dies consumed by his own fire, and, what is worse, before dying, beholds love dead at his feet. We cannot rebel against the laws of nature, nor can we subjugate them; but it is conceded to us to direct them to our advantage. And thus it is in our case. Between ecstasy and ecstasy we can sow joy and suppress tediousness; between voluptuousness and voluptuousness we can suppress weariness and pick the flowers of sentiment, and from too ardent and sensual contemplations we can repair to the cool temple of thought to meditate and remember together. This is perfect love, this is ideal love, which keeps pure, unaltered, brilliant as a diamond in the tormented sand of a river. A few reach it; many, however, can approach it, and for human happiness and human greatness it is enough to see it even from afar, like the promised land, which, as the poet says, "is always beyond the mountain."
The man who brutally opposes the holy and noble aspirations of woman for a higher participation in mental work signs his own sentence; and when he cynically sends her back to the bed or to nursing cares, he resigns himself to knowing only the coarsest and most brutish part of the joys of love. You may be the strongest male and the wisest libertine; but Venus herself, descended from the heaven of the ideal, would tire you, and for you, too, would arrive the hour of dislike; then you would curse the vanity of love and execrate life, reciting the litany of lamentations and disappointments which, from Adam down, has been repeated by all those who know not how to love and are bestially ignorant of the laws of the economy of strength. We must elevate woman more and more in order not only to fulfil an act of justice but also to enlarge the field of our joys and increase the value of our voluptuousness. A great step has been made in this direction, by transforming the female of the polygamous gyneceum into the mother of a family; but this new "freedman" of modern civilization is merely tolerated, not considered equal to us, like an orphan taken from the street and living with the members of a family but not forming an integral part of it. If the concubine has become a mother, a great step still remains to be made in order that she may become a woman, or, to put it in a better way, become a female-man, a most noble and delicate creature, who shall think and feel as we do and think and feel in a feminine way, thus completing in us the aspect of things, of which we see only a part, and bringing to us, in the meditations and struggles of life, that precious element which only the daughter of Eve can give us. If from woman you want nothing but the joys of love, then sow sentiments and ideas in her. She is like the bee that changes sugar and nectar and the fluid of every flower into honey: make her wise, and wisdom will be transformed into caresses; make her strong, and she will use her strength to enrich you; make her great, and she will place her greatness at your feet for a kiss. Fear not; she will never place her foot upon the neck of man, because she loves him too much, and because, to become a tyrant, she would be compelled to amputate the better part of herself, abdicating her omnipotence.
Where man and woman are bound together by the three natures of sense, sentiment and thought, love is easily preserved by its own nature and without any need of artifice. Some fortunate individuals ask with astonishment why their love should ever cease; and love lives in them, warm, tenacious, invincible, and only with death is extinguished, instantaneously, like the porcelain bowl, very old but always new, which falls from the hands of the inexperienced servant and perishes as it was created, beautiful and brilliant.
It is not so when voluptuousness is all, or nearly all, of love; then the easiest way to preserve it is to keep always some drops of desire in the cup of love, so that, between embrace and embrace, voluptuousness is never quite extinguished, giving a deeply sexual character to the common relations of habits, conversations and family intercourses. This is an indirect but sure advantage, ever produced by chastity between two creatures that love each other without having the fortune to participate in any treasures beyond those of the senses. It is opportune to remember that every virtue is the fruitful mother of other virtues.
The preservation of love is one of the most sacred rights or duties incumbent upon woman, although we cannot refuse with impunity to take an active part in this mission. We, however, are too light-minded, too polygamous, too exacting in our sudden desires to find prudence and economy of love easy virtues for us. To see all, to touch all, to want all and at once: such is the childish appearance of many virile loves. Woman loves more than we, but she foresees, presurmises, fears. In love, too, she is a good provider, and, while she picks the flower for the joy of today, knows how to preserve the fruit for the dreary winter. Woe to her, if she joins in the thoughtlessness of her prodigal companion! They will make together a splendid bonfire of their affections, of their voluptuousness, renewing, alas! too soon, the thousandth edition of the story of the grasshopper and the ant.
If the women who will read my book should learn nothing but this one thing, I would believe that they have had a just compensation for the tediousness which they may have experienced; and I shall be happy for not having written in vain to promote the welfare of the dearer part of the human family. With the right given to me by a long and troublesome experience, by a deep, untired study of the human heart, I pray and entreat and conjure them to close with their white little hands and their rosy lips the lips of the man who too ardently begs their love. Let them say "no" and "no" again, and bury the "yes" of the friend under a shower of flowers, reserving the desire for other supplications and other battles. Every sacrifice will be compensated a hundredfold, and for a caress denied today, they will receive ten tomorrow. Woman is an old teacher of sacrifice, and let her use this practical wisdom in preserving love, which is the air she breathes, the blood which gives life to her, love which is her dearest treasure. Never should she say "yes" before having said "no" at least once; if she truly loves the prodigal friend, she should save for the days of famine the crumbs which now fall from his hands and which today he despises; let her be the stewardess of love as she already is that of the household; let man fecundate and woman preserve; let him conquer and let her keep the booty.
If genital chastity is the virtue which, better than any other, preserves vulgar loves, a certain chastity of sentiment and thought, a certain reserve of manner and forms are also indispensable if sublime loves are to last. The man must never see his wife nude, nor should the woman ever behold her companion nude before her; veils and mists, leaves and flowers must shade the man and woman in sense, sentiment and intellect. The infinite is the only thing that man never tires of loving, contemplating, studying, just because it is neither weighed nor measured. And so it is in love: the beautiful, the true, the good of the creature whom we love must be infinite, because they must not be seen, weighed or measured by us. A sun that passes from the crepuscule of the morning to the evening twilight and never entirely reveals itself: such is eternal and immutable love, that fears no frost of winter or hurricanes of summer; that dies standing like the ancient heroes.
