Human beings of a low order or of a simple nature do not observe in themselves the rising of the energy of that new sentiment called love, until the development of the germinative glands has marked in them the character of sex. On the contrary, in rich and powerful natures, many years before sex has imprinted its indelible mark on the organism, a vague, mysterious, and modest sympathy attracts the little boy to the little girl. There where the sun must rise in the boundless azure of the skies, one notices a rosy tint scarcely delineated on the horizon, but which suffices to tell us, ‘It is here that the superior star must shine, the father of all light.’ The sun is ever the most beautiful among all the lovely things of the heavens, but I have studied with a warm and constant affection, I have watched with religious attention the first rays of that other sun which we are now studying in this book. They appear without being invited by the precocious corruption of books and surroundings; they rise spontaneously in the heart of the most unconscious innocence; they shine like the serene and tranquil rays of a light that later will be ardent and bewitching; they appear and disappear like lightning flashes which noiselessly illuminate the clouds and then leave them darker than before. It is a coarse, vulgar malignity to assert that no child is ignorant of the secrets of love. Childhood innocence is truer, more sincere, deeper than is supposed, and it holds out limpid and adamantine even when splashed with the mud of social corruption. The rosy lips of a child can repeat, with a look of lascivious malice, a jest learned at home from a servant or from a libertine, but that filth does not penetrate the crystalline nature of the child, and the spray of a fountain will suffice to wash away the dirt. It is the custom with the malicious to doubt the innocence of others, as it is the practice of the wicked to deny all virtue.
In the noisy and turbulent games which form the delight of the first period of life, all at once a little boy distinguishes a little girl among a hundred, a thousand; and an instantaneous sympathy weaves the rosy knot of a nameless affection, of an innocent love unconscious in itself, which could seem at the same time the caricature and the miniature of a sublime picture. I remember having seen an angelic little creature, blond as an ear of corn and rosy as the dawn, throw her arms around the neck of a little fellow, stern as a brigand and dark as a pirate. She covered him with kisses, but he scorned the fondling and repulsed her angrily; and she tried to tell him that she loved him very much, that she wanted to make him her little spouse. A world reversed! – a microscopic scene of a chaste Joseph who knew not woman and a Lilliputian woman who, in the innocent ardour of a childish embrace, seemed to be the wife of Potiphar,25 though in reality an angel!
However, these instantaneous movements of affection between two children of a different sex sometimes conceal a real passion which has proud jealousies, tears, sighs, delirious joys, a history, a future!
Young girls, whom a kind or a cruel nature destined to arouse at every step through life a desire and a sigh, are often ignorant of the fact that among the multitude of their adorers there are also boys who kiss in secret the flowers that have fallen from their bosoms; who furtively and mysteriously, like domestic thieves, enter the little room that shelters their angel to kiss the bed, to kneel upon the carpet where rest the feet of that woman whom they already distinguish above all other creatures in the world, whom they dare to place on a level with their mother. And how often, while running her fingers through the hair of a boy who lays his head upon her lap, a woman is unconscious that there is a little heart that beats loudly, loudly at the touch of that caress; that when the child raises his curly head his face is not flushed from congestion, but burning with a fire of which he himself is unconscious – love.
These rosy phantoms, which gild some of the most fruitful hours of our child-life, seem to last as long as the shades of morning; and certainly the battles of youth often make us forget them. And many of slippery memory and sceptical heart, hearing them mentioned, have only words of contempt and gestures of compassion for what they are pleased to term childish lullabies to be relegated among the horrors of witchcraft and the caresses of nurses. Yet how often these flying phantoms announce the storms of the future, reveal a nature deeply enamoured, and warp the first threads of a tissue of delirious joys and torments! Some privileged mortal may, on his deathbed, press the hand of the only one he has ever loved, whom he loved even as a child before he knew she was a woman. The trembling lip of the dying man can reunite the last kiss of life with the first hearty kiss imprinted on the downy cheek of a ten-year-old girl. And without reaching this lofty sphere of an ideal too far removed from us, how often after a long life, callous from the tortures of a hundred passions, having lost all faith and love, in the first shades of evening a last rosy flash of sunset awakens a dear memory of many buried years, and the heart of an old man races, while a tear courses down his wrinkled cheek! In front of the weary eyes there has passed a little straw hat with two blue streamers, but in the depths of that heart what an abyss has been opened for an instant! In the night of the past a most limpid ray of light has illuminated a picture all light, all beauty – an antique cameo seen under the pick of the excavator among the dust and rubbish! And that picture was a childish love, a flower uprooted by the miry torrents of a storm, but preserved by the friendly hand of memory, which is not always cruel and ungrateful.
