MORNING CREPUSCULES OF LOVE--THE GOOD AND EVIL SOURCES OF LOVE
A human being of a low order or of a simple nature does not feel the
energy of that new sentiment called love rise within him until the
development of the germinative glands has marked in him the character of
the sex and made of that being a man or a woman. On the other hand, in
rich and powerful natures, many years before sex has impressed its deep
mark on the organism, a vague, mysterious and chaste sympathy attracts
the young boy toward the young girl. There, where the sun of the
infinite azure of the skies is to rise, one notices a rosy tint lightly
projected on the horizon, but sufficient to warn us: "There must the
greatest star shine some day, the father of all light." The sun is ever
the most beautiful among all the beautiful things of the skies, and I
have studied with warm and constant affection, watched with religious
attention the first crepuscules of that other sun which we are now
studying in this book. They appear without being invited by the
precocious corruption of books and of neighbors, they rise spontaneously
in the heart of the most unconscious innocence; they shine like serene
and calm rays of a light that later will be ardent and fascinating. They
appear and disappear, like flashes of lightning, flashes which
noiselessly illuminate the clouds and then leave them darker than
before. A vulgar and coarse malignity repeats a blasphemy every day when
it asserts that no child is ignorant of the secrets of love. The
innocence of childhood is truer, more sincere and deeper than is
supposed, and lasts limpid and adamantine even when it has been splashed
with the mud of social corruption. The rosy lips of a child may repeat,
with an expression of lascivious malice, a jest learned by chance from a
maid-servant or from a libertine, but that stain does not penetrate into
the crystalline nature of the child, and the spray of a fountain will be
sufficient to wash the trace away. The malignant rabble is wont to doubt
of the innocence of others, just as the wicked is to deny all virtue.
In the infantile songs, in the noisy and turbulent games which form the
delight of the first age, suddenly a young boy beholds a little girl
among a hundred, among a thousand; and an instantaneous sympathy ties
the rosy knot of a nameless affection, of an innocent, unwitting love,
which may seem at the same time the caricature and the miniature of a
sublime picture. I remember having seen an angelic little girl, blonde
as an ear of wheat and rosy as the aurora, throw her arms around the
neck of a little boy as haughty as a brigand and as dark as a pirate.
And the impudent little thing would cover him with kisses, and he would
disdain and resent these cajoleries; and she would tell him that she
loved him very much, that she wanted to make of him her little
bridegroom. A reversed world, a microscopic scene of a chaste Joseph who
did not know what woman was, and a Lilliputian woman who, in the
innocent ardors of a childish embrace, seemed to be the wife of Potiphar
and was nothing but an angel. However, this sudden movement of affection
between two children of different sex conceals sometimes a true and real
passion which has haughty jealousies, tears and sighs, delirious joys, a
history, a future.
The beautiful young girls whom a kind or a cruel nature has destined to
arouse at every step of life a desire or a sigh, often ignore the fact
that in the multitude of their adorers there are boys so small as to
seem babies and who kiss in secret the flowers that have fallen from
their bosoms; who furtively and mysteriously, like domestic thieves,
steal into the little room that shelters their angel to kiss her bed, to
kneel on the carpet which that woman treads--that woman whom they
already distinguish above all the creatures in the world, whom they dare
already to place on the same level as their mother. And how often a
woman who playfully runs her fingers through the locks of a boy laying
his head upon her knees, is unconscious of a little heart that beats
loudly, loudly, under those caresses; unconscious, when the child raises
his curly head, of the cause of his flush, which does not come from
congestion, but from burning with a fire of which he himself is
ignorant, but which is love.
These rosy phantoms, which gild some of the most beautiful hours of our
child-life, seem to last only as long as the morning twilight; and
certainly the battles of youth often cause them to be forgotten. And
many, with slippery memories and skeptical hearts, when they hear them
mentioned have only words of contempt and gestures of pity for what they
are pleased to term infantile lullabies to be relegated among the
horrors of the witches and the caresses of the nurse. And yet how often
these fleeting phantoms announce the storms of the future, reveal a
deeply enamored nature and weave the first threads of a long fabric of
delirious joys and torments! Some very, very fortunate mortal, on his
death-bed, could press the hand of the only woman he had ever loved,
whom he had loved when still a child, before he even knew she was a
woman. The trembling lips of the dying man could link the last kiss of
life with the first noisy, insolent, clumsy kiss on the soft cheek of a
ten-year-old girl. And without trying to reach this loftiest sphere of
an ideal too far removed from our existence, how often, after a long
life hardened by the tortures of a hundred passions, after having lost
faith and love, in the dusk of the early evening a last rosy flash of
sunset awakened a dear memory, buried many years since, and the heart of
an old man throbbed and a tear ran down his wrinkled face! Before the
weary eyes a little straw hat had passed, with two blue streamers, but
in the depths of the heart what an abyss of dear memories had opened in
an instant! In the night of the past, a limpid ray of light had
illumined a picture all life and all beauty; an antique cameo had
appeared under the pick of the gravedigger, among ruins and dust! And
that picture was a childish love, a flower carried away by the turbid
torrent of a storm, but preserved by the friendly hand of memory,
which, after all, is not always ungrateful or cruel.
