In the Apollo room in the Vatican you will see an ancient bas-relief representing two bacchantes with the Dionysian thyrsus; one is standing, while the heat of voluptuousness is flaming within her; she bears the thyrsus, lust transpires on her face, and a bull is beating his horns against her legs; the other falls exhausted from intoxication. These are two moments of the voluptuousness of love, but they are also the two most elementary forms of the sentiment that bind man to woman. Now an ardent energy, then calm possession; now struggle that conquers, then affectionate blandishment that restrains. The most sublime, most constant, most perfect love that a man of superior race can desire or dream of, is a hot, bright flame, lasting as long as life, and at which, from time to time, are kindled the sparks of a desire that flares up, wavers and disappears.
Love, in comparison with all other sentiments, is such a thing that, when it comes in contact with them, it rules, attracts and draws them into the orbit of its movements, like a small fragment of cosmic matter which, having come too near to the sun, is attracted and devoured by that body. The sentiments are forces, each controlled by certain laws in its own sphere; when they come together, they conglomerate or eliminate each other, or exercise a mutual influence which causes them to deviate from the line followed by them a moment before. When an affection approaches love it is so powerfully influenced by it as to seem to disappear from the sight of the common people, while neither matter nor force can ever be destroyed, but can only change in form.
On this subject many fallacious arguments are advanced every day. It is said, for instance, that love is the most egotistic of sentiments, because we seek in it the greatest voluptuousness; but love and egotism are two affections that follow very different orbits, since the former causes us to love another creature and has as its object the preservation of the species, while the latter makes us love ourselves and tends to preserve the individual. If by egotism we mean the desire of satisfying a need, then all the sentiments, even the most generous ones, could be considered as forms of egotism, since even the martyr satisfies a very high need of a generous sentiment.
Love is, on the contrary, at perpetual war with egotism; and although the latter is a gigantic affection, yet it pales before the brilliant light of the Titan of the Affections. Many animals prefer death to abandoning the faithful companion. Even the toad suffers himself to be tortured, burned, to have his limbs amputated, his eyes gouged; but as long as he has one limb intact, he uses it to embrace the female in an amorous clasp. And do we not, too, offer as holocaust to love wealth, glory, science? Does not woman offer to love the long illness of gestation, the tortures of childbirth, the pains of nursing, the anxious cares of domestic and educational struggles? And how many think, in the intoxication of love, of the bitterness and the thorns which they are sowing in that moment; the history of sorrow which, perhaps, by an inexorable law, they are preparing for themselves?
Even the most perfect egotist, if he be a healthy man, desires and loves a woman. Apart from a few elect creatures to whom the supreme joys of the creations of thought are permitted, love represents the greatest of energies, the crowning of every edifice. We may thirst for wealth and glory as the greatest of joys, but in the background we behold the outline of a feminine creature at whose feet the trophies of victory must be laid. I do not speak of woman, because, for her, every satisfied vanity, every hoped for glory, all riches desired, every flower and every fruit of the garden of life must be laid at the feet of somebody, and this somebody is always a man. The fireworks with which every festivity of life ends must always be a woman; at the bottom of every vulgar revelry and on the horizon of every sublime glory there is ever an Eve. To love and to be loved is of all human things the best; and even in the world of the suprasensible, the religions of every country have always promised to the good and the believer an eternity of love in the harem of voluptuousness, or in a mystic but amorous ecstasy. Read the burning pages of the mystic writers, and you will be able to tell me if all that fantastic world is not, too, a transubstantiation of love. The gods of every Olympus also have a sexual form, and there are feminine forms for the males and masculine forms for the females. From the cradle to the grave, love is for all and always the highest promise. Between the automatic lust of adolescence and the studied and covetous lecheries of old age, we pass, through the feverish hysteria of early youth, to the deep passions of virility; but for every age love is the sweetest joy. The tocsin of old age begins to sound when, with the first white hairs, we fear that we are no longer able to love; and every one ardently, anxiously hopes that the hour, the minute will never come for him in which he shall be compelled to say the tremendous words: "I cannot."
I do not deny that in some human monsters egotism, as a sacrifice made to the god "Myself," is so powerful as to exclude love; but such cases are very rare if they last the whole life, rare when they last for a shorter period. It often occurs that a man, trained to and living in the most sordid egotism, falls in love when old with a poor young girl, and becomes expansive with her, generous, prodigal, perhaps; and he too pays, at one time and in a very ridiculous way, the debt which nature in vain claimed from him during his young and mature age.
Great egotists also love, but in a selfish manner, denying the most prodigal and most splendid of the passions that tribute which they cannot refuse to themselves. They are ignorant of the most sublime joys, of the most inebriating enthusiasms of love, of the holy voluptuousness of loving a woman more than oneself; but they also love, they love in their own way. If you wish to study the physiognomy of egotistical love, compare man's with woman's love and you will find it easy to penetrate into the mysteries of this part of psychology; and if you desire a more striking contrast, that the differences may be represented in a bolder relief, compare the love of an old man with that of a young woman: you will have in the former an egotistical type of love, in the latter a generous one.
More complex are the influences which the sentiment of possession and that of self-esteem exercise upon love, and the importance given to jealousy is sufficient to prove this.
The physiological study of jealousy would be sufficient, if it were still needed, to demonstrate the queer confusion of language in relation to psychical facts. One would say that it is the language of the alchemists, employed to express the chemical composition of bodies; one would believe that we are still dealing with the "nothing white," the "philosophic wool" and the "tetrascelitetraoxicoquindodeca" of our good ancestors.
Jealousy really signifies a pain of the sentiment of love, or, to be more specific, the sentiment caused by the offense done us through the infidelity of the person we love. This pain is natural in all men, in all times and in almost all races. It is the injury to our property applied to love. The child scratches and bites him who touches or spoils its fruits or its toy; it grieves us to be robbed of our books, of the flowers of our garden. It is natural, then, that he who touches our sweetheart, our dearest thing, should be hated. And, in fact, this jealousy is but a form of hatred, the most natural, the most legitimate of all hatreds. It is not necessary to create a new energy or a new word to express this hatred. We may beat or kill a man because he has brutally offended our son, our father, our friend, our country, our sweetheart; five offenses given to five different sentiments, but always hatred aroused by grief, energy developed by the same mechanism. The paternal, the filial, the friendly sentiment, the devotion to our country, love have been offended in us, and we have responded with a centrifugal hatred, with blows or death. But in these various cases, was the presence of a new sentiment deemed necessary in order that the crime might be committed? Certainly not. It was said that the paternal affection, injured, had aroused such distress in us as to lead to assault or assassination; it was simply asserted that an insult to the flag of our country had rendered us blind and led us to commit violence; and why, then, when love is offended, should we create a new sentiment—jealousy? All sentiments, when satisfied, lead us to close friendships, to endearments, to be of assistance to those who have given us these satisfactions. All injured sentiments lead us, on the contrary, to repel those who have offended them, to harm those from whom we have received that pain.
