LOVE IN RELATION TO TEMPERAMENTS--OF THE WAYS OF LOVING
I shall not repeat in these pages for the hundredth time the criticism
of temperaments as they were described by the ancient schools, and which
I have expounded in many of my works, small and large. Not everybody has
accepted my standards of classification, but all agree with me in the
belief that temperaments have had their time, and that hygiene,
medicine, psychology await from the progress of modern physiology the
elements to determine, as science requires, the physical and moral
characteristics of a human individual. Against this impotency of modern
physiology I have protested, changing the name of "temperament" to that
of "individual constitution": innocent revenge of all men who, when
powerless to change a thing, satisfy their rage by changing its name.
Every man loves in his own way and, as we bring to love the greatest
possible tribute of psychical elements, it follows that human loves
differ more than hatreds, more than the manners of eating, of motion, of
will. The lower we descend from the branches to the trunk, the more
human elements resemble each other; the higher we ascend to the loftiest
branches of the tree, the more the elements diverge and differ. Ask a
woman of easy virtue, or a Don Juan, how many are the methods of loving,
and they both not only will answer that every one loves in a different
manner, but will add that the manners themselves are so extraordinarily
different that calling all these most variform ways of loving by the one
name of the same sentiment excites repugnance.
It is true that some authors have amused themselves by describing a
"sanguine love," a "nervous love," a "lymphatic love," a "hepatic love";
but these pictures are innocent pastimes, arabesques traced on the
epidermis of human nature, and the schools of psychology and literature,
which succeed each other, so completely obliterate these arabesques that
not the least trace of them is left. Even when, instead of the
caricatures of temperaments, we should succeed in delineating a true
family of human constitutions, it would be very difficult to class under
it all forms of love. The thousands and thousands of color cases of the
Roman mosaic-maker are sufficient to classify the innumerable tints that
an expert eye succeeds in discerning; but who will give me a palette so
gigantic that I may spread on it all the polychromic mixtures, all the
simple and compound colors, all the proteiform iridescences offered by
the human light when it strikes the powerful prism of love?
The question as to the quantity of love which an individual may feel is
the easiest to solve; but it is also one of the most important. In every
psychological problem there is an element of quantity; and as it is the
simplest, it is also the most visible. It is, I would almost say, the
skeleton of the phenomenon and we should grasp it eagerly, as the thread
which guides us through the labyrinth of these studies.
Many men, even if possessing a lofty mind and a gentle heart, have asked
themselves seriously, and more than once, whether they were capable of
loving, unacquainted as they were with all that world of mysteries and
passions which they found described in many books and heard from the
mouths of some enamored friends. To those men my book, although I have
striven to contain it within the limits of a physiological study, may
seem an exaggeration, a caricature of nature. Now, all those men are
petty and weak lovers. To them love is an intermittent prurience that
begins at eighteen years and ends, perhaps, at forty, or fifty at the
latest; a prurience that stands somewhere between pleasure and bother
and which can be morally cured by only one medicine, woman. This
medicine, so they say, is sometimes worse than the disease, and it is
necessary to reflect at length and with great care whether preference
should be given to that prurience which poets call "love," or to that
other load which naturalists call "the female of man" and the courteous
dictionaries "woman." When these eunuchs of the sentiment of love prefer
the woman, they may find that this animated object, so like ourselves,
is also tolerably pleasing and congenial, and a sweet and tender habit
of benevolence may tie them to this companion whom they love, and truly
love, in their own way, that is, calmly, prudently, suavely. These
unhappy creatures have more than one reason to ask of themselves whether
what they feel is love, and a thousand reasons to inquire of true
lovers: "But tell me now, will you explain to me what this love is!" The
moon radiates heat; frogs, too, develop heat: well, then, these
gentlemen, too, do love!
Peaceful love, petty or cold love (call it what you will) does not
exclusively belong to the male; but, on the contrary, it offers,
although more rarely, its most perfect forms in woman. Man, however weak
a lover he may be, cannot renounce the mission of sex, which compels him
to attack, assault, declare that war which must lead him to conquest.
