HOW LOVE IS PRESERVED AND HOW IT DIES
The man who, through fault of the trees he sprang from or through his
own, lives on the bestial frontiers of the human kingdom, is like the
brute for which love is a desire that rises, is satisfied and falls
asleep. If his affection for woman is not a passion of spring or autumn,
it is always an erotic and intermittent love which dies every time a
need is satisfied and revives with every renewed desire. The stimulus of
the flesh announces in him the dawning of sentiment, and the obesity of
the flesh puts an end to the passion of love. The new desire may have
the same person or another as its object: this is for him a secondary
and merely accidental question, and, according to the manner in which
circumstances force him to solve it, he will be a monogamist or a
polygamist, a virtuous man through habit or a libertine through caprice.
Oftener than it seems this is the way in which many dark-skinned nations
love, as well as many white-skinned men, who nevertheless believe that
they faithfully love one woman at a time. The history of their love is a
necklace of Venetian beads, to which a new bead is added for every
desire satisfied; and if the hues of the glass corpuscles are not too
diverse, one may have before his eyes a pretty ornament that may spangle
the neck of a decent virtue and an honest passion. Between the desire
that dies and another that is born, you can set a gentle remembrance of
gratitude for the pleasure enjoyed, a sweet hope of a greater joy for
the future; and the garland of your passion will then acquire greater
beauty and new flowers and perhaps stimulate a true and great love. The
most sublime heights of sentiment, the summits of thought, are reached
by few; while hundreds and hundreds of lowly sheep ruminate on the
plains, where thousands and thousands of bees are buzzing, and millions
and millions of ants are swarming. Upon the sapphire summits of the Alps
two lone eagles represent the world of the living.
Love, although a most powerful affection, always follows the laws of
elementary physics, which govern all the energies accumulated in our
nervous centers and which we call sentiments. As long as passion remains
in a condition of desire, that is to say, as long as force is potential
and is not turned into a product, energy lasts and sentiment lives,
vigorous and ardent. All the art of preserving love is, therefore,
reduced to this alone: to preserve desire and to cause it to spring up
again almost immediately after it is spent. And as even love, with all
its omnipotence, cannot evade the physical laws, and every spark that
springs forth must always be followed by a period of repose, it is
indispensable to act in such a way that while a part of the force is
transformed into labor, another be accumulated, preparing a new spark in
such a short time that it should be nearly impossible to perceive any
interval between the two sparks. To transform the intermittent electric
current into a continuous one constitutes the great secret of
protracting the existence of love.
As long as desire is not satisfied, and the struggle has not become a
conquest, love is not only preserved but increased; and not in vain does
woman provide for her happiness in asking for time and prolonging the
battle. A love must be either very weak or very brutal if it withdraws
from the struggle before victory; and as it happens very seldom that a
woman yields everything at once, the small and great favors which from
time to time she concedes to the conqueror mark a continual renewal of
ever ardent desires and a continuous revivification of love. Finally,
sooner or later, the day of the wished-for victory arrives, and one
embrace makes two lives one, melts in a single crucible two volcanic
rocks and two feelings of voluptuousness. However, even when love is so
base as to be only a thirst for pleasure, it seldom dies with the first
embrace. And who can say that he has possessed a woman entirely in one
night of love? Human charms are such and so many, and our esthetic
needs so exquisite and ardent, that even the acquisition of
voluptuousness alone is, fortunately, very slow, and in the sweet
occupation of new provinces love is preserved or revivified. The various
treasures of beauty and sensuality of two lovers, the art of loving, so
neglected even after Ovidius' times, mark the limit of duration of those
loves that derive their energies only from the worship of form or from
the ardor of voluptuousness; and if in some cases that duration is
long-lasting, it never is infinite. The hour comes when, alas! the wing
of time smites the fresh cheeks of youth, and the northern winds wrinkle
them, and the storm scatters over the ground the rosy petals of human
beauty; the hour comes when the cup of lust no longer contains a drop of
nectar, and then, if nothing is left, love is dying, and no miracle in
the world can save it from a certain death. The energy of passion had
its only source in voluptuousness and beauty; one has vanished, the
other one is withered and the strength is spent. No force in the world
is produced without the transmutation of matter; no energy is increased
without transformations of equilibrium and decompositions of affinities.
