Wedlock

At Darmstadt, Germany, lives a slender ascetic gentleman in life's early autumn; bald over the temples, high and round of brow, thinly bearded and of a faintly Oriental cast of countenance. He is Count Hermann Keyserling, philosopher. He conducts a School of Wisdom, where mature thinkers go by petition or invitation to contemplate problems of great moment to mankind; where philosophical treatises are conceived, prescribed, submitted, criticized, developed, issued to the world. Count Keyserling's chief preoccupation is with the Western World, whose soul and mind he and others (notably Herr Doktor Oswald Spengler) profess to find in a decline. He has equipped himself to serve the Western World as one of its philosophers by visiting practically all the world. The publication of his Travel Diary of a Philosopher last year gained him his first wide hearing outside of Germany, being an account "not so much of countries and peoples as of civilizations and states of souls." This Diary moved the New York Times to compare the author with Dante. Dr. Glenn Frank thought: "Keyserling may turn out to be a John the Baptist." Even dour Dean Inge brightened and said: "A really profound and original book."

This wide and deep enthusiasm for the Diary inevitably brings to public attention Count Keyserling's new book,* which, unfortunately, is about one-tenth as readable. In it, the state of wedlock has been treated as a musical theme is treated to turn it into a symphony. Count Keyserling is the conductor. To the woodwinds of psychoanalysis, the percussives of aristocracy, the bass viols of biology, the brass of anthropology, the muted strings of art and mysticism, are assigned various parts. The players include--besides several German savants little known in the U. S. --Havelock Ellis, Rabindranath Tagore, Leo Frobenius, Jakob Wassermann, C. G. Jung, Alfred Adler, Beatrice Hinkle. Some of the titles on their scores are: "The Genesis of Marriage," "The Indian Ideal," "The Chinese Conception," "Bourgeois Marriage," "The Marriage of the Future," "Marriage as a Task," "Love as an Art," "Marriage as a Fetter," "Marriage as a Sacrament." All these improvisations follow a baton wielded with profoundly elaborate care by Count Keyserling in the overture chapter: "The Correct Statement of the Marriage Problem."

Not Immanuel Kant himself walking meticulously under the lindens at Koenigsberg could have been at greater pains than Count Keyserling to express in dry, recondite terms of utterly accurate cognition the following thoughts:

Marriage is not an ideal, no formula for "happiness." It constitutes a specific state with a significance and laws of its own. It is essentially tragic, in that it is incapable of solution. It is inevitably destructive to some degree of the individualities of man and wife, but Since it depends upon their retaining their individuality and brings into play their supra-personal (unselfish) capacities, it is creative of a higher order of individuals.

"It corresponds exactly with an elliptical field of force" (where two foci of energy re-act upon each other in dynamic equilibrium). The ellipse vanishes if the partners fail to keep their distance or to stimulate each other. Approaching, trying to become "one," they will either cancel each other into static death of the spirit, or be mutually repelled into unmarried isolation. The Significance. A seeming contradiction runs through this opening chapter, which is all-important to an understanding of the subsequent chapters. Count Keyserling says: "Marriage is neither an outcome of natural laws nor the play of destiny . . . being altogether a creation of the spirit. Nature only knows of racial preservation and cares nothing for progress and evolution." A few pages later he is touching upon the primitive beginnings of marriage among animals and barbarians; he speaks of woman's "instinct" for marrying wisely; he refers to the "evolution" of marriage--his terms here sounding like parts of a "naturalist's" vocabulary. The explanation is that Count Keyserling is a mystic. He regards humanity as supernatural. When he says, "Every spiritualized state grows out of what was originally a non-spiritual one," he is thinking of some sudden stepping-up of the state rather than the slow process called growth. He thinks that physical things were at some time and place endowed with spirituality much as particles of matter are now understood to undergo rapid transits up (and down) the scale of energy-content. The purpose of his book, therefore, is to reveal marriage in its true light as a state through which humanity can achieve a new, higher character, still more supernatural. He regards all efforts at reforming marriage, not only Feminism but even the current fashion in divorces, as helpful toward this revelation. He predicts, not the ultimate prevalence of successful marriages, but a decreasing number of bungled efforts, the inept learning to adopt other relations, leaving marriage to persons who are sufficiently sensitive, tactful, dignified, artistic, spiritual, creative to make it what it should be.

*THE BOOK OF MARRIAGE--Count Hermann Keyserlincr and 24 Collaborators--Harcourt, Brace ($5). *Economics.