MORNING CREPUSCULES OF LOVE—THE GOOD AND EVIL SOURCES OF LOVE

A human being of a low order or of a simple nature does not feel the energy of that new sentiment called love rise within him until the development of the germinative glands has marked in him the character of the sex and made of that being a man or a woman. On the other hand, in rich and powerful natures, many years before sex has impressed its deep mark on the organism, a vague, mysterious and chaste sympathy attracts the young boy toward the young girl. There, where the sun of the infinite azure of the skies is to rise, one notices a rosy tint lightly projected on the horizon, but sufficient to warn us: "There must the greatest star shine some day, the father of all light." The sun is ever the most beautiful among all the beautiful things of the skies, and I have studied with warm and constant affection, watched with religious attention the first crepuscules of that other sun which we are now studying in this book. They appear without being invited by the precocious corruption of books and of neighbors, they rise spontaneously in the heart of the most unconscious innocence; they shine like serene and calm rays of a light that later will be ardent and fascinating. They appear and disappear, like flashes of lightning, flashes which noiselessly illuminate the clouds and then leave them darker than before. A vulgar and coarse malignity repeats a blasphemy every day when it asserts that no child is ignorant of the secrets of love. The innocence of childhood is truer, more sincere and deeper than is supposed, and lasts limpid and adamantine even when it has been splashed with the mud of social corruption.[Pg 42] The rosy lips of a child may repeat, with an expression of lascivious malice, a jest learned by chance from a maid-servant or from a libertine, but that stain does not penetrate into the crystalline nature of the child, and the spray of a fountain will be sufficient to wash the trace away. The malignant rabble is wont to doubt of the innocence of others, just as the wicked is to deny all virtue.

In the infantile songs, in the noisy and turbulent games which form the delight of the first age, suddenly a young boy beholds a little girl among a hundred, among a thousand; and an instantaneous sympathy ties the rosy knot of a nameless affection, of an innocent, unwitting love, which may seem at the same time the caricature and the miniature of a sublime picture. I remember having seen an angelic little girl, blonde as an ear of wheat and rosy as the aurora, throw her arms around the neck of a little boy as haughty as a brigand and as dark as a pirate. And the impudent little thing would cover him with kisses, and he would disdain and resent these cajoleries; and she would tell him that she loved him very much, that she wanted to make of him her little bridegroom. A reversed world, a microscopic scene of a chaste Joseph who did not know what woman was, and a Lilliputian woman who, in the innocent ardors of a childish embrace, seemed to be the wife of Potiphar and was nothing but an angel. However, this sudden movement of affection between two children of different sex conceals sometimes a true and real passion which has haughty jealousies, tears and sighs, delirious joys, a history, a future.

The beautiful young girls whom a kind or a cruel nature has destined to arouse at every step of life a desire or a sigh, often ignore the fact that in the multitude of their adorers there are boys so small as to seem babies and who kiss in secret the flowers that have fallen from their bosoms; who furtively and mysteriously, like domestic thieves, steal into the little room that shelters their angel to kiss her bed, to kneel on the carpet which that woman treads—that woman whom they already distinguish above all the creatures in the world, whom they dare already to place on the same level as[Pg 43] their mother. And how often a woman who playfully runs her fingers through the locks of a boy laying his head upon her knees, is unconscious of a little heart that beats loudly, loudly, under those caresses; unconscious, when the child raises his curly head, of the cause of his flush, which does not come from congestion, but from burning with a fire of which he himself is ignorant, but which is love.

These rosy phantoms, which gild some of the most beautiful hours of our child-life, seem to last only as long as the morning twilight; and certainly the battles of youth often cause them to be forgotten. And many, with slippery memories and skeptical hearts, when they hear them mentioned have only words of contempt and gestures of pity for what they are pleased to term infantile lullabies to be relegated among the horrors of the witches and the caresses of the nurse. And yet how often these fleeting phantoms announce the storms of the future, reveal a deeply enamored nature and weave the first threads of a long fabric of delirious joys and torments! Some very, very fortunate mortal, on his death-bed, could press the hand of the only woman he had ever loved, whom he had loved when still a child, before he even knew she was a woman. The trembling lips of the dying man could link the last kiss of life with the first noisy, insolent, clumsy kiss on the soft cheek of a ten-year-old girl. And without trying to reach this loftiest sphere of an ideal too far removed from our existence, how often, after a long life hardened by the tortures of a hundred passions, after having lost faith and love, in the dusk of the early evening a last rosy flash of sunset awakened a dear memory, buried many years since, and the heart of an old man throbbed and a tear ran down his wrinkled face! Before the weary eyes a little straw hat had passed, with two blue streamers, but in the depths of the heart what an abyss of dear memories had opened in an instant! In the night of the past, a limpid ray of light had illumined a picture all life and all beauty; an antique cameo had appeared under the pick of the gravedigger, among ruins and dust! And that picture was a childish love, a flower carried away by the turbid torrent of[Pg 44] a storm, but preserved by the friendly hand of memory, which, after all, is not always ungrateful or cruel.