If you ask a boy why he loves a little girl, he will blush and run away;
if you ask the little girl, her face will flush and she will answer with
a sublime impertinence. They love--_and they know not why_! Ask a
precocious rosebud why it wanted to bloom in March, instead of awaiting
the warm and voluptuous air of May; ask a July cyclamen why it did not
await the cool breezes of September to perfume the mossy bed in which it
had made its nest. _They love, and they know not why!_ In passionate men
the first light of love appears sooner, because Nature, fruitful and
impatient, longs to give her flowers, 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 conceive that which the masses will never
conceive at thirty.
And why, my boy, do you prefer that little girl to all the others? And
why, my pretty girl, do you allow yourself to be kissed only by the lips
of that dark, impertinent little beau? Because that little girl differs
from all the others; because that dark lad is unlike any other boy.
Love, from its first and most indistinct appearance, is selection, a
deep and irresistible sympathy of different natures, the recomposition
of discomposed forces, the equilibrium of opposites, the complement of
dissociated things; the harmony of harmonies; the most gigantic, the
most prepotent of the affinities ties of attraction!
Aside from the precursory crepuscules of natures most powerful in love,
this sentiment, in ordinary men, rises when a new want springs forth
under the rod of that magical transformer which is puberty. At that
time, on the smooth, pubescent, roundish surface of the infantile
nature, a deep crevice opens; a void is formed which woman alone can
fill; then, that little, round, smooth fruit called _little girl_ also
sheds its childish skin, disclosing the juicy and delicate flesh of the
fruit which was hidden in it. Then, from every developed muscle of the
virile organism, from every sound of its strengthened voice, from every
hair that makes its skin hirsute, there rises a powerful cry which
demands in the loudest tone: _A woman!_ And from every flexuous limb of
the girl who has become a woman, from every quiver of the hair which
makes her proud, from every pore of the young girl who has become a
crater of burning desires, arises a cry which demands: _A man!_
The passage of the fatal bridge that separates adolescence from youth is
one of the epochs most burdened with anxieties, most merry with
convulsive joys, and for this I call it the _hysterical period of life_.
I shall illustrate it, perhaps, some day, in a work which I am preparing
on the ages of man. I shall here describe with few, wide strokes of the
pen how the necessity of loving makes itself felt to most men. And if I
have referred to woman most of the time, it is because she, more chaste,
more reserved, and yet a hundred times more in need of love, feels more
deeply the shudder which announces to her the appearance of the new god;
more innocent than we are, she does not know his nature; more timid, she
has a greater fear of him. Nature conceded to man common resources
almost unknown to woman, and only too often precocious vice makes him
acquainted sooner with voluptuousness than with love. When he is chaste,
virtuous and impassioned, he also feels the same raging tumult, which
stirs his soul; he too, somber, melancholy, frantic, demands of nature,
with the accents of wrath and plaintive lamentations: _A woman!_
To this cry answers, alas! only too often, the first comer. It is
impossible for certain natures to resist a long time the tortures of
robust and vigorous chastity: the frail human shell would fall to pieces
if it persisted in keeping imprisoned an accumulation of forces, all
gigantic, all fresh, all ready for the battle. The first love is not
slow to appear; and if the neophyte who appears on the horizon lacks
more than two-thirds of the desired virtues, Love is such a magician
that he can create them and transform a worm into a god.
The maiden in her dreams, by looking at the pictures in the church and
within the domestic walls, had fancied a winged man with nothing earthly
and material but two lips to kiss. The object desired by her was an
angel, all love and all ether, who would gather under his large folded
wings the soul of the young girl and carry it away, through the space of
heaven, to a golden region, all light and warmth. The quivering of the
wings and the velvet of a kiss were all the voluptuousness which the
chaste virgin ever thought of dreaming; and beyond it, an obscure and
infinite mystery of which she knew neither name, nor confines, nor form.
And instead of this angel, she beholds a man in trousers, with
mustaches, who smokes much and slanders women; perhaps his hair is
already turning gray, already he may be a husband and a father--but he
is a man.
And the youth, too, had dreamed of his angel. She should have been all
eyes, all locks of hair; divinely slender, with feet which would hardly
touch the earth, eternal smile wreathed in an aureole of light, a soul
ardent as fire and an innocence as pure as the snow that falls upon the
summits of the Jungfrau. And, instead, she who wakes us from the dream
of the night is the provocative, stout maid-servant who by her contours
only, distinct and strong as they are, shows nothing but that she is
much of a woman, and instead of wings she has two sinewy arms and two
hands hardened from the use of pot and broom; and, far from having
winged feet, she pounds the floor with pattens that seem to be soled
with iron--but she is a woman.
