Love, being the most powerful known agitator of human elements, stirs up the slime which is found in the noblest natures, while in men kneaded with mire it becomes the greatest coefficient of vice and crime. Love, like all the other sentiments, has a pathology of its own and a superior one, because it extends its sphere of action into a larger field and has more powerful needs to satisfy. The man who would not be capable of baseness even though dying of hunger, even when about to lose all that he holds most dear, can compromise with conscience where there is a question of love, and many, many blemishes stain the textures of the noblest and loftiest natures. Love wants to possess us with our hands and feet bound, to have us in its possession, as the Jesuits wish to have their neophytes perinde ac cadaver.70 This is an inexhaustible source of degradation and crime.
The degradations of love are as innumerable as the sands of the sea, and are as many as love’s delights; they are of every magnitude, and can adapt themselves to every degree of human baseness. It seems to me, however, that in a general study of physiology they can be reduced to two principal forms, impotency and prostitution.
Impotency is not only a disease that should receive the attention of the physician and the hygienist, it is not only a case for the legislator, but a moral degradation that must be thoroughly studied by the psychologist who seeks to trace the natural story of love.
In the simplest organism of the inferior animal, every desire of love ceases when age, disease, or a wound has exhausted every energy of the genital organs. In man, on the contrary, the most irresistible and beastly wants are so complicated with the psychical elements of the moral and intellectual world as to survive the organic disease. The innocent man loves before he is conscious of his manhood, and a woman can die of love and yet know nothing of the existence of the womb. It is very true that in the perfect eunuch every amorous note is silent, or, if we behold the phantoms of a strange lasciviousness wandering here and there, they are spectres that belong to the limbo of transcendent pathology. These poor pariahs of nature are, however, very rare; while our rickety civilization fabricates by hundreds the semi-eunuchs who fill with cuckold ornaments the sanctuary of the family and the low world of wandering loves. The statistics, fortunately, cannot give the exact number of these ‘semi-men’ and consign them to the inexorable files; it is enough for us to know that they are much more numerous than feminine virtue and patience can tolerate.
True love is not all sentiment or thought, but it is also a function of reproductive life, it is also a need of the senses. Martyrs and saints have mutilated themselves and died happy in consequence; but the human majority does not consist of saints and martyrs. Every mutilation of love is a disgrace and the most fecund generator of many other minor degradations. In the chaste and fresh dawn of youth, many a woman has consented unknowingly to an infamous agreement in which a man offered her a great name, great riches in exchange for a ‘yes.’ The wretched man loved her, desired her, but he could not possess her as nature commanded man to possess woman, he wished to own the temple without having the right to enter. Sometimes the eunuch confessed his shame before betrayal, and the innocent maiden did not understand and accepted the contract. Who does not believe himself a hero or a martyr at this age? And the eunuch embraced the precious booty, inundated it with sterile kisses, and endeavoured to warm it with his impotent caresses; and the marble statue of adolescent virginity trembled with new and incomprehensible emotions. Later on the virgin perceived that she was a woman, that she was one in vain, and love seized virtue, ruined it, notwithstanding its clamours, and the agreement sworn to in good faith was cancelled by the omnipotence of the affections. How many domestic misfortunes, what a fruitful sprinkling of bastards, how many brigands spring forth from this filthy source!
Real eunuchs, half eunuchs, quarter eunuchs, do not hope to be loved by a woman on whom you have imposed an infamous contract; no virtue is sufficient, no oath can resist the sacred laws of love: nothing is stronger than nature. And if you have found a heroine, why make of her a martyr? Do you want to be the executioner of her whom you say you love? And you, generous women, noble women, who can elevate to the highest regions even the basest passions, do not consent to an agreement that requires a mutilation of love. You, teachers of every kind of sacrifice, think to make happy an outcast of nature; you impose upon yourselves, smiling perhaps, the sublime mission of redeeming a desperate creature; but I assure you neither virtue, sacrifice, nor heroism can stifle that formidable cry of the universe of the living that wants you to be spouse and mother. While the martyr, with the palm of sacrifice clutched tightly in her hand, will try to smile, a cruel spasm of the viscera will say to her, ‘You, Eve and daughter of Eve, will become a mother only by means of a crime; you will enter the sanctuary of sanctuaries, the tabernacle of matrimony through the door of domestic treachery.’
