BOUNDARIES OF LOVE, AND THEIR RELATIONS TO THE SENSES
A country cannot be surveyed without tracing exactly its boundaries,
without following them in their capricious and serpentine lines, without
marking the point where its individuality ends and the influence of the
neighboring country begins to be felt. You may have trampled every clod;
wandered through every path, scented the soil of every field, and drunk
the water of every spring and every stream; but if you have not sketched
the confines of a country, you know less than half its history.
Everything is important for what it is and what adjoins it. Not one,
then, in this world can impunely be near to another, and all things act
and react reciprocally. So it is with love, which has frontiers as vast
as the human world, as indented as the coast of Dalmatia or of Norway,
capricious, irregular, changeable. It is a land which projects into all
adjacent countries, and with it sense, sentiment and thought come into
close and complicated contact.
Every sense, every passion, every force of the mind is an instrument of
love; but this, in turn, bends in a thousand different ways to senses,
passions and thoughts. It is a continual interlacing of factors and
instruments, of causes and effects; and while this gigantic power warms
and agitates the inmost fibers of the human organism, it radiates its
penetrating light to the furthermost confines of the world.
Love, which by the supreme right of existence requires the contact of
two different natures, which is but the kiss of two creatures who blend
for an instant and fuse together the germs of their power, must have
most varied, numberless relations to the sense of touch. It could even
be said, without departing from strict scientific truth, that physical
love is a sublime form of contact and touch. In inferior animal forms,
as well as in human natures of a low and bestial type, love is nothing
but touch and contact; but ascending to the high spheres of the animal
world and of the human microcosm, the other senses also add their
flowers to the garland of love, with the exception of taste, which takes
no part in the pleasures of love, except in peculiar cases, which can,
without any scruple, be entrusted to the clinic of pathological
psychology. Of the other four senses, touch has the greatest part in
love, hearing the smallest; sight and smell range between the two former
in very different degrees.
The senses, however, differ more in the nature of the joys and sorrows
with which they take part in the greatest of human passions than in the
various quantities of elements which they yield to love. Touch conquers,
and twinges with delight; sight reveals and charms; hearing impassions
and conquers; smell cherishes and inebriates. We can easily have a
comparative idea of the various parts which the four senses take in love
by comparing these four moments: To see the beloved woman and gaze at
her for a long time; to embrace her passionately; to hear her voice
without seeing her; to inhale voluptuously the aroma with which she is
wont to scent her robe.
A thousand, a hundred thousand, a million notes would be insufficient to
express all the harmonies and melodies of amorous contact; and as the
most voluminous dictionary in the world would decline to enter upon such
an undertaking, the pen of the writer would slip into the field where
science becomes lasciviousness. I regret at times that one of the
greatest poets did not sing the sublime voluptuousness of love with such
loftiness of style as to leave his pen uncontaminated. Perhaps man would
like to know also the limits of the genius of lust, to mark the
confines, too, of this human possibility; but I find some consolation
for this sublime ignorance of ours, for this glorious lacuna left by
modesty in the field of human knowledge, in thinking that where poetry
kept silent and science inactive, where an intimate contact of two
kisses creates a new existence, an unknown current transmits to the new
man, together with the sparks of life, all the treasures of past
voluptuousness; and the son of Adam, with a second kiss, will transmit
the innate science of love, pour all the nectar of the chalice of
voluptuousness into the lips of the daughter of Eve. Sublime science,
which was never written on papyrus nor sculptured in marble or bronze,
but is transmitted in the flash of a kiss through thousands of
generations that loved, love, and will love!
From the purest caress on a mass of hair to the greatest hurricane of
voluptuousness, touch always keeps the character moulded for it by its
anatomy. Touch, in love, is always made oversensitive by voluptuousness,
always deeply sensual, is always a positive, definite, uncontrasted and
uncontrastable possession. Woman may delude herself into believing that
she is unblemished by man's contact when his hand has but touched the
hem of her garments or the leather of her shoes; but when skin has
touched skin, when a finger has touched a finger, something is already
lost of that waxy varnish which nature spreads upon the virginal fruit
still preserving the perfume of the tree that nourished it. A hand that
clasps a hand means, in love, two fires that blend in one; a mass of
hair that touches a mass of hair means two streams of voluptuousness
rushing into the bed of one river; two feet that come in contact are
always two sparks that fly. A molecule of a man who loves can never
touch impunely a molecule of the woman who returns his love; and
although the contact may be more rapid than lightning, every molecule
that returns to the spheres of its own individuality carries away
something that does not belong to it, and leaves with the other
something of itself. Touch soft iron with the loadstone and you will see
it magnetized; touch a molecule of a man with that of a woman and the
two molecules will not be what they were before. Touch is always the act
of possession, and the thousand contacts can, gradually, steal so much,
that we may find ourselves carried into the sphere of the woman we love,
while she has entirely passed into our sphere. Not in vain the modest
woman trembles and rebels at every innocent contact. Every sensation of
touch, in love, means a boundary that is eliminated between two
properties; it means the loss of a property.