Anything is good and enough for a first love, which is nearly always a
million of hunger and a penny of bread. How vulgar is the object of that
enamored young girl's thoughts! The heart of a grocer in the body of a
porter! But he is pallid, and the hebetude of his stare seems
sentimental languor to her; he is ill, and to her his illness appears
poetic; he is robust, and for her he is the god of strength; he is
arrogant, but to her he is passionate; he is an egotist, and so much the
better, for he will love but her, who alone will know how to make him
happy. How much poetry that ardent youth has launched to the skies, when
he sang the exciting form of a strong peasant woman! How many elegies
has he not wept, thinking of the bluish paleness of a cholerotic
working-woman! Woe, if seduction accompanies all this texture of lies
with which too often the first love builds its nest! Woe, if to the
inexperienced maiden the aged libertine says, with the accent acquired
from long practice: "I love you!" Woe, if the lascivious old woman,
satisfying her old appetite with unripe fruit, knows how to warm the
innocent youth at the fire of new voluptuousness! Then the fire is
kindled, the flames spread, and the first object loved is placed on the
altar with vows of eternal fealty, and perfumed with the incense of the
maddest, most unrestrained idolatry.
The first love is not always born so evilly, but it too closely
resembles, alas! these first loves which I have just described. Let us
be sincere from the very first steps in our studies, for hypocrisy is
the wood-worm that in modern society cuts into and corrodes the highest
and strongest tree in the garden of life. The original sin of love
appears to us with its first cry, and even when we have been forced to
use all the artifices of the galvanoplastic to gild our idol, even when
the bellows of imagination have worked to inflame the first love, the
very first thing we say is a lie: "I love you above everything in this
world; I shall love you forever. You are my first love, and one can love
but once." And a second vow answers the first, perhaps more sacred and
more ardent; and in a kiss, that is often the sum of two lies, the first
hypocrisy is sealed, which down to the last generation of the loves of
those two beings will seal with an everlasting mark all the expressions
of affection, all the cravings of the heart.
Be sincere with the first kiss, if you desire love to be the chief joy
of life, not a shameful trade of voluptuous lies. Yes, yours is the
first love, but because it is the first it is neither true nor just nor
natural that it should be the greatest, the one, the only love. Do not
swear falsely, do not perjure yourselves before you know what truth is.
To the eternity of your vows, the indifference of tomorrow will answer
with a sardonic, mocking grin. Before you have really loved, you will
sing in every tune that virtue does not exist, that love is a dream,
and, children and elders at the same time, you will forswear a god whose
temple you have never seen.
You are two: a man and a woman; and you say that you love each other,
and perhaps it is first love for both. Well, then, during the first days
do not swear, if you still value the word of an honest man, and if
perjury still has terrors for you. Rarely is the first love true love,
as the first book of an author rarely is the true expression of his
genius. One is weak from excessive youth as from old age; and the one
and first and only love, like many other dogmatic formulas which delight
so much that pedantic and hypocritical biped called man, has made more
victims in modern society than many crimes and many maladies of body and
mind ever did. If your love is the first, so much the better; with hands
chastely clasped and lips modestly conjoined, do not pronounce any other
words but these: "Let us love each other!" If you are among the few and
happy mortals who will love but once; if you are among the very few who,
in the first woman or in the first man, have found the angel seen in
their first dreams of youth, thousand and thousand times blessed! The
fidelity of the future will cement for life the virtues of your souls.
As for myself, if the increased progress of true and healthy democracy
should eliminate from juridical institutions the formula of the oath, I
would wish that the man and the woman who love each other should never
swear. An adjuration less and a caress more, what a delight! An eternity
less, and a longer caress, what voluptuousness! Nor should chaste and
chosen souls throw my book away, feeling hurt by my cynic advice. If
they will read the pages that follow, they will clearly see that no one
more than I intends to elevate love to the most serene regions of the
ideal, and that, however high sentiment can ascend, I, also, feel the
strength to follow it. The triple and thick skin of hypocrisy that
enwraps us from infancy, the Arcadic varnish which makes us look
polished and brilliant, nearly always forbid us to see the true nature
of things, and in love we are all unmistakably counterfeiters. The
greatest liberty, the greatest sincerity alone can cure us of this
malady, which is civil rather than national, because it penetrates every
race, every social class; it does not spare the highest and strongest
natures; it has become an integral part of every fiber of our hearts, of
the framework of all our institutions.
Which are the true sources of love? Which are the paths that lead to the
sacred temple? There should be an only source, an only path, but so many
are those who throng and crowd to enter there, where all expect the
greatest joy, that not all enter by the great highway of nature, but
through secret gates and oblique ways reach their aim; they are unhappy
because the original sin of their loves condemns them to a dangerous
life sown with despondency and bitterness.