Study the fortunate men who are not only capable of arousing, but also of preserving great passions, and you will behold in them all those exalted virtues which may be grouped under the name of crepuscular politics. A beauty that has more grace than splendor, more seduction than heat; a flexibility that retains strength; an authority that can be made to smile, and a nature that is smiling rather than laughing; a deep and tender kindness, and a genius that has more spirit than grandeur: such are the great preservative powers of love. Grace more than beauty preserves love, because it has more crepuscular hues; sympathetic natures more than beautiful ones preserve love, kind natures more than grand ones, wit more than genius. There are men and women who at first sight do not make any great impression, but on every hair of their head they seem to have a hook and in every pore of the skin a leech, so that no sooner have you come into intimate contact with them than you find yourself seized by a thousand grapnels and absorbed by a thousand cupping-glasses, as though a gigantic polyp had seized you in the absorbing coils of its manifold tentacles.
Love is dead without possibility of resurrection when, unlike all living things, there is no galvanism to awaken the slumbering nerves, no wave of blood to rouse the heart. But love also has swoons and syncopes and, like the rotifer, may die provisorily and desiccate, awaiting a beneficial rain to restore it to life. Whoever denies this virtue in love, then believes that love is baser than the rotifer and has never known the most elementary physiology of life and affection. There is for love, as for any other organism, a real death and an apparent one; the former is inexorable, the latter curable, like any other malady, by having recourse to skill and knowledge.
How often has a love apparently dead resuscitated as live as ever, probably more alive than before; and this, heralded as a miracle, is one of the usual mysteries of the heart, for life was not extinguished, but only latent, as no dead, really and truly dead, with the exception of Lazarus, has ever been seen to rise again. A nerve was still sensitive, a desire could still be resuscitated, and the apparently dead comes to life again. Physicians remark that apparent death is much more frequent in cases of hysteria, catalepsy and in all forms of neurosis; it is then natural that many loves, alive but believed to be dead, have been interred through a most cruel mistake, since an organism more nervous, more cataleptic and more hysterical than love is difficult to find in the entire world of the living. In our case, however, the burial is less dangerous, because love itself opens every coffin, every grave, overturns every clod and appears to you saying: "Do not weep; here I am!"
Very rarely does love die a violent death, and cases called by that name are wounds, ruptures, syncopes and nothing more. Real death occurs through senility and after long illness. Duty frequently commands not to love him or her who suddenly has seemed base and infamous to us; but love, sentenced to death, weeps, despairs, but does not want to die. Sent back to prison, without light, without food, it defies hunger, darkness, cold, but does not die. The public, perhaps, believes that it has disappeared from the face of the earth, as has happened with illustrious prisoners plunged into the stillness of a castle; but love lives in those depths and groans, convulsed by a prolonged agony, until at last, with him who feels it, it dies a merciful death.
If the appearance of a new creature on the path of life seems to kill love violently, it is because it was not true love; and if it really were such, the battle will be relentless and long, and the Prince of Affections will die, as in other cases, a lingering death. When we shall once and forever have ceased to call love that which is the desire of the flesh and the pride of possession, that sentiment will appear to us as a much more beautiful thing, greater and more honorable than is ordinarily supposed; many miracles will at last be explained as very simple physical phenomena, and many obscure mysteries will be exposed to light.
To cause love to gush forth from the rock of indifference is a fascinating prodigy; to rouse it from its slumber is a desirable power; to sow the path of our life with love and desires may be the splendid pride of every living creature; but to cherish the conquered love, to preserve it pure and bright, to bring it impunely through the cyclones of life, the fogs of November and the frost of December, to guide it, healthy and robust, from the spring of youth to the border of the grave that it may die, like the Mexican victim, amid choruses of admiration and adorned with flowers of eternal freshness, is one of the highest ambitions to which we can aspire. It is as beautiful a thing as to create a work of art; it is as useful an achievement as to become rich; it is as great a feat as to reach glory. It is said by many that the most natural way for love to die is to transform itself into friendship; but several times already I have made clear to the reader what I think of sexual friendships. Perhaps, in some very rare cases, neither of the two lovers remembers that the beloved one belongs to the other sex: but how can the loves of the entire past be forgotten? How can we suddenly obliterate the ardent remembrances of the many years of love? If for a dead love the sweet custom of friendly visit can be substituted, if a man and a woman can forget that they are man and woman, what name will this new and singular affection deserve? Perhaps that of automatic habit; and I will send this psychical phenomenon back to the laboratory of the physiologist, that he may study it together with the unconscious and reflected motions.
Whenever I see a flower that opens and shows its cheerful petals on the border of an abyss, the same thought ever recurs to my mind: there is love, which always seems to live between two infinities, height and depth. While its aspirations carry it aloft, while it seems to ask of heaven space and light, it projects its roots into the most intricate mazes of the rocks, into the most somber mysteries of the abyss. Star that glitters in the infinity of the ideal, root that dissolves the stones in the infinity of depth, it reaches all altitudes and all profundities, is the most human of passions and always placed among the divine passions; it is inmost in us and the most ethereal. Thought on the summit of a mountain, strength in the valley below, it guides the poet when he ascends to paradise, accompanies man when he plunges into the hot sea of sensuality; virgin and father in heaven, lover and spouse on earth. If to live means to exist in the most beautiful form of life, then love is richness, luxury, splendor of life; love is whatever is divine in human beings.
No one will ever be able to say where love penetrates when it lifts the bottom of human nature, where pearls and corals are intermixed with mud. It is a diver that brings to light strange and unknown things and reveals to the astonished eye of the observer new things never before conceived; it is the most daring and the most fortunate of excavators. How many simple natures of young girls, how many vulgar talents of men are perturbed, agitated and renovated by the contact of the new god, who seems to evoke from the abysses all silent passions, all dormant ideas, all the phantoms of heart and thought! The deep simmering of psychical elements at the contact with love almost always announces the birth of a second moral nature and, revivifying life, marks a new era in it. Of our birth we are always ignorant, and of our death almost always unconscious; between the "to be" and the "not to be" only one third and great thing is possible—"to love." While the common people judge from the hair on the face and from the deepened voice that a boy has become a man, a tremendous profound earthquake warns him that he must love, that he already loves; and while mothers behold with affectionate trepidation the rounding of their daughters' form to womanhood, another profound earthquake warns the girl that she must love, that she already loves.