It is not hypocrisy alone that makes modesty more exacting in higher
races; in exquisitely elevated natures a contact is more dangerous
because it radiates rapidly into the field of voluptuousness, into that
of the other senses and that of sentiment. Vulgar natures begin where
refined natures end; and while too elevated natures live long together,
held back by the barrier of a handshake, the bold and uncouth rustic
throws a kiss to the girl and embraces her at the first declaration of
love. It is typical of this most powerful passion to perform a hundred
miracles a day and thus arrest voluptuousness at the last boundary of
kissing; but adroitness and fortune are necessary to make it possible to
stop there for a long time. From handclasping to the kiss the path may
be very long and even endless; but beyond a kiss given and returned,
every definite boundary has vanished and everything is possible. Even in
touch love has but two principal stations before the goal is reached;
handclasping and kiss. Whoever believes she has remained a virgin after
a kiss given and returned is a hypocrite, like him who believes that the
studied reticence of lust may still leave something to conquer. O women
who have the dangerous fortune to be beautiful and to be desired, do not
let your adorers go beyond handclasping; you may in rare cases arrive at
the kiss that you may receive; but remember that a kiss returned is a
tremendous bond, which you should never sign,--never, of course, unless
you intend to change your name.
Sight is the first messenger of love, and in elect natures it is so
prodigal of joy to lovers as to excel, in extensity if not in intensity,
even the insuperable heights of voluptuousness. Sight possesses
everything save the delirium of possession, and rapid and penetrating as
it is, it sounds at a stroke the abysses of infinite beauty, over which
is suspended, as in a halo, the object of our love. What one
contemplates with the eyes of love from head to foot always ends in two
infinities into which desire hurls itself with frenzied audacity and
insatiable curiosity. Sight is made to accompany us in that delicious
excursion; and as it can tarry long and suavely at a dimple of the
cheek, at the little vortex of a curl or at the opalescence of a nail,
it can also compel us to pass and repass with vertiginous speed, a
thousand times in a minute, through the divine lines that enclose our
treasure.
The eyes of love have all the virtue of the telescope and the
microscope, and while not a single curve of the thousand labyrinths
through which the mobile feminine beauty seems to flutter and flicker
can escape them, they also attain the most sublime summits of ideal
beauty. When the eye admires and conquers, it invites to the picture
which it draws from nature all senses, all passions, all thought, all
psychical energies of man. No other sense possesses this gigantic
faculty of elevating us to the highest regions of the ideal, compelling
the minor senses, the animal instincts and the lower passions to
contemplate its panoramas. The eye is the first minister of the mind,
and while it refines desire and frees passion from the coarsest
lasciviousness, it elevates the man and woman who love to the highest
spheres of human possibility. Touch likes to remove the veils that cover
the beautiful; sight need not divest the object it contemplates, for its
light illumines every shade, penetrates through opaque bodies and makes
them transparent, threads its way through the most intricate folds, and
while it sees it also surmises, inspects, divines, analyzes, measures,
compares and controls with incredible agility all the elements of the
esthetic world.
The eye which rests the rays of its light on a loving eye illumines it,
is illumined in turn and shows to us the phenomenon of two brilliant
stars exchanging their lights and rendering themselves more beautiful.
If one does not lower the chaste eyelids, it may so happen that the fire
will spread from the high spheres of the esthetic ideal down to the vile
and brutish instincts. This, in fact, happens in all men of a base type;
every emotion of love is rapidly transferred to the regions of touch.