No, love is not all senses and lust; sentiment can pervade it to such an extent as to conceal voluptuousness in the most secret of hidden recesses. No, woman can be happy without voluptuousness, provided she feels herself loved; but she wishes to and should love ‘a man.’ I appeal to all the daughters of Eve, and, in order to be spared a blush, they reply with a nod of the head and without moving their lips: is it not true that they would prefer a hundred times to be loved by a ‘real man,’ even with a vow of chastity, rather than to be profaned and gorged with lust by the hands of a eunuch? Is it not true that they want to lean on that strong column called an honourable man? And certainly he is not a man, who, having lost his manhood, presumes to possess a woman and be loved by her.
The semi-men who at forty, at fifty years of age aspire to become the head of a family, after having trailed the half of their virility through the lasciviousness of prostitution and the gastronomy of the erotic kitchen, never suppose that lechery can take the place of true love in a woman. They may prostitute their spouse, but they can never make her love them deeply and seriously. They are called upon by the inexorable laws of nature to give the largest contingent to predestined husbands.
When impotency falls like a thunderbolt on the head of two happy lovers, it is only a disease, it is a misfortune that concerns the physician and the pharmacist; but when it precedes love, it is a baseness, a degradation, an infamy. The honest man never attempts to conceal it, to justify it; he either courageously renounces love, which is something that does not concern him, or he exposes the sore and invokes the aid of the surgeon. He becomes a man again, and then sees if he can be a lover and husband; he cures the flesh, and then sees if he can aspire to the delights of sentiment. Before he becomes a farmer he possesses some land.
The complicated mechanism of our social organism, in the same manner that it offers to the thirst of ardent youth voluptuousness without love, imposes on many lovers, with more cruel amputation, love without voluptuousness; two chief sources of the thousand sorrows that human society prepares for those who love: ‘voluptuousness minus love,’ that is, all the shame and degradation of prostitution; ‘love minus voluptuousness,’ namely, all the tortures of enforced chastity. Between these two hells the enamoured youth remains a long time suspended, until, in order to survive, he ships lechery and fancy in a gloomy old barge and away he flees with them to hide among the cane reeds and marshes of self-abuse – greatest of the degradations of love and which occupies a convenient place between impotency and prostitution. Yes, as man should enjoy the Olympus of love, he should also submit to its degradations. He is an animal that prostitutes himself and makes love without the female; he is an animal that buys and sells voluptuousness or fabricates it for himself in the familiar shell of the basest egotism. Man, in love, is monogamous and polygamous. How rich in resources, how multiform in loves!
In the book which I will dedicate to the hygiene of love this problem will be thoroughly studied; here I will indicate only what concerns the physiology of sentiment. It is sad to say, but true: our modern society has rendered love so difficult to many unhappy creatures as to make them pass under the Caudine Forks71 of this cruel dilemma: either to buy voluptuousness and with it counterfeit love, or in the mire of lasciviousness to dream of love. In one way or the other we are condemned to be counterfeiters, and to blush before ourselves at the manner in which we satisfy the most powerful of human needs.
Self-abuse is not only a sin of hygiene which destroys health and vigour, but also a moral offence and the poison of happiness. He who is frequently obliged to blush and who repeatedly falls again into the same crime tarnishes daily the limpid purity of his own dignity; weakens daily the strong spring of virile intentions; and daily makes himself more cowardly for all the battles of life. While he blushes for himself and curses himself and the love that condemns him to a daily abasement, he blushes more than ever in the presence of woman, of whom he does not feel worthy and of whom at each fall he feels less worthy. He poisons the wave of love in its first sources, and even when later on he succeeds in loving, he has spoiled the purity of his tastes, of his aspirations, and in the arms of a woman who loves him he complains of the solitary twinges of a diseased voluptuousness resembling in everything the one who, having burned his mouth with the pungent aromas of the pipe and brandy, can no longer relish the perfumes of the pineapple and strawberry.
Love is the greatest of conquests, the sweetest of delights, it is the joy of joys; to renounce it in order to supplant it with degradation is worse than a crime, it is an infamy. Better a hundred times chastity with its sublime tortures; better a hundred times prostitution with its mire. True and complete love is the splendid banquet under the fragrant trees of a garden, among the harmonies of music and the merry badinage of friends: solitary love is the furtive meal of a bone gnawed in the dark and taken from the fetidness of a dunghill.