Woman, on the contrary, if she be born a _eunuch_, need not attack her
companion in the slightest way; she can, if she so wishes, avoid the
trouble of directing her gaze toward her lover or opening her lips to
say "yes." To let herself be loved will be enough. How many romantic
delights in these few words! To let herself be loved; to leave to others
every labor of conquered timidity, of injured modesty; every strategy,
every tactic of moral violence; to let the others struggle and reserve
for herself alone the voluptuousness of slightly opening the door or
even letting others open it! To let herself be loved! What esthetic,
heavenly beatitude, what voluptuousness of soft undulations and carnal
prurience, what wonderful warmth of sweet caresses! And, then, no
responsibility for the future of a passion which has never been
confessed; no storm; a calm lake without tempest, without tides. And if
the heart, full of sentiment, would take the liberty of a restless
throb, to apply then and there a cataplasm to bring it back to its
duty, and modesty to justify the perpetual ice, and virtue to apologize
for the absence of aroma. Oh, why did not heaven make us out of this
blessed, soft, sweet paste? Oh, why can we not reduce love to a problem
of hygiene and régime?
From this zero of the amatory scale we gradually rise to the maximum
degree of the pyrometer, where every metal is melted and volatilized and
the entire human organism is transformed into a red and incandescent
vapor that burns everything it touches. There are tremendous lovers, who
have loved before they were men, who will love, too, when they are men
no longer; there are women who have loved, perhaps, since they were
closed in the maternal womb, and will love even the sexton who will nail
down the cover on the cold coffin which contains their morbid flesh;
there are men and women in whom every affection takes a sensual form and
love absorbs them like a sponge born, grown and dead in the saline
depths of a tropical sea. Having neither time nor patience to wait, they
love the first comer, to whom they lend their affections and their
imagination; then, discouraged but not wearied, they love the next comer
and, always loving more than they are loved, they remain with their
thirst forever unquenched. Happy they are when they succeed, although
rarely, in being satisfied with consecutive loves; but oftener they
precipitate quickly into polygamy, where, through sophisms, reticences
and compromises with conscience, they love this one with the heart, that
other one with the mind, and all of them with the senses. They have a
_first_ love, an _only_ love, a _true_ love; but too frequently they
forget the names of such loves and use them to designate too many
different lovers, and, like the octopus, they stretch forth their
numerous, avid, sucking arms to reach the hot, succulent flesh of the
feminine cosmos. Among these polygamists there are some who love only
with the heart, others only with the senses; while to a few giants
nature concedes the sad gift of a twofold thirst for affection and
voluptuousness.
Between these two poles, which mark the extreme degrees of amatory
intensity, plods the innumerable mass of those men who are neither Don
Juans nor chaste Josephs; the numberless women who are neither
Messalinas nor Joans of Arc.
Besides the variform force of amorous needs, the sentiment which we are
now studying together assumes a different character, according to the
passion which predominates in the individual and by which love is marked
as proud, humble, egotistical, vain, furious, jealous. And around these
binary compounds of love and pride, of love and egotism, of love and
vanity, there are grouped many other minor elements, which, although
with less energetic affinity, still form a homogeneous whole that might
be called a "temperament of love" or a "constitutional form of love." I
shall try to sketch some of them from nature.
_Tender Love._--This love is more frequently felt by men of mild and
gentle character; it has shaded outlines and little relief. Emotion
surprises them for the slightest cause; tears are always ready to gush
forth at the first impulse of joy or sorrow; a perennial compassion and
an inexhaustible tenderness drown declarations of love, ardors of
voluptuousness and outbursts of affection in a most sweet sea of milk
and honey. Tender love is suppliant, lachrymose and faithful; it often
touches the boundaries of sensual love, but never enters that sea under
full sail. It is a love that is frequently constant and trustworthy,
almost as immutable as an old and serene friendship; it has, however, a
tendency to being disconsolate and mournful, if not querulous, and it
sighs, sobs or weeps too often. Nevertheless, it is capable of wonderful
expansiveness which, however interminable, is pregnant with intense joy
and sweet solace and predisposes us to universal benevolence, to
philanthropy, to forgiveness. It is a Christian, evangelical love that
delights more in a caress than in a kiss, and in lingering kisses more
than in sudden battles. Its most esthetic forms are found in the woman,
whom we readily exculpate from a certain weakness and who may even swoon
without making herself ridiculous. Persons with fair complexion,
Germans and lymphatic creatures love in this way.
_Contemplative Love._--A high, esthetic sense, an irresistible tendency
to inertness and limited genital needs constitute the soil in which
germinate and grow the various forms of contemplative love. It is a
lofty love--too lofty; it has something of the mystic and the
supernatural; the lover places his idol very high and prostrates himself
before it, lavishing upon it every kind of adoration and incense.
