BOUNDARIES OF LOVE—THEIR RELATIONS TO THOUGHT
Thought may, for very different reasons, now be an ally and now a victim of love. First instrument of seduction, next to the external form of the body, thought revives, flares up in contact with the new sentiment, as occurs with every other energy condensed in our brain; and while it becomes purer, it strengthens itself, exhibiting some of its rarest, most exquisite fruits. Many torpid intellects do not awake except by the kiss of love, and then only to fall back into the previous lethargy the moment they are left without the stimulus of desire; but healthier brains, too, rise above themselves when called upon to offer an unusual tribute on the new altar. For very many, poetry is the song of spring, and, prosaic and mute before having loved, they return to their prose and taciturnity when the season of loves is past. As they are men, they may continue to possess a woman; but being poor in moral energy, in the May of their life they have only a smile of poetry, lasting as long as the petals of a rose. Their cold and indolent imagination indulges in a little flight among the bushes of the garden or the orchard; emits its feeble trill, then falls wingless on the highroad, plodding until death. How often a woman, who has been loved by one of these spring lovers and who remembers having once seen him, an ardent creature, full of imagination, finds it very difficult to persuade herself that the man who today is all prose, from head to foot, living between his chocolate and his nightcap, wearing seven varieties of flannels, and using ten different kinds of lozenges, once wrote verses and fell on his knees at her feet, which he covered with bitter tears!
More fortunate men, instead, derive from their loves a continual and powerful stimulus to the works of thought, which seems to reshape and renew itself at each different phase of passion, at each change of love. These influences upon the lives of many artists, poets, and even statesmen can be studied in their works, and have a stronger power when the artist, the poet, the head of the state is a woman.
The influence of love upon the forces and forms of thought is twofold, and is derived from self-love and from the psychical nature of the person loved. Being a sentiment born during youth or rejuvenated during old age, it especially excites the imagination and refines the aptitude for reproducing the beautiful; in a few words, it warms those mental aptitudes that generally reach their climax at the same age when love manifests its greatest energies. Very rarely a man can be a poet or a great artist without having loved intensely, without having had at least a great capacity for loving. Chastity, forced or voluntary, may conceal love; but down in the depths of the heart some images, resembling an angel more than a woman, have sway, rising at every inspiration of genius, at every song of the lyre, at every touch of the brush, and reviving or kindling the sacred fire of art. The genius of many among the greatest poets, artists and writers of the world had love as its first companion and supreme inspirer; and without this sentiment their names might be totally unknown to us. The love that is born in a sublime brain accumulates gigantic forces, and chastity, always imposed by great passions in their first stage, refines and intensifies them; so that love seems to transform into genius, and genius dyes with splendid hues every amorous manifestation. A chaste genius which loves is a legion of fighting forces, a whole host of winged geniuses, and therefore no difficult question, no irresistible force can oppose it. Thought, when the companion of love, offers to it the richest tributes of its energy, just as the enamored bird sings its most harmonious notes for its companion, the flower condenses all its perfumes and the fascination of its most beautiful colors around the nest in which plants love. And with[Pg 147] thought, intensified, transformed, adorned with all its splendors, goes the stimulus of self-esteem, which in the satisfaction of pride of the person loved finds always new incitement and new incentive to work. Nor does the creature loved receive only the tribute, but from the enthusiastic eloquence with which gratitude is expressed by that creature, it is manifest that the latter also feels the same inciting influence, and the most modest and stillest tongue finds splendors of form and savoriness of style unknown to that day.
A long experience in every country of the world demonstrates the superiority of woman over man in the epistolary style and especially in love-letter writing, which is the effect not only of the peculiar nature of the feminine mind but also of the powerful excitement created in woman by the stimulus of love. A letter is nearly always an exchange of affections, and woman more than man feels the intimate relations between two affections; she loves more and better than we. Man has a hundred different ways of exerting his talents when excited by love; art, ambition, science open to him a thousand avenues to manifest his new energies; to woman, on the contrary, no literary path is open other than amorous correspondence, and she uses and abuses it in a surprising manner. In the numberless hecatombs, in the daily pyres of many perfumed letters, real treasures of art are being destroyed, which should be saved from the conflagration that consumes so many volumes of words and phrases; for the commonplace always dominates every field of good and evil, and commonplace, like all things human, are most loves. Was it not Balzac who said: "It is recognized that in love all women have some 'esprit'"?
The eloquence of love, a real song of a gifted mind in love, is not contradicted by the timid and often dull silence which invariably accompanies the first declarations, the first skirmishes. Fear in all its forms desiccates the mouth and the pharynx, suspends nearly instantaneously the secretions of mucus and saliva, and many are made physically unable to speak, in the same manner as when a violent mental perturbation disconcerts ideas and words, so that eloquence is[Pg 148] reduced to an absolute silence, possibly interrupted only by disconnected phrases. That man so mute in love, however, has hardly returned to the quiet of his solitary room when he suddenly becomes a new Demosthenes, and pours out into space or on paper the rivers of a fiery eloquence, which a few moments before would have proved so opportune and so beautiful. Happy love, in the stage of attainment, raises all brains above medium temperature, continually infusing new energies into them. Even during the intoxication, the thyrsus of the dithyramb never falls from the hand of the happy mortal who loves or hopes to be loved. When, on the contrary, our affection vibrates with the notes of sorrow, a sublime elegy may be produced as the outburst of thought; one can become poet or insane. Brains better organized are cured of the great sorrows of the heart with a book, or a musical creation, or a picture; but many human brains submerge in the hurricane of an unhappy love, and the statistics of the hospitals for the insane always show a large number of cases of insanity produced by love, while in the secrecy of the domestic walls are concealed many other brains withered or fallen into lethargy through unfortunate loves.
I am writing in these pages a modest essay of general physiology, or, as it is usually termed, psychology, and have neither the right nor the strength to undertake the work of literary critic, which still remains to be done, notwithstanding the very beautiful things written by many upon the influence of love in art. Not only has every poet and every artist (and I consider the writer the greatest of all) left in his works the imprint of his loves, but he has felt and interpreted love in a way entirely his own, and which in some cases became the style of a school or an epoch. The woman loved by Byron is quite different from the woman loved by Burns; Laura is not Beatrice, and the woman dimly discerned by Leopardi is not Vittoria Colonna. To study the influences of the times and the mind over the particular mouldings of the loves of great men—in a few words, to draw the comparative psychology of celebrated loves and of the amorous types of art—is a gigantic labor, in which the[Pg 149] artist, the psychologist and the literary man should join hands in order to produce a work worthy of the subject. For me it will suffice to have prepared in the present essay some materials for this work of the future.
Love ceases to be an impulse for thought and becomes its first assassin, not only when it is unhappy, but also when it sinks into the mud of lust. Chastity is an almost entirely hygienic question, and here we should mark the place where the hygienic branch shoots out from the great trunk of physiology. No embrace has ever debased thought when voluptuousness was only love; but when lasciviousness is stronger than sentiment and the animal man regrets having given too much of himself to the future, then the individual rebels against the excessive tribute paid to the preservation of the species. Then the animal man is diseased and the moral man has fallen into libertinism. No; nature never punishes him who wisely obeys its laws, and after the sacrifice of love man is as happy and intelligent as before, since, in the blessed languor of a brief repose, nature stills even the pain of weariness.
"Lay waste the entire forest of concupiscence, not one tree alone. When you shall have felled every tree, cut every branch, you can then pronounce yourselves free, pure, virtuous," exclaims the Dhammapada, and science utters the same cry, but instead of the word "concupiscence" it writes the more precise term "lust." In our organism every function is so wel............