BOUNDARIES OF LOVE--THEIR RELATIONS TO THOUGHT
Thought may, for very different reasons, now be an ally and now a victim
of love. First instrument of seduction, next to the external form of the
body, thought revives, flares up in contact with the new sentiment, as
occurs with every other energy condensed in our brain; and while it
becomes purer, it strengthens itself, exhibiting some of its rarest,
most exquisite fruits. Many torpid intellects do not awake except by the
kiss of love, and then only to fall back into the previous lethargy the
moment they are left without the stimulus of desire; but healthier
brains, too, rise above themselves when called upon to offer an unusual
tribute on the new altar. For very many, poetry is the song of spring,
and, prosaic and mute before having loved, they return to their prose
and taciturnity when the season of loves is past. As they are men, they
may continue to possess a woman; but being poor in moral energy, in the
May of their life they have only a smile of poetry, lasting as long as
the petals of a rose. Their cold and indolent imagination indulges in a
little flight among the bushes of the garden or the orchard; emits its
feeble trill, then falls wingless on the highroad, plodding until death.
How often a woman, who has been loved by one of these spring lovers and
who remembers having once seen him, an ardent creature, full of
imagination, finds it very difficult to persuade herself that the man
who today is all prose, from head to foot, living between his chocolate
and his nightcap, wearing seven varieties of flannels, and using ten
different kinds of lozenges, once wrote verses and fell on his knees at
her feet, which he covered with bitter tears!
More fortunate men, instead, derive from their loves a continual and
powerful stimulus to the works of thought, which seems to reshape and
renew itself at each different phase of passion, at each change of love.
These influences upon the lives of many artists, poets, and even
statesmen can be studied in their works, and have a stronger power when
the artist, the poet, the head of the state is a woman.
The influence of love upon the forces and forms of thought is twofold,
and is derived from self-love and from the psychical nature of the
person loved. Being a sentiment born during youth or rejuvenated during
old age, it especially excites the imagination and refines the aptitude
for reproducing the beautiful; in a few words, it warms those mental
aptitudes that generally reach their climax at the same age when love
manifests its greatest energies. Very rarely a man can be a poet or a
great artist without having loved intensely, without having had at least
a great capacity for loving. Chastity, forced or voluntary, may conceal
love; but down in the depths of the heart some images, resembling an
angel more than a woman, have sway, rising at every inspiration of
genius, at every song of the lyre, at every touch of the brush, and
reviving or kindling the sacred fire of art. The genius of many among
the greatest poets, artists and writers of the world had love as its
first companion and supreme inspirer; and without this sentiment their
names might be totally unknown to us. The love that is born in a sublime
brain accumulates gigantic forces, and chastity, always imposed by great
passions in their first stage, refines and intensifies them; so that
love seems to transform into genius, and genius dyes with splendid hues
every amorous manifestation. A chaste genius which loves is a legion of
fighting forces, a whole host of winged geniuses, and therefore no
difficult question, no irresistible force can oppose it. Thought, when
the companion of love, offers to it the richest tributes of its energy,
just as the enamored bird sings its most harmonious notes for its
companion, the flower condenses all its perfumes and the fascination of
its most beautiful colors around the nest in which plants love. And
with thought, intensified, transformed, adorned with all its splendors,
goes the stimulus of self-esteem, which in the satisfaction of pride of
the person loved finds always new incitement and new incentive to work.
Nor does the creature loved receive only the tribute, but from the
enthusiastic eloquence with which gratitude is expressed by that
creature, it is manifest that the latter also feels the same inciting
influence, and the most modest and stillest tongue finds splendors of
form and savoriness of style unknown to that day.
