LOVE AND AGE
In studying the morning crepuscules of Love, we have involuntarily
outlined the first phases of Love. We have seen him timid and spasmodic,
exerting himself between the swaddling clothes of infancy and the first
weapons of arrogant youth, like a boy warrior armed with a wooden sword
and a pop-gun. During the age of adolescence this sovereign affection
shows the most sublime puerilities, the maddest hysterias, the most
fanciful vows of an infinite without limits of time or space. Side by
side with the most ideal aspirations we find, however, the impetuous and
automatic outbreaking of the first lusty actions; and a youthful
imagination, inflaming the first fevers of lust, agitates and shakes the
tender and fragile organism. Happy those who in the first storms of life
find a friendly hand as a guide and solace to preserve them from
thousands of dangers which threaten health and morality at the same
time.
The first, impatient acts of lust in adolescence are generally followed
in elect natures by a period of reaction, during which heroic vows of
chastity are made together with extraordinary endeavors to learn to hate
woman. Just at that time, in the diary of the boy who is about to become
a man, we may read these vows and aspirations for chastity which I
literally reproduce here for you:
" ... Tremendous dilemma of life; the cosmos less the woman--the
woman less the cosmos."
"I have been able to pass an entire day without embracing a woman
and without any fervid aspiration for her; and yet I have passed a
very happy day! Try and do without the evil-born race of Eve, for
all time."
"I took a seat near a Creole young lady and found her beautiful,
inebriating, voluptuous. I thought of a paradise of delights in
looking at her, and wavered. The most Creole embrace in the world,
however, is not worth the cosmic synthesis as I have conceived it
and as I will expose it to men."
"No pleasure is shorter than the erotic delirium; no sacrifice more
fruitful of useful consequences than the disdain for this
voluptuousness."
"Instinct, with the fury of its power, is for you the outward
manifestation of pleasure in its most attractive aspect; it is only
a faculty of yours, and tends to draw into its whirlpool all your
activity.
"It is only one of your faculties and that which you have in common
with the lowest creatures at the bottom of the series of creation,
and this faculty wants to be the first; the first and only for a
few moments; but in these moments the least noble of your powers
wants to, and can, take a great part of yourself, of your _ego_. It
is a sovereign who rules only for a few seconds, but who has power
enough during the period of his reign to destroy half of the state
and leave his throne upon a heap of ruins, firebrands and ashes; it
is easy to destroy, but from a mass of ruins and ashes to rebuild a
state is a hopeless task."
These few expressions are but the thousandth reproduction of a psychical
phenomenon which is reiterated in all men when they pass from the
threshold of adolescence into the gardens of youth. An historical fact
and a proverb embodied this truth in two great monuments: in the Council
of Trent those who voted for celibacy were the youngest priests; and the
French language has a proverb which says: "If youth but knew; could age
but do!"--a vote and a proverb deserving a volume of meditations, and
springing forth from the deepest roots of the human heart.
Exuberance of forces prepares us for the battle; but, at the same time,
it leaves us calm and serene, because true force is always calm. Rarely
a braggart is strong, and a frequent intimation of one's own energy is
nearly always a symptom of decline and weakness. The invalid who fears
death often says that he feels very well, even before being asked about
his health, and endeavors to delude himself and others with respect to
the danger that threatens him.
A young man is, in love, always more timid than an adult or an old man;
and this fact originates from so many and mysterious causes as to occur
in many animals as well. Birds, among others, the older they are, the
quicker they go at their amorous undertaking. A young man, however deep
his love may be, still trembles. He is a ripe and fragrant fruit, but
the rude contacts of the gardener and the store have not deprived him
yet of his untouched varnish. He has foregone the useless and too
unequal struggles against love and flung himself into its arms; but he
still trembles when the currents of the god pass through his body and
cause his nerves to vibrate. He is a priest initiated into the mysteries
of the temple, but still trembling when in the _sanctum sanctorum_, and
a gentle and sublime timidity tempers in him the too virile expression
of strength. Before our eyes we have one of the most sublime pictures of
the moral world: the apex of beauty without the mannerism of pride, the
maximum of strength without a shadow of convulsion; an ever lively
force, a serene but definite energy, ready to spring, ready for action
and reaction.