All the natural flows of the true and great love collect in one source.
They are drops which slowly trickle into the depths of our body, and
there they gather and form rivulets and streamlets that, in turn,
collect in the channel of our veins until they effuse as the warm,
quivering wave of _sympathy_.
Sympathy is the only and true source of love. _Sympathy_, most beautiful
among the beautiful words of human speech! To suffer together, a
melancholy vaticination of life lived in two; but better still, to feel,
laugh and weep together! Two organisms, but one sense; two exterior
worlds, but which unite around a unique center; two nerves that by
various ways carry various sensations, but which interweave and run
together in one heart. To see, to gaze at, to desire each other. A spark
shoots forth from the contact of two desires: such is the first fact of
love. Two solitary ships in the desert of the ocean were plowing through
the waves, unknown to each other; the wind propelled one near to the
other; a shiver of sympathy ran through the sails and the shrouds and
caused them to creak simultaneously; they felt pressed by a common need,
and cast out a hawser which should tie them together. From that moment
they shall plow the same waters, expose themselves to the same dangers,
and long and sigh for the same land.
The most rapid and ardent sympathies have their sources in the
admiration of form, that is to say, in the sentiment of the beautiful
which is satisfied by the object which we desire and are about to love.
Among the four definitions of love that Tasso was wont to discuss, there
are three which express or suggest this idea: "Love is a desire of
beauty; Love is the cupidity of embrace for the pleasure of those who
covet a particular beauty; Love is the union through pleasure of
beauty." And, in fact, what is love if not the choice of the better
forms in order to perpetuate them? What is love if not the selection of
the best in order that it may triumph over the mediocre, a selection of
youth and strength in order that it may survive the old and weak
elements? Woman, the custodian of germs, the vestal of life, must be
more beautiful than we, and man loves in her the form above all other
things; and mediocre forms can, if elevated by a gigantic genius and an
impassioned heart, still excite ardent passions. But these are always
unstable sympathies, and where a real deformity appears, love is dead,
or lives only as a prodigy of heroism, or as an esthetic malady. Woman
also is immediately affected by the beauty of virile forms and can love
a man merely because he is handsome; but in her the field of sympathy
expands and is much higher, and character and genius will seduce her
more frequently than is the case with men. The ugliest men enjoyed the
superhuman voluptuousness of being loved; but in the attitude of their
characters, in the power of their genius, in the greatness of their
position, they possessed a fascination which belonged, nevertheless, to
the world of beauty. Woman has within herself such a power of
transmission of the germinative elements and such an accumulation of
beauty as to be capable of doing without the power and the beauty of her
companion; but she wants to feel conquered by a superior force,
fascinated by something that shines or flashes or thunders.
In love, genius and character exercise very little influence if they do
not assume a beautiful form, and esthetics dominate and govern all
amorous phenomena. This is not enough: even those who believe that their
judgment in making a selection soars to the loftiest spheres of the
ideal world, and despise the beautiful as a vulgar fascination of dull
and clouded minds, seek, involuntarily, unknowingly, some virtues that
bear a deep sexual mark. There may be a philosopher who boasts of having
loved a homely but intelligent and sensible woman; but let him search
the depths of his heart, let him study the sources of his love, and he
will find that he admires and loves in his companion those virtues which
are essentially feminine: the flexuous grace of tenderness and the kind
intelligence of the heart, or the insuperable cleverness of affection,
or the coquettish forms of a refreshing and modest intellect. In other
words, the proud despiser of form was seduced by the form, all beautiful
and all feminine, of a character or of an intelligence. And woman, when
she happens to love an ugly man, is conquered either by dominating
intellect, by dazzling ambition, by heroic courage, or by the power of
some virtues that bear a deeply virile mark. Sex is too great a portion
of the economy of life to be eliminated from our calculations by our
caprice, and love is a stream too large to be dammed and directed
between the paper dikes of our sophisms and our reticences; and if some
one should not be convinced yet that beauty is the supreme inciter of
every amorous sympathy, let him remember that love is the passion of
youth, and this is always a chosen form of beauty.
It rarely happens that two flashes from the eyes of a man and of a woman
who meet for the first time should kindle one fire only. This is the
ideal of the most ardent sympathies, the most fortunate combination in
the great, hazardous game of life. To meet suddenly, to see, to admire,
to desire each other at once and to embrace with such a look as if it
came from above; to feel inundated by a gaze, equally warm and
penetrating; to blush together and to feel all at once that two hearts
beat louder and mutely make this sweet confession: "I love you, and you
are mine!"--all this is a joy too rare, too beautiful, one which few
mortals have known and few will know.
