indeed, the whole North European contingent among the American immigrants, which was formerly nearly 90 per cent of the whole, has since 1890 steadily sunk, and the majority of the immigrants now belong to the Central, Southern, and Eastern European stocks. The racial, and, it is probable, the psychological characteristics of the people of the United States are thus beginning to undergo, not merely modification, but, it may almost be said, a revolution. If, as we may well believe, the influence of the original North-European racial elements—Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, and French—still continues to persist in the United States, it can only be the influence of a small aristocracy, maintained by intellect and character.

When we turn to Canada, a land that is imposing, less by the actual size of the population than by the vast tracts it possesses for its development, the question has not yet been fully investigated; but such facts and official publications as I have been able to obtain all indicate that, in this matter, the English Canadians approximate to the native Americans. In the United States it is the European immigrants who maintain the general population at a productive level, and thus indirectly oust the Anglo-Saxon element. In Canada the chief dividing line is between the Anglo-Saxon element and the old French element in the population; and here it is the French Canadians who are gaining ground on the English elements in the population. Engelmann ascertained that an examination of one thousand families in the records of Quebec Life Assurance companies shows 9.2 children on the average to the French Canadian child-bearing woman. It is found also from the records of the French Canadian Society for Artisans that 500 families from town districts, taken at random, show 9.06 children per family, and 500 families from country districts show 9.33 children per family.[98] It must be remembered that this average, which is even higher than that found in Russia, the most prolific of European countries, is not quite the same as the number of children per marriage; but it indicates very great fertility, while it may be noted also that sterile marriages are comparatively rare among French Canadians, although among English Canadians the proportion of childless families is found to be almost exactly the same (nearly 20 per cent) as among the infertile Americans of Massachusetts. The annual Reports of the Registrar-General of Ontario, a province which is predominantly of Anglo-Saxon origin, show that the average birth-rate during the decade 1899-1908 has been 22.3 per 1000; it must be noted, however, that there has been a gradual rise from a rate of 19.4 in 1899 to one of 25.6 in 1908. The report of Mr. Prevost, the recorder of vital statistics for the predominantly French province of Quebec, shows much higher rates. The general birth-rate for the province for the year 1901 is high, being 35.2, much higher than that of England, and nearly as high as that of Germany. If, however, we consider the thirty-five counties of the province in which the population is almost exclusively French Canadian, we find that 35 represents almost the lowest average; as many as twenty-two of these counties show a rate of over forty, and one (Yamaska) reached 51.52. It is very evident that, in order to pull down these high birth-rates to the general level of 35.2, we have to assume a much lower birth-rate among the counties in which the English element is considerable. It must be remembered, however, that infant mortality is high among the French Canadians. The French Canadian Catholic, it has been said, would shrink in horror from such an unnatural crime as limiting his family before birth, but he sees nothing repugnant to God or man in allowing the surplus excess of children to die after birth. In this he is at one with the Chinese. Dr. E.P. La Chapelle, the President of the Provincial Conseil d'Hygiene, wrote some years ago to Professor Davidson, in answer to inquiries: "I do not believe it would be correct to ascribe the phenomenon to any single cause, and I am convinced it is the result of several factors. For one, the first cause of the heavy infant mortality among the French Canadians is their very heavy natality, each family being composed of an average of twelve children, and instances of families of fifteen, eighteen, and even twenty-four children being not uncommon. The super-abundance of children renders, I think, parents less careful about them."[99]

The net result is a slight increase on the part of the French Canadians, as compared with the English element in the province, as becomes clear when we compare the proportion of the population of English, Scotch, Irish, and all other nationalities with the total population of the province, now and thirty years ago. In 1871 it was 21 per cent; in 1901 it was only 19 per cent. The decrease of the Anglo-Saxons may here appear to be small, though it must be remembered that thirty years is but a short period in the history of a nation; but it is significant when we bear in mind that the English element has here been constantly reinforced by immigrants (who, as the experience of the United States shows, are by no means an infertile class), and that such reinforcement cannot be expected to continue in the future.

From Australia comes the same story of the decline of Anglo-Saxon fertility. In nearly all the Australian colonies the highest birth-rate was reached some twenty or thirty years ago. Since then there has been a more or less steady fall, accompanied by a marked decrease in the number of marriages, and a tendency to postpone the age of marriage. One colony, Western Australia, has a birth-rate which sometimes fluctuates above that of England; but it is the youngest of the colonies, and, at present, that with the smallest population, largely composed of recent immigrants. We may be quite sure that its comparatively high birth-rate is merely a temporary phenomenon. A very notable fact about the Australian birth-rate is the extreme rapidity with which the fall has taken place; thus Queensland, in 1890, had a birth-rate of 37, but by 1899 the rate had steadily fallen to 27, and the Victorian rate during the same period fell from 33 to 26 per thousand. In New South Wales, the state of things has been carefully studied by Mr. Coghlan, formerly Government statistician of New South Wales, who comes to the conclusion that the proportion of fertile marriages is declining, and that (as in the United States) it is the recent European immigrants only who show a comparatively high birth-rate. Until 1880, Coghlan states, the Australasian birth-rate was about 38 per thousand, and the average number of children to the family about 5.4. In 1901 the birth-rate had already fallen to 27.6 and the size of the family to 3.6 children.[100] It should be added that in all the Australasian colonies the birth-rate reached its lowest point some years ago, and may now be regarded as in a state of normal equipoise with a slight tendency to rise. The case of New Zealand is specially interesting. New Zealand once had the highest birth-rate of all the Australasian colonies; it is without doubt the most advanced of all in social and legislative matters; a variety of social reforms, which other countries are struggling for, are, in New Zealand, firmly established. Its prosperity is shown by the fact that it has the lowest death-rate of any country in the world, only 10.2 per thousand, as against 24 in Austria and 22 in France; it cannot even be said that the marriage-rate is very low, for it is scarcely lower than that of Austria, where the birth-rate is high. Yet the birth-rate in New Zealand fell as the social prosperity of the country rose, reaching its lowest point in 1899.