If man and woman do not revive an affinity of sympathy, no combination
can take place; no light, no heat can spring forth from their contact.
Let them sing the psalms of death and together bury the remains of a
love which, kept alive by voluptuousness alone, was inexorably to perish
with it.
This is the most general way in which vulgar loves die, and the duration
of their life can be calculated with fair precision by weighing the
beauty of the two lovers, their youth, their lust, their art of loving.
Those loves may last an hour, a day, a month, a year, ten years; they
may, in rare cases, last for the entire period of human youth. Men, and
especially women, do not fall without a struggle under the blows of
time, and with incredible art repair the ravages of age; and not only
are forms daily adulterated, denatured and counterfeited, but into the
cup of love, as well, spices and drugs and philters are poured, that the
silent hunger may receive the stimulus of an artificial appetite, and
soft blandishments and morbid temptations of the flesh substitute the
ardor and impetus of passion. Long lasts the battle before defeat is
acknowledged and love changes its nature but still lives. It was a
volcano, it is now a Bengal light; it was as nude and chaste as an
Uranian Venus, it is now as clothed and immodest as a courtesan; it was
love of every hour, it is now periodical, intermittent, like the tertian
or the quartan; it impunely defied the rays of the sun at midday, it now
prefers the twilight; but, when all is said, in spite of so much
reticence and so much tinkering, it is still and always love. Women, you
who behold with horror the gradual extinction of that fire which for so
many years has warmed your enamored members, if you were happy through
beauty alone, remember that that fire will be extinguished with the
withering of the last attraction of your body; and when the heartrending
cry which invokes the stimulus of a desire will not be answered, prepare
for the funeral psalmody. As long as you can, with the galvanism of
lust, arouse a desire in the flaccid flesh of your lover, love will not
be dead. You see, then, to what a low level the art of preserving love
has sunk, when love has its origin only in the desire of bodily form: it
sinks to a question of hygiene; I would nearly say, it transforms itself
into a problem of taxidermy and preservation by chemical process! It is
necessary to study the antiseptic virtue of deliberate refusals and
libertine reticence; to submit lust to a chemical research and fatigue
to a physiological investigation; to meditate upon the economy of
energies and visit the pharmacy for the purpose of discovering the
aphrodisiacal virtues of the various silken fabrics, of the various
smiles, and of the sensual movements of the body. To these basest
studies we have lowered the woman who would so gladly have wished to
soar aloft with us through the numberless spheres of the beautiful and
not only embrace the world of exterior forms, but also the infinite
worlds of sentiment and thought.
You will tell me, perhaps, that I aspire to an ideal love, impossible,
therefore, to reach; you will tell me that a man with a good
constitution can be handsome for forty years of his life, and that
woman, too, is entitled to thirty years of beauty and ten more years of
gracefulness; so that a love which should last but these thirty or forty
years would still be a most beautiful and most enviable thing. A spring
and a summer of forty years, ending with a mild autumn, in which a sweet
remembrance, a suave reciprocal gratitude, and an intimate friendship
prepare the last twilight of old age, may seem to us a worthy triumph of
a long and splendid life of love. And I am with you if you mean the
common loves of the common people; but we must have a high, a very high
aim, and we all should desire a love lasting as long as life and which
shall be buried alone in its grave. And then every healthy man can offer
to woman the thyrsus of love, and every healthy woman can offer the cup
of voluptuousness to man; but how many men are handsome, how many women
can be called beautiful? Perhaps not ten in a hundred; and all the
others who in various degrees are removed from the type of perfection of
form, shall they not love, can they not be loved? Certainly.
