The man who, by reason of the circumstances of his origin or through his own fault, lives on the animal frontiers of the human kingdom is like the brute for whom love is a desire which springs up, is satisfied, and then is lulled. If in him affection for woman is not a passion of spring or autumn, it is always an erotic and intermittent love, which dies with every want satisfied and is born again with every desire renewed. The stimulus of the flesh marks in him the dawn of sentiment, and the unwieldy flesh puts an end to the passion of love. The new desire may apply to the same person or to another; this is for him a secondary and purely accidental question, and from the manner in which circumstances force him to solve it, he will be a monogamist or a polygamist, a virtuous man through habit or a libertine through caprice. Oftener than it seems, this is the way in which many dark-skinned people love, and many of their fairer brethren, who nevertheless believe that they faithfully love one woman at a time. The history of their love is a necklace of Venetian pearls, to which is added a new pearl at every desire satisfied, and if the colour of the glass is not too varied, one can have before the eyes a pretty necklace fit to deck a decent virtue and honest passion. Between the death of one desire and the birth of another, you can have a gentle, grateful remembrance of the pleasure enjoyed, a sweet hope of greater joy for the morrow; and then the garland of your passion will become more beautiful, new flowers will be added, and gradually it will simulate a true and great love. The lofty heights of sentiment and the apex of thought are reached by few; while hundreds of humble goats ruminate on the plains, and thousands of bees are buzzing, and millions of ants are swarming, upon the sapphire summits of the Alps two eagles alone represent the entire world of the living.
Love, although it is a most powerful emotion, still always follows the laws of elementary physics which govern all the energies accumulated in our nervous centres and which we term sentiments. As long as passion remains in the state of desire, that is to say, as long as the force is in tension and is not transformed into fruitful labour, the energy lasts and sentiment lives, vigorous and ardent. The entire art of preserving love is reduced, therefore, to this alone, to preserve desire and to make it spring up again immediately after it is spent. As, then, even love with all its omnipotence must submit to physical laws, and as after every spark that escapes there is always a period of repose, it is expedient to act in such a way that while one part of the force is transformed into labour, another is accumulated and prepares as soon as possible a new spark, so that gradually it will not be possible to measure the interval between one and the other. To transform the intermittent electric current into a continuous one is the great secret of preserving love.
As long as desire is not satisfied, as long as the struggle has not become a conquest, love is not only preserved but increased: and not in vain does woman provide for future bliss in imploring time and prolonging the battle. That love which retires from the struggle before the victory must be either very weak or brutal, and as it is exceedingly rare that a woman concedes everything at once, the little and great favours which she grants at times to the conqueror mark a continual renewal of ardent desires and a continuous revival of love. At last, sooner or later, the day of the looked-for victory arrives, and one embrace changes two beings into one, blends in a single vessel love and voluptuousness. Even when love is so base as to be only a thirst for pleasure, it rarely dies with the first embrace. And who can say that he possessed the entire woman in a night of love? Human attractions are such and so many, and our aesthetic necessities are so ardent and exquisite, that even the acquisition of voluptuousness alone is fortunately very slow, and in the sweet pursuit of new provinces, love is preserved or revivified. The various treasures of beauty or sensuality of the two lovers, the art of loving so neglected since the days of Ovid mark the duration of loves that have their force only from the worship of the form or from the heat of voluptuousness; and in some cases this duration can be very long, never infinite. Too soon arrives the hour in which the wing of time lashes the fresh cheeks of the young girl, the northern blast wrinkles them, and the wind scatters over the ground the rosy petals of human beauty; too soon arrives the hour in which the bowl of lechery has no longer a drop of nectar; and then, if there is no other attraction, love is dying, and no miracle in the world can save it from certain death. The energy of passion sprang entirely from voluptuousness and beauty; this is faded, that is sear, and strength is spent. No force in the world rises without mutation of matter, no energy is increased without transformations of equilibrium and decompositions of affinity; if the man and the woman do not arouse affinity or sympathy, no combination can arise; no light, no heat can flash from their contact. They intone the chorus De profundis, and together they bury the cadaver of a love which, kept alive by voluptuousness alone, should inexorably die with it.
