CONQUEST AND VOLUPTUOUSNESS
If man elevates his loves to the highest spheres of the ideal; if he can
be called the most sublime lover on the terrestrial planet, he can boast
of having had from nature the largest cup at the banquet of
voluptuousness; he can also boast of being able, alone among the living
creatures, to die of pleasure and to end his life with lasciviousness.
Certainly, a tremendous thing is the embrace of a man and a woman who
love each other! So tremendous that, before this hurricane of the
senses, the painter lets the brush fall from his hand, the physiologist
loses the thread of analysis, and the philosopher is bewildered by the
ferocious grandeur and the brutish sublimity of that act, in which every
human force seems to be offered as a holocaust to animal fecundation.
The avowed or secret aim of every love, the dream of every virgin and
rage of every lust, the torment and delight of every man, voluptuousness
is the greatest pleasure of the senses; but it is also the deepest abyss
into which vulgar loves fall at every step, and where the great ones too
are submerged. Voluptuousness! Tremendous word that recalls the most
ardent scene of life and the greatest chaos, which concentrates wherever
an organism is born or destroyed; formless chaos, from which flashes
radiate and where elements quiver and earthquakes rumble and thunder;
chaos in which good and evil are so near as to mingle, confuse and melt
together; chaos in which angel and brute join in close embrace, and
human individuality vanishes for a moment to give way to a fantastic
monster, half man and half woman, half god and half demon; chaos from
which a man is born, just as from another chaos arose the cry that
generated light. I open the book of human deeds and read:
"In Sardinia the San Luri belle killed with her exuberance of
carnality the young King Martin II. of Sicily, of the House of
Aragon, him who gave the last blow to the independence of Sardinia,
subjecting to his dynasty that part of the island which was still
free. In 1409 he had gained a splendid victory over Brancaleone
Doria and the Viscount of Narbonne, when he himself was defeated in
turn by the belle of San Luri, who, modern Judith, killed the
Aragonese king with the fury of her kisses." ("La Marmora,
Itinerario in Sardegna," etc., p. 270.)
"The Empress Theodora was the source of such exquisite delight that
it was said that painting and poetry were incapable of delineating
the matchless excellence of her form. The satirical historian has
not blushed to describe the naked scenes which Theodora was not
ashamed to exhibit in the theatre. After the mention of a narrow
girdle, which she wore, as none could appear stark naked in the
theatre, Procopius adds: [Greek: anapeptôkuia]. After exhausting
the arts of sensual pleasure, she most ungratefully murmured
against the parsimony of nature, wishing a _fourth altar_, on which
she might pour libations to the god of love. After having been
possessed by everybody, she seduced Justinian, who made her his
wife and called her _a gift of the Deity_." (Gibbon, "Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire.")
"The old age of David was warmed by the young Shunammite, and
Hermippus lived to be one hundred and five years old, sustained by
the spirit of many young women." (Bible.)
These few examples will be sufficient to delineate in a general way the
frontiers within which human voluptuousness struggles, an insatiable
author of so much good and so much evil. And yet, in the eyes of
science it is nothing but "the most powerful of chemical affinities
comprehended by the most perfect of living brains." Prepared in the slow
laboratory of a man and a woman, the gemmulæ of life intensely seek each
other and are reciprocally attracted; and when love gathers them by
millions and millions, they kiss and join and, quivering, restore one of
the most prodigious equilibriums of nature and generate a man.
If it is true that at every second a leaf detaches itself and falls from
the human tree, it is most true that in the same unit of time ten
existences at least are fused in order to relight the torch of life; and
if all the gigantic forces which are condensed in those aggregations
could be summed up, they would certainly be sufficient to send the world
through infinite space without the aid of the laws of Newton. In the hut
of the savage and in the gilded halls of the prince, on the soft
cushions of new-mown hay and on the glaciers of the Sorata; on the swift
train and on two camels crossing the desert, within the damp walls of
the prison and in the deep mines where the rays of the sun never
penetrate, in the forest and on the sands of the sea-shore, wherever a
man and a woman find themselves near and can desire each other,
voluptuousness wreathes its garlands and says to the man and the woman:
"Be gods for an instant!"