A young man with a good physical constitution belongs entirely to love,
and love is the property of youth. All the energies of sentiment, all
the powers of thought at that age are moulded by that sovereign
affection, which absorbs and carries away everything into its hot and
turbulent whirlpools. He is less than a eunuch who does not love at
twenty, because even a eunuch can love, and there is an amorous
sterility which has its seat in the brain and in the heart, and which
is more humiliating than any mutilation of organs, than any lack of
functions. If, at twenty, a man does not encounter a woman in the social
world, he loves the picture or statue of a woman, he loves the heroine
of a story or of a poem, and the young girl adores the angels whose
wings flutter around her virginal bed.
At twenty, one should possess the physical energy to love a hundred
women, and even the most modest maiden finds in the air, at every step,
a spark darting from her contact with a man. Notwithstanding, however, a
gigantic and fruitful possibility of polygamy, man and woman are, in
their robust youth, essentially monogamous, and in their most senseless
idolatries they are still monotheists. One god, one temple, one religion
only. One must be born with singular perversity to be polygamous from
the first steps in love, and the young girl who already loves more than
one man at a time must have been conceived in a bawdy-house by the
kneading of the blood and the flesh of a bacchante.
Yet against this virtuous, energetic, holy monogamy there rise on all
sides enormous obstacles; formidable adversaries move against it from
every quarter, opposing the first steps. Adam has found his Eve; Eve has
seen her Adam; but in the embrace of those two lovers, how many enemies,
how many barriers, how many abysses! Adam loves Eve; Eve loves Adam;
what can be more simple, what affinity more intense, what affection more
inevitable than their union? Still before they can embrace each other,
these two unfortunate creatures must ask permission of prejudice,
hypocrisy, conventionalities, hygiene, morality, religion, and above
all, finance; and there is scarcely one chance out of a hundred that the
answer will be a "yes" from all these superior authorities that have the
right of vetoing their affection. The nightingale has seen and loved his
modest companion; in the deep shadow of a mysterious alder he has sung
to her his tenderest song and infused his love into her. Today they
sleep, happy in their love, and tomorrow they will find flexuous
branches and soft moss to weave their nest. No need of civil matrimony,
of religious matrimony, of financial matrimony. But woe to the man who
shall rely upon nature to have his nest prepared! The morrow of his
loves would be cursed by hunger; and scrofula and rachitis would kill
his children, born of a union which lacked the consent of finance.
From the clash of two contrary forces there arises a decomposition of
movements, a transformation of energies; and this phenomenon occurs in
love when, pure, virginal, powerful and hardly issued from the hot bosom
of nature, it finds the sharp rocks of social obstacles, and, like a
wave, breaks against them, raises a mass of foam and withdraws dragging
away a congeries of stones, splinters and mud scattered by the turbulent
clashing of so many forces and resistances. Would fortune that in that
first shock love should suffer nothing but sorrow! Tears have blessed
thousands of loves and bathed them in a sweet dew; very few have they
killed. But in the dashing of the first love against the cruel rock of
social resistances many new forces, all of them ruthless, spring from
the decomposition of the two contrary motions, and a thousand
compromises with conscience stain in its swaddling clothes the new-born
love, humiliating it under the shame of an original sin.
The very first compromise with his own conscience on the part of a pure
and enamored youth, when prevented by society from being monogamous, is
that of decomposing love into sentiment and voluptuousness; thus he
strives to preserve his heart pure and to erect one temple only, while
sacrifices are offered to lust on the hundred altars of the wandering
Venus.
And still this decomposition of love seems to the most refined and most
virtuous lovers a very wise move, a miracle of art, the ideal of
morality coupled with the most urgent needs of a heart and senses; and
after a few skirmishes and lamentations every one adapts himself to this
compromise and tries to make himself as comfortable as possible, as
though in an uncomfortable carriage in which one must journey for a long
time. The most considerate, the most virtuous lovers, however, are
continually looking forward to the fortunate day when all hypocrisy
will be eliminated and physical and moral loves united will give them
the right to build a nest in which sentiment and voluptuousness will
keep faithful company. And in the meantime we just go on between a
reticence and a lie; the heart to the wife of another, the body to the
courtesan.