If you ask the child-man why he loves a little girl, he will run off bashfully; if you question the little girl, her face will become suffused with blushes. They love… and they know not the reason why! Ask a precious rosebud why it bloomed in March instead of awaiting the warm and voluptuous zephyrs of May; ask a July cyclamen why it did not await the cool breezes of September to perfume the mossy bed in which it has made its nest… and they know not the reason why! In passionate men the first rays of love appear sooner because they long to yield the flowers to ripe and impatient nature, and an entire life will be for them too short a day to satisfy the intense thirst of love which consumes them. They love soon because they love much – as men of genius at ten years of age often reflect on that which the masses will never think of at thirty.
And why, boy, do you prefer that little girl to all the others? And why, pretty child, do you permit yourself to be kissed only by that dark little fellow? Because that little girl differs from all the others; because that dark little fellow is not like any of the other boys. Love, from its first and more confused appearance, is election, a deep and irresistible sympathy of different natures, the recomposition of analysed forces, the equilibrium of opposites, the complement of disunited things; it is the harmony of harmonies; the most gigantic, the most prepotent of the affinities of attraction!
With the exception of those natures more powerful in love, this sentiment, in men of the lower classes, rises when a new want springs up under the wand of that magical transformer – puberty. It is then that on the smooth, round, pubescent surface of the infantile nature a deep crevice is formed, a void that woman alone can fill; it is then that that round, smooth fruit called a ‘little girl’ also sheds its childish skin, revealing the soft and juicy pulp of the fruit which was enclosed therein. It is then that from every accentuated muscle of the virile organism, from every accent of his strengthened voice, from every hair that has rendered his flesh bristly, there rises a powerful cry which demands in the loudest voice, A woman! And from every curve of the child become a woman, from every proud toss of the head, from every pore of the young girl now a crater of warm desires, arises a cry which demands, A man!
And innocence and ignorance linked to the arm of the boy and girl urge them to flee far, far away, through the flower beds of the garden, through the cool fragrant woods, up, up the steep mountain side. On, on they run, until they are dazed, wearied, in order to deafen the ear to that incessant cry, A man! A woman! And they play and fool impetuously to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are the same as they were yesterday; they laugh and weep without cause to deceive themselves and others, to tell them that they are more than ever children beguiled by the last impressions; but all in vain. In play and in chase, through the flower beds of the garden and among the bushes of the woods, the new demon does not abandon them, but shouts continually, mockingly into their ears the same words, A man! A woman! Night comes on and the muscles, weary from many playful battles, prepare them for a profound sleep in which unmindful childhood seems to sink into a sea of forgetfulness; but in that sleep unusual larvae of naked phantoms, ah! too naked, put to flight innocence and ignorance; and strange torments, voluptuous pains which seem tearful joys, disturb, confuse them, cause their hearts to palpitate. And the innocent girl, bathed in perspiration and tears, seats herself on the virginal couch and strokes her abundant hair dishevelled from the dreams of the night, and asks herself, terrified: ‘What sin have I committed? Mamma, mamma mia, where are you?’ After a weary, restless night she runs to her mother, complains of feeling ill, seriously ill, though she has no pain! And to the affection that smiles or consoles her, she responds with unusual tears, unreasonable impatience, with a world of new tastes, new desires, strangest caprices. And how many painless, unreasonable tears, how many storms in a serene sky, how many romances created by fancy in an hour, and overturned in one moment by a mad contempt! How many caresses bestowed on a lapdog that has never been loved, how many kisses given to a canary that has never been caressed, how often the curly hair of a little brother is toyed with, and how many passionate glances cast at the eyes and limbs of a St John the Baptist, in the church during the hours of devotion! How much sudden enthusiasm and sudden dejection, how many convulsions of the heart, what a pandemonium of fancies!
The passage over the fatal bridge that separates adolescence from youth is one of those epochs most freighted with anguish, most blithe with convulsive joys, and consequently I term it the hysterical period of life. I shall illustrate it some day, perhaps, in a work which I am preparing on the age of man. For the present it will suffice to mark with a flourish of the pen how the necessity of love announces itself in most men. And if I have hitherto referred principally to woman, it is because she, more modest, more reserved, and a hundred times more in need of love, feels more deeply the shudder which announces to her the approach of the new god; and being more innocent than we are, she is ignorant of his nature – more timid, she has a greater fear of him. Nature has conceded base resources to man almost unknown to woman, and too often precocious vice makes him acquainted with voluptuousness before love. If he is modest, virtuous, and impassioned, he also feels the same raging tumult stirring his viscera, and demands of nature in wrathful accents and plaintive lamentation, A woman!
To this cry responds, alas! too often, the first comer. It is impossible for certain natures to long resist the tortures of a robust and vigorous chastity; the frail human shell would go to pieces if it persisted in imprisoning an accumulation of forces, all gigantic, all fresh, all ready for the battle. First love is not slow in announcing itself, and if the neophyte who appears on the horizon lacks more than two-thirds of the desired virtues, love is the magician to create them and to transform a worm into a god.
