SUBLIME PUERILITIES OF LOVE
Like the butterfly, which, when just emerged from the involucre of the chrysalis, still bears on its folded wings some strips of the wrapping in which it was long enveloped, so Love, the youngest of human passions, carries remnants of the robe of childhood which he has just discarded. In his caprices and in his follies, in his games full of grace and strength, in his blind idolatries and in his childish sorrows, you would say that you behold before you a child genius. Now he surprises you with his violence, then he awakens your sympathy for his weakness; now all powerful, then most timid; now a hero, then a coward; today he defies heaven with closed fists; tomorrow he will with tears implore a caress. Love is childish because he is a child; childish because he is a poet; childish because, unleashing all the impulses of the moral world, and agitating in a convulsive kaleidoscope all the images of thought, he is more often lyric than epic, and writes more dithyrambs than stories, more poems than philosophical treatises.
Furthermore, Love is puerile because he is also so religious as to be superstitious and subject to all the nonsensical ideas that may pass through the brain of a timid and ignorant woman. Love, even in northern countries, delights in the pomp of the idolatry which is most characteristic of the south, protests against the severe worship of certain religious sects and, being a great admirer of churchly gorgeousness, demands incense, images, tinsel, altars, insignia, canopies and tabernacles.
No religion ever had more senseless idolatry than Love, no[Pg 119] Olympus had more gods, more altars and more priests. He accepts every belief, every worship, from the fetish of the savage to the omnipotent, invisible God of nobler religions. Full of faith and fears, Love would himself have invented idolatry if this had not had an infinity of other roots to sprout from through the human brain.
When man feels, desires, loves very much, and has reached the furthermost boundary of the human field, he always erects an altar with the richest and most beautiful material at his command and there, on his knees, prays and adores; often he prays and adores at the same time. To that altar he brings the amber and the coral gathered on the sea-shore and the gold found in the sands of the stream, the poetry found in his erratic wanderings through the heaven of the ideal, the most beautiful flowers of his thought, and offers all as a tribute to a creature of earth or space, of nature or imagination. And to love, also, man erects his altar, at the furthermost boundary of the human world, and, on his knees, solemnly asserts that beautiful, good and holy above everything is the creature whom he loves. Not satisfied with this, he raises himself upon the altar and casts avidious glances into the darkness of the unknown, where no form appears to him but the expansion and the reflection of the rays of this world; and there he is suspended over the abysses of nothingness. In that darkness live all the infinities, all the gods, all the human loves carried into the farthest regions of the ideal.
To love, everything is holy that has been touched by the hand, the eye, or the thought of the beloved, everything in which the dear image is reflected. A............