Is it jealousy, then, the hatred that an animal manifests toward any creature which interrupts it in its loves? Well, for many savages, to whom love is nothing but sexual intercourse, all the phenomena of jealousy are reduced to this single form. When the instinct is satisfied, as the unions are promiscuous and woman is considered common property, there can be no jealousy. If woman is a cup out of which every one may drink, why should there be jealousy? A Bolivian woman once cynically told me: "Woman is the water of a stream. Throw a stone into it: will you be able to tell me a minute afterward where the stone broke that water? You are very foolish, you man, to make distinctions between identical things!"
In polygamous races, man only can be jealous; in polyandric ones, woman alone can be jealous legally. With various nations, woman is a property like any other; hence she can be voluntarily offered to the friend or to the guest, like a horse or a dog. They do not want anybody to steal her, but she can be given away without either disgrace or jealousy. Only in the higher and monogamous races the sentiments of love, self-esteem and property, forming a triple armor around our woman, incite us to defend her "with claws and beak"; and to this unyielding body, consisting of the union of three sentiments, we give the name of "jealousy"; and here we have a second psychical form, another thing called by the same name.
But, as though such confusion were not already excessive, we have called jealousy a special psychical individual organization by which we become suspicious and tyrannical toward the person we love and whom we offend without any reason and from whom we withhold all legitimate liberty. And after having confused three different things, that is to say, the grief of injured love, the triple combination of three sentiments—love, self-pride, possession—and a pathological irritability of suspicion, we discuss at length, and always in vain, in order to decide whether all men are jealous and whether jealousy measures love with an exact ruler and whether anyone can love without being jealous: vain, not to say puerile, discussions, which would not take place if words were previously defined. If by jealousy you mean the sorrow caused by not being loved or by being deceived, then every heart that loves must be jealous; thus, whoever loves country, mother, son, cannot witness without sorrow an offense offered to son, mother, country. But if by jealousy you mean that form of tyrannical suspicion which tortures the person possessed by it, then I shall tell you that we very well can and should love without ever feeling that jealousy, and that we can be jealous even without loving. Let us proceed to an elementary analysis, and we shall understand each other. Under the name of a single sentiment, of a single effective energy, the most dissimilar phenomena are grouped, to wit:
(1) The sorrow caused by a love offense;
(2) The sorrow for an injury to property;
(3) A sorrow born of the sentiment of self-esteem;
(4) An habitual, constitutional suspicion, which centers on the person beloved or possessed.
The only common ties among these psychical phenomena are these: that all apply to a love offended, or alleged to be offended, and that they are all accompanied by grief. Such an empiricism, such a coarse empiricism! Is this not actual alchemy, that which called all volatile bodies "spirits," and the oxide of zinc "philosophic wool"!
As jealousy is not an elementary psychical phenomenon, but simply an empirical mixture, it has many and varied ethnical forms, and becomes necessary in all countries where polygamy prevents man from physically and morally satisfying a woman, and where the husband, merely because he is rich and powerful, selects his wife and forces his love upon her. The jealousy of many Oriental nations is proverbial, and perhaps monogamous peoples become jealous through contact with polygamous ones, as in Sicily and in certain parts of Spain. It seems to me, however, that in some cases jealousy has not a clear historical origin, but assumes an ethnical character, according to the special constitution of a race. In any case, in Europe, Italians, Spaniards, and, above all, Portuguese are very jealous; and, as I learned, in America the most jealous of all are the Brazilians.
The common people will certainly not be persuaded by my psychological analysis, and will continue to measure the force of love by the unreasonableness of suspicion; and many dear and lovely women will continue, heaven knows for how many centuries, to taunt their lovers with this foolish plaint: "You do not love me because you are not jealous. How can you love me if you do not feel for me the slightest jealousy?" Foolish lamentations, often uttered by happy creatures who, perhaps, finding it strange and against nature to be too happy, look for some occasion of sorrow and regret. Can anyone love anybody on earth more deeply than one's own children? Certainly not; and yet we are not jealous when others love them, and father and mother sublimely vie with each other in adoring and fondling them. You should love your companion in love in the same manner; and if you fear to lose him, that fear must not be the wrath of the inquisitor nor the clutch of the miser. Vain counsels! Words thrown to the winds! Jealousy is one of the most constitutional psychological maladies, and, if one is born with it, it is very difficult to cure. May a benign fate keep it from you! It poisons the dearest joys of life; penetrates every pore of the skin; pours its gall into every drop of water, into every mouthful of bread; it transforms the man who loves into a policeman, always armed, with alert ear and prying eyes. And the jealous man is always spying, doubting, suffering; he investigates the past, the present and the future; he seeks the lie in a caress, indifference in a kiss; in love he always fears hypocrisy. What a hellish life! It is a hundred times better not to love than to love in this way. The punishment of the few jealous men with exquisitely gentle heart should be this: to know that those who are as jealous as they generally entertain more self-love than love, and that the highest and noblest creatures have always loved without jealousy. The day when we perceive that we are no longer loved, when we are deceived, let love die without replacing it with jealousy. From suspicion to condemnation or acquittal, between sincere lovers, the path cannot and must not be a long one; to a frank question, a frank answer; let suspicion or love die, but they should die in a hurricane or in a battle, die a violent death; they should not drag a miserable existence between the courts and the prisons. A hundred times better a lightning that kills us than the feverish jaundice which consumes the stamina of our lives, poisons all sources of our joy.