The maiden in her dreams, as she gazed at the pictures in the church and those on the domestic walls, thought only of a winged man with nothing of earthly material save two lips to imprint on hers a kiss. The object desired was an angel all love and ether, who sheltered beneath his massive wings the soul of the young girl and bore it away through heavenly space to a golden region, all light and warmth. The tremor of the wings and a velvety kiss were all the luxury that the chaste virgin permitted in her dream; and beyond that, an obscure and infinite mystery of which she knew neither the name, the confines, nor the form. Instead of this angel there appears before her a man in trousers, with moustaches, who smokes excessively and betrays women; perhaps his hair is already grey, he may be a husband and father – but he is a man!
And the youth too has dreamed of his angel. She should have been all eyes, all hair; with a slender figure, feet to scarcely touch the ground, an eternal smile wreathed in an aureole of light, a soul ardent as fire, and an innocence pure as the snow that caps the summit of the Jungfrau.26 And instead, she who wakes him from the dream of the night is a saucy fat chambermaid, whose firm accentuated curves only intimate that she is very feminine; instead of wings she has two sinewy arms and two hands hardened from the use of the pot and broom; and she pounds the floor with wooden shoes that seem to be tipped with iron – but she is a woman!
Anything satisfies first love, which is, like the hunger of a million, to be satisfied with a penny’s worth of bread. How vulgar is the object of that young girl’s thoughts! A heart of a grocer in the body of a porter! But he is pallid, and the dullness of his gaze seems to her sentimental languor; he is ill, and his illness appears poetic; he is robust, and for her he is the god of strength; he is arrogant, but she thinks him passionate; he is an egotist, and so much the better, for he will love but her, who alone knows how to make him happy. How much poetry that ardent youth has wafted to the skies composing hymns to the luxurious bust of a strong peasant woman! How many elegies has he indited to the sky-blue paleness of a chlorotic workingwoman! Woe to him if seduction unites itself to all this tissue of lies with which first love too often weaves its nest! Woe if to the inexperienced maiden the aged libertine knows how to say in accents acquired from long practice in the art, ‘I love you!’ Woe if the lascivious old woman, quelling the appetite with unripe fruit, understands how to warm the innocent youth at the fire of new voluptuousness! Then the fire is lighted, the flames arise, and the first object loved is placed on the altar, choruses of eternal oaths chanted to it, perfumed by the incense of the maddest, most licentious idolatry.
First love does not always originate so basely, but it often only too closely resembles these first loves which I am expounding. Let us be sincere from the very first steps in our studies, for hypocrisy is the moth that in modern society notches and corrodes the highest and strongest trees in the garden of life. The original sin of love unveils itself to us with its first infant-cry, and even when we are obliged to use all the artifices of galvanoplasty27 to gild our idol, when the bellows of fancy labour to warm up first love, our very first utterance is a lie: ‘I love you above everything in this world; I will love you forever. You are my first love, and we can love but once.’ And a second oath responds to the first, perhaps more sacred, more ardent, and in a kiss that is often the sum of two lies the first hypocrisy is sealed, which to the last generation of the loves of those two creatures will imprint an everlasting mark on all the expressions of affection, on all the deliriums of the heart.
Be sincere in the first kiss if you wish love to be the chief joy of life and not an illicit trade of voluptuous lies. Yes, first love is yours, but because it is the first, it is neither true, just, nor natural that it should be the great, the one, the only love. Do not swear falsely, do not perjure yourself before you know what truth is. To the eternity of your oaths there will reply with a jesting smile the indifference of tomorrow and the repentance of the day after tomorrow. Before you have really loved you will sing in every key that virtue does not exist, that love is a dream; and, young and old at once, you will deny the existence of a god whose temple you have never seen. Abandoned by a chambermaid who into your fresh robust youth steeped the heat of her members inflamed by long-standing lasciviousness, you will cry, ‘Treachery!’ and mistake lechery for love; hitched for a day to the wagon of a coquette, you will curse the betrayed faith, if through caprice the silken thread was broken, which bound you together with many other slaves of the triumph: liars yourselves, you say that love is a lie!