In elect natures, on the contrary, sight has ever some beauty to
discover, a region to explore, a world to conquer. The richest man in
the world can always count the dollars and the stocks he possesses; the
most powerful king can always know the extent in square miles of his
dominions: but he who loves a beautiful creature dies without having
seen, contemplated or admired all. In the last day of his life there is
always some "unknown land" which the eye has not yet discovered or
sufficiently explored. And this is just the intimate difference which
distinguishes touch from sight. While the former has well determined
boundaries and a definite task, the latter widens the limits of its
dominions to include a number infinitely greater in esthetic
combinations. In a flash of the eye you have seen a beautiful being and
immediately said: "Oh, the angelic creature!" A chaos of sensations, a
world of beautiful things have surprised, enraptured, enamored you; but
how many days, how many months, how many years will be required for your
eyes to roam through the thousand paths of that garden, to study every
flower, every petal of each flower. What intensity of voluptuous
analysis, how many poems of delight, in order to say again, five or ten
years after: "Oh, the angelic creature!"
Nature was very generous in distributing attractions in the bodies of
man and woman, and the short, sad day of our life always vanishes before
we have been enabled to see all the forms of human beauty. But to the
esthetic treasures of nature, man succeeded in adding those of art; and
with the thousand artifices of garment and ornaments, we have added to
our forms such and so many beauties that it is easier to imagine than to
enumerate them. Perhaps I will some day attempt to write a "Physiology
of Beauty," in which, if I do, I intend to point out the general laws
which govern the esthetic world. Here I must only describe the confines
where love and beauty meet and, in turn, kiss and fecundate each other.
When the eye has love for a companion it finds a new world to
contemplate in the cerulean star-thistle which our sweetheart
interweaves for the first time in her golden hair, or in the crimson
geranium which gives a magnificent relief to her raven locks; a naughty
little muslin apron may become a new continent, and a glove, which too
cruelly and too tightly squeezes a rosy little hand, may enclose in the
nest of its little buttons of mother of pearl so many new beauties as to
stir our senses or infuse an unknown voluptuousness into us. The man who
loves a beautiful woman laughs compassionately at the polygamist pasha
who needs a hundred women to find the hundred beauties of the human
Venus; and the beautiful woman, in the arsenal of her garments, in the
variety of her smiles, in the thousand undulations of her flexuous body,
evokes before the eyes of her lover not a hundred, but a thousand women,
all beautiful with a different beauty.
Sight is the only sense which, in love, proceeds to effect moral and
intellectual discoveries in the person beloved; and we not only
contemplate to admire and to enjoy, but also to discover, by the flash
of the eye and the throbbing of the facial muscles, how many affections,
how many thoughts we can find in the one whom we intend to make ours
forever. However, beauty is such a powerful tyrant in love that it
forces us under its yoke and usurps the rights of the highest needs. A
beautiful woman who is desired seldom seems to us frivolous and
heartless, and the fascination of beauty may impel us to pardon every
crime, to accept the most shameful compromises with our conscience, and
may cause in us the most ridiculous and farcical hallucinations.
However, this fault is not of the eyes, that see, but of the senses,
that desire too ardently; and, above all, of nature, which has such a
loving care of the forms in which germs are moulded into living bodies.
Nature defends and protects the beautiful above everything else, perhaps
because it is the crucible in which the good and the true are melted
together.
If I wished to indicate by an ideographic sign all the varied and
essential parts which the sense of sight assumes in love, I would use
the figure of a winged messenger, a sort of Mercury, with the left hand
leading Voluptuousness on the earth, and with the right directing our
gaze toward the highest regions of the ideal, where in holiest and most
tender company live the good and the beautiful, the true and the
sublime, where are preserved all the variform archetypes of sublimity.
Hearing has a small but interesting part in the story of love, if we set
aside the prominent part it has as an instrument of thought. We are not
to discuss here music or the value of ideas communicated through words,
but the purely sensual influence of the ear in amorous phenomena.
Hearing yields some pleasures almost tactile, and always very sensual,
such as are brought to us by some sounds which may be termed lascivious
(the swish of a silk gown, the warbling of some birds, the murmur of
certain waves, etc.); but beyond these rare exceptions, hearing has a
tender, affectionate part. We would say that it stirs affections,
predisposing them to vibrate with the sweetest, most impassioned notes.
Man and woman have each a peculiar voice, and the sexual character of
the feminine voice affects man, while the virile timbre of his voice
causes woman's heart to throb with the most deeply sexual desires. There
are some feminine voices that cannot be heard with impunity, so suavely
do their notes penetrate into the greatest depths of the heart, which
throbs with excitement and emotion. The voice of some women resembles a
caress by the wing of a swan; and while it delights us, it perturbs and
confuses us, affects us deeply and lastingly. Man and woman, through the
notes of their voices, chastely reveal their sex, and the heart
palpitates violently, as that of a girl bathing, who, before trusting
her little foot to the wave, looks around as though frightened by the
rustle of the leaves.
