THE DEGRADATIONS OF LOVE
Love, being the most powerful agitator of human elements that was ever
known, stirs the slime which is always found even in the noblest
natures; while in men whose souls have been kneaded with sludge it
becomes the greatest coefficient of vice and crime. Love, like all other
sentiments, has a pathology of its own, a superior pathology, because it
so widens its sphere of action as to enclose a larger field and has more
prepotent needs to satisfy. A man incapable of a base deed even though
dying of hunger, even though about to lose all that he holds most dear,
may compromise with his conscience when a question of love arises, and
many, many blemishes stain the texture of the noblest and loftiest
natures. Love wants to possess us bound hands and feet, and this is an
inexhaustible source of disgrace, guilt, mean cowardice and great
crimes.
The degradations of love are as numberless as the grains of sand in the
sea, as many as love's own delights; they are of every size and adapt
themselves to the infinite degrees of human baseness. It seems to me,
however, that in a general study of physiology they can be reduced to
two principal forms, that is to say, _impotency_ and _prostitution_.
Impotency is not only a disease that should receive the care of the
physician or the hygienist; it is not only a case which requires the
attention of the legislator: but it is a moral shame that must be
thoroughly studied by the psychologist who endeavors to outline the
natural story of love.
In the very simplest organism of inferior animals every desire of love
ceases when age, disease or a wound has exhausted the energy of the
genital organs. In man, instead, the most irresistible and bestial
needs are so teeming with psychical elements of the moral and the
intellectual world as to survive the disease of the organ. An innocent
man loves even without being aware of his manhood, and a woman can die
of love although knowing nothing of the existence of the womb. True it
is, no amorous note arises in the eunuch, or if the phantoms of a
strange lasciviousness are noticed wandering here and there, they are
specters that belong to the limbo of the most transcendent pathology.
These poor pariahs of nature are, however, very rare; while our rachitic
civilization makes by hundreds the semi-eunuchs who fill with cuckoldly
ornaments the sanctuary of the family and the low world of wandering
loves. Statistics, fortunately, cannot obtain the exact number of these
"half-men" and consign them to their inexorable files; be it enough for
us to know that they are many, very many, much more numerous than
feminine virtue and patience could tolerate.
Nature's whole love, true love, nude but innocent love, is not all
sentiment or thought, but also a function of reproductive life, a need
of the senses. Martyrs and saints could mutilate themselves and die in
the beatitude of their mutilations; but the majority of men does not
consist of saints or martyrs. Every mutilation of love is a shame and
the most fecund generator of many other minor shames. In the chaste and
cool dawn of early youth, more than one woman consented unwittingly to
an infamous compact by which a man offered her a great name and great
wealth in exchange for a "yes." The wretched man loved her, desired her,
but could not possess her as nature commanded man to possess woman; he
wished to own the temple and feel the emotion of owning it without
having the right to enter it. Sometimes the eunuch was not an abject
being and did confess his shame before his betrayal, but the innocent
maiden did not understand and accepted the compact. And who does not
believe himself a hero or a martyr at that age? And the eunuch embraced
his precious prey, inundated her with sterile kisses, and endeavored to
warm her with his impotent caresses; and the marmoreal statue of
adolescent virginity trembled with new and, to her, incomprehensible
emotions. Later on, the virgin realized that she was a woman, that in
vain she was a woman, and love attacked and seized virtue, and felled it
despairing and imploring, and the covenant sworn in good faith was
broken by the most powerful of affections. How many domestic
misfortunes, what a fruitful stream of bastards, how many brigands
spring from this contaminated source!
O you, real eunuchs, half-eunuchs, quarter-eunuchs, do not hope to be
loved by a woman on whom you have imposed an infamous contract! No
virtue, no oath can resist the sacred laws of love; nobody is stronger
than nature. And if you have found a heroine, why make a martyr of her?
Do you want to be the executioner of her whom you say you love?
