1 The Aesthetic Validity Of Marriage
PART TWO
CONTAINING THE PAPERS OF B: LETTERS TO A
Les grandes passions sont solitaires, et les transporter
au désert, c’ est les rendre à leur empire.
Chateaubriand
1 THE AESTHETIC VALIDITY OF MARRIAGE
These lines your eyes first fall upon were written last. Their aim is to try once more to compress into letter form the extensive inquiry commended to you herewith. They are therefore of a piece with the lines that come last; together these form an envelope and thus indicate externally what you will find many proofs to convince you of within, that it is indeed a letter you are reading. The idea of writing you a letter has been one I have been unwilling to give up, partly because the time at my disposal has not permitted the more careful preparation required of a treatise, partly because I was reluctant to forgo this opportunity to address you in the more admonitory and urgent tones which the form of a letter allows. You are far too adept in the art of speaking in altogether general terms about anything, and without letting yourself be personally affected, for me to tempt you into mobilizing your dialectical powers. […] As a public official I am accustomed to writing in folio. That could have its advantages if it can contribute to giving what I write a certain authority. The letter you hereby receive is of some size: if weighed on the Post Office scales it would have been an expensive one. On the fine scales of cultivated criticism it could prove very insignificant. So I beg you not to use either of these scales: not the Post Office’s, for the letter is to be received into your own charge and not for further conveyance; nor that of criticism, since I would hate to see you incur such an uncongenial misunderstanding.
If this inquiry came to any other person’s eyes but your own, it would strike them as exceedingly strange and pointless; if it were a married man he might exclaim with the bonhomie of the paterfamilias, ‘Yes, marriage, that’s life’s aesthetic.’ If it were a young man he might rather vaguely and unreflectingly chime in, ‘Yes, love, you are life’s aesthetic.’ But neither of them would be able to grasp why it should occur to me to want to save the aesthetic reputation of marriage. Indeed, rather than earning the gratitude of actual or aspiring husbands, I would no doubt invite their suspicion. For to defend is to indict. And I would have you to thank for that, since I myself have never been in doubt about it; yes, you who in spite of all your bizarrerie I love like a son, a brother, a friend, who I love with an aesthetic love, since perhaps sometime you will find a centre for your eccentric movements; who I love for your impetuosity, your passions, your foibles; who I love with the fear and trembling of a religious love because I see in what ways you have gone astray, and because for me you are something quite other than mere appearance. Yes, when I see you lunge to the side, see you rear like a wild horse, starting back and then plunging forward, yes, I refrain then from any pedagogical frippery but think of a horse that is unbroken, and see, too, the hand that holds the reins, see the scourge of an overpowering fate raised above your head. And when now at last this inquiry has come to hand, perhaps you will say, ‘Yes, undeniably it is a monstrous task he has set himself, but now let us see how he has coped with it.’
Perhaps I speak to you too mildly; perhaps I bear with you too much, perhaps I should have wielded more of that authority which for all your pride I do wield over you; or perhaps I should not have involved myself with you in this topic at all; for you are in many ways a pernicious person and the more one has to do with you the worse it becomes. You are not really an enemy of marriage, but you abuse your ironic glance and sarcastic taunting to make a mockery of it. I will admit to you that in this respect you are not tilting at the air, that you strike home, and that you are extremely observant. But I will also say that this is perhaps what is wrong with you. Your life will be nothing but approach-runs. You will no doubt reply that that is better, after all, than to travel on the train of triviality and lose oneself like an atom in the social throng. As I say, you cannot say that you hate marriage, for your thoughts have no doubt never really come that far, at least not without the very idea scandalizing you, so you will have to forgive me for assuming that you have not thought the matter through. What you are drawn to is the first rapture of love. You know how to drown and hide yourself in a dreamy, love-intoxicated clairvoyance. All around yourself you spin the finest spider’s web and then lie in wait. But you are not a child, not a waking consciousness, and the look in your eye means something else; but for you that is enough. You love the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a captured glance, that is what you are after, that is a theme for your idle imagination. You who always make so much of being the observer must put up with being an object of observation in return. I will remind you of a case in point. A pretty young girl who happened (for naturally this had to be stressed, that you had no idea of her social standing, name, age, and so on) to be seated beside you at table was too prim to want to bestow you a glance. You were perplexed for a moment as to whether it was simply prudery or whether there wasn’t some embarrassment mixed up with it, which when properly illuminated, might present her in an interesting situation. She sat opposite a mirror in which you could see her. She cast a shy glance at it without guessing that your eye had already taken up residence there; she blushed when your eye met hers. Things like that you preserve as accurately as a daguerreotype and register just as quickly, just half a minute even in the worst weather, as you know.
Alas! you are indeed a strange being. Child one moment, old man the next, at one moment reflecting with tremendous seriousness upon the most exalted scientific problems, on how you will give your life to them, the next a love-struck fool. From marriage, however, you are a long way off, and I hope your guardian angel stops you going astray; for sometimes I seem to detect signs in you of wanting to play at being a little Zeus. You are so exclusive in your love that you no doubt fancy that any girl should count herself lucky to be your sweetheart even for a week. That gives you your studies in the amorous to pursue along with aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, world-politics, etc. It is impossible really to be angry with you; the evil in your case, as in the medieval conception, has a certain admixture of good nature and the childlike. As for marriage, you have always remained simply an observer. There is something treacherous in wanting only to observe. How often have you not – yes I admit, it amused me – how often have you not also plagued me with your stories of how you have sneaked your way first into the one then into another husband’s confidence, in order to see how deeply he had become stuck in the mire of married life. To steal your way into people, that’s where you have a truly great gift, I do not deny it, or at the same time that it is a proper entertainment to hear you recount the results and to witness your uncontained joy every time you can bring some really fresh observation to the market. But frankly your psychological interest lacks seriousness and is more like hypochondriacal curiosity.
But now to the matter in hand. There are two things in particular I must regard as my task. To show the aesthetic significance of marriage, and to show how the aesthetic element can be sustained in the face of life’s manifold obstacles. However, so that you can devote yourself the more safely to any edification the reading of this little essay might possibly bring you, I will prefix short polemical prologues to the discussion of these points in which due consideration will be given to your sarcastic observations. But in this way I hope also to have paid my dues to the pirate states thus to be left in peace at my vocation, for it is indeed my vocation as a husband to fight for marriage – pro aris et focis [for hearth and home]. And I assure you the affair is so close to my heart that I, who otherwise feel little temptation to write books, could really be tempted if I could hope to save even a single marriage from whatever hell it may have plunged into, or to make a few people better able to bring to fruition the most beautiful task set for a person.
To be on the safe side, I will occasionally allude to my wife and my relationship with her, not because I would make so bold as to present our marriage as the exemplary norm, but partly because poetic portrayals plucked out of thin air have, through their gener ality, no particular power to convince, and partly because it is important for me to show how it is possible to preserve the aesthetic even in everyday circumstances. […] One thing I thank God with all my soul for is that she is the only one I have ever loved, the first. And one thing I pray God with all my heart for is that He will give me the strength never to want to love another. This is a domestic prayer in which she joins me; for every feeling, every mood, acquires a higher meaning for me by my making her party to it. All feelings, even the highest religious ones, can acquire a certain spaciousness and ease when one is always agreed in them. In her presence I am at once priest and congregation. And if I should once in a while be so unloving as not to remember this good, so ungracious as not to give thanks for it, she will remind me. For mark well, my young friend! what we have is not the dalliance of the first days of infatuation, or attempts at experimental eroticism, of the kind in which practically everyone in the days of engagement has posed himself and the loved one the question whether she hasn’t been in love before or he hasn’t loved someone before. It is life’s earnest, and yet it is not cold, unbecoming, unerotic, unpoetic. And in truth, that she really loves me and that I really love her, are things I have very much at heart. Not, of course, that our marriage has not in the passage of years become as stable as most others, but for me this is a matter of the continual rejuvenation of our first love. […] This rejuvenation […] is not just a sad backward glance, or the poetic memory of an experience which is really only a way of deluding oneself – all things of that kind sap one’s energy. This is an activity. The time when one has to be content with memories can come all too soon; life’s fresh spring should be kept open as long as possible. You, on the contrary, really live from theft. You creep up on people unawares, steal from them their moments of happiness, their most beautiful moments, put this phantom-image into your pocket […] and present it whenever you want. […] You think […] they should be grateful to you because from your study of lighting effects and by your captivating turn of phrase you have let them appear transfigured in those exalted moments into something larger than life. Perhaps they lose nothing, and one may even surmise that they might possibly retain a memory of these things, which always causes them pain. But you lose. You lose your time – your peace of mind – your patience to live; for you well know how impatient you are. […] There is an unrest in you over which your consciousness nevertheless soars light and clear. Your whole soul is gathered at that point. Your mind draws up a hundred plans, everything is prepared for the assault. Should it fail in one direction, instantly your well-nigh diabolical dialectic is ready to explain that away as necessary part of the new plan of operation. You hover constant! over yourself and however decisive each step you take, you are ready with an interpretation which with a word can change everything. And then there is the whole embodiment of the mood: your eyes sparkle, or rather it is as though a hundred watchful eyes were simultaneously shining, a fleeting blush passes rapidly over your face; you have full confidence in your calculations, and yet still wait with a terrible impatience – yes, my dear friend, I really think that in the final analysis you delude yourself; all this talk of catching a person in his moment of happiness, it is only your own exalted mood that you capture. You are so wrought up that you are fabricating things. That is why I thought it was not so harmful for others. For you it is absolutely harmful.
And underlying this is there not after all a monstrous breach of faith? You say people do not concern you yet should thank you for turning them, through this contact with them, not into swine as Circe did1 but from swine into heroes. You say it would be quite different if there were someone who really confided in you but that so far you have never met such a person. Your heart is moved, you melt with inward agitation at the thought of sacrificing everything for him. Nor will I deny that you have a certain kindly disposition to help, that the way you support the needy, for example, is truly beautiful, and that in the gentleness you display now and then there is something noble. Nevertheless I think that there lurks here a certain superiority. […] You once told me how while out walking you came up behind two poor women. Maybe my own account here of what happened lacks the vividness of yours when you rushed up to me possessed only of this thought. They were two women from the poorhouse. They’d perhaps seen better days, but all that was forgotten and the poorhouse is not exactly the place to foster hope. While one of them took and offered the other a pinch of snuff, she said, ‘If only someone had five dollars.’ Perhaps this bold wish, which reverberated unanswered over the slopes up to the ramparts, surprised even herself. You approached. Before taking the decisive step you had already taken out your wallet and extracted a five-dollar bill, so that the situation should remain duly flexible and she should not suspect anything too soon. You approached with an almost subservient civility, as befits a ministering spirit; you gave her the five dollars and vanished. You revelled in the thought of the impression it would have on her, whether she would see this as some divine dispensation, or whether her mind would rather, perhaps grown defiant through much suffering, turn almost with contempt against a divine governance that took on the form here of pure accident. You told me that this prompted you to consider whether the wholly accidental fulfilment of such an accidentally expressed wish could cause someone to despair because of its negating the reality of life in its deepest roots. Thus what you wanted was to play the part of fate, what you really revelled in were the multifarious thoughts you could spin out of the situation. Now I admit you are well suited to the part of fate, to the degree one links this word to the notion of the greatest inconstancy and caprice. For myself, I am content with a less superior appointment in life. Moreover, you can see in this case an example that might enlighten you on just how far you do not harm people with your experiments. It can look as though the advantage were on your side; you have given a poor woman five dollars, fulfilled her highest wish. And yet you yourself admit that its effect on her could just as well be to make her, as Job’s wife advised him to do, curse God. You may say these consequences are not under your control, and that if one has to calculate consequences in this way one cannot act. But I will reply, yes, one can indeed act. If I’d had five dollars I too might have given them to her, but I would also have been very much aware of not behaving experimentally; I would remain convinced that divine providence, whose poor instrument I felt myself that instant to be, would surely arrange everything for the best, and that I had nothing to reproach myself for. […]
The eagerness you exhibit can be praiseworthy enough, but can you not see how increasingly clear it is that what you lack, lack entirely, is faith? Instead of saving your soul by putting everything into God’s hands, instead of making this short-cut you prefer an endless detour which may never lead you to your goal. To this you will no doubt say, ‘Yes, that means you need never act.’ I would reply, ‘Of course you must, when you know in yourself that you have a place in the world which is yours and where you should concentrate all your activity. But acting as you do borders on insanity.’ You will say that if you had just stood by and let God take care of things the woman might not have been helped. I would reply, ‘Possibly, but you would have been helped, and the woman too if she entrusted herself to God.’ And do you not see that if you really put on your travelling-boots and journeyed out into the world, wasting your time and energy, you would miss the chance of all other activity, which may come to torment you again later on? But, as I said, is this capricious way of living not a breach of faith? It may look as if journeying around the world to find the poor woman showed an extraordinary, an unprecedented degree of constancy, nothing the least egoistic motivated you, it was not as when a lover travels in search of the loved one, not at all, it was pure sympathy. I reply, ‘Certainly you should take care not to call that feeling egoism; it is your usual rebellious lack of shame.’ Everything established by divine or human law you despise, and to free yourself from it you grasp hold of the accidental, as in this case a poor woman unknown to you. And as for your sympathy, perhaps it was pure – for your experiment. […]
As I have said, what you want to be is – fate. But now wait a moment. I do not mean to preach to you, but there is a seriousness in you for which I know you still have an unusually deep respect; anyone with the power to evoke it in you, or enough confidence in you to let it come to the surface, would see in you today, I know, a quite different person. Imagine, to take the highest we can, imagine that the almighty creator of all things, that God in heaven were in this way simply to posit Himself as a riddle for man, were to let the whole human race hover in this fearful ignorance. Would not something deep inside you rebel in resentment against this, could you stand such agony, could you stand the very thought of such a horror, even just for a moment? Yet it is almost, dare one say it, as if God Himself were haughtily to have declared, ‘What care I for man?’ But that is why it is not so. And when I myself say that God is incomprehensible, it is because my soul is raised to the heights; it is precisely in the most blessed moments that I say the word – incomprehensible – because His love is incomprehensible, incomprehensible because his love surpasses all understanding.2 […] But bear in mind your life is passing; there will come a time even for you when it draws to its close, when you are offered no further ways out in life, when recollection is all that is left. Yes, recollection, but not in the way you so much love it, this mixture of poesy and truth, but the serious and faithful recollection of conscience. Take care that it does not unroll a personal record, not indeed of genuine crimes, but of wasted possibilities, phantom-images which it will be impossible for you to chase away. You are still young, the suppleness of your spirit is becoming to youth and amuses the eye for a while. One is struck at the sight of a clown whose joints are so pliant as to repeal the necessity of human gait and posture. That, spiritually speaking, is how you are, you can just as well stand on your head as your feet, for you everything is possible and with this possibility you can surprise others and yourself. But it is unhealthy, and for the sake of your own peace of mind I beg you to watch out that your advantage does not become a curse. No one convinced of something can turn himself and everything else upside down at will in this manner. I am warning you, therefore, not about the world but about yourself and I am warning the world about you. This much is certain: had I a daughter of an age where there could be any question of her being influenced by you, I would most assuredly warn her, the more so if she were also intellectually gifted. And if there were no reason to warn her against you, then I myself, who nevertheless imagine I might be your match, if not in suppleness then at least in firmness and constancy, if not in the variable and brilliant then at least in steadiness – then I myself, with a certain reluctance, sometimes actually feel that you are corrupting me, that I am letting myself be carried away by your exuberance, by the apparently good-natured wit with which you mock everything, that I am letting myself be borne away into this aesthetic-intellectual intoxication in which you live. In a way, then, I feel to some degree uncertain towards you, at times being too severe, at others too indulgent. However, that is not so strange, for you are the epitome of all possibility; so that one may see in you the possibility at one moment of your own ruin, at another of your own salvation. Every mood, every thought, good or evil, cheerful or sad, you pursue to its farthest limit, yet more in abstraction than concretely, so the pursuit is itself more like a mood from which nothing results except the knowledge of it, though not enough to make it more difficult or easy next time to abandon yourself to that same mood; for you keep it as a constant possibility. So it is almost as though you could be reproached for everything and nothing at all, because it is and yet is not attributable to you. You admit or don’t admit, according to circumstances, to having had such a mood. But you are not available for any charge. The important thing for you is that you have had the mood completely, with proper pathos.
But it was the aesthetic significance of marriage I was to deal with. That inquiry might seem unnecessary, to be something everyone would concede as having been sufficiently demonstrated. Haven’t knights and adventurers for centuries withstood unbelievable trials and tribulations to end up in the quiet peace of a happy marriage? Haven’t novelists and their readers for centuries worked their way through one volume after another to come to a halt with a happy marriage? And hasn’t one generation after another endured again and again four acts of trials and intrigues just because there was some likelihood of a happy marriage in the fifth? However, these huge exertions have accomplished very little for the glorification of marriage, and I very much doubt whether there is anyone who has felt that reading such works has qualified him to fulfil the task he has set himself, or felt himself oriented in life. For this is precisely what is pernicious and unhealthy about such writings, that they end where they should begin. After the many twists of fate they have overcome, the lovers finally fall into each other’s arms, the curtain falls, the book ends, but the reader is none the wiser. […] What is true in [these works], the properly aesthetic element, is the fact that love is put to work, that this feeling is represented as fighting its way through an opposite. What is false in them is that the struggle, this dialectic, is entirely external, and that love comes out of the struggle as abstract as it entered into it. Once there is a proper appreciation of love’s own dialectic, of its pathological struggle, of its relation to the ethical, to religion, there will in truth be no need of hard-hearted fathers, maidens’ bowers, or enchanted princesses and ogres and monsters to give love enough to do. Nowadays one seldom meets such cruel fathers or frightful monsters, and to the extent that recent literature models itself on the earlier it is really money that has become the medium of opposition through which love moves, and again we struggle through four acts if there is reasonable prospect of a rich uncle dying in the fifth.
However, performances like these are less frequent, and recent literature is on the whole fully occupied with ridiculing love in that abstractly immediate form found in the world of the romance. […] [But] how far has the age which demolished romantic love succeeded in replacing it with anything better? First I shall offer some criteria of romantic love. One could say, in one word, that it is immediate, that to see her and to love her were one and the same; or, though she saw him just once through a slit in the closed window of her maiden’s bower, from that moment she loved him and him alone in the whole world. The immediacy of romantic love is revealed by its dependence on natural necessity. It is based on beauty, in part on sensual beauty, in part on the beauty that can be depicted through, in, and with the sensual, not in the way that some thought-process is needed to bring it to light, but as if constantly on the point of expressing itself on its own, peeping out through the sensual. Though based essentially on the sensual, this love still has a nobility by virtue of the consciousness of the eternal it takes up in itself. For what distinguishes love from lust is its having the stamp of the eternal. […] For the sensual is the instantaneous. [It] seeks instant satisfaction, and the more refined it is, the better it knows how to make the moment of pleasure into a little eternity. [While] the true eternity in love, as in the truly ethical way of life, is what really first delivers love from out of the sensuous. But to bring about this true eternity there must be a determination of the will; of which more later.
The weakness of romantic love is something our own age has grasped very clearly. Its ironical polemic against it has also on occasion been directly amusing; whether it has remedied the defects and what it has put in its place we shall now see. It can be said to have struck out on two paths, one of which is shown at first glance to be a wrong one, that is, an immoral path; the other is more respectable, but to my mind misses the deeper aspects of love. For if love depends on the sensual, then anyone can see quite easily that this immediate knightly loyalty is madness. What wonder, then, that women want emancipation – one of many ugly phenomena in our time and for which men are to blame. The eternal in love becomes an object of scorn, the temporal is retained, but the temporal refined again in a sensual eternity, in the eternal instant of the embrace. What I say here applies not only to this or that seducer slinking about in the world like a beast of prey; no, it befits a numerous chorus of often highly gifted persons, and it is not only Byron who declares love to be heaven, marriage hell.3 One now sees clearly that what we have here is a reflection, something romantic love lacks. The latter can happily accept the blessing of the Church as one more beautiful celebration, yet without this having any significance for it as such. On the basis of this reflection the love now in question has, with the fearful unfeeling fixity of intellect, come up with a new definition of unhappy love,4 namely to be loved when one is no longer in love, rather than be in love and not have one’s love requited. And in truth, if those who go this way knew just what profundity lies in these few words, they would recoil; for apart from all its experience, shrewdness and sophistication, it also contains an inkling of the existence of a conscience. […] This direction is of course absolutely immoral, but on the other hand it brings us in one way a step nearer our goal, in thought; in a sense it lodges a formal protest against marriage. In a sense this same direction tries to put on a slightly more decent exterior, so it does not just confine itself to the single instant but extends this to a longer period, yet in such a way that instead of taking up the eternal in its consciousness, it takes up the temporal, or entangles itself in this opposition between the eternal and the idea of a possible change in time. It thinks it is possible to put up with living together for quite a while but wants to keep a way out open so that if a happier choice appeared it would still be possible to choose that. It makes marriage into a civil arrangement; one only has to notify the appropriate authority that this marriage is now over and a new one entered into, just as one gives notice of a change of address. Whether this is an advantage for the State, I leave undecided; for the individual it must be a truly remarkable situation. Hence one does not often see it in fact, though the threat is constantly there in the times. Indeed it would require shamelessness of a high degree – I do not think the word is too strong – just as much as it would betray a frivolity bordering on depravity, especially on the part of the female party to this association.
