THE FIRST WEAPONS OF LOVE--COURTSHIP
How subtle and mysterious must that high chemistry be which unites the
germinative elements of two organisms of different sex to renew life and
generate a new organism! It does not suffice that in the calm and long
silence of thirty or forty years, half lived by a man and half by a
woman, the gemmulæ have prepared and made ready to call and attract each
other; it does not suffice that the powerful energies of sexual
affinities have accumulated; it still does not suffice that a sudden
sympathy shall prepare the spark and the conflagration. All this long
activity of nature has prepared things in order that the great
phenomenon may occur; but the atoms that seek each other and ardently
desire to unite must long oppose each other in order to rekindle the
ardors and centuplicate the energies. To the human male the aggressive
mission has been assigned; to the human female, the difficult task of
defending herself. The part assigned to man is simple and requires only
strength, physical or moral, intellectual or made complex by many
elements; yet always an energy of attack and seduction, to assail and
overthrow, one after the other, curtain-walls and ramparts, barricades
and lunettes, all the intricate system of fortifications which woman
erects against man to defend herself; or rather, to let herself be
defeated slowly and chastely.
To woman, on the other hand, nature has assigned a task much more
difficult and cruel. She must repudiate what she desires; she must
struggle against the voluptuousness which invades her, repel him whom
she loves, exact sacrifices when she would ask only for kisses, be
avaricious when everything urges her to be generous. She must collect
all her meager strength to defend a gate vigorously attacked, and cry
out aloud, "Wait!" to him whom she would like to press sweetly to her
bosom.
The battles of desire and coquetry, of ardor and modesty, impatience and
reticence are fought in the various countries and in the various epochs
with widely different strategy and tactics, but all may be reduced to
this general formula. Even when the sweet chain of sympathy prepares a
sure love for two lovers, the one says, "Immediately," and the other
answers "Later." When the sexes exchange their strategy and tactics, and
invert their amorous missions, there invariably arises a violent
disorder, and virtue and esthetics are submerged in the same shipwreck.
In Paraguay, where laxity of customs prevails, a most impatient young
man, who had reasons to believe himself loved, would repeat in every
key, from the most tender to the most impassioned, with sobbing voice
and tyrannical accent, this one word: "Today!" And the beautiful Creole,
who knew nothing of Darwin and sexual selection, would reply smilingly:
"But why today? You have known me for ten days only; in two months,
perhaps." In this artless reply that Paraguayan girl was evolving the
philosophy of seduction and coquetry, the fundamental lines of the
physiology of the sexes.
Every day the most beautiful half of the human race throws in our faces
the rude accusation that we are much less exacting in our tastes, and
that, satisfied with the external forms, we rarely seek to determine the
substance. And it is natural that it should happen this way; the
different missions assigned to each of the two sexes in the amorous
strategy require that this should be done. If certain contours exercise
so great and immediate a sway over us, it is because we seek in them,
unwittingly and involuntarily, the good mother and the good nurse; and,
more than it seems, voluptuousness prepares the future generations for
the good and the better. To fructify a human female, who shall become a
good mother and a good nurse, the flash of a desire and the
instantaneous ardor of a battle will suffice; but woman does not seek a
fecundator only; she wants her companion to be the defender of her
future children, the protector of her weakness; she wants to assure
herself as to the deep energy of the passion of him who says he loves
her; she wants to sound the abysses of heart and mind. The man shall
build the nest: is he an architect? He shall defend it from rapacious
animals: is he courageous? He shall train and enrich his children: has
he talent, ambition, tenacity of purpose? He must know all this. For
some time she has been aware that she is young and beautiful; many a
time the ardent rays of a thousand desires have showered upon her; at
her command numerous adorers would fall at her feet, all young, perhaps,
handsome and robust; but she does not want a man; she wants the man who
will be lastingly, powerfully and ardently hers. This is how, in the
initial web of love, we read the inexorable laws which govern it; how
clearly nature explains to us the inevitable fickleness of human males,
their polygamic wanderings and their unreasonable requirements; just as
modesty, chastity and the sublime reticence of woman are the faithful
guardians of the destinies of the future family. Much of this elementary
strategy was lost in the stormy vicissitudes of modern civilization; it
is necessary to scrape off much varnish and snatch away many rags in
order to touch the robust members of the primitive passions;
nevertheless, through multiform hypocrisy, we succeed in finding the
kernel of the thing.