And you, generous women, noble women, who can elevate to the highest
regions even the lowest passion, do not accept any compact involving a
mutilation of love. You, teachers of every kind of sacrifice, you think
that you will make happy an outcast of nature, you impose upon
yourselves, smiling perhaps, the sublime mission of redeeming a
desperate man: but I assure you that neither virtue nor sacrifice nor
heroism can stifle that formidable cry of the universe of the living
that wants you to be wives and mothers. While the martyr, with the palm
of sacrifice tightly pressed to her bosom, will try to smile, a cruel,
deep, painful stab in her heart will warn her: "You, Eve and daughter of
Eve, will become a mother only through a crime, will enter the sanctuary
of sanctuaries, the tabernacle of maternity, only through the door of
domestic treason."
No; love is not all senses and all lust. Sentiment can be such a great
part of it as to conceal voluptuousness in the most secluded recess of a
hidden region. No; woman can be happy even without voluptuousness if she
only feels herself loved: but she wishes to love, and should love, "a
man." I appeal to all the daughters of Eve, and, to be spared blushing,
they may reply with a nod of the head and without moving their lips: Is
it not true that you would prefer a hundred times to be loved by a
"real man," even with a vow of chastity, rather than to be profaned and
satiated with lust at the hands of a eunuch? Is it not true that above
all you want to have for support that firm column called "an honorable
man"? And certainly he is not an honorable man who claims the possession
of a woman and demands to be loved by her when he is not a man.
The half-men who at forty, at fifty years of age aspire to have a
family, after having dragged their half-virility through the
lasciviousness of prostitution and the dainties of the erotic kitchen,
should never suppose that lechery can take the place of true love in a
woman. They can prostitute their spouse, but they can never make her
love them earnestly and deeply. They are foredoomed by the inexorable
laws of nature to figure largely in the population of cuckoldom.
When impotency falls like a thunderbolt on the head of two happy lovers,
it is only a disease, a misfortune that concerns the physician and the
pharmacist; but when it precedes love, it is cowardice, degradation,
infamy. The honest man should never attempt to conceal it from himself
or justify it; he should either courageously renounce love, a thing that
does not concern him, or expose the sore and ask the armed hand of the
surgeon to cut and cauterize it. Let him become a man again, and then
see if he can aspire to the delights of sentiment. Before becoming a
farmer, he should possess a farm.
The complicated mechanism of our social organism, in the same manner as
it offers to the thirst of ardent youth voluptuousness without love,
imposes on many lovers, with a more cruel amputation, love without
voluptuousness. Here we have the two chief sources of the thousand
sorrows which human society prepares for those who love: "Voluptuousness
without love," that is, all the degradations and shames of prostitution;
"Love without voluptuousness," that is, all the tortures of enforced
chastity. Between these two hells the enamored youth remains a long time
suspended, until, to avoid death, he takes lechery and imagination into
a somber old boat and flees away with them to hide in the reedy marshes
and among the miasmas of self-abuse--the lowest of the degradations of
love, and one which occupies a proper place between impotency and
prostitution. Yes; as man enjoys all the Olympus of love, he must also
submit to all its degradations.
In the book which I will dedicate to the hygiene of love this problem
will be thoroughly studied. Here I shall refer to it only so far as it
concerns the physiology of sentiment. It is painful to admit it, but it
is true: our modern society has rendered love so difficult to many
unhappy creatures as to make them pass under the Caudine Forks of this
cruel dilemma: either to buy voluptuousness and counterfeit love with
it, or dream of love in the mire of solitary lasciviousness. In one way
or the other, we are forced to become counterfeiters and to blush for
ourselves at the manner in which we satisfy the most powerful of human
needs.
Solitary love is not only a sin against hygiene, and one which kills
health and vigor, but it is also an offense against morals, a poison of
happiness. He who repeatedly falls into the crime and is frequently
obliged to blush, tarnishes more every day the limpid purity of his own
dignity, weakens the strong spring of virile resolutions and becomes a
greater coward in all the battles of life. While he blushes for himself
and curses himself and the love that condemns him to a continuous
debasement, he blushes more than ever in the presence of the woman of
whom he does not feel worthy and of whom he becomes less worthy at each
fall. He poisons the wave of love at its very first source and, even
when he later succeeds in loving, has spoiled the purity of his tastes
and his aspirations and in the arms of a woman who loves him complains
of the solitary twinges of a morbid voluptuousness, like one who, having
burned his mouth with the pungent tastes of pipe and brandy, can no
longer relish the flavors of pineapple and strawberry.