However, there is a quite different tendency of mind which can easily come upon a similar idea, and since it is very characteristic of our time I think I should deal with it here. Such a plan can in fact originate in either an egoistic or a sympathetic melancholy. There has been enough talk now of the frivolity of our age; I think it high time to speak a little of its melancholy, and I trust that this will make everything clearer. For is not melancholy the defect of our time, is this not what reverberates even in its frivolous laughter, is it not melancholy that has bereft us of the courage to command, the courage to obey, the strength to act, the confidence to hope? And now when the good philosophers are doing everything they can to intensify the actual, will we not soon be so crammed with it that we choke? Everything is cut away except the present; little wonder then that in one’s constant anxiety about losing it one does lose it. Now, it is true enough that we ought not to vanish in a fleeting hope, and that this is not the way we are to be transfigured on high; but for real enjoyment one must have air and it isn’t only in the moment of sorrow that the heavens must be held open, it is important to have an unobstructed view even in times of joy and the double doors thrown wide. […] If enjoyment were the main thing in life I would sit at your feet to learn, for in this you are a master. At one moment you can become an old man in order to suck in through the funnel of memory, in slow draughts, what you have experienced, at another you are in the first blush of youth, flushed with hope; at one moment masculine, at another feminine; now you enjoy immediately, now you enjoy reflecting on your enjoyment, now reflecting on the enjoyment of others; at one moment you enjoy abstaining from enjoyment, at another you enjoy abandoning yourself to it; your mind is open, accessible as a city that has capitulated, reflection is silenced and every step of the intruders echoes in the empty streets, yet there will always be a little outpost left over, observing; and then your mind is closed again and you barricade yourself in, unapproachable and intractable. This is how it is, and you will see also how egoistic your enjoyment is, and that in fact you never abandon yourself, never let others enjoy you. […]
Naturally the egoistic kind [of melancholy] fears for itself, and like all melancholy it is self-indulgent. It has a certain exaggerated deference for, a secret horror of, a lifelong alliance. ‘What can one count on? Everything can change. Perhaps this being whom I now almost worship will change; perhaps fate will tie me to another that is truly the ideal I dreamed of.’ Like all melancholy it is defiant and knows it. ‘Perhaps my tying myself irrevocably to one person may make this being I’d otherwise love with all my soul intolerable, perhaps, perhaps, and so on.’ The sympathetic melancholy is more painful and also somewhat nobler: it fears for itself for the other’s sake. ‘Who can be sure one cannot change? Perhaps what I now consider good in me may vanish, perhaps what the beloved finds captivating in me, and which I want to hold on to for her sake, can be taken from me, and now she stands there, disappointed, tricked; perhaps a brilliant prospect opens for her, she is tempted, she doesn’t resist the temptation – good God, I’d have that on my conscience; I have nothing to reproach her for, it is me that has changed, I forgive her everything if only she can forgive me for being so incautious as to let her take such a decisive step. Although I know quite well that far from talking her round I warned her against me, it was her own free decision, but perhaps it was this very warning that tempted her, made her see in me a better being than I am, etc. …’ It is easy to see how this way of thinking is no better served by a ten-year alliance than a five-year one, […] that such a way of thinking is only too well aware of the meaning of the phrase ‘sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof’.5 It is an attempt to live each day as though that day were decisive, as though every day were examination day. For this reason the widespread tendency today to neutralize marriage is not, as in the Middle Ages, because unmarried life is considered more perfect, but is due to cowardice and self-indulgence. It is also evident that contracting marriages for a definite period is of no avail, since such marriages involve just the same difficulties as do those contracted for a lifetime and, far from bestowing on the parties the strength to live, on the contrary they sap the inner energy of married life, loosen the power of the will, and diminish the blessing of trust that marriage possesses. Also it is already clear, and will later become even more so, that associations of this kind are not marriages, since although contracted in the sphere of reflection they have nevertheless not attained the consciousness of the eternal, as has the ethical way of life, which is what makes the alliance a marriage. This is also something you will entirely agree with, for how often and how unerringly have those mood-tableaux not been the well-deserved targets of your mockery and your irony (‘fortuitous love affairs or love’s bad infinite’)?6 As when someone with his sweetheart looks out of the window at the moment when a young girl turns the corner into another street, and it occurs to him that ‘it is her I’m really in love with’; but as he is about to pick up the trail something interrupts, and so on.
The other expedient, the respectable way, would be the marriage of convenience. The very name indicates that one has entered the sphere of reflection. Certain persons, you among them, have always frowned at what is meant here to be a marriage between immediate love and calculating reason – for if one is to respect linguistic usage shouldn’t one really call it ‘the marriage of reason’? You in particular tend always, with much ambiguity, to recommend ‘respect’ as a solid foundation for the tie of marriage. That it has to resort to such an expedient as the marriage of convenience shows how thoroughly reflective our age is. To the extent that such an alliance disavows genuine love, it has at least the merit of consistency, but it also shows that it is no solution to the task. A marriage of reason must therefore be looked upon as a kind of capitulation made necessary by life’s complications. But how sad all the same that this should be, as it were, the only comfort left for the poesy of our age, that despair should be its only solace. For, clearly, it is indeed despair that makes such an alliance admissible. It tends therefore to be entered into by people who have long since reached the years of discretion and who have learnt that real love is an illusion and its fulfilment a pious wish. Its concern, therefore, is with the prose of life: making a living, social standing, etc. In so far as it has neutralized the sensual in marriage it has the appearance of being moral; but one may ask all the same whether this neutralizing is not as immoral as it is unaesthetic. Or if the erotic is not entirely neutralized after all, then it is disheartened by a prosaic rational consideration that one should be cautious, not too quick to pick and choose, that life after all never gives us the ideal, that it is quite a respectable match, etc. So the eternal which, as was shown above to be part of every marriage, is not really present here, for a rational calculation is always temporal. […]
We have seen now how romantic love was based on an illusion, and how its eternity was based on temporality, and that regardless of the knight’s remaining fervently convinced of its absolute durability, there was still no assurance of this inasmuch as love’s trials and temptations had hitherto been in an entirely external medium. […] We have seen how, when taken up in the consciousness of a reflective age, this immediate, beautiful, but also naive love had to become the object of its scorn and its irony; and we have seen what such an age was reduced to replacing it with. Marriage, too, it took up into its consciousness and declared itself partly in favour of love, to the exclusion of marriage, partly in favour of marriage, disavowing love. […]
With this our little inquiry (as no doubt I’m obliged to call what I’m writing, though first I thought only of a longish letter) has reached the point where marriage can first be viewed in the proper light. That marriage belongs to Christianity, that for all the sensuality of the Orient and for all the beauty of Greece the pagan nations have not perfected it, that in spite of its truly idyllic elements even Judaism has been incapable of that – all this you will surely grant without my having to go into details, all the more so since one only has to recall that the contrast between the sexes has nowhere been made the object of a reflection deep enough to do the opposite sex full justice. But within Christianity, too, love had to suffer many a turn of fate before coming to where it could see the profundity, beauty and truth that lie in marriage. Since, however, the immediately preceding age and to some extent our own have been reflective, it is not such an easy matter to demonstrate it. […]
In so far as it proved a defect of romantic love that it was not reflective, it might perhaps seem proper to let true conjugal love begin with a kind of doubt. That might seem all the more necessary, seeing it is a world of reflection that has brought us to this point. I will not deny that a marriage might be artfully accomplished in accordance with such a doubt, but the question remains whether this is not already to alter the nature of marriage, seeing that it envisages a divorce, after all, between marriage and love. The question is whether it can really be part of marriage to annihilate the possibility of first love through doubt of the possibility of realizing that love, and to make conjugal love both possible and actual through this annihilation […] [or] whether the immediate, the first love can be secured against this scepticism by being taken up into a higher concentric immediacy, so that the conjugal love would not need to plough under the beautiful expectations of the first love, but be itself first love with an admixture of qualities which did not impoverish but enriched it. This is a difficult point to prove, yet of immense importance if we are not to get a rift in the ethical like that in the intellectual sphere between faith and knowledge. And how beautiful, dear friend, you won’t deny it for your heart too has, after all, a feeling for love, as your head is all too familiar with doubt – how beautiful it would be if the Christian could call his God the God of love also in a way that what he was thinking of was that inexpressibly blessed feeling, that eternal force in the world – earthly love.
Seeing, then, that in the foregoing I have presented romantic love and reflective love as discursive positions, we are now well placed properly to appreciate how far the higher unity is a return to the immediate, how far the latter contains, besides the ‘more’, also what lay in the first. It is now sufficiently clear that reflective love constantly consumes itself and stops quite arbitrarily now here, now there; it is clear that it points beyond itself to something higher, but the question is whether the higher cannot straightaway combine with first love. Now, this higher something is the religious, where rational reflection ends, and just as for God everything is possible, so neither for the religious individual is anything impossible. In the religious sphere love finds again the infinity for which as reflective love it sought in vain. […]
The first thing I must do now is orient myself and particularly you in the essential characteristics of marriage. Obviously, what really constitutes marriage, what is its substance, is love, or if you want to be more explicit, the being in love.7 Take that away and a shared life is either just a satisfaction of sensual desire or an association, a partnership in the interests of some goal. But love has in itself precisely the quality of eternity, whether the love is of the superstitious, romantic, chivalrous kind or the deeper moral and religious love which is filled with an energetic and vital assurance.
Every estate has its traitors, so too matrimony. Naturally I do not mean the seducers, for of course they have not entered into this holy estate (I trust the mood this inquiry meets you in doesn’t cause you to smile at that expression); I do not mean those who have left it through divorce, for they have at least had the courage to be openly rebellious. No, I mean those who are rebels only in thought, who do not even dare let it be expressed in action, these wretched husbands who sit and sigh over the fact that love has long ago evaporated from their marriage, these husbands who, as you once said of them, sit like lunatics each in his matrimonial cell, and tug at the iron bars and fantasize about the sweetness of betrothal and the bitterness of marriage, these husbands who, as you rightly observe, are among those to congratulate, with a certain malicious glee, anyone who gets engaged. I cannot describe how despicable they appear to me, and how much unholy joy it gives me when such a husband confides in you and pours out all his sufferings, rattling off all his lies about the happy first love, and you say with a knowing look, ‘Yes, I’ll make sure not to get onto thin ice’, and he is all the more embittered that he can’t drag you with him into a common shipwreck. It is these husbands you so often refer to when you speak of a tender paterfamilias with four blessed children he would sooner see in hell.
Now, if there was any truth in what they say, there would have to be a separation of love and marriage, so that love is assigned to one moment in time and marriage to another, love and marriage remaining incompatible. Then it would not take long to discover to which moment of time love belonged – it would be the engagement, the beautiful time of the engagement. […] If the engagement really were the most beautiful time, truly I fail to see why they and – if they are right – why anyone at all gets married. But still they do get married with all possible petty-bourgeois precision, when it suits aunts and cousins, neighbours and the people across the street, which betrays the same drowsiness and apathy as looking on the engagement as the most beautiful time. […]
The substantial element in marriage is being in love; but which comes first: love, or marriage so that being in love forms the sequel? This latter view has enjoyed no little esteem among narrow-minded advocates of common sense, has been preached not infrequently by shrewd fathers and even shrewder mothers who themselves think they have learnt from experience and, to compensate for the harm done, insist their children should learn from it too. This is the wisdom of dove-fanciers who shut two doves up in a little cage, though they haven’t the slightest sympathy for each other, and think they are bound to learn to come to terms. This whole way of thinking is so narrow-minded that I mention it only as a matter of form and also to remind you of much that, in this respect, you have turned your back upon. […]
Marriage, then, is not meant to evoke love; on the contrary it presupposes it, but presupposes it as something present, not past. Yet marriage has an ethical and religious factor; being in love has not. For this reason marriage is based upon resignation; being in love is not. Now unless we are to assume that everyone makes two moves in their lives, first the (if I may so put it) pagan move, where being in love belongs, and then the Christian move which is expressed in marriage, unless one is to say that such love has to be left out by Christianity it will have to be shown that love and marriage are compatible. […]
First, then, an examination of love. Here I shall fasten on an expression which for me, despite your own and the whole world’s derision, has nevertheless always had a beautiful meaning: first love (believe me, I am not going to give in and presumably neither will you, so on this point there will be a peculiar discord in our correspondence). When I myself mention this phrase I think of what is among the most beautiful things in life; when you use it, it is the signal for the whole line of your advanced observation-posts to open fire. Yet just as for me there is nothing ludicrous about this phrase, and frankly I only put up with your attack because I overlook it, so is there none of the sadness in it for me that it can no doubt have for some. This sadness need not be morbid, for the morbid is always the untrue and contrived. There is something pleasing and salutary in someone’s having had ill-luck in his first love, when he has come to know its pain but still kept true to his love, still kept faith in this first love; there is something nice about it when, in the course of years, he sometimes now recalls it quite vividly, and although his soul has been sound enough to, so to speak, take leave of that kind of life in order to dedicate itself to something higher, there is something pleasing about his then remembering it sadly as something that may have fallen short of perfection but was very beautiful none the less. And this sadness is far more healthy, more beautiful, and nobler than the prosaic reasonableness which has long ago done with such childish pranks, or than this devilish shrewdness of the song-master Don Basilio which fancies itself to be health but is nevertheless the most wasting of sicknesses.8 For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?9 For me there is nothing at all sad in this phrase ‘first love’, or in any event only a small seasoning of bittersweet. For me it is a battle-cry, and although now a married man of several years, I have still constantly the honour to fight under first love’s victorious banner.
For you, on the contrary, its significance, its over- and under-evaluation, has a puzzling wave-like motion. At one moment you are altogether enthusiastic about the first love. You are so infused with the energetic concentration implied in it that it is the only thing you want. You are so kindled and inflamed, so burning with love, so dreaming and fertile, as heavy as a rain cloud, as gentle as a summer breeze, you have in short a lively conception of what it means for Jupiter to visit the loved one in a cloud or in rain.10 The past is forgotten, every restriction removed. You expand more and more, you feel a softness and pliability, every joint becomes supple, every bone a flexible sinew: as a gladiator reaches up and stretches his body so as to exert complete control over it – anyone would think this would deprive him of his energy and yet this voluptuous torture is precisely the condition for his making proper use of his strength. You are now in the state in which you enjoy the pure rapture of complete receptivity. The softest touch is enough to thrill this invisible, fully stretched-out spiritual body through and through. There is an animal which I have frequently pondered upon, the jellyfish. Have you noticed how this gelatinous mass can extend itself into a plane and then slowly sink or rise, so still and firm that one might think one could step on it? Now it observes its prey drawing near, it makes itself hollow, becomes a bag and sinks with immense speed deeper and deeper, using this speed to snatch the prey into – not its bag, for it has no bag, but into itself, for it is itself a bag and nothing more. It can now contract itself so much that it is incomprehensible how it could possibly expand. This is just about how it is with you, and you will simply have to forgive me for having no more beautiful animal to compare you with, as also for the fact that you cannot perhaps quite help smiling at yourself at the thought of being just a bag. At such moments it is ‘the first’ you are pursuing, that alone is what you want, without suspecting that it is contradictory to want the first constantly to return, and that it follows from this that either you simply cannot have reached the first or you have had the first and what you now see, what you now enjoy, is always merely a reflection of that first; from which we may additionally note that you are in error in believing that the first could be completely present in anything other than the first itself if only one seeks rightly, and that, as far as your appealing to your own practice is concerned, this too is a misunderstanding since you have never practised in the right direction. […]
From you, then, one seeks in vain to learn what lies behind this mysterious word ‘first’, a word that has had and always will have enormous significance in the world. What significance the word has for the individual is really decisive for his whole spiritual condition, just as its having no significance at all for him is enough to show that his soul is not at all attuned to being touched and thrilled by higher things. For those, on the other hand, for whom ‘first’ has acquired a significance, there are two paths. Either ‘the first’ contains the promise of the future, is the propulsive, infinite impulse in their lives; and these are the fortunate individuals for whom the first is nothing but the present, though the present as the first in its constant unfolding and rejuvenation. Or the first does not urge the individual on within; the energy that is in the first does not become the motive power in the individual but the power of repulsion that thrusts away. These are the unfortunate individuals who are continually distancing themselves more and more from ‘the first’. This, naturally, can never be something for which the individual himself is totally without blame.
All affected by the idea of the first connect the word ‘first’ with a solemn conception, and it tends only to be in connection with things at a lower level that ‘first’ means worst. You are rich in examples in this respect: the first proofs, putting on a new dress coat for the first time, etc. The greater the likelihood something can be repeated, the less significant the first becomes, the less likelihood the more significant; while on the other hand, the more significant whatever proclaims itself for the first time, the less likely it can be repeated. Should there even be something eternal in it, then all likelihood that it can be repeated vanishes. If, then, one has spoken with a certain wistful earnestness of the first love as something that could never be repeated, this is no disparagement of love but the most profoundly-felt extolling of it as the eternal power. […]
So much for the predicate we give love when we call it the ‘first’. I now go on to consider first love more directly. […] It is surely obvious enough that the philistines who think they have pretty well come to that point in life when the thing to do is listen and look about (perhaps even in a newspaper) for a life partner have already excluded themselves from first love, and that a philistinism of this kind cannot be regarded as the state that precedes first love. It is, of course, conceivable that Eros might be merciful enough to play a trick on such a person by making him fall in love. ‘Merciful’ indeed, because it shows extraordinary mercy to bestow the highest earthly good upon a person, and that is what first love always is even when it is unhappy; but this will always be the exception and his previous condition will remain just as unedifying. If one is to believe the priests of music (and this is a matter in which one is almost bound to believe them), and if in their company one were also to hearken to Mozart, then surely the state preceding first love must be described by recalling how love makes blind. The individual becomes as though blind, you can almost see it in him, he sinks into himself, looks in upon his own looking, and yet there is a constant striving to look out upon the world. Though the world has blinded him, he still stares out at it. It is this dreaming yet searching state that Mozart has depicted in the Page in Figaro, as sensual as it is of the soul. In contrast, the first love is an absolute wakefulness, an absolute watchfulness, and this has to be kept going not to do it injustice. It is directed at a single, definite, actual object which is all there is for it; everything else just does not exist. This one object exists not in vague outline, but as a definite living being. This first love has an element of the sensual, of beauty, in it, yet it is not simply sensual. The sensual as such comes forth first in reflection, but first love lacks reflection and is therefore not simply sensual. This is the necessity in first love. As with everything eternal, it has in itself the twofold character of presupposing itself back into all eternity and forward into all eternity. […]
[First love] is the unity of freedom and necessity. The individual feels drawn to the other with an irresistible power but precisely in this feels his freedom. It is a unity of the universal and the singular, it has the universal as the singular, even to the verge of the contingent. But it is not on the strength of reflection that it has all this, it has it immediately. The more definitively first love conforms to this, the healthier it is, the more likely that it is indeed a first love. The two are drawn to one another by an irresistible power and yet they enjoy in this their whole freedom. I have no hard-hearted fathers on hand here, no sphinxes to be dealt with first,11 I have fortune enough with which to equip them (nor have I taken it on myself, as novelist and playwright, to drag out time to the torment of the whole world, of the lovers, of readers and audience), so in the name of God let them come together. You see I offer you the noble father and actually it is really a very attractive role if only we ourselves had not often made it so laughable. You noted perhaps that, in the father’s style, I added the little phrase, ‘in the name of God’. This you can surely forgive in an old man who may never have known what first love is or has long since forgotten; but that a younger man still enthused over first love lets himself make a point of it, may surprise you. […]
So first love is immediately secure in itself. But the individuals have also had a religious development. This I have a right to assume, and indeed I shall, seeing I am to show that first love and marriage can survive together. It is of course another matter when an unhappy first love teaches the individuals to seek security in God and marriage. Then the first love is changed even if it may still be possible to restore it. […] Here it is not in time of sorrow that they seek God, nor is it fear and dread that impel them to pray. Their heart, their whole being, is filled with joy; what more natural than to thank Him for this? There is nothing they fear: outside dangers will have no power over them, and inward dangers, yes, those are quite unknown to first love. But this thanksgiving does not alter first love; it has not been joined by any disturbing reflection, it is assumed into a higher concentricity. But a thanksgiving of this kind, like all prayer, is combined with an element of action, not in an external but an internal sense, in this case to want to hold on to this first love. This doesn’t change the nature of the first love, no reflection has joined in, its firm-jointedness is not loosened, it still retains its blessed assurance intact, it is simply assumed into a higher concentricity. Perhaps in this higher concentricity it simply does not know what it has to fear, perhaps it imagines no dangers, and yet through this good intention, which also is a kind of first love, it is lifted up into the ethical. […]
You will of course remind me that I left it quite unclear and vague which God I was referring to, that it was not a heathen Eros who would gladly be privy to love’s secrets, and whose presence was then at bottom merely a reflection of the lovers’ own mood, but the Christian God, the God of spirit who is jealous in His opposition to everything that is not spirit. You would remind me that in Christianity beauty and the sensual are negated, you would remark in passing that for the Christian it is indifferent whether Christ was ugly or beautiful; you would beg me to keep away from love’s secret meetings with my orthodoxy and in particular from any attempt at mediation, which you oppose even more than the most crass orthodoxy: ‘Yes, how cheering for the young girl, how totally in harmony with her mood, to step up to the altar. As for the congregation, it must surely see in her an imperfect being who has been unable to resist the seduction of earthly desire; she is to stand there as though to be chastised or make a public confession; and the priest first reads the text and then perhaps leans over the rail to confide to her, as a small crumb of comfort, that matrimony is, after all, an estate well pleasing to God. All that’s worthwhile here is the priest’s position, and if the girl were sweet and young I wouldn’t mind being in it so I could whisper this secret in her ear.’