There is no love without voluptuousness, but voluptuousness alone is not
love, as that is not love which is ridiculously termed platonic. Lust
and platonic love are maladies or monsters of love and are possible,
nay, even too prevalent, like the deaf-mutes, the lame, the deformed,
the giants and the dwarfs.
There is no conquest without possession of the thing conquered, just as
there can be no love without voluptuousness. Take the flower from the
tree, the fruit from the flower, and you will have a faithful image of
all those amorous reticences which hypocritically stop at the threshold
of the temple and, incapable alike of chastity and courage, of vice and
virtue, drag a wretched existence in the limbo of bastardly affections.
Often duty must be stronger than love, and, the principles of honesty
forbidding, love must be conquered with a cruel and incredible torture;
but it is better to be heroes of duty than brigands acquitted for lack
of proofs, often despised, despicable always. If you truly love, if you
can love, then love in the name of the most powerful of the gods of
Olympus, love in the name of nature, in the name of the most sacred of
rights. Leave aside all amorous casuistry, the worst of human
hypocrisies; leave aside the hope of winning with your reticences and
your compromises with conscience the Goliath of the sentiments. How many
have I beheld, after long sentimental tirades on platonic love, and
after bitter tears and vows of virtue, sink from hypocrisy into
hypocrisy and down to lasciviousness! How many guilty lovers did not
wish sin and had vice, did not wish guilt and had prostitution! All or
nothing: such is love's command. Break down the tree that you cannot
cultivate, be everything to somebody; demand to be everything to your
companion; do not try to divide the indivisible; do not attempt to
overthrow the omnipotent, to win over the invincible. With love you
cannot jest; any compromise is impossible.
Voluptuousness, even in its purest and simplest forms, without love is
always lasciviousness; it is immoral even when it seems hygienic. With
love, even lust is virtue; and the studied casuistry of theologians is
more immodest than the most ardent kiss ever exchanged between two
lovers educated by a long experience of embraces. Voluptuousness is as
penetrating as light, as inexhaustible as the sun, and, enclosed between
two infinities, one of desire and the other of languor, it will never be
all known by the human family, were it to live for millions of
centuries. All forms of the beautiful are conquered by the blandishments
of art; all forms of virtue are the delight of the sentiment of the
good; every great and true idea is the joy of our thought; but
voluptuousness relishes simultaneously all the joys of the senses, of
sentiment and of intellect, calms all morbosities, extinguishes all
fires, intoxicates itself with all inebriations, high and low, with all
languors, all human flashes. Voluptuousness is a light which gilds
every object it strikes and encircles it with a halo of celestial
iridescence. Nor is the embrace of love alone voluptuous; for
voluptuousness is in every contact of quivering robes, of glossy hair;
voluptuousness is in every quiver of the skin, in every shock of the
nerves, in every kiss of the flesh. Unfortunate he who has tasted
voluptuousness only out of the one cup of Venus! Let him take lessons of
woman, wisest teacher of every exquisite and sublime sensuality. A
Boeotian in art, let him go to Athens and study the beautiful. There is
no worse enemy of voluptuousness than lust, no sister more faithful than
chastity. If the poet, the painter, the sculptor could conceive this
divine group, "the joy of Love guided by the hand of Chastity," that
representation, whether due to pen, brush or chisel, would be as holy a
thing as an altar, a lesson in virtue and a great work of art; fire
enclosed in alabaster, the sun abducted by the wave, enamored and
jealous; Hercules led by a child!
Lovers who love and possess each other, lovers whom voluptuousness
inebriates every hour, if you still have an instant to devote to
prudence, remember that voluptuousness should not be the bread but the
wine of love; that if you wish that your lips be eternally thirsty, your
voluptuousness must be chaste and modest; you must swim, but not drown;
you must quiver, but not fall into convulsions; you must be in the grasp
of death, but not dead. Modest voluptuousness, this priceless treasure,
was given by nature to woman, that she may restore it to you with
unbounded joys; and you should respect it as a palladium of domestic
happiness and nurture it in your daughters, because verily I say unto
you that in modern society there is often more pudicity in the lowest of
courtesans than in some married women whose nuptial education has been
imparted by an aged and libertine husband.