You are two: a man and a woman, you say that you love each other, and, perhaps, for both it is first love. Well then, during the first days do not swear eternal fidelity if you yet value honour and if perjury still terrifies you. First love is rarely true love, as the first book of an author is rarely the true expression of his genius. We may be weak either from excessive youth or from advanced age, and love – the one, first, and only, like many other dogmatic forms which delight so much that hypocritical biped called man – has made more victims in modern society than many crimes and maladies of the body and mind. If it is your first love, so much the better. With hands chastely clasped and lips modestly united, do not pronounce any other words but these: ‘Let us love each other!’ If you are of the few and happy mortals who love but once; if you are among the rare exceptions who, in the first man or the first woman, find the angel seen in the first dreams of youth, then you are a thousand times blessed. The fidelity of the future will cement for life the virtue of your compact. If the God of the Church be really seated eternally on his gilded throne and gazing down with undying patience on the men who scrape the crust of our planet, how often must he not laugh in his sleeve as he listens to the strange abuse of oaths and the miserable ill-use that lovers make of eternity! And, perhaps, that smile comforts him in the constant disgust that he alone must submit to the fatal condemnation of eternity. As for me, if the progressive growth of a true and healthy democracy should cancel from judicial institutions the form of oath, I would wish that the man and woman who love each other should never swear to it. A vow less and an extra caress, what delight! An eternity less, and a prolonged kiss – what voluptuousness! Nor should modest and chosen souls throw aside my book, indignant at the cynicism of my advice. The reading of other pages will show them that no one more than myself intends to bear love on high to the most serene regions of the ideal, and that as far as sentiment can reach, I too feel the strength to follow. The triple and firm rind of hypocrisy that from the time of our swaddling clothes entangles us, the Arcadian varnish which makes us smooth and brilliant scarcely ever permit us to see the true nature of things, and in love we are all counterfeiters. The greatest liberty, the greatest sincerity can alone cure us of this malady which, more than national, is civil; its virus is absorbed by every race, every social class; it spares not the highest and strongest natures; it is incarnate in every fibre of our hearts, in the framework of every one of our institutions.
Which are the true sources of love? Which are the ways that lead to the sacred temple? There must be an only source, an only road, but too many are they who press and crush to enter there where all await the greatest joy, for not all enter by the great highway of nature, but through secret gates and oblique paths reach the centre; and they are unhappy because the original sin of their loves condemns them to a dangerous life sown with discomforts and bitterness.
All the natural fountainheads of true love are summed up in one alone. They are drops which slowly distil in the depths of our viscera, and in these they couple and form rivulets and streams that, in turn, write in the channel of our veins until they gush forth in the one hot, trembling wave of sympathy.
Sympathy is the true and only source of love. Sympathy, most beautiful among all the lovely words of human speech! To suffer together – melancholy predictions of life experienced in two; but, better still, to feel, laugh, and weep together! Two organisms, one sense; two exterior worlds, but which unite in one centre; two nerves that by diverse ways bear various sensations, but which interweave and run parallel in one heart alone. One sees, gazes, desires: a spark that shoots forth from the contact of two desires; this is the first act of love. Two solitary wheels in the desert of waters plough the deep, unknown to each other; the wind impels one toward the other; a shiver of sympathy runs through the sails and cordage and causes them to creak; they feel themselves pressed by a common need, and throw out a rope that unites them. From that moment they plough the same waters, expose themselves to the same dangers, and long to reach the same shore.
The most rapid and ardent sympathies arise from the admiration of form, that is to say, the sentiment of the beautiful, which is satisfied in the object desired and loved. Among the definitions of love that Tasso was pleased to discuss there are three which express and delineate this idea: ‘Love is the desire of beauty. Love is the immoderate desire of cohabitation for satisfaction by those who covet particular beauty. Love is the union of beauty for satisfaction.’ And, in fact, what is love if not the selection of the better form in order to perpetuate it? What is love if not the choice of the best in order to triumph over the mediocre – a choice of youth and strength in order to survive the old and weak elements! Woman, the custodian of seeds, vestal of life, should be more beautiful than we, and in her, man loves the figure above all other things. Mediocre forms can – elevated by a gigantic genius and an impassioned heart – still excite ardent passions, but these are always medicated sympathies. Where, then, a real deformity appears, love is dead, or it exists as a prodigy of heroism, or an aesthetic malady.
Woman too is immediately carried away by the beauty of the virile form, and can love a man merely because he is handsome; but in her the field of sympathy is extensive, and character and genius seduce her more frequently than they do us. The ugliest men have enjoyed the superhuman voluptuousness of being loved, but in the phases of their character, in the power of their genius, in the pomp of their position they possessed a fascination which, nevertheless, belonged to the world of beauty. Woman contains within herself such a power of transmission of the germinative elements, and such an accumulation of beauty, that she can do without that of her companion; but she likes to feel herself conquered by a superior force, fascinated by something that shines, flashes, thunders.
In love, genius and character exercise very little influence if they do not take the shape of the beautiful, and the aesthetic dominates and governs all amorous phenomena. And this is not enough: even those who seek to place in the loftiest spheres of the ideal world the criterion of their choice, and despise the beautiful as a vulgar fascination of dull and clouded minds, seek unwittingly, unknowingly powers that bear a deep sexual mark. The philosopher, maybe, who boasts of having loved an ugly, intelligent, and sensible woman; but let him sound the depths of his heart, study the sources of his love, and he will find that he admires and loves in his companion qualities essentially feminine: the pliant grace of tenderness, the noble intelligence of the heart, the insuperable shrewdness of affection, or the coquettish ways of her charming and modest personality. In a word, the proud despiser of form was seduced by the lovely feminine phases of character or wit. And woman, when she happens to love an ugly man, is always conquered by dominating talent, dazzling ambition, heroic courage, or the prepotency of some power that bears a deep virile mark. Sex plays too great a part in the economy of life to be stricken from the ledger, and love is too strong a current to be turned and guided between the paper banks of our sophisms and Machiavellian duplicity. If some one is not yet persuaded that beauty is the supreme inciter of every amorous sympathy, let him remember that love is the passion of youth, and youth is always a chosen form of beauty.