If you ask a boy why he loves a little girl, he will blush and run away; if you ask the little girl, her face will flush and she will answer with a sublime impertinence. They love—and they know not why! Ask a precocious rosebud why it wanted to bloom in March, instead of awaiting the warm and voluptuous air of May; ask a July cyclamen why it did not await the cool breezes of September to perfume the mossy bed in which it had made its nest. They love, and they know not why! In passionate men the first light of love appears sooner, because Nature, fruitful and impatient, longs to give her flowers, and an entire life will be for them too short a day to satisfy the intense thirst of love which consumes them. They love soon because they love much; as men of genius, at ten years of age, often conceive that which the masses will never conceive at thirty.

And why, my boy, do you prefer that little girl to all the others? And why, my pretty girl, do you allow yourself to be kissed only by the lips of that dark, impertinent little beau? Because that little girl differs from all the others; because that dark lad is unlike any other boy. Love, from its first and most indistinct appearance, is selection, a deep and irresistible sympathy of different natures, the recomposition of discomposed forces, the equilibrium of opposites, the complement of dissociated things; the harmony of harmonies; the most gigantic, the most prepotent of the affinities ties of attraction!

Aside from the precursory crepuscules of natures most powerful in love, this sentiment, in ordinary men, rises when a new want springs forth under the rod of that magical transformer which is puberty. At that time, on the smooth, pubescent, roundish surface of the infantile nature, a deep crevice opens; a void is formed which woman alone can fill; then, that little, round, smooth fruit called little girl also sheds its childish skin, disclosing the juicy and delicate flesh of the fruit which was hidden in it. Then, from every developed muscle of the virile organism, from every sound[Pg 45] of its strengthened voice, from every hair that makes its skin hirsute, there rises a powerful cry which demands in the loudest tone: A woman! And from every flexuous limb of the girl who has become a woman, from every quiver of the hair which makes her proud, from every pore of the young girl who has become a crater of burning desires, arises a cry which demands: A man!

The passage of the fatal bridge that separates adolescence from youth is one of the epochs most burdened with anxieties, most merry with convulsive joys, and for this I call it the hysterical period of life. I shall illustrate it, perhaps, some day, in a work which I am preparing on the ages of man. I shall here describe with few, wide strokes of the pen how the necessity of loving makes itself felt to most men. And if I have referred to woman most of the time, it is because she, more chaste, more reserved, and yet a hundred times more in need of love, feels more deeply the shudder which announces to her the appearance of the new god; more innocent than we are, she does not know his nature; more timid, she has a greater fear of him. Nature conceded to man common resources almost unknown to woman, and only too often precocious vice makes him acquainted sooner with voluptuousness than with love. When he is chaste, virtuous and impassioned, he also feels the same raging tumult, which stirs his soul; he too, somber, melancholy, frantic, demands of nature, with the accents of wrath and plaintive lamentations: A woman!

To this cry answers, alas! only too often, the first comer. It is impossible for certain natures to resist a long time the tortures of robust and vigorous chastity: the frail human shell would fall to pieces if it persisted in keeping imprisoned an accumulation of forces, all gigantic, all fresh, all ready for the battle. The first love is not slow to appear; and if the neophyte who appears on the horizon lacks more than two-thirds of the desired virtues, Love is such a magician that he can create them and transform a worm into a god.

The maiden in her dreams, by looking at the pictures in[Pg 46] the church and within the domestic walls, had fancied a winged man with nothing earthly and material but two lips to kiss. The object desired by her was an angel, all love and all ether, who would gather under his large folded wings the soul of the young girl and carry it away, through the space of heaven, to a golden region, all light and warmth. The quivering of the wings and the velvet of a kiss were all the voluptuousness which the chaste virgin ever thought of dreaming; and beyond it, an obscure and infinite mystery of which she knew neither name, nor confines, nor form. And instead of this angel, she beholds a man in trousers, with mustaches, who smokes much and slanders women; perhaps his hair is already turning gray, already he may be a husband and a father—but he is a man.

And the youth, too, had dreamed of his angel. She should have been all eyes, all locks of hair; divinely slender, with feet which would hardly touch the earth, eternal smile wreathed in an aureole of light, a soul ardent as fire and an innocence as pure as the snow that falls upon the summits of the Jungfrau. And, instead, she who wakes us from the dream of the night is the provocative, stout maid-servant who by her contours only, distinct and strong as they are, shows nothing but that she is much of a woman, and instead of wings she has two sinewy arms and two hands hardened from the use of pot and broom; and, far from having winged feet, she pounds the floor with pattens that seem to be soled with iron—but she is a woman.

