BOUNDARIES OF LOVE, AND THEIR RELATIONS TO THE SENSES

A country cannot be surveyed without tracing exactly its boundaries, without following them in their capricious and serpentine lines, without marking the point where its individuality ends and the influence of the neighboring country begins to be felt. You may have trampled every clod; wandered through every path, scented the soil of every field, and drunk the water of every spring and every stream; but if you have not sketched the confines of a country, you know less than half its history. Everything is important for what it is and what adjoins it. Not one, then, in this world can impunely be near to another, and all things act and react reciprocally. So it is with love, which has frontiers as vast as the human world, as indented as the coast of Dalmatia or of Norway, capricious, irregular, changeable. It is a land which projects into all adjacent countries, and with it sense, sentiment and thought come into close and complicated contact.

Every sense, every passion, every force of the mind is an instrument of love; but this, in turn, bends in a thousand different ways to senses, passions and thoughts. It is a continual interlacing of factors and instruments, of causes and effects; and while this gigantic power warms and agitates the inmost fibers of the human organism, it radiates its penetrating light to the furthermost confines of the world.

Love, which by the supreme right of existence requires the contact of two different natures, which is but the kiss of two creatures who blend for an instant and fuse together the germs of their power, must have most varied, numberless[Pg 123] relations to the sense of touch. It could even be said, without departing from strict scientific truth, that physical love is a sublime form of contact and touch. In inferior animal forms, as well as in human natures of a low and bestial type, love is nothing but touch and contact; but ascending to the high spheres of the animal world and of the human microcosm, the other senses also add their flowers to the garland of love, with the exception of taste, which takes no part in the pleasures of love, except in peculiar cases, which can, without any scruple, be entrusted to the clinic of pathological psychology. Of the other four senses, touch has the greatest part in love, hearing the smallest; sight and smell range between the two former in very different degrees.

The senses, however, differ more in the nature of the joys and sorrows with which they take part in the greatest of human passions than in the various quantities of elements which they yield to love. Touch conquers, and twinges with delight; sight reveals and charms; hearing impassions and conquers; smell cherishes and inebriates. We can easily have a comparative idea of the various parts which the four senses take in love by comparing these four moments: To see the beloved woman and gaze at her for a long time; to embrace her passionately; to hear her voice without seeing her; to inhale voluptuously the aroma with which she is wont to scent her robe.

A thousand, a hundred thousand, a million notes would be insufficient to express all the harmonies and melodies of amorous contact; and as the most voluminous dictionary in the world would decline to enter upon such an undertaking, the pen of the writer would slip into the field where science becomes lasciviousness. I regret at times that one of the greatest poets did not sing the sublime voluptuousness of love with such loftiness of style as to leave his pen uncontaminated. Perhaps man would like to know also the limits of the genius of lust, to mark the confines, too, of this human possibility; but I find some consolation for this sublime ignorance of ours, for this glorious lacuna left by modesty in the field of human knowledge, in thinking that where poetry[Pg 124] kept silent and science inactive, where an intimate contact of two kisses creates a new existence, an unknown current transmits to the new man, together with the sparks of life, all the treasures of past voluptuousness; and the son of Adam, with a second kiss, will transmit the innate science of love, pour all the nectar of the chalice of voluptuousness into the lips of the daughter of Eve. Sublime science, which was never written on papyrus nor sculptured in marble or bronze, but is transmitted in the flash of a kiss through thousands of generations that loved, love, and will love!

From the purest caress on a mass of hair to the greatest hurricane of voluptuousness, touch always keeps the character moulded for it by its anatomy. Touch, in love, is always made oversensitive by voluptuousness, always deeply sensual, is always a positive, definite, uncontrasted and uncontrastable possession. Woman may delude herself into believing that she is unblemished by man's contact when his hand has but touched the hem of her garments or the leather of her shoes; but when skin has touched skin, when a finger has touched a finger, something is already lost of that waxy varnish which nature spreads upon the virginal fruit still preserving the perfume of the tree that nourished it. A hand that clasps a hand means, in love, two fires that blend in one; a mass of hair that touches a mass of hair means two streams of voluptuousness rushing into the bed of one river; two feet that come in contact are always two sparks that fly. A molecule of a man who loves can never touch impunely a molecule of the woman who returns his love; and although the contact may be more rapid than lightning, every molecule that returns to the spheres of its own individuality carries away something that does not belong to it, and leaves with the other something of itself. Touch soft iron with the loadstone and you will see it magnetized; touch a molecule of a man with that of a woman and the two molecules will not be what they were before. Touch is always the act of possession, and the thousand contacts can, gradually, steal so much, that we may find ourselves carried into the sphere of the woman we love, while she has entirely passed into our[Pg 125] sphere. Not in vain the modest woman trembles and rebels at every innocent contact. Every sensation of touch, in love, means a boundary that is eliminated between two properties; it means the loss of a property.

