Ellen Key

“ Not until the spring rain of the new ideas has fallen sufficiently to penetrate the roots and rise as sap in the tree of life, will a greater happiness grow from the new love, which is not to be blamed because men have dreamed it greater than they themselves are at present. ”

“ Those who dread the dissolution of society through the insistence upon the rights of love, do not reflect that its right to break up marriage is allowed to the feeling, which has not only the red glow of passion, but also the clearness through which two people have become conscious of each other as a revelation of the whole unsuspected richness of life. ”

“ The sanctity and loftiness of one’s own feeling is the indestructible part of happiness in love. No longer to be able to love is the greatest sorrow. But a person no more becomes less worthy of love because his own love is dead, than he becomes so through leaving love unrequited. ”

“ Never in after life has the world such a marvellous glamour as when the first dream of love has swathed all contours in its opalescent mists of sunrise, but—never do we so easily go astray. It may happen that the lifting of the mists will disclose the most beautiful landscape. ”

“ The mother should feel the same reverence for the unknown worlds in the wide-open eyes of her child, that she has for the worlds which like white blossoms are sprinkled over the blue orb of heaven; the father should see in his child the king's son whom he must serve humbly with his own best powers, and then the child will come to his own ”

“ Marriage: I call marriage the will shared by two, to create the one,—the one that is in itself more than its creators. Reverence for one another, I call marriage; such reverence as is meet for those whose wills are united in this one act of will. ”

“ Thus from one country to another fly the shuttles of gold and shuttles of steel, drawing the fine and many-coloured woof of contemporary consciousness through thread after thread of the strong warp, made up of the laws and customs of various nations. ”

“ Never do greater possibilities exist for the happiness both of the individuals and of the race than in a love which begins so early that the two can grow together in a common development; when they possess all the memories of youth as well as all the aims of the future in common; when the shadow of a third has never fallen across the path of either; when their children in turn dream of the great love they have seen radiating from their parents. ”

“ Never has the earth seen a more complicated and contradictory being than this woman, melancholy and wistful, cold and sensitive, thirsting for life and tired of life at the same time. The blood dances otherwise in her veins, sings another song in her ears, than it has in those of any other woman since time began. She sees through her husband and is a stranger to him; his desire seems brutal to her finely-shaded and contradictory moods: she is not won, even when she allows herself to be embraced. She fears the child, since she knows she cannot fulfil its simple demands. ”

“ The relentless force of nature’s uniting will shows itself not only in the way love brings together contradictions in marriage, but also in the rupture of marriage. A good wife, married to a good husband, loving and loved, is thus seized by a passion, incomprehensible to herself, for another man. Without reflection she gives herself up to her passion, to return again to the husband she has not ceased to love, but who never inspired in her the overmastering emotion whose purpose—according to the will of nature and of the woman herself—ought to have been a child. ”

“ We must realise that every pebble by which one breaks into the glassy depths of the child's soul will extend its influence through centuries and centuries in ever widening circles. Through our fathers, without our will and without choice, we are given a destiny which controls the deepest foundation of our own being. Through our posterity, which we ourselves create, we can in a certain measure, as free beings, determine the future destiny of the human race. ”

“ But that dream of a Third Kingdom, pure as the lily, warm as the sun, can only be realised in the temper of the child who looks for life and happiness, who brushes away joyously and frankly the clouds of man's fall and man's humiliation. ”

“ We shall see behind the figure of every child the infinite line of past generations, before it the equally endless ranks of those to come. We shall remember in our actions that the child is the sum of these dead ones, the hope of those unborn. ”

“ Unless death interrupts them they will thus build up their life together as the Gothic cathedrals were built: buttress upon buttress, arch above arch, ornament within ornament, until finally the gilding of the topmost spire catches the last rays of the sunset. ”

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

“ When a child strikes his small sister the mother strikes him and believes that he will see and understand the difference between the blows he gets and those he gives, that he will see that the one is a just punishment and the other vicious conduct. But the child is a sharp logician and feels that the action is just the same, although the mother gives it a different name. ”

“ To-day, countless women are still being sacrificed to this doctrine of marriage, or to its unconscious effects; their exhausted wombs are a poor soil for the new generation; their crushed souls a broken support for the growth of new wills. For one woman who defends herself with the resolution lent by horror, there are thousands who have conceived and still conceive children in loathing. For one wife who is met with the modest prayer of love, there are thousands who with a feeling of humiliation concede to their proprietors the right inculcated by the Lutheran doctrine of matrimony. ”

“ It is impossible to attain this result under the torture of the crude methods in our present home and school training. We need new homes, new schools, new marriages, new social relations, for those new souls who are to feel, love, and suffer, in ways infinitely numerous that we now can not even name. Thus they will come to understand life; they will have aspirations and hopes; they will believe; they will pray. The conceptions of religion, love, and art, all these must be revolutionised so radically, that one now can only surmise what new forms will be created in future generations. ”

“ When fate attempts to tune these fragile beings to their full pitch, they break like harp-strings under a rough touch. They are only able to live partially—but thus they do not find life worth living. ”

