BOUNDARIES OF LOVE--THEIR RELATIONS TO OTHER SENTIMENTS--JEALOUSY
In the Apollo room in the Vatican you will see an ancient bas-relief
representing two bacchantes with the Dionysian thyrsus; one is standing,
while the heat of voluptuousness is flaming within her; she bears the
thyrsus, lust transpires on her face, and a bull is beating his horns
against her legs; the other falls exhausted from intoxication. These are
two moments of the voluptuousness of love, but they are also the two
most elementary forms of the sentiment that bind man to woman. Now an
ardent energy, then calm possession; now struggle that conquers, then
affectionate blandishment that restrains. The most sublime, most
constant, most perfect love that a man of superior race can desire or
dream of, is a hot, bright flame, lasting as long as life, and at which,
from time to time, are kindled the sparks of a desire that flares up,
wavers and disappears.
Love, in comparison with all other sentiments, is such a thing that,
when it comes in contact with them, it rules, attracts and draws them
into the orbit of its movements, like a small fragment of cosmic matter
which, having come too near to the sun, is attracted and devoured by
that body. The sentiments are forces, each controlled by certain laws in
its own sphere; when they come together, they conglomerate or eliminate
each other, or exercise a mutual influence which causes them to deviate
from the line followed by them a moment before. When an affection
approaches love it is so powerfully influenced by it as to seem to
disappear from the sight of the common people, while neither matter nor
force can ever be destroyed, but can only change in form.
On this subject many fallacious arguments are advanced every day. It is
said, for instance, that love is the most egotistic of sentiments,
because we seek in it the greatest voluptuousness; but love and egotism
are two affections that follow very different orbits, since the former
causes us to love another creature and has as its object the
preservation of the species, while the latter makes us love ourselves
and tends to preserve the individual. If by egotism we mean the desire
of satisfying a need, then all the sentiments, even the most generous
ones, could be considered as forms of egotism, since even the martyr
satisfies a very high need of a generous sentiment.
Love is, on the contrary, at perpetual war with egotism; and although
the latter is a gigantic affection, yet it pales before the brilliant
light of the Titan of the Affections. Many animals prefer death to
abandoning the faithful companion. Even the toad suffers himself to be
tortured, burned, to have his limbs amputated, his eyes gouged; but as
long as he has one limb intact, he uses it to embrace the female in an
amorous clasp. And do we not, too, offer as holocaust to love wealth,
glory, science? Does not woman offer to love the long illness of
gestation, the tortures of childbirth, the pains of nursing, the anxious
cares of domestic and educational struggles? And how many think, in the
intoxication of love, of the bitterness and the thorns which they are
sowing in that moment; the history of sorrow which, perhaps, by an
inexorable law, they are preparing for themselves?
Even the most perfect egotist, if he be a healthy man, desires and loves
a woman. Apart from a few elect creatures to whom the supreme joys of
the creations of thought are permitted, love represents the greatest of
energies, the crowning of every edifice. We may thirst for wealth and
glory as the greatest of joys, but in the background we behold the
outline of a feminine creature at whose feet the trophies of victory
must be laid. I do not speak of woman, because, for her, every satisfied
vanity, every hoped for glory, all riches desired, every flower and
every fruit of the garden of life must be laid at the feet of somebody,
and this somebody is always a man. The fireworks with which every
festivity of life ends must always be a woman; at the bottom of every
vulgar revelry and on the horizon of every sublime glory there is ever
an Eve. To love and to be loved is of all human things the best; and
even in the world of the suprasensible, the religions of every country
have always promised to the good and the believer an eternity of love in
the harem of voluptuousness, or in a mystic but amorous ecstasy. Read
the burning pages of the mystic writers, and you will be able to tell me
if all that fantastic world is not, too, a transubstantiation of love.
The gods of every Olympus also have a sexual form, and there are
feminine forms for the males and masculine forms for the females. From
the cradle to the grave, love is for all and always the highest promise.
