BOUNDARIES OF LOVE—THEIR RELATIONS TO OTHER SENTIMENTS—JEALOUSY
In the Apollo room in the Vatican you will see an ancient bas-relief representing two bacchantes with the Dionysian thyrsus; one is standing, while the heat of voluptuousness is flaming within her; she bears the thyrsus, lust transpires on her face, and a bull is beating his horns against her legs; the other falls exhausted from intoxication. These are two moments of the voluptuousness of love, but they are also the two most elementary forms of the sentiment that bind man to woman. Now an ardent energy, then calm possession; now struggle that conquers, then affectionate blandishment that restrains. The most sublime, most constant, most perfect love that a man of superior race can desire or dream of, is a hot, bright flame, lasting as long as life, and at which, from time to time, are kindled the sparks of a desire that flares up, wavers and disappears.
Love, in comparison with all other sentiments, is such a thing that, when it comes in contact with them, it rules, attracts and draws them into the orbit of its movements, like a small fragment of cosmic matter which, having come too near to the sun, is attracted and devoured by that body. The sentiments are forces, each controlled by certain laws in its own sphere; when they come together, they conglomerate or eliminate each other, or exercise a mutual influence which causes them to deviate from the line followed by them a moment before. When an affection approaches love it is so powerfully influenced by it as to seem to disappear from the sight of the common people, while neither matter nor force can ever be destroyed, but can only change in form.
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On this subject many fallacious arguments are advanced every day. It is said, for instance, that love is the most egotistic of sentiments, because we seek in it the greatest voluptuousness; but love and egotism are two affections that follow very different orbits, since the former causes us to love another creature and has as its object the preservation of the species, while the latter makes us love ourselves and tends to preserve the individual. If by egotism we mean the desire of satisfying a need, then all the sentiments, even the most generous ones, could be considered as forms of egotism, since even the martyr satisfies a very high need of a generous sentiment.
Love is, on the contrary, at perpetual war with egotism; and although the latter is a gigantic affection, yet it pales before the brilliant light of the Titan of the Affections. Many animals prefer death to abandoning the faithful companion. Even the toad suffers himself to be tortured, burned, to have his limbs amputated, his eyes gouged; but as long as he has one limb intact, he uses it to embrace the female in an amorous clasp. And do we not, too, offer as holocaust to love wealth, glory, science? Does not woman offer to love the long illness of gestation, the tortures of childbirth, the pains of nursing, the anxious cares of domestic and educational struggles? And how many think, in the intoxication of love, of the bitterness and the thorns which they are sowing in that moment; the history of sorrow which, perhaps, by an inexorable law, they are preparing for themselves?
Even the most perfect egotist, if he be a healthy man, desires and loves a woman. Apart from a few elect creatures to whom the supreme joys of the creations of thought are permitted, love represents the greatest of energies, the crowning of every edifice. We may thirst for wealth and glory as the greatest of joys, but in the background we behold the outline of a feminine creature at whose feet the trophies of victory must be laid. I do not speak of woman, because, for her, every satisfied vanity, every hoped for glory, all riches desired, every flower and every fruit of the garden of life must be laid at the feet of somebody, and this somebody is[Pg 135] always a man. The fireworks with which every festivity of life ends must always be a woman; at the bottom of every vulgar revelry and on the horizon of every sublime glory there is ever an Eve. To love and to be loved is of all human things the best; and even in the world of the suprasensible, the religions of every country have always promised to the good and the believer an eternity of love in the harem of voluptuousness, or in a mystic but amorous ecstasy. Read the burning pages of the mystic writers, and you will be able to tell me if all that fantastic world is not, too, a transubstantiation of love. The gods of every Olympus also have a sexual form, and there are feminine forms for the males and masculine forms for the females. From the cradle to the grave, love is for all and always the highest promise. Between the automatic lust of adolescence and the studied and covetous lecheries of old age, we pass, through the feverish hysteria of early youth, to the deep passions of virility; but for every age love is the sweetest joy. The tocsin of old age begins to sound when, with the first white hairs, we fear that we are no longer able to love; and every one ardently, anxiously hopes that the hour, the minute will never come for him in which he shall be compelled to say the tremendous words: "I cannot."
I do not deny that in some human monsters egotism, as a sacrifice made to the god "Myself," is so powerful as to exclude love; but such cases are very rare if they last the whole life, rare when they last for a shorter period. It often occurs that a man, trained to and living in the most sordid egotism, falls in love when old with a poor young girl, and becomes expansive with her, generous, prodigal, perhaps; and he too pays, at one time and in a very ridiculous way, the debt which nature in vain claimed from him during his young and mature age.