Contemplative love is situated in the anterior lobes of the brain; it
affects but slightly the somber depths of the heart and hardly skims
over the warm wave of voluptuousness; it lives on ecstasies and
contemplations and, making of the creature it loves a god or a goddess,
it forgets too frequently that the god comprehends a human male, the
goddess a human female. This sublime forgetfulness makes of this love
the greatest cuckold ever known, because nature can neither be forgotten
nor offended with impunity; and while one adores and is absorbed in
admiration in the temple, the warlike and rapacious love profanes the
tabernacle and carries off the god. Contemplative love lives on the
frontiers of pathology, and properly belongs to Arcadic, fanatic and
mystic persons. Disillusioned and betrayed, they accuse love of simony
and falsehood, when they themselves are only too guilty of having caused
their own sorrows and their own bitter disappointments.
_Sensual Love._--This is one of the most ardent, most inebriating, most
tenacious of loves, because it springs from the most fruitful and
spontaneous source of sensual affections. It is the most sincere and
most powerful of loves, because it satisfies one of the most natural and
most irresistible needs of man; but its foundation rests on a shifting
ground: beauty; and its ardors are indicated by too deep a note: desire.
It never lies; it does not wrap itself in the hundred cloaks of amorous
hypocrisy, but is nude, entirely nude and, in its nudity, often modest.
Brazen or tender, insatiable or satisfied, rash to the point of
insolence, it is, however, always itself: the tremendous attraction of
two great and opposite organic units; a burning thirst that seeks the
cool water of the Alpine spring; the most vigorous clash of the two most
gigantic forces in the world of the living. From voluptuousness to
voluptuousness, if youthful strength does not accompany it, it usually
slides into lasciviousness, where it sinks deeper each day that passes
and with the decline of each force; and down, down it plunges until it
reaches the filth of domestic libertinism or that of the wandering
Venus. It is inexhaustible in discoveries and inventions, indefatigable
in voluptuousness; it is also a sublime artist; it may emit high musical
notes of tenderness and show warm and fascinating tints. Born in the
lowest depths of the animal man, it rarely rises to the high spheres of
the ideal and knows no dignity, no delicacy, no heroism; rather, it is
often suppliant to the point of baseness, impure to nausea. It accepts a
bone to gnaw, just as it accepts voluptuousness without love. It does
not matter to sensual love whether voluptuousness is reached by the sole
moral path of love, but it accepts it also through this way, it seeks it
by all possible ways. And it conquers, steals, buys love; it goes even
so far as to borrow it, to commit forgery, provided it gets it. Let its
insatiable prurience be but appeased and sensual love will act as
mediator or pander for the loves of others, become usurer, thief and
forger with the same callousness. This love is generally masculine: in
women, even licentiousness always dons a splendid robe of sentiment and
hides its too insolent nudity.
_Ferocious Love._--Perhaps the term which is applied to this love is
stronger than it should be; but in painting a psychical picture one is
irresistibly inclined to exaggerate the coloring or the outlines and
give the subject more relief than it has in nature. Abnormal development
of the sense of ownership, amplified by conceit and joined to a certain
impetuosity of character: such is the most natural source of all those
violent loves which I class under the common name of "ferocious love."
Its birth is nearly always like the eruption of a volcano and
accompanied by so many storms and fits of affection and such clashing of
energies that one would suppose that, instead of a love, a hatred had
come into existence. And this original sin follows it through life, and
ends only with death. We see this love distribute handshakes with such
strength that we say they are tetanic convulsions, kisses that seem
bites, embraces that look like homicides; and we behold it as a tyrant
without jealousy, a fury without anger, insatiable even after
possession, because voluptuousness does not calm nor fidelity always
satisfy it. Venus triumphant and not disarmed would represent this love
in all the sublime greatness of its forces. If kindness of habits or the
patient file of education does not succeed in smoothing its angles, it
often becomes rugged and even brutal. So must have loved our most remote
ancestors of the caves and the palisades, who continuously bathed in the
blood of hunt and war and stained their hands with blood in love as
well, as woman also was the prey belonging to the strongest and most
audacious. As it is easy to imagine, man generally is the one who loves
ferociously; but woman, too, occasionally feels this cruel form of love;
and the more attached she is to her lover, the more she torments him and
the deeper she plunges the claws of her passion into the depths of his
body to feel its heat and to say with voluptuous fury: "This, too, is
mine!"
