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The Book of Love
By
Prof. Dr. Paolo Mantegazza
Professor of Anthropology and General Pathology, Founder of the
first Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in
Italy, Senator of the Kingdom of Italy
_A translation of_
The Physiology of Love
_from the Italian text_
American-Neo-latin Library
New York, N. Y.
[Illustration: "PROFANE LOVE" _By Caravaggio_ _Berlin Museum_]
PAOLO MANTEGAZZA, Italian physiologist and anthropologist, was born at
Monza in 1831. He travelled extensively in Europe, India and America. He
was appointed surgeon at Milan Hospital and Professor of General
Pathology at Pavia. In 1870 he was nominated Professor of Anthropology
at the Istituto di Studii Superiori, Florence. He founded the first
Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Italy, and the Italian
Anthropological Society. He was deputy for Monza in the Italian
Parliament from 1865 to 1876, subsequently being elected to the Senate.
He is the author of many well known works, as "The Physiology of
Sorrow," "The Physiology of Pleasure," "Elements of Hygiene," "Pictures
of Human Nature," "Human Ecstasies," "Head," etc. His books are most
popular in Europe, where they have been translated into almost every
language and have reached an enormous circulation. Paolo Mantegazza
ranks with the greatest European medical authorities and the most
brilliant Italian writers.
Copyright, 1917, by THE AMERICAN--NEO-LATIN LIBRARY
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION: GENERAL PHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE 13
CHAPTER
I LOVE IN PLANTS AND ANIMALS 29
II MORNING CREPUSCULES OF LOVE--THE GOOD AND
EVIL SOURCES OF LOVE 41
III THE FIRST WEAPONS OF LOVE--COURTSHIP 64
IV MODESTY 72
V THE VIRGIN 79
VI CONQUEST AND VOLUPTUOUSNESS 89
VII HOW LOVE IS PRESERVED AND HOW IT DIES 94
VIII THE DEPTHS AND THE HEIGHTS OF LOVE 107
IX SUBLIME PUERILITIES OF LOVE 118
X BOUNDARIES OF LOVE--THEIR RELATIONS TO
THE SENSES 122
XI BOUNDARIES OF LOVE--THEIR RELATIONS TO
OTHER SENTIMENTS--JEALOUSY 133
XII BOUNDARIES OF LOVE--THEIR RELATIONS TO THOUGHT 145
XIII CHASTITY IN ITS RELATIONS TO LOVE 155
XIV LOVE IN SEX 158
XV LOVE AND AGE 165
XVI LOVE IN RELATION TO TEMPERAMENTS--OF
THE WAYS OF LOVING 175
XVII THE HELL OF LOVE 186
XVIII THE DEGRADATIONS OF LOVE 198
XIX THE FAULTS AND CRIMES OF LOVE 211
XX THE RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF LOVE 219
XXI THE COVENANTS OF LOVE 227
FOREWORD
Mantegazza is to Physiology what Flammarion is to Astronomy. The two
great masters head a brilliant galaxy of modern writers on natural
phenomena who draw their material from science and mould it in an
esthetic form. After the most skilful analysis of the scientific
elements to their minutest components, they proceed to an ideal
synthesis in which the various elements retain their substance, yet
change their outward appearance. It seems as if these elect minds,
having once satisfied their scientific curiosity as to physical and
human phenomena, had been fascinated and inspired by an irresistible
love of creation, and rising above the facts and laws of nature to the
evanescent and melodious world of imagination, they offer us their work
in a harmonious unity of two seemingly opposite and irreconcilable
elements--the real and the ideal, Science and Poetry.
And thus, I dare say, it is as if, by a generous law of reaction and
equilibrium, while our generation seems to gravitate toward a life of
facts and order, barren of idealism, Science would teach us that she
herself does not benumb or kill sentiment, but, on the contrary,
discloses to the minds of the elect the flowery slopes of an unknown and
infinite world of wonders and sentiment.
So it must be that those who have attained a high place in intellectual
life will gladly replace the old conception of physical and human
phenomena with a new and more intense representation, which, measured in
the finitude of our reason, is loved in the infinity of our sentiment.
To the uninitiated mind most beautiful is the representation of the sun
in the image of Phoebus crossing the heavens in his flaming chariot
drawn by fiery horses; but still more beautiful for the intellectual
mind is it to think of the immense body of fire, of the energy darting
from a star more than a hundred million miles distant from our planet,
more than a hundred million times larger than the earth, and yet a star
millions of times smaller than millions of other celestial bodies to our
naked eye unknown, unknown to our most powerful telescopes, and whose
existence and fantastic speed in the space of the heavens are divined
only by the abstraction of our faculties in an infinite representation
of the laws of physics. Poetical is the vision of a goddess of Olympus
descending to earth and carrying to a man asleep the message or the
image of a dear, distant person; but immensely more poetical is the
conception of a telepathic force within us, made of us, consciously or
unconsciously created by us, an integral part of our psychical organism,
and by which we instantly communicate over hills and dales, mountains
and valleys, oceans and deserts, with another human being whose spirit
is harmoniously attuned to ours.
The impersonation of hatred and love by Fury and Cupid is much less
poetical than the conception of an explosion of psychical forces,
powerful and antagonistic, in millions of men at the same time.
The task of dealing with the natural history, the origin and the
development of the sentiment which underlies the principal phenomena of
human existence, which came into being with the first twilight of
organic life, and which indissolubly binds together the individuals and
the generations, seems to have been reserved to the genius of Paolo
Mantegazza, and with this great subject he dealt in a masterly way, in a
way unimitated and inimitable. He has snatched Love from the Olympus of
the gods of old, from the clutches of classic literature, stripped him
of all his tinsel and garments, and revealed him as part--flesh and
blood of man.
By a new conception of love, more rational, more human and yet no less
poetical than the classic representations to which we have been
accustomed from times immemorial, Mantegazza gives us a work in which
the scientific foundation and the poetical conceptions are united in
such wealth of colors and harmonies that its reading, rich with true
and romantic charm, is incomparably superior to our best fiction. It is
a daring deed, both in the literary and the philosophical field, and it
opens a new horizon to the idealization of human feelings, discoveries
and events.
