THE DEPTHS AND THE HEIGHTS OF LOVE
Whenever I see a flower that opens and shows its cheerful petals on the
border of an abyss, the same thought ever recurs to my mind: there is
love, which always seems to live between two infinities, height and
depth. While its aspirations carry it aloft, while it seems to ask of
heaven space and light, it projects its roots into the most intricate
mazes of the rocks, into the most somber mysteries of the abyss. Star
that glitters in the infinity of the ideal, root that dissolves the
stones in the infinity of depth, it reaches all altitudes and all
profundities, is the most human of passions and always placed among the
divine passions; it is inmost in us and the most ethereal. Thought on
the summit of a mountain, strength in the valley below, it guides the
poet when he ascends to paradise, accompanies man when he plunges into
the hot sea of sensuality; virgin and father in heaven, lover and spouse
on earth. If to live means to exist in the most beautiful form of life,
then love is richness, luxury, splendor of life; love is whatever is
divine in human beings.
No one will ever be able to say where love penetrates when it lifts the
bottom of human nature, where pearls and corals are intermixed with mud.
It is a diver that brings to light strange and unknown things and
reveals to the astonished eye of the observer new things never before
conceived; it is the most daring and the most fortunate of excavators.
How many simple natures of young girls, how many vulgar talents of men
are perturbed, agitated and renovated by the contact of the new god, who
seems to evoke from the abysses all silent passions, all dormant ideas,
all the phantoms of heart and thought! The deep simmering of psychical
elements at the contact with love almost always announces the birth of a
second moral nature and, revivifying life, marks a new era in it. Of our
birth we are always ignorant, and of our death almost always
unconscious; between the "to be" and the "not to be" only one third and
great thing is possible--"to love." While the common people judge from
the hair on the face and from the deepened voice that a boy has become a
man, a tremendous profound earthquake warns him that he must love, that
he already loves; and while mothers behold with affectionate trepidation
the rounding of their daughters' form to womanhood, another profound
earthquake warns the girl that she must love, that she already loves.
In the loving season many animals change color and shape, adorn
themselves with new feathers, or arm themselves with new weapons; with
the nuptial robe they assume different habits and singular abilities;
mutes, they become clever singers; obtuse, they are transformed into
skilled architects; granivorous, they become carnivorous; if the earth
is their habitat, they become winged messengers of the skies; if
caterpillars, they are metamorphosed into butterflies. So it is with
man, although such transmutation hardly affects his epidermis, but sinks
into the veins and the meanders of his physical nature. The phase of
puberty deserves to be dealt with separately; it will suffice here to
remark that every force redoubles, every vigor refines, and while, with
our growing to manhood, forces and energies prepare and grow, love calls
forces and energies into action. Puberty declares us in a state of war;
love calls us to the battle. Defenseless if we have not reached puberty,
we are armed if we have reached it; armed and combative if we have
reached it and are in love.
Not all human forces are good, not all the resources of mind are
beneficial to the good, and, therefore, love calls into action bad
elements as well, which had not been seen before. For the first time,
from the deep abysses of the moral man, specters of crime and vice,
phantoms of revelry and prison appear. In defective organisms,
predestined for the prison or the madhouse, together with first love
often the first crime or the first mania reveals itself. To the great
summoner of profundity and sublimity every human element answers,
"Present"; and the sudden anger in natures erstwhile mild, the first
tears on faces till then smiling, the first poetic outburst in natures
hitherto utterly prosaic, the first hysterical paroxysms in a body that
seemed to have no nerves, the first ambitions in the most timid youth,
the first meditations at the mirror, the first impulses, the first war
declared against an invisible enemy, the first follies, the first
flashes of genius, the first lies and the first heroisms, are all new
specters called from the abysses by the magic wand of the sorcerer among
sorcerers, by the greatest conjurer of spirits that the blessed age of
wizards and exorcisms might have boasted of.
The man who loves is twice a man, because for the first time he feels
not only that he is alive, but also that he has the power of creating
living beings, of procreating. Nor is woman the sole generator, because
in man's blood is half of a future creature, and the seed of a second
existence within us doubles us and makes us almost as proud as the
ancient prophets, to whom God entrusted, as to a tabernacle, the supreme
truth, the prophecy of future events. A man who loves has within him a
part of that which will live in the future, the fruitful germs of a new
generation.