In man, rich in so many physical elements, the beautiful does not end
with the exterior form, nor should love spring from the source of
voluptuousness alone. No deformity, no disease in him who would
procreate men: this is hygiene; but the hundred forms of moral and
intellectual beauty, relieved only by a soft shade of sex, can and
should awaken ardent and tenacious passions that do not vanish with the
sun of youth. Thus, while love can dispense its delights to every man
and every woman, perfect love should be born of the contemplation and
adoration of every type of beauty; and when that of the form begins to
fade, let moral beauty shine in all its power, and, later still, let the
beauty of thought appear to us in all its brilliant majesty, so that
while one star disappears, another twinkles, and from the slumbering
desires of the senses we feel a stronger yearning awaken, the yearning
for possessing the treasures of sentiment and thought of a creature who
is all ours, and whom, if we suddenly loved her for the beauty of form,
we now love and will continue to love for her beauty of kindness,
culture, ideas, and everything that a human being can boast of beauty
and greatness. Even character and thought have a profoundly sexual type,
and feminine kindness can be adored by us, just as virile courage is
admired by the sweet and tender nature of woman. When we have loved in a
woman not only the beautiful female, but a whole nature imbued with all
the beauties and graces of the human Eve, the longest life will not
suffice to satisfy our desires of possession, and at the last hour of
extreme old age we have still some new conquest to make, and some desire
is reawakened, while the accumulation of most sweet memories fills the
void which youth, by fleeing, has left behind itself. Sublime triumph of
human nature, in which love survives the senses exhausted,
voluptuousness which is mute, the beauty of forms which is buried, while
a warm ray of light shines on the silvery heads of two old beings who
still love each other because they still desire each other and because
heart and mind unite in an embrace, sexual by origin, but ideal for the
heights attained. Our study on love in old age will complete this
picture, certainly one of the most beautiful and seductive in the great
museum of love: a picture which we should all desire to represent in the
late years of our life.
When the sources of love are many, while one dries up another swells so
that love never lacks a flow of water to quench its insatiable thirst.
All passions follow in their movements a parabolic line, and those that
have risen the highest descend the most rapidly; hence the weariness so
close to strength; the tediousness that follows enthusiasm; the thousand
dangers of the death of sentiment. More than any other passion, love
presents these phenomena and dangers, and it is impossible for all to
make voluptuousness, ecstasy and apotheosis last beyond a very short
flash of a few instants. Intermittence is one of the most inexorable
laws of the nervous system, and he who would increase enthusiasm and
"Only breathe the life of kisses and of sighs,"
dies consumed by his own fire, and, what is worse, before dying,
beholds love dead at his feet. We cannot rebel against the laws of
nature, nor can we subjugate them; but it is conceded to us to direct
them to our advantage. And thus it is in our case. Between ecstasy and
ecstasy we can sow joy and suppress tediousness; between voluptuousness
and voluptuousness we can suppress weariness and pick the flowers of
sentiment, and from too ardent and sensual contemplations we can repair
to the cool temple of thought to meditate and remember together. This is
perfect love, this is ideal love, which keeps pure, unaltered, brilliant
as a diamond in the tormented sand of a river. A few reach it; many,
however, can approach it, and for human happiness and human greatness it
is enough to see it even from afar, like the promised land, which, as
the poet says, "is always beyond the mountain."
The man who brutally opposes the holy and noble aspirations of woman for
a higher participation in mental work signs his own sentence; and when
he cynically sends her back to the bed or to nursing cares, he resigns
himself to knowing only the coarsest and most brutish part of the joys
of love. You may be the strongest male and the wisest libertine; but
Venus herself, descended from the heaven of the ideal, would tire you,
and for you, too, would arrive the hour of dislike; then you would curse
the vanity of love and execrate life, reciting the litany of
lamentations and disappointments which, from Adam down, has been
repeated by all those who know not how to love and are bestially
ignorant of the laws of the economy of strength. We must elevate woman
more and more in order not only to fulfil an act of justice but also to
enlarge the field of our joys and increase the value of our
voluptuousness. A great step has been made in this direction, by
transforming the _female_ of the polygamous gyneceum into the mother of
a family; but this new "freedman" of modern civilization is merely
tolerated, not considered equal to us, like an orphan taken from the
street and living with the members of a family but not forming an
integral part of it. If the _concubine_ has become a _mother_, a great
step still remains to be made in order that she may become a woman, or,
to put it in a better way, become a _female-man_, a most noble and
delicate creature, who shall think and feel as we do and think and feel
in a _feminine way_, thus completing in us the aspect of things, of
which we see only a part, and bringing to us, in the meditations and
struggles of life, that precious element which only the daughter of Eve
can give us. If from woman you want nothing but the joys of love, then
sow sentiments and ideas in her. She is like the bee that changes sugar
and nectar and the fluid of every flower into honey: make her wise, and
wisdom will be transformed into caresses; make her strong, and she will
use her strength to enrich you; make her great, and she will place her
greatness at your feet for a kiss. Fear not; she will never place her
foot upon the neck of man, because she loves him too much, and because,
to become a tyrant, she would be compelled to amputate the better part
of herself, abdicating her omnipotence.