Jealousy, besides, as it has already largely declined in monogamous society, will continue to decrease in the future, when matrimony shall be but the sanctification of love, when the choice shall be always reciprocal, when in the moral relations between the two sexes all trace of hypocrisy shall have disappeared. To know that we are loved, esteemed, and to love and esteem our companion, deeply and sincerely, is the surest guarantee of defense against that sordid parasite, that wood-worm of love which is jealousy. Let woman cease to be a slave or a freedwoman, let the husband or lover cease to be the proprietor of a woman, and all those lepers of love, the jealousy-mad, will disappear at once.
Self-esteem, independent of jealousy, has many legitimate relations to love, of which it enriches the treasures. No man, no woman in the world, knowing that he or she is loved by a most noble creature, can help feeling proud; and if a delicate reserve prohibits our heralding our good fortune, we can, however, relish the secret joy of knowing that the world envies us. It is almost always beyond human strength to renounce these joys, which can be delighted in without humiliating others and without any shadow of rancor. Woman, especially, with admirable art, knows how to say countless things silently; and when she is proud of a noble love, she radiates such an aureole of light as to dazzle the adorer and the apathetic. With the majesty of a queen and the reserve of a woman, and without opening her lips, she can say to all: "Envy me; I am loved!" Holy and just and chaste pride, which I wish all the daughters of Eve who shall have deserved love should feel.
Lovers and sweethearts, choirs of adorers and famous beauties may be objects of luxury, as are horses and palaces; and it is natural for human vanity to seek those things and to appreciate and utilize them to humiliate those who have them not. Vanity uses love, then, as a pretext; and many women, incapable of loving, may conquer men solely as trophies of war, just as men oftener than women may, through pure vanity, undertake a war of conquest. All these facts, however, belong to the history of pride and vanity, and we have already dealt with them in our study on the sources of love.
In that study we have seen by what paths one is led to love, and we were therefore obliged to consider friendship, compassion and many other sentiments as sources of love. But all endearing sentiments may have relation to the Prince of Affections; that is to say, take the place of love that wanes. When the sun shines in the heavens, the light of the moon and that of the minor stars are invisible; and in the same way, when love glows above the horizon of life, friendship, compassion, and all other tender affections can no longer be seen or felt; but when love disappears we can see the minor sentiments take its place.
Esteem, veneration and all other analogous sentiments may be companions of love; but only too often they are bestowed upon a creature who little deserves them. Love is a wizard that transforms and beautifies and magnifies everything he touches; and we can have immense esteem and deep veneration for the most despicable man, for the most abject, most wicked woman. It does not reflect much honor upon us, but it is true. No brigand ever stood in need of loves, often deep and ardent, and no beautiful courtesan ever lacked illustrious lovers. What does it matter if the object of love is a disgrace in everybody's eyes, spat upon by public contempt, set in the pillory of universal hatred?
We love him, we love her; that is enough. And why do we love him? Why do we love her? Because it pleases us. Before the inappellable rudeness of this explanation what can science say, what can morality suggest?
Science recognizes the fact and explains it. A creature despicable in every respect must please us very much to inspire us with love; and this sentiment must be really gigantic if it conquers human conventionalities, vulgar prejudices and the most persistent habits. It has been said with much truth that no woman was more ardently loved than a homely woman; and the same may be said of a brutal or criminal man, a woman of the street or abject for any reason. A great man, if accused of loving a debased or silly woman, could often, blushing with shame, strip her before the world, like ancient Phryne, saying: "Let him dare throw the first stone at me, who feels himself incapable of loving this beautiful creature!" And the man who, through crime or baseness, has been banned from civilized society, has in his heart, for the woman who loves him, some pure and virgin oasis in which his love is lying; he still has some untainted place reserved in his soul for the beloved one; and this love, concealed and bitter, possesses, for certain natures, all the perilous seductions of strong aromas and intoxicating poisons. No man in the world is entirely wicked; and some of the ferocious kindnesses of the assassin, some of the generous impulses of the thief are preserved for the companion of love. Such is the omnipotence of this sentiment, which, like an ancient alchemist, transmutes the vilest metals into liquid gold and discovers the only diamond buried in the sand of a great alluvium! Science, then, admits loves without esteem, and, bowing its head with a blush of shame, acknowledges that they are only too frequent.
Where science is still and humiliates itself, morality erects its head and flagellates. Love without esteem is a crime—and a crime which breeds other crimes. Woe to us when, bold avengers of public contempt, we dare boast of loving a vile creature, and impudently parade such love, as though intending by our arrogance to impose silence on indignant decency, or by our insolence to act as pedestal for the offended paramour! Liars in our own eyes, we defy, alone, the holiest and most inviolable laws of beauty and honesty; and proud, first, then bold and insolent, we end by becoming truly ribalds, and all encircled and hidden by mire, we permit no gentle creature to approach us who could inspire us with a pure and noble affection. Human passions may try many stunts and tricks, but, in the end, natural sentiments, like normal situations, are the healthiest and most enjoyable. We can raise, for an instant, the vilest creatures on the shield of pride, but our arms will tire and we will roll into the mire, together with our idol of a day.
The woman we love must not only be the companion of our voluptuousness, but also the mother of our children; the man a woman loves must be the husband and the father of the family. We should not consecrate the blush of our face in that of our children, who will curse our wicked loves, and will, perhaps, execrate the name of the father or the memory of the mother. When pride has lost its keenness, and the hour of revenge has passed, woe to us if we shall find ourselves alone with a creature whom we cannot hold in estimation!
If Love is really the holiest thing of life, the most ardent affection, the most voluptuous joy, we must erect a temple to him, with our own hands, and with our most sublime sentiments decorate his tabernacle, in which we can worthily adore him as a god. Love born among crimes and turpitudes is a nest woven with thorny shrubs and thistles, while we should weave it with the most aromatic leaves and the most beautiful flowers. Men and women, we should vie with each other in gleaning fields and gardens and in bearing to love every gentle affection, every noble aspiration, every impulse of lofty ambition. Lust and pride, when coupled, become the step-parents of every love without esteem, which, like every organism born of evil, lives a scrofulous and rachitic life, full of sorrows and calamities.
If love is really the most precious gem, we should enclose it in a casket which, for richness of material, artistic skill and inimitable esthetic conception, should be worthy of its contents. Nothing but noblest things should touch it; no breath, unless perfumed with sandalwood and roses, should be exhaled near it; no hand but that of an angel should caress it; no heat should warm it but that of the kisses of two loving lips.