Love at first sight is the ideal of the most ardent sympathies, it is the most fortunate combination in the great hazardous games of life. All at once to meet, to admire, to desire, to embrace with a look like a lightning flash – to feel one’s self inundated by another gaze, equally passionate and penetrating, so that one feels himself naked in front of another naked creature, to blush together in the same moment and to feel all at once that two hearts beat louder, and mutely make the sweet confession ‘I love you, and you are mine!’ – all this is a joy, too rare, too perfect, that few have known and few will ever experience.
Very frequently it occurs that the awakened sympathies progress unequally, so that one has already transported man to the highest summits of desire and passion while the other scarcely begins to move itself; the one is in spasms, the other barely vibrates. Even when two loves are called to high and fortunate destinies; even when they will soon flap their robust wings together in blissful space, to woman is reserved a task in love’s intercourse which differs too widely from ours for her to feel with us the same instantaneous and violent emotions. Man says everything with a look; he instantly and proudly acknowledges his defeat. Woman, even under the spell of the most ardent sympathy, lowers her eyelids to shut out the excessive light and summons up all her calmness to defend her heart. The man has already said to the woman a hundred times with the flash of his eye, ‘I love you!’ The woman, trembling, scarcely dares to say, ‘Perhaps I love you!’ And the two happy creatures flee, chase each other until the sympathy of one equals that of the other, until the supreme languor of a long battle dies away in two notes which vibrate in sweetest harmony. They sigh together and say to themselves, ‘I love you!’ while to nature they repeat with a second sigh, ‘I thank you!’
The energies of amorous desire, which the longer they last the more they accumulate, follow the laws of elementary physics that govern forces. The most instantaneous loves are not always the most lasting, and if an unexpected satisfaction follows a sudden desire, love can sometimes resemble a glorious rape rather than a real passion. It is true that love is not a battle but a long war, and when to the first victory there succeed a hundred, a thousand, the fulminating sympathy can also take deep root in our heart and, becoming renewed after every struggle, reach the ideal perfection of coupling intensity with extension, of reflecting at the same time the light of those stars that never set and the lightning flash that ploughs the skies. The most perfect love is a sun that never sets. In ordinary cases, however, love that rises slowly disappears in the same manner; and that of the nature of lightning lasts about as long. Anyhow, a healthy love, well constituted and destined for a prolific existence, should begin with a violent shock that measures the depths from which the warm sympathy flashed. All other benevolent sentiments originate in a manner different from love, whose right it is to be born amid thunder and lightning, as befits the birth of gods or demons. Princes cannot enter the world like the masses; and the prince of the affections cannot come to light by the hands of a fond and intelligent midwife and the domestic care of relatives. Where a coruscation of the heavens and a trembling of earth do not accompany the new love; where nature does not hurl forth a cry of voluptuousness, or of pain – no one can deceive me – a friendship, a benevolence, any kind of a sentiment has sprung into being, but to the newborn I shall certainly not give the holy baptism of love.
And thus, naturally, we have arrived at those frontiers which separate the only legitimate way that leads to the temple, from the oblique, unfrequented paths. Friendship can be a source of love, an excellent cause, but it has always a pathological origin, not a natural, and leads step by step to the worst among the sources of love: gratitude, compassion, vanity, luxury, revenge.
When one has been accustomed to see a woman daily, to talk to her, live perhaps with her without ever calling her by any other name save sister or friend, if some day it seems that we love her, such love resembles those tropical fruits raised in our climate by means of manure and the hothouse. If love be possible between man and woman is an old problem and one that will never be solved, because many give this name to real loves, which, meeting on the threshold of desire, held back by the rigid hands of duty, waver gently and slowly before the temple without ever entering it. It is proper for the sake of delicacy to term these loves friendship. I will certainly not condemn the innocent falsification; but a real, true friendship, with all the specific characteristics that distinguish this serene affection, between man and woman is possible only on one condition: that of making tabula rasa of every sexual mark in the two who have shaken hands. Now the destroying of sex in an individual is a cruel physical and moral mutilation that destroys more than half the man. If friendship joins two eunuchs of this kind, I will say that their affection is not that of man and woman, but of two neutral beings. But as long as it is possible for one to desire the person of the other; as long as the most modest, the most innocent longing may spring up, the friendship becomes love. How many are those moral eunuchs? How many men and women can love without desire? Count them, and then I will be able to tell you how many are the cases, well verified, of friendship without love between man and woman.
