exists to us. If a Goethe and a George Sand--to take
these two from the many who have acted and are acting like them--live
according to the inclinations of their hearts--and about Goethe's love
affairs whole libraries are published that are devoured by his male and
female admirers in wrapt ecstasy--why condemn in others that, which done
by a Goethe or a George Sand, becomes the subject of ecstatic
admiration?

Indeed, such freedom in the choice of love is an impossibility in
bourgeois society. This fact was the objective point in our preceding
array of evidence. But place the whole community under social conditions
similar to those enjoyed by the material and intellectual elect, and
forthwith the opportunity is there of equal rights and freedom for all.
In "Jacques," George Sand depicts a husband who judges the adulterous
relations of his wife with another man in these words: "No human being
can command love; and none is guilty if he feels, or goes without it.
What degrades the woman is the lie: what constitutes her adultery is not
the hour that she grants to her lover, but the night that she thereupon
spends with her husband." Thanks to this view of the matter, Jacques
feels obliged to yield the place to his rival, Borel, and he proceeds to
philosophize: "Borel, in my place, would have quietly beaten his wife,
and perhaps would not have blushed to receive her afterwards into his
bed, debased by his blows and his kisses. There are men who cut the
throat of an unfaithful wife without ceremony, after the fashion of the
Orientals, because they consider her as legal property. Others fight
with their rival, kill him or drive him away, and again seek the kisses
of the woman they pretend to love, and who shrinks from them with
horror, or resigns herself in despair. These, in cases of conjugal love,
are the most common ways of acting, and I say that the love of the hogs
is less vile and less gross than that of these men." Commenting on these
passages, Brandes observes: "These truths, which are considered
elemental with our cultured classes, were 'sophisms that cried to
heaven' only fifty years ago." But the "property and cultured world"
dare not to this day openly avow the principles of George Sand,
although, in point of fact, it lives up to them in the main. As in
morality and religion, the bourgeois is a hypocrite in marriage also.

What Goethe and George Sand did, has been done and continues to be done
by thousands of other