My young friend! Yes, matrimony is indeed an estate well pleasing to God: on the other hand I know of no place in the Scriptures which speaks of a special blessing for bachelors – which is after all where all your multifarious love affairs end. But dealing with you is just about the hardest of tasks, for you are capable of proving anything and in your hands every phenomenon can become anything. Yes, certainly, the Christian God is spirit and Christianity is spirit, and a discord is posited between flesh and spirit; but flesh is not sensuality, it is selfishness, and in this sense even the spiritual can be sensual; if for example someone takes his spiritual gifts in vain, then he is carnal. And well I know that for the Christian it is not necessary that Christ should have been an earthly beauty, and if it were, it would be very sad for a different reason from the one you proffer, for if beauty were essential think how the believer would have to yearn to see him. But from all this it in no way follows that the sensual is annihilated in Christianity. First love has in it the element of beauty, and the joy and fullness to be found in the sensual when it is innocent can very well be taken up into Christianity. […]
So you have found what your soul was yearning for, what in many mistaken attempts it thought it would find; you have found a girl in whom your whole being finds its repose; and even if one might think you a little too experienced, this then is nevertheless your first love, of that you are convinced. ‘She’s pretty’ – naturally; ‘sweet’ – what else? ‘and yet her beauty lies not in the normal, but in the unity of the manifold, in the accidental, the self-contradictory’; ‘she has a soul’ – I can imagine; ‘she can abandon herself to an impression so that it can practically make your head swim; she is light, she can bob like a bird on a twig, she has spirit, spirit enough to illuminate her beauty but not more’. The day has come that is to assure you of the possession of all you own in the world – a possession which for that matter you are certain enough of. You have requested the favour of imparting extreme unction upon her. You have already waited some time in the family dining-room; several times a bustling chambermaid, four or five inquisitive cousins, a venerable aunt, a hairdresser, have hurried past. You are already half indignant at all this. Then the door to the parlour slowly opens, you take a quick look inside, you are delighted there is not a soul there, that she has had the tact to remove all intruders even from the parlour. She is pretty, prettier than ever, there is an animation about her, a harmony whose vibrations resonate even through her. You are astonished; she exceeds even your dreams; you too are transformed but your subtle reflection instantly conceals your emotion; your calm has a still more seductive effect upon her, imparts a desire in her soul which gives interest to her beauty. You approach her. Her finery, too, gives the situation a touch of the uncommon. You still haven’t uttered a word. You look at her, yet as though you were not looking, you do not wish to embarrass her with amorous boorishness, but even the mirror comes to your aid. Upon her bosom you fasten a brooch you gave her the first time you kissed her, with a passion which now seeks its confirmation; she has herself kept it hidden, no one has known about it. You produce a little bouquet of flowers of just one sort, a flower of no significance in itself. When you sent her flowers there was always a small shoot of it, but not noticeable, so no one suspected it but her. Today this flower too shall stand up in honour and dignity, it alone is to adorn her, for she loved it. You hand it to her, a tear trembles in her eye, she returns it to you, you kiss it and fasten it to her bosom. A certain sorrow spreads over her. You yourself are moved. She takes a step back, she looks half in anger at the finery that is getting in her way, she throws her arms about your neck, she cannot tear herself away, she embraces you as vehemently as though an enemy power would tear you from her. Her delicate finery is crushed, her hair has fallen down, in the same instant she has vanished. You are left once more to your solitude, which is broken only by a bustling chambermaid, four or five inquisitive cousins, a venerable aunt, a hairdresser. Then the parlour door opens, she enters, and a quiet earnestness is to be read in her every feature. You press her hand, leave her only to meet her again – yes, at the Lord’s altar; you had forgotten that, you who had pondered so much at other times on that too. You forgot it in your infatuation. You had come to terms with the situation as it is for everyone else, but this you had not considered; and yet you have come too far not to see that a marriage is rather more than a ceremony. You are seized by a fear: ‘This girl whose soul is as pure as the light of day, sublime as the vault of heaven, innocent as the ocean, this girl before whom I could fall down in worship, whose love I feel could snatch me out of all confusion and give me new birth, it is she I am to lead to the Lord’s altar, she who is to stand there like a sinner, of whom and to whom it shall be said that it was Eve who seduced Adam. To her before whom my proud soul bows down, the only one to whom it has bowed down, to her it shall be said that I am to be her master and she subservient to her husband. The moment has come, the Church is already reaching out its arms for her and before giving her back to me it will first press a bridal kiss upon her lips, not that bridal kiss I gave the whole world for; it is already reaching out its arms to embrace her, but this embrace will cause all her beauty to fade, and then it will toss her over to me and say, “Be fruitful and multiply”. What kind of power is it that dares intrude between me and my bride, the bride I myself have chosen and who has chosen me? And this power would command her to be true to me; does she then need to be so commanded? And is she to be true to me only because a third party commands it, one whom she therefore loves more than me? And it bids me be true to her; must I be bidden to be that, I who belong to her with all my soul? And this power decides our relation to each other; it says I am to ask and she is to obey; but suppose I do not want to ask, suppose I feel myself too inferior for that? No, I will obey her, her hint is my command, but I will not submit to a foreign power. No, I will flee with her afar while there is still time, and I will beg the night to hide us and the silent clouds to tell us fairy-tales in bold images, as befits a wedding night, and under the immense vault of heaven I will intoxicate myself in her physical charms, alone with her, alone in the whole world, and I will throw myself into the abyss of her love; and my lips are mute, for the clouds are my thoughts and my thoughts are clouds; and I will cry out and implore all the powers of heaven and earth that nothing may disturb my happiness, and I will bind them on oath and let them swear to this. Yes, away, far away, that my soul might be restored to health, that my breast might breathe again, that I shall not stifle in this sickly air – away.’ – Yes, away, that is what I would say too: Procul o, procul este, profani.12 But have you also considered whether she will follow you on this expedition? ‘Woman is weak’, no, she is meek, she is much nearer to God than man is. That is why, for her, love is everything, and she will certainly not disdain the blessing and the confirmation which God would grant her. It has certainly never occurred to a woman to have anything against marriage, and in all eternity it never will, so long as men themselves do not corrupt her, for an emancipated woman might well light upon such a thing. Offence always comes from men; for man is proud, he wants to be everything, he will have nothing above him. […]
The first thing that scandalized you was that you should be solemnly instated as her master. As if that is not what you were and perhaps all too much so, as though your words did not carry that stamp sufficiently. But you will not give up this idolatry, this coquetry, about wanting to be her slave though you sense very well that you are her master.
Second, what made your soul rebel was that your beloved should be declared a sinner. You are an aesthete, and I might be tempted to propose it to your idle head’s consideration whether this could not make a woman even more beautiful. […] You can well understand I am not serious in this […] [but] there would be plenty for you to busy yourself with in this respect. You would have thought of the tremulous light which even in the Gospel spreads over the woman that was a sinner, whose many sins were forgiven because she loved much.13 What I would say, however, is that, once again, it is just a whim of yours to have her stand there as a sinner. For it is one thing to sin in abstracto, another to know it in concrete. But woman is meek and certainly it has never occurred to a woman to be truly offended at the earnest word of the Church being addressed to her. Woman is meek and full of trust. Who can cast her eyes down like a woman, but who like her can lift them up? So if the Church’s solemn proclamation that sin has come into the world should bring about any change in her, it would have to be that she held fast still more strongly to her love. […]
Finally, it upsets you that a third power wants to bind you to being true to her and her to you. For the record, I must ask you to recall that this third power does not impose itself; since the individuals we have in mind are religiously developed, they themselves seek it out, and the question is whether anything in it stands in the way of their first love. You will hardly deny that it is natural for first love to seek corroboration through love being made, in one way or another, into a duty the lovers impose upon themselves in the face of a higher power. Lovers swear fidelity to one another by the moon, the stars, the ashes of their fathers, their honour, etc. If to this you say: ‘Yes, such oaths wouldn’t mean anything, they’re just a reflection of the lovers’ own mood, why otherwise should it occur to them to swear by the moon?’, I reply that here you yourself have changed the nature of first love; for the beauty of first love is precisely that everything acquired reality for it on the strength of love, and only in the moment of reflection is it clear that swearing to the moon is meaningless […]
We saw, then, how first love could come into relation with the ethical and the religious without the aid of a reflection that changed its nature, since it is simply drawn up into a higher immediate concentricity. In one sense a change has indeed occurred, and it is this I shall now consider, what could be called the lovers’ metamorphosis into bride and bridegroom. The way the lovers refer their love to God is by thanking God for it. Here the change is one of refinement. The weakness to which the man is most prone is to suppose he has conquered the girl he loves; this makes him feel superior – but there is nothing at all aesthetic in that. When he thanks God, on the other hand, he humbles himself under his love, and it is in truth far more beautiful to take the beloved as a gift from the hand of God than to have subdued the whole world to conquer her. Add to this that a man really in love will not find rest in his soul until he has thus humbled himself before God; and the girl he loves really means far too much for him to dare take her even in the most refined sense as a prize. And should it please him to conquer and take possession of her, he will realize that the proper thing is daily possession throughout a whole lifetime, not the preternatural power of brief infatuation. Yet this does not occur as though consequent upon some previous doubt, it happens immediately. Thus what is really living in first love remains, while the bitter elements, if I may so put it, are filtered out. It is natural for the other sex to be sensible of the imbalance and submit to it, and if she goes so far as to feel joy and happiness in being nothing, that might well be on the way to becoming something untrue, but if she now thanks God for the loved one, her soul is safe against suffering; being able to thank God means she can put the loved one at just enough distance for her to be able to draw breath. And that occurs not as a result of an anxious doubt. She knows no such thing. It happens immediately.
I have already indicated above that even the illusory eternity in first love made it moral. In now referring their love to God, this thanks which the lovers give for their love will itself give it an absolute stamp of eternity, as also will the intention and the obligation, and this eternity will be based not upon dark forces but upon the eternal itself. The intention is significant in another way too. In it lies the possibility of movement in the love, and so also the possibility of its being freed of the difficulty under which first love as such labours, that it cannot get started. The aesthetic in it lies in its infinitude, but its unaesthetic aspect lies in the fact that this infinitude can be finitized. I shall use a more figurative expression to throw light on how the advent of the religious cannot disturb the first love. The religious is really the expression of the conviction that with God’s help man is lighter than the whole world, the same faith that lies behind man’s ability to swim. Now assuming there is a swimming belt that can hold one up, we might suppose it would always be worn by someone who had been in mortal danger, but we might also suppose that a person who had never been in mortal danger would wear it too. The latter corresponds to the relation between first love and the religious. First love girdles itself with the religious without any previous painful experience or anxious reflection. Only do not, I pray, press the analogy too far, as if the religious only stood in an external relation to first love. That this is not the case has been shown above.
And let us settle accounts once and for all. You talk so much of the erotic embrace, but what is it compared with the matrimonial! What greater richness of modulation in the matrimonial ‘we’ than in the erotic! It resonates neither with the merely momentary eternity of seduction, nor with the illusory eternity of fantasy and imagination, but with the eternity of consciousness, the eternal’s eternity. What strength in the matrimonial ‘my’, for will, resolve and intention sound a note of far greater depth. What energy and resilience, for what so hard as will and what so soft! What power of movement! – not the merely confused enthusiasm of dark incitement, for marriage is made in heaven and duty permeates the whole body of the universe to its furthest extremity; it prepares the way and assures us that in all eternity no obstacle is able to disturb the love! So let Don Juan keep his leafy bower, the knight the dark heaven and its stars if he cannot see above it; marriage has its heaven even higher. Such is marriage; and when it is not so, God is not to blame, nor Christianity, nor the wedding, nor a curse or a blessing, but man alone. And is it not a pity and a shame that books are written which confuse people about life, make them bored with it before they begin, instead of teaching them how to live? If they were right, that would be a painful truth, but it is lies. We are taught to sin, and those who haven’t the heart for that are made just as unhappy in another way. I myself, alas, am all too affected by the aesthetic not to know diat the word ‘husband’ grates on your ear. But I do not care. Even if the word ‘husband’ has come into disrepute and is now almost a laughing matter, it is high time one tried to restore it to its place of honour. And if you say, ‘You never see anything like that even though you see marriages often enough’, that does not disturb me; for seeing marriage every day makes one see the greatness in it less often, not least when one does everything to belittle it. For have you not brought it to such a pass diat a girl who offers a man her hand before the altar is thought more imperfect dian those heroines in your romances with their first love?
Now that I have listened patiently to you and your outbursts, more angry perhaps than you would rightly admit (but when you confront marriage as a reality you will perhaps see that you have not quite understood these agitations inside you – you will rage inwardly yet presumably again without confiding in anyone), then you may forgive me my small observations. One loves only once in one’s life, the heart holds on to its first love – marriage! Hearken to and wonder at this harmony of the different spheres. It is the same thing, just expressed aesthetically, religiously and ethically. One loves only once. To help make this a reality marriage steps in, and if people who do not love one another take it into their heads to get married, then the Church cannot be held responsible. One loves but once, this echoes from the most divergent quarters: from the fortunate to whom each day brings happy proof of the fact, and from the unhappy, of whom there are really only two classes, those continually yearning for the ideal and those not willing to hold on to it. The latter are the real seducers. You meet them less often because there is always something special about them. I knew one, yet he too admitted that one loves only once, but love had been unable to tame his wild lust. ‘Yes,’ say certain people, ‘one loves only once, one marries twice, three times.’ Here again the spheres are united; for the aesthetic says no and the Church and clerical ethics look with suspicion on the second marriage. This for me is of the utmost importance; for if it were true that man loved several times, then marriage would come into question; it might look as though the erotic was being injured by an arbitrary rule of religion requiring one to love only once, treating matters of the erotic so carelessly in this way. As if to say, ‘You can marry once and let that be an end of it.’
We have now seen how first love came into relation with marriage without being changed. That same aesthetic which is to be found in the first love must therefore also be found in the marriage, since the former is contained in the latter. But the aesthetic aspect of first love lies in its infinitude, its apriority – as explained above. Next, it h’es in the unity of opposites which love is: love is sensual yet spiritual; it is freedom yet necessity; it is in the instant, has to a high degree the quality of presence, and yet has an eternity in itself. All this marriage has too: it is sensual yet spiritual, but it is more, for applying the word ‘spiritual’ to first love amounts to saying it is of the soul, that it is sensuality permeated with spirit. It is freedom and necessity, but also more, for freedom in the case of first love is really rather the freedom of the soul in which individuality has not yet expurgated itself of natural necessity. But the more freedom, the more self-surrender, and only a self-possessed person can be lavish with himself. The religious freed the individuals – he from false pride, she from false humility, and it thrust itself between the lovers who held each other in such a close embrace, not to separate them but so that she could give of herself with an abundance she had never before suspected, and he not simply receive but give of himself to be received by her. It has in it an inner infinitude even more than first love, for marriage’s inner infinitude is an eternal life. It is a unity of opposites even more than first love, for it has one opposition more, the spiritual and thereby the sensual in a yet deeper opposition; but the further from the sensual one gets the greater aesthetic significance it acquires, for otherwise the most aesthetic thing would be animal instinct. But in marriage the spiritual is higher than in first love, and the higher the heaven over the marriage bed the better, the more beautiful, the more aesthetical it is, and the heaven that overarches the marriage is not this earthly one but the heaven of the spirit. […]
Yes, I confess, it may be wrong of me, but often when I think of my own marriage, the thought awakens an inexplicable sadness within me; that it will come to an end, that certain as I am that I shall live in another life with her to whom my marriage united me, she will be given to me there in another way, that the opposition which was one of the conditions of our love will be transcended. Yet it consoles me that I know, that I shall recall, that with her I have lived in the most heartfelt, the most beautiful fellowship that earthly life affords. For if I understand anything of all this, then earthly love’s defect is the same as its advantage, that it is preferential love. Spiritual love shows no partiality and goes in the opposite direction, constantly discharging all relativities. In its true form earthly love takes the opposite path and at its best is only love for one single person in the whole world. Herein lies the truth in having to love only one and love only once. Earthly love begins by loving several – the preliminary anticipations – and ends in loving one. Spiritual love opens itself constantly wider, loves more and more, has its truth in loving all. So marriage is sensual but spiritual at the same time, free and also necessary, absolute in itself and also, within itself, pointing beyond itself.
Because it has this inner harmony, marriage naturally has its teleology in itself; it is, in so far as it constantly presupposes itself, and in this respect any question of its ‘why’ is a misunderstanding. […] I would stress the beauty in those marriages which have as little ‘why’ as possible. The less ‘why’ the more love, that is, when one sees what is true in it. For the frivolous there will of course prove to have been a little ‘why’ in retrospect; for the serious person there will prove, to his joy, to have been a huge ‘why’. The less ‘why’ the better. In the lower classes marriage is usually entered upon without any great ‘why’, but that is why these marriages resound far less frequently with so many ‘hows’ – how to make ends meet, how to provide for the children, etc. For marriage there is only marriage’s own ‘why’, but that is infinite and so it is not a ‘why’ according to the sense I am taking it in here. […] The true ‘why’ is only one but at the same time has in it an infinite energy and strength which can stifle all ‘hows’. The finite ‘why’ is a totality, a swarm, from which each takes his own, one more, the other less, all as bad as each other. For even if someone could unite all finite ‘whys’ at the beginning of his marriage, he would be the basest of husbands just for that reason.
One of the seemingly most reputable answers to the ‘why’ of marriage is that marriage is a school for character; one marries in order to elevate and improve one’s character. I shall stick to an actual occurrence which I owe to you. There was a government official you had ‘got hold of, as you put it, and that’s just like you, for when something becomes an object for your observation you shrink from nothing, you think you are following your vocation. He was, besides, quite a clever fellow and had a particularly good knowledge of languages. The family was gathered round the tea-table. He was smoking his pipe. His wife was no beauty, looked rather simple, and old compared with him, all of which could promptly lead one to suppose, as you remarked, that there must be some very special ‘why’. At the table sat a young, rather pale, newly-wed woman, who looked as though she knew another ‘why’. The wife herself poured tea. It was passed round by a young girl of sixteen, not pretty but plump and lively – she appeared not yet to have arrived at any ‘why’. In that honourable company your unworthiness had also found a place. You, who were present ex officio, who had already on a number of occasions come there in vain, naturally found the situation far too favourable to let it slip. There had been talk at the time of a broken engagement. The family had not yet heard this important piece of local news. The case was pleaded from all sides, that is to say, everyone was prosecutor; it was submitted to judgement and the sinner excommunicated. Feelings ran high. You ventured to put in a little word in the condemned man’s favour, which naturally wasn’t intended to be to his advantage but to act as a cue. It didn’t succeed, so you continued, ‘Maybe the whole engagement was too hasty, maybe he failed to account for the important “why” – one might almost say the “but” – which should precede so decisive a step, – enfin why does one marry, why, why?’ Each of these ‘whys’ was uttered with its distinctive but equally doubting inflection. That was too much. One ‘why’ would already have been enough, but such a comprehensive roll-call, a general call to arms in the enemy’s camp, was decisive. The moment had come. With an air of good humour that also bore the stamp of a prevailing common sense, the host said, ‘Yes of course, my good man, I can tell you, one marries because marriage is a good school for character.’ Now the whole thing was in motion. Partly by opposing, partly by approving, you got him to surpass himself in absurdity – scarcely to the edification of his wife, to the scandal of the young married woman, and to the astonishment of the young girl. Then I reproached you for your behaviour, not for the host’s sake but for the women, for whom you were malicious enough to make the scene as trying and protracted as possible. Two of the womenfolk do not need my defence, and it was also only your customary coquetry which led you not to avert your eyes from them. But his wife, perhaps she really loved him, in which case think how dreadful it must have been for her to listen to this. Also there was something indecent in the whole situation; far from making marriage moral, common-sense reflection really makes it immoral. Sensual love has only one transfiguration in which it is equally aesthetic, religious and ethical, and that is love; common-sense calculation makes it just as anaesthetic as irreligious, because the sensual here is not within its immediate rights. So the man who marries for this or that reason takes a step as unaesthetic as it is irreligious. The goodness of his purpose helps not at all, for the fault is precisely that he has a purpose. Were a woman to marry so as – yes, one has heard of such madness, a madness that appears to give her marriage an immense ‘why’ – so as to bear a saviour to the world, that marriage would be just as unaesthetic as immoral and irreligious. It’s something one cannot make clear often enough. A certain class of common-sense persons look down with enormous contempt on the aesthetic as vanity and childishness, and in their pitiable teleology they imagine they are raised high above such things. But it is the exact opposite: with their common sense such people are as unethical as they are unaesthetic. So one always does best to look to the other sex, which is both the more religious and the more aesthetic. The host’s exposition was in any case rather trivial and I do not need to present it. On the other hand, I will conclude these remarks by wishing every such husband a Xanthippe for his wife and as wicked children as possible, so that he can hope to possess the means for attaining his purpose.