If woman should concede her love only to the honest and industrious man, if it were possible that man loved no woman but a modest one, we would see the human family regenerated in the course of a generation, we would see men educated through voluptuousness. For the prison that terrifies, for the hell that threatens, we would then substitute the caresses of a woman, the kisses of a man, as educative energies. Shall this eternally be a dream? Shall we always threaten and assault men to make them better? Shall we not have a medicine less cruel than sorrow to cure men of vice and crime?
Thought may, for very different reasons, now be an ally and now a victim of love. First instrument of seduction, next to the external form of the body, thought revives, flares up in contact with the new sentiment, as occurs with every other energy condensed in our brain; and while it becomes purer, it strengthens itself, exhibiting some of its rarest, most exquisite fruits. Many torpid intellects do not awake except by the kiss of love, and then only to fall back into the previous lethargy the moment they are left without the stimulus of desire; but healthier brains, too, rise above themselves when called upon to offer an unusual tribute on the new altar. For very many, poetry is the song of spring, and, prosaic and mute before having loved, they return to their prose and taciturnity when the season of loves is past. As they are men, they may continue to possess a woman; but being poor in moral energy, in the May of their life they have only a smile of poetry, lasting as long as the petals of a rose. Their cold and indolent imagination indulges in a little flight among the bushes of the garden or the orchard; emits its feeble trill, then falls wingless on the highroad, plodding until death. How often a woman, who has been loved by one of these spring lovers and who remembers having once seen him, an ardent creature, full of imagination, finds it very difficult to persuade herself that the man who today is all prose, from head to foot, living between his chocolate and his nightcap, wearing seven varieties of flannels, and using ten different kinds of lozenges, once wrote verses and fell on his knees at her feet, which he covered with bitter tears!
More fortunate men, instead, derive from their loves a continual and powerful stimulus to the works of thought, which seems to reshape and renew itself at each different phase of passion, at each change of love. These influences upon the lives of many artists, poets, and even statesmen can be studied in their works, and have a stronger power when the artist, the poet, the head of the state is a woman.
The influence of love upon the forces and forms of thought is twofold, and is derived from self-love and from the psychical nature of the person loved. Being a sentiment born during youth or rejuvenated during old age, it especially excites the imagination and refines the aptitude for reproducing the beautiful; in a few words, it warms those mental aptitudes that generally reach their climax at the same age when love manifests its greatest energies. Very rarely a man can be a poet or a great artist without having loved intensely, without having had at least a great capacity for loving. Chastity, forced or voluntary, may conceal love; but down in the depths of the heart some images, resembling an angel more than a woman, have sway, rising at every inspiration of genius, at every song of the lyre, at every touch of the brush, and reviving or kindling the sacred fire of art. The genius of many among the greatest poets, artists and writers of the world had love as its first companion and supreme inspirer; and without this sentiment their names might be totally unknown to us. The love that is born in a sublime brain accumulates gigantic forces, and chastity, always imposed by great passions in their first stage, refines and intensifies them; so that love seems to transform into genius, and genius dyes with splendid hues every amorous manifestation. A chaste genius which loves is a legion of fighting forces, a whole host of winged geniuses, and therefore no difficult question, no irresistible force can oppose it. Thought, when the companion of love, offers to it the richest tributes of its energy, just as the enamored bird sings its most harmonious notes for its companion, the flower condenses all its perfumes and the fascination of its most beautiful colors around the nest in which plants love. And with thought, intensified, transformed, adorned with all its splendors, goes the stimulus of self-esteem, which in the satisfaction of pride of the person loved finds always new incitement and new incentive to work. Nor does the creature loved receive only the tribute, but from the enthusiastic eloquence with which gratitude is expressed by that creature, it is manifest that the latter also feels the same inciting influence, and the most modest and stillest tongue finds splendors of form and savoriness of style unknown to that day.
A long experience in every country of the world demonstrates the superiority of woman over man in the epistolary style and especially in love-letter writing, which is the effect not only of the peculiar nature of the feminine mind but also of the powerful excitement created in woman by the stimulus of love. A letter is nearly always an exchange of affections, and woman more than man feels the intimate relations between two affections; she loves more and better than we. Man has a hundred different ways of exerting his talents when excited by love; art, ambition, science open to him a thousand avenues to manifest his new energies; to woman, on the contrary, no literary path is open other than amorous correspondence, and she uses and abuses it in a surprising manner. In the numberless hecatombs, in the daily pyres of many perfumed letters, real treasures of art are being destroyed, which should be saved from the conflagration that consumes so many volumes of words and phrases; for the commonplace always dominates every field of good and evil, and commonplace, like all things human, are most loves. Was it not Balzac who said: "It is recognized that in love all women have some 'esprit'"?
The eloquence of love, a real song of a gifted mind in love, is not contradicted by the timid and often dull silence which invariably accompanies the first declarations, the first skirmishes. Fear in all its forms desiccates the mouth and the pharynx, suspends nearly instantaneously the secretions of mucus and saliva, and many are made physically unable to speak, in the same manner as when a violent mental perturbation disconcerts ideas and words, so that eloquence is reduced to an absolute silence, possibly interrupted only by disconnected phrases. That man so mute in love, however, has hardly returned to the quiet of his solitary room when he suddenly becomes a new Demosthenes, and pours out into space or on paper the rivers of a fiery eloquence, which a few moments before would have proved so opportune and so beautiful. Happy love, in the stage of attainment, raises all brains above medium temperature, continually infusing new energies into them. Even during the intoxication, the thyrsus of the dithyramb never falls from the hand of the happy mortal who loves or hopes to be loved. When, on the contrary, our affection vibrates with the notes of sorrow, a sublime elegy may be produced as the outburst of thought; one can become poet or insane. Brains better organized are cured of the great sorrows of the heart with a book, or a musical creation, or a picture; but many human brains submerge in the hurricane of an unhappy love, and the statistics of the hospitals for the insane always show a large number of cases of insanity produced by love, while in the secrecy of the domestic walls are concealed many other brains withered or fallen into lethargy through unfortunate loves.