Even in the rarer and more fortunate cases of two lovers suddenly and
simultaneously struck by a sympathy equally warm and energetic, it is
necessary that man and woman should court each other for a longer or
shorter period of time. They should show to each other, in a hundred
ways, their physical, moral and intellectual beauties. After having been
rapidly conquered through their glances, they must re-conquer each other
every day, every hour, with the seductions of the heart, grace and
talent. It is necessary that the great god should receive the homage of
all our beauties, all our virtues, all our perfections. From morning
till night, we go on gleaning from the fields, picking from gardens and
orchards and roaming through forests and over mountains, in order to
carry to the altar of our idol every leaf, every flower, and every fruit
which our hands can snatch away from fruitful nature. Sublime contest of
homages and tributes, sublime profusion of riches and forces! The woman,
also, who feels sure of being already loved brings to the altar a fresh
sheaf of corn ears, a fresh bouquet of flowers, and exultantly exclaims:
"This, too, is yours!" And man, although not doubting that he is the god
of his companion, approaches every moment the door of the temple, he
also carrying a new fruit, a new treasure, and always repeats: "This,
too, is yours!"
These reciprocal seductions especially succeed where dissimilarities are
deeper between the two lovers, whether proceeding from different
sympathy, age, beauty, or from any other difference of some importance
between the two that must unite to make one individual. It is then
necessary that the increased energies of the one should conquer by
degrees the treasures of the other, so that the differences may vanish
or diminish and an equilibrium be brought about without which perfect
love is impossible. One hundred volumes would not suffice to describe
the craftinesses with which man conquers a woman's love, to enumerate
the hundred thousand arts with which woman warms tepid sympathies or
carries to delirium a great passion. In many cases the intriguant holds
off a step further every day "the aim of his warm desires," and while
the avid and ardent hand is on the point of picking the fruit, this is
withdrawn by an invisible and cruel hand. "Higher, higher, still
higher," the young girl seems to say to the puppy which jumps to catch
the cracker from her rosy hands; and "Higher, still higher," cry and
should cry the women of the entire world to the man who sighs and asks
for their love.
Longer, more persistent, more fiery is the battle between desire and
conquest, and richer is the trophy of victory. The daughters of Eve
never regret the time lost in the first fights of love; not only do long
wars prepare the most splendid victories, but the first struggles are of
themselves, and for themselves alone, a better part of love's paradise,
and a long string of easy conquests is not worth one fierce and bloody
battle of enticements. If, however, O daughters of Eve, you have the
brilliant but dangerous mission of defending yourselves from a compact
phalanx of adorers, you must redouble your arts of strategy and tactics.
If you are really powerful, victory cannot fail you, and you will choose
the best among the best. Train your impatience and kill the weak with
time. The first to withdraw are the pallid loves and the desires of
libertinism. True and deep passions ignore impatience and weariness,
and, fighting every day, and every day advancing, they leave the
disputed field strewn with corpses; and when you, tired in turn, proffer
your hand to those who have long waited and long struggled, you may rest
assured that you are among the blest.
Physiological seduction, or conquest of love by nature's law, is called
by the English-speaking people _courtship_, and Darwin, by using this
word in a much broader sense and for all animals, has impressed upon it
the precious and wholly scientific mark. _Coquetry_ is only a form of
this art of seduction and conquest, and belongs already to the field of
pathology. Much more frequent in woman, it is also seen in man; and it
is so deeply rooted in some natures that it springs up before puberty
and disappears only with death. Self-esteem, however, plays in it a part
so great that its history belongs rather to the domain of pride than of
love. Physiological seduction is a necessity; coquetry is a vice; the
need of pleasing is one of the most fundamental elements of love, one of
its most useful tools; coquetry has only itself for aim. When the
conquest is made, physiological seduction lowers its weapons and
withdraws; coquetry, on the contrary, is immortal and every day it grows
afresh with new ardor and new yearning. To satisfy it, it is necessary
to awaken daily a new desire in those who have already been vanquished,
and new passions in those who have not been conquered yet, no matter
whether we share the passion or not. Above all, woman wishes to be loved
by many; and, in the less reprehensible cases, around true love she
wishes to entwine a garland of sympathies. While the heart is given to
one alone, she dispenses smiles, sighs--perhaps, also, half-chaste
kisses and semi-libertine caresses--to those she does not wish to lose
as adorers and whom she deems it opportune to keep in bondage, tying
them to herself with the subtle but strong thread of hope. In the
gravest cases the heart cannot be given to any one, because it has been
promised to all, and the huge task of pleasing many wearies the
sentiment and breaks the vertebræ of character in such a way as to make
impossible the development of any sincere and ardent affection. The most
indefatigable coquettes and the most worn-out flirts never love; and if,
in questions of love, not falling means to be virtuous, then coquetry
can be said to be most pure and most holy. Every day the moral sense
rebels at seeing many women selling smiles and desires every hour and,
posing as Lucretias, impunely playing with lasciviousness which they do
not feel, and with love which does not burn them, while they hurl
anathemas at the woman who may, perhaps, have fallen but once, torn, as
it were, by a true and strong passion, guilty of no other wrong than
believing mendacity and treachery impossible. The virtue of the coquette
is like that of the asbestos, which resists the fire by its fire-proof
nature; it is a virtue entirely physical, anatomical, and he who values
it does not possess a shadow of moral sense, nor has he even read a page
of the physiology of the human heart.