Mantegazza, unlike countless love writers and poets, approaches his
field not with a hoe or a plow to scratch the surface of the ground, but
with a powerful drill that penetrates into the lowest strata of the
earth and reveals its deepest terrestrial composition. In the pursuit of
his aim, carried by enthusiasm in the innermost research of facts and by
admiration for the beauty of his subject, Mantegazza has used all the
wealth of his literary training, skilfully and lavishly drawing upon all
the resources of the Italian language. The task of the translator has
thus been made doubly difficult, as the original language of the book
has more subtlety and artistic abandon than the English language would
allow. Rather than run the risk of betraying either the substance or the
representation of the author's idea, often it has been preferred to
sacrifice the turn of the English phrase to that of the corresponding
Italian, and possibly incur the imputation of exoticism.
Such is the translation of a beautiful Book of Love offered to the
American public at a time when all the evil passions and degradations of
hatred are unleashed over the world. In striking contrast with the trend
of the human mind today, what a meager chance is awaiting the
contemplation of a sentiment whose mission is to tie all humanity with a
bond of affection! And yet, while time and evolution relegate the memory
of the most fearful cataclysms of the human race to the icy page of
history, the fundamental elements constituting human life cannot be
changed or destroyed. Love will continue to exist as long as the laws of
affinity and procreation seize the human being at his birth and by the
evolution of matter dominate him even after his death. The struggle for
life may become intensified or disappear from the world; hatred among
classes, nations, races may deepen, expand or be altogether eliminated;
passions may gain further ascendancy over humanity, or humanity may
learn to control them; and, in the words of Shelley,
"Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change, to these
All things are subject but eternal Love."
At the feet of him, procreator and prince of all affections, at once
proud, generous, kind, fair, and weak, avaricious, cruel, deceitful, in
all virtues rich and in all sins, a king and a miser, we shall always
lay, proudly or in shame, the innermost throbs of our heart, our tears
and our joys, the highest aspirations of our mind, the sweetest
ecstasies of our soul, our convulsions, our despairs, our crimes, up to
the very threshold of the great oblivion, when, in the words of the
poet, of the extenuated race one lone man and one woman, among the ruins
of the mountains and of the dead woods, in the wake of the departing
warmth, clasped together in the supreme fate of creation, livid, with
glassy eyes shall see the last sun descend forever.
ER. BE.
TO THE READER
I have conceived love to be the most powerful and at the same time the
least studied of human affections. Surrounded by a triple forest of
prejudice, mystery and hypocrisy, civilized men know it too often only
through stealth and shame. Poets, artists, philosophers, legislators,
snatch a morsel now and then from the flesh of the great god, and hurry
away to conceal it as a precious booty of forbidden fruit. To study love
as a phenomenon of life, as a gigantic power which moulds itself in a
thousand ways among various races and in various epochs, and as an
element of health for the individual and for the generations, has
appealed to me as a great and worthy undertaking.
THE AUTHOR.
THE BOOK OF LOVE
"... _this precious jewel
Upon the which is every virtue founded._"
--DANTE.
INTRODUCTION
GENERAL PHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE
Many years ago I wrote that to live means _nutrition and generation_,
and the deeper I cast the sounding-line into the dark abysses of life,
the more I am convinced that this definition faithfully depicts the most
striking characteristics of all creatures which, from bacteria to man,
come to life, grow and die on the face of our planet. If, however, I
wished still further to simplify my idea, reducing life to its simplest
and most essential form, I would say without fear of betraying the
truth, that _to live means to generate_.
Every living body is perishable, but before dying it has the power of
reproducing the form that has made it capable of living; and that
whirlwind which absorbs and rejects, which assimilates new atoms and
repels old ones, and which so clearly represents the eternal picture of
life in all its manifestations, is also the most faithful representation
of every form of generation.
Nutrition is a real genesis, and in the great chemical laboratory of
living beings we have at all times before our eyes the reproduction of
histological elements of organs and individuals. We lose hair,
epithelia, white corpuscles every day; and yet every day we generate
hair, epithelia and leucocytes: this is an every-day generation in the
body of man. A nail falls off, a new one takes its place: this is the
reproduction of an organ. We generate children similar to ourselves:
this is the reproduction of an entire organism, the true _generation_.
But in one of our offspring we see re-repeated a mole which is on our
nose: this is the reproduction of an organ within an organism. On the
other hand, one race generates another race, one species another
species; and here we see a broader genesis by which from the
reproduction of a cell through another cell we gradually pass to the
generating of an organ, of an individual, of a race, of a species.
The world of living beings is a gigantic tree and from its trunk shoot
forth the branches of classes, orders, species. On the branches leaves
grow, which are the individuals; but each one of these small individuals
generates within itself many cells, true organisms within greater ones.
The world of living beings is but a great laboratory of prolific,
incessant generation. Cells generate cells; organs, organs; species,
species. An intimate brotherhood makes us members of one great
organism--the placenta of living beings; and among ourselves we exchange
the same matter which each of us in turn contributes to the work of
apparent destruction, called _nutrition_, and to that of reproduction,
designated as _generation_. To feed themselves and to generate, living
beings are continually exchanging with each other a part of their own
matter which, passing from one organism to another, seems to acquire new
energy and new life. On the one hand, seaweeds live on mushrooms,
carnivorous animals devour herbivorous, herbivorous feed on herbs, and
man, the highest branch of the tree of living beings, partakes of all.
On the other hand, males and females in continuous succession
interchange part of their matter, remoulding their primitive forms.
The most elementary form of life is not, however, the cell, since at a
lower stage we find the _protoplasm_, the true _primum vivens_ which, by
scission, generates the individual; and, by nourishing itself, nobody
can tell what mysterious genesis of atoms it induces within its own most
simple organism. The protoplasm cannot live without a continual exchange
of matter, so that the live molecules of yesterday are dead today; and
those which are alive today will be dead tomorrow; therefore nutrition
also, in the last analysis, is an intimate and very mysterious
generation.
Evanescence of forms is one of the most essential characteristics of
living beings, and we give the name of death to the falling of every
leaf from the tree of life. Man, also, drops some of these leaves every
day--hair, epithelia, cells, which often produce a secretive substance
and fall with it. Before dying, a part of the preëxisting form remains
to re-animate the dead form and follows in its turn the parabolical
cycle through which the mother form has passed. This is the most general
principle and includes all possible kinds of generation, from that of
scission to the highest form of sexual genesis. One would say that the
life of an individual is only a moment of the great life of the species,
of the classes, of the kingdoms of living beings; it is a spark which
shoots off intermittently, passing from one organism to another.