A long experience in every country of the world demonstrates the
superiority of woman over man in the epistolary style and especially in
love-letter writing, which is the effect not only of the peculiar nature
of the feminine mind but also of the powerful excitement created in
woman by the stimulus of love. A letter is nearly always an exchange of
affections, and woman more than man feels the intimate relations between
two affections; she loves more and better than we. Man has a hundred
different ways of exerting his talents when excited by love; art,
ambition, science open to him a thousand avenues to manifest his new
energies; to woman, on the contrary, no literary path is open other than
amorous correspondence, and she uses and abuses it in a surprising
manner. In the numberless hecatombs, in the daily pyres of many perfumed
letters, real treasures of art are being destroyed, which should be
saved from the conflagration that consumes so many volumes of words and
phrases; for the commonplace always dominates every field of good and
evil, and commonplace, like all things human, are most loves. Was it not
Balzac who said: "It is recognized that in love all women have some
'esprit'"?
The eloquence of love, a real song of a gifted mind in love, is not
contradicted by the timid and often dull silence which invariably
accompanies the first declarations, the first skirmishes. Fear in all
its forms desiccates the mouth and the pharynx, suspends nearly
instantaneously the secretions of mucus and saliva, and many are made
physically unable to speak, in the same manner as when a violent mental
perturbation disconcerts ideas and words, so that eloquence is reduced
to an absolute silence, possibly interrupted only by disconnected
phrases. That man so mute in love, however, has hardly returned to the
quiet of his solitary room when he suddenly becomes a new Demosthenes,
and pours out into space or on paper the rivers of a fiery eloquence,
which a few moments before would have proved so opportune and so
beautiful. Happy love, in the stage of attainment, raises all brains
above medium temperature, continually infusing new energies into them.
Even during the intoxication, the thyrsus of the dithyramb never falls
from the hand of the happy mortal who loves or hopes to be loved. When,
on the contrary, our affection vibrates with the notes of sorrow, a
sublime elegy may be produced as the outburst of thought; one can become
poet or insane. Brains better organized are cured of the great sorrows
of the heart with a book, or a musical creation, or a picture; but many
human brains submerge in the hurricane of an unhappy love, and the
statistics of the hospitals for the insane always show a large number of
cases of insanity produced by love, while in the secrecy of the domestic
walls are concealed many other brains withered or fallen into lethargy
through unfortunate loves.
I am writing in these pages a modest essay of general physiology, or, as
it is usually termed, psychology, and have neither the right nor the
strength to undertake the work of literary critic, which still remains
to be done, notwithstanding the very beautiful things written by many
upon the influence of love in art. Not only has every poet and every
artist (and I consider the writer the greatest of all) left in his works
the imprint of his loves, but he has felt and interpreted love in a way
entirely his own, and which in some cases became the style of a school
or an epoch. The woman loved by Byron is quite different from the woman
loved by Burns; Laura is not Beatrice, and the woman dimly discerned by
Leopardi is not Vittoria Colonna. To study the influences of the times
and the mind over the particular mouldings of the loves of great men--in
a few words, to draw the comparative psychology of celebrated loves and
of the amorous types of art--is a gigantic labor, in which the artist,
the psychologist and the literary man should join hands in order to
produce a work worthy of the subject. For me it will suffice to have
prepared in the present essay some materials for this work of the
future.
Love ceases to be an impulse for thought and becomes its first assassin,
not only when it is unhappy, but also when it sinks into the mud of
lust. Chastity is an almost entirely hygienic question, and here we
should mark the place where the hygienic branch shoots out from the
great trunk of physiology. No embrace has ever debased thought when
voluptuousness was only love; but when lasciviousness is stronger than
sentiment and the animal man regrets having given too much of himself to
the future, then the individual rebels against the excessive tribute
paid to the preservation of the species. Then the animal man is diseased
and the moral man has fallen into libertinism. No; nature never punishes
him who wisely obeys its laws, and after the sacrifice of love man is as
happy and intelligent as before, since, in the blessed languor of a
brief repose, nature stills even the pain of weariness.