The sound of the voice, beyond the idea it represents, cannot say, "I am
beautiful, I am intelligent," but it can say, alone, many other sweet
things: "I am a woman, I am very much of a woman, I desire much, I am
languishing with love, I am alone, I want you at once, I await you
ardently," etc.
The seduction of the voice has some of the characteristics attributed
to ancient sorcery; it surprises, fascinates and conquers us, and we are
unable to discover the cause of such a storm roused by a few sounds, a
few words. We feel ourselves almost humiliated at being vanquished
without a battle, carried off without our consent; and the fascination
of a voice seems to us the work of a witch. More than once we have
resisted the seductions of sight, the violence of touch; but the voice
conquers us, delivers us, bound, hand and foot, into the arms of a
mysterious power which demands from us the blindest submission, against
which rebellion is impossible. And this influence of the voice lasts a
long time, is never forgotten, often survives love itself.
After long years of silence, indifference, contempt, the wind carries to
us the sound of a voice; and we feel ourselves disturbed, surprised,
reconquered, as in the first day of our love. Hearing will cast its
fishing-line into the deepest waters of our affection; and more than one
love has been resuscitated miraculously from the coldest ashes by a dear
voice which we had, perhaps, long since forgotten.
Love has many mysterious relations to the olfactory sense. In the animal
world perfumes are often the more direct and powerful instigators in
amorous struggles; and even before the female has seen the companion by
whom she desires to be conquered, the wings of the wind have carried to
her nostrils a perfume that inebriates and fills her with
voluptuousness.
This sense may be a powerful excitant in inferior races, or in the lower
type of men of high races, but it exercises, in love, a powerful
influence even in the most refined natures, by means of perfumes which
we have conquered from nature and which, by the omnipotence of
chemistry, we know how to reproduce without having recourse to the power
of life. We have brought into our power the essence of every petal, the
perfume of every calyx, of every leaf, of every bark, the repugnant
smell of many enamored animals, and, with impudent art, mixing the odors
of flowers with exciting aromas, we have concentrated in a few drops of
essence so much olfactory voluptuousness as warm spring could hardly
concentrate in a flowering meadow or in a tropical forest. Now the deep
and intense voluptuousness of perfumes is the daughter of a remote
atavism which makes us susceptible of the sexual exhalations of many
living beings and, solely for this reason, no sense has more intimate
ties with animal voluptuousness than smell.
If you study the expression on the face of a woman who is scenting a
very odorous flower and feels as though inebriated, you will see that
such a picture resembles, more than anything else, a sublime scene of
love. Ask many over-sensual men and they will tell you that they cannot
visit with impunity the laboratories where essences and perfumes are
made. Ask the art of the perfume-maker, and it will answer that, after
having mixed a hundred essences of flowers and leaves, it gives relief
to and improves all those perfumes by adding an infinitesimal quantity
of a matter, fetid in itself, but taken from the organs of love of some
animal. Ask why women love perfumes so much, and perhaps a few will be
able to tell you, or will answer with a blush. And if by a long
experience they have already learned the most subtle mysteries of the
senses, all the finest arts of coquetry, they will tell you that
perfumes are a powerful weapon in the arsenal of love and that some of
them possess an irresistible charm over the senses of man.
It is difficult to remain a long time in the warm atmosphere of
voluptuousness without sacrificing a great part of those noble forces
which are destined for higher attainments; and this explains why no
impassioned mania for perfumes can have a moral influence over us. He
who plunges into the tepid, titillating and morbid wave of odors no
longer measures his strength in relation to a chaste and robust
virility, but squeezes from the fruit the last drop of juice, and in the
rapid convulsion of weariness imagines new delights. But between this
human debasement and the contempt for perfumes there is an abyss, and by
abandoning them to the courtesan, or to the savage woman who anoints
herself from head to foot, we throw away, without any reason, much of a
dear and sweet voluptuousness which could be enjoyed and cultivated by
us without any offense to morals.
Do you believe that a kiss given to that one whom you love and who is
yours, through the petals of a rose, is a sin of lust? Do you ever
believe that love gathered in a shower of violets, hyacinths and
narcissus, between the crepuscules of two sighs, could be called
lasciviousness? Nature is eternally rich, and the garlands we weave with
her flowers around our joys do not deplete her inexhaustible gardens.