Powerful and irresistible is the tendency to generate; in a great many
cases the individual sacrifices himself consciously, or is unwittingly
sacrificed by the laws of nature, provided that before death he transmit
life to others. "Let the individual perish, if this preserve the
species!" Such is the eternal cry of nature, which men and infusoria,
oaks and mushrooms alike must obey. If the individual is protected and
possesses preservative instincts and defensive organs, the species has a
hundred bulwarks, a thousand manners of safeguard, more means of
protection than are needed. In fact, living beings generate so profusely
that one species alone would pervade the earth if the various circles of
expansion, falling in with each other, did not struggle among
themselves, like the circles caused on the smooth surface of a lake by a
handful of sand thrown upon it by a child. Apart from the manner in
which life is transmitted, there is an amount of life which passes away,
there is _a certain amount_ of fecundity, and this may seem, at first
glance, most whimsical, while it is governed by the laws of
preservation.
_To be born and to die--fecundity and mortality_--are so closely
connected with each other that we can consider them as different aspects
of the same phenomenon, as the action and reaction of life. When
reproduction increases beyond measure, the dangers for the individuals
generated increase at the same time, and destruction mows down the
excessive number of those which are born. Now it is food that is no
longer proportionate to the new-born; then parasites and enemies of the
over-expanded species, which, increasing in turn, reëstablish the
equilibrium. The destructive forces and the protective balance mutually,
as happens with many other forces, simpler and better known.
The Malthusian problem, however, is much more intricate. If all species
were equally prolific and had a life of equal length, the problem would,
in fact, be reduced to a question of space and food; but, on the
contrary, the duration of life and the various degrees of fecundity
serve in turn to reëstablish the equilibrium by other ways. If the
reproduction of mice were as slow as that of man, they would all be
destroyed before another generation could be born; and even if they
could live fifteen or sixteen years, not one of them, perhaps, would
ever attain that age, surviving all dangers. And on the other hand,
should oxen multiply in the same proportion as infusoria, the entire
species would die of hunger in a week.
In order that an organic form be preserved, the individual must preserve
itself and generate other individuals. Now these forces must vary
inversely. If the individual, through its simple organization, is little
fit to resist danger, it must countervail this weakness with reaction,
generating intensely. If, on the contrary, high qualities give it a
great capacity for self-protection, it should then diminish its
fecundity proportionately. If danger is reckoned as a constant quantity,
inasmuch as capacity for resistance should be equal in all species, and
does consist of two factors (faculty to maintain individual life and
power to multiply it), these factors cannot but vary in opposite
directions. This most simple and sublime law, which Herbert Spencer read
in the great book of nature, is one of those that rule with the most
inflexible tyranny the elementary phenomena of reproduction, as well as
the highest and most complex phenomena of human love.
In the _Diatomaceæ_ the fecundity by scission is gigantic: Smith
reckoned that a single gnat could create a thousand million individuals
in one month. A young _Gonium_, capable of scission after twenty-four
hours, can produce in a week 268,435,456 individuals equal to itself. In
other cases, the process of multiplication is not scissiparous, but
endogenous, as with the _Volvox_; but the reproduction is always
extraordinary. If all the individuals generated should survive, a
_Paramecium_ would, by scission, produce in the course of a month
268,000,000 individuals. Another microscopic animal can produce
170,000,000,000 individuals in four days. The _Gordius_--the entozoön of
an insect--lays 8,000,000 eggs in less than a day. An African termite
lays 80,000 eggs in twenty-four hours, and Eschricht reckoned at
64,000,000 the number of eggs in the adult female of an _Ascaris
lumbricoides_.
If, from the minute microscopic creatures exposed to every danger and
which consume very little matter--if, from these living atoms of which
you could gather as many in your hands as there are men on earth, you
pass to the elephant, you have there a giant of flesh that requires
thirty years of its life to become fecund, and then, after a long
gestation, produces but one offspring. And above the elephant you find a
giant of thought, Man, who requires the third part of his average life
to reproduce himself, and after nine long months generates one child
only; and, what is worse, he sees half of his offspring mowed down
before they are able to bear flower and seed.
The methods of transmitting life are manifold, since nature in no other
function has been so inexhaustibly rich with forms as in generation; but
we, dealing here with the general physiology of love, will reduce all
the various generative forms to these few:
_Separation or Scission._--The individual dissevers into two parts,
and each of these, made independent, reproduces the generator. This
is the most simple form of genesis, in which the function of
reproduction is not distinct from the other functions, but merges
into them.
_Endogenesis._--Within an individual many other individuals are
formed; the parent opens, and, destroying its own individuality,
dissolves in its offspring.
_The individual by itself alone generates other individuals._--The
parent generates through special organs and without dissolving in
its offspring. The individuals generated and separated from the
generator are eggs, seeds, perfect organisms; but in every case
these are always elements evolved within the generator through
special organs. The generative function is already marked and
distinct in a laboratory which detaches and prepares some of the
elements of the individual, so that they may reproduce it.
_Monoecious Sexual Generation._--A step higher, the generative
laboratory becomes complicated and divides into two parts, one of
which brings forth the egg, the other the fecundating element.
Each, for its own account, prepares the element destined for the
reproduction of the individual; but if both do not come in contact,
the new being is not generated. We have the sexes quite distinct,
but enclosed within a single individual. Strange to observe,
however, we behold an individual that generates an egg which cannot
be fecundated by that individual's seed; or an individual that
produces a seed which cannot be of any service to the egg. A duplex
embrace of two hermaphrodites which interlace a quadruple love, and
the appearance of winds, insects, or birds, as fecundatory
paranymphs, resolves these problems of a most singular generation.
_Dioecious Sexual Generation._--Finally, the generating organs,
too, separate and fix themselves each upon a single individual,
which is sterile in itself, produces but one of the generating
elements, and, therefore, must combine with the other; and by such
union they may produce the new creature: the sum of two
individualities, the male and the female, the father and the
mother. Man loves in twain; but although, like the other superior
animals akin to him, he presents a dioecious sexual generation,
yet in his inmost tissues he also possesses the _endogenous_
genesis and the genesis by _scission_, and presents in this regard
the remains also of the elementary forms of life enclosed within
him.
In this rapid course through all the forms of generation we see
delineated the same laws by which nature rules the other functions.
Gradually new forces appear and new organs are brought forth to
represent the subdivision of work. First, it is the whole individual
that generates, then an organ of the individual, then again two organs
in the same individual, and again two organs in separate individuals. In
the many forms of genesis, the unity of the plan is more than ever
manifest, and we, the highest of all living creatures, while, like the
amoeba, we have in our protoplasm and scattered all through the mass of
our body the faculty to generate, recognize in man and woman the two
distinct laboratories which prepare the seed and the human egg.