Anything is good and enough for a first love, which is nearly always a million of hunger and a penny of bread. How vulgar is the object of that enamored young girl's thoughts! The heart of a grocer in the body of a porter! But he is pallid, and the hebetude of his stare seems sentimental languor to her; he is ill, and to her his illness appears poetic; he is robust, and for her he is the god of strength; he is arrogant, but to her he is passionate; he is an egotist, and so much the better, for he will love but her, who alone will know how to make him happy. How much poetry that ardent youth has launched to the skies, when he sang the[Pg 47] exciting form of a strong peasant woman! How many elegies has he not wept, thinking of the bluish paleness of a cholerotic working-woman! Woe, if seduction accompanies all this texture of lies with which too often the first love builds its nest! Woe, if to the inexperienced maiden the aged libertine says, with the accent acquired from long practice: "I love you!" Woe, if the lascivious old woman, satisfying her old appetite with unripe fruit, knows how to warm the innocent youth at the fire of new voluptuousness! Then the fire is kindled, the flames spread, and the first object loved is placed on the altar with vows of eternal fealty, and perfumed with the incense of the maddest, most unrestrained idolatry.

The first love is not always born so evilly, but it too closely resembles, alas! these first loves which I have just described. Let us be sincere from the very first steps in our studies, for hypocrisy is the wood-worm that in modern society cuts into and corrodes the highest and strongest tree in the garden of life. The original sin of love appears to us with its first cry, and even when we have been forced to use all the artifices of the galvanoplastic to gild our idol, even when the bellows of imagination have worked to inflame the first love, the very first thing we say is a lie: "I love you above everything in this world; I shall love you forever. You are my first love, and one can love but once." And a second vow answers the first, perhaps more sacred and more ardent; and in a kiss, that is often the sum of two lies, the first hypocrisy is sealed, which down to the last generation of the loves of those two beings will seal with an everlasting mark all the expressions of affection, all the cravings of the heart.

Be sincere with the first kiss, if you desire love to be the chief joy of life, not a shameful trade of voluptuous lies. Yes, yours is the first love, but because it is the first it is neither true nor just nor natural that it should be the greatest, the one, the only love. Do not swear falsely, do not perjure yourselves before you know what truth is. To the eternity of your vows, the indifference of tomorrow will answer with a sardonic, mocking grin. Before you have[Pg 48] really loved, you will sing in every tune that virtue does not exist, that love is a dream, and, children and elders at the same time, you will forswear a god whose temple you have never seen.

You are two: a man and a woman; and you say that you love each other, and perhaps it is first love for both. Well, then, during the first days do not swear, if you still value the word of an honest man, and if perjury still has terrors for you. Rarely is the first love true love, as the first book of an author rarely is the true expression of his genius. One is weak from excessive youth as from old age; and the one and first and only love, like many other dogmatic formulas which delight so much that pedantic and hypocritical biped called man, has made more victims in modern society than many crimes and many maladies of body and mind ever did. If your love is the first, so much the better; with hands chastely clasped and lips modestly conjoined, do not pronounce any other words but these: "Let us love each other!" If you are among the few and happy mortals who will love but once; if you are among the very few who, in the first woman or in the first man, have found the angel seen in their first dreams of youth, thousand and thousand times blessed! The fidelity of the future will cement for life the virtues of your souls. As for myself, if the increased progress of true and healthy democracy should eliminate from juridical institutions the formula of the oath, I would wish that the man and the woman who love each other should never swear. An adjuration less and a caress more, what a delight! An eternity less, and a longer caress, what voluptuousness! Nor should chaste and chosen souls throw my book away, feeling hurt by my cynic advice. If they will read the pages that follow, they will clearly see that no one more than I intends to elevate love to the most serene regions of the ideal, and that, however high sentiment can ascend, I, also, feel the strength to follow it. The triple and thick skin of hypocrisy that enwraps us from infancy, the Arcadic varnish which makes us look polished and brilliant, nearly always forbid us to see the true nature of things, and in love we are all[Pg 49] unmistakably counterfeiters. The greatest liberty, the greatest sincerity alone can cure us of this malady, which is civil rather than national, because it penetrates every race, every social class; it does not spare the highest and strongest natures; it has become an integral part of every fiber of our hearts, of the framework of all our institutions.

Which are the true sources of love? Which are the paths that lead to the sacred temple? There should be an only source, an only path, but so many are those who throng and crowd to enter there, where all expect the greatest joy, that not all enter by the great highway of nature, but through secret gates and oblique ways reach their aim; they are unhappy because the original sin of their loves condemns them to a dangerous life sown with despondency and bitterness.