_Proud Love._--This form is a binary combination of one part of love and
ten parts of self-love. When proud love is satisfied, when it is in all
the pomp of its happiness, it may appear as a pure, great, sublime love;
but as soon as self-love suffers a sting it froths and swells like a
snail or a basilisk and shows the dual nature of its energy in all its
nudity. Even in the few moments when this affection is entirely happy,
it never betokens it nor does it abandon itself to an unrestrained
confession of beatitude or bliss, for the same reason that the rustic
never admits that he admires new and great things. Proud love thinks
more of being loved than of loving; it always speaks of rights and
often does not know of duties. Rich in exactions and poor in
consideration, it swells up with pride if fortunate, and murmurs at the
slightest suspicion; it is the most jealous of loves and among the most
unhappy, among the poorest in sweet abandonments and ingenuous
voluptuousness. Even in the most secret intimacy it never unfolds its
thoughts for fear of ridicule or of spoiling a crease of the starched
paludament in which it has wrapped itself; it is never the first to
concede a caress, but expects it as a right and a duty. It is a love
which, to be approached, requires infinite attentions, ceremonies,
formalities; which quickly becomes tiresome and often disgusting. It
exacts fidelity, not as a dear reciprocation of affection, but as a
right of its own dignity, and easily pardons such sins as the world does
not become aware of. It is a sterile, barren, sickly love.
_Excoriated Love._--Because of its origins, this form of love is often
confounded with the preceding; but it is still more unhappy and
rightfully belongs to the pathology of the heart. It is a love that can
be sincere, tender and passionate; but it is so irritable and such a
grumbler that a mosquito would annoy it and a pebble in its path cause
it to cry against misfortune and treachery. Like the Epicurean of old,
it cannot sleep unless a folded rose-leaf is placed in its bed. It also
seeks, like all human affections, the goal of its aspirations; but never
reaches it, because suspicion, susceptibility and fear stop it at every
step, freeze the words on its lips, weaken its arms in the embrace,
extinguish its flame when hardly lighted. I compare this affection with
a St. Bartholomew obliged to walk among brambles and over rocks
bristling with points, and for this reason I have given it the strange
and new name of _excoriated love_; the French would call it _un amour
mauvais coucheur_. It is perhaps the most wretched of loves, because,
besides the natural misfortunes which are the inevitable lot of every
daughter of Eve and every son of Adam, it creates its own troubles and
enlarges them with the lens of the most unhappy imagination. Excoriated
love is a fatal still which transforms rose-petals into poison-ivy,
honey into wormwood, aroma into fetidness, nourishment into venom. If
kissed, it murmurs because the kiss was too violent or too cold; if
caressed, it suspects that the caress may have had a second end in view.
Even in the ecstasies of creation it would ask of the Creator why He had
made the light so soon or so late. Whoever is loved by these
unfortunates has always the right to address them with the words of the
courtesan of Venice to the unhappy and mad philosopher of Geneva:
"_Zaneto, Zaneto, ti non ti xe fato per far a l'amor!_" ("Johnny,
Johnny, you are not made to make love!") And yet these unfortunate
creatures love, and love deeply; and it is the enviable glory of
powerful lovers to cure and win them over to the point of making them
confess that at least once in their lives they were truly, faithfully
and passionately loved. It is one of the most admirable triumphs of the
amatory art to find a fabric so fine that it can touch the excoriated
flesh of those poor unfortunates, and create for them an artificial
atmosphere, in which they may be able to move without groaning, breathe
without coughing, and live without cursing life.
These forms of love, which I have poorly outlined, are but rarely found
in nature in a simple state, but are complicated and interwoven with
each other, forming a thousand pictures: a real mine of resources for
art, a veritable treasure of torments for the psychological thinker.
No man loves like another and no man loves perfectly, in the manner in
which the type of a sublime love can be idealized in the regions of
thought of our brain.
The perfect harmony of one love lacks a note of sensuality, that of
another a tone of energy; one is too restless, another too languid, a
third too violent. Even the most fortunate creatures, those who possess
a just measure of voluptuousness, of sentiment and of poetry,--even
those, who know they are loved ardently and faithfully, aspire to a love
more perfect than that which they feel and better than that which they
receive; and when this thirst for the ideal does not induce us to
violate the compact of fidelity, we should not complain, because love,
too, must obey the common law, which compels us ever to aspire to purer
regions, richer in splendors and warmer with ardors. At early dawn love
awaits the promise of a warm noon, and in the burning sultriness looks
forward with eager anticipation to the cool twilight of the evening; it
is spurred by that impulse which drives forward men and things, matter
and force, and the bliss of today expects a more intense voluptuousness
for tomorrow. If this unquenchable thirst for the better should cease in
us, it would be simply because life is spent in us; if the irresistible
desire for a higher love should cease, it would be simply because, as
light to the blind, the heavenly regions of the ideal--those regions
where numberless targets are gathered at which are aimed the glances and
the arrows of the human family--have all at once been closed to us.