While the pathology of love, in many cases of lasciviousness, shows the
last declining remains of a promiscuous hermaphroditism, imagination, a
forerunner of science, causes us to divine that in more complex
creatures sexes may be more than two, and generation presents a deeper
subdivision of work, in the same manner as in the cynical or skeptical
distinctions between platonic and sensual loves and in the most daring
polygamies of soul and senses we perceive in the distance other lights
which disclose to us the horizon of new and monstrous generative
possibilities, some of them reaching the suprasensible and some as base
and brutal as the most repelling atavic regressions.
When the science of the future will permit our posterity to connect all
the phenomena of nature, from the most elementary to the most complex,
from the simplest motion of a molecule to the flash of the most sublime
genius, in an uninterrupted chain of facts, then perhaps the first
origins of love will be sought in the elementary physics of dissimilar
atoms which endeavor to find each other and combine, and with opposite
motion generate the equilibrium. The positive electric body seeks the
negative, the acid seeks the base, and in these conjunctions, with great
development of light, heat and electricity, new bodies are formed, new
equilibriums obtained; it seems that Nature renews her forces and,
rejuvenescing, prepares herself for new combinations and new loves.
And is not love perhaps the combination of two dissimilar atoms which
seek each other and combine, notwithstanding all the adverse forces of
heaven and earth? And in the same manner as the molecule of potassium
snatches the oxygen away from water with a great development of light
and heat, is not the union of those two molecules, which we call man and
woman, accompanied by a hurricane of passion, by flashes of genius, by
infinite glittering of flames and ardor? Do we not perceive a
pandemonium of physical and psychical forces accumulating, battling and
equilibrating around that point where a man and a woman are attracted
toward each other, to rejuvenate the human matter and rekindle the torch
of life?
A particular motion, originated in the ovary and in the testis,
accumulates such energy in the nervous centers as eventually to bring
the masculine element in contact with the feminine, so that the
generative gemmulæ produced in the slow laboratory of two different
organisms reunite in that nest which is the maternal womb and where the
fecundated egg must transform into a human being.
The poet and the metaphysician may define love in whatever manner they
choose. There is only one definition for science: Love is the energy
which must bring in contact the egg with the seed; without ovary and
without testis there can be no love.
That forward movement which is called generation is so powerful as to
oppose and even destroy the minor motion, that is, the preservation of
the individual; and while each individual rotates, it is carried forward
with a movement a hundred times more irresistible and powerful through
space and time. The first motion represents the narrow life of the
individual and is protected by egotism; the second is the great life of
the species, and love defends it.
The most superficial study of the generative function is sufficient to
convince us that love is always a phenomenon of high chemistry, in which
the generating atoms, in order to combine, must be neither too similar
nor too dissimilar. No sooner has sex manifested itself in animals than
we have in the same individual, but in two distinct laboratories, the
formation of two generative elements. Sex, which, at first thought,
appears to us as one of the deepest mysteries of life, is nothing but a
laboratory which attracts the elements generated by every element of the
organism, and encloses and preserves them in itself in order to pour
them into the bosom of other elements, similar but not equal, generated
in another laboratory, that is, the opposite sex. When the two
generative laboratories are separated in two distinct organisms, it is
probable that the diversity of their gemmulæ is greater. If in
individuals closely resembling each other, but of different races, we
combine the generative elements, we still will probably have fecundity;
while, if we pass to different species, fecundity will be more
difficult; if we pass to different genera it will in most cases become
impossible.
But let us set aside the words _species_ and _genera_, which, in nature,
have not the same value as we assign to them in our museums and in our
books, and let us, instead, take from the world of the living a handful
of animals, haphazard, so that we may gather together brothers, cousins,
nephews, individuals of the same or affinitive classes, genera, orders,
and let us place them in line, in the order of their degrees of
similarity. Should we try to couple them, or study their spontaneous
loves, we would find cases of sterility in beings too similar and in
beings too dissimilar; therefore, generation moves between these two
opposite poles, too great similarity and too great dissimilarity. That
is the reason why we may see a woman with a mustache, atrophied breasts
and deep voice remain sterile with a robust man: they do not generate
because they have too close a resemblance. That is the reason why a dog
and a cat are sterile: they do not generate, because they are too
dissimilar. Nature said to living beings: "If you wish to love, be
neither too similar nor too dissimilar."
Let us try and discover the reason of this law. Germs that are too
similar cannot concur in fecundation, or fecundate unsatisfactorily,
perhaps through the same laws of elementary physics and chemistry which
cause bodies to repel other bodies equally electrified or with which
they have too close a resemblance in their physico-chemical
characteristics. Try the combination of sulphur with phosphorus, of
iodine with bromine, and, on the other hand, observe the ardent loves of
chlorine and hydrogen, of potassium and oxygen. The fecundity of two
different organisms is, besides, an energy bearing in one direction; it
is the sum of resistances all of them equal, while two quantities,
different but susceptible of being summed, give a greater number of
diverse resistances and have, therefore, a greater possibility of living
and resisting external enemies. An individual is the sum of many
victories over exterior elements, the result of many and infinite
adaptations to the ambient which surrounds it. Two individuals
dissimilar, but not enough to impede generation, will bring together
those adaptations and those victories through which the new creature
enjoys the possibility of resistance and will meet with fewer dangers.
It is much easier to explain why forms too dissimilar cannot love each
other. This impossibility is one of the most powerful means of
preserving the living forms, extremely varied, in those conditions which
are useful to their existence. When a living being has come out of the
struggles of life, when it has yielded to external agents and enemies in
a certain way, it transmits itself to future generations in that form
and nature which are the fruit of a long and successful battle.
Precisely for the same reason, an herbivorous animal, which is the
offspring of another that has gained its flesh with herbs, cannot grow
and multiply except by feeding on herbs. Imagine for a moment that
organs and tissues feeding on meat should be grafted on to the organs
and tissues of an herbivorous animal. What disorders would not arise! A
fragment of carnivorous animal closed up in an organism which has teeth
to chew herbs, gastric juice to digest herbs, intestinal tube to
assimilate herbs, and olfactory nerves which find leaves and flowers
delectable! The apparent stability of the species, which in fact
resolves itself in a slow mutation, is nothing therefore but the
unavoidable necessity for male and female to pour into the crucible of
generation elements that can combine, metals that can fuse, forming a
homogeneous and compact alloy.