It happens more frequently that nascent sympathies proceed unequally, so
that the one has already carried a man to the highest summits of desire
and passion, while the other hardly begins to stir; the one already
throbs, the other only faintly vibrates. Even when two loves are called
to high and fortunate destinies, even when they will soon spread their
robust wings together in the space of bliss, a task is reserved to woman
in the vicissitudes of love, so different from ours that she cannot feel
with us the same sudden and violent emotions. Man says everything with a
look; unhesitatingly and proudly he acknowledges his defeats. Woman,
even under the spell of the most ardent sympathy, lowers her eyelids,
refuses the too intense light and protects her heart with all the
refrigeratives and sedatives at her command. Man has already said to
woman a hundred times with the flash of his eyes: "I love you!" The
woman, trembling, hardly dares to say: "Perhaps I will love you!" And
away run those two happy beings, fleeing from each other, until the
sympathy of the one equals that of the other, until the supreme languor
of a long battle is smothered in two notes which vibrate together with
the sweetest harmony, while they say to each other, with a sigh, "I love
you!" and to nature repeat with another sigh: "Thanks!"
The energies of amorous desire, which the longer they last the larger
they grow, follow the laws of elementary physics governing the forces.
The most instantaneous love is not the most durable, and if an
unexpected satisfaction follows a sudden desire, love may sometimes
resemble a glorious rape rather than a true and real passion. It is true
that love is not a battle but a long war, and when the first victory is
followed by a hundred, a thousand victories, the fulmineous sympathy
also may take deep roots in our hearts, and rallying after nearly every
struggle, may pervade us all and reach the ideal perfection of coupling
intensity with extensiveness, of twinkling at the same time with the
light of those stars that never set and that of the lightning flash
that plows the skies. The most perfect love is a sun that never sets,
but does cast forth now and then more scintillant flashes. In ordinary
cases, however, loves that rise slowly, slowly die away; and those of
the nature of lightning last as long as lightning. In all cases, a
healthy love, well constituted and destined for a prolific existence,
whether born suddenly or slowly, should begin with a violent shock that
measures the depths from which the warm sympathy sprang forth. All other
affectionate sentiments arise in a manner different from love, whose
nature it is to be born amidst thunder and lightning, as gods or demons
should be born. Princes cannot come into the world like the masses; and
the Prince of Affections cannot come to light with the assistance of an
intelligent and affectionate midwife and the domestic cares of
relatives. Where a coruscation of the skies and a trembling of the earth
do not attend the birth of the new love; where nature does not rend the
air with a cry of voluptuousness or of pain, no one can deceive me: a
friendship, an affection, some sort of a sentiment, may have come into
existence; but I shall certainly not christen the new-born with the
sacred baptism of love.
And thus, naturally, we have arrived at those frontiers which separate
the only legitimate way by which we may enter the temple from those ways
that lead to it through oblique and unused paths. Friendship can be a
source of love, and a very good one, but it is always a pathological,
unnatural origin, which leads step by step to the worst of the sources
of love, such as gratitude, compassion, vanity, lust, revenge.
When one has been able to see a woman during a long time, talk to her
and perhaps live with her without calling her by any other name but that
of sister or friend, if he feels some day that he loves her, such love
resembles those tropical fruits grown in our climate by means of manure
and hothouse. Whether friendship is possible between man and woman is an
old problem which will never be solved, because many give that name to
true, real loves, which, approaching the threshold of desire, held
back, perhaps, by the rigid hand of duty, oscillate suavely and
lingeringly in front of the temple without ever entering it. It is by a
conventional politeness that to these loves we give the name of
friendship, and I will certainly not condemn such innocent
falsification; but a true and real friendship, with all the specific
characteristics that distinguish this serene affection between man and
woman, is not possible except on one condition: to obliterate every
sexual mark in the two beings that have shaken hands. And the
elimination of the sex in an individual is such a cruel mutilation, both
physical and moral, that it destroys more than half of man. If
friendship unites two eunuchs of this kind, I shall say that their
affection is no longer that which exists between man and woman, but that
of two neutral beings. However, as long as a single desire of the
other's person is possible in them, as long as the most chaste, the most
innocent of desires may arise in them, friendship becomes love. How many
are these moral eunuchs? How many men and women can love without desire?
Count them and then I shall be able to tell you how many are the cases,
well ascertained, of _friendship without love_ between man and woman.
I wish, nevertheless, to be more explicit, so that I may not seem to go
on beating about the bushes without attacking and solving the question
because I find it difficult. Are there in this sublunary world a man and
a woman glad to see each other, who love each other and who have never
desired even a kiss from each other? Yes; those two angels, then, are
friends and I admit the possibility of the psychological phenomenon of
friendship between two persons of different sex.
From any form of mild affection one can pass to love, and therefore much
more easily from that friendship between man and woman knowingly
admitted by us as possible. Long-lasting and healthy loves may arise in
this way, but they always have a cold skin and a somewhat lymphatic hue.
They require restoratives, a hydropathic cure, and, sometimes, cod-liver
oil as well, because from the lymphatic they may also pass to the
scrofulous stage. A common variety of this kind of loves is that which
originates from gratitude.