Between the automatic lust of adolescence and the studied and covetous
lecheries of old age, we pass, through the feverish hysteria of early
youth, to the deep passions of virility; but for every age love is the
sweetest joy. The tocsin of old age begins to sound when, with the first
white hairs, we fear that we are no longer able to love; and every one
ardently, anxiously hopes that the hour, the minute will never come for
him in which he shall be compelled to say the tremendous words: "I
cannot."
I do not deny that in some human monsters egotism, as a sacrifice made
to the god "Myself," is so powerful as to exclude love; but such cases
are very rare if they last the whole life, rare when they last for a
shorter period. It often occurs that a man, trained to and living in the
most sordid egotism, falls in love when old with a poor young girl, and
becomes expansive with her, generous, prodigal, perhaps; and he too
pays, at one time and in a very ridiculous way, the debt which nature in
vain claimed from him during his young and mature age.
Great egotists also love, but in a selfish manner, denying the most
prodigal and most splendid of the passions that tribute which they
cannot refuse to themselves. They are ignorant of the most sublime joys,
of the most inebriating enthusiasms of love, of the holy voluptuousness
of loving a woman more than oneself; but they also love, they love in
their own way. If you wish to study the physiognomy of egotistical love,
compare man's with woman's love and you will find it easy to penetrate
into the mysteries of this part of psychology; and if you desire a more
striking contrast, that the differences may be represented in a bolder
relief, compare the love of an old man with that of a young woman: you
will have in the former an egotistical type of love, in the latter a
generous one.
More complex are the influences which the sentiment of possession and
that of self-esteem exercise upon love, and the importance given to
jealousy is sufficient to prove this.
The physiological study of jealousy would be sufficient, if it were
still needed, to demonstrate the queer confusion of language in relation
to psychical facts. One would say that it is the language of the
alchemists, employed to express the chemical composition of bodies; one
would believe that we are still dealing with the "nothing white," the
"philosophic wool" and the "tetrascelitetraoxicoquindodeca" of our good
ancestors.
Jealousy really signifies a pain of the sentiment of love, or, to be
more specific, the sentiment caused by the offense done us through the
infidelity of the person we love. This pain is natural in all men, in
all times and in almost all races. It is the injury to our property
applied to love. The child scratches and bites him who touches or spoils
its fruits or its toy; it grieves us to be robbed of our books, of the
flowers of our garden. It is natural, then, that he who touches our
sweetheart, our dearest thing, should be hated. And, in fact, this
jealousy is but a form of hatred, the most natural, the most legitimate
of all hatreds. It is not necessary to create a new energy or a new word
to express this hatred. We may beat or kill a man because he has
brutally offended our son, our father, our friend, our country, our
sweetheart; five offenses given to five different sentiments, but always
hatred aroused by grief, energy developed by the same mechanism. The
paternal, the filial, the friendly sentiment, the devotion to our
country, love have been offended in us, and we have responded with a
centrifugal hatred, with blows or death. But in these various cases, was
the presence of a new sentiment deemed necessary in order that the crime
might be committed? Certainly not. It was said that the paternal
affection, injured, had aroused such distress in us as to lead to
assault or assassination; it was simply asserted that an insult to the
flag of our country had rendered us blind and led us to commit violence;
and why, then, when love is offended, should we create a new
sentiment--jealousy? All sentiments, when satisfied, lead us to close
friendships, to endearments, to be of assistance to those who have given
us these satisfactions. All injured sentiments lead us, on the contrary,
to repel those who have offended them, to harm those from whom we have
received that pain.
Is it jealousy, then, the hatred that an animal manifests toward any
creature which interrupts it in its loves? Well, for many savages, to
whom love is nothing but sexual intercourse, all the phenomena of
jealousy are reduced to this single form. When the instinct is
satisfied, as the unions are promiscuous and woman is considered common
property, there can be no jealousy. If woman is a cup out of which every
one may drink, why should there be jealousy? A Bolivian woman once
cynically told me: "Woman is the water of a stream. Throw a stone into
it: will you be able to tell me a minute afterward where the stone broke
that water? You are very foolish, you man, to make distinctions between
identical things!"