In the loving season many animals change color and shape, adorn themselves with new feathers, or arm themselves with new weapons; with the nuptial robe they assume different habits and singular abilities; mutes, they become clever singers; obtuse, they are transformed into skilled architects; granivorous, they become carnivorous; if the earth is their habitat, they become winged messengers of the skies; if caterpillars, they are metamorphosed into butterflies. So it is with man, although such transmutation hardly affects his epidermis, but sinks into the veins and the meanders of his physical nature. The phase of puberty deserves to be dealt with separately; it will suffice here to remark that every force redoubles, every vigor refines, and while, with our growing to manhood, forces and energies prepare and grow, love calls forces and energies into action. Puberty declares us in a state of war; love calls us to the battle. Defenseless if we have not reached puberty, we are armed if we have reached it; armed and combative if we have reached it and are in love.
Not all human forces are good, not all the resources of mind are beneficial to the good, and, therefore, love calls into action bad elements as well, which had not been seen before. For the first time, from the deep abysses of the moral man, specters of crime and vice, phantoms of revelry and prison appear. In defective organisms, predestined for the prison or the madhouse, together with first love often the first crime or the first mania reveals itself. To the great summoner of profundity and sublimity every human element answers, "Present"; and the sudden anger in natures erstwhile mild, the first tears on faces till then smiling, the first poetic outburst in natures hitherto utterly prosaic, the first hysterical paroxysms in a body that seemed to have no nerves, the first ambitions in the most timid youth, the first meditations at the mirror, the first impulses, the first war declared against an invisible enemy, the first follies, the first flashes of genius, the first lies and the first heroisms, are all new specters called from the abysses by the magic wand of the sorcerer among sorcerers, by the greatest conjurer of spirits that the blessed age of wizards and exorcisms might have boasted of.
The man who loves is twice a man, because for the first time he feels not only that he is alive, but also that he has the power of creating living beings, of procreating. Nor is woman the sole generator, because in man's blood is half of a future creature, and the seed of a second existence within us doubles us and makes us almost as proud as the ancient prophets, to whom God entrusted, as to a tabernacle, the supreme truth, the prophecy of future events. A man who loves has within him a part of that which will live in the future, the fruitful germs of a new generation.
While all the psychical forces are still confused and indistinct at first contact with the new sentiment, Love will march them in procession and muster them under his orders. Every beauty must transmute itself into flowers for a garland, every passion must lend its fire, every energy must don the livery of a servant or a slave. Many to serve, one to command; many strong, but only one supremely strong; many subjects, but only one tyrant. No objection, no discussion; where love is present, who would give suggestions or counsel? O virgin and rising forces of youth, bow your head before your god; splendid beauties of human nature, lay your tributes upon the new altars. Are you not satisfied with the glory of doing homage to love? Rarely does avarice find place in the first and deep meditations of a heart in love, but the question is continually repeated: "Have I something else, something better, to offer? Have I really given my whole self to my king?"
A most singular and heartrending voluptuousness of love is to feel that everything leaves us and that we no longer belong to ourselves. It seems as though we were witnessing a satanic phantasmagoria in which we behold limbs, organs, senses, affections, thoughts fleeing from us, running madly toward a new center, where a new organism is being moulded with our remains. Even time appears to be ours no longer, since it is no longer measured by the watch, but by the impatience of desire or the flashes of voluptuousness; thought, too, no longer belongs to us, as it is tyrannically ruled by one image alone. To find ourselves again, to remember that we have still intimate relations with the man of yesterday, we must go and seek another creature who has robbed us of everything. Hence a vague unrest which invades the body, the senses and the thoughts of every lover; hence the undertaking, most difficult even for the ablest dissembler, to conceal the new god who invades and penetrates every part of us. Every hair, every pore, every nerve, every part of the epidermis of the man who loves sings and says to the universe of the living: "I love, and who loves me?" Day and night, in the calm and in the storm, all the nature of a lover sings its note until another song responds in the same tone. Not a moment of peace, not an instant of truce, until the new energy has found a sister energy. Love is like the sea: here it is as calm as the surface of an Alpine lake, still and smooth as a sheet of lead; but there, among the rocks or upon the coast, it is eternally in motion, and, roaring or sighing, howling or caressing, agitates with incessant motion the land it kisses. Man and woman who meet and love are the sea and the land, which are perpetually at war—a war in turn sweet and bitter, tender and cruel, voluptuous and merciless.
Look at that young girl seated at the window, bending over a piece of white linen which she is sewing. How attentive she is to her work! She seems, between one stitch and another, to be meditating on the solution of the quadrature of the circle, so absorbed is she in her arduous task. But if I only could write the volume of thoughts that pass through her brain between two stitches! She is fishing in the deep abysses of love.
And at a short distance thence, she unaware of it, a young man, too, is at the window, his hair disheveled, his hands firmly thrust into his pockets, his breast swelling as by a threat. He has been staring at the sky for the last hour. Is he meditating, perhaps, upon the tremendous problem of the proletariate or on that of human liberty? Is he, perhaps, dreaming of glory, of wealth? No; he, too, is fishing in the deep abysses of love.
Woman more than man dives deeper and soars higher in the regions of love; society generally withholds her from the field of action, and an infinite time is left to her for penetrating into the abysses of the heart. How often an innocent young girl, who, perhaps, hardly knows how to write, for many long hours feels in her imagination the sweetness of a kiss which lasted but a second; how often she is tortured during a whole night by the bitterness of a cold salute or of a rude word! Here is a deepness of sense which, nevertheless, is nothing in comparison with the queer and transubstantial process of sentimental analysis with which woman pulverizes, analyzes, distills a look, a word, a gesture. Hide, O chemists, your ignorance before the profundity of the analytical art of an enamored woman; to her the spectroscope is a coarse instrument of prehistoric science; homœopathic draughts are poisons; atoms are worlds; she has measured them many centuries before Thomson. A billionth part of a milligram of rancor diluted in an ocean of voluptuousness is detected by her process of analysis; an atom of indifference in the lava of desire is instantaneously traced by the thermo-electric apparatus which she uses in her laboratory. She is a priestess of the ideal, of the infinite, of the incommensurable, and will continue to be religious many centuries after man will have buried the last god. Even in love, the infinite is insufficient for her.