"Love who to none beloved to love remits" sang the poet, and he told the
truth; but this goes on one condition, that between the two who love
each other there shall be no other difference but in the length of the
step; that is to say, that one should arrive first and the other join
him afterward; otherwise they would never meet on the main road of
sympathy. You, O tutors, who believe in the love of a pupil; you,
gentlemen, who believe in the love of the orphan girl whom you have
helped out of her poverty; you, old bachelors, who believe in the love
of the grateful chambermaid, remember that gratitude alone did never
generate a legitimate love. If gratitude takes you by the hand and leads
you on the road of sympathy, it may be a good guide, but nothing more.
There are men and women who very much resemble cold-blooded animals,
which have the same temperature as the ambient that surrounds them, but
can generate little or no heat. They know not how to love of themselves,
and it is necessary that another love descend upon them to soak them, to
saturate them, like cake dipped in wine. Their sympathies are cold and
equal for all; they often ask of books and men what is love, and compare
the descriptions by others to what they feel in their hearts, like the
naturalist who turns and turns an insect in his hands, compares it to
the pictures before him, and finally exclaims: "It really seems to me
that this insect is the _Amor verus_ of the entomologists. I, too, do
love, really love." For all these gentlemen, whose number is much
greater than supposed, the verse of the poet is most true, and they
always love out of gratitude or compassion, which is almost the same.
That mild and sweet affection which is love out of gratitude must not be
confused with that commiseration which women especially feel for those
who love them desperately, and to whom they often concede not love, but
love out of pity. Woman is easily moved; she cannot look on
apathetically when a man suffers, and frequently yields, not out of
lewdness but of pity, which is also coupled with the legitimate pride
of being able to transform a wretched being into a happy man. And man
often takes advantage of this weakness of Eve and wickedly abuses it,
and is ready, later, to calumniate her who has made him happy. Man, too,
can love out of compassion, but more frequently concedes himself without
affection and through pride, as we shall see further on in the course of
our studies.
Woman, however, sometimes concedes love, together with voluptuousness,
to him who weeps, sighs and suffers for her. Compassion is the
benevolent chord which vibrates even in natures brutally egotistical;
while in woman, rich in so many affections, it can vibrate until it
tortures her. This sentiment, however, is, of its own nature, tender and
mild, and by placing a hand on him who suffers, keeps him always 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 narrow, long and
thorny paths, it leads us to love, this is always under the influence of
its bastardly origin. All loves out of compassion are forms of
affectionate commiseration, of benign protection, and lack the highest
notes of passion. They strongly resemble the verses of him who is not a
poet; the god of fire does not pervade, does not inflame them; they do
not know the sacred agitation of the sibyl; and if they can live long in
a mild climate, they can, however, be suddenly overthrown by the
appearance of the true god, who demands his rights, his tributes of
blood and of ardors. The woman who, unfortunately, has not yet
experienced any love other than that inspired in her by compassion, may
deceive herself, may believe that she loves truly and deeply; but woe to
her, if a real and warm sympathy should awake in her heart, that she may
make a comparison between the true love and the false one! The weak
little plant of an affection long guarded by commiseration will fall and
be carried away by the fury of the impetuous stream, and the poor
creature, who really loves for the first time, may suffer the most
excruciating pain, and be made to fight the bloodiest struggles between
duty and passion, between commiseration and love. I know only too well
that among the thousand forms of cowardly love there is also the
cowardice which begs love on bended knees, but I would prefer to be
loved by caprice, revenge or lechery, rather than by compassion. The
woman who loves us in that way has always her heel on our heads; and
although the sweet pressure of a woman's little foot may be as dear as
the caress of her hand, in the face of nature we commit an act of
cowardice and invert the most elementary laws of the physiology of the
sexes. The man who waives the primacy of conquest is a lion that allows
his mane to be shorn, a Samson with clipped hair, always a mild and
disguised form of eunuch. May fortune protect you all from love out of
compassion!