The fact that, apart from this, marriage really is a school for character or, to avoid using so philistine an expression, a genesis of character, is something I gladly admit; though naturally I must constantly hold that anyone who marries for that reason should rather be directed to any other school at all than to that of love. Besides, someone like that will never derive any benefit from attending that school. In the first place, he deprives himself of the strength, the consolidation, the shiver running through all one’s thoughts and limbs which is what a marriage is, for it is indeed an act of daring; but that is what it should be, and far from its being correct to want to calculate, such a calculation is precisely an attempt to enervate it. Second, he has of course let go the great working capital of love and the humility which the religious element in marriage gives. Naturally he is much too super-shrewd not to bring with him a pat conception of how he wants his development to go; this will then be the guideline for his marriage and for the unfortunate being he has been shameless enough to select as his sampler. […]
Or one marries – to have children, to make one’s humble contribution to the propagation of the human race upon earth. Imagine he gets no children; then his contribution will be very meagre. True, States have taken it upon themselves to invest marriage with this purpose, giving out rewards for those who marry and for those with most male children. At times Christianity has done the opposite by giving out rewards for those who avoid marriage. Even if this was a misunderstanding, at least it shows a deep respect for the person, that to this extent the individual is not to be treated as merely an element, but as definitive. The more abstractly the State is conceived, and the less it champions individuality, the more natural such an injunction and such an encouragement become. By contrast, in our own time childless marriage has occasionally been almost extolled. For our age finds it hard enough to summon the resignation needed to enter a marriage; having performed that amount of self-denial, one thinks that that must be enough and one cannot really put up with such extravagances as a flock of children. In novels one often finds, if only idly in a casual aside, but still proffered as a reason for a particular individual’s not marrying, the fact that he cannot abide children; in real life one sees this manifested in the most refined countries in the removal of children at the earliest opportunity from their parents’ home, their being placed in boarding-schools, etc. How often have you not amused yourself at the expense of these tragi-comic heads of family with four blessed children who in all secrecy they wished far away! How often have you not regaled yourself with the injury done to the superiority of those heads of family by the pettiness life brings with it, when the children have to be spanked, when they spill things, when they scream, when the great man – the father – feels his dauntlessness obstructed by the thought that his children bind him to the earth. How often have you not, with well-deserved cruelty, brought such a father to the highest pitch of suppressed rage when you occupied yourself exclusively with his children, letting fall a few words about what a blessing it is, after all, to have children.
Marrying in order to contribute to the propagation of the race might seem an extremely objective reason and a highly natural one. It is as though one took God’s point of view and saw from there the beauty of maintaining the race. Indeed, one might attach a special importance to the saying ‘Increase and multiply and replenish the earth’. And yet such a marriage is as unnatural as it is arbitrary and has no support in the Holy Scriptures. For we read that God established marriage because it was ‘not good that man should be alone’, to make a companion for him.14 And if to some mocker of religion there might seem something slightly questionable about this companionship which begins with man being cast into perdition, that proves nothing and I would rather appeal to that event as a motto for all marriages; for only after the woman had brought this about was the heartfelt fellowship established between them. Then we also read, ‘and He blessed them’.15 These words are completely overlooked. And when the Apostle Paul in some place exhorts the woman to ‘learn in silence with all subjection’ and ‘to be in silence’, and then, having silenced her, to humiliate her even further, adds, ‘she shall be saved in childbearing’, I would never have forgiven the Apostle this contempt had he not made up for it all by adding, ‘if they continue in faith and charity, and holiness, with sobriety’.16 […]
But back to […] those married people indefatigably bent on propagating the race. A marriage of this sort usually covers itself in a more aesthetic wrapping. A noble old family of distinction is about to die out; only two representatives remain, a grandfather and his grandson. It is the venerable old man’s only wish that the grandson marry so that the family should not become extinct. Or a man who is of no great importance in his own life thinks back, if not so very far then at least to his parents, whom he has loved so much that he would rather their name should not die out but be preserved in the grateful memories of the living. Perhaps he has some vague idea of how fine it would be to be able to tell the children of their grandfather, long since dead, and let this ideal picture, which is just a memory, give strength to their lives and inspire them to all that is noble and great. Maybe he thinks he can in this way repay some of the debt he feels he owes to his parents. That is all very nice and beautiful but irrelevant to marriage, and a marriage entered into for this reason alone is as unaesthetic as it is unethical. That may sound harsh but it is true. Marriage can only be undertaken with one purpose which makes it ethical and aesthetic in the same degree, but that purpose is immanent; every other purpose separates what belongs together and in doing so turns both the spiritual and the sensual into fmitudes. Someone may win a girl’s heart by talking in this way, particularly if the sentiments expressed are to some extent genuine, but it is wrong and the fact alters her very being, and it is always an insult to a girl to want to marry her for any other reason than that one loves her.
Although all (to use one of your own expressions) stud-farm purposes are as such irrelevant for marriage, a person who has not become confused about his relationship will find a blessing in the family descent. It is a beautiful thing, after all, for the one person to owe the other as much as possible, but the highest thing, surely, one person can owe another is – life! And yet a child can owe a father even more, for it does not receive life bare and blank, it receives it with a definite content, and when the child has rested long enough at the mother’s breast it is laid at the father’s, and he too nourishes it with his flesh and blood, with a stormy life’s dearly bought experience. And, after all, what possibility there is in a child! I am ready to agree with you in hating all the idolatry practised with children, especially the whole cult of the family and the circulating of children at the dinner-table and supper-table for the family kiss, family adulation and family expectations, while the parents complacently congratulate one another on the troubles they have survived and rejoice in the product of their art. Yes, I admit I can be almost as sarcastic at such tiresome practices as you. But I do not allow myself to be disturbed further by them. Children belong to the innermost and most private life of the family, and it is to this twilight zone of mysteries one ought to direct every serious or God-fearing thought on the matter. But there every child will also be shown to have a halo round its head, and every father will feel there that there is more in the child than it owes to him, indeed with humility he will feel that the child is a trust and that he is in the finest sense of the word its stepfather. […]
As for you, indeed you love possibility, yet the thought of children certainly will not make you glad, for I have no doubt this, too, is a world your inquisitive and vagabond mind has peeped into. That, of course, is because you want to have possibility under your own control. You are very fond of being in the same state children are in when they wait in the darkened room for the Christmas tree to appear. But a child, to be sure, is a possibility of quite another kind, and of so serious a kind that you would hardly have the patience to put up with it. And yet children are a blessing. It is a fine and good thing for someone to think with deep seriousness of what is best for his children, but if he does not at least sometimes remember that it is not just a duty that is imposed upon him, a responsibility, but also a blessing, and that God in heaven has not forgotten what even human beings never forget, to lay a gift on the cradle, then he has not opened his heart, either to aesthetic or to religious feelings. […]
I have seen a poor woman who carried on a small trade, not in a shop or stall – she stood in the open square, she stood there in the rain and wind with a baby in her arms; she herself was clean and tidy and the baby carefully wrapped. I have seen her many times. A fashionable lady came by who practically told her off for not leaving the child at home – all the more so because it got in her way. And a priest passing in the same direction approached her; he wanted to find a place for the child in an institution. She thanked him kindly, but you should have seen the look with which she glanced down at the child. Had the child been frozen, that look would have thawed it; had it been dead and cold, that look would have called it back to life; had it been famished and parched, that look’s blessing would have restored it. But the child slept and not even its smile could reward the mother. See how this woman perceived what a blessing a child is! If I were a painter I would never paint anything but this woman. Such a sight is a rarity, like a rare flower which one gets to see only by a lucky chance. But the world of spirit is not subject to vainglory; if one finds the tree it blooms perpetually. Her I have often seen. I showed her to my wife. I did not affect importance, sent no rich gifts as though I had a divine authority to reward; I humbled myself beneath her, in truth she needs neither gold nor fashionable ladies, or institutions and priests, or a poor judge in civil law and his wife. She needs absolutely nothing except that the child will one day love her with the same tenderness, and she wants not even for that, it is the reward she has deserved, a blessing which heaven will not withhold. […]
But children are a blessing also in another sense, for one learns so indescribably much from them. I have seen proud people whom hitherto no fate had humbled, who snatched the girl they loved from out of the family life where she belonged with such assurance that it was as if to say, ‘When you have me, that should be enough, I’m used to defying storms, how much more so now when I have the thought of you to give me heart, now that I have much more to fight for.’ I have seen the same men as fathers; a small mishap that befell their children could humble them, a sickness bring prayer to their proud lips. I have seen people who prided themselves for practically despising the God that is in heaven, who were wont to pick on every believer as a target of scorn – I have seen them as fathers take the most pious people into service for the good of their children. I have seen girls whose proud glance brought Olympus to tremble, girls whose vain minds lived only for pomp and finery – I have seen them as mothers endure every humiliation, practically begging like mendicants for what they thought was to their children’s advantage. […]
In another way, too, one learns much from children. In every child there is something original upon which all abstract principles and maxims come more or less to grief. One has to begin from the beginning, often with much trial and tribulation. There is a deep significance in the Chinese saying: ‘Bring your children up well, and you will come to know what you owe your parents.’ And now, the responsibility that rests on the father. One consorts with other people, one tries to convey to them some idea of what one thinks right, perhaps makes several attempts; when it does not help, one stops having anything to do with them, one washes one’s hands. But when does the moment come when a father dares, or rather when a father-heart can resolve, to give up any further attempt? The whole of life is lived again in the children; only then does one come to some understanding of one’s own life. However, it is really no use talking to you about all this; there are things about which one can never form a living conception if one has not experienced them, among them being a father.
And now finally, the fine way in which one is connected by means of one’s children to a future and a past. Although one may not exactly have fourteen distinguished ancestors and a concern for producing the fifteenth in line, one has in fact a far longer genealogy, and indeed it gladdens the heart to see how the race takes on as it were a distinct pattern. The unmarried man, too, can of course make such observations, but he will not to the same degree feel prompted to do so, nor entitled, since to some extent they are the interventions of an intruder.
Or one marries to acquire a home. One was bored at home, one has travelled abroad and was bored, one has returned home and was bored. For the sake of company one keeps a remarkably fine retriever and a thoroughbred mare, but one feels that something is missing. For some time one has been vainly seeking an acquaintance at the restaurant where one meets some like-minded friends. One learns he has married, one becomes soft-hearted, sentimental about one’s old age; one feels that everything around one is so empty, no one is waiting for you when you are away. The old housekeeper is basically a very decent woman but she has no idea at all how to cheer one up, how to make things a little comfortable. One marries. The neighbourhood claps its hands, finds that one has acted wisely and sensibly, and then they go on to discuss the most important factor in housekeeping, the supreme earthly good: a well-behaved and reliable cook who can be trusted to go to the market alone, a nimble-fingered chambermaid who is so capable that she can be used for anything. If only a bald-headed old hypocrite like this were content to marry a night-nurse – but usually that is not the case. The best is not good enough, and finally he succeeds in capturing a pretty young girl who is then fashioned into a galley-slave of this kind. Perhaps she has never loved; what a frightful misunderstanding!
You see, I have been giving you the floor. However, you must admit that, particularly among more common folk, one finds marriages entered into for the purpose of acquiring a home which have a rather pleasing effect. These are for men of younger years. Not having been especially buffeted by life, they have accumulated the necessary income and now think of getting married. That is agreeable. I also know it would never occur to you to direct your scorn on marriages like these. A certain noble simplicity lends them a touch of both the aesthetic and the religious. For there is nothing egoistic here in the thought of wanting a home; on the contrary, the notion they attach to it is that of duty, a vocation, which is laid upon them, but at the same time a duty that is dear to them.
One all too often hears married folk console themselves and alarm the unmarried by saying, ‘Yes, at least we have a home, and a place of refuge for when we grow older.’ They sometimes add with a rare Sunday flourish in the edifying style: ‘Our children and children’s children will one day close our eyes and mourn for us.’ The fate of the unmarried will be the opposite. It is admitted with a certain envy that for a while, in their younger days, these have the best of it; one silently wishes that one was not yet married oneself. Yet it all comes again: like the rich man,17 the unmarried have taken their goods in advance.
All such marriages suffer from the defect that they treat one single factor in marriage as the purpose of marriage, and therefore they often feel disappointed (especially, of course, the first of the three) when they have to admit that a marriage, after all, means rather more than the acquisition of a comfortable, agreeable and convenient home. But now let us again abstract from the mistake in order to see what is fine and true. It is not granted to everyone to extend his activity so very widely, and many who imagine they are working for something greater, sooner or later catch themselves in a delusion. I do not at all mean to refer to you, for you of course are too clever not to get wind of this illusion at once, and your scorn has been directed at it often enough. You have, in this respect, an extraordinary degree of resignation and have shown once and for all a total renunciation. You prefer to amuse yourself. You are everywhere a welcome guest. Your wit, your ease in company, a certain good naturedness, likewise maliciousness, all contribute to the sight of you conjuring up the thought of a pleasant evening. You have always been, and always will be, a welcome guest in my house, partly because I am not all that afraid of you, partly because it will be some time before I have to begin being so: my only daughter is just three years old, and you surely don’t start sending your messages that early. […] You talk so sensibly, so knowledgeably, that anyone not knowing you better must believe you are a settled man. However, you have by no means reached the truth. You have come to a halt at the destroying of illusions, and since that is something you have done in all possible and imaginable ways, really you have worked your way into a new illusion: the illusion that one can come to a halt there. Yes, my friend, you are living in an illusion and you accomplish nothing. […]
It is this thought, that it is a vocation, that must be associated, first of all, with the idea of a home, so as to be rid of any untrue and contemptible thought of ease. Even in the man’s pleasure there should be an element of this calling, even if it is not manifested in any single, external tangible act. A man can be active in this respect without its being seen, while the woman’s domestic activity is more apparent. But the idea of a home is associated, secondly, with such a mass of small considerations that it is very hard to say anything about them in general. In this respect each house has its own distinctive character, and it could be of some interest to acquaint oneself with a wide variety of these. Naturally, however, the point is whether any such character is permeated with a certain spirit, and I for my part abhor all that separatist nonsense in those families which, from the very first, make a point of showing how special everything is in their house, and which sometimes extends to the family’s speaking its own language, or in such enigmatic allusions that one doesn’t know what to make of it. What matters is that the family itself has such a distinctive character, the art is to contrive to conceal it.
Those who marry in order to have a home are always complaining that they have no one waiting for them, no one to welcome them, etc. This in itself shows they really only have a home because they think also of an outside. Praise God I have no need at all to be outside, either to remember or to forget that I have a home. […]
What more I could wish to say to you in this matter I would rather say in connection with a particular expression I think can justifiably be applied to you, and one you yourself often use: that you are a ‘stranger and an alien’ in the world. Young people who have no idea of the cost of experience – and no idea of its unutterable wealth either – could easily let themselves be carried away in the same swirl; your talk may perhaps affect them like a fresh breeze which lures them out onto that infinite ocean you show them; even you yourself can be youthfully intoxicated, almost out of control at the thought of this infinity, which is your element, an element which, like the ocean, changeless, hides everything on its deep floor. Should you not, already an experienced hand in these waters, know how to tell of disaster and distress at sea? Of course, generally there is not much one man knows about another on this sea. Here it is not a matter of large ships that one fits out and launches only with difficulty upon the deep; no, it is a question of very small boats, jolly-boats just for one person; one takes advantage of the instant, one spreads one’s sail, one skims along with the infinite speed of restless thoughts, alone on the infinite ocean, alone with the infinite heaven. This life is full of danger, but one is familiar with the thought of losing it, for the real enjoyment is to disappear into the infinite so far that all that is left is enough to savour the disappearance. Seafarers relate how on the great world-ocean one sees a kind of craft called the Flying Dutchman. It is able to spread a small sail and then with infinite speed skim over the surface of the sea. That is pretty much how it is with your voyage over the sea of life. Alone in one’s kayak one is sufficient unto oneself, one has nothing to do with anybody except in the instant one wants to. Alone in one’s kayak one is sufficient unto oneself – I cannot rightly grasp how one is still able to fill this void, but as you are the only person I have known of whom it can be said with some truth that you do fill it, I know also that you have a person on board who can help you fill the time. You should therefore say: alone in one’s boat, alone with one’s care, alone with one’s despair, which one is craven enough to want rather to keep than submit to the pain of being healed. […] I beg you reflect on the pain, the sadness, the humiliation that lies in being in this sense a stranger and an alien in the world. […]
Think of the hidden life of [a] family when it is clothed in an outward form so beautiful that the seams are nowhere visible, and reflect on your relation to it. Just such a family would be to your taste. And you would perhaps often delight in entering its circle. With your easy ways you would soon be as though intimate with it. I say ‘as though’ since it is clear that you would not be that, clear that because you will always be a stranger and an alien you never could. You would be looked upon as a welcome guest, they might be kind enough to make everything as agreeable for you as possible, they would be gracious towards you, yes, they would treat you as one does a child one is fond of. As for you, you would be inexhaustible in your attentions, inventive in delighting the family in every way. Very pretty, don’t you think? And in one bizarre moment you might be tempted to say that you didn’t care to see the family in dressing-gowns, or the daughter in slippers, or the wife without her cap; and yet for you, if you look more closely, there is a colossal humiliation implied by the family’s correct behaviour towards you. Every family would have to behave towards you like that, and you would be the one humiliated. Do you not think that the family harbours within itself an entirely different life which is its shrine? Do you not believe that all families still have their household gods even if they don’t place them in the ante-room? And in that remark of yours does there not lie a very refined weakness? For if ever you were to marry, I really do not believe that you could bear to see your wife in a négligée, unless this were a decorative garment designed to please you. You think no doubt that you have done much for the family by entertaining them, by spreading over it a certain aesthetic lustre. But suppose the family cared very little for this compared with the inner life it possesses. That is how it will go for you with every family. And however proud you may be, there is a humiliation in it. No one shares sorrow with you. No one confides in you. You no doubt often think they do; certainly you have enriched yourself with a multitude of psychological observations. But this is often a deception; what people like is to talk to you only of this and that, and touch distantly upon, or offer hints of, an anxiety only because the interest it arouses in you eases their pain and already contains that agreeable quality which prompts them to yearn for this medicine even when they don’t need it. And if someone approached you just because of your isolated position (you know that people would rather commune with a mendicant monk than with their father-confessor), it would never acquire its true meaning, for you or for him. Not for him because he would sense the arbitrariness in its being you he confided in; not for you because you would be unable altogether to ignore the ambiguity your competence rests on. […]
But now I return to what we were discussing above, to the finite purposes for which people enter marriage. I have mentioned only three because, after all, there did seem to be something to be said for them, seeing that they focus on one or another single factor in marriage, regardless of the fact that in their onesidedness they become as ridiculous as they are anaesthetic and irreligious. I will forbear to mention a host of altogether despicable finite purposes, because one cannot even laugh at them. As when one marries for money, or out of jealousy, or because of the prospects – because there are prospects of her dying soon, or of her living long but being a blessed branch that bears much fruit, so that with her one can pocket the inheritances of a whole line of aunts and uncles. I have no mind to mention all this sort of thing.
As an outcome of this inquiry I can emphasize here that what proved to be the case was that marriage, in order to be aesthetic and religious, must have no ‘why’. But precisely this was what formed the aesthetic factor in first love, and so here marriage stands once more on a level with first love. And the aesthetic in marriage is this: that it conceals a multitude of ‘why’s’ which life reveals in all their blessedness.
Since what I took it upon myself to prove in the first instance, however, was the aesthetic validity of marriage, and since what set marriage apart from first love was the ethical and religious element, but again, in so far as the ethical and religious seeks expression in something particular, it finds that most essentially in the marriage ceremony, it is upon this – so as not to appear to treat the matter too lightly, so as not to be guilty of the least thing that could make it seem I was concealing the schism between first love and marriage which you and many others, if for different reasons, try to establish – it is upon this that I will now dwell. […]
What […] does the wedding ceremony do? It offers, first of all, a survey of the genesis of the human race, and thereby fastens the new marriage onto the great body of the race. It offers thereby what is general, the purely human, calls it forth in consciousness. This offends you; you may say, ‘It is disagreeable at the moment of uniting oneself so tenderly with another person, so that everything else disappears, to be reminded that es ist eine alte Geschichte,18 something that has been and is and will be.’ You want to rejoice in what is peculiar to your love, you want to let all the passion of love blaze up in you, and you do not want to be disturbed by the thought that Peter and Paul do the same: ‘It is extremely prosaic to be reminded of one’s numerical significance: in the year 1750 Mr N.N. and the virtuous Miss N.N., at ten o’clock; the same day, at eleven o’clock, Mr N.N., Miss N.N.’ That sounds perfectly dreadful, but your reasoning conceals a reflection that has disturbed the first love. Love is, as noted above, a unity of the universal and the singular, but the sense in which you want to enjoy the singular shows a reflection that has put the singular outside the universal. The more the singular and the universal permeate each other, the more beautiful the love. The great thing is not to be the singular, either immediately or in a higher sense, but in the singular to possess the universal. So it cannot be a disturbing preliminary to first love to be reminded of the universal. Moreover, the wedding ceremony does more than that. In order to point back to the universal it leads the lovers back to the first parents. So it does not stop with the universal in abstracto, but presents it as expressed in the human race’s first couple. This is a hint as to how every marriage is. Every marriage, like every human life, is at once this individual thing and yet the whole, an individual and a symbol at the same time. Accordingly it gives the lovers the most beautiful picture of two people who are not disturbed by the thought of others; it says to the individuals, ‘Thus you too are a couple, it is the same event that has repeated itself in you, you too now stand here alone in the infinite world, alone before the face of God.’ So you see that the wedding ceremony also gives what you ask, but that in addition it gives more, it gives the universal and the singular together.