While all the psychical forces are still confused and indistinct at
first contact with the new sentiment, Love will march them in procession
and muster them under his orders. Every beauty must transmute itself
into flowers for a garland, every passion must lend its fire, every
energy must don the livery of a servant or a slave. Many to serve, one
to command; many strong, but only one supremely strong; many subjects,
but only one tyrant. No objection, no discussion; where love is present,
who would give suggestions or counsel? O virgin and rising forces of
youth, bow your head before your god; splendid beauties of human nature,
lay your tributes upon the new altars. Are you not satisfied with the
glory of doing homage to love? Rarely does avarice find place in the
first and deep meditations of a heart in love, but the question is
continually repeated: "Have I something else, something better, to
offer? Have I really given my whole self to my king?"
A most singular and heartrending voluptuousness of love is to feel that
everything leaves us and that we no longer belong to ourselves. It seems
as though we were witnessing a satanic phantasmagoria in which we behold
limbs, organs, senses, affections, thoughts fleeing from us, running
madly toward a new center, where a new organism is being moulded with
our remains. Even time appears to be ours no longer, since it is no
longer measured by the watch, but by the impatience of desire or the
flashes of voluptuousness; thought, too, no longer belongs to us, as it
is tyrannically ruled by one image alone. To find ourselves again, to
remember that we have still intimate relations with the man of
yesterday, we must go and seek another creature who has robbed us of
everything. Hence a vague unrest which invades the body, the senses and
the thoughts of every lover; hence the undertaking, most difficult even
for the ablest dissembler, to conceal the new god who invades and
penetrates every part of us. Every hair, every pore, every nerve, every
part of the epidermis of the man who loves sings and says to the
universe of the living: "I love, and who loves me?" Day and night, in
the calm and in the storm, all the nature of a lover sings its note
until another song responds in the same tone. Not a moment of peace, not
an instant of truce, until the new energy has found a sister energy.
Love is like the sea: here it is as calm as the surface of an Alpine
lake, still and smooth as a sheet of lead; but there, among the rocks or
upon the coast, it is eternally in motion, and, roaring or sighing,
howling or caressing, agitates with incessant motion the land it kisses.
Man and woman who meet and love are the sea and the land, which are
perpetually at war--a war in turn sweet and bitter, tender and cruel,
voluptuous and merciless.
Look at that young girl seated at the window, bending over a piece of
white linen which she is sewing. How attentive she is to her work! She
seems, between one stitch and another, to be meditating on the solution
of the quadrature of the circle, so absorbed is she in her arduous task.
But if I only could write the volume of thoughts that pass through her
brain between two stitches! She is fishing in the deep abysses of love.
And at a short distance thence, she unaware of it, a young man, too, is
at the window, his hair disheveled, his hands firmly thrust into his
pockets, his breast swelling as by a threat. He has been staring at the
sky for the last hour. Is he meditating, perhaps, upon the tremendous
problem of the proletariate or on that of human liberty? Is he, perhaps,
dreaming of glory, of wealth? No; he, too, is fishing in the deep
abysses of love.
Woman more than man dives deeper and soars higher in the regions of
love; society generally withholds her from the field of action, and an
infinite time is left to her for penetrating into the abysses of the
heart. How often an innocent young girl, who, perhaps, hardly knows how
to write, for many long hours feels in her imagination the sweetness of
a kiss which lasted but a second; how often she is tortured during a
whole night by the bitterness of a cold salute or of a rude word! Here
is a deepness of sense which, nevertheless, is nothing in comparison
with the queer and transubstantial process of sentimental analysis with
which woman pulverizes, analyzes, distills a look, a word, a gesture.
Hide, O chemists, your ignorance before the profundity of the analytical
art of an enamored woman; to her the spectroscope is a coarse instrument
of prehistoric science; homoeopathic draughts are poisons; atoms are
worlds; she has measured them many centuries before Thomson. A billionth
part of a milligram of rancor diluted in an ocean of voluptuousness is
detected by her process of analysis; an atom of indifference in the lava
of desire is instantaneously traced by the thermo-electric apparatus
which she uses in her laboratory. She is a priestess of the ideal, of
the infinite, of the incommensurable, and will continue to be religious
many centuries after man will have buried the last god. Even in love,
the infinite is insufficient for her.
