SUBLIME PUERILITIES OF LOVE
Like the butterfly, which, when just emerged from the involucre of the
chrysalis, still bears on its folded wings some strips of the wrapping
in which it was long enveloped, so Love, the youngest of human passions,
carries remnants of the robe of childhood which he has just discarded.
In his caprices and in his follies, in his games full of grace and
strength, in his blind idolatries and in his childish sorrows, you would
say that you behold before you a child genius. Now he surprises you with
his violence, then he awakens your sympathy for his weakness; now all
powerful, then most timid; now a hero, then a coward; today he defies
heaven with closed fists; tomorrow he will with tears implore a caress.
Love is childish because he is a child; childish because he is a poet;
childish because, unleashing all the impulses of the moral world, and
agitating in a convulsive kaleidoscope all the images of thought, he is
more often lyric than epic, and writes more dithyrambs than stories,
more poems than philosophical treatises.
Furthermore, Love is puerile because he is also so religious as to be
superstitious and subject to all the nonsensical ideas that may pass
through the brain of a timid and ignorant woman. Love, even in northern
countries, delights in the pomp of the idolatry which is most
characteristic of the south, protests against the severe worship of
certain religious sects and, being a great admirer of churchly
gorgeousness, demands incense, images, tinsel, altars, insignia,
canopies and tabernacles.
No religion ever had more senseless idolatry than Love, no Olympus had
more gods, more altars and more priests. He accepts every belief, every
worship, from the fetish of the savage to the omnipotent, invisible God
of nobler religions. Full of faith and fears, Love would himself have
invented idolatry if this had not had an infinity of other roots to
sprout from through the human brain.
When man feels, desires, loves very much, and has reached the
furthermost boundary of the human field, he always erects an altar with
the richest and most beautiful material at his command and there, on his
knees, prays and adores; often he prays and adores at the same time. To
that altar he brings the amber and the coral gathered on the sea-shore
and the gold found in the sands of the stream, the poetry found in his
erratic wanderings through the heaven of the ideal, the most beautiful
flowers of his thought, and offers all as a tribute to a creature of
earth or space, of nature or imagination. And to love, also, man erects
his altar, at the furthermost boundary of the human world, and, on his
knees, solemnly asserts that beautiful, good and holy above everything
is the creature whom he loves. Not satisfied with this, he raises
himself upon the altar and casts avidious glances into the darkness of
the unknown, where no form appears to him but the expansion and the
reflection of the rays of this world; and there he is suspended over the
abysses of nothingness. In that darkness live all the infinities, all
the gods, all the human loves carried into the farthest regions of the
ideal.
To love, everything is holy that has been touched by the hand, the eye,
or the thought of the beloved, everything in which the dear image is
reflected. All these become an object of worship, all is transformed
into a magic mirror in which we contemplate our god. Who does not
remember the adoration for a rosebush from which _she_ had plucked a
flower, and the idolatry for a petal which _she_ had scented; and who
does not remember the thousand various and foolish relics of love?
In the reliquary of love have found a place the beautiful and the
grotesque, the horrid and the graceful. I had a friend who used to weep
for long hours with joy and emotion, kissing and contemplating a thread
of silk which _she_ had held in her hands, and which was for him the
only relic of love. Another kept on his desk for long years the skull of
his sweetheart as his dearest companion. There are those who have slept
for months and years with a book, a dress, a shawl. And who can
enumerate all the sublime puerilities, all the ardent tendernesses, all
the insensate acts of the idolatry of love?
Sensations accumulate such mysterious and deep energies in the brain of
man, that, at a sign from us, they can all spring up and erect an
edifice before us, greater and more beautiful than the reality of
things. No woman was ever as beautiful as the image which her lover sees
in the calm of his solitary adoration, or pictures upon the black ground
of a night of dreams, a comparison which would often be dangerous, if
the magic brush of imagination did not also overcolor the beauty of the
things seen by the eye and caressed by the hand; but it is a comparison,
however, which often sows the lives of artists and poets with sorrow,
delusions and even crimes.
If every beautiful woman could know all the kisses, all the caresses,
all the hymns offered to her by the multitude of men who admire and
desire her, she would certainly feel proud that she possessed the power
of calling forth so many energies from the world of the living. Who
knows where all those rays end, where the heat of so many motions
accumulates, where such a scattered force gathers again? If it is true
that nothing is lost of all that is generated, what transformation takes
place in so many ardent desires that extend in the infinite void of
space?
Modesty imposes a great sobriety of behavior on woman, often a
tyrannical reserve. She conceals from our eyes the most intimate
adorations, the revels of the heart and the strange hysterics of
sentiment. We, always less enamored than she, give vent more freely to
our effervescence; and if a beautiful and fortunate woman should
describe the scenes which she has witnessed in her youth, she would
present a collection of caricatures before which all others would grow
dim and mawkish; a collection which would combine the grotesque with the
sublime, folly with passion, impudent threats of death and impossible
fasts; sudden abandonments of one's dignity, abdications of common
sense, stupid sacrifices of one's own personality, orgies of fancy and
hurricanes of the senses, humiliations worthy of a Franciscan friar and
braggart rodomontades. How much misery, how many carnivals and
bacchanalia, and how much baseness has woman to witness! Fortunately for
us, she is merciful and modest; for our honor's sake, she covers us with
a corner of her queenly mantle, hiding our puerilities from the eyes of
the profane, and often from our own.