LOVE IN SEX

Man and woman can love with the same degree of force, but they will never love in the same manner, since to the altar of their passion they carry two greatly different natures beside their different genetic missions. As long as there shall live on our planet a man and a woman, they will eternally exchange and counterchange this innocent reproach: "Ah, you do not love me as I love you!" And the lament will be forever true, because woman will never love like man, and man will never be capable of loving like woman. In a complete essay on the comparative psychology of the two sexes we could delineate the distinctive characteristics of virile love and feminine love, and I may try it some day; be it sufficient for me here to sketch in a general way the two figures of passion, one in essence, but rendered so variform by the two different natures called Adam and Eve.

Listen to two spontaneous cries, uttered by two nations very distant and well-nigh uncivilized, and you will find the first lines of a physiology of the sexual characters of love. The Munda-Kols of Chota Nagpur have some popular songs which express the psychical difference between man and woman. The women sing:

    "Singbonga from the beginning has made us smaller than you, therefore we obey you. Even if it were not so and from the beginning we had overburdened you with work, still we would not be your equals. To you God has given with two hands, to us with one; and for this we do not plough the ground."

And the men sing to the women:

    "As God has given us with two hands, so has He made us bigger than you. Have we made ourselves big? He[Pg 159] Himself has divided us into big and small. If you do not obey now the word of man, you certainly disobey the word of God. He himself has made us bigger than you."

And flying to a very distant land, we find a Kabyle song, in which a chorus of young women alternates with a chorus of sturdy youths.

    The women: "Let him who wants to be loved by a woman march with his weapons; let him put the butt-end of the gun to his cheek and cry: 'Come to me, O maidens!'"

    The men: "You do well to love us. God sends us war and we will die, and keep at least the memory of the happiness that you have given us."

Rising from the Munda-Kols and the Kabyles to the higher and more civilized races, we always find, however, an echo of this wild cry of nature, in which man proclaims his strength or imposes it, and woman acquiesces in or invokes it. Hence the very unequal part of joys and sorrows, of rights and duties, which man allows his companion in the world of love; hence an ever increasing usurpation of joys and rights by the strong as we descend to the lower strata of humanity; hence civilized nations continually struggling to divide good and evil in a more equitable proportion between the two sexes, which still so unfairly share light and darkness, joys and sorrows.

Where muscular strength is the criterion of hierarchies, where it constitutes the first of human forces, the difference between man and woman in the rights and joys of love is immense, and woman becomes little more than a domestic animal which is bought, sold or killed according to the necessity of the moment. Setting civilization aside, polygamy exists where morality is uncertain and lust is ardent; and woman, guarded as a treasure of voluptuousness, falls morally lower than in a wandering tribe of nude but monogamous savages, where woman is the companion of the labors and joys of man. For this, perhaps, Solomon used to cry[Pg 160] out in his harem: "And who will find me a strong woman?" Among us, also, woman does not play in love the part assigned to her by nature; and here also she can without scruple class herself among the oppressed who await their "jacquerie" or their constitution; here also she is a legitimate pretender who, by right or might, will have some day to conquer her place in the sun.

But I will speak of rights in another chapter; here we must remain within the confines of physiology, which still is, or should be, the legitimate mother of every human legislation. If anthropology should put in our hands all the moral and intellectual elements which separate man from woman, then science could most safely establish in its laws and customs the right place for each sex, without any danger of usurpation, abuse or imposition from any quarter.

Nature has given woman the greatest part of love, and if this difference could be expressed with figures, I would say that we were allotted one fifth, or one fourth at most, of love's territory. Only a woman could write Mme. de Sta?l's sublime words: "Undoubtedly, in the mysteries of nature, to love and still to love is what we have retained of our celestial inheritance." Neither civilization in any of its most varied phases, nor customs in their numberless forms, nor impositions of tyrants, nor power of genius could alter this immutable law. In the rank and fetid hut of the Eskimo, or in the palace of the prince, woman gives all of herself to man, first as daughter, then as lover, as wife, as mother. She is the great placenta of human beings, the bosom from which we draw blood, voluptuousness, love, every delight of our soul, every heat that warms us. Woe to us, if we should poison the source of human life with a pseudo-education; woe to us, if we should deny Eve the most sacred of rights! For woman, love is the first, the uppermost necessity, and all her organism and her psychology are softened and moulded by the influence of love. Van Helmont said too rudely, "Tota mulier in utero," but thinkers of all epochs applauded the aphorism of the Dutch physician. Woman physically desires for long time; she[Pg 161] possesses for long time and can enjoy her conquest every day, every hour, and turn it into a warm and scented atmosphere in which she lives as in a nest; woman nurses in her bosom an angel who always ardently desires and who does not quench in her the affection for her companion; she moulds the man, nourishes and caresses him, and as the years pass she sees herself, her flesh, her loves transformed into a group of little angels who dance around her, who are bits of her heart, petals of a rose fallen from the flower of her beauty, all calling her "mother," which has the meaning of "placenta of life." From the ardent embrace of the man whom she loves she flits to the endearments of her little children; voluptuousness does not fatigue, nor ardor wither, nor passion weary her; she is all, from her hair to her feet, imbued with love, the fluid that flows in her through every vein and moistens every fiber; so that when she is deprived of it she is like the tree shattered by the hurricane and which sees every leaf wither, every flower fall. The love of man is a lightning that flashes, thunders and vanishes; the love of woman is a ray of sun which, slow and warm, penetrates her heart and fecundates her; and she absorbs it, languidly and voluptuously, and every little root of her sentiments, her joys, her thoughts imbibes and feasts upon it; so that, even after the sun has disappeared, its fruitful rays remain, hidden in the earth which............