Prostitution is, after self-abuse, the greatest degradation of love, and, what is worse – it should be said at once – in modern society it is a necessary degradation. Tibullus hurls at it a splendid malediction:
Jam tua qui Venerem docuisti vendere primus
Quisquis es, infelix urgeat ossa lapis.72
This imprecation, repeated by all moralists of every age, could not prevent for one day alone the sale of love, and universal experience demonstrates that St Augustine was a sound philosopher when he wrote, ‘Aufer meretrices de rebus humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus; constitue matronarurm loco, labe ac dedecore dehonestaveris.’73 If St Augustine had written but this sentence alone, I would proclaim him a thorough psychologist; in a few words he has indicated all the phases of the tremendous problem, he has given a lesson of toleration to the intolerant, a lesson of social science to economists, and today, after so many centuries, his words are as true, profound, inexorable as when he pronounced them to a world so different to ours. Today Alfieri also, in his memoirs, speaking of woman, did not blush to write, ‘As the health of my soul had become again a thousand times dearer to me than that of the body, I endeavoured and succeeded in my efforts to flee always from the virtuous.’
Difficult problems are not solved by fleeing from them or concealing them; and yet many physicians, many philosophers attempt to solve the most burning questions of modern society after the manner of a child, who, closing the eyes, thinks to flee from the dog that threatens him. Catholicism has only one method of solving the problem, and the moralist of its school proclaims it to the four winds, now with a touching, pathetic voice, now in angry and threatening tones. The city of Rome, one of the most corrupt in the world, bears a horrible testimony of the fruit derived from public morality. I never wondered at this morality nor at its unavoidable consequences; but I certainly wept when I found physicians allied to Catholic intolerance. To Dr Monlan in Spain and Dr Bergeret in France, who thought to save society by abolishing prostitution, I replied in a few words which I wish to save from the shipwreck of journalism in order to gather them in the shadow of this book.
I have never wondered at finding some philosopher who studies man in Fichte or in Kant without ever having touched the palpitating viscera, or examined a fibre with the microscope; and who advises the legislator to destroy in the social organism with iron and fire that livid and cancerous spot called prostitution; I have never raised the hue and cry of fright or of miracle when I heard the auto-da-fé invoked against cases of toleration by some moralist who has had the singular fortune to be born without the sixth sense; or the still rarer merit of smothering it with the extinguisher of an iron will. But when I hear these intolerant cries from the mouth of a physician, I shake my head diffidently, and with a compassionate voice I ask myself, Is he really a physician? It this moralist perhaps someone who has seen man in a convulsive delirium and, cold and hard, has cut into his flesh on the chilly marble of the anatomical hall? Is he who hurls the anathema at prostitution really the physician, who should serve as a kind link between the legislator, who in man sees only an accused person to punish, and the philanthropist, who in him considers but an unhappy creature to heal and help?
These questions and other similar ones I addressed to the illustrious Spanish physician Monlan, when he proposed to his government the absolute suppression of houses of ill fame; and then I had the pleasure of seeing my poor words printed in the progressive Spanish medical journals. Now I make the same reproach to Dr Bergeret, who, in one of his memoirs on prostitution in the villages and small towns of France, flung an anathema against that caustic wound which civilization has opened in the diseased flesh of the modern social organism; and I, with a sad air, repeat to the French physician a melancholy Tu quoque, fili mi?74
Bergeret lost much time and ink in narrating lurid stories of what occurs in French country towns. And who is ignorant of these stories? We have the same in Italy, in Germany; the same things must happen in every land where there are men who love and suffer, who get drunk and seek out prostitutes; wherever the eye of authority cannot penetrate into the fissures of the social edifice, where lie concealed the lurid parasites that sting and devour us. But from the deploring of the evil results of clandestine prostitution to the destroying of all toleration there is an abyss that must not be crossed by the physician and the legislator on the waxen wings of an Arcadian flight, but over the solid bridge of a wise criticism.
Then, my dear moralist, my dear theorist, you say that men learn vice in houses of ill fame; but without taverns would there be no assassins, without pharmacists would there be no poisoning cases, without manufacturers of gunpowder and bayonets would there be no wars? And who, pray tell me, makes houses of ill fame, taverns, daggers, poisons, firearms, if not man himself, that man whom you ought to be able to understand, if it is true that you also are made of the same dough? Your morality is that of the inquisitor who burns the sinner whom he cannot convert; it is as false and coarse as that of the legislator who has only the prison and the scaffold for the education of the guilty; it is that of the surgeon who barbarously amputates the member that with a wiser and more compassionate science he should preserve. Modern civilization substitutes the school for the inquisitor’s stake; it has more faith in books than in prisons and halters, more confidence in preservative medicine than in the surgeon’s knife. And as long as the social organism is diseased, as long as it is a poor creature saturated with evil humours, with many carious bones and many scrofulous tumors, we kindly cauterize the flesh to keep it alive, to diverge in more ignoble parts those acrid humours that would poison the sources of life, until with the tonic cure of education we succeed in renewing the blood in the veins of this old invalid, and then strengthen flesh, bones, and nerves and make of them something new.