From the elementary physics of generation you may jump to the most
ardent sympathies, to the juxtaposition of human characters in the nest
of love, and you will see that the same law rules all and each of these
facts. _Neither too similar nor too dissimilar._ Love is the sum of
analogous but not identical forces; it is the complement of complements;
it is the square of squares; it tolerates neither subtractions nor
divisions.
We shall see at every step of our studies the same laws which govern
generation, or the so-called _physical love_, re-appear in the high
spheres of love. For us, love is simply one function which, to be
understood, must not be barbarously mutilated and disrupted so as to
have one part of its limbs sent to the laboratory of physiology, and the
other left in the library of the philosopher. Love is such energy that
from the lowest grades of the most automatic instinct it ascends to the
highest regions of the suprasensible, and perhaps no other psychical
element reaches to more distant poles.
Think of the shepherd of the high Apennines who loves a goat, and of
Heine, who in the clutches of death wants to be brought to the Louvre to
see the Venus of Milo once more, and you will have a pallid idea of the
frontiers which this ardent, tenacious, violent, multiform passion
called love seeks to conquer.
While in the field of chemical facts generation marks the highest point
of molecular chemistry, in the psychological field love reaches the
loftiest summits of the ideal. Love is the force of forces; it makes its
appearance when man is strongest; it vanishes when age has weakened him.
Love is the joy of joys, it is at the bottom of every desire, of all
riches, on every horizon of pleasure; it is always the highest aim. If
we except men who were born without gentle feelings, in every human sky
love is the brightest star; it is the sun of every firmament. It is the
strongest, the most human, the richest of passions.
In all forms of generation, whether agamous or sexual, by scission or by
endogenesis, whether we consider the son in comparison with the father,
or with far Adam, we behold the generated preserve a part of the last or
of the first generator, so that the motion communicated from the first
to the last generation is transmitted without interruption. Take as the
starting-point the Adam of the Bible or the Adam of progressive
evolution, the clay breathed into by a God or the Darwinian _ascidia_:
each one of us has still within himself a material part belonging to the
first man or first father of all men, so that an immense brotherhood
unites all living beings. To the divination of the poet who, beholding
the flowery meadows, the forests, the swarming of animals, cries out
with emotion: "O Mother Nature!" science answers in accord, as it
contemplates a quantity of matter and a quantity of life pass from one
to the other of those organisms called individuals. For every life
extinguished a new life is born, and within us, who occupy the loftiest
place among all the living beings on this planet, quiver and vibrate the
molecules which have passed through thousands and thousands of
existences and thousands and thousands of loves.
If love is the warmest and the most human of passions, it is also the
richest. To its altar every faculty of the mind carries its tributes,
every throb of the heart carries its fire. Every vice and every virtue,
every shame and every heroism, every martyrdom and every lewdness, every
flower and every fruit, every balm and every poison may be brought to
the temple of love. Everything human can be carried away in the
whirlwind of love; and more than once man regrets that he possesses but
one life to offer as a holocaust to this god. And yet this gigantic
force is the least governed of all the passions. It would seem that
before it man feels too small and too weak; and just as the savage falls
on his knees before the lightning and weeps, or flees, the civilized
man, even today, is terrified before the unexplored hurricane of this
sovereign force, and acknowledges his powerlessness and his ignorance.
In the delirium of voluptuousness and in the storm of desperation, he
lets himself be carried away by a force which he considers superior to
reason, too powerful in comparison with his weakness. In his codes he
writes, timidly, laws which he violates every day; opprobrious
punishments which the juries always cancel; and a dense fog of ignorance
surrounds the temple of love, which he enters nearly always as a thief
and from which he emerges nearly always as an outcast. Our legislation
on love is a wretched connubiality of hypocrisy and lechery, and as we
know not how to look love in the face, we disguise it with the garments
of the buffoon and the prostitute. Our laws are so perfect that many
must not love, and very many cannot love; and while we all weep over the
few victims of hunger, we shrug our shoulders at the hundreds of
thousands who die in celibacy for not having been able to gather the
straw for their nests, and we laugh at the millions of celibates who
know nothing of love save masturbation and prostitution. In the presence
of love we are still more or less savage--the basest brutishness before
the most powerful of human forces!
Yet love also should be conquered like all other forces of nature; and
without losing a fraction of its energy, or a flower of its garden, it
also must be governed by science, which understands and directs all
things. The lightning which prostrates the savage in the dust of fear is
guided by us on the small wire of the conductor, gilds the ornaments of
our women and transmits our thoughts from one hemisphere to the other.
This other lightning, also, which, more powerful and more dangerous,
explodes in the hurricanes of the human heart, must be studied, guided
and reduced to a live force that can be measured, weighed and governed.
Love should be the dearest, the most precious, the most powerful of
civilized forces. No other passion can claim supremacy where it appears;
no other can solve the sublime problem of combining the greatest
voluptuousness with the greatest virtue, of generating the good of
future beings through the joy of the living ones, of transmitting
civilization to posterity in the spasm of an embrace.
LOVE IN PLANTS AND ANIMALS
CHAPTER I
LOVE IN PLANTS AND ANIMALS
Arcadians, metaphysicians, and all adorers of the past are cursing every
day and every hour the modern mania of comparing human things to living
beings and call for anathemas against this absurd and sacrilegious
profanation of the man-God. Comparative anatomy, physiology and
psychology are for these gentlemen nothing but different forms of a
strange aberration of the human mind; something capricious and morbid
which, by the continual comparison of man and beast, brutalizes us,
prostitutes us, and sends us back with a new insanity to the bestial
Olympus of men with animal members and of human grafts set on the flesh
of the son of God. According to those most exalted and supercilious
gentlemen, these are psychic maladies not to be discussed, but cured by
contempt and ridicule; they are the hysterics of thought, which
disappear with the generation that has seen them rise from the corrupt
entrails of the human family. But man does not lower himself by
comparing himself with beings that are the matrix from which he came; he
does not degrade himself by scenting the earth from which you, also you,
O super-gentlemen, say we have been moulded and which is ever the frame
supporting us.
The true metaphysics, if this word has still any meaning, was created by
modern science, which, by the boldest comparisons of the simplest things
with the most complex, of the smallest with the greatest, extracts the
subtile from the subtile, and under the motley appearance of the form
reveals the only law that governs them. We are going to seek in the
limbus of living beings the crepuscules of the highest human things.