All the natural flows of the true and great love collect in one source. They are drops which slowly trickle into the depths of our body, and there they gather and form rivulets and streamlets that, in turn, collect in the channel of our veins until they effuse as the warm, quivering wave of sympathy.

Sympathy is the only and true source of love. Sympathy, most beautiful among the beautiful words of human speech! To suffer together, a melancholy vaticination of life lived in two; but better still, to feel, laugh and weep together! Two organisms, but one sense; two exterior worlds, but which unite around a unique center; two nerves that by various ways carry various sensations, but which interweave and run together in one heart. To see, to gaze at, to desire each other. A spark shoots forth from the contact of two desires: such is the first fact of love. Two solitary ships in the desert of the ocean were plowing through the waves, unknown to each other; the wind propelled one near to the other; a shiver of sympathy ran through the sails and the shrouds and caused them to creak simultaneously; they felt pressed by a common need, and cast out a hawser which should tie them together. From that moment they shall[Pg 50] plow the same waters, expose themselves to the same dangers, and long and sigh for the same land.

The most rapid and ardent sympathies have their sources in the admiration of form, that is to say, in the sentiment of the beautiful which is satisfied by the object which we desire and are about to love. Among the four definitions of love that Tasso was wont to discuss, there are three which express or suggest this idea: "Love is a desire of beauty; Love is the cupidity of embrace for the pleasure of those who covet a particular beauty; Love is the union through pleasure of beauty." And, in fact, what is love if not the choice of the better forms in order to perpetuate them? What is love if not the selection of the best in order that it may triumph over the mediocre, a selection of youth and strength in order that it may survive the old and weak elements? Woman, the custodian of germs, the vestal of life, must be more beautiful than we, and man loves in her the form above all other things; and mediocre forms can, if elevated by a gigantic genius and an impassioned heart, still excite ardent passions. But these are always unstable sympathies, and where a real deformity appears, love is dead, or lives only as a prodigy of heroism, or as an esthetic malady. Woman also is immediately affected by the beauty of virile forms and can love a man merely because he is handsome; but in her the field of sympathy expands and is much higher, and character and genius will seduce her more frequently than is the case with men. The ugliest men enjoyed the superhuman voluptuousness of being loved; but in the attitude of their characters, in the power of their genius, in the greatness of their position, they possessed a fascination which belonged, nevertheless, to the world of beauty. Woman has within herself such a power of transmission of the germinative elements and such an accumulation of beauty as to be capable of doing without the power and the beauty of her companion; but she wants to feel conquered by a superior force, fascinated by something that shines or flashes or thunders.

In love, genius and character exercise very little influence[Pg 51] if they do not assume a beautiful form, and esthetics dominate and govern all amorous phenomena. This is not enough: even those who believe that their judgment in making a selection soars to the loftiest spheres of the ideal world, and despise the beautiful as a vulgar fascination of dull and clouded minds, seek, involuntarily, unknowingly, some virtues that bear a deep sexual mark. There may be a philosopher who boasts of having loved a homely but intelligent and sensible woman; but let him search the depths of his heart, let him study the sources of his love, and he will find that he admires and loves in his companion those virtues which are essentially feminine: the flexuous grace of tenderness and the kind intelligence of the heart, or the insuperable cleverness of affection, or the coquettish forms of a refreshing and modest intellect. In other words, the proud despiser of form was seduced by the form, all beautiful and all feminine, of a character or of an intelligence. And woman, when she happens to love an ugly man, is conquered either by dominating intellect, by dazzling ambition, by heroic courage, or by the power of some virtues that bear a deeply virile mark. Sex is too great a portion of the economy of life to be eliminated from our calculations by our caprice, and love is a stream too large to be dammed and directed between the paper dikes of our sophisms and our reticences; and if some one should not be convinced yet that beauty is the supreme inciter of every amorous sympathy, let him remember that love is the passion of youth, and this is always a chosen form of beauty.

It rarely happens that two flashes from the eyes of a man and of a woman who meet for the first time should kindle one fire only. This is the ideal of the most ardent sympathies, the most fortunate combination in the great, hazardous game of life. To meet suddenly, to see, to admire, to desire each other at once and to embrace with such a look as if it came from above; to feel inundated by a gaze, equally warm and penetrating; to blush together and to feel all at once that two hearts beat louder and mutely make this sweet[Pg 52] confession: "I love you, and you are mine!"—all this is a joy too rare, too beautiful, one which few mortals have known and few will know.