However, I wish to be more explicit. Do not suppose that because the problem is difficult I run past it without solving it. Are there in this sublunary world a man and a woman who are always glad to see each other, who love each other, and who have never desired even a kiss from their companion? Yes; now then, those two angels are friends, and I admit the possibility of the psychological phenomenon: friendship between two persons of a different sex.
One can pass from any form of mild benevolence to that of love, and therefore much more easily from friendship, which we have admitted scientifically possible between man and woman. Lasting loves may arise in this way, but they have always a cold surface, a certain lymphatic tint. They require a hydropathic cure and sometimes cod-liver oil, because from the lymphatic state they can also pass to the scrofulous. A common variety of these loves is that which springs from gratitude.
‘Amor che a nullo amato amor perdona,’ sings the poet28 with truth, but on one condition only, that between the two who love each other there be no other difference than in the length of the step; that is to say, one arrives first and the other soon after; otherwise they never meet on the broad road of sympathy. O tutors who believe in the love of a pupil; philanthropists who believe in the love of the orphan benefited by you; old bachelors who believe in the love of the grateful chambermaid, remember that gratitude alone has never generated a legitimate love. It has often produced good and honest children, but they are all bastards. If gratitude takes you by the hand and conducts you over the road of sympathy, it may be a good guide, but nothing more. There are men and women who very much resemble the cold-blooded animals, which take their temperature from the atmosphere that surrounds them but of themselves can generate but little or no heat. Such men and women know not how to love of themselves, and need another love which rains down upon them, absorbs them, saturates them like sweetbreads dipped in wine. Their sympathies are cold and equal for all; they often ask of books and men what love is; they compare the descriptions given them with that which they feel in their hearts, like the naturalist who turns an insect over and over again in his hand, compares it with the chart before him, and finally exclaims: ‘But it really seems to me that this insect is the amor verus29 of the entomologist. Am I also in love, really in love?’ For all these gentlemen, who are much more numerous than is supposed, the verse of the poet is most appropriate. They always love through gratitude or compassion, which is almost the same.
This sweet and mild benevolence – grateful love – must not be confused with that pity which women frequently have for those who love them desperately, and to whom they sometimes concede a compassionate love. Woman is easily moved, she cannot witness suffering with indifference, and she often yields, not through lechery but through pity, to which she frequently unites a legitimate pride in being able to transform a wretched creature into a happy man. And man often speculates on this weakness of Eve, and usually abuses it, ready then to slander her who had made him happy. Man too can love through compassion, but more frequently he gives himself without affection and through pride, as we shall see further on in the course of our studies.
Woman, however, sometimes concedes, together with voluptuousness, also love to him who has wept, sighed, and suffered for her. Compassion is the benevolent chord which vibrates even in the most brutally egotistical natures, and in woman, so rich in affection, it can vibrate until it tortures. This sentiment is of a mild and tender nature in itself, and keeps him who suffers in a state of subjection, so that true equality can never exist between the one who inspires compassion and the one who feels it. This is the essential character of compassion, and even when by long, narrow, thorny paths it guides us to love, the latter feels the influence of its bastard origin. Compassionate loves are all forms of affectionate pity, of benign protection, and lack the highest notes of passion. All in all they are similar to the verses of a would-be poet. The god of fire does not invade them, warm them; they do not know the holy anger of the sibyls, and if they can live long in a mild climate they can still be overthrown by the appearance of the true god who demands his rights – his tributes of blood and heat. The woman who, unfortunately, has not yet experienced other love than that inspired by compassion, can deceive herself into thinking that she loves truly and deeply, but woe to her if a real warm sympathy be awakened in her heart so that she can compare the true love with the false. The tender plant of an affection long guarded by pity falls uprooted by the breaking of a fiery torrent, and the poor creature who really loves for the first time suffers the bitterest pain, the bloodiest struggles between duty and passion, sympathy and love. I know too well that some go so far as to crave love on bended knee; but I would rather be loved for the sake of caprice, revenge, or lechery than compassion.
The woman who loves a man in this way has her foot on his head, and although the pressure of a woman’s little foot may be just as dear as that of her hand, in the face of nature we are guilty of baseness and invert the most elementary laws of the physiology of the sexes. The man who renounces the primacy of conquest is a lion that permits its tail to be cut off, a Samson after the scissors – always a mild form of eunuch. May Dame Fortune preserve you, reader, from all forms of compassionate love!