This is the general way in which vulgar loves die, and the duration of their life can be calculated with much precision by weighing the beauty of the two lovers, their youth, their lust, their art of loving. These loves can last an hour, a day, a month, a year, ten years; they can, in rare cases, last during the entire period of human youth. Men, and especially women, do not fall without a struggle under the lash of time; with unheard-of arts they repair the ravages of age, and not only do they fabricate daily adulterated and counterfeit forms, but ever into the goblet of love they pour drugs and philtres; hence to silenced hunger they give the stimulus of an artificial appetite, and for the heat and impetus of passion they substitute the soft blandishments and prurient incitements of the flesh. The battle continues a long time before defeat is acknowledged, and love changes its nature but still exists. Formerly it was a volcano, today it is a Bengal flame; formerly it was nude and chaste as a Uranian Venus, now it is clothed and brazen as a harlot; formerly it was the love of every hour, now it is periodical, intermittent, of the tertian or quartan type; formerly it defied with impunity the rays of the noonday sun, and now it seeks the twilight; but in fine, in spite of so much duplicity and so many medicaments, it is still always love. O women, who daily behold with horror the cooling off of that fire at which for so many years you have warmed your enamoured members, if you were happy on account of your beauty alone, remember that, as the last grace of the body withers, that fire will be spent, and when to the heart-rending cry which invokes the stimulus of a desire no one will respond, prepare yourselves for the funeral psalmody. As long as you can, with the galvanism of lust, arouse a desire in your lover’s soft flesh, love is not yet extinguished. Behold to what a base level the art of preserving love is reduced, when this has its origin only in the desire of forms: it lowers itself to a question of hygiene, I would say it almost transforms itself into a problem of taxidermy or of Appert’s Preserves!41 It is necessary to consider the antiseptic virtue of the studied refusals and of libertine reticence: to analyse lechery chemically and languor physiologically; to meditate upon the economy of the energies and visit the pharmacy to discover the aphrodisiacal virtue of various silken stuffs, of the different smiles, and of the soft movements of the thighs. To these vilest of studies we have lowered woman, who would gladly have wished to soar aloft with us and roam through the many spheres of the beautiful; to embrace not only the world of exterior forms, but also the infinite worlds of sentiment and thought.
You will tell me, perhaps, that I aspire to an ideal love impossible to reach; you will tell me that the healthy, well-formed man can be handsome for forty years of his life, and that woman also has a right to thirty years of beauty and ten years of gracefulness; so that a love which lasted but thirty or forty years would still be a beautiful and enviable thing. A spring and a summer of forty years closed by a mild autumn, in which sweet remembrances, suave, reciprocal gratitude, and intimate friendship prepare for the twilight of old age, can seem to us a worthy triumph of a huge and splendid life of love. And I agree with you, if you refer to the common loves of the people; but we must look high, very high, to arrive at the middle path of the ascent, and we should all desire a love that lasts as long as life and which is buried with us in the tomb. And then, you tell me, every healthy, well-made man can present to woman the thyrsus, and every well-formed woman can offer the cup of voluptuousness to man; but how many men are handsome, how many women can call themselves beautiful? Perhaps not ten in a hundred; and the others who in various degrees are removed from the type of perfection of form, must they not love, can they not be loved?