Love is the greatest of conquests, the sweetest of delights, the joy of
joys; to renounce it in order to replace it with degradation is worse
than a crime, it is an infamy. Better a hundred times chastity with its
sublime tortures, prostitution with its filth. True and complete love
is a splendid banquet under the fragrant trees of a garden, amidst the
glittering of the chalices, the harmonies of music and the witty jests
of friends; solitary love is a furtive meal with a bone picked up in the
fetidness of a dunghill and gnawed in the dark.
Prostitution is, after solitary abuse, the greatest degradation of love,
and, what is worse,--it should be said at once,--a necessary one in
modern society. Tibullus hurls at it a splendid malediction:
"Jam tua qui Venerem docuisti vendere primus
Quisquis es, infelix urgeat ossa lapis!"
("Whoever thou art who first hast taught to sell the pleasures of
love, may an ill-boding stone crush thy bones!")
This imprecation, repeated by all moralists of every succeeding age,
could not prevent for one day the sale of love, and universal experience
demonstrates that St. Augustine was a sounder philosopher when he wrote:
"Aufer meretrices de rebus humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus;
constitue matronarum loco, labe ac dedecore dehonestaveris."
("Take the prostitutes out of human things, and you will disturb
the whole world with lust; put them in the place of wives, and you
will defile home with disease and dishonor.")
If St. Augustine had written but this sentence, I would proclaim him a
great psychologist; in a few words he has shown all the sides of the
tremendous problem, given a lesson of toleration to the intolerant, of
social science to economists, and today, after so many centuries, his
words are as true, profound, inexorable as when he addressed them to a
world so different from ours.
Difficult problems are not solved by fleeing from or by concealing
them; and yet many physicians, many philosophers attempt to solve the
most burning questions of modern society after the manner of a child who
by closing his eyes believes that he is fleeing from the dog that
threatens him. To Dr. Monlau in Spain and Dr. Bergeret in France, who
thought that they would be able to save society by abolishing
prostitution, I replied in a few words which I wish to save from the
shipwreck of the newspapers in order to gather them in the shadow of
this book:
"I have never wondered at finding philosophers who study man in
Fichte or in Kant without having ever touched his palpitating body,
or examined any of his fibers with the microscope; who advise the
legislator to destroy in the social organism, with iron and fire,
that livid and cancerous spot called prostitution; neither have I
given the alarm or extolled it as a miracle when I heard the
_auto-da-fé_ invoked against the houses of ill fame by moralists
who have had the rare fortune of having been born without the sixth
sense, or the still rarer merit of smothering it with the
extinguisher of an iron will. But when I hear these intolerant
cries from the mouth of a physician, I shake my head diffidently,
and with a compassionate voice I ask myself: 'Is he really a
physician? Has this moralist actually seen a man in convulsive
delirium and cut into his cold and rigid flesh on the chilly marble
slab of the anatomical cabinet? He who hurls the anathema at
prostitution, is he really the physician who should act as a kind
link between the legislator, who in man sees only a defendant to
punish, and the philanthropist, who in him considers only an
unhappy creature to heal and help?'
"These and other questions I addressed to the illustrious Spanish
physician Monlau when he proposed to his government the absolute
suppression of the houses of ill fame; and then I had the pleasure
of seeing my poor words printed in the progressive Spanish medical
journals. Now I make the same reproach to Dr. Bergeret, who, in
one of his memoirs on prostitution in the country places and small
towns of France, went so far as to fling the anathema against that
caustic wound which civilization has opened in the diseased flesh
of the modern social organism; and I, with a sad air, repeat to the
French physician a melancholy: '_Tu quoque, fili mi_?'
"Bergeret lost much of his time and ink in narrating lurid stories
of what occurred in some villages of France. And who does not know
similar stories? We have them in Italy, in Germany; we can find
them in every country where humanity loves and suffers, gets drunk
and prostitutes itself; wherever the eyes of the authorities cannot
penetrate into the most secret fissures of the social edifice where
lie concealed the lurid parasites that sting and devour us. But
between deploring the evils that are the results of clandestine
prostitution and destroying all toleration on this ground there is
an abyss over which the physician and the legislator should not
pass on the waxen wings of an Arcadian flight, but which should be
crossed over the solid bridge of a wise criticism.