‘But the marriage ceremony proclaims that sin has entered the world, and it grates, after all, just when one feels most pure, to be reminded so forcibly of sin. Further, it teaches that sin entered the world with marriage, and that seems hardly an encouragement to the respective partners; of course the Church can wash its hands if anything unfortunate comes out of it, since it hasn’t fostered vain hopes.’ But should not the fact that the Church doesn’t foster vain hopes be regarded as in itself something good? The Church says that sin entered the world with marriage, but still allows marriage; it says that sin entered with marriage, but it could still be a major question whether it teaches that it was because of marriage that it entered. In any case it proclaims sin merely as the lot of man in general, making no definite application to the individual, and least of all does it say, ‘You are now just about to commit a sin.’ Indeed it is a very difficult matter to explain in what sense sin entered with marriage. It could look as if sin and sensuality were here being said to be the same; yet it cannot be quite like that, seeing the Church allows marriage. ‘Yes,’ you will say, ‘that’s only when it has taken away all that is beautiful from earthly love.’ ‘By no means,’ I would reply, ‘at least no word of that is to be found in the ceremony.’
Further, the Church proclaims the punishment of sin, that the woman shall bear children with pain and obey her husband. But surely the first of these consequences is such that, even if the Church were not to proclaim it, it would proclaim itself. ‘Yes,’ you reply, ‘but what is disturbing is that it is asserted to be the consequence of sin.’ You find it aesthetically beautiful that a child is born with pain, it is a mark of respect for a human being, an emblematic indication of the significance that lies, after all, in the fact that a human being enters the world, as opposed to animals which, the lower they are on the scale, the more easily they bring forth their young. Here I must stress again that it is proclaimed as the lot of man in general, and that the fact that a child is born in sin is the profoundest expression of its highest dignity, that it is indeed a glorification of human life to refer everything that pertains to it to the category of sin.
Further, it is said that the woman shall obey the man. Here you may say, ‘Yes that’s fine, and it has always appealed to me to see a woman who, in her husband, loves her master.’ But you find it shocking that it should be a consequence of sin, and you feel called upon to act as the woman’s knight. Whether you do her a service thereby I leave undecided, but I believe you have not grasped to the full the inner nature of woman, to which also belongs the fact that she is at once more perfect and more imperfect than the man. If you want to say what is purest and most perfect, you say ‘a woman’; if you want to say what is weakest, you say ‘a woman’; if you want to illustrate spiritual ascendancy over the sensual, you say ‘a woman’; if you want to illustrate the sensual, you say ‘a woman’; if you want to say what innocence is in all its inspiring greatness, you say ‘a woman’ when you want to say what the dispiriting feeling of guilt is, you say ‘a woman’. So the woman is in a certain sense more perfect than the man, and the Scriptures express this by saying she is more guilty. If you now recall again that the Church only proclaims the lot of woman in general, then I do not see how there can be anything in this to cause first love disquiet, but only for the reflecting thought that does not know how to keep hold of her with this possibility in mind. Besides, the Church does not make the woman a mere slave, it says, ‘And God said, I will make for Adam a helpmeet for him’,19 an expression possessing as much aesthetic warmth as it has truth. Therefore the Church teaches that, ‘a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife’.20 One would almost have expected it to say, ‘The woman shall leave her father and her mother and cleave unto her husband’, for the woman is after all the weaker. In the Scriptures’ expression there lies an acknowledgement of the woman’s importance, and no knight could be more gallant towards her.
Finally, as for the curse which fell to the man’s lot, the circumstance that he shall eat his bread in the sweat of his brow does indeed seem, in a single word, to cast him out of the honeymoon of first love. The fact that this curse, like all divine curses, as we have often been reminded, conceals within it a blessing, here proves nothing, seeing that the experience of it must always be reserved for a later time. What I would remind you, though, is that first love is not cowardly, that it does not fear dangers, and that therefore it will see in this curse a difficulty which cannot frighten it.
So what does the marriage ceremony do? ‘It brings the lovers to a standstill,’ you say. Not at all, it lets what was already in motion proceed openly. It brings into the picture the universally human, and in that sense also sin; but all the dread and anguish that wishes sin had not entered the world is based on a reflection unknown to first love. To wish that sin had not entered the world is to take humanity back to something less perfect. Sin has entered, but by humbling themselves beneath it, individuals stand higher than they stood before.
The Church then turns to the single individual and puts several questions to him. Which again appears to prompt a reflection: ‘What’s the point of such questions? Love contains its own assurance.’ But the Church puts the questions not to cause vacillation but to make firm, and to let what is already firm declare itself. Here we meet the difficulty that the Church, in its questions, seems quite unconcerned with the erotic. It asks whether you have consulted God and your conscience and after that your friends and acquaintances. I shall not stress here what great benefit there is in the Church’s putting such questions in deep seriousness. The Church, to use one of your own expressions, is not a match-maker.21 Why then should the parties concerned be put off? In giving thanks they have indeed referred their love to God, and in that sense consulted Him. For even if only indirectly, thanking God is to consult Him. So the reason why the Church does not ask them whether they love one another is not at all that it wants to destroy earthly love, but because it takes it for granted.
The Church then exacts a vow. We saw above how splendidly love can merge in a kind of higher concentricity. The intention makes the individual free, but as already explained, the freer the individual, the more aesthetically beautiful is the marriage.
Thus I believe it has become apparent that, in so far as one looks for the aesthetic quality of first love in its presentational, immediate infinitude, marriage must be regarded as the transfiguration of first love, and is even more beautiful than it. This I believe is evident from the above, and in the immediately preceding we have seen, too, that all this talk of the Church’s belittlement is plucked out of thin air and applies only to the person who has taken offence at religion.
But if that is so, the rest follows of itself. For the question is now whether this love can be realized. Perhaps, having granted everything that has gone before, you will say, ‘Marriage is as difficult to realize, after all, as first love.’ To this I must answer, no. For in marriage there is a law of motion. The first love remains an unreal An-sich22 which never acquires inner substance because it moves merely in an outer medium; in the ethical and religious intention, marital love has the possibility of inner history and distinguishes itself from first love as the historical from the non-historical. First love is strong, stronger than the whole world, but the instant it occurs to it to doubt, it is annihilated; it is like a sleepwalker who can proceed infinitely surefooted over the most dangerous places, but as soon as you mention his name he plunges down. Marital love is armed; its purpose directs attention not just at the surrounding world, the will is directed inwardly at itself. And now I turn the whole thing around and say, ‘the aesthetic lies not in the immediate but in the acquired.’ But marriage is precisely the immediacy which has mediacy in itself, the infinity which has the finite in itself, an eternity which has the temporal in itself. Thus marriage proves to be ideal in a double sense, in both the classical and the romantic senses of the word.23 In saying that the aesthetic lies in the acquired, I do not at all mean that it lies in the mere exertion; for that is negative and the merely negative is never aesthetic. When, on the contrary, an exertion includes its own subject-matter, a conflict its own victory, then in that duality I have the aesthetic. This is something I think I ought to call to mind in view of the passion of despair with which one can nowadays hear the acquired being praised against the immediate, as though the whole point was at bottom to destroy everything in order to build anew. Really it has alarmed me to hear the jubilation with which younger people, like the men of terror in the French revolution, cry: de omnibus dubitandum.24 Perhaps that is narrow-minded of me. Still, I believe one must distinguish between a personal and a scientific doubt. Personal doubt is always about something special, and a passion for annihilation of the kind one so often hears talk of leads at most to a crowd of people venturing out without having the strength to doubt, and failing, or else ending in some half-measures which is certain failure just the same. If the struggle of doubt within a particular individual develops, on the contrary, the strength which again overcomes the doubt, then that sight is an inspiring one by showing what a person is on his own account, but not really a beautiful one; for that it needs immediacy in itself. A development of that kind, brought about in the highest degree by doubt, strives towards what one in an extreme case calls turning someone into a quite different person. Beauty here consists, on the contrary, in the immediate’s being acquired in and along with the doubt. I have to stress this against the abstract form in which doubt has been invoked, the way it has been deified, the recklessness with which people have plunged into it, the blind faith with which they hope for a glorious outcome. It should also be remarked that the more spiritual the gain, the more one can extol doubt; but love belongs always to a province where you cannot so much talk of an acquiring as of a giving, and of a giving which is acquired. I have no idea what kind of doubt this should be. Are we to say that the proper situation of a husband is to have had distressing experiences, to have learned to doubt, and that the truly beautiful marriage is the one that proceeded when now, on the strength of this doubt and with great moral seriousness, he married and as a husband was faithful and constant? We would praise him but we would not extol his marriage, except as an example of what a human being is capable of. Or, to be a doubter with a vengeance, should he also doubt her love, the possibility of retaining the beauty of this relationship, but yet have enough stoicism to will it? I know quite well how very ready you false teachers are to praise such a thing, just so that your false teaching can find better acceptance; you praise it when it suits your purpose and say, look, that’s a true marriage. But you know quite well that in this praise there lurks a censure, and particularly the woman is far from being well served thereby, and so you do everything to tempt her. Therefore you make a distinction according to the old maxim, ‘Divide and rule.’ You praise first love. It remains, as you tell it, an instant lying outside time, a mysterious something about which one can make up any lie. Marriage cannot hide itself in that way; it takes days and years to unfold. How easy then the opportunity to tear down or build up with perfidious considerations of this kind, so that it needs a despairing resignation to endure it.
This, then, we are agreed on: marital love considered on its own is not only as beautiful as first love, it is even more beautiful because in its immediacy it contains the unity of a larger number of opposites. So it is not true that marriage is a highly respectable personage but a tiresomely moral one, while love is poetry. No, really it is marriage that is poetic. And if the world has so often painfully observed that first love could not be fulfilled, then I will readily join in the grief, but also draw attention to the fact that the mistake lay not so much in what came later as in one’s not having begun correctly. For first love lacks the second aesthetic ideal, the element of history. There is no law of motion in it. Were I to treat personal faith as immediate in the same way, then what corresponded to first love would be a faith which believed itself, on the strength of divine assurance, capable of moving mountains, and would then go about working miracles. Perhaps it would succeed, but this faith would have no history, for the check-list of all its miraculous deeds is not its history; on the contrary, the history of faith is the appropriation of faith in personal life. Marital love has this movement, for in the intention the movement is turned inwards. The religious aspect leaves it as though to God to look after the whole world, the intention makes it ready in union with God to strive for itself, to acquire itself in patience. The consciousness of sin contains a conception of human frailty, but in the intention it is represented as overcome. This I cannot sufficiently stress in regard to marital love. I have certainly done full justice to first love and think I am a better judge of it than you, but its fault is to be found in its abstract character. […]
The historical nature of marital love is apparent from its being a process of assimilation; it tries its hand in what it experiences and refers its experience back to itself. Accordingly it is not a disinterested witness of what occurs but essentially a participant; in short, it experiences its own development. Romantic love, too, refers its experiences to itself, as when the knight sends his beloved the banners, etc. won in battle; but even if romantic love could imagine a considerable time being spent on all such conquests, it could never occur to it that the love should have had a history. The prosaic view goes to the opposite extreme; it can well grasp that love should acquire a history, usually a short history, so plain and pedestrian that the love soon acquires feet to walk upon. Experimental love, too, acquires a kind of history, yet is as if without true apriority,25 also without continuity, and rests merely upon the caprice of the experimenting individual who is his own world and its fate simultaneously. Experimental love is therefore very apt to inquire about its own condition and so has a double joy, one part in its outcome corresponding to the calculation, and another when something quite else transpires. In the latter case it is also content inasmuch as it finds a task for its inexhaustible combinations. Marital love has apriority in itself, but likewise constancy, and the strength in this constancy is the same as the law of its motion, the intention. The intention posits something else but posits it also as that which is overcome; the something else is posited in the intention as something inner, inasmuch as the outer is itself seen reflected in the inner. The historical aspect consists in this something else coming to light, acquiring its validity, but seen precisely in its validity as something that is not about to become valid, so that love emerges tested and purified from this movement and assimilates the experience. For the individual who does not adopt an experimental attitude, how this something else comes to light is not under his control; yet love has, likewise in its apriority, triumphed over the whole thing without knowing it. It says somewhere in the New Testament, ‘For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.’26 Most people are ready to be grateful when they receive a good gift, but at the same time they demand that it be left to them to decide what present is good. This shows their narrow-mindedness. That other gratitude, on the other hand, is truly triumphant and a priori since it contains in itself an eternal health which not even an evil gift can disturb, not because one knows how to hold it at a distance, but because of the boldness, the high degree of personal courage, which dares to give thanks for it. So, too, with love. Here it could not occur to me to reflect on all the Jeremiads you maliciously keep in constant readiness for the edification of concerned husbands; and I hope this time you will restrain yourself, seeing that here you are dealing with a husband who cannot tempt you into amusing yourself by making him still more confused.
But in the course of my pursuit of love from its cryptogamous concealment to its phanerogamous life,27 I stumble upon a difficulty which you will certainly say is of no little significance. Posito, I assume for argument, that I have succeeded in convincing you that those religious and ethical factors which in marital love join first love by no means diminish the latter, that in your heart of hearts you are really deeply convinced of this and now by no means scorn a religious point of departure. You would therefore, alone with the one you loved, be ready to humble yourself and your love under God; you are really much impressed and moved – but watch out now! I mention a word, ‘congregation’, and immediately, as in the ballad, everything vanishes again.28 To get beyond the category of inwardness, that I think is something you will never succeed in. ‘Congregation, the dear congregation, which in spite of its diversity is still a moral personage; yes, if only, just as it has all a moral person’s tiresome qualities, it likewise had the good quality of having but one head on one neck – I know what I would do.’29 You no doubt know there was a madman whose idée fixe was that the room he lived in was full of flies,30 so that he was in danger of being choked by them. He fought with the fear and the fury of despair for his very existence. Thus you, too, appear to fight for your life against a similar imaginary swarm of flies, against what you call ‘the congregation’. Not such a dangerous matter, however, but I will first go over the most important points of contact with the congregation. Before that I would merely remind you that first love can scarcely count it an advantage that it knows no such difficulties; for that fact is due to its being kept abstract and having no contact at all with reality.
You will know very well how to discriminate between those abstract relationships to a surrounding world whose abstraction cancels the relationship. Having to pay a priest and a parish clerk and a functionary of the law, that’s something you can put up with, for money is an excellent means of removing any relationship; which is why you also initiated me into your plan never, ever to do anything or ever receive anything, not the slightest thing, without giving or receiving money. Yes, if we look a little at the matter, were you ever to marry, you would be capable of paying a douceur to everyone who came to witness your joy in taking that step. It must not surprise you if in that case the congregation grows in numbers, or if what the man with the flies feared actually befalls you. The personal relationships you are afraid of are those which, in inquiries, congratulations, compliments, yes, even presents, aspire to enter into a relation with you that cannot be measured in money, and to show how enthusiastically they share in your joy, though on just this occasion you for your part and that of your loved one would rather they didn’t share in it. ‘Money, after all, gets you out of a mass of ludicrous situations. With it you can stop the mouth of the church trumpeter who would otherwise make as though to herald the opening of the Royal Assizes, money can get you out of being pronounced a husband, an upright husband, before the whole congregation when you want to limit yourself to being that just for one person.’ This is not my invention, this portrait, it is yours. Can you recall how you once fumed on the occasion of a church wedding? You asked, why not let the whole tenderly sharing fraternity bestow a congregational kiss upon the bride and bridegroom, just as clerics present at ordinations come forward to lay their hands upon the ordinand! Yes, you said you were unable to mention the words ‘bride’ and ‘bridegroom’ without thinking of the big moment when a dear father or a friend of long standing rises with his glass unctuously to intone those beautiful words ‘bride and bridegroom’. For just as you found the whole church ceremony excellently suited to stifling the erotic, so is there as great an absence of decency in the subsequent worldly proceedings as there was an excess of it in the church ceremony; ‘after all, wasn’t it indecent, ludicrous, tasteless to place such an almost man and wife at a dining-table and convey the partial, untrue, and indelicate thought that it might not be up to the Church to ordain them man and wife’. So you seem to favour a quiet wedding. To that I have no objection, but merely inform you that you will be pronounced a properly married man just as fully there. Perhaps you can bear those words better when no one else hears them. I have to remind you, moreover, that it does not say ‘before the whole congregation’, but ‘before God and the congregation’, which is neither discomfortingly narrow nor lacking in boldness.
As for what else you have to say in this respect, that I can more easily forgive even if it comes with the usual intemperance, because it is only the social relationships you attack. […] In my view the great thing is to live in them, to bring something finer out of them if one can; if one can’t, to subordinate oneself to them and put up with them. I do not see that love is at all endangered by publishing banns from the pulpit; nor do I believe such publication is harmful for the hearers, as your overwrought severity once led you to divine when you proposed that the announcing of banns be abolished because that is what so many people, especially women, went to church just to hear, so that the impact of the sermon was destroyed. There is something untrue at the bottom of your anxiety, as if all small things of this kind were able to disturb a healthy and strong love. […] Another explanation I can offer of your great anxiety at all this privity and fuss is that you are afraid of missing the erotic instant. You know how to keep your soul as motionless as a bird of prey before it swoops; you realize the instant is not within one’s power and that yet it contains the most beautiful experience; therefore you know how to watch out, you do not want to anticipate anything in the restlessness with which you await the instant. But when an event like this is now fixed for a definite time which one knows well in advance, when the preparations constantly remind one of it, one runs the risk of ‘missing the point’. From this one sees you have not grasped the nature of marital love and that you cherish a heathen superstition for first love. […]
Every process of becoming, precisely the more healthy it is, always has something polemical about it, and every marital connection has that too, and you know very well that I hate that family laxity, that insipid community of goods which can give a marriage the appearance of being entered into with the entire family. If marital love is a true first love, then there is also something undisclosed about it. It does not want to present itself to view, does not stake its life on mounting guard over the families, does not draw its sustenance from congratulations and compliments or from idolatry, in the way the family can lend itself to. This you know very well – just let your wit make play with all that. In many ways I can well agree with you, and I believe that it would not hurt you or the good cause if occasionally you allowed me, as the experienced, loving forester, to mark the rotten trees for felling, but also in other places to mark a cross.
I have absolutely no reservations, now, in declaring secretiveness to be the absolute condition for the safeguarding of the aesthetic in marriage, not in the way that one should make a point of it, chase after it, take it in vain, place the real pleasure simply in savouring the secretiveness. It is one of first love’s pet notions that it wants to run off to an uninhabited island. This has been ridiculed enough, I will take no part in the wild iconoclasm of our time. The fault lies in the fact that first love believes that taking flight is the only way it can be realized. That is a misunderstanding which stems from its non-historical character. The art is to remain in the multiplicity and yet preserve the secretiveness. Here again I might dwell, by way of a prudential maxim, on its only by being among people that the secretiveness acquires its true energy, that it is only with this resistance that its point bores more and more deeply in. But I will not do so, for the same reason as before, and also because I always acknowledge a relationship to other persons as something real. But for that one needs art, and marital love does not run away from these difficulties; it preserves and appropriates them. Besides, marital love has so much else to think about that it has no time to get itself bogged down in a polemic against the particular.
Inwardly this principal condition goes as follows: openheartedness, uprightness, publicity on the largest conceivable scale; for this is the life-principle of love, and secretiveness here is its death. However, this is easier said than done, and truly it needs courage to carry it out consistently; for you no doubt realize that I am thinking of something more than the gabbling prattle which is rife in family marriages. Naturally there can only be talk of publicity where there can be talk of secretiveness; but the more there is talk of the latter, the more difficult the former becomes. It needs courage to reveal oneself as one truly is, it needs courage not to want to purchase one’s freedom from a little humiliation when one can do that through a certain secretiveness, not to want to purchase oneself a little addition to one’s stature when one can do that by being reticent. It needs courage to want to be healthy, to want the truth in all honesty and candour.