No; in man, rich in so many physical elements, the beautiful does not end in the exterior form, nor should love gush forth only from the spring of voluptuousness. No deformity, no malady in him who would make men; this is hygiene; but the hundred forms of moral and intellectual beauty, relieved only by the soft shade of sex, can and should arouse ardent and tenacious passions, which do not set with the sun of youth. Thus, while love can dispense its delights to every man and every woman, perfect love should be born of the contemplation and adoration of every type of beauty; and when that of the form begins to pale, moral beauty shines in all its power, and later still the beauty of thought appears to us in all it majestic brilliancy; so that while one star disappears, another twinkles, and from the desires absorbed by the senses, we feel more strongly aroused the longing for the treasures of sentiment and thought of a creature who is all ours, and whom, if at first sight we loved on account of beauty of form, we now love and will continue to love because she is beautiful in kindness, in culture, in ideas, and in everything that man possesses of beauty and greatness. Even character and thought have a profoundly sexual type, and feminine benignity can be adored by us, just as the sweet and tender nature of woman bows before virile courage. When we, in woman, have loved not only an attractive female but also a nature imbued with all the beauties and graces of Eve, the longest life does not suffice to satisfy our desires of possession, and at the last hour of extreme old age some new conquest remains for us to make, and some desire is always renewed, while the accumulation of sweetest memories fills the void which fleeting youth has left behind it. Sublime triumph of human nature, in which love survives the spent senses, the silenced voluptuousness, the beauty of buried forms, and a warm ray of light glitters on the silvery heads of two aged persons who still love because they still desire each other, because heart and mind unite in an embrace, sexual in origin, ideal by reason of the heights which it reaches. Our study on love in old age will complete this picture, certainly one of the most beautiful and seductive in the great museum of love: a picture which we should all desire to represent in the late years of life.
When the sources of love are many, while one recedes the other swells up, so that the insatiable thirst of love never feels the want of a wave to satisfy it. All the passions in their movements follow a parabolical line, and those that have risen the highest descend the most rapidly; hence the weariness so allied to strength; hence the ennui which approaches enthusiasm; hence the thousand dangers which accompany the death of sentiment. Love presents, more than any other passion, these phenomena and dangers, and it is almost impossible to make voluptuousness, ecstasy, and apotheosis last beyond a very short flash of a few instants. Intermittence is one of the most inexorable laws of the nervous system, and he who would increase enthusiasm and
Only breathe the exhalation
Of a kiss and of a sigh,
dies consumed by his own fire; and, what is worse, before expiring he beholds love dead at his feet. We cannot rebel against the laws of nature, nor can we subjugate them; but it is conceded us to direct them to our advantage; and thus it is in our case. Between one ecstasy and another we can sow the seeds of joy and suppress ennui; between one voluptuousness and another we can overcome weariness and cull the flowers of sentiment, and from too ardent contemplations we can repair to the cool temple of thought and meditate together. This is perfect love, this is ideal love, which is preserved pure, unaltered, brilliant as a diamond in the tortured sand of a stream. Few reach it; many, however, can approach it, and for human happiness and human greatness it is enough to see it from afar, like the promised land, which, as the poet says, ‘is always beyond the mountain.’
The man who brutally opposes the holy and noble aspirations of the woman for a higher participation in mental culture signs his own condemnation; and when he cynically sends her to bed or to the nursery, he shows that he cares to know only the coarsest and most brutal part of the joys of love. You may be the strongest male and the wisest libertine; but even Venus herself, descended from the heaven of the ideal, would tire you, and for you too will arrive the hour of nausea; then you will curse life and the vanity of love and recite the litany of lamentation and disillusion which, from Adam down, has been repeated by all those who know not how to live, and who bestially ignore the laws of the economy of strength. We must elevate woman not only in order to fulfil an act of justice, but also to enlarge the field of our joys and increase the value of our voluptuousness. A great step has been taken in this respect by transforming the prostitute of the polygamous gynaeceum into the mother of a family; but this new freedwoman of modern civilization is tolerated, not raised to any equality by us; she is like an orphan picked up on the wayside, who lives with the members of a family without forming an integral part of it. If the concubine has become a mother, she has still a great step to take in order to become hic et haec homo42 – a most noble and delicate creature, who thinks and feels with us, and thinks and feels femininely, thus completing in us the aspect of things of which we see only a part; and she brings to us in the meditations and struggles of life that precious element which only a daughter of Eve can give us. If from woman you want only the joys of love, then teach her the sentiments and ideas of the same. She is like the bee that changes sugar to nectar, and the juice of every flower into honey; make her wise, and wisdom will be transformed into caresses; make her strong, and she will use her strength to enrich you; make her great, and she will deposit her greatness at your feet in exchange for a kiss. Fear not, she will never place her foot upon the neck of man, because she loves him only too well, and because, in order to become a tyrant, she would be obliged to amputate the better part of herself, abdicating her omnipotence.
