“If you (Fanny Lewald) claim the complete equality of woman with man in social and political life, then George Sand must also be right in her struggles for emancipation, which aim at nothing more than what man has long possessed without any dispute. Indeed, there is no reasonable ground for admitting the head and not the heart of woman to this equality, to give and to take as freely as man. On the contrary, if woman has by nature the right, and, consequently, also the duty – for we should not bury the talent bestowed upon us – of exerting her brain tissue to the utmost in the race with the intellectual titans of the opposite sex, then she must also have precisely the same right to preserve her equilibrium by quickening the circulation of her heart’s blood in whatever way seems good to her. For all of us have read, without the slightest moral indignation, about Goethe – to take the greatest as our first example – and how he wasted the warmth of his heart and the enthusiasm of his great soul, time and again, on different women. Reasonable people regard this as perfectly natural on account of the very greatness of his soul and the difficulty of satisfying it. Only the narrow-minded moralist stops to condemn his conduct. Why, then, deride the “great souls” among women! [ . . . ] Let us suppose that the whole female sex consisted of great souls like George Sand, that every woman were a Lucretia Floriani, whose children were all children of love, raised with true motherly affection and devotion, as well as intelligence and good sense. What would become of the world? There can be no doubt that it could continue to exist and progress, just as it does now; it might even feel exceptionally comfortable.”
But why should that privilege exist only for the “great souls” and not for those who are not “great souls”? If Goethe and George Sand (to choose these two among the many who act and have acted like them) were able to live according to the inclinations of their own hearts – and if whole libraries have been published about Goethe’s love affairs and if these, in turn, have been devoured by his male and female admirers in rapt ecstasy – then why condemn others for doing that which is the subject of ecstatic admiration when done by Goethe or George Sand?
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