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 Stöcker, 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 für 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 für 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 æsthetic 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."

IV

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 Léon 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 Méray 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-huitième Siècle (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, anæmic, 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 Ibañez 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!