There where man and woman are bound together by the senses, sentiment, and thought, love is easily preserved, and without any artificial aid. Some fortunate individuals demand with astonishment why their love should ever cease; love lives in them, ardent, tenacious, invincible, and at death is extinguished instantaneously, like the porcelain cup, old but always new, which falls from the hand of the inexperienced servant and perishes as it came into being, beautiful and brilliant.
It is not thus when voluptuousness is all or almost all of love: then the easiest way to prolong it is to always preserve in the cup of love some drop of desire, so that between one embrace and another voluptuousness is never spent, and gives a deep sexual mark to the relations of conversation and habit. And this is an indirect but decided advantage, which ever produces chastity between two persons who love each other without having the fortune to participate in any treasures beyond those of the senses. One should remember that every virtue is the fruitful mother of other virtues.
The preservation of love is one of the most sacred rights and duties that devolve upon woman, although we cannot refuse with impunity to take an active part in this mission. We, however, are too thoughtless, too polygamous, too exacting in our instantaneous desires for the prudence and economy of love to be easy virtues to us. To see all, touch all, desire all and at once, this is the childish physiognomy of many virile loves. Woman loves more than we, but she foresees and fears; also, in love she is the better provider, and while she culls the flower for the joy of today, she knows how to preserve the fruit for the dreary wintertime. Woe to her if she joins in the thoughtlessness of her prodigal companion! They will make together a splendid blaze of their affections, renewing, alas! too soon, the thousandth edition of the grasshopper and the ant.
If the women who read my book learn nothing but this, I would believe them recompensed for the ennui which they will have experienced; and I will be happy to know that I have not written in vain for the welfare of the most cherished part of the human family. With the right of a long and laboured experience, with the right which is mine by a deep, unwearied study of the human heart, I pray them and conjure them to close with their white little hands and their rosy lips the mouth of the man who asks too eagerly for love. Let them say no and no again, and let them bury the friendly yes under a mass of flowers, holding back desire for new supplications and new battles. Every sacrifice will bring them one hundred per cent profit, and for a caress denied today they will have ten tomorrow. Woman is the ancient teacher of sacrifice, and she makes use of her experienced wisdom in preserving love, which is the air she breathes, the blood which nourishes her, her greatest treasure. She must never say yes before having said at least one no; if she truly loves the prodigal friend, she reserves for the days of famine the crumbs which fall from his hand and which today he despises; let her be the stewardess of love as she already is of the household; man produces and she preserves; man conquers, and she retains the booty.
If genital chastity is the chief preservative of vulgar loves, a certain chastity of sentiment and of thought, a certain reserve, is also indispensable for the duration of sublime loves. The man must never see his wife naked, nor should the woman ever find her companion naked before her; veils and mists, leaves and flowers should shade the man and woman in their senses, sentiments, and intellect. The infinite is the only thing that man never wearies of loving, contemplating, studying, because it is neither weighed nor measured. Now so it is in love; the beautiful, the true, the good of the person beloved should be infinite, because we must neither see, weigh, nor measure these qualities in their entirety. A sun that passes from one crepuscule into another, never manifesting itself fully, such is eternal and immutable love, which does not fear the frost of winter nor the hurricane of summer; that dies on its feet like the ancient heroes.