Love always elevates the lover above the average man; and as his increased strength makes him capable of greater undertakings, the horizon widens before him more and more because he sees men and things from a greater height. Each one of us has a different capacity of soaring to the regions of the ideal; but rabble and genius, prose and poetry, always raise themselves, by the action of love, to a world which is nobler, more beautiful, more serene than that in which we drag out our daily uneventful existence. How many vulgar, despicable natures are redeemed by the action of love; how many inert intellects are guided through the paths to glory; how many of the vulgar herd reach the height of the Olympus of thoughts with the aid of a loving hand! And still the ignoble proverb is daily repeated, that science and glory must guard against love as against a bitter enemy, and the examples are pedantically quoted of great men who loved but art and to chastity alone owed their greatness. Strange disorder of ideas, in which hygiene is confused with morality, chastity with the incapacity of loving; but a man healthy in sense and sentiment will always be elevated by love, if he does not make an unworthy creature the object of his affection, if he does not confound love with lust. For one genius killed by love, you have a hundred who owe to love their greatest inspirations, who drew from it the strength to live, who blessed it as superior to glory, who in it alone found the fresh wave that tempered the burning ardor of enthusiasm and passion. It is an old habit of the human beast to trample under its feet the rind of the fruit from which it has just sucked the last drop of juice!
If love does not work in all creatures the same miracles which we expect, if it is not always a virtue that elevates and refines, it is because we have lowered woman to the level of our lasciviousness, because even we, civilized men, feel for her more desire than esteem, more lust than love. And yet woman thirsts more than man for the ideal, and, like all oppressed creatures, looks upward with more faith. Her exquisitely sensitive nature, open to the raptures of enthusiasm, easily inflamed by the warmth of poetry, attracts her irresistibly to higher and higher altitudes, and she would have helped us also to soar if we had not made of her a sweet concubine or a good housewife. Woman feels the ideal, aspires to every sublimity, but she has neither courage nor strength to ascend; and if she is not supported by the robust arm of her lover, she will become easily prostrated and sit down to rest on the path that leads upward. To her nature has assigned the task of indicating the high aim, to us the duty of accompanying and sustaining her. In a magnificent painting by Schoeffer, Dante is standing below, Beatrice above. Dante gazes at her, contemplates her and is inspired by her; and Beatrice, her eyes turned to heaven, seems to say to him: "Upward, upward! There it is where we shall go together!" Nothing is more contagious than enthusiasm; nothing more fascinating, more irresistible than the enthusiasm of woman. Without arguments that induce one to believe, without the strength of hoping, sustained only by love, she is always full of faith in great and beautiful things, and at every step of life, now handsome by her sublime imprudence, now affecting by her youthful enthusiasm, seems to say to us: "Onward, onward!" And with her tender little hands she draws us upward, guides us and lends us her ever fresh strength, even when she would appear fatigued.
When Christ made faith the corner-stone of his religion, when he said that with faith we could move the mountains, he was inspired, perhaps, by that ardent faith which woman is possessed of and which makes her strong in her weakness. Woe to us, if before preparing for an undertaking we should be obliged to weigh with mathematical precision all favorable and unfavorable probabilities; woe to us, if we were to launch only into those enterprises of which we are sure! More than three-fourths of the great achievements would never have been performed. There is always an element which evades calculation, and it is in the capricious hands of destiny; it is the lacuna which must be filled by faith, by that faith which lifts the mountains, and which woman so deeply feels and so tenderly infuses into our hearts. You may point at the most celebrated eunuchs of the heart, who, without the aid of woman, reached the prodigious heights of fame; but I most solemnly affirm that, had they been guided by a loving hand, they would have soared still higher. Love is a second sight, and woman sees things from a point of view which nearly always escapes the synthetic survey of man; she discovers many hidden elements of things which we, through excessive haste or excessive pride, do not see; and helping us with the light of love, she assists us in penetrating more deeply into the substance of every problem and, above all, into the knowledge of human nature. In small and great things, after having consulted science and art, experience and imagination, after having read the book of history and the book of the human heart, you should never fail to consult the woman who loves you; whether about a book, or a law, or a work of art, or commerce, or industry, or poetry, woman will always have something new to tell you, she will always have her revelations, and through the action of love you will feel elevated.
Some men of talent lack the coefficient of ambition to ascend, and you will often see them die before producing the fruit of their gigantic forces; only woman and love can give them that energy which they cannot obtain from the stimulus of self-love. Eve knows how to infuse faith into the skeptic, ambition into the disheartened, strength to all; unaspiring for herself, she is intensely ambitious, haughty, proud, if necessary, for the man she loves; and thrones and political power, civil and martial crowns, glories of art and science, were won through the ambition lent or inspired by a beloved woman. In heroic and chivalrous ages this was publicly proclaimed and boasted of; today, when women are sold in houses of prostitution or at the counter of matrimony, it has become fashionable to blush at owing one's glory to a woman, and the chivalrous element, alas! sank and perished together with many other evil things which we would not like to see come back again. Chivalrous love vanished and its place was taken by the cicisbeism of our great-grandfathers, while today in the limbo of a new rising generation we feel that we begin to discern the germs of a more beautiful epoch for the amorous life of man.
The more ballast love throws away which keeps it near to the ground, the higher we soar in the regions of the ideal. This ballast consists all of lust and self-pride, and it is woman's duty to help us throw it out of our car. She should not assist with her lasciviousness and her vanity in further debasing man's loves, already so brutish and vulgar. In the rapture we feel when inhaling the pure air of the loftiest mountains, we may sometimes forget that night is drawing near and home is far away; and thus in love we may feel so carried away by the fascination of the ideal as to desire a love without contact, the spirit without the matter. These are sublime derangements of the brain, only too rare, but reaching the extreme limits of human possibilities; they lead to delirium, to self-sacrifice; they drag us to folly or to martyrdom. If a desire continues durable and pure upon the highest summits of human love and is not perturbed by the contact of matter, men from beneath will contemplate that statue as a fantastic monument erected by the morning clouds of the mountain. Not knowing whether it is an effect of the mist or the imagery of a dream, they contemplate and admire.