“ Rarely is a mother of the upper class one of those artists of home life who through the blitheness, the goodness, and joyousness of her character, makes the rhythm of everyday life a dance, and holidays into festivals. ”

“ For a couple who share it thus, everyday life will scintillate with little delights as a wheat-field at midsummer with cornflowers; and the high days will be white with joy as a spring garden with fruit blossoms. A couple who live thus will be able to play so that beyond their sport will always be the calm of tenderness; to smile so that behind their smiles will always lie an easily-aroused seriousness. ”

“ Marriage by capture was once “natural,” as courtship is now. What new transformations the race is destined to undergo; what losses and gains, at present unsuspected, of organs and senses, faculties and properties of the soul, await it—this is the secret of the future. But the more mankind is convinced of its power of intervening in its own development, the more necessary does a conscious purpose become. We must understand what obstructions we will root out, what roads we will block up, and what sacrifices we will impose upon ourselves. ”

“ These women, who thus without more ado renounce motherhood, have they ever held a child, not in their bosom, but even in their arms? Have they ever felt the thrill of tenderness such a soft-limbed creature, made, as it seems, of a flower’s soft surfaces and fair tints, inspires? ”

“ She will devote her finest and strongest forces to the difficult and beautiful art of being at the same time the beloved and the mother; her religious cult will be to create the supreme happiness of life. Because she will know and value the psychical and physical conditions of health and beauty she will choose the father of her children with clearer vision and deeper feeling of responsibility than at present; she will bear and rear sound and beautiful beings and she herself will possess greater attraction and longer youth than the woman of the present. ”

“ Still it is not sufficient for the ideal beauty of marriage and the harmony of the child that the woman knows in general what is before her. A young man said once to me that most marriages are spoilt at the very beginning, because the man brings with him the point of view and the habits of those degraded women, from whom he has received his initiation into love; frequently he annihilates forever the tenderest element in his relation to his wife. He damages the most beautiful factor in their mutual feelings. ”

“ But great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life’s gracious gifts to its elect. There can be no other standard of morality for him who loves more than once than for him who loves once only: that of the enhancement of life. He who in a new love hears the singing of dried-up springs, feels the sap rising in dead boughs, the renewal of life’s creative forces; he who is prompted anew to magnanimity and truth, to gentleness and generosity, he who finds strength as well as intoxication in his new love, nourishment as well as a feast—that man has a right to the experience. ”

“ If in one case a married life has so dried up the feelings of both that a gust of wind drives them apart like two withered leaves, in another it may have given the feelings such deep roots that, even if all the leaves that the springtime gave are torn away, even if life seems as empty and cold as naked boughs in winter—it is still lived in common. ”

“ It is true that she cannot efface her husband’s past. But she can create together with him a new and stronger generation. The man who knows what his beloved has suffered through his past; who has seen the wings of her courage lose something of their power, her confidence something of its smile, her joy something of its playfulness—he will in time teach his sons that a man may certainly become once more strong and healthy through happiness in love, but that he cannot win so beautiful and sure a happiness as self-control can prepare ”

“ It is therefore an indisputable necessity that every love entirely detached from the rest of humanity must die for want of nourishment.
But the band which attaches it to humanity may be woven of several materials; the gift to the race may express itself in various ways. In one case a great emotion may bring about a tragic fate, which opens the eyes of humanity to the red abysses it contains within itself. Another time it may create a great happiness, which sheds a radiance around the happy ones, illuminating all who come near them. ”

“ Love may possess, according to his belief, no sterling value: he regards it as always a forged note with which nature obtains the co-operation of human beings—especially of women—to her ends.
This love knows no atmosphere but that of the alcoves where it has pursued its bought or stolen pleasure. It has never breathed the air of the wilds, the air which quivers with sunshine and shakes with storms; the air through which murmurs all life’s longing for renewal, all the wistful intuition of eternity born of a hunger for happiness, which raises generation above generation towards unknown goals ”

“ This wealth in the elements of mutual dependence is what keeps fidelity in love both inwardly and outwardly. This soft current of the soul's depths keeps the sensuous charm fresh; while mere relation, both legal marriage and free union, very soon exhausts happiness and leaves behind ennui, if love has contained only sensuous attraction, and not that mutual feeling of dependence, which involves the union of the soul and the sense, and which unites the spirit and the sympathies. ”

“ In the school, the painful restlessness of the present "to get somewhere" will disappear entirely. In the calm, profound atmosphere of my school, the young generation will be trained to believe that the most important thing for man is not to do something, but to be something. It may be harsh to say that common natures are reckoned by what they do, noble natures by what they are; yet it is a deep truth, forgotten in this century of activity, in this age of woman. But it is bound to be remembered in the century of contemplation, in the century of the child. ”

“ The school should be nothing but the mental dining-room in which parents and teachers prepare intellectual bills-of-fare suitable for every child. The school must have the right to determine what it can place on its bill-of-fare, but the parents have the right to choose, from the mental nourishment supplied by it, the food adapted to their children. The phantom of general culture must be driven from school curricula and parents' brains; the training of the individual must be a reality substituted in its place; otherwise reform plans will be drawn up in vain. ”