But let us begin with something less momentous. It was in connection with a newly-wed couple who saw themselves obliged to ‘limit their love within the narrow confines of three small rooms’ that you took a little excursion into the realm of fantasy, though that realm borders so close on your daily residence that one doubts whether it should be called an excursion. You then devoted yourself with the greatest care and taste to decorating your future as you could wish it. […] So you imagined yourself married, happily married, after having delivered your love inviolate from all adversity, and you were now deliberating how you would arrange everything in your home so that your love could preserve its fragrance as long as possible. For that you needed more than three rooms. I granted you this, seeing that as a bachelor you use five. It would be disagreeable for you to have to give up one of your rooms to your wife; as far as that goes you would hand over four of them to her and live in the fifth rather than share one in common. After pondering these inconveniences you continued, ‘I take the three rooms in question as my point of departure, but not in a philosophical sense, for I’ve no intention of returning to them, on the contrary, I intend getting as far away from them as possible.’ Yes, such was your aversion to three small rooms that, if you could not have more, you would prefer to live like a vagrant under the open sky, though that in the last resort was so poetic as to require a considerable suite of rooms in compensation. I tried to call you to order by reminding you that this was one of the customary heresies of non-historical first love, and then was very happy to accompany you through the many big, cool, high-vaulted halls in your castle in the air, through the private, half-darkened salons, the dining-rooms illuminated into the farthest corners by lights and chandeliers and mirrors, the small room with double doors opening out onto the balcony where the morning sun fell and a scent of flowers, which breathed only for you and your love, wafted towards us. Here I will not pursue your bold steps further as, like a chamois hunter, you leap from one peak to another. All that I shall discuss a little more closely is the principle behind your arrangement. Your principle was obviously secretiveness, mystification, refined coquetry. It was not just that the walls in your rooms were to be edged with glass, but the world of your consciousness was also to be multiplicated with similar refracted beams of light. Not just everywhere in the room but also everywhere in consciousness you would meet her and you, and you and her. ‘But for this to be possible all the riches in the world are not enough, it needs spirit, and a wise moderation controlling the powers of the spirit. So one must be strangers enough to each other for familiarity to be interesting, familiar enough for strangeness to form a titillating resistance. The married life must not be a dressing-gown one makes oneself comfortable in, but neither a corset that hampers one’s movements; it must not be a labour that needs strenuous preparation, but not a dissolute indolence either; it must bear the stamp of the accidental, yet in the distance one must discern an art. One doesn’t exactly have to stare oneself blind day and night stitching a carpet big enough to cover the floor in the great hall; on the other hand the slightest little curiosity can very well have some small secret sign on its border. One doesn’t exactly have to have one’s monogram on the cake every day one eats together, yet there can certainly be some small telegraphic allusion. It’s a matter of postponing as far as possible that point at which one suspects the movement is circular, that point where repetition begins; and when it can’t be postponed altogether, it’s a matter of having made adjustments to allow for variation. One has only a certain number of texts, if one preaches oneself out the first Sunday then not only is there nothing left for the whole of the next year, there is not even enough for the first Sunday next year. One should remain to some degree enigmatic to one another as long as possible, and so far as one successively reveals oneself, this must be done with as much use of accidental circumstance as possible, making it relative in a way that allows this, too, to be viewed from many other sides. One must be on one’s guard against all surfeit and after-taste.’ So you want to live on the ground floor of this lordly castle, which should be situated in a beautiful district but in the vicinity of the capital. Your wife, your consort, should occupy the left-hand wing of the first floor. It is something you have always envied princely people, that man and wife lived separately. But what took the aesthetic away again from a court life of this kind was a ceremonial that claimed priority to love. One is announced, one waits a moment, one is received. That in itself did not lack beauty, but it only assumed its true beauty when it became a move in the divine game of love, when it was ascribed a validity in such a way that one could just as well deprive it of its validity. The love one was in would itself have to have many limits, but every limit would also have to be a thrilling temptation to transcend that limit. So you lived on the ground floor where you had your library, billiard-room, audience-chamber, closet, bedroom. Your wife lived on the first floor. Here, too, was your bridal suite, a large room with two closets, one on each side. There would have to be nothing to remind you or your wife that you were married, and yet again everything should be such that no unmarried person could have it thus. You would not be aware of what your wife was up to, or she of what you occupied yourself with; this, however, not at all so as to be inactive or to forget one another, but to be able to give each contact significance, to remove that moment of death when you looked at each other and, behold, you were bored! So you would not trudge about in matrimonial procession on each other’s arm; for a long time to come you would follow her with youthful infatuation from your window as she walked in the garden, you would prepare your eyes to look out for her, lose yourself in the contemplation of her image when it vanished from your sight. You would steal after her, yes, probably on occasion she would also rest on your arm – after all there was always something beautiful in what had become a traditional way among people of expressing a particular feeling; and you would give her your arm, half giving what is beautiful in this custom its due, half making fun of walking in this way like a proper married couple. Yet, where should my pursuit of the clever refinements of your ingenious head be able to find its end in this Asiatic luxuriance, which almost wearies me and makes me wish myself back with the three small rooms you passed so proudly by!
If there were anything aesthetically beautiful in this whole view, then one should probably look for it partly in the hints you drop of erotic bashfulness, partly in not wanting at any point to possess the loved one as though possession were already gained, but continue constantly to try to gain it. The latter is in itself true and right, but the task by no means set with erotic seriousness, and accordingly so far not solved either. You were clinging constantly to an immediacy as such, to a category of nature, not daring to let it be transfigured in a common consciousness; for this is what I have meant by uprightness and openness. You fear that when the enigma has gone love will cease, while I believe that only when it has gone does love begin. You fear that one dare not altogether know what one loves, you reckon with the incommensurable as an absolutely vital ingredient, while I maintain that only when one knows what one loves does one truly love. Furthermore, all your good fortune lacks a blessing, for it lacks adversity; and since that is a fault it is also, in so far as you were actually to mislead someone with your theory, just as well that it is not true. Let us then turn to the realities of life. In insisting on the part played by adversity, it is far from my intention to let you identify marriage with a catalogue of tribulations. On the contrary, adversity’s contribution is already to be found in the resignation contained in the intention, as explained earlier, but without yet having assumed any definite shape or being a cause of anxiety, because in the intention they are looked upon as already overcome. Moreover, the adversity is not seen outwardly but inwardly, as it is reflected in the individual. The secretiveness becomes, as explained above, a contradiction when it has nothing to deposit in its secrecy, a puerility when all its cellar contains are amorous knick-knacks. Only when the individual’s heart is truly opened by love, when love has made him eloquent far more profoundly than the usual sense in which love is said to make one that (for even a seducer can have eloquence of that kind), only when the individual has thus deposited everything in the shared consciousness, only then does secretiveness acquire strength, life and meaning. But this calls for a decisive step, and thus courage too; without it married love lapses into nothing, for it is only through this that one shows that one loves not oneself but another. How is one to show that except by being only for the other, yet how can one be only for another except by not being for oneself? But being for oneself is the most general characterization of the secretiveness of the individual life when it remains in itself. Love is to give of oneself, but I can give of myself only if I go out of myself; how then can it be reconciled with the concealment that wants precisely to remain in itself? ‘But one suffers loss by revealing oneself in that way’; yes, of course, anyone who profits by being secretive suffers loss. But to be consistent, you would have to go much further, you would have to advise not just against marriage but against every form of personal approach, and how will your clever head deal with communication by telegraph? The most interesting reading is that in which the reader himself is to a degree productive; truly erotic artfulness would be to make an impression at a distance, an impression which would be highly dangerous for the person in question just because there was nothing from which she herself had created her object and loved now her creation; that is not love but the coquetry of the seducer. The person who loves is, on the contrary, one who has lost himself in another; but in losing and forgetting himself in the other he is revealed to the other, and in forgetting himself he is recalled in the other. The person who loves is not one who will want to be mistaken for the other, whether a better or a poorer, and the person who lacks this deference to himself and to the other does not love. In general therefore secretiveness has its basis in a pettiness which would like to add a cubit to its stature. The person who has not learnt to scorn this has never loved; for if he had he would have felt that even if ten cubits were added to his stature, he was still too lowly. […]
First love can wish with supernatural pathos, but this wish can easily become an ‘in case’ without content, and our lives are not so paradisal that our Lord gives every married couple the whole world to do with as it likes. Married love knows better. Its movements are not outwards but inwards, and here it is soon aware that it has a wide world to itself, but also that every little constraint on its self has a quite other commensurability with the infinitude of love; and even if it feels pain because there is so much to fight against, so too it feels courage for this contest. Yes, it is daring enough to outdo you in paradoxes in practically taking pleasure in sin’s having entered the world; but it has the daring to outdo you in paradoxes in another sense too: it has the courage to resolve them. For marital love, like first love, knows all these obstacles are overcome in the infinite moment of love. But it also knows that the historical element in it is precisely the gaining of this victory, and that gaining it is not just a game but also a conflict, though also not just a conflict but also a game, as the conflict in Valhalla was a life-and-death struggle and yet still a game, since the contestants continually rose again rejuvenated from the dead. It also knows that this fencing is not an arbitrary duel but a conflict under divine patronage; and it feels no need to love more than one, yet feels a blessedness herein, and no need to love more than once, yet feels an eternity herein. And is it still your belief that this love which has no secrets forgoes something beautiful? Or that it is unable to resist time but must needs be blunted by daily association? Or that boredom overtakes it more swiftly, as though marital love did not possess an eternal content of which one never grows tired, an eternal content which it acquires, and is constantly acquiring, now with a kiss and a jest, now with fear and trembling? […]
Yet not infrequently one sees marriages in which the secrecy system is carried through to perfection. I have never seen a happy one in which that was the case. However, since that may be due entirely to accident, I shall state what reasons there are in general for its being so. This is important for me here, for an aesthetically beautiful marriage is always a happy marriage, so if a happy marriage could be built on that basis my theory would have to be changed. I will shun none of its guises and will describe each as fairly as I can, especially one which, in the house where I saw it realized, was accomplished with a virtuosity which was really fascinating.
Generally, you will admit, the secrecy system proceeds from the husbands, and notwithstanding it is always wrong, this is still more tolerable than the intolerable kind where it is the wife who wields such a dominium. The ugliest form is, of course, a pure despotism in which the wife is a slave, a maid-of-all-work in the domestic arrangements. Such a marriage is never happy, even if the years bring a dullness which comes to terms with it. A more becoming form is the very opposite of this, a misplaced solicitude. ‘Woman is weak,’ they say, ‘she cannot endure sorrow and anxiety; the weak and frail must be handled lovingly.’ Falsehood! Falsehood! The woman is just as strong as the man, maybe stronger. And do you really treat her lovingly when you thus humiliate her? Who gave you leave to humiliate her? How can your soul be so blind that you take yourself to be a more perfect being than her? Just confide everything to her! If she’s weak she can’t bear it; but then, of course, she has you to lean upon, you have the strength for that. But look! You can’t stand that, that is something you do not have the strength for. So it is you who lacks strength, not her. […]
For a time I frequented a house where I had the opportunity to observe the silence system put into effect in a more artistic and refined manner. The man was fairly young, unusually gifted, with an excellent mind and of a poetic disposition, too lazy to produce anything himself but with an extraordinary flair and sense for making daily life itself poetic. His wife was young, not unintelligent, but of an exceptional character. This tempted him. His ability to arouse and nourish every youthful conceit in her was truly astonishing. Her whole life, their life together, was a tapestry of poetic enchantment. His eye was everywhere; when she looked round, his eye was averted. His finger was in everything, but no more literally or, in a finite sense, really than God’s is present in history. Whichever way her thought might turn, he was there beforehand; like Potem-kin he knew how to conjure up landscapes,31 and of just the sort, after a little surprise, a little hesitation, to please her. His domestic life was a Creation story in miniature, and just as everything in Creation focuses on mankind, so was she the centre in an enchanted circle in which she nevertheless enjoyed her full freedom, for the circle would bend to comply with her and had no boundary of which it might be said, ‘Here and no further!’. Plunge where she might, whichever way she went the circle gave way but still remained there. She walked as if in a toddler’s practice basket, yet not one braided with withies; it was woven out of her hopes, dreams, longings, wishes, fears, in short it was formed out of the whole content of her soul. He himself, in this dream world, moved with great certainty, he surrendered none of his dignity, claimed and asserted his authority as man and lord. She would have been upset had he not done so; it might have aroused in her an anxious suspicion which could lead to the secrecy being dissolved. He seemed, not only to the world at large but to her too, to be such a considerate person; yet inside he knew that every impression she got of him was just as he wished it, and he knew that it was in his power with a single word to dispel the enchantment. All that she might find disagreeable was removed; if anything of the kind occurred, she would receive, whether after being allowed to press her own inquiries or in candid anticipation of these, by way of frank notification an account he had himself drafted, in stronger or weaker terms, according to the impression he had calculated on. He was proud, fearfully consistent, he loved her, but he could not abandon the proud thought, which came to him deep in the still of the night or in an instant outside time, of venturing to say to himself, ‘Yes, she owes everything to me.’ – You have followed this description with interest, have you not? however imperfectly I have succeeded. Because it conjures up a picture in your soul with which you sympathize, which perhaps you would try sometime to put into practice yourself if you became a husband. Was this, then, a happy marriage? Yes, if you like, yet there hovered a dark fate over that happiness. Suppose he failed, suppose she suddenly suspected something. I do not think she could ever forgive him; her proud soul was too proud to let it be said that he had done it from love for her. There is an old-fashioned expression for the relation between a married couple, of which I will remind you here (in any case I always like to support the revolution, or rather the holy war, in which the plain and simple but true and rich expressions strive to win back the realm from which the novel has expelled them). It is said of married people that they should live on a good understanding with one another. Most often one hears it expressed negatively: a couple does not live on a good understanding, and then one usually thinks of their being unable to stand one another, of their fighting, quarrelling, etc. Take now the positive expression. The married couple described, do they not live on a good understanding? Yes, that is what the world would say, though not you, surely; for how could they live on a good understanding when they do not understand one another? Yet is it not part of the understanding that the one knows how solicitous and loving the other is? Or if he deprived her of nothing else, he deprived her of the opportunity for that degree of gratitude in which her soul would have found repose. Is it not a pretty, a becoming, and an uncomplicated expression: to live on a good understanding? […]
So you see, the secrecy system is by no means conducive to a happy, and thus neither to an aesthetically beautiful marriage. No, my friend; honesty, openheartedness, revelation, understanding, that is the life-principle in marriage; without it marriage is unattractive and indeed unethical, for then it separates what love joins, the sensual and the spiritual. Only when the being I live with in earthly life’s most tender association is just as close in spiritual respects – only then is my marriage ethical and therefore also aesthetically attractive. And you proud men who perhaps rejoice silently at this victorious triumph over women, you forget, in the first place, that it is not a good triumph when one triumphs over the weaker, and that the man honours himself in his wife – and the man who does not do that? He despises himself.
So understanding is the life-principle in marriage. One often hears people of experience discussing when one should advise against marriage. Let them discuss these circumstances as thoroughly and interminably as they will: generally what they say amounts to very little. I, for my part, will mention just one case, that is, when the complications in the individual life are such that it is unable to reveal itself. If the history of your inner development contains something unutterable, or if your life has made you privy to secrets – in short, if in one way or another you have gorged yourself on a secret which cannot be dragged out of you without costing you your life, then never marry. Either you will feel tied to a being who has no suspicion of what is going on in you, and your marriage then becomes an uncomely misalliance, or you bind yourself to a being who is anxiously aware of this, who at every instant sees these shadow-images on the wall. She may resolve never to cross-examine you, never to come too close, she will renounce the apprehensive curiosity that tempts her, but she will never be happy, nor you either. […] But having now mentioned secretiveness and understanding as two sides of the same matter, this being the main thing about love as the absolute condition for preserving the aesthetic in marriage, I am no doubt liable to be faced with the objection, on your part, that I seem here to be forgetting ‘what I otherwise harp on as insistently as the refrain in a song’, namely the historical character of marriage. You yourself have hopes of putting time to the test with the help of your secretiveness and your cleverly calculated relative information, ‘but when married folk get down to telling their story, short or long, they soon come to the point where one says, “and that’s the end of the story”’. My young friend, what you fail to notice is that it is only because you are not properly placed that you can make such an objection. By virtue of your secretiveness, you have a time dimension in you, and it really is a matter of time being put to the test. Through revelation, however, love has, on the contrary, an eternal dimension, and so all concurrence becomes impossible. Also, it is just a wilful misunderstanding to think of this revelation as a matter of married people spending a fortnight recounting their careers, followed by a deathly silence broken only now and then by a [retelling of] the sufficiently familiar story – ‘as is told somewhere in a fairy-tale of a mill that, while all this was happening, went clip, clap, clip, clap’. The historical character of marriage makes of this understanding precisely as much a matter of constant development as an all-at-once affair. It is the same as in an individual life. Just because one has arrived at clarity about oneself, has had the courage to be willing to see oneself, it by no means follows that the story is now over; it is now that it first begins, acquires for the first time a proper meaning through referring each lived moment to this total view. So too in marriage. The immediacy of first love founders upon this revelation, yet is not lost but assumed into the knowledge the marriage shares. With this the story begins, and the particular is referred to this shared knowledge; in this lies its felicity, an expression in which again the historical character of marriage is preserved, and which corresponds to the blitheness, or what the Germans call Heiterkeit, which first love has.
It is essential, accordingly, for married love to become historical, and because the individuals are now properly placed, the commandment, ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread’, is not a terrible and unexpected message. And the courage and strength married love feels corresponds to the romantic need of knightly love for adventurous exploits, and is the element of truth in that. Just as the knight is without fear, so too is married love, notwithstanding the foes it has to contend with are often far more dangerous. Here a broad vista opens up to observation, into which it is not, however, my intention to enter. But if we let the knight say that the man who does not defy the whole world in order to save his beloved does not know knightly love, then we should let the husband say the same. Except that I must always remind you that every victory of this sort that married love wins is more aesthetically beautiful than the one which the knight wins, because in winning this victory it also wins its own glorification. It fears nothing, not even small deviations, it has no fear of minor infatuations, on the contrary, these too serve only to nourish the divine wholesomeness of married love. Even Ottilia in Goethe’s Elective Affinities is ploughed under as but a tender possibility by the serious marital love; how much more, then, should a deeply religious and ethically planned marriage have the strength for that! Yes, just what Goethe’s Elective Affinities provides is proof of what secretiveness leads to. That love would not have acquired such power if it had not been allowed to grow in tranquillity. Had he had the courage to open himself to his wife it would have been averted, and the whole story would have become a divertissement in the drama of the marriage. The fateful part is that Edvard and his wife both have affairs simultaneously; but this is again the fault of their keeping silent. The husband who has strength to confide in his wife that he loves another – he is saved, and so too the wife. But when he does not have it, he loses confidence in himself, and so what he looks for is forgetfulness in the love of another. Undoubtedly, it is as much the pain of not having resisted in time, as true love for the other, that brings a man to yield. He feels he has lost himself, and when that feeling first occurs, it takes strong opiates to deaden it.
The difficulties marital love has to contend with I will discuss only in quite general terms, to show that they are not so important that marital love has anything to fear from them as far as the preservation of the aesthetic is concerned. […] I can divide these difficulties into the external and the internal, though always remembering the relative nature of such a division in the case of marriage, where of course everything is internal. First, then, the external difficulties. I am by no means reluctant or afraid to mention all these depressing, humiliating, vexatious finite afflictions, in short everything that goes to make up a tearful drama. Here, as everywhere, you and your ilk are exceedingly arbitrary. If a drama of this kind obliges you to undertake such a peregrination through the caves of misfortune, then you say it is unaesthetic, snivelling and tiresome. And you are right. But why? Because you are indignant that something sublime and noble should succumb to the like of this. If you turn to the real world, on the other hand, and there meet a family which has undergone half the adversities a hangman of a playwright has devised for that delicious pleasure, reserved for tyrants, of torturing others, you get the shivers; you think, ‘Goodnight to all aesthetic beauty.’ You show compassion, you are ready to help if for no other reason than to strip away the gloomy thoughts, but you have already long ago given up hope on the unfortunate family’s behalf. Yet if it is true in real life, the poet has the right to present it and he is in the right when he does so. When you are sitting in the theatre, intoxicated with aesthetic enjoyment, you have the bravado to require the poet to let the aesthetic triumph over all misery. It is the only comfort left, and, even more effeminately, you, whose own strength has not been given a chance to test itself by life, grasp it. […] If it is true, as you teach and proclaim in life, that adversity on a far smaller scale can put a person in thrall, make him walk with head bowed and forgetful that he, too, is created in God’s image, then please God let it be your just punishment that all playwrights write nothing but lachrymose dramas of all possible terror and ruination, pieces which would not let your effeminacy recline on theatre cushions, nor give you a chance to spread your unnaturally pungent perfume, but which might frighten you into learning to believe in reality what you want only to believe in the form of poetry. I have not, in my own marriage, experienced many adversities of this kind, that I freely admit, so I cannot speak from experience; still, I am convinced that nothing is capable of crushing the aesthetic in a person. It is a conviction so powerful, so felicitous, so heartfelt, that I thank God for it, as for a gift of grace. And when we read in the Holy Scriptures of the many gifts of grace, I would really count among them the frankness, the confidence, the trust in reality and in the eternal necessity with which beauty triumphs, and in the blessedness that lies in the freedom with which the individual comes to the aid of God. And this conviction is an element in my whole spiritual make-up; I do not permit myself to be convulsed in effeminate and voluptuous tremors by the artificial stimulus of the theatre. All I can do is thank God for this unshakeableness in my soul, but in doing so I would also hope to have exempted my soul from taking it in vain. You know I hate all experimenting, but a person is supposed to be able in thought to have experienced much that he never gets to experience in reality. There are occasional moments of despondency, and when a person does not evoke these arbitrarily, to try his hand at such things, this too is a contest, an extremely serious contest, and in this contest an assurance can be gained which, even if it does not have quite the reality it would have acquired in real life, is still of great importance. Sometimes in life it is a good sign, and a sign of something great, that a person fails like a madman to separate the worlds of poetry and reality but sees the latter sub specie poeseos.32 Somewhere, in one of his sermons where he is speaking of poverty and need, Luther says, ‘One has never heard of a Christian person dying of hunger.’ With that Luther is finished with the matter and thinks, surely with good reason, that he has spoken of it with much unction and to the genuine edification of his readers.
