THE COVENANTS OF LOVE
Love is not only a voluptuousness given and returned, the interweaving
and untying of instantaneous knots, but a compact between two creatures
who, after having given themselves to each other, may in a single
instant have created a family, perhaps a nation. In man, love is
fecundation as well, but is, above all, the interweaving of two
existences, a combination of new relations, a deep modification of the
manner of existence for a man and a woman.
Even in the lowest races, even where morality is only interest defended
by strength and sacrifice is a folly, where phantoms of religious
sentiment scarcely exist, where they bury the old mother alive, or
celebrate victories and vintage with a sea of blood; even there love is
bound by a compact, silent or sworn. Prostitution also is a compact that
may last an hour or a minute, but is always a compact. In any case, the
sale and purchase of voluptuousness cannot found a family, a tribe, a
people; and even the loosest libertine and the wildest savage feel other
needs than that of fecundating a female: they feel the necessity of
loving a woman. And to love does not mean to unite the members of two
bodies in a single knot, but to possess each other a long time, and to
desire, to defend, to protect each other; it means to hold oneself
responsible to nature for the weakness of one creature and the violence
of another, for the future of the being whom we have procreated together
and brought into the world.
Woman, when fecundated, is for nine months weaker and more vulnerable;
the woman who is in travail is a wounded creature; the woman who nurses
can neither flee nor defend herself, and the man-child is for a long
time defenseless and very weak. The man, then, who has loved a companion
even for one day becomes for a long time her friend and protector
without ceasing to be her lover. This is the simplest form of the
nuptial compact, which is found in many of the lower nations. While the
savage female leans affectionately and confidingly on the male who has
made her fruitful, he often finds himself to be a man when his companion
cannot be a woman, and he then fecundates other females, who are added
to his possessions and whom he protects with the same devotion and
affection with which he protects and defends the first woman who was
his. The very weak man can have but one female, or he must often do
without her, because the strong men have more than one and the very
strong have many, who often dwell merrily under one roof without being
in the least jealous of one another. A polygamy limited to a few females
is the most common form of human society in the lower races, and our
organism is so imbued with this custom that even in the highest forms of
civilization, where morality and religion do not lend their valid
support, monogamy slips and falls, to give place to a polygamy more or
less acknowledged or concealed.
We, however, must occupy ourselves only with our own society, where the
compact of love has but one moral form: _matrimony_; while it has
various forms that belong to the world of pathology, namely,
_prostitution_, _rape_, _concubinage_.
We have already studied prostitution. It is the sale of voluptuousness,
the possession of bodies without love, the swindling and deceiving of
nature; and if nature, only too often cruel, causes a new creature to be
generated through a purchased embrace, that creature will enter the
world with the mark of infamy on its brow, and, anonymous child of vice,
will be cast by society into the most obscure corner of the social
vaults, where the things lie which we wish to efface, forget and allow
to die. Prostitution is a safety-valve only too necessary in our immoral
and hypocritical society, wretchedly constituted, and it exists to prove
with most cruel eloquence that many men cannot love, that very many men
should not love.
We have also dealt with rape in the house of others. Even this greatest
of the crimes of love we have been compelled to discuss: secret
agreement of two traitors who, in the shadow of a social and holy
compact, violate the faith of the family and bastardize the world; vile
contract of the thief with the procurer, who assassinate in the dark and
conceal the victim in the wide folds or the deep fissures of our written
codes.
Concubinage in many imperfect societies, and even among us, is a form of
matrimony which lacks only religious and civil consecration. It is more
despicable for its origin than for the nature of the compact that binds
it, because if it lasted eternally, supported only by the word of honor
of two creatures who love each other, it would be a true and proper
marriage, sealed by the faith of two lovers. Only too often, however,
concubinage has an obscure and even shameful origin: it is domestic
lechery which has become a habit; it is a vulgar custom that has a
periodical type: mustiness of the kitchen or stench of the hospital.