Bowing our head modestly before the simplicity of laws which govern and
control such a wealth of forms, let us return to the reality of things,
feeling neither dejected nor ashamed of ourselves, but satisfied with
having known how to read the notes of harmony written in the world of
dwarfs and giants. Our pride will find sufficient satisfaction, after so
many comparisons, in realizing that we are first among all living
beings.
No spectacle of nature is more splendid, more admirable than that of the
loves of plants and of animals. Nature could not write more fascinating
music with a less number of notes, and no other phenomenon of life can
resemble that of generation in profusion of forms, lavishness of
artifices, inexhaustible conception of mechanisms. One would say that
where the reproductive gemmulæ are attracted, where life reconcentrates
its best part to renovate itself with a new impetus, there new and
strange energies are developed, and the forces of nature appear with the
most gigantic pomp, the most gorgeous luxury. In every other function,
Nature, like an economical housewife, seeks the useful and often is
satisfied with the necessary; she simplifies the mechanisms, removes the
attritions and through the simplest ways attains her aim. But she is not
content with the good and the true for generation, and, surrounding the
nest of love with a large profusion of esthetic elements, she exhausts
every resource to prepare a feast for the life which renews itself. It
is around the flower that, nearly always, the most exquisite beauty of
form, the most inebriating seductions of perfume, the most varied tints
of the painter's palette are interwoven. How many treasures of esthetic
force in a lily and in a rose! And all that luxury to do honor to the
love of a day, the love of an hour; and all the splendor of a nuptial
robe, a thousand times more beautiful than human industry could produce,
to screen the virginal kiss of an anther and a pistil!
And jumping from the lily and the rose to the summits of the animal
world, how many splendors of fancy, how many flashes of passion, what an
interlacement of elements, to make a garland for the kiss of a man and a
woman. Run, fly, on a spring day, among the blossoming beds of a
garden, among the thousand amorous corollas of the flowers; shake the
severe boughs of the cypress and of the pine; plunge your feet into the
soft, wet carpet of vallisnerias; let your eyes penetrate into the humid
recesses of the barks and the mossy labyrinths of the granite; and
everywhere a warm circumfusion of pollen, spores and antheridia will
tell your flaming heart that in the world of plants, among the perfumes
of the corollas and the emeralds of the seaweeds, love exists in a
thousand ways, and the atmosphere is all pervaded with the warm,
inebriating sparks which, on the wings of the winds and of the insects
and in the rays of the sun, diffuse everywhere an amorous, voluptuous
wave.
The love of flowers is mute in the soft perfume of their corollas, but
in many of them silence does not prevent tender blandishments and
fervent embraces; many plants, always immovable, have convulsions in
their flowers; always cold, they flame up in the calyx of their loves.
Often they love only once a year; but what a profusion of embraces, what
a fecundity of pollen and seed! Shake with your hand a single branch of
the juniper or of the blossoming pine, and you will immediately see the
air darken with a cloud of fruitful dust; entire forests love at one
time, and for miles and miles they fill the air with voluptuous murmurs;
more than once do the winds carry clouds of pollen, and the wanton rain
washes and purifies the atmosphere, and tinges itself all with the
amorous dust.
And without jealousy or rancors, in the shade of the blossoming pines,
and among the stamens of the enamored flowers, in every clod of grass,
in every cavern of mountain, in every fissure of rock, in every bed of
seaweeds, in the deep waves of the ocean, and in the drops of water
oozing from the glaciers, in the somberest darkness of mines and in the
infinite sky, the animals interweave their loves; so that in every part
of the globe, and in every hour of the day and of the night, every ray
of the sun warms and contemplates millions of embraces, while every ray
of the moon guides the nocturnal lovers to a thousand more intimate
blandishments. If it is true that a leaf falls from the tree of life
every second and dies, then at every moment a new gemma is born, and
for every gemma how many embraces, for every new-born how many loves!
The flowers planted in the ground of a cemetery appeal to me as the
noblest form of the cult of the dead; for, if our planet is a vast
cemetery, where every atom of time buries an atom that was living once,
this earth is all a nest of love, in which every zephyr carries to our
ear a sigh of voluptuousness, and the harmony of the ether, a dream of
the ancient poets, is nothing, perhaps, but the sum of all the kisses
exchanged among the living creatures.
If the anatomist and the physiologist discover in the study of
generation in the various animals some precious materials to mark the
highest laws of the morphology of the living beings, the psychologist
finds in the loves of brutes sketched nearly all the elements that man
has gathered under his robust wings. No function is more adapted than
love to contemplate the unique type and the infinite legion of its
forms, to admire a unique conception developed in a thousand different
tongues.
No sooner has sex made its appearance than the male quickly
distinguishes himself by his aggressive character. With few exceptions,
it is the male that seeks, conquers, keeps the prey. Glance over the
pages of Darwin's work on sexual selection and you will see how many
weapons nature has given to males to conquer and keep their mates. Even
in plants, it is the pollen that goes in search of the ovulum, the
ovulum that awaits the spark that is to fecundate it. In the most simple
of animal forms, where the male and female live and die fettered to the
spot that saw their birth, it is the virile element that is always
carried there, where the germ awaits it. This is the first dogma that
governs the religion of love in the entire world of the living; and when
all high races look with contempt upon the woman who attacks and the man
who flees, they only protest against the violation of one of the most
tyrannical laws which men and mollusks, women and pistils, cannot evade.
Man summarizes all the forms of the living nature; so that we are
frequently tempted to affirm that whatever of human is in him is the
greatest synthesis of all the minor forms of the living, and that he is
precisely the first because under the bark of his individuality all the
forces are gathered within him, from the secondary to the last; and the
same phenomenon we observe in the psychical elements of his loves.
Pigeons, even when intermingled with the most varied breeds, are seldom
unfaithful to their mates; and although the male, in a rare whim, may
break the vow of fidelity, he quickly returns to the dear nuptial bed of
his spouse. Darwin kept some pigeons of different breeds shut up in the
same place for a long time, and there was never a bastard among them. Do
we not also find among men splendid examples of the most faithful
monogamy and do you not recognize it as the social basis in almost all
the superior races?