I am writing in these pages a modest essay of general physiology, or, as it is usually termed, psychology, and have neither the right nor the strength to undertake the work of literary critic, which still remains to be done, notwithstanding the very beautiful things written by many upon the influence of love in art. Not only has every poet and every artist (and I consider the writer the greatest of all) left in his works the imprint of his loves, but he has felt and interpreted love in a way entirely his own, and which in some cases became the style of a school or an epoch. The woman loved by Byron is quite different from the woman loved by Burns; Laura is not Beatrice, and the woman dimly discerned by Leopardi is not Vittoria Colonna. To study the influences of the times and the mind over the particular mouldings of the loves of great men—in a few words, to draw the comparative psychology of celebrated loves and of the amorous types of art—is a gigantic labor, in which the artist, the psychologist and the literary man should join hands in order to produce a work worthy of the subject. For me it will suffice to have prepared in the present essay some materials for this work of the future.
Love ceases to be an impulse for thought and becomes its first assassin, not only when it is unhappy, but also when it sinks into the mud of lust. Chastity is an almost entirely hygienic question, and here we should mark the place where the hygienic branch shoots out from the great trunk of physiology. No embrace has ever debased thought when voluptuousness was only love; but when lasciviousness is stronger than sentiment and the animal man regrets having given too much of himself to the future, then the individual rebels against the excessive tribute paid to the preservation of the species. Then the animal man is diseased and the moral man has fallen into libertinism. No; nature never punishes him who wisely obeys its laws, and after the sacrifice of love man is as happy and intelligent as before, since, in the blessed languor of a brief repose, nature stills even the pain of weariness.
"Lay waste the entire forest of concupiscence, not one tree alone. When you shall have felled every tree, cut every branch, you can then pronounce yourselves free, pure, virtuous," exclaims the Dhammapada, and science utters the same cry, but instead of the word "concupiscence" it writes the more precise term "lust." In our organism every function is so well regulated that we, like the citron, can always bear leaves, flowers and fruits, provided we do not sacrifice the fruit to the flower and do not imitate the monstrous flowers with over-expanded petals or seedless fruits. Wise chastity is the ablest administrator of vital harmonies and energies; love and labor do not oppose each other, as many too exacting or hypercritical moralists are continually repeating with too rigid severity.
I have previously stated that the influence of love over thought is twofold, and we have still to study its second manifestation, namely, the influence exerted by the psychical nature of the person loved. Two creatures who love each other are two bodies differently electrified, continually exchanging currents of energy in order to reëstablish the equilibrium of forces and obey the law of universal affinity. But, since no two identical creatures, no two identical brains, no two identical sentiments ever exist in nature, it follows that, of the two thoughts brought face to face by love, one exercises an influence of attraction greater than the other, and consequently one of the two gives more than it receives. Generally the stronger mind exercises a greater fascination; and as the mind of man is oftener greater than that of woman, the latter more easily follows the ideas, the theories, the intellectual tastes of man. It is not always true, however, that a greater attraction betokens a greater mental force, since some peculiar characteristics of certain intellects render them more fascinating, their contact more dangerous and richer in elective affinity. Thought may be robust, original; but if rigid, rude and without any weapon of conquest, it lives alone, in solitary loftiness, and the person loved contemplates it with admiration, but feels no attraction. It is like a star, too cold and too distant for us to desire. Some other talents, on the contrary, seem to be magnetized, so strongly do they adhere to men and things; and when we approach them, we feel ourselves absorbed and, after their contact, carry away some influence of contagion, of fascination, of imitation. These magnetic brains combine with the other amorous seductions another and most powerful one, that of subjugating and bending the mind of the person loved, so that to the sweet chain of affection is added the chain of thought.
A most peculiar and little studied influence of fascinating talents is seen in some women, who add to their other admirable qualities the power of conquering the thought of men whose minds are stronger and swifter than theirs. Living with them, breathing their moral atmosphere, it becomes impossible, even for the most tenacious opposers of the ideas of others, not to think as they think, not to write as they write, not to acquire certain psychical tastes which constitute their delight. The style of certain writers, the manner of certain painters have unconsciously yielded to these slow and mysterious influences; and the masses, investigating the origin of these esthetic mutations, seek it in mysterious causes and in evolutions of art and science, while, instead, they have a humbler but more natural source. The style and manner changed when the head was resting on the bosom of a blonde friend, or the hand playing among the curly labyrinths of raven hair. In the history of arts and of literature, mention of these influences is nearly always omitted because nearly always they are unknown to the biographer, and often unknown to the artist and the poet who was subject to them. Woman always confesses, and frequently with pride, that she has moulded her thought on that of her friend; man hardly acknowledges this, and if warned by criticism, rebels and feels hurt by such an odd accusation. How and when should the king of the universe ever change the style and the direction of his thought through the influence of a kiss or a caress? "Mine, and only mine!" exclaims the man who loves. "His, and only his!" always sighs the woman who loves; and I must, although with different words, have frequently said the same thing in this book.
It is not only the robust and attracting nature of human brains that measures their various influences in the struggles and the caresses of love, but it is the degree that causes the high influences of thought to be differently felt. The more one loves, the more one yields to the fascination of another's talent; the more one loves, the more one is disposed to abdicate one's own ideas and esthetic tastes in order to assume the ideas and the tastes of the person loved. Man, proudly awkward, constantly repeats in every tone that in politics, morality, religion, woman thinks always like her lover; and by this he deludes himself into believing that he affirms with the most eloquent proof the uncontrasted superiority of his mind. However, in our case he fails to mention a reason, most honorable for woman and little for us: woman generally feels more deeply the influence of a virile thought, not only because she is weaker than we, but because she loves us much more than we ever could love. She sacrifices instantly and willingly even self-pride to love; man rarely and with difficulty makes this sacrifice. "She is silly, but beautiful," we say, feeling very happy. Woman, on the contrary, says oftener than we: "How can Democracy be respectable if he insults it every day? And how cannot Socialism be a sacred thing if it is his religion?" Man is always right for the woman who loves him, because she can seldom love without esteem. We, indeed, allow ourselves to love with all our senses a woman whom we cannot or must not hold in estimation. This difference would be sufficient to demonstrate that, in the psychical evolution of the two sexes, woman is ahead of us in the esthetic of sentiment, as we outrun her in intellectual development. Woman has already attained perfect love, which is the fusion of all human elements, the selection of selections; we see the concubine even in the sweetheart and in the wife; and the highest talent does not disdain to pour out the molten metal of its thoughts into the mould of a Venus who hardly could be called heavenly. In matters of love we are disciples oftener than masters on the field of sentiment.
