Some would abolish marriage, but the normal shape of the demand is that men and women shall be free to love and beget children whether or no they ask the blessing of Church or State. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Goethe took a concubine on the pagan model, many of the first literary men in Europe pressed this demand, and it is sustained by some of the most brilliant writers in every country to-day. The movement exhibits the slow and steady growth characteristic of reforms which eventually triumph. It is no mere bubble on the surface of our effervescent life; it is the new intelligence of the race examining the old traditions.
Moralists, lay and clerical, have a preposterous way of representing this as a surging of selfish passion against the barriers which human experience or superhuman wisdom has erected. There is, it is true, much in our rebellious literature itself which misrepresents the movement. You get the impression that, as the eighteenth century questioned the divine right of kings and the nineteenth century that of priests, the twentieth century is challenging the divine right of moralists. But this is due to the common practice of giving a narrow meaning to the word “immorality.” Goethe and Swinburne became zealous for “morality,” but they never altered their opinions on “free love.” Sudermann and Anatole France and Perez Galdòs and d’Annunzio, G. B. Shaw and T. Hardy and E. Carpenter and H. G. Wells, are sincere moralists: they inculcate honour, truthfulness, kindliness,