The antelope of South Africa has up to a dozen mates, and the _Antilope
saiga_ of Asia more than a hundred. But have we not the small and
hypocritical polygamies of modern society, and those, most splendid and
impudent, of the Orientals? Have we not in man, as in very many animals,
females who submit to love as to a duty, and males on whom love must be
imposed? Have we not libertinism at the very side of chastity? Have we
not in the world of man all the lasciviousness, all the ardors, all the
possibilities of lewdness of the animals' world?
Several fulmineous forms of love which last no longer than the flash of
the lightning not infrequently occur among men, as the cold,
long-lasting kisses of many insects are an amorous practice of various
human temperaments. And fiery, cruel jealousies and bloody battles are
scenes common to men and brutes; nor is death for love an exclusive
privilege of man. The few and coarse passions of animals are all carried
as a holocaust to the altar of generation, while man carries to it all
the ardors of his rich nature, all the infinite forces which he has
drawn from the great womb of the living beings and which he has
centuplicated with the accumulations of his hundred civilizations. The
chaffinch, in the contests of amorous song, more than once falls from
the tree on which he is singing his erotic hymn, smothered by pulmonary
apoplexy; just as many a poet beholds the lyre of his genius and the
chords of his life break at the feet of a woman. In the silence of the
shady thickets, the nightingale, exhausted, swoons with love and
fatigue, and dies for having been unable to vanquish a more fortunate
rival in melody and strength of notes; and hundreds and hundreds of
times, in the somber labyrinths of life, the human lover dies in the
battles of an unhappy love, and he too dies because he could not sing
louder and sweeter than his rival. Nor is coquetry peculiar to the human
female only; no woman in the world will ever be the equal of a female
canary in the wicked art with which she resists the impatient ardors of
her companion; and the thousand travesties with which in the feminine
world a "yes" is concealed under a "no" are but pallid imitations of the
refined coquetry, the simulated flights, the amorous bitings and the
hundred thousand cajoleries of the world of animals.
As to the esthetic elements which nature has lavished upon the loves of
living beings, they are such and so many that the richest palette would
be insufficient to depict them or the poet's words to describe them.
Here are two pictures from my meager collection.
I
I am in the garden, lying down upon a wall so low that I can
voluptuously scent the soft aroma of the earth damped by a storm; I have
no rugs under my body or pillows under my head; a slate, furrowed and
shining, is my bed. With one hand extended above the wall, I am nipping
the petals of a lemon flower, while with the other I am frightening the
ants which hustle about in the sandy path. All at once, two little
shadows, two brown sprites, pass before my eyes and alight, facing me,
in the middle of the path. They are two children of heaven, all wings
and all beauty; the organs of terrestrial life are reduced to a thread,
but a thread that sucks the nectar from the flowers, and four gigantic
wings to conquer the skies. Their hours are numbered; they must love and
die, and nature made them warm and swift for intense love: organs of
sense greater than the venter, organs of beauty greater than the
entrails. They are butterflies, but I know not their names, and I feel
disappointed. I look around in vain for an entomologist to name them for
me: man does not feel that he possesses a creature unless he has
sprinkled it with the ink of his dictionaries. They will die, as far as
I am concerned, nameless; and in vain will they knock at the gates of
paradise, to enter the place where dear and beloved things are
remembered. Can you imagine ever having loved a woman whose name you
know not? As in religion, so it is in love: baptism is the first and
holiest of sacraments.
But these butterflies love each other without baptism; they are
frolicking on the pebbles of the path, and running after each other.
They do not suspect that the greatest tiger of our planet is watching
them, and that a great lizard is creeping down slowly from the little
wall and turns its head to left and right sullenly, licking its own lips
with its forked tongue and anticipating the savory taste of the delicate
flesh of those pretty creatures. They are too happy to think of enemies
that surround them; and life and love are flowers which are picked in
the midst of hurricanes and battles. They have found a stalk of withered
grass which, under the footsteps of many pedestrians and in the sand
strewn by the gardener, has succeeded in living and blossoming. That
microscopic bush is an entire world for those two lovers, and the little
female resorts to it as to a defense against her sweet assailant and
runs around it like a child who flees from blows by running around a
table. But, after a few impatient circumvolutions, the lover jumps over
that little tree and with his wings shakes those of his companion. A
pinch of golden dust spreads through the air, and a slightly spiteful
shrug, a rebuff and a voluptuous quiver close that first scene of love.
At times the little female seems about to yield to the impatient
embraces of her companion; and when he, with the trepid anxiety of him
who is about to grasp happiness, is very close to her and on the point
of touching with his pubescent and loving antennæ the velvety body of
his beloved one, she flies two yards away, and he after her and again
and again is met with mockery and cajoleries. The heat increases and the
surcharged desire has become as ardent as the sun. The coquette has
turned her back to her pursuer and opens her wings slowly in order to
show the splendor of her gems, her silver, her velvet, in all their
pomp; and having shown them, she folds and raises her wings and
instantly hides all the most splendid dress with which nature has made
her so beautiful. Nor is the male less of a seducer, as with a little
bound, which resembles a flight, he places himself in front of his
companion, and in turn opens his wings, showing his thousand colors and
the charm of his golden eyes. But too restless is the impatience of
those two lovers who exchange their first kisses. Whoever has witnessed
but once the caresses of two butterflies can certainly imagine how the
angels love; but does any planet shelter a human creature that lives
with wings also in heaven?
Now those two butterflies come near to each other, so near as to touch,
to kiss with their antennæ; then in a wink one bounds upon the other and
with a leisurely, sweet, prolonged caress, fondly they kiss each other
with their wings. And then they repose, as though they wished to relish
the sweetness of that grand and voluptuous caress, in which the wing of
the one softly and slowly kisses the silk and velvet of his companion.
How sweet, how sensual must be the caress of two wings which with a
thousand scintillating papillæ touch each other in a perfect
juxtaposition, and yet in this intermingling of nerves and velvet do not
lose one single speck of that golden dust which adorns them!
Many and many a time I saw those happy creatures prance around and kiss
each other; many a time I stood with beaming eye, envying that angelic
kiss of two wings. Man may, indeed, envy the butterfly which in its rich
loves of glittering inspiration puts to shame our corporeal embraces.
Two creatures, nude yet clothed, passionate and chaste, that love but
once and one creature only, that kiss on earth and unite in the skies;
that, inebriated with the nectar of flowers and the rays of the sun,
caress each other with their wings and fall in love with such beautiful
hues as Titian and Rubens strove in vain to obtain from their art and
their chemistry; two creatures that abandon life in a long love and from
the spasms of a leisurely embrace return to nature their bodies
extinguished by love!