Born between the Turkish babooshes and the nightcaps, between the
after-dinner yawns and the advices of the hygienist, it has a tinge of
prostitution and rape, but knows neither the inebriation of the one nor
the pungent remorse of the other. It is a vulgar pickpocket, who begs
pardon of the public and is ashamed of himself and weeps when caught in
the act; it is something low, plebeian and shameful, that does not admit
of public confession, and hides like a wound in the leg or a false
tooth; it debases love to pygmy proportions, lowers the level of the
spouse and elevates that of the chambermaid. It is an upstart who can
dress well, but smells of the stable; a despicable, often even
ridiculous creature, who is merely tolerated.
When one refrains from assuming all moral responsibility; when, through
sluggishness, ignorance or skepticism, or for all these reasons, one
abdicates the supreme primacy of husband and father, a right which not
even the nude cannibal will relinquish, one becomes in modern society a
sort of convict freed on parole, to whom liberty is granted on condition
that he will regularly report to the police; a sort of brigand allowed
at large, who, for lack of proof, cannot be sentenced to prison. A
hundred times better, prostitution with its degradations and vile
infirmities! Public opinion, laws, books should scourge and place in the
pillory of ridicule and opprobrium this bastard compact of concubinage,
denying it all assent, consent and toleration. And women too, who, more
than the laws, can be the avengers of these social degradations, should
flagellate these amphibia of love, denying them caresses and esteem, and
showing to them at every hour, with cruel art, how different are the
voluptuous aromas of true love from the daily slop of domestic
concubinage.
The man of a high race, who aspires to be called a civilized man, should
be monogamous, and cannot consecrate his love with any other compact
than matrimony.
Matrimony should be a free, a very free selection, for the woman as much
as for the man; it should be the selection of selections, the typical
selection.
As long as we deny the young woman a free and wise education so that she
may choose well; as long as we deny her the same right of selection as
man possesses, we never will be able to elevate matrimony. The common
consciousness in two creatures that they have chosen each other freely
and that they love each other without any bond of interest, any pressure
of authority, of prejudice, of ambition, is the sacred corner-stone on
which the most splendid temples of conjugal happiness are erected, and
it has sufficient power to preserve that happiness amidst the greatest
domestic storms.
Neither do I believe in sudden and irresistible loves, nor in the future
happiness of a married couple who, without straw to weave the nest, in
the open country, amid the frosts of misery, wish to erect a temple to
Love. No; matrimony is love and should be nothing except love. But love
is nude and wants to be clothed; love is delicate, and wants to be
nourished and protected from the winds and the frosts; love is
fruitful, and should have bread and wine to keep alive the little angels
that will bloom in its garden. All this should be known by our young
girls; our authority should go no further than temporizing; we should
never impose anything on lovers except patience; and this in itself is
sufficient to cause many transient desires to vanish, while it
invigorates true loves. But in any case, and always, selection should be
free, and to prepare for it the education of our daughters should be
more sincere, more frank, less hypocritical, less false. Teach your
child modesty and personal dignity, and you will see that with such
sentiments the fortress you wish to guard will very rarely capitulate.
Perpetual diffidence rouses many false alarms, stirs up in many
frivolous and touchy natures the desire for spite and revenge.
Diffidence always in arms gives one a pessimistic idea of the virtues of
mothers; perhaps they remember how weakly they resisted temptation and
they try by every art to avoid it, instead of strengthening the forces
that should defend virtue.
The free selection of woman is much more important in our society,
because she is not ignorant of the fact that in marriage she will find
an immense liberty; perhaps she also divines that, even though she
should not love the official spouse, she can still love and be loved.
When a society is entirely saturated with adultery and hypocrisy, even
the chaste and ingenuous maiden is dimly prescient of certain things
which she dares not acknowledge to herself. Without leaving the domestic
nest, she may perhaps know with what infamy a family may become sullied;
she has, perhaps, more than once repeated to herself: "I will not sin,
but--I, too, could sin with impunity."
Free selection is the best guarantee of faith; it is the only touchstone
by which the true natural rights of mutual fidelity are tried. No one
has the right to cast the first stone at the adulteress if she,
ignorant, was dragged to the altar; no wife can be condemned if she was
forced to sign the compact like a victim and a slave instead of as a
woman and a lover.
All these reforms which must elevate matrimony will be but slowly
secured through the progress of education and customs, through morality
strengthened by science and not by fear, through greater respect for the
liberty of woman, who must be raised from the low level where modern
society has still left her.
THE END