A still more turbid source of love is vanity. To hear that a woman is very beautiful and chaste, that she has never permitted herself to be loved, is an immediate stimulus to man, who knows his strength and admires the daughters of Eve. And these, in turn, willingly persist in throwing the fish hook at the cold, lonely fish who live in the most obscure depths of solitude and chastity. Hence many distrustful plunges which lead oftener to the conquest of the body than to the dominion of the heart, to trophies of vanity rather than true love. The great lovers who have long since renounced the virtue of sublime love are accustomed to conquer the impressionable solely for vanity’s sake – to bind with amorous chains to their triumphal car a new slave and a new victim. They like to conquer the most eccentric and difficult character, and you see them ardently desirous of giving the first lesson in voluptuousness to the innocent, and subjugating the oldest and craftiest libertine. Together with vanity in this choice of victims there also cooperates the prurient shrub of curiosity, which is one of the strongest threads in the psychological web of woman. A weary palate can be excited by the wild fruit as well as by the sharp pungency of stale cheese; and the gay woman of pleasure is passionately fond of these alternate acid and burning relishes, of this succession of men inexperienced in love and those already consumed by this sentiment; lechery can be carried so far in their natures as to love through pure curiosity for the unknown, excluding lust, which is not always necessary in these pathological tastes.
However, even when vanity alone has brought a man and a woman together, a posthumous sympathy can awaken a real love with healthy members and a long life. Yet it is always a love that resembles the rich man of low birth, the parvenu who can, in the midst of luxury and pleasure and in the most courteous manner, give one a donkey kick. To be born well is ever the first problem of life, and democracy itself will not see the overthrow of the ancient aristocracy until it can boast of legitimate and noble births.
Man, who daily accuses his companion of vanity, manifests oftener than she the most grotesque forms of this sentiment, and in our case we rarely see him renounce the puerile obstinacy of his loves of bastard origin. How often he basely insults the woman who blessed him with love, telling her that he sought her love only to add another trophy to his triumphal chariot! Woman, on the contrary, almost always, even when she desires to be loved through vanity alone, also when she is about to dismiss the servant who has wearied her, gives him a testimonial which makes him happy and persuades him that he pleased for a day, a month, a year the woman who, perhaps, feigned to love him, or loved him indifferently. No man is humiliated in thinking himself the sweet victim of a caprice: all men feel themselves degraded when made the target of a vain speculation. Woman, very frequently, with a gracious shrewdness, feigns ignorance of the fact that she is desired and loved solely for vanity’s sake, and slowly, slowly she makes men love her for herself alone, and, without the hostile enemy perceiving it, succeeds with subtle art in substituting a sincere and ardent passion for the wretched ambition that had inspired the attack and the conquest: one of the thousand proofs that woman surpasses us in sentiment just as we are superiour to her in the strength of genius, one of the proofs that woman always endeavours to elevate even the basest loves, while we so often pass under the pitchfork of voluptuousness even those loves which, like the eagle, are born on the highest rocks of psychology.
Lechery is the prolific mother of the most vulgar loves, and for many this sentiment is only the necessity of drinking at a fountain found to be sweeter than the others. Naked love, without the splendid garments of fancy and of the heart, with the robust flesh which lent it the sentiment of the beautiful washed away, becomes reduced to a skeleton – lust, which for many is all love. What a miserable thing! A practice of lasciviousness! Woman converted into a favourite cup because with it we have long been accustomed to satiate our thirst. And still we have loves that owe their origin to the house of prostitution, or the audacious rape of a moment of unreasonable lust. To have possessed previous to having loved, to have been possessed before having given the kiss of love – what ignominy! What baseness! And yet love is such a magician that at times it can perform the miracle of rising from lechery or the cradle of the brothel. However, I do not wish that any of my readers should become acquainted with love in such a way.
Love born of lust is the most difficult to preserve. Even the most murderous cunning of the art of pleasure blunts its weapons against insurmountable difficulties; and woman, after prodigies of prostitution and lechery of the heart and of the senses, can behold her victims snatched away from her by the first comer. Love can be hot, ardent, a thirst, but the glass that satisfies it is of the most fragile crystal, and can fall from one moment to another shattered into a thousand pieces.
Revenge, which is a form of hate, can with incestuous nuptials become a mother or, better, a stepmother of love. To see one’s self betrayed, to wish to humiliate the guilty one by flinging into his face a new love – here we have the origin of revengeful lovers. The unfortunate paranymph that forms the bait of a degraded passion does not always perceive the insidiousness he loves, and permits himself to be loved, and often amuses those who feign to love him, or who assist indifferently at the unworthy spectacle. Vanity diminishes the vision, and does not permit us to see that, perhaps, in the whirl of a day we have been seen, desired, conquered; and while puffed up with pride we wheel about like a peacock, without perceiving that we are placed upon the stage in order to humiliate and wound him or her who is still more than ever beloved. In some cases we descend so low as to be placed on a level with a mustard cataplasm, or a cupping-glass; the cure – thanks to ourselves – is so quick and perfect, and we are speedily dismissed, like the physician who is paid and saluted impatiently because his services are no longer needed.