After long kisses and many caresses, my two angels exchanged a last,
more ardent rebuff, and then away in the sky to relight the torch of
life which was soon to be extinguished in them. Sighing, I followed
them, now united in a whirling flight, until they were lost in the azure
of the skies. Why do we not also love in that way?
II
On my neighbor's roof the first rays of the sun have stirred up an
infernal racket. Among the tiles, tawny and corroded by the black
wartwort, there are some soft cushions of moss, and on the eaves, with
edges frayed by rust and twisted by the alternating of sun and ice,
grows some grass that, more frugal than an anchoret and happier than a
king, lives on light and dew. On those tiles and on those eaves all the
sparrows in the neighborhood have their rendezvous; and, sprightly,
petulant, noisy, they pursue each other, intermingle with their wings,
and clash, peck, play with their little feathered bodies. They speak a
common and inharmonious language, but they seem to narrate the dreams of
the night, and to have many and important things to tell each other. One
shrieks, another warbles, a third is chirping; not one is still. Happy
because they have slept well, having already forgotten yesterday, and
unmindful of today, they are basking their feathers in the first rays of
the sun, and, beaks hidden under their wings, waging war upon some
importunate acarus. There are some small and some big. The gray, the
coppery, and the black with slight variations of hues indicate, perhaps,
to the naturalist age and sex, perhaps even varieties of species; but in
this moment they are all kindred chattering and enjoying themselves
together. No difference of caste seems to humiliate one and elate
another; no infirmity produces pain in some of them and compassion in
others; here is neither etiquette of rank nor hypocrisy of compliments.
Have they, those dear and happy young sparrows, carried into effect the
republic of Plato?
But, lo! in that crowd of thoughtless, happy creatures I behold a
sparrow of a deeper black, a darker chestnut hue, and more high-chested
than the others. Frequently he stands upright on his small legs,
stretches his neck, his body, his head, like a child about to have his
height measured, and, without moving from his place, he looks to the
right and to the left with an air of indefinable, vain complacency. And,
lo! among his neighbors he sees a female sparrow, of a plain gray color,
with an elongated body, delicate and pretty. She seems to have been made
for the ivory hand of a lady to hold, thrusting out her loving head from
that nest of intelligent folds that is the hand of a woman. The impudent
sparrow sees her and, without approaching, utters a cry of conquest
which in force and petulance already seems to be a cry of victory. It
appears to me that in the sparrow's dictionary that sound must be a word
with great significance and important consequences, because the pretty
little female with a short flight leaves the noisy crowd of her
companions and draws near to the edge of the roof. But the bold lover
impatiently flies after her and repeatedly renews his insistent,
petulant cry; he is already very close to her, but the little female
flies to the roof of the house on the opposite side of the street. She
has hardly reached it when the male overtakes her, and at short distance
they both face and defy each other; and, twittering in different voices,
they hurl at each other a world of words which seem to me insolence and
tenderness at the same time. The one whines, the other shrills; the one
implores, the other commands, and frequently the prating is so closely
intermingled that it seems like the sound of one instrument. But the
bickering appears to have fatigued them, and the pretty little female
withdraws, running to an eave, while the male looks up at the sun and
awaits new strength. And strength seems to be restored to him very soon,
for the warbling and shrieking begin anew. Nor is the insolent lover
satisfied with his voice, but runs by leaps and flights to peck his
companion; and a hasty retreat, a confused crying, a continual clashing
succeed each other at brief intervals through the mossy labyrinths of
that roof. Already many battles have been fought between the two lovers;
the anxiety to escape and to defend herself from wanton desires seems so
sincere in that winged little female that I almost begin to believe that
she does not want to be loved that morning. But, if this be really so,
why does she not open her wings and fly away into the infinite sky? And
if she does not love that too obstinate persecutor, why does she call
him when he, piqued, flies to the top of the roof, almost simulating
indifference or vexation? But desire cannot stand that war any longer,
and the male is now decided to seize the sweet prize of victory, and as
if sliding down on those tiles, with short leaps that seem steps he
pursues his companion, who withdraws to a corner of the roof where it
projects over the street. Behind her she has not an inch of space left:
she must either fly away and lose, perhaps, her lover, already tired of
so many refusals, or capitulate. Fractions of an inch seem to have
become infinite space, measured as they are by male and female with
steps and leaps; and the female raises her voice louder and louder at
intervals, but does not succeed in drowning the more robust and
courageous voice of the lover who is now so close to her as to touch her
with his beak and shake her with his wings. The two little warm bodies
come into contact, clash, commingle. There, on the extreme brink of the
eave, with her little body suspended over the abyss, the female concedes
the crowning voluptuousness to her companion, and a sweet inspiration
and a rebuff which seems like a flash of lightning attend an ardent,
intimate, fulmineous love, a love caught over the abyss of space.
The two lovers fall in a swoon; they rise slowly and stare at each
other, amazed and languid; then, with a shiver, they adjust their
feathers, disarranged by the embrace; with a second shiver they absorb
slowly, slowly the last quaver of the vanishing voluptuousness, and away
they fly to hide in some hospitable tree their happy lassitude and to
restore their strength for new battles and new loves.
These two pictures, which I have rapidly sketched from nature, are only
poor specimens from an immense collection, rich in the warmest tints and
in the most singular designs. In no function does life multiply its
forces as in love, and the queerest phenomena are interlaced around the
union of the sexes, which, unique in essence, assumes the most varied
forms. The philosopher, the poet, the artist, should study with interest
the thousand ways in which living beings exchange the germinative
gemmulæ, and they would find subjects for profound meditation and a
strong incentive to inspiration. Only in the eyes of the hypocrite or of
the idiot many loves of living beings may seem brutal battles or
lascivious embraces. Nowhere does Nature manifest herself more powerful,
more inexhaustible, more admirable than where she teaches the living how
to perpetuate life. It is well to conceal, as far as possible, from the
eyes of our children, especially from little girls, the too obscene
intercourses of those domestic animals which most resemble us. However,
the most rigorous morals in the world and the most puritanical modesty
would be unable to hide the kisses of doves, the amorous duets of
canaries, the sublime embraces of butterflies. More than one maiden had
in these pictures of nature her first lesson of love; and many years
before the lips of a lover taught her the life in two, doves, canaries,
butterflies had caused her heart to throb, disclosing to her a corner in
the realm of infinite and glowing mysteries.