This is why we still preserve the cautery of prostitution, and we wish to guard it with the same jealous care with which a physician keeps a precious sore open which saves the life of a diseased organism; and believe me, worthy ultramontane colleague, that when life will no longer be threatened and the organism will be strengthened, we will heal this wound also, together with many others now bleeding. We will then close the houses of voluptuousness, when every man can have a nest of his own, and when love will not be a crime for anyone.75
Lubbock76 attempted lately an ethnography on prostitution: I will delineate it still more completely in my ‘Pictures of Human Nature;’ here we must occupy ourselves only with the sale of love as it is carried on in our European society.
There are some savage races who do not prostitute themselves: no civilized nation lacks prostitutes; on the contrary, every country, even the most moral, has the refined and very refined, the low and very low. Not in all countries are prostitutes cynically named according to the price they require for their favours, as in Persia, where they are termed the fifty tomans,77 the twenty tomans, etc.; but everywhere a tariff rates the hierarchy of vice and a scale of lechery. Alexander Severus did not wish the money collected from taxes on houses of prostitution to enter the treasury; and Ulpian, his minister, devoted it to the maintenance of the theatres and public health. With youthful sagacity the government of Brazil devotes to the circumspection of vice the money received from the sale of decorations and titles of nobility. In our country a tax is levied on lechery, but they dare not enter it on the state ledgers, and it goes toward increasing the secret funds, destined for the rule or misrule of that pandemonium of our modern society called quaestorship, espionage, electoral broils, etc. Wherever we find women who sell themselves, we also find, to our honour, that society is ashamed of this stain, conceals it, and is silent; and a great mystery of a mephitic air hangs heavily over the simony of love.
A thousand muddy streamlets bear their tribute to prostitution; but the source of all is the same powerful one; in man the brutal appetite for voluptuousness, in woman the frightful want of bread or licentiousness, or of licentiousness and bread at the same time. And unfortunately woman can sell, at all hours, five minutes of voluptuousness without love, without desire; she can sell herself with nausea in her heart and hatred on her lips. And the joy she sells is paid for according to the requirements of beauty, luxury, manner, according to the infamous art with which she feigns pleasure and counterfeits love. Procurers and procuresses hasten to the market of lechery to feel the flesh of the precious victims, to fatten the lean, and to buy the plump at the greatest advantage; and in the shadow of the law they conceal in the lurid or gilded prisons of prostitution that trembling herd of youth and shame. And there are found shut up in the same atmosphere obscure martyrs of love and many affected with nymphomania; victims of hunger and victims of ignorance; fallen angels and filthy demons – all the lowest depths of feminine society.
And there, at the sound of a bell which seems to call a victim to the scaffold; at the creak of a door that seems to open a prison or a galley, a human female must run, smiling, to a man who, without love, without ever having seen her before, for a few pennies or a few francs can make her his own, insult her in what woman holds most sacred, and can make of it dung for his intoxication and tainted drivelling for his most obscene lusts. If at least the money were hers, earned with so much shame; if she could with that filthy lucre, accumulated with so many tears and so much frivolity, dream of a ransom, a real oblivion of the past in distant lands! But no: that money is restored to the mistress of the place, to her who buys and fattens those anonymous chickens of universal lechery; for them suffice the bread that nourishes and the silk gown loaned at illegal interest, which serves as a bait for the blackbirds.
And there, in those dark haunts of licentiousness, man forgets how to love, there he loses daily the holy poetry of the heart and the mysterious quiverings of sentiment, there he prostitutes the most gigantic forces of thought and affection. Without hunger one partakes there of delicious food, without thirst men become intoxicated, without the necessity of overcoming modesty one obtains everything, and money levels all virtue and concedes the wildest polygamy; and there one sees the nude and chaste statue of love trailed in the fetid mire by a merry, tipsy crowd. Behold the love that modern civilization offers to the hundred thousand pariahs who cannot find a straw wherewith to weave the chaste family nest; to all those who cannot make a vow of chastity, and who do not wish to betray an innocent maiden or violate the wife of others.
Our civil society can really be proud of this: the philanthropists with their tearful dirges, the economists with their wise reflections, the legislators with their elaborate codes can all chant in chorus hosanna to the stupendous solution of the problem. Either a starving family or prostitution; children cast on the dunghill of misery or faith betrayed in the house of a friend; degradation or crime. Stupendous dilemmas that crown our society with a wilderness of horns, that sow betrayal, hunger, and corruption everywhere. If the rotten trunk of our modern civilization were not covered by a thick rind, what a horrible spectacle would be presented to us! And when a sincere moralist, when a true philosopher attempts to split the bark, and through a little fissure would show us the thorough rottenness, we flee appalled, raising the hue and cry of sacrilege and impudence.