Readers, if you have the misfortune of loving a coquettish woman, never
forget that coquetry belongs to the history of the lust of sentiment;
and if you thirst for love, go and seek it elsewhere, for you have taken
the wrong road to it. Where you are, do seek play and folly,
pyrotechnics, acrobatism, the tintinnabulation of the fool's bells, the
laughter of the masquerader; but do not seek ardent voluptuousness, or
the sublime palpitations of an affection which never was the companion
of coquetry.
True love, which does not seek voluptuousness only, but the full,
absolute, complete possession of all the beloved, cannot bring into play
the subtle arts of the diplomacy of coquetry, because it cannot have the
patience to study them, or the calmness to learn them. It is a genius
that knows not how to adapt itself to the domestic cares of the home
life; a general who knows how to win battles, but does not waste any
attention on the buttons of the uniforms and on barrack regulations.
Love shines, thunders, weeps, fulminates, threatens and prays;
overthrown, it overthrows; wounded, it kills. It curses and blesses, but
is wrong in one thing only: it does not know the game of chess.
Coquetry, on the contrary, is the most famous chess-player ever known.
Natural seduction is the art of making all our values well appreciated
by presenting them with the best possible appearance. To please, we
better ourselves as much as we can, and, made beautiful by nature and
art, knock at the door through which affections enter. Man, who is the
stronger of the two who love, and from strength derives his most
irresistible seductions, after having tossed his leonine hair throws
himself habitually at the feet of the woman and begs an alms of love.
And woman, who is the weaker of the two, loves to disarrange with her
gentle hands the mane of the king of animals, to tease him and to enjoy
the superhuman voluptuousness of placing her foot on strength, to feel
it quiver underneath and be able to say: "It is mine!" This is one of
the most general forms of the reciprocal seduction of the sexes; and
when man, on his knees and, perhaps, weeping, pleads for love, he obeys
one of the most inexorable laws of nature and does not appear a coward,
nor does he debase himself. Before throwing himself down in the dust, he
must have shown flashes and thunder. "Lion for all, lamb for
myself!"--such is the man who claims a woman; she wants only to be the
Franklin of the human lightning and to attract it to herself and conduct
it along the most subtle wires of her nervous organism. And when grace
has conquered strength the daughter of Eve feels complete; and when the
man feels the rough skin of his herculean nature caressed by the soft
contact of a woman's body, he also feels as though redoubled; and both,
in the fullness of bliss, feel changed into that perfect being which is
the sum of a man and a woman.
When a difficult problem belonging to the moral world presents itself
to us, the only way to resolve it is that of simplifying it by leading
it again to the broad highway of physiology. To read and re-read the
great book of nature, trying to follow blindly its laws in the human
world: there is art. This is manifest at every step in our studies on
the sentiment of love. Which are the elements that make a woman
seductive above all others? Beauty, grace, affection. Which are the
virtues that make a man fascinating above all others? Strength, courage,
talent. There is seduction, there is sympathy, which seem the most
foolish and the most mysterious things in the world, taken back to the
virgin source of the physiology of the sexes; there is an opening
through which we see much of the light of future progress. Man must make
himself more manly than ever in order to seduce and conquer the love of
the daughters of Eve; and woman must always make herself more womanly in
order to please the sons of Adam. And both must refine and elevate the
type of their respective sexes, higher and higher, to the greatest
sublimity which human hands and poet's wings may attain. Woman may
dress, if she likes, with all the allurements of art; she may adorn her
hair with the fragrant flowers of sentiment, assume all the classic
graces and consume us with the fire of all her physical and moral
seductions; but, at the bottom, there should ever remain a female, and
under the wings of an angel and a cherub there should always be an Eve.
And man may torture his ambition in order to bend it under the heel of
love, and spur his talent so that it may throw its treasures at the feet
of his idol; he may be a hero or a martyr, Spartacus or Cæsar, a tamed
lion or a roaring lion; but in his loves let him always be as manly as
ever, so that woman, after having stripped her hero, may always find an
Adam. Seduction is never baseness, never violence, never treachery,
never tyranny, when it is inspired by a true and great love, when it is
the alliance of all our forces guided by the most legitimate, the most
powerful, the most ardent of our desires, that of loving and being
loved. Without love, seduction is a rape of voluptuousness, or a bargain
in mordant vanities; it is either a crime or a vice.