Love always elevates the lover above the average man; and as his
increased strength makes him capable of greater undertakings, the
horizon widens before him more and more because he sees men and things
from a greater height. Each one of us has a different capacity of
soaring to the regions of the ideal; but rabble and genius, prose and
poetry, always raise themselves, by the action of love, to a world which
is nobler, more beautiful, more serene than that in which we drag out
our daily uneventful existence. How many vulgar, despicable natures are
redeemed by the action of love; how many inert intellects are guided
through the paths to glory; how many of the vulgar herd reach the height
of the Olympus of thoughts with the aid of a loving hand! And still the
ignoble proverb is daily repeated, that science and glory must guard
against love as against a bitter enemy, and the examples are
pedantically quoted of great men who loved but art and to chastity alone
owed their greatness. Strange disorder of ideas, in which hygiene is
confused with morality, chastity with the incapacity of loving; but a
man healthy in sense and sentiment will always be elevated by love, if
he does not make an unworthy creature the object of his affection, if he
does not confound love with lust. For one genius killed by love, you
have a hundred who owe to love their greatest inspirations, who drew
from it the strength to live, who blessed it as superior to glory, who
in it alone found the fresh wave that tempered the burning ardor of
enthusiasm and passion. It is an old habit of the human beast to trample
under its feet the rind of the fruit from which it has just sucked the
last drop of juice!
If love does not work in all creatures the same miracles which we
expect, if it is not always a virtue that elevates and refines, it is
because we have lowered woman to the level of our lasciviousness,
because even we, civilized men, feel for her more desire than esteem,
more lust than love. And yet woman thirsts more than man for the ideal,
and, like all oppressed creatures, looks upward with more faith. Her
exquisitely sensitive nature, open to the raptures of enthusiasm, easily
inflamed by the warmth of poetry, attracts her irresistibly to higher
and higher altitudes, and she would have helped us also to soar if we
had not made of her a sweet concubine or a good housewife. Woman feels
the ideal, aspires to every sublimity, but she has neither courage nor
strength to ascend; and if she is not supported by the robust arm of her
lover, she will become easily prostrated and sit down to rest on the
path that leads upward. To her nature has assigned the task of
indicating the high aim, to us the duty of accompanying and sustaining
her. In a magnificent painting by Schoeffer, Dante is standing below,
Beatrice above. Dante gazes at her, contemplates her and is inspired by
her; and Beatrice, her eyes turned to heaven, seems to say to him:
"Upward, upward! There it is where we shall go together!" Nothing is
more contagious than enthusiasm; nothing more fascinating, more
irresistible than the enthusiasm of woman. Without arguments that induce
one to believe, without the strength of hoping, sustained only by love,
she is always full of faith in great and beautiful things, and at every
step of life, now handsome by her sublime imprudence, now affecting by
her youthful enthusiasm, seems to say to us: "Onward, onward!" And with
her tender little hands she draws us upward, guides us and lends us her
ever fresh strength, even when she would appear fatigued.
When Christ made faith the corner-stone of his religion, when he said
that with faith we could move the mountains, he was inspired, perhaps,
by that ardent faith which woman is possessed of and which makes her
strong in her weakness. Woe to us, if before preparing for an
undertaking we should be obliged to weigh with mathematical precision
all favorable and unfavorable probabilities; woe to us, if we were to
launch only into those enterprises of which we are sure! More than
three-fourths of the great achievements would never have been performed.
There is always an element which evades calculation, and it is in the
capricious hands of destiny; it is the lacuna which must be filled by
faith, by that faith which lifts the mountains, and which woman so
deeply feels and so tenderly infuses into our hearts. You may point at
the most celebrated eunuchs of the heart, who, without the aid of woman,
reached the prodigious heights of fame; but I most solemnly affirm that,
had they been guided by a loving hand, they would have soared still
higher. Love is a second sight, and woman sees things from a point of
view which nearly always escapes the synthetic survey of man; she
discovers many hidden elements of things which we, through excessive
haste or excessive pride, do not see; and helping us with the light of
love, she assists us in penetrating more deeply into the substance of
every problem and, above all, into the knowledge of human nature. In
small and great things, after having consulted science and art,
experience and imagination, after having read the book of history and
the book of the human heart, you should never fail to consult the woman
who loves you; whether about a book, or a law, or a work of art, or
commerce, or industry, or poetry, woman will always have something new
to tell you, she will always have her revelations, and through the
action of love you will feel elevated.
Some men of talent lack the coefficient of ambition to ascend, and you
will often see them die before producing the fruit of their gigantic
forces; only woman and love can give them that energy which they cannot
obtain from the stimulus of self-love. Eve knows how to infuse faith
into the skeptic, ambition into the disheartened, strength to all;
unaspiring for herself, she is intensely ambitious, haughty, proud, if
necessary, for the man she loves; and thrones and political power, civil
and martial crowns, glories of art and science, were won through the
ambition lent or inspired by a beloved woman. In heroic and chivalrous
ages this was publicly proclaimed and boasted of; today, when women are
sold in houses of prostitution or at the counter of matrimony, it has
become fashionable to blush at owing one's glory to a woman, and the
chivalrous element, alas! sank and perished together with many other
evil things which we would not like to see come back again. Chivalrous
love vanished and its place was taken by the cicisbeism of our
great-grandfathers, while today in the limbo of a new rising generation
we feel that we begin to discern the germs of a more beautiful epoch for
the amorous life of man.