In polygamous races, man only can be jealous; in polyandric ones, woman
alone can be jealous legally. With various nations, woman is a property
like any other; hence she can be voluntarily offered to the friend or to
the guest, like a horse or a dog. They do not want anybody to steal her,
but she can be given away without either disgrace or jealousy. Only in
the higher and monogamous races the sentiments of love, self-esteem and
property, forming a triple armor around our woman, incite us to defend
her "with claws and beak"; and to this unyielding body, consisting of
the union of three sentiments, we give the name of "jealousy"; and here
we have a second psychical form, another thing called by the same name.
But, as though such confusion were not already excessive, we have called
jealousy a special psychical individual organization by which we become
suspicious and tyrannical toward the person we love and whom we offend
without any reason and from whom we withhold all legitimate liberty. And
after having confused three different things, that is to say, the grief
of injured love, the triple combination of three sentiments--love,
self-pride, possession--and a pathological irritability of suspicion, we
discuss at length, and always in vain, in order to decide whether all
men are jealous and whether jealousy measures love with an exact ruler
and whether anyone can love without being jealous: vain, not to say
puerile, discussions, which would not take place if words were
previously defined. If by jealousy you mean the sorrow caused by not
being loved or by being deceived, then every heart that loves must be
jealous; thus, whoever loves country, mother, son, cannot witness
without sorrow an offense offered to son, mother, country. But if by
jealousy you mean that form of tyrannical suspicion which tortures the
person possessed by it, then I shall tell you that we very well can and
should love without ever feeling that jealousy, and that we can be
jealous even without loving. Let us proceed to an elementary analysis,
and we shall understand each other. Under the name of a single
sentiment, of a single effective energy, the most dissimilar phenomena
are grouped, to wit:
(1) The sorrow caused by a love offense;
(2) The sorrow for an injury to property;
(3) A sorrow born of the sentiment of self-esteem;
(4) An habitual, constitutional suspicion, which centers on the
person beloved or possessed.
The only common ties among these psychical phenomena are these: that all
apply to a love offended, or alleged to be offended, and that they are
all accompanied by grief. Such an empiricism, such a coarse empiricism!
Is this not actual alchemy, that which called all volatile bodies
"spirits," and the oxide of zinc "philosophic wool"!
As jealousy is not an elementary psychical phenomenon, but simply an
empirical mixture, it has many and varied ethnical forms, and becomes
necessary in all countries where polygamy prevents man from physically
and morally satisfying a woman, and where the husband, merely because he
is rich and powerful, selects his wife and forces his love upon her. The
jealousy of many Oriental nations is proverbial, and perhaps monogamous
peoples become jealous through contact with polygamous ones, as in
Sicily and in certain parts of Spain. It seems to me, however, that in
some cases jealousy has not a clear historical origin, but assumes an
ethnical character, according to the special constitution of a race. In
any case, in Europe, Italians, Spaniards, and, above all, Portuguese are
very jealous; and, as I learned, in America the most jealous of all are
the Brazilians.
The common people will certainly not be persuaded by my psychological
analysis, and will continue to measure the force of love by the
unreasonableness of suspicion; and many dear and lovely women will
continue, heaven knows for how many centuries, to taunt their lovers
with this foolish plaint: "You do not love me because you are not
jealous. How can you love me if you do not feel for me the slightest
jealousy?" Foolish lamentations, often uttered by happy creatures who,
perhaps, finding it strange and against nature to be too happy, look for
some occasion of sorrow and regret. Can anyone love anybody on earth
more deeply than one's own children? Certainly not; and yet we are not
jealous when others love them, and father and mother sublimely vie with
each other in adoring and fondling them. You should love your companion
in love in the same manner; and if you fear to lose him, that fear must
not be the wrath of the inquisitor nor the clutch of the miser. Vain
counsels! Words thrown to the winds! Jealousy is one of the most
constitutional psychological maladies, and, if one is born with it, it
is very difficult to cure. May a benign fate keep it from you! It
poisons the dearest joys of life; penetrates every pore of the skin;
pours its gall into every drop of water, into every mouthful of bread;
it transforms the man who loves into a policeman, always armed, with
alert ear and prying eyes. And the jealous man is always spying,
doubting, suffering; he investigates the past, the present and the
future; he seeks the lie in a caress, indifference in a kiss; in love he
always fears hypocrisy. What a hellish life! It is a hundred times
better not to love than to love in this way. The punishment of the few
jealous men with exquisitely gentle heart should be this: to know that
those who are as jealous as they generally entertain more self-love than
love, and that the highest and noblest creatures have always loved
without jealousy. The day when we perceive that we are no longer loved,
when we are deceived, let love die without replacing it with jealousy.