To the extent, then, that marriage involves such external trials, the thing to do, of course, is to make them internal. I say ‘of course’ and am pretty free-spoken about all this, but it is to you, and only to you, I am writing, and we two have probably just about the same amount of experience of this kind of adversity. The thing, then, is to turn the external adversity into an internal one. […] It is not at all to be denied, as your quick mind will soon grasp, that this very changing of the external trial to an internal one can make it still harder; but then nor do the gods sell anything great for nothing, and it is exactly here that the educative, the idealizing effect in marriage lies. It is often said that when one stands alone in the world it is easier to bear such things. True enough, to some extent; but often this saying conceals a significant untruth. For how is it that one is able to bear them more easily? By being able to throw oneself away, suffer damage to one’s soul without its being anyone else’s concern, by being able to forget God, let the storm of despair drown out the scream of pain, by being able to become dulled, and find one’s pleasure in living practically like a ghost among people. Of course everyone, even if he stands alone, should mind himself, but only he who loves has a proper conception of what he is and what he is capable of, and only marriage yields historic fidelity, which is every bit as beautiful as the chivalrous kind. For a married man can never behave thus and, however much the world goes against him, if he forgets himself even for an instant and begins to feel so light because despair is about to set him afloat, feel so strong because he has the numbing drink mixed by defiance and despondency, cowardice and pride, so free because the bond which binds him to truth and righteousness is, as it were, loosened, and he now experiences the swiftness which is the transition from good to evil – still, he will soon turn back to the old paths and as husband [Aegtemand] prove himself a genuine man [œgte Mand].
That must suffice for these external adversities. I am brief about them because I feel no special competence to contribute to the subject, and because to do so properly would require a much fuller treatment. Nevertheless this is the conclusion I reach: if love can be preserved, and so help me God it can, then the aesthetic, too, can be preserved; for love itself is the aesthetic.
The further objections are due mainly to a misunderstanding of the meaning of time and of the aesthetic validity of the historical. They accordingly affect every marriage and can therefore be discussed in quite general terms. That I shall do now, and do my best not to overlook, in this generality, the point of the attack and of the defence.
The first thing you will mention is ‘habit, the unavoidable habit, that fearful monotony, the perpetual sameness in the dreadful still-life of married domesticity; nature I love but I’m a hater of second nature’.33 One must admit you know how to portray with seductive warmth and sadness the happy time when one still makes discoveries, to delineate with dread and horror the time when that is over; you know how to touch in, in laughable and abominable detail, a marital uniformity not even nature can match, ‘for there, after all, as Leibniz has already shown, nothing is quite identical; such a uniformity is only reserved for rational creatures, the fruit either of their drowsiness or their pedantry’.34 Now, I have absolutely no mind to deny to you that it is a beautiful time, an eternally unforgettable time (mark well in what sense I can say this), when in love’s world the individual is astonished by, and finds bliss in, what indeed has been discovered long ago, and of which indeed he has often heard and read, but now first appropriates with all the enthusiasm of surprise, with all the depth of inwardness. It is a beautiful time, from the very first inkling of love, the first sight, the first disappearance, of the beloved object, the first chord of this voice, the first look, the first touch of the hand, the first kiss, right up to the first complete certainty of possession; it is a beautiful time, the first uneasiness, the first longing, the first pain because she failed to appear, the first joy because she came unexpectedly – but that is not at all to say that the sequel is not equally beautiful. You who imagine you have such a chivalrous way of thinking, test yourself. When you say the first kiss is the most beautiful, the sweetest, you insult the loved one, for what gives the kiss absolute value here is time and what pertains to that.
But if the cause I defend is not to be harmed, you first owe me a small explanation. For unless you want to proceed in a quite arbitrary manner, you will have to attack first love in the same way that you attack marriage. For, to survive in life, it must be exposed to the same calamities, and it will have nothing like the resources to counter them that married life has in the ethical and the religious. To be consistent, therefore, you must hate all love which wants to be an eternal love. You must stop, therefore, with first love by itself. To have its true meaning, however, first love must have the naive eternity in it. Should that have ever struck you as an illusion, then you have lost everything, unless you took pains to succumb to the same illusion once again, which is a contradiction. Or could it be that your clever head had so conspired with your lust that you could altogether forget what you owed others? Could it be that you thought that, even though it could never be repeated like the first time, there was still a tolerable way out: renewing oneself by experiencing the illusion in others, so that one savoured the infinitude and novelty in its pristine state in the individual whose virginal corset of illusion was not yet loosened? That sort of thing betrays as much desperation as depravity, and since it betrays desperation, it will be impossible here to find enlightenment about life.
The first thing I must now protest against is your right to use the word ‘habit’ for the recurrence characteristic of every life, and so also of love. ‘Habit’ is used properly only of what is bad, either through denoting persistence in something which is in itself bad, or through denoting a repetition of something in itself innocent but with an obduracy that makes the repetition bad on that account. ‘Habit’ therefore designates something unfree. But just as the good cannot be performed without freedom, so neither can one stay in it without freedom; thus with regard to the good one can never talk of habit.
Further, I must also protest when, in portraying marital monotony, you say that even in nature you will find nothing like it. That is very true, but monotony can be the very expression of something beautiful, and mankind can to that extent be proud of being its inventor. Thus in music an even tempo may have much beauty and great effect.
Finally, I would like to say that if such a monotony were unavoidable in marital life, then were you honest you would have to realize that the task was to conquer it, that is, preserve love under it, not to despair. For despair can never be a task; it is a convenience, but only seized upon, I will admit, by those who see the task.
But let us now look rather more closely at this notorious monotony. It is your error, and so too your misfortune, that everywhere, and so also with regard to love, you think too abstractly. You conceive a small summary of love’s elements; as you yourself perhaps would say, you conceive the categories of love. In this respect I willingly concede you an exceptional categorial thoroughness. You think of everything concrete in terms of an aspect, and this is the poetic way. Then when you go on to conceive the protractedness of marriage, it seems dreadfully incongruous to you. The mistake is that you do not think historically. Were a systematic thinker to conceive the category of interaction, explain it thoroughly and with sound logic, but then add, ‘it takes an eternity before the world can be done with all its eternal interaction’, you can hardly deny we would have a right to laugh at him. It is, after all, the meaning of time, and the lot of mankind and of individuals, to live in it. So if all you can say is that it is not to be endured, you will have to look about for another auditorium. Now, this would be a quite satisfactory answer, but to deprive you of the chance of saying, ‘We are basically agreed, it’s just that you find it best to put up with what can’t be altered’, I shall try to show not just that one had better put up with it, as it is surely a duty, but that putting up with it is in truth the best.
But let us begin at a place which we can assume to be a point of contact. You are not afraid of the time that precedes the culmination, on the contrary you love it, and often strive with a multitude of reflections to make the moments longer in their reproduction than they were originally, and if someone tried to reduce your life to categories at this point, you would be highly indignant. Nor indeed, in that time before the culmination, is it just the big, decisive encounters that interest you, but every little triviality, and you know well enough how to talk of the secret which was hidden from the wise, that the least is the greatest. On the other hand, when the point of culmination is reached, why yes, then everything has changed, everything has shrivelled up into a paltry and unappetizing abbreviation. This, then, you would have us suppose is based in your nature, which is merely to conquer but cannot possess. […]
In insisting ‘that’s just how you are’, you admit that others might be different; more I dare not assert so far, for it might be that you were the normal person, notwithstanding the anxiousness with which you insist on remaining just as you are hardly suggests that. But what do you make of others? When you see a married couple whose union, as it appears to you, drags on in the most fearful boredom, ‘in the most vapid repetition of love’s holy institutions and sacraments’, why yes, a destructive fire rages in you, a flame which would consume them. And this, indeed, is not a piece of capriciousness on your part, you are in the right, you are justified in letting the lightning of irony strike them, the thunder of wrath undo them. You annihilate them, indeed, not because that is your desire, but because they have deserved it. You condemn them. But what does ‘condemn’ mean, except to demand something of them? And if you cannot demand it, and it is a contradiction to demand the impossible, then it is a contradiction to condemn them. You have committed a blunder, have you not? You have hinted at a law which you yourself will not recognize, and which you have nevertheless enforced upon others. Still, you are not to be put out, you say, ‘I don’t blame them, I don’t reproach them, I don’t condemn them, I pity them.’ But now suppose the people concerned did not find it boring at all. A self-satisfied smile springs to your lips, you have surprised yourself with a happy thought, which might also surprise the one you address: ‘As I said, I pity them; for either they feel the whole weight of boredom and so I pity them, or they do not notice it and then, too, I pity them for being subject to such a pitiable illusion.’ That is about how you would answer me, and were several people present, your air of assurance would not fail of effect. But now there are none to hear us, and I can therefore continue the investigation. So you pity them in either case. Only a third possibility remains, namely that one knows this is how it is with marriage and, happily, has not entered into it. But clearly this situation is just as pitiable for the one who has felt love and now sees that it cannot be realized. And finally, the situation of the person who has helped himself as best he may out of this shipwreck by the same egoistic makeshift is also pitiable, for he has set himself up as a robber and troublemaker. It looks, then, as though marriage itself has become the general expression of a happy ending of something, so that marriage’s own outcome is not so joyful. Thus general pity is what we arrive at as the true result of this whole investigation. But such a result is in itself a contradiction; it is as if a person were to say that the result of life’s development is that one goes backwards. As a rule you are not afraid of concessions and perhaps will say here, ‘Yes, it does happen sometimes; when the wind is dead ahead and the going slippery, then often the result of going forward can be to go backwards.’
Nevertheless, I return to the consideration of your whole spiritual make-up. You say that you are by nature a conqueror who cannot possess. In saying this, I take it you do not think you have said anything disparaging; rather the contrary, you feel greater than others. Let us examine this a little more closely. What calls for greater strength, walking uphill or downhill? When the hill is as steep in either case, obviously the latter calls for more strength. There is an innate disposition to go uphill in nearly everyone, whereas most people are somewhat apprehensive about going downhill. Thus, too, I believe far more natures are formed for conquering than for possessing, and in your feeling of superiority in relation to large numbers of married people and ‘their stupid brute satisfaction’, there may indeed be some truth, but you are not willing to learn from your inferiors either. True art, as a rule, goes in a direction opposite to that of nature, without therefore annihilating the latter, and thus true art will turn out to possess, not to conquer, for possession is conquering in reverse. In these expressions you can see already how art and nature vie with each other. A person who possesses, yes, he too has something that is conquered; indeed, strictly speaking one can say that it is only when a person takes possession that he conquers. Now you, too, believe you possess, for you do indeed have the instant of possession; but it is no possession, for there is no deeper appropriation. If I were to imagine a conqueror who had subdued kingdoms and countries, then he would indeed also possess the provinces he had subdued; he would then have large possessions; and yet one would describe such a prince as a conqueror, not a possessor. Only when he ruled those lands wisely in their own best interests, only then would he possess them. Now this is very rare in someone whose nature it is to conquer; as a rule he will lack the humility, the religiousness, the true humanity that is essential to possession. It was, you see, just for this reason that, in explaining the relationship of marriage to first love, I stressed the religious element because this will dethrone the conqueror and let the possessor come into view. I therefore praised the fact that marriage was constructed with the highest in mind: lasting possession. I can remind you here of a saying you are fond of flourishing: ‘the great thing isn’t the original but the acquired’; for the urge to conquer, and the fact that one makes conquests, that is what is really original, while the fact that he possesses and wants to do that, that is the acquired. To conquer, one needs pride; to possess, humility. To conquer, one needs to be violent; to possess, to have patience. To conquer, greed; to possess, contentment; conquering calls for eating and drinking, possessing for praying and fasting. Yet all the predicates I have used here, and surely correctly, to characterize the nature of the conqueror lend themselves to natural man and fit him absolutely; but natural man is not the highest, for a possession is not a spiritually null and void, even if legally enforceable, proof of ownership, but a constant acquisition. Here, once more, you see that the nature of the possessor has in it that of the conqueror, for he conquers like the countryman, who does not put himself at the head of his men and drive away his neighbour, but conquers by digging the earth. Thus the truly great is not to conquer but to possess. […] When conquering, one constantly forgets oneself, when possessing one remembers oneself; not as an empty pastime but with all possible seriousness. When going uphill one has only the other in sight; when going downhill one must watch over oneself, over the correct relation between the point of support and the centre of gravity. […]
Nature, a philosopher has said,35 takes the shortest way. One could say it takes no way at all; it is there all at once, at a stroke; and when I want to lose myself in contemplation of the vaulted heavens, I do not have to wait until the numberless heavenly bodies have taken shape, for there they are all at once. The way of history, like that of justice, is on the contrary very long and hard. Art and poetry then step in and shorten the way for us and have us rejoice in the moment of consummation; they concentrate the extensive in the intensive. But the more significant whatever it is that is to arrive there, the slower the course of history, but then that much more significance, too, in the course itself, that much more that which is the goal proves also to be the way. With regard to individual life, there are two kinds of history, external and internal. These are two kinds of currents, moving in opposite directions. The first in its turn has two sides. The individual does not have what he strives for and history is the struggle in which he acquires it. Or else the individual does have it, but cannot take possession of it because something outside constantly prevents him from doing so; history is then the struggle in which he overcomes those obstacles. The second kind of history starts with the possession, and history is then the development through which the individual obtains the possession. Now since history in the first case is external, and what one strives for lies outside, the history is not truly real, and the poetic and artistic account quite rightly takes steps to shorten it and to hasten to the intensive moment. […] Only internal history is true history, but true history struggles with the life-principle in history – with time, but when one struggles with time, that is exactly when the temporal and every little moment acquire their great reality. Wherever the inner blossoming of the individual has not begun, where the individual is still closed, it is a matter of external history. But as soon as the buds open, so to speak, the inner history begins. Consider what we began with: the distinction between the natures of the one who conquers and the one who possesses. The nature of the conqueror is constantly outside itself, that of the possessor inside itself; so the former has an external history, the latter an internal. But since external history is the one that lends itself without detriment to concentration, it is natural for art and poetry to prefer it for representation, and with it to choose the unopened individual and everything belonging to him. Love opens the individual, it may be said; but not when love is understood in the way that it occurs in Romanticism. The individual is brought only to the point of opening itself, and there one ends; or it is in the process of opening itself but is interrupted. Yet, just as external history and the closed individual are the preferred objects of artistic and poetic representation, so too is everything that makes up the content of such an individual. But that, basically, is everything that pertains to natural man. Here are a few examples. Pride lends itself superbly to representation, for what is essential in pride is not succession in time but intensity in the moment. Humility is hard to represent just because it is indeed successive, and while the observer need only see pride in its culmination, so in the case of humility he really requires what poetry and art cannot provide, to see it in its constant process of becoming, for it is essential to humility that it is present constantly; and if you show it to him in its idealized moment, he feels that he misses something, because he feels that its true ideality consists not in being idealized in the moment but in its being present all the time. Romantic love lends itself superbly to representation in the moment; not so married love, for an idealized husband is not a husband once in his life but is that every day. If I want to represent a hero conquering kingdoms and countries, that lends itself superbly to representation in the moment; but a cross-bearer who every day takes up his cross can never be represented, either in poetry or in art, because the point of it is that he does it every day. If I want to imagine a hero giving his life, that lends itself superbly to being represented in the moment; but not the risking of his life every day, because the main thing is that it happens every day. Courage lends itself superbly to concentration in the moment; not so patience, just because patience struggles against time. You will say that art, after all, has represented Christ as an image of patience, as bearing all the world’s sin, that religious poetry has concentrated all the bitterness of life in one chalice and let one individual drain it in a single moment. That is true; but it is because it has been concentrated in an almost spatial way. Anyone moderately informed about patience, on the other hand, knows very well that its real opposite is not the intensive moment of suffering (for then it comes closer to courage), but time, and that true patience is the patience that reveals itself in a struggle against time, or is really long-suffering. But long-suffering does not lend itself to artistic representation, for the point of it is incommensurable with art; neither can it be poetized, for it demands the protractedness of time. […]
In following the development of the aesthetically beautiful, dialectically as well as historically, one finds that the direction of the movement is from the category of space to that of time, and that the perfecting of art depends on art’s being able continually to free itself more and more from space and to define itself in temporal terms. Herein lies the transition, and the significance of the transition, from sculpture to painting, as Schelling opportunely indicated. Music has time as its element but gains no persistency in it; its meaning is persistently to vanish in time; it sounds but fades at the same time and has no duration. Poetry, finally, is the most complete of all the arts and therefore that form which knows best how to do justice to the significance of time. It does not need to confine itself to the moment in the way painting does, nor vanish without trace in the way music does. Yet it, too, as we have seen, is obliged nevertheless to concentrate itself in the moment. So it has its limits, and cannot, as was shown above, represent something whose very truth is temporal succession. Still, the fact that justice is done to time detracts in no way from the aesthetic; on the contrary, the more justice is done to it the richer and fuller the aesthetic ideal becomes.
But then what about the aesthetic? If it remains incommensurable even with poetic representation, how can it be represented? Answer: by being lived. In this way it acquires a certain similarity with music, which is only because it is constantly repeated, which is only in the moment of performance. That is why I drew attention in the above to the pernicious conflating of the aesthetic with what can be presented in the form of poetic reproduction. For, indeed, all that I am talking about here can be represented aesthetically; not, however, through poetic reproduction but by one’s living it, realizing it in actual life. This is how aesthetics transcends itself and reconciles itself with life; for just as poetry and art are indeed in one sense precisely a reconciliation with life, so in another they are at enmity with life because they only reconcile one side of the soul.
With this I have reached the highest in the aesthetic. And truly, he who has the humility and courage to let himself be transfigured aesthetically, he who has a sense of being a character in the play written by God, a play where the playwright and prompter are not different people, where the individual, like the trained actor who has made himself one with his part and his lines, is not put off by the prompter but feels that what is whispered to him is what he himself would say, so that he begins almost to doubt whether it is the prompter that is putting the words into his mouth or he putting them into the prompter’s; he who in the deepest sense feels himself at once composer and composition, who the instant he feels himself composing has the original pathos of the line, the instant he feels himself composed has the erotic ear that picks up every sound; – he, and only he, has realized the highest in aesthetics. But this history, with which not even poetry proves to be commensurable, this is the internal history. Internal history has the idea in itself and is just for that reason aesthetic. So it begins, as I expressed it, with the possession and its progress is the acquiring of this possession. It is an eternity in which the temporal has not disappeared as an ideal factor, but in which it is constantly present as a real one. When patience acquires itself in this way in patience, it is internal history.
Let us now glance at the relation between romantic and married love, since the relation between the natures of the conqueror and the possessor cannot offer any difficulties. In itself romantic love always remains abstract, and if it is not able to acquire any external history, death already lies in wait for it because its eternity is illusory. Married love begins with the possession and acquires an internal history. It is faithful, so too is romantic love, but now see the difference: the faithful romantic lover can wait, say, for fifteen years, then comes the instant of his reward. Here, very rightly, poetry says that the fifteen years lend themselves superbly to concentration, then it hastens to the moment. A husband is faithful for fifteen years; yet for those fifteen years he has had possession. Accordingly, throughout that long lapse of time he has constantly acquired the faithfulness he possessed, since married love has first love within it and thereby its faithfulness. But an ideal husband of this kind cannot be represented, for the essential thing is time in its extension. At the end of the fifteen years he has apparently come no further than at the beginning, and yet he has lived aesthetically in a high degree. For him his possession has not been a dead property, his possession is something he has constantly acquired. He has fought, not with lions and ogres, but with that most dangerous enemy which is time. But here eternity does not come afterwards as it does for the knight; eternity is something he has had in time, preserved in time. Only he, therefore, has triumphed over time; for it can be said of the knight that he has killed time – as indeed a man always wants to kill time when it has no reality for him – but that is never the real victory. As a true victor, the husband has not killed time but saved and preserved it in eternity. The married man that does this, yes, the life of that man is truly poetical, he solves the great riddle: to live in eternity yet so to hear the parlour clock strike that its striking does not shorten but prolongs his eternity – a contradiction no less profound, but far more glorious, than the one contained in that famous situation in the medieval story of the unfortunate of whom it recounts that he woke up in hell and shouted, ‘What time is it?’, to which the devil answered, ‘An eternity.’ […]
Married love, then, has its enemy in time, its victory in time, its eternity in time; so even were I to imagine all so-called external and internal trials gone, it would always have its task. The former, as a rule, it also has, but to grasp them properly one must take note of two things: they are always inward factors, and they always contain a temporal aspect. For that reason, too, it is easy to see that love of this kind cannot be represented. It is constantly drawing itself in, and itself being (in a good sense) drawn along in time, while with anything to be presented in a reproduction it must be possible to coax it out and shorten its time. You will be further convinced of this if you consider the predicates applicable to married love. It is faithful, constant, humble, patient, forbearing, indulgent, sincere, contented, observant, persistent, willing, joyful. All these virtues have the property of being inward specifications of the individual. The individual does not fight external enemies; it is with itself and its love that it fights it out, of its own accord. And they have a temporal qualification, for their truth consists not in applying once and for all, but all the time. And nothing else is acquired by means of these virtues, just the self. Married love is, therefore, at one and the same time what you have often mockingly called the everyday and also the divine (in the Greek sense), and it is the divine through being the everyday. Married love does not come with an external mark, not like the rich bird with a rush and a roar,36 it is the incorruptible being of a quiet spirit.37
Of this, you and all those whose nature it is to conquer have no conception. You are never within yourselves but constantly outside. Yes, so long as your every nerve is a-tingle, whether you steal about softly or make yourself known and the brass band inside you drowns out your consciousness, yes, that is when you think you are alive. But when the battle is won, when the last echo of the last shot has died away, when the swift thoughts like orderly officers hasten back to headquarters to report that the victory is yours – yes, then there is nothing more you know, you do not know how to begin; for only then do you stand at the true beginning.