Where man and woman are bound together by the three natures of sense,
sentiment and thought, love is easily preserved by its own nature and
without any need of artifice. Some fortunate individuals ask with
astonishment why their love should ever cease; and love lives in them,
warm, tenacious, invincible, and only with death is extinguished,
instantaneously, like the porcelain bowl, very old but always new, which
falls from the hands of the inexperienced servant and perishes as it was
created, beautiful and brilliant.
It is not so when voluptuousness is all, or nearly all, of love; then
the easiest way to preserve it is to keep always some drops of desire in
the cup of love, so that, between embrace and embrace, voluptuousness is
never quite extinguished, giving a deeply sexual character to the common
relations of habits, conversations and family intercourses. This is an
indirect but sure advantage, ever produced by chastity between two
creatures that love each other without having the fortune to participate
in any treasures beyond those of the senses. It is opportune to remember
that every virtue is the fruitful mother of other virtues.
The preservation of love is one of the most sacred rights or duties
incumbent upon woman, although we cannot refuse with impunity to take an
active part in this mission. We, however, are too light-minded, too
polygamous, too exacting in our sudden desires to find prudence and
economy of love easy virtues for us. To see all, to touch all, to want
all and at once: such is the childish appearance of many virile loves.
Woman loves more than we, but she foresees, presurmises, fears. In love,
too, she is a good provider, and, while she picks the flower for the joy
of today, knows how to preserve the fruit for the dreary winter. Woe to
her, if she joins in the thoughtlessness of her prodigal companion! They
will make together a splendid bonfire of their affections, of their
voluptuousness, renewing, alas! too soon, the thousandth edition of the
story of the grasshopper and the ant.
If the women who will read my book should learn nothing but this one
thing, I would believe that they have had a just compensation for the
tediousness which they may have experienced; and I shall be happy for
not having written in vain to promote the welfare of the dearer part of
the human family. With the right given to me by a long and troublesome
experience, by a deep, untired study of the human heart, I pray and
entreat and conjure them to close with their white little hands and
their rosy lips the lips of the man who too ardently begs their love.
Let them say "no" and "no" again, and bury the "yes" of the friend under
a shower of flowers, reserving the desire for other supplications and
other battles. Every sacrifice will be compensated a hundredfold, and
for a caress denied today, they will receive ten tomorrow. Woman is an
old teacher of sacrifice, and let her use this practical wisdom in
preserving love, which is the air she breathes, the blood which gives
life to her, love which is her dearest treasure. Never should she say
"yes" before having said "no" at least once; if she truly loves the
prodigal friend, she should save for the days of famine the crumbs which
now fall from his hands and which today he despises; let her be the
stewardess of love as she already is that of the household; let man
fecundate and woman preserve; let him conquer and let her keep the
booty.
If genital chastity is the virtue which, better than any other,
preserves vulgar loves, a certain chastity of sentiment and thought, a
certain reserve of manner and forms are also indispensable if sublime
loves are to last. The man must never see his wife nude, nor should the
woman ever behold her companion nude before her; veils and mists, leaves
and flowers must shade the man and woman in sense, sentiment and
intellect. The infinite is the only thing that man never tires of
loving, contemplating, studying, just because it is neither weighed nor
measured. And so it is in love: the beautiful, the true, the good of the
creature whom we love must be infinite, because they must not be seen,
weighed or measured by us. A sun that passes from the crepuscule of the
morning to the evening twilight and never entirely reveals itself: such
is eternal and immutable love, that fears no frost of winter or
hurricanes of summer; that dies standing like the ancient heroes.
Study the fortunate men who are not only capable of arousing, but also
of preserving great passions, and you will behold in them all those
exalted virtues which may be grouped under the name of _crepuscular
politics_. A beauty that has more grace than splendor, more seduction
than heat; a flexibility that retains strength; an authority that can be
made to smile, and a nature that is smiling rather than laughing; a deep
and tender kindness, and a genius that has more spirit than grandeur:
such are the great preservative powers of love. Grace more than beauty
preserves love, because it has more crepuscular hues; sympathetic
natures more than beautiful ones preserve love, kind natures more than
grand ones, wit more than genius. There are men and women who at first
sight do not make any great impression, but on every hair of their head
they seem to have a hook and in every pore of the skin a leech, so that
no sooner have you come into intimate contact with them than you find
yourself seized by a thousand grapnels and absorbed by a thousand
cupping-glasses, as though a gigantic polyp had seized you in the
absorbing coils of its manifold tentacles.