The pure and intimate communion of thought and sentiment, with nothing of the senses but two clasping hands and two pairs of eyes which blend together, is certainly a voluptuousness among the greatest of the sexual world; and without any need of platonic love, it may so happen that two creatures in that moment will forget that one of them is a man and the other a woman. Then feminine nature shines with all the halo of its celestial light; from that source of poetry, genius may draw its greatest energies. Then coarse natures undergo the influence of refinement in that pure air, social scrofula disappears and all human soil is washed off. Women, you should take advantage of those fleeting instants to regenerate the human family and urge it on to higher destinies! The influence of the ecstasy of sentiment on man is of shorter duration than on woman, and your angel will soon fall at your feet, imploring of you the kiss of the terrestrial creature. You are omnipotent then, for you have the lion at your feet; and if man is strong, you are stronger still, since his strength is all for you. Guide it toward the good and the better; direct it to the beautiful. In that lion which roars with a subdued voice at your feet there is still much of the beast; in that conquered Hercules there is still much of the human brute. Silence the beast by running your slender fingers through his disheveled mane, summon forth from the depths holy energies, noble inspirations and a thirst for the ideal. We wish to be great for your sake; we wish to be strong in order to give you all our strength; we desire the conquest, but only to place it at your feet. To every kiss of yours may the human family owe a great attainment; to every endearment of yours, a useful deed! May your love be the highest and dearest prize to every ambition! True, you are weak; but when you are desired you are very strong. Who dares assert that he is stronger than the "no" of a woman? What phalanx attempts to advance when the finger of woman threatens and commands: "Stand back!"?
Woman sins at least four times less than man; she fears crime, she is horrified at the very thought of crime. Let us, then, disarm the man who too often wounds or strikes; let the coward find no woman who loves him, let him have no cup but that of the coarsest voluptuousness; let the ignorant, the debased, the social parasites, all the fiends of the moral world, find no bosom of woman on which to rest their heads! As the Church once would banish excommunicated persons, so that they could find no bread, no shelter, it should so be with moral monsters: let them be banished from the region of love! And the elect women, whom nature favored with the fateful gift of beauty, should preserve their treasures for the strong and the immortal; their smiles should be the crown of triumphing genius and magnanimous heart, for genius and beauty are the most sublime interlacement of human forces, one of the most splendid pictures of the nature of living beings.
Love, after having spread the minute fibrils of its tiny roots into all the deep fissures of the human world and absorbed every drop of liquor, every throb of energy, sends up to the branches of the robust tree every sap and every energy; and there, high in the air, leaves, flowers, and fruits drink from the rays of the sun the sweetest and most inebriating voluptuousness. There, in those regions full of light and heat, and which no worm of the soil, no atom of dust, no miasmatic exhalation ever attain, profundity becomes sublimity, and man and woman, blended in the ecstasy of an ardent contemplation of the beautiful and the good, ask of themselves: "And what is God?"
Like the butterfly, which, when just emerged from the involucre of the chrysalis, still bears on its folded wings some strips of the wrapping in which it was long enveloped, so Love, the youngest of human passions, carries remnants of the robe of childhood which he has just discarded. In his caprices and in his follies, in his games full of grace and strength, in his blind idolatries and in his childish sorrows, you would say that you behold before you a child genius. Now he surprises you with his violence, then he awakens your sympathy for his weakness; now all powerful, then most timid; now a hero, then a coward; today he defies heaven with closed fists; tomorrow he will with tears implore a caress. Love is childish because he is a child; childish because he is a poet; childish because, unleashing all the impulses of the moral world, and agitating in a convulsive kaleidoscope all the images of thought, he is more often lyric than epic, and writes more dithyrambs than stories, more poems than philosophical treatises.
Furthermore, Love is puerile because he is also so religious as to be superstitious and subject to all the nonsensical ideas that may pass through the brain of a timid and ignorant woman. Love, even in northern countries, delights in the pomp of the idolatry which is most characteristic of the south, protests against the severe worship of certain religious sects and, being a great admirer of churchly gorgeousness, demands incense, images, tinsel, altars, insignia, canopies and tabernacles.
No religion ever had more senseless idolatry than Love, no Olympus had more gods, more altars and more priests. He accepts every belief, every worship, from the fetish of the savage to the omnipotent, invisible God of nobler religions. Full of faith and fears, Love would himself have invented idolatry if this had not had an infinity of other roots to sprout from through the human brain.
When man feels, desires, loves very much, and has reached the furthermost boundary of the human field, he always erects an altar with the richest and most beautiful material at his command and there, on his knees, prays and adores; often he prays and adores at the same time. To that altar he brings the amber and the coral gathered on the sea-shore and the gold found in the sands of the stream, the poetry found in his erratic wanderings through the heaven of the ideal, the most beautiful flowers of his thought, and offers all as a tribute to a creature of earth or space, of nature or imagination. And to love, also, man erects his altar, at the furthermost boundary of the human world, and, on his knees, solemnly asserts that beautiful, good and holy above everything is the creature whom he loves. Not satisfied with this, he raises himself upon the altar and casts avidious glances into the darkness of the unknown, where no form appears to him but the expansion and the reflection of the rays of this world; and there he is suspended over the abysses of nothingness. In that darkness live all the infinities, all the gods, all the human loves carried into the farthest regions of the ideal.
To love, everything is holy that has been touched by the hand, the eye, or the thought of the beloved, everything in which the dear image is reflected. All these become an object of worship, all is transformed into a magic mirror in which we contemplate our god. Who does not remember the adoration for a rosebush from which she had plucked a flower, and the idolatry for a petal which she had scented; and who does not remember the thousand various and foolish relics of love?
In the reliquary of love have found a place the beautiful and the grotesque, the horrid and the graceful. I had a friend who used to weep for long hours with joy and emotion, kissing and contemplating a thread of silk which she had held in her hands, and which was for him the only relic of love. Another kept on his desk for long years the skull of his sweetheart as his dearest companion. There are those who have slept for months and years with a book, a dress, a shawl. And who can enumerate all the sublime puerilities, all the ardent tendernesses, all the insensate acts of the idolatry of love?