Those young men who adapt themselves too easily to this ignominious and
degrading compromise with their conscience are cruelly punished for
their crime, since they will not know the richest and most splendid
treasures of youthful love. Do not lie, do not betray; do not seek your
love in the mire, but in the sky; and then abandon your heart and senses
to the wave that carries you to paradise. Inhale all the perfumes, pick
all the flowers of a garden over which no winter breeze ever blows, and
where for every petal that falls a hundred new corollas blossom. Be
rich, be recklessly rich; be gods at least once in your life: nature
concedes a day of spring even to the most miserable creature and weaves
a garland on the head of the lowliest of men. Remember, there is no
coffer in which an hour of sunlight can be kept, no artifice of chemical
science that can preserve a blooming rose.
The fortunate young man who has not subjected his love to the process of
decomposition we have described loves ardently, recklessly, splendidly.
His love is a sunny day in May, without clouds, without chills, without
sorrows; it is a feast where weariness, fatigue and delusions are
unknown. He lives because he loves, and he loves because he lives. He
burns his incense to the goddess, but he is chaste and knows very little
of lasciviousness. He is sometimes so pure as to call a blush on the
face of a woman who, being in her thirties, already loves too knowingly.
He neither measures nor weighs; and who has ever dared to reduce to a
mathematical formula the force of a thunderbolt or the kilogrammeters of
an earthquake? And the loves of a young man are thunderbolts or
earthquakes. A young man is not very jealous; he is less so, in any
case, than the adult and the old; he is too confident, too happy to
doubt; and, besides, he has no time! His lips are wreathed in a
perpetual smile; a golden ray of sunlight rests on his brow like a halo
of bliss. There is no tomorrow for him except under the form of a
continuation of the happiness of today; he does not remember the past,
and in good faith believes himself to have always loved his goddess,
even when he did not know her. He believes in inborn loves, as the
philosopher of old used to believe in congenital ideas. O happy youth!
If the young man is the most powerful, the most ardent lover, the adult
is the most skillful. The use and abuse of life have somewhat dulled his
spirit, almost extinguished the flames of passion; but no excessive
impatience, no needless timidity, no sudden explosions of desire oppose
any obstacle to the blissful perfection of his loves. He loves with
shrewdness, with passion, with a most subtle art; he is a hundred times
more libertine than the youth, but also more delicate, richer in
exquisite tastes belonging to the world of thought. The youthful lover
is a nude and often ferocious savage; the adult has become civilized
from long experience and is clothed with the blandishments of his art.
His most spontaneous sympathies are for unripe fruit, for the flowers
still enclosed within the untouched and thorny calyx of innocence and
ignorance; but he likes to love the independent woman as well, the widow
and the matron; he is essentially eclectic. His joys are scarcer than in
the days of youth, but they are more precious, because rendered more
savory by a certain economy almost verging on avarice. He knows that his
hours are numbered and follows with a caress every coin he spends;
before parting with it, he bestows upon it a look of affection and
regret. Rich in memories, but poor in hopes, he concentrates all his
cares, patience and attention on the present. He is the ablest, the
wisest master of love; and when health and freshness of heart do not
desert him, he can awaken ardent and lasting passions and preserve them
for a long time. Woman much less than man is bent on inquiring about
white hair and birth certificates; and if she only feels that she is
loved deeply and ardently, she willingly forgets half a score of years,
and more, of the age of her companion.
In the love of the adult man for the young woman one feels always a
benevolent and sympathetic protection, an almost paternal affection,
full of tenderness and generous impulses. This characteristic tends to
deprive mature love of some of the warmest and most voluptuous
expansions, to cool down the volcanic explosions of youthful love; but
the paternal affection, which might easily tend to become authority and
eliminate the perfect equality between the two lovers, is tempered in
adult man by a deep and hidden mistrust of himself.