Whatever be the reason for which a brain in love bends its love companion with a larger power of influence, the tyrant, too, undergoes the influence of the victim. Two thoughts cannot impunely be enclosed in the same atmosphere, they cannot follow the orbit of the same planetary system. The one gives much, and the other gives little; the one receives more than it gives, the other gives more than it receives; but they both alter and exchange influences and energies. This is a consequence of the most elementary laws of physics: two loves and two brains are two systems of forces; and, however powerful one may be in comparison with the other, they both must undergo, in their contacts, a molecular modification of their movements. To the direct influence of love add the automatic power of imitation, the tyranny of habit, the epicurism of the compromise of ideas and of conscience, and many other minor causes, and you will see how inexorably thought must change when we think in two.
Not all intellectual phenomena undergo the influence of love in equal measure, but those feel it most who by contacts and origins are nearer to the energies of sentiment or are interwoven with them, constituting binary bodies, composed of affection and thought. Religion and morality are more easily modified than esthetic tastes, and these change more frequently than philosophical theories or the method of study. There is a certain architecture in our brains that constitutes their framework and can be destroyed only by death or insanity. Against it love is powerless; furthermore, certain intellectual antitheses between a man and a woman are enough to render love impossible, even when the sympathy of forms and a certain community of affections violently rouse the sovereign of sentiments.
To scorn influences of love over thought may be the fruit of pride, but it is also, more frequently, an incontrovertible proof of crass ignorance,—pride and ignorance which we shall bitterly expiate, because, if we today may be contented with the beauty of form, and if robust youth, comforted later by coquetry, may prolong the life of love founded on voluptuousness only, the day will come, sooner or later, in which, when the great disparity of brains shall destroy every hope of common intelligence, we shall find ourselves in the presence of this horned dilemma: either to renounce dual thought—horrible amputation of intellectual life—or lower ourselves more every day in order that the voice of a person who speaks in a subdued tone may reach our ear. Hence a continual toil, a weary and sad exertion, the impairment of lofty intellects and the disorders of weak brains; hence the inevitable death of a love which should have submerged only with the last plank of shipwrecked beauty; hence the veiled polygamy of our modern society, profoundly hypocritical, because it is so impatient that it wants to run, when it has only the strength to walk slowly; because it is so petulant that it wants to jump while its legs are still tied by the sacred straps of the middle ages.
We must all inexorably yield to the influence of thought in love. If our robust brain can elevate in some little measure the smaller one of the person we love, we must always descend from our lofty plane, lowering the level of our thought and wasting many of the nobler forces of human progress. A certain disparity of levels is inevitable, but it should never be excessive, because, in the continual efforts to equalize them, in the sorrowful struggles to reach them, a great part of love may be wretchedly dissolved.
This chapter may to many readers seem utterly useless in a psychological work, since chastity is a question of hygiene or a negation of love; and in any case, someone could whisper in my ear: "Non est hic locus." Let the enemies of chastity, or those who do not know what chastity is, jump this chapter, which will be among the shortest in the book, and allow us, when we speak of light, to say at least what shade means.
Chastity is the shadow of love, and the most enthusiastic among the adorers of the sun seeks always the friendly shade of a tree where, among the labyrinths of the knotty roots, or on the soft carpet of a meadow, he can slowly drink in the light of which he went in search; he, too, must love a tranquil shade from which to contemplate without injury the distant splendors of the supreme father of every energy and every heat. Even in the desert of sand called the Sahara, or in the desert of grass called the Pampas, man feels the necessity of resting in the shadow of his camel, or of his horse, to brood voluptuously over the long and fiery suns absorbed. Repose you, also, then in the shadow of the hair, of the eyebrows of your sweetheart to relish the long memories of the lightning flashes of love.
Chastity is not only repose, but also a wise and powerful creation of new energies and infinite poetry. Voluptuousness is a hurricane or thunderbolt, but always a superior force which brutally rends and brutally bends the tree of life, dashing the leaves against the ground that nourishes them. Chastity is a boundless temple, in which the fresh and silent atmosphere dries the sweat of the struggles, refreshes the sultry air of the battle and restores calm to every turbulent and stormy brow. The chastity of two lovers is a real temple in which the animal man collects himself, prays and invokes an unknown god that he may make him an angel; and love is purified, cleansed of all mire, and soars on its wings to the highest regions of the ideal. Desire, when subdued without violence but without hesitation by chastity, lowers its eyes, bows its head and kneels before the statue of love, and, quivering but subdued, caresses with its long neck and warm hair the soft knees, like an enamored swan fondled by the gentle hand of a nude but chaste woman.
Have you ever noticed two lovers who, sitting on one chair, read the same book together, while a little child, the fruit of their first loves, sits at their feet, chattering and prattling? When that little angel raises its head too petulantly or screams too boisterously, the fondling hand of the mother or that of the father will silence him. Thus must desire long remain under restraint at the feet of the two lovers, obeying an amorous voice and not the rod of the schoolmaster of old.
No more odious virtue exists than chastity taught by the intolerant and often not very chaste prude; no more delicate, more sublime virtue than chastity taught by love and by the noblest faculties of the human mind. An immodest love, an unchaste love may be happy for a time; it may laugh and smile, let itself be carried away by the maelstrom of voluptuousness into a revel of unrestrained dances; but it is always an inebriated love, and inebriety ends quickly and, generally, very badly. Chaste love is ardent but serene; a love always armed and always cheerful; a sapphire illuminated by electric light. Self-imposed chastity is a hidden form of onanism, disease or mania; the evidence of something lacking in a man, or of a violent amputation, of a cruel mutilation. The free and sweet chastity of two lovers is a most wise lust, which sacrifices the daily bread to the splendors of a Sardanapalian banquet; an education of senses and affections; a most holy worship of the noblest joys of thought; one of the most precious gems that can adorn the crown of life. Blessed are those who know how to be chaste in this manner, to turn love into an energy that educates and etherealizes, and who find in it the greater coefficient of noble ambitions and magnanimous purposes!