Sensations accumulate such mysterious and deep energies in the brain of man, that, at a sign from us, they can all spring up and erect an edifice before us, greater and more beautiful than the reality of things. No woman was ever as beautiful as the image which her lover sees in the calm of his solitary adoration, or pictures upon the black ground of a night of dreams, a comparison which would often be dangerous, if the magic brush of imagination did not also overcolor the beauty of the things seen by the eye and caressed by the hand; but it is a comparison, however, which often sows the lives of artists and poets with sorrow, delusions and even crimes.
If every beautiful woman could know all the kisses, all the caresses, all the hymns offered to her by the multitude of men who admire and desire her, she would certainly feel proud that she possessed the power of calling forth so many energies from the world of the living. Who knows where all those rays end, where the heat of so many motions accumulates, where such a scattered force gathers again? If it is true that nothing is lost of all that is generated, what transformation takes place in so many ardent desires that extend in the infinite void of space?
Modesty imposes a great sobriety of behavior on woman, often a tyrannical reserve. She conceals from our eyes the most intimate adorations, the revels of the heart and the strange hysterics of sentiment. We, always less enamored than she, give vent more freely to our effervescence; and if a beautiful and fortunate woman should describe the scenes which she has witnessed in her youth, she would present a collection of caricatures before which all others would grow dim and mawkish; a collection which would combine the grotesque with the sublime, folly with passion, impudent threats of death and impossible fasts; sudden abandonments of one's dignity, abdications of common sense, stupid sacrifices of one's own personality, orgies of fancy and hurricanes of the senses, humiliations worthy of a Franciscan friar and braggart rodomontades. How much misery, how many carnivals and bacchanalia, and how much baseness has woman to witness! Fortunately for us, she is merciful and modest; for our honor's sake, she covers us with a corner of her queenly mantle, hiding our puerilities from the eyes of the profane, and often from our own.
A country cannot be surveyed without tracing exactly its boundaries, without following them in their capricious and serpentine lines, without marking the point where its individuality ends and the influence of the neighboring country begins to be felt. You may have trampled every clod; wandered through every path, scented the soil of every field, and drunk the water of every spring and every stream; but if you have not sketched the confines of a country, you know less than half its history. Everything is important for what it is and what adjoins it. Not one, then, in this world can impunely be near to another, and all things act and react reciprocally. So it is with love, which has frontiers as vast as the human world, as indented as the coast of Dalmatia or of Norway, capricious, irregular, changeable. It is a land which projects into all adjacent countries, and with it sense, sentiment and thought come into close and complicated contact.
Every sense, every passion, every force of the mind is an instrument of love; but this, in turn, bends in a thousand different ways to senses, passions and thoughts. It is a continual interlacing of factors and instruments, of causes and effects; and while this gigantic power warms and agitates the inmost fibers of the human organism, it radiates its penetrating light to the furthermost confines of the world.
Love, which by the supreme right of existence requires the contact of two different natures, which is but the kiss of two creatures who blend for an instant and fuse together the germs of their power, must have most varied, numberless relations to the sense of touch. It could even be said, without departing from strict scientific truth, that physical love is a sublime form of contact and touch. In inferior animal forms, as well as in human natures of a low and bestial type, love is nothing but touch and contact; but ascending to the high spheres of the animal world and of the human microcosm, the other senses also add their flowers to the garland of love, with the exception of taste, which takes no part in the pleasures of love, except in peculiar cases, which can, without any scruple, be entrusted to the clinic of pathological psychology. Of the other four senses, touch has the greatest part in love, hearing the smallest; sight and smell range between the two former in very different degrees.
The senses, however, differ more in the nature of the joys and sorrows with which they take part in the greatest of human passions than in the various quantities of elements which they yield to love. Touch conquers, and twinges with delight; sight reveals and charms; hearing impassions and conquers; smell cherishes and inebriates. We can easily have a comparative idea of the various parts which the four senses take in love by comparing these four moments: To see the beloved woman and gaze at her for a long time; to embrace her passionately; to hear her voice without seeing her; to inhale voluptuously the aroma with which she is wont to scent her robe.
A thousand, a hundred thousand, a million notes would be insufficient to express all the harmonies and melodies of amorous contact; and as the most voluminous dictionary in the world would decline to enter upon such an undertaking, the pen of the writer would slip into the field where science becomes lasciviousness. I regret at times that one of the greatest poets did not sing the sublime voluptuousness of love with such loftiness of style as to leave his pen uncontaminated. Perhaps man would like to know also the limits of the genius of lust, to mark the confines, too, of this human possibility; but I find some consolation for this sublime ignorance of ours, for this glorious lacuna left by modesty in the field of human knowledge, in thinking that where poetry kept silent and science inactive, where an intimate contact of two kisses creates a new existence, an unknown current transmits to the new man, together with the sparks of life, all the treasures of past voluptuousness; and the son of Adam, with a second kiss, will transmit the innate science of love, pour all the nectar of the chalice of voluptuousness into the lips of the daughter of Eve. Sublime science, which was never written on papyrus nor sculptured in marble or bronze, but is transmitted in the flash of a kiss through thousands of generations that loved, love, and will love!
From the purest caress on a mass of hair to the greatest hurricane of voluptuousness, touch always keeps the character moulded for it by its anatomy. Touch, in love, is always made oversensitive by voluptuousness, always deeply sensual, is always a positive, definite, uncontrasted and uncontrastable possession. Woman may delude herself into believing that she is unblemished by man's contact when his hand has but touched the hem of her garments or the leather of her shoes; but when skin has touched skin, when a finger has touched a finger, something is already lost of that waxy varnish which nature spreads upon the virginal fruit still preserving the perfume of the tree that nourished it. A hand that clasps a hand means, in love, two fires that blend in one; a mass of hair that touches a mass of hair means two streams of voluptuousness rushing into the bed of one river; two feet that come in contact are always two sparks that fly. A molecule of a man who loves can never touch impunely a molecule of the woman who returns his love; and although the contact may be more rapid than lightning, every molecule that returns to the spheres of its own individuality carries away something that does not belong to it, and leaves with the other something of itself. Touch soft iron with the loadstone and you will see it magnetized; touch a molecule of a man with that of a woman and the two molecules will not be what they were before. Touch is always the act of possession, and the thousand contacts can, gradually, steal so much, that we may find ourselves carried into the sphere of the woman we love, while she has entirely passed into our sphere. Not in vain the modest woman trembles and rebels at every innocent contact. Every sensation of touch, in love, means a boundary that is eliminated between two properties; it means the loss of a property.