It happens more frequently that nascent sympathies proceed unequally, so that the one has already carried a man to the highest summits of desire and passion, while the other hardly begins to stir; the one already throbs, the other only faintly vibrates. Even when two loves are called to high and fortunate destinies, even when they will soon spread their robust wings together in the space of bliss, a task is reserved to woman in the vicissitudes of love, so different from ours that she cannot feel with us the same sudden and violent emotions. Man says everything with a look; unhesitatingly and proudly he acknowledges his defeats. Woman, even under the spell of the most ardent sympathy, lowers her eyelids, refuses the too intense light and protects her heart with all the refrigeratives and sedatives at her command. Man has already said to woman a hundred times with the flash of his eyes: "I love you!" The woman, trembling, hardly dares to say: "Perhaps I will love you!" And away run those two happy beings, fleeing from each other, until the sympathy of the one equals that of the other, until the supreme languor of a long battle is smothered in two notes which vibrate together with the sweetest harmony, while they say to each other, with a sigh, "I love you!" and to nature repeat with another sigh: "Thanks!"

The energies of amorous desire, which the longer they last the larger they grow, follow the laws of elementary physics governing the forces. The most instantaneous love is not the most durable, and if an unexpected satisfaction follows a sudden desire, love may sometimes resemble a glorious rape rather than a true and real passion. It is true that love is not a battle but a long war, and when the first victory is followed by a hundred, a thousand victories, the fulmineous sympathy also may take deep roots in our hearts, and rallying after nearly every struggle, may pervade us all and reach the ideal perfection of coupling intensity with extensiveness, of twinkling at the same time with the light[Pg 53] of those stars that never set and that of the lightning flash that plows the skies. The most perfect love is a sun that never sets, but does cast forth now and then more scintillant flashes. In ordinary cases, however, loves that rise slowly, slowly die away; and those of the nature of lightning last as long as lightning. In all cases, a healthy love, well constituted and destined for a prolific existence, whether born suddenly or slowly, should begin with a violent shock that measures the depths from which the warm sympathy sprang forth. All other affectionate sentiments arise in a manner different from love, whose nature it is to be born amidst thunder and lightning, as gods or demons should be born. Princes cannot come into the world like the masses; and the Prince of Affections cannot come to light with the assistance of an intelligent and affectionate midwife and the domestic cares of relatives. Where a coruscation of the skies and a trembling of the earth do not attend the birth of the new love; where nature does not rend the air with a cry of voluptuousness or of pain, no one can deceive me: a friendship, an affection, some sort of a sentiment, may have come into existence; but I shall certainly not christen the new-born with the sacred baptism of love.

And thus, naturally, we have arrived at those frontiers which separate the only legitimate way by which we may enter the temple from those ways that lead to it through oblique and unused paths. Friendship can be a source of love, and a very good one, but it is always a pathological, unnatural origin, which leads step by step to the worst of the sources of love, such as gratitude, compassion, vanity, lust, revenge.

When one has been able to see a woman during a long time, talk to her and perhaps live with her without calling her by any other name but that of sister or friend, if he feels some day that he loves her, such love resembles those tropical fruits grown in our climate by means of manure and hothouse. Whether friendship is possible between man and woman is an old problem which will never be solved, because many give that name to true, real loves, which, approaching[Pg 54] the threshold of desire, held back, perhaps, by the rigid hand of duty, oscillate suavely and lingeringly in front of the temple without ever entering it. It is by a conventional politeness that to these loves we give the name of friendship, and I will certainly not condemn such innocent falsification; but a true and real friendship, with all the specific characteristics that distinguish this serene affection between man and woman, is not possible except on one condition: to obliterate every sexual mark in the two beings that have shaken hands. And the elimination of the sex in an individual is such a cruel mutilation, both physical and moral, that it destroys more than half of man. If friendship unites two eunuchs of this kind, I shall say that their affection is no longer that which exists between man and woman, but that of two neutral beings. However, as long as a single desire of the other's person is possible in them, as long as the most chaste, the most innocent of desires may arise in them, friendship becomes love. How many are these moral eunuchs? How many men and women can love without desire? Count them and then I shall be able to tell you how many are the cases, well ascertained, of friendship without love between man and woman.

I wish, nevertheless, to be more explicit, so that I may not seem to go on beating about the bushes without attacking and solving the question because I find it difficult. Are there in this sublunary world a man and a woman glad to see each other, who love each other and who have never desired even a kiss from each other? Yes; those two angels, then, are friends and I admit the possibility of the psychological phenomenon of friendship between two persons of different sex.

From any form of mild affection one can pass to love, and therefore much more easily from that friendship between man and woman knowingly admitted by us as possible. Long-lasting and healthy loves may arise in this way, but they always have a cold skin and a somewhat lymphatic hue. They require restoratives, a hydropathic cure, and, sometimes, cod-liver oil as well, because from the lymphatic they[Pg 55] may also pass to the scrofulous stage. A common variety of this kind of loves is that which originates from gratitude.