And you, women, you who have the "intellect of love," teach chastity to us, for whom this holiest of virtues is difficult to acquire. Prize dearly this delicate mission, because you will be the first to enjoy its fruits. Through an ignoble and vulgar calculation, you prefer to disarm your lovers in order that they may not strike other victims than you,—perhaps, also, that they may not hurt their own hands; but your calculation is groundless. From the nausea of satiety more infidelity has sprung than from the prudent restraint of desires; and to leave a desire always lighted, and a flower in your garden always untouched, is one of the most precious secrets for reigning eternally, for being always loved.
There is an absolute chastity imposed by the cruel laws of sects or of society, but this is not the place to speak of it. And there is another absolute chastity imposed by ambition, by a misinterpreted virtue, or even by egotism; a chastity which, at the bottom, is nothing else than self-idolatry, a rabid concentration of forces to reach lofty or insensate ends. The fruit which human voluptuousness reaps is, however, generally beneath its desire or expectation, and nature wreaks its vengeance in a thousand ways upon those who outrage it. In many cases, however, true, sincere chastity, imposed by an iron will, is an admirable thing, deserving a place among the rarest and most valuable things in a museum. Not one case in a hundred of those upon which history has bestowed veneration deserves the praises which are habitually offered to them, because many of these forms of chastity are false, or easy through impotency; they are, therefore, false virtues. Other chastities are as sterile as the sands of the desert, they are clouds that rise without shape and without aim in the imagination of the human heart, and vanish without leaving any trace. Be that as it may, they do not belong to the history of love, and to discuss them here would entitle the gentle reader to whisper in my ear a second time: "Non est hic locus."
Man and woman can love with the same degree of force, but they will never love in the same manner, since to the altar of their passion they carry two greatly different natures beside their different genetic missions. As long as there shall live on our planet a man and a woman, they will eternally exchange and counterchange this innocent reproach: "Ah, you do not love me as I love you!" And the lament will be forever true, because woman will never love like man, and man will never be capable of loving like woman. In a complete essay on the comparative psychology of the two sexes we could delineate the distinctive characteristics of virile love and feminine love, and I may try it some day; be it sufficient for me here to sketch in a general way the two figures of passion, one in essence, but rendered so variform by the two different natures called Adam and Eve.
Listen to two spontaneous cries, uttered by two nations very distant and well-nigh uncivilized, and you will find the first lines of a physiology of the sexual characters of love. The Munda-Kols of Chota Nagpur have some popular songs which express the psychical difference between man and woman. The women sing:
"Singbonga from the beginning has made us smaller than you, therefore we obey you. Even if it were not so and from the beginning we had overburdened you with work, still we would not be your equals. To you God has given with two hands, to us with one; and for this we do not plough the ground."
And the men sing to the women:
And flying to a very distant land, we find a Kabyle song, in which a chorus of young women alternates with a chorus of sturdy youths.
The women: "Let him who wants to be loved by a woman march with his weapons; let him put the butt-end of the gun to his cheek and cry: 'Come to me, O maidens!'"
The men: "You do well to love us. God sends us war and we will die, and keep at least the memory of the happiness that you have given us."
Rising from the Munda-Kols and the Kabyles to the higher and more civilized races, we always find, however, an echo of this wild cry of nature, in which man proclaims his strength or imposes it, and woman acquiesces in or invokes it. Hence the very unequal part of joys and sorrows, of rights and duties, which man allows his companion in the world of love; hence an ever increasing usurpation of joys and rights by the strong as we descend to the lower strata of humanity; hence civilized nations continually struggling to divide good and evil in a more equitable proportion between the two sexes, which still so unfairly share light and darkness, joys and sorrows.
Where muscular strength is the criterion of hierarchies, where it constitutes the first of human forces, the difference between man and woman in the rights and joys of love is immense, and woman becomes little more than a domestic animal which is bought, sold or killed according to the necessity of the moment. Setting civilization aside, polygamy exists where morality is uncertain and lust is ardent; and woman, guarded as a treasure of voluptuousness, falls morally lower than in a wandering tribe of nude but monogamous savages, where woman is the companion of the labors and joys of man. For this, perhaps, Solomon used to cry out in his harem: "And who will find me a strong woman?" Among us, also, woman does not play in love the part assigned to her by nature; and here also she can without scruple class herself among the oppressed who await their "jacquerie" or their constitution; here also she is a legitimate pretender who, by right or might, will have some day to conquer her place in the sun.
But I will speak of rights in another chapter; here we must remain within the confines of physiology, which still is, or should be, the legitimate mother of every human legislation. If anthropology should put in our hands all the moral and intellectual elements which separate man from woman, then science could most safely establish in its laws and customs the right place for each sex, without any danger of usurpation, abuse or imposition from any quarter.
Nature has given woman the greatest part of love, and if this difference could be expressed with figures, I would say that we were allotted one fifth, or one fourth at most, of love's territory. Only a woman could write Mme. de Staël's sublime words: "Undoubtedly, in the mysteries of nature, to love and still to love is what we have retained of our celestial inheritance." Neither civilization in any of its most varied phases, nor customs in their numberless forms, nor impositions of tyrants, nor power of genius could alter this immutable law. In the rank and fetid hut of the Eskimo, or in the palace of the prince, woman gives all of herself to man, first as daughter, then as lover, as wife, as mother. She is the great placenta of human beings, the bosom from which we draw blood, voluptuousness, love, every delight of our soul, every heat that warms us. Woe to us, if we should poison the source of human life with a pseudo-education; woe to us, if we should deny Eve the most sacred of rights! For woman, love is the first, the uppermost necessity, and all her organism and her psychology are softened and moulded by the influence of love. Van Helmont said too rudely, "Tota mulier in utero," but thinkers of all epochs applauded the aphorism of the Dutch physician. Woman physically desires for long time; she possesses for long time and can enjoy her conquest every day, every hour, and turn it into a warm and scented atmosphere in which she lives as in a nest; woman nurses in her bosom an angel who always ardently desires and who does not quench in her the affection for her companion; she moulds the man, nourishes and caresses him, and as the years pass she sees herself, her flesh, her loves transformed into a group of little angels who dance around her, who are bits of her heart, petals of a rose fallen from the flower of her beauty, all calling her "mother," which has the meaning of "placenta of life." From the ardent embrace of the man whom she loves she flits to the endearments of her little children; voluptuousness does not fatigue, nor ardor wither, nor passion weary her; she is all, from her hair to her feet, imbued with love, the fluid that flows in her through every vein and moistens every fiber; so that when she is deprived of it she is like the tree shattered by the hurricane and which sees every leaf wither, every flower fall. The love of man is a lightning that flashes, thunders and vanishes; the love of woman is a ray of sun which, slow and warm, penetrates her heart and fecundates her; and she absorbs it, languidly and voluptuously, and every little root of her sentiments, her joys, her thoughts imbibes and feasts upon it; so that, even after the sun has disappeared, its fruitful rays remain, hidden in the earth which it has warmed.
