bout it) an
undercurrent of impatient materialism in matters of sex. To become freed
from the inadequate morality of Puritanism is, for thousands of young
people, to adopt another morality which is, if more sound in many ways,
certainly as inadequate as the other.

So that Ellen Key comes into the lives of many in this country as a
conservative force, holding up a spiritual ideal, the ideal of monogamy,
and defending it with a breadth of view, a sanity, and a fervor that
make it something different from the cold institution which these
readers have come to despise. She makes every allowance for human
nature, every concession to the necessities of temperament, every
recognition of the human need for freedom, and yet makes the love of one
man and one woman seem the highest ideal, a thing worth striving and
waiting and suffering for.

She cherishes the spiritual magic of sex as the finest achievement of
the race, and sees it as the central and guiding principle in our social
and economic evolution. She seeks to construct a new morality which will
do what the present one only pretends, and with the shallowest and most
desperately pitiful of pretenses, to do. She would help our struggling
generation to form a new code of ethics, and one of subtle stringency,
in this most important and difficult of relations.

Thus her writings, of which "Love and Marriage" will here be taken as
representative, have a twofold aspect--the radical and the conservative.
But of the two, the conservative is by far the truer. It is as a
conservator, with too firm a grip on reality to be lured into the
desertion of any real values so far achieved by the race, that she may
be best considered.

And germane to her conservatism, which is the true conservatism of her
sex, is her intellectual habit, her literary method. She is not a
logician, it is true. She lacks logic, and with it order and clearness
and precision, because of the very fact of her firm hold on realities.
The realities are too complex to be brought into any completely logical
and orderly relation, too elusive to be stated with utter precision.
There is a whole universe in "Love and Marriage"; and it resembles the
universe in its wildness, its tumultuousness, its contradictory quality.
Her book, like the universe, is in a state of flux--it refuses to remain
one fixed and dead thing. It is a book which in spite of some attempt at
arrangement may be begun at any point and read in any ord