"Love who to none beloved to love remits" sang the poet, and he told the truth; but this goes on one condition, that between the two who love each other there shall be no other difference but in the length of the step; that is to say, that one should arrive first and the other join him afterward; otherwise they would never meet on the main road of sympathy. You, O tutors, who believe in the love of a pupil; you, gentlemen, who believe in the love of the orphan girl whom you have helped out of her poverty; you, old bachelors, who believe in the love of the grateful chambermaid, remember that gratitude alone did never generate a legitimate love. If gratitude takes you by the hand and leads you on the road of sympathy, it may be a good guide, but nothing more. There are men and women who very much resemble cold-blooded animals, which have the same temperature as the ambient that surrounds them, but can generate little or no heat. They know not how to love of themselves, and it is necessary that another love descend upon them to soak them, to saturate them, like cake dipped in wine. Their sympathies are cold and equal for all; they often ask of books and men what is love, and compare the descriptions by others to what they feel in their hearts, like the naturalist who turns and turns an insect in his hands, compares it to the pictures before him, and finally exclaims: "It really seems to me that this insect is the Amor verus of the entomologists. I, too, do love, really love." For all these gentlemen, whose number is much greater than supposed, the verse of the poet is most true, and they always love out of gratitude or compassion, which is almost the same.

That mild and sweet affection which is love out of gratitude must not be confused with that commiseration which women especially feel for those who love them desperately, and to whom they often concede not love, but love out of pity. Woman is easily moved; she cannot look on apathetically when a man suffers, and frequently yields, not out of lewdness but of pity, which is also coupled with the [Pg 56]legitimate pride of being able to transform a wretched being into a happy man. And man often takes advantage of this weakness of Eve and wickedly abuses it, and is ready, later, to calumniate her who has made him happy. Man, too, can love out of compassion, but more frequently concedes himself without affection and through pride, as we shall see further on in the course of our studies.

Woman, however, sometimes concedes love, together with voluptuousness, to him who weeps, sighs and suffers for her. Compassion is the benevolent chord which vibrates even in natures brutally egotistical; while in woman, rich in so many affections, it can vibrate until it tortures her. This sentiment, however, is, of its own nature, tender and mild, and by placing a hand on him who suffers, keeps him always in a state of subjection, so that true equality can never exist between the one who inspires compassion and the one who feels it. This is the essential character of compassion; and even when, by narrow, long and thorny paths, it leads us to love, this is always under the influence of its bastardly origin. All loves out of compassion are forms of affectionate commiseration, of benign protection, and lack the highest notes of passion. They strongly resemble the verses of him who is not a poet; the god of fire does not pervade, does not inflame them; they do not know the sacred agitation of the sibyl; and if they can live long in a mild climate, they can, however, be suddenly overthrown by the appearance of the true god, who demands his rights, his tributes of blood and of ardors. The woman who, unfortunately, has not yet experienced any love other than that inspired in her by compassion, may deceive herself, may believe that she loves truly and deeply; but woe to her, if a real and warm sympathy should awake in her heart, that she may make a comparison between the true love and the false one! The weak little plant of an affection long guarded by commiseration will fall and be carried away by the fury of the impetuous stream, and the poor creature, who really loves for the first time, may suffer the most excruciating pain, and be made to fight the bloodiest struggles between duty and passion, between [Pg 57]commiseration and love. I know only too well that among the thousand forms of cowardly love there is also the cowardice which begs love on bended knees, but I would prefer to be loved by caprice, revenge or lechery, rather than by compassion. The woman who loves us in that way has always her heel on our heads; and although the sweet pressure of a woman's little foot may be as dear as the caress of her hand, in the face of nature we commit an act of cowardice and invert the most elementary laws of the physiology of the sexes. The man who waives the primacy of conquest is a lion that allows his mane to be shorn, a Samson with clipped hair, always a mild and disguised form of eunuch. May fortune protect you all from love out of compassion!

A still more turbid source of love is vanity; to hear that a woman is very beautiful and chaste, that she has never permitted herself to be loved, is an immediate stimulus of sudden ambition to the man who knows that he is strong and adores the daughters of Eve. And the daughters of Eve, in turn, very willingly persist in throwing the baited hook to catch the cold, lonely fish who lives in the most dark recesses of solitude and chastity. Hence many challenges sent and taken which lead oftener to a conquest of bodies than to true love. The great woman-lovers, who have long since renounced the virtue of sublime love, are accustomed to conquer all the conquerable solely for vanity's sake, solely to tie with amorous chains to their triumphal chariot a new slave and a new victim. They nearly always like to conquer the most difficult and different characters, and you may find them ardently wishing to give the first lesson in voluptuousness to the innocent as well as to subjugate the most cunning and oldest libertines. Besides vanity, the goad of morbid curiosity has its share in this choice of victims, as curiosity is one of the strongest threads in the psychological web of woman. A tart, wild fruit may stimulate the appetite of a palate too dull, as would the mordant pungency of cheese too old; the frivolous woman is passionately fond of this alternating of sour and burning tastes, of this succession of men inexperienced in love and men only too well versed in[Pg 58] it; and lechery may go so far in these natures as to cause them to love through mere curiosity of the unknown, even excluding lust, which is not always necessary in these pathological tastes. At any rate, even when vanity alone has brought a man and a woman together, a posthumous sympathy may awaken a real love with healthy members and a long life. It is, however, always a love that resembles the rich man who was born a peasant and, true upstart that he is, may, in the midst of luxury and pleasure and in the most courteous manner, kick you out of his presence when you least can afford it. To be born well is really the first problem of life in all cases, and democracy itself cannot succeed in overthrowing the ancient aristocracy unless it can boast of a legitimate and noble birth.