The young man asks for love on his knees, but knows that he is
legitimately entitled to it, and often from the humble position of a
beggar of alms, prostrated in the dust, he leaps to his feet, demanding
with the force of beauty, genius, passion, that which he could not
obtain by humility. A mature man, on the contrary, has lost many rights,
and his requests are made with greater constraint, with a reserve full
of grace and delicacy; he often implores with a tenderness so ardent and
a tone so supplicatory that it is difficult to answer with a refusal.
The continual alternation of an authority that teaches and an authority
that implores gives the adult love the most characteristic hue, the most
conspicuous mark. And when poor nature, medicated by art, has succeeded
in attaining love, the precious affection firmly fixes itself on it and
thrusts its roots into the deepest recesses of the heart. The adult has
tenacious passions, and none is more faithful in love than he; often,
conditions being equal, he is the best husband, and not only through
egotism does the bridegroom seek a bride a few years younger than
himself. Man grows old later than woman, and two ignorant and very young
people seldom wed without exposing themselves to the most serious
dangers.
The woman of thirty, also, loves with modesty, with deep tenderness,
with religious fidelity, with avaricious sagacity.
The man who is growing old is the trunk of a tree on which every day a
branch withers, and from which every gust of wind detaches a handful of
yellow leaves. When the entire tree is dead, then upon the ruins of love
rises an implacable hatred for those who love and are loved; the cruel
domestic inquisitions and a posthumous, ridiculous ostentation of forced
continence or mummified modesty will then poison the existence of the
intolerant old man, who avenges himself upon the young people for his
misfortune in not being longer able to love. It is an inexorable law
which condemns those old men to mystic and wrathful meditations, because
in all times and in all countries the last spark of lust serves to light
the bilious taper on the altar of superstition. Most unfortunate is the
poor young girl who must have as a confidante of her first loves an
irascible and bigoted old woman, to whom love is a synonym of lechery
and affection a sin. Less monstrous and less cruel is the deformity of a
Chinese foot than the contortions which a youthful love must undergo in
the hooked and yellow clutches of intolerant bigotry.
Man, however, is a tree so robust and vigorous that it rarely dies all
at once, and in the old man there often remains flourishing the only
branch of lust. It is then that the economy of the adult turns into real
avarice, lust becomes lasciviousness, and love assumes unheard-of forms,
worthy of Tiberius and Caligula. The lust of the old man, warmed by the
stifling atmosphere of vice, is like a mushroom produced by the fetid
artifices of horticulture and bears fruits which give out in the
distance the stench of the manure in which they were raised. Nor can the
name of love be given to those lusts, but they should be given that of
erotic mercature, of prostitution of innocence to the calculus of
probability of life, or to the expectation of an inheritance. And yet
some powerful lovers maintain ghosts of desire until their extreme
decrepitude and, like eels, go on rubbing their frothy paunches in the
hot mire of the lowest social strata; to their last breath, with their
ossified hands they strip of leaves the rosebushes and purchase at
fabulous prices an "I love you" icier than snow, more deceitful than
Tartufe.
The man of high type, too, can love until old age; but then, lust being
spent, every right of conquest having been abandoned, love soars to the
highest spheres of the ideal world and becomes a sublime contemplation
of feminine beauty. Whether before the maiden and heroic greatness of
Joan of Arc, or the startling sensuality of the statue of Phryne by
Barzaghi, hearing the lively prattling of a girl of fourteen or at the
side of a calm and plump matron, even a venerable old man, without any
offense in words or acts, feels moved; and, perhaps, under the childlike
or compassionate caresses of a woman, his eyes will fill with tears and,
if he is a believer, he will invoke the benedictions of Heaven on the
most beautiful half of the human family.
If even the old man can love a young woman, the old woman also can love
a young man; but their love should be a serene contemplation of the
beautiful, a suave remembrance of joys possessed for a long time and
ardent aspirations for an ideal which is ever loved, because it is never
attained. Even the white-haired old man can, without offending the
modesty of her who cannot be his any more, caress with paternal
affection the curls of Eve, adore in her the most splendid manifestation
of the esthetic forces of nature, warm his cold imagination again at the
ardent fire of others' loves; and, without envy and without regrets, but
with sweet satisfaction he can say: "I, too, have done my duty; do yours
now. I, too, have loved without sowing the seeds of remorse for my old
age; try you, and follow my example!"