"Lay waste the entire forest of concupiscence, not one tree alone. When
you shall have felled every tree, cut every branch, you can then
pronounce yourselves free, pure, virtuous," exclaims the Dhammapada, and
science utters the same cry, but instead of the word "concupiscence" it
writes the more precise term "lust." In our organism every function is
so well regulated that we, like the citron, can always bear leaves,
flowers and fruits, provided we do not sacrifice the fruit to the flower
and do not imitate the monstrous flowers with over-expanded petals or
seedless fruits. Wise chastity is the ablest administrator of vital
harmonies and energies; love and labor do not oppose each other, as many
too exacting or hypercritical moralists are continually repeating with
too rigid severity.
I have previously stated that the influence of love over thought is
twofold, and we have still to study its second manifestation, namely,
the influence exerted by the psychical nature of the person loved. Two
creatures who love each other are two bodies differently electrified,
continually exchanging currents of energy in order to reëstablish the
equilibrium of forces and obey the law of universal affinity. But, since
no two identical creatures, no two identical brains, no two identical
sentiments ever exist in nature, it follows that, of the two thoughts
brought face to face by love, one exercises an influence of attraction
greater than the other, and consequently one of the two gives more than
it receives. Generally the stronger mind exercises a greater
fascination; and as the mind of man is oftener greater than that of
woman, the latter more easily follows the ideas, the theories, the
intellectual tastes of man. It is not always true, however, that a
greater attraction betokens a greater mental force, since some peculiar
characteristics of certain intellects render them more fascinating,
their contact more dangerous and richer in elective affinity. Thought
may be robust, original; but if rigid, rude and without any weapon of
conquest, it lives alone, in solitary loftiness, and the person loved
contemplates it with admiration, but feels no attraction. It is like a
star, too cold and too distant for us to desire. Some other talents, on
the contrary, seem to be magnetized, so strongly do they adhere to men
and things; and when we approach them, we feel ourselves absorbed and,
after their contact, carry away some influence of contagion, of
fascination, of imitation. These magnetic brains combine with the other
amorous seductions another and most powerful one, that of subjugating
and bending the mind of the person loved, so that to the sweet chain of
affection is added the chain of thought.
A most peculiar and little studied influence of fascinating talents is
seen in some women, who add to their other admirable qualities the power
of conquering the thought of men whose minds are stronger and swifter
than theirs. Living with them, breathing their moral atmosphere, it
becomes impossible, even for the most tenacious opposers of the ideas of
others, not to think as they think, not to write as they write, not to
acquire certain psychical tastes which constitute their delight. The
style of certain writers, the manner of certain painters have
unconsciously yielded to these slow and mysterious influences; and the
masses, investigating the origin of these esthetic mutations, seek it in
mysterious causes and in evolutions of art and science, while, instead,
they have a humbler but more natural source. The style and manner
changed when the head was resting on the bosom of a blonde friend, or
the hand playing among the curly labyrinths of raven hair. In the
history of arts and of literature, mention of these influences is nearly
always omitted because nearly always they are unknown to the biographer,
and often unknown to the artist and the poet who was subject to them.
Woman always confesses, and frequently with pride, that she has moulded
her thought on that of her friend; man hardly acknowledges this, and if
warned by criticism, rebels and feels hurt by such an odd accusation.
How and when should the king of the universe ever change the style and
the direction of his thought through the influence of a kiss or a
caress? "Mine, and only mine!" exclaims the man who loves. "His, and
only his!" always sighs the woman who loves; and I must, although with
different words, have frequently said the same thing in this book.
It is not only the robust and attracting nature of human brains that
measures their various influences in the struggles and the caresses of
love, but it is the degree that causes the high influences of thought to
be differently felt. The more one loves, the more one yields to the
fascination of another's talent; the more one loves, the more one is
disposed to abdicate one's own ideas and esthetic tastes in order to
assume the ideas and the tastes of the person loved. Man, proudly
awkward, constantly repeats in every tone that in politics, morality,
religion, woman thinks always like her lover; and by this he deludes
himself into believing that he affirms with the most eloquent proof the
uncontrasted superiority of his mind. However, in our case he fails to
mention a reason, most honorable for woman and little for us: woman
generally feels more deeply the influence of a virile thought, not only
because she is weaker than we, but because she loves us much more than
we ever could love. She sacrifices instantly and willingly even
self-pride to love; man rarely and with difficulty makes this sacrifice.