It is not hypocrisy alone that makes modesty more exacting in higher races; in exquisitely elevated natures a contact is more dangerous because it radiates rapidly into the field of voluptuousness, into that of the other senses and that of sentiment. Vulgar natures begin where refined natures end; and while too elevated natures live long together, held back by the barrier of a handshake, the bold and uncouth rustic throws a kiss to the girl and embraces her at the first declaration of love. It is typical of this most powerful passion to perform a hundred miracles a day and thus arrest voluptuousness at the last boundary of kissing; but adroitness and fortune are necessary to make it possible to stop there for a long time. From handclasping to the kiss the path may be very long and even endless; but beyond a kiss given and returned, every definite boundary has vanished and everything is possible. Even in touch love has but two principal stations before the goal is reached; handclasping and kiss. Whoever believes she has remained a virgin after a kiss given and returned is a hypocrite, like him who believes that the studied reticence of lust may still leave something to conquer. O women who have the dangerous fortune to be beautiful and to be desired, do not let your adorers go beyond handclasping; you may in rare cases arrive at the kiss that you may receive; but remember that a kiss returned is a tremendous bond, which you should never sign,—never, of course, unless you intend to change your name.

Sight is the first messenger of love, and in elect natures it is so prodigal of joy to lovers as to excel, in extensity if not in intensity, even the insuperable heights of voluptuousness. Sight possesses everything save the delirium of possession, and rapid and penetrating as it is, it sounds at a stroke the abysses of infinite beauty, over which is suspended, as in a halo, the object of our love. What one contemplates with[Pg 126] the eyes of love from head to foot always ends in two infinities into which desire hurls itself with frenzied audacity and insatiable curiosity. Sight is made to accompany us in that delicious excursion; and as it can tarry long and suavely at a dimple of the cheek, at the little vortex of a curl or at the opalescence of a nail, it can also compel us to pass and repass with vertiginous speed, a thousand times in a minute, through the divine lines that enclose our treasure.

The eyes of love have all the virtue of the telescope and the microscope, and while not a single curve of the thousand labyrinths through which the mobile feminine beauty seems to flutter and flicker can escape them, they also attain the most sublime summits of ideal beauty. When the eye admires and conquers, it invites to the picture which it draws from nature all senses, all passions, all thought, all psychical energies of man. No other sense possesses this gigantic faculty of elevating us to the highest regions of the ideal, compelling the minor senses, the animal instincts and the lower passions to contemplate its panoramas. The eye is the first minister of the mind, and while it refines desire and frees passion from the coarsest lasciviousness, it elevates the man and woman who love to the highest spheres of human possibility. Touch likes to remove the veils that cover the beautiful; sight need not divest the object it contemplates, for its light illumines every shade, penetrates through opaque bodies and makes them transparent, threads its way through the most intricate folds, and while it sees it also surmises, inspects, divines, analyzes, measures, compares and controls with incredible agility all the elements of the esthetic world.

The eye which rests the rays of its light on a loving eye illumines it, is illumined in turn and shows to us the phenomenon of two brilliant stars exchanging their lights and rendering themselves more beautiful. If one does not lower the chaste eyelids, it may so happen that the fire will spread from the high spheres of the esthetic ideal down to the vile and brutish instincts. This, in fact, happens in all men of a base type; every emotion of love is rapidly transferred to[Pg 127] the regions of touch. In elect natures, on the contrary, sight has ever some beauty to discover, a region to explore, a world to conquer. The richest man in the world can always count the dollars and the stocks he possesses; the most powerful king can always know the extent in square miles of his dominions: but he who loves a beautiful creature dies without having seen, contemplated or admired all. In the last day of his life there is alwa............