From suspicion to condemnation or acquittal, between sincere lovers, the
path cannot and must not be a long one; to a frank question, a frank
answer; let suspicion or love die, but they should die in a hurricane or
in a battle, die a violent death; they should not drag a miserable
existence between the courts and the prisons. A hundred times better a
lightning that kills us than the feverish jaundice which consumes the
stamina of our lives, poisons all sources of our joy.
Jealousy, besides, as it has already largely declined in monogamous
society, will continue to decrease in the future, when matrimony shall
be but the sanctification of love, when the choice shall be always
reciprocal, when in the moral relations between the two sexes all trace
of hypocrisy shall have disappeared. To know that we are loved,
esteemed, and to love and esteem our companion, deeply and sincerely, is
the surest guarantee of defense against that sordid parasite, that
wood-worm of love which is jealousy. Let woman cease to be a slave or a
freedwoman, let the husband or lover cease to be the proprietor of a
woman, and all those lepers of love, the jealousy-mad, will disappear at
once.
Self-esteem, independent of jealousy, has many legitimate relations to
love, of which it enriches the treasures. No man, no woman in the
world, knowing that he or she is loved by a most noble creature, can
help feeling proud; and if a delicate reserve prohibits our heralding
our good fortune, we can, however, relish the secret joy of knowing that
the world envies us. It is almost always beyond human strength to
renounce these joys, which can be delighted in without humiliating
others and without any shadow of rancor. Woman, especially, with
admirable art, knows how to say countless things silently; and when she
is proud of a noble love, she radiates such an aureole of light as to
dazzle the adorer and the apathetic. With the majesty of a queen and the
reserve of a woman, and without opening her lips, she can say to all:
"Envy me; I am loved!" Holy and just and chaste pride, which I wish all
the daughters of Eve who shall have deserved love should feel.
Lovers and sweethearts, choirs of adorers and famous beauties may be
objects of luxury, as are horses and palaces; and it is natural for
human vanity to seek those things and to appreciate and utilize them to
humiliate those who have them not. Vanity uses love, then, as a pretext;
and many women, incapable of loving, may conquer men solely as trophies
of war, just as men oftener than women may, through pure vanity,
undertake a war of conquest. All these facts, however, belong to the
history of pride and vanity, and we have already dealt with them in our
study on the sources of love.
In that study we have seen by what paths one is led to love, and we were
therefore obliged to consider friendship, compassion and many other
sentiments as sources of love. But all endearing sentiments may have
relation to the Prince of Affections; that is to say, take the place of
love that wanes. When the sun shines in the heavens, the light of the
moon and that of the minor stars are invisible; and in the same way,
when love glows above the horizon of life, friendship, compassion, and
all other tender affections can no longer be seen or felt; but when love
disappears we can see the minor sentiments take its place.
Esteem, veneration and all other analogous sentiments may be companions
of love; but only too often they are bestowed upon a creature who little
deserves them. Love is a wizard that transforms and beautifies and
magnifies everything he touches; and we can have immense esteem and deep
veneration for the most despicable man, for the most abject, most wicked
woman. It does not reflect much honor upon us, but it is true. No
brigand ever stood in need of loves, often deep and ardent, and no
beautiful courtesan ever lacked illustrious lovers. What does it matter
if the object of love is a disgrace in everybody's eyes, spat upon by
public contempt, set in the pillory of universal hatred?
We love him, we love her; that is enough. And why do we love him? Why do
we love her? Because it pleases us. Before the inappellable rudeness of
this explanation what can science say, what can morality suggest?