These, however, are the most unfortunate cases which belong to the most repulsive pathology of the heart; in other instances, revengeful love, through the virtue of either or both of the lovers, becomes a true sentiment which cures the old wounds and opens great horizons of happiness to the man and woman who had become acquainted in such a strange manner. So then it may be said that he who should be the revengeful executor, he who should be the unconscious minister of the justice of love, becomes instead the chief physician and afterward the lover of the offence; while a new sentiment arises upon the ruins of the old affection.
I certainly do not claim to have explained all the pure and impure sources of love; but I would like to touch upon the most important; I would like to mark with a great flourish of the pen the genealogy of this sentiment. In an analytical work, no matter how much care one takes in order not to detach pertinent things, it is next to impossible to avoid breaking some thread, or destroying something. It frequently occurs that the source of love is not simple but complex, formed by the meeting of several streams, so that it is often difficult to determine whether the newborn be legitimate or a bastard. A slight but sincere sympathy can be associated with great vanity, and the desire for revenge can – fortunately for us – encounter a warm and violent affection. Thus, lechery, vanity, compassion, gratitude can meet at the same time and fecundate a love which later will run pure and limpid in its bed, although its source was a turbulent, muddy stream.
Sometimes one loves another not for himself but because that person resembles a person long loved and, perhaps, already lost. Thus it happens that one loves the daughter after having loved the mother; and there have been instances in which one has loved three successive generations. The excessive disproportion in the age of the lovers – a certain mummy perfume which even the most carefully embalmed bodies exhale – gives to these loves a character that compels me to place them at least on the frontiers that separate physiology from pathology; hence I term them physio-pathological.
The greater the sympathy, the purer and more fervid those loves of mixed origin; and this element alone would suffice to assign them a place in the hierarchical scale of nobility. The influence which the first origin exercises over love is so lasting and so prepotent that frequently affections which are brought into subjection by grave maladies recover all at once at the tender remembrance of such thoughts as ‘You really loved me one day of your life,’ ‘You are mine alone,’ ‘And yet I loved you!’ It often occurs that a man born in the highest circles and of noblest blood descends gradually to the gutter, loses his dignity, his fortune, even his outer garment of education and manners; but if you observe him attentively, you will certainly find in the nobility of some gesture, in the majesty of his accent, in some fine taste the traces of his distinguished origin, surviving after so much shipwreck. And such is well-born love. I have seen passions trailed in the mire of prostitution, tattered and filthy, like velvet rags picked up in the street; I have seen loves sold and bought again, and passed through the hands of a hundred hucksters at the public auction of vice and infamy. But in those poor rags I have always found something which remained intact, and which revealed the ancient and noble origin. With my own eyes I have witnessed fabulous resurrections which seemed miracles, and redemptions that caused me to think of divine intervention and of galley slaves calmed too Arcadian-like in the rose-water bath of our modern philanthropists.
When love begins we may doubt the reality of the passion before our eyes. The heart beats more quickly than usual, and in the serene heavenly space some clouds pass and disappear in the deep azure. Perhaps in the distant fog there is an occasional flash; but will we have a storm or fine weather? If the heart is compelled to respond, it may make the same solemn mistakes as the meteorologists of almanacs or universities. Embryos are all similar, and even today the most powerful microscope cannot distinguish the egg of the lion from that of the rabbit. Love too assumes so many and such varied disguises that we are frequently unable to make a good diagnosis. However, it is always easier to perceive love in our own case than in that of others, notwithstanding that it is much more necessary to our happiness to know that we are loved than to feel conscious of being in love. To distinguish in others the true love from the false, my study of physiology will be of service to you; to explore your own heart, a moderate attention to the phase of your sentiments will suffice.
One truly loves when to the excruciating cry ‘A Man!’ ‘A Woman!’ a friendly voice in the distance replies, ‘Do not weep; I am here.’ One loves when after hearing that voice the cry is silent and the immense void of desire is filled. One truly loves when all at once one pales and blushes at the sound of a name, or the swish of a garment that approaches. One loves when involuntarily one name alone arises to the lips a hundred times a day. One loves when the eyes are forever fixed on one point of the astronomical quadrant – there where dwells the creature who has become the half of ourselves. One loves when one hurries to the mirror every moment and the question arises within ‘Am I beautiful enough?’ and we penetrate the unquiet glance into the abysses of conscience to inquire of ourselves, ‘Can I be loved?’ One loves when in every fibre of the heart, in every atom of the organism the juices of life are excited and hurry on in their winding course through every vein and every nerve so that a deep, intimate, penetrating tumult tells us that something great and unusual is within us – almost a god has visited us. This is true love, which is not appeased by lechery, calmed by ambition, cooled by distance, which does not even disappear in the dreams of the night: to leave us it must carry off with it a great piece of bleeding flesh and broken nerves.