It is not hypocrisy alone that makes modesty more exacting in higher races; in exquisitely elevated natures a contact is more dangerous because it radiates rapidly into the field of voluptuousness, into that of the other senses and that of sentiment. Vulgar natures begin where refined natures end; and while too elevated natures live long together, held back by the barrier of a handshake, the bold and uncouth rustic throws a kiss to the girl and embraces her at the first declaration of love. It is typical of this most powerful passion to perform a hundred miracles a day and thus arrest voluptuousness at the last boundary of kissing; but adroitness and fortune are necessary to make it possible to stop there for a long time. From handclasping to the kiss the path may be very long and even endless; but beyond a kiss given and returned, every definite boundary has vanished and everything is possible. Even in touch love has but two principal stations before the goal is reached; handclasping and kiss. Whoever believes she has remained a virgin after a kiss given and returned is a hypocrite, like him who believes that the studied reticence of lust may still leave something to conquer. O women who have the dangerous fortune to be beautiful and to be desired, do not let your adorers go beyond handclasping; you may in rare cases arrive at the kiss that you may receive; but remember that a kiss returned is a tremendous bond, which you should never sign,—never, of course, unless you intend to change your name.
Sight is the first messenger of love, and in elect natures it is so prodigal of joy to lovers as to excel, in extensity if not in intensity, even the insuperable heights of voluptuousness. Sight possesses everything save the delirium of possession, and rapid and penetrating as it is, it sounds at a stroke the abysses of infinite beauty, over which is suspended, as in a halo, the object of our love. What one contemplates with the eyes of love from head to foot always ends in two infinities into which desire hurls itself with frenzied audacity and insatiable curiosity. Sight is made to accompany us in that delicious excursion; and as it can tarry long and suavely at a dimple of the cheek, at the little vortex of a curl or at the opalescence of a nail, it can also compel us to pass and repass with vertiginous speed, a thousand times in a minute, through the divine lines that enclose our treasure.
The eyes of love have all the virtue of the telescope and the microscope, and while not a single curve of the thousand labyrinths through which the mobile feminine beauty seems to flutter and flicker can escape them, they also attain the most sublime summits of ideal beauty. When the eye admires and conquers, it invites to the picture which it draws from nature all senses, all passions, all thought, all psychical energies of man. No other sense possesses this gigantic faculty of elevating us to the highest regions of the ideal, compelling the minor senses, the animal instincts and the lower passions to contemplate its panoramas. The eye is the first minister of the mind, and while it refines desire and frees passion from the coarsest lasciviousness, it elevates the man and woman who love to the highest spheres of human possibility. Touch likes to remove the veils that cover the beautiful; sight need not divest the object it contemplates, for its light illumines every shade, penetrates through opaque bodies and makes them transparent, threads its way through the most intricate folds, and while it sees it also surmises, inspects, divines, analyzes, measures, compares and controls with incredible agility all the elements of the esthetic world.
The eye which rests the rays of its light on a loving eye illumines it, is illumined in turn and shows to us the phenomenon of two brilliant stars exchanging their lights and rendering themselves more beautiful. If one does not lower the chaste eyelids, it may so happen that the fire will spread from the high spheres of the esthetic ideal down to the vile and brutish instincts. This, in fact, happens in all men of a base type; every emotion of love is rapidly transferred to the regions of touch. In elect natures, on the contrary, sight has ever some beauty to discover, a region to explore, a world to conquer. The richest man in the world can always count the dollars and the stocks he possesses; the most powerful king can always know the extent in square miles of his dominions: but he who loves a beautiful creature dies without having seen, contemplated or admired all. In the last day of his life there is always some "unknown land" which the eye has not yet discovered or sufficiently explored. And this is just the intimate difference which distinguishes touch from sight. While the former has well determined boundaries and a definite task, the latter widens the limits of its dominions to include a number infinitely greater in esthetic combinations. In a flash of the eye you have seen a beautiful being and immediately said: "Oh, the angelic creature!" A chaos of sensations, a world of beautiful things have surprised, enraptured, enamored you; but how many days, how many months, how many years will be required for your eyes to roam through the thousand paths of that garden, to study every flower, every petal of each flower. What intensity of voluptuous analysis, how many poems of delight, in order to say again, five or ten years after: "Oh, the angelic creature!"
Nature was very generous in distributing attractions in the bodies of man and woman, and the short, sad day of our life always vanishes before we have been enabled to see all the forms of human beauty. But to the esthetic treasures of nature, man succeeded in adding those of art; and with the thousand artifices of garment and ornaments, we have added to our forms such and so many beauties that it is easier to imagine than to enumerate them. Perhaps I will some day attempt to write a "Physiology of Beauty," in which, if I do, I intend to point out the general laws which govern the esthetic world. Here I must only describe the confines where love and beauty meet and, in turn, kiss and fecundate each other. When the eye has love for a companion it finds a new world to contemplate in the cerulean star-thistle which our sweetheart interweaves for the first time in her golden hair, or in the crimson geranium which gives a magnificent relief to her raven locks; a naughty little muslin apron may become a new continent, and a glove, which too cruelly and too tightly squeezes a rosy little hand, may enclose in the nest of its little buttons of mother of pearl so many new beauties as to stir our senses or infuse an unknown voluptuousness into us. The man who loves a beautiful woman laughs compassionately at the polygamist pasha who needs a hundred women to find the hundred beauties of the human Venus; and the beautiful woman, in the arsenal of her garments, in the variety of her smiles, in the thousand undulations of her flexuous body, evokes before the eyes of her lover not a hundred, but a thousand women, all beautiful with a different beauty.
