HOW LOVE IS PRESERVED AND HOW IT DIES

The man who, through fault of the trees he sprang from or through his own, lives on the bestial frontiers of the human kingdom, is like the brute for which love is a desire that rises, is satisfied and falls asleep. If his affection for woman is not a passion of spring or autumn, it is always an erotic and intermittent love which dies every time a need is satisfied and revives with every renewed desire. The stimulus of the flesh announces in him the dawning of sentiment, and the obesity of the flesh puts an end to the passion of love. The new desire may have the same person or another as its object: this is for him a secondary and merely accidental question, and, according to the manner in which circumstances force him to solve it, he will be a monogamist or a polygamist, a virtuous man through habit or a libertine through caprice. Oftener than it seems this is the way in which many dark-skinned nations love, as well as many white-skinned men, who nevertheless believe that they faithfully love one woman at a time. The history of their love is a necklace of Venetian beads, to which a new bead is added for every desire satisfied; and if the hues of the glass corpuscles are not too diverse, one may have before his eyes a pretty ornament that may spangle the neck of a decent virtue and an honest passion. Between the desire that dies and another that is born, you can set a gentle remembrance of gratitude for the pleasure enjoyed, a sweet hope of a greater joy for the future; and the garland of your passion will then acquire greater beauty and new flowers and perhaps stimulate a true and great love. The most sublime heights of sentiment, the summits of thought, are reached by few; while hundreds and[Pg 95] hundreds of lowly sheep ruminate on the plains, where thousands and thousands of bees are buzzing, and millions and millions of ants are swarming. Upon the sapphire summits of the Alps two lone eagles represent the world of the living.

Love, although a most powerful affection, always follows the laws of elementary physics, which govern all the energies accumulated in our nervous centers and which we call sentiments. As long as passion remains in a condition of desire, that is to say, as long as force is potential and is not turned into a product, energy lasts and sentiment lives, vigorous and ardent. All the art of preserving love is, therefore, reduced to this alone: to preserve desire and to cause it to spring up again almost immediately after it is spent. And as even love, with all its omnipotence, cannot evade the physical laws, and every spark that springs forth must always be followed by a period of repose, it is indispensable to act in such a way that while a part of the force is transformed into labor, another be accumulated, preparing a new spark in such a short time that it should be nearly impossible to perceive any interval between the two sparks. To transform the intermittent electric current into a continuous one constitutes the great secret of protracting the existence of love.

As long as desire is not satisfied, and the struggle has not become a conquest, love is not only preserved but increased; and not in vain does woman provide for her happiness in asking for time and prolonging the battle. A love must be either very weak or very brutal if it withdraws from the struggle before victory; and as it happens very seldom that a woman yields everything at once, the small and great favors which from time to time she concedes to the conqueror mark a continual renewal of ever ardent desires and a continuous revivification of love. Finally, sooner or later, the day of the wished-for victory arrives, and one embrace makes two lives one, melts in a single crucible two volcanic rocks and two feelings of voluptuousness. However, even when love is so base as to be only a thirst for pleasure, it seldom dies with the first embrace. And who can say that he has possessed a woman entirely in one night of love?[Pg 96] Human charms are such and so many, and our esthetic needs so exquisite and ardent, that even the acquisition of voluptuousness alone is, fortunately, very slow, and in the sweet occupation of new provinces love is preserved or revivified. The various treasures of beauty and sensuality of two lovers, the art of loving, so neglected even after Ovidius' times, mark the limit of duration of those loves that derive their energies only from the worship of form or from the ardor of voluptuousness; and if in some cases that duration is long-lasting, it never is infinite. The hour comes when, alas! the wing of time smites the fresh cheeks of youth, and the northern winds wrinkle them, and the storm scatters over the ground the rosy petals of human beauty; the hour comes when the cup of lust no longer contains a drop of nectar, and then, if nothing is left, love is dying, and no miracle in the world can save it from a certain death. The energy of passion had its only source in voluptuousness and beauty; one has vanished, the other one is withered and the strength is spent. No force in the world is produced without the transmutation of matter; no energy is increased without transformations of equilibrium and decompositions of affinities. If man and woman do not revive an affinity of sympathy, no combination can take place; no light, no heat can spring forth from their contact. Let them sing the psalms of death and together bury the remains of a love which, kept alive by voluptuousness alone, was inexorably to perish with it.