The more ballast love throws away which keeps it near to the ground, the
higher we soar in the regions of the ideal. This ballast consists all of
lust and self-pride, and it is woman's duty to help us throw it out of
our car. She should not assist with her lasciviousness and her vanity in
further debasing man's loves, already so brutish and vulgar. In the
rapture we feel when inhaling the pure air of the loftiest mountains, we
may sometimes forget that night is drawing near and home is far away;
and thus in love we may feel so carried away by the fascination of the
ideal as to desire a love without contact, the spirit without the
matter. These are sublime derangements of the brain, only too rare, but
reaching the extreme limits of human possibilities; they lead to
delirium, to self-sacrifice; they drag us to folly or to martyrdom. If a
desire continues durable and pure upon the highest summits of human love
and is not perturbed by the contact of matter, men from beneath will
contemplate that statue as a fantastic monument erected by the morning
clouds of the mountain. Not knowing whether it is an effect of the mist
or the imagery of a dream, they contemplate and admire.
The pure and intimate communion of thought and sentiment, with nothing
of the senses but two clasping hands and two pairs of eyes which blend
together, is certainly a voluptuousness among the greatest of the sexual
world; and without any need of platonic love, it may so happen that two
creatures in that moment will forget that one of them is a man and the
other a woman. Then feminine nature shines with all the halo of its
celestial light; from that source of poetry, genius may draw its
greatest energies. Then coarse natures undergo the influence of
refinement in that pure air, social scrofula disappears and all human
soil is washed off. Women, you should take advantage of those fleeting
instants to regenerate the human family and urge it on to higher
destinies! The influence of the ecstasy of sentiment on man is of
shorter duration than on woman, and your angel will soon fall at your
feet, imploring of you the kiss of the terrestrial creature. You are
omnipotent then, for you have the lion at your feet; and if man is
strong, you are stronger still, since his strength is all for you. Guide
it toward the good and the better; direct it to the beautiful. In that
lion which roars with a subdued voice at your feet there is still much
of the beast; in that conquered Hercules there is still much of the
human brute. Silence the beast by running your slender fingers through
his disheveled mane, summon forth from the depths holy energies, noble
inspirations and a thirst for the ideal. We wish to be great for your
sake; we wish to be strong in order to give you all our strength; we
desire the conquest, but only to place it at your feet. To every kiss of
yours may the human family owe a great attainment; to every endearment
of yours, a useful deed! May your love be the highest and dearest prize
to every ambition! True, you are weak; but when you are desired you are
very strong. Who dares assert that he is stronger than the "no" of a
woman? What phalanx attempts to advance when the finger of woman
threatens and commands: "Stand back!"?
Woman sins at least four times less than man; she fears crime, she is
horrified at the very thought of crime. Let us, then, disarm the man who
too often wounds or strikes; let the coward find no woman who loves him,
let him have no cup but that of the coarsest voluptuousness; let the
ignorant, the debased, the social parasites, all the fiends of the moral
world, find no bosom of woman on which to rest their heads! As the
Church once would banish excommunicated persons, so that they could find
no bread, no shelter, it should so be with moral monsters: let them be
banished from the region of love! And the elect women, whom nature
favored with the fateful gift of beauty, should preserve their treasures
for the strong and the immortal; their smiles should be the crown of
triumphing genius and magnanimous heart, for genius and beauty are the
most sublime interlacement of human forces, one of the most splendid
pictures of the nature of living beings.
Love, after having spread the minute fibrils of its tiny roots into all
the deep fissures of the human world and absorbed every drop of liquor,
every throb of energy, sends up to the branches of the robust tree every
sap and every energy; and there, high in the air, leaves, flowers, and
fruits drink from the rays of the sun the sweetest and most inebriating
voluptuousness. There, in those regions full of light and heat, and
which no worm of the soil, no atom of dust, no miasmatic exhalation ever
attain, profundity becomes sublimity, and man and woman, blended in the
ecstasy of an ardent contemplation of the beautiful and the good, ask of
themselves: "And what is God?"