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731.
Marriage, property, speech, tradition, race, family, people, and State, are each links in a chain—separate parts which have a more or less high or low origin. Economically they are justified by the surplus derived from the advantages of uninterrupted work and multiple production, as[Pg 191] weighed against the disadvantages of greater expense in barter and the difficulty of making things last. (The working parts are multiplied, and yet remain largely idle. Hence the cost of producing them is greater, and the cost of maintaining them by no means inconsiderable.) The advantage consists in avoiding interruption and incident loss. Nothing is more expensive than a start. "The higher the standard of living, the greater will be the expense of maintenance, nourishment, and propagation, as also the risk and the probability of an utter fall on reaching the summit."
732.
In bourgeois marriages, naturally in the best sense of the word marriage, there is no question whatsoever of love any more than there is of money. For on love no institution can be founded. The whole matter consists in society giving leave to two persons to satisfy their sexual desires under conditions obviously designed to safeguard social order. Of course there must be a certain attraction between the parties and a vast amount of good nature, patience, compatibility, and charity in any such contract. But the word love should not be misused as regards such a union. For two lovers, in the real and strong meaning of the word, the satisfaction of sexual desire is unessential; it is a mere symbol. For the one side, as I have already said, it is a symbol of unqualified submission: for the other, a sign of condescension—a sign of the appropriation of[Pg 192] property. Marriage, as understood by the real old nobility, meant the breeding forth of the race (but are there any nobles nowadays? Quaeritur),—that is to say, the maintenance of a fixed definite type of ruler, for which object husband and wife were sacrificed. Naturally the first consideration here had nothing to do with love; on the contrary! It did not even presuppose that mutual sympathy which is the sine qua non of the bourgeois marriage. The prime consideration was the interest of the race, and in the second place came the interest of a particular class. But in the face of the coldness and rigour and calculating lucidity of such a noble concept of marriage as prevailed among every healthy aristocracy, like that of ancient Athens, and even of Europe during the eighteenth century, we warm-blooded animals, with our miserably oversensitive hearts, we "moderns," cannot restrain a slight shudder. That is why love as a passion, in the big meaning of this word, was invented for, and in, an aristocratic community—where convention and abstinence are most severe.
733.
Concerning the future of marriage. A super-tax on inherited property, a longer term of military service for bachelors of a certain minimum age within the community.
Privileges of all sorts for fathers who lavish boys upon the world, and perhaps plural votes as well.
A medical certificate as a condition of any marriage, endorsed by the parochial authorities, in which a series of questions addressed to the parties and the medical officers must be answered ("family histories").
As a counter-agent to prostitution, or as its ennoblement, I would recommend leasehold marriages (to last for a term of years or months), with adequate provision for the children.
Every marriage to be warranted and sanctioned by a certain number of good men and true, of the parish, as a parochial obligation.
734.
Another commandment of philanthropy.—There are cases where to have a child would be a crime—for example, for chronic invalids and extreme neurasthenics. These people should be converted to chastity, and for this purpose the music of Parsifal might at all events be tried. For Parsifal himself, that born fool, had ample reasons for not desiring to propagate. Unfortunately, however, one of the regular symptoms of exhausted stock is the inability to exercise any self-restraint in the presence of stimuli, and the tendency to respond to the smallest sexual attraction. It would be quite a mistake, for instance, to think of Leopardi as a chaste man. In such cases the priest and moralist play a hopeless game: it would be far better to send for the apothecary. Lastly, society here has a positive duty to fulfil, and of all the demands that are made on it, there are few more[Pg 194] urgent and necessary than this one. Society as the trustee of life, is responsible to life for every botched life that comes into existence, and as it has to atone for such lives, it ought consequently to make it impossible for them ever to see the light of day: it should in many cases actually prevent the act of procreation, and may, without any regard for rank, descent, or intellect, hold in readiness the most rigorous forms of compulsion and restriction, and, under certain circumstances, have recourse to castration. The Mosaic law, "Thou shalt do no murder," is a piece of ingenuous puerility compared with the earnestness of this forbidding of life to decadents, "Thou shalt not beget"!!! ... For life itself recognises no solidarity or equality of rights between the healthy and unhealthy parts of an organism. The latter must at all cost be eliminated, lest the whole fall to pieces. Compassion for decadents, equal rights for the physiologically botched—this would be the very pinnacle of immorality, it would be setting up Nature's most formidable opponent as morality itself!
735.
There are some delicate and morbid natures, the so-called idealists, who can never under any circumstances rise above a coarse, immature crime: yet it is the great justification of their anmic little existence, it is the small requital for their lives of cowardice and falsehood to have been for one instant at least—strong. But they generally collapse after such an act.
736.
In our civilised world we seldom hear of any but the bloodless, trembling criminal, overwhelmed by the curse and contempt of society, doubting even himself, and always belittling and belying his deeds—a misbegotten sort of criminal; that is why we are opposed to the idea that all great men have been criminals (only in the grand style, and neither petty nor pitiful), that crime must be inherent in greatness (this at any rate is the unanimous verdict of all those students of human nature who have sounded the deepest waters of great souls). To feel one's self adrift from all questions of ancestry, conscience, and duty—this is the danger with which every great man is confronted. Yet this is precisely what he desires: he desires the great goal, and consequently the means thereto.
737.
In times when man is led by reward and punishment, the class of man which the legislator has in view is still of a low and primitive type: he is treated as one treats a child. In our latter-day culture, general degeneracy removes all sense from reward and punishment. This determination of action by the prospect of reward and punishment presupposes young, strong, and vigorous races. In effete races impulses are so irrepressible that a mere idea has no force whatever. Inability to offer any resistance to a stimulus, and the feeling that one must react to it: this[Pg 196] excessive susceptibility of decadents makes all such systems of punishment and reform altogether senseless.