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 of sudden ambition to the man who knows
that he is strong and adores the daughters of Eve. And the daughters of
Eve, in turn, very willingly persist in throwing the baited hook to
catch the cold, lonely fish who lives in the most dark recesses of
solitude and chastity. Hence many challenges sent and taken which lead
oftener to a conquest of bodies than to true love. The great
woman-lovers, who have long since renounced the virtue of sublime love,
are accustomed to conquer all the conquerable solely for vanity's sake,
solely to tie with amorous chains to their triumphal chariot a new slave
and a new victim. They nearly always like to conquer the most difficult
and different characters, and you may find them ardently wishing to give
the first lesson in voluptuousness to the innocent as well as to
subjugate the most cunning and oldest libertines. Besides vanity, the
goad of morbid curiosity has its share in this choice of victims, as
curiosity is one of the strongest threads in the psychological web of
woman. A tart, wild fruit may stimulate the appetite of a palate too
dull, as would the mordant pungency of cheese too old; the frivolous
woman is passionately fond of this alternating of sour and burning
tastes, of this succession of men inexperienced in love and men only too
well versed in it; and lechery may go so far in these natures as to
cause them to love through mere curiosity of the unknown, even excluding
lust, which is not always necessary in these pathological tastes. At any
rate, even when vanity alone has brought a man and a woman together, a
posthumous sympathy may awaken a real love with healthy members and a
long life. It is, however, always a love that resembles the rich man who
was born a peasant and, true upstart that he is, may, in the midst of
luxury and pleasure and in the most courteous manner, kick you out of
his presence when you least can afford it. To be born well is really the
first problem of life in all cases, and democracy itself cannot succeed
in overthrowing the ancient aristocracy unless it can boast of a
legitimate and noble birth.
Man, who daily accuses of vanity his female companion, shows oftener
than the latter the most grotesque and clownish forms of that sentiment;
and we rarely see him renounce the puerile ostentation of those of his
loves which had the bastardly origin of vanity. How often has he reached
the lowest stage of cowardice by casting up to the woman who blessed him
with love, that he sought her love only to adorn with another trophy his
triumphal chariot! Woman, instead, almost always, even when she has
desired to be loved out of vanity alone, even when she is about to
dismiss the servant who has wearied her, will give him a testimonial
which makes him happy, does not humiliate him, and will satisfy him that
he pleased--for a day, a month, a year--the woman who, perhaps, feigned
to love him, or loved him very blandly. No man feels humiliated in
thinking that he was the sweet victim of a caprice; all feel dejected if
made the target of a vainglorious speculation. And many other times,
woman, with a very refined and generous tact, pretends not to understand
that she is desired and loved solely out of vanity, and gradually
succeeds in making men love her for herself, and for herself alone. The
_friendly enemy_ not perceiving it, she succeeds with subtle art in
substituting a sincere and warm passion for the narrow ambition that had
inspired the attack and the conquest: one of the thousand proofs that
woman is superior to us in sentiment in the same degree as we are
superior to her in mental strength; one of the thousand proofs that
woman always endeavors to elevate even the basest loves, while we so
often want to force under the Caudine Forks of voluptuousness even those
loves which, like the eagles, were born on the highest rocks of
psychology.
Lust is the prolific mother of most vulgar loves; nay, this sentiment is
to many only the necessity of drinking at a spring found to be sweeter
than any other. Nude love, without the splendid garments of imagination
and heart, stripped even of the robust flesh lent to it by the sentiment
of the beautiful, is reduced to a skeleton which is lust and which for
very many is all they think of love. What a poor, wretched thing! A
practice of lasciviousness! Woman converted into a cup which we prefer
to any other because we have long been accustomed to satiate our thirst
out of it. To have possessed before 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 prodigy
of being born of lechery.
Loves born of lust are the most difficult to preserve, and every day of
their life is a difficult and rare conquest. Even the most perfidious
cunning of the arts of pleasing blunts against insurmountable
difficulties, and woman, after having brought into play all the witchery
of body and heart, may see her victim snatched away from her by the
first comer. Love may be warm, ardent, thirsty, but the glass that
satisfies it is always made of the most fragile crystal and may at any
moment fall and be shattered into a hundred pieces.
Revenge, which is a form of hatred, may, by incestuous nuptials, become
a mother, or better, a stepmother of love. To be deceived and to know
it, to wish to humiliate the guilty by flaunting in the latter's face a
new love, to seek it, finding it in one day: there is the source of love
out of revenge. The unfortunate paranymph who acts as the call-bird of a
degraded passion does not always perceive the trap, allows himself to be
loved, loves, and often amuses the person who pretends to love him and
those who unconcernedly witness the shameful spectacle. Vanity makes us
blind, and it does not permit us to see that, perhaps, in the period of
a day we have been seen, desired, conquered; and while, inflated with
pride, we display our feathers like a peacock, we do not realize that we
are actors in a comedy staged to humiliate him or her who is loved
always and more than ever. In some very humiliating cases we serve as
rubefacient and sink so low as to be placed on a level with a mustard
poultice or a leech; and the cure effected at our expense is so quick
and perfect that we are immediately dismissed, like a physician who is
impatiently paid and impatiently taken leave of because his services are
no longer required.
These, however, are the most unfortunate cases, and belong to the
ugliest pathology of the human heart; in other instances love out of
revenge becomes, through the virtue of either or both of the lovers, a
true and real love which cures the old wound and opens a wide horizon of
happiness to the man and to the woman who have become acquainted in such
a strange manner, and it may then be said that he who was to be the
revengeful executioner, the unconscious minister of the justice of love,
becomes, instead, first the physician and afterward the lover of the
offended, and a new love arises on the ruins of the old one.