What you despise, therefore, as unavoidable for marriage under the name of habit, is simply the historical side of it, which to your perverted eye takes on such a terrifying aspect.
But what is it you are used to regard as not only destroyed, but what is worse, profaned by the habit inseparably tied to married life? What you think of, in general, are ‘the visible, holy signs of the erotic, which surely, like all visible signs, have no meaning in themselves, but whose meaning is due to the energy, the artistic bravura and virtuosity which is, after all, the natural genius with which they are executed. How disgusting to see the vapidness with which everything of that kind is accomplished in married life, how perfunctorily, how apathetically all that happens, practically on the stroke of the clock, almost like the tribe the Jesuits came upon in Paraguay who were so apathetic that the Jesuits found it necessary to have a bell rung at midnight as an agreeable message to all husbands to remind them of their marital duties. Thus everything happens in tempo, the way they’ve been trained.’ Let us now agree not to let the fact that there is much that is ludicrous and absurd in existence put us off in our observations, but just see whether it is necessary, and if it is, then learn from you the way of salvation. I dare not expect much from you in this respect, for you keep on fighting like that Spanish knight,38 though in another way, for a vanished time. For, in fighting for the moment against time, you are really fighting all the time for what has vanished. Let us take an idea, an expression, from your poetic world, or from the real world of first love: ‘The lovers look at each other.’ This word ‘look’, how superbly you know how to stretch it out and put an infinite reality, an eternity into it. A married couple who have lived together for ten years and seen each other daily cannot look at each other in that sense; but does that mean they cannot look lovingly at each other? Here we have your old heresy again. You happen to limit love to a certain age, to limit the love of one person to a very short time, and then like all those disposed to conquer you recruit for your experiment. But just that, indeed, is the most profound profanation of the eternal power of love. It is, in fact, despair. However you turn and twist in it, you must admit that the task is to preserve love in time. If this is impossible, then love is an impossibility. Your misfortune is to identify love simply and solely with these visible signs. If these are to be repeated over and over again and, let it be noted, with a morbid concern for their constantly having the reality they had by virtue of the accidental feature of its being their first occurrence, it is no wonder you are afraid and refer these signs and ‘gesticulations’ to those things of which one dare not say ‘decies repetitia placebunt’,39 for if it was the first time that gave them their value, then a repetition is an impossibility. But healthy love has a quite different worth; it works itself out in time, and is therefore also capable of rejuvenating itself through these outward signs; and – what for me is the main point – it has quite another idea of time and of the meaning of repetition.
I have expanded in the foregoing on how married love has its conflict in time, its victory in time, its blessing in time. In this I have been taking time to be just simple progression. But now it will appear that it is not just a simple progression in which what was there originally is preserved, but a growing progression in which what was there originally increases. You, who are so observant, will no doubt concede the generalization that people divide into two large classes, those who live mainly in hope and those who live mainly in recollection. Both exhibit an incorrect relation to time. The healthy individual lives in both hope and recollection, at one and the same time, and it is only through this that his life acquires true, substantial continuity. Accordingly, he has hope, and unlike those individuals who live only in recollection, he does not want to go back in time. But then what does recollection do for him, since it must surely have some influence? It puts a cross on the note of the instant; the further back recollection goes, the more frequent the repetition and the more crosses. Thus if he has an erotic moment in the present year, it is increased by his remembering one in the previous year, etc. This has come to be beautifully expressed in married life. I do not know how old the world is now, but you and I both know it is customary to say that first there came a Golden Age, then a Silver Age, then a Copper Age, then an Iron Age. In marriage it is the other way round: the silver wedding comes first and then the golden wedding. Or is recollection really the main point of such a wedding? But then the marriage terminology declares these other weddings to be even more beautiful than the first. […] It has often occurred to me, also, to wonder why, according to ordinary ways of talking and thinking, the single state has no such prospects, that one tends instead to think it laughable that a bachelor succeeds in celebrating a jubilee. The reason, no doubt, is that it is generally assumed that the single state can never grasp the true present, which is a unity of hope and recollection, and therefore tends either to lie in hope or in recollection. But this, again, suggests the correct relation to the present that married love has in the popular mind.
However, there is something else in married life that you also indicate with the word ‘habit’. ‘Its uniformity, its total uneventfulness, its incessant vacuity, which is death and worse than death.’ You know there are neurasthenics who are disturbed by the slightest noise, who are unable to think when someone walks softly over the floor. Have you noticed that there is also another kind of neurasthenia? There are people so weak that they need proper noise and distracting surroundings to be able to work. Why if not because they have no command over themselves, only in an inverse sense? When they are alone, their thoughts disappear in the indefinite; on the other hand, when noise and hubbub surround them, this compels them to pit their will against it. It is only when you have opposition that you are within yourself, but then, really, you are never within but constantly outside yourself. The moment you assimilate the opposition, there is quiet once more; so that is something you dare not do. But then you and the opposition are standing facing each other, and so you are not within yourself.
Naturally, the same applies here as before with time. You are outside yourself and therefore you cannot do without the other’s opposition. You believe that only a restless spirit is alive, while all men of experience think only a quiet spirit truly lives. For you a turbulent sea is a picture of life, for me the still, deep water. I have often sat beside a small stretch of flowing water. It is always the same, the same soft melody, the verdure on its bed, swaying beneath its tranquil waves, the same small creatures moving about down there, a little fish which glides in under the cover of the flowers, it spreads its fins against the stream, it hides beneath a stone. How uniform, and yet how rich in change! Thus is married domesticity, quiet, modest, murmuring; not many changements, and yet, like that water, it is flowing, like that water it has melody, dear to the one that knows it, dear to him just because he knows it. It is without pomp, and yet a lustre sometimes spreads over it though without interrupting its habitual course, just as when moonbeams fall upon that water and reveal the instrument upon which it plays its melody. Such is married domesticity. But to be seen thus and live thus presupposes a property I shall now mention to you. There is a verse of Oehlenschläger’s which I know you at least used to set great store by. For the sake of completeness, I transcribe it:
Yet how much must cohere in the world,
To conjure forth true love!
First: two hearts which each other know,
Then grace, their attendant guide;
Then the moon with its beam downcast
Through the branching beech in spring;
So they can meet alone –
Then the kiss – and then, too, innocence.
You, too, are in the business of eulogizing love. I will not deprive you of what, indeed, is not yours to own since it belongs to the poet, but of what you have nevertheless appropriated; yet since I, too, have appropriated it, let us be sharers – you get the whole verse, I the last word: and then, too, innocence.
Finally, there is yet another side to married life that has often given you occasion for attack. You say: ‘Married love conceals in itself something quite different; it seems so mild and lovely and tender but once the door is closed behind the married couple, and before you know what, out comes the cane and we are told it’s a duty. Deck out this sceptre as much as you may, make it into a Shrove-tide rod, it is still just a cane.’ I deal with this objection here because essentially it, too, is due to a misunderstanding of the historical aspect of married love. You would have either dark powers or mood to be the constituent factors of love. As soon as consciousness joins in, the enchantment vanishes. But married love has that consciousness. To put it crudely, in place of the conductor’s baton, whose movements provide the tempo for the graceful postures of first love, you show us the disagreeable corporal’s cane of duty. You have to admit, first of all, that as long as there is no change in the first love which, as we were agreed, married love contains, there can be no question of the strict necessity of duty. So you do not really believe in the eternity of first love. Look, here we have your old heresy again. After all, it is you who set yourself up so often as first love’s knight, and yet you do not believe in it, yes, you profane it. Not believing in it, you dare not enter into an alliance which, when you are no longer volens, can compel you nolens to stay in it. For you, then, love is clearly not the highest thing; for otherwise you would be happy if there were a power capable of compelling you to stay in it. You may say that such an expedient is no expedient; but to that I will remark that it depends on how you look at it. […]
You regard duty as the enemy of love, I regard it as its friend. That assertion may satisfy you, and with your usual mockery you will congratulate me on such an interesting and no less unusual friend. I, for my part, will by no means be satisfied with that, but take the liberty of carrying the war over into your own territory. If duty, once apparent to consciousness, is the enemy of love, then love must look to defeating it; for after all, you would not have it that love was so impotent a being as not to be able to overcome all opposition. On the other hand, you think that when duty comes into view it’s all over with love, and also that sooner or later duty does have to come into view, not just in married love but also in romantic love. And really you fear married love because there duty is so much part of it that when it becomes visible you cannot run away from it. Yet you think that is quite all right in the case of romantic love, for the very instant duty is mentioned the love is over, and duty’s arrival is the signal for you – with a very polite bow – to take your leave, or, as you once put it, for you to regard it as your duty to take your leave. Here, again, you see how it goes with your eulogizing of love. If duty is the enemy of love, and love cannot defeat this enemy, then love is not the true victor. What follows is that you must leave love in the lurch. Once you have got hold of the despairing notion that duty is the enemy of love, then your defeat is assured and you have disparaged love and divested it of its majesty, just as you have done with duty, and yet that was the last thing you wanted. You see, this is despair once more, and it’s that whether you feel the pain of it or try, in despair, to forget it. If you cannot reach the point of seeing the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious as the three great allies, if you do not know how to preserve the unity of the different expressions everything acquires within these different spheres, then life is without meaning and you must be accounted fully justified in your pet theory that one can say of everything: do it or do not do it, you will regret both.
Now, unlike you, I am not under the tragic necessity of having to mount an always unsuccessful campaign against duty. Duty is not for me one climate and love another; duty makes my love into the true, temperate climate, and perfection is this unity. However, in order properly to reveal to you your false doctrine, I will pursue it a little further, begging you to ponder the different ways in which one might feel that duty was the enemy of love.
Imagine someone who has become a husband without ever properly taking into account the ethical factor in marriage. He loves with all the ardour of youth, and is then suddenly, through some outward circumstance, affected by doubt as to whether the one he loves, and to whom he is also bound by ties of duty, might not think that really he only loves her because it is his duty. His case, indeed, is similar to the one indicated above; it seems to him, too, that duty turns out to be opposed to love. But he loves, and for him his love is truly the highest thing, and accordingly his efforts are directed at defeating this enemy. That is, he wants to love her, not because that is what duty enjoins – not according to the poor measure for the necessary minimum duty can yield – no, he wants to love her with all his soul, all his might, and all his fortune. He wants to love her even at the moment, should this be possible, when duty allowed him to refrain. You can easily see the confusion in his train of thought. What does he do? He loves her with all his soul; but that is exactly what duty enjoins, for let us not be confused by the talk of those who think that duty in respect of love is merely a catalogue of rules of etiquette. Duty here is just one thing, truly to love, with the sincerity of the heart, and duty is as protean as love itself, declaring everything holy and good when it is of love, and denouncing everything, however pleasing and specious, when it is not of love. So you see, he too has taken an incorrect attitude; but just because there is truth in him, he does what duty enjoins – seeing it is not just what he wants to do – neither more nor less than what duty enjoins. The ‘more’ he does is really his doing it; for the ‘more’ that I can do is always that I can do what duty enjoins. Duty enjoins, it cannot do more. The ‘more’ I am capable of is doing what it enjoins, and the moment I do that I can say that, in a sense, I am doing ‘more’; I translate the duty from the external to the internal and thereby go beyond duty. From this you see what infinite harmony and wisdom and consistency there is in the world of spirit. When one proceeds from a definite position and quite calmly pursues it with truth and energy, it must always be an illusion when all the rest seems to be in contradiction with it; and when someone believes he effectively demonstrates the disharmony, he demonstrates the harmony. So the husband we have been talking of came out of it well; really his only punishment was that the duty teased him a little for his ‘little faith’. Duty constantly chimes in with love. If you separate them, as he did, and make one part into the whole, then you are in constant self-contradiction. It is as if one were to separate the ‘t’ and the ‘e’ in the syllable ‘te’, and then want no ‘e’ but claim the ‘t’ is all there is to it. The moment he says it, he says the ‘e’ too. So it is with true love. It is not something speechless, abstractly inexpressible, but neither is it something soft, ungraspably indefinite. It is an articulate sound, a syllable. If duty is hard, eh bien, then love enunciates that fact, it makes it real, and thereby does more than its duty; if love is on the point of becoming so soft that it cannot be kept hold of, then duty sets a limit to it.
Now, if that was what your view that duty is the enemy of love amounted to, if it was nothing but an innocent misunderstanding, then, why yes, your case would be much as that of the man we are discussing. But much as your grasp of the matter is indeed a misunderstanding, it is also a culpable misunderstanding. Hence you disparage not just duty but love; hence duty looks as though it were an insuperable enemy. That is because it is true love that duty loves and it has a mortal hatred of false love, yes, it kills it. If they are in the truth, the individuals will see in duty merely the eternal expression of the fact that the way is prepared for them in eternity, that the way they would gladly go is one along which they are not merely permitted to proceed, indeed they are enjoined to do so. And over that path there watches a divine providence which is constantly showing them the way ahead, putting protective shields at all the dangerous places. And for a person who truly loves, why should he be unwilling to accept a divine authorization just because it expresses itself divinely, and says not merely ‘you may’ but ‘you must’? In duty, everything is put in order for the lovers, and that, I believe, is why the language of duty is in the future tense, to suggest the historical aspect.
Now I am through with this little exposition. Presumably, though, it has made an impression upon you; you feel that everything has been turned around, and you cannot quite harden yourself to the logical rigour of my remarks. Nevertheless, if I had said all this to you in conversation, you would have found it hard not to offer the sarcastic comment that I am ‘preaching’. However, you cannot justly accuse my presentation of suffering from that defect, or of being perhaps just as it ought, when one talks to a sinner as hardened as you; and as for your own lecturings and wisdom, these not infrequently remind one of the Preacher’s Book,40 and indeed one might believe you occasionally chose your texts from that source.
But I will let you yourself provide me with an opportunity to illuminate this matter. For as a rule you do not allow people to scoff at ethics, and in fact one has to force you to a certain point before you jettison it. You always keep it on your own side as long as you possibly can. ‘I don’t by any means despise duty’, that is how the more moderate lectures, the more refined assassinations of duty, begin: ‘far be it from me, but above all let’s keep our consciences clean, duty is duty, love is love, period! and above all, no mishmash. But isn’t it the case that marriage is alone in being a monstrosity of that kind, with this hermaphroditic ambiguity? All else is either duty or love. I recognize it is a person’s duty to seek a definite position in life, I regard it as his duty to be true to his calling, while if he violates his duty, on the other hand, he well deserves the punishment he suffers. This is duty. I make some definite undertaking, I can state precisely what it is I promise dutifully to comply with. If I do not do that, I am confronted by a power which can compel me. If I form an intimate attachment to another person, on the other hand, love is everything, I acknowledge no duty. If the love is over, we are through with the friendship. It is reserved exclusively for marriage to base itself on such an absurdity. What does it mean, after all, to pledge oneself to love? Where is the boundary? When have I discharged my duty? How is my duty to be more precisely defined? To what tribunal can I appeal in cases of doubt? And if I fail to discharge my duty, where is the power to compel me? Certainly, the State and the Church have established a certain limit; but may I not still be a bad husband even if I don’t overstep it? Who will punish me, who will defend her who suffers under this?’ Answer: you yourself. [To resolve] the confusion in which you have ensnared both yourself and me […] [let] us take a look at your classification. […] You think that everything else can be grasped under either the category of duty or its opposite, and that it has never occurred to anyone to apply another criterion: marriage alone is guilty of this self-contradiction. You offer the duty of one’s calling as an example and think it an apt illustration of a purely dutiful relationship. This, however, is by no means the case. For if a person simply conceived of his occupation as a sum of appointments he had to keep at definite times and places, he would be degrading himself, his calling and his duty. Or perhaps you think a point of view like that would make for a good official? Where, then, would there be room for the enthusiasm with which one hallows one’s calling, where room for the devotion with which one loves it? What forum could keep an eye on these? Or perhaps such things are not required of him as part of his duty? But then would the State not look upon anyone who assumed office without them as a hireling, whose sweat and toil it could exploit and reward, but who in another sense was an unworthy official? If the State does not say so in so many words, that is because what it demands is something outward, something tangible, and when it gets that it presupposes the other. In marriage, on the other hand, the main thing is what is inward, what cannot be pointed at. Yet the precise expression of this is love. I see no contradiction, therefore, in requiring it as a duty; for the fact that there is no one to keep an eye on it is not to the point, seeing the man can, after all, always keep an eye on himself. Should you continue, therefore, to demand such a check, it is either because you want it to help you worm your way out of your duty, or because you are so afraid of yourself that you would gladly have yourself declared legally incompetent; but that is just as wrong and just as reprehensible.
If you bear in mind what I have explained in the foregoing, in the way I have explained it, you will easily perceive that my insisting on the inwardness of duty in love is not done with the hullabaloo one occasionally finds with people whose prosaic common sense has first destroyed the immediate and who now, in old age, have taken to duty; people who, in their blindness, cannot voice their scorn of the purely natural in strong enough terms, nor sing their praises of duty stupidly enough – as though, in this way, it were something different from what you call it. Such a rupture, thank God, is unknown to me. I have not run off with my love into trackless regions and deserts where, in my loneliness, I lose my way, nor exactly have I asked my neighbours and the people across the way for their advice on what I should do. Such isolation and such particularization are equally wrong. I have always had footprints before me in this very region of universal validity which is duty. I have also felt that there are moments when the only salvation is to let duty speak, that it is healthy to let it punish one, not with the dismal effeminacy of a heautontimoroumenos,41 but in all seriousness and emphatically. But I have not been afraid of duty, it has not appeared before me as an enemy which wanted to disturb the crumb of joy and happiness I had hoped to preserve through life; it has appeared as a friend, our love’s first and only confidant. But this strength of having the prospect always free, that is the blessing of duty, while romantic love, because of its non-historical character, goes astray or comes to a standstill.
Dixi et animam meant liberavi,42 not as if my soul had hitherto been trapped and now in this prolix unburdening had got itself air; no, it is merely a healthy drawing of breath in which it has savoured its freedom. Drawing breath in Latin is called respiratio, a word which indicates a flowing back of what had first flowed out. In drawing breath the organism enjoys its freedom, the freedom I have every day.
Accept now, well prepared, what is offered to you, well tested. Should you find it all too little to satisfy you, then see if you cannot prepare yourself better, whether you have not forgotten some precaution or other. The Serbs have a legend which tells of an immense giant with an equally immense appetite.43 He comes to a poor cottager and wants to share the latter’s dinner. The cottager puts out what the humble resources of the house afford. The giant’s greedy eyes have already devoured it all, and he no doubt reckoned he would be no nearer having his fill had he actually eaten it. They sit down to the table. It does not occur to the cottager that there might not be enough for both. The giant reaches for the dish. The cottager stops him with the words: ‘It is the custom in my house first to say a prayer’; the giant complies, and behold! there is enough for them both.
Dixi et animam meam liberavi; for her also, whom I still love, constantly, with the youthfulness of first love, her too have I liberated, not as if she had previously been bound, but she has rejoiced with me in our freedom.
In accepting my loving greeting, accept, too, as usual, a greeting from her, friendly and sincere as always.
It is a long time since I have seen you in our home. I can say this both in a true and a figurative sense; for notwithstanding the fortnight of evenings I have devoted almost entirely to this letter, I have constantly had you with me in a way, and yet I have not, in the figurative sense, really had you in my home, not in my house, in my living-room, but outside my door, from which, with my reproaches, it is almost as though I have been trying to drive you away. For me this has not been an agreeable way of passing the time, nor will you, I know, take my behaviour amiss. However, it will always be, both truly and figuratively, still more agreeable to me to see you in our home both truly and figuratively. I say this with all the husbandly pride of one who feels qualified to use that formula: in our home. I say it with all the humane respect every individual ‘in our home’ can always be certain of receiving. For next Sunday, then – you receive no standing family invitation ‘for ever’, i.e. for a whole day. Come when you want – always welcome; stay as long as you want – always the agreeable guest; go when you want – always well commended.