"Then, my dear moralist, my dear theorist, you say that men learn
vice in the houses of ill fame; but, then, without taverns would
there be no assassins, without pharmacists would there be no
poisoners, without manufacturers of gunpowder and bayonets would
there be no wars? And who, pray, is the cause of the existence of
houses of ill fame, taverns, daggers, poisons, firearms, if not man
himself, that man whom you ought to be able to understand if it is
true that you also are made of the same dough? Your morals are
those of the inquisitor who burns the sinner whom he cannot
convert; they are as false and coarse as those of the legislator
who has only the prison and the scaffold for the education of the
guilty; as those of the surgeon who barbarously amputates the
member which, with a wiser and more merciful science, he should
preserve. Modern civilization substitutes the school for the
inquisitor's stake, has more faith in books than in prisons and
halters, more in preservative medicine than in the surgeon's
knife. And as long as the social organism is diseased, as long as
it is a poor creature imbued with evil humors, with many curious
bones and many scrofulous tumors, we will kindly cauterize its
flesh to keep it alive, to divert into more ignoble parts those
acrid humors that would poison the sources of life, until we shall
succeed with the tonic cure of education in renewing the blood in
the veins of this old invalid and in pouring this new blood into
his flesh, his bones and his nerves, to rebuild them.
"This is why we still preserve the cautery of prostitution, and we
wish to guard it with the same jealous care with which a physician
keeps a precious wound open to save the life of a diseased
organism.
"And believe me, O egregious colleague of the country beyond the
Alps, when life shall be no longer threatened and the organism
shall have new blood, then we will close this wound, too, together
with many other ones which are still bleeding. We will close the
house of voluptuousness when every man will have his nest and love
will not be considered a crime any longer."
There are some savage races among which prostitution is unknown, while
no civilized nation is without prostitutes; on the contrary, every
country, even the most moral, has the high prostitutes and the very
high, the low and the very low. Not in all countries are prostitutes
cynically named according to the price they ask for their favors, as in
Persia, where they are termed "the fifty _tomani_," "the twenty
_tomani_," etc.; but everywhere a tariff is the index of the hierarchy
of vice and a scale of lechery. Alexander Severus did not want the money
collected through taxes on houses of prostitution to be paid into the
treasury; and Ulpian, his minister, used it for the maintenance of the
theaters and the public health. With Juvenalian sagacity, the government
of Brazil devotes to the regulation of vice the money received from the
sale of decorations and titles of nobility. We find everywhere women who
sell themselves, but we also find, to our honor, that society is
everywhere ashamed of this stain, conceals and does not mention it, and
a mysterious mephitic air hangs heavily over the simony of love.
A thousand muddy streamlets carry their tributes to prostitution; but at
the first source the cause is one and powerful: in man an imperious
appetite for voluptuousness, in woman an imperious want of bread or
licentiousness, or licentiousness and bread at the same time.
Unfortunately woman can always sell five minutes of voluptuousness
without love, without desire; she can sell herself with disgust in her
heart and hatred on her lips. And the joy she sells is paid for
according to the requirements of beauty, luxury, fashion, according to
the infamous art with which she knows how to feign pleasure and
counterfeit love. Procurers and procuresses hasten to the market of
lechery to test the flesh of the precious victims, to fatten the lean
and buy the plump for the higher bidder; and panders and bawds, keeping
within the shadow of the law, conceal in the lurid or gilded prisons of
prostitution that quivering herd of youth and shame. And prisoners in
the same gloomy atmosphere are martyrs of love and nymphomaniacs;
victims of hunger and of ignorance; fallen angels and foul demons; all
the lowest strata of feminine society, all the bloody carrions of the
great social battles.