Many have contradicted my opinion, which I expressed several years ago in my "Physiology of Pleasure," that woman has received from nature a larger cup to drink at the inexhaustible spring of the voluptuousness of love; and inasmuch as joy cannot be measured or weighed yet, the problem must wait for its solution a long time still. Nobody, however, can deny that, lasciviousness and sensibility being equal in both sexes, Eve can thirst much longer than man, and, without experiencing fatigue, realize the happy dream of a voluptuousness which, changing its form, is eternally renewed. But while for many men voluptuousness is all that is in love, for a woman, be she the most libertine among the sensual women, it is only a sweet episode. And if you do not believe such a bold assertion, send heralds through the whole civilized world and assemble all those, men and women, who can love and invite them to a singular love tournament; ask them whether they would accept an eternal and most faithful love without voluptuousness in exchange for voluptuousness without love. For every hundred women who will vote for love, ten, perhaps five, men will decide for the sublime refusal of the embrace.
O you, all of you who have studied the heart of woman in the most abject places and believe that you are making your companion happy because you give her luxuriousness and gold and dresses, remember that woman wants to love above all, to be warmed by the spirit of man, to lean all upon the faithful arm of man, to feel that she is needed by a companion of whom she wants to be proud; she wants to be the first for someone. You may behold a woman unhappy amid the splendors of luxury, caressed by the sweet affection of a husband, satisfied in all her desires; and you may see another happy in poverty, amid the storms of life, oppressed by the brutal whims of a lover. "Mysteries of the heart," you say. "A very natural thing," I say. The first woman does not love her husband; the second loves her lover. This is another essential difference between man's and woman's loves: man wants to be loved; woman wants, above all, to love. The sentiment which burns in her is more active, more expansive than in man. Little she demands of her companion, because she is too rich and her affection is too strong to need the support of self-esteem to fight the battles of life. Certain it is that perfect love is the sum of these two most beautiful things, "I love—I am loved"; but often woman is satisfied when able to exclaim, "I love," while man needs only to expand his chest and say, "I am loved."
Do not ask woman why she loves. She can love such ugly, poor, deformed creatures as to astonish and horrify us. If that creature can only be hers, she will know how to adorn him with the flowers of imagination, illumine him with the brilliant light which comes from her heart. When woman loves she almost never doubts of being loved. Has Cæsar ever doubted of winning a battle? Has Napoleon ever doubted of being immortal? So it is with woman's love; she will creep like a reptile at the feet of her companion, or roar like a lion which wants what it wants; she will be a pet rabbit caressed in the bosom of a child, or an eagle that carries aloft the prey in its claws; but her love will be reciprocated. The ardent faith of the neophyte, the proud faith of infallibility, the immeasurable arrogance of the fortunate conqueror, are virtues that are more frequently found in woman's loves, more rarely in man's.
In order to love, woman needs only find talent, strength and even crime in the man she wants to have for herself; she can love the ugliest, most wicked, most deformed of men. She elevates every man she touches; she believes she can heat even the ice. Man loves the beautiful above all and pardons everything else; man often lowers even the highest loves. Woman carries even luxuriousness aloft into the big regions of sentiment; man lowers even affection into the mire of lasciviousness. Pardon my cynical phrase, but do not reject it, because it is too true: man in his loves is more of a brute than of an angel; woman is more of an angel than of a human being.
An essay on the comparative psychology of love cannot be written unless based upon a complete physiology of the two sexes. Every thought, every word, every gesture of man or woman in love receives the imprint of the sex; and when the characters are inverted a most disgusting spectacle takes place and we behold a caricature, a monster, or even a crime. At times, however, women of manly inclinations love manly, and men of docile disposition manifest in their loves sublime tenderness, softness and sentiments which should be found in woman only. We are again in the domain of pathology, but the psychical forms may, from the unusual combination of figures and strange coloring, derive an esthetic element which astonishes us and invites us to meditation.
However variform the sexual elements of love may be, our modern civilization is stained by a most heinous sin because we allow woman, who is the true and great priestess of love, but a small tribute and a trivial part. We have for ourselves ambition, glory, science, the morbid thirst for gain; we have granted to man all the energies of sentiment, all the conquests of genius, all the victories of passion; to woman we have refused every nourishment of heart and thought, representing to her that she must only love. After having robbed her of nearly every field of human activity, we have left the garden of love to her as her only possession, her only solace. And when this poor prisoner, with all the ardent curiosity of her nature, wished to pick the flowers and the scented herbs of her garden, when she proceeded to cultivate the garden in her own way, we interfered there, too, setting up the posters of our restrictive regulations and erecting the fences of our laws: "That flower-bed is reserved; that flower must not be picked. No thoroughfare." The selection of the plants to cultivate must also be made by us,—by us, who possess the orchard and the field, the meadow and the forest, the ice-fields of the Alps and the water of the ocean. Thus we have a woman slave who murmurs and conspires against us; thus we have made sterile and barren the garden where a proud and noble lady would have splendidly received us, where we could rest from our glorious labors; thus, instead of being welcomed by a lady of our station, in gilded halls, brilliantly decorated with gems, we have a woman prisoner or slave who reclines her head on our knees and weeps. We have measured the bread and wine of her life as the jailer does with the thief; and, tyrants in love as well, we have kept the lion's share both in voluptuousness and in the free choice of the sovereign affection. But every injustice must be paid for, just as the equilibrium is reëstablished every time it has been disturbed; and the continual deceptions, only too well justified, of our slaves, seraglio conspiracies and palace plots, are every day evidence that we erect upon a false foundation the edifice of family, and loudly proclaim that it will soon be necessary to give woman what belongs to her, the free choice of loves, the equality of rights in the affections as well as in the family.