Love is dead without possibility of resurrection when, unlike all living
things, there is no galvanism to awaken the slumbering nerves, no wave
of blood to rouse the heart. But love also has swoons and syncopes and,
like the rotifer, may die provisorily and desiccate, awaiting a
beneficial rain to restore it to life. Whoever denies this virtue in
love, then believes that love is baser than the rotifer and has never
known the most elementary physiology of life and affection. There is for
love, as for any other organism, a real death and an apparent one; the
former is inexorable, the latter curable, like any other malady, by
having recourse to skill and knowledge.
How often has a love apparently dead resuscitated as live as ever,
probably more alive than before; and this, heralded as a miracle, is one
of the usual mysteries of the heart, for life was not extinguished, but
only latent, as no dead, really and truly dead, with the exception of
Lazarus, has ever been seen to rise again. A nerve was still sensitive,
a desire could still be resuscitated, and the apparently dead comes to
life again. Physicians remark that apparent death is much more frequent
in cases of hysteria, catalepsy and in all forms of neurosis; it is then
natural that many loves, alive but believed to be dead, have been
interred through a most cruel mistake, since an organism more nervous,
more cataleptic and more hysterical than love is difficult to find in
the entire world of the living. In our case, however, the burial is less
dangerous, because love itself opens every coffin, every grave,
overturns every clod and appears to you saying: "Do not weep; here I
am!"
Very rarely does love die a violent death, and cases called by that name
are wounds, ruptures, syncopes and nothing more. Real death occurs
through senility and after long illness. Duty frequently commands not to
love him or her who suddenly has seemed base and infamous to us; but
love, sentenced to death, weeps, despairs, but does not want to die.
Sent back to prison, without light, without food, it defies hunger,
darkness, cold, but does not die. The public, perhaps, believes that it
has disappeared from the face of the earth, as has happened with
illustrious prisoners plunged into the stillness of a castle; but love
lives in those depths and groans, convulsed by a prolonged agony, until
at last, with him who feels it, it dies a merciful death.
If the appearance of a new creature on the path of life seems to kill
love violently, it is because it was not true love; and if it really
were such, the battle will be relentless and long, and the Prince of
Affections will die, as in other cases, a lingering death. When we shall
once and forever have ceased to call love that which is the desire of
the flesh and the pride of possession, that sentiment will appear to us
as a much more beautiful thing, greater and more honorable than is
ordinarily supposed; many miracles will at last be explained as very
simple physical phenomena, and many obscure mysteries will be exposed to
light.
To cause love to gush forth from the rock of indifference is a
fascinating prodigy; to rouse it from its slumber is a desirable power;
to sow the path of our life with love and desires may be the splendid
pride of every living creature; but to cherish the conquered love, to
preserve it pure and bright, to bring it impunely through the cyclones
of life, the fogs of November and the frost of December, to guide it,
healthy and robust, from the spring of youth to the border of the grave
that it may die, like the Mexican victim, amid choruses of admiration
and adorned with flowers of eternal freshness, is one of the highest
ambitions to which we can aspire. It is as beautiful a thing as to
create a work of art; it is as useful an achievement as to become rich;
it is as great a feat as to reach glory. It is said by many that the
most natural way for love to die is to transform itself into friendship;
but several times already I have made clear to the reader what I think
of sexual friendships. Perhaps, in some very rare cases, neither of the
two lovers remembers that the beloved one belongs to the other sex: but
how can the loves of the entire past be forgotten? How can we suddenly
obliterate the ardent remembrances of the many years of love? If for a
dead love the sweet custom of friendly visit can be substituted, if a
man and a woman can forget that they are man and woman, what name will
this new and singular affection deserve? Perhaps that of automatic
habit; and I will send this psychical phenomenon back to the laboratory
of the physiologist, that he may study it together with the unconscious
and reflected motions.