Great egotists also love, but in a selfish manner, denying the most prodigal and most splendid of the passions that tribute which they cannot refuse to themselves. They are ignorant of the most sublime joys, of the most inebriating enthusiasms of love, of the holy voluptuousness of loving a[Pg 136] woman more than oneself; but they also love, they love in their own way. If you wish to study the physiognomy of egotistical love, compare man's with woman's love and you will find it easy to penetrate into the mysteries of this part of psychology; and if you desire a more striking contrast, that the differences may be represented in a bolder relief, compare the love of an old man with that of a young woman: you will have in the former an egotistical type of love, in the latter a generous one.
More complex are the influences which the sentiment of possession and that of self-esteem exercise upon love, and the importance given to jealousy is sufficient to prove this.
The physiological study of jealousy would be sufficient, if it were still needed, to demonstrate the queer confusion of language in relation to psychical facts. One would say that it is the language of the alchemists, employed to express the chemical composition of bodies; one would believe that we are still dealing with the "nothing white," the "philosophic wool" and the "tetrascelitetraoxicoquindodeca" of our good ancestors.
Jealousy really signifies a pain of the sentiment of love, or, to be more specific, the sentiment caused by the offense done us through the infidelity of the person we love. This pain is natural in all men, in all times and in almost all races. It is the injury to our property applied to love. The child scratches and bites him who touches or spoils its fruits or its toy; it grieves us to be robbed of our books, of the flowers of our garden. It is natural, then, that he who touches our sweetheart, our dearest thing, should be hated. And, in fact, this jealousy is but a form of hatred, the most natural, the most legitimate of all hatreds. It is not necessary to create a new energy or a new word to express this hatred. We may beat or kill a man because he has brutally offended our son, our father, our friend, our country, our sweetheart; five offenses given to five different sentiments, but always hatred aroused by grief, energy developed by the same mechanism. The paternal, the filial, the friendly sentiment, the devotion to our country, love have been offended[Pg 137] in us, and we have responded with a centrifugal hatred, with blows or death. But in these various cases, was the presence of a new sentiment deemed necessary in order that the crime might be committed? Certainly not. It was said that the paternal affection, injured, had aroused such distress in us as to lead to assault or assassination; it was simply asserted that an insult to the flag of our country had rendered us blind and led us to commit violence; and why, then, when love is offended, should we create a new sentiment—jealousy? All sentiments, when satisfied, lead us to close friendships, to endearments, to be of assistance to those who have given us these satisfactions. All injured sentiments lead us, on the contrary, to repel those who have offended them, to harm those from whom we have received that pain.
Is it jealousy, then, the hatred that an animal manifests toward any creature which interrupts it in its loves? Well, for many savages, to whom love is nothing but sexual intercourse, all the phenomena of jealousy are reduced to this single form. When the instinct is satisfied, as the unions are promiscuous and woman is considered common property, there can be no jealousy. If woman is a cup out of which every one may drink, why should there be jealousy? A Bolivian woman once cynically told me: "Woman is the water of a stream. Throw a stone into it: will you be able to tell me a minute afterward where the stone broke that water? You are very foolish, you man, to make distinctions between identical things!"
In polygamous races, man only can be jealous; in polyandric ones, woman alone can be jealous legally. With various nations, woman is a property like any other; hence she can be voluntarily offered to the friend or to the guest, like a horse or a dog. They do not want anybody to steal her, but she can be given away without either disgrace or jealousy. Only in the higher and monogamous races the sentiments of love, self-esteem and property, forming a triple armor around our woman, incite us to defend her "with claws and beak"; and to this unyielding body, consisting of the union of three sentiments, we give the name of "jealousy"; and[Pg 138] here we have a second psychical form, another thing called by the same name.
But, as though such confusion were not already excessive, we have called jealousy a special psychical individual organization by which we become suspicious and tyrannical toward the person we love and whom we offend without any reason and from whom we withhold all legitimate liberty. And after having confused three different things, that is to say, the grief of injured love, the triple combination of three sentiments—love, self-pride, possession—and a pathological irritability of suspicion, we discuss at length, and always in vain, in order to decide whether all men are jealous and whether jealousy measures love with an exact ruler and whether anyone can love without being jealous: vain, not to say puerile, discussions, which would not take place if words were previously defined. If by jealousy you mean the sorrow caused by not being loved or by being deceived, then every heart that loves must be jealous; thus, whoever loves country, mother, son, cannot witness without sorrow an offense offered to son, mother, country. But if by jealousy you mean that form of tyrannical suspicion which tortures the person possessed by it, then I shall tell you that we very well can and should love without ever feeling that jealousy, and that we can be jealous even without loving. Let us proceed to an elementary analysis, and we shall understand each other. Under the name of a single sentiment, of a single effective energy, the most dissimilar phenomena are grouped, to wit:
(1) The sorrow caused by a love offense;
(2) The sorrow for an injury to property;
(3) A sorrow born of the sentiment of self-esteem;
(4) An habitual, constitutional suspicion, which centers on the person beloved or possessed.
The only common ties among these psychical phenomena are these: that all apply to a love o............