Man, who daily accuses of vanity his female companion, shows oftener than the latter the most grotesque and clownish forms of that sentiment; and we rarely see him renounce the puerile ostentation of those of his loves which had the bastardly origin of vanity. How often has he reached the lowest stage of cowardice by casting up to the woman who blessed him with love, that he sought her love only to adorn with another trophy his triumphal chariot! Woman, instead, almost always, even when she has desired to be loved out of vanity alone, even when she is about to dismiss the servant who has wearied her, will give him a testimonial which makes him happy, does not humiliate him, and will satisfy him that he pleased—for a day, a month, a year—the woman who, perhaps, feigned to love him, or loved him very blandly. No man feels humiliated in thinking that he was the sweet victim of a caprice; all feel dejected if made the target of a vainglorious speculation. And many other times, woman, with a very refined and generous tact, pretends not to understand that she is desired and loved solely out of vanity, and gradually succeeds in making men love her for herself, and for herself alone. The friendly enemy not perceiving it, she succeeds with subtle art in substituting a sincere and warm passion for the narrow ambition that had inspired the attack and the conquest: one of the thousand proofs that[Pg 59] woman is superior to us in sentiment in the same degree as we are superior to her in mental strength; one of the thousand proofs that woman always endeavors to elevate even the basest loves, while we so often want to force under the Caudine Forks of voluptuousness even those loves which, like the eagles, were born on the highest rocks of psychology.

Lust is the prolific mother of most vulgar loves; nay, this sentiment is to many only the necessity of drinking at a spring found to be sweeter than any other. Nude love, without the splendid garments of imagination and heart, stripped even of the robust flesh lent to it by the sentiment of the beautiful, is reduced to a skeleton which is lust and which for very many is all they think of love. What a poor, wretched thing! A practice of lasciviousness! Woman converted into a cup which we prefer to any other because we have long been accustomed to satiate our thirst out of it. To have possessed before having loved, to have been possessed before having given the kiss of love! What ignominy! What baseness! And yet love is such a magician that, at times, it can perform the prodigy of being born of lechery.

Loves born of lust are the most difficult to preserve, and every day of their life is a difficult and rare conquest. Even the most perfidious cunning of the arts of pleasing blunts against insurmountable difficulties, and woman, after having brought into play all the witchery of body and heart, may see her victim snatched away from her by the first comer. Love may be warm, ardent, thirsty, but the glass that satisfies it is always made of the most fragile crystal and may at any moment fall and be shattered into a hundred pieces.

Revenge, which is a form of hatred, may, by incestuous nuptials, become a mother, or better, a stepmother of love. To be deceived and to know it, to wish to humiliate the guilty by flaunting in the latter's face a new love, to seek it, finding it in one day: there is the source of love out of revenge. The unfortunate paranymph who acts as the call-bird of a degraded passion does not always perceive the trap, allows himself to be loved, loves, and often amuses the person who pretends to love him and those who [Pg 60]unconcernedly witness the shameful spectacle. Vanity makes us blind, and it does not permit us to see that, perhaps, in the period of a day we have been seen, desired, conquered; and while, inflated with pride, we display our feathers like a peacock, we do not realize that we are actors in a comedy staged to humiliate him or her who is loved always and more than ever. In some very humiliating cases we serve as rubefacient and sink so low as to be placed on a level with a mustard poultice or a leech; and the cure effected at our expense is so quick and perfect that we are immediately dismissed, like a physician who is impatiently paid and impatiently taken leave of because his services are no longer required.

These, however, are the most unfortunate cases, and belong to the ugliest pathology of the human heart; in other instances love out of revenge becomes, through the virtue of either or both of the lovers, a true and real love which cures the old wound and opens a wide horizon of happiness to the man and to the woman who have become acquainted in such a strange manner, and it may then be said that he who was to be the revengeful executioner, the unconscious minister of the justice of love, becomes, instead, first the physician and afterward the lover of the offended, and a new love arises on the ruins of the old one.

