A Swede who had his own part in the period of "storm and stress" in his native land, and has since in the course of cosmopolitan wanderings acquired an almost Stevensonian aptness in the use of English, declared of Ellen Key, the pioneer of the insurrection of women in Sweden, that she dealt in "winged words," and as a lecturer fairly flung well-aimed facts at her hearers. Something of the quality of style so described remains even in the translation of a part of Miss Key's notable work Lifslinjer, which is now, after a lapse of eight years since the appearance of the original, published here with the title Love and Marriage. Those eight years represent, perhaps, the interval between the stage of progress of the so-called women's movement in America and that in the nations of northern Europe. There, in the nature of things, the problems of readjustment arising out of the present "industrial" phase of civilization have earlier become acute, partly owing to the greater complexity of the social fabric which was suddenly exposed to the strain of these new conditions, and partly because the northern European populations had already reached—and passed—that "saturation point" which is with us even now only a matter of the very near future.

These interesting scientific questions aside, Miss Key, who at the age of sixty-two years is still actively engaged in her life's work, is estimated by Mr. Havelock Ellis, in his preface to the present volume, as "a personality which is one of the chief moral forces of our time." Her writings, he proceeds, "are the candid expression of her intimate self." They have about them, too, in spite of the brave candor and forthright recognition of facts which is not their least characteristic, a certain quality of the poet and the seer which it is not necessary to ascribe entirely to Miss Key's Scottish ancestry, though the progenitor of her family did happen to be a Highlander—one Col. McKey who fought under the renowned Gustavus Adolphus. There are seers and poets also in Scandinavia.

Perhaps the clearest way to put it is to say that this Swedish woman uses, in the frankest and broadest treatment of the complex questions of sex as related to legal forms of marriage and divorce and customary standards of so-called morals, true and false, the utmost idealism of aim and point of view. The resulting conclusions—where any are drawn—are quite as apt to rebuke the modern feminist of the extreme type, as to shock Mrs. Grundy. On the one hand, for instance, Miss Key is clear that the present marriage form is outgrown and inadequate as the sole contrivance, for mating men and women; on the other, she is equally clear that the notion of emancipating woman at large from the care of her children and collecting the nation's offspring in state nurseries under the supervision of "professional mothers," is fatal and foolish.

Again, she declares with entire frankness that strict monogamy has remained, and will remain for a long time to come, an unrealized ideal. She even admits that there is as yet no proof that it is the best thing for the race, and allows grounds, both in biology and economics, for the practical difference in the standards of morality for men and women. It is at the point of the economic basis that she would attack the problem of bringing the practical standards closer together. Evolution is already at work, she thinks, in the same direction: And it is just in that which conventional moralists most fear—in the growing freedom of love to make its own choice and decide its own questions of morals—that she sees the evidence—and the line—of that evolution.

What she insists upon—and what all the new moralists insist upon—is that the present classification of things as moral and immoral needs radical revision. What she strives to do is to bring home the realization that there are things condoned, legalized, and even blessed by the church, which are infinitely more dangerous to the race, to society, to the nation, to the family and to the individual, than certain unions without wedlock and births without benefit of clergy.

Thus, she discusses the right of woman to motherhood—even asserts the right of unmarried woman to motherhood in certain circumstances, which are not as exceptional as they ought to be—in the same spirit that she discusses the other question of the right to exemption from motherhood which the earlier type of the emancipated woman was so eager to claim, and which the merely frivolous type of woman of fashion has shown herself more and more disposed to assume without argument or defense. She finds the exemption justified, of course, in certain exceptional cases, but she is not less convinced that motherhood is not merely the destiny, but the highest privilege, of womanhood, and that with all the approximation of the mental attitude of the two sexes that comes of woman's new and growing activities, woman should and must remain a specialist. Nay, even her social and civic activities Miss Key pictures as tending in direction of the exercise of a "collective motherliness." The women who choose, or have thrust upon them, "careers" rather than child-bearing, should find employment, she says, which makes use of the mother in them, and does not allow that special endowment to go quite to waste.

Thus you have a wise woman, mellow and singularly sane for the prophet of a new era, telling the truth as she sees it, and telling it such plain words, taking account of things so intimate and delicate, that quotation in an article like this can be indulged in only sparingly. Even the paraphrase, indeed, must often sacrifice definition and force to discretion. However, a few passages may be quoted. Here is one:

The feminine fiction of the present day reminds one of a relief on a sacrificial altar in the Roman forum, where the ox, the sheep and the pig proceed in file to meet the knife. Hecatombs of these animals—in the likeness of husbands or lovers—are now sacrificed to Eros by the new woman. It may not be very long before the vow of fidelity is exchanged for an oath of silence, and the marriage contract contains a provision that, in case of a rupture, love-letters are not to be used as literature.

Again, Miss Key remarks upon the fallacy of the notion—fostered, she declares, by the Christian Church—that "While God walked in Paradise and founded marriage, the Devil went about in the wilderness and instituted love." Her doctrine is that the tendency—which all who care for the race must aid—is to make these twain, marriage and love, not two, but one. The true morality will come when that "dualism is vanquished by monism." And with it, perhaps, as evolution educates "love's selection" toward the point where each chooses infallibly his own one perfect mate, we shall attain the ideal monogamy.

Meantime, "the new man lives in the dream of the new woman, and she in a dream of the new man. But when they actually find one another, it frequently results that two highly developed brains analyze love, or that two worn-out nervous systems fight out a disintegrating battle over love. The whole thing usually ends in each of them seeking peace with some surviving incarnation of the old Adam and the eternal Eve." The same healthy sense of life and fact lurks in Miss Key's dictum that the "wise virgins' deadly sin against love is that they disdained to learn of the foolish ones the secret of fascination; that they would know none of the thousand things that bind a man's senses or lay hold of his soul; that they regard the power to please as equivalent to the betray." She writes also, not without pungency:

So long as "pure" women take pleasure in the cruel sport of the cat; so long as with the facile changes of the serpentine dancer, they evade the responsibilities of their flirtations: so long as they delight in provoking jealousy as a homage to themselves; so long will they be helping to brew the hell-broth around which men will celebrate the witches' Sabbath in the company of the bat-winged bevies of the night.

It need hardly be said, even for the benefit of those who do not know her work, that Miss Key champions woman's suffrage.