There, in those dark haunts of licentiousness, man forgets how to love,
loses the holy poetry of the heart and the mysterious quivers of
sentiment, prostitutes the most gigantic forces of thought and
affection. Without hunger, he partakes of savory food; thirstless, he
becomes intoxicated; without the necessity of overcoming modesty, he
obtains everything, and money levels all virtues and concedes the
maddest polygamy; and there one sees the nude and chaste statue of Love
dragged in the fetid bog by a frolicsome tipsy crowd. Such is the love
that modern civilization offers to all those hundred thousand pariahs
who cannot find the straw to weave the chaste nest of the family, to all
those who cannot make a vow of chastity and do not wish to deceive an
innocent maiden or steal another man's woman.
Our civilized society can really be proud of this; the philanthropists
with their tearful dirges, the economists with their wise reflections,
the legislators with their elaborate codes, can join in a chorus to sing
hosannas to this stupendous solution of the problem. Either a starving
family or prostitution; either children cast into the depth of misery or
faith betrayed in the house of a friend; proletariate or infamy;
degradation or crime. Stupendous dilemmas that crown our society with
numberless horns and sow deception, hunger and corruption everywhere. If
a thick bark of hypocrisy did not cover the rotten trunk of our modern
civilization, what a horrible spectacle should we behold! And when a
sincere moralist or a true philosopher attempts to cut the bark away and
show to us through a little fissure how deep the decay is, then we flee
horrified and clamor against such impudence, such sacrilege!
The government should, therefore, deal with prostitution as a malady to
be treated, not because there is any hope of cure, but because society
owes to every sick person a physician and a bed. It should not be
permitted to grow, to spread, to parade its lurid sores, to cover itself
with tinsel and paint; but it should be watched tenderly as in a
hospital, so that in the passer-by it may awaken compassion rather than
lechery.
And while the state keeps a good vigil, writers and teachers should
raise the level of general culture and teach the elect the paradise of
chastity, which contains a treasure of delights for the future of him
who waits (this, alas! the libertine will never be able to understand),
and preserves for true love, which all may hope to attain, the infinite
joys of a virgin voluptuousness. The sale of love should neither be
proclaimed as a feast of the human family, nor officially suppressed,
because it then overflows and inundates all the paths of society; it
should be tolerated and pitied, as we already tolerate and pity many
other maladies of our social organism.
To reach this sublime goal, to hope at least to attain it, we must above
all scrape off from modern love the hundred coats of hypocrisy; we must
not have our children learn love as a crime in the house of vice; but
immediately, at the first dawn of youth, they should be taught that it
is a sublime delight conceded to the good and the noble and is to be
conquered in the same manner as glory and wealth. Not the chambermaid or
the prostitute, but a modest and pure girl should be the first teacher
of love; a woman who should teach us love before voluptuousness, to be
chaste in our desires in order to possess her some day.
We conceal and believe that we are able with silence to suppress the
passions and suffocate the desires; but we have concealed too much and
have been silent too long. In the most puritanical country in the world,
England, one of the most honest and wisest physicians of London
published a book--that has already reached the ninth edition--in which
he frankly dared assert that free love, without fecundation, is the only
remedy against the proteiform corruption that invades modern society,
because of the impossibility for most of the people of morally
satisfying one of the most powerful needs. This book was a distressing
surprise to me. When they can write such a book as this in England and
devour nine editions, when an honest physician can calmly discuss
_preventive intercourse_, when Malthus finds such an eloquent and daring
commentator who brings his theory from the field of economy into that of
morality, of hygiene and even of religion, I believe it my duty to
affirm that society is thoroughly diseased and (I say it loudly) should
be cured.
Yes; modern society, infected with so much prostitution and adultery,
and incessantly proclaiming itself monogamous while it is largely
polygamous, demands a physician to cure its sores, to cleanse it from so
much degradation, to concede loves virtuous and more free, or at least
less soiled with filth and lies. And this physician must be a less
hypercritical and less exacting morality, but at the same time more
exalted, because more human; a morality that should teach us never to
separate voluptuousness from love, and that chastity is the most
beautiful and holiest of joys and the most watchful guardian of love.
The elect never prostitute themselves, not even in these times, because
they love, and because, having once entered the paradise of love, they
feel too great repugnance to descend to the mire of the simony of
voluptuousness. They should exert all their faculties with all their
strength in order that the masses, too, may elevate themselves to the
high spheres in which they dwell, and where they breathe a purer air and
cull the most delicate and beautiful flowers.