Study the fortunate men who are capable not only of arousing great passions but also of preserving the same, and you will perceive in them all those exalted virtues precisely understood in the term politica crepuscolare.43 A beauty that has more grace than splendour, more seduction than heat, a compliance that retains strength, an authority that can be made to smile, a deep and tender benignity, and a genius that has more spirit than grandeur – these are the great preservative powers of love. Grace preserves love longer than beauty does, because it has more glimmering tints than the latter, and sympathetic natures retain love longer than beautiful nature, and wit longer than genius. There are men and women who at first sight do not thrill, but on every hair of their head they seem to have a hook and in every pore of the skin a vent-hole, so that you have scarcely come into intimate contact with them, when you find yourself seized by a thousand fish hooks and swallowed up by a thousand suckers, as though a gigantic polyp has embraced you in the absorbing coils of its numerous tentacles.
Love is dead without possibility of resurrection, when, as is the case with all living things, there is no galvanism to awaken the sleepy nerves, nor wave of blood to rouse the heart. How often an apparently dead love has been resuscitated! And it has been called a miracle, one of the usual mysteries of the heart; whereas life was not spent but only latent; the truly dead, with the exception of Lazarus, have never been known to rise again. A nerve was still sensible, a desire was still possible, and the apparent dead revived. Physicians observe that cases of apparent death are much more frequent in hysteria, catalepsy, and all forms of nervous diseases; now it is natural that many live loves have been interred with most cruel equivocation, since an organism more nervous, more cataleptic, and more hysterical than love it is difficult to find in the entire world of the living. In our case, however, the sepulture is less dangerous, because love of itself opens every casket, every tomb; penetrates every kind of earth, overturns every sod, and appears, saying, ‘Do not weep, I am here!’
Love rarely dies a violent death, and cases so termed are wounds, ruptures, syncope, and nothing more. Real death comes through decay and after long illness. Duty frequently forbids us to love him (or her) who suddenly appears to us vile and infamous; but love, condemned to death, weeps, despairs, but does not want to expire. Chased back to prison, without light, without food, it resists hunger, darkness, frost, but does not die. The public, perhaps, believe that it has disappeared from the face of the earth, like those illustrious prisoners concealed in the stillness of a castle; but love lives there, in the depths, and groans and tosses about in prolonged agony, and dies a pitiful death alone with him who feels it.
If the appearance of a new creature on the path of life seems to kill love violently, it is because it was not a true love; if it really were such, the battle would be long and bitter, and the prince of the affections would die, as in other cases, a slow and lingering death. When we shall once have ceased to give the name of love to the desire of the flesh and the pride of possession, we shall see that that sentiment is much more beautiful, great, and honourable than is generally supposed; many miracles will be explained as simple physical phenomena, and many obscure mysteries made clear.
To cause love to gush forth from the stone of indifference is a seductive prodigy; to rouse it from its sleep is a desirable power; to sow our steps through life with love and desires can be the dazzling pride of every living creature; but to preserve the acquired love, to retain it pure and bright, to make it pass with impunity through the cyclones of life, the fogs of November and the frosts of December, to guide it healthy and robust from the spring of youth to the border of the tomb, so that it dies, like the Mexican victim, amid choruses of admiration and surrounded by flowers of eternal freshness, is one of the highest ambitions to which we can aspire; it is as beautiful a thing as to create a work of art; it is as useful a work as to become rich; it is as great a work as to win fame.
Many say that the most natural way for love to die is to transform itself into friendship; but several times already I have given the reader to understand what I think of sexual friendship. Perhaps in some very rare cases neither of the two remembers that the beloved object belongs to the other sex: but how can they forget the loves of the entire past, how cancel suddenly the ardent remembrances of the many years of intercourse? If the sweet habit of seeing each other can be substituted for exhausted love; if a man and a woman can forget that they are man and woman, what name will this new and singular affection merit? Perhaps that of automatic habit; and I will send this psychical phenomenon back to the laboratory of the physiologist, so that he may study it together with unconscious and reflex actions.