There where modern society is pitifully and modestly wise is when, although cursing prostitution, it tolerates and oversees it as a senile wound that preserves the old social organism from a deadly corruption. And we should do likewise, until civil progress will have conceded to all men a woman and a nest; until progressive education will have given many to understand and enjoy the holy delights of chastity. As we are constituted at present, prostitution, with its degradation, infamy, and gangrene, is a hundred times preferable to the proletarians who abandon their offspring on the public roads; a hundred times better the purchased voluptuousness, than domestic treachery, habitual adultery, and matrimony made the illicit trade of capital and the friendly shadow of polygamy; a hundred times better voluptuousness cruelly wrenched away from love, than friendship betrayed and love contaminated in the sanctuary of the family, and all society saturated with the cancerous sap of false virtue and profound lechery that kills it slowly but surely.
In this country the government should handle prostitution as a malady to be treated, not because there is any hope of cure, but because society owes to every sick person a physician and a bed. It should not be permitted to spread, to parade its lurid sores, to cover itself with tinsel and false gems; but it should be pitifully guarded as in a hospital, so that it may awaken in the passerby compassion instead of lechery. If some people, cynically audacious, write on certain houses, ‘Here is enjoyment,’ I would write these more appropriate words: ‘Here is weeping, and here the healthy become diseased.’
And while the state watches and guards, writers and teachers should raise the level of general culture and teach the elect the paradise of chastity, which contains a treasure of delights for the future (that the libertine will never be able to understand) and preserves for true love, which all may hope to attain, the infinite joys of a virgin voluptuousness. And every one of us should teach men that prostitution, even in extreme cases, should be but a question of hygiene, and can never be substituted for or united to true love. The sale of love should neither be proclaimed as a feast of the human family nor officially suppressed, because then it overflows all the paths of society; it should be tolerated and pitied, as we tolerate and pity many other maladies of our social organism.
To reach this sublime goal, to at least hope to attain it, we must above all scrape off the hundred coats of hypocrisy of modern love; we must not permit our children to learn love as a crime in the houses of vice, but immediately, at the first dawn of youth, they should be taught that it is a sublime delight conceded to the good and excellent, and must be attained in the same manner as glory and riches. No, the chambermaid or the prostitute should not be the first mistress of love; she should be a modest and pious maiden, a woman who teaches us love before voluptuousness, who teaches us to be chaste in the desire to possess her some day. I dare to suppose that this, my poor Physiology of Love, may be read by a youth and contribute to his virtue. Today, while we do not even permit a maiden to direct her gaze to a sympathetic youth, and to our sons, already men, we do not concede the right to desire and to love, the innocence which we think to guard with an Arcadian and ridiculous rigour plunges into the mire of domestic concubinage, solitary lasciviousness, corrupted prostitution.
We conceal and with silence think to suppress the passions and suffocate desire; but we have concealed too much and have been silent too long. In the most reserved country in the world, England, one of the most honest and wisest physicians of London published a book that has already reached the ninth edition, in which he frankly dared to assert that free love, without fecundation, is the only remedy against the proteiform corruption that invades modern society, on account of the impossibility which the majority find of morally satisfying one of the most powerful needs. I do not agree with the English physician, who wrote anonymously in order not to offend the delicate susceptibility of those dear to him; but in the perusal of the book I stop in sad surprise, as one stretches the ear at the sound of the tocsin. When in England they can write such a book and devour nine editions; when an honest physician can calmly discuss preventive intercourse; when Malthus finds so ardent and eloquent a commentator, who brings his theory from the field of economy into that of morality, hygiene, and even religion, I must affirm that society is thoroughly diseased, and should be cured.
Yes, modern society, which, tainted with so much prostitution and adultery, daily proclaims itself monogamous and is largely polygamous, demands a physician to cure its sores, to cleanse it from all degradation, to concede it loves more free and virtuous, at least less deformed with mire and lies. And this physician should have a morality less false and less exacting, but at the same time more exalted, because more human; it should be a morality that teaches us never to separate voluptuousness from love; that teaches us chastity as the most beautiful and holiest of joys, as the most watchful guardian of true love.
Even today the elect never resort to prostitution themselves, because they love, and because, having once entered the paradise of love, they are too reluctant to descend to the mire of the simony of voluptuousness. The few elect should exert themselves with all their strength so that the masses too may elevate themselves to the high spheres in which they dwell, where, as the air they breathe is purer, they also cull more beautiful flowers.