"She is silly, but beautiful," we say, feeling very happy. Woman, on the
contrary, says oftener than we: "How can Democracy be respectable if he
insults it every day? And how cannot Socialism be a sacred thing if it
is his religion?" Man is always right for the woman who loves him,
because she can seldom love without esteem. We, indeed, allow ourselves
to love with all our senses a woman whom we cannot or must not hold in
estimation. This difference would be sufficient to demonstrate that, in
the psychical evolution of the two sexes, woman is ahead of us in the
esthetic of sentiment, as we outrun her in intellectual development.
Woman has already attained perfect love, which is the fusion of all
human elements, the selection of selections; we see the concubine even
in the sweetheart and in the wife; and the highest talent does not
disdain to pour out the molten metal of its thoughts into the mould of a
Venus who hardly could be called heavenly. In matters of love we are
disciples oftener than masters on the field of sentiment.
Whatever be the reason for which a brain in love bends its love
companion with a larger power of influence, the tyrant, too, undergoes
the influence of the victim. Two thoughts cannot impunely be enclosed in
the same atmosphere, they cannot follow the orbit of the same planetary
system. The one gives much, and the other gives little; the one receives
more than it gives, the other gives more than it receives; but they both
alter and exchange influences and energies. This is a consequence of the
most elementary laws of physics: two loves and two brains are two
systems of forces; and, however powerful one may be in comparison with
the other, they both must undergo, in their contacts, a molecular
modification of their movements. To the direct influence of love add the
automatic power of imitation, the tyranny of habit, the epicurism of the
compromise of ideas and of conscience, and many other minor causes, and
you will see how inexorably thought must change when we think in two.
Not all intellectual phenomena undergo the influence of love in equal
measure, but those feel it most who by contacts and origins are nearer
to the energies of sentiment or are interwoven with them, constituting
binary bodies, composed of affection and thought. Religion and morality
are more easily modified than esthetic tastes, and these change more
frequently than philosophical theories or the method of study. There is
a certain architecture in our brains that constitutes their framework
and can be destroyed only by death or insanity. Against it love is
powerless; furthermore, certain intellectual antitheses between a man
and a woman are enough to render love impossible, even when the sympathy
of forms and a certain community of affections violently rouse the
sovereign of sentiments.
To scorn influences of love over thought may be the fruit of pride, but
it is also, more frequently, an incontrovertible proof of crass
ignorance,--pride and ignorance which we shall bitterly expiate,
because, if we today may be contented with the beauty of form, and if
robust youth, comforted later by coquetry, may prolong the life of love
founded on voluptuousness only, the day will come, sooner or later, in
which, when the great disparity of brains shall destroy every hope of
common intelligence, we shall find ourselves in the presence of this
horned dilemma: either to renounce dual thought--horrible amputation of
intellectual life--or lower ourselves more every day in order that the
voice of a person who speaks in a subdued tone may reach our ear. Hence
a continual toil, a weary and sad exertion, the impairment of lofty
intellects and the disorders of weak brains; hence the inevitable death
of a love which should have submerged only with the last plank of
shipwrecked beauty; hence the veiled polygamy of our modern society,
profoundly hypocritical, because it is so impatient that it wants to
run, when it has only the strength to walk slowly; because it is so
petulant that it wants to jump while its legs are still tied by the
sacred straps of the middle ages.
We must all inexorably yield to the influence of thought in love. If our
robust brain can elevate in some little measure the smaller one of the
person we love, we must always descend from our lofty plane, lowering
the level of our thought and wasting many of the nobler forces of human
progress. A certain disparity of levels is inevitable, but it should
never be excessive, because, in the continual efforts to equalize them,
in the sorrowful struggles to reach them, a great part of love may be
wretchedly dissolved.