Sight is the only sense which, in love, proceeds to effect moral and intellectual discoveries in the person beloved; and we not only contemplate to admire and to enjoy, but also to discover, by the flash of the eye and the throbbing of the facial muscles, how many affections, how many thoughts we can find in the one whom we intend to make ours forever. However, beauty is such a powerful tyrant in love that it forces us under its yoke and usurps the rights of the highest needs. A beautiful woman who is desired seldom seems to us frivolous and heartless, and the fascination of beauty may impel us to pardon every crime, to accept the most shameful compromises with our conscience, and may cause in us the most ridiculous and farcical hallucinations. However, this fault is not of the eyes, that see, but of the senses, that desire too ardently; and, above all, of nature, which has such a loving care of the forms in which germs are moulded into living bodies. Nature defends and protects the beautiful above everything else, perhaps because it is the crucible in which the good and the true are melted together.
If I wished to indicate by an ideographic sign all the varied and essential parts which the sense of sight assumes in love, I would use the figure of a winged messenger, a sort of Mercury, with the left hand leading Voluptuousness on the earth, and with the right directing our gaze toward the highest regions of the ideal, where in holiest and most tender company live the good and the beautiful, the true and the sublime, where are preserved all the variform archetypes of sublimity.
Hearing has a small but interesting part in the story of love, if we set aside the prominent part it has as an instrument of thought. We are not to discuss here music or the value of ideas communicated through words, but the purely sensual influence of the ear in amorous phenomena.
Hearing yields some pleasures almost tactile, and always very sensual, such as are brought to us by some sounds which may be termed lascivious (the swish of a silk gown, the warbling of some birds, the murmur of certain waves, etc.); but beyond these rare exceptions, hearing has a tender, affectionate part. We would say that it stirs affections, predisposing them to vibrate with the sweetest, most impassioned notes. Man and woman have each a peculiar voice, and the sexual character of the feminine voice affects man, while the virile timbre of his voice causes woman's heart to throb with the most deeply sexual desires. There are some feminine voices that cannot be heard with impunity, so suavely do their notes penetrate into the greatest depths of the heart, which throbs with excitement and emotion. The voice of some women resembles a caress by the wing of a swan; and while it delights us, it perturbs and confuses us, affects us deeply and lastingly. Man and woman, through the notes of their voices, chastely reveal their sex, and the heart palpitates violently, as that of a girl bathing, who, before trusting her little foot to the wave, looks around as though frightened by the rustle of the leaves.
The sound of the voice, beyond the idea it represents, cannot say, "I am beautiful, I am intelligent," but it can say, alone, many other sweet things: "I am a woman, I am very much of a woman, I desire much, I am languishing with love, I am alone, I want you at once, I await you ardently," etc.
The seduction of the voice has some of the characteristics attributed to ancient sorcery; it surprises, fascinates and conquers us, and we are unable to discover the cause of such a storm roused by a few sounds, a few words. We feel ourselves almost humiliated at being vanquished without a battle, carried off without our consent; and the fascination of a voice seems to us the work of a witch. More than once we have resisted the seductions of sight, the violence of touch; but the voice conquers us, delivers us, bound, hand and foot, into the arms of a mysterious power which demands from us the blindest submission, against which rebellion is impossible. And this influence of the voice lasts a long time, is never forgotten, often survives love itself.
After long years of silence, indifference, contempt, the wind carries to us the sound of a voice; and we feel ourselves disturbed, surprised, reconquered, as in the first day of our love. Hearing will cast its fishing-line into the deepest waters of our affection; and more than one love has been resuscitated miraculously from the coldest ashes by a dear voice which we had, perhaps, long since forgotten.
Love has many mysterious relations to the olfactory sense. In the animal world perfumes are often the more direct and powerful instigators in amorous struggles; and even before the female has seen the companion by whom she desires to be conquered, the wings of the wind have carried to her nostrils a perfume that inebriates and fills her with voluptuousness.
This sense may be a powerful excitant in inferior races, or in the lower type of men of high races, but it exercises, in love, a powerful influence even in the most refined natures, by means of perfumes which we have conquered from nature and which, by the omnipotence of chemistry, we know how to reproduce without having recourse to the power of life. We have brought into our power the essence of every petal, the perfume of every calyx, of every leaf, of every bark, the repugnant smell of many enamored animals, and, with impudent art, mixing the odors of flowers with exciting aromas, we have concentrated in a few drops of essence so much olfactory voluptuousness as warm spring could hardly concentrate in a flowering meadow or in a tropical forest. Now the deep and intense voluptuousness of perfumes is the daughter of a remote atavism which makes us susceptible of the sexual exhalations of many living beings and, solely for this reason, no sense has more intimate ties with animal voluptuousness than smell.
If you study the expression on the face of a woman who is scenting a very odorous flower and feels as though inebriated, you will see that such a picture resembles, more than anything else, a sublime scene of love. Ask many over-sensual men and they will tell you that they cannot visit with impunity the laboratories where essences and perfumes are made. Ask the art of the perfume-maker, and it will answer that, after having mixed a hundred essences of flowers and leaves, it gives relief to and improves all those perfumes by adding an infinitesimal quantity of a matter, fetid in itself, but taken from the organs of love of some animal. Ask why women love perfumes so much, and perhaps a few will be able to tell you, or will answer with a blush. And if by a long experience they have already learned the most subtle mysteries of the senses, all the finest arts of coquetry, they will tell you that perfumes are a powerful weapon in the arsenal of love and that some of them possess an irresistible charm over the senses of man.
It is difficult to remain a long time in the warm atmosphere of voluptuousness without sacrificing a great part of those noble forces which are destined for higher attainments; and this explains why no impassioned mania for perfumes can have a moral influence over us. He who plunges into the tepid, titillating and morbid wave of odors no longer measures his strength in relation to a chaste and robust virility, but squeezes from the fruit the last drop of juice, and in the rapid convulsion of weariness imagines new delights. But between this human debasement and the contempt for perfumes there is an abyss, and by abandoning them to the courtesan, or to the savage woman who anoints herself from head to foot, we throw away, without any reason, much of a dear and sweet voluptuousness which could be enjoyed and cultivated by us without any offense to morals.
Do you believe that a kiss given to that one whom you love and who is yours, through the petals of a rose, is a sin of lust? Do you ever believe that love gathered in a shower of violets, hyacinths and narcissus, between the crepuscules of two sighs, could be called lasciviousness? Nature is eternally rich, and the garlands we weave with her flowers around our joys do not deplete her inexhaustible gardens.