I certainly do not claim to have studied all the pure and impure sources
of love, but I would feel satisfied if I had touched upon the most
important ones, and outlined the genealogy of this sentiment. In an
analytical work, however great may be the care exercised in order not to
detach adherent things, it is next to impossible to avoid breaking some
fiber or destroying anything. It frequently occurs that the source of
love is not one, but double, or is formed by the collecting of various
streamlets, so that it would be difficult to state whether the new-born
is a legitimate son or a bastard. A slight but sincere sympathy may be
associated with great vanity, but the desire for revenge may,
fortunately for us, fall in with a warm and violent affection. Thus,
lust, vanity, compassion, gratitude, may meet at the same time and
fecundate a love which later may flow limpid and pure in its bed,
although its source was an impure, muddy stream.
Sometimes a human being loves another not for the latter's sake, but out
of a strange resemblance which the latter bears to a person long loved
and, perhaps, already lost; thus it happens that one may love the
daughter after having loved the mother; and there have been cases in
which one has loved even three successive generations. The excessive
disproportion in the age of the lovers, a certain mummy effluvium
exhaled even by the most carefully embalmed bodies, gives to those loves
a character that induces me to place them at least on the frontiers that
separate physiology from pathology; I would, therefore, term them
"physio-pathological."
Loves of mixed origin are the purer and warmer, the larger the part
played in them by sympathy, and this element alone would suffice to
allot a place to them in the hierarchical scale of nobility. The
influence which the first origin exercises over love is so lasting and
so prepotent that more than once affections suffering from a dangerous
illness recovered suddenly at the tender remembrance of these thoughts:
"You really loved me one day of your life." "You are mine by love and
nothing else." "And yet I loved you!" Often a man born in the highest
place and of noblest blood sinks gradually into the mire, loses his
dignity, his fortune, even the most superficial appearance of manners
and behavior; yet if you observe him attentively you will certainly find
in the nobility of some gesture, in the majestic tone of his voice, in
some refined taste, such traces of his ancient origin as may have
survived the shipwreck. And so it happens with a well-born love. I have
seen passions dragged in the mire of abjection, tattered and foul, like
a velvet rag picked up in the gutter; 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 shreds I have always found
something that had remained intact and revealed its ancient and noble
origin; and with my own eyes I have witnessed fabulous resurrections
that seemed miracles, and redemptions that caused me to think of the
divine intervention and of the galley-slaves too arcadically
rehabilitated through the rose-water bath of our modern philanthropists.
When love begins we may entertain some doubts as to the reality of the
passion before our eyes. The heart beats more quickly than usual, and in
the serene sky some clouds pass and evanesce in the deep azure; perhaps
in the distant mist we behold, at times, a lightning flash; but will we
have a storm or fine weather? If the heart is forced to answer, it may,
in these cases, make the same solemn mistakes as the meteorologists in
their almanacs or from the university chair. Embryos in their first
stage are all similar, and even the most powerful microscope cannot
distinguish today the egg of the lion from that of the rabbit. Incipient
sympathies, growing friendships, affinities about to become loves, are
all crepuscular things faintly delineated on the gray horizon, and the
human eye may be easily deceived; but we cannot cast any blame upon it.
And love, too, assumes so manifold and varied disguises as to render it
difficult for us to make a good diagnosis in many cases. However, it is
always easier to recognize love in our own home than in that of others,
notwithstanding the fact that it is much more important for our
happiness to know whether we are loved than to realize that we really
are in love. To distinguish in others the true love from the mendacious,
you may be helped by this physio-psychological essay, while in order to
explore your own heart scant attention to the phase of your sentiments
will suffice.
One truly loves when to the agonizing cry: "A man!--A woman!" a friendly
distant voice replies: "Do not weep; I am here!" One loves when, after
hearing that voice, the cry subsides and the deep void of desire is
filled. One loves when the desire of the beloved is placed above
everything else. One loves when one suddenly blushes or pales if he
hears a name or the familiar swish of a garment that approaches. One
loves when one involuntarily has on one's lips one name only a hundred
times in a day, or when one ceases to pronounce a word which one was
pronouncing a hundred times before. One loves when one's eyes are always
fixed on one point of the star-map where the creature dwells who has
become half of ourselves. One loves when one hurries to the mirror at
every instant to ask of oneself, "Am I beautiful enough?" and when one
restlessly explores the abyss of one's own conscience with the query,
"Can I be loved?" One loves when in every fiber of the heart, in every
atom of the organism, the sap of life is stirred and rushes through
every vein and every nerve, so that an intimate, penetrating, deep
commotion warns us with thrilling voice that something great and unusual
is in us, as though God had visited us. This is the true love, that is
not appeased by lust, nor quieted by ambition, nor cooled by distance,
that does not even lose itself in the dreams of the night; the love
that, to abandon us, must carry away with itself a large piece of
bleeding flesh and tortured nerves.