Science recognizes the fact and explains it. A creature despicable in
every respect must please us very much to inspire us with love; and this
sentiment must be really gigantic if it conquers human
conventionalities, vulgar prejudices and the most persistent habits. It
has been said with much truth that no woman was more ardently loved than
a homely woman; and the same may be said of a brutal or criminal man, a
woman of the street or abject for any reason. A great man, if accused of
loving a debased or silly woman, could often, blushing with shame, strip
her before the world, like ancient Phryne, saying: "Let him dare throw
the first stone at me, who feels himself incapable of loving this
beautiful creature!" And the man who, through crime or baseness, has
been banned from civilized society, has in his heart, for the woman who
loves him, some pure and virgin oasis in which his love is lying; he
still has some untainted place reserved in his soul for the beloved one;
and this love, concealed and bitter, possesses, for certain natures, all
the perilous seductions of strong aromas and intoxicating poisons. No
man in the world is entirely wicked; and some of the ferocious
kindnesses of the assassin, some of the generous impulses of the thief
are preserved for the companion of love. Such is the omnipotence of
this sentiment, which, like an ancient alchemist, transmutes the vilest
metals into liquid gold and discovers the only diamond buried in the
sand of a great alluvium! Science, then, admits loves without esteem,
and, bowing its head with a blush of shame, acknowledges that they are
only too frequent.
Where science is still and humiliates itself, morality erects its head
and flagellates. Love without esteem is a crime--and a crime which
breeds other crimes. Woe to us when, bold avengers of public contempt,
we dare boast of loving a vile creature, and impudently parade such
love, as though intending by our arrogance to impose silence on
indignant decency, or by our insolence to act as pedestal for the
offended paramour! Liars in our own eyes, we defy, alone, the holiest
and most inviolable laws of beauty and honesty; and proud, first, then
bold and insolent, we end by becoming truly ribalds, and all encircled
and hidden by mire, we permit no gentle creature to approach us who
could inspire us with a pure and noble affection. Human passions may try
many stunts and tricks, but, in the end, natural sentiments, like normal
situations, are the healthiest and most enjoyable. We can raise, for an
instant, the vilest creatures on the shield of pride, but our arms will
tire and we will roll into the mire, together with our idol of a day.
The woman we love must not only be the companion of our voluptuousness,
but also the mother of our children; the man a woman loves must be the
husband and the father of the family. We should not consecrate the blush
of our face in that of our children, who will curse our wicked loves,
and will, perhaps, execrate the name of the father or the memory of the
mother. When pride has lost its keenness, and the hour of revenge has
passed, woe to us if we shall find ourselves alone with a creature whom
we cannot hold in estimation!
If Love is really the holiest thing of life, the most ardent affection,
the most voluptuous joy, we must erect a temple to him, with our own
hands, and with our most sublime sentiments decorate his tabernacle, in
which we can worthily adore him as a god. Love born among crimes and
turpitudes is a nest woven with thorny shrubs and thistles, while we
should weave it with the most aromatic leaves and the most beautiful
flowers. Men and women, we should vie with each other in gleaning fields
and gardens and in bearing to love every gentle affection, every noble
aspiration, every impulse of lofty ambition. Lust and pride, when
coupled, become the step-parents of every love without esteem, which,
like every organism born of evil, lives a scrofulous and rachitic life,
full of sorrows and calamities.
If love is really the most precious gem, we should enclose it in a
casket which, for richness of material, artistic skill and inimitable
esthetic conception, should be worthy of its contents. Nothing but
noblest things should touch it; no breath, unless perfumed with
sandalwood and roses, should be exhaled near it; no hand but that of an
angel should caress it; no heat should warm it but that of the kisses of
two loving lips.
If woman should concede her love only to the honest and industrious man,
if it were possible that man loved no woman but a modest one, we would
see the human family regenerated in the course of a generation, we would
see men educated through voluptuousness. For the prison that terrifies,
for the hell that threatens, we would then substitute the caresses of a
woman, the kisses of a man, as educative energies. Shall this eternally
be a dream? Shall we always threaten and assault men to make them
better? Shall we not have a medicine less cruel than sorrow to cure men
of vice and crime?