We thus find that from the three great Anglo-Saxon centres of the world—north, west, and south—the same story comes. We need not consider the case of South Africa, for it is well recognized that there the English constitute a comparatively infertile fringe, mostly confined to the towns, while the earlier Dutch element is far more prolific and firmly rooted in the soil. The position of the Dutch there is much the same as that of the French in Canada.

Thus we find that among highly civilized races generally, and not least among the English-speaking peoples who were once regarded as peculiarly prolific, a great diminution of reproductive activity has taken place during the past forty years, and is in some countries still taking place. But before we proceed to consider its significance it may be well to look a little more closely at our facts.

We have seen that the "crude" birth-rate is not an altogether reliable index of the reproductive energy of a nation. Various circumstances may cause an excess or a defect of persons of reproductive age in a community, and unless we allow for these variations, we cannot estimate whether that community is exercising its reproductive powers in a fairly normal manner. But there is another and still more important consideration always to be borne in mind before we can attach any far-reaching significance even to the corrected birth-rate. We have, that is, to bear in mind that a high or a low birth-rate has no meaning, so far as the growth of a nation is concerned, unless it is considered in relation to the death-rate. The natural increase of a nation is not the result of its birth-rate, but of its birth-rate minus its death-rate. A low birth-rate with a low death-rate (as in Australasia) produces a far greater natural increase than a low birth-rate with a rather high death-rate (as in France), and may even produce as great an increase as a very high birth-rate with a very high death-rate (as in Russia). Many worthy people might have been spared the utterance of foolish and mischievous jeremiads, if, instead of being content with a hasty glance at the crude birth-rate, they had paused to consider this fairly obvious fact.

There is an intimate connection between a high birth-rate and a high death-rate, between a low birth-rate and a low death-rate. It may not, indeed, be an absolutely necessary connection, and is not the outcome of any mysterious "law." But it usually exists, and the reasons are fairly obvious. We have already encountered the statement from an official Canadian source that the large infantile mortality of French Canadian families is due to parental carelessness, consequent, no doubt, not only on the dimly felt consciousness that children are cheap, but much more on inability to cope with the manifold cares involved by a large family. Among the English working class every doctor knows the thinly veiled indifference or even repulsion with which women view the seemingly endless stream of babies they give birth to. Among the Berlin working class, also, Hamburger's important investigation has indicated how serious a cause of infantile mortality this may be. By taking 374 working-class women, who had been married twenty years and conceived 3183 times, he found that the net result in surviving children was relatively more than twice as great among the women who had only had one child when compared to the women who had had fifteen children. The women with only one child brought 76.47 per cent of these children to maturity; the women who had produced fifteen children could only bring 30.66 of them to maturity; the intermediate groups showed a gradual fall to this low level, the only exception being that the mothers of three children were somewhat more successful than the mothers of two children. Among well-to-do mothers Hamburger found no such marked contrast between the net product of large families as compared to small families.[101]

It we look at the matter from a wider standpoint we can have no difficulty in realizing that a community which is reproducing itself rapidly must always be in an unstable state of disorganization highly unfavourable to the welfare of its members, and especially of the new-comers; a community which is reproducing itself slowly is in a stable and organized condition which permits it to undertake adequately the guardianship of its new members. The high infantile mortality of the community with a high birth-rate merely means that that community is unconsciously making a violent and murderous effort to attain to the more stable and organized level of the country with a low birth-rate.

The English Registrar-General in 1907 estimated the natural increase by excess of births over deaths as exceptionally high (higher than that of England) in several Australian Colonies, in the Balkan States, in Russia, the Netherlands, the German Empire, Denmark, and Norway, though in the majority of these lands the birth-rate is very low. On the other hand, the natural increase by excess of births over deaths is below the English rate in Austria, in Hungary, in Japan, in Italy, in Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, and Ontario, though in the majority of these lands the birth-rate is high, and in some very high.[102] In most cases it is the high death-rate in infancy and childhood which exercises the counterbalancing influence against a high birth-rate; the death-rate in adult life may be quite moderate. And with few exceptions we find that a high infantile mortality accompanies a high birth-rate, while a low infantile mortality accompanies a low birth-rate. It is evident, however, that even an extremely high infantile mortality is no impediment to a large natural increase provided the birth-rate is extremely high to a more than corresponding extent. But a natural increase thus achieved seems to be accompanied by far more disastrous social conditions than when an equally large increase is achieved by a low infantile death-rate working in association with a low birth-rate. Thus in Norway on one side of the world and in Australasia on the opposite side we see a large natural increase effected not by a profuse expenditure of mostly wasted births but by an economy in deaths, and the increase thus effected is accompanied by highly favourable social conditions, and great national vigour. Norway appears to have the lowest infantile death-rate in Europe.[103]

Rubin has suggested that the fairest measure of a country's well-being, as regards its actual vitality—without direct regard, of course, to the country's economic prosperity—is the square of the death-rate divided by the birth-rate.[104] Sir J.A. Baines, who accepts this test, states that Argentina with its high birth-rate and low death-rate stands even above Norway, and Australia still higher, while the climax for the world is attained by New Zealand, which has attained "the nearest approach to immortality yet on record."[105] The order of descending well-being in Europe is thus represented (at the year 1900) by Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, England, Scotland, Finland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Austria, France, and Spain.