I certainly do not claim to have studied all the pure and impure sources of love, but I would feel satisfied if I had touched upon the most important ones, and outlined the genealogy of this sentiment. In an analytical work, however great may be the care exercised in order not to detach adherent things, it is next to impossible to avoid breaking some fiber or destroying anything. It frequently occurs that the source of love is not one, but double, or is formed by the collecting of various streamlets, so that it would be difficult to state whether the new-born is a legitimate son or a bastard. A slight but sincere sympathy may be associated with great vanity, but the desire for revenge may, fortunately for us, fall in with a warm and violent affection. Thus, lust, vanity, compassion, gratitude, may meet at the same time and [Pg 61]fecundate a love which later may flow limpid and pure in its bed, although its source was an impure, muddy stream.

Sometimes a human being loves another not for the latter's sake, but out of a strange resemblance which the latter bears to a person long loved and, perhaps, already lost; thus it happens that one may love the daughter after having loved the mother; and there have been cases in which one has loved even three successive generations. The excessive disproportion in the age of the lovers, a certain mummy effluvium exhaled even by the most carefully embalmed bodies, gives to those loves a character that induces me to place them at least on the frontiers that separate physiology from pathology; I would, therefore, term them "physio-pathological."

Loves of mixed origin are the purer and warmer, the larger the part played in them by sympathy, and this element alone would suffice to allot a place to them in the hierarchical scale of nobility. The influence which the first origin exercises over love is so lasting and so prepotent that more than once affections suffering from a dangerous illness recovered suddenly at the tender remembrance of these thoughts: "You really loved me one day of your life." "You are mine by love and nothing else." "And yet I loved you!" Often a man born in the highest place and of noblest blood sinks gradually into the mire, loses his dignity, his fortune, even the most superficial appearance of manners and behavior; yet if you observe him attentively you will certainly find in the nobility of some gesture, in the majestic tone of his voice, in some refined taste, such traces of his ancient origin as may have survived the shipwreck. And so it happens with a well-born love. I have seen passions dragged in the mire of abjection, tattered and foul, like a velvet rag picked up in the gutter; I have seen loves sold and bought again, and passed through the hands of a hundred hucksters at the public auction of vice and infamy; but in those poor shreds I have always found something that had remained intact and revealed its ancient and noble origin; and with my own[Pg 62] eyes I have witnessed fabulous resurrections that seemed miracles, and redemptions that caused me to think of the divine intervention and of the galley-slaves too arcadically rehabilitated through the rose-water bath of our modern philanthropists.

When love begins we may entertain some doubts as to the reality of the passion before our eyes. The heart beats more quickly than usual, and in the serene sky some clouds pass and evanesce in the deep azure; perhaps in the distant mist we behold, at times, a lightning flash; but will we have a storm or fine weather? If the heart is forced to answer, it may, in these cases, make the same solemn mistakes as the meteorologists in their almanacs or from the university chair. Embryos in their first stage are all similar, and even the most powerful microscope cannot distinguish today the egg of the lion from that of the rabbit. Incipient sympathies, growing friendships, affinities about to become loves, are all crepuscular things faintly delineated on the gray horizon, and the human eye may be easily deceived; but we cannot cast any blame upon it. And love, too, assumes so manifold and varied disguises as to render it difficult for us to make a good diagnosis in many cases. However, it is always easier to recognize love in our own home than in that of others, notwithstanding the fact that it is much more important for our happiness to know whether we are loved than to realize that we really are in love. To distinguish in others the true love from the mendacious, you may be helped by this physio-psychological essay, while in order to explore your own heart scant attention to the phase of your sentiments will suffice.

One truly loves when to the agonizing cry: "A man!—A woman!" a friendly distant voice replies: "Do not weep; I am here!" One loves when, after hearing that voice, the cry subsides and the deep void of desire is filled. One loves when the desire of the beloved is placed above everything else. One loves when one suddenly blushes or pales if he hears a name or the familiar swish of a garment that approaches. One loves when one involuntarily has on one's lips one name only a hundred times in a day, or when one[Pg 63] ceases to pronounce a word which one was pronouncing a hundred times before. One loves when one's eyes are always fixed on one point of the star-map where the creature dwells who has become half of ourselves. One loves when one hurries to the mirror at every instant to ask of oneself, "Am I beautiful enough?" and when one restlessly explores the abyss of one's own conscience with the query, "Can I be loved?" One loves when in every fiber of the heart, in every atom of the organism, the sap of life is stirred and rushes through every vein and every nerve, so that an intimate, penetrating, deep commotion warns us with thrilling voice that something great and unusual is in us, as though God had visited us. This is the true love, that is not appeased by lust, nor quieted by ambition, nor cooled by distance, that does not even lose itself in the dreams of the night; the love that, to abandon us, must carry away with itself a large piece of bleeding flesh and tortured nerves.