This is the most general way in which vulgar loves die, and the duration of their life can be calculated with fair precision by weighing the beauty of the two lovers, their youth, their lust, their art of loving. Those loves may last an hour, a day, a month, a year, ten years; they may, in rare cases, last for the entire period of human youth. Men, and especially women, do not fall without a struggle under the blows of time, and with incredible art repair the ravages of age; and not only are forms daily adulterated, denatured and counterfeited, but into the cup of love, as well, spices and drugs and philters are poured, that the silent hunger[Pg 97] may receive the stimulus of an artificial appetite, and soft blandishments and morbid temptations of the flesh substitute the ardor and impetus of passion. Long lasts the battle before defeat is acknowledged and love changes its nature but still lives. It was a volcano, it is now a Bengal light; it was as nude and chaste as an Uranian Venus, it is now as clothed and immodest as a courtesan; it was love of every hour, it is now periodical, intermittent, like the tertian or the quartan; it impunely defied the rays of the sun at midday, it now prefers the twilight; but, when all is said, in spite of so much reticence and so much tinkering, it is still and always love. Women, you who behold with horror the gradual extinction of that fire which for so many years has warmed your enamored members, if you were happy through beauty alone, remember that that fire will be extinguished with the withering of the last attraction of your body; and when the heartrending cry which invokes the stimulus of a desire will not be answered, prepare for the funeral psalmody. As long as you can, with the galvanism of lust, arouse a desire in the flaccid flesh of your lover, love will not be dead. You see, then, to what a low level the art of preserving love has sunk, when love has its origin only in the desire of bodily form: it sinks to a question of hygiene; I would nearly say, it transforms itself into a problem of taxidermy and preservation by chemical process! It is necessary to study the antiseptic virtue of deliberate refusals and libertine reticence; to submit lust to a chemical research and fatigue to a physiological investigation; to meditate upon the economy of energies and visit the pharmacy for the purpose of discovering the aphrodisiacal virtues of the various silken fabrics, of the various smiles, and of the sensual movements of the body. To these basest studies we have lowered the woman who would so gladly have wished to soar aloft with us through the numberless spheres of the beautiful and not only embrace the world of exterior forms, but also the infinite worlds of sentiment and thought.

You will tell me, perhaps, that I aspire to an ideal love, impossible, therefore, to reach; you will tell me that a man[Pg 98] with a good constitution can be handsome for forty years of his life, and that woman, too, is entitled to thirty years of beauty and ten more years of gracefulness; so that a love which should last but these thirty or forty years would still be a most beautiful and most enviable thing. A spring and a summer of forty years, ending with a mild autumn, in which a sweet remembrance, a suave reciprocal gratitude, and an intimate friendship prepare the last twilight of old age, may seem to us a worthy triumph of a long and splendid life of love. And I am with you if you mean the common loves of the common people; but we must have a high, a very high aim, and we all should desire a love lasting as long as life and which shall be buried alone in its grave. And then every healthy man can offer to woman the thyrsus of love, and every healthy woman can offer the cup of voluptuousness to man; but how many men are handsome, how many women can be called beautiful? Perhaps not ten in a hundred; and all the others who in various degrees are removed from the type of perfection of form, shall they not love, can they not be loved? Certainly.

In man, rich in so many physical elements, the beautiful does not end with the exterior form, nor should love spring from the source of voluptuousness alone. No deformity, no disease in him who would procreate men: this is hygiene; but the hundred forms of moral and intellectual beauty, relieved only by a soft shade of sex, can and should awaken ardent and tenacious passions that do not vanish with the sun of youth. Thus, while love can dispense its delights to every man and every woman, perfect love should be born of the contemplation and adoration of every type of beauty; and when that of the form begins to fade, let moral beauty shine in all its power, and, later still, let the beauty of thought appear to us in all its brilliant majesty, so that while one star disappears, another twinkles, and from the slumbering desires of the senses we feel a stronger yearning awaken, the yearning for possessing the treasures of sentiment and thought of a creature who is all ours, and whom, if we suddenly loved her for the beauty of form, we now love and[Pg 99] will continue to love for her beauty of kindness, culture, ideas, and everything that a human being can boast of beauty and greatness. Even character and thought have a profoundly sexual type, and feminine kindness can be adored by us, just as virile courage is admired by the sweet and tender nature of woman. When we have loved in a woman not only the beautiful female, but a whole nature imbued with all the beauties and graces of the human Eve, the longest life will not suffice to satisfy our desires of possession, and at the last hour of extreme old age we have still some new conquest to make, and some desire is reawakened, while the accumulation of most sweet memories fills the void which youth, by fleeing, has left behind itself. Sublime triumph of human nature, in which love survives the senses exhausted, voluptuousness which is mute, the beauty of forms which is buried, while a warm ray of light shines on the silvery heads of two old beings who still love each other because they still desire each other and because heart and mind unite in an embrace, sexual by origin, but ideal for the heights attained. Our study on love in old age will complete this picture, certainly one of the most beautiful and seductive in the great museum of love: a picture which we should all desire to represent in the late years of our life.

When the sources of love are many, while one dries up another swells so that love never lacks a flow of water to quench its insatiable thirst. All passions follow in their movements a parabolic line, and those that have risen the highest descend the most rapidly; hence the weariness so close to strength; the tediousness that follows enthusiasm; the thousand dangers of the death of sentiment. More than any other passion, love presents these phenomena and dangers, and it is impossible for all to make voluptuousness, ecstasy and apotheosis last beyond a very short flash of a few instants. Intermittence is one of the most inexorable laws of the nervous system, and he who would increase enthusiasm and
"Only breathe the life of kisses and of sighs,"

[Pg 100]

dies consumed by his own fire, and, what is worse, before dying, beholds love dead at his feet. We cannot rebel against the laws of nature, nor can we subjugate them; but it is conceded to us to direct them to our advantage. And thus it is in our case. Between ecstasy and ecstasy we can sow joy and suppress tediousness; between voluptuousness and voluptuousness we can suppress weariness and pick the flowers of sentiment, and from too ardent ............